I think you’re massively downplaying how much of a hit this will be.

Let’s say you make $100k/year. Think about the lifestyle it allows. You’ve just been informed that it’s now going part time, and you’ll only be making $15k/year. How far does that get you?

Now, you’re expecting someone else to pay for that advertising spot, so it won’t be that bad. But who is even eligible? Microsoft’s Bing is the obvious answer, and probably DDG. The rest of the default search engines aren’t even general web searches.

Do you really think that either of them are going to pay any significant amount to be the default? Especially when most people are going to change it back to Google anyway, since these are automatically people willing to change to a different browser?

Sure, they might be willing to pay something. But it won’t be anything close to what they had before.

You forget how close it came to passing. You can singularly thank John McCain for stopping it.

I don’t think there will be another one to stop it this time.

That might have been a reference to a very old Slashdot meme, ca. 2002. Sometimes those words were combined; there was a movie with the words + “from outer space”; and there was a trolling group GNAA.

Now, is that what they were going for? Only you can answer that. It’s a pretty deep cut into a pretty nerdy corner of the Internet.

You are comparing it to a hash, following some extra rules on what the data could be. You have exactly the length of hash before you can reliably count on duplicates (and collisions happen much sooner). In torrent v1, this is SHA-1, which has a 160-bit (or 20 byte) hash. Which means for every single additional random bit, you have doubled the number of possible matches.

If your torrent has an uncommonly small chunk size of 256KiB, that’s 261,144 bytes. Minus the 20 from above, and you have a likely 256^261124 chunks that match your hash. That’s a number so large that Google calls it infinity. It would take you forever just to generate these chunks by brute force, since each would need to be created, then hashed, then the results stored somewhere. Many years ago, I remember someone doing this on CRC32 (32 bits/4 bytes) and 6 byte files. It took all night, and produced dozens of hash-matching files. You’re talking many orders of magnitude bigger.

But then what? You’d still need to apply the other rules on what the data could be. Rules that are probably more CPU-intensive than the hash algorithm.

The one trick that AI might be able to use to save the day is that it may contain in its corpus the original file. In effect, that would make the AI an unlikely seeder.

I can confirm that All on Sopuli is regularly inundated by suggestive (but usually not outright pornographic) anime pics. Most of these are the “Moe” communities, but there are a handful that specific to the franchise the characters are from.

SuprNova was the big one for me. Everything else was either redundant (Like RARBG) or just faded away (like my Usenet sources). I didn’t have any replacement lined up when SuprNova died.

I agree. That was an additional detail that I did not cover, as I wanted to keep it relatively simple. I expect that the anti-Netanyahu Jewish voters are unlikely to switch to voting Trump, given that the latter is firmly and openly pro-genocide.

What, specifically, did I say that you disagree with?

To be clear, at no point was I trying to justify any actions. My only goal was to explain the strategic path that would lead to it. And of course there are additional nuances, which I alluded to at the end.

Besides, a winning strategy is not an indicator of ethics.

It’s a numbers game. There are WAY more Jewish people in the US than there are Arabs (~7.5 vs 3.5 million, according to a quick Google search).

Strategically, those Jewish voters are also more likely to switch to a Republican vote than the Arabs, regardless. It would take 2 Arabs (or any other Democratic voter) sitting out to counter a single Democratic voter switching to a Republican vote.

Granted, none of this accounts for voter locations (because only the 7 swing states matter), voter enthusiasm, claims of national security, or (most importantly of all) ethics.

There’s a certain point where they become abandoned property, and you can just do with them whatever you want. My guess is that it’s some point after the existing contract runs out, plus 30/90/365 days or whatever. Possibly requiring a court order, public notice, or something else. This will depend entirely on your jurisdiction’s laws on abandoned property.

Not to take away from the joke or the implication, but I’m pretty sure the info is useless now. Just like knowing about Silk Road.

That said, I have no idea what value they could get from having an answer.

The weird thing about this claim is that these aren’t deal breakers. It’s possible to get insurance for exotics like McLaren or Bugatti (although no idea if GEICO does those); it just costs a lot.

I’d really like to hear more about those underwriting standards.

I once heard it described as a “3 day relationship between a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old that left 6 people dead”

Presumably, “other places” refers to other insurance companies. IOW, GEICO is (allegedly) denying them coverage. OP is hoping that Allstate, Progressive, etc will also deny coverage.

My point is that every company is a tech company.

It’s easy to think of tech as being companies that primarily produce electronics or operate information services, but that’s not the case. Every company uses (and often creates) technology in various forms that benefit from standards and interoperation.

Connected devices benefit from standardized Wi-Fi. Cars benefit from standardized fuel- both in ICE (octane ratings, pumps) and electric (charging connectors, protocols). It even applies to companies that make simple molded plastic, because the molds can be created/used at many factories, including short-term contract manufacturing.

It’s very much the Oracle model.

A long time ago, Oracle DB could handle workloads much, much larger than any of their competitors. If you needed Oracle, none of the others were even a possibility. There are even tales that it was a point of pride for some execs.

Then Oracle decided to put the screws to their customers. Since they had no competition, and their customers had deep pockets (otherwise they wouldn’t have had such large databases), they could gouge all they wanted. They even got new customers, because they had no competition.

Fast forward and there are now a number of meaningful competitors. But it’s not easy to switch to a different DB software, and there are a ton of experienced Oracle devs/DBAs out there. There are very few new projects built using Oracle, but the existing ones will live forever (think COBOL) and keep sucking down licensing fees.

VMware thinks they are similarly entrenched, and in some cases they’re right. But it’s not the simple hypervisor that everyone is talking about. That can easily be replaced by a dozen alternatives at the next refresh. Instead it’s the extended stack, the APIs and whatnot, that will require significant development work to switch to a new system.

All of the consumer lines are pretty bad these days. Acer has a reputation for being unreliable (backed by some data from SquareTrade ~10 years ago). HP is just as bad, in mostly the same ways, but has avoided the reputation.

Reliable laptops are the enterprise lines - Dell Latitude/Precision, HP Elite Book, and Lenovo Thinkpad. But they are significantly more expensive when buying new.

Often there are contracts. Sometimes for a very long time, often multi-year. There are sometimes escape clauses (like a morality clause for a spokesperson), but these aren’t easy to invoke.

I suspect many of them are up for annual review/renewal, when they can be terminated without penalty. It might also just be an attempt to get better terms.