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TV Airwaves To Deliver Internet?
roscoetoon directs our attention to a proposal from an odd assortment of tech companies — Google, Microsoft, H-P, Intel, and others — to reuse TV wavelengths to deliver first-mile connectivity. The Washington Post article is subtitled "Cable, Phone Companies Watch Warily." As well they might. One of the big content companies that the incumbent duopolists propose to soak by dismantling network neutrality, in company with some powerful allies, is striking back at the heart of their business.
wireless tubes or radio tubes?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
As we all learned in college, words have meanings and deconstructing those meanings is the only worthwhile human pursuit. The UN excels at this. Take the situation in Darfur, for example. A simplistic person such as an American might look at 250,000 civilian deaths and conclude that its a "genocide". Silly American with your black and white views of the world! Learn to see shades of grey! While it is an easy mistake to make to call Darfur a genocide, everyone knows that only white people commit "genocide". When brown people kill black people its grey! Quoting from the UN report:
"In particular, the commission found that government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur... These acts were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity... [But] The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing..."
Phew, we dodged a bullet there! See, if there had been genocidal intent in those 250,000 murders, then we would have had to do something about it! But since there's no intent, there is no genocide, and we can just tut-tut about it a little and then get back to important things, like textual deconstruction! After all, the US firms practice of saying Last Mile instead of First Mile clearly has negative connotations for people living on it, and we wouldn't want to discourage people in places like Darfur by implying that their discursive status is to be dismissed as cavalierly as their lives! Then we can concentrate our efforts into the political and ideological reasons why people don't have Internet technology, and ignore those silly American corporations who persist on trying to find technical and financial solutions to the problem. (See the excellent breakdown in parent's article for the UN.) I mean, who expects something prosaic like *broadcasting* and *cheap, mass-produced hardware* to work at reaching the rural population? Its not like that worked for radio and television! No, we got radio and television deployed essentially everywhere by deconstructing the root political and ideological reasons for absence of television!
Seriously for a moment: you want Last Mile connectivity? Stop arguing about what its called, get the "development" eggheads out of the way, and tell American industry that there is money in it. Bam, they WILL find a path to the cheese. You don't even have to tell them there is money in it because they already know -- everyone is looking at bypassing the guys who own the physical networks and if you surmount the Last Mile problem then networks cease to become really impressive because you can't own the customers attached to them. The fact that surmounting that problem will also make for vastly cheaper infrastructure expenses for the portion of the world that isn't wired yet (which, if you're talking about broadband, includes most of the States!) is one of those happy accidents of progress. Capitalism: It Works.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.