If you had a ham radio connection and wanted to broadcast emergency bulletins to people, radio fax would be quite useful.
It’s push rather than pull like the web. Email works too, but fax has more utility in an emergency situation. Beats having to download adobe acrobat on every computer….
They talk about so little because that’s what the fcc rules limit them to. Can’t blame people for behaving like Elmer the safety elephant all the time.
What can you do with a license?
Jam live music with other people over the air, in full duplex mode. Thats something only analog radio can do—because the latency is so low.
Yes, discussing politics or broadcasting music is not allowed over ham radio. Basically all we can do is exchange call signs, locations and details about our signals and stations.
I have wondered if you could use the fact that analog radio over short distances has latencies measured in the microseconds, so you could have a jazz band with players scattered over an entire city, but they can play like they are in the same room. Internet comms have too much latency (measured in the milliseconds).
I spent my life looking for such an elegant tome. If I had discovered it when I was 15 maybe my life would have been happier.
Utilitarian programming is like utilitarian food. Programming should be seen as an act of worship to the god of simplicity. If the artificial world intrudes and makes the program complicated, this is what leads to suffering. Ultimately it is the world which should be changed.
If I could look down mid-flight and see what was happening below…ancient battles, modern news events…that would be a truly educational inflight experience.
This is a great example of a good idea that absolutely doesn’t depend on the technology at hand. In fact it might make it worse: in the middle of most flights you’re above the clouds. Any battle details would be infinitesimally small. And looking at the floor for extended periods of time would be very uncomfortable.
Why not take the same idea and just… show it on a screen?
I enjoy looking out windows and really like the in-flight views that many airlines have put into seat-back entertainment, but they're all just rendering aerial/satellite photos, not actually showing you. I'd love it if there were actual cameras on the planes that showed you exactly what was out the window (with some map overlay).
If you know your approximate position and have a good feeling for geography, you can see a lot. Coming back from Europe during daylight, I was able to see Lac Manicougan, the St Lawrence River, and eventually Lake Champlain (since it was a clear day, I actually saw more of it on that flight than I did when I drove across it a few years later, when it was foggy). I've identified highways from cruising altitude and used that to identify the larger towns/smaller cities we were passing. Flying to Europe at night, I've had a full view from Ireland to Amsterdam as we approached landfall.
All of those would be even better if I could have looked ahead and to both sides with actual cameras. I wouldn't want to spend a whole flight in a VR headset, but an hour or two would be great, especially since 1-2-1 has become the default seating in business class - I'm traveling with my wife and so we have to sit in the middle of the plane to be able to sit next to one another.
Perhaps that is the experience he was after for his billion node graph.