I completely agree with you. Lawyers shouldn't be allowed to disqualify a juror for any reason whatsoever. Look what happended in Tulia, Texas. Think any of those jurors were black or well educated? It seems that the prosecutor and (public) defender always want jurors whom are the most easily swayed (ie, gullible or not too bright...).
It's bad enough now that I kind of wish that there were professional jurors similar to the way the Romans did. At least then there would be some accountability of the jurors and a system by which to correct gross negligence in that part of the legal system. It's too bad that it would take an amendment to the Constitution to do that...
Yes, for the typical orbit boost, a Homan transfer, you need both a boost to get you into an eliptical orbit to get to the higher orbit and another boost at apogee to make your orbit circular. However, that boost to get you into the eliptical orbit is huge compared to the boost needed to circularize the orbit at apogee, usually requiring an upper stage just for that purpose.
If these tethers work as claimed, they could significantly reduce the cost of getting satellites into geosynch orbits and high earth orbits, not to mention interplanetary travel as you mention.
I believe you are correct. However, I think that there were theories that the Iraqis stored only the precursors to the weapons, which are much less volatile and could be quickly combined for deployment. Heck, one of the reasons that some people thought that the trailers they found weren't used for producing biological/chemical weapons were because they didn't have effective sterilization processes built in which would result in very poor weapon production (causing the chemicals to break down even faster than they would otherwise).
We're talking about Americans here - they barely know the time zone in other states.
You really aren't even trolling as that is absolutely true. If I asked my father what timezone he's in relative to GMT, he would probably respond "huh??" (it's -5 GMT by the way). Many people who do little travelling in the states often have no clue what the time offset is even within the normal US naming conventions of the local timezones (such as between Mountain and Eastern for example).
I remember in the old NES days everyone would say "I have a Nintendo" NOT "I have a Nintendo entertainment system". The reason for this was obvious -- the Nintendo corporation didn't sell anything else in the US (or not anything that kids knew about) and they had their name emblazened on the box. It seems this should apply to Lego as well since, as far as I know, they don't make anything other than plastic pieces which plug together (and now the Mindstorm computers). So if one says "I have some Legos", it's obvious they are refering to Lego blocks.
I've had basic cable for a year for $10 a month. Even someone on minimum wage should be able to afford that. Frankly, they'd be better off without wasting their time watching TV but going to the library, socializing, etc.
People cans still use their radio for emergency broadcast reception, perhaps in addition to a weather radio. Also, in the cases of dire emergency, there is reverse-911.
None of this will work however, if the US switches SA back on (Selective Availability)
Actually, in a differential GPS situation, S/A has essentially no effect. The only noticable difference is that the signal has been dithered. The errors caused by S/A are completely eliminated by differencing the station with unknown coordinates with the station with fixed, known coordinates. Even if both are unknown, you can still get a very good relative position between the two stations.
Also, as far as the time it takes to generate a solution depends on a couple of other things. You were discussing how to get a solution using cheap receivers that only calculate the pseudo-ranges to satellites using the code transmitted on the first GPS frequency (the technique used by consumer receivers). In the case of high-precision GPS, the receiver may not even calculate its own position. Rather, after acquisition of at least 4 satellites (the 10-300 seconds you mention), the receiver will transmit its observables to some server which does the position calculations. With more expensive, phase-locking receivers the accuracy greatly improves. In this case, a receiver will lock onto the first (and possibly second) frequencies, counting the number of cylces it receives. Once the server can calculate the correct integer offset to add to this counter (the number of cycles between the receiver and the given satellite), the position is known to within centimeters of its true location. However, the process of calculating these unknown integer cycle offset values for each observed satellite is rather tedious, usually taking at least 15 minutes for a fixed reciever, longer for a moving one (such as one on a buoy).
The position may be recalculated later once high precision satellite orbit data is available (this is provided by tracking stations around the world every 12-24 hours).
The key differences are the fact that it is a network of receivers working together and that these receivers are not consumer-level. Rather, the receivers use both GPS frequencies to attain their solution. Although the second frequency isn't decoded (it's encrypted), the phase is locked on by the receiver, with the receiver simply counting the number of cyles that are received over time. With two frequencies, delays caused by weather (the troposphere) are essentially eliminated. Also, since this is a network, common errors between the receivers are eliminated, greatly increasing the accuracy (up to sub millimeter over time with phase-locked receivers).
The receivers themselves aren't generating the solution. Rather, they upload raw data to a central server which calculates the position of the receivers sometime after the data was collected (probably once high-precision satellite orbit data is available--this is generated by satellite tracking from several ground stations around the world, updated every 12-24 hrs I think).
Even consumer-level receivers will give you a decent solution when several days of data for a fixed point are averaged (about 5-10cm I think), assuming satellite visibility is good.
That wouldn't work either, unless they make it illegal to park cars in parking structures or garages (GPS signals are really weak and can't get through much other than glass). Probably nothing short of visual inspection would ensure that the antennas haven't been purposefully blocked. Perhaps a new job for the parking Nazis? Even then you could through a magnet over the antenna before driving off, still defeating the system. I still can't imagine how they could force people to install GPS systems into their car and additionally force them not to tamper with it.
Actually, for any amount of accuracy you need four satellites for a 3-d fix. The four variables are x, y, z, and time (the clock error of the receiver). Without the fourth satellite, you can only get a reliable 2d fix, which assuming you're on the surface of the earth, is just fine for some applications.
Also, all of the satellites need to be visible, otherwise they don't do you any good at all. Considering they only have three SVs up there, they probably can't perform any navigation yet, except for perhaps a few minutes of the day if that's how they designed their orbit constellation.
I generally agree with your post, but money does help a school system. I attended a school in the country (in Texas) that had plenty of parental involvement in the sports and other programs, but was somewhat on the poor side compared to suburban schools. I then went to a school about 35 miles away that had significantly more funding and had at least as much parental involvement. The difference was striking. Not only were classes less crowded, but they're were many more subjects to choose from, more extra curricular activities, etc. Finally, I moved to Colorado where the schools tend to have much less financing. At a school in Colorado Springs, the funding was aweful (they hadn't been able to raise a bond to expand the school for over a decade, despite over crowding). There were nearly zero extra curricular activities, tons of temp buildings, and (perhaps coincidentally) much less parental involvement.
While parental involvement is required, funding can't be neglected either.
GPS is accurate enough to gage distance, esp. if they base their estimate off of the vehicle's velocity rather than absolute position. However, it would be trivial to tamper with the system (put a piece of wood over the antenna). I don't know how they are going to prevent people from simply disabling the GPS device and simply claim "Oh, I leave my car parked in a garage all of the time." I think this one is a non-starter.
I'm not sure what you mean by "most popular" but most word processors (and cell phones) autocomplete based off of word frequency and sometimes a user dictionary.
Now, why should what time I wake up ever, ever affect my grade in a class?
This is a sign of a poor educator. From my experience, whether or not the teacher actually believes in the grade-based system (I've had some that didn't), this is strictly indicating the teacher's lazyness of assigning grades (attendance is always the lowest denominator). Even if a teacher doesn't believe in the A-F grade system (from my own experience), they usually then simply either a) let you give yourself a grade (physics teacher in high school) or simply give you an A unless you do horribly on tests or seem to not care about their course.
Gee, and I thought my piano class for non-music majors was aweful...
spinning faster will cause itty bitty sonic booms which of course won't treat the hardware so nicely
This is true, of course. I wonder if they could maintain a vacuum around the spinning discs to reduce/eliminate (if the vacuum is REALLY good) the sonic booms. The problem with this is that if the vacuum every suddenly broke, the hard drive would probably catastrophically fail. Another problem is that as the density of air decreases, so does the speed of sound. This in turn causes the micro sonic booms to occure sooner, just with a weaker effect. Once the gas becomes rarified (I believe) the booms essentially become nonexistant.
I think it's important to remember the reasons why 8-track crashed and burned. Sure, it had great market penetration, but the skyrocketing success of its penetration had nothing to do with why it fell out of favor. Rather, it's for the reasons that you mentioned earlier, that is there were many substantial flaws with its format (ranging from low tape endurance to horrible audio quality). Obviously in the case of the DVD format, >99% of people don't notice or care about any imperfections with the current quality of video/audio. If this is true, then why would they want to spend more money in the near future to purchase the DVD2 (or DVD3) format players which aren't compatible with their old DVD collection? In my opinion, there will still be plently of DVD-compatible players 20 years in the future. The only reason that I can think of that this wouldn't be true is if a package format like Sony MiniDiscs becomes accepted (where the disc is enclosed in a permanent plastic case). Otherwise, any new and improved lasers in the future reading every increasing platter densities should still be able to read lower density platters like DVDs.
Considering the fact that the number of patent applications has increased every year since the Patent Office was formed (I'm 90% sure of that), it would seem unlikely that anyone at any point of time would have made a statement like that.
Also, it isn't whether new code can be created in the future, but what the utility of the new code will be and the efficacy of new business models which can profit from new software. For instance, can word processing software really improve much over what is already available and if not, why should people continue purchasing new versions of MS Office? (BTW, I don't feel that the software industry is dead, just trying to play devil's advocate)
BTW, the guy you're responding to isn't indicative of the general US population. You guys are obviously America's closest allies (I guess Canada and Israel are pretty close too...) and we've always helped each other in a pinch. Go Brits!! (really:-)
Heh, well, the fact that the founding fathers were rich might have had something to do with the slave labor (african slave labor) to work their farms and large estates. Indentured servitude, slave labor, no women's rights...
Have you studied American history? First, a number of the founding fathers were against slavery (Adams and Franklin in particular; also Thomas Jefferson later freed his slaves, all of whom continued to work for him by their own free will). At the time, the founders from the North couldn't convince representatives from the South to give up their slaves, so they either had to form two seperate governments or write a Constitution which would at the present allow slavery (despite the obvious contradictions with the Declaration of Independence--treating all people as equals), but could in the future be changed without recreating the government (which was done by Amendment 13).
While these men weren't perfect, many of them certainly had some altruistic qualities, which is obvious if you had ever read any of Jefferson's, Washington's, Adam's or Franklin's papers (a good example would be the Federalist and Ant-Federalist Papers, which was an open debate about the forming of the new government).
Also, it is important to consider that these men were a product of their times. Slave labor and indentured servitude were very common at the end of the 18th century in many parts of the world (as it had been for the thousands of years preceding it). Also, while American women didn't have the rights then as they do now, they did eventually get them through another amendment of the Constitution and even back in the 18th century had many more rights than women in some Arab countries in the 21st century!! (freedom of speach, freedom of religion, freedom of picking one's spouse, freedom of divorcing one's spouse, freedom to travel (by one's self), freedom to choose their professions, etc.). There was obviously significant biases against them, but at least it was legal for them to do all of these things (just not always practical). If you have a better example of a government formed at the end of the 18th century that is still in existance, I'd love to hear about it.
We are certainly successful, but who ever said ethics had anything to do with it?
This is a rather unfortunate statement that I'm afraid many people may agree with nowadays. It's unfortunate because it could not possibly be any further from the truth. Ethics have everything to do with the success of people and governments. Governments and people that are plagued with corruption can not possibly compete against open societies. The reason that the US government has three branches with a thorough check and balance system is because the founders, above all, didn't trust individuals to act in the best interest of all. What happened to these plantation owners, railroad tycoons and CEO's? Well, for a while they did well, of course. But once the intransigences of these people exceeded what the public would tolerate, the government would right some laws and/or prosecute these individuals to cease these practices. This is how the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commision) came into existance (after the stock market crash in the 1929). This is why former CFOs of major coperations such as Enron, ImClone, and WorldCom, just to name a few, are facing serious charges and even lengthy prison sentences. One huge reason they got into this mess is because they believed what you do, that this is a country for the CEOs created by the CEOs (essentially) so they may achieve maximum profit and pleasure for themselves while, unbeknownst to them, the country is, as it always has been, a country for the people by the people!!
I can not emphasize this enough. People need to become less cynical and much more proactive (and pragmatic) towards maintaining the US democracy and staying as vigalent as ever about our government rather than simply whining and moaning all the time without doing anthing at all!! While the government may have been formed pragmatically and even altruistically, it requires a ton of maintenance and interaction with the people themselves to prevent it from falling apart.
Because guess who is on the news? Norway? Canada? Switzerland? Nope, it's the USA, duly prejudiced by your local (and international) media companies and/or government. Frankly, there isn't a perfect government on this planet, but currently the one walking around with the biggest stick and biggest voice is the US, which provokes responses from everyone else.
Everyone always talks about how other countries, such as Canada, are superior (morally and in other ways) to the US. But does anyone ever critically consider the merits of this? Of course they don't because they don't want to put out the time and effort it would take to form an informed opinion (besides, it would be a waste of time since they know that they're right!!). Rather, they will just spout off of what they've heard (which is often heavily biased and utterly false) and have selective memories.
For example, it was rather convenient for all of the Muslims (excepting Iraqi exiles and Kuwaities) to forget about the autrocities commited by Saddam Hussein's regime while the war went on in Iraq, isn't it? Did you hear of the story where journalists working for Al Jazeera were attacked by a mob of Iraqis living in Detroit for this very reason?
In short, everyone is biased and even brain washed. If the Shia clerics in Iraq tell their people to cooperate with the US military, they'll do exactly that. If a week later they tell them to go and rid the country of the 'Infedels' they will gleefully go and attempt to kill every last military person there. My point is that people need to form their own informed opinions rather than acting like brainless fools.
The problem is that everything you mention takes money, the more the better. One reason why the US got off to such a good start was because a bunch of surprisingly ethical, brilliant and rich people got together and decided to build a new country. Unfortunately, it seems fairly uncommon to find people who are both ethical and rich (esp. in destitute countries, in part because the only way to get rich is by being unethical).
Sure, if you can get together a few multi-millionares who actually wanted to help, Ghana could be hooked up in no time (pay initial rents on access and conection to the 80 gig pipline, pay off the relevant officials/executives). It would probably take decades before they would ever get their money back and would be a very risky venture (which is why it won't happen tomorrow).
You could store the wave form, but unless you could crack it quickly it probably wouldn't do you any good as nearly all of the info you could glean from the broadcasts are very perishable (time-sensitive). What good would it do you if you knew where your enemy was 5 weeks ago!
Also, if the frequency is changing at a rate of 10kHz, simply doing a Fourier Transform of the signal probably won't help you much in trying to determine the true frequency at any given point in time, especially if you don't have a clue what the frequency changing algorithm or key values are.
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It's bad enough now that I kind of wish that there were professional jurors similar to the way the Romans did. At least then there would be some accountability of the jurors and a system by which to correct gross negligence in that part of the legal system. It's too bad that it would take an amendment to the Constitution to do that...
If these tethers work as claimed, they could significantly reduce the cost of getting satellites into geosynch orbits and high earth orbits, not to mention interplanetary travel as you mention.
I believe you are correct. However, I think that there were theories that the Iraqis stored only the precursors to the weapons, which are much less volatile and could be quickly combined for deployment. Heck, one of the reasons that some people thought that the trailers they found weren't used for producing biological/chemical weapons were because they didn't have effective sterilization processes built in which would result in very poor weapon production (causing the chemicals to break down even faster than they would otherwise).
You really aren't even trolling as that is absolutely true. If I asked my father what timezone he's in relative to GMT, he would probably respond "huh??" (it's -5 GMT by the way). Many people who do little travelling in the states often have no clue what the time offset is even within the normal US naming conventions of the local timezones (such as between Mountain and Eastern for example).
I remember in the old NES days everyone would say "I have a Nintendo" NOT "I have a Nintendo entertainment system". The reason for this was obvious -- the Nintendo corporation didn't sell anything else in the US (or not anything that kids knew about) and they had their name emblazened on the box. It seems this should apply to Lego as well since, as far as I know, they don't make anything other than plastic pieces which plug together (and now the Mindstorm computers). So if one says "I have some Legos", it's obvious they are refering to Lego blocks.
I've had basic cable for a year for $10 a month. Even someone on minimum wage should be able to afford that. Frankly, they'd be better off without wasting their time watching TV but going to the library, socializing, etc.
People cans still use their radio for emergency broadcast reception, perhaps in addition to a weather radio. Also, in the cases of dire emergency, there is reverse-911.
Radio still works, doesn't it?
Actually, in a differential GPS situation, S/A has essentially no effect. The only noticable difference is that the signal has been dithered. The errors caused by S/A are completely eliminated by differencing the station with unknown coordinates with the station with fixed, known coordinates. Even if both are unknown, you can still get a very good relative position between the two stations.
Also, as far as the time it takes to generate a solution depends on a couple of other things. You were discussing how to get a solution using cheap receivers that only calculate the pseudo-ranges to satellites using the code transmitted on the first GPS frequency (the technique used by consumer receivers). In the case of high-precision GPS, the receiver may not even calculate its own position. Rather, after acquisition of at least 4 satellites (the 10-300 seconds you mention), the receiver will transmit its observables to some server which does the position calculations. With more expensive, phase-locking receivers the accuracy greatly improves. In this case, a receiver will lock onto the first (and possibly second) frequencies, counting the number of cylces it receives. Once the server can calculate the correct integer offset to add to this counter (the number of cycles between the receiver and the given satellite), the position is known to within centimeters of its true location. However, the process of calculating these unknown integer cycle offset values for each observed satellite is rather tedious, usually taking at least 15 minutes for a fixed reciever, longer for a moving one (such as one on a buoy).
The position may be recalculated later once high precision satellite orbit data is available (this is provided by tracking stations around the world every 12-24 hours).
The receivers themselves aren't generating the solution. Rather, they upload raw data to a central server which calculates the position of the receivers sometime after the data was collected (probably once high-precision satellite orbit data is available--this is generated by satellite tracking from several ground stations around the world, updated every 12-24 hrs I think).
Even consumer-level receivers will give you a decent solution when several days of data for a fixed point are averaged (about 5-10cm I think), assuming satellite visibility is good.
That wouldn't work either, unless they make it illegal to park cars in parking structures or garages (GPS signals are really weak and can't get through much other than glass). Probably nothing short of visual inspection would ensure that the antennas haven't been purposefully blocked. Perhaps a new job for the parking Nazis? Even then you could through a magnet over the antenna before driving off, still defeating the system. I still can't imagine how they could force people to install GPS systems into their car and additionally force them not to tamper with it.
Also, all of the satellites need to be visible, otherwise they don't do you any good at all. Considering they only have three SVs up there, they probably can't perform any navigation yet, except for perhaps a few minutes of the day if that's how they designed their orbit constellation.
While parental involvement is required, funding can't be neglected either.
GPS is accurate enough to gage distance, esp. if they base their estimate off of the vehicle's velocity rather than absolute position. However, it would be trivial to tamper with the system (put a piece of wood over the antenna). I don't know how they are going to prevent people from simply disabling the GPS device and simply claim "Oh, I leave my car parked in a garage all of the time." I think this one is a non-starter.
I'm not sure what you mean by "most popular" but most word processors (and cell phones) autocomplete based off of word frequency and sometimes a user dictionary.
This is a sign of a poor educator. From my experience, whether or not the teacher actually believes in the grade-based system (I've had some that didn't), this is strictly indicating the teacher's lazyness of assigning grades (attendance is always the lowest denominator). Even if a teacher doesn't believe in the A-F grade system (from my own experience), they usually then simply either a) let you give yourself a grade (physics teacher in high school) or simply give you an A unless you do horribly on tests or seem to not care about their course.
Gee, and I thought my piano class for non-music majors was aweful...
This is true, of course. I wonder if they could maintain a vacuum around the spinning discs to reduce/eliminate (if the vacuum is REALLY good) the sonic booms. The problem with this is that if the vacuum every suddenly broke, the hard drive would probably catastrophically fail. Another problem is that as the density of air decreases, so does the speed of sound. This in turn causes the micro sonic booms to occure sooner, just with a weaker effect. Once the gas becomes rarified (I believe) the booms essentially become nonexistant.
I think it's important to remember the reasons why 8-track crashed and burned. Sure, it had great market penetration, but the skyrocketing success of its penetration had nothing to do with why it fell out of favor. Rather, it's for the reasons that you mentioned earlier, that is there were many substantial flaws with its format (ranging from low tape endurance to horrible audio quality). Obviously in the case of the DVD format, >99% of people don't notice or care about any imperfections with the current quality of video/audio. If this is true, then why would they want to spend more money in the near future to purchase the DVD2 (or DVD3) format players which aren't compatible with their old DVD collection? In my opinion, there will still be plently of DVD-compatible players 20 years in the future. The only reason that I can think of that this wouldn't be true is if a package format like Sony MiniDiscs becomes accepted (where the disc is enclosed in a permanent plastic case). Otherwise, any new and improved lasers in the future reading every increasing platter densities should still be able to read lower density platters like DVDs.
Considering the fact that the number of patent applications has increased every year since the Patent Office was formed (I'm 90% sure of that), it would seem unlikely that anyone at any point of time would have made a statement like that.
Also, it isn't whether new code can be created in the future, but what the utility of the new code will be and the efficacy of new business models which can profit from new software. For instance, can word processing software really improve much over what is already available and if not, why should people continue purchasing new versions of MS Office? (BTW, I don't feel that the software industry is dead, just trying to play devil's advocate)
BTW, the guy you're responding to isn't indicative of the general US population. You guys are obviously America's closest allies (I guess Canada and Israel are pretty close too...) and we've always helped each other in a pinch. Go Brits!! (really :-)
Same for me, different meaning:
Low Earth Orbit (common acronym used in orbital mechanics)
Have you studied American history? First, a number of the founding fathers were against slavery (Adams and Franklin in particular; also Thomas Jefferson later freed his slaves, all of whom continued to work for him by their own free will). At the time, the founders from the North couldn't convince representatives from the South to give up their slaves, so they either had to form two seperate governments or write a Constitution which would at the present allow slavery (despite the obvious contradictions with the Declaration of Independence--treating all people as equals), but could in the future be changed without recreating the government (which was done by Amendment 13).
While these men weren't perfect, many of them certainly had some altruistic qualities, which is obvious if you had ever read any of Jefferson's, Washington's, Adam's or Franklin's papers (a good example would be the Federalist and Ant-Federalist Papers, which was an open debate about the forming of the new government).
Also, it is important to consider that these men were a product of their times. Slave labor and indentured servitude were very common at the end of the 18th century in many parts of the world (as it had been for the thousands of years preceding it). Also, while American women didn't have the rights then as they do now, they did eventually get them through another amendment of the Constitution and even back in the 18th century had many more rights than women in some Arab countries in the 21st century!! (freedom of speach, freedom of religion, freedom of picking one's spouse, freedom of divorcing one's spouse, freedom to travel (by one's self), freedom to choose their professions, etc.). There was obviously significant biases against them, but at least it was legal for them to do all of these things (just not always practical). If you have a better example of a government formed at the end of the 18th century that is still in existance, I'd love to hear about it.
We are certainly successful, but who ever said ethics had anything to do with it?
This is a rather unfortunate statement that I'm afraid many people may agree with nowadays. It's unfortunate because it could not possibly be any further from the truth. Ethics have everything to do with the success of people and governments. Governments and people that are plagued with corruption can not possibly compete against open societies. The reason that the US government has three branches with a thorough check and balance system is because the founders, above all, didn't trust individuals to act in the best interest of all. What happened to these plantation owners, railroad tycoons and CEO's? Well, for a while they did well, of course. But once the intransigences of these people exceeded what the public would tolerate, the government would right some laws and/or prosecute these individuals to cease these practices. This is how the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commision) came into existance (after the stock market crash in the 1929). This is why former CFOs of major coperations such as Enron, ImClone, and WorldCom, just to name a few, are facing serious charges and even lengthy prison sentences. One huge reason they got into this mess is because they believed what you do, that this is a country for the CEOs created by the CEOs (essentially) so they may achieve maximum profit and pleasure for themselves while, unbeknownst to them, the country is, as it always has been, a country for the people by the people!!
I can not emphasize this enough. People need to become less cynical and much more proactive (and pragmatic) towards maintaining the US democracy and staying as vigalent as ever about our government rather than simply whining and moaning all the time without doing anthing at all!! While the government may have been formed pragmatically and even altruistically, it requires a ton of maintenance and interaction with the people themselves to prevent it from falling apart.
Everyone always talks about how other countries, such as Canada, are superior (morally and in other ways) to the US. But does anyone ever critically consider the merits of this? Of course they don't because they don't want to put out the time and effort it would take to form an informed opinion (besides, it would be a waste of time since they know that they're right!!). Rather, they will just spout off of what they've heard (which is often heavily biased and utterly false) and have selective memories.
For example, it was rather convenient for all of the Muslims (excepting Iraqi exiles and Kuwaities) to forget about the autrocities commited by Saddam Hussein's regime while the war went on in Iraq, isn't it? Did you hear of the story where journalists working for Al Jazeera were attacked by a mob of Iraqis living in Detroit for this very reason?
In short, everyone is biased and even brain washed. If the Shia clerics in Iraq tell their people to cooperate with the US military, they'll do exactly that. If a week later they tell them to go and rid the country of the 'Infedels' they will gleefully go and attempt to kill every last military person there. My point is that people need to form their own informed opinions rather than acting like brainless fools.
Sure, if you can get together a few multi-millionares who actually wanted to help, Ghana could be hooked up in no time (pay initial rents on access and conection to the 80 gig pipline, pay off the relevant officials/executives). It would probably take decades before they would ever get their money back and would be a very risky venture (which is why it won't happen tomorrow).
Also, if the frequency is changing at a rate of 10kHz, simply doing a Fourier Transform of the signal probably won't help you much in trying to determine the true frequency at any given point in time, especially if you don't have a clue what the frequency changing algorithm or key values are.