Just make the vote of each state proportional to the number of people who voted in that state.

Or change the Constitution.

The electoral college is as much of a mess as it is in part because it already includes the proportional ratios of the House into consideration (and as pointed out in related threads, a large reason why it would ever tie in the first place, and isn't just some odd number derived from the number of states). Surely in the case of an EC tie, leaving the House to vote as the House, proportionately representative, is no less a representation of the votes of the states than the electoral college itself at that point?

Meanwhile, in Sao Paulo we are getting to 34C (93F) every day, and even the nights have been extremely warm. And here at the southern hemisphere it's winter now.

What are winters normally like? You seem to be about as far from the equator as places like Miami, so I'm not sure what to expect.

At São Paulo, it should be usual to have days where the maximum temperature is around 15°C, but most should reach high 20's. It should rain a lot of the time too, but with a small amount of water.

But hot and dry days are not unheard of, they are just unusual.

I'm sorry you guys are experiencing this. I hope that my question isn't foolish, but is it possible that the deforestation in the Amazon is partially causing the reduced rain?

I don't think so.

First, the forest covering of the Amazon didn't change that much on the last few years. Don't let international press fool you, the forest isn't "all burning down". It's burning down a lot, but not that much.

But more importantly, the rain on that region is mostly from oceanic and local humidity (São Paulo is in a forest area, with plenty of rivers).

It rains less there in La Niña years. I don't know how abnormal the situation really is. But the heat is way more unusual than low humidity.

Here in the Netherlands it is currently 32 degrees C.

This is the latest date we have had 30+ temperatures since measurements began in 1901.

And ten years from now we'll remember this as cool.

I remember visiting Amsterdam in a heatwave, maybe 2016, and they were hosing the canal bridges off to cool them so they'd close properly.

Apparently they'd expanded from the heat more than they were designed to cope with.

That happens in Seattle too. I'm surprised the metal expands that much myself.

The expansion is as a fraction of length. For steel its around 10-20ppm per degree C.

So a 40 degree temperature swing would be 400-800ppm, which means about 1mm difference in length for 2m of steel. Obviously bridges aren't usually made of a single span of steel, but there will be limits to how much expansion a given joint can tolerate, and each half of a draw-bridge needs to be fairly rigid. On top of that, 40 degrees is probably much less than the difference in road temperature between a cold night in January vs. a sunny day in August.

Railway tracks used to buckle in the heat before they built them with a small gap between the rail spans.

In September? Wow. It should be warming, with those crazy days you leave the house ready for 4 seasons. 34C is nuts.

ZFS stores the checksums of files to prevent bit rotting. Since they are comparing their database to ZFS, I guess it stores the checksums for the same reason. If bit rotting occurs, you don't need to discard the entire database, just the affected entry. If the entry was already there for some time, you might even be able to restore it from a backup.

I can understand it with a file system; but in a typical key/value store application the data elements are much smaller (likely even smaller than the hash result).

Isn't a 256-bit Blake hash a little OTT, versus a simple CRC, or even a faster, smaller hash like MurmurHash or Jenkins-one-at-a-time?

It's a cryptographic hash, so it will detect tampering with the data, which a simple CRC, MurmerHash or Jenkins would not.

Still, I'd like an option to use a faster, more efficient CRC or hash - bit rot is usually the main threat, rather than tampering. Not to mention that if a user can tamper with the data they can probably just create a new hash at the same time.

Using a cryptographic hash as a souped-up CRC seems rather odd, given how many more CPU cycles and RAM it will use, but I don't know the reasoning behind the decision; there must be one.

> if an attacker can tamper with the data they can probably just create a new hash at the same time

That's true for ordinary databases, but this was developed for a blockchain and uses a Merkle hash tree.

An attacker can only tamper with the data and create a new hash for a data item by also creating a new hash for every node up to the root of the tree. In a blockchain context, even that isn't enough, they'd have to modify the blockchain nodes as well, as I presume they periodically record tree root hashes.

The hash tree gives it some other interesting features too. O(n) diff time, where n is the number of changes output in the diff, is probably due to having a hash tree.

The fast diff would also work with a non-cryptographic hash, but it would be considered not quite reliable enough against occasional, random errors. With a cryptographic hash, for non-security purposes we treat the values as reliably unique for each input. For example, see Git which depends on this property.

I meant to say "attacker", rather than "user".

> Even the OAB (brazilian akin to advocates' guild) recognized this wasn't the case for at leas two weeks. And when the accused were given access to formal accusation, they only had access to a small chapter of it.

Do you have any source? I tried to google 'Roberto Jefferson OAB', but I found nothing.

You should try to remember the political scenario at the time. The Snowden leaks had generated an immense discomfort in Brazilian government regarding the fact that US based companies could just wiretap Brazilian communications. WhatsApp didn't have a subsidiary at Brazil, and Facebook Brazil used to say they didn't respond for WhatsApp matters. Since Brazilian justice didn't manage to get WhatsApp to answer subpoenas even for extremely low-profile cases, they tried to force their hand on them. The blocks were clearly a demonstration of force, trying to get companies providing services to Brazilians to obey Brazilian law at least to some extent.

"The uploader has not made this video available in your country"

Having countries matter on the internet now feels like going back to the 90's after living in the future for a while. :/

The 90s Internet didn't have deliberate region blocks. The future is old, and it is dying.

While the connection speeds of today are hard to give up, I liked having oceans of smaller sites instead of a handful of larger ones with content shared from the others. http://c0rk.tripod.com