What exactly defines a "good place to build"? If you define it as somewhere with low flooding risk, low earthquake risk, low hurricane risk, etc., there are lots of places in the middle of the U.S. that fit that standard.

Most of those places no longer exist. They blew away back in the 1930s, or had their milkshake sucked out by Homo Hoover.

Certain aquifer zones in the High Plains Aquifer System are now empty; these areas will take over 100,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall.

So your property is cheap to insure, but your futures contract on bottled water breaks the bank. Nice solution.

It's been so long since Google moved the bar on search in a substantive way, I've begun to wonder if they still hold true to their original vision. It was something about indexing and knowledge.

Does it take a miraculous growth spurt of Wolfram Alpha to remind Google that innovation is still possible, fifteen years later? No matter if you burst onto the world stage shaming Picasso, any corporation that sits on its hands long enough eventually becomes part of the problem.

For a while Google was so good one almost believed their principal technology was a time machine. Lately I'm beginning to wonder if the time machine has its dial permanently welded at 2010.

All Shuttleworth had to do was to put some logic into the "upgrade" box that warned people away from Unity whose present system configuration indicated that Unity couldn't possibly amount to a preferred experience at that stage of Unity's evolution—if ever.

Timing the introduction of Unity around an LTS on the old Gnome with an extra year of support would have gone a long ways to keeping some of us old farts in the fold while the new world order shook itself out.

No, the flow of traffic changed from driving on the right to driving on the left without so much as a single advance sign, or a well-marked alternate route driving on the accustomed side of the road. Also changed were the width of the lanes, clearance height on the underpasses, and the legality of making a left turn at a red light (which used to be a right turn), with no posted warnings.

Those of us driving larger loads were blind-sided and left to fend elsewhere, as fast as our little feet could take us there on short notice.

stuff rammed down their throats willy

I see you can't resist a willy goad. Shuttleworth goes goatse, and that's what cries out for comment.

their methodology results in a pretty pricey setup

You're being pedantic in a way that's annoying and counterproductive, unless you're the kind of person who wallet thickens on discovering the following tidbit:

Audioquest Everest are the most expensive speaker cables in the world at over $21000 for 3m.

Oh come on. This does not properly belong in the category of "speaker cables". If it did, "taking a step back" would land you this:

Pear Cable Corporation's ANJOU Speaker Cable, a 12 foot length of which retails for $7,250

These aren't products, they are honeypots of rarefied nonsense. Navy Investigating Bills For $660 Ashtrays, $400 Wrenches:

The Navy is investigating bills from Grumman Aerospace Corp. to determine why it was charged $660 each for two aircraft ashtrays and $400 each for two socket wrenches.

The costs of the parts, manufactured by Grumman, were revealed during an inspection this month, said Cmdr. Tom Jurkowsky, spokesman for the Pacific Fleet Naval Air Force.

Burch said the Navy officers who authorized the purchases would be disciplined and possibly dismissed.

First cross off anything that will get you disciplined or possibly dismissed, then take a step back toward the sane center. Is that so hard?

I don't build as many boxes as I once did, but it only takes a couple of hours a year to stay current if you know how to parse the tea leaves, and you pick a up quick booster shot from Ars Technica System Guide: July 2013.

When I've purchased bundled systems, I usually discover surprising limitations and short-cuts down the road unless one pays the insurance premium of buying twice the box you really needed.

Apple has a tiny product line, so at least with Apple any warts are soon well known, until the day comes that they change the software underneath you and deprive you of features you had come to depend upon, with little warning and no public rationale. Welcome to an ecosystem with benefits you can't refuse.

Traffic analysis is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication. It can be performed even when the messages are encrypted and cannot be decrypted. In general, the greater the number of messages observed, or even intercepted and stored, the more can be inferred from the traffic.

The primary filter has always been traffic analysis. It constructs the social graph. I've heard that's worth something. An otherwise valueless company seems to trade on it.

Traffic analysis is what one can do effectively on a perversive scale. It puts the "focus" into focused intelligence, which would otherwise amount to extracting needles from haystacks concerning the detection of novel threats. Indeed, often the forest is worth more than the trees. The bits of business of an individual life are often less easy to read than a person's extended social footprint.

Fu..hrermore, in an electronic society where six degrees of separation is an overestimate by half, is there anyone in the population less secluded than a junior wife in a Mormon splinter town who couldn't be painted as a threat for having crossed digital paths with at least three shady characters over three decades of normal living?

The social graph colours all nodes. Does anyone think that members of the judicial oversight committee are required to bone up on Turing's use of log probability to establish meaningful discrimination thresholds?

Consider the four principal categories of metadata:
* who
* what
* when
* where

Looks harmless to me. What goes under "why"? Anything their little minds decide to write down.

Who: public school teacher
What: google search for "pressure cooker"
When: yesterday
What: google search for "backpack"
When: day before yesterday
Where: domestic residence, Springfield

Yet again, the metadata paints a compelling picture: moral turpitude. What could be more obvious among a law enforcement community prone to the syllogism that "I don't like the look on your face" equates to "disturbing the peace".

Checks and balances? Guess what? Metadata signs all cheques.

It was delayed a year and performed like shit on PC when it was released. GTA was originally a PC game and they have been treating PC as a second class revenue stream lately.

FTFY.

The gaming industry has sensation seekers over a barrel. You're only satisfied with the latest and greatest, and you probably value being there and part of the crowd when it happens.

The primacy of first class revenue streams is not going to change until movies earn more revenue not on the opening weekend, but the weekend after—supposing it doesn't suck.

The new shiny! Ready, set, go ...

That group experience is what they are really selling here.

GTA was originally a PC game

I imagine you originally fed yourself by sucking on your mother's tit. What changed your mind?

This would be no guarantee of security at all, since it would mean that the email service has everyone's keys and can decrypt everyone's email.

FTFY. The game theory matrices are completely different for capabilities routinely exploited or just held in reserve.

Such an approach would shift the risk profile from ad hoc to systemic. The major surveillance powers actually do manage not to blab everything they intercept onto public networks, which is is not guaranteed with ad hoc interception. There's that word again.

I really wish we took more of a belt and suspenders approach and encouraged encryption at multiple levels. That will never happen if we continue this business of casually equating insufficiency with irrelevance. Wouldn't it be nice if clear text didn't flood onto public wires at the first transient misconfiguration of the The One Armoured Pipe To Rule Them All?

What you seem to mean is that it will change hardly anything from the perspective of the people already supporting or enhancing ZFS.

One would hope that this nice umbrella will evolve into a single point of access to learn about the major initiatives planned or in progress. Sometimes these things turn into just another layer of non-information.

Especially if existing developers perceive the addition as not amounting to change.

but I doubt there will be a perfect automatic speech translation in place that can immediately translate

No, not immediately, unless you count five minutes later and semi-automated as close enough. Man, do you ever underestimate the scope and resources of the surveillance-industrial society.

Not only do they have human ears for every language of the world on tap, but probably also strange fish who speak seven different conlangs, some of whom can place your Klingon dialect to America, central Europe, or Japan. These are the kinds of seriously strange people who inhabit comic book shops.

How quickly your call percolates through this system depends on precisely what shit list you're on. It's nothing more than a routing problem. At the highest level of alert, I would guess an unintelligible fragment is dispatched within fifteen minutes to enough desks to cover 99% of the world's spoken languages. And if that verdict isn't clear, another 30 minutes later they've covered Basque, Sindarin, Klingon, proto-Semitic, Esperanto, and Hungarian pig Latin. Obviously they can't route more than a tiny fraction of what they capture through the cauliflower-ears switchboard. Nevertheless, what gets expedited doesn't stand a chance unless so peculiar that it's permanently archived in the bootstrap corpus of automatic speech decoding. You better hope your off-the-cuff adaptations are incalculably different from your unknown soul-mate of cute obscurity who vanished from the planet five years prior.

At this stage in the process, they don't actually care if you're a terrorist. They care if you cast a large enough footprint of capabilities, connections, and motives to engage in terrorist activities, should you choose to take that path at the next spur-of-the-moment major life setback.

PhD in mathematics or synthetic chemistry? Strike one. Fluent in Farsi? Strike two? Too much money, or too little money? Strike three. Scuba license? Strike four. Longtime Tor user? Strike five. Loss of child custody? Strike six. Attend a Unitarian church? Strike seven. Caught exchanging short messages with another code orange individual, couched in a street slang that not even Henry Higgins crossed with a wind-talking Kimball O'Hara can decipher? Strike fifty-five. Congratulations, you've just a scored yourself a priority routing code on the cauliflower nexus for everything they ever capture that comes out of your mouth, which will be plenty, because you've earned a gold star for that, too.

The exact bumps and gradations within this filter-feeding behemoth have been refined with methodical vigour since about 1940, incorporating in their regression database everything that ever slipped through their fingers, where in retrospect the clue dawned either a little bit or a lot too late. There are small pockets of competence ensconced in these hidebound, dysfunctional organizations that would render Danny Hillis or Craig Venter the dumbest man in the room—or at least put enough fright on them to seriously consider the matter for the first time in their lives (perhaps excluding Danny's private lunches with Richard Feynman, or Craig's lunches near a reflective surface).

For the people who built this system, the Manhattan project was a one-shot dry run. Of course, any program on this scale that runs for sixty years with have more than the normal share of dysfunction, especially at the intake maw concerning the enormous flow of public funds, where the proud bow to the vain. My oh my, that can't be a fun place.

I bet the NSA has some seriously interesting psychological criteria concerning the men who ultimately take on these roles (the highest level of career functionary reporting to anointed bozos). That's one file the bozos will rarely see. The NSA probably has some internal Masonic order to guard over exactly this.

Make no mistake, though, it's a comedy of the hyper-competent.

Nobody goes on a modern cruiseship these days expecting to be "shipwrecked" or "Titanic'd" within the first hours of the cruise..

Certainly none of the people living in the Disney World bubble of credit card reward points.

The autonomous and self-defined individual goes through life expecting the unexpected, but then I suppose this type of person is less attractive to lying about in floating cocoons of immaculate white paint. We might choose a less passive adventure.

Dude! 1998 called. They want your guru stick back.

Someone mod that up to +15, just for old times' sake. Thanks for the voyage. You made my day.

There's no such thing as a universal all-efficient work flow. If the OS begins to dictate work flow (or encourage so strongly as to make departure a non-starter) then the creative world will balkanize into work flow camps. Within each camp the efficiency is great. But now you're not actually hiring the best freelancer for your project: you're merely hiring the best guy who has bought into your particular dictatorial OS. This is a loss of efficiency you can't directly measure.

A large pool of talented people offering services to an industry with many different work flow needs is necessarily going to have some friction where work styles clash. This is not an avoidable friction, without sacrificing as much or more than you gain in the larger efficiency of the skill marketplace.

Second, the very same system the creatives want to protect their own work (intellectual property law) has wreaked havoc on happy integration to no-one's great surprise. For portions of property law, we've figured out that the cure is far worse than the disease. But this is legal reform, not software design.

And even without that, the GPU vendors work hard to keep their secret sauce close to the vest, resulting in many of these GPU performance challenges because now the available drivers are determined by the ROI of the market served, and that almost always leads to favouring bland ubiquity.

So yeah, sell up the river everyone's compensation models but your own, and the world becomes a peachy place.

Exactly. This means that the data is bad and you can't change that. Period.

By the prudent norms of science, this is an excellent first approximation. For the first hundred years, the satellite data will support at most modest convictions. Our accumulated climate record will really hit its stride two centuries from now. And actually, from nearly every perspective of human progress, this represents a tremendous leap over what was known previously. Why should the earth's climate prove easier to decode than Mendel's peas? We finally found the actual genes and we're still pretty sketchy about how they really work. Complicated little buggers they are.

That said, the satellite data isn't actually bad, it just falls way short of historical norms of scientific prudence. We're stuck wandering around in the uncanny valley between one sigma and five sigma.

This doesn't mean society can't choose to draw a tentative, intermediate conclusion and act on that basis. However, the consequences of human political resolve are even murkier than the climate science itself, and the scientists can't help up sort this out, unless they have a giant boner for N=1. We have no control planet. Any choice we made can only be compared to counterfactual outcomes grounded in a proto-science itself still slowly gaining clearance from the null hypothesis on its major claim and with error bars a mile wide on the magnitude and immediacy and severity of the presumed effect.

I think we should be paying plenty of attention to the impacts of climate variability whether or not the cause is anthropogenic. Let's just not put the knee-jerk "all change is bad" types in charge who once decided that forests should never burn. Blockading change is change, too. One of the consequences of embarking upon a global economy is that you soon reach the situation where there's no such thing as somebody else's problem, whether the root cause is anthropogenic or not.

I have severe reservations about whether it's a good idea to instigate novel political initiatives on a global scale (e.g. abandonment of the hydrocarbon economy) against a back-drop of alarmist proto-facts. Much of the time our best, well-cured, time-proven facts barely suffice to move the political dial in any coordinated way. That's going to radically change over the twenty years? I highly doubt it. Of course, change has to begin somewhere, however bleak the early returns.

I was reading about some dude yesterday knowingly infected with HIV who had sex with 300 partners, none of whom he informed, and many he lied to. The ultimate self-gratifying scumbag. But what if he only worried he had HIV and never got himself tested? Would he still be a scumbag? Yes, I think so. Even if his worry is only 1.5 sigma? Yes, I think so.

But if Exxon has only 1.5 sigma belief that carbon emissions could prove disastrous, it's business as usual. "We didn't know!" Not with scientific certainty, anyway, which is unfortunately true. Any certainty worth having is late to the party. This is, however, entirely the wrong standard of prudence and concern. While 1.5 sigma is merely a proto-fact, not yet conclusively proven, it nevertheless demands proper consideration. Facthood in the moment is way too high a standard (and harlot to corporate convenience).

In retrospect, we will know the difference. Just as we do now about the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer. Whatever doubt remained about this in 1970 is now totally busted. We could confiscate their profits in retrospect. That would make them think twice about not knowing in the first place. I understand that it's bad form to suddenly shout "New rule!" so we could instead begin by suggesting that existing companies take out insurance against future confiscation of profit derived from embarking upon unproven, potentially destructive lines of business—as soberly judged by a future generation with a vastly superior knowledge base (subject to the same horrific political winds deflated by one percent, but as I said, however bleak the early returns, change must begin somewhere).

The corporations will complain about the difficulty of tying the incentives of their existing management to these adverse consequences far into the future (and so will the corporations refusing to insure them at sane rates while this problem remains).

That is a big problem. It's the big unsolved problem of the recent banking fiasco: the smart people who drove the economy over a cliff mostly walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars. I think that the people responsible for taking these risks should have their skin at stake until we know with high confidence, perhaps years later, they didn't actually sink the ship they were so well compensated to navigate safely.

I have a vaguely formed idea in my head that the amount of leverage a financial firm is permitted to take on should be tied to the length of time executive bonuses are held in public escrow against future financial calamities. If the firm subsequently mutters "too big to fail" while pointing at itself within that term, cancel all escrowed bonus payments for each and every bonehead recently in charge. The devil is in the details and there are myriads of problems with this, but it certainly rights the worst term in the equation as things presently stand, and that term proved to be on the order of a trillion dollars, so I fail to see how a serious implementation of this could lead us to being worse off (though no doubt we'll be told we ended up worse off with counterfactual vigour of owning the most expensive suit).

The governance of self-serving corporations in the public interest does seem to need a viable level of fact halfway between wild-ass-guess and scientifically proven against which to impeach their greed. The other solution, which seems to hold sway among climate scientists, is that we deflate historical norms of scientific certainty to serve this purpose in the delicate meanwhile. Proto-facts are the new king. Everyone line up to call the other side dunderheads for not bowing to your side's self-evident truths. Then complain when the public dials out with their hands over their ears.

I personally think that deflating historical norms of scientific certainty in exchange for a political outcome that won't transpire is badly judged. Do you need to discover the Higgs boson to believe in the standard model? Not really. Is turning every last stone decade after decade what makes science great? Absolutely. Science is like gravity: the weakest of all possible forces, until substance accumulates in due course.

Due course has no concern whatsoever about whether we need or wish to act promptly. Passing off proto-facts as real facts is weak-sauce science.

My preference is that we get busy strengthening our social institutions (rather than deflated them) so that we're better prepared to cope if/when climate change actually rocks the blue marble. This is the real work of the human species. Nearly every indicator of the best places to live are tied to the strength of a country's social institutions (e.g. adherence to and respect for the rule of law).

It's that old problem about awareness. The more you improve, the greater your perception of the problems as yet unsolved. For this reason, every generation runs around petrified that the whole process is about to switch gears and run backwards. But today's fear is bigger than ever before!

True enough. It's always possible that a black swan has photographed your generation's license plate. Just like the many Christians who believe in the second coming who expect it will happen in their own lifetime. It rather puts the long view out of mind.