In what I’m sure is totally unrelated news, South Korea’s work force is predicted to shrink by half in the next 50 years.

To be clear, Google will still be storing copies of the pages they crawl. They just won’t be making those copies available to end users.

Microsoft tried to shanghai me to the “new outlook”. When I realized the scope of what they were trying to do, under the guise of a simple software update, I was floored. I don’t even think Google, with all of their Borg-ish tendencies, would attempt such a blatant hijacking of user data. The privacy implications are profound.

This situation seems analogous to when air travel started to take off (pun intended) and existing legal notions of property rights had to be adjusted. IIRC, a farmer sued an airline for trespassing because they were flying over his land. The court ruled against the farmer because to do otherwise would have killed the airline industry.

I’m with you. Also, it seems like it would be much more efficient to do carbon capture at the source, where the fuel is being used, like a power plant, where the concentrations are relatively high, compared to atmospheric capture where CO2 is less than 0.1%.

I wish Apple wouldn’t restrict them as much as they do.

I’m seeing a lot of commenters shitting on Texas here, and while it’s not completely undeserved, I’d like to point out that Texas is 1st in the nation in wind power generation. Texas will implement things – even “Blue” things – if the economics make sense.

I feel like this is the ad-equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage situation, pre-crisis. With mortgages, you had loans that no individual bank or bank manager would want, and then you had an automated process that obfuscated the individual loan details and produced financial products that could be sold as high quality. In the ad world, it’s the same thing. You have these websites that nobody would buy ads from, individually, but somehow, through an automatic process offered by Google and friends, the worthless product becomes valuable.

I wish there was a way to turn off predictive radar. It sometimes has the storm completely changing direction. So inaccurate.

I’ve noticed the same thing. I was somewhat optimistic about Apple’s purchase of DarkSky and planned integration of DarkSky technology into Apple Weather. I mean, DarkSky was awesome. Surely, DarkSky technology + Apple’s resources would result in the ultimate weather app! Boy, was I wrong. Apple obviously took a wrong turn somewhere because the new and improved Apple Weather is anything but.

That’s a really great idea. Makes a lot more sense than relying on official accounts on 3rd party platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.

If there was an easy answer, someone would have implemented it already. Obviously, it’s a challenging problem, and I don’t claim to have the solution.

I think expanding the voting dimensions (a la Slashdot) would make it easier to create an algorithm, but it pushes complexity to the user, so that’s a tradeoff.

But, even with up/down votes, I think there are potential ways of identifying users whose votes deserve more weight. For instance, someone who up-votes both sides of an argument chain (because both sides are making good-faith responses and adding to the conversation) should be boosted.

We need the karma-equivalent of PageRank. Every vote should not be treated the same, just as Google doesn’t weight every link equally. The “one user one vote” system is the equivalent of pre-Google search engines that would rank pages by how many times they contained the search term. But it can’t be as simple as “votes from higher-karma users are worth more” because the easiest way to build insane karma is to build a bot or spam low-effort replies to every rising post. Still, the system needs to be able to extract the wisdom of the crowd from the stupidity of the crowd, and the only way to do that is to apply a weighting gradient to users and their votes.