Not just grid capacity, but battery banks. Conventional lead-acid batteries don't last a while. I've been reading good reports on Ni-Fe (Iron Edison is the main brand) batteries, while not as dense, have a 20+ year life.
Of course, there are charge controllers to make sure you feed the power to the batteries at the right voltage and amperage. Too many volts, and lead-acid batteries will boil.
With a source of fuel like propane or natural gas, going off-grid is doable, since a lot of heavy hitting appliances like water heaters, dryers, furnaces, and even fridges/freezers can run from LP gas. However, the one item that requires electricity, and requires a lot of it (more than most off-grid systems will be able to handle) is air conditioning. In Germany, this isn't as big an issue, but in warmer climates, this can make it impossible to cut the cord from the poco.
One issue I recall was around 2011, when IAP came along, the fundamental change of apps. Before that, one would buy an app for 99 cents, and it would be playable, people would tell their friends, friends would buy it, and so on.
IAP came along and fundamentally changed the landscape from having a good game that was well engineered from start to finish to games whose sole goal is to get the player stuck so they would throw money at IAP in order to buy extra currency/lives/etc. so they could move on. Games also put deliberate bottlenecks in place where it might take 2-3 weeks to earn enough currency to get some levels, or one could pay $20 and skip that. The fact that the most popular (as in app clones) games changed from tower defense to casino slots also echos this.
People are tired of games that are "free"... but in reality may take $30 to complete. So, user apathy is causing sales to sag in app stores. Candy Crush was the first big game along these lines, but consumers are bored with stuff like that and there won't be another game in that genre which will gross even near that.
Maybe it is time for developers to actually not go for the low and easy road with IAP, but go for something playable that can get a lot of people buying it.
Same problem in the console industry and the PC game industry. DLC used to be for expansions and added levels, not must have content to play the game, or items which make the game not a grueling grind. It is no wonder why game sales are sagging across the board, regardless of platform.
I notice that open source software has bugs ready to be patched.
Windows has exploits in the wild and major breaches in progress due to exploits, such as the one today.
The Linux vulnerabilities were fixed on the boxes I'm responsible for in minutes. MS, you can wait a month for a fix, and in the meantime, there may be no workarounds.
Because TrueCrypt is abandoned with nobody really able to prove they own it, other than the people who have the Authenticode and PGP/gpg keys, it just might be that their licenses are not enforcable, and the code might be essentially public domain.
However, all it would take is one person or organization suing people, with some "proof" (no matter how unsubstantiated) to cause a lot of hassle in the court system, and this would not just affect the TC successor, but possibly the users as well.
It would be expensive, but I've wondered about starting from scratch with a clean room set of code that is functionally identical, or if there is F/OSS code from a relevant project, using or forking that. This way, some party doesn't step out of nowhere and start suing people in large quantities because they have some random signed statement that they have copyright ownership of the code.
All and all, I also think it might be wise to merge projects. CipherShed + OTFE, for instance. This way, there is less duplication of effort, and more work can be done getting it to work on more platforms, as well as getting the code audited and vetted for security by people who know what they are doing.
People should be moving to 2FA anyway as a general rule. With the fact that breaches and thefts of the entire password hash database are becoming the rule and not the exception, it is wise to not just have that single form of authentication be the only thing between your stuff and an attacker.
On the server side, what would help is a specific appliance, similar to a HSM that stores private keys, but dedicated for authenticating ID/password tuples [1]. The database stays on the device, and only ever leaves via a SD card slot [2] or gets replicated with another device. Authentication is done via protocol of choice, and the device itself handles the password comparison and returns the value. Timeouts can be placed in as well, so if someone is trying to brute force a user account, it would just return "no" for everything until the timeout expired, or perhaps a timeout message.
With a device like the above, a blackhat may be able to get everything else, but the hashed DB table is still not theirs, barring physical compromise.
[1]: It doesn't have to be username/password, but some unique identifier like a Windows SID so if the user changes their handle, E-mail address or other info, authentication can proceed as normal.
[2]: Not a USB slot since USB devices can present themselves as a lot of things. A SD card can be used for other things, but explicit drivers are needed. To boot, SD cards reserve a portion of their space for encrypted data.
Maybe I am just cynical. I personally prefer the idea of a "better shut things down NOW, as this battery may be going ka-boom", but I wouldn't put this past most companies.
Even in the enterprise, some makers of SANs have cache batteries that have to be replaced... and the gauge isn't the battery life, but just a rough calendar, so I wouldn't be surprised to see more shenanigans done to force people to buy more batteries than devices.
I hope you are right. I am jaded about this, and have a feeling that this technology will be used as another way to keep people on the upgrade treadmill for devices, even what they currently have is still usable. I also wouldn't be surprised to see device makers tie the fail warning to battery age as well, as assurance that nobody will use their older models of cellphones or tablets past 2-3 years. I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if I see the fact that battery age be slipped in to the fact a battery is rendered inoperable. Some printer companies did it with their cartridges, so that even ones out of the packaging were expired due to date/time and were inoperable.
If not blocking charging, the device maker could just have the device hard-shutdown and refuse to turn on if this comes up. It won't protect against stupidity... but it will be purchased to make the lawyers happy, and that rendering batteries inoperable earlier on means a nice revenue stream. In fact, it can be the case that replacement batteries are not sold, forcing consumers to have to buy a new device (under the excuse that the battery and electronics are so precisely matched that they cannot be separated.)
Not sure how much this will benefit the end user. Yes, not having explosion prevention is nice, but for the most part, this is a nonissue. Another line of defense might make things a tad safer... but in reality, this pre-fail technology will be used for boosting the replacement battery revenue stream.
That is exactly what will happen. If device makers don't use this technology somehow, they will be sued when someone leaves the device in an extremely hot area such as on the dash of a black car in 100 degrees F (~38 degrees C) and it ruptures, or someone tries "wave charging" their device as per a "friend's" advice on/b/.
We will see this technology get widespread adoption not because it benefits the consumer in any way... but it allows for more batteries to be sold, similar to how the chips on ink cartridges that disallow printing cause more printer supplies to be sold.
Very true. I'm reminded of one vendor that as part of the contract got their own direct connect to company LANs in order to directly service/support their software. I always worried that all it took was some compromise on the vendor's side, and it was a big gaping hole that could be easily nailed. The vendor was pretty much protected (part of the software contract), so if they got hacked, it was pretty much game over.
I did stick in a firewall though. The vendor had unfettered access to their machines... but no unrelated boxes, and their machines were also sectioned off. However, it was like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound, because of all the things their software touched.
Point of sale systems are not rocket science. We had better quality of code when game companies made Playstation 1 CDs (as they could not be updated, so what was released was it.) It might just be time to return to that finished quality of code... but still have an update mechanism. An update mechanism that requires not just signed firmware, but someone physically pressing a button (so the software can't be remotely updated.)
I wouldn't blame the IT staff. A lot of places have PHBs that feel that security has no ROI, so give token (at best) funding to security.
As it stands now, most companies will not suffer much even with a critical breach. PCI-DSS3 is only for the little guys, and HIPAA, SOX, FERPA, and other regs are lightly enforced if that. The people who suffer are end users, and that doesn't really matter.
Even with a good security staff in place, there is also the fact that you can't win a war with just defense. Ultimately, a network similar to SIPRNet or NIPRNet is needed, something that is not part of the Internet and has defense both by a centralized party, and at the endpoints, where machines communicating with each other is prearranged beforehand to minimize the damage of what a compromised box can do.
Sears, last time I checked was a definite IBM AIX shop with the point of sale terminals being a tad more than IBM 3151 VTs, except with a credit scanner and cash drawer. Is K-Mart on a different system, or do both Sears and K-Mart use the same POS these days?
Malware on Windows is one thing... nailing AIX systems actually would be an accomplishment.
I see this during the weeks that there are festivals in Austin. People camping tables at local cafes, not ordering anything, but using the wireless network for Netflix, with an occasional uTorrent downloading a movie to watch later on.
One coffee shop here in Austin chucked their Wi-Fi because the tables kept occupied with people who didn't even at least buy a drink. As soon as they stopped doing that, their business went up, since they had paying clients again.
Another place turned off their APs from 11 to 1, and again, their business is booming.
If I had a shop, I'd have a Wi-Fi system that would use one time passwords (doesn't have to be extremely secure... something like AOL's old system with two words and a hyphen between them is good enough) which grant the user time, as well as a block of bandwidth. These would be free of charge with a purchase. This way, if someone wants to download a 22 gig BD-R rip, they can... but they will be making a lot of purchases. Elaborating on this, there could always be two tiers, one paid for with the one use password, and free... so people who made purchases would have higher precedence than the person who is at work, but whose laptop is in their car in the parking lot with a terabyte torrent chugging away.
It gets worse when you go RV-ing, to the point where a device with tethering or a personal Mi-Fi-like device is an absolute requirement. There are just too many people who will clog up a RV park's Wi-Fi, making it unusable for everyone else. Plus, for decent Wi-fi, it is expensive... and RV parks don't make that much money per square meter of space relative to a hotel or coffee shop.
The ironic thing is that even in rural Texas [1], even the coal rollers think that Teslas are extremely useful and hope that eventually the company would make a one ton pickup truck. It would make life nice for a number of reasons:
1: A lot of ranch vehicles tend to go a long distance, but get parked near the same spot at night, so an electric charger is useful.
2: Trucks need torque at 0RPM. Electric motors deliver here in spades.
3: Welders and other tools are needed. Having a heavy duty inverter and the ability to use the battery bank for powering an air compressor would come quite handy.
4: Electric motors need a lot less upkeep than a diesel engine. No pee cans, no DPFs, no EGR valves, air filters, oil filters, just very minimal maintenance required.
5: They use no fuel when stopped/idling, other than to keep the vehicle electronics going and the climate control system.
6: They are quiet.
7: An electric motor can sit indefinitely without worry about fuel turning to sludge (in the case of gasoline) or getting algae in it (like diesel.)
8: No exhaust.
Electric cars are like solar. Both sides, be it the hippies or the banjo country types understand how useful the technology is or can be.
We can solve that problem when we come to it. Right now, on a medium to long term basis, the goal is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as waste heat is far secondary from the heat trapped via CO2, methane, and other gases. Waste heat can be an issue, but a society that will run into issues with it will have a lot better technology than what we have now, and could solve the problem. Right now, our civilization is in peril because of the burning of fossil fuels, and the conflict that obtaining access to them causes. Once pissing contests for oil wind up in the past, civilization can actually advance, and face challenges like having the problem of waste heat actually be an issue.
Costs are a big issue, but the problem with fusion is getting more energy than is put in... and keeping that reaction sustained indefinitely. Yes, one can get energy out, and sometimes more energy out for a brief bit with a tiny gold-plated capsule... but there is a huge jump from pulverizing a mini-nugget with a big boom to having a reactor that you can turn on, and let it power stuff on an indefinite basis. Same difference between an explosion from TNT and the small, controlled explosions pushing pistons down in an IC engine.
In the TFA, supposedly their dynomak [1] actually does a sustained reaction, but the key is how sustained. Even at a couple kilowatts, if it can just sit there and act as a steam turbine, it will power a UPS for a long time. Scaling up to megawatts is where it solves the big problems, because it can power desalination plants to keep California habitable and other things which are energy/cost prohibitive as of now.
As always, I hope this succeeds. Energy is money, and the more energy available, the more a country and a people can do.
[1]: Is it that different from a tokamak which have been in use for decades?
Isn't gathering, indexing, and trying to find heads/tails of data what Splunk is designed for? It is a commercial utility, and not cheap by any means... but at least this is one software package meant to sift through and generate reports/graphs/etc on stuff.
Disclaimer: Not associated with them, but have ended up using their products at multiple installations with very good results (mainly keeping customers happy with a morning PDF report that all is well, with the charts to prove it.)
I'd rather not punish the individual worker. They are here to try to eke out a decent living, improve skills, and generally try to fit in.
If I had my say, I'd dispense of the H-1B program entirely, and convert them into work visas or permanent resident cards. That way, the H-1B system which is an abomination is tossed, while the individual people who are here are not punished.
I wonder if the hardware based security can be used in addition to splitting the passphrase that mounts/data into the long phrase that unlocks the device, and the short PIN to unlock the screen. This way, even though there is protection against brute forcing similar to what Apple has, I am still packing my own parachute with a very long passphrase.
There is also the fact that the crystal on a watch has different properties as the glass on a phone or tablet. A watch crystal needs to be a lot harder to resist scratches, while a larger display needs to be more resilient to deter shattering.
If GT does a good job on the Apple Watch, they will have a permanent niche in the market.
It really depends on the school. A lot of schools teach nothing else but the three Cs (confirm, comply, consume), and the really bright kids are pretty much threatened by the Handicapper Generals with juvenile detention if they don't toe the line and don't show that they are better than the average students.
Take computers for instance. If a kid in the US shows "mad skillz", they will get hauled off by the local school PD. Same kid in China, Russia, or another BRIC country will likely have a career ahead of them. This is why you don't see the tinkering/hacking (hacking as in creating) mentality in the US as much as it once was, a decade or two ago... it just gets stomped out early on.
There is also the fact that cartoons were not obviously just advertisements for products. Yes, there was merchandising... but a Bugs Bunny cartoon stood alone... it wasn't something made to sell a Bugs doll or an Elmer-Fudd styled blunderbuss.
There is also the quality difference. The 1950s backdrops that were painted by hand versus crap where the characters barely move when dialog happens. It is nice to see a mouth move, not a square or triangle flash when a character makes dialog. Mainstream animation is junk for the most part.
The sad thing, there are still quality artists out there. You just don't see their animation work on TV because their work isn't selling something or is part of a merchandising campaign to get kids whining to their parents for yet another made-in-China toy that ends up tossed in the trash in less than a few months.
Here is the problem rearing up with two nasty heads:
The first is that security has no ROI, and has a relatively trivial financial cost. A major breach happens, a company feeds a PR firm some cash, says they boosted security [1], they toss all affected a year's subscription to some monitoring service, and that is that. Come a lawsuit, there isn't much to sue because they can easily throw their hands up and say that the hackers would get through anything.
Which brings up the second point. In the 1990s, a rogue Internet site could be pulled from the net. Now, doing that is tantamount to an act of war, similar to blockading a port with a naval force. So, no matter what, there is no shutting down blackhats. IP blocks can be worthless since it just takes a compromised computer to bypass them. So, eventually the bad guys will find a way in.
Want an actual solution to the hacking problem? Banks need to create a separate network that uses dedicated physical links that is not connected to the Internet, and if it is, it is connected via application firewalls. Machines are keyed to only be able to connect with other boxes in a pre-arranged manner. If box "A" wants to connect to box "B", it needs to be registered beforehand, or the central switch fabric will deny it. Built into the fabric would be the ability for the central switching fabric to completely lock a box out at the L1 level, so a DoS is stopped.
Yes, this sounds Draconian, and puts power into a central place... but this isn't the Internet we are looking at, but a private network between banks, banks and credit card processors, and other entities. With this in mind, the actual machine NICs could be made with tamper-resistant chipsets, public keys, and authorization can be done via a PKI system.
Higher layers could be controlled by the individual institutions, so that even though L1/L2 traffic is handled by a central authority, application permissions can be controlled on a per machine basis with whitelists. That way, if the central authority is compromised, machines are still secured. Spoofing is protected, since public key fingerprints would be used as a part of a box's IP and stored on a HSM on the interface.
This is nowhere near 100%, but what it means is that there is not just an open network for someone to go after a site. To access a bank, it would require a compromise of an extremely hardened CA and a L1 ISP (both the keys authorizing machines to communicate and the actual WAN switching fabric, which could be kept completely separate from each other.) If a breach happens, it can be fixed fairly rapidly, and a site failing to address it would be disconnected from the WAN.
In general, not a 100% secure solution, but this gives three benefits. The network is separate, so for any mischief to occour, it require compromise of the core fabric. Then, individual hosts will have to be attacked, and with contract stipulations mandating a high level of security, this would be difficult. Finally, sites that are too lazy to keep current with security advisories would have their access pulled as part of being on this network.
This is pretty much done with NIPRNet and SIPRNet, so why not a similar WAN mechanism for businesses and finance.
[1]: The security "boost" could be another checkbox ticked off in a GPO object applied to the ass end of the company, so that passwords are needed to be changed every 60 days instead of every 90. Yep, a security boost.
I have a shed on a friend's property which has a number of LED lights on it which are glowing quite well, and it is definitely night.
What is desperately needed is a form of energy storage technology. We get within an order of magnitude of energy by volume of gasoline for energy density, and transportation will be fundamentally changed. Even basic power grid design would be changed by such a discovery.
There is also the cost of burning coal and oil that isn't seen. Climate change is controversial, but it is pretty obvious that it is happening, and really bad stuff is going to happen unless we stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere at the rate that it is going in.
Coal and oil should be the last thing looked at for anything other than a stopgap measure. Short term, maybe, but medium term really belongs to nuclear (thorium reactors or later gen reactors), med-long term belongs to high capacity batteries and solar, and of course, fusion from there on out.
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Not just grid capacity, but battery banks. Conventional lead-acid batteries don't last a while. I've been reading good reports on Ni-Fe (Iron Edison is the main brand) batteries, while not as dense, have a 20+ year life.
Of course, there are charge controllers to make sure you feed the power to the batteries at the right voltage and amperage. Too many volts, and lead-acid batteries will boil.
With a source of fuel like propane or natural gas, going off-grid is doable, since a lot of heavy hitting appliances like water heaters, dryers, furnaces, and even fridges/freezers can run from LP gas. However, the one item that requires electricity, and requires a lot of it (more than most off-grid systems will be able to handle) is air conditioning. In Germany, this isn't as big an issue, but in warmer climates, this can make it impossible to cut the cord from the poco.
One issue I recall was around 2011, when IAP came along, the fundamental change of apps. Before that, one would buy an app for 99 cents, and it would be playable, people would tell their friends, friends would buy it, and so on.
IAP came along and fundamentally changed the landscape from having a good game that was well engineered from start to finish to games whose sole goal is to get the player stuck so they would throw money at IAP in order to buy extra currency/lives/etc. so they could move on. Games also put deliberate bottlenecks in place where it might take 2-3 weeks to earn enough currency to get some levels, or one could pay $20 and skip that. The fact that the most popular (as in app clones) games changed from tower defense to casino slots also echos this.
People are tired of games that are "free"... but in reality may take $30 to complete. So, user apathy is causing sales to sag in app stores. Candy Crush was the first big game along these lines, but consumers are bored with stuff like that and there won't be another game in that genre which will gross even near that.
Maybe it is time for developers to actually not go for the low and easy road with IAP, but go for something playable that can get a lot of people buying it.
Same problem in the console industry and the PC game industry. DLC used to be for expansions and added levels, not must have content to play the game, or items which make the game not a grueling grind. It is no wonder why game sales are sagging across the board, regardless of platform.
I notice that open source software has bugs ready to be patched.
Windows has exploits in the wild and major breaches in progress due to exploits, such as the one today.
The Linux vulnerabilities were fixed on the boxes I'm responsible for in minutes. MS, you can wait a month for a fix, and in the meantime, there may be no workarounds.
Because TrueCrypt is abandoned with nobody really able to prove they own it, other than the people who have the Authenticode and PGP/gpg keys, it just might be that their licenses are not enforcable, and the code might be essentially public domain.
However, all it would take is one person or organization suing people, with some "proof" (no matter how unsubstantiated) to cause a lot of hassle in the court system, and this would not just affect the TC successor, but possibly the users as well.
It would be expensive, but I've wondered about starting from scratch with a clean room set of code that is functionally identical, or if there is F/OSS code from a relevant project, using or forking that. This way, some party doesn't step out of nowhere and start suing people in large quantities because they have some random signed statement that they have copyright ownership of the code.
All and all, I also think it might be wise to merge projects. CipherShed + OTFE, for instance. This way, there is less duplication of effort, and more work can be done getting it to work on more platforms, as well as getting the code audited and vetted for security by people who know what they are doing.
Cool, they have en_RN as a language choice, like in RedHat 5.x? (Not RHEL... RedHat.)
People should be moving to 2FA anyway as a general rule. With the fact that breaches and thefts of the entire password hash database are becoming the rule and not the exception, it is wise to not just have that single form of authentication be the only thing between your stuff and an attacker.
On the server side, what would help is a specific appliance, similar to a HSM that stores private keys, but dedicated for authenticating ID/password tuples [1]. The database stays on the device, and only ever leaves via a SD card slot [2] or gets replicated with another device. Authentication is done via protocol of choice, and the device itself handles the password comparison and returns the value. Timeouts can be placed in as well, so if someone is trying to brute force a user account, it would just return "no" for everything until the timeout expired, or perhaps a timeout message.
With a device like the above, a blackhat may be able to get everything else, but the hashed DB table is still not theirs, barring physical compromise.
[1]: It doesn't have to be username/password, but some unique identifier like a Windows SID so if the user changes their handle, E-mail address or other info, authentication can proceed as normal.
[2]: Not a USB slot since USB devices can present themselves as a lot of things. A SD card can be used for other things, but explicit drivers are needed. To boot, SD cards reserve a portion of their space for encrypted data.
Maybe I am just cynical. I personally prefer the idea of a "better shut things down NOW, as this battery may be going ka-boom", but I wouldn't put this past most companies.
Even in the enterprise, some makers of SANs have cache batteries that have to be replaced... and the gauge isn't the battery life, but just a rough calendar, so I wouldn't be surprised to see more shenanigans done to force people to buy more batteries than devices.
I hope you are right. I am jaded about this, and have a feeling that this technology will be used as another way to keep people on the upgrade treadmill for devices, even what they currently have is still usable. I also wouldn't be surprised to see device makers tie the fail warning to battery age as well, as assurance that nobody will use their older models of cellphones or tablets past 2-3 years. I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if I see the fact that battery age be slipped in to the fact a battery is rendered inoperable. Some printer companies did it with their cartridges, so that even ones out of the packaging were expired due to date/time and were inoperable.
If not blocking charging, the device maker could just have the device hard-shutdown and refuse to turn on if this comes up. It won't protect against stupidity... but it will be purchased to make the lawyers happy, and that rendering batteries inoperable earlier on means a nice revenue stream. In fact, it can be the case that replacement batteries are not sold, forcing consumers to have to buy a new device (under the excuse that the battery and electronics are so precisely matched that they cannot be separated.)
Not sure how much this will benefit the end user. Yes, not having explosion prevention is nice, but for the most part, this is a nonissue. Another line of defense might make things a tad safer... but in reality, this pre-fail technology will be used for boosting the replacement battery revenue stream.
That is exactly what will happen. If device makers don't use this technology somehow, they will be sued when someone leaves the device in an extremely hot area such as on the dash of a black car in 100 degrees F (~38 degrees C) and it ruptures, or someone tries "wave charging" their device as per a "friend's" advice on /b/.
We will see this technology get widespread adoption not because it benefits the consumer in any way... but it allows for more batteries to be sold, similar to how the chips on ink cartridges that disallow printing cause more printer supplies to be sold.
Very true. I'm reminded of one vendor that as part of the contract got their own direct connect to company LANs in order to directly service/support their software. I always worried that all it took was some compromise on the vendor's side, and it was a big gaping hole that could be easily nailed. The vendor was pretty much protected (part of the software contract), so if they got hacked, it was pretty much game over.
I did stick in a firewall though. The vendor had unfettered access to their machines... but no unrelated boxes, and their machines were also sectioned off. However, it was like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound, because of all the things their software touched.
Point of sale systems are not rocket science. We had better quality of code when game companies made Playstation 1 CDs (as they could not be updated, so what was released was it.) It might just be time to return to that finished quality of code... but still have an update mechanism. An update mechanism that requires not just signed firmware, but someone physically pressing a button (so the software can't be remotely updated.)
I wouldn't blame the IT staff. A lot of places have PHBs that feel that security has no ROI, so give token (at best) funding to security.
As it stands now, most companies will not suffer much even with a critical breach. PCI-DSS3 is only for the little guys, and HIPAA, SOX, FERPA, and other regs are lightly enforced if that. The people who suffer are end users, and that doesn't really matter.
Even with a good security staff in place, there is also the fact that you can't win a war with just defense. Ultimately, a network similar to SIPRNet or NIPRNet is needed, something that is not part of the Internet and has defense both by a centralized party, and at the endpoints, where machines communicating with each other is prearranged beforehand to minimize the damage of what a compromised box can do.
Sears, last time I checked was a definite IBM AIX shop with the point of sale terminals being a tad more than IBM 3151 VTs, except with a credit scanner and cash drawer. Is K-Mart on a different system, or do both Sears and K-Mart use the same POS these days?
Malware on Windows is one thing... nailing AIX systems actually would be an accomplishment.
Tragedy of the commons.
I see this during the weeks that there are festivals in Austin. People camping tables at local cafes, not ordering anything, but using the wireless network for Netflix, with an occasional uTorrent downloading a movie to watch later on.
One coffee shop here in Austin chucked their Wi-Fi because the tables kept occupied with people who didn't even at least buy a drink. As soon as they stopped doing that, their business went up, since they had paying clients again.
Another place turned off their APs from 11 to 1, and again, their business is booming.
If I had a shop, I'd have a Wi-Fi system that would use one time passwords (doesn't have to be extremely secure... something like AOL's old system with two words and a hyphen between them is good enough) which grant the user time, as well as a block of bandwidth. These would be free of charge with a purchase. This way, if someone wants to download a 22 gig BD-R rip, they can... but they will be making a lot of purchases. Elaborating on this, there could always be two tiers, one paid for with the one use password, and free... so people who made purchases would have higher precedence than the person who is at work, but whose laptop is in their car in the parking lot with a terabyte torrent chugging away.
It gets worse when you go RV-ing, to the point where a device with tethering or a personal Mi-Fi-like device is an absolute requirement. There are just too many people who will clog up a RV park's Wi-Fi, making it unusable for everyone else. Plus, for decent Wi-fi, it is expensive... and RV parks don't make that much money per square meter of space relative to a hotel or coffee shop.
The ironic thing is that even in rural Texas [1], even the coal rollers think that Teslas are extremely useful and hope that eventually the company would make a one ton pickup truck. It would make life nice for a number of reasons:
1: A lot of ranch vehicles tend to go a long distance, but get parked near the same spot at night, so an electric charger is useful.
2: Trucks need torque at 0RPM. Electric motors deliver here in spades.
3: Welders and other tools are needed. Having a heavy duty inverter and the ability to use the battery bank for powering an air compressor would come quite handy.
4: Electric motors need a lot less upkeep than a diesel engine. No pee cans, no DPFs, no EGR valves, air filters, oil filters, just very minimal maintenance required.
5: They use no fuel when stopped/idling, other than to keep the vehicle electronics going and the climate control system.
6: They are quiet.
7: An electric motor can sit indefinitely without worry about fuel turning to sludge (in the case of gasoline) or getting algae in it (like diesel.)
8: No exhaust.
Electric cars are like solar. Both sides, be it the hippies or the banjo country types understand how useful the technology is or can be.
We can solve that problem when we come to it. Right now, on a medium to long term basis, the goal is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as waste heat is far secondary from the heat trapped via CO2, methane, and other gases. Waste heat can be an issue, but a society that will run into issues with it will have a lot better technology than what we have now, and could solve the problem. Right now, our civilization is in peril because of the burning of fossil fuels, and the conflict that obtaining access to them causes. Once pissing contests for oil wind up in the past, civilization can actually advance, and face challenges like having the problem of waste heat actually be an issue.
Costs are a big issue, but the problem with fusion is getting more energy than is put in... and keeping that reaction sustained indefinitely. Yes, one can get energy out, and sometimes more energy out for a brief bit with a tiny gold-plated capsule... but there is a huge jump from pulverizing a mini-nugget with a big boom to having a reactor that you can turn on, and let it power stuff on an indefinite basis. Same difference between an explosion from TNT and the small, controlled explosions pushing pistons down in an IC engine.
In the TFA, supposedly their dynomak [1] actually does a sustained reaction, but the key is how sustained. Even at a couple kilowatts, if it can just sit there and act as a steam turbine, it will power a UPS for a long time. Scaling up to megawatts is where it solves the big problems, because it can power desalination plants to keep California habitable and other things which are energy/cost prohibitive as of now.
As always, I hope this succeeds. Energy is money, and the more energy available, the more a country and a people can do.
[1]: Is it that different from a tokamak which have been in use for decades?
Isn't gathering, indexing, and trying to find heads/tails of data what Splunk is designed for? It is a commercial utility, and not cheap by any means... but at least this is one software package meant to sift through and generate reports/graphs/etc on stuff.
Disclaimer: Not associated with them, but have ended up using their products at multiple installations with very good results (mainly keeping customers happy with a morning PDF report that all is well, with the charts to prove it.)
I'd rather not punish the individual worker. They are here to try to eke out a decent living, improve skills, and generally try to fit in.
If I had my say, I'd dispense of the H-1B program entirely, and convert them into work visas or permanent resident cards. That way, the H-1B system which is an abomination is tossed, while the individual people who are here are not punished.
I wonder if the hardware based security can be used in addition to splitting the passphrase that mounts /data into the long phrase that unlocks the device, and the short PIN to unlock the screen. This way, even though there is protection against brute forcing similar to what Apple has, I am still packing my own parachute with a very long passphrase.
There is also the fact that the crystal on a watch has different properties as the glass on a phone or tablet. A watch crystal needs to be a lot harder to resist scratches, while a larger display needs to be more resilient to deter shattering.
If GT does a good job on the Apple Watch, they will have a permanent niche in the market.
It really depends on the school. A lot of schools teach nothing else but the three Cs (confirm, comply, consume), and the really bright kids are pretty much threatened by the Handicapper Generals with juvenile detention if they don't toe the line and don't show that they are better than the average students.
Take computers for instance. If a kid in the US shows "mad skillz", they will get hauled off by the local school PD. Same kid in China, Russia, or another BRIC country will likely have a career ahead of them. This is why you don't see the tinkering/hacking (hacking as in creating) mentality in the US as much as it once was, a decade or two ago... it just gets stomped out early on.
There is also the fact that cartoons were not obviously just advertisements for products. Yes, there was merchandising... but a Bugs Bunny cartoon stood alone... it wasn't something made to sell a Bugs doll or an Elmer-Fudd styled blunderbuss.
There is also the quality difference. The 1950s backdrops that were painted by hand versus crap where the characters barely move when dialog happens. It is nice to see a mouth move, not a square or triangle flash when a character makes dialog. Mainstream animation is junk for the most part.
The sad thing, there are still quality artists out there. You just don't see their animation work on TV because their work isn't selling something or is part of a merchandising campaign to get kids whining to their parents for yet another made-in-China toy that ends up tossed in the trash in less than a few months.
Here is the problem rearing up with two nasty heads:
The first is that security has no ROI, and has a relatively trivial financial cost. A major breach happens, a company feeds a PR firm some cash, says they boosted security [1], they toss all affected a year's subscription to some monitoring service, and that is that. Come a lawsuit, there isn't much to sue because they can easily throw their hands up and say that the hackers would get through anything.
Which brings up the second point. In the 1990s, a rogue Internet site could be pulled from the net. Now, doing that is tantamount to an act of war, similar to blockading a port with a naval force. So, no matter what, there is no shutting down blackhats. IP blocks can be worthless since it just takes a compromised computer to bypass them. So, eventually the bad guys will find a way in.
Want an actual solution to the hacking problem? Banks need to create a separate network that uses dedicated physical links that is not connected to the Internet, and if it is, it is connected via application firewalls. Machines are keyed to only be able to connect with other boxes in a pre-arranged manner. If box "A" wants to connect to box "B", it needs to be registered beforehand, or the central switch fabric will deny it. Built into the fabric would be the ability for the central switching fabric to completely lock a box out at the L1 level, so a DoS is stopped.
Yes, this sounds Draconian, and puts power into a central place... but this isn't the Internet we are looking at, but a private network between banks, banks and credit card processors, and other entities. With this in mind, the actual machine NICs could be made with tamper-resistant chipsets, public keys, and authorization can be done via a PKI system.
Higher layers could be controlled by the individual institutions, so that even though L1/L2 traffic is handled by a central authority, application permissions can be controlled on a per machine basis with whitelists. That way, if the central authority is compromised, machines are still secured. Spoofing is protected, since public key fingerprints would be used as a part of a box's IP and stored on a HSM on the interface.
This is nowhere near 100%, but what it means is that there is not just an open network for someone to go after a site. To access a bank, it would require a compromise of an extremely hardened CA and a L1 ISP (both the keys authorizing machines to communicate and the actual WAN switching fabric, which could be kept completely separate from each other.) If a breach happens, it can be fixed fairly rapidly, and a site failing to address it would be disconnected from the WAN.
In general, not a 100% secure solution, but this gives three benefits. The network is separate, so for any mischief to occour, it require compromise of the core fabric. Then, individual hosts will have to be attacked, and with contract stipulations mandating a high level of security, this would be difficult. Finally, sites that are too lazy to keep current with security advisories would have their access pulled as part of being on this network.
This is pretty much done with NIPRNet and SIPRNet, so why not a similar WAN mechanism for businesses and finance.
[1]: The security "boost" could be another checkbox ticked off in a GPO object applied to the ass end of the company, so that passwords are needed to be changed every 60 days instead of every 90. Yep, a security boost.
I have a shed on a friend's property which has a number of LED lights on it which are glowing quite well, and it is definitely night.
What is desperately needed is a form of energy storage technology. We get within an order of magnitude of energy by volume of gasoline for energy density, and transportation will be fundamentally changed. Even basic power grid design would be changed by such a discovery.
There is also the cost of burning coal and oil that isn't seen. Climate change is controversial, but it is pretty obvious that it is happening, and really bad stuff is going to happen unless we stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere at the rate that it is going in.
Coal and oil should be the last thing looked at for anything other than a stopgap measure. Short term, maybe, but medium term really belongs to nuclear (thorium reactors or later gen reactors), med-long term belongs to high capacity batteries and solar, and of course, fusion from there on out.