Or, people could grow up and learn to work without needing coworkers in close physical proximity peer-pressuring them into being productive.

The arcology (from 1990s SimCity) or Google's mega structure may never come to pass if we develop sufficient network infrastructure that people can work from their homes, eliminating commute times completely. Sure, physical jobs still need physical presence, but information pushers (read: 90% of government, and most larger corporations), can push that information through video telepresence. I rented a car from the airport the other day, two people sitting at the counter were helping customers in lines 3 deep - then there's this little video kiosk, I walk up to it, pick up a telephone handset, and voila, an agent for the company located hundreds of miles away helps me, just as quickly and efficiently as the flesh and blood counter reps, probably better because he didn't have to get up and drive to the airport during morning rush hour in a big metro city. The people cleaning the cars and guarding the exit still need to be present, but the counter workers could have 20 square foot "office cubes" located in their homes, where they could work 5 or 6 hours a day, be more productive for the company, and spend 1/2 as much time on their workday.
 

The railroad is built, and kicked butt over ox and wagon, and has been outmoded by car/truck (thus my example) and plane - and left to rot.

Yes, train service sucks - unless you are a hopper car full of ore and don't particularly have a schedule.

The article starts with the observation that the hardware bottleneck is mostly gone, if you can afford to supply basic coffee to your employees, the IT hardware doesn't cost much more than that - contrast that to 1991 when the PC on my desk cost 2 months of my salary, and our "network" was a 4 line phone sitting next to it (modems came to our office 5 years later).

Then, let's dream about what's next... you can dream, can't you?

If the "transcontinental railroad" is truly built, then the cloud won't be going down (for any significant amounts of time) in the future.

How often do you venture out onto the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system, stymied that you can't use it in the normal fashion (yes, rush hour in metro areas still needs work, mostly population control, I say, but...)?

If your "cloud is down" more than 5 minutes per day, or has a big (multi hour) outage more than once a year, then you have not yet arrived at modern (2014) IT nirvana.

Personally, I'd call an simplistic algorithm that gets 70% right brilliant, and one that has a tremendous amount of insight that also gets 70% correct overly complicated and prone to unpredictable failure.

g was good enough for me, but I bought an n anyway and was very pleased with the upgrade. Corners of the house that used to be spotty coverage became rock solid. The "yard range" went from near the house to almost 100' further into the yard. Sure, g was fast and reliable enough and covered what I needed, but n was a clear improvement and actually useful at times.

Ships travel in fleets - updating the relative antenna positions in heaving seas, that's where the fun is...

There's a local shop that hires a mix of experienced developers, kids still in college, and H1Bs... they have horrendous turnover (average tenure 1 year is because the H1Bs stay put. The college kids bolt at first opportunity, and the experienced ones seems to find better things fairly often too...

The Clayton Act only applies when someone applies it. If you were wronged by these people, bring suit under the Clayton Act and have at them.

Unfortunately, if you're just a bystander, or the statute of limitations has run out, or you have accepted other settlement in the matter, you can't.

Bear in mind, the model only gets it right 70% of the time, and a red-black roulette spin would get it right nearly 50% of the time.

I was going to say: media preference datapoint: NPR vs FOX, might be the strongest predictor.

In this particular case, I'm not very impressed with a 70% prediction rate on a binary decision... you could get similar results by saying "Uphold" every time and ignoring all the data.

What would be more impressive is if the algorithm could predict (with greater accuracy) how theoretical courts would perform with new justices assigned to the bench. Say a seat is opening up and there are several candidates for the position, can the algorithm tell you what the outcome of an upcoming case will be with the various choices of new justices?

The manufacturers think they can do it safely. They even have multinational conferences where they get together and the 2 guys from every company who would rather travel than work sit around and agree with each other that they have put in enough safety checks to protect their customers.

The problem is, most people can't mentally scale risk up to millions of copies. The basic engineer's metric is: "I tried it on my test rig as many ways as I can think of and nothing ever failed." Put this guy in a "world class" test facility with all the best toys money can buy and he'll write you all kinds of analyses "proving" that their accelerated degradation models guarantee a trillion hour MTBF. Problem is: when you put a million imperfect copies of a thing into the real world, with a million different people operating them in thousands of different use cases in hundreds of different environments, the "world class" test facility becomes a myopic little ivory tower by comparison.

One of the answers is "post market surveillance" - but that's expensive, politically unpopular, and logistically difficult to implement, though it is getting cheaper and easier, I don't think it's getting any more politically acceptable. Personally, I feel that the commercial arm of the corporations have corrupted the good in onboard diagnostics, putting up a little "feed my mechanics' and dealers' families" light on your dashboard that comes on for every little problem, but still managing to let you get stranded by the side of the road with little to no warning Why would I ever trust such a system to "phone home" with data about my driving habits?

They've been playing at this since the 1970s. Scan code systems that sell for $50K. "Open" protocols that you have to be a member of the society to get a copy of, membership fee: $25K plus a reason they deem as valid to join. This was last century.

Just be glad that the OBD-III proposals with RFID communication requirements never got passed (or did they?) - with that, the same type of toll readers that are more and more common could as easily query your OBD port and read everything about your present vehicle condition - effectively making possible a "go directly to your mechanic and pay to fix your vehicle or get your license revoked" checkpoint anywhere desired, including across a 6 lane interstate where traffic moves at 80mph - yes, the protocol can query all the vehicles on the road simultaneously as they drive through a checkpoint.

Yeah, that nutso fruity computer company had absolutely no business getting into music players, or phones, did they?

If 1 out of 100 of Google's crazy ideas take off on large scale, they stand to profit overall, and the 99 so called failures can also been called learning experiences, helping that 1/100 to succeed.