Your data is invaluable to you. But there is a fair market price for your data. It is determined by what price other people are willing to sell their data. In slashdot people talk a lot about privacy, but most Americans sell their entire grocery/pharmacy/gasoline purchase history for 25 cents off bread loaf and 2 cents off a gallon of gas.

Same way, you guard your data. Rest of the city will let the insurance companies get it to get 20$ off the insurance premium, flood their cars screens with ads to "get a (one in million) chance to win a overpriced unsellable cruise ticket". At some point you will give up.

It is not a Greek bailout. It is a bailout of German and French banks, that lent irresponsibly to Greece. They did not do due diligence, and they knew Greece would not be able to repay. They knew the banks will be bailed out. The banks have become too big to fail, their top honchos too big to jail. The incentives are for irresponsible reckless risky practices.

True, Greece borrowed irresponsibly and spent it in wasteful ways. But the banks can not shirk their responsibility.

I discovered something astounding. I used a remote control to turn the TV on. Then I accidentally stepped on the remote and destroyed it completely. But the TV was still on. I did not understand why the TV was on even after I destroyed the remote. Called their tech support, they said if I wanted the TV to go off, I have to walk all the way to the TV and press on a designated location with some cryptic icon which they called a "switch". Not swipe, not single or double tap, press with a finger and let go, according to their tech support script. They claim this is the intended behavior.

The article talks about the potential benefits and drawbacks of the six letter system. If there were advantages nature would have stumbled on it eons ago. Why did it not happen?

Of course we did not evolve wheels neither. Almost all animals above worms are torii topologically. (The digestive tract is the hole in the ring). There is one bacteria that has a free spinning flagellum. So nature started on that kind of disjoint topology, but could not scale it beyond bacteria. Two symbiotic animals one providing a wheel with shaft and another providing the bearing, together could have formed a wheeled animal. But that never happened, there is no path in the fitness landscape to achieve that configuration. Is it something fundamental like this that prevented six letter DNA

Or, more prosaically, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. After all computers use binary not tertiary numbers. The four letter DNA is technically a binary system. Two pairs. So even if this thing escapes the laboratory it won't thrive in the wild and wipe out all the present forms of life Comforting if it is so.

I think our brains have enough short term memory to go through a day chasing zebra in the African plains. And when we sleep the short term memory gets transcribed into long term memory. Brain is quite plastic and we have stretched it to last a whole day in this modern lifestyle.

Short sleep might restore the muscles and other organs and prep them for another day. But "doing physical and cognitive tests" as well as well slept mice says nothing about the long term memory of such short sleepers.

We all know how well Amazon and Netflix predict what you would like to watch/read/buy based on past behavior. I am sure they are working on algorithms that predict what you would buy and how much you would be willing to pay. Pretty soon you would see $1.99 for an episode when you log in as A, but it could be $5.99 for B and free for C.

Right now more people are willing to pay more to Google show advertizements for shoes and lipstick to women than similar masculine products to men. So women see more lipstick ads and men see the lower priced ads for 200K jobs. It is even possible men are more likely to fall for 200 K con jobs than women who are more savvy in spotting fake ads.

Not so easy. The precedent has been set. You can expect the ambulance chasers to get on to the game.

We all hate personal injury lawyers and their shady advertisement. But when corporations behave like this, they are the only leverage an ordinary consumer has.

Buddy, as an Indian-American I am drowning in a sea of doctors. Insurance companies have an invoice rate and they they actually pay something like 20cents on the dollar of the invoice amount. From that amount they pay the medical assistants, nurses, and database services to log into billing networks, liability insurance. I don't see doctors driving nicer cars than other people with Masters level education. (Not PhDs though. They end up in academics and drive Accords and Camrys. )

Don't worry on that count, right now the children of Indian-American immigrants are filling up the vacuum. When they realize the con job they got suckered into we will find another demographic.

China, you invented paper. (I mean real paper from plant-cellulose back in the 7th century). Became the factory of the world. Worked your poor people to their bones to get on the good side of the multinational corporations. Foreign direct investment is what you coveted and sought and pursued with great vigor.

Now it is time for us to return the favor.

Please accept with our compliments the following:

Pointy haried bosses, MBAs, "make the numbers for the next quarter" mentality, "The stock market must be propped up at the expense of tax payers" arguments, "Abysmal interest rates that plays havoc on the retirees depending on interest income is acceptable" policy, "income from the capital must be taxed at a lower rate than income earned by working" justification, "too big to fail, too big to jail" etc etc

That is probably what actually happened. It got some command, it knew it was garbled, so it did not execute it. Then what? More commands are sure to follow. Ground control would assume the command has been executed. It can wait to check status, it takes 5 hours for the status to be reported back. The ground control thinks the machine is in some state, but the machine knows that is not true due to one skipped command. So it probably sends out a status update saying, "Need to synch everything up. Going back to safe mode, known state". It takes 5 hours for ground control to know this. Another hour or so of procedures to restart from the known state safe mode. Then 5 more hours to send more commands to the probe, 5 more hours for confirmation that it is back to normal.

Movement from India to USA used to be a one way street. Indians come over, become hyphonated Americans, to borrow Jindal's phrase, and stay. That was the norm till about 2000. Then it began to change. Most of the top grads from IITs and IIMs, no longer are coming over. Those who came, many have left, returned back to India to start companies over there. The ones who came over, learnt the system here, some got US degrees, some did not, established connections, then lots of them returned.

Not all of them returned, heck not even most of them returned. But risk-tolerance, ambition etc are not distributed uniformly, it follows the power law. So the 20% who returned took with them 80% of the risk-tolerance, ambition, entrepreneurship with them back to India.

So let Greece give up euro for drachma, let drachma fall as low as INR. It will thrive on tourism, and the Greeks coming back to start companies a few years down the road.

Germany has benefitted a lot by the economic union. Had Deutschmark stayed out of euro, its exports would have become so expensive no one could import them. 80% of Germany's exports are to rest of Europe. Capital would have naturally flowed to less expensive countries, and they would have the companies and employment restoring the balance. Greece leaving euro is going to be a bigger blow to Germany than to Greece.

Comments in Italian is actually a blessing for English speaking coders. Dijkstra's dictum was: "Never debug the comments. Always debug the code". (I could not find the reference, if he did not say it, someone equally great said it, because it is certainly not my original idea. ) Often comments are redundant, insanely stupid, misleading or obsolete. The only useful comments I find in my own code are along the lines of: "Yes, this function searches through the entire edge list, we tried to speed it up, but the complexity and the cost of maintaining a sorted set of edges were not worth it". Something that documents a dead end code that had been removed.

I would guess "fault" is their word for crash. This one did not crash, some audit method failed, it entered a safe fall back mode.

Can't blame NASA though, when the commands are transmitted over 3 billion miles, the signal would degrade so much it is possible some critical command or an command argument was not correctly received.

Opps, so I am stupid. What a way to start the week.