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I am rather supprised that no one yet has mentioned A123 systems.

The got a big writeup in the September issue of IEEE Spectrum: http://spectrum.ieee.org/sep07/5490

I wonder what exactly the big concern is with nuclear power. We wouldn't have such a large waste problem if we'd just reprocess the fuel, and who cares if it yields weapons-grade plutonium? Security risk, boo hoo... Really, we might as well use the plutonium for fuel too.

I do admit I don't know entirely about the economic feasibility of it, but France seems to be getting along fine with their large nuclear power system.

France has come the farthest is reprocessing nuclear fuel yet they still have problems. Reprocessing creates waste that's even hotter than before and it creates a lot of toxic residue. IEEE"s "Spectrum" has an article on France's reprocessing, Nuclear Wasteland . It goes over some of the problems France has with reprocessing.

The feds aren't going to clean up the mess. The best hope is that local governments or communities (hell, even a home owners' association or group of neighbors) will build out infrastructure, fiber, wireless, whatever, and either run it as a cooperative or allow open access to ISPs to provide service. The important thing is don't repeat the mistake made with cable companies: Don't grant a monopoly. Own the infrastructure like you own the roads. Let companies compete to provide service over the infrastructure, like Fedex and UPS compete to provide service using the same roads.

In northeastern Utah some cites have banded together to create a "Broadband Utopia :

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

While I'm a Libertarian and support a freemarket, infrastructure like this I prefer to have local coop, government, or nonprofit to own. They would then allow any and all comers who have the resources to use to the infrastructure to offer services.

Do you have some free time in your hands? If so, search for management training. I have a Bachelor's in Computer Science and I'm now completing my Master's in Management. It's useful, but in order to benefit fully you have to read research papers from business academic journals and not just learn from the university book or lectures. I suggest exploring the distance learning programmes offered by Open University. A programme of study will help your mind get used to the vocabulary and basic ideas and conceptions of management, so you will be prepared to seek more knowledge yourself during and after the formal study.

You can also register to a professional association focusing on management. I am a member of the IEEE Engineering Management Society and I read their and other journals, and I am also associated with the Chartered Management Institute, in addition to many engineering and computing societies (ACM, BCS, IET...). I actually combine business consulting and computer consulting in my work as an independent contractor, and I have also found that management and business consulting in general is way more profitable than technology consulting, so I would surely recommend every techie geek to get familiar with basic business jargon and concepts. There are endless opportunities for IT people who have a good grasp of business out there.

To be a good manager you have to focus on both your business processes and your people. Design good processes for your orgranisation. But merely focusing on processes isn't enough, as you need capable and motivated people in order to implement them. That's why you have to be a people manager as well. You must make people believe in you and trust you. You need to actively help your people succeed in their roles, not just demand from them to do something. If you have firing powers, make sure everyone is aware of them, but use them sparingly and with great care. If you are involved in hiring, make sure you have a good grasp of human psychology and always ask potential hires to write some code. If you communicate with clients, keep in mind that the client has a problem and needs a solution to it, not a technology or a product. Even if you use the best programming language, you will fail if you didn't understand what the client wanted in the first place. Actually the ability to correctly figure out what a client wants is what distinguishes a programmer who can work independently (self-employed) from one who can't (and therefore needs to be the employee of a company or cooperate with others in a firm). It's difficult because it's like having to work two brains at the same time (a techie brain and a business brain with lots of psychological empathy and listening skills), bit it's possible and those who can do it see great rewards. Keep in mind that since you work for an organisation you will have to understand your boss's vision as well, since you are being asked to implement it.

The problem for businesses is that a large percentage of programmers who are capable of interacting with clients and thinking about business leave to work alone when they realise their true abilities, so companies, especially SMEs, are always short of good middle managers. If you can code and handle human issues at the same time, it's good to realise it early in your career. If you are only one-sided (only code or only business) then you can work on it and improve.

Improving your management capabilities can happen in two stages: Since you are a developer I assume you are well-versed in analytical thinking, so you can start by learning about business processes. After your brain starts thinking in business terms, begin stressing it with people management issues and some psychology. Enroll to some training programmes, read independently recent management research (most research papers that weren't written just to grab a grant have something u

Many of these recent articles relate to EU Theory ...

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isYea r=2007&isnumber=4287017

They do publish outside of vanity presses, but many papers that should occur sometimes never do. We had one situation where a guy had built a rig out of spare parts and around $100 that precisely duplicated the features of Martian Spiders using a CRT monitor and some fiber glass dust. With just $100, he was able to present a possible explanation for something that at one time was considered a great mystery of the solar system. He presented everything to a journal and he was asked to explain how it might be that planets might store and trade electrical charges. This guy made this rig in his garage. He clearly knows nothing like that. A good case could be made that it is an impossible requirement to be met because it is a contentious subject. The general gist was that electrical terra-forming is not an option for at least that journal -- which is really quite sad because the evidence in support of it is plentiful.

NASA's seeing it on Io right now, and they're about to return more shots of it on Enceladus. We're all eagerly waiting over here to see how they're going to explain roving hot ice geysers with super-hot point sources of heat. It seems like an obvious contradiction to me, and I'm not sure that even they will believe themselves.

To create insurmountable barriers though for publication about the phenomenon seems wacked. This is the kind of crap that those guys have to deal with.

Do you have a link to a web page that doesn't look like it's trying to sell you something? Something for scientists/engineers rather than lay people?

IEEE Spectrum had a recent article that had MUCH better information than Wikipedia though, I don't have it with me at the moment unfortunately.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul07/5280 for those interested.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/5429

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/5429

Because although the potential is phemomenonally great, it just isnt there yet to kill 1 terabit encryption yet.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/comments/1710

The computer demo aforementioned in the link (quick google search, sorry if its not the best article) is a mere 16qbits. From what I gathered, 256qbits is the minimum for a useful qpc. But I am no professional or even a hobbyist in the field. Talk to one if you want more reliable data.

A die in the context of integrated circuits is a small block of semiconducting material, on which a given functional circuit is fabricated. Typically, integrated circuits are produced in large batches on a single wafer of electronic-grade silicon (EGS) through processes such as lithography. The wafer is cut into many pieces, each containing one copy of the ciruit. Each of these pieces is called a die.

There are three commonly used plural forms: dice, dies, and die.

A die in the context of integrated circuits is a small block of semiconducting material, on which a given functional circuit is fabricated. Typically, integrated circuits are produced in large batches on a single wafer of electronic-grade silicon (EGS) through processes such as lithography. The wafer is cut into many pieces, each containing one copy of the ciruit. Each of these pieces is called a die.

There are three commonly used plural forms: dice, dies, and die.

A die in the context of integrated circuits is a small block of semiconducting material, on which a given functional circuit is fabricated. Typically, integrated circuits are produced in large batches on a single wafer of electronic-grade silicon (EGS) through processes such as lithography. The wafer is cut into many pieces, each containing one copy of the ciruit. Each of these pieces is called a die.

There are three commonly used plural forms: dice, dies, and die.

A die in the context of integrated circuits is a small block of semiconducting material, on which a given functional circuit is fabricated. Typically, integrated circuits are produced in large batches on a single wafer of electronic-grade silicon (EGS) through processes such as lithography. The wafer is cut into many pieces, each containing one copy of the ciruit. Each of these pieces is called a die.

There are three commonly used plural forms: dice, dies, and die.

Related links: * LDX@MIT
* Physics of magnetically confined fusion [pdf]
* The main principles of magnetic fusion
* Magnetic fusion experiments at LANL
* High density magnetic fusion
* Has a good bit on magnetic confinement
* Can a magnetic field be used to contain plasma?
* International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
* What's happening in fusion?
* Design of magnetic fields for fusion experiments [pdf]
* Wikipedia article on the topic
* Magnetized target fusion bibliography
* Plasma physics bibliography
* Databases for plasma physics

* Plasma physics laboratories
* List of plasma physicists
* Plasma on the internet

To improve air quality some states have set zero emission standards for cars. A vehicle converted to operate on hydrogen easily meets this standard and can actually improve upon it by cleaning the air through which it travels by reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon monoxide, diesel soot, tire particles and unburned hydrocarbons and converting these pollutants into carbon dioxide and water. This air cleaning capability provides a Minus Emissions Vehicle (MEV).

I don't really care for the government funding business like this at all but I'm not a pure-conservative in the sense that I can allow for some government expenditures for public-access things

I am Liberal, but not as is commonly used today in the USA, instead I am a Classical Liberal, and believe in Liberty and a small government just as Thomas Jefferson did. Today the party that comes closest is the Libertarian Party. Infrastructure is one area I disagree with some Libertarians, I say some because I've seen other Libertarians express the same opinion. I believe that if not the local government then a local business, coop, or nonprofit should own the local infrastructure. They would then be required to have open access to that infrastructure. This would include, but not be limited to, cable, phone, and powerlines. Anybody would be able to start a cable company to deliver cable tv to clients, same with phones and powerlines. If someone wanted to start an electricity business, say using geothermal, solar, or wind generators to generate electricity they could use the powerlines to deliver it to anyone who buys from them. A good example of this in broadband is in northeastern Utah where a group of communities have established a Broadband Utopia .

I see you specify state government and state not the federal government. State is better than fed, but even better is a more local unit such as city, county, or parish. A group of them may join together, as with the Broadband Utopia, to build the infrastructure.

And somehow a single government controlled monopoly will be better than numerous independent monopolies?

It's working fine in at least one place, in northeastern Utah a group of communities have been able to build a Broadband Utopia. Anybody can start a business delivering any service the infrastructure is capable of, whether it be broadband access, phone service, tv, or a combination of them. It is capable of speeds of up to 100Mbs.

Here's a good few:

http://isis.poly.edu/~forensics/pubs/icme2007.pdf

http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/Luk FriSPIE06_v9.pdf

http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/Research/dou ble.pdf

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10206/32570/101109 TIFS2006873602.pdf?arnumber=101109TIFS2006873602

The actual signatures can be retrieved from signal processing methods. I wouldn't have believed that each
camera has its own unique signature (although I have noticed that one or two pixels will be fixed to a particular colour), and that this can be recovered even after JPEG compression.

What's next, "Oooeeyaaaeee"???

Nothing that's not already been considered...

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/i el5/9738/30721/01422583.pdf?arnumber=1422583

Microwave beam control system for solar power satellite
Hashimoto, K.; Matsumoto, H.
Radio Science Conference, 2004. Proceedings. 2004 Asia-Pacific
Volume , Issue , 24-27 Aug. 2004 Page(s): 616 - 617
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/APRASC.2004.1422583
Summary: Solar power system (SPS) transmits microwave energy to receiving site(s). SPS generally uses a retrodirective system which steers the microwave beam to the direction of a pilot signal sent from the receiving site. Microwave beam control issues including beam pointing accuracy, retrodirective systems, and propagation effects are discussed.

Well Seagate say a maximum drive temperature of 60C

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/10 0389997c.pdf page 12

But that might not be the whole story

From here
http://www.calce.umd.edu/whats_new/2003/1203.pdf
"Nakamura (2001) derived an activation energy of 1.27 eV for the fatigue of piggyback PZT actuators, a common wearout mechanism, which resulted in a predicted lifetime of 6.4 years when operating at 3 kHz at 25C."

Googling for the paper I can only get the abstract
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/i el5/20/19818/00917646.pdf?arnumber=917646
"Summary:The experimental lifetime predictive equation for a piggyback PZT actuator was derived. A piggyback actuator is a fine actuator of a dual-stage servo system that is essential to increase the recording density of hard disk drives (HDD's). The obtained equation agrees with Arrhenius' equation."

Arrhenius's equation give a reaction rate which is exponential with temperature

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~wwalsh/arrhenius.html

So the drive will fail faster at 60C than at 25C. You could actually work out the constants in the equation from the figures in the first link and then work out the fail time at 60C. I can convince myself to spend a few dollars on a big fan from the above graph though. This guy

http://www.silentmods.com/section2/item213/part3

says "At the temperature of 65 C the life time of hard disks is shortened two times if not more.". Looking at the Arrhenius graphs above that might well be the case.

Or if you can't fit a fan to you Mac, try to get a low power drive. Either a 5400rpm one, or even a 2.5" one and an adaptor. Since you need an adaptor anyway, you could even get a 2.5" SATA drive and a mounting kit (ideally one that acts like a big heatsink) and connect it via a PATA to SATA dongle.

The research presented in this article reminds me of a an abstract I read a while back about a team who developed an on chip vacuum tube micro-triode which used carbon nanotubes as field emitters. It might not be possible to build a computer out of them, but logic built from them would have some of the same advantages mentioned in TFA (high immunity to electromagnetic radiation, etc.)
Link (warning PDF) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/i el5/16/21940/01019936.pdf

While it is only one study, this suggests that mobile phones are capable of interfering with GPS receivers.

Moore's Law as it applies to PCs has its own "law": Machrone's Law. It's not as strong a "law" as Moore's as it has had to undergo continual adjustment, but there is a definite phenomenon. Also related is the amusing Wirth's Law, also described in that IEEE Spectrum online blurb.

Students often need to download copyrighted material to support their work. I wonder if Kansas U has considered the implications of their policy: if the RIAA can get you disconnected instantly for downloading an MP3, surely other publishers can do the same.

In my own work, I often have to fetch journal and conference papers from digital libraries, e.g. a good one. Often I will find a paper is not available to me because it isn't covered by my University's subscription, like many of the papers here or here. That situation is supposed to force a trip to the brick-and-mortar library (if it has the document), but sometimes you can find the paper online anyway, using a search engine. It might be on the author's website or Citeseer. Sometimes people seem to "accidentally" leave copies of papers where a search engine can find them. This is extremely helpful for a researcher, saving much time, and it is known that online articles are more likely to be cited.

However, except in special cases (e.g. the author has retained the copyright and distributed it for free), this is technically copyright infringement. The publishers want you to get everything through their paywall. That would be fine if everything was accessible, but the exhorbitant fees charged for full access by some organisations prevent that. Therefore, copyright infringement actually helps scientific research by allowing information to flow. At my University, nobody seems to notice (or care about) students digging up papers from elsewhere. But if the Kansas U management style spread here, a publisher could presumably get students instantly disconnected for "bypassing the paywall". You might lose your Internet connection -- for studying.

Is this close to a situation where research is actively inhibited by greed?

"The content you requested is not part of your subscription, please pay $30 to download this 10 page article".

Just filter the iPhones out. Use a netfilter and figure out the damn MAC address range. Gotta be using one of these listed here...

http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt

Who cares if people complain. I wouldn't even deal with it. Must be noob network admins.

Oh ... Web 2.1 beta. Is that what this pervasive, location-aware encryption is all about?

You're also pretending that I don't want any oil production whatsoever. That's quite impossible, given our need for materials like plastics

Actually petro oil isn't needed to make plastic. Plastic was originally made with the same thing as what this new plant uses to make ethanol, plant cellulose. Eastman Kodak, the camera company, has a good description on making plastic from trees:
From Trees to Plastic

as I said, the "clean" way to deal with the fuel is to reprocess it.

Reprocessing nuclear fuel is not clean. It produces highly toxic waste and the radioactive waste left is even hotter. IEEE's Spectrum magazine had an article in the Febuary 2007 issue on France's, who has gone the farthest on it, reprocessing program "Nuclear Waste Land" . In it the writer, Peter Fairley, goes over the problems the French have with reprocessing, and "the basic problem of waste remains unsolved."

I agree in theory, but if the FCC didn't regulate the airwaves, then it would be too easy for your competition to just jam you. Or else, everyone would try to use the same frequencies and the end result would be that nobody could use anything.

Actually broadcasters, those who use the airwaves, would eventually come up with an agreement on how to alocate the airwaves. If there wasn't an agreement it would lead to an arms races driving their costs skyward which would bankrupt them. If I recall right IEEE's Spectrum had an article on this last year, I didn't find it online but it may just of been in print. They do have another article on The End of Spectrum Scarcity though. It goes over some of the same stuff.

I agree in theory, but if the FCC didn't regulate the airwaves, then it would be too easy for your competition to just jam you. Or else, everyone would try to use the same frequencies and the end result would be that nobody could use anything.

Actually broadcasters, those who use the airwaves, would eventually come up with an agreement on how to alocate the airwaves. If there wasn't an agreement it would lead to an arms races driving their costs skyward which would bankrupt them. If I recall right IEEE's Spectrum had an article on this last year, I didn't find it online but it may just of been in print. They do have another article on The End of Spectrum Scarcity though. It goes over some of the same stuff.

How is making sure that every idea you have, but never intend to build, winds up in the public domain any better than patenting something and lying in wait for the poor sap who actually spends time and treasure building it? In both cases you are denying someone who did the hard work: building it and bringing it to market, the fruits of their labor. Just because your motivation is socialist (give things to me that other people worked for) doesn't make it any better than greed. In its effect on the guy who built it, it's the exact same, and the likely effect on bringing products to market: reducing the incentive to do so, is the exact same.

In a business that is built entirely on software, if you don't have some protected IP, you will have a very hard time getting capital, because others can just sit on the sidelines, see your idea, and copy it. Frequently these others are large entrenched companies. With Patent protection, the cost of defending the lawsuit, and the probability of losing, gets factored into their build vs buy calculation.

I think that the USPTO current peer review project addresses the real problem of obviousness or prior art. It used to be that patents required that the idea be "reduced to practice", which was generally interpreted as putting it into use in some way. Addressing trolling by requiring that "inventors" actively try to bring the invention to market would round out this reform, and, with audit of the existing patent portfolio using these methods, would solve the bulk of the problem.

The /. crowd should be careful what we wish for in this arena. Many of us have livelihoods that depend on VCs being willing to fund startups, which depends on larger companies being willing to pay up if those startups become successful. In many cases, the pay up boils down to them not being willing to take the risk of being sued if they build it themselves. After all, once you've built it, you've made all the mistakes along the way, so copying you costs less than it took (capital in from the VC) in the first place. There are only two reasons that you buy the company rather than copying them: 1: Customer base/reach, which is much less common, although it's the one you hear about (MySpace, YouTube) 2: Intellectual property. Otherwise, they can just hire your key employees and/or reverse engineer your code.

The "right of way" for infrastructure use is enforcing the monopoly. In this case, the providers are not building the infrastructure, only using it -- therefore, it is no longer a natural monopoly situation and should be open to competition. They are not directly maintaining the infrastructure, but rather paying taxes on their income that does maintain that infrastructure. Since that's the case, no matter how many companies enter, the single shared infrastructure would be maintained and costs would be minimized with profit rates approaching the risk-free new money rate. The government is effectively providing an unfair monopoly in this situation, and is not looking out for consumer interests.

While I generally support a freemarket, in cases like this where a right of way for cables or whatever are needed I prefer a local group own it. That group may be the city or county government, or it may be a coop, or even a nonprofit the locals own. Whoever owns it then allows anyone who wants to to provide any services it is capable of, broadband access, cable tv, phone service, or anything else that comes down the road. A project like this is currently underway in northeastern Utah to provide a A Broadband Utopia. What they built could provide net speeds of 50Mbs to 100Mbs. A household could have two hdtv channels at once, or someone could simply provide phone service.

As for radio, TV, and such -- that is hardly a monopoly (outside of the Clear Channel case anyways) because you can have 20ish stations which provides plenty of competition... The FCC in this case isn't enforcing a monopoly so much as protecting the rights of a broadcaster to the frequency they have paid for.

Yea, if you think so try to start your own radio or tv station. Without megabucks you won't be able to buy a license, if you can get an open frequency. Current technology isn't that expensive and allows a lot of stations to use the spectrum, however the FCC uses rules for broadcasting made in 1934 when the FCC was created. A lot more stations can be setup in the same spectrum today than the technology avaiable then allowed. However the mass media doesn't want the rules to be changed so more stations can broadcast, more stations mean more competition which they don't like. Start a Pirate radio station and watch how quickly licensed radio stations in the area sick the FCC on you even when you aren't interfering with thier signal.

the original poster should look up economic terms before throwing them about.

That was my point as well when I replied to you.

And the Cell is designed for scalable multicore/chip parallelism.

Its main magic is its coherent, superfast "elements" bus, which retains coherency even at 1.6Tbps across multiple cores and chips.

IBM has 4-core chips in pairs already deployed in public, and 128-core chips in the lab, where a massive new top-predator supercomputer is being built on the new architecture.

The Cell has builtin allocation facilities, so app code doesn't have to schedule or otherwise closely manage the fast SPEs, just send tasks to a generic pool.

Which SPEs just DMA into a unified memory model.

That kind of simplicity makes Cell programming harder than, say, PowerPC programming, but much easier than other parallel programming, without losing its speed. Once there are some basic libraries for programming "common" new parallel tasks on the Cell, it won't be considered any harder than it was to program x86 "Protected Mode", Extended vs Expanded Memory, word alignment, etc.

• There is very few storage on the SPE side, which must be shared by the code, the data and the stack.
• The SPEs do not have memory protection on their Local Store, which means that smashing your data or code with the stack is not detected and handled automatically.
• The SPEs have a pure vector ISA, which forces the programmer to vectorize the SPE code in order to obtain good performance. In fact having a pure vector ISA forces the compiler to emmit lots of additional instructions (rotating and masking) for non vectorized code (compared to scalar ISAs), making the LS space limitations toughter.
• The PPU, although multithreaded, is not as powerful as a traditional PPC (e.i. no OoO execution), which in practice means that you cannot spend too many cycles on scheduling work for the SPEs, otherwise your SPEs will be starved.

just so long as we can get the greens to stop beating up on nuclear fission..

Nuclear fission isn't an answer, it's a problem. Even if you want to reprocess the waste. The French have done to most research on reprocessing and they don't have it figured out yet. Instead what they have is hotter waste as well as highly toxic chemicals leftover. The "IEEE Spectrum" had an article of this a few months ago.

Ehm... no.... that should be "First College to Deploy DRAFT 802.11n Network"

802.11n hasn't been ratified yet, there's no such thing as an 802.11n network at the moment.
Currently expected in september 2008
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/Reports/802. 11_Timelines.htm

It will be a while before someone rolls out the first 802.11n network.

TTB

Before flaming this post based on the subject line, read this article and this one, which are about studies demonstrating the mechanism for learning disability caused by exposure to 700MHz RF fields.

All of the solar arrays on ISS are about the same.

The dimensions of each panel (total 4 panels per truss) are 111.6 ft x 15.2 ft. Behold ASCII art skillz! (cut, because /.'s fucking lameness filter)

Source: "Photovoltaic Power for Space Station Freedom" by Baraona, C.R. in "Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, 1990., Conference Record of the Twenty First IEEE"

And here are some Dutch guys doing it 3 years ago:

This http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arn umber=179738 if you can get it (IEEE login required, Idon't have one).

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Magnetic%20For ce%20Scanning%20Tunneling%20Microscope%20Imaging%2 0of%20Overwritten%20Data%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Yes, that's exactly it. Continuing to develop software with techniques and practices that made sense decades ago requires only the tools developed back then. Perhaps this style of development and the mindset that perpetuates it are factors in why the failure rate for software development projects remains high despite tremendous advances in the technology -- and the practices not adopted.

France has a bunch of uranium that they aren't quite sure what to do with:

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

EEE 802.1X is an IEEE standard for port-based Network Access Control; it is part of the IEEE 802 (802.1) group of protocols. It provides authentication to devices attached to a LAN port, establishing a point-to-point connection or preventing access from that port if authentication fails.

You might want to read the documents you refer to. I guess, what you meant was NAC - Network Admission Control

I have asked my sysadmin to set up a separate network for laptops that might be used outside our intranet that is not part of the trusted intra net.

Well, what about the 'natural monopoly' of the owners of the last mile of copper wire/fiber optic cable to the homes? Unless we want 15 different cables and wires coming into each home for 15 different competing providers, how will we provide competition in the marketplace?

A local government or non profit can own the infrastructure. They then allow whoever to lease bandwidth and offer whatever service they want whther it be cable tv, net access, or phone service. A groups of communities in northeast Utah is doing this, they have A Broadband Utopia there.

if science is necessarily naturalistic, then how do we know that a naturalistic explanation like "big bang + evolution" is true, as opposed to a credible falsehood?

As the naturalistic explanation describes a greater diversity of the observed data compactly, it's more probably the truth. (See Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism, and Kolmogorov Complexity", by Paul M. B. Vitányi and Ming Li [subscription PDF, free PS] for the math to prove this.) You can write the equations for all the most complicated models in physics (which describe pretty well all observed phenomena) and put them legibly on a one square meter poster, with the worst inconsistency being between quantum mechanics and relativistic gravity. The bible takes longer and presents more internal contradictions (or as the Catholic Church prefers to call them, "Mysteries of Faith").

This whole "falsification" thing seems a little two-edged to me. Please demonstrate that it cuts creationists but not evolutionists in light of "creationism as an attempt to falsify evolution".

Simple; falsification means that some hypothetical data might be found to prove the theory wrong. For example, Evolution (on Earth) might be proven false (and Intelligent Design true) by, say, the landing of UFO's and the appearance of the immortal alien designers who have been engineering the Earth's ecology for the past four billion years or so. "Yes, we've been doing this for entertainment. If you want, we can give you a courtesy copy of the 'Making Of' special to watch. We nearly went broke when the giant reptillians market went bust and have been struggling frantically to catch up with the competition ever since. One of our VP's for marketing has a possible comeback idea that he thinks will appeal to the same key demographic, though he won't say where he got it; your females won't need much modification, but the males of your species are going to need to grow a lot more tentacles over the next couple generations...."

Shortly before the collapse of civilization into a bad Hentai piece, the scientists admit that, yes, evolution is a crock, that whole thing (at least hearabouts) was "intelligently designed", allowing for the loose value of "intelligent" that "entertainment executive" gives us.

However, there is no* possible datum that might appear that would disprove their proposition "life was intelligently designed". It might become an observed fact (if they get really miraculously lucky), but it won't ever be a theory, because it's not falsifiable. Intelligent design isn't merely wrong, it isn't even wrong .

* I suppose the appearance of God announcing "Say, I thought I left an nice damp chunk of iron here; where'd all this wet carbon-based goo wandering about come from?" shortly before correcting the problem might change a few minds before wiping them out, but technically that doesn't rule out that the whole thing is one of Satan's practical jokes.

Stick it in a breeder reactor and you not only get more fuel you can stick into the first reactor

Do you really think reprocessing nuclear waste is a solution to the waste? Not even the French, who have done the most research on this, has been able to get reprocessed fuel without generatiing extremely hot radioactive, and toxic, waste. A few months ago IEEE's "Spectrum" had an article on this, Nuclear Wasteland .

No, the problem with waste is that a chain of political idiots and their energy department appointees

As the above article states, your suggestion is only a pipedream, it is not currently feasible.

the problem with waste is that a chain of political idiots and their energy department appointees (every president since Carter, inclusive)

Carter, who did his post-graduate work studying nuclear physics? Who also was a command officer on a nuclear submarine?

• A free email service. GMail offers free mail forwarding and I presume some other services do so as well.
  
• A university alumni address. There's a good chance your alma mater offers one. Universities benefit because they get to stay in contact with potential alumni donors. Institutions of higher education are more stable than almost any other entity in society, so the odds joe@alumni.example.edu will still work 50 years from now are as high as you can hope for.
  
• A for-pay forwarding service. Pobox has been around since 1995 and I've been a customer since 1996. The current price is $20 a year for three pobox.com addresses and some other features like spam filtering. As for whether customers can rely on any one company to stick around, Pobox's current FAQs have long since been "corporatized" but a rough paraphrase of a question in an earlier version went something like this:

  Q: How do I know you'll be around in the future?
  
  A: Will you? (Ha! Didn't think of that, did you?)

  
  I prefer my pobox.com address over my university's alumni address because the latter assigns a letter-and-number userid I've never liked. I could always start using my gmail.com address instead, under the presumably-safe assumption Google and GMail will be around for a long time, but as a firm believer in TANSTAAFL I can't believe that GMail and/or forwarding mail to another address will remain free forever. Meanwhile, Pobox has a more than ten-year history and counting with better than 99.44% uptime. Even were I to switch to GMail for my day-to-day email access as opposed to the Emacs-based mailer I've been using for more than a decade, I suspect I'd still give out my pobox.com address instead of the gmail.com one.
  
  If you prefer gaining a permanent address by supporting a worthy nonprofit, two possibilities are IEEE and the Free Software Foundation. Each costs annually considerably more than $20, of course; if FSF would offer some sort of lifetime membership for a reasonable sum I'd probably do it, though.