No, you really need calculus in computing today if you're going to get above the peon level. This is recent. I went through Stanford for a MSCS in 1985, and it was all discrite math - number theory, automata, mathematical logic. You didn't even need an FPU back then. That was sort of true until the mid-1990s or so. Then it changed.
Today, it's machine learning, machine vision, deep neural nets, Bayesian statistics, adaptive control... That's all number-crunching intensive. Today, advertising requires calculus. The algorithms behind Google, Facebook, and Amazon all involve heavy number-crunching. So does most of the "big data" stuff. Then there's quantitative finance.
There's an outsourcing firm in India which starts 23,000 people on a six month course in programming twice a year. That's the competition at the low end. You need to know a lot more than they do, and that does not mean knowing Javascript quirks.
These "online courses" are mostly the same old crap repackaged for online distribution. Videos of actual blackboards, in some cases. It's not a semi-intelligent program teaching you the subject, something that's quite feasible for calculus and much of basic math.
It merely makes it harder to craft a working exploit from bugs like buffer overflows, but not impossible.
Right. Address space randomization is a form of "security by obscurity". There are "spraying attacks" which try patching multiple likely locations. If you can execute some kind of code on the target machine in a sandbox environment like Javascript in a browser, and also have an exploit which gets you down to the machine level, you can have Javascript which searches for the right place to patch.
Address space randomization has the downside of making bugs less reproduceable, making it easier for developers to deny their existence and refuse to fix them.
The Broadcom BCM283 system on a chip is impressive, cramming all that capability into one cheap part. So is the Allwinner, which is similar, costs $7, and is the basis of tablets that cost $40. The Raspberry Pi is just a breakout board with a crappy connector layout. There are lots of other ARM boards, most with better layouts.
This seems like it utilizes swarm/schooling behavior.
Right. That goes back to Craig Reynolds' "Boids" paper, and is the basis for much crowd behavior in movies and video games. In the real world, it's less useful. The general idea is that there are attracting and repelling fields, and you add up the fields and get a direction vector. This works OK in not-too-crowded spaces. It's great for birds and fish. When there are turning circle limits, or narrow lane limits, it's not as useful.
We tried this approach on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004-2005. It wouldn't work in tight spots. We had to go with a completely different approach. We ended up projecting alternative curved paths in front of the vehicle out to stopping distance and picking the best one.
It looks like these Nissan robots are slow, round, and can turn in place. That's the ideal case for a flocking algorithm.
"Famous for being famous" used to be a Hollywood thing. (Angelyne is considered to have invented this. In the 1980s, she rented billboards in LA to promote herself.) Now it's a Silicon Valley thing too. Paul Saffo and Vivek Wadhwa come to mind as heavily into self-promotion but lacking a track record of results. Nicholas Negroponte (MIT Media Lab, One Laptop Per Child) is close, but he actually got some real things done in his younger days.
As with Hollywood, it helps to be good-looking. Shai Agassi, former CEO of Better Place, the failed car-recharging company, was like that. I've met him. He's very good looking, a good speaker, and his business plan was bullshit. His company got over half a billion dollars in funding before it went bust.
It's probably worse in "social", but I try to ignore that crowd.
Will autonomous vehicles have to have a driver on board? If not then delivery companies would love the idea of sacking all theirs. The public might not like having to fetch their parcels from a truck pulled up on the street outside their house, rather than have them delivered to the door, but meh.
Just use an autonomous quadrotor for the last hundred feet. You could even deliver to apartments that had a small landing pad outside a window, maybe on a balcony or on top of an air conditioner.
Buy a MariaDB support contract. If your business uses databases, this gets you access to the MariaDB developers. It might help you get rid of some expensive Oracle databases.
Yahoo Finance, which was very popular in the financial community, has also been "redesigned". Yahoo Finance was popular because you put in a ticker symbol and you got a chart and all the key performance numbers on one screen. Yahoo was the first to have stock charts where you could easily change the time period displayed, and investors liked that.
Now, there are four rows of Yahoo menu bars at the top of a stock symbol page. There's a big Flash ad at the top. There's a "trade now" button. ("Please provide feedback on the new Trade Now function.") There's another ad. There are links on the left. That's all you get "above the fold", before scrollling.
Below the "fold", there are some links to "reports" Then there are those annoying "Ad topics that might interest you" links. (Not Outbrain, Yahoo does this in house.) There's a table of the top holdings in the fund. Continued scrolling finally gets to the numbers that matter: YTD return, 5-year return, beta, etc.
Yahoo has completely missed the point of why investors go to a page like that.
Microsoft's big problem is simply that Windows 7 is quite good. Business desktops use it, they work fine, they crash rarely, and they get the job done. Microsoft conquered the driver quality problem by forcing drivers to pass the Static Driver Verifier, a proof of correctness system which looks at source code to see if it can buffer-overflow, make improper calls, or otherwise crash the kernel. That took care of about half of crashes. The other half, from Microsoft's own code, were handled by a system which classifies core dumps by commonality, so they can collect core dumps with the same cause, then find and fix the problem. So Microsoft conquered the big problem that business cares about - Making It Work.
Businesses see no need to "upgrade". Certainly not to Windows 8. Or Office N+1. It won't help the business.
Microsoft struggles with being "cool". Apple does well with "cool", but nobody else does. It's not clear it will help in the post-Jobs era. (Olivetti once made beautiful office machines. It didn't help them. Most major museums of modern art have some Olivetti products, but few offices did.)
What really made the iPod work was deals with the music industry. Something that many people miss is why Jobs was able to pull that off. Jobs was also CEO of Pixar, and thus, as a major film studio head, at the top of the Hollywood hierarchy. So he was able to deal with the music industry from a position of superiority. That's what made iTunes. (The hierarchy in Hollywood is very real, and very rigid. Ask anybody in the industry.) That's what re-launched Apple. The Mac was below 10% market share, and was stuck there for years, even after Jobs took over again.
There's room for a breakthrough in user interfaces. The rectangular grid of single-purpose icons is lame.
We can be sure that breakthrough will not come from the open source community.
The simulated challenge back in June revealed that the entrants' movement control software isn't very good yet. The winning team's simulated robot fell down 12 times. DARPA has posted only heavily censored videos of the results, possibly because they're so embarrassingly bad.
Some of the blame attaches to the simulator used.
The Gazebo simulator's physics engine, which is borrowed from video games, is not good enough for the job. Video game simulators use tricks that look OK, but aren't physically realistic. That's no good when you're using them to match a real robot, or even if you're doing control based on reported forces from the simulator.
This should be fixed in early 2014 when they get an honest physics engine from Mike Sherman, who knows what he's doing. (If you need a accurate humanoid robot simulator right now, try OpenHRP3, from AIST in Japan.)
I suspect that the December 2013 event, which will be public, will be rather disappointing. But the planned 2014 event may be very impressive.
That's how it went with 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge for automatic driving, which was so pathetic it was covered by the Comedy Channel. Then in 2005, all the robot vehicles at the event could drive autonomously without running into anything and several finished the whole course with good times. The second day of the 2005 Grand Challenge was the moment when automatic driving became real to the world.
Well, what does this slide refer to? It's titled "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Outline of water processing facilities" and dates from June 4, 2011.
Their water processing facility
doesn't work yet."Recent leaks from a novel type of radioactive water treatment device, currently under trial runs at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, occurred from corrosion holes in welds, Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant operator, said July 25, 2013."
It's been years since the event, and Fukushima still doesn't have a radioactive water processing plant. The US has dealt with this problem before, both at 3 Mile Island and some Superfund sites. Water itself doesn't become radioactive (except for tritium, which has a 12 year half life); as with fallout, the radioactives are mostly solids in the water, and can be removed and converted to smaller amounts of solid waste.
With a processing plant, they could reuse the cooling water, instead of building more and more storage tanks.
Not sure how an OS tuned to run on under-powered laptops would be a good choice to use as a server OS.
Me either. Chrome "OS" is mostly a user interface on top of Linux. A server doesn't need a user interface.
If anything, there's an argument for a much simpler server OS than Linux. Something that's more like a virtual machine manager with remote facilities for loading, starting, and monitoring client image. The client images need a minimal OS that's more like a run-time library - no file systems, no drivers, no GUI.
Amazon kills competition. Great!
People have to find new jobs. Robots work for Amazon.
Man, that really sucks. . ..
Amazon used to be a hand-picking operation, where computers told the people what to do. Then Amazon bought Kiva Robotics, which was already handling about 10% of online orders with their mobile robots. Those new Amazon warehouses have lots of mobile robots and very few people. "15 minutes from click to ship."
As for jobs making the robots, Kiva Systems has only 250 employees. A few robot factories, a modest number of huge automated warehouses, and maybe half of the whole retail sector disappears.
It's even fuel efficient. The biggest energy consumption in groceries is the trip by the two-ton SUV to the grocery store to move 20 pounds of products.
I've always been skeptical of other people picking out my groceries. On the other hand, I must admit that (at least in its Seattle delivery area) Amazon Fresh does an impressive job of delivering decent produce.
You think that happens by accident? It's done by machine vision. Fruit and vegetable processing plants have automated sorting machines on their production lines. Even peas can be individually inspected. That video is worth watching. A huge stream of peas feeds through the machine at high speed, and the peas are inspected with cameras and lasers in flight as they come off a wide, fast conveyor belt. Air jets turn on for milliseconds to knock the rejects into the reject bin, and only good peas make it to the output conveyor. A hundred humans couldn't sort peas that fast.
The video demonstrates that it actually works. He's added about 2000 invented words to the vocabulary, most of which are either shortcuts for strings or navigational commands. This might be useful for doing technical work on smartphones, where typing sucks.
One area where this has potential is 3D animation and engineering software. There, you're constantly going back and forth between pointing at geometry and other input. There are various ways to do this, but voice input hasn't been used effectively yet.
It seems dweebish, but then, I never thought the day would come when about half the population would be walking around looking at 3" screens.
There are a lot of junk online courses out there. A lot of them are simply videos of lectures, repurposed as "online courses". Stanford does a lot of that. Their original machine learning class was like that, and it is painful. Especially since the instructor's blackboard writing (yes, it's video of a real chalk blackboard) is messy. This in a field which has its own unique (and not very good) notation.
Khan Academy has courses which consist of a color etch-a-sketch display of the instructor's writing plus a voice-over. I viewed the lectures for forces and torques recently. The instructor had clockwise and counterclockwise reversed, used a multiply symbol where he needed an add, and went from talking about a body in free space to one pinned at a pivot point without mentioning that he'd shifted. Not only is the production value very low, nobody is reviewing that stuff, or even proofreading it.
MIT's course on rotating electrical machinery is basically the class notes from a course. There are a few drawings, then endless math derivations. You don't get the labs online.
I've seen some good online courses, but most of this stuff is a low-budget conversion of old lecture and notes.
Bitcoin would be useful if it weren't such a slimeball magnet. The basic feature of Bitcoins is irrevocable unidirectional funds transfer between anonymous remote parties. This is the scammer's dream. Scammers don't have to worry too much about the marks coming after them with cops or baseball bats. So just about every financial scheme known has been tried in the tiny Bitcoin world in the last two years.
Even the "legitimate" Bitcoin companies are flakes. Most of the "online wallet" companies turned out to be scams. Several of the "exchanges" turned out to be scams. The previous market leader, Mt. Gox, stopped paying out on US dollar withdrawals two months ago. (Whether they're broke, incompetent, or persecuted is a subject of active debate. They claim problems with their banking relationships that prevent withdrawals, but continue to accept deposits.)
Bitcoin could have been a useful petty cash system for the Internet. If you could buy song downloads or MMORPG game items with it, it would be convenient and widely used. But that's not happening. You can buy WordPress hosted blog upgrades with Bitcoins, but that's about the most mainstream thing you can do.
Way back when, I placed a pre-order on a small BitCoin miner from Butterfly Labs. Later they sent me an e-mail wanting to know if I wanted to continue with the order, or get a refund back to my PayPal account. I chose the refund. Thank God!
Good move. Butterfly Labs has a large number of angry customers on the Bitcoin forums. They deliver months late or not at all. The Bitcoin "difficulty" level is now increasing so fast that late hardware is unprofitable when delivered.
The original design capacity for Eurotunnel was supposed to be 30 trains per hour in each direction. But with the present signalling system (classic fixed block), it's only 20 trains per hour. They never reach that, though, much to the annoyance of Eurotunnel's financial backers. They have far more capacity than they need. Surprisingly, the tunnel hasn't totally replaced car ferries, although it did put the hovercraft ferries out of business. There are shuttles, through passenger trains, and freight trains all being funneled into the tunnels.
This is a real worry for SF to LA high speed rail. If built, it may be way underutilized.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you really need calculus in computing today if you're going to get above the peon level. This is recent. I went through Stanford for a MSCS in 1985, and it was all discrite math - number theory, automata, mathematical logic. You didn't even need an FPU back then. That was sort of true until the mid-1990s or so. Then it changed.
Today, it's machine learning, machine vision, deep neural nets, Bayesian statistics, adaptive control... That's all number-crunching intensive. Today, advertising requires calculus. The algorithms behind Google, Facebook, and Amazon all involve heavy number-crunching. So does most of the "big data" stuff. Then there's quantitative finance.
There's an outsourcing firm in India which starts 23,000 people on a six month course in programming twice a year. That's the competition at the low end. You need to know a lot more than they do, and that does not mean knowing Javascript quirks.
These "online courses" are mostly the same old crap repackaged for online distribution. Videos of actual blackboards, in some cases. It's not a semi-intelligent program teaching you the subject, something that's quite feasible for calculus and much of basic math.
It merely makes it harder to craft a working exploit from bugs like buffer overflows, but not impossible.
Right. Address space randomization is a form of "security by obscurity". There are "spraying attacks" which try patching multiple likely locations. If you can execute some kind of code on the target machine in a sandbox environment like Javascript in a browser, and also have an exploit which gets you down to the machine level, you can have Javascript which searches for the right place to patch.
Address space randomization has the downside of making bugs less reproduceable, making it easier for developers to deny their existence and refuse to fix them.
The Broadcom BCM283 system on a chip is impressive, cramming all that capability into one cheap part. So is the Allwinner, which is similar, costs $7, and is the basis of tablets that cost $40. The Raspberry Pi is just a breakout board with a crappy connector layout. There are lots of other ARM boards, most with better layouts.
It's written in C and it's a buffer overflow exploit, right?
We warned you. You didn't listen. Now suffer.
This seems like it utilizes swarm/schooling behavior.
Right. That goes back to Craig Reynolds' "Boids" paper, and is the basis for much crowd behavior in movies and video games. In the real world, it's less useful. The general idea is that there are attracting and repelling fields, and you add up the fields and get a direction vector. This works OK in not-too-crowded spaces. It's great for birds and fish. When there are turning circle limits, or narrow lane limits, it's not as useful.
We tried this approach on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004-2005. It wouldn't work in tight spots. We had to go with a completely different approach. We ended up projecting alternative curved paths in front of the vehicle out to stopping distance and picking the best one.
It looks like these Nissan robots are slow, round, and can turn in place. That's the ideal case for a flocking algorithm.
It looks like Slashdot is having server problems:
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [byline] block not found.
"Famous for being famous" used to be a Hollywood thing. (Angelyne is considered to have invented this. In the 1980s, she rented billboards in LA to promote herself.) Now it's a Silicon Valley thing too. Paul Saffo and Vivek Wadhwa come to mind as heavily into self-promotion but lacking a track record of results. Nicholas Negroponte (MIT Media Lab, One Laptop Per Child) is close, but he actually got some real things done in his younger days.
As with Hollywood, it helps to be good-looking. Shai Agassi, former CEO of Better Place, the failed car-recharging company, was like that. I've met him. He's very good looking, a good speaker, and his business plan was bullshit. His company got over half a billion dollars in funding before it went bust.
It's probably worse in "social", but I try to ignore that crowd.
Will autonomous vehicles have to have a driver on board? If not then delivery companies would love the idea of sacking all theirs. The public might not like having to fetch their parcels from a truck pulled up on the street outside their house, rather than have them delivered to the door, but meh.
Just use an autonomous quadrotor for the last hundred feet. You could even deliver to apartments that had a small landing pad outside a window, maybe on a balcony or on top of an air conditioner.
Buy a MariaDB support contract. If your business uses databases, this gets you access to the MariaDB developers. It might help you get rid of some expensive Oracle databases.
No, nobody is going to steal your board game design. Or play it.
Yahoo Finance, which was very popular in the financial community, has also been "redesigned". Yahoo Finance was popular because you put in a ticker symbol and you got a chart and all the key performance numbers on one screen. Yahoo was the first to have stock charts where you could easily change the time period displayed, and investors liked that.
Now, there are four rows of Yahoo menu bars at the top of a stock symbol page. There's a big Flash ad at the top. There's a "trade now" button. ("Please provide feedback on the new Trade Now function.") There's another ad. There are links on the left. That's all you get "above the fold", before scrollling.
Below the "fold", there are some links to "reports" Then there are those annoying "Ad topics that might interest you" links. (Not Outbrain, Yahoo does this in house.) There's a table of the top holdings in the fund. Continued scrolling finally gets to the numbers that matter: YTD return, 5-year return, beta, etc.
Yahoo has completely missed the point of why investors go to a page like that.
First off, the Tech Titans that go to Burning Man fly in private jets and stay in "Pay to Play" camps.
Nine air charter companies now serve Burning Man. No waiting in line with the peons, either. The temporary airport (88NV) has its own ticket gate.
If you really need a phone, get an Iridium phone. Reception should be great; the whole sky is visible on the playa.
Microsoft's big problem is simply that Windows 7 is quite good. Business desktops use it, they work fine, they crash rarely, and they get the job done. Microsoft conquered the driver quality problem by forcing drivers to pass the Static Driver Verifier, a proof of correctness system which looks at source code to see if it can buffer-overflow, make improper calls, or otherwise crash the kernel. That took care of about half of crashes. The other half, from Microsoft's own code, were handled by a system which classifies core dumps by commonality, so they can collect core dumps with the same cause, then find and fix the problem. So Microsoft conquered the big problem that business cares about - Making It Work.
Businesses see no need to "upgrade". Certainly not to Windows 8. Or Office N+1. It won't help the business.
Microsoft struggles with being "cool". Apple does well with "cool", but nobody else does. It's not clear it will help in the post-Jobs era. (Olivetti once made beautiful office machines. It didn't help them. Most major museums of modern art have some Olivetti products, but few offices did.)
What really made the iPod work was deals with the music industry. Something that many people miss is why Jobs was able to pull that off. Jobs was also CEO of Pixar, and thus, as a major film studio head, at the top of the Hollywood hierarchy. So he was able to deal with the music industry from a position of superiority. That's what made iTunes. (The hierarchy in Hollywood is very real, and very rigid. Ask anybody in the industry.) That's what re-launched Apple. The Mac was below 10% market share, and was stuck there for years, even after Jobs took over again.
There's room for a breakthrough in user interfaces. The rectangular grid of single-purpose icons is lame. We can be sure that breakthrough will not come from the open source community.
The competition is in December 2013, and this team may not be ready by then. Here are the other robots being entered.
The simulated challenge back in June revealed that the entrants' movement control software isn't very good yet. The winning team's simulated robot fell down 12 times. DARPA has posted only heavily censored videos of the results, possibly because they're so embarrassingly bad.
Some of the blame attaches to the simulator used. The Gazebo simulator's physics engine, which is borrowed from video games, is not good enough for the job. Video game simulators use tricks that look OK, but aren't physically realistic. That's no good when you're using them to match a real robot, or even if you're doing control based on reported forces from the simulator. This should be fixed in early 2014 when they get an honest physics engine from Mike Sherman, who knows what he's doing. (If you need a accurate humanoid robot simulator right now, try OpenHRP3, from AIST in Japan.)
I suspect that the December 2013 event, which will be public, will be rather disappointing. But the planned 2014 event may be very impressive.
That's how it went with 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge for automatic driving, which was so pathetic it was covered by the Comedy Channel. Then in 2005, all the robot vehicles at the event could drive autonomously without running into anything and several finished the whole course with good times. The second day of the 2005 Grand Challenge was the moment when automatic driving became real to the world.
Well, what does this slide refer to? It's titled "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Outline of water processing facilities" and dates from June 4, 2011.
Their water processing facility doesn't work yet. "Recent leaks from a novel type of radioactive water treatment device, currently under trial runs at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, occurred from corrosion holes in welds, Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant operator, said July 25, 2013."
It's been years since the event, and Fukushima still doesn't have a radioactive water processing plant. The US has dealt with this problem before, both at 3 Mile Island and some Superfund sites. Water itself doesn't become radioactive (except for tritium, which has a 12 year half life); as with fallout, the radioactives are mostly solids in the water, and can be removed and converted to smaller amounts of solid waste.
With a processing plant, they could reuse the cooling water, instead of building more and more storage tanks.
Not sure how an OS tuned to run on under-powered laptops would be a good choice to use as a server OS.
Me either. Chrome "OS" is mostly a user interface on top of Linux. A server doesn't need a user interface.
If anything, there's an argument for a much simpler server OS than Linux. Something that's more like a virtual machine manager with remote facilities for loading, starting, and monitoring client image. The client images need a minimal OS that's more like a run-time library - no file systems, no drivers, no GUI.
Amazon kills competition. Great! .
People have to find new jobs.
Robots work for Amazon.
Man, that really sucks. . .
Amazon used to be a hand-picking operation, where computers told the people what to do. Then Amazon bought Kiva Robotics, which was already handling about 10% of online orders with their mobile robots. Those new Amazon warehouses have lots of mobile robots and very few people. "15 minutes from click to ship."
As for jobs making the robots, Kiva Systems has only 250 employees. A few robot factories, a modest number of huge automated warehouses, and maybe half of the whole retail sector disappears.
It's even fuel efficient. The biggest energy consumption in groceries is the trip by the two-ton SUV to the grocery store to move 20 pounds of products.
I've always been skeptical of other people picking out my groceries. On the other hand, I must admit that (at least in its Seattle delivery area) Amazon Fresh does an impressive job of delivering decent produce.
You think that happens by accident? It's done by machine vision. Fruit and vegetable processing plants have automated sorting machines on their production lines. Even peas can be individually inspected. That video is worth watching. A huge stream of peas feeds through the machine at high speed, and the peas are inspected with cameras and lasers in flight as they come off a wide, fast conveyor belt. Air jets turn on for milliseconds to knock the rejects into the reject bin, and only good peas make it to the output conveyor. A hundred humans couldn't sort peas that fast.
The video demonstrates that it actually works. He's added about 2000 invented words to the vocabulary, most of which are either shortcuts for strings or navigational commands. This might be useful for doing technical work on smartphones, where typing sucks.
One area where this has potential is 3D animation and engineering software. There, you're constantly going back and forth between pointing at geometry and other input. There are various ways to do this, but voice input hasn't been used effectively yet.
It seems dweebish, but then, I never thought the day would come when about half the population would be walking around looking at 3" screens.
There are a lot of junk online courses out there. A lot of them are simply videos of lectures, repurposed as "online courses". Stanford does a lot of that. Their original machine learning class was like that, and it is painful. Especially since the instructor's blackboard writing (yes, it's video of a real chalk blackboard) is messy. This in a field which has its own unique (and not very good) notation.
Khan Academy has courses which consist of a color etch-a-sketch display of the instructor's writing plus a voice-over. I viewed the lectures for forces and torques recently. The instructor had clockwise and counterclockwise reversed, used a multiply symbol where he needed an add, and went from talking about a body in free space to one pinned at a pivot point without mentioning that he'd shifted. Not only is the production value very low, nobody is reviewing that stuff, or even proofreading it.
MIT's course on rotating electrical machinery is basically the class notes from a course. There are a few drawings, then endless math derivations. You don't get the labs online.
I've seen some good online courses, but most of this stuff is a low-budget conversion of old lecture and notes.
Bitcoin would be useful if it weren't such a slimeball magnet. The basic feature of Bitcoins is irrevocable unidirectional funds transfer between anonymous remote parties. This is the scammer's dream. Scammers don't have to worry too much about the marks coming after them with cops or baseball bats. So just about every financial scheme known has been tried in the tiny Bitcoin world in the last two years.
Even the "legitimate" Bitcoin companies are flakes. Most of the "online wallet" companies turned out to be scams. Several of the "exchanges" turned out to be scams. The previous market leader, Mt. Gox, stopped paying out on US dollar withdrawals two months ago. (Whether they're broke, incompetent, or persecuted is a subject of active debate. They claim problems with their banking relationships that prevent withdrawals, but continue to accept deposits.)
Bitcoin could have been a useful petty cash system for the Internet. If you could buy song downloads or MMORPG game items with it, it would be convenient and widely used. But that's not happening. You can buy WordPress hosted blog upgrades with Bitcoins, but that's about the most mainstream thing you can do.
Way back when, I placed a pre-order on a small BitCoin miner from Butterfly Labs. Later they sent me an e-mail wanting to know if I wanted to continue with the order, or get a refund back to my PayPal account. I chose the refund. Thank God!
Good move. Butterfly Labs has a large number of angry customers on the Bitcoin forums. They deliver months late or not at all. The Bitcoin "difficulty" level is now increasing so fast that late hardware is unprofitable when delivered.
The original design capacity for Eurotunnel was supposed to be 30 trains per hour in each direction. But with the present signalling system (classic fixed block), it's only 20 trains per hour. They never reach that, though, much to the annoyance of Eurotunnel's financial backers. They have far more capacity than they need. Surprisingly, the tunnel hasn't totally replaced car ferries, although it did put the hovercraft ferries out of business. There are shuttles, through passenger trains, and freight trains all being funneled into the tunnels.
This is a real worry for SF to LA high speed rail. If built, it may be way underutilized.