Many universities already replace them with computers by making the test consist of filling in bubbles on the scantron answer sheets so that they can grade 200 exams in 2 minutes or whatever. I encountered this in freshmen chemistry at WVU. 20 questions were on the test so you miss 3 and you get a B. I'd usually get the long questions right and the short, easy questions wrong. But it was easy to have marked incorrect the entire 6 part chemistry equations (I forget what the actual type of problem was but I believe it entailed balancing out equations) by messing up the last step and getting an answer that was listed as a possible answer (multiple choice test) and fill that in on the scantron sheet. If the professor would ever view it though he would have seen that you got the first 5 parts right and just did a stupid mistake so he could have given some credit where credit is due, but not with the stupid scantron answer sheets.

With airplay and whatnot, the need to transmit analog audio and video is rapidly disappearing, which is probably why the new plug has nine pins in stead of the previous billion. It's been months since I used my cable for anything besides charging, and I really can't see what I'd want from it that USB + wifi + bluetooth can't already offer.

Apple has only within the last year provided sync'ing capability and software updates over wifi. Previous to that users had to use their charging cord to transmit data as well.

Let's face it: it's a money-making ploy and nothing more. It is of course entirely within their rights to use proprietary designs that way, but harassing people trying to adapt to it is not (or shouldn't be), and it is entirely within my rights to dispise and chastise them for it in any case.

It may have been a money-making ploy in the beginning but they have been gradually providing features to minimize the need for using the charging cord. And since they have allowed 3rd parties to develop docks one rarely has to use the charging cord for actual charging while at home/work. Because of wifi and bluetooth being utilized more and more by Apple, it's probably what has made it possible for Apple to reduce the pin count on the connector because it performs fewer functions. Whether they include an adapter for free in the iPhone 5 packaging remains to be seen. They might and if they do that will reduce the amount of money they can make. They can still sell them separately though for people who lose their adapters or who need extra ones. But Apple isn't the only company, they weren't the first, and they won't be the last to try increasing profits by making proprietary technologies. But like with any company who uses that mechanism for increasing profits, they have to be careful they don't go overboard like Sony has in the past with their Memory Sticks because that just alienates consumers. So far, it seems Apple based on their stock price that they found the right amount of proprietaryness to inflict on us.

By the way, people may complain about Apple charging more for accessories like charging cords but the cheap knockoffs that sell for $5-$10 compared to Apple's costing $20+ end up breaking soon after you buy them, thus necessitating buying another cheap accessory. So you get what you pay for when you buy the more expensive Apple branded products because they are designed a certain way and have higher manufacturing standards to make them last longer than the cheap knockoffs.

Homo Depot, Target, JCPenney and others actively give thousands of dollars each year in support of gay pride marches and indoctrination of kids and employees to accept the gay lifestyle. Gets boycotted. Chik-Fil-A (you spelled it wrong) CEO (not the founder, as you said) expouses his *personal* belief and the company he runs has an attempted boycott against it (but it fails) with numerous people coming forth to express their support for the CEO's personal opinion. Apparently people are no longer allowed to have opinions, or at least those that are in disagreemnt with the homosexual agenda. HOW DARE HE STAND IN THE WAY! At least he isn't actively giving thousands of dollars away to support his belief, unlike the companies I mentioned above. Thos companies AREN'T staying neutral and yet Cathy has been accused of not being neutral just by having a dissenting opinion. I'm not sure how one can only have an opinion and still not be considered neutral but that's the double standard traditional family believers have to contend with.

I'm continually amazed that people think that their viewpoint is the be all and end all viewpoint, especially when the viewpoint is being a proponent of homosexuality and gay marriage. Any attempt to dissent from being a proponent makes people start acting like the people on here: haters. They call the people homophobes, racist (?), intolerant, etc. but never stop to think that they are being intolerant just as much for not realizing that their opinion is just that, nothing more. I'm not sure if it is in inherent demand and assumption of the homoesxual community that 100% of the heterosexual population of this planet must agree with their lifestyle or if the homosexuals and their supporters just enjoy being outright angry and hateful towards anyone who peacefully objects to them, no matter the reasoning. And I think a lot of people who are offended at the homosexual lifestyle would not even be heard if it weren't for the fact that the homosexuals feel the need to thrust themselves into the spotlight and into the public view (they even identify themselves by sexuality first, rather than by race or gender, which is messed up), like they are the chosen people or something AND then get annoyed that someone decided to join them in the limelight by disagreeing with them like "how dare you choose to not accept my decision to be gay". Newsflash: you aren't special, you don't need a TLD, and not everyone is going to bow down to you so just get over it. If you go back into the shadows then so will everyone else. Don't try forcing people to accept you and then get angry when you encounter dissent; just live your life like all the heterosexuals do.

why not fuckyou.gays? The Saudis have every right to object to this just as the gays would have every right to object to a hypothetically proposed .gayssuckass TLD, and for the same reason. Will the Saudis win? Hard to say, but don't be silencing their objections and calling them names just because YOU disagree with them. That's intolerant to not accept that everyone views things the same way you do and no one ever said YOU are the authority.

For one thing, sites wouldn't be forced to use the new TLD so they would still need to worry about blocking individual .com sites. Secondly, giving an entire TLD to gays is validating/recognizing something that all religions consider a sin so that's why they object. And they have every right to object for their own reasons despite some people on here claiming that they don't. Remember, just because they object doesn't mean they will win. I'm unsure why people feel the need to give such special treatment to the gays to the extent of creating an entire TLD dedicated to them. Come on people. Why not also have .best (bestiality), .les, .trans (transgender), .whatevercombinationthey'llthinkofnext or are those considered to be arbitrarily bad and gay is considered arbitrarily good? When is this special treatment going to stop? And it *is* special treatment because they aren't proposing one called .hetero are they? Creating TLDs for the other topics mentioned is also stupid.

Seriously, you've not pointed out whats _wrong_ with your spreadsheets to help us make _any_ real suggestion.

There may not be anything actually wrong with their system; they just may want to make it better. People have been quite capable of making suggestions without needing to know what's wrong with their current system of spreadsheets.

Firstly your gunning to change a system which apparently works. This is asking for failure.

The fact the person posted on Ask Slashdot could be viewed 2 different ways, but either way makes you wrong. 1) They could be posting simply because their current system does *not* work and they want an alternative. There is no reason why one should think that wanting to fix what is broken is asking for failure. That's ludicrous. To them, the broken system is what has failed. The other scenario is that everything really does work just fine but they want to *improve* their system to make it more efficient or add functionality that just isn't possible or easily added with spreadsheets. There is no reason to think that this is asking for failure either just because they want to make it better. If that were the case then no one would want to improve anything because they would dramatically increase the risk of failure. Failure only occurs by not trying.

Where was the incompetence and greed? Explain your version of events to me. I want to hear if you are using an accurate representation of history to fuel your anger.

I'll add to your #2 item by stating that another reason they made sub-prime loans was because the individual mortgages were rolled up into mortgage-backed securities and sold to investors so the lenders were also getting money by selling them as bundled securities. This money from investors became an essential piece to funding the sub-prime mortgage boom. But please note, the investors aren't at fault here because they were just making investments in securities that they thought had little risk, just like they invest in other securities based on risk. It was the lenders who were making the risky deals with people who couldn't pay their mortgages AND because there were so many of them it began to backfire. Had the people actually suddenly been able to make their enormous payments or had there not been so many of them there may have been a chance at the investment banks surviving putting all their eggs in one basket, despite being told that the fact that these mortgages were bundled lessened the risk (it did lessen it but couldn't offset the fact that so many mortgages were made to people who eventually couldn't make their payments). It's unfortunate you were modded flamebait but as usual the truth hurts. But to be honest, I think jhoegl was kidding since admitted the loans were given to people who couldn't afford them. By the way, one of the good things that JPMorganChase does for people is they provide an avenue for corporations, who employ us, to make investments for their employees' pensions and 401ks.

Big data, and big data technologies may be a buzz word today, and you are probably right most people don't need them. However, Big Data is a very, very real problem. I design and run systems which crunch 60 plus gigabits of data per second. So no, a few "well crafted python scripts" will accomplish exactly nothing.

Agreed. The OP doesn't realize just how big Big Data can be, how diverse it can be (binary vs text, structured vs unstructured, real-time or historical, etc.), and how much can be generated each day if he/she thinks that some scripts will fix the problem. When companies like EMC, Splunk, LogRhythm, Tibco, Q1 Labs, etc. exist to analyze and collect data for their customers and they have to throw millions into R&D then you know it's not just a fad.

And how are we measuring the size? What sizes are measured for typical 'big data'?

You measure the size based on how much storage capacity the data takes up on disk. Usually it's on SAN storage. Big data can be any size but typically it is used for customer data that is in the terabyte range, which can obviously extend from 1 TB to 1024 TB. For one company 1 TB of data may be created in one day and for another it might take a year. But creation isn't the issue...it's the storage, analysis and being able to act on the data that can be difficult at those capacities. Why you ask? Look at my answer to your next question.

Are we talking about detailed information, or inefficient data formats?

Anything. When you begin talking about *everything* an enterprise logs, generates, captures, acquires, etc. and subsequently stores then the data formats can seem infinite, which is why it is so difficult to be able to analyze the data because there are file formats to consider, normalization, unstructured data, etc. to contend with. The level of detail depends on what a company desires. Big Data can represent all the financial information they track for bank transactions, the audit data that tracks user login/logout of company workstations, email logs, DNS logs, firewall logs, inventory data (which for a large company of 100k employees can change by the minute), etc.

Are we talking about high-resolution long-term time series, or are we talking about data that is big because it has a complex structure?

A company's data, depending on the app that generates it, may become lower resolution as time goes on but not always. It's big simply because there is a lot of it and it is ever-growing. The best ways to combat even searching against data sets in the terabyte and exabyte levels is to index it and to use massive computing clusters, otherwise you'll spend forever and a day waiting for the machine to search for what you need out of it. That also assumes the data has already been stored in an efficient manner, normalized, and accessible by an application intended to process that much data by companies who are in the Big Data business (such as my employer).

Is the data big because it has been engineered so, or is it begging for a more refined system to simplify?

It's big simply because companies generate so much data during the course of a day, month, year, 10 years, etc. On top of what they generate, many of them are held to retention regulations such as the medical and financial institutions for various reasons such as HIPAA and SOX. So when they have to store not only stuff that their Security team requires, their HR team, their IT dept, etc. as well as what the gov't requires them to collect (which is usually in the form of logs), it just becomes the nature of the beast of doing business. In some cases, like data generated by the LHC in Europe, it has been engineered to be big just because the experiments generate so much data but a small ma and pop business doesn't generate that much, mostly because they don't need it; they don't care about it.

It definitely is begging for a more refined system to simplify it in the form of analytics tools that are built to do just that. Of course, you need a way to collect the data first, store it, process it, and then you can analyze it. After you analyze it you can then act on the data, whether it is showing that your sales are down in your point-of-sale stores that are only in the southeastern US, or your front door seems to get hits on it from Chinese IPs every Monday morning, etc. Each of the collection, storage, processing and analysis steps I mentioned above requires new ways of doing things when we're talking about terabytes and exabytes of data, especially when a single TB of data may be generated every day by some corporations and their analytical teams need to be able to process it the next day, or sometimes on the fly in near real-time. This means software engineers need to find new algorithms to make it all run faster so that companies competing in the Big Data world can sell their products and services to other companies who have Big Data.

but here in north central WV (not in the mountains) we also received a little bit of snow in April, and we haven't had that in I don't know how long. In fact, I believe I had less than 3" of snow all winter despite the previous year experiencing about 3 feet so it doesn't mean anything. So yeah March was warmer than usual but April was also colder than usual. It doesn't mean anything. There still were days when the records weren't reached in March here in WV, records that have stood for decades but we came close to them. So if the record highs were set decades ago then what does that tell you about this year? That's right, it is nothing special. Obviously I'm extrapolating local climate to being global climate, but then again, so did this report when it collected stats for a single country rather than the world. Apparently it was just a bit warmer than it was 10 years ago based on averages and I know the report isn't drawing any conclusions readers will, including me. This data isn't anything out of the ordinary and never will be. There is no general trend as can be easily gathered by the data depicted in the top 10 warmest 12 month period in the US chart in the report.

why scientists assume this has to be a mistake rather than by design? Oh that's right. We are all mere beasts who therefore don't have any moral absolutes and who all share the same DNA because we supposedly all came from the same puddle of amino acids that came to life from a lightning strike (or was it a meteorite from outer space infected by the remnants of a supernova?) billions of years ago. Of course, there is no proof of any of that complicated web of ifs, maybes, must haves, probablys, etc. Evolutionists apparently never heard of Occam's Razor. I wonder who has more faith: the scientist who has to convince himself that all those improbabilities and guesses must have happened since he exists to even consider the possibility (despite no evidence actually directly linking any of these findings) or the Creationsist who believes that God designed and created everything and everyone (based on a book written by Man and whose content was handed down by God) and therefore rendered evolution unneeded? Which is the simpler theory? And which is chosen simply to avoid acknowledging a God exists despite being more complicated and unsubstantiated?

Just another example of our rights to search and seizure eroding away.

Based on what? Sentinel is an investigation tool, not a surveillance system. You may not like the name but this will help them prosecute and convict interstate criminals faster and cheaper because they will have electronic tools at their disposal to assist in finding patterns and links when a human can't.

There is no way to prove this theory. They can "think" it all they want but that doesn't make it true. What ever happened to Occam's Razor? The simplest solution is usually the correct one. In the case of human/Earth origin, the simplest answer is God. That eliminates the complex web of lies that constitute evolution and all the "thinks" and "must have been" that scientists have to use when trying to theorize how evolution supposedly made things the way they are. The "must have been" is only used when humans think they know what happened when they weren't around and need something to fit their theory. That's just arrogance. God, however, just created everything from scratch at the same time with no need for the animal kingdom to evolve. Simple. And how do I know this? I have faith...it's also the simplest solution. Can it be proven? I guess that's where faith partially comes into play. Scientists need just as much faith, if not more, in their own theories though. That's why we get the "must have been this way" because otherwise their whole career is demolished and so is their theory. I view everything I can see as proof such as gravity, chemical elements, the effects the laws of physics have on the universe, etc.