Dude. That's not what people mean when they say big data. HP and Dell will both quite happily sell you machines with 2TB of main memory, and SGI will go to 16TB, and anything which can fit in memory on a single machine without custom hardware isn't big data. It's only big data once you get up to a few hundred terabytes.

I think the difference is when you use file formats that are flatter than databases and certain GUIs. In those cases, rather than taking the data as it needs it, it attempts to load all of it into memory and can max out the memory allowed to the process in 32 bit systems. But even then, there are ways around that through smart planning, variable use, and multiple data files for different variables so not all are in memory at once (of course databases implements all three at once internally).

Keep in mind that Universities, one of the biggest centers of innovation (often government funded), tend to have massive patent portfolios. They license them out to companies and that in turn funds more fundamental research^W^W^W bigger stadium. So if we killed the system completely we would also have to restructure how basic research is done... which would probably be a good, thing.. just pointing out that corporations are not the only ones utilizing this system.

Edison's lightbulb is a really bad example. Edison took something which was already working in a lab (wire emitting light when you send electricity through it) and made it actually useful. Before Edison it was a scientific curiousity.

That is not fundamental research, it is directed product development.

The whole article was not much more than a high level review. The graphic naturally draws attention to the parameters the writer wanted to cover but he did not back up his graphic with any sort of serious textual review of what he felt were the weaknesses or advantages of the different programming language at least not in any detail.

No, all fundamental discoveries are made by government. Commercial entities have never invented anything.

That is because profit is incompatible with social benefit.

We need to encourage more funding from government through taxation of corporation. Let's give government more control over corporations.

About the only things that deserve patents are fundamental discoveries and drugs that are unique and cost hundreds of millions to develop and test. And even then, just provide some kind of "formula patent" that only lasts 5-6 years.

From spooky to downright disturbing, because if that is true, then the passengers of the very first viable colony expedition to another star will look back and see a super flare roast the Earth to a cinder just as soon as they are out of range.

From the article:

Update: For those of you inquiring about the strength of my Hotmail password – it was a seven-letter string of lowercase letters. Not a dictionary word, but part acronym, part proper noun. It’s not the world’s strongest password, and I can feel the parental glare of Davey Winder from 200 miles away, but it wasn’t that weak, either.

Yeah, not a very strong password. What the hell was he thinking? At least mix case and have one number. Passwords I use have mixed case, numbers and symbols in it so it's not so easy to guess.

When you transmit particles though matter, or bounce them off of a surface, do they keep their properties? I don't know much about particle physics, but I thought that when this happens, particles are being absorbed, and new particles emitted. i.e. light doesn't actually "bounce" off of a mirror, but the particle interactions within the surface of the matter that makes up the mirror give a result that makes the photon appear to bounce. If this is true, wouldn't slowing things down with fiber optic cable or mirrors break the experiment?

The situation I was wondering about it this:

Victor has been sent to a distant planet, and is supposed to relay information to earth. For simplicity sake, lets say it's a yes or no answer (this is a simplification with a single bit that could be extended to bigger messages).

The experiment described in the article is done many times in succession (lets say a million times) with Alice and Bob recording results, and victor choosing the same thing every iteration (he will entangle for all million attempts, or not for all million attempts). While Alice and Bob cannot communicate directly with Victor to see whether he has entangled or not, the first handful of observations that they make would be indistinguishable from randomness, but after several thousand iterations, wouldn't there be a significant statistical deviation towards correlation of Alice and Bob's results if Victor was entangling?

In this way, couldn't victor communicate with Alice and Bob instantaneously?