Given that this machine is supposed to ground the meat and have to cook it, it would mean that each burger would take at least a few minutes to produce. That's a very deep pipeline operation with a few minutes of latency.

Not if you call ahead, or rather... launch the app, and buy the burger.... then you just come to the machine to pick up your order :)

In many cases people who do manual jobs do so because they enjoy them and/or have an affinity for them which they would not have if they were doing some sort of indoor office role

Everyone has to have a Plan B; at least until/unless they invent such a thing as "Job Obsolescence insurance," to cover the risk of becoming unemployable in your favorite job, due to changes in economic client. That's just the way the economy works -- anyone's kind of job might be irrelevent tomorrow, and have to vary to a slightly different role to survive, it's just part of the business risk involved in being an employee.

Same as anyone... the more varied the job skills, experience, training, and knowledge you acquire, the better.

And especially.... leadership skills, and management experience; which doesn't necessarily mean working in an office.

OK, maybe not that useful in the "robot apocalypse" ; imaginary end of the economy scenario, where most of the labourers can be replaced by robots (and therefore, not need anyone to manage them, either)

People who don't do up their seatbelt buckles die.
Therefore, seat belts fail to protect people.

If researchers show people on average say they do up their seat belts but are actually fibbing, lying, or mistaken, and don't actually do up their seatbelts properly, then, yes, it does show seat belts fail to protect people.

But more importantly: it says, you can't trust people when they say they do up a seatbealt.

Which is where you and your analogy fall flat on the face.

It doesn't physically effect other people (much), if you fail to put on your seatbelt, and you lie about it -- you're hurting yourself.

If nobody follows the scientific method, or implements appropriate statistical procedures -- then they are generating garbage, that other people might accidentally rely upon.

Showing people don't actually follow the scientific method, is pretty much as good as showing the scientific method doesn't work.

Not the method is not valid, BUT: because people can't (or don't) actually follow the method, even when they say they do: AND, there's no method available of keeping people honest.

At least with the proper doing-up of seatbelts, there are police officers, to monitor, and enforce it in some cases (people still often don't wear their seatbelts) -- with scientific method implementation - not only is there no enforcement, but there are practical barriers that make enforcement, or reliable fraud detection, essentially impossible.

"Flubbing" of results was considered kind of, you know, ordinary, and if you didn't get what was expected, well, you were expected to just kind of ignore it.

See... research teams should have separation of duties, to avoid the temptation to cheat. The scientist does the experiment, someone else takes the measurements, someone else records the results, and enters into digital format; which quickly become immutable, digitally signed and timestamped; with noone taking or recording measurements allowed to be the people that know exactly what that measurement "is supposed to be".. finally, an independent auditor monitors, and signs off on the results.

The peer review journals then require the scratch sheets for each trial of the experiment, as signed off by the auditors and measurement takers :)

I'm just saying these people sometimes get away with doing an extremely poor job at documentation.

They're not the only ones... it happens in IT a whole lot, as well.

Right, but they are utilizing the scientific method to test the quality of published papers

This could turn into a study on... what is the quality of published papers/ ? :)

If studies show, that studies are meaningless -- eg if it becomes shown that very often, the scientific method has been ignored....

Then the scientific method is effectively shot, not because it's invalid, but because it's not being followed, and it becomes no longer reasonable to believe researchers are following it

We have discussed here before the problem of too much content being generated and not enough people to peer review it all. Still not a failing of The Scientific Method.

The article's headline text is a demonstration of that issue of too much content and not enough peer review :)

This is why we'll have to be careful once the scientists get off their lazy butts and give us hyperdrive. There you are, zipping along, and all of sudden, "chomp," you get eaten by an uncharted black hole. :)

There isn't such a high density of black holes that the risk would be that high.

Assuming your hyperdrive equipped vehicle still has to obey the laws of physics... the gravitational forces exerted by any celestial object, including dark matter, could be a risk.

Specifically... the risk of crashing into solid matter that doesn't emit or reflect light.

That is called deduplication and most modern SAN systems have this feature. You can have both thin-provisioning and deduplication for increased savings.

It's true that SANs have deduplication functions, but there are a few problems with SAN deduplication -- the main one, is this typically operates on a 'volume', LUN, or disk level. A SAN can't deduplicate data stored across storage systems, so there are scalability limits.

That is this doesn't scale very well to large numbers of volumes, with intentional duplicates for performance... and when you need to make backups of the filesystem, there is a tendency of the backup or replication target to Re-Duplicate the deduplicated data.

An application that actually implements this functionality can achieve far better characteristics than a SAN is capable of, because the application would be aware of consumers of the data, and logical pairings.

And at lower cost, by using non-specialized storage hardware

There are perhaps 2 SAN vendors out there with a scalable dedup option, and they are both very expensive per GB of storage options that would not be a very tenable thing to base a free service off of.

That is, the dedupping SAN vendors charge 10 to 20x as much per disk drive of a given capacity, than you can buy off the street, and claim efficiency, lower cost, lower power consumption because dedup means you get twice as much storage.

(E.g. SANs are expensive, and the storage vendors want to reap profit advantages by selling dedupped storage, for more, as well... which can be as much increase in cost as dedup supposedly saves)

That is a good description of data compression

It's not exactly the same as compression, because compression is a bit more of a flexible concept. Data compression can leverage some similar concepts. In fact, if they divide files into 4K blocks, they can choose to compress separate blocks they store, as well, or make a decision to compress or not, based on the ratio of size reduction.

Any sufficiently strong encryption algorithm produces a bitstream which is virtually indistinguishable from random.

This is true, but it would be unusual for someone to include large encrypted files, as encryption is inconvenient and difficult for the end user as well to work with at well -- normally there would be no reason to encrypt media, software, that other users would have in common.

This method could still be useful on DRM encrypted materials such as eBooks or DVDs, since multiple people would have the _same_ ciphertext.

I'm not sure of what their service policies are -- it might very well be a violation of their policies to upload large encrypted files, in which case, they could recover space from unexpected resource hoggers dedup doesn't work on, by terminating the offending accounts of people uploading encrypted blobs.

Depending on the backend SAN he has, you can use thin-provisioning since there will not be a demand from all users for the entirety of their storage immediately.

He also doesn't need thin provisioning, to have a file system smaller than the capacity promises.

It's very possible also, the storage organization is not just your files uploaded stored on a filesystem verbatim.

Your files, might, for example be divided into 4K or 8K chunks.

And each 'chunk' instead of each file, might be persisted to a file on a filesystem/volume somewhere, with a "chunk ID" based on a crypto hash of that chunk, placed in a directory based on its ID; different pieces might be on different volumes as required.

There may be a database table indicating what files you have on your account, and what "chunk IDs" in what order belong to the files you uploaded.

Chunks might be identified by checksums, so if you have two users with a very similar file, or a very similar 1K, 2K, 4K, or 8K block. The different users' files will share the exact same "chunks".

Instead of having to store the same exact chunk multiple times.... then you increase an "in use" counter on the chunk, and have records from both separate user accounts pointing to the same "chunk"

The result is... you could upload 50GB of data, but use zero, or very close to zero extra space on the server --- as long as all the files you uploaded, are identical or 99% the same as some file uploaded by a different user of the service.

You're also in trouble if you mistype your e-mail address.. you'll have to register all over again.... Personally I use a password manager to generate and save a secure strong password, anyways, so I don't type it in the first place.... :)

I'm not concerned about determining when, myself. My assertion was only that it was possible.

If you can't even describe how it would be possible for someone to determine; then you may assume that it is impossible to determine.

And if it's not possible to accurately measure whether a corporation is evil or not, then it's irrelevent, and the distinction doesn't really exist :)

1) You started when you were very young. Very young is when most people pick up new interests

Yep... your chances are probably better at getting the kids involved in gaming with you, if they are of sufficient age to play. However... they may also quickly become better at the games, and think you're no fun to play with, because they win too easily :)

Unique games, that you both will be about equally good at, assuming neither of you played the game before. In other words: play in a game you haven't played very much, so you will not be appearing to have a great advantage or be the untouchable game-expert, so in fact, your spouse has a chance of being the better player at the game early, even if you do your best.

Things that resemble electronic versions of traditional games; such as Chess, Monopoly, Risk, board games. Turn-based games that are highly strategic, and require understanding of the rules, the specific game, or mathematics, to have an advantage.

These provide you less advantage, due to your experience with games that allow players to level high dexterity attained playing previous real-time/ shoot em up games to obtain an advantage.

It's certainly no fun playing a game you are relatively unfamiliar with against an expert player, who has been exposed to games of that sort for years.

So pick a genre you are less familiar with, or more uncomfortable with :)