Where do you work? I want to short some stock...

Guess keeping your data around and intact isn't a high priority for you. Those "big data" systems you mention aren't ACID compliant. Hope you never have to find out just how foolish you Hadoop folk are being.

I work for a "big data" company too...but we are a bit different than most (streaming SQL), not trying to replace DBs and data warehouses as this going to get someone fired when they learn the hard way what ACID is.

Please, for the love of all that is holy tell me you are joking. Nothing about the Tea party is rational and their having a "seat at the table" is what caused this non-sense in the first place. Their type of thinking is what caused this mess over the last 30 years and they behave like spoiled children even when they get their way. Unless we get rid of some military spending, we can't maintain our current debt load. And going after "entitlements" is basically stealing from the poor (SS is getting back your own money, not getting it from someone else). Most of our debt is from military spending, not from entitlements unless the FICA line on my paycheck is something else. We can't keep spending $700B a year on defense (that's about $2.3K per person each year) and keep not taxing the wealthy. Pick one and we'll talk. Until then they will continue to be the same people who didn't realize that teabagging is a sexual term and not a source of serious political thought or even adults.

I work for the company that created the back-end for that visualization, SQLStream. Disclaimer: I didn't work on this project, I work on our product team and I don't speak for my employer.

Its real. The apache logs are read by our streaming SQL backend, transfered to HBase and then used to generate the AJAX web front end. We make a streaming database which is architected much like a traditional DBMS with the additional capability of streams which act like tables but instead of being a destination for relational tuples on disk, they instead are conduits through which data flows. Think JMS with a standards based SQL control (publish is an insert, subscribe is a select). This allows for SQL queries to support streaming and windowed aggregation (think querying on a tuple's timestamp in addition to its data). I'm trying not to make this a cheap marketing ploy so if you want to know more, just go to our website: www.sqlstream.com

What you are describing is the problems around distributed systems. What would I do with a billion cores? Run tens of millions of instances of VMWare (x8 or 16 each) and write distributed code that runs on millions of machines. No shared memory, communication channels which are slow compared with computation? Basically, that's the line between distributed systems and non-distributed systems. Not that most distributed systems problems are solved, but this is the model that we would be investigating assuming no major shift in the computational model (turning vs quantum, etc).

Actually, I'm building an enterprisy application right now that uses the canvas tag to emulate a 3D environment. We support IE via the Google Chrome Frame. So there's one way around your problem and one example of people using canvas in the real world.

If that was the case, it you would see a more gradual decline in the traffic and not so regular usage across the board. Its looks like a bot net with significant infection in the countries with increased traffic after the first stripe. I'm sure something with more experience in this type of thing could tell us even more about it however...

There are a lot of potential valuable modern art (mostly ab ex) that even experts can't decide if it authentic. There are several Jackson Pollock works that can't be authenticated. In many of these cases, there are accusations of bias on all sides as the art world can be very subjective at its core. This type of system might help in those cases but the ramifications of depending upon such a system are complex to say the least. If this type of system became some sort of legal standard, it might even let forgers "debug" their works so as to copy a valuable work more accurately.

CM is always on the last Friday of the month at 6pm.

Does this comment answer your question?

Drivers are very impatient when it comes to cyclists and don't care if there are no available bike lanes which push cyclists onto the roads with faster traffic. In my experience, most drivers are very impatient and don't even want to wait on cyclists when it won't effect their arrival time. I've seen it get downright nasty even here in San Francisco (to the point of violence in some cases). The truth is that bikes are only practical in certain places, usually very dense population centers. And even there, there is generally quite a lot of friction between drivers and cyclists. Because of the anger among the cyclists, Critical Mass was started which generally only pisses off the drivers but also is a lot of fun.

And riding a bike in some locations does have a certain amount of cultural cashe (and yes, will even get you laid). The fact that an bike expert doesn't know this says more about the article's lack of research than anything.

Sure it is, they were from Florida.

Yes and no, water actually is a very good "thermal" battery. That is why coastal regions have a more temperate climate than inland region. Its cheap and we know a lot about how to move it around and have existing infrastructure for doing exactly that. Its not the most efficient way, but often it is the most practical and economical.

Ok, my company (a small software startup) posted a Wikipedia article about itself but only included details about the founders, dates of operation and the space in which we compete. Our competitors of all sizes have similar Wikipedia pages. None of these pages including ours had links to anything other than the front page of their websites. Our page was deleted in under two weeks. I understand that you don't want wiki spam, but this wasn't a marketing effort. It was a good faith effort to add general information about our company to the wiki. While you might think its of no use, hundreds (hopefully many more in the future) of people who will search for us might like to see a Wiki entry that provides this type of basic information.

Either all of the companies' wiki entries are spam or they are not. The absence of these types of policies and the seemly capricious nature of these decisions is a problem. Its not that we don't agree that there is a lot of wiki spam. Its that the human editors are acting as the world's worst spam filter. Spam filters are judged not entirely by their accuracy rate. False positives are dramatically more important than false negatives and so we tolerate only a reduced amount of spam in exchange for very few valid emails being flagged as spam. More importantly, a software spam filter doesn't enforce a personal agenda.

The much bigger issue here for the Wiki org is that its alienating its most loyal users. Most companies have contact information on their products to identify the most involved customers because they influence sales by an order of magnitude more than other people. Wikipedia is in the interesting position of having those customers not only identify themselves, but contribute to their "product". But instead of welcoming this, they actively are driving them away. A curious behavior to say the lest.