It doesn't use the NBN. That's an optical access network for residential housing and small business with an access rate of 100Mbps. It uses AARNet -- Australia's Academic and Research Network -- which has installed multiple 100Gbps links across Australia for this project.

Where 5 monitors is the bare minimum.

A 1% risk of what? Presumably early death.

1% is a massive number when considering size of the population at risk. 1% is the early death of at least 40 million people. A tragedy of the scale of a major pandemic. So I am not at all reassured by your "not even 1% risk". In fact I'm rather scared that it could be within orders of magnitude of 1%.

What was your source for such a disturbingly high estimate? Or did your research consist of pulling a number you thought seemed low enough out of the air?

There is a proven possible danger from handsets. That is, there is a higher incidence of brain cancer in rats from massive exposures of mobile-band RF. And until we'll all been holding handsets to the side of our heads for 40 years that's about all the results we can reasonably expect from science.

But as any consideration of the inverse-square law taught in those schools' physics classes will show, exposure from laptops and access points is orders of magnitude less than handsets.

And that's what's really wrong with this proposal. Lumping handsets, laptops and access points all together shows a basic lack of understanding. Without understanding, we can't expect reasonable conclusions.

Matt Bishop found the standard Microsoft employment agreement offered as evidence in some litigation http://www.scribd.com/doc/49542881/Microsoft-Employment-Agreement

As you can see the words of the agreement very much discourages moonlighting. The words also say that Microsoft owns your intellectual output. There is an exception process via agreement with management. The words also say you won't use MIcrosoft facilities such as laptops, phones and Internet access for non-Microsoft purposes.

Of course, the gap between words and actions can vary. That's something only those inside Microsoft would know, and it could very well vary by office or manager.

So in the most simplest case their will be a pro-forma IPR notification available from the WP7 team and a policy that managers accept that pro-forma. Two signatures and the paperwork is done. The worst case is an updated Agreement. Again, two signatures and the paperwork is done.

The difference between this and the usual case is that Microsoft *want* this to happen. So getting the legal paperwork sorted is simple rather than obstructive.

"What really is the benefit of extended virtualization?

1) The ability to deploy a system image without deploying physical hardware. All those platforms you are meant to have, but don't: a build machine, an acceptance test machine, a pre-production test machine. And if you've done all the development and testing on a VM then changing the machine when it moves from production from a VM to being real hardware doesn't seem worth the risk.

2) IT as a territorial dispute. You are the IT Director for a large enterprise. You want everything in good facilities, what after the last time a cleaner unplugged the server that generates customer quotes, bringing revenue to a screaming halt. The owner of the quotes server will barely come at that. They certainly won't hand over sysadmin control. Their sysadmins like whitebox machines (the sysadmin's brother assembles them), but you'll never have parts on the shelf for that if it breaks. So get them to hand over a VM image, which you run on hardware of your choice, and which you can backup and restore for them.

3) Single hardware image. No more getting a "revised" model server and finding that the driver your OS needs isn't available yet (or better still, won't ever be available for that OS, since the manufacturer really only supports new hardware in their forthcoming releases). And yeah, the server manufacturer has none of the previous model in stock.

And of course there's minor stuff. Like being able to pull up a shiny clean enterprise image to replicate faults.

You'll notice the lack of the word "silver bullet" above. Because virtualisation isn't. But it does have a useful role, so the naysayers aren't right either.

I'm waiting for the realisation that merely combining images onto one physical machine does not do much to lower costs. For a directly-administered Windows OS the sysadmin's time was costing you more than the hardware. Now that the hardware is gone can you really justify maybe $50kpa/5 = $10pa per image for sysadmin overhead? This is particularly a problem for point (2) above, as they are exactly the people likely to resist the rigorous automation needed to get sysamdin per image overhead to an acceptable point (the best practice point is about $100 per image -- the marginal cost of centrally-administered Linux servers. You'll notice that's some hundreds of times less than worst-practice sysadmin overhead).

I'll also be a bit controversial and note that many sysadmins aren't doing themselves any favours here. How often do you read on Slashdot of time-consuming activities just to get a 5% improvement. If that 5% less runtime costs you 5% more sysadmin time then you've already increased costs by a factor of ten.

Australia has a "dial before you dig" system. The builder submits *their* plans. These are run against registrations of interest in particular streets, and the builders plans copied out to the registered parties. It it then up to the holder of the underground asset to directly contact the builder. The staff of the dial before you dig agency is vetted by the security agencies. This retains the privacy of installations -- even the dial before you dig agency doesn't know the path of your underground asset in any detail which wouldn't be apparent from physical inspection. The assets holders commit not to sue if the builder has lodged plans and the asset holder didn't list the locality of the asset in the database or didn't contact the builder. As a result, all builders send in their plans, since no one wants a huge fiber/water/sewage/electricity/gas repair and compensation bill. The result is a system which leads to Australia having much less backhoe incidents than the US.

Such typical Slashdot responses. One suggesting that windows should have curtains shut during the day, like that is a reasonable thing. Maybe reasonable in New York, not in a small Australian city. The other response giving some argument about light levels, as if mere argument could magically change a fact (although given US foreign policy of the past five years, maybe Americans do believe that). I'm reminded why I gave up on Slashdot. I might leave it for another few years...

Um, the Google camera that drove past my house was 3m off the road (notice that it's on a pole on top of a car). So it sees over the fence and right into my daughter's bedroom. A person on the road with a ladder and a camera perving into windows and posting the results on the Internet would have been arrested. Apparently it's OK when done by a multinational corporation.

Uh no, my experience of textbooks is that publishers don't want two editions, so they'll dumb down the main text. You see that in current US biology texts -- there isn't a "Texas edition". I've found I need to heavily supplement US biology texts when teaching biology in Australia.

This is about teaching school science, not about the conduct of research. So your "good science" point is irrelevant.

There's a limited number of teaching hours. Spending them teaching "both sides" when most scientists are of one mind and the other side of the argument is a kooky fringe group (although perhaps powerfully connected and well funded) is simple waste. Writing as an Australian who's had the misfortune to teach science in US schools, you don't have time for that sort of waste -- most of your students fail modern biology thanks to thirty years of treating your schools as philosophical battlegrounds.

It's exactly the same reason we don't bother to "teach the controversy" about the author of the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare.