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Submission + - U.S. wireless spectrum auction raises $44.9 billion (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The FCC's wireless spectrum auction closed on Thursday, and the agency has raked in far more money than anyone expected. Sales totaled $44.89 billion, demonstrating that demand for wireless spectrum is higher than ever. The winners have not yet been disclosed, but the FCC will soon make all bidding activity public. "The money will be used to fund FirstNet, the government agency tasked with creating the nation’s first interoperable broadband network for first responders, to finance technological upgrades to our 911 emergency systems, and to contribute over $20 billion to deficit reduction. In addition, the auction brought 65 Megahertz of spectrum to market to fuel our nation’s mobile broadband networks. The wireless industry estimates that for every 10 Megahertz of spectrum licensed for wireless broadband, 7,000 American jobs are created and U.S. gross domestic product increases by $1.7 billion."

Comment Re:They come that cheap? (Score 2) 181

does anyone else find it surprising how cheaply these guys will bend over?

No. The petty cost of trading influence is well known. William Greider detailed this phenomena 23 years ago in "Who Will Tell the People." A nice fur coat or use of a private plane is often sufficient.

Seems almost like you could troll for fun at those prices

That won't work. They don't simply spin about on a whim. The sellouts are predisposed to the buyers for many reasons and the tokens you're dwelling on are really just obligatory offerings and partly symbolic; tossing a liberal some exclusive theater tickets usually won't buy a pro-gun vote.

Comment Re:Good news (Score 1) 422

His plots

Plots? Plural?

The plot is a young male Jedi + sexy princess trying to blowing up the ebil command ship/death star thingee followed by celebration and an awkward award ceremony. This single, recurring plot is punctuated by light saber fights.

Anyhow, as far as Disney discarding Lucas's work, it's really hard to imagine them doing worse. The only interesting part of this story is that George actually thought enough of his own work that he appears to be surprised they aren't using it. LOL.

Comment Re:Who expected differently? (Score 5, Informative) 204

Because Dems don't look to their angry leftist commentators to be told how to think?

Sharpton's regular broadcast just started as I read your bullshit. I listen to his hate mongering on WVON out of Chicago. You have no idea what you're talking about.

The callers are the best part. They've all been filled with hate from birth and many of them want violence.

Comment Re:There is one last revolution for storage (Score 3, Interesting) 93

HP is marketing these ideas as "The Machine." The basic concept is using Re-RAM (ions) for all storage, fiber optics (photons) for all communications and electronics (electrons) for all processing. Ions, photons and electrons in a flattened crossbar matrix. Look up Martin Fink's recent presentations if you need a Buck Rogers fix.

The incredibly small, simple and easy to fabricate cell structure that Re-RAM seems to offer is just too compelling to ignore. Crossbar (the company) appears to be solving the Re-RAM problem. All we're trying to do is move ions around with current. There is a long list of possible materials and designs yet to be investigated. Eventually a sweet spot will be found. When that happens non-volatile storage density and speed will leap forward an order of magnitude, and the whole storage stack from the CPU cache to the tape drive will get flatter.

Or not. It's not like we need this to make the future exciting. Humanoid robots alone will provide more than enough excitement for the rest of my life.

Comment Re:The one leaving (Score 4, Insightful) 153

Supply and demand. The US elderly have voted themselves a limitless supply of funding for their medical care, so demand for doctors is very high and every other prerogative of our nation is pushed down the list. We've got Medicare paying for 74 year old gender reassignments. You want to know where they've spent your dreams?

So you take your little degree and your dreams of academic success and sod off. We have millions upon millions of knees and hips to replace. Find something that pays well too, mule; we're going to need you to cover that ACA mandate no matter how high it climbs.

Comment Re:Fuck the libs! (Score 2) 216

the current bunch Ds are typically to the right of Reagan

Do any of you even remember Reagan?

What do you mean? We are awash in staunchly pro-life, tax cutting, government bashing, communist hating Democrats that want to aggressively expand military spending, appoint moderates like Rehnquist and Scalia, outlaw hiring of illegal immigrants and casually joke about nuking the Soviets on live radio.

You can't swing a cat without hitting one of these right wing Democrats.

Comment Re:C versus Assembly Language (Score 1) 226

Yes. Sometimes to get maximum possible performance you need to use assembly. The subset of professional programmers that can actually achieve significant performance gains using assembly in a reasonable amount of time is very small. Employers willing and capable of funding that sort of work is also quite small.

Most often programmers resort to assembly because some hardware device or processor mode has to be dealt with and the compiler can't output the necessary instructions. That sort of problem is typically easier and involves less knowledge than trying to outperform compiler optimized code.

I've done it twice in 19 years as a programmer. Once in the late 90's to reach some special processor instructions for which the compiler had no support, and again a couple years ago to write an x86 real mode BIOS extension for an embedded system.

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