It seems like it could, provided that the lines can handle the bandwidth (which you claim, I'll take your word for it). As for the other end, if I got it right the process can be reversed to restretch out small chunks of the signal into something slow enough to be readable.

I wonder something though, can't they just send a bunch of parallel signals each at different frequencies instead of bothering with serialising the whole thing onto the same carrier? I mean it would use the same bandwidth in the end, so why bother making it all be on one carrier?

Yes, but you can't impress your style-over-substance Mac-loving friends with a quad-core desktop and 8GB of RAM in a boring case.

Counterexample.

I pull up Slashdot with no Javascript and get a nice comment list. It works, and that's all there is to it.

I pull up Slashdot with Javascript enabled and sit there and wait for the browser to grind code for five seconds (bringing everything else on my computer, including Folding@Home, to a stall), just for a stupid little box that floats along the left side of the page like a stray dog that's decided to follow you around for some reason and has a bunch of sliders that are supposed to show and hide content but don't work at all.

I'll take the no-JS version of the page, thanks.

And don't even get me started about the Preferences...

It seems you've never worked with "enterprise software"

At my previous company we built 'enterprise' software. Generally the 'stagnation' you describe was a customer effect, not a vendor effect. The customers had an integrated enterprise system and refused to upgrade, even if it meant new features. We were on Version 6, but still had to support Version 3 (which amusingly required IE6) Kind of like my dad and his old volvo - If it ain't broke, they didn't fix it.

Like cattle. Then you could really be accounted for. No problemo.

It's the old issue of "polling" vs automatic "interrupts". In this case, the polling solution would appear to have less impact on personal privacy. Anything that could generate an "interrupt" when you moved away from your computer could just as well track you as you moved eleswhere. As I said, cattle tags.

I think I'd rather put up with the minor annoyance of having my systems periodically time out on me.

For one simple reason, micropayments as they are debated here will never work.

When the product is too cheap, then the time and effort buying the product is the true cost to the buyer.

In other words, after a certain point, it just has to be free, or it simply isn't worth it.

What's more, if the seller doesn't value their product enough to charge a non-micro amount for it, then what they are doing is failing to make a value proposition, which is the essence of a business transaction.

No one will pay pennies for something worth pennies.

Newspapers are already cheap, but they are not free. But they aren't micro-priced either. Whether it is buying a paper at the stand or subscribing months at a time, there is a valid value proposition there.

On-line media has yet to find that value proposition. Without that proposition, debating the technical details concerning how payments will be made is getting waaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of yourself.

GPS devices never "talk" to the GPS satellites. They "listen".

Any "talking" the device does is done via other avenues. In this case, it's cellular, and most likely the cellular module can't connect to the network if it's not activated (subscribed). If it's not connected, it can't send its location.

In my case, because I got run out of several other places when I asked if I could boot an Ubuntu live CD in order to check for compatibility, but the OfficeDepot guy said "sure, no problem".

And because I've twice gotten some really good answers to "what have you got in the back that was returned that you really don't want to deal with and will cut me a radical deal on?" question.

When I was in college the one professor who taught me the most, and especially the most that has helped my career, told me "publish, publish, publish!"

I didn't stay in academia, I've never had a peer-reviewed article in a major paper, but I've taken his advice to heart and it's served me well. I get my name out there as much as I can.

Back in the '90s, Ed Catmull, of Pixar fame, emailed me out of the blue on the basis of a discussion I participated in on comp.graphics.algorithms, and I went to work there for a while. That's my most dramatic episode of making a good contact online, but it's far from the only one.

I've had recruiters who actually knew what I was looking for contact me (rather than the usual annoyance of keyword matching on Dice), and they already knew what it would take to get me to move (One email started something like "I see you just bought a house in wine country, I can't imagine moving here is attractive, but the client told me to contact you anyway", which got my attention, because he cared enough to find out who I was. Even though "wine country" is a bit of a stretch... I suppose he was being nice).

I don't really like the social networking sites, and I rarely send invites because I feel like that's something of an imposition, but I gladly receive them because things that raise my visibility have, so far, been good for my career and my life.