As I read the fine print, it appears that Yahoo Groups is deleting the file storage portion of each Yahoo group site, What will remain is the membership list and the engine that remails messages to the persons listed on the membership list. What about the recently sent emails? I presume they will not be deleted.

Here is the economic question: What is the specific cost and revenue problem that drives this downsizing effort? Is the files portion of the Yahoo groups costing too much because of administration costs (I mean the labor bill for US based system administrators), is it the inability of advertising to produce revenue when the file storage is accessed, is the static file base a legal problem because of possibly illegal file content? Or are the system costs getting too high such as the bandwidth cost or the electricity cost or the capital cost of servers and disk drives?

How about a Slashdot reader with knowledge about how Internet costs and benefits are shaking out tell what she sees?

My further comment is, running a 35 watt server with a 5tb disk costs $5 for electricity, $30 per month for the cheapest Internet connection to my house. So a minimal hardware cost is $35 per month. The administration costs at $35 dollars an hour immediately dominate the cost framework.

Reducing stratospheric air travel 90% is just blowing the foam off the top of a pitcher of beer. It is the youngest of the massive fossil fuel burning schemes that exploit the human enjoyment of speed and movement.

I am posting a really difficult point of view regarding the CO2 problem.

Humans are emitting 8 times too much fossil fuel CO2. Eight times too much.

Here is the outstanding book "Without Hot Air" by Donald MacKay presenting this difficult finding in context:

http://www.inference.org.uk/wi...

It boils down to humans need to cut absolute fossil fuel CO2 emissions by -10% per year for about 30 years in a row.

Here is a URL to my writing on this problem. Regarding air travel. I feel a 90% reduction needs to be done until Arctic temperatures begin dropping.
https://www.lowco2america.com/

A recent Slashdot post frames the global warming problem as eventual extinction of all life. See:
https://science.slashdot.org/s...

I think we should adopt a simple and direct plan of reducing human caused CO2 emissions until we can get the locally measured CO2 numbers to stand still or go down. The easy obvious way to get the first 10% reduction is to fill commuter cars and work fewer days a week and stop 90 % of petroleum based flying .

What we want to do is accomplish a Great Depression slowdown of society without bankruptcy, foreclosure, hunger, unemployment or desperation.

The modern American way to do this is establish local CO2 measurement systems that can report social CO2 changes with one day's data. Use cell phone applications and a synthetic digital currency to fund and accelerate social change from a velocity of slow disaster to determined high speed reductions.

Local CO2 is out of control because we are not measuring it with meaningful speed and location. CO2 is invisible and without local measurement there is no local control of the problem. We have had 30 years of a spreadsheet thinking, while the real numbers relentlessly creep up.

Come by and visit my blog where I am working on this problem: http://www.lowco2america.com/

America, at least, is locked in a battle between climate change people and deniers. Much of the heat of the battle is being generated by the shared assumption of most of the battling parties that the government must be parsimonius and whatever taxes or restraints are applied will be hard on poor people or it will be hard on rich oil business people.

Lets consider an approach that is 90 degrees different for both parties. The given fact is we must substantially reduce our oil use. I propose we make engaging in a much less carbon emitting activity economically attractive. We pay people to not drive their car for commuting. Suppose you and another person ride with a third person on your morning commute to work. The commute takes longer so we arrange to pay the rider an additional sum to make ride sharing to work a no-brainer economic advantage. The economics are like this: You don't spend $4 on gas. That is $4 of retained wealth. The sponsoring agency pays you another $4 in an Ethereum currency that can be spent on solar panels or an electric car. The program designers raise the no-Co2 bonus until virtually everybody chooses to participate.

Using the payment model, we go after social institutions with related bonus programs. For the program designers, the problem is to figure out how many tons of
CO2 not emitted per program dollar are being accomplished. We pick all the low hanging CO2 consumption activities. Deniers and acceptors alike can enjoy the incentive to switch to a low CO2 emission society, while increasing one's personal wealth or ability to overcome adversity.

The X-prize project is hoping to find a way to make money (they call it incenttivize) by making a product using the concentrated CO2 and waste heat from a conventional power plant. That product is supposed to sequester the CO2 from the environment.

An alternative direct attack for reducing human generated CO2 is to pay people to substitute low CO2 activities for high CO2 activities. An example is, pay people to accept riders and engage in ride sharing. A gasoline burning commuter is paid to be a rider. The rider doesn't buy $30 a week of gasoline, so the rider's net wealth goes up $30, plus the rider is paid some number of dollars, like 5 dollars in Ethereum for 15Kg of CO2 not emitted (by the rider not driving). The driver still buys $30 in gasoline and he gets 5 dollars in Ethereum that can be spent to purchase an electric vehicle and a share of a destination charging station. As soon as the driver shows statistical likelihood of dependably carrying riders, the driver qualifies for a huge Ethereum loan switch to electric power and have $30 per week retained wealth also.

See my blog:
http://www.lowco2america.com/2...

In effect, we pay people to not burn gasoline, which results in retained cash in the individuals personal finance plus an accumulating amount of Ethereum that can be invested in activities that are alternative to the combustion of fuel. For the individual or family, the goal is to make not emitting CO2 more economically and socially advantageous than the conventional gasoline burning consumer life. Generous payment is needed because the program needs everybody to join in and conserve, no matter where they reside on the climate change denial scale. From the government point of view, we are buying down the globe's CO2 burden. The further development of this is to set off a conservation cascade. Think up ways to directly not emit CO2 and fund them. Suppose we establish the right to a low co2 emission public education for the child and her parents. Think three day work weeks, Local baseball and football teams. Four week long local music and dance festivals per year. Manufacture of 100 year roofs from locally collected plastic.

Wouldn't it be interesting to see the transaction ledger that would show the actual movement of one specific exchange purchase of a bitcoin, and then show the second transaction where this specific bitcoin is transferred to another party in exchange for another kind of money or a tangible item like food.

The problem for us as spectators is to get a picture of some bitcoin transactions with the seller and the exchange shown. Then another picture with the exchange and the buyer shown. Then a third picture with both source transaction currencies and bitcoin shown. Is there a circular or destabilizing flow taking place due to asymmetry in the currency exchange rates seen as a loop?

As a spectator, my editorial comment is the Chinese bitcoin exchange shutdown is probably caused by the government's ability to investigate domestic bank transactions. It seems there has been promotion of bitcoin sales in the domestic US (judging by the popup ads I see). The US side of the bitcoin exchange may showing a big blast of dollars. There I am stuck.

What is this speculative surge of dollars doing to the Chinese economy? Is this surge the problem the Chinese government is trying to halt?

I was exhibiting my atmospheric CO2 loggers at Maker Faire San Mateo and a gentleman walked up to me and explained to me this self extinction hypothesis.

Due to three years experience of using a CO2 meter and measuring things like my car CO2 emission, I have started thinking about the CO2 problem in terms of identifying and implementing a low CO2 emission society at a low level, such as a school district.

What I would recommend to every Slashdot reader is: Buy a CO2 meter and start developing a hands-on understanding of the CO2 problem.

Here is my blog, 2 years out of date: https://lessco2essay.blogspot....

This ingenious analysis of why we don't hear any extraterrestial signals means the time to begin converting to an equitable, fair, reasonable and enjoyable low carbon emission society is now.

Suppose you are driving a car with electric steering and the computer drops in a 1/2 second time delay between your motion of the steering wheel and the actuation of the linkage pivoting the wheels. As a driver you already have some time delay. The road bends to the right and you turn the wheel. Nothing happens. You turn the wheel some more.While the time delay holds the car on one course, you have now drifted 2 feet across the double yellow line. You see a dangerous situation and you react by turning the wheel more. Even though the time delay was only 1/2 second, the cybernetic control loop for driving the car now turned an ordinary drive into an exercise leading to imminent disaster.

That is why proposition 54 is a very very bad idea. A three day time delay would make it impossible to navigate anything that moves. Laws are a special kind of idea that affects the direction of society.

From a practical and cybernetics standpoint, proposition 54 aims to cripple the legislature and prevent it from acting promptly. Proposition 54 has an embedded assumption that the legislature will do something bad if it is allowed to pass bills without a 72 hour freeze.

From a cybernetics point of view, the operational problem from introducing an unconditional 72 hour time delay into the feedback loop of the legislature guiding the operation of the state is the time delay will create a potential instability in the feedback loop.

A good example of how time delay affects the operation of a state government is the state of Maryland. That state has a part time citizen legislature that nominally meets for about 2 weeks every year. In that short time period, all the bills are passed. Political parties, insiders and deals get made in a great hurry. Another effect of the part time citizen legislature is the part time legislators tend to have jobs such as working for a fire department where the employer has quite an interest in many budget items and bills to be passed by the legislature.

The moral of the story is introducing an unconditional time delay into the operation of a government sets off ripples and instability in the expression of democracy in an American government.

I bought a Lenovo S21e about a year ago. A few hours with the Windows sales and merchandising festival of tricks wore me out. For the conversion to Ubuntu Linux I wound up getting a USB 3.0 port extender with an ethernet socket and three USB 3.0 ports, plus a 128 Gig micro SD card. I did a more or less conventional install of the latest Ubuntu Linux, I believe from a 2 Gig USB flash drive with the computer attached to the Internet by way of the external ethernet connection provided by the port extender device. The S21e does not have an ethernet socket. You have to provide it by means of a plug in port extender.

The S21E locks up hard like it has a momentary power glitch when a usb 3.0 plug is pushed into the left hand usb 3.0 socket. I have to depress the power switch maybe 20 seconds until the right side power light switched to a steady on state. Then, a conventional push and hold the power switch for 5 seconds seems to work. I don't have the patience to figure out the goofy way the laptop sometimes needs several minutes to get it running.

The Lenovo touch pad did not work and I eventually found a helpful website at https://alpha-labs.net/2015/08.... The short story is Linux kernels about a year ahead of the then current Ubuntu kernel have a touchpad driver embedded in the kernel. A knowledgeable kernel hacker edited the embedded touchpad driver to make the Lenovo s21e work. On the same website I list the easy and short wham bang steps to download and install the fixes for the touch pad.

Due to the passage of time, the current kernel may now have the needed touch pad driver mods now in the distribution kernel.

I bought my S21 e aiming to use it as a low power wireless SSH connection point running Python programs and talking to Raspberry Pi's with a 50 to 100 foot wireless link. What is missing so far is a low power auto lighter socket power supply good for 48 hours run time.

I work with severely disabled kids and in that setting I get to see mentation in very simple terms. For example, I roll a ball to the child. The child catches the ball and throws it back to me. In the child the senses send data to the brain. In the brain current data and memory are processed at many different levels and the result is the brain sends signals to the muscles causing movement of the body, called motor activity. Games such as kids play at elementary and intermediate school recess are important learning activities in themselves. I am going to use this term later: Playing a game results in the construction of a game model. We know thatt the brain is intermediate between the senses and the motor actions of the body.

As a child grows up and matures into an adult I suggest to you that the fancy and refined activities of adulthood mostly still involve the brain sending signals to the muscles causing movement of the body. Even the greatest pianist making the most sublime music still presses piano keys.

Now regarding the shooter such as in this October 1st event, Some combination of memories and events happening in the present have been assembled to form a grief or a grievance. Grief is a very interesting emotion. I suggest that the substance underlying the grievance is very much the same as the experience of many other people. The thing about the persons who become shooters is they have become prisoners of a literal resolution of their grievance.

I am a little puzzled at this analysis. What does it mean that a person becomes "a prisoner of the literal resolution of their grievance"? A prisoner is a person who is subject to physical confinement. Hypothesis: the persons who become shooters have a game model that they learned somewhere in their lives. What is the likelihood that shooters are enacting a game model with their physical shooting activity?

In a very limited school situation, I once saw that the energy driving ethnic gang formation came from 7th grade boys who looked around class and saw that there were only three pretty ethnically matched girls in their class. It was like that when I was in 7th grade 50 years ago. The school appropriate resolution of that tension is social dance and carefully chaperoned after school dances so the rising blood of the young men can be democratically sated by the manners and implicit sharing of a social dance setting.

For the potential shooters, we need a parallel pathway of social resolution to their personal grief or grievance. All the kids need to learn it before they drop out from school. I have not figured this out, for the person who is stuck with the idea of using a gun on others what would be a way to "abstract" the grief to a higher and harmless level. Operas like Carmen use the curtain call to show the audience that the little seamstress didn't actually die. To my great relief, really. Kids baseball teams form a line and each team gives the other a high five.

For the deadly stampedes and fights after soccer matches, some games are being played with interleaved seating. Lets look for simple modest solutions for the shooter situation.

In Los Angeles in 1981 there was a social psychological self-help movement called "Co-counseling". With a framework of rules pairs of people in a co-counseling class opened a pathway to a saner and more balanced state of mind regarding themselves and their own personal griefs.

Both the International Energy Agency article and the Forbes magazine orticle cited in the Slashdot story are written for narrow viewpoint audiences such as business finance managers and economists working for national governments.

Think of the audience being written to as accountants who watch accounting transactions and balance sheets. For these people, the news is a business operating ratio of energy consumption vs. economic activity has changed a very small amount.

If anything, both OP articles should be faulted for not presenting the two numbers that compose an actual "operating ratio". What is the ratio of gross KWH producing CO2 to Dollars or Euros of economic activity? That is a number the IEA should have presented. Together with error bars, of course.

In the articles, a clue to the very narrow perspective of the "news" is that the IEA article does not mention global warming atmospheric gas concentration increase. The bad news from the Mauna Loa observatory is:

Recent Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2
February 2015: 400.26 ppm
February 2014: 397.91 ppm
Last updated: March 5, 2015