The New York Times Magazine of June 11, 2000 contains an article entitled "Tech 2010," which contains 32 predictions about technological innovations that will be introduced within the next ten years. Many of them involve information technology and have implications for electronic commerce.

Problem 1. [50 points] Innovation #6 is "The Train You’re Never Late For." You can read about it here. The idea is that people will ride individually in tracks (or tunnels) in personal vehicles (cocoons) made of fiberglass. You can’t be late for a train since to get to your destination all you have to do is put your vehicle on the track and you will be taken to your destination.

It’s not clear that this will be available to humans within ten years, but something similar might be useful for delivering products ordered over the Internet. If the world contained a maze of underground tunnels (let’s say, 3 feet in diameter) and such a tunnel went to every house and apartment, then we could potentially have a world-wide package delivery system. To send you something, a store could just drop it in a fiberglass sphere programmed with your address. If the spheres could travel at 100 miles per hour, then it would only take a day and a half to send something from New York to Los Angeles. (Deliveries from your supermarket would arrive in minutes.) It would take only 5 days to send something halfway around the Earth.

A) [10 points] Assume the delivery system would be similar to the Internet architecture. Explain what would correspond to routers, IP addresses and domain names. Would queues be required anywhere? Note that packages (analogous to packets) cannot be "dropped" in the physical world the way they can in the Internet. What would happen if they begin to pile up somewhere?

B) [10 points] What technology would you employ to automate the system? How would a package be identified? How would routing be accomplished?

C) [10 points] In your architecture, how many miles of tunnels would be required to connect 1 billion locations? (If the number frightens you, consider that the world has roads that go to this many places.) Assume that 10 billion packages per day would be delivered this way. What bandwidth do we need in the backbone tunnels? (Bandwidth here would be measured in packages per hour. A backbone tunnel is a major long-distance carrier, for example, from San Francisco to Tokyo.)

D) [10 points] What would be an intelligent way to charge for such delivery? Could the cost be lower than the mail, Fedex or UPS?

E) [10 points] Describe how you would connect the delivery system electronically with the Internet so that the locations of every package could be determined and the delivery time estimated to a high degree of precision. How would you deal with priority packages (for example, lifesaving medicine or perishable foods)?

Problem 2. [50 points] Innovation #24 is "The Watch That Is Your Lifeline To the World," a watch that contains a GPS, credit-card payment system, radio, TV, phone, Internet connection, etc. In short, the universal mobile device. Read about it here.

A) [10 points] Certainly if you lose your watch you don’t want the person who find it to be able to spend your money. Describe how you would (1) prevent the watch from being used by an unauthorized person; and (2) how your watch can determine whether or not you are the wearer so it can prove to remote sites (like banks and merchants) that you are the one that has it on.

B) [10 points] Now suppose you want to let someone (like your child) borrow your watch for the evening. You want to limit the amount they can spend but you don’t want them to be able to prove they are you. What kind of security or access control would allow this function?

C) [20 points] The wrist GPS will allow us to track the location of everyone (at least people who wear their watch) at all times. List five legitimate business uses for such a stream of information and tell (in one sentence) how the person being tracked would be helped by each use. List five bad uses of the information and tell how the person tracked would be harmed.

D) [10 points] Assume that data is taken every minute for 24 hours a day for every person on Earth. Of course, if we only record distances to within 30 feet then many consecutive readings will be identical (as during sleep, class, eating, etc.) (a) How many bytes per year would be required to store all this data without compression? (b) If a good lossless compression algorithm were used, estimate how many bytes per year would be required. (Do not guess. Make reasonable assumptions, state what they are, and base your answer on them.)