Code School

Code School

Learning by Doing

No setup. No hassle. Just learning.
Code School teaches web technologies in the comfort of your browser
with video lessons, coding challenges, and screencasts.

Mostly modern web development classes... really good...

Some classes are also free, for example:
Try Git

BMW i3, i8: Carbon-Fiber Electric Cars

Carbon-Fiber Cars - IEEE Spectrum

BMW i3, an electric city car, expected in 2013,
for $40 000 to $50 000.

Later, there will be BMW i8, a hybrid-electric sports car

End of the Public Switched Phone Network

The End of the Public Phone Network - IEEE Spectrum:
The 134-year-old U.S. public phone network is dying—a third of all U.S. households are already cellphone-only. And it’s not just cellular that’s killing it. More and more businesses and households are trading their traditional switched telephone service for voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, services. That’s led to a paradoxical situation, where a huge number of phone calls start out as Internet packets and end as Internet packets, but have to be switched to, and then from, a voice circuit in between.

---

So, it will be replaced by Internet (IP) based digital phone communication,
by a fixed date: June 15, 2018.

Why this date? Because it is 6 years from a meeting of the committee that determined this, and "humans are able to do almost anything in about 6 years".

This interview also explains that current (100+ year old) design of telephone networks is created to be anti-competitive, so it is very expensive, and such by replacing it by IP network there will be huge savings.

So why this info is relevant?
Because a similar committee would also like to "regulate" internet communication...
If they did, we could be still using 1.2 Kbps modems, for a high price...