...at which point there won't be a human in the place other than maybe the person who cleans the tables and bathrooms (and only until they perfect the self-busing table).
I'd like to see the self-cleaning toilet, or a toilet-cleaning robot soonest. Humans don't like cleaning the bathroom, and a truly remarkable number of humans somehow fail to get their waste actually into the toilet properly when they're using a public bathroom. A public bathroom cleaning robot seems like a really useful invention, not just in fast food joints, but everywhere. It could clean more often, more thoroughly, and more quickly than even a practiced human.
The details are a little tricky, considering the bizarre things people do to public toilets. It would have to know how to flush first, detect and clear clogs and foreign objects too large for the drain, clean the floor and walls around the toilet, and be thoroughly self-cleaning too, because too many people are just nasty. But it has some advantages. The toilet itself provides both running water and disposal, so the robot only has to carry the cleaning chemical(s) and its own sensors and manipulators.
Of all the various things that could be automated, the commercial toilet cleaner seems like an obvious target with a massive potential market.
Where does this leave Elon Musk/Panasonic's Megafactory?
In addition to what the other responder said, it's worth mentioning that the Gigafactory only occupies 18% of its eventual footprint right now. It may be that some part of it will be built to produce something other than Panasonic's batteries when it's finally completed.
And yes, it may be that it will be Tesla that commercializes this battery design. Elon Musk has repeatedly said in public, "Send me a sample." If a box of samples shows up on Tesla's doorstep, I'm quite sure someone will trundle them down the hall to the lab and test them out. (In a fireproof box.) If their own testing confirms these results, why wouldn't Tesla seriously consider doing the work to enable mass production? I'm quite certain that people at Tesla have been tasked to pay close attention to what Panasonic did to install its assembly line, so they already have some experience in house in doing precisely that.
I fully expect Tesla to commercialize some new battery tech, eventually. Shell hires chemists to figure out new things to do with petroleum, after all. It's maybe not directly comparable, but lithium mining companies aren't funding battery development, so it's going to have to happen further up the chain. Elon Musk has already exhibited a penchant for vertical integration (especially with SpaceX), so it's entirely reasonable to think that Tesla will invest in the most fundamental aspect of their business at a basic level.
May as well put a movie into the pattern of stones used to pace a sidewalk.
That... is a really cool idea. When I have to repave my driveway, I'm doing that. Not a movie though. Not enough space, even with a fairly small particle size. Maybe a family photo, as a jpg. I'm thinking standard 512 byte sectors, complete with sector header, data section, and ECC section, but rectilinear rather than arcs.
Possible, but utterly meaningless.
Well sure, meaningless to you. But not to my family.
I'm curious to know why the east district of texas has gotten this notorious for being a patent troll's best friend? Not the statistics, we've seen the statistics. I want to know why it keeps happening?
The patent attorney who answered you covered a lot, but there's one more thing. From July 2015 regarding a lawsuit filed by a patent troll against NewEgg:
The Federal Eastern District is wildly corrupt. From the Newegg filing:
Further evidencing the unreasonableness of the delay in Newegg’s case is the most recent Civil Justice Reform Act (“CJRA”) Report for Judge Gilstrap, which indicates that as of September 30, 2014, Judge Gilstrap had only a single civil case pending for more than three years, and that he had no motions pending for more than six months.
That's from Newegg's argumentation that a 20 month delay in issuing a ruling is ridiculous. What they tacked on in the footnotes is fascinating:
Curiously, although TQP’s case against Newegg (filed May 6, 2011) had been pending for more than three years, and although Newegg’s JMOL motion (filed February 17, 2014) had been pending more than six months at that time, neither the case nor the motion were listed in Judge Gilstrap’s September 2014 CJRA Report.
Gilstrap wants to punish Newegg for daring to go to trial at all over the patent lawsuit, and further for daring to be right when they proved they weren't infringing, and finally for making a mockery of the idiot east Texas jury that found infringement and awarded millions for it, completely in contradiction to the law, other case law, and the plain reading of the text of the patent. And he wants to get away with it by hiding it from the CJRA Report. And he's doing it.
In other words, a law was passed by Congress to evaluate the performance of judges, specifically to catch malpractice like this, and he got a fraudulent report created that hides his misbehavior.
Newegg has the discretion to call that "curious." The rest of us call it criminal. Impeach the bastard.
It's usually the very first algorithm in any book on algorithms. It's what they use to introduce the subject. If you don't remember the very first algo you ever saw well.....
You might have seen your first algorithm at the age of 14 and you're now in your 40s after 20 years as a successful software developer?
The first algorithm I saw was whatever is the first one in lander.bas. I sure as hell don't remember what it was.
I've seen what passes as higher education and I can tell you that from this republican's perspective it comes with a HUGE liberal slant.
Only in the liberal arts college. I can tell you that higher education has no political slant whatsoever in the engineering college. There's no time for political bullshit when there isn't really enough time to cover all the useful factual stuff we learn in engineering. That and the equations that describe the behavior of a transistor don't care about your fucking family values, regardless of whether they're of the "manly men and women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" or of the "sensitive men and women aren't equal enough" variety. The professor standing in front of the class certainly gave no hint what his (or in several cases, her) opinion was. If your answer to the boolean algebra question on the exam is, "Why is it either/or? I reject your hetero-normative culture!" then you fail.
Why should I subsidize people living that far from civilization, especially when all banking and bill payment can be done online as well as correspondence?
You like food, don't you? And wood and paper products? And cotton clothes? Hell, even petroleum-derivative clothes come from feed stocks acquired "off in the sticks". Humanity has managed to automate 90% of the work required to gather all of these things so there's a smaller percentage of people doing that work than ever before in history, but as with all things, the first 90% is the easy part.
Automating that last 10% completely may never happen. It certainly won't happen in your lifetime. A lifetime that would be remarkably abbreviated if those people weren't out there. If they stopped doing what they do, there's about a year to a year and a half worth of food in the pipeline, from canned foods in warehouses to corn, wheat, and flour in silos. If those people stop, your civilization is dead in about 2 years, with something like 60% casualties.
I think you can handle subsidizing information delivery (both postal and digital) and electricity delivery for the 20% of the population that has been handling the bottom half of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for you for so long that you've forgotten why they exist.
Competitive private industry always does it better, faster and cheaper than the government (note I said competitive).
This is purely a religious statement, with plenty of contradictory evidence. Competitive private industry does many things quite well, it's true, but the one thing competitive private industry never does is ubiquity. It can sometimes come close, especially for portable things, but when it comes to utilities, private industry never achieves ubiquity unless both coerced and incentivized by government to do so. This has been repeatedly demonstrated for centuries, ever since capitalism became an -ism.
Meanwhile, private courier services in the US have soundly demonstrated that the USPS is indispensable. The private services have consolidated until there are only two remaining and they do not compete and they do not provide service to all addresses in the country. FedEx and UPS have tacitly divided up the market between them, with FedEx assuming the premium role and UPS the "everything else" role, and UPS is maintaining their position by cheating, leaning heavily on the USPS to do it.
It takes a minimum of four independent entities operating under substantially similar conditions and providing substantially similar goods or services to produce a competitive environment, and we are already below that threshold with respect to courier services. Even if we were dumb enough to follow your advice and privatize the post office, the current trajectory would continue. FedEx would buy a handful of the most profitable bits of the USPS, UPS would buy some of the rest, and both would totally abandon rural America, leaving some 95% of the land area unserviced by any courier when the remaining unprofitable bits of the USPS collapsed.
Government is monopolistic, sedentary and there is no drive to compete or improve.
Almost correct, but you and those like you who spout the tenants of capitalism as religious truth have cause and effect perfectly backwards. Government is not monopolistic because it's behaving like a robber baron. Government is monopolistic because a) ubiquity for certain things, particularly certain services, is desirable and b) ubiquity for those things is not and can not be profitable. Ubiquity for fire prevention, law enforcement, military services, and yes, courier services, among a good many other things, is only achievable in a functional way through government.
To take one example, competitive fire prevention is nonsensical. The most successful fire prevention service allows the least poss
Are they gonna cook one up in 12-18 mos? I'd love to see it but I think its far fetched to say the least.
Dragon capsules already fly pressurized, and the Dragon trunk already exists, and is designed to fulfill the duties of a crew service module.
SpaceX was awarded $75 million as part of NASA's second phase Commercial Crew Development program in 2011, $460 million in 2013, $9.6 million in 2014, and $2.6 billion in 2015, for a total of $3.1 billion (not all of which they've collected yet, since Commercial Crew only pays once stuff works). They started development work on all things crew-related 6 years ago, not yesterday. This commercial flight is entirely predicated on the success of SpaceX's NASA-funded Commercial Crew effort, and that schedule says they'll be ready in 2018.
Initial Falcon development was paid for out of Elon Musk's pocket. He hasn't had to pay directly for much since. Also known as "a successful business with paying customers", something unfamiliar in most headline companies today.
Cue the complainers about tax money paying for joy rides for billionaires, who will be ignoring the fact that this tax money is being spent to develop an alternative to paying Russia for rides to the ISS. The tax money only paid to enable joy rides for billionaires as a side effect of paying to enable NASA astronauts to commute to work.
And for the complainers, the same program awarded Boeing $4.8 billion (also not all collected yet), and started a year earlier, so this isn't something exclusive to SpaceX.
The Platform Security Processor (PSP) is built in on all Family 16h + systems (basically anything post-2013), and controls the main x86 core startup. PSP firmware is cryptographically signed with a strong key similar to the Intel ME. If the PSP firmware is not present, or if the AMD signing key is not present, the x86 cores will not be released from reset, rendering the system inoperable.
The PSP is an ARM core with TrustZone technology, built onto the main CPU die. As such, it has the ability to hide its own program code, scratch RAM, and any data it may have taken and stored from the lesser-privileged x86 system RAM (kernel encryption keys, login data, browsing history, keystrokes, who knows!).
Personally I think IME/PSP would be great things to have: if I could set a jumper and burn my own firmware image and signature verification key, then unset the jumper.
Ryzen seems to be quite competitive as it stands looking at the glossy PR ads. The question is really about durability. AMD has a history of running things a bit hot and not achieving the same reliability as Intel.
Then you'll be pleased to look at the TDP column in side by side comparisons of Ryzen and (especially) i7s. Ryzen is 95W TDP. i7 with exactly the same single-thread performance (to within the margin of error) and worse multi-thread performance is 140W TDP.
That's right, Intel has been faffing about with their failed 10nm process node for so long that they're now the ones selling the slower, much hotter chips. A complete role reversal. It is quite amusing for those of us who remember the AMD of the '90s.
Unfortunately for AMD, history is not repeating. Intel is not floundering in a Netburst culdesac. Ryzen has achieved only parity. It is not giving the Core architecture the single-threaded performance spanking that Netburst suffered. Zen cores with HBM2 laminated on top of them might be able to give Core chips a spanking, but that remains to be seen, and rumor has it that Intel has been paying attention and will be ready to answer with HBM2-inclusive Core chips. So while AMD is once again enjoying a performance/watt advantage over Intel, it won't last nearly as long as the last one.
Still, AMD's advantage is there now. If you're building a new desktop system this year, you're going to need a really specific benchmark-backed reason not to build a Ryzen system. Or just be an Intel fanboy who is made of money. That works too.
Curved displays have one use: building an immersive cockpit environment for games. Flight simulators, racing simulators, and giant robot games could benefit from 210 degrees of curved display. Oh, and that farming simulator where you can drive the tractors and combines. There isn't much else that does. Of course they're only useful if you can afford enough of them. The large format ones tend to have a radius of 13 to 16 feet, requiring so many to surround your cockpit and so many stacked vertically to fill your field of vision that it gets prohibitively expensive and ends up with a goofy image distortion problem in the uppermost row of displays. That and some curved TVs are a parabolic arc, not a circular arc, causing further problems.
If you could get ultrawide curved screens with circular arcs of radius of 6 to 8 feet, you've got yourself a great way to build a serious cockpit for simulations.
The cockpit building community[1] has for years now been using projectors and curved projection surfaces. This keeps costs down, but of course means the cockpit structure has strictly limited height, or it will interfere with the projections. If the curved display fad among manufacturers lasts just long enough, they'll get to seriously upgrade.
---- [1] Yes, there's a community. With 7 billion people on the planet, there's enough people to form an interest group for literally anything.
Manufacturers wanted to make the TVs thinner, but didn't want the top half flopping over.
This post deserves its +5 moderation for this sentence alone. The mental image it summons up makes me giggle. Pair it with an Abbot and Costello routine trying to prevent the top half from flopping over for even more giggles.
I tend to agree that the mechanics of the situation have made the curve attractive to manufacturers. It'd be different if all large screens were wall mounted, and the ISO mount was something like a bar along the top instead of the rectangle in the middle. As it is, with a large percentage of TVs sitting on stands supporting them from their ISO mounts, I can easily see the curve being exploited to make a thinner display, reducing material costs.
The USPS was a great idea 240 years ago and they served their purpose for a long time, but it is high time that we fully privatize them and let them go bankrupt if they can't perform a competent service.
The USPS can not be fully privatized. It is an integral part of the US legal system, and the one and only courier service that delivers to all physical addresses in the United States. In nineteen jurisdictions, process service can be completed on an individual by mail: Alaska, California, Washington D.C., Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota (with prior written consent), Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. In three of those jurisdictions, a summons can be sent simply by first class mail. The rest require registered or certified mail.
Only two jurisdictions allow delivery by private couriers: Washington D.C. and North Dakota.
Only one jurisdiction allows delivery by "electronic means": Washington D.C. and only by prior consent.
Only one jurisdiction allows delivery by fax machine: Idaho. (Yes, Idaho. Go figure.)
A myriad of other legal things are tied to postal addresses, including that thing near and dear to everyone's heart: your taxing jurisdiction. The USPS maintains the legal "where everybody is" database, and even the private couriers depend on it. People file change of address forms with the USPS, not with UPS or FedEx. We've seen alternative attempts to provide such a database. Uptake of such systems is basically nil. The inertia of 240 years gives the USPS a fantastically powerful network effect. Quite aside from those nineteen legal jurisdictions, the sheer amount of software that depends on the existence and current method of functioning of the post office is mind boggling.
A functional, government-run or quasi-government-run post office is one of the cornerstones of civilization. One of the symptoms of a failed state today is not having one. You mess with the post office at your peril. Fix it if it needs fixing, sure, but privatization is not a fix: it would break everything.
Please explain what you mean by better peripheral support?
24 PCI-e lanes between the CPU and the motherboard chipset, vs Intel's 16 in the same class, and therefore better able to saturate the throughput of modern high-bandwidth peripherals. Obviously not relevant for things like file transfers between NVMe and Gb ethernet because that's a DMA transfer where the data itself never touches the CPU, but helpful when the data requires actual processing prior to transfer.
Shifting from stable except in specific ignition fuels to dangerous at all times lithium batteries that explode violently doesn't improve safety. Tesla was a failed business from the start.
As opposed to gasoline, which first catches fire, then explodes violently.
If Tesla was a failed business from the start, I presume you've shorted millions of dollars of TSLA. In which case, thank you for your money. Moron.
I'd like to see a like-for-like benchmark between Ryzen and I7, such as single-thread at the same clock speeds.
Uh, they did. The Cinebench single-threaded results are in the slide. Right hand side. The 1800X is indistinguishable from Intel's 6900K at single-threaded performance. And Cinebench is compiled with Intel's compiler.
Undoubtedly there will be some benchmarks where Intel is still ahead, and yes we are waiting for third party testing. Still, from what we're seeing out of AMD, they're no longer down 10% in like-for-like comparisons. They're +/- 1% now. While being substantially cheaper. If the accompanying motherboards are competitive in features and build quality, Ryzen is a serious contender for all buyers, not just seriously budget-conscious buyers. It's no longer a matter of "oooh, I guess I can put up with not having the best to save some money." It's now "ooo, I can get exactly the same performance for half the price, and better peripheral support." (Well, I say now, but I mean March 2nd.)
AMD fanboys can place pre-orders without even a hint of remorse or compromise. The rest of us can hold off on any planned new system purchases until mid-March, when the folks at Tom's Hardware are done with their benchmarking. Odds are that unless you really really really have to buy the Intel system because you don't intend to use it for anything other than running that ONE piece of software that is an outlier in benchmarks (whatever it might be: 7-zip?), then you should be buying an AMD system if you can find a motherboard that meets your needs. Unless you really enjoy throwing away $600 for nothing.
Sigh, the orange one is the poster child for the Dunning Kruger effect.
Not really. Dunning-Kruger requires you to actually be an expert at something. Being born rich is not an expertise. We need another name for the syndrome where having lots of money makes people think they're experts at everything.
Things like getting married, starting a family, or even moving out from underneath Mom and Dads roof; all of these life events will likely cost more than the average "interesting" salary.
Many Chinese men will never have the opportunity without plural marriage. There's 27 million more men than women in China right now. By 2020, it's expected to be 35 million more men than women. As the linked article points out, that's the entire population of Canada. A country worth of young men will not be able to marry and start a family. It's 15% of their age cohort. Fifteen percent! That's insane. And they're already an economic force to be reckoned with. Singles Day sales in China dwarfs Black Friday sales in the US.
Gigging is one reaction to that massive demographic disparity. There's no need to look for the stability and independence that goes with a family because for tens of millions of Chinese men, there will be no family. The consequences of China's One Child policy are going to be with them (and possibly with us, the rest of the world) for the rest of the century, and no one really understands all of the ramifications. This has never happened before, in all of human history. The closest analog is perhaps the American West during the colonial period, but that gender disparity neither lasted as long as this one must nor involved anything like the sheer scale of the one in China. Gigging may be the least of the distortions that are coming.
Apparently, I still do not see the sarcasm must be some retarded wiring in my brain, but/sarcasm or some kind of hint at it usually helps.
You must be a little more autistic than most around here.
...so what ever you said I've already forgotten because I know that it's wrong. I also intend to misquote you.
That wasn't just obvious sarcasm; that was heavy sarcasm. Do you really think he forgot everything you said instantly? And the last sentence is, for all intents and purposes, a </sarcasm> tag. Really, it was clearly sarcasm.
I didn't know that Chattanooga was doing so well. I'd heard about the rollout, and the whining and crying in court from AT&T and Comcast. I hadn't heard that AT&T and Comcast had ultimately been told to go to hell, though I applaud the court that decided that. And one of you swarm of ACs says it was all paid off in 4 years... That's kind of fantastic, for that much physical plant.
Is it just me, or is Google doing it wrong? I think Google is doing it wrong, 'cause their quoted billion dollars per city is nuts. In fact, I'd say that's the clearest evidence yet that Google has become a classic American corporation, in the mold of GM and IBM and Lockheed Martin. They really have jumped the shark, despite all their precious interview puzzle questions. And that's for pole-hung fiber, too! Not even paying for burial. That's outrageous. That's like Lockheed's price tag for launching a payload to orbit, when the real cost should be what SpaceX charges. That's an epic failure of management on Google's part, and Chattanooga is the proof.
If I happen to own some land in CA that Musk wants to tunnel under/through, can he really do so without my permission or even knowledge?
Of course not. And of course he knows that. Tunneling under roads always requires the city/county/state's permission, depending on which authority is most directly responsible for the road in question, and in the case of important roads, like the interstate highways, it may require the permission of all three at once. Tunneling under private property requires either the mineral rights (in which case the owner of the surface isn't the owner of the depths anyway) or an easement from the surface owner. In the case of utilities, there's usually a public easement that has been forced upon the property owner by the government. It usually follows the road, but can also include any or all edges of everyone's property for things like cable television.
Slashdot is so goddamned weird sometimes. Elon Musk is in the rocket business and in the automobile business, two of the most highly regulated industries in the world. He can probably quote chapter and verse of the top 10 regulations he despises, plus name multiple examples of regulations he thinks are highly appropriate. The guy knows more about government regulations than any Slashdot reader who is not actually employed as a government regulator or as a compliance officer, because he's up to his eyeballs in them day in and day out. Plus, you know, he has money, which buys lawyers. I'm absolutely certain he has three whole law firms on retainer, one for SpaceX, one for Tesla, and one for himself personally because billionaire. And when you're already paying them, you might as well ask them questions, to get some value for your money.
So despite appearances, he's not going into this blindly. I'm sure the day he had a hole dug in his parking lot is also the day he had a lawyer down at city hall, filing the proper paperwork for a tunnel under the road to his parking structure. According to another poster, he's been trying to get a pedestrian bridge built for some time now, but for whatever reason, the city hasn't approved it. The interesting thing is it's a different department that approves tunnels. (Well, it is here, anyway. It probably is in Hawthorne too.) He's probably hoping to find a department of the city that will actually process the paperwork in a timely fashion.
Glad to hear we're implementing that new-fangled 4th amendment I keep hearing about.
If only. It isn't possible to use a Stingray constitutionally, period. Here's the 4th Amendment, in its entirety:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A Stingray sucks up data for hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people if run in a metro area, and there is no warrant for that. A warrant must "particularly [describe] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" and every court in the land has ruled time and time again that "I want to seize something from 100 people" is not in any way "particular" enough, let alone "I want to seize something from 10,000 people".
The proposed law is unconstitutional, attempting to provide legal cover for unconstitutional activities. The only constitutional warrant names an individual or individual device or a very small group thereof and is issued to the phone company. The government does not get to pretend to be the phone company, and Hoover up the data for thousands of people at a time.[1]
I would question whether or not the current Supreme Court would uphold the Constitution and strike down this law if it passes, but it won't come before this court. The legal gyrations to prevent a challenge of the Stingrays with standing will continue indefinitely. We know this because the same stonewalling is already happening with respect to NSA spying on the Internet. Add to that the length of time required to run through the appeals process and actually reach the Supreme Court, and I doubt either Kennedy or Ginsberg will still be alive if and when that case finally gets to the Court.
Unless we are exceedingly fortunate, and this unconstitutional bill becomes law and suckers some prosecuting attorney into letting a Stingray-based case that is being challenged go forward, we're probably in for a decades of unconstitutional activity.
Not that it will be the first time...
---- [1] No apologies for the pun. It was too appropriate.
Missouri had just switched from a Republican trifecta to Republican controlled state houses with a Democratic governor when it started and successfully completed a project to replace or repair 802 bridges in 4 years, with project planning beginning in late 2008 and construction starting in 2009 and ending in 2012, on budget and 14 months ahead of schedule. And then the Republicans cut the budget so now we can only handle 100 bridges a year, just barely keeping our heads above water, as about 100/year go into "poor" condition. We proved we're capable of twice that rate, if the budget is available. Admittedly, some of that money was Federal stimulus money after the Great Recession (we actually used it to repair infrastructure), but the rest of it was ours.
Missouri is nearly a Democratic state, but we got gerrymandered into appearing Republican with the 2000 census. Our state voting districts are so fucked up they have actual holes in them, with discontiguous pieces. We have one Republican and one Democratic Federal senator, a Democratic governor, and Republican state houses. At least one of the state houses would be Democratic if we had honest voting districts. It's not visible on the maps here but can be seen at the address by address level if you zoom in far enough in Google Maps. Our state Senate districts are fairly honest, since there's considerably fewer of them, but our state House districts are downright creative. Also, we'd be less Republican, but the Baptists are a force to be reckoned with, and they're stilling buying the anti-abortion bullshit the Republicans claim, but don't actually follow up on.
Geographically, we have a lot of hills, a lot of rivers, and a lot of streams. We have the largest river in the country, the Mississippi, making up the entirety of our eastern border and we have the Missouri river, the third largest river in the country that isn't mostly Canadian, after the Mississippi and the Ohio. Those two huge rivers have carved bluffs all over the place, many of which were subsequently abandoned as the river shifted. In short, we need a lot of bridges to get around. Replacing 800 in 4 years was significant, but we do still have a long ways to go. And we're not quite as politically backwards as we appear to be. By just a little bit.
Can I just call up Tesla and GM to buy them at that price, or do I go through a reseller? Or is that the bottleneck for the price (a 500% markup seems excessive, though... especially for such a large bulk purchase). Let me know, please! I'm 100% serious here.
You can go to Tesla's website and order the Powerwall 2 with a credit card[1] on the spot, then dismount it from your wall after it's installed and stuff it into your RV. GM does not resell batteries in any form. Powerwall 2 is 39 cents per watt hour, not the 19 cents per watt hour they pay wholesale, but still, it's only a 100% markup, rather than 500%.
I've been told that it's cheaper to buy naked cells, though I don't know anywhere else you can get Panasonic cells for 39 cents per watt hour and you would lose Tesla's sophisticated power pack cooling, charging, and discharging hardware and software. (Liquid cooling is integrated.) I presume you don't intend to use the batteries for motive power, in which case a Powerwall 2 is just what you need. You might even be able to get the electrician to install it directly into your RV for you.
It's more than double the capacity you were planning on, but it's a turnkey solution. I hear modern RVs all have 120V appliances now, so it's literally a drop-in installation, though exactly what gets wired where might be a little complex if you have a fueled generator as well as the external power connection. The electrician would remove the existing inverter, since the Powerwall 2 has its own. It's 44" x 29" x 5.5" and is designed to be installed vertically. A horizontal installation might work, but might void the 10 year warranty (And might not. You'd have to ask). It can peak at nearly 60 amps output and sustain 40 amps, so it should have no trouble starting up and running the typical RV air conditioning system without letting the voltage sag to anything electronic, even without external power. It's beefier than the typical RV battery system, which tends to top out at 30 amps.
---- [1] And holy crap, how did Slashdot not notice that change? There's a Powerwall 2 now (a nice clean rectangle, instead of the goofy truncated oval thing) and it's 14 kWh for $5500, with trivial credit card ordering, instead of having to call them. Much friendlier than the old way.
People are afraid of nuclear fission whether or not those fears are justified. That is human nature and it is unlikely to change.
Nonsense. It's not even remotely human nature, and it was changed, forcibly. Humanity's fear, and in particular Americans' fear of nuclear power is one of the great propaganda victories of the 20th Century.
Immediately after the end of World War II, the Greatest Generation was absolutely convinced that they were entering the Atomic Age and that it was going to be the best thing since sliced bread. Science fiction was absolutely saturated with atomic everything, and even though it was a disrespected fringe literature at the time, that didn't stop its enthusiasm from leaking over into the rest of the world. To the point where "atomic" became synonymous with "good", "modern", and "the future", slapped on advertising copy as a matter of course, in much the same way as "green" is today. The phrase "too cheap to meter" originated in 1954, and though the speaker was referring to fusion power, the phrase stuck, and is still applied today, to both fission and fusion. (Sarcastically, nowadays, but it persists nonetheless.) The future was bright, and it was going to be nuclear powered.
Then Green Peace set themselves against it. They spent the '60s and '70s telling the world how dangerous nuclear power was, and when the Three Mile Island accident happened in 1979, they were quick to capitalize on it, despite there being zero injuries or deaths caused by it right up through the present day. They spent the next seven years hammering on that accident, trying to convince the world how scary nuclear power was. And they were succeeding. If the propaganda had gone the other way, Three Mile Island would have been a great victory for nuclear power. Even with a partial core meltdown, no one was injured. The "Big Scary Thing" had happened, and it wasn't scary at all. Except people were being told that it was scary, and after a generation of it being hammered on, it was starting to stick.
Then in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster happened, the greatest gift to anti-nuclear forces since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And still, it could have gone the other way. The Nixon era attempt at détente had withered and the USSR was again the Great Enemy of America. (The USSR didn't disintegrate until the tail end of 1991.) Chernobyl could have been spun as a Soviet screwup, proof of the inherent inferiority of the Soviet system and indeed, it was used for that purpose, but by far the loudest message hitched to that disaster was "nuclear bad". And it worked.
It took two generations of intense propaganda and legal obstructionism, but Green Peace won. They had completely reversed the attitude towards nuclear power of an entire continent. Meanwhile, between 1946 and 1989, 4208 people, including 116 children, died in coal mining accidents and disasters around the world, while just 31 people died as a direct result of Chernobyl. (The count of indirect deaths of both coal burning and the Chernobyl disaster are violently disputed, so I'll leave them aside, saying only that both are much bigger than the direct deaths.) Human nature should have been terrified of coal by the end of the 20th Century, because it had indisputably and directly killed so many. Human nature is to be scared of the things we're told to be scared o
Check your server logs. Ours get automated breach attempts thousands of times a day from countries all over the world. Usual tests are for wordpress bugs and ssh with many usernames and passwords.
The thousands of ssh login attempts I've been seeing have lately been exclusively for root. I'm guessing there's some IOT thing that allows root logins.
Meanwhile my server has never allowed a root login over ssh, in 18 years. I wish they'd use nmap to fingerprint my box and then go away, knowing it won't let them in no matter how hard they try.
Slashdot Mirror
...at which point there won't be a human in the place other than maybe the person who cleans the tables and bathrooms (and only until they perfect the self-busing table).
I'd like to see the self-cleaning toilet, or a toilet-cleaning robot soonest. Humans don't like cleaning the bathroom, and a truly remarkable number of humans somehow fail to get their waste actually into the toilet properly when they're using a public bathroom. A public bathroom cleaning robot seems like a really useful invention, not just in fast food joints, but everywhere. It could clean more often, more thoroughly, and more quickly than even a practiced human.
The details are a little tricky, considering the bizarre things people do to public toilets. It would have to know how to flush first, detect and clear clogs and foreign objects too large for the drain, clean the floor and walls around the toilet, and be thoroughly self-cleaning too, because too many people are just nasty. But it has some advantages. The toilet itself provides both running water and disposal, so the robot only has to carry the cleaning chemical(s) and its own sensors and manipulators.
Of all the various things that could be automated, the commercial toilet cleaner seems like an obvious target with a massive potential market.
Where does this leave Elon Musk/Panasonic's Megafactory?
In addition to what the other responder said, it's worth mentioning that the Gigafactory only occupies 18% of its eventual footprint right now. It may be that some part of it will be built to produce something other than Panasonic's batteries when it's finally completed.
And yes, it may be that it will be Tesla that commercializes this battery design. Elon Musk has repeatedly said in public, "Send me a sample." If a box of samples shows up on Tesla's doorstep, I'm quite sure someone will trundle them down the hall to the lab and test them out. (In a fireproof box.) If their own testing confirms these results, why wouldn't Tesla seriously consider doing the work to enable mass production? I'm quite certain that people at Tesla have been tasked to pay close attention to what Panasonic did to install its assembly line, so they already have some experience in house in doing precisely that.
I fully expect Tesla to commercialize some new battery tech, eventually. Shell hires chemists to figure out new things to do with petroleum, after all. It's maybe not directly comparable, but lithium mining companies aren't funding battery development, so it's going to have to happen further up the chain. Elon Musk has already exhibited a penchant for vertical integration (especially with SpaceX), so it's entirely reasonable to think that Tesla will invest in the most fundamental aspect of their business at a basic level.
May as well put a movie into the pattern of stones used to pace a sidewalk.
That... is a really cool idea. When I have to repave my driveway, I'm doing that. Not a movie though. Not enough space, even with a fairly small particle size. Maybe a family photo, as a jpg. I'm thinking standard 512 byte sectors, complete with sector header, data section, and ECC section, but rectilinear rather than arcs.
Possible, but utterly meaningless.
Well sure, meaningless to you. But not to my family.
I'm curious to know why the east district of texas has gotten this notorious for being a patent troll's best friend? Not the statistics, we've seen the statistics. I want to know why it keeps happening?
The patent attorney who answered you covered a lot, but there's one more thing. From July 2015 regarding a lawsuit filed by a patent troll against NewEgg:
The Federal Eastern District is wildly corrupt. From the Newegg filing:
Further evidencing the unreasonableness of the delay in Newegg’s case is the most recent Civil Justice Reform Act (“CJRA”) Report for Judge Gilstrap, which indicates that as of September 30, 2014, Judge Gilstrap had only a single civil case pending for more than three years, and that he had no motions pending for more than six months.
That's from Newegg's argumentation that a 20 month delay in issuing a ruling is ridiculous. What they tacked on in the footnotes is fascinating:
Curiously, although TQP’s case against Newegg (filed May 6, 2011) had been pending for more than three years, and although Newegg’s JMOL motion (filed February 17, 2014) had been pending more than six months at that time, neither the case nor the motion were listed in Judge Gilstrap’s September 2014 CJRA Report.
Gilstrap wants to punish Newegg for daring to go to trial at all over the patent lawsuit, and further for daring to be right when they proved they weren't infringing, and finally for making a mockery of the idiot east Texas jury that found infringement and awarded millions for it, completely in contradiction to the law, other case law, and the plain reading of the text of the patent. And he wants to get away with it by hiding it from the CJRA Report. And he's doing it.
In other words, a law was passed by Congress to evaluate the performance of judges, specifically to catch malpractice like this, and he got a fraudulent report created that hides his misbehavior.
Newegg has the discretion to call that "curious." The rest of us call it criminal. Impeach the bastard.
It's usually the very first algorithm in any book on algorithms. It's what they use to introduce the subject. If you don't remember the very first algo you ever saw well.....
You might have seen your first algorithm at the age of 14 and you're now in your 40s after 20 years as a successful software developer?
The first algorithm I saw was whatever is the first one in lander.bas. I sure as hell don't remember what it was.
I've seen what passes as higher education and I can tell you that from this republican's perspective it comes with a HUGE liberal slant.
Only in the liberal arts college. I can tell you that higher education has no political slant whatsoever in the engineering college. There's no time for political bullshit when there isn't really enough time to cover all the useful factual stuff we learn in engineering. That and the equations that describe the behavior of a transistor don't care about your fucking family values, regardless of whether they're of the "manly men and women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" or of the "sensitive men and women aren't equal enough" variety. The professor standing in front of the class certainly gave no hint what his (or in several cases, her) opinion was. If your answer to the boolean algebra question on the exam is, "Why is it either/or? I reject your hetero-normative culture!" then you fail.
Why should I subsidize people living that far from civilization, especially when all banking and bill payment can be done online as well as correspondence?
You like food, don't you? And wood and paper products? And cotton clothes? Hell, even petroleum-derivative clothes come from feed stocks acquired "off in the sticks". Humanity has managed to automate 90% of the work required to gather all of these things so there's a smaller percentage of people doing that work than ever before in history, but as with all things, the first 90% is the easy part.
Automating that last 10% completely may never happen. It certainly won't happen in your lifetime. A lifetime that would be remarkably abbreviated if those people weren't out there. If they stopped doing what they do, there's about a year to a year and a half worth of food in the pipeline, from canned foods in warehouses to corn, wheat, and flour in silos. If those people stop, your civilization is dead in about 2 years, with something like 60% casualties.
I think you can handle subsidizing information delivery (both postal and digital) and electricity delivery for the 20% of the population that has been handling the bottom half of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for you for so long that you've forgotten why they exist.
Competitive private industry always does it better, faster and cheaper than the government (note I said competitive).
This is purely a religious statement, with plenty of contradictory evidence. Competitive private industry does many things quite well, it's true, but the one thing competitive private industry never does is ubiquity. It can sometimes come close, especially for portable things, but when it comes to utilities, private industry never achieves ubiquity unless both coerced and incentivized by government to do so. This has been repeatedly demonstrated for centuries, ever since capitalism became an -ism.
Meanwhile, private courier services in the US have soundly demonstrated that the USPS is indispensable. The private services have consolidated until there are only two remaining and they do not compete and they do not provide service to all addresses in the country. FedEx and UPS have tacitly divided up the market between them, with FedEx assuming the premium role and UPS the "everything else" role, and UPS is maintaining their position by cheating, leaning heavily on the USPS to do it.
It takes a minimum of four independent entities operating under substantially similar conditions and providing substantially similar goods or services to produce a competitive environment, and we are already below that threshold with respect to courier services. Even if we were dumb enough to follow your advice and privatize the post office, the current trajectory would continue. FedEx would buy a handful of the most profitable bits of the USPS, UPS would buy some of the rest, and both would totally abandon rural America, leaving some 95% of the land area unserviced by any courier when the remaining unprofitable bits of the USPS collapsed.
Government is monopolistic, sedentary and there is no drive to compete or improve.
Almost correct, but you and those like you who spout the tenants of capitalism as religious truth have cause and effect perfectly backwards. Government is not monopolistic because it's behaving like a robber baron. Government is monopolistic because a) ubiquity for certain things, particularly certain services, is desirable and b) ubiquity for those things is not and can not be profitable. Ubiquity for fire prevention, law enforcement, military services, and yes, courier services, among a good many other things, is only achievable in a functional way through government.
To take one example, competitive fire prevention is nonsensical. The most successful fire prevention service allows the least poss
Crew Service Module??
Are they gonna cook one up in 12-18 mos? I'd love to see it but I think its far fetched to say the least.
Dragon capsules already fly pressurized, and the Dragon trunk already exists, and is designed to fulfill the duties of a crew service module.
SpaceX was awarded $75 million as part of NASA's second phase Commercial Crew Development program in 2011, $460 million in 2013, $9.6 million in 2014, and $2.6 billion in 2015, for a total of $3.1 billion (not all of which they've collected yet, since Commercial Crew only pays once stuff works). They started development work on all things crew-related 6 years ago, not yesterday. This commercial flight is entirely predicated on the success of SpaceX's NASA-funded Commercial Crew effort, and that schedule says they'll be ready in 2018.
Initial Falcon development was paid for out of Elon Musk's pocket. He hasn't had to pay directly for much since. Also known as "a successful business with paying customers", something unfamiliar in most headline companies today.
Cue the complainers about tax money paying for joy rides for billionaires, who will be ignoring the fact that this tax money is being spent to develop an alternative to paying Russia for rides to the ISS. The tax money only paid to enable joy rides for billionaires as a side effect of paying to enable NASA astronauts to commute to work.
And for the complainers, the same program awarded Boeing $4.8 billion (also not all collected yet), and started a year earlier, so this isn't something exclusive to SpaceX.
Does AMD have anything like the dreaded Intel Management Engine hardware Trojan?
Yes. AMD Platform Security Processor.
The Platform Security Processor (PSP) is built in on all Family 16h + systems (basically anything post-2013), and controls the main x86 core startup. PSP firmware is cryptographically signed with a strong key similar to the Intel ME. If the PSP firmware is not present, or if the AMD signing key is not present, the x86 cores will not be released from reset, rendering the system inoperable.
The PSP is an ARM core with TrustZone technology, built onto the main CPU die. As such, it has the ability to hide its own program code, scratch RAM, and any data it may have taken and stored from the lesser-privileged x86 system RAM (kernel encryption keys, login data, browsing history, keystrokes, who knows!).
Personally I think IME/PSP would be great things to have: if I could set a jumper and burn my own firmware image and signature verification key, then unset the jumper.
Too bad that's not happening...
Ryzen seems to be quite competitive as it stands looking at the glossy PR ads. The question is really about durability. AMD has a history of running things a bit hot and not achieving the same reliability as Intel.
Then you'll be pleased to look at the TDP column in side by side comparisons of Ryzen and (especially) i7s. Ryzen is 95W TDP. i7 with exactly the same single-thread performance (to within the margin of error) and worse multi-thread performance is 140W TDP.
That's right, Intel has been faffing about with their failed 10nm process node for so long that they're now the ones selling the slower, much hotter chips. A complete role reversal. It is quite amusing for those of us who remember the AMD of the '90s.
Unfortunately for AMD, history is not repeating. Intel is not floundering in a Netburst culdesac. Ryzen has achieved only parity. It is not giving the Core architecture the single-threaded performance spanking that Netburst suffered. Zen cores with HBM2 laminated on top of them might be able to give Core chips a spanking, but that remains to be seen, and rumor has it that Intel has been paying attention and will be ready to answer with HBM2-inclusive Core chips. So while AMD is once again enjoying a performance/watt advantage over Intel, it won't last nearly as long as the last one.
Still, AMD's advantage is there now. If you're building a new desktop system this year, you're going to need a really specific benchmark-backed reason not to build a Ryzen system. Or just be an Intel fanboy who is made of money. That works too.
Curved displays have one use: building an immersive cockpit environment for games. Flight simulators, racing simulators, and giant robot games could benefit from 210 degrees of curved display. Oh, and that farming simulator where you can drive the tractors and combines. There isn't much else that does. Of course they're only useful if you can afford enough of them. The large format ones tend to have a radius of 13 to 16 feet, requiring so many to surround your cockpit and so many stacked vertically to fill your field of vision that it gets prohibitively expensive and ends up with a goofy image distortion problem in the uppermost row of displays. That and some curved TVs are a parabolic arc, not a circular arc, causing further problems.
If you could get ultrawide curved screens with circular arcs of radius of 6 to 8 feet, you've got yourself a great way to build a serious cockpit for simulations.
The cockpit building community[1] has for years now been using projectors and curved projection surfaces. This keeps costs down, but of course means the cockpit structure has strictly limited height, or it will interfere with the projections. If the curved display fad among manufacturers lasts just long enough, they'll get to seriously upgrade.
----
[1] Yes, there's a community. With 7 billion people on the planet, there's enough people to form an interest group for literally anything.
Manufacturers wanted to make the TVs thinner, but didn't want the top half flopping over.
This post deserves its +5 moderation for this sentence alone. The mental image it summons up makes me giggle. Pair it with an Abbot and Costello routine trying to prevent the top half from flopping over for even more giggles.
I tend to agree that the mechanics of the situation have made the curve attractive to manufacturers. It'd be different if all large screens were wall mounted, and the ISO mount was something like a bar along the top instead of the rectangle in the middle. As it is, with a large percentage of TVs sitting on stands supporting them from their ISO mounts, I can easily see the curve being exploited to make a thinner display, reducing material costs.
The USPS was a great idea 240 years ago and they served their purpose for a long time, but it is high time that we fully privatize them and let them go bankrupt if they can't perform a competent service.
The USPS can not be fully privatized. It is an integral part of the US legal system, and the one and only courier service that delivers to all physical addresses in the United States. In nineteen jurisdictions, process service can be completed on an individual by mail: Alaska, California, Washington D.C., Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota (with prior written consent), Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. In three of those jurisdictions, a summons can be sent simply by first class mail. The rest require registered or certified mail.
Only two jurisdictions allow delivery by private couriers: Washington D.C. and North Dakota.
Only one jurisdiction allows delivery by "electronic means": Washington D.C. and only by prior consent.
Only one jurisdiction allows delivery by fax machine: Idaho. (Yes, Idaho. Go figure.)
A myriad of other legal things are tied to postal addresses, including that thing near and dear to everyone's heart: your taxing jurisdiction. The USPS maintains the legal "where everybody is" database, and even the private couriers depend on it. People file change of address forms with the USPS, not with UPS or FedEx. We've seen alternative attempts to provide such a database. Uptake of such systems is basically nil. The inertia of 240 years gives the USPS a fantastically powerful network effect. Quite aside from those nineteen legal jurisdictions, the sheer amount of software that depends on the existence and current method of functioning of the post office is mind boggling.
A functional, government-run or quasi-government-run post office is one of the cornerstones of civilization. One of the symptoms of a failed state today is not having one. You mess with the post office at your peril. Fix it if it needs fixing, sure, but privatization is not a fix: it would break everything.
Please explain what you mean by better peripheral support?
24 PCI-e lanes between the CPU and the motherboard chipset, vs Intel's 16 in the same class, and therefore better able to saturate the throughput of modern high-bandwidth peripherals. Obviously not relevant for things like file transfers between NVMe and Gb ethernet because that's a DMA transfer where the data itself never touches the CPU, but helpful when the data requires actual processing prior to transfer.
Shifting from stable except in specific ignition fuels to dangerous at all times lithium batteries that explode violently doesn't improve safety. Tesla was a failed business from the start.
As opposed to gasoline, which first catches fire, then explodes violently.
If Tesla was a failed business from the start, I presume you've shorted millions of dollars of TSLA. In which case, thank you for your money. Moron.
I'd like to see a like-for-like benchmark between Ryzen and I7, such as single-thread at the same clock speeds.
Uh, they did. The Cinebench single-threaded results are in the slide. Right hand side. The 1800X is indistinguishable from Intel's 6900K at single-threaded performance. And Cinebench is compiled with Intel's compiler.
Undoubtedly there will be some benchmarks where Intel is still ahead, and yes we are waiting for third party testing. Still, from what we're seeing out of AMD, they're no longer down 10% in like-for-like comparisons. They're +/- 1% now. While being substantially cheaper. If the accompanying motherboards are competitive in features and build quality, Ryzen is a serious contender for all buyers, not just seriously budget-conscious buyers. It's no longer a matter of "oooh, I guess I can put up with not having the best to save some money." It's now "ooo, I can get exactly the same performance for half the price, and better peripheral support." (Well, I say now, but I mean March 2nd.)
AMD fanboys can place pre-orders without even a hint of remorse or compromise. The rest of us can hold off on any planned new system purchases until mid-March, when the folks at Tom's Hardware are done with their benchmarking. Odds are that unless you really really really have to buy the Intel system because you don't intend to use it for anything other than running that ONE piece of software that is an outlier in benchmarks (whatever it might be: 7-zip?), then you should be buying an AMD system if you can find a motherboard that meets your needs. Unless you really enjoy throwing away $600 for nothing.
Sigh, the orange one is the poster child for the Dunning Kruger effect.
Not really. Dunning-Kruger requires you to actually be an expert at something. Being born rich is not an expertise. We need another name for the syndrome where having lots of money makes people think they're experts at everything.
Things like getting married, starting a family, or even moving out from underneath Mom and Dads roof; all of these life events will likely cost more than the average "interesting" salary.
Many Chinese men will never have the opportunity without plural marriage. There's 27 million more men than women in China right now. By 2020, it's expected to be 35 million more men than women. As the linked article points out, that's the entire population of Canada. A country worth of young men will not be able to marry and start a family. It's 15% of their age cohort. Fifteen percent! That's insane. And they're already an economic force to be reckoned with. Singles Day sales in China dwarfs Black Friday sales in the US.
Gigging is one reaction to that massive demographic disparity. There's no need to look for the stability and independence that goes with a family because for tens of millions of Chinese men, there will be no family. The consequences of China's One Child policy are going to be with them (and possibly with us, the rest of the world) for the rest of the century, and no one really understands all of the ramifications. This has never happened before, in all of human history. The closest analog is perhaps the American West during the colonial period, but that gender disparity neither lasted as long as this one must nor involved anything like the sheer scale of the one in China. Gigging may be the least of the distortions that are coming.
Apparently, I still do not see the sarcasm must be some retarded wiring in my brain, but /sarcasm or some kind of hint at it usually helps.
You must be a little more autistic than most around here.
...so what ever you said I've already forgotten because I know that it's wrong.
I also intend to misquote you.
That wasn't just obvious sarcasm; that was heavy sarcasm. Do you really think he forgot everything you said instantly? And the last sentence is, for all intents and purposes, a </sarcasm> tag. Really, it was clearly sarcasm.
I didn't know that Chattanooga was doing so well. I'd heard about the rollout, and the whining and crying in court from AT&T and Comcast. I hadn't heard that AT&T and Comcast had ultimately been told to go to hell, though I applaud the court that decided that. And one of you swarm of ACs says it was all paid off in 4 years... That's kind of fantastic, for that much physical plant.
Is it just me, or is Google doing it wrong? I think Google is doing it wrong, 'cause their quoted billion dollars per city is nuts. In fact, I'd say that's the clearest evidence yet that Google has become a classic American corporation, in the mold of GM and IBM and Lockheed Martin. They really have jumped the shark, despite all their precious interview puzzle questions. And that's for pole-hung fiber, too! Not even paying for burial. That's outrageous. That's like Lockheed's price tag for launching a payload to orbit, when the real cost should be what SpaceX charges. That's an epic failure of management on Google's part, and Chattanooga is the proof.
If I happen to own some land in CA that Musk wants to tunnel under/through, can he really do so without my permission or even knowledge?
Of course not. And of course he knows that. Tunneling under roads always requires the city/county/state's permission, depending on which authority is most directly responsible for the road in question, and in the case of important roads, like the interstate highways, it may require the permission of all three at once. Tunneling under private property requires either the mineral rights (in which case the owner of the surface isn't the owner of the depths anyway) or an easement from the surface owner. In the case of utilities, there's usually a public easement that has been forced upon the property owner by the government. It usually follows the road, but can also include any or all edges of everyone's property for things like cable television.
Slashdot is so goddamned weird sometimes. Elon Musk is in the rocket business and in the automobile business, two of the most highly regulated industries in the world. He can probably quote chapter and verse of the top 10 regulations he despises, plus name multiple examples of regulations he thinks are highly appropriate. The guy knows more about government regulations than any Slashdot reader who is not actually employed as a government regulator or as a compliance officer, because he's up to his eyeballs in them day in and day out. Plus, you know, he has money, which buys lawyers. I'm absolutely certain he has three whole law firms on retainer, one for SpaceX, one for Tesla, and one for himself personally because billionaire. And when you're already paying them, you might as well ask them questions, to get some value for your money.
So despite appearances, he's not going into this blindly. I'm sure the day he had a hole dug in his parking lot is also the day he had a lawyer down at city hall, filing the proper paperwork for a tunnel under the road to his parking structure. According to another poster, he's been trying to get a pedestrian bridge built for some time now, but for whatever reason, the city hasn't approved it. The interesting thing is it's a different department that approves tunnels. (Well, it is here, anyway. It probably is in Hawthorne too.) He's probably hoping to find a department of the city that will actually process the paperwork in a timely fashion.
Glad to hear we're implementing that new-fangled 4th amendment I keep hearing about.
If only. It isn't possible to use a Stingray constitutionally, period. Here's the 4th Amendment, in its entirety:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A Stingray sucks up data for hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people if run in a metro area, and there is no warrant for that. A warrant must "particularly [describe] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" and every court in the land has ruled time and time again that "I want to seize something from 100 people" is not in any way "particular" enough, let alone "I want to seize something from 10,000 people".
The proposed law is unconstitutional, attempting to provide legal cover for unconstitutional activities. The only constitutional warrant names an individual or individual device or a very small group thereof and is issued to the phone company. The government does not get to pretend to be the phone company, and Hoover up the data for thousands of people at a time.[1]
I would question whether or not the current Supreme Court would uphold the Constitution and strike down this law if it passes, but it won't come before this court. The legal gyrations to prevent a challenge of the Stingrays with standing will continue indefinitely. We know this because the same stonewalling is already happening with respect to NSA spying on the Internet. Add to that the length of time required to run through the appeals process and actually reach the Supreme Court, and I doubt either Kennedy or Ginsberg will still be alive if and when that case finally gets to the Court.
Unless we are exceedingly fortunate, and this unconstitutional bill becomes law and suckers some prosecuting attorney into letting a Stingray-based case that is being challenged go forward, we're probably in for a decades of unconstitutional activity.
Not that it will be the first time...
----
[1] No apologies for the pun. It was too appropriate.
Missouri had just switched from a Republican trifecta to Republican controlled state houses with a Democratic governor when it started and successfully completed a project to replace or repair 802 bridges in 4 years, with project planning beginning in late 2008 and construction starting in 2009 and ending in 2012, on budget and 14 months ahead of schedule. And then the Republicans cut the budget so now we can only handle 100 bridges a year, just barely keeping our heads above water, as about 100/year go into "poor" condition. We proved we're capable of twice that rate, if the budget is available. Admittedly, some of that money was Federal stimulus money after the Great Recession (we actually used it to repair infrastructure), but the rest of it was ours.
Missouri is nearly a Democratic state, but we got gerrymandered into appearing Republican with the 2000 census. Our state voting districts are so fucked up they have actual holes in them, with discontiguous pieces. We have one Republican and one Democratic Federal senator, a Democratic governor, and Republican state houses. At least one of the state houses would be Democratic if we had honest voting districts. It's not visible on the maps here but can be seen at the address by address level if you zoom in far enough in Google Maps. Our state Senate districts are fairly honest, since there's considerably fewer of them, but our state House districts are downright creative. Also, we'd be less Republican, but the Baptists are a force to be reckoned with, and they're stilling buying the anti-abortion bullshit the Republicans claim, but don't actually follow up on.
Geographically, we have a lot of hills, a lot of rivers, and a lot of streams. We have the largest river in the country, the Mississippi, making up the entirety of our eastern border and we have the Missouri river, the third largest river in the country that isn't mostly Canadian, after the Mississippi and the Ohio. Those two huge rivers have carved bluffs all over the place, many of which were subsequently abandoned as the river shifted. In short, we need a lot of bridges to get around. Replacing 800 in 4 years was significant, but we do still have a long ways to go. And we're not quite as politically backwards as we appear to be. By just a little bit.
Can I just call up Tesla and GM to buy them at that price, or do I go through a reseller? Or is that the bottleneck for the price (a 500% markup seems excessive, though... especially for such a large bulk purchase). Let me know, please! I'm 100% serious here.
You can go to Tesla's website and order the Powerwall 2 with a credit card[1] on the spot, then dismount it from your wall after it's installed and stuff it into your RV. GM does not resell batteries in any form. Powerwall 2 is 39 cents per watt hour, not the 19 cents per watt hour they pay wholesale, but still, it's only a 100% markup, rather than 500%.
I've been told that it's cheaper to buy naked cells, though I don't know anywhere else you can get Panasonic cells for 39 cents per watt hour and you would lose Tesla's sophisticated power pack cooling, charging, and discharging hardware and software. (Liquid cooling is integrated.) I presume you don't intend to use the batteries for motive power, in which case a Powerwall 2 is just what you need. You might even be able to get the electrician to install it directly into your RV for you.
It's more than double the capacity you were planning on, but it's a turnkey solution. I hear modern RVs all have 120V appliances now, so it's literally a drop-in installation, though exactly what gets wired where might be a little complex if you have a fueled generator as well as the external power connection. The electrician would remove the existing inverter, since the Powerwall 2 has its own. It's 44" x 29" x 5.5" and is designed to be installed vertically. A horizontal installation might work, but might void the 10 year warranty (And might not. You'd have to ask). It can peak at nearly 60 amps output and sustain 40 amps, so it should have no trouble starting up and running the typical RV air conditioning system without letting the voltage sag to anything electronic, even without external power. It's beefier than the typical RV battery system, which tends to top out at 30 amps.
----
[1] And holy crap, how did Slashdot not notice that change? There's a Powerwall 2 now (a nice clean rectangle, instead of the goofy truncated oval thing) and it's 14 kWh for $5500, with trivial credit card ordering, instead of having to call them. Much friendlier than the old way.
People are afraid of nuclear fission whether or not those fears are justified. That is human nature and it is unlikely to change.
Nonsense. It's not even remotely human nature, and it was changed, forcibly. Humanity's fear, and in particular Americans' fear of nuclear power is one of the great propaganda victories of the 20th Century.
Immediately after the end of World War II, the Greatest Generation was absolutely convinced that they were entering the Atomic Age and that it was going to be the best thing since sliced bread. Science fiction was absolutely saturated with atomic everything, and even though it was a disrespected fringe literature at the time, that didn't stop its enthusiasm from leaking over into the rest of the world. To the point where "atomic" became synonymous with "good", "modern", and "the future", slapped on advertising copy as a matter of course, in much the same way as "green" is today. The phrase "too cheap to meter" originated in 1954, and though the speaker was referring to fusion power, the phrase stuck, and is still applied today, to both fission and fusion. (Sarcastically, nowadays, but it persists nonetheless.) The future was bright, and it was going to be nuclear powered.
Then Green Peace set themselves against it. They spent the '60s and '70s telling the world how dangerous nuclear power was, and when the Three Mile Island accident happened in 1979, they were quick to capitalize on it, despite there being zero injuries or deaths caused by it right up through the present day. They spent the next seven years hammering on that accident, trying to convince the world how scary nuclear power was. And they were succeeding. If the propaganda had gone the other way, Three Mile Island would have been a great victory for nuclear power. Even with a partial core meltdown, no one was injured. The "Big Scary Thing" had happened, and it wasn't scary at all. Except people were being told that it was scary, and after a generation of it being hammered on, it was starting to stick.
Then in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster happened, the greatest gift to anti-nuclear forces since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And still, it could have gone the other way. The Nixon era attempt at détente had withered and the USSR was again the Great Enemy of America. (The USSR didn't disintegrate until the tail end of 1991.) Chernobyl could have been spun as a Soviet screwup, proof of the inherent inferiority of the Soviet system and indeed, it was used for that purpose, but by far the loudest message hitched to that disaster was "nuclear bad". And it worked.
It took two generations of intense propaganda and legal obstructionism, but Green Peace won. They had completely reversed the attitude towards nuclear power of an entire continent. Meanwhile, between 1946 and 1989, 4208 people, including 116 children, died in coal mining accidents and disasters around the world, while just 31 people died as a direct result of Chernobyl. (The count of indirect deaths of both coal burning and the Chernobyl disaster are violently disputed, so I'll leave them aside, saying only that both are much bigger than the direct deaths.) Human nature should have been terrified of coal by the end of the 20th Century, because it had indisputably and directly killed so many. Human nature is to be scared of the things we're told to be scared o
Check your server logs. Ours get automated breach attempts thousands of times a day from countries all over the world. Usual tests are for wordpress bugs and ssh with many usernames and passwords.
The thousands of ssh login attempts I've been seeing have lately been exclusively for root. I'm guessing there's some IOT thing that allows root logins.
Meanwhile my server has never allowed a root login over ssh, in 18 years. I wish they'd use nmap to fingerprint my box and then go away, knowing it won't let them in no matter how hard they try.