Secret bidder delivers 'open access' to US airwaves As the US Federal Communications Commission auctions off the coveted 700-MHz "C Block" - a prime portion of the American airwaves - bidding has topped $4.6bn. And that's a key number. $4.6bn is the "reserve price" for the C Block, and now that the FCC has at least that much in hand, we can be sure this juicy slice of wireless …
I am not sure if that sentence is grammatically, or factually, correct. What Verizon did was petition the U.S. court of appeals to decide on behalf of Verizon, against the decision of the FCC. The appeals court decided not to hear the case, apparently. Or it got dismissed on a summary judgment motion.
It was quite interesting to see the head-snapping U-turns by the major telecoms when Google announced their intent to play in their sandbox. You'd think the majors would welcome a little amateur competition...gee, what are you guys afraid of?
"Schmidt: "Two years, seven months, and four days ago. But who's counting? Actually, we agreed the month before we went public that we would work together for 20 years. I will be 69, and according to Google I'm going to live to 84, so I should be fine.""
Very Big Brother, Schmidty. Although 20 minutes is a long time in the Internet. In that time you can compose a XSS ZerodDay Crack Hack that will XXXXpose any Weakness or Vulnerability, or in some cases, which might just probably definitely maybe be most cases, a QuITe Deliberate Honey Pot and Revenue Stream, to Rabid Dogs of War and Wolves to Fortune, and with AI Stealth that is QuITe Beyond Belief*.
*Optional Area 51 Director Input ... And in periods of Intense and XXXXTensive Sun SPOT HyperRadioProActivity, be prepared for those EMP Gravitational Wave thingies .........Naturally TEMPESTuos Forces beyond Earthly Controls ..... but well in Order at the Behest of Global Operating Devices on their Quests.....Flights of Passionate Fancy.
Mr. Zuckerberg should take note, this is how it is done: if your young, nonconformist, highly capitalized, publicly traded startup has a QUARTERLY PROFIT of $1.2bn, you can crack jokes about your precisely timed demise, and dispense other levity at your discretion.
if your company has no business model; if you have no idea when or if you will ever turn a profit (or have an income at all); if you're facing a lawsuit from the guys who appear to have some evidence that you stole their idea, from them, in person; and if all you have is investment capital, you should save your wit and your energy for finding your way out of that hole you wound up in...because it's called a "burn rate" for a reason, bitch.
I mean I could set up a VPN account for a private network with no internal or external accessible resources, so while I could claim anyone can connect a fat lot of good it will do them. Does the FCC requirement include specifics as to what access permissions a device connecting to this spectrum might actually have?
Allow everyone to connect for free, but as part of that arrangment you have to agree to have all your traffic monitored for anything of use to advertisers. You happen to mention to a friend via IM that you couldn't find your white socks this morning so are wearing blue ones and 5 mins later all the webpages you visit (running google ads) are throwing things at you like 'no white socks, we can help' and 'lost your white socks again? with the white sock finder you will never lose another white sock'
Google then get to charge advertisers even more with promises of 'targeted ads - in real time!' followed by a new corporate slogan
Google: All your information are belong to us
....where Jack Nicholson, whose character is a retiring insurance exec, says (IIRC) "Tell me a man's age, race, marital status, where he lives and works and what he does for a living, and I can tell you with great certainty how long that man will live." Hasn't that been true of actuarial science for some time now? If you have enough of the right statistics to back you up, you can predict almost anything - though "enough of the right statistics" can be a HUGE cliff to climb in practice!
Although this has been going around a bit, the actual problem would occur if a significant number of systems are still running OSes that have not gone to 64-bit time_t. (solutions involving epoch shifting for archival data already exist).
Maybe someone's cufflinks will still be running a 32-bit OS that hasn't been updated in 30+ years, but I doubt Google will.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
