It's kind of astonishing how little we (by which I mean the U.S.A.) spend on weather forecasting relative to the economic effects. The economic costs of weather are in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. You can't change the weather, but more accurate predictions will save more lives and property.
I try not to plan my life around the weather, but a few million to possibly offset billions in damage from an incorrect hurricane path prediction is a no-brainer.
So, let's get this straight: there's no proof that the police are connected to this, just a half-baked assumption based on someone's analysis of a couple two-sentence emails? And the messages aren't even very funny anyway... ("LOL, he used the word concert . What a loser! Must be a cop!")
I do not have large batteries that will need to be recycled or tossed into a landfill next year.
This idea that hybrid batteries need to be replaced every year is a thoroughlydebunkedurbanlegend. I drove to the office this morning in a Ford Escape Hybrid that has 70,000 miles and is 5 years overdue for a battery replacement, by your count.
And out of curiosity, what's wrong with recycling a battery?
Had this happen last year. Came home late at night on Christmas 2011 to a broken basement window and saw that all my electronics had been stolen - TV, laptop, desktop, game system, etc. While it was certainly pretty frustrating (especially dealing with the police (hint: don't expect much) and insurance company), eventually I realized that it was actually a good opportunity to rebuild my tech collection from scratch.
In other words, think about what devices you didn't use much, and how to replace that functionality with other things you have. For me, this was:
- an early 40" LCD ($1200 circa 2007). It was 1080p, but it was a monster to move anywhere and too small to make watching HD content worthwhile when sitting across the room. Still, it worked fine - I wasn't going to go buy another one. I also don't watch much TV to begin with, so it went days without being turned on. So, I replaced it with an Epson HD projector ($800). Sure, the lamp life is less, but I don't use it more than a few hours/week anyway.
- a Blu-ray player (bought in 2008 for $160) replaced with a PS3 ($200 on eBay).
- an Apple time capsule ($300) replaced with FreeNAS (in virtual sandbox) on desktop computer (free, since I was replacing the desktop anyway).
The Xbox is basically a specialized, stripped-down Windows gaming computer, in terms of both software and hardware. The games use DirectX, just like regular Windows, and make it trivial for developers to port their games to desktop. In other words, the Xbox ecosystem makes the Windows platform stronger, not weaker.
It's disappointing how the Microsoft-pioneered "buy up your competitors before they can afford to buy you" technique has become standard practice for Apple. Up until the day before they were purchased, so many people I knew were using Lala on a daily basis. And why wouldn't you use it? Lala had a great catalog, came up high on Google results, offered full songs for preview, and worked in any web browser. And this was all 2-3 years before Spotify was available in the US.
When Apple bought them, I naturally assumed they'd be offline for a couple days and then reappear on "me.com" or something. In fact, months went by before I realized that wasn't going to happen.
It's too bad. iTunes has gotten a lot better, but competition is always a good thing.
The problem with a home-brew or emulation-only game system is that the hardware is now easier than the software. We're now well into the age of mobile devices. The hardware here is basically a smartphone with a lower-resolution screen and slightly different processor. (Although the screen choice seems like a bad idea: 320x240 is just too low.)
The hard part is getting developers to write native games for it. Good luck with that in this day and age unless you're Sony or Microsoft and can spend millions on wooing developers with dev tools and conferences.
The emulation aspect is an interesting idea, but as someone who has fooled around with Playstation and N64 emulation, I can tell you that with most games, you'll find yourself wishing for a native controller pad if you play for more than a couple minutes. And why not? That's what the games were originally designed for and tested with. But even without accounting for the ergonomics, how are you going to play PS games when the device has fewer control buttons than the PS controller did?
Why would anyone be surprised that a low-tier service for lazy people to do little more than crop photos and apply crappy-looking digital filters loses market share when said service announces that they're effectively going to steal all their user's photos?
AIG's stock had fallen 95% in a matter of months and the company was days away from bankruptcy. If 14 percent interest was so damn high, why the hell didn't they make the deal with the private investors that were willing to go with a lower rate than the feds?
I wish the tech media (/. included, though Gizmodo is the worst offender) would stop covering McAfee's latest antics. The guy clearly has some serious mental and legal issues and needs professional help. Enabling him by conducting interviews and real-time blog coverage isn't doing anyone any good (except for a few journalists who clearly have book deals pending).
He resigned 5 days prior to the congressional hearing on what transpired at the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and other US personnel.
Oh, for crying out loud. Look, maybe there was a genuine conspiracy relating to the Benghazi attack. Or maybe there wasn't and shit just happens.
But, if you want to convince anyone else of your case, you have to stop treating every shadow like it's a smoking gun and every government official like they're a co-conspirator until you have real, substantial evidence. That's the way it works: you don't get to claim conspiracy just by randomly picking facts to be a story and hoping some of it pans out.
If Congress wants to talk to Petraeus, they'll subpoena him. If that happens and he flees the country, then that's a story. His exact job title really doesn't matter.
This probably is not well-known to people except those working in neuroscience/behavioral psych research, but "wanting" and "liking" are part of a drug addiction theory called incentive salience. The basic notion is that "liking" something is a momentary, pleasurable feeling of hedonism. It passes quickly, but it's powerful reinforcement that drives you to want that hedonic feeling. The "wanting" is where motivation and incentive comes into play to drive the craving for reward (be it drugs, food, whatever).
Think about it: what's the last time you ate a cheeseburger? Do you have a vivid memory of it? Probably not.
But do you want a cheeseburger? Especially one with cheese, bacon, medium rare, fries on the side... mmm...
Anyway, the theory explains why addiction persists and drug abusers fall back into old habits, even when they've been clean for years. Salient cues are too much to ignore (a needle, a bus stop they used to meet their dealer, etc). The theory works with rats getting drugs, food, sex... No reason it can't be applied to website visitors too.
This is exactly why we need to do away with publicly funded education. This type of shit would never fly in the private sector. Remember this story the next time you get your tax bill.
Umich researcher here (full-time staff, part time comp sci student)... yes, I wish my tuition was a bit lower, especially since I'm a self-funded student. But we have one of the top CS programs in the country (and arguably the best outside of Silicon Valley). The only way you can build and maintain a program like that is to have resources like this available to the students to experiment with and learn from. It's an investment, not an expense.
By the way, don't worry too much about your tax bill. Our state legislature is doing their best to defund us all the way to zero (last time I checked, state money was less than 10% of the U-M budget).
It's becoming Media-Con and people are letting it. Which is why I have no interest in attending. I'd rather go to a show closer to home which Hollywood isn't trying to take over. It's called Comic -Con and should seriously consider getting back to the business of Comics.
A comic book is just a medium for telling a particular story. The notion of a "comic strip" was originally telling a story with a sequence of pictures. Television and film is arguably just an evolution along that path. In other words, focusing on stories regardless of the medium they're told in is going back to the original business of comics.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing Comic-Con as anything but a win for everyone involved. Fans love it for the interactivity, writers, artists and actors love it for the chance to get fans excited about their work, and I'm sure it makes plenty of money for the ownership. I suspect very few people in those groups want the event to go back to focusing solely on comic books.
I'm in southeast Michigan. Temp here is 98 today, and has been similar for the past week. At home, I normally run the air conditioning a couple weeks of the summer. This year, it's been running constantly since April. At work, our buildings are serviced by an internal power plant and it seems to hit capacity when the temp gets over 95 or so, so we've been under instructions for the past week to turn off lights and computers to reduce the electrical and heat load. I'm sure HVAC systems in places like Houston and D.C. are designed to deal with this kind of heat, but Michigan ain't Texas (or at least we keep telling ourselves...)
On the topic of dealing with the heat, one thing that helped me a few years ago was losing weight. I lost about 50 pounds (went from ~230 to 175), and one of the unexpected positive consequences is that I am much more tolerant of warm temperatures than before. Previously, just sitting around in anything over 80 degrees was uncomfortable, now that threshold is more like 90. (On the other hand, I'm now more sensitive to cold, but hey, that's what winter coats are for.)
'Under the new pricing plan, a smartphone customer opting for the cheapest data bucket, 1 gigabyte, will pay $90 before taxes and fees ($40 for phone access and $50 for 1 GB).
Not that I'm a defender of Verizon, but why the hell would anyone sign up for a shared plan with only one device? Obviously you're going to lose out... the prices are designed to make it marginally cheaper to add additional devices in return for a higher "first device" fee.
The new "share everything" plans are designed to make it easier (and a bit cheaper) for families with a bunch of smartphones, a tablet or two, and text-messaging addicted teenagers. Not for single-device customers looking for a bargain.
Why they insist on hermetically sealing them, though, that is baffling to me.
The only reason I've ever heard that actually makes sense is that it cuts down on in-store returns.
People often feel that if they return a product to the store that they're obligated to include all the original packaging: little plastic baggies and paper flyers, as well as the foam padding and the box itself.
In reality, most stores are far more lenient, but when you have quite literally destroyed the package in the process of testing it out, it makes you far less likely to take that $10 light bulb back to the store.
You do know that R01 grants aren't exactly done on a secret handshake agreement, right? There are so many hoops academic researchers have to jump through to get federal funding. And I say that as someone who almost lost his job the day after landing a big grant, because I accidentally kept someone out of the loop. Your grant proposal gets reviewed by your department people, by the IRB committee, by the university's office of research, and by internal counsel (if needed) BEFORE it ever leaves campus. And then it gets reviewed by program officers, and many impartial and often vicious grant reviewers. And let's not forget that NIH grant success rates in many institutes are approaching 10%, so likely it won't matter at all because you won't get funded.
You personally may disagree with the decision that the project is ethical, but you can't argue that they weren't honest with everyone about what they set out to do.
So, the data started to decouple from predictions, circa year 2000. It seems rather convenient to say that 1970-2000 matches the model, and then simply ignore 2000-onward.
And could we maybe narrow down that prediction a bit, too? Anything between economic collapse (zero) and "unlimited economic growth" is pretty open-ended. (And what the fuck does the term "unlimited economic growth" actually mean, anyway? Money growing on trees?)
Reading predictions of economic doom always brings to mind a quote from "The West Wing" about how economists and futurologists almost always fail to account for technological progress:
BARTLET: You ever read Paul Erlich's book?
TOBY: "The Population Bomb"?
BARTLET: Yeah. He wrote it in 1968. Erlich said it was a fantasy that India would ever feed itself. Then Norman Borlaug comes along. See the problem was wheat is top-heavy. It was falling over on itself and it took up too much space. The dwarf wheat... it was an agricultural revolution that was credited with saving one billion lives.
When the iPhone "Find My Friends" app came out last year, I was rather surprised by how many people were opposed to it and refused to share information. "I don't want other people to know where I am all the time" was the most common complaint.
My response at the time was, "do you really think the police/federal government/big telecoms can't already track you?"
If you're going somewhere you don't want other people to know about, leave your phone at home.
I'm a hard science/computer science guy who's livelihood is working on various NIH/NSF projects. A common thread talking to other scientists the past few years has been the theme that the tools for data analysis have not kept pace with the tools for data acquisition. Companies like National Instruments sell sub-$1000 USB DAQ boards with resolution and bandwidth that would make a scientist from the early 1990's weep for joy. But most data analysis is done the same way it's been done since that same era: with a desktop application working with discrete files, and maybe some ad-hoc scripts. (Only now the scripts are Python instead of C...)
The funny thing is, most researchers haven't yet wrapped their brains around the notion of offloading data onto cloud computing solutions like Amazon AWS. I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.
Oh, but California would rather you die of complications of diabetes or heart disease than cancer. No, really, that's the unavoidable conclusion.
I'm not sure about diabetes, but when my time comes up I'd much prefer a massive heart attack (hopefully with the majority of suffering for me and my family over in less than a day), than a slow, drawn-out battle with cancer. I've seen that a couple times, and used to work next to a cancer center. Cancer is an ugly way to go.
Unfortunately, my family history has many more cases of cancer and Alzheimer's than heart disease, though I've still got a few decades to decide on a strategy. Eating lots more burgers and fries, perhaps? Assuming California doesn't outlaw those...
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of astonishing how little we (by which I mean the U.S.A.) spend on weather forecasting relative to the economic effects. The economic costs of weather are in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. You can't change the weather, but more accurate predictions will save more lives and property.
I try not to plan my life around the weather, but a few million to possibly offset billions in damage from an incorrect hurricane path prediction is a no-brainer.
So, let's get this straight: there's no proof that the police are connected to this, just a half-baked assumption based on someone's analysis of a couple two-sentence emails? And the messages aren't even very funny anyway... ("LOL, he used the word concert . What a loser! Must be a cop!")
Slashdot editors, you need to step up your game.
I do not have large batteries that will need to be recycled or tossed into a landfill next year.
This idea that hybrid batteries need to be replaced every year is a thoroughly debunked urban legend. I drove to the office this morning in a Ford Escape Hybrid that has 70,000 miles and is 5 years overdue for a battery replacement, by your count.
And out of curiosity, what's wrong with recycling a battery?
Had this happen last year. Came home late at night on Christmas 2011 to a broken basement window and saw that all my electronics had been stolen - TV, laptop, desktop, game system, etc. While it was certainly pretty frustrating (especially dealing with the police (hint: don't expect much) and insurance company), eventually I realized that it was actually a good opportunity to rebuild my tech collection from scratch.
In other words, think about what devices you didn't use much, and how to replace that functionality with other things you have. For me, this was:
- an early 40" LCD ($1200 circa 2007). It was 1080p, but it was a monster to move anywhere and too small to make watching HD content worthwhile when sitting across the room. Still, it worked fine - I wasn't going to go buy another one. I also don't watch much TV to begin with, so it went days without being turned on. So, I replaced it with an Epson HD projector ($800). Sure, the lamp life is less, but I don't use it more than a few hours/week anyway.
- a Blu-ray player (bought in 2008 for $160) replaced with a PS3 ($200 on eBay).
- an Apple time capsule ($300) replaced with FreeNAS (in virtual sandbox) on desktop computer (free, since I was replacing the desktop anyway).
The Xbox is basically a specialized, stripped-down Windows gaming computer, in terms of both software and hardware. The games use DirectX, just like regular Windows, and make it trivial for developers to port their games to desktop. In other words, the Xbox ecosystem makes the Windows platform stronger, not weaker.
It's disappointing how the Microsoft-pioneered "buy up your competitors before they can afford to buy you" technique has become standard practice for Apple. Up until the day before they were purchased, so many people I knew were using Lala on a daily basis. And why wouldn't you use it? Lala had a great catalog, came up high on Google results, offered full songs for preview, and worked in any web browser. And this was all 2-3 years before Spotify was available in the US.
When Apple bought them, I naturally assumed they'd be offline for a couple days and then reappear on "me.com" or something. In fact, months went by before I realized that wasn't going to happen.
It's too bad. iTunes has gotten a lot better, but competition is always a good thing.
The problem with a home-brew or emulation-only game system is that the hardware is now easier than the software. We're now well into the age of mobile devices. The hardware here is basically a smartphone with a lower-resolution screen and slightly different processor. (Although the screen choice seems like a bad idea: 320x240 is just too low.)
The hard part is getting developers to write native games for it. Good luck with that in this day and age unless you're Sony or Microsoft and can spend millions on wooing developers with dev tools and conferences.
The emulation aspect is an interesting idea, but as someone who has fooled around with Playstation and N64 emulation, I can tell you that with most games, you'll find yourself wishing for a native controller pad if you play for more than a couple minutes. And why not? That's what the games were originally designed for and tested with. But even without accounting for the ergonomics, how are you going to play PS games when the device has fewer control buttons than the PS controller did?
Why would anyone be surprised that a low-tier service for lazy people to do little more than crop photos and apply crappy-looking digital filters loses market share when said service announces that they're effectively going to steal all their user's photos?
What a bunch of ungrateful bastards.
AIG's stock had fallen 95% in a matter of months and the company was days away from bankruptcy. If 14 percent interest was so damn high, why the hell didn't they make the deal with the private investors that were willing to go with a lower rate than the feds?
Oh, that's right, because there weren't any.
I wish the tech media (/. included, though Gizmodo is the worst offender) would stop covering McAfee's latest antics. The guy clearly has some serious mental and legal issues and needs professional help. Enabling him by conducting interviews and real-time blog coverage isn't doing anyone any good (except for a few journalists who clearly have book deals pending).
He resigned 5 days prior to the congressional hearing on what transpired at the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and other US personnel.
Oh, for crying out loud. Look, maybe there was a genuine conspiracy relating to the Benghazi attack. Or maybe there wasn't and shit just happens.
But, if you want to convince anyone else of your case, you have to stop treating every shadow like it's a smoking gun and every government official like they're a co-conspirator until you have real, substantial evidence. That's the way it works: you don't get to claim conspiracy just by randomly picking facts to be a story and hoping some of it pans out.
If Congress wants to talk to Petraeus, they'll subpoena him. If that happens and he flees the country, then that's a story. His exact job title really doesn't matter.
There are plenty of jobs where you can hold personal secrets without exposing yourself or your subordinates to real danger.
Being CIA director is not one of them.
This probably is not well-known to people except those working in neuroscience/behavioral psych research, but "wanting" and "liking" are part of a drug addiction theory called incentive salience. The basic notion is that "liking" something is a momentary, pleasurable feeling of hedonism. It passes quickly, but it's powerful reinforcement that drives you to want that hedonic feeling. The "wanting" is where motivation and incentive comes into play to drive the craving for reward (be it drugs, food, whatever).
Think about it: what's the last time you ate a cheeseburger? Do you have a vivid memory of it? Probably not.
But do you want a cheeseburger? Especially one with cheese, bacon, medium rare, fries on the side... mmm...
Anyway, the theory explains why addiction persists and drug abusers fall back into old habits, even when they've been clean for years. Salient cues are too much to ignore (a needle, a bus stop they used to meet their dealer, etc). The theory works with rats getting drugs, food, sex... No reason it can't be applied to website visitors too.
This is exactly why we need to do away with publicly funded education. This type of shit would never fly in the private sector. Remember this story the next time you get your tax bill.
Umich researcher here (full-time staff, part time comp sci student)... yes, I wish my tuition was a bit lower, especially since I'm a self-funded student. But we have one of the top CS programs in the country (and arguably the best outside of Silicon Valley). The only way you can build and maintain a program like that is to have resources like this available to the students to experiment with and learn from. It's an investment, not an expense.
By the way, don't worry too much about your tax bill. Our state legislature is doing their best to defund us all the way to zero (last time I checked, state money was less than 10% of the U-M budget).
A border patrol vigilante is busy trying to figure out how to load a magazine clip into his assault rifle flatscreen.
It's becoming Media-Con and people are letting it. Which is why I have no interest in attending. I'd rather go to a show closer to home which Hollywood isn't trying to take over. It's called Comic -Con and should seriously consider getting back to the business of Comics.
A comic book is just a medium for telling a particular story. The notion of a "comic strip" was originally telling a story with a sequence of pictures. Television and film is arguably just an evolution along that path. In other words, focusing on stories regardless of the medium they're told in is going back to the original business of comics.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing Comic-Con as anything but a win for everyone involved. Fans love it for the interactivity, writers, artists and actors love it for the chance to get fans excited about their work, and I'm sure it makes plenty of money for the ownership. I suspect very few people in those groups want the event to go back to focusing solely on comic books.
I'm in southeast Michigan. Temp here is 98 today, and has been similar for the past week. At home, I normally run the air conditioning a couple weeks of the summer. This year, it's been running constantly since April. At work, our buildings are serviced by an internal power plant and it seems to hit capacity when the temp gets over 95 or so, so we've been under instructions for the past week to turn off lights and computers to reduce the electrical and heat load. I'm sure HVAC systems in places like Houston and D.C. are designed to deal with this kind of heat, but Michigan ain't Texas (or at least we keep telling ourselves...)
On the topic of dealing with the heat, one thing that helped me a few years ago was losing weight. I lost about 50 pounds (went from ~230 to 175), and one of the unexpected positive consequences is that I am much more tolerant of warm temperatures than before. Previously, just sitting around in anything over 80 degrees was uncomfortable, now that threshold is more like 90. (On the other hand, I'm now more sensitive to cold, but hey, that's what winter coats are for.)
'Under the new pricing plan, a smartphone customer opting for the cheapest data bucket, 1 gigabyte, will pay $90 before taxes and fees ($40 for phone access and $50 for 1 GB).
Not that I'm a defender of Verizon, but why the hell would anyone sign up for a shared plan with only one device? Obviously you're going to lose out... the prices are designed to make it marginally cheaper to add additional devices in return for a higher "first device" fee.
The new "share everything" plans are designed to make it easier (and a bit cheaper) for families with a bunch of smartphones, a tablet or two, and text-messaging addicted teenagers. Not for single-device customers looking for a bargain.
Why they insist on hermetically sealing them, though, that is baffling to me.
The only reason I've ever heard that actually makes sense is that it cuts down on in-store returns.
People often feel that if they return a product to the store that they're obligated to include all the original packaging: little plastic baggies and paper flyers, as well as the foam padding and the box itself.
In reality, most stores are far more lenient, but when you have quite literally destroyed the package in the process of testing it out, it makes you far less likely to take that $10 light bulb back to the store.
Damn, pasted wrong URL. Hate it when I do that.
http://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=8070026&icde=12211723
You do know that R01 grants aren't exactly done on a secret handshake agreement, right? There are so many hoops academic researchers have to jump through to get federal funding. And I say that as someone who almost lost his job the day after landing a big grant, because I accidentally kept someone out of the loop. Your grant proposal gets reviewed by your department people, by the IRB committee, by the university's office of research, and by internal counsel (if needed) BEFORE it ever leaves campus. And then it gets reviewed by program officers, and many impartial and often vicious grant reviewers. And let's not forget that NIH grant success rates in many institutes are approaching 10%, so likely it won't matter at all because you won't get funded.
And, shockingly, the grant description has been available at NIH.gov since at least 2009: "An important innovation of this phase of the longitudinal study will be careful assessment of social aggression in online communication by providing adolescents with handheld devices and recording and coding the content of their text messaging, Instant Messaging, and email communication."
You personally may disagree with the decision that the project is ethical, but you can't argue that they weren't honest with everyone about what they set out to do.
So, the data started to decouple from predictions, circa year 2000. It seems rather convenient to say that 1970-2000 matches the model, and then simply ignore 2000-onward.
And could we maybe narrow down that prediction a bit, too? Anything between economic collapse (zero) and "unlimited economic growth" is pretty open-ended. (And what the fuck does the term "unlimited economic growth" actually mean, anyway? Money growing on trees?)
Reading predictions of economic doom always brings to mind a quote from "The West Wing" about how economists and futurologists almost always fail to account for technological progress:
BARTLET: You ever read Paul Erlich's book?
TOBY: "The Population Bomb"?
BARTLET: Yeah. He wrote it in 1968. Erlich said it was a fantasy that India would ever feed itself. Then Norman Borlaug comes along. See the problem was wheat is top-heavy. It was falling over on itself and it took up too much space. The dwarf wheat... it was an agricultural revolution that was credited with saving one billion lives.
When the iPhone "Find My Friends" app came out last year, I was rather surprised by how many people were opposed to it and refused to share information. "I don't want other people to know where I am all the time" was the most common complaint.
My response at the time was, "do you really think the police/federal government/big telecoms can't already track you?"
If you're going somewhere you don't want other people to know about, leave your phone at home.
I'm a hard science/computer science guy who's livelihood is working on various NIH/NSF projects. A common thread talking to other scientists the past few years has been the theme that the tools for data analysis have not kept pace with the tools for data acquisition. Companies like National Instruments sell sub-$1000 USB DAQ boards with resolution and bandwidth that would make a scientist from the early 1990's weep for joy. But most data analysis is done the same way it's been done since that same era: with a desktop application working with discrete files, and maybe some ad-hoc scripts. (Only now the scripts are Python instead of C...)
The funny thing is, most researchers haven't yet wrapped their brains around the notion of offloading data onto cloud computing solutions like Amazon AWS. I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.
Oh, but California would rather you die of complications of diabetes or heart disease than cancer. No, really, that's the unavoidable conclusion.
I'm not sure about diabetes, but when my time comes up I'd much prefer a massive heart attack (hopefully with the majority of suffering for me and my family over in less than a day), than a slow, drawn-out battle with cancer. I've seen that a couple times, and used to work next to a cancer center. Cancer is an ugly way to go.
Unfortunately, my family history has many more cases of cancer and Alzheimer's than heart disease, though I've still got a few decades to decide on a strategy. Eating lots more burgers and fries, perhaps? Assuming California doesn't outlaw those...