mav3r1ck

The droughts are not one off, they are occurring with more regularity due to global warming

And the 2007-2008 world food prices were cause by this, not related to inflation at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_pr...

I think with both the gas prices and food charts (thank @cdtwigg for pointing out longer-term historical food prices) I'm sorry to say but this is an extreme abuse of statistics. If you extend the chart you linked to by exactly one more year-"BOOM!" just as I said about a barrel of oil* being the same price is was exactly 5 years ago. The huge drop in price resulted from a full-blown recession that would have been worst if the Fed sat around and did nothing.

*Price of a barrel of oil is a much more reliable measure because extreme environmental laws really get in the way of building refineries, which are also prone to being shut down, thus consumer gas prices are much more volatile than the price of crude. This reminds me that the price of oil is very strongly influenced by OPEC, so that is actually something I'd avoid looking at when measuring energy prices. Besides, oil is just one component of energy (although, probably the most important and largest one I'll say). Coal is still cheap as ever (discounting environment regulations) and natural gas prices has bottomed out due to fracking.

PS: Link is a little off still (missing ampersand between USA/Average)

Um, your link to gas prices show them going down. I don't consider that as "energy prices going through the roof", quite the opposite actually. By the way, a barrel of oil right now is in the same exact price range it was 5 years ago (go to Marketwatch and click 5-year price).

Furthermore, one would be hard pressed to claim a rise in food-prices resulted solely from inflation-- given the record droughts in America [1] and record fires in Russia [2] that devastated entire crops last year.

Please, for the sake of good argument, try to be factually correct when trying to claim others aren't.

[1] http://theweek.com/article/index/230673/americas-worst-droug...

AND http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_drought

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires

I think Krugman hit the nail on the head with some comparisons here, such as of being a bit-bug is no different than being a gold-bug and how money cannot stand outside the system. That's exactly what the value of money is-- it's other people's belief in whether other people believe in it, which actually is pretty much how social networks work.

The thing I never liked about bitcoin was the whole let's prevent inflation by not allowing the 'printing' of money bit that are baked into how the bitcoin supply expands. I don't see any reason to expound on that other than to make a political, rather strongly libertarian-leaning, statement.

Not quite sure what this article is talking about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems#File_syst...

I personally believe log-based file systems are a perfect match due to never saving the same file repeatedly to the same location (so provides built in wear-leveling) and one can optimize writes by always clearing the head of the log for the next write.

I'm surprised no one commented on the cost: 14,400!

Assuming they don't do job placement (didn't see anything about that) then this is a total rip off and is just some people trying to cash in on the data science fad.

Besides, they just listed a bunch of free resources that invalidates the need to go through them, so unless they offer job-placement in an actual data-science-like position, why waste your money on this?

Besides, 12 weeks reminds me of Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself programming in 21 days"

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

I really don't think Lincoln said that (assuming he did, Lincoln certainly didn't try to apply that to the question of slavery, so under what context did he say it?). My sense of history smell is calling shenanigans and a quick search shows it's one of those things that was probably made up as I couldn't easily find an actual source.

Sorry to be slightly off-topic here, but it grinds my gears when using a made up quote by someone famous who didn't say actually it (and never likely did historically) doesn't add any real value to a conversation.

Same problem as with airlines-- a toilet would probably remove 4-6 paying passenger seats, which means less money. Toilets don't generate revenue whereas seats keep paying for themselves many times over.

Actually, the different between fuzzy logic and probability is more than just notational. There is a nice table at the end of Section 8.2 (in the 3rd edition) of Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence book talking about the epistemological (what an intelligent agent believe about facts) versus ontological commitments (what exists in the world) of various "languages" (e.g., propositional logic, first-order logic, probability theory and fuzzy logic).

Taken straight from that table, here is the comparison:

Language | Ontological Commitment | Epistemological commitment

Probability | facts | Degree of belief \in range from 0 to 1

Fuzzy Logic | facts with degree of truth | known interval value

He was also smart enough to have hundreds of PDF documents on his work computer proving the crime at hand.

I think The Register might have had a valid scoop here because it's not like everyone reads Verizon case studies to get their news and it's similar to how the latest medical studies make the news rounds.

However, this is an absolutely horrible piece of journalism. What company is it? For all I know, this story could have been completely made up and it certainly lacked any sort of journalistic investigation other than to rip off the report.

@edw518, Awesome! Thank you for sharing what you're doing here with the data. I was thinking of playing with this dataset too and since I'm new to this field (data), look forward to learning from you if you post more info in the future!

Thanks!

This should come as no surprise to those that are familiar with MSR (Microsoft Research). I've had the fortune of visiting the place a few times and it is amazing, especially the people they get to come in for research (even the interns are geniuses).

Even if you don't know of MSR, this should be of no surprise if you have any recall of the news you read over the years. A lot of the work they do has appeared in the NYTimes and such. For example, I remember very clearly that about 6 years ago, Bill Gates basically said that robots are the future. It didn't take me long to find articles and website to remind myself of what he said (see link below). Although Bill Gates is no longer CEO, he is still chairman and you can certainly bet that MSR will be leading the way in this research.

http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/01/07/bill-gates-r...

The whole point of Monty Python's "Dark Night" sketch was because Cleese wanted to show the ridiculousness of the statement of "always persevere".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Knight_(Monty_Python)

I agree with your statements and am glad to hear you're doing well, but I think that sometimes, it is wiser to know when to stop and take a long, hard look at what you are actually best at. But at least most Silicon Valley startups don't make quadriplegics out of survivors.