My wife's RAZR MAXXXXXXXX routinely goes all weekend without needing to be recharged and it's two years old. It used to do better when first bought. She's a pretty heavy talker and casual game player too.

Well, considering that the US DOD is just about the only agency that tracks everything into orbit (other than Russia but we cooperate and share significantly with them, so it's about the same) pretty much everyone has to ask their permission first. Otherwise they risk slamming into some piece of space debris, micro satellite or other very bad thing. The Europeans have a pretty good system now, but they don't track as many objects or as many small objects as the US does.

So, really it's about practicality. No insurer and no sane person would put a space plane into orbit without first checking with the DOD that that orbit was safe. Given that most launches I've been party to have had to have their orbit adjusted some either in launch time or actual orbital trajectories due to the potential for collisions, I think that they would have a really, really hard time getting any insurance or any sane person to sign on if the DOD wasn't going to vet the trajectory before launch. Sure, a satellite could risk it, but not an orbital space tourism plane with people on board.

Interesting apocryphal story I heard once had to deal with the Bay of Pigs. The Russians were having to provide all sorts of manuals and technical detail to the Cubans in advance. At the time, pretty much only English and Russian had terms for things like "super-heterodyning receiver". Spanish was of no use, and the Cubans did not know Russian. Both knew English pretty well, so all technical interchange for the Bay of Pigs between the two sides was done in English. I expect that it's still the closest to a universal technical language, where all of the context does not get lost in translation (Exception text seems to get horribly mangled in translation).

The US government is selling off Upper L-Band TM, lower L-Band TM, and S-Band TM allocations within the next 5-10 years. Those are THE beachfront, prime spectrum bands that the US government owns that can be used for cell networks. The plan has been rolling for at least 5 years already now. It does take a while to upgrade every single test asset that the government uses to the new C-Band spectrum. It's going to take probably 75% of the money that the government will get from sale of this spectrum to pay for the upgrades (aka, tens of billions of dollars).

So, yea, they're working it. In fact, the push has become very, very sustained these last 3-4 years.

Forgot to add that it's the longer waves (lower frequency = longer wavelength) that penetrates walls and objects better.

It adds good, compatible MIMO to the spec. Nicer routers will actually dynamically point a more directional beam at devices that are having signal to noise problems to allow for a better connection. Not much, but that extra 3-5dB or so can really make a big difference in connection quality.

Well, if that's you're going in point, then for NK all he has to do is approve a plan also. The military already has their preferred scenarios planned out, Obama would just have to approve that one.

I mean, let's compare apples to apples here. There were significant potential for consequences in the Osama attack, and we've felt some with cooling of Pakistani relations, other small-time allies worried about us doing the same thing to them, etc. Furthermore, it could have been 1,000x worse had the operation gone horribly wrong (reference Jimmy Carter here).

You can't discharge student loans in bankruptcy. They're with you for the rest of your life. My guess is that they have a similar or better repayment rate than most corporations, which can discharge a lot of this in bankruptcy (not only Oracle uses this specific trick). Those student loans come form the same place as Oracle's borrowing, so it makes sense to ask why twice to three times the interest rate to invest in our workforce than the interest rate to invest in a corporation?

But you still can't instantaneously revoke all of the passwords in that vault. That's the current problem.

True, but if that password manager gets compromised by, say, Red October via capturing your keystrokes, everything is compromised for all sites until you take the time individually change each one,.

Currently, with Google Authenticator, I have it set up to authenticate me for a number of things, as if it gets compromised, simply telling it to re-sync again re-secures all of my credentials. Much, much better management. Single point control.

It really is. I love their current implementation. It's actually security done right. I use Google Authenticator on my phone. If I login from an unknown computer, it asks me for a pass code also, which I just bring up on my phone. I only need to remember the password to my phone/tablet. It's easily the most seamless and secure two-factor authentication I've ever used, and I've used a lot of them....

I also use it as a token to access a couple of other sites. I believe that Apache has a module that can sync to Authenticator. It's great two-factor.

It also comes with a list of one time codes that I can carry around for when I don't have access to my phone or tablet.

It's like a permanent key/password manager for all of Google. It'd be great to turn it into my whole life. Much easier to just de-sync the Authenticator, then re-sync rather than blow away passwords for all sites, then re-create them for all sites if something gets compromised.

TL;DR I trust Google to do this right because they're already miles ahead of everyone else.

The article mentions that it still has incredibly high textile strength, and shows a small fiber holding up a light (not much, but still).

I think that cost would scale down well since it's very similar to other material handling.

Right now, a large part of the cost and problems with data cables are the really thin wires -- we'd like them to be thinner, but can't make them any thinner without making the cable too brittle. I purposely buy extra-thick data cables merely to reduce problems in the field due to flex. If these flex well, that's a huge boon.....but then, do these survive soldering or crimping? Or am I going to have to teach my techs to sew?

Some people fly ~weekly for our jobs, and that pilots and workers are subject to it multiple times a day....so, yea. We probably should do the same type of research on these that we did with cell phones. Due diligence and all that.

Google just filed an brief, and brought along a couple of other heavy hitters asking the patent office to reform, and to scrub current patents for overarching generalities like "on the internet". From their brief, it even sounds like they're willing to pay the USPTO some of the cost associated with doing that patent scrub. They are putting their money where their mouth is, but in the meantime you don't win a thermonuclear war (current smartphone market) without some warheads of your own.

But then we would have to give the rebels our GPS decryption keys for the check, which rotate often times unpredictably. Given that we don't even give those keys to most of our allies, or even our own soldiers on the ground that have a reasonable risk of being captured, I'd say that that idea is likely not going to fly.