Let me repeat my ideas. Essentially put a couple short range cell towers on every block. Put it on top of peoples homes. They pay the electricity but get free internet. Very simple.You get the option as part of your internet connection.

Normal cell towers then become backups for cities.

The block towers would only transmit up to a few blocks with radio bands being interleaved. So long as each of the local cell towers could handle a few hundred users then everything would work out.

I don't see why a drone couldn't be fitted with a special receiver for a laser signal sent from a satellite. Pretty hard to jam a signal from above.

A nuclear satellite can easily having enough power for multiple laser transmitters. The transmissions would only be one way but that's good enough to send it telemetry. The satellite could itself could figure out the approximate crafts position visually. And it would only be used when radio contact is down and or it goes off course. And of course it could have lasers itself for transmission.

An even better solution is having a high flying drone to relay signals from lower flying drones. As exponentially harder achievement would be jamming and faking out two drones simultaneously.

I can't see a viable strategy for jamming laser UV or X-Rays. These types of lasers can even transmit through clouds.

Personally I hope they don't find higgs.

I just don't buy gravity as a particle. They seem to want to reduce everything analog to a particle.

What I want to see is them quantifying is space as a thing; that the ether is actually a real tangible thing and how it relates to the bubbles in it that we call particles and how these particles are moving in multiple "dimensions" and yet we only really notice 3 of space and 1 of time.

Tell me which business or government agency has filled up 10.x.x.x. IPv6 doesn't matter internally unless your a communications company. Yet it's the communications companies that are keeping it from their customers because it invites a more distributed internet.

It's trivial and easy to upgrade users, just get a new routers, upgrade the firmware on existing ones, or use simple IPv6 to IPv4 endpoint converters. So long as the internet tunnels are IPv6 there are no deployment problems. Servers want visitors which are predominantly web surfers, so they need need to be IPv6. IPv6 users can connect to IPv4 servers easily, the reverse is not true.

Speculation:

Geeks drive this technology. The reason for IPv6 is the contention for addresses. Yet the new IPv6 hands out /64's to end points like it's water... It's not like it was handing out /16's which might be reasonable. So anyone looking at this can clearly see we are being set up for failure and their will obviously need to be an IPv7 or IPv8 to fix the /64 mess. It looks like new scheme is trying to supplant/abandon port numbers.

Open source apps will set the standard and it will be up to the commercial developers to make apps with the added functionality customers are willing to pay for.

But expect individuals applying more and more for patents for simple obvious features.

Of course there is life on other planets. There are a lot of systems out there and I'm convinced planets are common. How exactly common an earth planet is, is relative. An earth like planet we could survive on I expect is as rare as 1 in 1000 systems. Could be as rare as 1 in 10,000. But they do exist simply because of the numbers involved. Furthermore we can be sure there are planets out there with what we would recognize as animal life although they will probably look bizarre. Even planets with huge animals like dinosaurs. Planets with only ocean life and maybe plants will be more common because that's how we started. We can not assume all the planets that foster life we do so as long as or longer than our planet.

The bigger question is the question of another intelligent species. And even that is not really a fair question. If there were only one earth like planet for every galaxy, just the number of galaxies alone would dictate, even considering the numerous variables involved, that right now there is another species our there that we would find comparable to our own.

The question is will WE contact another intelligent species within our species lifetime. How close could another intelligent species that CURRENTLY exists be to us? Does physics hold secrets beyond the venerated "standard model" that will allow us to communicate across or travel these vast regions of space in reasonable time frames?

The question of intelligent species will be solved simply. Even if faster than light communication and travel isn't possible I believe most intelligent species that evolve with have the concept of monuments. Things that could endure time long after a species may have died off. The monuments will be found where intelligent species will naturally look, at or near unusual stars, and nebulas, black holes, and pulsars. We just need to look for the non natural signals in the natural phenomena. What signal would you send? What signals would be possible? Could we leave a signal in star light? Could we leave a signal that would trigger after a star went supernova? A galactic light signal saying "We were Here we Existed!"

Can't they sue for the loss of business and or freedom of speech?

Could the federal government put you in Guantanamo and then release you a year later and just say... sorry

Where is the compensation for undeserved and unreasonable abridgement of you life, liberty and property?

It were a fully armed drone? They could have reprogrammed it or taken control of it to attack US or Saudi or Israeli targets.

It you were really sophisticated you could perform a man in the middle attack. Down the drone, mod the software/replace some hardware chips so you have effectively trojaned the drone. Then during a military action you can down the drone again and add weapon bio weapons package so that when it returns to base it could attack the military facility and personnel.

Too bad it's such a repressive religious regime that doesn't believe in technology/creative thinking otherwise they would have the talent to pull this off.

I'm surprised that most of the middle east isn't developing itself for electronics manufacturing.They have the capital for to purchase the manufacturing tools. And manufacturing is getting more and more automated all the time such that they wouldn't need a cheap workforce like china. They have plenty of silicon though sand and they have plenty of sun for solar energy...

Technologically repressive regimes... sounds like George Lucas' THX1138.

And it should be easily provable that the things she said were outright blatant lies and not opinion or credible accounts of personal experience.

And proof that she was asking for money...

Intentional defamation ... lawsuit

Now if everything she actually said was reasonably accurate, i.e. her opinion ...

Bloggers need more protection than the professional press. In fact the smaller you are and the less money you make the more protection you need.

The more money you make from what you write and the more respected your writing is the more you should vet what you write.

The national enquirer for example counts as gossip.

I'm wondering if Microsoft is contemplating giving windows away more or less free and then locking down the platform and go for an app store model where they take a cut of the software pie. A more secure DRM'd platform... Certainly takes away most of the threat of viruses and trojans and that could be used to sell the idea to the public.

The future is many tablets per person. Everyone will have one deluxe tablet for active content and multimedia and a handful of cheaper auxiliary tablets for static content. And they will work together as a combined virtual device with multiple screens. We will have a few of each of various sizes. And I think soon enough universal wireless charging will become standardized. And I believe cell phones themselves will be supplanted more and more by personal hotspots (hubs) like the Verizon MiFi but smaller and get augmented with more wireless frequency options.

I find it so hard to even have an opinion about global warming because the questions and subject is so loaded.

First of all the global temperature doesn't stay the same, it's constantly rising and falling. Earth has ice ages which are defined as ice sheet existing on planet as is the case currently at our poles and we have glacial periods and interglacial periods which are defined as more extensive ice sheets and the times between them.

The earth naturally undergoes periods without any ice caps all at the poles. Volcanoes erupt all the time (in the geological sense) and put out way way more gases that change the atmosphere more profoundly than man. A bunch of small volcanoes can cause global warming in a few thousands of years and a large super volcano explosion can send us into an ice age and or glacial period overnight.

Earth weather does indeed change and that is the norm.

Human beings are unquestionably contributing to climate change. But how bad is it really vs the climate shifts that would occur anyways if we didn't exist? Where no one makes the distinction is calculating where the climate would be without humans. Global temperatures and been consistently rising since modern man appeared at the beginning of the decline of the last glacial period approximately 12,000 years ago. We probably didn't significantly effect climate until at the earliest 2000 years ago although I suspect is more like after 1200AD. But the earth was warming anyways...

Second they don't comment on possible benefits climate change can have in some areas vs the bad in others. No one seems to even notice that without ice caps we get a new continent to inhabit.

Further it seems to me we are overly focused on greenhouse gases and the atmosphere and temperature. I think a bigger issue of consequence is deforestation of unoccupied land and the over farming of the oceans. The more variety of life the quicker the adaptation rate.

And while we may be totally fuck up this planets current ecology I doubt we could destroy it completely even intentionally. Given our best shot to turn the earth into a desert I bet the earth would be teaming with life again 100 million years later.

The truth is that consoles are evolving into the home media server. They were the original locked platforms, way before the iTunes and the iPhone. By having a game platform they have a market of customers ready for software makers and media. The platform is already DRM managed. The market is already established. Developers will want to build apps for it. The consoles are so powerful they can be used to transcode and store media for all your devices.

Eventually there will be versions of the console that aren't designed for fancy video games but are more generic media servers for those that don't play games because by then then people will have already bought into the locked apps and media and maybe they want to use another console for games but don't want to give up their apps. Also maybe the game platform locks up and they want to move the apps to an isolated and more stable box. All your email and files are stored on this media device. It becomes the home server. All your electronic devices coordinate with it.

The game console itself will evolve into a background network computing device. Becoming your cloud in the home. It merely broadcasts video streams over the home network rather than generating video signals directly. You connect to a virtual desktop computer though any video monitor connected to the home network. Add a wireless keyboard and mouse... and voila, desktop computer...

The HDTV video standard will become a thing of the past since the media will be compressed to video files that can more easily be transcoded to any number of resolutions and formats. Combo fiber optic/low voltage power cables will be installed through the home up to wall plates with routers built into them. Flexible copper wire will still be used to plug into them but given shorter distances of say 10 meters they will be able to handle unbelievable throughput.

I would figure most genomes are highly compressible. Especially if compressed against thousands of samples of a species and even across different species.

I have half my mothers genome and half my fathers. I couldn't have that many mutations. To store all three genomes couldn't take more than 2.0001 times the size of a human genome.