hnmullany

When you first read a popular science article that garbles a subject you've developed expertise in, you begin to wonder how much of what you believe to be scientific truth is bullshit (because you learned it from a popular science article.)

There are absolutely viable ways to reduce concrete emissions by about 30% - but it is staggeringly difficult to get the construction industry (including architects, structural engineers, standards bodies etc.) to change practices.

Yes on CO2 capture, but electric personal cars are substantially lower emissions than internal combustion cars. Anyone saying something different is pushing fossil propaganda - that is just not a fact-based argument.

Yes, getting everyone onto electrified public transport + scooters is better - but EVs do provide meaningful emissions reduction.

I would add flexible demand response sw/hw and long duration energy storage

Because it's now headed by an ex-lobbyist for the chemical industry

No that was above my pay grade. They met with the engineering leads directly.

For 4.51, it was $100k per cert slot. We were just trying to cover the cost of the engineering team.

I was the product manager with responsibility for root certificates in the Netscape 4.51 browser. It's crazy to see someone factor it 25 years later.

Just to reply to some people in the comments. Yes, we knew export grade encryption was weak - that was the point - that the NSA could decrypt it - and the govt. required us to do it anyway.

FWIW - we had the goal of expanding the list of root authorities in the 4.5x release - and this might have been the first release to monetize the root slots because Netscape was under severe pressure to generate revenue.

(Also - Verisign hated that we were expanding competition and tried to convince us to implement a program that would re-restrict the list to a set of "responsible" companies aka Verisign and one or two others. We declined.)

I was a private equity analyst in the 90's and we owned Berol - one of the classic American pencil companies. Their classic wood pencils were made the exact same way - batch oriented and quite labor intensive.

Their next gen process was a fully automated continuous process co-extruder that extruded a core of hot graphite surrounded by a cellulose/wood mixture. That continuous string of graphite/wood composite was pulled down a two hundred foot line where it was cooled, sealed, painted twice, varnished, cut, capped with erasers and boxed. The whole line could be operated with two people.

I worked in private equity as an analyst in the 90's - we looked at an ambulance service that was up for sale - the underlying operating margins (before you load on debt) were pretty reasonable, although I don't remember the details.

I worked in private equity in the 90's and looked at one of the big regional ambulance service companies that was up for auction. The underlying operating margins were fairly reasonable - the private equity owned companies only have issues because of their debt load.

I think the strength of the "vouch" is understood to be much weaker in Silicon Valley - it's more like - I've talked to this guy for 30mins to an hour and I can vouch that he (or she) is not a waste of time for you to talk to them for a similar amount of time. It's not a vouch that they're the next Steve Jobs or you have diligenced their background.

On every tech that would have made HTML5 an effective application platform (databases, advanced AV, animation) - Apple has been 5-10 years behind Google and Firefox, and in many cases simply vetoed or wouldn't implement.

Flash didn't disappear when internet technologies got better. Flash disappeared because Apple refused to distribute it on iPhone - partly because Adobe couldn't effectively shrink it down to early generation iPhone technical capabilities - but partly because they didn't want a competitor to the iOS SDK.

Then Apple effectively vetoed - explicitly and through lack of investment) futher improvement in audiovisual web platform technologies (e.g. the custom shaders that Adobe wanted to make part of the nextgen filter spec) during the critical period where developers were making their platform choice for mobile.

Apple has been no friend to the further evolution of the web.