T&L Publications

There are two petitions currently before the Federal Communications Commission to reverse the removal of Morse code as a requirement to obtaining an Amateur radio (Ham) license. Both petitions are without merit. One claims due to problems with the Electronic Comment Filing System his comments were not posted and allowed to be reviewed. The other petition supporting reinstatement of the Morse code requirment equates Morse code knowledge with national security:


Please review these and post comments, if you desire.

Comments are found here:


http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retr ... 6518808784

and here:

http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retr ... 6518808553

My heart goes out to this man as I have had some bad experience dealing with the FCC in the past. It seems that speed of response is directly proportional to the wad of money you have stuffed in your back pocket. I earned my First class license w/ radar endorsement years ago and at that time the FCC was totally different - there to serve the common man and for reasons it was originally intended for. Today - its all about money, can you beleive they actually sell radio spectrum now? Several years ago, the company I worked for had to completely dismantle their 2GHz microwave data relay network and replace every thing with 6 GHz equipment, antennas and all. The reason - so that the new ( at that time) pcs network could take over that part of the spectrum. The new licensses partialy covered the cost of our transfer, but still left us in a gaping financial hole. All this, just so some teeny bopper could call up and say "whassss Hoppennn". Gee, you don't think this switchover had anything to do with money, do you?

I wish the media would do us all some good - by

1) investigate and report on what the FCC has done with the 10's of billions of dollars they took in for the cellular spectrum auctions for the last 15+ years. They must have all bought leather chairs for their offices and took lots of junkets before turning over what was left to the Federal General Fund.

2) Anti-trust among the oil companies

The FCC (and our DOC) has beenso busy misdirecting people, as well as the media with the evils of Howard Stern saying the word "Penis", that nobody was watching them rape and pilliage chunks of bandwidth to the highest bidder. Nobody has noticed the many, many BILLIONS of dollars they are Squirrelling away. They have become a joke of their former self, now that they have become The Publishers Clearing House of the airways.

why is the press and TV trash-news ignoring the FCC spectrum-sales? Selling the public its own ether. Not enough sex or blood? No evangelist?

Starting this year, we'll see "road use taxes". As in London. Soon Manhattan and elsewhere. In addition to all the taxes you now pay, they'll charge you a lot to use roads except at 3AM. And track you with RFID tags or force you to use GPS loggers to get a discount if you drive off-peak.

Then what? FCC charging the Internet Use Tax?

And soon: A Clean Air tax. If you don't pay, you are not allowed to breathe.

"It Takes A Village" is damned scary.

And don’t forget the FDA, instead of ten years worth of testing on a new drug, for the savings some one put in their back pocket you get to be the test subject and drop dead,.... and they only have to say oops sorry?

Politicians will sell everything because its not theirs and they don’t give a damn, then they run to the nearest off shore bank for a quiet deposit.

Quote Stevec
"Then what? FCC charging the Internet Use Tax?
We have been paying a $6 fee every month on our telephone bill for about ten years now. It is spelled out as an FCC mandatory access fee and is directly proportional to the basic service bill. Repeated inuireries to Telco as to what is this charge for or even why, have just resulted in" passing the buck". Does any one know whats going on with this or what crooked political agency's pocket it ends up in?
As to Stevec's question - they already have their greedy hands in the landline sector so why not the Internet next!

If you're talking about the Universal Access Fee. That pays reduced cost phone service for low income and helps keep the cost of telco constant between rural and city areas (picks up the cost slack in rural areas). It is assessed on virtually all telco services.

The money is supposed to end up in these pockets, not the FCC.
http://www.universalservice.org/default.aspx

While the FCC is not charging for internet itself (DSL no longer pay after Aug 2006), it can now charge it for VOIP (and I haven't checked it may be bundled in my ISP bill as well) http://news.digitaltrends.com/article10753.html

In other words it's just another tax to pay for another social entitlement program. Unless you're poor, a doctor or a teacher, you'll probably only see any return if you live in the boondocks and pay the same for phone service as city folk. It also helps keep the cost of education low by reducing the cost of communications on school budgets.

FCC is just another fat law enforcement body, if your unhappy, blame the politicians who wrote the laws it enforces. If you think it is inefficient and makes mistakes, that's par for the course. In the end, its less broken than some other bureaucracies.

As far as charges on the phone bill....

Did you claim your $30 or $40 refund on your taxes this year? This was for a tax that has been on phones since the Spanish American War! This was a tax imposed in 1898. NO! I did not type that wrong! Eighteen ninty eight! The tax was to be repealed in 2000 or there abouts but the TAX STAYED IN PLACE! The IRS kept fighting for this even though courts found against them numerous times. BUT the refund was only for the last three years, even though they kept collecting the tax six more years.

The Universal Access Fee or another tax on phone bills is for giving Internet connections to poor schools. Wait a minute; don't schools RUN off property tax dollars already? Don't they get state funds as well? (The answer to both of these is YES.) Yet they get taxes off yours and my phone bill to give them Internet access. Simple solution, find something in the budget to cut to get the Internet access.

Courts,? IRS? they don't write tax law, they enforce it. Congress does the real dirty work. I'm sure that tax was buried deep on a line item linked to something else of more importance. Sometimes its hard to nix a tax when the tax bill authors trap it in line items.

Its not just poor schools. Imagne a small school in very northern CA. It might be faced with a +10,000 expenditure just to lay the wire to the school to get high speed internet while the school in Silicon Valley is already hooked up and only needs to pay the ISP and maybe some routers and labor. Is that fair, just because they live far from a city? They're not necessarily poor. Those customers who benefit from Universal Lifeline service are low income though.

Schools are, in general, barely adequately funded, any loss of revinue is generally evident right away.

I missed that deduction but since it generally takes $50 to move up a line on the tax chart, it may not have made a difference.

Last I heard there is still a tax in the telephone bill system that is still paying off the “Spanish Americanâ€

THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW...
And it better be a Good ONE (just one) !

Schools phools!
The public library has free internet and free tuition and plenty of books.
I've been going there since I dropped out of college.
They even have classes sometimes. And it's QUIET in there! Shush!
If they're on this planet, they have a satellite dish for the internet.

Oh, you don't have to pay the idiot taxes on the phone bill.
If you don't have tone and rotary dialing, don't pay for both.
And the Spanish war tax is repealed, so don't pay it.
This is ok and legal, unless you live in some crazy place.
The phone company actually says,
"Ok, you don't have this service and you don't have to pay for it".
Just like you don't pay car insurance after you sell your car.
Chances are they are charging you for caller id if you don't have it, or something.
If you have internet you can use your computer as a phone without buying VOIP.

Then again, you might be getting crazy bills 100x the correct rate!
http://www.verizonmath.com/

Spanish-American War tax on telephone service continues today.

http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2005/07 ... ues-today/

In 1898, Congress passed a levy of one cent per telephone call to help raise money for the Spanish-American War. By 1990, the tax had become three percent (3%) of your overall telephone bill.

Now some members of Congress want to end the 3% federal excise tax on phone service which traces its history back to 1898, before the IRS tries to apply it to Internet telephone users, according to News.com and have introduced the Telephone Excise Tax Repeal Act.