And yet, this reports the abuse of ham radio by the Indianapolis, IN, USA police department. You can read about FCC actions, for example, this one, which is typical of the kinds of illegal use commercial operations make of ham radio.

There are those who would claim that your listening announcement IS calling CQ. I hold the opinion that "it's nice that you're listening, if you wanted to talk to someone you'd say that."

Are you in the US? If so, yes, you can. You are not encrypting it for the purposes of obfuscating the meaning.

That says neither that it is needed nor that it was intended for that purpose.

Here. While it includes an HF component, the local transport is almost exclusively via packet.

Because the hospitals are eventually going to ask for it.

"Health and welfare" is not medical information covered by HIPAA.

You've already lost that battle. You should keep up with the changes to the regulations.

Well, I dunno. You've said a lot of things that are wrong. They may have been correct in the past, but times have changed. Just your statement that "encryption is not legal", for starters. Your ignorance of Winlink. That you think there is some limit on government employee's use of ham radio. And that you seem to think that "health and welfare" traffic is what HIPAA is about.

It's called "RAYNET" and it is very similar to ARES in the US. Support for emergency services like hospitals and government agencies. Hospitals, at least in this area, get a lot of support from ARES. Hospitals tend to deal with medical data.

And then you provide a quote that proves I am right. Thanks.

He wasn't "worried" they were, he KNEW they were. He knew and did nothing but issue "vague warnings". It was a SEEcret, you see. And as a US Senator with a mandate to serve the public who elected him, he didn't.

Those "secrecy rules" would not prevent him from writing exactly the bill he's being lauded for writing now. It would not have prevented him from writing a bill to prohibit what was happening. It would not have prevented him from doing a lot of things. All the secrecy laws kept him from doing was telling the public the specifics, but "telling the public" isn't how you get these things stopped. Nothing is still nothing.

Wow, he proved someone lied to congress. He didn't do anything to stop what they had been doing while they were doing it, but after they did it long enough he asked a question. I'm impressed.

Yes, I agree. And to know who their friends aren't. The fact remains: Wyden could have easily written such a shotgun bill the day he found out what was going on, but he chose not to. He's not the friend you think he is.

Why yes, it would be wonderful for the same kind of people who play fart sounds on the local repeater to be able to send telecommand signals to amateur radio satellites. Just a great idea. By the way, that's one of the kinds of signals that is explicitly called out in the regulations as allowing encryption.

But the rules don't actually talk about encryption, they talk about obfuscating the meaning. There are a large number of people using what used to be called HSMM -- basically, 2.4G wifi -- and they have encryption enabled. Why is it necessary? To keep Joe Ignorant from using his unlicensed laptop from connecting to a licensed NAP.

Also wrong.

Got no idea what you think you're saying here.

Also wrong. Nobody has said it is needed to increase usage, and "health and welfare" traffic has nothing to do with it. What is involved is the integration of amateur volunteers (and non-volunteers) into hospital emergency communications plans. And now, the excuse that the hams passing that traffic won't be employees of the hospital is gone, because it is highly likely that at least some of them will be. They'll have a radio in their hand they cannot use because HIPAA applies to them.

Good question. And completely unanswerable based solely on the description of the bill here on /.. (How DO you properly end a sentence that ends with '/.'?)

But if you read the bill (pdf), you might find some clues. For example:

(a) IN GENERAL. -- Except as provided in subsection (b), no agency may mandate that a manufacturer, developer, or seller of covered products design or alter the security functions in its product or service to allow the surveillance of any user of such product or service, or to allow the physical search of such product, by any agency.

How broad can you get with your paintbrush? An interesting interpretation of this might be that the FCC regulations for emissions no longer apply, because a cellphone can be "surveilled" by following the signals it emits using the FCC standards. E911 info is FCC mandated surveillance, as well, in very broad terms.

Maybe the "exception" paragraph?

(b) EXCEPTION. -- Subsection (a) shall not apply to mandates authorized under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (47 U.S.C. 1001 et seq.).

So this law is already watered down by CALEA. And what is a "covered product"? Here you go:

(2) the term "covered product means any computer hardware, computer software, or electronic device that is made available to the general public.

Emphasis mine.

Or maybe it will be voted down when it becomes an amendment, as it was in the house?

In the House of Representatives, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) took up the issue of government encryption rules earlier this year. She passed an amendment to the annual defense funding bill ...

She didn't actually pass the amendment, she proposed the amendment and the house passed it. In any case, it was a rider to an otherwise unrelated bill. It is a standard ploy to attach unrelated things, and when one side votes against the part they don't like, they get painted in pubic as being against the other part they could accept. That's why there is talk of a "line item veto" from time to time, to remove the President from the "all or nothing" game.

Or maybe they'll vote against it because of what it is: a political game played by a master gamesman, who chose now to do something when he could have done it long ago. All this NSA stuff that got leaked -- he knew it before it got leaked. He's on the committee that has regulatory oversight to that agency. Did he do anything when he found out what they were doing? No.

This applies only to those who were not re-elected to congress. All the rest -- that majority -- still have to worry about the next re-election bid.

This, in spades.

If he really gave a rat's ass, he wouldn't have sat back before the NSA/Snowden revelations saying "you don't know the half of it". He was on the Senate committee that oversees such things and was fully briefed on it, and did nothing to stop it.

That's what Wyden is all about. I live in his state. I've seen him work and how he runs campaigns.

"Sync" doesn't imply two-directional, it simply means "make the two things align". In TV-land, that means all the monitors and cameras align their horizontal and vertical sync to the master sync generator. The master never cares what the cameras think is the correct timing. In iTunes-land, that means "make the iThingy look like the master".

It's relatively new that "sync" means "change everybody to look like everybody else", and even then it's not always possible to do that. Palm was very good at it; Google is horrible at bidirectional sync of my calendar. My phone now has at least two of every calendar entry.

Well, this is the confusing part for me, a non-Apple user. Both TFA and the summary say:

As explained by the publication, users attempting to sync an iPod with an iTunes library containing music from a rival service, such as RealNetworks, would see an ambiguous error message without prompting them to perform a factory reset. After restoring the device,

You say the users were told to do a factory reset; the articles says they were not prompted to perform one.

If, as you say, they were told to do a factory reset, then why would they think that any files they manually put on the device would be there after? I mean, that's the PURPOSE for a factory reset: to restore a device to 'from the factory' condition. If iTunes then automatically restores the library of stuff you bought from iTunes, that's a plus.

I can't see how Apple could legally restore music content you didn't purchase from them. You didn't buy it from them, they don't know you have it legally. They don't even have a record that you had it.

I cannot speak to Canadian regulations, but down in the US it would be very hard for one wireless carrier to "wipe out the competition", since the FCC auctions for wireless bandwidth were specifically set up so that there were two winners for each service area. It was a design goal that there be competition.

No, it was that they were actually costing less to the telecom so they paid less for the service. It's irrelevant if they were subsidized or not, the point was that they're going to be unhappy. I don't know too many people who would say "gee, I now have a data cap on the streaming video feeds that used to be unlimited, but that's ok because I was leeching off of everyone else..." They're going to think "thanks Canadian regulators for screwing up my service and making me pay more."

Cell phone service is hardly a monopoly in any sense of the word, neither is streaming video service. What it actually was was a company saying "I can provide this to you cheaper because of vertical integration". Vertical integration is how many companies cut costs, and it doesn't create a monopoly.

While the cost for the actual content may have little difference, the cost of transport isn't the same by any means. You need to look at total costs, not just the cost to buy a program package.

Well then, Canadian regulators screwed their constituents pretty bad, because in the US there are alternatives. It is that way by design. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile -- I believe all four are infrastructure providers -- and then the contract carriers like Cricket, USCellular. The list of the latter is nearly endless. You don't like one, you've got another choice. Too bad Canada's equivalent to the FCC didn't think ahead.

But that still doesn't mean that the unlimited users were being subsidized. They added nothing to the peering costs, so they got a better price. If you want to talk about one group subsidizing another, look to the heavy data users who expect unlimited service for the same price that the low-volume users pay. That's 180 degrees from your claim.

I bet the people who used to have unlimited streaming of telecom-provided feeds are just all warm and fuzzy that they now have a cap.

So your answer should have been "Yes, I expect the companies to lift their caps." What good is incentive to do so if you don't expect them to do so in return? And how does this help the former unlimited-data user who was consuming only telecom streams -- he's still wound up with a cap, and he's now going to have to worry about paying extra.

Why shouldn't services that cost less to provide cost less to the consumer, even if it's just a little bit less? All services are not equal cost.

And after the merger, replace option 2 with "move to a Charter area". If you're moving just to get a certain brand of cable TV, then it's just as reasonable to move to a Charter area as a TW area.

Now, if there were truly only one cable company covering the entire US, that would be a good market force for the creation of more cable companies to compete directly. Or you could also get Dish/Direct/etc if you didn't want to limit "competition" for television services to wired providers.

The employee is paid by the employer. I.e., the "company".

So there were people buying Flip Jacks before they existed? There were no customers for Flip Jacks before the company that designed them paid people to design and produce some that they could then market (another job, marketing them) and then eventually sell.

And had there been people waiting to buy Flip Jacks but Orgreenic decided not to design and market and sell them, there would be no jobs designing, marketing, making, or selling them.

Jobs without demand. Demand without jobs. Neither could be true if you were right. If you were right, then all it would take to have jobs is a demand for jobs. That is so obviously not the way the world works that it is hard to imagine why you keep saying it.

The fact is, most companies start up with zero customers. It really is hard to buy something from a company that doesn't exist. The next time you manage to do it, let us know. I suppose that once in a blue moon someone finds a guy on the street and says "I am giving you $10,000 to create a company to build me a widget", but it is uncommon enough to be statistically and economically irrelevant. I know I'd never buy widgets that way -- I'd buy them from an established company that has already created the jobs necessary to make and sell widgets. My demand comes long after the jobs exist, which makes it very very hard to claim that my demand created those jobs.