He has a 5-axis robot with a cutting tool. That's enough to do real sculpture. Just grinding out a three-legged table with straight cuts is far less than the machine could do. This suggests the software being used isn't a real 5-axis CNC package. He needs HyperMill. Take a look of what that can do with a 5-axis mill.

Can you get several devices on the same phone number? Do they synchronize their contact lists? And, most important, are you going to be charged for two airtime plans?

From the article, writing about China:

The US used to be more about manufacturing, and there was no disgrace to being an engineer in a factory. There was a certain contempt for "college men" as impractical and lazy. That lasted through WWII and into the 1950s. Then came the post-war education boom, a vast number of college graduates, and, for a while, jobs for them. Then came information technology, and a huge cutback in paper-pushing.

China is going into their education boom with the paper-pushing era already over.

No, that was HalTek, a competitor of HalTed. HalTed is still there. They have a faded copy of a receipt from Steve Jobs, buying a used 'scope, on their bulletin board.

Address space randomization is a form of security through obscurity. It's also an admission that your system security really sucks. The concept is that the code is full of exploitable buffer overflows, but address space randomization will make it harder for exploits to patch the right target area. So low-level exploits tend to crash the system, or at least just mess it up, rather than getting their code executed.

There are now "address spraying" attacks which counter address space randomization, so this is already an obsolete defensive measure.

We're entering an era where more countries have nuclear weapons. They've become too easy to make. Isotope separation used to take huge gaseous-diffusion plants. Entire cities were built just to enrich uranium. Centrifuge plants are now medium sized industrial park installations. That's URENCO's plant in New Mexico. It produces enough enriched uranium to power a sizable fraction of US reactors, and it's being expanded. A much smaller plant could enrich enough uranium for a few bombs.

Once you have enriched uranium, making a nuclear bomb isn't a huge job. As a build, it's roughly comparable to making an auto engine from scratch, a job that some auto racing shops can do. Machining uranium isn't that hazardous. Here's a how-to guide from Union Carbide from the 1980s. (Plutonium is a totally different story; there you need glove boxes, remote manipulators, and huge precautions against dust escaping.) There aren't many secrets left about how ordinary atomic bombs work. It's been almost 70 years, after all. (Some of the tricks of fusion weapons still haven't leaked out.)

We've been very lucky that this was a hard thing to do. But it's not that hard any more, and it keeps getting easier.

That cannot have happened by accident. Barracuda Networks should be charged with material support of terrorism for this.

There are far fewer middle managers than there used to be. Span of control (number of persons reporting to a manager) was typically 4-5 in the 1950s. Now it's typically up to around 8-10. This is a direct result of improved information technology. This implies less upward mobility.

Retail is shrinking. The US has a lot of closed stores and dead malls. They're not coming back. First Wal-Mart clobbered the small town main street, and now Amazon is clobbering what's left.

A less discussed side effect of information technology is that it's now possible to run bigger business units than before. Before heavy use of computers and networks, management and control problems of scaling tended to choke large businesses. Big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. Dividing companies into divisions was necessary just to deal with scaling issues. General Motors was the classic example of the division-based company. Each brand had its own factories.

That's much less true today. Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and Amazon don't seem to have scaling problems. Automakers run as units, with work farmed out to various factories as appropriate. With no real operational limits on business size, (and weak antitrust enforcement) the trend is towards a world where there are only a very few huge businesses in each category.

That's where the middle class went.

In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. Not because the components were reliable, but because the architecture was. If you design high-reliability systems, you should understand the architecture of Number 5 Crossbar.

Because Steve Jobs was a bully. I know someone who left Apple for Palm. He worked on the iPhone, stayed until it shipped, then left. He was a quiet guy and didn't like being yelled at by Steve Jobs.

Automatic burger machines date back to the 1950s. Back then, everybody ate the same thing, so assembly-like type systems were useful. American Machine and Foundry built an automated fast-food outlet in the 1960s, but it wasn't cost-effective. McDonalds tried this out back in 2003.

It's not that it's technically difficult. It's that the volume required to make it profitable is higher than most fast food outlets can sell.

We've heard this before from the top-down AI crowd. I went through Stanford CS in the 1980s when that crowd was running things, so I got the full pitch. The Cyc project is, amazingly, still going on after 29 years. The classic disease of the academic AI community was acting like strong AI was just one good idea away. It's harder than that.

On the other hand, it's quite likely that Google can come up with something that answers a large fraction of the questions people want to ask Google. Especially if they don't actually have to answer them, just display reasonably relevant information. They'll probably get a usable Siri/Wolfram Alpha competitor.

The long slog to AI up from the bottom is going reasonably well. We're through the "AI Winter". Optical character recognition works quite well. Face recognition works. Automatic driving works. (DARPA Grand Challenge) Legged locomotion works. (BigDog). This is real progress over a decade ago.

Scene understanding and manipulation in uncontrolled environments, not so much. Willow Garage has towel-folding working, and can now match and fold socks. The DARPA ARM program is making progress very slowly. Watch their videos to see really good robot hardware struggling to slowly perform very simple manipulation tasks. DARPA is funding the DARPA Humanoid Challenge to kick some academic ass on this. (The DARPA challenges have a carrot and a stick component. The prizes get the attention, but what motivates major schools to devote massive efforts to these projects are threats of a funding cutoff if they can't get results. Since DARPA started doing this under Tony Tether, there's been a lot more progress.)

Slowly, the list of tasks robots can do increases. More rapidly, the cost of the hardware decreases, which means more commercial applications. The Age of Robots isn't here yet, but it's coming. Not all that fast. Robots haven't reached the level of even the original Apple II in utility and acceptance. Right now, I think we're at the level of the early military computer systems, approaching the SAGE prototype stage. (SAGE was an 1950s air defense system. It had real time computers, data communication links, interactive graphics, light guns, and control of remote hardware. The SAGE prototype was the first system to have all that. Now, everybody has all that on their phone. It took half a century to get here from there.)

"Leveraged support model" does not mean what you think it means.

Right. The current record for all solar cells is 44%. 27% has been achieved without rare materials.

When you see indium and gallium in the materials list, it's not going to be a high-volume product.

The obvious company to buy the XBox line would be Hon Hai Precision Industries, the parent of Foxconn. They already make the XBox. Hon Hai's CEO wants to develop a global brand of their own. It would just mean Hon Hai taking over a slightly larger portion of the supply and marketing chain for something they already make.