The remaining producers of machine tools have either shifted production to other machine tool lines, or have moved production offshore.

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After all, this outcome was made virtually inevitable by the Europeans' unwillingness over the past week to implement or enforce what the United States hoped would be the three basic pillars of allied action -- the lifting of the arms embargo against Bosnian Muslims, air strikes and a total shut-down of the Danube and other essential supply lines for the Serbian war machine and economy.

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Once a design is set, different bits of the manufacturing process are tried out on computer: a virtual pipe-bending machine, for instance, makes sure that the fuel lines which snake their way through the airframe can be created without wrapping themselves around the machine and bringing it to a halt.

ECONOMIST: Manufacturing technology

Even common reverse engineering tools merely render malware as thousands of lines of garbled text more legible to machine than man.

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The company says that current production rates see one backhoe machine roll off one of its manufacturing lines every three minutes.

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Currently known as Peru 2000, this machine has been set up on corporatist lines, working in shanty towns, and among peasant farmers and small business.

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Along these lines, last June, Google connected together 16, 000 computer processors into a giant machine vision learning neural net and let them loose on YouTube.

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But among the tasks the machine can perform in a single step are edge detection, inversion, the identification of lines and shapes of different orientations, and the filling-in of concave shapes all things that are useful in image-processing, and not all of which can be managed by digital technology.

ECONOMIST: Analogue computing