Every once in a while the Prof blows it, and this post about reserve mobile phone capacity is one such. Fortunately, before I started typing out a long rebuttal, I found that Steven Den Beste has done a much better job than I could ever manage, since he's actually a qualified CDMA designer. Bottom line is the same though: TANSTAAFL. You want reserve capacity in the system, then you pay capital costs up front, and they have to be cranked into the rate base, just like power utilities. With the difference that the requirement will have differing effects on competing carriers, depending on which technology they use: Den Beste follows up with a short primer on CDMA and other mobile voice/data systems. Bottom line: Qualcomm would end up a winner if reserve capacity were enforced, as CDMA's greater spectral efficiency would advantage carriers using it over others.

Non sequiter: Sandwiched between those two articles is Den Beste's glowing review of Miyazaki's animated movie Spirited Away. All I can do is whole-heartedly concur. If you haven't seen this yet, just go buy it. Trust us. And if Japan hasn't yet declared Miyazaki a national treasure, then someone's blown it.
5:01:39 PM    

It's good for you.
2:37:24 PM    

But unlike Jim Clark, he's bailing out to Oregon. Well, have fun, and remember to rotate your seating position periodically so the moss builds up evenly...
1:00:04 PM    

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change has a great roundup of private efforts in getting to LEO and beyond.

Whatever the details of the Columbia report when it emerges, there's only one possible outcome: the costs of a Shuttle launch and interval between them are going nowhere but up - sort of a negative learning curve. The current NASA manned space effort will not end with that report, but it has long been the equivalent of the VC's "living dead" company: it cannot scale up and escape its government subsidy niche.

The private efforts that Joe and other he points to cite are beginning small and simple, but they have the hope and financial imperatives to achieve a positive learning curve. Time to send NASA back to buying down risk on edge technologies, and managing deep space exploration, and take away the charter for bureaucratically and politically inspired and encumbered manned space flight.

Update: After reading Laughing Wolf's full post, I'm in much the same situation. I grew up on NASA in the '60s. Followed the Mercury and Gemini shots on the schoolbus radio news. Mourned at the death of fellow Hoosier Grissom and the others in the Apollo fire, and cheered for Apollo 8 and 11. Weaseled my way onto the 'NASA Notes' teachers' newsletter mailing list - and still have them in my keepsakes. Alas for the can-do version of the agency, but it's gone with our youth. If we'd pursued computing with the same federalized approach, we'd right now be arguing whether transistors can be trusted. Time to die.
11:27:15 AM