Most hams (including myself) are interested in HF (and others are interested in SWL and the new below-AM BCB ham frequencies.)

50 MHz means 6 meters and above -- basically, nothing that has any regularly occurring usable propagation modes. Many of these upper bands are almost dead -- I've not heard anyone on 2 meters or 70 cm around here in the last year -- but 10 through 160 meters (28 MHz through 1.8 MHz) are busy as heck, and of course all the SW spectrum in between.

Worse, we're almost certain to be about to slide down the sunspot curve, making the already mostly dead-by-choice bands completely dead-by-nature, propagation-wise.

RFSPACE's upcoming new unit is .009 (9khz) through 50 MHz. That's a lot more attractive to me. Both to use, and to support.

Then there's funcube dongle pro plus... 50 khz through 1.8 GHz, albeit without adequate filtering up front. But it's reasonably cheap, so there's that. (and I already supported it, PITA though it was, so it's not subject to the no-more-USB-devices rule.)

Well, whatever they end up with, I sure hope it's ethernet-connected and uses the standard SDR protocol as do Andrus, AFEDRI and RFSPACE. I've supported my last black sheep USB device (every darned OS has radically different USB interfacing and requirements... building my free cross-platform SDR software is most tricky with regard to USB issues. Ethernet, by comparison, is almost identical on all platforms -- the same SDR protocol / interfacing code works fine across linux, Windows and OS X.)

Keep the Jehovahs and Mormons from getting in the house. Bonus if it can hold off people pushing meritless products. But I repeat myself.

As for serving drinks or drugs, the damn things should do what they're told. I don't need robots to take agency from me. Lard knows the frigging government is spending more than enough effort on that already. For me personally, all I have to say is "I already have (had) a mother, and her last bit of authority over me expired in 1977."

First time a (non-conscious) robot refused to do what I told it to, presuming only it was within its comprehension and skill set, I think I'd take a hammer to it.

in addition, proposing a 2 billion prize to a private enterprise which will *skim* a part for its own shareholder/CEO make no sense, just give directly the money to public research...

In fact the free market is most probably the culprit with overusage of antibiotic for cattle and chicken rising. In this case though, public research should be here the solution. Yes sometimes the free market is not the solution, but rather public pooled resource, call it socialist or whatnot. Just like you would not want to have fire service be private, sometimes some research area need to be public too.

Look. The only reason you wouldn't be able to keep your insurance that the ACA could even *vaguely* be named responsible for is if it was so bad that it didn't meet the minimum standards of the ACA, and your insurance company didn't upgrade the policy accordingly -- most likely, they cancelled it in favor of new policies that *did* meet the minimum requirements. The whole *point* of the ACA was to see to it that people were *sufficiently* insured.

Otherwise, the only reasons you would lose your current insurance would be if the insurance company cancelled your policy -- and in that case, the blame lands squarely on the insurance company; or your employer decided to take the opportunity to cut your benefits and blame it on the ACA. In that case, look to your employer.

As for your doctor, the only ACA-related reason you might not be able to keep your doctor is if they don't bother to register with the pool you chose -- and all you have to do there is tell your doctor which one it is. And if they fail to register, you can blame your doctor. My doctor did the right thing, and she's still my doctor. I specifically asked, and she said there was almost nothing to it.

Now, let's look this issue right in the face. Are there conditions where you couldn't keep your doctor? Sure. For instance, if your doctor got run over by a bus. Or retired. Or committed suicide. Or moved to Botswana. Or switched jobs. So "Obama lied", right? But of course, if you're a sane person and not trying to shill your way through a bout of Obama-hate, you would understand that there will be some exceptions, and generally, they're going to be related to the doctor's circumstance -- just as the bus incident would be. Because there isn't one damn thing in the ACA that says "this here doctor can't be used."

As with the previous poster, my circumstances were enormously improved by the ACA. I did get to keep my doctor (it was no problem at all, she just did a little paperwork, that was it) and my coverage is now excellent.

Is everything perfect? No. Republicans are blocking the medicaid expansion here, so many no- and low-income individuals who were intended to be covered by the ACA, aren't. While this goes on, the taxes we paid here to cover them go to another state as the already-allocated funds are disbursed elsewhere. Consequently, our medical and insurance costs here are rising because we are paying the hospitals for uncompensated care for people who should have been covered, and for which the funds were already allocated.

Why don't you use some of those billions of dollars used to build those mega data centers and spend them on more undercover agents and actual investigation, instead of simply sifting through everyone's e-mail looking for interesting keywords?

To be fair, the NSA's mission is SIGINT, not HUMINT. I do agree that intelligence gathering needs to be more targeted though. The only people who can change that is us, and it requires a combination of technological and political changes: End to End Encryption for Everything using a global PKI system, and explicit prohibitions on collecting bulk data, or accepting bulk data from other countries, or purchasing bulk data from the private sector.

it would be very difficult to create a robot that could determine if someone is drunk

That's a solved problem.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/...

It isn't up to the NSA to set the balance, the NSA job is to push the balance one way.

That's true to some extent, but every member of the military -- which runs the NSA -- and sworn officers of other agencies take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States first at foremost, and to disobey unlawful orders, in the military at least. (Apparently they don't instill this value in other agencies, but it's well taught within the DoD.)

Now, is asking for more access unconstitutional? Probably not. But it's impossible to compromise security for just the good guys. Compromised security is compromised security, and that makes all of us less safe, which goes against the mission.

"Having the ability to touch any word on the screen and have definitions, translations, and wikipedia entries pop up as you read (which is great for many of the older books) is a fantastic benefit "

And thus bring up thousand more distraction to break your reading. In my experience (having tested both) it is far far better for comprehension and reading "wellness" to simply note on a side paper what you want to search later and leave it there until you are finished reading. Unless there is a word which stops you understanding completely (which should be quite rare for the average book) this works well.

Perhaps it should be the job of the president. Oh, that'd stir up the hornet's nest a bit. :)

Executive order #xxx: congressman Ex P. Facto, supporter of the Add Punishment After Conviction bill (APAC, HR 666), goes home to [State] today, never to return to legislative service. [State], if you want representation this term, time for an off-season election. Try a little harder so you pick someone who can read this time around, and see to it that they read and understand that thing they swear an oath to.

We don't need a vague demand for justice, but an actual accountable process for determining and doing away with unconstitutional laws.

Well, see, if we say you are forbidden from doing X, and you do X, and we do nothing, what we have done is set up a situation where when forbidden from doing Y, you will see absolutely no reason not to do Y, too. Welcome to the US state and federal legislatures.

To these people, no does not mean no. Because they are sophist bullshit artists. And we won't show them no does mean no. So that's the end of it.

If the citizens cared, any number of means could be provided. But frankly, no one cares. The number of people I have met who actually know what the constitution says is appallingly small. We live in a corporate oligarchy inside a banana dictatorship shell, in the main populated with ignorant couch potatoes.

except for the part where legislators that pass unconstitutional laws are punished

Yeah... the part that might have made it work. :/ Instead, they just arrogated article 5 powers unto themselves, also without oversight (and they have used that freedom from oversight to outright ignore the constitution over and over again.)

You notice how laws have consequences? And that's the basis, we hope anyway, for people to obey them even if they'd like to disobey? Notice that the laws, supposedly the highest in the land, in the constitution have zero punishment / teeth? You know why that was? Because people were expected to act with honor in public service. Good grief, what an error that was.

There are only three ways you can easily kill someone with pot.

First, put them in jail. Rape and murder are potential outcomes. Then, once released as a felon, suicide may get them when they find the doors of (legal) opportunity have closed and they are permanently ranked lowest-class-irredeemable by society's permanent retribution stick. Finally, if they try to make it in the underground economy, the system will likely get another whack at them in its rape-and-murder parlors. Also, as the government has created a violent black market in pot with its laws, competition in the underground economy is also a potential source of death.

Second, stuff enough pot into their windpipe to completely block their breathing. That'll do it.

Third, drop a 100 kg bale of pot on their head from about 100 meters above. That'll do it pretty much every time. See? Pot can be dangerous.

There are other ways, but they are more difficult to set up and generally require many bales of pot and restraint of the victim.

That is NOT the responsibility of the individual. It is the responsibility of the legislature that decided they were going to pay for it. The taxpayers have recourse, too -- tell their legislators they don't accept paying for it. If enough do so, it'll stop. You see the government paying for housing for those the taxpayers are happy to see living under a bridge? No. Think about it.

On the other hand, if the representatives get the message that we're compassionate enough to offer to help those who want to be helped? Well then, that's how it'll go. And of course, there is some small chance that private charity will address a problem. Very small.

It still doesn't give anyone the right to tell another person what to do, or not do, with their own body or those of others who consent (and even if you try to arrogate such a right, you will inevitably find that it won't "take." Witness the failure of prohibition and the drug war and the sex worker / sex client war and the pro-heterosexuality war and slavery.)

These things have two obvious things in common: First, the laws themselves, far more than the things they make illegal, cause immense harm. The second is that they make legislators look incredibly stupid in front of anyone who can think their way out of a paper bag. The former is a damned shame. The latter, I'm afraid, we already had ample proof of.