So get Congress to do their job and pass some laws protecting industry from harassing lawsuits from enviro groups. Not that industry should get a free ride, but no more of these BS lawsuits.
Same with reactors, though I don't support any nuclear program that doesn't include reprocessing and modern reactor designs. We should be pouring money into IFR research/design and getting a nice standard design into production. At the same time, get drilling and getting new oil capacity online. Even if we get a great battery and can build electric cars and the reactors to power them, it's going to be years before we transition to electric on a large scale. I would also love to see some solar thermal plants built out in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah (where I live, so yes, in MY backyard).
Re:Thought UCITA was inherently through the back d
on
UCITA By the Back Door
·
· Score: 1
Oh, another one of us. I was beginning to think I was the only Utah resident on/..:)
If there are more, we should think about forming a political party or at least a PAC. Not that I think it would get far in this wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party we call Utah.
I'm glad someone has a Senator that listens. My Senator is Orin Hatch. I could be "God Almighty" setting bushes on fire, and talking to him would still be useless. I do anyway, but I get wonderful form letters back that basically say "Thanks for your opinion, but you're an idiot. Yay copyright. Oh, and vote for me next time around, okay.".
I don't think there was even someone running against him last time. If there wasn't I voted for myself just so I wouldn't be voting FOR that retard. I don't know what ring of hell the RIAA/MPAA summoned him from, but he's sure done a lot of their bidding.
I haven't read up much on it, so this is honestly me wanting to know. Why is Constellation a waste? It seems like they are re-using parts from the Shuttle program, SRBs and the fuel tank and engines from the orbiter seem like they are at least similar. Not much design to be done for SRBs, they are pretty simple devices as far as the space program goes. May as well re-use the liquid fuel engines as well I suppose. The shuttles have to go, for a number of reasons, and re-using parts from them seems like a good step toward something better.
The only other option I can see supporting is the research into nuclear powered rocket motors from the 50s and 60s. More power, less weight. Those will never fly given the current political climate though. Even if they would be better for the environment.
I think the best chance for standardized PC gaming is for someone to pitch a desktop-console. Essentially they'd just be selling a standardized box of subsidized PC hardware. Market it well enough to developers and to consumers and hopefully enough people will hop on board to make it a defacto standard by popularity.
Get the right hardware and you can put it in the living room in one self contained box. My MythBox is set up that way. It sits under the TV just fine and you can't tell it's on without looking at the LEDs. My TiVo is louder when it's drive is thrashing. And the TiVo IS a full computer. It has a Linux OS, hard drive, network, USB, etc.. It's just a quiet, lower power computer. I could build my backend with a mini-ITX based system and get close to the same power consumption if I wanted to. I need the big CPU for the HD playback on the frontend though.
There's a MySQL server in there? Use MythBuntu and you don't know about that stuff.:)
Myth requires more hardware because TiVo and such use proprietary hardware to decode the MPEG2/MPEG4 streams that we don't have available. Even if we did, getting drivers would be a PITA. So we use normal CPUs and decode in software. It takes an Athlon X2 for me to do HDTV with deinterlacing, but it works and is quiet.
Unless you have some proof that the LDS church leadership ordered the massacre, they have nothing to apologize or take responsibility for. Not that it wasn't a terrible thing, but blaming the whole religion for the actions of a few misguided people is stupid. Should all of Catholicism be held responsible for a few priests molesting kids? And that's just to name the first such example I could think of. I would think most any religion that's been around for a while will have examples we could name. But that doesn't make the whole religion bad, it just points out that a few people made a mistake.
Have you tested it with 720P and/or 1080I MPEG2 files like those one would get from an ATSC tuner? That's what I need in a Myth frontend. I use a AMD X2 box to do it now, but if I can make a PS3 do it well, I would buy one. With blu-ray and games available in the same box, that's worth $400 if they can get Myth playing ATSC files deinterlaced with a 720P output.
It seems to me, that the same tech my wireless ISP uses to throttle my connection to the speed I pay for, even though the link speed is higher, would work here. Just add a simple twist. Monitor the usage of everyone, which they are probably doing anyway, and during congested periods you prioritize based on who uses the most. So the heavy torrent users get throttled back to allow more space for the web-browsing, email-reading masses. When it's not busy, just let it go. As an ISP, you're paying for the bandwidth anyway, aren't you? This lets you get more users in while only slowing down the heavy users who are probably doing bulk transfers anyway. It doesn't really matter if the file takes another hour to download, but it lets the web users through. If you want better service, pay up. So the ISP gets another revenue stream to help pay for the extra bandwidth for users who really DO need that file an hour earlier. Or think they do enough to pay more for the privilege anyway. You would only need to throttle people during the peak times, 5-10PM maybe?
So during peak, the heavy users might go from being throttled at 5M down to 2M for a few hours, but it opens up more space for everyone else. Then the caps all reset in the off-peak times. And the heavy users can do their thing without bugging anyone most of the time. And you could pay a little more for uncapped service, so the ISP can afford a bigger internet pipe. Asking ISPs to have enough capacity for [users]*[speed] is a little much. Some over subscription is fine as you are unlikely to have everyone going full speed 100% of the time. I just think the formula needs to be updated past [users]*[56Kbps]/[ratio] from the dial-up days that they seem to be using. The ratio probably needs to be smaller, and you have to expect people to use more than modem speeds. Add in a little tech to help things along, and you can probably please 95% of your customers without any draconian policies.
As for downloading the latest TV show, we really need to get working multicast. There is no good reason we need thousands of unicast streams for people to get the same damn data. Or caching, or torrent... There are a number of ways to help that out. Part of it is the retarded "content providers" and their DRM making it impossible to cache the data. I don't have a good solution for that one.
That's a good point. Care to source a 30-channel SATA controller?:)
I suppose you could use a large number of the available and cheap 4 or 8 channel variety and just use a lot of PCI/PCI-E slots. A single 7u size chassis should support that. Plus, if I were to try doing this, I'd spend some of the profit from the first year to have an EE work up a PCI-E board with a few of the standard SATA controller chips so I wouldn't need so many slots. The rest of the hardware is simple enough. You could buy 10 cases of drives at a time from Seagate, WD, etc.. The mobo, CPU, RAM are all standard and you don't need a huge box by today's standards to run a 30 disk RAID. Use software RAID so you can swap controller chips as they become outdated and you don't need to rely on company X producing the proprietary RAID cards forever. I'm willing to bet an Athlon X2 or C2D can run XOR fast enough to get the job done and still have enough left for the I/O you need. My Athlon64 server can have the RAID5 array going full speed without breaking 10% CPU.
For more redundancy you could break up the size of the RAID into smaller RAID6 arrays and stripe them. Or use striped mirrors. In a single 30 disk array, I'd be concerned that I might actually lose more than 1 or 2 disks before even a hot-spare could be brought into the array. With redundant sites and fast pipes, that's a little less of a worry though.
I've tried a few times to like indie music. I've even found a couple bands I thought were pretty good and bought a cheap CD or two from them directly. But is there a way to find bands I might like based on other bands I do like? I'd love to see an internet radio feed that mixes indie stuff I might like with mainstream stuff I do like. I need a way to find new stuff I like in the vast ocean of stuff I don't. Some kind of filtering needs to be in place, I get tired of searching though the pile of stuff I don't like for the one thing I do. That's the traditional role of radio, but all the local stations seem to be owned by ClearChannel now and all play the same crap with no indie stuff.
I don't know why people don't get this. If it "doesn't matter" then why the hell not do it? At least then you have spoken your mind. IMO, if you don't vote or don't vote your conscience (even if it's to just write yourself in (ie. "I could do a better job than ANY of these morons!")) you have no right to bitch about the actions of the government.
The DS can't be flashed without a hardware mod. There are two pads on the board you have to short out to be able to write to the firmware flash chip. Back when flashing was required for running homebrew with the old Slot-2 cards we used to have to put some metal tool in a hole and short those contacts to get the flash to write. Not needed with the slot-1 cards out now though. The new cards use a software hack of some kind.
I disagree. Most companies are at a huge advantage when it comes to bargaining power compared to prospective employees. They simply don't allow modifications to the standard "screw you" employment contracts. You boss / potential boss simply doesn't have the power to negotiate on that level, and those that do simply won't talk to you. That's where laws come in, to help level the field so negotiations can take place without one side wielding all the power. The situation now simply gives even more power to the already powerful side by exempting computer experts from overtime pay. That is unreasonable in my view. I don't think time and a half is required, but I do think at least straight hourly should be required.
Before this law was on the books, I was classified "Salary Non-Exempt". So I just got paid my normal salary unless I (or my boss) reported an exception. Then I got paid more for extra hours, less for fewer (or had PTO/Vacation/Sick applied). I see no reason why that is an unreasonable thing to expect companies to do. Currently, I am a contractor and that's basically how it works. I just don't get benefits like insurance and PTO, but I get paid more and my wife's job provides insurance.
On my 11g network I find VNC to be perfectly usable. RDP works alright as well for Windows stuff. I haven't tried X in a while, haven't needed it. I also have one side of the link wired, so that helps. That's the other thing that sucks about wireless, you can't talk to 2 stations at the same time. Switched ethernet can. For now, I use wireless for my laptop which gets used 90% of the time for internet access. With a 3Mbit connection, I don't think I need worry about 11g's bottleneck for a while.:) Everything else is wired. If it doesn't move, there is no need for expensive, high-latency connections. Cheap wired ethernet will get it done easier and faster. If I need to move big files, the laptop gets plugged into the cables as well. Wireless just can't match the speed I can get over ethernet. Note that I care about actual data throughput, not the signaling speed. Wireless gets about 1/3rd of it's rated speed in real life. Throw in more than one station trying to talk and general RF noise, and wireless starts to suck for large volumes of data. For internet it's great though.:)
One more thing to add, they slow the site down significantly. If I get stalled loading a page and Firefox says "Waiting for adserver.com" guess what's getting added to my adblock filter?:) And when I do, that site starts going really fast. Interesting, isn't it?
Note to advertisers: I don't block google ads, think about that. They are fast, unobtrusive, and often relevant. I even click on them and sometimes buy stuff. The irritating full page flash stuff gets blocked, AND I make a mental note to NEVER buy anything from them. Same thing with pop-up and pop-under ads. If you want my money, don't piss me off. Simple.
Why should it? Really. IPTV over the existing internet is shit tech. Every user has to have their own unicast stream (multicast doesn't work over the public internet) which quickly sucks up all available bandwith with very few users. For things like HBO, the broadcast model is so much better that there is no contest. For high bandwidth time sensitive stuff like HD video streams, we need a broadcast based (multicast might work if implemented properly) network separate from the normal internet traffic flow, so it CAN'T be messed with by accessing a torrent or somesuch.
The best way to mix them is the way the cablecos are doing it now. That pains me to say as I hate Comcast and their ilk. The TV channels are on those freqs, the internet data is on those other ones. Get the data closer to the local nodes with satellite, which is, incidentally, what satellite is good for, and you no longer need the public internet for that data, it's local. From there, you own the network, so you can break up the traffic in a reasonable way that prevents them from stepping on each other. This is all possible right now with current tech. The UTOPIA project works like this, with one better, the fiber is owned by the cities and they lease capacity out to whoever wants to offer services. There are a number of ISPs to chose from, some TV and phone services, etc.. So you get all that, plus competition for last-mile ISPs at excellent pricing. I have a friend that lives in a UTOPIA city and gets 10Mbit bidirectional for $30/mo and has TV and phone available should he want them. He has also recently switched ISPs with a simple phone call.
It can be done now, at a reasonable cost. But streaming HD over the public internet for each user is retarded. It's like driving a screw in with a hammer, sure, it mostly works, but using a screwdriver works better, and the fastener is stronger as a result.
This kind of crap is exactly why I have come to the conclusion that monopoly/duopoly broadband providers is a bad arrangement. I have found only one way I can see that can work, that's the one the guy in the article is advocating. Government owns the infrastructure and rents capacity on it to all who want to provide services. It's a fiber network, so gigabit speeds are easy. The cities here that have implemented this system have TV, internet and phone services running on the fiber now. I know a guy with 10/10 internet service that can actually get that speed and it's $40/mo. It can be done. The cablecos and telcos just don't want to give it to us. I find that particularly annoying as we already paid the phone companies billions to build and provide exactly this. And we don't have it.
I generally cringe at the idea of the government "fixing" things, but at least this type of thing is what they are good at. It's infrastructure, like roads, water, etc.. In Utah at least, governments are not allowed to sell services over the network, they have to let the private sector compete over it. I think that's perfectly reasonable. Even Comcast and Quest could buy capacity and sell it to their customers.
So if both sources are right, these guys have matched power density with li-ion. I'd like to see ratings in watt-hours and voltage/current capabilities as well. If those are all good, and they can build the things at a decent price, they could be very useful. Of course, like all new announcements, it's likely 5-10 years from commercial production.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we put that 70ft tower underground? Out of sight, out of mind.... :)
So get Congress to do their job and pass some laws protecting industry from harassing lawsuits from enviro groups. Not that industry should get a free ride, but no more of these BS lawsuits.
Same with reactors, though I don't support any nuclear program that doesn't include reprocessing and modern reactor designs. We should be pouring money into IFR research/design and getting a nice standard design into production. At the same time, get drilling and getting new oil capacity online. Even if we get a great battery and can build electric cars and the reactors to power them, it's going to be years before we transition to electric on a large scale. I would also love to see some solar thermal plants built out in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah (where I live, so yes, in MY backyard).
Is Google really so hard to use?
The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act
http://www.ucita.com/
Oh, another one of us. I was beginning to think I was the only Utah resident on /.. :)
If there are more, we should think about forming a political party or at least a PAC. Not that I think it would get far in this wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party we call Utah.
I'm glad someone has a Senator that listens. My Senator is Orin Hatch. I could be "God Almighty" setting bushes on fire, and talking to him would still be useless. I do anyway, but I get wonderful form letters back that basically say "Thanks for your opinion, but you're an idiot. Yay copyright. Oh, and vote for me next time around, okay.".
I don't think there was even someone running against him last time. If there wasn't I voted for myself just so I wouldn't be voting FOR that retard. I don't know what ring of hell the RIAA/MPAA summoned him from, but he's sure done a lot of their bidding.
I haven't read up much on it, so this is honestly me wanting to know. Why is Constellation a waste? It seems like they are re-using parts from the Shuttle program, SRBs and the fuel tank and engines from the orbiter seem like they are at least similar. Not much design to be done for SRBs, they are pretty simple devices as far as the space program goes. May as well re-use the liquid fuel engines as well I suppose. The shuttles have to go, for a number of reasons, and re-using parts from them seems like a good step toward something better.
The only other option I can see supporting is the research into nuclear powered rocket motors from the 50s and 60s. More power, less weight. Those will never fly given the current political climate though. Even if they would be better for the environment.
Don't you have to send the resulting signal through the deflector dish? I mean, that thing is used for everything. :)
So, XBox then?
Get the right hardware and you can put it in the living room in one self contained box. My MythBox is set up that way. It sits under the TV just fine and you can't tell it's on without looking at the LEDs. My TiVo is louder when it's drive is thrashing. And the TiVo IS a full computer. It has a Linux OS, hard drive, network, USB, etc.. It's just a quiet, lower power computer. I could build my backend with a mini-ITX based system and get close to the same power consumption if I wanted to. I need the big CPU for the HD playback on the frontend though.
:)
There's a MySQL server in there? Use MythBuntu and you don't know about that stuff.
Myth requires more hardware because TiVo and such use proprietary hardware to decode the MPEG2/MPEG4 streams that we don't have available. Even if we did, getting drivers would be a PITA. So we use normal CPUs and decode in software. It takes an Athlon X2 for me to do HDTV with deinterlacing, but it works and is quiet.
Unless you have some proof that the LDS church leadership ordered the massacre, they have nothing to apologize or take responsibility for. Not that it wasn't a terrible thing, but blaming the whole religion for the actions of a few misguided people is stupid. Should all of Catholicism be held responsible for a few priests molesting kids? And that's just to name the first such example I could think of. I would think most any religion that's been around for a while will have examples we could name. But that doesn't make the whole religion bad, it just points out that a few people made a mistake.
1984!
Have you tested it with 720P and/or 1080I MPEG2 files like those one would get from an ATSC tuner? That's what I need in a Myth frontend. I use a AMD X2 box to do it now, but if I can make a PS3 do it well, I would buy one. With blu-ray and games available in the same box, that's worth $400 if they can get Myth playing ATSC files deinterlaced with a 720P output.
I must be missing something.
It seems to me, that the same tech my wireless ISP uses to throttle my connection to the speed I pay for, even though the link speed is higher, would work here. Just add a simple twist. Monitor the usage of everyone, which they are probably doing anyway, and during congested periods you prioritize based on who uses the most. So the heavy torrent users get throttled back to allow more space for the web-browsing, email-reading masses. When it's not busy, just let it go. As an ISP, you're paying for the bandwidth anyway, aren't you? This lets you get more users in while only slowing down the heavy users who are probably doing bulk transfers anyway. It doesn't really matter if the file takes another hour to download, but it lets the web users through. If you want better service, pay up. So the ISP gets another revenue stream to help pay for the extra bandwidth for users who really DO need that file an hour earlier. Or think they do enough to pay more for the privilege anyway. You would only need to throttle people during the peak times, 5-10PM maybe?
So during peak, the heavy users might go from being throttled at 5M down to 2M for a few hours, but it opens up more space for everyone else. Then the caps all reset in the off-peak times. And the heavy users can do their thing without bugging anyone most of the time. And you could pay a little more for uncapped service, so the ISP can afford a bigger internet pipe. Asking ISPs to have enough capacity for [users]*[speed] is a little much. Some over subscription is fine as you are unlikely to have everyone going full speed 100% of the time. I just think the formula needs to be updated past [users]*[56Kbps]/[ratio] from the dial-up days that they seem to be using. The ratio probably needs to be smaller, and you have to expect people to use more than modem speeds. Add in a little tech to help things along, and you can probably please 95% of your customers without any draconian policies.
As for downloading the latest TV show, we really need to get working multicast. There is no good reason we need thousands of unicast streams for people to get the same damn data. Or caching, or torrent... There are a number of ways to help that out. Part of it is the retarded "content providers" and their DRM making it impossible to cache the data. I don't have a good solution for that one.
That's a good point. Care to source a 30-channel SATA controller? :)
I suppose you could use a large number of the available and cheap 4 or 8 channel variety and just use a lot of PCI/PCI-E slots. A single 7u size chassis should support that. Plus, if I were to try doing this, I'd spend some of the profit from the first year to have an EE work up a PCI-E board with a few of the standard SATA controller chips so I wouldn't need so many slots. The rest of the hardware is simple enough. You could buy 10 cases of drives at a time from Seagate, WD, etc.. The mobo, CPU, RAM are all standard and you don't need a huge box by today's standards to run a 30 disk RAID. Use software RAID so you can swap controller chips as they become outdated and you don't need to rely on company X producing the proprietary RAID cards forever. I'm willing to bet an Athlon X2 or C2D can run XOR fast enough to get the job done and still have enough left for the I/O you need. My Athlon64 server can have the RAID5 array going full speed without breaking 10% CPU.
For more redundancy you could break up the size of the RAID into smaller RAID6 arrays and stripe them. Or use striped mirrors. In a single 30 disk array, I'd be concerned that I might actually lose more than 1 or 2 disks before even a hot-spare could be brought into the array. With redundant sites and fast pipes, that's a little less of a worry though.
I've tried a few times to like indie music. I've even found a couple bands I thought were pretty good and bought a cheap CD or two from them directly. But is there a way to find bands I might like based on other bands I do like? I'd love to see an internet radio feed that mixes indie stuff I might like with mainstream stuff I do like. I need a way to find new stuff I like in the vast ocean of stuff I don't. Some kind of filtering needs to be in place, I get tired of searching though the pile of stuff I don't like for the one thing I do. That's the traditional role of radio, but all the local stations seem to be owned by ClearChannel now and all play the same crap with no indie stuff.
+1 Technobabble
I don't know why people don't get this. If it "doesn't matter" then why the hell not do it? At least then you have spoken your mind. IMO, if you don't vote or don't vote your conscience (even if it's to just write yourself in (ie. "I could do a better job than ANY of these morons!")) you have no right to bitch about the actions of the government.
The DS can't be flashed without a hardware mod. There are two pads on the board you have to short out to be able to write to the firmware flash chip. Back when flashing was required for running homebrew with the old Slot-2 cards we used to have to put some metal tool in a hole and short those contacts to get the flash to write. Not needed with the slot-1 cards out now though. The new cards use a software hack of some kind.
I disagree. Most companies are at a huge advantage when it comes to bargaining power compared to prospective employees. They simply don't allow modifications to the standard "screw you" employment contracts. You boss / potential boss simply doesn't have the power to negotiate on that level, and those that do simply won't talk to you. That's where laws come in, to help level the field so negotiations can take place without one side wielding all the power. The situation now simply gives even more power to the already powerful side by exempting computer experts from overtime pay. That is unreasonable in my view. I don't think time and a half is required, but I do think at least straight hourly should be required.
Before this law was on the books, I was classified "Salary Non-Exempt". So I just got paid my normal salary unless I (or my boss) reported an exception. Then I got paid more for extra hours, less for fewer (or had PTO/Vacation/Sick applied). I see no reason why that is an unreasonable thing to expect companies to do. Currently, I am a contractor and that's basically how it works. I just don't get benefits like insurance and PTO, but I get paid more and my wife's job provides insurance.
No, we're at war with eurasia, and always have been.
On my 11g network I find VNC to be perfectly usable. RDP works alright as well for Windows stuff. I haven't tried X in a while, haven't needed it. I also have one side of the link wired, so that helps. That's the other thing that sucks about wireless, you can't talk to 2 stations at the same time. Switched ethernet can. For now, I use wireless for my laptop which gets used 90% of the time for internet access. With a 3Mbit connection, I don't think I need worry about 11g's bottleneck for a while. :) Everything else is wired. If it doesn't move, there is no need for expensive, high-latency connections. Cheap wired ethernet will get it done easier and faster. If I need to move big files, the laptop gets plugged into the cables as well. Wireless just can't match the speed I can get over ethernet. Note that I care about actual data throughput, not the signaling speed. Wireless gets about 1/3rd of it's rated speed in real life. Throw in more than one station trying to talk and general RF noise, and wireless starts to suck for large volumes of data. For internet it's great though. :)
One more thing to add, they slow the site down significantly. If I get stalled loading a page and Firefox says "Waiting for adserver.com" guess what's getting added to my adblock filter? :) And when I do, that site starts going really fast. Interesting, isn't it?
Note to advertisers: I don't block google ads, think about that. They are fast, unobtrusive, and often relevant. I even click on them and sometimes buy stuff. The irritating full page flash stuff gets blocked, AND I make a mental note to NEVER buy anything from them. Same thing with pop-up and pop-under ads. If you want my money, don't piss me off. Simple.
Why should it? Really. IPTV over the existing internet is shit tech. Every user has to have their own unicast stream (multicast doesn't work over the public internet) which quickly sucks up all available bandwith with very few users. For things like HBO, the broadcast model is so much better that there is no contest. For high bandwidth time sensitive stuff like HD video streams, we need a broadcast based (multicast might work if implemented properly) network separate from the normal internet traffic flow, so it CAN'T be messed with by accessing a torrent or somesuch.
The best way to mix them is the way the cablecos are doing it now. That pains me to say as I hate Comcast and their ilk. The TV channels are on those freqs, the internet data is on those other ones. Get the data closer to the local nodes with satellite, which is, incidentally, what satellite is good for, and you no longer need the public internet for that data, it's local. From there, you own the network, so you can break up the traffic in a reasonable way that prevents them from stepping on each other. This is all possible right now with current tech. The UTOPIA project works like this, with one better, the fiber is owned by the cities and they lease capacity out to whoever wants to offer services. There are a number of ISPs to chose from, some TV and phone services, etc.. So you get all that, plus competition for last-mile ISPs at excellent pricing. I have a friend that lives in a UTOPIA city and gets 10Mbit bidirectional for $30/mo and has TV and phone available should he want them. He has also recently switched ISPs with a simple phone call.
It can be done now, at a reasonable cost. But streaming HD over the public internet for each user is retarded. It's like driving a screw in with a hammer, sure, it mostly works, but using a screwdriver works better, and the fastener is stronger as a result.
This kind of crap is exactly why I have come to the conclusion that monopoly/duopoly broadband providers is a bad arrangement. I have found only one way I can see that can work, that's the one the guy in the article is advocating. Government owns the infrastructure and rents capacity on it to all who want to provide services. It's a fiber network, so gigabit speeds are easy. The cities here that have implemented this system have TV, internet and phone services running on the fiber now. I know a guy with 10/10 internet service that can actually get that speed and it's $40/mo. It can be done. The cablecos and telcos just don't want to give it to us. I find that particularly annoying as we already paid the phone companies billions to build and provide exactly this. And we don't have it.
I generally cringe at the idea of the government "fixing" things, but at least this type of thing is what they are good at. It's infrastructure, like roads, water, etc.. In Utah at least, governments are not allowed to sell services over the network, they have to let the private sector compete over it. I think that's perfectly reasonable. Even Comcast and Quest could buy capacity and sell it to their customers.
According to Wikipedia, li-ion is rated at:
Specific power density: 300 to 1500 W/kg (@ 20 seconds[10] and 285 Wh/L)
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery
So if both sources are right, these guys have matched power density with li-ion. I'd like to see ratings in watt-hours and voltage/current capabilities as well. If those are all good, and they can build the things at a decent price, they could be very useful. Of course, like all new announcements, it's likely 5-10 years from commercial production.