By getting rid of the catalog, IKEA will save a big chunk of change. The C-Suite and VP who made the decision will get a big bonus too. It looks so good on paper!

Long after that VP has moved on or retired and the leadership has changed, years later the C-Suite will struggle with declining sales. They'll throw cash at more marketing, redesigned their website over and over, reduce staff, close stores, all without understanding the root cause. The C-Suite will even balk at suggestions of reintroducing the catalog, since the costs are too high.

It's just a short-term gain and most of the people involved won't even be around to see the long term effect!

Eventually, IKEA might even have to go public to raise capital and continue operating. An IPO will get a lot of attention, after all it is a popular brand. But this will only slow down it's inevitable decline. But at least someone got a bonus for making the decision.

I treat people with respect. But find it to be pompous and arrogant for an individual to try and appear androgynous, change their name to something non-gender specific, and then get upset when they're not addressed properly?

If it's difficult to figure out, he or she. Maybe we should try using dick or cunt. As in the vulgar noun. Or dick and cunt, since "they" might have both.

If "they" are offended by being called a pompous and arrogant dick, just change the phrase to pompous and arrogant cunt. Problem solved!

After a thirty foot drop to the asphalt, it would seperate into pieces. Find where the batteries went and put them back in. Find the battery cover and put it back on. Find the tape cover and snap on back into place. Reinsert the tape, press play, and it would WORK. This happened a few times. Mine eventually stopped working when the drive belt broke.

• 090-NNNN-NNNN
• 080-NNNN-NNNN
• 070-NNNN-NNNN

There are currently three cell phone prefixes. That's 300 million 11-digit phone numbers.

• 090-NNNN-NNNN
• 080-NNNN-NNNN

Land lines still use 10-digit phone numbers.

One additional point to consider...

Companies like Amazon are always looking to optimize their supply chain. If you take some daily use product like toilet paper, toothpaste, dish soap, or something. Amazon may notice that the sale of a product dips or spikes by 20% throughout the course of a year.

If Amazon were to pull in travel information, purchased from a data broker, they might be able to make a correlation. Which could help them understand why consumers do not purchase the product like clock-work. When traveling consumers may not be using as much of a product, or maybe they purchase more of it before traveling.

With up to date travel data, Amazon could accurately predict (and account for) some percentage of the dips and spikes. But not the whole 20%.

An individual data point -or- the data on a single individual is not that valuable.
When you have multiple data points on multiple individuals, trends can be interpreted.
With these interpretations, you could theoretically predict something. At least to a certain degree.
Even the most mundane data points, could help with these interpretations.

More data points, on more individuals, could lead to more accurate the predictions.

Companies are not looking to identify a market, they're looking to predict how successful some product will be. Basing their predictions on the number of individuals that have the right data points indicating specifically desired trend(s).

Of course there's a lot of chaos, noise, and randomness in many of the data points. While companies are collecting every data point they can, analysis is still a budding field. AI can help identify some trends, data scientists apply their own theories, all with the goal of predicting the future.

Box office records are an artificial metric. Designed to create hype, but it's not a accurate measurement. It counts the money, not the number of seats filled.

While there may be a small increase in the number of movie-goers every year, the next blockbuster movie will break "all the records" too. Ticket prices raise every few years, making it possible for this (movie) magic accounting outperform previous records.

Outside of finance, there are very few realistic use cases. Too many ideas focus on one or two features of a blockchain, distributed architecture and "secure". Often ignoring things like 51%, plain text data, or potential size of the blockchain itself. To be useful, a blockchain can only be successful when there's a tangible value in sharing the data. You can see a use case I put together here.

I often point out that a blockchain is WORM storage. Once data is written, it's there forever. In finance, every transaction is important to calculate the current balance. This leaves very few data sets where a value set today will be useful in 10 or 20 years. Even less, where it's valuable for others to access that data. But provenance is one of those data sets.

Tracking commodities, consumables, or other disposable data with a blockchain is foolish. Nobody will care about the ________ of their coffee after it's been brewed.

Clean as a brand-new installation of Windows.
I'm sure it will include all the annoying notifications!

Having contributed a hundred searches in the last week, it's another BAD metric claiming how popular python is.
Last time, it was that python had the most questions on Stack Overflow.

When a search does not answer a question, when Stack Overflow does not have the answer, it does not mean python is popular.
It indicates that python is the most frustrating!

I spent hours trying to get python to use syslog. Any may other languages it's simply syslog().
To do it with python, search for it yourself. You'll find a dozen ways to do it, but which will work for you?

Carolyn Meadows of the National Rifle Association (NRA), who is also and member of the American Conservative Union (ACU), gave the ACU's Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award to Ajit Pai.

The reason that Japan does it this way is, the Telecom monopoly breakup occurred AFTER the internet. The incumbent (NTT) had already built internet infrastructure, later it was forced (through deregulation) to provide ISP's with competitive access. AND the rules made it so "the infrastructure owner isn't allowed to run it's own ISP".

This model will not work in the USA, because the rules keep that coveted 'last mile' in private hands. Phone companies in the USA were forced (through deregulation) to provide competitive access to the old copper infrastructure, but the rules were too narrow. Only the copper infrastructure. So the BIG telephone companies have been removing that copper and replacing it with fiber. Eliminating competitive access to the last mile, since the deregulation rules do not apply to the fiber.

Sure, but which source of data presents an 'more' accurate picture of a programming languages popularity?

The percentage and growth of:
a. Developers asking how to do {x} in programming language {y}?
b. The number of unique public repositories using programming language {y} on a site like Github, Bitbucket, etc?