Quite being a douchebag zealot. BSD and MIT are both perfectly fine open source licenses. If Haiku decided to close up their project, another team could take the last OSS release, fork it, and pick up where Haiku left off.
Wall Street is using models, because a large percentage (and growing) of U.S. business is NOT creating real long-term wealth. They're looking for something to analyze.
Close, but IMHO, not quite. I'd go with: "U.S. business is NOT creating real long-term wealth. They're creating short-term profits at the expense of long-term sustainability." And, of course, when you have computer models that successfully provide ungodly amounts of short-term ROI, big surprise that those businesses flocked to those models and failed to question the fundamentals of what they were doing.
Huh? CDS's would've existed regardless of the financial instrument being insured. And given it was a 100% unregulated market, yes, it's an excellent example of the dangers of hands-off government policy with respect to the financial industry.
Uh, you're contradicting yourself. If this statement is true:
The study of economics can therefore be viewed as a study of groups of self-interested participants working for their own betterment.
Then this statement is false;
What is being proposed here is to continue to view markets as purely mathematically modelable phenomena. Economic decisions occur on the most local of levels, the individual level. No model accounts for the variability of the individual.
Anyone who knows anything about game theory can tell you that groups of self-interested participants working for their own betterment is precisely the kind of thing game theory exists to model. And I have bad news for you: game theory is based on, you guessed it, mathematics. Moreover, your claim that "no model accounts for the variability of the individual" is simply absurd: the whole point is you *don't* need to look at the variability of the individual, as you *can* model they behaviour of groups as an aggregate, as the noise of individual variability tends to cancel itself out.
As an aside, Austrian economists had no monopoly on knowledge of the impending crisis. Plenty of economists, Keynesian or otherwise, could've told you that sub-prime mortgages being used as the foundation for an economic house of cards was going to lead to a crash. And you didn't need to be omniscient to see that government policy (keeping interest rates extremely low) was leading to a misallocation of investment funds into real estate. Furthermore, you need only look at the CDS debacle to see what happens when government opts for a hands-off approach to markets, as you seem to be proposing.
I really wish wall street would get off their 'risk models' fetish.
I think you're slightly off base, here. Risk models and the like aren't fundamentally a bad thing if they're used as a *tool* for guiding investment strategies. The problem, I think, was that too many looked at the output of any given model, and then proceeded to internalize the results wholesale with doing even a basic gut check. I mean, come on, does it really take a genius to realize that handing out huge mortgages to people who can't afford them is actually a bad idea?
In short, the real problem is Wall Street's movement away from a blending of techniques that includes good ol' fashioned common sense. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of short-term gain available to those who are willing to take silly risks makes it virtually inevitable that, left to their own devices, the financial industry would once again walk up to the abyss and then leap off to catch that last nickle. Which is why government regulation of the financial industry is absolutely *vital* for a stable, thriving economy.
The only thing I can crib about is x86 hardware compatibility - that part sucks pretty bad.
Well, that and, let's face it, their userland is *incredibly* primitive. Sure, it's POSIX compliant, but that's about all you can say for it. Until you add the GNU toolset, it's deeply painful to use on a day-to-day basis.
That's an interesting opinion. All I know is that there would be little benefit to sending an equivalent to any of the Mars lander missions to the Moon. They wouldn't have added much beyond what Apollo already figured out.
Also bullshit. The reason we don't bother sending rovers to the moon is because nothing interesting actually happens on the surface. Anything we might want to look at is easily discovered with high-resolution cameras operating in lunar orbit.
Contrast this with Mars where interesting geological formations, not to mention potential biochemical activity, make on-the-ground investigation far more interesting and rewarding.
How about nine months or more.
Uhuh. I'll believe it when I see it. Hell, we don't even have a decent solution to radiation protection for the trip to, and mission on, Mars. And you're expecting astronauts to settle on the surface for *nine months*? Sure.
Absolutely. If you're committing hundreds of tons of mass to humans for life support, shielding and other purposes, then an extra few tons for science equipment is not that big a deal.
You *really* don't understand the economics of space travel, do you? It costs somewhere around $10k *per pound* to launch something into orbit, let alone on a trajectory to Mars. Hell, a large number of the design decisions that went into building the shuttle involved keeping weight down. In short: when you're planning a launch, *every single pound counts*.
There are economies of scale to a large mission.
If you believe that, you don't understand what "economies of scale" means. So let me define it for you: economies of scale means something gets cheaper if you do it in the large. Space travel is *not like that*. Every single ounce you add adds to the launch cost. That's just life in the world of chemical rockets.
Hell, if you want to talk about scaling, scaling up robotic missions makes a *lot* more sense. More robots don't need more life support, more supplies, more living quarters, etc. They just need room on the rocket. That's it.
It's embarrassing that there still are people who insist that a rover that moves maybe a few hundred yards a day with a few limited instruments is capable of doing even 1% of the science of a well-equipped manned expedition with real, live scientists on the field.
In the same span of time? No, of course not. But given we're nowhere *near* having the technology to have a decades-long manned mission to Mars, it's embarrassingly obvious that robotic missions provide much greater long-term bang for the buck.
And it obsoleted unmanned missions to the Moon for several decades.
Oh, that's pure bullshit. We stopped sending missions to the Moon, manned *or* unmanned, for one simple reason: people stopped giving a shit. It's really that simple. Hell, the only reason there's any curiosity about it now is the rmeote possibility of water at the poles.
Now for the second example. A key thing often ignored in discussion of exploration of Mars is the amount of time it takes to design, build, launch, and deploy a new space probe. This routinely is well in excess of ten years. Suppose your probe finds something interesting, but beyond the limited capabilities of the probe to figure out. Then you have to go through the cycle again in order to study this new phenomenon. Ten or more years between hypothesis and test is terribly slow.
Yes, and a manned mission is so much quicker? No. You have limited supplies you can send, not to mention limited instruments. If you're lucky, the people will last, what... a week? A month at the outside given our current technology? And then what? You have to send a re-supply shuttle. Or yet another mission. And how long will that take? Yes, that's right... probably as long as it would take to build and send another rover.
Now imagine that the interesting phenomenon was observed by on site humans with considerable knowledge and tools at their disposal.
And there's your mistake. Considerable knowledge, sure. But tools? Hell no. What are we going to send, exactly, that can't be sent as part of a robotic package? Especially given that mission payload has to be given over to supplies for the astronauts themselves? And then how long can they actually operate there? Again, if you're lucky, *maybe* months. Maybe. And in that time, you'll have me believe they can do more science than a rover or a satellite operating on or above Mars for *years*? Ha. Right.
That's the rumour. According to the tinfoil hat brigade
Rumour? Wha? The frickin' EU investigated this "rumour". Hell, right in Motion for a Resolution they flat out state:
whereas the existence of a global system for intercepting communications, operating by means of cooperation proportionate to their capabilities among the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the UKUSA Agreement, is no longer in doubt
Followed by:
whereas there can now be no doubt that the purpose of the system is to intercept, at the very least, private and commercial communications, and not military communications, although the analysis carried out in the report has revealed that the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed
And then:
whereas, therefore, it is surprising, not to say worrying, that many senior Community figures, including European Commissioners, who gave evidence to the Temporary Committee claimed to be unaware of this phenomenon
ECHELON exists. How capable it is... well, you can read the report yourself. And it's primarily focused on satellite communication interception. But it definitely exists.
Look, I went to both films. They were, I think, entertaining for what they were (I'd put them at the same level as, say, a Tim Burton Batman film). But comparing Pan's Labyrinth to the cheesefest that was Hellboy 1/2 (particularly 2, which is, IMHO, the lesser of the two films but a good margin), it's hard to deny that del Toro is, at best, a man who's a little uneven, quality-wise.
But on Pan's Labyrinth alone I'm willing to give the credit. No one can create something with that much depth in meaning, character, and visuals on a fluke.
Funny, I disagree. Let's take the Wachowski brothers. In The Matrix, they created one of the great action movies of our time, blending incredible visuals with an engrossing (if admittedly derivative story) and pulled it off masterfully. And yet, the followups were *terrible*, and what have they done since? Speedracer. *gag*
Similarly, George Lucas has been credited with some fine films (Star Wars and Indiana Jones come to mind... neither have the pure artistic sense of Pan's Labyrinth, but they're still fine movies), and yet Return of the Jedi and the Star Wars prequels were *terrible*.
Hell, I'm sure there are *many* other directors who, for one reason or another, just managed to get lucky with a strong script, a strong cast, a good editor, a good director of photography, etc, and managed to put something together that, as a whole, exceeded their singular abilities.
Maybe his stuff isn't that great in translation? Especially when he's working in translation, like Hellboy.
Bah, that's just a bullshit excuse. The man is a director, not a screenwriter. If he can't take existing material, understand it, internalize it, and then transform it into a decent film, that's his fault, plain and simple.
Now, to be fair, I suspect Hellboy and it's sequel also suffered from a plain ol' shitty script, but even so, at minimum, del Toro should've seen that and said 'no' to the project at the outset. But he didn't. So he either has no sense of artistry, or he's a sell-out. Frankly, I can't figure out which. But neither is a good thing.
And collectively those probes would be doing less than that manned mission.
Yes, I realize that's your claim. It's entirely baseless, of course, but it does a good job of reinforcing your beliefs.
Seriously, show me how a manned mission can last as long on the surface of Mars as the rovers, and maybe you'll have a point. But humans are fragile, and require far more resources than any robotic mission. There's simply no way a single manned mission could exceed the amount of science we could do with a dozen probes. The entire idea is absurd.
Even if we could merely (as the AC, that I was replying to, implied) reach orbit, that's still a very short communication delay compared to communicating from Earth. You'd get far better control of those dozens of specialized probes.
Yes! The *worst* of both worlds! Spend *billion* getting people into martian orbit just so they can perform telepresence activities on Mars with rovers. All the problems of a manned mission, combined with a robot mission! Brilliant!
Orbiting? How about on the ground, looking and doing stuff that unmanned space probes can't do?
Such as?
The fact is, for the cost of a single manned mission, we could send dozens of specialized probes, each with eyes, ears, and fingers far more sensitive than those of any space-suit-clad meatbag you might want to send over; probes that can work in extreme conditions over far longer than any human is capable of, all while running on simple sunlight.
Honestly, the idea that a manned mission is even remotely sane or cost-effective if the goal is scientific research is beyond absurd.
Anonymization is the same basic principle - genericize the data to the point that it is useful in aggregate, but valueless for targeting individual users, based on a preponderance of possible matches.
Good luck with that. Unlike a fuzzy search where you're performing textual matches to infer properties of a document, the whole point of a database is to provide concrete properties about entities. And if you can concretely say entity X has properties 1 through 99, then odds are good you can use that information to gain a very good idea of who entity X actually is. And if you perform some transformation such that you can no longer say entity X has properties 1 through 99 so that you can hide the identity of the individual X corresponds with, then you've destroyed information during your transformation, and as such, made the data less useful in order to anonymize it effectively. Which is, of course, the entire point of the article.
If there's anything robots don't do, it is "look to the stars." It is men who comprehend the insignificance of this world in relation to the vast emptiness of space, and the costs it will take to traverse that scape. It is men who want to watch the enormous Earth grow smaller and wax philosophical. It is men who walked upon the lonely face of the moon and felt enormous elation and accomplishment coupled with their nigh-incomprehensible solitude.
While that's all very romantic and everything, you still haven't provided an actual, real reason for humans to bother venturing past our gravity well.
Look, it's simple: if your goal is to learn, to do basic science, then robots are perfectly sufficient. Are they ideal? No. But you can send a *lot* more of them, and you can do it cheaply. And they can do it for a *lot* longer (how long have the rovers been at it on Mars? Good luck achieving the same longevity with a manned mission).
If that's not your goal, then what is? Simply to "escape the fishbowl" is no damned reason. It's just romanticizing. A legitimate reason may be to provide humanity with a backup plan. But, of course, any human population stuck on Mars is just that, stuck. Mars isn't exactly the kind of place you want to bootstrap a new civilization.
IMHO, if you really want humanity to have a backup plan, long-term space-based habitation makes far more sense... either way, you're gonna have to build an artificial biosphere, but at least with mobile habitation, you can take people to the resources, rather than the other way 'round. But, of course, no one's really seriously talking about long-term space habitation. They're talking about planetary colonization, which, given the nature of the moon, Mars, and other bodies in our solar system, is absurd... why trap ourselves in yet another gravity well, and this time a sterile one?
More like Christo-Rightwing-uber-corporate fascism.
Which has nothing to do with real Christianity, though the practitioners thereof often make loud noises about their Christianity. Hypocritical lying sacks of shit that they are.
No offense, but that sounds an *awful* lot like the No True Scotsman fallacy. After all, what is Christianity if not the sum total of the actions of it's followers?
Ingo's post was written to appear civil, but it was a big "fuck you con" if you read between the lines.
OR, you could not be a paranoid dickhead and choose not to assume the worst right away. But you're right, it makes far more sense to assume Ingo was giving "a big 'fuck you con'", and decided to do it with an extensive set of benchmarks and followup discussion. Yes, that sounds very sensible indeed...
Yeah, but the whole point is, given a zip code, birth date, household income, and hobbies, I can probably figure out who you are.
Fundamentally, the issue is very simple: Given some sort of identifier, and a series of properties about that identifier, if you have enough dimensions of detail, you end up narrowing down your sample so much that you end up with a population of one, that being the person the identifier "hides". It's just that simple.
The only way to prevent this is to generate crosscuts of data where you eliminate those correlations. ie, given an identifier, you only provide a limited set of dimensions which, by themselves, aren't enough to get down to a single person. But, of course, that process destroys information.
Well, I think what your example demonstrates is that *application-specific* anonymization and, in your case, aggregation, can produce data that's both useful and actually anonymous. But I happen to agree with the article that, in the *general* case, it's impossible to take data and anonymize it in a way that retains it's usefulness across a large domain of potential applications while simultaneously protecting the anonymity of those in the database.
'course, when you think about it, that's common sense: To anonymize data effectively, as this article points out, you can't just throw in new identifiers, as enough detail correlated together is enough to identify individuals. Instead, if you really want to anonymize data, you have to throw out some of those details, so that the correlations are no longer possible. But if you do that, you lose information, which limits usefulness.
So, what you really need is the ability for an outside individual to submit a request to a database to obtain some cross-section of aggregated/anonymized data that's useful to them specifically, but isn't sufficiently detailed to allow individual identification. 'course, how you determine a given query is "too detailed", I don't know...
Slashdot Mirror
Quite being a douchebag zealot. BSD and MIT are both perfectly fine open source licenses. If Haiku decided to close up their project, another team could take the last OSS release, fork it, and pick up where Haiku left off.
Wall Street is using models, because a large percentage (and growing) of U.S. business is NOT creating real long-term wealth. They're looking for something to analyze.
Close, but IMHO, not quite. I'd go with: "U.S. business is NOT creating real long-term wealth. They're creating short-term profits at the expense of long-term sustainability." And, of course, when you have computer models that successfully provide ungodly amounts of short-term ROI, big surprise that those businesses flocked to those models and failed to question the fundamentals of what they were doing.
And that is why I personally think IPv6 is stillborn and won't catch on.
Kinda ironic you mentioning that, given that one of the features explicitly baked into IPv6 is roaming/mobility.
Huh? CDS's would've existed regardless of the financial instrument being insured. And given it was a 100% unregulated market, yes, it's an excellent example of the dangers of hands-off government policy with respect to the financial industry.
Uh, you're contradicting yourself. If this statement is true:
Then this statement is false;
Anyone who knows anything about game theory can tell you that groups of self-interested participants working for their own betterment is precisely the kind of thing game theory exists to model. And I have bad news for you: game theory is based on, you guessed it, mathematics. Moreover, your claim that "no model accounts for the variability of the individual" is simply absurd: the whole point is you *don't* need to look at the variability of the individual, as you *can* model they behaviour of groups as an aggregate, as the noise of individual variability tends to cancel itself out.
As an aside, Austrian economists had no monopoly on knowledge of the impending crisis. Plenty of economists, Keynesian or otherwise, could've told you that sub-prime mortgages being used as the foundation for an economic house of cards was going to lead to a crash. And you didn't need to be omniscient to see that government policy (keeping interest rates extremely low) was leading to a misallocation of investment funds into real estate. Furthermore, you need only look at the CDS debacle to see what happens when government opts for a hands-off approach to markets, as you seem to be proposing.
I really wish wall street would get off their 'risk models' fetish.
I think you're slightly off base, here. Risk models and the like aren't fundamentally a bad thing if they're used as a *tool* for guiding investment strategies. The problem, I think, was that too many looked at the output of any given model, and then proceeded to internalize the results wholesale with doing even a basic gut check. I mean, come on, does it really take a genius to realize that handing out huge mortgages to people who can't afford them is actually a bad idea?
In short, the real problem is Wall Street's movement away from a blending of techniques that includes good ol' fashioned common sense. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of short-term gain available to those who are willing to take silly risks makes it virtually inevitable that, left to their own devices, the financial industry would once again walk up to the abyss and then leap off to catch that last nickle. Which is why government regulation of the financial industry is absolutely *vital* for a stable, thriving economy.
TFS: Students Take Pictures From Space.
TFA Title: MIT Students Take Pictures from Space on $150 Budget.
You were saying?
The only thing I can crib about is x86 hardware compatibility - that part sucks pretty bad.
Well, that and, let's face it, their userland is *incredibly* primitive. Sure, it's POSIX compliant, but that's about all you can say for it. Until you add the GNU toolset, it's deeply painful to use on a day-to-day basis.
You know, I realize editing standards are in the toilet these days, but honestly... wtf.
That's an interesting opinion. All I know is that there would be little benefit to sending an equivalent to any of the Mars lander missions to the Moon. They wouldn't have added much beyond what Apollo already figured out.
Also bullshit. The reason we don't bother sending rovers to the moon is because nothing interesting actually happens on the surface. Anything we might want to look at is easily discovered with high-resolution cameras operating in lunar orbit.
Contrast this with Mars where interesting geological formations, not to mention potential biochemical activity, make on-the-ground investigation far more interesting and rewarding.
How about nine months or more.
Uhuh. I'll believe it when I see it. Hell, we don't even have a decent solution to radiation protection for the trip to, and mission on, Mars. And you're expecting astronauts to settle on the surface for *nine months*? Sure.
Absolutely. If you're committing hundreds of tons of mass to humans for life support, shielding and other purposes, then an extra few tons for science equipment is not that big a deal.
You *really* don't understand the economics of space travel, do you? It costs somewhere around $10k *per pound* to launch something into orbit, let alone on a trajectory to Mars. Hell, a large number of the design decisions that went into building the shuttle involved keeping weight down. In short: when you're planning a launch, *every single pound counts*.
There are economies of scale to a large mission.
If you believe that, you don't understand what "economies of scale" means. So let me define it for you: economies of scale means something gets cheaper if you do it in the large. Space travel is *not like that*. Every single ounce you add adds to the launch cost. That's just life in the world of chemical rockets.
Hell, if you want to talk about scaling, scaling up robotic missions makes a *lot* more sense. More robots don't need more life support, more supplies, more living quarters, etc. They just need room on the rocket. That's it.
It's embarrassing that there still are people who insist that a rover that moves maybe a few hundred yards a day with a few limited instruments is capable of doing even 1% of the science of a well-equipped manned expedition with real, live scientists on the field.
In the same span of time? No, of course not. But given we're nowhere *near* having the technology to have a decades-long manned mission to Mars, it's embarrassingly obvious that robotic missions provide much greater long-term bang for the buck.
And it obsoleted unmanned missions to the Moon for several decades.
Oh, that's pure bullshit. We stopped sending missions to the Moon, manned *or* unmanned, for one simple reason: people stopped giving a shit. It's really that simple. Hell, the only reason there's any curiosity about it now is the rmeote possibility of water at the poles.
Now for the second example. A key thing often ignored in discussion of exploration of Mars is the amount of time it takes to design, build, launch, and deploy a new space probe. This routinely is well in excess of ten years. Suppose your probe finds something interesting, but beyond the limited capabilities of the probe to figure out. Then you have to go through the cycle again in order to study this new phenomenon. Ten or more years between hypothesis and test is terribly slow.
Yes, and a manned mission is so much quicker? No. You have limited supplies you can send, not to mention limited instruments. If you're lucky, the people will last, what... a week? A month at the outside given our current technology? And then what? You have to send a re-supply shuttle. Or yet another mission. And how long will that take? Yes, that's right... probably as long as it would take to build and send another rover.
Now imagine that the interesting phenomenon was observed by on site humans with considerable knowledge and tools at their disposal.
And there's your mistake. Considerable knowledge, sure. But tools? Hell no. What are we going to send, exactly, that can't be sent as part of a robotic package? Especially given that mission payload has to be given over to supplies for the astronauts themselves? And then how long can they actually operate there? Again, if you're lucky, *maybe* months. Maybe. And in that time, you'll have me believe they can do more science than a rover or a satellite operating on or above Mars for *years*? Ha. Right.
That's the rumour. According to the tinfoil hat brigade
Rumour? Wha? The frickin' EU investigated this "rumour". Hell, right in Motion for a Resolution they flat out state:
Followed by:
And then:
ECHELON exists. How capable it is... well, you can read the report yourself. And it's primarily focused on satellite communication interception. But it definitely exists.
I remember the Dreamcast was the first system to get a mod chip to play pirated games.
'fraid not. No modchip was required for the DC. Just burn and play.
Excellent my ass.
Look, I went to both films. They were, I think, entertaining for what they were (I'd put them at the same level as, say, a Tim Burton Batman film). But comparing Pan's Labyrinth to the cheesefest that was Hellboy 1/2 (particularly 2, which is, IMHO, the lesser of the two films but a good margin), it's hard to deny that del Toro is, at best, a man who's a little uneven, quality-wise.
Yes, Del Toro was really lucky to find a strong script for Pan's Labyrinth --- flowing from his fingertips.
You *do* realize that writers can get lucky, too, right? Or did you not watch the Matrix sequels?
But on Pan's Labyrinth alone I'm willing to give the credit. No one can create something with that much depth in meaning, character, and visuals on a fluke.
Funny, I disagree. Let's take the Wachowski brothers. In The Matrix, they created one of the great action movies of our time, blending incredible visuals with an engrossing (if admittedly derivative story) and pulled it off masterfully. And yet, the followups were *terrible*, and what have they done since? Speedracer. *gag*
Similarly, George Lucas has been credited with some fine films (Star Wars and Indiana Jones come to mind... neither have the pure artistic sense of Pan's Labyrinth, but they're still fine movies), and yet Return of the Jedi and the Star Wars prequels were *terrible*.
Hell, I'm sure there are *many* other directors who, for one reason or another, just managed to get lucky with a strong script, a strong cast, a good editor, a good director of photography, etc, and managed to put something together that, as a whole, exceeded their singular abilities.
Maybe his stuff isn't that great in translation? Especially when he's working in translation, like Hellboy.
Bah, that's just a bullshit excuse. The man is a director, not a screenwriter. If he can't take existing material, understand it, internalize it, and then transform it into a decent film, that's his fault, plain and simple.
Now, to be fair, I suspect Hellboy and it's sequel also suffered from a plain ol' shitty script, but even so, at minimum, del Toro should've seen that and said 'no' to the project at the outset. But he didn't. So he either has no sense of artistry, or he's a sell-out. Frankly, I can't figure out which. But neither is a good thing.
And collectively those probes would be doing less than that manned mission.
Yes, I realize that's your claim. It's entirely baseless, of course, but it does a good job of reinforcing your beliefs.
Seriously, show me how a manned mission can last as long on the surface of Mars as the rovers, and maybe you'll have a point. But humans are fragile, and require far more resources than any robotic mission. There's simply no way a single manned mission could exceed the amount of science we could do with a dozen probes. The entire idea is absurd.
Even if we could merely (as the AC, that I was replying to, implied) reach orbit, that's still a very short communication delay compared to communicating from Earth. You'd get far better control of those dozens of specialized probes.
Yes! The *worst* of both worlds! Spend *billion* getting people into martian orbit just so they can perform telepresence activities on Mars with rovers. All the problems of a manned mission, combined with a robot mission! Brilliant!
If you want to see an example of his work, watch Pan's Labyrinth. It's very well done.
Yeah, or Hellboy and it's sequel, which most certainly are not.
Orbiting? How about on the ground, looking and doing stuff that unmanned space probes can't do?
Such as?
The fact is, for the cost of a single manned mission, we could send dozens of specialized probes, each with eyes, ears, and fingers far more sensitive than those of any space-suit-clad meatbag you might want to send over; probes that can work in extreme conditions over far longer than any human is capable of, all while running on simple sunlight.
Honestly, the idea that a manned mission is even remotely sane or cost-effective if the goal is scientific research is beyond absurd.
Anonymization is the same basic principle - genericize the data to the point that it is useful in aggregate, but valueless for targeting individual users, based on a preponderance of possible matches.
Good luck with that. Unlike a fuzzy search where you're performing textual matches to infer properties of a document, the whole point of a database is to provide concrete properties about entities. And if you can concretely say entity X has properties 1 through 99, then odds are good you can use that information to gain a very good idea of who entity X actually is. And if you perform some transformation such that you can no longer say entity X has properties 1 through 99 so that you can hide the identity of the individual X corresponds with, then you've destroyed information during your transformation, and as such, made the data less useful in order to anonymize it effectively. Which is, of course, the entire point of the article.
If there's anything robots don't do, it is "look to the stars." It is men who comprehend the insignificance of this world in relation to the vast emptiness of space, and the costs it will take to traverse that scape. It is men who want to watch the enormous Earth grow smaller and wax philosophical. It is men who walked upon the lonely face of the moon and felt enormous elation and accomplishment coupled with their nigh-incomprehensible solitude.
While that's all very romantic and everything, you still haven't provided an actual, real reason for humans to bother venturing past our gravity well.
Look, it's simple: if your goal is to learn, to do basic science, then robots are perfectly sufficient. Are they ideal? No. But you can send a *lot* more of them, and you can do it cheaply. And they can do it for a *lot* longer (how long have the rovers been at it on Mars? Good luck achieving the same longevity with a manned mission).
If that's not your goal, then what is? Simply to "escape the fishbowl" is no damned reason. It's just romanticizing. A legitimate reason may be to provide humanity with a backup plan. But, of course, any human population stuck on Mars is just that, stuck. Mars isn't exactly the kind of place you want to bootstrap a new civilization.
IMHO, if you really want humanity to have a backup plan, long-term space-based habitation makes far more sense... either way, you're gonna have to build an artificial biosphere, but at least with mobile habitation, you can take people to the resources, rather than the other way 'round. But, of course, no one's really seriously talking about long-term space habitation. They're talking about planetary colonization, which, given the nature of the moon, Mars, and other bodies in our solar system, is absurd... why trap ourselves in yet another gravity well, and this time a sterile one?
No offense, but that sounds an *awful* lot like the No True Scotsman fallacy. After all, what is Christianity if not the sum total of the actions of it's followers?
Ingo's post was written to appear civil, but it was a big "fuck you con" if you read between the lines.
OR, you could not be a paranoid dickhead and choose not to assume the worst right away. But you're right, it makes far more sense to assume Ingo was giving "a big 'fuck you con'", and decided to do it with an extensive set of benchmarks and followup discussion. Yes, that sounds very sensible indeed...
Yeah, but the whole point is, given a zip code, birth date, household income, and hobbies, I can probably figure out who you are.
Fundamentally, the issue is very simple: Given some sort of identifier, and a series of properties about that identifier, if you have enough dimensions of detail, you end up narrowing down your sample so much that you end up with a population of one, that being the person the identifier "hides". It's just that simple.
The only way to prevent this is to generate crosscuts of data where you eliminate those correlations. ie, given an identifier, you only provide a limited set of dimensions which, by themselves, aren't enough to get down to a single person. But, of course, that process destroys information.
Well, I think what your example demonstrates is that *application-specific* anonymization and, in your case, aggregation, can produce data that's both useful and actually anonymous. But I happen to agree with the article that, in the *general* case, it's impossible to take data and anonymize it in a way that retains it's usefulness across a large domain of potential applications while simultaneously protecting the anonymity of those in the database.
'course, when you think about it, that's common sense: To anonymize data effectively, as this article points out, you can't just throw in new identifiers, as enough detail correlated together is enough to identify individuals. Instead, if you really want to anonymize data, you have to throw out some of those details, so that the correlations are no longer possible. But if you do that, you lose information, which limits usefulness.
So, what you really need is the ability for an outside individual to submit a request to a database to obtain some cross-section of aggregated/anonymized data that's useful to them specifically, but isn't sufficiently detailed to allow individual identification. 'course, how you determine a given query is "too detailed", I don't know...