I'm curious then, how many people are giving their potential employers their SSN and DOB before actually having the job?

This only gives a person's work history? Far less of an issue than getting a loan in another person's name. Unless someone can show me a hack that makes use of this information that's worse than getting a credit line... Many places are also making a switch to transparent salaries anyway. Again, why is this a big deal?

There is probably the possibility of it happening in the reasonably far future in decently large cities. There are a couple problems with making a giant mesh network. A couple have been mentioned above.

Routing tables would be fairly hard to figure out how to handle effectively, especially if each device in the mesh network could move around ( like if we were using a cell phone as a node in the network ). The routes would have to update extremely fast with extreme variability in each nodes transfer speeds, latency, reliability, etc. Not something we can currently do fast enough. Even if we limit ourselves to stationary nodes there may be a large number of hops, which means fairly long latency. So we'd need a trunk, which almost sounds like your typical ISP.

Then we have the issue of distance between nodes. Depending on population density, each node may be out of range of any other node. Making the idea fall apart for any place with reasonably low population density. I'm imagining this will be a mostly wireless type mesh network ( as the OP seems to indicate asking about frequency allocations ). So, we could increase transmission power, but then we'll have problems with collision avoidance algorithms increasing latency since we'd have to have confirmation that no other devices will be communicating over a fairly large radius of transmission assuming people will want to pay enough for such a large transmitter/receiver, which also means certain nodes would become trunk nodes, fairly similar to what an ISP already will do. Since we have such a large amount of distance between nodes in certain areas we'll most likely have disconnected networks. Especially over oceans and uninhabitable mountainous regions.

HAM radio is actually a possibility to build a network like this along with bluetooth and wifi over short/medium distances. So there does exist some spectrum already for experimental/commercial devices. But there's another problem, if this network does get built, there would need to be a sharing of some of the spectrum for this network, as only certain frequencies have the capability of being transmitted long enough distances, or being capable of anything other than line-of-sight type communication. I'm sure I'm missing some problems with creating a world wide mesh network. These issues would severely limit the feasibility of any global type mesh network, unfortunately.

This article reminds me of using a quantum monte carlo algorithm vs a classical monte carlo. The quantum monte carlo scales linearly with the number of trotter slices, but really a real quantum algorithm should use 2^n slices each coupled to one another. It definitely sounds like the people who are doing this research are at least 30 years behind the technological times. The biggest reason for not having all the memory directly accessible in a single processor computer is technological feasibility and cost. Hence caching. A GPU can do massive parallel calculations just like this neural network seems to be doing. Fault tolerance would just be deactivating the various processors that are no longer functioning properly. Seems like this problem is already known and solved.

I remember reading an article about how dragonflies were using stones to tap down their nests making it harder for predators to find. The result was a reclassification on what constituted a tool removing the dragonflies from being classified as tool users.
Many animals use tools. So, I don't really see how this is news worthy other than that the bird learned to build them on its own without help from other birds.

I think you missunderstood the last post. I was refering to the word "Calibrating" in the parent. As it was posted using my phone autocorrect decided to change "jailbreaking" into "Calibrating". This change wasn't what I had intended, and, while admitedly, I should have checked the post to ensure that none of those really obvious substitutions was present, it was there and I attempted to make the post less obsfuscated. I suppose an assignment would have been more appropriate to help with understanding, or perhaps reposting the entirety of it, however, that may have resulted in more of the same errors decreasing readability and increasing my annoyance with my telephone.

Stupid phone. Calibrating == jailbreaking.

Aren't jailbreaking and unlocking different? Calibrating refers to being able to execute cystine programs on your phone, whereas unlocking allows one to use any carrier. I think this article is referring to jailbreaking.

Is that regular avian delivery? or with QOS?

It's not even a generalization. It's the exact same algorithms. Once you can solve a 4x4x4 there is no extra algorithms needed at all to solve any cubes of any higher degree.

The typical idea is to solve the cube to the point of being a 3x3x3 with all the centers and edges solved. When solving the edges if you're trying to get the edges in place any portion of the edges can be grouped to look like a cube with a smaller degree.

Someone could argue that the 5x5x5 and 4x4x4 algorithms are needed, because of the extra center edge pieces, but with proper edge pairing that's usually a moot issue. But, I could always be wrong, the 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 algorithms might be needed for any cube larger than a 3x3x3. The real point is that anything above a certain point is the exact same algorithms.

Nailing, even by hand, isn't old-school manual construction.

Nailguns are mostly only useable in certain circumstances, like when doing framing, or woodwork finishing. When it comes to things like putting metal siding, spiking concrete, or putting in drywall beads nail guns don't have the accuracy, nor the light touch required.

Also, if you're meaning screws are the wave of the future, they don't have the type of give that are needed in many situations. For instance, if a building was put up with only screws in an earthquake the screws would tend to break whereas the nails would allow for some room to move and maintain their hold. Either way, nailing is still new school.

I'm pretty sure that not being paid would instroduce more bias than having some kind of standard rate. The reason I say this is because many of the reviewers will just briefly look over the paper and give some kind of default opinion on it without really reading it well. With monetary incentive they may do a better job of reviewing it as their time is paid for.

Then again, it could also introduce a problem where people still just give a default review and take the money.

Perhaps a study needs to be done on this so that the journal can be locked behind a paywall never to be read by anyone as the price would be too high.

I'm surprised noone has said it yet, but do they have a predefined kill limit? So, if they get out of hand we can send wave after wave of men at them?

I'm all for having more expert computers in the fields, as it means we can potentially get better treatment. But, people tend to be lazy, and I'm sure, given as many patients as some doctors have to see in a day, that some of the people that are supposed to be doing what we hire doctors to do will be just asking watson for the treatment with probably only a half-assed attempt at verifying how good those results may be. It seems like Isabel might have a bit more promise in these markets for safety.

Also, if Isabel doesn't understand non-jargon, why not develop a way to use Watson to "translate" into technical speak for Isabel. Then again, that might just be a google translate style accident waiting to happen.

You call that a bag? This is a bag.

That's not a bag, that's a jar.

Oh, I see you've played baggy-jarry before.