"I'm a time traveller. I point and laugh at archaeologists!" (TV: Silence in the Library)

"Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over."

Got beaten to the punch here. I was about to submit this confusing quote from TFA:

Took a few reads before I finally figured out they were referring to 300-ohm twin lead...

[digression]Captcha for this is "shudders". Indeed...[/digression]

This. This is the terrestrial broadcasters trying to stay relevant in a world where they increasingly are not due to streaming. Just like the electric companies fighting solar tooth and claw, broadcasters are having to deal with Netflix, Hulu, and so on.

"Screaming, 'We're too important during emergencies to not have around!' worked for ham radio," the broadcasters must be thinking, and the FCC, at least, seems to agree. For FM, at least, they don't have to worry about encumberance from cell phones, unlike UHF TV.

Personally, though, I think almost all terrestrial broadcast is a waste of bandwidth, but I know that's not the popular opinion even here on /.

Gigafactory (and friends)

That is, disconnect from the grid entirely. Once rechargables come down decently in price per cycle ((dis)charge) and price/watt-hour, there won't be a need to put up with this. This can only apply to residential and some small business, of course, as factories take in may times what power they could generate themselves, but the utilities should be scared, especially as they work to piss off people even more than telecom/cable utilities.

I've been thinking about this for years: the same problem affects DMR (MotoTRBO and friends) and D-STAR (and its sibling NXDN) and seems related to diversity, sub-standard trellis and other ECC, and so on that were solved in cell (mobile) phone standards a decade or two ago: most(all?) of the solutions are patented, which is a problem for D-STAR but not for the others. It's just clear the companies involved don't want to put any effort into fixing these problems.

I hardly listen to the wasteland that is broadcast radio other than to check traffic or propagation conditions. I know we're talking about Norway, but is the broadcast radio there worth listening to? It sure isn't here in the USofA. :(

tl;dr if this happened in USA tomorrow I probably wouldn't notice for a week or more; how about you?

Oh, please, pot meet kettle:

Google has only been acting really evil in the last few years; for M$, Oracle, and many other companies, doing evil is corporate policy and they have *NEVER* STOPPED being evil. To put it another way, Oracle is the Monsanto of software, M$ is the DuPont of software, and Google is more like factory farms, doing both good and evil at the same time. (I freely admit the Google comparison is weak--please feel free to come up with a better one.)

I have no problem with Google being investigated, but they should go after M$ as well, especially with what they did to Nokia, Linux, and Android; fat chance that'll happen, though.

I couldn't figure out why Google wasn't getting pissy AT ALL over Cyanogen forking and talking smack about them.. Now the other shoe has dropped: Cyanogen's fork (and the company's very existance) is Google's main anti-trust defense, at least at the OS level.

Now Google's ad business, that's a whole 'nother matter...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_latitudesare what you are referring to. These deserts are referred to as "sub-tropical", as opposed to, say, the northern Great Basin or eastern Washington, which is mainly created from rain shadowing.

Also, Sahara is north of the equator (the desert, the street, and the casino).

Tell that to the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc. (If not in USA, substitute for your own equivalent like GCHQ, GRU, etc.)

[digression]Captcha to post this was "conspire", lol![/digresson]