Quick now, who holds the land-speed record for sending data over the Internet?
If you pulled out your Guinness World Records book and said the Laboratory, you might earn a pint of the dark brew for which the donnybrook-deciding tome is named. Los Alamos collaborated with researchers from the California Institute of Technology, European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva, and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to set the record that the Guinness record-keepers recently certified as official. Using off-the-shelf personal computers, the team blasted a trillion bytes of data from California to Switzerland at an eye-popping 2.38 billion bits, or 2.38 gigabits, per second. By comparison, a typical telephone modem connection transmits data at less than 56,000 bits per second. At that speed, computer users could send full-length DVD movies to each other from halfway across the world in less than 20 seconds, or the entire Library of Congress in 14 hours. “What’s remarkable about this achievement is that no special equipment is needed other than commodit
