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Comment Re: Good salary better than free education (Score 1) 552

Arguably as technology eats jobs, there are going to be a lot of low end automation related jobs. For example, right now if you can master a bit of SQL and pump out charts you can do a passable job in business intelligence without much problem. Not great, but passable. How many other roles are going to exist where the job is not programming so much as it is making data accessible to non IT decision makers? Arguably a lot. If these people have other strengths; having minimum proficiency in technology is going to take you a long way.

Comment Re:Zillow (Score 1) 32

As someone who works in the (Australian) industry and is familiar with the various sorts of rules engines and automated valuation models (AVMs) in use, it's really not that hard to predict the selling price of a *standard, boring suburban house* so long as you have a rough idea of the land area, living area, age, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. You then index transactions/settlements on other properties with similar attributes and get a range of likely values. When the figure comes back "spot on", it's more like that behind the scenes. Feeds of these transactions are published fairly widely, and it's easy to just index everything "just in case" something in the area transacts. Anywho: 1) Your loan to value ratio was beneath a certain level of risk for the bank 2) The range of values out of the automated model were considered accurate enough 3) Its often easier for a set of rules around lending decisions to mark you as 'acceptable risk' and display a matching figure to an end user/decision maker than to display a range or something a few hundred dollars off *if* you pose no obvious risk. Either that, or you had a contract of sale, so the valuation is only really agreeing your offer is reasonable. Where it gets interesting is when the housing is non standard - proximity to waterfront views, industry, rail, high value, weird zoning, etc - if there was anything like that flagged, people would be involved to get the 'ground truth'.

Comment Re:all this has been said before (Score 1) 403

I'll take a zooming user interface on the desktop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) - this already works quite well for things like google maps (more zoom = more information); I can see it working well for other things as well. I'm talking more about Jef Raskin's archy mockups rather than the current smartphone ZUI controls we get; which simply make text bigger without having other content available.

Comment Re:RDFa steamrollered by microformats then microda (Score 2, Informative) 71

I suppose what I'm frustrated by the most here is that an engineer behind the google news aggregation platform hasn't even look at what other ways to solve this problem are out there.

The link/@rel pattern fits this problem much better than a meta tag at the very least.

If you want to go a bit further; there are some fairly core vocabularies out there (DublinCore/PRISM) which describe a lot of what a document is and who authored it without much effort; and undoubtedly "googlenews:syndication-source" and "googlenews:original-source" could be put along side terms such as "owl:sameAs", "rdf:seeAlso", or "dc:source".
It's not like it takes much effort at all to render that; and it sure makes it easier for other platforms to extract useful content.

Comment Re:430? (Score 4, Interesting) 254

Also - think of the cost! I believe it was around $42 million set aside to implement such a filter - a hair over $100k per site. Are you really telling me that there is value in this? Are you really telling me that you could not put $100k under a police investigation per site in order to shut some of them down? I'm aware there was already funding for the AFP included in the initial proposals; but if you are going to do something, why not do it right? Give $42 million to those that can actually prosecute the offenders in some % of cases.

Comment Re:Some obvious observations (Score 1) 255

Additionally: It's called a justification. To do a project, you need one. If you do a project without one, it's pointless, almost by definition.

So, where is it? Where is a well thought out, rational perspective on why we need any kind of internet filtering? Where is the research or argument which demonstrates the positives, balanced against the negative?

I can't find it; and apparently neither can the pro filter crowd - so how is this my government reflecting the will of the people?

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