well the car, since there is no information on the "virt2real" board itself. And a SoC running linux with some real time components is hardly new. Nothing here that couldn't of been done with a Raspberry Pi, old android phone, or old router and the likes. If you didn't post this as a commercial product, but rather as a community project with docs and source code, the reactions here would of been very different.

Yes. Very. Especially since you didn't even try to refute the technical blunders mentioned above. This would of been a nice article on hackaday, but not on slashdot where most engineers are themselves capable of doing a better job. No offense, it's a nice hobby project, but making this commercial is simply a bad joke.

not to mention it's a freaking Opel Vectra .. the least sexy car ever built .. If they want to build "bond car" accessories, why don't they build a kit that spits out an oil spill or nails to flatten pursuers' tires. The liability will probably be the same as for this joke.

they're using a small underpowered RC servo with plastic shaft to pull the mechanical throttle on the carburetor (forget doing this on a modern car too), the motor on the steering wheel sounds very underpowered, not to mention the twisting of the mechanical mounting from the torque. They didn't show how they actuate the breaks. This has been done many times before by hobbyists and engineering students. But in this state it's at best a joke, certainly not viable as a commercial product. All there is to see here is a guy that wrote a nice iOS app, and a guy that interfaced some servo's with a mcu that accepts commands over wifi. Would be a nice read on hackaday, but come on, are they serious about commercializing this high-school project ?

why don't they just install an automatic fire extinguisher. problem solved, and bonus points for being innovative.

what kind of internet connection does this guy have that this is not slashdot-ed into oblivion ? very nice job, but a bit too messy for my taste ... also free advertising ;)

At those frequencies (ELF/VLF) there's isn't too much bandwidth. Maybe enough for sensor buoys to send a few bytes every few minutes. But it's not even going to get close to even 1200 bps.

And yet another high level layer to cope with high-error-rate and slow physical layers. But the problem remains the attenuation of RF underwater. Where are the interesting details, like the carrier frequency, modulation type, bandwidth, power efficiency etc ..

Well a 70 Hz carrier doesn't quite give you enough bandwidth to run even a silly 1200 bps UART. With radiowaves in the microwave range (like your 2.4GHz) water absorbs most of the energy and turns it into heat. Like your microwave oven does. The water dipole attempts to continuously reorient in electromagnetic radiation's oscillating electric field. Dependent on the frequency the dipole may move in time to the field, lag behind it or remain apparently unaffected. When the dipole lags behind the field then interactions between the dipole and the field leads to an energy loss by heating.

In many radio reception techniques the signal is down-converted to a much lower frequency for easier processing. This is done through so called "heterodyning", which takes the carrier signal and mixes it with the signal from a Local Oscillator (LO) to create an Intermediate Frequency (IF). The IF and LO signals will radiate and need to be properly shielded.

"the highly elliptical orbit of the spacecraft will limit its usefulness as a relay for operating landers on the surface." while the summary says "Maintaining communications with the rovers is considered essential, hence the preparations and launch will proceed. "

Just slap on an 8bit mcu like an AVR of PIC or whatever over SPI/I2C/USART/... to do the real time stuff.

60 Hz would be terrible. Let's imagine they can IQ modulate 64 symbols (6 bits per symbol) with a samplerate of 60 Hz, that gets you 6 * 30 (Nyquist) = 180 bits per second.

I can't find anything in the article that would support that. As far as I can tell this water has been in direct contact with spent fuel and contains amongst other things strontium-90, which is also used in RTG's.

That doesn't sound very plausible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat