Also, perhaps, if we reject DRM, the parts of the web we wall off are exactly the ones we should.

Music will be on our side of the wall; DRM is dead there. Seems to me that's a trend worth encouraging.

and useful to boot.

Well, face it, it won't be very useful if you don't boot it...

It's key to the whole idea of a unified country that states recognize each other's legal actions. That's why it's in black and white.

Ignoring another state's marriage violates the spirit of the constitution, its plain language, and hundreds of years of precedent, including precedent about marriages and divorces (see history of Nevada).

Are you under the impression that if story A is here, story B is not?

I'm not sure that's how it works.

But in any case, I'm pretty sure the homosexual / straight distribution of nerds is the same as everyone else, pretty much. It really *is* news for nerds.

Time to get out of mom's basement, then.

Cursing is family friendly. Repression is not. Learning how and why and when people curse is productive and useful. If you're not being raised by really broken people, you'll hear cursing, you'll get to curse, etc.

I am grateful I grew up in a home where language was respected, not repressed. The result? I *very* rarely curse. But when I do, it's situationally appropriate, meaning, I'm using it for emphasis -- not "I'm checking the age of the ears nearby"

The HAM network is almost completely self policed.

I think this is confusing "mostly well behaved" with self policed. For instance, look at the abject fuckery that goes on at 14.313 MHz each and every day. All manner of rule violations. Not judging the rules here, but no question, deep and serious violations of them. No one "polices" this in any sense of the term; nothing any ham does shuts it down, slows it down, restrains it, or otherwise serves as a "police" function. Reporting it to the FCC does nothing; years and years of reports have gone without any response.

Now, it's quite true that most hams don't take part, and further, view the situation as appalling; but this is like your neighbor disliking seeing crack sold on the sidewalk. That's behaving well, not policing. They're not policing it; they might report it, but that's still not policing it. Only the police can do that, because they have the authority and power to do something about it. In the ham situation, the feds aren't coming when they are called, either, so the activity goes unchallenged in any realistic way. And believe me, getting on there and arguing? Not helpful.

There's more than that going on, too. I know for a fact that there are stations on the air using considerably more than legal power; stations that intentionally interfere with others in several ways, etc. I *also* know that the FCC has the analytical tools to detect, and the authority to stop, this kind of behavior. I lay the blame for this shameful garbage entirely at the FCC's feet.

Allowing encrypted traffic would allow me to sell internet service to people in rural areas because there's no way to detect what is in the encrypted content.

Yes, but any ham can do the same thing for free. Encrypted or not. That's going to make your business model unsustainable. Also, I should point out that packet has allowed email back and forth to the Internet for decades now. So I think your idea of "providing Internet" isn't going to choke the spectrum. Hard to sell something others give away for free (not impossible... but hard.)

Another thing: With the plethora of digital modes available right now, it's become a royal PITA to try and figure out what you're listening to, much less decode it. Is it Olivia? RTTY? Amtor? Heil? Packet? and on and on for must be over a hundred modes and variants. The difference between an encrypted packet and one you can't figure out otherwise is... nothing.

And one more thing (lol): As far as HF goes, we don't have the bandwidth to supply anything like Internet to anyone. There's no risk whatsoever of commercial interest of that type coming in. You'd have to be talking about operation at UHF and above, and *that* means line of sight, and *that* means latency that grows with every link, and it also means that those 99.99% dead bands would see some use, which might keep them from being taken from us. Not a perfect reason by any means, but a reason regardless. The fact is, cellphones have almost entirely killed VHF/UHF ham activity. It's sad as hell, but there it is.

Oh, hey. One MORE thing: Your "Internet supply" is going to have to accept all manner of interference from other hams, etc. That's going to make your service really, really poor. Quite aside from the free competition that will start up the day after you do because you're going to offend every ham with half a wit.

It's news for everybody, including nerds. I'm straight, and I was pleased to see it here. You are free to not read any story that you're not interested in. For you to advocate kicking stories off smacks of interest -- not disinterest. Perhaps a little examination of your own motives is in order.

Yeah, I read that three times and my head is still spinning.

That's pretty much what happened the first time, too. Just doesn't want to sink in. I don't have the background to really comprehend this at the right level; just local physics instincts, and they often seem to come up short when cosmology is the subject at hand.

I would love to go over a couple things with you via email, if you felt you could spare the time. I'm at gmail, same handle. If not, no sweat, of course. Cheers!

Physics doesn't care.

That's what I like about physics. :) (contrariwise, it's what makes me suspicious of quantum physics...)

Time can stop, go backward, go imaginary, you name it. It's just us forcing physics into a badly fitting mathematical suit.

Have you run into the "proof" of determinism demonstrated by showing that a viewpoint across an interval where the object being viewed is on an (I believe) approaching vector near lightspeed) results in viewing that object in the future, thereby assuring us of the fixed sequence of events that will lead to that view? I may have that a little jumbled, the idea had me dizzy for days.

Nova had some dumbed-down cosmological thing on where they diagrammed that out. I had to go listen to some Pink Floyd afterwards, lol.

There seem to be a lot of RTL sticks out there. I know of a dev who is working on a server app that takes an RTL stick and creates a routable Ethernet stream from them with the intent of making it compatible with my SdrDx app. I do support USB soundcard SDRs, but quickly grew less than enthused with USB as people constantly complain about windows installing the wrong USB drivers over the ones that are correct and things stop working, plus it's a PITA to maintain the separate code bases for USB across Windows and OSX. Ethernet based SDR setups are *so* much cleaner to handle, plus Qt (which is what I use to make this cross platform) has network drivers that work well, and identically, on both platforms. The real win, though, for a lot of people is the ability to remote the SDR away from local noise.

But the light from those places will never reach us since it is trying to fly towards us on a kind of conveyor belt ("space itself") that's moving the other way more rapidly.

Yep, that's pretty much the hard argument for what I said. Keeping in mind that light doesn't give a north end of a southbound rat how we define anything. Of course, since that light never reaches us, its existence is wholly theoretical, but I just go with the last semi-sane thing I hear from a cosmologist. :)

Yes, tubes and fets share various characteristics, but there are a lot of things they don't share and I guarantee you that a good grounding (hah!) in fets of all kinds isn't sufficient to go off and do tube design beyond the very simplest applications. There have been some seriously weird tubes with no corresponding single-semiconductor solution; quite aside from the huge range of voltages involved, there are screen grids, directly heated cathodes, gas-filled regulators, CRTs (imagine depending on knowledge of a FET to make a CRT work, eh?), coupling issues, various kinds of noise peculiar to tubes, weird stuff like microphonics, just a whole host of interesting issues and devices. Plus, things you'd take as similar act quite differently, even starting just from a rectifier diode. And tubes glow in the dark. You're thinking orange, right? But an OA2 in normal operation is a beautiful, bright purple. And there are tubes that are green bar graphs, tubes that can display characters... :)

Yes, that ham made a huge difference for me, and I try to do the same - happy to wear the "Elmer" hat. Been an extra class for decades now. Also, lately, been working on a free software defined radio app, so in way, I'm getting right back to my roots.

When I was young kid, in the early 1960's, I visited a ham radio operator a bunch of times. Cool radios, etc. He taught me some key things about tubes, started a long slide into technology that still hasn't stopped. I asked him about transistors. He looked at me somewhat askance and said "yeah, "I heard about them things. Tubes, son. I know tubes." And went back to teaching me about tubes, and resonance, and etc. Outside of his place, I hooked into an NRI electronics course, and spent a summer sucking that down, while running to my older friend Tony to help me with the math. NRI was teaching tubes then too, but they had an excellent section on transistors, and so I grew comfortable with them just as they were becoming interesting and more widely used. Tubes, except for certain specific jobs, just aren't used much now as we all know, and I've always been grateful for my luck in terms of timing; a few years earlier, and I'd have been looking askance at transistors myself. But instead, I've been comfortable with semiconductors right up until they got too small for me to handle (surface mount, trembling hands, etc.) And I know tubes.

The idea that another revolution of similar importance may happen in my lifetime...

Damn. I just feel like one amazingly lucky fellow. :) Now, will I be able to grasp the tech if it makes it to market? That, as they say, remains to be seen. Getting older doesn't mean you're without a clue. It just means you no longer always know where you put them.

But space isn't something. Period. That's why expansion of distance between two somethings with nothing between can exceed light speed.

As far as we understand it right now, I should add.