With the news that a five-member panel of the FCC are considering creating a series of super powerful free WiFi network across America, it’s to be expected that the corporate lobbyists for the $178 billion wireless industry are already working overtime to scuttle these plans.

Conversely, according to The Washington Post, there has been an equally aggressive push coming from tech giants like Google and Microsoft for free WiFi networks “who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor”:

The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.

If approved by the FCC, the free networks would still take several years to set up. And, with no one actively managing them, con­nections could easily become jammed in major cities. But public WiFi could allow many consumers to make free calls from their mobile phones via the Internet. The frugal-minded could even use the service in their homes, allowing them to cut off expensive Internet bills.

In a country where Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest employer and doesn’t really even pay a living wage, this sort of monthly savings for what has become a necessity of modern life would seen quite attractive for the common man. The costs are surprisingly minimal, too.

But what of the poor, put-upon media barons who won’t be able to continue sticking the masses with a monthly cell phone bill? Should the management and stockholders of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Intel and Qualcomm be disallowed from skimming around a hundred bucks a month from the bank accounts of the average American?

Of course, the wireless telecom and cable providers are determined not to let this happen. In a January letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the architect of this ambitious plan, and a powerful member of the Obama inner circle, several major companies argued that the government should concentrate on selling the public airwaves to private business, and raising money for the US Treasury that way, rather than going with the free WiFi for all, option.

They would feel that way, wouldn’t that??? LOL.

Naturally, the Republicans are lining up behind this ridiculously blinkered, backwards “free market” approach. Who can forget watching the Tea party dolts who were against net neutrality—because someone on Fox News told them it was something “socialist,” I guess—and braying like buffoons for the privilege of being able to give more power to the telecoms, even if it would mean seeing their own monthly bills rise... because, um, THEIR FREEDUMBS were apparently at stake.

This is a different kind of free market entirely that we’re talking about, one that could alter American lives in profound ways, spurring great innovation and perhaps even unprecedented high tech job creation. The saying goes that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but free WiFi is already occurring in New York City and parts of Silicon Valley. In January, Google announced that it was providing free WiFi for NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood (where Google is headquartered in Manhattan). Soon that will extend to indoor fiber optic wiring as well. Google also rolled out high-speed fiber-optic Internet coverage recently in the Kansas City area, with download speeds up to 1 Gigabit per second. That’s pretty good. In fact it’s approximately 200 times faster than your home broadband connection. It’s not five times faster, it’s 200 times faster. (So much for innovation among the cable companies themselves, eh?)

Google’s blazing fast fiber optic service is beginning to draw hi-tech start-ups to Kansas City. Who would have thought that would happen a few years ago?

Furthermore, the major wireless carriers own far more spectrum than would even be necessary to provide public WiFi, and it would also improve their existing wireless networks for their own consumers. The only downside for this is for a relatively tiny group of stockholders. The benefits for Americans overall? Well, they seem limitless in terms of what can be imagined from 2013.

Designed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the plan would be a global first. When the U.S. government made a limited amount of unlicensed airwaves available in 1985, an unexpected explosion in innovation followed. Baby monitors, garage door openers and wireless stage microphones were created. Millions of homes now run their own wireless networks, connecting tablets, game consoles, kitchen appliances and security systems to the Internet.

“Freeing up unlicensed spectrum is a vibrantly free-market approach that offers low barriers to entry to innovators developing the technologies of the future and benefits consumers,” Genachow­ski said in a an e-mailed statement.

He’s 1000% right. Although not seeing the economic benefits flowing upwards at first may discombobulate their tiny brains, how idiotic would even Republicans have to be not to see the logic of this decidedly free market approach? If they balk, they need to be reminded of what the earlier—but far more technologically limited, pre-PC, iPad and smartphone, of course—Reagan-era changes in the management of the public airways wrought for the economy.

This is a real us vs.against them situation. The fattest cats versus EVERYBODY ELSE. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out. It’s an idea that’s time has come—IF NOT, WHY NOT—and I don’t think it’s going to go away until there’s free Wifi for all. The cat’s out of the bag and it ain’t going back in.

 
Possible geek heaven? A selection of Kate Bush album covers re-imagined as ZX Spectrum artwork.

More here.
 

 
More geek heaven, after the jump…
 

Are you actually surprised?
 
I know there’s all kinds of pithy puns I could make about the righteous dick-swinging contest that was the Cold War; of course it would produce a piece of art so rooted in masculine sexuality! I’m so enamored of the idea though, that I can’t help be reassured by the little glowing lady.

We spent $238 million on a computer system to detect Russian nuclear attacks, creating what was then the largest computer ever made, and a programmer rendered a George Petty pin-up on the screen, taking a Polaroid for posterity. It’s believed to have been created in 1956 or 1958.

Our most human priorities shine so brightly, don’t they?

Via The Atlantic

 
Does it not fill your heart with patriotic pride ?
 

 
Thanks to Richard Devine !

 
Headphones for headbangers. I ordered myself a pair. Will get back to you with a review.

Here’s the hype from Motörheadphones’ website:

We all love the deep, low, warm feeling of that body-shuddering sound called ‘bass’. It rumbles through your chest like a juggernaut, feeling like it’s coming from within instead of a speaker off in the distance. Unfortunately most headphone makers (in a desperate hunt to achieve that warm low end) end up sacrificing the presence and dynamics in the mid and high end areas of the sound spectrum. The result is no warm low end body-shuddering bass experience.

And you lose the guitar sound, because in this misguided attempt to achieve the warm low end, the low/mid range is also lost. A double negative really. One which we weren’t prepared to engage in.

When we at Motörheadphönes developed our headphones, we immediately went to the very top of the professional headphone range as a bench mark. Why wouldn’t we? We want to make the best, so we refer to the best of the best.

Another thing we realized, was that most of the music we listen to today, is guitar-based rock and pop. There was nothing which allowed for the heavy rock experience, nothing which could accommodate the crushing power of loud rock’n’roll.

Obviously somebody needed to do something, and that somebody was the iconic Motörhead, the genuine road warriors for the last three decades. This is why we can now, after hard work and collaboration, proudly present Motörheadphönes, by rockers for rockers.

Does the volume control go to 11?

 
Here’s Compressorhead playing Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades.”

If you feel inclined to “like,” this is their Facebook fan page.
 

 
Via Nerdcore

His explanation of male arousal is my favorite.
 
Born in 1888, Dr. Fritz Kahn was an actual Gynecologist, who just happened to have a flare for art. His interpretations of mechanized human anatomy are as striking as they are fascinating, as gears and pipes disrupt bodies that have been rendered all but biological.

Kahn a Jew, was expelled from his native Germany not long after some of his work gained notoriety. His books were even burned and banned by the Nazis, with one edition surviving under a fake name, after the addition of an anti-Semitic chapter.

Kahn eventually escaped to the U.S. and continued a successful career as an author until his death in 1968. His work has recently been collected in the book, Man Machine, showing the growth and evolution of his perceptions of the body.
 

“Man as Industrial Palace”
 

Vision compared to photography technology
 

The nervous system as an office

 
Indulge me a little romance for technology long past. I generally avoid waxing nostalgic over the time before people like me got to live on the Internet all day, but there’s something so compelling about the primordial technology that served only brief, esoteric purpose.

Long before computers were mass-produced, you had arcane wooden lovelies like this one, hand-made by Steve Wozniak himself. There’s undeniable warmth to the console, and not just because of the organic materials; the wood-shop quality reveals a creator, and the personal touches connect us to a craftsman, as well as a programmer.

A model like this one (only 200 were made) originally sold for $666.66, though collectors now pay up to $50,000.

 
Writers need stability to nurture their talent and unfetter their imagination. Too much chaos dilutes the talent and diminishes the productivity. Writers like Norman Mailer squandered too much time and effort on making his life the story - when in fact he should have been writing it. J. G. Ballard was well aware of this, and he had the quiet certainty of a 3-bed, des res, with shaded garden and off-street parking at front. Yet, Ballard’s seeming conformity to a middle class idyll appeared to astound so many critics, commentators, journalists, whatevers, who all failed to appreciate a true writer’s life is one of lonely, unrelenting sedentary toil, working at a desk 9-5, or however long - otherwise the imagination can not fly.

That’s why I have always found suburbs far more interesting places than those anonymous urban centers. Cities are about mass events - demonstrations, revolution, massacre, war, shared public experience. Suburbia is about the repressed forces of individual action. It’s where the murders are planned, the orgies enjoyed, the drugs devoured, the imagination inspired. Suburbia is where dysfunction is normalized.

And J. G. Ballard was very aware of this.

Future Now is a documentary interview with J G Ballard, made in 1986 not long after he had achieved international success with his faux-biographical novel Empire of the Sun. Opening with a brief tour of his Shepperton home, Ballard gives an excellent and incisive interview, which only reminds what we have lost.

Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara have edited together a brilliant collection of interviews and conversations with J G Ballard 1967-2008, in one volume called Extreme Metaphors, which is a must-have for anyone with an interest in Ballard.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Postcards from J. G. Ballard

 
With thanks to Richard!
 

 
Eclectic Method‘s montage of Hollywood’s vision of the future as seen through film.

I want to tell you something about the future. It will either be: A mind-bendingly awesome; utopian landscape where all of Earth’s problems have been resolved and technology and humanity have evolved to create harmony.

Or it might be a fucked-up dystopian nightmare. Where artificial intelligence has surpassed that of its creators. Or perhaps humans have ravaged the Earth to such a degree that it has gone into full revolt. Or a scarcity of resources has humans warring over water. It depends on which film you watch or what time of day you might have asked Stanley Kubrick’s opinion.

 
Via Boing Boing