What I'd love to see is a PTT app available on any android phone.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/ctialive/story/sprint-planning-direct-connect-android-app-promises-ptt-renaissance/2012-05-09

Not ANY Android phone, but any SPRINT Android.

Had the FCC said yes, you can bet AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc. would be eyeing vairous bits and pieces of the satellite band to purchase - it's that much cheaper.

Not likely. Telcos already have better spectrum. 700/800 to get the broad coverage and 1900 to get higher capacity. And then there's Clearwire up in 2500 with the bandwidth capacity of a train. 1600 will work, but it's mediocre at best. The noise that wireless companies are making is because it's expensive to refarm existing spectrum. You have get all those annoying customers to replace their handsets.

While I could have worded that better, I think you're missing my point.

Your point is apparently not related to what you wrote.

What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done.

An example of this is you take your car down to the garage to get a tune up. The mechanic says it will be $100 and it'll be ready at the end of the day. Now if he spends the next 4 hours doing crossword puzzles, it's no concern of yours as long as your car is ready at the end of the day. You're paying a set amount ($100) to get the project done in the specified timeframe (end of the business day). Anything beyond that is not in your contract.

Possibly what you are trying to say is you hired a mechanic to put in an 8 hour shift and focus on tuning up your car. While he is dedicated to your project, you are paying for his time and not specific performance. Which means you could reallocate his time to another project if something of higher priority came up or your tune up took less time than expected. Under these circumstance that 4 hours of crossword puzzles is your concern.

Maybe that isn't the chart you intended to link, because that is NOT what it says. If that was the correct link, then you need a refresher on the difference between revenue vs spending deficits and debt. What that chart does show is revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP. From 1990 through 2001 Federal government spending as a percentage of GDP was dropping. And 1998 through 2001 revenue exceeded spending. (budget surplus)

But the agency that keeps track of our debt, the US Treasury, says we still managed to increase our debt each of those years:
1998 113,046,997,500
1999 130,077,892,718
2000 17,907,308,271
2001 133,285,202,313

It sure would be nice to have that kind of deficit now....

What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done. Would you want to pay them for that 20% of the time that they would be using to do nothing towards your project?

If you are paying a set rate, then technically you aren't paying for ANYTHING beyond the delivery of your project. You aren't paying for time, you are paying for performance. It doesn't matter if they spend 10 hours a week or 100 hours a week on your project if they meet the deadline.

It'll only be a financial burden if lending dries up. Otherwise they'll just pass it along to their children like the generations before them. There hasn't been a reduction in national debt since Eisenhower was in office, and we were in the low billions of debt.

Note that he didn't say he was 20,000 feet from a DSLAM, he is 20,000 feet from a CO. It's quite common for Telcos to run fiber to a neighborhood and then install a DSLAM. In my old neighborhood they ran fiber to the neighborhoods in the early 90s because they were running out of copper pairs. Back when modems and fax machines were booming. To upgrade to DSL they just upgraded the cabinets/huts with DSLAMs.

OTOH, just because you are close enough doesn't mean they can provide DSL. In the mid 90's I lived in an apartment complex that had a phone cabinet on the premises. At that time I couldn't get DSL because, although I was within the length limit to the CO, they ran fiber to the complex and then copper to the apartments. Bell didn't feel that the complex would support a DSLAM, so we all went with Roadrunner.

The problem is that people who have debt piling up are under pressure to just get their degree and start working,

Why would they be under any pressure to graduate due to debt? The loans are subsidized and interest doesn't start accruing until they go into repayment. Granted, it's been a couple decades ago, but I knew people in college that were planning to go on and get a Masters simply because as long as they stayed in school they weren't accruing interest and didn't have to make payments. And they knew they had a better chance of earning the advanced degree then rather than leaving school after their Bachelor's and trying to come back once they had jobs, families, mortgages, etc.

The pressure only comes after you graduate and see what the job market has to offer.

As far as general ed, no one likes general ed.

... are re-classified as no longer needing to be prescribed, insurance companies stop covering the cost of such drugs

In most cases, but not always. If the drug is available both with a prescription and without, your insurance will pay if you have the prescription. Insulin is an excellent example. Oddly, I can buy insulin without a prescription cheaper than I can with one. I pay either way since I'm on an HRA with a $1500 deductible, so I buy without even though I have the prescription. Syringes and test strips are the same and next year I'm readjusting my FSA to take the insurance co. completely out of the equation for them.

That would be a $30 fee for each jurisdiction, not one $30 fee for every agency worldwide.

So, $30 from every local law enforcement branch.

Follow the links to the actual document. That's $30 per month from an individual agency per telephone number, and only ones requested through their web site. Otherwise it's $20 for each request. It's not like they are sending a bill to every law enforcement agency in the country every month.

AT&T requires you to 'activate' their 911 tool for $100 and then $25 a day. And TMobile just charges $100 a day. So I guess if you have lots of people you want to track, hope they are on AT&T or TMobile and get a volume discount.