Once the lasers are switched off, data recorded this way will, according to Dr Birge, remain stable for more than 12 years.

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Pearse and others dream of unifying the mess, with a box that blends both optics and electronics, fusing the circuit-switched world of phone calls and packet-switched world of Internet data.

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When users install Google Maps on their iPhone, the option to share location data with Google is switched on by default.

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It is a packet-switched technology, and only consumes network resources when data is being transmitted, so it is widely expected that customers will be charged for the amount of data they exchange, rather than the time they spend logged on to the network.

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At the carrier switching office, the voice is separated from the data and converted back to regular circuit-switched voice.

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However, VOIP differs from the usual phone services in that it sends calls as digital packets of information over data networks rather than relying on a dedicated circuit-switched network.

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Back above ground, students from around the world are shown the Atlas control room, one of the places where data from the LHC will be gathered when it is switched back on.

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On the other hand if the data had been dual licensed to the OSM Foundation or me personally then we could have switched the license much more quickly.

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The first time the terminal is switched on, it directs web surfers to a portal where they enter their billing information and choose which voice or data package they want.

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