It was a similar kind of law passed back then. I don't know if it was repealed or is just being ignored because it was declared unconstitutional. Someone named Ober had pushed it.
There were a lot of these laws passed during the time Senator Joseph McCarthy was conducting his witch hunts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H investigations. There was also something at the time called the House Un-American Activities Committee that did similar things (often involving guilt by vague association) . Then came the famous Army-McCarthy hearings ("point of order, point of order", "sir, have you no decency") that discredited McCarthy. The HUAC seemed to melt away, various laws went to court and were declared unconstitutional, and the whole situation wound down.
Does this mean that vote suppression during elections, vote buying, bribes by lobbyists, and other illegal activities by political parties and lobbyists require subversive registration?
I use OO all the time and it has been my main office suite since it was first released. Especially at Version 3, I have very little difficulty collaborating with others on documents in MS Office formats.
Back during the Microsoft monopoly trial, it was pointed out that the file incompatibility of MS Office file formats with those of other office suites is the basis of Microsoft's Windows monopoly. That is why many corporate users feel they must use MS Office and thereby adopt Windows as their basic operating system.
Executive Row at Microsoft must realize this. Take away the need for MS Office and you eliminate the need for Windows. That's why they regard OO as a major threat.
This has actually been litigated before -- as crazy as it sounds, courts HAVE consistently held that booting a computer (and thus loading it to memory) does create a copy. End-users are granted a license to do so, and here Pystar doesn't have such a license. Crazy yes -- but Apple is on solid precedential ground in claiming so.
An early case involved a machine that was being sold with a maintenance contract. A third party started competing on the maintenance. The machine manufacturer claimed that every time the third party started the diagnostic software (copying it from disk to ram) they were making an infringing copy. The courts upheld it.
Several years ago there was a series of conferences on F/OSS in government sponsored by George Washington University. There were several presentations made on use of F/OSS by DoD. They included the certification of F/OSS for use in command-control systems, the use of F/OSS in weapons systems, and other applications. Topics addressed included interpretation of terms of the GPL when F/OSS is used in systems for which DoD secrecy requirements apply to the software. (In that case, distribution within DoD and its contractor community is treated as internal to the user and not subject to general disclosure.)
The conferences included numerous presentations about F/OSS is government, including health care and a wide variety of other areas. DoD was just as active as other agencies in using it.
Change a digit or transpose digits in an SSN and you most likely will transform it into another valid SSN.
The SSN numbering system was developed in the mid 1930's. The modern mathematics of error control were published by Shannon after World War II. (His work or error control was related to work on cryptography.) By "modern" mathematics, I refer to the fact that there was some understanding of error control in old telegraph systems, but it wasn't developed systematically.
Credit cards have check digits that will catch some common errors in data entry. Computer and communications technology use error control in many ways. SSN's are still back in the 1930's.
Perhaps it is time to modernize them by at least adding check digits. Also, the prohibition against using them as personal identifiers should be strengthened and enforced.
I'm not a twitterer. But when I read the suggestion that people provide cover for the Iranian protesters by setting their twitter to reflect a location in Tehran, one quotation popped into mind:
"Ich bin ein Berliner" (John F. Kennedy)
The situation is a little different. Berlin was a free enclave behind the Iron Curtain. Freedom is only a hope in the minds of the Iranian protesters.
Setting twitter to Tehran (and the appropriate time zone) is more than a technical step someone can do. It is a mark of solidarity with oppressed people fighting for freedom.
The first is that unbreakable encryption was invented in 1917, and if it is applied with discipline can be kept unbreakable. It is called the "one-time pad." It was used in World War II for high level telephone conversations (e.g., Roosevelt to Churchill) that could not be broken today if you could have a recording of the encrypted transmissions. It has its limitations, but isn't difficult to implement, especially with modern technology.
The second is that NSA produced Security-Enhanced Linux. SE-Linux demonstrates NSA's capability for innovation.
NSA may well be a hidebound bureaucracy. It is, after all, a government agency, with all the issues of a government agency.
However, the main problem is that technology is now far beyond the capability of the legal system to easily deal with it.
.. Earth had near collisions with Venus and Mars within recorded history. The results of these near collisions had a significant impact on our religious history. Much of religious speculation regarding the "end of the world" is because it almost happened once or twice within historical memory. Organized science rejected Velikovsky, but people continue to follow and expand on his works.
Among other impacts of his efforts, by correlating the various events across cultures and records, he was able to show that in building the timeline of history there were several hundred years fit in that didn't exist. They were put in because people and places with multiple names were treated as separate and placed in different eras of history.
I don't want to be within 200 miles of their aim point. Being anywhere near their beam is like being in a huge microwave oven. It will surely cook your insides.
If their beam drifts due to excessive pointing error, watch out. Somebody is going to get baked. Probably a whole town.
How may miles radius do they have to empty of people to even get an earth reception station built for the power transmission? How do they clear the ocean target area of shipping if they were to try this on a storm?
There is a deposition from a lawsuit stating that, IIRC, either the screens or the machines themselves were manufactured in --literally -- a sweatshop in the Philippines. There was excessive heat and moisture. IIRC, the only testing was a shake test; they shook each product and if they didn't hear any loose parts it passed the test.
Our nation is founded on the principle that "...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Both the sellers and the buyers of these touchscreens are attempting to use cheap crap for implementing that principle, i.e., determining the "consent of the governed". Those who allow this to happen should be deeply ashamed.
IIRC, the fix for this problem is to put a nonlinear resistance in the line connecting the transformer core to the earth ground. The issue is excessive DC currents in the transformer core that mess up its usual magnetics.
I believe northerly utilities are now doing this as a matter of practice. The main issue is how far south the impact would occur. Last time (late 80's or early 90's), the effect was roughly as far south as the Mid-Atlantic states.
If the resistance needs to be switched in, 15 minutes is plenty of time for a SCADA system to send out the commands.
The communications impacts are also a concern, but they don't affect fiber, and can be mitigated in shielded nodal devices.
... in the commercial building sector is the triple-net lease. This is the most common lease for commercial space. The lease put all the costs, including energy, onto the tenant. The owner has no incentive to make energy efficiency improvements, and possibly a lot of disincentive. Even if the tenant is willing to pay for the improvements (as a trade off against their energy costs) the owner has incentives to disapprove them (such as avoidance of legal liability or any other kind of hassle).
Only owner-occupied buildings tend to get energy efficiency infrastructure technology. I've heard that is about 10% of the sector. The only way around this will be to adopt laws that cause pain to building owners that is best relieved by making or agreeing to energy efficiency improvements.
... it is "the" Maryland Court of Appeals. In other states it would be known as the state supreme court.
A similar situation is that what other states call the "state house of representatives" in Maryland is called the House of Delegates. (Virginia calls its lower house that also.)
... is that some of the prior art (the open account) can be shown to exist in Babylonian cuneiform. Does the USPTO search back to Babylonian cuneiform for evidence of prior art in business practices?
The open account is where the customer walks into the store, is recognized by the owner or clerk, requests some goods, says "put it on my account", and receives the goods. The owner or clerk updates the account. In the one click patent the recognition is by a cookie.
Does Yelp also make sure that the restaurant's plate glass doesn't get broken by rocks thrown through it and that the head chef's knees don't get broken in an "accident" with a thug?
Or is that a possible future service offering consistent with their current portfolio of services?
Advanced broadband (gigabit or multi-gigabit bidirectional to the end user) is a natural monopoly. Once you have the fiber and a basic complement of bandwidth installed, the marginal cost of adding more bandwidth is near zero. That makes the competitive price near zero. It also makes competitive market entry very difficult or impossible.
Cable companies are part of the entertainment industry. They built their bandwidth to deliver entertainment, and their limited bandwidth makes it a scarce resource and justifies their business models. They want to keep the bandwidth dumbed down to preserve their business models and those of their content suppliers. They want everything bundled and very limited end-user choice in what content they pay for.
Telco's had been common carriers -- providing bandwidth only -- but they want the profits of the entertainment business models and even if they install fiber they dumb the bandwidth down to preserve its scarcity.
If we want real, high-speed broadband the policy should be to prohibit providers of bandwidth from providing or selecting content or services. They should be strictly providers of bandwidth.
Content and services should be competitive. That punctures some existing business models, but opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, with bidirectional, gigabit or greater speed bandwidth any end-user can become a content or service provider. The only limit is how innovative people can be in producing content and services.
Achieving the separation of content/services from bandwidth can be done by making bandwidth a regulated monopoly, by having end-user ownership of the last mile of bandwidth, by municipal or non-profit ownership of the bandwidth, or by other alternatives.
If the bandwidth is high enough, competition in bandwidth will not work to make it offered more broadly or increase its use.
People used to say about a mathematician or physicist that "what he is doing is so important that only a few people in the world can understand what he is talking about."
In a few cases it was actually true.
Also, there were mathematicians who believed that the highest form of mathematics was work that had no practical application. There was a story that the inventor of matrix theory expressed pride that he had invented a form of mathematics with absolutely no practical use. Little did he know how extensively his work could be used. He would have been appalled.
There still seems to be a feeling that the less people are able to understand a paper in a math journal, the more important the paper is likely to be.
At one time I was a subscriber to the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Papers in math journals usually assume that you know every paper previously written by the author and the others in the field. There is often very little introductory material and no tutorial material in these papers. Even if you have a general understanding of the topic, you can't follow the papers because they are written very concisely, and assume that nothing needs to be explained if it was ever published anywhere else. You may have to backtrack for years of someone's papers and still not be able to understand the paper you are trying to read.
This is probably a combined consequence of "publish or perish" in academia and page limits in journals. It is often hard to tell if a given paper makes any sense or is useful.
I guess you could call it job security through obscurity.
Linux netbooks tend to have very little storage. The equivalent Windows netbooks have 120 gig hard drives and 1 or 2 gig memories. The undersizing is probably the main reason people take them back.
If I get one, I will take advantage of the fact that the Windows netbooks are XP, squash the Windows partition on the hard drive, and install Linux as dual boot, with it being the default OS.
My biggest problem with Vista is that it will not let you reduce the hard drive partition below half its installed size, but I want to get it down to 20%.
There are two equally valid descriptions of markets. One is by Adam Smith, with the "unseen hand" guiding the markets. Smith markets are well behaved, efficient, and amenable to analysis by what amount to small-signal statistics.
The other description is by Charles Mackay in his book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds." In that book he describes the Dutch tulip craze and other bubbles in history prior to the mid 1800's. This economic crash is more of the same.
The models, probably because of "free market" ideology, assume a market where Adam Smith's "unseen hand" is at work. The modelers don't consider the kinds of markets described by Charles Mackay. Most of the models are based on the Black-Scholes option pricing theory. If you look at the assumptions underlying that theory, they describe good behavior, efficiency, and changes describable by what amount to small-signal statistics.
Mackay markets are boom and bust, with greed and lies and herd behavior all around. That's what we had. The underlying mathematics has been studied, but not for markets. If you have a pre-LCD TV, an electronic circuit that is non-statistical but related to boom-and-bust market behavior creates the sawtooth sweeps that paint the picture onto your screen.
Installing advanced broadband in schools and hospitals is similar to a plan being implemented in Canada for rolling out advanced broadband nationwide. (By advanced broadband, I mean gigabit or better, bidirectional.)
Connecting public facilities provides an infrastructure that can later be extended to homes and small businesses. New York State, under a project that involved Cornell University, either studied or actually implemented a multi-school-district network that allows enriched and advanced courses to be taught remotely that could not be justified for an individual school.
Broadband installation in hospitals enables telemedicine, in which expert remote consultation is available for difficult cases, and lays the groundwork for installing an advanced hospital information system network. Such a network would cut costs and improve performance in medicine. I've been told there are two excellent hospital information systems in existence, one developed by Kaiser and the other developed by the Veterans Administration and available as open source software.
Finally, someone is listening to what has been discussed for many years and is working to get it done.
The load following and frequency regulation take place at the grid control center (a.k.a. "balancing authority"). The information will get to the car via the Smart Grid (the information infrastructure of the grid, to be enhanced and expanded under Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007).
Charging electric cars is mostly an overnight load. Wind power is mostly an overnight resource. If we had 25% wind power and every car were electric or pluggable hybrid electric, wind would provide enough energy for all the battery charging. Denmark is now at 25% with plans to go to 50%.
Wind is also intermittent and variable, as is solar. Storage is needed between the generation and load to ensure that the right amount of power will be available when needed. Electric car batteries provide suitable storage. Without proper storage, some experts claim that for grid reliability you need as much conventional generation available as you have wind power running. There was an incident in Texas where they lost 1500 megawatts of wind generation in about four hours because a weather front came through and they had to dump interruptable loads and bring up conventional generation to maintain reliability.
Hawaii Electric tried wind power some years ago, and it threw their grid into instability. Older wind generators eat lots of reactive power, and the need to feed their reactive power requirements was what made the Hawaii grid unstable. (Electric power has sine and cosine wave components. Reactive is the sine component. A common related term is power factor.)
Newer technologies can take care of the reactive power issue, but it has to be done carefully. In the late 1980's Tokyo suffered a voltage collapse and blackout because of peculiar circumstances in which they simply ran out of reactive power.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a similar kind of law passed back then. I don't know if it was repealed or is just being ignored because it was declared unconstitutional. Someone named Ober had pushed it.
There were a lot of these laws passed during the time Senator Joseph McCarthy was conducting his witch hunts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H investigations. There was also something at the time called the House Un-American Activities Committee that did similar things (often involving guilt by vague association) . Then came the famous Army-McCarthy hearings ("point of order, point of order", "sir, have you no decency") that discredited McCarthy. The HUAC seemed to melt away, various laws went to court and were declared unconstitutional, and the whole situation wound down.
Does this mean that vote suppression during elections, vote buying, bribes by lobbyists, and other illegal activities by political parties and lobbyists require subversive registration?
I use OO all the time and it has been my main office suite since it was first released. Especially at Version 3, I have very little difficulty collaborating with others on documents in MS Office formats.
Back during the Microsoft monopoly trial, it was pointed out that the file incompatibility of MS Office file formats with those of other office suites is the basis of Microsoft's Windows monopoly. That is why many corporate users feel they must use MS Office and thereby adopt Windows as their basic operating system.
Executive Row at Microsoft must realize this. Take away the need for MS Office and you eliminate the need for Windows. That's why they regard OO as a major threat.
This has actually been litigated before -- as crazy as it sounds, courts HAVE consistently held that booting a computer (and thus loading it to memory) does create a copy. End-users are granted a license to do so, and here Pystar doesn't have such a license. Crazy yes -- but Apple is on solid precedential ground in claiming so.
An early case involved a machine that was being sold with a maintenance contract. A third party started competing on the maintenance. The machine manufacturer claimed that every time the third party started the diagnostic software (copying it from disk to ram) they were making an infringing copy. The courts upheld it.
Several years ago there was a series of conferences on F/OSS in government sponsored by George Washington University. There were several presentations made on use of F/OSS by DoD. They included the certification of F/OSS for use in command-control systems, the use of F/OSS in weapons systems, and other applications. Topics addressed included interpretation of terms of the GPL when F/OSS is used in systems for which DoD secrecy requirements apply to the software. (In that case, distribution within DoD and its contractor community is treated as internal to the user and not subject to general disclosure.)
The conferences included numerous presentations about F/OSS is government, including health care and a wide variety of other areas. DoD was just as active as other agencies in using it.
Change a digit or transpose digits in an SSN and you most likely will transform it into another valid SSN.
The SSN numbering system was developed in the mid 1930's. The modern mathematics of error control were published by Shannon after World War II. (His work or error control was related to work on cryptography.) By "modern" mathematics, I refer to the fact that there was some understanding of error control in old telegraph systems, but it wasn't developed systematically.
Credit cards have check digits that will catch some common errors in data entry. Computer and communications technology use error control in many ways. SSN's are still back in the 1930's.
Perhaps it is time to modernize them by at least adding check digits. Also, the prohibition against using them as personal identifiers should be strengthened and enforced.
I'm not a twitterer. But when I read the suggestion that people provide cover for the Iranian protesters by setting their twitter to reflect a location in Tehran, one quotation popped into mind:
"Ich bin ein Berliner" (John F. Kennedy)
The situation is a little different. Berlin was a free enclave behind the Iron Curtain. Freedom is only a hope in the minds of the Iranian protesters.
Setting twitter to Tehran (and the appropriate time zone) is more than a technical step someone can do. It is a mark of solidarity with oppressed people fighting for freedom.
I join in urging all twitterers to do it.
The first is that unbreakable encryption was invented in 1917, and if it is applied with discipline can be kept unbreakable. It is called the "one-time pad." It was used in World War II for high level telephone conversations (e.g., Roosevelt to Churchill) that could not be broken today if you could have a recording of the encrypted transmissions. It has its limitations, but isn't difficult to implement, especially with modern technology.
The second is that NSA produced Security-Enhanced Linux. SE-Linux demonstrates NSA's capability for innovation.
NSA may well be a hidebound bureaucracy. It is, after all, a government agency, with all the issues of a government agency.
However, the main problem is that technology is now far beyond the capability of the legal system to easily deal with it.
.. Earth had near collisions with Venus and Mars within recorded history. The results of these near collisions had a significant impact on our religious history. Much of religious speculation regarding the "end of the world" is because it almost happened once or twice within historical memory. Organized science rejected Velikovsky, but people continue to follow and expand on his works.
Among other impacts of his efforts, by correlating the various events across cultures and records, he was able to show that in building the timeline of history there were several hundred years fit in that didn't exist. They were put in because people and places with multiple names were treated as separate and placed in different eras of history.
I don't want to be within 200 miles of their aim point. Being anywhere near their beam is like being in a huge microwave oven. It will surely cook your insides.
If their beam drifts due to excessive pointing error, watch out. Somebody is going to get baked. Probably a whole town.
How may miles radius do they have to empty of people to even get an earth reception station built for the power transmission? How do they clear the ocean target area of shipping if they were to try this on a storm?
These guys are nuts!
"...Teksavvy has informed it's customers that were this to go through the current monthly cap would be quartered"
Will they be drawn as well as quartered?
Isn't that extreme overkill for just exceeding a usage cap?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered
There is a deposition from a lawsuit stating that, IIRC, either the screens or the machines themselves were manufactured in --literally -- a sweatshop in the Philippines. There was excessive heat and moisture. IIRC, the only testing was a shake test; they shook each product and if they didn't hear any loose parts it passed the test.
Our nation is founded on the principle that "...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Both the sellers and the buyers of these touchscreens are attempting to use cheap crap for implementing that principle, i.e., determining the "consent of the governed". Those who allow this to happen should be deeply ashamed.
IIRC, the fix for this problem is to put a nonlinear resistance in the line connecting the transformer core to the earth ground. The issue is excessive DC currents in the transformer core that mess up its usual magnetics.
I believe northerly utilities are now doing this as a matter of practice. The main issue is how far south the impact would occur. Last time (late 80's or early 90's), the effect was roughly as far south as the Mid-Atlantic states.
If the resistance needs to be switched in, 15 minutes is plenty of time for a SCADA system to send out the commands.
The communications impacts are also a concern, but they don't affect fiber, and can be mitigated in shielded nodal devices.
... in the commercial building sector is the triple-net lease. This is the most common lease for commercial space. The lease put all the costs, including energy, onto the tenant. The owner has no incentive to make energy efficiency improvements, and possibly a lot of disincentive. Even if the tenant is willing to pay for the improvements (as a trade off against their energy costs) the owner has incentives to disapprove them (such as avoidance of legal liability or any other kind of hassle).
Only owner-occupied buildings tend to get energy efficiency infrastructure technology. I've heard that is about 10% of the sector. The only way around this will be to adopt laws that cause pain to building owners that is best relieved by making or agreeing to energy efficiency improvements.
... it is "the" Maryland Court of Appeals. In other states it would be known as the state supreme court.
A similar situation is that what other states call the "state house of representatives" in Maryland is called the House of Delegates. (Virginia calls its lower house that also.)
... is that some of the prior art (the open account) can be shown to exist in Babylonian cuneiform. Does the USPTO search back to Babylonian cuneiform for evidence of prior art in business practices?
The open account is where the customer walks into the store, is recognized by the owner or clerk, requests some goods, says "put it on my account", and receives the goods. The owner or clerk updates the account. In the one click patent the recognition is by a cookie.
Does Yelp also make sure that the restaurant's plate glass doesn't get broken by rocks thrown through it and that the head chef's knees don't get broken in an "accident" with a thug?
Or is that a possible future service offering consistent with their current portfolio of services?
Hmmm.
Advanced broadband (gigabit or multi-gigabit bidirectional to the end user) is a natural monopoly. Once you have the fiber and a basic complement of bandwidth installed, the marginal cost of adding more bandwidth is near zero. That makes the competitive price near zero. It also makes competitive market entry very difficult or impossible.
Cable companies are part of the entertainment industry. They built their bandwidth to deliver entertainment, and their limited bandwidth makes it a scarce resource and justifies their business models. They want to keep the bandwidth dumbed down to preserve their business models and those of their content suppliers. They want everything bundled and very limited end-user choice in what content they pay for.
Telco's had been common carriers -- providing bandwidth only -- but they want the profits of the entertainment business models and even if they install fiber they dumb the bandwidth down to preserve its scarcity.
If we want real, high-speed broadband the policy should be to prohibit providers of bandwidth from providing or selecting content or services. They should be strictly providers of bandwidth.
Content and services should be competitive. That punctures some existing business models, but opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, with bidirectional, gigabit or greater speed bandwidth any end-user can become a content or service provider. The only limit is how innovative people can be in producing content and services.
Achieving the separation of content/services from bandwidth can be done by making bandwidth a regulated monopoly, by having end-user ownership of the last mile of bandwidth, by municipal or non-profit ownership of the bandwidth, or by other alternatives.
If the bandwidth is high enough, competition in bandwidth will not work to make it offered more broadly or increase its use.
People used to say about a mathematician or physicist that "what he is doing is so important that only a few people in the world can understand what he is talking about."
In a few cases it was actually true.
Also, there were mathematicians who believed that the highest form of mathematics was work that had no practical application. There was a story that the inventor of matrix theory expressed pride that he had invented a form of mathematics with absolutely no practical use. Little did he know how extensively his work could be used. He would have been appalled.
There still seems to be a feeling that the less people are able to understand a paper in a math journal, the more important the paper is likely to be.
At one time I was a subscriber to the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Papers in math journals usually assume that you know every paper previously written by the author and the others in the field. There is often very little introductory material and no tutorial material in these papers. Even if you have a general understanding of the topic, you can't follow the papers because they are written very concisely, and assume that nothing needs to be explained if it was ever published anywhere else. You may have to backtrack for years of someone's papers and still not be able to understand the paper you are trying to read.
This is probably a combined consequence of "publish or perish" in academia and page limits in journals. It is often hard to tell if a given paper makes any sense or is useful.
I guess you could call it job security through obscurity.
Linux netbooks tend to have very little storage. The equivalent Windows netbooks have 120 gig hard drives and 1 or 2 gig memories. The undersizing is probably the main reason people take them back.
If I get one, I will take advantage of the fact that the Windows netbooks are XP, squash the Windows partition on the hard drive, and install Linux as dual boot, with it being the default OS.
My biggest problem with Vista is that it will not let you reduce the hard drive partition below half its installed size, but I want to get it down to 20%.
There are two equally valid descriptions of markets. One is by Adam Smith, with the "unseen hand" guiding the markets. Smith markets are well behaved, efficient, and amenable to analysis by what amount to small-signal statistics.
The other description is by Charles Mackay in his book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds." In that book he describes the Dutch tulip craze and other bubbles in history prior to the mid 1800's. This economic crash is more of the same.
The models, probably because of "free market" ideology, assume a market where Adam Smith's "unseen hand" is at work. The modelers don't consider the kinds of markets described by Charles Mackay. Most of the models are based on the Black-Scholes option pricing theory. If you look at the assumptions underlying that theory, they describe good behavior, efficiency, and changes describable by what amount to small-signal statistics.
Mackay markets are boom and bust, with greed and lies and herd behavior all around. That's what we had. The underlying mathematics has been studied, but not for markets. If you have a pre-LCD TV, an electronic circuit that is non-statistical but related to boom-and-bust market behavior creates the sawtooth sweeps that paint the picture onto your screen.
I don't publish a newsletter. However, here are two relevant links on the subject:
http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/broadband.asp
http://www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/ccp/docs/Gigabit-WP.pdf
Installing advanced broadband in schools and hospitals is similar to a plan being implemented in Canada for rolling out advanced broadband nationwide. (By advanced broadband, I mean gigabit or better, bidirectional.)
Connecting public facilities provides an infrastructure that can later be extended to homes and small businesses. New York State, under a project that involved Cornell University, either studied or actually implemented a multi-school-district network that allows enriched and advanced courses to be taught remotely that could not be justified for an individual school.
Broadband installation in hospitals enables telemedicine, in which expert remote consultation is available for difficult cases, and lays the groundwork for installing an advanced hospital information system network. Such a network would cut costs and improve performance in medicine. I've been told there are two excellent hospital information systems in existence, one developed by Kaiser and the other developed by the Veterans Administration and available as open source software.
Finally, someone is listening to what has been discussed for many years and is working to get it done.
The load following and frequency regulation take place at the grid control center (a.k.a. "balancing authority"). The information will get to the car via the Smart Grid (the information infrastructure of the grid, to be enhanced and expanded under Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007).
Charging electric cars is mostly an overnight load. Wind power is mostly an overnight resource. If we had 25% wind power and every car were electric or pluggable hybrid electric, wind would provide enough energy for all the battery charging. Denmark is now at 25% with plans to go to 50%.
Wind is also intermittent and variable, as is solar. Storage is needed between the generation and load to ensure that the right amount of power will be available when needed. Electric car batteries provide suitable storage. Without proper storage, some experts claim that for grid reliability you need as much conventional generation available as you have wind power running. There was an incident in Texas where they lost 1500 megawatts of wind generation in about four hours because a weather front came through and they had to dump interruptable loads and bring up conventional generation to maintain reliability.
Hawaii Electric tried wind power some years ago, and it threw their grid into instability. Older wind generators eat lots of reactive power, and the need to feed their reactive power requirements was what made the Hawaii grid unstable. (Electric power has sine and cosine wave components. Reactive is the sine component. A common related term is power factor.)
Newer technologies can take care of the reactive power issue, but it has to be done carefully. In the late 1980's Tokyo suffered a voltage collapse and blackout because of peculiar circumstances in which they simply ran out of reactive power.