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Oops, the image ran out of bandwith, here's a mirror: maynor video screenshots (image 6)
If you check the mac address you will see that it's an apple mac address. See the IEEE OUI list.

So, what we have is:
a) Maynor claiming he is using an external card
b) Maynor claiming that the ip they got is 192.168.1.50 (see the video)
c) According to the screenshot the mac address associated with that ip is 00-17-F2-41-31-6D
d) According to the IEEE OUI that mac address belongs to apple
e) Maynor claiming he did not hack the apple driver but an external card's driver

THE VIDEO WAS FAKED. END OF STORY

This is only tangentially related, but I thought /.ers would enjoy seeing this space elevator concept video, made by my friend Alan Chan. He's done special effects for LOTR and Harry Potter, so the production values on this video are much nicer than your standard NASA flick.

There is also a very good companion article on IEEE Spectrum, and a fun interview explaining how it was made (short answer: lots and lots of Lightwave).

No, I'm not getting paid to promote this or anything, I just enjoy sharing it with friends/family, and thought a few of you would like it as well. Alan Chan's a ridiculously cool guy, I mean anyone who could make a short film entitled 12 Hot Women and get people to play it at pretentious movie festivals... wow.

For someone who lives in an apartment, maybe this is something that is feasable.
I should look into this more and talk to my neighbors and landlord.

I'm sure we'd all save a lot of money if we split the internet, cable, and telephone bills.

A small group of people are already doing this in NYC. An engineer and tech from a phone or cable company started a business where they laydown fiber from their co to apartments, homes, and offices. They then offer cable, internet access, and phone service and for all three services the cost is cheaper than what the customer would normally pay. This has enabled those who otherwise could not afford these services to get them. They have been negotiating with city officals to expand the service. It was featured in an article in IEEE's Spectrum .

I'm almost beginning to believe that a nationally run telecommunications monopoly may be a better thing after all.

Um, no.

I remmeber AT&T as king dog and I also remeber phone leases and elevated long distance calls.
In the 70s, a phone lease was about $5 a month and a one time purchase of about $70- you never owned the phone you used, kinda like the cable box or satellite receiver is now. In state long distance for my state started at 12cents a minute past 40 miles from the center of town and went up from there. Out of state calls were $.35 a minute - I still have a phone book from the 70s with the rates published.

There is a way around that. The locals, in whatever way, shape, or form, can own the infracturer but then allow anyone who wants to to provide services. IEEE's Spectrum has an article on A Broadband Utopia . In the northeastern region of Utah a group of communities got together to build and offer broadband services. If someone wants to sale services like broadband, phone, or tv they can through the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency with "a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s."

As a Libertarian I am against the government owning many things, but like the highway system I can go along with this. Or a coop or other organization can own it, however because it creates a natural monopoly, it would have to be open to all who want to offer services.

I'm almost beginning to believe that a nationally run telecommunications monopoly may be a better thing after all.

Um, no.

I remmeber AT&T as king dog and I also remeber phone leases and elevated long distance calls.
In the 70s, a phone lease was about $5 a month and a one time purchase of about $70- you never owned the phone you used, kinda like the cable box or satellite receiver is now. In state long distance for my state started at 12cents a minute past 40 miles from the center of town and went up from there. Out of state calls were $.35 a minute - I still have a phone book from the 70s with the rates published.

There is a way around that. The locals, in whatever way, shape, or form, can own the infracturer but then allow anyone who wants to to provide services. IEEE's Spectrum has an article on A Broadband Utopia . In the northeastern region of Utah a group of communities got together to build and offer broadband services. If someone wants to sale services like broadband, phone, or tv they can through the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency with "a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s."

As a Libertarian I am against the government owning many things, but like the highway system I can go along with this. Or a coop or other organization can own it, however because it creates a natural monopoly, it would have to be open to all who want to offer services.

Comcast black listed IEEE accounts as well for a while. Morons.

What if someone found a hole in antitrust laws that allowed some companies to be the only provider of their (important) services to a large group of consumers (a monopoly)? Would you want legislation to fix this, or would you want to wait until it was a serious problem, if it ever became one?

What monopolies are you referring to? Do you mean the cable and telcos? Those are monopolies, natural monmpolies, granted by government to begin with. The local authority is usually the granting authority and it is the responsibility of the locals to make sure any monopoly is open.

While I am a Lbertarian and believe in the freemarket, there are instances where a local community can do things better than a business can. One such instance is "A Broadband Utopia where a groups of communities in Utah got together and put a broadband network in. The communities own the infrastructure but allow anyone who wants to to provide services to people there. I don't have a problem with this because it's the local people who decided themself to do it.

Actually, Susan is my boss, but I'm going to assume you paid attention to where I indicated that in my original post, and are addressing your comments rhetorically. For the record Susan's been in journalism for decades, is a frequent judge for journalism awards, lectured at NYU's journalism school, etc, etc., and been the EIC of Spectrum for over six years. So drop the patronizing smarm. Finding your own angle on a story that's going around is one thing: failing to give adequate attribution is another, and is violation of, e.g., the Washington Post's ethics policy:

Attribution of material from other newspapers and other media must be total. ... It is the policy of this newspaper to give credit to other publications that develop exclusive stories worthy of coverage by The Post.

Certainly, for example, digging up Matthew Patton was an element of the VCF story that was exclusive to Spectrum's coverage, as Patton had not appeared in other media outlets before or since Spectrum's coverage until today.

Even when publications are chasing the same story, when one publication gets something unique it is normal to see lines such as "As first reported in the New York Times..." etc in stories in other outlets. A similar attribution in passing in the text was all that would have been required: instead the only attempt at attribution by the Post article is buried in the credits list for the accompanying timeline graphic, where the "Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers" is credited as a source, which is a) insufficient and b) wrong (the source was "IEEE Spectrum Magazine". Crediting the IEEE is like crediting General Electric for information taken from a "Today Show" segment.)

As a concrete example, let's look at the recent Sony-BMG DRM rootkit controversy. I did a story on that, interviewing many of the people involved, people who got interviewed by a lot of media outlets at the same time, but when I found a nugget that had been exclusivey reported by one other news outlet--a video of a DHS offcial talking to a local buisiness group about the issue--I gave credit where credit where was due. To the Washington Post in fact: "One party that cares is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which includes cybersecurity as part of its portfolio. On 10 November, as reported by the Washington Post, Stewart Baker, assistant secretary for homeland security, made a pointed reference to the Sony BMG protection system..." [Emphasis added]

Speaking personally as someone who hires freelancers, and who's been a staff journalist and editor for somewhat more than a week myself, if your post is indicative of your grasp of the ethical standards of journalism, you can be sure this is one editor who wouldn't call on your abilities as a stringer, or anything else.

This seems to be another one in a string of papers by Fortunato et.al.; the previous ones were The egalitarian effect of search engines (from arXiv, which never seems to have been published properly), and Googlarchy or Googlocracy (from IEEE spectrum.)

It was even featured on slashdot before: Search Engine Results Relatively Fair, posted by Zonk on Sat Nov 19, '05 04:29 AM.

But they seem to have improved their reasoning this time: They finally cite Donato et.al.'s work (Large scale properties of the Webgraph), which explicitly contradicts their claim that there is a correlation between in-degree and pagerank.

Regards, Sebastian.

I'm an editor at IEEE Spectrum. Spectrum laid out out this story in September '05. (I submitted a link to Slashdot at the time, but the editors in their Infinite Wisdom rejected it). Despite our story being prominently featured in google, wikipedia, winning awards, etc, and using similar sources, and so on, the Washington Post didn't acknowledge any of Spectrum's reporting, which has prompted Spectrum's Editor-in-Chief to complain to the Washington's Post's Ombusdman thusly:

Dear Ms. Howell,

We were startled to see that the article "The FBI Upgrade that Wasn't" by
Eggen and Witte in today's Washington Post is taken directly from an article
we did in September 2005 called "Who Killed the Virtual Case File," by Harry
Goldstein (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1455). His article has won 5
major magazine awards. Neither Harry or Spectrum gets credit or attribution
in the Washington Post piece.

Your writers reinterviewed all our sources, including Matthew Patton, whose
only press interview until your story today was in the Spectrum article.
They filed the same FOIA, etc.

Is this plagiarism? Not exactly. Is it shoddy, lazy journalism? You bet.

Sincerely yours,

Susan Hassler

Yeah, IEEE's Spectrum had an article a few months back about a A Broadband Utopia. Good article. And while I prefer a freemarket I think they've got a good idea in that the communities themselves own the infrastructure, backbone but allow others to offer different services.

I think some sort of boost is needed, but I'm not sure what. Obviously, the market is providing enough incentive to innovate and expand services.

In many cities, villages, and other places local governments or other groups are trying to bring broadband, wired if not wireless, to the area they are in yet the telcom and cable companies are fighting this. If these businesses were to offer the service then the local governments wouldn't be trying to do it themselves. Normally I prefer a freemarket but when it comes to things where a natural monopoly occures, as with cable, fiber, and phone lines are concerned I'd rather they be owned by the locals whether it's the government or not, Then have the infracture open to whomever wants to provide, sale, the services to consumers. An excellent example of this is what a group of communities is doing in northeastern Utah:

"A Broadband Utopia"

Utopia, as described by Sir Thomas More, the man who originated the term in the early 16th century, is an imaginary place of few laws, great natural abundance, and an absence of poverty and want. We still don't know how to cure poverty and want. But in a western U.S. desert, a utopia of sorts is taking shape for broadband users who would like to get their phone, television, and Internet services from the providers of their choice.

As it turns out, this Utopia, known formally as the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, promises to be just that, a broadband utopia. And it is very much a real place, encompassing 14 cities in northeastern Utah. It delivers to each of its 3000 subscribers high-speed Internet access, telephony, and television programming through a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s. That's enough to download a 2-hour movie in about 6 minutes, 10 to 20 times as fast as the typical U.S. cable or digital subscriber line connection, 6 times as fast as Verizon Communications Inc.'s much-publicized fiber-to-the-home service (called FiOS) and twice as fast as the new DSL now being introduced in Europe by France Telecom and others.

This is just the first two paragraphs and there's a lot more.

As a side note, if it was a wireless service then it is a simple matter of checking the MAC address that had the IP at that time and tracking it back.

Currently video franchising is done through local municipalities, except in the few states that have recently passed state-wide video franchises (Texas was the first, but there have been others). That means that in most places, a company like Verizon has to go to each county or town to get a franchise, an expensive and time-consuming process. Ultimately that means that fiber to the home is still many months (if not years) away from getting to a lot of people. And meanwhile cable companies are enjoying their nice virtual monopolies on paid TV services.

The Telcos would and do have their own monopolies, allowing them to go to the state or the feds to get approval to lay fiber everywhere would only extend their monopoly unless they were required to share it. Not just anyone can go and lay down land lines, whether it be cable, phone, or fiber. The only financially feasable ways to prevent a monopoly is to either not allow anyone to lay fiber, which isn't really financially sensible, or for the community to own the fiber which then allows others to sale services using the fiber. A good example of this is in IEEE's "Spectrum". A group of communites in Utah got together to lay the work to offer A Broadband Utopia. An association of the local governments paid for and own the lines. They then let business's and such to sale access to different services.

Currently video franchising is done through local municipalities, except in the few states that have recently passed state-wide video franchises (Texas was the first, but there have been others). That means that in most places, a company like Verizon has to go to each county or town to get a franchise, an expensive and time-consuming process. Ultimately that means that fiber to the home is still many months (if not years) away from getting to a lot of people. And meanwhile cable companies are enjoying their nice virtual monopolies on paid TV services.

The Telcos would and do have their own monopolies, allowing them to go to the state or the feds to get approval to lay fiber everywhere would only extend their monopoly unless they were required to share it. Not just anyone can go and lay down land lines, whether it be cable, phone, or fiber. The only financially feasable ways to prevent a monopoly is to either not allow anyone to lay fiber, which isn't really financially sensible, or for the community to own the fiber which then allows others to sale services using the fiber. A good example of this is in IEEE's "Spectrum". A group of communites in Utah got together to lay the work to offer A Broadband Utopia. An association of the local governments paid for and own the lines. They then let business's and such to sale access to different services.

You might be interested in these articles:
http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2005/12/0512 CroxfordChapman.html
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1454

They're about a company called Praxis who build software from the ground up using formal verification techniques to write high integrity systems (i.e. not just basic algorithms). They claim that their approach creates software with less defects and is cheaper in the long run compared to traditional techniques.

Mod parent up: here is the IEEE citation from 2001.

Some phone or cable company owns the lines for the last mile. Deregulation means they own then and nobody else can run lines (unless we want a spagheti mess going to every house). So then, where is the competition? Last mile needs to be considered something like a municipal service. It needs to be fiber, and then we can connect up to whomever we choose at the hubs. There really isn't any other way to do it that I can see that doesn't involve some corporation owning the lines and therefore having a monopoly. At least we have some more direct control over the city officials.

What deregulation means is that a competitor can come in and offer better wireless connectivity. Or the community itself can laydown and own the landline/fiber and allow others access to it and sale various services like what some cities in Utah are doing. A Broadband Utopia. A municipally owned network in Utah is poised to offer 100 megabits per second--and that's just to start.

Suppose your town had four telephone companies. How do you get service from one of them to your house? Somebody has to pay for the physical lines between their CO and your home to start with. If there's just one phone company for that "territory," that company can estimate the revenue they'll make by running out trunk lines to a neighborhood; with four companies, none of them can make nearly as good an estimation. Do you pay for the actual last mile between the nearest junction box and your house? And who owns that last mile, the phone company you're buying from? What if you want to switch services? Does the new company have to run out *their* trunk line to your neighborhood to get to you, and do they have to put in their own connection to your house? Their competitors not only aren't compelled to give them access, after all, they now have a vested interest in making that access *difficult.*

There is a solution as to who owns the last mile, wireless. Because many other countries don't have landline structures in place they can go straight to wireless. Finland and South Korea for instance. Or countries in Africa. Building wireless services is cheaper than laying landlines. With wireless all you need for transmittion over a broad area is to buy or rent a small area to build transceivers/repeaters. IEEE Spectrum has had a number of articles on what groups, whether businesses, communities, or organizations, have done in different countries. Even in the US people in most places have a choice in who they get cellphone service from. I, like many colleges students, only have a cellphone. And with today's technology if the FCC were to open up more frequences, or better yet was compleatly abolished, more services could be offered.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, I suspect your choice of local phone company, cable service, etc. would still be dictated for you in a "purely free market" scenario, because the economies of scale involved would drive the phone companies to negotiate exclusive contracts with subdivision planners, builders, property managers and, yes, municipalities. (The only solution to that I could come up with would, ironically, be *more* government involvement, not less: make the "last mile" an actual public utility; the four theoretical phone companies could connect at the municipal COs, all at the same rates.)

I could possibly go with this. A few days ago I posted an article that was published in the IEEE Sceptrum about A Broadband Utopia , where "a municipally owned network in Utah is poised to offer 100 megabits per second--and that's just to start". Normally I'm all for free trade however I think this idea of communities owning the physical last mile and allowing various businesses to access it and sale services may be a good idea.

Suppose your town had four telephone companies. How do you get service from one of them to your house? Somebody has to pay for the physical lines between their CO and your home to start with. If there's just one phone company for that "territory," that company can estimate the revenue they'll make by running out trunk lines to a neighborhood; with four companies, none of them can make nearly as good an estimation. Do you pay for the actual last mile between the nearest junction box and your house? And who owns that last mile, the phone company you're buying from? What if you want to switch services? Does the new company have to run out *their* trunk line to your neighborhood to get to you, and do they have to put in their own connection to your house? Their competitors not only aren't compelled to give them access, after all, they now have a vested interest in making that access *difficult.*

There is a solution as to who owns the last mile, wireless. Because many other countries don't have landline structures in place they can go straight to wireless. Finland and South Korea for instance. Or countries in Africa. Building wireless services is cheaper than laying landlines. With wireless all you need for transmittion over a broad area is to buy or rent a small area to build transceivers/repeaters. IEEE Spectrum has had a number of articles on what groups, whether businesses, communities, or organizations, have done in different countries. Even in the US people in most places have a choice in who they get cellphone service from. I, like many colleges students, only have a cellphone. And with today's technology if the FCC were to open up more frequences, or better yet was compleatly abolished, more services could be offered.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, I suspect your choice of local phone company, cable service, etc. would still be dictated for you in a "purely free market" scenario, because the economies of scale involved would drive the phone companies to negotiate exclusive contracts with subdivision planners, builders, property managers and, yes, municipalities. (The only solution to that I could come up with would, ironically, be *more* government involvement, not less: make the "last mile" an actual public utility; the four theoretical phone companies could connect at the municipal COs, all at the same rates.)

I could possibly go with this. A few days ago I posted an article that was published in the IEEE Sceptrum about A Broadband Utopia , where "a municipally owned network in Utah is poised to offer 100 megabits per second--and that's just to start". Normally I'm all for free trade however I think this idea of communities owning the physical last mile and allowing various businesses to access it and sale services may be a good idea.

Eh, I've seen this reported in the IEEE Spectrum.

Nothing interesting here -- they say that currently they use fridge-sized receiver; the technology is
not quite there yet.

Such a standard would be openly published, for anybody to inspect. It would, in fact, be an open standard. That's why we have standards.

Thus another way of looking is this is that the thing we need to fear is too few corporation controlliing the internet and resulting in bottlenecks on backbones. In the long run to get high bandwidth we will need p2p that does not traverse a central backbone.

Broadband dooesn't need to avoid the backbones.

A Broadband Utopia
By: Steven Cherry

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

Utopia, as described by Sir Thomas More, the man who originated the term in the early 16th century, is an imaginary place of few laws, great natural abundance, and an absence of poverty and want. We still don't know how to cure poverty and want. But in a western U.S. desert, a utopia of sorts is taking shape for broadband users who would like to get their phone, television, and Internet services from the providers of their choice. As it turns out, this Utopia, known formally as the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, promises to be just that, a broadband utopia. And it is very much a real place, encompassing 14 cities in northeastern Utah. It delivers to each of its 3000 subscribers high-speed Internet access, telephony, and television programming through a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s. That's enough to download a 2-hour movie in about 6 minutes, 10 to 20 times as fast as the typical U.S. cable or digital subscriber line connection, 6 times as fast as Verizon Communications Inc.'s much-publicized fiber-to-the-home service (called FiOS) and twice as fast as the new DSL now being introduced in Europe by France Telecom and others...

That's the first two paragraphs on the first page of the article, and there's two more pages.

Even in old-fashioned Australia, we get ADLS2/2+ across most of the country. Albeit not 20 megabit due to the large distances involved but the average is around 12-15.

And why is 15meg a big deal when places like France (see parent) and Utah (see UTOPIA) have 100 megabit active fibre networks?

The current prototype accepts voltage from -23 to +23v

And the guy's writing the article for IEEE Spectrum. Good luck in your next job.

A little of topic, but related:

If you have been watching the Alctal - Lucent merger, then you might be interested in what IEEE Spectrum has to say:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may06/3427

Technical details of such a system are documented in "Vegas 911" in April's issue of the IEEE Spectrum.

The article document's Jeffery Jonas' development of an anonymized system for the NSA based on his security work in Las Vegas. The work is now being done by IBM. The example in the article demonstrates how anonymized cruise passenger data could be compared with an anonymized watch list by a trusted third party. If the trusted third party finds correlations in the data, the government agency can get a warrant for the specific passenger data from the cruise line.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/apr06/3171 (registration required)

This is all a bit old hat, isn't it?
I was pushing bloodcells around using dielectrophoresis in Uni over a decade ago. Shortly thereafter, water was being tested for purity using the same method, and one of the post-docs was moving tagged proteins around too.
How come it took so long to create a system to be used in protein manufacture?
examples:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/abs_free.jsp?arNumb er=297897 (1994)
http://www.biophysj.org/cgi/content/abstract/77/1/ 516 (1994)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9351287&dopt=Citation (1997)

rTMS uses magnetic fields to treat some of the same things but it does not require anesthesia or muscle relaxant and does not induce seizures. (The film buffs may not realize that Jack Nicholson's portrayal of shock treatment has not been reality for 60 years. The magic of anesthesia and muscle relaxants allow patients sleep through the whole thing without straining a muscle.)

rTMS stimulates a targeted region of the brain (say, a few cubic centimeters). Example? You can hit just the right frontal lobe. Move the coil backwards to aim for motor functions- twitch city. Move it to the center (above the cingulate) and you get a sort of Magnetic Valium effect. Put it over your knee to simulate a rubber mallet.

disclaimer: I know what I've seen, but I'm not a physician. I'm a humble firmware guy. [Why yes, these machines do contain microcontrollers.] rTMS is approved in Canada and elsewhere but is still in clinical trials in the USA.

Do not try this at home. You don't want to find out the hard way that you are a latent epileptic.

The magnetic muscle stimulation machines used by physical therapists and sports-medics are, um, different on the outside...

There's a bit more on this stuff in ieee Spectrum. See: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3050/1

Have a read of the following:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr06/3173/3

which includes a description of the Japanses kei cars. This is a brilliant example of a government recognising a problem that will not be solved by the market alone (everyone buying SUV's) and creating through legislation a competitive advantage to those willing to be more fuel efficient and drive smaller cars.

How sad! Hopefully the study referred to in this Slashdot article will reach a wide audience.

IEEE's Spectrum Magazine has an excellent article on Do-It-Yourself Patents this month. To answer your question, from the article:

The first step in conducting a [patent] search is to classify what it is you have invented. Look in the government classification manual to find the class and subclass that apply to your invention. The manual is available online at http://www.uspto.gov/go/classification/uspcindex/i ndexs.htm.

[skip example]

The next step is to search the patent database at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-adv.htm.

It goes on from there. An excellent read.

Gigabit Token Ring Not sure if there are acually any products which support it.

To be sure, I believe this is a single-wavelength transmission record. For WDM (multiwavelength), I believe Alcatel's 2002 record of 10 Tbps over 3 x 100 km still hasn't been topped (Frignac et al, OFC 2002).

$40 Billion in cash!!! why they could build 4 space elevators and corner the space transportation market... wtf are we doing still stuck in this gravity well when Microsoft have the spare cash to pull us out into orbit...

Here's the original link:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3069

http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3069

Here's the article:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3069

(Sorry about ruining everybody's speculation with facts....)

At http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/3069. Here's the info on the authors:

Bill Strauss is an expert in aircraft electromagnetic compatibility at the Naval Air Warfare Center and is the technical activities committee chairman for the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society. He recently completed his Ph.D. on this topic in the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. M. Granger Morgan (IEEE Fellow) is head of Carnegie Mellon's department of engineering and public policy and a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering. Jay Apt is a distinguished service professor in the department of engineering and public policy and a research professor at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon. He is an active pilot and former NASA astronaut. Daniel D. Stancil (IEEE Fellow) is a professor in Carnegie Mellon's department of electrical and computer engineering.

at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/3069.

people who want you to believe you can make a cell phone call at significant altitude. I don't buy it. Also, I'd like to mention that there is plenty of room for error in their study in that he did a blind experiement with passengers who were not participating. Thus, he has no idea whether anyone actually even had cell phones on or not, just that he saw the waveforms that are indicative of cell phone RF. I'm curious whether or not the plane had wireless on it already, or whether he was passing over and picking up cell tower radiation. Granted, I'm taking a narrow approach to his study, but I am slightly appauled by his lack of consideration for all the factors. By the way, someone should link this to the more tech oriented article on ieee.org, http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3069/5

I agree -- but FWIW here is a more in-depth article in IEEE Spectrum (March 2006 issue) by Strauss et al that has a bit more technical meat on it.

As far as I know the IEEE will happily accept "techs". I always thought membership was open to anyone, but it's hard to verify that right now, as their server seems to be having problems. I don't believe they do accreditation, though there has been talk about it.

From the article:
Despite an eroding manufacturing base and the threat of "offshoring" of some technical services, there's a rising demand for science and engineering skills.
What I get from this is that if you're a member of the IEEE and/or AITP etc., (basically any industry-recognized accreditation body,) you have nothing to worry about. On the other hand, you had better start praying if you are just a tech.

Most of it is surprisingly simple -- the problem being that the physics of earthquake is not well understood yet. For instance, people often observed eerie lighs in the sky in the hours before a quake. Turns out that rock squeezed along a rift can free up eletrons, which means that huge currents flow accross the soil when the pressure is maximum -- right before a quake. It also seems to generate VLF noise (around 0.01 Hz). A simple pair of metal plates separated by an airgap can detect the chance of air conductivity, along with a VLF receptor, can thus form a good earthquake forecast station.

Of course, nobody really knows why these eletrical phenomenon occurs before a quake. But they still can be observed.

First off, a better view of the article(plaintext, one page).

What the submitter failed to mention is that the patent claim is validated only when the patent owner attempts to sue an alleged infringer of that patent. FTFA: "Should the patent owner try to sue an alleged infringer, an examination for novelty would be the initial step in any litigation." And goes on to claim that this is better because the alleged violator will have to provide prior art to invalidate the patent.

This seems to increase the amount of time developers will have to spend in courts, attacking and defending, while reducing the burden on the patent office. Less chance of mistakes, but probably not a viable option for smaller developers without the resources to spend on litigation.

Also, the other linked article claims that "Novelty could be challenged at any point by someone submitting prior art and paying a small fee." Anyone have any idea where this information comes from?

Moodle and other open-source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are your best bet. They are based on a set of open standards known as the Sharable Content Object Object Reference Model, or SCORM. SCORM is the product of years of research and development by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. There are lots of resources available on the ADL site to help you get started and to test your content for conformance. The nice thing about going with SCORM as the basis for your work is that you can move up to a supported, enterprise-level LMS if you need it. A lot of schools already have a SCORM-conformant LMS (like BlackBoard) in place.

SCORM is composed of several component specifications like IMS Content Packaging and IMS Simple Sequencing. You can also include (optional) metadata about the parts of your course, known as Sharable Content Objects (SCOs) and assets. Other standards like the Question and Test Interoperability Specification (QTI) are not officially a part of SCORM but can be incorporated using a number of established techniques.

As far as tools go, there are open-source tools available that expose the SCORM specs in a form that is usable by computer-savvy users, like Reload. There are other tools available that are intended for use by users who are less technical, like InSite Studio by Mississippi State University. Other tools are also available from commercial vendors. Some LMSs even have web-based tools built-in, and are known as Learning Content Management Systems (LCMSs).

SCORM is a mature set of specs that are designed to meet the needs of organizations that are in your exact position, and are widely accepted -- some Asian countries have adopted it as a national standard. The SCORM community is growing quickly and new complimentary specs are being leveraged within SCORM-conformant courses all the time. Tool support should also expand quickly now that the SCORM 2004 spec has been in circulation for a while and vendors are getting thier products certified by the ADL.

This is a very interesting article about the cell chip:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jan06/2609

The IEEE is a professional body called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, so they should know what they are talking about. From the article it sounds like the PS3 will blow the X-Box 360 out of the water. My only hope is that it is not too expensive.

you can be sure the US Gov will be interested in data for its program to put weapons in space...that do the same thing (with smaller rods) to earth.

Scientific Journals, like the various AGU publications, typically prefer photographs in .jpg, false-color data in .tiff, and charts, graphs, and other line-art suitable images as .eps. .Png is acceptable for electronic versions. Photoshop .psd's are not acceptable, and .ai files are acceptable for review / draft stages only. In fact, the IEEE won't accept .jpg files at all. This may differ from what Redbook, Car and Driver, and Rolling Stone want; I've never been published in one of those. But considering that the images under discussion are scientific images, I'd say that .eps files are most definitely on the preferred format list.