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Comparison of Islamist attacks to far right wing attacks in US since 9/11. The numbers are pretty close. It doesn't include left wing attacks, but there have been a lot. It also doesn't include foiled attacks. There have been many foiled attacks by both Islamists and right wingers.

http://securitydata.newamerica...

Pre-9/11 there were a huge number of right wing terror attacks. And of course, going back to the '70s and '80s, you can find a lot of left wing terror attacks.

They're hardly platitudes, and have been discussed to death. Feigning ignorance isn't really helping your position.

The USA has some of the highest cell phone costs in the developed world. You picked a pretty terrible example. Citation provided.

Medical insurers have to have a physical presence or subsidiary in the state where they want to sell.

Citation really, really needed. I haven't found a single site that makes this claim. Some of the places I looked (from Google search 'medical insurance across state lines'):
        http://www.forbes.com/sites/th...
        http://www.ncsl.org/research/h...
        http://www.newamerica.net/pres...
        http://www.motherjones.com/kev...

It has been upheld in US courts that even the minor fame from open-source authorship counts as economic gain (thus reinforcing the GPL's validity as being consequential).

I'd like to know the court citation. I did a quick Google search for "Arms Export Control Act open source software" and it looked like open source and anything else that was public domain was not subject to export restrictions.

http://oti.newamerica.net/blog...

http://www.mtu.edu/research/ad...

As to imports of scientific information, I read about that (I think) in Science, about how some American journals were refusing to accept papers from restricted countries. At least some lawyers argued that the regulations allowed the exchange of scientific information, the journals were wrong, and should start accepting papers.

I've seen submissions in the New England Journal of Medicine from Iran, usually short pieces in their "Images in Clinical Medicine" feature. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... Iran has a pretty good health care system, with doctors trained in the UK.

Iraq used to have one of the best health care systems in the world. Some of the most bitter critics of Saddam Hussein were Iraqi doctors, and I used to read their articles in The Lancet and BMJ. After the war, some of them were treated worse by George W. Bush than they were by Saddam (as in blowing up hospitals).

If they couldn't publish their stuff in American medical journals, the British journals are happy to publish high-quality work.

US Broadband is slow because that's the state of the infrastructure -- the infrastructure is very expensive to build out, and most of the country can't support a broadband build out.

It may surprise some, but the majority of the United States is not serviced by a cable television or internet system: http://www.fcc.gov/maps/connec...

What happens if you scale that map so that regions are sized according to the population within the region rather than the geographical area of the region?

Or, to put it another way, is the majority of the US population serviced by a broadband Internet service provider? the FCC's "Eighth Broadband Progress Report", from August 2012, says that the percentage of the US population "without access to fixed broadband meeting the speed benchmark", said benchmark being 4Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up, is 6% (5.9% of households), with the figure for rural areas being 23.7% and for non-rural areas being 1.8%. So the majority of the US population is serviced by a broadband ISP (by the FCC's 4Mb/s down/1Mb/s up definition of "broadband") - and even the majority of the rural US population is.

Why is an area not serviced?

By "serviced" you presumably mean "serviced by broadband Internet access above some speed threshold"; what is your threshold? Presumably it's better than 4Mb/s down/1Mb/s up, as most area that actually has people in it is serviced by services that's at least 4Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up.

So how about municipal broadband? Take the private company out of the picture and make internet a government service and it must get really cheap, right? Well, Bristol, Virginia is considered the most successful implementation of Municipal Broadband right now. This village of 17,000 people offers fiber optic connections to its residents for....roughly the same price as TWC or Comcast (for comparable speeds) and far far more expensive for 1GBps service ($320/mo) than Google offers.

And Google's service is a little under twice as expensive as the 1 GB/s service Bredbands Bolaget offers - 899 SEK/mo (the rate after the first year) is USD 137.73/mo at the current exchange rate. That, in turn, appears to suck relative to, say, HelloVision's $31.47 (at the exchange rate at the time for the South Korean Won) for 1Gb/s up and down, according to table 2 in the New America Foundation's "The Cost Of Connectivity 2013", but I don't know whether that's a first-year teaser rate or not (Bredbands Bolaget's first-year rate is, at the current exchange rate, $73.31).

The facts are this:

1. Huge portions of the country cannot be cost effectively serviced by high speed internet access.

How high is "high speed"?

3. Most large population centers do not have enough potential 1Gbps residential customers to make it cost effective to upgrade the equipment in those locations to support 1Gbps connection speeds -- businesses can already get those speeds and more but it is not inexpensive.

[Citation needed] What statistics do you have for the number of potential 1Gb/s residential customers in those large population centers?

4. New entrants with deep pockets don't have to deal with replacing equipment that is still being used to pay for the debt taken out to install it in the first place, but they will.

They do, however, have to deal with installing equipment in the first place.

5. More options for internet service in a community mean lower market shares for the participants, which mean

Let's consolidate this so people aren't confused.

Cool, so when does the President go on trial for authorizing the murder of civilians using WMDs?

Sorry, that is BS. Apparently you didn't read my post carefully. Hellfire missiles are not WMDs in the military context even if they are for US domestic criminal law. So, suggesting that the President is using WMDs is nonsense. It would also be nonsense domestically in the US since government has the legal authority to use lethal force with weapons not available to civilians. Second, the US isn't deliberately attacking innocent civilian populations. The terrorists do, as did the Boston bomber. Launching a Hellfire missile at a SUV of senior al Qaida or Taliban members traveling down a road isn't going to kill many people other than the intended targets. So third, the 50:1 casualty rate is fiction. If it were true, you would need to find 50,000 dead civilians in the drone attack areas of Pakistan - there would be no way to cover that up. That is obviously nonsense as noted by the Pakistani government spokesman below. That doesn't mean that attacks are never made in error, or that innocent people are never killed. But that is a different question from deliberately targeting them.

Pakistan drone strikes: 2012

Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

“Myths and rumours about US predator strikes and the casualty figures are many,” Mehmood said, according to Dawn, “but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners.”

He even brought stats. According to the general, “about 164 drone strikes have occurred since 2007 — the New America Foundation tallies 226 since 2004 — have killed “over 964 terrorists.” Of those, 793 were Pakistanis and 171 were foreigners, “including Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens, Filipinos and Moroccans.” (Filipinos? Huh.) Only “a few civilians” have been killed, he said.

From a wider angle, taking Afghanistan into account, it is the Taliban causing most of the casualties. And you would expect that since one of their key means of attack is bombs and mines placed along roads that kill whomever comes along, as well as bombings in market places, and attacks on institutions like schools. Those are mainly going to kill civilians.

Taliban Causes Most Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan, U.N. Says

Before you respond with any of that , "at war blah blah blah" nonsense, keep in mind that Congress has not declared war on Pakistan.

The SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES. is not limited to geographic area. The US government and Pakistan have had an arrangement.

Ex-Pakistani President Musharraf admits secret deal with U.S. on drone strikes

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- Ex-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf acknowledged his government secretly signed off on U.S. drone strikes, the first time a top past or present Pakistani official has admitted publicly to such a deal.

Pakistani leaders long have openly challenged the drone program and insisted they had no part in it. Musharraf's admission, though, suggests he and others did play some role, even if they didn't oversee the program or approve every attack.

You might want to read more arstechnica, which frequently gets cited on slashdot. They've done numerous articles (vs. blogs) on all aspects of this. They're a Conde Nast publication [as is Wired, IIRC] and are usually pretty credible. I tend to follow (and bookmark) articles on this. The two I posted were taken [quickly] from about 100 I've amassed and they all pretty much say the same thing.

But, you wanted an actual "study".

For example, this article is based on a study:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/report-data-caps-just-a-cash-cow-for-internet-providers/

The actual study [linked within the article] is:
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/capping_the_nation_s_broadband_future [*]

[*] If you dispute the data/conclusions, take it up with the authors.

There are other articles, from various publications, that talk about the disincentive for telcos to provide higher speeds.

If you want to know how easy it is to roll out fiber, check out sonic.net. They're a regional telco and ISP based in Santa Rosa, CA. They provide ADSL2+ throughout California at 3x the speed of AT&T's elite service at half the price ($40/month) with no data caps.

They're also rolling out fiber to the home as fast as they can and will provide their subscribers with that higher speed, at the same price, and, again, no data caps.

About 70% of bombings conducted in the US since 9/11 have been conducted by neo-nazis and similar radical groups.

http://homegrown.newamerica.net/map

T-Mobile is the fastest wireless broadband service provider in the U.S.A. and ranked 10th in the world.

Ref: http://oti.newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_cost_of_connectivity

The argument that monopolies raise the price of cell phone service is well-supported.

Cell phone service voice and data plans are extraordinarily high in the U.S., Japan and Canada, compared to other nations. America is way above the international average. We're the most expensive when it comes to texting. For the whole package of cell phone service America and Canada are the most expensive. Guess which countries keeps coming up as among the most expensive? The U.S. and Canada.

http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/an_international_comparison_of_cell_phone_plans_and_prices

As for PC prices, the number of competitors had very little effect compared to the power of Moore's Law. Had we had more competitors, PC prices might be 25% less right now. A huge part of what we pay for PCs is Windows. If we had more competition there we certainly would see lower prices.

So yes, oligopolies mean higher prices. And Jesus WAS/is in fact a liberal. :D

The $2 million "internet in a suitcase" grant from TFA is going towards OTI's Commotion Wireless project. Pulling together a secure solutions using open source software and involving developers from GNU Radio, OpenBTS, TOR, Serval, and others. So no, we won't be including any back doors in our software.

Exhibit A.
Exhibit B.

And here is how his employers describe his career, in particular:

Between 2006 and 2008, Morozov was director of new media for Transitions Online, a Prague-based media development NGO working in 29 countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and has also been a fellow at the Open Society Institute. In addition to being a Schwartz fellow, Morozov will be a visiting scholar at Stanford University as of Sept 2010.

This is apparently one of "oppressed Russian journalists" who would write anything as long as it's against Putin, and someone pays for it.

Exhibit A.
Exhibit B.

And here is how his employers describe his career, in particular:

Between 2006 and 2008, Morozov was director of new media for Transitions Online, a Prague-based media development NGO working in 29 countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and has also been a fellow at the Open Society Institute. In addition to being a Schwartz fellow, Morozov will be a visiting scholar at Stanford University as of Sept 2010.

This is apparently one of "oppressed Russian journalists" who would write anything as long as it's against Putin, and someone pays for it.

Exhibit A.
Exhibit B.

And here is how his employers describe his career, in particular:

Between 2006 and 2008, Morozov was director of new media for Transitions Online, a Prague-based media development NGO working in 29 countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and has also been a fellow at the Open Society Institute. In addition to being a Schwartz fellow, Morozov will be a visiting scholar at Stanford University as of Sept 2010.

This is apparently one of "oppressed Russian journalists" who would write anything as long as it's against Putin, and someone pays for it.

Well then allow me to post the rebuttal for their benefit as well :)

What are all of those channels with no call numbers next to them? Or am I reading your chart incorrectly?

Either way, there is still a lot of the U.S. outside of where you live.

Market | Percent of TV Band Spectrum Vacant After DTV Transition
Juneau, Alaska 74%
Honolulu, Hawaii 62%
Phoenix, Arizona 44%
Charleston, West Virginia 72%
Helena, Montana 62%
Boston, Massachusetts 38%
Jackson, Mississippi 60%
Fargo, North Dakota 82%
Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas 40%
San Francisco, California 37%
Portland, Maine 66%
Tallahassee, Florida 62%
Portland, Oregon 58%
Seattle, Washington 52%
Las Vegas, Nevada 52%
Trenton, New Jersey 30%
Richmond, Virginia 64%
Omaha, Nebraska 52%
Manchester, New Hampshire 46%
Little Rock, Arkansas 60%
Columbia, South Carolina 70%
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 44%

(Source: http://www.newamerica.net/files/nafmigration/archive/Doc_File_2713_1.pdf)

Personally, I'm still waiting for you to either label the unlabeled channels from your first chart, or admit you're just being a troll. Because really, after this response, those are your only two options.

What are all of those channels with no call numbers next to them? Or am I reading your chart incorrectly?

Either way, there is still a lot of the U.S. outside of where you live.

Market | Percent of TV Band Spectrum Vacant After DTV Transition
Juneau, Alaska 74%
Honolulu, Hawaii 62%
Phoenix, Arizona 44%
Charleston, West Virginia 72%
Helena, Montana 62%
Boston, Massachusetts 38%
Jackson, Mississippi 60%
Fargo, North Dakota 82%
Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas 40%
San Francisco, California 37%
Portland, Maine 66%
Tallahassee, Florida 62%
Portland, Oregon 58%
Seattle, Washington 52%
Las Vegas, Nevada 52%
Trenton, New Jersey 30%
Richmond, Virginia 64%
Omaha, Nebraska 52%
Manchester, New Hampshire 46%
Little Rock, Arkansas 60%
Columbia, South Carolina 70%
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 44%

(Source: http://www.newamerica.net/files/nafmigration/archive/Doc_File_2713_1.pdf)

Direct loans were cheap, and the consolidation brought them down to ~5% afair.

I had a similar experience -- don't think I ever paid more than ~4% and some of them were cheaper. A lot of it depends on your lender/servicer, though, and they're not always particularly nice institutions...

thats because some idiot decided having non-direct loans and promising a profit to everyone who serviced them. Doh!

Yep. According to this article on student loans, that would apparently be congress circa the mid 1990s.

Over the last 4-5 years, it's been increasingly recognized that this has led to abuses that's getting to be systemic.

... student loan debt tends to be some of the easiest debt to get forbearance or deferment for.

If you get the right lender / loan manager, of course. In the last few years it's been revealed there's a lot of abuse in the student lending system, not everyone involved is trustworthy.

I like the last mile proposal where you buy it and share it condominium style with your neighbors. Then ISPs plug into a shared community portal. http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/homes_tails

Who owns what part of the run from the central office or switch to the curb? One fiber for each person? Bundles of thousands of fibers would be expensive. And how would millions be handled? Where is the space for all that? And what if you don't want it?

I can see home owners owning the fiber from the curb to the home or other building but not from there to the office, switch, or whatever. Now what I can see working is the separation of the ownership of the infrastructure from the services it can provide. Say a coop or the local government builds, owns, and maintains the connection fibers and hardware to the curb but then sells access to Comcast and other providers who then maintain their own equipment and bill customers.

Falcon

I like the last mile proposal where you buy it and share it condominium style with your neighbors. Then ISPs plug into a shared community portal. http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/homes_tails

There's only one problem with Topolski's argument: it's completely bogus. In fact, it is revisionist history. Network administrators, at the time, were cheering the release of something more powerful and flexible than Gopher (which UMN had just decided it was going to try to license for money). Here's the truth behind Topolski's nonsense. The reason Topolski is making this tenuous, bogus argument is that he has just been hired by a Washington, DC lobbying group called the New America Foundation. This group is what's known as an "astroturf group." It pretends to be populist, but in fact is funded by big corporate money and promotes agendas that those corporations tell it to promote. In the case of the "New America Foundation," this is quite blatant: the Chairman of the group is Eric Schmidt, the CEO of GoogleClick (Google, which has merged with DoubleClick and is therefore the world's largest invader of Web users' privacy). Schmidt he has funneled more than $1 million of Google's money to the group. The group, in turn, parrots Google's corporate agenda to the letter. As does Topolski. Both Google and Topolski are seeking to regulate the Internet in ways that benefit Google at others' expense. In particular, the legislation which Google favors would force ISPs to raise prices, harm or even destroy competitive Internet service providers (leaving a cable/telco duopoly), and harm all Internet users' quality of service. In short, this is a corporate scam. Don't fall for it.

See Measuring TV 'White Space' Available for Unlicensed Wireless Broadband. Dense urban markets like Boston will have ~30% underused, medium markets like Portland will have ~60%, and rural markets like Fargo will have ~80%.

I do it occasionally too, but that person is not going to believe you without support. However, if you researched further, you might find out that the experiment wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

While it is possible to cause these issues, if that statement were patently true then TV stations would cause interference with each other. If a signal only uses a portion of the adjacent channel then it can operate without interference. Furthermore in the rural areas that much of this is targetted at 2nd and even 3rd adjacent channels are wide open.

http://www.ittc.ku.edu/publications/documents/pett y2007_Dyspan07.pdf
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/quan tifying_the_impact_of_unlicensed_devices_on_digita l_tv_receivers

AT&T as a captive carrier

You know, I really don't care for Apple and I tend to think that most of their products are more marketing success then actual functionality, but even so you can't really blame them for AT&T being a captive carrier. That's the way the damn cell industry works in the United States. The carriers have all the power. Ever tried to create an app for a cell phone? Ever tried to do something in the interest of your users and not in the interest of the carriers? Good luck!

Verizon and AT&T rank as the least friendly carriers to do business with -- both for developers and for their end users. Crippled phones, disabled features, draconian terms of service, etc, etc, etc. Sprint is slightly better and T-Mobile USA is probably the most friendly but even they pale in comparison to the freedom of choice that exists in the rest of the World.

I would encourage everybody to go read this document. It explains how the industry works and advocates for an adoption of wireless network neutrality and applying the carterphone rules to the wireless industry. There is simply no excuse for why I can't just go down to Wally World, buy any phone I want (from a $20 el-cheapo POS to a $600 PDA), plug my SIM card (or RUIM card for CDMA) into it and use it.

The green party strongly supports IRV and has been able to promote it is some jurisdictions (e.g. http://www.newamerica.net/blogs/2007/02/takoma_par ks_new_vote_system_makes_debut).

To end gerrymandering, all that is needed is for 27 more states to ratify the Congressional Apportionment Amendment:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congression al_Apportionment_Amendment. So, if you don't live in NJ, MD, NC, SC, NH, NY, RI, PA, VA, VT or KY get your state legislature to ratify.
--
Switch to solar http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Before Bayh-Dole, there was a system where everything was patented with the patent assigned to the government and it sat on a shelf, as no one benefited by marketing the patent to potential customers. The *right* thing to do from a public point of view would have been that all inventions funded in whole or in part by US taxpayer dollars should have been put into the public domain as they had already been paid for. Instead, patent lawyers and universities got a free hand-out and the US public gets asked to pay twice (or more) for the same stuff. Conflict-of-interest and corruption plain and simple. Now universities keep professors from talking about their research until patents are filed and academic research is further skewed by pressure short term commercialization possibilities. The problem of money in academia has to do more with the pyramid scheme nature of PhD eduction (see below).

For more on how Bayh-Dole has ruined academia, see the article "The Kept University" for example:
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/20 00/the_kept_university
http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/papers/k eptu.html
"One of the most basic tenets of science is that we share information in an open way," says Steven Rosenberg, of the National Cancer Institute, who is among the country's leading cancer researchers. "As biotech and pharmaceutical companies have become more involved in funding research, there's been a shift toward confidentiality that is severely inhibiting the interchange of information." A few years ago Rosenberg confronted this problem firsthand when he tried to obtain information on safe-dosage levels for a reagent he sought to use in a clinical trial involving an experimental cancer treatment. The company asked Rosenberg to sign a confidentiality agreement, and when he refused, they withheld the information. Rosenberg has become so alarmed about secrecy that he now urges all scientists and research institutions to reject confidentiality restrictions on principle. Few have heeded his call. A 1997 survey of 2,167 university scientists, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed that nearly one in five had delayed publication for more than six months to protect proprietary information -- and this was the number that admitted to delay. "The ethics of business and the ethics of science do not mix well," Rosenberg says. "This is the real dark side of science."

For more on the deeper issue of the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme, as the exponential growth of academia has ended, see Dr. David Goodstein's testimony to Congress (he is the Vice Provost of CalTech):
http://web.archive.org/web/20060509161315/http://w ww.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
"In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science. There are some who have blamed these problems on a shortage of Federal funds for research. Many have argued that we should double our national investment in science, and that may well be true. But I do not thin

See http://www.newamerica.net/programs/wireless_future /broadband_policy_and_community_wireless/, for example.

At least some regulation is a given with anything telecom-related, but "regulate" doesn't have to mean "discourage" or "prohibit"...

(Note: I work at this think tank, but am not involved with the Wireless Future Program. I do like the idea of community wi-fi, though!)

For those who want a better understanding of the FCC's approach, this is a must read: The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy (pdf).

My only concern is that I originally read about this on a website largely visited by wierdos, miscreants, the usual riff-raff. Original Post. (the original post's links are dead, use the one above).

Most people live within walking distance of one,

If by "most people" you mean "people living within two miles of a public library", sure.

The United States had 9074 public libraries" as of 2001. It also has 3,537,441 square miles in total. Assuming no overlap in public libraries, (9074*3.14159*2^2) = 114027 square miles of "walkable" library coverage, or 3.2% of the total land area.

Only about 6% of the land of the United States is actually used for residence.

The absolute upper limit of "percentage of people living in the United States who can walk to a public library" is thus 3.2 / 5.5 = 58% .

This is old news to anyone who works in Defense.

In fact, if you want to use hardware/software in a classified area, it has to be from a United States based company and passed through a rigorous investigation as to whether or not it is safe to use. Even things like Java or C++ libraries have to undergo this for the simple fact of the matter that the US government is over-cautious.

Do you blame them? Can you strip down a Laptop and really ensure that there's nothing like a keystroke logger or a very very low-level chipset process running on a side processor or microcontroller that captures choice information and automatically sends it out the NIC to a Chinese agency?

You have to remember that there are conspiracy theorists out there that are paid and unpaid. The paid ones are simply better at controlling their imagination to realistic limits and are hired by governments to think & fear.

Now, do you remember when certain Chinese conspiracy theorists decided that China's government suspected Windows SP2 of foul play? This is more of the same kind of thinking ...

We have had some peaks and valleys in our history, but I think post-World War II and World War II itself was a peak, and we had some really good people thinking hard about these issues. And one of the things that they probably wouldn't tell you if they were here today - unless they'd had a few drinks, and Harry Truman would have had a few - (laughter) - is that they didn't want another FDR. They did not want another Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They even amended the Constitution to make sure they didn't get one for more than eight years. But they didn't want the secrecy, they didn't want the concentration of power, they didn't want the lack of transparency into principal decisions that got people killed, even though they'd been successful in arguably one of the greatest conflicts the world has seen. And so they set about trying to ensure that this wouldn't happen again.

That is not the case today. And when I say that is not the case today, I stop on 26 January 2005. I don't know what the case is today; I wish I did. But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

We have had some peaks and valleys in our history, but I think post-World War II and World War II itself was a peak, and we had some really good people thinking hard about these issues. And one of the things that they probably wouldn't tell you if they were here today - unless they'd had a few drinks, and Harry Truman would have had a few - (laughter) - is that they didn't want another FDR. They did not want another Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They even amended the Constitution to make sure they didn't get one for more than eight years. But they didn't want the secrecy, they didn't want the concentration of power, they didn't want the lack of transparency into principal decisions that got people killed, even though they'd been successful in arguably one of the greatest conflicts the world has seen. And so they set about trying to ensure that this wouldn't happen again.

That is not the case today. And when I say that is not the case today, I stop on 26 January 2005. I don't know what the case is today; I wish I did. But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

Secondly, the notoriously paranoid government in Beijing has also long feared that Microsoft Windows has a "back door" that could allow for U.S. government snooping -- a fear no doubt enhanced by the January discovery of bugging devices in President Jiang Zemin's new personal Boeing 767. Microsoft, of course, denies that it would ever be involved in such matters, but many Chinese still feel safer using the open code of Linux. In China, after all, any company as big as Microsoft would be in cahoots with the government.

Lobbyists for spectrum license holders have written thousands of pages of F.C.C. comments ridiculing proposals to allow low-power transmissions (whispering) within their frequency bands. For example, highpower TV broadcasters argue that such low-power unlicensed underlays for uses such as WiFi would create harmful interference with their signals and lead to an inefficient allocation of resources. By lobbying against unlicensed underlays, they hope to hinder potential competitors and create a vast new market for themselves.

Good question. Jennifer Washburn might know (about US institutions, at least).

Not one US Supreme Court justice came down on the side of Gore. The 5-4 malarky you hear is just a lot of hot air - Gore was on really thin ice legally.

Since the Florida supreme court came to the opposite conclusion, it would appear that you are the one with the balderdash.

Naturally, the court you agree with is the correct one and the court you disagree with is activist. That fact remains that the highest court with authority to interpret Florida law ruled in Gore's favor.

SCOTUS played nice with SCOFLA. The US Supreme court could have gone all the way to Article II of the US Consitution that says that electors are selected "as the legislature directs".

According to Justice Scalia, "the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world." (reference) His opinion is therefore based on foreign standards, not US law. I'm sure you could rationalize the decision until you're blue in the face, but let's agree on the facts:

- it was a 5-4 decision
- it could easily have gone in Gore's favor if the court were composed differently

The FCC doesnt care what you are sending or if you interfere. Your rights are of no concern to big media.

Presenting, The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy.

The first time i read it, it seemed like fluff. But its actually quite educational.
Myren

I wouldn't put it past the FCC to try controlling content on any open broadcast medium. I agree with you on the point that the FCC shouldn't really be in charge of decency. However, the job of the FCC commissioner IS glamorous when he is raking in BILLIONS from spectrum auctions. The petty six figure decency fines are chump change in comparison.

Hahah! What are you smoking sir?

http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=program&Pro gID=17
This is hardly nerconservative libertarians (never heard of such of thing anyway).

New America's Universal Health Insurance Program has four primary components:

National Policy Research

In its first two years, the Program will publish an integrated series of ten major policy papers, which will collectively lay the intellectual foundation for a system of mandatory but privately administered insurance coverage

There is a typo in page 16 (page 10 of the pdf file.

Humans can hear frequencies from 20 Hz to 20 kHz
not 20 kHz to 20000 kHz.

The 0 kHz in the radio makes me think somebody typoed all "Hz" words to "kHz".

You are correct in that trade secrets cannot be declared over existing patents; I was (mistakenly)referring to the Listerine case where royalties from a competitor were awarded even though no patent was ever granted and the formula had been public (i.e. not secret) for 25 years.

I understand the argument that industry needs patent protection in order to justify its investment in innovation, but that argument is up for debate. I mean, for one thing, some have argued that our system actually stifles innovation because researchers balk at the high prices of royalties and the fees involved in finding out who holds patents and licenses in the first place. Second, some people would also argue that the "rate of innovation" has decreased dramatically over the past thirty years; drugs that appear "to have therapeutic qualities similar to those of an already marketed drug" appear much more frequently than inherently new, innovative drugs. And that doesn't even begin to get into concerns over equity, monopoly, and price-gouging.

I'm not arguing that patents be abandoned, but I think that there is some merit to arguing over the efficacy of our system.

You live a sheltered life, doncha? There are quite a lot of people who think the government is big and greedy. They're called Republicans.

You are joking, right?

Have you been paying attention to what Pres. Bush has been doing? You'd think he had eliminated the dept of education, welfare, medicare, and social security all last year given by how conservatives seem to think that his becoming president is like the second coming of jesus. But clearly, he's done the opposite. He not only wants to make these programs bigger, he wants to make them globalized. He's even turning out to be a bigger pork barrel spender than Bill Clinton was (and that's even if you take away his "defense spending" for the WoT and Iraq).

Republican might say that government is too big and too greedy, but they contribute to its size and greediness just as much, if not more so, than the democrats.

Please don't be discouraged by idiotic replies.

The basic idea of a short-hop forwarded wireless network is excellent, and arguably even essential for the continued health of the Internet. It calls for peer co-operation by individuals of the same sort that was applied by universities and research institutions when the Internet broke loose from ARPANet.

Everyone interested in this topic should read Kevin Werbach's Open Spectrum proposal, which has already been posted on Slashdot.

The network design and implementation problems are surely soluble, but haven't been thoroughly addressed yet. The key problem is how to start a deployment. It requires some critical mass of users to create a local system that provides a model for further deployment. Here's a possible scenario:

1. A volunteer local wireless network using fixed-station point-to-point communications implements a more general protocol suitable for mobile stations.
2. A few public-minded geeks slip an implementation of the protocol into the system for a hand-held computer. It doesn't need to be the most popular hand-held, it just needs to have a sufficient following to get noticed.
3. Other local wireless network organizations copy the method, including amateur groups, universities, and businesses that use it to attract customers to buy other goods and services.

Here's an excerpt describing the Markle grant: "This Fellows program is designed to support the next generation of public intellectuals who foster fresh ideas and contribute to the national and international dialogue on these issues."

The end of TiVo is worthy of national and international dialogue?

Whatever.

Hmm, no mention of Markey's recent bill, the "Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act" aka hr4641. It would use some of the proceeds from spectrum auctions to go to a fund to support digital divide issues and clear our new unlicensed spectrum. There's a companion bill in the Senate that *doesn't* include the spectrum bit, so we'll have to fight for it.

Yall West Coast politico-wannabe's must be out of it if yall missed this, get in the game already. This stuff is going down in Washington and yall don't even know it. Couldn't Larry Lessig have clued you in? Seriously, here's some resources on this.

Quick info on the bill from the Center for Digital Democracy (lead group on the open access fight)

http://democraticmedia.org/news/washingtonwatch/ma rkeyBill.html

The proposal is kinda a scaled down version of the a proposal called the Digital Promise, hatched by a guy who used to head PBS.

This was all discussed at a gab fest at the New America Foundation last week. Check out the agenda (pdf), the spectrum panel is on towards the end. You'll notice Reed Hundt, former FCC commissioner, and Yochai Benkler who's scholarship intersects w/ free software and other kinds of commons.

Hmm, no mention of Markey's recent bill, the "Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act" aka hr4641. It would use some of the proceeds from spectrum auctions to go to a fund to support digital divide issues and clear our new unlicensed spectrum. There's a companion bill in the Senate that *doesn't* include the spectrum bit, so we'll have to fight for it.

Yall West Coast politico-wannabe's must be out of it if yall missed this, get in the game already. This stuff is going down in Washington and yall don't even know it. Couldn't Larry Lessig have clued you in? Seriously, here's some resources on this.

Quick info on the bill from the Center for Digital Democracy (lead group on the open access fight)

http://democraticmedia.org/news/washingtonwatch/ma rkeyBill.html

The proposal is kinda a scaled down version of the a proposal called the Digital Promise, hatched by a guy who used to head PBS.

This was all discussed at a gab fest at the New America Foundation last week. Check out the agenda (pdf), the spectrum panel is on towards the end. You'll notice Reed Hundt, former FCC commissioner, and Yochai Benkler who's scholarship intersects w/ free software and other kinds of commons.

Hmm, no mention of Markey's recent bill, the "Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act" aka hr4641. It would use some of the proceeds from spectrum auctions to go to a fund to support digital divide issues and clear our new unlicensed spectrum. There's a companion bill in the Senate that *doesn't* include the spectrum bit, so we'll have to fight for it.

Yall West Coast politico-wannabe's must be out of it if yall missed this, get in the game already. This stuff is going down in Washington and yall don't even know it. Couldn't Larry Lessig have clued you in? Seriously, here's some resources on this.

Quick info on the bill from the Center for Digital Democracy (lead group on the open access fight)

http://democraticmedia.org/news/washingtonwatch/ma rkeyBill.html

The proposal is kinda a scaled down version of the a proposal called the Digital Promise, hatched by a guy who used to head PBS.

This was all discussed at a gab fest at the New America Foundation last week. Check out the agenda (pdf), the spectrum panel is on towards the end. You'll notice Reed Hundt, former FCC commissioner, and Yochai Benkler who's scholarship intersects w/ free software and other kinds of commons.