Jinn of Quality and Risk

Government regulation of radio (and TV) spectrum violates the First Amendment and has been used to ration frequencies while maintaining artificial scarcity. In other words, airwaves should be as free from government intervention as the printing presses are, for the same reasons. Stuart Minor Benjamin: The Supreme Court has distinguished the regulation of radio spectrum from the regulation of printing presses, and applied more lenient scrutiny to the regulation of spectrum, based on its conclusion that the spectrum is unusually scarce. The Court has never confronted an allegation that government actions resulted in unused or underused frequencies, but there is good reason to believe that such government-created idle frequencies exist. Government limits on the number of printing presses almost assuredly would be subject to heightened scrutiny and would not survive such scrutiny. ... I argue that the scarcity rationale does not support, and instead undercuts, government actions that limit the use of the spectrum. Government decisions that exacerbate the problems that gave rise to government regulation in the first place subvert the entire justification for lenient review. And no other rationale would distinguish spectrum from print in a way that would support government constraints on the former but not the latter. 

One century after the first powered flight, commercial space travel (and tourism) will arise from private enterprise, not thanks to NASA or ESA. A private manned spaceflight program was unveiled last Friday at a desert airport, where it has been in secret development by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan for two years. A rocket plane, dubbed SpaceShipOne, and the White Knight, an exotic jet designed to carry it aloft for a high-altitude air launch, were shown off in a hangar at Mojave Airport, where Rutan developed Voyager, the airplane that made the first nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world in 1986. The program is run by Scaled Composites, in Mojave, California (where else, one is tempted to say). 

Apple informed MacCentral by special invitation of an event the company will hold in San Francisco on Monday, April 28, 2003. The invitation says that Apple will have announcements that will be music to your ears. Speculation in recent weeks has focused on three rumours: a new iPod; the acquisition of Universal Music; and an online music service.