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High-Speed Data Transfer Over ... Mud
An anonymous reader writes "You might have laid Ethernet through some pretty aggressive environments, but how about through a 4-inch diameter steel pipe immersed in electrically conductive mud at pressures up to 1000 atmospheres, temperatures up to 150 deg C, and with vibrational accelerations of hundreds of g?
The Department of Energy has announced the invention of a system to allow data transmission up to 1 Mbit/s along drillpipe. That might not sound too fast, but the current technology uses some pretty neat electromechanical engineering to get ... 10 bits per second (on a good day). This will revolutionize the oil industry's ability to see where its wells are going and steer them into pockets of oil."
This is good because acording to George W. Bush the Oil companies just can't seem to get enough oil. Now they more efficiently rape the envirement.
Help I'm a rock.
While I think it's a pretty nifty thing to be able to do, all they are going to use if for is to get more oil so they can mess up the environment more... Now it would be interesting if they hooked this up so everyone in a nieghborhood could connect to each other through a mud connection :p.