This is actually a great suggestion. If you are a dog person it can bring a lot of joy, amusement and companionship. The thing that sucks though is that they very short lives. My lhasa apso did live to be 17 years, but this is unusual for most other dog breeds.
About loneliness and losing people dear, my brother's friend's dad lost his parents, wife and son all at an unusually early age. I would have no idea how to deal with that.
Part of my commute involves walking through a public park and I've noticed that the people out walking their dogs seem to find it much easier to strike-up conversations with each other thank other park users. I'm not a dog person, but a dog might help Xcelerate's father make new friends, or at least acquaintances, as well as providing companionship.
I also agree with this suggestion. I know that battle grounds are drawn on the dog vs cat debate, but either/or would do well for most lonely people. My wife's grandfather died when we first started seeing each other; 5/6 or so (oops - I hope she isn't reading) years ago. Bizarrely, this was within a few months of his dog dying. He took that thing everywhere - snook him into hotel rooms, family houses, the golf club, trips abroad.
Dogs are amazing companions, however the long hours he works probably don't help, however he's probably working long hours so he doesn't have to come home to an empty house.
"Apple Inc. is in talks with Comcast Corp. about teaming up for a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast's cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web, people familiar with the matter say."
Wow, I can't believe how quickly and with such little fuss Net Neutrality was killed. Shouldn't it be highly controversial for Apple to be exploiting this situation?
There are some subtleties that seem to make this situation different than Comcast's strictly prioritizing some internet traffic over others. Apple seems to want to use the part of the pipe usually reserved for cable VOD. Though perhaps you could argue that separating VOD from the internet portion of the pipe (which has been the case ever since VOD existed) is itself a violation of net neutrality principles.
As you mentioned, a lot of people already have a problem with cable companies' VOD getting preferential treatment, but I think it's an order of magnitude worse for cable companies to then lease out the VOD bandwidth they've carved out for themselves to the highest bidder.
With this precedent set, Youtube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime could all end up paying a Comcast Tax to remain competitive with Apple. If that happens, all of a sudden there will be way fewer video or other high bandwidth startups, unless they're lucky enough to get sufficient VC to pay off the cable companies. No new Dropboxes or Vimeos.
Also, I think this situation is fairly different than, say, Motorola manufacturing set-top boxes for cable companies.
The Apple boxes will be sold in retail stores directly to the consumer, and are an attempt by Apple to create a Netflix/Roku killer. Apple paying a Comcast tax to gain competitive advantage seems to be a pretty clear violation of what Net Neutrality was all about.
So, because Netflix and Youtube get the same deal to compete w/ Apple, it somehow affects companies in the dropbox space?
I think there are a few things -- like video -- that are sensitive to latency and need consistent bandwidth. Most things aren't like that. Dropbox specifically was built to sync over slower connections.
I'm not sure how I feel about what Apple's doing here, but I know I feel differently than you do about the implications.
I guess you could quibble with Dropbox as an example (except when syncing with a new device, or uploading a massive file to immediately transfer to another device or share with others), but I don't think it changes my point at all.
In fact, it probably helps prove it by demonstrating the lengths U.S. startups have to go to to work around the bandwidth congestion created by the cable monopolies.
It also shows that the end of Net Neutrality will hurt innovation. Online file storage didn't really take off until Dropbox came up with a way to work around shitty bandwidth (as well as device interoperability). You claim that only a handful of video startups would be affected, but I bet the real number is probably in the hundreds or thousands, and many of those haven't yet had the opportunity to build a userbase big enough to pay a bandwidth tax. There could be countless other applications in VR, gaming, video, and who knows what other sectors, that are held back because of the bandwidth situation in the U.S, and an end to Net Neutrality would almost certainly make it worse.
Maybe somebody will point that out. I doubt the average person keeps this on their mind often enough to put two and two together, though.
I guess this was inevitable. If a business model is viable, someone is going to try and use it to their advantage. Whether it be Beats Music and AT&T Wireless' "toll-free data", or, well, Apple and Comcast.
I can only speculate, but as you may recall, Numenta abandoned their original, belief-propagation-based design, replacing it with a new one based on sparse distributed memory. Dileep had done a lot of work on the original design, and I recall reading that's what Vicarious is using, having licensed it from Numenta. So I think you can put it down to a difference in technical direction between Dileep and Jeff. As far as I know, the split was amicable.
Their marketing and fund-raising approaches also seem to be completely different. I think this was good for both of them, especially if Dileep is licensing from Numenta.
It seems like the two algorithms are very similar, but that RCN's represent information in a more continuous way. Maybe this allows for more flexibility? Do the sizes of the hierarchical / recursive chunks get changed over time now, or is it not a strict hierarchy anymore? Stuff is weird.
Depends on how you value your time. If you have time to spare, buy crappy old PCs with Vista license keys on Ebay, "harvest" the license keys, install a nice shiny Ubuntu and re-sell them as Computer (No Windows) on Ebay again.
Might even be that you'll get a better price for a computer without windows than for one with vista.
Windows Vista has higher system requirements than Windows 7 or 8. If it has Vista drivers, it probably has 7/8 drivers too, they're largely the same. Windows 8 only requires 1GHz and 1GB RAM. Rumor is that Windows 8.2 may drop that to 512MB of RAM to widen the potential hardware base for low-end tablet makers.
PG needs to automatically add a little "Paywall?" tooltip to Times submissions, because this comes up every time.
Just zap your cache, use Incognito, an alternate browser, search for the article in Google News, or, Gasp!, buy a subscription, and you'll be able to view it. They limit you to 10 a month.
I would also set him up on Skype so that you and your sister can interact with him in a personable way more often.