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As I've wrote before (f*cking IEEE paywall):

"Convergent evolution is one of the most impressive concepts of Darwinian thought. As stated in the literature, "It is all the more striking a testimony to the power of natural selection that numerous examples can be found in real nature, in which independent lines of evolution appear to have converged, from very different starting points, on what looks very like the same endpoint" [Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker, p. 94]. Eyesight is a good example of a remarkable biological tool that has appeared independently many times. For instance, the octopus' eye has evolved from a line independent of our lineage, and there are records of some 40 such "parallel" lines of evolution leading to the development of eyes [L. F. Land, "Optics and vision in invertebrates," in Handbook of Sensory Physiology, Vol. VII, H. Autrum, Ed. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1980, pp. 471-592]."

0) On many cars with DC batteries, the turn signal lights pulse on and off. So your reasoning is clearly wrong. Just because the battery is DC doesn't mean that car makers won't have lights that use PWM. It is more ridiculous to assume that there weren't any car manufacturers that decided to combine tail lights and brake lights in an annoying or crappy manner.
1) Unless you know exactly what they were looking at, how can you be so sure that they didn't see it?
2) Even if something is in the 30KHz range that doesn't mean there won't be a perceptible and annoying "beat frequency" effect. See: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/8099/22400/01045635.pdf?arnumber=1045635 while that is for sound, there is no reason why it would not apply to sight. And it does apply to sight. If you have two lights, one at 30000Hz and one at 30050Hz, you will get a beat frequency effect at 50Hz. Of course if the phosphors do not decay significantly in 1/30000 seconds then the following could be an explanation.
3) The lights might not be that "stable" - they might be going at 30Khz, but their brightness level could be modulated by a perceptible lower frequency. If that is impossible, AM radio would be impossible.

It could all be in their minds, but it might not be. I don't see enough proof that your former coworker's wife was imagining things or not. But it seems likely enough that some car LED tail lights flicker.

it has absolutely nothing to do with whether something is a "visual effect" or not. the GPU does not care whether its calculations are for generating 3D graphics or a table of numbers. and physics problems definitely aren't limited to gaming.

the fact of the matter is, physics calculations generally involve applying the same operation to a large set of numbers, thus greatly benefit from data parallelism. that is why SIMD processors are perfect for physics calculations.

and the reason why Ageia PhysX chips are the only dedicated PPUs on the market is precisely because there's very little practical difference between a PPU and a GPU, which is why most PPUs are GPUs (and vice-versa). there just isn't a market for a dedicated PPU when your GPU's stream processors will do the exact same thing. the Cell processor's SPU stream processors are used for both graphics and physics calculations. likewise, the NVidia GPUs in next-gen graphics cards will likely all have PhysX support (even current gen graphics cards without the PhysX chip will soon have PhysX support through firmware upgrades).

and i really don't see what gameplay has to do with anything. whether a game is well designed has nothing to do with whether or not consumers have dedicated PPUs or not.

Tons of articles already published: http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/2008/08/12/robot_builder_profile_aiko.html http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/19/aiko-worlds-first-sexually-harassed-disabled-fembot/ And if you want to talk with the builder, here you go: http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=1335.0

FWIW the inventor, Le Trung, does appear to be somesort of prodigy, and has previously produced an awesome artificial hand.

You can see some videos of him here:

http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/2008/08/12/robot_builder_profile_aiko.html

This fembot is no doubt not as capable as the human body and pop press would make you believe, but I'd not be surprised if below the media generated hype there's some real achievement also.

Cortland Starrett has met with good results teaching high school kids Executable UML. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=04281135 This will put them ahead of their peers in college, as they will have better insight into proper partitioning of the problem spaces present in a system.

OTOH, they may have trouble understanding some of the illogical approaches taken by their professors and peers in the name of "good" OOP, or have trouble talking problem solving at a lower level of abstraction.

Those Chipmakers should pay attention to IEEE's opinion. Dealing with memory is a significant problem for processors as the number of cores increase. That sounds like a hardware problem to me.

Shoving responsibility from software to hardware or from hardware to software isn't going to solve anything. There's things that have to happen on both sides before we can go nuts with the number of cores we put on chips.

A related problem to the speed of memory access is the energy efficiency of it. In an IEEE Spectrum Radio piece interviewing Peter Kogge, current supercomputers can spend many times more energy shuffling bits around than operating on them. Today's computer can do a double-precision (64-bit) floating point operation using about 100 picojoules. However, it takes upwards of 30 pJ per bit to get the 128 bits of data loaded into the floating point math unit of the CPU, and then moving the 64-bit result elsewhere.

Actual math operations consume 5-10% of a supercomputer's total power, moving data from A to B is approaching 50%. Most optimization and innovation in the past few decades has gone into compute algorithms in the CPU core, and very little has gone into memory.

See the original article for equivalent diagrams.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1083337

HP has already done some internal research within the same group on using memristor chips with neural network type logic.

They also have a major collaborative grant proposal underway for studying the use of memristor chips as the basis for neural networks, but it hasn't been finalized.

Well. It's not officially registered to a company, so your router doesn't exist.

From http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml :

Here are the results of your search through the public section of the IEEE Standards OUI database report for de-ad-be:

Sorry!

The public OUI listing contains no match for the query de-ad-be
Please back up to the search page and try again.

Surely one hour's R&D expenses could be spared for the LHC.

Actually, cosmic rays can and do cause errors. Muon flux where I live tends to be roughly one through your hand per second, and they're going a pretty hefty fraction of C. With memory size and transistors scaling further and further down, cosmic ray interference becomes a really big issue, which is why ECC is so important.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel1/16/6912/00278509.pdf?temp=x

We're dealing with more delicate technology these days; It's only gotten worse since then.

This the kind of innovation they are on about. Can any of these patents be turned into real working devices, without spending thousands of man-hours and huge wads of money. I'm thinking of the NTP v Blackberry litigation. NTP basically bought up some old wireless, paging and email patents, sat on them and them and then waited until Blackberry did all the work ...

'NTP is a holding company created in 1992 to manage certain patents belonging to Thomas Campana'

'on 20 May 1991. Campana filed a patent application for his idea to merge existing e-mail systems with radio-frequency wireless communication networks'

TFA did exactly that. One of them, at least. This one: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug08/6558

In experiments, researchers found that an 86-microsecond exposure of the beam would bore a hole 40 meters into a block of copper.

That's pretty significant energy. Admittedly, it's probably a fairly small hole, but it does a good job of explaining why the beam needs to be diffused and scattered as it's being dumped into a block of graphite.

Greenwich time was used by the British railway companies from 1847
GMT was established in 1675 for ships.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel3/1150/5280/00206266.pdf?arnumber=206266 (halfway down page 6)

This short survey would not be complete without some brief mention of the important part played by the railway telegraph in the establishment of standard timekeeping throughout the country.

Before the advent of the railway, different communities kept local time related to the meridien of the place concerned. Although the time of day therefore varied from place to place (16 minutes between London and Penzance), this was of little inconvenience because travellers were few and the rate of travel was slow. The development of railways after 1825 however brought a new situation. The continuing use of local time in different parts of the country caused great difficulty in compiling timetables and maintaining punctuality, especially on those lines, such as the GWR [Great Western Railway], which ran mainly east to west.

Proposals had been made as early as 1840 that London time should be kept throughout the country, but many towns were reluctant to come into line, and it was not until 1880 that the maintenance of Greenwich time became a legal requirement. On the railways however, the companies had agred in 1847 that they would adopt London time as standard for timetable compilation and train running. In then became necessary to have some means of checking the time kept by the railyway clocks throughout the system, ...

If anyone is interested, there's info here on that.

You might enjoy reading this paper on the EDL system.

This what i believe is what the truth. Read all of it do not scan it!

This what i believe is what the truth. Read all of it do not scan it!

Sure. Briefly, Micheal sucks.
The Michael MIC sucks so badly in ways we know about that the spec says you need to drop the connection for 1 minute if you detect any possible tampering. It was chosen in order to be able to be implemented on the hardware of the day without much performance loss, not for security.
WPA with TKIP is still considered strong, though theoretically attackable for today, but I will be greatly surprised (as would the designer of the MIC) if it lasts much longer.
Once the MIC falls, the scheme becomes open to similar attacks that killed WEP.

The plan espoused by most wlan security people is get the heck off WEP 5 years ago towards something stronger, and be planning all your new equipment purchases in order to get off of WPA-TKIP to WPA2-AES soon.

Here's a supporting blurb from the 802.11i standard that defines the basis for WPA and WPA2:

The TKIP MIC trades off security in favor of implementability on pre-RSNA devices. Michael provides only weak protection against active attacks. A failure of the MIC in a received MSDU indicates a probable active attack. A successful attack against the MIC would mean an attacker could inject forged data frames and perform further effective attacks against the encryption key itself. If TKIP implementation detects a
probable active attack, TKIP shall take countermeasures as specified in this subclause. These countermeasures accomplish the following goals:

MIC failure events should be logged as a security-relevant matter. A MIC failure is an almost certain indication of an active attack and warrants a follow-up by the system administrator.

The rate of MIC failures must be kept below two per minute. This implies that STAs and APs detecting two MIC failure events within 60 s must disable all receptions using TKIP for a period of 60 s. The slowdown makes it difficult for an attacker to make a large number of forgery attempts in a short time.

As an additional security feature, the PTK and, in the case of the Authenticator, the GTK should be changed.

From http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.11i-2004.pdf section 8.3.2.4
Also:

The confidentiality and integrity mechanisms of TKIP are not as robust as those of CCMP. TKIP is designed to operate within the hardware limitations of a broad class of pre-RSNA devices. TKIP is suitable for firmware-only, hardware-compatible upgrade of fielded equipment. RSNA devices should only use TKIP when communicating with devices that are unable or not configured to communicate using CCMP.

Section 8.3.1 of 802.11i-2004, emphasis mine

Also see Security Analysis of Michael: the IEEE 802.11i Message Integrity Code

IEEE Spectrum covered these conversions months ago.

This news is from February.

More detail here...
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/5995

Is it really any cheaper? Their website quotes a price of $7.9m to get 420kg to LEO, or about $20,000 per kilo. This is just about exactly what we pay now. There's no cost advantage as far as I can see.

FWIW here's a citation that google turned up.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=593995&isnumber=12748

"For castor and petroleum oils, viscosity decrease with increasing electric field is observed."

Whether that will actually improve combustion efficiency to a useful degree is another matter.

Nokia offers an Apache distro for Symbian phones, open-source, free, etc.

http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/mobile-web-server/

(And folks don't write off the 800 lb. gorilla called Nokia from the mobile space too early; the nation of Finland is motivated and hard working, and gets technology like open-source, etc. Disclaimer, I did a project at Nokia and that company blows my mind. Talk about running on all cylinders!)

btw, I've heard of folks getting the LAMP CMS Drupal running on Symbian phones.

I realise that most biometric systems use minutiae point templates, however, as another poster has pointed out, it appears that even this information can be used to reconstruct "prints" that will fool commercial readers.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/34/4107554/04107560.pdf?temp=x

Fingerprints are stored in the form of Minutiae Points rather than scanned imaged.

But that doesn't mean they can't be reconstructed.

IEEE
http://www.ieee.org/portal/site

you're just ignorant eh?

Mr. Uzi Nissan started a company called Nissan Computers, way back when Nissan cars were sold under the Datsun marque. It didn't stop Nissan Motors sueing him over his nissan.com domain (which he had properly registered and used for his company). Nissan Motors mostly won in a series of bizarre precedent-setting decisions, and Mr. Nissan is about a million bucks out of pocket in legal expenses.
http://www.lctjournal.washington.edu/Vol2/a002Rozsnyai.html
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=i100302

I'm guessing a reporter saw 500% and accidentally read it as 500x. Even a 500% (5x) increase from the current ~10% efficiency we have now would be huge, but with the recently coined Photovoltaic Moore's Law, I'd believe it. Maybe this is done by several layers each catching 10% (or less) of the energy?

The effective surface area of an object's three-dimensional "face" vastly exceeds the surface area of another object's two-dimensional face. This means you can actually absorb more of the sun's light. However, only so much light shines in any given area, and it's still a ray from above, so shadows should start to affect this negatively at a certain point, so while this could certainly give a boost, it's not going to do much (certainly not 500x!).

I could have sworn I read something about 3-d solar panels a while ago, but nobody else seems to have. There seem to be tons of hits searching for 3-d solar cell, many of which are from 2007.

How can one call "new" a 9-years-old technology?

Actually, Delay-tolerant Networking has applications that go beyond just space. One prime example is acoustic networks for oceanic monitoring - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4302188/4302189/04302341.pdf has a nice paper about the application. Also, battlefield communications where there may be intermittent connectivity benefits from DTN.

Anyway, the reason for getting direct IP connectivity to space probes is to reduce the overhead: If you can just say wget http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mars/opportunity/todayspic.jpg to access Oppy's camera instead of having to go through various hoops it makes everyones work easier. Combine this with dynamic and automatic routing (for example, for solar oppositions)..So yes, mostly the benefits are for scientists and engineers in space projects.

Because Information Theory has no practical application to the physics of the Universe, right?

Or not.

given the state of US politics, can you even imagine the outcry if our government tried to implement such a system?

The US already has a place like that. Broadband Utopia in northeastern Utah is a broadband infrastructure owned by the communities, cities and villages, in the region. Though government owns it they let anyone to connect and offer services the infrastructure is able to deliver, including cable tv, net access, and phone service. They are planning on offering speeds of 100Mbps.

Falcon

No boom tomorrow either:

"First beam circulated" != "First collisions"

I duno, when the beam needs a Dump Block consisting of an 8M long, 10ton graphite rod encased in 1000 tons of concrete, and even then has to be directed around in a pattern to keep from burning through it because it is "capable of melting a 500-kilogram block of copper," Id say boom possible, but not likely. I just wouldnt want to be in the tunnels with something like that racing around held in place by magnets, if one nearby turns off, BOOM you either turn into the incredible hulk, get zapped off to another world or simply vaporized like that 500kg block of copper.

tm

They're a way of making big bucks out of stupid people. Pure and simple.

Sure some carbon credit schemes are out to part money from people but not all are. Some groups are trying to start rating systems and such. One thing looked at is whether a project financed by people paying into a carbon credit plan will do what's promised. Will a project help, such as plans that will finance alternative energy, solar or wind for instance. Then they look at whether the construction of it will happen without the carbon credits or will only be constructed because of the credits. I don't know of any that does this but one thing I'd like to see is money from carbon offsets be used to buy and build a PV array or wind turbine to provide power to a small African village far from any powerlines where it's used to electrify a school and/or clinic which improves the lives of the people in the village. Children can then go to school to learn. And the adults can take remedial classes, or get training. The clinic could provide health care.

I read an article in the print edition of the IEEE's "Spectrum" where a person in Southeast Asia, Vietnam I think but I'm not sure, started a business building small PV systems. He then sales them to villagers. One villager ran a work shop making things in a small building, and with a light powered by a PV that charged a battery he was able to increase his income. The extra income was more than enough to pay for the loan for the system. A family bought another one and the children could use the light at night to study for school. Then with increased education they would be able to make more money when older. Ended up the person who started the business improved his economics as well as others, besides those who bought a system, he created jobs by hiring people to build the systems. Admittedly that may not be much in the West but it's a big deal in the Third World.

If people really wanted to help the environment, they could stop driving their SUVs instead of purchasing redemption.

That's why some people don't like carbon credits, instead of a person changing their lifestyle they buy credits. However you can do both, change lifestyle and buy credits.

Falcon

This chip utilizes PUFs (so called Physically Unclonable Functions). These are currently a hot topic of research, especially in the secure embedded computing community.

The fundamental idea is that a PUF should produce a unique value for a chip, in a repeatable fashion, with a side effect that modification of the chip will be detectable.

PUFs are of 4 main types -
1. Optical - These are the oldest forms of PUFs. They started with physicists trying to use chips as diffraction gratings. You shine a laser at the silicon vias and record the signature of light. These require depackaging the chip in question and are mostly impractical
2. Silicon - Usually implemented as long delay lines, but are sensitive to environmental conditions (mainly temperature & injected faults) There remains an ongoing research attempt to make these better (less reliant on environmental factors)
3. Coating - These are currently considered one of the best forms of PUFs. The topmost layer of the chip has some embedded metal flakes. The bottom layer of the chip has a capacitance sensor. Since the distribution of the metal flakes is random, the capacitance is random and unique to each chip (the resolution of the capacitance sensor is tuned to ensure this). This method has the added advantage that the minute someone tries to attack the chip, by depackaging it, the capacitance changes and the chips data (usually the secret key for an encryption cipher such as AES/DES) can be wiped. The main problem is that it adds a few extra fab steps , which means it increases the cost. Additionally, the first calibration costs more money to do.

4. Intrinsic - These are the current area of research. In particular for FPGAs. As any hardware designer knows, RAM cells are initalized to random values, but most FPGAs have some small logic which resets them all to zero. If we remove that logic, we have a chip, which has a whole bunch of random numbers, which will usually initialize the same way, based on process variation etc. This technique has been shown for FPAGs and will probably be brought over soon to full scale chips.

In order to keep this short, i have omitted a lot of references, but you can find more info, about intrinsic PUFS here.

Actually Phillips does a lot of research with PUFs and I am surprised that Verayo claims to be the first maker of PUF based chips.

If IT wants to unionize, forget traditional labor unions. Lobby. Make the economy and tech labor issues move to the top of the campaigns. Spread your propaganda to all your union employees and astroturf the hell out of it. MADD and AARP are far more effective "unions" than the teamsters. Bend the laws to make it unprofitable to offshore. Spread beyond IT, many of us EE/CS/ME types feel the same pain you do. I'd pay dues for an organization that had real power in Washington for issues I care about.

Exactly.

Lets start with simple things. There are a number of "Trade Organizations" that relate to what most of us do.

How many of us have joined http://www.ieee.org/ [ieee.org] and/or http://www.acm.net/ [acm.net]?

How many have joined http://www.eff.org/ [eff.org]?

Take a look at this list of money spent by PACs in the 2004 election http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#2004_Presidential_election [wikipedia.org] and tell me why we shouldn't form one to watch over OUR interests?

Those are better options for IT. Join professional organizations (and your MSCE isn't what I mean), and found a PAC or Lobbying group to support our interests, and we'd be in much better shape than trying to unionize.

Well, I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't have found either of those orgs (IEEE or ACM) if it hadn't been for a professor who mentioned them when I went back to college to finish up my degree. This was after I was already working in the field and had been for almost 8 years. This probably isn't uncommon in a group that has a large contingent of "self taught" people.

If IT wants to unionize, forget traditional labor unions. Lobby. Make the economy and tech labor issues move to the top of the campaigns. Spread your propaganda to all your union employees and astroturf the hell out of it. MADD and AARP are far more effective "unions" than the teamsters. Bend the laws to make it unprofitable to offshore. Spread beyond IT, many of us EE/CS/ME types feel the same pain you do. I'd pay dues for an organization that had real power in Washington for issues I care about.

Exactly.

Lets start with simple things. There are a number of "Trade Organizations" that relate to what most of us do.

How many of us have joined http://www.ieee.org/ and/or http://www.acm.net/?

How many have joined http://www.eff.org/?

Take a look at this list of money spent by PACs in the 2004 election http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#2004_Presidential_election and tell me why we shouldn't form one to watch over OUR interests?

Those are better options for IT. Join professional organizations (and your MSCE isn't what I mean), and found a PAC or Lobbying group to support our interests, and we'd be in much better shape than trying to unionize.

Seriously, these organizations already do much of what the ABA does in terms of a) being a professional society, b) providing professional education from books, journals/ magazines, courses, and conferences, c) contribute to recommended education curriculum, d) have a global presence, with chapters around the world, e) provide some services (e.g. insurance) for professionals who are working on their own, f) have been present, and try to be vocal about legal issues (i.e. USACM), g) provide standards that industry really do use, think IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n as one of many.

These organizations are not perfect, but they are respectable profession associations that do merit consideration. (Disclosure: I am a member of IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and the IEEE itself)

IEEE Computer Society

ACM - Association for Computing Machinery

I've seen some pictures that show that tin whiskers are very good at punching through other materials. According to this, one layer of conformal coating will not stop them.

The locomotives that pull the Shuttle are to the Berne gauge, but the vehicles they pull are much wider.

(IEEE subscription required)
"The wide loading gauge of the shuttles wagons means that the fleet is captive to the concession, the exception to this being the locomotive."

Fixed resolution 8bit/channel RGB data will degrade gracefully with random bit errors (to an extent), unlike compressed formats like JPG and PNG which will just die completely.

Actually, there are several known algorithms that allow recovery of complete information from JPEG files with small numbers of random bit errors in them. E.g. this one. JPEG2000 is considered much more resiliant, also; it is, in fact, optimised for transmission over unreliable media (e.g. one-way satellite links).

You'd be much better off using ECCs (e.g. reed-solomon, or even, in the extreme, storing 3 copies of the file so you can process them bit-by-bit and pick the most common value at each point) to find and correct bit errors than using uncompressed images and letting them degrade arbitrarily.

Note that most media you're likely to use is probably using error correction anyway, so single bit errors are unlikely: they would be found and fixed by the media itself. Probably the smallest error you'll see is an unreadable block of a few hundred bits. So the block cipher is unlikely to be much of an issue, as the media you're likely to be recording on has exactly the same issue: errors wipe out blocks, not individual bits.

Translating these gains from the lab bench to the marketplace has not been a trivial undertaking, however. In January 2007 we filed for patents on the process, which we dubbed CRAMES, for Compressed RAM for Embedded Systems.

I haven't managed to find the patent application yet, but I wonder if Connectix's RAM Doubler product would be considered prior art.

Each live wire in the main feed to your house is only 120 volts relative to ground. It wouldn't be that bad, you'd probably drop the hammer.

Speaking as an Electrical Engineering student, that is woefully incorrect. To quote Bernstein, "Electrical Shock Hazards and Safety Standards," IEEE Transactions on Education 34.3 (Aug 1991): 216 - 22,

When dealing with electrocution (death caused by electricity), the discussion will primarily be concerned with the shock effects on the cardiovascular system as lethal electrical shocks usually cause death because of the effect on the heart. It is generally agreed that it is the magnitude and time duration of a continuous current which passes through the body which causes a given effect. The voltage in a circuit is only important insofar as it will produce a given current depending on the impedance in the circuit path.

The path the electricity takes through a shock victim's body is important. While a shock that passes through the fingertips might be painful and annoying, a shock that passes through the chest or head area can be lethal. Ordinary household current can induce ventricular fibrillation, which causes unconsciousness within 10 seconds and irreparable brain damage in about five minutes. The above article explains the conditions for lethal shocks in more detail.

When working around or with household current sources, always take electrical safety precautions. Turn off nearby wiring at the circuit breaker—and make sure it's off. Because prompt medical attention is the only thing that can save you from death by cardiac arrest, never work alone.

The IEEE Spectrum editors had a blog post related to this article that the poster missed:

"To take another example, First Solar, a relatively young company based in Tempe, Arizona, has suddenly been getting a lot of attention with claims that it has figured out a way to make PV material at an installation cost of $1 per wattâ"though the global average for solar installations was in the range of $6 or $7 per watt last year. How plausible is that claim? Well, itâ(TM)s hard to know, because as a feature article appearing in this monthâ(TM)s IEEE Spectrum magazine points out, âoeThe company does not talk to reporters. Not at all.â"

The take-home point here? Be wary of companies that make extravagant claims without details. Especially if the best they can do now is $3/W.

Now I do like First Solar more than some of Slashdot's other favorite snake-oil salesmen (anyone remember EESTOR?), but I'm still suspicious.

Cycle the water through so that you're returning water that has a higher salt concentration, but hasn't yet reached the point of brine. If you can put this in a place with relatively fast currents, the return water may dissipate fast enough that there is essentially no overall effect.

This might work however not everywhere fresh water is needed is close to a good place for discharge. The IEEE has a research paper, "Waste brine disposal from coastal desalination plants" that shows what steps can be taken to reduce or eliminate problems, however I wonder how many desalination plants actually put mechanisms in place and use theses steps.

Falcon

You also have to worry that he was involved but that he had co-conspirators and his suicide may prevent the investigation from getting to them.

When I read the news reports earlier today, the first thing I thought of was Costas Tsalikidis's apparent suicide in the Greek cell phone tapping scandal that happened during the previous olympics. If you haven't read the story you should, its real james bond kinda stuff.

Since you still refuse to publish a URL of your supposed YEARS of fighting the voting machine.

We'll start you off nice and slow this morning.

Your homework consists simply reading several articles. Then removing your foot from your mouth.

Hunt for the (backdoor)kill switch in microchips.

US reveals plans to hit back at cyber threats (note the part about CHIPS)

Investigating Machine Identification Code Technology in Color Laser Printers (if you can do this you can do anything)

The Hunt for the Kill Switch (This is the best of the articles in my opinion)

So your idea of "computerized tabulation" will work only if the public John Doe/ Jane Doe/ You/ Me/ Slashdot Readers/ "We The People" and anyone else is allowed to destructively reverse engineer every electronic voting machine component under an electron microscope looking for backdoor logic (Which is NOT allowed), and any network, hub, switch, vault, radio transmitter, Radio receiver, or memory device that might have been used in conjunction with the election (Again the public is NOT allowed to, not to mention it would be physically impossible and too costly at the expense of bringing down the entire communications infrastructure.), and monitor the whole spectrum 24/7 at all geographic locations during an election. (ain't going to happen) And monitor the power supply for rogue signals, or frequency or voltage anomalies.

So really what your saying is it's okay for someone to walk in on election day, reach into their pocket, activate their hidden transmitter, and flip the vote, by a plethora of methods.

And that's just the HARDWARE.

Shall we wait until you digest all that before we talk about the SOFTWARE and WHAT'S ALREADY BEEN FOUND?

hint #1
Top To Bottom Review

hint #2
Federal Vote-Counting Accuracy Mandate Is Ignored
Violations abound, but no federal action is taken

And again I remind you that 100% hand counts of ballots that have 100% chain of custody (even that is broken) with 100% public oversight (currently the public is denied access and ballots have been illegally destroyed) have never been compared to the 100% machine tabulation.

Furthermore your continued publicizing of the myth that "hand counted paper ballots are unrealistic due to population." Is just that. A MYTH!

If your ideas are so open source, show them right here right now. Quit saying you don't know where to take these ideas, I'm telling you right now.

Publish it! Publish it right here, right now.

Get a free frigging yahoo/geocities account, and publish it. Make a god damned blog and publish it. Rar the shit up and upload it to Rapidshare. Create an account at sourceforge and PUBLISH IT!