It's both. Locally sold advertising funds the station operations, hopefully including news, and unlike ads on satellite, may help local non-chain businesses reach customers too. Broadcasters also already provide free public affairs programming time, public service announcements and various types of programs etc. There's no reason they couldn't fairly allocate an amount of that time of their own choosing for candidate statements, debates, community comments or other appropriate programming to inform the public before elections. Ideally more local station ownership, and fewer stations consolidated under a common owner in a market, would help insure diversity and fairness in political conversation and in news coverage. Diverse local ownership would also create more exposure opportunities for local and emerging musicians.

Only the PAID political time would be done away with. We wouldn't get the endless repetitive hours of negative ads, candidates would be on a more equal footing, and no candidate would be placed in the position of accepting money from sources attempting to buy influence. As it is now, a candidate that turns away all those tainted dollars could be unfairly disadvantaged by less exposure. Since stations would not take money from you or me as well as the corporations, there'd be no discrimination against so-called corporate free speech.

The corruption isn't so much with the broadcast stations (beyond perhaps not being able to be unbiased and critical enough of the hands that feed them).
The real problem is the buying of government influence through campaign contributions. Way too much money is involved. Attempts at controlling contributions weren't effective, and now with the so-called freedom of speech of corporations, huge amounts of money is being piled in from who knows where.

Sidestepping the completely failed approach at regulating contributions, and not involving election code at all, FCC changes could go a long way to solve this serious problem.

Stations are supposed to operate in ways that serve the public interest including promoting education, an awareness of events and issues essential to a informed democracy, and profitably advertising in ways that help local businesses prosper while meeting community needs. Local businesses create better jobs, personal wealth, and fuel less economic leakage. More of the dollars people spend should stay in their local economies. National account ad sales on satellite tv, or across networks are efficient for the huge chains, but put local businesspeople at a serious disadvantage. Even if cable or satellite carries your local stations, they generally won't carry all of them, and all of the digital sub-channels.

I'm not that familiar with NTIA and will work to learn more. They definately do have some involvement with commercial operations. I saw they were providing reimbursement grants for digital tv transmission equipment upgrades to broadcasters in some smaller markets. (application deadline ended this month)

Adding the NDA really fuels the Streisand effect behind that too. It suggests that the app does something, or comes too close to doing something, too powerful... They don't want an app out there that could sniff in-app purchase transaction data. The apps really ought to be totally fire-walled from each other, especially if whatever it monitored can be mirrored to a 3rd party remote location as well as reported to the user. It didn't say whether it just detected system calls or read actual data. I'm assuming the list of app activity entries were sent from users.
Hmmmm. That might suggest a built-in potential to pass along everything to somewhere?? The OS should never allow that kind of access. It could be a added feature to look-alike versions of apps.

Maybe someone working via WiFi could sniff and tell what it, and anything else there too with similar capabilities, is doing. Some things might be time shifted.

The GP was essentially talking about wanting to measure resources taken by those profiting as data path providers. Airwaves are a public resource. All spectrum should be used in ways that serve the public interest. It is a limited resource that could be put to other uses and it certainly has value. Assigning frequency segments is equivalent to mapping it out.

It's not simply the cable bill dollars that are diverted from the local economy, but advertising revenue that is diverted away from local radio, tv, and print. Some take a sizable chunk of national ad account dollars. Cable can also take local advertiser ad dollars. With no local announcers or news departments to fund, ads sold by cable companies are often priced so low enough that they drive down ad rates not only for local television, but even radio. The problem is especially severe in smaller more isolated areas where there's less local tv, high penetration by cable/satellite, and low ad rates already due to the smaller population. I know of one case where a local tv station carrying two major networks fired a dozen news people with only a reporter or two left, and the news coming from another station they own 150 miles away. Low radio ad rates left them vulnerable to corporate/venture-capital groups taking them over and consolidating them when the FCC essentially dropped ownership limitations. (That's in spite of an FCC study, ordered destroyed, that showed it would damage local news reporting and diversity). Cable, satellite, and consolidated distant corporate ownership of radio/tv have severely crippled local radio, tv and print news operations.

That's a bit of double-talk since one could call any frequency regulated by the government a government frequency.. Government agencies (police etc) license through the FCC. The NTIA is part of the Department of Commerce, so they really function more like lobbyists/advocates for business (at least that's how it seems, much the way some view the FD&A and the drug companies). The NTIA is certainly not pushing for any spectrum the public could use directly for free or nearly so. Things needn't be so damn expensive, but that's how it is in the U.S.
Healthy business is great, but sometimes the public would be better served without AT&T, Verizon and other big players making large profits on everything we do. Broadband and telephone services are faster or cheaper of both in places like South Korea than the U.S. because of the way we've done things.
We were lied to about the need to take so much tv spectrum taken away. Very little was needed for emergency communications, a narrow-band application. And they've been piling other commercial users into tv spectrum. (white space etc)

Spectrum is being treated too much like oil leases with the same results. And we wonder why some countries nationalized oil company operations.

Profits above all else has had a devastating effect on broadcasting and overall news operations in the U.S. It's so bad the U.S. government is subsidizing the BBC to fill some of the void. Our ability to compete and the functioning of democracy suffer when we're poorly informed and poorly educated. The changes in broadcasting contribute to both.

Paid political ads in broadcasting should be terminated. The funds raised to pay for them are a primary source of corruption. That chain can be cut. Free community service time can be provided to candidates.

Oh, that's a simple one. No need to worry about "after", just assume it'll never be over.

The worst things can't be fixed. A restore won't make your corporate discoveries secrets again. Your system use experience might even remain as delightful as ever with you left unaware that anything has happened.

It's a bit silly to talk about maintenance issues when the real consequences are from data compromise or from the malfunction of something that matters.

We should ask if we are secure, or do we just maintain an illusion to make us feel better? If it won't work against the unknown, it doesn't work. It's best not to pretend otherwise. Really. Sometimes too late really is too late. If one bullet gets you, dodging 999 out of 1000 doesn't mean much. We functioned before there were networks. Maybe some things should still be that way.

I could be wrong, maybe you just need a newer version of Windows.

It's too bad fish can't talk

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/climate-change/july-dec12/swinomish_07-18.html

What's the point in knowing where everything is? Having cables between and in communities is no surprise to anyone. If you are going to look at utilities, don't forget cable and satellite companies. It is also worth examining how the revenue siphoned off by them may reduce resources at local news operations.

It might be more interesting to look at what happens with our frequency spectrum. Should the push always be towards something business can monetize? Some might prefer peer owned networks with minimal expenses. It's like having most of your power or water heating from your own panels versus always having to buy energy from a major utility.

There's more than the F.C.C. involved with spectrum

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/about

Ahhh, I see... they were talking about Steve Ballmer.

Now to get that image of him in sweaty wet shirt out of my head.

Speaking of head, there was the time the MS marketing guys cut a black mans' head off and pasted on a white one.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/25/microsoft-sucks-at-photoshop/

Wake me up when you've figured out how to seed the atmosphere with a catalyst that converts CO2 and sunlight to oxygen and a rain of transistors.

Of course the characteristics that matter depend on the application. For a processor, fast switching is desirable, with low leakage in the off state, a low saturated resistance in the on state, low input capacitance, low capacitance from the output to the input etc. Additionally when there are devices in series across the supply, the characteristics should be such that a spike of current is avoided during switching.
The input capacitance is important since it takes current to charge and discharge it, increasing the drive power requirements as the operating frequency rises.

The nature of the input/output transfer function between on and off is very important to linear applications, such as audio, instrumentation, r.f. receiver circuits, linear r.f. power amplifiers etc. Low noise characteristics may also be sought. Those things are important to wireless communications and networking.

In power applications, things like the temperature coefficient of the saturated on resistance become important. Devices with a positive temperature coefficient may have potential problems with thermal runaway since losses and heat then boost each other. When building power devices, shifts in saturated on resistance, switching threshold, and gain with temperature are all important. If a portion of the transistor tends to draw more current when heated, the portion of the chip that conducts first, or that which has the least effective cooling, may tend to hog a disproportionate amount of the current, further increasing the temperature at the hotter spot. The safely handled power level is reduced when the current density is less uniform. Those sorts of characteristics make some existing types of power FETs that are fine for switching more failure prone in something like a linear audio power amplifier. When geometries are very small and current densities are high, metal migration from interconnects may occur possibly leading to eventual failure.

The effective thermal resistance is also important. Like electrical resistance which develops a voltage drop (or rise if you prefer) when current flows, thermal resistance develops a temperature rise with heat flow. Usually expressed units of temperature rise in degrees C per Watt, the junction to package surface, package surface to heatsink (pad), and heatsink to ambient thermal resistances are additive. The temperature rise across those combined resistances must be such that a maximum safe junction temperature is not exceeded. The heatsink to ambient thermal resistance can be reduced with a fan, but if thermal conductivity within the chip/package is poor, power handling ability is less than it would be otherwise. It's usually more difficult to achieve low thermal resistance with faster devices since they're generally smaller. A low speed power transistor with a large chip generally has lower thermal resistance than a fast one with a small chip. (smaller may reduce carrier transit times and capacitance). Of course smaller transistors usually reduce cost since more can be produced in a given size die, but process costs and yield are also factors. (and licensing fees?)

From the above it should be apparent that developing optimal devices for a given application is an involved art. It will be interesting to see which devices can see improved performance from use of graphene technology.

Marketing-speak tends to lie or at least mislead. Although the amount to data to/from memory goes up when the path gets wider, that iisn't increasing the rates the individual data lines are clocked at. So while it is reasonable to talk of so many gigabits per second memory bandwidth, it's isn't a memory clock in the GHz. When the data path got wider, some multiplied the frequency of the memory clock by the path multiplier to inflate the advertised number, but the signals are still at a few hundred MHz, not those high numbers. And even then, if wait states are needed, the effective memory clock is much less yet. Usually only a small amount of cache runs at high speeds. Even if the memory really was much faster, it becomes very difficult to design busses and board layouts at much higher speeds. In practice, if those many GHz speeds are achieved, it'll likely be mostly confined to within the CPU. That's great for encryption and complex codecs, if the related data can be moved fast enough. Can these transistors be used for higher-speed memory that doesn't use too much energy? (I refrain from calling it efficient, since essentially ALL of the power becomes heat)

Time will tell what useful products these transistors can actually improve. Since there are many problems to solve to ship successful products, we should be cautious of excessive hype.

Perhaps a recipe has been declared a state secret?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1079364