Exactly! I'd mod you up if I had points, but I'll just "me too" instead. The Linux ones were rather good, and I felt confident buying a Linksys b/g router after my old 802.11b-only Linksys died after a happy useful life. Only after I'd suffered with the new one for a while did I realize what the problem was. No one will probably buy the vxworks piece of junk for the insignificant cost savings.
That said, while the utter joke that is the V5 should never have made it out the door, they've finally fixed many of the worst problems with the thing. So my guess is that this is mostly really good news for those that have problems still not yet fixed or for those that wanted some of the OpenWRT features -- I would have jumped on this a year ago, but today I might skip it.
Interesting -- sounds like a combination of a DLP chip with an LCD monitor. Is the switch just an on-off (like a DLP), or can it vary the brightness continuously as well? I worry that the darkest gray it can produce will be much lighter than the black it produces.
First and foremost, cut class sizes by some large factor. Cutting them in half would be a good start, but to see dramatic results you'd need an average class size under about 10. To do this, you'll need the same large factor more teachers, and this will cost money.
The logistics of doing so would be particulary difficult, as most existing school buildings have rooms designed to hold 30 students or more.
Pay teachers more. It feels wrong that those chosen to spend 12+ formative years with our children have to get special loans to pay for housing in many areas, and I think we're losing many people who might otherwise make excellent teachers. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel to find people willing to work for the pittance they are paid.
Do away with grade levels (i.e. 1st grade, 12th grade) as we know them. There's too big a difference between learning rates to expect everyone to have progressed the exact same amount in one year. High schools typically are better, as they have "honors" level course, and you can (for example) take a math class typically only offered to those a year ahead of you, and the logistics still work out. But there just aren't enough areas where progression rates are allowed to differ over a long period of time.
Convince people to vote for taxes that pay directly for education. Those towns that have good public schools are the ones that have citizens voting for these levies. This causes them to be desirable places to live, raising the cost of living there even more. But if you are willing to put the money into your schools, the investment you've made on your house will grow in turn, often disproportionately, as the value of your house raises.
While it's true that the formal definition in the field of logic corresponds to the link you provided, I've always been bothered by it, because it relies on an archaic definition of the word "beg". (When was the last time, apart from this particular logical fallacy, that you heard someone in real life use this word in that manner?)
To use the more modern definition of the word "beg", or to "ask for", "begging the question" could quite literally mean that the proposed conclusion is so unfounded that it essentially begs related questions to be asked. So while it is not the historically correct usage, it does fit in perfectly well with modern English in my opinion.
Of course, I'm no apologist for commonplace modern incorrect usage of something to override its true correct definition -- spelling "spatial" as "spacial" or using the word "irregardless" irritates me to no end. But in this case, his usage was not incorrect per se.
(Aside: Of course, the real reason I even made this comment is that I always hated those tests where I had to remember all the fallacies, because "begging the question" never matched with what I knew the definitions of the individual words to mean. It wasn't until recently that I even learned that at some point in history "beg" meant "assume". So it's really a personal vendetta against that particular fallacy. If they'd just used some other phrase, or even the Latin, I'd probably never have been bothered by it.)
I don't know how well the multi-GPU support works with NVIDIA cards under Linux -- I can only testify that dual monitors from a single card works flawlessly. Others in this thread have indicated it should work well if you can get a new motherboard with dual PCI-E and slap a couple 6800s in it, but I haven't seen it in person.
What I do know is that you can go to a multi-node system and run DMX (Distributed Multiheaded X11), which was designed to run powerwall displays. You're in the unfortunate position of having a three-headed wall, as going to a multi box system feels like overkill for you. That said, three PCs with a gig-E interconnect is going to cost far less than one Onyx IR pipe, DMX scales well, and we've got much larger walls than that (I forget the number -- maybe 2x4) running beautifully on a cluster. It's stood up to demos to VIPs without crashing, and I believe that's the most failure-inducing state for any setup.
By the way, DMX is transparent to your application -- it looks just like a single X server with a single OpenGL context. Thus, it can be used with any existing OpenGL apps.
Thanks for the clarification. Nice link, by the way.
Interestingly, the sibling to your reply (by Coward, Anonymous) seems to state that a non-progressive DVD player will have removed the extra information needed to properly deinterlace the original by the time it becomes a 480i output.
In either case, it doesn't seem to matter: My TV doesn't have the Faroudja, and my DVD player doesn't either, and I can guarantee my progressive scan DVD player output looks a better than my non-progressive scan one. So it passes the empirical test on the equipment I've got.:)
I've been trying to figure out for a while if having the upconversion to 480p happen on the DVD player is truly better than having the scaler in the TV do it. After all, they're both starting with 480i data, right?
I don't know enough about the telecine proces though, so I can read your comment one of two ways:
(1) that if the TV knew the incoming stream source, it might be able to do as good of a job. But that's usually the point of a progressive output DVD player, so having it in the player will almost guarantee the best quality upconversion you are going to get.
Or, (2) there is information directly encoded in the DVD that is lost by the time it makes it to the video output, and it is quite literally impossible for anything (like a TV) that does not have direct access to the raw data to do as good a quality conversion as a (good) progressive DVD player.
> Because once they connect to the Internet with an exploited system, it becomes everybody's problem.
I'll second that, and go one further. As the person my family and friends beg for help when their Windows systems have been crippled by spyware, as soon as I'm done cleaning up (or re-installing), I always install Firefox and suggest they use it. I warn them that they might come across some pages that do not work correctly in Firefox, but I also remind them that there are some pages IE was not displaying correctly either, and suggest the effort and frustration saved by using Firefox most of the time would be worth it.
> You want to mount drives form a Mac? > Share the drives and mount them.
He can't, because VPN usually shuts off the other network connections.
> You want to mount vpn mapped drives from a Mac? > Same deal, share them and mount them. If you can't share them, them subst them and share the subst.
Sharing won't work at all over TCP/IP while VPN is in use.
> You want to access your network from the Mac via the laptop? > Enable routing on the laptop. > Better yet, why not install the VPN client on the Mac and leave the laptop out of the question?
He did install VPN on the Mac -- his data is on the Windows laptop.
> What do you want?
He wants to get at all his work data, which is on his work laptop, while using his home desktop machine to connect with his servers at work. Since he can't use a normal TCP/IP connection to have the two machines talk to each other, but they are both at home with him, he thought using USB or Firewire to connect them would avoid the issues with trying to share data between them while the Mac is hooked up to VPN.
The Wen Ho Lee case turned out to be very similar - he was slightly sloppy with some data
Yes and no. The problem was not that he backed things up and accidentally took the disk home with him. The problem was that he intentionally copied classified data to his unclassified computer to back it up. This cannot happen by accident. Anyone who works with such data should knows exactly what will happen if they do this -- prison. In Wen Ho Lee's case, the assumption was originally that he was selling secrets to the Chinese this way, but I think the final answer turned out to be he was just lacking common sense, and thus his long prison term punishment did not fit his crime of stupidity.
> maybe you missed yesterday's story where Trolltech announced that Qt/Win32 is now available under the GPL.
Apparently you didn't notice, but I actually linked to it in my comment. I thought a lot of the discussion in that story was relevant and did a better job explaining the subtleties than I could do in a short amount of time.
As you correctly point out, this port of 3.3.3 is probably going to be useless as of 4.0 because of Trolltech's annoucement, but I thought I might explain the reasons why it would be Qt they are porting to Win32, not KDE.
No, I assume they actually mean Qt, believe it or not. This previous story may help explain.
In short, the Qt version for Windows is only available under the GPL/QPL license for an ancient version, 2.3.0 I believe. There is a GPL version for 3.3.3 for X11, but the modern Windows versions are only available under a commercial license. Thus, I assume the KDE are modifying the X11 one to run natively under Windows so that they can use the GPL licensed version.
Sorry, but I fail to see what Blender and the GIMP have to do with real scientific visualization. Blender is for 3D modelling, and the GIMP is for image processing.
If you're looking for complete, open source scientific visualization and data analysis packages, try VisIt, which supports dozens of input formats and runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Pick it up at http://www.llnl.gov/visit, or get the latest binaries from FTP here.
Both of these are also developed in part by the national labs; they can run parallel to handle terabytes of data, so if you've got small dataset they should be smokin' fast, and if you've got your own cluster you should be able to visualize some huge data.
If you're looking for just a toolkit to build your own application, try OpenDX or VTK.
Mostly true, but you forgot the most important one: Every year there are plenty of cases of death by alcohol overdose. Last I studied the subject of psychopharmacology, there were no known deaths by marijuana overdose alone ever.
(Obviously I use the term "overdose" loosely in the case of the latter. One could argue that there is no such thing.)
If you wait long enough, the page will appear. It appears to be NTS -- the DOE Nevada Test Site. It is the location of hundreds of nuclear weapons tests through 1992.
Open the PC up. That doesn't void your warranty does it? If so, COMPLAIN COMPLAIN COMPLAIN.
I realize there is the occasional anti-Dell sentiment here (not that I'm accusing you of this), but as someone who has both built machines from parts and bought them from Dell, they have been quite good about warranty issues in the past. I have not dealt with their service in the most recent few years, but I have certainly had good experiences with Dell -- they seem to be very kind to those of us who are going to open the cases anyway.
Case one: Bought new computer from Dell without a sound card. Bought soundblaster AWE-32 full-length (and I mean full length!) card. Realized motherboard would have benefitted from extra spacers near the last slot. Called Dell, told service rep I was liable to crack the mobo, and she said she would make a note of it in the system so I wouldn't get any grief should I have to get a replacement.
Case two: My Dell computer, my sister's defective hard drive. Wasn't sure if her IDE card or the drive itself was going bad, so I hooked her hard disk up to my Dell. Momentarily, sparks and smoke from my power supply. Called Dell, they overnighted a new power supply to me with a return box to overnight the defective one to them. And this was as a normal home user's costumer service, not some priority business service.
So in short, unless Dell has had serious problems in the past couple of years, they should be just fine with you installing whatever the fsck you want in your machine.
Short and sweet: burn-in refers to phospors. CRT televisions, both direct-view and rear projection, have phosphors and are susceptible to burn-in. Plasma displays have phosphors and are susceptible to burn-in.
LCD flat panels, LCD projection, and DLP (projection) do not have phosphors. They cannot "burn-in".
This is true in the technical/grammatical sense in that if there were a similar process, it would not be called burn-in. But it is also true that there is no process much like burn-in that happens for these types of TVs. You might have dead pixels, or afterimages, but the former is not burn-in, and the latter is highly temporary and exceptional.
Sorry, no Mod points today, but you deserve 'em. At least you saved me the trouble of typing it all up myself. And just to reiterate, because this is often debated and often gotten wrong: LCD Rear Projection TV's do not burn in. (Excessive heat buildup might cause some temporary afterimages, but that is rare, minor, and temporary, and is thus not burnin. ) And why on earth did they put LCD rear projection with CRT rear projection, but leave DLP off by itself? LCD RP and DLP (RP) are so much more similar than CRT RP is to either one. I'm tempted to send the author a nice polite note with some educational material.
That being said, there are downsides to LCD RP that the author didn't mention. Specifically, slightly worse contrast ratio and a slightly higher dead pixel ratio than DLP. Also, an SDE (screen door effect) is more likely because of bigger gaps between pixels.
However, I bought an LCD RP because these disadvantages were far less intrusive than the disadvantages I saw with DLP. Specifically, some DLPs had dithering that was very disturbing, the price was far too much (relative to LCD RP), and the moving parts were a slight maintenance concern.
> > "These snafus have led the government to open up the labs to defense-contracting bids for the first time in their 60+ year history (until now the labs have been run by UC-Berkeley)." > And why suddenly decide to break open the bidding for the contract, within days/hours of an incident?
It sounds too convenient because that statement is wrong. The contracts for LANL and LLNL had already been opened up. LLNL has been granted an extra two years under UC management, but LANL's contract will be going out to bid now. In fact, I believe the specific association with Berkeley is wrong as well; these two labs are merely managed by the Regents of the University of California.
Sandia, on the other hand, is not run by UC, it is run by Lockheed Martin. I believe their contract was renewed in 2002 for five years.
Re:Windows Wireless Zero Configuration Problem
on
Linux Unwired
·
· Score: 1
I don't believe that works. It doesn't actually connect to them, it merely drops the original connection to let you know that they are available. To quote an Ars article: "You won't fully associate with that network, but the service will pop-up and tell you that there are multiple wireless networks to join, even if you have removed all other networks from your preferred settings (this contradicts Microsoft's report, which says it only affects preferred networks)."
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! I'd mod you up if I had points, but I'll just "me too" instead. The Linux ones were rather good, and I felt confident buying a Linksys b/g router after my old 802.11b-only Linksys died after a happy useful life. Only after I'd suffered with the new one for a while did I realize what the problem was. No one will probably buy the vxworks piece of junk for the insignificant cost savings.
That said, while the utter joke that is the V5 should never have made it out the door, they've finally fixed many of the worst problems with the thing. So my guess is that this is mostly really good news for those that have problems still not yet fixed or for those that wanted some of the OpenWRT features -- I would have jumped on this a year ago, but today I might skip it.
Interesting -- sounds like a combination of a DLP chip with an LCD monitor. Is the switch just an on-off (like a DLP), or can it vary the brightness continuously as well? I worry that the darkest gray it can produce will be much lighter than the black it produces.
You can look up by UID if you want:
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?uid=1
Oh, and UID 0 is always the current user.
First and foremost, cut class sizes by some large factor. Cutting them in half would be a good start, but to see dramatic results you'd need an average class size under about 10. To do this, you'll need the same large factor more teachers, and this will cost money.
The logistics of doing so would be particulary difficult, as most existing school buildings have rooms designed to hold 30 students or more.
Pay teachers more. It feels wrong that those chosen to spend 12+ formative years with our children have to get special loans to pay for housing in many areas, and I think we're losing many people who might otherwise make excellent teachers. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel to find people willing to work for the pittance they are paid.
Do away with grade levels (i.e. 1st grade, 12th grade) as we know them. There's too big a difference between learning rates to expect everyone to have progressed the exact same amount in one year. High schools typically are better, as they have "honors" level course, and you can (for example) take a math class typically only offered to those a year ahead of you, and the logistics still work out. But there just aren't enough areas where progression rates are allowed to differ over a long period of time.
Convince people to vote for taxes that pay directly for education. Those towns that have good public schools are the ones that have citizens voting for these levies. This causes them to be desirable places to live, raising the cost of living there even more. But if you are willing to put the money into your schools, the investment you've made on your house will grow in turn, often disproportionately, as the value of your house raises.
While it's true that the formal definition in the field of logic corresponds to the link you provided, I've always been bothered by it, because it relies on an archaic definition of the word "beg". (When was the last time, apart from this particular logical fallacy, that you heard someone in real life use this word in that manner?)
To use the more modern definition of the word "beg", or to "ask for", "begging the question" could quite literally mean that the proposed conclusion is so unfounded that it essentially begs related questions to be asked. So while it is not the historically correct usage, it does fit in perfectly well with modern English in my opinion.
Of course, I'm no apologist for commonplace modern incorrect usage of something to override its true correct definition -- spelling "spatial" as "spacial" or using the word "irregardless" irritates me to no end. But in this case, his usage was not incorrect per se.
(Aside: Of course, the real reason I even made this comment is that I always hated those tests where I had to remember all the fallacies, because "begging the question" never matched with what I knew the definitions of the individual words to mean. It wasn't until recently that I even learned that at some point in history "beg" meant "assume". So it's really a personal vendetta against that particular fallacy. If they'd just used some other phrase, or even the Latin, I'd probably never have been bothered by it.)
I don't know how well the multi-GPU support works with NVIDIA cards under Linux -- I can only testify that dual monitors from a single card works flawlessly. Others in this thread have indicated it should work well if you can get a new motherboard with dual PCI-E and slap a couple 6800s in it, but I haven't seen it in person.
What I do know is that you can go to a multi-node system and run DMX (Distributed Multiheaded X11), which was designed to run powerwall displays. You're in the unfortunate position of having a three-headed wall, as going to a multi box system feels like overkill for you. That said, three PCs with a gig-E interconnect is going to cost far less than one Onyx IR pipe, DMX scales well, and we've got much larger walls than that (I forget the number -- maybe 2x4) running beautifully on a cluster. It's stood up to demos to VIPs without crashing, and I believe that's the most failure-inducing state for any setup.
By the way, DMX is transparent to your application -- it looks just like a single X server with a single OpenGL context. Thus, it can be used with any existing OpenGL apps.
Thanks for the clarification. Nice link, by the way.
:)
Interestingly, the sibling to your reply (by Coward, Anonymous) seems to state that a non-progressive DVD player will have removed the extra information needed to properly deinterlace the original by the time it becomes a 480i output.
In either case, it doesn't seem to matter: My TV doesn't have the Faroudja, and my DVD player doesn't either, and I can guarantee my progressive scan DVD player output looks a better than my non-progressive scan one. So it passes the empirical test on the equipment I've got.
That's the best explanation I've heard yet.
I've been trying to figure out for a while if having the upconversion to 480p happen on the DVD player is truly better than having the scaler in the TV do it. After all, they're both starting with 480i data, right?
I don't know enough about the telecine proces though, so I can read your comment one of two ways:
(1) that if the TV knew the incoming stream source, it might be able to do as good of a job. But that's usually the point of a progressive output DVD player, so having it in the player will almost guarantee the best quality upconversion you are going to get.
Or, (2) there is information directly encoded in the DVD that is lost by the time it makes it to the video output, and it is quite literally impossible for anything (like a TV) that does not have direct access to the raw data to do as good a quality conversion as a (good) progressive DVD player.
Any answer to which of these two is correct?
> Because once they connect to the Internet with an exploited system, it becomes everybody's problem.
I'll second that, and go one further. As the person my family and friends beg for help when their Windows systems have been crippled by spyware, as soon as I'm done cleaning up (or re-installing), I always install Firefox and suggest they use it. I warn them that they might come across some pages that do not work correctly in Firefox, but I also remind them that there are some pages IE was not displaying correctly either, and suggest the effort and frustration saved by using Firefox most of the time would be worth it.
Really? That's good news. I assume if I'd RTFM I might have known that.....
> You want to mount drives form a Mac?
> Share the drives and mount them.
He can't, because VPN usually shuts off the other network connections.
> You want to mount vpn mapped drives from a Mac?
> Same deal, share them and mount them. If you can't share them, them subst them and share the subst.
Sharing won't work at all over TCP/IP while VPN is in use.
> You want to access your network from the Mac via the laptop?
> Enable routing on the laptop.
> Better yet, why not install the VPN client on the Mac and leave the laptop out of the question?
He did install VPN on the Mac -- his data is on the Windows laptop.
> What do you want?
He wants to get at all his work data, which is on his work laptop, while using his home desktop machine to connect with his servers at work. Since he can't use a normal TCP/IP connection to have the two machines talk to each other, but they are both at home with him, he thought using USB or Firewire to connect them would avoid the issues with trying to share data between them while the Mac is hooked up to VPN.
The Wen Ho Lee case turned out to be very similar - he was slightly sloppy with some data
Yes and no. The problem was not that he backed things up and accidentally took the disk home with him. The problem was that he intentionally copied classified data to his unclassified computer to back it up. This cannot happen by accident. Anyone who works with such data should knows exactly what will happen if they do this -- prison. In Wen Ho Lee's case, the assumption was originally that he was selling secrets to the Chinese this way, but I think the final answer turned out to be he was just lacking common sense, and thus his long prison term punishment did not fit his crime of stupidity.
> maybe you missed yesterday's story where Trolltech announced that Qt/Win32 is now available under the GPL.
Apparently you didn't notice, but I actually linked to it in my comment. I thought a lot of the discussion in that story was relevant and did a better job explaining the subtleties than I could do in a short amount of time.
As you correctly point out, this port of 3.3.3 is probably going to be useless as of 4.0 because of Trolltech's annoucement, but I thought I might explain the reasons why it would be Qt they are porting to Win32, not KDE.
No, I assume they actually mean Qt, believe it or not. This previous story may help explain.
In short, the Qt version for Windows is only available under the GPL/QPL license for an ancient version, 2.3.0 I believe. There is a GPL version for 3.3.3 for X11, but the modern Windows versions are only available under a commercial license. Thus, I assume the KDE are modifying the X11 one to run natively under Windows so that they can use the GPL licensed version.
You're probably right about OpenDX, but I haven't used it. Thanks for the clarification.
Also, I think VTK has a native Tk interface, and I know VisIt is fully exposed through a Python API.
Sorry, but I fail to see what Blender and the GIMP have to do with real scientific visualization. Blender is for 3D modelling, and the GIMP is for image processing.
If you're looking for complete, open source scientific visualization and data analysis packages, try VisIt, which supports dozens of input formats and runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Pick it up at http://www.llnl.gov/visit, or get the latest binaries from FTP here.
I have less knowledge of ParaView, but it is also free: http://www.paraview.org.
Both of these are also developed in part by the national labs; they can run parallel to handle terabytes of data, so if you've got small dataset they should be smokin' fast, and if you've got your own cluster you should be able to visualize some huge data.
If you're looking for just a toolkit to build your own application, try OpenDX or VTK.
Mostly true, but you forgot the most important one: Every year there are plenty of cases of death by alcohol overdose. Last I studied the subject of psychopharmacology, there were no known deaths by marijuana overdose alone ever.
(Obviously I use the term "overdose" loosely in the case of the latter. One could argue that there is no such thing.)
Really? When you said that, I expected they moved it. But alas, the link still works for me....
Maybe try again?
The page was unintuitive and confusing, but here is a permalink to the story that actually works.
If you wait long enough, the page will appear. It appears to be NTS -- the DOE Nevada Test Site. It is the location of hundreds of nuclear weapons tests through 1992.
Open the PC up. That doesn't void your warranty does it? If so, COMPLAIN COMPLAIN COMPLAIN.
I realize there is the occasional anti-Dell sentiment here (not that I'm accusing you of this), but as someone who has both built machines from parts and bought them from Dell, they have been quite good about warranty issues in the past. I have not dealt with their service in the most recent few years, but I have certainly had good experiences with Dell -- they seem to be very kind to those of us who are going to open the cases anyway.
Case one: Bought new computer from Dell without a sound card. Bought soundblaster AWE-32 full-length (and I mean full length!) card. Realized motherboard would have benefitted from extra spacers near the last slot. Called Dell, told service rep I was liable to crack the mobo, and she said she would make a note of it in the system so I wouldn't get any grief should I have to get a replacement.
Case two: My Dell computer, my sister's defective hard drive. Wasn't sure if her IDE card or the drive itself was going bad, so I hooked her hard disk up to my Dell. Momentarily, sparks and smoke from my power supply. Called Dell, they overnighted a new power supply to me with a return box to overnight the defective one to them. And this was as a normal home user's costumer service, not some priority business service.
So in short, unless Dell has had serious problems in the past couple of years, they should be just fine with you installing whatever the fsck you want in your machine.
You are correct, and the grandparent is wrong.
Short and sweet: burn-in refers to phospors. CRT televisions, both direct-view and rear projection, have phosphors and are susceptible to burn-in. Plasma displays have phosphors and are susceptible to burn-in.
LCD flat panels, LCD projection, and DLP (projection) do not have phosphors. They cannot "burn-in".
This is true in the technical/grammatical sense in that if there were a similar process, it would not be called burn-in. But it is also true that there is no process much like burn-in that happens for these types of TVs. You might have dead pixels, or afterimages, but the former is not burn-in, and the latter is highly temporary and exceptional.
Sorry, no Mod points today, but you deserve 'em. At least you saved me the trouble of typing it all up myself. And just to reiterate, because this is often debated and often gotten wrong: LCD Rear Projection TV's do not burn in. (Excessive heat buildup might cause some temporary afterimages, but that is rare, minor, and temporary, and is thus not burnin.
)
And why on earth did they put LCD rear projection with CRT rear projection, but leave DLP off by itself? LCD RP and DLP (RP) are so much more similar than CRT RP is to either one. I'm tempted to send the author a nice polite note with some educational material.
That being said, there are downsides to LCD RP that the author didn't mention. Specifically, slightly worse contrast ratio and a slightly higher dead pixel ratio than DLP. Also, an SDE (screen door effect) is more likely because of bigger gaps between pixels.
However, I bought an LCD RP because these disadvantages were far less intrusive than the disadvantages I saw with DLP. Specifically, some DLPs had dithering that was very disturbing, the price was far too much (relative to LCD RP), and the moving parts were a slight maintenance concern.
> > "These snafus have led the government to open up the labs to defense-contracting bids for the first time in their 60+ year history (until now the labs have been run by UC-Berkeley)."
> And why suddenly decide to break open the bidding for the contract, within days/hours of an incident?
It sounds too convenient because that statement is wrong. The contracts for LANL and LLNL had already been opened up. LLNL has been granted an extra two years under UC management, but LANL's contract will be going out to bid now. In fact, I believe the specific association with Berkeley is wrong as well; these two labs are merely managed by the Regents of the University of California.
Sandia, on the other hand, is not run by UC, it is run by Lockheed Martin. I believe their contract was renewed in 2002 for five years.
I don't believe that works. It doesn't actually connect to them, it merely drops the original connection to let you know that they are available. To quote an Ars article: "You won't fully associate with that network, but the service will pop-up and tell you that there are multiple wireless networks to join, even if you have removed all other networks from your preferred settings (this contradicts Microsoft's report, which says it only affects preferred networks)."