How very shallow. I'm coming at this from a radical left perspective, but I happen to think it's good to think things through before pulling your hair out and running around like a crazy person screaming bloody murder.

This story has no mention of any *new* civil liberties violations. Palantir *aggregates* existing data. If anything, this could help *limit* civil liberty violations. Palantir or a similar system means the government can actually use the data they are already collecting, which implies they can optimize it and get rid of spying tactics that never help deter crime. A logical person should probably agree that if there's a proven way to stop a crime from happening, it's in society's best interest to use it. The point of civil liberties isn't to protect criminals, it's to protect ourselves from the government's mistakes. I think Palantir will allow the government to make less mistakes and be more efficient.

To all the people talking about Big Brother: you are all very shallow. I'm coming at this from a radical left perspective, but I happen to think it's good to think things through before pulling your hair out and running around like a crazy person screaming bloody murder.

This story has no mention of any *new* civil liberties violations. Palantir *aggregates* existing data. This is extremely useful and, if anything, could help *limit* civil liberty violations. Palantir or a similar system means the government can actually use the data they have, which implies they can optimize it and get rid of spying tactics that never help deter crime. A logical person should probably agree that if there's a proven way to stop a crime from happening, it's in society's best interest to use that. The point of civil liberties isn't to protect criminals, it's to protect ourselves from the government's mistakes. I think Palantir will allow the government to make less mistakes and be more efficient.

Sure, if you look at it that way. But...

You don't need to store 1000 batteries, you only need to store enough for X hours worth of demand. So you take data on your gas station and find the busiest X hours in history, where X is the number of hours it takes to charge a battery. From that you find that you had N cars in your busiest X hours. So then you set up N charging stations with N spare batteries. You can multiply N by some fudge factor to give you the ability to handle failures, unprecedented spikes in demand, etc.

Hard numbers are indeed scary, and we humans are scaredy cats so we evolved this lovely brain to help us out.

This is the only post from someone qualified to comment on the subject. Everyone else is just speculating based on age old notions of what mob rule might look like. In my opinion, the world is different enough now from ten years ago that a direct democracy is worth a shot, at least in a controlled environment like Switzerland has.

Mob rule has a bad connotation because it's in the powerful minority's interest for it to be so. There's no fundamental characteristic of humans that makes them incapable of picking out a good future for themselves. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of human existence was spent under "mob rule". Now, of the hundred thousand years or so that we've been running around on two feet making cool weapons, let's list out the conflicts that resulted in massive life loss. And then let's list out the progress that we've made as a species and let's fairly compare mob rule to other systems. I might be biased, so other people should chime in. But here's my list so far:

Casualties:
- Most of these are instigated by warlords (Genghis, Julius, Alexander, Hitler, Napoleon, etc.): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_by_casualties
- Also, most of these, even the Chinese rebellions (because there were always leaders): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll

Progress:
- individual people, sometimes sponsored by their community, sometimes by states invented most of the things we find useful today.
- populist movements, especially the nonviolent kind, helped win us many of the human rights we enjoy today. Labor laws, equality of races, genders, etc.

I love Ron Paul. He's the most idealistic person I've ever known. He's basically lying to everyone though. Most of the things he says go like this:

1. Cut funding
2. ??? Allow free market to do it's thing ???
3. Problem solved

He doesn't mention two crucial things. One is that step 2. may take a very long time. The other is that for 2 to happen effectively, we have to equalize any unfair and corruption-driven advantages that others have gained in a crooked system over two hundred years. Once highly paid yuppies get busted for illegally claiming "expenses" as tax free money and corporations get busted for gambling with pension funds at the same rate that people get busted for stealing a piece of bread or robbing a grocery store, then we'll have a truly fair environment for the free market to do its thing. In the meantime, Ron Paul is selling pipe dreams. Awesome pipe dreams, but ultimately dreams without good plans to back them up.

It's ok for the U.S. to cheat on corn, but not for China to cheat on Solar Panels. When did our country become such a fuckin pansy? Let's grow back our balls and compete with whatever the world throws at us. I'm fuckin up for it, are you?

Nobody mentioned him. He's the first person I saw to demo the multi-touch gestures that are now so familiar to everyone. He did this at the TED conference in 2007, almost a full year before the iPhone was announced. I love Steve Jobs' idealism, but his intellectual honesty is not too admirable.

What? This is 4 years early: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096874/
Do you realize what this could do to the space time continuum?!
Oh wait, there's nothing to prove they didn't exist before 2015...

I strongly dislike Apple products. However, I also will miss Steve Jobs the CEO, he's a great leader. I wish him good health and much happiness.

"No other CEO on the planet is so closely associated with their company"

Really?

Seriously - Yoga.

I'm only 29 but I'm obsessed with the concept of getting older and losing my razor sharp skillz :)
So I do Yoga, stretch, relax, read, talk, play. If you fully enjoy life you'll find that technology is just a tool. Your brain will be flexible and fresh enough to adapt to any situation. At least that's what I tell myself.

1. Horrible movies come out.
2. Some artsy movies gain traction.
3. People who hate artsy movies go crazy and crave superhero movies again.
4. Re-make of superhero movies in 6D sweeps the nation for the next 12 years.

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssss!

finally. thank the deities.

We laughed at the british armies when we read about the Revolutionary War in school. They would just stand there and take no cover but wait for the enemy to shoot them. They were stupid because of their rules. We laughed at that.

I'm going to call you out for racism. Generalizing something like the coding ability of the millions of coders in either Japan, India, or the US is ludicrous. Some people code well, some people don't. It has a little bit to do with education but mostly with passion and dedication. That can't really be taught and can develop in people at different times in their life. So I think as long as the education is somewhat adequate, the blame and glory of the results rests solely with the individual.