My tax return demands a signature on paper. The taxman will accept my accountant's statement that he has seen a signature, but there must at some point be a physical pen on physical paper - or so may accountant tells me.
Occam was intended as a reply to all the problems that can happen with threading, The ides with Occam is that a lot of the things that can go wrong with threads simply cannot happen in Occam. Think of it as Java to threading's C. Just as you cannot create random pointers in Java, you cannot lock random mutexes in Occam (which doesn't have mutexes),
Traditional threading really is assembler level coding for parallelism; Occam tries to move to a high level language.
They are the only people competent to judge the cost/benefit of the tests/treatments they want. The alternative is to have accountants with no medical knowledge making this decision.
NHS funds are not a bottomless bucket. Yes, care is free at the point of use. But the total care available is finite. If money is wasted on unnecessary treatments, then other, more necessary, treatments will get cut.
Since the demand for medical services is infinite but the supply is finite, there will always be rationing in the NHS. You may not like it, but, like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you cannot avoid it. What you can change is where rationing appears. If you hide it in one place it will pop up in another. Much better to have it out in the open than to have it done by secret conclaves of consultants or the blind workings of an administrative machine not designed for the purpose.
Which is totally irrelevant to this post. Of course you need proper oversight of, appeal against, and investigation of, all law enforcement bodies. Their powers, whatever they may be, should not be used without due cause and appropriate evidence. But this is nothing new - law enforcers are inherently liable to become over-suspicious, because they spend most if their time working with (or rather, against) criminals. *If* they are working properly, the GP's post is true; if they are not working properly, we have a bigger problem to solve.
I would agree with this based on my experience learning Java. With many years C++ experience, learning the Java syntax was half a day with a book, and being able to write reasonably good code wehich did what I expected was about two days. But, reckoning by hindsight, it was about eighteen months before I was a good Java programmer with all the language idioms at my fingertips and a good knowledge of all the pitfalls. And that is with a clean, well designed, language. With a hybrid, lower level, and sprawling language like C++, I reckon that it will take even longer to reach that level. I doubt that more than a few percent of C++ programmers are really masters of all aspects of the language. I have to say that, while I call myself a good C++ programmer, I approach writing templates, other than the most trivial, with fear and trembling. And templated overloaded operators need even more care.
Which, to return to the subject, means that if you are teaching "vocationally", the sooner you get students started on their target language the better. Whereas if you are teaching theoretically, you want the cleanest and simplest example of each class of language. Java and Python fill both needs, Pascal/Delphi is clean but has little industry use. VB is the odd one out: widely used, but not particularly clean and simple.
The world is full of companies making open source stuff. The design of a burger is hardly a deep secret. Lots of fixtures around the house - and business - are manufactured to standard designs, and are the more valuable because they are standardized. Sure, I can cook my own burger. I might well be able to manufacture my own bolts and so on. But why bother?
The point here is that these guys are succeeding not because of some magic intellectual property, with legal IP protection or secrecy.They are succeeding because of the economies of scale. While I could perfectly well duplicate their design, it will cost me, in components and time, much, much more than it costs them. Why should I bother building my own when I can buy theirs, probably better built, tested, and with some sort of a manual, for the same price or little more? Batch or mass production produce economies which allow shipping and warranty costs to be absorbed and still leave a workable profit. The clue here is cutting marketing, selling, and shipping costs. And the answer here is the Internet. The Internet allows world-wide advertising at low-to-no cost; setting up a shopping cart is trivial for any geek; we now have payment systems which work for the whole developed world, and parcel shippers will delver across the developed world in 2-3 working days.
Actually, the model for this is PC assemblers, up to and including Dell. The design of a Windows/Linux compatible PC is open source. The components are widely available. Thousands of companies, from one man shops up to Dell, are making a business of selling PCs that any geek could assemble for himself - and often does, in the evenings. But at salaried rates, it is better value to buy in your assembled PC from your mate down the road who does ten a day, or from Dell who does 10,000 a day, than to go to the bother of ordering the bits, assembling and testing something that will be no better when you have finished it.
Under the GPL, you have to distribute, or offer to distribute, the source to anyone to whom you distribute the binary, and with the right to redistribute in the same way. I this case, this would imply that the OP has to offer the source to all other departments that use the code, and that they then have the right to distribute as they see fit. However, they are presumably bound by the same university regulations. However, it would give the OP a way round a single uncooperative manager. If an internal user could be found with a more positive attitude to Open Source, that user could request the source and then redistribute it in any way compatible with the GPL i.e. return it to the OS community.
The reason you need giant parties is to form governments. A house with 300 MPs from 500 parties, each with their own ego, would not have formed a government before the next election came due. Parties, too large for one person to control and vouch for, are the way we form some sort of a consensus. I accept that it does not *have* to be this way - as Churchill said, democracy is the worst possible system - except for all the others that have been tried. Before you pull down this system, let's see your better replacement.
Even the lowest level sign-putting-up volunteer can be over-enthusiastic enough to try to fix the system so his side wins. How are you going to draw the line between low-level volunteers, who I am not expected to vouch for, and high level ones I am? I will just classify everybody other than myself as low-level.
I don't think I would trusty/anybody/ to vouch for them to the level you require. There are a very few I would trust at the level of honesty, but those few I would not trust at the level of (occasional) incompetence or gullibility to others. We all make mistakes, some more often than others. What you are constructing is a system of thousands (hundreds of thousands, in my view) of components, with fatal results on first error.
Maybe it is time for a new law: You cheat, you die.
Imagine that a party leader becomes responsible for the actions of the members of his party. Some lowly member cheats, the leader gets a bullet in the head.
I join your party under a false name, cheat blatantly and run like hell (hopefully before the cheating is detected). Your leader gets a bullet in the head.
India has a population over a billion. The major parties will have hundreds of thousands of low-level workers. Do you seriously expect any human organisation to keep a hundred thousand people whiter than white?
Put it another way - has any policeman been convicted of corruption in your city? Remember, policemen are selected, trained at length, and continuously supervised. And yet bent coppers still turn up, at a rate of probably a few per thousand. Expecting a hundred thousand election workers to be honest is ridiculous.
And how to you suggest to apply that system on an election environment? If the checksum doesn't match, you remove all votes from the voters who used that particular machine? You repeat the elections until no machine was tampered with?
That, basically, is what what you do if you discover fraud in a paper based election. Repeat the election until the level of fraud is below the winner's margin. Repeat elections have happened. If the fraudsters are convinced enough that tampering will be discovered and the election re-run, they don't bother to try. But you have to make it clear that you/will/ re-run fraudulent polls, whether the fraud is electronic, paper, or voter intimidation.
As far as I can tell, all ATMs are based on data processing OSes - either ones with a desktop heritage then multi-processing and networking added on (Windows) or with a data processing/networking heritage with desktop added on (*nix families). It seems to me that they ought to be based on real-time control OSs, such as those used in the automotive and aerospace industry, I don't see how an ATM is any more complicated than a Digital Engine Control system, especially for state-of-the art engines. People who design such systems know about reliability, which can include security in a limited function machine. The problem with general-purpose machines is that they have generalized functionality, just hidden away. Such systems can be subverted and the extra functionality exploited. Machines built from the ground up to do only what they have to do do not have the functionality to be subverted.
I see no reason why such fixed-function machines should be much more expensive that those based on general purpose machines. There is an up-front cost in getting started, probably compensated by reduced security testing later. Wat will be harder is all the dreams the marketing people will have, of using the ATM to do other things, such as sell insurance. It will do only what it is built to do. Inflexible, but secure.
Yes, we need more parallelism. But parallelism does not have to be implemented via GPUs - though a man from NVidia would say so. GPUs provide a quick-and-dirty form of parallelism which is easy to kludge onto the current PC architecture. Which, given the way the appalling x86 architecture has succeeded by pure kludgy brute force, may be the way we end up going. But actually we would be much better with an architecture that inherently supports parallelism, such as Functional Programming. I don't known whether we can overcome the inertia of the huge corporations committed to the current way of doing things, but there are much better ways. A homogeneous system is easier to use than a heterogeneous one, to start with.
But, in this particular case, there is hard evidence that it is not cheaper. The policy may be tenable in a weakly secured environment, but not in a strongly secured environment, Proper security implies that no machines that are not 100% under the Security Team control connect to the network.
At $10 million the container of 4 missiles, it is still $250 million to take out a battle group - and difficult to keep that stealthy. Too big a project for terrorist groups. Remember that, for all the fuss about how well the are funded, 9/11 was done with $5 box cutters, and most of the damage in Afghanistan is being done by $200 IEDs and Kalashnikovs. A small country will have definite "we know where you live" problems: OK, if all goes right, you take out a carrier. Now what? You have undoubtedly hurt the US, but far from disabled it. And big countries fire the same missiles from missile-carrying destroyers, which have other uses.
The ides is to sell it to countries with military budgets but not much clue. Many of the high tech weapons sold to third world countries are essentially useless for their real military needs. But they make the generals feel good, and therefore support the dictator (or even elected president) who keeps buying such toys for the only group with the realistic possibility of toppling him.
While I agree that the defensive armament of a carrier battle group is intended to defend against precisely this sort of attack, the container ship would not have to be near: this sort of cruise missile typically has ranges of the order of 200 miles. You cannot enforce a 200 mile radius exclusion circle round your battle group. The missile will fly most of this distance at the height of a hundred or sofeet, so it is vulnerable only as it approaches the screening ships - which is why they are there.
And how do you think scientists are expected to predict what can be done with their future discoveries? The same technologies that produced antibiotics can also produce germ warfare. The people who originally researched that atom thought it was unsplittable and their research was the purest of blue-sky investigation. Unfortunately, their research showed that it was splittable - with dramatic results.
This has been going on since inventions began. The stone which opens the coconut crushes skulls. Weapons used for haunting can be used for war. Fire keeps you warm, cooks food, and can by used to burn heretics at the stake. There is no way that science can predict whether an invention will be used for good or ill - or, as is almost always the case, both. The only thing to do would be to stop all development completely,
In this case, I thing the scientists are probably thinking a lot about the ethics.The head bit is hype: what they are trying to do is develop the ability for humans to regrow damaged limbs. is that not ethically good? Of course they may find the ability to regrow everything i.e. immortality. Is that ethically good - billions of lives saved for ever - or unethical - overpopulation will destroy the world and may result in cataclysmic wars?
Firstly, to clarify, ARM doesn't manufacture chips. It manufactures and licenses the IP for a family of CPUs with which other manufacturers make chips - most notably Samsung, which manufactures most of the CPUs that Apple uses.
To start with, if they started restricting who Arm could sell the IP to, they would destroy the market from which ARM makes most of its money, which would be like burning up the money they are spending. It would also, I think, put them into serious risk or anti-trust problems,
However, ARM is extending its processors by adding on features for, for example, video processing. I think Apple would very much like to steer the way this is developing, and then get early releases of it. Without keeping other people off it, they could have their drivers in place when the chip comes out, rather than waiting until Arm gets ready enough to announce it to all manufacturers.
However, I cannot see it bringing that much extra value to Apple, for a colossal investment. I think that, whatever it does, buying Arm would harm Arm's primary market: it independence is seen as an asset by those who buy its IP, precisely because there is no Big Brother distorting Arm's priorities. And this is another newspaper rumour. I would guess Apple have thought of the idea, but decided not to.
Those YouTube megabytes are being requested by end users. It is they who are getting the "ride" - and it is usually not free. Google/YouTube is just making content available on demand - as is just about every other data supplier on the net except spammers. The only people getting a free ride are spammers, because they are using a "push" mode. Before they stop or slow my YouTube, which I want, let them do something about spam.
Strange burial that buries people with miscellaneous wildlife. While it has been known for people to be buried with pets, it is usually just one or two. And known burial rituals only data back about 50,000 years, whereas these are just under 2 million.
TFA suggest they were washed into an inaccessible cave system by a sudden flood.
As a long time reader of Science Fiction, I am interested that no SF writer (to my knowledge) ever predicted GPS. They predicted many other things that we now have (and, of course, tons of stuff that we don't have and probably never will have). But nobody seems ever realized how useful it is to have a device that quietly, cheaply, and easily tells you exactly where you are. Possibly they never put it together with the other necessary component for most applications: cheap, fast, low power storage of a few hundred megabytes of map data,
They also got the licensing for relatively up-to-date satellite/aerial photography. Previously, the owners of this had charged very high fees because their customers typically wanted only a tiny area, so they had to charge a large per-square-mile rate to cover their costs. By doing a bulk buy and putting it, effectively, in the public domain, Google have both given the original owners as much money as they could ever have expected from residual sales and given the public, including academics, a valuable dataset (plus the tool to look at it).
Microsoft have followed suit to some extent, but they would never have gone there if Google hadn't gone there first.
Sadly, and perversely, most disk drive manufacturers count a megabyte as 2^20 bytes, but a gigabyte as a thousand megabytes i.e 10^3 * 2^20 bytes and a terabyte as a million megabytes i.e. 10^6 * 2^20 bytes. Crazy, but true at least until a couple of years ago; I haven't been disk shopping recently.
Slashdot Mirror
My tax return demands a signature on paper. The taxman will accept my accountant's statement that he has seen a signature, but there must at some point be a physical pen on physical paper - or so may accountant tells me.
Occam was intended as a reply to all the problems that can happen with threading, The ides with Occam is that a lot of the things that can go wrong with threads simply cannot happen in Occam. Think of it as Java to threading's C. Just as you cannot create random pointers in Java, you cannot lock random mutexes in Occam (which doesn't have mutexes),
Traditional threading really is assembler level coding for parallelism; Occam tries to move to a high level language.
They are the only people competent to judge the cost/benefit of the tests/treatments they want. The alternative is to have accountants with no medical knowledge making this decision.
NHS funds are not a bottomless bucket. Yes, care is free at the point of use. But the total care available is finite. If money is wasted on unnecessary treatments, then other, more necessary, treatments will get cut.
Since the demand for medical services is infinite but the supply is finite, there will always be rationing in the NHS. You may not like it, but, like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you cannot avoid it. What you can change is where rationing appears. If you hide it in one place it will pop up in another. Much better to have it out in the open than to have it done by secret conclaves of consultants or the blind workings of an administrative machine not designed for the purpose.
Which is totally irrelevant to this post. Of course you need proper oversight of, appeal against, and investigation of, all law enforcement bodies. Their powers, whatever they may be, should not be used without due cause and appropriate evidence. But this is nothing new - law enforcers are inherently liable to become over-suspicious, because they spend most if their time working with (or rather, against) criminals. *If* they are working properly, the GP's post is true; if they are not working properly, we have a bigger problem to solve.
As TFA said, put it in a Faraday Bag. It cannot wipe on losing signal. Then you have time to contact the manufacturer to check on how to unlock it.
I would agree with this based on my experience learning Java. With many years C++ experience, learning the Java syntax was half a day with a book, and being able to write reasonably good code wehich did what I expected was about two days. But, reckoning by hindsight, it was about eighteen months before I was a good Java programmer with all the language idioms at my fingertips and a good knowledge of all the pitfalls. And that is with a clean, well designed, language. With a hybrid, lower level, and sprawling language like C++, I reckon that it will take even longer to reach that level. I doubt that more than a few percent of C++ programmers are really masters of all aspects of the language. I have to say that, while I call myself a good C++ programmer, I approach writing templates, other than the most trivial, with fear and trembling. And templated overloaded operators need even more care.
Which, to return to the subject, means that if you are teaching "vocationally", the sooner you get students started on their target language the better. Whereas if you are teaching theoretically, you want the cleanest and simplest example of each class of language. Java and Python fill both needs, Pascal/Delphi is clean but has little industry use. VB is the odd one out: widely used, but not particularly clean and simple.
The world is full of companies making open source stuff. The design of a burger is hardly a deep secret. Lots of fixtures around the house - and business - are manufactured to standard designs, and are the more valuable because they are standardized. Sure, I can cook my own burger. I might well be able to manufacture my own bolts and so on. But why bother?
The point here is that these guys are succeeding not because of some magic intellectual property, with legal IP protection or secrecy.They are succeeding because of the economies of scale. While I could perfectly well duplicate their design, it will cost me, in components and time, much, much more than it costs them. Why should I bother building my own when I can buy theirs, probably better built, tested, and with some sort of a manual, for the same price or little more? Batch or mass production produce economies which allow shipping and warranty costs to be absorbed and still leave a workable profit. The clue here is cutting marketing, selling, and shipping costs. And the answer here is the Internet. The Internet allows world-wide advertising at low-to-no cost; setting up a shopping cart is trivial for any geek; we now have payment systems which work for the whole developed world, and parcel shippers will delver across the developed world in 2-3 working days.
Actually, the model for this is PC assemblers, up to and including Dell. The design of a Windows/Linux compatible PC is open source. The components are widely available. Thousands of companies, from one man shops up to Dell, are making a business of selling PCs that any geek could assemble for himself - and often does, in the evenings. But at salaried rates, it is better value to buy in your assembled PC from your mate down the road who does ten a day, or from Dell who does 10,000 a day, than to go to the bother of ordering the bits, assembling and testing something that will be no better when you have finished it.
Under the GPL, you have to distribute, or offer to distribute, the source to anyone to whom you distribute the binary, and with the right to redistribute in the same way. I this case, this would imply that the OP has to offer the source to all other departments that use the code, and that they then have the right to distribute as they see fit. However, they are presumably bound by the same university regulations. However, it would give the OP a way round a single uncooperative manager. If an internal user could be found with a more positive attitude to Open Source, that user could request the source and then redistribute it in any way compatible with the GPL i.e. return it to the OS community.
The reason you need giant parties is to form governments. A house with 300 MPs from 500 parties, each with their own ego, would not have formed a government before the next election came due. Parties, too large for one person to control and vouch for, are the way we form some sort of a consensus. I accept that it does not *have* to be this way - as Churchill said, democracy is the worst possible system - except for all the others that have been tried. Before you pull down this system, let's see your better replacement.
Even the lowest level sign-putting-up volunteer can be over-enthusiastic enough to try to fix the system so his side wins. How are you going to draw the line between low-level volunteers, who I am not expected to vouch for, and high level ones I am? I will just classify everybody other than myself as low-level.
I don't think I would trusty /anybody/ to vouch for them to the level you require. There are a very few I would trust at the level of honesty, but those few I would not trust at the level of (occasional) incompetence or gullibility to others. We all make mistakes, some more often than others. What you are constructing is a system of thousands (hundreds of thousands, in my view) of components, with fatal results on first error.
Maybe it is time for a new law: You cheat, you die.
Imagine that a party leader becomes responsible for the actions of the members of his party. Some lowly member cheats, the leader gets a bullet in the head.
I join your party under a false name, cheat blatantly and run like hell (hopefully before the cheating is detected). Your leader gets a bullet in the head.
India has a population over a billion. The major parties will have hundreds of thousands of low-level workers. Do you seriously expect any human organisation to keep a hundred thousand people whiter than white?
Put it another way - has any policeman been convicted of corruption in your city? Remember, policemen are selected, trained at length, and continuously supervised. And yet bent coppers still turn up, at a rate of probably a few per thousand. Expecting a hundred thousand election workers to be honest is ridiculous.
And how to you suggest to apply that system on an election environment? If the checksum doesn't match, you remove all votes from the voters who used that particular machine? You repeat the elections until no machine was tampered with?
That, basically, is what what you do if you discover fraud in a paper based election. Repeat the election until the level of fraud is below the winner's margin. Repeat elections have happened. If the fraudsters are convinced enough that tampering will be discovered and the election re-run, they don't bother to try. But you have to make it clear that you /will/ re-run fraudulent polls, whether the fraud is electronic, paper, or voter intimidation.
As far as I can tell, all ATMs are based on data processing OSes - either ones with a desktop heritage then multi-processing and networking added on (Windows) or with a data processing/networking heritage with desktop added on (*nix families). It seems to me that they ought to be based on real-time control OSs, such as those used in the automotive and aerospace industry, I don't see how an ATM is any more complicated than a Digital Engine Control system, especially for state-of-the art engines. People who design such systems know about reliability, which can include security in a limited function machine. The problem with general-purpose machines is that they have generalized functionality, just hidden away. Such systems can be subverted and the extra functionality exploited. Machines built from the ground up to do only what they have to do do not have the functionality to be subverted.
I see no reason why such fixed-function machines should be much more expensive that those based on general purpose machines. There is an up-front cost in getting started, probably compensated by reduced security testing later. Wat will be harder is all the dreams the marketing people will have, of using the ATM to do other things, such as sell insurance. It will do only what it is built to do. Inflexible, but secure.
Yes, we need more parallelism. But parallelism does not have to be implemented via GPUs - though a man from NVidia would say so. GPUs provide a quick-and-dirty form of parallelism which is easy to kludge onto the current PC architecture. Which, given the way the appalling x86 architecture has succeeded by pure kludgy brute force, may be the way we end up going. But actually we would be much better with an architecture that inherently supports parallelism, such as Functional Programming. I don't known whether we can overcome the inertia of the huge corporations committed to the current way of doing things, but there are much better ways. A homogeneous system is easier to use than a heterogeneous one, to start with.
But, in this particular case, there is hard evidence that it is not cheaper. The policy may be tenable in a weakly secured environment, but not in a strongly secured environment, Proper security implies that no machines that are not 100% under the Security Team control connect to the network.
At $10 million the container of 4 missiles, it is still $250 million to take out a battle group - and difficult to keep that stealthy. Too big a project for terrorist groups. Remember that, for all the fuss about how well the are funded, 9/11 was done with $5 box cutters, and most of the damage in Afghanistan is being done by $200 IEDs and Kalashnikovs. A small country will have definite "we know where you live" problems: OK, if all goes right, you take out a carrier. Now what? You have undoubtedly hurt the US, but far from disabled it. And big countries fire the same missiles from missile-carrying destroyers, which have other uses.
The ides is to sell it to countries with military budgets but not much clue. Many of the high tech weapons sold to third world countries are essentially useless for their real military needs. But they make the generals feel good, and therefore support the dictator (or even elected president) who keeps buying such toys for the only group with the realistic possibility of toppling him.
While I agree that the defensive armament of a carrier battle group is intended to defend against precisely this sort of attack, the container ship would not have to be near: this sort of cruise missile typically has ranges of the order of 200 miles. You cannot enforce a 200 mile radius exclusion circle round your battle group. The missile will fly most of this distance at the height of a hundred or sofeet, so it is vulnerable only as it approaches the screening ships - which is why they are there.
And how do you think scientists are expected to predict what can be done with their future discoveries? The same technologies that produced antibiotics can also produce germ warfare. The people who originally researched that atom thought it was unsplittable and their research was the purest of blue-sky investigation. Unfortunately, their research showed that it was splittable - with dramatic results.
This has been going on since inventions began. The stone which opens the coconut crushes skulls. Weapons used for haunting can be used for war. Fire keeps you warm, cooks food, and can by used to burn heretics at the stake. There is no way that science can predict whether an invention will be used for good or ill - or, as is almost always the case, both. The only thing to do would be to stop all development completely,
In this case, I thing the scientists are probably thinking a lot about the ethics.The head bit is hype: what they are trying to do is develop the ability for humans to regrow damaged limbs. is that not ethically good? Of course they may find the ability to regrow everything i.e. immortality. Is that ethically good - billions of lives saved for ever - or unethical - overpopulation will destroy the world and may result in cataclysmic wars?
Firstly, to clarify, ARM doesn't manufacture chips. It manufactures and licenses the IP for a family of CPUs with which other manufacturers make chips - most notably Samsung, which manufactures most of the CPUs that Apple uses.
To start with, if they started restricting who Arm could sell the IP to, they would destroy the market from which ARM makes most of its money, which would be like burning up the money they are spending. It would also, I think, put them into serious risk or anti-trust problems,
However, ARM is extending its processors by adding on features for, for example, video processing. I think Apple would very much like to steer the way this is developing, and then get early releases of it. Without keeping other people off it, they could have their drivers in place when the chip comes out, rather than waiting until Arm gets ready enough to announce it to all manufacturers.
However, I cannot see it bringing that much extra value to Apple, for a colossal investment. I think that, whatever it does, buying Arm would harm Arm's primary market: it independence is seen as an asset by those who buy its IP, precisely because there is no Big Brother distorting Arm's priorities. And this is another newspaper rumour. I would guess Apple have thought of the idea, but decided not to.
Those YouTube megabytes are being requested by end users. It is they who are getting the "ride" - and it is usually not free. Google/YouTube is just making content available on demand - as is just about every other data supplier on the net except spammers. The only people getting a free ride are spammers, because they are using a "push" mode. Before they stop or slow my YouTube, which I want, let them do something about spam.
Strange burial that buries people with miscellaneous wildlife. While it has been known for people to be buried with pets, it is usually just one or two. And known burial rituals only data back about 50,000 years, whereas these are just under 2 million.
TFA suggest they were washed into an inaccessible cave system by a sudden flood.
As a long time reader of Science Fiction, I am interested that no SF writer (to my knowledge) ever predicted GPS. They predicted many other things that we now have (and, of course, tons of stuff that we don't have and probably never will have). But nobody seems ever realized how useful it is to have a device that quietly, cheaply, and easily tells you exactly where you are. Possibly they never put it together with the other necessary component for most applications: cheap, fast, low power storage of a few hundred megabytes of map data,
TFA suggest that the bodies were washed into an inaccessible cave by a sudden flood, and the ages of the skeletons are compatible with mother/son.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but never assume conspiracy when cockup will do.
They also got the licensing for relatively up-to-date satellite/aerial photography. Previously, the owners of this had charged very high fees because their customers typically wanted only a tiny area, so they had to charge a large per-square-mile rate to cover their costs. By doing a bulk buy and putting it, effectively, in the public domain, Google have both given the original owners as much money as they could ever have expected from residual sales and given the public, including academics, a valuable dataset (plus the tool to look at it).
Microsoft have followed suit to some extent, but they would never have gone there if Google hadn't gone there first.
Sadly, and perversely, most disk drive manufacturers count a megabyte as 2^20 bytes, but a gigabyte as a thousand megabytes i.e 10^3 * 2^20 bytes and a terabyte as a million megabytes i.e. 10^6 * 2^20 bytes. Crazy, but true at least until a couple of years ago; I haven't been disk shopping recently.