at the temporal coordinates: 3/8/02 1:51 PM, the entity known as Thomas
Cherry at jceaser_at_mac.com conveyed the following:
>
> The US government bailed out Iridium. I heard they were passing phones out
> to government employees to use as they see fit.
>
Well, not directly. It really is a corporation. But I suspect that they'd
never have gotten funding if they hadn't had a strong case that the Defense
Dept. would be an "anchor" customer. As I posted earlier, the new Iridium
company has a DoD contract that's worth nearly as much as what they paid to
buy the constellation.
As for passing the phones out like candy... I've seen NO indication of
that. For one thing, the US Gov't. simply doesn't pass around pieces of
equipment worth thousands of dollars in that manner. (They may do many
other foolish things with expensive things, but this isn't one of them.)
For another thing, there aren't all that many of those phones in existence
(I think the number is likely in the few tens of thousands).
{BTW, if were going to go into this sort of tangent, we'd probably best do
it off-list. If folks want to bash WinCE or speculate about how the Newt
could be used in a similar manner, then continue, as that's the sort of
discussion I was hoping to prompt.}
- Eric.
--Eric Strobel (fyzycyst_at_NOSPAM^mailaps.org)
===================================================================== END RADIOPHOBIA!!! More nukes, less kooks!!! =====================================================================
-- Read the List FAQ/Etiquette: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Read the Newton FAQ: http://www.guns-media.com/mirrors/newton/faq/ This is the NewtonTalk mailing list - http://www.newtontalk.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Apr 02 2002 - 14:02:26 EST