Hey, now that Intel is trying to sell quarks NICs, we could be looking at a real crunch in the IPv6 space... (and, at a tray price of over $9/unit, large atoms and even most molecules becoming enormously expensive.)

Listening is 'hauling in data'(unless you are purely passive about it, which they aren't.) I didn't mention humans at all.

Yes, and I don't see why faces, especially if you have a method for quickly and easily algorithmically fingerprinting them, would be of any less interest than any other aspect of an intercepted signal that could be used to draw inferences about who and where it came from, where it's going and who it's intended for, draw correlations between otherwise apparently separate transmissions, and so on.

Given the relative obscurity of video compared to voice and text, I wouldn't see it replacing CDR grovelling or anything; but that's merely a question of scale rather than of scope.

And there are no digitized images or videos that include faces anywhere among the data they haul in?

Relatively early in their life, they were pretty much at parity or better with anything else you could get for roughly the same money and anything like the same convenience, in terms of specs, and much better supported. The fact that subsequent revisions were stagnant or worse and the state of routers-that-actually-work-with-3rd-party-builds didn't stay still took the shine off them. Then re-releasing (now with new higher price and extra letter!) the WRT54GL was something of an insult.

Strictly speaking, under their definition, wouldn't anything that doesn't cause the bootloader to run away crying and fits in the available flash space count as 'a firmware'?

My concern is that both will die because neither can win. This is a problem. I used to support OpenOffice, until Sun was bought by Oracle. Then I recommended LibreOffice for about as long as it took Oracle to give the package to Apache Foundation. Now? Who gives a shit, use either. But then again, that is the problem in the first place.

Not having a clear winner, nor a clear advantage in operations (moral/functional) makes it the "use either" that will assure neither succeeds.

Just tried that, and my wife slapped me and called me a perv. Thanks asshole!

You're correct, except for one point. Cable TV expects life to revolve around the 7-10PM slot, when I happen to be busy with "life". And, I often don't have time to watch for several weeks in a row. And DVRs are stupid with On Demand Viewing like Netflix available. All said and done, unless you HAVE to be that annoying person who "spoiler alerts" every freaking conversation, then please spare me the "second run content". That is so 20th Century.

I doubt anything the OpenBSD group develops is going to be under the GNU licenses.

Unless you are one serious badass, you won't be in the mood for much 'sneaking' after a few hours of hypothermia and hypoxia. If your luck holds, you didn't die or get violently ejected at a lethal altitude; but you've still been in a state closer to 'amateur hibernation', not one of our strong points, than anything else. You'll probably just lie on the tarmac defrosting and then maybe try some experimental crawling.

They had (maybe still have) an ARGUS-IS unit puttering around in the vicinity of Quantico, VA for a while, for, um, demonstration purposes only, I'm sure. Now, I suspect that an ARGUS-IS deployment has a price tag that would make the folks at Persistent Surveillance Systems look like a hobby aircraft; but the performance is... impressive.

I suspect that, aside from basic technological advance, it really doesn't help that the Iraq and Afghanistan markets are winding down a bit, so assorted stuff for hunting foreigners we don't care about is now being rebadged and flogged as public safety gear.

I know that there has been some (largely speculative/small scale test) work on a pneumatic equivalent to pumped hydro, using oil and gas wells that have already been emptied of hydrocarbons but are suspected of being geologically sound enough to store compressed air; but I haven't heard of any commercial-scale deployments. Not sure if that one hit the rocks in some fairly fundamental way, or if it's just winding its way through R&D. That one would be handy if it did work, especially since a lot of the US petro production includes areas that don't have much in the way of hydro potential (even if you were given a free hand against environmental objections, hydro means some serious construction if you don't already have a reasonably appropriate site).

I know less about batteries; but I'd love to see something less obnoxious than lead acid become viable even at the smallish datacenter scale.

Given that unpretentious vodka is pretty much food-grade ethanol and water, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, and powdered alcohol would be food grade ethanol, some sort of dextrin, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, they'd have to be saving a lot of money on the reduced bulk and weight of the omitted water to do any better.

Given that, and given the obvious utility in alcohol concealment and infiltration scenarios, I suspect that they aren't even going for price parity with either the Not Too Much Methanol(tm) brand vodkas or the Tastes Like Piss And Turns to Piss!(tm) economy beer sector.

My religion? I was preemptively dismissing all but the most absurdly optimistic assumptions, verging on cheap-magic-teleporters, as irrelevant to the finitude of economic activity. My personal suspicion is much closer to anything extrasolar being forever a spectator sport, and much of what's within it being something you do purely for reasons of scientific curiosity.