720p+ car cameras have been available for a while see http://www.chinavasion.com/china/wholesale/Car_Video/Mirror_Monitors/Car_Rear_View_Mirror_with_Dashcam_and_Wireless_Parking_Camera_-_5_Inch_Screen_GPS_Speed_Radar_Detector_Bluetooth/ or http://www.chinavasion.com/china/wholesale/Car_Video/

Which big government contractor needs work now? That seems to drive these projects more than actual need. I'm guessing the NWS/NOAA has plenty of computing resources, just need to fine tune the models a little bit and collaborate techniques with the Europeans...

Yes, be afraid of the LHC and the old water, because it's not like we're modifying the DNA of the food we consume purely for corporate profits

Set up a local courier IMAP server and copy mails there, and archive the Maildirs...each message will be a file and you can use tools like grep to search the Maildirs

Since the linksys branding to Cisco, is there a cheat sheet explaining which VoIP products are linksys and which are Cisco?

Am I the only one who finds it odd that it is cheaper to purchase and circulate physical media rather than "virtual" media? I know my local school district, looking at fruity tablet computers, determined that electronic textbooks would end up costing more than the actual books they are purchasing now - largely because e-books from their publishers would have to be purchased every year, and not allowed to be passed down for a few years like a traditional book. Sound like the publishers killing e-books

You'll also want to invest in a good spectrum analyzer if you go the WISP route. I recommended 3.65 Ghz because it is likely quiet in your area, but specific links may need 900MHz (most forgiving when a link isn't quite perfect line of sight), 5 GHz, or 2.4 GHz to work well and the spectrum analyzer will give you great insight on what could interfere or how strong the signal from the POP really is. You may have to make agreements with some of your customers in good locations to place multiple antennas on their site to serve other customers who may not have a good LOS to the main POP. You'll also have to figure out things like authentication and access control (you'll want to cut off non-paying customers!), subnetting/VLANS, size of netblocks (or become an IPv6 only ISP?), etc. early on so you're not re-configuring many CPEs when you realize you need to manage many customers and not just sharing services with a few friends!

Find a high structure (a WISP in NW Minnesota here uses grain elevators in each town) you can attach to for a reasonable rent or trade out of service. Get a 3.65 Ghz license , place Ubiquiti Rockets attached to sector antennas (or an Omni if you're covering a really small area), and use Ubiquiti NanoStations for CPEs....If the structure is remote from the fiber termination use something like Air Fiber for the back haul to fiber termination - this could start as a 150Mbps 5.8 GHZ point-point link if you're on a budget, but you'll want to eventually get a back haul that won't get saturated during heavy use. Ideally you'll want build fiber to each POP though.

Likely a tirga research reactor or something similar

People still use WordPerfect 7? (Joke of course, what I read when I saw WP7)...is there a big Windows Phone 7 market?

Substation level is too coarse as distribution switching can change the makeup of the feeder. There could be metering at switches, junction boxes, transformers - but it would be much added cost and complexity to the distribution system. The revenue meter is already at each service point, so it is just natural to use the existing metering points and aggregate them. I've never seen an AMR system that reads residential meters less than 15 minutes intervals or commercial meters less than 5 minute intervals (just think of the bandwidth and storage needed to do more) - in fact most utilities I work use do 1-4 hour intervals for residential and 30 min- 1 hr for commercial.

Knowing where and when power is used and developing trends based on actual fine-grained information helps the electric grid be run more efficiently. The whole effort in the 2006 energy bill was to reduce the number of power plants and transmission lines the need to be constructed by using the existing facilities more efficiently, and better planning for new facilities. DO you think the power companies are actually going to go through 100Ks of customers to determine when they wake up, do laundry, eat meals, etc...We might need a HIPPA type lay for utility companies to prevent them from selling data to 3rd parties who might be willing to pay a high price for raw meter data, but for the most part people are over-reacting to smart meters. I'd be more concerned about my Sheriff's dept flying a drone over my home (my sheriff's dept in northeast ND actually is http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2012/03/grand_forks_police_to_begin_regularly_using_drones_this_spring.php http://www.suasnews.com/2012/03/12582/grand-forks-sheriff%E2%80%99s-department-launching-uas-program/ )

Knowing what time electricity spikes and ebbs and where it's used can help the power companies schedule generation and transmission in advance when rates are stable instead of the real-time market....Also can cut back on the amount of low-efficiency, high polluting oil and gas peak generation (i.e. combustion engines) that are needed during peak events by smarting loading of feeder circuits.

Have the system call home with a serial number periodically and return with an encrypted expiration date. (I would go 30-45 days to avoid issues with loss of Internet connectivity)...also log the time, date, and ip address of the registrations so you can find "shared" serial numbers that can be disbaled... Or you can open source your software and be in the services business, supporting the software, helping people install, configure, and use the software.