I think they have it right in Mass Effect. It's going to be really really awful and boring. Gunners are going to be mathematicians, and you can turn into some sort of butcher simply by missing.


Gunnery Chief: [as the character enters the Citadel] This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferris slug, feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an everest class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means- Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's first law?

Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!

Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!

Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!

Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!

Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!

Well, during other months they don't do anything at all, and that's altogether more recognizable for me.

Between this, Indefinite Detention, and SOPA, I am really struggling to recognize America this month.

Okay, but, again, you're addressing it from an internal standpoint. If people on the other side of your firewall can determine which workstations are doing what on your network, your firewall sucks.

I found it interesting that you said this, as I was thinking it. And the reason I was thinking it, was because I had recently seen this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

I am going to go out on a limb and say that your corporate environment does not give every workstation their own public IP address.

You know, it's bad enough that ISP's, Verizon definitely included, are using bandwidth caps now, which limits the attraction of a service like Netflix.

It's bad enough that Verizon charges you extra to use functions on your phone that don't have a damn thing to do with their network at all (Mobile Hotspot).

I don't think I want to know how they manage to ruin Netflix, if they were to snatch it up.

I don't know about anyone else, but I regularly encounter people who have never heard of Doctor Who. I'm not saying a bad Doctor Who film would be fine, but any Doctor Who film will help expose the show, especially to Americans.

And it deserves more exposure.

Because when it stops working in some communities thanks to the interference that this supposedly slides under, you'll stop selling it in others.

However, if you were to start off in a licensed spectrum right off the bat, you could sell the tech to just about every utility company in America.

I am, of course, assuming they intend to make more than one in the future, and have more than just one customer.

Okay, but, again, why an unlicensed band? If this is for utility companies to use, and has a large over-reaching benefit to all sorts of communities (many of them owning or running the utilities), why wouldn't there be cause for a licensed band? I understand the intention, and the expectation that this will work anyways, but why not just make sure by using a licensed band instead?

I don't understand why you would use something with this kind of range in an unlicensed band.

You are basically setting yourself up to fail when you get interference all over your supposed coverage area.