Well, you can do the math, but here are some conversions:
1 kW-hr = 3412 BTUs
This one might be more useful, though:
1 therm = 29.3 kW-hr
The second conversion uses both unit typically found on a residential utility bill. 1kW-hr is equal to lighting ten 100W incandescents for a period of one hour. So, a single 100W light bulb will produce 0.0034 therms for every hour it is on.
I'll use my rates to do a calculation:
On my last bill, I paid almost $0.10/kW-hr and about $1.30 a therm for gas.
1 therm / 0.0034 therms/hr = 294.1 hours of on time for the bulb to equal one therm.
294.1 hrs x 0.1 kW = 29.41 kW-hr consumed by the bulb to generate one therm.
29.41 kW-hr x $0.1 / kW-hr = $2.94 worth of electricity used by the bulb to equal one therm.
I'm assuming that the 5% light energy will eventually end up as heat as well once absorbed by its surroundings. As you can see, it's more than twice as expensive for me to heat with electricity than it is with gas...even when considering heat loses in the inefficiencies of my high-efficiency furnace with a little heat going out the PVC stack.
Even with all of this said, I still think that incandescents are appropriate, even necessary in some applications, including one's personal desire in lighting type. An outright ban on incandescents is quite short-sighted as other comments have outlined.
Well, look at this way: The light wouldn't need to be electrically powered when the Microwave is running, there should be more than ample stray microwave energy to get it to light up...until it blows up.
Good math, but I think that you are correct in saying that it's really optimistic. 33MPH is a pretty strong breeze, and to extract the necessary energy to cool that amount of air, you will develop a significant amount of static pressure leading into it, slowing the amount of air processed. I think getting a liter an hour is a better optimistic, top-end estimate for a machine roughly the size you postulated...a lot more, of course, in a moisture rich environment.
The more I think about this idea, I think it might be advantageous to use the underground temperature to help you out. Pump the air through a pipe with cooling fins underground to drop the air temperature somewhat before applying additional vacuum to lower the temperature further to reach the dewpoint. I know it sounds good, but the inefficiencies would likely catch up with you pretty quick...not to mention the huge amount of ground you'd need to excavate and the associated cooling network needed to get the desired result.
Good point, but the wind is also stronger during the day. It's sunlight that heats the ground, causing air to rise, creating an area of lower pressure, that results in wind. Nighttime might be a better time to extract water since the air temp is closer to the dewpoint, but will there be enough wind left to run the contraption?
Re:Interested....
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I believe that it's works based off of the ideal gas law, more more specifically, Gay-Lussac's law. The blades reduce the air pressure in close vicinity, causing a drop in temperature. Colder air can't hold as much moisture so some of it condenses out as water.
What gets me is that this machine will have to work really hard in drier climates to extract water, as you essentially need to lower air to its dewpoint temperature to get water to condense out. In a desert, the dewpoint can be as low as 35F on a 100F degree day. This means that you need to lower the air in the column to below 35F to get any results. Fortunately, most places aren't always that bad when it comes to a "dry heat". Since it's powered by the wind, you really can't claim it as being energy hungry, just maybe not effective enough to necessarily meet demand.
Great choice! I own two of these for use on my personal watercraft (2 watercraft, one for each craft). Nice durable radio, 5W output, long battery life and they definitely stand up to a swim as I keep it on my vest, even when I jump in.
DSC (digital selective calling) is nice, but the radio needs to have GPS receiver built-in or integrated in some other way. IIRC, Garmin is getting close to this as they have already integrated a FRS radio with a GPS receiver. It would seem to me that the next logical step is to do the same with VHF marine guts instead. You are correct that there are hand-helds that do DSC, but I remember if they are equipped with a GPS to report their position (they can do the rest of the DSC stuff).
Another thing that is emerging are personal EPIRB's (Emergency Position-Indicating Rescue Beacon) that mariners (primarily commercial, but also available for private use) can keep on their vests/belts. The ones that I see on the market now are 121.5MHz only, which they are trying to phase out in favor of the 406MHz versions that also transmit location information from an integrated GPS receiver. Unfortunately, they're just like life vests. They're only good if you're wearing it.
Cellphones are usually next to useless once you get about 12-15 miles offshore. Aside from that, it would be very likely that his boat is equipped with a VHF marine radio. For the Coast Guard, this is 1000 times more helpful than a cellphone as virtually every rescue boat and helo is equipped with automatic direction finding equipment (doppler antenna array) that allows them to nearly instantly determine the direction of a radio signal within a degree or two of its originating direction.
While the Coast Guard is likely putting out urgent marine broadcasts to mariners, the problem is that many sailboater prefer to sail with their radio off to save battery power (or course they turn it on when they want to use it, or get into trouble) so he wouldn't hear it if he were being sought.
If he fell overboard, the radio (or a cellphone) isn't going to do him much good at that point. While powerboats tend to start circling after a little bit of time, sailboats tend to keep getting pushed downwind and away from whoever was thrown overboard. The sailboat can also get pushed outside the initial search area as well because of this. They take wind, current and type of boat into consideration when they widen the search area.
--- 12 years doing search and rescue on open water in addition to being a geek.
We have a telescope in orbit that's servicable. It seems to me that the big, expensive part of this marvel would be the large optical reflector. Unless someone could point out a reason otherwise, would it not make sense to just keep making camera upgrades to put on the end of this thing? Yes, I realize that I may be oversimplying this procedure, but if it's not feasible to service it in the near future, is there something wrong with tucking it away in a safe orbit until it would become feasible...or clearly determine that the telescope has reached the end of its useful life and then de-orbit it?
Heck, if privatized, manned spaceflight is just around the corner, sell the silly thing to a private entity so they can fix it up and sell operating (viewing) time on it. Richard Branson and his ilk could have a field day with it.
Now when someone tries to cast a vote from home on their spyware-riddled PC, later to find out it wasn't counted or cast incorrectly, then what? Or worse a whole bunch of voters are disenfranchised and don't even know it because of their clunky equipment.
Sorry fellas, you have to leave the internet out of this idea for now. Get the bugs worked out of the stand-alone electronic voting machines first.
Why do we keep looking at corn when it comes to Ethanol? The short answer is that we grow way too much of it, anyway. While ethanol can be made from corn, it's not the most effective feedsource for producing it. Obviously, something like sugar is much more effective.
What bothers me every time the argument pro/con ethanol comes up is that ethanol production from cellulose materials is not mentioned. This emerging technology holds the promise of significant gains in production efficiency, allowing up to a ten-fold gain from corn, but more importantly the production of ethanol from less labor intensive crops such as grasses, and even reclamation from current waste products, such as spent wood liquor at paper mills. This technology already exists and it's just starting to be implemented.
Now is ethanol the long-term solution? Probably not, but it sure makes for a good transitional fuel until the price of fuel cells and other promising technologies become economically feasible.
It's a combination of the two. Remember, electricity isn't generated from the heat, but by harnessing heat movement (i.e. thermodynamic principle of heat diffusing outward into its environment). Yes, there's a lot of heat emitted by all those things plugged in, but there's also a significant amount going out the cooling towers/cooling pond/river/lake/ocean as well.
The show, in too many different ways, albeit technological, chronological, sociological, etc. has parted ways with the bounds of reality so much that the show has become uninteresting to watch because it lacks any plausibility any more.
The artistic license given to Hollywood (and now, New York) is so vast that I've stopped watching CSI regularly for similar reasons. I mean, these guys can pull a good DNA sample off of dog poop and trace it back through the Miami-Dade Humane Society's database on any canine that's passed through a vetrinary's office within a 100 mile radius. Or, my favorite, reading and enhancing the license plate off a car, at night, parked almost perpendicular to the camera view, from an ATM camera recording.
Anyway, it's obvious that the offender had inside access to the shows, as commented on many times previously. A copyright issue? Likely. But it's more like an issue of confidential insider information leaked before it was supposed to go public. The information in this case, was the episodes.
Now, a real entrenpreneur would take the resulting globs of fat from liposuction, transesterifcate it into biodiesel, and sell the product at their pumps!
Adding to the "icky" factor of this idea, the glycerin by-product from the biodiesel making process could be used to make soap. So, just situate your Bath and Body Works in the same strip mall.
The biodegradability is a "feature". It forces the user to upgrade their phone/iPod/PDA on a regular basis. If Microsoft can force obsolecence of software, why can't the hardware people come up with a similar solution?
Actually, if they have the capability of putting power back on the grid, they'd love it. Since Joe Consumer would be generating such a miniscule amount of power, they can pay him a real cheap rate for it. Multiply Joe consumer by 10,000 or so and you have a generation system that is distributed, not maintained by the utility, and the utility pays less than what it would to buy power from a neighboring utility for power...and saves the transmission cost.
The biggest PITA for a utility is power generation facilities maintenance and cost. The big issue that they face today is keeping up with consumer demand, which requires more generation capacity, that requires a whole myriad of legal and environmental hoops to be jumped through just to even mention the idea of constructing a new power plant (or windmill farm, for that matter). With something like this, someone else has shouldered all the cost of setting up and getting a generation facility (albeit small) online, and they have the added benefit that they can pay a below market price for the electricity to boot, and not have to pay transmission costs as cherry on top of all of this.
Seems to me that the utilities would encourage things like this.
I think the system is designed to address the more primitive weapons, such as the rocket-propelled grenade, that rely upon good aim prior to launching. AFAIK, it's still pretty hard to shoot down a plane with such a primitive weapon, anyway.
Military technology that is specifically designed to shoot down a plane using an air-to-air missile, or even surface-to-air missile is much more sophisticated, and has a very good chance of defeating such a system at this point.
Agreed with what you've said about the reasons for secrecy and its importance.
My point is in this particular case, it's not like the result of your vote is displayed on a large overhead display. Rather, someone would have to go through quite a bit of trouble to capture this information. It would be akin to placing one of those nickel-sized camera/transmitters inside the voting booth to see which ovals you filled in on your ballot (or touched on the screen, for that matter). Am I implicating that the problem should be ignored? Hardly. I just think that it's being made out to be a much more serious issue than it probably is in comparison to other ones (i.e. machine tampering/vulnerabilities).
Next, we'll hear that the secrecy was compromised because someone is lifting fingerprints from touchscreens. The obvious counter to this is to randomly switch the order of the candidates on the touchscreens so that their name isn't in the same spot for every voter. In fact, this might be the solution for the case in the article. Of course, this opens up the next can of worms as political parties niggle over whether or not the order was truly randomized, because we all know that way too many people just vote for the candidate on the top of the list.
Imagine those companies that sell expensive toner and ink cartridges pairing up with someone to write some malicious code to burn through your printing supplies faster.
It won't be long before you hear about something like the "Page_Blackout" or "Toner_Drain" worm.
It's nice to see that someone cares about the secrecy of the voting process, but I would think that integrity in the vote count itself would take a much higher priority over this issue.
In some remote way, it reminds me of the military's concern long ago (and largely before my time) over the use of IBM Selectric typewriters, as the RF emissions (i.e. coils and motors starting and stopping, a primitive spark-gap transmitter in a sense) from the mechanisms could be detected and reconstituted into what was being typed from a short distance away.
What about the hard drives in the laptops of passengers on commercial airplanes? I would think that some of those travel in upwards of 800km/hr during flight.
So what they really need to do is find a way to stop a chain reaction from occurring. This technology might be good step in that direction. What needs to be determined is whether the separation between the cells provides sufficient thermal isolation/disipation to prevent one grouping of short-circuited cells from overheating adjacent ones.
I wouldn't necessarily keep looking to the telcos for broadband access. It seems to me that there's an increasing number of options to the consumers, including more rural areas. If you can't get DSL, then what about cable (there's more of it strung up in the countryside than most people realize)? If you can't get cable, what about satellite? If satellite is too expensive, someone might be offering WiMax. I know where I live in semi-rural Wisconsin, there are several companies that have established a network of Motorola Canopy wireless broadband sites. If not that, check into Sprint/Nextel's 3G cards...about the same price as satellite, without the propagation delay.
I realize that low-end DSL rivals a good dial-up on cost, but one should realize that the more expensive broadband options are typically faster. The DSL that Verizon was offering in my area was 384kbps downstream for the $19/mo charge. Will that serve most people's needs? Maybe. If it will, then a ~56kbps dial would probably meet their needs, too. For a little bit more, I get 8Mbps from the cable company. I pay more than the DSL, but I also get quite a bit more in speed...particularly on upstream performance.
The way I see it, there's an emerging number of means of conveying voice/data available to the consumer...and it's already started reaching those in less populated areas through various wireless schemes. The paradigm shift from looking to the telcos for your voice/data needs to other providers has long since begun./P.
I think you are correct in saying that it was taken out of context. I believe their intent was to convey that the frequency (i.e. portion of broadcast spectrum) was public property, and technically belonged to everybody, not just the entity that was licensed to transmit on it.
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Well, you can do the math, but here are some conversions:
This one might be more useful, though:
1 therm = 29.3 kW-hr
The second conversion uses both unit typically found on a residential utility bill. 1kW-hr is equal to lighting ten 100W incandescents for a period of one hour. So, a single 100W light bulb will produce 0.0034 therms for every hour it is on.
I'll use my rates to do a calculation:
On my last bill, I paid almost $0.10/kW-hr and about $1.30 a therm for gas.
1 therm / 0.0034 therms/hr = 294.1 hours of on time for the bulb to equal one therm.
294.1 hrs x 0.1 kW = 29.41 kW-hr consumed by the bulb to generate one therm.
29.41 kW-hr x $0.1 / kW-hr = $2.94 worth of electricity used by the bulb to equal one therm.
I'm assuming that the 5% light energy will eventually end up as heat as well once absorbed by its surroundings. As you can see, it's more than twice as expensive for me to heat with electricity than it is with gas...even when considering heat loses in the inefficiencies of my high-efficiency furnace with a little heat going out the PVC stack.
Even with all of this said, I still think that incandescents are appropriate, even necessary in some applications, including one's personal desire in lighting type. An outright ban on incandescents is quite short-sighted as other comments have outlined.
Well, look at this way: The light wouldn't need to be electrically powered when the Microwave is running, there should be more than ample stray microwave energy to get it to light up...until it blows up.
Good math, but I think that you are correct in saying that it's really optimistic. 33MPH is a pretty strong breeze, and to extract the necessary energy to cool that amount of air, you will develop a significant amount of static pressure leading into it, slowing the amount of air processed. I think getting a liter an hour is a better optimistic, top-end estimate for a machine roughly the size you postulated...a lot more, of course, in a moisture rich environment.
The more I think about this idea, I think it might be advantageous to use the underground temperature to help you out. Pump the air through a pipe with cooling fins underground to drop the air temperature somewhat before applying additional vacuum to lower the temperature further to reach the dewpoint. I know it sounds good, but the inefficiencies would likely catch up with you pretty quick...not to mention the huge amount of ground you'd need to excavate and the associated cooling network needed to get the desired result.
Good point, but the wind is also stronger during the day. It's sunlight that heats the ground, causing air to rise, creating an area of lower pressure, that results in wind. Nighttime might be a better time to extract water since the air temp is closer to the dewpoint, but will there be enough wind left to run the contraption?
I believe that it's works based off of the ideal gas law, more more specifically, Gay-Lussac's law. The blades reduce the air pressure in close vicinity, causing a drop in temperature. Colder air can't hold as much moisture so some of it condenses out as water.
What gets me is that this machine will have to work really hard in drier climates to extract water, as you essentially need to lower air to its dewpoint temperature to get water to condense out. In a desert, the dewpoint can be as low as 35F on a 100F degree day. This means that you need to lower the air in the column to below 35F to get any results. Fortunately, most places aren't always that bad when it comes to a "dry heat". Since it's powered by the wind, you really can't claim it as being energy hungry, just maybe not effective enough to necessarily meet demand.
Great choice! I own two of these for use on my personal watercraft (2 watercraft, one for each craft). Nice durable radio, 5W output, long battery life and they definitely stand up to a swim as I keep it on my vest, even when I jump in.
DSC (digital selective calling) is nice, but the radio needs to have GPS receiver built-in or integrated in some other way. IIRC, Garmin is getting close to this as they have already integrated a FRS radio with a GPS receiver. It would seem to me that the next logical step is to do the same with VHF marine guts instead. You are correct that there are hand-helds that do DSC, but I remember if they are equipped with a GPS to report their position (they can do the rest of the DSC stuff).
Another thing that is emerging are personal EPIRB's (Emergency Position-Indicating Rescue Beacon) that mariners (primarily commercial, but also available for private use) can keep on their vests/belts. The ones that I see on the market now are 121.5MHz only, which they are trying to phase out in favor of the 406MHz versions that also transmit location information from an integrated GPS receiver. Unfortunately, they're just like life vests. They're only good if you're wearing it.
Cellphones are usually next to useless once you get about 12-15 miles offshore. Aside from that, it would be very likely that his boat is equipped with a VHF marine radio. For the Coast Guard, this is 1000 times more helpful than a cellphone as virtually every rescue boat and helo is equipped with automatic direction finding equipment (doppler antenna array) that allows them to nearly instantly determine the direction of a radio signal within a degree or two of its originating direction.
While the Coast Guard is likely putting out urgent marine broadcasts to mariners, the problem is that many sailboater prefer to sail with their radio off to save battery power (or course they turn it on when they want to use it, or get into trouble) so he wouldn't hear it if he were being sought.
If he fell overboard, the radio (or a cellphone) isn't going to do him much good at that point. While powerboats tend to start circling after a little bit of time, sailboats tend to keep getting pushed downwind and away from whoever was thrown overboard. The sailboat can also get pushed outside the initial search area as well because of this. They take wind, current and type of boat into consideration when they widen the search area.
--- 12 years doing search and rescue on open water in addition to being a geek.
We have a telescope in orbit that's servicable. It seems to me that the big, expensive part of this marvel would be the large optical reflector. Unless someone could point out a reason otherwise, would it not make sense to just keep making camera upgrades to put on the end of this thing? Yes, I realize that I may be oversimplying this procedure, but if it's not feasible to service it in the near future, is there something wrong with tucking it away in a safe orbit until it would become feasible...or clearly determine that the telescope has reached the end of its useful life and then de-orbit it?
Heck, if privatized, manned spaceflight is just around the corner, sell the silly thing to a private entity so they can fix it up and sell operating (viewing) time on it. Richard Branson and his ilk could have a field day with it.
Now when someone tries to cast a vote from home on their spyware-riddled PC, later to find out it wasn't counted or cast incorrectly, then what? Or worse a whole bunch of voters are disenfranchised and don't even know it because of their clunky equipment.
Sorry fellas, you have to leave the internet out of this idea for now. Get the bugs worked out of the stand-alone electronic voting machines first.
Why do we keep looking at corn when it comes to Ethanol? The short answer is that we grow way too much of it, anyway. While ethanol can be made from corn, it's not the most effective feedsource for producing it. Obviously, something like sugar is much more effective.
What bothers me every time the argument pro/con ethanol comes up is that ethanol production from cellulose materials is not mentioned. This emerging technology holds the promise of significant gains in production efficiency, allowing up to a ten-fold gain from corn, but more importantly the production of ethanol from less labor intensive crops such as grasses, and even reclamation from current waste products, such as spent wood liquor at paper mills. This technology already exists and it's just starting to be implemented.
Now is ethanol the long-term solution? Probably not, but it sure makes for a good transitional fuel until the price of fuel cells and other promising technologies become economically feasible.
And, FWIW, this applies to any power plant that uses stored energy. Whether it's coal, natural gas, oil, or nuclear.
It's a combination of the two. Remember, electricity isn't generated from the heat, but by harnessing heat movement (i.e. thermodynamic principle of heat diffusing outward into its environment). Yes, there's a lot of heat emitted by all those things plugged in, but there's also a significant amount going out the cooling towers/cooling pond/river/lake/ocean as well.
The show, in too many different ways, albeit technological, chronological, sociological, etc. has parted ways with the bounds of reality so much that the show has become uninteresting to watch because it lacks any plausibility any more.
The artistic license given to Hollywood (and now, New York) is so vast that I've stopped watching CSI regularly for similar reasons. I mean, these guys can pull a good DNA sample off of dog poop and trace it back through the Miami-Dade Humane Society's database on any canine that's passed through a vetrinary's office within a 100 mile radius. Or, my favorite, reading and enhancing the license plate off a car, at night, parked almost perpendicular to the camera view, from an ATM camera recording.
Anyway, it's obvious that the offender had inside access to the shows, as commented on many times previously. A copyright issue? Likely. But it's more like an issue of confidential insider information leaked before it was supposed to go public. The information in this case, was the episodes.
Now, a real entrenpreneur would take the resulting globs of fat from liposuction, transesterifcate it into biodiesel, and sell the product at their pumps!
Adding to the "icky" factor of this idea, the glycerin by-product from the biodiesel making process could be used to make soap. So, just situate your Bath and Body Works in the same strip mall.
(eww...)
The biodegradability is a "feature". It forces the user to upgrade their phone/iPod/PDA on a regular basis. If Microsoft can force obsolecence of software, why can't the hardware people come up with a similar solution?
Actually, if they have the capability of putting power back on the grid, they'd love it. Since Joe Consumer would be generating such a miniscule amount of power, they can pay him a real cheap rate for it. Multiply Joe consumer by 10,000 or so and you have a generation system that is distributed, not maintained by the utility, and the utility pays less than what it would to buy power from a neighboring utility for power...and saves the transmission cost.
The biggest PITA for a utility is power generation facilities maintenance and cost. The big issue that they face today is keeping up with consumer demand, which requires more generation capacity, that requires a whole myriad of legal and environmental hoops to be jumped through just to even mention the idea of constructing a new power plant (or windmill farm, for that matter). With something like this, someone else has shouldered all the cost of setting up and getting a generation facility (albeit small) online, and they have the added benefit that they can pay a below market price for the electricity to boot, and not have to pay transmission costs as cherry on top of all of this.
Seems to me that the utilities would encourage things like this.
I think the system is designed to address the more primitive weapons, such as the rocket-propelled grenade, that rely upon good aim prior to launching. AFAIK, it's still pretty hard to shoot down a plane with such a primitive weapon, anyway.
Military technology that is specifically designed to shoot down a plane using an air-to-air missile, or even surface-to-air missile is much more sophisticated, and has a very good chance of defeating such a system at this point.
Agreed with what you've said about the reasons for secrecy and its importance.
My point is in this particular case, it's not like the result of your vote is displayed on a large overhead display. Rather, someone would have to go through quite a bit of trouble to capture this information. It would be akin to placing one of those nickel-sized camera/transmitters inside the voting booth to see which ovals you filled in on your ballot (or touched on the screen, for that matter). Am I implicating that the problem should be ignored? Hardly. I just think that it's being made out to be a much more serious issue than it probably is in comparison to other ones (i.e. machine tampering/vulnerabilities).
Next, we'll hear that the secrecy was compromised because someone is lifting fingerprints from touchscreens. The obvious counter to this is to randomly switch the order of the candidates on the touchscreens so that their name isn't in the same spot for every voter. In fact, this might be the solution for the case in the article. Of course, this opens up the next can of worms as political parties niggle over whether or not the order was truly randomized, because we all know that way too many people just vote for the candidate on the top of the list.
Imagine those companies that sell expensive toner and ink cartridges pairing up with someone to write some malicious code to burn through your printing supplies faster.
It won't be long before you hear about something like the "Page_Blackout" or "Toner_Drain" worm.
It's nice to see that someone cares about the secrecy of the voting process, but I would think that integrity in the vote count itself would take a much higher priority over this issue.
In some remote way, it reminds me of the military's concern long ago (and largely before my time) over the use of IBM Selectric typewriters, as the RF emissions (i.e. coils and motors starting and stopping, a primitive spark-gap transmitter in a sense) from the mechanisms could be detected and reconstituted into what was being typed from a short distance away.
What about the hard drives in the laptops of passengers on commercial airplanes? I would think that some of those travel in upwards of 800km/hr during flight.
So what they really need to do is find a way to stop a chain reaction from occurring. This technology might be good step in that direction. What needs to be determined is whether the separation between the cells provides sufficient thermal isolation/disipation to prevent one grouping of short-circuited cells from overheating adjacent ones.
I think the brand that you are thinking of is Milwaukee power tools...named just like the city in Wisconsin where the company was founded.
I wouldn't necessarily keep looking to the telcos for broadband access. It seems to me that there's an increasing number of options to the consumers, including more rural areas. If you can't get DSL, then what about cable (there's more of it strung up in the countryside than most people realize)? If you can't get cable, what about satellite? If satellite is too expensive, someone might be offering WiMax. I know where I live in semi-rural Wisconsin, there are several companies that have established a network of Motorola Canopy wireless broadband sites. If not that, check into Sprint/Nextel's 3G cards...about the same price as satellite, without the propagation delay.
I realize that low-end DSL rivals a good dial-up on cost, but one should realize that the more expensive broadband options are typically faster. The DSL that Verizon was offering in my area was 384kbps downstream for the $19/mo charge. Will that serve most people's needs? Maybe. If it will, then a ~56kbps dial would probably meet their needs, too. For a little bit more, I get 8Mbps from the cable company. I pay more than the DSL, but I also get quite a bit more in speed...particularly on upstream performance.
The way I see it, there's an emerging number of means of conveying voice/data available to the consumer...and it's already started reaching those in less populated areas through various wireless schemes. The paradigm shift from looking to the telcos for your voice/data needs to other providers has long since begun./P.
I think you are correct in saying that it was taken out of context. I believe their intent was to convey that the frequency (i.e. portion of broadcast spectrum) was public property, and technically belonged to everybody, not just the entity that was licensed to transmit on it.