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Comment Re:Sorry to sound apologetic... (Score 1) 427

There is a difference between getting access to information and use it properly. UN Fundamental statistical principle (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/statorg/FP-English.htm) or the US Title V Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency (CIPSEA - http://www.eia.doe.govosscipsea.pdf/ for example dictate what is deemed acceptable. You can commonly get access to data for "research or scientific" purposes but it is often explicitly forbidden to use it for re-identification or even commercial purposes. This is just was WSJ did: map data to individuals and publish it. So of course you can do it, but it doesn't mean it's right or even legal.

Comment Re:HP is the worst (Score 2) 243

If you're not too young, remember when stuff used to work with about 1 Mb of RAM? I can understand a 3.5Mb printer driver, but 200Mb to make it work smoothly? Do you realize how much code and data that is? OK, maybe half of that is dedicate to windows bug workaround but many developers have sadly been pampered by speedy processors and too much memory. They have lost sense of what code efficiency is about (expect for games, hight performance computing, and some other exception).
Businesses

'I Just Need a Programmer' 735

theodp writes "As head of the CS Department at the University of Northern Iowa, Eugene Wallingford often receives e-mail and phone calls from eager entrepreneurs with The Next Great Idea. They want to change the world, and they want Prof. Wallingford to help them. They just need a programmer. 'Many idea people,' observes Wallingford, 'tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to having the idea. Programmers are a commodity, pulled off the shelf to clean up the details. It's just a small matter of programming, right?' Wrong. 'Writing the program is the ingredient the idea people are missing,' he adds. 'They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could implement their own ideas.'"

Comment Re:Quality, not quantity (Score 1) 554

The other issue you'll have to deal with is inequality. Who gets access to treatment? The one who don't may not be too happy about it. Already today, if you are born in the US, your have a decent chance to live until 75.5. This is #34 on the list (and wil likely go down thanks to obesity and other health issues) but still twice as long as the one at the bottom. How would you feel if I you would know that in most countries, people live to an average of 140 years? I think I would like to move there... What if this gap gets much larger....

Comment Re:Quality, not quantity (Score 1) 554

Earth can sustain a few billion more, then obviously you'll need to expand to other moons/planets as any good sci-fi classic would teach you. The chance of self-destruction by one idiot with unlimited power however increases so rapidly lately that this will likely be a non-issue.

Submission + - How would classic and quantum computers integrate? (pascalheus.name)

kulnor writes: "Quantum computers may become a reality in the years or decades to come. But if we had a production level system available today, then what? How would such system fit into our existing "classic" IT world? What would we do with it? How would the IT industry react to such new technology: embrace it or shame away from it? What shape would such quantum computer take: a mainframe like box, a virtual machine in the cloud, a quantum co-processor? How would today's IT developers understand how to leverage on quantum algorithms? Should quantum programming be integrated in Java, C, .NET and the likes or get its own languages? These are some of the questions I'm trying to answer through my research project on Quantum Information Technology. I would very much like to capture the views and perspectives of the SlashDot community on the subject (see also http://pascalheus.name/research/thesis/)

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