Given there have been a couple of very high-profile failures of "the grid" in the last 10 years and a lot of attendant talk about the lack of investment and quality of the grid, I don't see how the grid will be magically transformed to adapt to a large influx of electric vehicles when the core grid functions of power distribution are relatively weak.
There's something like 250 million cars in the US. Let's say in 10 years 10% of them are replaced with electric cars. As a worst-case scenerio, they all use the Tesla charging rate (40A @ 240V, about 10kWh). That's a huge electric consumption increase nationally. My math says that's 250 gigwatts of power (and I'll admit I may have screwed up by an order of magnitude, but.01 MW * 25 million cars it sounds right).
While they could probably make up some of this at a national scale, at a local or regional scale it could be a lot more difficult. I don't know how my back alley power grid would handle an added load of 80-100kW.
There might be some offsets, such as smaller cars that need less charging overall or can be effectively charged for a day's use at a lower consumption rate.
"Intent to distribute" started out life reasonably well when they started decriminalizing drugs, usually pot, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Usually the rhetoric was that the user was bad but was mostly a victim of the evil dealer who profited selling the evil drugs to the hapless user. Therefore, we should "decriminalize" drugs somewhat and make the penalties somewhat less severe for drug users but still look the line the Appian Way with the crucified bodies of drug dealers.
Anyway, they ended up codifying a number of "intent to distribute" laws which were meant to keep severe felony charges against dealers. Usually quantity was what mattered, but they also invented ideas like multiple containers, drug dealing equipment (scales, empty bags) and other similar kinds of criteria to distinguish between personal use and dealing.
Anyway, the original idea was mostly reasonable -- stop sending a guy with a joint to felony prison for 10-20 years but still "go after the dealer".
Of course now it's just gotten out of hand and is used in strange situations like secret boxes in your car.
I think the idea is that investigative journalism would have been going on the entire time the site was being put together, not just after it launches and doesn't work right.
It's debatable how "newsworthy" this could have been in a general news publication -- how you build a web site is technical and even good technology choices made by talented and experienced people can be open to debate. It would probably be hard to make interesting reading, probably along the lines of trying to explain financial derivatives or credit-default swaps.
At the end of the day, this is the most significant web site launch in Federal government history (at least in terms of profile, if not in actual citizen impact) and there probably should have been reporters engaged in the entire development process and hopefully cultivating the kind of sources who would expose deviations from standard software development, weird product choices and deviations from traditional methodologies.
But this whole project just went unnoticed until it exploded.
So we're back to the yellow journalism of the 19th century.
The question is, how did the old yellow journalism become the so-called serious journalism of the 20th century? I kind of question whether we EVER had a real serious investigative press.
Sure, we had progressive muckrakers but their medium was often books, not newspapers. We seemed to have a pinnacle of journalism in the Watergate years, but a lot of the mid century seemed to be an establishment press more than happy to tow the establishment line.
TV news and the 24 hour news cycle seemed to have seriously sidelined written journalism, and when nobody reads you can't have an idea that doesn't take 30 seconds to deliver, especially if there's not a picture.
IMHO, where we're headed probably looks more like China than anything else.
Capitalists like the highly managed populations and tight controls on labor. The State likes the deep national security control and will give the capitalists anything they want to keep it -- perpetual patent and trademark, socializing bank debt and risk, subsidized money creation, etc.
The ideological facade will remain baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, but as we've seen, it's largely a facade and subject to being voided by state interests as needed -- National Security Letters, NSA surveillance, DEA seizures, stop-and-frisk, the TSA, mandatory border control check points away from the border, etc.
Anachronisms like a free press and gun ownership will continue to provide both political distraction as well as counter-points to reinforce a facade of freedom.
The press was either cheerleading for Obama in other areas, railing against everything the Republicans did or supporting the failed gun control push, among other items.
And that's when the Obama administration wasn't pursuing press relations that would have made Goebbels and Stalin proud, like their stage-managing of White House press photography.
Serious investigative journalism of the ACA implementation, had it revealed what we know now, is very likely to have further enabled repeal attempts or at least led to significant delays in implementation. I don't doubt that there were closed-door editorial debates over whether ideology and party loyalty were more important than journalism.
And even if you posit a perfectly neutral press, what exactly does investigative journalism of ACA implementation look like? How do you put software development issues on the front page of a newspaper? So many technical decisions that can, would and will be debated endlessly (cf. Slashdot), plus so much would be completely opaque given it was in the hands of several different contractors who would have never cooperated with the press and who would have run to their political patrons for protection as soon as the press began sniffing around. It would have taken lawsuits to gain access to this information.
Since 1988, the House of Bush has occupied the Presidency for 12 years, the House of Clinton for 8 years and been a major player in another administration for 4 years as well as having better than average odds of gaining the White House for at least another 4 years if not 8.
It gets even more like that if you start looking at the House, Senate and Governorships and factor in other family dynasties like the Kennedys, the broader House of Bush.
Then there are various corporate/government crossovers where scions of capitalists enter politics. Minnesota's governor is the child of the Dayton family (retail shopping, family was behind Dayton's and now Target Stores).
I'm not sure we need to declare a new monarchy or aristocracy; we've just more less quietly reinstated it.
Doesn't it have to have some kind of rules given to it to define what things are, some kind of basic meanings?
Or are the results somewhat subjective, like maybe the computer will present a set of images it says are related and its up to a person to interpret the "knowledge" the computer gained?
I think Big Oil is less threatened by it than Big Electricity.
While I'm sure there's still some places that occasionally fire up a couple of megawatts of generation on diesel, Big Oil is selling all the natural gas it can frack to Big Electricity who are looking to cut their coal consumption to meet environmental guidelines.
Big Electricity I think dislikes solar because it cuts into rate revenue via the rules that require them to buy excess power (spinning meters backwards) without necessarily cutting their generation costs significantly. I think they might fear (and not without some justification) a shit ton of solar power jacked into the distribution grid in a chaotic way that doesn't really help and causes big rate payers to get big discounts.
I'm sure Big Electricity would like a lot more control over this whole process and probably would like to eliminate requirements they pay for excess power generation by solar-enabled customers, or at least paying a lot less.
In some ways this seems to be just a subset of the gripes that many libertarian leaning conservatives have with the Republican party. The larger narrative seems to be unhappiness with institutional Republicans whose first instinct is to protect big business and their interests, whether its big banking or big energy, along with other issues that aren't specifically economic.
At one time this spawned a grass roots movement which got named "Tea Party" but which got co-opted by various members of the Republican establishment, mostly the more zealous types looking to make a name for themselves, like Michelle Bachman. This promptly led to the discrediting of anything associated with "Tea Party".
Except low fats isn't a solution, it's part of the problem. Usually low carb diets keep protein at about 35% of dietary intake but increase fat consumption to about 55-60% of dietary intake and reduce carbohydrate consumption to 10% or less.
The food controversy is a huge part of this. There are a fair number of pretty smart people who have looked at diet and reached the conclusion that low carb, high-fat diets are healthy diets and that high carb diets, which is largely what you get when you eliminate animal products, are not healthy. (Google Gary Taubes for a good sample of these arguments).
You might be able to make the argument, or at least demonstrate, that as population soldiers are involved in enough physical activity that they can absorb the higher carbohydrate consumption associated with a vegan diet.
I'm perfectly willing to believe we have what amounts to an existential food crisis -- meat is good for us and what we should be eating, but our population size and environmental constraints make shifting to a diet of animal products prohibitive, leaving us stuck with a choice of a diet that is good for us and bad for the environment at our current populations levels, or a diet that is bad for us but more environmentally sustainable.
A friend of my wife just went through this TWICE in a week because she presumably didn't scrub her computer.
She had her total identity stolen -- addresses changed, a mortgage applied for, thousands charged to her credit cards, bank information stolen (although they didn't actually take her bank account yet).
She changed everything -- new cards, new bank account, etc, and a few days later had it all stolen again.
What I find strange is that she was re-targeted. Given the apparent low cost of an identity with a lot of money, you'd think ID thieves who "lost" an identity they were trying to steal would move on to another one unless they one they had stolen was worth healthy six figures plus. This woman wasn't that -- she's a single parent with a kid in college.
The age of the cars matters as well, as does the relative state of maintenance.
It's a reasonable assumption/statement that all Tesla Model S cars are essentially new and likely to be in near perfect maintenance condition.
If the gasoline car fire numbers were adjusted to only include cars within the age range of Tesla Model S cars and (if possible) the number of cars still within factory warranties, I would imagine the number of gasoline car fires would be significantly lower.
I wonder if the lack of an indictment or any sworn statement that he will be arrested is some kind of bargaining status diplomatically. Maybe not a very good one, since it doesn't seem likely that the US would NOT try to persecute, I mean, prosecute him if they could.
But perhaps by not indicting him or "officially" promising to arrest him, Ecuador will somehow feel pressure to boot him out of their embassy or at least not feel as interested in letting him stay.
And I would imagine that the distributed filesystems they use on those systems probably aren't even very coherent even if you could read a physical disk.
Most of the SANs I've seen support disk encryption and IPSec encryption between the SAN and the host or OS talking to it. If your OS writes encrypted data to storage (encrypted filesystem) as well, you have two layers of encryption on the platter and two layers of encryption in transit.
Of course that doesn't address weaknesses in ciphers or key exchange systems, but it seems like it would make it a lot harder to get at the data because the only place it is decrypted is during interprocess communication (decrypting from the filesystem and before re-encrypting it for final transit to client).
Not that this trivializes that risk, but it seems to make it a lot tougher.
Are they 3D printing reliable plastic barrels now?
I guess I can see a very thick barrel surviving a few centerfire pistol rounds and maybe the same surviving many.22LR rounds, but I don't see them being at all accurate as I don't think the rifling would stand up.
Overall I see the barrel deforming from the heat of firing and possibly resulting in the same situation as you would end up with squib loads -- blocked barrel on the squib, detonated chamber/barrel on the second...
Like your credit score, another number without any transparency easily manipulated into sub-optimal values so that you can be forced into paying more fees and higher costs.
The only "rock salt" I've ever seen are irregular chunks that wouldn't fit in a BB gun, which is only designed to fire a round pellet 4.5mm in diameter.
I suppose you could wedge smallish chunks of rock salt in a single-shot, breech loading BB gun, but the terminal performance would be awful, probably not developing enough energy to hurt anything. And the salt would more likely foul the barrel and action, inducing rust.
I have heard (but have never seen) of people creating rock salt loads for *shotguns* which makes more sense. But it would still be hell on barrels and I'm not sure what real use there would be for it.
In some ways I think data centers have gotten out of hand and created a market for less intensive, more retail-friendly versions.
I get that there's definitely a need for all the security and triple-redundancy that high end data centers provide. But I also think there's definitely a market for a less complex version that maybe doesn't have the kinds of security or redundancy that big operations have. Not zero redundancy or zero security, but a less involved version -- maybe less peering, less security, one generator instead of two, etc.
I work in SMB consulting and there's a certain number of clients who host their own systems in house but could benefit from putting them in a data center, but who don't quite want to pay the costs asociated with the standard model of data center. What they need is a rack with reliable power and cooling and better internet connectivity than they can get from a DSL line + Cable.
A "retail" data center might let them get their toes in the water and solve some short term problems without having to cross the Rubicon into "big time" datacenter use.
The most apt comparison I can make is Snap Fitness vs. Lifetime Fitness. Lifetime has more and better equipment, trainers, a pool, tennis, etc. But some people just want to lift weights and run on a treadmill.
Slashdot Mirror
The grid will have plenty of time to adapt.
Given there have been a couple of very high-profile failures of "the grid" in the last 10 years and a lot of attendant talk about the lack of investment and quality of the grid, I don't see how the grid will be magically transformed to adapt to a large influx of electric vehicles when the core grid functions of power distribution are relatively weak.
There's something like 250 million cars in the US. Let's say in 10 years 10% of them are replaced with electric cars. As a worst-case scenerio, they all use the Tesla charging rate (40A @ 240V, about 10kWh). That's a huge electric consumption increase nationally. My math says that's 250 gigwatts of power (and I'll admit I may have screwed up by an order of magnitude, but .01 MW * 25 million cars it sounds right).
While they could probably make up some of this at a national scale, at a local or regional scale it could be a lot more difficult. I don't know how my back alley power grid would handle an added load of 80-100kW.
There might be some offsets, such as smaller cars that need less charging overall or can be effectively charged for a day's use at a lower consumption rate.
"Intent to distribute" started out life reasonably well when they started decriminalizing drugs, usually pot, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Usually the rhetoric was that the user was bad but was mostly a victim of the evil dealer who profited selling the evil drugs to the hapless user. Therefore, we should "decriminalize" drugs somewhat and make the penalties somewhat less severe for drug users but still look the line the Appian Way with the crucified bodies of drug dealers.
Anyway, they ended up codifying a number of "intent to distribute" laws which were meant to keep severe felony charges against dealers. Usually quantity was what mattered, but they also invented ideas like multiple containers, drug dealing equipment (scales, empty bags) and other similar kinds of criteria to distinguish between personal use and dealing.
Anyway, the original idea was mostly reasonable -- stop sending a guy with a joint to felony prison for 10-20 years but still "go after the dealer".
Of course now it's just gotten out of hand and is used in strange situations like secret boxes in your car.
I think the idea is that investigative journalism would have been going on the entire time the site was being put together, not just after it launches and doesn't work right.
It's debatable how "newsworthy" this could have been in a general news publication -- how you build a web site is technical and even good technology choices made by talented and experienced people can be open to debate. It would probably be hard to make interesting reading, probably along the lines of trying to explain financial derivatives or credit-default swaps.
At the end of the day, this is the most significant web site launch in Federal government history (at least in terms of profile, if not in actual citizen impact) and there probably should have been reporters engaged in the entire development process and hopefully cultivating the kind of sources who would expose deviations from standard software development, weird product choices and deviations from traditional methodologies.
But this whole project just went unnoticed until it exploded.
So we're back to the yellow journalism of the 19th century.
The question is, how did the old yellow journalism become the so-called serious journalism of the 20th century? I kind of question whether we EVER had a real serious investigative press.
Sure, we had progressive muckrakers but their medium was often books, not newspapers. We seemed to have a pinnacle of journalism in the Watergate years, but a lot of the mid century seemed to be an establishment press more than happy to tow the establishment line.
TV news and the 24 hour news cycle seemed to have seriously sidelined written journalism, and when nobody reads you can't have an idea that doesn't take 30 seconds to deliver, especially if there's not a picture.
I don't think I've ever seen Fox News engaged in journalism.
IMHO, where we're headed probably looks more like China than anything else.
Capitalists like the highly managed populations and tight controls on labor. The State likes the deep national security control and will give the capitalists anything they want to keep it -- perpetual patent and trademark, socializing bank debt and risk, subsidized money creation, etc.
The ideological facade will remain baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, but as we've seen, it's largely a facade and subject to being voided by state interests as needed -- National Security Letters, NSA surveillance, DEA seizures, stop-and-frisk, the TSA, mandatory border control check points away from the border, etc.
Anachronisms like a free press and gun ownership will continue to provide both political distraction as well as counter-points to reinforce a facade of freedom.
Are you kidding me?
The press was either cheerleading for Obama in other areas, railing against everything the Republicans did or supporting the failed gun control push, among other items.
And that's when the Obama administration wasn't pursuing press relations that would have made Goebbels and Stalin proud, like their stage-managing of White House press photography.
Serious investigative journalism of the ACA implementation, had it revealed what we know now, is very likely to have further enabled repeal attempts or at least led to significant delays in implementation. I don't doubt that there were closed-door editorial debates over whether ideology and party loyalty were more important than journalism.
And even if you posit a perfectly neutral press, what exactly does investigative journalism of ACA implementation look like? How do you put software development issues on the front page of a newspaper? So many technical decisions that can, would and will be debated endlessly (cf. Slashdot), plus so much would be completely opaque given it was in the hands of several different contractors who would have never cooperated with the press and who would have run to their political patrons for protection as soon as the press began sniffing around. It would have taken lawsuits to gain access to this information.
Since 1988, the House of Bush has occupied the Presidency for 12 years, the House of Clinton for 8 years and been a major player in another administration for 4 years as well as having better than average odds of gaining the White House for at least another 4 years if not 8.
It gets even more like that if you start looking at the House, Senate and Governorships and factor in other family dynasties like the Kennedys, the broader House of Bush.
Then there are various corporate/government crossovers where scions of capitalists enter politics. Minnesota's governor is the child of the Dayton family (retail shopping, family was behind Dayton's and now Target Stores).
I'm not sure we need to declare a new monarchy or aristocracy; we've just more less quietly reinstated it.
Doesn't it have to have some kind of rules given to it to define what things are, some kind of basic meanings?
Or are the results somewhat subjective, like maybe the computer will present a set of images it says are related and its up to a person to interpret the "knowledge" the computer gained?
I think Big Oil is less threatened by it than Big Electricity.
While I'm sure there's still some places that occasionally fire up a couple of megawatts of generation on diesel, Big Oil is selling all the natural gas it can frack to Big Electricity who are looking to cut their coal consumption to meet environmental guidelines.
Big Electricity I think dislikes solar because it cuts into rate revenue via the rules that require them to buy excess power (spinning meters backwards) without necessarily cutting their generation costs significantly. I think they might fear (and not without some justification) a shit ton of solar power jacked into the distribution grid in a chaotic way that doesn't really help and causes big rate payers to get big discounts.
I'm sure Big Electricity would like a lot more control over this whole process and probably would like to eliminate requirements they pay for excess power generation by solar-enabled customers, or at least paying a lot less.
In some ways this seems to be just a subset of the gripes that many libertarian leaning conservatives have with the Republican party. The larger narrative seems to be unhappiness with institutional Republicans whose first instinct is to protect big business and their interests, whether its big banking or big energy, along with other issues that aren't specifically economic.
At one time this spawned a grass roots movement which got named "Tea Party" but which got co-opted by various members of the Republican establishment, mostly the more zealous types looking to make a name for themselves, like Michelle Bachman. This promptly led to the discrediting of anything associated with "Tea Party".
Except low fats isn't a solution, it's part of the problem. Usually low carb diets keep protein at about 35% of dietary intake but increase fat consumption to about 55-60% of dietary intake and reduce carbohydrate consumption to 10% or less.
The food controversy is a huge part of this. There are a fair number of pretty smart people who have looked at diet and reached the conclusion that low carb, high-fat diets are healthy diets and that high carb diets, which is largely what you get when you eliminate animal products, are not healthy. (Google Gary Taubes for a good sample of these arguments).
You might be able to make the argument, or at least demonstrate, that as population soldiers are involved in enough physical activity that they can absorb the higher carbohydrate consumption associated with a vegan diet.
I'm perfectly willing to believe we have what amounts to an existential food crisis -- meat is good for us and what we should be eating, but our population size and environmental constraints make shifting to a diet of animal products prohibitive, leaving us stuck with a choice of a diet that is good for us and bad for the environment at our current populations levels, or a diet that is bad for us but more environmentally sustainable.
A friend of my wife just went through this TWICE in a week because she presumably didn't scrub her computer.
She had her total identity stolen -- addresses changed, a mortgage applied for, thousands charged to her credit cards, bank information stolen (although they didn't actually take her bank account yet).
She changed everything -- new cards, new bank account, etc, and a few days later had it all stolen again.
What I find strange is that she was re-targeted. Given the apparent low cost of an identity with a lot of money, you'd think ID thieves who "lost" an identity they were trying to steal would move on to another one unless they one they had stolen was worth healthy six figures plus. This woman wasn't that -- she's a single parent with a kid in college.
"Yes, I have something for each of you."
The age of the cars matters as well, as does the relative state of maintenance.
It's a reasonable assumption/statement that all Tesla Model S cars are essentially new and likely to be in near perfect maintenance condition.
If the gasoline car fire numbers were adjusted to only include cars within the age range of Tesla Model S cars and (if possible) the number of cars still within factory warranties, I would imagine the number of gasoline car fires would be significantly lower.
I wonder if the lack of an indictment or any sworn statement that he will be arrested is some kind of bargaining status diplomatically. Maybe not a very good one, since it doesn't seem likely that the US would NOT try to persecute, I mean, prosecute him if they could.
But perhaps by not indicting him or "officially" promising to arrest him, Ecuador will somehow feel pressure to boot him out of their embassy or at least not feel as interested in letting him stay.
And I would imagine that the distributed filesystems they use on those systems probably aren't even very coherent even if you could read a physical disk.
Most of the SANs I've seen support disk encryption and IPSec encryption between the SAN and the host or OS talking to it. If your OS writes encrypted data to storage (encrypted filesystem) as well, you have two layers of encryption on the platter and two layers of encryption in transit.
Of course that doesn't address weaknesses in ciphers or key exchange systems, but it seems like it would make it a lot harder to get at the data because the only place it is decrypted is during interprocess communication (decrypting from the filesystem and before re-encrypting it for final transit to client).
Not that this trivializes that risk, but it seems to make it a lot tougher.
I think I read in the NY Times that the US does not have any GPS ground stations in Russia. If we did, it would be a hard thing to say no to.
Are they 3D printing reliable plastic barrels now?
I guess I can see a very thick barrel surviving a few centerfire pistol rounds and maybe the same surviving many .22LR rounds, but I don't see them being at all accurate as I don't think the rifling would stand up.
Overall I see the barrel deforming from the heat of firing and possibly resulting in the same situation as you would end up with squib loads -- blocked barrel on the squib, detonated chamber/barrel on the second...
Like your credit score, another number without any transparency easily manipulated into sub-optimal values so that you can be forced into paying more fees and higher costs.
How exactly do you load a BB gun with rock salt?
The only "rock salt" I've ever seen are irregular chunks that wouldn't fit in a BB gun, which is only designed to fire a round pellet 4.5mm in diameter.
I suppose you could wedge smallish chunks of rock salt in a single-shot, breech loading BB gun, but the terminal performance would be awful, probably not developing enough energy to hurt anything. And the salt would more likely foul the barrel and action, inducing rust.
I have heard (but have never seen) of people creating rock salt loads for *shotguns* which makes more sense. But it would still be hell on barrels and I'm not sure what real use there would be for it.
Should have hired a professional gardener to re-do the pots. Then you would have had a proven monetary damage.
In some ways I think data centers have gotten out of hand and created a market for less intensive, more retail-friendly versions.
I get that there's definitely a need for all the security and triple-redundancy that high end data centers provide. But I also think there's definitely a market for a less complex version that maybe doesn't have the kinds of security or redundancy that big operations have. Not zero redundancy or zero security, but a less involved version -- maybe less peering, less security, one generator instead of two, etc.
I work in SMB consulting and there's a certain number of clients who host their own systems in house but could benefit from putting them in a data center, but who don't quite want to pay the costs asociated with the standard model of data center. What they need is a rack with reliable power and cooling and better internet connectivity than they can get from a DSL line + Cable.
A "retail" data center might let them get their toes in the water and solve some short term problems without having to cross the Rubicon into "big time" datacenter use.
The most apt comparison I can make is Snap Fitness vs. Lifetime Fitness. Lifetime has more and better equipment, trainers, a pool, tennis, etc. But some people just want to lift weights and run on a treadmill.