2.1Ah at what, 3.8V? At 120V that's around 10A. Certainly a lot, but not unheard of. Hell my laser printer uses 8.6A at 120V. More likely though it won't be a 20 second charger, but perhaps a 5 minute charger. Still quite fast, but that would pull less than a single amp out of the wall socket.

The other possibility is they'll put some regular capacitors into the charger. Build a rapid charger with a couple of those big capacitors they put into disposable cameras, let it charge those caps at a couple mA, then when you plug your phone in it dumps them in seconds. Given how much they charge for phone chargers these days, I think they could afford to toss in a couple extra caps without raising the price too much.

Faraday cage? Or you could just...ya know...unplug the router! :)

it would need to store more than one picture in RAM though -- to never touch the flash memory it would need to store every picture you have not yet viewed. Of course, the bigger concern is probably that rebooting your phone would wipe every image you haven't yet seen.

This isn't a rural area; this is outside NYC. It's got reasonable population density, and perhaps more importantly it's the wealthiest region in the entire state of NJ. It's also a very small region -- they could probably blanket the entire town with a single cell tower. I highly doubt they'll have any signal strength issues unless they decide to put the receiver in their freakin basement.

They're trying to invest in basic infrastructure. We don't have any obvious use for this stuff yet...but how could we, when we it doesn't really exist yet? I mean I'm not saying it's the best use of money in the world, but you've gotta be pretty dense to not understand why they're doing it. If nobody ever spent money on seemingly useless things, we wouldn't have electricity or tv or radio or ANY remotely modern technology, even back further than those.

I'm reminded of a story of Faraday...it is said he gave a very early demonstration of electricity in London -- essentially two coils of wire, one around a magnet and one around a compass, so when the magnet moved the compass needle did too. After the demo, one of the audience members approached and said "Well that's all very interesting, but what USE is it?" to which Faraday simply replied, "Of what use is a newborn baby?"

Also I think it's worth noticing that so far investments in communications technology have never really been wasted. Telegraphs to telephones to dial-up to broadband, every time we expand it we find something to fill that space. Humans LOVE communications tech. This is fairly new tech, and while I can't think of any good use for the average person to have that much bandwidth, I'm sure someone will figure something out. Why not crank it all the way up and just see what happens? Plenty of far worse things that the government blows money on -- like bombing eight year old Pakistani kids at $60k+ each.

Oh, and I know this isn't the point, but if you offered me 500amps of electricity for my home at $35/month, I'd take it in a heartbeat. Not sure what I'd do with it, but I'm damn sure I'd have a helluva lot of fun figuring that out! Wonder how much juice you'd need to keep a gattling railgun operating... :)

People used to think electricity was useless too.

So who's the idiot who decided put this on 4/20? :D

Well...it's a voice recording, so it's still somewhat identifiable even if they don't store any further information with it...

...except that studies have shown that GMO crops tend to use more pesticides while providing equal or even lower yields. Although they do provide more consistent yields, which can certainly be beneficial.

Either way though, the poll very clearly says -- multiple places -- that it is about how much you care, not which side you are on. Nowhere does it ask if you support or oppose.

OK, so we've got posts here about wiring up a webcam to a computer to do motion tracking and such...how about build a simple pedal with a momentary push button and have the conductor tap his feet on that, then connect that to, say, a 555 timer to generate an audible tone while the button is depressed which can be routed to some sort of earpiece or headphone -- or even a piezo element which the singer should be able to feel vibrate or click. Whole solution shouldn't cost more than $20, and that's at Radioshack prices. And it could be put together in an afternoon. Only downside is you'd need to have a wire running between the conductor and the singer, and it may be slightly more complicated for the conductor. Could have one of the other musicians tap his foot instead and see if that'd work, that would shorten the run of wire as well.

They do, however, apply a separate legal framework to Palestinians than they do to Israeli Jews. Which is also the literal definition of apartheid....

How can they declare war when we're already at war?

So they were supposed to come negotiate with us...when, exactly? While we were threatening to blow them off the face of the earth? Maybe while we were telling the world that they're Satan incarnate? And why would they? We've already proven to them that we won't uphold our end of the agreements we make, and we've also proven in Iraq that we're willing to launch an all-out war for literally no legitimate reason.

Could they have stopped this? Sure. But look at what we're doing. They finally match the weapons we were pointing against them 60 years ago, and we go drop fake bombs on them just to prove we could still kill them all with the slightest provocation. Great way to ease tensions...

I'm not saying this is entirely our fault, I'm just saying if you look at the history you sure as hell can't pretend we're entirely blameless.

Got a citation for that? Russia helped then with experimental reactors prior to signing the NPT, but never completed a full power reactor. Try reading the Wikipedia page...or correct it i guess if you can actually verify your claim.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_North_Korea#section_1

Sorry for posting this twice; my first comment didn't appear and I thought maybe I had forgotten to submit it fully.