I think that the DRM sticker would be more welcomed on the face of the CDs than the Explicit Lyrics one, since DRM, as proven by Sony, can be much more damaging to the consumer than swearing in songs.
In many cases, it is actually in the record label's interest to post the "Tipper Tag" (Explicit lyrics label) because it will, quite frequently, boost sales.
The DRM warning, on the other hand, will most likely cut sales, ergo it is not in the label's interest.
Well, maybe not "die." Maybe just replaced with something functionally equivalent, but that works better.
How about SSH? Just about any SSH client also has an SCP and/or SFTP client that goes with it, and most any SSH server can process these requests, all over port 22. No nonsesnse, and very highly scriptable. Oh, and I almost forgot.... it's secure.
The only downside is that it is a tad slower than FTP when using it on a LAN (due to encryption overhead). Over a WAN, you probably won't notice any difference.
Why does more current going through the wire cause them to sag? Heat?
Exactly correct. In fact, you can see it even on the distribution lines in this part of the country (upstate NY). During the summer, when a lot of power is being drawn to run air conditioners and pool pumps, and the ambient temperature is high, the distribution lags sag a fair bit. Typically nothing dangerous, but definitely noticeable. Look at that same line during the bone-chilling days in January, and you will see the very same line as taut as a piano string.
Is there a formula to determin how much it sags at a given current?
There probably is. I suspect it could be worked out by any sufficiently adept engineering or physics student, but I don't have the details in front of me. The data you would need to know, though, are that the cables are made of aluminum, you would have to know the diameter of the cable, the distance between pylons, the height of the pylons at the point where the cable meets the insulators, the amount of current (not power or voltage, but power and voltage could be used to get current) flowing through the cable, what the minimum altitude would be that you would want the cable to reach, and maybe the ambient temperature.
More to the point, this is something that would have already been worked out by the engineers who built the transmission line, and expressed in the transmission line's specifications. The dispatchers (both human and computer) in the control centre would be aware of the specifications and expected to conform to them.
BTW, I work for NYISO. Any opinions I've just expressed are mine, and not theirs. Any errors or omissions in what I've just said are my responsibility.
Just looking at the pictures in the ham radio books demonstrates that this hobby's high point passed back in the 70s. Read some QST magazines: yawn. So until I stumble upon someone local who's roughly my age (30s), I'm unlikely to actively participate. Back in the day the geeks were into radios, but now they're into the internet, so I predict ham radio will continue it's slow decline.
Well, I'm in my mid-30s and I don't let the age difference get in my way. There are at least two hams under 20 that I know of and talk with from time to time (one of them actually seeks me out at every hamfest.... he lives about 100 miles from me and so we don't get to eyball much), and several in my area who are mid-to-late 30s.
The trick is to find a club that has not calcified. I am the treasurer of the Schenectady Museum Amateur Radio Association, a club with about 50 members (52, actually, last I checked the records), and yes, we do have some geezers in the club, but all of the club officers are currently in our 30s, except for our VP, who is in his late 20s. The active core of the club ranges from age 25 to 40, averaging probably in the high 30s. We operate two repeaters, one of which participates in a New York State-wide network, and an eQSO link (W2IR/L, usually on room 101-English). We have a permanent station in the basement of the Schenectady Museum featuring an Icom 746Pro HF transceiver and several 6m/2m/440 transceivers, all of which are available to any club member in good standing (competence test required) during Museum hours.
Our club is also open to other types of radio hobbyists, such as scannists and SWLs. We try to nurture and cross-pollinate these different radio hobbies.
On the other hand, there is a rival club also in our fair city, which club has indeed calcified. Last year, their field day operation was out of commision for all but about 8 hours due to a lack of participants. Ours went on the air at the start and stayed on the full 24 hours.
Another local ham activity is the Capital District Commuter Net, every morning on the 146.94 repeater. It's kind of an informal net, and is used to exchange traffic conditions throughout the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area. It puts ham radio to a specific purpose, and often puts traffic conditions in front of you before the broadcast radio does.
This author does not understand the subject material.
I disagree. The author has simply misplaced his metric units. He used the word "milliseconds", where he should have used the word "microseconds". You can see an example of this where he refers to milliseconds as one millionth of a second, rather than the one thousandth that they actually are.
The way I see it, there are five classes of individuals who have historically been interested in ham radio. These four classes are not mutually exclusive, and I am in all five of them.
First, there are folks who want to meet people and chat. These folks now have the internet, and have gradually withdrawn from ham radio.
Second, there are folks who want to be able to make phone calls away from a landline. Traditionally, this has been done via a phone patch. Cell phones are now dirt cheap, so these folks have gradually withdrawn from ham radio. As a result, there are also fewer phone patches than there used to be.
Third, there are folks who want some form of intra-family communications. These folks would get their entire household licenced historically. Now these folks either get cell phones, or FRS or GMRS radios, or in some rare cases, MURS or CB radios, and so these folks have (need I say it?) gradually withdrawn from ham radio.
Fourth, there are folks who generally love radio. These folks will never leave ham radio because playing with radios is fun (which is the real answer to your question).
Fifth and finally, there are the ever-prepared crowd. These folks will do whatever they feel they need to in order to make themselves stable and useful in the event that social order breaks down for some reason or other.
Radioheads such as myself, when reading of an allocation beginning with "The", read it to mean that the allocation is in the vicinity of the stated frquency, without saying anything about how wide the band is. In other words, rather than reading this as being 20MHz of spectrum somewehere around 2.1GHz, I read it as being an unspecified amount of spectrum somewhere around 20MHz, which led me to "How the hell are they going to pull that off?!?"
"A" 20MHz allocation, on the other hand, can be any consecutive 20MHz wide block of spectrum.
Regular GSM is encrypted, as you say, although weakly. The GSM encryption encrypts the link from phone to cell tower. This will, in no way, prevent a government wiretap or telco employee with greased palms from intercepting your call after it has been decrypted and put on the network.
This, on the other hand, provides end-to-end encryption, and stronger encryption at that.
Let me tell you about my college experience on this front. For reference, this would have been between fall 1989 and spring 1994, and I fully realise that a lot (GUI quality, for instance) has changed since then.
Different classes that I took in college used or didn't use IDEs based mostly on the professor's choice of platform. The fundamentals courses (which I aced becasue I'd been programming for almost a decade before I got to college) were all taught within an IDE. This was true for most of the courses where the platform of choice was DOS.
However, when taking courses where VMS, PR1MOS or *NIX was the platform of choice, there were no IDEs. We were shown how to use the different editors (vi, emacs, TPU), and how to use the debuggers, compilers and linkers and left to figure out what to do from there on our own. Tool choice, from that point on, was up to the student.
One interesting exception was the x86 assembly language programming course I took, where we did not use an IDE, despite working on a DOS platform. QEdit was the editor provided by the college IT guys, and we would then just feed the text files into tasm to get our object files, etc, just like working with a compiler on VMS/PR1MOS/*NIX.
Today, I mostly code without an IDE, but I have them available to me, and know how to use them if I need to see my code from a different angle. Generally, both emacs and vi do a good enough job of syntax highlighting and linting that problems are apparent before you try to compile.... at least in my experience.
On the other hand, I'd like to mention one Sony product I fell in love with. A long time ago, I got one of their early Sony Clie PDAs.
Let me add another one to that: I have a 4-year-old Sony Mavica CD camera. Granted, it is a tad sluggish by today's standards, and is "only" 2.1 Mpx, but it takes very nice pictures, and blank media cost $25 for a stack of 50 blank discs. When done, the disc is a pretty-much normal data CD, save for the fact that it is 8cm rather than the more typical 12cm size.
Compared to some newer cameras, it isn't that great, but the fact that I never have to even think about compatibility is fantastic, and that is the real reason I bought it.
BTW, I also own two Sony sound systems; one is a 70's vintage system, which mixes and matches with the best of them (I use it with a Technics turntable, Harman-Kardon speakers, and my Linux workstation); the other is a modern, but modest, home-theatre sound system that also integrates well (used with a JVC satellite receiver and a Mintek DVD player--it came with its own speakers). The latter, and obviously the former, were purchased before the rootkit fiasco.
A few days ago I received a laptop from the IT department for a business trip the day after. I told them to install some software on it. Net result was that I received a laptop with the software I requested - but without a login, and the software wasn't activated.
If the IT department thinks along with you those things shouldn't happen.
A very big question I would ask in this scenario is this: Who put it off to the last minute, and why? There may be a very good answer to this, but one thing that is generally not understood is that system builds never go smoothly. It is absolutely mandatory that enough lead time be in place that the little problems that will be encountered can be squashed before the deadline.
This entails cooperation on the part of both parties. The user needs to make the request in a timely fashion; the IT guys need to act on it in a timely fashion. The user should perform acceptance testing well before the facility is needed (in this case, a day or two would probably be OK). If something goes wrong in the acceptance testing, then the IT guys need to act on it straight away.
The IT world is frought with problems that refuse to solve under stress. Yes, thinking is a good idea, but it is no substitute for timeliness.
I should send a box of loose blank DVD's with 'Screw you MPAA' written on them for their next photo-op on finding dvd's.
I have a better suggestion. Label them with the names of various movies. That way, when they are determined in court to be blanks, you will have made royal asses out of them.
People don't value their time like they should. I agree it is expensive, but we are talking here about a culture that will wait outside a store for hours and cause a stampede over a $23 DVD player.
If the price of gasoline had been allowed to rise, bringing with it the correct economic signal, then the demand would have been far less likely to so violently outstrip the supply. Rather than pissing away several hours waiting for gasoline by showing up at 5:00 AM to get a place in a line for a station that didn't open for another three hours, people would have instead gotten the hint and found ways to drive less, because it would cost more.
The way I see it, I'm the customer here. I'm paying for bandwidth, and that bandwidth had fucking well better go wherever I want it to go. If it doesn't, and my ISP is at fault, I'm finding myself a different ISP.
While I'm on it, let me point out that the government has tried regulating the price of gas. Unfortunately, most of us are too young to remember the gas lines that resulted from it in the early 70s.
If you are in eastern upstate New York, or western Massachusetts or southern Vermont, then Stewart's is your friend, and you can't go five blocks without passing one of their stores. I drink a lot of their store brand diet tea when I don't have time to brew my own. It has zero calories, and meets your "bottled convenience" and "contains caffeine" requirements, not to mention that it is cheaper than a lot of other options.
Unlicensed means there is no one who pays a license for exclusive use of the space. That is not the same as restricted, wherein the unlicensed use must conform to certain specifications.
Close, and probably close enough for the most part.
In the interest of being complete, though, let me point out that it is possible to acquire a licence for channels 1-6 in the US that comes with extra priviliges and some extra restrictions. This is because the band used by 802.11 overlaps one of the amateur radio bands, and so any licenced ham can punch a LOT of extra power on those frequencies (up to 1200W) as long as they operate under the amateur radio rules.
Mind you, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near an open-air 1200W transmitter on 2.4GHz.... that's enough to boil water in just a couple of minutes or warm up a frozen burrito in just two.:-)
This is all on top of the change coming with 802.11n, which uses 40MHz ranges, many of which may default to channel 6 out of habit, though 3 and 9 will be better selections based on legal bandwidth, and their use of channel 9 will probably swamp your little 11g unit.
That is not the way I read it. 802.11n uses a 20MHz channel twice, banking on phase differences and multipath reflections to sort out which part of the signal came from which transmitter. This is that "solution to spectrum scarcity" that comes up every time someone mentions radio interference around here, actually applied practically.
Already we have toll roads. We have examples of where special lanes are set aside for people who are willing to pay more for better service. So how is complaining about internet providers doing the same different?
Simple. By paying $49.95/month for Road Runner rather than $9.99 for Blue Frog, I am already paying a $40/month "toll" to use the fast lane. I've paid for it, now fork it over.
As for paying a "tiered" toll, I'm already there. I picked the middle tier. I get half the bandwidth for $29.95, or double for some other price ($89.95, I think?).
But none of this, nor your toll road system, exacts a penalty for what I might choose to call my destination.
That is a very weak analogy. You can get into an HOV lane with any brand of vehicle as long as it is a motorcycle, or you are carrying a passenger. You won't get turned out of the HOV lane just for driving a Hummer, nor will you get automatic admittance just for driving a Prius.
No, the HOV lane is more like priority being given to some services than to some providers.
On the other hand, the original analogy is weak, too. A better analogy would be that you get to use the HOV lane only if you are going to a particular place downtown (such as a mall), but if you are going to other places that aren't sanctioned by the highway, you have to use the other lanes. Perhaps, even, if you want to go to the place of business that competes with the highway's sponsor, you may even be condemned to driving through a non-stop construction zone. That's a better analogy.
The analogy as stated is more akin to giving preferential bandwidth to Windows users over Mac or Linux users. That would fly real well, eh?
The disease I'd like to complain about today is the "read receipt". I can only imagine how much time people waste looking up whether I've read their message or not. You can turn that off, too, but some people really go crazy if they don't get their read receipts.
On the other hand, there was a case where I have found read receipts to be supremely useful.
At a job in my distant past, there was one particular person with whom I needed to talk fairly frequently, and in all cases, my need to talk to this person was time-sensitive. He was very rarely at his desk, not because he was not in the office, but because he was off doing other useful things, which warranted non-disturbance.
The solution was to send him an email with a read receipt flag on it. When I saw the read receipt show up in my inbox, I would be able to go out and find him at his desk reading his email.
BTW, before anyone goes of on me for doing things this way, this was done in the interest of providing good customer service. I was working at a technical support call centre at the time, and I employed this tool, with appropriate moderation, when I had a customer who was waiting for a call back from me.
There is one thing I want more than anything else in a news site. If a news article is about a legislative action, then I want bill numbers, amendment numbers and a sidebar that shows me who voted how. That way, I can pick up the phone as soon as I have read the article, without spending two hours trawling through the house/senate web sites looking for the info, and call my elected representatives to either thank them or to tell them they are sons of bitches.
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I think that the DRM sticker would be more welcomed on the face of the CDs than the Explicit Lyrics one, since DRM, as proven by Sony, can be much more damaging to the consumer than swearing in songs.
In many cases, it is actually in the record label's interest to post the "Tipper Tag" (Explicit lyrics label) because it will, quite frequently, boost sales.
The DRM warning, on the other hand, will most likely cut sales, ergo it is not in the label's interest.
Well, maybe not "die." Maybe just replaced with something functionally equivalent, but that works better.
How about SSH? Just about any SSH client also has an SCP and/or SFTP client that goes with it, and most any SSH server can process these requests, all over port 22. No nonsesnse, and very highly scriptable. Oh, and I almost forgot.... it's secure.
The only downside is that it is a tad slower than FTP when using it on a LAN (due to encryption overhead). Over a WAN, you probably won't notice any difference.
Why does more current going through the wire cause them to sag? Heat?
Exactly correct. In fact, you can see it even on the distribution lines in this part of the country (upstate NY). During the summer, when a lot of power is being drawn to run air conditioners and pool pumps, and the ambient temperature is high, the distribution lags sag a fair bit. Typically nothing dangerous, but definitely noticeable. Look at that same line during the bone-chilling days in January, and you will see the very same line as taut as a piano string.
Is there a formula to determin how much it sags at a given current?
There probably is. I suspect it could be worked out by any sufficiently adept engineering or physics student, but I don't have the details in front of me. The data you would need to know, though, are that the cables are made of aluminum, you would have to know the diameter of the cable, the distance between pylons, the height of the pylons at the point where the cable meets the insulators, the amount of current (not power or voltage, but power and voltage could be used to get current) flowing through the cable, what the minimum altitude would be that you would want the cable to reach, and maybe the ambient temperature.
More to the point, this is something that would have already been worked out by the engineers who built the transmission line, and expressed in the transmission line's specifications. The dispatchers (both human and computer) in the control centre would be aware of the specifications and expected to conform to them.
BTW, I work for NYISO. Any opinions I've just expressed are mine, and not theirs. Any errors or omissions in what I've just said are my responsibility.
So what you're saying is that the author may understand the source material, but he's an idiot too stupid to proofread
Yeah, pretty much.
Just looking at the pictures in the ham radio books demonstrates that this hobby's high point passed back in the 70s. Read some QST magazines: yawn. So until I stumble upon someone local who's roughly my age (30s), I'm unlikely to actively participate. Back in the day the geeks were into radios, but now they're into the internet, so I predict ham radio will continue it's slow decline.
Well, I'm in my mid-30s and I don't let the age difference get in my way. There are at least two hams under 20 that I know of and talk with from time to time (one of them actually seeks me out at every hamfest.... he lives about 100 miles from me and so we don't get to eyball much), and several in my area who are mid-to-late 30s.
The trick is to find a club that has not calcified. I am the treasurer of the Schenectady Museum Amateur Radio Association, a club with about 50 members (52, actually, last I checked the records), and yes, we do have some geezers in the club, but all of the club officers are currently in our 30s, except for our VP, who is in his late 20s. The active core of the club ranges from age 25 to 40, averaging probably in the high 30s. We operate two repeaters, one of which participates in a New York State-wide network, and an eQSO link (W2IR/L, usually on room 101-English). We have a permanent station in the basement of the Schenectady Museum featuring an Icom 746Pro HF transceiver and several 6m/2m/440 transceivers, all of which are available to any club member in good standing (competence test required) during Museum hours.
Our club is also open to other types of radio hobbyists, such as scannists and SWLs. We try to nurture and cross-pollinate these different radio hobbies.
On the other hand, there is a rival club also in our fair city, which club has indeed calcified. Last year, their field day operation was out of commision for all but about 8 hours due to a lack of participants. Ours went on the air at the start and stayed on the full 24 hours.
Another local ham activity is the Capital District Commuter Net, every morning on the 146.94 repeater. It's kind of an informal net, and is used to exchange traffic conditions throughout the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area. It puts ham radio to a specific purpose, and often puts traffic conditions in front of you before the broadcast radio does.
This author does not understand the subject material.
I disagree. The author has simply misplaced his metric units. He used the word "milliseconds", where he should have used the word "microseconds". You can see an example of this where he refers to milliseconds as one millionth of a second, rather than the one thousandth that they actually are.
The way I see it, there are five classes of individuals who have historically been interested in ham radio. These four classes are not mutually exclusive, and I am in all five of them.
First, there are folks who want to meet people and chat. These folks now have the internet, and have gradually withdrawn from ham radio.
Second, there are folks who want to be able to make phone calls away from a landline. Traditionally, this has been done via a phone patch. Cell phones are now dirt cheap, so these folks have gradually withdrawn from ham radio. As a result, there are also fewer phone patches than there used to be.
Third, there are folks who want some form of intra-family communications. These folks would get their entire household licenced historically. Now these folks either get cell phones, or FRS or GMRS radios, or in some rare cases, MURS or CB radios, and so these folks have (need I say it?) gradually withdrawn from ham radio.
Fourth, there are folks who generally love radio. These folks will never leave ham radio because playing with radios is fun (which is the real answer to your question).
Fifth and finally, there are the ever-prepared crowd. These folks will do whatever they feel they need to in order to make themselves stable and useful in the event that social order breaks down for some reason or other.
Stay in New York, New Yahkuhs.
It probably won't surprise you in the least when I say.... Up yours!
"A" 20MHz allocation != "The" 20MHz allocation
Radioheads such as myself, when reading of an allocation beginning with "The", read it to mean that the allocation is in the vicinity of the stated frquency, without saying anything about how wide the band is. In other words, rather than reading this as being 20MHz of spectrum somewehere around 2.1GHz, I read it as being an unspecified amount of spectrum somewhere around 20MHz, which led me to "How the hell are they going to pull that off?!?"
"A" 20MHz allocation, on the other hand, can be any consecutive 20MHz wide block of spectrum.
Bad summary! Bad summary! Bad! Bad! Bad!
Regular GSM is encrypted, as you say, although weakly. The GSM encryption encrypts the link from phone to cell tower. This will, in no way, prevent a government wiretap or telco employee with greased palms from intercepting your call after it has been decrypted and put on the network.
This, on the other hand, provides end-to-end encryption, and stronger encryption at that.
How about both ways?
Let me tell you about my college experience on this front. For reference, this would have been between fall 1989 and spring 1994, and I fully realise that a lot (GUI quality, for instance) has changed since then.
Different classes that I took in college used or didn't use IDEs based mostly on the professor's choice of platform. The fundamentals courses (which I aced becasue I'd been programming for almost a decade before I got to college) were all taught within an IDE. This was true for most of the courses where the platform of choice was DOS.
However, when taking courses where VMS, PR1MOS or *NIX was the platform of choice, there were no IDEs. We were shown how to use the different editors (vi, emacs, TPU), and how to use the debuggers, compilers and linkers and left to figure out what to do from there on our own. Tool choice, from that point on, was up to the student.
One interesting exception was the x86 assembly language programming course I took, where we did not use an IDE, despite working on a DOS platform. QEdit was the editor provided by the college IT guys, and we would then just feed the text files into tasm to get our object files, etc, just like working with a compiler on VMS/PR1MOS/*NIX.
Today, I mostly code without an IDE, but I have them available to me, and know how to use them if I need to see my code from a different angle. Generally, both emacs and vi do a good enough job of syntax highlighting and linting that problems are apparent before you try to compile.... at least in my experience.
On the other hand, I'd like to mention one Sony product I fell in love with. A long time ago, I got one of their early Sony Clie PDAs.
Let me add another one to that: I have a 4-year-old Sony Mavica CD camera. Granted, it is a tad sluggish by today's standards, and is "only" 2.1 Mpx, but it takes very nice pictures, and blank media cost $25 for a stack of 50 blank discs. When done, the disc is a pretty-much normal data CD, save for the fact that it is 8cm rather than the more typical 12cm size.
Compared to some newer cameras, it isn't that great, but the fact that I never have to even think about compatibility is fantastic, and that is the real reason I bought it.
BTW, I also own two Sony sound systems; one is a 70's vintage system, which mixes and matches with the best of them (I use it with a Technics turntable, Harman-Kardon speakers, and my Linux workstation); the other is a modern, but modest, home-theatre sound system that also integrates well (used with a JVC satellite receiver and a Mintek DVD player--it came with its own speakers). The latter, and obviously the former, were purchased before the rootkit fiasco.
A few days ago I received a laptop from the IT department for a business trip the day after. I told them to install some software on it. Net result was that I received a laptop with the software I requested - but without a login, and the software wasn't activated.
If the IT department thinks along with you those things shouldn't happen.
A very big question I would ask in this scenario is this: Who put it off to the last minute, and why? There may be a very good answer to this, but one thing that is generally not understood is that system builds never go smoothly. It is absolutely mandatory that enough lead time be in place that the little problems that will be encountered can be squashed before the deadline.
This entails cooperation on the part of both parties. The user needs to make the request in a timely fashion; the IT guys need to act on it in a timely fashion. The user should perform acceptance testing well before the facility is needed (in this case, a day or two would probably be OK). If something goes wrong in the acceptance testing, then the IT guys need to act on it straight away.
The IT world is frought with problems that refuse to solve under stress. Yes, thinking is a good idea, but it is no substitute for timeliness.
I should send a box of loose blank DVD's with 'Screw you MPAA' written on them for their next photo-op on finding dvd's.
I have a better suggestion. Label them with the names of various movies. That way, when they are determined in court to be blanks, you will have made royal asses out of them.
People don't value their time like they should. I agree it is expensive, but we are talking here about a culture that will wait outside a store for hours and cause a stampede over a $23 DVD player.
If the price of gasoline had been allowed to rise, bringing with it the correct economic signal, then the demand would have been far less likely to so violently outstrip the supply. Rather than pissing away several hours waiting for gasoline by showing up at 5:00 AM to get a place in a line for a station that didn't open for another three hours, people would have instead gotten the hint and found ways to drive less, because it would cost more.
The way I see it, I'm the customer here. I'm paying for bandwidth, and that bandwidth had fucking well better go wherever I want it to go. If it doesn't, and my ISP is at fault, I'm finding myself a different ISP.
While I'm on it, let me point out that the government has tried regulating the price of gas. Unfortunately, most of us are too young to remember the gas lines that resulted from it in the early 70s.
I don't know where you live.
If you are in eastern upstate New York, or western Massachusetts or southern Vermont, then Stewart's is your friend, and you can't go five blocks without passing one of their stores. I drink a lot of their store brand diet tea when I don't have time to brew my own. It has zero calories, and meets your "bottled convenience" and "contains caffeine" requirements, not to mention that it is cheaper than a lot of other options.
Now that's just neat. Scary, but neat. I wasn't aware of people doing this.
I don't think I'll try it myself.... I seem to have the most fun operating in the 10m and 2m bands. :-)
73 DE KC2IDF
Unlicensed means there is no one who pays a license for exclusive use of the space. That is not the same as restricted, wherein the unlicensed use must conform to certain specifications.
Close, and probably close enough for the most part.
In the interest of being complete, though, let me point out that it is possible to acquire a licence for channels 1-6 in the US that comes with extra priviliges and some extra restrictions. This is because the band used by 802.11 overlaps one of the amateur radio bands, and so any licenced ham can punch a LOT of extra power on those frequencies (up to 1200W) as long as they operate under the amateur radio rules.
Mind you, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near an open-air 1200W transmitter on 2.4GHz.... that's enough to boil water in just a couple of minutes or warm up a frozen burrito in just two. :-)
This is all on top of the change coming with 802.11n, which uses 40MHz ranges, many of which may default to channel 6 out of habit, though 3 and 9 will be better selections based on legal bandwidth, and their use of channel 9 will probably swamp your little 11g unit.
That is not the way I read it. 802.11n uses a 20MHz channel twice, banking on phase differences and multipath reflections to sort out which part of the signal came from which transmitter. This is that "solution to spectrum scarcity" that comes up every time someone mentions radio interference around here, actually applied practically.
Already we have toll roads. We have examples of where special lanes are set aside for people who are willing to pay more for better service. So how is complaining about internet providers doing the same different?
Simple. By paying $49.95/month for Road Runner rather than $9.99 for Blue Frog, I am already paying a $40/month "toll" to use the fast lane. I've paid for it, now fork it over.
As for paying a "tiered" toll, I'm already there. I picked the middle tier. I get half the bandwidth for $29.95, or double for some other price ($89.95, I think?).
But none of this, nor your toll road system, exacts a penalty for what I might choose to call my destination.
Ever hear of an HOV lane?
That is a very weak analogy. You can get into an HOV lane with any brand of vehicle as long as it is a motorcycle, or you are carrying a passenger. You won't get turned out of the HOV lane just for driving a Hummer, nor will you get automatic admittance just for driving a Prius.
No, the HOV lane is more like priority being given to some services than to some providers.
On the other hand, the original analogy is weak, too. A better analogy would be that you get to use the HOV lane only if you are going to a particular place downtown (such as a mall), but if you are going to other places that aren't sanctioned by the highway, you have to use the other lanes. Perhaps, even, if you want to go to the place of business that competes with the highway's sponsor, you may even be condemned to driving through a non-stop construction zone. That's a better analogy.
The analogy as stated is more akin to giving preferential bandwidth to Windows users over Mac or Linux users. That would fly real well, eh?
The disease I'd like to complain about today is the "read receipt". I can only imagine how much time people waste looking up whether I've read their message or not. You can turn that off, too, but some people really go crazy if they don't get their read receipts.
On the other hand, there was a case where I have found read receipts to be supremely useful.
At a job in my distant past, there was one particular person with whom I needed to talk fairly frequently, and in all cases, my need to talk to this person was time-sensitive. He was very rarely at his desk, not because he was not in the office, but because he was off doing other useful things, which warranted non-disturbance.
The solution was to send him an email with a read receipt flag on it. When I saw the read receipt show up in my inbox, I would be able to go out and find him at his desk reading his email.
BTW, before anyone goes of on me for doing things this way, this was done in the interest of providing good customer service. I was working at a technical support call centre at the time, and I employed this tool, with appropriate moderation, when I had a customer who was waiting for a call back from me.
There is one thing I want more than anything else in a news site. If a news article is about a legislative action, then I want bill numbers, amendment numbers and a sidebar that shows me who voted how. That way, I can pick up the phone as soon as I have read the article, without spending two hours trawling through the house/senate web sites looking for the info, and call my elected representatives to either thank them or to tell them they are sons of bitches.
Project Vote-smart is a good step in the right direction, but the database is indexed the wrong way and doesn't touch committees at all. Besides, it isn't a news site. I want it integrated into a news site.
That alone will probably get my undying loyalty.