I thought they weren't going to fly over Compton/Los Angeles anymore at nighttime after the Soyuz-jackings last year?

> What will it be transmuted into?

We can run out of a material even though it is still firmly trapped in Earths gravity well. For example the element Bismuth (which is only twice as common as gold abundance wise) is used in large amounts in Pepto Bismol. Once this is eaten and excreted, it really becomes unrecoverable again.

Air Force has huge departments dedicated to space.
http://www.afspc.af.mil/units/index.asp

They manage GPS satellites as well as scan the skies and catalog 10's of thousands of pieces of space debris.

> Costs them more to bill you for the text message than they likely spend delivering it.

Yes, but only if you ignore the costs of -- Cell towers. Antennas. Radios. Packet Control Units. Amplifiers. Receivers. Transcoders. Mobile Switching Centers. Private Lines over SONET rings. Fiber optics equipment. Racks of GSM base station blades. Switch software licenses and support contracts to people like Ericsson. WAP headcount licenses. Software licenses. More software licenses. And also the salaries of network engineers, cellular engineers, trunking engineers, traffic analysts, operations staff, support engineers, and some management costs in there as well.

LOFAR will find a stream of information from an extraterrestrial source. When we decode it, we'll find that it's archives of extraterrestrial warez.

Order your Microcontrollers for $3-$4 from http://www.digikey.com/

Buy an ISP programmer from Pololu for $20 http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1300

Download AVR Studio 4 for free from Atmel
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=2725

GO

That enough of their souls are still poured into these incredible, sleek products to maintain the extremely high level of magic and wonder we've become accustomed to finding in each amazingly designed box.

At least, this is what I see working with SNMP data coming off dumps from the cellular base transceiver stations attached to our towers.

Every 15 minutes, every GSM handset measures the perceived strength of the tower signal it is using, this is reported to the tower, and we record them all. Also every 15 minutes, the strength of the handset signal, from the perspective of the tower is sampled and recorded.

These readings go into buckets, for example if a reading showed a -78 dbm signal, it goes in the -78dbm bucket. Before long, a histogram can be generated with the datain the buckets, and we can see typical distribution for receive performance - for both handsets and the tower. Different towers have very different "signatures" in this data.

You may go around sampling receive performance, (which would be interesting) but I don't think you'll be able to map how well the cellular system is receiving from you.

> a filesystem for flash devices

here we go again, unless we stop supporting flash, Apple has refused to distribute dual-boot Linux enabled iPads

...700 feet into the air

1) pirates unaffected
2) legit consumers annoyed and prevented from seeing their movie

I'll be letting my Dual Tuner Dish DVR boxes grab all our favorite shows up to two at a time. We'll watch them exactly when we want to, and we'll skip over all the commercials by pressing the Yellow Arrow key on our remote 6 or 7 times.

At least I always credited myself : ) My name was Deathcow back in Diablo-1 days, (and thus explains the origins of my name here). For some reason I always enjoyed rounding up a group of people in the chatrooms to visit the "secret cow level". My name lent authenticity to my offers. Once I had a group of hardy adventurers I would lead them to the cows standing around in the field. I would give careful instructions to all of them about where to stand and then tell them to stay put while I opened the gateway. This will begin to test patience after a while. I would then begin to blame the individuals for items they are holding/etc.