Unless it's peer-reviewed, I'm not going to listen
on
The Limits To Skepticism
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
But if the peer-review process itself has been corrupted from within, what then? The basis for your trust is gone. Those who gamed the system have made it impossible for you to continue to practice as you have.
To be a good scientist now, you must _refuse_ to participate in any review process involving the same group of peers as before. You must have a clean assessment with a new team. You must re-affirm old measurements, re-assess old assumptions, and come to fresh conclusions.
In a word, you must rebuild your body of facts. Climate science has fallen victim to one of the oldest of human weaknesses: we "know" when we have the right answer, so we become very good at explaining away all evidence to the contrary.
Climate science is like a sensor suspected of recording data incorrectly. You must to send it back to the lab, re-calibrate and re-measure. There is no other choice.
You're a parent, an uncle, a grandfather. You don't play video games. You want to give something the kid will like. You hear he's "into" video games. You step into the local gamer store, and...
YOU HAVE NO CLUE
The one thing you want to avoid is buying that game with "blood spurting out of victims' bodies, human carcasses littering the floor, blood-stained walls and floors, and copious screams of torture" (Dead Space: Extraction). Otherwise, your sister Jenny will have your head on a platter... for real.
I have yet to see any major newspaper actively recruit and develop the legions of amateur reporters out there armed with a computer. Major league sports has a farm system for developing and identifying talent, and bringing it into play. Newspapers need to embrace what's happening, not compete and complain. They're the experts. They should be leading the exploitation of the Internet for the delivery of news and information.
Truth be told, tiny C-SPAN is far and away the best in the news business at getting this right. Their use of all the means of modern communication -- radio, TV, Internet -- is outstanding. They run contests to develop young reporters. They have blog aggregation pages. They run dedicated news dashboards during special events such as elections. They have call-in shows. They are scrupulously even-handed in their coverage, which is not only the best way to be objective, it makes for a lively and interesting show. Watch and learn, guys. It's not rocket science.
As we're on the cusp of moving much of our data to the cloud, we've got the perfect opportunity to improve the resilience of information storage for a lot of people at the same time.
Sounds like you may not have had time to read all of the article yet; I highly recommend it, it really is very well done, a fine example of history, not at all political. American History magazine used to produce great content like this regularly, but sadly, it is very rare these days. You can get the History Channel to run thousands of hours of programming about mechanized warfare, haunted houses, and UFOs, but they'd never run a piece like this.
The article is all about monoply. The telegraph plays just a supporting role in the saga. Any analogies to modern day are to the strain that exists between powerful corporations and the government, not between the telegraph and the internet.
Passing a law that the Internet is a "common carrier", like the mail and the telephone, is all the regulation that is really needed. There's nothing technical about it, it's all about preventing the next Jay Gould from taking away the public square from the public.
It's interesting enough that according to that article, the reason for the existence of "monopolies" on the telegraph was the government itself.
I read the entire article and came to EXACTLY the opposite conclusion. The article lays out how Jay Gould took over the railroad, the telegraph, Western Union and the AP in a brilliantly-executed series of buyouts, stock price manipulations, information suppression, and other monopolistic practices. It was only when Congress finally passed a law that the telegraph was a "common carrier", just like the mails, that the monopoly was busted.
To me, it's as clear as day that ALL forms of communication technology -- mail, telegrpaph, radio, TV, the internet, the Next Big Thing -- are common carriers because the right to speech has a dependency on communication.
The internet isn't a right. It's a service you pay for that an ISP can regulate however it wants. Don't like it, don't use that ISP.
You're neglecting to mention that to reach you with its service, that ISP had to be granted access to scarce natural resources (land and radio spectrum) that is held in trust by the government on behalf of the public. Since the ISP does not own the resources it uses -- it leases them -- regulation is the price of admission.
The Internet is a public-private partnership. There can be no totally free market in this case.
language once, and the syntax turned out to be pretty similar to Rev4. Basically, one needs a simple way to control flow, a simple way to express logic, a simple way to manipulate data, and a simple way of interacting with the user.
A huge part of writing an effective language is anticipating how the writer *thinks* something should be stated before they've even tried to write it. If your target programmer is someone without formal programming training, you want to avoid anything that assumes an understanding of abstract programming concepts such as object orientation. Rev4's use of natural language "glue" and it's simple verb-object sentence structure follows pretty well the way a non-programmer would think.
As others have pointed out, however, just simplifying the language is not enough. To get a real boost in productivity, one needs to add a lot of *useful* abstractions to data manipulation and user interactions. That generally means lots of pre-built functions that do meaningful work (as the non-programmer would define it) for very little effort. This is essentially the same role that human vocabulary plays: by using a single word, we can express an entire concept. Give me a vocabulary with several thousand words and a simple sentence structure, and there's not a lot I can't convey.
I've only looked at Rev4 very briefly, but it does seems to have a pretty large and useful vocabulary. There are useful abstractions of data structures (looks a lot like hypercard, actually), useful abstractions of UI, and useful abstractions of string manipulation operations. I can easily imagine being pretty productive with this as my first programming language.
All these simplifications and abstractions, of course, come with a cost: extensibility. The more lower level a language is, the easier it is to get it to do things not envisioned by the language writer. I don't know this for sure, but I highly suspect that if the card-stack data abstraction won't cut it for your needs, then writing in Rev4 will be painful and frustrating.
There will always be a need for varying levels of programming languages. If a user needs something done that is so easy that it could be done by a non-programmer, then why hire a programmer to do it with a more capable language? It's not like programmers aren't busy enough. There's plenty of work for everyone.
It's too bad that we're all here talking about the legal issues surrounding Excel's implementation of Sparklines, rather than praising the developers at MS for picking up on this great idea and putting it in the code. Isn't this what is supposed to happen in a free market of ideas?
It's obvious that MS isn't trying to claim authorship of Sparklines per se, since they mention Dr. Tufte's name right up front. Seems to me they're just being aware of a terrific UI idea, and putting it into code. There's not a thing wrong with that, and frankly, it doesn't happen nearly often enough.
The fact is, Sparklines look awesome in Excel, and I'd love to see them in Sharepoint, too, where a lot of dashboard-type information gets displayed. Way to go, Microsoft! It's great to see some outside-the-box thinking; you've beat your open source competitor at his own game.
People who know me know I don't normally take Microsoft's side on IP issues, but if their patent is properly limited in scope and novel in execution then let 'er rip. If the patent claim is trash, well then, OK, throw it out. But we need to make sure we don't discourage this imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery style of development. That's how we advance the art.
The world still needs journalists, but we don't need them to do the same things they've always done. The internet has changed a lot of that.
We don't need journalists to do as much original "breaking" news reporting. They've got a billion pair of eyes that can be used to do that, courtesy the internet. I'm imagining a news agency that replaces most of its reporting staff with a social network of 100,000 "cub reporters" who feed stories and leads to a professional staff of researchers, writers, and editors. Cub reporters earn nothing more than a byline -- and maybe a shot at joining the ranks of the pros. They'd be "developed", just like a minor league player -- give 'em some training, assign them a mentor, feed them an assignment to go hunt something down and report in.
I would pay a lot for an fast-moving but authoritative source of news that was demonstrably unbiased (like C-SPAN, bless its geeky 'lil heart.)
The law grinds unbelievably slowly, especially compared to the rest of the Internet-addled world. One year to get the lawyers to agree to a memo like this is really rushing them.
Tech people are generally clueless about what happens when the lawyers get involved. Lawyers are trained to find problems, not to create new things such as software or services. They are trained very, very well. Things are rarely, if ever, perfect. Problems WILL be found.
Call in a lawyer, double the delivery time. That's my rule of thumb.
The proposed rules only apply to "lawful content", "lawful applications", "lawful services", and "lawful devices". I'm not sure what I think about this. By way of analogy, do we have laws for our public highway system that limits our use of the road based on what content we carry in our vehicles? Is our use of the roadway illegal if we intend to use something we're carrying for an evil purpose or application? I can see where my vehicle (device) might be unlawfully configured (over the maximum weight limit, for example), and that might be analogous to a lawful network device, but even then, only in so far as it affects use of the network itself, not in any other context.
Why do we need this automatic extension of contexts? It will mean that anything illegal in one context (say, money-laundering), is going to also be automatically illegal in the entirely different context of how it is being conveyed. It would not only be illegal to launder money, but if one uses the Internet, it would be additionally illegal to have merely conveyed instructions to do so.
That we will get all manner of unintended, unhappy side consequences out of this mixing of contexts seems almost guaranteed.
The rules say, "no dynamic code". I'm not a MS-SQL guy, but this article makes it pretty clear that one has to use the MS SQL "EXEC" statement to dynamically evaluate a stored procedure. In my brief look at the databases, I did find some EXEC statements, but not many.
Just finding an EXEC statement is probably not enough to establish a "smoking gun". If the only variable parts of the stored procedure are parameter value placeholders, then the EXEC may just be serving as a way to encapsulate parameters, which sounds like an attempt to prevent an injection attack. I guess you'd have to inspect the source code that defined the actual values passed into the procedure to be sure.
I didn't find this to be true for me. When I moved my humble little web application from a dedicated host to a cloud platform (Amazon), I saved myself 50%. A dedicated server or hard drive is rented in bulk, so you wind up paying for a lot of unused capacity while you wait for your needs to catch up to your investment. Amazon does charge a preimium price, but there's zero fat. YMMV, but the upshot for me was that Amazon was in fact cheaper. The fact that I also get all the virtualization-on-demand toys made this a slam dunk.
"...genomic evolution was nearly constant for 20,000 generations. Such clock-like regularity is usually viewed as the signature of neutral evolution, but several lines of evidence indicate that almost all of these mutations were beneficial. This same population later evolved an elevated mutation rate and accumulated hundreds of additional mutations dominated by a neutral signature. Thus, the coupling between genomic and adaptive evolution is complex and can be counterintuitive even in a constant environment. In particular, beneficial substitutions were surprisingly uniform over time, whereas neutral substitutions were highly variable."
In other words, random mutation ain't the great source of creative, beneficial change we all thought? It's just sorta.. random?
I see your point, but perhaps such a negative reaction is something the consumer base is growing out of. I do think people are becoming more security conscious; certainly, everyone has heard tales of identity theft (products guarding against it are on heavy rotation on the local radio where I live), have seen tons of suspicious-looking emails and web sites.
Perhaps its just the idealist in me, but I think customers would appreciate their banks getting more serious about protecting online banking. Widely publicized stories such as the FBI Director no longer using online banking will have their impact on the culture.
Your point about the PR angle, however, is well taken. This would have to be done delicately.
A bank with any technical savvy would be immediately preparing a LiveCD/USB distro that boots as quickly as possible into a browser pre-configured with the bank's portal page set as the home page. The distro would contain nothing extraneous -- just enough for fast, safe banking. It would, of course, be thoroughly branded, but completely legit vis a vis source code and license notices. Give them away in the mail, or even sell USB drives.
There aren't many FOSS web sites devoted to feminist issues AND the few that do exist have declining membership AND many people have vigorously denied that they are sexist, some of whom have been pretty darn mean about it, in fact,
True, I could say, "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."
Everyone is so worried about the MS of 10 years ago that I think they're missing the dynamic now.
Spot-on. Microsoft is undergoing some radical changes from within, but one thing they won't change is their aggressive competitiveness. Anyone who still thinks that MS is still banking on dominating the desktop hasn't been paying attention. MS is moving very aggressively into the application server space (Sharepoint, Dynamics), the cloud (Live, Azure, Bing), Rich client (Silverlight), and non-desk-bound computing (Surface, Courier). They have a large pile of cash, they have been busily hiring some the best engineering talent in the business, and they are not going to let their franchise slip away to the likes of Google, Apple, Sun, or Adobe.
1) Speed of recovery. You have instantaneous access to data backed-up to the cloud. Getting access to your securely-stored hard drive will take longer.
2) Ability to backup-and-forget. Backups to the cloud can be done automatically. You need to physically make and transport manual backups. This is tedious, uninteresting work. People hate doing this kind of thing, so they typically stop trying after a time.
3) Frequency of backups. Backups to the cloud can be done at a much higher frequency than manual backups.
The limitations of cloud-based backups are bandwidth and cost. You would use the cloud only for critical files (such as every file in your home directory tree) where the cost of disruption would be much greater than the cost of backing up.
Wait a minute. Obama, a Nobel laureate, just refused to meet with the The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), another Nobel laureate. Does that mean he will have to give his medal back?
Slashdot Mirror
But if the peer-review process itself has been corrupted from within, what then? The basis for your trust is gone. Those who gamed the system have made it impossible for you to continue to practice as you have.
To be a good scientist now, you must _refuse_ to participate in any review process involving the same group of peers as before. You must have a clean assessment with a new team. You must re-affirm old measurements, re-assess old assumptions, and come to fresh conclusions.
In a word, you must rebuild your body of facts. Climate science has fallen victim to one of the oldest of human weaknesses: we "know" when we have the right answer, so we become very good at explaining away all evidence to the contrary.
Climate science is like a sensor suspected of recording data incorrectly. You must to send it back to the lab, re-calibrate and re-measure. There is no other choice.
You're a parent, an uncle, a grandfather. You don't play video games. You want to give something the kid will like. You hear he's "into" video games. You step into the local gamer store, and ...
YOU HAVE NO CLUE
The one thing you want to avoid is buying that game with "blood spurting out of victims' bodies, human carcasses littering the floor, blood-stained walls and floors, and copious screams of torture" (Dead Space: Extraction). Otherwise, your sister Jenny will have your head on a platter ... for real.
I have yet to see any major newspaper actively recruit and develop the legions of amateur reporters out there armed with a computer. Major league sports has a farm system for developing and identifying talent, and bringing it into play. Newspapers need to embrace what's happening, not compete and complain. They're the experts. They should be leading the exploitation of the Internet for the delivery of news and information.
Truth be told, tiny C-SPAN is far and away the best in the news business at getting this right. Their use of all the means of modern communication -- radio, TV, Internet -- is outstanding. They run contests to develop young reporters. They have blog aggregation pages. They run dedicated news dashboards during special events such as elections. They have call-in shows. They are scrupulously even-handed in their coverage, which is not only the best way to be objective, it makes for a lively and interesting show. Watch and learn, guys. It's not rocket science.
As we're on the cusp of moving much of our data to the cloud, we've got the perfect opportunity to improve the resilience of information storage for a lot of people at the same time.
Sounds like you may not have had time to read all of the article yet; I highly recommend it, it really is very well done, a fine example of history, not at all political. American History magazine used to produce great content like this regularly, but sadly, it is very rare these days. You can get the History Channel to run thousands of hours of programming about mechanized warfare, haunted houses, and UFOs, but they'd never run a piece like this.
The article is all about monoply. The telegraph plays just a supporting role in the saga. Any analogies to modern day are to the strain that exists between powerful corporations and the government, not between the telegraph and the internet.
Passing a law that the Internet is a "common carrier", like the mail and the telephone, is all the regulation that is really needed. There's nothing technical about it, it's all about preventing the next Jay Gould from taking away the public square from the public.
It's interesting enough that according to that article, the reason for the existence of "monopolies" on the telegraph was the government itself.
I read the entire article and came to EXACTLY the opposite conclusion. The article lays out how Jay Gould took over the railroad, the telegraph, Western Union and the AP in a brilliantly-executed series of buyouts, stock price manipulations, information suppression, and other monopolistic practices. It was only when Congress finally passed a law that the telegraph was a "common carrier", just like the mails, that the monopoly was busted.
To me, it's as clear as day that ALL forms of communication technology -- mail, telegrpaph, radio, TV, the internet, the Next Big Thing -- are common carriers because the right to speech has a dependency on communication.
The internet isn't a right. It's a service you pay for that an ISP can regulate however it wants. Don't like it, don't use that ISP.
You're neglecting to mention that to reach you with its service, that ISP had to be granted access to scarce natural resources (land and radio spectrum) that is held in trust by the government on behalf of the public. Since the ISP does not own the resources it uses -- it leases them -- regulation is the price of admission.
The Internet is a public-private partnership. There can be no totally free market in this case.
language once, and the syntax turned out to be pretty similar to Rev4. Basically, one needs a simple way to control flow, a simple way to express logic, a simple way to manipulate data, and a simple way of interacting with the user.
A huge part of writing an effective language is anticipating how the writer *thinks* something should be stated before they've even tried to write it. If your target programmer is someone without formal programming training, you want to avoid anything that assumes an understanding of abstract programming concepts such as object orientation. Rev4's use of natural language "glue" and it's simple verb-object sentence structure follows pretty well the way a non-programmer would think.
As others have pointed out, however, just simplifying the language is not enough. To get a real boost in productivity, one needs to add a lot of *useful* abstractions to data manipulation and user interactions. That generally means lots of pre-built functions that do meaningful work (as the non-programmer would define it) for very little effort. This is essentially the same role that human vocabulary plays: by using a single word, we can express an entire concept. Give me a vocabulary with several thousand words and a simple sentence structure, and there's not a lot I can't convey.
I've only looked at Rev4 very briefly, but it does seems to have a pretty large and useful vocabulary. There are useful abstractions of data structures (looks a lot like hypercard, actually), useful abstractions of UI, and useful abstractions of string manipulation operations. I can easily imagine being pretty productive with this as my first programming language.
All these simplifications and abstractions, of course, come with a cost: extensibility. The more lower level a language is, the easier it is to get it to do things not envisioned by the language writer. I don't know this for sure, but I highly suspect that if the card-stack data abstraction won't cut it for your needs, then writing in Rev4 will be painful and frustrating.
There will always be a need for varying levels of programming languages. If a user needs something done that is so easy that it could be done by a non-programmer, then why hire a programmer to do it with a more capable language? It's not like programmers aren't busy enough. There's plenty of work for everyone.
It's too bad that we're all here talking about the legal issues surrounding Excel's implementation of Sparklines, rather than praising the developers at MS for picking up on this great idea and putting it in the code. Isn't this what is supposed to happen in a free market of ideas?
It's obvious that MS isn't trying to claim authorship of Sparklines per se, since they mention Dr. Tufte's name right up front. Seems to me they're just being aware of a terrific UI idea, and putting it into code. There's not a thing wrong with that, and frankly, it doesn't happen nearly often enough.
The fact is, Sparklines look awesome in Excel, and I'd love to see them in Sharepoint, too, where a lot of dashboard-type information gets displayed. Way to go, Microsoft! It's great to see some outside-the-box thinking; you've beat your open source competitor at his own game.
People who know me know I don't normally take Microsoft's side on IP issues, but if their patent is properly limited in scope and novel in execution then let 'er rip. If the patent claim is trash, well then, OK, throw it out. But we need to make sure we don't discourage this imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery style of development. That's how we advance the art.
The world still needs journalists, but we don't need them to do the same things they've always done. The internet has changed a lot of that.
We don't need journalists to do as much original "breaking" news reporting. They've got a billion pair of eyes that can be used to do that, courtesy the internet. I'm imagining a news agency that replaces most of its reporting staff with a social network of 100,000 "cub reporters" who feed stories and leads to a professional staff of researchers, writers, and editors. Cub reporters earn nothing more than a byline -- and maybe a shot at joining the ranks of the pros. They'd be "developed", just like a minor league player -- give 'em some training, assign them a mentor, feed them an assignment to go hunt something down and report in.
I would pay a lot for an fast-moving but authoritative source of news that was demonstrably unbiased (like C-SPAN, bless its geeky 'lil heart.)
Happily, since you released your contribution for free, your software that got used by military X also got used by military Y to nullify X.
The two waves cancel each other out, leaving a calm space where your code lives on doing some good.
The lawyers were by far the biggest delay.
The law grinds unbelievably slowly, especially compared to the rest of the Internet-addled world. One year to get the lawyers to agree to a memo like this is really rushing them.
Tech people are generally clueless about what happens when the lawyers get involved. Lawyers are trained to find problems, not to create new things such as software or services. They are trained very, very well. Things are rarely, if ever, perfect. Problems WILL be found.
Call in a lawyer, double the delivery time. That's my rule of thumb.
The proposed rules only apply to "lawful content", "lawful applications", "lawful services", and "lawful devices". I'm not sure what I think about this. By way of analogy, do we have laws for our public highway system that limits our use of the road based on what content we carry in our vehicles? Is our use of the roadway illegal if we intend to use something we're carrying for an evil purpose or application? I can see where my vehicle (device) might be unlawfully configured (over the maximum weight limit, for example), and that might be analogous to a lawful network device, but even then, only in so far as it affects use of the network itself, not in any other context.
Why do we need this automatic extension of contexts? It will mean that anything illegal in one context (say, money-laundering), is going to also be automatically illegal in the entirely different context of how it is being conveyed. It would not only be illegal to launder money, but if one uses the Internet, it would be additionally illegal to have merely conveyed instructions to do so.
That we will get all manner of unintended, unhappy side consequences out of this mixing of contexts seems almost guaranteed.
The rules say, "no dynamic code". I'm not a MS-SQL guy, but this article makes it pretty clear that one has to use the MS SQL "EXEC" statement to dynamically evaluate a stored procedure. In my brief look at the databases, I did find some EXEC statements, but not many.
Just finding an EXEC statement is probably not enough to establish a "smoking gun". If the only variable parts of the stored procedure are parameter value placeholders, then the EXEC may just be serving as a way to encapsulate parameters, which sounds like an attempt to prevent an injection attack. I guess you'd have to inspect the source code that defined the actual values passed into the procedure to be sure.
No, of course not. LOL.
I didn't find this to be true for me. When I moved my humble little web application from a dedicated host to a cloud platform (Amazon), I saved myself 50%. A dedicated server or hard drive is rented in bulk, so you wind up paying for a lot of unused capacity while you wait for your needs to catch up to your investment. Amazon does charge a preimium price, but there's zero fat. YMMV, but the upshot for me was that Amazon was in fact cheaper. The fact that I also get all the virtualization-on-demand toys made this a slam dunk.
From the summary,
"...genomic evolution was nearly constant for 20,000 generations. Such clock-like regularity is usually viewed as the signature of neutral evolution, but several lines of evidence indicate that almost all of these mutations were beneficial. This same population later evolved an elevated mutation rate and accumulated hundreds of additional mutations dominated by a neutral signature. Thus, the coupling between genomic and adaptive evolution is complex and can be counterintuitive even in a constant environment. In particular, beneficial substitutions were surprisingly uniform over time, whereas neutral substitutions were highly variable."
In other words, random mutation ain't the great source of creative, beneficial change we all thought? It's just sorta .. random?
Huh. That is counterintuitive.
THE INTERNET.
I see your point, but perhaps such a negative reaction is something the consumer base is growing out of. I do think people are becoming more security conscious; certainly, everyone has heard tales of identity theft (products guarding against it are on heavy rotation on the local radio where I live), have seen tons of suspicious-looking emails and web sites.
Perhaps its just the idealist in me, but I think customers would appreciate their banks getting more serious about protecting online banking. Widely publicized stories such as the FBI Director no longer using online banking will have their impact on the culture.
Your point about the PR angle, however, is well taken. This would have to be done delicately.
A bank with any technical savvy would be immediately preparing a LiveCD/USB distro that boots as quickly as possible into a browser pre-configured with the bank's portal page set as the home page. The distro would contain nothing extraneous -- just enough for fast, safe banking. It would, of course, be thoroughly branded, but completely legit vis a vis source code and license notices. Give them away in the mail, or even sell USB drives.
There aren't many FOSS web sites devoted to feminist issues
AND
the few that do exist have declining membership
AND
many people have vigorously denied that they are sexist, some of whom have been pretty darn mean about it, in fact,
THEREFORE
FOSS is sexist
True, I could say, "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."
Or, I could say "cloud".
Everyone is so worried about the MS of 10 years ago that I think they're missing the dynamic now.
Spot-on. Microsoft is undergoing some radical changes from within, but one thing they won't change is their aggressive competitiveness. Anyone who still thinks that MS is still banking on dominating the desktop hasn't been paying attention. MS is moving very aggressively into the application server space (Sharepoint, Dynamics), the cloud (Live, Azure, Bing), Rich client (Silverlight), and non-desk-bound computing (Surface, Courier). They have a large pile of cash, they have been busily hiring some the best engineering talent in the business, and they are not going to let their franchise slip away to the likes of Google, Apple, Sun, or Adobe.
The problems going begging are:
1) Speed of recovery. You have instantaneous access to data backed-up to the cloud. Getting access to your securely-stored hard drive will take longer.
2) Ability to backup-and-forget. Backups to the cloud can be done automatically. You need to physically make and transport manual backups. This is tedious, uninteresting work. People hate doing this kind of thing, so they typically stop trying after a time.
3) Frequency of backups. Backups to the cloud can be done at a much higher frequency than manual backups.
The limitations of cloud-based backups are bandwidth and cost. You would use the cloud only for critical files (such as every file in your home directory tree) where the cost of disruption would be much greater than the cost of backing up.
Wait a minute. Obama, a Nobel laureate, just refused to meet with the The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), another Nobel laureate. Does that mean he will have to give his medal back?