...is not "is your data safe in the cloud" but ARE your data safe in the cloud. +1 for English majors.

Or, read Vonnegut's Player Piano. The writing doesn't hold up too well, but the cultural ideology is all there. Ditch digger or computer programmer, you're one or the other. Better get used to it.

or: Technology Eliminates Jobs. Doh!

A high school kid to design a wheel? I think soapbox derby cars are made by 5th-graders. If the silly "robot" actually *used* power and could, say, navigate stairs, they might have something.

...when I read: "I certainly don't want to take the position that anyone who doesn't deny their guilt is guilty — but we shouldn't assume that they're innocent, either." Hmm. Okay, he must have a different view of law. I'm pretty sure "presumed innocence" is fundamental tenet.

Yeah, folks, this is non-news. The DNS is hierarchical. It can't be replaced. It's not a technology, it's a consideration to global name recognition.

The last paragraph of this article ( from *2002*: http://www.shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html ) says it best:

"There are no pure engineering solutions here, because this is not a pure engineering problem. Human interest in names is a deeply wired characteristic, and it creates political and legal issues because names are genuinely important. In the 4 years since its founding, ICANN has moved from being merely unaccountable to being actively anti-democratic, but as reforming or replacing ICANN becomes an urgent problem, we need to face the dilemma implicit in namespaces generally: Memorable, Global, Non-political -- pick two."

So please, let's quit with all this talk about "replacing" the DNS. Get real, kids.

Touche. Like this hasn't been tried before. Ooh, but wait, it's Peter Sunde!! He'll change the whole DNS! Yeah, he's so the man! All the ISPs in the world will do whatever he says! Go, Peter!

You misread the report. That's modeled with 36 failed satellites.

485 miles is a lot closer than 22,236 miles.

WAS freaking awesome? It still IS freaking awesome. I'm not sure why people are talking about Iridium in the past tense, I used my phone last week.

Yes, my 9500 handset is large, with a huge phallic antenna. Yes, minutes are expensive ($1.49). But I have coverage where literally nobody else does. That's what it's for.

That's utterly incorrect. Motorola lost about three $billion on Iridium: http://www.heavens-above.com/iridiumdemise.asp

>But latency through multi-hop LEO is potentially as bad as geostationary.

No, it's not. Iridium LEOs are 485 mi high, GEOs are 22,236 mi high. That's 46 hops, which Iridium doesn't do. Even with per-satellite latency, you're nowhere near GEO delay.

I used to own an Inmarsat phone, which uses GEOs. There's simply no comparison. The Inmarsat phone is in a little briefcase, and the lid is the antenna (which must be aimed at the GEO). By comparison to my (admittedly large) Moto 9500, it's like, uh, carrying a briefcase. And it doesn't work above 80 degrees latitude.

Slashdotters think that if it doesn't fit in your ear like some Zoolander phone, it's not a breakthrough. With Iridium, I can talk to anyone, from anywhere, any time. I consider that a breakthrough.

>Um. Iridium didn't actually work that well at all. Perhaps you missed my post. It works flawlessly. It was never going to compete with cell phones, nor was it designed to. It works where cell phones *don't*, not where they already do. Tall buildings? Why would you need a satellite phone if you're near a tall building? Your cell phone doesn't work in the middle of the desert (technical flaw?). Nor in the middle of the Sargasso Sea. Nor in most of the places in the Pacific Ocean. My Iridium phone does.

I have an Iridium phone (the original Motorola 9500). Not only does it work flawlessly (as long as you're outdoors...), it only uses 66 active LEOs. They vastly underestimated the number of people who want/need one, but it's the only (handheld) phone system in the world that works *everywhere* in the world: North pole, south pole, everywhere.

The only "flaw" (besides the multi-billion-dollar goof in estimating the market size), was the name: They knew they really only needed 66 satellites, but who's going to name a company after that wacky Lanthanoid "dysprosium"? Nobody, that's who.

Footnote: Globalstar (the only other publicly-offered, LEO-based satphone system) also went bankrupt. But they also have resurrected, and have a larger customer base than Iridium, despite vastly smaller world coverage (in part because of cheaper handsets and air time).