The GPL is a license - "General Public License". The code is copyrighted. When you use copyrighted material you must agree to abide by the terms of the license that is attached to it. In the case of GPLed code, you have agreed to release source code of the software that you distribute if it is a derivative of GPLed code.
This is a choice that the author of the original work has made. Other authors choose to keep the source code and release binaries for money, others choose other licenses, such as the BSD licence, which may or may not require you to acknowledge the work of the original author.
It is not a contract violation to ignore the terms of the GPL, it is a license violation. Without agreeing to the terms of the license you have no right to use the code - it is copyrighted.
The GPL protects the rights of the author just as any other license would in this kind of circumstance. Yes, a licence allows you to impose control over your creations. This is the case unless you place the work in the public domain or use a licence which allows for the code to be used in derivative works without any strings attached.
By placing works under the GPL an author is trying to ensure that everyone using his works gain from the effort made by anyone improving on his works. This is a "scientific" approach, "Standing on the shoulders of giants"-Isaac Newton. Alternatively it is the ethos which drove the early hackers in the homebrew computer computer club, before it was wrecked by some idiot named bill gates. If you don't believe me maybe you should spend some time reading?
That said it must also be noted that I believe that it is the authors right to set the terms under which his work can be used. Their rights should be respected regardless of whether this means that you have to release any derivatives under the same licence or whether the license requires you to pay to use the work and expressly forbids the creation of derivative works.
"Proprietary software with many features makes work easier."
Not always true. There are many instances where the shear number of features make learning how to properly utilise a package detrimental to actually getting work done. For instance OrCAD is a proprietary PCB design package, with many features, it is also very complex and hard to learn how to use - I know, I've had to learn the basics in the past. Where as Easy-PC, which lacks many of the advanced features that OrCAD has, is much easier to learn and use, is more than adequate for many users.
If they're photographers they're going to prefer Photoshop to the GIMP. If they're authors they're going to prefer Microsoft Word to Open Office Write. If you play video games you are going to want Microsoft Windows and not GNU/Linux. This again is simply not true. I know many photographers that are happy to pay for photoshop, I also know many photographers that are not and are quite happy to use the GIMP. Many authors do not use Microsoft Word, at least up till 2000 it had an annoying feature of becomming very unstable as documents got large, especially if they contained a large number of images. There are people that use word for large documents, but there are also a large number of authors that use simple editors and write there documents using TeX. I admit that if you want to play all the latest games then Windows is still pretty much a prerequisite, though this is changing. A growing proportion of the largest games titles are being written and ported to windows, Mac and Linux. For example: Unreal Tournament, Doom 3 & Neverwinter Nights
One of the most amazing things about the Free Software movement is that somehow a core of very intelligent people have somehow convinced themselves that acutally LOWERING their productivity by using incredibly arcane and user unfriendly applications is in some way a GOOD thing I once again disagree. I have been more productive since I started using opensource software. I have been able to concentrate on the job at hand, without worrying about the latest viruses and worms. I don't have to worry about attachments so much. All my applications are updated from one simple to use GUI updater. I can quickly search and install hundreds of useful applications from a similarly simple to use GUI and uninstall then just as easily if I find they do not do what I want them to do.
To paraphrase Han Solo: "The people aren't in this for your revolution, princess." With this I will have to agree. The majority of people do not use opensource to be part of some revolution. They use opensource because it offers them things that other software does not. The web is driven by open software. Google use Linux, Yahoo uses one of the BSDs, most DNS servers run BIND, a large percentage of mail servers run sendmail, again a large percentage of webservers use apache. A large number of acedemic projects utilise and/or produce opensourced software. A growing number of large corporations and municipal authorites are turning to opensource software for their IT needs. Very few of these people are doing this just because it is opensource. They are doing it because it makes good political or business sense to them.
Appologies, I was looking for 2000, not 2003 and a quick glance on a few sites lead me to prices in the order of £680.
Still I think my point still remains that both versions of windows are more than the £50 for SUSE 9.2 Professional, A high price to pay for something that could quite easily be done with debian or other distro for free!
He's running win2K workstation instead of server and is only allowed 5 connections on IIS.
Ahh and there in lies the problem of paying in the order of £70 (OEM) for the workstation version rather than £680 (5 CAL) for the server version. Or of course, £50 for SUSE 9.2 Professional.
Given that Katie.com is owned by an individual whom lives in the United Kingdom and Penguin are a multi-national (i.e. are likely to have offices in the UK), I wonder what the relevent UK laws state. I wonder if Katie Jones could bring a claim to the UK courts if she wanted.
I imagine you will see a similar stance by WindRiver maker of the popular Realtime Embedded OS VXWorks.
Actually from what I have seen, quite the opposite. WindRiver seem to be actively working on an embedded Linux Distribution and development environment of their own as an alternative to VXWorks. They seem to have strategically partnered themselves, with Redhat according to their webpage.
BT, Britain's monopolist telephone company. A phone company that makes you pay by the second for local calls.
Ok, I have family that works for BT so I'll bite on this one. BT used to be a part of the post office, it was then split off as a private company and I believe it had a monopoly for a number of years. I think in about the last 10 years or so competition has been introduced (NTL, various others - I don't pay much attention) and the industry regulated by oftel (I believe a name change has happen recently).In the early-ish days of this non-monopoly market BT were thinking about offering free local calls, however oftel objected as this would kill the competition (which is a fair point, to some degree). Since then BT's market share has reduced and are now not in a position to offer such an attractive package.
Before I get flamed into oblivion I would just like to add that I appriecate BT doesn't have the best of public images, however some of the competition make them smell of roses.
And why on earth is "running under KDE" not "supporting KDE"?!
The majority of KDE apps use QT, dcop, the arts sound server.
Whilst Gnome apps can be loaded from within KDE (unsuprisingly) it will require the GTK libraries and are unlikely to use dcop and arts. They might as well say it would work under any desktop environment given the required libraries are installed.
I like the apps, if I was currently using Gnome I'd use them.
If this was purely practical they would choose one desktop or use a strategy that is completely desktop agnostic.
However I feel that the choice to support both KDE and Gnome was a political decision, due to the fact this kind of decision often causes huge outcry and doesn't fit well with the "choose the successes" statement.
The fact remains that this combination of browser, productivity suite, groupware client and instant messenger is fairly biased towards Gnome. This means that a smaller, less memory intensive setup is likely to be realised with Gnome, making KDE kinda superflous.
To me it doesn't make much sense to claim to support KDE and not it's default set of applications as well because as it is all you are doing is loading Gnomes services and libraries behind KDE, which isn't really supporting KDE.
Or just write some alternative firmware to make it work well with existing open protocols.
Seriously, people have hacked arround with the Xbox, why not hack the iPod to play the file types (minus DRM) that geeks want (I.E. Ogg...). I know its difficult, It probably doesn't have a standard PC architecture, or mac architecture, but I bet it's got a known processor in it.
"We cannot choose one desktop over the other - Gnome or KDE - because there's users for both code bases."
He then states:
"We're making the decision it's going to be OpenOffice, the browser it's going to be Mozilla, the email client it's going to be Evolution, the IM client it's going to be Gaim. So we basically have to pick successful open source projects and put them together."
The problem is that, as far as I know, these tend to be the default applications used on top of the gnome DE. Granted I would install OpenOffice when setting up a computer with KDE, but it would make more sense to use konqueror, kmail(/Kontact) and kopete instead of the other programs. In fact given time and if koffice manage to convert over to the openoffice file format (which I believe they are doing) it might make more sense to install this for basic users, as like the other programs, it is tied in well to the KDE DE. This leads me to the assumption that Novell will eventually, at least in the short run, ship Gnome as the default as KDE will have to load 2 lots of services (it's own + those for OOo/gaim/evolution/mozilla integration) and will thus require many more resources.
In the long term I hope that this kind of activity will help to unify the two desktops background services, allowing software to be written that works with an equal level of tie-in with both DE, however I guess this will take a long time and lots of carefull negotitation before it happens.
Ahh, but there's where you have it all wrong, due to it's likely size, weight and general brick like appearance, along with the anoyance factor when it BSODs people are likely to get stressed and throw this device. Thereby making a rather deadly projectile.
They probably can't release the documentation for some reason, however as long as there are a number of intel people on the project _with_ access to the documentation this isn't as huge a problem as it would otherwise be.
This allows the community to help stear the portions of the code that don't require the documentation and to help them properly tie the driver into Linux.
As long as the code isn't a complete mess it will also be possible to get some understanding of the workings of the chip from the code.
I agree that it is not ideal, however it's better than a binary-only driver.
I am sure it's not hard to find, but I'll bet it's one hell of a lot more expensive than Windows help. The Slashdot hoards can say what they wish, but the setup of a basic Windows LAN with filesharing, network printing, backup and web access (the kind of arrangement one would find in a small ad firm, law office, etc) is less difficult than doing the same thing on Linux. There are just fewer steps.
Hmm, I think this is becoming less and less true. Mandrake at least has GUI tools for setting all these up and they have worked for me recently. But I just play with it and admin family computers and friends private networks.
So, I don't need some guru to come in and charge me $100 an hour to build me a Linux LAN when I can go to the classified ads and get some Windows jerk for $30 an hour to leave me with the same results.
I very much doubt you will get the same results, initially similar I'll grant you.
Before you furrow your brow and ask if I really want that guy building my network, consider the scenario. If it was a database build, a web development project or something hard, then no, but that guy is more than qualified to meet the needs of a vast, vast majority of true small businesses.
But that is the problem, the $30 an hour mouse monkey will most likely not know the theory behind what he is doing nad is far less likely to document what he has done. Yes he maybe able to setup an initial deployment, but as Microsoft I'm sure have stated themselves countless times in the past it is the on-going maintenance that costs the most. Networks built and maintained by $30 an hour guys are completely rebuilt on a regular basis and this is likely to cause conciderable downtime which will harm the company or lead to costly overtime/out-of-hours pay. Networks built and maintained by $100 an hour gurus will probably work for years...
From what I've seen, the ubiquitous that guy doesn't exist in the UNIX world.
I think you will find that he does, however you will find you have approximately the same problem with the $30 an hour UNIX guy as he is likely to be quite new to UNIX and have limited experience/ knowledge of what he is doing.
I will not dispute that it's science which is to old to be called technology anymore.
From www.dict.org:
technology
1: the practical application of science to commerce or industry
[syn: engineering]
2: the discipline dealing with the art or science of applying
scientific knowledge to practical problems; "he had
trouble deciding which branch of engineering to study"
science
2. Accumulated and established knowledge, which has been
systematized and formulated with reference to the
discovery of general truths or the operation of general
laws; knowledge classified and made available in work,
life, or the search for truth; comprehensive, profound, or
philosophical knowledge.
3. Especially, such knowledge when it relates to the physical
world and its phenomena, the nature, constitution, and
forces of matter, the qualities and functions of living
tissues, etc.; -- called also natural science, and
physical science.
Nope, still a technology.
If someone in south america has an emergency they should be calling someone a wee bit closer than the US.
I don't know if you noticed, but your country shares a common border with South America, this is not about trying to call into the US. It is about your potential HF spectrum noise destroying communications between 2 settlements in South America which happen to be unlucky enough to be near the boarder.
the internet carries critical communications every second of every hour of everyday
...Into your home? Tell me, do you run a business from your house - let alone one that could be considered to require these "critical communications"? Are you seriously concidering running your communications over powerline, in the unfortunate event that this technology actually is allowed to be used? Wouldn't it be far better to get a slighty faster connection - being that the comms to your house are so critical?
It lets loveones know we are safe and ok EVERYDAY. I carries news like wildfire globally in seconds.
Ah, I use a telephone for the first one (its nice to hear a voice don'tca know) and the second, well hardly "critical" say, in a natural disaster kind of way. At least the news being spread isn't going to be of use to those in the effected area as ham-radios would be - i.e. to co-ordinate rescue efforts.
HF communications may prove critical to an emergency once in a great while (generally the people who need contacting will certainly be contactable over other frequency).
No, that's the point. This is one of the few radio frequencies that can be easily picked up over a reasonable range, utilising battery powered devices, which also allows many devices to transmit and recieve on a common channel - which is essential in a disaster situation.
Not only that, but there are still hobbist that enjoy using ham-radio, there are probably many in the US. What gives you the right to stop them from using ham-radio or so little gain? This is not going to be hugely fast and will require a fair amount of infrastructure change. For example, if I start up my nice lathe that is sitting in the shed, which uses a noisy 3-phase motor, unless special damping is going to be provided, this is going to kill comms over power lines dead whilst it is running!
Yes, I know this is the case as I knew some people working on the technology at university whist I was doing an Engineering degree and any use of noisy equipment near there lab (even though it was isolated as best as possible) was causing havoc. It's a nice idea, but ultimately flaud in so many ways that I believe that, at least in the UK, there is very little funding to work on it anymore.
Because it's called being conciderate to others in a global community. The global community in which you are currently airing your naive, elitist views.
Explain to me why a call in South America, no matter what type of emergency, should be denied so that you may have the convience of receiving a broadband connection over powerlines?! Especially since Ham radio has already been in use for years.
I kept a 5.25" floppy drive about for pure nostalgia reasons, then about a month ago a friend came to me with an old 5.25" floppy that had some software on he needed for a research project!
It's now in my machine waiting for the next person who needs it. Just trying to find the 8" disk drive now!
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL is a license - "General Public License". The code is copyrighted. When you use copyrighted material you must agree to abide by the terms of the license that is attached to it. In the case of GPLed code, you have agreed to release source code of the software that you distribute if it is a derivative of GPLed code.
This is a choice that the author of the original work has made. Other authors choose to keep the source code and release binaries for money, others choose other licenses, such as the BSD licence, which may or may not require you to acknowledge the work of the original author.
It is not a contract violation to ignore the terms of the GPL, it is a license violation. Without agreeing to the terms of the license you have no right to use the code - it is copyrighted.
The GPL protects the rights of the author just as any other license would in this kind of circumstance. Yes, a licence allows you to impose control over your creations. This is the case unless you place the work in the public domain or use a licence which allows for the code to be used in derivative works without any strings attached.
By placing works under the GPL an author is trying to ensure that everyone using his works gain from the effort made by anyone improving on his works. This is a "scientific" approach, "Standing on the shoulders of giants"-Isaac Newton. Alternatively it is the ethos which drove the early hackers in the homebrew computer computer club, before it was wrecked by some idiot named bill gates. If you don't believe me maybe you should spend some time reading?
That said it must also be noted that I believe that it is the authors right to set the terms under which his work can be used. Their rights should be respected regardless of whether this means that you have to release any derivatives under the same licence or whether the license requires you to pay to use the work and expressly forbids the creation of derivative works.
"Proprietary software with many features makes work easier."
Not always true. There are many instances where the shear number of features make learning how to properly utilise a package detrimental to actually getting work done. For instance OrCAD is a proprietary PCB design package, with many features, it is also very complex and hard to learn how to use - I know, I've had to learn the basics in the past. Where as Easy-PC, which lacks many of the advanced features that OrCAD has, is much easier to learn and use, is more than adequate for many users.
If they're photographers they're going to prefer Photoshop to the GIMP. If they're authors they're going to prefer Microsoft Word to Open Office Write. If you play video games you are going to want Microsoft Windows and not GNU/Linux.
This again is simply not true. I know many photographers that are happy to pay for photoshop, I also know many photographers that are not and are quite happy to use the GIMP. Many authors do not use Microsoft Word, at least up till 2000 it had an annoying feature of becomming very unstable as documents got large, especially if they contained a large number of images. There are people that use word for large documents, but there are also a large number of authors that use simple editors and write there documents using TeX. I admit that if you want to play all the latest games then Windows is still pretty much a prerequisite, though this is changing. A growing proportion of the largest games titles are being written and ported to windows, Mac and Linux. For example: Unreal Tournament, Doom 3 & Neverwinter Nights
One of the most amazing things about the Free Software movement is that somehow a core of very intelligent people have somehow convinced themselves that acutally LOWERING their productivity by using incredibly arcane and user unfriendly applications is in some way a GOOD thing
I once again disagree. I have been more productive since I started using opensource software. I have been able to concentrate on the job at hand, without worrying about the latest viruses and worms. I don't have to worry about attachments so much. All my applications are updated from one simple to use GUI updater. I can quickly search and install hundreds of useful applications from a similarly simple to use GUI and uninstall then just as easily if I find they do not do what I want them to do.
To paraphrase Han Solo: "The people aren't in this for your revolution, princess."
With this I will have to agree. The majority of people do not use opensource to be part of some revolution. They use opensource because it offers them things that other software does not. The web is driven by open software. Google use Linux, Yahoo uses one of the BSDs, most DNS servers run BIND, a large percentage of mail servers run sendmail, again a large percentage of webservers use apache. A large number of acedemic projects utilise and/or produce opensourced software. A growing number of large corporations and municipal authorites are turning to opensource software for their IT needs. Very few of these people are doing this just because it is opensource. They are doing it because it makes good political or business sense to them.
I suggest one of these.
Appologies, I was looking for 2000, not 2003 and a quick glance on a few sites lead me to prices in the order of £680.
Still I think my point still remains that both versions of windows are more than the £50 for SUSE 9.2 Professional, A high price to pay for something that could quite easily be done with debian or other distro for free!
Ahh and there in lies the problem of paying in the order of £70 (OEM) for the workstation version rather than £680 (5 CAL) for the server version. Or of course, £50 for SUSE 9.2 Professional.
Damn, not even a pair of puppies.
Given that Katie.com is owned by an individual whom lives in the United Kingdom and Penguin are a multi-national (i.e. are likely to have offices in the UK), I wonder what the relevent UK laws state. I wonder if Katie Jones could bring a claim to the UK courts if she wanted.
I imagine you will see a similar stance by WindRiver maker of the popular Realtime Embedded OS VXWorks.
Actually from what I have seen, quite the opposite. WindRiver seem to be actively working on an embedded Linux Distribution and development environment of their own as an alternative to VXWorks. They seem to have strategically partnered themselves, with Redhat according to their webpage.
I think you will find that many people will have learnt it as V=IR. Like pretty much the entirety of the UK.
Voltage is not a unit, a Volt is.
Sometimes it seems dubious as to whether Microsoft wants the Hotmail Brand Name.
BT, Britain's monopolist telephone company. A phone company that makes you pay by the second for local calls.
Ok, I have family that works for BT so I'll bite on this one. BT used to be a part of the post office, it was then split off as a private company and I believe it had a monopoly for a number of years. I think in about the last 10 years or so competition has been introduced (NTL, various others - I don't pay much attention) and the industry regulated by oftel (I believe a name change has happen recently).In the early-ish days of this non-monopoly market BT were thinking about offering free local calls, however oftel objected as this would kill the competition (which is a fair point, to some degree). Since then BT's market share has reduced and are now not in a position to offer such an attractive package.
Before I get flamed into oblivion I would just like to add that I appriecate BT doesn't have the best of public images, however some of the competition make them smell of roses.
Linux, for various reasons of various worth, can certainly be cryptic (the same can be said of Windows and probably every OS under the sun)
I suppose I better take another look at Solaris, it's obviously worth it's price tag if it is the least cryptic of os'.
You obviously don't have to install PC's for friends and family on aging hardware, where easy of use is of prime importance.
The majority of KDE apps use QT, dcop, the arts sound server.
Whilst Gnome apps can be loaded from within KDE (unsuprisingly) it will require the GTK libraries and are unlikely to use dcop and arts. They might as well say it would work under any desktop environment given the required libraries are installed.
I like the apps, if I was currently using Gnome I'd use them.
If this was purely practical they would choose one desktop or use a strategy that is completely desktop agnostic.
However I feel that the choice to support both KDE and Gnome was a political decision, due to the fact this kind of decision often causes huge outcry and doesn't fit well with the "choose the successes" statement.
The fact remains that this combination of browser, productivity suite, groupware client and instant messenger is fairly biased towards Gnome. This means that a smaller, less memory intensive setup is likely to be realised with Gnome, making KDE kinda superflous.
To me it doesn't make much sense to claim to support KDE and not it's default set of applications as well because as it is all you are doing is loading Gnomes services and libraries behind KDE, which isn't really supporting KDE.
Or just write some alternative firmware to make it work well with existing open protocols.
Seriously, people have hacked arround with the Xbox, why not hack the iPod to play the file types (minus DRM) that geeks want (I.E. Ogg...). I know its difficult, It probably doesn't have a standard PC architecture, or mac architecture, but I bet it's got a known processor in it.
Right after saying:
"We cannot choose one desktop over the other - Gnome or KDE - because there's users for both code bases."
He then states:
"We're making the decision it's going to be OpenOffice, the browser it's going to be Mozilla, the email client it's going to be Evolution, the IM client it's going to be Gaim. So we basically have to pick successful open source projects and put them together."
The problem is that, as far as I know, these tend to be the default applications used on top of the gnome DE. Granted I would install OpenOffice when setting up a computer with KDE, but it would make more sense to use konqueror, kmail(/Kontact) and kopete instead of the other programs. In fact given time and if koffice manage to convert over to the openoffice file format (which I believe they are doing) it might make more sense to install this for basic users, as like the other programs, it is tied in well to the KDE DE. This leads me to the assumption that Novell will eventually, at least in the short run, ship Gnome as the default as KDE will have to load 2 lots of services (it's own + those for OOo/gaim/evolution/mozilla integration) and will thus require many more resources.
In the long term I hope that this kind of activity will help to unify the two desktops background services, allowing software to be written that works with an equal level of tie-in with both DE, however I guess this will take a long time and lots of carefull negotitation before it happens.
Just found an interesting link on jisc...
Ahh, but there's where you have it all wrong, due to it's likely size, weight and general brick like appearance, along with the anoyance factor when it BSODs people are likely to get stressed and throw this device. Thereby making a rather deadly projectile.
They probably can't release the documentation for some reason, however as long as there are a number of intel people on the project _with_ access to the documentation this isn't as huge a problem as it would otherwise be.
This allows the community to help stear the portions of the code that don't require the documentation and to help them properly tie the driver into Linux.
As long as the code isn't a complete mess it will also be possible to get some understanding of the workings of the chip from the code.
I agree that it is not ideal, however it's better than a binary-only driver.
"It would be a crippled OS"
And it's not now?
I am sure it's not hard to find, but I'll bet it's one hell of a lot more expensive than Windows help. The Slashdot hoards can say what they wish, but the setup of a basic Windows LAN with filesharing, network printing, backup and web access (the kind of arrangement one would find in a small ad firm, law office, etc) is less difficult than doing the same thing on Linux. There are just fewer steps.
Hmm, I think this is becoming less and less true. Mandrake at least has GUI tools for setting all these up and they have worked for me recently. But I just play with it and admin family computers and friends private networks.
So, I don't need some guru to come in and charge me $100 an hour to build me a Linux LAN when I can go to the classified ads and get some Windows jerk for $30 an hour to leave me with the same results.
I very much doubt you will get the same results, initially similar I'll grant you.
Before you furrow your brow and ask if I really want that guy building my network, consider the scenario. If it was a database build, a web development project or something hard, then no, but that guy is more than qualified to meet the needs of a vast, vast majority of true small businesses.
But that is the problem, the $30 an hour mouse monkey will most likely not know the theory behind what he is doing nad is far less likely to document what he has done. Yes he maybe able to setup an initial deployment, but as Microsoft I'm sure have stated themselves countless times in the past it is the on-going maintenance that costs the most. Networks built and maintained by $30 an hour guys are completely rebuilt on a regular basis and this is likely to cause conciderable downtime which will harm the company or lead to costly overtime/out-of-hours pay. Networks built and maintained by $100 an hour gurus will probably work for years...
From what I've seen, the ubiquitous that guy doesn't exist in the UNIX world. I think you will find that he does, however you will find you have approximately the same problem with the $30 an hour UNIX guy as he is likely to be quite new to UNIX and have limited experience/ knowledge of what he is doing.
I will not dispute that it's science which is to old to be called technology anymore.
...Into your home? Tell me, do you run a business from your house - let alone one that could be considered to require these "critical communications"? Are you seriously concidering running your communications over powerline, in the unfortunate event that this technology actually is allowed to be used? Wouldn't it be far better to get a slighty faster connection - being that the comms to your house are so critical?
From www.dict.org:
technology
1: the practical application of science to commerce or industry [syn: engineering]
2: the discipline dealing with the art or science of applying scientific knowledge to practical problems; "he had trouble deciding which branch of engineering to study"
science
2. Accumulated and established knowledge, which has been systematized and formulated with reference to the discovery of general truths or the operation of general laws; knowledge classified and made available in work, life, or the search for truth; comprehensive, profound, or philosophical knowledge.
3. Especially, such knowledge when it relates to the physical world and its phenomena, the nature, constitution, and forces of matter, the qualities and functions of living tissues, etc.; -- called also natural science, and physical science.
Nope, still a technology.
If someone in south america has an emergency they should be calling someone a wee bit closer than the US.
I don't know if you noticed, but your country shares a common border with South America, this is not about trying to call into the US. It is about your potential HF spectrum noise destroying communications between 2 settlements in South America which happen to be unlucky enough to be near the boarder.
the internet carries critical communications every second of every hour of everyday
It lets loveones know we are safe and ok EVERYDAY. I carries news like wildfire globally in seconds.
Ah, I use a telephone for the first one (its nice to hear a voice don'tca know) and the second, well hardly "critical" say, in a natural disaster kind of way. At least the news being spread isn't going to be of use to those in the effected area as ham-radios would be - i.e. to co-ordinate rescue efforts.
HF communications may prove critical to an emergency once in a great while (generally the people who need contacting will certainly be contactable over other frequency).
No, that's the point. This is one of the few radio frequencies that can be easily picked up over a reasonable range, utilising battery powered devices, which also allows many devices to transmit and recieve on a common channel - which is essential in a disaster situation.
Not only that, but there are still hobbist that enjoy using ham-radio, there are probably many in the US. What gives you the right to stop them from using ham-radio or so little gain? This is not going to be hugely fast and will require a fair amount of infrastructure change. For example, if I start up my nice lathe that is sitting in the shed, which uses a noisy 3-phase motor, unless special damping is going to be provided, this is going to kill comms over power lines dead whilst it is running!
Yes, I know this is the case as I knew some people working on the technology at university whist I was doing an Engineering degree and any use of noisy equipment near there lab (even though it was isolated as best as possible) was causing havoc. It's a nice idea, but ultimately flaud in so many ways that I believe that, at least in the UK, there is very little funding to work on it anymore.
Why?
Because it's called being conciderate to others in a global community. The global community in which you are currently airing your naive, elitist views.
Explain to me why a call in South America, no matter what type of emergency, should be denied so that you may have the convience of receiving a broadband connection over powerlines?! Especially since Ham radio has already been in use for years.
I kept a 5.25" floppy drive about for pure nostalgia reasons, then about a month ago a friend came to me with an old 5.25" floppy that had some software on he needed for a research project!
It's now in my machine waiting for the next person who needs it. Just trying to find the 8" disk drive now!