Fake artists in playlists? Well, where are the screen shots? Or doesn't Spotify show clearly what is playing when?
I skimmed the first link in TFA which supposedly was an earlier article about the same issue, and it didn't show any screen shots or any other form of evidence other than some vague allegations. For now I have to put this in the "fake news" corner.
Everybody assumes that these umbrellas disappear while "on rent". I think it's quite safe to assume they disappear while "off rent", as otherwise there wouldn't be an issue with losing umbrellas as they would know who had the missing umbrella in their possession.
I thought VPN is encrypted pretty much by default already, making it hard to detect.
OK, maybe I used a wrong example with port 80 (http - unencrypted - can be inspected indeed), make that 443 (https). The outside observer can only see which IP it goes to, with no way to figure out what the content of the transmission is. With the world moving to https everywhere it's going to be hard to block that port. It'd also be an issue for all the local services that rely on encryption to remain safe.
It would have been a lot more interesting had they called themselves the Umbrella Movement, especially if they would be selling yellow umbrellas (honestly I'm not sure if it's nowadays OK again to walk around the mainland with a yellow umbrella).
China has been going after and is already blocking lots of VPN services. But of course all the time new such servers will pop up, new domain name, new IP address, and the mainlanders have their connection back.
How will they ever be able to block all VPN connections? They could of course start by blocking some common ip ports, but there's nothing stopping people from using a different port, e.g. port 80, and we're back to situation we have now, where they have to go hunt down server after server.
I'm sure it's possible to heat lots of water with such a heater on just 24V, as long as you can get the current big enough you will get the power needed. Not easy to do, not practical to do, but it should definitely be possible.
Not something I'm planning to try, though:-) In such a situation gas is probably the way to go.
Three 32A fuses just for that one device (and three 64A fuses downstairs where some really thick wires connect the block to the grid). It probably can be rewired to a single phase but it's rated power is 21 kW so that'd be about 88A at a single phase, 240V, instead of 3x 19A at 380V.
Just in case you're wondering: it's an instant on type, without reservoir.
In case of going for solar exclusively (same accounts for wind, another intermittent renewable that has to rely on battery storage) it makes more sense of converting most of your household electronics to DC power. Laptops, phone chargers, TVs, even LED lights: they all take AC and convert it to DC to power the device itself. So why use an inverter in the first place? Power everything on 24V instead, directly off the batteries. You'll still need a converter to go from the 24V to the actual voltage they need (5-12V commonly) but those converters are cheap and efficient (>90%).
Washing machines, air cons and so are trickier. They can of course run on 24V DC instead of 240V AC, that's a matter of installing different motors, it's just that the current jumps tenfold as well, but it's still quite feasible.
Even worse would be my electric water heater, which takes about 20 Amp, 3-phase power. That's not going to work any more I'm afraid.
The inverter would be needed for connecting to the grid back and forth (your backup power), but when converting all your home appliances to DC you should be able to get away with a much smaller, cheaper inverter.
USD 100 for 20W? That's ridiculously expensive. You can buy the same in China - where they're made - for about USD 10-15. Even with battery and charge controller you're at no more than half that price.
Larger panels are cheaper per watt - a 20W panel is really small.
You're only correct on the CO2 level. On any other level, those motorbikes stink - literally. Blue or white smoke coming out of the exhaust of most if not all of them. Doing something about that is a very good thing (though the suggested way is not the best).
It's about the trucks and the cars, but not in the way you state it.
Most likely they just want to make more room for those, and think the motorbikes are a nuisance. That's the same way many places look at bicycles. It's just so hard to put an environmental hazard on bicycles, much easier to complain about the motorbikes - as added bonus, they are generally very poorly maintained and indeed seriously polluting, so getting rid of them will clean the sky in the city.
Of course the more prudent move would be to encourage what's already going on: the move to electric powered bikes.
It may "make it harder to teach evolution and climate change". On the other hand, it could also make it harder to teach intellectual design, or if teaching religion the schools may have to broaden their teaching past a certain branch of Christianity, but to also include e.g. Islam and Taoism.
You don't remember the time when Netscape was becoming so broken that people longed for the much better working and faster IE?
That, by the way, was only partly due to the strong lock-in MS created with their extensions. A lock-in that led to the disaster of IE6 (which, when it was just released, was a pretty advanced browser).
Chrome becoming the new IE is what I'm afraid of. Its market share is >60 and rising fast - at this rate in a few years Chrome is reaching 90% and everything else is marginalised. That opens up the opportunity for Google to start "extending" its browser and for web developers to develop sites that are Chrome-only as "it's what everyone uses", instead of coding to standards as they just about have to in the current situation.
The risk of Google stopping browser innovation and stalling the web for a decade is less likely than back in the IE vs Netscape days but it is a distinct possibility when we again have a single browser dominating the field.
This "bike sharing" is purely commercial here (Hong Kong). Mainland company that is expanding across the border. Several of such companies are active with varying success in the mainland, all using stationless systems so no dependency on a government providing space (which the HK government won't).
It's not sharing. It's plain old commercial rental of homes, rental of tools, pre-booked taxi rides, etc. Everything nowadays is called "sharing", recently here a "bike sharing" company came, offering lots of bicycles for rent. Not so long ago this would simply be called "bike rental", as that's really what it is.
AirBnB is not a "home sharing" company, it's a private short-term rentals broker. Uber and Lyft are not "ride sharing" companies, they're taxi service brokers. And so on.
Uber iirc started off on the premise "you're going from A to B, have empty seats in your car, why not fill them up and have the passengers share your cost". That's ride sharing. Very soon though it became people requesting rides from A to B, and then the driver going to A to pick up the passenger, then drive to B, even though the driver has no other reason to go to either A or B. That's when it became a taxi service.
AirBnB never even had such a "sharing" stage, that was designed to enable commercial short-term rentals by individuals of single apartments from the get-go.
There's something terribly wrong if your grid is so unreliable that your self-maintaned system is better.
Where I live, whenever there's a power outage lasting longer than a fraction of a second it's in the news. Those blips happen once or twice a year at most, and then often only in part of the territory. Bigger outages are usually limited to a building or two.
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Fake artists in playlists? Well, where are the screen shots? Or doesn't Spotify show clearly what is playing when?
I skimmed the first link in TFA which supposedly was an earlier article about the same issue, and it didn't show any screen shots or any other form of evidence other than some vague allegations. For now I have to put this in the "fake news" corner.
You don't have to. Just charge the credit card provided with their registration (the same card used to charge the deposit and rental fees).
Yes I know I used the wrong example with unencrypted port 80. More and more web traffic moves to encrypted traffic fast.
Everybody assumes that these umbrellas disappear while "on rent". I think it's quite safe to assume they disappear while "off rent", as otherwise there wouldn't be an issue with losing umbrellas as they would know who had the missing umbrella in their possession.
I thought VPN is encrypted pretty much by default already, making it hard to detect.
OK, maybe I used a wrong example with port 80 (http - unencrypted - can be inspected indeed), make that 443 (https). The outside observer can only see which IP it goes to, with no way to figure out what the content of the transmission is. With the world moving to https everywhere it's going to be hard to block that port. It'd also be an issue for all the local services that rely on encryption to remain safe.
It would have been a lot more interesting had they called themselves the Umbrella Movement, especially if they would be selling yellow umbrellas (honestly I'm not sure if it's nowadays OK again to walk around the mainland with a yellow umbrella).
More likely this is not an issue of people not returning an umbrella they rented, but people taking an umbrella without renting it.
Only if more people keep subscribing to your business than you lose umbrellas. Has the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme.
China has been going after and is already blocking lots of VPN services. But of course all the time new such servers will pop up, new domain name, new IP address, and the mainlanders have their connection back.
How will they ever be able to block all VPN connections? They could of course start by blocking some common ip ports, but there's nothing stopping people from using a different port, e.g. port 80, and we're back to situation we have now, where they have to go hunt down server after server.
I'm sure it's possible to heat lots of water with such a heater on just 24V, as long as you can get the current big enough you will get the power needed. Not easy to do, not practical to do, but it should definitely be possible.
Not something I'm planning to try, though :-) In such a situation gas is probably the way to go.
Yes. Real three phase power.
Three 32A fuses just for that one device (and three 64A fuses downstairs where some really thick wires connect the block to the grid). It probably can be rewired to a single phase but it's rated power is 21 kW so that'd be about 88A at a single phase, 240V, instead of 3x 19A at 380V.
Just in case you're wondering: it's an instant on type, without reservoir.
In case of going for solar exclusively (same accounts for wind, another intermittent renewable that has to rely on battery storage) it makes more sense of converting most of your household electronics to DC power. Laptops, phone chargers, TVs, even LED lights: they all take AC and convert it to DC to power the device itself. So why use an inverter in the first place? Power everything on 24V instead, directly off the batteries. You'll still need a converter to go from the 24V to the actual voltage they need (5-12V commonly) but those converters are cheap and efficient (>90%).
Washing machines, air cons and so are trickier. They can of course run on 24V DC instead of 240V AC, that's a matter of installing different motors, it's just that the current jumps tenfold as well, but it's still quite feasible.
Even worse would be my electric water heater, which takes about 20 Amp, 3-phase power. That's not going to work any more I'm afraid.
The inverter would be needed for connecting to the grid back and forth (your backup power), but when converting all your home appliances to DC you should be able to get away with a much smaller, cheaper inverter.
USD 100 for 20W? That's ridiculously expensive. You can buy the same in China - where they're made - for about USD 10-15. Even with battery and charge controller you're at no more than half that price.
Larger panels are cheaper per watt - a 20W panel is really small.
You're only correct on the CO2 level. On any other level, those motorbikes stink - literally. Blue or white smoke coming out of the exhaust of most if not all of them. Doing something about that is a very good thing (though the suggested way is not the best).
It's about the trucks and the cars, but not in the way you state it.
Most likely they just want to make more room for those, and think the motorbikes are a nuisance. That's the same way many places look at bicycles. It's just so hard to put an environmental hazard on bicycles, much easier to complain about the motorbikes - as added bonus, they are generally very poorly maintained and indeed seriously polluting, so getting rid of them will clean the sky in the city.
Of course the more prudent move would be to encourage what's already going on: the move to electric powered bikes.
It may "make it harder to teach evolution and climate change". On the other hand, it could also make it harder to teach intellectual design, or if teaching religion the schools may have to broaden their teaching past a certain branch of Christianity, but to also include e.g. Islam and Taoism.
an internet without Google is basically a broken internet now.
Indeed. And that's pretty scary in itself.
You don't remember the time when Netscape was becoming so broken that people longed for the much better working and faster IE?
That, by the way, was only partly due to the strong lock-in MS created with their extensions. A lock-in that led to the disaster of IE6 (which, when it was just released, was a pretty advanced browser).
Chrome becoming the new IE is what I'm afraid of. Its market share is >60 and rising fast - at this rate in a few years Chrome is reaching 90% and everything else is marginalised. That opens up the opportunity for Google to start "extending" its browser and for web developers to develop sites that are Chrome-only as "it's what everyone uses", instead of coding to standards as they just about have to in the current situation.
The risk of Google stopping browser innovation and stalling the web for a decade is less likely than back in the IE vs Netscape days but it is a distinct possibility when we again have a single browser dominating the field.
This "bike sharing" is purely commercial here (Hong Kong). Mainland company that is expanding across the border. Several of such companies are active with varying success in the mainland, all using stationless systems so no dependency on a government providing space (which the HK government won't).
It's not sharing. It's plain old commercial rental of homes, rental of tools, pre-booked taxi rides, etc. Everything nowadays is called "sharing", recently here a "bike sharing" company came, offering lots of bicycles for rent. Not so long ago this would simply be called "bike rental", as that's really what it is.
AirBnB is not a "home sharing" company, it's a private short-term rentals broker. Uber and Lyft are not "ride sharing" companies, they're taxi service brokers. And so on.
Uber iirc started off on the premise "you're going from A to B, have empty seats in your car, why not fill them up and have the passengers share your cost". That's ride sharing. Very soon though it became people requesting rides from A to B, and then the driver going to A to pick up the passenger, then drive to B, even though the driver has no other reason to go to either A or B. That's when it became a taxi service.
AirBnB never even had such a "sharing" stage, that was designed to enable commercial short-term rentals by individuals of single apartments from the get-go.
Of course, nothing is perfect, but it's a whole lot less vulnerable to normal weather patterns such as snow storms and typhoons than overhead wires.
I'd say it rather makes it look HOT!
That's why most of the world uses underground cables where possible.
There's something terribly wrong if your grid is so unreliable that your self-maintaned system is better.
Where I live, whenever there's a power outage lasting longer than a fraction of a second it's in the news. Those blips happen once or twice a year at most, and then often only in part of the territory. Bigger outages are usually limited to a building or two.