The overall semi-passive temperature control concept seems like something that deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten. I used to have a town home with no AC, but with a house fan that would blow air up through the attic... sounded like an airliner in the upstairs hallway when we turned it on. It was actually surprisingly effective, but to keep things comfortable in the summer we had to turn the house fan on at the right time in the evening, turn it off at the right time in the morning, open/close downstairs windows to draw in cool air, and then keeping the blinds closed on windows when the sun was on that side of the house.

It's the kind of thing that's annoying for humans to keep track of, but trivial to optimize with software. The hard part would be in having the actuated systems to control the vents, windows, blinds, and fans, and then software to integrate it all. Some of those things exist, but they're expensive so the ROI generally isn't there. A system like yours though basically fully automates the stuff I was doing with the house fan.

Have you ever crunched numbers on the savings? I would bet in terms of cost efficiency a simple system could pay for itself in a couple years, but in terms of energy efficiency I would think you're using at least an order of magnitude less energy than active cooling.

To be fair, we had plenty of that even back in the glory days... but the noise has stayed constant while the signal seems to have dropped off with most topics.

I'm curious, do you think the semi-passive cooling system will still be useful at beginning and end of summer, even if the night get too warm? Savings obviously aren't going to be as attractive as using it all through the summer, but I would hope there are still seasons where the system is worth running.

I can understand using cloud storage for ease of use, but it's unacceptable that they didn't at least have a cold storage backup plan. 50TB is a laughably trivial amount of data for an organization like this.

"Oh, my God, that's disgusting! Weird fringe adult films? Where? Where did they post those?" :P

This was a really interesting post in the spirit of classic slashdot. I have no mod points, but I salute you for keeping the dream alive.

These mega corps wouldn't be in California if it wasn't critically necessary. Try moving to Texas with no generational talent, no blue collar workers, no union buy-in.

This is just whining of pathetic nepo welps.

The Wall Street Journal used to be a very good newspaper with a moderately conservative viewpoint and an extreme (some would say nutty) Radical Right editorial page. Now it just exists to provide a veneer of respectability to whatever scheme the hard Radical Right has cooked up to demonize a new Other (or resurrect the demonization of a previous Other) and hoover more money out of the pockets of the median Citizen.

Good point!

Darl McBride used to refer to the "spiffy agent technology" that was going to find the allegedly infringing code, so that particular grift is nothing new.

> No reason why actual antibiotics requires long and careful testing to make sure they are reasonably safe. We can do away with all that now!

Some of the more modern antibiotics can melt your liver or cause you to rip your tendons.

You definitely want these things to be thoroughly tested.

Nixon started the cancer moon shot 50 years ago and during that time we have learned that cancer is not 40 diseases. It's 400.

All my Rokus are now infested with ads but the Roku stick is even worse since it seems to take an absurd amount of time for it to just connect to the wifi.

(my real Rokus are all hard wired)

I'm sure they all get subjected to the same annual corporate ethics training courses. Some policies apply company wide even in megacorps that employ 300,000 people.

I am old and my sight grows dim, but I am pretty sure this all happened before the first 0.01 version of Linux was released.

"If you must write a check, he said, try to deliver it in person or take it inside a post office to mail rather than relying on your own mailbox or public drop boxes. "

That was the neighborhood advice going around our area 1-2 years ago. I myself was skeptical that mail theft was going on as I had dealt with the Postal Police when managing an e-commerce site and I knew they are very good at finding things like this. Unfortunately it turned out (1) I was wrong: there was mail theft going on in our neighborhood but (2) everyone else was wrong too: the mail wasn't being stolen from blue boxes; it was being lifted from the bins behind the slot in our postal service center. The perps were eventually caught but it took far longer than I would have thought.