Why would you think that they wouldn't spy on their own people, especially with their relationship to the Palestinians? If anything, the fact that it's not showing up in the US would tend to prove the point that it was Israel. The US clearly isn't afraid to spy on it's own people.

The poster isn't incompetent necessarily, just completely lazy dumping his research project on an internet forum and hoping other people will google stuff for him while he goes and does what ever he does when he's not working.

I looked into doing this at my place in Seattle. There are a number of options with their own pros and cons. Direct microwave antenna on the roof to the fiber hub downtown was the best option for large buildings, but that's specific to my area and had a large cost of entry.

Ended up not doing anything and I highly recommend it. Best you can do is to tell everyone to go solve the problem themselves and if a few neighbors want to share a connection over a WiFi router that has QOS enabled and split the bill then the association won't report them to the ISP for violating the TOS.

To give you an idea of why this is almost certainly the best option, here is the list of things you should have done as soon as you got this task assigned to you:
do the actual work you've been assigned of getting the list of provider,
examining the different terms of service,
see what options exist,
do a cost benefit analysis,
decide how you want the liability to work,
determine who is responsible for responding to DMCA take-down notices when some teenager is hosting stolen content,
decide what happens if you have a heavy bit torrent user that is reported to you,
who pays the lawyers fees for dealing with issues that may arise,
what binding agreement you are going to give each of your units,
what if they are renting to other tenants,
what if they have an open wifi router connected,
who is going to draft the binding terms of service,
how much is it going to cost just to get the agreement worked out,
how cats and dogs are supposed to live together,
etc...

Google is actually good about publishing this data (much more than any other company I know of online). Would be good if they broke it down further by requester and state, but at least you get an idea from last years data: 5950 requests, complied with 93%, disclosed info on 11057 users. http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/US/?p=2011-06

Always link to the printable version in the future please! http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/26828-techshop-paradise-for-tinkerers (still have the splash, but then it's one page not 5 or whatever).

I'd revise that to a 'Probably not'.

I've had 4 separate projects with 3 separate companies outsourced, 3 to Indian companies, and one to a Russian company. Two of the 3 Indian outsourcings were for testing of a product, and this is the one case where outsourcing can possibly work in my experience (1 of the 2 experiences was less than a total waste of money). What worked was having a liaison in-house that was available to talk to the dev team here, and work out how the product was changing daily, how the test matrix needed to adapt, and was there to clarify bug repros and whatnot. Every night he would do a call to the dev team in India to catch them up on everything that had happened that day, and every morning he would call again to get all the info on their progress. The success of the situation rested heavily on his competency to manage the offsite team and keep them on task with a changing target. This was still a pain in some cases as an in-house test team could just walk over and talk to the devs rather than having a 24hr turnaround on all things, but it worked out.

The other 3 outsourcings were not as well managed, and I would consider them of significantly less benefit than having in-house development and testing. Development outsourcing in particular needs a heavy hand and constant tending. No matter how detailed and specific your spec is, there are always implementation questions and nuances that need clarity, and blocking issues that need workarounds and having a creative discussion over how best to solve the issue is critical. Not to mention that the quality of the developers is a huge unanswered question and the code you get at the end of it is written by someone that gets paid for doing this contract, not for maintainability, adaptability and clarity of the code.

Since they arrested him they must have some good idea that its him, but it will be interesting to see what evidence they have, how it was collected, and how they can show it was only he who could have done the deed. With how easy it is to remotely control computers and especially if he had a wifi router, who's to say that his computer wasn't rooted and someone remotely did what he is accused of.

4chan is staying true to it's roots. Just yesterday they spent the whole night changing a Tea Party website to different incredibly offensive imagery and language after someone posted that the admin password was p9assw0rd. also reddit still had boat loads of cat pictures so there's that.

really though /. isn't doing too bad compared to ars or tech crunch. the only way i can stand them any more is through an rss feed, and even then just barely.

Here is my friends project. Super smart bunch of people. If the kickstarter bubble bursts (through a sullied reputation or scamming or whatever), another one will come along to replace it that learns from the mistakes of the past. It's a clearly good idea. Allowing small niche markets to find and fund engineering and creative talent is something that will always be desirable.

Yes.

maybe not so doubtful after all... http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/04/27/1311255/microsoft-patches-major-hotmail-0-day-flaw-after-widespread-exploitation

Agreed. Unless the hacker exploited a flaw in Hotmail to get the login credentials or it was obtained from some other Microsoft service (highly doubtful), then really it could be the editors fault for either having an easily guessable password (the same as he luggage perhaps), or logging in from a computer that had been rooted and was key logging or whatever.

What are your thoughts on Evacuated Tube Transport as a launch system for the future, or do you have hopes for some other technology? I realize this may be out of scope for your single launch for the moon, but the ETT technology is a fascinating next step that seems elegant to me as an aerospace outsider with an engineering background and would cut down on the actual launch costs. I wonder why the side of a big mountain near the equator is not already a planning site.

If it's just a robot why not just shoot it out of a big cannon?

I think it's more economic than cultural. They sell the systems at a loss initially (and eventually break even later as manufacturing costs go down, but they still have to pay off a large amount of R&D). If they allow the system to be hackable and the average consumer can pirate games, then they wouldn't get the average game purchases high enough to turn a profit. They have to protect their investment. I wish I could pay double price and play my old emulators without all the hassle though.

These ones look like a promising technology as well: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/12/vuzix-augmented-reality-smart-glasses-prototype-hands-on-video/