For a cell phone to work... it needs to know where you are !

This is because the connection or the data packets need to be routed to a radio that can physically transmit them to you. That is the radio that defines the cell. The cell is in a place. The radio has to transmit the packets to you - which is a direction within the cell.

For the billing to work... you need to keep records! Because.. the radios and the backhaul belong to lots of different people, all of whom need paying.

Now ; how many criminals/terrorists have been tracked by virtue of these records? Many.

Is it right? Well, if you want a cell phone, you have to accept this - because thats the way it works, and there is no way it will change in the foreseeable future.

The problem with this is that if the core is hot, or if the rods are distorted, or if the core is damaged, well, if anything, the rods don't fall in.

And I thought that the reason that statisticians weren't good as sports coaches or generals was because there were 1000's of variables that couldn't be quantified or computed.

oh... wait...

Watson is unnatural, any of it's advantages are unnatural.

It won, it was better at this game than anyone else.

While being quick on the buzzer is important Watson can answer general questions accurately. Not perfectly, but as well as a human, IBM have shown this is so by Watson winning the competition, but also by careful statistical analysis of it's performance in testing.

The three huge achievements are :

- very fast information retrieval; Google et-al have similar technology, but let's not forget that it's all pretty new.

- natural language query decoding; Watson doesn't understand NL queries, but it is able to decode them into search queries.

- precise information extraction and presentation; whereas Google produces several pages of results with the answer in there (and can often highlight the right result) Watson can pull "the answer" out and present it in the required format.

This is about the enterprise mobility market, not the consumer market, RIM is in trouble.

This is all about enterprise mobility. With exchange and sharepoint 2010 microsoft have a strong hold on the enterprise personal productivity and comms markets. They have been trying to leverage this for ages but until WM7 were behind with the software to do it, now they are frustrated by the lack of handsets and partnering with Nokia fixes this.

Expect RIM to run to Oracle, or possibly IBM.

oh hun "perfect for higher management, where all that really counts are results."

My sweet, its friends that count in higher management.

Bad results go to where the friends aren't.
Good results go to where the friends are.
or in an incorrigibly unredistributably bad results context...

you go where your friends are waiting with good results having concealed the bad results until you are gone. At which time 2 things happen.

You claim : it was all good until I left.
The new guy says : it was the old guy.

Both of you get $4M.

Fankoo.

Errm - well, the double slit experiment is kind of observable, and there are lots of sort of explanations of it that don't involve a multi-verse.

But you could say that Feynman should have been taken literally, although he didn't want to be.

To be frank, Feynman should have been taken literally (and with a bucket full of worship) full stop.

You know why you hear this kind of sentiment (ie. I'd rather live in a fascist state than let my life be run by "the big corps")?

Because the dead have no voice, that's why.

Raise a toast to Thomas Payne, raise a toast to the dead, raise a toast to Abe Lincon and thank god they did what they did.

Quite some fall from grace - how many billions has he earned?

The big problem with this request is that it reveals one of two things.

Either the business plan is in trouble, you should have been profitable by now, or they can't project profits in the timeframe that they have funding for, or worse, there is no proper plan.

Either way, they are going bust unless you guys help out. The sensible comments about asking for stock may or may not reveal this, but if they can't have a sensible discussion about where the business stands then its for sure that they are staring down the barrel. If they won't hand stock over then my guess is that they have non left to hand over, if that's the case then they have played thier last card; your job is gone.

The rational action in that situation is to stay there and get your cheque but be looking for work like crazy.

On the other hand, if they will talk about stock, will discuss the business plan - this could be an opportunity. Participate if you believe in it.

Bill & Hillary don't tow the line - they write it.

Facebook has a very large number of active users, and it will have a very large number of active users for at least the next 3 years. The photo albums and friend networks are very good reasons why people will keep coming back, and I think it would take some fairly strong disincentives to get them to stop.

All of this means that they have a way of making money for at least the next 3 years, probably far longer. It won't be enough to justify their valuation, but it will be a lot.

I think that they are a far better bet that Google or Apple right now, but they are hugely overvalued. None of these companies will go bust or just disappear, but all three will find tougher times ahead for sure; and all three will be worth much less in 3 years than they are now. On the other hand if you had bought stock in them three years ago and keep it for another three years you will still be quids in (I know that you can't buy facebook stock)

It is a good company, and a great idea, but it's worth something like $10bn not $50bn and that's factoring for big growth in revenue and maintenance of the user base.

The Foxbat in itself was a response to an American program (XB70). The existence of the Foxbat was then used to justify the F15 which in turn resulted in the SU-27.

The most successful aircraft during this period (by my thinking) were the F16 and Mig 29, both of which were produced to deliver on tactical requirements rather than willy waving requirements.

There are 2 types of valid study; an experimental investigation that tries to test the prediction of a theory to either confirm or disprove it, or secondly a study that attempts to quantify an observed phenomena.

Fishing expeditions (lets see if esp is real, lets see if random compounds do something for condition x) are not valid - for all the reasons outlined in the article, unless they produce results that are stone cold solid. One example of an investigation of this type that has worked is the mapping of novas to redshift that revealed dark energy (or yet another reason to stop believing anything about cosmology, what ever you want to call it) - they were mapping the sky and found that all the models of the universe were utter bollocks (note, any theory that fails to account for 90% of the known physical conditions that it attempts to derive is utter rubbish, and no amount of bum squeezing carping whilst pointing to nonsense sums will make up for it. When you can explain mass we will talk, when you can explain non-baryonic matter I will sit and listen)

Interestingly though that study, which no one can argue with (cos you can look at the sky and see it if you have a few thousand $ of kit) has been dealt with by the cosmology community with a name (dark energy) and a few sheepish looks.