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IEEE Spectrum is a magazine sort of like Popular Science except it's based on reality. Articles are geared for the general techie/engineer type and don't rely on you knowing specific fields. http://spectrum.ieee.org/

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-top-10-programming-languages

Software works well for the back-end of the radio, ie. detector. The front-end and antenna are another story.

But antenna's of approximately the right length are almost as good as specifically tuned antennas, and the technology for dealing with multi-wavelength radios is growing by leaps and bounds. See this summary of Fractal Antennas. (full article is paid), as well as this article

Developed over the last 20 years, fractal antennas have proven to be a fundamentally important breakthrough in antenna technology. This technology has allowed for antennas that are more powerful, versatile and compact. Because a fractal antenna uses fractal geometry and builds a complex pattern from the repetition of a simple shape, the inherent qualities of fractals enable the production of high-performance antennas that are typically 50% to 75% smaller than traditional ones. Because antenna performance is attained through the geometry of the conductor, rather than with the accumulation of separate components or separate elements that inevitably increase complexity and potential points of failure, fractal antennas offer better reliability and lower cost than traditional antennas.

.

So it would seem, that these antennas are destined to simply be "Printed" onto a substrate, perhaps the back cover of the phone, and segments enabled as needed. One antenna for all bands, just by using different segments to create the best pattern. This is bound to become dirt cheap to make.

When combined with a software defined radio, rather than the discrete band models we are used to, the flexibility to produce a true world phone is possibly closer than previously thought. As soon as the designers stop chasing multi-discrete-band radios, and just plan for a world of hundreds of band segments, the Software Radio will drive the unit lower than what we have today.

I'm surprised that it didn't have some sort of dead-reckoning or inertial system as a backup in such cases. If the dead-reckoning says "whoa, it is physically impossible for you to be anywhere NEAR where you think you are so ignore the GPS, go on inertial" ...

This reminds me of a cruise ship running aground because a GPS antenna came unhooked. The crew was supposed to use LORAN to verify the GPS every hour, but they didn't.

In some ways, the US may have learned just as much from this as the Iranians. Losing one unmanned aircraft to learn of a serious exploit that has implications far beyond drones might not be such a bad result.

how about value added content?

Sure, it starts with cute & cuddly camera-wielding robots.
But in a couple of years they will announce a brilliant cost-saving measure - use retired military robots from the Demilitarised Zone.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/military-robots/a-robotic-sentry-for-koreas-demilitarized-zone

A somewhat older but more detailed article.

I realize that you might like to get information from a TV show, but IEEE argues that these devices are potentially very dangerous to safe operation.

"Yet our research has found that these items can interrupt the normal operation of key cockpit instruments, especially Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, which are increasingly vital to safe landings. Two different studies by NASA further support the idea that passengers' electronic devices dangerously produce interference in a way that reduces the safety margins for critical avionics systems."

BTW, I only know of the test pilot because I used a NASA plane and had to get some electronics certified for flight and the guys got to talking, I'm not going to have a link for you.

Climate changes. It isn't static. Weather, even more so. To cast climate change as the villain in a scare story is the ultimate gimmick. When I was a kid (in the 1950's), we had some long dry spells in NE Pennsylvania. And there was the dust bowl.

No climate isn't static and no scientist claims it is. However, WE have adapted to a particular climate and expect it to stay within norms to survive. Changes in the climate can have devastating effects to regions not prepared to deal with them.

As to your examples, a dry spell isn't climate change. The dust bowl wasn't climate change either. Those were both weather events.

Further back, there were other notable and unusual climate events. And huge swings in temperature. Also huge swings in CO2 (although they lagged warm periods, they didn't lead them... obviously the plants making lots and lots.

Your claim of CO2 lagging warming is nonsense and has been thoroughly debunked. Also, plants do no make CO2, they consume it. Conditions millions of years ago have jack to do with our current climate. Different albedos, land mass configurations, etc. .

But this doesn't provide evidence that CO2 increases warmth, it provide evidence that CO2 correlates with decreasing warmth.

Really? And what is your scientific research backing up such a ridiculous claim? It seems all the peer-reviewed science says the exact opposite. Let me guess, you're a conspiracy nut, right?

Still, no one can predict climate in the best of times, much less now.

Of course, since you're clearly an expert on the subject. Climate is much easier to predict than weather.

Yet, sometimes the climate does very unfriendly things.

Yes it does, usually over 100's or 1000's of years which is usually enough time for adaptation. Sudden changes have had some rather nasty side effects in the past. The changes we are seeing now are happening with a lifetime or two. At best, that should raise some concern. It wouldn't take much change to render the US into a nation full of starving people for example. Shift the jet stream north and suddenly the nations breadbasket turns into a desert.

So it's the perfect bogy-man to point at if you want to scare money out of people, or distract them.

You're confusing terrorism and climate science. Terrorism is an ill-defined nebulous threat with about as much real threat as you being struck by a bolt of lightning on any given day. Climate science is a well researched topics that has made many verifiable predictions and has a huge amount of data and research backing it up.

Having said that, yes, we should reduce our CO2 emissions. And the good news is, we will -- quite naturally -- as we stop burning petroleum. And we will stop, because it's hard to get, appears to be running out, and we have to negotiate with crazy people to get enough, and alternate sources make more sense on many levels, and we'll be reducing our power consumption by increasing efficiency, a good example being by wide adoption of electric vehicles, which we'll have in great numbers very shortly -- VERY shortly if recent battery tech announcements (1,2) pan out. What we don't need to to is torque the economy (even further) out of shape to deal with an emergency that isn't here and which so far, no one has shown decisively to be incoming.

The point is that if we keep burning fossil fuels until they get too expensive to use we will just make the situation worse. It's not just oil. It's also coal, natural gas, and any other carbon based fuel source that isn't carbon neutral. None of these are going away any time soon.

But clearly, no amount of scientific research will convince you otherwise, so we'll just wait and see what happens over the next decade or so.

Climate changes. It isn't static. Weather, even more so. To cast climate change as the villain in a scare story is the ultimate gimmick. When I was a kid (in the 1950's), we had some long dry spells in NE Pennsylvania. And there was the dust bowl. Further back, there were other notable and unusual climate events. And huge swings in temperature. Also huge swings in CO2 (although they lagged warm periods, they didn't lead them... obviously the plants making lots and lots. But this doesn't provide evidence that CO2 increases warmth, it provide evidence that CO2 correlates with decreasing warmth.) Still, no one can predict climate in the best of times, much less now. Or weather. Yet, sometimes the climate does very unfriendly things. So it's the perfect bogy-man to point at if you want to scare money out of people, or distract them.

Having said that, yes, we should reduce our CO2 emissions. And the good news is, we will -- quite naturally -- as we stop burning petroleum. And we will stop, because it's hard to get, appears to be running out, and we have to negotiate with crazy people to get enough, and alternate sources make more sense on many levels, and we'll be reducing our power consumption by increasing efficiency, a good example being by wide adoption of electric vehicles, which we'll have in great numbers very shortly -- VERY shortly if recent battery tech announcements (1,2) pan out. What we don't need to to is torque the economy (even further) out of shape to deal with an emergency that isn't here and which so far, no one has shown decisively to be incoming.

So let me get this straight... If a workstation is compromised, it's cleaned, but there's no need to bother reimaging. If a server is compromised, and data is lost/damaged, it doesn't matter because it was already the admin's job to fix it, so it doesn't cost anything? And the lost productivity due to countless meetings to review doesn't cost anything? And the projects that get delayed don't cost anything, regardless of being under contracts? And the resulting investigation, likely involving travel to foreign countries, doesn't cost anything?

That is what I call nonsense.

But hey... I guess you know your stuff. After all, banks are very secure.

That was featured several days ago on /. -- Quoting an IEEE article:

The world's three major nuclear accidents had very different causes, but they have one important thing in common: In each case, the company or government agency in charge withheld critical information from the public. [..] [TEPCO] has only made the situation worse by presenting the Japanese and global public with obfuscations instead of a clear-eyed accounting

While you may argue about the semantics of "lying", this falls far short of full disclosure.

"hydroelectric, biogas, biomass, solar thermal with storage and ocean thermal energy conversion can provide baseload power.

Depends. Hydroelectric traditionally is used for the more lucrative peaking load, that is, drain the water source during peak load times and let it refill during the rest of the time. Using it as base load is inefficient. Biogas and biomass run into a couple of problems. First, they displace agricultural resources. What gets burned in the generator can't be used in the field. Second, they only work as long as you have something to burn. A lot of biomass is seasonal.

Solar thermal with storage can work, but it hasn't been shown competitive. Also, there's the problem of real estate. Nuclear power has high power density, higher than any of these quoted technologies, aside from some biogas/biomass facilities which use an existing biomass stream.

I have much to say on Desertec since I think it's a symptom of a deeper problem here. Desertec sounds like a viable concept and it gets over the real estate problem, but the project seems placed in the wrong hands. I glanced over the website and it has a lot of future fail present. For example, the use of the phrase "the world's most ambitious solar power project". If you have to tout that before you've even built anything of note, then maybe you need to put it in other hands. The news stream also has very little information on Desertec itself. I've seen that game played before on other business and project websites to give the impression that a lot is happening. But the problem is that the happening part need not have anything to do with the business or project in question.

I'd be more interested, if they had a more conservative technology buildup and a business case that's self-funding. Building a 500 MW plant as the first stage of their project definitely is ambitious, but it also introduces a great deal of risk.

Similarly, I don't see evidence that the project could move on under its own merits. The project seems to depend too much on government funding and subsidies. Currently, the political fad of the moment is green power. But it's a bit foolish to be so reliant on that. A more incremental approach that pays for future debt acquisition with revenue from existing successful projects would be a more viable approach. So that's why I assert above that it doesn't have much of a business plan.

Seriously, financing projects longer than 2 years is getting harder and harder. That is why you need government backing, and we all know how great government taking downside risks from large banks has worked . . .

Sure, there's a short term credit crunch from the recent financial difficulties, but that will go away. Past that, I just don't see your assertion. Financing big projects has always been difficult, but that's because it always is a difficult thing to show that you can pay back that kind of money.

Hash chaining E2E ballot receipts in this particular way has been in the literature since at least 2009. See section IV of:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5282555

Even if solar panels were free, solar electricity still has a high hurdle to jump before it becomes competitive with other sources.

The costs include the mounting structure and the power inverter.

The article isn't about electricity from photovoltaic panels mounted on roofs. It's about large industrial scale solar concentrators like this one. It has the potential to be cheaper than PV generated electricity and it keeps producing electricity after the sun goes down.

Seems that the Nobel Prize winning scientist whose work on radiation exposure is the basis for our standards today may have lied about there being no threshold: http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/education/radiations-big-lie

That is a "proof", not a "preprint".

In the journals I've published in, the two are the same.

And given the context of the discussion, the version the IEEE allows you to publish is almost the proof. From the complainer's own page, he links to the FAQ, where it says:

The new policy retains substantial rights for authors to post on their personal sites and their institutions' servers, but only the accepted versions of their papers, not a published version as might be downloaded from IEEE Xplore®.

And the first question in the FAQ is:

How does IEEE define an "accepted" version?

  An accepted manuscript is a version which has been revised by the author to incorporate review suggestions, and which has been accepted by IEEE for publication.

This isn't the final formatted version, but the version that is final in content. No more revisions will be made. It is the one accepted by peer review, and is for all practical purposes as good as the published one.

Granted, the FAQ does define a preprint to be the one prior to submission, which conflicts with my usage, but then the complainer is factually incorrect in saying that the IEEE only allows preprints.

The fact, however, remains that the IEEE allows you to publicly post the final revision after peer review.

So I agree that the preprint is just as good as the final paper (sometimes better, as it can be updated on the arXiv after publication to fix typos, and doesn't have the errors that the journal makes when retyping the paper even though the latex source was provided...!), but this is not the version that the journal created - the copyright on that belongs to them.

So we're in agreement. It just seems silly to whine that you can't publish the final formatted paper, when you can publish one as good as it.

Nope, the preprint at least some journals allow you to publish on a preprint server is the version prior to you submitting the paper.

Perhaps in some journals, but not in IEEE, which is one of the two he was complaining about:

From the IEEE submission guidelines:

Proof: Before publication, proofs will be sent to the author (or to the contact author who submitted the paper). Typographical, illustration problems and other errors should be marked according to the instructions accompanying the proofs. This is not the time to rewrite or revise the paper, and the cost of excessive changes will be billed to the author. However, it is important to review the presentation details at this time and carefully check for any errors that might have been introduced during the production process.

Emphasis mine.

They send you the proof (which is the preprint) after all the refereeing is done and any changes the referees suggest have been implemented.

They all do. The "prestigious" ones especially and yes IEEE does too.

From the IEEE submission guidelines:

Voluntary Page Charges and Reprints: After a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the author's company or institution will be asked to pay a voluntary charge to cover part of the cost of publication. IEEE page charges are not obligatory, and payment is not a prerequisite for publication. The author will receive 100 free reprints if the charge is honored. Detailed instructions on page charges and on ordering reprints will accompany the proof.

Emphasis mine.

TEPCO’s supply situation would look less grim were it not for a quirky split that divides Japan’s power grids in half: While Tokyo and the rest of eastern Japan run on 50-hertz electricity, the big cities southwest of Tokyo and the rest of the country run on alternating current that cycles at 60 Hz. It’s a historical accident from the 19th century, when Tokyo’s electrical entrepreneurs installed 50-Hz generators mainly from Germany, while their counterparts in Osaka selected 60-Hz equipment from the United States.

So yes allowing fragmented systems is inherently bad when it comes some monopolistic areas of effect. And in this case it caused significant damage because they couldn't use the power from the west to help the east.

From the Article ( I know, hersay... )

Thrun and Urmson acknowledged that there are many challenges ahead, including improving the reliability of the cars and addressing daunting legal and liability issues. But they are optimistic (Nevada recently became the first U.S. state to make self-driving cars legal.) All the problems of transportation that people see as a huge waste, "we see that as an opportunity," Thrun said.

Nevada bill:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/nevada-bill-would-provide-tentative-roadmap-for-autonomous-vehicles

Yest, 95% accuracy has always been the bane of speech systems (even 99% accuracy can be a problem). It just costs a lot of time to correct things, especially when they are not obvious typos but are similar looking real words. This has been a problem with speech to text from the start. That is why I believe ultimately, rather than for dictation, speech is best used in a more conversational way, interpreting what is said, and with back-and-forth questioning and feedback.

I worked for a time as a contractor at IBM Research doing embedded speech around 1999 on the IBM Personal Speech Assistant:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=940752

I wrote up some conceptual ideas for an even more conversational system (running a display wall for use in creating new designs and new patents). When my supervisor went on vacation, made a display wall mockup with nine think pads (a bit like a Jeopardy wall :-) to test a bit of that. Boy was my supervisor surprised when he came back from vacation -- luckily I was not in the lab when he saw it the first time. :-) And now, a decade later, there is Watson.

An Apple recruiter contacted me a couple years ago (I am on a patent related to that PSA work) but I was not interested back then (who knows, I might be now). But I figured something like Siri was in the air, because that's essentially the kind of thing we were working on back then.

If your heart acquires strength, you will be able to remove blemishes from others without thinking evil of them.

Mohandas Gandhi

It is unusual for a software shop to be as immature in its tools and processes as your new employer. Rather than join in the chorus of voices condemning your employer, let me suggest an alternative.

Understand the reasons for the current situation. Professionals, especially engineers, usually have a rational basis for their choices. Perhaps they are disillusioned from having wasted time and energy in the past (see Test Automation Snake Oil). Perhaps they have a few heroic individuals who hold everything together and don't see the need for tools. I have no idea. I cannot wrap my brain around how someone would try to get by without revision control but that's immaterial. You have to understand that before you can either change it, or learn to live with it.

Read the IEEE paper, How to Be a Star Engineer. Then, be a star. Help your team see the value in some basic tools like version control. Introduce them. Train your peers. Proceed slowly and patiently. Talk to your managers and senior staff about the risks you can mitigate and be realistic about the costs of doing so. In other words, help your company do better software engineering.

It is very possible they hired you because you come from a disciplined engineering shop and can help them improve their practices.

Or you can take the coward's way out and flee before you try to teach anything or learn anything.

We don't, and have never, lived in anything approaching a free market.

Unfortunately you're partially right. Except for slavery the 1820s was as close to a free market as we've had. This was when Alexis de Tocqueville toured the USA before writing his "Democracy in America". Almost all politics was local and there were no career politicians. There weren't all the laws, licenses, and regulations running a business. Or a farm, or inn, boarding house etc. Growing up before I was legally able to get a part-time job in high school from spring to fall I went around my neighborhood with a lawnmower and can of gas cutting grass to earn money. I helped people with their gardens, planning it, digging it out, and planting seedlings or sowing seeds. In many places now to commercially do lawn care or landscaping local governments require licenses. In my own back yard my family and I grew our own garden and I composted anything and everything organic. I tossed our dog's feces and the cats' litter in the compost as well. I few years ago the city I live in said I had to hide the composting feces in a box or other closed container. I couldn't just mix it in with the leafs, cut grass, and other yard debris. Unless of course they were contained too. Just this morning before going online I went outside to do some raking. In maybe 15 minutes I filled 5 large compostable yard bags yet all I did was put a dent in the leafs to be raked. And I'm supposed to have a bin large enough?

Stabilization policies should be used to minimize pricing variations, which is good. The dairy industry for instance benefited from this

I disagree, governments should not be regulating or have many of the policies they do have. The sole purpose of government is to protect life. liberty, and property as well as create a climate wherein everyone has equal opportunity, opportunity not outcome.

Oh, and actually I know of an ISP in Maine that drives DSL over some fairly long distances. He's made a nice business, but it requires a lot of work, and capital. And risk. Telcoms don't much care for risk.

Take away Telcoms' and Cable's monopolies and require them to compeat in a freer market. I don't mean a duopoly, allow any body to offer cable, telephone, and electrical services. Same with cable and fiber. It's not ideal but in "A Broadband Utopia" the IEEE "Spectrum" says how a group of communities in northeastern Utah got together to build a broadband infrastructure. Telcoms and cable cos would not build it so they did themselves. Of course having to face competition these monopoly businesses pressed Utah to pass a law outlawing the communities from delivering their own services. We've had articles on /. about how after a small city in MN asked broadband providers build the infrastructure and was refused it decided to build it out themselves.Of course those who refused to build out broadband themselves then sued the city to stop them. Judge Tosses Telco Suit Over City-Owned Network.

Falcon

There's actually even at least one paper on this:
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/newsletters/emcs/sprng01/pp_hanada.htm

SAIC's greatest FAILs:

• FBI Virtual Case File
• NSA Trailblazer
• NYC's CityTime

Wow. The hits just keep coming...

I know that someone has to build those robots,

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/may05/selfrep.ws.html

and someone else has to create the control software for those robots,

http://www.profactor.at/en/production/forschung-entwicklung/robotik-und-automation-bis-losgroesse-1/selbstprogrammierende-robotersysteme-fbirescope-flexpaint.html

and someone else has to provide the knowledge for those robots,

http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa/deepqa.shtml

and someone else has to maintain those robots,

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/may05/selfrep.ws.html

and if factory robots then someone else has to design the stuff those robots build,

http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/e/sac/meem/public/old_issue/vol02iss04/MEEM020404.pdf

and someone else has to oversee and control those robots

Wishful thinking. There may be one temporary job here - but only until it's recognized that the system can do a better job of monitoring itself. http://inventorspot.com/robot_demonstrates_self_awareness

, ..., point is, there'll be always jobs, you just have to find and adapt.

True. There may still be extremely low paying jobs for tasks that are simply too unnecessary to justify spending the capital on a robotic system - such as feeding (or burying) the 6 billion uneducated/unemployed meatbags that on longer serve a purpose other than to consume resources.

Privacy matters re: smart meters is not a new topic. An interesting article from last year on IEEE Spectrum discusses the same problem in relevance to using home appliances. Two researchers quoted provide a couple of ideas as counter-measures; batteries being one of the two.

Somewhat related, but not quite the solution is the Distributed Bill of Materials (DBOM): http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=924533 (and related articles); The DBOM tells the devolvers how to devolve a product and what the resulting parts are made of.

I do not think that you get net energy savings (by using the same basic technology, e.g., CMOS at room temeprature or "cold"), if you take into account the fact that cooling things down also costs energy! For example, liquid helium refrigeration costs about 1 kW of wall outlet power to compensate for 1 W dissipated at 4.2 K.

Changing your basic technology to, e.g., some version of superconductor-based logic can help (a lot!), current state of the art (in my very biased opinion, since I am cheering for those guys, and have been involved in related research for years) is here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower ...

Paul B.

Having a universal power supply for mobile devices (UPAMD) would be sweet.. Try to suggest to an otherwise intelligent person that we need a sustainable solution to the mountains of power adapters going into the landfill and they'll angrily accuse you of expecting us to compute with abacuses and slide-rules.

But any advance in this area is a good thing, if you ask me. We don't have enough copper to serve everyone's needs and its Ohm's Law losses are too much to be acceptable in the future.

cheers...ank

It's called 802.11n (which has been working for quite some time now), this is just doing it with cell phones.

Rice's team overcame the full-duplex hurdle by employing an extra antenna and some computing tricks.

We repurposed antenna technology called MIMO, which are common in today's devices

Yup.

Night charging does not solve the problems that numerous EVs or plug-in hybrids would create for the grid:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/speed-bumps-ahead-for-electricvehicle-charging/0

What anonymous doesn't have in common with those people is crippling poverty and religious conviction, that are given as the underlying cause. I don't understand the mentality involved here.

Actually, many of the suicide bombers don't have crippling poverty. They are more likely to be literate and have college degrees than the general populations from which they spring. One fact that might be particularly interesting to Slashdot is that there's a disproportionate number of terrorists who are engineers. See e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html and http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-are-terrorists-often-engineers. There's an associated idea known as the Salem Hypothesis which is the observation that in the US, anti-evolution proponents with advanced degrees are disproportionately engineers - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis). Engineers in the United States are also more politically conservative and religious than scientists. There's something weird going on here. But regardless, attributing "crippling poverty" as a major part of why people engage in suicide bombing seems to be off.

An interesting article about the 'Great Brain Race' which also mentions IBM's SyNAPSE project can be found at IEEE Spectrum. http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/moneta-a-mind-made-from-memristors/0

This is guaranteed to have many applications from the useful to the beautiful to the absurd. Combine this with recent research on direct neuro-electronic interfaces (see for example multiple papers at link below) and you now have interesting possibilities for sending and receiving signals to/from devices on the skin -- or across the room. Directly stimulating cells in the skin responsible for detecting pressure, heat and so forth might enable more compelling virtual or augmented realities. Combine with LED technology and you could have moving full-color tattoos. Amazing and exciting!

Neural Engineering (NER), 2011 5th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on

Well, if you are actually interested in the science, the research this car is based on can be easily found, I think, using google. Here, read this article (exhibited at the 2008 IEEE computational intelligence conference hosted in Hong Kong), and if you comprehend it, you can implement their procedure yourself: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4634099&tag=1

The article is written by Xinhua news staff and contains no technical information at all. The article is mostly your typical laymen fluff filled with public outrage, pundit soundbites, and general background information. The lack of details about the nature of the "circuit design flaw" really precludes this from being considered "news for nerds". As someone with experience working in an FDA regulated environment, oversight and accountability of projects and tasks is something I am quite familiar with. I wonder how much (if any) details will emerge that will answer some of the questions the circuit geeks among us would ask. I know it is a poor substitute (and maybe slightly off-topic), but this article from years ago has always stuck with me and constantly reminds me of the perils the electronics industry continues to face.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/bogus

To original poster, I read the articles on: http://sciencedaily.com/ (all sciences- this is by far my favorite) http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing (computer science) http://mathoverflow.net/ (though this one is usually way above my head) http://extremetech.com/ (engineering) I also have Scientific American subscription, and although it occasionally has very interesting physics articles (the accuracy of which I couldn't tell you), I think there are better magazines.

I've thrown all the feeds from each of these sites into Google Reader. In no particular order:

wired.com
slashdot.org
spectrum.ieee.org
scientistscanvas.com
arxiv.org
techcrunch.com
techdirt.com
news.discovery.com
physicsworld.com
newscientist.com
physorg.com
nationalgeographic.com
scienceblog.com

I have plenty more. Any RSS feeder app works. You get some repeats but there's a constant stream of science news.

Unless the guy that invented it works for free the true cost is surely much higher than $1390. This IEEE article from a month ago says it took him a year and a half to develop so I'd include the guy's salary, lab equipment, CAD tool licenses, etc. unless he worked on it in his free time with all free open source software...

Brain Workshop is a free, open-source program which can make you smarter. It implements the dual n-back task, which has been shown to improve people's performance on IQ tests in three separate studies.

That's the story I read from the post-mortem articles for FBI Virtual Case File system. I work for a global IT consulting company, and yeah, they're all about doing whatever the customer wants. No push back, please. :-) So SAIC isn't bad, per se, it's just that hiring SAIC is not a sufficient condition for project success. The clients still need their heads in the clear, open air instead of rammed upside their... posteriors. :-)

This is the major reason why the military has been investing heavily in green tech. A gallon of diesel fuel at the front lines in Afghanistan costs the military something like $400 because it first needs to be shipped in-country, then trucked through hostile territory on roads, and sometimes lashed to a mule and packed in. Plus, supply convoys are ripe targets - casualties due to roadside bombs these days are comparable, if not higher, than actual combat. The military realized this a couple of years ago, looking at the single-walled canvas tents they are cooling with A/C run from diesel generators in a 110 F desert. Being one of the biggest users of, well, everything in this world, their economies of scale and opportunities for savings at home and in theater are huge. They have been working on it, but it's a huge infrastructure and logistical change to undertake. If anything, it should give us all pause to realize how big a job the rest of the world will have to change our own infrastructure and habits to become more efficient.

This is the best information I found:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/security/lockheed-martin-cyber-attack-routine-a-warning-or-a-possible-act-of-war

The IEEE has the Medal of Honor that just went to Andrew J. Viterbi, without which your cell phone, WiFi, or digital TV would not be working.

The IEEE John von Neumann Medal is for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology. Recipients include Donald Knuth, Carver Mead, Gordon Bell, and John Hopcroft.

The IEEE has the Medal of Honor that just went to Andrew J. Viterbi, without which your cell phone, WiFi, or digital TV would not be working.

The IEEE John von Neumann Medal is for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology. Recipients include Donald Knuth, Carver Mead, Gordon Bell, and John Hopcroft.

...Typically redundant systems use instruments from different manufacturers or instruments that are implemented with different technology.

This is not possible for digital systems because they are too costly to implement multiple times. What this means is that redundant digital control systems use same software.

Not in well designed systems. In well designed systems there can be hardware, software, and algorithmic redundancy. Different algorithms may be used to calculate the same result and a voting system may be used to pick the correct result with increased reliability or signal an exception.

I haven't studied quantum information theory (I dropped Paul Ginsparg's quantum information theory class after a few days because I had too much work this semester), but it's general knowledge among physicists that Dwave has not made anything worth writing home about. Two wide-audience survey articles about this are http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/loser-dwave-does-not-quantum-compute from IEEE and http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/controversial-computer-is-at-lea.html?ref=hp from the magazine Science