MP3 players predated the iPod, and someone else, probably Sony, would have owned that market. The iPod wasn't the innovation. The iTunes store was the innovation. Jobs' contribution was making micropayments work.
Tablet computers had been tried many times before Apple. The hardware, and the wireless networking, weren't ready. Nor was the entertainment market. Early tablets were intended as general-purpose computers. Modern tablets are output-mostly devices, for which a touch screen is good enough.
I try to listen to the radio, I really do, but I cannot for more than, maybe, an hour.
We're fortunate in Silicon Valley to have two good nonprofit broadcast FM stations: KZSU (Stanford University) and KCEA (Menlo-Atherton High School. Menlo-Atherton High School, for somewhat strange reasons, plays big-band music from the 1930s and 1940s.
The local broadcast stations are the usual crap, except that about half of them are the usual crap in Spanish.
Fantasy Books are now king while interest in science-based fiction is almost null.
Yes. Our local Barnes and Noble has four shelf sections of "Paranormal Teen Romance", plus one of "New Paranormal Teen Romance". Half of the SF section is now vampire-related. So is a big fraction of the romance section, plus some of the main fiction section. All the vampire books combined into one section would be impressive. One of the goths who works there says that vampire book sales are down, but zombie books are picking up.
At retail, SF is either space opera, paranormal, or reprints.
"Nokia and Microsoft have entered into a non-binding term sheet. The planned partnership remains subject to negotiations and execution of the definitive agreements by the parties and there can be no assurances that the definitive agreements would be entered into".
That's normal. About half of announced major business deals don't close.
The Slashdot posting was mostly plagarized from this story at SearchEngineLand. That story also has the phrase "And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely.", without saying who it was. Searching for that phrase in Google brings up 73 results from sites which scraped that article, but no insight. Variations on that phrase bring up mostly hits to scraper sites.
Clearly, the new Google patch doesn't detect scraper sites. Catching those would be a big win, because there are so many of them and they have near zero value.
There's a new nonprofit site in the UK, Churnalism, which is intended to help detect which stories were copied from other content. But its database is too small and its algorithms too weak to detect much. It may improve; they're just starting out.
Google's latest change is being discussed in the "search engine optimization" community. The consensus seems to be that a few big-name junk sites are being hit, and some minor link farms stopped having an effect, but the change isn't doing much else. "eHow" entries still show up. "alibaba.com" (a wholesale supplier directory, mostly for China, India, etc.) was hit, "globalsources.com" wasn't.
This may be a "manual adjustment", in emulation of Blekko's blacklist of content farms. Google's announcement, of course, provides little useful information.
I have to disagree here. In the corporate enterprise world there is a HUGE demand for this since it centralizes and simplifies the software distribution problem.
Yet Java applets, which have many of the same properties as programs run in this sandbox system, have almost disappeared. The killer seems to be that you can't start execution until all the code is loaded. That's why Javascript and Flash won out over Java and Shockwave. The latter two are far more powerful than the first two, but you have to wait for loading.
It has very little to do with performance and a whole lot to do with being able to use pre-existing binary-only code safely.
No. The code has to be recompiled with a modified compiler, and has to use the special cross-platform API. Porting isn't a big job, but you do need the source code. Read the tech paper.
That's not new. That's a standard AS&E Z-backscatter scanner. The first one was installed in the US at Sky Harbor Airport, Pheonix, AZ in 2007. As of 2010, there are about 68 US airport installations.
They're very expensive, bulky machines. AS&E just got a phase II R&D contract from Homeland Security to develop a smaller, more portable unit. That's hard, though. The technology requires that the detector be 90 degrees from the emitter, with respect to the target, so it sees the backscatter. That geometry is why the machines are so large.
That's been around for a while. x86 machine code has to be written in a special way which prevents certain problems, such as buffer overflows into return addresses. Google has a modified GCC for this. Read the research paper. It uses the rarely-used segmentation protection features of x86 CPUs to help provide an inner section of sandboxing. That's not enough, though; static analysis of the code, to check that all branches go to valid instructions, is necessary. This works much like the Java byte code verifier, the checker that runs as Java code loads. All returns and calls have to go through some extra code to insure that control goes where it is supposed to.
The 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set don't have the segmentation machinery. The AMD designer of that mode once told me "nobody uses that". So this approach doesn't translate well to 64-bit code, and all code under this system runs in 32 bit mode.
This comes with an API and an OS shim. Executable modules can make about a hundred system calls, which are portable across Windows and Linux. In the original version, you couldn't get at the graphics hardware, so it wasn't a suitable delivery mechanism for games. But now, Google has a connection to OpenGL in the thing. That makes it more useful. Games with full system performance could be delivered through this approach, while appearing to run within the browser.
The performance is about 90 to 98% of unprotected code.
It's very clever, and a good idea from a security standpoint. Untrusted processes communicating through narrow interfaces are always a good thing from a security perspective. The problem is that it doesn't solve a problem that anybody really seems to have - there's little demand for higher performance apps in the browser.
There have been good voice-based systems. Wildfire (audio demo) was a really nice voice controlled phone system. The original version, from the late 1990s, used a lot of CPU time and Wildfire accounts were very expensive, about $5 to $10 a day. As CPU power got cheaper, the technology became more available, and Orange offered it on mobiles for a while.
Then Microsoft bought the technology, Microsoft never did much with it, although part of it ended up in OnStar Virtual Advisor.
I've been in the auditorium at Dolby Labs in San Francisco,
which is set up for high quality audio. (The entire room is vibration-isolated from the rest of the building and soundproofed to the point that external noise is essentially zero. The audio gear is, of course, good.) In there, 24 bit audio with full dynamic range can be clearly distinguished from 16-bit audio on orchestral music. The soft passages don't get that awful 4 to 6-bit sound quality when the high bits are all zero.
Through earbuds, on the street, or in a car, no way can you detect that difference in quality. For rock, it doesn't make sense. Hip-hop could probably be clipped at 8KHz without much loss. As long as you had enough speaker power for the bass nobody would notice.
PHP is a big part of the problem. PHP's interface to SQL encourages putting in parameters without proper escaping. Python has a slightly different interface, one where there's one SQL statement with fields represented by %s, and a tuple with the values to be filled in. The values are escaped automatically. If PHP had only such an interface, most SQL injection attacks would fail.
It would help if there was simply a restriction that only one SQL statement can be submitted per call. Since all the major SQL implementations now have transactions, there's no reason to put two statements in one call any more.
Another problem with PHP is a tendency to install a large number of standard PHP scripts which shouldn't be installed at all. Look at your server logs and you'll see constant attempts by hostile sites to call common bad scripts.
Hosting "control panels" implemented in PHP are part of the problem. If you have one of those, you can't just turn off PHP, even if you're not using it. Worse, "control panels" tend to run with very high privileges, and present a large attack face.
Top speed is well known: 2,193.167 mph, achieved in 1976. Most of the speed runs came in between 2100 and 2200 mph. The most impressive one is from 1990, with an average speed of 2124.5 mph over 2086 miles. That's the truly impressive number. Rocketing to Mach 3 for a brief period has been done by various experimental aircraft, but coast to coast at that speed, only the SR-71 could do in atmosphere.
An actual M-21 aircraft, the SR-71 with the Tagboard drone option, is at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle. They have the maintenance documentation for it, and if you're interested you can make arrangements to see it. Some has been scanned and is on the Web.
I know. I have FlashBlock installed, and BlockSite installed but disabled. I'm not running AdBlock. However, I have cookies and images blocked from many sites. I'm not sure what's making it stall.
The article is from some clueless blogger type, and reads like something from a content mill.
Google does have problems. The biggest one is that most of their "products" lose money. YouTube finally has become ad-heavy enough to make money, the first product other than search to go into the black. Google buys market share by giving stuff away, but revenue usually doesn't follow. Being #1 in giving away mail service isn't a business. Android, as a business, loses money. Google has never had a second killer profitable product, and not for lack of trying.
On the search front, Google's defenses against spam are weak. That's technically fixable, but fixing it would cut into the 30% of revenue that comes from AdSense sites, most of which are junk. Google's recent bad press stems from their addiction to revenue from junk sites.
As for "social", that looks like a bubble. Facebook is way overpriced as a company. Facebook already has so much obnoxious advertising that it's hard to see where they can generate more revenue without becoming even more annoying. Facebook tried a phone once; it was called Helio. Didn't work.
Google does have a "social" system, Orkut, It's #1 in Brazil but nowhere else, much to the annoyance of Google executives.
Hi Arek,
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 1:10 AM, Arek StefaÅski wrote:
> Hey, I thought Unladen Swallow is dead.
> Sure seems close to this.
> It's really cool project, why is it so 'abandoned' right now?:
Jeffrey and I have been pulled on to other projects of higher importance to Google. Unfortunately, no-one from the Python open-source community has been interested in picking up the merger work, and since none of the original team is still full-time on the
project, it's moving very slowly. Finishing up the merger into the py3k-jit branch is a high priority for me this quarter, but what happens then is an open question.
Collin Winter
Doesn't sound like "because other projects have exceeded US goals", does it?
I don't know of a major Python library that isn't upgrading to Py3 - and this release marks the tipping point where we wave goodbye to the aging 2.x codebase.
Ah, denial. Some major modules that aren't making the transition:
BeautifulSoup (HTML/XML parser - replaced by HTML5parser, which is much bigger and slower and has a completely different output tree.)
MySQLdb (MySQL database interface. The developer says it's too hard to convert it to Python 3.)
M2Crypto (interface to OpenSSL - replaced by new, incompatible SSL module.)
SGMLparser (Used by some other modules)
FeedParser (Reads RSS feeds. No replacement.)
And those are just ones I happen to have used.
Because the Python community is so tiny, there are major modules that are maintained by only one person. In many cases, they've moved on to other things, and no one is maintaining the modules. The major changes required to move to Python 3.x are non-trivial and aren't being done, because someone would have to take responsibility for a big module they didn't write to do the conversion.
In some cases, there are newer, completely different modules with different APIs that perform the old functions. So end users have to do a major rewrite on production programs just to stay in the same place.
It's a huge transition. Guido has this smoke-and-mirrors pitch claiming that it's "done". That's because the Python organization, such as it is, disclaims all responsibility for getting modules ported. So it's not his problem that it sucks.
None of the non-CPython implementations are making the transition. Not IronPython (abandoned by Microsoft). Not Shed Skin (only one developer). Not PyPy (defunded by the European Union). Not even Google's own Unladen Swallow is moving to Python 2.6, (Google seems to have abandoned Unladen Swallow after discovering that Guido's insistence on excessively dynamic features meant a JIT compiler didn't speed it up much.) The transition to Python 3 has thus killed all other Python projects.
CPython is a naive interpreter, roughly 60x slower than C. It's been stuck at that speed for a decade. And now, that's all we have left.
If you're using Python for anything important, start working on your exit strategy.
Modularity costs thickness. That's the problem. Thinness is a key sales point for laptops.
Some of the components in a laptop are custom, and some aren't. Design involves cramming the ones you can change around the ones you can't. This results in oddly shaped PC boards, flat cables running around the insides, and boards stacked over thinner components.
Incidentally, "cleaning laptop fan" is a heavily spammed phrase in search. The top 10 results in Bing are all content mills.
This is a consequence of the decline in the U.S's nuclear industry. Tritium is usually produced in nuclear reactors. It's useful for several purposes, from boosting nuclear weapons to exit sign lighting in aircraft.
Tritium is made by irradiating lithium with neutrons
Tritium decays with a half-life of 12 years. He3, which is stable, is one of the decay products, and that's where He3 comes from. (This is a commercial application of transmutation.)
The US used to have a reactor at Savannah River to produce tritium, but that was shut down in 1988. Since the early 1990s, there have been efforts to set up a new source, and presently, two power reactors of the Tennessee Valley Authority are used to produce tritium, A few extra lithium rods are put in, and changed out occasionally to recover the tritium.
The He3 shortage is a side effect of the tritium shortage.
"We live in a time when national security is the highest priority..."
No, it isn't the highest priority. There have been times when it was. When the British army invaded Washington in 1812. it was. When the Nazis had conquered Europe and were getting ready to do the same to the US, it was. When the USSR built 10,000 atomic bombs and talked about conquering the world, it was.
But not now. No foreign power is an immediate threat. Not even close. Terrorism is down to the nuisance level, well below floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and drunk driving as a problem. Street crime is down. Most of the Mafia has been crushed. Nobody is talking about a revolution, except maybe the Tea Party crowd.
There is no big national security problem right now. It's time to lighten up, and take a hard look at Homeland Security's budget.
The big problems right now are economic and internal, not foreign threats.
Tablet computers are cheap for the hardware you get. It's the services that are expensive. Data service is $12.50/GB, minimum of $25, for iPhones. (AT&T is in trouble for overbilling on iPhone traffic) And you can't even run an ad blocker. Then there's Apple's own "store" system. Over the life of the product, those charges will dwarf the hardware cost.
"Creates a direct connection between your wallet and and our bank account".
Slashdot Mirror
MP3 players predated the iPod, and someone else, probably Sony, would have owned that market. The iPod wasn't the innovation. The iTunes store was the innovation. Jobs' contribution was making micropayments work.
Tablet computers had been tried many times before Apple. The hardware, and the wireless networking, weren't ready. Nor was the entertainment market. Early tablets were intended as general-purpose computers. Modern tablets are output-mostly devices, for which a touch screen is good enough.
I try to listen to the radio, I really do, but I cannot for more than, maybe, an hour.
We're fortunate in Silicon Valley to have two good nonprofit broadcast FM stations: KZSU (Stanford University) and KCEA (Menlo-Atherton High School. Menlo-Atherton High School, for somewhat strange reasons, plays big-band music from the 1930s and 1940s.
The local broadcast stations are the usual crap, except that about half of them are the usual crap in Spanish.
Somebody makes a modest advance in materials science, and it's hyped into an application. Again. The Discovery crowd is notorious for these.
The usual subjects for this class of hype are batteries, displays, and memory devices.
Fantasy Books are now king while interest in science-based fiction is almost null.
Yes. Our local Barnes and Noble has four shelf sections of "Paranormal Teen Romance", plus one of "New Paranormal Teen Romance". Half of the SF section is now vampire-related. So is a big fraction of the romance section, plus some of the main fiction section. All the vampire books combined into one section would be impressive. One of the goths who works there says that vampire book sales are down, but zombie books are picking up.
At retail, SF is either space opera, paranormal, or reprints.
"Nokia and Microsoft have entered into a non-binding term sheet. The planned partnership remains subject to negotiations and execution of the definitive agreements by the parties and there can be no assurances that the definitive agreements would be entered into".
That's normal. About half of announced major business deals don't close.
The Slashdot posting was mostly plagarized from this story at SearchEngineLand. That story also has the phrase "And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely.", without saying who it was. Searching for that phrase in Google brings up 73 results from sites which scraped that article, but no insight. Variations on that phrase bring up mostly hits to scraper sites.
Clearly, the new Google patch doesn't detect scraper sites. Catching those would be a big win, because there are so many of them and they have near zero value.
There's a new nonprofit site in the UK, Churnalism, which is intended to help detect which stories were copied from other content. But its database is too small and its algorithms too weak to detect much. It may improve; they're just starting out.
Google's latest change is being discussed in the "search engine optimization" community. The consensus seems to be that a few big-name junk sites are being hit, and some minor link farms stopped having an effect, but the change isn't doing much else. "eHow" entries still show up. "alibaba.com" (a wholesale supplier directory, mostly for China, India, etc.) was hit, "globalsources.com" wasn't.
This may be a "manual adjustment", in emulation of Blekko's blacklist of content farms. Google's announcement, of course, provides little useful information.
I have to disagree here. In the corporate enterprise world there is a HUGE demand for this since it centralizes and simplifies the software distribution problem.
Yet Java applets, which have many of the same properties as programs run in this sandbox system, have almost disappeared. The killer seems to be that you can't start execution until all the code is loaded. That's why Javascript and Flash won out over Java and Shockwave. The latter two are far more powerful than the first two, but you have to wait for loading.
It has very little to do with performance and a whole lot to do with being able to use pre-existing binary-only code safely.
No. The code has to be recompiled with a modified compiler, and has to use the special cross-platform API. Porting isn't a big job, but you do need the source code. Read the tech paper.
That's not new. That's a standard AS&E Z-backscatter scanner. The first one was installed in the US at Sky Harbor Airport, Pheonix, AZ in 2007. As of 2010, there are about 68 US airport installations.
They're very expensive, bulky machines. AS&E just got a phase II R&D contract from Homeland Security to develop a smaller, more portable unit. That's hard, though. The technology requires that the detector be 90 degrees from the emitter, with respect to the target, so it sees the backscatter. That geometry is why the machines are so large.
That's been around for a while. x86 machine code has to be written in a special way which prevents certain problems, such as buffer overflows into return addresses. Google has a modified GCC for this. Read the research paper. It uses the rarely-used segmentation protection features of x86 CPUs to help provide an inner section of sandboxing. That's not enough, though; static analysis of the code, to check that all branches go to valid instructions, is necessary. This works much like the Java byte code verifier, the checker that runs as Java code loads. All returns and calls have to go through some extra code to insure that control goes where it is supposed to.
The 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set don't have the segmentation machinery. The AMD designer of that mode once told me "nobody uses that". So this approach doesn't translate well to 64-bit code, and all code under this system runs in 32 bit mode.
This comes with an API and an OS shim. Executable modules can make about a hundred system calls, which are portable across Windows and Linux. In the original version, you couldn't get at the graphics hardware, so it wasn't a suitable delivery mechanism for games. But now, Google has a connection to OpenGL in the thing. That makes it more useful. Games with full system performance could be delivered through this approach, while appearing to run within the browser. The performance is about 90 to 98% of unprotected code.
It's very clever, and a good idea from a security standpoint. Untrusted processes communicating through narrow interfaces are always a good thing from a security perspective. The problem is that it doesn't solve a problem that anybody really seems to have - there's little demand for higher performance apps in the browser.
There have been good voice-based systems. Wildfire (audio demo) was a really nice voice controlled phone system. The original version, from the late 1990s, used a lot of CPU time and Wildfire accounts were very expensive, about $5 to $10 a day. As CPU power got cheaper, the technology became more available, and Orange offered it on mobiles for a while. Then Microsoft bought the technology, Microsoft never did much with it, although part of it ended up in OnStar Virtual Advisor.
Right.
I've been in the auditorium at Dolby Labs in San Francisco, which is set up for high quality audio. (The entire room is vibration-isolated from the rest of the building and soundproofed to the point that external noise is essentially zero. The audio gear is, of course, good.) In there, 24 bit audio with full dynamic range can be clearly distinguished from 16-bit audio on orchestral music. The soft passages don't get that awful 4 to 6-bit sound quality when the high bits are all zero.
Through earbuds, on the street, or in a car, no way can you detect that difference in quality. For rock, it doesn't make sense. Hip-hop could probably be clipped at 8KHz without much loss. As long as you had enough speaker power for the bass nobody would notice.
Check your facts, Android makes money, it's in the black
That article says it has revenue, not profits. There's a difference.
PHP is a big part of the problem. PHP's interface to SQL encourages putting in parameters without proper escaping. Python has a slightly different interface, one where there's one SQL statement with fields represented by %s, and a tuple with the values to be filled in. The values are escaped automatically. If PHP had only such an interface, most SQL injection attacks would fail.
It would help if there was simply a restriction that only one SQL statement can be submitted per call. Since all the major SQL implementations now have transactions, there's no reason to put two statements in one call any more.
Another problem with PHP is a tendency to install a large number of standard PHP scripts which shouldn't be installed at all. Look at your server logs and you'll see constant attempts by hostile sites to call common bad scripts.
Hosting "control panels" implemented in PHP are part of the problem. If you have one of those, you can't just turn off PHP, even if you're not using it. Worse, "control panels" tend to run with very high privileges, and present a large attack face.
The flight manual is online at sr-71.org
Top speed is well known: 2,193.167 mph, achieved in 1976. Most of the speed runs came in between 2100 and 2200 mph. The most impressive one is from 1990, with an average speed of 2124.5 mph over 2086 miles. That's the truly impressive number. Rocketing to Mach 3 for a brief period has been done by various experimental aircraft, but coast to coast at that speed, only the SR-71 could do in atmosphere.
An actual M-21 aircraft, the SR-71 with the Tagboard drone option, is at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle. They have the maintenance documentation for it, and if you're interested you can make arrangements to see it. Some has been scanned and is on the Web.
It's funny that the page-load is blocked.
I know. I have FlashBlock installed, and BlockSite installed but disabled. I'm not running AdBlock. However, I have cookies and images blocked from many sites. I'm not sure what's making it stall.
Here in the US, surveillance is privatized. The article won't load because we have "google-analytics.com" blocked. Page load is stalled here:
Big Google is watching you. And you can't turn him off.
The article is from some clueless blogger type, and reads like something from a content mill.
Google does have problems. The biggest one is that most of their "products" lose money. YouTube finally has become ad-heavy enough to make money, the first product other than search to go into the black. Google buys market share by giving stuff away, but revenue usually doesn't follow. Being #1 in giving away mail service isn't a business. Android, as a business, loses money. Google has never had a second killer profitable product, and not for lack of trying.
On the search front, Google's defenses against spam are weak. That's technically fixable, but fixing it would cut into the 30% of revenue that comes from AdSense sites, most of which are junk. Google's recent bad press stems from their addiction to revenue from junk sites.
As for "social", that looks like a bubble. Facebook is way overpriced as a company. Facebook already has so much obnoxious advertising that it's hard to see where they can generate more revenue without becoming even more annoying. Facebook tried a phone once; it was called Helio. Didn't work.
Google does have a "social" system, Orkut, It's #1 in Brazil but nowhere else, much to the annoyance of Google executives.
Completely wrong and extremely trollish in nature. Unladen Swallow (US) is a dead project because other projects have already exceeded US' goals.
Here's what the developers of Unladen Swallow had to say::
Hi Arek, On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 1:10 AM, Arek StefaÅski wrote: :
> Hey, I thought Unladen Swallow is dead.
> Sure seems close to this.
> It's really cool project, why is it so 'abandoned' right now?
Jeffrey and I have been pulled on to other projects of higher importance to Google. Unfortunately, no-one from the Python open-source community has been interested in picking up the merger work, and since none of the original team is still full-time on the project, it's moving very slowly. Finishing up the merger into the py3k-jit branch is a high priority for me this quarter, but what happens then is an open question.
Collin Winter
Doesn't sound like "because other projects have exceeded US goals", does it?
I don't know of a major Python library that isn't upgrading to Py3 - and this release marks the tipping point where we wave goodbye to the aging 2.x codebase.
Ah, denial. Some major modules that aren't making the transition:
And those are just ones I happen to have used.
Because the Python community is so tiny, there are major modules that are maintained by only one person. In many cases, they've moved on to other things, and no one is maintaining the modules. The major changes required to move to Python 3.x are non-trivial and aren't being done, because someone would have to take responsibility for a big module they didn't write to do the conversion. In some cases, there are newer, completely different modules with different APIs that perform the old functions. So end users have to do a major rewrite on production programs just to stay in the same place. It's a huge transition. Guido has this smoke-and-mirrors pitch claiming that it's "done". That's because the Python organization, such as it is, disclaims all responsibility for getting modules ported. So it's not his problem that it sucks.
None of the non-CPython implementations are making the transition. Not IronPython (abandoned by Microsoft). Not Shed Skin (only one developer). Not PyPy (defunded by the European Union). Not even Google's own Unladen Swallow is moving to Python 2.6, (Google seems to have abandoned Unladen Swallow after discovering that Guido's insistence on excessively dynamic features meant a JIT compiler didn't speed it up much.) The transition to Python 3 has thus killed all other Python projects.
CPython is a naive interpreter, roughly 60x slower than C. It's been stuck at that speed for a decade. And now, that's all we have left.
If you're using Python for anything important, start working on your exit strategy.
Modularity costs thickness. That's the problem. Thinness is a key sales point for laptops.
Some of the components in a laptop are custom, and some aren't. Design involves cramming the ones you can change around the ones you can't. This results in oddly shaped PC boards, flat cables running around the insides, and boards stacked over thinner components.
Incidentally, "cleaning laptop fan" is a heavily spammed phrase in search. The top 10 results in Bing are all content mills.
This is a consequence of the decline in the U.S's nuclear industry. Tritium is usually produced in nuclear reactors. It's useful for several purposes, from boosting nuclear weapons to exit sign lighting in aircraft.
Tritium is made by irradiating lithium with neutrons Tritium decays with a half-life of 12 years. He3, which is stable, is one of the decay products, and that's where He3 comes from. (This is a commercial application of transmutation.)
The US used to have a reactor at Savannah River to produce tritium, but that was shut down in 1988. Since the early 1990s, there have been efforts to set up a new source, and presently, two power reactors of the Tennessee Valley Authority are used to produce tritium, A few extra lithium rods are put in, and changed out occasionally to recover the tritium.
The He3 shortage is a side effect of the tritium shortage.
"We live in a time when national security is the highest priority..."
No, it isn't the highest priority. There have been times when it was. When the British army invaded Washington in 1812. it was. When the Nazis had conquered Europe and were getting ready to do the same to the US, it was. When the USSR built 10,000 atomic bombs and talked about conquering the world, it was.
But not now. No foreign power is an immediate threat. Not even close. Terrorism is down to the nuisance level, well below floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and drunk driving as a problem. Street crime is down. Most of the Mafia has been crushed. Nobody is talking about a revolution, except maybe the Tea Party crowd. There is no big national security problem right now. It's time to lighten up, and take a hard look at Homeland Security's budget.
The big problems right now are economic and internal, not foreign threats.
Tablet computers are cheap for the hardware you get. It's the services that are expensive. Data service is $12.50/GB, minimum of $25, for iPhones. (AT&T is in trouble for overbilling on iPhone traffic) And you can't even run an ad blocker. Then there's Apple's own "store" system. Over the life of the product, those charges will dwarf the hardware cost.
"Creates a direct connection between your wallet and and our bank account".