To static electricity, why not coat the plexiglas with an antistatic metallic layer (similar to what's used in antistatic bags)? While it won't be as crystalline in appearance, it will still be nice and shiny, and if the antistatic metallization is thick enough to prevent static buildup, but thin enough to be transparent, then the loss of aethetics will be minimized...
Of course, I could use the Red Green method on mine, make it with chicken wire and duct tape, does wonders for cooling, and is static free! Ghetto boxen, anyone?
Well hey, which would you rather have as a spinoff of the space race, Tang and Velcro? Or a chance to visit outer space and enjoy the same thing in it's native environment?...;)
There are two sides to the issue that people have made about this sale, although so far they've only covered the following:
How hard up for cash is Russia's space program?
The other side that very few have covered is simply this: Russia's space program (who really have nothing to lose) is branching out into the commercial field that allows the general public to actually have a part in space flight... They have either very much to lose or everything to gain as the first nation to *not* treat space as a domain only for the elitest of elites (yah, you still have to pay millions of dollars to launch, but that's the cost of EVERY space flight, this ain't a Pinto and grain alcohol deal)...
NASA won't do it, remember their last attempt at civilians in space (the Challenger disaster for you younguns)? The ESA won't do it, they lack the infrastructure to build anything more than satellite launch mechanisms... The Chinese won't do it, they lack the infrastructure to do much, and are behind the US/Russia by as much as 30 years (yeah, they swiped out launch technology, but still will take years to RE and blueprint so they can successfully build their own boosters)... Australia, India, and others are just entering the field, and right now the fact that Russia is opening up the market, it gives them another business model to consider...
We've spent the first 25 years of space flight with little more than a focus on it's military application... That's why since the time it began, space flight has been under military jurisdiction... Military men in military funded operations claiming military territory in a military race... Remember why we went into the space program in the first place? The US space program is showing cracks around the facade, but it still is largely a military business model...
While the Russians still know to maintain a military level of professionalism, they aren't afraid nowadays to let a little humanity impose on outer space... As a result, they might wind up being the Princess Cruiselines of space flight... Oh god... With that thought...
Spaaaaace, exciting and new, come aboard, we're expecting you, the Looooove Mirrrr, sorry the toilet is on the blink, the Loooove Mirrrr, please don't try to use the sinnnnk!
"Then why does the government continue to strike hardest at poor, minority neighborhoods?"
Because they put them there in the first place... When I was 12, I lived on welfare, and when my mom got off welfare, we lived in the Bronx... Just a mere 3-4 weeks after the Contra cocaine scandal during the Reagan years, crack cocaine appeared in the area...
I'm pretty much surprised that the miscellaneous black leaderships took so long (almost 15 years) to figure it out in the first place... What did they think the CIA was doing with all that coke? Supplying it to Dubbya's personal stash?
Long ago, anime fans got together to trade tapes with either raw or fansubbed anime videos... Usually cash would change hands, enough to cover the price of the tape itself (or postage in the event that they were on a mailing list)...
The same happens today, on Usenet and/or websites, either offering tapes for trade or full episode downloads... Now considering that this was, in essense, far more beneficial for anime releases in the US (would there have been any interest in Tenchi Muyo if not for the fansub tapes that were made?), would it be fair to say that anime tape/episode trading was in fact stealing from the Japanese?
Considering that this was being done decades hence, while the anime fans in Japan were doing more than enough to cover the costs of production, it would seem that this is an adequate business model for the US markets to observe...
In my own history, I've purchased DVD's based on what I've downloaded and enjoyed... The MPAA's attitude that the download of movies equals theft is incorrect... If you watch a movie that is crap, then you're out the $7+ you paid for the tickets... The movie industry then profits from it, and decides that the crap in question is justification to produce more crap similar to the crap you wasted your money on...
If you go to a restaurant and the food sucks, you can get your money back, or at least a free meal to make up for it... If you purchase any equipment that doesn't function, or functions improperly, you can get a refund or exchange... If you watch a movie for free and then pay for it if you like it, then it's the same exact thing... If I downloaded a movie I liked, I'd hold onto it til the DVD came out (which is where most movies really make their profits to begin with), and if not, there's 600+ megs of HD space I could use for something better...
Close to 20 years ago... It was called Smell-O-Vision, involving a simple printed card with numbers and scratch and sniff spots, and was distributed with the John Waters movie 'Hairspray'...
With all the money blown on the iSmell, they could have printed these out and distributed them with custom logos for the sites they represented, made a mint from the sites aforementioned, saved a ton of money on R&D, and still remain solvent in the dot com bust...
And of course, around 1985 or so, they released the scent disk player, which involved a felt and plastic disk that would release a pleasing scent when heated, which would then be blown out with a low power fan... Failed horribly...
Back in the days of Kruschiev (sp?), the Soviet space program was working on a plan for a nuclear ordinance space station (pre Salyut) as a method for bombarding foreign countries with orbital nukes... The name of that space was Zarya...
The same name as the first Russian ISS module...;)
Scanners:
(where the hero hacks into the pharmoceutical company's computer simply by scanning it over the phonelines with his mind)
The President's Analyst:
While not a true hacker movie, it DOES however draw interesting parallels to modern times despite dating back to 1967 (quickie synopsis, a psychiatrist is hired on to act as the president's shrink... Several spy organizations follow him, each trying to capture him in order to find out just what's on the president's mind... He's finally captured by the most nefarious spy organization around, the phone company... They in turn atempt to brainwash him into advising the president to sign a new bill allowing them wider reaching powers of operation (telecommunications bill, anyone?), and allow them to implant a microscopic wireless telephone into everyone's brains (literal cellular phone, anyone?)...
Colossus: The Forbin Project:
A classic 'Computers want to rule the world' movie... First good example of using a DOS attack to stop a mainframe computer from communicating with it's counterpart...
Demon Seed:
While a pretty lame movie, it does introduce a better grasp of how misunderstood by Hollywood that computers are, and thusly how their users are similarly misunderstood...
Max Headroom:
Believe it or not, this WAS a movie before it became a TV show... Lots of hacker-fu in this one kids...
Johnny Mnemonic:
Bwahhahhahhhahhahhhhh!!!! (sorry)
Oh, wait, I'm drifting into cyberpunk now... Well... I'll leave it at this then...
Well, technically by the logic displayed in the courts, Charles Manson should be released from prison... After all, he never actually committed the murders he's known for, he simply 'encouraged' the members of his 'family' to perform them... Speech is speech, after all, whether written or spoken...
Oh you younguns today *snicker*... I've dealt with Windows 2000 AND Windows ME (crap) when they first came out, and had to swat some Linux users with a cluebat when they bitched and moaned about the (then) 600 meg install footprint that both required...
Do you really want to know what the true install footprint of Win2K/WinME is? 300 megs, including media player, IE, etc... About 50-100 megs above that of Win98...
For those saying it's still too large, try installing the full Redhat Server w/Apache and whatnot, you'll note that it's twice the install base...
Now then, since that's out of the way, you're probably wondering (since most *nux bigots never even touched a Windows 2000 system) what that remaining 300 megs (600 w/WinME's rollback feature) is for... Well, ever install something, ANYTHING into your system, new NIC, video card, sound card, etc, and get a 'Please insert your Windows 9x installation disk' prompt? That's because all the drivers/VXDs/DLLs for Win9x were stored, whereas Windows 2000/ME and XP will be dumped to a system directory for future use...
Call it a time saver and a space waster, when it dumps 250 megs of drivers you'll probably never use onto you HD, but it IS nice to not have to constantly remind Windoze where it's own drivers are stored... It would have been much better though, if Windows 2000/ME would have given you the option to delete drivers that you KNOW you don't use, and that you probably won't ever use...
(sung to 'Blame Canada' from South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut)
Times have changed
PC's are getting worst
When I open my browser
I just want to scream and curse!
Should we blame the hackers?
Or blame cryptology?
Or should we blame the IBM PC?
Heck no! Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
With their corporate HQ
And coders chugging lots of Dew
Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
Another General Protection Fault
It's Microsoft's fault!
Don't blame me
My favorite is a Mac
If I saw a file extension
Then I'd have a heart attack
And I have Linux
I bought it right off the shelf
But when there's a problem
Tech tells me to fuck myself
Well, Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
And their nerdy little boss
Offing him would be no loss
Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
It's not even a real OS anyway
I once had an Amiga
The fastest one it's true
It's now a pair of bookends
It's a good thing that I bought two
Should we all blame Commodore?
Should we blame the stores?
Or should we all try blaming ol' Al Gore?
Heck no! Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
With their icky old XBox
And their poor excuse for SOCKS
Blame Microsoft!
Shame on Microsoft!
The bugs we must stop
The sales we must top
Blue screens and DOS
Get rid of their boss
We must blame them and whine and cuss
Before they stick us with WindowsXP Plus!
The key problem lies not in hardware, but IN software...
It lies within a lack of sufficient bandwidth as well, when 56K is woefully insufficient for those who aren't able to sanely justify moving within servicable areas for *DSL or cable modem service... In other words, for many it involves plunking down $1,000+ just to be in a more convenient area for broadband service... When you're talking those numbers, you may as well ask them to install a T3 in the middle of nowhere to offset the costs...
I'm using a PIII 750 (in actuality a marginally overclocked PIII 733, which at last check, around $130 on PriceWatch) which is NOT that high an expendature, compared to the price they're gouging on P4's... In which case, get a Thunderbird 1Ghz+... But irregardless, it works fine for MPEG 2 AND 4 en/decoding in software(though on decoding, still some minor flaws in timing exist)...
As for Sorenson, that's the only damnned Apple approved codec that makes ANYTHING on a PC look inferior to their precious Macs... In fact, one could say that it was so bloody processor intensive on a x86 deliberately, just so Apple could maintain their 'A 500 Mhz G3 is faster than a 1 Ghz Pentium III' claim...
Just look at the Lord of the Rings Sorenson preview in Quicktime on anything less than a 500 Mhz processor, and you'll know what I mean...
However, for non entertainment value, what is there? I don't program, so therefore compile times matter none to little... And on the open market, to the average couch potato Joe Public, that means nothing at all...
Considering how the FCC has ben subject to US corporate radio/media payola for almost as long as radios have existed? Considering how much crap they force people to go through in order to get licenses? Considering how alternative radio (eg: public, college, or community) stations have been repeatedly squashed by the same FCC, paid to outlaw and derail such stations by the aforementioned corporate radio/media conglomorates?
You'd be amazed at what any federal organization would do if you crossed their palms with sufficient silver...
And you thought that the phone company being the biggest organization of evil in 'The President's Analyst' was just a clever joke...;)
Approximately 20-25 years ago, someone attempted to run a pirate radio station on a rebuilt cargo ship... They were broadcasting just off of Long Island NY, in international waters, whilst claiming to be under another country's citezenry...
The attempt failed, when the country denied any knowledge of their citizenship, and promptly the US Coast Guard zipped in and shut down the radio station...
In the case of Iridium, it's a fairly (under 5 years in orbit)new satellite system, that despite the owners having gone bankrupt (the buyout happened in late 2000), is very much operational and current technology... The Iridium satellite network had sold very few phones, due to a $3,000 price tag... However, they also allow for worldwide wireless net access as well as voice communications... Useful if you're stuck in the boonies, or doing scientific studies in areas where there aren't cel/telephone systems in place...
Largely though, the lack of sales was due to rabid competition from existing local and national cellular phone technology... It still is a viable technology, just don't expect it to sell in any country that practically gives cel phones away...
As for the story itself, it's old (3 months hence) news, originally viewable at:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-4119384.htm l
Yup! And therefore, the sole cause for Microsoft holding a monopoly today is NOT Microsoft, but the same ubergeeks and uberhackers who refuse to make, let alone allow Linux to be a user friendly OS...
The only reason Linux has the professional level of respect that it does, is that it's a viable alternative to other flavors of *nix, which many professional IT and engineers are already familiar with, and unlike the professional grade OS's like Unix (which can cost thousands to set up), costs nothing... And $0 is a very pretty number to the beancounters...
Therein lies the irony, Linux is used by those *evil* corporations that the Linux zealots tend to rail on about... They also make a profit by using an OS that they can get for free, writing off their on site geeks as a tax deduction... They're laughing all the way to the bank, and yet Linuxers have displayed this as a badge of honor...
Oh, but I suppose handing the brass ring to evil corporations is okay, as long as it defines your skills as '1337'... Next they'll say how their computers are made of organically grown components designed by Buckminster Fuller, powered by a Wilheim Reich designed orgone harvester, transmitted via Tesla broadcast power, using an open source wireless net stabdard designed by Jerry Garcia...
I think he meant it as 'blank', to imply storage in any medium, tape, disk, etc (as storage mediums evolve over time, to imply any singular form is moot)... Additionally he probably meant website/ftp/p2p systems...
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, what comes to mind for me is the Simpsons... Especially since Homer started a dotcom and was bought out by Bill Gates... D'oh!
That nobody manufactures truly transparent mobo's, rig one of those up with neon or electroluminescent paneling, now that would look 1337...;)
While on the subject, it's amazing that everyone loves the clear cases, etc... I mean... Does anyone remember Crystal Pepsi? *shudder*
Don't forget the hamster wheel...;)
To static electricity, why not coat the plexiglas with an antistatic metallic layer (similar to what's used in antistatic bags)? While it won't be as crystalline in appearance, it will still be nice and shiny, and if the antistatic metallization is thick enough to prevent static buildup, but thin enough to be transparent, then the loss of aethetics will be minimized...
Of course, I could use the Red Green method on mine, make it with chicken wire and duct tape, does wonders for cooling, and is static free! Ghetto boxen, anyone?
Well hey, which would you rather have as a spinoff of the space race, Tang and Velcro? Or a chance to visit outer space and enjoy the same thing in it's native environment?...;)
There are two sides to the issue that people have made about this sale, although so far they've only covered the following:
How hard up for cash is Russia's space program?
The other side that very few have covered is simply this: Russia's space program (who really have nothing to lose) is branching out into the commercial field that allows the general public to actually have a part in space flight... They have either very much to lose or everything to gain as the first nation to *not* treat space as a domain only for the elitest of elites (yah, you still have to pay millions of dollars to launch, but that's the cost of EVERY space flight, this ain't a Pinto and grain alcohol deal)...
NASA won't do it, remember their last attempt at civilians in space (the Challenger disaster for you younguns)? The ESA won't do it, they lack the infrastructure to build anything more than satellite launch mechanisms... The Chinese won't do it, they lack the infrastructure to do much, and are behind the US/Russia by as much as 30 years (yeah, they swiped out launch technology, but still will take years to RE and blueprint so they can successfully build their own boosters)... Australia, India, and others are just entering the field, and right now the fact that Russia is opening up the market, it gives them another business model to consider...
We've spent the first 25 years of space flight with little more than a focus on it's military application... That's why since the time it began, space flight has been under military jurisdiction... Military men in military funded operations claiming military territory in a military race... Remember why we went into the space program in the first place? The US space program is showing cracks around the facade, but it still is largely a military business model...
While the Russians still know to maintain a military level of professionalism, they aren't afraid nowadays to let a little humanity impose on outer space... As a result, they might wind up being the Princess Cruiselines of space flight... Oh god... With that thought...
Spaaaaace, exciting and new, come aboard, we're expecting you, the Looooove Mirrrr, sorry the toilet is on the blink, the Loooove Mirrrr, please don't try to use the sinnnnk!
Sorry about that...
"Then why does the government continue to strike hardest at poor, minority neighborhoods?"
Because they put them there in the first place... When I was 12, I lived on welfare, and when my mom got off welfare, we lived in the Bronx... Just a mere 3-4 weeks after the Contra cocaine scandal during the Reagan years, crack cocaine appeared in the area...
I'm pretty much surprised that the miscellaneous black leaderships took so long (almost 15 years) to figure it out in the first place... What did they think the CIA was doing with all that coke? Supplying it to Dubbya's personal stash?
Can I play the Peruvian air force pilot who gets to shoot down missionaries, when I mistake their plane for a smuggler's???
Just remember kids, you're ALL POW's in the war on drugs... Irregardless of innocence or guilt...
Long ago, anime fans got together to trade tapes with either raw or fansubbed anime videos... Usually cash would change hands, enough to cover the price of the tape itself (or postage in the event that they were on a mailing list)...
The same happens today, on Usenet and/or websites, either offering tapes for trade or full episode downloads... Now considering that this was, in essense, far more beneficial for anime releases in the US (would there have been any interest in Tenchi Muyo if not for the fansub tapes that were made?), would it be fair to say that anime tape/episode trading was in fact stealing from the Japanese?
Considering that this was being done decades hence, while the anime fans in Japan were doing more than enough to cover the costs of production, it would seem that this is an adequate business model for the US markets to observe...
In my own history, I've purchased DVD's based on what I've downloaded and enjoyed... The MPAA's attitude that the download of movies equals theft is incorrect... If you watch a movie that is crap, then you're out the $7+ you paid for the tickets... The movie industry then profits from it, and decides that the crap in question is justification to produce more crap similar to the crap you wasted your money on...
If you go to a restaurant and the food sucks, you can get your money back, or at least a free meal to make up for it... If you purchase any equipment that doesn't function, or functions improperly, you can get a refund or exchange... If you watch a movie for free and then pay for it if you like it, then it's the same exact thing... If I downloaded a movie I liked, I'd hold onto it til the DVD came out (which is where most movies really make their profits to begin with), and if not, there's 600+ megs of HD space I could use for something better...
Close to 20 years ago... It was called Smell-O-Vision, involving a simple printed card with numbers and scratch and sniff spots, and was distributed with the John Waters movie 'Hairspray'...
With all the money blown on the iSmell, they could have printed these out and distributed them with custom logos for the sites they represented, made a mint from the sites aforementioned, saved a ton of money on R&D, and still remain solvent in the dot com bust...
And of course, around 1985 or so, they released the scent disk player, which involved a felt and plastic disk that would release a pleasing scent when heated, which would then be blown out with a low power fan... Failed horribly...
Back in the days of Kruschiev (sp?), the Soviet space program was working on a plan for a nuclear ordinance space station (pre Salyut) as a method for bombarding foreign countries with orbital nukes... The name of that space was Zarya...
The same name as the first Russian ISS module...;)
Scanners:
(where the hero hacks into the pharmoceutical company's computer simply by scanning it over the phonelines with his mind)
The President's Analyst:
While not a true hacker movie, it DOES however draw interesting parallels to modern times despite dating back to 1967 (quickie synopsis, a psychiatrist is hired on to act as the president's shrink... Several spy organizations follow him, each trying to capture him in order to find out just what's on the president's mind... He's finally captured by the most nefarious spy organization around, the phone company... They in turn atempt to brainwash him into advising the president to sign a new bill allowing them wider reaching powers of operation (telecommunications bill, anyone?), and allow them to implant a microscopic wireless telephone into everyone's brains (literal cellular phone, anyone?)...
Colossus: The Forbin Project:
A classic 'Computers want to rule the world' movie... First good example of using a DOS attack to stop a mainframe computer from communicating with it's counterpart...
Demon Seed:
While a pretty lame movie, it does introduce a better grasp of how misunderstood by Hollywood that computers are, and thusly how their users are similarly misunderstood...
Max Headroom:
Believe it or not, this WAS a movie before it became a TV show... Lots of hacker-fu in this one kids...
Johnny Mnemonic:
Bwahhahhahhhahhahhhhh!!!! (sorry)
Oh, wait, I'm drifting into cyberpunk now... Well... I'll leave it at this then...
Well, technically by the logic displayed in the courts, Charles Manson should be released from prison... After all, he never actually committed the murders he's known for, he simply 'encouraged' the members of his 'family' to perform them... Speech is speech, after all, whether written or spoken...
Oh you younguns today *snicker*... I've dealt with Windows 2000 AND Windows ME (crap) when they first came out, and had to swat some Linux users with a cluebat when they bitched and moaned about the (then) 600 meg install footprint that both required...
Do you really want to know what the true install footprint of Win2K/WinME is? 300 megs, including media player, IE, etc... About 50-100 megs above that of Win98...
For those saying it's still too large, try installing the full Redhat Server w/Apache and whatnot, you'll note that it's twice the install base...
Now then, since that's out of the way, you're probably wondering (since most *nux bigots never even touched a Windows 2000 system) what that remaining 300 megs (600 w/WinME's rollback feature) is for... Well, ever install something, ANYTHING into your system, new NIC, video card, sound card, etc, and get a 'Please insert your Windows 9x installation disk' prompt? That's because all the drivers/VXDs/DLLs for Win9x were stored, whereas Windows 2000/ME and XP will be dumped to a system directory for future use...
Call it a time saver and a space waster, when it dumps 250 megs of drivers you'll probably never use onto you HD, but it IS nice to not have to constantly remind Windoze where it's own drivers are stored... It would have been much better though, if Windows 2000/ME would have given you the option to delete drivers that you KNOW you don't use, and that you probably won't ever use...
(sung to 'Blame Canada' from South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut)
Times have changed
PC's are getting worst
When I open my browser
I just want to scream and curse!
Should we blame the hackers?
Or blame cryptology?
Or should we blame the IBM PC?
Heck no! Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
With their corporate HQ
And coders chugging lots of Dew
Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
Another General Protection Fault
It's Microsoft's fault!
Don't blame me
My favorite is a Mac
If I saw a file extension
Then I'd have a heart attack
And I have Linux
I bought it right off the shelf
But when there's a problem
Tech tells me to fuck myself
Well, Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
And their nerdy little boss
Offing him would be no loss
Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
It's not even a real OS anyway
I once had an Amiga
The fastest one it's true
It's now a pair of bookends
It's a good thing that I bought two
Should we all blame Commodore?
Should we blame the stores?
Or should we all try blaming ol' Al Gore?
Heck no! Blame Microsoft!
Blame Microsoft!
With their icky old XBox
And their poor excuse for SOCKS
Blame Microsoft!
Shame on Microsoft!
The bugs we must stop
The sales we must top
Blue screens and DOS
Get rid of their boss
We must blame them and whine and cuss
Before they stick us with WindowsXP Plus!
Saudi Arabia has banned Pokemon games/cards...
. po kemon/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/meast/03/26/saudi
Hmmm... Maybe WOTC made a good choice to sell finally...;)
I will stop my "cloning" experiments in exchange for *pinky to mouth* One... Million Dollars!
It's probably just as good, and accesses a deceny number of servers... You can find it at http://www.winmx.com
The key problem lies not in hardware, but IN software...
It lies within a lack of sufficient bandwidth as well, when 56K is woefully insufficient for those who aren't able to sanely justify moving within servicable areas for *DSL or cable modem service... In other words, for many it involves plunking down $1,000+ just to be in a more convenient area for broadband service... When you're talking those numbers, you may as well ask them to install a T3 in the middle of nowhere to offset the costs...
I'm using a PIII 750 (in actuality a marginally overclocked PIII 733, which at last check, around $130 on PriceWatch) which is NOT that high an expendature, compared to the price they're gouging on P4's... In which case, get a Thunderbird 1Ghz+... But irregardless, it works fine for MPEG 2 AND 4 en/decoding in software(though on decoding, still some minor flaws in timing exist)...
As for Sorenson, that's the only damnned Apple approved codec that makes ANYTHING on a PC look inferior to their precious Macs... In fact, one could say that it was so bloody processor intensive on a x86 deliberately, just so Apple could maintain their 'A 500 Mhz G3 is faster than a 1 Ghz Pentium III' claim...
Just look at the Lord of the Rings Sorenson preview in Quicktime on anything less than a 500 Mhz processor, and you'll know what I mean...
However, for non entertainment value, what is there? I don't program, so therefore compile times matter none to little... And on the open market, to the average couch potato Joe Public, that means nothing at all...
Considering how the FCC has ben subject to US corporate radio/media payola for almost as long as radios have existed? Considering how much crap they force people to go through in order to get licenses? Considering how alternative radio (eg: public, college, or community) stations have been repeatedly squashed by the same FCC, paid to outlaw and derail such stations by the aforementioned corporate radio/media conglomorates?
You'd be amazed at what any federal organization would do if you crossed their palms with sufficient silver...
And you thought that the phone company being the biggest organization of evil in 'The President's Analyst' was just a clever joke...;)
Whoops, correction, it was actually 10-15 years ago, danged long term memory glitch, 1985-1990 seems so long ago...
Approximately 20-25 years ago, someone attempted to run a pirate radio station on a rebuilt cargo ship... They were broadcasting just off of Long Island NY, in international waters, whilst claiming to be under another country's citezenry...
The attempt failed, when the country denied any knowledge of their citizenship, and promptly the US Coast Guard zipped in and shut down the radio station...
In the case of Iridium, it's a fairly (under 5 years in orbit)new satellite system, that despite the owners having gone bankrupt (the buyout happened in late 2000), is very much operational and current technology... The Iridium satellite network had sold very few phones, due to a $3,000 price tag... However, they also allow for worldwide wireless net access as well as voice communications... Useful if you're stuck in the boonies, or doing scientific studies in areas where there aren't cel/telephone systems in place...
m l
Largely though, the lack of sales was due to rabid competition from existing local and national cellular phone technology... It still is a viable technology, just don't expect it to sell in any country that practically gives cel phones away...
As for the story itself, it's old (3 months hence) news, originally viewable at:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-4119384.ht
Yup! And therefore, the sole cause for Microsoft holding a monopoly today is NOT Microsoft, but the same ubergeeks and uberhackers who refuse to make, let alone allow Linux to be a user friendly OS...
The only reason Linux has the professional level of respect that it does, is that it's a viable alternative to other flavors of *nix, which many professional IT and engineers are already familiar with, and unlike the professional grade OS's like Unix (which can cost thousands to set up), costs nothing... And $0 is a very pretty number to the beancounters...
Therein lies the irony, Linux is used by those *evil* corporations that the Linux zealots tend to rail on about... They also make a profit by using an OS that they can get for free, writing off their on site geeks as a tax deduction... They're laughing all the way to the bank, and yet Linuxers have displayed this as a badge of honor...
Oh, but I suppose handing the brass ring to evil corporations is okay, as long as it defines your skills as '1337'... Next they'll say how their computers are made of organically grown components designed by Buckminster Fuller, powered by a Wilheim Reich designed orgone harvester, transmitted via Tesla broadcast power, using an open source wireless net stabdard designed by Jerry Garcia...
Give us a break...
I think he meant it as 'blank', to imply storage in any medium, tape, disk, etc (as storage mediums evolve over time, to imply any singular form is moot)... Additionally he probably meant website/ftp/p2p systems...