My grandparents lived on the landing approach path to JFK, out in Floral Park. When the Concorde came in, you freakin' knew it was the Concorde. It was a lot louder than the other airplanes on that approach, and it was nice that it only went over twice a day (It was a very cool airplane, and we'd go out to look, at least for the morning landing).

I dunno about "normal cruising speed", but on "approach to JFK" it was a hell of a lot louder than the 747s, DC10s and similar of the late '70s and early '80s. Looking at the approach profiles I see that the aircraft were probably at about 2k feet over Floral Park. I reject your statement, from experience.

Anyone taking bets on how long until we see the first "Carpool is 1 or more persons per vehicle" sign?

See, for example, "Effect of adaptive cruise control systems on traffic flow.", Davis LC., which suggests that if just 20% of drivers used ACC we'd eliminate traffic jams (although traffic would flow more slowly at high densities, it wouldn't have the non-laminar jam behavior it does now). So, yes, depending on how you define "congestion", it could happen with a fairly low adoption rate.

And others have mentioned that you could also have closer follow distance, so you could probably at least double vehicles per lane-hour throughput.

The heck with hacking, does this mean we're going to equip deer with WiFi, and fine children who ride near the street on tricycles that aren't equipped?

Cooperative communication can be used for things like platooning and adaptive cruise control, but it has to be augmented by enough situational awareness to understand what's happening without cooperation. So the "safety" thing doesn't make any sense to me: If you're depending on inter-vehicle communication for safety, all it takes is an unequipped roadway participant, or a failed transceiver, to create a dangerous situation.

It takes several nights (and several hours per night) of viewing, but the most dramatic "wow, there's really stuff happening up there!" class project I've seen is calculating the orbital periods of Jupiter's moons. With just a 'scope, if you look at Jupiter, and then use a stopwatch to find the times for each of the moons going out of frame, and then have your kids plot those points out on graph paper. Do this at hour intervals for 3 nights running, you can then fit sine curves to the points and see what the orbital period of the moons is.

You can also do this with a digital camera with a decent sized lens (most of the SLRs with the 1.6 or so multiplier and a 300mm lens will work well), just counting pixels of separation.

The "wow, that's not just static" realization can be profound.

I haven't built a web page yet for this experiment, but I do have a spreadsheet to do the graphing automatically, drop me an email if you'd like further class materials and maybe that'll get me to build the page for this.

It seems like it could, provided that the lines can handle the bandwidth (which you claim, I'll take your word for it). As for the other end, if I got it right the process can be reversed to restretch out small chunks of the signal into something slow enough to be readable.

I wonder something though, can't they just send a bunch of parallel signals each at different frequencies instead of bothering with serialising the whole thing onto the same carrier? I mean it would use the same bandwidth in the end, so why bother making it all be on one carrier?

Yes, but you can't impress your style-over-substance Mac-loving friends with a quad-core desktop and 8GB of RAM in a boring case.

Counterexample.

I pull up Slashdot with no Javascript and get a nice comment list. It works, and that's all there is to it.

I pull up Slashdot with Javascript enabled and sit there and wait for the browser to grind code for five seconds (bringing everything else on my computer, including Folding@Home, to a stall), just for a stupid little box that floats along the left side of the page like a stray dog that's decided to follow you around for some reason and has a bunch of sliders that are supposed to show and hide content but don't work at all.

I'll take the no-JS version of the page, thanks.

And don't even get me started about the Preferences...

It seems you've never worked with "enterprise software"

At my previous company we built 'enterprise' software. Generally the 'stagnation' you describe was a customer effect, not a vendor effect. The customers had an integrated enterprise system and refused to upgrade, even if it meant new features. We were on Version 6, but still had to support Version 3 (which amusingly required IE6) Kind of like my dad and his old volvo - If it ain't broke, they didn't fix it.