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.

I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this.

This has been my life for the past couple decades. I am often the "voice of reason", and I don't have the heart to tell folks "No, I'm the voice of common sense", although I suspect they wouldn't get it.

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.

It would lock up much software as then each person who contributed is basically a copyright holder and can sue under that.

That's true of the Linux kernel. It's not true of most GPL'd code, which is almost all available under GPL version X (for some X) "or (at your option) any later version".

But one Breivik is newsworthy only because it's such a rare occurrence.

THANKYOU!

I'm glad someone said it. Breivik was a rare occurrence. 9/11 was a rare occurrence. Fort Hood was a rare occurrence. The random nutter with a gun in Sydney is a rare occurrence. All crimes of this nature are rare occurrences. That is why they are remarkable, and that is why we take note of them.

When drones take out a whole street in Pakistan, nobody pays attention, because this is not a rare occurrence.

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

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.

So bad executive behavior, which has been immortalized in dilbert for *decades*, is now worthy of an essay?

There's a certain sense of irony here.

At the jury level this is expected. The appeal was expected either way. And in the longer term this may turn out differently.

Anti-trust concerns usually do benefit the consumer in the short term. And as the article points out, the jury specifically wrote that the features have an immediate benefit to the consumer.

Usually anti-trust problems are not immediately bad for the consumer. In the short term the consumer sees a lower price, easier access, and other conveniences.

In the long term the market ends up with monopolies and oligopolies, a loss of vibrancy, a slowdown in innovation, less desire to follow expensive advances, and worse customer experiences. Think of your local telco and cable companies as prime examples.

I expect that like so many other technical cases the jury's verdict will be overturned on appeal because juries in the US rarely understand the actual law. While criminal law is usually pretty straightforward for a lay jury, things like IP law and business law are often miscommunicated or misunderstood when handed to a jury of random citizens.

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.

With 8 TB drive sizes I would think you would want double parity and some kind of hotspare. The rebuild times on that could be glacial.

Or would that just be considered a gag gift?

I think they do this already -- a recent newspaper article about our local police department detailed a half-dozen officers terminated for various reasons.

But I think it begs the larger question of what remaining officer morale is like if the kinds of "fire 'em all" mindset towards swift and harsh discipline takes place.

I'm not trying to defend bad police behavior, I'm trying to put into the context of a bunch of highly unionized employees who aren't trivially monitorable like $10/hr clerical employees working in some 3,000 square foot desk farm.

There are ways (and I'm sure most experienced officers know them) of simply doing less that no level of oversight can measure let alone measure to the level that satisfies union work rule disciplinary procedures. Sure, fire them all, but who the hell are you going to be hiring to do the job?