During my absence, I took a road trip up to Manhattan to attend an event in the city.  I arrived in the city about three hours before the event began, so I decided to walk around lower Manhattan for a while.  One of the things I noticed while walking around was how many gold enhancements there were on the old buildings and fixtures.  Much of this was simply small gold leaf effects, but every once in a while there would be a quantity of golf being used (or at least it looked like gold).  One of the buildings was the Manhattan Municipal Building.  The sunlight glistened off of the building like a beacon, and made me think about how gold has such an unusual quality.

Have you ever noticed how glossy gold can be?  Untarnished silver and even some other polished metals can have a mirrored surface, but none of them glow in the matter that gold does.  This quality, along with its rarity, has made it a most sought after mineral in the world.  Countries have been storing it for years, while the everyday individuals can purchase it on their one. You can buy gold online, at market dealers, or even at your local coin, gold, and stamps shops. While I don’t think you’ll ever buy enough to coat the roof of your house with gold leaf like some of the buildings I’ve seen in New York City, you can at least enjoy the reflective quality of the metal in your own home.

Going through my mail tonight, I receive a flyer from the group Broadband for America. On the cover of the flyer is a picture of Harold Ford, Jr. (the former Representative from Tennessee). Their mission is “to make broadband access to the Internet available to every household in the nation; to provide data transfer speeds to make that broadband experience valuable to users; and to provide the bandwidth necessary for content providers to continue to make the Internet a cultural, societal, and economic engine for growth.” That is a fairly decent goal, and one-day it will happen. But how?

I recall waiting for the cable providers in my area to provide broadband service to my development. Friends and coworkers in neighboring develops were receiving broadband coverage for years before it ever reached me, and the delay was simply a confusion over which hub served our area. (You would think that the hub that provided our cable television was also the hub supplying the internet service.) Since those frustrating times, I have enjoyed 10 years of relatively reliable broadband coverage.

However, there are still some areas in the U.S. that doesn’t have coverage. Many of these locations are in rural areas where it would be just too expensive to lay cable to supply just a handful of potential users. One alternative that the Broadband for America group should consider is broadband delivered via satellite. Satellite internet service providerssuch as Wild Blue, HughesNet, and DirectTV can transmit their service to remote locations with ease the same way as cell phones such as the iPhone can connect to the net through their wireless signal.

I feel that this is the way our internet access will evolve in the near future. Ford should understand this, as Tennessee has many rural towns, which might be why he is an honorary board member. Is it cheaper to transmit signals via satellite than to lay cable all over the United States? I would have to think so, as well as being more environmentally friendly.

I will chalk this up as a simple misstatement by Kathleen Sebelius over the weekend. During an interview on ABC, the Secretary said:

The bill has passed the House. The bill has passed the Senate with a super-majority.

To be correct, she should have said:

A bill has passed the house. A bill has passed the Senate with a super-majority.

This is what much of the debate between Congressional Democrats have been about, and why the Health Care Summitt was called the other week. It wasn’t simply because the Republicans have refused to support the legislation, but because the House Democrats and the Senate Democrats passed two different bills. Since the Democrats have lost their super-majority control in the Senate, they are forced to rely on the House to vote for the Senate-version of the bill, which some Democrats refuse to do.  If “the bill” had been passed as Sebelius stated, there wouldn’t be any debate right now, since the President would have already signed the bill into law.