The average family size is shrinking. I’ve seen my neighbors stretch 55 gallons to 6 or even 7 weeks.

The times, they are a changin’…

I’m really hoping it’s a slipup that you included the Earth revolving around the sun in the list of crazy, there’s quite good evidence for heliocentrism!

“If you give a man a fish, he’ll tape it to a broken ATM in protest. If you teach a man to fish, he’ll tape fish to lots of broken ATMs in protest.” - the wisdom of the elder humans

WaterSeer was initially somehow related to some part of UC Berkeley, rather than MIT.

You may be thinking of this device: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30444-X

… Or the metal oxide framework predecessor to it, or the newer thing that uses some sort of gel.

I’m not aware of a commercial product based on this work.

Thank you for this explanation. I got as far as an example that highlights the difference (“I made sure he died.” vs. “I made sure he was dead.”), but couldn’t nail down why there is a difference between those things.

Ideas can only be patented, not copyrighted. If a company designs something novel enough to qualify for a patent, and so good that people willingly pay for the feature, that’s impressive, and arguably still a good thing. If instead they design a better user experience, or an improvement in performance, the ideas can be used in open source, even when the code cannot be.

Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google’s storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a “60 day grace period” ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.

He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn’t really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they’re going to delete his account in a week, which isn’t enough time to retrieve his data… because he didn’t do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn’t do anything during the grace period, and hasn’t done anything since the grace period ended.

I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he’s not paying that cost anymore.