David "Cognitive Radio" Reed takes USA Today's coverage of Powell's promise to open more spectrum apart:
From the article: "Academics have long argued that more bands should be set aside for
unlicensed services and that they could even share certain frequencies with
licensed services without interfering."I love this use of the word "academics". Where did that come from? The Open Spectrum advocacy has some folks from "academy" (Benkler, Lessig, Lippman, Shepard). But most of us have been doing business in the "real world" (me, Dewayne, Werbach, Hughes, …). And the wider support of unlicensed radio is doing quite well as a business, thank you. Better competitive business people there than at the top of the ILEC, cable, and broadcaster megacorps. Even Intel and Microsoft support unlicensed bands where industry works together to set standards.
Academic, as in "purely academic", I suppose. Just like Szilard (the holder of the patent on the atomic bomb) was an academic. Or like the people who invented the Internet because AT&T could not bring itself to imagine a world where they weren't in control were academics.
