Teledesic, the censored internet in the sky. Late last year the organized violence monopolies of the world voted to give Bill Gates 400 Megahertz of bandwidth, at the same frequency in each monopoly. I would guesstimate the value of this grant to be around ten billion dollars. Don't run out and buy Microsoft shares. When I said Bill Gates, I meant Bill Gates. I did not mean Microsoft. Bill Gates intends to build an internet in the sky, eight hundred satellites in low earth orbit, each of them with big bandwidth connections to its nearest neighbors, and each with a four hundred megahertz connection to each of many squares of ground underneath it. What caused the collected killers of the world to show such unanimous generosity towards Bill Gates? Bill Gates proposed a network that would be completely censorable. He will not sell pipes to his space backbone, he will sell pipes from a particular rectangle on the ground to its space backbone. You would buy a right to connect from any place in a single small area, not any a right to connect from any place in the world, and Bill Gates would only sell such rights to government approved organizations, which would then presumably resell connections to private individuals -- connections that would first run through government controlled pipes to check for politically incorrect bits before they reached Bill Gates' sky backbone. Of course we should not condemn him too harshly for this: He needs approval from Singapore, Iran, France, Germany, Communist China, and the like, in order to get a single uniform world wide frequency band, and would be unlikely to get it for any reasonable proposal. The government pipes in his proposal are as useless as wheels on a fish, because he promises his ground stations will be quite cheap. Therefore private citizens who are not permitted direct access to his internet in the sky will feel the impact of tyranny immediately in their wallets. Bill Gates internet in the sky will provide short and near constant latency, therefore telephone connections running through it should be pretty good, whereas existing internet phone sucks mightily. Teledesic is promised to come on line in 2001, though we have seen how Microsoft meets schedules in the past. I conjecture 2006. I also predict that once the scheme is securely in place, and jamming it becomes painful, Bill Gates will find a thousand ways to chisel the government monopoly middlemen in his proposal. I would guess that Motorola's less ambitious Iridium project will only be a year or two late, but it has little potential to revolutionize the world the way Bill Gates proposal has. I expect once the scheme is in place, the government monopolies in Gate's plan will be under attack both from above and from below. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com