What seems to be missing is discussion of the fact that Google's customers are the advertisers. The search engine users are the product. To what extent does Google monopolize the sales of eyeballs to the advertisers?
And, if Google can't pay to be the default any more, and given that users are the product, maybe the solution is for the search engines to somehow pay us to select them as the default.
How about this. For each row, compute an 8 bit hash and write to a file whose name is the hash value. Now you have 256 files that you can dedupe in memory (and if not, use a 10 bit hash or whatever).
I don't think we really disagree. My point is that the market won't function unless demand can adjust to prices. Right now there is no mechanism to allow it and the market can't possibly work.
If there were, as you say, it still might not work. But there were a lot of pictures of empty buildings with lots of lights on, etc. so there are inefficiencies. And if customers were automatically switching off (or simply reducing their own usage) as prices went up maybe prices would never have gotten so high. Ideally it would sort of be a fine-grained "rolling blackout" where priority is determined by what a customer chooses to purchase given all the variables that only the customer is aware of. That's a functioning market.
I agree that it may be completely impractical to make it work for electricity.
It would seem that an important part of the "market" is missing, namely the ability of consumers to respond to price signals. If every customer could set a maximum price and automatically be cut off when the price goes higher then the load shedding would be automatic, with the available power going to those willing to pay more, presumably because they need it more or can afford it.
Maximizing vertical space is why I always put the task bar dock or whatever at the right. Plus you have less back and forth with the mouse because scrollbars are also on the right.
This is cool. I had a similar idea, but for spending instead of investing. It seems likely that, post Citizens United, directing your spending towards companies that are supporting politicians that you also support is probably more effective than making small donations or writing letters. When you buy a product, the political activity of the company that sells it are part of what you are paying for. If companies are going to play politics then let's have some transparency and let them compete partly on that basis.
Has anyone ever tried to sue the union for keeping a misbehaving cop on the street? It may be that they have to defend their members, but the union should pay for the consequences, not the citizens at large.
How about ssdnodes (https://www.ssdnodes.com/)? I've only used them for personal sites but so far, so good and it seems to be a good value. I also like webfaction (https://www.webfaction.com/). You get shell access but they manage the OS and provide a GUI for installing and configuring things.
> Automatic censorship of live feeds, how do you do that?
Make it live but with a time delay (say 1 hour). Allow .1% of all users to see it immediately. Add a Flag This Content button. Depending on how many people flag it, triage as safe to show/don't show/ask a human to decide.
I'm sure this could be refined. Maybe an hour is too much or too little. Maybe .1% is to many or too few. Also, over time you should be able to recognize groups of users that are better at recognizing different problems based on the fact that they agree with the human review done by fb or whoever.
I was told to assume $350/square foot for new construction here in the East Bay by a design/build firm I contacted recently. So a typical 2000 sq. ft. home is $700K just for design, construction, and permits, plus $300K for land if you can find it. So it seems more like localized inflation to me. Architects and tradespeople need to pay to live here too. Plus requirements due to seismic and fire hazards, insulation requirements, etc. add to costs. Now solar panels will be required as well.
IMO prop 13 worked out really badly but it isn't the main cause of the problem, just one more giant expense for the new homeowner on top of everything else.
I wonder how it really works. My first thought is to have a dedicated credit card used only to pay for my google services, kept in a drawer at home (and not uses for any other online service) and therefore unlikely (less likely?) to be used fraudulently. But I have three cards known to Google Payments. If any one of them has an issue would Google lock my account? I hope not.
Yes the mechanics of handling a message or posting or whatever is understood at some level by everyone and perfectly acceptable. What's troubling is that they associate all of it and more with a cumulative collection of information about a "persona" that is essentially permanent, and in the majority of cases they know who that persona belongs to. The individual concerned has no control over it. Further even FB et al do not have complete control how that persona is used or abused.
Agree it depends on the bottom line. But if this makes people more skeptical of things they see on Facebook and reduces the effectiveness of ads on the platform then it could be a problem.
To me it all boils down to this: hardware is all about making billions of things, all identical. Software is about building innumerable things on top of that hardware, all different.
What would you like it to do, what can be done, how to do it, how to organize a group of people to do it, how to make sure it works and stays working, it's all creative work and it takes time to do it well.
I was wondering the same thing. It would have to be a sphere, a thick shell constructed of an incompressible material such that the inward pressure causes compression. Some kind of honeycomb structure?
The weight of the shell depends on the area (goes up as the square of the radius). The lift depends on the volume (goes up as the cube). Seems like for a large enough size you might be able to get positive lift.
The inward pressure per square inch of shell is constant (14.7 lbs. per sq. in. at sea level with a total vacuum inside), so as long as the inward pressure is distributed evenly it doesn't seem like it has to be stronger just because it is larger.
Inside would only have to be a partial vacuum. You can heat the gas inside to reduce the pressure differential, which might not be too costly if the shell is fairly thick and provides thermal insulation. Here again the volume vs. area works in your favor.
Conclusion: Probably Buckminster Fuller could come up with something.
The problem is that we do not have any discernable influence on our nominal political representatives. A workaround is that we might be able to influence the corporations that do have significant influence. It's worth a try.
The Citizens United decision means the money you spend is used to influence the political process. It's part of what you're buying, so why not factor it in to your purchasing decision?
I suppose you begin to learn what is ethical and what isn't in kindergarten. What's legal is an entirely different matter. Copyright is just a government regulation.
So ideally they publish music from the artists directly, eliminating the other intermediaries and effectively making them the... the... the record label.
And, if Google can't pay to be the default any more, and given that users are the product, maybe the solution is for the search engines to somehow pay us to select them as the default.