Sikorsky has a demonstrator copter that does 290 MPH and the Eurocopter X-3 does 300 MPH.

Why spend spend 100 Billion to go slower?

They track you using your credit card. The cards are because people want them these days. Albertsons finally knuckled under and started offering them. Not because they needed them for tracking, like I said they already did that, but because customers whined they weren't getting a "good deal". So they raised their prices, and introduced a card.

I can see it now.

One day, after you stop in at the local Ice cream shop or fast food place, you get an email:

You have consumed products that have been deemed harmful to your health. You premium has been temporarily increased by 1% for this month. Continuing these unhealthy practices can result in a permanent increase.

Sincerely,

Your local Obamacare Health Oversight and Accountability Administrator.
A Healthy Citizen makes for a Healthy Nation.

Have a Healthy Day!

The government scares me less because they don't want to maximize the money they get from me.

Tell that to the IRS

In theory, I have far more control over my government than my insurers.

You can change Insurers, but not really your Government.

Certainly I have more oversight, and there are laws governing what the government can do with my information.

ROFLMAO!!!

Private companies don't have the same restrictions, and even if they did they have limited liability, an army of lawyers, and my only recourse will be to get $1.28 in a class action lawsuit.

And you can't sue the Government unless they agree to be sued.

It doesn't take in to account the net speeds that people have. So you might well have a provider who has no problem doing HD video from Youtube all day every day, on lines that can handle it. However they sell slower lines and some customers have that, so that skews things.

Like say a phone company offers ADSL and IDSL for customers who are way out in the boonies, but VDSL for people in the city. Well those slow connections will bring down their stats, even if their network is quite fast and makes them look bad, despite them actually being the only option for some people.

A somewhat similar deal with cable companies can be people using old hardware. DOCSIS 2 cable modems only use one channel per segment, and those can get saturated these days. Well cable providers tend to be DOCSIS 3 to deal with that... but not everyone has a new modem. The cable company can recommend they get one, but if it is your equipment they can't make you (I guess other than cutting you off but they don't wanna do that).

But it is scientist approved.
Or are you going to go back on the scientific process and just join the same group as climate change deniers.

Kernighan wasn't involved until much later, according to Ritchie's own history of the language. C was a direct successor to B, which was Thompson's brainchild, and he was directly involved in much of the development of C, though Ritchie was the lead on it.

People often assume it was Kernighan and Ritchie because they co-authored the seminal book on the language (the eponymous K&R white book), but that book didn't even get published until almost 6 years after C was already complete.

Now these guys may not be the best programmers out there. As programming is different for every type of job.

Someone who can compile a nice compiler may not be able to make an OS as well. Or an OS developer may not be able to make a clean User interface for a web site.

There are so many details out there that makes a comparison near impossible. What this list captures are the Most popular programmers. Who's popularity is often due to their personality that makes their program popular.

We as programmers tend to come up with new innovative solutions to problems all the time, and often all this work isn't noticed by anyone, because it works so well that no one ever notices.

I think it's more a matter of that the phone was in a particular cell than that the call was made.

I would like to see cell-tracking technology whereby a phone never reports its ID when idle and pinging tower. I'd like to see the tower push three bloom filters on ping, one of all predicted to be in the cell, one of all predicted to be in the area (surrounding cells), and one of all in the system.

For a flat assumption of 10^12 phone numbers CC-AAA-RRR-XXXX including country codes, assume nearly 100% of all numbers are being dialed at the exact same time. You can gain a 1% probability of error on if a number is being dialed in about 116GB. In any situation of over 50% saturation, you'd invert: list what numbers aren't being dialed, hence the size of the worldwide packet is 58GB. That's the theoretical bound in an insane situation. (Besides, you can only dial half the phones in the world at once...)

In reality, we don't have 100 country codes, and not all countries have 10 digit phone numbers. In America, there are only really 800 possible area codes, 269 in service in the USA, and 26 in Canada. Not all areas saturate the exchange; most exchanges aren't saturated. The number of phone numbers world-wide isn't 142 times the size of the number of people.

So let's assume 10 billion numbers instead, not all of which are cell phones. You're looking at 580MB for the packet to express near 50% saturation of numbers being dialed *right now* for the whole world. That's much better.

Phones ring for approximately 10 seconds. They're answered or taken to voice mail by then. In addition, most phones aren't being dialed at any given time. If we assume 1 in 7000 cell phones is currently ringing, the worldwide packet is 174kB for a 1% margin of error.

So let's call the regional a 10 million phone coverage area, and the local a 1 million phone coverage area. Assuming 1 in 7000 phones is currently ringing, the packet sizes are 174kB worldwide, 178 bytes regional, and 17.8 bytes local, for a 1% margin of error. That is: you have a 1 in 100 chance of the phone deciding it's probably in the bloom filter when it's not. If we double the sizes here, then the false positive rate is 0.01%, or 1 in 10,000--almost never.

We can further reduce these by scaling them dynamically, and by delaying the ring if you're out of known area. I'll use the double-size numbers for a 0.01% false positive chance.

Let's say somebody calls your phone. The cell system predicts, based on prior data (i.e. you're usually in this city, your home address on file is here, whatever), that you're in the 1 million person coverage area contained by some cells. In Baltimore City, we have 660,000 people; 1 million coverage is bigger than my city. So the system adds you only to the 35.6 byte local dialing filter for a 1 second cycle.

If your phone fails to respond to the tower, the system leaves your number in the 36 byte local dialing filter. It begins including it in the regional dialing area. The regional dialing area excludes any phone dialed for less than 1 second, any phone found in a local dialing area, or any phone included in the local dialing area filter. More than 95% of phones should be excluded: there's better than a 95% chance that you're currently in your local area. The filter is about 89 bytes on average, assuming 1 in 7000 phones in the 5,000,000 phone region is ringing.

The worldwide filter is different. If in 1 more second you don't answer, the cell system adds you to the bloom list for the whole world. Assuming a 95% chance of someone being in the region if not in the local area, that's 95% of 5%, or 0.25%. Assuming 10 billion phones, the worldwide list of numbers currently being dialed is 9 bytes.

For a 1 in 10,000 false positive rate, you'd have to push 134 bytes of dialing filters. If you're outside of your normal region, there's a 2 second delay. We can further step this with a 100 million phone region to net whole countries in the last list, but we'd introduce a 3 second delay for people who are outside their country.

In this system, no phone would tell the tower its identity until it wanted service. Of course, most phones are sucking down data, so this is all pointless; but, if you shut data off and are on straight receiving calls, your phone doesn't actually tell the towers where you are--it doesn't identify itself. The towers say, "Here is a bloom filter of phone numbers. If your number hits the bloom filter, it's 99.99% likely you're being dialed right now." If you're in any of the three filters, you ping the tower and tell it you're ready to answer, and in this cell.

You're ready to receive calls, and yet the tower doesn't know where you are unless someone calls you.

It would be trivial for a computer to realize something is being said mid-sentence by measuring the time between your previous word and when you say "computer, adjust the volume".. AS for a demo playing in the background .. yeah that is an issue but i try not to play demos of voice UI interaction in the car. If I did, I would make sure the trigger word to activate a voice command is not "computer" but some name that is rarely used like "Cthulu of the Netherworld".

You are absolutely correct. You can have the windows and use heads up displays, or "helmet" mounted displays (Google Glass?) supplement additional information.

As a pilot, I can think of nothing more idiotic than to get rid of the front wind screens/canopies/windshields whatever you want to call them.

The window leads to a lot of mistakes as well, probably far more than a video feed dying.
Cases have been documented when flying over an large body of water pilots can get disinterested and confuse their up from down, and fly their plains upside down, until they crash.

In the rare case where the feed dies, there are a bunch of other instruments available for them.

Teams of researchers from around the globe competed for the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize way back in 2009, that would be awarded to the team that managed to improve the algorithm by even 10%. It took them the better part of a year to accomplish it, and you seem to think that a lone programmer can just get in there and knock out a lot of low-hanging fruit to substantially improve things?

I don't deny that there's always room for improvement (such as the example you provided), but suggesting that it can all be fixed by "hiring a programmer" is a bit naive.

You do realize that IMDb is a type of wiki, right? The tags are user-submitted. They're good for some stuff, but probably not so useful for the sorts of things Netflix likely needs them for. Besides which, IMDb is owned by Amazon, so there's likely all sorts of legal issues in using its data for their service.

To much Science Fiction and not enough Science Fact.
A common theme in Science Fiction is the idea that technology will replace humans, which is often true. However most SciFi usually takes this idea and follows the slippery slop to a far more interesting to read, but most likely not possible worst case situation.

SciFi books about say a middle grade analyst having to change careers in his mid 40's because technology had made his current job obsolete. Is rather dull. But if that system some how became the all knowing overlord, picking who lives and who lives on a global scale. Now that is interesting, and allows conflict with a rag tag team of Humans in their seemingly impossible task in out thinking the super computer.

When you read a cautionary tail, it isn't about stopping progress, but opening your mind to other options, if these options are bad, put insurances to protect the bad stuff from happening.