MS Outlook encourages you to use bloated email formats, e.g. mailing around Word documents and Powerpoints instead of text, and using various formatted text formats instead of plaintext.
I'm currently using about 1.5GB for the last year of work email, not counting the stuff I've deleted after saving the attachments or reading the contents. It'd be a lot bigger, except that Outlook apparently freaks out and dies if your.pst is 2GB or larger, and it also gets way too slow to search for things, so I try to keep it down to 500 MB (also made it easier to back up onto CD, back when I used CDs.) And I keep the older stuff in separate mailfiles as well. Not hard to burn 5-10GB that way, especially when people mail you lots of powerpoint stuff that you need to keep. My personal email, which Eudora mostly stores in Unix-mbox text formats, is an order of magnitude smaller for a similar number of messages.
But yes, it's a lot less than the space I burn on the machine where I download music:-)
The right design for most applications is probably to use Flash for read-mostly drives containing your OS and most common applications, so they load fast without annoyances like rotational latency, and mechanical disk drives for bigger file storage (especially your media collection which is going to soak up whatever space you've got available), and enough caching RAM that you don't need to spin the disk too often. It's easy to do crude versions of this today (e.g. booting from Knoppix-in-flash and using power-management to spin down disks when you're not using them), and longer-term operating systems should be designed to take better advantage of flash to minimize startup latency.
Also, there are flash technologies that are starting to get rid of the limited numbers of write cycles that plagued earlier flash, as well as load-leveler drivers that even out the cycles on current flash.
Ok, Ellen will be smiling and dancing and Tom will be jumping on the couch, and if it's a derivative of an Apple product it'll either be Insanely Great or a doesn't-get-the-concept unpolished imitation, but WTF does Dashboard/Konfabulator/etc. DO? The names *aren't* giving any information, and since the article was presumably intended for those of us who *didn't* see Ellen do the demo, could somebody say what it DOES?
Almost every website I go to, especially Apache websites run by techies who are highly unlikely to actually look at the cookie responses, seems to try a cookie request and then not mind if you reject it. (I normally run my browser with ask-me mode as the default because I want to know what sites are doing.) Is this a default, or does everybody really tell their website to do this? The cookies are normally from the sites themselves - it's not just cookies from ad-banners or whatever.
Privacy doesn't appear to have been mentioned
on
Ambient Findability
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Some kinds of information hiding are important for the information providers, which probably does improve information findability for the user, but it's also important for the users to be able to hide information about themselves, especially when data-mining is becoming increasingly practical, inexpensive, and popular with marketers and governments.
There's some information hiding that can happen by accident, but way too much of it requires explicit thought and planning, and doesn't happen if it's not planned for. For instance, the designs of cookies and HTTP-REFERER interact in ways that make it easy for a central banner-ad service to track your reading across multiple sites, and most kinds of back-linking just increase that effect. But there's no mention of it in the article - does the book address it, or does the book pay more attention to _maximizing_ the ability to do data-mining? That turns out to have been a serious problem with Ted Nelson's Xanadu architecture - if everything is transcluded instead of just copied or one-way-linked to, and you can track between readers and authors to support copyright payments, then it's possible to track who's reading what across the entire network with just a Simple Matter of Programming.
My standard practice with online mapping programs is not to use a precise address, especially for both ends of a trip. Bad enough they've got my IP address, but there's no need for them to have my exact street address, when around the corner or the next town over is usually close enough. My ZIP code is almost always 90210 (though sometimes that's a problem - Apple iTunes keeps telling me about events at the Beverly Hills Apple Store, which isn't helpful:-), my birth year is usually the example year on websites that have one, and there are other things that don't need to know real information about me either.
But it only gets worse as mobile devices start Ambiently Finding things - your cellphone tells you when the next bus is going to arrive, creating a log entry at the bus-finder's service, and as you ride down the street it's checking the temperature of the decaf coffee at every Starbucks you go by (creating log entries, but not necessarily alerting the baristas at Fourth&Brannan that they'll need to brew more before you arrive), inventorying the 50ml Irish Whisky mini-bottles at the liquor store acros the street from Starbucks, creating another log entry, refusing to accept a pushed coupon ad attempt from the Old Navy store the bus goes by. And that's not even counting what happens as RFIDs become widely used - every shoestore you walk by starts telling you your Birkenstocks are due for a retread, but the Homeland Security Terrorism Reduction Data Entry system (aka traffic light controller) decides that you obviously must be a leftist so it takes your photograph with the redlight-camera.
Deeply Intertwingled with Ted Nelson
on
Ambient Findability
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is the first time I've heard somebody other than Ted Nelson or people that I know were once Xanadudes using the word "Intertwingled". It was such a nice hippie cosmic term, but the 70s called and said we should give it back and make up our own pseudolexicons for our own millenium...
On a more technical point, one of the unforeseen problems with Xanadu was privacy, which is also a major problem with Ambient Findability - in a worldwide information network with deep two-way linking, where quoting worked by transclusion instead of either copying or URLs pointing to complete documents, and copyright payments could be made to original authors of transcluded material, it turns out to be very hard to preserve privacy about what you're reading or writing. With Findability, some of the risks would be blatantly obvious even without a Bush Administration in power, but there's also a lot of more subtle risks, e.g. knowing who walked by a given building because there's a cookie on their mobile that got tweaked when it looked up the temperature of the decaf coffee at the Starbucks on the ground floor while they were getting money from the bank machine, and also queried the arrival time of the next bus, then hopped on the bus, which drove by three more Starbucks (one of which was out of decaf), queried the next-bus timer at the bus-stop by the medical marijuana clinic every five minutes for the next 20, and queried the Starbucks status again on the way back.
Look, if they can't get a Slashdot article to say what Mambo *is*, and the people who reply say you really ought to be using Joomla instead, without any explanation about that either, and the website's Slashdotted because nobody else can figure out what it is and the website has too much graphical content to survive that many downloads, they're obviously not good at documentation or naming. Is Mambo a development environment, or a game, or a compiler, or another guy you're supposed to vote for instead of Kodos?
I'm sure there are prudes in the Chinese government who think that it's important to protect Traditional Family Values, but I think there are lots more politicians and police who think that the public will let them exercise power if they call their activities "fighting pornography" than if they call it "Controlling the internet so they can censor dissent", which is mostly what they've done. Perhaps they've stopped some small fraction of Chinese-language porn, but they've also been attacking political dissenters, religious groups such as the Falun Gong, and other politically incorrect targets.
But they haven't significantly affected the amount of Spam that gets through China's firewalls - most of the spam that I receive points to websites in China to deliver their information.
Also, their firewalls are too slow, and interfere with legitimate business activities. I work for an ISP in the US, and we constantly hear complaints from customers that their offices in China get terrible performance for VPNs and generally bad performance for web browsing because the Chinese monopoly telecom providers never have enough bandwidth in their connections to the rest of the world. Also, too much of the traffic between China and other sites in Asia seems to go across the Pacific Ocean to the US and then back again instead of staying on connections in Asia.
Android is mostly an older term for human-shaped robots - when I hear it, I expect something with the B-movie visual-effects qualities of Flash Gordon or early Dr. Who, or maybe a bit more art-deco styling but still crude motions. It's stuff that was old when the Rocky Horror Show Theme Music was written.
ID seems to really have two fairly different groups of people touting it.
Scientists who also believe in God and want to find some way to reconcile evolution, which obviously happens, with creation which they also believe in.
Creationists who dislike evolution and find ID a convenient scientific-sounding handle to rehash the same old attempts at getting evolution out of schools.
Evolution does _not_ work the way you think it does - one of the big reasons that the anti-evolutionism is so popular is that real evolution is so depressingly mindless that even people who like their ideas of evolution keep coming up with bogus strawmen that they like *better* than the real thing, and many of those ideas get knocked down by anti-evolutionists.
Evolution isn't "progress" - species aren't becoming "better" or "fitter" or "evolving" in some higher-purpose direction. Genetic traits mutate at random, and the traits that let a population of individuals reproduce more successfully or get killed less often before reproducing end up with more individuals carrying those traits around; traits that lead to individuals getting killed more or being less successful reproductively become less common and usually die out.
"Evolution as progress to something better and cooler" is just as non-scientific as "intelligent design", and the fact that it's more popular with fuzzy-headed liberals than trying-to-challenged-salvage-belief-systems conservatives doesn't make it any less bogus. At least with intelligent design, God (or some rhetorical-sleight-of-hand that ID proponents are politically pretending might not be named Jehovah) _does_ have the option of playing dice with the universe without invalidating the fundamental models - they're trying to impose "progress" on evolution as an _exterior_ influence rather than some inherent behaviour which just doesn't exist no matter how hard the pro-progress folks wish it might.
Surviving or dieing out aren't "better" or "worse" - they're just things that happen. As humans, we're intelligent enough to have strong preferences about which of those things happen to _us_, and also to species we like, most of which are either cute fuzzy megafauna or tasty plants.
"Fitter" isn't "better" - it's just something that results in individuals with those traits being more common. It doesn't have a normative value, and the "Social Darwinists" who say that "We're _obviously_ fitter to survive than the poor, and Evolution means it's Scientifically Beneficial for us to beat up the poor (or the Jews, or natives of some desirable colony, or whoever.)" are as scientifically bankrupt as they are morally bankrupt. There's a lot of enthusiastic anti-evolution rhetoric that beats up on these people while thinking it's beating up on the actual scientific theories of evolution.
Improved short-to-medium-term reproductive success in some population doesn't necessarily mean that the traits that produce it lead to long-term survival - the "fitter" individuals may be using up some critical resources faster, leading to a more severe population crash in the future, and possibly to extinction, while a "less successful" population might have stuck around longer before going extinct. That still doesn't mean that extinction or survival are normative - everything dies eventually.
News media and politicians trying to scare the public often talk about evolution as if it were some more directed force - those nasty Bird Flu bacteria are just _itching_ to develop the ability to spread from human to human so they can repeat their 1918 Pandemic World Tour, so you'd better give The President $7Billion for a program to keep scaring\\\\\\\ protecting the public from evolving nasty bird flu, and his right-winger supporters are perfectly happy to ignore the fact that they're talking about evolution if it gives them more emotional control of the public. But from a scientific point of view, the main thing is that human behaviour and genetics does make pandemics possible, and viruses are simple enough that mutations can cause major changes in behaviour, and it would be good to do a lot of research.
Species are just a convenient abstraction for the behaviour of bunches of individuals with various collections of inheritable traits. We define two individuals as being part of the same s
Back when I was in college, and we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to the punch-card computer center, my freshman roommate was a ham radio operator, and was friends with another ham, Phil Karn, KA9Q, who you might remember from TCP/IP on DOS and other projects. Phil had a job one year as a computer operator. The computer was a mainframe that lived out near the airport, and there were a bunch of punch-card/printer computer centers around campus that needed operators to feed them. The mainframe was an IBM 370 with VM and a variety of guest operating systems on top of it, including CMS and several batch systems. Phil guessed one day that the password for the backup administrator account (a 4-character uppercase password) might be BKUP, so he was able to access a copy of VM and run it on top of the main VM. The client OS on top of that ran v...e..rrrr..yyyy s...l...ooo...wwww...llll...y, and remember that that's a definition of "slowly" that considers punchcard access to a ~1 MIPS mainframe to be "not slow":-)
Powerless pissed-off people blow things up with small bombs because they don't have big ones. Powerful power-hungry people blow things up with big bombs because they can, or sometimes because they're pissed off. The IRA used to regularly blow things up, killing people in pubs and shopping centres. Tim McVeigh blew up the OKC Fed building because he was pissed off about the Feds attacking a church for no good reason. Osama blows up western targets; Clinton responded by bombing Afghan camps and Sudanese medical factories. Radical leftists in the US used to make bombs, though it's not clear how many actually got used. Puerto Rican nationalists used to bomb US airport lockers. The Baader-Meinhof gang and Red Army Faction mostly used guns rather than bombs. The Philadelphia Police Force bombed the MOVE cult headquarters, burning down the rest of the block in the process. Very few anarchists actually bombed anybody, but we've been insulted about it ever since. GHW Bush started bombing Iraq by blowing up the phone company building; GW Bush's army went for "shock and awe". FDR's firebombed much of Germany, particularly Dresden. Arab Palestinians blow up Israeli targets; Israeli forces bulldoze houses and bomb Lebanon and assassinate people with missiles and repeatedly bombed Arafat's headquarters. India set off the Mahatma Gandhi memorial nuclear weapons tests to scare Pakistan; Pakistan did their own nuclear weapons tests to scare India. Saddam might have used US chemical weapons against the Kurds. Bush kept lying about how Saddam was building nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, while Scooter "Germ Boy" Libby kept hyping biological weapons. Japanese kamikazi pilots bombed US ships.
The only real differences seem to be why somebody's pissed off and what resources they have to do something about it. The Arabs have done a lot of suicide bombing rather than simple car bombing, mainly because it really freaks people out, but they're hardly the only ones. US propagandists talk about US soldiers sacrificing themselves for their country as the highest good, while they talk about suicide bombers as bizarre cultists that Western culture can't understand. It's all a load of crap.
My guess is that they're using it to do testing of aircraft components or other heavy military equipment. Some days X-Rays just don't penetrate well enough to image the things that you want, and you need something stonger, and for some applications, gamma rays do the job well. For other applications, you want various different kinds of beams from cyclotrons/synchrotrons/etc., such as protons or whatever. So you've gone and flown your airplane past its design parameters, or crashed your tank into walls and bounced around the crash test dummies, and you want to find out how badly you've bent the metal. Gamma ray imaging might be what you need. Or not.
I forget if they also use gamma rays to image concrete, or if that's other kinds of radiation, but there are times you want to crash the tank into the wall and see how badly you bent the wall.
Radiation shielding is a job that lead does fairly effectively. It's possible to design electronics that are much more radiation-tolerant than conventional electronics, which is why so much NASA and other satellite gear is low-CPU-horsepower antique-looking stuff (e.g. when the Space Shuttle crew first took a Compaq 386 laptop up with them, it had significantly more CPU than the entire rest of the equipment on board, but it's not designed to last a long time in radiation environments.) But if you don't have a weight constraint, lead's your friend. Takes a bit of work to get video cameras shielded well, if you need to point the camera at the radiation source, and if that's likely to be a frequent problem, building in a bunch of spare cameras is a good idea, and cheap.
Radioactive bomb disposal is fortunately not a frequently-encountered problem - most bomb-handling robots are more designed for conventional explosives, and while it's nice to have well-protected electronics, you'll only need to replace them if the bomb explodes, at which point it's no longer an emergency so cheap easily-replaced parts are just as good. However, Sandia Labs is the kind of place where radioactive explosive Bad Things can happen, and you'd think they'd have some rad-hard bomb-handler robots. After all, their job is designing and building Weapons of Mass Destruction.
As far as I know, I'm not related to William "Luke" Stewart, except that all of us Stewarts (and variant spellings) are descendents of Walter fitz Alan, high steward of Scotland, or of peasants on land owned by Stewart landlords.
Don't know if it's still there, but there was a highway bridge north of Baltimore airport that used to have a construction sign saying "Open Joints On Bridge". Seemed like a good idea.
Sure, if something is totally broken because a backhoe knocked over a pole or whatever, you'd like to know that, so obviously the system would need to send keepalives to detect failures. But power systems have a lot more problems that need fixing besides total outage. If the voltages are getting too high or too low, somebody may need to adjust or fix something. If the inductive load is unbalanced, that may need attention. If equipment temperatures are too high, something may be about to melt and catch fire or otherwise risk failing. If there's some parameter that's on a trend that will take it out of bounds, you'd like to know _before_ it fails and do some preventive maintenance.
Somebody else posted the idea that TCP/IP fixes stuff. Sure, if you have alternate routes available, IP can find them, and TCP can adjust traffic rates to match available capacity, but if your physical topology doesn't provide alternate routes, you're still isolated by equipment failures. Probably the higher-powered portions of a power distribution network have redundant routes, but the smaller feeder networks are more likely to be tree-structured, so there'll be limits on what parts can actually reroute around failures. The US telephone networks make extensive use of satellites for equipment monitoring - the overall data rates don't need to be very high, but the connectivity needs to be available when the underlying network is down. If the powerline folks want to get fancy, they could add some out-of-band monitoring in critical sections as well - but BPL already gives them a lot more information than they had before.
There's of course no technical detail there, but it says Adoption has also been slowed by technical hurdles. For example, the technology has interfered with local emergency radios and Ham radios. But experts say these issues have been worked out and that interference is no longer a problem..
No indication on whether the solution is to say that "Ham" is a problem in pork-producing states, and as long as BPL doesn't interfere with "Beef" or "Oil", Texas is ok with it... or whether there are actual technical solutions of some sort.
Yes, we understand that recent Apple products do graphics very, very nicely, and can do things that IE and Firefox can't always do. I don't really know what graphics horsepower my new cellphone has for its 128x128 color screen, but it's probably not much, and my Palm 7x has a 20 MHz Dragonball and grayscale 160x160 screen. Some of the Treo-like devices friends of mine have are better, but you still can't assume that there's a lot of real estate or horsepower. Lots of this stuff is pretty low-powered.
Basically, if you want to support mobile browsers, you need to get rid of Flash, Javascript, and frames, and put the main navigation into brief text at the top of the page, and try not to be too wordy about it. In other words, make pages that Netscape 1.0 and Lynx could have rendered well, and you're off to a very good start.
The real threats this stuff is likely to help with are rifle bullets. It'd be interesting to know how easily it burns - will WP or napalm set it on fire, or just go around it?
Depleted uranium isn't something that would normally be used for rifle bullets - it's used for big honking anti-tank rounds, and it's unlikely that nanotech body armor would keep you alive if you're hit by one of them even if it could keep it from penetrating - there's just too much kinetic energy that's going to get dissipated around your ribcage. Maybe they could build tank armor out of the stuff that would be lighter or more effective than heavy steel; that's really a separate question, though it's also a cost-effectiveness problem.
Conventional bullet-proof vests, made of things like Kevlar, will stop almost all pistol bullets and shotgun pellets but not rifle bullets. If you're making body armor for the military, that's important; if you're making it for police, it's less of a problem because (in spite of US propaganda) most criminals don't use assault rifles, they use pistols, which are easily concealed and much more convenient. If by "armor-piercing shells" you mean things meant to pierce tank armor, as opposed to body armor, those are going to pack enough wallop that it probably doesn't matter much if you're wearing armor.
Economics may not be critical for most scientists, but it's definitely critical for engineers, because you're trying to solve real problems for people. The math is certainly easy enough that either group can do it. If this device costs UKP 25000, and you're using a conservatively low interest rate of 4% for your cost of money, that's UKP 1000/year - that probably doesn't count the installation cost, and definitely doesn't count the difficult-to-measure cost to drivers. I spend a bit more than that lighting and electrically heating my house - I'd think a stoplight could run on a lot less, especially if it's using LEDs. Say 100 watts for incandescent lights, times 10 bulbs at a time, times 8640 hours/year, is 8640 kWh - so if the cost were only 1000 pounds/year, that'd be 11 pence/kWh. That's a bit higher than the price of electricity here in California, which has been politically manipulated to be fairly high, but I don't know UK costs.
By contrast, LED lights appear to use about 15 watts. The bulbs do cost a lot more than conventional bulbs, but also last a lot longer, cutting replacement costs significantly, and a typical city policy seems to be that any time a light needs replacing, to change the whole thing to LEDs, but not necessarily to go replacing bulbs proactively unless their road crews aren't busy doing other things.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm currently using about 1.5GB for the last year of work email, not counting the stuff I've deleted after saving the attachments or reading the contents. It'd be a lot bigger, except that Outlook apparently freaks out and dies if your
But yes, it's a lot less than the space I burn on the machine where I download music :-)
Also, there are flash technologies that are starting to get rid of the limited numbers of write cycles that plagued earlier flash, as well as load-leveler drivers that even out the cycles on current flash.
Ok, Ellen will be smiling and dancing and Tom will be jumping on the couch, and if it's a derivative of an Apple product it'll either be Insanely Great or a doesn't-get-the-concept unpolished imitation, but WTF does Dashboard/Konfabulator/etc. DO? The names *aren't* giving any information, and since the article was presumably intended for those of us who *didn't* see Ellen do the demo, could somebody say what it DOES?
Almost every website I go to, especially Apache websites run by techies who are highly unlikely to actually look at the cookie responses, seems to try a cookie request and then not mind if you reject it. (I normally run my browser with ask-me mode as the default because I want to know what sites are doing.) Is this a default, or does everybody really tell their website to do this? The cookies are normally from the sites themselves - it's not just cookies from ad-banners or whatever.
There's some information hiding that can happen by accident, but way too much of it requires explicit thought and planning, and doesn't happen if it's not planned for. For instance, the designs of cookies and HTTP-REFERER interact in ways that make it easy for a central banner-ad service to track your reading across multiple sites, and most kinds of back-linking just increase that effect. But there's no mention of it in the article - does the book address it, or does the book pay more attention to _maximizing_ the ability to do data-mining? That turns out to have been a serious problem with Ted Nelson's Xanadu architecture - if everything is transcluded instead of just copied or one-way-linked to, and you can track between readers and authors to support copyright payments, then it's possible to track who's reading what across the entire network with just a Simple Matter of Programming.
My standard practice with online mapping programs is not to use a precise address, especially for both ends of a trip. Bad enough they've got my IP address, but there's no need for them to have my exact street address, when around the corner or the next town over is usually close enough. My ZIP code is almost always 90210 (though sometimes that's a problem - Apple iTunes keeps telling me about events at the Beverly Hills Apple Store, which isn't helpful :-), my birth year is usually the example year on websites that have one, and there are other things that don't need to know real information about me either.
But it only gets worse as mobile devices start Ambiently Finding things - your cellphone tells you when the next bus is going to arrive, creating a log entry at the bus-finder's service, and as you ride down the street it's checking the temperature of the decaf coffee at every Starbucks you go by (creating log entries, but not necessarily alerting the baristas at Fourth&Brannan that they'll need to brew more before you arrive), inventorying the 50ml Irish Whisky mini-bottles at the liquor store acros the street from Starbucks, creating another log entry, refusing to accept a pushed coupon ad attempt from the Old Navy store the bus goes by. And that's not even counting what happens as RFIDs become widely used - every shoestore you walk by starts telling you your Birkenstocks are due for a retread, but the Homeland Security Terrorism Reduction Data Entry system (aka traffic light controller) decides that you obviously must be a leftist so it takes your photograph with the redlight-camera.
On a more technical point, one of the unforeseen problems with Xanadu was privacy, which is also a major problem with Ambient Findability - in a worldwide information network with deep two-way linking, where quoting worked by transclusion instead of either copying or URLs pointing to complete documents, and copyright payments could be made to original authors of transcluded material, it turns out to be very hard to preserve privacy about what you're reading or writing. With Findability, some of the risks would be blatantly obvious even without a Bush Administration in power, but there's also a lot of more subtle risks, e.g. knowing who walked by a given building because there's a cookie on their mobile that got tweaked when it looked up the temperature of the decaf coffee at the Starbucks on the ground floor while they were getting money from the bank machine, and also queried the arrival time of the next bus, then hopped on the bus, which drove by three more Starbucks (one of which was out of decaf), queried the next-bus timer at the bus-stop by the medical marijuana clinic every five minutes for the next 20, and queried the Starbucks status again on the way back.
Look, if they can't get a Slashdot article to say what Mambo *is*, and the people who reply say you really ought to be using Joomla instead, without any explanation about that either, and the website's Slashdotted because nobody else can figure out what it is and the website has too much graphical content to survive that many downloads, they're obviously not good at documentation or naming. Is Mambo a development environment, or a game, or a compiler, or another guy you're supposed to vote for instead of Kodos?
Yes, they're Austrians, speaking at the Chaos conference which is currently happening in Berlin.
But they haven't significantly affected the amount of Spam that gets through China's firewalls - most of the spam that I receive points to websites in China to deliver their information.
Also, their firewalls are too slow, and interfere with legitimate business activities. I work for an ISP in the US, and we constantly hear complaints from customers that their offices in China get terrible performance for VPNs and generally bad performance for web browsing because the Chinese monopoly telecom providers never have enough bandwidth in their connections to the rest of the world. Also, too much of the traffic between China and other sites in Asia seems to go across the Pacific Ocean to the US and then back again instead of staying on connections in Asia.
Besides, the term "Robots" first appeared in Capek's play R.U.R., where they definitely hadn't thought of Asimov's laws yet.
Android is mostly an older term for human-shaped robots - when I hear it, I expect something with the B-movie visual-effects qualities of Flash Gordon or early Dr. Who, or maybe a bit more art-deco styling but still crude motions. It's stuff that was old when the Rocky Horror Show Theme Music was written.
Back when I was in college, and we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to the punch-card computer center, my freshman roommate was a ham radio operator, and was friends with another ham, Phil Karn, KA9Q, who you might remember from TCP/IP on DOS and other projects. Phil had a job one year as a computer operator. The computer was a mainframe that lived out near the airport, and there were a bunch of punch-card/printer computer centers around campus that needed operators to feed them. The mainframe was an IBM 370 with VM and a variety of guest operating systems on top of it, including CMS and several batch systems. Phil guessed one day that the password for the backup administrator account (a 4-character uppercase password) might be BKUP, so he was able to access a copy of VM and run it on top of the main VM. The client OS on top of that ran v...e..rrrr..yyyy s...l...ooo...wwww...llll...y, and remember that that's a definition of "slowly" that considers punchcard access to a ~1 MIPS mainframe to be "not slow" :-)
The only real differences seem to be why somebody's pissed off and what resources they have to do something about it. The Arabs have done a lot of suicide bombing rather than simple car bombing, mainly because it really freaks people out, but they're hardly the only ones. US propagandists talk about US soldiers sacrificing themselves for their country as the highest good, while they talk about suicide bombers as bizarre cultists that Western culture can't understand. It's all a load of crap.
I forget if they also use gamma rays to image concrete, or if that's other kinds of radiation, but there are times you want to crash the tank into the wall and see how badly you bent the wall.
Radioactive bomb disposal is fortunately not a frequently-encountered problem - most bomb-handling robots are more designed for conventional explosives, and while it's nice to have well-protected electronics, you'll only need to replace them if the bomb explodes, at which point it's no longer an emergency so cheap easily-replaced parts are just as good. However, Sandia Labs is the kind of place where radioactive explosive Bad Things can happen, and you'd think they'd have some rad-hard bomb-handler robots. After all, their job is designing and building Weapons of Mass Destruction.
As far as I know, I'm not related to William "Luke" Stewart, except that all of us Stewarts (and variant spellings) are descendents of Walter fitz Alan, high steward of Scotland, or of peasants on land owned by Stewart landlords.
Don't know if it's still there, but there was a highway bridge north of Baltimore airport that used to have a construction sign saying "Open Joints On Bridge". Seemed like a good idea.
Somebody else posted the idea that TCP/IP fixes stuff. Sure, if you have alternate routes available, IP can find them, and TCP can adjust traffic rates to match available capacity, but if your physical topology doesn't provide alternate routes, you're still isolated by equipment failures. Probably the higher-powered portions of a power distribution network have redundant routes, but the smaller feeder networks are more likely to be tree-structured, so there'll be limits on what parts can actually reroute around failures. The US telephone networks make extensive use of satellites for equipment monitoring - the overall data rates don't need to be very high, but the connectivity needs to be available when the underlying network is down. If the powerline folks want to get fancy, they could add some out-of-band monitoring in critical sections as well - but BPL already gives them a lot more information than they had before.
No indication on whether the solution is to say that "Ham" is a problem in pork-producing states, and as long as BPL doesn't interfere with "Beef" or "Oil", Texas is ok with it... or whether there are actual technical solutions of some sort.
Basically, if you want to support mobile browsers, you need to get rid of Flash, Javascript, and frames, and put the main navigation into brief text at the top of the page, and try not to be too wordy about it. In other words, make pages that Netscape 1.0 and Lynx could have rendered well, and you're off to a very good start.
Depleted uranium isn't something that would normally be used for rifle bullets - it's used for big honking anti-tank rounds, and it's unlikely that nanotech body armor would keep you alive if you're hit by one of them even if it could keep it from penetrating - there's just too much kinetic energy that's going to get dissipated around your ribcage. Maybe they could build tank armor out of the stuff that would be lighter or more effective than heavy steel; that's really a separate question, though it's also a cost-effectiveness problem.
Conventional bullet-proof vests, made of things like Kevlar, will stop almost all pistol bullets and shotgun pellets but not rifle bullets. If you're making body armor for the military, that's important; if you're making it for police, it's less of a problem because (in spite of US propaganda) most criminals don't use assault rifles, they use pistols, which are easily concealed and much more convenient. If by "armor-piercing shells" you mean things meant to pierce tank armor, as opposed to body armor, those are going to pack enough wallop that it probably doesn't matter much if you're wearing armor.
By contrast, LED lights appear to use about 15 watts. The bulbs do cost a lot more than conventional bulbs, but also last a lot longer, cutting replacement costs significantly, and a typical city policy seems to be that any time a light needs replacing, to change the whole thing to LEDs, but not necessarily to go replacing bulbs proactively unless their road crews aren't busy doing other things.