Same thing happened to me....I said that I had some exclusions to the intellectual property agreement, inventions of my own. They said, document it and we'll exempt it fromt he agreement. I brought them the documentation about my inventions but they never got around to having me sign their int. prop. agmt. Now I've left. HA HA HA.
I got tired of reading everyone else's dumb-ass comments and disagreeing, so now I will tell you what I think. I don't really have any professional qualifications on power systems, only a year of college economics, but I do dabble a bit so I have a bit of knowledge.
I'd like to know where that guy who said that it takes more energy to create a photovoltaic cell than it will ever produce, heard this. I have never heard this claim before and doubt it.
Solar Cells do not have a terribly short life if treated well. They are rated for 25 years, and will often perform much longer. Since they are modular, those parts that fail (rather than a system-wide gradually degradation) can be replaced.
Photovoltaics are expensive. Current new, retail pricing is about $4/watt for the cells. You still need control & distribution, and storage. It does get expensive. I think that the control that ones gets by being 'off the grid' is worth it.
Solar Cells aren't just for the sun-shine states. There's a lot more energy in grey skies than you may think. And cells actually perform BETTER in cold weather!
Photovoltaics DO require expensive, hi tech factories for production. I don't know about the pollution created but imagine there is some.
Wind power is much more low-tech. It's possible create your own wind-power system out of everyday parts, if you have a bit of mechanical skill.
Like photovoltaics, there is an additional control, distribution, and storage cost.
There is, obviously, places where the air is too still for wind power to be effective. Luckily, I live in an area (New England) which is pretty windy. Coastal and off-shore areas are good, as are many mountains.
The problem with wind power is the height required to get the best wind is over 100 feet. 130 foot towers are common. These are expensive. The cost can be mitigated by using the towers for other, secondary uses such as antennas, flag poles, weather stations, observation towers.
If that weren't enough of a problem, there is the zoning regulations that make it imposible to put up large enough towers for either aesthetic or aviation reasons. The NIMBY effect comes into play here. We need enabling legislation to allow towers for wind power where they make sense, over-riding local regulations.
Hydro is a great source of power. Unlike solar and wind, hydro has its own built-in energy storage when using a dam (let as much water through the gates as you need). The move towards larger and larger hydro projects is, however, flooding vast areas of land, displacing many people and wildlife. Maybe smaller projects, or non-dam projects, should be used in many instances.
tidal power is another type of hydro. Most people don't know this, but the very expensive part of Boston's downtown known as Back Bay was once water, and the tidal energy was harnessed to operate a mill. I believe that tidal power has not recieved the attention it deserves. The possibilities are great (imagine if we could tap the energy of the tides in the Bay of Fundy!)
I don't know much about geothermal, because it isn't really feasable anywhere near me, I haven't explored it. I know it works well in Iceland.
I don't think that Nuclear is a good idea, because humans just aren't competent enough to run them. Even if we were, there's still the waste problem.
California is a car dependant state, like most of the US. A car is an economic neccessity in the US, and should be treated as such. I don't think that the agressive destruction of older cars is acceptable, from either the economic or personal property rights perspective. Instead of trashing old cars, maybe special mufflers could be developed for them, to make emissions less. If fuel economy is the issue, how about a luxury tax on SUVs and other gas gobblers that aren't neccessary? Most of these SUVs don't even go off road. I'd say anyone living in a city & its suburbs should be taxed for their SUV. People who actually need such off-road ability, those in the country, should not have to pay this tax. (most of these supposed SUVs really suck off road from what I hear. You'd be better off with a jeep or a subaru 4wd).
The energy crisis in California is the fault of the people, the state government, and the federal government. It is the fault of both the democrats and the Republicans alike. California needs conservation, alternative energy, and also needs new plants. Deregulation has been a failure, not just in california but around the country (here in Boston my rates just doubled!). The whole world has to be more aware of the resources we have and their distribution. How many times have we paniced at the actions of OPEC, made all these promises to be Good Little Consumers, and then slid back into wasteful, careless sloppyness when the pressure was off? I remember twice in the 1970s when it was quite bad. How much do we need bigger, faster, more? On my recent trip to Houston I was disgusted by the waste I saw there. I have never considered myself a 'hippie' or 'tree hugger' and would cringe at the label 'environmentalist', but there's really got to be a limit to the gluttony that places like Houston and Las Vegas have. These places make me ashamed to be an American.
Let's all try to be a little bit more aware of the limits of resources. I am not suggesting that we give up all the benefits of the 21st century. But please consider walking if you can, consider taking a train, consider buying a car that gets at least 20 miles to the gallon, consider not leaving that 21 inch monitor on all the time. And, like your mom said, turn off the lights when you leave the room!
Actually, there have been many failures for both amsat and for nasa, and others as well. This is very difficult stuff to get right. While no doubt some improvements can be made in both amsat and nasa, I think they've both done a great job.
While there has been some crossover between the free software movement and amateur radio, there needs to be more. I think that both groups can learn from each other. I'd like to create an atmosphere where ham projects (schematics, etc) are published under a GPL. Software should come to
Linux first (Not trying to get into a religious war here: its just because BSDs and Solaris can run Linux bins). At least, help get ms-dos & ms-win packages to run properly under emulators.
Many people in the free software movement are involved because they value freedom from control by corporations. They like the fact that they can get their hands into the workings and customize and improve the design. Much of the Ham community has the same type of do-it-yourself devotion.
At least one linux distribution has to serve the needs of ham radio operators. I know there is some effort by Debian, but the results are buggy. All of the various ham utilities that are for ms-dos and windows need to be ported to Linux and organized in a reasonable fashion. Once this happens, Linux will start to become more prevalent in the ham community.
How about this: links to advisories are accepted, but the publisher gives the list maintainer irrevokable permission to mirror the advisory, and to accept any updates to the site at his/her discretion.
One of the things to remember is that Spread Spectrum data communications is illegal in many countries. This is because those governments don't have the ability to listen in when they want to. In the US, Spread Spectrum is restricted in the use of its spreading (scrambling) codes, and the section of the transceiver where to code is located has to be made tamper-proof.
It may be better to simply use G3RUH amateur radio
type 9600 bps packet radio, and possibly PSK31 for greater distances (using NVIS propagation) over HF.
My reservations about this project are dealing with Motorola. It's a really evil company. And doesn't the dragonball lack an MMU? I'd rather use
a little bit better processor such as the strongARM. They use a bit more power than the dragonball but you get a lot more out of it. But hey, don't mean to be so critical....Pengachu looks like a great project! Its along the lines of stuff I've had in mind for a while. sinister.com/radio and other stuff
and Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian/American, invented radio TELEPHONY - the ability to do VOICE transmission. Marconi gets the credit because he spent a lot of money on Patent Lawyers to have Tesla's patents voided. (hrm, sounds very modern)
Oh yea sure...give up all our bandwidth so some schmarmy silicon valley corp can charge you lots of money to look at high-speed porn on the go...no thanks, there's already plenty of ways to do that.
Think of the Amateur radio spectum as a wildlife reservation, protected for the inventive mind (though there's lots of NON INVENTIVE people there, too)
Has anyone else noticed the subtle influence of
Christianity in Herbert's Dune? Was Paul Jesus?
Was the Kwisatz Haderach the Jews' Messiah? I am not saying it IS, but just giving you all something to ponder.
Since you don't really care about quality of the music you are broadcasting, and you don't seem concerned about the range, why spend the money? Use
a better hack and transmit AM with your monitor!
I Use netbank...still requires Java but it works on openbsd w/ netscape.
Also, their fees are reasonable. www.netbank.com
That being said, I wonder if there's a way to get these banks to comply, threatening them with a lawsuit over non-ADA (Disabilities act) compliance. Lynx is the only browser that does text-to-speech, which is what the blind will need.
Therefore, banks need to be lynx compatible or
get sued. Note that this is just idle rambling I am not a lawyer, etc.
College is already expensive enough without saddling an additional burden on students. There's so much theft already in dorms, this will onloy makeit worse. And for what? So the school doesn't have to provide computer labs? More likely just to impress people that massachusetts has a gud education system. Well hey, its not all that bad, I mean, we're not kentucky. Maine wants to do this for high school students and I think its an equally dumb idea.
Good education comes from commitment from students, professors, and administration - not arbitrary political requirements smoothed over with assistance from public funds.
Microsoft must love this..I am sure that each of these laptops has paid the appropriate microsoft tax. I wonder if Umass students are also required to run winders. It wouldn't surprise me.
Governor Celluci is terrible. I voted for Weld, even though he pissed me off at times I thought he had a good head on his shoulders - Celluci does not. I wish Weld would come back.
You claim the supreme court ruled the airwaves were a natural resource? using the law search engine at caselaw.findlaw.com, I can find no case that says this. DO you have the case number, or any information about it, that may help in this search?
In any case, you have completely misunderstood what I have said. Licenses in the past have not been franchises or concessions. The purpose of the FCC was not to enrich the government, it is to facilitate communications for the common good. The application of fees is designed to put some of the financial burden of the FCC's investigation of the claims of the public good served by a license applicant upon the applicant themselves. This had a secondary purpose of helping to prevent frivolous applications, and frequency hoarding. The natural progress of bureacracy, it seems, is towards greater complexity but decreasing efficiency, and license fees and processes created a significant burden for legitimate users. Several attempts at reform have been variously successful.
Evidently some person who thought themselves really clever in inventing a capitalist (note: NOT free market) scheme for frequency allocation that would enrich the goverenment instead of costing it money in bureacratic costs. This is how the spectrum auctions were born. The precedent set with these auctions is very harmful to private and public good for all but a few of the very largest corporations.
I wonder if anyone has heard of a man named Ivar Kreuger, who was known in the 1920's as 'The Swedish Match King'. Kreuger would lend money to unethical or desperate rulers or many counries, on the condition that he be given a complete monopoly on the production and sale of matches. This made Krueger an economic wunderkind of that naieve era. However, his empire later crashed and burned, possibly as a consequence of the great 1929 crash but also possibly because a country with such a tax, devistating to the poor, impoverished the country to the point where loans could no be repaid.
This is an example of a Concession, or franchise. That is, the government deprives its citizens/vassals of a right, in exchange for some benefit that it gains. Another example is the British East India Company, who was given an exclusive right for trade with the East Indies in exchange for a large sum paid to the Crown. The crown, and the Company, were enriched to the detriment of the English people and to the near complete destruction of the East Indies.
A student of history should come to the conclusion that a government must be very careful when giving concessions/franchises to companies. An ethical government will not sell out its citizens rights for simple 30 pieces of silver. When Vail's AT&T was given certain rights of monopoly in the US, it was a carefully considered bargain that served to expand and rationalize the telephone system. However, this concession was greedily defended long after it had outlived its usefulness, and its influences are still being felt today, 17 years after the Bell System breakup.
Another example of a concession that has been successful in some ways but is becoming completely out of control is the patent system. In exchange for complete description of an invention, the government grants the rights of exclusive rights to profit from that invention for a limited period of time. The inventor is enriched to a reasonable degree based upon the market value of the invention, while the public is let in on the secret of how it works. It is, in theory, a fair trade, though one can say that the devil is in the details.
What will happen to these frequency sales? I don't see how they serve the public good in any way besides lining the pockets of the government which is selling things that are not its to sell.
According to the Radio Act of 1934, which created the FCC, frequency allocations are not property and neither the FCC or licensees own them. Therefore, these auctions are illegal.
I think its great for huge companies to bid themselves into bankruptcy over these new allocations. TV is a vast wasteland, and its 60 year old technology doesn't make efficient use of the bandwidth it has been allocated.
But this latest revelation on the size of 3G wireless systems for bandwidth frightens me. I see ham radio being among the first victims, as it doesn't generate any revenue for the government and its lobby (the ARRL) is orders of magnitude less funded than the commercial wireless industry.
Time and time again, hams have been pushed off of bands that have 'commercial value', even though hams made a lot of the technical breakthroughs that allowed those bands to be practically used.
Ham Radio itself is somewhat to blame. THe numbers of licensed hams has (supposedly) been declining over the past several years. The hobby has a reputation as a haven for a bunch of crotchety old men who talk about nothing but ham radio, and collect postcards from people in small countries that they have done nothing more than exchange callsigns and reception reports from. Ham radio needs to have new blood. Many of the current ham population have pointed out that the thing that attracted them to radio was the ability to contact strange and distant lands, and that these days that role is fulfiled by the Internet. But I am one of those who believe that the community of hams and the community of Internet hobbyists (hobbyists=people who don't use the Internet solely to make or spend money) have great possibilities to merge the two worlds, to a greater extent than has been done.
Enough rambling. You should already know about GuerrillaNet.
Take the amateur radio exam and get licensed (its really not hard, and you don't have to know morse code any more)...then you can add to the ranks of licensed Amatuer Radio operators and make the FCC think twice about selling off the spectrum so we can all have sprint wristwatch TVs (that will still work like shit)
Bob Metcalfe is an idiot. This isn't hard to determne, just go look at his public pronouncements over the past several years. I don't know why people still bother to quote him any more.
I heard that he lives here in Boston, in the posh Back Bay. I'd like to show up and give him measured rate air.
There's an upper limit to the number of devics you can have on a given wavelan network anyhow, i think it might be 252. Which means that you'd have to start routing anyhow.
The Harvard/IBM MARK I came online in January 1943, almost a full year before Colossus I, (Dec 43). Why does the media keep on listening to British propaganda?
Computers were not invented, they were developed.
The Mark I was electromechanical, where the Colossus was fully electronic. That made it much faster. But it was not the first. For a timeline,
see - this.
I have to agree. I was in Harvard Square all afternoon at the street fair, but left at about 6:30. Had I known about this yesterday, I could have been there.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, nmap their servers. when someone writes back complaining, you have a contact to get stuff fixed.
I'd also check whois on thei main domains.
If all else fails, dig for titles on their web page, sr. whatever and work your way down. that's a lot easier than working your way up.
Same thing happened to me....I said that I had some exclusions to the intellectual property agreement, inventions of my own. They said, document it and we'll exempt it fromt he agreement. I brought them the documentation about my inventions but they never got around to having me sign their int. prop. agmt. Now I've left. HA HA HA.
I got tired of reading everyone else's dumb-ass comments and disagreeing, so now I will tell you what I think. I don't really have any professional qualifications on power systems, only a year of college economics, but I do dabble a bit so I have a bit of knowledge.
I'd like to know where that guy who said that it takes more energy to create a photovoltaic cell than it will ever produce, heard this. I have never heard this claim before and doubt it.
Solar Cells do not have a terribly short life if treated well. They are rated for 25 years, and will often perform much longer. Since they are modular, those parts that fail (rather than a system-wide gradually degradation) can be replaced.
Photovoltaics are expensive. Current new, retail pricing is about $4/watt for the cells. You still need control & distribution, and storage. It does get expensive. I think that the control that ones gets by being 'off the grid' is worth it.
Solar Cells aren't just for the sun-shine states. There's a lot more energy in grey skies than you may think. And cells actually perform BETTER in cold weather!
Photovoltaics DO require expensive, hi tech factories for production. I don't know about the pollution created but imagine there is some.
Wind power is much more low-tech. It's possible create your own wind-power system out of everyday parts, if you have a bit of mechanical skill.
Like photovoltaics, there is an additional control, distribution, and storage cost.
There is, obviously, places where the air is too still for wind power to be effective. Luckily, I live in an area (New England) which is pretty windy. Coastal and off-shore areas are good, as are many mountains.
The problem with wind power is the height required to get the best wind is over 100 feet. 130 foot towers are common. These are expensive. The cost can be mitigated by using the towers for other, secondary uses such as antennas, flag poles, weather stations, observation towers.
If that weren't enough of a problem, there is the zoning regulations that make it imposible to put up large enough towers for either aesthetic or aviation reasons. The NIMBY effect comes into play here. We need enabling legislation to allow towers for wind power where they make sense, over-riding local regulations.
Hydro is a great source of power. Unlike solar and wind, hydro has its own built-in energy storage when using a dam (let as much water through the gates as you need). The move towards larger and larger hydro projects is, however, flooding vast areas of land, displacing many people and wildlife. Maybe smaller projects, or non-dam projects, should be used in many instances.
tidal power is another type of hydro. Most people don't know this, but the very expensive part of Boston's downtown known as Back Bay was once water, and the tidal energy was harnessed to operate a mill. I believe that tidal power has not recieved the attention it deserves. The possibilities are great (imagine if we could tap the energy of the tides in the Bay of Fundy!)
I don't know much about geothermal, because it isn't really feasable anywhere near me, I haven't explored it. I know it works well in Iceland.
I don't think that Nuclear is a good idea, because humans just aren't competent enough to run them. Even if we were, there's still the waste problem.
California is a car dependant state, like most of the US. A car is an economic neccessity in the US, and should be treated as such. I don't think that the agressive destruction of older cars is acceptable, from either the economic or personal property rights perspective. Instead of trashing old cars, maybe special mufflers could be developed for them, to make emissions less. If fuel economy is the issue, how about a luxury tax on SUVs and other gas gobblers that aren't neccessary? Most of these SUVs don't even go off road. I'd say anyone living in a city & its suburbs should be taxed for their SUV. People who actually need such off-road ability, those in the country, should not have to pay this tax. (most of these supposed SUVs really suck off road from what I hear. You'd be better off with a jeep or a subaru 4wd).
The energy crisis in California is the fault of the people, the state government, and the federal government. It is the fault of both the democrats and the Republicans alike. California needs conservation, alternative energy, and also needs new plants. Deregulation has been a failure, not just in california but around the country (here in Boston my rates just doubled!). The whole world has to be more aware of the resources we have and their distribution. How many times have we paniced at the actions of OPEC, made all these promises to be Good Little Consumers, and then slid back into wasteful, careless sloppyness when the pressure was off? I remember twice in the 1970s when it was quite bad. How much do we need bigger, faster, more? On my recent trip to Houston I was disgusted by the waste I saw there. I have never considered myself a 'hippie' or 'tree hugger' and would cringe at the label 'environmentalist', but there's really got to be a limit to the gluttony that places like Houston and Las Vegas have. These places make me ashamed to be an American.
Let's all try to be a little bit more aware of the limits of resources. I am not suggesting that we give up all the benefits of the 21st century. But please consider walking if you can, consider taking a train, consider buying a car that gets at least 20 miles to the gallon, consider not leaving that 21 inch monitor on all the time. And, like your mom said, turn off the lights when you leave the room!
China was not in the Soviet Block. Duh
MonoLith and I don't mean ML.ORG
I'd like to get one...someone mentioned they are now $35....where besides walmart is cheap?
can someone please moderate down all these off topic posts?
Actually, there have been many failures for both amsat and for nasa, and others as well. This is very difficult stuff to get right. While no doubt some improvements can be made in both amsat and nasa, I think they've both done a great job.
While there has been some crossover between the free software movement and amateur radio, there needs to be more. I think that both groups can learn from each other. I'd like to create an atmosphere where ham projects (schematics, etc) are published under a GPL. Software should come to
Linux first (Not trying to get into a religious war here: its just because BSDs and Solaris can run Linux bins). At least, help get ms-dos & ms-win packages to run properly under emulators.
Many people in the free software movement are involved because they value freedom from control by corporations. They like the fact that they can get their hands into the workings and customize and improve the design. Much of the Ham community has the same type of do-it-yourself devotion.
At least one linux distribution has to serve the needs of ham radio operators. I know there is some effort by Debian, but the results are buggy. All of the various ham utilities that are for ms-dos and windows need to be ported to Linux and organized in a reasonable fashion. Once this happens, Linux will start to become more prevalent in the ham community.
How about this: links to advisories are accepted, but the publisher gives the list maintainer irrevokable permission to mirror the advisory, and to accept any updates to the site at his/her discretion.
This way, stuff doesn't dissappear or get 1984'd.
gesundheit...oh, wait, i'll have to sue you...
One of the things to remember is that Spread Spectrum data communications is illegal in many countries. This is because those governments don't have the ability to listen in when they want to. In the US, Spread Spectrum is restricted in the use of its spreading (scrambling) codes, and the section of the transceiver where to code is located has to be made tamper-proof.
It may be better to simply use G3RUH amateur radio
type 9600 bps packet radio, and possibly PSK31 for greater distances (using NVIS propagation) over HF.
My reservations about this project are dealing with Motorola. It's a really evil company. And doesn't the dragonball lack an MMU? I'd rather use
a little bit better processor such as the strongARM. They use a bit more power than the dragonball but you get a lot more out of it. But hey, don't mean to be so critical....Pengachu looks like a great project! Its along the lines of stuff I've had in mind for a while. sinister.com/radio and other stuff
and Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian/American, invented radio TELEPHONY - the ability to do VOICE transmission. Marconi gets the credit because he spent a lot of money on Patent Lawyers to have Tesla's patents voided. (hrm, sounds very modern)
Oh yea sure...give up all our bandwidth so some schmarmy silicon valley corp can charge you lots of money to look at high-speed porn on the go...no thanks, there's already plenty of ways to do that.
Think of the Amateur radio spectum as a wildlife reservation, protected for the inventive mind (though there's lots of NON INVENTIVE people there, too)
Has anyone else noticed the subtle influence of
Christianity in Herbert's Dune? Was Paul Jesus?
Was the Kwisatz Haderach the Jews' Messiah? I am not saying it IS, but just giving you all something to ponder.
Since you don't really care about quality of the music you are broadcasting, and you don't seem concerned about the range, why spend the money? Use a better hack and transmit AM with your monitor!
I Use netbank...still requires Java but it works on openbsd w/ netscape.
Also, their fees are reasonable. www.netbank.com
That being said, I wonder if there's a way to get these banks to comply, threatening them with a lawsuit over non-ADA (Disabilities act) compliance. Lynx is the only browser that does text-to-speech, which is what the blind will need.
Therefore, banks need to be lynx compatible or
get sued. Note that this is just idle rambling I am not a lawyer, etc.
flags? bah...too late! the subgenius already have the face of j.r. "bob" dobbs on Mars!
College is already expensive enough without saddling an additional burden on students. There's so much theft already in dorms, this will onloy makeit worse. And for what? So the school doesn't have to provide computer labs? More likely just to impress people that massachusetts has a gud education system. Well hey, its not all that bad, I mean, we're not kentucky. Maine wants to do this for high school students and I think its an equally dumb idea.
Good education comes from commitment from students, professors, and administration - not arbitrary political requirements smoothed over with assistance from public funds.
Microsoft must love this..I am sure that each of these laptops has paid the appropriate microsoft tax. I wonder if Umass students are also required to run winders. It wouldn't surprise me.
Governor Celluci is terrible. I voted for Weld, even though he pissed me off at times I thought he had a good head on his shoulders - Celluci does not. I wish Weld would come back.
You claim the supreme court ruled the airwaves were a natural resource? using the law search engine at caselaw.findlaw.com, I can find no case that says this. DO you have the case number, or any information about it, that may help in this search?
In any case, you have completely misunderstood what I have said. Licenses in the past have not been franchises or concessions. The purpose of the FCC was not to enrich the government, it is to facilitate communications for the common good. The application of fees is designed to put some of the financial burden of the FCC's investigation of the claims of the public good served by a license applicant upon the applicant themselves. This had a secondary purpose of helping to prevent frivolous applications, and frequency hoarding. The natural progress of bureacracy, it seems, is towards greater complexity but decreasing efficiency, and license fees and processes created a significant burden for legitimate users. Several attempts at reform have been variously successful.
Evidently some person who thought themselves really clever in inventing a capitalist (note: NOT free market) scheme for frequency allocation that would enrich the goverenment instead of costing it money in bureacratic costs. This is how the spectrum auctions were born. The precedent set with these auctions is very harmful to private and public good for all but a few of the very largest corporations.
I wonder if anyone has heard of a man named Ivar Kreuger, who was known in the 1920's as 'The Swedish Match King'. Kreuger would lend money to unethical or desperate rulers or many counries, on the condition that he be given a complete monopoly on the production and sale of matches. This made Krueger an economic wunderkind of that naieve era. However, his empire later crashed and burned, possibly as a consequence of the great 1929 crash but also possibly because a country with such a tax, devistating to the poor, impoverished the country to the point where loans could no be repaid.
This is an example of a Concession, or franchise. That is, the government deprives its citizens/vassals of a right, in exchange for some benefit that it gains. Another example is the British East India Company, who was given an exclusive right for trade with the East Indies in exchange for a large sum paid to the Crown. The crown, and the Company, were enriched to the detriment of the English people and to the near complete destruction of the East Indies.
A student of history should come to the conclusion that a government must be very careful when giving concessions/franchises to companies. An ethical government will not sell out its citizens rights for simple 30 pieces of silver. When Vail's AT&T was given certain rights of monopoly in the US, it was a carefully considered bargain that served to expand and rationalize the telephone system. However, this concession was greedily defended long after it had outlived its usefulness, and its influences are still being felt today, 17 years after the Bell System breakup.
Another example of a concession that has been successful in some ways but is becoming completely out of control is the patent system. In exchange for complete description of an invention, the government grants the rights of exclusive rights to profit from that invention for a limited period of time. The inventor is enriched to a reasonable degree based upon the market value of the invention, while the public is let in on the secret of how it works. It is, in theory, a fair trade, though one can say that the devil is in the details.
What will happen to these frequency sales? I don't see how they serve the public good in any way besides lining the pockets of the government which is selling things that are not its to sell.
I think its great for huge companies to bid themselves into bankruptcy over these new allocations. TV is a vast wasteland, and its 60 year old technology doesn't make efficient use of the bandwidth it has been allocated. But this latest revelation on the size of 3G wireless systems for bandwidth frightens me. I see ham radio being among the first victims, as it doesn't generate any revenue for the government and its lobby (the ARRL) is orders of magnitude less funded than the commercial wireless industry. Time and time again, hams have been pushed off of bands that have 'commercial value', even though hams made a lot of the technical breakthroughs that allowed those bands to be practically used. Ham Radio itself is somewhat to blame. THe numbers of licensed hams has (supposedly) been declining over the past several years. The hobby has a reputation as a haven for a bunch of crotchety old men who talk about nothing but ham radio, and collect postcards from people in small countries that they have done nothing more than exchange callsigns and reception reports from. Ham radio needs to have new blood. Many of the current ham population have pointed out that the thing that attracted them to radio was the ability to contact strange and distant lands, and that these days that role is fulfiled by the Internet. But I am one of those who believe that the community of hams and the community of Internet hobbyists (hobbyists=people who don't use the Internet solely to make or spend money) have great possibilities to merge the two worlds, to a greater extent than has been done.
Enough rambling. You should already know about GuerrillaNet.
Take the amateur radio exam and get licensed (its really not hard, and you don't have to know morse code any more)...then you can add to the ranks of licensed Amatuer Radio operators and make the FCC think twice about selling off the spectrum so we can all have sprint wristwatch TVs (that will still work like shit)
I heard that he lives here in Boston, in the posh Back Bay. I'd like to show up and give him measured rate air.
There's an upper limit to the number of devics you can have on a given wavelan network anyhow, i think it might be 252. Which means that you'd have to start routing anyhow.
I have to agree that Fosters is crap. Knowing that Australians don't actually drink it makes me have a bit more respect for them.
Computers were not invented, they were developed. The Mark I was electromechanical, where the Colossus was fully electronic. That made it much faster. But it was not the first. For a timeline, see - this.
I have to agree. I was in Harvard Square all afternoon at the street fair, but left at about 6:30. Had I known about this yesterday, I could have been there.