Surface to air missile? Like a stinger... costs around $40k??
Question is could it hit a drone? Military doing a strike...or surveillance? Hard to say.
Border patrol tailing civilians and cars... yeah I think maybe.
I assumed that traditional SAM's were out of reach for many organizations, but some guy in his basement could create a jet powered UAV for not a lot of money. Add a detonator to unfurl some wire cable, and you don't even need a direct hit to foul the propeller on a prop driven drone like the MQ-9.
How long until the Mexican drug cartels start contracting out for anti-drone drones?
If $10,000 buys an anti-drone drone, it would be a cheap way to take out a $12M drone and rack up huge expenses on the American side.
Amateurs have already built a 366mph jet powered UAV (faster than the MQ-9 drone) - I'm sure on the international black market, better quality drones are already available. And they get bonus PR points if they can get the drone to crash on a populated area (or truck the remains of the crashed drone to a populated area) showing what a menace they are.
It's a shame that San Diego is now so huge that there isn't a single spot to land between the pacific and Arizona...
RTFA.....
It's based out of Arizona but was patrolling the sea off the California coast, as it was designed to do.
I read TFA (both of them) and they say pretty much the same thing as the summary (and what you said). They crashed it into the ocean because it couldn't make it back to San Diego.
But surely there's some airport or deserted stretch of land in the 100 - 200 miles between the ocean and Arizona where they could have landed the $12M piece of equipment? Now maybe they lost control of the drone and were forced to crash it, but neither article says so.
That people feel they are entitled to steal someone else's work and not compensate that person (or group)? Yes, it is sad that a study needs to state the obvious
Or that when presented with a paid option that is less convenient and more restricted than the free option, they'll take the free option. If there were a legitimate and reasonably priced download service for non-DRM protected movies, then there would be less incentive to pirate movies, and the industry would have a leg to stand on when they whine that downloaders are ruining their business.
I usually buy used disks from amazon and rip them, while if I wanted to, I could download a movie torrent in a few hours -- not everyone is willing to place an order, wait a week for the disk to arrive and then rip it when they could just download it for free. Why pay more for less?
With a DVR I don't have to wait for the entire movie to download, I can start watching it immediately and then pause while it's still downloading. Then if I rewind or watch it later there is no need to redownload a second time.
Even better you can have these thngs downloaded already for you, if you manage to have self control instead of demanding instant gratification. Schedule a download for the middle of the night so that it's ready to go. Friends coming over for movie night means you can prepare for it instead of having them groan when the movie starts skipping or rebuffering.
I already have "plan ahead if you want to watch a movie" service, can get pretty much any movie I want, even those that aren't available in any streaming catalog, and I can have my movies "downloaded" to my home in 2 - 3 days with full Blu-ray quality. They arrive in the mail in a red envelope.
If you're in the Bay Area, then you had more choices than just the big two, but you have to do your homework via web searches &asking on forums like DSLReports, rather than rely on ads to know about them. Just to name the most well-known ones that I know are available all over the Bay: Sonic.net & DSLExtreme both have DSL and Fusion (if you're not too far from the central office), plus Sonic.net has fiber in a couple of cities now.
No, I really didn't. Or rather I did have some DSL options, but they all ran over the same AT&T copper, so all gave equivalent speeds -- Sonic's Fusion product wasn't available in my CO at that time, but they could have given me ADSL at the same speed that AT&T offered.
Where in the SF Bay area do you live? I ask because I had crappy DSL (and it doesn't matter who your ISP was, speed is the same; I had DSLExtreme for years) cause I lived 10k+ feet from the office and switched to Comcast and I get 50mbit+ now.
BTW, I'm in CV.
That was when I lived in the Sunset district of SF -- I've moved out of the city since then and now have Sonic.Net Fusion DSL. 15mbit (5500 feet from the CO) plus a free phone line for $39/month (taxes + equipment rental make it closer to $55) -- great deal, great service. I still have a Comcast 50Mbit connection, but will drop that as soon as my 12 month term is up -- when it works, it works well, but once or twice a week, packet loss and latency go through the roof, and the line becomes unusable for 30 - 60 minutes at a time. Calls to support have not been helpful, by the time I go through their standard script (reboot the computer, renew DHCP, power cycle the modem, etc), the problem either resolves itself or not, but even when it doesn't all they say is that they can send a technician to look at my wiring, but if there's no problem, I'll have to pay.
I got the Sonic connection to use as a backup to Comcast, but for the past few months, I've flipped around with Sonic as the primary and Comcast as the backup and the Sonic connection has been great.
I can never tell if people are joking, but are you mentally ill or just severely stupid?
You'll have to give a little more context if you'd like me to answer your insightful question - I have no idea what point you're trying to make. Am I crazy and/or stupid for suggesting that being banished to Mars can't be all that bad if 200,000 people would volunteer, or is it because I implied that Snowden shouldn't get a free trip to Mars when hundreds of thousands of people are in line in front of him?
Only if you have to go there with one of the 200,000 people who have signed up. (Except for the few hot chicks who did it for fun.)
I hope "hot chick" is way down on the list of things they look for in an application - a "hot chick" is probably the person I'd least want to live with on mars, and I'd chose the nerdy chick (or dude) that sits in the basement all day building Arduino projects.
That's not to say that there are no nerdy hot chicks, but they don't seem to be the norm. Plus, my only relationship with a "hot chick" ended dramatically with a visit from the police, and almost a restraining order.
For the consumer. For a provider, it's a godsend. Grant access to your material in some obfuscatory wrapper and call it an "app", and now you control all access, assuming you scramble the encryption keys once a week and bake them deep enough into the wrapper when you update.
It can be good consumers too -- I don't want to wait to download an entire movie before watching it, I want to click "play" and have it start playing immediately. And I don't necessarily want to store every movie or video clip I watch anyway - there are lots of things I watch only once and never want to see again. Streaming certainly can be bad for consumers, but it has its good points.
If your connection speed is fast enough that an end user can't tell the difference between it and their hard drive, there goes a good half? three quarters? of the incentive for bored nerds to liberate your content.
What does connection speed have to do with pirating content? I don't think anyone pirates a movie because it loads too slow from Netflix, given that bittorrenting a movie can take all night.
Sure, but do you really want to live in a country where there are on average 1200 people per square mile, vs the USA where there is on average 84 people per square mile? http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/... my source.
People keep blaming lackluster USA broadband options on density, but when I lived in a USA city with a density of 17,000 people per square mile, my broadband choices were Comcast with up to 15mbit (12mbit was more typical, except for when it was worse or down), or AT&T DSL (not U-Verse) which could offer "up to" 1.5mbit due to my distance from the central office. When you look at my entire metropolitan area, it encompasses 7000 square miles (about half the size of The Netherlands) and has a density of 1000 people per square mile.
So yeah, if I lived in a field in the middle of Nebraska, I probably shouldn't complain when I have limited options, but if I live in a city, why do my poor broadband choices get blamed on population density?
Even when I use the gigabit connection at work, I don't notice a huge difference between that and the 50mbit connection at home unless I'm doing a big download (but even so, I rarely get gigabit speeds unless I'm connecting to one of the servers on the other end of our gigabit pipe -- the internet and server on the other end tend to limit the speed).
Pages don't seem to load any faster (which I assume is due to rendering time and time to wait on slow ad networks to spit out their javascript to let the page finish loading), and videos don't seem to load any faster, since the time to buffer enough of the video to start playing isn't that significant, even at a paltry 50mbit).
And this quote:
Then try panning to another area of the painting. It drags, doesn’t it? It may even slow your browser across other tabs—it did on mine.
So somehow downloading data faster means that your browser won't slow down over multiple tabs? I'm on a 10mbit connection now, and my browser pans smoothly, but I have to wait a second or two for the hi-res image to load.
I'd be happy to have gigabit at home if it were affordable, but I don't see it being a miraculous change. And I bet a lot of people wouldn't notice any difference at all between a 10mbit broadband connection and a 1000mbit connection.
I think he is relatively safe if he stays in Russia. "Relatively". Should he leave there, he should prepare to be dragged into a van with a canvas sack over his head -- the subject of an "extraordinary rendition." (This is of course illegal. I don't condone it, but I do expect it.) He's barely safe in Russia, and probably not safe anywhere else. He made his own bed, now he gets to sleep in it.
Given that he's already said that all the docs will be released if he comes to an untimely demise, there seems to be little incentive for the USA to extradite him unwillingly, and much incentive for the USA to keep him alive and well.
He made his own bed, now he gets to sleep in it.
Which is why many people consider his acts heroric -- he sacrificed his own welfare and safety to reveal illegal activities by the US government.
It's BS that Snowden is unwilling to come back to the US to stand trial. I'm sure there are plenty of great lawyers who would work pro bono to take his landmark case, and if he was willing to fight, he might be able to affect more change to the government spying program and achieve the goals he set out to reach.
Even great lawyers can't do anything when the evidence is hidden or heavily redacted in the name of national security. "Your honor, we'd like to introduce this document showing that the NSA was overstepping its legal bounds" "Objection! That document is classified top secret, so instead you can use this redacted version that is completely black except for the words "We", "love", and "freedom".
It's especially difficult when the lawyer is going up against an agency that has already shown itself willing to lie directly to congress -- supposedly the people that are overseeing the agency. If they don't mind lying to congress, why wouldn't they lie to a court?
With the deck stacked that heavily against him, what hope is there for any sort of fair trial? Esepcially when he's guilty of what he's accused of -- stealing and releasing classified documents. Without whistleblower protection laws to support him, the reason he stole the documents is immaterial.
So stop using gmail. When it was new it was special - clean simple webmail. Those days are long past. Outlook.com doesn't suck. Some people like Yahoo mail. Neither company does the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does.
Why do you think that if I don't use Gmail that Google can't track my searches?
Neither company *admits* they do the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does, but I've seen nothing in the Terms of Use and Privacy Policies for either vendor that precludes them from doing so, and both have popular ad networks (well, it looks like Yahoo is using Bing for search and ads), so it seems highly unlikely that they'd cede a competitive advantage to Google by not using customer data to their advantage.
Do people like having Google keep a record of what they are searching for?
This is creepy.
Since I can't download a copy of the internet to my computer so I can search it privately, there doesn't seem to be much choice - even if I trust Duckduckgo or other search engine to not log my searches, I still end up using Google for most of my searches because it works so much better than Duckduckgo. I tried it for a month, and by the end of the month, I was almost always adding "!g" to my searches to run them on Google. So whether or not I *like* Google tracking my search history is not really relevant -- I'm willing to trade that privacy for the use of their search engine. Just as I may not *like* paying the oil industry $4/gallon for gas, but I don't have much of a reasonable choice.
Google was great when it was small and had shared vision.
Now we're seeing the company both have many more screwups, and be more manipulative, basically by trying to force us all to use GoogleBook (or G+ as they call it).
I don't think they're bad people. I think human organizations, when they get too large, become unstable because shared vision is lost and people start treating it as "just a job."
Obviously, no amount of free soft drinks and stock options can remedy that.
I don't think they've lost their shared vision, they seem pretty focused on getting as many people to use Google+ as possible. It seems most like now what they see in their vision is monetizing their users.
I don't know why no EV manufacturer has thought of this:
Build a small generator / fuel tank into a TRAILER that you can hook up to your EV. This gives you the best of both worlds: for short, around-town trips, you leave the range extender trailer at home; but, when you want to drive long distance, just hook up the trailer and you can travel an arbitrarily long distance. Given the incredible efficiency of EVs, it's likely that a well-designed range extender trailer could give you several thousand kilometres of range.
I think the challenge is that it takes a lot of power to keep an EV running at highway speeds. If the Nissan Leaf can travel 85 miles on a 24KWh battery, then it needs 18KWh to travel 65mph -- so a generator needs to sustain 18KW. Still doable in a trailerable generator, but it will add weight to the car and reduce gas mileage.
Though I wonder if renting a $20,000, 3000lb 20 KVA generator would be much cheaper than just renting an entire car?
Nice calculations - I wonder if they account for clouds or snow - certainly they are not expecting any tree shade. 1100 sq ft of roof space, DC is 39 degrees North, so the actual size of the panel is likely 1415 sq ft.
As others have pointed out, incentives are temporary, so the system costs $68K and generates $114K worth of power in 25 years, for a ROI period of roughly 15 years. During those 15 years, what's the labor cost of keeping the panels clean, connections maintained, etc? Also, what's the efficiency degradation of the panels throughout that 25 year lifespan? You likely need more like 2000 sq. ft of panel to continue to power your lifestyle throughout the period, especially if your personal go-fer drone(s) and other future power users will charge from your home - that pushes out to $95K for system installation, giving you more power in return, but you likely won't be able to sell it for what it costs to buy (real costs of transmission & storage, not to mention administrative overhead.)
We may actually be at the economic break-even point for solar, for people who don't have tree-shade. I've always had way too many trees shading my home to even think about a serious solar system.
The use average insolation values that include normal weather activity, but not shading (and not snow cover, but since I've seen solar panels in Wisconsin, I'm assuming that they know how to handle snow).
A solar installation needing be a static "install once and never upgrade", if you plan ahead by oversizing the inverter and other components, you can add additional panels later for little more than the cost of the panels (which will likely come down in price and increase in efficiency)
This site says that the industry standard warranty is 90% power after 10 years, 80% after 20 years, but typical degradation is close to 3% in the first year and 0.5% every year after that.
You should talk with a solar installer in your area if you want to find the full costs including a service contract to handle all maintenance if that's what you're looking for.
If your vendor doesn't want to play ( no pun intended ) and send Google what could amount to millions with all the hassle that goes with it, you cant just pony up the 75 cents yourself.
I'm not sure if you're making a point or just stating how a license fee works.
But it sounds like a reasonable choice -- the vendor can save a dollar on the cost of the handset to be more price competitive, or they can add a dollar to the price and provide a feature that some users want (but others might not care about). I'm sure the front camera on my phone wasn't free, yet the manufacturer chose to put it in there and I paid for it even though I have never used it and am unlikely to ever use it.
Slowly but surely they are moving from a free and open operating system to a vendor lock-in proprietary system, they are the Microsoft of the mobile space but with one difference: they also build profiles on you to use for advertising by mining your data. It used to be that the services were free of cost because the cost was made up for with advertising revenue but they are now charging OEMs for it, sure the cost is small now but not so long ago it didnt cost anything and was free and open, it has gone a long way from that in a very short space of time so if you think a 75 cent fee will be the end of it you are looking at this with google glasses on.
Why do you think Microsoft isn't also building profiles on you to use for advertising by mining your data?
to a big poly corporation like samsung, giving out even the smallest sliver of pie isn't tolerable. samsung has their own android-clone operating system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
I think you mean Tizen, as far as I know, Samsung has given up on Bada.
I'm looking forward to seeing some Tizen devices, the more players the better. Microsoft hasn't shown itself to be a strong contender, so hopefully Tizen will do well.
such a system in Washington DC would require 1100 sq ft of roof space, and cost $68,000 before incentives, or $24,000 after incentives.
If everyone is doing it (as the article proposes), the incentives will evaporate. Tax incentives and government rebates/matching funds/whatever only work if the number of people taking advantage of them is small compared to the total population.
It's nice when you get your neighbors to pay 2/3 the cost of your solar array, not so nice when you have to pay 2/3 the cost of their solar arrays.
Other than that, I question the ability of your system to charge your car reliably if you take your car to work on a regular basis. And if you don't, why do you have it anyway?
If everyone is doing it, economies of scale and future efficiency gains will reduce prices (scarcity could reduce supply and increase prices, but solar panels aren't exactly exotic technology that only a few companies can produce using rare elements), so incentives will become less important.
Some of the incentives are paid for by power companies, ostensibly because it saves them money by reducing their need to build and operate peaker plants. But they may find that they've overused that "But peak power is *expensive* so we *have* to charge high peak hour rates" excuse as more home solar arrays come online, and they've got issues with too many home users backfeeding the grid.
I don't care if the actual electrons that I feed into the grid go into my car, it's all the same, so the way to charge your car during the day when it's parked at work is to use net metering and feed the grid during the day to help with peak hour needs, and suck power from cheaper baseload generating stations during the night. But as I said, power companies are claiming that the grid wasn't designed for this and is causing challenges (how much of that is true and how much is just the power companies wanting to squeeze more revenue from consumers is debatable). And if everyone charges their cars at home at night, the peak could shift to nighttime.
In the future, there may be other ways to mitigate the problem -- perhaps through better battery technology that lets home users cost effectively store up solar energy during the day (or perhaps other ways to store energy), or dividing the grid into smaller "smart sub grids" with enough of a mix between power producers and consumers to reduce the power imbalance.
No matter what happens, expect utilities to fight it every step of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
If $10,000 buys an anti-drone drone,
Surface to air missile? Like a stinger... costs around $40k??
Question is could it hit a drone? Military doing a strike...or surveillance? Hard to say.
Border patrol tailing civilians and cars... yeah I think maybe.
I assumed that traditional SAM's were out of reach for many organizations, but some guy in his basement could create a jet powered UAV for not a lot of money. Add a detonator to unfurl some wire cable, and you don't even need a direct hit to foul the propeller on a prop driven drone like the MQ-9.
How long until the Mexican drug cartels start contracting out for anti-drone drones?
If $10,000 buys an anti-drone drone, it would be a cheap way to take out a $12M drone and rack up huge expenses on the American side.
Amateurs have already built a 366mph jet powered UAV (faster than the MQ-9 drone) - I'm sure on the international black market, better quality drones are already available. And they get bonus PR points if they can get the drone to crash on a populated area (or truck the remains of the crashed drone to a populated area) showing what a menace they are.
Anyone else read that as "of 1,361 kilos of cocaine, weapons or other payload"?
FTFY
The extra 1 kg was for the baggies, so he didn't include it in the total cocaine weight.
It's a shame that San Diego is now so huge that there isn't a single spot to land between the pacific and Arizona...
RTFA.....
It's based out of Arizona but was patrolling the sea off the California coast, as it was designed to do.
I read TFA (both of them) and they say pretty much the same thing as the summary (and what you said). They crashed it into the ocean because it couldn't make it back to San Diego.
But surely there's some airport or deserted stretch of land in the 100 - 200 miles between the ocean and Arizona where they could have landed the $12M piece of equipment? Now maybe they lost control of the drone and were forced to crash it, but neither article says so.
It must be sad to make studies about the obvious.
That people feel they are entitled to steal someone else's work and not compensate that person (or group)? Yes, it is sad that a study needs to state the obvious
Or that when presented with a paid option that is less convenient and more restricted than the free option, they'll take the free option. If there were a legitimate and reasonably priced download service for non-DRM protected movies, then there would be less incentive to pirate movies, and the industry would have a leg to stand on when they whine that downloaders are ruining their business.
I usually buy used disks from amazon and rip them, while if I wanted to, I could download a movie torrent in a few hours -- not everyone is willing to place an order, wait a week for the disk to arrive and then rip it when they could just download it for free. Why pay more for less?
With a DVR I don't have to wait for the entire movie to download, I can start watching it immediately and then pause while it's still downloading. Then if I rewind or watch it later there is no need to redownload a second time.
Even better you can have these thngs downloaded already for you, if you manage to have self control instead of demanding instant gratification. Schedule a download for the middle of the night so that it's ready to go. Friends coming over for movie night means you can prepare for it instead of having them groan when the movie starts skipping or rebuffering.
I already have "plan ahead if you want to watch a movie" service, can get pretty much any movie I want, even those that aren't available in any streaming catalog, and I can have my movies "downloaded" to my home in 2 - 3 days with full Blu-ray quality. They arrive in the mail in a red envelope.
If you're in the Bay Area, then you had more choices than just the big two, but you have to do your homework via web searches &asking on forums like DSLReports, rather than rely on ads to know about them. Just to name the most well-known ones that I know are available all over the Bay: Sonic.net & DSLExtreme both have DSL and Fusion (if you're not too far from the central office), plus Sonic.net has fiber in a couple of cities now.
No, I really didn't. Or rather I did have some DSL options, but they all ran over the same AT&T copper, so all gave equivalent speeds -- Sonic's Fusion product wasn't available in my CO at that time, but they could have given me ADSL at the same speed that AT&T offered.
Where in the SF Bay area do you live? I ask because I had crappy DSL (and it doesn't matter who your ISP was, speed is the same; I had DSLExtreme for years) cause I lived 10k+ feet from the office and switched to Comcast and I get 50mbit+ now.
BTW, I'm in CV.
That was when I lived in the Sunset district of SF -- I've moved out of the city since then and now have Sonic.Net Fusion DSL. 15mbit (5500 feet from the CO) plus a free phone line for $39/month (taxes + equipment rental make it closer to $55) -- great deal, great service. I still have a Comcast 50Mbit connection, but will drop that as soon as my 12 month term is up -- when it works, it works well, but once or twice a week, packet loss and latency go through the roof, and the line becomes unusable for 30 - 60 minutes at a time. Calls to support have not been helpful, by the time I go through their standard script (reboot the computer, renew DHCP, power cycle the modem, etc), the problem either resolves itself or not, but even when it doesn't all they say is that they can send a technician to look at my wiring, but if there's no problem, I'll have to pay.
I got the Sonic connection to use as a backup to Comcast, but for the past few months, I've flipped around with Sonic as the primary and Comcast as the backup and the Sonic connection has been great.
I can never tell if people are joking, but are you mentally ill or just severely stupid?
You'll have to give a little more context if you'd like me to answer your insightful question - I have no idea what point you're trying to make. Am I crazy and/or stupid for suggesting that being banished to Mars can't be all that bad if 200,000 people would volunteer, or is it because I implied that Snowden shouldn't get a free trip to Mars when hundreds of thousands of people are in line in front of him?
Only if you have to go there with one of the 200,000 people who have signed up. (Except for the few hot chicks who did it for fun.)
I hope "hot chick" is way down on the list of things they look for in an application - a "hot chick" is probably the person I'd least want to live with on mars, and I'd chose the nerdy chick (or dude) that sits in the basement all day building Arduino projects.
That's not to say that there are no nerdy hot chicks, but they don't seem to be the norm. Plus, my only relationship with a "hot chick" ended dramatically with a visit from the police, and almost a restraining order.
Why "stream" things as Google advertises?
Because
Streaming is stupid technology
For the consumer. For a provider, it's a godsend. Grant access to your material in some obfuscatory wrapper and call it an "app", and now you control all access, assuming you scramble the encryption keys once a week and bake them deep enough into the wrapper when you update.
It can be good consumers too -- I don't want to wait to download an entire movie before watching it, I want to click "play" and have it start playing immediately. And I don't necessarily want to store every movie or video clip I watch anyway - there are lots of things I watch only once and never want to see again. Streaming certainly can be bad for consumers, but it has its good points.
If your connection speed is fast enough that an end user can't tell the difference between it and their hard drive, there goes a good half? three quarters? of the incentive for bored nerds to liberate your content.
What does connection speed have to do with pirating content? I don't think anyone pirates a movie because it loads too slow from Netflix, given that bittorrenting a movie can take all night.
Sure, but do you really want to live in a country where there are on average 1200 people per square mile, vs the USA where there is on average 84 people per square mile? http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/... my source.
People keep blaming lackluster USA broadband options on density, but when I lived in a USA city with a density of 17,000 people per square mile, my broadband choices were Comcast with up to 15mbit (12mbit was more typical, except for when it was worse or down), or AT&T DSL (not U-Verse) which could offer "up to" 1.5mbit due to my distance from the central office. When you look at my entire metropolitan area, it encompasses 7000 square miles (about half the size of The Netherlands) and has a density of 1000 people per square mile.
So yeah, if I lived in a field in the middle of Nebraska, I probably shouldn't complain when I have limited options, but if I live in a city, why do my poor broadband choices get blamed on population density?
Even when I use the gigabit connection at work, I don't notice a huge difference between that and the 50mbit connection at home unless I'm doing a big download (but even so, I rarely get gigabit speeds unless I'm connecting to one of the servers on the other end of our gigabit pipe -- the internet and server on the other end tend to limit the speed).
Pages don't seem to load any faster (which I assume is due to rendering time and time to wait on slow ad networks to spit out their javascript to let the page finish loading), and videos don't seem to load any faster, since the time to buffer enough of the video to start playing isn't that significant, even at a paltry 50mbit).
And this quote:
Then try panning to another area of the painting. It drags, doesn’t it? It may even slow your browser across other tabs—it did on mine.
So somehow downloading data faster means that your browser won't slow down over multiple tabs? I'm on a 10mbit connection now, and my browser pans smoothly, but I have to wait a second or two for the hi-res image to load.
I'd be happy to have gigabit at home if it were affordable, but I don't see it being a miraculous change. And I bet a lot of people wouldn't notice any difference at all between a 10mbit broadband connection and a 1000mbit connection.
I think he is relatively safe if he stays in Russia. "Relatively". Should he leave there, he should prepare to be dragged into a van with a canvas sack over his head -- the subject of an "extraordinary rendition." (This is of course illegal. I don't condone it, but I do expect it.) He's barely safe in Russia, and probably not safe anywhere else. He made his own bed, now he gets to sleep in it.
Given that he's already said that all the docs will be released if he comes to an untimely demise, there seems to be little incentive for the USA to extradite him unwillingly, and much incentive for the USA to keep him alive and well.
He made his own bed, now he gets to sleep in it.
Which is why many people consider his acts heroric -- he sacrificed his own welfare and safety to reveal illegal activities by the US government.
It's BS that Snowden is unwilling to come back to the US to stand trial. I'm sure there are plenty of great lawyers who would work pro bono to take his landmark case, and if he was willing to fight, he might be able to affect more change to the government spying program and achieve the goals he set out to reach.
Even great lawyers can't do anything when the evidence is hidden or heavily redacted in the name of national security. "Your honor, we'd like to introduce this document showing that the NSA was overstepping its legal bounds" "Objection! That document is classified top secret, so instead you can use this redacted version that is completely black except for the words "We", "love", and "freedom".
It's especially difficult when the lawyer is going up against an agency that has already shown itself willing to lie directly to congress -- supposedly the people that are overseeing the agency. If they don't mind lying to congress, why wouldn't they lie to a court?
With the deck stacked that heavily against him, what hope is there for any sort of fair trial? Esepcially when he's guilty of what he's accused of -- stealing and releasing classified documents. Without whistleblower protection laws to support him, the reason he stole the documents is immaterial.
Can't we privately send him to Mars with a 3D printer? He'll do fine over there and he'll be in a new paradise far away from decaying Earth.
Is going to Mars such a horrible thing? 200,000 people have signed up for a possible trip to Mars, why put Snowden at the head of the line?
So stop using gmail. When it was new it was special - clean simple webmail. Those days are long past. Outlook.com doesn't suck. Some people like Yahoo mail. Neither company does the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does.
Why do you think that if I don't use Gmail that Google can't track my searches?
Neither company *admits* they do the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does, but I've seen nothing in the Terms of Use and Privacy Policies for either vendor that precludes them from doing so, and both have popular ad networks (well, it looks like Yahoo is using Bing for search and ads), so it seems highly unlikely that they'd cede a competitive advantage to Google by not using customer data to their advantage.
Do people like having Google keep a record of what they are searching for?
This is creepy.
Since I can't download a copy of the internet to my computer so I can search it privately, there doesn't seem to be much choice - even if I trust Duckduckgo or other search engine to not log my searches, I still end up using Google for most of my searches because it works so much better than Duckduckgo. I tried it for a month, and by the end of the month, I was almost always adding "!g" to my searches to run them on Google. So whether or not I *like* Google tracking my search history is not really relevant -- I'm willing to trade that privacy for the use of their search engine. Just as I may not *like* paying the oil industry $4/gallon for gas, but I don't have much of a reasonable choice.
Google was great when it was small and had shared vision.
Now we're seeing the company both have many more screwups, and be more manipulative, basically by trying to force us all to use GoogleBook (or G+ as they call it).
I don't think they're bad people. I think human organizations, when they get too large, become unstable because shared vision is lost and people start treating it as "just a job."
Obviously, no amount of free soft drinks and stock options can remedy that.
I don't think they've lost their shared vision, they seem pretty focused on getting as many people to use Google+ as possible. It seems most like now what they see in their vision is monetizing their users.
I don't know why no EV manufacturer has thought of this:
Build a small generator / fuel tank into a TRAILER that you can hook up to your EV. This gives you the best of both worlds: for short, around-town trips, you leave the range extender trailer at home; but, when you want to drive long distance, just hook up the trailer and you can travel an arbitrarily long distance. Given the incredible efficiency of EVs, it's likely that a well-designed range extender trailer could give you several thousand kilometres of range.
Others have thought the same thing:
http://gajitz.com/little-gener...
I think the challenge is that it takes a lot of power to keep an EV running at highway speeds. If the Nissan Leaf can travel 85 miles on a 24KWh battery, then it needs 18KWh to travel 65mph -- so a generator needs to sustain 18KW. Still doable in a trailerable generator, but it will add weight to the car and reduce gas mileage.
Though I wonder if renting a $20,000, 3000lb 20 KVA generator would be much cheaper than just renting an entire car?
Nice calculations - I wonder if they account for clouds or snow - certainly they are not expecting any tree shade. 1100 sq ft of roof space, DC is 39 degrees North, so the actual size of the panel is likely 1415 sq ft.
As others have pointed out, incentives are temporary, so the system costs $68K and generates $114K worth of power in 25 years, for a ROI period of roughly 15 years. During those 15 years, what's the labor cost of keeping the panels clean, connections maintained, etc? Also, what's the efficiency degradation of the panels throughout that 25 year lifespan? You likely need more like 2000 sq. ft of panel to continue to power your lifestyle throughout the period, especially if your personal go-fer drone(s) and other future power users will charge from your home - that pushes out to $95K for system installation, giving you more power in return, but you likely won't be able to sell it for what it costs to buy (real costs of transmission & storage, not to mention administrative overhead.)
We may actually be at the economic break-even point for solar, for people who don't have tree-shade. I've always had way too many trees shading my home to even think about a serious solar system.
The use average insolation values that include normal weather activity, but not shading (and not snow cover, but since I've seen solar panels in Wisconsin, I'm assuming that they know how to handle snow).
A solar installation needing be a static "install once and never upgrade", if you plan ahead by oversizing the inverter and other components, you can add additional panels later for little more than the cost of the panels (which will likely come down in price and increase in efficiency)
This site says that the industry standard warranty is 90% power after 10 years, 80% after 20 years, but typical degradation is close to 3% in the first year and 0.5% every year after that.
You should talk with a solar installer in your area if you want to find the full costs including a service contract to handle all maintenance if that's what you're looking for.
If your vendor doesn't want to play ( no pun intended ) and send Google what could amount to millions with all the hassle that goes with it, you cant just pony up the 75 cents yourself.
I'm not sure if you're making a point or just stating how a license fee works.
But it sounds like a reasonable choice -- the vendor can save a dollar on the cost of the handset to be more price competitive, or they can add a dollar to the price and provide a feature that some users want (but others might not care about). I'm sure the front camera on my phone wasn't free, yet the manufacturer chose to put it in there and I paid for it even though I have never used it and am unlikely to ever use it.
Slowly but surely they are moving from a free and open operating system to a vendor lock-in proprietary system, they are the Microsoft of the mobile space but with one difference: they also build profiles on you to use for advertising by mining your data. It used to be that the services were free of cost because the cost was made up for with advertising revenue but they are now charging OEMs for it, sure the cost is small now but not so long ago it didnt cost anything and was free and open, it has gone a long way from that in a very short space of time so if you think a 75 cent fee will be the end of it you are looking at this with google glasses on.
Why do you think Microsoft isn't also building profiles on you to use for advertising by mining your data?
to a big poly corporation like samsung, giving out even the smallest sliver of pie isn't tolerable. samsung has their own android-clone operating system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
I think you mean Tizen, as far as I know, Samsung has given up on Bada.
I'm looking forward to seeing some Tizen devices, the more players the better. Microsoft hasn't shown itself to be a strong contender, so hopefully Tizen will do well.
If everyone is doing it (as the article proposes), the incentives will evaporate. Tax incentives and government rebates/matching funds/whatever only work if the number of people taking advantage of them is small compared to the total population.
It's nice when you get your neighbors to pay 2/3 the cost of your solar array, not so nice when you have to pay 2/3 the cost of their solar arrays.
Other than that, I question the ability of your system to charge your car reliably if you take your car to work on a regular basis. And if you don't, why do you have it anyway?
If everyone is doing it, economies of scale and future efficiency gains will reduce prices (scarcity could reduce supply and increase prices, but solar panels aren't exactly exotic technology that only a few companies can produce using rare elements), so incentives will become less important.
Some of the incentives are paid for by power companies, ostensibly because it saves them money by reducing their need to build and operate peaker plants. But they may find that they've overused that "But peak power is *expensive* so we *have* to charge high peak hour rates" excuse as more home solar arrays come online, and they've got issues with too many home users backfeeding the grid.
I don't care if the actual electrons that I feed into the grid go into my car, it's all the same, so the way to charge your car during the day when it's parked at work is to use net metering and feed the grid during the day to help with peak hour needs, and suck power from cheaper baseload generating stations during the night. But as I said, power companies are claiming that the grid wasn't designed for this and is causing challenges (how much of that is true and how much is just the power companies wanting to squeeze more revenue from consumers is debatable). And if everyone charges their cars at home at night, the peak could shift to nighttime.
In the future, there may be other ways to mitigate the problem -- perhaps through better battery technology that lets home users cost effectively store up solar energy during the day (or perhaps other ways to store energy), or dividing the grid into smaller "smart sub grids" with enough of a mix between power producers and consumers to reduce the power imbalance.
No matter what happens, expect utilities to fight it every step of the way.