It's poorly worded above, but perhaps a better way to say it is that the time-dependent churn in a particular model is negligible (to a statistical irrelevance) if you can get enough data quickly enough. Effectively, once your data stream outpaces the time-dependent effects, those effects may no longer be relevant variables in your calculations.

For example, I'd expect that Google can collect enough data in an hour to determine if a UI improvement is helpful, or if a particular change to PageRank results in more accurate results. Because Google has such a high volume of data collection all of the time, a very short sampling duration all but eliminates the variation due to the time of day, day of the week, or season of the year.

I'm not suggesting that a Big Data solution is somehow magically independent of time. Rather, what I'm saying is that the "store first, ask questions later" approach that is central to Big Data lends itself readily to collecting useful samples quickly enough that delta-t is negligible.

This pretty much sums up the entirety of Big Data.

Data analysis can highlight the correlations that would otherwise go unnoticed, and the "big" data sets involved help to ensure that the noticed correlations are statistically significant. With a large enough sample size, the effects of time can be eliminated from the statistics, supporting analysis of even highly-dynamic models. To a statistician, this is all trivial, given a large enough data set.

Once correlations are discovered, interpreting them in the business context is a different matter for which computers are not well-suited. As the phrase goes, correlation is not causation. A business expert must analyse the observations and figure out what it all means. There may be a correlation indicating a causal relationship, or there may be a hidden cause not covered by the available data.

Even if a causal relationship can be identified, the management may not want to act on it. Sure, the company might make more money by changing their behavior in a particular market segment, but if that segment is dying, it may not be worth the expense to change now. That's also not a task for computers, yet.

Big Data techniques are effectively just a tool. It does one job particularly well, and does a few other jobs well enough to be useful. It is still up to humans to determine if Big Data is the best tool for a particular situation.

They don't produce any offspring that live long enough to breed, making them effectively sterile for generational purposes.

Eventually the first-generation males will die, as well, leaving just the greatly-reduced next-generation population.

Not really.

With a suitable search warrant, the police can tear your house apart to find your stash. You cannot legally prohibit them from opening your house, and you cannot stop them from executing the search warrant to the full extent of its authorization.

And likewise, you cannot prohibit them from opening the encrypted volume.

Then it's a decision for a judge to make. The judge would be the one to decide if, by not providing a password, you are violating the court orders. You can provide evidence for your story, and the police can provide their own evidence. If you claim that somehow you had a 50-gig corrupt file, and the police show encryption software and logs of file access on volumes that don't exist, you're going to have a hard time convincing a judge of your story.

A better analogy would be evidence locked in a safe. The police can see the safe and can infer that it holds evidence, but you can claim to have forgotten the combination, or claim it's an antique to which you never knew the combination, or claim that it broke. If you can make a convincing case, you have a shot. If the police have evidence that you opened the safe a day earlier, you're pretty much screwed.

If the court orders you to teach the police how to read your language, then yes, you are in fact required to do so.

You could try teaching them incorrectly, but that's effectively obstruction of justice and/or perjury, depending on how it's handled.

Well, yeah. Remember that the Constitution's version of "due process" is not supposed to actually restrict the government, so much as it protects the people from the historical (at the time) abuses governments had commonly employed.

The 5th Amendment protects against defendants being forced to create evidence against themselves. Remember the fun of the Inquisition, where the accused would be tortured or killed if they didn't confess? The 5th Amendment is a counter to that, and not much more. It's not a magic wand that allows you to hide crimes you actually committed. Notably, it does not allow you to hide evidence that already exists.

Once you put information into anything except your own head, it's fair game for a subpoena or search warrant. Period. Encryption doesn't matter. You can be compelled to provide keys or passwords, because the keys and passwords themselves aren't evidence against you. They just unlock the evidence that already exists.

Jokes aside, that's about it. The case in question is a bog-standard investigation and prosecution. The only notable twist is the guy's political connections. There's really no reason for widespread coverage.

This stunt may as we'll be Operation Our Favorite Crime, spreading awareness of Anonymous' obsession with this particular flavor of felony. We'll put it up next to the neckbeard ranting about his favorite video game, and the fat guy touting the virtues of his favorite food. Just like the armchair art critic and the armchair gourmet critic (and the nerd typing Slashdot comments when he should be sleeping) this will accomplish nothing to make the world a better place, but it will give a few individuals a few moments of pride in their hollow awareness campaign.

So in other words, justice is being served, and a sentence is being delivered that the judge (within the guidelines set by legislators) feels is appropriate to the crime committed.

There's nothing left for Anonymous to do, except to remind the world that this guy did something bad, and by so doing, perpetuate the shame and embarrassment his friends and family are subjected to. It won't affect the perpetrator himself, because he'll be in prison for the entire life of this "operation".

Harassing innocent bystanders is what Anonymous does best.

I seem to recall tales of trade cities that were quite paranoid about outsiders learning their craft, some of which predated industrialized Great Britain or Germany by a rather large number of years.

Perhaps the most well-known example is Murano, whose artistic glassblowing techniques were held in high esteem by the region. An older example would be Damascus metalworking, and I have vague recollections of similar industrial pride dating back to Egypt.

I'm afraid my memory is not a particularly reliable source, but I believe there were often stiff penalties for trying to export the local expertise. Perhaps someone with a more complete knowledge of history can fill in the details...

There is a risk, calculated or otherwise, that you are Pierre Mohammed Finklestein III of Bychawa, Poland.

I have determined this based on my keen understanding of the information I have about you. With a little more information I could reduce the uncertainty...

For quite some time, I've argued in favor of teaching a programming class with QBasic. No, not the early BASICs that required line numbers, but the later QBasic that shipped with certain versions of DOS and Windows.

Later BASIC variants have one defining characteristic that makes them perfect for educational use: Zero overhead. For the simplest example programs, there is absolutely no boilerplate required to allocate memory, configure the process, or tell the compiler/interpreter how to work. An example that demonstrates three things has three lines.

For the very first stages of programming education, that's all you need. It's enough to show that instructions are executed sequentially, that you have to be explicit, and to walk through the compile/execution process. It hits all of the major concepts, with no extra parts to confuse the new students. From my time teaching CS, those basic concepts comprise the bulk of the initial difficulties most struggling students face. Once they understand those building blocks fully, the students can begin learning algorithms, design patterns, and all those more substantial parts of a full CS education... and that work should be done in a language that can trace its heritage to C.

Last time I was in school, I had a better grasp of "modern technology" than most of my professors. This was in a computer science program. It's not a problem, because my CS professors didn't need to teach me how to use Facebook or make a slideshow shiny enough to woo investors. They still understood algorithms better than I did, and that was the knowledge they were passing on.

In today's shocking news story, we find that older people are familiar with an older generation of tools. For most "primary and secondary teachers", their job is to teach the basic skills and concepts that are elemental for the more advanced intellectual tasks encountered in a professional career. Sure, technology can assist in that endeavor, but it's not the whole solution. Teachers only need enough technology knowledge to use the technology needed for their classes. Anything more is gratuitous.

I now have "Another One Bites The Dust" in my head.

Anybody have any better music suggestions appropriate for this story?

Only incidentally. If, as king neckbeard suggested, the vinyl master were done completely analog for some reason (hipster executive producer?), it would be possible that they'd want to do it differently, effectively making the two media two separate artistic works.

One detail that's often missing from discussions about loudness and compression is that it's all intentional. The term "Loudness War" isn't just for emotional response. Producers kept pushing compression higher a little bit at a time, over the course of decades. The idea of what a song should sound like has changed, just as how other forms of art have gone through several different styles as painters, sculptors, and architects have accommodated changing aesthetics in their media.

This notion that "compression is bad" is a relatively new thing, previously just the complaint of self-proclaimed audiophiles and pretentious critics. The vast majority of listeners won't care, so unless the producer has an artistic inclination to change their style, it's not likely to happen.