I've been using the pidgin plugin for a while now, but it seems a little flaky. This will be rather nice to have a standards-based protocol. This also means I have plausible deniability now as to whether or not I'm logged into facebook all day. ;-)

So what is the big deal? This data was sent out unencrypted from many transmitters all across the nation. It would have been (and still is) very easy to intercept. There is no data security. Those considering it a secure medium have simply been mislead. Congress, as a whole, is rather ignorant of these technical concepts. There are programs that use a soundcard for data capture, but for best results make sure and use the receiver's discriminator output, not the filtered audio out. Google for "POCSAG and FLEX decoding" for all the goodies and software you need to do your own intercepts. -Michael

What a dumbass

Uh, no. Range is not a function of signal power. It more is a function of the overall signal/noise ratio and the sensitivity of the receiver. This includes noise introduced in the transmitter, natural/other noise, and noise introduced in the receiver. An antenna system with gain can both concentrate and attenuate signals, depending on the directivity and where its pointed.

BTW, I got over 1400 miles out of a little 0.3 watt ham signal, but thats no where near as impressive as Earth still being able to receive signals from Voyager 1 and 2 nearly 10 billion miles away. That's impressive.

-Michael

Finally a sane ruling. I'm happily surprized a court didn't rule that breaking a website's T.O.S. is an act of domestic terrorism, punishable by loss of citizenship and infinite water boarding at guantanamo followed by an eternity in hell.

Can the bios be re-flashed with something more useful?

The local oscillator in your standalone GPS creates a signal too :-) (albeit very tiny)

Never, and I repeat, NEVER agree to pay for GPS "service." You already have in your federal taxes. These ***hole cellphone companies that charge you for GPS are full of themselves. I will never use a phone-based GPS if it costs me a penny extra. Vote with your wallet.

Anybody or organization using an SSN as both an identifier and a form of authentication is stupid, irresponsible and should be held accountable 100% for breach of whatever resource they control. The problem is in the "shared secret" type use of a damn 9-digit number, with a few of the digits already known based on state of birth.

Want a list of ssn's for every state? Here's all of them. Have fun.

-Michael

What's so kinky about morse code? http://fists.org/

obviously, bittorrent to distribute the resulting set far and wide.

group-iv tiff + ASCII, key-value metadata descriptor in XML. Keep it generic.

It seems like this is the holy grail for electric vehicles, and we can finally stop burning dinosaur juice in our little bitty engines and realize the economies of scale of burning dinosaur farts in really big and efficient prime movers. This is all well and good, but how plentiful is lithium, and can it be recycled easily (I suspect yes)? -Michael

Open systems are used because evaporation carries away far more heat than a closed-loop system. To illustrate, the 6-cycle engine (standard 4-stroke + steam stroke) needs no cooling system whatsoever, and only carries about as much water as fuel.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=27.605462,-97.306359&spn=0.013139,0.021544&t=h&z=16 Suck in ocean water from one area, blow it out in another. This plant sucks water from the Laguna Madre (the body of water between the Texas coast and Padre Island) then spills the water into the Oso Bay, which is in turn connected to the Corpus Christi bay. This plant is a natural-gas fired plant, but evidently had coal in mind with the docks...cooling water and fuel via the same route.