The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.

Yes, I can come up with a thousand free market answers. And yes, that pretty much answers your question.

Would you buy a vehicle from any company whatsoever if you knew that parts were difficult to acquire? A manufacturer can play a game with parts availability only if they don't plan to stay in business.

Maybe we should go back to renting our phones from ATT as well.

I wrote this up a day before that at http://technocrat.net/d/2014/2/20/6. I've known about it for a month or so, I don't know why nobody else was excited until now.

That makes more sense. Thanks.

I did that with Slashdot. I don't like the way it worked out.

Hi,

So, it is tempting to resurrect Technocrat.net now that Slashdot stinks worse than the last two times I shut down technocrat.net .

If you remember, we didn't get very many readers. We didn't get them because not enough people submitted usable articles.

As it happens, we don't just need a better Slashdot. We need a replacement for Groklaw. And I personally would be happier reading something with the absolute minimum of Javascript except perhaps in the submission editor. Maybe I'm old-fashioned.

I know that I can do it technically, and I have the server, and Cloudflare should be able to help me handle the load. But if it is like last time, and my wife observes that I'm talking to the same dozen guys all of the time, it's not going to work.

What do you think?

You dial 1-510-4PERENS. Email is probably better, though. bruce@perens.com .

How about a smartphone app that encodes steganographic audio in your photographs? If you upload your photos, the spies get your audio too!

You could do this using FRS walkie talkies, as long as they have microphone and earphone connections. Or analog telephones. It's been tested multiple times on ham FM walkie talkies. Anything that carries voice should work. The bandwidth is only 1.25 kHz and I think the low end starts at about 700 Hz.

There is a video of the codec vs. SSB on the same radio link here. You can also take any radio links you have at hand and run the FreeDV program. This is an evening project to set up without a business case, and at least some companies appreciate people who take the initiative to do this sort of thing.

I can get the soundrack of your entire lifetime on a 32G micro-SD card.

Since I did this talk, a lot of information about AMBE has been revealed and there is a receive-only implementation in Open Source. The patents in general run out by 2015. But AMBE is still a relatively low-performance codec compared to ours.

Sorry. When I say "1200 Baud", I am in general thinking of the TAPR TNC 2, which was never built for voice but can do it, to a degree, with this codec. It's sort of a Bell 212 modem on half-duplex radio. There were many commercial products based on the TNC 2 design and many hams have them on hand. It's a good demo to put speech through a pair of them, not really practical because the latency is high.

MOS is only for people who want to pay a lot of money. Of the automated processes, the one available to us isn't validated for less than 4K bps codecs.

It would be a great improvement to MOS if there was an open version of POQLA. But the actual customer base for the codec have never even heard of MOS and thus we aren't volunteering to write that. The folks who want to put it in expensive government support systems yet aren't willing to help with testing don't get our sympathy.

Correct. It's made for radio, and indeed you need to go connection-based rather than datagram-based to keep the header overhead smaller than the payload.