Difference is when a private company pulls a stunt like taking down its entire IT system, customers start to abandon it and head to a competitor. If they screw up badly enough, they go bankrupt and everyone who worked there is out of a job. That creates a huge incentive to do things in a manner least disruptive to their customers.
*cough*PSN*cough* Hell, even for your example, Blackberry is still around. And its massive displacement in various places has more to do with competition than with having horrible/no service for a few days (and the places it's still strong is precisely because there are no real good replacements, no matter how much they fuck up things). I mean, you're right to a point about a lack of accountability, but most organizations of any significant size have huge issues with accountability with workers. The most that can usually happen is the whole company goes under or people suffer lay-offs, of which the people responsible are often far from the first to go, while funds are reallocated to deal with the issues.
When a government agency pulls the same stunt, they tell the customers "f- you, wait in line like a good citizen while we get everything worked out, because we're the government. We have a monopoly on the service we're providing so you're subservient to us, not the other way around."
No. They just demand more money and hire a private contractor to fill in for them, just like the article shows. The only places where that doesn't work is where the legislature/executive doesn't give much of a shit about providing remotely good service which means they'll already shoestring the budget on the department anyways. Why else would BMVs have such a consistently horrible reputation?
No matter how badly they screw it up, they can't go bankrupt because their department was created in order to fulfill a need; and as long as the legislature says that need needs to be fulfilled, there has to be a department to do it.
But they can run out of money. And if they're not allotted more funds, they effective shut down (although just like private industry, I'm sure people at the top make sure to always allot enough funds so they're paid short of the whole department closing).
(This is the same reason why vendor lock-in and monopolies are bad in private industry. I've often wondered if government could be made more efficient by, as counter-intuitive as this sounds, creating two agencies for each job/service. Force them to compete for funding based on customers serviced or data requests fulfilled per dollar spent, and scale the pay of everyone who works there accordingly.)
Then you'd have an oligarchy. How's the working out for the price of new Wii-U, XBox 360, and PS3 games (vs Android/iPhone/etc) and how locked down the new consoles are/will be? Or how breaking up AT&T brought in competition--which, btw, only really happened after they were forced to open their lines. Or the whole DSL/Cable oligarchy. And that doesn't even consider the possibly unsaid agreement for the two departments to never try too hard, lest it be expected of them. No, the real issue is that it's hard to find good managers. And once you get a few layers deep in any organization, there's so much disconnect from what the organization actually is supposed to do and is actually doing, that managers often are most interested in simply bleeding their budget at a consistent rate without much concern on if things are getting done.
Oh, and the idea to split out the problem into plenty of smaller contractors (bid or no bid) is precisely why the article occurred. People underbid all the time just to jump rates later. Government can't or won't back out of projects half-way if they're going badly because it's seen too much as waste, just like they can't or won't have 10 different companies all building the same thing. And then contractors themselves are paid a premium for their work over any full-time employee, which leads to contractors forming small or even large corporations which undermines the whole principle of using small contractors...
From a recent pastebin post allegedly from a Microsoft person, the DRM scheme appears to be actually better for consumers.
Better compared to what? Because last I checked, the default of no DRM is superior to any other sort of scheme.
How often are people screwed by selling their used games for pennies on the dollar?
One, if people are selling a luxury item at pennies on the dollar, it's a good bet that they're getting sufficient value at even pennies on the dollar to make it worthwhile. Two, odds are good your complaint is directed more at the ratio of sold used game prices vs new game prices, which has a lot to do with the fact that Nintendo, MS, and Sony games are so damn expensive even on the cheap side--excluding the digital download games (wow, just like Steam with all the non-resellable aspects*). Three, the rest of your complaint is directed at middlemen like Gamestop, Amazon, etc who buy low and sell high while using aspects of being the market maker to get a larger cut of the buy/sell price (just like HFT), but that speaks more to the point that if MS gave a damn they'd set up exchanges to facilitate sales without taking those huge cuts.
The XBOX One scheme actually does two things: it provides consumer protection in the used game market by elevating prices and it appears to also provide minimal (and nominal) revenue for publishers when a game is resold.
Um.."consumer protection... by elevating prices"? Maybe in the reduces-the-degree-of-depreciation sense. But video games aren't cars and it's quite crazy to presume there won't be substantial depreciation in a used game. Besides, as mentioned above, to actually work on "consumer protection" MS would setup used game exchanges to facilitate safer used game sales or similar things. And as for providing "nominal revenue for publishers"...uh...why should the publishers (or developers) be getting any money? Because MS said so?
This model seems to work on Steam and TODAY nobody is bad-mouthing Steam after over a decade of DRM-encumbered operation.
Um, plenty of people bad-mouth Steam. I bad-mouth Steam. Steam Client for Linux is a crash-prone mess, at least for me. Even if it weren't crash-prone, having to start up a separate program to play a game is ridiculous. Having it constantly running to avoid that is ridiculous. Having it be a nanny and check to be really super-sure the 100th time that, yea, I really did buy the game and it's okay for me to play it, is ridiculous. The fact that so many games are Windows focused and trying to fiddle with them to get them to work under a [beta] Linux executable (if even available), wine (using Windows Steam Client, of course), or Virtualbox (with questionable 3D support) is hampered by the Steam mindset that the above are three different machines and hence require three separate 9GB d/ls just to see which works best is ridiculous--and even if I can do a backup/restore from one "machine" to the other, that's only marginally less ridiculous.
But, yea, keep singing to your choir.
*Note, I don't say this is as a great champion of the non-resellability of Steam. But then it's funny how you think it's better for consumers if prices raise [on used games] ignoring the space without used games has lower prices. In any case, the obvious risk to any of the above schemes are issues of monopolistic prices due to control by a distributor. Of course, the beauty to that is precisely the multi-porting of games and the competition of the various platforms, though that leaves the user with the serious disadvantage of having to buy several platforms to buy different games on different platforms to get the best price. And, of course, one of those platforms is the used game part on the PC outside of Steam, so odds are good at least that MS will at worst hurt itself and boost PC sales of games.:/
According to the story it is Indiana University, not Indian University.
See, that makes a lot more sense.:)
I wonder if scheme was in some way necessary or conducive to running on the gpu, or if that was an arbitrary choice.
I'd say it's a mixture of both. On the one hand, Professor R. Kent Dybvig is one of the editors behind R6RS (and earlier editions) and author of Chez Scheme. In general, IU uses Scheme as one of the major languages to teach things including compiler design, so basically a CS alumni from IU is almost always a Schemer (or perhaps an anti-Schemer from the experience:)). That boils down to the point that Scheme is basically a much simplified version of Lisp (basically, the reverse of Lisp in complexity) which can function as a functional language (with all the inherent thread-safe features) if you're careful about not using mutable functions on your data, and Scheme readily supports 1st order and anonymous functions. Given that GPUs (and Cell processors) are basically very apt for those properties, it'd seem to be quite a good fit. Having said all that, there's probably plenty of other functional languages that are as good or even better for the job--the very scope of Scheme being such a cut down language good for teaching also tends to make it a pain to actually use in any production environment because of a lack of libraries, so I hope Harlan is designed to hand off the non-GPU work to another language.
I still have nightmares of car and cdr from way back when.
Can't really help you there. Personally, car and cdr ended up making linked-list so intuitive for me that I'm often perplexed why anyone has so much trouble with them, especially with memory leaks and the like.:/
I'm not taking a position on whether this is "right" or "wrong", but I don't see how it's currently illegal. Personally, I've always assumed the US mail was (somehow) tracked and recorded, just like with UPS and FedEx.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,..."
Basically, all those photographs are being stored precisely to do searches later. That seems pretty unreasonable if you treat the photographs *as* the search, and I don't think putting a computer in the mix to do the major work somehow really gives the government an out because the computers are government owned/authorized. As for the point of tracking/recording, that may or may not be the same thing. Obviously, if it were merely a matter of tracking, they'd just be recording the output of the destination without keeping a whole photo. The point of having a photo, of course, is so they can get more information like the shape, size, etc of the letter.
Oh, and the UPS and FedEx aren't government agents or agencies, but if they were, they should be treated to the same standard as the government's restrictions--which should also hold for said TelCos. There is, after all, a major difference between letters and packages--the former is all about sending information and the latter is all about sending things (of which, of course, information may come with it). It'd seem pretty clear that any action to universally collect details of mail could have a chilling effect on free speech, as one would no longer really feel secure in one's papers sent to others against unreasonable government monitoring; after all, if they had a warrant they'd be limited to the warrant date and later to search your stuff and so long as you don't think you're suspected of anything you'd feel reasonable safe in your mail, but this is all obvious a step to allow retroactive searches which is entirely unreasonable. That's, btw, the whole reason the government was assigned the job of mail delivery--to allow a universal, unabridged conduit for people to speak with one another. That the government wants to attack both the mail and e-mail is no surprise, with claims of stopping terrorism just being icing on the cake.
How about turning that question on its head? Why ever did Windows 95 introduce the start menu? And why did Windows 8 get rid of it?
The start button can be configured to send you to the All Apps window, which takes you to a sortable list of all your apps. Much more useful than an alphabetical list of folders with identical icons, IMO.
If a sortable list of all your apps is so useful, why isn't that what the start menu presents to the user? A good hint would be noticing just how badly that works out in practice, which is precisely why organizing things by folders was/is so important.
You can turn off hot corners. You can boot right to desktop. They've brought back unified search. You can even pull up the (not full screen) search pane directly from the desktop, and search for files and applications in a unified view.
So, you're saying they're backtracking on all those features because of user input. That's a good thing, right? Or are all those features actual improvements and the users are just whiny to learn something new? I mean, it'd be nice to have some of facts or something to support that point.
What more exactly do you want? Yes, it's different, but it's getting harder and harder to argue that it's not better. What is so great about the start menu that you refuse nothing less than a line-for-line copy?
What's so great about the new app launcher? What's so terrible about the old app launcher? Where's any bit of evidence that this isn't just MS pushing their own design decisions on users, regardless of whether it particularly benefits anyone (other than Microsoft)?
Seriously, the only argument I've heard out of MS is about trying to unify their UI on multiple devices (from phones to tablets to the desktop). That'd, of course, be a great argument if MS was actually selling enough phones/tablets that those skills for one being transferable to another would be useful. Instead, it seems more that MS wants to blur the lines between phone, tablet, and desktop to the point that people will accidentally buy one device expecting something else--the same disaster as people expecting Windows CE to run Win32 apps. Meanwhile, actual desktop users are learning a whole new UI which only pops up with certain apps or doing certain actions in Windows and behind being tacked on, doesn't obviously provide any real advantage to the desktop user.
That they would ask that features not be stripped out or be subverted and redirected to something comparable seems hardly a great request or expectation. And wanting them to in some fashion *justify* why they don't want seemingly arbitrary change? Really?
Well, it does actually cost the banks *something* to securely and reliably process transactions, so if they don't charge for that then they are cross-subsidising, which some people object to even more.
Then they shouldn't be using banks because that's fundamentally what banks are all about--pooling money and loaning most of it out such that the bank can take the interest to earn a profit and pay for all the bank services to lure said people in in the first place to part with their money. That banks have resorted to slamming people, poor or not, with all sorts of fees and penalties, has more to do with banks acting to gain as much profit as they can.
This is precisely why there are so many bank regulations, so that banks continue to be a useful service and not some sort of predatory organization. So, to an extent you're right that if they stop exploiting you as a greater cash flow, they'll turn to everyone else to shore up their profits, but there is clearly a quick end to that--you can't get blood from a stone. In any case, your argument calls for better/more regulations, not to let the mosquitoes bite you more so they'll leave your kids alone.
More to the point, the only reason they can display a McDonald's sign (legally) is precisely because they paid a franchise fee to McDonald's Corporation. Without it, they'd be violating McDonald's trademark and would not benefit from all the advantages of being associated with that organization. By the same token, it's in the best interest of McDonald's to demand franchises to follow certain standards--with a threat of removing said franchise rights--precisely to avoid the above mentioned GGP's post.
Trying to split hairs over the point only demotes possible expectations out of any single McDonald's restaurant, which is obviously a bad thing. So, kudos to the parent and GPP. Please keep them modded up.:)
Logically it's true; but by technical definition, a classified thing is always classified until a party with the proper clearance de-classifies it.
classified \classified\ adj.
1. arranged into classes or categories; as, {unclassified}.
Syn: categorized.
[WordNet 1.5 +PJC]
2. assigned to a class of documents withheld from general
circulation; -- of information or documents. Opposite of
{unclassified}.
Seems to me that definition two is the relevant one and..what do you know, once "general circulation [in a newspaper]" happens, something really is no longer classified. Now, "legally" it may still be classified. But that's in the same scope of if the law said that a potato was a flower. Ie, it's crazy and should be changed. Further, the courts really should just throw out such a definition inherently nullifying it.
Oh, and yea, I know that dictionaries are descriptive and not prescriptive, but since the law as written often has no basis on reality on the usage of terms as understood by anyone, then it becomes quickly pointless to even have a discussion in those terms. I say this specifically because the Legislature (and Executive) long ago figured out that once you start using common terms the wrong way, they could twist the minds of the courts and the populace towards their ends--I have no doubt it's in the same scope of loaded or leading questions in polls. I mean, look no further than "The Patriot Act". To that end, given dictionaries still describes the populace using the sensible form of classified, I'd state that we're not so far gone yet to pretend that the current legal definition is the right one. And that's obviously really important because the whole justification for allowing punishments on classified information is precisely because it's secret and was kept secret for a purpose. Once you get a circular argument that it's classified because the government says it is, you can punish anyone for possessing/distributing/whatever classified documents.
No, the outrage would be that criminal law has decided to morph a military term into a civil one and then so bastardize it's meaning that any explosive of 1/4 oz or more is suddenly a WMD. Or do you really think a pipe bomb and a nuclear weapon are at all comparable with their usage? What part of any sort of justice* can be derived from grouping the two together? That criminal law should mutilate a term and then further for you or others to justifice that it's "in-line with current criminal law practice" really sends home the point that "current criminal law practice" is really fucked up.
*You know, justice? The part where a person who steals a loaf of bread isn't treated the same as a person who stills hundreds of cars? Where the law is written to differentiate "petty theft" from "grand theft auto"? Yea. Crazy talk.
He wasn't actually making a direct threat at any place or thing...just shooting off his mouth.
My God! If he's committing such a suicidal act like putting a gun to his mouth and pulling the trigger, he needs to be taken to a mental ward. Either that or the authorities do.
For purposes of criminal law, the bomb was legally a weapon of mass destruction.
...
The charges are in-line with current criminal law practice.
Yep. Just like the military can't use tear gas on enemies but the police can use tear gas on protesters. In short, fuck "purposes" and "law practice". How about having some outrage about the absurdity of "purpose" overriding sensibility, about having near doublethink acceptance of the charges, or using "it is how it is" as some sort of valid excuse?
... they simply require evaluation according to a set process to declassify it.
Which I'm sure is just as reasonable and valid as the set process that classifies information in the first place. Ie, it's a very much entirely invalid argument. It should be reasonably true that if information has no valid reason to be classified in the first place, should not be currently classified, or if it can be shown to have been released publicly that it cannot be considered classified. So, sure, keep the set process to declassify information. Meanwhile, it should be a valid legal defense (and have the effect of officially declassifying) that information should not haven been classified in the first place, should not be classified, or has been made publicly available not through the defendant or a co-conspirator's actions..
Trying to pull off some hair splitting on some absurd "technically" is simple bullshit. Going further and actually blocking websites for US Army personnel is beyond offensive.
No, technically, it is true. What is also true is that the Army/US Government is insane to act otherwise. But, then, obviously any government's insanity in action can override their technical obligations or general reality. That's why, of course, even under the most well intentioned regime it's insane to grant any government the sort of NSA spying apparatus. Because if it's convenient enough for their cause, government is more than willing to say water is not wet. I mean, look no further than the Boston Marathon Bomber having used a "WMD".
PS - This is obviously one reason why so many people put so much hope in the courts. Legislature try to define things. Executives try to twist things. One can only hope that the Judiciary will, being life-long appointed, have the wisdom to look beyond "technically". Then again, that can lead down nasty roads as well--where not selling a product interstate is seeing as interstate commerce (which has some logical validity but wisdom should have prevailed that such an argument was too broad and hence too abusable to be given as such). And, of course, that ignores just how slow the court system is relative to the continuous new abuses of the Legislature and Executive.:(
Another interesting take on the idea of everyone having access to pervasive surveillance (and good data mining) is Platonic Chain. Oddly enough, Platonic Chain is mostly a comedy.
Three people died yesterday in Boston due to a car wreck.
Fuck that analogy. How about this? Between every five and six days in Boston, there's a murder (that is, it's been in the 50-70 people murdered per year for a while). So, what did that terrorist attack amount to? A few weeks worth of murders. Now, what's Boston's response to the equivalent of ~20 terrorist-level attacks on a regular basis? Near nothing, really--and by that, I mean, there hasn't been any calls for martial law which is seemingly what anti-terrorists want.
Oh, but you say, the terrorists also injured a good many people too! Well, wouldn't you know, assaults in Boston are on the scope of ~3,000/year. So, on the order of ~15 terrorist-level assaults per year (okay, that's rather unfair, since clearly assaults include all scopes of attacks and I doubt many result in permanent maiming). But, then, there's all sorts of other crimes (rapes and armed robbery) as well which could be argued of equal or greater heinousness in many multiples more of peoples lives.
The point then? Even when serious, ongoing crimes, we wouldn't accept martial law--war on crime may be twisted that way repeatedly but it quickly gets slapped down when applied to someone in power or influence. No, it's precisely because terrorism is seen as some sort of short-term problem that martial law can fix. But, then, the only people who tend to believe that are those who have no memory of history or having been personally effected want "justice" (aka vengeance) and really don't give a shit about the law. Well, you know, all those people victimized by common crimes I mentioned above fall into the same boat. And society generally ignores them--at best, a few quick sound bites in the newspaper blotter.
In short, if I would figuratively weep for the victims of the Boston bombing, I have way more figurative tears for a lot more, less published victims. Of course, it doesn't help that way more "victims" of the Boston bombing are merely people who happen to commute/live in Boston and say to themselves, "it could have been me".
Nah, you just missed the part where when the talk about running Windows Apps, they mean Microsoft Windows Apps--that they come preinstalled or you'll buy later on the Microsoft online store. Because (a) no one but Microsoft would be crazy enough to develop for the Surface RT and/or (b) at least the people involved with the Surface RT are so tunnel-visioned, they really only see Microsoft Windows Apps as they apps you'd actually want to run. I mean, chalk this up to the same sort of people who were so wowed by Gadgets in Windows Vista--which were about as much a clusterfuck as every other gadget setup I've seen on every other platform (slow/choppy behavior, huge memory leaks, huge security holes, unstable)--just to see them disappear just as fast. *shrug* I guess you shouldn't clone hollywood movie UIs.
No, it's a bit more insidious than that. School administrators, even in rural midwestern towns, are mandating that students rent tablets (like iPads*) for school. But, as outlandishly expensive as iPads can be (compared to Android tablets), obviously Surface RT prices are even more galling. The obvious answer then is to undercut iPads and at least be price competitive with Android tablets. Add to that the promise of "it's like a laptop" and "comes with MS Office", and you'd be hard pressed to not see plenty of schools pushing for such devices.
*Yea, as ridiculous as that. You'd think they'd go for Android tablets, if anything, to be cheaper for everyone concerned. I guess schools may be delusional and think those iPads are actually secure wall gardens, perfect for controlling their rented-out property. Personally, I think tablets for every student is outright an absurd idea even if they were free. They're simply too much of a distraction for adults, let alone for children. Beyond that, I'm generally against the idea of just about any company dumping (and possibly at all selling) their branded products at schools precisely because it's designed to create life-long lock-in. I mean, why else would MS or Apple or whatever push for schools to use their products, possibly even selling at a loss? Now, if the Gates Foundation were doing such a thing...I'd still be suspicious because I don't see the Surface RT as the right tool for the job, anyways.
Nah, I'd argue HFT is a symptom of a moderately broken system. The whole point of exchanges is to be market makers--to allow the means for transactions to occur. HFT are supposedly part of the solution to issues of liquidity--that two parties who are technically willing to trade but on their face claim otherwise can be manipulated to get out that information and allow the transaction to occur. It seems pretty clear that if exchanges are failing in their part and a 3rd party can succeed, then it's exchanges which need to change.
To that end, I propose a simple solution. Exchanges will run their own equivalent of HFT, without any unnecessary price spread. And since HFTers, no matter how close they are, are outside the exchange, they'll never be as fast as the exchange in carrying out those all-important liquidity transactions. Of course, it'll also just help if exchanges used ranges for prices for buy/sell, and then the overlap would be very apparent and HFTers would have little ability to step in and earn much of anything.
But more importantly, don't you see the irony that his "poor education" allowed him to know the difference between right and wrong where apparently you don't?
That's not irony. That's a non sequitur. Or are you unaware of the concept of a "mad scientist"? No, the only irony I see is you placing some sort of faith in "poor [educated]" people. Being "smarter" may place you to be more aware of how you can extend your lust for power over your duty to morality, but poorly educated people are quite able and do lust for power. The real difference, of course, is who is more likely to be caught and punished and for what crime. To that end, I'd suggest that you're a lot more likely to be caught and punished if what you do is unusual. Hence, in a higher murder area, murderers go free. Now, consider the probability of this clear case of abuse and corruption in the US government leading to an arrest and punishment and of whom it would apply.
And that's the reason, of course, Snowden is a hero.
If I may impose, could you explain how it is known that CO2 drives warming, and not vice versa?
It's both. More CO2 drives warming. More warming causes CO2 to bubble out of the ocean, permafrost to thaw and organic matter to rot and release CO2, etc. And thinks to the practice of carbon dating, we can say reasonably well that a large part of the current CO2 increase is from long-buried carbon sources--aka fossil fuels.
Regarding the assertion that the temperature rise in the last century has been exceptional: should I presume that it is rate of rise that is being discussed, not the level? Because there were far warmer periods in the past; for example the late Jurassic, when Dinosaurs roamed Canada in tropical conditions. Do we have any reliable basis for CO2 measurements during this period?
Yes, it's the rate that's troubling. Because in the past it took thousands of years to see the sort of warming the gradually resulted in tropical conditions in Canada's latitude. But with the rapid rate we're seeing now, the honest fear is that even if we were to simply stop fossil fuel CO2 emissions completely, we'd still continue to see the unprecedented rapid temperature rise because of the previously mentioned warming->CO2 release.
It is also interesting to me that there have been warmer periods in the past during which, at least to my understanding, CO2 was lower than it is presently. Presumably there is a lot more involved than CO2 level. That suggests to me that at this time the situation needs further study more than it needs extreme and precipitous action. I would be receptive to having any faults in this reasoning pointed out.
Except that your point is sort of superfluous. Even if what you state is true--which I'm not certain of--, the fact is that we know pretty confidently that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and higher CO2 concentrations means a greater temperature. We also know, pretty confidently, that greater temperatures have the above mentioned forcing cycle. That there have been possible exceptions to this cycle isn't comforting unless we have a good reason to believe the mentioned cycle won't repeat itself. That is, even if someone could come up with a good explanation for past higher temp/lower CO2 periods, it doesn't resolve the current higher temp/higher CO2 period. A better place to look would be lower or flat temper/high CO2 periods and consider why or how we could take that track. To that end, I haven't remotely heard anything to suggest we could be or are on that track.
The closest I've heard about anything along those lines is considerations on combating global warming with things like mitigating global warming with dust clouds (either in the atmosphere or in space). The general problem with that is a matter of scale--that human CO2 emissions are so great, countering them with dust would be of similar scale great, and that introduces a lot of unknowns like (a) how much dust to use, (b) how to remove dust if we go too far, (c) all the atmospheric (if done in the atmosphere) risks of increased dust, (d) the cost/risks of doing the same in space (a dust cloud could slow asteroids and increase the risk of them hitting Earth), etc. In essence, anything of the scale that could fix the problem are probably also of the scale of the problem itself. So, we have the real risk of solving one problem just to produce another one. Hence, it'd seem a lot wiser to head off CO2 release as much as we can and only really consider alternatives as a last resort.
But, seriously, we're so far from even seriously trying to deal with CO2 release.:(
Everything about Big Data relies on the assumption that having more complete information allows a particular business to improve efficiency.
That word. I don't think it means what you think it means. Now, if you mean "improve sales"...
For advertising and medicine, this is pretty obvious. Just saying a brand name to the right person at the right time makes a sale.
And taking that same person at the right time and showing them that generic X is equivalent to brand name except for the label and the much cheaper prices increases efficiency. Funny that. Not very "Big Data" efficient, though.
A doctor who can see the symptoms and outcomes of tens of millions of patients can better match a particular patient's case with an earlier example. If that assumption holds true, Big Data is useful.
Congratulations. You've proven correlation == causation. Oh, wait, no you didn't. Ten million people might have a cough because it's flu season. But, Joe may cough because he has lung cancer. Big Data *is* more efficient, though, if it means Joe is given some zinc pills and dies. And by efficient, I mean cheaper for the hospital when it can push people through on a diagnostic assembly line and cheaper for insurance companies that have to pay for a cheap prescription instead of having to fund expensive anti-cancer drugs.
This ultimately boils down to the issue of anecdotal vs. statistical evidence. Each individual's information is an anecdote, and holds value to the erson (or people) it relates to, but the anecdote doesn't really provide insight for the future. On the other hand, statistical information is only useful on a large scale with a large sample, collected from people who know little enough about the project to alter its outcome. As you said, the statistical information is worth buying, but anecdotes aren't.
So true. Too bad the plural of anecdote isn't data. So Big "Data" isn't inherently good for statistical analysis. Oh, and did I mention that real statistical analysis is really, really hard? I mean it-requires-a-human hard. But, since Big "Data" is all about trying to push through (aka "analyze" with an algorithm) more anecdotes than individuals can reasonably process... That's not to say it's impossible, sometimes, to pull out little threads of insight. I know throughout medical history there's been plenty of examples of that happening; I mean, sure, it might take thousands of false positives and a dedicated researcher to manually go over them... But the hype and hope of Big "Data" is in the same scope of nativity (or con, if you're a cynic) as trying to make a programming language/ui/whatever that anyone can use. A few isolated examples or scopes of problems? Sure. But remotely in general? Completely, insanely impossible.
PS - I really hope your work is an exception to the rule.
I don't really think so myself. Efficiency is the key thing to making "stuff" more affordable and therefore more ubiquitous.
Relatively cheap is the key to making stuff more ubiquitous. Having a good deal of *demand* is probably even a lot more important. Efficiency may or may not enter into it based heavily on just how much a prototype costs relatively to what the market can bare. Which leads too...
For example, efficiencies in semiconductor fabrication enabled personal computers to be affordable by the average joe, even really poor people, whereas it used to be only the very rich owned them.
No, the integrated circuit (aka semiconductor fabrication itself) is the primary based upon which more than the very rich owned a personal computer. Before that point, all the transistors and wires were a bulky mess which didn't entirely forego the non-very rich from owning a personal computer, but it certainly set the stage for allowing the progressive miniaturization in lithography that were those "efficiencies" you speak of. Yet, well before that point, of course, plenty of people had their own PC. Of course, the IC itself could be said to be an example of the "efficiencies" you speak of, but that's not right really. What made ICs so important is that it allowed the bulk package of everything together which in itself made the production a unified thing. I guess that again could be chalked up to a point of efficiency, like the assembly line, but it was the fact that computers can do so much that spurred so much adoption. Yes, without a lower floor on the price of a PC, computers would certainly be a lot less ubiquitous. But they'd be well outside of the scope of for just "the very rich".
The same thing can be said for cars and Ford's original Model T.
Again, no. Yes, at the start the Model T was more of a novelty to the very rich who could potentially waste a great deal of money on something that may not pan out . But, the very nature of the current shipping system we have today I think shows that there's a strong commercial interest in having a horseless carriage. So, the ubiquitous nature of cars would seem to be based heavily on demand there as well. Of course, being cheaper makes them *more* ubiquitous, but without the demand in the first place...
One key part of this is economies of scale, which means you need to sell large quantities of something in order for it to be affordable by the masses. And subsequently, a key part of that is marketing. Marketing is expensive as hell, and goes into the cost of those goods. If big data makes marketing cheaper, then that savings will eventually (though not immediately) make its way to joe sixpack.
Except the rule has consistently been to spend yet even more money on marketing to spur even further sales to produce further revenue to pay for said marketing. The truth is, big data as a concept is very, very old. It's based on the idea that if you can collect enough information about potential customers, you can make them actual customers. Yet, just like directed advertising, it forgets the key point of marketing is not to sell products but to inform a consumer who has a demand, even if he hasn't fully realized it yet. The thing is, we're already well to the point of having a system where ads can read potential customers. And ads continue to stray further and further into trying to conjure up a demand out of nothing, rather than informing a consumer into a real demand they have.
So, the real specter of big data is to yet further manipulate consumers even more than directed ads do--and if you don't see how trying to create a per-user view of available products doesn't manipulate the consumer, you'll already well lost--by further trying to take what consumers already buy or know and try to match them up with...stuff the select few companies who pay the most want to sell. Meanwhile,
Methinks the start screen is just a highly visible rallying point for people to whine about Windows.
Like a nuclear bomb is just a critical mass detonation of tremendous energy in the form of significant heat, force, and radiation. Throwing in that "just" is rather belittling to the point. The major advantage Windows 95, as a UI, had over its predecessors (and other competing UIs of the era) was the always-on-top taskbar + start menu. And MS decided to throw those away, effectively, in Metro mode. And best of all, they're pushing people into using Metro mode to do things--the fact that you can circumvent MS's efforts doesn't change that fact.
But, yea, it's "just" a bit of whining from people being manipulated into using an inferior UI. As others have pointed out, the only reason such an inferior UI is at all accepted on tablets and smartphones is their inferior resolution. But, I'd venture a guess that in short order people with tablets will "whine" even more in time for a start menu + taskbar too as the resolution issue is a much mooter point there. This is, btw, a major reason why Windows CE sucked so much--there, it tried to shove a start menu + taskbar on a too small of a resolution screen.
I mean, let it not be said "use the best tool for the job" or "there's no such thing as a universal UI". Oh, wait... And here we see why Unity is a failure as well, with the same group of whiners.
Yet one person gets murdered here and everyone seems to be yelling "terrorist" and going weak at the knees in fear and stupidity.
In part. A tiny minority group has an agenda and uses anything and everything to pursue it. The vast majority of people are too cowardly or too stupid to confront that minority with any sort of logic or reason. Instead, the mere fact that they may be painted as pro-terrorism, pro-murder, anti-nationalistic, or simply non-compassionate leaves them to be walked all over, often go as far as parroting the party line instead of making a stand on principle or character or integrity. So, congratulations Britain; you're just like America.
Slashdot Mirror
*cough*PSN*cough* Hell, even for your example, Blackberry is still around. And its massive displacement in various places has more to do with competition than with having horrible/no service for a few days (and the places it's still strong is precisely because there are no real good replacements, no matter how much they fuck up things). I mean, you're right to a point about a lack of accountability, but most organizations of any significant size have huge issues with accountability with workers. The most that can usually happen is the whole company goes under or people suffer lay-offs, of which the people responsible are often far from the first to go, while funds are reallocated to deal with the issues.
No. They just demand more money and hire a private contractor to fill in for them, just like the article shows. The only places where that doesn't work is where the legislature/executive doesn't give much of a shit about providing remotely good service which means they'll already shoestring the budget on the department anyways. Why else would BMVs have such a consistently horrible reputation?
But they can run out of money. And if they're not allotted more funds, they effective shut down (although just like private industry, I'm sure people at the top make sure to always allot enough funds so they're paid short of the whole department closing).
Then you'd have an oligarchy. How's the working out for the price of new Wii-U, XBox 360, and PS3 games (vs Android/iPhone/etc) and how locked down the new consoles are/will be? Or how breaking up AT&T brought in competition--which, btw, only really happened after they were forced to open their lines. Or the whole DSL/Cable oligarchy. And that doesn't even consider the possibly unsaid agreement for the two departments to never try too hard, lest it be expected of them. No, the real issue is that it's hard to find good managers. And once you get a few layers deep in any organization, there's so much disconnect from what the organization actually is supposed to do and is actually doing, that managers often are most interested in simply bleeding their budget at a consistent rate without much concern on if things are getting done.
Oh, and the idea to split out the problem into plenty of smaller contractors (bid or no bid) is precisely why the article occurred. People underbid all the time just to jump rates later. Government can't or won't back out of projects half-way if they're going badly because it's seen too much as waste, just like they can't or won't have 10 different companies all building the same thing. And then contractors themselves are paid a premium for their work over any full-time employee, which leads to contractors forming small or even large corporations which undermines the whole principle of using small contractors...
In short, there is no simple panacea.
Better compared to what? Because last I checked, the default of no DRM is superior to any other sort of scheme.
One, if people are selling a luxury item at pennies on the dollar, it's a good bet that they're getting sufficient value at even pennies on the dollar to make it worthwhile. Two, odds are good your complaint is directed more at the ratio of sold used game prices vs new game prices, which has a lot to do with the fact that Nintendo, MS, and Sony games are so damn expensive even on the cheap side--excluding the digital download games (wow, just like Steam with all the non-resellable aspects*). Three, the rest of your complaint is directed at middlemen like Gamestop, Amazon, etc who buy low and sell high while using aspects of being the market maker to get a larger cut of the buy/sell price (just like HFT), but that speaks more to the point that if MS gave a damn they'd set up exchanges to facilitate sales without taking those huge cuts.
Um.."consumer protection ... by elevating prices"? Maybe in the reduces-the-degree-of-depreciation sense. But video games aren't cars and it's quite crazy to presume there won't be substantial depreciation in a used game. Besides, as mentioned above, to actually work on "consumer protection" MS would setup used game exchanges to facilitate safer used game sales or similar things. And as for providing "nominal revenue for publishers"...uh...why should the publishers (or developers) be getting any money? Because MS said so?
Um, plenty of people bad-mouth Steam. I bad-mouth Steam. Steam Client for Linux is a crash-prone mess, at least for me. Even if it weren't crash-prone, having to start up a separate program to play a game is ridiculous. Having it constantly running to avoid that is ridiculous. Having it be a nanny and check to be really super-sure the 100th time that, yea, I really did buy the game and it's okay for me to play it, is ridiculous. The fact that so many games are Windows focused and trying to fiddle with them to get them to work under a [beta] Linux executable (if even available), wine (using Windows Steam Client, of course), or Virtualbox (with questionable 3D support) is hampered by the Steam mindset that the above are three different machines and hence require three separate 9GB d/ls just to see which works best is ridiculous--and even if I can do a backup/restore from one "machine" to the other, that's only marginally less ridiculous.
But, yea, keep singing to your choir.
*Note, I don't say this is as a great champion of the non-resellability of Steam. But then it's funny how you think it's better for consumers if prices raise [on used games] ignoring the space without used games has lower prices. In any case, the obvious risk to any of the above schemes are issues of monopolistic prices due to control by a distributor. Of course, the beauty to that is precisely the multi-porting of games and the competition of the various platforms, though that leaves the user with the serious disadvantage of having to buy several platforms to buy different games on different platforms to get the best price. And, of course, one of those platforms is the used game part on the PC outside of Steam, so odds are good at least that MS will at worst hurt itself and boost PC sales of games. :/
See, that makes a lot more sense. :)
I'd say it's a mixture of both. On the one hand, Professor R. Kent Dybvig is one of the editors behind R6RS (and earlier editions) and author of Chez Scheme. In general, IU uses Scheme as one of the major languages to teach things including compiler design, so basically a CS alumni from IU is almost always a Schemer (or perhaps an anti-Schemer from the experience :)). That boils down to the point that Scheme is basically a much simplified version of Lisp (basically, the reverse of Lisp in complexity) which can function as a functional language (with all the inherent thread-safe features) if you're careful about not using mutable functions on your data, and Scheme readily supports 1st order and anonymous functions. Given that GPUs (and Cell processors) are basically very apt for those properties, it'd seem to be quite a good fit. Having said all that, there's probably plenty of other functional languages that are as good or even better for the job--the very scope of Scheme being such a cut down language good for teaching also tends to make it a pain to actually use in any production environment because of a lack of libraries, so I hope Harlan is designed to hand off the non-GPU work to another language.
Can't really help you there. Personally, car and cdr ended up making linked-list so intuitive for me that I'm often perplexed why anyone has so much trouble with them, especially with memory leaks and the like. :/
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, ..."
Basically, all those photographs are being stored precisely to do searches later. That seems pretty unreasonable if you treat the photographs *as* the search, and I don't think putting a computer in the mix to do the major work somehow really gives the government an out because the computers are government owned/authorized. As for the point of tracking/recording, that may or may not be the same thing. Obviously, if it were merely a matter of tracking, they'd just be recording the output of the destination without keeping a whole photo. The point of having a photo, of course, is so they can get more information like the shape, size, etc of the letter.
Oh, and the UPS and FedEx aren't government agents or agencies, but if they were, they should be treated to the same standard as the government's restrictions--which should also hold for said TelCos. There is, after all, a major difference between letters and packages--the former is all about sending information and the latter is all about sending things (of which, of course, information may come with it). It'd seem pretty clear that any action to universally collect details of mail could have a chilling effect on free speech, as one would no longer really feel secure in one's papers sent to others against unreasonable government monitoring; after all, if they had a warrant they'd be limited to the warrant date and later to search your stuff and so long as you don't think you're suspected of anything you'd feel reasonable safe in your mail, but this is all obvious a step to allow retroactive searches which is entirely unreasonable. That's, btw, the whole reason the government was assigned the job of mail delivery--to allow a universal, unabridged conduit for people to speak with one another. That the government wants to attack both the mail and e-mail is no surprise, with claims of stopping terrorism just being icing on the cake.
How about turning that question on its head? Why ever did Windows 95 introduce the start menu? And why did Windows 8 get rid of it?
If a sortable list of all your apps is so useful, why isn't that what the start menu presents to the user? A good hint would be noticing just how badly that works out in practice, which is precisely why organizing things by folders was/is so important.
So, you're saying they're backtracking on all those features because of user input. That's a good thing, right? Or are all those features actual improvements and the users are just whiny to learn something new? I mean, it'd be nice to have some of facts or something to support that point.
What's so great about the new app launcher? What's so terrible about the old app launcher? Where's any bit of evidence that this isn't just MS pushing their own design decisions on users, regardless of whether it particularly benefits anyone (other than Microsoft)?
Seriously, the only argument I've heard out of MS is about trying to unify their UI on multiple devices (from phones to tablets to the desktop). That'd, of course, be a great argument if MS was actually selling enough phones/tablets that those skills for one being transferable to another would be useful. Instead, it seems more that MS wants to blur the lines between phone, tablet, and desktop to the point that people will accidentally buy one device expecting something else--the same disaster as people expecting Windows CE to run Win32 apps. Meanwhile, actual desktop users are learning a whole new UI which only pops up with certain apps or doing certain actions in Windows and behind being tacked on, doesn't obviously provide any real advantage to the desktop user.
That they would ask that features not be stripped out or be subverted and redirected to something comparable seems hardly a great request or expectation. And wanting them to in some fashion *justify* why they don't want seemingly arbitrary change? Really?
Then they shouldn't be using banks because that's fundamentally what banks are all about--pooling money and loaning most of it out such that the bank can take the interest to earn a profit and pay for all the bank services to lure said people in in the first place to part with their money. That banks have resorted to slamming people, poor or not, with all sorts of fees and penalties, has more to do with banks acting to gain as much profit as they can.
This is precisely why there are so many bank regulations, so that banks continue to be a useful service and not some sort of predatory organization. So, to an extent you're right that if they stop exploiting you as a greater cash flow, they'll turn to everyone else to shore up their profits, but there is clearly a quick end to that--you can't get blood from a stone. In any case, your argument calls for better/more regulations, not to let the mosquitoes bite you more so they'll leave your kids alone.
More to the point, the only reason they can display a McDonald's sign (legally) is precisely because they paid a franchise fee to McDonald's Corporation. Without it, they'd be violating McDonald's trademark and would not benefit from all the advantages of being associated with that organization. By the same token, it's in the best interest of McDonald's to demand franchises to follow certain standards--with a threat of removing said franchise rights--precisely to avoid the above mentioned GGP's post.
Trying to split hairs over the point only demotes possible expectations out of any single McDonald's restaurant, which is obviously a bad thing. So, kudos to the parent and GPP. Please keep them modded up. :)
Seems to me that definition two is the relevant one and..what do you know, once "general circulation [in a newspaper]" happens, something really is no longer classified. Now, "legally" it may still be classified. But that's in the same scope of if the law said that a potato was a flower. Ie, it's crazy and should be changed. Further, the courts really should just throw out such a definition inherently nullifying it.
Oh, and yea, I know that dictionaries are descriptive and not prescriptive, but since the law as written often has no basis on reality on the usage of terms as understood by anyone, then it becomes quickly pointless to even have a discussion in those terms. I say this specifically because the Legislature (and Executive) long ago figured out that once you start using common terms the wrong way, they could twist the minds of the courts and the populace towards their ends--I have no doubt it's in the same scope of loaded or leading questions in polls. I mean, look no further than "The Patriot Act". To that end, given dictionaries still describes the populace using the sensible form of classified, I'd state that we're not so far gone yet to pretend that the current legal definition is the right one. And that's obviously really important because the whole justification for allowing punishments on classified information is precisely because it's secret and was kept secret for a purpose. Once you get a circular argument that it's classified because the government says it is, you can punish anyone for possessing/distributing/whatever classified documents.
The US Army. Dying for your freedom. But only really able to experience it if they avoid the US Army's networks.
No, the outrage would be that criminal law has decided to morph a military term into a civil one and then so bastardize it's meaning that any explosive of 1/4 oz or more is suddenly a WMD. Or do you really think a pipe bomb and a nuclear weapon are at all comparable with their usage? What part of any sort of justice* can be derived from grouping the two together? That criminal law should mutilate a term and then further for you or others to justifice that it's "in-line with current criminal law practice" really sends home the point that "current criminal law practice" is really fucked up.
*You know, justice? The part where a person who steals a loaf of bread isn't treated the same as a person who stills hundreds of cars? Where the law is written to differentiate "petty theft" from "grand theft auto"? Yea. Crazy talk.
My God! If he's committing such a suicidal act like putting a gun to his mouth and pulling the trigger, he needs to be taken to a mental ward. Either that or the authorities do.
Yep. Just like the military can't use tear gas on enemies but the police can use tear gas on protesters. In short, fuck "purposes" and "law practice". How about having some outrage about the absurdity of "purpose" overriding sensibility, about having near doublethink acceptance of the charges, or using "it is how it is" as some sort of valid excuse?
Which I'm sure is just as reasonable and valid as the set process that classifies information in the first place. Ie, it's a very much entirely invalid argument. It should be reasonably true that if information has no valid reason to be classified in the first place, should not be currently classified, or if it can be shown to have been released publicly that it cannot be considered classified. So, sure, keep the set process to declassify information. Meanwhile, it should be a valid legal defense (and have the effect of officially declassifying) that information should not haven been classified in the first place, should not be classified, or has been made publicly available not through the defendant or a co-conspirator's actions..
Trying to pull off some hair splitting on some absurd "technically" is simple bullshit. Going further and actually blocking websites for US Army personnel is beyond offensive.
No, technically, it is true. What is also true is that the Army/US Government is insane to act otherwise. But, then, obviously any government's insanity in action can override their technical obligations or general reality. That's why, of course, even under the most well intentioned regime it's insane to grant any government the sort of NSA spying apparatus. Because if it's convenient enough for their cause, government is more than willing to say water is not wet. I mean, look no further than the Boston Marathon Bomber having used a "WMD".
PS - This is obviously one reason why so many people put so much hope in the courts. Legislature try to define things. Executives try to twist things. One can only hope that the Judiciary will, being life-long appointed, have the wisdom to look beyond "technically". Then again, that can lead down nasty roads as well--where not selling a product interstate is seeing as interstate commerce (which has some logical validity but wisdom should have prevailed that such an argument was too broad and hence too abusable to be given as such). And, of course, that ignores just how slow the court system is relative to the continuous new abuses of the Legislature and Executive. :(
Another interesting take on the idea of everyone having access to pervasive surveillance (and good data mining) is Platonic Chain. Oddly enough, Platonic Chain is mostly a comedy.
Fuck that analogy. How about this? Between every five and six days in Boston, there's a murder (that is, it's been in the 50-70 people murdered per year for a while). So, what did that terrorist attack amount to? A few weeks worth of murders. Now, what's Boston's response to the equivalent of ~20 terrorist-level attacks on a regular basis? Near nothing, really--and by that, I mean, there hasn't been any calls for martial law which is seemingly what anti-terrorists want.
Oh, but you say, the terrorists also injured a good many people too! Well, wouldn't you know, assaults in Boston are on the scope of ~3,000/year. So, on the order of ~15 terrorist-level assaults per year (okay, that's rather unfair, since clearly assaults include all scopes of attacks and I doubt many result in permanent maiming). But, then, there's all sorts of other crimes (rapes and armed robbery) as well which could be argued of equal or greater heinousness in many multiples more of peoples lives.
The point then? Even when serious, ongoing crimes, we wouldn't accept martial law--war on crime may be twisted that way repeatedly but it quickly gets slapped down when applied to someone in power or influence. No, it's precisely because terrorism is seen as some sort of short-term problem that martial law can fix. But, then, the only people who tend to believe that are those who have no memory of history or having been personally effected want "justice" (aka vengeance) and really don't give a shit about the law. Well, you know, all those people victimized by common crimes I mentioned above fall into the same boat. And society generally ignores them--at best, a few quick sound bites in the newspaper blotter.
In short, if I would figuratively weep for the victims of the Boston bombing, I have way more figurative tears for a lot more, less published victims. Of course, it doesn't help that way more "victims" of the Boston bombing are merely people who happen to commute/live in Boston and say to themselves, "it could have been me".
Nah, you just missed the part where when the talk about running Windows Apps, they mean Microsoft Windows Apps--that they come preinstalled or you'll buy later on the Microsoft online store. Because (a) no one but Microsoft would be crazy enough to develop for the Surface RT and/or (b) at least the people involved with the Surface RT are so tunnel-visioned, they really only see Microsoft Windows Apps as they apps you'd actually want to run. I mean, chalk this up to the same sort of people who were so wowed by Gadgets in Windows Vista--which were about as much a clusterfuck as every other gadget setup I've seen on every other platform (slow/choppy behavior, huge memory leaks, huge security holes, unstable)--just to see them disappear just as fast. *shrug* I guess you shouldn't clone hollywood movie UIs.
No, it's a bit more insidious than that. School administrators, even in rural midwestern towns, are mandating that students rent tablets (like iPads*) for school. But, as outlandishly expensive as iPads can be (compared to Android tablets), obviously Surface RT prices are even more galling. The obvious answer then is to undercut iPads and at least be price competitive with Android tablets. Add to that the promise of "it's like a laptop" and "comes with MS Office", and you'd be hard pressed to not see plenty of schools pushing for such devices.
*Yea, as ridiculous as that. You'd think they'd go for Android tablets, if anything, to be cheaper for everyone concerned. I guess schools may be delusional and think those iPads are actually secure wall gardens, perfect for controlling their rented-out property. Personally, I think tablets for every student is outright an absurd idea even if they were free. They're simply too much of a distraction for adults, let alone for children. Beyond that, I'm generally against the idea of just about any company dumping (and possibly at all selling) their branded products at schools precisely because it's designed to create life-long lock-in. I mean, why else would MS or Apple or whatever push for schools to use their products, possibly even selling at a loss? Now, if the Gates Foundation were doing such a thing...I'd still be suspicious because I don't see the Surface RT as the right tool for the job, anyways.
Nah, I'd argue HFT is a symptom of a moderately broken system. The whole point of exchanges is to be market makers--to allow the means for transactions to occur. HFT are supposedly part of the solution to issues of liquidity--that two parties who are technically willing to trade but on their face claim otherwise can be manipulated to get out that information and allow the transaction to occur. It seems pretty clear that if exchanges are failing in their part and a 3rd party can succeed, then it's exchanges which need to change.
To that end, I propose a simple solution. Exchanges will run their own equivalent of HFT, without any unnecessary price spread. And since HFTers, no matter how close they are, are outside the exchange, they'll never be as fast as the exchange in carrying out those all-important liquidity transactions. Of course, it'll also just help if exchanges used ranges for prices for buy/sell, and then the overlap would be very apparent and HFTers would have little ability to step in and earn much of anything.
That's not irony. That's a non sequitur. Or are you unaware of the concept of a "mad scientist"? No, the only irony I see is you placing some sort of faith in "poor [educated]" people. Being "smarter" may place you to be more aware of how you can extend your lust for power over your duty to morality, but poorly educated people are quite able and do lust for power. The real difference, of course, is who is more likely to be caught and punished and for what crime. To that end, I'd suggest that you're a lot more likely to be caught and punished if what you do is unusual. Hence, in a higher murder area, murderers go free. Now, consider the probability of this clear case of abuse and corruption in the US government leading to an arrest and punishment and of whom it would apply.
And that's the reason, of course, Snowden is a hero.
It's both. More CO2 drives warming. More warming causes CO2 to bubble out of the ocean, permafrost to thaw and organic matter to rot and release CO2, etc. And thinks to the practice of carbon dating, we can say reasonably well that a large part of the current CO2 increase is from long-buried carbon sources--aka fossil fuels.
Yes, it's the rate that's troubling. Because in the past it took thousands of years to see the sort of warming the gradually resulted in tropical conditions in Canada's latitude. But with the rapid rate we're seeing now, the honest fear is that even if we were to simply stop fossil fuel CO2 emissions completely, we'd still continue to see the unprecedented rapid temperature rise because of the previously mentioned warming->CO2 release.
Except that your point is sort of superfluous. Even if what you state is true--which I'm not certain of--, the fact is that we know pretty confidently that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and higher CO2 concentrations means a greater temperature. We also know, pretty confidently, that greater temperatures have the above mentioned forcing cycle. That there have been possible exceptions to this cycle isn't comforting unless we have a good reason to believe the mentioned cycle won't repeat itself. That is, even if someone could come up with a good explanation for past higher temp/lower CO2 periods, it doesn't resolve the current higher temp/higher CO2 period. A better place to look would be lower or flat temper/high CO2 periods and consider why or how we could take that track. To that end, I haven't remotely heard anything to suggest we could be or are on that track.
The closest I've heard about anything along those lines is considerations on combating global warming with things like mitigating global warming with dust clouds (either in the atmosphere or in space). The general problem with that is a matter of scale--that human CO2 emissions are so great, countering them with dust would be of similar scale great, and that introduces a lot of unknowns like (a) how much dust to use, (b) how to remove dust if we go too far, (c) all the atmospheric (if done in the atmosphere) risks of increased dust, (d) the cost/risks of doing the same in space (a dust cloud could slow asteroids and increase the risk of them hitting Earth), etc. In essence, anything of the scale that could fix the problem are probably also of the scale of the problem itself. So, we have the real risk of solving one problem just to produce another one. Hence, it'd seem a lot wiser to head off CO2 release as much as we can and only really consider alternatives as a last resort.
But, seriously, we're so far from even seriously trying to deal with CO2 release. :(
That word. I don't think it means what you think it means. Now, if you mean "improve sales"...
And taking that same person at the right time and showing them that generic X is equivalent to brand name except for the label and the much cheaper prices increases efficiency. Funny that. Not very "Big Data" efficient, though.
Congratulations. You've proven correlation == causation. Oh, wait, no you didn't. Ten million people might have a cough because it's flu season. But, Joe may cough because he has lung cancer. Big Data *is* more efficient, though, if it means Joe is given some zinc pills and dies. And by efficient, I mean cheaper for the hospital when it can push people through on a diagnostic assembly line and cheaper for insurance companies that have to pay for a cheap prescription instead of having to fund expensive anti-cancer drugs.
So true. Too bad the plural of anecdote isn't data. So Big "Data" isn't inherently good for statistical analysis. Oh, and did I mention that real statistical analysis is really, really hard? I mean it-requires-a-human hard. But, since Big "Data" is all about trying to push through (aka "analyze" with an algorithm) more anecdotes than individuals can reasonably process... That's not to say it's impossible, sometimes, to pull out little threads of insight. I know throughout medical history there's been plenty of examples of that happening; I mean, sure, it might take thousands of false positives and a dedicated researcher to manually go over them... But the hype and hope of Big "Data" is in the same scope of nativity (or con, if you're a cynic) as trying to make a programming language/ui/whatever that anyone can use. A few isolated examples or scopes of problems? Sure. But remotely in general? Completely, insanely impossible.
PS - I really hope your work is an exception to the rule.
Relatively cheap is the key to making stuff more ubiquitous. Having a good deal of *demand* is probably even a lot more important. Efficiency may or may not enter into it based heavily on just how much a prototype costs relatively to what the market can bare. Which leads too...
No, the integrated circuit (aka semiconductor fabrication itself) is the primary based upon which more than the very rich owned a personal computer. Before that point, all the transistors and wires were a bulky mess which didn't entirely forego the non-very rich from owning a personal computer, but it certainly set the stage for allowing the progressive miniaturization in lithography that were those "efficiencies" you speak of. Yet, well before that point, of course, plenty of people had their own PC. Of course, the IC itself could be said to be an example of the "efficiencies" you speak of, but that's not right really. What made ICs so important is that it allowed the bulk package of everything together which in itself made the production a unified thing. I guess that again could be chalked up to a point of efficiency, like the assembly line, but it was the fact that computers can do so much that spurred so much adoption. Yes, without a lower floor on the price of a PC, computers would certainly be a lot less ubiquitous. But they'd be well outside of the scope of for just "the very rich".
Again, no. Yes, at the start the Model T was more of a novelty to the very rich who could potentially waste a great deal of money on something that may not pan out . But, the very nature of the current shipping system we have today I think shows that there's a strong commercial interest in having a horseless carriage. So, the ubiquitous nature of cars would seem to be based heavily on demand there as well. Of course, being cheaper makes them *more* ubiquitous, but without the demand in the first place...
Except the rule has consistently been to spend yet even more money on marketing to spur even further sales to produce further revenue to pay for said marketing. The truth is, big data as a concept is very, very old. It's based on the idea that if you can collect enough information about potential customers, you can make them actual customers. Yet, just like directed advertising, it forgets the key point of marketing is not to sell products but to inform a consumer who has a demand, even if he hasn't fully realized it yet. The thing is, we're already well to the point of having a system where ads can read potential customers. And ads continue to stray further and further into trying to conjure up a demand out of nothing, rather than informing a consumer into a real demand they have.
So, the real specter of big data is to yet further manipulate consumers even more than directed ads do--and if you don't see how trying to create a per-user view of available products doesn't manipulate the consumer, you'll already well lost--by further trying to take what consumers already buy or know and try to match them up with...stuff the select few companies who pay the most want to sell. Meanwhile,
Like a nuclear bomb is just a critical mass detonation of tremendous energy in the form of significant heat, force, and radiation. Throwing in that "just" is rather belittling to the point. The major advantage Windows 95, as a UI, had over its predecessors (and other competing UIs of the era) was the always-on-top taskbar + start menu. And MS decided to throw those away, effectively, in Metro mode. And best of all, they're pushing people into using Metro mode to do things--the fact that you can circumvent MS's efforts doesn't change that fact.
But, yea, it's "just" a bit of whining from people being manipulated into using an inferior UI. As others have pointed out, the only reason such an inferior UI is at all accepted on tablets and smartphones is their inferior resolution. But, I'd venture a guess that in short order people with tablets will "whine" even more in time for a start menu + taskbar too as the resolution issue is a much mooter point there. This is, btw, a major reason why Windows CE sucked so much--there, it tried to shove a start menu + taskbar on a too small of a resolution screen.
I mean, let it not be said "use the best tool for the job" or "there's no such thing as a universal UI". Oh, wait... And here we see why Unity is a failure as well, with the same group of whiners.
In part. A tiny minority group has an agenda and uses anything and everything to pursue it. The vast majority of people are too cowardly or too stupid to confront that minority with any sort of logic or reason. Instead, the mere fact that they may be painted as pro-terrorism, pro-murder, anti-nationalistic, or simply non-compassionate leaves them to be walked all over, often go as far as parroting the party line instead of making a stand on principle or character or integrity. So, congratulations Britain; you're just like America.