[blockquote]GMail scans and extract the meaning of the communication ... they are extracting, saving, using and building a database of meaningful content from your email ...[/blockquote]
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It depends on what algorithm they are using, but if it is a Bayesian type analysis, they aren't extracting meaning, but a mathematical pattern which correlate to certain subjects that trigger ads.

You can see this type of behavior in results and it doesn't show much in the way of intelligence or actually finding "meaning", any more than looking for 2+2 and giving 4.

Pattern recognition is a machine level, non-thinking action -- that can be correlated, statistically (another numeric formula w/probabilities) to give formulaic outputs that can be used to trigger ads.

That isn't the same as deciphering meaning.

You don't think MOST of the NSA's scanning is automated?

Just because it is automated, doesn't mean they don't pick out information they want and act on it.

How is this different than if a human scanned it?

You don't understand -- the prison industry is a growth industry fueled by owners like Dick Cheney, who aren't about to let one of their biggest "feeds" into their system become "legal". The US prison industry is one of the few that continues to grow despite[due to] budget cuts and bad economic conditions. It grows during good times, and grows even faster during bad times.

On top of this, there is the move toward privatization where profits can really be had as economies of scale increase and provided "benefits" are cut below ethical levels, but still passing "official" guidelines (which are set by those making money by cutting them).

It's also a way of creating a new "underclass". With racism coming under constant harassment, some women making more than men, children's work restricted, a new class of low-wage slave laborers is needed. Those with prison records get to face all sorts of legal discrimination in housing and employment. It's a ripe market for development!

Happy OpenSuSE users? Ha! W/the switch to away from initd to a windows systemservicesd that takes over the HW operations of other daemons in preparation for licenses tied to your HW config as on windows? Yeah, real happy.

"Maybe I'm being naive, but where is the problem with this arrangement? "

What you are talking about -- phone subsidies, is primarily, dealt with via "early cancellation penalties". Carriers also check your credit before "advancing you" the cost of a phone to verify that you are an acceptable credit risk.

Phone locking allows companies like Verizon to lock out features of the phone. Example: not being able to transfer [music] files from my computer to the device.

My phone had the capability to transfer music files over USB, but Verizon locked out this ability, to encourage me to use "air time" and "data minutes" to download my own music to the device as well as paying per-song charges at the time.

Then comes the issue of being able to take my phone with me -- AFTER any contractual-obligation period, to a new carrier. This was (and with lock-in, still is) doesn't allow me to use a phone I've, *long since*, paid for.

Phone locking has little to nothing to do with something that is already dealt with via early cancellation penalties and Obama didn't ask that early cancellation penalties be abolished.

Phone locking disallows consumers bringing their own device to a network (presuming the device is network compatible) and is used to artificially inflate the costs of services and features long after any contractual-obligation period.

Top tax rate for corporations is less than that of individuals in the US by about 20%.

So yeah, it should be cheaper for corporations to supply products than individual tax payers.
So why isn't?

You statement is loaded with an assumption that people don't pay taxes -- they do. It's the corporations that have lower tax rates, yet have many rights as people including owning many politicians.

So if it is easier for corporations to be cheaper, why aren't they?

Um... there is an assumption that one would disassociate all the atoms in the body in this disintegration -- but disintegration isn't an exact synonym for disassociation. If you think of items taking up a certain amount of space / mole (6.02x10^23 "things") -- gasses are fairly similar, so converting water to 2xH2+O2 would take up a large amount of space -- i.e. big explosion. That was never the case in a phaser set to disintegrate (or vaporize -- which is a closer synonym to disassociate).

Instead, it would be more efficient to annihilate part of the matter to power the conversion and ensure that there was no left over matter to expand in the space as well as converting no MORE matter than necessary to do the job, so no excess energy is released. A miniature computer in the phaser would likely do the trick.

With E=mass x light^2, only a tiny amount of the body's mass would need to be converted to energy to power the whole reaction.

3*10^8 squared, = 9 * 10^16. A gigajoule = 10^9 joules. So, we'd only
need 10^(-7)* of the mass units... ?? grams? kg? moles? But that's
an awfully small amount. The phaser just has to control the fusion conversion. Considering in the star-trek era, fusion was considered an old tech, I would guess they'd have it fairly well controllable.

(forgive any math errors, as I didn't look everything up, but hopefully people get the general idea)....

Welcome to living in a society with free *speech*.

Was you kid physically bullied? No. Where they even teased by classmates (in this case, unknown)?
Absent any provable damage other than the "feeling" you get when you go to a theater and watch a movie where all the kids in the movie are killed by the end in the movie, you think scary things should be grounds for action against the scary thing?

Um...where do you draw the line: Generally, when there is actual damage.

I wanted to vote yours insightful, but wanted to respond to next,

so +Insightful.

This is conversion to HTML?

The other coefficients are only a little more difficult. To find them we can use a trick discovered by Fourier. Suppose we multiply both sides of Eq. (50.2) by some harmonic functionâ"say by $\cos7\omega t$. We have then \begin{alignat}{2} f(t)\cdot\cos7\omega t &= a_0\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + a_1\cos\hphantom{1}\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_1\sin\hphantom{1}\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + a_2\cos2\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_2\sin2\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + \dotsb &&+ \dotsb\notag\\ &\quad + a_7\cos7\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_7\sin7\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ \label{Eq:I:50:4} &\quad + \dotsb &&+ \dotsb \end{alignat}

???
Looks more like LateX than HTML...

The summary also said they explored failures under warrantee. Have 80GB SSD's even been around as long as a 5-yr-warrantee HD?

How do the SSD's stack up in failures/GB?

Face it, at 98.5% failure rate and 6-8 drives = 1 HD, we are talking,
um... 98.5**6 - 98.5**8 = 91.3% - 88.6% chance of NO failure, or
8.7-11.4% chance of failing in a shorter warrantee period for the same
amount of disk space or 50-100% higher.

Not when they are given government permission to be a monopoly provider in area, nor when they are given common carrier status. They've been given exclusive rights in various areas by the government -- now they want to abuse those rights to make more money.

That needs to be viewed as an attempted at theft.

@readin: I see your point, ... it would be like calling Chinese, Japanese and Korean the same because they shared the same Chinese symbols. Er -- strike that original statement...my bad. ;-)

Anon wrote: "And I assume you mean "Chinese characters" instead of "kanji." Kanji refers to the Chinese characters that were adopted by the Japanese."

I look too much at Japanese. I thought Kanji mean Chinese character/word? But that's looking at it from a Japanese viewpoint, I supposed. It was your calling that to my attention that started me thinking how language, especially in this case, existed before the importing of the writing system and how Imperialistic the previous way I had learned it could possible sound.

Reprogramming the biased way you were taught knowledge as a child is so interesting as it uncovers biases in what or how you were taught. Not that either might not be true from a particular point of view, thought I see CJK more as separate, and that makes it easier how the earlier invention of a writing system that can be adapted to local needs can be a tool for both unification and Colonialism.

I still find the difference between syllabic-and-conceptual languages from the alphabetic languages to be fascinating. It's hard to imagine one's brain working in a different system and how that would introduce it's own biases on a more primary level than the information we were taught.

Anon quoted: "The Wikipedia article takes a neutral approach and calls them "varieties of Chinese [wikipedia.org].

Probably the safest approach.

Many of those languages are mutually intelligible if they are written down.
China has long had a history of a dialect problem -- with the pronunciation of the national language being different from town to town.

They don't call it a different language, because it is the same alphabet...they just can't understand the various non-standard pronunciations used for the same kanji.

@ 1000 emails/day, that's 15000 seconds processing time, or over 4 hours. That seems a bit excessive, but being having your email delayed a cumulative 4+ hours/day.