eck

IANAL but threat of filing a lawsuit and threat of reporting criminal activity to authorities are not equivalent.

I would really like to see a business case study of building out and operating an HFC network in a single average suburb, and how that varies with how cooperative the suburb is.

Could any of the economies of scale enjoyed by the huge/evil ISPs be recaptured by using some kind of franchise-model where the locals can own an ISP like they would a McDonalds?

I think towns might be more willing to make those concessions if at least some of the competitors were local small businesses rather than giant corporations like Google.

With respect, you don't know who my local government representative is or how effectively I can persuade him.

The question I asked was what policies, not how to persuade politicians to pass them.

Could a local government impose net neutrality rules as a condition for a franchise?

[edit] Or more practically, what general policy changes could a municipality make to maximize the availability of competitive free internet?

I doubt they'll ever throw anything out entirely. 2000ms latency and 75% packet loss is as good as blocked and the PR team can keep saying they don't block anything.

e.g. Tor and P2P style.

You are always going to be able to encrypt your data in a way that their filters do not understand. The problem is that anything the filters do not understand will go to the low priority queue. Your Tor traffic will get treated just like Netflix traffic, in the event that Netflix chooses not to pay protection money.

Speaking of FB ad targeting in elections, I was recently surprised to learn that an advertiser can give FB a specific list of names of people they want to target.

I learned that because I own a handful of shares of Arconic, which is a company in the midst of a hostile takeover attempt. I was rather curious how FB figured that out... but both sides know my identity, and apparently whatever I agreed to when I opened a brokerage account included giving my identity to companies I invest in, and them giving it to activist investors, and the company/investors giving it to social networks.

My understanding is that in the US at least, it's common for both parties to attempt to maintain complete databases of all voters, so it's feasible for them to select individual ad targets themselves and just give FB the names.

It could have been an accident that they survived. In this case the assassins dying along with the victim is a feature, not a bug.

People have been saying that if the emergency spillway fails, it will release the top 30' (?) of the lake. What determines that height? Is there bedrock or something else expected to stop erosion 30' below the level of the emergency spillway or something?

The keyspace of SSNs is only 10^9. I don't think password hashing would help much.

That could actually be an interesting problem. It might sound like "in the event of a impact >Xg, stop, shut down, and wait for police/NTSB/etc to come investigate". But if, say, you hit a deer on a wilderness road in the winter, that behavior could lead to the passengers all dying of exposure.

Do self-driving cars have a button labeled "fuck your rules and DRIVE"?

It moves at that speed because the index of refraction of glass is about 1.5. In single-mode fiber the light doesn't really bounce off the walls.

From what I understand, the gas is not flowing out of a pipe at ground level; the leak is deep underground and it is diffusing into rock and coming up over a wide area. It's not clear that combustion could be sustained in that configuration. I have as much oil/gas industry experience as rube goldberg, but I suppose if they put a huge upside-down funnel over the area maybe they could collect it and light the top, but I have no idea whether the radius of that funnel would have to be 10m or 10km.

I feel a good solution would be to implement a carbon tax, and an unburnt methane tax at the greenhouse equivalent, and start charging the company the estimated leak. I imagine their engineers would become more motivated.

Yeah. I can't even imagine how much revenue YC must lose for each minute of news downtime.

Once again, someone has proposed that an ad supported company offer subscriptions for exactly its revenue-per-user, without seeming to realize that not all users are equally valuable to advertise to, and only the most valuable ones will opt out.

Can you explain why there is a line going to the airport?

I assume it is because there is a fixed fare to/from JFK so drivers have little incentive to start/stop the meter at the exact pickup/dropoff location.

Also did you overlay it onto a map?

No. If taxis did not pick up or drop off people on some street, that street does not appear. For example there is an area downtown where there are streets but they have had security barriers since 9/11 thus no taxis.

How did you get the angled effect if it's just a grid?

None of NYCs grids are exactly north/south/east/west aligned.

The trouble with making a higher res image is that when you make that lat/lon buckets smaller, you have fewer samples in each one, so the image gets noisier. For the best possible image you'd want to download all the years of data.

The process of making it was quite simple. I zeroed a 2d array of integers, then took all the pickup/dropoff points and incremented the nearest cell. The pixel values are based on the logarithm of the counts, since otherwise everything outside midtown would be pretty much black.

There are some artifacts, like the thin vertical line down the east river. I think that was because of how the data was rounded, i.e. the number of unique longitude values that map to a certain image column.

I wrote this myself with a few hundred lines of C++, though I'm sure there's GIS software out there that will do all this for you with a few clicks.

I downloaded the first year dataset and didn't get very far in my analysis... but this was the first result, which was kind of pretty:

http://i.imgur.com/ov6K6mt.jpg

which can put out a very harmful amount of ionizing radiation

It's not ionizing radiation any more than wifi is. It's just a lot of concentrated non-ionizing radiation.

A much more important example of this than "martian potatoes" is uranium enrichment.

Natural uranium is ~1% U235; bombs need 90+% U235. So when you've enriched it from 1% to 2% it doesn't seem like you've made a lot of progress towards 90.

If instead of enriching U235 you think of it as eliminating U238, though, then you've done half of the work.

An alternative theory to "don't want other 4/5 eyes knowing" is they want to filter out people who don't take OpSec rules seriously.

it's a constantly growing amount.

If they're still pumping coolant into the reactors, why aren't they reusing the water that's already radioactive for that purpose?

You cannot compare averages because the users who choose to pay to kill ads will not be randomly selected. No, there will be massive adverse selection -- the users with lots of disposable income are the ones that make advertising lucrative, and will be exactly the ones who pay to opt out of it. The averages massively understate what they would have to charge.

statement about the software being bug free

I bet they required the guy who delivered the rocket fuel to sign something saying it contained no impurities, the guy who delivered the external tank to sign something saying it did not leak, etc... why should the software guy be special?

Yeah I know. We're special. But the world doesn't always see it that way.

My first thought from "properly dispose of, we don't want it in landfills" was, this is for hazardous waste -- you know, that box of old paint cans and dead SLA batteries that you know your city has a plan for, if only you could be bothered to figure it out. If not, maybe the website should make that more clear.

FTS means flight termination system. Meaning the thing that blows it up if it goes off course and is going to crash into people. They were saying "safed" not "saved", meaning, no longer armed.

What are the odds that I'm going to get a payout?

The expected value of slot machines is negative too. Humans have a psychological weakness for "Just one more, I haven't won in a while, I'm due." In this case though it wouldn't even cost money to play.

1. Alice installs app on smartphone. Alice puts smartphone in cradle on dashboard. Smartphone captures license plates Alice drives by on way to work. Alice drives by Bob.

2. Carol goes to website. Carol enters Bob's license plate number. Website says, "25 hits found. Enter credit card number to see times and locations". Carol enters credit card. Carol finds Bob.

3. Alice gets some of Carol's money, since she took the photos.

Why is that not a thing yet? License plate reading, unlike, say, tapping undersea fiber, is not something you need either a government's resources or a government's ability to skirt the law to do. This is easy stuff.

It's not erase(), it's begin(). It's going to do a linear scan of the hash table from the beginning to find the first non-empty cell.

This was a good one:

http://blog.willbenton.com/2008/11/rent-a-coder-hilarity/