While Fusion 360 does have many non-NURBS procedural surfaces, they definitely also have NURBS. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to import an IGES or step file.
Using a solids kernel with procedural surfaces can help many cases, as you keep the modeling tree around and can recompute portions at higher tolerance as needed. However that's just another cumbersome workaround to the fundamental problem that the math doesn't have clean solutions.
I think a big part of why this happens is that a lot of the fundamental math of CAD doesn't have good answers - everything is heuristics and approximations to within a tolerance.
You can get a simple NURBS kernel up and running in maybe 2 dev-years. But getting good heuristics created for all of the common edge cases is what takes the huge number of dev-decades, and what you pay for with one of the commercial kernels. You won't even know what the common edge-cases are until you start getting user reports of things failing, so you'll need to be doing this development with a large community of users.
There is no closed-form formula to tell how long a NURBS curve is. Offsets of NURBS curves are not NURBS curves. Likewise, intersecting NURBS surfaces produces intersection curves that are not possible to represent as NURBS curves.
So something as simple as a fillet is impossible to exactly produce in like 3 ways. Booleans then add the joy of topology to the mix. It's all heuristics and approximations and dirty hacks.
I'd heard people say that the architecture of a city is usually frozen in the time when it had the most money.
If you look at the skyscrapers and other buildings from Zaha Hadid, they're not Art Deco. UAE and other countries which are currently building out significantly aren't sticking just to Art Deco. London is interesting in that they've had money pouring in for a long time, and have an eclectic mix of large buildings.
Last year there were 29,000 categories that could be targeted. If an ad sales rep wanted to close a deal, how difficult would it be to add one more for recent burn victims, or people who recently bought a specific product?
From the links that m_ke posted, facebook already has ties to loyalty card information, so it's very possible that they didn't need to do any inference, they just had the data directly.
In any case, the main point is that facebook doesn't need to listen to what people are saying, it has a ton of other data streams that could explain the stories in the link.
Facebook is amassing a huge amount of valuable information on every member.
I disagree that the threat of outrage is sufficient to stop the information being used badly. For example, there is outrage against Equifax, but their cache of information has still been compromised. We have seen data leak after data leak from various companies. If a country's spy agencies want to go after the data, they have a lot of resources, from hacking to legislation to physical intrusion or coercion.
Add to that, it seems like Facebook doesn't institutionally care about privacy (probably because it is hard to explain something to someone whose paycheck depends on them not understanding it). For example, http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com has some very damaging graph searches. Or people who have been outed as gay by incomprehensible privacy settings.
Facebook is a sieve, and the reason to care about them having a lot of information is the same reason to care about privacy in general.
Right, like the example from Target. It is possible that facebook has access to a stream of Target purchases or credit card purchase information. I'd be 0% surprised if there was a data sharing agreement with credit rating companies.
Even if they just knew the price of the purchase, combined with the job (burn risk) and location data (traveled from work to nearest store with pharmacy during the day), it's possible that you might be able to infer a burn with enough accuracy to be valuable to advertisers.
In the UK, some Amazon deliveries were sent via 'Amazon Logistics', which was usually someone in a little car full of packages. I think it's been going on for at least the last 3 or 4 years?
Using a solids kernel with procedural surfaces can help many cases, as you keep the modeling tree around and can recompute portions at higher tolerance as needed. However that's just another cumbersome workaround to the fundamental problem that the math doesn't have clean solutions.