What are the odds that Hong Kong servers are pretty nearly directly connected to Chinese government servers?
Small. Very small. Far smaller than the known direct link between the US government and the major internet companies there.
If the mainland tried anything like it, they could face a serious backlash by the Hong Kong people. It appears you know even less about the current situation here, than I know about Watergate (which is very little).
Recently I had the need of a virtual server - just to run my web site, host my documents, and various other tasks. So searching for this I specifically searched for local Hong Kong companies (which is where I live), to host such a server. And a short search later I found one that offers cloud servers, just what I needed.
A few months ago I was thinking about the same issue - and then I was considering Amazon. I am a customer of Amazon already, for their glacier cold storage service, where I keep back-ups (all encrypted before they leave my systems). They have a good reputation, and overall very good prices, however it being a US company made me not even consider them now.
And that's a direct result of Snowden's revelations.
Maybe, but unlikely. The real reason it won't happen is because it would cost 1000x what the TSA costs now.
Honestly I'd love to see the actual cost of airport security in Israel vs that in the US, see which one is more expensive (corrected for passenger volume of course, so a cost per passenger). No idea which one costs more.
Maybe a bit tricky to get the airport security cost separated from the rest of the cost - then have a look at the whole fo the TSA and related agencies (FBI, CIA) and compare that to the Israeli cost.
As others have pointed out, they use tricks like having an attractive woman chat up a single man, without him even being aware that he's being profiled (at least at first).
Well now I know that if I'd travel to Israel, and upon leaving someone tries to chat me up, that I'm likely being profiled. It's not that common for people to start chatting up other people in airports, so if it happens, it's good to know it's likely a profiler.
Economy: We need small businesses who can innovate (and much more than silly mobile apps). [...] Or get some lawsuit for stepping on some bogus patent or make a product that someone misused and hurt themselves.
And this is, I'm afraid, a pretty valid reason not to bother starting up a technologically innovative business in the US. As soon as you gain any traction you will be swamped with patent claims from many different patent trolls.
I think everyone has a source within walking distance: the power outlet at home. So I'd not be too worried about that part.
And for third-party charging stations, that's the typical chicken-and-egg problem. As soon as there are more electric cars, that require quick top-ups of their batteries, there will be more gas stations selling electricity too.
Manufacturing aluminium takes a lot of energy, however it's perfectly recyclable, and that uses relatively little energy. Good chance that there is recycled aluminium in your bike, too. I shouldn't worry about that part too much.
The amount of energy to move your fat ass in your fat car is a lot more than the amount of energy needed to move the same fat ass using a bicycle. For the simple reason that you don't have to move that heavy car with it.
Part of the problem of this theory is that polluting is free. You don't pay for polluting the air, or the soil, or whatever. While I agree that the cost of a product is a measure of how much energy it takes to produce, it does not take into account the pollution it causes - during production, use, and disposal.
It is possible to account for energy use during normal use of the product (which is what makes a CFL cheaper than a traditional incandescent bulb). It is not possible to account for cost of pollution (which, in case of the CFL example, may be a major cost as a CFL is definitely more polluting than an incandescent in the disposal stage, if not recycled properly).
This is a major problem in countries like China. Many factories produce cheap, because they don't have to worry about pollution. They can just dump their toxic waste in the river, while in Europe or in the US they'd have to pay big bucks to have it taken care of properly. However those big bucks are nothing compared to the cost to the environment: the direct loss of life, both human and animal, the loss of farmland, the loss of suitable drinking water, the cost of cleaning it all up again after the fact. And those cost do not come back in the price of the product.
Similarly, we would have the ability to start switching everyone to green power if everyone has an electric vehicle. Seen that way, keeping everyone on fossil fuels has a very high opportunity cost, because you can't switch a gasoline motor to solar/wind/nuclear.
That might even help in making wind and solar more viable.
At all times, cars will be charging. When people park their car (at home, at work,...) they plug it in as part of their parking routine, and the battery can start charging. And most of the time, most of the cars are parked - except maybe for rush hour. The average car is maybe an hour or two, three a day on the road, the rest of the time it's parked somewhere.
The problem of solar and wind is that the supply is unreliable, and can change in seconds. That's a big issue for the network, when such supplies become a major factor - it's hard to deal with the sudden loss of like 20% of your supply, just as it is to deal with a sudden increase of such an amount.
Electric cars may be part of that solution (similar to the earlier proposed solution of using cold storage facilities as power sinks): they don't need constant supply of power, like you need for your TV or your light bulbs. As long as there is a good average supply, the user can be sure that after a certain time the battery is full. When there is a lot of supply, cars are charged - when there is little supply, they're not charged.
Implementation may be tricky. I envision a separate outlet for "unreliable supply" that is switched on and off depending on the availability, and where the power is like half price of the normal "reliable" supply. It'd require at least a second meter and some electronics in that meter to switch on and off the supply (or to limit current instead of outright on and off switching). People may want to use it for applications like their fridge or freezer as well.
It's not that black and white as you try to state it.
Sure a lot of electricity comes from coal, which produces relatively much CO2 and other pollutants. However modern scrubbers can take care of most of these other pollutants, allowing coal fired plants to be pretty clean. So how much pollution the electricity you get has caused, depends a lot on the overall technology, not just whether it's coal or nuclear or wind.
Small-time gasoline engines like used in hybrids are usually less efficient than large-scale power plants, thus using more fossil fuels than a power plant to produce the same amount of electricity. And thanks to the scrubbers installed in modern power plants, their smokestack may well have much cleaner air than what comes out of the exhaust of your car.
Which one wins, depends a lot on the technology used on both sides. The fuel used in the power plant, the efficiency of your car's engine, the exhaust cleaning solutions in place, etc. And those parameters again vary with where you live, and the exact make of car you're looking at.
Well back in the mid 1990s, CSS and JS were not an issue. They didn't exist yet. It was just HTML you could use.
That was also the time that (if the server allowed it) you could edit the html in the built-in editor of Mosaic or Netscape, and upload it back to the server. A primitive form of modern-day wiki's.
As another replied already, I must concur: PrefBar is great indeed. It allows you to create a button for every single option available in the about:config options, on top of the many already built-in buttons. Extremely customisable.
What may be more notable, is the staying power of Win XP.
Win XP is with 37% market share not far behind the 44% of Win 7 (two major versions ahead of XP, and released almost four years ago by now). If all computers that had been replaced would have received Win 7, the market share of Win 7 compared to Win XP should be much higher: if the average lifetime of a PC is five years, some 80% of the computers that were in use back in summer 2009 have been replaced by now. Yet newer-than-XP versions of Windows are far behind that number.
And while it's market share is falling, it's falling only slowly, with a 0.5% loss over the past month. And I really can not imagine just 0.5% of computers are being replaced in a month - at an average lifespan of 5 years for a PC there should be nearly 1.7% replacement rate per month. So is it that XP computers are all just old ones that are not being replaced? Or is it that XP is being installed on new computers? Both are about as unbelievable, yet I can't think of another reason XP's market share is falling so much slower than the computer replacement rate.
Yes. This would almost certainly be a democratic decision by the flying public, on whether to go pilotless or not. Thanks to the forces of economics.
There are numerous airlines in this world, and most routes (at least the popular ones) are served by multiple companies. The smaller routes don't count much in this picture, and those are likely to be the last to be automated, for there are less savings to be made. Also volume is just a fraction of that on the main routes.
Now if one company moves to pilotless flights, presumably to undercut the fares of the competition, the public has an obvious choice. If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow. If they do not, the pilotless airline will have to reinstate their pilots or go out of business.
So the actual handling of the media - from contacting the remote server to displaying the images on the screen - is handled by the DRM plug-in? Makes me wonder how that's different than the current Flash situation. And what the role of FF is in that scenario, beyond passing the URL to the DRM handler.
Slashdot Mirror
Crocodile tears.
What are the odds that Hong Kong servers are pretty nearly directly connected to Chinese government servers?
Small. Very small. Far smaller than the known direct link between the US government and the major internet companies there.
If the mainland tried anything like it, they could face a serious backlash by the Hong Kong people. It appears you know even less about the current situation here, than I know about Watergate (which is very little).
'nuff said
Agreed, fully.
Recently I had the need of a virtual server - just to run my web site, host my documents, and various other tasks. So searching for this I specifically searched for local Hong Kong companies (which is where I live), to host such a server. And a short search later I found one that offers cloud servers, just what I needed.
A few months ago I was thinking about the same issue - and then I was considering Amazon. I am a customer of Amazon already, for their glacier cold storage service, where I keep back-ups (all encrypted before they leave my systems). They have a good reputation, and overall very good prices, however it being a US company made me not even consider them now.
And that's a direct result of Snowden's revelations.
Chip making ... low-level engineering ...
I'd say putting devices together is lower level than making the chips, which is generally considered high-tech.
That just goes to show that those cops have a brain. They can tell the difference between an empty shell and a bomb.
Maybe, but unlikely. The real reason it won't happen is because it would cost 1000x what the TSA costs now.
Honestly I'd love to see the actual cost of airport security in Israel vs that in the US, see which one is more expensive (corrected for passenger volume of course, so a cost per passenger). No idea which one costs more.
Maybe a bit tricky to get the airport security cost separated from the rest of the cost - then have a look at the whole fo the TSA and related agencies (FBI, CIA) and compare that to the Israeli cost.
As others have pointed out, they use tricks like having an attractive woman chat up a single man, without him even being aware that he's being profiled (at least at first).
Well now I know that if I'd travel to Israel, and upon leaving someone tries to chat me up, that I'm likely being profiled. It's not that common for people to start chatting up other people in airports, so if it happens, it's good to know it's likely a profiler.
Economy: We need small businesses who can innovate (and much more than silly mobile apps). [...] Or get some lawsuit for stepping on some bogus patent or make a product that someone misused and hurt themselves.
And this is, I'm afraid, a pretty valid reason not to bother starting up a technologically innovative business in the US. As soon as you gain any traction you will be swamped with patent claims from many different patent trolls.
OK then, show me a man-made pump that can receive a complete overhaul without having to be taken out of service.
It can at least give a whole new meaning to "transsexual"
I think everyone has a source within walking distance: the power outlet at home. So I'd not be too worried about that part.
And for third-party charging stations, that's the typical chicken-and-egg problem. As soon as there are more electric cars, that require quick top-ups of their batteries, there will be more gas stations selling electricity too.
Manufacturing aluminium takes a lot of energy, however it's perfectly recyclable, and that uses relatively little energy. Good chance that there is recycled aluminium in your bike, too. I shouldn't worry about that part too much.
The amount of energy to move your fat ass in your fat car is a lot more than the amount of energy needed to move the same fat ass using a bicycle. For the simple reason that you don't have to move that heavy car with it.
Part of the problem of this theory is that polluting is free. You don't pay for polluting the air, or the soil, or whatever. While I agree that the cost of a product is a measure of how much energy it takes to produce, it does not take into account the pollution it causes - during production, use, and disposal.
It is possible to account for energy use during normal use of the product (which is what makes a CFL cheaper than a traditional incandescent bulb). It is not possible to account for cost of pollution (which, in case of the CFL example, may be a major cost as a CFL is definitely more polluting than an incandescent in the disposal stage, if not recycled properly).
This is a major problem in countries like China. Many factories produce cheap, because they don't have to worry about pollution. They can just dump their toxic waste in the river, while in Europe or in the US they'd have to pay big bucks to have it taken care of properly. However those big bucks are nothing compared to the cost to the environment: the direct loss of life, both human and animal, the loss of farmland, the loss of suitable drinking water, the cost of cleaning it all up again after the fact. And those cost do not come back in the price of the product.
Similarly, we would have the ability to start switching everyone to green power if everyone has an electric vehicle. Seen that way, keeping everyone on fossil fuels has a very high opportunity cost, because you can't switch a gasoline motor to solar/wind/nuclear.
That might even help in making wind and solar more viable.
At all times, cars will be charging. When people park their car (at home, at work, ...) they plug it in as part of their parking routine, and the battery can start charging. And most of the time, most of the cars are parked - except maybe for rush hour. The average car is maybe an hour or two, three a day on the road, the rest of the time it's parked somewhere.
The problem of solar and wind is that the supply is unreliable, and can change in seconds. That's a big issue for the network, when such supplies become a major factor - it's hard to deal with the sudden loss of like 20% of your supply, just as it is to deal with a sudden increase of such an amount.
Electric cars may be part of that solution (similar to the earlier proposed solution of using cold storage facilities as power sinks): they don't need constant supply of power, like you need for your TV or your light bulbs. As long as there is a good average supply, the user can be sure that after a certain time the battery is full. When there is a lot of supply, cars are charged - when there is little supply, they're not charged.
Implementation may be tricky. I envision a separate outlet for "unreliable supply" that is switched on and off depending on the availability, and where the power is like half price of the normal "reliable" supply. It'd require at least a second meter and some electronics in that meter to switch on and off the supply (or to limit current instead of outright on and off switching). People may want to use it for applications like their fridge or freezer as well.
It's not that black and white as you try to state it.
Sure a lot of electricity comes from coal, which produces relatively much CO2 and other pollutants. However modern scrubbers can take care of most of these other pollutants, allowing coal fired plants to be pretty clean. So how much pollution the electricity you get has caused, depends a lot on the overall technology, not just whether it's coal or nuclear or wind.
Small-time gasoline engines like used in hybrids are usually less efficient than large-scale power plants, thus using more fossil fuels than a power plant to produce the same amount of electricity. And thanks to the scrubbers installed in modern power plants, their smokestack may well have much cleaner air than what comes out of the exhaust of your car.
Which one wins, depends a lot on the technology used on both sides. The fuel used in the power plant, the efficiency of your car's engine, the exhaust cleaning solutions in place, etc. And those parameters again vary with where you live, and the exact make of car you're looking at.
Well back in the mid 1990s, CSS and JS were not an issue. They didn't exist yet. It was just HTML you could use.
That was also the time that (if the server allowed it) you could edit the html in the built-in editor of Mosaic or Netscape, and upload it back to the server. A primitive form of modern-day wiki's.
As another replied already, I must concur: PrefBar is great indeed. It allows you to create a button for every single option available in the about:config options, on top of the many already built-in buttons. Extremely customisable.
Average, so yes that would be like "all" computers replaced: some not, some twice - that's what averages do.
What may be more notable, is the staying power of Win XP.
Win XP is with 37% market share not far behind the 44% of Win 7 (two major versions ahead of XP, and released almost four years ago by now). If all computers that had been replaced would have received Win 7, the market share of Win 7 compared to Win XP should be much higher: if the average lifetime of a PC is five years, some 80% of the computers that were in use back in summer 2009 have been replaced by now. Yet newer-than-XP versions of Windows are far behind that number.
And while it's market share is falling, it's falling only slowly, with a 0.5% loss over the past month. And I really can not imagine just 0.5% of computers are being replaced in a month - at an average lifespan of 5 years for a PC there should be nearly 1.7% replacement rate per month. So is it that XP computers are all just old ones that are not being replaced? Or is it that XP is being installed on new computers? Both are about as unbelievable, yet I can't think of another reason XP's market share is falling so much slower than the computer replacement rate.
It has: Win '95, Win '98, Win 2000.
Yes. This would almost certainly be a democratic decision by the flying public, on whether to go pilotless or not. Thanks to the forces of economics.
There are numerous airlines in this world, and most routes (at least the popular ones) are served by multiple companies. The smaller routes don't count much in this picture, and those are likely to be the last to be automated, for there are less savings to be made. Also volume is just a fraction of that on the main routes.
Now if one company moves to pilotless flights, presumably to undercut the fares of the competition, the public has an obvious choice. If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow. If they do not, the pilotless airline will have to reinstate their pilots or go out of business.
So the actual handling of the media - from contacting the remote server to displaying the images on the screen - is handled by the DRM plug-in? Makes me wonder how that's different than the current Flash situation. And what the role of FF is in that scenario, beyond passing the URL to the DRM handler.
Well, thanks to their DRM, no netflix for me. And that's not even because I'm not using Windows.
Come on, that are yesterday's buzzwords! You can do better, I'm sure.