If you follow the grid network backwards behind the wall socket, the meter, and the utility poles on your street, you eventually get to a building called a grid operations center, where megawatts of energy flow from state to state and specially trained operators make split-second decisions that can mean the difference between blackouts or business as usual.

The move is part of a high-tech collection system the city will roll out next year with new trash and recycling carts embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes.

Under the terms of the deal, Intel will pay $48 a share in cash, a 60 percent premium to McAfee's Wednesday closing stock price of $29.93.

The move signals Intel's biggest effort to date to expand beyond its core chip-making business. The purchase is Intel's biggest since its acquisition of Level One Communications for $2.2 billion in 1999.

In reality, no one gets these speeds. That's not news to the techno-literate, of course, but a new Federal Communications Commission report shines a probing flashlight on the issue and makes a sharp conclusion: broadband users get, on average, a mere 50 percent of that "up to" speed they had hoped to achieve.

The often-reliable Chinese language newspaper – which correctly predicted the first coming of the iPad when everyone else on the planet was carping on about a sub-$500 netbook from the Cupertino company – has been digging about in the skips behind a number of Chinese factories and reckons it knows who will be making which bit of the much-predicted iPad 2.

But the Web has grown up a bit in the past few years, and the presence of digital research journals, fact-finding social media tools, textbook exchanges, and e-readers have made it a much more complicated landscape for anyone who encounters the education world's slow march beyond the traditional textbook. When things have shaken out, it may be a world where free-for-all online information hubs are accepted or, if proponents of "collaborative knowledge" have their way, even embraced.

We don't expect everyone to agree with every aspect of our proposal, but there has been a number of inaccuracies about it, and we do want to separate fact from fiction.

The speed is significantly faster than the maximum speeds promised by the opposition in its broadband policy, and highlights the growing gap between what a fiber-based broadband network can offer compared with existing technology.

It has also emerged that NBN Co told staff to ignore political attacks on the company by the opposition, after its finance spokesman, Andrew Robb, called it a "stodgy" bureaucracy, labeled its staff "talentless" and promised to close it down if elected to government.