Open letter to Commissioner Tate of the FCC

Commissioner Tate,

I know you are under no obligation to share your reasoning as quoted in the WSJ.

"Republican Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, on the other hand, said she was "lukewarm" at best about the so-called open-access conditions that were agreed upon".

But what did you mean by "lukewarm"?

How have we, the public, who own the frequencies, been served by closed systems such as Verizon? Do you feel that an individual company will invest more money into a closed network with a guaranteed return rate vs. open with each company fighting it out for the best product? I look forward to the day of not yet envisioned technology that bypasses the dyed in the wool thought process of the FCC.

Of Oil, Iraq and Saudi Arabia

In performing research on the interaction between the price of a barrel of oil and the decrease in the relative value of the dollar to world currencies, I came across a interesting article on the decrease of Saudi oil field production rates despite the increased price of oil. It seems that Saudi oil output declined 8% in 2006 - what does this mean? The mighty Ghawar oil field is already in decline, and the Saudis don't want anyone to know.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2393

How does this fit with Iraq? Who is close enough to the Saudis to have known about this for some time? The Bush Family of course.

How does the US involvement in Iraq help the Saudis - I don't know ... but there are up to 200 billion barrels of oil in Iraq. http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/04/19/iraqi_oil_reserves_may_be_twice_as_large/

What will happen if the Saudi's run out of oil by 2010?
Alternative energy sources are looking better all the time.

Fill the Silence!

Fairly recently, some exciting pictures returned from Mars.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) used its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument to take a lovely photo the apparently very, very deep hole - a feature that may cause more scientists to ponder about potential subsurface biology on Mars.

So far, seven of these holes in various sizes have been found.

Now - the camera used cut off the black data since it was unexpected (they limit the number of bits they are looking at to save bandwidth?).

I look forward to a new picture with full spectral details. When I queried a friend of mine at JPL he quipped that rather than figuring out what they might need logistically to support an expidition to Mars for several years - they just sent up a Wal-Mart and were so shamed they blacked it out.

Somewhere I had seen some Mars night-time thermal imaging showing warm spots where these holes are.

How deep, especially in the heights (like these holes are) would you need to go to start increasing atmospheric pressure "a la Blue Mars".