Thinking of Radio as Smart Enough to Live Without Rules

some researchers now believe that recent advances in a new technology called cognitive radio might make it possible to think about the spectrum as limitless. These researchers say that more powerful microchips and improvements in signal processing - combined with networking ideas borrowed from the Internet - may someday eliminate radio's current hub-and-spoke model, in which high-powered transmitters blast signals to dumb receivers. Instead, intelligent radios - smart in that they are able to sense, respond to and work with other radios in their environment in order to transmit in the most efficient manner possible - would be linked in a web in which traffic was passed along in packets on constantly shifting frequencies until it reached its destination./

What does this have to do with rhetoric, technology, and teaching? Hmm....good question. I find it fascinating to see a decentralized model of information transmission taken from one medium (the internet) and applied to the other. It's also the kind of thing that could change our everyday lives. Or it could be a bunch of post-new economy hoo hah.