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Excerpt - Companies participating in an auction of wireless licenses increased their bids to almost $10.3 billion on Wednesday, with cable providers bidding against cellphone companies as rising prices prompted satellite broadcasters to drop out. The Federal Communications Commission is auctioning off 1,122 licenses for spectrum that can be used to provide wireless services. The spectrum, currently used by the military and law enforcement, will help wireless carriers upgrade their services and other companies to get into new business lines. ~ snip ~

A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day Free Republic made its debut in September, 1996, and the forum was added in early 1997.   Over 100,000 people have registered for posting privileges on Free Republic, and the forum is read daily by tens of thousands of concerned citizens and patriots from all around the country and the world. A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day was introduced on June 24, 2002. It's only a small room in JimRob's house where we can get to know one another a little better; salute and support our military and our leaders; pray for those in...

I was trolling the site of the Intellectual Insurgent and came across this neat test. It can help you identify where you truly fall on the ideological spectrum. The questions are kind of simplistic, but they did nail me. Read More... Craig DeLuz Visit The Home of Uncommon Sense... www.craigdeluz.com

BRITISH scientists are developing a revolutionary vaccine that works against all types of flu, the UK DAILY MAIL fronts on Friday. It would protect people against flu and a single jab could give lifelong immunity. Currently, new vaccines have to be developed each year. The major breakthrough has been made by the Cambridge biotech firm Acambis. When it announced the news yesterday the value of its shares jumped by 9p. Such a vaccine would be massively lucrative for its manufacturer. Each year, flu kills up to 12,000 people in the UK, many of them elderly. But experts have been warning...

NEWINGTON, CT, Feb 25, 2005--At the urging of the ARRL, Rep Michael Bilirakis (R-FL) has introduced The Amateur Radio Spectrum Act of 2005 into the US House of Representatives. The bill, designated HR 691 , has been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee where Bilirakis serves as vice chairman. Like previous versions of the proposal, the current measure would require the FCC to provide "equivalent replacement spectrum" to the Amateur Radio and Amateur-Satellite services in the event of reallocation to other services of primary amateur spectrum or the diminution of secondary amateur spectrum. The bill also would cover...

The FCC is considering opening up additional spectrum to unlicensed uses -- the same kind of regulatory change that gave rise to Wifi. Much of the spectrum being considered for unlicensed use is currently allocated for broadcasters, however, so FCC's proposal creates tension between incumbents and groups that want to take advantage of the possibilities inherent in unlicensed spectrum. Most issues the FCC deals with, even contentious ones like limits on the ownership of radio and television stations, are changes within regulatory schemes. The recent proposal to move the maximum media market reach from 35% to 45% took the idea...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 August 12 The Spectrum of a Meteor Credit & Copyright: P. Jenniskens (SETI Inst.), E. Jehin (ESO) et al., FORS1/VLT, ESO Explanation: Chasing the brief flash of a meteor trail across the sky with a very large telescope is a nearly impossible task. But on May 12, 2002, astronomers got lucky, as a bright meteor chanced across the narrow slit of their spectrograph at the Paranal Observatory....

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 April 18 Stellar Spectral Types: OBAFGKM Credit & Copyright: KPNO 0.9-m Telescope, AURA, NOAO, NSF Explanation: Astronomers divide stars into different spectral types. First started in the 1800s, the spectral type was originally meant to classify the strength of hydrogen absorption lines. A few types that best describe the temperature of the star remain in use today. The seven main spectral types OBAFGKM are shown above with...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 June 29 The Solar Spectrum Credit & Copyright: Nigel Sharp (NOAO), FTS, NSO, KPNO, AURA, NSF Explanation: It is still not known why the Sun's light is missing some colors. Shown above are all the visible colors of the Sun, produced by passing the Sun's light through a prism-like device. The above spectrum was created at the McMath-Pierce Solar Observatory and shows, first off, that although our...

WASHINGTON, June 24 — Florida Gov. Jeb Bush says Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean is “too far out of the mainstream. ... Ultra left-wing people aren’t going to be president of the United States.” Meanwhile, some Democrats say Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman is too conservative to win their support as presidential nominee. But a look at their records shows both Dean and Lieberman to be very much mainstream Democrats on most issues. From abortion to taxes, Dean and Lieberman are aligned with most rank-and-file Democrats. SOME DEMOCRATIC activists deride the entire labeling process. “Of the six major contenders, there is...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 5 X-Ray Cygnus A Credit: A. Wilson & A. Young (UMD), P. Shopbell (Caltech), CXC, NASA(Inset Credit: NRAO) Explanation: Amazingly detailed, this false-color x-ray image is centered on the galaxy Cygnus A. Recorded by the orbiting Chandra Observatory, Cygnus A is seen here as a spectacular high energy x-ray source. But it is actually more famous at the low energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum as...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 September 28 X-Ray Rainbows Credit: J. McClintock et al. (CfA), CXC, NASA Explanation: A drop of water or prism of glass can spread out visible sunlight into a rainbow of colors. In order of increasing energy, the well known spectrum of colors in a rainbow runs red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. X-ray light too can be spread out into a spectrum ordered by energy ......

The other day I was asked to comment on something called "laissez-faire socialism" and what I thought about American conservatism as a political ideology. This was my response. "Laissez-Faire socialism" is a contradiction in terms. Socialism involves government ownership and control over industry and under pure socialism each and every citizen is owned by the collective and has no rights -- only whatever the government decides to give him or her. Work becomes compulsory for each and all (see Marx's Communist Manifesto's ten planks). Under hard-core socialism, all economic activity is rigidly controlled by a clique of central planners...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 July 2 The Average Color of the Universe Credit: Karl Glazebrook & Ivan Baldry (JHU) Explanation: What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky was smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what stars are commonplace in nearby galaxies. The answer, depicted above, is a conditionally perceived shade of beige. To determine this,...

What Is A True Color Image? Image with intrinsic color relationships. Same image roughly convolved with the response of the human eye. What is a true color astronomical image? Is it what an astronaut would see if there was an eye piece on, say, the Hubble Space Telescope? Or is it one that captures the intrinsic colors emitted by the stars, nebulae, and gas clouds in galaxies? For the Hubble Heritage image of globular cluster, M15, we constructed an image which attempted to captured these intrinsic colors as closely as possible given Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data. The detail...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 March 19 Breaking Distant Light Credit: VIMOS, VLT, ESO Explanation: In the distant universe, time appears to run slow. Since time-dilated light appears shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (redshifted), astronomers are able to use cosmological time-slowing to help measure vast distances in the universe. Above, the light from distant galaxies has been broken up into its constituent colors (spectra), allowing astronomers to measure the...