hect0r

What ever happened to those?

And who here was on Altos?

Cloudant and MongoHQ are both pretty good and cost-effective. It would come down to DB preferences -- CouchDB v MongoDB.

I would put my money on Cisco. They have been trying to reinvent themselves as a cloud company and clearly their financials show declining margins on hardware as the market shifts to cloud. Their intercloud announcement is interesting but not real yet and I think a Rackspace acquisition would give them a serious boost just as the SoftLayer acquisition by IBM has really accellerated IBM's move into cloud services.

The other possible buyer could be EMC -- for similar reasons -- but I would definitely think Cisco would be more likely.

Yes. This is also quite common with Arabic and there are a number of online Arabic courses that use Skype (for example) as the means of communication.

Freedom of press and freedom of speech are complete red herrings here.

DO is a private company and they are free to agree to whatever they want in their contracts. They don't owe anyone any obligation other than to adhere to the agreements they form with their customers.

All DO are asking the blog author to do is to just honour the Terms of Service that he himself agreed to. I don't see any controversy here; it is all very simple.

Maybe, the blog author is attention-seeking and trying to manufacture outrage by trying to cast himself as a "victim". The real victim, if there is one, is the Googler who has had his conversations in a closed forum relayed to the world and editorialised by someone who obviously didn't explain his true intents. Anyway, if the blog author disagrees and doesn't feel that he wants to honour his contract then he can just move his blog or, as DO suggest, launch legal action and get an injunction. I suspect though he will just skulk off and look for some other controversy to rant about.

It is probably true if you consider SoftLayer and the number of websites they host. I think sites hosted by AT&T are also based on IBM Cloud.

Interesting. Who published it prior to Aleph One?

It would be interesting to see what would happen if Microsoft/Apple moved beyond Google to target IBM.

The orthodox belief you state that Jesus is the same as God is basically equivalent to the Hindu belief that their various gods are just different facets or aspects of God (with a capital G). If Christianity is monotheistic then, by this definition, so is Hinduism.

As for veneration of saints and relics, then anything that worshipped is a god and asking for blessings, intervention in worldly affairs, etc are all acts of worship. So when someone prays to a particular saint seeking something they are engaging a polytheistic act just as one who prays to an idol is engaging in polytheism.

I am not sure about Muslims worshipping Muhammad. Maybe in some polytheistic branches of Islam such as sufism and so forth which were themselves influenced by hindu/christian/etc ideas.

Right, however the Pauline creed places Jesus as divine alongside God. This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone. And predates the period you describe. Of course, Christianity has become more and more polytheistic over time and now resembles, particularly in the third world where saint worship and veneration of bones is common practice, a belief system that is only marginally more monotheistic than Hinduism.

Nowadays, the only two major religions that one can say are even remotely monotheistic are Judaism and Islam. The Islamic notion of "tawheed" (unity of God) being a good example of a belief system that is genuinely monotheistic.

Many Christian societies are also polytheistic. The trinity is nothing if not an expression of polytheism.

Neither pornography or booze are prerequisites for startup success. If someone has a predliction for either that they cannot surpress then I suppose this UAE the place for them.

UAE. Free market economy, law and order, easy air travel to anywhere in world via Emirates/Etihad/Qantas, majority of world's people live within +/- four hours of timezone, access to both low cost resources but also some highly skilled resources, etc

In general practice, you will find that doctors become less accurate as they get older; whereas in surgery, older doctors generally perform better with less complications. The reason is that the feedback loop in surgery is instant -- you do something wrong, you have to fix immediately -- wheas in general practice, it is often the case that the doctor never even knows of the prescribed treatment worked so the feedback is a lot "weaker". Therefore, I think Watson could be hugely beneficial and counter-balance the biases and decline in skills that plagues many doctors who work in general practice.

Exactly.

And let's not forget that Microsoft -- as a corporation -- as no responsibilities other than to make money for its shareholders and, as CEO, Bill Gates had likewise no responsibility beyond making money for his employers (i.e. shareholders). So talk about what Microsoft did or did not do is disingenuous since it is people, not corporations, that have moral or social responsibilities.

Therefore, what Bill Gates has done is extremely praiseworthy as he has spent his own personal wealth and it is not diminished by whatever Microsoft may have done to give him that wealth.

On your first point about access to education being based on wealth: education and knowledge are products just like any other and cost money to produce. Hence, it is perfectly moral to charge for access and indeed it is necessary to ensure that others invest the time and incur the opportunity cost of doing things that further human knowledge. If we make education and all knowledge free, how do you propose that the costs of producing this knowledge are offset? Taxes? Personally, I would rather that research and knowledge is entirely funded by private money and the private sector than by government fiat.

With regards to your second point, failure to publish may mean losing your job but then that is because publish is part and parcel of your job. Failure to teach, turn up in the morning, wear decent clothes and a plethora of other things could likewise cost one their job but this still doesn't constitute coercion because the person is still free to work elsewhere.

As for your last point, I fail to see why this is an issue. Publishing is prestigious because it is a proxy for the endorsement of ones peers and a form of validation in an "industry" where there are few objective measures of a person's relative performance as a researcher. Maybe the issue isn't publishing per se but rather that journals are not exclusive enough and hence accept lower grade research. Maybe there is a market then for a journal to be even more selective -- and therefore even more prestigious than its competitors -- and by doing so incent a higher level of research.

Yes but did it occur to him that maybe the only reason such journals exist is because they are commercial enterprises?

It is also a fallacy that they are giving it away. They must be deriving some non-monetary value from doing it else they would not do it since they are free to decide not to publish or select a particular outlet. The fact is that authors are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in a journal.

I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content since all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper authors, seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion. The authors of papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in such a journal and do so willingly and fully aware that someone else will make money from the work via selling subscriptions etc

A better idea would be to invest the effort and money in building free alternatives based on alternative business models and working out how to incent authors to use them. This doesn't involve the breaking of any contracts or dishonouring agreements and is actually addressing the root cause rather than engaging in journal by journal skirmishes.

Even if that is true, it doesn't change the fact that when the person's own family and friends are not discussing this matter, it doesn't behoove a stranger (more or less) blogging about it. It just strikes me as being in bad taste.

By his own admission, he had only had "dozens" of emails with Jody over a few years and wasn't a close friend. Given Jody's family and close friends haven't spoken on this topic, I still consider the internet pontification of someone with only a sparse email-based connection to Jody to be speculation since he presents absolutely no evidence to support his allegations nor is there any corroboration from those with a confirmed connection to Jody.

This seems to me to simply be a gratuitous speculation on Jody's death with no other purpose than to try and generate traffic by appearing to be some sort of brave, dissenting voice. It is completely unnecessary and in bad taste to pontificate on his cause of death and, even if it was suicide, I really struggle to see the benefit of discussing what is ultimately a private matter for his family.

The argument that discussing the circumstances of Jody's death is necessary because there is a systemic issue of founders killing themselves is outrageous and an insult to the reader's intelligence. Is there any evidence at all that founders are more likely to kill themselves than, say, the unemployed or indeed any other vocational group? Sure, being a founder is stressful but then so are many other vocations in life...

I agree.

It would be better of this content was anonymised so that it cannot be associated with the participants since the names of the people involved are, for the most part, irrelevant to lawyers who need to read this content.

As for the costs, then charging for it does provide a barrier to entry that would hopefully dissuade people from using it for nefarious purposes. A better model would be to recognise that the 'owners' of this content are the people involved in the case and perhaps allow them to license the content of their case and derive income from when it is used. This would address a large number of issues that exist with this system, including privacy.

A marriage is a private contract between consenting parties just like any other. The state should not get involved.

The fundamental question is who decides what is a public record and what is not? Why are your medical records private but your ex-wife's court-room accusations that you were sexually promiscuous, impotent, or secretly homosexual to be considered public records that must be "freed"?

So what about when Joe's colleagues circulate his divorce case details around for a laugh or, worse, to character smear the guy to damage a promotion or gain political points in the workplace?

Why do people believe that this data is a "public good"? In the case of disputes between individuals, such as divorce, I do not accept that this information belongs to the general public and must be "emancipated". On the contrary, I believe that this is owned by the individual participants in the case and not the government or public. Only if they collectively agree to publish this material should it be available in public. There is no moral justification for the wholesale distribution and publication of material relating to other people's private lives and affairs.

We are talking about divorce cases (amongst other things). These should be private matters and there is no public benefit in this being made available for free via Google. To take your argument to its natural conclusion, all your interactions with publicly funded entities should be freely available as well. For example, maybe your medical records, your school transcripts, transcripts of complaints made to police about you, etc.

I think most people who are lionising Aaron's efforts in "freeing" the PACER data really do so because they are in love with an idea rather than because of any considered assessment of the value (and harm) that this content could bring if made freely available.