The current and possibly into the distant future way of understanding what you want is to have ONE entity answer it. This single point learns the human condition over time and adapts the responses to the locals. Having this learning distributed to each and every local processor is wasteful and ineffective.
We don't provide enough input nor does the system have enough sensors or processing capability for it to "learn" about us and our needs; let alone our wants . The sensors and processing will be solved over time, but the former will not. We don't teach every entity we interact with about us, we expect them to learn through trial & error and figure it out to interact with us (the wife being the perfect example). The threshold of errors before we cut the relationship varies depending on the relationship & parties involved. For in adamant objects, it is very low. To deal with husbands, it is very high.
Having a single central system that learns from a million of us helps figure out what we want and spreads out the errors enough to continue interaction. Having it locally tips the balance in the other direction. Unfortunately, the former system means someone is listening in on us at all times and has enough meta data on us to identify us individually. It is just the tradeoff we must live with. The best we can do is put in enough controls to keep up with the technology and reduce the human greed factor on the other end of the line. That chance for abuse can never be eliminated and just something we have to get used to. On the plus side, the system should work in reverse too... it will let us identify the abusers so we can hold them accountable. That would be the most effective deterrent for abuse.
Thanks for the link. Wow, my google-fu sucks. Anyway, I know about 1/2 those games and most of the remaining aren't that great. BUT, that still leaves a lot of really ok to good games to play. Rating system seems to align to my personal tastes too. Seems 2014 was the last good year for PS3, which is 2 years worth of games that I haven't touched. The last great game seems to be Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel; Oct 2014. Played it, but the remaining games of that time should keep me busy for the year. In November, I can check this site to see if the PS4 (or Xbox?) is worth it this year.
Thanks again. Here is hoping this site doesn't get too popular. Then the Gods that Be will effect the rating system and site value.
I really miss couch coop. I would give up a lot of today's graphic details to gain that back. That and good unique stories; rather than movie rehashes. Even if the story is a generic rehash. I am not really interested in creating clans, leader boards, who wasted a weekend doing what, etc. I just want a simple, fun game that when a friend comes over we can just start up and play. Having network capability and all is a plus, but can't be the core value.
I think the whole "fun" aspect of gaming has long died and I miss it. The last POS I bought was Destiny. CoD, Resistance 3, Crisis, MoH, etc are ok games. But I just can't get the feeling out of my head that I had more fun 8 years ago. The last fun games I played were Lost Planet 2, Army of Two, and Gears of War.
I guess I am an old fart and clearly not today's gaming demographic. It feels like today, all the game needs is a good marketing campaign. Maybe I will buy a PS4 this Christmas if this year's games live up to half their shiny.... but probably not. Certainly not falling for any pre-order bullshit.
Yeah, overall not very impressive. I mean you could tie a mini windmill, vibrating ribbon between two branches, or sail to achieve the same if not better results. I don't understand the purpose of this other than application of a known theory in yet another expected environment.
We could put it on all downhills in a certain grade range. Steal power from the brakes.
Also local roads with traffic that burn gas inefficiently should be ok too. They don't run the engine efficiently so stealing some excess power should be ok.
You can organize your icons on an Android around widgets, or at different parts of the screen. Similar to a Windows Desktop. I agree with the grandparent, no on screen/lock screen widgets and just dummy icons is a huge draw back of the iPhone. I wish more icons were like the Calendar and Clock. In the end I do prefer the iPhone over Android just for the battery life and UI fluidity. But I prefer Android tablets over the iPad.
You hear this all the time in any business at all clients. About undocumented access rights, old systems, phone numbers, applications, etc. My response has been: "Its going to fail, accept it. Do you want it to happen randomly and you have no idea what happened. Or do you want it to happen predictably and you know why." Sadly many pick the former because "it hasn't happened yet."
Because it is not the same thing. We are talking about Africa, not China, their dictators basically enslave the people using the very weaponry the developed world produces. At what point do we say, "No, we should intervene"? Do we let the child soldiers in Africa roam free looting and pillaging their people & resources so that the master can buy higher end weapons from us to support his effort? Hitting closer to home, if the South won the Civil war, became a nation, and kept slavery; should northern USA sit idly by and say "They are a developing nation."
Nike sweatshops in the 1970s are the perfect example. Without consumer awareness and backlash, the situation would have taken decades more to fix itself. Nike did a good job, providing day care facilities in their factories, educational facilities, and doing random inspections. It not only impacted the workers at Nike, but also other companies assessing their current facilities and setting up new ones.
At the same time, it is easy to go too far and become protectionist; imposing our ideals on them. Example: 7 year old is young, but 13... most cultures consider them basically adults. Many carry more responsibilities than 21 year olds in the Western world.
I still remember my college professor's story about setting up child free factories in China in the 90s due to the "sweatshop" scare. I am paraphrasing, but his Chinese counterpart responded to a stern statement after a laugh: "No, no one under 16 will work at _your_ factories Mr. Smith. I will make sure of it. They will continue their regular jobs just outside; servicing the now richer men after shift hours."
So the pendulum can be pushed too far, but it will take forever to get to a good balance by leaving it where it is. I know I made up unfair scenarios up top, but can't we atleast say that labor shifts can't be more than 9 hours long? The underlying reason being that 1 person working for 16 hours is less effective than 2 people working 8 each? There has to be tons of stuff like this that we learned the hard way and can pass on or enforce onto these nations.
I think what you are trying to do is still do able. Just that the old game of getting identifiable information without giving anything is going away. And rightfully so, there have been too many businesses that have abused what is the equivalent of dumpster diving. Asking people not to shred their trash isn't going to go anywhere.
However, why not setup an intranet at each location. Provide people the ability to scan bar codes and get pricing information on the spot on their phone (Macys). Provide a layout of the store and where they can find things (HomeDepot). Provide weekly, in store, or cart based electronic coupons. Provide the weekly ad. In return for this convenience, you get identifiable information on the user. This is a far better trade off to determine what folks are interested in, identify dead zones in your store, or how sales effect foot traffic.
This is true of ANY organism, GMO, non-GMO, hybrid, grafted... except maybe fruits. Nothing out there is working its evolutionary butt off to provide its children for you to safely rip up, process, and consume. In fact, it's just the opposite.
GMOs don't change this equation. That all natural Potato, Corn, Fish, etc are all working to figure out how to kill you so that you won't kill them. In all cases, humans selectively harvest and propagate the mutants off their natural paths.
Although he didn't do this, you can't use clean room implementations against patents like you can against copyright. Else a lot of patents on solutions that are obvious after the fact, naturally converging, or having multiple independent sources would be useless. A lot of the patents from the founding fathers time would be pointless. Patents on the lightbulb, telephone, and steam engine would have been worthless.
Oh BS. What about all the other crap corporations produce? Toothpaste, vaccines, cars, houses, etc. What makes GMO special that corporations will cause Armageddon with it but haven't with the rest? The system _might_ cause millions to die tomorrow so let's hold back GMO so that millions die today?
Crop diversity? GMO crops aren't one unique sequence or exact clones anymore than the current non-GMO sets. The risk doesn't change with GMO as we were already a mono crop planter with the non-GMO stuff.
Shelf life? What purpose is beer, wine, cheese, jams, pickles, canning, and a whole slew of oddities we call food and have consumed for generations with no issue in digestions? Grains, pulses, and nuts can last for years. There are fruits that will last multiple weeks. That doesn't make them less digestible. Shelf life's purpose isn't to sit in a compost pile longer. It just won't spoil as quickly with proper care.
This isn't a Western concept only. Check out the regulatory environment, shipping via trucks, car dealerships, mechanics, home financing, insurance, police tickets, futures trading, NASCAR, casinos, credit cards, etc. Tell me they aren't trying to wiggle through loopholes. All in the US.
There is no reason this day and age that the US can't make a quality measuring test for stuff like hammers, chainsaws, and screwdrivers. At this point we should have even outsourced that and just be properly auditing it.
The reason is simply because someone in the US didn't want to pay the pennies extra to build the process as the customer base showed there was a higher profit margin without it.
But you are implying that marketing, distribution, exhibition, etc cost multiple times the movie's budget. There is something wrong there. This is digital content, not physical goods traveling around the world on sneakers. Inflated seems too weak of a word here.
The days of putting your blinders on and working in your silo segregated from the rest of the company's operations and external influences are long gone. PHBs would love for you to do that as you are more manageable and closer to the cog they need but it is very detrimental to your personal growth and career.
All employees should be keeping an eye on the competition and motions within the company. This will help you dodge bad positions, career paths, and management. The docile employee is the perfect fall guy, scape goat, and low end of the bonus curve to keep HR's averages happy. At the same time, he is that "unnecessary" cost that needs to be reduced. The employee that keeps looking at greener pastures is actually valued more by the company. Because he has others tell the company what he is worth.
People take the path of least resistance. Work the tickets that come in properly, delay till SLA on the whiners, and there is no SLA on emails. You take your time to respond that this email request should be submitted via a ticket.
I used to run a service desk and have had to deal with this many times. Executing on the emails is basically your actions speaking louder than your words.
MariaDB and MySQL are basically the same thing. It comes down to licensing and vendor preference. But Postgresql vs MySQL vs Sqlite is just a question of what your use case is.
Sqlite is for the prototyping, small projects, and small foot print. Its an amazing piece of software and solution for its niche. It is probably the most widely used DB out there. Extremely easy to setup, program against, and test. And very forgiving.
MySQL is for the small to large size operations. Easiest to setup and manage for the feature set you obtain. It is fast and reliable and has a lot of 3rd party support. Most devs work in this area and I think this is why it is used so much. It is also many folks first "personal" testing DB and thus has a lot of momentum. You can use it at the enterprise level, but not really where it shines. Its like taking a Camry and putting a HEMI in it. It works, but that's all we can really say about it. Use when migrating an existing solution is too costly.
Postgresql is large to enterprise level projects. I place it between MSSQL and Oracle. Its a wonderful software minus the "Dedicated Vendor Support" toilet paper that PHBs love. Extremely feature rich. But it needs enterprise level care and maintenance processes just like the others. You can use it on small projects, but its really over kill.
This is the same discussion we been having since 2005. Each system has improved a lot, and their use cases overlap more, but the general logic on which is best to use is still the same.
I am going to vote for one of the two above. If you don't like either, vote for me as I am the third option. Please? -- signed, Independent Simbot v0.1
The thread isn't about affordability, it's about how you have more options than prop software. Assuming someone will pay for it, most software vendors do not like creating custom versions of software. It sets a bad precedent, complicates SDLC, and sets bad expectations with the customer. The sales guy can say the custom version is "unsupported" but you will end up providing support to maintain customer relations. This is why prop don't customize their offerings per customer.
GNU and BSD software gets customized all the time. Major distributions do it, major customers do it. In fact few people use the vanilla kernels, and software. Most customizations are simple tweaks or integrations with other software or feature addons. The customers understand that this is their version of the software and they can't go running upstream for support. For this reason, this works in GNU and BSD.
Anyway, back to the article, the vendor was probably charging too high of a price to make the feature worth it. The proper decision here was to remove or archive all the old comments prior to the first official announcement.
Well said. People just don't understand this concept that corporations, even those global conglomerates like Siemens, Tata, Hilti, etc which are bigger than many governments do not embark on these expensive, high risk endeavors. Even simple Earth stuff like figher jets, and battle ships have massive amounts of government backing for the proof of concept designs. Exploring space is going beyond the moon and that is far more complicated than what we do on Earth.
Big companies in general are risk averse; decisions are made irrelevant of the rewards. Only small/mid companies really take risks. The former wont do it for the risk, and the latter don't have the funds. Up to LEO, sure eventually commercial will take over, the foundations are mostly known. But beyond the moon, commercial is still waiting for the Nina to be built by the queens monies, let alone chart the way and return to tell what it found.
Foreign taxes can be credited against your US tax. So you don't pay "double". You just end up paying the greater of. Additionally, you only get taxed on the profits you recognize in the US company. So if you sell a widget to China using the YouCompany@China, then that company pays the Chinese tax. And when that company sends the profits to the US "owner" company, then the US company pays the taxes minus the tax amount paid on it in China.
No one is saying Do NOT spy. It's spy on a smaller set of people. Right now the ratio of data to information is too high. The background noise is too high to obtain any valuable signal. At best it will help you work backward from an incident*. But this level of data won't help you predict.
People make this false assumption all the time. The more data I have the more information I have. And if it doesn't make sense now, it will later on so collect it. No, you only collect enough data to give a more and more accurate representation of the population. At one point of collection the inferrences you want start becoming insignificant in the information and become impossible to ascertain from the noise.
Take for example fingerprints. If you collect every ones print in the world, then prints at crime scenes become useless. You will have so many false positives from so man matches. If you up the number of data points you look at to uniquely identify a print, you need high quality prints collected. A small smudge will give you zero hits or a bunch of false positives again. And the searching and DB maintenance would be huge.
It is better to fill your data population with valuable, target rich information than to just fill it with data. Quality matters over quantity.
This is what intelligence agencies in the past did, mostly because they didn't have the resources to search through all data nor could they collect as much. But now the means of collection may have changed and the speed of inferences; but the fundamentals of answering a question on said data has not. It like having a multiple choice question where there are 50+ choices and the last will always say "None of the above".
* = but I guess this is what the politicians and populace really want and is the driving force here. How did this happen is more important than when will this happen. Sad times.
Right, so if I setup Private NSA Inc, take a couple of major loans from the US government, use that to buy up all the NSA sites, and then provide my "services" to the NSA. Its all good because the government isn't doing it. I get a cherry on top by giving myself a huge bonus, going bankrupt, selling my assets for cheap to Private NSA Two Inc, and reneg on the loans.
Slashdot Mirror
The current and possibly into the distant future way of understanding what you want is to have ONE entity answer it. This single point learns the human condition over time and adapts the responses to the locals. Having this learning distributed to each and every local processor is wasteful and ineffective.
We don't provide enough input nor does the system have enough sensors or processing capability for it to "learn" about us and our needs; let alone our wants . The sensors and processing will be solved over time, but the former will not. We don't teach every entity we interact with about us, we expect them to learn through trial & error and figure it out to interact with us (the wife being the perfect example). The threshold of errors before we cut the relationship varies depending on the relationship & parties involved. For in adamant objects, it is very low. To deal with husbands, it is very high.
Having a single central system that learns from a million of us helps figure out what we want and spreads out the errors enough to continue interaction. Having it locally tips the balance in the other direction. Unfortunately, the former system means someone is listening in on us at all times and has enough meta data on us to identify us individually. It is just the tradeoff we must live with. The best we can do is put in enough controls to keep up with the technology and reduce the human greed factor on the other end of the line. That chance for abuse can never be eliminated and just something we have to get used to. On the plus side, the system should work in reverse too... it will let us identify the abusers so we can hold them accountable. That would be the most effective deterrent for abuse.
Thanks for the link. Wow, my google-fu sucks. Anyway, I know about 1/2 those games and most of the remaining aren't that great. BUT, that still leaves a lot of really ok to good games to play. Rating system seems to align to my personal tastes too. Seems 2014 was the last good year for PS3, which is 2 years worth of games that I haven't touched. The last great game seems to be Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel; Oct 2014. Played it, but the remaining games of that time should keep me busy for the year. In November, I can check this site to see if the PS4 (or Xbox?) is worth it this year.
Thanks again. Here is hoping this site doesn't get too popular. Then the Gods that Be will effect the rating system and site value.
I really miss couch coop. I would give up a lot of today's graphic details to gain that back. That and good unique stories; rather than movie rehashes. Even if the story is a generic rehash. I am not really interested in creating clans, leader boards, who wasted a weekend doing what, etc. I just want a simple, fun game that when a friend comes over we can just start up and play. Having network capability and all is a plus, but can't be the core value.
I think the whole "fun" aspect of gaming has long died and I miss it. The last POS I bought was Destiny. CoD, Resistance 3, Crisis, MoH, etc are ok games. But I just can't get the feeling out of my head that I had more fun 8 years ago. The last fun games I played were Lost Planet 2, Army of Two, and Gears of War.
I guess I am an old fart and clearly not today's gaming demographic. It feels like today, all the game needs is a good marketing campaign. Maybe I will buy a PS4 this Christmas if this year's games live up to half their shiny.... but probably not. Certainly not falling for any pre-order bullshit.
Yeah, overall not very impressive. I mean you could tie a mini windmill, vibrating ribbon between two branches, or sail to achieve the same if not better results. I don't understand the purpose of this other than application of a known theory in yet another expected environment.
We could put it on all downhills in a certain grade range. Steal power from the brakes.
Also local roads with traffic that burn gas inefficiently should be ok too. They don't run the engine efficiently so stealing some excess power should be ok.
A billion trillion years from now, Hurd will be the only sentient being left. As the rest moved onto a higher plane of existence.
You can organize your icons on an Android around widgets, or at different parts of the screen. Similar to a Windows Desktop. I agree with the grandparent, no on screen/lock screen widgets and just dummy icons is a huge draw back of the iPhone. I wish more icons were like the Calendar and Clock. In the end I do prefer the iPhone over Android just for the battery life and UI fluidity. But I prefer Android tablets over the iPad.
You hear this all the time in any business at all clients. About undocumented access rights, old systems, phone numbers, applications, etc. My response has been: "Its going to fail, accept it. Do you want it to happen randomly and you have no idea what happened. Or do you want it to happen predictably and you know why." Sadly many pick the former because "it hasn't happened yet."
Because it is not the same thing. We are talking about Africa, not China, their dictators basically enslave the people using the very weaponry the developed world produces. At what point do we say, "No, we should intervene"? Do we let the child soldiers in Africa roam free looting and pillaging their people & resources so that the master can buy higher end weapons from us to support his effort? Hitting closer to home, if the South won the Civil war, became a nation, and kept slavery; should northern USA sit idly by and say "They are a developing nation."
Nike sweatshops in the 1970s are the perfect example. Without consumer awareness and backlash, the situation would have taken decades more to fix itself. Nike did a good job, providing day care facilities in their factories, educational facilities, and doing random inspections. It not only impacted the workers at Nike, but also other companies assessing their current facilities and setting up new ones.
At the same time, it is easy to go too far and become protectionist; imposing our ideals on them. Example: 7 year old is young, but 13... most cultures consider them basically adults. Many carry more responsibilities than 21 year olds in the Western world.
I still remember my college professor's story about setting up child free factories in China in the 90s due to the "sweatshop" scare. I am paraphrasing, but his Chinese counterpart responded to a stern statement after a laugh: "No, no one under 16 will work at _your_ factories Mr. Smith. I will make sure of it. They will continue their regular jobs just outside; servicing the now richer men after shift hours."
So the pendulum can be pushed too far, but it will take forever to get to a good balance by leaving it where it is. I know I made up unfair scenarios up top, but can't we atleast say that labor shifts can't be more than 9 hours long? The underlying reason being that 1 person working for 16 hours is less effective than 2 people working 8 each? There has to be tons of stuff like this that we learned the hard way and can pass on or enforce onto these nations.
I think what you are trying to do is still do able. Just that the old game of getting identifiable information without giving anything is going away. And rightfully so, there have been too many businesses that have abused what is the equivalent of dumpster diving. Asking people not to shred their trash isn't going to go anywhere.
However, why not setup an intranet at each location. Provide people the ability to scan bar codes and get pricing information on the spot on their phone (Macys). Provide a layout of the store and where they can find things (HomeDepot). Provide weekly, in store, or cart based electronic coupons. Provide the weekly ad. In return for this convenience, you get identifiable information on the user. This is a far better trade off to determine what folks are interested in, identify dead zones in your store, or how sales effect foot traffic.
This is true of ANY organism, GMO, non-GMO, hybrid, grafted... except maybe fruits. Nothing out there is working its evolutionary butt off to provide its children for you to safely rip up, process, and consume. In fact, it's just the opposite.
GMOs don't change this equation. That all natural Potato, Corn, Fish, etc are all working to figure out how to kill you so that you won't kill them. In all cases, humans selectively harvest and propagate the mutants off their natural paths.
Although he didn't do this, you can't use clean room implementations against patents like you can against copyright. Else a lot of patents on solutions that are obvious after the fact, naturally converging, or having multiple independent sources would be useless. A lot of the patents from the founding fathers time would be pointless. Patents on the lightbulb, telephone, and steam engine would have been worthless.
Oh BS. What about all the other crap corporations produce? Toothpaste, vaccines, cars, houses, etc. What makes GMO special that corporations will cause Armageddon with it but haven't with the rest? The system _might_ cause millions to die tomorrow so let's hold back GMO so that millions die today?
Crop diversity? GMO crops aren't one unique sequence or exact clones anymore than the current non-GMO sets. The risk doesn't change with GMO as we were already a mono crop planter with the non-GMO stuff.
Shelf life? What purpose is beer, wine, cheese, jams, pickles, canning, and a whole slew of oddities we call food and have consumed for generations with no issue in digestions? Grains, pulses, and nuts can last for years. There are fruits that will last multiple weeks. That doesn't make them less digestible. Shelf life's purpose isn't to sit in a compost pile longer. It just won't spoil as quickly with proper care.
This isn't a Western concept only. Check out the regulatory environment, shipping via trucks, car dealerships, mechanics, home financing, insurance, police tickets, futures trading, NASCAR, casinos, credit cards, etc. Tell me they aren't trying to wiggle through loopholes. All in the US.
There is no reason this day and age that the US can't make a quality measuring test for stuff like hammers, chainsaws, and screwdrivers. At this point we should have even outsourced that and just be properly auditing it.
The reason is simply because someone in the US didn't want to pay the pennies extra to build the process as the customer base showed there was a higher profit margin without it.
So... who do you recommend? Sorry, Life is compromise.
But you are implying that marketing, distribution, exhibition, etc cost multiple times the movie's budget. There is something wrong there. This is digital content, not physical goods traveling around the world on sneakers. Inflated seems too weak of a word here.
The days of putting your blinders on and working in your silo segregated from the rest of the company's operations and external influences are long gone. PHBs would love for you to do that as you are more manageable and closer to the cog they need but it is very detrimental to your personal growth and career.
All employees should be keeping an eye on the competition and motions within the company. This will help you dodge bad positions, career paths, and management. The docile employee is the perfect fall guy, scape goat, and low end of the bonus curve to keep HR's averages happy. At the same time, he is that "unnecessary" cost that needs to be reduced. The employee that keeps looking at greener pastures is actually valued more by the company. Because he has others tell the company what he is worth.
People take the path of least resistance. Work the tickets that come in properly, delay till SLA on the whiners, and there is no SLA on emails. You take your time to respond that this email request should be submitted via a ticket.
I used to run a service desk and have had to deal with this many times. Executing on the emails is basically your actions speaking louder than your words.
MariaDB and MySQL are basically the same thing. It comes down to licensing and vendor preference. But Postgresql vs MySQL vs Sqlite is just a question of what your use case is.
Sqlite is for the prototyping, small projects, and small foot print. Its an amazing piece of software and solution for its niche. It is probably the most widely used DB out there. Extremely easy to setup, program against, and test. And very forgiving.
MySQL is for the small to large size operations. Easiest to setup and manage for the feature set you obtain. It is fast and reliable and has a lot of 3rd party support. Most devs work in this area and I think this is why it is used so much. It is also many folks first "personal" testing DB and thus has a lot of momentum. You can use it at the enterprise level, but not really where it shines. Its like taking a Camry and putting a HEMI in it. It works, but that's all we can really say about it. Use when migrating an existing solution is too costly.
Postgresql is large to enterprise level projects. I place it between MSSQL and Oracle. Its a wonderful software minus the "Dedicated Vendor Support" toilet paper that PHBs love. Extremely feature rich. But it needs enterprise level care and maintenance processes just like the others. You can use it on small projects, but its really over kill.
This is the same discussion we been having since 2005. Each system has improved a lot, and their use cases overlap more, but the general logic on which is best to use is still the same.
I am going to vote for one of the two above. If you don't like either, vote for me as I am the third option. Please?
-- signed, Independent Simbot v0.1
The thread isn't about affordability, it's about how you have more options than prop software. Assuming someone will pay for it, most software vendors do not like creating custom versions of software. It sets a bad precedent, complicates SDLC, and sets bad expectations with the customer. The sales guy can say the custom version is "unsupported" but you will end up providing support to maintain customer relations. This is why prop don't customize their offerings per customer.
GNU and BSD software gets customized all the time. Major distributions do it, major customers do it. In fact few people use the vanilla kernels, and software. Most customizations are simple tweaks or integrations with other software or feature addons. The customers understand that this is their version of the software and they can't go running upstream for support. For this reason, this works in GNU and BSD.
Anyway, back to the article, the vendor was probably charging too high of a price to make the feature worth it. The proper decision here was to remove or archive all the old comments prior to the first official announcement.
Well said. People just don't understand this concept that corporations, even those global conglomerates like Siemens, Tata, Hilti, etc which are bigger than many governments do not embark on these expensive, high risk endeavors. Even simple Earth stuff like figher jets, and battle ships have massive amounts of government backing for the proof of concept designs. Exploring space is going beyond the moon and that is far more complicated than what we do on Earth.
Big companies in general are risk averse; decisions are made irrelevant of the rewards. Only small/mid companies really take risks. The former wont do it for the risk, and the latter don't have the funds. Up to LEO, sure eventually commercial will take over, the foundations are mostly known. But beyond the moon, commercial is still waiting for the Nina to be built by the queens monies, let alone chart the way and return to tell what it found.
Foreign taxes can be credited against your US tax. So you don't pay "double". You just end up paying the greater of. Additionally, you only get taxed on the profits you recognize in the US company. So if you sell a widget to China using the YouCompany@China, then that company pays the Chinese tax. And when that company sends the profits to the US "owner" company, then the US company pays the taxes minus the tax amount paid on it in China.
No one is saying Do NOT spy. It's spy on a smaller set of people. Right now the ratio of data to information is too high. The background noise is too high to obtain any valuable signal. At best it will help you work backward from an incident*. But this level of data won't help you predict.
People make this false assumption all the time. The more data I have the more information I have. And if it doesn't make sense now, it will later on so collect it. No, you only collect enough data to give a more and more accurate representation of the population. At one point of collection the inferrences you want start becoming insignificant in the information and become impossible to ascertain from the noise.
Take for example fingerprints. If you collect every ones print in the world, then prints at crime scenes become useless. You will have so many false positives from so man matches. If you up the number of data points you look at to uniquely identify a print, you need high quality prints collected. A small smudge will give you zero hits or a bunch of false positives again. And the searching and DB maintenance would be huge.
It is better to fill your data population with valuable, target rich information than to just fill it with data. Quality matters over quantity.
This is what intelligence agencies in the past did, mostly because they didn't have the resources to search through all data nor could they collect as much. But now the means of collection may have changed and the speed of inferences; but the fundamentals of answering a question on said data has not. It like having a multiple choice question where there are 50+ choices and the last will always say "None of the above".
* = but I guess this is what the politicians and populace really want and is the driving force here. How did this happen is more important than when will this happen. Sad times.
Right, so if I setup Private NSA Inc, take a couple of major loans from the US government, use that to buy up all the NSA sites, and then provide my "services" to the NSA. Its all good because the government isn't doing it. I get a cherry on top by giving myself a huge bonus, going bankrupt, selling my assets for cheap to Private NSA Two Inc, and reneg on the loans.