1 watt lasers have been around for years. You can buy the diodes. This is just cute packaging. It's not powerful enough to be a useful weapon or cutting tool, and it's too powerful in a narrow beam to be a useful illumination source.
In the CNC laser cutter world, this is viewed as a very weak laser. Commercial laser cutters start around 30 watts (for thin plastic and wood) and go up to about 5KW (sheet steel).
Back in 1991, Stanford University spun off the management of their endowment into the Stanford Management Company. At first they were into classic passive investments, like most university endowments. But they've gone beyond that. They invest in venture capital companies. They're located out on Sand Hill Road, where all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists have offices. Executives have moved between the Stanford Management Company and venture capital firms for years. The ties to that community are very close.
This has worked out very well. Stanford tends to take an equity stake in companies spun out of Stanford. Stanford owns part of Cisco, part of Yahoo, and part of Google. It's getting to the point that Stanford University is becoming a VC firm that runs an educational operation on the side as a tax break.
So a deal to run educational operations through a VC firm is perfectly normal for Stanford.
I wrote "Safer arrays for C" back in 2008. After working on this for a while, I realized that it couldn't be made fully backwards compatible with existing code, which limited its utility. So I gave up on that.
There was an "embedded C" group working on this issue at one point, but they don't seem to be very active any more.
That may be true in the EU, but here in the US, and only in some states - like New Mexico - it is possible to form a pseudo-anonymous corporation, with absolutely no tiebacks to you other than through the IRS.
It's cheap (very cheap), and you can build an unlimited stack of DBAs like Robert Brown or John Smith. I'm not going to even start with the many ways that could be abused.
Yes, there are "low-doc" US states. Nevada is one. However, if you accept credit cards from California residents, there's California Business and Professions Code
Section 17358, which requires disclosing the "actual name and address from which the business is conducted". California prosecutors routinely use that provision against scam sites; if the site is doing something slimy and is anonymous, prosecution under 17538 is an easy misdemeanor conviction good for 6 months in jail max.
But we need to face the fact that C is outdated.... Many other C design decisions have been shown to cause problems, confusions, and common security-problem-inducing bugs.
I know, as do most of the other people serious about programming language design. I've written about this before in various forums for years, proposing ways to fix some of the problems in C that lead to decade after decade of buffer overflows and crashes. But there's too much legacy code.
Nobody is even trying. Most of the effort in programming languages today involves late binding, just-in-time compilation, virtual machines, and complex template and object semantics. The last really serious effort to fix the problems of C as a systems programming language was Ada, and it was just too bulky. (On the other hand, modern C++ makes modern Ada look simple.) Modula 3 was actually quite good, and an OS was written in it. But it died with DEC Research when Compaq bought DEC.
It's hard to tell what, if anything, this thing does. The "documentation" is a mostly empty wiki. There's a useless FAQ and a useless technical FAQ. Neither answers basic questions like "what does this run on" and "what is the API for programs which run on it". I can't even figure out whether it runs on a bare machine or on Windows or Linux or what. ("Your search for 'installation' has returned 0 results").
What this seems to be is some kind of scheme for running Microsoft.NET on a bare machine. Except that it doesn't, apparently, really boot on a bare machine; it's normally run as a Windows application under Visual Studio. I think.
Schmidt is insistent that Google has the right to know who their users are. On the other hand, Google doesn't do proper due diligence on their customers, the ones who buy ads. That just cost them a $500 million fine to the Department of Justice for running phony pharmaceutical ads. (Those supposed "Canadian pharmacies" often aren't real pharmacies at all, and many are not in Canada. DOJ went after Google because an investigation into some Mexican drug dealer was also running an offshore pharmacy.)
Because of Google's "we don't care who you are" policy about advertisers, Google has become the advertising system for a wide range of scams: typosquatting, adware, ads for free stuff that's not free, ads for counterfeit software, and mortgage modification scams. Prof. Benjamin Edelman at the Harvard Business School estimates that Google makes about $25 million a year from ads for spyware and adware, about $6 million a year from ads for "credit repair" scams, and about $100 million a year by allowing competing trademarks as search keywords (that last is being litigated.)
Most of those scams depend on advertiser anonymity.
Business aren't entitled to privacy. Even in the European Union, which has privacy rights for individuals, businesses don't get that right. The European Directive on Electronic Commerce is very clear about that. Google has the right to demand proof of business identity from advertisers, and to demand that the advertiser disclose the actual name and address from which the business is conducted on their web site. Google doesn't do this, which makes Google the scammer's friend, and in some cases, as they just discovered expensively, an accomplice to criminal activity.
Google claimed to the DOJ that they cleaned up their act on drug ads. Let's see. Search for "no prescription diet pills". See a Google ad for "Phentremine 37.5 mg HCL - As low as $30. Free Shipping.
www.phentreminediet.com No subscriptions, or hidden cost.". There it is, right at the top of the page, in prime position, a drug ad run by Google. This is a fake drug scam site. It's a form of drug typosquatting; the real drug is spelled "phentermine". The site has a Google Checkout seal (which may be fake) and a BBBonline seal (which is fake). Yet Google is running that ad.
Prof. Edelman says it better than I can:
"I have long doubted Google's claims of innocence. For one, Google has an obvious incentive to allow deceptive and unlawful ads: each extra ad means extra revenue -- an ad in lieu of white space, or an extra competitor encouraging other advertisers to bid that much higher. Furthermore, unlawful and deceptive ads have been widespread; I found dozens in just a few hours of work. Meanwhile, it's hard to reconcile Google's engineering strength -- capably indexing billions of pages and tabulating billions of links -- with the company's supposed inability to identify new advertisements mentioning or targeting a few dozen terms known to deceive consumers. From these facts, I could only suspect what the DOJ investigation now confirms: Unlawful ads persist at Google not just because advertisers seek to be listed, but also because Google intentionally lets them stay and even offers them special assistance."
NSA has been trying for decades to get vendors to get serious about security, without much success. One of NSA's units is the Central Security Service, the defensive side, which develops and tests security technologies for Government and military use. They have people testing safes and locks, for example.
Back in the 1980s, NSA tried applying that approach to computing, with the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria. Systems were classified from A1 down to D. A very few specialized systems made it to an A level, but most commercial systems couldn't come close.
Manufacturers hated the testing procedure. Software vendors are used to controlling their own Q/A process. The NSA approach came from the test procedures for safes and padlocks - vendors could submit something, and it was tested by NSA personnel against NSA criteria. If it failed, the manufacturer got a list of defects, which was not necessarily complete. The manufacturer could resubmit the product, and NSA would retest it, on a strictly pass/fail basis. No third try was allowed, and failure was publicly announced by NSA.
After a decade of screaming and foot-dragging by vendors, the "common criteria" security scheme replaced the TCSEC in 2002-2005. This is much more "vendor friendly". The most strict levels of the TCSEC criteria were removed. Security evaluation is mostly done by outside labs, not NSA, and the vendor pays for and controls the process. The vendor can keep trying to pass as many times as they want. Failure is not publicized.
A reasonable number of systems meet some levels of the common criteria, but nothing below EAL5 really means much. Windows XP made it to EAL4.
NSA has tried, with NSA Secure Linux, to get people to take mandatory security seriously. NSA Secure Linux has "mandatory security", where there are levels and compartments which create boundaries data is not allowed to cross. Think of everything being in its own sandbox, with limited and tightly controlled intercommunication between sandboxes.
The point of that is not that NSA Secure Linux is a highly secure implementation of mandatory security. It was to get people to implement, modify, and partition applications so that they could work under a mandatory security model. A web browser, for example, would have to be structured so that the parts which could open local files were completely separated from the parts that communicated with the untrusted outside world. This didn't catch on in the browser world, although finally, a decade or so too late, browsers are starting to to run Flash in sandboxes.
NSA keeps trying. This new database is one for which fine-grained access control is possible. The challenge is to write apps that can live with such tight controls. They're trying to get people to get serious about security.
(It's been a long time, but I used to work on this stuff.)
These Maxwell ultracapacitors packaged as "transportation modules". 63 farads at 125 volts per unit. Max continuous current for an ordinary braking-type operation, 240A. So each such unit could absorb 30KW. The current generation of NYC subway car has a maximum current drain of 313KW per car. So nine such units per car, at 65Kg each, could accelerate a subway car. Stored energy is only 1.3KWh, but that's just about right for accelerating or decelerating a subway car once.
Some of the newer NYC subway trains do have regenerative braking. All have dynamic braking, where the motor acts as a generator, but in the older cars, the energy is dumped into huge iron resistors.
In the NYC subway, there's usually a train drawing power somewhere in the section of third rail connected to a single substation. So there's usually some load able to take regenerated power. Subway traction power is distributed at 27KV AC, and rectified to about 600VDC at one of 215 substations. Regeneration can only supply power to a single DC section; the substations can't up-convert DC to AC and feed it back upstream. (Interestingly, back when the subway system used rotary converters instead of rectifiers, some power could in theory be fed from the DC system into the AC system.)
If there's no load able to take regenerated power, it has to be dumped somewhere, either into resistors at the substation or on the train.
The question is whether enough unused regenerated power is produced to justify storing it. It's quite likely that during late-night off-peak hours, there may be only one train running on a substation and power will have to be dumped. But late-night power is cheap, and in NYC, mostly from hydro plants. So flywheel energy storage probably isn't worth it.
On-vehicle flywheels have been tried, but ultracapacitors look more promising today.
Traction elevators (with cables, as opposed to hydraulics) have usually been regenerative for decades, both for the gravity and inertial loads.
One option is mechatronics, where mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, control theory, and computer science meet. Most complex mechanical systems today have some electronics in them to manage the machinery. Find a school with a good mechatronics program if you want to go that route. There aren't that many.
Mechanism design requires the visualization skills of an artist. Some of that is genetic. You've probably heard the classic joke that a sculptor, asked how he did something, said that he just chipped away the stone around the figure until it emerged. That's not a joke. The people who do that sort of thing well have that kind of clear visualization. I know such people; I'm not one of them, even though I do some mechanical design. If you have that ability, you already know it. It's rare. The number of people who ever designed a good original gun, a good original Teletype, a good original mechanical adding machine, or a good original can opener is very small.
You're ex-military. The military uses lots of little mechanical stuff that has to work under tough conditions. Getting little stuff right is hard. Latches that stay shut when they should, open easily when wanted, don't have too many parts, and keep working when cold, hot, dirty, or unlubricated are tough to design. (However, today, few consumer companies will pay for the engineering to get that right. There used to be companies like HP, IBM, and even Tupperware who did. Today, it seems to be beyond the ability of the TV remote industry to make a battery case cover that will reliably stay on. Car guys, though, do worry about that stuff.)
One wonders what Google will kill next. Likely targets are products which lose money, don't provide opportunities for ad insertion, and don't collect monetizable information about users. Take a look at Google's list of products (which, amusingly, doesn't contain "G+"). Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Picnik (Google's photo editor), Google Voice, Google Talk, and SketchUp may be next.
Google Health has already been killed. Google has stopped digitizing old newspapers. Knol (Google's answer to Wikipedia) was never very successful. Those are likely targets, too.
Google is no longer worried about Microsoft, which has failed to compete successfully in online services. Google is worried about Facebook and Apple. So all those Google products which targeted Microsoft's business model, but lost money, can be dumped.
True. He's a pundit. He did a Y2K COBOL-conversion startup back in the 1990s; that's his contribution to "engineering". His academic positions are "hanger-on" types, not actual professorships.
I've been a visiting scholar at Stanford. It's not a big deal.
Vivek Wadhwa is a self-promoter who puts a lot of effort into getting his name in the press, but hasn't actually done much. He once had a company doing Y2K COBOL conversions with semi-automatic tools. It did not do too well.
His academic positions are all hanger-on type, like "Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program". That's not being on the Harvard faculty.
Is there a way to detect these, like a wifi signal?
Yes.
Nuk Alert. This is a keychain-sized sealed radiation detector with a 10-year battery life. It beeps from 1 to 10 times, based on the log of the radiation level. You can test it with a dental X-ray machine. Price about $170.
That's a real issue. Santa Clara County, CA, which used to be a major agricultural area before Silicon Valley took it over, had, for decades, a rain-making operation. Several hundred silver-iodide generators were spread around the county, and, when conditions were right, the call went out to turn them on. This increased rain in the agricultural valley, while reducing it in the barren inland hills. The end result was about 10% more rain.
It's very much a non story: a guy lost an iPhone, it may have been a prototype.
What's the big deal? Hon Hai in Shenzen (the real manufacturer; Apple is just the design and marketing company) can make more.
While we're on the subject of bars, many name brands of booze are outsourced. Skyy is just a marketing company. The alcohol comes from a big MGP Ingredients (formerly Midwest Solvents) plant in Pekin, IL. They sell beverage, industrial,and fuel alcohols. (Yes, kiddies, E85 and vodka come from the same plants.) It's pumped into railroad tank cars and shipped to Frank-Lin Distillers Products in San Jose, which makes most of the bottom-shelf booze on the West Coast. They run the alcohol through another distilling and filtering pass, add de-ionized San Jose city water, and some flavoring, and fill the bottles. Frank-Lin makes about a thousand products, but only has about a hundred different recipes. Their systems can switch recipe, bottle, and label on the fly, as they crank out all those "brands".
The perceived value comes from the hype, not the manufacturing process.
CoffeeScript doesn't actually do much; it's just another syntax for writing Javascript. Javascript is an OK language, Not a great one; it suffers from some of the standard mistakes.
A classic error is thinking you don't need declarations, and then having to retrofit them. This usually leads to ugly problems, especially if declarations are optional, because the defaults will be backwards. There's a long history of this, starting with FORTRAN and continuing through BASIC and C. Python is almost the only language to successfully work without declarations.
It's just a stretchable light source. There's no image. Making a display requires a lot more components and interconnects, which also have to be stretchable.
It uses gallium, which also makes great solar cells, more efficient than anything else. But the cost of gallium solar cells is so high that they're only used on spacecraft. They're about 3x more efficient than silicon solar cells, and 300x more expensive.
I've met some of the Wave Glider people. The things already have an Iridium uplink, and can be given waypoint lists to follow. They generally stay within about 50 meters of the desired track. They're simple, robust, and effective. They've been sent from Hawaii to Monterey Bay, then up to Alaska and back. The only powered moving part is the rudder. See the link above for how they move.
I don't know what they need Gosling for, though. Their present software seems to be quite effective.
What we need is less junk in web pages. The amount of dreck in web pages has gotten completely out of control. The home page of Slashdot has 3424 lines of HTML, not counting included files. This is not unusual. I'm seeing pages over 4000 lines long for newspaper stories. Pages with three to five different tracking systems. Hidden content for popups that's sent even when the popup isn't being loaded. Loading of ten files of CSS and Javascript for a routine page.
CSS was supposed to make web pages smaller, but instead, it's made them much, much bigger. Being able to include CSS from common files was suppose to improve caching, but instead, many content management systems create unique files of CSS for each page.
And you get to pay for downloading all this junk to your smartphone. It doesn't matter what route it takes through the backbone; eventually all that junk crosses the pay-per-bit bandwidth-throttled air link to the phone.
Where bandwidth really matters is video. There, the video player already negotiates the stream setup. That's the place to handle choosing which source to use. Not DNS.
Slashdot Mirror
The site is real, and amusing.
It's hosted by Leaseweb. It uses Google Analytics, with Google ID 'UA-3816538-24'.
1 watt lasers have been around for years. You can buy the diodes. This is just cute packaging. It's not powerful enough to be a useful weapon or cutting tool, and it's too powerful in a narrow beam to be a useful illumination source.
In the CNC laser cutter world, this is viewed as a very weak laser. Commercial laser cutters start around 30 watts (for thin plastic and wood) and go up to about 5KW (sheet steel).
Back in 1991, Stanford University spun off the management of their endowment into the Stanford Management Company. At first they were into classic passive investments, like most university endowments. But they've gone beyond that. They invest in venture capital companies. They're located out on Sand Hill Road, where all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists have offices. Executives have moved between the Stanford Management Company and venture capital firms for years. The ties to that community are very close.
This has worked out very well. Stanford tends to take an equity stake in companies spun out of Stanford. Stanford owns part of Cisco, part of Yahoo, and part of Google. It's getting to the point that Stanford University is becoming a VC firm that runs an educational operation on the side as a tax break.
So a deal to run educational operations through a VC firm is perfectly normal for Stanford.
Most civil lawsuits settle. If the defendant's attorneys see that they're likely to lose, they usually propose settlement.
I wrote "Safer arrays for C" back in 2008. After working on this for a while, I realized that it couldn't be made fully backwards compatible with existing code, which limited its utility. So I gave up on that.
There was an "embedded C" group working on this issue at one point, but they don't seem to be very active any more.
That may be true in the EU, but here in the US, and only in some states - like New Mexico - it is possible to form a pseudo-anonymous corporation, with absolutely no tiebacks to you other than through the IRS. It's cheap (very cheap), and you can build an unlimited stack of DBAs like Robert Brown or John Smith. I'm not going to even start with the many ways that could be abused.
Yes, there are "low-doc" US states. Nevada is one. However, if you accept credit cards from California residents, there's California Business and Professions Code Section 17358, which requires disclosing the "actual name and address from which the business is conducted". California prosecutors routinely use that provision against scam sites; if the site is doing something slimy and is anonymous, prosecution under 17538 is an easy misdemeanor conviction good for 6 months in jail max.
But we need to face the fact that C is outdated. ... Many other C design decisions have been shown to cause problems, confusions, and common security-problem-inducing bugs.
I know, as do most of the other people serious about programming language design. I've written about this before in various forums for years, proposing ways to fix some of the problems in C that lead to decade after decade of buffer overflows and crashes. But there's too much legacy code.
Nobody is even trying. Most of the effort in programming languages today involves late binding, just-in-time compilation, virtual machines, and complex template and object semantics. The last really serious effort to fix the problems of C as a systems programming language was Ada, and it was just too bulky. (On the other hand, modern C++ makes modern Ada look simple.) Modula 3 was actually quite good, and an OS was written in it. But it died with DEC Research when Compaq bought DEC.
It's hard to tell what, if anything, this thing does. The "documentation" is a mostly empty wiki. There's a useless FAQ and a useless technical FAQ. Neither answers basic questions like "what does this run on" and "what is the API for programs which run on it". I can't even figure out whether it runs on a bare machine or on Windows or Linux or what. ("Your search for 'installation' has returned 0 results").
What this seems to be is some kind of scheme for running Microsoft .NET on a bare machine. Except that it doesn't, apparently, really boot on a bare machine; it's normally run as a Windows application under Visual Studio. I think.
Schmidt is insistent that Google has the right to know who their users are. On the other hand, Google doesn't do proper due diligence on their customers, the ones who buy ads. That just cost them a $500 million fine to the Department of Justice for running phony pharmaceutical ads. (Those supposed "Canadian pharmacies" often aren't real pharmacies at all, and many are not in Canada. DOJ went after Google because an investigation into some Mexican drug dealer was also running an offshore pharmacy.)
Because of Google's "we don't care who you are" policy about advertisers, Google has become the advertising system for a wide range of scams: typosquatting, adware, ads for free stuff that's not free, ads for counterfeit software, and mortgage modification scams. Prof. Benjamin Edelman at the Harvard Business School estimates that Google makes about $25 million a year from ads for spyware and adware, about $6 million a year from ads for "credit repair" scams, and about $100 million a year by allowing competing trademarks as search keywords (that last is being litigated.)
Most of those scams depend on advertiser anonymity. Business aren't entitled to privacy. Even in the European Union, which has privacy rights for individuals, businesses don't get that right. The European Directive on Electronic Commerce is very clear about that. Google has the right to demand proof of business identity from advertisers, and to demand that the advertiser disclose the actual name and address from which the business is conducted on their web site. Google doesn't do this, which makes Google the scammer's friend, and in some cases, as they just discovered expensively, an accomplice to criminal activity.
Google claimed to the DOJ that they cleaned up their act on drug ads. Let's see. Search for "no prescription diet pills". See a Google ad for "Phentremine 37.5 mg HCL - As low as $30. Free Shipping. www.phentreminediet.com No subscriptions, or hidden cost.". There it is, right at the top of the page, in prime position, a drug ad run by Google. This is a fake drug scam site. It's a form of drug typosquatting; the real drug is spelled "phentermine". The site has a Google Checkout seal (which may be fake) and a BBBonline seal (which is fake). Yet Google is running that ad.
Prof. Edelman says it better than I can: "I have long doubted Google's claims of innocence. For one, Google has an obvious incentive to allow deceptive and unlawful ads: each extra ad means extra revenue -- an ad in lieu of white space, or an extra competitor encouraging other advertisers to bid that much higher. Furthermore, unlawful and deceptive ads have been widespread; I found dozens in just a few hours of work. Meanwhile, it's hard to reconcile Google's engineering strength -- capably indexing billions of pages and tabulating billions of links -- with the company's supposed inability to identify new advertisements mentioning or targeting a few dozen terms known to deceive consumers. From these facts, I could only suspect what the DOJ investigation now confirms: Unlawful ads persist at Google not just because advertisers seek to be listed, but also because Google intentionally lets them stay and even offers them special assistance."
NSA has been trying for decades to get vendors to get serious about security, without much success. One of NSA's units is the Central Security Service, the defensive side, which develops and tests security technologies for Government and military use. They have people testing safes and locks, for example.
Back in the 1980s, NSA tried applying that approach to computing, with the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria. Systems were classified from A1 down to D. A very few specialized systems made it to an A level, but most commercial systems couldn't come close.
Manufacturers hated the testing procedure. Software vendors are used to controlling their own Q/A process. The NSA approach came from the test procedures for safes and padlocks - vendors could submit something, and it was tested by NSA personnel against NSA criteria. If it failed, the manufacturer got a list of defects, which was not necessarily complete. The manufacturer could resubmit the product, and NSA would retest it, on a strictly pass/fail basis. No third try was allowed, and failure was publicly announced by NSA.
After a decade of screaming and foot-dragging by vendors, the "common criteria" security scheme replaced the TCSEC in 2002-2005. This is much more "vendor friendly". The most strict levels of the TCSEC criteria were removed. Security evaluation is mostly done by outside labs, not NSA, and the vendor pays for and controls the process. The vendor can keep trying to pass as many times as they want. Failure is not publicized.
A reasonable number of systems meet some levels of the common criteria, but nothing below EAL5 really means much. Windows XP made it to EAL4.
NSA has tried, with NSA Secure Linux, to get people to take mandatory security seriously. NSA Secure Linux has "mandatory security", where there are levels and compartments which create boundaries data is not allowed to cross. Think of everything being in its own sandbox, with limited and tightly controlled intercommunication between sandboxes.
The point of that is not that NSA Secure Linux is a highly secure implementation of mandatory security. It was to get people to implement, modify, and partition applications so that they could work under a mandatory security model. A web browser, for example, would have to be structured so that the parts which could open local files were completely separated from the parts that communicated with the untrusted outside world. This didn't catch on in the browser world, although finally, a decade or so too late, browsers are starting to to run Flash in sandboxes.
NSA keeps trying. This new database is one for which fine-grained access control is possible. The challenge is to write apps that can live with such tight controls. They're trying to get people to get serious about security.
(It's been a long time, but I used to work on this stuff.)
These Maxwell ultracapacitors packaged as "transportation modules". 63 farads at 125 volts per unit. Max continuous current for an ordinary braking-type operation, 240A. So each such unit could absorb 30KW. The current generation of NYC subway car has a maximum current drain of 313KW per car. So nine such units per car, at 65Kg each, could accelerate a subway car. Stored energy is only 1.3KWh, but that's just about right for accelerating or decelerating a subway car once.
Some of the newer NYC subway trains do have regenerative braking. All have dynamic braking, where the motor acts as a generator, but in the older cars, the energy is dumped into huge iron resistors.
In the NYC subway, there's usually a train drawing power somewhere in the section of third rail connected to a single substation. So there's usually some load able to take regenerated power. Subway traction power is distributed at 27KV AC, and rectified to about 600VDC at one of 215 substations. Regeneration can only supply power to a single DC section; the substations can't up-convert DC to AC and feed it back upstream. (Interestingly, back when the subway system used rotary converters instead of rectifiers, some power could in theory be fed from the DC system into the AC system.)
If there's no load able to take regenerated power, it has to be dumped somewhere, either into resistors at the substation or on the train.
The question is whether enough unused regenerated power is produced to justify storing it. It's quite likely that during late-night off-peak hours, there may be only one train running on a substation and power will have to be dumped. But late-night power is cheap, and in NYC, mostly from hydro plants. So flywheel energy storage probably isn't worth it.
On-vehicle flywheels have been tried, but ultracapacitors look more promising today.
Traction elevators (with cables, as opposed to hydraulics) have usually been regenerative for decades, both for the gravity and inertial loads.
One option is mechatronics, where mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, control theory, and computer science meet. Most complex mechanical systems today have some electronics in them to manage the machinery. Find a school with a good mechatronics program if you want to go that route. There aren't that many.
Mechanism design requires the visualization skills of an artist. Some of that is genetic. You've probably heard the classic joke that a sculptor, asked how he did something, said that he just chipped away the stone around the figure until it emerged. That's not a joke. The people who do that sort of thing well have that kind of clear visualization. I know such people; I'm not one of them, even though I do some mechanical design. If you have that ability, you already know it. It's rare. The number of people who ever designed a good original gun, a good original Teletype, a good original mechanical adding machine, or a good original can opener is very small.
You're ex-military. The military uses lots of little mechanical stuff that has to work under tough conditions. Getting little stuff right is hard. Latches that stay shut when they should, open easily when wanted, don't have too many parts, and keep working when cold, hot, dirty, or unlubricated are tough to design. (However, today, few consumer companies will pay for the engineering to get that right. There used to be companies like HP, IBM, and even Tupperware who did. Today, it seems to be beyond the ability of the TV remote industry to make a battery case cover that will reliably stay on. Car guys, though, do worry about that stuff.)
One wonders what Google will kill next. Likely targets are products which lose money, don't provide opportunities for ad insertion, and don't collect monetizable information about users. Take a look at Google's list of products (which, amusingly, doesn't contain "G+"). Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Picnik (Google's photo editor), Google Voice, Google Talk, and SketchUp may be next.
Google Health has already been killed. Google has stopped digitizing old newspapers. Knol (Google's answer to Wikipedia) was never very successful. Those are likely targets, too.
Google is no longer worried about Microsoft, which has failed to compete successfully in online services. Google is worried about Facebook and Apple. So all those Google products which targeted Microsoft's business model, but lost money, can be dumped.
True. He's a pundit. He did a Y2K COBOL-conversion startup back in the 1990s; that's his contribution to "engineering". His academic positions are "hanger-on" types, not actual professorships.
I've been a visiting scholar at Stanford. It's not a big deal.
Vivek Wadhwa is a self-promoter who puts a lot of effort into getting his name in the press, but hasn't actually done much. He once had a company doing Y2K COBOL conversions with semi-automatic tools. It did not do too well. His academic positions are all hanger-on type, like "Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program". That's not being on the Harvard faculty.
This guy is on Slashdot twice today.
Is there a way to detect these, like a wifi signal?
Yes. Nuk Alert. This is a keychain-sized sealed radiation detector with a 10-year battery life. It beeps from 1 to 10 times, based on the log of the radiation level. You can test it with a dental X-ray machine. Price about $170.
That's a real issue. Santa Clara County, CA, which used to be a major agricultural area before Silicon Valley took it over, had, for decades, a rain-making operation. Several hundred silver-iodide generators were spread around the county, and, when conditions were right, the call went out to turn them on. This increased rain in the agricultural valley, while reducing it in the barren inland hills. The end result was about 10% more rain.
It's very much a non story: a guy lost an iPhone, it may have been a prototype.
What's the big deal? Hon Hai in Shenzen (the real manufacturer; Apple is just the design and marketing company) can make more.
While we're on the subject of bars, many name brands of booze are outsourced. Skyy is just a marketing company. The alcohol comes from a big MGP Ingredients (formerly Midwest Solvents) plant in Pekin, IL. They sell beverage, industrial,and fuel alcohols. (Yes, kiddies, E85 and vodka come from the same plants.) It's pumped into railroad tank cars and shipped to Frank-Lin Distillers Products in San Jose, which makes most of the bottom-shelf booze on the West Coast. They run the alcohol through another distilling and filtering pass, add de-ionized San Jose city water, and some flavoring, and fill the bottles. Frank-Lin makes about a thousand products, but only has about a hundred different recipes. Their systems can switch recipe, bottle, and label on the fly, as they crank out all those "brands".
The perceived value comes from the hype, not the manufacturing process.
CoffeeScript doesn't actually do much; it's just another syntax for writing Javascript. Javascript is an OK language, Not a great one; it suffers from some of the standard mistakes.
A classic error is thinking you don't need declarations, and then having to retrofit them. This usually leads to ugly problems, especially if declarations are optional, because the defaults will be backwards. There's a long history of this, starting with FORTRAN and continuing through BASIC and C. Python is almost the only language to successfully work without declarations.
It's just a stretchable light source. There's no image. Making a display requires a lot more components and interconnects, which also have to be stretchable.
It uses gallium, which also makes great solar cells, more efficient than anything else. But the cost of gallium solar cells is so high that they're only used on spacecraft. They're about 3x more efficient than silicon solar cells, and 300x more expensive.
I've met some of the Wave Glider people. The things already have an Iridium uplink, and can be given waypoint lists to follow. They generally stay within about 50 meters of the desired track. They're simple, robust, and effective. They've been sent from Hawaii to Monterey Bay, then up to Alaska and back. The only powered moving part is the rudder. See the link above for how they move.
I don't know what they need Gosling for, though. Their present software seems to be quite effective.
The Life and Career of Steve Jobs, from Next Media Animation in Tapei. Enjoy.
What we need is less junk in web pages. The amount of dreck in web pages has gotten completely out of control. The home page of Slashdot has 3424 lines of HTML, not counting included files. This is not unusual. I'm seeing pages over 4000 lines long for newspaper stories. Pages with three to five different tracking systems. Hidden content for popups that's sent even when the popup isn't being loaded. Loading of ten files of CSS and Javascript for a routine page.
CSS was supposed to make web pages smaller, but instead, it's made them much, much bigger. Being able to include CSS from common files was suppose to improve caching, but instead, many content management systems create unique files of CSS for each page.
And you get to pay for downloading all this junk to your smartphone. It doesn't matter what route it takes through the backbone; eventually all that junk crosses the pay-per-bit bandwidth-throttled air link to the phone.
Where bandwidth really matters is video. There, the video player already negotiates the stream setup. That's the place to handle choosing which source to use. Not DNS.