Since I'm suburban and stuck with a 35ft vertical limit, not so good. I'm already badly short on 75 and 160. Opening up LF doesn't really help someone on a quarter acre lot. I'd love to have a quad set of beverage antennas but that's not happening soon either.

Those sunspots also charge our ionosphere. The dearth of spots means less bounce off of the F layer and less signal propagation.

(This comment only relevant to the 5 or so amateur radio ops who read /.)

Even amateur radio has issues at high power. The FCC calls it MPE or Maximum Permissible Exposure. As others have said it's based on power, freq., distance and exposure time. The allowed exposure for say 3.9 mhz is WAY higher than say 29Mhz, and cell is up near the ghz range.

You are in what they call an uncontrolled area (which is more restrictive). Your problem is that exposure will be hours at a time, at high frequency in Continious Commercial Service (100% duty). Even if the ERP isn't that high, I'd still be a little wary.

Having said that, this is really a REAL ESTATE issue. The reason you can afford that killer appt is that every buyer who goes up there sees those antennas too. Location, location.... Unless the market is smokin' hot it'll be tough to re-sell. Even if you understand that there's no danger, you'd have to convince every prospective buyer of that

Walk away now.

 

What, no "build it and they will come"? The Niagara Frontier are has had job availability issues since the 80's. They've got power, people, reasonably cheap land, a single fault that shakes about once every 30 years so little you can't feel it. They do get snow, but usually not as bad as further south near Buffalo and the lake Erie shore. With good air flow, they'll probably only need to run the chillers 2-3 months out of the year.

1. ..which is ice locked for how many months a year? 3-4? And when it does thaw, it's so cold that nobody really spends much time in it.

2. More like 3. Winter, Mosquito, fall

3. I suspect those are people getting away from the central midwest

4. Ice storms? Overcast from october through march?

5. about the same as anywhere that's not tornado alley

6-8 I'll spot you these, but in the end, you have to sell yourself to the C level people who make location decisions and they've been fleeing the old rust belt for 40 years. I'm sorry, I'm from Buffalo and I feel your pain. Almost everybody I grew up with left for anywhere else. Cars were built in Detroit because it was on/near great lakes, steel mills, rail arteries and coal deposits. Otherwise it's a good place for orchards and other agg, but after you shoot the last CWD infested deer, then what do you do for fun?

late, but you're still missing the point. If I have to create an intermediate technology to read the data, it's likely we're back to 7 track mag tape.

The film stock you refer to hasn't been used in over 50 years. It was the old acetate crap that was basically nitrocellulose. The reason that digitization is the first step in restoration is because it's far easier to apply the fixes in the digital domain than to retouch frame by frame.

Here's the issue we keep coming back to. It's not digital vs analog, it's what will be readable in 100 years or even 200. Digital is fine, except that you'll have to re archive it about every 10 years if you don't want to be orphaned like a 7 track 800bpi tape. Sure someone COULD build a reader, but who will finance that? And that assumes your digital media won't drop bits in that timeframe. We could take an Ansel Adams glass plate from the '30's and print it today. We could take a 1868 Timothy O'Sullivan photo of the American southwest and print that. No special tech other than we kept them in stable human habitable conditions.

Using advanced aging techniques, we can speculate on the lifespan of current inks and papers, but we KNOW that silver salts on glass last over 160 years. We KNOW silver on ph neutralized linen based papers lasts for over 160 years. In fact we KNOW that certain inks on treated goat hide will last a couple of thousand years stored in a jar in a cave.

I'm another one that believes that 200 years from now, historians will be cursing our lack of foresight in archiving not only the major events but the minor "how we lived" ones

Current Ultracaps can still be used. They're used to "frontend" battery packs. They work great at providing bursts of high current needed during acceleration because of low internal DC resistance. Batteries hate having those loads thrown at them and they accelerate the cell decay. By designing in ultracaps, you should be able to reduce the cell count (lower peak loads), and extend their service life (better managed charge/discharge patterns). I don't know the economics of it though.

Really? The only game or the only one you want to play? No DSL? No T1/T3? No view of the Southern sky (Hughes)

This has NOTHING to do with lazy. EVERY ISP, EVERY corporate network, EVERY CoLo, oversubscribes their network. You NEVER build out a network so that all ports can run full b/w across the LAN (the exception being certain HPTC cases), no less across the WAN. Why? Because it's not the use case and a huge waste of money. Insuring delay and jitter sensitive traffic is prioritized isn't a "problem", it's an effing design goal. Intelligent traffic shaping (queuing) makes sure that VoIP or even gaming traffic gets through, and doesn't backup, get out of order or drop packets. Mail and bulk transfers which can stand a few retransmits or window size adjustments will have plenty b/w, the transfers will just be more bursty as it's slotted in between the other traffic. When they start to throttle (not the same thing) by src/dst or protocol, maybe you can whine. If you bought a commercial "Tn/En" or OCnn, then you can whine. Go price a T3 to your house (which won't be anywhere near as fast in theory) and you'll find out the real cost of bandwidth. BTW, if the ISP's are to be believed, about 5% of their users account for most of their traffic.