There are parts of the British Isles where solar panels might work. There are other parts, especially in Scotland, where using solar panels would require seeing the sun, and therefore are obviously out of the questions. The typical local description of the weather runs to "If you can see across the bay, it'll rain within 24 hours; if you can't see across the bay, it's already raining." Sure, some parts of the year it's sunny and beautiful, but you need the streetlights to work all year around, *especially* when it's foggy, raining, and dark. So you might need some pretty big panels.
On the other hand, these ramps probably cost a big enough pile of money that it's still cheaper to use mains power than "free" power siphoned off passing cars.
Wow, I didn't realize any of the Feds still cared about Commies any more. I do know that Philadelphia still had a Red Squad back in the early 90s, who were spying on an anarchist convention I went to - they were parked in front of the Quaker school where the convention was held and the anarchist-run coffeehouse in the evening. (I did the obvious thing and went out and offered them coffee, but they'd brought their own:-)
There's definitely a major major threat that college students reading Mao's Red Book are going to go out and start peasant revolutions - here in the US they'd need to learn to sing country music first, and then they'd find that most of the farms have been taken over by large agribusinesses like Tyson Chicken and Archer-Daniels-Midland, who've got other ways to be connected to power. I mean, sure, the Little Red Book was popular reading back in the 1960s, since the US hadn't had a Cultural Revolution and reading was still legal, but the Feds are starting to catch up with Mao.
At least they don't have to worry about anybody reading "Das Kapital" and believing Marxist economics - it's a really dull read and the economics are transparently bogus, unlike the Communist Manifesto which is at least short and enthusiastic.
For interlibrary loan, he presumably needed to leave his name, address, and student ID number with the library so they could contact him when the book arrived.
There are way too many US colleges that routinely violate the privacy of their students and expose them to identity theft by using their Social Security Number as a student ID number, because it's ostensibly unique and they sometimes also need it if the student's an employee or has a government loan. Fortunately neither school I attended did that, but it's extremely common. Similarly, many US states use the SSN as a driver's license number, and all of them collect the SSN in keep it in their databases. And many medical insurance companies use SSNs as a customer ID number (HIPAA's changing that a bit, but Medicare's still based on SSNs so they usually need it anyway.) And too many companies use SSNs as an employee ID. It's appalling, but get used to it.
Jeri Ellsworth is a self-taught VLSI designer (she also built racing cars for a few years.) She gave a great talk at Stanford on her experiences growing up as a hacker, putting up with prejudice against female high-school dropouts, hanging out at computer stores and starting one, learning VLSI and learning how to work with toy and electronics manufacturers to get things manufactured in China, and about the design itself. She did two C64 emulators. Commodore-One was the first, and the newer C64DTV is built into the base of a joystick. In addition to the commodoreworld site, it's available less expensively at Amazon.
I wasn't the one who posted the reference to Rense - I haven't seen it. The author of the article I was replying to said that he hadn't ever heard of Bush's remark, and I posted a URL which is the canonical original press source for the quote. It may be a true quote, or it may be a bogus lie made up by an enemy of Bush, but it's the place to go to read about it. And thanks to one of the people who followed up on this chain for posting links Thompson's followup articles.
And while somebody said Capitol Hill Blue has a habit of posting out-of-character quotes, I've read enough other well-attributed things in the press (e.g. Bamford's book "A Pretext for War") about Bush blowing up like that that I wouldn't say it's out of character - which is separate from the question of whether he actually said it ; if you're going to falsely attribute quotes to someone, it often works best if you make them in character.
And Bush's Religious Right-Winger supporters, who don't generally like the Constitution either, at least ought to be upset because he's breaking the Ten Commandments in his use of profanity (as opposed to when he's been quoted as referring to someone as a "motherfucker", which is merely vulgar.)
If it were "most" of the Senate, they could have voted down this evil bill and gotten rid of it. Unfortunately that's not the case - the Republicans just don't have enough control of their party members to get a 60% supermajority to override a Democratic filibuster. That does mean that a few Republicans and a few Democrats appear to have actual concerns of conscience about it, and most of the Democrats at least view this as a good partisan opportunity that won't lose them support back home because Patriot is unpopular.
Rense may be a dubious site, but the original article seems to have been at Capitol Hill Blue. I can't vouch for either of them, but the author Doug Thompson says he's confirmed it with three different aides.
No, they're not really listening very well. This wasn't a vote to kill the evil bill - this was the Democrats threatening to filibuster it if there's a vote on it, and the Republicans not having enough control over their party members to override and limit debate. Some of the Democrats, and maybe even some Republicans, may be listening to their consciences here, which would be a good start, or to reasoned public comment, though mostly they're listening to the political winds blowing and deciding that it's the right partisan move at the right time.
While I'd hesitate to call any of the Senate Republicans "leaders", what's happened here is that the Democrats have threatened to filibuster a Republican attempt to pass this evil thing, and the Republican honchos in and outside the Senate have failed to get complete enough Republican support to override it if they do. That doesn't mean it's over yet - they've got until the end of the year, and Frist is threatening to keep trying, just in case any Democrats were planning to go home for Christmas before the right-wing Republicans go home for Winter Holidays. So America could still get screwed. Also, of course, they could start a new evil bill next year, but at least this one would have temporarily expired, and they'd have to deal with more extensive debate than the original Patriot Act, and come up with yet another obsequious name for it.
I can't really call this a success, because the Senate didn't have the guts to actively reject it, but at least it's a start.
Whether the administrative tools use graphical or command-line interfaces is really separate from whether the box draws its graphics using a kernel-space or user-space graphics system to do the rendering. Moving graphics systems into the kernel meant that the system was more likely to crash in mysterious ways and therefore more likely to need frequent repairs (:-), so undoing that should help, though the most popular repair interface in Windows has always been the reboot (take your choice of Ctrl-Alt-Delete or the power switch) rather than the GUI.
If you've got a network-friendly graphics system like X Windows or NeWS, the GUI clients (which do need to run on the server) don't need to be on the same box as the graphics display, but that's not the issue here.
Some kinds of content are really badly poisoned on the search engines. One example is medicines - if you're looking for information about a single drug, you'll typically find a few pointers to popular sites, such as the NIH and the manufacturer, a moderate number of legitimate links to sites selling the drug, and a huge number of obviously bogus links, with strings of drug names in the domain name or the URL, which are probably some specific trick to get search engines to point to some site selling stuff.
If you're looking for interactions between two different drugs, it turns out to be much harder, because you not only get the sales sites promoting them, you also get legitimate medical information sites where each page has a frame index pointing to the N different drugs they've got information about and often keywords about interaction (Drug A interacts badly with Drug Z and Drug B interacts well with drug F, but you wanted to know about A and B, etc.) This means that you need to look at a lot more legitimate sites to find anything, and therefore you've got to wade through a huge amount more junk because the real stuff isn't all at the top.
Only Extra-Sleazy SEO promoters lie to their customers, because they don't care about repeat business. It's a bit hard to get away with, because the customer can check Google and Yahoo to find out ranking, though of course the SEO can still lie about how much extra business that'll bring in.
Regular SEOs are sleazy too, but they're in the business of helping their customers lie to Google's robots so they tell the search engine to lie to its users about how interesting the customer's web pages are. The main objective of SEO, after all, is to take an uninteresting web page and get the search engines to think it's interesting so the readers will read it.
Most SEOs provide some valuable advice about how to tag your web pages so the robots can find your content, and making sure your content is available as text and not just some flash animation, but that takes about 15 minutes and isn't enough to run a business on, unless they can find customers who want somebody to implement that for them.
A few SEOs are actually in the legitimate business of helping their customers create content that's sufficiently interesting that people actually want to read it, but they still think it's worthwhile marketing themselves as SEOs rather than writers or editors. However, even most SEOs who say that's what they're offering are more likely to focus on tricks, like keeping the content updated at frequencies that the seach engine thinks are likely to be interesting, rather than actually tracking readership, though that's certainly better than running link farms.
Google translation of the Spiegel article says "Hot steam flows into a expansionsmaschine, which is coupled to the crankshaft. There steam which is at high pressure is converted into a rotating motion and so additional strength into the drive strand is led." and additionally Thus sufficiently energy meets, in order to heat ethanol on zirka 150 degrees Celsius and to propel with it a second expansionsmaschine, which likewise contributes to the increase in output or to the consumption saving.. So there are two expansion machines that are powered by the water and alcohol steam systems that need to couple to the crankshaft - it sounds like they're not simply additional engine cylinders, but it's really hard to tell from the article. Either way, they've got weight and mechanical complexity, though at least it sounds like the power gets combined before they go to the transmission.
Less serious material
Since it's a closed system, you don't have to constantly stop and fill up the ethanol side with vodka.
There's definitely a need for some kind of steampunk anime otaku quote here, about "The world will be saved by STEAM!" or giant mecha robots or something
You need 48 bits for autoconfiguration, so that'd be a/80 as the minimum - the other 16 bits in a/64 seem to be there for subnets within an allocation, unless I've missed something major. All the early descriptions looked _so_ much like some of the Novell Netware config stuff from decades ago:-) Administation doesn't have to be expensive, because a DHCP server or equivalent can do parts of it, but you're still highly likely to have a human in the loop to decide which permissions the wireless subnet has vs. the wired ones.
While they've lost much of their initial popularity, the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and "Saddam's in League with Al-Qaeda" shows still seem to be playing fairly well on the "Enemies" network in the US an UK.
Offering multiple classes of service for different prices doesn't violate common-carrier provisions - if your favorite package delivery company is a common carrier, notice that they'll still sell you different grades of service with different handling procedures, prices, and speeds. The technical issues are different, obviously, but your ISP also charges you more for bigger pipes, and telcos charge ISPs more for bigger raw-bandwidth pipes, and most people know enough not to complain about that (though it's sometimes surprising how much cheaper big pipes are per megabit than small pipes.)
I'm a libertarian anarcho-capitalist myself, so you won't find me making apologies for socialism. However, there were Socialist countries outside the Soviet Evil Empire, such as Sweden, and some of them have done quite well technologically. From a consumer Internet services standpoint, they're probably significantly ahead of most of the US, though if I were running a large Internet business in Europe, I'd probably put it on the Continent for connectivity and latency reasons or else in Ireland for tax reasons.
A morally pure capitalist might resist regulatory frameworks that benefit private interests at the expense of the market, but historically a large fraction of actual capitalists would happily encourage regulatory frameworks that benefit _them_ at the expense of their competition, and that's part of the trap the Bell System was in for a hundred years, especially once FDR's New Deal gave the Bell System a monopoly in return for regulations that guaranteed them a profit. The New Deal also effectively locked them out of the radio business and marginalized non-amateur non-broadcast radio, which pretty much guaranteed that rural areas wouldn't get telephones until somebody ran subsidized copper wire down their roads, instead of having the telcos do innovative things with radio in the 1940s-1960s. There were amateur radio phone-patch things in the 60s and 70s, often run by volunteers connecting overseas military people with their families, but you couldn't run them as a business competing with the telcos.
The grandparent article missed a *lot* of things, including that there were a bunch more Baby Bells than just SBC - there have been some re-mergers since, but there's still SBC, BellSouth, and Qwest, and also Verizon which has much of the old GTE territory, and a few smaller parts and independent telcos. Also, AT&T wasn't just long-distance after 1984 - it got to keep the Western Electric manufacturing business as well. Today, long-distance voice is a small part of the pie - the AT&T parts before the SBC merger were mostly business data traffic, Internet, and high-end business voice (800 numbers, etc.), while consumer voice has become a commodity.
The mid-90s split initially had three parts - AT&T (which got the communications services and a small part of Bell Labs), Lucent (which got the Western Electric manufacturing and most of Bell Labs), and NCR (which continued to do cash registers, business computers and databases, and equipment management, though it was substantially changed by the AT&T period.) Later Lucent spun off Avaya (I mainly run into their PBXs, but I think they make other things) and Agere (semiconductor business, making things like DSPs and modem chips) and probably some other pieces.
Bellcore was never part of post-divestiture AT&T - when the 1984 Divestiture happened, the seven Baby Bells got a chunk of Bell Labs, which they renamed "Bell Communication Research", called Bellcore, and funded it for a number of years, after which it had to fly on its own. Eventually, SAIC bought it and renamed it Telcordia.
Qwest was a merger of the US West telco/RBOC and Qwest, a long-haul fiber data company started by ex-AT&Ter Joe Nacchio.
There's more than just AT&T (former SBC) and BellSouth
I agree with you that Verizon's really important - they've got most of the old GTE territory, so they're a major player in the non-Bell markets, plus a bunch of once-big ISPs, and they're buying MCI, including telco and UUnet.
Qwest also has a lot of local telco territory in the mountain states, plus close relationships with Level 3.
Sprint's still an important ISP, but since their merger with Nextel, it looks like their main focus is cellphones.
Cingular's currently an SBC / BellSouth joint venture. I hear random speculation about whether that's stable or one side will buy out the other, but I've got no inside information.
Long Distance Voice used to be the cash cow for all the LD telcos, but the prices have been in such total free-fall for a decade that there's no margin left in consumer LD, and only a little in business voice, where there are value-added services supporting call centers. Most LD voice bottoms out around 2 cents/minute, but in reality that's because of telco settlement rules left over from divestiture - the LD companies have to pay the local companies by the minute for delivering the calls at the destination, at least in the US, and that cost gets passed through to the customer, but the amount of money that the LD company gets is a lot smaller than the telco's cut.
On Jon Stewart the other night, Jimmy Carter was saying that Jon Stewart's show is on too late at night, past his bedtime, but now that they had Tivo he could watch it the next day. A few of his other guests have also mentioned Tivo. I think I've seen House refer to it as well.
The Pentagon has a regular budget that covers routine costs - but the Bush Administration has kept coming to Congress for additional funds for the war. I haven't kept track of how many $80B blank checks they've asked for, but $215B sounds about right for the total of extra requests. That doesn't count the fact that the Pentagon's budget was supposed to allow us to be prepared for about 1-and-a-half wars already - so the cost of the war includes part of the regular budget as well as the special additional funds.
My personal opinion is that the Pentagon and Administration lied to get us into the war, so Congress should tell them to use their existing budget to fight it, and if that means reallocating funds from other programs, then they'll have to decide what they most want to spend it on.
I'm a bit old-school on this, having been repeating this rant since the SGML days in the late 80s, back when we were using it for typesetting before the web existed....
It's entirely the reader's job to decide how the web page gets rendered - HTML is designed to tag content, and the reader's system, which knows what screen capabilities are available and what preferences the reader has, is responsible for rendering. The web page author can use tools like CSS to give hints, but doesn't know how much screen real estate is available to the browser (and I continue to see really ugly screens when I'm using smaller or larger windows than the designers expected), and the web page author doesn't know if the reader has a text-based browser or monochrome screen or PDA or 30" Apple display or Macintosh with Postscript font rendering or rejects all Javascript for security reasons or has limited vision so uses big plain fonts or prints all web pages to dead trees or doesn't want fonts that change when you wave a mouse over them.
Picking good fonts is valuable for improving readability - but only the reader can do that.
TV is inherently a broadcast medium - they're sending the one-way same signal out to millions of recipients. By contrast, voice/video over IP over cellphone-data is taking space on the radio channel for each individual recipient in two directions, even though hundreds of people may be watching the same content at the same time in the same radio cell. Makes a lot more sense to broadcast, if you can do it efficiently. From an IP perspective, it's possible to do multicast IP (though ISPs mostly don't see a business model for implementing it between carriers yet), but the scarce resource here is the radio channel.
But the radio bandwidth choices seem odd. They've supposedly got 5 MHz across their target market (both North America and Europe), which is approximately one analog TV channel. How many programs do they plan to carry? Does using a cellphone-sized screen mean the resolution is enough lower than current US TV that they can cram a lot of channels in it, or are they only getting ~4 channels like conventional Low-Def Digital TV? If they're getting a bunch of channels of even-lower-def TV, are they broadcasting the same material everywhere, or doing some kind of cellular system that lets them (say) send the top 10 channels that the listeners in that cell want right now?
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Sure, some parts of the year it's sunny and beautiful, but you need the streetlights to work all year around, *especially* when it's foggy, raining, and dark. So you might need some pretty big panels.
On the other hand, these ramps probably cost a big enough pile of money that it's still cheaper to use mains power than "free" power siphoned off passing cars.
There's definitely a major major threat that college students reading Mao's Red Book are going to go out and start peasant revolutions - here in the US they'd need to learn to sing country music first, and then they'd find that most of the farms have been taken over by large agribusinesses like Tyson Chicken and Archer-Daniels-Midland, who've got other ways to be connected to power. I mean, sure, the Little Red Book was popular reading back in the 1960s, since the US hadn't had a Cultural Revolution and reading was still legal, but the Feds are starting to catch up with Mao.
At least they don't have to worry about anybody reading "Das Kapital" and believing Marxist economics - it's a really dull read and the economics are transparently bogus, unlike the Communist Manifesto which is at least short and enthusiastic.
There are way too many US colleges that routinely violate the privacy of their students and expose them to identity theft by using their Social Security Number as a student ID number, because it's ostensibly unique and they sometimes also need it if the student's an employee or has a government loan. Fortunately neither school I attended did that, but it's extremely common. Similarly, many US states use the SSN as a driver's license number, and all of them collect the SSN in keep it in their databases. And many medical insurance companies use SSNs as a customer ID number (HIPAA's changing that a bit, but Medicare's still based on SSNs so they usually need it anyway.) And too many companies use SSNs as an employee ID. It's appalling, but get used to it.
Jeri Ellsworth is a self-taught VLSI designer (she also built racing cars for a few years.) She gave a great talk at Stanford on her experiences growing up as a hacker, putting up with prejudice against female high-school dropouts, hanging out at computer stores and starting one, learning VLSI and learning how to work with toy and electronics manufacturers to get things manufactured in China, and about the design itself. She did two C64 emulators. Commodore-One was the first, and the newer C64DTV is built into the base of a joystick. In addition to the commodoreworld site, it's available less expensively at Amazon.
And while somebody said Capitol Hill Blue has a habit of posting out-of-character quotes, I've read enough other well-attributed things in the press (e.g. Bamford's book "A Pretext for War") about Bush blowing up like that that I wouldn't say it's out of character - which is separate from the question of whether he actually said it ; if you're going to falsely attribute quotes to someone, it often works best if you make them in character.
And Bush's Religious Right-Winger supporters, who don't generally like the Constitution either, at least ought to be upset because he's breaking the Ten Commandments in his use of profanity (as opposed to when he's been quoted as referring to someone as a "motherfucker", which is merely vulgar.)
If it were "most" of the Senate, they could have voted down this evil bill and gotten rid of it. Unfortunately that's not the case - the Republicans just don't have enough control of their party members to get a 60% supermajority to override a Democratic filibuster. That does mean that a few Republicans and a few Democrats appear to have actual concerns of conscience about it, and most of the Democrats at least view this as a good partisan opportunity that won't lose them support back home because Patriot is unpopular.
Rense may be a dubious site, but the original article seems to have been at Capitol Hill Blue. I can't vouch for either of them, but the author Doug Thompson says he's confirmed it with three different aides.
Bush calls Constitution just a G-ddamned piece of paper
No, they're not really listening very well. This wasn't a vote to kill the evil bill - this was the Democrats threatening to filibuster it if there's a vote on it, and the Republicans not having enough control over their party members to override and limit debate. Some of the Democrats, and maybe even some Republicans, may be listening to their consciences here, which would be a good start, or to reasoned public comment, though mostly they're listening to the political winds blowing and deciding that it's the right partisan move at the right time.
I can't really call this a success, because the Senate didn't have the guts to actively reject it, but at least it's a start.
If you've got a network-friendly graphics system like X Windows or NeWS, the GUI clients (which do need to run on the server) don't need to be on the same box as the graphics display, but that's not the issue here.
If you're looking for interactions between two different drugs, it turns out to be much harder, because you not only get the sales sites promoting them, you also get legitimate medical information sites where each page has a frame index pointing to the N different drugs they've got information about and often keywords about interaction (Drug A interacts badly with Drug Z and Drug B interacts well with drug F, but you wanted to know about A and B, etc.) This means that you need to look at a lot more legitimate sites to find anything, and therefore you've got to wade through a huge amount more junk because the real stuff isn't all at the top.
Regular SEOs are sleazy too, but they're in the business of helping their customers lie to Google's robots so they tell the search engine to lie to its users about how interesting the customer's web pages are. The main objective of SEO, after all, is to take an uninteresting web page and get the search engines to think it's interesting so the readers will read it.
Most SEOs provide some valuable advice about how to tag your web pages so the robots can find your content, and making sure your content is available as text and not just some flash animation, but that takes about 15 minutes and isn't enough to run a business on, unless they can find customers who want somebody to implement that for them.
A few SEOs are actually in the legitimate business of helping their customers create content that's sufficiently interesting that people actually want to read it, but they still think it's worthwhile marketing themselves as SEOs rather than writers or editors. However, even most SEOs who say that's what they're offering are more likely to focus on tricks, like keeping the content updated at frequencies that the seach engine thinks are likely to be interesting, rather than actually tracking readership, though that's certainly better than running link farms.
Less serious material
You need 48 bits for autoconfiguration, so that'd be a /80 as the minimum - the other 16 bits in a /64 seem to be there for subnets within an allocation, unless I've missed something major. All the early descriptions looked _so_ much like some of the Novell Netware config stuff from decades ago :-) Administation doesn't have to be expensive, because a DHCP server or equivalent can do parts of it, but you're still highly likely to have a human in the loop to decide which permissions the wireless subnet has vs. the wired ones.
While they've lost much of their initial popularity, the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and "Saddam's in League with Al-Qaeda" shows still seem to be playing fairly well on the "Enemies" network in the US an UK.
Really, those four people are so lucky! They'll be off the planet when the Enormous Mutant Star Goat arrives!
Offering multiple classes of service for different prices doesn't violate common-carrier provisions - if your favorite package delivery company is a common carrier, notice that they'll still sell you different grades of service with different handling procedures, prices, and speeds. The technical issues are different, obviously, but your ISP also charges you more for bigger pipes, and telcos charge ISPs more for bigger raw-bandwidth pipes, and most people know enough not to complain about that (though it's sometimes surprising how much cheaper big pipes are per megabit than small pipes.)
A morally pure capitalist might resist regulatory frameworks that benefit private interests at the expense of the market, but historically a large fraction of actual capitalists would happily encourage regulatory frameworks that benefit _them_ at the expense of their competition, and that's part of the trap the Bell System was in for a hundred years, especially once FDR's New Deal gave the Bell System a monopoly in return for regulations that guaranteed them a profit. The New Deal also effectively locked them out of the radio business and marginalized non-amateur non-broadcast radio, which pretty much guaranteed that rural areas wouldn't get telephones until somebody ran subsidized copper wire down their roads, instead of having the telcos do innovative things with radio in the 1940s-1960s. There were amateur radio phone-patch things in the 60s and 70s, often run by volunteers connecting overseas military people with their families, but you couldn't run them as a business competing with the telcos.
The mid-90s split initially had three parts - AT&T (which got the communications services and a small part of Bell Labs), Lucent (which got the Western Electric manufacturing and most of Bell Labs), and NCR (which continued to do cash registers, business computers and databases, and equipment management, though it was substantially changed by the AT&T period.) Later Lucent spun off Avaya (I mainly run into their PBXs, but I think they make other things) and Agere (semiconductor business, making things like DSPs and modem chips) and probably some other pieces.
Bellcore was never part of post-divestiture AT&T - when the 1984 Divestiture happened, the seven Baby Bells got a chunk of Bell Labs, which they renamed "Bell Communication Research", called Bellcore, and funded it for a number of years, after which it had to fly on its own. Eventually, SAIC bought it and renamed it Telcordia.
Qwest was a merger of the US West telco/RBOC and Qwest, a long-haul fiber data company started by ex-AT&Ter Joe Nacchio.
Long Distance Voice used to be the cash cow for all the LD telcos, but the prices have been in such total free-fall for a decade that there's no margin left in consumer LD, and only a little in business voice, where there are value-added services supporting call centers. Most LD voice bottoms out around 2 cents/minute, but in reality that's because of telco settlement rules left over from divestiture - the LD companies have to pay the local companies by the minute for delivering the calls at the destination, at least in the US, and that cost gets passed through to the customer, but the amount of money that the LD company gets is a lot smaller than the telco's cut.
On Jon Stewart the other night, Jimmy Carter was saying that Jon Stewart's show is on too late at night, past his bedtime, but now that they had Tivo he could watch it the next day. A few of his other guests have also mentioned Tivo. I think I've seen House refer to it as well.
My personal opinion is that the Pentagon and Administration lied to get us into the war, so Congress should tell them to use their existing budget to fight it, and if that means reallocating funds from other programs, then they'll have to decide what they most want to spend it on.
It's entirely the reader's job to decide how the web page gets rendered - HTML is designed to tag content, and the reader's system, which knows what screen capabilities are available and what preferences the reader has, is responsible for rendering. The web page author can use tools like CSS to give hints, but doesn't know how much screen real estate is available to the browser (and I continue to see real ly ugly screens when I'm using smaller or larger windows than the designers expected), and the web page author doesn't know if the reader has a text-based browser or monochrome screen or PDA or 30" Apple display or Macintosh with Postscript font rendering or rejects all Javascript for security reasons or has limited vision so uses big plain fonts or prints all web pages to dead trees or doesn't want fonts that change when you wave a mouse over them.
Picking good fonts is valuable for improving readability - but only the reader can do that.
But the radio bandwidth choices seem odd. They've supposedly got 5 MHz across their target market (both North America and Europe), which is approximately one analog TV channel. How many programs do they plan to carry? Does using a cellphone-sized screen mean the resolution is enough lower than current US TV that they can cram a lot of channels in it, or are they only getting ~4 channels like conventional Low-Def Digital TV? If they're getting a bunch of channels of even-lower-def TV, are they broadcasting the same material everywhere, or doing some kind of cellular system that lets them (say) send the top 10 channels that the listeners in that cell want right now?