This actually isn't a bad idea. A while back there was a story about the urinal fly, and how urinal in Amsterdam have a sticker of a little fly on them because they found that it improved people's aim when they had something to focus on. This seems like the same principle taken to the next level.
Not sure who modded you insightful, but in today's regulated markets, par value for stocks is essentially a meaningless concept. Companies can basically set it at whatever value they like, and it has no relation to the IPO value or any other meaningful quantity.
From the Motley Fool glossary:
Par value (stock)
An arbitrary dollar value that a company assigns to its shares. Par value has no economic significance. The legal significance of par value is, roughly, that if shares are issued below par value, the holders of those shares might be assessed the difference between par value and the issue price. Most stock certificates state that the shares are fully paid and nonassessable to indicate that holders are not on the hook for additional contributions because the shares were issued at a price greater than par value. Companies usually assign a very low par value to common stock.
Not to mention, most CxOs and other highly-placed insiders make their money from option grants, whose strike price the company's board can set to guarantee a profit for the recipients no matter where the current stock price is.
Is it you, or Vonage, or both, that seem to be confused over the concept that, Victor Kiam notwithstanding, although customers may also be shareholders or potential shareholders, i.e, investors, and vice versa, they are not the same thing.
Actually, you're the one that's confused here. If you're RTFA in the parent post, it would have told you that this whole debacle started when Vonage decided to offer shares of the company to its customers at the IPO price. If you were an existing customer (as I was), you received an email about a month back telling you about the pending IPO and offering to let you buy shares.
The company reserved about 14% of its IPO shares for its customers. In other circumstances, this might be seen as a perk: Buy the service, get hot stock. In this case, however, at least in the early going, it's proving to be an efficient way to engender widespread customer frustration.
At this writing, Vonage customers who took the company up on its offer have lost 15% of their money. Some of them, presumably, are now selling their stock to non-customers who were savvy or fortunate enough to wait until the stock started trading. Even if the stock recovers from here, Vonage customers will no doubt remember that they could have done better. And if the stock continues tanking...well, then, even Vonage customers who love the VOIP service will feel nothing but bile toward the company.
[...]
Given the difficulty Vonage had generating institutional demand for its IPO (witness the tanking stock), a cynic might suggest that the apparently customer-friendly IPO gesture was actually just a savvy capital-raising move: "Our customers don't know jack about IPO valuations--so let's sell 'em stock!" Or, perhaps, Vonage is just so confident in the future of its company and stock price that it is sure its currently chagrined customer-IPO-buyers will be grateful later.
In any case, if the stock stays in the tank, it will be interesting to see how many customers quit Vonage's service because they have lost money in Vonage's stock.
Unlike their current services, in which online shoppers pay around $4 to rent new movies for up to a month, the films will be sold for prices "similar to home video," says Ramo.
Ramo (Chief Executive of Movielink) is more explicit in a separate LA Times article where he admits that Movielink will actually be selling the online downloads for about double the street price of the physical DVD. The article quotes movie studios as saying that they don't want to alienate their existing DVD sales channel operators, since DVDs currently account for 46% of studio sales -- about double the take from the box office.
Piracy fears also prevent online services from giving technological early adopters what they really want -- the ability to watch downloaded movies on their televisions. That's because the studios insist that downloadable movies include rigorous safeguards on copying. Users, for instance, can burn a DVD of a downloaded movie, but it will play only on a PC.
[...]
Ramo said download-to-own movies would sell for $20 to $30 -- up to double the $15 that discount retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. charge for DVDs, with downloads of classic titles for $10 to $17. He said the premium reflected the convenience of the service and the flexibility to transfer the digital download to two computers, as well as the ability to create a backup DVD that also would play on computers running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.
Reading quotes like this really make me wonder if some of these executives are living in a bizarro parallel reality, or if they've just gotten accustomed to spewing this sort of doublespeak nonsense with a straight face. Supposedly consumers will be happy to pay double for the "flexibility" of being able to back up their new movie to computer and play them on their computers. Well, when I buy the physical DVD from the store, surprise surprise, I can play my DVD on my computer OR the TV -- and guess which display I'm going to be watching most of my shows on, my 20" monitor screen or the 35" TV downstairs? Backing up the DVD is a snap too, and I don't have to deal with the annoying hassle of Movielink/CinemaNow's homebrew DRM.
Last I checked, paying more for something that I can do strictly less with wasn't the dictionary definition of "flexibility", but hey, I'm not a high-paid exec, what do I know.
Really? Check out their MSFT page - it really is a lot better organised than Yahoo's. Once they support Singaporean stocks (they already have lots of information), I'm gonna be all over these guys.
Have you ever actually used Yahoo Finance to do any in-depth analysis? The depth of information you can dig up from their site is astounding.
Want to know their daily historical prices going back to 1986? How about getting the percent of their float currently shorted as a gauge of bearishness on the stock? Or track insider trading as an indicator of management's confidence in their own company? Check the options chain for ways to hedge your positions or as a way of leveraging an investment in the stock? Yahoo provides all this and more.
At present Google Finance just gives you the thousand-mile overview and links you to other sites for anything more detailed. While this might improve in the future, at the moment the article summary's judgement on their scope is valid.
Where I do see an opportunity for Google Finance to one-up Yahoo is in their corporate news section. Yahoo mainly gets corporate news related to a company from news wires like Reuters or PR Newswire. As a result, a lot of smaller companies that analysts don't follow as closely have very few news stories associated with them. Of course, this same universe of small companies is where a diligent personal investor can uncover lots of value stocks overlooked by Wall Street. With their excellent Google News technology, this would be a great spot for Google to use their expertise at pulling in the latest news stories off all corners of the news world for all stocks, not just the big ones that are closely watched by the Street. That would certainly give me a reason to use their service to keep tabs on stocks I'm interested in following.
Because AOL will now be able to lower the threshold for spam flagging and increase their false positive rate. Services like electronic bank statements are going to be among the first to be adversely affected, forcing banks and the like to pay the "tax" you mention to continue to offer these services. After all, when Joe Sixpack's electronic statements stop showing up in his inbox, who do you think he's going to call up, AOL or his bank? AOL is counting on it simply being cheaper for companies to cough up money for their fees than to pay for additional customer service reps to educate each caller on the real source of the problem.
Another major provider, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo Inc., in the coming months will test an optional certified e-mail program based on "transactional" messages only, such as bank statements and purchase receipts, Yahoo spokeswoman Karen Mahon said.
If we have lousy SNR, we might only be able to differentiate between the most distinct two states of the transmitter (one bit per symbol: either 1 or 0), since all the noise impinging on our signal looks an awful lot like the more subtle states (or even worse, completely obstructs all states, making decoding impossible). This gives us a data rate of 1bps.
If we can increase the signal level at the receiver, thus increasing SNR (assuming we're not distorting the living hell out of our transmission, natch) but increasing our transmitter's output, we might be able to encode *two* bits per symbol (00, 01, 10 or 11) by adding two more symbols to the constellation. By doing this, we haven't increased our symbol rate (still only one symbol every second), but we *have* doubled our throughput.
You're missing the point. Yes, you can increase data rate by increasing power. However, by quoting a data rate per watt, they're claiming that power increase required is linear in the increase in data rate. It's well known that an exponential increase in power is required to increase your data rate. OP was pointing out that the data rate they reported has to be at a specific power level, and that you'd quickly discover it's not going to be very feasible to increase the data rate significantly beyond that by increasing power (contrary to what that "per watt" statistic suggests).
You're thinking of just taking different frequency channels and bonding them together. That basically just uses more frequency to transmit more data rate, while the number of bits per second per hertz (the spectral efficiency) remains the same.
In the MIMO system they're discussing here, you use the same frequency bandwidth but deploy multiple antennas, which gives you spatial diversity. Wireless communications are basically limited by the probability that your channel goes screwy and experiences what's called a fading event, where your signal suddenly drops because of interference. This means you have to be more conservative in the data rate you transmit at.
What they're trying to do is transmit, receive, and resolve multiple signals in the same frequency band by using multiple antennas, and resolving them in a clever way to try to create independent data channels. Since each antenna is physically at a separate location, the signal paths (and hence the fading characteristics) from the transmitter to the receiver will be more independent. Then the odds that all channels experience fading simultaneously drops significantly, improving the overall robustness of your communication channel to fading. That means you can be less conservative and achieve higher bit rates through your channel.
In short, same frequency usage, but they're getting spatial diversity by using more antennas and giving themselves a more robust channel.
Isn't the main unknown in that gap between III and IV how Han met Chewie? All the other Ep IV relationships are fairly well accounted for...
It's been covered in Brian Daley's Han Solo books already. The shortversion is that Han (who was an Imperial officer at the time) happened to be stationed at the slave camp that Chewie was in. He saved Chewie from being killed by some other Imperials for rebelling against his captors, and in return Chewie swore a life debt to Han.
Forehead advertising has been around for a while; I'm surprised that this guy would get posted on Slashdot since at this point the shock value is pretty much gone. Toyota pulled a similar stunt earlier this year to advertise their Scions. (There's a mirror of the article from adage here.) There's even a company that rents advertising space on a (presumably) regular basis.
Poker, Blackjack or other such games are the only sort of gambling I would be remotely willing to participate in because it involves much more than straight chance as involved in slots, roulette or craps. Sure statistics come into play, but nothing forces the stats to hold consistently.
I'm not sure what made you say that, because the only reason you would prefer blackjack or poker over the slots is purely because of the statistics -- you're guaranteed to lose because the odds are always against you at slots, while there exist strategies with winning odds at blackjack. (Poker's a bit harder to pin down mathematically, because a lot depends on how good you are at bluffing and reading bluffs, elements not present in blackjack.)
Taking blackjack as an example, if you come up with a strategy that gives you better odds than the house, a little something called the central limit theorem guarantees that in the long run, you're going to win. What you should be concerned about instead is that your bankroll is big enough to let you play long enough for that to happen -- if you run out of money too quickly due to a run of bad luck (something math guys call the "gambler's ruin" problem), then you're screwed. Then it becomes trying to figure out what the odds are of that not happening, as a function of how much money you start out with.
The popular Bringing Down The House is an easy read that actually does a good job of discussing a lot of these issues, in the guise of an entertaining story.
I love its popularity. The more that play, the more I can win!
That's a popular sentiment among "old hands" at poker who've been watching the game's surge in popularity. I'd say a lot of credit has to go to Travel Channel and WPT for promoting poker. TV poker is much more interesting to watch than live poker, since being able to see each player's hole cards makes it easier to appreciate the betting strategies being employed.
For those who are just starting out, Brunson's Super System is considered the classic text -- it's been around forever and supposedly every pro has read it. (Brunson has since said that he regrets writing it and giving up so much of what he's learned; he hasn't enjoyed as much success since publishing as he did before.) If the old-school formatting and layout (and sheer size) turn you off, Sklansky's Theory of Poker is also well written, a bit more concise, and appealing to people with a fancy for game theory.
This sucks. I don't know if anything can be done legally, but we can slashdot the hell out of the offending site, right?
Um, given that I assume the reason carorcar.com copied someone else's site in the first place was to get money from advertiser revenue from page hits, doesn't that just help their scheme make more money?
Some day people will realize the answer is to remove the vulnerable hosts that are being used as attack sources.
This is the obvious solution (after all, no zombies = no DDoS-nets), but the problem is there's no practical way to achieve it. As things stand today, there's no incentive pushing owners of compromised machines to react quickly to remove them from the net -- there's no financial cost for many home users if they don't do so, and they're shielded from liability by the "I didn't know I was infected" defense.
A second problem is that for the average computer user, it can be very difficult to tell casually if your computer's been infected and is packeting someone else. The fraction of the computer population that checks their firewall to measure their traffic, or goes over the processes running in memory every once in a while, is probably fairly small. This means that infected computers tend to stay infected for a long time. There's also no real, efficient way for a DDoS target to notify thousands of machines about the problem, much less expect a significant proportion of them to respond in any short amount of time.
I think the goal of this approach was to try to make it inconvenient for the compromised machines by taking down their net connection, and thus push the owners to investigate what the problem was. A friend of mine recently discovered that her brother's laptop was riddled with trojans and spyware, after he brought it to her complaining that it was "running slow". Turned out he was oblivious to the problem for a long time until so many processes had loaded down his machine that it was running at 100% utilization even when it was "idle". In the meantime, it was potentially available to be a participant in DDoS attacks. It wasn't until it was inconvenient for him that he took any steps to figure out what was wrong with it.
Of course, many of the other posts have already explained why this particular approach is bad -- everything from spoofing causing innocent victims to be hit with counter-attacks, to the problem of having enough bandwidth to DOS a distributed attack in the first place. The challenge is going to be to develop a practical way of creating incentives for people with compromised machines to fix them quickly.
Taking something away from someone else and threatening not to return it until they give you money. It doesn't matter if they OWE you money anyway, that's extortion.
Why is this +5 Informative? Stopping services when someone doesn't pay is perfectly legit. Try taking this approach with the utility company if you stop paying your electricity bill, and see how far you get. Same with internet, phone, and a variety of other services.
The real issue is whether he's owed money or not. As someone pointed out, he's basically asking for over $8,000 per month hosting what should be a relatively small local site (I'd like to see how his hits were measured -- if those are unique visits, I'd be pretty surprised). The article seems to imply that he already had a verbal contract to provide the service for free in return for publicity (as suggested by the article). If that's the case, then he's essentially trying to change the terms of his agreement unilaterally while holding the site hostage, and that's what's getting him the extortion charge.
I think this has gone a little bit too far. HardOCP posted an article that was quite misleading. I don't think they they maliciously *lied*, but definitely misled it's readers.
Could you be more specific about which parts you found deliberately misleading?
I read through the letter that Infinium sent HardOCP, and a lot of it was "he said-she said" where essentially Infinium seems to be complaining that they weren't given a chance to rebut points made in the article before it went to virtual "press" -- points like the existance or non-existance of facilities, buildings, and demos.
There were also other issues that I thought was clearly nit-picking. For example, point 3 complains that because Roberts quit as CEO of BIG 6 months before it went bankrupt, he clearly shouldn't be blamed for the bankruptcy. Is Infinium implying that BIG was doing great until Roberts quit, and suddenly collapsed 6 months after he left? If anything, I think that interpretation of the facts is much more misleading than HardOCP's.
I do think that the HardOCP piece was not favorable towards Infinium, especially in light of more recent coverage that seems to suggest they've actually got working models now. However, as far as I can tell, the HardOCP article was factual in content and it's certainly its perogative to publish a negative piece on hardware that it doesn't like. As long as HardOCP is accurate in its use of research material cited in the case, I think this whole case is less about whether HardOCP likes the Phantom or not, and more about the right of news sites to call things as they see them -- whether you do or don't agree with their opinions. You're free to post a rebuttal if you disagree, but not to sue to shut them up in the first place.
Why have a central authority at all? With wireless mesh technology, it would seem simple enough to set up a community internet without any central government or corporate provider at all.
Because there's a finite amount of spectrum out there, and with a lot of people using it, you're going to be interference-limited. In other words, finite bandwidth, large number of people sharing it, double-plus ungood. It's similar to the cable-modem sharing problem, where cable modem users in a neighborhood typically share a constant pool of bandwidth, and as the provider signs up more customers, the speed of everyone's connection degrades. Cable modem operators combat this by adding more capacity as the number of subscribers increases too much, but that's not an option for wireless systems.
That'll always be the advantage that wireline systems hold over wireless ones -- when you run out of capacity, you can just put in more wires. Both wireless and wireline systems have their place; one is not a replacement for the other.
A widely-cited paper by Gupta and Kumar discussing theoretical limits on wireless network capacity came out a few years ago that makes for dense but interesting reading. You can get a copy here if you're interested.
I can't decide whether to praise this kind of "innovation" for the convenience, or to complain about the possibilities for abuse.
Pardon me if I've misunderstood your post, but it sounds awfully like you've stating that it's "innovation" when you're tracking someone else, and "abuse" when they're tracking you.
I read the grandparent and thought the same thing, but you beat me to the punch. It's interesting to look at the E-Z Pass system on the East Coast as a comparison, since similar concerns were raised when it was first implemented. Although initially records were supposed to be for billing only, over time they've been subpoenaed to be used in criminal cases, divorce proceedings, etc.. If the information is there, there'll be a temptation to use it.
Having said that, I don't see why they couldn't implement these systems in public and city-owned vehicles only, like buses and public works vehicles. There's no reason you need every car in the city to have one, just enough so that you can monitor traffic flow.
I'm a strong believer in "no blood, no foul" when it comes to traffic laws. If I'm the only one on the road, and I'm speeding, why should that be illegal? I'm not harming anyone, even if I do wreck I'll be the only one involved.
Apparently you've never heard of a 2-vehicle collision. (How often are you "the only one on the road"? And how can you be sure another car isn't coming at you from just around the bend?)
Insurance is a scam anyway, you are legally forced to purchase it, and if you ever use it they'll raise your rates or simply just drop you altogether. If everyone invested the $150 a month they spend on insurance in mutual funds our economy would be a lot better off...
To use your phrasing, I'm a strong believer in the idea that some form of liability insurance ought to be mandatory. You don't want personal injury coverage, fine; you don't care about collision damage to your own car, no problem. But if you hit someone else, something should be in place to make sure that you're able to compensate them for it. The risks you take with your own life and property are your own business, sure, but when those risks involve other members of society, then there's plenty of reason to regulate you to make sure that you can compensate them for the consequences of your actions.
Wouldn't this only be a problem if you use these devices every day directly in contact with your skull?
Both my blow drier and my razor actually come pretty close to my skull when I use them:)
I agree that the news release seems pretty sensationalized, though. If you read carefully, you'll note that in the study they subjected the rats to a 60Hz field for 24 hours continuously, not a few minutes at a time:
In the study, the researchers discovered that rats exposed to a 60-hertz field for 24 hours showed significant DNA damage, and rats exposed for 48 hours showed even more breaks in brain cell DNA strands.
I don't consider this enough evidence to support their conclusion that the damage is cumulative, since to prove that they'd need to expose the rates to 24 hours of radiation a few minutes at a time, with long breaks in between, in a manner that would more closely mimic the use of the electronic devices they refer to.
A loose analogy would be that I can hold my breath for ten seconds 30 times over the course of a day without any danger, but if I tried to do it all at once the results would probably be pretty harmful.
The methods used may be different but just about every breed of dog known to Man has been 'genetically engineered.' [...] Take any dog and you'll find that someone wanted a dog that could do this or that or was such a size so they went about selecting different existing species and breeding them to create their perfect dog.
A small nitpick regarding your terminology: two organisms that are able to breed to produce offspring are by definition the same species. While you could argue that the Boston Terrier breed was engineered, it certainly isn't a new species.
That aside, the reason these fish are being trumpted as "genetically engineered" while dogs are not are because tropical zebra fish cannot breed with sea anemones in nature; the genes have artifically introduced in order to produce the new "glowing" variant.
Slashdot Mirror
This actually isn't a bad idea. A while back there was a story about the urinal fly, and how urinal in Amsterdam have a sticker of a little fly on them because they found that it improved people's aim when they had something to focus on. This seems like the same principle taken to the next level.
what Mailinator has been providing for years.
Internetoutsider.com has a good outline of the chain of events:
Last I checked, paying more for something that I can do strictly less with wasn't the dictionary definition of "flexibility", but hey, I'm not a high-paid exec, what do I know.
Want to know their daily historical prices going back to 1986? How about getting the percent of their float currently shorted as a gauge of bearishness on the stock? Or track insider trading as an indicator of management's confidence in their own company? Check the options chain for ways to hedge your positions or as a way of leveraging an investment in the stock? Yahoo provides all this and more.
At present Google Finance just gives you the thousand-mile overview and links you to other sites for anything more detailed. While this might improve in the future, at the moment the article summary's judgement on their scope is valid.
Where I do see an opportunity for Google Finance to one-up Yahoo is in their corporate news section. Yahoo mainly gets corporate news related to a company from news wires like Reuters or PR Newswire. As a result, a lot of smaller companies that analysts don't follow as closely have very few news stories associated with them. Of course, this same universe of small companies is where a diligent personal investor can uncover lots of value stocks overlooked by Wall Street. With their excellent Google News technology, this would be a great spot for Google to use their expertise at pulling in the latest news stories off all corners of the news world for all stocks, not just the big ones that are closely watched by the Street. That would certainly give me a reason to use their service to keep tabs on stocks I'm interested in following.
Yahoo is already trying to make this tax explicit:
In the MIMO system they're discussing here, you use the same frequency bandwidth but deploy multiple antennas, which gives you spatial diversity. Wireless communications are basically limited by the probability that your channel goes screwy and experiences what's called a fading event, where your signal suddenly drops because of interference. This means you have to be more conservative in the data rate you transmit at.
What they're trying to do is transmit, receive, and resolve multiple signals in the same frequency band by using multiple antennas, and resolving them in a clever way to try to create independent data channels. Since each antenna is physically at a separate location, the signal paths (and hence the fading characteristics) from the transmitter to the receiver will be more independent. Then the odds that all channels experience fading simultaneously drops significantly, improving the overall robustness of your communication channel to fading. That means you can be less conservative and achieve higher bit rates through your channel.
In short, same frequency usage, but they're getting spatial diversity by using more antennas and giving themselves a more robust channel.
Forehead advertising has been around for a while; I'm surprised that this guy would get posted on Slashdot since at this point the shock value is pretty much gone. Toyota pulled a similar stunt earlier this year to advertise their Scions. (There's a mirror of the article from adage here.) There's even a company that rents advertising space on a (presumably) regular basis.
Taking blackjack as an example, if you come up with a strategy that gives you better odds than the house, a little something called the central limit theorem guarantees that in the long run, you're going to win. What you should be concerned about instead is that your bankroll is big enough to let you play long enough for that to happen -- if you run out of money too quickly due to a run of bad luck (something math guys call the "gambler's ruin" problem), then you're screwed. Then it becomes trying to figure out what the odds are of that not happening, as a function of how much money you start out with.
The popular Bringing Down The House is an easy read that actually does a good job of discussing a lot of these issues, in the guise of an entertaining story.
For those who are just starting out, Brunson's Super System is considered the classic text -- it's been around forever and supposedly every pro has read it. (Brunson has since said that he regrets writing it and giving up so much of what he's learned; he hasn't enjoyed as much success since publishing as he did before.) If the old-school formatting and layout (and sheer size) turn you off, Sklansky's Theory of Poker is also well written, a bit more concise, and appealing to people with a fancy for game theory.
A second problem is that for the average computer user, it can be very difficult to tell casually if your computer's been infected and is packeting someone else. The fraction of the computer population that checks their firewall to measure their traffic, or goes over the processes running in memory every once in a while, is probably fairly small. This means that infected computers tend to stay infected for a long time. There's also no real, efficient way for a DDoS target to notify thousands of machines about the problem, much less expect a significant proportion of them to respond in any short amount of time.
I think the goal of this approach was to try to make it inconvenient for the compromised machines by taking down their net connection, and thus push the owners to investigate what the problem was. A friend of mine recently discovered that her brother's laptop was riddled with trojans and spyware, after he brought it to her complaining that it was "running slow". Turned out he was oblivious to the problem for a long time until so many processes had loaded down his machine that it was running at 100% utilization even when it was "idle". In the meantime, it was potentially available to be a participant in DDoS attacks. It wasn't until it was inconvenient for him that he took any steps to figure out what was wrong with it.
Of course, many of the other posts have already explained why this particular approach is bad -- everything from spoofing causing innocent victims to be hit with counter-attacks, to the problem of having enough bandwidth to DOS a distributed attack in the first place. The challenge is going to be to develop a practical way of creating incentives for people with compromised machines to fix them quickly.
The real issue is whether he's owed money or not. As someone pointed out, he's basically asking for over $8,000 per month hosting what should be a relatively small local site (I'd like to see how his hits were measured -- if those are unique visits, I'd be pretty surprised). The article seems to imply that he already had a verbal contract to provide the service for free in return for publicity (as suggested by the article). If that's the case, then he's essentially trying to change the terms of his agreement unilaterally while holding the site hostage, and that's what's getting him the extortion charge.
I read through the letter that Infinium sent HardOCP, and a lot of it was "he said-she said" where essentially Infinium seems to be complaining that they weren't given a chance to rebut points made in the article before it went to virtual "press" -- points like the existance or non-existance of facilities, buildings, and demos.
There were also other issues that I thought was clearly nit-picking. For example, point 3 complains that because Roberts quit as CEO of BIG 6 months before it went bankrupt, he clearly shouldn't be blamed for the bankruptcy. Is Infinium implying that BIG was doing great until Roberts quit, and suddenly collapsed 6 months after he left? If anything, I think that interpretation of the facts is much more misleading than HardOCP's.
I do think that the HardOCP piece was not favorable towards Infinium, especially in light of more recent coverage that seems to suggest they've actually got working models now. However, as far as I can tell, the HardOCP article was factual in content and it's certainly its perogative to publish a negative piece on hardware that it doesn't like. As long as HardOCP is accurate in its use of research material cited in the case, I think this whole case is less about whether HardOCP likes the Phantom or not, and more about the right of news sites to call things as they see them -- whether you do or don't agree with their opinions. You're free to post a rebuttal if you disagree, but not to sue to shut them up in the first place.
That'll always be the advantage that wireline systems hold over wireless ones -- when you run out of capacity, you can just put in more wires. Both wireless and wireline systems have their place; one is not a replacement for the other.
A widely-cited paper by Gupta and Kumar discussing theoretical limits on wireless network capacity came out a few years ago that makes for dense but interesting reading. You can get a copy here if you're interested.
Having said that, I don't see why they couldn't implement these systems in public and city-owned vehicles only, like buses and public works vehicles. There's no reason you need every car in the city to have one, just enough so that you can monitor traffic flow.
I agree that the news release seems pretty sensationalized, though. If you read carefully, you'll note that in the study they subjected the rats to a 60Hz field for 24 hours continuously, not a few minutes at a time:
I don't consider this enough evidence to support their conclusion that the damage is cumulative, since to prove that they'd need to expose the rates to 24 hours of radiation a few minutes at a time, with long breaks in between, in a manner that would more closely mimic the use of the electronic devices they refer to.A loose analogy would be that I can hold my breath for ten seconds 30 times over the course of a day without any danger, but if I tried to do it all at once the results would probably be pretty harmful.
That aside, the reason these fish are being trumpted as "genetically engineered" while dogs are not are because tropical zebra fish cannot breed with sea anemones in nature; the genes have artifically introduced in order to produce the new "glowing" variant.
Wait, I'm confused; I thought on Slashdot we're supposed to wait for someone to mention Chess before we bring up Go?