LightSquared CEO Resigns Amid Appearance of Bribery 211
New submitter msauve writes "LightSquared, the company who's request to use make use of spectrum in a way likely to interfere with GPS was recently denied, has suffered another setback. CEO Sanjiv Ahuja has now resigned, only a week after a report detailing political contributions and the personal financial interests of Obama and officials in his administration in SkyTerra, the precursor company to LightSquared.
Ahuja's one and only contribution to the Democratic Party occurred on the same day he tried to arrange a meeting with Obama administration officials, apparently as part of LightSquared's desire to fast track FCC approval of a change beneficial to the company."
Important to note (Score:5, Interesting)
He attempt to do what many /.ers say happen all the time, and got busted.
Re:Important to note (Score:5, Insightful)
He attempt to do what many /.ers say happen all the time, and got busted.
Oh, that's just because he tried to cheap it out. 28K for a Senate Seat, 50K for Obama.
When you're in the big leagues, you've got to drop the big bucks. Remember this kids, you get what you pay for!
Re:Important to note (Score:5, Funny)
Actually it was only 8K for the Senate seat. The Dems returned $20,000.
Must have been running a special that week.
Re:Important to note (Score:5, Funny)
Actually it was only 8K for the Senate seat. The Dems returned $20,000.
Must have been running a special that week.
8K should be enough for anybody.
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No true Scotsman fallacy.
Why let evidences and data have an actual impact on any conclusion you come to, right?
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When in the big leagues you've got to bribe both political parties just to start.
Then buy lots of inexplicable advertising time on the news networks, sponsor a PBS show or two.
Keep it up for a decade or two. Always remember, it's soft power, it disappears in daylight. So use a light hand.
Light Squared are children grabbing at candy. No surprise they got caught.
Re:Important to note (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't buy the "Bribery" angle that's just more anti-obama birther nonsense.
It's true that the Democratic party received about $20k from Falcone in 2010. But the Republican Party received nearly $50k in 2008.
If you go through his political contributions he tended to shotgun across party lines. And none of the money in 08 was for Obama. It was almost exclusively for Senatorial candidates and Giuliani and Chris Dodd.
http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/philip-falcone.asp?cycle=08 [campaignmoney.com]
And yes I do imagine there was some Lightsquared/Obama white house conversations--One of Obama's campaign promises was broadband for all. Lightsquared promised to deliver on that promise for the president. I'm unaware of another company which Lightsquared favoritism would have pushed out of business. By the very nature of their technology it seemed that there *can't* be a competitor since they themselves don't work. ;)
Of course it matters. (Score:4, Informative)
From reading /. I learned that only those morally bankrupt evil conniving lowdown scumbag Republicans take bribes.
Democrats take campaign donations.
Hope that clears things up.
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LS raised billions of dollars... yet just defaulted on their first payment to inmarsat last week. Those billions are gone. All of it.
If I were that guy, I'd be getting out of my contract by any means necessary, purchasing a new identity, grabbing my family and running for the hills.
Heck if I took company paper clips home I'd be using that as an ethics violation to get the heck out, alive.
Re:Important to note (Score:5, Insightful)
He wasn't doing it right.
First off, at that level, he needs to start bri *ahem* making campaign donations to everybody, not just to the President. Senators, congressmen, judges, even the ones running the party all need their cut. And he needs to be doing it over multiple election years.
A few thousand dollars doesn't cut it anymore these days--at least not at the Federal level. To play in that game, he needs a warchest of at least half a million.
Additionally, he needed a lobbying firm to do the dirty work on his behalf. If it was a lobbying firm who did the brib *ahem* gift-giving instead, he would be shielded from all this by plausible deniability and would have kept his job. He could've just fired the lobbying firm and re-hired them under a different company name *ahem* I mean find another one.
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+1
Did you notice the fancy lingo the intro?
"LightSquared, the company who's request ...
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Actually it's even worse than that...
"LightSquared, the company who's request to use make use of spectrum in a way...
Never mind comments, People can't even be bothered to check a topic post when they write one, or when they accept one.
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He attempt to do what many /.ers say happen all the time, and got busted.
Actually he got busted because he was trying to bribe his way around a technological limitation that has no known solution and would completely disable the American military - and he's not being tried for treason. I'd hardly say he got busted.
Re:Important to note (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Important to note (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps you can elaborate?
It's Obama's fault!
Further explanations are unnecessary and might complicate things.
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Obama probably has almost nothing to do with this, except that it's under his watch. The people responsible are those bits of dirt and grime that are swept into positions of authority on his very long coat-tails.
This sort of thing can happen with *any* modern President, and while I am not an Obama supporter, this isn't something wrong with him, or even the Democrats as individuals. It's what's wrong with government that is big enough that it has its fingers in everything.
If there is something wrong with O
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Ah, like that old Bloom County [wikipedia.org] Picayune editor: It's Reagan's Fault!
Re:Important to note (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, F&F was not doing anything close to what it did under Holder during the Bush years, and it's not Bush's attorney general lying up and down about what he knew about the program and when.
Re:Important to note (Score:4, Insightful)
Ia lot of the noise about F&F is coming in the form of conspiracy theories from the NRA
Mainstream news is almost totally ignoring the debacle, so at least one organization is talking about it.
It's not really a conspiracy theory when gun dealers openly say, "Yeah, we knew that buyer was a drug runner but the ATF agent in our back office told us to sell him the guns anyways."
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Re:Important to note (Score:4, Interesting)
F&F did not involve legal gun sales that just happened to end up being misused, it involved illegal gun sales to suspected traffickers. Gun store owners were directly instructed to illegally sell guns and were told that the ATF would be tracking them. The owners were actually very wary about making the sales but were instructed to keep selling by the ATF agents in charge.
So people are crying foul because A) the ATF had to instruct shop owners to disregard local, state and federal laws to sell the guns in question, B) there was no real program in place to track the illegally sold guns which led to terrible consequences and C) people in Washington are already using F&F as an excuse to talk about toughening gun laws even though the laws in place to prevent just such sales had to be expressly ignored to allow the program to take place.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Green Party is bad in the way that every single interest party is. A political party can't just get into office and work on only one thing, they have to work on everything that a government is responsible for. That means it usually sneaks in some sort of unusual or undesirable underlying governmental goals while relying on general support for their one special interest to get them into office.
Yes, the Greens are usually socialists, and that's why I won't touch them with a ten foot pole. I think the e
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hell i can't think of a single thing the man did better and that's just fricking sad.
Finding Osama Bin Laden for one. Oh, you were speaking in hyperbole.
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If that is the best you can do, that is pretty sad. And it wasn't Obama who did it, it just happened on his watch. However, I'll give the guy Kudos for actually giving the kill order, something I didn't think he had the guts to do.
That being said, if Bush gets the blame for starting all the things that went south on Obama's watch, then shouldn't Bush get credit for the things that went right under Obama's watch?
The thing about Politics, is it is always the other guys fault, unless it is something "good", th
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Kind of hard to keep up with your eyes clamped shut and your hands over your ears.
Politicians are dirty, period. It's not like Republicans have a monopoly on corruption.
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F&F is 100% Obama's; it began in 2009.
"Wide Receiver" was a Bush program that failed but unlike F&F, WR was at least set up to track the weapons they allowed to be sold to the cartels. The 450 guns the ATF allowed to be sold under WR were tagged with RFID chips and tracked through aerial surveillance. Of course the ATF did a awful job tagging them and used RFID with short battery lives and also damaged most of them when installing them, reducing their effectiveness. There were also refueling issu
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Solyndra
Beacon Power
SpectraWatt
Evergreen Solar
AES - Eastern Energy
Here are more that got loans are having notable difficulties:
A123
Fisker Automotive
Nevada Geothermal
Sun Power
First Solar
These alone are putting the taxpayers on the hook for $6billion. It's not that there was a company that failed. It's that there is a laundry list of companys that have and continue
Re:Important to note (Score:5, Informative)
When I get the time, I'll look up the others.
My suggestion would be: perhaps before you get your "blood boiling", you should consider NOT taking what the right wing says about Obama at face value. They have a strong vested interest in generating scandal where there is none.
Re:Important to note (Score:4, Informative)
F&F began under Bush.
No, "Project Gunrunner" began under President Bush. "Operation Fast and Furious", while part of Project Gunrunner, didn't begin until 2009.
And I'm aware only of one solar company that received a grant, yet later failed
I can think of three off the top of my head: Solyndra and Beacon Power who both received DOE money, and Evergreen Solar who received Massachusetts money.
While they are still around I personally don't have high hopes for 1366 Technologies, who also received DOE money. They appear to be repeating the same mistake Evergreen made, specifically, betting that the price of silicon isn't going to go down. They may also be falling into the non-standard panels problem but I don't know enough about their final process to be sure.
Also, while not a solar company, Ener1, another DOE recipient filed for chapter 11 about a month ago.
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Gunwalker started under Bush and was ended because the Mexican authorities weren't catching them on their side. The Mexican authorities were informed prior to the sale unlike F&F were it was unilaterally decided to let weapons go.
Fast & Furious was 0bama's baby. We're three years into this mess and time for 0bama to 'man up' to take responsibilities.
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As I posted above, F&F did not involve the legal sale of guns, gun shop owners were directly instructed by the ATF to sell weapons illegally. There are even official statements released by the ATF showing shop owners were concerned about making the sales.
Re:Important to note (Score:4, Informative)
No you stupid fuckwit, it didn't. Operation Wide Receiver did, however that was known and sanctioned by the Mexican government and was a serious attempt to track the routes the guns used, with the majority of the weapons having GPS trackers in them, albeit ones that turned out to be ineffectual. Said operation used less than 500 guns and was STOPPED because it was completely ineffectual. The operations, multiple, started under Obama all had the express purpose of shifting as many guns as possible across the border to, and I quote, be recovered at crime scenes. It did NOT have the sanction of the Mexican government, technically making it an act of war, and coincided with the 90% of Mexican crime guns FUD pushed by the government and helped along by CBS NBC et al. The operation started after the Brady bunch was told Obama was working on gun control back in early 2009 and the only logical interpretation of what happened was that they were attempting to drum up support for another AWB. Either that or they're batshit fucking insane. Completely different fucking operations to anybody with two fucking neurons to rub together.
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None.
So no, it wasn't "team Obama" -- it was career feds, doing what they're supposed to do: review loan applications and decide whether to approve or deny.
Some loan recipients go bust. That's the way it is -- which you'd likely admit, if an honest appraisal of the situation were your main goal.
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you're on slashdot. No evidence IS evidence of wrongdoing.
Re:Of course it was Bush's fault! (Score:4, Informative)
Rejected? Rejected is a bit of a strong word. Try deferred until they met certain conditions like raising further outside capital.
Which they met.
And no, it was not Bush's fault. Nobody is saying that. They are saying that Bush originated the program, and that Solyndra was a fast-track candidate, but fault is distinct from the clarification. When it comes to fault, It was China's. Because China massively subsidized their own solar industry.
However, Solyndra DID build their factory, they DID follow through on what they claimed to do, so you know what? The people who claim it was a fraud and a scam are wrong.
Re:Important to note (Score:4, Insightful)
They all failed because they can't compete with China. US solar companies can't compete with Chinese solar companies because the Chinese government backs its renewable tech companies while the US doesn't.
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They all failed because they can't compete with China. US solar companies can't compete with Chinese solar companies because the Chinese government backs its renewable tech companies while the US doesn't.
Oh, and if a Chinese company goes down the drain for corruption (AKA greedy CEO), there is quite a chance that their board gets a front row seat in an open-air public execution spectacle. Makes them think twice about stealing subsidies!
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That only happens if they didn't establish the right connections in government. The ones who get shot are the little guys who stepped on bigger toes.
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Names, but no circumstances (Score:3, Informative)
Let's see, counting Solyndra, you have now come up to 4.
You're still 4 short.
Oh wait, Uni-Solar's PARENT company is the one that filed for bankruptcy, not just the Uni-Solar unit. Maybe the whole company had problems, but the unit itself could have been fine. Evergreen got subsidies from the State of Massachusetts, not the Feds. I'd look up SpectraWatt, but I think two out of three is enough disputation to demand that you share more facts to justify your claims.
Re:Important to note (Score:4, Informative)
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It's just a market in government influence. No government has ever been able to stop markets. They can however make the economic incentives perverse.
I think 'Perverse Economic Incentives' would make a good porno title.
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Re:Important to note (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing 'funny' about it is that LightSquared's CEO didn't anything for his 'donation'. No private audience with Obama and no fast-track approval for the company's idiotic plan.
The Democratic Party took the donation and treated it as a donation while the administration killed the company, which is exactly what should have happened. For once, the system worked as intended.
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Well this makes a bunch of really funny things going on for Obama. And what 8 or 9 failed solar companies that got massive hand outs and F&F plus an extra gun running program that was started that let guns walk. Obama not better than the last guy, he's much, much worse.
I don't think it should be a surprise that some green-tech companies receiving government backed loans failed. Even if you discount the cheap panels coming from China's subsidized industry, if these companies were strong companies with a proven market and were on solid financial footing, the private market would have been lining up to invest in them.
Instead, these companies were in a speculative industry whose strength depends heavily on the price of oil (which has its own hidden and explicit government sub
Re:Important to note (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Important to note (Score:5, Insightful)
Had it been left entirely up to the FCC they would have made their money.
Their mistake was underestimating the strength of the push back from the GPS users and manufacturers.
That and overestimating the power of law. They thought all they had to do was bribe someone to change the laws of physics.
Call me crazy... (Score:2)
Implications for the administration? (Score:3)
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Keep in mind that the intended effect (fast track approval) didn't happen.
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They did get conditional approval and lots of praise from the FCC, though. The problem was using bandwidth for terrestrial stations that close to the GPS spectrum was always a bad idea. The spectrum was always intended to be used for satellite transmissions: the FCC themselves designated it for that. For them to offer conditional approval later shows someone was pushing for Lightsquared to succeed. Not even that could get past the fact that their system interferes with most GPS systems, though, and it would
Re:Implications for the administration? (Score:5, Informative)
For them to offer conditional approval later shows someone was pushing for Lightsquared to succeed.
They appear to be crooks and what they're doing was a dumb idea from a tech standpoint ... but... from personal experience the FCC will license almost anyone to do almost anything on a conditional experimental non-interfering basis. I know this goes against /. group think about the govt, but at least WRT to temporary conditional experimental licenses the FCC has always been very libertarian, perhaps the most so of all the fedgov, maybe more than all the rest of the fedgov put together.
The way its supposed to work, for a real world example, is 20 ham radio guys who know what they're doing, get a temporary experimental license to F around near the now unused traditional 500 KHz marine radio band, mostly trying to figure out how they can do it without interfering with any remaining primary users (if any?). Then the experiment ends and everyone goes away, more or less happy. Someday, maybe Very Soon the data those guys gathered will get the hams a 500 KHz allocation ... or maybe not. What LS did instead of basically a big lab experiment, was get their standard off the shelf FCC response of "go out there, F around, and for gods sake don't break anything and stop the moment I tell you to" permission slip that anyone else can get for the asking, and then used it to raise Billions of dollars and make campaign contributions and then started crying unfair when it turns out it didn't work out.
Its not like the FCC was "pushing" just for LS, they pretty much rubber stamp any non-totally stupid experimental request. LS is just crying because the experiment failed and they owe Billions and though thousands in campaign contributions would fix it. Millions in bribes might have. But thousands? Not gonna work.
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Re:Implications for the administration? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it did, in a way. The fast track process was started, the filing was accepted in one day (a process which normally takes months). The normally required 30 day comment period was reduced by the FCC to an effective 5 1/2 days (it was 10 days, but across a long US holiday weekend). Granted, the actual approval didn't end up happening, but not because the FCC didn't try to help them out. It was an alert CTIA [ctia.org] which filed an extension request, and alerted GPS users of the potential issues.
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Exactly. Moreover, despite the implications of the report in The Daily Caller (which has right-wing leanings), there doesn't seem to be much "there", there.
Exactly. This whole non-story just reeks of another right-wing think tank attempt to paint the picture of a corrupt administration that sneakily gets away with things all the time. And just in time for the 2012 election cycle as their golden boy Mitt is close to clinching the Republican nomination.
Look for this to be plastered all over the conservative rags and Faux news for the next several months. The sad thing is that the people will just eat it up because they want so badly to believe that Obama is a
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the 2012 election is going to cost north of $500 million per campaign. figure $20,000 - $50,000 max per donor when you figure the dinners and the individual contribution.
one less $50,000 check from a pissed off hedge fund manager in a sea of donations isn't going to swing it to the republicans. there are hundreds of funds headquartered in DNC heavy areas that will still go for obama
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What implications? The implication that they don't do special favors in exchange for the donations? Kinda like that F.O.P. sticker on your bumper isn't actually a get out of jail free card?
Nothing new (Score:3)
There's absolutely nothing new about this situation. It's a fact of modern political life that if you want face time with a politician you have to donate to their campaign. Planet Money did an interesting podcast about the concept of political fundraisers in Washington that really sheds light on the problem: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/01/141913370/the-tuesday-podcast-inside-washingtons-money-machine [npr.org]
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AS someone who has met with politician, and not made any kind of donation, I call you a liar.
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Why Bother resigning? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? Chris Dodd basically dick-smacked the entire concept of "bribing government is bad" into non-existence, but they force this guy out?
I guess that "contribution" wasn't big enough.
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Disgusting in context with Chris Dodd (Score:3, Informative)
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If Chris Dodd had been involved in bribery, you might have had a point, but he wasn't. I'm sure Fox told you he was, and I should expect you to thin for yourself. Still, I have hope you people can rub your two remaining brain cells together.
He was a victim of the same machine that tried to scandalize Clinton. Make a huge issue and of normal stuff, but when nothing comes out just stop reporting, let the rumor mill work around, and don't mention you were wrong in the first place. If you are lucky, you might f
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assumed its was like India (Score:2)
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No, it is really much more corrupt in India, it's just that here, we have certain more stringent expectations of our government that most Indians do not have of theirs.
What's the story here? (Score:2)
So what's different about this deal that warranted an article describing something that happens every day here?
So Ahuja Got Fired (Score:3)
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Now he can become a politician (Score:2)
Maybe I'm a bit biased against all politicians, but the way I see it, if allegations are true, he's now passed all requirements to become a politician in any country.
Less government power is the answer (Score:3)
The way to have less corruption is for government to have less power over people. Why bribe someone who can't help (or hurt) you? Smaller government is the answer.
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Because very simply, governments will always have *some* power and with *some* power there's profit to be made in legalized bribery (campaign contributions). The only way for your suggestion to work is to go the "On the duty of civil disobedience" route which means NO government, which will never work unfortunately.
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In his defense, he did say "less corruption", not "no corruption". Corruption is not a good thing, but there's a difference between someone paying off a cop to get out of a speeding ticket and someone paying the government to give them thousands or millions in taxpayer money. You'll probably never get rid of the more venial sort of corruption, except possibly through education and strict control, but you can reduce the scope of what government corruption makes possible. After all, one of the reasons that
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Well, of course, apart from the fact that it would smashed neighboring frequencies and would probably have never worked properly, of course.
Re:I knew it was too good to be true. (Score:5, Informative)
Because there isn't anything to prove, it's basic physics. But to appease shills like you, they did do that test [businessweek.com].
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I can't believe you're serious. If you put the electrons that have been used to technically decimate the Lightsquared proposal together in a row you could probably make a wire that stretched to Alpha Centuri.
I'm not even going to make a LMGTFY link. You'll have to do it yourself.
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the businessweek link is indeed dead.
on top of that, if you search for the article, you can find it on the businessweek site, but that link is a 404 too, and most other sites linked to that.
anyhow. http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2011/dot16411.html [dot.gov] should suffice.
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Wikipedia talks about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightSquared [wikipedia.org]
IT does look like they were working through the issues; which mostly involved GPS.
Now, maybe they couldn't completely do it, so he tried to bribe people.
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You know, really depressing thing I've found is that there appears to be no proof of this allegation. The accusation enough seems to have been sufficient to stop anyone from even trying to prove it.
If you're getting paid to astroturf, I hope its in cash because LS already stiffed Inmarsat for $50M last week. Its gone, all of it.
Re:I knew it was too good to be true. (Score:5, Informative)
You've obviously not been looking hard enough. The Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] article sums up the science behind it pretty well (basically, they did a test run of the terrestrial base-stations and it interfered with ~75% of GPS devises, after LightSquared reduced the stations power to try to fix the problem). There is a ton of proof that they actually interfere with GPS signals, namely, actual experiments.
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"intermodulation distortion"
GPS receivers are built too cheap
So? GPS receivers were built under the assumption that no terrestrial signals would exist near them (which was a safe assumption given the frequency allocations). If the choice comes down to 1) keep GPS as it is (receivers are relatively cheap, small, and readily available) or 2) have the service LS was developing at that frequency, then I'd say GPS is the clear winner. Why have to dispose of decades worth of GPS receivers just for yet another LTE network? Why doesn't LS just use a different frequency? Ther
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Hmm.. When you put it like that, I'm surprised the Iranian government hasn't already implemented this technology.
How do you know?
http://www.qsl.net/n9zia/wireless/gps_jam-pics.html [qsl.net]
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
-GiH
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I agree this happens in politics all the time. The differences are that the purchase of influence is extraordinarily well documented in these cases, and the people buying influence from Obama don't seem to know how to run a business at a profit.
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How much politics have you been involved with? How many government agencies?
I have never seen this happen. Most investigation into these matter find nothing, and when they do people are punished.
But you keep living in your bubble of ignorance... just keep it to yourself.
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When the people in the White House do things the Chicago Way in Washington it is a felony.
You do know the whole point of this "drama" is he did it perfectly legally?
Well there is some weirdness with the non-legally-required job data they gather where he listed his former employer, but since its optional data, no one did anything illegal.
You might have the quaint idea that illegal = immoral = unethical but that hasn't been the American way, ever, although its traditionally been how we look inaccurately at the past. Kind of like how we traditionally believe the founding fathers were hyperreligiou
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If you're aware of Jefferson's religious belief, or lack thereof, the hilarious part is they put that on his coin but they were not smart enough to remove him from our currency.
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I would be upset if a company I have invested money into were to give money to people without hope of getting anything back in return.
That describes quite a few CEOs, golden parachutes and all.
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Are you serious? They're contributions made under the US Campaign Finance [wikipedia.org] laws. The legal intent is that they are to be spent on political campaigns to sway voters to support the candidate/party to whom they're given, not to directly influence policy. The latter is bribery [wikipedia.org].
If a company has an interest in particular areas of government policy, they should be contributing to candidates who best