Society is not going to run down because we need smaller electronics. It's nice to have portable devices with enough compute power to play grandmaster-level chess, but most people max out running Angry Birds and watching TV.
Society is going to run down because we need energy sources. Every energy source we have today is a minor improvement on technology at least 50 years old. The non-renewables are running out, fusion didn't work, fission isn't looking too good right now, many of the really good wind sites already have wind farms, solar doesn't work at night, and growing crops for fuel competes with growing food. The future will run at a much lower energy level than today.
Apple allowed Grindr: "The app makes use of the device geolocation, which allows users to access other gay and bisexual men within close proximity. This is accomplished through a simple user interface that displays a grid of representative pictures of men, arranged from nearest to farthest away."
I'm surprised that one passed Apple's porno filter.
So, if the opposition wants to have a say, so be it.
Something I'd like to see more of are those stiff plastic cards that provide a quick reference for something. You see those for "Algebra I" in most bookstores. Ones for programming languages and programs would be useful.
Writing one of those cards is a useful exercise for designers. If you can't cram the essential instructions onto one card, the interface probably needs a redesign or something needs to be automated.
From an individual device, you can only get a rough direction. But with timestamped events from multiple locations, you can get the actual location of the target. That's much more useful. You can transmit the target coordinates to artillery.
A gun-location app for a smartphone is quite possible. There's a microphone, a GPS, compute power, and comm.
Irrelevant if the 'other party' is based out of communist China
So file a complaint against Google. They're not an innocent party here; they're taking a cut of the revenue. An "app store" cannot take advantage of the "safe harbor" that an ISP can.
That's criminal copyright infringement. If it's for commercial gain, and the total retail value exceeds $1000, and distributed over a computer network, the criminal provisions apply.
At $2500, it becomes a felony.
I don't want drivers looking at a screen instead of the road.
They should be driving, not playing Angry Birds.
At least until self-driving car technology is deployed.
Reactors 1,2 and 3 still have water levels below the top of the core, and seawater injection continues. So they still haven't reached cold shutdown.
Desperate attempts are being made to fill the spent fuel pool. which, incidentally, is well above ground level in a severely damaged building that has just had a fire. Radiation levels are too high for anyone to approach. Helicopter water drops have been tried. Military fire trucks, ones that can spray water without the operator getting out of the truck, are being used. "The effect of these operations is under evaluation".
It's not that big a deal. I've been to Lucasfilm's sound stage at "Kerner Optical" (which used to be a cover story for Lucasfilm.) That's where they do physical effects and model work. Got to see their prop and camera shops, and some cameras used for notable shots that fans probably care about but I don't. They were the first to put a camera in a carbon-fibre housing, that camera has been through many crashes and explosions, and it still works. Nice engineering.
They were doing some R&D work on 3D cameras where the separation between the cameras could be varied dynamically. Watching that on a 3D monitor while someone twiddles the interocular distance is a non-fun visual experience, close to headache-inducing.
They were showing off FrameFree, which is a frameless video compression technology. It decomposes the image into layers which are then morphed from frame to frame, allowing arbitrarily slow motion. They sold that off, but some of the technology for cleanly decomposing images went into 2D to 3D conversion technology.
The most unusual thing about the place is that almost all the employees have been there for decades. Someone who'd been there three years was referred to as the new guy. You just don't see that kind of low employee turnover any more.
I've been to some computer animation places. They're just cube farms, not very interesting. They used to have high-end SGI workstations, but now it's all PC. (I saw that transition between 1998 and 2002; on my first visit to Sony Imageworks, the shop was 90% SGI machines, with a few PCs. Four years later, 80% PCs, with a few SGI machines for legacy work. SGI's "Silicon Studio" division is long gone, and the Computer Museum has their building.)
Watching a really good animator use a high-end animation package makes you realize that some people have really, really, good 3D visualization skills. There's a classic comment from some sculptor that he just chips away the stone until the object emerges. That's what working 3D artists do all day. Fast. There's much drawing and little adjustment. Pros don't tweak meshes; they draw them.
If you're not into either the "Hollywood thing" or fandom, dealing with the film industry is generally frustrating. Either they're in pre-production and have trouble coming up with a valid credit card, or they're in production and want a new feature yesterday.
the solution needs to be upscaled. The group has so far created and tested a few hundred bits
It's another one of those overhyped materials-science articles. Here's the hype part:
Pop says that he envisions a point where a device could get its power needs from harvested thermal or mechanical energy or sourced purely from solar. Consumer devices won't be the only beneficiaries, however.
"We're not just talking about lightening our pockets or purses," Pop said. "This is also important for anything that has to operate on a battery, such as satellites, telecommunications equipment in remote locations, or any number of scientific and military applications."
Server farms or data centers could also benefit from lower energy costs by utilizing the solution. The researchers say that the low-power memory could even lead to previously elusive three-dimensional stacking of chips.
Really. They've come up with yet another alternative to silicon-based memory devices. There are hundreds of such schemes, from Ovonics to silicon-on-sapphire. Many of them work, but each has something that makes it inferior to the mainstream technologies. Some (like this one, probably, since it's heating-based) have slow write times. Some are expensive to fab. Some won't scale up.
The problem with the "elusive 3D stacking of chips" is not that it can't be done, but that it doesn't make systems cheaper. In the technologies developed to date, each new layer of devices costs about as much as making a separate part.
The future of nuclear power, if there is any, is something like a pebble bed reactor...
The trouble with pebble bed reactors is that the pebble removal systemwears and jams. In most reactors, there are no moving parts inside the reactor vessel other than the control rods. Pebble bed reactors are continuously adding and removing billiard-ball sized "pebbles", making for a much more complex mechanical system within the hot, corrosive and radioactive environment inside the reactor core. The German AVR reactor failed for this reason.
The good thing about pressurized-water reactors is that what's inside the reactor is mechanically simple and uses non-volatile materials. There's no extremely flammable liquid sodium (as in sodium cooled reactors), no liquid fluorine (as in thorium reactors), and no flammable graphite (as at Chernoybl).
There's still not much hard information available. Most of the info coming from outside Japan is punditry or speculation. The major Japanese news outlets, NHK and Asahi Shimbun, seem to be having problems keeping up with events. Transportation within Japan is so disrupted that reporters can't get to the scene.
At this point, two reactors have lost all cooling systems. Both have had seawater with boron (a neutron absorber) injected as an emergency cooling measure. The Japan Self Defense Force had to bring in portable pumps, and the USAF flew in extra boron supplies. Those reactors will never operate again.
A major meltdown is unlikely at this point, with seawater being forced in. In a few days, the reactors will be cold, and a long, slow cleanup will begin.
Casualties from the reactor accident will be low. Bear in mind that Japan has lost at least 10,000 lives so far. Entire towns are gone. A big oil refinery in Tokyo is still on fire. Four railroad trains are missing. Food is running short in Tokyo. Power is out across sizable parts of the country. Roads are shredded in some areas. But, when the dust settles, Fukushima Daiichi will be responsible for very few deaths.
There's a
keychain-sized radiation detector available for $160. It's a sealed unit, always on, and has a 10-year battery life. It sounds a burst of "chirps" if it detects radiation, with the number of chirps indicating logarithmically the level of hazard. One chirp, the level of radiation is safe for 40 days of exposure. 10 chirps, lethal within hours. Putting one in front of a dental X-ray machine produces about five chirps.
Carry one of those through a body scanner and see what happens.
Until the mid-1980s, computer science was mostly about discrete mathematics. Knuth is heavy on combinatorial and clever integer math. Mathematical logic and proof of correctness were big. I went through Stanford CS for a Masters in the mid-1980s, and and never had any class that required serious number-crunching.
But now it's completely different. Graphics, game programming, machine learning, robotics, control, audio and video processing, and even finance all involve heavy number-crunching. Differential equations come up everywhere. Statistics is far more important, and there have been major developments in the theory of statistics. (Much classic statistics assumes you're limited on compute power; that's why "least squares" methods were so popular once. Now there are better techniques, ones much better at handling outliers.) As a result, AI is working much better than it did during the "expert system" and "AI Winter" eras.
Basic calculus is not advanced math. Calculus is just what gets you to entry level so you can learn real math. Real people use this stuff. Last year I took a course at Hacker Dojo on machine learning, taught by a quant from Blackstone Capital using the Stanford course materials. They assumed everyone had a thorough knowledge of calculus. I'm not a "math person", nor an academic, but that's the price of staying active in this industry.
If you just want an "IT" degree, you may not need much math. The math parts will be bought with the package you install and administer. But in that case, you're probably better off getting a degree in business administration with some extra IT courses.
What happens when spammers, MAFIAA's etc start writing scripts, virus's botnets etc to submit downvotes on legitimate pages?
That's the trouble with recommendation systems. They're far too easy to spam. Yelp and Citysearch are heavily spammed in this way. Nor will requiring a Google login help. There's Jiffy Gmail Creator to generate fake Google accounts in bulk. Even phone-verified accounts can be purchased in bulk.
This is "Make" magazine again, the O'Reilly publishing/convention empire's attempt to 0wn the do-it-yourself movement by turning it into a cult. Looks like they're now targeting libraries.
I have a membership at TechShop, and use it regularly.
TechShop is not a "hacker space". It's a machine shop.
(Silicon Valley has a "hacker space", called Hacker Dojo. I took a good machine learning class there. Hacker Dojo is a place where people with no office go to work, like Starbucks.) The point of TechShop is that they offer access to large machine tools. Most of those tools are way too heavy duty for a library. TechShops have manual and CNC milling machines, a plasma cutter or water jet cutter, CNC laser cutters, a welding shop, sheet metal machinery, etc. Yesterday, TechShop SF had a crew from the power company digging up the street to put in heavier power lines.
TechShop gives about forty different "Safety and Basic Usage" courses. Each runs one to two hours, and is required before using the relevant machine. That makes the TechShop concept work. Many of them are taught in the evenings by people who use such machines as their day job. The courses cost $50 to $100 each, and the instructors are paid.
This is way beyond the public library level.
Those places are tough to run, and they're still debugging the concept. The one in Silicon Valley works because there's enough engineering talent in Silicon Valley to make just about anything. It's not yet clear how San Francisco will work out.
If the Government takes a DNA sample, they should be required to run it through 23andMe and give you the results for free. That would provide some benefit.
The "criminal" DNA matching systems are far cruder than the 100,000 point analysis 23andMe does.
Our initial attempts to produce isobutanol in C. glutamicum resulted in the maximum production of 4.9 g/L...
So they got 0.5% product. That's far too low for commercial fuel production. This is a research development, nowhere near a commercial technology. That's progress, but it shouldn't be reported as "Researchers Develop Biofuel Alternative To Ethanol".
The problem with ethanol from cellulose, which is a related technology, tends to be that the enzymes used cost more to produce than the fuel product is worth. Much work is going into cracking that problem, but this new research hasn't solved it or bypassed it.
Bear in mind that one can convert hydrocarbons to other hydrocarbons, at some energy cost. Gevo, a startup funded by some major VCs, has an sugar to isobutanol process. It's a fermentation process, like brewing, and scales up well. A 20 million gallon per year plant is under construction. As a fuel, isobutanol works fine; the EPA has already approved it as a gasoline additive, and some race cars use it.
Robots still don't have enough "common sense" (i.e. reliable prediction of consequences) for this. That's really hard, but there's steady progress. Also, all-round sensing on all surfaces, the equivalent of skin touch, is needed.
As someone who's worked with both autonomous robots and horses, it's worth comparing the two. Horses are moderately safe to be around once you can read horse body language and understand the safe positions around a horse. Some horses are safe around untrained people (this is teachable, and I once owned an ex-police horse who'd been explicitly taught it.). With most horses, you will get banged into once in a while, not deliberately, but just because a half-ton animal moved a bit.
Horses are not safe around people who can't move. Kids and ponies mix well well, but that's because the kids have fast reflexes and aren't usually hurt by falls and minor blows. It's not because the ponies are cautious.
We aren't even up to the pony level of robot safety yet.
First, there's no reason why a cell phone tower or an ATM should need GPS data to operate. There are many other ways to get timestamps, and in neither case is the facility likely to move much.
Anything important should have a GPS smart enough to tell when its data is no good. If you can receive from four satellites, you have enough information to tell if the data you're getting is bogus. Life-critical applications like aircraft should receive from GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo, and cross-check.
GPS satellites fail occasionally, and there are occasional gaps in coverage. Also bear in mind that GPS control is very centralized. It's run from Colorado Springs, and if the control center goes down, the constellation becomes inaccurate after a week or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Society is not going to run down because we need smaller electronics. It's nice to have portable devices with enough compute power to play grandmaster-level chess, but most people max out running Angry Birds and watching TV.
Society is going to run down because we need energy sources. Every energy source we have today is a minor improvement on technology at least 50 years old. The non-renewables are running out, fusion didn't work, fission isn't looking too good right now, many of the really good wind sites already have wind farms, solar doesn't work at night, and growing crops for fuel competes with growing food. The future will run at a much lower energy level than today.
Apple allowed Grindr: "The app makes use of the device geolocation, which allows users to access other gay and bisexual men within close proximity. This is accomplished through a simple user interface that displays a grid of representative pictures of men, arranged from nearest to farthest away." I'm surprised that one passed Apple's porno filter.
So, if the opposition wants to have a say, so be it.
Something I'd like to see more of are those stiff plastic cards that provide a quick reference for something. You see those for "Algebra I" in most bookstores. Ones for programming languages and programs would be useful.
Writing one of those cards is a useful exercise for designers. If you can't cram the essential instructions onto one card, the interface probably needs a redesign or something needs to be automated.
From an individual device, you can only get a rough direction. But with timestamped events from multiple locations, you can get the actual location of the target. That's much more useful. You can transmit the target coordinates to artillery.
A gun-location app for a smartphone is quite possible. There's a microphone, a GPS, compute power, and comm.
Irrelevant if the 'other party' is based out of communist China
So file a complaint against Google. They're not an innocent party here; they're taking a cut of the revenue. An "app store" cannot take advantage of the "safe harbor" that an ISP can.
That's criminal copyright infringement. If it's for commercial gain, and the total retail value exceeds $1000, and distributed over a computer network, the criminal provisions apply. At $2500, it becomes a felony.
Here's how to report it.
Or "apps". Too much "head down" time.
I don't want drivers looking at a screen instead of the road. They should be driving, not playing Angry Birds. At least until self-driving car technology is deployed.
Actually, they've been using boric acid mixed with seawater.
(Incidentally, names of elements are not capitalized.)
See the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum site for reactor status reports that have real information. The latest status report (22:00, March 17) Their table for the spent fuel pool in #4 says "Level low, preparing water injection, damage to fuel rods suspected."
Reactors 1,2 and 3 still have water levels below the top of the core, and seawater injection continues. So they still haven't reached cold shutdown.
Desperate attempts are being made to fill the spent fuel pool. which, incidentally, is well above ground level in a severely damaged building that has just had a fire. Radiation levels are too high for anyone to approach. Helicopter water drops have been tried. Military fire trucks, ones that can spray water without the operator getting out of the truck, are being used. "The effect of these operations is under evaluation".
It's not that big a deal. I've been to Lucasfilm's sound stage at "Kerner Optical" (which used to be a cover story for Lucasfilm.) That's where they do physical effects and model work. Got to see their prop and camera shops, and some cameras used for notable shots that fans probably care about but I don't. They were the first to put a camera in a carbon-fibre housing, that camera has been through many crashes and explosions, and it still works. Nice engineering.
They were doing some R&D work on 3D cameras where the separation between the cameras could be varied dynamically. Watching that on a 3D monitor while someone twiddles the interocular distance is a non-fun visual experience, close to headache-inducing.
They were showing off FrameFree, which is a frameless video compression technology. It decomposes the image into layers which are then morphed from frame to frame, allowing arbitrarily slow motion. They sold that off, but some of the technology for cleanly decomposing images went into 2D to 3D conversion technology.
The most unusual thing about the place is that almost all the employees have been there for decades. Someone who'd been there three years was referred to as the new guy. You just don't see that kind of low employee turnover any more.
I've been to some computer animation places. They're just cube farms, not very interesting. They used to have high-end SGI workstations, but now it's all PC. (I saw that transition between 1998 and 2002; on my first visit to Sony Imageworks, the shop was 90% SGI machines, with a few PCs. Four years later, 80% PCs, with a few SGI machines for legacy work. SGI's "Silicon Studio" division is long gone, and the Computer Museum has their building.)
Watching a really good animator use a high-end animation package makes you realize that some people have really, really, good 3D visualization skills. There's a classic comment from some sculptor that he just chips away the stone until the object emerges. That's what working 3D artists do all day. Fast. There's much drawing and little adjustment. Pros don't tweak meshes; they draw them.
If you're not into either the "Hollywood thing" or fandom, dealing with the film industry is generally frustrating. Either they're in pre-production and have trouble coming up with a valid credit card, or they're in production and want a new feature yesterday.
From the article:
the solution needs to be upscaled. The group has so far created and tested a few hundred bits
It's another one of those overhyped materials-science articles. Here's the hype part:
Pop says that he envisions a point where a device could get its power needs from harvested thermal or mechanical energy or sourced purely from solar. Consumer devices won't be the only beneficiaries, however. "We're not just talking about lightening our pockets or purses," Pop said. "This is also important for anything that has to operate on a battery, such as satellites, telecommunications equipment in remote locations, or any number of scientific and military applications." Server farms or data centers could also benefit from lower energy costs by utilizing the solution. The researchers say that the low-power memory could even lead to previously elusive three-dimensional stacking of chips.
Really. They've come up with yet another alternative to silicon-based memory devices. There are hundreds of such schemes, from Ovonics to silicon-on-sapphire. Many of them work, but each has something that makes it inferior to the mainstream technologies. Some (like this one, probably, since it's heating-based) have slow write times. Some are expensive to fab. Some won't scale up.
The problem with the "elusive 3D stacking of chips" is not that it can't be done, but that it doesn't make systems cheaper. In the technologies developed to date, each new layer of devices costs about as much as making a separate part.
The future of nuclear power, if there is any, is something like a pebble bed reactor...
The trouble with pebble bed reactors is that the pebble removal system wears and jams. In most reactors, there are no moving parts inside the reactor vessel other than the control rods. Pebble bed reactors are continuously adding and removing billiard-ball sized "pebbles", making for a much more complex mechanical system within the hot, corrosive and radioactive environment inside the reactor core. The German AVR reactor failed for this reason.
The good thing about pressurized-water reactors is that what's inside the reactor is mechanically simple and uses non-volatile materials. There's no extremely flammable liquid sodium (as in sodium cooled reactors), no liquid fluorine (as in thorium reactors), and no flammable graphite (as at Chernoybl).
There's still not much hard information available. Most of the info coming from outside Japan is punditry or speculation. The major Japanese news outlets, NHK and Asahi Shimbun, seem to be having problems keeping up with events. Transportation within Japan is so disrupted that reporters can't get to the scene.
At this point, two reactors have lost all cooling systems. Both have had seawater with boron (a neutron absorber) injected as an emergency cooling measure. The Japan Self Defense Force had to bring in portable pumps, and the USAF flew in extra boron supplies. Those reactors will never operate again.
A major meltdown is unlikely at this point, with seawater being forced in. In a few days, the reactors will be cold, and a long, slow cleanup will begin.
Casualties from the reactor accident will be low. Bear in mind that Japan has lost at least 10,000 lives so far. Entire towns are gone. A big oil refinery in Tokyo is still on fire. Four railroad trains are missing. Food is running short in Tokyo. Power is out across sizable parts of the country. Roads are shredded in some areas. But, when the dust settles, Fukushima Daiichi will be responsible for very few deaths.
There's a keychain-sized radiation detector available for $160. It's a sealed unit, always on, and has a 10-year battery life. It sounds a burst of "chirps" if it detects radiation, with the number of chirps indicating logarithmically the level of hazard. One chirp, the level of radiation is safe for 40 days of exposure. 10 chirps, lethal within hours. Putting one in front of a dental X-ray machine produces about five chirps.
Carry one of those through a body scanner and see what happens.
CS is more about continuous math than ever.
Until the mid-1980s, computer science was mostly about discrete mathematics. Knuth is heavy on combinatorial and clever integer math. Mathematical logic and proof of correctness were big. I went through Stanford CS for a Masters in the mid-1980s, and and never had any class that required serious number-crunching.
But now it's completely different. Graphics, game programming, machine learning, robotics, control, audio and video processing, and even finance all involve heavy number-crunching. Differential equations come up everywhere. Statistics is far more important, and there have been major developments in the theory of statistics. (Much classic statistics assumes you're limited on compute power; that's why "least squares" methods were so popular once. Now there are better techniques, ones much better at handling outliers.) As a result, AI is working much better than it did during the "expert system" and "AI Winter" eras.
Basic calculus is not advanced math. Calculus is just what gets you to entry level so you can learn real math. Real people use this stuff. Last year I took a course at Hacker Dojo on machine learning, taught by a quant from Blackstone Capital using the Stanford course materials. They assumed everyone had a thorough knowledge of calculus. I'm not a "math person", nor an academic, but that's the price of staying active in this industry.
If you just want an "IT" degree, you may not need much math. The math parts will be bought with the package you install and administer. But in that case, you're probably better off getting a degree in business administration with some extra IT courses.
What happens when spammers, MAFIAA's etc start writing scripts, virus's botnets etc to submit downvotes on legitimate pages?
That's the trouble with recommendation systems. They're far too easy to spam. Yelp and Citysearch are heavily spammed in this way. Nor will requiring a Google login help. There's Jiffy Gmail Creator to generate fake Google accounts in bulk. Even phone-verified accounts can be purchased in bulk.
This is "Make" magazine again, the O'Reilly publishing/convention empire's attempt to 0wn the do-it-yourself movement by turning it into a cult. Looks like they're now targeting libraries.
I have a membership at TechShop, and use it regularly. TechShop is not a "hacker space". It's a machine shop. (Silicon Valley has a "hacker space", called Hacker Dojo. I took a good machine learning class there. Hacker Dojo is a place where people with no office go to work, like Starbucks.) The point of TechShop is that they offer access to large machine tools. Most of those tools are way too heavy duty for a library. TechShops have manual and CNC milling machines, a plasma cutter or water jet cutter, CNC laser cutters, a welding shop, sheet metal machinery, etc. Yesterday, TechShop SF had a crew from the power company digging up the street to put in heavier power lines.
TechShop gives about forty different "Safety and Basic Usage" courses. Each runs one to two hours, and is required before using the relevant machine. That makes the TechShop concept work. Many of them are taught in the evenings by people who use such machines as their day job. The courses cost $50 to $100 each, and the instructors are paid.
This is way beyond the public library level. Those places are tough to run, and they're still debugging the concept. The one in Silicon Valley works because there's enough engineering talent in Silicon Valley to make just about anything. It's not yet clear how San Francisco will work out.
Is it possible to mirror SourceForge, retaining all the updates and comments?
If the Government takes a DNA sample, they should be required to run it through 23andMe and give you the results for free. That would provide some benefit. The "criminal" DNA matching systems are far cruder than the 100,000 point analysis 23andMe does.
That's a big help. Reading the paper,
Our initial attempts to produce isobutanol in C. glutamicum resulted in the maximum production of 4.9 g/L...
So they got 0.5% product. That's far too low for commercial fuel production. This is a research development, nowhere near a commercial technology. That's progress, but it shouldn't be reported as "Researchers Develop Biofuel Alternative To Ethanol".
The problem with ethanol from cellulose, which is a related technology, tends to be that the enzymes used cost more to produce than the fuel product is worth. Much work is going into cracking that problem, but this new research hasn't solved it or bypassed it.
Bear in mind that one can convert hydrocarbons to other hydrocarbons, at some energy cost. Gevo, a startup funded by some major VCs, has an sugar to isobutanol process. It's a fermentation process, like brewing, and scales up well. A 20 million gallon per year plant is under construction. As a fuel, isobutanol works fine; the EPA has already approved it as a gasoline additive, and some race cars use it.
Robots still don't have enough "common sense" (i.e. reliable prediction of consequences) for this. That's really hard, but there's steady progress. Also, all-round sensing on all surfaces, the equivalent of skin touch, is needed.
As someone who's worked with both autonomous robots and horses, it's worth comparing the two. Horses are moderately safe to be around once you can read horse body language and understand the safe positions around a horse. Some horses are safe around untrained people (this is teachable, and I once owned an ex-police horse who'd been explicitly taught it.). With most horses, you will get banged into once in a while, not deliberately, but just because a half-ton animal moved a bit.
Horses are not safe around people who can't move. Kids and ponies mix well well, but that's because the kids have fast reflexes and aren't usually hurt by falls and minor blows. It's not because the ponies are cautious.
We aren't even up to the pony level of robot safety yet.
This is a Government-funded paper, but it's behind a paywall. The price is $20.
There are lots of biotech schemes for digesting cellulose into something more useful, but so far, none of them are cheap enough.
First, there's no reason why a cell phone tower or an ATM should need GPS data to operate. There are many other ways to get timestamps, and in neither case is the facility likely to move much.
Anything important should have a GPS smart enough to tell when its data is no good. If you can receive from four satellites, you have enough information to tell if the data you're getting is bogus. Life-critical applications like aircraft should receive from GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo, and cross-check.
GPS satellites fail occasionally, and there are occasional gaps in coverage. Also bear in mind that GPS control is very centralized. It's run from Colorado Springs, and if the control center goes down, the constellation becomes inaccurate after a week or so.
NASA still has about 58 "active astronauts". NASA had 95 in 2005, which was far too many for the number of flights.. Downsizing will continue.
One ex-astronaut was recently annoyed that JSC pulled his pass. Ex-astronauts used to be entitled to visit NASA installations.
Sure, sex is often two-dimensional in games.
Especially the ones implemented in Flash.