I thnk their core business WAS the web directory but that seemed to become irrelevent and less useful once Google came around. Their age and size has allowed them a certain amount of inertia with users who simply don't know or care for anything better.

I think there's some value in a high-quality curated web directory. Given what Wikipedia accomplishes with volunteers and no advertising, I would think that Yahoo could have come up with some way to basically pay people to browse the web and curate a directory given the money they have to spend.

Google search is better in some regards and use cases but in some ways, if it isn't on the first page of results it probably won't be useful, especially if you don't know what to search for or are looking for a class of information or type of web site.

But they seemed to have given up on that in favor of "web services" which they probably can't ever compete with. Their technology isn't competitive, they don't have any media clout and nothing unique to offer.

The whole question of "which direction is the causality" is misleading in the first place; pure, uni-directional causality in situations of interest to people is almost non-existent. What we should usually look for is stable configurations ("stable" not implying "good," as in poverty), and self-reinforcing cycles (whether virtuous or vicious). Even if manipulating A causes B to change, it may also be that manipulating B would cause A to change.

The DMCA was implemented by elected lawmakers.

Those lawmakers have not been removed from office, with new law makers installed with a mandate to remove DMCA.

Therefore, the market has voted (with votes, rather than dollars) for the DMCA.

I agree with this in principle, but I worry that there's a certain naivete to it -- making surveillance harder will not cause the security apparatus to give up mass surveillance.

In a world with only limited use of encryption, surveillance was generally a matter of just listening, and targets that used encryption were either immune because of the extra effort and/or low profile but if they were high enough profile, they were attacked through other more resource intensive vectors.

In a world of mass encryption, the security apparatus will instead attack the infrastructure of encryption -- root CAs, encryption technologies and software, neutralizing the value of encryption and eliminating the utility value of it while retaining all the costs to the implementer (CAs, extra CPU cycles, complexity, etc). I think it also destroys trust in some existential way, which may be one of the worst aspects of this.

I think the entire encryption system needs to become decentralized in some way that forces attacks on encryption to be more difficult. Locally generated keys without the need for centralized trust seems to be part of the solution, but the existing CA system provides the trust component making it more difficult to rely on random keys.

The context of this discussion is that TechyImmigrant claimed that someone who would support deporting an illegal immigrant "has something against immigrants." So TechyImmigrant was equating the two. I simply pointed out that doing that is dishonest.

I have several reasons for being against illegal immigration while not being against legal immigration. I did not expound on them in my post, as they were not relevant to the point I was making, but I still see no reason why you should immediately jump to the conclusion that those reasons do not exist.

I don't see how you could possibly make that assessment based on my statement, which was simply that you can be against illegal immigration without being against legal immigration.

Versus the equipment to actually perform the desalination?

California has some pretty big wind farms and one of the issues with wind power is its availability when the grid can't accept the power. I wonder how much capacity goes unused and whether it would make sense to direct that power to a desalination facility that could provide a working load for the power in a scalable way that could be quickly and granularly spun up and down inversely to grid demand for that power.

The power the wind farms can generate but isn't absorbable into the grid is kind of free energy in a way and it would seem to make sense to do useful work with it like desal.

Men and women from the same culture and class demonstrate very different behavior, as do young and old people. I have never seen any evidence to support the notion that there are significant behavioral differences associated with skin color. If you've got some evidence that shows that black people are more likely to commit crimes than white people that were raised the same way, I'd love to see it.

Right. The good old "the illegals just can't stop themselves from jumping the border!" argument.

I'd bet that they commit just as much crime as black people of similar social culture and class.

There's a difference between having something against immigrants, and having something against illegals. Pretending that the two are equivalent is a typical dishonest tactic of the supporters of illegal immigration.

thus the invention/"work around" of Translit and Volapuk encoding.

Regardless of the licensing, a lot of the content on the site is useful because its just unavailable otherwise.

I wonder this about Youtube. What if it was just shutdown? At this point you can laugh but it has historical value. Beyond the cat videos there are documentaries, content from laserdisc, obscure commercials, very useful user howtos and reviews etc. This list goes on and on. If all you search for on youtube is funny videos then you are missing out on a treasure trove of content that spans many decades.

At some point I think the site will have to become a public archive. Which it kind of already is, it just needs the legal status so that some greedy corporation can't just turn off the switch. Now if only we could cut down on the crap that is a result of everyone trying to monetize youtube. But I guess that's wishful thinking because without that Google might just shut down Youtube outright.

Gack.

I remember long bus rides. In the summer, it was kind of 50-50 you'd get a bus with air conditioning. No AC? Now you sweat like a pig, which is really awesome on the way into work. This was marginally less oppressive on the way home, but only marginally less oppressive because when you got home you could strip off your sweaty clothes.

In the winter not enough heat wasn't the problem, too much heat was. Since I had to walk six blocks to the stop and wait at least 10 minutes, I had to dress for whatever outside was like in Minnesota in January, which usually meant dressing for 10-20F. Then you get on the bus and it's like entering a crematorium -- the heat blowing batshit, making it like 80 degrees. And it's crowded and you can only take off so much of your winter stuff, because there's no room to put any of it.

I did do a fair amount of reading, but working? The buses I rode were all like coach airline seats (although not as extreme as coach has recently become). There was no room to practically use a laptop and of course no tray table or anything to put it on.

I eventually gave up the bus and plowed an extra $200/month into a paid parking spot and it was actually LESS stressful. The climate control worked. The seating more comfortable. And despite periodic traffic headaches, it was less stressful to commute for 25 minutes in my car than to wait 10-15 minutes outside for the bus, sit on the bus for 45-50 minutes, and then walk another six blocks to get home. The daily one-way trip time from door-door was almost double on the bus.

It will be a cold day in hell before I commute on a bus again. I might be swayed if I had less than a five minute walk, the stop was climate controlled, and the ride actually on par with driving time AND the seating approximated a first class airline seat in terms of room and a tray table, etc.

Well, maybe, but as long as they stick to targeting muslin and don't attack wool or polyester, I think we'll be OK.