Thankfully, the evidence does not seem to support that idea--unless the evidence is being read by the few people out there who wanna see photo voter ID cards.
I'm sorry, but at least the part of California I'm in has so much voter fraud (and other screwups) that it's not funny. Examples:
My next-door neighbor's mother died a few years ago. She keeps getting voter info, and keeps going to the clerk to get her mother removed from the rolls. After mommy popped back a couple times the registrar flat out refused to take her off again because "she was still voting".
On election day vans full of people show up at the polls to register-and-vote. The neighbors have never seen these people before. Then the van goes to another polling place, and another...
Over four thousand absentee ballots were addressed to the same house in Berkeley.
and I could go on.
Fake voters and multiple voting are not the only forms of of election fraud. But they're currently the easiest. Anyone who has ever hacked or defended a system can understand the effect of the following combination:
You can register by mail without showing I.D. or any other proof of elegibility, citizenship, or even existence.
You can request an absentee ballot at any time - including first time and every time - for no reason and showing no hardship. By mail.
Your ballot can be sent to any mailing address. It will not be checked against the boundaries of your district or against other absentee ballots' addresses.
(I've twice found myself double-registered because I changed party affiliation and the clerk typoed my name and the computer entered it as a new voter.)
I DON'T want voter photo I.D. - or any national I.D. card. But by damn, if they're going to force a national I.D. card down our throats, I want to see it used to insure that non-citizens, zombies, crooks, and computer-generated pseudo-people aren't selecting our legislators and other government officials and amending our state constitutions.
And I want to put the people pushing such an I.D. card (whom I perceive to be the same ones benefiting from voter fraud) to have to think twice before they finally vote on it.
Elections are why a Republic is stable: The losing side of the election won't try to reverse the result by civil war, because they know they'd lose. This holds true even if the election is close and there was SOME fraud - because the winners would be joined by the people who don't like sore losers. But if the election process becomes SO corrupt that people stop believing it predicts a Civil War's outcome, some people will be willing to take the chance.
The ID card will carry a check-box and date: "Elegibility to vote in Federal elections demonstrated on [date]." Proving elegibility (i.e. citizenship, non-convicted-felon status where applicable) is not required to obtain the ID, but is required to get the box checked.
The ID, or its number, WITH the box checked, will be required to vote, or obtain an absentee ballot to vote, in any election where a federal office is on the ballot.
The ID number will be collected during the registration process. It will be checked for uniqueness of registration and for disqualifications since the certification date. (For states that allow at-poll registration the voter's ballot will be sequestered and not counted until the number has been checked.)
If implemented this would go a long way toward eliminating certain classes of (rampant!) voter fraud. So putting the rider on the bill will create significant opposition to the bill by politicians who currently benefit from the fraud.
Thus the rider would make the bill more likely to fail, and if it DOES pass at least it gives us SOME benefit to mitigate the damage to our privacy.
Just think: If the politicians actually had to get REAL votes from REAL voters, one each, they might be a bit more responsive to those voters' concerns. Like privacy, for instance. B-)
There is a tendency, especially in the OSS/FSF world, to under-estimate the significance of innovations in software. While I am largely against the current patent system, my dislikes for it revolve around the duration of patents, and the inability of clerks to apply or monitor the requirements for innovation.
There is a single invention that, IMHO, constitute prior art for most of the offensive patents: Find a useful technique in the non-computer world and emulate it on a computer.
One example:
Real world: Record your customer's name, address, and/or credit card number. When he calls in and places an order, fill out the forms to bill him.
Computer world: "One-click shopping."
I'm sure anyone here could come up with a dozen others.
The point is that "automating a well-known process" has already been invented. Unless there's something NEW and NON-OBVIOUS about a particular way to automate yet another task, simply doing so should not be patentable.
The PARTICULAR CODE would be a COPYRIGHTable work, just like the words of a manual of instructions. But trying to copyright the program's operation as a "performance", or its interface when it consists of a straightforward clone of realworld objects or an obvious application of a standard interface toolset, should also be rejected.
The patriot missile failure was blamed on a roundoff error causing an accumulating time error, resulting in a miss.
But the bug was more fundamental: The missile and radar computers synchronized clocks when the system was booted, then drifted apart. After a hundred hours the drift from the roundoff was enough to make it lose a target.
But had the missile synchronized its clock upon launch (or better: target acquisition, to give it time to settle), the tiny roundoff error accumulated in flight wouldn't have mattered. Meanwhile, had the calculation been perfect, differential clock speeds still would have caused a drift.
If you get a spam from China, reply with a message (in Chinese if possible) stating:
Thank you for your continued support of the Falun Gong movement. It's great to see that people even in China understand the horribleoppression under which members of Falun Gong live. I look forward to your future e-mails on this issue.
Of course the spammers' response will be to provide return addresses pointing to their enemies (such as chinese anti-spammers, sysadmins, etc.) or other innocent parties.
... it only takes ONE widely-deployed OS with a vulnerability to make trouble for the rest of the Net. Thus more variety means more pools of machines able to be converted into troublemakers.
Not sure I follow here. I think the convolution of virus and DOS attacks is somewhat misleading.
First: A mail virus makes trouble for unpenetrated (and uninfectable) machines by flooding them with email.
Second: A mail virus can be the initial penetration vector to recruit the infected machine into a DoS attack tribe, or can carry an infection payload that IS a DoS attack.
Third: There are other attacks. Example: The nimda worm, which infected Microsoft web servers and caused trouble for lots of devices that were NOT running Microsoft web servers (including crashing Cisco routers) by TRYING to infect them.
Fourth: I'm not limiting this to viruses, worms, and DoS attacks. The general case is an operating system with ANY security vulnerability, combined with ANY attack that exploits the vulnerability to cause trouble for other machines on the net which are not running the vulnerable OS.
I hate all things MS with a passion, but switching from MS software wholesale to another system will not fix the problem....
Switching to another system (linux, for instance) will just changed the set of bugs that virus writers attempt to exploit.
But it would make things a LOT better, for two reasons:
The existing set of Microsoft-only viruses (virtually all of 'em) would die off.
The other system (unix, linux, etc.) has, not just a different set of vulnerabilities, but a MUCH SMALLER set.
What is needed is variety. If there were more variety in the software and OSen people used, we could avoid such widescale abuses.
Unfortunately, that's not enough by itself. Yes a variety of systems makes it harder to write a virus to attack them all, so some will survive unscathed. But an infected computer can cause a lot of trouble even for other computers that AREN'T subject to the infection. (For instance: By flooding it with infection attempts or by ganging up with other infected machines to DOS-attack it.)
So it only takes ONE widely-deployed OS with a vulnerability to make trouble for the rest of the Net. Thus more variety means more pools of machines able to be converted into troublemakers.
It sounds like these guys have a severe short-term cashflow problem, rather than a longterm profitability problem.
Right.
Much of tech is in a cash crunch right now, due to the deeper/longer than usual downturn.
The customers save by slowing or stopping expansion.
The service suppliers already have enough equipment in inventory to handle the slowed expansion and stop buying from equipment manufacturers.
The equipment manufacturers have to "live on stored fat" until the service suppliers start buying again.
A company can go through a long economic downturn - even unprofitably. But if the cash goes too low it crashes hard and fast.
The company I'm working for builds equipment for three parts of networking. One is still building out (though slower than expected), one is just starting to grow (though again slower than expected), and one has completely hit the wall for the time being. So we're in a moderate pickle.
Since we already laid off about everybody we won't need (unless we decide to drop one of the lines or not do a followon), we still have a cash crunch, and management doesn't want to alienate the employees who are still onboard.
So management required employees to take a minimum amount of accrued vacation - like five days per quarter.
This means the employees still get paid. But they get paid out out of a pot of money that the company had already "spent", rather than out of new spending. The employees don't take a cut, and the company doesn't lose (many of) the employees. (Five days of mandatory vacation a quarter saves as much as laying off about one employee out of about every 12 or so.)
It also tells the employees they're valued and the company is doing everything possible to keep them around. So with the rest of the sector also in a pinch they have a good reason to stick around until the upturn rather than trying their luck elsewhere.
For fairness, employees who don't have enough accrued are "loaned" vacation days - and the loan will be forgiven if they have to be laid off later. That doesn't help the books. But in a startup most employees have a bunch of vacation accrued.
You can't keep it up forever. But we did 5 days per quarter for a couple quarters (while getting the other restructuring behind us and the investors placated), then 10 days over three quarters (while the restructuring savings kick in) to give the employees relief and the ability to plan vacations better. Most of our key employees are still onboard.
Here's the problem, if you want to make stars (like the music industry most certainly does), than you need to get them exposure. The web isn't bad for distribution, but promotion is tough.
Now, if the music industry tells the radio conglomerates not to air artist so-and-so, you can bet your arse you won't be hearing them. If Bobby and Sally Teen USA don't see your awesome band on MTV, then they could only ever be "a great underground band".
That's the way it WAS.
But we're on the Internet now.
The Mainstream Media is getting CREAMED by the Internet, in one venue after another: news, content, and and exposure to name just three.
To paraphraise the way my wife puts it:
"Word of Mouth" takes on a whole new meaning when you can get on your computer and recommend an artist you like to "a couple million of your closest friends".
I don't have many feelings (positive or negative) for Gateway's products, but I must say I've been rather impressed with Gateway's rebellion against some big players.
The RIAA/MPAA picked this fight: by trying to shut down computer-based content distribution. This hits the market for tech big-time, and Gateway's products are dead-center on ground zero.
Which makes their reaction no less impressive. Unlike (or at least ahead of) everyone else in the industry, they recognized it. And they are now staging a big-time counter-offensive, with style and effectiveness.
Computer-based content distribution IS the next thing, both for computers and for content. Rahter than accommodating it the RIAA/MPAA have declared war on it, in the courts and the legislature. Their blitzkrieg-style first strikes (media taxes, Napster takedown, DCMA,...) have been very effective, and flushed with this victory they became refractory, and tried to finish "conquering the virtual world" with legally-mandated hardware misfeatures that would totally destroy the hardware market and licencing requirements that would totally destroy webcasting.
If the hardware sellers don't want their future destroyed they MUST now either bring the RIAA/MPAA to heel or break their monopoly on content and content-licencing terms. Given their orgin in organized crime and their recent success with intimidation, it's unlikely they'll domesticate gracefully.
Gateway has recognized this, and taken on the battle with guts and style. Kudos to them.
ATI supply the specs but apart from that do almost nothing, they have enough trouble supporting high quality Windows drivers. The reason you need the specs is to get any kind of driver support at all, when the manufacturer is delivering full high quality up to date drivers with more OpenGL support and extension support and quality than anyone else I'd rather have that than specs and a driver development effort that can't keep up.
Here's how hardware developers (and not just ATI) can get solid Linux support on the cheap:
If:
You haven't done a Linux driver yet.
You have done a good Windows driver.
You OWN the source code for your Windows driver.
The source code doesn't leak a deep dark trade secret (if it does - PATENT it and then it won't).
Then release:
The Windows driver source under an Open Source license, along with...
documentation of the device. (That's typically schematics, chip specs, and maybe some internal docs and/or memos from the development team.)
You already have it. Vet it for any deep secrets and licencing problems with your partners, but otherwise don't bother to clean it up. Just dump it on us.
I'm sure that if your device is AT ALL interesting somebody in the Linux community will be GLAD to port your driver - and any future upgrades.
That's the point of the "pilot" signal.
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You are still thinking about this in a system where there is no atmosphere on earth. You forgot about refraction due to the atmosphere. The refraction might be small enough to ignore for the time being, but a large flux in the atmospheric pressure, storms, and you can have your beam focusing completely off target.
That's the point of the "pilot" signal from the ground. It experiences the same refraction, and its phase at the transmitter array controls the phase of the return signal. Even in the most violently mixed atmosphere the refractive index won't change enough to matter in the fraction of a second it takes for the return signal to arrive.
It's just like the holography hack where they record the phase distortion of the frosted glass and predistort an image so it is transmitted through the frosted glass and reconstructed correctly on the far side.
You have the wrong "microwaves"
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The generators would then convert the energy into harmless microwave beams, which would be aimed at collecting stations on Earth
Apparently this dude has never put a marshmallow in his microwave oven.
You misunderstand the technology.
The household microwave oven uses K-band microwaves. These were chosen because they're strongly absorbed by water, resulting in very efficient heating of most foods. (There are several ranges of frequencies that do that. But K band is absorbed about the right amount to cook food through rather than frying the surface or mostly passing right through.) Microwave ovens also have a very high energy density because the microwaves bounce back-and-forth and build up until they're absorbed by the food (or the transmitter magnetron, which is why they burn out if you run them too long when empty).
The "microwaves" proposed for space solar power downlinks are MILIMETER waves - chosen because they're easy to handle and go RIGHT THROUGH water without being strongly absorbed. That's mostly so they'll go through humidity and clouds without major loss - though it helps that birds don't get cooked either.
At the downlink rectenna farm the milimeter wave energy density is similar to the energy density of sunlight to maybe three times that. But the rectenna is MUCH more efficient than a solar panel at turning it into electricity. And the rectenna intercepts very little light. You can graze cattle under it.
Even if there were an issue with the waves if they hit something ELSE (and for some stuff there is - it would heat up as if a heat lamp was shining on it), aim is not a problem. That's because the downliink is a synthetic-aperture system driven by a pilot beam from the rectenna site. The pilot signal is the only thing keeping the thousands of individual transmitters in phase. So if it's lost the beam defocusses. Most of it misses the planet entierly and the rest becomes nothing more than an annoying milimeter-band radio noise.
But sync orbit is better.
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You don't take photovoltaic cells to the moon, you build a factory on the moon and make the cells there.
But why:
use photovoltaic
ship power back from the moon?
This was examined back in the 70s and there's a set of even better solutions. Two samples:
1) Put the actual collectors/generators in sync orbit:
Much shorter distance to ship the power.
Much greater surface area than the moon.
Negligible gravity (just tidal and station-keeping forces). Alternatively: Use the L4 or L5 points - same distance from the Earth but still has the low-gravity and improved surface area factors.
Mine the moon for the bulk of the material, but use a catapult to launch it to orbit. (For L5 there's an orbit using one of the other L points as a lens that requires very little delta-v to perform the final injection, so the catapult does essentially all the work.) Smelt and construct it in orbit.
2) Build a STEAM plant on the ground and launch the pieces into sync orbit, where they're assembled. (Most of 'em go in reusable unmanned heavy-lifters. Much cheaper than the shuttle.)
Steam has the advantage that you don't need to do a lot of fancy processing. Just a turbine, mirrors, pipes, generators, condensers (a flat plate painted black at right angles to the sun or behind the collector mirror, with some more plumbing attached), and a trick microwave transmitter (plus an antenna farm in the desert.) You don't need much water, and it goes around and around without leaking out for decades or more, like the freon (or whatever) in a household refrigerator.
Tesla could have done it (except he'd have used VLF radio for the power feed, at considerable loss).
These proposals and several others were examined in detail by the L5 society (founded by the same Keith Henson who is now in Canadian exile over the Scientology thing).
NASA did a study on number 2, and came to the conclusion that it was too expensive. The L5 society then studied NASA's study and found an error: They'd done it in two steps:
- Design a plant.
- Design a set of vehicles to lift the parts.
The heavy-lift vehicle was sized to lift the largest single part, which was the turbine wheel, which was enormous, making the vehicle very expensive. But it turns out it was enormous only because the plant designer had gone for efficiency with no thought to the launch issue. By sacrificing 10% efficiency the turbine could be reduced to the size of the next largest part, which would enable a much smaller and cheaper rocket to do the job.
With the (unofficial) revised estimates, amortized over enough plants to feed the rate of growth of US power demand at the time, the total capital investment was a bit over a trillion bux. Sounds like a lot. But in fact it was cheaper than building any of the earthbound alternatives for the same capacity. (Fossil fuel and nuclear were both expensive - though nuclear wasn't yet politicized out of affordability - and the remaining options such as water, tidal, wind, biomass, etc. couldn't hack the demand.)
Of course that's without even considering that the fuel is free.
... TV stirs up controversy whenever it can to increase ratings. This is the real reason that the so called 'fairness doctrine' where both sides of any dispute are required to be presented continues; people watch conflict.
Unfortunately for your argument, the "fairness doctrine" (a former FCC regulation) was deleted as a government requirement quite a few years ago. This was in response to complaints from the networks that minor parties were demanding equal time as a result of every news item showing a major party politician, and covering them was not practical and distracted from coverage of the "important" news.
Immediately after the fairness doctrine was removed the electronic media began a massive and unified move to the far left - in news, entertainment, and even children's cartoons.
The change was so universal, extreme, and consistent that now even a moment of air time covering a centerist or moderately conservative view brings complaints that the network has gone to the far right. Actual right-wing viewpoints just don't make it to the air on television, nor do libertairan views, nor anything from most non left-wing-urban-US cultures.
The only exceptions are the exposure of Moderate Conservative (as opposed to right-wing) viewpoionts in talk radio and as PART of the coverage on cable television's Fox News. (The latter has led to some coverage of Conservative views on other cable news channels.)
Now if the media were after REAL conflict they'd be busy covering all sides of the issues, to maximize it. Instead the mainstream media still cover coastal urban and inner-city issues and viewpoints exclusively, with others merely characatured when they appear at all.
The exception of the Moderate Conservative coverage in talk radio and cable news appears to have occurred solely as an economic fallout from the US's culture war: With the Progressive side covered and the Pluralist not, about half the potential audience was not served at all by the mainstream media. Conservative talk radio tapped into this potential source of advertising revenue, as did Fox News when it provided SOME coverage of their cultures' issues and news items.
But you're still on target with the observation that "people watch conflict". It's just that dramatized artificial conflict is much more eye-grabbing than the real thing. So the media plays to their target audiences' biases with stereotypes and fictions, rather than risking offending them or making them more diverse and harder to predict by exposing them to accurate coverage and portrayals of other viewpoints and cultures.
Meanwhile the officials who make the laws and policies are largely isolated from the actual people, but exposed to the media's news coverage. So the media can obtain considerable political power by feeding them false information about the opinions and likely voting behavior of the country's population. Thus they have a strong incentive to avoid any (non-belittling) mention of any political or social viewpoints other than their own and to run rigged public opinion polls whose results can be misrepresented.
The real question is why people stick around in an area with a food shortage?... Why not just move the people out of there?... Is there something I'm missing here?
Yes.
There are already people living and working in the areas with food. A sudden influx of starving foreigners who really "will work for food" depresses the labor market and their standard of living - quite possibly down to that of the starving immigrants, or even lower.
So there is resistance to such migrations by the people in the "area with food" - or land or whatever. This can be very violent, even if the people in the moved-to area are of the same race, culture, and citizenship. (Read the history of the "dust bowl" in the US for an example.) When the immigrants are NOT clones of those already there it gets worse, to the point of genocide.)
Examples of this abound, even in the US. (Consider the treatment of the Irish Ptoato-Famine immigrants, especially in the West - or their effect on the Indian population.) The US is able to absorb immigrants now without major wars resulting - but only because of its massive surplusses of food and goods. Yet even here there are repercussions and conflict.
But to really understand the violence invovled, recall that all the "colonialist genocides of indigineous people" are the result of just such migrations as you propose as a solution to a short-term (decades) resource shortage.
In the most visible current example of how migration can lead to cofilict the migration was over land for establishing, and then securing, a state, rather than food. But you can still see in the Israel/Palestine conflict the result, after only half a century, of a migration for resource acquisition.
Isn't it better to try to figure out how to grow food, or make something to trade for food, where the starving people currently live? Even if it means they're dependent on charity until they get their infrastructure bootstrapped?
Okay--one square yard equals 9 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1 acre worth of quicklime would recapture CO2 for 4,840 people.
They're talking one square yard of SURFACE area, not a square yard of GROUND. (Unless the engineers are dumb enough just to let the quicklime lie around and scrape it up with bulldozers for recycling.)
You can STACK it - trays in rooms in floors in skyscrapers. You can GRIND IT UP into powder to get LOTS of surface area in a tiny volume, then put a massive volume inside a container.
Three-D has LOTS more surface than Two-D, as much more as you want.
For 20 cents per gallon, you could subsidise a better fuel such as Biodiesel [biodiesel.com] which absorbs more carbon while growing than it emits while being used as fuel.
In fact the Diesel engine was originally develooped to burn renewable fuels such as vegitable oil - mainly in response to shortages of crude oil in wartime due to lack of local oil resources plus blockades.
Diesels can also use the byproduct fats and used oils from food processing that are no longer suitable for human consumption. THAT's not a food/fuel tradeoff.
Lindows isn't selling their distribution yet, reall--they're letting people pay for the privilege of being beta-testers;... Beta testers are commonly defined by their contracts/livenses as employees and forbidden from distributing copies of the beta software.
They obtained a license to make copies of the source code - modified or otherwise - which requires them to provide source on demand and an automatic sublicense to any party to whom they have given or sold the object. Period. There is no exception for "employees" - especially "empoyees" who have PAID for the privilege. If they fail to do this they are in violation of the license - regardless of how much they have "helped the open source movement" in the past or concurrently.
Further: For an open source project having the source, modifying it, and installing the mods ARE PART OF THE BETA TEST.
... it does open the possibility for an interesting loophole--perpetual beta!
Which is PRECICELY why the open source community, and its FSF spearpoint, can't afford to let the loophole exist, even for a short period. If it is OK for a while you get into a perpetual battle of defining what is "a while". In the software biz a few months of lead time - FOR EACH RELEASE - is all it takes to make a monopoly. If it's not OK AT ALL, the problem is nipped in the bud.
If you pull up the FIRST weed to sprout in your lawn before it goes to seed you avoid thousands of its offspring.
Isn't there supposed to be GPS chips installed in all cell phones as of last year anyways under the guise of being able to home in on accident victims more precisely than the current system?
The network doesn't need GPSes in the phone to locate the phone:
The existing base stations already locate the phone by relative signal strength, at a minimum, to decide which station is the best one to contact it. They do this as a separate transaction before actually ringing the phone. If you don't have a monitor on the phone to let you know every time it transmits you won't know if they're pinging it.
With a very small software upgrade the phone companies can trivially locate the phone to the resolution of the nearest cell tower whenever it is being used, and with a very slightly more extensive software upgrade they can ping it but not ring it, and tell the police the results.
The base stations can also measure the round-trip delay to the phone, thus obtaining the radius of a sphere centered on the cell antenna. The phone will be on the surface of that sphere if the path is direct, slightly inside it if the path takes a bounce. (The intersection of the sphere with the earth's surface is a circle if the ground is level.) With two base stations the phone is located to the intersection of two spheres - a vertical circle intersecting the ground at two points. With three base stations (that aren't on a straight line but are at the same altitude) you typically get one or two points in space, and if it's two they're one above the other. Bingo.
Of course this also works just pinging the phone without ringing it. There's a variant that lets the one handling the call or pinging the phone provide timing info to others that are passively monitoring.
This capability is already deployed in some cell systems. In at least one city it is used to create traffic condition reports by measuring the speed of active cell phones in traffic on major routes.
These capabilities make it possible to "tail" anyone with a cell phone, any time the phone is powered up.
Once you're being tailed the location data can be archived, then data-mined to to create a dossier of your typical behavior, then call for a cop's attention if you deviate from your normal travel habits.
One of the reasons the mandate is so expensive is it requires enough equipment to simultaneously monitor an ENORMOUS number of phones. (Something like a third of all of them or a third of the calls in progress, if I recall old news items correctly.) It's not enough to continuously monitor everybody all the time. But I seem to recall thinking that it IS enough to monitor everybody with a criminal record or a green card, even in "high-crime" residential areas, plus all the pay phones. (Am I confused on this?) Of course cell-phone location monitoring, rather than call content monitoring, isn't a big load once the software is in place to do it at all. So that can be done to ALL the cellphones ALL the time.
Let's see, with GPS installed and phone taps readily available now, doesn't that make anyone else here just a wee bit uneasy about using a cell phone?
Yep.
Makes me want to turn off my phone (and remove the battery) whenever I'm not actually making a call, and to use a vending-machine calling card in payphones when on vacation.
Actually, it's a bit of a shame that they are hiding telephone numbers etc. on the letters in question. I understand why - to prevent harrasing calls etc. - but hey the letter is apparently public record why not expose them? Seems fair enough to me!:-)
Fair, yes. B-) But also an excuse for the Church of Scientology's lawyers to demand the letter be taken down. With the contact info removed they can't hide behind a harassment claim. They must expose their REAL reason for trying to get it down: censorship of any negative information about the behavior of CoS and its members.
I'm glad to see Google standing up in this manner. One of the major problems with the DCMA is that, in order for an anonymous poster to keep his site/links up, he must expose his identity. If the web page is critical of a criminal or gang which will harras the poster with extralegal actions once they FIND him, this requirement has a major chilling effect on anonymous speech.
the "[multiple derisive characterizations deleted] U.S. Congress has... shortsightedly instructing the FCC to sell... spectrum that had been reserved for other uses."
"... what, in the end, are public airwaves."
Like the land is all public land, and we're all tennants in government housing projects?
One of the problems with the radio spectrum is that there's a limited amount of it. With the "public airwaves" and "licencing this public trust" model the government's central planners have kept large blocks of spectrum unutilized or underutilized by older technoligies that make less efficient use of it.
One of the most effective methods known to handle the allocation of a scarce resource is a market, where people can OWN pieces of it, subdividiing and trading them as convenient and profitable - which, in the absense of government interference, often ends up with the pieces being used for the most-valuable-to-people purposes.
Like land, there's only so much spectrum. Like land, some uses can "leak out" and pollute neighboring pieces.
The government has decided to try an experiment and switch from the central-planning model to the property/market model for part of the spectrum, to see if that works better.
Of course this gores the oxen of the people who are currently using the spectrum they're selling, so they complain (and often rightly so).
And of course it also gores the oxen of people who have a political leaning toward central-planning, prompting them to spew rhetoric. This set of people apparently includes Hal Plotkin of SFGate.
It's a pity, because the rhetoric obscures anything of interest he might have had to say.
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I'm sorry, but at least the part of California I'm in has so much voter fraud (and other screwups) that it's not funny. Examples:
My next-door neighbor's mother died a few years ago. She keeps getting voter info, and keeps going to the clerk to get her mother removed from the rolls. After mommy popped back a couple times the registrar flat out refused to take her off again because "she was still voting".
On election day vans full of people show up at the polls to register-and-vote. The neighbors have never seen these people before. Then the van goes to another polling place, and another...
Over four thousand absentee ballots were addressed to the same house in Berkeley.
and I could go on.
Fake voters and multiple voting are not the only forms of of election fraud. But they're currently the easiest. Anyone who has ever hacked or defended a system can understand the effect of the following combination:
You can register by mail without showing I.D. or any other proof of elegibility, citizenship, or even existence.
You can request an absentee ballot at any time - including first time and every time - for no reason and showing no hardship. By mail.
Your ballot can be sent to any mailing address. It will not be checked against the boundaries of your district or against other absentee ballots' addresses.
(I've twice found myself double-registered because I changed party affiliation and the clerk typoed my name and the computer entered it as a new voter.)
I DON'T want voter photo I.D. - or any national I.D. card. But by damn, if they're going to force a national I.D. card down our throats, I want to see it used to insure that non-citizens, zombies, crooks, and computer-generated pseudo-people aren't selecting our legislators and other government officials and amending our state constitutions.
And I want to put the people pushing such an I.D. card (whom I perceive to be the same ones benefiting from voter fraud) to have to think twice before they finally vote on it.
Elections are why a Republic is stable: The losing side of the election won't try to reverse the result by civil war, because they know they'd lose. This holds true even if the election is close and there was SOME fraud - because the winners would be joined by the people who don't like sore losers. But if the election process becomes SO corrupt that people stop believing it predicts a Civil War's outcome, some people will be willing to take the chance.
The ID card will carry a check-box and date: "Elegibility to vote in Federal elections demonstrated on [date]." Proving elegibility (i.e. citizenship, non-convicted-felon status where applicable) is not required to obtain the ID, but is required to get the box checked.
The ID, or its number, WITH the box checked, will be required to vote, or obtain an absentee ballot to vote, in any election where a federal office is on the ballot.
The ID number will be collected during the registration process. It will be checked for uniqueness of registration and for disqualifications since the certification date. (For states that allow at-poll registration the voter's ballot will be sequestered and not counted until the number has been checked.)
If implemented this would go a long way toward eliminating certain classes of (rampant!) voter fraud. So putting the rider on the bill will create significant opposition to the bill by politicians who currently benefit from the fraud.
Thus the rider would make the bill more likely to fail, and if it DOES pass at least it gives us SOME benefit to mitigate the damage to our privacy.
Just think: If the politicians actually had to get REAL votes from REAL voters, one each, they might be a bit more responsive to those voters' concerns. Like privacy, for instance. B-)
There is a single invention that, IMHO, constitute prior art for most of the offensive patents: Find a useful technique in the non-computer world and emulate it on a computer.
One example:
Real world: Record your customer's name, address, and/or credit card number. When he calls in and places an order, fill out the forms to bill him.
Computer world: "One-click shopping."
I'm sure anyone here could come up with a dozen others.
The point is that "automating a well-known process" has already been invented. Unless there's something NEW and NON-OBVIOUS about a particular way to automate yet another task, simply doing so should not be patentable.
The PARTICULAR CODE would be a COPYRIGHTable work, just like the words of a manual of instructions. But trying to copyright the program's operation as a "performance", or its interface when it consists of a straightforward clone of realworld objects or an obvious application of a standard interface toolset, should also be rejected.
The patriot missile failure was blamed on a roundoff error causing an accumulating time error, resulting in a miss.
But the bug was more fundamental: The missile and radar computers synchronized clocks when the system was booted, then drifted apart. After a hundred hours the drift from the roundoff was enough to make it lose a target.
But had the missile synchronized its clock upon launch (or better: target acquisition, to give it time to settle), the tiny roundoff error accumulated in flight wouldn't have mattered. Meanwhile, had the calculation been perfect, differential clock speeds still would have caused a drift.
If you get a spam from China, reply with a message (in Chinese if possible) stating:
Thank you for your continued support of the Falun Gong movement. It's great to see that people even in China understand the horribleoppression under which members of Falun Gong live. I look forward to your future e-mails on this issue.
Of course the spammers' response will be to provide return addresses pointing to their enemies (such as chinese anti-spammers, sysadmins, etc.) or other innocent parties.
You gotta admit: There's a LOT more profit to be made turning sewage into heroin than turning it into hydrogen.
... it only takes ONE widely-deployed OS with a vulnerability to make trouble for the rest of the Net. Thus more variety means more pools of machines able to be converted into troublemakers.
Not sure I follow here. I think the convolution of virus and DOS attacks is somewhat misleading.
First: A mail virus makes trouble for unpenetrated (and uninfectable) machines by flooding them with email.
Second: A mail virus can be the initial penetration vector to recruit the infected machine into a DoS attack tribe, or can carry an infection payload that IS a DoS attack.
Third: There are other attacks. Example: The nimda worm, which infected Microsoft web servers and caused trouble for lots of devices that were NOT running Microsoft web servers (including crashing Cisco routers) by TRYING to infect them.
Fourth: I'm not limiting this to viruses, worms, and DoS attacks. The general case is an operating system with ANY security vulnerability, combined with ANY attack that exploits the vulnerability to cause trouble for other machines on the net which are not running the vulnerable OS.
I think everyone is falling into the false thinking that something is "secure". An operating system is not ever "secure period".
I could argue that it's possible for an OS to be secure. But I doubt there are any of them in existence at the moment. B-)
But it's a lot harder to penetrate a cube of steel than a cube of swiss cheese. Unfortunately, most of the world's desktops are running a cheesy OS.
Switching to another system (linux, for instance) will just changed the set of bugs that virus writers attempt to exploit.
But it would make things a LOT better, for two reasons:
The existing set of Microsoft-only viruses (virtually all of 'em) would die off.
The other system (unix, linux, etc.) has, not just a different set of vulnerabilities, but a MUCH SMALLER set.
What is needed is variety. If there were more variety in the software and OSen people used, we could avoid such widescale abuses.
Unfortunately, that's not enough by itself. Yes a variety of systems makes it harder to write a virus to attack them all, so some will survive unscathed. But an infected computer can cause a lot of trouble even for other computers that AREN'T subject to the infection. (For instance: By flooding it with infection attempts or by ganging up with other infected machines to DOS-attack it.)
So it only takes ONE widely-deployed OS with a vulnerability to make trouble for the rest of the Net. Thus more variety means more pools of machines able to be converted into troublemakers.
The solution is a few, secure, operating systems.
Right.
Much of tech is in a cash crunch right now, due to the deeper/longer than usual downturn.
The customers save by slowing or stopping expansion.
The service suppliers already have enough equipment in inventory to handle the slowed expansion and stop buying from equipment manufacturers.
The equipment manufacturers have to "live on stored fat" until the service suppliers start buying again.
A company can go through a long economic downturn - even unprofitably. But if the cash goes too low it crashes hard and fast.
The company I'm working for builds equipment for three parts of networking. One is still building out (though slower than expected), one is just starting to grow (though again slower than expected), and one has completely hit the wall for the time being. So we're in a moderate pickle.
Since we already laid off about everybody we won't need (unless we decide to drop one of the lines or not do a followon), we still have a cash crunch, and management doesn't want to alienate the employees who are still onboard.
So management required employees to take a minimum amount of accrued vacation - like five days per quarter.
This means the employees still get paid. But they get paid out out of a pot of money that the company had already "spent", rather than out of new spending. The employees don't take a cut, and the company doesn't lose (many of) the employees. (Five days of mandatory vacation a quarter saves as much as laying off about one employee out of about every 12 or so.)
It also tells the employees they're valued and the company is doing everything possible to keep them around. So with the rest of the sector also in a pinch they have a good reason to stick around until the upturn rather than trying their luck elsewhere.
For fairness, employees who don't have enough accrued are "loaned" vacation days - and the loan will be forgiven if they have to be laid off later. That doesn't help the books. But in a startup most employees have a bunch of vacation accrued.
You can't keep it up forever. But we did 5 days per quarter for a couple quarters (while getting the other restructuring behind us and the investors placated), then 10 days over three quarters (while the restructuring savings kick in) to give the employees relief and the ability to plan vacations better. Most of our key employees are still onboard.
Here's the problem, if you want to make stars (like the music industry most certainly does), than you need to get them exposure. The web isn't bad for distribution, but promotion is tough.
Now, if the music industry tells the radio conglomerates not to air artist so-and-so, you can bet your arse you won't be hearing them. If Bobby and Sally Teen USA don't see your awesome band on MTV, then they could only ever be "a great underground band".
That's the way it WAS.
But we're on the Internet now.
The Mainstream Media is getting CREAMED by the Internet, in one venue after another: news, content, and and exposure to name just three.
To paraphraise the way my wife puts it:
"Word of Mouth" takes on a whole new meaning when you can get on your computer and recommend an artist you like to "a couple million of your closest friends".
MGM had the roaring lion in the logo. Then MTM (Mary Tyler Moore) did the takeoff with the pussycat. Now Gateway with the cow...
I don't have many feelings (positive or negative) for Gateway's products, but I must say I've been rather impressed with Gateway's rebellion against some big players.
...) have been very effective, and flushed with this victory they became refractory, and tried to finish "conquering the virtual world" with legally-mandated hardware misfeatures that would totally destroy the hardware market and licencing requirements that would totally destroy webcasting.
The RIAA/MPAA picked this fight: by trying to shut down computer-based content distribution. This hits the market for tech big-time, and Gateway's products are dead-center on ground zero.
Which makes their reaction no less impressive. Unlike (or at least ahead of) everyone else in the industry, they recognized it. And they are now staging a big-time counter-offensive, with style and effectiveness.
Computer-based content distribution IS the next thing, both for computers and for content. Rahter than accommodating it the RIAA/MPAA have declared war on it, in the courts and the legislature. Their blitzkrieg-style first strikes (media taxes, Napster takedown, DCMA,
If the hardware sellers don't want their future destroyed they MUST now either bring the RIAA/MPAA to heel or break their monopoly on content and content-licencing terms. Given their orgin in organized crime and their recent success with intimidation, it's unlikely they'll domesticate gracefully.
Gateway has recognized this, and taken on the battle with guts and style. Kudos to them.
Here's how hardware developers (and not just ATI) can get solid Linux support on the cheap:
If:
You haven't done a Linux driver yet.
You have done a good Windows driver.
You OWN the source code for your Windows driver.
The source code doesn't leak a deep dark trade secret (if it does - PATENT it and then it won't).
Then release:
The Windows driver source under an Open Source license, along with...
documentation of the device. (That's typically schematics, chip specs, and maybe some internal docs and/or memos from the development team.)
You already have it. Vet it for any deep secrets and licencing problems with your partners, but otherwise don't bother to clean it up. Just dump it on us.
I'm sure that if your device is AT ALL interesting somebody in the Linux community will be GLAD to port your driver - and any future upgrades.
You are still thinking about this in a system where there is no atmosphere on earth. You forgot about refraction due to the atmosphere. The refraction might be small enough to ignore for the time being, but a large flux in the atmospheric pressure, storms, and you can have your beam focusing completely off target.
That's the point of the "pilot" signal from the ground. It experiences the same refraction, and its phase at the transmitter array controls the phase of the return signal. Even in the most violently mixed atmosphere the refractive index won't change enough to matter in the fraction of a second it takes for the return signal to arrive.
It's just like the holography hack where they record the phase distortion of the frosted glass and predistort an image so it is transmitted through the frosted glass and reconstructed correctly on the far side.
The generators would then convert the energy into harmless microwave beams, which would be aimed at collecting stations on Earth
Apparently this dude has never put a marshmallow in his microwave oven.
You misunderstand the technology.
The household microwave oven uses K-band microwaves. These were chosen because they're strongly absorbed by water, resulting in very efficient heating of most foods. (There are several ranges of frequencies that do that. But K band is absorbed about the right amount to cook food through rather than frying the surface or mostly passing right through.) Microwave ovens also have a very high energy density because the microwaves bounce back-and-forth and build up until they're absorbed by the food (or the transmitter magnetron, which is why they burn out if you run them too long when empty).
The "microwaves" proposed for space solar power downlinks are MILIMETER waves - chosen because they're easy to handle and go RIGHT THROUGH water without being strongly absorbed. That's mostly so they'll go through humidity and clouds without major loss - though it helps that birds don't get cooked either.
At the downlink rectenna farm the milimeter wave energy density is similar to the energy density of sunlight to maybe three times that. But the rectenna is MUCH more efficient than a solar panel at turning it into electricity. And the rectenna intercepts very little light. You can graze cattle under it.
Even if there were an issue with the waves if they hit something ELSE (and for some stuff there is - it would heat up as if a heat lamp was shining on it), aim is not a problem. That's because the downliink is a synthetic-aperture system driven by a pilot beam from the rectenna site. The pilot signal is the only thing keeping the thousands of individual transmitters in phase. So if it's lost the beam defocusses. Most of it misses the planet entierly and the rest becomes nothing more than an annoying milimeter-band radio noise.
But why:
use photovoltaic
ship power back from the moon?
This was examined back in the 70s and there's a set of even better solutions. Two samples:
1) Put the actual collectors/generators in sync orbit:
Much shorter distance to ship the power.
Much greater surface area than the moon.
Negligible gravity (just tidal and station-keeping forces).
Alternatively: Use the L4 or L5 points - same distance from the Earth but still has the low-gravity and improved surface area factors.
Mine the moon for the bulk of the material, but use a catapult to launch it to orbit. (For L5 there's an orbit using one of the other L points as a lens that requires very little delta-v to perform the final injection, so the catapult does essentially all the work.) Smelt and construct it in orbit.
2) Build a STEAM plant on the ground and launch the pieces into sync orbit, where they're assembled. (Most of 'em go in reusable unmanned heavy-lifters. Much cheaper than the shuttle.)
Steam has the advantage that you don't need to do a lot of fancy processing. Just a turbine, mirrors, pipes, generators, condensers (a flat plate painted black at right angles to the sun or behind the collector mirror, with some more plumbing attached), and a trick microwave transmitter (plus an antenna farm in the desert.) You don't need much water, and it goes around and around without leaking out for decades or more, like the freon (or whatever) in a household refrigerator.
Tesla could have done it (except he'd have used VLF radio for the power feed, at considerable loss).
These proposals and several others were examined in detail by the L5 society (founded by the same Keith Henson who is now in Canadian exile over the Scientology thing).
NASA did a study on number 2, and came to the conclusion that it was too expensive. The L5 society then studied NASA's study and found an error: They'd done it in two steps:
- Design a plant.
- Design a set of vehicles to lift the parts.
The heavy-lift vehicle was sized to lift the largest single part, which was the turbine wheel, which was enormous, making the vehicle very expensive. But it turns out it was enormous only because the plant designer had gone for efficiency with no thought to the launch issue. By sacrificing 10% efficiency the turbine could be reduced to the size of the next largest part, which would enable a much smaller and cheaper rocket to do the job.
With the (unofficial) revised estimates, amortized over enough plants to feed the rate of growth of US power demand at the time, the total capital investment was a bit over a trillion bux. Sounds like a lot. But in fact it was cheaper than building any of the earthbound alternatives for the same capacity. (Fossil fuel and nuclear were both expensive - though nuclear wasn't yet politicized out of affordability - and the remaining options such as water, tidal, wind, biomass, etc. couldn't hack the demand.)
Of course that's without even considering that the fuel is free.
... TV stirs up controversy whenever it can to increase ratings. This is the real reason that the so called 'fairness doctrine' where both sides of any dispute are required to be presented continues; people watch conflict.
Unfortunately for your argument, the "fairness doctrine" (a former FCC regulation) was deleted as a government requirement quite a few years ago. This was in response to complaints from the networks that minor parties were demanding equal time as a result of every news item showing a major party politician, and covering them was not practical and distracted from coverage of the "important" news.
Immediately after the fairness doctrine was removed the electronic media began a massive and unified move to the far left - in news, entertainment, and even children's cartoons.
The change was so universal, extreme, and consistent that now even a moment of air time covering a centerist or moderately conservative view brings complaints that the network has gone to the far right. Actual right-wing viewpoints just don't make it to the air on television, nor do libertairan views, nor anything from most non left-wing-urban-US cultures.
The only exceptions are the exposure of Moderate Conservative (as opposed to right-wing) viewpoionts in talk radio and as PART of the coverage on cable television's Fox News. (The latter has led to some coverage of Conservative views on other cable news channels.)
Now if the media were after REAL conflict they'd be busy covering all sides of the issues, to maximize it. Instead the mainstream media still cover coastal urban and inner-city issues and viewpoints exclusively, with others merely characatured when they appear at all.
The exception of the Moderate Conservative coverage in talk radio and cable news appears to have occurred solely as an economic fallout from the US's culture war: With the Progressive side covered and the Pluralist not, about half the potential audience was not served at all by the mainstream media. Conservative talk radio tapped into this potential source of advertising revenue, as did Fox News when it provided SOME coverage of their cultures' issues and news items.
But you're still on target with the observation that "people watch conflict". It's just that dramatized artificial conflict is much more eye-grabbing than the real thing. So the media plays to their target audiences' biases with stereotypes and fictions, rather than risking offending them or making them more diverse and harder to predict by exposing them to accurate coverage and portrayals of other viewpoints and cultures.
Meanwhile the officials who make the laws and policies are largely isolated from the actual people, but exposed to the media's news coverage. So the media can obtain considerable political power by feeding them false information about the opinions and likely voting behavior of the country's population. Thus they have a strong incentive to avoid any (non-belittling) mention of any political or social viewpoints other than their own and to run rigged public opinion polls whose results can be misrepresented.
The real question is why people stick around in an area with a food shortage? ... Why not just move the people out of there? ... Is there something I'm missing here?
Yes.
There are already people living and working in the areas with food. A sudden influx of starving foreigners who really "will work for food" depresses the labor market and their standard of living - quite possibly down to that of the starving immigrants, or even lower.
So there is resistance to such migrations by the people in the "area with food" - or land or whatever. This can be very violent, even if the people in the moved-to area are of the same race, culture, and citizenship. (Read the history of the "dust bowl" in the US for an example.) When the immigrants are NOT clones of those already there it gets worse, to the point of genocide.)
Examples of this abound, even in the US. (Consider the treatment of the Irish Ptoato-Famine immigrants, especially in the West - or their effect on the Indian population.) The US is able to absorb immigrants now without major wars resulting - but only because of its massive surplusses of food and goods. Yet even here there are repercussions and conflict.
But to really understand the violence invovled, recall that all the "colonialist genocides of indigineous people" are the result of just such migrations as you propose as a solution to a short-term (decades) resource shortage.
In the most visible current example of how migration can lead to cofilict the migration was over land for establishing, and then securing, a state, rather than food. But you can still see in the Israel/Palestine conflict the result, after only half a century, of a migration for resource acquisition.
Isn't it better to try to figure out how to grow food, or make something to trade for food, where the starving people currently live? Even if it means they're dependent on charity until they get their infrastructure bootstrapped?
Okay--one square yard equals 9 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1 acre worth of quicklime would recapture CO2 for 4,840 people.
They're talking one square yard of SURFACE area, not a square yard of GROUND. (Unless the engineers are dumb enough just to let the quicklime lie around and scrape it up with bulldozers for recycling.)
You can STACK it - trays in rooms in floors in skyscrapers. You can GRIND IT UP into powder to get LOTS of surface area in a tiny volume, then put a massive volume inside a container.
Three-D has LOTS more surface than Two-D, as much more as you want.
It's time to think INSIDE a box.
For 20 cents per gallon, you could subsidise a better fuel such as Biodiesel [biodiesel.com] which absorbs more carbon while growing than it emits while being used as fuel.
In fact the Diesel engine was originally develooped to burn renewable fuels such as vegitable oil - mainly in response to shortages of crude oil in wartime due to lack of local oil resources plus blockades.
Diesels can also use the byproduct fats and used oils from food processing that are no longer suitable for human consumption. THAT's not a food/fuel tradeoff.
Lindows isn't selling their distribution yet, reall--they're letting people pay for the privilege of being beta-testers; ... Beta testers are commonly defined by their contracts/livenses as employees and forbidden from distributing copies of the beta software.
... it does open the possibility for an interesting loophole--perpetual beta!
They obtained a license to make copies of the source code - modified or otherwise - which requires them to provide source on demand and an automatic sublicense to any party to whom they have given or sold the object. Period. There is no exception for "employees" - especially "empoyees" who have PAID for the privilege. If they fail to do this they are in violation of the license - regardless of how much they have "helped the open source movement" in the past or concurrently.
Further: For an open source project having the source, modifying it, and installing the mods ARE PART OF THE BETA TEST.
Which is PRECICELY why the open source community, and its FSF spearpoint, can't afford to let the loophole exist, even for a short period. If it is OK for a while you get into a perpetual battle of defining what is "a while". In the software biz a few months of lead time - FOR EACH RELEASE - is all it takes to make a monopoly. If it's not OK AT ALL, the problem is nipped in the bud.
If you pull up the FIRST weed to sprout in your lawn before it goes to seed you avoid thousands of its offspring.
The network doesn't need GPSes in the phone to locate the phone:
The existing base stations already locate the phone by relative signal strength, at a minimum, to decide which station is the best one to contact it. They do this as a separate transaction before actually ringing the phone. If you don't have a monitor on the phone to let you know every time it transmits you won't know if they're pinging it.
With a very small software upgrade the phone companies can trivially locate the phone to the resolution of the nearest cell tower whenever it is being used, and with a very slightly more extensive software upgrade they can ping it but not ring it, and tell the police the results.
The base stations can also measure the round-trip delay to the phone, thus obtaining the radius of a sphere centered on the cell antenna. The phone will be on the surface of that sphere if the path is direct, slightly inside it if the path takes a bounce. (The intersection of the sphere with the earth's surface is a circle if the ground is level.) With two base stations the phone is located to the intersection of two spheres - a vertical circle intersecting the ground at two points. With three base stations (that aren't on a straight line but are at the same altitude) you typically get one or two points in space, and if it's two they're one above the other. Bingo.
Of course this also works just pinging the phone without ringing it. There's a variant that lets the one handling the call or pinging the phone provide timing info to others that are passively monitoring.
This capability is already deployed in some cell systems. In at least one city it is used to create traffic condition reports by measuring the speed of active cell phones in traffic on major routes.
These capabilities make it possible to "tail" anyone with a cell phone, any time the phone is powered up.
Once you're being tailed the location data can be archived, then data-mined to to create a dossier of your typical behavior, then call for a cop's attention if you deviate from your normal travel habits.
One of the reasons the mandate is so expensive is it requires enough equipment to simultaneously monitor an ENORMOUS number of phones. (Something like a third of all of them or a third of the calls in progress, if I recall old news items correctly.) It's not enough to continuously monitor everybody all the time. But I seem to recall thinking that it IS enough to monitor everybody with a criminal record or a green card, even in "high-crime" residential areas, plus all the pay phones. (Am I confused on this?) Of course cell-phone location monitoring, rather than call content monitoring, isn't a big load once the software is in place to do it at all. So that can be done to ALL the cellphones ALL the time.
Let's see, with GPS installed and phone taps readily available now, doesn't that make anyone else here just a wee bit uneasy about using a cell phone?
Yep.
Makes me want to turn off my phone (and remove the battery) whenever I'm not actually making a call, and to use a vending-machine calling card in payphones when on vacation.
Actually, it's a bit of a shame that they are hiding telephone numbers etc. on the letters in question. I understand why - to prevent harrasing calls etc. - but hey the letter is apparently public record why not expose them? Seems fair enough to me! :-)
Fair, yes. B-) But also an excuse for the Church of Scientology's lawyers to demand the letter be taken down. With the contact info removed they can't hide behind a harassment claim. They must expose their REAL reason for trying to get it down: censorship of any negative information about the behavior of CoS and its members.
I'm glad to see Google standing up in this manner. One of the major problems with the DCMA is that, in order for an anonymous poster to keep his site/links up, he must expose his identity. If the web page is critical of a criminal or gang which will harras the poster with extralegal actions once they FIND him, this requirement has a major chilling effect on anonymous speech.
the "[multiple derisive characterizations deleted] U.S. Congress has ... shortsightedly instructing the FCC to sell ... spectrum that had been reserved for other uses."
"... what, in the end, are public airwaves."
Like the land is all public land, and we're all tennants in government housing projects?
One of the problems with the radio spectrum is that there's a limited amount of it. With the "public airwaves" and "licencing this public trust" model the government's central planners have kept large blocks of spectrum unutilized or underutilized by older technoligies that make less efficient use of it.
One of the most effective methods known to handle the allocation of a scarce resource is a market, where people can OWN pieces of it, subdividiing and trading them as convenient and profitable - which, in the absense of government interference, often ends up with the pieces being used for the most-valuable-to-people purposes.
Like land, there's only so much spectrum. Like land, some uses can "leak out" and pollute neighboring pieces.
The government has decided to try an experiment and switch from the central-planning model to the property/market model for part of the spectrum, to see if that works better.
Of course this gores the oxen of the people who are currently using the spectrum they're selling, so they complain (and often rightly so).
And of course it also gores the oxen of people who have a political leaning toward central-planning, prompting them to spew rhetoric. This set of people apparently includes Hal Plotkin of SFGate.
It's a pity, because the rhetoric obscures anything of interest he might have had to say.