On a related note, take a look at the certificate on www.ice.gov.
The certificate hierarchy is
GTE CyberTrust Global Root
Akamai Subordinate CA 3
www.ice.gov
Now that's interesting, and worrisome. Akamai possesses a wildcard subordinate CA cert that permits them to impersonate any site, even U.S. Government sites. Even the chief security officer of Akamai is worried about this.
Digital Globe and GeoEye now operate commercial imagery satellites. That's where Microsoft and Google get their imagery for areas where they don't have close aerial coverage. DoD buys a lot of their info. Best commercial resolution is 45cm. Which, realistically, is enough to find most threats that can be seen from above.
Once growth has stopped, the company's value has to be based strictly on revenue. The value of the stock is the present value of future dividends. It's not clear how profitable Facebook really is. Since they're private, audited numbers are not available.
Once the number of users has peaked, all the ways to increase revenue annoy users. Facebook can run more ads. (See Myspace for where that leads.) They can add more services (Yahoo and Google went overboard in that direction. It didn't help.) They can force developers to pay them. (That works in the short term, until the major developers figure out another way to get paid.)
Social networks have a life cycle, like nightclubs. They start small, get the cool people, then allow massive numbers of people in. The jerk level becomes excessive, the cool people leave, and the social network winds down. This happened to AOL, Geocities, Orkut, Tribe, Xanga, Bebo, Yahoo 360, Nerve, and Myspace. Facebook looks to be next.
Note the setup. All the work that requires thinking is automated. Bins are brought to the order pickers. A laser pointer shows the order picker what to pick. They pass the item under a bar code scanner and put it in an output bin. Learning the job takes about half a day.
Machines do the thinking. Humans do simple, repetitive tasks.
We're past the "AI Winter", though. I got a MSCS from Stanford in 1985, which was just about at the point where it was clear that "expert systems" weren't very useful. (The Stanford AI faculty of the time was mostly in denial about that.) What followed was about 15 years of very little progress in AI.
AI has since made a big comeback, but with completely different technology. It's machine learning and statistics now, not trying to describe the real world with predicate calculus. There was a sort of side trip through neural nets, simulated annealing, and other pseudo-statistical methods, but finally the Bayesian statistics people put a mathematical basis under hill-climbing systems and they started to work. It's about heavy number-crunching now. AI R&D today is done in Matlab, not LISP.
On the vision front, there's been huge progress. All those old problems like image segmentation and image matching have been solved by the graphics industry. Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) from camera data now works. Nor does any of this require supercomputers; now it's often done on commercial GPUs. I used to go to talks on "how we did (interesting thing with images) with 20 minutes of Cray time". We're well past that.
I don't see a "singularity" in the near future, but automated vacuums that really work are becoming available.
I tend to agree. The article says there are only 8.7 million robots in the world. (I'm not sure about their definition. Do they count Roombas. Hard automation driven by cams?) That's an incredibly small number. It's one year of production for Toyota or GM, for example.
The big problem is that the cost of the mechanics hasn't declined much. That's mostly a lack of volume issue. However, the control electronics keeps getting cheaper, since it's computer technology.
Robot vision systems have improved a lot. Many pick and place robots now have at least a basic vision system for fine alignment. This is cheaper than trying to make the robot and the fixture so rigid that the job can be done blind. The biggest headache in industrial robotics is simply getting everything lined up so precisely that a dumb machine can do the job. Adding enough smarts to allow for some misalignment makes things work much better.
There's been progress on unstructured vision. Towel folding now works. The software is really slow. That can probably be fixed.
Having been in the field, I will say that we're now at the point where throwing money at the problem works. That wasn't true in the 1980s and 1990s. (See NASA's Flight Telerobotic Servicer, a $200 million flop.). The DARPA Grand Challenge was instructive in showing what money can do. The 2004 Grand Challenge was pathetic - nothing worked very well. At the 2005 Grand Challenge, the worst vehicles were better than anything from 2004, and the best ones were really good. It took NASCAR-sized budgets and the combined efforts of entire computer science departments and auto manufacturers, but it worked.
That would be one possible way to drill down to appropriate codes, but this system is designed to be used anywhere in the world, including places where hospitals don't have computers, and was devised in 1990. So that's a bit much to expect.
Not really. It's only needed where there's an insurance reimbursement system in use that requires detailed tracking of what's being done for each patient. If the bureaucracy is in place for that, there will be computers available.
The medical billing people have this obsession with "codes", because they're designing for paper-based systems. This sort of info ought to be collected with something where someone clicks on a body outline to show where the injuries are, and then there's additional info for "how serious" and "source of injury". For the last part, it's probably only worth collecting info for the top 20 or so causes (autos, guns, falls, etc.) Allow for a narrative description for unusual cases, and send those to a call center for detailed coding.
It's really a marketing program for refrigerators. ARCA runs "cash for clunkers" programs, subsidized by electric companies and government agencies. They don't even accept broken appliances, only working ones being replaced with new ones.
The machinery is built by UNTHA in Germany. There's more than shredding involved. The first step is removing the refrigerant, which is a semi-manual process. Then the shredding takes place in a nitrogen atmosphere. The usual separation techniques are employed; magnets pull out the ferrous materials, and then AC magnets pull out non-ferrous metals. Then there are cyclones and screens to separate the flufff by density. The insulation fluff is heated to drive CFCs out of the material, and those are recovered. The remaining fluff is pelletized.
Refrigerators are relatively uniform from a materials standpoint, so this is a straightforward separation process. General trash recycling is much tougher.
Many short-lived isotopes are in short supply. There's very limited US tritium production, medical radioisotopes production is so limited that there are medical shortages, and there are fewer research reactors operating. Transmutation is almost a dying technology.
Most of the radioisotopes were made in facilities built for bomb programs. Both the US and the USSR now have far too much bomb-grade PU-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years. The giant nuclear facilities of the Cold War are mostly idle, or are hazardous waste sites.
The smaller nuclear powers are mostly separating uranium isotopes, which today is a centrifuge operation carried out in plants of modest size. The old gaseous diffusion plants were huge - square miles of plant.
Cupertino is mostly suburban housing and strip malls. Apple's plan would be an improvement.
As isolated corporate campuses go, it's not very isolated. Just in Silicon Valley, there are far more isolated HQs.
There's Oracle HQ, which is surrounded by water on three sides and has a huge lawn on the fourth. Like Larry Ellison, it's an in-your-face statement of arrogance.
Google HQ is somewhat isolated; they now have almost all of the Shoreline Industrial Park. Their architecture is standard industrial park, built for SGI before SGI tanked.
For over-the-top corporate HQ design, there's Excite@Home. Yes, they're long gone. But before that dot-com went bust, they built an awesome headquarters complex on a finger of land a full mile out in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It has spectacular architecture, isolation, impressive open spaces, baseball fields, a health club with Olympic size pool, and a marina. Excite@Home went bust before moving in. The buildings were vacant for years, as a real estate company tried to rent them out. It was strange to walk through the huge complex of beautifully maintained empty office buildings. EA, Dreamworks, and some pharma companies now rent space there. It's still underutilized.
IBM's Almaden Research Center is the purest expression of the isolated research center. It's on a mountaintop south of San Jose, surrounded by open land and parks. You enter through a modest gate, then drive half a mile through the hills, seeing nothing but open land and trees. Then you see IBM's glass and steel buildings. The view of the mountains from the cafeteria is spectacular. Much good work came out of there during IBM's glory years, including disk drive technology and several Nobel prizes. Today it's a shadow of what it once was.
Compared to all of those, Apple's planned HQ is nothing.
This is all coming from one story from Agence France-Presse. More info is needed. The US DoD says they don't have a record of this happening.
It's possible that it might be a South Korean plane of a US type, not a USAF plane. If someone was just up on a routine training flight, they might choose to land due to a GPS failure. With no mission to complete, there's no reason not to. Wait for Aviation Leak to cover the story.
All major USAF aircraft have inertial navigation capability, and have for decades. Everyone assumes GPS will be jammed. Even "smart bombs" have a low end inertial navigation system, one that gets its initial fix from the much better INS in the aircraft and only has to guide for about a minute.
This raises the question of 'How did they do this in World War II, before we had GPS?'
Very badly. Aerial navigation in WWII barely worked.
Bombers routinely had trouble finding their targets. The V-1 and V-2 could at best hit a city-sized target; using them to attack an airfield was hopeless. (Had they been accurate enough to hit airfields, the Battle of Britain might have turned out differently.) There were various radio beam schemes, most of which were jammable.
Much bombing was done by sending in the best navigators as "pathfinders". They dropped incendiaries, and the other bombers dropped bombs on the resulting fire. Both sides occasionally set up big bonfires to divert bombers looking for such fires.
Absent from the article is a key question - how does either the "domainer" or the scammer make money? Pumping fake traffic through fake domains is usually monetized through Google AdSense.
No, it's not. The largest tidal plant in the world averages 96 megawatts. That's a tenth the output of a nuclear unit. There are only about ten good sites for tidal plants in the world, the Bay of Fundy being the best. You need a bay you can dam. Schemes with floats bobbing up and down to extract power cost too much for the energy produced.
Windmills can do a whiz of a job.
Only in specific locations. Here's the detailed wind map of the US for wind power siting purposes. There are four good locations in California, and all four already have wind farms on them.
There are lots of good wind locations in the Great Plains states, but most of them aren't near areas that can use the power. Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio have real potential. East of the Rockies, forget it.
Me too. I have a.com domain which is the same as a school domain in.co.uk. I used to get a fair amount of their mail, until I turned off the catch-all address.
(That was years ago. Today, if you have a catch-all address, you get to see the same spams come in for a long list of common names.)
No, the real issue is that under the "gold standard", the money supply is related to gold finds - which are random events. It's not like the supply of gold is actually fixed. So someone could find a huge gold vein tomorrow, and crash the world economy. Just like printing money, but done by individuals!
That actually happened to Portugal and Spain, back when they were world powers with vast colonies in the Americas. Their explorers found gold, and sizable expenditures were made to set up colonies and operations to mine it. They thought they were generating wealth, but they were mostly just inflating their medium of exchange.
Agreed. There's this mindset in the "social" community that online social inputs can validate businesses through "crowdsourcing". This has repeatedly failed, because crowds can be sourced. Citysearch, Twitter, and Yelp are full of fake "reviews", many auto-generated so that crawlers will find and count them. This took Google Places into the tank last October. Here's a video from an SEO firm which shows how bad the situation is.
The explanation on the site of how it works is "
"Convergence allows you to configure a dynamic set of Notaries which use network perspective to validate your communication. " What the hell is "network perspective"?
Some of these crowdsourced systems work at first because nobody is bothering to spam them. Blekko and WOT are like that. If they ever get any significant market share, they get slammed with spam, like Google Places.
Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social.
CAs should be limited to sets of domains, and this enforced in browsers. Country-level CAs should be limited to the country in which they operate. Government CAs should be limited to their domain (".gov", "mil.uk", etc.).
CAs for the open domains should have to post a big bond, which can obtained through a bonding agency if necessary, with a value of at least $10 million, to back up their "relying party agreement".
That's what "corporate responsibility" means - third party bonding.
Bartz did well at Autodesk. While she was in charge there, Autodesk essentially took over the entire computer animation software industry. They got into solid modeling CAD, where they'd been behind, and are now the leader in that area. She managed to avoid getting Autodesk into anything dumb during the Internet boom, and picked up some good technology in the following bust.
Autodesk is about the size of Facebook, but doesn't get much press attention.
Marx's analysis of the flaws of capitalism is generally considered to be reasonable. His solutions are now known not to work too well. (On the other hand, in the last century Russia has tried monarchy, democratic communism, dictatorial communism, democratic anarchy, capitalist oligarchy, and the current capitalist semi-dictatorship. None worked all that well for them.)
Marx was quite right about a key point - if capitalism is allowed to use competition between workers to drive wages down, buying power drops and the system stalls, or stabilizes with most people just above some minimum survival level. That's where we are now. (Wal-Mart has a useful way to measure this. They look at weekly store-to-store sales over each month, and observe that their customer base is presently running out of money before the end of each month, and they then stop buying until their next paycheck.)
Unions were developed to beat that problem. The purpose of unions is to force employers to pay employees more than they are economically worth. This helps both union and non-union workers; in a society where a sizable fraction of workers belong to unions, non-union employers have to pay wages competitive with union shops to avoid unionization. This was well understood in the 1930s through the 1970s. The phrase used back then was "labour should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of commerce." That sounds strange today. Which is part of the problem.
After a slow decade in the 1970s, we got Reagan, the "great communicator", who sold America on "unfettered" capitalism. US median per-capita real income hasn't gone up much since, after a huge rise in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The US peak was in 1973.
Government is not neutral in this. Deregulation, free trade, weak antitrust and labor law enforcement, anti-union state policies, and tax cuts for the rich all helped to reduce US wages.
The point here is that the economy has more than one stable state. One stable state looks like a third-world country - wages are at poverty levels, a few people have most of the money, disposable income is low, and production is limited by available disposable income. Another stable state has much higher wages and consumption levels. The US has seen both, and has chosen the former.
Unlike e-mail, in the US, sending junk faxes is illegal. Not only is it illegal,anyone can sue for damages of $1000 per fax, with triple damages in many cases. There are lawyers ready to handle junk fax cases. There were lots of lawsuits a few years ago. "Fax.com", a major junk fax operation, was sued for $2.2 trillion; they're no longer in business.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to Seattle when I had some business at Microsoft HQ. The sun was shining the three days I was there. I didn't realize how rare that was.
Microsoft now has a campus in Silicon Valley, near Google HQ. The people there seem happier than the ones in Redmond.
The problem is that Akamai, which is not a CA, has a cert which gives it the powers of a CA.
On a related note, take a look at the certificate on www.ice.gov.
The certificate hierarchy is
Now that's interesting, and worrisome. Akamai possesses a wildcard subordinate CA cert that permits them to impersonate any site, even U.S. Government sites. Even the chief security officer of Akamai is worried about this.
It is kind of lame. All you can do is read what's on someone's page. This will make screen-scraping easier.
Interestingly, it's all JSON. XML seems to be on the way out for API interfaces.
Digital Globe and GeoEye now operate commercial imagery satellites. That's where Microsoft and Google get their imagery for areas where they don't have close aerial coverage. DoD buys a lot of their info. Best commercial resolution is 45cm. Which, realistically, is enough to find most threats that can be seen from above.
Digital Globe has an analysis of Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan..
Facebook's user count has stopped growing in the US and UK. That's a killer sign for an IPO.
Once growth has stopped, the company's value has to be based strictly on revenue. The value of the stock is the present value of future dividends. It's not clear how profitable Facebook really is. Since they're private, audited numbers are not available.
Once the number of users has peaked, all the ways to increase revenue annoy users. Facebook can run more ads. (See Myspace for where that leads.) They can add more services (Yahoo and Google went overboard in that direction. It didn't help.) They can force developers to pay them. (That works in the short term, until the major developers figure out another way to get paid.)
Social networks have a life cycle, like nightclubs. They start small, get the cool people, then allow massive numbers of people in. The jerk level becomes excessive, the cool people leave, and the social network winds down. This happened to AOL, Geocities, Orkut, Tribe, Xanga, Bebo, Yahoo 360, Nerve, and Myspace. Facebook looks to be next.
Take a look at Kiva Systems robotic order picking system. About 10% of online orders are picked with these systems.
Note the setup. All the work that requires thinking is automated. Bins are brought to the order pickers. A laser pointer shows the order picker what to pick. They pass the item under a bar code scanner and put it in an output bin. Learning the job takes about half a day.
Machines do the thinking. Humans do simple, repetitive tasks.
We're past the "AI Winter", though. I got a MSCS from Stanford in 1985, which was just about at the point where it was clear that "expert systems" weren't very useful. (The Stanford AI faculty of the time was mostly in denial about that.) What followed was about 15 years of very little progress in AI.
AI has since made a big comeback, but with completely different technology. It's machine learning and statistics now, not trying to describe the real world with predicate calculus. There was a sort of side trip through neural nets, simulated annealing, and other pseudo-statistical methods, but finally the Bayesian statistics people put a mathematical basis under hill-climbing systems and they started to work. It's about heavy number-crunching now. AI R&D today is done in Matlab, not LISP.
On the vision front, there's been huge progress. All those old problems like image segmentation and image matching have been solved by the graphics industry. Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) from camera data now works. Nor does any of this require supercomputers; now it's often done on commercial GPUs. I used to go to talks on "how we did (interesting thing with images) with 20 minutes of Cray time". We're well past that.
I don't see a "singularity" in the near future, but automated vacuums that really work are becoming available.
I tend to agree. The article says there are only 8.7 million robots in the world. (I'm not sure about their definition. Do they count Roombas. Hard automation driven by cams?) That's an incredibly small number. It's one year of production for Toyota or GM, for example.
The big problem is that the cost of the mechanics hasn't declined much. That's mostly a lack of volume issue. However, the control electronics keeps getting cheaper, since it's computer technology.
Robot vision systems have improved a lot. Many pick and place robots now have at least a basic vision system for fine alignment. This is cheaper than trying to make the robot and the fixture so rigid that the job can be done blind. The biggest headache in industrial robotics is simply getting everything lined up so precisely that a dumb machine can do the job. Adding enough smarts to allow for some misalignment makes things work much better.
There's been progress on unstructured vision. Towel folding now works. The software is really slow. That can probably be fixed.
Having been in the field, I will say that we're now at the point where throwing money at the problem works. That wasn't true in the 1980s and 1990s. (See NASA's Flight Telerobotic Servicer, a $200 million flop.). The DARPA Grand Challenge was instructive in showing what money can do. The 2004 Grand Challenge was pathetic - nothing worked very well. At the 2005 Grand Challenge, the worst vehicles were better than anything from 2004, and the best ones were really good. It took NASCAR-sized budgets and the combined efforts of entire computer science departments and auto manufacturers, but it worked.
That would be one possible way to drill down to appropriate codes, but this system is designed to be used anywhere in the world, including places where hospitals don't have computers, and was devised in 1990. So that's a bit much to expect.
Not really. It's only needed where there's an insurance reimbursement system in use that requires detailed tracking of what's being done for each patient. If the bureaucracy is in place for that, there will be computers available.
The medical billing people have this obsession with "codes", because they're designing for paper-based systems. This sort of info ought to be collected with something where someone clicks on a body outline to show where the injuries are, and then there's additional info for "how serious" and "source of injury". For the last part, it's probably only worth collecting info for the top 20 or so causes (autos, guns, falls, etc.) Allow for a narrative description for unusual cases, and send those to a call center for detailed coding.
It's really a marketing program for refrigerators. ARCA runs "cash for clunkers" programs, subsidized by electric companies and government agencies. They don't even accept broken appliances, only working ones being replaced with new ones.
The machinery is built by UNTHA in Germany. There's more than shredding involved. The first step is removing the refrigerant, which is a semi-manual process. Then the shredding takes place in a nitrogen atmosphere. The usual separation techniques are employed; magnets pull out the ferrous materials, and then AC magnets pull out non-ferrous metals. Then there are cyclones and screens to separate the flufff by density. The insulation fluff is heated to drive CFCs out of the material, and those are recovered. The remaining fluff is pelletized.
Refrigerators are relatively uniform from a materials standpoint, so this is a straightforward separation process. General trash recycling is much tougher.
Many short-lived isotopes are in short supply. There's very limited US tritium production, medical radioisotopes production is so limited that there are medical shortages, and there are fewer research reactors operating. Transmutation is almost a dying technology.
Most of the radioisotopes were made in facilities built for bomb programs. Both the US and the USSR now have far too much bomb-grade PU-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years. The giant nuclear facilities of the Cold War are mostly idle, or are hazardous waste sites.
The smaller nuclear powers are mostly separating uranium isotopes, which today is a centrifuge operation carried out in plants of modest size. The old gaseous diffusion plants were huge - square miles of plant.
Cupertino is mostly suburban housing and strip malls. Apple's plan would be an improvement.
As isolated corporate campuses go, it's not very isolated. Just in Silicon Valley, there are far more isolated HQs. There's Oracle HQ, which is surrounded by water on three sides and has a huge lawn on the fourth. Like Larry Ellison, it's an in-your-face statement of arrogance.
Google HQ is somewhat isolated; they now have almost all of the Shoreline Industrial Park. Their architecture is standard industrial park, built for SGI before SGI tanked.
For over-the-top corporate HQ design, there's Excite@Home. Yes, they're long gone. But before that dot-com went bust, they built an awesome headquarters complex on a finger of land a full mile out in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It has spectacular architecture, isolation, impressive open spaces, baseball fields, a health club with Olympic size pool, and a marina. Excite@Home went bust before moving in. The buildings were vacant for years, as a real estate company tried to rent them out. It was strange to walk through the huge complex of beautifully maintained empty office buildings. EA, Dreamworks, and some pharma companies now rent space there. It's still underutilized.
IBM's Almaden Research Center is the purest expression of the isolated research center. It's on a mountaintop south of San Jose, surrounded by open land and parks. You enter through a modest gate, then drive half a mile through the hills, seeing nothing but open land and trees. Then you see IBM's glass and steel buildings. The view of the mountains from the cafeteria is spectacular. Much good work came out of there during IBM's glory years, including disk drive technology and several Nobel prizes. Today it's a shadow of what it once was.
Compared to all of those, Apple's planned HQ is nothing.
This is all coming from one story from Agence France-Presse. More info is needed. The US DoD says they don't have a record of this happening.
It's possible that it might be a South Korean plane of a US type, not a USAF plane. If someone was just up on a routine training flight, they might choose to land due to a GPS failure. With no mission to complete, there's no reason not to. Wait for Aviation Leak to cover the story.
All major USAF aircraft have inertial navigation capability, and have for decades. Everyone assumes GPS will be jammed. Even "smart bombs" have a low end inertial navigation system, one that gets its initial fix from the much better INS in the aircraft and only has to guide for about a minute.
This raises the question of 'How did they do this in World War II, before we had GPS?'
Very badly. Aerial navigation in WWII barely worked. Bombers routinely had trouble finding their targets. The V-1 and V-2 could at best hit a city-sized target; using them to attack an airfield was hopeless. (Had they been accurate enough to hit airfields, the Battle of Britain might have turned out differently.) There were various radio beam schemes, most of which were jammable.
Much bombing was done by sending in the best navigators as "pathfinders". They dropped incendiaries, and the other bombers dropped bombs on the resulting fire. Both sides occasionally set up big bonfires to divert bombers looking for such fires.
Absent from the article is a key question - how does either the "domainer" or the scammer make money? Pumping fake traffic through fake domains is usually monetized through Google AdSense.
Tidal energy is enormous.
No, it's not. The largest tidal plant in the world averages 96 megawatts. That's a tenth the output of a nuclear unit. There are only about ten good sites for tidal plants in the world, the Bay of Fundy being the best. You need a bay you can dam. Schemes with floats bobbing up and down to extract power cost too much for the energy produced.
Windmills can do a whiz of a job.
Only in specific locations. Here's the detailed wind map of the US for wind power siting purposes. There are four good locations in California, and all four already have wind farms on them. There are lots of good wind locations in the Great Plains states, but most of them aren't near areas that can use the power. Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio have real potential. East of the Rockies, forget it.
Me too. I have a .com domain which is the same as a school domain in .co.uk. I used to get a fair amount of their mail, until I turned off the catch-all address.
(That was years ago. Today, if you have a catch-all address, you get to see the same spams come in for a long list of common names.)
No, the real issue is that under the "gold standard", the money supply is related to gold finds - which are random events. It's not like the supply of gold is actually fixed. So someone could find a huge gold vein tomorrow, and crash the world economy. Just like printing money, but done by individuals!
That actually happened to Portugal and Spain, back when they were world powers with vast colonies in the Americas. Their explorers found gold, and sizable expenditures were made to set up colonies and operations to mine it. They thought they were generating wealth, but they were mostly just inflating their medium of exchange.
Agreed. There's this mindset in the "social" community that online social inputs can validate businesses through "crowdsourcing". This has repeatedly failed, because crowds can be sourced. Citysearch, Twitter, and Yelp are full of fake "reviews", many auto-generated so that crawlers will find and count them. This took Google Places into the tank last October. Here's a video from an SEO firm which shows how bad the situation is.
The explanation on the site of how it works is " "Convergence allows you to configure a dynamic set of Notaries which use network perspective to validate your communication. " What the hell is "network perspective"?
Some of these crowdsourced systems work at first because nobody is bothering to spam them. Blekko and WOT are like that. If they ever get any significant market share, they get slammed with spam, like Google Places.
Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social.
CAs should be limited to sets of domains, and this enforced in browsers. Country-level CAs should be limited to the country in which they operate. Government CAs should be limited to their domain (".gov", "mil.uk", etc.).
CAs for the open domains should have to post a big bond, which can obtained through a bonding agency if necessary, with a value of at least $10 million, to back up their "relying party agreement".
That's what "corporate responsibility" means - third party bonding.
Bartz did well at Autodesk. While she was in charge there, Autodesk essentially took over the entire computer animation software industry. They got into solid modeling CAD, where they'd been behind, and are now the leader in that area. She managed to avoid getting Autodesk into anything dumb during the Internet boom, and picked up some good technology in the following bust.
Autodesk is about the size of Facebook, but doesn't get much press attention.
Marx's analysis of the flaws of capitalism is generally considered to be reasonable. His solutions are now known not to work too well. (On the other hand, in the last century Russia has tried monarchy, democratic communism, dictatorial communism, democratic anarchy, capitalist oligarchy, and the current capitalist semi-dictatorship. None worked all that well for them.)
Marx was quite right about a key point - if capitalism is allowed to use competition between workers to drive wages down, buying power drops and the system stalls, or stabilizes with most people just above some minimum survival level. That's where we are now. (Wal-Mart has a useful way to measure this. They look at weekly store-to-store sales over each month, and observe that their customer base is presently running out of money before the end of each month, and they then stop buying until their next paycheck.)
Unions were developed to beat that problem. The purpose of unions is to force employers to pay employees more than they are economically worth. This helps both union and non-union workers; in a society where a sizable fraction of workers belong to unions, non-union employers have to pay wages competitive with union shops to avoid unionization. This was well understood in the 1930s through the 1970s. The phrase used back then was "labour should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of commerce." That sounds strange today. Which is part of the problem.
After a slow decade in the 1970s, we got Reagan, the "great communicator", who sold America on "unfettered" capitalism. US median per-capita real income hasn't gone up much since, after a huge rise in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The US peak was in 1973.
Government is not neutral in this. Deregulation, free trade, weak antitrust and labor law enforcement, anti-union state policies, and tax cuts for the rich all helped to reduce US wages.
The point here is that the economy has more than one stable state. One stable state looks like a third-world country - wages are at poverty levels, a few people have most of the money, disposable income is low, and production is limited by available disposable income. Another stable state has much higher wages and consumption levels. The US has seen both, and has chosen the former.
Unlike e-mail, in the US, sending junk faxes is illegal. Not only is it illegal,anyone can sue for damages of $1000 per fax, with triple damages in many cases. There are lawyers ready to handle junk fax cases. There were lots of lawsuits a few years ago. "Fax.com", a major junk fax operation, was sued for $2.2 trillion; they're no longer in business.