And static IPs don't help if someone takes their phone adapter with them on a business trip either.
Ok, sure, some people take their phone adapter with them on business trips. Most people don't. The driving force for VOIP is cheap phone calls, not portability. Portable devices will always be harder to locate. The cell phone solutions may work, but only if you're outside and able to see 4 or more GPS sats (the tower data just helps the GPS get a lock faster). If you call 911 from the basement, it is unlikely they'll be able to quickly locate you.
Just one little problem with this, MAC addresses are never seen outside of a network
As far as a MAC not seen outside a network, of course that's the case, but (for example), cable billing/authorization systems use the cable modem MAC address as a serial number. It shouldn't be much harder for billing systems to do the same thing with VIOP boxes. Remember, this whole thing is about trying to kill off Vonage and the others, not VOIP.
Last I heard, everything on the Internet already has an address. Since we have these things called databases, we can match up a MAC address and a billing acount, why the heck can't we get all these combined together? Of course, we'd all need to have a static IP address, and we all know that that's impossible unless you pay extra. MOST of the people I know don't move their VOIP boxes around much anyway (oh, they all say how they can, but I've never seen it happen). I think the FCC is really getting ready for the rollout of the major player's VOIP systems, and the wholesale changeover of POTS to VOIP. This time will be looked at as a bump in the road for the likes of the RBOCS and Cable companies. Of course, the FCC will get lobbied by someone claiming to represent the 911 call centers of the world (but funded by the big telecom players) to get the portable/3rd party solutions outlawed, since they are hard to track for 911 service, and they'll walk in with their integrated database solution (with a 10. address on their network).
I really don't understand the big deal about VOIP anyway. Sure, cheap international phone calls are nice, but that's still a niche market. My cell phone has a boatload of minutes, lots of competition, and nationwide calling without long distance fees. The ONLY reason I could see moving to a landline again is so that 2 people could be on an extension at the same time, but there are devices out there that allow cells to connect to landline infrastructure in the home. As far as the bandwidth needed to move everyone to a cell phone, I don't think that's an issue. After all, I see many people just hanging on phones all the time in cars, walking down the street, etc. I don't think they'd be sitting at home yacking away like that, because they're on their way to someplace. The rest of us are going to follow normal, predictable calling patterns, which require a normal precictable engineering solution (and maybe yet another spectrum auction).
Say they do this, what is to stop the terrorists from using ham frequencies and using an encrypted signal? Yet again this is the problem with the FCC at the moment, they don't seem to understand the problem.
Well, as long as you're violating the law, my HF tranceiver can be modified to transmit on any frequency it receives. encryption on a ham band (at least HF) would get a lot of attention. Not so much on VHF and above, but still, why not pick one no one is listening to.
you will have seen the Coke glasses prominently displayed in front of each judge, and carefully sat back down so that the logo is always perfect aligned to the camera
Watch Sienfield. They've based entire episodes on commericals (Kenny! Kenny! Come back Kenny!)
I think that at some point, we'll be able to tell our TV's that we are looking for, say, a new truck, and it will send us commercials for trucks and car dealers' offers. Of course, I'll tell the TV I'm really intrested in Victoria's Secret and Women's hair care products, but hey, at least the advertising company can say that I watch 100% of them!
I often thought it would be easy to build a sterling engine on a deep mountain lake. Since the tempature would not go very high at the bottom of the lake, it should be possible to pipe cooling fluid to the bottom of the lake. This way it wouldn't need as much of a solar reflector, or a greater amount of energy could be produced, due to the greater difference in tempatures. Just run glycol pumps off the driveshaft, one for hot, one for cold, blow air across a radiator and into the chambers. Any reason it wouldn't work (other than a warming of the bottom of the lake) on Lake Powell or Lake Mead?
Why is it every politican and marketing guy out there thinks wireless is the answer to everything? Don't they realize that it is in an unliscensed band for a reason? Are they eventually going to outlaw microwave ovens and cordless phones if there is interference? Doesn't it make much more sense for a municipality to run FIBER OPTIC CABLE to everyone, since they control the right of way to the homes serviced? If done right, it could be potentially as inexpensive to operate as a massive bunch of WIFI nodes, and have much greater bandwidth (not to mention reliablity).
Oh, but the hype of fiber optic cable is very low right now, so it can't be any good. And besides, all you have to do is get a few high school kids to mess around with Linksys routers and Pingles cans to get WIFI working. Fiber optic systems need to have trained professionals. Sorry, I forgot.
The reason there is no real spectrum management in the 2.4GHz band is because of the very real likleyhood that you will get interference from microwave ovens. Are they going to shut down every microwave oven that is impacting their network? Remember, the ovens in the airport are likely to be the very powerful commercial types that can heat up your crapy food in 10 seconds and have lots of warning stickers. Let's not forget automatic doors, and who knows what else.
BTW, this is why we need the FCC. Those of you who think that the FCC should be abolished must have very good lawyers, because in the absence of government management of "property," you end up with squatters, lawyers and vigilanty groups.
Yes, because a student is certainly going to trust that a device supplied by the teacher is going to protect his anonymity, instead of reporting him as a dangerous terrorist commie pervert.
You must not have gone to college. In most college classrooms, being labeled as a commie is a GOOD thing.
Once back on Earth, the items would either be disposed of or returned to researchers.
Attention... Would those of you who have trash from the ISS please come and claim it? If you don't pick up your trash in hanger 12 by 4:00pm, it will be disposed of at your expense. That is all."
Well, get rid of your Intel stock. Now that they don't have time for the cheap, simple chips, I really think their days are numbered. Any time a large company abandons the low end, it is a sign that they are not hungry anymore and can't be bothered with innovation, since it typically happens from the low end and migrates to the higher end product lines later. Think about RISC processors. One of the big draws to them was the fact that they are very cheap, fast, dumb devices. Even though everyone thinks they are expensive because they were found in Macs and high end workstations, the bottom end of the chipsets were typically found in routers, switches and imbeded systems. For example, I have a router card from a 3Com Total Control router platform with a PPC 601 chip, an audio generator with a Motorola DSP-56001 (OK, so it was never used in a workstation, but you get the idea), and I know that Cisco has been using r5000 processors for years. Even though they aren't sexy products, they all have more power than they need and can be a great way to have engineers squeeze performance out of inexpensive chips. This will lead upwards, as the Pentium processor proved. After all, the Pentium has RISC like architecture and that most likely would not have happened without the low end chips being able to do summersaults within the constraints put in place.
You can, but it will require a little playing around with an antenna. It is unlikely you will be able to hear with a standard "rubber duck" antenna. I use one of these, made by Arrow Antennas, for working Ham satellites. Then you need to figure out when the satelite will be in range. For example, AO-51 is in a polar orbit. It makes 2 passes per day. I have heard it with a 1/4 wave dipole on my HT, but not very well. The Arrow works much, much better. A good source of location data is the Heavens-Above web site, but if you really get into satelite listening, you'll want to download a tracking program. I use STS Plus, mostly because it is freeware, but there are many others.
Once you get some idea of when the sat will be overhead, you can start tuning around the transmit frequency. You have to keep the squelch open, and it helps to have a continuous tuning receiver because it is easier to adjust for doppler shift. I wouldn't think the NASA communications between the ISS and ground control is open for the general public (looks like the ground control systems are not easily heard by a scanner anyway), but the HAM stuff is all just narrowband FM. Good luck.
As for the design specifics. . . If you look at the proposed designs, they aren't what anybody would have created starting from a clean slate. The NYT article implies it's all about saving money, but the real reason for using recycled Shuttle components is all about politics and expedience.
ANY idea that is floated out there will be good old tried and true technology. Remember, the last thing anyone in NASA wants to see (with good reason, mind you) is an exploded rocket on CNN. NASA has become very, very conservitive. Even with the request from the White House to get a manned mission to Mars, I don't expect to see it in my lifetime, at least not Americans - maybe the Chinese. Hopefully the technology has become cheap enough to have a realistic private enterprise solution, but until there is some compelling reason for private business to go there, I don't see that happening.
"This is the new Nasa. If we cannot prove this is safe, we don't want to go there. It exceeded our threshold and we needed to take action," Mr Hale said.
That was my thought as well. As I read this quote, all I can think is "This is the end of maned spaceflight."
Sorry about the "ME TOO!" quote, but this sort of thinking is what's wrong with America these days. Where are the bold men and women who built this great land of ours? I'm not just talking about the great ones in the history books, but the people who built the railroads (yea, yea, I know many of them came from China), created so much wealth from raw materials, took ideas that seemed crazy and made them commonplace, and had songs written about them? And where the heck is WOZ?
You know, that's what I thought at first, too. But lets remember Discovery is 21 years old now. If you had a 21 year old car, would not not treat it a little more gently than something new? Would you not expect a few maintenence issues?
If I drove my car as often as a shuttle launches, then, yes, I would expect it to behave as new. Keep in mind, many of the tiles are replaced after every flight.
The big problem is that I don't think NASA believes in maned spaceflight. It seems like the only reason they do it is to get the folks in Washington interested in funding. The shuttle program is a huge piece of pork for Rockwell, Norton Thiokol and anyone else who can get on board.
That being said, I stll love to watch every launch I can, and I'm very much in awe of the men and women who go to work on the end of a rocket.
Great. Now, for the rest of the world running Windows, how the hell are we going to figure all this out? See, I wanted to play an mpeg 2 file on my Windows machine. I downloaded the file, double clicked on it and it automagically opened in media player and played. I didn't have to load anything else, didn't have to add "pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/9.3 on ftp.gwdg.de" or "MPlayer, w32codec-all, mplayerplug-in (for Mozilla/Firefox), and kmplayer (KDE frontend for MPlayer/FFMpeg/Xine and much cleaner than the default MPlayer GUI)"
I realize there's a little bit of humor in your post, but COME ON! Playing a multimedia file should be a no brainer on any desktop operating system.
On a related note, I spent the better part of a month attempting to get Xastir running on a basic Mandrake install. I ended up having to complile a kernel (which always seems to mess things up in unexpected ways), screw around with low level soundcard stuff, and I still didn't get it working. So, I put Win98 back as the default boot, installed UI-View32 and it's been running without a hitch for a few months now. I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I have been around computers all my life, starting with a PDP-8e that I programmed from the front panel. One would think I could get a simple application to load. And why is it that an.rpm package needs to have dependenancies? Just load the darn things. If the package needs 'em, go get 'em (or better yet, include them with the package). What a pain, and a perfect example of why Linux will never be a good OS for the masses -the folks developing it are not developing for the masses, but for themselves.
Instead of POTS over cable, how about a "cordless" phone that works all over town, within x distance of the cable system. Most of us spend the majority of our time somewhat close to our homes (the average commute is about 15 miles, if I recall). It would be somewhat easy to develop a phone that would act as an extension/intercom all over town. I really think that the first cell/mobile phone company that makes it very easy and free to call phones under the same account (much like extensions on wired phones), will clean up and make major inroads to the wired phone world. At this point that seems to be the only real advantage to wired phones.
Oh, and using the cable system to pick up wireless phones using picocellular tech will greatly increase battery life, and make it possible to provide much more bandwidth per call (due to greater frequency reuse). Too bad it won't happen, because of this obsession with wireline phone service by the cable companies. The sad thing is that it is already too late for the wired phone line. Verizon realizes this, since they are one of the few RBOCs that has a real cell network. They can see the growth of cellular and decline of wireline. They aren't loosing wireline customers to cable or CLECs, they are loosing them to cellphones.
Business may be the exception, but greater use of VOIP on internal networks will mean fewer POTS lines overall by business as well.
It seems very wasteful of energy to have a reuseable launch vehicle anyway. At least, the satellite communications industry seems to think so. Not too many of them are launched via the shuttle. The Russian space program doesn't use reuseable, either. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it makes sense, economically or otherwise.
I remember seeing the Appollo 11 command module in the National Air and Space museum. It looked a little scorched, but there was enough that could have been reused that it may have made sense to salvage parts for future flights. Most of it was just sheet metal anyway, so what's the point of reusing such a large amount of the orbiter? If the engines are so valuable, make them part of the reentry vehicle (or put them on their own reentry vehicle).
I hope the engineers designing the shuttle's replacement keep in mind that it doesn't HAVE to land like a glider, just get the darn thing back to the Earth's surface. The landings are boring anyway. I know that the idea was to truck stuff back from a space station or capture satellites and return them to the shop for upgrades. I think that has happend maybe once or twice that we know of (what with the military missions of the 80's), so that was a great success.
Maybe the next "launch platform" will be more than one solution- the right tool for the job at hand.
If you ask my opinion though, now is the perfect time to start your own Japanese empire.
1. Move to Japan
2. Have like 12 kids
3. Wait a couple generations
4....
5. Profit! (genetically speaking)
Just make sure to save a couple of kids to care for you when you are old and infirm. I seriously doubt this robo-suit thing will pan out.
The problem is LI #1 - Move to Japan. The main reason we in the US won't have as much of a problem with aging boomers as Japan (who also had a post-WWII boom) is because we're more than happy to allow imigration (legal or otherwise) to bolster the ranks of the working. Japan is still a very closed society. If a country wants to maintain racial purity they have to have lots of children. Japan failed to do that, and is unwilling to increase the number of imagrants into the country. Now they are beginning to embrace women in the workplace (no pun intended) because they have no choice. Unfortuantly this will make things worse, due to women not having to rely on a man for food and shelter (and not getting married), and the tradition of long hours at work and scheduling conflicts. There was a NOVA about this subject a few months ago. They profiled a rural school with 1 student. When he graduates, the school will close down because there is no one after him. The elderly farmers in the area have no one to help take care of them as they age. I guess there's always harri-karri...
here is a list of the Computer Chronicles references to the Amiga. For you young whipper snappers out there, Computer Chronicles was the way we got to see all the neat computer stuff we couldn't afford, provided we could pick up the PBS station with the antenna.
Jeeze, you're lucky this isn't the Ham group I used to meet up with twice a month back home. I once got pissed off about this requirement and it was like a wolf pack frenzy on my arse for daring to question something so enobling as learning code.
That's one of the biggest problems with the whole debate. The ham group in the town I used to live in was all HF, no new stuff, and above all, CW now... CW forever. I went to a few meetings and got the very cold shoulder. Never got on the air for about 4 years after that, except at hamfests to talk to my dad and uncle on FM simplex.
Now, after I moved, a lot of the people I talk to on the repeater network (http://www.colcon.org/ are no code techs, very friendly, and not one code debate so far. The great thing about it is, now that I'm back in the hobby again, I'm learning code and hopefully going to be able to upgrade my license this fall.
That's because it is one of the few things that are still better to build yourself than buy. There are very few of us out there who can build as good a radio as what Icom/Yeasu/Kenwood can sell us. Those of us who like to build things have taken more to making accessories for the radios instead of the radio itself (not counting the QRP (low power) guys who still are able to get radio kits and build their own stuff).
The reason we all talk about them is because the antenna is the most important part of the circuit from a radiation prospective, and is usually very easy and cheap to build, using simple parts found at the home center. I have a mix of commercial and homebrew antennas, and the commerical antennas work just fine, but I wouldn't have bought them if I didn't get a good deal on them -the exception being on my car... I can't see being able to build something that will stand up to that kind of abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, sure, some people take their phone adapter with them on business trips. Most people don't. The driving force for VOIP is cheap phone calls, not portability. Portable devices will always be harder to locate. The cell phone solutions may work, but only if you're outside and able to see 4 or more GPS sats (the tower data just helps the GPS get a lock faster). If you call 911 from the basement, it is unlikely they'll be able to quickly locate you.
Just one little problem with this, MAC addresses are never seen outside of a network
As far as a MAC not seen outside a network, of course that's the case, but (for example), cable billing/authorization systems use the cable modem MAC address as a serial number. It shouldn't be much harder for billing systems to do the same thing with VIOP boxes. Remember, this whole thing is about trying to kill off Vonage and the others, not VOIP.
I really don't understand the big deal about VOIP anyway. Sure, cheap international phone calls are nice, but that's still a niche market. My cell phone has a boatload of minutes, lots of competition, and nationwide calling without long distance fees. The ONLY reason I could see moving to a landline again is so that 2 people could be on an extension at the same time, but there are devices out there that allow cells to connect to landline infrastructure in the home. As far as the bandwidth needed to move everyone to a cell phone, I don't think that's an issue. After all, I see many people just hanging on phones all the time in cars, walking down the street, etc. I don't think they'd be sitting at home yacking away like that, because they're on their way to someplace. The rest of us are going to follow normal, predictable calling patterns, which require a normal precictable engineering solution (and maybe yet another spectrum auction).
Been watching _Airplane!_ lately?
"They bought their tickets, they knew what they were in for... I say, let 'em crash!"
Well, if the gaskets hold up, it may even work better, since it will be water cooled.
Well, as long as you're violating the law, my HF tranceiver can be modified to transmit on any frequency it receives. encryption on a ham band (at least HF) would get a lot of attention. Not so much on VHF and above, but still, why not pick one no one is listening to.
Watch Sienfield. They've based entire episodes on commericals (Kenny! Kenny! Come back Kenny!)
I think that at some point, we'll be able to tell our TV's that we are looking for, say, a new truck, and it will send us commercials for trucks and car dealers' offers. Of course, I'll tell the TV I'm really intrested in Victoria's Secret and Women's hair care products, but hey, at least the advertising company can say that I watch 100% of them!
I often thought it would be easy to build a sterling engine on a deep mountain lake. Since the tempature would not go very high at the bottom of the lake, it should be possible to pipe cooling fluid to the bottom of the lake. This way it wouldn't need as much of a solar reflector, or a greater amount of energy could be produced, due to the greater difference in tempatures. Just run glycol pumps off the driveshaft, one for hot, one for cold, blow air across a radiator and into the chambers. Any reason it wouldn't work (other than a warming of the bottom of the lake) on Lake Powell or Lake Mead?
Oh, but the hype of fiber optic cable is very low right now, so it can't be any good. And besides, all you have to do is get a few high school kids to mess around with Linksys routers and Pingles cans to get WIFI working. Fiber optic systems need to have trained professionals. Sorry, I forgot.
BTW, this is why we need the FCC. Those of you who think that the FCC should be abolished must have very good lawyers, because in the absence of government management of "property," you end up with squatters, lawyers and vigilanty groups.
And they say morse code will die if the FCC doesn't require hams to know code on HF...
You must not have gone to college. In most college classrooms, being labeled as a commie is a GOOD thing.
Attention... Would those of you who have trash from the ISS please come and claim it? If you don't pick up your trash in hanger 12 by 4:00pm, it will be disposed of at your expense. That is all."
Well, get rid of your Intel stock. Now that they don't have time for the cheap, simple chips, I really think their days are numbered. Any time a large company abandons the low end, it is a sign that they are not hungry anymore and can't be bothered with innovation, since it typically happens from the low end and migrates to the higher end product lines later. Think about RISC processors. One of the big draws to them was the fact that they are very cheap, fast, dumb devices. Even though everyone thinks they are expensive because they were found in Macs and high end workstations, the bottom end of the chipsets were typically found in routers, switches and imbeded systems. For example, I have a router card from a 3Com Total Control router platform with a PPC 601 chip, an audio generator with a Motorola DSP-56001 (OK, so it was never used in a workstation, but you get the idea), and I know that Cisco has been using r5000 processors for years. Even though they aren't sexy products, they all have more power than they need and can be a great way to have engineers squeeze performance out of inexpensive chips. This will lead upwards, as the Pentium processor proved. After all, the Pentium has RISC like architecture and that most likely would not have happened without the low end chips being able to do summersaults within the constraints put in place.
Once you get some idea of when the sat will be overhead, you can start tuning around the transmit frequency. You have to keep the squelch open, and it helps to have a continuous tuning receiver because it is easier to adjust for doppler shift. I wouldn't think the NASA communications between the ISS and ground control is open for the general public (looks like the ground control systems are not easily heard by a scanner anyway), but the HAM stuff is all just narrowband FM. Good luck.
ANY idea that is floated out there will be good old tried and true technology. Remember, the last thing anyone in NASA wants to see (with good reason, mind you) is an exploded rocket on CNN. NASA has become very, very conservitive. Even with the request from the White House to get a manned mission to Mars, I don't expect to see it in my lifetime, at least not Americans - maybe the Chinese. Hopefully the technology has become cheap enough to have a realistic private enterprise solution, but until there is some compelling reason for private business to go there, I don't see that happening.
That was my thought as well. As I read this quote, all I can think is "This is the end of maned spaceflight."
Sorry about the "ME TOO!" quote, but this sort of thinking is what's wrong with America these days. Where are the bold men and women who built this great land of ours? I'm not just talking about the great ones in the history books, but the people who built the railroads (yea, yea, I know many of them came from China), created so much wealth from raw materials, took ideas that seemed crazy and made them commonplace, and had songs written about them? And where the heck is WOZ?
If I drove my car as often as a shuttle launches, then, yes, I would expect it to behave as new. Keep in mind, many of the tiles are replaced after every flight.
The big problem is that I don't think NASA believes in maned spaceflight. It seems like the only reason they do it is to get the folks in Washington interested in funding. The shuttle program is a huge piece of pork for Rockwell, Norton Thiokol and anyone else who can get on board.
That being said, I stll love to watch every launch I can, and I'm very much in awe of the men and women who go to work on the end of a rocket.
Great. Now, for the rest of the world running Windows, how the hell are we going to figure all this out? See, I wanted to play an mpeg 2 file on my Windows machine. I downloaded the file, double clicked on it and it automagically opened in media player and played. I didn't have to load anything else, didn't have to add "pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/9.3 on ftp.gwdg.de" or "MPlayer, w32codec-all, mplayerplug-in (for Mozilla/Firefox), and kmplayer (KDE frontend for MPlayer/FFMpeg/Xine and much cleaner than the default MPlayer GUI)"
.rpm package needs to have dependenancies? Just load the darn things. If the package needs 'em, go get 'em (or better yet, include them with the package). What a pain, and a perfect example of why Linux will never be a good OS for the masses -the folks developing it are not developing for the masses, but for themselves.
I realize there's a little bit of humor in your post, but COME ON! Playing a multimedia file should be a no brainer on any desktop operating system.
On a related note, I spent the better part of a month attempting to get Xastir running on a basic Mandrake install. I ended up having to complile a kernel (which always seems to mess things up in unexpected ways), screw around with low level soundcard stuff, and I still didn't get it working. So, I put Win98 back as the default boot, installed UI-View32 and it's been running without a hitch for a few months now. I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I have been around computers all my life, starting with a PDP-8e that I programmed from the front panel. One would think I could get a simple application to load. And why is it that an
Instead of POTS over cable, how about a "cordless" phone that works all over town, within x distance of the cable system. Most of us spend the majority of our time somewhat close to our homes (the average commute is about 15 miles, if I recall). It would be somewhat easy to develop a phone that would act as an extension/intercom all over town. I really think that the first cell/mobile phone company that makes it very easy and free to call phones under the same account (much like extensions on wired phones), will clean up and make major inroads to the wired phone world. At this point that seems to be the only real advantage to wired phones.
Oh, and using the cable system to pick up wireless phones using picocellular tech will greatly increase battery life, and make it possible to provide much more bandwidth per call (due to greater frequency reuse). Too bad it won't happen, because of this obsession with wireline phone service by the cable companies. The sad thing is that it is already too late for the wired phone line. Verizon realizes this, since they are one of the few RBOCs that has a real cell network. They can see the growth of cellular and decline of wireline. They aren't loosing wireline customers to cable or CLECs, they are loosing them to cellphones.
Business may be the exception, but greater use of VOIP on internal networks will mean fewer POTS lines overall by business as well.
I remember seeing the Appollo 11 command module in the National Air and Space museum. It looked a little scorched, but there was enough that could have been reused that it may have made sense to salvage parts for future flights. Most of it was just sheet metal anyway, so what's the point of reusing such a large amount of the orbiter? If the engines are so valuable, make them part of the reentry vehicle (or put them on their own reentry vehicle).
I hope the engineers designing the shuttle's replacement keep in mind that it doesn't HAVE to land like a glider, just get the darn thing back to the Earth's surface. The landings are boring anyway. I know that the idea was to truck stuff back from a space station or capture satellites and return them to the shop for upgrades. I think that has happend maybe once or twice that we know of (what with the military missions of the 80's), so that was a great success.
Maybe the next "launch platform" will be more than one solution- the right tool for the job at hand.
If you ask my opinion though, now is the perfect time to start your own Japanese empire.
...
1. Move to Japan
2. Have like 12 kids
3. Wait a couple generations
4.
5. Profit! (genetically speaking)
Just make sure to save a couple of kids to care for you when you are old and infirm. I seriously doubt this robo-suit thing will pan out.
The problem is LI #1 - Move to Japan. The main reason we in the US won't have as much of a problem with aging boomers as Japan (who also had a post-WWII boom) is because we're more than happy to allow imigration (legal or otherwise) to bolster the ranks of the working. Japan is still a very closed society. If a country wants to maintain racial purity they have to have lots of children. Japan failed to do that, and is unwilling to increase the number of imagrants into the country. Now they are beginning to embrace women in the workplace (no pun intended) because they have no choice. Unfortuantly this will make things worse, due to women not having to rely on a man for food and shelter (and not getting married), and the tradition of long hours at work and scheduling conflicts. There was a NOVA about this subject a few months ago. They profiled a rural school with 1 student. When he graduates, the school will close down because there is no one after him. The elderly farmers in the area have no one to help take care of them as they age. I guess there's always harri-karri...
here is a list of the Computer Chronicles references to the Amiga. For you young whipper snappers out there, Computer Chronicles was the way we got to see all the neat computer stuff we couldn't afford, provided we could pick up the PBS station with the antenna.
Jeeze, you're lucky this isn't the Ham group I used to meet up with twice a month back home. I once got pissed off about this requirement and it was like a wolf pack frenzy on my arse for daring to question something so enobling as learning code.
That's one of the biggest problems with the whole debate. The ham group in the town I used to live in was all HF, no new stuff, and above all, CW now... CW forever. I went to a few meetings and got the very cold shoulder. Never got on the air for about 4 years after that, except at hamfests to talk to my dad and uncle on FM simplex.
Now, after I moved, a lot of the people I talk to on the repeater network (http://www.colcon.org/ are no code techs, very friendly, and not one code debate so far. The great thing about it is, now that I'm back in the hobby again, I'm learning code and hopefully going to be able to upgrade my license this fall.
You should look for a Morse code trainer.
Using the G4FON Kotch method trainer. Seems to be working, but I'm not going to learn it in 2 weeks, as some others claim to have done.
That's because it is one of the few things that are still better to build yourself than buy. There are very few of us out there who can build as good a radio as what Icom/Yeasu/Kenwood can sell us. Those of us who like to build things have taken more to making accessories for the radios instead of the radio itself (not counting the QRP (low power) guys who still are able to get radio kits and build their own stuff).
The reason we all talk about them is because the antenna is the most important part of the circuit from a radiation prospective, and is usually very easy and cheap to build, using simple parts found at the home center. I have a mix of commercial and homebrew antennas, and the commerical antennas work just fine, but I wouldn't have bought them if I didn't get a good deal on them -the exception being on my car... I can't see being able to build something that will stand up to that kind of abuse.