If there is no provision in the law to make all non-terrorist discovered evidence non-admissible, then it is not about terrorism, but creating a police state.

The article shows nothing new from an analytics angle, except how to apply common techniques to the online gaming industry. For quite some time, grocery stores to airlines to web sites have been modeling user patterns, and exploiting them by adapting the product to what works the best. Anti-churn algorithms and targeted educative emails are cool techniques that work. Not every company needs or can use this style of analytics. Some companies stumble upon "gut-feel" brilliance and just do everything right. Others have to work at success and modern analytic techniques make that possible. As the article points out, insight can be misused. Those that become overbearing will suffer, and others will take their place.

So if I have 10% packet loss and incur a lot of transmissions, will that be counted in my cap? Hopefully they will only charge for data truly received at the application layer and not for the overhead. I also don't want to pay for SPAM or any random address pinging me, even if this is all just noise compared to my Netflix and Vonage use. If there must be a cap, let it be for usable data where I initiated the request. Hopefully this move triggers an invalidation of contracts with every town where they do business. Its time to bring in competition.

A computer networking show, probably Interface, was underway in Washington DC and in our booth we had a live network connection to our corporate intranet. I was running the tech support for the booth and got an instant message from one of my co-workers back at the office telling me what had happened. This is in the days before cell-phones, so the buzz spread from our booth very quickly. The show just stopped for a while until people could take it all in. It was a shocker. The report that followed was good insight into the workings of NASA and flight operations. In the history of discovery, space is still a lot safer than the early days on the ocean were.

Opt in won't work. Not enough people will do it to keep contextual ads flowing. Opt out might work, but not one that is all-or-nothing. Tracking is done by the site you are visiting and across sites by the ad networks. The former is critical to make the site suck less. The latter is the problem people are concerned about. Products you look at on site A turn up as ads on site B. The online ad market is worth 10's of billions and is not going to be quieted easily. Ads in context work so much better, and are therefore worth much more. It is hard to fight the strong flow of money, especially when it has a chance of helping the economy. Admit it or not - advertising works.

Business users have a job to do - and there is plenty of external sources for tools to excel at the job (no pun intended). IT teams are often too focused on SLA and cost cutting, not agility and user productivity. The IT organization needs to realize that it is part of the solution, and no longer has a monopoly. Well run IT departments provide value that is respected, not barriers to jump around.

>This year we are going to see a new record low for arctic sea ice --- surpassing even the dramatic 2007 decline. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png

Another source, the Arctic News, differs with your conclusion. See link here: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png and the main site at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

It is still bad. This year will be the runner-up, not the new record low for arctic sea ice. Perhaps, as before, the moisture in the arctic air will swirl down and result in a good snow year for the northeast US ski areas.

I had a good look at the US Census hardware and used it in the field with a census taker. It did nothing a smart phone couldn't do, but appeared to be an over-engineered yet poorly featured military industrial complex piece of crap. I'm SURE it cost way too much money, especially compared with the cost of an LG smart phone.

Why can't we get past the question if and why - and on to the more important question, now what? There is little science that I've seen showing that anything we do will change things. Perhaps we are past the tipping point and just have to ride out the results. The economic costs of stopping CO2 emission are very high - and there is no guarantee it will do any good. Why not invest billions in fixing whatever climate change brings. Perhaps a carbon tax could go towards this, but my fear is global corruption will take control of this and we'll all get screwed.

Brazil's market stock has a "kill switch" that turns off trading in cases such as these. If the stocks take a nose dive because of a computer glitch or
because of a human typo, the kill switch automatically closes the market for that day.

That would be a great feature to add to our stock markets here in the US.