The people of japan are crammed together like NYC. and the money to deploy comes more from public funds than private.
What I find insane is the amount of hand-waiving (again) in this article by people who are declaring "the end of competition" and "stifling of deployment" even as the companies involved are declaring their intent to roll out BECAUSE of these freedoms from regulation these coal mine canaries are yapping about.
With regulation: nothing happens because it costs a fortune to deploy this stuff and no one wants to invest Billions of dollars and then have to hand over that infrastructure to the competition.
Without regulation: rollouts happen, people have infrastructure in their communities we didn't have before and the market is able to begin shaping new innovation.
But this new freedom in the market is bad because... well because it's good for corporations and that's ALWAYS a bad thing for "the little guy." Never mind this shit is outrageously expensive to deploy which pretty much has kept "the little guy" on the bench from the get-go.
I'm sure glad these "watchdogs" aren't running the FCC. You want to see nothing happen, put a bunch of socialists in charge of industry...
SBC and MS? I'm sure with those players it will be no time before the inevitable waves of screaming about that evil Michael Powell and the FCC playing into corporate hands, stifling our ability to freely communicate with one another, and just generally doing lots of mean things to us geeks...
if I wanted to make money on the premise that "sex sells", buy a cheap UHF station in NYC, LA, or Chicago, and run 24h porn, I could make a fortune from the ads. But the FCC would swing down on me, with Powell hitting me as hard as he could.
And this is somehow "new" because... we had all those 24 hr sex stations BEFORE Powell came to the FCC?
Dude, get a grip - on something other than yourself. Broadcast media under this administration has, until very recently (when the FCC started cracking down BECAUSE THE BUSYBODIES ON THE HILL THREW A FIT) been every bit as "free" as it was under Clinton. If you'll consult your history books (compare, for example, the deadtree editions of Penthouse and Hustler six months before Clinton and six months after) you'll see that's really saying something.
But even aside from that obvious flaw in your "free market" myth, the biggest opposition the FCC poses is the huge prices it forces on public bandwidth leases.
Again you obviously know very little about the history of all this. In fact, just a very few years ago - even during the Reagan era - when new spectrum became available it was generally provided under a sort of "lottery" system. ANYONE could apply for spectrum, and all you had to do to win a spectrum grant was submit a legitimate plan for how you would use it.
Guess what happened? The people who won these grants of public resources would sit on the spectrum for months or years, then SELL IT to one of those evil mean and nasty corporations. Some very big players in the communications industry were born from a business which added ZERO value to our spectrum - they simply won the grants and then resold them, pocketing the change.
In a free market economy this sort of thing is nearly impossible to prevent without blurring constitutional protections. So, the government - citing these BILLIONS lost over the years to private spectrum sales, cut out the middleman and put that money into the back pocket of "we, the people."
You're a little guy in need of spectrum? fine - apply to the FCC. A portion of every single spectrum auction is set aside exclusively for businesses like yours.
That is, if you had a business.
The FCC could invest the billions collected from these corporations while there's still a technical reason for a supply/demand crunch.
"Invest?" Invest in what? It's not the FCC's hjob to "invest" in technology - it's the FCC's job to regulate spectrum in a way that allows private industry and an open market to best establish its use. We don't need the FCC "investing" in technology - next thing you know they'd be demanding a "TV tax" to sustain their "research efforts" and then we'd ALL have something to complain about.
New tech can slice the spectrum up into tighter bands to increase supply, create spectrum hopping and frequency timesharing, use phased arrays for geospatial differentiation of same-frequency transmissions.
Blah blah blah. I guess you never heard of "wimax" - or the way the FCC, under Powell, has approved the conjugate use of portions of the BROADCAST TV band for spread spectrum digital network use. Or the battle over UWB, which the defense department (NOT the FCC) keeps throwing a fit over every time there's talk from the FCC of allowing its experimental use because it "may interfere" with some of their gear.
The FCC controls access to the market
Bzzzt. The FCC controls the public spectrum. I live in an area that gets all of three TV stations - you want to be a broadcaster? Come to NE Mississippi and apply for a license... there's hundreds of MHz of spectrum not being used here.
Competition - often overhwelming competition from corporations - controls access to the market. The broadcast market. The legacy broadcast market. Don't nobody control my (or your) ability to compete digitally but me (or you).
And it's quite obvious you have zero faith in this thing we cal
You know, if you really believed in the internet and the power of free and open communications you wouldn't be grumbling like this. What happens when the people in VA say vonage cannot keep subscribers there unless they provide 911 service to every rural customer? Or when MS says they have to pay taxes to the state for every call made here?
Federal regulations can help industries grow by providing protection from inconsistent laws that may be enacted purely in their own self interest - like making it hard for a company in GA to compete with the boys back home in TN. Given the state of our school systems today I can understand you may not have been given this lesson in history class, but such practices are as old as our union. If you weren't so blinded by your OWN agenda you might be able to see the value in such federal governance.
Powell believes in the value of the internet to grow ON ITS OWN. That does NOT mean making it easy for "internet radio stations" to become another wasteland of corporate pop, nor does it mean moves that seem to "embrace" corporations by allowing the old school broadcast spectrum to further deepen this wasteland should be taken at face value.
If the local TV stations and newspapers are all controlled by corporate interests - yet every home is eqipped to receive unlimited local information via the internet - do you not see the opportunity for individuals to provide these services? All it takes to become your own LOCAL news source is a free account on any of dozens of services and the will to fulfill a need rather than complaining how no one will do it for you. You want to be a broadcaster? Setup a wifi mesh and have at it - all the free bandwidth your community can muster.
You want competition? Compete. Powell isn't stopping you.
"Hackers can cause totalitarianism to approach from a distance, as a protective father approaches when a juvenile delinquent ventures a hand under a daughter's dress."
Dude... a daughter's dress? In a discussion of IP matters? Nice to see you're one of those illuminated parents who doesn't consider one's feminine children property... or, uh, anything like that.
I wish we had something like that in linux - like an ASCII art animation that bounced around the terminal while find was running. Cute, useless junk like that tells joe user "this is so good we had time to work on this useless crap rather than fixing code."
Hmm... maybe I need to put together a shell script...
As someone who himself has fought a lifelong battle with depression, I relate well to his story.
Sad as it is, if it hadn't been this it would likely have been something else. We are, in many ways, doomed to our fates. He simply lived the life he had to live, and nothing more.
I cat binaries all the time - not biggie. Did you cat it to stdout or to your browser or something?
Choosing to do something bad on your desktop and causing a crash isn't nearly equatable to something that could allow Ivan's porn TGP to rootkit your machine simply by sending it a properly formed TEXT file.
You nailed it - it's sad no one "in the party" can (or wants) to understand this.
My first election was in 1980. I was 18 years old and the "three candidates" were Reagan, Carter, and Anderson. There was also a Libertarian on the ticket - whom I voted for - and even then he got little news coverage even on election night, and only a tiny fraction of the vote (independant John Anderson got much more, and mainstream coverage on election night). And this is the guy who is in the record books for getting the most votes of ANY LP presidential candidate.
The LP is anti-corporate, which pretty much guarantees they're going to have to pay for every second of airtime they get - Fox, Time Warner, Disney and the others sure aren't going to be giving them anything. They have this vague "anti interventionist" policy that never really addresses real world concerns other than they apparently want us to be the biggest, strongest, Switzerland in the world. That worked for Switzerland, but this isn't the 1600's and we're supposed to already be "free." They have a completely hands off social policy which would ultimately leave Millions of Americans in the exact same boat our great-grandfathers were in before the Great Depression, and they want to let people have the freedom to control their own bodies by legalizing drugs and prostitution.
So who is left to vote for them? I'm not a single issue voter, but it's not often I look at the field of presidential candidates and decide the LP is the only party that would represent a better alternative. If they want more votes, they need to come up with a softened platform that more of those "mainstream" Nader voters can relate to.
Libertarians don't like Nader for the same reason the Dems don't: they're jealous. In the last election Nader probably took more of the CONSERVATIVE vote than the entire lot cast for the LP candidate.
When I see an LP candidate on the ticket for judge, I vote for that candidate. When I see them on the ticket for local representative, I cast my vote that direction. I think the LP has a great platform for this sort of position in government (although if I recognize a green on the ticket, you lose that one too).
But even so, I'm not going to vote for ANYONE who accuses me of "throwing away my vote" when I am doing what is exactly my right and speaking my conscience. "Throwing away" a vote is voting for someone who represents more of the same greedy, corrupt system that we have now. There are plenty of alternatives to this without voting to abolish public education and social programs for the truly needy.
I sure understand why you were ashamed to put your name on that post. I usually don't reply to ACs, but what the hell I got karma to burn... and wow. What an incredible morass of misinformation presented in what would otherwise appear to be a thoughtful, well consructed post.
Nice job, AC. Way to mislead! You should be a politician.
That's entirely believable. I worked at a GW call center for several months and I'm dead certain 90% of the computers people contacted me about had spyware or virii on them even if it wasn't directly related to the issue. Keep in mind most of the businesses that buy these things are going to have their own IT - those don't call for help.
What's hilarious is the way techs are told "document everything" and "don't fix spyware and virii issues" but then get chastised (and even written up) if their average goes over some ridiculously low number like 40% redirected due to "out of warranty" issues (ie spyware or virii).
I quit - simply couldn't tolerate anymore the hypocrisy of it all and we were about to move to supporting ONLY Microsoft calls (which would make the work my vision of hell).
Dell has, in the past, stated it's their policy to not help the customer by suggesting ANY spyware removal tools, since those tools may help the customer remove software put their by Dell's partners. Is this still the case? I can't think of any prefab, corporate, store bought machines that don't come with some sort of spyware included right in the reload image.
I've never seen a test show the Sempron is the "better chip." I have an AMD now, but if AMD doesn't stop playing all these stupid games with their chips the next one (I'm going to get a mobile for my present mbd) will be the last.
"Digital Lifestyles" (who here doesn't see that phone number and think "is this an e-machine?") has previously hyped partnerships with Wild Tangent and Snapstream as well - the spyware and spam come built in!
I do find it funny they're marketing a Windows computer to kids. My sampling here may be limited, but I don't know any teenage kids who equate "Windows" with "ooh, that's what I want!" OTOH maybe the illiteracy level of the press release (Check the flagrant use of "apostrophe's!") will appeal to Jr. High students.
I do know this: since she was introduced to Mandrake, the 16 year old neighbor kid is becoming a champ at gimp-ing and has sworn she'll never go back to weener-doze.
And he's all about reducing regulations, which I see as a good thing. The FCC didn't even "crack down on indecency" until it was pressured by a bunch of reactionaries on the hill (if you want to blame somebody for "FCC censorship then you need to call your congressperson or senator, because they're the ones leading that charge). And the harping going on here is no different than everyone screaming bloody murder when he lowered regulations on corporate station ownership - it's all just fine and dandy until someone steps in your backyard, huh?
The internet is a revolution in communications that can easily offset that station ownership nonsense - but not unless it's as ubiquitous as TV signals. We have cheap "receivers" (walmart computers) and with one of those "receivers" each of us has an equal opportunity to produce "content" for those receivers - but to do this the internet needs as many chances to grow (under its own energy) as possible. BPL opens the door for small, disconnected communities to take up that "last mile" buildout themselves. Combine BPL with local wifi (or wimax if it ever gets here) and you open the door to community "radio" and "tv" stations that are off the internet at large but can provide regional programming essentially "free" on the back of community wireless WANS. Many communities don't have this now because there's nowhere to go once the WAN is built - it's still isolated, or is facing a bill of hundreds of dollars a month for a gateway faster than a pool of dialup connections - so the local buildout never happens.
Wideband, BPL, wimax - all this stuff needs its fair share. Opening up the TV band to spread spectrum is one of the first truly logical progressions I've seen in years, especially being one who lives in a heavily forested rural area where we get all of THREE tv stations, no cable, no dsl, and even the phone lines suck. BPL would be very welcome here, and would likely spur further development in other areas. The tradeoff is a bit more background noise on some parts of the spectrum. As licensed and trained amateur radio engineers you're supposed o know how to deal with a little RFI; let's all work together and build a bridge... so you can get over it.
a km? I made a solid fuel estes when I was in Jr. High that would go to 3000ft (more or less a km) and it required none of that other crap. It was about a meter tall, had three stages, and used three solid fuel engines that, all combined, cost about ten bucks.
Why is this a story? Someone deisgned and constructed an overpriced, hard to use, liquid fuel rocket that can be outperformed by a twenty year old Estes and is offering copies of it for sale, but no one has been stupid enough to buy one yet. This is news?
Quite frankly, this just looks like more of the same we've been seeing
I must thank you folks. Seems like just when I'm feeling my most curmudgeonly about our own government I get snapped right out of it by seeing just how fucked up you people keep things back in the old world.
This kind of technology can prevent people from getting wrong treatments in the hospital
So will the prospect of a good lawsuit and losing one's license.
It may also keep babies from being switched after birth.
So... taking their footprints at birth... what's that about then?
Again it comes down to responsibility and the threat of a good lawsuit. Adding tracking devices to us all like so many wild animals because some people are negligent is not a reasonable argument.
Uh, I'm not like a Bush supporter or anything, but I have to ask "what are you smoking?" Both sides want to tell you how to live, and democrats have supported some of the most intrusive legislation we've seen (anyone remember the DMCA? Gore's "clipper chip?" Need I go on?)
If you really care about keeping the gov the hell out of your personal life there's really only one party to vote for - and it starts with neither "r" nor "d."
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The people of japan are crammed together like NYC. and the money to deploy comes more from public funds than private.
What I find insane is the amount of hand-waiving (again) in this article by people who are declaring "the end of competition" and "stifling of deployment" even as the companies involved are declaring their intent to roll out BECAUSE of these freedoms from regulation these coal mine canaries are yapping about.
With regulation: nothing happens because it costs a fortune to deploy this stuff and no one wants to invest Billions of dollars and then have to hand over that infrastructure to the competition.
Without regulation: rollouts happen, people have infrastructure in their communities we didn't have before and the market is able to begin shaping new innovation.
But this new freedom in the market is bad because... well because it's good for corporations and that's ALWAYS a bad thing for "the little guy." Never mind this shit is outrageously expensive to deploy which pretty much has kept "the little guy" on the bench from the get-go.
I'm sure glad these "watchdogs" aren't running the FCC. You want to see nothing happen, put a bunch of socialists in charge of industry...
I didn't even have time to hit the "post" button before my prediction came true...
SBC and MS? I'm sure with those players it will be no time before the inevitable waves of screaming about that evil Michael Powell and the FCC playing into corporate hands, stifling our ability to freely communicate with one another, and just generally doing lots of mean things to us geeks...
Maybe if enough people buy these things the proprietors will be able to afford themselves an edumucation...
And this is somehow "new" because... we had all those 24 hr sex stations BEFORE Powell came to the FCC?
Dude, get a grip - on something other than yourself. Broadcast media under this administration has, until very recently (when the FCC started cracking down BECAUSE THE BUSYBODIES ON THE HILL THREW A FIT) been every bit as "free" as it was under Clinton. If you'll consult your history books (compare, for example, the deadtree editions of Penthouse and Hustler six months before Clinton and six months after) you'll see that's really saying something.
But even aside from that obvious flaw in your "free market" myth, the biggest opposition the FCC poses is the huge prices it forces on public bandwidth leases.
Again you obviously know very little about the history of all this. In fact, just a very few years ago - even during the Reagan era - when new spectrum became available it was generally provided under a sort of "lottery" system. ANYONE could apply for spectrum, and all you had to do to win a spectrum grant was submit a legitimate plan for how you would use it.
Guess what happened? The people who won these grants of public resources would sit on the spectrum for months or years, then SELL IT to one of those evil mean and nasty corporations. Some very big players in the communications industry were born from a business which added ZERO value to our spectrum - they simply won the grants and then resold them, pocketing the change.
In a free market economy this sort of thing is nearly impossible to prevent without blurring constitutional protections. So, the government - citing these BILLIONS lost over the years to private spectrum sales, cut out the middleman and put that money into the back pocket of "we, the people."
You're a little guy in need of spectrum? fine - apply to the FCC. A portion of every single spectrum auction is set aside exclusively for businesses like yours.
That is, if you had a business.
The FCC could invest the billions collected from these corporations while there's still a technical reason for a supply/demand crunch.
"Invest?" Invest in what? It's not the FCC's hjob to "invest" in technology - it's the FCC's job to regulate spectrum in a way that allows private industry and an open market to best establish its use. We don't need the FCC "investing" in technology - next thing you know they'd be demanding a "TV tax" to sustain their "research efforts" and then we'd ALL have something to complain about.
New tech can slice the spectrum up into tighter bands to increase supply, create spectrum hopping and frequency timesharing, use phased arrays for geospatial differentiation of same-frequency transmissions.
Blah blah blah. I guess you never heard of "wimax" - or the way the FCC, under Powell, has approved the conjugate use of portions of the BROADCAST TV band for spread spectrum digital network use. Or the battle over UWB, which the defense department (NOT the FCC) keeps throwing a fit over every time there's talk from the FCC of allowing its experimental use because it "may interfere" with some of their gear.
The FCC controls access to the market
Bzzzt. The FCC controls the public spectrum. I live in an area that gets all of three TV stations - you want to be a broadcaster? Come to NE Mississippi and apply for a license... there's hundreds of MHz of spectrum not being used here.
Competition - often overhwelming competition from corporations - controls access to the market. The broadcast market. The legacy broadcast market. Don't nobody control my (or your) ability to compete digitally but me (or you).
And it's quite obvious you have zero faith in this thing we cal
You know, if you really believed in the internet and the power of free and open communications you wouldn't be grumbling like this. What happens when the people in VA say vonage cannot keep subscribers there unless they provide 911 service to every rural customer? Or when MS says they have to pay taxes to the state for every call made here?
Federal regulations can help industries grow by providing protection from inconsistent laws that may be enacted purely in their own self interest - like making it hard for a company in GA to compete with the boys back home in TN. Given the state of our school systems today I can understand you may not have been given this lesson in history class, but such practices are as old as our union. If you weren't so blinded by your OWN agenda you might be able to see the value in such federal governance.
Powell believes in the value of the internet to grow ON ITS OWN. That does NOT mean making it easy for "internet radio stations" to become another wasteland of corporate pop, nor does it mean moves that seem to "embrace" corporations by allowing the old school broadcast spectrum to further deepen this wasteland should be taken at face value.
If the local TV stations and newspapers are all controlled by corporate interests - yet every home is eqipped to receive unlimited local information via the internet - do you not see the opportunity for individuals to provide these services? All it takes to become your own LOCAL news source is a free account on any of dozens of services and the will to fulfill a need rather than complaining how no one will do it for you. You want to be a broadcaster? Setup a wifi mesh and have at it - all the free bandwidth your community can muster.
You want competition? Compete. Powell isn't stopping you.
Dude... a daughter's dress? In a discussion of IP matters? Nice to see you're one of those illuminated parents who doesn't consider one's feminine children property... or, uh, anything like that.
it's the only thing about XP I do like.
I wish we had something like that in linux - like an ASCII art animation that bounced around the terminal while find was running. Cute, useless junk like that tells joe user "this is so good we had time to work on this useless crap rather than fixing code."
Hmm... maybe I need to put together a shell script...
As someone who himself has fought a lifelong battle with depression, I relate well to his story.
Sad as it is, if it hadn't been this it would likely have been something else. We are, in many ways, doomed to our fates. He simply lived the life he had to live, and nothing more.
I cat binaries all the time - not biggie. Did you cat it to stdout or to your browser or something? Choosing to do something bad on your desktop and causing a crash isn't nearly equatable to something that could allow Ivan's porn TGP to rootkit your machine simply by sending it a properly formed TEXT file.
Now the british government has an excuse for making ISPs keep those gigabytes of internet traffic records on all their users...
You nailed it - it's sad no one "in the party" can (or wants) to understand this.
My first election was in 1980. I was 18 years old and the "three candidates" were Reagan, Carter, and Anderson. There was also a Libertarian on the ticket - whom I voted for - and even then he got little news coverage even on election night, and only a tiny fraction of the vote (independant John Anderson got much more, and mainstream coverage on election night). And this is the guy who is in the record books for getting the most votes of ANY LP presidential candidate.
The LP is anti-corporate, which pretty much guarantees they're going to have to pay for every second of airtime they get - Fox, Time Warner, Disney and the others sure aren't going to be giving them anything. They have this vague "anti interventionist" policy that never really addresses real world concerns other than they apparently want us to be the biggest, strongest, Switzerland in the world. That worked for Switzerland, but this isn't the 1600's and we're supposed to already be "free." They have a completely hands off social policy which would ultimately leave Millions of Americans in the exact same boat our great-grandfathers were in before the Great Depression, and they want to let people have the freedom to control their own bodies by legalizing drugs and prostitution.
So who is left to vote for them? I'm not a single issue voter, but it's not often I look at the field of presidential candidates and decide the LP is the only party that would represent a better alternative. If they want more votes, they need to come up with a softened platform that more of those "mainstream" Nader voters can relate to.
Libertarians don't like Nader for the same reason the Dems don't: they're jealous. In the last election Nader probably took more of the CONSERVATIVE vote than the entire lot cast for the LP candidate.
When I see an LP candidate on the ticket for judge, I vote for that candidate. When I see them on the ticket for local representative, I cast my vote that direction. I think the LP has a great platform for this sort of position in government (although if I recognize a green on the ticket, you lose that one too).
But even so, I'm not going to vote for ANYONE who accuses me of "throwing away my vote" when I am doing what is exactly my right and speaking my conscience. "Throwing away" a vote is voting for someone who represents more of the same greedy, corrupt system that we have now. There are plenty of alternatives to this without voting to abolish public education and social programs for the truly needy.
I sure understand why you were ashamed to put your name on that post. I usually don't reply to ACs, but what the hell I got karma to burn... and wow. What an incredible morass of misinformation presented in what would otherwise appear to be a thoughtful, well consructed post.
Nice job, AC. Way to mislead! You should be a politician.
That's entirely believable. I worked at a GW call center for several months and I'm dead certain 90% of the computers people contacted me about had spyware or virii on them even if it wasn't directly related to the issue. Keep in mind most of the businesses that buy these things are going to have their own IT - those don't call for help.
What's hilarious is the way techs are told "document everything" and "don't fix spyware and virii issues" but then get chastised (and even written up) if their average goes over some ridiculously low number like 40% redirected due to "out of warranty" issues (ie spyware or virii).
I quit - simply couldn't tolerate anymore the hypocrisy of it all and we were about to move to supporting ONLY Microsoft calls (which would make the work my vision of hell).
Dell has, in the past, stated it's their policy to not help the customer by suggesting ANY spyware removal tools, since those tools may help the customer remove software put their by Dell's partners. Is this still the case? I can't think of any prefab, corporate, store bought machines that don't come with some sort of spyware included right in the reload image.
Semprons are only "better" for AMD's bottom line.
It's only spelled "Linus."
It's pronounced "Luxury Yacht."
"Digital Lifestyles" (who here doesn't see that phone number and think "is this an e-machine?") has previously hyped partnerships with Wild Tangent and Snapstream as well - the spyware and spam come built in!
I do find it funny they're marketing a Windows computer to kids. My sampling here may be limited, but I don't know any teenage kids who equate "Windows" with "ooh, that's what I want!" OTOH maybe the illiteracy level of the press release (Check the flagrant use of "apostrophe's!") will appeal to Jr. High students.
I do know this: since she was introduced to Mandrake, the 16 year old neighbor kid is becoming a champ at gimp-ing and has sworn she'll never go back to weener-doze.
And he's all about reducing regulations, which I see as a good thing. The FCC didn't even "crack down on indecency" until it was pressured by a bunch of reactionaries on the hill (if you want to blame somebody for "FCC censorship then you need to call your congressperson or senator, because they're the ones leading that charge). And the harping going on here is no different than everyone screaming bloody murder when he lowered regulations on corporate station ownership - it's all just fine and dandy until someone steps in your backyard, huh?
The internet is a revolution in communications that can easily offset that station ownership nonsense - but not unless it's as ubiquitous as TV signals. We have cheap "receivers" (walmart computers) and with one of those "receivers" each of us has an equal opportunity to produce "content" for those receivers - but to do this the internet needs as many chances to grow (under its own energy) as possible. BPL opens the door for small, disconnected communities to take up that "last mile" buildout themselves. Combine BPL with local wifi (or wimax if it ever gets here) and you open the door to community "radio" and "tv" stations that are off the internet at large but can provide regional programming essentially "free" on the back of community wireless WANS. Many communities don't have this now because there's nowhere to go once the WAN is built - it's still isolated, or is facing a bill of hundreds of dollars a month for a gateway faster than a pool of dialup connections - so the local buildout never happens.
Wideband, BPL, wimax - all this stuff needs its fair share. Opening up the TV band to spread spectrum is one of the first truly logical progressions I've seen in years, especially being one who lives in a heavily forested rural area where we get all of THREE tv stations, no cable, no dsl, and even the phone lines suck. BPL would be very welcome here, and would likely spur further development in other areas. The tradeoff is a bit more background noise on some parts of the spectrum. As licensed and trained amateur radio engineers you're supposed o know how to deal with a little RFI; let's all work together and build a bridge... so you can get over it.
a km? I made a solid fuel estes when I was in Jr. High that would go to 3000ft (more or less a km) and it required none of that other crap. It was about a meter tall, had three stages, and used three solid fuel engines that, all combined, cost about ten bucks.
Why is this a story? Someone deisgned and constructed an overpriced, hard to use, liquid fuel rocket that can be outperformed by a twenty year old Estes and is offering copies of it for sale, but no one has been stupid enough to buy one yet. This is news?
Quite frankly, this just looks like more of the same we've been seeing
I must thank you folks. Seems like just when I'm feeling my most curmudgeonly about our own government I get snapped right out of it by seeing just how fucked up you people keep things back in the old world.
So will the prospect of a good lawsuit and losing one's license.
It may also keep babies from being switched after birth.
So... taking their footprints at birth... what's that about then?
Again it comes down to responsibility and the threat of a good lawsuit. Adding tracking devices to us all like so many wild animals because some people are negligent is not a reasonable argument.
You ahhh... you DO realize these are unmanned craft... right?
This isn't "insightful" - it's just silly.
George Bush is president and now a branch of government is talking about marking people?
See? I told you all he was the antichrist.
Just what was the significance of that big white ball that followed Number Six?
Uh, I'm not like a Bush supporter or anything, but I have to ask "what are you smoking?" Both sides want to tell you how to live, and democrats have supported some of the most intrusive legislation we've seen (anyone remember the DMCA? Gore's "clipper chip?" Need I go on?)
If you really care about keeping the gov the hell out of your personal life there's really only one party to vote for - and it starts with neither "r" nor "d."