...for the nearly $1 million that Google gave to the Obama campaign and the similar amount that it gave to the Obama transition team. Not to mention the more than $100K it gave for the inauguration. The so-called "network neutrality" rules proposed by the FCC aren't the slightest bit neutral; they'd tie ISPs' hands while giving control of the Net's future to Google and preventing newcomers from arising to challenge Google's monopolies. And no wonder: they were written by Google lobbyists whom Obama -- breaking his pledge not to hire lobbyists -- hired into the administration. What's more, at least one of the FCC Commissioners -- Michael Copps, the most senior and the one who was Interim Chairman -- has already stated that he wants to use these new regulatory powers to censor the Net. (He's the one who went ballistic over the exposure of Janet Jackson's pastie at the Super Bowl many years ago.) ISPs won't censor the Net; in fact, they have NEVER censored legal content. But the FCC, given the power, will follow in the footsteps of the Australian government and will try to do so.

rd is wet and icy oops aaaaaaaaagh

Unfortunately, Atom-based Netbooks have a 100% failure rate with the latest updates to "Snow Leopard." :-S

Gee, I guess that they're going to have to go after the publisher of PackRat (AKA Tornado Notes), because it did the same thing way back in 1985, on MS-DOS, with no GUI. Oh, waitaminnit.... That pre-dates the patent by nearly a decade.

...is obviously just a series of tubes.

There's only one problem with Topolski's argument: it's completely bogus. In fact, it is revisionist history. Network administrators, at the time, were cheering the release of something more powerful and flexible than Gopher (which UMN had just decided it was going to try to license for money). Here's the truth behind Topolski's nonsense. The reason Topolski is making this tenuous, bogus argument is that he has just been hired by a Washington, DC lobbying group called the New America Foundation. This group is what's known as an "astroturf group." It pretends to be populist, but in fact is funded by big corporate money and promotes agendas that those corporations tell it to promote. In the case of the "New America Foundation," this is quite blatant: the Chairman of the group is Eric Schmidt, the CEO of GoogleClick (Google, which has merged with DoubleClick and is therefore the world's largest invader of Web users' privacy). Schmidt he has funneled more than $1 million of Google's money to the group. The group, in turn, parrots Google's corporate agenda to the letter. As does Topolski. Both Google and Topolski are seeking to regulate the Internet in ways that benefit Google at others' expense. In particular, the legislation which Google favors would force ISPs to raise prices, harm or even destroy competitive Internet service providers (leaving a cable/telco duopoly), and harm all Internet users' quality of service. In short, this is a corporate scam. Don't fall for it.

One of the reasons Boxee may well have more problems like this is that it supports BitTorrent. By doing P2P, it acts as a server on the customer's Internet connection 24x7, which is likely not only to slow the connection but to expose the user to penalty charges for exceeding caps. And it violates ISPs' terms of service as well. (That's not to mention the fact that BitTorrent is mostly used for illegal downloading. The Boxee is said only to point to "legal" trackers, but can easily be pointed at illegal ones.) Finally, most users of the Boxee are completely naive about the fact that their Internet connections are being co-opted to serve up content -- a serious disclosure issue. If it didn't do P2P, the Boxee might do a lot better.

I, a software developer, should pony up tax dollars to be used to create software that competes with what I create? And this will somehow stimulate the economy?

The problem with a circularly polarized signal is that it is not orthogonal to any linearly polarized one. In other words, while two linearly cross-polarized signals won't interfere with one another, any linearly polarized signal will interfere with all circularly polarized ones. So, this technique won't help to avoid interference on the airwaves.

There are more than 4,000 competitive high speed wireless ISPs in the US alone. See http://bennett.com/blog/2009/02/thought-you-had-no-alternatives-for-broadband/ (which was Slashdotted last week, by the way).

Ted, sounds like you need a better WISP. Ours has none of those problems.

Actually, Motorola's Canopy stole many of its ideas from a little known outfit in Georgia called Cirronet. They then mixed in a few ideas from the TDM cellular world. Overall, they tried to design the system to be the "meanest SOB in the Valley" when it came to the unlicensed bands. Canopy steps on everything, is courteous to nothing, and tries to take over every last shred of any band it's on. What's more, Motorola has lobbied to take spectrum away from WISPs. So, our company will not use anything they make. (We don't want to fund anyone who tries to take away the few bits of spectrum we currently have.) But this is really not the place to discuss WISP equipment. Let's just say that standards-based WISPs have big advantages, because they're not tied to one manufacturer (who can raise their costs through the roof at will).

Gee. I'm revealing my true identity, but you're hiding behind anonymous postings (which are off topic, by the way; endless "network neutrality" debates belong elsewhere) and launching bogus ad hominem attacks in which you quote me out of context. Please quit trolling.

Larry, there are at least half a dozen WISPs serving the LA area. They're probably in such demand already (with that population base) that they don't dare advertise! This is the case with many WISPs. Most are self-financed and simply don't have the capital that's required for meteoric growth.

802.11b and 802.11g were not originally intended for outdoor use, but they work surprisingly well there. Early on, there were several academic papers published which explored how to tweak the technology to work better outdoors. The modulation schemes are, in fact, the same ones that are used in proprietary equipment -- there's nothing to change about them to make them work outdoors. It's just a matter of tuning the MAC layer to account for the "hidden node" problem (many transmitters that might not be able to hear one another). And there have been solutions available for that problem since 1992, when Karlnet (developed at Ohio State University and then taken private) came out.