Oops, you're right. jcupitt is the creator and principal maintainer of libvips, but I guess I linked to his "personal copy" git repo (which comes up first on google!).
You linked to a git repo, I linked to docs, but here's docs with internal links to the 'official' repo.
Since kdb is SO good with time series data, I would need a lot of tech details to even know if AWS is worth testing.
It's a LOT of work to test a time series db at scale.
Realistically they would sue you in your country. Worst-case, they have you prosecuted for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and demand extradition (most countries have extradition treaties with the US)
I know of a company that scrapes craigslist in bulk. The owner insisted that he's had no problems. Importantly, his company is not based in the US. Maybe he just ignores their c&d letters.
A better way to frame the spending is, how many additional people would be homeless if not for the efforts of San Francisco. There aren't just 6,700 people that refuse to be helped but tens of thousands on the cusp of a very bad situation.
I'd wager approximately 0. If you mean, how many additional people are homeless in San Francisco because of the efforts here, then the number surely isn't negligible but the wealthiest area in the country seems like a decent place to extend a little humanity. What's the alternative? Treat our homeless like shit so other people don't want to move here?
At that rate they could, you know, provide homes for them and feed them? Sounds like that's part of the plan (500 units), but not in a way that makes sense to me.
Micro-apartments at ~200sq.ft., with really basic (read: mostly plastic/easy to wash, plus maybe a cot) furniture, could go for ~$800/month and still be a good deal for a developer. That's $9600/year. Throw in inexpensive food at another $800/month, and it would be $19,200/year, or a savings of $14,800 per year. Partner with a developer, guarantee the rents, and let the private sector fork over the capital for the building of WAY more than 500 units.
A lot of the cost is actually far more than $34k/person, by the way. There are charities that leverage this fact by finding chronic emergency-room users and getting them a home, food, and sometimes a companion animal. [1] When a homeless person checked into a hospital can cost $9000. An emergency room visit can cost $3700. [2] When someone has serious health issues, they can visit the emergency room multiple times a month; some end up costing the taxpayer $44,400 per year.
Apparently 90% of the homeless at any one time are just going through a bad spot in their lives. And giving someone a place to live can break the cycle of homelessness: You need to have an address to get a job, typically. You also need to be able to shower. Let them keep living in the cheap apartment if they want, but if their income passes a threshold then they need to start contributing to the room & board.
Or don't force them to pay; food and shelter really should be human rights anyway. Why not start in San Francisco? Everyone else would benefit by there being fewer people peeing on walls or sleeping on sidewalks, and by the (relatively) cheaper labor pool that would be available.
Go one better. Provide them all of those things, as well as /a/ job (not necessarily one they're trained in) as well as time for and inclusion at, training for jobs that are open.
I imagine that maintenance of public infrastructure is a thing which won't go away any time soon.
If you define the above as a poverty line (and the re-education time slot is also usable for personal crafts/recreation/etc) then you've also very nicely defined a minimum wage which must be beaten. Providing the apartments at a monetary level in areas also defines a value level for housing in a given area, which is one way of eliminating price gouging (or at least giving added value when it is done).
Not a bad thought, though some of that 10% of the homeless who are chronically homeless probably should be allowed to just fail to go to their job with no consequences.
Ideally they'd have social services and/or psychiatric care, and some of them, after sufficient care might then be able to work. But some are just going to be chronically unemployable.
Maybe so, or at least it's an interesting thought experiment.
I've thought for a while that the dominant business model of the web is for-profit piracy. I don't mean The Pirate Bay -- those are small time players and are not very profitable if at all. I mean Google, Facebook, etc.
To make that argument work you have to define piracy independently of whether or not it's illegal piracy. In this case we'd define for-profit piracy as the "indirect monetization of content you did not produce or license and in which you do not pay the producer."
Google monetized the entire web. They didn't create the content, but they sold ads on it. It's like having a radio station where you don't make the music, don't license the music, and don't even run the transmitter, but you get to present ads in-stream. Then on top of that you get to charge people for those ads while you are also monetizing them. It's brilliant.
That's not illegal (in this case), but it is perhaps a form of piracy. Google would have had no value had the web not been full of people dumping valuable information online.
Does this mean Google is a value extraction enterprise rather than a value creating one? I'm picking on Google but this applies to a whole lot of the web's business models. I think it's legitimate to question the economic justice of this. Again it's not illegal, but there are many things that are not illegal that are shady. Is the monetization of what began as an open gift culture shady?
Obviously Google's founders didn't think of it this way when they built Google, but one of the things social criticism does is to question what things really are or really become independent of their original intent.
The counter argument is that Google provided a valuable service that made the web more useful. That's undeniably true. But how much effort went into that vs. creating all the web's content? Does building a road to make it easier to reach someone's farm entitle you to 100% of the proceeds of their farm?
Your premise is backwards. Does your desire to be a farmer oblige society to build a road so you can get access to the market?
The the internet is a big stack of books in a room, Google is a librarian with a master index who organizes the data. Calling that piracy is a stretch of the term.
Actually, taking the thought experiment further, you could argue that book publishers are the real pirate, taking ideas and making themselves toll keepers.
The problem being explored by this and other ideas is this: the Internet has massively increased our intellectual wealth, but for the vast majority this does not translate into any increase in physical wealth. If anything, the Internet may actually make it harder for many people to earn physical renumeration from intellectual activity.
Meanwhile the cost of the most necessary physical goods and services keeps rising. We've created a world where a person can be homeless yet have the combined knowledge of all of humanity available to them instantly. We've created an imaginary post-scarcity society online, but that's coming into stark conflict with the very real scarcity of the physical world in which it ultimately exists. Cyberspace is like the Egyptian afterlife: you go to heaven, but someone must guard and bring food to your Ka.
It's truly bizarre, a total inversion of the ancient world where almost everyone could live off the land yet the priests monopolized knowledge and literacy.
You're 100% correct. Except neither Google nor Yahoo have yet to figure out how to get people to give them the amount of personal information that Facebook has and does.
I don't trust Google or Yahoo any more than I trust Facebook but at least the former two companies don't know about me what Facebook probably does. I say probably because I actually deleted my account several years ago and block their trackers. But I'm under no delusion that they don't know who I am or don't still retain a significant amount of my personal information even though I deleted my account.
Facebook knows the facade that you want to present to the world.
Google knows what you want (or what you want to know).
Now, each of these is actually only addressing the front-facing portion of the business. Each company obviously has much more information when you begin to consider their link tracking, advertising network tie-ins, communication mining and external domain 'likes'.
But it's good to remember that Google's advertising is so damned valuable because you're already looking for stuff when you go there.
VirnetX's market cap is $850 million, which would be a very steep discount if the company were "on the verge" of being paid $340 million/year from Apple.
