They save social-security and Medicare money too, by not living long enough to draw down benefits!

As opposed to today, when... bureaucrats make decisions regarding my family's health care.

Here are the people who today control whether my treatment is covered: 1) the bureaucrats at the insurance company my employer chose; and 2) the bureaucrats at my employer who chose the insurance company.

Of course, if I'm rich, I can pay for anything I want out of pocket. That will be the same under PPACA, too. But if I'm not rich (and I'm not), it's bureaucrats deciding if I'm covered, yesterday and tomorrow.

I suppose it depends on whether a larger proportion of personal distinctiveness resides above or below the neck, but I would guess it's closer to a head getting a body transplant, than to a body getting a head transplant.

Another vote for Privoxy. I recently switched to Privoxy from Ghostery, and have found it much faster. The addon-based ad-blockers seem to have some overhead, because they have to traverse the DOM and generally interact with the browser's rendering pipeline. I found my RAM usage in Firefox significantly declined, and the browser got much more responsive, after I removed Ghostery. Privoxy does the same job in some fast C code that runs in its own process, outside the browser.

As a side note, it's the modern descendent of the Internet Junkbuster, so has been around just about as long as internet advertising has been.

To be more specific, the geometric mean has the property that a 5% change in factor A and a 5% change in factor B have the same influence on the result, regardless of their units.

There actually are rules on that, but in this case the firm winning the contract was technically a U.S.-based firm, which happens to be a subsidiary of a foreign company.

You could try to prohibit that, but that would cut out a lot of companies that often legitimately bid for contracts, e.g. Siemens USA is the American subsidiary of German-based Siemens. You could alternatively disqualify companies that outsource more than a certain percentage of their work, but that would disqualify a number of US-based firms, too, like IBM.

These kinds of contracts are supposed to be bid out to the lowest bidder.

If that actually happens: people complain that a company like Infosys wins the contract.

If it doesn't happen: people complain that the government is overpaying for IT services, and back up their allegations by quoting a much lower price someone in the private sector got (...from Infosys) as evidence that the government is inefficient.

I'm waiting for them to put out a press release when they hit 5x Linux market share.

They also have an abandoned/destroyed village from the area around Fukushima.

Now they just need to get Ukraine to let them drive the Street View car through Pripyat...

These days I don't think you really get sketchy points for anything in SF proper. Unless maybe you're living in an SRO in the Tenderloin.

All people who enjoy living in cities are hipsters? I guess like, 75% of Europeans are hipsters, because they prefer living in a nice part of London to some godforsaken suburb...

The parts of Oakland near the BART stations have undergone considerable gentrification over the past 10 years, and yeah, a lot of it is due to techies moving there. The area around West Oakland BART is nothing like it used to be, although some of that is also due to the area being less cut off since the demolition of the Cypress Street Viaduct. Uptown Oakland (near 19th st BART) is also pretty gentrified, again largely with tech workers.

Ah, good catch. In that case, if they aren't actually using existing wifi hardware, why pick that particular frequency range? It doesn't seem like it has particularly great properties as far as the intended application. Is it just due to regulatory issues, since it's in the mostly-unregulated ISM band?

When it comes to viewing the movement of humans through walls, there have already been infrared cameras for years, which in most situations will do anything this wifi approach can do and more. The only real advantage of this wifi approach is that it's cheaper, using ubiquitous commodity hardware.

So when it comes to government agencies, this doesn't really change the technological situation: they've already had the ability to track movement through walls for years. They're only restricted in using it to the extent that legal restraints are successful. For example in Kyllo v. United States the Supreme Court threw out a conviction that was obtained in part by using infrared cameras to look inside a home without a warrant.

Yeah, from their perspective individual inaccuracies aren't a huge deal. The only kind of inaccuracies that particularly matter to them are systemic ones that their actual customers, banks and lenders, care about. So e.g. if they were flagging large groups of would've-been-profitable folks or not flagging large groups of deadbeats, they might try to tweak their data-collection or score formula to reduce the rate of those false-positives or false-negatives. But that's all at a macro-level: much like Google, they don't care to resolve individual mistakes in a case-by-case manner.