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I remembered that most of the new work on prosthetic arms these days focuses on using EMG to drive the arm behaviour (including Dean Kamen's new bionic arm), and there's a bunch of stuff done (and papers released) with driving the mouse for people with disabilities.

Surely this patent application has to be thrown out, and isn't Microsoft just wasting the Patent Office (and our) time with applications that are so easily shown to have been demonstrated before?

Look Ma, No Pen! Electrical Impulses Can Reproduce Handwriting
SmartHand: Merging Mind and Machine
Application of facial electromyography in computer mouse access for people with disabilities
Demonstrating the feasibility of using forearm electromyography for muscle-computer interfaces
Electromyography sensor based control for a hand exoskeleton

What's the original part here? The patent application does not specify any specific software application (just talks about interpreting the signals), so all the prior art should hold.

"technology" at least is still something that is largely created in Western countries and Japan.

Of the 40 new semiconductor fabs now under construction around the world, 35 of them are in Asia. Clue: The technology to build these next-generation fabs is not coming from "Western countries and Japan." Even if it were, the west could not design the next generation, because it will have had no experience operating and optimizing the present generation -- and none of its profits to reinvest.

When I was in graduate school in 1981, at a major US state university, I was one of four graduate students out of 102 in the electrical engineering department that were born in the US. A coworker attended the same university department in 1990, and was the only doctoral candidate who was a US citizen, out of almost 200 students. I begrudge my fellow foreign students nothing at all -- I knew several of them well, and it's a tough life; they had and have my respect -- but it was quite clear even 20 or 30 years ago that the nexus of new technology development was not going to stay in the US. And while this university was somewhat of an extreme case, the trend nationwide is clear. Very clear. Open a random IEEE technical journal -- Journal of Solid State Circuits, for example -- and look at the authorship of the papers. Globalization, which I support, has a corollary, and that is that no one nation or region has a monopoly on research and development.

http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt
ifconfig eth0 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`

In addition, software patents aren't worth the paper they're written on in Canada (Software Patents in Canada)

On Page 24,

"Subsection 27(8) of the Patent Act6 further discloses, “No patent shall be
granted for any mere scientific principle or abstract theorem”. It is therefore
not possible to obtain a patent protection for a formula per se."

And,

It therefore appears that an algorithm per se is excluded from patentable
subject matter. An algorithm in a software innovation is accordingly
excluded from patentability de jure.
It is further disclosed in the Manual of Patent Office Practice (MPOP)8
that “claims consisting solely of code listings are not patentable.
Software expressed as lines of code or listings may be protected as literary
works under the Copyright Act.”
In fact, the Manual of Patent Office Practice (MPOP) discloses9 that :
“For a method to be considered an art under section 2 of the
Patent Act, the method must be:
A. an act or series of acts performed by some physical agent
upon some physical object and producing in such object
some change either of character or of condition; and
B. it must produce an essentially economic result relating to
trade, industry or commerce”.

There is a reason why i4i (a Canadian company) sued Microsoft in a US court rather than (more sensibly) a Canadian court. It is more than likely the Canadian court would have laughed them out of the door (emphasis mine).

With IEEE you can't get the article in question anywhere else.

Thats a myth. Yes Its true in some cases (even research going back into the 80's!) but sure you can get it elsewhere, especially when it comes to quality research. One example of many will cost you a cool $30 from IEEE. But why pay IEEE's extremely high, no value added gatekeeper taxes when you can get the same research from a better source, for free (as it should be).

Interesting side note: AFAIK all physics research is open access - at least the physicists have got it right - you would think that at least the computer scientists would have been the ones to get a clue and stop supporting these scams. But then I suppose they did invent http.

IEEE is one of the worst offenders of paywalled search results clogging up my google searches and making my information searches slow and painful. I would so love to have them drop off the face of my search results...

That's not true at all. When the LHC broke down the first time it caused a decent amount of damage, boring a deep whole into the surrounding concrete. Also the normal beam can bore a hole through 40 meters of solid copper, and it require a very special grouping of materials to stop used up beams.

Here is a much more detailed article that answers your question (and more !). Look at the last paragraph of page 2 and the first of page 3.

The problem is that you can't recycle nuclear fuel. There are always residual byproducts that last for long and have a potential to pollute eveything around them.

Well that's funny. France has recycled their fuel for years, and Japan is following suit.

From Dr. Ozcan's list of refereed papers :

Lensfree on-chip cytometry towards wireless health

It is possible to provide some electricity through the carbon nanotubes themselves, but the conversion rate is not great. Solar power would be nice, but would require huge fins which dramatically increase the weight of the climber. Beamed power solves most issues.

Beam solar power. Some Slashdotters like to talk about satellites beaming solar power to the ground, well why not combine this with the space elevator? Beam power down to a receiving station near the space elevator pad and use it to drive the laser.

IMO tho, nuclear batteries will make this whole debate obsolete. ;)

And where will these batteries be? In the payload carrier, where they take up space and weight? I can see it now, the uproar over nuclear materials, people opposed the launch of Cassini with its nuclear generator.

Falcon

I can't provide an exhaustive list, but I can give at least one brand example - every recent VW/Audi has this. I may be wrong that the feature is widespread among other brands, but it certainly is a part of VW AG's products.

There is an article from IEEE Spectrum's Risk Factor Blog about the number of design faults that may have contributed to these crashes.

In fact, it might not be far off to say that there is not ONE SINGLE car that can be stopped with brakes alone when at full throttle. Read http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/computing/it/riskfactor/how-hard-should-it-be-to-stop-a-runaway-car [ieee.org]

I managed to haul down a Honda Civic going 80km/h. Consumer Reports was able to stop a VW and a Mercedes because of their throttle management system, and was able to bring a Toyota Venza (a four thousand pound vehicle with a honey of a an engine; the same as in the Lexus in question) down to ~15km/h and would likely have eventually stopped it.

I'd try the experiment with our own Toyota Sienna (same engine as the Venza and the Lexus) except that I don't want to damage my own car.

It's very easy to apply 225 pounds of pressure to a brake pedal, unless you're very small. Most people can approach or exceed it by standing on one leg and jumping. The IEEE is not correct in this.

While what you said makes sense (and I believed the same myself until I started looking into it), it unfortunately is not the reality. You lose your power brakes at full throttle, and it seems that people are paying with their lives in these circumstances.

No, you don't. You lose braking force after one or two presses at full throttle, just as you would if the car lost power entirely. Pumping or repeatedly stabbing the brakes will use up that assist and/or boil the brake fluid and/or heat the pads and rotors. Stomping on it will just heat the rotors and pads, and will slow you down.

I'm not saying this isn't a tragedy, because it is. What I am saying is that it was entirely unavoidable:

• The dealer laid down the wrong mats for the car (winter mats for a truck, FWIW)
• The dealer put those mats on top of the existing, clipped-down mats, and didn't secure them.
• The accelerator pedal is mounted as such that the mats could snag it (lots of cars are like this)
• The driver, despite being a trained CHP officer, panicked and did the wrong things. You can slap a Lexus ES into neutral easily---even if it's in the manumatic gate, you can move it over and up. He likely pumped, rather than stood, on the brakes. He also didn't hold down the engine stop button to halt the car, or use the emergency/parking brake

People tend to think about driver training as the cure-all or panacea, but training, especially in an emergency, is not a given. People---even cops---panic, especially in an unfamiliar or out-of-context setting and do the wrong thing despite training to the contrary. Never mind that what you do in a controlled, high-speed chase as a highway patrol officer is not the same thing as being in the car that's speeding.

The only people with "training" in this are drifters, rally-racers and stunt drivers.

There's no car you can buy today where you cannot overpower the engine with full braking force. Try it: stand on the accelerator with your left foot for a while, then stand on the brake. Push both down as hard as you can; your car will slow down and stop. It won't be happy about it, but it will. The drivers in this case didn't do that: they panicked and didn't press the brakes hard enough.

Unfortunately, you are categorically wrong.

In fact, it might not be far off to say that there is not ONE SINGLE car that can be stopped with brakes alone when at full throttle. Read http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/computing/it/riskfactor/how-hard-should-it-be-to-stop-a-runaway-car

As for hitting the brakes to slow a car down, another issue pops up, says the Times. "The ES 350 and most other modern vehicles are equipped with power-assisted brakes, which operate by drawing vacuum power from the engine. But when an engine opens to full throttle [like in a runaway car situation], the vacuum drops, and after one or two pumps of the brake pedal, the power assist feature disappears."
Tests indicate that a person would have to exert 225 pounds of pressure on a brake pedal to stop it - a mean feat for almost anyone, let alone a person trying to keep a car on the road while avoiding hitting anything as it is traveling at 176 feet per second.

While what you said makes sense (and I believed the same myself until I started looking into it), it unfortunately is not the reality. You lose your power brakes at full throttle, and it seems that people are paying with their lives in these circumstances.

I know the tendency at /. is to believe that most people are nitwits-- most of all policemen-- (a belief I tend to share), in the case of the Lexus police officer, he was trained for high speed pursuits, and witnesses say they saw smoke coming out of the brakes. Sometimes, you have to hang your beliefs at the door and examine the facts.

If you are already moving at highway speeds when you jam the brake and accelerator you are going to keep moving.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/computing/it/riskfactor/how-hard-should-it-be-to-stop-a-runaway-car claims that "Tests indicate that a person would have to exert 225 pounds of pressure on a brake pedal to stop it " where it is a Lexus ES 350 with the throttle stuck on full open. Because the power assist fails after you panic pump the brakes...

Assuming you don't cut the engine of course, which given the strangeness of that car - no key to turn to kill the engine, non-standard tricky (in a panic situation) way to get it into neutral - doesn't seem that strange.

See the above comment. These brakes aren't the "simple hydraulic brakes" you're thinking of.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/computing/it/riskfactor/how-hard-should-it-be-to-stop-a-runaway-car

As for hitting the brakes to slow a car down, another issue pops up, says the Times. "The ES 350 and most other modern vehicles are equipped with power-assisted brakes, which operate by drawing vacuum power from the engine. But when an engine opens to full throttle [like in a runaway car situation], the vacuum drops, and after one or two pumps of the brake pedal, the power assist feature disappears."

Source

As for hitting the brakes to slow a car down, another issue pops up, says the Times. "The ES 350 and most other modern vehicles are equipped with power-assisted brakes, which operate by drawing vacuum power from the engine. But when an engine opens to full throttle [like in a runaway car situation], the vacuum drops, and after one or two pumps of the brake pedal, the power assist feature disappears." Tests indicate that a person would have to exert 225 pounds of pressure on a brake pedal to stop it - a mean feat for almost anyone, let alone a person trying to keep a car on the road while avoiding hitting anything as it is traveling at 176 feet per second.

Sorry for the anon posting, but I don't want to undo my moderation in this thread ...

F-22 raptor - 1.7 million lines of code
F-35 joint strike fighter - 5.7 million
Boeing 787 - 6.5 million
Premium class automobile - ~ 100 million

IEEE Spectrum: "How hard should it be to stop a runaway luxury car?" http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/computing/it/riskfactor/how-hard-should-it-be-to-stop-a-runaway-car

IEEE Spectrum: "This car runs on code" http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-car-runs-on-code

F-22 raptor - 1.7 million lines of code
F-35 joint strike fighter - 5.7 million
Boeing 787 - 6.5 million
Premium class automobile - ~ 100 million

IEEE Spectrum: "How hard should it be to stop a runaway luxury car?" http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/computing/it/riskfactor/how-hard-should-it-be-to-stop-a-runaway-car

IEEE Spectrum: "This car runs on code" http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-car-runs-on-code

A lot of people seem to believe that hacking an election that uses electronic voting machines is so hard it's the stuff of science fiction.

However some time ago I came across an article describing how an unknown group hacked the Vodafone-Panafon cell-phone system. To me this hack conclusively proves that these groups have the technical and financial resources necessary to steal an electronic voting election.

Consider:

• They tapped the cellphones of Greece's prime minister and over 100 high-ranking dignitaries. All people for whom security is important and who would have noticed if something was amiss.
• They hacked into Vodafone's switches: equipment that's rarer and more expensive than voting machines.
• They had to hot-patch the software in memory since these switches are almost never rebooted. No such trickery is needed for voting machines.
• They also had to ensure their hacks would evade detection and survive the regular software upgrades. In particular these upgrades perform checksums on the running software to ensure the starting point is as expected. But hey had countermeasures to avoid detection by these checksums. Not an issue you have if you hack the voting machines at the right time before the election.
• To evade detection they also had to make sure none of their activity would be visible in any of the audit logs.
• Yet, they remained undetected for over 6 months and where only detected by chance. In an election your hack only has to remain undetected for one day, then it can wipe itself clean and you've won.
• The group who performed this hack was never identified.

Even in bandwidth, 10Gb ethernet is still orders of magnitude smaller than RAM access speeds in a supercomputer. At least use InfiniBand which can be configured to 96Gb bandwith with much better latency.

However, the main problem with a 100 core chip for supercomputing is not the network bandwidth but the memory bandwidth. The cores will starve for data with the limited memory bandwidth. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/multicore-is-bad-news-for-supercomputers

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1186532

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1328881

There are a couple direct from Apple. Here is a list of the posters presented at the last WWDC:

http://www.apple.com/science/poster/

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1186532

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1328881

There are a couple direct from Apple. Here is a list of the posters presented at the last WWDC:

http://www.apple.com/science/poster/

http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/robotics/robotics-software/automaton/skiing-robot-races-down-slope

I know everyone here likes to armchair quarterback, but designing a proper voting system is Really Hard (tm). I attended a workshop put on by Ron Rivest about a year ago (details here), and had dinner with him afterward. I wish I had been taking notes because I don't remember all the details, but at least one salient point stuck with me.

One the one hand, you want a system that prevents voting coercion: "Vote for who I tell you or I'll break your legs." That's a strong reason why we give people privacy when they vote (the secret ballot). On the other hand, you want a system that prevents fraud by allowing a voter to make sure her vote was counted in the final tally. But here's the catch: you can't give the voter a receipt, or in fact anything that can be used (even theoretically) to recover a list of the candidates they voted for, because coercion now becomes "Give me the receipt/token/URL/whatever or I'll break your legs." Reconciling these two requirements is a Really Hard Problem, and there are smart people (like Dr. Rivest) who are working on it. In fact, he presented a few really innovative but embryonic solutions at the workshop, including a kind of hashing scheme that can even defeat on-site source code tampering.

Until these problems are solved, we won't be able to trust ANY voting system code, regardless whether it's open source or not. So while it's important that the Sequoia source code was released, please try to have some perspective.

I suspect, that they avoided suing members who were on the 802.3 (Ethernet) committee. Each of which contributed technology to the Ethernet standard(s). (Excepting HP, which split off it's semi tech to Agilent Technologies. )

AMD, IBM, Intel and 3com where all core members. "802.3 Patent Letters of Assurance"

I can only imagine that this lawsuit is over Ethernet tech not based on Intel, AMD, IBM, or VIA chip sets/technology. But, instead it's about routers, gateways, wireless access points, printers, etc which connected up via Ethernet tech.

The concept of bus mastering/DMA hidden control & buffer memory technology is just an extension of intelligent add on Ethernet boards, (VME, MultiBus-II, etc), dating back to the early 1980's.

This technology is only a subset of the prosthetic arm - 'Luke' - developed by Dean Kamen's company. The prosthetic arm is controlled directly by the user's brain as well and allows a lot more complexity compared to the hand shown here. Also, Luke is being built as a modular system where you only use the parts of the arm that you need - if you don't need the upper arm, you can use just the hand and lower arm, and so forth.
More details below:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob/
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/dean-kamens-luke-arm-prosthesis-readies-for-clinical-trials/2
http://blog.ted.com/2008/02/dean_kamens_arm.php

PS: For those who can't place the name, Dean Kamen is the inventor of Segway, among other things.

2) Post from a laptop you bought at a garage sale, having left your cell phone elsewhere.

Presto, true anon posting.

Nice try, dumbass.

Save the IEEE MAC address/organisation list from http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt, generate a fake MAC address with the 1 liner below, and there's no need to buy a 2nd hand laptop:
echo `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`

Can probably be tidied up, but will generate a valid, but fake, MAC.

This is great BTW, but if I try and change the MAC of my WLAN adapter with ifconfig the wireless stops working. Not looked into it much though..... it might work with ath5k, but didn't with ath_pci when I tried it.

what you say is reasonable but there are a lot of assumptions and i really would like to see some numbers. So what about solar panel ? Are they made with this concepts in mind or are they made just as cheap as possible without taking in account pollution made to make them or not? How long does it takes to make them "greener" or , using math, when this is true ?

Google is your friend. This IEEE Spectrum article has some numbers.

Also, even though the panels are made to last "forever" (many manufacturers give 25-year warranties), some players in the industry are already giving the option to recycle (since it only costs 1/3 in energy terms to recycle them than to manufacture them from scratch).

I agree charging by the amount of bandwidth used may, just may, be better but for years broadband providers sold unlimited service. The contract I signed with Time Warner for my cable, now it's Comcast, did not have any sort of limits. Now it did say the speed would be up to, I think though I don't recall for sure, 1.5MB. There wasn't anything about traffic shaping, blocking, or redirecting though. If ISPs oversold capacity it's not the fault of the users, it's the ISPs own fault. When I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet I refuse to accept the restaurant from preventing me or anyone else from eating all we can.

A price-per-byte structure, if properly implemented, could result in reduced monthly payments for grandma and a higher portion for the guy with the strange habit of downloading "Linux ISOs" all the time.

The problem with this is that incumbent broadband providers try to prevent any competition that will offer more bandwidth. How many tymes has news articles been summarized and linked to on slashdot because some incumbent provider tried to stop competition whether cable, fiber, wireless, or any other broadband? An example was in northeastern Utah a few years back. A group of communities got together to build their own Broadband Utopia. Of course the incumbents did all they could to stop it and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers. The 14 cities that make up the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency built an infrastructure that will provide "100 megabits per second" to start with. That infrastructure can be used to deliver cable TV, net access, phone services, or whatever a person could think of. Because of it Comcast was "forced" to bundle "broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint" and I doubt they are losing money. I say "forced" because they only had to do it if they wanted to continue to provide services in the area otherwise people would not have been willing to pay the higher costs.

perhaps content directly delivered by the ISP would fall under this category. But I don't see why that is -inherently- wrong.

You don't see what's wrong? Try this, say only Company X provides broadband in your area, so you have no other choice for broadband, and you want to search the web. So you head over to Google and if you can connect it is slow because Google didn't pay your ISP. Or your ISP supports one political party and blocks traffic from all other parties? Do you still not see a problem?

Falcon

Yes, there's more than back-prop for succesfull neural processing. One of the most instereseting approaches IMO were done by Liaw and Berger on adaptable sinaptic training models, but that was more than ten years ago!

I were to use another company's MAC/Ethernet pre-fix code's for my own company's Ethernet cards ?

I were to use another company's MAC/Ethernet pre-fix code's for my own company's Ethernet cards ?

If people would care about their battery life, they wouldn't buy iPhones, right?

But the point is valid, battery drain is pretty much the only limiting factor. Security can be solved by public-key crypto (even self-managing systems like this one).

Store-carry-forward networks will work best for delay-tolerant traffic of low to medium throughput (email, txt messaging), but why not push-to-talk too? Speex doesn't produce large files for a minute of talking. The thing can be extended to VANETs too.

I'd love to see some practical research done.

As for proof of offensiveness... I have no proof. Offensiveness is by its nature a subjective measure. I am offended by the idea that one could "understand" a thing without direct observation and investigation. Maybe I misunderstand the meaning of the word "science". There's a chance that we disagree about what the meaning of the word "is" is.

For anyone interested IEEE Spectrum also has a story about Harmonix and the new Beatles game they are making: http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gaming/the-making-of-the-beatles-rock-band

The procedures of the patent office have changed in the last year. Not even provisional patents any more : http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-poor-mans-patent

also, most countries operate on a first-to-file basis, since that's easier to establish.

Even in the US, the filing takes precedence - anything challenging it has to be proven first. The legal presumption is with the patent holder. It's going to cost more to do the legal challenge (it can go into the millions) than to file for the patent in the first place.

On top of which, software should more properly be protected by copyright, not patent. The GPL works because copyright protection works. Windows is copyrighted, not patented. OSX is copyrighted, not patented. This is slashdot - we're supposed to be recognize the stupidity of business and software patents (we got it right wrt these bogus patents well before the courts and general public started to get a clue).

Facts are:
- The laser has a ~20% efficiency (say: 80% needs to be cooled or blows away with hot gases) ...
- The laser produces "corrosive hydrogen fluoride gas" ...
- The whole military program costs billions (not only millions) up to now ...

More details at IEEE-Spectrum:
- www.spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/ray-guns-get-real

I can't believe a tech magazine has gone OUT OF ITS WAY to make this article practically unreadable.

Nothing works - Single page view still shows me about 65% page-width of sidebar, there is no print view to speak of, only a "Print" option that I could use to make a PDF, except even that is too shittily formatted to read, and for some reason the text column decides it's a good idea to get even narrower at some point after the insanely difficult-to-decipher timeline image. Of which a convenient PDF download is linked to, which is THREE FRAKKIN MEGABYTES and still a total disaster to read.

Is this some sort of test about who RTFA and who doesn't?

Well, even TFA is one meandering, rambling muse better suited for a blog, which is a real pity, as the writer Alfred Nordmann has two reasonably well written essays up on his site. *sigh* Some people are just better at papers than articles with word-limits.

Here's an illustration that explains it all in a glance.

Of course you shouldn't expect it not to break. But an explosion? That's unacceptable.

Funny enough, here's a quote from an article in IEEE's Spectrum magazine:

the energy density of lithium-ion batteries used for laptop computers, at 40 watt-hours per kilogram, [is] already getting uncomfortably close to that of your basic hand grenade

I'm just saying.

Before everybody gets all crazy and excited about this, there doesn't seem to be any details about Marc Bowman's comments anywhere (not even NASA's site) except for a 5-sentence blurb from RIA Novosti (the Russian state-owned news agency). There was a cool article in IEEE Spectrum recently about Russia's Mars dreams, but they were along the lines of "here's some neat ideas, we need money."

My suspicion is that Marc Bowman said something generic like "it would be nice for Russia and NASA to work together more in the future on things like Mars missions," and RIA Novosti just decided to run with it.

anyone know what will happen if this technology is combined with http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/robotics/robotics-software/automaton/robots-evolve-to-exploit-inadvertent-cues and used for tasks such as food harvesting also, robo wars of the 2 technologies combined would be fun -- superfast and evolving bots...

really

Really they do. Where I live channel 9 is a Fox station and I can not broadcast on that frequency. Or any other frequency for TVs, without paying millions of dollars to buy a license, if anyone will sell me theirs.

Since they have to get their broadcast feeds from the networks, it's hard to imagine the networks granting more than one station franchise

That does not matter. I couldn't start broadcasting even if I wanted to make my own shows. Since I used trains and model railroads before I will again. If as a model railroad enthusiast I wanted to start a model railroad channel and broadcast it, I could not legally without a license. Forget the equipment, that's pretty cheap, the cost is in the license. And the scarcity is an artificially imposed one [pdf].

Falcon

Over the past few years, IEEE Spectrum magazine has been running a series of reviews of "Sci/Tech Museums". You'll find most of the reviews simply by searching there:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/search?media=all&q=museums&x=0&y=0

You'll get a good dozen or so reviews right there, and done by sharp, observant technology professionals.

Right now, the only suitable infrastructure for such delegation is DNS. And it's horribly insecure for such things.

Fortunately, it'll become possible with DNSSEC. Indeed, there are groups working on certificate delegation via DNS.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F10467%2F33214%2F01565268.pdf%3Farnumber%3D1565268&authDecision=-203

The high voltage transmission losses may be as LOW as 7%. But what about all the other conversions? Even if each and every one of those processes is 90% efficient (they aren't), after the several steps, you have significantly less usable energy than you started with. See e.g. the IEEE Spectrum article: "How Green is My Plug-In" at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-grid/how-green-is-my-plugin.

I have recently put on a IEEE Teachers In Service Program (TISP), where engineering students, usually grad and undergrad, go to local elementary through high school class rooms to inform teachers about lesson plans, such as ones you are asking for.

The best news for you is that it is almost fully subsidized!

Here are the some of the lesson plans. I would greatly recommend you look into the program, as I really enjoyed being able to bring teachers new material that got their classes excited about engineering and science.

I have recently put on a IEEE Teachers In Service Program (TISP), where engineering students, usually grad and undergrad, go to local elementary through high school class rooms to inform teachers about lesson plans, such as ones you are asking for.

The best news for you is that it is almost fully subsidized!

Here are the some of the lesson plans. I would greatly recommend you look into the program, as I really enjoyed being able to bring teachers new material that got their classes excited about engineering and science.

Electricity or at least energy consumption will increase

Energy consumption will not increase so much renewable sources can't cover it even if the population grows. Here's a link to photos somewhere in Sudan that's no where near an electrical grid, yet some owners were able to open a net cafe powered by solar panels. All together the net cafe, a vocational school, and the micro loan office is powered by PVs. I couldn't find a link to it online but the print edition of IEEE's magazine "Spectrum" had an article about how a business was started in Southeast Asia, I don't recall the country, that employed people to assemble small portable solar PV systems. With loans from a micro loan bank they were sold to villagers who were then able to improve their own lives.

Falcon