Maybe move all data centers into geostationary orbit. They would be solar powered with direct communication between each orbiting center and transmitters/receiver stations on the planet surface. With that sort of lifting capacity, it wouldn't take too long to move most data center servers into orbit. Would it be cost effective? Maybe not. But I reckon there would be some climate change benefit by moving all that heat out into space.
Unlikely. Cooling is a huge challenge in space, needing crazy big radiators. Dumping excess heat into water or air is a lot more effective than black-body radiating it in a vacuum.
Definitely not. Cooling datacenters is a major cost component and that gets way harder in space as you have to radiate it away and cannot use air/water as a heat sink. Add in repairing components that break and that'll likely never happen.
I'd be more concerned about space radiation. As for cooling, in space you have a lot of space, and each computation unit may get equipped with its own radiator tailored for its heat production, and you may spread datacenters across large areas, so they have enough cooling capacity.
Each solar panel produces a shade, which can be used to put a radiator into, and between the solar panel and the radiator we can put some specific amount of heat-producing computation units.
> thus alleviating the need for the developer to release a new version through the app store review process
I'm not an native app developer but this seems like a win, right? I wonder what app store owners will make of it?
> All users see the latest version of the UI at the same time on both iOS and Android
Seems very much like what you can do with a typical browser application. In the long run, I wonder if this is detrimental to the native app ecosystem. Why not just build for the browser?
> it seems rather clear to me that all these things cannot and will not be resolved on the implementation level
Absolutely! This is why we need good legislation. Tech issues will never be solved by tech builders. All tech measures invariably have a tech counter-measure. We've been round this loop so many times over the last two decades. It's a Sisyphean nightmare.
> It is structurally impossible to design your way out of capitalism
This is what good legislation can do for us. The only problem is it takes a lot longer to introduce good legislation than it takes to build bad tech. I'm optimistic that we're approaching the end of the bad tech era.
> Short of economic changes that are completely outside the particular problem domain that these kinds of posts tackle, there is nothing at all to be done.
I reckon legislators in the EU would disagree. They are doing a lot and it's starting to work.
I get the impression that the GDPR is ushering in the surgeon general moment that you mention. It's slowly starting to improve the health of the web. The latest rulings may even finally kill the cookie banner. Hallelujah.
Not sure if you're being humorous but just in case, it means the 'making of a sigh' as in 'generating something new' rather than a 'group of people'. As a joke, it works for my generation. The older I get the more I sigh and these days it has a lot to do with cookie banners. But that's another matter.
Nice read. Firm supporter of Web Pi (3.1415). When it comes to building for the web today, I'm always amazed that "so much can be done with so little" and yet the default is the opposite - "so much is needed to deliver so little" - so irrational! Where did we go wrong? I wonder what Web Euler (2.71828) would have looked like?
My favourite phase of the web was Web Golden (1.61803). :) It mostly had static websites but some websites had tiny guestbooks that allowed a little user-generated content.
I remember some of the website hosting providers made it really easy to add guestbooks, even for someone with no programming experience. All one needed to do was create an HTML page that contained a <form> element with the "action" attribute set to a URL of a server-side script provided by the hosting provider. The server-side script would accept every comment submitted via the guestbook and automatically insert the new comment into a static HTML page after escaping the special characters properly.
This criticism doesn't make sense. You could argue that the expense is a contributing factor to why the US' healthcare is better, and if it had a single category that said "healthcare is 90% better in other country because it costs less" then that would be misleading somehow. But that's not at all what happened. They gave two metrics: comparative life expectancy and comparative healthcare expense. The metric where your country fares better is red, the one where it fares worse is green. You cannot argue that lower cost isn't purely better if you are solely examining that single metric. Splitting it into separate metrics allows you to do so.
Your backlash against the representation says more about your beliefs than it does about the site.
That was somewhat of an ad hominem attack, I believe the point that was being made is that Red and Green have certain connotations, generally Red = Bad, Stop, Danger and Green = Good, Go, Safe. I don't think it has anything to do with ones beliefs and though it may indicate an opinion, there is no value in criticizing someone for having a different opinion when they provide it in the appropriate space such as a comments' forum.
> Red and Green have certain connotations, generally Red = Bad, Stop, Danger and Green = Good, Go, Safe.
Yes, this was understood. The context I gave my answer in was after seeing other comments which indicated that the site was somehow designed to make the US look bad. The only reason I can even fathom for how a commentor would question the inclusion of the healthcare cost metric is from embarassment at healthcare costs here and wishing to justify it with a discussion of outcomes (which, as I pointed out earlier, is already included in the life-expectancy metric).
I don't see how any interpretation of their comment can get around the fact that GP doesn't agree that healthcare costs should have been included as a "benefit", which I take issue with. Healthcare costs are a valid concern, and something I'd look into before emigrating. To me, big healthcare costs is a gigantic red flag for a country. In fact, health care costs (and other sensibilities around public welfare) are near the top of the list for why I might some day emigrate.
Why do you think GP doesn't see lower healthcare costs as a benefit?
If I was to make a guess, I would say because unfortunate as it is, innovations in the health care field are currently driven by profit.
I am not sure if the argument regarding life expectancy being tied to healthcare costs is a valid one as there are so many other factors, but I do know that there is somewhat of a brain drain that tends to draw health specialists from countries with lower health care costs to the US. Eg: According to Google... An anesthesiologist's average annual salary in Canada is $218,069 where as in the US the average is $403,300 and that is without doing any currency exchange. This results in a reduced number of surgeries in Canada as it is required to have an anesthesiologist present when ever someone is sedated, and that results in long waiting lists, especially for non essential surgeries such as those for knee or back pain. 2 years or more is not unusual before getting a referral to see a specialist and then there can be just as long of a wait for the surgery.
Basically in Canada we have very low health care costs but also defacto bread lines for medical treatment.
Disagree. The key information is no longer than an average privacy policy (and frankly, less complex) and whereas there are millions of privacy policies (which no one ever reads), there is only one GDPR. Give it one hour of close reading and you'll see just how important and useful it is. It's worth the effort because you only need to do it once.
