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In March 2004, acting on a number of reports from general aviation pilots that Samsung SPH-N300 cellphones had caused their GPS receivers to lose satellite lock, NASA issued a technical memorandum that described emissions from this popular phone. It reported that there were emissions in the GPS band capable of causing interference.

There is more. Go read it yourselves.

Arthur Clarke, in his last interview with IEEE Spectrum - "I'm often asked why I didn't try to patent the idea of communications satellites. My answer is always, 'A patent is really a license to be sued.' "

I would suggest looking into Olin College of Engineering. It's a small, project-oriented engineering school in Massachusetts. They pay the tuition of each student so the cost only runs around $17.000 a year instead of $50,000 a year.
School Website: http://olin.edu/
Article in IEEE Spectrum on Olin: http://spectrum.ieee.org/may06/3432

There is the paper about the multi-apeture camera by the same guys:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4114959
(Provided that your uni has acceess)

Credit where credit is due. Mr. Clarke was brilliant and creative in many ways, plus he was one of my favorite science and science fiction writers.

However...the story about him inventing the communications satellite, or even the geosynchronous orbit is slightly exagerated. It is well known that he gave the idea wide exposure in a Wireless World (magazine) article back in 1945. The geosynch idea is older than that however, going back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (at least).

If you can access the IEEE database , look up the following paper:

"The Geostationary Orbit and Satellite Communications: Concepts Older Than Commonly Supposed" published in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AEROSPACE AND ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS VOL. 38, NO. 4 OCTOBER 2002.

In any event, I am deeply saddened by his passing. Who will inspire us now that he and most of his ilk are gone? Where are this generation's Clarke, Asimov, Sagan, Heinlein, Feynman, etc?

The undersigned hereby assigns to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Incorporated (the "IEEE") all rights under copyright that may exist in and to the above Work, and any revised or expanded derivative works submitted to the IEEE by the undersigned based on the Work....

The undersigned hereby assigns to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Incorporated (the "IEEE") all rights under copyright that may exist in and to the above Work, and any revised or expanded derivative works submitted to the IEEE by the undersigned based on the Work....

I'm thinking remove their incumbent advantage instead of adding another layer. Open them up to free market forces. Land, mineral right, and time, all pseudo tangible ownership objects are traded on the free market and do just fine. EM spectrum and cabling can be done the same.

I agree a free market would work with the airwaves but for landlines it's totally different. Whereas it's relatively cheap to erect towers for wireless services but laying or stringing cable or fiber for landlines is expensive and the needed right of way can only handle so many cables or fibers. However what you could do is separate ownership of the infrastructure and delivering any services it can handle. In the Broadband Utopis of northeastern Utah that's what a group of communities are doing. The communities are building the infrastructure they will own but then they will have open access so any entity that wants to offer any service it is capable of can use it.

Wireless infrastructure is a completely different and much less expensive matter. Cell towers aren't cheap, but compared to running cable to every residence they're practically free.

And that's why landline companies are fighting attempts to offer Muni WiFi. Small city X has no provider of broadband services so they decide to setup their own wifi. When they do they end up fighting commercial businesses trying to stop them. These businesses are concerned about compeating against government, which I understand, but then they won't buildout themselves which is why the munis decided to themselves. Being libertarian I don't particularly like taxpayers being stuck with the bill myself, I do however like what a group of communities in northeastern Utah are doing. There they are creating a "Broadband Utopia". While the communities own the infrastructure access by any entity that wants to provide a service it is capable of can use it. Because of the competition almost 2 years ago Comcast was forced to offer a triple play of cable tv, net access, and phone service (landline) for $90 in the area.

In the late 70's TC May, an scientist working at Intel proved that cosmic rays could flip bits... given that discovery was many years ago, it seems rather clear that as chips get smaller, etc. that cosmic ray dectection could be a good thing on chips. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1479948

The claim is that the current model...can provide real time feedback.

    Bad form replying to my own post blah blah blah ...

    Just google for 'highway slinky effect'. This paper
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/3166/8984/00396876.pdf
discusses the phenomena and others in decent detail. It
references papers dating back to 1960 and even the '39 World's Fair.

Belthize

NASA, the FBI, etc. all seem to follow the same pattern. They get the idea in their head for something big (usually as the result of politicians putting it there or the need to make it look like they're doing something about some big problem). Then they contract the technical stuff out to some contractor who feeds them a line of bullshit

I'd argue that most large public-sector software development failures reflect more upon the public-sector organization than the contractors.

For example, the FBI Virtual Case File system was mostly done in by weak blueprints (because no one in the FBI was willing to make a decision because that could be a problem for internal politics), then the requirements kept changing (again, because the interlocking politics makes it difficult for anyone to actually specify something).

Now it is true that many contractors love to eat up the money for over-runs due to bad and changing requirements...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File

In truth, most private-sector large software projects also fail because of badly defined system requirements, but there is more hope in the private sector for a single "neck wringer" to make actual decisions.

Why software projects fail:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1685
http://www.stylusinc.com/Common/Concerns/SoftwareProjectsFailure.php

When geeks design a Style Guide, it looks like this. Simple, elegant, uncluttered.

When the weenies in Marketing design a Style Guide, the audience ends up trying to punch a psychedelic virtual monkey. Please don't suggest anything that would put marketing personnel in a position to produce anything that will guide me, thankyouverymuch.

Yeah, they're horrible, aren't they? Well, we won't be fooled by amateur hobbyists who claim otherwise.

Yeah, they're horrible, aren't they? Well, we won't be fooled by amateur hobbyists who claim otherwise.

It seems obvious to me that if you some rural location with a low cost of living was wired it could allow those areas to be more competitive with outsourcing overseas or south of the border.

Most of those jobs don't pay much though, and they don't create new jobs. At most they bring back jobs that were outsourced to begin with. Like what Dell did. At first Dell sent support to India but ended up relocating support to Carolina, I don't recall whether North or South. Outsourcing to India didn't really work for them.

And then there are the entrepreneurs that we dont know about...

And all the unknown jobs. However seeing as how TFA was about new jobs it would of been nice if they had said somethng about what sort of jobs they would be.

There is distance learning which would help educate those in more rural areas who cannot reach a community college.

Some people find distance learning helpful but others need someone physically present. I learned this a long tyme ago when I used to tutor. Since then I relearned, because of an injury I survived, yes survived as I wasn't expected to live, that. After struggling in classes I realized I needed that person aid. Heck, after my injury for a while I had an ILS, Independent Living Skills, nurse help me.

Yet we don't have the infrastructure to do it. And based on a a lot of the comments here on Slashdot there is not the appreciation or the willpower to do it. Probably because most of you posting already have your fast connection. If just those digital 'have nots' would pull themselves up by their tin can straps...

I don't know where this comes from. Other /.ers have, as I have myself, railed against Cablecos and Telcos for not expanding, building out, the infrastructure for broadband. And yet they have already been paid billions of dollars to do so. There's the "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal", "Pennsylvania Broadband Fraud", and "You've Already Paid $2,000 For A Fiber Connection You'll Never Get". And those are from the still good bookmarks I have. Googling /. for broadband cableco OR telco" returns 1250 results. Admittedly not all are where /.ers complain about broadband not being rolled out but a good percentage should be. I don't recall how many tymes, but it's been a bunch, I've posted about the Broadband Utopia in northeastern Utah and have said that though I consider myself libertarian I like that the infrastructure here is owned by the communities involved, who then allow anyone to use it to provide any services it can deliver, and not some for profit monopoly. However it doesn't have to be owned by government as in this case, actually I'd rather it be owned by a coop.

Yeah, a 2W PA at 60 GHz would be very impressive.

The guy has some publications. There's a conference paper called "Implementation of a Gigabit Per Second Millimetre Wave Transceiver on CMOS", but I don't have access to IEEE papers, unfortunately.

Here's a 60 GHz PA that's about 50 mW: http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~sorinv/papers/rfic_06_tyao.pdf

This one claims 23 dBm out (200 mW): http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4117364

So maybe it's some class-E deal.

I would say understanding and using the manual octal grouped switches on the front of a PDP11/35 is high on the list. Using the halt/run switch is a lost art.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pdp-11-40.jpg
Running a shmoo curve on magnetic core memory is an obsolete skill.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/20/22897/01066073.pdf?arnumber=1066073

Interestingly enough, everyone's favorite new solar technology, CIGS (the tech Nanosolar uses), is not only ubercheap to produce (profitable selling at $0.50/W to $1.50/W), but it's also amazingly tolerant of radiation.

France has embraced nuclear as much as anybody. They have not solved the issues with reprocessing:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4891

There is no doubt that there is a great deal of room to further develop such technologies, but nuclear is far from a panacea. Its still probably better than coal, at least until there isn't any usable nuclear fuel left.

You also seem surprisingly certain that there is only one guy after you nickel. Greed knows no bounds. Not even global energy conspiracies.

Here is a bunch of links about Computer Ethics from when I was researching about it. The google video link (last one on this list) is particularly interesting. Computer ethics is actually a university research topic! http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/cei_hp.htm http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/ http://www.southernct.edu/organizations/rccs/resources/teaching/teaching_mono/moor/moor_definition.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ProfessionalEthics.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4279094 http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/ http://www.oekonux.org/texts/copykillsmusic.html http://www.progilibre.com/Open-Source-Alternative-ou-fausse-route-_a350.html http://www.osalt.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/ethics.html http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/overview/Ten_Commanments_of_Computer_Ethics.htm http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm http://www.ieee.org/portal/site http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-3088012854941915784&q=computer+ethics

Ethics is an interesting concept - first thing that may come a person's mind :

"good and bad"
"wrong or right"
"black and white"

Personally, when one finds themselves in IT related predicaments, I'm guessing it's not that usual to land in a black or white situation, but one of a million shades of gray.

A few more:

"the way one lives"
"actions that land you on the right (good?) side of the fence"
"oath"
"creed"
etc . . .

What is a creed? One definition in an online dictionary defines it as ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/creed ) : " . . .any system or codification of belief or of opinion. . ."

eek . . . the entertainment industry (I'm guessing a person can come up with centuries or more worth of examples there) would have us believe in "good" creeds or "bad" creeds - religions, knights, assassins and more.

One might also ask - will your ethics lead you to copy chunks of the comments to the slashdot article above? Ethics in research and writing papers - that's a fought over issue as well. (people often hate to look in this mirror :)

Several professional groups have published "ethics" . . .

American Chemical Society ( http://pubs.acs.org/meetingpreprints/ethics.html )
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics ( http://www.aiaa.org/content.cfm?pageid=198 )
American Institute of Architects ( http://www.aia.org/about_ethics )
American Institute of Chemical Engineers ( http://www.aiche.org/About/Code.aspx )
American Society of Landscape Architects ( http://www.asla.org/about/codepro.htm )
Instutute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers ( http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html )

To pick a few. Look kind of like science/fantasy fans might see as guild rules :)

IT is no different.

People who strive for SANS/GIAC certification agree to their ethics as part of completing the certification process. ( http://www.giac.org/overview/ethics.php )

SAGE, LOPSA & USNIX share the same code of ethics - http://lopsa.org/CodeOfEthics

ACM - http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

CISA, CISM, CGEIT - ( http://www.isaca.org/Template.cfm?Section=Code_of_Professional_Ethics&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=20454
)

SSCP, CAP & CISSP (certification) ethics - ( https://www.isc2.org/cgi-bin/content.cgi?category=12 )

I'm sure there are plenty more.

I'm guessing there are very few if any CS or IT related courses that don't include some kind of ethics class or section.

Personally - when I was growing up - with a lot of computer enthusiasts in the neighborhood - some slided one way or the other (ethics wise) and some stood fairly firmly on one side or the other (usually the "old guys").

I've been in the professional IT industry for several years - and doing semi-professional IT stuff on and off years before that. Seeing I'm still there - I hope I'm on the an acceptable side of the fence :)

I've been involved in a few ethics dust-ups over the years . . . never got a horrible

Which would apply to the Computer Society: http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/ethics/code_ethics.html

Other professional organizations also exist. For example, the IEEE Code of Ethics.

There are other organizations that also take a moral stand, such as the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer or the Order of the Engineer. Those particular organizations are geared more toward the kind of engineering where life is at risk.

I like the fact that IEEE actually has realistic and practical articles about Ethics as they apply to the modern day workplace. For example, they clearly describe the problem with being a whistleblower, despite various laws to protect the individual. A whistleblower will often become disadvantaged forever in the company and possibly in the whole industry. But it is still the "right" thing to do. Likewise, intellectual property rights are a difficult thing to balance. An engineer who invents something wants protection from patents or copyright. On the other hand these protections should not be weapons that stifle advancement in the trade. Perhaps the IEEE archives may help while offering a scholarly reference at the same time.

Hi-
This comment is a couple of days late and a dollar short. How far up is your injury? From what I've been told, Johns Hopkins is designing a peripheral nerve interface for their DARPA arm that might bypass your condition. (also it could be used with the Luke arm). I'm sorry that you're faced with it, but the future looks a lot better for upper limb amputees.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/video?id=221

That's Kamen's Luke arm, and though Chuck controls it with foot pedals, that's only because his amputation was done too long ago-- I think the reinnervation surgery is ideally done within a year after amputation.

The arm, however, can be controlled with any kind of interface, ranging from the completely noninvasive (like those foot pedals) to the extremely invasive (electrodes in your brain). As you might imagine, the more invasive, the finer the motor control. At DARPATech, I saw the Johns Hopkins Proto-II arm being used by a man who had had the reinnervation surgery. It was insane: the man's artificial arm moved completely by intuition, there was no effort or delay or "robotic"-ness of movement. The Kamen arm is amazing-- but watching the Johns Hopkins arm was more astonishing by an order of magnitude.

Better yet, in reinnervation trials (which, incidentally, rewires the Brachial plexus nerves), Chicago researchers "accidentally" tapped into phantom limb feeling, so when you touch a certain sensor on the Proto II arm, the wearer can consequently "feel" you touching his hand. There are also receptors for pressure, haptic feedback and shear force.

It is utterly mind-blowing-- and that project still has 2 years to go. I am on the edge of my seat waiting to see what the final deliverable will look like.

a) Development focus. The telcoms in the U.S. are not just developing for NYC. They have to accommodate that vastness that is the U.S. moderately populated area. Often the case, there is a balance to be struck between high performance and range. The telcoms in the U.S. usually focus on extending the range, so they can reach more of that moderately covered area versus pushing for max bandwidth.

Oh really? Is that why they fight municipalities who want to build up their own broadband services when the telecos won't? Because the Broadband Utopia a group of communities in northeastern Utah setup Comcast was forced by market pressure to offer a bundled package for $90. When the project was proposed broadband providers pushed for a Utah law to stop it. Instead a law was passed that required any such project to allow open access, which is what UTOPIA does. Anyone who wants to offer any service it is capable of, broadband access, HDTV, and or phone service and use the system to offer them can use it.

Do you really think a telco or cableco would pay to build such a system? The only way they would is if they were paid to and were held liable. They have already been paid hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do so but they haven't.

Right now is probably the most exciting time there is in broadband, with 3g, Clearwire, Comcast, and DSL all competing for the same broadband market.

Try telling that to the millions who can't anything faster than dialup, or the millions more that has only one choice between duopoly providers. What's excising is what UTOPIA is providing, a Broadband Utopia. While it's government who's doing it it's local governments doing it not the feds. That I can live with. However the feds have already given hundreds of millions of dollars away to companies to build out the broadband infrastructure, and all they did was use the money to pad their pockets.

MANDATED minimum of 100mbps

As of now according to IEEE's "Spectrum" UTOPIA currently only delivers 30Mbps but is capable of speeds up to 100Mbps or more. Still, that's better than most people can get in the US.

A month or so ago, just for yuks, I checked with Verizon again. They told me that we can't get DSL, because we're too far away. Speakeasy's DLS goes over a line leased from Verizon, of course, since Verizon is the local monopoly. Verizon can't (or more likely won't) supply DSL on their line, but at the moment they're required by law to lease it to other companies. It turns out that two of those companies (Covad and speakeasy) are collaborating to do with Verizon's line what Verizon can't be "arsed" to do.

I wonder if the people at Verizon are ignorant. They're obviously missing out on having you as a customer.

OTOH, Verizon is actively pushing their FIOS in our neighborhood.

In Minneapolis we have both Sprint and Verizon are laying FIOS though it's not widespread yet. Sprint is also rolling out WiMax. What I'd like to see is somebody to lay fiber all over the city then allow anyone to offer services using it. In northeastern Utah a group of communities are doing this and creating a Broadband Utopia. I just wonder how their paying for it, I'd rather not have tax payers left to pay the bills, if you use it pay but those who don't shouldn't have to.

Instead he spent time funneling money to his cronies and vetoing bipartisan child health care bills.

I find it ironic you say Bush didn't protect and defend the Constitution of the USA and at the same tyme you say he vetoed child health care bills. Can you show me anywhere in the Constitution where it says it gives the government that authority?

Another irony is that right now on CNN Dr. Sanjay Gupta is discussing national health care. In it he says a root cause of the health care crisis goes back to WWII. Back then laws barred businesses from paying employees more, there were wage control laws, but government not only allowed businesses to offer employees benefits like health insurance but gave them tax breaks as well. Because of this there is no real free market in health care. Now if government allowed employers to pay employees more without raising taxes then employees could get their own health insurance thus creating competition which would lower prices.

Japan, South Korea, and other countries have faster speeds available than *anywhere* in the US.

Do these countries really have faster speeds than the Broadband Utopia in northeastern Utah? They offer 30Mbps now and are capable of delivering 100+ Mbps.

Did you mean the Telecommunications Act of 1996? Google only returns 3 results for "Telecom Act of 1994" but more than 34,000 for "Telecom Act of 1996".

The telcos simply have not delivered what they promised for receiving deregulation and all those tax breaks.

Agreed Big tyme!!! The telecom and cable companies have been paid a lot to deliver broadband but haven't. Other than Sprint, who's rolling out fiber, I know of no other company who's really working to provide broadband. Seems to me the others only work to prevent others from offering broadband, blocking competition. Normally as a libertarian I prefer a free market, but in the case of infrastructure such as cable and telecom I lean towards what cities and communities in Northeastern Utah are doing, creating a Broadband Utopia. The local governments are building and will own the infrastructure but then they allow anyone capable to provide any service it can deliver. The system can provide cable tv, broadband internet access, and or phone service. For net access it's currently capable of 30Mbps but will be capable of up to 100Mbps. It can also handle more than 2 high-definition TV channels.

The original paper about this must be getting a bit old. Time to bring out a new one!

Design an 8 cylinder internal combustion engine where each cylinder wall is the stator of an electric generator, and the pistons are the rotor. Deceleration of the massive piston (in comparison to the projectile) would generate a current spike onto the railgun rail. Still not enough? Use really massive pistons and a higher compression. Still not enough? Use a flywheel to store the energy.
The energy density of a flywheel is significantly higher than a capacitor bank and there are fewer energy losses.

The point is, if the induction pulse can be shaped correctly, it's not necessary to store the energy electrically.

Think of it as an energy conversion problem:

How much kinetic energy does one piston in an internal combustion engine contain:

From http://www.flatlanderracing.com/jechrys-sbft.html
Piston weighs 489 grams (1.08 lbs) stroke = 4"
Assuming 5500 RPM (181 trips up and down per second), pistons max speed is
181 trips/sec * pi * 4" stroke = 2298 in/sec = 191 feet/sec

From http://www.chuckhawks.com/rifle_ballistics_table.htm .308 Win. (150 Sp) has 2820fps and 2648 foot pounds of energy
e = mv^2 so projectile weight = .0003 lbs
The 1.08lb piston would need to move (2648 = 1.08 * v^2) or v = 49 feet/sec to have as much energy.

As you can see, one one pound piston in an engine running at 5500 RPM contains almost 4 times as much kinetic energy as a .308 round. The engine would stall if you tried to extract that much energy however:

The power output of a chrysler slant 6 engine is 134kw (mere 180 hp), power in watts of a 308 round is 3590 watt seconds.

Assuming railgun efficiency of 47%, energy extraction from the flywheel efficiency of 70% = 32%, you should be able to fire ((134/3.59)*.32)=11 rounds per second.

As far as the heating problem goes, pumped liquid nitrogen or water coolant + Gatling configuration should be close.

(Note: I mixed and matched some of the cylinder/engine figures, I couldn't find the information I needed tied to the same engine.)

Another cool Railgun link:
http://www.powerlabs.org/railgun2.htm

Reading through the references in the Photosynth siggraph paper I saw that they briefly mentioned this paper as being similar:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/9854/31039/01443228.pdf

It's by Brown and Lowe at UBC comp sci department. Now what I couldn't figure out is how the Photosynth software differs. It adds a nice morphing effect, but what challenges did it overcome? The methodology looks very similar.

Maybe someone who knows more can enlighten me.

Just a shame they test it in Scotland then - with lots of lovely depleted uranium. Aye, it's braw stuff. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3148853.stm

Let us rewind:

• 1990 - Facility at Dundrennan Range, Kirkcudbright announced http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12517010.300-scotland-to-host-rail-gun-testbed-.html
• 1995 - Velocities by 5MJ's performed http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel3/3330/9963/00472945.pdf
• 2003 - First sea trials at 1/8 scale http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2003/05/mil-030512-navsea04.htm
• 2005 - Commenced construction of the new test launcher facility at Dahlgren, VA, using old Army refurbished SDI launcher http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/systems/emrg.htm
• 2007 - Delivery to Dahlgren by BAE of new system - 40 ton, "laboratory" version with removable rails - aiming for 32MJ (scaling to 64) http://www.navytimes.com/news/2007/01/aprailgun070117/

And may, I draw you attention to this http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2004armaments/DayII/SessionI/01_Cilli_EM_Gun.pdf. Slides 12/13 are particularly interesting... ("use their test facility at no cost to US")

1) 'the Plasma Universe' is NOT 'supported by IEEE! At least, not in the sense that you imply. In fact, I hear that this claim has caused some IEEE members to get quite upset, and they are now taking steps to stop this kind of nonsense.

Here's the lowdown on the part of the IEEE that DOES cover plasma physics (my emphasis): "NPSS [Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society] IS...
- The IEEE Technical Society that covers the fields of Fusion Technology, Nuclear Medical and Imaging Sciences, Particle Accelerator Science and Technology, Pulsed Power Systems, Radiation Effects, Radiation Instrumentation, Plasma Sciences and Applications, Standards for Nuclear Instruments and Detectors, and Computer Applications in Nuclear and Plasma Sciences." [source: http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/nps/aboutnpss.htm]

2) Isn't time we hear from proponents of the weak force? the strong force?

I mean, proponents of 'the Electric Universe' claim, falsely, that astrophysicists regard gravity as the only force worth studying, and counter-claim that 'electricity'* is really the only one (odd though that while 99.{insert more 9's here, to your taste}% of the universe is plasma, 100% is mass-energy, so gravity wins).

Surely there must be folk who believe that a plague should visit both houses; that the strong force is {insert your favourite number here} orders of magnitude stronger than electromagnetism, and that only the inconsequential neutrinos can escape the grip of the strong force (see, true believers of this cult can make just as many false claims as 'EU theorists'!)? There must be a Nobel Laureate whose work can be picked over to find juicy morsels that support these obvious truths!

And let's not neglect the weak force ... it may be weak in name, but its effects are profound, its wingéd messengers can leap tall buildings in a single bound! not only can they pass through solid walls, but even a light-year of solid lead is but tissue paper to them! Its flock vastly outnumber those of the baryons, and when the truth about dark matter (DM) is finally discovered (any day now, promise), the awesome reality of the dominance of the universe by the weak force will become clear - DM is neutralinos, the supreme embodiment of the weak force!!!! {feel free to continue adding exclamation marks here}.

Oh, and let's not forget that the weak force IS ('could be' only to doubters) responsible for CP violating events, and thus, the reason for our very existence in our universe today (why we have matter-antimatter asymmetry, and all that).

* Of course, they don't mean that; they really mean electromagnetism.

I'd really like to see these guy's algorithms in the game of Go (wei-qi).
Or imagine one day being able to get some machine learning from Guo Juan http://www.guojuangoschool.com/ - she's pretty nice and (still) understandable high-dan player.
Recently some Chinese professor that participated in the Deep Blue's victory over Gary said with the help of M$ research money he's inking closer on the brute-force approach in Go next http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5552 . But it is still a steep curve. The chinese chess projections point to a breakthrough in the next 2-3 years and it is still a couple of exponents simpler than Go.
So, way to go, Ms.Pac-Man :-)

Here's a link to IEEE:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10/18784/00867951.pdf

There have been methods to charge pacemakers through inductive coupling.

Their days are increasingly numbered. It seems there is a solid state equivalent for everything these days, including high power medium wave RF transmitters. Probably the next to last vestige of the tube, after CFLs. But even those might go with the way LEDs are improving. No tube is safe. It's hard to believe but true.

Only SOUTH Koreans of all ages and certain others in high-density areas will see these speeds any time soon.

No, there's a place in the US who will soon be able to get these speeds if they can't get them today. It's a little place in northeastern Utah called Broadband Utopia. Because of the competition Comcast was "Forced to offer $90 bundle in fiber-fed region".

There are numerous refutations to your "never suggested that publishing their design or secrets would lead to better security". Many experts have said precisely that.

An IT Security article on full disclosure states that as early as the middle of the 19th century locksmith Alfred C. Hobbes thought full disclosure was important to clear up the rash of lock picking people were experiencing. It goes on to discuss exactly why full disclosure works so well.

David Wagner says in an article on security: "Today, many security companies are strongly resisting this, and I think they will need to learn to accept and embrace public scrutiny as a natural and necessary part of security systems." -- David Wagner and Ian Goldberg are the ones who cracked the security of the SSL layer in Netscape 4.

IEEE article abstract stating that full source code access can have "real benefits for security", although that's not automatic and it has to be done correctly.

Bruce Schneier -- yes, THAT Bruce Schneier -- has an article on his blog that starts "Full disclosure -- the practice of making the details of security vulnerabilities public -- is a damned good idea. Public scrutiny is the only reliable way to improve security, while secrecy only makes us less secure."

Is that enough or do I need to go to the second page of this Google search?

BTW, DJB thinks that both full disclosure and isolation of trusted components are absolutely vital. He's the guy who won the right for Americans to export cryptography technology in court against the Department of Justice. He also found a timing attack against OpenSSL's AES cipher and his Unix Security Holes class of 16 students turned up 91 previously unknown holes in one semester.

As for "Security by design", that helps. However, with many programs being written in languages which allow null pointers, stack overflow, buffer overflow, and array overflow the design can be as secure as you want and the program can still be crashed. In some cases arbitrary code can still be executed. Address randomization, NX bits, run-time bounds checking, and automatic memory management can go a long way. Sanitation of inputs, static analysis, time padding, and more still have to be considered in some cases.

The tests Coverity is running are an example of static analysis. If there's a C routine that can be coerced into smashing the stack or overflowing a buffer in the heap, that can often be automatically caught and reported. Memory leaks often can be, too. They're probably also able to do at least rudimentary checks for sanitizing input values.

just because the United States has an aversion to reprocessing fuel doesn't mean it's not a good idea. France seems to do just fine.

France doesn't seem to be doing so well with reprocessing as some think. Seems there may be a Nuclear Wasteland in France.

"Disposal" isn't as big a problem as it's made out to be; reprocessing reduces the amount of waste produced tremendously, and storing a little waste for a time is a whole lot better than *not* storing it and dumping it into the atmosphere, as we're doing with coal.

The French, who have come the farthest in reprocessing, are finding out it's not as simple to reprocess as many would have you believe. IEEE's magazine "Spectrum" has a good article on this: "Nuclear Wasteland". However another /.er brought up the Candu reactor in Canada a few weeks ago. I don't know much about it so I can't say whether there are any problems with the design or waste, or whether its economically feasible. However nuclear power isn't really needed, not in the US. The Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind power to supply the 48 continuous states with electricity. Add OR, CA, AZ, NM, and Texas along with some offshore sites from Cape Cod to the Mid Atlantic and much more can be generated by wind. Also many megawatts of potential power goes up smoke stacks daily as Waste Heat. Combining wind, solar power, cogeneration or waste heat recovery and conservation negates the need for nuclear power. The alternative power sources, both listed above and others, have a distinct advantage over nuclear power, while it can take years and years for a nuclear power plant to be constructed and brought online, these others can be added immediately. Wind generators and solar PVs can be made from raw material and brought online in months, and can be sited closer to many of the placed where the energy is needed. Besides PVs on roofs a farmer in the Adirondack Mountains in New York can provide electricity to NYC. The farmer would then have a second source of income.

Somehow France manages to get by.If we reprocessed nuclear fuel in a rational way, there is very little that is unused.

Yes but even the French, who have gone the farthest, haven't got it yet. According to TFA in the IEEE's "Spectrum" article " Nuclear Wasteland" they are still having troubles. Perhaps with Vitrification the nuclear waste can be encased in glass however there's still a lot of toxic chemicals leftover. Simply even the French don't have the magic wand yet.

And back in the real world, conservation is never, never, EVER going to happen. Civilization is not going to revert back to metaphorically living in caves -- and that's the only way conservation could ever fix the problem. A couple of CF bulbs is not going to do it.

Nor does civilization have to live in caves. One simple step can reduce people's energy usage. Switching light bulbs to CFLs can reduce the energy for lighting by 75% to 80%. And LED lights, though they aren't good for area lighting yet, use only 10% of the energy an incandescent light does. By improving insulation of buildings heating and cooling needs can be significantly reduced, then geothermal energy can be used for what heating and cooling is needed in many places. Then there's solar, wind, and other alternative sources of energy. In the US the Rocky Mountains alone contain enough wind energy potential to provide all of the 48 continuous states with power. And that's just the Rockies. There plenty of other places that can provide wind power.

The only way forward is preserving our way of life using sustainable technology.

Oh, I TOTALLY AGREE!!! But nuclear IS NOT sustainable. Solar and wind both are though.

The legislation that is about to pass in Wisconsin, and probably any other state, was bought by direct solicitation of the elected representatives by AT&T and via a sponsored, directed TV ad campaign referencing a website called "TVForUs.com".

That may be true of Wisconsin but do they give one company a monopoly, ie is it exclusive, or does it allow more than one provider?

Hopefully, Governor Doyle will do a line-item veto and bring back the Customer Protection items that were so skillfully deleted.

I don't know about this, but I support customer protection, and choice!

By the way, "praying for exclusivity" in a market is the corporate dream of the Southern Boys Club, as it would be for any company. Don't need anything to back that up - history is a good teacher.

Notice how above I said I support customer choice? And lots of them, instead of simply having the choice of getting service or not getting it I support the ability to choice who provides the service. Actually in the case of a physical infrastructure such as cables, phone lines, and powerlines I'd prefer they be owned locally by say a coop. Then whoever owns it allow anyone who wants to provide a service that uses it to do so. Say I want to start an electric company that generates electricity via solar or wind gennies, I should be able to connect to the powerlines and sell the electricity to whomever will pay me. I'll then pay whoever owns the powerlines. A good example of this, for communications, is the Broadband Utopia in northeastern Utah.

Extending this to the airwaves, I'd have the FCC abolished and would get rid of the requirements that broadcasters and others that use the airwaves not have to have a license to use those airwaves. If someone wanted to start a radio station they would be able to as long as they didn't interfere in someone else's radio station.

Same for String Theory, until recently. Why was that "allowed"?

To some extent, parsimony. String theory was an attempt to condense multiple distinct models into a single one. Assume the strong Church-Turing universe thesis; the work of Vitanyi/Li and Wallace/Dowe indicate that the simpler prediction correctly describing the known data is more likely to be correctly predictive.

That said, I would say that until some solid evidence turned up that previous theories didn't cover, String Theory was more philosophy than science per se.

ask a guy who might know. Vint Cerf wrote an article in IEEE Computer back on January that put forth his worries that our data comms bandwidth and our content packaging automation will outstrip human capacities to absorb and understand [I think it already has...most people don't even know how much of the flood of data has passed them by]. You may have a problem with the link [to the abstract] because Computer is a subscription journal for IEEE members. Cerf's short piece is mostly concerned with the way the explosion of ways and speeds for copy, transmit and search have and will continue to put all DRM attempts in a losing position. He also thinks the 75 years-after-death copy right is overkill.

But this is not a socialist breakdown of the free market, it's exactly what happens in free markets with no regulation - the move towards monopolies.

Many regulations create monopolies. When a regulation makes it hard if not impossible to enter a market then you have monopolies, duopolises, or otherwise are restricting competition and the market. One way to solve this is by having locals, whether they be a coop, city or county government, or nonprofit organization own the physical infrastructure and mandate they allow anyone to use it. A good example of this is in northeastern Utah where a group of communities got together to create a Broadband Utopia. Businesses can use the infrastructure to offer net access, phone service, and or cable tv to customers. It allows 30M bps net connections now but is capable of 100M bps.