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I think it's pretty awesome that you can fire up less than a movie ticket worth of computer via credit card and process something you'd never have a ghost of a chance to do on your desktop in a reasonable amount of time. And then do it again the next day. And the next day. Repeat until you have some useful output.

$10 gets you ~ 1000 hours on an EC2 Micro spot-instances. !!!!

Big data is a minefield of opportunity. Do go walk in it.

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>Repeat until you have some useful output.

Do you really think that's how useful work is accomplished?

The point of TFA is that there aren't as many problems in need of brute forcing as we'd like to believe. In truth, most important problems require intelligent and skillful analysis. Where computing power is truly the bound, it tends to be applied pretty quickly.

Most "big data" sets tend to be proprietory though, and not generally accessible.

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