This is an important result, and it's going to be more important when the mechanism by which it happened is figured out. Read the article.
The great thing here is that the researcher made a backup every 500 generations of bacteria, by
freezing samples. So it's possible to go back and make this happen again and again, which has bee done. Then it's possible to find out exactly when it happened, and eventually decode the DNA before and after the evolutionary jump. This should produce some real insight into the underlying mechanism. We're a step closer to figuring out how evolution really works.
This further limits any legal action Apple might take against Psystar for shipping computers that run retail copies of the MacOS.
Apple is limited on the copyright front by antitrust law; the requirement in the EULA that purports to require that the software only be run on Apple hardware is probably an illegal tying arrangement. (Don't argue otherwise without doing some reading first. There's a history of relevant cases and the party trying to enforce the tying terms usually loses.)
With this decision, Apple is also limited on the patent front. Apple's patent rights were "exhausted" when the boxed copy of the MacOS was sold. They can't raise a patent claim based on some restriction on later use of the software, not even for "method" claims.
I continuously hear complaints about VWs not being worth the trouble, especially from people much younger and hipper than me.
Well, yeah. If you're near San Francisco, go to Burning Man, went to Thunderdome last weekend, and have friends in Vau de Vire, real life has about as much drame, and as much bare skin, as Second Life. If you're stuck in Outer Nowhere, Second Life looks like a good option.
In the last six months, Google has been visibly "dumbed down". Originally, Google was literal about spelling; a misspelled word would not match much. Then Google started offering hints: "Did you mean Mississippi?." Now, Google has aggressive spelling correction, and looks for the most common word close to the input word. To look for an uncommon word, it may be necessary to exclude common words similar to it with "-".
This reflects user behavior. Most search requests are incredibly dumb. Look at any list of top queries.
In fact, most requests to Google don't reach the search engine at all; there's a canned set of responses to common queries in the front end machines, which cuts the load on the main engine by at least 50%. Yahoo put considerable effort into special cases for common queries (weather, sports, directions, etc.) back in 2007, and for a while Yahoo was technically ahead, not that it helped their stock any. Now Google is doing that too.
Been there, done that. It's a big airless rock. Unless we get some way of lifting stuff to orbit at a price comparable to, say, China to US air freight, forget it. Chemical rockets are about as good as they will ever get, which is not very. Maybe with nuclear rockets or something new, but redoing Apollo is pointless. (Also, the current NASA would botch it.)
We have trouble keeping the ISS supplied and staffed, and can't find any really good reason for having built it in the first place.
The A305-S6845 comes with a fairly crowded Windows desktop, filled with icons for pre-loaded software and web links to numerous free offers.
This thing has substantial crap preloaded onto it. It even has Vongo pre-installed, which is very hard to uninstall. It has PowerCinema installed, which not only is hard to uninstall but uses resources when idle. And those are just the ones known to be malware. Buy from another vendor.
Very nice. It's beautiful from high angles, and not too bad from low angles. (Middle-click and hold to change view angle, mouse wheel to zoom, left click to pan.) They put in enough photographs to have side images for most of the buildings. It's really impressive when you look at a courtyard from the inside.
There seems to be some support beyond the height-map level. It usually misunderstands bridges, but in at least one place, it got a multi-level situation right, so they have the right machinery, they just need more oblique photos in the difficult areas.
The pseudo-nanotechnology people are a pain. Especially when they work for NASA. They make some minor improvement in materials science, then call a press conference to announce giant telescopes on the moon.
Let's see those guys produce one good-sized mirror without polishing before turning on the NASA PR machine.
Or we could just make the California Lottery terminals in every 7-11 and liquor store self service and eliminate the need to go to Vegas.
Or revive the existing train, with an extraterritoriality agreement to allow gambling
on the train under Nevada law as soon as it leaves the LA station.
You think this is silly? Look at the history of modern "riverboat gambling" on the Mississippi. Originally, the riverboats had to actually go out on the river and cruise around. Then they did "pseudo-cruises", where the boat stayed at the dock but they loaded and unloaded people as if they were going somewhere. The next step was casinos on barges that never went anywhere. Then the casino barges were moved a short distance inland to ponds with river water circulated through the ponds. Currently, land based "riverboat gambling" is allowed in some states if they're close enough to water.
(Some of this came from safety problems. Big passenger boats full of thousands of drunks on a busy industrial river weren't a good idea. Tying them up alongside a dock led to problems. Building inspectors didn't regulate them because they were boats, and the Coast Guard didn't regulate them because they weren't mobile watercraft. They didn't have lifeboats or a full set of life preservers, or functional engines. There were three major accidents with docked gambling ships. In the worst one, in 1998, a loose barge from a barge tow hit the lines tying up a gambling ship, "The Admiral", near St. Louis, and it floated out into the river, tied up by only one line and with no way for the gamblers to get off. A frantic deployment of every tugboat in the area was able to force the ship back to the dock before it broke loose completely.)
In most big US drugstores and office supply stores, and in every WalMart, there is a section that has pocket calculators, pocket dictionaries, low-end PDAs, and other small electronics. Some of those devices are quite sophisticated, even though they're very cheap.
Soon we'll be seeing laptops in that section, in a blister pack hanging from a hook. During "back to school" season, there will be big piles of the things. We'll see this as soon as the price can be brought below $200.
There will still be higher-end laptops, but the low end units will be the volume market.
In the many years I studies physics, there were no particles I knew of that created something called "millimeter waves".
Er, studied physics where?
There's nothing mysterious about millimeter waves. They're from about 30GHz to 300GHz. They're not ionizing radiation, like X-rays. Here's a simple scanning millimeter wave radar system with pictures of the components and images from the system. Note the tiny waveguide and feed horn. It's a radar in miniature. This little unit runs at 35GHz, so it's just barely into the millimeter range.
In the millimeter RF range, it seems to be possible to get up to about 100GHz with off the shelf components using Gunn diodes and GaAs transistors. Above 100GHz is still mostly an area for experimental work.
There are people working on "to 100GHz and beyond!. But not much is really working up there yet.
This isn't a backscatter X-ray system. That's a completely different technology.
This isn't an X-ray machine, or even a Z-backscatter machine. It's a millimeter wave device.
TSA has a web page for the thing.
It's not as detailed as a Z-backscatter image.
Nothing in the solicitation has a $30 billion price tag on it. No idea where that number came from. There are no dollar amounts at this stage; DARPA is soliciting bids.
What DARPA is asking for is a 10,000 node Internet simulator, and that's in the final phase. The whole system can be started, stopped, and flushed to a clean state for new tests. Users are simulated:
"Replicants will simulate physical interaction with device peripherals, such as keyboard and mice. Replicants will drive all common applications on a desktop environments." Attacks on the network are supported; the vendor even has to provide a "malware library".
The simulated machines have to be simulated at a fine level of detail. "The NCR must be capable of taking a physical computer and rapidly creating a functionally equivalent, logical instance of that machine that can be replicated repeatedly and injected into a testbed.
Given a never-before-seen physical computing device, create logical instantiations of the physical native machine that accurately replicates, not only the software on the machine, but hardware to the interrupt level, chipset, and peripheral cards and devices.". That's going to be hard. They may end up with real computers hooked up to peripherals that simulate human inputs. (DoD does this all the time; it's how flight control software is debugged. Serious flight simulators use the real "black boxes" of real aircraft with simulated inputs and outputs.)
They need that level of fidelity because they want to observe virus and attack behavior.
See Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten. Now that's a zoom.
As for doing it in real time, Keyhole (bought by Google and renamed Google Earth) was doing this on PCs five years ago. Any decent GPU can do this today, and you can download Google Earth to see it.
I saw one of the first systems able to do this in real time about 25 years ago. It was inside a classified tank at a major aerospace firm, and required a rack of special-purpose hardware. The user interface was beautifully simple - a big trackball (for pan), a lever (for zoom), and a knob (for rotation).
Even Microsoft's little film isn't original. That technique has been used a few times in commercials.
So Silverlight doing this isn't exactly a big "wow" development.
But a '30's machine shop couldn't make modern vacuum-degassed, oil-impregnated bronze bearing stock, for instance.
Right. You could make Babbitt-metal bearings, which are simply cast, then allowed to wear in.
They don't require the tight tolerances of ball or roller bearings. 19th century machine shops were self-replicating by necessity; nobody was making parts. That tradition continued for a long time, and big factories tended to have the in-house capability to make most of their own parts through World War I. This allowed bombed-out factories to boot themselves back up to operation given time and skilled people. The real skills were in the people, not the machinery.
The whole point of this "self-replicating fab" thing is to come up with some technology that can replicate itself fully, even if it's not optimal manufacturing technology. RepRap isn't even close, even though they like to say "self-replicating" a lot.
It doesn't make a "copy of itself". It doesn't make the plastic output device. It doesn't make the servomotors, the cables, the metal rods, or the control computer. All it actually makes, in fact, are the brackets used to assemble the other parts. The easy parts.
A manual Bridgeport milling machine, on the other hand, used to be considered "self-replicating". If you have a milling machine, a small foundry, a supply of good quality steel scrap, sand, and fuel, and a skilled machinist, you can eventually make another milling machine and all the foundry equipment. Factories that made Bridgeport milling machines (the design was widely copied) did in fact make them using Bridgeport milling machines. A good 1930s machine shop really can replicate itself with only a supply of good people and raw materials.
This machine is more hype than substance. It's just a mediocre stereolithography machine.
If you want to use a good one, and you're in Silicon Valley, sign up with TechShop in Menlo Park. They have one, and it's not used much.
The loyalty oath issue is interesting. The loyalty oath in Florida used to contain the language "that I am not a member of the Communist Party; that I have not and will not lend my aid, support, advice, counsel or influence to the Communist Party". This was a big deal during the Red Scare era in the 1950s. It's not an oath of office; all state employees were required to sign it.
Florida law says that any state employee refusing to sign the oath shall be discharged. It's not clear there's any penalty for an employee who, through some omission of the state, was never asked to sign it.
Florida judges are mostly elected, and normally the loyalty oath is required as part of the paperwork for getting on the ballot. But it seems that Judge Tunis was appointed (by Gov. Jeb Bush) to fill a vacancy created when the Legislature increased the number of judgeships. For most state employees, it's the responsibility of the employee's superior to make sure that the loyalty oath is signed. But for elected positions, there's no "superior", so it's not clear who's supposed to get this done.
Which is probably how she became a judge without signing the loyalty oath first. Anyway, Judge Tunis did sign the oath at a later date.
Thompson started his career as a loudmouth by complaining about some rap from "2 Live Crew" back in the early 1990s. I bought the 2 Live Crew CD to see what all the fuss was about. They were a terrible rap group, at the low end of the garage-band level. My comment at the time was that "this group would never have gotten off the South Florida club circuit without the censorship attempt".
Those new "little" CPUs coming out aren't so little. They're above 1GHz now, they're going into machines with 1 GB of memory, and some of them are superscalar. They even have GPUs. That's more than enough power for any reasonable portable system. Mail, web browsing, video playing, the occasional PowerPoint presentation - you don't need a quad-core 3 GHZ CPU part for that.
What you need is battery life. The next frontier may be less CPU power but a full day of operation or more between recharges. Note that phone battery life was a huge issue until it reached a day or two of moderate to heavy use. After that, it stopped being a major factor in buying decisions.
Despite Wales' hype about Wikia becoming comparable to Google, Wikia is mostly a hosting service for fancruft. The biggest wikis are Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], the Marvel Comics database, and similar dreck. Wikia's demographic lives in their parents basement.
SiteAdvisor is basically an anti-virus program connected to a web spider; it downloads pages and looks for hostile code. This is valuable as a firewall feature, but it doesn't say much about whether a domain is worth visiting.
PhishTank has a list of sites currently involved in phishing scams. Let's take a look at that. At SiteTruth, we have historical PhishTank data in a database, with 40997 phishing attacks recorded. So when we ask the right question (which is "SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(domain,".",-1) AS tld, COUNT(*) as cnt
FROM domainnegatives
GROUP BY SUBSTRING_INDEX(domain,".",-1) ORDER BY cnt DESC LIMIT 20;"), we get
"com",16284
"cn",3787
"net",2866
"tw",2715
"hk",2398
"ru",1065
"org",844
"fr",797
"uk",720
"ph",599
"kg",599
"info",497
"it",495
"de",463
"br",310
"ch",303
"us",282
"pl",282
"jp",279
"at",270
Here, "com" is by far the most popular TLD with phishers.
This reflects the desires by phishers to have a plausible-looking domain name. Some phishers, the ones who register domains in bulk, do pick rather bogus-looking domains (like "0001fyg0.com"
"00039cscsgrjc.com"
"0003s6tw0wqf70l.com"
"0003ureb.com"
"0004ssen.com"
"0004y1x9.com"
"00062lku1ekaj.com"). Others have more plausible choices, (like "americaonllinebank.com").
Top-level domain statistics are more of a curiosity than anything else. They don't help you avoid or deal with attacks. We could generate many other similar statistics, and we've posted some on the SiteTruth blog.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an important result, and it's going to be more important when the mechanism by which it happened is figured out. Read the article.
The great thing here is that the researcher made a backup every 500 generations of bacteria, by freezing samples. So it's possible to go back and make this happen again and again, which has bee done. Then it's possible to find out exactly when it happened, and eventually decode the DNA before and after the evolutionary jump. This should produce some real insight into the underlying mechanism. We're a step closer to figuring out how evolution really works.
This further limits any legal action Apple might take against Psystar for shipping computers that run retail copies of the MacOS.
Apple is limited on the copyright front by antitrust law; the requirement in the EULA that purports to require that the software only be run on Apple hardware is probably an illegal tying arrangement. (Don't argue otherwise without doing some reading first. There's a history of relevant cases and the party trying to enforce the tying terms usually loses.)
With this decision, Apple is also limited on the patent front. Apple's patent rights were "exhausted" when the boxed copy of the MacOS was sold. They can't raise a patent claim based on some restriction on later use of the software, not even for "method" claims.
I continuously hear complaints about VWs not being worth the trouble, especially from people much younger and hipper than me.
Well, yeah. If you're near San Francisco, go to Burning Man, went to Thunderdome last weekend, and have friends in Vau de Vire, real life has about as much drame, and as much bare skin, as Second Life. If you're stuck in Outer Nowhere, Second Life looks like a good option.
So whining about yourself on your own blog is good for you. But writing about something of interest to others isn't.
Well, it explains the success of Myspace.
"You are not trying. You are whining." Nigel to Andrea, "The Devil Wears Prada".
In the last six months, Google has been visibly "dumbed down". Originally, Google was literal about spelling; a misspelled word would not match much. Then Google started offering hints: "Did you mean Mississippi?." Now, Google has aggressive spelling correction, and looks for the most common word close to the input word. To look for an uncommon word, it may be necessary to exclude common words similar to it with "-".
This reflects user behavior. Most search requests are incredibly dumb. Look at any list of top queries. In fact, most requests to Google don't reach the search engine at all; there's a canned set of responses to common queries in the front end machines, which cuts the load on the main engine by at least 50%. Yahoo put considerable effort into special cases for common queries (weather, sports, directions, etc.) back in 2007, and for a while Yahoo was technically ahead, not that it helped their stock any. Now Google is doing that too.
Been there, done that. It's a big airless rock. Unless we get some way of lifting stuff to orbit at a price comparable to, say, China to US air freight, forget it. Chemical rockets are about as good as they will ever get, which is not very. Maybe with nuclear rockets or something new, but redoing Apollo is pointless. (Also, the current NASA would botch it.)
We have trouble keeping the ISS supplied and staffed, and can't find any really good reason for having built it in the first place.
OK, I want public disclosure of this data for every elected official in Washington and every registered lobbyist.
The A305-S6845 comes with a fairly crowded Windows desktop, filled with icons for pre-loaded software and web links to numerous free offers.
This thing has substantial crap preloaded onto it. It even has Vongo pre-installed, which is very hard to uninstall. It has PowerCinema installed, which not only is hard to uninstall but uses resources when idle. And those are just the ones known to be malware. Buy from another vendor.
Very nice. It's beautiful from high angles, and not too bad from low angles. (Middle-click and hold to change view angle, mouse wheel to zoom, left click to pan.) They put in enough photographs to have side images for most of the buildings. It's really impressive when you look at a courtyard from the inside.
There seems to be some support beyond the height-map level. It usually misunderstands bridges, but in at least one place, it got a multi-level situation right, so they have the right machinery, they just need more oblique photos in the difficult areas.
The pseudo-nanotechnology people are a pain. Especially when they work for NASA. They make some minor improvement in materials science, then call a press conference to announce giant telescopes on the moon.
Let's see those guys produce one good-sized mirror without polishing before turning on the NASA PR machine.
Or we could just make the California Lottery terminals in every 7-11 and liquor store self service and eliminate the need to go to Vegas.
Or revive the existing train, with an extraterritoriality agreement to allow gambling on the train under Nevada law as soon as it leaves the LA station.
You think this is silly? Look at the history of modern "riverboat gambling" on the Mississippi. Originally, the riverboats had to actually go out on the river and cruise around. Then they did "pseudo-cruises", where the boat stayed at the dock but they loaded and unloaded people as if they were going somewhere. The next step was casinos on barges that never went anywhere. Then the casino barges were moved a short distance inland to ponds with river water circulated through the ponds. Currently, land based "riverboat gambling" is allowed in some states if they're close enough to water.
(Some of this came from safety problems. Big passenger boats full of thousands of drunks on a busy industrial river weren't a good idea. Tying them up alongside a dock led to problems. Building inspectors didn't regulate them because they were boats, and the Coast Guard didn't regulate them because they weren't mobile watercraft. They didn't have lifeboats or a full set of life preservers, or functional engines. There were three major accidents with docked gambling ships. In the worst one, in 1998, a loose barge from a barge tow hit the lines tying up a gambling ship, "The Admiral", near St. Louis, and it floated out into the river, tied up by only one line and with no way for the gamblers to get off. A frantic deployment of every tugboat in the area was able to force the ship back to the dock before it broke loose completely.)
In most big US drugstores and office supply stores, and in every WalMart, there is a section that has pocket calculators, pocket dictionaries, low-end PDAs, and other small electronics. Some of those devices are quite sophisticated, even though they're very cheap.
Soon we'll be seeing laptops in that section, in a blister pack hanging from a hook. During "back to school" season, there will be big piles of the things. We'll see this as soon as the price can be brought below $200.
There will still be higher-end laptops, but the low end units will be the volume market.
In the many years I studies physics, there were no particles I knew of that created something called "millimeter waves".
Er, studied physics where?
There's nothing mysterious about millimeter waves. They're from about 30GHz to 300GHz. They're not ionizing radiation, like X-rays. Here's a simple scanning millimeter wave radar system with pictures of the components and images from the system. Note the tiny waveguide and feed horn. It's a radar in miniature. This little unit runs at 35GHz, so it's just barely into the millimeter range.
In the millimeter RF range, it seems to be possible to get up to about 100GHz with off the shelf components using Gunn diodes and GaAs transistors. Above 100GHz is still mostly an area for experimental work. There are people working on "to 100GHz and beyond!. But not much is really working up there yet.
This isn't a backscatter X-ray system. That's a completely different technology.
This isn't an X-ray machine, or even a Z-backscatter machine. It's a millimeter wave device. TSA has a web page for the thing. It's not as detailed as a Z-backscatter image.
Here's the product page for the ProVision scanner. It's made by Level 3 Communications.
This thing was first announced last year, so the story is out of date.
Nothing in the solicitation has a $30 billion price tag on it. No idea where that number came from. There are no dollar amounts at this stage; DARPA is soliciting bids.
What DARPA is asking for is a 10,000 node Internet simulator, and that's in the final phase. The whole system can be started, stopped, and flushed to a clean state for new tests. Users are simulated: "Replicants will simulate physical interaction with device peripherals, such as keyboard and mice. Replicants will drive all common applications on a desktop environments." Attacks on the network are supported; the vendor even has to provide a "malware library".
The simulated machines have to be simulated at a fine level of detail. "The NCR must be capable of taking a physical computer and rapidly creating a functionally equivalent, logical instance of that machine that can be replicated repeatedly and injected into a testbed. Given a never-before-seen physical computing device, create logical instantiations of the physical native machine that accurately replicates, not only the software on the machine, but hardware to the interrupt level, chipset, and peripheral cards and devices.". That's going to be hard. They may end up with real computers hooked up to peripherals that simulate human inputs. (DoD does this all the time; it's how flight control software is debugged. Serious flight simulators use the real "black boxes" of real aircraft with simulated inputs and outputs.) They need that level of fidelity because they want to observe virus and attack behavior.
This is going to be a useful asset.
See Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten. Now that's a zoom.
As for doing it in real time, Keyhole (bought by Google and renamed Google Earth) was doing this on PCs five years ago. Any decent GPU can do this today, and you can download Google Earth to see it.
I saw one of the first systems able to do this in real time about 25 years ago. It was inside a classified tank at a major aerospace firm, and required a rack of special-purpose hardware. The user interface was beautifully simple - a big trackball (for pan), a lever (for zoom), and a knob (for rotation).
Even Microsoft's little film isn't original. That technique has been used a few times in commercials.
So Silverlight doing this isn't exactly a big "wow" development.
Aero, Anvil, Pelican, or hard-shelled Sampsonite will work.
There's also Zero Halliburton aluminum luggage, the favorite of movie drug dealers.
If it's for tools, get a real toolcase, with the pallets and loops to hold tools. I have a big Jensen toolkit myself, in one of those cases.
Here's where the $10,000 goes:
The big-ticket item is the furniture.
Did they throw in any games?
But a '30's machine shop couldn't make modern vacuum-degassed, oil-impregnated bronze bearing stock, for instance.
Right. You could make Babbitt-metal bearings, which are simply cast, then allowed to wear in. They don't require the tight tolerances of ball or roller bearings. 19th century machine shops were self-replicating by necessity; nobody was making parts. That tradition continued for a long time, and big factories tended to have the in-house capability to make most of their own parts through World War I. This allowed bombed-out factories to boot themselves back up to operation given time and skilled people. The real skills were in the people, not the machinery.
The whole point of this "self-replicating fab" thing is to come up with some technology that can replicate itself fully, even if it's not optimal manufacturing technology. RepRap isn't even close, even though they like to say "self-replicating" a lot.
It doesn't make a "copy of itself". It doesn't make the plastic output device. It doesn't make the servomotors, the cables, the metal rods, or the control computer. All it actually makes, in fact, are the brackets used to assemble the other parts. The easy parts.
A manual Bridgeport milling machine, on the other hand, used to be considered "self-replicating". If you have a milling machine, a small foundry, a supply of good quality steel scrap, sand, and fuel, and a skilled machinist, you can eventually make another milling machine and all the foundry equipment. Factories that made Bridgeport milling machines (the design was widely copied) did in fact make them using Bridgeport milling machines. A good 1930s machine shop really can replicate itself with only a supply of good people and raw materials.
This machine is more hype than substance. It's just a mediocre stereolithography machine. If you want to use a good one, and you're in Silicon Valley, sign up with TechShop in Menlo Park. They have one, and it's not used much.
The loyalty oath issue is interesting. The loyalty oath in Florida used to contain the language "that I am not a member of the Communist Party; that I have not and will not lend my aid, support, advice, counsel or influence to the Communist Party". This was a big deal during the Red Scare era in the 1950s. It's not an oath of office; all state employees were required to sign it.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that language to be an unconstitutional restriction on free speech and association in 1961. So the legislature took out the "Communist party" part. The shortened oath is still required of all state employees and candidates.
Florida law says that any state employee refusing to sign the oath shall be discharged. It's not clear there's any penalty for an employee who, through some omission of the state, was never asked to sign it.
Florida judges are mostly elected, and normally the loyalty oath is required as part of the paperwork for getting on the ballot. But it seems that Judge Tunis was appointed (by Gov. Jeb Bush) to fill a vacancy created when the Legislature increased the number of judgeships. For most state employees, it's the responsibility of the employee's superior to make sure that the loyalty oath is signed. But for elected positions, there's no "superior", so it's not clear who's supposed to get this done. Which is probably how she became a judge without signing the loyalty oath first. Anyway, Judge Tunis did sign the oath at a later date.
Thompson started his career as a loudmouth by complaining about some rap from "2 Live Crew" back in the early 1990s. I bought the 2 Live Crew CD to see what all the fuss was about. They were a terrible rap group, at the low end of the garage-band level. My comment at the time was that "this group would never have gotten off the South Florida club circuit without the censorship attempt".
Those new "little" CPUs coming out aren't so little. They're above 1GHz now, they're going into machines with 1 GB of memory, and some of them are superscalar. They even have GPUs. That's more than enough power for any reasonable portable system. Mail, web browsing, video playing, the occasional PowerPoint presentation - you don't need a quad-core 3 GHZ CPU part for that.
What you need is battery life. The next frontier may be less CPU power but a full day of operation or more between recharges. Note that phone battery life was a huge issue until it reached a day or two of moderate to heavy use. After that, it stopped being a major factor in buying decisions.
Despite Wales' hype about Wikia becoming comparable to Google, Wikia is mostly a hosting service for fancruft. The biggest wikis are Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], the Marvel Comics database, and similar dreck. Wikia's demographic lives in their parents basement.
This is not a basis for a useful search engine.
SiteAdvisor is basically an anti-virus program connected to a web spider; it downloads pages and looks for hostile code. This is valuable as a firewall feature, but it doesn't say much about whether a domain is worth visiting.
PhishTank has a list of sites currently involved in phishing scams. Let's take a look at that. At SiteTruth, we have historical PhishTank data in a database, with 40997 phishing attacks recorded. So when we ask the right question (which is "SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(domain,".",-1) AS tld, COUNT(*) as cnt FROM domainnegatives GROUP BY SUBSTRING_INDEX(domain,".",-1) ORDER BY cnt DESC LIMIT 20;"), we get
Here, "com" is by far the most popular TLD with phishers. This reflects the desires by phishers to have a plausible-looking domain name. Some phishers, the ones who register domains in bulk, do pick rather bogus-looking domains (like "0001fyg0.com" "00039cscsgrjc.com" "0003s6tw0wqf70l.com" "0003ureb.com" "0004ssen.com" "0004y1x9.com" "00062lku1ekaj.com"). Others have more plausible choices, (like "americaonllinebank.com").
Top-level domain statistics are more of a curiosity than anything else. They don't help you avoid or deal with attacks. We could generate many other similar statistics, and we've posted some on the SiteTruth blog.