Robotic maintenance was considered for SAGE in the 1950s. Robots were never built for that, but the SAGE racks were designed with easy-to-handle plug-in rack modules with all connections on the back.

(Vacuum tube failure wasn't a major operational problem with vacuum tube computers. For the UNIVAC I, normal procedure was to power up the machine and set it to 10% overvoltage mode for 10 minutes. This would burn out any tubes near failure. Those were replaced, and the machine would then run for the rest of the day without another tube problem. Since the machine had a dual CPU for self-checking, any problem would cause an immediate stop.)

"In your face from outer space" - Motto of the USAF Space Warfare Center, Falcon AFB.

That's from 1996. SWC never really quite lived up to that motto, and their successor, the Space Innovation & Development Center, is more of an R&D operation. It's becoming closer to reality, though.

We'll know it's real the first time some space-based weapon zaps an individual on the ground.

It's not really that tough a job. The thing is about 4 lanes wide, and not excessively tall. There's less than 20 miles of road movement at each end of the trip. So it's going to be a routine big move with brief road closures. Probably late at night.

The rest of the trip is by barge, down the East Coast, around Florida, and up the Mississippi, Illinois, and DesPlanes rivers to Chicago. There are standard barges which can easily handle something of that size. The locks on that route have 110 foot width.

Most of the articles about this are rehashes of the press release. They even use the same language. OK, there are 8 CPUs. But what kind?.

The new Kinect supposedly is a real per-pixel time-of-flight device. Any more info on that?

The War on the IRS

(The Bush-Obama administration's castration of the IRS.)

What was one of George W. Bush's first actions after he stole the 2000 presidential election (other than snarfing down a celebratory cheeseburger pizza)?

Bush shut down the "high roller" division in the IRS; that section which garnered the greatest recovered tax revenues by auditing the richest individuals and the richest corporations --- and redirected the IRS against much lower-income working Americans!

Now, this information about several IRS agents targeting the Tea Party and affiliated groups isn't breaking news --- they've been sitting on this for quite some time!

So why the sudden newsy firestorm now?

On the very same day this bullcrap spewed forth, on the IRS web site (please see special links below) an international, joint investigation was announced. Their target: trillions of untaxed dollars sitting in offshore tax havens (i.e., offshore financial centers, etc.). This investigation will be undertaken by the IRS, the UK and Australia, thanks to leaked data from these tax havens.

Now this is the big story which they are misdirecting our attention away from, the one not being covered by the CorporateMedia today!

Instead, we are treated to "breaking news" of the moronic type.

Now, I'm no fan of the IRS, and we all should realize by this time that the tax code was written by the super-rich to benefit the super-rich (one need only read IRS Rule 401(a)(5) which essentially states that structured inequality, that is, screw the workers, is legally acceptable to them to comprehend that), so this is the first real egalitarian action by the IRS in many decades, but the CorporateMedia and the Bush-Obama Administration wishes to kill it!

Support the IRS in their investigation and tell the gov't to ignore this bullcrap!

Special Links:

http://www.online-accounting-degrees.net/tax-havens/

http://www.icij.org/blog/2013/05/authorities-announce-tax-haven-investigation

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/IRS,-Australia-and-United-Kingdom-Engaged-in-Cooperative-Effort-to-Combat-Offshore-Tax-Evasion

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/05/it%E2%80%99s-high-time-the-irs-investigates-the-funding-of-the-tea-party/

Reading sources:

Treasure Islands, by Nicholas Shaxson

Offshore, by William Brittain-Catlin

Somebody didn't get the memo that vampires are over.

You can track this at a Barnes and Noble store by noting how many bookcases in the teen section are devoted to a subject. At peak, there were four cases of "Teen Paranormal Romance" and two of "New Teen Paranormal Romance". That dropped to three cases total, then two. "Survival" books are big now - there are two cases of Hunger Games imitations, not including the table of Hunger Games merch.

We already have "knowledge bases", "community support", and support outsourced to Far, Far Away. Microsoft did some work with Bayesian statistics to find out which questions a support tech should ask first. Much software already "phones home" to send trouble reports and crash dumps. There's been some good work on automated crash dump classification, to group similar crash dumps together and send them all to the same maintenance programmer.

Not entirely representative, but on my Jabber roster about 30% are Google people, and about half of them are Google employees. I wonder how many Google Talk users have no non-Google people on their roster, and will be happy to learn that Google has just decided that they can no longer talk to them.

One word. "Apps."

The OP made the point that with GSM hardware is decoupled from paid services, so he was talking about the advantage of the GSM (2GSM, UMTS, LTE) standard.

The GP is wrong in suggesting that it would have been shortsighted and is using a lot of the myths that Qualcomm spread about GSM to promote that view. Qualcomm could have made a decent phone standard, but they felt the carriers wanted "a digital version of AMPS" and that's pretty much, functionally, what they originally created, with messaging and data being grafted on, clumsily, later, in a game of catch up that they never really won. By the time the TIA standards finally supported SIM cards the carriers were so locked to a SIMless platform they weren't prepared to implement it. And at that point it was pretty much clear that GSM/UMTS standards were so far ahead that Qualcomm would never catch up.

CDMA is being phased out. Sometimes the market works... over a period of decades...

So out of 3 million people signed up with Coursera, only 900 have completed 10 or more courses, comparable to roughly a year of full-time schooling. Only 100 have completed 20 or more. That's a 99.97% dropout rate after one year.

This isn't going to replace other forms of education with stats like that.

It's easy to fuck up if you decide to try to do the entire thing yourself. If you go to a (cheap) tax preparer like H&R Block, you generally end up filing a tax return that's unlikely to be audited, and if it is is likely to be accurate as long as you answered the preparer's questions truthfully.

And if you're about to tell me how terrible it is you might need a tax preparer's services, then consider the fact that before such companies existed it was common to hire a considerably more expensive accountant to do this kind of thing. The tax code is only superficially more complex than it was fifty years ago.

Fine and jail you? Only if you've been dishonest, and continue to be dishonest throughout the audit.

OK, so this vaccine needs a booster every decade or so. Lots of vaccines are like that. The vaccines against tetanus and hepatitis A and B all need to be re-administered every few years. No big deal.