The heck with hacking, does this mean we're going to equip deer with WiFi, and fine children who ride near the street on tricycles that aren't equipped?

Cooperative communication can be used for things like platooning and adaptive cruise control, but it has to be augmented by enough situational awareness to understand what's happening without cooperation. So the "safety" thing doesn't make any sense to me: If you're depending on inter-vehicle communication for safety, all it takes is an unequipped roadway participant, or a failed transceiver, to create a dangerous situation.

It takes several nights (and several hours per night) of viewing, but the most dramatic "wow, there's really stuff happening up there!" class project I've seen is calculating the orbital periods of Jupiter's moons. With just a 'scope, if you look at Jupiter, and then use a stopwatch to find the times for each of the moons going out of frame, and then have your kids plot those points out on graph paper. Do this at hour intervals for 3 nights running, you can then fit sine curves to the points and see what the orbital period of the moons is.

You can also do this with a digital camera with a decent sized lens (most of the SLRs with the 1.6 or so multiplier and a 300mm lens will work well), just counting pixels of separation.

The "wow, that's not just static" realization can be profound.

I haven't built a web page yet for this experiment, but I do have a spreadsheet to do the graphing automatically, drop me an email if you'd like further class materials and maybe that'll get me to build the page for this.

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.