How is "it has to work offline" an answer to the question of whether there are functional solutions for voice controlling things like sending emails and other basic PC usage scenarios?
I don't know the elderly woman in question, but my bet would be that she cares _a lot_ more about whether or not she can make the solution do what she needs, than whether or not it is offline or online. Either way, that's her call.
citing the challenges of turning a profit in an "extremely competitive" market
True, that. It's hard to turn a profit when your competitors have drones that fly, while yours grab headlines for literally dropping out of the sky.
That's only half joking. The PR disaster of the early design issue was pretty huge. Personally, I think it's a shame. The likes of DJI really could use some stiff competition.
Why would I ask an outside company for permission to change a setting on a thermostat, or light, or alarm system or camera?
While that is how some connected devices work (well, sort of, "ask for permission" is hyperbolic phrasing), it's not by any means all of them. Case in point, my Philips Hue lights work just fine without an internet connection. I can't use Google Home to control them while offline, and I obviously can't use the app outside my LAN in such a case, but while at home both switches and app work fine.
In other words, I dispute your claim of it being exactly like buying a home and having to ask for the real estate agent to let you in. It's more like how you might have your alarm company keep a spare set of keys to offer you the convenience of helping you out if you should lose yours. At the expense of the added risk of there being an extra set of keys outside of your control.
Update: I browsed the Reddit real quick, and it seems likely it's not just a trick to retain a day's worth of battery, but to prevent devices from shutting down by drawing too much power. If that is the case then obviously an option to run full blast would be a bad idea. Informing the user would still be a grand idea, though.
The very least they should do is to inform the user: "Your battery is degraded and performance is reduced as a result. It is recommended you have the battery replaced."
Having said that, I don't agree that an advanced option somewhere an average user won't even know to look, is "increasing complexity in configuring". Heck, it seems every time my iPad gets a major update I have to go through a handful of screens worth of iCloud logins and what not. This is stuff I _already_ configured. If Apple feels that is OK, I really don't see the argument against an option tucked away somewhere.
I see your point. The other angle to look at it from is that gambling is already regulated, and that this is gambling in a new form that current legislation doesn't cover. In effect, a loophole allowing for unregulated gambling.
If one of the primary goals of gambling regulation is to prevent predatory behavior when it comes to exploiting those with addictive personalities, and I believe that to be the case, then I cannot see how we can leave this unregulated. I don't see a way to both be for gambling regulations and being against them applying to video games.
The removal of 32-bit support is what has stopped me from upgrading my iPad. I have a number of games on there that will never get a 64-bit version since the studios that ported them are long gone. I paid good money for those games.
I guess that there might come a time when some application I really want is only available for iOS 11 and outweighs my desire to retain access to my 32-bit library, but until then I'm sticking with 10.
I have nothing against firing people who won't do their job (if they can't, it depends on the reason), the question is whether the stack rank system aids in doing that and does so in a way that does not have a significant negative impact.
A lot more goes into making a Tesla or solar panels than thousands of people standing at an assembly line performing an easily quantifiable monotonous task. How do you create metrics that accurately judges a person's overall value to the company? That one guy in R&D that keeps coming up with useless ideas, might be the same guy that came up with <insert something you find ingenious about Teslas>. If your metric for R&D personell is "number of ideas that end up making it to production", he'd be fired, but he was in reality much more valuable than the guy that submitted a bunch of minor tidbits no one really cares about. Once people realize this, they stop thinking big and just churn out minor stuff to keep their rank up. This is obviously an entirely hypothetical scenario, but the difficulty in creating good metrics and the push towards gaming the system, I believe would be real.
One could argue that any time a company needs to cut down on employees, they're in one way or another stack ranking to decide who goes and who stays, even if it's only managers offering a general opinion on each employee. But the way I interpret it, the notion with the type of stack ranking we're talking about here seems to be a formalized way to constantly "prune" employees, and that just doesn't sit right with me. It reduces employees to a points value and sounds like something that might have seemed like a good idea a hundred years ago and we make fun of today.
Based on what I know of the US workplace, though, I see how it might seem a lot more appealing. It's a different world over there when it comes to things like employee protection legislation (seems to barely exist in many states) and working environments in general. Around here, "I think someone else could do this job better" is explicitly not a valid reason to fire someone. You'd have to show negligence or vastly reduced work performance (compared to that employee's norm, not everyone else's) over a significant period of time to be able to fire someone and for it to hold up in court. The employer is also responsible for trying to help rectify the issue before being allowed to fire (e.g. meeting with the employee to let them know what's expected, offering extra training etc.).
I googled "stacked ranking" and the first page of search hits contained titles like "stack ranking employees is a bad idea", "the trouble with stacked rankings", "Amazon to drop dreaded stack-ranking".
I hadn't heard of the thing before now, but reading up on it I get the impression it would be very hard to apply to anything but very specific types of jobs where it's possible to come up with clear and relevant metrics (e.g. "number of chairs assembled per day", "number of chairs failing QA"). For more complex (for lack of a better term) types of jobs, coughing up relevant metrics can be close to impossible. And in all cases it will likely affect moral negatively as it pits employees against each other and encourages "gaming" the ranking system.
At least now I know one more thing to make sure a company does not do before I consider accepting a position there.
When it hadn't shown yet, people were expecting The Family Guy in Space, full of fart jokes.
I watched the first episode and thought that's exactly what was delivered. Granted, I haven't watched much Family Guy so perhaps the similarity is less than I remember it to be, but Orville was full of puerile toilet humor. I couldn't stand it.
There are some forms of humor where it doesn't necessarily matter if I get the joke or not. Where, if I don't, it doesn't actively detract from everything around it. I've found toilet humor to be the opposite, it actively ruins any ability to enjoy the surrounding show.
Remove the inane attempts at humor, and I'm pretty sure I would have loved the show. Can't win 'em all.
That she didn't use Facebook to connect with her clients, was a pretty big point. It says so right there in the synopsis: "Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all"
ask yourself: if it takes "scientists" to do your job, why can we outsource it to low-wage workers in the other side of the world with no loss whatsoever?
My language doesn't attach the word "science" to computer degrees, so we're ahead of you on that one (well, except for Bachelor and Master degrees, but those are international names so don't blame us).
As for the quoted statement, in my experience we can't. Any company I've been in that has outsourced, and every friend who has been in the know in his or her company, tells the same story: outsourcing looks great on paper, but is a pile of stinking poo in reality. Money saved on wages for developers, gets lost in the poor quality of the delivered product, and the extra resources needed to manage them.
The only remedy I've seen is to not rent resources but instead establish a local office, then send people there a lot in order to bring that culture more in line with our own. It takes a long time, and costs a lot of money, but eventually they might become productive. I can only think of one example of it working, and it took about a decade to get there.
...a euphemism for (insert name for ultimate evil) to many Americans.
I used less-than/more-than instead of parens originally, which 1) vanished on preview and, 2) caused the message to not appear when trying to edit, so I had no way of fixing it.
I don't have the numbers to give an objective comment, but I cannot remember this type of divide around here. We have rural areas the police literally only routinely visits on a weekly basis, with response times in the area of "45 minutes in 80% of urgent cases", and I don't recall hearing the locals argue for larger degrees of gun ownership. What they do tend to complain about, is the response time for medical aid.
My speculation would be that in a society with low crime and levels of violence, priorities are skewed in comparison to high crime nations. It seems logical. Adding to that, in case you missed it in my original response, if you call the cops here they will by default show up unarmed. They'll only arm themselves if the situation is judged to warrant it, and central approval having been given.
If all (or most) of this holds true, a cultural shift would do wonders to the US. But I don't see that happening without significant political upheaval. A major driver for reduction of crime seems to be financial equality, and redistribution of wealth is in the US almost synonymous with communism which is again a euphemism for to many Americans.
It seems like a tricky area to do reliable research on. It's not like you have two virtually identical countries and can ban guns in one and not the other and see how it all pans out. Australia's changes to gun laws following their Port Arthur massacre might be cited to show restrictive legislation can work, but then again it's very difficult to control for other influences (IIRC gun related violence was already on a downward trend, but with the trend seeming to accelerate after the new legislation).
Then there are nations with both restrictive legislation _and_ high rate of gun ownership, that do not have these issues. So one could argue that might be the way to go. For example, in my own nation (Norway) we have a high rate of gun ownership, but "for protection" is simply not a valid reason to buy a firearm. You buy one for hunting, or for sports. For handguns you need to pass a safety course and be an active member of a club for a minimum of six months, at which point you can buy a safe approved for firearms storage (requirements being designed to prevent the firearm from being stolen) and then _apply_ for a permit to purchase a handgun. Typically you'll get approved, but the police does check with your club so if you've been behaving like an idiot and ignored safety protocols and such, they'll let the police know. In other words, this serves to instill a mindset of safety with regards to firearms.
Do I think that's the holy grail of how to sort out gun violence? To be honest, no. It works for us, because we are us. We're a society where people do not in general view firearms as something you need for protection. We don't sit on our back porch taking potshots at bottles (hey, I'm entitled to at least one stereotype here, I figured). Where police are still not generally armed. How can what works here be expected to work in a nation like the US, where the primary argument for gun ownership seems to be protection from your neighbors and your own government? Where there's a very real risk of a traffic stop turning into a shootout?
Now, I do think the US legislation and culture when it comes to gun ownership is nothing short of bonkers. That doesn't mean I can claim to know what might work to help solve it. Although I don't see many ways of making it worse, so just about anything seems worth trying.
They didn't break it, they removed it. I can't tell if you're aware of that and just being facetious by saying "broke". Choice of words matter.
But yeah, it was annoying. On the other hand it took all of half an hour to figure out how to enable L2TP/IPSec at work, so not exactly the end of the world. The rigidity of IT in larger corporations is probably more of a stumbling block than the technical side of it.
As I said, it's a difficult figure to calculate. How do you put a ROI figure on the existence of things like LASIK and kidney dialysis machines? Over the years I've googled the topic numerous times, and the number of articles concluding that there's a vast positive ROI outnumbers those that claim the opposite by a huge amount. I have no way of evaluating whether yours is any more accurate than any other of them. Although, your article refers to 1990 as "recent", so presumably it's getting close to 30 years old now, which may or may not be relevant to the calculation.
Rather, almost as if it's... actually difficult. E.g. how exactly do you calculate the value to society of the reduction in accidents by grooved pavement?
Considering NASA costs next to nothing (about 0.5% of the US govt's total budget), and the studies I've seen referenced show its return on investment to be about $10 for every $1 used (granted, it's a difficult figure to calculate, but even if assuming a huge error margin that's still great ROI), it's no wonder you chose to post that anonymously.
Leaving this type of decision to an IT professional would be fine, but a regular end-user would not even understand the question. Allowing incompatible AV to keep running might lead to pretty severe stability issues on an OS level, disabling it is a decision the OS vendor doesn't really have any choice but to make on behalf of the user. As long as they inform the user and direct them to information on how to obtain an update when it becomes available, it's about as well as it could be handled IMO.
Those are entirely different things (unless TFA contradicts the summary). What hotels tried to do was to block hotspots in order to force you to connect e.g. your laptop to the hotel's wifi (presumably at a premium) rather than your own hotspot. From what I remember, they pretty much willfully caused interference to accomplish this, thus why the FCC were not fans.
This patent, on the other hand, is about intercepting and reacting to content while on the store's wifi.
Guess what? It doesn't rely on it. The permafrost isn't anywhere near as cold as the desired storage temperature of -18 C. It is, however, nice to have, both as an energy saver and to slow the heating process in case of refrigeration failure (something being underground helps with regardless). And, until such time as it should indeed vanish, it'll keep things at -3 even in the event of extended cooling failure.
What do you mean? The location was picked _because_ it is geologically stable. There's no tectonic activity, it's at high enough altitude to remain above sea level even if the ice caps should fully melt, and permafrost safeguards against refrigeration failure.
The recent flooding of the entrance was caused by surface melt, not thawing of the subterranean permafrost surrounding the vault itself. Once the water entered the tunnel and flowed deeper, it froze. Even if it should heat up enough up there to kill off the permafrost entirely, the subterranean nature of the vault still eases the refrigeration needs.
Seed vaults already exist all over the world, the Svalbard vault is the backup in case they are lost. Hyperbolically speaking "due to global disaster". More realistically speaking, when one of the other vaults get wiped out from fire, war, floods etc.
In addition, it's intended to be self sustained. It's locally powered, and in the event of refrigeration failure permafrost still maintains below freezing temperatures (though not deep freeze, obviously), presumably ensuring seeds are viable for a long time after a global disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
How is "it has to work offline" an answer to the question of whether there are functional solutions for voice controlling things like sending emails and other basic PC usage scenarios?
I don't know the elderly woman in question, but my bet would be that she cares _a lot_ more about whether or not she can make the solution do what she needs, than whether or not it is offline or online. Either way, that's her call.
True, that. It's hard to turn a profit when your competitors have drones that fly, while yours grab headlines for literally dropping out of the sky.
That's only half joking. The PR disaster of the early design issue was pretty huge. Personally, I think it's a shame. The likes of DJI really could use some stiff competition.
Why would I ask an outside company for permission to change a setting on a thermostat, or light, or alarm system or camera?
While that is how some connected devices work (well, sort of, "ask for permission" is hyperbolic phrasing), it's not by any means all of them. Case in point, my Philips Hue lights work just fine without an internet connection. I can't use Google Home to control them while offline, and I obviously can't use the app outside my LAN in such a case, but while at home both switches and app work fine.
In other words, I dispute your claim of it being exactly like buying a home and having to ask for the real estate agent to let you in. It's more like how you might have your alarm company keep a spare set of keys to offer you the convenience of helping you out if you should lose yours. At the expense of the added risk of there being an extra set of keys outside of your control.
That would be my preference. But I'm not American, so I don't count. Also, I agree it doesn't exactly run off the tongue.
Update: I browsed the Reddit real quick, and it seems likely it's not just a trick to retain a day's worth of battery, but to prevent devices from shutting down by drawing too much power. If that is the case then obviously an option to run full blast would be a bad idea. Informing the user would still be a grand idea, though.
The very least they should do is to inform the user: "Your battery is degraded and performance is reduced as a result. It is recommended you have the battery replaced."
Having said that, I don't agree that an advanced option somewhere an average user won't even know to look, is "increasing complexity in configuring". Heck, it seems every time my iPad gets a major update I have to go through a handful of screens worth of iCloud logins and what not. This is stuff I _already_ configured. If Apple feels that is OK, I really don't see the argument against an option tucked away somewhere.
I see your point. The other angle to look at it from is that gambling is already regulated, and that this is gambling in a new form that current legislation doesn't cover. In effect, a loophole allowing for unregulated gambling.
If one of the primary goals of gambling regulation is to prevent predatory behavior when it comes to exploiting those with addictive personalities, and I believe that to be the case, then I cannot see how we can leave this unregulated. I don't see a way to both be for gambling regulations and being against them applying to video games.
The removal of 32-bit support is what has stopped me from upgrading my iPad. I have a number of games on there that will never get a 64-bit version since the studios that ported them are long gone. I paid good money for those games.
I guess that there might come a time when some application I really want is only available for iOS 11 and outweighs my desire to retain access to my 32-bit library, but until then I'm sticking with 10.
I have nothing against firing people who won't do their job (if they can't, it depends on the reason), the question is whether the stack rank system aids in doing that and does so in a way that does not have a significant negative impact.
A lot more goes into making a Tesla or solar panels than thousands of people standing at an assembly line performing an easily quantifiable monotonous task. How do you create metrics that accurately judges a person's overall value to the company? That one guy in R&D that keeps coming up with useless ideas, might be the same guy that came up with <insert something you find ingenious about Teslas>. If your metric for R&D personell is "number of ideas that end up making it to production", he'd be fired, but he was in reality much more valuable than the guy that submitted a bunch of minor tidbits no one really cares about. Once people realize this, they stop thinking big and just churn out minor stuff to keep their rank up. This is obviously an entirely hypothetical scenario, but the difficulty in creating good metrics and the push towards gaming the system, I believe would be real.
One could argue that any time a company needs to cut down on employees, they're in one way or another stack ranking to decide who goes and who stays, even if it's only managers offering a general opinion on each employee. But the way I interpret it, the notion with the type of stack ranking we're talking about here seems to be a formalized way to constantly "prune" employees, and that just doesn't sit right with me. It reduces employees to a points value and sounds like something that might have seemed like a good idea a hundred years ago and we make fun of today.
Based on what I know of the US workplace, though, I see how it might seem a lot more appealing. It's a different world over there when it comes to things like employee protection legislation (seems to barely exist in many states) and working environments in general. Around here, "I think someone else could do this job better" is explicitly not a valid reason to fire someone. You'd have to show negligence or vastly reduced work performance (compared to that employee's norm, not everyone else's) over a significant period of time to be able to fire someone and for it to hold up in court. The employer is also responsible for trying to help rectify the issue before being allowed to fire (e.g. meeting with the employee to let them know what's expected, offering extra training etc.).
I googled "stacked ranking" and the first page of search hits contained titles like "stack ranking employees is a bad idea", "the trouble with stacked rankings", "Amazon to drop dreaded stack-ranking".
I hadn't heard of the thing before now, but reading up on it I get the impression it would be very hard to apply to anything but very specific types of jobs where it's possible to come up with clear and relevant metrics (e.g. "number of chairs assembled per day", "number of chairs failing QA"). For more complex (for lack of a better term) types of jobs, coughing up relevant metrics can be close to impossible. And in all cases it will likely affect moral negatively as it pits employees against each other and encourages "gaming" the ranking system.
At least now I know one more thing to make sure a company does not do before I consider accepting a position there.
When it hadn't shown yet, people were expecting The Family Guy in Space, full of fart jokes.
I watched the first episode and thought that's exactly what was delivered. Granted, I haven't watched much Family Guy so perhaps the similarity is less than I remember it to be, but Orville was full of puerile toilet humor. I couldn't stand it.
There are some forms of humor where it doesn't necessarily matter if I get the joke or not. Where, if I don't, it doesn't actively detract from everything around it. I've found toilet humor to be the opposite, it actively ruins any ability to enjoy the surrounding show.
Remove the inane attempts at humor, and I'm pretty sure I would have loved the show. Can't win 'em all.
That she didn't use Facebook to connect with her clients, was a pretty big point. It says so right there in the synopsis: "Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all"
ask yourself: if it takes "scientists" to do your job, why can we outsource it to low-wage workers in the other side of the world with no loss whatsoever?
My language doesn't attach the word "science" to computer degrees, so we're ahead of you on that one (well, except for Bachelor and Master degrees, but those are international names so don't blame us).
As for the quoted statement, in my experience we can't. Any company I've been in that has outsourced, and every friend who has been in the know in his or her company, tells the same story: outsourcing looks great on paper, but is a pile of stinking poo in reality. Money saved on wages for developers, gets lost in the poor quality of the delivered product, and the extra resources needed to manage them.
The only remedy I've seen is to not rent resources but instead establish a local office, then send people there a lot in order to bring that culture more in line with our own. It takes a long time, and costs a lot of money, but eventually they might become productive. I can only think of one example of it working, and it took about a decade to get there.
...a euphemism for (insert name for ultimate evil) to many Americans.
I used less-than/more-than instead of parens originally, which 1) vanished on preview and, 2) caused the message to not appear when trying to edit, so I had no way of fixing it.
I don't have the numbers to give an objective comment, but I cannot remember this type of divide around here. We have rural areas the police literally only routinely visits on a weekly basis, with response times in the area of "45 minutes in 80% of urgent cases", and I don't recall hearing the locals argue for larger degrees of gun ownership. What they do tend to complain about, is the response time for medical aid.
My speculation would be that in a society with low crime and levels of violence, priorities are skewed in comparison to high crime nations. It seems logical. Adding to that, in case you missed it in my original response, if you call the cops here they will by default show up unarmed. They'll only arm themselves if the situation is judged to warrant it, and central approval having been given.
If all (or most) of this holds true, a cultural shift would do wonders to the US. But I don't see that happening without significant political upheaval. A major driver for reduction of crime seems to be financial equality, and redistribution of wealth is in the US almost synonymous with communism which is again a euphemism for to many Americans.
tl;dr: I don't have the answer either.
It seems like a tricky area to do reliable research on. It's not like you have two virtually identical countries and can ban guns in one and not the other and see how it all pans out. Australia's changes to gun laws following their Port Arthur massacre might be cited to show restrictive legislation can work, but then again it's very difficult to control for other influences (IIRC gun related violence was already on a downward trend, but with the trend seeming to accelerate after the new legislation).
Then there are nations with both restrictive legislation _and_ high rate of gun ownership, that do not have these issues. So one could argue that might be the way to go. For example, in my own nation (Norway) we have a high rate of gun ownership, but "for protection" is simply not a valid reason to buy a firearm. You buy one for hunting, or for sports. For handguns you need to pass a safety course and be an active member of a club for a minimum of six months, at which point you can buy a safe approved for firearms storage (requirements being designed to prevent the firearm from being stolen) and then _apply_ for a permit to purchase a handgun. Typically you'll get approved, but the police does check with your club so if you've been behaving like an idiot and ignored safety protocols and such, they'll let the police know. In other words, this serves to instill a mindset of safety with regards to firearms.
Do I think that's the holy grail of how to sort out gun violence? To be honest, no. It works for us, because we are us. We're a society where people do not in general view firearms as something you need for protection. We don't sit on our back porch taking potshots at bottles (hey, I'm entitled to at least one stereotype here, I figured). Where police are still not generally armed. How can what works here be expected to work in a nation like the US, where the primary argument for gun ownership seems to be protection from your neighbors and your own government? Where there's a very real risk of a traffic stop turning into a shootout?
Now, I do think the US legislation and culture when it comes to gun ownership is nothing short of bonkers. That doesn't mean I can claim to know what might work to help solve it. Although I don't see many ways of making it worse, so just about anything seems worth trying.
They didn't break it, they removed it. I can't tell if you're aware of that and just being facetious by saying "broke". Choice of words matter.
But yeah, it was annoying. On the other hand it took all of half an hour to figure out how to enable L2TP/IPSec at work, so not exactly the end of the world. The rigidity of IT in larger corporations is probably more of a stumbling block than the technical side of it.
As I said, it's a difficult figure to calculate. How do you put a ROI figure on the existence of things like LASIK and kidney dialysis machines? Over the years I've googled the topic numerous times, and the number of articles concluding that there's a vast positive ROI outnumbers those that claim the opposite by a huge amount. I have no way of evaluating whether yours is any more accurate than any other of them. Although, your article refers to 1990 as "recent", so presumably it's getting close to 30 years old now, which may or may not be relevant to the calculation.
"granted, it's a difficult figure to calculate"
Almost as if it's on purpose ...
Rather, almost as if it's... actually difficult. E.g. how exactly do you calculate the value to society of the reduction in accidents by grooved pavement?
Considering NASA costs next to nothing (about 0.5% of the US govt's total budget), and the studies I've seen referenced show its return on investment to be about $10 for every $1 used (granted, it's a difficult figure to calculate, but even if assuming a huge error margin that's still great ROI), it's no wonder you chose to post that anonymously.
Leaving this type of decision to an IT professional would be fine, but a regular end-user would not even understand the question. Allowing incompatible AV to keep running might lead to pretty severe stability issues on an OS level, disabling it is a decision the OS vendor doesn't really have any choice but to make on behalf of the user. As long as they inform the user and direct them to information on how to obtain an update when it becomes available, it's about as well as it could be handled IMO.
Those are entirely different things (unless TFA contradicts the summary). What hotels tried to do was to block hotspots in order to force you to connect e.g. your laptop to the hotel's wifi (presumably at a premium) rather than your own hotspot. From what I remember, they pretty much willfully caused interference to accomplish this, thus why the FCC were not fans.
This patent, on the other hand, is about intercepting and reacting to content while on the store's wifi.
Guess what? It doesn't rely on it. The permafrost isn't anywhere near as cold as the desired storage temperature of -18 C. It is, however, nice to have, both as an energy saver and to slow the heating process in case of refrigeration failure (something being underground helps with regardless). And, until such time as it should indeed vanish, it'll keep things at -3 even in the event of extended cooling failure.
What do you mean? The location was picked _because_ it is geologically stable. There's no tectonic activity, it's at high enough altitude to remain above sea level even if the ice caps should fully melt, and permafrost safeguards against refrigeration failure.
The recent flooding of the entrance was caused by surface melt, not thawing of the subterranean permafrost surrounding the vault itself. Once the water entered the tunnel and flowed deeper, it froze. Even if it should heat up enough up there to kill off the permafrost entirely, the subterranean nature of the vault still eases the refrigeration needs.
Seed vaults already exist all over the world, the Svalbard vault is the backup in case they are lost. Hyperbolically speaking "due to global disaster". More realistically speaking, when one of the other vaults get wiped out from fire, war, floods etc.
In addition, it's intended to be self sustained. It's locally powered, and in the event of refrigeration failure permafrost still maintains below freezing temperatures (though not deep freeze, obviously), presumably ensuring seeds are viable for a long time after a global disaster.