I don’t think I’d buy my genome mapping. I’m freaked out enough that Universal Studios has my fingerprint.

I don’t know, I don’t think society knows, the impact of an FCC auction for licenses of wireless spectrum that opened today. If anyone finds good summary articles of the auction, its players, its impacts, and more, please email or comment with them. Essentially, the switch-to-digital-OTA-TV next February is opening up a big chunk of high-quality bandwidth (the UHF 52-69 channel range.) This space, because of its penetrate through building capabilities, is huge for communication and data providers. And the intrigue abounds… The FCC is looking for billions of dollars from this auction, which will go until it finishes (the last one went over 100 rounds.) Google is in on it, although stuff I’ve read said they’re doing it to try and enforce openness in how people use the spectrum (ie: not locking it to just ProviderA’s devices, or allowing Google to be able to share it openly or via sub-license.) They also help the bigger players (ATT, Verizon, Ryan Harden,) meet the reserves (which are six digits or better.) Sorry, Ryan.

There’s also a 22MHz band up for auction that hopefully will have an impact on reducing the number of EMS channels, or make organizations use them smarter, in a bigger push to try to free up more spectrum space from government.

Even if you don’t understand it, and I certainly don’t, know that this is big news and the impacts of who wins this auction and how they implement it will have huge secondary effects on the future of telecommunication. (Both in the introduction of new services and the scrutiny of FCC licensure/distribution.)

Edit: Marc adds www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4246037.html

This post is for the Computer Scientist people out there. Those who don’t dig CS231 content should shift their attention pointers elsewheres …

Around the start of the semester, I subscribe to all the course newsgroups to make sure they’re being used, check for obvious threads about IT related issues, etc. It also means I get to lurk questions about the first homework assignments. Sometimes, those questions are “winners”. Like this gem, from the 231 class:

The director of the Binary Zoo has decided that he would like to give
each of the zebras in the main exhibit a new name consisting of a unique
pattern of 0’s and 1’s. There are currently 461 zebras – quite a herd.
How many bits will he need, in order to write out each name?

So I don’t get it. Once again. did I miss some lesson on Bits?

It seems like a straight-forward question, but then again I’m a more experienced Computer Scientist than the posting student. Maybe it would help if we told him the zebras are just a red herring. I dunno. Maybe the student did miss the lesson on bits. They should review that stuff — it’s only going to get harder.