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It seems Silverpop's "Permission based marketing" may come back to bite them. Just a wild guess, but could sending out a billion or so emails, tweets, facebook posts, etc possibly make you a preferred target for blackhats? And why do I think your personal data is coming soon to a Wikileaks mirror near you? http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/internet/mcdonalds-data-breach-supersized http://www.silverpop.com/blogs/email-marketing/

One presumes that you meant to say General Motors' (or General Motors's if you prefer) NASA Robot On Tour.

So, Robonaut is now credited to General Motors, and Robert Ambrose and the Robonaut
group at NASA Johnson Space Center don't even get a shout out anymore?

Maybe a link to their 2000 IEEE Intelligent Systems article?

If it is, my money says the Linux crowd will employ it first, Apple will make it sexy, and Windows will blatantly copy it. In that order.

Yes, because Microsoft is so behind the game. Apple did patent this back in 2006, and as far as I am aware Microsoft don't have patents for this technology. But it is not as if it was that revolutionary an idea even back in 2006, as this paper from 2005 shows.

I am sure that it is not an easy thing to implement, so the real proof of the pudding will be when one company finally ships a commercial product. That is the problem with the patent system. You get rewarded just for coming up with an idea that you can't possibly implement. Then you wait until everyone else solves the implementation problems and comes out with their prototypes and then you can call the lawyers.

Mind you, knowing how secretive Apple is about forthcoming products, they may be on the verge of releasing their system right now. If that is the case then they will deserve credit as innovators.

Do you have a source for that claim? my understanding was that they were made in china by a taiwanese firm using a formula that was stolen from a japanese company and messed up in the process.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/leaking-capacitors-muck-up-motherboards

You have some very valid points. I've worked in manufacturing.

One thing to remember in this case, however, is the machines in question were not the Dell Crap line machines, they were the premium-quality Optiplex line, where you pay more to get a reliable machine for Enterprise users.

And the bad caps? Not the work of poor QC from a "Chinese peasant", but industrial espionage from some Taiwanese capacitor firms who had engineers steal a formula from from a company in Japan, but got it wrong.

And Dell bought low-end capacitors from cut-rate suppliers. They are not the first to make this mistake, but on your premium line, where you charge premium prices, you should be buying name-brand components. Good electrolytics are expensive.

This story was all covered by IEEE Spectrum. They have a story on the Dell scandal as well.

You have some very valid points. I've worked in manufacturing.

One thing to remember in this case, however, is the machines in question were not the Dell Crap line machines, they were the premium-quality Optiplex line, where you pay more to get a reliable machine for Enterprise users.

And the bad caps? Not the work of poor QC from a "Chinese peasant", but industrial espionage from some Taiwanese capacitor firms who had engineers steal a formula from from a company in Japan, but got it wrong.

And Dell bought low-end capacitors from cut-rate suppliers. They are not the first to make this mistake, but on your premium line, where you charge premium prices, you should be buying name-brand components. Good electrolytics are expensive.

This story was all covered by IEEE Spectrum. They have a story on the Dell scandal as well.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/telecom/security/how-stuxnet-is-rewriting-the-cyberterrorism-playbook has a good overview published a month ago.

Yes, we can

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process

When the USAF tried to get Congress to let them build a plant in Montana it has been blocked by Congress because it doesn't reduce CO2 emissions, however some processes can be near carbon neutral, Henry Waxman won't allow it unless it's carbon negative

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/us-air-force-syntheticfuel-program-in-limbo

With the House going Republican, I bet the USAF project comes back to life in '11-13

everyone knows it's easy to slip backdoors into hardware, but hiding it is the hard part. every fabless chip maker does spot checks of their products and will find these backdoors. at the very least they will find that the shipping products aren't like the ones they designed with extra circuits.

As per this quite old story, hiding malicious circuitry is easy enough that there are serious concerns about it. A moment's thought will reassure you that Moore's law works against us. The intel i5 has 774 million transistors, enough that a significant number of them are simply 'rounded off' when talking about them. The intel 286 had 134,000 transistors, again likely rounded off. So even with back-of-the-envelope calculations a more-than-enough-for-bad-things 286 is capable of being 'lost in the noise' of a modern CPU.

But let's be fair, that is just a transistor count. How many would be required to perform a malicious function? Ideally they would be situated in specific spaces where data across a bus is a constant, perhaps in a cache or in one of the MULTITUDE of pipelines in a CPU/GPU. You need to match a specific pattern, and substitute a new one. One possibility is a LSFR that is checked against some serial bus over and over until the bitstream matches exactly. Based on some totally reliable random internet post, building an LSFR should cost far less than 1000 transistors. I have no electronics background, so that factor is probably off by at least an order of magnitude.

So are you gonna find 1000 transistors in the middle of a few hundred million?

Wikipedia, as linked in the summary: "Its secure government communications work has involved the NSA in numerous technology areas, including the design of specialized communications hardware and software, production of dedicated semiconductors (at the Ft. Meade chip fabrication plant), and advanced cryptography research. The agency contracts with the private sector in the fields of research and equipment."

Spectrum IEEE: "The DOD also maintained its own chip-making plant at Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., until the early 1980s, when costs became prohibitive."

I'm betting this statement is now bullshit.

I dunno about the NSA, but I do know that *my* semiconductor fabrication company has a dedicated military fab line in California, and if the DoD orders a simple voltage regulator and is willing to pay for the extra cost, the fab goes through the layout, makes sure it's good, and runs it and packages it in a secure facility. I've not *seen* this, but coworkers have been in the fab and said that where most engineers in our company have Dilbert cartoons up, everyone in that facility has posters of military aircraft -- that it's like a military facility inside our company. Apparently they have full production capability: silicon design, fabrication, packaging, applications engineering, test engineering, and production engineering.

I know my company's aversion to spending money. They wouldn't *do* this unless it was economically profitable, which means we're actively pitching our secure fabrication capability to buyers, so anyone who is buying compromised hardware is doing so knowing the risk.

Wikipedia, as linked in the summary: "Its secure government communications work has involved the NSA in numerous technology areas, including the design of specialized communications hardware and software, production of dedicated semiconductors (at the Ft. Meade chip fabrication plant), and advanced cryptography research. The agency contracts with the private sector in the fields of research and equipment."

Spectrum IEEE: "The DOD also maintained its own chip-making plant at Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., until the early 1980s, when costs became prohibitive."

I'm betting this statement is now bullshit.

From what I know of flash, the 'bad bits' aren't repeatedly bad. The bad-sector-swap-out-routine in most flash drives and USB sticks will actually swap out a sector after a single read that can't be ECC-corrected, but that doesn't mean all the bits in the sector can't be written correctly ever again.

For example, in this article (IEEExplore, so paywalled for you, sorry) a generic NAND flash chip has been tested for bit-error-rates. In the 5K write cycles after an average bit has failed, it only failed to be written correctly 4 times more. That would mean that a single erase-rewrite cycle would write the complete sector without any bit errors 99% of the time: to find 'most' of the bad bits, the sector would have to be rewritten 1000s of times every time the software would want to check the fingerprint.

Not only would that take a fair amount of time, it would also introduce new failed bits. That would mean the ID of the flash chip can only be checked so many times beffore the complete sector goes bad.

I'd feel much better about dumping nukewaste that we know will be harmless in a couple years, than dumping, say, heavy metals that we know will never, ever be harmless.

Nuclear Wasteland. "France's engineers tried harder than those in any other country to build and run breeder reactors reliably at a commercial scale, but ultimately they failed. The result is that even in France--the best real-world model of what reprocessing can accomplish--the technology remains a tantalizing but only partial solution to the problem of high-level nuclear waste."

Falcon

Get rid of all the stupid environmentalists who opposed nuclear energy.

The lack of new nuclear power plants has little to do with environmentalists. Nuclear plants are a huge long-term investment—tens of billions of dollars—and the payback period is decades away. If long-term market prices change in an unfavorable way, you're screwed. For example, solar power has been following its own version of Moore's Law for some time now, so why on Earth would you build a nuclear plant if there's a good chance it will be eclipsed by the sun in twenty years? They used to make economic sense, but haven't since the 80s when oil prices plummeted. Since then, essentially the only actors willing to make the investment have been governments.

In the event they need to dismiss the beam, a dump block is used.

The dump block is a cylinder of graphite and the beam is deflected with small oscillations
to disperse it and not have it all bore though a tiny spot in the center.

Other materials apparently are no good and sustain damage. Run the LHC beam straight
into copper and it'll bore a hole the length of which is measured in meters.

If the beam was deflected at a not too shallow angle, it could perhaps penetrate
the mass of earth atmosphere, and be usable in knocking out satellites.

ps. a bit of googling and http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/cern-to-start-up-the-large-hadron-collider-now-heres-how-it-plans-to-stop-it says the dump block 10 tons and 8 meters long.

I'd also add that Steam's own client is very root kit like. It buries itself deep inside your OS, working around your AV software in the supposed interest of preventing cheating. See here.

The Rare-Earth-Metal Bottleneck mentions that another major source will come from Europe in 2012. China supplies more than 95% of the rare earth metals. One solution is to have Japan buy their rare earth metals from, for example, Indonesia. Indonesia may still get rare earth metals from China. Indonesia gets a small profit as a middleman/broker in the transaction. Your touch screen device now costs a couple extra bucks.

Looks like something on the TODO list would make it so even that is not a safe option.
From the site: TODO: adding support for Silverlight Isolated Storage, and using Java to produce a unique key based off of NIC info

I'm glad to see I haven't missed out by not having Java installed for many years. Back on Windows 3.11, I installed IE3 because it came with a Java VM as there wasn't one available for 16bit Netscape. What Java was used for then was unimpressive, and otherwise I have only seen the occasional corporate intranet that actually needed Java (one place I worked, the time recording system was a Java applet in the browser, served off the intranet. It was fucking awful, and only tolerable as it was the gateway to being paid!).

I hacked the following together to anonymise myself if I use a public AP, or one infected by a corporation (the BT home and business hubs are clearly controllable by BT[1], so fuck knows what they record about connected clients. They cannot possibly not be at least trying to track users, as the prospects of being able to sell that data in the future (once the DPA or similar is lobbied away) is too much for a corporation to ignore).

Save a copy of this http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt and then run the below. It will change your MAC to be a perfectly valid, but false, MAC. You might get lucky and get a fake MAC that is plausible, like a Linksys. Or you might appear to be on a Xerox machine, or a Cray. When attached via wireless, this could look dodgy! The odds of it being noticed are slim though, but intrusion detection might spot it.

ifconfig eth1 down hw ether `cat oui.txt | grep \(base\ 16\) | sed 's/\(..\)/:\1/g' | cut -b2-9 | shuf | tail -1``dd if=/dev/urandom bs=$RANDOM count=1 2> /dev/null | md5sum | sed 's/\(..\)/:\1/g' | cut -b1-9`

Change eth1 to the interface you want to modify. This doesn't work with all network drivers though, seemingly. The wireless in my laptop will not cope with having the MAC changed, an ath5k driven Atheros card. A USB wireless dongle I have that uses the rt73 module does cope with having its MAC changed, as does an old Orinocco PCMCIA card.

[1] IIRC, one guy I knew with a BT business hub at his small business got a phone call from BT telling him they had reset the BT supplied router's password to the one they initially allocated, as he had changed the admin password himself - for obvious reasons. The fact BT were able to still get back into the router means there is a backdoor, so there is no way I would ever do business with those fuckers. But sometimes a BT connection is the only internet connection available, so anonymising oneself is necessary.

Revocable biometrics exist, and you don't have to chop off your fingertips either: for example, http://www.turbine-project.eu/ or http://vast.uccs.edu/biodistmet.html or http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4318487 and so on By the way, not to be a grammar nazi, just informative: did you ever tried -> did you ever try

`The IEEE Spectrum Online website is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this service interruption may cause you. We try to limit the duration of any outage, so please check back with us soon. Thank you' link

That's 178 out of 404 which equals 44% of the original data sample. And 44% of that is 19%, so less than a fifth were engineers.

"Diego Gambetta soon found themselves poring through records of 404 people from 30 countries engaged in political violence between 2005 and 2007.Their answer? Engineering. Of the 178 whose academic focus could be ascertained, 44 percent of those were engineers" link

why not develop improved manufacturing technology and capability -- demonstrating that it's possible to make competitive products without "exploiting" the poor?

Exactly, this is a good strategy for countries that can develop advanced industrial robots. The top 10 countries by robot density all have successful economies when compared with the rest of the world. There are some industries where high levels of automation are not possible yet (sewing clothes together, assembling complex 3D structures, picking vegetables, things that rely on hand-eye coordination and human mobility); these are the human labour intensive industries where cost pressures mean labour is generally sourced from other countries (where outsourcing is possible), or immigrants (where local). But for everything else, the developed world needs to continue to move from a culture of "building stuff" to a culture of "building robots that build stuff". Competing directly with countries like China to provide cheap labour is not going to work, waiting for the salary of the average Chinese to reach Western levels will take too long, and starting a trade war through punitive taxation is only going to hurt both sides in the long term. I do find it odd that people seriously still think the Western world could be competitive with China in traditional manufacturing - it is simple economics that work will flow to the human worker who costs 1/10th of the competition.

In fact, hidden content can be interpolated and is done with texture seam filling algorithms, sufficient for a limited motion parallax. Moreover, there are two other ways motion parallax can be dealt with: using more cameras, and even simply using a wider separation with just the usual two cameras (the content then can be reprojected for a smaller separation based on the derived depth-map).

Mircolens can in fact handle adaptation, so you are 100% wrong on that: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1545799. Also note that microlens handle not just accommodation but naturally reproduce motion parallax. This is all accomplished with a single camera which also has a microlens array (or just use an array of small cameras of standard resolution). It's unfortunate I did not see your post earlier so I could correct the horrible misinformation on microlens you perpetrated upon the /. reading public.

Situations where a single transmitter and single receiver are the norm are almost never the case anymore (at least in the wireless domain). A favorite paper on the subject is: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1624625 Cooperative MIMO, Spread Spectrum, and Cognitive networks potentially allow EM jamming to be avoided and more easily predicted. Perhaps DARPA suspects that the channel is, in reality, a non-zero-sum game. That would overturn Shannon alright!

I would sue the living shit out of Northrop. That's insane.

Based on what would they sue? The contract they signed had no requirement of redundancy. As much fault as NG has in this, it's not like they broke the contract or anything. This is as much the fault of the incompetents in Virginia's IT Agency as on NG's.

Apparently, when VITA negotiated its 10-year, $2.3 billion outsourcing contract with Northrop Grumman to modernize Virginia's 85 state government agencies' IT systems and networks, it forgot to require network that backup capability be provided in case of network failure, the Richmond Times-Disptach reported over the weekend.

Really? This is hardly a great track record:

During the first six months of 2009, Virginia's Department of Transportation (VDOT) experienced 101 significant IT outages totaling 4,677 hours: an average of more than 46 hours per outage. One outage, the Times-Dispatch said, took 360 hours to correct. The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has experienced over the course of 5 weeks this autumn some 12 outages that put individual DMV offices out of business for a total of more than 100 hours the paper says.

From here. I'm sorry, but there is no excuse for that.

I actually happened to read this article on IEEE Spectrum about new RAM technologies, and it covers both Phase-Change RAM (PC-RAM), which may of hit a road block in its development, and Resistance RAM (RRAM), of which memristor is a particular kind of.

Up until recently the memristor was a theoretical fundamental circuit element (like resistor, capacitor and inductor - but the are easy to create in the real world). A few years ago they were actually created and there is a lot of interesting things you can do with the technology

For more info see The mysterious memristor

Or just search Google memristor ieee

Dude, people who can take 5 seconds to Google something that's really easy to find wouldn't be asking dumbass questions on Slashdot.

Better to point them to something like Just Fucking Google It. Like the author of that site says, "the popularity of this site just blows my mind". There are a lot of lazy helpless people. They're sort of like trolls -- don't feed them. If you feed them by typing obvious keywords into well-known search engines for them, it only encourages them.

For more info see The mysterious memristor

Or just search Google memristor ieee

Yup, and how unsafe that really is.

Any time you build a back door, you weaken security. End of story.

The "legal intercept" (aka Wire Tap) functionality on phone switches was used, rather recently, in Athens, by an unknown party, to tap the lines of a number of non profit group leaders, and government officials. It was only discovered after it had been in operation for a while, and was discovered entirely by accident.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair/0

That said, I really don't see where governments have such legitimate cases for wiretapping. I mean, sure, I can see their case for wanting to tap, or having cause to tap, certain individuals. However, I don't see how that need translates into a need to force the entire infrastructure to be designed such that they can do it.

Whats the REAL damage of them not being able to do this when they have a case for it? Some criminals get away? Some are harder to catch and require more work? So what? I don't see how that need should usurp the entire populations security for the occasional need to tap someones phone.

I know we can dream up all sorts of fanciful scenarios where they might need it.... but imagination land can justify many many things... and movie plots threats do not make for good public policy (as evidenced by the TSA)

-Steve

You could also determine when a group of people are not around their home and use this information to decide when to rob their house.

They can also sniff media access control (MAC) addresses to target the most popular premium laptops.

Here are some sources for reading about bit error rates, and how they are dealt with on each side of a connection, rendering the interconnect (the cable) moot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_error_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/3/10G_study/public/july99/chang_2_0799.pdf
http://blog.lewan.com/2009/09/14/sas-vs-sata-differences-technology-and-cost/

homebrew equipment (items with net connection capabilities added after manufacture, or entirely cottage-manufactured)

These still need a networking interface, which means a MAC address, which means an IEEE Organizationally Unique Identifier. An OUI costs $550.00 for a block of 4000 or $1,650.00 for a block of 16.7 million, and the paper trail for OUIs helps to establish the number of such devices that have been manufactured.

A quick Google found this which would seem to support the claim.

Accurate or not I can not say but I have come across the line count elsewhere so it is likely to be reasonably close.

I have not seen anyone answer you. Twenty years ago when I studies such things, 1% for something like a HeNe laser was good. I hear the National Ignition Facility lasers are good to maybe 4%. The quantum efficiency of a laser diode might be as high as 60%. You have a couple of considerations. In an optically pumped laser, you have the efficiency of creating the pump photons. These put the lasing medium in an excited state which happens as some fraction less than 100%. Lastly, the excited state medium can either spontaneously emit, or emit via stimulation. You need the one to start the laser, but any spontaneous emission after that counts towards inefficacy.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=307495

Suggests NIF lasers might be 10% efficent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion

Thats because we don't have the sense to reprocess our nuclear waste like other countries (read: France).

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user), during EVERY SINGLE CALL and with EVERY SINGLE USER.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user), during EVERY SINGLE CALL and with EVERY SINGLE USER.

I disagree, but feel free to enlighten me.

Ok, I will.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user

I disagree, but feel free to enlighten me.

Ok, I will.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user

Here's the Spectrum article.

In fact, it's even more of a dupe than that. Here's the link to an IEEE article in March of 2007 http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/military-robots/a-robotic-sentry-for-koreas-demilitarized-zone. Also, here's a Youtube video of it in action http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ.

and to elaborate, not being against software patents and being for software patents are two very different things.

Since when has IEEE not been for software patents? They even brag about how they get cited in more patents than ACM.

Why is this only now unacceptable? IEEE has never been against software patents. In fact they brag about the fact that "IEEE leads the pack as the top scientific-technical source of patents – 32% of all patent citations, versus just 10% for the number-two organization, ACM."

2) Your problem needs to be floating point. GPUs push 32-bit floating point numbers really fast. The most recent ones can also do 64-bit FP numbers at half the speed. Anything older is pretty much 32-bit only. For the most part, count on single precision FP for good performance.

That requirement is not necessarily true. Or at least not in the traditional sense of 'floating point.' GPUs make awesome pattern-matchers for data that isn't necessarily floating point.

Elcomsoft (of adobe DRM international arreset fame) has a GPU accelerated password cracker that is essentially a massively parallel dictionary attack,

A number of anti-virus vendors have GPU accelerated scanners - like Kaspersky.

And some people have been working with GPUs for network monitoring via packet analysis too.

Considering that property ownership means "lease until you stop paying property taxes to the City/State/Feds" or "eminent domain" Kelo v. City of New London ...

And if you "own an OEM license for an operating system" that is "non transferrable to another machine" ...

It's not surprising that the "phone you buy and own" is actually controlled by the Manufacturer and can be modified by them over the air at their discretion:

Pertinent examples:
Syrian Radar: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-hunt-for-the-kill-switch/0
Kindle's Orwellian book deletion: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
iPhone

This fits the "subscription model" that anti-virus, browser, and now operating systems all use to ensure steady cash-flow and hopefully phase out that frustrating "buy it once" legacy mentality that is also symptomatic of people who don't use credit cards.

I strongly suggest periodically researching alternatives to large corporations that ignore your rights or sense of ownership - i.e. try a different browser (firefox/opera?), a different search engine (hakia.com) , and hopefully somebody will fork Android like Centos does a wonderful job for Red Hat (and then post it on Sourceforge / slashdot).

http://standards.ieee.org/guides/style/ is the page with the IEEE style guides.

http://standards.ieee.org/guides/style/2009_Style_Manual.pdf is the guide itself.

If your paper agrees with this it shouldn't be too hard to change it later to fit into the particular style requirement of the final journal.

You can also go to http://arxiv.org/ and read some of the papers in the Math or Computing Science sections closest to your topic to see the styles in the field.

http://standards.ieee.org/guides/style/ is the page with the IEEE style guides.

http://standards.ieee.org/guides/style/2009_Style_Manual.pdf is the guide itself.

If your paper agrees with this it shouldn't be too hard to change it later to fit into the particular style requirement of the final journal.

You can also go to http://arxiv.org/ and read some of the papers in the Math or Computing Science sections closest to your topic to see the styles in the field.

Water is not the limiting factor in geothermal development.

It is too, especially when you're talking "new" geothermal, which works on lower-temperature deposits. - please turn to this very interesting IEEE Spectrum article for more details.

... IEEE members should read their own publication more