First of all, as someone who's work in parallel computing for a while, I think it's actually quite hard to define tasks that actually have value that can be broken down into such small and easy sub-tasks. And within the set of problems where you can do that, there is a pretty large overlap between what a completely untrained person can do and what a perl script can do. So the whole idea of an army of anonymous random humans adding microvalue that adds up to big value is problematic for me. Maybe there is theoretical value there, but so many things could go wrong.

Secondly, if you can clearly define a task like that, and what it is worth to you, why restrict your solution to humans? Provide an API and let me try to solve it algorithmically. If all you care about is getting the task done, what does it matter whether I get it done with a dozen Indian subcontractors, a thousand trained monkeys, or a clever little genetic algorithm?

Actually you *can* do that kind of multi-dimensional filtering, equivalent to multiple AND statements followed by a GROUP BY. There are different data sets here, with different usage models. Perhaps most interesting is the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). Docs here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/data_documentation/public_use_microdata_sample/

PUMS contains records representing individual responses to the American Community Survey (ACS). These individual responses include detailed data including housing data (# rooms, heating fuel, property value, mortgage, age of house, etc) and personal data (family income, vehicles, employments status, # children, language spoken, etc). Now, ACS is a sample, not a full enumeration like the decennial census, but the sampling is done carefully in an attempt to be representative. Full record definition here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/data_documentation/pums/DataDict/PUMS_Data_Dictionary_2006-2010.pdf

Back to the confidentiality question: this detailed data is carefully altered to protect individual privacy while still being correct at an aggregate level. Here's what the site says about this protection:

"As required by federal law, the confidentiality of ACS respondents is protected through a variety of steps to disguise or suppress original data while making sure the results are still useful. The first means of protecting is the suppression of all personal identification, such as name and address, from each record. In addition, a small number of records are switched with similar records from a neighboring area or receive another collection of characteristics developed by using a modeling technique. Age perturbation is one example of procedures that disguise original data by randomly adjusting the reported ages for a subset of individuals. The answers to open-ended questions, where an extreme value might identify an individual, are top-coded. Top coded questions include age, income, and housing unit value. In addition to modifying the individual records, respondents' confidentiality is protected because only large geographic areas are identified in the PUMS."

That's right, and even at the block level data may be swapped around between block or obfuscated in other ways that protect individuals while still keeping the data accurate at an aggregate level. I know it is easy to be concerned about this when looking at it for the first time, but Census has been seriously working for years on how to protect confidentiality while releasing quality data at as low a level as possible.

The Census site has a little info about this: http://www.census.gov/privacy/data_protection/statistical_safeguards.html

But more relevant is this link to the American Statistical Association, which goes into significant depth on the techniques used to protect confidentiality: http://www.amstat.org/committees/pc/index.html

On this page http://www.fcsm.gov/working-papers/spwp22.html we find a working paper from the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, which has deeper details on actual operations.

From that page, the "Statistical Disclosure Limitation: A Primer" document has an interesting section defining inferential disclosure - "occurs when individual information can be inferred with high confidence from statistical properties of the released data."

And the "Current Federal Statistical Agency Practices" describes the multi-dimensional linear programming used to prevent that, along with other techniques including geographic thresholds, population thresholds and coarsening.

So the summary is: Yes, it is a serious issue to be concerned about, but Census is taking it seriously, applying some real science and math to it, and it looks like they are doing a good job.

Seeing a lot of discussion, but not much real information here, so I'll contribute.

For starters, here is the website: https://lasers.llnl.gov/

And here is a page of that site that has some explanation about how it works: https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/nic/icf/how_icf_works.php

I've actually toured this facility, and it was pretty damn cool. A few points that stuck in my memory:

The generally do one shot each night. They prep it during the day, then they all go home and it goes off at night with not many people there, because that's safer.

The electricity usage is intense but very short, lasting only around 20 billionths of a second. They do this by charging up their capacitors and then discharging them very rapidly. They said the air conditioning for the building actually uses more power than the laser.

They talk about the "seven wonders of NIF", which are seven advances in materials and technology that were made during the project which made it all possible. I thought the rapid crystal growing was pretty wicked. Info on them here: https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/seven_wonders.php

In the actual ignition step itself, while you might think you shine the powerful laser on the thing you want to heat up, that's actually not how it works. They have the thing they want to heat, and near it (like 1mm) is this little metallic trough thing. They blast the laser into the trough thing and when the light hits that it creates microwaves, and the microwaves heat the target. Of course by the time it's done all those parts are completely vaporized.

Also of interest, around April this year the place was shut down for maintenance for a month. For about two weeks during that period some filming for the next Star Trek movie took place inside the NIF facility. So check out the pix and see if you can spot the NIF scenes when the movie comes out. It does kinda look like the engine room of a starship: https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/photo_gallery/target_area/?id=5&category=target_area Obviously, the whole lab is full of nerds who like Star Trek, but they were not allowed to see what was going on.

Well said. Also, NIF defines "ignition" as "achieving nuclear fusion burn and gain", i.e. getting more energy out than you put in. They create fusion all the time, they just have not passed that breakeven point yet. There is lots of great info on their site: https://lasers.llnl.gov/

BTW, here is their actual message to the fans announcing their retirement:

http://www.cartalk.com/content/time-get-even-lazier

This makes me feel sad. They were a great part of Saturday mornings. I know they are up at retirement age, but I hope they find some other projects that help them share their wit and wisdom. Click and Clack Rock.

Can we call these "somewhere between PCs and tablets" machines "lap-tabs"? It's just snappy.

and Behold the Mystical Power of EXPONENTS!! Prepare to be amazed!! We will magically create numbers so big they are Unimaginable!!

Agreed.

There is great value in knowing which things we (i.e. humanity and the scientific community) understand and which we don't. To me this is the primary message and the joy of reading/listening to Feynman. Over and over again he sketches out what we understand in a field and then highlights the questions that remain, and shares his enthusiasm and wonder for those unanswered questions that are waiting out there for a sharp mind grasp. This focus on the unanswered question is what makes his work so inspirational. It makes you want to become a physicist so you can go out and solve some of those mysteries. And that also is what differentiates Feynman's approach from how science is taught in most places. It's taught with a focus on what we know, which unintentionally gives the student the impression that we mostly understand things, which is completely wrong.

On another note, as a computer scientist and architect of large systems, it is important for me to know what is do-able and what is not, which problems we have solutions for, which are intractable nonstarters, and which we have a chance to solve in the right situation with the right brainpower applied. The details of why are less important. For example, I don't need to understand deep crypto to know what we can encrypt the comms between these two components. I know it's a solved problem, what it can and cannot do, and that's all that matters to me. Put it in my toolbox along with sorting, hash tables, full-text indexing, AJAX, machine learning, and hundreds of other techniques, each of which is its own deep field, and I can use this knowledge to design systems with high confidence that they are going to work as planned.

...published in the 1960s and I don't think have ever really been brought up to date...

They have been updated. From wikipedia: "Also released in 2005, was a "Definitive Edition" of the lectures which includes corrections to the original text."

And the Amazon page says: "The revised edition of Feynman's legendary lectures includes extensive corrections and updates collated by Feynman and his colleagues. A new foreword by Kip Thorne, the current Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, discusses the relevance of the new edition to today’s readers."

Freedom isn't free! It cost folks like you and me.
And if we don't all chip in, we'll never pay that bill.
Freedom isn't free! No there's a hefty fucking fee.
And if you don't throw in your buck o'five who will?

If you don't throw in your buck o'five who will?
Ooh... buck o'five

Freedom cost a buck o'five

(please visualize this sung by marionettes.)
Parker and Stone 'Putting The "F" Back In Freedom'

Seems like this would have big potential for use in all-optical routing, but I did not see any mention of that in the articles. Any optical routing pros out there who can tell us if this tech is applicable?