Dan Gillmor has a nice column outlining what Facebook would like to do: become a monopoly or standard utility.

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PowerBox Concept hybrid, for example, shown at the L.A. show, looks a lot like a standard sports utility vehicle (SUV) but combines a supercharged V-6 engine that runs on compressed natural gas and an electric motor that provides added power for acceleration and passing.

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But utility service outages are a standard part of life in such nations and so it may be impossible to tell, at least at first, whether outages near the first of the new year are related to the year 2000 computer glitch or just a normal daily event.

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Under the best-case scenario, the utility would simply push a firmware update across the standard wireless network to all the affected meters, overwrite the worm, and return the meters to normal operation.

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Implementation of this standard and the supporting hardware built to the standard have attracted significant attention in the electric utility industry.

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Many would defend utility theory (as well as other aspects of their standard model of behaviour) as a useful approximation, pointing out that exceptions to approximations can always be found.

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