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FOR most people modern technology is a nightmare of impenetrable acronyms and standards. Does your phone have Bluetooth? Your laptop have Wi-Fi? Is your PDA GPRS-enabled? Does your car come with built-in GPS? Should you care?

As long as it works, perhaps not. Often the only reason you need to know which one of these a device supports is to know if it can communicate with another one. But that may soon change. On the way are intelligent devices that can autonomously choose the best radio signal, based on the local conditions around it and on how busy each frequency…

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