As an earthmoving project, each kilometer of wall is 18M cubic meters. The Panama Canal was about 250M cubic meters of earthmoving. So every 14KM of wall is one Panama Canal. The proposed Arabian Canal near Dubai (to create "valuable waterfront property" accessable by yacht) would require about 1100M cubic meters of earthmoving. So one Arabian Canal is about 60KM of wall.

In terms of speed, one Bagger 288 can move about 250K cubic meters of earth a day. That's 5KM of wall per year. With one such $100 million machine for every 100KM of wall, the project would take 20 years.

It's a big project, but not impossibly big. Just expensively big.

Procedural generation of outdoor scenes has been done for years. Decades, even. Works fine. Most of nature can be simulated with fractals, and basic terrain generators are simple. Speedtree turns out really nice trees and vegetation.

What's really tough is procedural generation of cities. There are programs that build a skyline, but so far, nobody has been able to procedurally generate a convincing city at high-detail level. There are systems that tried, like Introversion and Instant Architecture, but the sameness of the buildings makes for boring cities. It's easy to do this badly, but very hard to do it well.

It's not impossible. You'd need something like The Sims engine or SimCity, which grows cities over time in response to their occupants'' needs. That would be a big win. You could build something like GTA without an army of people constructing the real estate.

Right. Reporting is from buildings that are mostly unoccupied is really useful. Industrial facilities have used that for decades - unattended pumping stations, power substations, water level gauges, and storage buildings with air conditioning routinely phone home. They usually have very limited bandwidth - pager channels are often used. Usually, they send a message every few minutes with a few numbers and an "I'm fine" message. If there's trouble, they start sending alarm messages. This is the real, existing "Internet of Things", but it's called "M2M" (machine to machine) in the industry. Two-way pager channels, cellular-based pagers, and two way satellite links are used. So your pipeline pumping station can phone home from Outer Nowhere, or you can keep track of what the irrigation pumps on the far side of your farm are doing, or your vacation cabin can check in.

Lucas originally wanted this location for his monument to himself. It's in open space in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, with unobstructed views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco Bay, and Alcatraz. That's one of the great urban waterfront public spaces of the world. So that plan was very unpopular in SF. Another location was proposed, some unused piers a few miles down the waterfront in the tourist waterfront area, but that wasn't dramatic enough for Lucas.

Here's the API reference. It doesn't let you see or do much. I though the Nest was supposed to "learn" your behavior patterns, but if it does, that info isn't exposed in the API. You can look at the temperature and heat/cool/fan status, and maybe change the setpoints. You can tell if someone is home, and when they set the time for when they were coming back.

This isn't an API for the device. It's an API for a Google-hosted service that controls the device. Google is in total control of your home.

Yes. See Howard Hughes, Sr. (Not the airplane guy; his father, the oil-drilling guy.) He licensed the only good oil-well drill bits for a fraction of the revenue from the well.

As a 450GHz computing element, this is a long way off. But it might lead to better terahertz radar. Right now, operating in the terahertz range is painfully difficult. It's a strange region where both electronics and optics work, but not easily. This may be a more effective way to work in that range.

I pay my ISP (sonic.net) for Internet access and an IMAP account on an email server. They pay for backbone bandwidth. No advertising revenue is involved.

I pay HostGator a few dollars a month to host my web sites. No advertising revenue is involved. Hosting is amazingly cheap. Basic hosting today is cheaper than remote backup for your smartphone. If I want to put up an image, it goes on Hostgator, not some "sharing" site.

Google's original business model was to charge ISPs for access to their search engine. If I had to pay a few dollars a month for that, it would be fine. If Google dumped ads, "search personalization" and "social", the search engine would be much cheaper to run, and they could lay off most of their sales force.

Before we had "social networks", we had Usenet, which is completely distributed, redundant, and ad-free. Still around, too.

Maps, though. Those are expensive. Surprisingly, most of the map systems aren't ad-heavy.

This is a nice little trick. This has the potential to extend shared consistent memory multiprocessor designs to far larger numbers of processors. Whether this is a performance win remains to be seen. Good idea, though. Note that the prototype chip is just a feasibility test; they used an off the shelf Power CPU design, added their interconnect network, and send the job off to a fab. A production chip would have optimizations this does not.

We known only two general purpose multiprocessor architectures that are broadly useful - shared consistent memory multiprocessors, and clusters of machines with no shared memory. Dozens of other schemes have been tried - SIMD machines (the Connection Machine), non-shared memory with DMA to a bigger memory (the Cell), message passing to adjacent machines in N dimensions (Hypercube), message passing over an on-chip network (several examples), cross-CPU DMA access (Infiniband) and shared memory without cache consistency (Intel experimental). In all cases, the hardware worked, the programming was a problem from hell, and the concept was dropped. The Cell in the PS3 is the only high-volume product with an exotic multiprocessor architecture, and that was such a pain that the PS4 dropped it for a more conventional architecture.

It's a good thing that some of those weapons were brought to the prototype stage, but not to production. Today, there's a strong tendency to have only one program underway for major aircraft, leading to production of marginal aircraft like the F-35.

There are many smaller weapons, such as the XM8 assault rifle, which made it to prototype but were then cancelled. Guided ammo for small arms has been demonstrated, but it's still some ways from being miitarily useful.

Laser weapons are in the same state - there are working demos, but they're not worth the trouble yet. Diode laser powered weapons are now up to 10KW (big array of 10W or so diodes), and can shoot down small rockets and artillery shells in demos. Current thinking is that, at 50KW-100KW, they'll be militarily useful.

Blackberry may make a comeback as the "big business smartphone". All the other smartphones are slaves to Apple or Google or a carrier. Blackberry phones are slaves to the enterprise Blackberry server, and Blackberry itself doesn't see phone traffic. Blackberry is the only major vendor serious about security and encryption. Everybody else is into advertising revenue.

Unless there's some well organized exchange, as for stocks and bonds, the U.S. Marshals Service sells everything by auction. No Bitcoin exchange is solid enough for a transaction of this size.

I get to my desk around 7:30am, I might start actually working sometime after the 9:00 stand up. :) Maybe.

Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery was first published in 1957.

A higher gasoline tax beats the proposed alternative, monitoring all cars for distance driven.