practical ad hoc networks in rural areas: man-made-meteor(ng)

many areas of the world where there is poor infrastructure also suffer from strife

during strife, there are lots of handy airplanes (often unmanned aerial vehicles conveniently supplied by the US) flying overhead as well as many people on the ground in possession of handy ground-to-air missiles

so if you want a good coverage radio net with better than line-of-sight, one way is to use meteor showers - of course, pesky meteors don't always show up when you want them,
so the solution is DIY - make your own meteor storm out of a few SAM missles and a few UAVs, then bounce your 802.11 WILD signals off those, and, voila, half of sudan covered in 11Mbps capacity unlicensed radio and no complaints from the telco

of course, the UAVs also make it less unethical since no pilots are hurt, although the wreckage hitting the ground may cause some minor problems

packet switching in the air

steve hailes just pointed me at this beautiful animation of flights over the USA....

now thats what I call public understanding of science!

endless-to-endless debate about pointless-to-pointless things

the end-to-end interest list is sometimes a place for interesting information (e.g. discussion of congestion control etc, was there in 1980s - see also comp.protocols.tcp-up etc etc) - but the current haranguing about architecture versus economics really takes the biscuit - in amongst the noise, there is some signal, but its pretty hard to find (you need to have a lot of spare time on your hands). one thing for sure is that a lot of arm-chair amateur economists (most of whom, in line with the usual cliche, seem to be techno-libetarians) wont get us anywhere , especially when even if they are right, they may not actually be in any position of power to influence things - i dont want to bet my shirt on the market being the best way to choose the next steps in Internet technology, especially since
i) there's no such thing as a free market (or lunch, although there's not necessarily a connection between those two facts)
and
ii) the market didn't choose IP (or cellular telephones) they were pushed (IP by DoD and cellular by the European Commission) so in this area at least, the argument is bogus.

someone said "the only things that are inevitable are taxes and death" - actually, for many hunderes of years, many people didn't pay tax, so they were only 50% right, but there's probably only two things that are evitable: IPv6 and IPmulticast, no, wait, three things, IPv6, multicast and mobile IP, no, wait, 4 things, IPv6, multicast, mobile IP and QoS, no, wait, no (argh - no-one expects the end-to-end inquisition...thud thud thud)....

the discussio nappears to have moved on to variable length addresses in much the manner of high school kids discussions of variable length willies...

the quantum distance between EE and CS...

wen it comes to talking about circuits, i heard the following phrase yesterday in an EE department, several times...

"...and them some holes leak in..."

something do do with creating excitons

hum - in my world, things leak out of holes, not vice versa:)

google announces the G-phone...

google's global hegemony took one step closer to reality today when
they announced their new open wifi hotspot voip service, dubbed the
G-spot. only avaialble to customers who have purchased the g-phone, these will have unlimited world wide calls for free.

The first customers will be the feds, or g-men as they have become known - often visible talking into hidden microphones built into their grey suits to avoid making the public jealous, g-men will now save the US governemnt millions of cents in AT&T bills

asked whether the FBI should trust google not to spy on their voice traffic, the director dwayne edgar hoobler said "oh yes, we trust google - we use them to spy on you after all"

you will be able to purchase g-phones soon, as seen on G-TV, so long as you have a Gisa credit card.


this has been unreal, and i am not serious, no really. no i am not. i mean it. stop it.

Press Freedom, and what Pops?

Today's Topic: Which freedoms do you want?

Time: May 14, 2007: 20.00 hrs.
Venue: Roger Needham room, Chancellor's Building, Wolfson College

press gangs of people talk about really fun stuff frequently at my college - i hope to be there to learn from them (but it deep ends on the weather!)

as i've advocated, it 'd be neat to have censorship proof publication channels - one can always use social nets to express disapproval of libel and slander and anyhow, what do sleezier magazines want in the world anyhow?

think how much less bad things would have been for Kelly if the Bliar stories had been allowed a bit more airtime before Government Central Spin took control - more importantly, perhaps, think how many less dead iraqis there might be (contentious, moi?)

was pretty interesting in the end - one idea popped up - China now has a Class Based Society!!! !!! Mao will be turning in his groove...

tilda, home at last,

so i just learned that the french word for "~" is
"pas de probleme" - this, above all else, will make me feel
at home in France!!!

virtualisation of networks, systems and users:)

was discussing virtualisation (in the context of GENI, a US programme, much of which appears to be proposing to use Xorp on Xen, both largely work done by Ian Pratt et al from Cambridge England, and Mark Handley (and Atanu Ghosh et al), from UCL England, but nevermind. We're proposing virtualising lots more things - I guess every home should have a virtual internet, plus we should virtualise handsets (since that way, we can actually programme the stupid things, and do an end run on the terminal stupidity of the people who write most handset "OSs", which are ab embarasment to Computer Science.

Aside from Red and Black nets and Red and Black sandboxes for "service provider approved" handset applications versus downloaded stuff playpens, we can have red and black set top boxes too for iptv and p2p. We can also (hopefully) start to give some stability to application developers - in the games world, they have to live with writing to the sony playstation, or nintendo wii, or microsoft XBox world, but in cellphone smart phones, they have at least 11 awful environments to write to, NONE of which has a decent market share or has tipped the world, so there's no real incentive to innovate (unless you make heroic efforts like RIM to write entire systems or are as big and patient as microsoft to just outwait everyone).