If given the choice between my medical data being on a server in a hospital or whatever managed by a grumpy sysadmin who also needs to take care of peoples desktops or stored on a server that happens not to be in a hospital, managed by people that do only that, I'd go for the cloud hands down.
However, one should be picky about the country and jurisdiction of your cloud. I suggest not to store your medical data on a US server (or a US company server) if you're not in the US.
Fear of the cloud is a bit like fear of flying. "OMG I'M NOT IN CONTROL", totally ignoring reality.
I didn't RTFA but it seems somewhat unlikely to me that the hot liquid itself directly causes cancer. Wouldn't it be more likely if some kind of thermally induced (chemical) reaction, for example with saliva, would produce carcinogenic compounds?
[quote]Nobody blinks an eye when the EU demands patient records and other 'protected' confidential data being held solely in Europe, but being financial in nature, all of a sudden that's overreaching?[/quote]
The EU does not demand that. The EU demands that information is well-protected (which may in turn mean that you should keep it out of the US). It does not forbid data to leave the EU at all. Turkey does.
[quote]All I can say is if you're a multi-national without the ability to data partition geographically, whatever your business is in, you're just welcoming a pain in the ass now or in the near future.[/quote]
How the hell do you expect that to work? Paypal facilitates international transactions. In order to comply to the approach you're proposing, they would have to keep data about all international transactions in at least two countries. In a world where every country acted like Turkey, there would be no international transactions.
It's not just overreaching; it's ridiculous incompetent idiot behavior.
There's much more going on than "some research". Australia is actively breeding coral that is adapted to future conditions (lower pH, more CO2, higher temperatures) and is planning on releasing the results in the wild. I got this from the documentary about the Great Barrier Reef on Discovery Channel, but this article also describes it:
They're not semi-sober, they're sober but respond to somewhat arbitrary tests. I wouldn't consider it acceptable to bother the up to 10% of the population that smokes weed with that.
That's why where I live (stoner country.nl) tests that merely display a correlation with being under the influence instead of clear proof are not legal.
Note the resemblance that using such tests shows with judging people on other arbitrary aspects of their appearance. It's just not right, especially not in areas where using weed is not illegal.
I have never heard of tire dust being considered a major health risk.
Where I live (.nl), in many places near houses, speed limits are much lower than the road design allows, in order to keep the fine dust in check. Since the advent of clean diesels, the majority of that comes from tires. Tire dust has always been a major health risk, containing irritants, allergenics and carcinogenic compounds and more. There's nothing new here, nevertheless everbody acts surprised:p
The BBC used to run a documentary - "Electric Dreams" - about a family that lived like people did in each decade of the past century. It clearly showed that the washing machine was the real life changer, the number one reason running a family no longer was an actual full time job. It should without any doubt be on the top of this list, well above the refrigerator.
To myself, the cellphone would be the number one life changer, not the smartphone. It's not so much carrying a computer around that makes the huge difference, it's being able to communicate with anybody at all times. I find it almost inconveivable how much time we used to spent making appointments and waiting for each other at meeting points. Going into town or to a concert of festival used to start with making appointments. Now you just go there and meet up. Even though we now do all that using smart phone features, it was the cell phone that was the game changer.
I find the when my guitar gently weeps video quite awkward. Prince is on stage the whole time but he isn't in the shot until all of the sudden, he steps forward and the spotlight is pointed at him. Also, the contrast between the guitarist soloing in the first half of the song and Prince was too extreme, to the point of being embarrassing. Also, I think, apart from his own awesome work that isn't available on social media, his cover of Radiohead's Creep show of his skills much better:
I don't care Google Play is the only app store. I don't care they impose restrictions on vendors. I don't care. What I do care about is the lack of innovation in mobile browsers. The sole reason native mobile app are and remain so popular is the lack of a proper web-based alternative, which is likely to be actively held back by Apple and Google, effectively creating a monopoly for native apps while we could have had proper web-based apps (with offline support, proper notifications, proper storage, proper integration with GPS/camera/*) that just work everywhere for ages. But we don't. Because of our friends at Google and Apple.
...but it's not in the voice of their personal assistants. It's in the gender breakdown. How could Amazon possibly achieve 39% female tech workers if only 18% of computer science graduates are women?! Do they have a super old workforce that stems from before the unexplicable decline of women in the 1980s? I doubt it...
You would be allowed to voluntarily provide data but your employer would not be allowed to maintain a database containing sensitive data like this without a good purpose. Nevertheless, I'm glad for you to be living in the USA, where anybody can create totally insecure databases containing all your personal information without restriction whatsoever.
That means that as an employer, it's fine if you keep Strava update mails from your employees in your inbox. Organising them into a folder quickly becomes dangerous territory.
Why would the want to do that? They might already have a nuclear warhead in orbit right now. All they have to do is press the button when it is over the USA and the EMP will blow the USA back to the 1800s.
Sanctions are irrelevant too. They're not law or whatever; they're merely the opinion of some random majority of countries and since the world is not a democracy, North-Korea doesn't really give a fuck. Why would it? It's at war with a country that's on the opposite side of the world. I would start developing proper weapons too if I were at war with a country that has an rather long history of Not Minding It's Own Business Unless The "Enemy" Has Big Ass Rockets.
In the Netherlands we used to have a lot of cyclists without lights. As in: well over half of the cyclists would bike around in the middle of the night, ignoring traffic lights on a pitch black bike. Maybe the law was too stringent?
Then we started seriously enforcing the law. Now a cyclist without lights is a rare sight and fatalities have dwindled a lot. What I'm trying to say: never judge the value of a law by how well people abide by it if the law is not properly enforced.
Buildbots probably wouldn't consume planets; escaping from their gravity well would be much too costly compared to the alternatives. They probably would use asteroids instead, taking their time to tweak their orbits so they arrive at their destination processing plant with a minimum amount of energy. This would almost certainly not happen at an exponential rate. As with all mining, they would start with the low hanging fruit, causing production to become increasingly more difficult as time passes, prohibiting durable exponential growth.
Also, while I'm typing a comment anyway, the Dyson sphere would probably reflect raditation to several power stations within it. These might very well redistribute it by simply reflecting it back out, for example to stations in the outer star system, from where it can be redistributed to their mining sites (perhaps even simply blasting asteroids with radiation in order to control their orbits). This would cause the radiation from the Dyson sphere that Schafer expects to come from somewhere else entirely and probably not in a uniform way at all; we might very well not even be able to detect it or would perhaps discount short bursts of radiation reflected from asteroids as being noise. I can imagine their entire star system to look like a giant beautiful collection of laser scanners;)
That might be true, but the continuous stream of valuable nutrients (especially hosphorus!) that used to simply be returned to the ground in the form of shit and bodies that are now either buried deeply or dumped in wastewater is probably huge. We cannot keep taking stuff from the environment and dump it in the sea or in graves and expect this not to have an impact. About 1% of the human body is phosporus. We contain 4% of total yearly phosporus. After burying a few hundred years worth of human bodies this starts to add up to quite a lot.
This "letter from the government" comes only weeks after they passed a law legalizing hacking by the police. It means nothing.
Also, this letter is available only in MS Word format and LibreOffice refuses to open it. The Dutch government is a bunch of clueless computer illiterate idiots.
The graph of software death looks much worse than this. What we see in this graph is that the number of open issues in this project grows linearly with the number of issues resolved. This is normal; the number of open issues directly corresponds to the size/complexity of the software. Many issues are likely not ever going to be resolved and in practice this is fine; for most software the economically optimum quality level is simply not "issue free".
Also, it is highly likely for software to gain features that are not going to stay. The bug count for such features will grow and make your graph look very sad. However, once the component is dropped and all open bugs can be closed, you will often see that a relatively large number of bugs were in that component. Without such information, it is impossible to tell what a graph is trying to tell you.
The sad graph of software death does not just have the number of open bugs growing; that's normal. It has the created:resolved rate itself growing. This might, however, be very subtle; perhaps even this projects' bug count is growing exponentially, but with a mere 15 data points it is impossible to tell.
So if your project looks like this graph, which I'm pretty sure it will if you're dealing with somewhat mature software that is continuously being developed, be happy about. You're just fine. Your software is not about to explode anytime soon. If, however, you see the created:resolved rate itself growing then you're in trouble.
This is nonsense. What Utrecht and Nijmegen are doing is simple welfare reform. It has absolutely nothing to do with basic income. I don't get how The Guardian failed to see that. Why these politicians keep calling it "basic income" is completely beyond me.
For real basic income, look at Finland; they're actually doing it.
Let's not forget Germany already has the oddest photography laws of all western countries. It is the only country that effectively makes the art of street photograph illegal: you should have consent of all people in your picture, even in public places. All pictures of the Berlin Wall being taken down would be illegal if taken today. There's a reason Germany doesn't have Google Streetview.
In most countries, photographs are the property of the photographer and he can do with them whatever he wants (if it is not obviously damaging to the subjects). In Germany, that's not the case; photographers need consent not only to use pictures but even to take them. In that regard, Germany is unique and against that background, this ruling is no surprise. In fact it is completely consistent with the way Germany deals with photography in general.
If Rossi actually succeeded with cold fusion, he would be the richest man on the planet, instead he is a clown with a black box.
That's not entirely true. The same could be said about super-efficient solar panels. Instead, they don't make you an instant billionaire either. There's always the economic component. Whether Rossi's eCat works or not, it requires fuel, hydrogen, a fat powerline and probably some hard-to-get permits. I can imagine it is very expensive to keep it running for longer terms and I think hydrogen storage is going to be a major issue when running this thing any longer than a few days. For comparison: the hydrogen tank in a car like the BMW Hydrogen 7 drains empty in a matter of days.
There's no reason to believe it will be significantly cheaper than any of the renewable energy sources we use today. It might be eventually (if it works at all), though. However, for the eCat to make Rossi rich, he's going to have to do a shitload of additional research.
When he advocated for the safety of leaded gasoline, he wasn't lying for financial gain, he was doing so because he believed it. The scientists protecting you from ozone holes or lead or snake oil are indistinguishable from the scientists that create the ozone holes or leaded gasoline in the first place, or the scientists that create better cancer treatments; it's only in hindsight that you know who was right.
When he was advocating the safety of leaded gasoline, that almost certainly wasn't science. It would even back then have been easy to see that. You can very well know who was or is right without hindsight.
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If given the choice between my medical data being on a server in a hospital or whatever managed by a grumpy sysadmin who also needs to take care of peoples desktops or stored on a server that happens not to be in a hospital, managed by people that do only that, I'd go for the cloud hands down.
However, one should be picky about the country and jurisdiction of your cloud. I suggest not to store your medical data on a US server (or a US company server) if you're not in the US.
Fear of the cloud is a bit like fear of flying. "OMG I'M NOT IN CONTROL", totally ignoring reality.
I didn't RTFA but it seems somewhat unlikely to me that the hot liquid itself directly causes cancer. Wouldn't it be more likely if some kind of thermally induced (chemical) reaction, for example with saliva, would produce carcinogenic compounds?
[quote]Nobody blinks an eye when the EU demands patient records and other 'protected' confidential data being held solely in Europe, but being financial in nature, all of a sudden that's overreaching?[/quote]
The EU does not demand that. The EU demands that information is well-protected (which may in turn mean that you should keep it out of the US). It does not forbid data to leave the EU at all. Turkey does.
[quote]All I can say is if you're a multi-national without the ability to data partition geographically, whatever your business is in, you're just welcoming a pain in the ass now or in the near future.[/quote]
How the hell do you expect that to work? Paypal facilitates international transactions. In order to comply to the approach you're proposing, they would have to keep data about all international transactions in at least two countries. In a world where every country acted like Turkey, there would be no international transactions.
It's not just overreaching; it's ridiculous incompetent idiot behavior.
There's much more going on than "some research". Australia is actively breeding coral that is adapted to future conditions (lower pH, more CO2, higher temperatures) and is planning on releasing the results in the wild. I got this from the documentary about the Great Barrier Reef on Discovery Channel, but this article also describes it:
http://www.nature.com/news/cli...
They're not semi-sober, they're sober but respond to somewhat arbitrary tests. I wouldn't consider it acceptable to bother the up to 10% of the population that smokes weed with that.
That's why where I live (stoner country .nl) tests that merely display a correlation with being under the influence instead of clear proof are not legal.
Note the resemblance that using such tests shows with judging people on other arbitrary aspects of their appearance. It's just not right, especially not in areas where using weed is not illegal.
I have never heard of tire dust being considered a major health risk.
Where I live (.nl), in many places near houses, speed limits are much lower than the road design allows, in order to keep the fine dust in check. Since the advent of clean diesels, the majority of that comes from tires. Tire dust has always been a major health risk, containing irritants, allergenics and carcinogenic compounds and more. There's nothing new here, nevertheless everbody acts surprised :p
The BBC used to run a documentary - "Electric Dreams" - about a family that lived like people did in each decade of the past century. It clearly showed that the washing machine was the real life changer, the number one reason running a family no longer was an actual full time job. It should without any doubt be on the top of this list, well above the refrigerator.
To myself, the cellphone would be the number one life changer, not the smartphone. It's not so much carrying a computer around that makes the huge difference, it's being able to communicate with anybody at all times. I find it almost inconveivable how much time we used to spent making appointments and waiting for each other at meeting points. Going into town or to a concert of festival used to start with making appointments. Now you just go there and meet up. Even though we now do all that using smart phone features, it was the cell phone that was the game changer.
I find the when my guitar gently weeps video quite awkward. Prince is on stage the whole time but he isn't in the shot until all of the sudden, he steps forward and the spotlight is pointed at him. Also, the contrast between the guitarist soloing in the first half of the song and Prince was too extreme, to the point of being embarrassing. Also, I think, apart from his own awesome work that isn't available on social media, his cover of Radiohead's Creep show of his skills much better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't care Google Play is the only app store. I don't care they impose restrictions on vendors. I don't care. What I do care about is the lack of innovation in mobile browsers. The sole reason native mobile app are and remain so popular is the lack of a proper web-based alternative, which is likely to be actively held back by Apple and Google, effectively creating a monopoly for native apps while we could have had proper web-based apps (with offline support, proper notifications, proper storage, proper integration with GPS/camera/*) that just work everywhere for ages. But we don't. Because of our friends at Google and Apple.
...but it's not in the voice of their personal assistants. It's in the gender breakdown. How could Amazon possibly achieve 39% female tech workers if only 18% of computer science graduates are women?! Do they have a super old workforce that stems from before the unexplicable decline of women in the 1980s? I doubt it...
You would be allowed to voluntarily provide data but your employer would not be allowed to maintain a database containing sensitive data like this without a good purpose. Nevertheless, I'm glad for you to be living in the USA, where anybody can create totally insecure databases containing all your personal information without restriction whatsoever.
That means that as an employer, it's fine if you keep Strava update mails from your employees in your inbox. Organising them into a folder quickly becomes dangerous territory.
Why would the want to do that? They might already have a nuclear warhead in orbit right now. All they have to do is press the button when it is over the USA and the EMP will blow the USA back to the 1800s.
Sanctions are irrelevant too. They're not law or whatever; they're merely the opinion of some random majority of countries and since the world is not a democracy, North-Korea doesn't really give a fuck. Why would it? It's at war with a country that's on the opposite side of the world. I would start developing proper weapons too if I were at war with a country that has an rather long history of Not Minding It's Own Business Unless The "Enemy" Has Big Ass Rockets.
In the Netherlands we used to have a lot of cyclists without lights. As in: well over half of the cyclists would bike around in the middle of the night, ignoring traffic lights on a pitch black bike. Maybe the law was too stringent?
Then we started seriously enforcing the law. Now a cyclist without lights is a rare sight and fatalities have dwindled a lot. What I'm trying to say: never judge the value of a law by how well people abide by it if the law is not properly enforced.
Buildbots probably wouldn't consume planets; escaping from their gravity well would be much too costly compared to the alternatives. They probably would use asteroids instead, taking their time to tweak their orbits so they arrive at their destination processing plant with a minimum amount of energy. This would almost certainly not happen at an exponential rate. As with all mining, they would start with the low hanging fruit, causing production to become increasingly more difficult as time passes, prohibiting durable exponential growth.
Also, while I'm typing a comment anyway, the Dyson sphere would probably reflect raditation to several power stations within it. These might very well redistribute it by simply reflecting it back out, for example to stations in the outer star system, from where it can be redistributed to their mining sites (perhaps even simply blasting asteroids with radiation in order to control their orbits). This would cause the radiation from the Dyson sphere that Schafer expects to come from somewhere else entirely and probably not in a uniform way at all; we might very well not even be able to detect it or would perhaps discount short bursts of radiation reflected from asteroids as being noise. I can imagine their entire star system to look like a giant beautiful collection of laser scanners ;)
totally negligible
That might be true, but the continuous stream of valuable nutrients (especially hosphorus!) that used to simply be returned to the ground in the form of shit and bodies that are now either buried deeply or dumped in wastewater is probably huge. We cannot keep taking stuff from the environment and dump it in the sea or in graves and expect this not to have an impact. About 1% of the human body is phosporus. We contain 4% of total yearly phosporus. After burying a few hundred years worth of human bodies this starts to add up to quite a lot.
This "letter from the government" comes only weeks after they passed a law legalizing hacking by the police. It means nothing.
Also, this letter is available only in MS Word format and LibreOffice refuses to open it. The Dutch government is a bunch of clueless computer illiterate idiots.
The graph of software death looks much worse than this. What we see in this graph is that the number of open issues in this project grows linearly with the number of issues resolved. This is normal; the number of open issues directly corresponds to the size/complexity of the software. Many issues are likely not ever going to be resolved and in practice this is fine; for most software the economically optimum quality level is simply not "issue free".
Also, it is highly likely for software to gain features that are not going to stay. The bug count for such features will grow and make your graph look very sad. However, once the component is dropped and all open bugs can be closed, you will often see that a relatively large number of bugs were in that component. Without such information, it is impossible to tell what a graph is trying to tell you.
The sad graph of software death does not just have the number of open bugs growing; that's normal. It has the created:resolved rate itself growing. This might, however, be very subtle; perhaps even this projects' bug count is growing exponentially, but with a mere 15 data points it is impossible to tell.
So if your project looks like this graph, which I'm pretty sure it will if you're dealing with somewhat mature software that is continuously being developed, be happy about. You're just fine. Your software is not about to explode anytime soon. If, however, you see the created:resolved rate itself growing then you're in trouble.
This is nonsense. What Utrecht and Nijmegen are doing is simple welfare reform. It has absolutely nothing to do with basic income. I don't get how The Guardian failed to see that. Why these politicians keep calling it "basic income" is completely beyond me.
For real basic income, look at Finland; they're actually doing it.
It was a controlled landing. Protocol is: in case of imminent trouble, destroy drone by crash landing it.
Let's not forget Germany already has the oddest photography laws of all western countries. It is the only country that effectively makes the art of street photograph illegal: you should have consent of all people in your picture, even in public places. All pictures of the Berlin Wall being taken down would be illegal if taken today. There's a reason Germany doesn't have Google Streetview.
In most countries, photographs are the property of the photographer and he can do with them whatever he wants (if it is not obviously damaging to the subjects). In Germany, that's not the case; photographers need consent not only to use pictures but even to take them. In that regard, Germany is unique and against that background, this ruling is no surprise. In fact it is completely consistent with the way Germany deals with photography in general.
If Rossi actually succeeded with cold fusion, he would be the richest man on the planet, instead he is a clown with a black box.
That's not entirely true. The same could be said about super-efficient solar panels. Instead, they don't make you an instant billionaire either. There's always the economic component. Whether Rossi's eCat works or not, it requires fuel, hydrogen, a fat powerline and probably some hard-to-get permits. I can imagine it is very expensive to keep it running for longer terms and I think hydrogen storage is going to be a major issue when running this thing any longer than a few days. For comparison: the hydrogen tank in a car like the BMW Hydrogen 7 drains empty in a matter of days.
There's no reason to believe it will be significantly cheaper than any of the renewable energy sources we use today. It might be eventually (if it works at all), though. However, for the eCat to make Rossi rich, he's going to have to do a shitload of additional research.
the scientific experts at the time disagree with you
But they obviously didn't do the science. Scientific experts can say what they want but if they didn't research it, you'd better be skeptical.
When he advocated for the safety of leaded gasoline, he wasn't lying for financial gain, he was doing so because he believed it. The scientists protecting you from ozone holes or lead or snake oil are indistinguishable from the scientists that create the ozone holes or leaded gasoline in the first place, or the scientists that create better cancer treatments; it's only in hindsight that you know who was right.
When he was advocating the safety of leaded gasoline, that almost certainly wasn't science. It would even back then have been easy to see that. You can very well know who was or is right without hindsight.
He's probably waiting until the end of the year because by then their shipment of D-Wave quantum computers will have arrived...