... lives in Bangalore and is a big fan of Russel Peters. Unless you consider that banking systems are not critical (*cough* RBS)

Wishful thinking.

You can also get a free tattoo in prison, but the available designs are limited to a specific subset based on the color of your skin and/or the number of your street.

That's the difference with Apple customers, who don't admit they're getting royally screwed over on price.

I believe that the only Windows involved in The Lattice is Windows XP, which happens to be the operating system used by the underlying SAN (an EMC Clariion) where all the data of the "known universe" (ours) is stored.

Yes people: your dearest memories could in fact stored on a device running Windows XP. One would need to be both a systems engineer and a neuroscientist to confirm this, but I suspect that the root cause of what we call Alzheimer is the WUAUCLT.EXE agent kicking into high gears and putting pressure on the SAN CPUs, preventing some bits of human memory to be properly serialized and stored.

This sucks but thanks to Windows XP at least we know that if the universe ends up crashing it won't be because the underlying storage infrastructure controller ran out of inodes while there is still plenty of disk space.

Since black is not a color, the meaning of your comment could qualify as a zen riddle. Thank you, this will give me something to ponder next time I'm in line at Starbucks*.

*Now I really want a salted caramel square...

Maybe the problem is that they hired an actress that was 24 years old to play a high school student in the original series. Back then she was young and fresh but since women age faster than men, of course at her 10 years reunion she looks like someone who could have kids in high school herself.

My point is: try installing VMware workstation in a VM created with VMware workstation. It does not work. Ergo, since I can install VMware workstation in the "real world" it means that the "real world" is not a VM running on VMware workstation.

The Lattice HAS to run on ESX or Hyper-V, unless Root has access to a better technology. Maybe Sun LDOMs?

In any event I hope it's not an organic/slimy technology like those pods in Existenz.

Thank you for posting that link. This is fascinating but they left out the most important question: does the Lattice run on ESX or Hyper-V? We already know it can't be VMware workstation because the product won't let one install an hypervisor inside a VM (I tried).

Kristen Bell is not the young beautiful nymph she was when the series came out. After seeing her playing a corporate whore vomiting during drunken sex with a Wesley Snipes wannabe in House of Lies it's difficult to picture her as Veronica Mars, fresh and bubbly college girl. She does not look the part anymore.

When the Batman movie came out nobody was surprised that Adam West was not playing the hero. Even for the remake of Get Carter they took a younger guy (but at least gave a role to the old one). Why the double standard with women?

The movie is not about Kristen Bell. She's just an actress, and years did not do her any favor. I'm sure she can star in many movies where they need an older woman and she will do a great job, but there are plenty of talented younger girls available for playing younger girls characters.

You can spend a lifetime making up WHYs and figuring out ways to prove or disprove them. That does not even come close to answering the fundamental question about the color of the watermelon.

The only solution to this problem is to have faith and live your life according to what the inside color of the watermelon means to you. You can even believe that there is no watermelon - that's a type of faith as well.

Now can we go back to being insulted that big companies found a way to minize risk in their commercial ventures by using a bait & switch approach so fans are the ones taking the risk?

Clearly you have no idea how complex the world of airplane tickets and hotel bookings can be. Just like in health care there are a few big networks (SABRE, Apollo) and a few spinoffs (Galileo, Shares), none of which is compatible with the others, plus there are plenty of small providers who do things in their own way. Yet companies like Kayak or Orbitz managed to build decent platforms dealing with this chaotic industry without pouring billions of dollars in a half-baked implementation.

There are systems like Morningstar who manage to keep track of data provided by various incompatible and antiquated financial services systems. There are online home/life insurance quotes providers. There is Equifax that does a decent job of merging nightmarish data sources.

I could go on and keep talking about websites that are more complex than a simple healthcare marketplace, but one thing I know is that with Obamaniacs nothing even remotely linked to His Administration will ever be considered less than perfect, be it a botched healthcare program or spying on American citizens and getting caught by a bunch of army transvestites and Autralian rapists.

With big data, when you actively look for patterns you always find them; this is how hedge funds have been operating for years. The purpose of the technology is not to make predictions, but rather to confirm existing trends and possibly identify new ones.

Proper way to utilize big data in this case would be:
1) to assist the CDC in confirming or refuting trends observed in the field
2) to offer additional correlations (such as: are people living closer to highways more sensitive fo specific strains of flu)
3) to provide long-term indicators facilitating the assessment of medication and other flu containment factors

Big data is not a magic eight ball but it's not a piece of shit either.

How many members of the electoral college actually work in car factories? And for that matter, how many GM plants are located in states that are likely to switch side because they lose this symbolic business?

After the healthcare.gov fiasco, the Obama administration should learn from their mistake, stop pouring money in legacy businesses and embrace the brave new world. This means Tesla: a technology that does not require to bomb arab countries to keep oil prices low and that does not open the door to polluting the beautiful gulf of Mexico.

If they do so, there will be an interesting question: do they have to pay the $1.43-a-mile EV tax when they drive on roads in other countries? Or maybe "not polluting" is worth a fine only in America?