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Comment by qompiler | Hacker News Reader

Haha, that's a really good name to use for your technology in South Africa. It's like Google fired its PR department a month ago.

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'White space' is the standard term for allocated but unused radio frequencies.

It has also been nearly 20 years since the end of Apartheid, South Africa is no longer defined only by its racially-segregated past. Your comment is as silly as including a reference to Communism in any mention of modern-day Russia.

Sad that your first though when seeing South Africa is institutional racism. South Africa has had a fully democratic government for almost 20 years.

Would the same comment be acceptable if Google were doing this in Mississippi which ratified the 13th Amendment to ban slavery in 1995?

...probably, yeah.

I had to read the article to see it in proper caps and with more adjacent text to parse it.

It turns out it's the (quite reasonable) name for the technology that uses unused TV bandwidth ("TV whitespace") for wireless networking.

The wikipedia article is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spaces_%28radio%29.

I doubt many South Africans would see it in racial terms. I live in SA, and see plenty of ads advertising credit relief for people who have been "blacklisted" (have poor credit scores).

Just FYI: possessive "its" does not receive an apostrophe.

If you're replying to qompiler, than I'm quite sure that it is more than reasonable to use "it's" as a contraction for "it is". Happy to be corrected here, but this is my understanding based on the use observed.

Disregard. Now realised the second its in the sentence and you are quite right.

I missed it as well, changing it now.

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