HN user
I'm surprised no one has brought up lead - childhood lead exposure leads to more rash behavior, and the drop in teen pregnancy starts roughly when the first children who were born after the removal of lead from gasoline and paint started would have become teenagers.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/unleaded-gasol...
Incremental computation is an interesting idea, and could be very useful to big data processing. However, the particular incremental technique of self-adjusting computation has two big flaws:
- There is a significant storage overhead due to all of the data that is collected about the computation (the "dynamic dependency graph").
- It makes the assumption that if the input to your algorithm changes a little, the execution path and intermediate variable values will still be the same for most of the computation. This is not true for many algorithms you might wish to make incremental.
I'm not necessarily saying these issues couldn't be overcome, but a lot more research is needed.
For some other alternatives to incremental computation that avoid these flaws (while introducing other problems of their own), you could look into:
DBToaster: http://www.dbtoaster.org/ LINVIEW: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2588555.2610519
The car has many fewer limitations on its peripheral vision when checking hazards because it has dozens of sensors all over the car, as opposed to the humans' very limited eyesight.
Maybe these are personal problems? I use Google Maps on the web all the time, and have never seen it hang.
As for finding directions: there's a search box, you type in an address, hit the 'directions' button that pops up, and enter another address. I literally can't think of a way to make this simpler.
I agree with the overall point of the responses that Google isn't in fact evil to be doing this, but I want to disagree somewhat with one point - the idea that Google doesn't have any obligation to respect users wishes just because its a free service that no one is forcing you to use.
The problem with this is that Google's very existence makes it harder for similar services to exist. There are a few reasons for this, including:
1. Google benefits from economies of scale
2. Google benefits from having massive amounts of data to crunch through (for example, its hard to build a span filter as good as Gmail's without a training dataset as big as Gmail's)
Its kind of like the argument for the minimum wage - conservatives would say its not needed because you can just choose not to work for a company that isn't offering enough money, but sometimes you don't really have an alternative.
To be clear, I'm not saying that Google should break the law. Instead, I'm saying that it's clearly the case that there are some bad laws in the world, and that its perfectly reasonable for companies to engage in advocacy to have those laws changed, rather than just rolling over and accepting them, for example the way that American tech companies have been releasing reports on the requests for data that they receive from the government in order to raise awareness of the issue.
I'm not even saying this necessarily applies to this exact situation - maybe the laws in France that Google was in violation of are good laws, in which case hopefully Google loses its appeal.
It's just ridiculous to say that companies should always just do whatever government tells them to do without question.
So then I suppose Google should have just given in to the Chinese government's demands for censorship, or the US government's demands for access to private data?