Based on these comments, Slashdotters are also experts on moving goal posts.

With every new NSA/GCHQ revelation, I am finding it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between these agencies, and an outright criminal internet hacker trolling group.

Devices and sites are being broken into en-masse, security systems at companies foreign and domestic are being compromised, social engineering is being used to torpedo national standards and progress, internet forums are being saturated with disruptive trolls, people are being targeted/retaliated/gaslighted in their jobs and homes, and now, yes here it is, people's webcams are being hacked into en-masse to take pictures of women in their bedrooms -- sorry I mean for national security whatevers.

My mental image of the NSA/GCHQ at this point is a building saturated with passive-aggressive computer geeks with a grudge against the world and a multi-billion dollar budget with which to indulge it. Ethics, maturity and responsibility are to be checked at the door.

I cannot tell where the NSA ends and anonymous/lulsec begins. And at this point I am waiting for the press release which reveals that 90+% of the chans are in fact hosted at Maryland, and that GCHQ is the principal distributor of 95% of all fetish pornography in the United Kingdom.

And I'm willing to take odds right now, that the mother and father of all illegal TV/Film torrent servers are situated in the T1 connected basements of Maryland and Cheltenam respectively.

This really only leaves Chromebooks, which, essentially are netbooks, not full blown notebooks or desktops.

If a consumer wants a 'real' machine with a choice of OS (or no OS at all), the pickings are incredibly thin -- and many of those pickings are from manufacturers who pay the tax to Microsoft, whether or not they ship the box with an OS on it. Often, they even pay an extra tax if they sell too many macines without a Microsoft OS on them.

I consider one of the saddest examples of inaccuracy to be "2001: A Space Odyssey".

No manned mission to Jupiter.
No HAL-9000. (But maybe that's a blessing?)
No manned base on the moon of any sort, let alone of the scale in the movie.
No pure-space vehicles like the lunar shuttle.
No commercial, civilian, accessible space station.
No common-use picture-phones.
No Pan Am shuttle to the space station.
No Pan Am.

I find myself wondering if it can be combined with MIMO. That would be very cool.

It IS MIMO: the special case where:

  - The base station antennas are widely separated.

  - The data is mapped so each remote antenna gets a particular one-spectrum-channel-worth subset of the data stream (rather than several antennas getting several spectru-channels worth, but in the form of differently phased-and-weighted sums of several carriers with mixes of the data). This allows the remobe devices to work with a single antenna that can move around independently of the others.

There's no reason the signal can't be mapped so that a device with two or more sufficiently separated antennas can receive roughly as many spectrm-channels worth of bandwidth as it has antennas.

Might not be practical on a handset (at least not at frequencies below 3GHz), because there is not enough space to put adequate separation between antennas, but it could work well with tablets and other physically larger devices.

You called it. The separation doesn't need to be all that large (if the device is positioned near enough to the base stations that it "sees" adeqiate separation of the base antennas). But it does need to be at least in the ballpark of a quarter wavelength or more, even in the best of cases.

Spreading the component antennas of the MIMO base station out to different cell towers expands the area where MIMO tricks can be fully utilized in proportion - at the cost of requiring precise synchronization of local oscillators among the various antenna sites (and precise compensation for relative sway of the cell towers). But it doesn't require any changes at the remote end of the link - those antennas need the same separation for a given frequency and given perceived angular separation of the base antennas, regardless of the distance to the base antennas. (Spreading them further just means the remote can resolve smaller apparent angles, and thus work in more-than-spectrum mode further from the set of base stations.)

Colleges don't teach software suites, they teach theories. Programming and information technology should be taught as vocations... high-paying, of course.

I can't teach your employees how to work in your company. I don't work in your industry or with your tools.

Universities are not outsourced training programs for private companies. They are places of education. If you want trained employees, train them yourself you cheapskate. The most we can do is make them more trainable.

Sounds like, in the process of creating the virtual-reality hand model, they've also identified, extracted, and processed EXACTLY the signals necessary to operate a prosthetic.

This gives us the expectation that with the cybernetic prosthetic in place the phantom limb pain may not be a problem, as well.

(Of course that's presuming the summary is correct and it is confirmed.)

Any number of novels by John Brunner, but Stand on Zanzibar if you have to choose one.

Fred Pohl's short-short "Day Million," about a cyborg spaceman and a transgendered otter-woman meeting, falling in love, exchanging virtual reality sex profiles and never meetin again.

Freeman Dyson's essay "The Greening of the Galaxy."

You don't even need high tensile strength material. You can just increase the thickness of the cable as you ascend to account for the increasing weight it must carry. The cables increase as you go upwards, in inverse analogy to rocket boosters on the ground. I think Arthur C. Clarke wrote an article about this.

That said, I personally am very skeptical on the basis that the counterweight dynamics do not seam obvious/feasible to me. Admittedly a space elevator would eventually be of huge benefit, but in order to construct and use one, you need to develop efficient rocketry first to accomplish the very same thing.

by Murray Leinster, March 1946. If you're going to talk about how our literature predicts the future, it's worth taking a look at how past literature predicted us. "A Logic Named Joe" did a pretty good job of nailing the internet, nomenclature aside, and it did it almost 70 years ago.

Steerable Null (alias DIDO or pCell) (the latter being steerable null with widely separated antennas) effectively multiplies the avaliable bandwidth by the number of base station antennas (by giving each remote a signal containig the full band's bandwidth directed to it, while the similar, simultaneous, signals to the other remotes cancel out).

See the article from last week: New 'pCell' Technology Could Bring Next Generation Speeds To 4G Networks.

Some posters were wondering what would be the driver for adopting it. This is it: There's no more spectrum being made - but this is a way to use it simultaneously multiple times without interference between the reuses.

I believe everything below the break point will fall to the ground and also in a path that wraps around the earth. Everything above will go up and stop at a new higher equilibrium point, still straight and under tension.

Tesla vehicles are not green. The fact that it costs close to $100k should indicate that it is a very resource intensive product.

Actually it indicates that the early adopters are paying for building a car company and designing the car, not just the car itself, This is a proven model for new tech.