This sounds like a good use for GPG based encryption using a smart card. I use the OpenPGP card for my private key. This prevents keylogging from being able to get my passphrase and then look at my encrypted backups. I can make a backup and encrypt it without the smart card, and it is only at decrypt time that I need the smart card and reader.

After three tries of the PIN that protects the card the PIN is disabled. After three tries of the admin reset PIN the card burns out. It doesn't matter if the HDD is duplicated -- once the keys are fried, they are out of luck.

It sounds lke the union movement in the US has a lot of maturing to do. Unions in Australia look after the rights of their members and a big part of this is collective bargaining. Large employers have decent sized teams working out employment conditions, and the union (or group of unions) is a reasonable counter to this. Otherwise you have a team of 5-10 professional negotiators 'negotiating' with employees one-on-one.

When industrial action is called for by the more mature unions, participation is voluntary. I was a member of a union that represented clerical and technical people in the electricity and local government industries. I had the choice of not striking, and when I did I was able to record that as protected industrial action. It gave my supervisor's manager a bit of a panic as he had to record it, and it wasn't usual for a professional engineer to strike (just for the day). The blue collar union that represented the electricians had very high turnouts, and the 'association' representing managers and professional engineers didn't get too many people taking part.

Promotion is on the basis of merit in the power industry, and the 'last on, first off' rules are pretty much legislated out of existence. Some unions do make rediculous demands when they think they have management over a barrel, and sometimes that results in jobs going overseas. Heinz were put in that position, and rather cave in to Australian union demands they expanded a factory in New Zealand instead.

A union that cares about the welfare of its members is also happy for an unsafe or dangerous worker to be shown the door. If workers bypass safety devices on a machine then they will get little support from their union, and rightly so.

Perhaps the US is just a few years behind the rest in the maturity of unions?

There is also the Australian 'Next G' combo of frequencies for Telstra: 850MHz and 2100MHz. A Telstra iPhone 3 or HTC Desire will work fine on AT&T.

The iPhone 4 is actually UMTS 850/900/1900/2100, so even a European iPhone 4 will work with AT&T's 3G. The 2100MHz might give T-Mobile coverage too, but they also use 1700MHz.

I'm guessing that you haven't used USB3 then? eSATAp is rarer than Thunderbolt, and a big benefit of USB3 is the additional power that is available to the connector. I've just installed a USB3 card into my desktop PC, and it requires a molex power feed to power the downstream devices. The backward compatibility of USB3 means that the new external drive I just bought will also work on my older computers. With the USB3 card on the desktop I am getting sustained 100MB/s transfers, which USB2 or FW400 won't achieve.

I think the multi-device thing that Thunderbolt offers and the ability to make external PCIe connections is fantastic too, but it is still early days. If Thunderbolt external drives are made that support USB or Firewire then great, but in the mean time you are limited in the devices that can use the protocol. USB3 is here now, with a lot more motherboard, laptop and external device support.

Power supply from a USB3 port is limited to 6 load units of 150mA, giving a port total of 900mA at 5V. This is an improvement over USB2 which was limited to 500mA. The eSATAp ports are generally eSATA/USB2 ports, and so there is less power available. The other problem with eSATAp is that there isn't an official standard. That's where USB3 wins out -- and the fact that I can buy USB3 stuff right now.

I can see that Runaway appreciates antennae and feedlines too. Why run 100W and loose 3dB over a 100' length of RG58, when you could use LMR400, run 60W and only have 0.9dB of loss. The same power gets to the antenna. HF CB is more forgiving than UHF CB due to the attenuation characteristics of cable. A 25' run of RG58 cable at 477MHz (Australia/New Zealand UHF CB) has 3dB loss (50% efficiency), but LMR400 has 0.7dB loss (85% efficiency).

Crappy coax is going to perform even worse than standard RG58!

Having wire in the air is the best to do, and coupling that with a good feed line (preferably open wire feeder for HF) and a moderate amount of power is more than sufficient. I've worked the Canary Islands from Brisbane on 5W SSB using 30m of wire tied off between two trees. The solar conditions are not good at the moment, so things will only get better. I now run 100W from an Elecraft K3 (the best amateur radio I've found) which makes it a bit easier for people to hear me, since I don't have the option of a bigger antenna. I still feel a bit dirty using that much power :-)

Yes, the CO2 emissions from a diesel look higher, but a large amount of that is due to the engine burning the fuel completely and having less CO. CO isn't considered a greenhouse gas (it isn't listed in the IPCC Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing report), so it doesn't matter. This is where 'carbon pollution' has ended up arse over tit: the carbon gases that will kill you are not considered pollution, and the ones that you can breath are pollution. Go figure.

Small diesels are now popular in Australia (despite being raped by the oil companies and paying more per litre than petrol -- the opposite of most countries). The VW Golf 118TSI Comfortline is a 1.4l 'twincharge' petrol with 118kW and 240Nm and the Golf GTD is a 2.0l turbo diesel with 125kW and 350Nm, so these are roughly equivalent in performance. With a DSG gearbox the 118TSI has emissions of 144g/km of CO2 and the GTD has emissions of 152g/km of CO2 -- but there is no mention of CO.

With the use of low sulphur diesel and good particulate filters there is no valid reason to ban the use of 'oil burners' in passenger cars. In someways these are better for biofuel as waste oils from the food industry can be converted to biodiesel, whereas ethanol for addition to petrol consumes a lot of valuable growing land. The appeal of biodiesel in heavily taxed countries is the, erm, 'lack' of excise.

I doubt that you'd be in front of most /. readers, since most have some science background and might recognise wavelengths etc.

Anyway, 10m is the 28MHz amateur radio band (10m being the wavelength). Ham gear is more powerful, and can drive larger linear amplifiers (the 'kicker' in CB parlance). A 1600W linear is going to need around 100W of drive, so the ham radio would work nicely. I think the legal limit of a CB is something like 10W, which would underdrive the linear.

The US obsession with RF power never ceases to amaze me, especially when I'm using 5W to talk to an operator running 1500W. The QRP mantra: power is no substitute for skill.

As you say, I can't believe I am biting at the troll ...

The ITU offer a heap of standards for FREE, which you don't get from the IEC or ISO. ETSI, who set the GSM and UMTS standards, also release these for free.

Pop along to www.3gpp.org and have a good read. For free.

The SIM can be locked to only work with one IMEI (this is done on the SIM itself). Since the SIM only works with one carrier (provided roaming is not enabled), then the carrier should be able to set things up so that only one IMEI (i.e. modem) can use that SIM.

We basically agree, except I meant to lock the SIM to the IMEI so the SIM cannot be used elsewhere. It is possible to lock a terminal to work with only one SIM too, but this is not the problem.

What idiot working for either the carrier or the road company got SIMs provisioned with voice? Surely private IP network GPRS would be sufficient and would keep the traffic lights off the public internet?

My prepaid 3G data SIM card is incapable of phone calls, so I know that GSM/UMTS has the ability to provide voice, data or both. As other people have said too, why was the SIM PIN not used? If the SIM PIN was enabled then the knowledge of that PIN should be tightly held and would give a clue to the 'inside' job nature.

Another protection would be IMEI locking with the carrier so the SIM couldn't be used elsewhere. When you put infrastructure in public then you need to be paranoid. We installed our GSM modems at the top of 275kV and 500kV power pylons, which have their own anti-climb features and a rather unhealthy sounding corona discharge.

Yes, but those RC planes have names like Predator, Reaper and Avenger and cost a lot of money and people with funny looking uniforms drive them. That makes it OK apparently.

If the internet can't cope then that sounds like a job for carrier pigeons with uSD cards, or at least the post. For the cost of the service at $100+ per month that makes for a lot of letters.

15 tracks for percussion does sound like a lot, but I'm no musician. Good use for unlimited internet, but I can't see that application taking off here. Maybe 48k 24b would be more suitable?

That sucks. Teltra charge the cable internet $100 if you don't take any other services. It is $90 if you have phone with them (conventional phone, not VoIP). If you have multiple services (such as a cellphone), the price drops to $70 for the internet component.

Telstra is fairly wierd in that it is the incumbent phone company and the part-owner of a cable TV network. Australia is wierd in that we have two cable networks in the capital cities. I have Optus cable and Telstra cable strung from the same power poles outside my house.

Sounds like the US needs a competition/fair play department.

Ohh, someone has learnt how to post out of context. News Corp just called -- they want you on staff NOW!

Interesting, interesting.

I guess when you're used to 'unlimited' data you do come up with interesting ways of using the internet that do require large amounts of traffic. I also put photos on the net, manage/mirror a couple of websites, but the volumes are not huge.

When I first got on the net the connection our country had to the US was sponsored by the NSF and was a 128kbit/s satellite link. Later on it went to a few Mbit/s. When I was at university traffic outside of the country was charged at $25/Mbyte, which made browsing with Mosaic expensive, but iPhone was worth it. I think that the conditions faced when you start using something affect your usage long term, so younger people are probably using the internet in more interesting ways than us older-farts.