I say we fix this oversight from 30 YEARS AGO by developing a new addressing scheme, compatible to an extent with the original, that can be overlaid on the network and distributed more evenly around the world. Oh, and make it bigger, too, so we don't revisit this problem for a while. Who's in?

The IntelliDrive program has been working on this for a while, and the OEMs are starting to test this on the road. You can look at some concept videos.

The RF band is around 5.4GHz, allocated specifically for short-range transportation communication.

I don't like the backscatter machines OR the pat-downs, but I saw this and it raised some questions. Now I'm a Schneier fan-boy, and we even work in the same field, but let's take the NY 9/11 attack as a comparison (2819 according to NYMag).

So for the scanner to be deadlier than just that attack, it would have to kill 16 extra people a year for a bit over 176 years. Am I missing something?

For further comparison there's an 9/11-equivalent loss of life on US road every 27 days (using 2008 numbers from the 'pedia.) Maybe it's me, but I don't see it being more deadly than terrorists. That said, I'm not going in them - radiation is cumulative. RF (the MM-wave scanners) is not.

"Eve Tokimatsuri" from Megazone 23 came out in March of 1985. Note this is an Anime OVA, and I suspect influenced the desires of the folks working on Hatsune Miku. My only remaining questions are when the aliens attack our Dyson Sphere-like satellite city, and where to get my Garland prototype.

There are two main approaches to government contracting: Lowest Cost and Best Value. Contrary to popular belief, Lowest Cost is not always the one chosen, by a long shot. I also previously misunderstood "Close enough for government work." Turns out most "government work" has very specific requirements and specifications, or you don't get paid. If you see something different, please call Waste, Fraud & Abuse.

Just a thought... I suggest a number of different exams (say 4, for a class size of 30?), randomly distributed to the students. This will help mitigate answer copying (unless the miscreants have the same version) - sending a question to get an answer means the answer provider has to do two or more exams, not just their own. You can't eliminate cheating, but you can raise the effort required to do it. This also means more work for you, but so would denying RF or IR comms, crib sheets, etc., and is less technically complex. Use a mix of different questions and the same questions with different parameters.

This is correct, the SSN is an identifier. (Yes, I know the card is marked not to use as identification, but that's different. The problem is that a secure transaction (on-line or off), requires an identifier and an authenticator. An identifier is like a username - it identifies who the party is. An authenticator is like a password - it attempts to confirm the entity supplying the identifier is the real one.

The problem is that the SSN is used as both identifier and authenticator, which is an inherent flaw. The SSN is a de-facto identifier. Any attempt to use it as a shared secret authenticator is doomed.

Didn't Roddenberry famously refer to Star Trek as "Wagon Train to the Stars"?

Free-To-Air (FTA) feeds and Wildfeeds are plentiful. Do some reading on http://www.satforums.com/ see if you can steer the dish, and if it's possible to enable it for Ku as well a C band (I'm guessing it's C because of the size). You can often refit a C band mesh dish to work on Ku by laying metal window screening on the surface of the reflector. Then you have to mount a KU feed at the focal point, usually offset next to the C feedhorn. Great site to find out what you can view FTA from your location: Lyngsat, for the central US try this page. To see if you can view a satellite from your location there are simple calculators on Lyngsat.

I haven't had to store experimental results like that. My work produces prototypes, some data, demos and support documentation. There are tons of KM tools out there to manage heterogenous data in a recoverable way. We've used document repositories like Hummingbird (acceptable) and of course SharePoint. The key (literally) is including the right metadata and tags when you check in the element. When a data set goes dormant (static) you can tarball the CVS tree or whatever and drop it in the repo. Then there's Knowledge Discovery, something we've created tools for. They let you understand how you got that idea from three hours of web/repo surfing.

FYI, The U.S. Postal Service has the largest fleet of alternative-fuel vehicles in the world - over 43,000 (including E85 vehicles).

DeVry, Unitek, Sequoia Institute, University of Phoenix, etc, are all scams.

Perhaps an AC troll, but I believe this is a generalization. I went to DeVry (after community college) and learned a lot - in a specific area (BS Information Systems). Liberal arts was of course neglected - this is a technical school. My classmates appeared to have a similar experience, generally successful.

I was working in the field during and after school, and went on to get an MS in Computer Science (the BS transferred just fine). I'm about to start my PhD.

I'm now mid-career, still doing work I love for six-figures. Worked out fine for me, and I'm NOT the top of my class or the most successful in the group.

Job placement is always what you make of it, and especially so during hard economic times. At my DeVry campus the IS program was a feeder to places like CBIT (Cincinatti Bell IT) who sucked up programmers as fast as they could be made. I, however, went to smaller local IT shops, as I more quickly would become the "smartest guy in the room", which afforded me flexibility to learn a great deal. Right now this would be much harder; programming being outsourced, stressed economy, etc. I highly recommend professional networking, getting to know what your peers are interested in and making sure they know what YOU are looking for. I started that late, thinking I wanted to get a job on merit rather than contacts. I didn't realize you have to find the opportunity first, then get it on merit. Professional associations in your field are wonderful for this, are cheap(er) for students, and usually like having fresh blood to complement the greybeards.

I do agree with the approach of starting with a community college - often the best bang for your buck, especially for the first two years. Then transfer to a four-year school who is credible in your field (which you might have only THEN decided upon). I also agree regarding applying for grants and scholarships. In fact, DeVry was truly outstanding in this, getting me grants I'd never heard of. The rest went on the ten-year student loan program.

DSL performance drops with distance, which is a factor in rural areas. You may be able to get 1.5mbits out to 9 or 10 thousand feet. If you're lucky you can still get SDSL 128K at 27K feet (which is really ISDN 2B+D bonded), but that's pretty much the limit out to 33K feet. There are some newer technologies for DSL, but I expect them to also suffer over distance. Fiber of course avoids much of this, but there's the cost of running it.

On the other hand, first responders may need location data in order to save lives and respond to 911 calls.

Enhanced 911 Phase 2 already requires wireless phone providers to deliver sub-300 meter accurate positions of 911 callers to the responding Public Safety Answering Point. This takes full effect in September 2012. 95% of subscriber phones were required to provide such location data by 2005.

So that entire section of the TFS is a red herring.

This is great intel, no doubt. There's a bit of irony in reporting vulnerabilities in malware - can I get a CVE for that? Counter-attack has a bunch of potential issues, though. The primary one is attack attribution, and the other primary one is that it's not legal in many places (including the United States) to counter-attack your attacker. If you execute code or access a system without the permission of the system-owner, you're in the same crime category as the original miscreant.