Quite the opposite I think. When another country builds more nukes, do we say, "Gee, they're building lots of nukes and that could hurt us, let's stop building nukes so we don't hurt anybody else." Nope, just the opposite, it causes us to build more. That's what we're going to see here. More "defensive" patents from MS, and more efforts put into enforcement of their patents.
While I'm sure this is a valid reason - that their contractors ripped of the code - is that an excuse to absolve them of blame? Hell no! MS needs to held responsible. What incentive do they have to prevent this kind of thing in the future if they aren't forced to take responsibility? And by responsibility, I don't mean blaming it on their contractor. This is a big "duh" that this is going to happen when you outsource to a country where the labor is cheap and cheating is culturally acceptable such that nobody gives a damn if they get caught. I've had to work with Indian contractors who ripped off code, which we identified thanks to just a little bit of diligence on our part because we actually want to know what we're releasing and charging our customers for.
Companies need to be held responsible for overseeing what their contractors are doing. Blaming the contractor != taking responsibility. That it was their contractors who stole might be the reason, but it is ABSOLUTELY NOT AN EXCUSE!
Yeah, crocodiles, in Florida. From the article: State biologists are studying the temporary use of magnets to disrupt the internal navigation of federally and state-protected American crocodiles, which have been spotted most often in neighborhoods of Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.
And because every good/. comment requires a wikipedia reference: American Crocodile:
"...there is a remnant population of less than 1200 in Florida, United States"
If this is indeed the case, then the kids should be in jail, not just being sued in civil court. The two articles cited don't specify those details, and I didn't dig any deeper. They make it sound like the kids just figured out how to spoof the magstrips and smartcards. Of course, the only thing more inaccurate than a/. summary is a news article.
I didn't see anything that said they did break in. It said they figured out how to break in, but that doesn't mean they did.
Your analogy is broken, because it states that they actually broke into your house. What the kids did would be more analogous to giving a talk on how to pick a lock, and perhaps telling us where we can get a lock pick set.
As long as we're talking imperfect analogies, what if this were Windows Vista? Let's say you discover a vulnerability. You could give a talk about how one could exploit that vulnerability without actually releasing a virus into the wild that exploits it (or submit a description to your favorite mailing list or forum). People do this kind of thing all the time.
Okay, so fundamentally, the MBTA's goal is to prevent the kids from making their knowledge public. The kids' goal is probably to make a name for themselves, and maybe do something cool by defeating the MBTA's security.
The judge threw out the gag ording, which I assume means the kids can legally make the knowledge public (even if they'll be sued later). By "hiring" the kids to make recommendations on their security, everyone saves a bunch of legal costs, the MBTA keeps the kids' from going public with the exploits, and the kids still get to make a name for themselves, and maybe make a few dollars. Everybody wins. That doesn't mean the MBTA actually cares about anything the kids have to say in their recommendations.
Everywhere else the idea would be killed by people who say what if I want to drive to the next city, or state?
Yep, whereas here it'll be killed by people saying it costs too much, because electricity is expensive here because it is produced by burning oil and diesel. It still costs $X to charge the cars at home. It still costs somebody $Y dollars to charge at the public charging stations, which doesn't make sense for only Z cars. Okay then, let's build a train. Wait, the train costs too much per passenger and the media loves to bash the train idea in their headline stories. It seems no other option is viable, so I guess we'll just keep burning oil. So reelect me, because clearly I care about the economy and the environment.
Okay...I'll try to explain. First, it's not the PUC making money. It is the PUC regulating HECO (the electric company). It is the PUC's regulations that allow HECO to make more money off of burning oil than buying wind power. Here's the math again. Note that I'm going from memory here, so figures may not be exact, but are within a cent or two. Cost of oil flucuates a bit, but the power bill comes in between 30 and 35 cents per kWh.
1. Oil/Diesel power. Costs HECO about 6c/kWh to generate (operating and maintaining generators etc), plus fuel costs of about 16c/kWh. HECO charges customer 32c/kWh. Profit = 10c/kWh.
2. Wind. Costs HECO about 13c/kWh. HECO charges customers 16c/kWh. Profit = 3c/kWh.
Notice in #1, HECO is charging customers a lot more. They are allowed to do this because the PUC allows them to pass through the cost of fuel, independent of the the maximum that they are otherwise allowed to charge. If the PUC didn't allow this fuel pass through, and capped all power at 16c/kWh period, we would be getting our power from other sources and saving us consumers a lot of money.
You make some good points, HOWEVER, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing to have a major impact on our economy, and thus our quality of life. For example, many people I know are either scraping change from the couch cushions just to be able to buy food, or have multiple jobs and thus no free time in order to pay the rent. Doing those things you listed above would have a significant positive impact on those people, basically by keeping more dollars here instead of sending our tourism and development dollars immediately back to the mainland, even though we certainly wouldn't be 100% independent.
Now let's talk about that 95% imported food. It sure as heck doesn't have to be that way, but it's part of the same political engine that makes us get >90% of our power from burning petro. For example, here on Maui, HC&S (Hawaii Commercial & Sugar Company) has 37,000 acres of sugarcane. All of the sugar they produce gets shipped off to the mainland or other countries. The water used to irrigate this sugar cane is provided by EMI (East Maui Irrigation), and consumes most of the agricultural water available from East Maui. HC&S does not - I repeat DOES NOT - turn a profit. In fact, recently they have been losing money. So why do they continue to grow sugar with all this land and water, when they could be using it to grow stuff that could be consumed in Hawaii? The answer is Matson. Matson is the shipping company where most of that imported food comes in on. Matson, EMI, and HC&S are all owned by Alexander & Baldwin. So, while HC&S and EMI lose money, Matson makes a huge profit because it forces us to pay to ship our food in. All this in blatant violation of the state constitution, specifically article 11, sections 3 and 7.
Guess who the major campaign contributors are for most of the local and state politicians. Guess who says "how high" when A&B or HECO says "jump."
Now to tie this obscenely long comment back to the original article...the point of car charging network is not to reduce oil consumption or to improve sustainability. Is it a good thing by itself? Yes. Is it a good thing come re-election time? Hell no. Lingle and other politicians will point to it, saying they are doing everything possible to reduce our dependence on the mainland and foreign countries, while the people of Hawaii happily cast their votes as their metaphorical rectums are bleeding from being financially raped.
In/. terms:
1. Use up all the land and water for sugar cane so nothing else can be grown.
2. Block wind and solar projects so all of our energy has to come from imported oil, passing the cost directly to consumers.
3. Force us to important our food on Matson.
4. Promote development, even though everyone who lives here is against it, to use up even more resources, create a larger customer base, and let the mainland based developers make money, a small percentage of which is given back to the politicians in the form of campaign contributions.
5. PROFIT!
You have a group of islands which are really active volcanos with some habitable land around them, and you're burning oil for energy instead of sucking energy out of the molten rock?
No, you have a group of islands where one of those islands (the Big Island) is viable for geothermal. There is a little bit of geothermal generation going on there, but so far wind and solar thermal would be much more cost effective here. The advantage of geothermal is that it's more consistent, so if it's dark and the wind is down (the wind is rarely down here) it's generating the same amount of power. For now, having primarily wind and solar thermal supplemented by the existing petro generators makes the most sense. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing, you can still have a major impact by getting as much power as you can from wind and solar while only burning oil when needed.
When has wind or solar ever been shown to be an effective, reliable replacement for fossil fuels? We need to develop methods for storing massive quantities of electrical(or thermal in the case of solar-thermal) energy before these power sources could be anything other than a supplemental power source.
True, you need some type of storage, such as pumped hydro, if you want to replace fossil fuels entirely. However, you could still easily replace a MAJORITY of it with wind and solar thermal. You'd still need the fossil fuel burning capacity that we currently have for times when wind and solar aren't meeting demand, but most of the time you wouldn't have to burn nearly as much fossil fuels.
As for cost effectiveness here are the facts, at least on Maui:
-The PUC lets Maui Electric Company (MECO, owned by Hawaiian Electric Company), can charge something like 16cents/kWh. However, they also get to pass through the cost of fuel in addition to this cost, directly to the consumer, resulting in power cost us more than 30cents/kWh.
-MECO would purchase wind power for about 13cent/kWh.
-Even though it would save us consumers A LOT of money to have wind power, MECO wouldn't make as much profit because they don't get the huge fuel pass through.
-MECO (HECO) has a ton of influence over the government.
-MECO is good at PR and convincing people that wind and solar are bad ideas for totally bogus reasons (this comment is already long enough, I won't go into more detail on that right now).
Perhaps they could consider a nuke plant instead. Those are actually cheaper than fossil fuels, and they are certainly more reliable than wind or solar.
Perhaps they should but it'll never happen here. The hippies complain about the waste, while everyone else is paranoid about safety, thanks to HECO's PR. Forget the fact that the navy has quite a few mobile nuke plants swimming around the islands already.
Where on Hawaii are you planning to put up 1000 propellers and a sea of black-glass?
Well...to answer your question specifically, I'm not familiar enough with Kauai or Oahu, but in Maui county, there are currently 20 1.5 megawatt wind turbines at Kaheawa along a ridge in West Maui. There's plenty of space in the central valley, between Kahului and Kihei, with strong consistent winds that are just A&B owned sugar cane fields right now (which makes no profit but is used to tie up land that could be used for useful things in order to force us to import everything on Matson ships, which is also owned by A&B). This location is already ugly and not visible from populated areas, unlike the small Kaheawa wind farm. This would also be a perfect area for a solar thermal plant, as it is in the rain shadow of Haleakala and is nearly always sunny, and is large and flat.
Castle & Cook, who own most of the land on the island of Lana`i, want to build a wind farm there at their expense and send this power via undersea cables to Oahu. Although Castle&Cook is pushing hard, the project is being blocked.
I was on the Big Island a few months ago and saw a small wind farm near Southpoint. There is also a larger farm of derelict old wind turbines near the functioning wind farm. These derelict wind turbines could be replaced with modern, functioning turbines, and there is plenty of space there to build a nice big wind farm.
I may sound paranoid and anti-corporation and all that hippy nonsense, but it's really just politics as usual. It's the same kind of curruption that goes on everywhere, it's just very obvious here since Hawaii is small and relatively isolated.
The points I was trying to make are:
1) If you're going to set up an electric car network, start with the places where it makes the most sense. Like places where it isn't >30 cents per kWh with nearly all power generated by burning petro. Once it's established in places where it makes the most sense, then begin moving to other places.
2) This is political showboating by Gov Lingle. She is doing this to make it look like she cares about reducing oil consumption as a distraction from the fact that she tries to block anything that is not oil friendly in order to pad the pockets of corporations like Hawaiian Electric Co and Alexander & Baldwin. These things include blocking large scale wind and solar project, trying to block legislation giving tax incentives for home solar, and allowing the fuel pass through that HECO is allowed to charge us which they wouldn't get with wind and solar, thus giving them significantly higher profits from oil generation which costs the customer (those of us that live here) a lot more money.
So...in conclusion, this is all about trying to distract us from the fact that she is not actually trying to reduce oil consumption, at the co$t to those of us who live here.
For US Bank anyway, when I tried to go to my bill pay when this was going on my browser gave a nice message that the SSL cert was self signed and issued to localhost.localdomain. Any modern browser makes is pretty clear that something bad is happening in this case, although I'm sure there's still plenty of ignorant users willing to click through.
True, my financial institution (US Bank) may or may not be to blame, HOWEVER, you'd think it wouldn't take a bank a full day to let users know or take away the bill pay link or something along those lines. When I saw the invalid certificate, I still needed to cancel an automatic payment so I decided to contact my bank. Their response was basically, "we take security very seriously, please make sure you're using a compatible browser, move along now, nothing here to see." It wasn't until at least a day later that they notified users when logging in that bill pay was down. I wonder how many users clicked through during that one day period, which could have easily been prevented by a faster response?
Slashdot Mirror
Because saying life can survive somewhere is different than saying it can evolve somewhere.
And even if they said life can evolve somewhere doesn't mean is has evolved there.
Quite the opposite I think. When another country builds more nukes, do we say, "Gee, they're building lots of nukes and that could hurt us, let's stop building nukes so we don't hurt anybody else." Nope, just the opposite, it causes us to build more. That's what we're going to see here. More "defensive" patents from MS, and more efforts put into enforcement of their patents.
You remember PC magazines? Is that what they had before web sites? You must be old.
While I'm sure this is a valid reason - that their contractors ripped of the code - is that an excuse to absolve them of blame? Hell no! MS needs to held responsible. What incentive do they have to prevent this kind of thing in the future if they aren't forced to take responsibility? And by responsibility, I don't mean blaming it on their contractor. This is a big "duh" that this is going to happen when you outsource to a country where the labor is cheap and cheating is culturally acceptable such that nobody gives a damn if they get caught. I've had to work with Indian contractors who ripped off code, which we identified thanks to just a little bit of diligence on our part because we actually want to know what we're releasing and charging our customers for.
Companies need to be held responsible for overseeing what their contractors are doing. Blaming the contractor != taking responsibility. That it was their contractors who stole might be the reason, but it is ABSOLUTELY NOT AN EXCUSE!
Yeah, crocodiles, in Florida. From the article:
/. comment requires a wikipedia reference: American Crocodile:
"...there is a remnant population of less than 1200 in Florida, United States"
State biologists are studying the temporary use of magnets to disrupt the internal navigation of federally and state-protected American crocodiles, which have been spotted most often in neighborhoods of Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.
And because every good
If this is indeed the case, then the kids should be in jail, not just being sued in civil court. The two articles cited don't specify those details, and I didn't dig any deeper. They make it sound like the kids just figured out how to spoof the magstrips and smartcards. Of course, the only thing more inaccurate than a /. summary is a news article.
I didn't see anything that said they did break in. It said they figured out how to break in, but that doesn't mean they did.
Your analogy is broken, because it states that they actually broke into your house. What the kids did would be more analogous to giving a talk on how to pick a lock, and perhaps telling us where we can get a lock pick set.
As long as we're talking imperfect analogies, what if this were Windows Vista? Let's say you discover a vulnerability. You could give a talk about how one could exploit that vulnerability without actually releasing a virus into the wild that exploits it (or submit a description to your favorite mailing list or forum). People do this kind of thing all the time.
Okay, so fundamentally, the MBTA's goal is to prevent the kids from making their knowledge public. The kids' goal is probably to make a name for themselves, and maybe do something cool by defeating the MBTA's security.
The judge threw out the gag ording, which I assume means the kids can legally make the knowledge public (even if they'll be sued later). By "hiring" the kids to make recommendations on their security, everyone saves a bunch of legal costs, the MBTA keeps the kids' from going public with the exploits, and the kids still get to make a name for themselves, and maybe make a few dollars. Everybody wins. That doesn't mean the MBTA actually cares about anything the kids have to say in their recommendations.
"A further discovery is that octopuses show no trait of individual personalities, even though they exhibit a high level of intelligence."
In other words, they are like 90%+ of the human population. Except for the high level of intelligence part, of course.
Everywhere else the idea would be killed by people who say what if I want to drive to the next city, or state?
Yep, whereas here it'll be killed by people saying it costs too much, because electricity is expensive here because it is produced by burning oil and diesel. It still costs $X to charge the cars at home. It still costs somebody $Y dollars to charge at the public charging stations, which doesn't make sense for only Z cars. Okay then, let's build a train. Wait, the train costs too much per passenger and the media loves to bash the train idea in their headline stories. It seems no other option is viable, so I guess we'll just keep burning oil. So reelect me, because clearly I care about the economy and the environment.
Okay...I'll try to explain. First, it's not the PUC making money. It is the PUC regulating HECO (the electric company). It is the PUC's regulations that allow HECO to make more money off of burning oil than buying wind power. Here's the math again. Note that I'm going from memory here, so figures may not be exact, but are within a cent or two. Cost of oil flucuates a bit, but the power bill comes in between 30 and 35 cents per kWh.
1. Oil/Diesel power. Costs HECO about 6c/kWh to generate (operating and maintaining generators etc), plus fuel costs of about 16c/kWh. HECO charges customer 32c/kWh. Profit = 10c/kWh.
2. Wind. Costs HECO about 13c/kWh. HECO charges customers 16c/kWh. Profit = 3c/kWh.
Notice in #1, HECO is charging customers a lot more. They are allowed to do this because the PUC allows them to pass through the cost of fuel, independent of the the maximum that they are otherwise allowed to charge. If the PUC didn't allow this fuel pass through, and capped all power at 16c/kWh period, we would be getting our power from other sources and saving us consumers a lot of money.
You make some good points, HOWEVER, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing to have a major impact on our economy, and thus our quality of life. For example, many people I know are either scraping change from the couch cushions just to be able to buy food, or have multiple jobs and thus no free time in order to pay the rent. Doing those things you listed above would have a significant positive impact on those people, basically by keeping more dollars here instead of sending our tourism and development dollars immediately back to the mainland, even though we certainly wouldn't be 100% independent.
/. terms:
Now let's talk about that 95% imported food. It sure as heck doesn't have to be that way, but it's part of the same political engine that makes us get >90% of our power from burning petro. For example, here on Maui, HC&S (Hawaii Commercial & Sugar Company) has 37,000 acres of sugarcane. All of the sugar they produce gets shipped off to the mainland or other countries. The water used to irrigate this sugar cane is provided by EMI (East Maui Irrigation), and consumes most of the agricultural water available from East Maui. HC&S does not - I repeat DOES NOT - turn a profit. In fact, recently they have been losing money. So why do they continue to grow sugar with all this land and water, when they could be using it to grow stuff that could be consumed in Hawaii? The answer is Matson. Matson is the shipping company where most of that imported food comes in on. Matson, EMI, and HC&S are all owned by Alexander & Baldwin. So, while HC&S and EMI lose money, Matson makes a huge profit because it forces us to pay to ship our food in. All this in blatant violation of the state constitution, specifically article 11, sections 3 and 7.
Guess who the major campaign contributors are for most of the local and state politicians. Guess who says "how high" when A&B or HECO says "jump."
Now to tie this obscenely long comment back to the original article...the point of car charging network is not to reduce oil consumption or to improve sustainability. Is it a good thing by itself? Yes. Is it a good thing come re-election time? Hell no. Lingle and other politicians will point to it, saying they are doing everything possible to reduce our dependence on the mainland and foreign countries, while the people of Hawaii happily cast their votes as their metaphorical rectums are bleeding from being financially raped.
In
1. Use up all the land and water for sugar cane so nothing else can be grown.
2. Block wind and solar projects so all of our energy has to come from imported oil, passing the cost directly to consumers.
3. Force us to important our food on Matson.
4. Promote development, even though everyone who lives here is against it, to use up even more resources, create a larger customer base, and let the mainland based developers make money, a small percentage of which is given back to the politicians in the form of campaign contributions.
5. PROFIT!
You have a group of islands which are really active volcanos with some habitable land around them, and you're burning oil for energy instead of sucking energy out of the molten rock?
No, you have a group of islands where one of those islands (the Big Island) is viable for geothermal. There is a little bit of geothermal generation going on there, but so far wind and solar thermal would be much more cost effective here. The advantage of geothermal is that it's more consistent, so if it's dark and the wind is down (the wind is rarely down here) it's generating the same amount of power. For now, having primarily wind and solar thermal supplemented by the existing petro generators makes the most sense. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing, you can still have a major impact by getting as much power as you can from wind and solar while only burning oil when needed.
When has wind or solar ever been shown to be an effective, reliable replacement for fossil fuels? We need to develop methods for storing massive quantities of electrical(or thermal in the case of solar-thermal) energy before these power sources could be anything other than a supplemental power source.
True, you need some type of storage, such as pumped hydro, if you want to replace fossil fuels entirely. However, you could still easily replace a MAJORITY of it with wind and solar thermal. You'd still need the fossil fuel burning capacity that we currently have for times when wind and solar aren't meeting demand, but most of the time you wouldn't have to burn nearly as much fossil fuels.
As for cost effectiveness here are the facts, at least on Maui:
-The PUC lets Maui Electric Company (MECO, owned by Hawaiian Electric Company), can charge something like 16cents/kWh. However, they also get to pass through the cost of fuel in addition to this cost, directly to the consumer, resulting in power cost us more than 30cents/kWh.
-MECO would purchase wind power for about 13cent/kWh.
-Even though it would save us consumers A LOT of money to have wind power, MECO wouldn't make as much profit because they don't get the huge fuel pass through.
-MECO (HECO) has a ton of influence over the government.
-MECO is good at PR and convincing people that wind and solar are bad ideas for totally bogus reasons (this comment is already long enough, I won't go into more detail on that right now).
Perhaps they could consider a nuke plant instead. Those are actually cheaper than fossil fuels, and they are certainly more reliable than wind or solar.
Perhaps they should but it'll never happen here. The hippies complain about the waste, while everyone else is paranoid about safety, thanks to HECO's PR. Forget the fact that the navy has quite a few mobile nuke plants swimming around the islands already.
Where on Hawaii are you planning to put up 1000 propellers and a sea of black-glass?
Well...to answer your question specifically, I'm not familiar enough with Kauai or Oahu, but in Maui county, there are currently 20 1.5 megawatt wind turbines at Kaheawa along a ridge in West Maui. There's plenty of space in the central valley, between Kahului and Kihei, with strong consistent winds that are just A&B owned sugar cane fields right now (which makes no profit but is used to tie up land that could be used for useful things in order to force us to import everything on Matson ships, which is also owned by A&B). This location is already ugly and not visible from populated areas, unlike the small Kaheawa wind farm. This would also be a perfect area for a solar thermal plant, as it is in the rain shadow of Haleakala and is nearly always sunny, and is large and flat.
Castle & Cook, who own most of the land on the island of Lana`i, want to build a wind farm there at their expense and send this power via undersea cables to Oahu. Although Castle&Cook is pushing hard, the project is being blocked.
I was on the Big Island a few months ago and saw a small wind farm near Southpoint. There is also a larger farm of derelict old wind turbines near the functioning wind farm. These derelict wind turbines could be replaced with modern, functioning turbines, and there is plenty of space there to build a nice big wind farm.
I may sound paranoid and anti-corporation and all that hippy nonsense, but it's really just politics as usual. It's the same kind of curruption that goes on everywhere, it's just very obvious here since Hawaii is small and relatively isolated.
The points I was trying to make are:
1) If you're going to set up an electric car network, start with the places where it makes the most sense. Like places where it isn't >30 cents per kWh with nearly all power generated by burning petro. Once it's established in places where it makes the most sense, then begin moving to other places.
2) This is political showboating by Gov Lingle. She is doing this to make it look like she cares about reducing oil consumption as a distraction from the fact that she tries to block anything that is not oil friendly in order to pad the pockets of corporations like Hawaiian Electric Co and Alexander & Baldwin. These things include blocking large scale wind and solar project, trying to block legislation giving tax incentives for home solar, and allowing the fuel pass through that HECO is allowed to charge us which they wouldn't get with wind and solar, thus giving them significantly higher profits from oil generation which costs the customer (those of us that live here) a lot more money.
So...in conclusion, this is all about trying to distract us from the fact that she is not actually trying to reduce oil consumption, at the co$t to those of us who live here.
For US Bank anyway, when I tried to go to my bill pay when this was going on my browser gave a nice message that the SSL cert was self signed and issued to localhost.localdomain. Any modern browser makes is pretty clear that something bad is happening in this case, although I'm sure there's still plenty of ignorant users willing to click through.
True, my financial institution (US Bank) may or may not be to blame, HOWEVER, you'd think it wouldn't take a bank a full day to let users know or take away the bill pay link or something along those lines. When I saw the invalid certificate, I still needed to cancel an automatic payment so I decided to contact my bank. Their response was basically, "we take security very seriously, please make sure you're using a compatible browser, move along now, nothing here to see." It wasn't until at least a day later that they notified users when logging in that bill pay was down. I wonder how many users clicked through during that one day period, which could have easily been prevented by a faster response?