In the entire history of relay-type signal control in the United States, only one accident was ever caused by a relay failure. Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad, near Gary, IN, 1926. And that was with a wierd centrifugal switch type of relay installed in 1911. The 70-year old design now in use has never caused an accident. That can't be said for solid-state or computerized systems.
In the entire history of electromechanical central offices in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of operation for more than thirty minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster.
How many times has your VoIP switch crashed?
The Aircreft Owners and Pilots Association has an excellent Flash presentation on flight procedures in the Washington area, or "how not to get shot down".
Verisign, better known for its domain registration business, has a dark side. Verisign operates the nation's wiretapping control center. From its offices in Northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters, and in Mountain View, CA, Verisign's staff has a back door into the nation's telephone system. Law enforcement and the intelligence community send their wiretapping requests to Verisign, which then remotely reroutes calls for the selected telephones to Verisign's wiretapping center.
Verisign became the central point for wiretapping
by acquiring Illuminet in 2001. Illuminet operated the "signalling system 7", or "SS7" network created decades ago by AT&T to control routing and billing throughout the telephone system. Ordinary phone functions like call forwarding work through SS7. Whomever controls SS7 can wiretap any phone, landline or cellular, within the area they control.
Verisign offers wiretapping as a commercial service, under the NetDiscovery name. As their advertising puts it, "Net Discovery is the premier turnkey service for provisioning, access, delivery, and collection of call information from operators to law enforcement agencies (LEAs)."
Verisign is expanding their NetDiscovery service to cover Internet access and voice-over-IP.
Their goal is to provide a single point of contact for all wiretapping requests in the United States.
"NetDiscovery makes it easy to fulfill lawful interception mandates and takes the
burden and expense of compliance out of a service provider's hands. By outsourcing
the service to VeriSign, service providers maintain continuous, hassle-free
compliance."
NetDiscovery is the wiretapping solution chosen by Vonage, Cox Cable, First Cellular, Arrival Communications, Cellular Mobile, Rural Cellular, and many others. Wireline, cellular, and VoIP carriers are already on line and being intercepted.
In the UK, NetDiscovery is the wiretapping solution for GSM mobiles.
If you want to see classic relay-based signalling, as used in the NYC subways, download NXSYS, a Windows-based simulator for the NYC subway signalling system.
This is an incredibly detailed simulator, going all the way down to the relay level. You can work the control panels, look at the relay schematics, and see the signals from the train operator's perspective in OpenGL.
The system simulated, developed by General Railway Signal in the 1940s, is the first "intelligent user interface" ever developed. There were many earlier signal systems, and by 1914 or so they were routinely interlocked against operator errors for safety. But this one, NX, for "entry-exit" signalling, was the first one that offered intelligent assistance to the signal operator.
The train dispatcher selects a train entering a junction full of switches, signals, and trains. The NX system will then light up all the currently valid "exits", places the train can exit the junction, checking for conflicts with other trains and timing constraints. When the operator selects an "exit", with one button push, the NX system does everything else. It sets the track switches, verifies that they're in position and locked, turns the appropriate signals green, lowers the appropriate train stops (alongside the track are mechanical devices that, if raised, will be hit by an air brake valve on any passing subway car, bringing the train to a stop), and tracks the train as it moves through the junction. As the train clears each signal, switch or crossover, that resource is released so another train can use it.
The train stops come back up behind each train (and the signalling system verifies that they do so), so that separation between trains is maintained. Even speed control is enforced. There are timers all through the system, so that when a train passes one signal, there's a minimum time before it can pass the next one. An overspeeding train will be tripped and stopped.
It's all done with relays. Big relays, with silver contacts to prevent corrosion. It's fail-safe in a formal sense - no relay coil failure, power failure, or broken wire will result in an unsafe condition. Everything is designed to "fail to red". The designers trusted gravity and solid metal, and not much else.
Situations programmer types never think of are handled. For example, a train stop might become jammed due to ice. That's not only detected, it's handled properly. If a train stop protecting a switch won't go to the up (stop) position, the signalling system won't let the switch move.
(And the gear is rugged enough that when someone goes out with a blowtorch to unfreeze the thing, it will be unharmed.)
This is a very safe technology. But it requires a huge, highly trained maintenance force.
more depth in the latest issue of the IEEE Spectrum
That article was totally clueless.
Relay based railroad signalling systems are still in use, and the parts are still in production. Here's the manual page for General Railway Signal relays. The basic design is 70 years old, the design stabilized around 50 years ago, and they're still manufactured. There are plug-compatible solid state replacements, but the mechanical relays are still widely used.
It's an old technology, but it works. It's known to work over a wide temperature range. It survives electrical transients, from the momentary appearance of 13KV on a track circuit as an electric locomotive enters a new block, to direct lightning strikes.
A spammer needs certain resources to survive. Most spam control effort focus on cutting off the spammer's ability to send spam. Much has been done in that direction. Now more effort needs to be applied to the other direction - cutting off the spammer's payment stream.
Legally, this is promising. First, there's no free speech issue. Second, in most jurisdictions, it's illegal to operate an anonymous business. So most spammers are criminals. Third, laundering transactions through intermediaries is usually a crime, too.
The problem for law enforcement is that following the money is difficult. Additional technical support for that would be a big help.
A good starting point would be to get a credit card issuing bank to cooperate in a scheme where, when one of their credit cards is used, full transaction details, including the payee's full identity, are immediately returned to the cardholder, using encrypted E-mail or some other secure means. That would make "following the money" much easier. This only requires one cooperating bank. That bank's credit cards might become popular with heavy Internet users.
Especially if this works for prepaid credit cards, so you can find out who's behind a web site by using some disposable credit card.
The next step is to crack down on "credit card intermediaries". Non-bank credit card intermediaries that handle spammer transactions should be stuck with the legal liability of the spammer. Legally, they're the "merchant".
They shouldn't be allowed to pass the buck to some other party. This will make "cheap merchant accounts" harder to get, which is probably a good thing.
Sveasoft firmware is terrible. Do not use.
on
Router Built for Gamers
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· Score: 4, Informative
We have three Linksys routers with Sveasoft firmware at Team Overbot. One is on the vehicle itself.
Our Linux enthusiast installed this, hoping to improve performance over the standard firmware.
It's awful. Latencies average around 30ms, with spikes to 120ms. Before we installed the Sveasoft crap, we could drive our robot vehicle remotely, using an older Linksys 802.11b unit with stock Linksys firmware. Now, the latency is so bad we can't. Fortunately, we usually drive it autonomously, and E-stop is on a completely separate radio link.
Worse, the Sveasoft software garbles TCP packets. If you have several TCP packets in flight, the later ones tend to get garbled.
We've put packet sniffers on both sides of the link, and we can see the TCP packets getting trashed. It looks like the packet queueing is badly broken. Worse, they don't get trashed randomly. The trashing is repeatable and the TCP connection never recovers. It looks like some kind of stateful TCP firewall has gone horribly wrong.
We have the Sveasoft firewall turned off, or at least as "off" as is offered by its options.
Non-TCP packets don't seem to get trashed in this way. So remote file access (NFS, QNX native networking) still works. And HTTP out to the Internet works. But local high-traffic TCP connections fail.
Most users probably don't see these problems because they're using these units to connect to the Internet through a slow uplink. So they never have a bottleneck across the WiFi link and don't get a packet backlog in the Sveasoft software. But try to talk to a local server using TCP. A CVS checkout from our local server over a pair of Linksys routers using the latest, licensed, paid-for Sveasoft software hangs. Every time, within ten seconds. (Works fine with a wired Ethernet connection.)
Attempts to get this fixed have dragged on for months. It's been reported to Sveasoft, of course.
So we definitely recommend against buying Sveasoft firmwere.
The worst real estate on earth is better than the best anywhere else in the solar system. Cities and towns have been built in some of the most inhospitable places on earth, from the Aleutian Islands to the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia.
Military bases have been built in even worse places. They're all easier environments for people to operate in than anywhere in orbit, on the Moon, or Mars. That's not going to change.
Space flight with chemical fuels will never work much better than it does now. There's just not enough energy per unit mass. It doesn't get any better than liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen, which has been used for over forty years.
Robots don't need air or water. And you don't have to bring them back.
LynxOS is not Linux. It's a completely different, and much smaller, kernel. It's not as minimal as QNX; LynxOS has drivers in the kernel. But it's far smaller than Linux. It's small enough to get through the expensive and difficult examination process required for avionics.
Confusingly, the company that sells LynxOS recently changed their name to LynuxWorks, and also distributes BlueCat Linux, an embedded Linux distro based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. LynuxWorks had a huge booth at the Embedded Systems Conference last month.
LynxOS, BlueCat Linux, and QNX all use the GNU compilers and tools. All are POSIX compatible, and will run most commmand line programs with a recompile.
Making cement housing shells just isn't that hard. Edison did this a century ago, using moulds that lock together. It's done routinely for industrial b buildings. If there was any market for concrete houses, it would be done for them.
"In 48 hours, Congress is set to vote on a bill that could cost Eva's organization $50 billion. To defeat this legislation, Eva will use the Democracy Direct 7.1 Communications Wizard to mobilize her stakeholders to generate emails to targeted legislators".
"Full grassroots and PAC management functionality"
"Legislator targeting".
Run the online demo. Especially the "asset tracking system", which generates maps It looks like Hollywood's vision of something a corrupt organization would use. But it's real.
If your co-location service has any spammers on it, go elsewhere. One can have some sympathy for an ISP that has to face zombies out on their DSL lines. But a colo service is actually selling service to the spammer.
Hosting services need to ask some questions when signing up new customers. Is the customer's DNS infomation valid? Does it match the info associated with the credit card? If the customer claims to be a business, do they have a business license, or a certificate of incorporation, or a fictitious name statement on file, or a Dun and Bradstreet rating? All those things can be checked, often automatically. And they should be.
The whole point of MAPS and the RBL is to provide some overkill and put fear into hosting services, so that they won't host spammers. It's working. Most spammers have to host offshore now, usually in China. "Bulletproof web hosting" is getting harder to find, now that AOL and Microsoft are targeting those companies.
A recent Lucas epic (I or II, I forget which) opened in Silicon Valley at the big Century Theaters multiplex in Mountain View. This is across the street from SGI's Silicon Studios division, in the midst of a large, high-tech industrial park, and half a mile from NASA Ames.
The Century Theaters booked half their screens for the film. They hired extra security guards. They were ready for huge crowds.
On opening day, many of the seats were empty. No lines. Bored security guards.
It was over.
There is way too much bullshit in this field
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm underwhelmed with the AI community. I went through Stanford CS. I've met most of the big names. I have some patents in AI-related areas myself. But really, nobody has a clue how to do strong AI.
The expert systems people hit a wall in the mid-1980s. An expert system is really just a way of storing manually-created rules. And those rules are written with great difficulty.
There used to be expert systems people claiming that strong AI would come from rule-based systems. (Read Feigenbaum's "The Fifth Generation"). You don't hear that any more.
Hill-climbing systems (which include neural nets, genetic algorithms, artificial evolution, and simulated annealing) all work by trying to optimize some evaluation function. If the evaluation function is getting better, progress is being made. But what this really means is that the answer is encoded in the evaluation function. If the evaluation function is noisy (as in, "does the creature survive") and requires major simultaneous changes to make progress (as in "evolutionary jumps"), hill climbing doesn't work very well. There is progress, though. Koza's group at Stanford is moving forward, slowly.
The formal logic people never made much progress on real-world problems. Formalizing the problem is the hard part. Once the right formalism has been found, the manipulation required to solve it isn't that hard. There's not much work going on there any more.
The reactive robotics people also hit a wall. Literally, as every Roomba owner knows. Reactive control will get you up to the low end of insect-level AI, but then you're stuck.
Reverse-engineering brains still has promise, but we can't do it yet. Progress is coming from trying to reverse engineer simple animals like sea slugs. (Sea slugs have about 20,000 neurons. Big ones.) Efforts are underway to completely work out the wiring. Mammals are a long ways off.
Lately, there's been a trend towards "faking AI".
This comes under such names as "social computing". The idea is to pick up cues and act intelligent when interacting with humans, even if there's no comprehension. This may have applications in the call center industry, but it's not intelligence.
I run one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot. On a problem like that, you can definitively fail, which means there's the potential for real progress. That's why it's worth doing.
Flash was once a rather nice delivery system for animated content. Then it became an advertising delivery system. Now it's becoming an adware/spyware vehicle.
It's almost, but not quite, time for spyware removal programs to remove Flash as hostile code. It's probably time for programs like AdAware to offer the user the option of easily removing Flash. Perhaps with a message like this:
"Macromedia Flash is a program used primarily to deliver advertising messages. It can turn on your microphone and camera (if present) and transmit the results to advertisers, store personalized data on your machine and transmit it to advertisers, and play commercials with audio. Do you want to remove Macromedia Flash?"
The "stockpile stewardship program" is basically a senior activity center for retired physicists. They have busywork projects to keep people thinking about how to design nuclear weapons. DOE is worried that all the old bomb designers will die off, and no new ones will replace them.
Remember, everything in the inventory was designed with far less compute power than today's desktops.
First "Altair Nanotechnologies" basically makes specialty powders for surface chemistry applications. Calling this "nanotechnology" is a stretch. What they actually do, as a business, is make titanium dioxide powder, the pigment used in white paint. Read their 10-K filing, which is more honest than the press releases they put out.
Altair claims to be working with the "Energy Storage Research Group" at Rutgers University. That did exist, and, sadly, it's one of the leftover bits of what was once Bell Labs. But what's left of it, at Rutgers, doesn't seem to be doing anything in this area. They're concentrating on capacitors and on hydrogen storage. The Rutgers articles on battery technology seem to stop around 2003.
If you look really hard, you can finally find the technical paper on this. It's from mPhase. They're actually trying to make the battery. But what they say they're doing is building a battery with a very long shelf life for use as a backup power source in telecom gear. That's useful, especiallly since mPhase makes DSL gear for telecom carriers.
There's gear out on poles that needs some backup power capability, and most existing batteries don't last long enough to be useful in that environment.
But this is a long way from Electric Cars Real Soon Now.
Transmeta's story is funny. Their big idea was supposed to be "code morphing", or on-the-fly recompiling for a different CPU. But it turned out that they achieved some success because they were the first to take on-chip power management seriously. That gave them an edge for one development cycle. Then, Intel and AMD noticed that power management mattered, and fixed their parts.
End of Transmeta.
"Code morphing" for the x86 instruction set never made too much sense, because making fast x86 machines is well understood, although painful. AMD already did some "code morphing" at cache load time; they inflate all the instructions to a constant length. (Intel does it differently.) For a CISC instruction set with inherent speed problems (the DEC VAX comes to mind) "code morphing" could be a big win. But there's no market for a fast VAX at this late date.
It's impressive that they can run boards with SMT components already soldered down through a second pass, a wave soldering machine for the components with leads. That must take really tight temperature/time control. Especially with the newer lead-free solders, which have higher melting points.
It looks like they put their automation budget into the SMT part of the operation. The components with leads are inserted by hand. Automated machinery exists for those jobs, but they may not want to be stuck with it as it becomes obsolete. As more parts go SMT, more of those manual jobs will be eliminated.
It's unusual to see a modern factory with eight floors. Note how they use their automated warehouse as a vertical transportation system for parts. That's unusual, too. Factories designed around automated warehouses were once more popular. The original Apple plant in Fremont was built that way. But it tends to lead to too much work in process in storage. It's the opposite of the "just in time" approach. However, "just in time" works well only when the assembler has more clout than their parts suppliers, as in the auto industry.
The Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that retailers are liable when rebates aren't paid by the manufacturer. So, now that they can't pass the buck on rebates, retailers want out of them.
Whois information is supposed to be public. There
are many reasons why it should be. Most of the arguments for "private registration" are bogus.
The "privacy" aspect is overrated.
All my web sites have valid domain registration information. The phone numbers are real and are answered. E-mail works. (Spam is filtered out, of course.) I've had two threats in ten years. (The invention broker scam is out of business, and the company who complained about Downside is down 97% from its peak.)
There is absolutely no right to run a business anonymously. In many states, it's a crime.
Fewer registrars are offering "private domain registration". GoDaddy is backing away from it. Under the CAN-SPAM act, proxy registration expose the nominal owner, usually the registrar, to liability. They're the name you sue.
Domains by Proxy and Verisign still offer private registration, but they will, if there's any risk to them, immediately disclose the real owner of a domain. Check those "sole discretion" clauses in the contract.
For a domain of any value, "proxy registration" creates real problems. If you have a dispute with the proxy company, they have control of the situation. And if they go bankrupt, it's even worse. The domain becomes an asset in bankruptcy, and you're just an ordinary creditor.
If you want lightweight anonymity for your family pictures, get an AOL or GeoCities account.
It is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
In the entire history of electromechanical central offices in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of operation for more than thirty minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. How many times has your VoIP switch crashed?
The Aircreft Owners and Pilots Association has an excellent Flash presentation on flight procedures in the Washington area, or "how not to get shot down".
Verisign, better known for its domain registration business, has a dark side. Verisign operates the nation's wiretapping control center. From its offices in Northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters, and in Mountain View, CA, Verisign's staff has a back door into the nation's telephone system. Law enforcement and the intelligence community send their wiretapping requests to Verisign, which then remotely reroutes calls for the selected telephones to Verisign's wiretapping center.
Verisign became the central point for wiretapping by acquiring Illuminet in 2001. Illuminet operated the "signalling system 7", or "SS7" network created decades ago by AT&T to control routing and billing throughout the telephone system. Ordinary phone functions like call forwarding work through SS7. Whomever controls SS7 can wiretap any phone, landline or cellular, within the area they control.
Verisign offers wiretapping as a commercial service, under the NetDiscovery name. As their advertising puts it, "Net Discovery is the premier turnkey service for provisioning, access, delivery, and collection of call information from operators to law enforcement agencies (LEAs)."
Verisign is expanding their NetDiscovery service to cover Internet access and voice-over-IP. Their goal is to provide a single point of contact for all wiretapping requests in the United States. "NetDiscovery makes it easy to fulfill lawful interception mandates and takes the burden and expense of compliance out of a service provider's hands. By outsourcing the service to VeriSign, service providers maintain continuous, hassle-free compliance."
NetDiscovery is the wiretapping solution chosen by Vonage, Cox Cable, First Cellular, Arrival Communications, Cellular Mobile, Rural Cellular, and many others. Wireline, cellular, and VoIP carriers are already on line and being intercepted. In the UK, NetDiscovery is the wiretapping solution for GSM mobiles.
That's how Big Brother really works.
Speeding up the disclosure of the identity of credit card merchants from 30 days to two minutes makes finding them much easier.
This is an incredibly detailed simulator, going all the way down to the relay level. You can work the control panels, look at the relay schematics, and see the signals from the train operator's perspective in OpenGL.
The system simulated, developed by General Railway Signal in the 1940s, is the first "intelligent user interface" ever developed. There were many earlier signal systems, and by 1914 or so they were routinely interlocked against operator errors for safety. But this one, NX, for "entry-exit" signalling, was the first one that offered intelligent assistance to the signal operator.
The train dispatcher selects a train entering a junction full of switches, signals, and trains. The NX system will then light up all the currently valid "exits", places the train can exit the junction, checking for conflicts with other trains and timing constraints. When the operator selects an "exit", with one button push, the NX system does everything else. It sets the track switches, verifies that they're in position and locked, turns the appropriate signals green, lowers the appropriate train stops (alongside the track are mechanical devices that, if raised, will be hit by an air brake valve on any passing subway car, bringing the train to a stop), and tracks the train as it moves through the junction. As the train clears each signal, switch or crossover, that resource is released so another train can use it.
The train stops come back up behind each train (and the signalling system verifies that they do so), so that separation between trains is maintained. Even speed control is enforced. There are timers all through the system, so that when a train passes one signal, there's a minimum time before it can pass the next one. An overspeeding train will be tripped and stopped.
It's all done with relays. Big relays, with silver contacts to prevent corrosion. It's fail-safe in a formal sense - no relay coil failure, power failure, or broken wire will result in an unsafe condition. Everything is designed to "fail to red". The designers trusted gravity and solid metal, and not much else.
Situations programmer types never think of are handled. For example, a train stop might become jammed due to ice. That's not only detected, it's handled properly. If a train stop protecting a switch won't go to the up (stop) position, the signalling system won't let the switch move. (And the gear is rugged enough that when someone goes out with a blowtorch to unfreeze the thing, it will be unharmed.)
This is a very safe technology. But it requires a huge, highly trained maintenance force.
That article was totally clueless.
Relay based railroad signalling systems are still in use, and the parts are still in production. Here's the manual page for General Railway Signal relays. The basic design is 70 years old, the design stabilized around 50 years ago, and they're still manufactured. There are plug-compatible solid state replacements, but the mechanical relays are still widely used.
It's an old technology, but it works. It's known to work over a wide temperature range. It survives electrical transients, from the momentary appearance of 13KV on a track circuit as an electric locomotive enters a new block, to direct lightning strikes.
Legally, this is promising. First, there's no free speech issue. Second, in most jurisdictions, it's illegal to operate an anonymous business. So most spammers are criminals. Third, laundering transactions through intermediaries is usually a crime, too.
The problem for law enforcement is that following the money is difficult. Additional technical support for that would be a big help.
A good starting point would be to get a credit card issuing bank to cooperate in a scheme where, when one of their credit cards is used, full transaction details, including the payee's full identity, are immediately returned to the cardholder, using encrypted E-mail or some other secure means. That would make "following the money" much easier. This only requires one cooperating bank. That bank's credit cards might become popular with heavy Internet users. Especially if this works for prepaid credit cards, so you can find out who's behind a web site by using some disposable credit card.
The next step is to crack down on "credit card intermediaries". Non-bank credit card intermediaries that handle spammer transactions should be stuck with the legal liability of the spammer. Legally, they're the "merchant". They shouldn't be allowed to pass the buck to some other party. This will make "cheap merchant accounts" harder to get, which is probably a good thing.
It's awful. Latencies average around 30ms, with spikes to 120ms. Before we installed the Sveasoft crap, we could drive our robot vehicle remotely, using an older Linksys 802.11b unit with stock Linksys firmware. Now, the latency is so bad we can't. Fortunately, we usually drive it autonomously, and E-stop is on a completely separate radio link.
Worse, the Sveasoft software garbles TCP packets. If you have several TCP packets in flight, the later ones tend to get garbled. We've put packet sniffers on both sides of the link, and we can see the TCP packets getting trashed. It looks like the packet queueing is badly broken. Worse, they don't get trashed randomly. The trashing is repeatable and the TCP connection never recovers. It looks like some kind of stateful TCP firewall has gone horribly wrong. We have the Sveasoft firewall turned off, or at least as "off" as is offered by its options.
Non-TCP packets don't seem to get trashed in this way. So remote file access (NFS, QNX native networking) still works. And HTTP out to the Internet works. But local high-traffic TCP connections fail.
Most users probably don't see these problems because they're using these units to connect to the Internet through a slow uplink. So they never have a bottleneck across the WiFi link and don't get a packet backlog in the Sveasoft software. But try to talk to a local server using TCP. A CVS checkout from our local server over a pair of Linksys routers using the latest, licensed, paid-for Sveasoft software hangs. Every time, within ten seconds. (Works fine with a wired Ethernet connection.)
Attempts to get this fixed have dragged on for months. It's been reported to Sveasoft, of course.
So we definitely recommend against buying Sveasoft firmwere.
John Nagle
LynxOS is not Linux. It's a completely different, and much smaller, kernel. It's not as minimal as QNX; LynxOS has drivers in the kernel. But it's far smaller than Linux. It's small enough to get through the expensive and difficult examination process required for avionics.
Confusingly, the company that sells LynxOS recently changed their name to LynuxWorks, and also distributes BlueCat Linux, an embedded Linux distro based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. LynuxWorks had a huge booth at the Embedded Systems Conference last month.
LynxOS, BlueCat Linux, and QNX all use the GNU compilers and tools. All are POSIX compatible, and will run most commmand line programs with a recompile.
Making cement housing shells just isn't that hard. Edison did this a century ago, using moulds that lock together. It's done routinely for industrial b buildings. If there was any market for concrete houses, it would be done for them.
"Full grassroots and PAC management functionality"
"Legislator targeting".
Run the online demo. Especially the "asset tracking system", which generates maps It looks like Hollywood's vision of something a corrupt organization would use. But it's real.
The Sony PS2 and PS3.
Post von Neumann is already here.
For that matter, GPUs are already far from von Neumman architectures.
Hosting services need to ask some questions when signing up new customers. Is the customer's DNS infomation valid? Does it match the info associated with the credit card? If the customer claims to be a business, do they have a business license, or a certificate of incorporation, or a fictitious name statement on file, or a Dun and Bradstreet rating? All those things can be checked, often automatically. And they should be.
The whole point of MAPS and the RBL is to provide some overkill and put fear into hosting services, so that they won't host spammers. It's working. Most spammers have to host offshore now, usually in China. "Bulletproof web hosting" is getting harder to find, now that AOL and Microsoft are targeting those companies.
The Century Theaters booked half their screens for the film. They hired extra security guards. They were ready for huge crowds.
On opening day, many of the seats were empty. No lines. Bored security guards.
It was over.
The expert systems people hit a wall in the mid-1980s. An expert system is really just a way of storing manually-created rules. And those rules are written with great difficulty. There used to be expert systems people claiming that strong AI would come from rule-based systems. (Read Feigenbaum's "The Fifth Generation"). You don't hear that any more.
Hill-climbing systems (which include neural nets, genetic algorithms, artificial evolution, and simulated annealing) all work by trying to optimize some evaluation function. If the evaluation function is getting better, progress is being made. But what this really means is that the answer is encoded in the evaluation function. If the evaluation function is noisy (as in, "does the creature survive") and requires major simultaneous changes to make progress (as in "evolutionary jumps"), hill climbing doesn't work very well. There is progress, though. Koza's group at Stanford is moving forward, slowly.
The formal logic people never made much progress on real-world problems. Formalizing the problem is the hard part. Once the right formalism has been found, the manipulation required to solve it isn't that hard. There's not much work going on there any more.
The reactive robotics people also hit a wall. Literally, as every Roomba owner knows. Reactive control will get you up to the low end of insect-level AI, but then you're stuck.
Reverse-engineering brains still has promise, but we can't do it yet. Progress is coming from trying to reverse engineer simple animals like sea slugs. (Sea slugs have about 20,000 neurons. Big ones.) Efforts are underway to completely work out the wiring. Mammals are a long ways off.
Lately, there's been a trend towards "faking AI". This comes under such names as "social computing". The idea is to pick up cues and act intelligent when interacting with humans, even if there's no comprehension. This may have applications in the call center industry, but it's not intelligence.
I run one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot. On a problem like that, you can definitively fail, which means there's the potential for real progress. That's why it's worth doing.
It's almost, but not quite, time for spyware removal programs to remove Flash as hostile code. It's probably time for programs like AdAware to offer the user the option of easily removing Flash. Perhaps with a message like this:
"Macromedia Flash is a program used primarily to deliver advertising messages. It can turn on your microphone and camera (if present) and transmit the results to advertisers, store personalized data on your machine and transmit it to advertisers, and play commercials with audio. Do you want to remove Macromedia Flash?"
Remember, everything in the inventory was designed with far less compute power than today's desktops.
First "Altair Nanotechnologies" basically makes specialty powders for surface chemistry applications. Calling this "nanotechnology" is a stretch. What they actually do, as a business, is make titanium dioxide powder, the pigment used in white paint. Read their 10-K filing, which is more honest than the press releases they put out.
Altair claims to be working with the "Energy Storage Research Group" at Rutgers University. That did exist, and, sadly, it's one of the leftover bits of what was once Bell Labs. But what's left of it, at Rutgers, doesn't seem to be doing anything in this area. They're concentrating on capacitors and on hydrogen storage. The Rutgers articles on battery technology seem to stop around 2003.
If you look really hard, you can finally find the technical paper on this. It's from mPhase. They're actually trying to make the battery. But what they say they're doing is building a battery with a very long shelf life for use as a backup power source in telecom gear. That's useful, especiallly since mPhase makes DSL gear for telecom carriers. There's gear out on poles that needs some backup power capability, and most existing batteries don't last long enough to be useful in that environment.
But this is a long way from Electric Cars Real Soon Now.
"Code morphing" for the x86 instruction set never made too much sense, because making fast x86 machines is well understood, although painful. AMD already did some "code morphing" at cache load time; they inflate all the instructions to a constant length. (Intel does it differently.) For a CISC instruction set with inherent speed problems (the DEC VAX comes to mind) "code morphing" could be a big win. But there's no market for a fast VAX at this late date.
It looks like they put their automation budget into the SMT part of the operation. The components with leads are inserted by hand. Automated machinery exists for those jobs, but they may not want to be stuck with it as it becomes obsolete. As more parts go SMT, more of those manual jobs will be eliminated.
It's unusual to see a modern factory with eight floors. Note how they use their automated warehouse as a vertical transportation system for parts. That's unusual, too. Factories designed around automated warehouses were once more popular. The original Apple plant in Fremont was built that way. But it tends to lead to too much work in process in storage. It's the opposite of the "just in time" approach. However, "just in time" works well only when the assembler has more clout than their parts suppliers, as in the auto industry.
The Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that retailers are liable when rebates aren't paid by the manufacturer. So, now that they can't pass the buck on rebates, retailers want out of them.
The "privacy" aspect is overrated. All my web sites have valid domain registration information. The phone numbers are real and are answered. E-mail works. (Spam is filtered out, of course.) I've had two threats in ten years. (The invention broker scam is out of business, and the company who complained about Downside is down 97% from its peak.)
There is absolutely no right to run a business anonymously. In many states, it's a crime.
Fewer registrars are offering "private domain registration". GoDaddy is backing away from it. Under the CAN-SPAM act, proxy registration expose the nominal owner, usually the registrar, to liability. They're the name you sue. Domains by Proxy and Verisign still offer private registration, but they will, if there's any risk to them, immediately disclose the real owner of a domain. Check those "sole discretion" clauses in the contract.
For a domain of any value, "proxy registration" creates real problems. If you have a dispute with the proxy company, they have control of the situation. And if they go bankrupt, it's even worse. The domain becomes an asset in bankruptcy, and you're just an ordinary creditor.
If you want lightweight anonymity for your family pictures, get an AOL or GeoCities account.
With a tie-in to ChoicePoint, products you'd be interested in would be displayed. Just like Minority Report.
What is the ID SNIPER rifle?
It is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis.