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Prior to CSPAN the Congress used to actually sit on the floor. After CSPAN they started hiding behind closed doors. So really CPSAN didn't reveal government - it just drove it underground.

The everyday work of the House and Senate is done in committee.

There are 100 Senators. 435 Representatives.

Twenty-five commitees in the House alone. Committee Offices Each with its own staff and funding.

In 1850 the House had 233 members and the Senate 62.

The Senate in those days was the place to be if you wanted to hear some remarkable debate and oratory: The Seventh of March Speech

But this sort of thing eats up a hell of lot of time if everyone wants to have their say.

In 1900 the House had 357 members and the Senate 90.

At this point, you simply have to break the work down to managable size or nothing gets done.

The standing committee with a permanent staff has a reasonable chance of holding its own against the executive, the bureaucrat and the lobbyist.

This is the fallacy of term limits.

No one is going to master the federal tax code, military procurement, agricultural policy, Social Security and Medicaid-Medicare - in two years.

I'll retract Che, as I couldn't find an example, but for the rest:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

I don't want to google more, but I remember seeing many more examples over the years.

You don't need to be a head of state to have photos edited, btw. It just need some devoted followers in the press or something like that.

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/tampering.html
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/publications/tr06a.html

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/tampering.html
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/publications/tr06a.html

Yes it does. You did something wrong.

No I didn't. I founded the instructions here as well as looked at your link. Notice though how yours does not say how to install Eclipse in OS X whereas mine does. Your instructions are specifically for installing it on Windows. And someone else got a similar error as I did when they installed it in Ubuntu.

Falcon

The amount of unnecessary spending is huge. In a project that analyzed 4,000 hospitals, the Dartmouth College Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice estimated that eliminating 30 percent of Medicare spending would not change either access to health care or the quality of the care itself.

The first thing I did was go looking for who funds the Dartmouth College Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Following the second search result was just too damn funny - excellence.php needs a bit of work, I guess.

I will use the universal language of prime numbers

OutputLogic

Anecdotes are not data, but I've never seen an airplane crash, and yet I've seen two fireball meteors (those are the ones that are big enough to make it well into the atmosphere and leave smoke trails), one daytime, one nighttime, both in the LA basin. And I've never seen a bomb explode (that I didn't make as a kid, I mean). Bombs are pretty rare. Meteors are quite common. How common? You can buy them on eBay for some dollars per ounce. The vast majority burn up in the atmosphere, but the larger ones do hit the earth pretty frequently. Most of the meteorites (the ones that hit the earth) are too small to do any damage upon impact. However, I would speculate that there's serious aerodynamic breaking that happens below 30,000 ft, so that even small ones might pack a punch at cruising altitude.

You may want to check this out (a report for the NTSB on TWA 800, I believe):

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/Cassidy.pdf

The conclusion is a little different from TFA, as it surmises that there should be a 'hit' every 50,000 years or so.

Really, if you think about it one would think there'd be a good amount of anecdotal evidence of pilots seeing meteorites shooting by in-flight (as they have pretty amazing visibility up there), if that last bit of atmosphere made such a difference.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~etrnsfer/water.htm

My prime plan is that I think it should be possible to cut or short one or more lines on the TPM chip to effectively deactivate it or at least isolate it, boot into custom control software, flip the switch, and just feed the chip the same sequence of values it would load during the authentic Trusted boot sequence.

This attack is known as the TPM reset attack.

Not necessarily true - most items created by students in the academic setting are vested to the University (they don't usually enforce this, but it is a legal question):

Many explicitly state their ownership over the copyrighted materials created by staff and students:

(example for IT) http://www.odu.edu/ao/facultyhandbook/index.php?page=ch04s03.html

(example for artworks, etc) http://www.cotr.bc.ca/handbook/cotr_web.asp?IDNumber=164

This is true of most colleges - they hold strict Work for Hire rights over the faculty, and any creation by s student is a "Joint" work and therefore tied up under the professors work for hire restrictions (e.g. they own the work).

When I went to school for photography, I remember this being specifically spelled out to us by one of my design professors who was in a fight with the school over work being sold by a student (it was sculpture - he was pissed that the school was trying to stop his student from selling the art).

Lately we've seen more colleges adopt policies where they allow the student and faculty the rights to their own work, but they explicitly have to state so through a transfer of copyright; see:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~osp/resources/policies/dartmouth/copyright.html

You'll also note that they still retain copyright over materials that are patentable.

Yes, they are just your notes; but they also qualify as a literary creation by you (created jointly with faculty).

ANYWAYS, my point isn't to start a debate about copyright in the academic setting, but to point out that it is unlikely that the professor has the right to mandate what is done with the students notes for one of two reasons:


1) The University holds the rights over those notes, and it would have to be University policy that mandated the destruction of the copyrighted material (since it is likely the only copy)

-OR-

2) The University has transferred those rights (as in the Dartmouth example) and the Prof. has no rights over the students work.

Short answer - Report this to the Dean.

... what TFA doesn't say is that she wanted to take online classes from that school.

RTGs really arent a risk, or at least a risk on the level of a 'dirty bomb.'

You can real Carl Sagan's take on them here:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/Syllabi/97Dartmouth/day-6/sagan.html

Maybe they don't "see" them with the naked eye, but they observe wobbles in the position of a star or observe when the planet occludes the star. How is that so far removed from when you look at any other picture? All you're really seeing is light reflected off the developed photograph. You're not "seeing" the light that hit the negative, but rather you're getting light that is a few steps removed conceptually from the original photons. Does that mean there's no evidence that what's in the picture actually exists?

I would say that there is more evidence that the planet exists than what you see in a photograph, unless someone's tampering with the data. An interesting page on a doctored photographs through history can be found here.

See this for a fascinating read about manipulating photographs throughout history.

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

Something that the CNET article failed to address was this: This work was _exactly_ in line with the norms and standards of networking research. It is quite normal for network operators to collect partial or full traffic traces, for both operational and research purposes.

If you believe that this study was inappropriate, then so is a very large fraction of networking measurement research. Consider at the very least:

    * Just about everything done by CAIDA.
    * The papers at IMC - the Internet Measurement Conference.
    * Data at CRAWDAD - the Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data at Dartmouth.

A large part of computer science research consists of observing how systems are used and how they work or don't work. You can do some small-scale studies on a private system with the explicit agreement of all users, but for something as large and complicated as the Internet, the only way to do meaningful research is to observe the real thing, which necessarily means that you can't identify and get the consent of all the users involved. That's the way this field works. Responsible researchers collect the least invasive information possible for their purposes, use it benignly, and anonymise anything they release so that individual users cannot be identified. The authors of this study did exactly those things.

Now, if you want to ban all observation-based networking research, I suppose that's a legitimate position. But you have to be willing to forgo the benefits of that research. Otherwise, you should accept that the authors acted responsibly and within the norms of the field. Moreover, the purpose of this research was to understand and thereby _improve_ TOR. The researchers identified several serious problems which were already being exploited by "black hats" for malicious purposes. Research like this enables those problems to be addressed before actual harm results.

Something that the CNET article failed to address was this: This work was _exactly_ in line with the norms and standards of networking research. It is quite normal for network operators to collect partial or full traffic traces, for both operational and research purposes.

If you believe that this study was inappropriate, then so is a very large fraction of networking measurement research. Consider at the very least:

  * Just about everything done by CAIDA.
  * The papers at IMC - the Internet Measurement Conference.
  * Data at CRAWDAD - the Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data at Dartmouth.

A large part of computer science research consists of observing how systems are used and how they work or don't work. You can do some small-scale studies on a private system with the explicit agreement of all users, but for something as large and complicated as the Internet, the only way to do meaningful research is to observe the real thing, which necessarily means that you can't identify and get the consent of all the users involved. That's the way this field works. Responsible researchers collect the least invasive information possible for their purposes, use it benignly, and anonymise anything they release so that individual users cannot be identified. The authors of this study did exactly those things.

Now, if you want to ban all observation-based networking research, I suppose that's a legitimate position. But you have to be willing to forgo the benefits of that research. Otherwise, you should accept that the authors acted responsibly and within the norms of the field. Moreover, the purpose of this research was to understand and thereby _improve_ TOR. The researchers identified several serious problems which were already being exploited by "black hats" for malicious purposes. Research like this enables those problems to be addressed before actual harm results.

You went in the wrong direction in my opinion. I left UAC on but run as a normal user so anytime the UAC pops up I have to type in the admin password. It is how I know that software is either written incorrectly or trying to do something I probably don't approve of.

I think you're looking for Citizendium. I also think you're wrong. To cite one study (emphasis added),

In this paper we examine how contributor motivations affect the quality of contributions to the open-content online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find that quality is associated with contributor motivations, but in a surprisingly inconsistent way. Registered users' quality increases with more contributions, consistent with the idea of participants motivated by reputation and commitment to the Wikipedia community. Surprisingly, however, we find the highest quality from the vast numbers of anonymous "Good Samaritans" who contribute only once. Our findings that Good Samaritans as well as committed "zealots" contribute high quality content to Wikipedia suggest that it is the quantity as well as the quality of contributors that positively affects the quality of open source production.

I've seen others in the same vein. I'm pretty sure one even said a majority of actual content was written by anonymous users, whereas a core of registered users made many more edits but mainly in terms of maintenance and dealing with vandalism.

As for trying to gauge expertise and then giving experts authority over their subjects, well, you could do that. Or you could require everyone to provide adequate citations and trust the community to recognize when someone has expertise, and defer to them when (but only when) it's appropriate. Wikipedia has so far chosen the latter model, and is now about as reliable as other encyclopedias by the metrics I've seen. The former model is open to anyone: Wikipedia is, after all, licensed under the GFDL, and a fair amount of Citizendium content is forked from it. Which will succeed? We'll see, I guess. I don't believe in trusting experts any more than they can back up their claims, especially not on controversial topics. "Experts" like political scientists, economists, alternative-medicine providers, etc. would have field days with their respective articles if not kept in line by amateurs with some common sense.

Porting a public domain programming language invented at Dartmouth http://math.dartmouth.edu/history/TBasic/ to personal computer platforms might not be buying cool stuff from other companies, but it isn't exactly innovating either.

Peak Oil is debated - have we already reached it, will it be in 10 years, 20 years? I tend to think we are living through it more or less now. However, I heard a representative from BP speak recently that indicated that, if demand drives the cost of oil up enough, there's enough tar sands and oil shale out there to push peak oil back a long ways. Sure, that's BP talking, and oil shale and tar sands are shit kinds of energy, but it is a facet of the debate.

Peak Coal, on the other hand, is decades or centuries off. The United States has enough coal reserves that we could be energy independent for a few hundred years. China, India, and Russia have lots of reserves, too.

Of course, there are prohibitive problems with becoming an all-coal energy economy for a few hundred years. I advocate that we move away from coal (and oil) as fast as possible. The point is, though, that there's still a lot of coal out there.

Just in case anyone is interested in learning more detailed information about the development process, the leader of the lab at MIT that the linked article described just gave a speech at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. The speech is publicly available either as podcast or video, the latter half of which deals specifically with carbon nanotube ultracapacitor creation.

Dartmouth COLLEGE not University : update summary! http://www.dartmouth.edu/

With regards to infection, there's a biological precedent for outside-to-inside the skull transmission of fluid--via emissary veins--that connect the scalp and intracranial sinuses that drain CSF. This pathway is called a "danger zone of the scalp." The pathway for infection exists already, but the invasive procedure of installing a heat sink could surely allow for additional means of infection, just based on the required surgery.

Nevertheless, based on the linked diagram from TFA, it appears that the heat sink would rest underneath the scalp's deepest layer, thereby transmitting excess heat outside of the cranial cavity but stopping just superficial to the skull. Therefore it wouldn't project through the skin of the scalp. So it appears IMHO that direct infection through the heat sink would be limited.

Also, since the heat sink is under the scalp--and skin being the most outer layer of the scalp--there wouldn't be any skin proper between the heat sink and the heat sink's conduit. However, there would be a bunch of connective tissue including arteries, veins and portions of muscle. These could definitely be compromised. Also, if I am correctly interpreting the linked diagram, the heat sink's secondary conduit is the scalp itself! The scalp does an excellent job of dissipating heat from our head as most folks can attest too--particularly those lacking hair. There's also very little fat in our scalp for insulation.

You might also check out the research of Hany Farid, a CS researcher at Dartmouth who has come up with algorithms to detect if an image has been doctored.

You might also check out the research of Hany Farid, a CS researcher at Dartmouth who has come up with algorithms to detect if an image has been doctored.

Mod parent up.

Take off your tin-foil hats long enough to ask how accurate this "forensic analysis" is. Has it been independently verified? Tested with known manipulated videos? The outputs of the forensic analysis don't even look reasonable for these segments.

There has been some real (peer reviewed) research on detecting digital forgeries by Dr. Hany Farid and his lab at Dartmouth:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~farid/research/tamper ing.html

Only on /. does this crap get modded +5 insightful (despite saying nothing of content), and for example, a comment I made that water is in fact BLUE gets modded -1 Troll (it only got up to +1 after I posted a source).

As others have pointed out, Moore regularly uses these tactics of improperly framing a situation and withholding information that would make you reassess his claim (and ultimately not accept his original framing). His most common tactics are: stating selective facts out of chronological order to present an entirely different situation; using quotes out of context; and most importantly, withholding information that would make it obvious he's messing with you. For example, he did this in Bowling for Columbine when he presented Charlton Heston as a racist by using a quote out of context, and did not bother to mention that Heston marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr, Sidney Poitier, etc, in favor of civil rights.

Disclaimer: I'm a liberal and I've never shot nor owned a gun. :D

You were taught wrong, as, apparently, most people here were. Water has a slight blue tint; that's why it looks clear in a small glass, but in a deep indoor pool, lake (on a cloudy day) or underwater in the ocean, it's dark blue. Because: WATER IS BLUE.

Water has a slight blue tint to it. You don't notice it in a glass, but it's obvious in a lake on a cloudy day, or in a deep indoor pool. Since I was modded troll by imbeciles, I'll post this fact again: WATER IS BLUE.

Where is the it-just-works email encrytion for dummies?

S/MIME, which is built in to Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, and every other major e-mail client. You just need to get yourself a certificate and install it.

Thanks for the tip. I'd never heard of a link between Pythagorean theory and natural vibrations. I found this site with some interesting geometry discussing that.

Email on Paper
Even at Dartmouth some people do not have personal computers or for other reasons do not receive email electronically. But everyone can receive conventional printed mail through campus mailboxes, called "Himnam boxes" after the name of the campus post office.

Once again the Dartmouth Name Directory is the key to reaching these people since everyone has an entry in the DND - even non-computer users - and one field of that entry is the person's Hinman box number. We created a special domain, Hinman.dartmouth.edu to address hinman boxes. If the person cannot receive email electronically (or chooses not to), their DND preferred email address can be set to name@hinman.dartmouth.edu. On the mail hub, sendmail directs messages for the hinman domain to a special program that formats email messages appropriately for sending through the hinman mail system. The resulting messages are printed several times a day, folded, and given to the Hinman post office for delivery, usually within 24 hours.

Farid's research is in detecting when a given image had been edited. This has nothing to do with watermarking or microdots; if it works, it would work even with existing images that have no such extra information added to them.

(If you're curious: digitally modifying images changes higher-order statistics in the wavelet domain. Farid's group has come up with statistical tests that are supposedly reliable enough to be able to tell if a given image has ever been tampered with, by checking these statistical properties. The same idea can be used to detect many kinds of steganography. You can see more in many of the papers here).

The discussion wouldn't be complete without a reference to the Cartoon Laws of Physics.

out of dominoes. That is, if I give you a sliding-block puzzle, where the blocks are all dominoes laid flat in a box, and to goal is to slide one a certain way, that puzzle is a kind of nondeterministic computer.

Details: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rah/ncl-tcs.pdf

If you take a look at Blitzmail you'll find that it actually hits most of your specs. It's still in use at Dartmouth (where I'm a student) but hasn't seen any major updates since the early 90s. It uses its own protocol instead of IMAP, which means you need to run the Blitzmail server too, but the server software supports Blitzmail, IMAP and POP. It also allows fuzzy matching of names when you send an email to someone in the Dartmouth directory, which is a pretty handy feature, also implemented on the server side. Spam filtering is done with Spam Assassin on the server side. It's extremely simple, but I'm going to guess that at least 80% of the people here still use it and swear by it. I've tried to convert to Thunderbird, but end up coming back to Blitz every time. Since it is basically stuck in 1994 it runs very quickly on any computer you can find. I can walk up to a public terminal, sign on, see that I have no new messages, and sign off in about 4 seconds. Anyway, if you're on vacation and have nothing better to do the technical details are here. While it's a little dated, it's proof that not all email has to look like Outlook and IMAP.

This is a really neat research project using crickets as the ghosts in Pacman. Considering that crickets can tell the temperature and that they have the most sensitive mechano-sensors known in the animal kingdom, this is a creature that demonstrates many geeky qualities.

Basically, what he's done with his system is come up with a (completely consistent, as far as I can tell from scanning from his website) framework where singularities now have a defined value

And despite the carping we are seeing here, no doubt prompted in part by how dumb TFA is, this is an interesting pursuit, although as you point out there are some serious issues with it.

Mathematicians sometimes talk about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" (the linked essay is by someone named Hamming, who ought to be familiar to /. readers, and is an extremely intelligent response to Wigner's crypto-creationist essay of the same name). But despite this "unreasonable effectivness" the fact is that algebraic descriptions of reality routinely contain singularities and false solutions that are pure artefacts of description. We, as scientists and engineers, routinely avoid the singularities and throw away the false solutions. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a mathematical description of reality that didn't have this quality? As a scientist, I sometimes feel like I have Tourette's Syndrome: in the midst of a clear and lucid description of some physical system I suddenly find myself spewing obscene singularities or hoping no one will notice the outburst of advanced waves that is flooding uncontrollably forth.

For some reason, mathematicians don't spend much time dealing with these gross inadequacies (although let a physicist come up with some new descriptive language and they'll take an interest, as Dirac learned.) They may feel it isn't fruitful, or there may simply be no approach that isn't obviously, trivially, wrong. Or fruitful approaches may require major fixes to other parts of math, as the current one appears to do. But in any case it is a worthy goal, and I don't think this guy deserves quite the rough ride he is getting here.

Basically, what he's done with his system is come up with a (completely consistent, as far as I can tell from scanning from his website) framework where singularities now have a defined value

And despite the carping we are seeing here, no doubt prompted in part by how dumb TFA is, this is an interesting pursuit, although as you point out there are some serious issues with it.

Mathematicians sometimes talk about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" (the linked essay is by someone named Hamming, who ought to be familiar to /. readers, and is an extremely intelligent response to Wigner's crypto-creationist essay of the same name). But despite this "unreasonable effectivness" the fact is that algebraic descriptions of reality routinely contain singularities and false solutions that are pure artefacts of description. We, as scientists and engineers, routinely avoid the singularities and throw away the false solutions. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a mathematical description of reality that didn't have this quality? As a scientist, I sometimes feel like I have Tourette's Syndrome: in the midst of a clear and lucid description of some physical system I suddenly find myself spewing obscene singularities or hoping no one will notice the outburst of advanced waves that is flooding uncontrollably forth.

For some reason, mathematicians don't spend much time dealing with these gross inadequacies (although let a physicist come up with some new descriptive language and they'll take an interest, as Dirac learned.) They may feel it isn't fruitful, or there may simply be no approach that isn't obviously, trivially, wrong. Or fruitful approaches may require major fixes to other parts of math, as the current one appears to do. But in any case it is a worthy goal, and I don't think this guy deserves quite the rough ride he is getting here.

although this story may be a dupe, 3 years ago, physicists from Europe accomplished a very similar feat. interesting stuff -- here . it has many implications into our currently security model, as in private/public keys. quantum cryptography, really cool stuff.

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~akapadia/moonstuff/mo ron.html

The moon landings were faked. Here's some pretty convincing evidence (no really, check it out!)
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~akapadia/moon.html

You might not be aware of that, but quantum encryption cannot be broken (as far as we know). Plus there is experimental evidence (can't find the darn article) that you can establish a secure link between a low orbit satelite and a ground based receiver.

>This is the sort of reasoning that Warren Buffet himself has used in the past. See his comments about limiting the number of share trades somebody may make in a lifetime for instance.

Are you talking about this?;
From http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/clubs/investme nt/WarrenBuffett.html
"When making investments, pretend in life you have a punch-card with only 20 boxes, and every time you make an investment you punch a slot. It will discipline you to only make investments you have extreme confidence in. "

What does this have to do with the majority of wealth in a small population? What does this have to do with observing the duality of a situation? Am I missing something here?

I agree with your basic point that you can't easily detect the sort of toxicity that leads to death/illness with low frequency, O(1 in 1M) or so. And the really bad stuff is self-evident, as you note. But there's the class of substances that occupy the middle ground- not obviously fatal, but pretty frickin' bad. It sure would be nice to catch these in the lab.

Lead is an interesting example.

The aqueduct that supplied water to the French city of Nimes had parts made of lead. It was operated continuously for nine centuries without obvious side effects.

Hey, guess what, my wife is a classics major. We honeymooned near Nimes and visited the Pont du Gard. I suggest you Google for /Roman lead gout/ and see what turns up. "Without obvious side effect" my ass. I recommend this summary. To wit:

In the first century A.D., Dioscorides, another Greek physician, noticed that exposure to lead could cause paralysis and delirium in addition to intestinal problems and swelling.

Well, I have my doubts.

First, I may be misreading it, but it appears that this is made up. The title of the page is "News fiction voted down, Bill Gates interview" and one of the sentences in the introduction says, "You'll vote for the Natalee Holloway is Alive fiction, but not the Bill Gates interview fiction?"

Y'See, I grew up around Dartmouth back in 1975 and used their Basic back then. Dartmouth's Basic compiler was written in assembly language for the GE635 mainframe and, of course, that's the code it produced. I can tell you for fact that there was no such thing as PEEK or POKE in Dartmouth's Basic, so I'm not sure what "functionality" was lost. Remember that this was the age of mainframes and terminals--not personal computers.

So I don't see that he could bum any code--maybe some design concepts or data structures...

I can see that being an ass generates a pile of interest. It unfortunately doesn't engender any actual reasoning, just more "thinking." You people are intellectually lazy.

Maybe I should try leading by example instead.

The key is that the GP says power, but he is really talking about energy budgets. This thing needs power over a very short time. Not a huge pile of energy.

How much energy... How about a calculation... oh dear is that sort of thing even possible on /. ? I'll try anyways. One caveat, whenever I trot out numbers: I *insist* you double check before believing them.

Lets pretend we are de-icing the entire surface area of a 747-400D, 541.2m^2. This is a huge overestimate of our work loads, because we really only have to defrost the leading edges and a foot or two back.

The C|Net article linked says he only needs to melt a micron or two for it to work, so we'll aim for three microns, or 3*10^-6 meters.

Ladies and gentlemen the total volume of water we are talking about over that vast area with the assumptions I have made is 1.6 mm^3. That is only about .146 grams of water.

That means we must expend .146 calories people. That's .611 joules.

You think a plane of any sort can spare lets say 611 joules, enough energy to de-ice the wings of a 747 a thousand times a flight ?

If you really think they don't have the energy budget, maybe we can just stick a D-Cell battery on board. Of course that's overkill because a D-Cell stores 10000 joules.

What about efficiency ? According to Petrenko's site at Dartmouth the system is wastes almost zero heat energy because of the short time over which it operates. Basically there is no time for it to go anywhere else.

You think we can somehow draw such a tiny amount of energy on even the flimsiest Cessna ? If not, I'm not getting into the damn thing.

In any case, it turns out Goodrich Aerospace has had good results flight testing the system on propeller driven aircraft, and is preparing to flight test it on jets. No details I got that from Petrenko's page at Dartmouth too.

Are you all starting to understand how cool this technology is ?

This site shows a range of the applications available. I'm sure that easteners would be interested in the de-icing of transmission towers. (Too bad this won't remove trees.)