And if you want to save a bit of money, you can pick up the older WRAP boards quite cheaply now. I have one and it runs a stock OpenBSD install on a 512MB compact flash card. Everything works nicely, although I did compile a custom kernel to remove everything that's not needed. The ALIX seems to only have one miniPCI slot, which is a shame. The WRAP had two, so you could plug in an 802.11 card and a crypto coprocessor for offloading VPN calculations.

+1 interesting, but ultimately unrealistic. Sifting through that much footage to demonstrate something that such a large number of people had done would be a monumental task. OTOH, it's easy for Joe Blow to have The Game up on his second flatpanel at work watching last night's footage of his favorite creepy spot to report people for troublesome behavior. I've been stopped by police because I looped around the block twice with my car in a neighborhood where there was a known drug dealer. Apparently the fact that I had $2k+ worth of camera gear for night photography (of the artistic variety, not surveillance) with me did not lessen their concern (this is after *returning* to the car having conducted said photography). Imagine the ease with which our friend Joe Blow could have reported me simply when I was in the wrong place at the wrong time trying to indulge my hobby.

You would have a problem with doppler shift...the energy of the light is not constant with reflection, the momentum imparted by the laser on the reflective surface lowers the energy level of the laser.

Somebody hasn't read much Larry Niven. Why take starlight as-is when you can use solar collectors to gather it up and power a laser to drive your sail?

I'm not sure that the maximum velocity is as much a limit as you think, either. Given the time and proper course, so long as you can get above the local escape velocity (which is easier done by stealing momentum from other celestial bodies than by carrying around fuel) you can go somewhere else.

"It's exciting new evidence of something new and exciting going on in the universe."

This guy must be from the dept-of-redundancy-dept

I guess it depends on what the negotiated price would have been in the absence of the agents. As a buyer I would not pay for the service, so I will not consider that part of the value I am basing my offer on. Only in the absence of alternatives (and this is where anti-competitive practices really get you) would I be 'forced' to pay for the agent services I do not value, else to keep the price of the home competitive/reasonable, the seller will have to pay out of their gross. Of course it also depends on how hot the market is - having multiple offers for every property is very different than having a house sit on the market for months or being forced to sell due to financial problems, etc.