Personally I do not take my hard legitimately earned money, convert it to cash and then keep it under the floorboards at the local crack house.

Maybe it's current status is under investigation and the people in question are / will be under arrest as suspects
  er will I may have known some one who new some one who downloaded obviously unauthorized copyrighted material from megaupload that was blatantly available is mass. There would be no way in hell I would use that as a cloud service for anything important or otherwise critical.

Look you just got to have common sense.

The only required infrastructure for communication is that the Earth has an atmosphere, I guess for line of sight, that may not be necessary.

I have not had that the experience yet. When it gets slow it recovers usually within an hour or two. I have not yet had it not recover by 0200 hrs..

Signal strength has been marginal at my home, when I first got the service it was real bad, there was a promise of adding towers, which were added (3 months late). It got better after that, however it is weaker at home than at work. ( moving around the ‘box’ at home affects speed) and it rarely gets all of the lights on. The person that I work fore has the service in Arlington and has told me it rips at 8mb plus just about 24/7. At home the dongle barley achieves 1mbit.

I use Clear in the Dallas Area. The USB dongle runs 3 to 5 mbit at work (24 miles from home) and the ‘Box’ runs 2 to 4 mbit at home. As with any RF system range is going to be an issue, so is its inherent bandwidth limitation (as with any system). Yes sometimes the data rate can get real bad, even drop out. This does not usually last a long time but it can be annoying. I have never experienced anything that I would believe as targeted or intentional limiting, however if enough people suck on the same straw at the same time what do you think is going to happen? As far as being able to get out of a contract for poor performance, maybe that has merit I don’t know.
Clear (sprint is involved here) has been having financial challenges lately, personally for me it would be sad to see them go. By the standards of the cable companies I would be a download hog. (multi part large WinRared binaries ..Clear provides me an alternative option, I Live in an urban connectivity hell, DSL for me is at best 2mbit, usually 1.4 or so. There is no upgrade available yet ( 3 blocks away it is a different story), and no Fios in my neighborhood. I own my home and it is not something I would sell over something that in 5 to 10 years will change.

From TFA:
        “Qualcomm bought the wireless spectrum powering FLO TV -- Lower 700 MHz D and E block spectrum - for only $125 million”
From Wikipedia:
        Block D: 10 MHz bandwidth (758–763 and 788–793 MHz)
        Block E: 6 MHz bandwidth (722–728 MHz)
16Mhz of bandwidth for 1.925 Billion .. Bucks .
Spectrum real estate sure is doing better than the housing market.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
HAL only had JK Flip Flops ....

Correct
For those who don’t have a lot of background on engines, review and under stand the “Opposed-piston engine” and keep this concept separate from opposed or “boxer engines” as in the, VW (air-cooled bug), Porsche, GM Corvair, BMW motorcycle, Subaru and others..
This ‘opoc’ engine combines these to architectures into a single engine.
It is kind’a cool, however as pointed out the complexity is not trivial.
A rebuild on a thing like that would be nasty.

So What.
15? (The facts in the article have lost some credibility with me) year old, joy rides a hot wired dirt bike (motorcycle not bicycle, as pointed out in many responses here at /.) In addition apparently he is a ward of the court and was on probation for some other offence, so he violated his probation.
Whatever seemingly ridicules stipulations are on this ruling it basically appears to be attempting to make sure that while he is on probation he has no right to privacy. So when he is suspected of screwing up, what ever resources he has can be searched. If any attempt is made to hide information it must be revealed of he can be incarcerated.
Whether the system works or not it is attempting to give him a chance to straighten up.
In our current system there are few paths to help juvenile screw ups.
When I was in high school I had more that one acquaintance that seriously screwed up, serious burglary and the like, that were enlisted into the military and sent to Viet Nam.
Not all, but most came back with the ability to hold a job, function is society and stay out of prison.
In today’s world most advanced juvenile screw ups graduate to the state and or federal penal system.

That is when having 3 or 4 Pit Bulls around is real handy ...kind of difficult accessing the underside of a car wit a Pit jaw locked on you’re ass

Yeah ... That worked out in Waco ..

Unfortunately lies are in the ears of the beholder, and this is about fundamental political ideology. In the long run Big Bucks will kill Net neutrality. Just like it is killing the public airways. Free is not a source of revenue for big industry. If file sharing could not be stopped by DRM .. well we will just throttle any un-trusted / unregistered connection to 75 Baud. I truly believe this is where this is going, and it Sucks

I have the Clear service, (the USB dongle and the Motorola Base station). My experience with it has been mixed. It works at 2+ to 4MB on the USB dongle at my work, which is in Carrollton TX 75007.
However it has been unreliable at home (where I need it). Some times it runs at 3 or 4 MB but 50% of the time it is sub 1MB or zilch.
Clear (part owned by Sprint) has promised that 2 more towers are due for activation in the area of my home. The date on this has slipped and I hope that it is not an empty promise.
However to be fair and honest when I purchased the system the coverage map (some type of GOOGLE earth overlay was accurate and I knew that coverage was spotty in my home neighborhood.
I am not in love with it but am not willing to abandon it yet.
I do not have the FIOS available where I live (75218) and My DSL is a long way from the concentrator I am limited to about 1.4 to 1.5 MB on it. (AT&T). U-verse is not available (distance)
The drag about this is that across the street the DSL runs fast and the U-verse is available, oh well

Not an off the shelf solution but .. A Delta IV is able to lift 6,275 kg to geosynchronous orbit.
A unfriendly payload could be delivered. Doing this in under a year would be a real challenge.
It would also be the most incredibly stupid thing to date as far as space debris issues.
GEO is a very special orbit that exists in one plane. Not a good place for random bits ..
Now if some bad guy living is a secret volcano with a white cat was to develop a launcher that would deliver, lets say 5 to 10 thousand kg of small bb’s into the GEO plane in ‘reverse’ orbit we could end the geosynchronous era for a long time