AFP is reporting another outrage out of the Iranian legal system where a journalist Bahman Ahmadi Amoui has been sentenced to over seven years in jail and a flogging with 34 lashes. Amoui was a critic of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s economic policies.
Amoui, who has been in jail since June 20th. He was an editor at the respected economic publication Sarmayeh. Iranian authorities shutdown the paper when it continued to criticize the economic policies of Ahmadinejad.
This follows the six-year jail sentence handed down a few days earlier to journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi.
For pictures of other journalists arrested in Iran, click here.
For the full story, click here.
Ohhh. Change the topic to nonsense when you can’t win, troll. Sweet.
Noise is corrected by parity measures, genius. Unlike fiber? Sat transmission, copper line and cable are all noisy too. They still work like a charm.
Speaking of Follow the money, heard this one yet.
First it was phantom Congressional districts. Now it’s phantom zip codes.
Last month, we reported on federal stimulus money credited with creating jobs in nonexistent New Mexico Congressional districts. Further examination of the most recent report on the recipients and uses of New Mexico’s share of the $787 billion stimulus shows jobs created and money going to zip codes that do not exist.
New Mexico Watchdog broke what became a national news story, and fodder for Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert. The website launched by the Obama Administration to track the destinations of billions of dollars of stimulus funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act showed billions going to nonexistent Congressional districts. The website, recovery.gov, reported $26.5 million going to ten New Mexico Congressional districts that do not exist. Those millions were credited with creating 61.5 jobs. Spadework by our Watchdog counterparts in other states showed a total of $6.4 billion reported as being allocated to 440 nonexistent, or “phantom,” Congressional districts.
http://newmexico.watchdog.org/2010/01/03/federal-stimulus-funds-reportedly-spent-in-nonexistent-zip-codes/
Deployment of BPL has illustrated a number of inherent challenges. The primary one is that power lines are inherently a very noisy environment. Every time a device turns on or off, it introduces a pop or click into the line. Energy-saving devices often introduce noisy harmonics into the line. The system must be designed to deal with these natural signaling disruptions and work around them. For these reasons BPL can be thought of as a halfway between wireless transmission (where likewise there is little control of the medium through which signals propagate) and wired transmission (but not requiring any new cables).
Broadband over power lines has developed faster in Europe than in the United States due to a historical difference in power system design philosophies. Power distribution uses step-down transformers to reduce the voltage for use by customers. But BPL signals cannot readily pass through transformers, as their high inductance makes them act as low-pass filters, blocking high-frequency signals. So, repeaters must be attached to the transformers. In the U.S., it is common for a small transformer hung from a utility pole to service a single house or a small number of houses. In Europe, it is more common for a somewhat larger transformer to service 10 or 100 houses. For delivering power to customers, this difference in design makes little difference for power distribution. But for delivering BPL over the power grid in a typical U.S. city requires an order of magnitude more repeaters than in a comparable European city. On the other hand, since bandwidth to the transformer is limited, this can increase the speed at which each household can connect, due to fewer people sharing the same line. One possible solution is to use BPL as the backhaul for wireless communications, for instance by hanging Wi-Fi access points or cellphone base stations on utility poles, thus allowing end-users within a certain range to connect with equipment they already have.
The second major issue is signal strength and operating frequency. The system is expected to use frequencies of 10 to 30 MHz, which has been used for many decades by amateur radio operators, as well as international shortwave broadcasters and a variety of communications systems (military, aeronautical, etc.). Power lines are unshielded and will act as antennas for the signals they carry, and have the potential to interfere with shortwave radio communications. Modern BPL systems use OFDM modulation, which allows them to mitigate interference with radio services by removing specific frequencies used. A 2001 joint study by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and HomePlug Powerline Alliance showed that for modems using this technique “in general that with moderate separation of the antenna from the structure containing the HomePlug signal that interference was barely perceptible at the notched frequencies” and interference only happened when the “antenna was physically close to the power lines” (however other frequencies still suffer from interference).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity
OT,
Follow the money, dipstick. That’ll answer your inane question.
you said,
“just pointed to a great big unopened box of it that we can open at any time”
What are they waiting for then. Sounds great, how are they coming along with it. Is it in service yet or are they just sitting on all that technology.
A google search of BPL providers comes up with alot of stories as old, if not older than yours.
One lives to be of service, Mike.
Good to have you back too, even if you absence was for the absolute best of causes: the grandkids. They are lucky kids to have a good grandfather. I know. I had one too. It is a treasure beyond measure.
Tom and Buddha,
I’m just sitting back and enjoying the cogency of your demolition.
Tom,
Excellent post. Good show.
While we are at it, let’s look at what controls have wrought in China and Saudi Arabia . . .
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/
and
http://www.amnestyusa.org/business-and-human-rights/internet-censorship/page.do?id=1101572
Ahhhh . . . the smell of repression!
Back on topic! It isn’t surprising that the regime in Iran would start cracking down on information and analysis of the economy there. Ahmadinejad ran as an economic populist – in a country where they basically pump money out of the ground, why should anyone be economically suffering? Of course, as the George W. Bush of the middle east, he has totally screwed things up, and that economic failure is a big part of what’s driving popular anger against his regime. Of course there are still many Ahmadinejad supporters – people who believe what the official right-wing propaganda sources tell them ([cough]see above[cough]). “It’s all the fault of foreign powers and their dis-loyal agents here in our country! Blame someone else!”
Better informed Iranians know that the current government is making a mess of things, and as a result, they’re reacting against the tragic joke of the last election. Being a good economics/business reporter or analyst and telling people about this mess in Iran sounds risky…
Another angle on the economy of Iran that I’d like to know more about is the role of the Revolutionary Guard in business there. I’ve heard brief references to the Guard owning businesses, along the line of the Burmese junta and the Chinese military. If this is true and wide spread, it may be a major impediment to improving the situation in Iran, both economically and politically. (Finally, let’s not forget that even a totally democratic Iran won’t necessarily be our BFFs – they have their own issues and interests, and they won’t align with ours all the time…)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRm5WcjOikQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Whomever hired/is paying OT, they really should have done a better job of selecting their shills. Maybe it isn’t a good idea to quote an article that references one of the Internet “godfathers” – Tim Berners-Lee. TBL is very strongly in support of legislation to maintain net neutrality. It’s also a clue when a shill has to call something out as “a respected American think-tank” that it’s a reference to a “we’ll write what you pay us to write, boss!” type of “think-tank.” For all we know, OT is being paid directly by either Nemertes, or more likely, the PR/astroturfing firm that hired Nemertes as part of this pathetic campaign. It’s pretty sad to think of this schmuck sitting at home in his soiled undershirt spamming blogs for scraps, with FauxNews blaring in the background. It’s extra sad when he wanders into a site like this and gets shredded quickly (nice stuff, BiL!)
(Hmmm… Corporate interests shaping and driving populist anger and confusion in a period of economic turmoil… Where did we see that before? Some country in central Europe in the middle of the last century, I think. Why do I think it led to a metal sign being stolen recently? Someone help me out here…)
For folks who care, we’re having to deal with net neutrality because folks like Comcast can’t just suck it up and provide fast, dumb, open internet connections. Their corporate mind-set is to weasel and scam every penny out of customers and the web content providers at the other end of their connections. They can’t conceive of a business model where they make modest profits in return for providing a simple, high quality, “neutral” service like a utility.
One of these corporate dolts once complained that Google was effectively freeloading on “his pipes.” Of course, that’s total crap – we pay our ISPs for access to the Internet, and companies like Google pay boatloads of money for the bandwidth on their end. Rather, this schmuck and his ilk see that Google is making nice profits, and they want a bigger cut of the action. In the bad old days, a hoodlum would come into a successful shop and say things like, “ya know, windows get broken, sometimes fires start for no reason, I can help protect you from some of does things, ya know?” Nowadays, these weasels are saying to content providers and end customers, “ya know, sometimes there’s brownouts on the internet. Maybe there won’t be enough bandwidth in place if we don’t get more money…” I’m looking for a difference, but I’m not seeing it. Just think where we’d be if the Mafia had the lobbyists in the 50s and 60s that AT&T and Comcast have today…
In reality, we need to treat internet access like a utility – a necessity that must be open and reliable, for a reasonable price, even if that means limited profits. And, yes, well functioning utilities need good, stringent government regulation.
Yes, which means it’s DUH an untapped resource.
As in something we can be using but aren’t YET. Your concern is bandwidth? I just pointed to a great big unopened box of it that we can open at any time.
And you still ignore sat IP service.
This is embarrassing. You argue like a child or a really smart dog. That is to say, poorly.
Yea it was untapped four years ago and by the looks of it, it still is.
Look! It’s more of Herr Beck hilarity!
Birthers are now a left wing conspiracy!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/05/glenn-beck-flooded-with-c_n_411741.html
Yeah. He’s a real credible source.
And citing Glenn Beck around here? If you want to talk credibility of information you should have just said PNAC or Dick Cheney gave you this “information” you have. Beck is demonstrably insane. I always look for the maximum insanity in my sources for information. That was sarcasm, since you have a demonstrable lack of capacity to pick that out.
No, what I pointed to was untapped bandwidth.
That and that your argument is ridiculous.
you said,
There is no shortage of bandwidth. It’s that simple.
and
Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 percent a year, will start to exceed supply as early as 2010 because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web sites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.
and then want to point to a article 4 years old.
OT,
Nice to see you can’t distinguish your stance being rendered ridiculous from a supporting argument. You don’t read very well. Yeah, there is increasing demand. There is also a huge untapped bandwidth channel already in place. I used to work in telecom. I’ve actually helped design and deploy both wireless and fiber networks. I know exactly how full of shit you are on this topic. This is a power play to allow corporations to control data flow to both maximize profits and to allow repression, either at their whim or by governmental “request”. Byron is 100% correct. The gains made because of the internet are directly related to it’s openness. It started off as a collaborative tool used by scientists and academics and then they realized the true utility of the internet. Now a select number of companies and people want total control of the data flow. That’s counter productive and destructive. And I know this fact too: there is no digital lock, no code so careful crafted it cannot be circumvented. Inserting controls will do one thing for a fact: bring out the black hat hackers in droves. And in this particular case? Some of the white hats too.
The mark of a true propagandist is the inability to realize that they are being made fun of and that their arguments are rendered ridiculous.
See where it says experts, something you aren’t
Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 percent a year, will start to exceed supply as early as 2010 because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web sites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.