I am not a techie, so the updates on the techie history was in itself fascinating. I enjoyed Wu’s application of his central theme of closed/open and hierachical/decentralized to techie innovations. His crediting Hayek is a nice touch. His failure to fully jump on the SK-IP bandwagon was disappointing but understandable. As he notes in a quote, empires must fall and fallen empires must reunite; it has always been so. AT&T came, left and is coming back. That simple. The law is a mere instrumentality. No more.

What makes this book a great read for a young thinker is that it inevitably makes you wonder if this applies to other industries, such as maritime, aviation, automobile, education, policing, etc. And if you start to wonder about these things, your inquiries should eventually lead you to Mises.org, and SK’s IP argument.

On a practical level, it makes me want to buy a Droid next year instead of an iPhone.

Just because they call it patent “reform” doesn’t mean it is. Patent reform is a fraud on America.
Please see http://truereform.piausa.org/ for a different/opposing view on patent reform.

Think about it. Without patents, if a small firm or lone inventor bets the house (which they often do) to bring a new product to market, other than a strong patent system, what is to stop a large would be competitor from copying their work and beating them out of the market they created? Nothing! Without a strong patent system no one in their right mind will risk all and take on such odds. The framers of our constitution understood that. Do you?

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/24/tim-wu-on-net-neutra.html

There has been an ongoing debate with and about Wu views on Monopoly here:

http://techliberation.com/2010/11/23/whats-an-internet-monopolist-a-reply-to-professor-wu/

Of course nobody can use it except for a privileged few.

Basically computers are getting fast enough that they can emulate radio signals using math on the processors in real time. You take those signals and pipe them out to the proper hardware interface then you can use any frequency or any radio protocol you could imagine. The main limitation is just the different types of antennas you can carry around with you.

This is budding technology. We are just getting to the point were general purpose computers have the processing capacity to do this.

You could theoretically use the same station to do GSM cell phone transmissions, wifi, AM radio, FM radio, short wave, satellite communication, HDTV signals, etc etc. Anything. Just program the radio to do what you want, get the proper interface board and antenna and you can do it. Using this technology we can have adaptive radios that will be able to adapt themselves on the fly to different sorts of broadcasts to avoid conjugation, maintain long links, do high speed local links.

Here is the build guide for compiling a radio from source code:
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/BuildGuide
All of it was created free of almost all copyright restrictions. You can download and compile it and run it right now. No copyright fees, no patent fees. It was all done by independent hobbyists and professionals working together to make a tool to make their lives easier and more enjoyable.

Both the software that runs on the computer and the FPGA logic for the hardware is available.

Some users:
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/OurUsers

Here is the company that sells the USRP
http://www.ettus.com/products

This is the USB device you hook up to your computer to do the actual input and output for the radio signals. You can purchase various daughter boards that are suitable for different frequencies.

http://www.ettus.com/WBX
This one can range from 50 MHz to 2.2 GHz. According to the FCC’s frequency allocation map that gets you from Amature radio, through broadcast television channels, mobile sattelite, aeronautical navigation, and full coverage of cellular phone radio.

Here is a guy developing a open source GSM basestation.
http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

See the image on there? Thats the USRP hooked up to a laptop running his software to produce something that you can take any GSM phone and call into a VoIP connection to the internet.

http://aligunduz.org/blog/snapshots_from_gsm_workshop.html

His approach at using software radios with VoIP connections instead of the traditional telecommunications getup the the phone companies use means that he can operate his networks at a vastly lower rates with much higher efficiency and performance. Your looking at a covering costs at about $1 per month for voice communication per user.

The GSM is a ‘IP’ minefield. The first thing that happened when he started the project was that he got sued. Right off the bat.

It’s not reform that’s needed, it’s utter annihilation. The is no place for any state privilege at any level in a true free market society.

Absolutely on the “excellent find” comment!

Statists don’t care about communications per se. They care about whatever you and I care about, and if that is communications, transportation, food, sports, education, or medical services, then so be it — that’s what they will seek to control. They will call it a “public good, and take it over.

Excellent find.