Well, I really do appreciate that we keep folks who can't articulate themselves without resorting to swear words out of the ham community, and that they have to take a test as well. The people we talk with on ham radio meet a higher standard than you'd meet in the local bar, or come to think of it, on Slashdot. And I'm not the slightest bit interested in lowering that standard.

Have you considered that people who already regularly get pussy don't need to take charity from corporations in order to have a nice pair of tits in their face?

Yes, that's exactly right.

I appreciate a pretty woman (and, fortunately, am married to one), but I'd rather not have that appreciation manipulated for someone else's commercial gain.

I resent that some business is attempting to grab me by the balls rather than by my rational self.

Wouldn't this make the medium a much more relevant and useful tool in the modern age

No, it really would not.

What it would make it is duplicative of functionality of internet, the cellular network, WiFi and WiMAX, and point-to-point links on Part 15 bands. You can already use all of those to do whatever you want, including commercial and obscene material.

One of the most important means of preserving it as a sandbox for experimenters is that the whole commercial world is excluded. So, there's room for us.

There was a science fiction story about what happened when it became possible to screen for the "gay" gene, and that screening was expected to lead to the extinction of homosexuality.

We'd better think about this stuff before it becomes possible.

Martin,

I think you missed the point that we are talkinig about radio.

When people fill a page with noise on Slashdot, they aren't really using up a scarce resource. Slashdot would just get more servers if they ran out of bandwidth to present blather to readers. So, the only thing that's really being wasted is the reader's time, and the reader has mechanisms to avoid that such as moderation, and I think "foe" lists (I haven't tried them).

On radio, in contrast, frequencies in which to operate are a scarce resource. So, that noise is getting in the way of a more useful communication. And while we can tune off the channel, we don't have an infinite supply of other channels to use.

The situation is made worse by radio propogation, which makes many of the frequencies we do have unusable for much of the time; by issues like the hidden-transmitter problem, which make frequencies that might appear usable by one station unusable by the one he's trying to talk with; and by various incompatible sharing partners, the worst being PAVE PAWS out here in California. So, frequencies in which you can do something useful become scarce.

So, we have valid reasons to keep as much noise as possible off of the Amateur bands.

Hopefully they'll teach you better by the time you're out of middle school.

The motive is to keep it open. That's really simple.

I continue to reject the premise that since there could be possible abuses that might not be handled by the rule or might not be caught, that we must allow all possible abuses. I don't leave my doors unlocked because a burglar might break the window.

It's from news media quoiting peopple who have no substantiation. In other words, it's B.S.

The QRZ survey numbers can be compared to the IARU survey of 2000.

But that's a bizarre argument. Many uses other than encryption might also do this (lets say, hypothetically, that it was indeed a Public Radio Entropy Source)

So, we're going to take an empty channel, filled with random noise, and replace it with a transmission filled with random noise! Which will be less random than what we started with.

I'm not impressed yet :-)

Go on believing that steganography can't be detected. I'd rather be able to watch you, if necessary, than not.

To say that you're not using real sources would be an understatement. The middle one is someone's entertaining list of things that they think will go extinct, offered more as comedy than anything else. The first is a 7-year-old interview with someone in Quatar, which just got Ham Radio around then, who offers no sources to substantiate his statement. And you seem to be assuming that the retirees cited by ARRL will all die and not be replaced, and the emergency groups will find something else to do, which makes no sense. But you are also relying on ARRL which has not presented any substantive survey on this issue.

QRZ, unlike ARRL, operates an online callbook, and thus can actually count the number of hams in many nations. Their survey is here. You need something with at least that much data to be taken seriously.

So, you're proposing that since we might not be able to detect steganography, that we allow all possible use of encryption. However, the first example would have to be well enough hidden that it would not make significant use of a scarce resource, and thus that resource would not be denied to others. The second example would potentially lock lots of people out of many frequencies that would be in exclusive use for private communications.

Also, don't assume that we can not detect steganography and intruders in general. There is a very active community that does just that.

he petitioner is not asking for encryption to be allowed for all traffic on all ham bands, as you have suggested at your site

With good governance, it would go that way. With bad governance, any abuser will be able to claim that they were performing a test or drill of emergency communications, and we will have no way to prove otherwise.

Since the petitioner was completely unaware of HSMM-MESH until yesterday, he didn't consider all of the possible abuses, and did not propose any governance means to deal with them.

Your first example would not have violated any rules, although the other operator might have died of boredom and, if deliberate, that would be murder :-) . Your second example would have if it were an encrypted message rather than just rubbing your fingers over the top row of the keyboard.

Unfortunately I think you would have to learn a bit more about the issue before you are able to mount a cogent objection.

Thanks

Bruce