The bottom line is that commercials give you the ability to watch content for free.
OK, I just want to point out an egregious misconception here. I know that you use the word free as in, you don't have to pay money. However, in my opinion, my spare time is worth more than money to me. By skipping commercials, I still can enjoy TV, but I can watch an hour show in just over 40 minutes. (Yes, there are that many commercials) That gives me 20 more minutes to do something else.
Bottom line is: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay. You will either pay with money, time, or you will choose not to consume the product. People slightly ahead of the curve will be able to avoid commercials, but the advertisers will either catch up with these people or stop paying for ads. I will avoid ads as long as I can, and once I can no longer do this, I will stop consuming.
Say... that gives me an idea. Maybe I could devise a system to run cables to peoples' houses, and put on commercial-free programming, and instead of paying by watching commercials, people could just pay for a subscription instead. But what would I call this "cabling" idea? Hmmm...
Yes, there are droughts in Africa all the time. Maybe you missed the part in my post where I said worst drought in recorded history. It's not something I put in there for effect. It's quantifiable. There are numbers to back it up.
And for the plan for ending them? Well, the first step of my plan is that we need to acknowledge that there is a problem, not go around pretending that this stuff isn't happening by telling anecdotal stories about 80's musical fundraisers. After you've got the first step down, I'll tell you the rest of my plan.
I have a Motorola DCT6412 DVR from Insight Communications, and it's amazing what a firmware update will do. It used to be extremely bad. It was clunky, hard to use, and very buggy. The software was horrible. Then they did an unannounced firmware update to the box, and instantly, it was awesome. They changed the interface, (much "prettier" now) fixed the bugs. (and I mean all of them, including the ones you mentioned above) The menus were updated, and little things to make it more user-friendly were added. They even added features. (Series recording, notably absent from the original.) Now, I love that thing.
I know that there are several different firmware options for the Motorola box, but you should seriously inquire to your cable company to see if they are working on an update. I wish I could give you more details on mine, but it's at home, and I don't know the firmware information off the top of my head.
Yeah... tell that to the people in east Africa. Worst drought in recorded history, amazingly coinciding with highest average temperatures in recorded history. One fact you seem to have missed, crops tend not to grow when water stops falling from the sky.
Great. That's exactly the insight I was looking for. I didn't really think that something like the Spinner/Crusher robot could be thrown together in a year, but I was interested to know the connection between these two entities. Whether they shared technologies, and whether the DARPA Grand Challenge technology was used for the military projects. (Since that was the stated goal of the Grand Challenge in the first place)
I am wondering how much of this technology is adapted from technology created for the DARPA Grand challenge? There are some interesting connections there, notable the involvement of Carnegie Mellon University. They didn't win the DARPA challenge, but they seemed to be the favorites from the outset, and took second and third place. I know that they are known for their robotics department, but did they work with DARPA as a result of thier participation in the Grand Challenge? Anyone have any insight on this?
Re:eliminate top-level domains ?
on
Is It Time For .tel?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, it's a function of how the current heirarchical domain system works. I'm not saying that it's absolutely required, but we would have to change quite a bit of the fundamental nature of the Internet if we eliminated all TLD's. I'm going to grossly oversimplify here, but basically, when I submit a query for foo.com, the very first thing queried is the top level domain, in this case,.com. If I were to submit a query to foo.org, the query would take a different path in resolving the name. Same with foo.net, foo.us, foo.biz, etc. The bottom line is that something needs to provide the first basic direction as to how the query is resolved. foo.com is a sub-domain of.com. support.foo.com is a subdomain of foo.com. us.support.foo.com is a subdomain of support.foo.com, etcerera. Without top level domains, we would basically make every DNS query a top-level query, and we would have to change the basic structure for how the Internet works. Note: for a more detailed definition of how DNS queries work, I highly recommend googling the subject. Makes for good nerd reading, and I'm sure the thousands of pages you get will do a better explanation than my single paragraph.
As a country, we prove ourselves irrationally xenophobic again and again. From the Dubai Ports World deal to people not buying laptops because they're "Chinese." What people don't know is that not much has changed since Lenovo bought the right to produce Thinkpads. They still use the same suppliers, and the manufacture is still basically the same. Thinkpads still kick ass, and I challenge anyone to find a laptop that isn't made primarily overseas.
You must be joking! A game like that would never sell! Rape, murder one, grand theft auto... nobody would want to commit these crimes in a virtual setting. Now maybe if you added some sort of hack that enabled you to go get some hot coffee or something...
Also, TFA isn't compltetly clear on when these sounds are recorded. It sounds like they are recorded all the time, not just while on the phone. What if, for example, I'm in a restaraunt having a private "insider" conversation about a new drug that just got denied. Some underpaid geek over at this ad company overhears this information, and suddenly he has a powerful incentive to use the information that he "accidentally" gleaned while making conversations unintelligible. (This process HAS to be done by humans - it doesn't seem likely that a computer could distinguish a private conversation for a soap opera or a Dorito's advertisement.)
Sorry, I quit about 4 months before the WorldCom scandal. (March of 2002) Unintentional good timing, although I lost my entire 401k. Never invest in the company that you work for, especially when it's WorldCom.
Way before BT. In fact, I worked there when Napster was just getting off the ground. I remember some of our clients connections going down because they were downloading too much with Napster, and the managers would say "What is Napster?"
I have long since moved on. Better pay, slower backbone connections. You take the good with the bad...:)
I tend to agree with TFA. I used to work at a UUNET datacenter, and my desktop PC was literally two hops away from multiple OC48 connections. (My computer -> wiring closet switch -> department router -> ATM switch -> UUNET backbone.) Truthfully, the experience was not much different that browsing on my cable modem at home. Sure, if I wanted to download something from the university in my city (which was on the same sonnet ring) it was fast as hell, but other than that, it wasn't really that much different. Where you get an advantage with huge bandwidth like that is in aggregate connections. There were tens of thousands of servers and multiple circuits terminating in that building, and hardly any latency at all on anything. But for an individual user... not much difference.
Dell Business service is OK for large corporations.
Wow... Not my experience. My company had a Dell enterprise rep, for whom I was the primary contact, and this guy was a sleazeball. He'd call me once a week and ask "How can I get more of your business?" (Translation: How can I get more of your money) I told him very nicely more than once "I know your number, I know what you sell. When I need something, I will call you."
Then, when I actually needed something, it was always a problem. I'm not sure what his job was, other than to bug me every week, but if I needed a server it was "Submit your request to me, and I'll forward it to my hardware guy." and if I needed software it was the same song. He NEVER did any hands on work with me, except to email me the invoices. I am a competant IT person, so I usually didn't need any assistance putting together servers, but if I actually wanted some advice, forget it. If I couldn't decide between two options, he (or more likely his hardware guy) would ALWAYS recommend whichever options were more expensive. "Oh, you're building a small fileserver for a small back office that will be used by only 5 people to access a single file and will not be running any other software? I would definitely go with the dual processors and the extra 4 gigs of memory." Wow buddy, thanks for that tip. And the big advantage of our "preferred" business account? We get a whopping 5% discount. Oh, and we don't get the priveledge to return anything or reconfigure something after the fact, like those suckers who are stuck paying 5% more. Heh heh.
5% Discount off what, you ask? I have no idea. Their pricing scales are different depending on which portal you go into on their website. Go ahead, try it. Click on the Small Business channel and configure a server. Then goto the Government/Education/Healthcare channel and configure the EXACT same server. Oh, they're just giving those poor guys a break, you say? No, actually the hospital or education server will usually be more expensive. They know those groups have deeper pockets than small business owners, and they price accordingly.
The only reason I still shop Dell is that they still have a quality product. The lion's share of servers at my company are Dells, and we rarely have problems with them. I am so frustrated with their sales and support that I avoid buying anything from them at all, but when I need to, I never count on any help. I just go on their website, configure the server I want, email it to my rep and say "Put this together for me." As soon as someone comes out with a better product, I'm signing up.
I do not have much tolerance for racism, either. My wife is full Mexican, and while not not Arab, she is quite brown and is often mistaken for Arab. (We have been "randomly" put into the "special" line at the airport EVERY time I have flown since 9/11, I kid you not.) I understand that people sometimes misinterpret my cinicism. No hard feelings.
Don't feel bad... The comment got modded offtopic. Apparently, you're not the only one who can't appreciate my biting sarcasm. And whoever modded it down apparently doesn't see the parallels between this story and the Dubai Ports Authority story from a few weeks ago. (Country: United ARAB Emirates If they did, they would see that it's exactly on topic.
For those who missed it, let me explain: We are xenophobic as a culture. We have these knee jerk reactions whenever we hear that someone from another country is providing services and get all freaked out. It happened a few weeks ago with the DPA deal, and it's happening with this deal. My point is that we need to start looking at these things logically, instead of having an emotional reaction and going with that. We should put every government laptop with sensitive information under a very keen microscope, not just the ones that come from China. Americans can be spies for the "enemy" too. The DPA deal got shot down by Congress, but government agents were still able to smuggle radiological material into the US without much effort at all.
And in response of your accusation calling me a "racist asshat." You know nothing about me. You have nothing by which to judge whether or not I feel differently about people from other cultures. Before flinging such a strong accusation around, you really should have more to go on than a comment that went over your head.
I know this article was featured on Slashdot, but for a really good explanation of why hardware specs aren't going to mean much anymore, I highly recommend reading Life After the Crash by David Wong
The essence of the article is that the direction that video games are moving in can't hold up much longer. Sure, Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox360 looks beautiful. You can see slightly better fog effects than previous generation consoles, and you can see beads of sweat dripping down the enemy soldiers' faces, but does this really make it a better game? For about 10 minutes your jaw hangs open at the realism of the game, but then you get used to it and realize it's exactly like every other first person shooter ever made. OK, instead of shooting demon possessed aliens from another dimension, you are shooting nazis, but does that really make the game any different once you adjust to your surroundings? Or, even more to the point, does it make it better than the last CoD title that you played?
The bottom line is that Nintendo is trying to do something that's actually different. They're betting the farm on the fact that gamers like myself are getting tired of shelling out more and more money for consoles that are less and less innovative. It's a gamble, and it's possible that they could be doing this too early, but they have proven in the past that they have a pretty good sense about the industry. I, for one, will stand in line to buy my Revolution, even if the fog effects aren't quite as good as the significantly more expensive Xbox360.
My account stopped working about a year ago. It was well after they made the announcement that they were not going to support hotmail accounts in Outlook, so I thought I dodged the bullet. Then I started getting the error messages. It's a shame, really, beacuse I was using Hotmail for years before Microsoft ever bought them out.
This Hotmail plugin for Thunderbird intrigues me. Maybe I'll check that out.
Not only this, but on most calling plans in the US, it is free (included in the monthly cost) to make unlimited local calls from a land line. That means you could dial a cell number on a fax machine or modem, set it for unlimited retries, and at no cost to you, the victim's cell phone would just keep ringing, and ringing, and ringing...
Not that I've ever done this to that dumb son of a bitch who thought it would be funny to prank call me on a Saturday night... Oops... I've said too much.:)
I still doubt that you could hear the difference in fidelity. It's not about how good your stereo is, or how fine your ears are. What you described sounds like a helluva stereo. It's about road noise. Unless you have a high-end luxury car, it's doubtful that you could hear a meaningful difference in sound while you're driving. (High end sedans focus heavily on eliminating road noise, and charge a premium.) We don't realize it so much because we're used to it, but road noise is typically very loud, especially at freeway speeds. (The average in-vehicle noise at freeway speeds is 80-90 dB. That's somewhere between your alarm clock and a lawnmower.) That's a lot of noise to interfere with the signal.
You've obviously never heard of a video card with TV Out.
Or a TV with VGA in.
I have one of the Samsung DLP jobs. It's nice, because my HTPC sees it as a 1280x720 digital monitor. Looks waaaaaaayy better than s-video out on a video card.
You bring up some good points, but let's just suppose I want to be an ass. (And believe me, nothing in the Constitution prevents me from doing so.) I could set up a noise generator in my neighborhood just for the heck of it so that nobody in my neighborhood could do anything. Sure, digital frequency hopping is great, but if I lived next door to you and wanted to be a douchebag, I could, without a whole lot of effort, build a device that would knock out all of your wireless networks. A little more tinkering, and I could make it so that all you hear when you turn on the radio in the morning is Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" on every radio in your house, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm not talking about 50,000 watts of power here, just enough to get maybe 100 feet. That should be enough to get even with you for letting your cat poop in my garden. Obviously, right now, all of the above activities would be patently illegal. They would come to my house in a matter of days, if not hours, and I would be tried for breaking the law. Without some sort of regulatory body, this type of thing would be common. Again, I hate to play devil's advocate for any government agency, but I just can't see effective self-regulation in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I just want to point out an egregious misconception here. I know that you use the word free as in, you don't have to pay money. However, in my opinion, my spare time is worth more than money to me. By skipping commercials, I still can enjoy TV, but I can watch an hour show in just over 40 minutes. (Yes, there are that many commercials) That gives me 20 more minutes to do something else.
Bottom line is: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay. You will either pay with money, time, or you will choose not to consume the product. People slightly ahead of the curve will be able to avoid commercials, but the advertisers will either catch up with these people or stop paying for ads. I will avoid ads as long as I can, and once I can no longer do this, I will stop consuming.
Say... that gives me an idea. Maybe I could devise a system to run cables to peoples' houses, and put on commercial-free programming, and instead of paying by watching commercials, people could just pay for a subscription instead. But what would I call this "cabling" idea? Hmmm...
Yes, there are droughts in Africa all the time. Maybe you missed the part in my post where I said worst drought in recorded history. It's not something I put in there for effect. It's quantifiable. There are numbers to back it up.
And for the plan for ending them? Well, the first step of my plan is that we need to acknowledge that there is a problem, not go around pretending that this stuff isn't happening by telling anecdotal stories about 80's musical fundraisers. After you've got the first step down, I'll tell you the rest of my plan.
I have a Motorola DCT6412 DVR from Insight Communications, and it's amazing what a firmware update will do. It used to be extremely bad . It was clunky, hard to use, and very buggy. The software was horrible. Then they did an unannounced firmware update to the box, and instantly, it was awesome. They changed the interface, (much "prettier" now) fixed the bugs. (and I mean all of them, including the ones you mentioned above) The menus were updated, and little things to make it more user-friendly were added. They even added features. (Series recording, notably absent from the original.) Now, I love that thing.
I know that there are several different firmware options for the Motorola box, but you should seriously inquire to your cable company to see if they are working on an update. I wish I could give you more details on mine, but it's at home, and I don't know the firmware information off the top of my head.
Yeah... tell that to the people in east Africa. Worst drought in recorded history, amazingly coinciding with highest average temperatures in recorded history. One fact you seem to have missed, crops tend not to grow when water stops falling from the sky.
Great. That's exactly the insight I was looking for. I didn't really think that something like the Spinner/Crusher robot could be thrown together in a year, but I was interested to know the connection between these two entities. Whether they shared technologies, and whether the DARPA Grand Challenge technology was used for the military projects. (Since that was the stated goal of the Grand Challenge in the first place)
I am wondering how much of this technology is adapted from technology created for the DARPA Grand challenge? There are some interesting connections there, notable the involvement of Carnegie Mellon University. They didn't win the DARPA challenge, but they seemed to be the favorites from the outset, and took second and third place. I know that they are known for their robotics department, but did they work with DARPA as a result of thier participation in the Grand Challenge? Anyone have any insight on this?
Actually, it's a function of how the current heirarchical domain system works. I'm not saying that it's absolutely required, but we would have to change quite a bit of the fundamental nature of the Internet if we eliminated all TLD's. I'm going to grossly oversimplify here, but basically, when I submit a query for foo.com, the very first thing queried is the top level domain, in this case, .com. If I were to submit a query to foo.org, the query would take a different path in resolving the name. Same with foo.net, foo.us, foo.biz, etc. The bottom line is that something needs to provide the first basic direction as to how the query is resolved. foo.com is a sub-domain of .com. support.foo.com is a subdomain of foo.com. us.support.foo.com is a subdomain of support.foo.com, etcerera. Without top level domains, we would basically make every DNS query a top-level query, and we would have to change the basic structure for how the Internet works. Note: for a more detailed definition of how DNS queries work, I highly recommend googling the subject. Makes for good nerd reading, and I'm sure the thousands of pages you get will do a better explanation than my single paragraph.
As a country, we prove ourselves irrationally xenophobic again and again. From the Dubai Ports World deal to people not buying laptops because they're "Chinese." What people don't know is that not much has changed since Lenovo bought the right to produce Thinkpads. They still use the same suppliers, and the manufacture is still basically the same. Thinkpads still kick ass, and I challenge anyone to find a laptop that isn't made primarily overseas.
You must be joking! A game like that would never sell! Rape, murder one, grand theft auto... nobody would want to commit these crimes in a virtual setting. Now maybe if you added some sort of hack that enabled you to go get some hot coffee or something...
Also, TFA isn't compltetly clear on when these sounds are recorded. It sounds like they are recorded all the time, not just while on the phone. What if, for example, I'm in a restaraunt having a private "insider" conversation about a new drug that just got denied. Some underpaid geek over at this ad company overhears this information, and suddenly he has a powerful incentive to use the information that he "accidentally" gleaned while making conversations unintelligible. (This process HAS to be done by humans - it doesn't seem likely that a computer could distinguish a private conversation for a soap opera or a Dorito's advertisement.)
Sounds like the same thing that AMANDA has been doing since 1997.
What is old is new again.
Sorry, I quit about 4 months before the WorldCom scandal. (March of 2002) Unintentional good timing, although I lost my entire 401k. Never invest in the company that you work for, especially when it's WorldCom.
Way before BT. In fact, I worked there when Napster was just getting off the ground. I remember some of our clients connections going down because they were downloading too much with Napster, and the managers would say "What is Napster?"
:)
I have long since moved on. Better pay, slower backbone connections. You take the good with the bad...
I tend to agree with TFA. I used to work at a UUNET datacenter, and my desktop PC was literally two hops away from multiple OC48 connections. (My computer -> wiring closet switch -> department router -> ATM switch -> UUNET backbone.) Truthfully, the experience was not much different that browsing on my cable modem at home. Sure, if I wanted to download something from the university in my city (which was on the same sonnet ring) it was fast as hell, but other than that, it wasn't really that much different. Where you get an advantage with huge bandwidth like that is in aggregate connections. There were tens of thousands of servers and multiple circuits terminating in that building, and hardly any latency at all on anything. But for an individual user... not much difference.
Wow... Not my experience. My company had a Dell enterprise rep, for whom I was the primary contact, and this guy was a sleazeball. He'd call me once a week and ask "How can I get more of your business?" (Translation: How can I get more of your money) I told him very nicely more than once "I know your number, I know what you sell. When I need something, I will call you."
Then, when I actually needed something, it was always a problem. I'm not sure what his job was, other than to bug me every week, but if I needed a server it was "Submit your request to me, and I'll forward it to my hardware guy." and if I needed software it was the same song. He NEVER did any hands on work with me, except to email me the invoices. I am a competant IT person, so I usually didn't need any assistance putting together servers, but if I actually wanted some advice, forget it. If I couldn't decide between two options, he (or more likely his hardware guy) would ALWAYS recommend whichever options were more expensive. "Oh, you're building a small fileserver for a small back office that will be used by only 5 people to access a single file and will not be running any other software? I would definitely go with the dual processors and the extra 4 gigs of memory." Wow buddy, thanks for that tip. And the big advantage of our "preferred" business account? We get a whopping 5% discount. Oh, and we don't get the priveledge to return anything or reconfigure something after the fact, like those suckers who are stuck paying 5% more. Heh heh.
5% Discount off what, you ask? I have no idea. Their pricing scales are different depending on which portal you go into on their website. Go ahead, try it. Click on the Small Business channel and configure a server. Then goto the Government/Education/Healthcare channel and configure the EXACT same server. Oh, they're just giving those poor guys a break, you say? No, actually the hospital or education server will usually be more expensive. They know those groups have deeper pockets than small business owners, and they price accordingly.
The only reason I still shop Dell is that they still have a quality product. The lion's share of servers at my company are Dells, and we rarely have problems with them. I am so frustrated with their sales and support that I avoid buying anything from them at all, but when I need to, I never count on any help. I just go on their website, configure the server I want, email it to my rep and say "Put this together for me." As soon as someone comes out with a better product, I'm signing up.
Spoken like a true gentleman. My hats off to you.
I do not have much tolerance for racism, either. My wife is full Mexican, and while not not Arab, she is quite brown and is often mistaken for Arab. (We have been "randomly" put into the "special" line at the airport EVERY time I have flown since 9/11, I kid you not.) I understand that people sometimes misinterpret my cinicism. No hard feelings.
You tend to miss a lot of things, don't you...
Don't feel bad... The comment got modded offtopic. Apparently, you're not the only one who can't appreciate my biting sarcasm. And whoever modded it down apparently doesn't see the parallels between this story and the Dubai Ports Authority story from a few weeks ago. (Country: United ARAB Emirates If they did, they would see that it's exactly on topic.
For those who missed it, let me explain: We are xenophobic as a culture. We have these knee jerk reactions whenever we hear that someone from another country is providing services and get all freaked out. It happened a few weeks ago with the DPA deal, and it's happening with this deal. My point is that we need to start looking at these things logically, instead of having an emotional reaction and going with that. We should put every government laptop with sensitive information under a very keen microscope, not just the ones that come from China. Americans can be spies for the "enemy" too. The DPA deal got shot down by Congress, but government agents were still able to smuggle radiological material into the US without much effort at all.
And in response of your accusation calling me a "racist asshat." You know nothing about me. You have nothing by which to judge whether or not I feel differently about people from other cultures. Before flinging such a strong accusation around, you really should have more to go on than a comment that went over your head.
It's OK, just as long as the PC's aren't made in any country with "Arab" in the name...
I know this article was featured on Slashdot, but for a really good explanation of why hardware specs aren't going to mean much anymore, I highly recommend reading Life After the Crash by David Wong
The essence of the article is that the direction that video games are moving in can't hold up much longer. Sure, Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox360 looks beautiful. You can see slightly better fog effects than previous generation consoles, and you can see beads of sweat dripping down the enemy soldiers' faces, but does this really make it a better game? For about 10 minutes your jaw hangs open at the realism of the game, but then you get used to it and realize it's exactly like every other first person shooter ever made. OK, instead of shooting demon possessed aliens from another dimension, you are shooting nazis, but does that really make the game any different once you adjust to your surroundings? Or, even more to the point, does it make it better than the last CoD title that you played?
The bottom line is that Nintendo is trying to do something that's actually different. They're betting the farm on the fact that gamers like myself are getting tired of shelling out more and more money for consoles that are less and less innovative. It's a gamble, and it's possible that they could be doing this too early, but they have proven in the past that they have a pretty good sense about the industry. I, for one, will stand in line to buy my Revolution, even if the fog effects aren't quite as good as the significantly more expensive Xbox360.
My account stopped working about a year ago. It was well after they made the announcement that they were not going to support hotmail accounts in Outlook, so I thought I dodged the bullet. Then I started getting the error messages. It's a shame, really, beacuse I was using Hotmail for years before Microsoft ever bought them out. This Hotmail plugin for Thunderbird intrigues me. Maybe I'll check that out.
Sadly, I stopped using Hotmail when they discontinued support for the Outlook plugin. I think it was a bad decision on their part.
Not only this, but on most calling plans in the US, it is free (included in the monthly cost) to make unlimited local calls from a land line. That means you could dial a cell number on a fax machine or modem, set it for unlimited retries, and at no cost to you, the victim's cell phone would just keep ringing, and ringing, and ringing...
:)
Not that I've ever done this to that dumb son of a bitch who thought it would be funny to prank call me on a Saturday night... Oops... I've said too much.
I still doubt that you could hear the difference in fidelity. It's not about how good your stereo is, or how fine your ears are. What you described sounds like a helluva stereo. It's about road noise. Unless you have a high-end luxury car, it's doubtful that you could hear a meaningful difference in sound while you're driving. (High end sedans focus heavily on eliminating road noise, and charge a premium.) We don't realize it so much because we're used to it, but road noise is typically very loud, especially at freeway speeds. (The average in-vehicle noise at freeway speeds is 80-90 dB. That's somewhere between your alarm clock and a lawnmower.) That's a lot of noise to interfere with the signal.
Or a TV with VGA in.
I have one of the Samsung DLP jobs. It's nice, because my HTPC sees it as a 1280x720 digital monitor. Looks waaaaaaayy better than s-video out on a video card.
You bring up some good points, but let's just suppose I want to be an ass. (And believe me, nothing in the Constitution prevents me from doing so.) I could set up a noise generator in my neighborhood just for the heck of it so that nobody in my neighborhood could do anything. Sure, digital frequency hopping is great, but if I lived next door to you and wanted to be a douchebag, I could, without a whole lot of effort, build a device that would knock out all of your wireless networks. A little more tinkering, and I could make it so that all you hear when you turn on the radio in the morning is Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" on every radio in your house, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm not talking about 50,000 watts of power here, just enough to get maybe 100 feet. That should be enough to get even with you for letting your cat poop in my garden. Obviously, right now, all of the above activities would be patently illegal. They would come to my house in a matter of days, if not hours, and I would be tried for breaking the law. Without some sort of regulatory body, this type of thing would be common. Again, I hate to play devil's advocate for any government agency, but I just can't see effective self-regulation in this area.