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It is not extraordinarily toxic. It's toxic, like any heavy metal, but not extraordinarily so.

http://www.radioactivity.eu.co...

Because of its lack of mobility, medical data do not confirm the reputation of plutonium as the most deadly substance known to man. It is not as immediately harmful as many chemicals. The danger resulting from its alpha radiation does not become effective unless plutonium is present in the human body after inhalation or ingestion.

To handle it one should wear gloves, goggles, and face mask. Not that different than handling many household cleaning solvents.

And some of those are among the countries with the highest broadband speeds in the EU: http://www.bme.eu.com/news/uk-broadband-speed (lighter color = better) If you look at the breakdown by region on the same picture, Central and Eastern European countries on average are ahead of Western European countries when it comes to broadband speed. So what's your point?

You didn't read read your own source. Slovakia has a penetration of 40%. Bulgaria is 20%. Romania is 40%. We're not talking not about how fast internet is in select areas, but how fast the overall network is for last mile. Those countries don't even have a last mile.

The EU has recently accepted what are considered second and third world countries, many within the last 10 years, including Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, etc. Just let me know - and provide some data, if you don't mind - exactly which US states have that level of GDP, poverty, and infrastructure.

And some of those are among the countries with the highest broadband speeds in the EU: http://www.bme.eu.com/news/uk-broadband-speed (lighter color = better) If you look at the breakdown by region on the same picture, Central and Eastern European countries on average are ahead of Western European countries when it comes to broadband speed. So what's your point?

Btw, none of those are considered 3rd world countries by far. The poorest of the new EU members (Bulgaria) is still considered an upper middle income economy (we don't use 1st, 2nd, 3rd world anymore). Some, like Slovenia and Czech Republic have overtaken some of the "western" European countries (Greece, Portugal) by any measure, including per capita GDP.

I drive the I-10 through West Texas, and see a huge (250-foot?) cell tower every mile or so.

But it's worth fuck-all to me if I can't get Google Maps to work because they refuse to put new equipment on those towers to handle data services.

There are two ways to go about this.

If you want a "just works" solution, go and buy CoPilot for your smartphone (iPhone/Android). It's your run-of-the-mill GPS navigation software, with UI like the hardware units, and offline maps. The version with North America maps is $30.

If you don't mind wasting time, you can get any of several apps that can display preloaded offline maps. For Android, I use Maverick. Then you take something like Mobile Atlas Creator, which downloads Google (Bing, ...) maps on your PC and prepackages them for offline use, and upload them to the phone. Voila! Though, given the effort, I mostly use this approach when going hiking - preloading the particular region with terrain and satellite layers in highest detail.

If you are interested in having high quality time in your datacenter, you will look at having a non-portable GPS unit. At a previous jobs, we had a 1u rack mount time server that synchronized itself via GPS through an antenna on the roof. Similar to these. Of course, at a certain scale everything is portable.

But Harald, well, 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-pyrate.

Admins are still using the net for timekeeping? A serious admin would use something like this and reduce a hacker's/worm's opportunity to attack.

... that time is defined by the vibrations of a cesium atom instead of being just a certain fraction of a day.

On another note, I notice that CentralNic have sex.eu.com up for auction as their charity thingy for the Farmers In Crisis fund, at www.auctions.eu.com, and nobody's bid for it yet...

Like Nielsen, I've been saying for years that eventually micropayment will be the way - at least for users who fall in the mid-range between couch potato and expert for the information in question. For example see here from 1997 (it shows) and the capsule version here.

The key points, it seems to me, are:

• What you pay your connection provider is a utility bill - like the lighting by which you read that book, the heating for your TV womb. Quite different from the payment for the book or the video, an (inadequate) portion of which goes to the humans who made the words and pictures.
• Micropayments offer the chance for wider diversity of content. With micropayments, if I want the scoop on CPRM I'll have these choices:
  • Going to an advertiser-supported site for a really quick view, with the added effort of reading through the commercial bias;
  • Paying $0.05 to an independent for their analysis and summary of what's going on; or
  • Doing the research myself from free sources, FoI requests, etc. Set aside a day or three...
• Corollary of the above: in your own area of expertise free stuff is fine. The areas where you want to pay an independent are those where you want proper information but to avoid expanding your expertise more than absolutely necessary, e.g. avoid learning statistical mechanics or Russian.
• To understand the argument between advertiser-supported and otherwise-supported media, it helps a lot to have spent time outside the USofA. Public-service media rock.
• Micropayments are linked to the battle between independents (like me) and the copyright-grabbing corporations. See Tasini -v- Times . Corporations don't like the idea because it increases pressure on them to hand over a share to the humans who make the content. How would you feel about a paid-for Napster if half the $1 went to the artists? Or 80%?
• Proper micropayments need to be digital cash: secure, anonymous and quite separate from the credit card clearance system. And if only interoperativity standards can be put in place they should be economic down to $0.0001 or less.

Mike