's partially built Echelon project has gathered dust for four years.

NPR: Stalled Las Vegas Strip Project To Get New Owner

Two-thirds of the price was subsidized by the city, which estimates that it has replaced almost a hundred thousand coal stoves since the project began, five years ago, cutting down on sulfur and dust emissions.

NEWYORKER: Green Giant

Well USRobotics is sick of the dust and the laughter, and they've enlisted their most talented engineers in a Manhattan Project of telephony that has resulted in a USB adapter which allows you to use corded or cordless phones as VoIP handsets.

ENGADGET: USRobotics USR9620 USB adapter VoIPs your old analog phones

The "Mona Lisa" experiment was transmitted at a slow data rate of about 300 bits per second, but the "pathfinding achievement sets the stage for ... high data rate laser-communication demonstrations that will be a central feature of NASA's next moon mission, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, " said Goddard's Richard Vondrak, the orbiter's deputy project scientist.

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