Unlimited Airwaves

Dan Gillmor has an article concerning the notion of scarcity of the airwaves, which has long been a testament of faith at the FCC. Recent advances in technology may render that testament false.

Comments

Finally

[Myshkin]

I'll finally be able to have my own television station and rebroadcast 'Thundar the Barbarian' 24 hours a day! Oh, Joy!

Yeah right

[Subcarrier]

Imagine if we had cars that could pass through each other and through people without any resistance. I would be the end of traffic jams!

Re:We need to do

[jxs2151]

I think what galls people about Gore's comment is that he appears to be yet another politician who tries to associate himself with the glorious accomplishments of truly intelligent and prescient individuals.

The fact remains that even if his phrasing was 'ackward' like the article you linked to suggests, it certainly does give one insight into what the average DC congresscritter thinks about himself.

Re:actually

[HiThere]

There will always be limits, but with low powered transmissions, packet switching retransmissions, etc. you can increase the level of em usage remarkably. I'm not sure of the details of what he's arguing (slashdot is largely down right now, so navigation is difficult), but spread-spectrum mainly buys you higher noise immunity at any given power level. It's the packet switching transmission and reduced power levels at each transmitting station that up the throughput.

OTOH, this might have its downside, too. It everything goes wireless then the amount of exposure to em radiation at numerous wavelengths will increase. This is bound to have effects, if nothing more than raising the temperature. It might, however, have substantially worse effects, even if those are hard to forsee. This kind of thing should be tested in small areas at first, and again for each increase in power concentration or spectrum coverage. I suspect that at least an entire town would need to be used as a guinea pig here, since we don't even know what effect we are looking for. Possibilities that occur to me are:
1) Increased level of cancer
2) Increased mould growth
3) Increased food spoilage
4) Increased glaucoma (i.e. opacity of the vitreous humor)
5) Faster proliferation of weeds
6) Increased pregnancy rate
7) Decreased pregnancy rate
8) ...
And I've though of reasonable mechanisms for all of the mentioned effects. (Of course, there's a big difference between a reasonable mechanism and a probably effect.)