I've got a database I periodically play with that is all the cities / major towns of the world and can quickly query it with distance data. (as in: Give me everything within 100 miles of Lat,Long)

How many cities/towns are there in the world, actually? That sounds like a trivially small problem.

1. Spatial indexing support -- without the ability to index the searches, he'll likely run into a lot of performance problems. Applying a formula to every row to see if it matches might not be viable.

2. Tools and standards -- he needs to interact with ESRI, so using standard formats (e.g. WKT and WKB) and having tools available to convert things for you properly will save him the effort.

3. Requirements tend to expand. If he's doing GIS stuff, and wants to interact with ESRI, there's a good chance he will soon want/need a lot more features.

4. Earth is not a sphere, so the Haversine formula will be inaccurate.

Disclaimer: I have only done very limited GIS stuff. I know other people that do a lot of GIS projects, so my comment above is just based on whatever I picked up through osmosis talking to them.

That seems like a question of the customer's knowledge at the time of purchase. I didn't think that the phone being locked to one network was any big secret.

In the US, it seems like the customer would have to know that, because the networks are all different here anyway. If you buy a verizon phone, you know it's only going to work on Verizon. I concede that the situation, expectations, etc., may be different in Chile.

But it still doesn't seem like a new law should affect old agreements. Either the original contract was invalid (e.g. maybe due to misrepresentation of the terms), in which case you don't need a new law to throw it out; or the original agreement is valid, in which case it should continue to be valid.

"...and must unlock free of charge all devices already sold to costumers through a simple form on their respective websites."

You applaud retroactively changing private contracts? For extreme cases, it can be justified, but for cell phones?!

If a country treats private contracts this way, it discourages investment in a major way.

"but some random publisher who did virtually nothing"

If they provide nothing, then why do researchers use them?

Keep in mind that the Democrats controlled Congress for two years before the 2008 crisis.

"S & P specifically stated that it was because of the lack of new revenues that they did the downgrade."

Read the actual report at standardandpoors.com (it's a full 8 pages, so I don't expect anyone to actually do this). If you're a real partisan and have already made up your mind, you won't be affected by it. But the reality is, there's lots in there for partisans on either side to latch onto.

The report highlights the debt debate political climate, of course. It was hard to reach an agreement, even though everyone knew this needed to be done for a *long* time. The debt ceiling could have been raised and the deficit decreased when the Democrats had control of everything for two years. Or, the House Republicans could have just said "OK, you get whatever you want, and we'll fight for our policies in the next election". Or, they both could have compromised a month earlier, rather than waiting until it was within a day. But none of those things happened. Go ahead and blame whichever party you don't like.

But it also talks about plain old fiscal policy and debt trajectory. Even if there had been a clean debt ceiling increase, it's not like the problem goes away. It just pushes it away a little longer, which is not particularly good. It's unclear that a clean increase would have avoided this rating drop. Again, blame whichever party you don't like: the Republicans in power from 2000-2006, the mixed government from 2006-2008 (of particular interest is that the Democrats controlled Congress for two years before the 2008 crisis), the Democrats in power from 2008-2010, or the mixed government we have now. No story around the fiscal policy really looks good for any party.

It talks about a lack of ability to increase revenues (which could be interpreted as lack of ability to raise taxes, but those things aren't exactly the same).

And it talks about lack of changes to Medicare and other entitlements.

It also talks about the not-so-hot economy. This means fewer people are paying taxes, and the absolute taxes that each person pays are lower (even if the tax rate is the same). It may also mean that more government services (like unemployment) are being consumed, but I'm not sure how significant that is. Again, blame the party you don't like.

What I think we can all agree on is that this is irresponsible. We are demanding more than we can provide, and making up the difference by borrowing more than a third of what the federal government spends. We know this is unsustainable, and we do it anyway because we want, want, want; now, now, now. We then hide our irresponsibility by exempting the government from the accounting standards we require of public businesses.

My understanding is that you only get the contact information after the deal is sealed. I'm sure there's still a way to back out at that point, but I doubt it's very easy (and probably has some negative consequences on your score as a host).

1. I think we can all agree that the criminals are to blame.

2. The victim used poor judgement, took a bad risk, and unfortunately paid the consequences.

3. If everyone used good judgement, would Airbnb still be in business? If not, what are the ethics of starting a business that relies on customers using poor judgement?

4. Can Airbnb mitigate the risk enough that this is still a viable business for customers using good judgement?

5. Airbnb actively prevents the host from getting personal information about the guest to mitigate the risk for themselves. This is a two-faced: they don't want customers to exchange personal information because they might use it to subvert Airbnb's payment channels, thereby cheating Airbnb out of their income; yet they depend on convincing their customers about the good nature of people (the same people who might cheat Airbnb out of their revenue) so that they will be comfortable renting to strangers.

6. The simple humanitarian aspect of the story is quite troubling. I don't necessarily think that it's Airbnb's responsibility to pay in these situations, but allegedly they tried to get her to be quiet to avoid disrupting a funding round, and they seemed to be taking credit for more help than they actually gave to her (allegedly). Some of these facts a little hazy, but on balance, the Airbnb response doesn't look very nice (and by "nice" I don't mean "give her a bunch of money"). Then, Paul Graham (investor) seems to be defending them, but with a fairly incomplete response, and made some unsubstantiated claims that attack a reporter, who very strongly and completely disputes them.

7. It's also slightly disturbing that so much reputation damage is being done to Airbnb when the facts are fairly hazy (and some actively in dispute). At a high level, Airbnb did do basically what one might expect of them: providing what they could to the police, and trying to make their system a little more robust to such problems in the future (if that's possible). I think this is mostly Airbnb's doing, because they handled the humanitarian aspects so poorly.

"You see, even if you run Postgres on a 64-bit platform, you're limited to XIDs of 2^31, or 2 billion rows."

That is false. You can insert as many rows as you want into a table as long as it's less than 32TB (8KB page size * 4 billion). In practice, people partition tables long before they hit 32TB, so that is not a practical limitation even if you do have more than 32TB. "Typical" rows might fit 100 to a page, so it's more like 400 billion rows per partition of a table in practice.

The XID limitation to which you are referring is much different, and refers to the number of transactions that the system keeps track of total (completed or not). That's OK, because after a while, individual transaction IDs become irrelevant. If transaction ID 100 and 103 both committed a long time ago (there is a technical definition here with several conditions, but it's not important for this discussion), do we really care that they were separate transactions? The answer is no. So vacuum can replace every instance of 100 and 103 with a marker that just says "committed a long time ago".

In fact, you probably want to do this quite a lot more often than every billion transactions (100M is the default). Why burden the system with having to keep track of the difference between 100 and 103 for a long time after that distinction is meaningless? It just happens that the maximum time you can wait is limited to a billion.

Does vacuum have a cost? Yes. Is it a good trade-off? I think so -- it takes care of a lot of cleanup tasks (this is only one) and it does so in the background, batching up work. And it's fairly intelligent about when it works and what it does.

If you believe that people should get a real job instead of an education then you've got a country of predominantly labourers and factory line workers.

The post was about graduate students. They already have about 16 years of education before they decide to become grad students.

Now, I'm sure there's a need for a small minority of people to achieve 20+ years of formal education. But if there are so many that it's becoming "cutthroat", there's a good chance that many of those people shouldn't be there.

However, many people can use their 12-16 years (or perhaps even less) of formal education, combine that with a career and a lot of informal education, and still produce great value for society.

I should also point out that even if they do rely 100% on patents today, then they wouldn't have much to lose if no new software patents were granted. That's because they could keep future developments secret, because they don't depend on publishing their code (as many other software companies do).

So, we can quibble over the details (and I still think they keep the current core algorithms secret), but it's really irrelevant to my point: Eliminating software patents is nearly all upside for Google.

Just because they have a patent with the title "page rank" doesn't mean that they have divulged all of their secrets.

I am not going to bother reading that, because the existence of a patent doesn't refute my claim that most of their core business algorithms are secrets (which is an educated guess; I certainly don't know first-hand). The patents are probably just there because they feel like they should have some patents, and they are probably watered-down or old versions of what they actually care about.

Other companies that release their software actually are releasing many of their core secrets, so they patent them because they have nothing to lose.

OK, I meant that those things that are of competitive advantage to Google are kept secret. It doesn't need to patent the search algorithms or the details of the ranking algorithms or the details of adwords pricing because those things are all secret.

Sure, it open sources other stuff, and that's good. But it would not have patented that stuff anyway. I didn't mention that because it seemed obvious to me, and seemed like a frivolous disclaimer.