You guys are very kind. I thought I was supplementing the Ham (amateur radio) thread. But, yes, digital broadcasting should reach computers. Apparently, as you say, it already has been done. The bandwidth opportunity is there. Another big bandwidth leap is by fiber optic wavelength division multiplexing. If separate thousands of colors can be independently transmitted and received on a single fiber, bandwidth explosion. Maybe few of you know, but the inventor of digital electronics, Otto Schmitt (Schmitt trigger), worked at the U of M for many years. Minnesota was once a leading technology center. Until the politicians took over science. Very sad. Your Linux group is a bright spot. Thanks. Andy Zbikowski (Zibby)" wrote: > > Now that I read it again, you're right. But he's talking brodcast. Not > satlite, but plain old brodcast tv. (Well, Digital TV brodcast now...) > > Well, it is possible. I know there was some show before the advent of > cable modems that included some sort of download in their show's signal. > No idea how it was actually decoded on the user end. Computer Chronicles used to do this. They'd send batches of shareware packages by using about 1/3 of the screen. To humans, it just looks like static. I'm not sure how much stuff got sent. They ran it for about 1-2 minutes, and while it was going, they would say what was getting downloaded. I suspect it ended up in the 30-50 MB range. > Setting the FCC regulations aside, could this really work? First hurdle > is that your brodcast tv signal is one way. It takes some high power > equipment and tall towers to get the signal to you. You would need a > similar setup to get it back for 2 way communication. True, but there is potential here -- certain data is good to broadcast. Weather images and data, for instance. I know that certain HDTV broadcasts are supposed to include extra information, so the frameworks are presumably already there, or are at least fairly well along. Hmm.. Though I wonder what will happen if someone were to serruptitiously include extra stuff in ordinary broadcasts. Send out a whole Linux ISO in ten minutes or less ;-) -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ Radioactive halibut is / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ good for fission chips. \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]