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Most connections are a lot faster at downloading than uploading.

It's my understanding, which may be wrong, that net speeds are asymmetric with download speeds being faster because when the web became open to the populace most people downloaded a lot more than they uploaded. Most uploading was done by browsers requesting connections to websites, sending email, and posting in newsgroups. Many people didn't even create and post their own websites, now however even children post websites, or at least webpages, on social networking websites. Dialup connections being slow, this was fine but with broadband available more people are uploading as well as downloading. Heck my niece, who's almost 4 years old, have her own website registered in her own name. Of course it's her parents who actually create, upload, and maintain it.

Fact is though is that connection speeds can boosted quite a lot if the FCC got out of the way and the cablecos and telcos either build out broadband they have already been paid to build out or got out of the way of others building out the infrastructure. One region in the US is working on an infrastructure that could offer speeds of 100Mbs. In Northeastern Utah a group of cities and communities have joined together to create a Broadband Utopia. While it's being build by the local governments that's all they are doing basically. They allow any entity, whether a business or not, to sale services it is capable of delivering whether it be net access, cable tv, or phone service. As of April 2006 "users can get 8-15Mbps symmetrical fiber for $35-$45 dollars through AT&T or providers like MStar." Because of the competition Comcast was forced to offer "broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month".

So speeds are not so much a limiting factor anymore as the lack of competition is the limiting factor.

What the hack does software hackers have to do with Insurgent groups, answer .. nothing. Why is it when you set off an IED, you're a terrorist, while if you drop white phosphorus on a civilian area, your a war hero.

"During the past four and a half years, the United States and its allies in Iraq have fielded the most advanced and complex weaponry ever developed. But they are still not winning the war"

Haven't the US learned anything since the Vietnam war, a low tech highly motivated guerilla army can defeat a so called hi-tech modern army.

"What we are seeing is the empowerment of the individual to conduct war,"

No what you are seeing is a highly pissed off populations defending their own country against an illegal and immoral occupation.

'Robb calls this new type of conflict "open-source warfare," because the manner in which insurgent groups are organizing themselves .. bears a strong resemblance to the open-source movement in software development'

What a complete load of tripe, have you noticed that anywhere there is 'terrorost' activity, it usually follows a period of oppression by some government. Are we supposed to forget why the Islamists are so pissed off at the US, it's to do with the Palestinian issue, the second and third generation refugees being a prime source for next years 'terrorists'.

"The resurrection of al-Qaeda is a good example"

There IS no al-Qaeda, just a bunch of severely pissed off ethnic Islamists. Like you drive a tank down my street and then have me ejected and forced to live in some refugee camp, that's gonna make one pissed off Arab.

"Given the structural changes that were required of al-Qaeda to adapt to its loss of Afghanistan as a safe haven,"

Bin Laden was sent into Afghanistan by the US to create an insurgent group that later on become known as al-Qaeda to fight the Russions. The one thing the Taliban did was reduce Opium production to zero, it is now back at its highest level ever. The implication that Afghanistan is now somehow not safe for 'al-Qaeda' is totally bogus. The coalition forces have no control there. As well as large areas of north Packistan are virtually no-go-areas for the Packistan government. Is this Rand fella living on the same planet as the rest of us.

"Unfortunately, the traditional weapons acquisition process .. is simply not designed to operate on such a fleeting timescale"

No, it's because you can't put enough troops on the ground to effectivly engage the enemy. In vietnam all it took was a bunch of barefoot gooks, a kalashnikov and a bag of rice to defeat the most powerfull and technologically advanced nation on the planet. You see they were prepared to sacrifice a hundred as against your one. Robots aren't much good in a war, as they don't hate people enough to travel half way round the world to kill people they have never met.

Who's gonna defend us against you ...

If you work for a wind power company then you should know that the output from a wind farm is not stable. The power fluctuates and can not be predicted. The power grid is stabilized by a control system running a model of expected production and load to keep everything balanced. They even have a separate model for the super bowl because the usage pattern changes. Several of the European governments posted warnings about the "lights-out" event in February, stating that it could unbalance the control system and cause blackouts. The problem with wind farms is that the output varies so much that they have a hard time predicting the output for the control system. They add capacitor banks to compensate for short drops, but it is still a major problem. The latest issue of "Power & Energy" from the IEEE Power Engineering Society was all about wind farms and connecting them to the grid. Link but you have to be a member to read it http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pes/public/2007/nov/index.html.

I don't think building a separate grid for the wind farms is going to fix anything. It think it would be better to make the output from the individual wind farms more stable, or at least more predictable.

The challenge for ISP's is to figure out how to sell internet service at prices that people will pay (cheap, flat-rate) but prevent the p2p usage from crushing their networks.

Some ISP's are building out more capacity, and provisioning symmetrical instead of asymetrical infrastructure. Verizon FIOS' 20/20 plan is a good example of this.

A better example is Broadband Utopia. According to DSL Reports, Comcast Versus Broadband Utopia, Comcast was "forced to offer $90 bundle in fiber-fed region".

"Utopia is one of the nation's largest wholesale muni-fiber deployments - via which users can get 8-15Mbps symmetrical fiber for $35-$45 dollars through AT&T or providers like MStar. The project has put Comcast in the unfamiliar position of having to truly compete, resulting in rare price reductions. According to this local ad, Comcast is now offering broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint."

> Yes, ethernet socket at home, 10/10Mb,

They have this in China too. I've yet to hear of a 100Mbps connection though.

"A Broadband Utopia"

"A municipally owned network in Utah is poised to offer 100 megabits per second--and that's just to start"

TFA is about 1 1/2 years old.

p2p is a legitimate technology, but it is used in the wrong way by some people and this makes it look as a liability from the ISP's standpoint. The solution to end the discrimination against P2P is only one: To make P2P mandatory. For example, we could use a P2P overlay over HTTP rather than the normal HTTP/1.1 to make the Web P2P as well. This would shut off the mouth of everyone criticising P2P. I don't just say to camouflage P2P as HTTP - I suggest to make every Internet technology P2P-based. If you think a bit about it, it's really stupid to host anything on a central server and not use the power of the crowds to disseminate your Web site files or your new GNU/Linux distro. We really don't use the Internet at its full potential without P2P. In fact if everyone used P2P for disseminating webpages and ordinary Internet traffic, the Internet would feel much more speedy than it is now.

It looks as if

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4348615&isnumber=4348298

is something like the work being reported on; 'A 1 Gsymbol/s, 64 QAM coherent signal was successfully transmitted over 150 km using heterodyne detection with a frequency-stabilized fiber laser and an optical phase-locked-loop technique. The spectral efficiency reached as high as 3 bit/s/Hz.'

Masato YOSHIDA's list of papers at

http://db.tohoku.ac.jp/whois/Tunv_Title_All.php?&user_num=LTU0OA==&sel1=1&sel2=1&sel3=1&sel4=2&page=1&lang=E

looks very plausible in the context of this work; 'coherent optical transmission' is I think the relevant buzz-word. Going from 1Gsymbol/s to 10Tsymbol/s is clearly a lot more work, but being able to do optical QAM at all is pretty spectacular.

Nuclear power has been the answer for Canada, France, Japan and others for quite a while. The looney left is the only reason the US doesn't have more plants.

Oh, and France doesn't have a Nuclear Wasteland?. They still haven't figured what to do with the hot and toxic waste left over from reprocessing. Nuclear power is not an answer to any question that needs to be asked. In the US, the Rockies contain enough potential wind power to provide the 48 continuous states with energy. But in case that's not enough the Pacific Northwest on down to California, then through Arizona, and New Mexico to Texas hold more potential wind power. As does other places in the East and Northeast such as Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras. Here's a Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States. Add that CA on through TX along with Florida are good places for solar power. Meanwhile, while it can take 10 or 20 years to build, inspect, then start a nuclear power plant, solar and wind can be added in less than a year.

1. VESA
2. The Open Group
3. IEEE
4. GSM
5. The Unicode Consortium
6. Bluetooth SIG
7. CAN
8. EIA (responsible for, among other things, JEDEC, who are responsible for DDR and related standards)

ANSI
IEEE
Wifi Alliance

See also these:
a summary of Graham Rawlinson's findings, as published in Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, IEEE in January this year, and of course Wikipedia's page on Typoglycaemia.

a vacuum also conducts electricity .Maybe not as well.could they use a vacuum?

Only when there is a source of free electrons nearby. A CRT works by having an electron gun in the back. When it is dead, the electron flow stops. Add a small amount of gas and excite it and you have a low pressure plasma much like in a neon tube or plasma sphere. A vacuum is used as an insulator. Here is an example..

http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/electric_power/illustrated_glossary/substation_equipment/vacuum_circuit_breakers.html
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1601629
http://www.power-technology.com/contractors/switchgear/huayi/huayi5.html

no gas. no plasma. little arc from vaporised metal.

What I think might be interesting is to decouple the wire from the service provider

They do have something like that in Utah called Utopia. Here's the link: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may06/3434

The biggest thing about Penryn is the move to 45-nm fabrication, and the technological advances that were required to pull it off. IEEE Spectrum has a nice, in-depth (but accessible) article on those advances. High-k dielectrics and new metal gate configurations will be how advanced ICs are produced from now on. It is as large a shift for the fabs as a new chip architecture is for designers.

Slowly these things get better. Automatically guided vehicles have been around for about 25 years, and they keep improving. Early ones were guided by wires buried in the floor, and essentially ran on tracks. Now they have much more flexibility.

About fifteen years ago there was a research project which used small forklift-like robots. These worked together to move loads too big for one to lift. Two such robots could pick up and move a couch. That idea needs to be revived.

Quietly, the machinery for moving containers around ports is becoming automated. Several ports now have large, autonomous machines moving containers around. Antwerp has had this for years, but there the container sits on top of the AGV. The new approach is automated straddle cranes, the same cranes normally driven by humans. The article points out that the robots drive better than people; fuel and tire consumption are down 30%. The big container cranes themselves have had vision systems and LIDAR units for years; many are now fully automated.

If you publish in an IEEE publication, you must transfer the copyright to IEEE, but the copyright transfer document immediately returns to the authors the right to reproduce the work as long as it's not used to imply IEEE endorsement of something described in the paper.

http://www.ieee.org/portal/cms_docs_iportals/iportals/publications/rights/IEEECopyrightForm.pdf

Is this it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_(amateur_extrasolar_planet_search_project)
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar07/4933

Pedestrian Detection from a Moving Vehicle

=identifying targets from a vehicle

I am not paranoid about 'a Chinese person', but about the ubiquitous presence of this (context: ... has published over 200 books, book chapters, journal papers, conference proceedings and technical reports in mechanics, intelligent control, robotics and automation. Currently, Dr. Wang is the Secretary-Elect of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Council, members of the ExCom and AdCom of IEEE ITS Council and IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Society, associate editors of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, SMC, and ITS, and the Editor-in-Charge of the World Scientific Series on Intelligent Control and Intelligent Automation.") particular one.

"The Chinese themselves don't think they're getting much of the advanced technology. While Americans have complained in the last year about their jobless economic recovery, Chinese have bemoaned what they call a "headless" or "brainless" boom, said panelist Fei-Yue Wang, a University of Arizona specialist on intelligent transportation, who has been involved in the Chinese government's long-term technology planning."
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/4040

If you look a little further at his publication history (a part of it), you might suspect dual-use research. Add experience with 'communist academic careers' (the 'German Democratic Republic' collapsed while I was working at a University here (formerly West)) and you know that you only make it if you are opportunistic. And then you perhaps wonder how he manages to co-author in such a broad variety of areas - coordinating for a more global target?

YMMV.

CC.

It always amazes me how technology on the cutting edge http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1473839 like this are utilized via commonly available commodity products by clever retailers. Unfortunately this seems to be another lack of support and customer service that ultimately scares the consumer away from these fabulous new technologies. I hope Best Buy learns that they really need to up the bar on customer service and support for these new technologies. I'm sure that Best Buy made the common profit driven mistake and did not include a cable to connect the memory tiles to the computer. As with HDTV's and lack of HDMI cables bundled with TV's at the retail level, they surely sell the memory tile cable at an extortionate markup, again scaring the consumer away from these wonderful new technologies. Of course I'm sure Best Buy support offered to send out the Geek Squad to fix the problem, but the cost to this poor consumer would be more than the item itself for the Geek Squad genius to configure the memory tiles, and that also required a 20 year service agreement sign up (including automatically signing up the consumer to MSN dialup account for life . Last but not least, I hope they branded with their private label to retain that customer marketing edge! Overall, I still give Best Buy the highest mark for running such a great company, good for the consumer, good for the economy, go Best Buy!

For those who are interested in the ACTUAL paper instead of a nested summary here is the link to IEEE http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?isnumber=4351918&arnumber=4351934&count=17&index=11 if you or your university has a subscription you can get the full PDF here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/3516/4351918/04351934.pdf?tp=&isnumber=4351918&arnumber=4351934

For those who are interested in the ACTUAL paper instead of a nested summary here is the link to IEEE http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?isnumber=4351918&arnumber=4351934&count=17&index=11 if you or your university has a subscription you can get the full PDF here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/3516/4351918/04351934.pdf?tp=&isnumber=4351918&arnumber=4351934

A few places have tried this type of thing already. One the professors at my university developed an e-nose a while ago mostly to look at emissions from agricultural processes.

paper abstract

IBM isn't the only folks working on this. IEEE Spectrum this month has a description of a competing 60 GHz technology.

Personally I will never fly on a plane that allows this. Maybe if there is a no-cell-phone area. Or even better, no cell phones, no babies, no teenage girls and no Europeans. But I digress.

In addition to annoying the shit out of everyone around you, there is a serious risk that devices like this will eventually crash a plane. I already posted this as a reply to another comment, hopefully I wont get filtered, but here is what the IEEE Spectrum says:

Unsafe At Any Airspeed?
March 01, 2006
Cellphones and other electronics are more of a risk than you think
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/spectrum/mar06/3069 [ieee.org]
[...]
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. Disturbingly, though, they were low enough to comply with FCC emissions standards.
[...]
In one telling incident, a flight crew stated that a 30-degree navigation error was immediately corrected after a passenger turned off a DVD player and that the error reoccurred when the curious crew asked the passenger to switch the player on again. Game electronics and laptops were the culprits in other reports in which the crew verified in the same way that a particular PED caused erratic navigation indications.

Hmmm, not the article I was looking for, but here's some examples:

Unsafe At Any Airspeed?
March 01, 2006
Cellphones and other electronics are more of a risk than you think
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/spectrum/mar06/3069
[...]
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. Disturbingly, though, they were low enough to comply with FCC emissions standards.
[...]
In one telling incident, a flight crew stated that a 30-degree navigation error was immediately corrected after a passenger turned off a DVD player and that the error reoccurred when the curious crew asked the passenger to switch the player on again. Game electronics and laptops were the culprits in other reports in which the crew verified in the same way that a particular PED caused erratic navigation indications.

For anybody who wants a little more info than is present in the popular-press summary, here's a couple of conference papers from Rozenblit's group on using coevolution and genetic algorithms to analyze/visualize military scenarios. I think they might require institutional subscriptions to see the full PDF, but I've pasted the abstracts below.

A coevolutionary approach to course of action generation and visualization in multi-sided conflicts

The current state of military operations includes many stability and support (SASO), multi-sided conflicts. The research presented in this paper attempts to address this complex environment by creating a SASO simulation, coevolutionary generation of courses-of-actions (COAs) for each side, and visualization tools for analysis of the resulting COAs. The SASO simulation is significantly different from previous systems because it incorporates non-conventional warfare units such as terrorists and media. The coevolution algorithm is different because it allows all sides of the conflict to evolve their COAs. The visualization tools are important because SASO doctrine is not as well developed as conventional warfare doctrine. Therefore, visual analysis and understanding of a system that is not well defined provides insight for future modeling and verification.

Modeling and simulation of stability and support operations (SASO)

Stability and support operations (SASO) are becoming increasingly important in modern military operations. Conflicts are no longer comprised solely of two opposing sides engaged in combat on an open battlefield. Instead, they are more likely to involve groups sharing various alliances and relationships each pursuing a range of different goals. The Sheherazade SASO wargaming engine presented here: a) incorporates subjective criteria for scoring course of action (COA) success such as the animosity between factions and attitudes of locales, b) uses nontraditional units such as refugees, media and information operators, and c) employs a coevolutionary genetic algorithm in modeling the dynamics of the complex multisided simulation for generating COAs. This paper outlines our approach towards the development of a wargaming model that handles the more complex and computationally demanding arena of SASO.

For anybody who wants a little more info than is present in the popular-press summary, here's a couple of conference papers from Rozenblit's group on using coevolution and genetic algorithms to analyze/visualize military scenarios. I think they might require institutional subscriptions to see the full PDF, but I've pasted the abstracts below.

A coevolutionary approach to course of action generation and visualization in multi-sided conflicts

The current state of military operations includes many stability and support (SASO), multi-sided conflicts. The research presented in this paper attempts to address this complex environment by creating a SASO simulation, coevolutionary generation of courses-of-actions (COAs) for each side, and visualization tools for analysis of the resulting COAs. The SASO simulation is significantly different from previous systems because it incorporates non-conventional warfare units such as terrorists and media. The coevolution algorithm is different because it allows all sides of the conflict to evolve their COAs. The visualization tools are important because SASO doctrine is not as well developed as conventional warfare doctrine. Therefore, visual analysis and understanding of a system that is not well defined provides insight for future modeling and verification.

Modeling and simulation of stability and support operations (SASO)

Stability and support operations (SASO) are becoming increasingly important in modern military operations. Conflicts are no longer comprised solely of two opposing sides engaged in combat on an open battlefield. Instead, they are more likely to involve groups sharing various alliances and relationships each pursuing a range of different goals. The Sheherazade SASO wargaming engine presented here: a) incorporates subjective criteria for scoring course of action (COA) success such as the animosity between factions and attitudes of locales, b) uses nontraditional units such as refugees, media and information operators, and c) employs a coevolutionary genetic algorithm in modeling the dynamics of the complex multisided simulation for generating COAs. This paper outlines our approach towards the development of a wargaming model that handles the more complex and computationally demanding arena of SASO.

(A) refrain from using a linux desktop for more than a year, or

(B) do whatever IP InnovatioN LLC or its holding company Acacia Technologies wants them to do. (I'm aware that this lawsuit is only targeted at Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc., but once IP Innovation LLC has some money why couldn't they repeat the trick to everyone else?).

Oops sorry i'm not allowed to say X-windows anymore, am I? I meant: the X window system(TM).

IIRC the GIF patent lawsuit went in a similar vein: sue just before the patent is going to run out, then the defendants are more likely to give in because the lawsuit might last longer than the remaining lifetime of the patent anyway, and they'll be able to use the technology again soon.

If you live in a country that tolerates software patents, I'd suggest you go do something about it (if you like multiple desktops, that is).

PS: who t.f. is "Technology licensing corporation", anyway?

PPS: I'm surprised Intellectual Ventures didn't bring this lawsuit.

PPPS here's the complaint (from Groklaw, see if you can get it from Pacer if you don't trust that).

And here's Acacia's announcement that IP Innovation LLC is "a wholly owned subsidiary" of theirs, for suing with GUI patents.

For those of you who have access to ieee online journal, it is still available through http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6

Ah, but my point was that it doesn't make any perceptible difference so why bother?

Incidentally, Klipsch was quite interested in creating low distortion sound. Distortion is roughly proportional to the power input to any loudspeaker, so with less power you also get less distortion. If you're particularly interested in the subject you can purchase several relevant papers from the AES and IEEE.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=2018
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1166350

Whatever insight your post had, I reverted to zero upon reading you call it a "Triple Play" with a straight face.

Why? What's wrong with "Triple Play"? I first heard it in I believe an article in IEEE's "Spectrum" a few years back. Lately around here ComCast has been advertising it's Triple Play services.

Now I'm not advocating it, I only stated if an entity wanted to offer it in Utopia Utah they could. As for me, I don't have it and I doubt I ever will. While my cable and net access is provided by ComCast, my ISP is Earthlink. Also I don't have landline phone service, the only phone I have is a cell phone, and it's cheaper.

Lets see .. but at least the technology has moved to the backyard from the time when no one thought it possible. It is 50 years of Sputnik's flight into orbit - has anyone seen the feature in IEEE Spectrum - http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sputnik ?

What I want to know is why Covad can't run their own lines to your home themselves. Sure, copper is expensive, and so is labor to run it, but if you offer a competitive service and provide for your customers, they tend to stick with you for years and years. What's preventing Covad from just dropping their own cables city by city? Let's forget any laws that force Verizon to allow competitors to use THEIR copper, and focus on why competitors can't have THEIR OWN copper, or fiber.

It's called a Natural Monopoly. More than likely when the original cables, or fiber now, was installed the company who installed it got an exclusive license to use the Right of Way to use the space for a given purpose. Only one company or other entity can use the right of way to string cable, fiber, and power cables. It makes sense, it can cost millions to put them in and it's a waste of resources as well as is limited on the number of cables it can handle. However it's simple to rectify, have one entity own the infrastructure who is then required to allow open access. In the case of digital communications, a group of communities in northeastern Utah banded together to create A Broadband Utopia. The cities wired the region for broadband and now they allow any company that wants to offer services using it to do so. A company can offer "cable" tv, internet access, phone service, or the Triple Play.

yes, physical plant should be maintained by an entirely separate entity - ideally a semi-governmental one, though one with tight regulatory and price control would be acceptable

That's what they did in A Broadband Utopia.

And who told you that you can't allow a competitor to run a new cable to your property? It wasn't Verizon who made a regulation making them the sole provider -- it was your local and State government. Don't be mad at Verizon because your government is completely fraudulent and corrupt -- if you vote, kick everyone out on the next election, and keep doing it until someone removes the monopoly provisions.

Actually the best way to deal with a Natural Monopoly like landlines is to separate the infrastructure from services. Maybe instead of a business owning the infrastructure local governments, nonprofits, or business can own it but then they are required to allow open access. This is what's being done in northeastern Utah with a Broadband Utopia. A group of communities in the area built the infrastructure and allows anyone to offer any services it is capable of. It could be internet access, phone service, "cable" tv, or any combination (Triple Play". How would you like a 30 megabit per second, mps, connection? That's what's available now however speeds could get to 100mps.

Most of the fossil fuel/greenhouse warming effect of a computer is in the manufacturing process. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/9100/28876/01299692.pdf That becomes more dramatic when one takes into account that the internet uses something like 6% of our electricity. I don't know how much it is, but manufacturing computers must spew a whole pile of greenhouse gases if they use so much electricity in operation.

My current motherboard is more than five years old. It runs Ubuntu Feisty Fawn fast enough to keep me from grumbling (I don't play games).

I realize that Vista needs some serious horsepower but I'm avoiding it. Lots of people and businesses are doing the same. Have we reached the place where most people and businesses don't have to upgrade every couple of years? Will environmental concerns put a brake on new computer sales?

Muni WiFi shoud fail for the sake of free speech. It's always boggled my mind to see the amount of support on /. for muni WiFi. With the general (and healthy) distrust of government in this forum, why should we desire to ask a government to own and operate a primary channel of the public's communication? Do you really want mayors and governors loyal to the Bush administration to have significant say in who has access to look inside your internet connection?

Why does muni wireless have to mean the government runs and controls it? Just because a governmental body provides the infrastructure it doesn't mean they have to control it. A good example of where government built the infrastructure but allowed whoever to offer services using it is in northeastern Utah. There several communities got together and created a Broadband Utopia. They built it but allow anyone to offer services using it. Though wired I see no reason wireless couldn't be added.

We also need to be building less hydro plants that rely on blocking rivers to generate power

I don't recall exactly when or what the title was but early this year or last year /. had an article about a new type of plant to generate power from rivers. Instead of building a dam and channeling water through turbines, the new idea was to have a boom over the water and lower turbines shaped like egg beaters or blenders. The water running by would spin them thus generating electricity.

Even FRANCE primarily uses nuclear power, so why shouldn't we?

"Nuclear Wasteland"

But solving the nuclear waste issue (or, more accurately, permitting one of the solutions to the nuclear waste problem to be implemented) is not optional. We have to do it to dispose of the waste we've already got. So one of the solutions to disposing of this waste will ultimately be implemented, even if it's just shipping it all to France, where they are disposing of the waste quite handily, thank you very much.

Actually France isn't doing so well with nuclear waste:

"Nuclear Wasteland"

The IEEE letter of assurance has nothing to do with promising not to sue for infringement. The letter merely states that the submitter holds a patent that is relevant to the proposed standard and indicates whether the submitter is willing or unwilling to license their patent in a non discriminatory manner.

The issue is further muddied by the summary claiming that CSIRO refused to submit the letter.

The actual IEEE Letter of Assurance form can be viewed at http://standards.ieee.org/board/pat/loa.pdf

I like the fact that you can map an MAC address to a IP address in DHCP. So, my machines in my network always get the same IP address, even though I all set them to be dynamically allocated. Autoconfig removes this ability, as far as I can see.

Just did some quick research on this - ECC is based upon the difficulty of calculating log_b(n) and the simplicity of calculating b^c. This problem and prime number factorization are polynomial problems on a quantum computer.

If I understand NP-completeness at all, and I could be extremely wrong, quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time (due to any NP-complete problem being able to be restated as any other NP-complete problem in polynomial time on a classical computer).

Harry Teasley, is that you?
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/gizmos/2007/08/perhaps_the_first_lukewarm_bio.htm

Transdermal drug delivery has been around for ages, as well as microfabricated needles. For a recent state-of-the-art, see:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/100/24/13755

The main problem (most of the physical fabrication issues have been overcome) is that almost any material used to fabricate the needles will quickly be recognized by the immune system, which will not only attempt to push the needles out but will also form a "fibrotic capsule" around the needles, preventing them from dispensing drug. How does HP intend to get around these problems? Smoke and Mirrors! This is the grand challenge of transdermal drug delivery, and it doesn't look like HP has gotten much further at all.

Additionally, I don't know about the (rest of the) heathens out there, but I wouldn't want needles permanently implanted in my arm, leaving my insides exposed to the outsides (and how do they plan to control backflow [i.e. bleeding] or prevent blood clots from blocking the needles, by the way??).

A much more promising approach for transdermal drug delivery is actually ballistic injection of (gold) (micro or nano) particles through the skin that are decorated with the drug of interest. This is reminiscent of Star Trek because it's an old idea that is based on some solid science. It might even be possible to use this for ballistic injection of DNA for vaccines, without having any of the drawbacks as described above for microneedles. Ask Dr. Google or see:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/7218/19491/00900385.pdf
and even better:
http://www.nature.com/nri/journal/v5/n12/full/nri1728.html

You also have to keep in mind that the skin MUST be properly disinfected before either microneedles are implanted or ballistic injection is performed, otherwise you may introduce bacteria or other nasties into you deeper dermal layers (does anyone remember flesh eating bacteria?).

There are the IEEE Code of Ethics and the ACM Code of Ethics that frown on that kind of behaviour.

That said, abuse by those with technical power can only be contained either by division (and therefore dilution) of power or by aggressive monitoring.

IEEE

ISC2, the organization that implements the CISSP certification

et al.

Nuclear plants work great in cultures like that; France is a prime example. Most of their power comes from nuclear plants, and they haven't had any problems.

You may be interested in an article in IEEE's "Spectrum", Nuclear Wasteland .

All signs, including your extra long post to a yes or no question, lead me to the conclusion that this theory is either completely wrong, or its proponents have done it a great disservice by not perusing it in the correct academic forums.