Posts by Schultz

Surface RT doing well?

"[...] revenue increase [...] attributed to Surface, and particularly to the 32GB model of the ARM-powered Surface RT [...]"

No shit Sherlock. They just wrote off USD 1 billion on their surface inventory. If they can't create at least a superficial appearance of success after this write-off, then Ballmer should be fired again!

"This is for life, this is for your grandchildren"

It was a definite eye-opener for me, when my grandma told me about 'how it really was' back in the times; your grandparents were no chaste angels 80 years ago, neither were your parents (exceptions do exist). Gives a somewhat relaxed point of view that cannot be obtained by any quantity of sex-education.

Not that this can - in any way - excuse the horribly actions of the boy.

Legitimate target

Some background information can be massively helpful to ensure cooperative behavior and is therefore a guarantor of peace and harmony (just ask Al Capone and his friends).

Based on the documentation series "24", a significant number of government officials everywhere are collaborating with nefarious terrorists. Hence I'd say that some surveillance is perfectly adequate.

What do you say, '24' is fiction? Well, now the terrorists had access to the series and know how to do those things ... and the Agency for Secret Surveillance of the USA (Ass of the USA) and it's partner ASS of the World will have to make sure it remains fiction.

Trolls, Trolls, Trolls. Don't overdramatize ...

The Chinese are surely aware that the US heavily spy on them. The NSA budget does give a little hint.

They would surely love to get Snowden, but they would just as much love to have any other educated NSA employee. Working with somebody else at Booz Allen would be much more discrete and there are surely some greedy bastards that are less principled (easier to buy) than Mr. Snowden.

Snowden also no longer has any documents. To get those the Chinese and Russians might try to go after the newspapers that have the documents. Or considering the excellent security of the NSA system, maybe they should just dig up a cable in Hawaii.

The US authorities try to smear Mr. Snowden and they try to build a case against him with hearsay and allegations. After all that Snowden did, I gotta say that I trust him to tell the truth (take that, Jake). Contrast that with the repeated lying of Mr Clapper and Mr. Alexander. Whom would you want as role model for your kids?

It's difficult to spend Google-scale amounts of money on fundamental research

Sounds like someone should finance some fundamental research to figure out how to finance fundamental research. It'll be a recursive project and if you do it right it can eat all the available resources.

Seriously, they should experiment with decentralized financing of research / development. They could offer prices for independent researchers (kind of like buying-out only the ideas you like), they could offer grants for people coming forward with good ideas, or they could follow the classic approach and just buy out anybody who develops a successful little company.

In the end, successful research is all about giving people the freedom to try out their crazy ideas and then to identify the gems among them. Picking winners is difficult, hence the top-down approach will only work for incremental (obvious) research. The big question should be: how can Google lower the barrier for people to try out their ideas -- and how can Google profit if someone succeeds with the Next Big Thing.

Dismal

The US attracted scientists for two reasons: (1) They have the biggest number of top scientists and scientific institutions, and (2) they were perceived as very welcoming to scientists and immigrants in general. Now they killed off number (2), the example here is just one in a long list of similar incidents. In the longer term, this will also affect point number (1) -- just look at how many of the top scientists originally came from abroad.

With their rising xenophobia, the US may well kill off its greatest source of scientific and economic success.

Have pity for the NSA

They have to spend oodles of money every year and they have to show some results for it. They did the 'snooping on terrorists' thing last decade, so the 'snooping on everybody and their grandma' thing was the only realistic (and obvious) target left.

What else should they do, ask for a budget-cut?

Just a few years in the land of the free...

When I grew up in the Free West (good old western Germany), I never would have believed that the roles might ever be thus reversed. There was an evil empire right next door and we all believed in the great and good US to protect freedom and liberty forever. And now the wistleblower has to run from the US to Russia to reveal the all-encompassing secret spying of the US.

Aaw, it sucks to grow old and cynical. Is it just me growing old, or has the world changed beyond recognition?

Storage of storage

I'd say that the storage location is much more important that the storage material.

Tungsten is well beloved for its high melting point and that seems to be the relevant property the boffins rave about when they propose etching of information onto tungsten. But if you want to keep stuff for elongated amounts of time, you have to worry about where to store the stuff.

St. Catherine's in the Sinai desert apparently has a good record on the order of millenia, mostly because it was far enough from the rest of civilization and those occasional wars didn't interfere with the storage location. For millions of years you should probably encase the thing in ice and send it on a loong-loong trajectory far away from our sun.

Who knows what kind of data they destroyed when shot that message capsule Tempel 1 .

Silkroad (or its decendents) is here to stay

Everybody involved should chill out a bit. So the police busted a major drug peddler and destroyed a drug market. But, as long as there is business, there are surely lots of others waiting to fill his shoes.

As long as people crave drugs (forever?), there will be drugs.

This is a war that could only be won in a totalitarian police state (although the example of North Korean indicates that a totalitarian police state may not be sufficient).

Beer: currently legal!

Numbers, Big numbers, and Random numbers

The article contains a not-so-smart quote from Kersti Hermansson "When you solve equations on the computer, you obtain information that is at such detail it is almost impossible to get it from any other method."

D'oh, when you solve equation on the computer you get numbers of arbitrary precision (it's a digital device, after all and it doesn't specify error bounds). Whether those numbers have any resemblance to some property of a chemical system is a completely independent question that is much harder to address. Once you properly consider the approximations going into most molecular calculations, you'll realize that the details are quite unreliable. The art is to ask the right question, a question that can be answered by a calculation despite the lousy approximations and despite all the wrong details.

I like the statement of Phil Bucksbaum: "Most theoreticians perform small-brain, big-computer calculations." The problems of this approach should be readily apparent.

This price honors the tools of the trade. Now smart people have to use those tools.

No reason _at_all_ for MS to buy BB

MS was not interested in buying a phone OS, they were interested in buying a competent phone manufacturer to complement their phone OS and to buy a strong brand name without any strings attached.

Why should MS spend money reviving an independent phone system that might or might not succeed? The managers at MS, just like everywhere else, want their own strategy/products to succeed, not to finance somebody else's. A financier might do the latter, hence the buyout of BB.

And for MS, the death of an independent BB is just as attractive as the success of BB under their tutelage might have been. Option 1 (let them sink) carries much less risk.

Corporate marriages are not made in heaven, quite the opposite. So stop dreaming and learn to live on the ground.