It's much easier to replicate manufacturing base than it is to replicate the bleeding edge research and development for microprocessors, new materials, etc...

There are many countries with cheap labor and resources that would love the ability to get a huge influx in technology -- because obviously any technology that is manufactured there is essentially transferred there (at very least, there's easy access for local reverse engineers; at very most, they directly gain the formula for implementing a particular technology). Additionally, easy access to local high-tech manufacturing would definitely catalyze local R&D efforts.

I doubt too many countries would be put off by the US defaulting on debt if China called it all in at once. The answer is to not call in the debt, but rather to continue to benefit from each other for as long as possible -- that's where the real gain is. In fact, China's electronics and manufacturing sector has exploded in large part due to the excessive demand from the US, and they are definitely better off because of it even if they don't get any of their US$ loans back. Many other countries would like the same situation for themselves.

Say what you want about the US... though we don't manufacture many products anymore, we certainly still manufacture a whole lot of technology design, code, etc... all of which falls under the category of IP. It's just that it's a lot harder to quantify those exports, since they're much more subjective than "X quantity of materials valued at $Y each." I'm not so stupid as to think the US is special -- any country could do the same given the resources and conditions we have. The US just happened to do the "right" things at the right time, and that is still the case when it comes to technology R&D (though this could change if our education system continues to deteriorate).

That's not to say that the rest of the world can't do the same, but the US certainly is still a leader in technology research and development.

Anyways, I never said I'm in favor of The Way Things Are(tm)... but that doesn't change the facts.

Even in a highly-globalized environment, I think you'll find that most citizens of any given country still focus on their local lives, their profession, their hobbies, etc, and have very little say in their country's economic strategies. I don't think any of the letters I've ever written to my government representatives have ever made a significant impact. All we can really do is observe, focus on our interests, try to alter our behavior to reflect how we think the world should be, and not get that involved unless things start to go really, really wrong.

Not quite... They own $1 trillion of our virtual currency

In exchange we got a lot of their material goods

If they abruptly ended the relationship one day and called in our debt, we would just default and they'd be left with nothing.
What option would they be left with? Go to war? Fat chance -- wars nowadays are fought with technology, not numbers of soldiers... and we spend almost as much as the rest of the world *combined* on defense (we spend $600 billion a year on military, whereas China is the 2nd highest with under $90 billion a year)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures#Stockholm_International_Peace_Research_Institute_figures

In the meantime, we would still have their manufactured items, and we'd just take our IP (read: engineering designs) to Malaysia or some other place (e.g. Mexico) for our manufacturing needs.

They don't "own us" -- it's a mutually beneficial relationship that requires both parties to take part.
Every country that plays the "globalization" game gets the benefits from and the dependency on every other player. As it stands now, they depend on us just like we depend on them. That could change, but it'd likely be a gradual change, or else a painful change for *both* sides.

A quick google search turned up the following for Starcraft. You probably want to do a bit of in-depth research before running these binaries... they may be buggy, fake, etc

One way might be to play Starcraft in windowed mode:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=72621

Or use a "high resolution" mod. There seem to be a lot of defunct mods like this that probably never worked too well, but the first link might be worth a shot:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=97122
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16643
http://freenet-homepage.de/ToiletGame/download.html
http://www.gamethreat.net/forums/user-downloads/38147-resolution-hack-release-4-0-a.html

It seems like future rovers should have instrumentation to sense the composition of the ground they are about to tread over, as well as extra limbs that can be used to repair the rover (even just a brush to clean the solar panels) or assist its movement (grappling hook?)

Say what you will about NASA's large budgets or sometimes questionable research efforts... when put to the task, they can produce some remarkable feats of engineering

The longevity of the Mars rovers never ceases to amaze me. Just the fact that we are controlling robots we landed on Mars is cool enough, but that they lasted 22 times longer than their intended 90-day lifetime in the harsh Mars environment, is truly an example of quality engineering.

Of course, their over-engineering of human risk-related matters leaves something to be desired. Anyone exploring uncharted territories has to accept the risks involved, including the possibility of a one way trip. Is that really such a bad thing though? There are plenty of risk-takers who thrive on this, and plenty of them would love to make history as part of the first colonization team on the moon (for example).

Instead of focusing resources on ensuring safe return, we should spend those resources on setting up permanent, sustainable facilities on the moon, so that we can slowly reduce our need to continually send materials. Is shipping miniature mining and production robot/facility to the moon that unimaginable? Once you can harvest and produce key materials on the moon, the task of setting up long-term human habitats becomes at least slightly easier.

I really hope the commercialization of space travel is the catalyst needed to accelerate the development of space colonization, and I hope that the excessive human-risk aversion policies that arguably held NASA back are not forced upon the participating private companies of the new space era.

On yet another mildly-unrelated note:
I'd love to see more development on the Launch Loop concept, which seems WAY more feasible than the space elevators... no science/technology breakthroughs are required, just a lot of energy and money ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

Does anyone have reliable info about when the GSM version of the Motorola Droid will be release?

And what will it be called? Sholes? Milestone? etc?

The Motorola Milestone is supposedly launching in Germany... can we import that and use it with T-Mobile or AT&T in the US?

Here are some more details from the abstract of a relevent paper:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121401991/abstract
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121401991/PDFSTART

This topic was also covered a few months ago -- with better results, but using actual lenses instead of just the bare CCD sensor:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/24/1440227/Use-Your-Cell-Phone-To-Diagnose-Blood-Diseases

Long runs of RCA will definitely act as giant antennas, and the noise picked-up will be amplified (as opposed to sending an already-amplified, powerful signal that's much larger than the received noise).

Unfortunately coaxial cable is sometimes not enough... the shield conductor in the coaxial wire is part of the signal transmitting system; any power that is sent on the signal wire will be returned through the shield. Therefore, noise that is received by the shield will end up affecting the signal.

The best simple solution is to use differential signalling (balanced audio), wherein you add a second signal wire that carries the inverse of the first signal wire. The two signal wires are coupled tightly (e.g. twisted), so any noise will be picked up on both. At the receiver, the balun subtracts the two signal wires, resulting in just the original signal remaining and the noise cancelling out. The twisted pair of signal wires should also be shielded with ground, so there is still some possibility for noise, but it's much better than just coaxial.

Balanced audio is standard for professional grade audio, microphones, etc... particularly for long runs

If you compare the percentage of poorly-written perl code (versus well-written code) to the percentage of poorly-written C/C++ code, I bet you won't find a statistically significant difference.

Perl just makes it really easy to publish a module in a centralized location (CPAN), whereas C/C++ code is spread all over the place.
Just because it's in CPAN, doesn't mean it's quality, nor that it's been tested and is production-worthy.

Please don't judge perl based on some bad code you've read. It takes a good programmer to write good code -- perl just is less strict about how you must write code, and so the programmers must keep themselves to a proper set of standards. A good programmer can utilize perl's flexibility to produce some very simple and powerful code, without sacrificing quality or maintainability.

It's pretty pathetic and negligent that software that controls explosive missles was not tested for over 100 hours of operation. That's a standard Quality Assurance procedure for even the simplest low-budget hardware...

It's also pretty pathetic that the system designers implemented a broken design and did not foresee this problem. High-resolution timekeeping has been accomplished pretty successfully already...

I wonder how much time and money was spent in research and development for this thing
It doesn't seem like we're getting a quality product for the likely huge sum that was paid for it...

Actually there will be a net gain in the plant population.

Plants are already at the bottom of the food chain and the higher up your OWN meal is on the food chain, the more plant mass is required to grow your food. Those plants are going to get eaten no matter what.

Skip the trophic levels and go straight to the bottom, and you save on calorie taxes that are imposed on carnivores.

Eat a pound of beef, and you use up the 12 pounds of grain that were needed to grow the beef. Eat a pound of grain, and you preserve 11 pounds of grain that would otherwise have gone into ranching.

Besides, you can't get rid of cows by eating them. That's called demand, and demand increases price, and price increases boost supply. So the long and short of it is that attempting to exterminate methane farting cows by eating them will only encourage farmers to breed more of them. The only way to make someone stop selling a good is to stop buying it.

Why must we beam the power to a space elevator?

Wouldn't it be reasonable to use wire conductors? If we will be able to build the support lines that can span from the earth to orbit, why couldn't we also make a couple of smaller ones inside the main one for carrying power? Or why not just use the support lines themselves to provide power (assuming there are multiple support lines for redundancy)?

Can anyone provide some more insight into this? I haven't been able to find a decent explanation

Music Player Daemon (mpd) has the right idea: separate the playing backend and the user interface. The result is an easily-interfaceable (many, many clients for all platforms, web, etc) and reliable player that rarely (never for me) crashes, and will continue to play even if X dies (which makes repairing X a little more enjoyable).

My favorite client is QMPDClient, which is cross-platform and has a good user interface for easily switching between the Library view (3-section Artist/Album/Songs), the Directories view (which shows the Music directory as a folder tree), and the Playlist view (for saving or loading playlists). The directory view is the big selling point for me, because I have my music folder well organized by genre, artist, album, but not necessarily well organized as far as ID3 tags go.

Here's a screenshot: http://dump.bitcheese.net/images/batidij/qmpdclient-win32.png

It's definitely worth a try...

MPD: http://mpd.wikia.com/
QMPDClient: http://bitcheese.net/wiki/QMPDClient
Other MPD Clients: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients

I think the OP was referring to data transfer bandwidth (the throughput, or data rate), rather than the traditional electronics use of "bandwidth" (referring to the width of the transmitted signal in the frequency spectrum; though "channel width" is a more exact term).

Of course higher carrier frequencies don't have a higher bandwidth, because bandwidth is a property of the whole system, including the data signal and modulation method. You can make the bandwidth as big or small as your system's constraints allow (e.g. one constraint might be to keep most of your transmitted power inside the allocated bandwidth).

If your data signal is modulated in the exact same manner regardless of the carrier, varying the frequency of the carrier will not affect the transmitted signal's bandwidth. The carrier frequency imposes the upper limit on the data signal's frequency, and thus a higher carrier frequency will theoretically allow for a high data rate.

Practically, however, the data signal is almost always much smaller than the carrier signal, and the transmitted frequency is subject to many other important factors such as noise, signal propagation through the environment, etc... In the case of 2.4GHz vs. 800MHz carrier frequencies, there is no practical gain in potential data rate.

This is all based on my limited understanding of communication theory. Please correct me and/or provide further details if possible!

Whenever I see facial recognition enhancement, I think of this:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1156

Turns out... it's theoretically impossible!

Seriously, this video plays like a bad science ficition movie... they say "let us monitor everything and we'll magically know when crimes are committed," without saying exactly *how* they plan on sorting through the incredible amount of data and coming up with "crime X being committed right now" in a timely manner.

I knew someone would bring up cellphones. However, it's relatively hard for it to capture much useful video from inside my pocket...

Also, my phone belongs to me, not my phone company, and it's open source. Meaning, it's pretty unlikely someone will actually use it to snoop on me. If they can, it'd certainly be a targeted attack, not a broad monitor-every-driver-always situation like we're discussing here. It's next to impossible to defend against a targeted attack, especially when it comes to computers (e.g. cell phones)... but that's not the issue here.