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 think I see why you're confused. The curse was an effective way to kick off the revolt, yes. Not any way to start an earthquake, though. Reality doesn't work that way.

OK, let's squash some of this nonsense right now.

I never believed the 2010 Haiti Erthquake was caused by a voodoo curse, and I'm astonished that anyone interpreted that post in that way. What I found anthropologically interesting is that something like Robertson's "satanic" invocation seems actually to have taken place. Not actually "satanic", but within Robertson's impoverished terms of reference that's about the only way he could describe an invocation of the loa.

I believe, and have repeatedly said, that the supposed "scientific consensus" on CAGW is not a conspiracy but an error cascade. I think most scientists are honestly trying to do right, but have been overly credulous about data and models that have been (and continue to be) fraudulently manipulated by a tiny minority of them. Those of you who think this makes me some sort of nut are going to have some explaining to do when measured GAT drops out of the bottom of the IPCC's 95% confidence band, which looks set to happen before the end of 2014.

I might reply to some of these other questions at more length, but these two deserved to be dispatched immediately

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.

I miss Usenet. Yes, the many of the groups got overrun with spam, and I'm not talking the binaries, but I really like the decentralized nature of it. But really, with a good reader, of your own choosing, you could just rip through discussions or participate. How it looked to you was your own doing. Some of the web forums these days are just painfull if you're trying to skim lots of messages. I really like slrn. Oh well.

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.