PBS is a video interconnection service for public television in the US (like an ISP or telecom carrier). PBS is also a distributor of shows (creates deals between PBS member stations and producers for broadcast of shows). PBS produces no content itself. PBS interconnection services also serve other program distributors (such as American Public Television and NETA).
As a program distributor, PBS negotiates deals for video content to be broadcast a certain number of times within a spcecified time period. These deals have generally not included Internet distrubiton/viewing rights. My impression is that most producers are not interested in having their work "Napsterized" without appropriate compensation.
The big difference is that the BBC may hold Internet distribution rights to its original productions (as would NPR), but PBS has nothing like that since they don't produce content.
That said, there are some experiments, for example much of the Newshour with Jim Lehrer is available online. PBS.org (the most popular.org site on the planet btw), also has a lot of supporting video clips for shows.
Regarding federal funding, PBS recives some funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which itself directly receives funds from the federal government. PBS receives a lot of other funding from PBS member stations and private organizations and corporations. PBS member stations receive a mix of funding from CPB, individual members, state governments, universities, and corporations.
There has been talk of expanding public broadcasting in the US to include Internet distribution of content. But as of now, it is just talk.
This is my understandng, but I certainly do not speak for PBS...
In the future, there will be no privacy, because there will be cameras everywhere, and not just government cameras, but private ones as well, and not just corporate cameras, but cameras of individuals as well. This is the technological trend.
We have already seen the use of a personal cellphone camera to catch a criminal. This is only the beginning.
Personally, I'd prefer a country of laws where we could have cameras everywhere (including viewing our elected officials!), and people wouldn't be afraid. Our laws should be in tune with out society, and laws should be limited to truly odious actions.
I am mass stereotyping a country yes, but the point is that shortly Japan will learn to do away with its massive anti-foreigner bias, and will have to import massive amounts of workers from Southeast Asia if it comes to the scenario you point out above...
This reminds me of last night, when I was in a local diner with a directional antenna tyring to pick up an 802.11b access point, a woman stopped and asked me what I was doing. When I told her, she said "Oh yeah, I was just reading in the Washington Post about how Wireless Growth Hinders Emergency Communications". I didn't have a chance to tell her that they really meant cell phones interfering with bad 800 MHz trunked radio systems...
Great, we just need to point our particle accelerators towards the sky to save the planet!
I think we cannot ignore the massive anthropomorphic changes in CO2 and other (more potent) greenhouse gasses. That said, we should do it in a way that maximizes global economic conditions, and is based on very solid science. Current greenhouse warming models have had little predictive value, so evidently we are still learning.
Microsoft Windows Media, for one, is the most advanced streaming video codec available..NET took a lot of work, I use it on a daily basis, it is pretty cool to develop with under C#. It is their answer to the world of Java app servers, while supporting the development of Web services and maintaining legacy support of COM interfaces.
So I think those are two places where a load of their money has been going - including the future of Windows being.NET driven, so that everything becomes an app server, is more virtualizable, etc.
I think India would be better off leaving these tax dollars in the hands of the Indian entrepreneurs, who seem to be doing a MUCH BETTER JOB now in terms of developing the economy THAN THE GOVERNMENT DID before economic reform of the early 1990's.
It isn't clear that going to the moon is a money-making venture. Better to let some neo-John-Carmack down there to start a sub-orbital space tourist business and make some money.
Socialism is its own reward, I hope India learned that from 1960-1990. Because it is time for more pro-capitalist economic reforms in India, not time for more central government socialist spending.
This same kind of blackout happened twice during full regulation of electrical energy, and now once during the (still early days of) deregulation.
This event has all the hallmarks of a transmission failure, not a generation problem. There appears to have been plenty of power capacity. Transmission is still handled by highly regulated ISOs, despite generation deregulation.
This isn't like the California situation where the state set up a "deregulation" law that made the ISO incapable of getting an efficient market rate for power from generators.
What does need to happen is that NIMBY anti-transmission line political forces need to be eradicated. We need more transmission lines in the East, and more generation in the West.
I have Enterasys cards which are supposedly rebranded Oronoco silvers. With Netstumbler, it seems to stop responding to new APs whilst wardriving. Any ideas? What is the best wardriving card to get, SMC?
Personally (as an ex-Ham who can copy code), I don't think this BPL stuff is so bad. First of all, on a lot of the lower HF frequencies you are screwed if you are near a power line today as is. Even broadcast AM is unlistenable if you are driving on a road with a lot of power poles and overhead wiring.
Second, if this stuff is really bad, where is the skip? All it takes is a few watts on 20m to do worldwide communication, so if the BPL is really an issue, it should show up globally there, yet I don't think it does.
While HF communications are pretty much dead in the continental US (except for relious shortwave and CQ DX UR 599 QSL 73), it is important in developing areas such as Africa.
The third issue is that if skywaves really become an issue, BPL could be filtered to 30-80 MHz, which really don't have much skip outside of solar max years.
You'll notice that all of the times when it is "hams to the rescue" in recent years really center around 144 MHz and up...also note that after 911, there was a lot of use of unlicensed 900 MHz Ricochets around the former WTC site.
I recently did a test across the Potomac River in Washington, DC, using the same cardboard and aluminum foil horn antenna design. We tried to avoid pointing it at the Pentagon though...
I think the problem is that suborbital New York to Tokyo is a much, much, much bigger scale trip than X-Prize. X-Prize is pretty much straight up and down. Ballistic New York to Tokyo requires fairly warm re-entry heats. You've seen the size of ballistic missiles to send footlocker sized nuclear devices half way around the world......moreover, how would you know which missiles, er, rockets have the million dollar part and which ones have the nukes?
One of the successes of "microcapital" in developing countries is AKASHGANGA which provides computer aided milk collectors in rural India. Automating milk tabulation and analysis in milk collectives has reduced queue times, thus decreasing milk spoilage, and provides more accurate assesments of milk contributions.
DS SS using CDMA provides a wide range of orthogonal codes for frequency re-use. That is why CDMA is popular for cellphones, because the RF path is the same for all receivers and transmitters, they just use different spreading codes.
There is some level of interference between different spreading codes, but it is small and looks like additive guassian white noise (AGWN), which is more easilly handled than fast-fading or Rayleigh channel models.
FH can more easilly mark and avoid narrowband interference areas, but there is no problem with multiple CDMA DS devices operating in the same spectrum. You can also mark off narrowband interference areas with DS, but it is a little tougher to implement.
My favorite solution is still TMDA, a free challenge-response auto-whitelist and complex filtering system for Linux. I realize you anti-challenege / response people won't hit the "R" key for me, but I consider that a useful filter...
I think mass transit can actually hurt poor people as well. I am looking for a house in a close-in DC suburb. The presence of a subway station has moved up house prices in the area to put them out of the reach of poor people renting or buying...well-off people are getting sick of spending 2 hours driving from their far-out suburban McMansions, especially the childless...
My journal has some information on building a WiFi horn antenna from cardboard and aluminum foil. These have much higher gains than the cantennas, but are of course larger.
I think that the exact spacing and element sizing required for high-gain array antennas (such as the yagi) at 2.4 GHz are tougher than many amateur antenna builders can achieve. The horn antenna is easy to make, if you don't mind something larger.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the excellent combination of Qmail with TMDA for flexible challenege-response spam blocking.
PBS is a video interconnection service for public television in the US (like an ISP or telecom carrier). PBS is also a distributor of shows (creates deals between PBS member stations and producers for broadcast of shows). PBS produces no content itself. PBS interconnection services also serve other program distributors (such as American Public Television and NETA).
.org site on the planet btw), also has a lot of supporting video clips for shows.
As a program distributor, PBS negotiates deals for video content to be broadcast a certain number of times within a spcecified time period. These deals have generally not included Internet distrubiton/viewing rights. My impression is that most producers are not interested in having their work "Napsterized" without appropriate compensation.
The big difference is that the BBC may hold Internet distribution rights to its original productions (as would NPR), but PBS has nothing like that since they don't produce content.
That said, there are some experiments, for example much of the Newshour with Jim Lehrer is available online. PBS.org (the most popular
Regarding federal funding, PBS recives some funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which itself directly receives funds from the federal government. PBS receives a lot of other funding from PBS member stations and private organizations and corporations. PBS member stations receive a mix of funding from CPB, individual members, state governments, universities, and corporations.
There has been talk of expanding public broadcasting in the US to include Internet distribution of content. But as of now, it is just talk.
This is my understandng, but I certainly do not speak for PBS...
In the future, there will be no privacy, because there will be cameras everywhere, and not just government cameras, but private ones as well, and not just corporate cameras, but cameras of individuals as well. This is the technological trend.
We have already seen the use of a personal cellphone camera to catch a criminal. This is only the beginning.
Personally, I'd prefer a country of laws where we could have cameras everywhere (including viewing our elected officials!), and people wouldn't be afraid. Our laws should be in tune with out society, and laws should be limited to truly odious actions.
I am mass stereotyping a country yes, but the point is that shortly Japan will learn to do away with its massive anti-foreigner bias, and will have to import massive amounts of workers from Southeast Asia if it comes to the scenario you point out above...
It already happened. It was called the Industrial Revolution. The workers are better off today, and live much longer.
Where is that Japanese 5th Generation Computing Project now??? If there is a market need for robots, I'm sure someone will step up to fill it.
SightSpeed uses a much better videoconferencing codec than H.323. It was first developed as the Linux-based Qvix.
This reminds me of last night, when I was in a local diner with a directional antenna tyring to pick up an 802.11b access point, a woman stopped and asked me what I was doing. When I told her, she said "Oh yeah, I was just reading in the Washington Post about how Wireless Growth Hinders Emergency Communications". I didn't have a chance to tell her that they really meant cell phones interfering with bad 800 MHz trunked radio systems...
Great, we just need to point our particle accelerators towards the sky to save the planet!
I think we cannot ignore the massive anthropomorphic changes in CO2 and other (more potent) greenhouse gasses. That said, we should do it in a way that maximizes global economic conditions, and is based on very solid science. Current greenhouse warming models have had little predictive value, so evidently we are still learning.
Microsoft Windows Media, for one, is the most advanced streaming video codec available. .NET took a lot of work, I use it on a daily basis, it is pretty cool to develop with under C#. It is their answer to the world of Java app servers, while supporting the development of Web services and maintaining legacy support of COM interfaces.
.NET driven, so that everything becomes an app server, is more virtualizable, etc.
So I think those are two places where a load of their money has been going - including the future of Windows being
What kind of support for Chinese does OpenOffice have????
This would be a keen time to ensure that Chinese and Hindi area handled well by GNU/Linux/OpenOffice...
I think India would be better off leaving these tax dollars in the hands of the Indian entrepreneurs, who seem to be doing a MUCH BETTER JOB now in terms of developing the economy THAN THE GOVERNMENT DID before economic reform of the early 1990's.
It isn't clear that going to the moon is a money-making venture. Better to let some neo-John-Carmack down there to start a sub-orbital space tourist business and make some money.
Socialism is its own reward, I hope India learned that from 1960-1990. Because it is time for more pro-capitalist economic reforms in India, not time for more central government socialist spending.
I bet 90% of the six pounds is the battery that lasts for a month.
No - there was plenty of capacity at the time.
Graph of capacity/demand
This same kind of blackout happened twice during full regulation of electrical energy, and now once during the (still early days of) deregulation.
This event has all the hallmarks of a transmission failure, not a generation problem. There appears to have been plenty of power capacity. Transmission is still handled by highly regulated ISOs, despite generation deregulation.
This isn't like the California situation where the state set up a "deregulation" law that made the ISO incapable of getting an efficient market rate for power from generators.
What does need to happen is that NIMBY anti-transmission line political forces need to be eradicated. We need more transmission lines in the East, and more generation in the West.
Yeah, that is my point, if BPL is really "polluting" HF, why is 20m still packed and not totally blown away?
The BPL interference is probably mostly a problem for HF operations in the immediate vicinity of them.
I have Enterasys cards which are supposedly rebranded Oronoco silvers. With Netstumbler, it seems to stop responding to new APs whilst wardriving. Any ideas? What is the best wardriving card to get, SMC?
Personally (as an ex-Ham who can copy code), I don't think this BPL stuff is so bad. First of all, on a lot of the lower HF frequencies you are screwed if you are near a power line today as is. Even broadcast AM is unlistenable if you are driving on a road with a lot of power poles and overhead wiring.
Second, if this stuff is really bad, where is the skip? All it takes is a few watts on 20m to do worldwide communication, so if the BPL is really an issue, it should show up globally there, yet I don't think it does.
While HF communications are pretty much dead in the continental US (except for relious shortwave and CQ DX UR 599 QSL 73), it is important in developing areas such as Africa.
The third issue is that if skywaves really become an issue, BPL could be filtered to 30-80 MHz, which really don't have much skip outside of solar max years.
You'll notice that all of the times when it is "hams to the rescue" in recent years really center around 144 MHz and up...also note that after 911, there was a lot of use of unlicensed 900 MHz Ricochets around the former WTC site.
Yes, but horn antennas must have a fairly long taper to maintain phase coherence. The Pyramids of Egypt would not be effective antennas.
I recently did a test across the Potomac River in Washington, DC, using the same cardboard and aluminum foil horn antenna design. We tried to avoid pointing it at the Pentagon though...
I think the problem is that suborbital New York to Tokyo is a much, much, much bigger scale trip than X-Prize. X-Prize is pretty much straight up and down. Ballistic New York to Tokyo requires fairly warm re-entry heats. You've seen the size of ballistic missiles to send footlocker sized nuclear devices half way around the world... ...moreover, how would you know which missiles, er, rockets have the million dollar part and which ones have the nukes?
One of the successes of "microcapital" in developing countries is AKASHGANGA which provides computer aided milk collectors in rural India. Automating milk tabulation and analysis in milk collectives has reduced queue times, thus decreasing milk spoilage, and provides more accurate assesments of milk contributions.
DS SS using CDMA provides a wide range of orthogonal codes for frequency re-use. That is why CDMA is popular for cellphones, because the RF path is the same for all receivers and transmitters, they just use different spreading codes.
There is some level of interference between different spreading codes, but it is small and looks like additive guassian white noise (AGWN), which is more easilly handled than fast-fading or Rayleigh channel models.
FH can more easilly mark and avoid narrowband interference areas, but there is no problem with multiple CDMA DS devices operating in the same spectrum. You can also mark off narrowband interference areas with DS, but it is a little tougher to implement.
My favorite solution is still TMDA, a free challenge-response auto-whitelist and complex filtering system for Linux. I realize you anti-challenege / response people won't hit the "R" key for me, but I consider that a useful filter...
I think mass transit can actually hurt poor people as well. I am looking for a house in a close-in DC suburb. The presence of a subway station has moved up house prices in the area to put them out of the reach of poor people renting or buying...well-off people are getting sick of spending 2 hours driving from their far-out suburban McMansions, especially the childless...
My journal has some information on building a WiFi horn antenna from cardboard and aluminum foil. These have much higher gains than the cantennas, but are of course larger.
I think that the exact spacing and element sizing required for high-gain array antennas (such as the yagi) at 2.4 GHz are tougher than many amateur antenna builders can achieve. The horn antenna is easy to make, if you don't mind something larger.