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Vinyl, on the other hand is analogue and as such requires a stylus contact to read the grooves which will eventually wear out the media.

Not true, in the latter days of vinyl, they developed a laser stylus now commercially available which doesn't touch the media

I was skeptical, assuming that this would largely negate the claimed advantage of analog vinyl over digital CDs, even with an absurd sampling rate, but following the link farm page to the real article suggests otherwise:

One of its biggest appeals for audiophiles is the fact that its electronics are entirely analogue – the signal is not digitised as part of the signalling and playback process.
[...]
The LT player's five lasers – one on each channel to track the sides of the groove, one on each channel to pick up the sound (just below the tracking beams), and a fifth to track the surface of the record and keep the pickup at a constant height

Sounds fancy. Whether that's worth $20,000, well, YMMV.

It's less TCAM overall, because of the large address space: you only need one v6 allocation to cover what ends up being thousands of separate tiny allocations in v4.

According to this video at 18:44, Comcast measure v6 on their residential deployment (the one in this world) as being slightly faster than v4. I'm not sure if that's a precise enough platform specification for you, but there it is.

Caller ID is on every cell phone I've owned, with no option to disable it. And automatic collision-avoidance systems that take control of your car will be mandated in the future

Nobody is forcing drone owners to download and install this update. And in case you weren't aware, the drone involved in this incident already has software to restrict access to no-fly zones. The only difference is now you can download an update that includes the White House no-fly zone.

The EFF is once again engaging in fear-mongering to try to get attention - and suckers are falling for it - again.

Please consider this - without manufacturing such "crisis", the EFF would not attract new members and funding to replace those leaving by various attrition methods. So, they are employing the same techniques as spammers and clickbait advertisers.

I think the truss is purely US-built. Here's a reasonably recent color-coded schematics.

Not anymore.

I'll admit Hollywood and artists have given us some wonderfully scary imagery of the killer robots of the future:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-i...
http://ockhamsbeard.files.word...

But I suspect the real future will be more like:

http://www.wired.com/images_bl...

Or the much less vulnerable and maintainable:

http://eandt.theiet.org/news/2...

Coupled with thermal imagery, a simple AI to identify sneaking human patrols, and (at least at first) a go/no go command from some Private Tentpeg hunkered down in a bunker or OP somewhere. Trust me on this: I've BEEN that Private Tentpeg .. and later, his supervisor. It isn't far, in the front lines, from a tripwire connected to a hand grenade" to a much more complicated (and even more lethal) machine. How much "intelligence" will be vested in that machine is just a quibble. Trip wires aren't smart at all, yet we've never hesitated to use them.

Take a look at http://eandt.theiet.org/news/2013/oct/metal-3d-printing.cfm

One of the many engineering triangles (design for cost, manufacturability, performance) is slowly getting turned on its head. The manufacturability aspect historically has held back performance and held back cost. With 3d printing, in particular with metals, the cost is volumetric - not complexity or volume driven, and the manufacturability is greatly simplified (needs to be defined in 3d space). This allows the designer of a part to minimize the compromises that they need to take.

It may reduce tolerances due to manufacturability, but as the above link shows, you end up with a part which supports the specifications that are needed.

My personal experiences are in trying to find a out-of-production part for a cupboard ( http://use-cases.org/2013/07/10/3d-printing-shelf-pegs/ ), 3 hours with a modeling tool saved a further 3 hours going through drawers at the hardware store or 3 hours on the internet searching for them. 3d printing solved my problem, and solved problems for a lot of other people (there have been about 150 orders on shapeways for this part).

Caught in the web that is drawing other threats to the status quo into the Swedish "justice" system.

Long complex production lines with a robot per few tasks? ...
http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2011/05/teardown.cfm notes an ipad2 has "1,227 (excluding box contents), of which 652 components reside on the Main PCB and 227 on the 3G Module."
~1000 parts to move around ... x stations with "robot" units .. x production lines running 2/4
More robots to keep parts flowing 24/7

I am going to call BS...

http://kn.theiet.org/news/sep10/tata-blaydon-jets.cfm

This car is more fuel efficient, lower emissions, faster and more powerful than anything ever produced for the commercial road.

The trick with jet engines is not to run it lower, but use the power to run an electrical engine that can be ramped up and down.

http://www.bladonjets.com/applications/automotive/

"Requiring no water-cooling system, oil or catalytic converter, it will provide vehicle weight savings of up to 15% – with a consequent reduction in fuel consumption and carbon emissions – compared to a piston engine. Further environmental benefits will be gained from its fast warm up (a few seconds, as opposed to several minutes for a conventional engine), cleaner combustion and lower manufacturing energy requirements. "

Indeed, there are a lot of different factors that you'd have to take into account. Also, as you said there are some different situations that could lead to different results. I would be hard work to try and figure it all out. Lucky for us, I found a page on the internet by people who have already worked it out, and come up with some conditions that must be fulfilled in order to see a reduction in carbon dioxide production.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/item/working-from-home-and-online-shopping-can-increase-carbon-emissions

It would have been nice if they'd also had a link to the actual paper.
http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm

This thing was pretty hard to find....It's interesting to me that the PRESS RELEASE (which doesn't reflect the report very well) generated 290 comments. Here's a link to download the actual report:

Rebound: unintended consequences of transport policy and technology innovations

Full Report: "Rebound: unintended consequences of transport policy and technology innovations", page has link to the PDF.

That was a crap press release about a crappy study. Study is here:
http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm

Look what you find:
- It's not new research, it's a compilation of existing research
- No mention of the methodology used to select studies. And to think that engineers get sniffy about medical research not being properly scientific -- it's impossible to imagine a Cochrane meta-analysis being done this shoddily
- The key studies date from ~2001/02! For online shopping! That's just nuts. Even if they were well-conducted, they're obviously well out-of-date and based on what was, then, much more theory than practice. No Ocado, Amazon a fraction of its current size, no online music to speak of, etc.

Crap crap crap

Not having the actual study, it's hard to say, but it seems like there's some big assumptions here.

http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm

Looks like it's a meta-study; it seems to quote this: http://is4ie.net/images/Matthews.pdf, quoted by someone else, which is a 2001 study from the US. Also this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1162/108819802763471816/pdf - a study of online book retailing in Japan in 2001.

I may have got this all wrong, and there may be some new UK research I didn't find.

I much prefer the Institute of Engineering and Technology "The science of predicting football results".

Ahh, we can melt through that with a small self contained probe that is RTG powered. It could be designed it to melt its way in, and climb down the hole as it goes. I don't see that as hard.. It could then release a probe or a number of gliders to roam about. The gliders could even be powered by their own small RTG's which would allow them to be driven!

As far as communications fhrough the ice well there is research in this area like this that utilize high loss. Take this article for instance: "Underwater communications gradually improves."

The robots will talk - in effect, using ultrasound - at distances of up to 5km apart.

Also, if you look at the Seagliders.. "Seaglider monitors waters from Arctic during record-breaking journey under ice."

One operated for 25 weeks, spending 51 days and traveling more than 450 miles under the ice, before being collected Feb. 26 by the Danish Navy.

Seagliders autonomously find shallow areas in ice in order to surface. Do we know if all of the ice on Europa is 3 kilometers thick? No. Maybe there are shallower, and warmer areas....

And lastly again, we can do a Europa mission in which we first get an orbiter first to identify shallower areas of ice, then we land on surface with a lander and take samples, then in a later mission we try to melt down into the water. We can do this if we wanted to. The only problem is that our agencies would rather focus on Mars. Why is that again?

http://www.theiet.org/publishing/books/wir-reg/17th-edition.cfm

Basically ALL electrical wiring, home or hotel or workplace, has to meet the standard.

Yes, UK plugs have fuses, sockets have switches, L/N are shielded, the plug has a cable anchor, and if you REALLY pull the wires out of the plug it is designed so the live, being shortest, comes out first.

But before the power gets to the socket it has to go through the "consumer unit" which carries RCD AND (over current) Breakers for each wiring loop.

People dying of electrocution in the UK is so rare I can't remember the last incident.

Here's a very good article from the IET about the AGC hardware: http://kn.theiet.org/magazine/issues/0912/smart-apollo-0912.cfm

The IET are running an event on Programmable Hardware Systems that looks interesting. Anyone going? Their website is http://conferences.theiet.org/phs/

Whereas in the real world UK, I have to get an electrical contractor to fill in form BS 7671:2008 after I have simply replaced a smashed light switch.

The fact that I live out in the sticks and that I cannot find a qualified electrician who will drive out to do such a small job, seems not to bother either the department of information retrieval - erm, I mean the local council planning department, nor my house insurers.

FFS. Replacing a light switch is no more difficult than wiring a plug. If you're dumb enough to cock that up, you probably have someone who looks after you anyway.

Today, I am the Harry Tuttle of electrical wiring.

What I could do with are some really nice ducts to hide my anarcho-lightswitch, before Bob Hoskins and his long-capped friends mark me as a terrorist.

I am a member of IET and just now I got their magazine, and here's what the cover article says: "For working meetings, you need good audio and the ability for everyone to see the same working documents. You don't have to look at each other." - Tony Gasson, Vice President for EMEA, Interwire. You need to quit the video meeting = face meeting mentality! In fact, in a videoconference, your brain may lose much more energy and time in processing your colleagues's behaviour, body language, and faces than focusing on what really matters to all of you: Your work. Focus on the f***cking document and the laptop with the software code, not on that nice woman's face!

Seriously, until IT has its own professional body that REQUIRES IT workers to be qualified/certificed in the same way as other professionals, its a career to steer clear of.

If you're in the UK, investigate the Institute of Engineering and Technology or the British Computer Society (the latter is more applicable to IT in the traditional sense of the term).