An AC induction motor has the highest power/weight density of all electric motors. Brushless DC motors are only competitive for very small motors.
Er, no. A "brushless DC" and a "variable-frequency synchronous AC" motor are the same thing. Smaller motors tend to be called "brushless DC" and are driven by "motor controllers", while larger motors are called "variable-frequency AC" and are driven by "drives" or "inverters". The threshold is around 1KW. The difference in terminology comes from different industries.
All motors are AC at the windings, or they'd reach a steady state position and stop. "Commutation" refers to the means provided to switch power to the windings so the motor continues to chase the minimum position for the magnetic field. Commutation can be performed with brushes and a commutator (which is just a drum of contacts), with external electronics, or simply borrowed from the power line frequency. "Brushless DC" and "variable AC" motors are driven by external electronics. They're usually at least 3 phase devices; this allows starting from a stationary position without the possibility of being stuck at a neutral point.
This concept scales up just fine. Here's the General Electric AC6000, the most powerful locomotive in the world, driven by 3-phase AC variable-frequency motors. The software, written in C++, locks all the wheels together as if they were geared together, even though there's a separate motor for each axle. This allows more tractive effort without wheel slip than any previous locomotive. There are thousands of these locomotives (mostly the smaller AC4400, but a few hundred of the big AC6000) in use today.
Does anybody actually run OpenSolaris in production on non-Sun hardware? Open-sourcing Solaris seems more of an end-of-life abandonware move than a product line.
A basic problem with this thing is that they just bring out the connections to header
connectors. So you have all the internal mess of a regular PC, crammed into less space.
It would be more useful in the PC market to have a board with roughly the same footprint as a
CD or DVD drive, with all the external connectors on the back edge of the
board. Get rid of all those internal jumper cables. If the thing is going to go in a box with a CD or DVD drive, there's not much point in making it smaller than the drive. I realize this is more or less an Intel Mac Mini. At that density, you have to have integrated design of board, packaging, and airflow.
The Mac IIci, over a decade ago, was the first machine to get this right. No internal cables. Even the power supply clicked into the motherboard. The machine was designed for automated assembly, instead of low-wage assembly.
Just what everyone needs:
A color Etch-a-Sketch monitor.
That's been tried. The Iconorama was a 1950s effort by the USAF to build a large-screen display. This was a computer-controlled Etch-a-Sketch like setup arranged as a projector. As with an Etch-A-Sketch, there was no selective erasing; when the image (which was mostly the tracks of attacking aircraft) became cluttered, the entire image was cleared and replaced with a newly drawn one. The previous big-screen attack plotting technology was an edge-lit Plexiglas map with people in on the back side plotting with grease pencils, so the Iconorama was a logical upgrade.
This was a mechanical device. The thing really was etching lines on a projection slide. "Erasure" was accomplished with a slide change to a new blank slide. The Iconorama was usually installed as a pair of units, both for backup and so that slide changes could be accomplished without waiting for a redraw.
I never actually saw one, but a 1970s evaluation of USAF large screen display systems once crossed my desk, and I recall the recommendation on the Iconorama being "Further systems of this type should not be procured."
Ref: Schmidt, George WN "The Iconorama System," Datamation 11, no. 1 (January 1965)
The NYPD's CompStat system has been doing that for about ten years now. It's working reasonably well. At first it was really effective, because career criminals tend to fall into predictable patterns. Crime in NYC has dropped enough that there's more randomness, and prediction is less effective.
I bet these autonomous vehicles perform really well in the mountains, yes...
The 2005 Grand Challenge course had narrow roads cut out of the side of mountains, with
no guard rails. The vehicles that finished all made it through there, even the
huge military truck from Oskosh.
I've seen a lot of people wrongly claim that forbidding things like <b><i>...</b></i> is an advantage of XHTML -- are you making the same mistake? Such things are forbidden in HTML too, it's just people tend to get away with things like that with HTML because of its undefined error handling.
I'm looking at it from the side of someone working on a site rating engine that has to parse real-world web pages. There are many constructs that are flatly wrong, yet common enough that they have to be handled. Incorrectly terminated comments show up very frequently, and have to be handled properly. "&" outside an entity is wrong, but almost normal. A </br> without a <br> is treated as a line break by most browsers, rather than being ignored. We see hostile pages that exploit the differences between the standards and what browsers actually understand, using tricks like escaped newlines in URLs. These things are all at the level where the document is turned into a tree, not at the higher levels where we see things like <li> without an enclosing <ul>.
It would be helpful if we could at least insist that pages parse correctly into a tree. Browsers enforce that for XML, which is a good first step towards consistency.
What's wierd about this is that it goes off in a completely different direction than XHTML. Tags don't have to be properly closed, no namespaces, etc.
A big advantage of XHTML was that the conversion to a parse tree was unambiguous. Why give up that at this late date? All this ambiguity breaks visual HTML editors. Dreamweaver 3 was closer to "what you see is what you get" than today's Dreamweaver 8.
Consider, for example, a lone </br> that doesn't terminate anything. Most browsers today treat that as a valid break, not an orphan tag to be ignored. XHTML was supposed to end that kind of nonsense.
The problem with XHTML has been that CSS layout was badly designed. "float" and "clear" just aren't a good set of layout primitives. Cell-based layout (yes, "tables") was a fundamentally more powerful concept. But it's not XHTML that's the problem. It's that the positioning mechanisms for "div" sections are terrible.
Layout is really a 2D constraint problem. Internally, you have constraints like "boxes can't overlap", which turns into constraints like "upper left corner of box B must be below lower left corner of box A", or "right edge of box A and left edge of box B must have same X coordinate". Browsers really ought to do layout that way. Table layout engines come close to doing that. At least with tables you never get text on top of other text. "div" doesn't have comparable power. "float" and "clear" represent a one-dimensional model of layout, and that's just not good enough.
Sounds like Microsoft is expecting some flak over their insecure operating systems. Probably related to those millions of Windows systems pwnd by.. somebody, and available for launching attacks.
There's a current worry in the security community that somebody is building up assets of pwnd systems. Somebody is acquiring the capability to do something big. But who, or why, isn't known. The assets being accumulated are more than a spammer needs.
It has some neat properties. It's a full screen window that's always on top, like a modal dialog.
There's no window title bar. Alt-tab will switch to another window, but the app switches back. Control-Alt-Del will bring up Task Manager, so you can kill the window that way by killing an instance of Firefox. Not sure if this works with IE, which is more deeply embedded in the OS. However, if the app launched a second window of itself, it could keep respawning faster than the user could kill it.
Alt-F4 will force the window to close, although the app could resist that if it wanted to.
The app suppresses that stupid Sun ad that runs when newer Java JVMs load. So it's not obvious that it's a Java app.
A key point here is that, since this thing takes over the whole screen with a real application, it could put up something that looked like a desktop to fool the user.
Did anybody ever fab the thing and offer it for sale? Simply RISC doesn't seem to be shipping any real hardware. The picture of the chip looks fake. It looks like they put the logo onto a picture of some other chip with Photoshop. Look at the jaggies on the logo, and how the logo doesn't line up with the upper edge of the chip.
Polaris Micro says they're shipping on Q3 2007, but their web site hasn't updated their news section since 2005.
It's neat that you can load their cut-down version of a SPARC CPU into an FPGA, but that's not a partcularly useful product.
May be it is just me but I find Forbes to be like women's "Cosmo" magazine for dumb guys and wannabes.
Forbes went downhill after Malcom Forbes Sr. died. Forbes Magazine used to do some hard-hitting investigative reporting. Malcom Forbes Sr's attitude was "Go ahead, sue me for libel. I'm a billionare". They've gone soft since the son took over.
Business Week, which used to be the cheering section for big business, has improved a bit.
It's not clear what will happen to the Wall Street Journal under Murdoch's ownership, but it's not looking good. The WSJ has gone downhill in the last few years, anyway. The fundamental problem is that its classic functions, stock charts and major stock-related events, are all on line now. Nobody on Wall Street needs to read the Wall Street Journal; anything that affects trading was on their Bloomberg long before.
This is one of those moves where some abandonware is being open sourced. Usually this happens with software, but here it's happening for hardware. The SPARC line is in decline; Sun is moving to x86 machines. Sun's hardware business is on the same trajectory as SGI's, but about five years behind. (Remember SGI, the MIPS processors, the overpriced x86 workstations, the bankruptcy?)
As Wikipedia points out, Sun already did this for the UltraSparc T1 in 2006. Nobody cared. Now they're doing it for the UltreSparc T2.
This might be useful if someone needed to emulate a SPARC CPU twenty or fifty years from now. So it's good to have the details of the CPU design on the record for historical purposes. But nobody is going to manufacture the things.
The "E-paper" and "E-ink" crowd have been touting "cheap, flexible displays" for about fifteen years now. But all they ever seem to deliver are expensive, rigid displays inferior to other technologies.
Electrostatic oil displacement has been used before, most notably in the Eidophor projection TV system. This is a technology first demonstrated in 1939, yet in use through 1993. Big, heavy, expensive, and complicated, but could project TV pictures brighter than film. The image medium was an oil film written by an electron beam, used as a reflector for a lamp.
The basic idea is simple, but making it work required rotating smoothed oil film past the projection station, so there were big moving parts. All this had to happen in vacuum, but it wasn't a sealed unit, because the cathode had to be changed every 200 hours or so. So it needed high-vacuum pumps, vacuum locks, hours of startup, and a skilled operator.
What's so striking is that there are so few different spams that make it through the filters. And most of the top spammers are known; see the ROKSO list. They're all crooks; legitimate businesses haven't been able to spam through filters in years now. With slightly more law enforcement effort, most of those spammers could be put behind bars. Two or three go to jail every year now; if that could be increased to ten or twenty, the problem would drop substantially.
The way to find them is by following the money. The FBI and Treasury have the means in place to do that, developed for money laundering. That's what FinCEN does. It's tough to repeatedly collect money via credit card and hide from FinCEN. Especially when investigators can initiate tranactions themselves, which is easy enough with Viagra spammers. Maybe after Bush is out of office this can be addressed.
Actually, if some anti-spam people wanted to deal with the Viagra spammers, it would be easy enough. Find the order form, and start ordering using a script. Use random credit card numbers that will pass the check digit check, delivery addresses of random buildings or PO boxes, and a broad range of IP addresses via proxies. The orders will all be rejected at credit card check, but their credit card service provider will hit them with a fee for each bogus transaction. Drive them out of business that way.
Marx put forward the view that technology is the only driver of ideology and social change ever. He didn't call it "technology," he called it "means of production," but we recognize what it is. Seemed pretty radical to some people then; funny he now seems so right.
That was really obvious back in his era. For most of human history before the Industrial Revolution, per capita GDP was nearly flat. For England, numbers like 1-3% per century have been published.
Capitalists will need to create will eventually get so ridiculous that people will just depose them. As far as futurism goes, I think this outline is aging rather well.
There's something to be said for that position. Until about 1900, around 80-90% of the working population was doing manufacturing, mining, agriculture, or construction - i.e. "real work". By 1950 or so, that number was down to 50%. Today, in the US, it's below 25%. So what's everybody doing? Much of what people are doing is fundamentally nonproductive. Half the cost of health care is now administration, insurance, etc. The financial services sector is bigger than manufacturing. Per capita advertising expenditures are about half of food expenditures. All these things are overheads of capitalism.
This is part of why everyone is working harder, but getting less for it. The overheads of capitalism are growing slowly over time.
(I sometimes wonder what might have happened if the USSR had hung on for ten more years. Soviet central planning never worked very well, but that was partly because they tried to do it on an annual cycle. Wal-Mart runs a bigger economic system out of Bentonville than the USSR ran out of Moscow. But Wal-Mart has daily updates and a weekly planning cycle, so there's fast feedback. Gosplan had quarterly reports, an annual planning cycle, and a five year plan. That approach was too static. They never had the compute power and communications to do it fast enough to keep the plan tied tightly to reality. The needed technology for that was less than a decade away. Bar-coding, networks, RFID tags, shipment tracking - today, you can make big production/distribution operations work well with central control. Communism, remember, is about getting rid of the "middleman", the player in the middle who warehouses stuff and marks up the price. In Internet commerce, that's called "disintermediation").
The surprising thing about this is the Perl mania. Perl is OK for little stuff. But if you're writing stuff in Perl that's complex enough to require hiring multiple programmers, you're probably using the wrong language. Maintainability in Perl is a big problem. The language is hard to read, and the "there's more than one way to do it" philosophy means that code written by different programmers tends to use different subsets of the language. I have three Perl books, including Larry Wall's, each of which describes a different subset of the language, which gives a sense of how bad that problem is. On the other hand, Perl comes closer to "write once, run everywhere" than anything else around. Your Perl web app will probably work the same on almost all hosting providers.
I once wrote a sizable app in object-oriented Perl, and wouldn't do that again. Python scales better.
Python as a language is quite good, especially if you need roughly Perl's function set. The main problem with Python is that the C libraries for key functions (SSL, databases) are maintained by different groups, often by a single person, aren't part of the main Python distro, and don't sync well with Python releases. You may have to explain to your manager that the Windows distribution of the SSL library for Python is maintained by a World of Warcraft guild and they can't fix it this week because they have a big raid coming up.
Users probably don't want all of the content from each of their social networks available on all of them. But it would be useful to have a standard mechanism for aggregating messages, announcements, and changes, so you could keep track of what's happening in your world without having to log into all of the things. A pull-type thing, like RSS, rather than a spammy push-type thing.
A standard format for events with dates, times, and locations would help, so the receiving end could
slot them into a calendar and/or a map.
A big problem with mechanical locks is the form factor. Anything that has to fit in a standard US cylinder lock hole is inherently weak. It's just too small.
There are some good locking systems out of Israel. Mul-T-Lock makes door locks that extend three or four deadbolts through the door and into the frame, like a vault door. These are made to work like ordinary door lever locks.
The best residential doors are found in older HUD-financed housing projects in bad neighborhoods. Apartment doors are steel fire doors mounted in steel frames, and walls are reinforced concrete.
Those things will resist a battering ram. The lock mechanisms usually aren't that great, but the threat there is generally brute force, not lockpicking.
It's surprisingly hard to get good doors and locks in the US. There are better locks in parts of the Third World.
From the description, this doesn't sound like procedural programming. It sounds like a rule engine.
One of those things where there are rules that fire if the current situation meets all the preconditions.
Multiple rules can fire simultaneously, and you need conflict-resolution logic to to choose which one to use when there's a conflict. If rules fire that want to set both "turn=right" and "turn=left", then some priority system or random choice has to pick one. And some hysteresis may be needed to prevent dithering between equally good choices. If non-conflicting rules fire, you can do two things at once, like "jump" and "punch". "Emergent behavior"!
This sort of thing drives the NPCs in quite a number of games. If Spore has something new, the article certainly didn't explain what they're doing differently.
Probably a bad idea. It will encourage drivers to drive drunk. Experience with ABS systems on cars indicates that it encourages drivers to brake more aggressively. This seems more of the same.
Drowsy driver detection systems have been around for a while, mostly on large trucks.
We're in an annoying period where vehicle control systems can help a bit, but aren't yet good enough to reliably drive cars automatically. That's getting close, though. A few more rounds of the DARPA Grand Challenge, in tougher situations, and we'll be there.
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An AC induction motor has the highest power/weight density of all electric motors. Brushless DC motors are only competitive for very small motors.
Er, no. A "brushless DC" and a "variable-frequency synchronous AC" motor are the same thing. Smaller motors tend to be called "brushless DC" and are driven by "motor controllers", while larger motors are called "variable-frequency AC" and are driven by "drives" or "inverters". The threshold is around 1KW. The difference in terminology comes from different industries.
All motors are AC at the windings, or they'd reach a steady state position and stop. "Commutation" refers to the means provided to switch power to the windings so the motor continues to chase the minimum position for the magnetic field. Commutation can be performed with brushes and a commutator (which is just a drum of contacts), with external electronics, or simply borrowed from the power line frequency. "Brushless DC" and "variable AC" motors are driven by external electronics. They're usually at least 3 phase devices; this allows starting from a stationary position without the possibility of being stuck at a neutral point.
This concept scales up just fine. Here's the General Electric AC6000, the most powerful locomotive in the world, driven by 3-phase AC variable-frequency motors. The software, written in C++, locks all the wheels together as if they were geared together, even though there's a separate motor for each axle. This allows more tractive effort without wheel slip than any previous locomotive. There are thousands of these locomotives (mostly the smaller AC4400, but a few hundred of the big AC6000) in use today.
Does anybody actually run OpenSolaris in production on non-Sun hardware? Open-sourcing Solaris seems more of an end-of-life abandonware move than a product line.
A basic problem with this thing is that they just bring out the connections to header connectors. So you have all the internal mess of a regular PC, crammed into less space.
It would be more useful in the PC market to have a board with roughly the same footprint as a CD or DVD drive, with all the external connectors on the back edge of the board. Get rid of all those internal jumper cables. If the thing is going to go in a box with a CD or DVD drive, there's not much point in making it smaller than the drive. I realize this is more or less an Intel Mac Mini. At that density, you have to have integrated design of board, packaging, and airflow.
The Mac IIci, over a decade ago, was the first machine to get this right. No internal cables. Even the power supply clicked into the motherboard. The machine was designed for automated assembly, instead of low-wage assembly.
Over 60% of PCs never have the case opened during their operating life. Expandability is rarely necessary.
Just what everyone needs: A color Etch-a-Sketch monitor.
That's been tried. The Iconorama was a 1950s effort by the USAF to build a large-screen display. This was a computer-controlled Etch-a-Sketch like setup arranged as a projector. As with an Etch-A-Sketch, there was no selective erasing; when the image (which was mostly the tracks of attacking aircraft) became cluttered, the entire image was cleared and replaced with a newly drawn one. The previous big-screen attack plotting technology was an edge-lit Plexiglas map with people in on the back side plotting with grease pencils, so the Iconorama was a logical upgrade.
This was a mechanical device. The thing really was etching lines on a projection slide. "Erasure" was accomplished with a slide change to a new blank slide. The Iconorama was usually installed as a pair of units, both for backup and so that slide changes could be accomplished without waiting for a redraw.
I never actually saw one, but a 1970s evaluation of USAF large screen display systems once crossed my desk, and I recall the recommendation on the Iconorama being "Further systems of this type should not be procured."
Ref: Schmidt, George WN "The Iconorama System," Datamation 11, no. 1 (January 1965)
The NYPD's CompStat system has been doing that for about ten years now. It's working reasonably well. At first it was really effective, because career criminals tend to fall into predictable patterns. Crime in NYC has dropped enough that there's more randomness, and prediction is less effective.
I bet these autonomous vehicles perform really well in the mountains, yes...
The 2005 Grand Challenge course had narrow roads cut out of the side of mountains, with no guard rails. The vehicles that finished all made it through there, even the huge military truck from Oskosh.
I've seen a lot of people wrongly claim that forbidding things like <b><i>...</b></i> is an advantage of XHTML -- are you making the same mistake? Such things are forbidden in HTML too, it's just people tend to get away with things like that with HTML because of its undefined error handling.
I'm looking at it from the side of someone working on a site rating engine that has to parse real-world web pages. There are many constructs that are flatly wrong, yet common enough that they have to be handled. Incorrectly terminated comments show up very frequently, and have to be handled properly. "&" outside an entity is wrong, but almost normal. A </br> without a <br> is treated as a line break by most browsers, rather than being ignored. We see hostile pages that exploit the differences between the standards and what browsers actually understand, using tricks like escaped newlines in URLs. These things are all at the level where the document is turned into a tree, not at the higher levels where we see things like <li> without an enclosing <ul>.
It would be helpful if we could at least insist that pages parse correctly into a tree. Browsers enforce that for XML, which is a good first step towards consistency.
What's wierd about this is that it goes off in a completely different direction than XHTML. Tags don't have to be properly closed, no namespaces, etc.
A big advantage of XHTML was that the conversion to a parse tree was unambiguous. Why give up that at this late date? All this ambiguity breaks visual HTML editors. Dreamweaver 3 was closer to "what you see is what you get" than today's Dreamweaver 8.
Consider, for example, a lone </br> that doesn't terminate anything. Most browsers today treat that as a valid break, not an orphan tag to be ignored. XHTML was supposed to end that kind of nonsense.
The problem with XHTML has been that CSS layout was badly designed. "float" and "clear" just aren't a good set of layout primitives. Cell-based layout (yes, "tables") was a fundamentally more powerful concept. But it's not XHTML that's the problem. It's that the positioning mechanisms for "div" sections are terrible.
Layout is really a 2D constraint problem. Internally, you have constraints like "boxes can't overlap", which turns into constraints like "upper left corner of box B must be below lower left corner of box A", or "right edge of box A and left edge of box B must have same X coordinate". Browsers really ought to do layout that way. Table layout engines come close to doing that. At least with tables you never get text on top of other text. "div" doesn't have comparable power. "float" and "clear" represent a one-dimensional model of layout, and that's just not good enough.
Sounds like Microsoft is expecting some flak over their insecure operating systems. Probably related to those millions of Windows systems pwnd by .. somebody, and available for launching attacks.
There's a current worry in the security community that somebody is building up assets of pwnd systems. Somebody is acquiring the capability to do something big. But who, or why, isn't known. The assets being accumulated are more than a spammer needs.
That's cute.
It has some neat properties. It's a full screen window that's always on top, like a modal dialog. There's no window title bar. Alt-tab will switch to another window, but the app switches back. Control-Alt-Del will bring up Task Manager, so you can kill the window that way by killing an instance of Firefox. Not sure if this works with IE, which is more deeply embedded in the OS. However, if the app launched a second window of itself, it could keep respawning faster than the user could kill it.
Alt-F4 will force the window to close, although the app could resist that if it wanted to.
The app suppresses that stupid Sun ad that runs when newer Java JVMs load. So it's not obvious that it's a Java app.
A key point here is that, since this thing takes over the whole screen with a real application, it could put up something that looked like a desktop to fool the user.
Did anybody ever fab the thing and offer it for sale? Simply RISC doesn't seem to be shipping any real hardware. The picture of the chip looks fake. It looks like they put the logo onto a picture of some other chip with Photoshop. Look at the jaggies on the logo, and how the logo doesn't line up with the upper edge of the chip.
Polaris Micro says they're shipping on Q3 2007, but their web site hasn't updated their news section since 2005.
It's neat that you can load their cut-down version of a SPARC CPU into an FPGA, but that's not a partcularly useful product.
May be it is just me but I find Forbes to be like women's "Cosmo" magazine for dumb guys and wannabes.
Forbes went downhill after Malcom Forbes Sr. died. Forbes Magazine used to do some hard-hitting investigative reporting. Malcom Forbes Sr's attitude was "Go ahead, sue me for libel. I'm a billionare". They've gone soft since the son took over.
Business Week, which used to be the cheering section for big business, has improved a bit.
It's not clear what will happen to the Wall Street Journal under Murdoch's ownership, but it's not looking good. The WSJ has gone downhill in the last few years, anyway. The fundamental problem is that its classic functions, stock charts and major stock-related events, are all on line now. Nobody on Wall Street needs to read the Wall Street Journal; anything that affects trading was on their Bloomberg long before.
It's a pixel-sized cell thing; each cell is sealed. At that scale, surface tension beats gravity, so orientation may not matter much.
This is one of those moves where some abandonware is being open sourced. Usually this happens with software, but here it's happening for hardware. The SPARC line is in decline; Sun is moving to x86 machines. Sun's hardware business is on the same trajectory as SGI's, but about five years behind. (Remember SGI, the MIPS processors, the overpriced x86 workstations, the bankruptcy?)
As Wikipedia points out, Sun already did this for the UltraSparc T1 in 2006. Nobody cared. Now they're doing it for the UltreSparc T2.
This might be useful if someone needed to emulate a SPARC CPU twenty or fifty years from now. So it's good to have the details of the CPU design on the record for historical purposes. But nobody is going to manufacture the things.
The "E-paper" and "E-ink" crowd have been touting "cheap, flexible displays" for about fifteen years now. But all they ever seem to deliver are expensive, rigid displays inferior to other technologies.
Electrostatic oil displacement has been used before, most notably in the Eidophor projection TV system. This is a technology first demonstrated in 1939, yet in use through 1993. Big, heavy, expensive, and complicated, but could project TV pictures brighter than film. The image medium was an oil film written by an electron beam, used as a reflector for a lamp.
The basic idea is simple, but making it work required rotating smoothed oil film past the projection station, so there were big moving parts. All this had to happen in vacuum, but it wasn't a sealed unit, because the cathode had to be changed every 200 hours or so. So it needed high-vacuum pumps, vacuum locks, hours of startup, and a skilled operator.
What's so striking is that there are so few different spams that make it through the filters. And most of the top spammers are known; see the ROKSO list. They're all crooks; legitimate businesses haven't been able to spam through filters in years now. With slightly more law enforcement effort, most of those spammers could be put behind bars. Two or three go to jail every year now; if that could be increased to ten or twenty, the problem would drop substantially.
The way to find them is by following the money. The FBI and Treasury have the means in place to do that, developed for money laundering. That's what FinCEN does. It's tough to repeatedly collect money via credit card and hide from FinCEN. Especially when investigators can initiate tranactions themselves, which is easy enough with Viagra spammers. Maybe after Bush is out of office this can be addressed.
Actually, if some anti-spam people wanted to deal with the Viagra spammers, it would be easy enough. Find the order form, and start ordering using a script. Use random credit card numbers that will pass the check digit check, delivery addresses of random buildings or PO boxes, and a broad range of IP addresses via proxies. The orders will all be rejected at credit card check, but their credit card service provider will hit them with a fee for each bogus transaction. Drive them out of business that way.
Marx put forward the view that technology is the only driver of ideology and social change ever. He didn't call it "technology," he called it "means of production," but we recognize what it is. Seemed pretty radical to some people then; funny he now seems so right.
That was really obvious back in his era. For most of human history before the Industrial Revolution, per capita GDP was nearly flat. For England, numbers like 1-3% per century have been published.
Capitalists will need to create will eventually get so ridiculous that people will just depose them. As far as futurism goes, I think this outline is aging rather well.
There's something to be said for that position. Until about 1900, around 80-90% of the working population was doing manufacturing, mining, agriculture, or construction - i.e. "real work". By 1950 or so, that number was down to 50%. Today, in the US, it's below 25%. So what's everybody doing? Much of what people are doing is fundamentally nonproductive. Half the cost of health care is now administration, insurance, etc. The financial services sector is bigger than manufacturing. Per capita advertising expenditures are about half of food expenditures. All these things are overheads of capitalism.
This is part of why everyone is working harder, but getting less for it. The overheads of capitalism are growing slowly over time.
(I sometimes wonder what might have happened if the USSR had hung on for ten more years. Soviet central planning never worked very well, but that was partly because they tried to do it on an annual cycle. Wal-Mart runs a bigger economic system out of Bentonville than the USSR ran out of Moscow. But Wal-Mart has daily updates and a weekly planning cycle, so there's fast feedback. Gosplan had quarterly reports, an annual planning cycle, and a five year plan. That approach was too static. They never had the compute power and communications to do it fast enough to keep the plan tied tightly to reality. The needed technology for that was less than a decade away. Bar-coding, networks, RFID tags, shipment tracking - today, you can make big production/distribution operations work well with central control. Communism, remember, is about getting rid of the "middleman", the player in the middle who warehouses stuff and marks up the price. In Internet commerce, that's called "disintermediation").
The surprising thing about this is the Perl mania. Perl is OK for little stuff. But if you're writing stuff in Perl that's complex enough to require hiring multiple programmers, you're probably using the wrong language. Maintainability in Perl is a big problem. The language is hard to read, and the "there's more than one way to do it" philosophy means that code written by different programmers tends to use different subsets of the language. I have three Perl books, including Larry Wall's, each of which describes a different subset of the language, which gives a sense of how bad that problem is. On the other hand, Perl comes closer to "write once, run everywhere" than anything else around. Your Perl web app will probably work the same on almost all hosting providers.
I once wrote a sizable app in object-oriented Perl, and wouldn't do that again. Python scales better.
Python as a language is quite good, especially if you need roughly Perl's function set. The main problem with Python is that the C libraries for key functions (SSL, databases) are maintained by different groups, often by a single person, aren't part of the main Python distro, and don't sync well with Python releases. You may have to explain to your manager that the Windows distribution of the SSL library for Python is maintained by a World of Warcraft guild and they can't fix it this week because they have a big raid coming up.
Users probably don't want all of the content from each of their social networks available on all of them. But it would be useful to have a standard mechanism for aggregating messages, announcements, and changes, so you could keep track of what's happening in your world without having to log into all of the things. A pull-type thing, like RSS, rather than a spammy push-type thing.
A standard format for events with dates, times, and locations would help, so the receiving end could slot them into a calendar and/or a map.
A big problem with mechanical locks is the form factor. Anything that has to fit in a standard US cylinder lock hole is inherently weak. It's just too small.
There are some good locking systems out of Israel. Mul-T-Lock makes door locks that extend three or four deadbolts through the door and into the frame, like a vault door. These are made to work like ordinary door lever locks.
The best residential doors are found in older HUD-financed housing projects in bad neighborhoods. Apartment doors are steel fire doors mounted in steel frames, and walls are reinforced concrete. Those things will resist a battering ram. The lock mechanisms usually aren't that great, but the threat there is generally brute force, not lockpicking.
It's surprisingly hard to get good doors and locks in the US. There are better locks in parts of the Third World.
From the description, this doesn't sound like procedural programming. It sounds like a rule engine. One of those things where there are rules that fire if the current situation meets all the preconditions. Multiple rules can fire simultaneously, and you need conflict-resolution logic to to choose which one to use when there's a conflict. If rules fire that want to set both "turn=right" and "turn=left", then some priority system or random choice has to pick one. And some hysteresis may be needed to prevent dithering between equally good choices. If non-conflicting rules fire, you can do two things at once, like "jump" and "punch". "Emergent behavior"!
This sort of thing drives the NPCs in quite a number of games. If Spore has something new, the article certainly didn't explain what they're doing differently.
Probably a bad idea. It will encourage drivers to drive drunk. Experience with ABS systems on cars indicates that it encourages drivers to brake more aggressively. This seems more of the same.
Drowsy driver detection systems have been around for a while, mostly on large trucks.
We're in an annoying period where vehicle control systems can help a bit, but aren't yet good enough to reliably drive cars automatically. That's getting close, though. A few more rounds of the DARPA Grand Challenge, in tougher situations, and we'll be there.
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Relevant documents:
MobileTerminal.app is NOT an SSH client, nor Telnet for that matter. It can however be used to execute a console ssh-client application."
What does it connect to as a terminal? Does the iPhone have a serial port? Or is it a console window for the iPhone's operating system?