Yes, cows produce CO2/Methane from their gut bacteria. Those same bacteria would still produce those same gasses without cows, just with rotting vegetation.
No, the bacteria produce far more CO2 and far less methane.
In the older case, one person could probably rack up enough charges to pay for their own minicomputer
Heh. In the early 90s I was playing with fractals (Julia sets) on the university mainframe. It was an awesome machine for the purpose because it had a vector processor, which allowed me to compute 16 pixels at a time. I had been playing with this for months, always running my jobs at "idle" priority so as to avoid interfering with anyone's real work, when I was called up to the computing center director's office. He wanted me to explain what I was doing and showed me the "bill" for my usage, which was over $200,000. I had a brief heart attack until he told me that I wasn't actually being charged. After I explained, he allowed me to continue, with the proviso that my jobs could be killed if they were found to be causing any problems. They were never killed.
Of course, my phone can now do the same calculations faster, without any parallelism. If I use all of its cores, it's faster yet.
Changing the American diet likely is the easier and faster option
Bwahahaha!/me wipes tear from eye.
Thanks! That's the funniest thing I've heard all day!
with the price of beef being what it is... that's coming anyways
No, high beef prices won't change the American diet. And in any case, they're not going to stay high.
Beef hit an all time high last year, but has been declining, and will continue to decline because the high prices of the last few years have motivated a lot of investment. What pushed prices up was primarily Chinese demand for beef, not that much beef is shipped to China, but a tremendous amount of feed has been going there (which seems insane, but there's lots of space on China-bound cargo ships, so it's actually quite economical). Chinese demand is not declining, but high prices are motivating more and more farmers to remove land from the Conservation Reclamation Program (CRP, the federal program that pays farmers to leave farmland fallow) and put it into production.
By way of example, my brother-in-law has several hundred acres in southern Idaho which he had in CRP and also used as a bird hunting preserve. But the rising prices motivated him a couple of years ago to take it out of CRP and put it into alfalfa production. His production isn't fully ramped up, though. The first year he was essentially dry farming while he dug a well, ran power to it and put irrigation infrastructure in. This year he irrigated, but still hasn't got all of the irrigation infrastructure he needs, and he also needs bigger tractors and other equipment to get maximum production. Next year he should really hit his stride. The recent high prices have allowed him to make all of this investment while still turning a small profit, and he estimates that his land will continue to be profitable until prices fall to about a third of what they are now.
If given a third choice of allowing some of my CPU time to be utilized by the site or extension for cryptocurrency mining
That's the same thing as paying for the extension, except instead of paying for it directly, you're paying for it indirectly via a higher electric bill. [...] Burying expenses in this way under multiple layers of misdirection is how you nickle and dime people to death, and thwarts normal market forces by hiding the true cost of buying/using something
I agree, but it should be pointed out that the same is true of ad-supported sites. There is a cost for producing ad-supported content, and it's paid for by the advertisers, who in most cases pay for it by charging higher prices than they would otherwise. So, it's also a payment mechanism with multiple layers of indirection. One that has proven extremely useful and effective, and one that is quite progressive in the sense that generally it's the people with plenty of money who end up paying the bulk of the cost. But it is payment via layers of misdirection.
Also, in the case of the mining, note that the extra cost of the electricity isn't the only, and may not be the primary, way in which you pay. You also pay by buying the hardware on which the mining is done. That is a sunk cost, however, and assuming you don't end up buying bigger hardware than you would otherwise need, it is an actual payment you can make at no cost to you. You're paying in the form of capacity that would otherwise be unused. That could be a good deal.
You might consider, perhaps, that not everyone is like you. In my house, grocery shopping is done with a pre-compiled list which everyone in the house adds to, and shopping is a chore. Assuming it was cost-effective and I was convinced that it was safe, I'd love this service. They wouldn't need a smart lock on my house since we basically never lock the doors anyway. Also, I wouldn't need to watch them on my phone because I work from home and my office window looks out on the front driveway, so unless I were in a meeting I'd greet them and help them bring the stuff in and put it away.
Fuzzers are pretty impartial, and I don't find it hard to believe that the Chromium/Chrome team is the best at security.
Also, I know a couple of people on the Project Zero team, and they treat Google absolutely different from anyone else. They attack everything, regardless of origin, with equal gusto and skill and have a strict, no-exceptions-ever 90-day public disclosure policy. I work on Android and Project Zero has even 0day'd us a couple of times, publishing existing vulns in Android that we haven't gotten fixed within the 90 day window.
It's interesting working with PZ team members directly because even though they're Google employees, they are not subject to the standard employee NDA. More than one time I've had one of them stop me mid-sentence to remind me that they are not allowed to hear non-public information... and that if I tell them anyway they are not obligated to keep it secret.
Project Zero is employed by Google, but that means nothing to them. And, strangely enough, Google is totally fine with that.
It could be that "crazy fast" is the main goal they're looking for. The NSA has an immense amount of compute that they can throw at cryptographic problems to try to brute force them. Reducing the amount of CPU it would take to test each guess increases their capacity by the same factor.
Now, all they have to do is make sure people use crappy PRNGs, and the NSA will be picking up the bar tab at the next FIVE EYES conference.
Hmm. I suppose. Seems like a stretch to me, but assuming they can get people to use crappy RNGs, making the algorithms X times faster would be the same as buying X times as much brute forcing hardware, so it could be worth doing.
But if that's what they're doing, there's no reason for people to avoid SIMON and SPECK. You may as well benefit from their high performance -- just make sure you have good randomness sources, which you need to do regardless.
Heh. Sometimes I happen to see an AC comment and can't help myself:-)
However, when I get notified of AC replies, I delete them without looking. It's a policy that has made my slashdot commenting much more pleasant. I highly recommend it.
Specifically, two new families of block ciphers called SIMON and SPECK. These ciphers are designed to be extremely fast, which is good because although AES is fairly fast on "big" hardware" or on large quantities of data, it can be a bit sluggish when used in extremely constrained environments on small amounts of data. In particular, its key schedule its heavy, so changing keys is slow. SIMON has been designed to make it particularly cheap in purpose-built hardware while SPECK is designed for very fast software implementations. Both are very, very fast on both hardware and software, though. The 128-bit version (block size and key size) of SPECK, for example, encrypts at about 1.25 cycles per byte on an i5 on long messages, and is almost as good on short messages. That's crazy fast.
Academic cryptanalysis of the ciphers has so far shown them to be quite solid, with a very good margin of security (meaning that cryptanalysts have only been able to break significantly cut-down versions of the ciphers, quite far from full versions).
Same trick.
Possible, but doubtful. In fact, the experience with Dual EC DRBG actually makes it significantly less likely, IMO. They tried to pull the trick with that, but it didn't work because academics discovered the mathematical structure that made the backdoor possible. That has to make them worried that the same thing would happen again, and in fact the trick would be much harder to pull off with symmetric block ciphers. The thing about elliptic curves is that they have rich mathematical structure which can be exploited in clever ways (this is what makes them useful for public key cryptography) by choosing the right curves. But symmetric key block ciphers like SIMON and SPECK don't have that, making it much harder to design back doors in.
It's not impossible that the NSA has some technique that can break these ciphers -- which are actually quite similar to ciphers produced by public cipher designers -- but it really seems unlikely. Nevertheless, once burned twice shy. I don't blame standards bodies for being reluctant and waiting for public cipher designers to produce algorithms with the desirable properties of SIMON and SPECK, but without the concern about origin.
They're also going to be awesome for spreading malware. Instead of "install this CODEC to watch this porn" it's "install this EME module to watch this porn" and it'll be a normal and "legit" thing for the user to do, 90% of the time.
I'm not particularly happy about the EME spec begin adopted. I really hate DRM for a wide variety of reasons. However, I don't think the scenario you paint is going to happen. Web browsers today are intensely focused on protecting users from malware, and if EME modules start to become used as malware vehicles, you'll very, very quickly see browsers implementing EME module whitelists and similar countermeasures.
No, the real problem is that all of the content on the web will begin using DRM, with one of the standard, trustworthy EME modules that will ship with all of the browsers.
I agree to that. These people do exists but their number is very, very small. The number of people that falsely believe they are one of these exceptional people is pretty high though.
I have yet to find a coder without CS degree that actually gets it and that is really expensive in the long run.
I know a few. I know one who doesn't even have a high school diploma
But the thing is, in order to be a really competent programmer without a formal education you have to get equivalent education informally, meaning self-education. In theory, it's possible for anyone to learn anything on their own. In practice, it's a lot of hard work, and relatively few people have the gumption to do it. In my experience, the only successful autodidacts are extraordinarily brilliant, and they're really, really rare.
Shares are still not the land. You, sir are a serf. My dad, uncle and brother own the land they live on, however.
Shares are a share of the metaphorical land. And, I own the land I live on, too. Well, the bank and I own it, but in a few years I will own it. What's your point?
in the text of many articles. latest BBC rediff from Nature Geoscience quotes it. latest CBC rediff on podcasts today and last night CBUT Vancouver shows it.
do your own work.
I'd like what you say to be true, and I spent the last five minutes searching but was unable to find a single article making that claim.
Perhaps my Google-fu sucks (which it normally doesn't). In any case, you're going to have to either provide some citations or be dismissed as full of shit, because what you're claiming is a truly massive shift in transportation production and it's just not believable that it's going to happen next year.
Why don't you ask a botanist what happens to plants in greenhouses when you add more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
(Here's a hint, they grow bigger!)
Or you could ask a botanist a relevant question, like what happens to marine life when the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide is increased.
The answer is, it depends on how tolerant the organism is to decreased pH levels. Dissolved CO2 creates a small amount of H2C03, AKA carbonic acid, which makes the water more acidic. Photosynthesizing sea life may well benefit from higher CO2 levels... if the increased acidity doesn't kill it. And of course there is also lots of non-photosynthesizing sea life that doesn't benefit from more CO2, and is also potentially harmed by acidity.
There are probably other effects on ocean life as well. A greenhouse isn't a useful analogy.
That depends on what you infer (or divine really) is the user's intended outcome from hitting the button.
I don't think the user intent (insofar as non-technical users have well-formed notions of intent, which is far from clear) when hitting the button is "I want to disabled WiFi connectivity but keep the ability to AirDrop".
Let's play a game, which is guess-what-the-user-actually-wants
(1) Disable all WiFi until I hit the button again, even after I get back at home so that I rack up cellular bills
(2) Disable all WiFi except for AirDrop and a bunch of other things I don't quite understand
(3) Get me off $CURRENT_WIFI (e.g. coffeeshop, airport) but do reconnect to my home network when I get back there even if I forget to hit the button
I think there's a lot of reasons to believe that the user's intended outcome is (3) rather than (1) or (2). YMMV, and I agree this is something of an imprecise science.
FWIW, Android does this, too.
The way Android does it is that the "turn Wi-fi off" switch turns Wifi off. But, in Wifi preferences there's an additional switch for "Turn on Wi-fi automatically", with explanatory text "WiFi will turn back on near high-quality saved networks, like your home network". The screen with the on/off button also has text that says either "Wi-Fi turns back on automatically" or "Wi-Fi doesn't turn back on automatically", and when you turn Wi-Fi off and it's set to turn back on, you also get a notification, so it should be fairly hard to think you've disabled it permanently if it'll turn back on.
However, it's worth pointing out that in order to turn Wi-Fi back on automatically, the Wi-Fi radio has to remain on and listening, so it can see the networks that trigger it to turn back on. So it's not completely off. But it's off in the sense that the phone won't transmit anything or attempt to connect to any network until it sees an SSID that triggers it to come back on.
This is stock Android Oreo. I'm building a Nougat image to see what it looks like there.
I for one welcome electric busses because they don't spew wretched diesel fumes all over the place.
Most of the busses in Vancouver, Canada are electric trolleys (using overhead cables). I'm referring to the buses in the city of Vancouver itself; the suburban buses are diesel.
Making the suburban buses battery-electric and setting up routes that rotate them through the city center to recharge could be very effective.
Why? A modern fast charger will give you close to a full charge in just double the average time it takes already to fill up at a gas station.
So, the battery capacity only needs to be double the tank capacity of the ICE car for the electric car to be able to compete...
No.
For ICEVs it's important that fill times be very quick, because you have to go to a dedicated filling station to do it, and a human has to be involved during the whole operation. For personally-owned EVs, nearly all charging is done at home, when the car is parked, so the time it takes is only a few seconds to plug and unplug. This presumes that you have a place to park where you can install a charger of course. EVs are not yet appropriate for people who don't.
For longer trips, the capacity only has to be large enough and the charging fast enough that the car's charging breaks can coincide with the people's bio breaks. Being able to drive for four hours then recharge in 30 minutes is adequate.
Filling my old car with petrol took 5 minutes (give or take).
Don't forget the time required to drive to the filling station. Whether or not that's significant depends on your location and route, but it almost always adds some time.
Sure, cities will have no problem buying enough busses to have two charging for every one on the road.
You mean one charging for every 10 on the road. Recharging should only take an hour or so, so if the battery can keep the bus on the road for half a day it will just need to stop for an hour, then be back in use. In practice, of course, all municipal bus systems have different loads throughout the course of the day. They buy enough buses to cover their needs during peak transit usage times, and then send most of them back to the depot for cleaning and repair during non-peak times. So as long as the bus batteries are big enough that all buses can be on the road during peak times and others can be rotated in during off-peak times while the rest of the fleet charges, there should be zero downtime for charging.
If somehow bus systems actually did need to recharge buses during times when they really need to be operating, there are several other options as well, because electricity is extremely flexible. One option is oOverhead power lines on some parts of the bus routes. Buses powered by overhead electric lines have long been used in some locations, but have the disadvantage that they can only operate where the lines exist. Battery-powered buses have no such limitation, but can still take advantage of overhead power where available.
Another option is the one mentioned at the top of the thread, battery swapping. Batteries on small trailers would make for extremely easy swaps, but swappable batteries packs in the undercarriage would also be fairly easy to engineer.
Yet another option is to put small (compared to bus engines) diesel or natural gas-powered generators on board as range extenders, perhaps roof-mounted. I really doubt that would be necessary, but it could be done and wouldn't be particularly expensive. For that matter, given the very large surface area of a bus roof, solar panels could provide a small range extension as well, though probably only on the order of 5%.
The option of buying a few more buses might also be perfectly acceptable, given the lower operational costs of EVs. According to this report on Florida buses, fully 20% of a bus system's operating budget is spent on maintenance and repair. With no oil changes, less brake wear (due to regenerative braking) and a far simpler and more reliable power train, those costs should decrease significantly. There will be fuel savings as well, since -- at least in most places -- electricity is significantly cheaper than diesel fuel, particularly since the bus systems will be buying mostly at commercial, off-peak rates.
However, I really doubt that any of that would be necessary. Just charging the buses during normal, expected downtimes should be sufficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, cows produce CO2/Methane from their gut bacteria. Those same bacteria would still produce those same gasses without cows, just with rotting vegetation.
No, the bacteria produce far more CO2 and far less methane.
In the older case, one person could probably rack up enough charges to pay for their own minicomputer
Heh. In the early 90s I was playing with fractals (Julia sets) on the university mainframe. It was an awesome machine for the purpose because it had a vector processor, which allowed me to compute 16 pixels at a time. I had been playing with this for months, always running my jobs at "idle" priority so as to avoid interfering with anyone's real work, when I was called up to the computing center director's office. He wanted me to explain what I was doing and showed me the "bill" for my usage, which was over $200,000. I had a brief heart attack until he told me that I wasn't actually being charged. After I explained, he allowed me to continue, with the proviso that my jobs could be killed if they were found to be causing any problems. They were never killed.
Of course, my phone can now do the same calculations faster, without any parallelism. If I use all of its cores, it's faster yet.
Changing the American diet likely is the easier and faster option
Bwahahaha! /me wipes tear from eye.
Thanks! That's the funniest thing I've heard all day!
with the price of beef being what it is... that's coming anyways
No, high beef prices won't change the American diet. And in any case, they're not going to stay high.
Beef hit an all time high last year, but has been declining, and will continue to decline because the high prices of the last few years have motivated a lot of investment. What pushed prices up was primarily Chinese demand for beef, not that much beef is shipped to China, but a tremendous amount of feed has been going there (which seems insane, but there's lots of space on China-bound cargo ships, so it's actually quite economical). Chinese demand is not declining, but high prices are motivating more and more farmers to remove land from the Conservation Reclamation Program (CRP, the federal program that pays farmers to leave farmland fallow) and put it into production.
By way of example, my brother-in-law has several hundred acres in southern Idaho which he had in CRP and also used as a bird hunting preserve. But the rising prices motivated him a couple of years ago to take it out of CRP and put it into alfalfa production. His production isn't fully ramped up, though. The first year he was essentially dry farming while he dug a well, ran power to it and put irrigation infrastructure in. This year he irrigated, but still hasn't got all of the irrigation infrastructure he needs, and he also needs bigger tractors and other equipment to get maximum production. Next year he should really hit his stride. The recent high prices have allowed him to make all of this investment while still turning a small profit, and he estimates that his land will continue to be profitable until prices fall to about a third of what they are now.
That's the same thing as paying for the extension, except instead of paying for it directly, you're paying for it indirectly via a higher electric bill. [...] Burying expenses in this way under multiple layers of misdirection is how you nickle and dime people to death, and thwarts normal market forces by hiding the true cost of buying/using something
I agree, but it should be pointed out that the same is true of ad-supported sites. There is a cost for producing ad-supported content, and it's paid for by the advertisers, who in most cases pay for it by charging higher prices than they would otherwise. So, it's also a payment mechanism with multiple layers of indirection. One that has proven extremely useful and effective, and one that is quite progressive in the sense that generally it's the people with plenty of money who end up paying the bulk of the cost. But it is payment via layers of misdirection.
Also, in the case of the mining, note that the extra cost of the electricity isn't the only, and may not be the primary, way in which you pay. You also pay by buying the hardware on which the mining is done. That is a sunk cost, however, and assuming you don't end up buying bigger hardware than you would otherwise need, it is an actual payment you can make at no cost to you. You're paying in the form of capacity that would otherwise be unused. That could be a good deal.
Assuming it was cost-effective and I was convinced that it was safe
Big assumption there considering these are people who are willing to work for the lowest wages possible.
Couldn't have such lower-class people breathing your air, surely not.
You might consider, perhaps, that not everyone is like you. In my house, grocery shopping is done with a pre-compiled list which everyone in the house adds to, and shopping is a chore. Assuming it was cost-effective and I was convinced that it was safe, I'd love this service. They wouldn't need a smart lock on my house since we basically never lock the doors anyway. Also, I wouldn't need to watch them on my phone because I work from home and my office window looks out on the front driveway, so unless I were in a meeting I'd greet them and help them bring the stuff in and put it away.
they treat Google absolutely no different
Gah. I reorganized that sentence and in the process lost the most important word.
Fuzzers are pretty impartial, and I don't find it hard to believe that the Chromium/Chrome team is the best at security.
Also, I know a couple of people on the Project Zero team, and they treat Google absolutely different from anyone else. They attack everything, regardless of origin, with equal gusto and skill and have a strict, no-exceptions-ever 90-day public disclosure policy. I work on Android and Project Zero has even 0day'd us a couple of times, publishing existing vulns in Android that we haven't gotten fixed within the 90 day window.
It's interesting working with PZ team members directly because even though they're Google employees, they are not subject to the standard employee NDA. More than one time I've had one of them stop me mid-sentence to remind me that they are not allowed to hear non-public information... and that if I tell them anyway they are not obligated to keep it secret.
Project Zero is employed by Google, but that means nothing to them. And, strangely enough, Google is totally fine with that.
It could be that "crazy fast" is the main goal they're looking for. The NSA has an immense amount of compute that they can throw at cryptographic problems to try to brute force them. Reducing the amount of CPU it would take to test each guess increases their capacity by the same factor.
Now, all they have to do is make sure people use crappy PRNGs, and the NSA will be picking up the bar tab at the next FIVE EYES conference.
Hmm. I suppose. Seems like a stretch to me, but assuming they can get people to use crappy RNGs, making the algorithms X times faster would be the same as buying X times as much brute forcing hardware, so it could be worth doing.
But if that's what they're doing, there's no reason for people to avoid SIMON and SPECK. You may as well benefit from their high performance -- just make sure you have good randomness sources, which you need to do regardless.
Your sig is a lie!!! ;)
Heh. Sometimes I happen to see an AC comment and can't help myself :-)
However, when I get notified of AC replies, I delete them without looking. It's a policy that has made my slashdot commenting much more pleasant. I highly recommend it.
Even $10 MCU have dedicated AES-256 hardware these days.
Sure, if you can afford such expensive hardware, AES is fine.
New "ciphers".
Specifically, two new families of block ciphers called SIMON and SPECK. These ciphers are designed to be extremely fast, which is good because although AES is fairly fast on "big" hardware" or on large quantities of data, it can be a bit sluggish when used in extremely constrained environments on small amounts of data. In particular, its key schedule its heavy, so changing keys is slow. SIMON has been designed to make it particularly cheap in purpose-built hardware while SPECK is designed for very fast software implementations. Both are very, very fast on both hardware and software, though. The 128-bit version (block size and key size) of SPECK, for example, encrypts at about 1.25 cycles per byte on an i5 on long messages, and is almost as good on short messages. That's crazy fast.
Academic cryptanalysis of the ciphers has so far shown them to be quite solid, with a very good margin of security (meaning that cryptanalysts have only been able to break significantly cut-down versions of the ciphers, quite far from full versions).
Same trick.
Possible, but doubtful. In fact, the experience with Dual EC DRBG actually makes it significantly less likely, IMO. They tried to pull the trick with that, but it didn't work because academics discovered the mathematical structure that made the backdoor possible. That has to make them worried that the same thing would happen again, and in fact the trick would be much harder to pull off with symmetric block ciphers. The thing about elliptic curves is that they have rich mathematical structure which can be exploited in clever ways (this is what makes them useful for public key cryptography) by choosing the right curves. But symmetric key block ciphers like SIMON and SPECK don't have that, making it much harder to design back doors in.
It's not impossible that the NSA has some technique that can break these ciphers -- which are actually quite similar to ciphers produced by public cipher designers -- but it really seems unlikely. Nevertheless, once burned twice shy. I don't blame standards bodies for being reluctant and waiting for public cipher designers to produce algorithms with the desirable properties of SIMON and SPECK, but without the concern about origin.
They're also going to be awesome for spreading malware. Instead of "install this CODEC to watch this porn" it's "install this EME module to watch this porn" and it'll be a normal and "legit" thing for the user to do, 90% of the time.
I'm not particularly happy about the EME spec begin adopted. I really hate DRM for a wide variety of reasons. However, I don't think the scenario you paint is going to happen. Web browsers today are intensely focused on protecting users from malware, and if EME modules start to become used as malware vehicles, you'll very, very quickly see browsers implementing EME module whitelists and similar countermeasures.
No, the real problem is that all of the content on the web will begin using DRM, with one of the standard, trustworthy EME modules that will ship with all of the browsers.
I agree to that. These people do exists but their number is very, very small. The number of people that falsely believe they are one of these exceptional people is pretty high though.
Classic Dunning-Kruger effect.
I have yet to find a coder without CS degree that actually gets it and that is really expensive in the long run.
I know a few. I know one who doesn't even have a high school diploma
But the thing is, in order to be a really competent programmer without a formal education you have to get equivalent education informally, meaning self-education. In theory, it's possible for anyone to learn anything on their own. In practice, it's a lot of hard work, and relatively few people have the gumption to do it. In my experience, the only successful autodidacts are extraordinarily brilliant, and they're really, really rare.
Shares are still not the land. You, sir are a serf. My dad, uncle and brother own the land they live on, however.
Shares are a share of the metaphorical land. And, I own the land I live on, too. Well, the bank and I own it, but in a few years I will own it. What's your point?
"These same changes, to reiterate, have been associated with all previous mass extinctions on Earth"
Note that this claim is found only in the summary. It's not in TFA.
in the text of many articles. latest BBC rediff from Nature Geoscience quotes it. latest CBC rediff on podcasts today and last night CBUT Vancouver shows it.
do your own work.
I'd like what you say to be true, and I spent the last five minutes searching but was unable to find a single article making that claim.
Perhaps my Google-fu sucks (which it normally doesn't). In any case, you're going to have to either provide some citations or be dismissed as full of shit, because what you're claiming is a truly massive shift in transportation production and it's just not believable that it's going to happen next year.
Why don't you ask a botanist what happens to plants in greenhouses when you add more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
(Here's a hint, they grow bigger!)
Or you could ask a botanist a relevant question, like what happens to marine life when the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide is increased.
The answer is, it depends on how tolerant the organism is to decreased pH levels. Dissolved CO2 creates a small amount of H2C03, AKA carbonic acid, which makes the water more acidic. Photosynthesizing sea life may well benefit from higher CO2 levels... if the increased acidity doesn't kill it. And of course there is also lots of non-photosynthesizing sea life that doesn't benefit from more CO2, and is also potentially harmed by acidity.
There are probably other effects on ocean life as well. A greenhouse isn't a useful analogy.
That depends on what you infer (or divine really) is the user's intended outcome from hitting the button.
I don't think the user intent (insofar as non-technical users have well-formed notions of intent, which is far from clear) when hitting the button is "I want to disabled WiFi connectivity but keep the ability to AirDrop".
Let's play a game, which is guess-what-the-user-actually-wants (1) Disable all WiFi until I hit the button again, even after I get back at home so that I rack up cellular bills (2) Disable all WiFi except for AirDrop and a bunch of other things I don't quite understand (3) Get me off $CURRENT_WIFI (e.g. coffeeshop, airport) but do reconnect to my home network when I get back there even if I forget to hit the button
I think there's a lot of reasons to believe that the user's intended outcome is (3) rather than (1) or (2). YMMV, and I agree this is something of an imprecise science.
FWIW, Android does this, too.
The way Android does it is that the "turn Wi-fi off" switch turns Wifi off. But, in Wifi preferences there's an additional switch for "Turn on Wi-fi automatically", with explanatory text "WiFi will turn back on near high-quality saved networks, like your home network". The screen with the on/off button also has text that says either "Wi-Fi turns back on automatically" or "Wi-Fi doesn't turn back on automatically", and when you turn Wi-Fi off and it's set to turn back on, you also get a notification, so it should be fairly hard to think you've disabled it permanently if it'll turn back on.
However, it's worth pointing out that in order to turn Wi-Fi back on automatically, the Wi-Fi radio has to remain on and listening, so it can see the networks that trigger it to turn back on. So it's not completely off. But it's off in the sense that the phone won't transmit anything or attempt to connect to any network until it sees an SSID that triggers it to come back on.
This is stock Android Oreo. I'm building a Nougat image to see what it looks like there.
Don't forget to multiply by 365.2422. Still a lot less than $100K, of course.
Most of the busses in Vancouver, Canada are electric trolleys (using overhead cables). I'm referring to the buses in the city of Vancouver itself; the suburban buses are diesel.
Making the suburban buses battery-electric and setting up routes that rotate them through the city center to recharge could be very effective.
Why? A modern fast charger will give you close to a full charge in just double the average time it takes already to fill up at a gas station.
So, the battery capacity only needs to be double the tank capacity of the ICE car for the electric car to be able to compete...
No.
For ICEVs it's important that fill times be very quick, because you have to go to a dedicated filling station to do it, and a human has to be involved during the whole operation. For personally-owned EVs, nearly all charging is done at home, when the car is parked, so the time it takes is only a few seconds to plug and unplug. This presumes that you have a place to park where you can install a charger of course. EVs are not yet appropriate for people who don't.
For longer trips, the capacity only has to be large enough and the charging fast enough that the car's charging breaks can coincide with the people's bio breaks. Being able to drive for four hours then recharge in 30 minutes is adequate.
Filling my old car with petrol took 5 minutes (give or take).
Don't forget the time required to drive to the filling station. Whether or not that's significant depends on your location and route, but it almost always adds some time.
Sure, cities will have no problem buying enough busses to have two charging for every one on the road.
You mean one charging for every 10 on the road. Recharging should only take an hour or so, so if the battery can keep the bus on the road for half a day it will just need to stop for an hour, then be back in use. In practice, of course, all municipal bus systems have different loads throughout the course of the day. They buy enough buses to cover their needs during peak transit usage times, and then send most of them back to the depot for cleaning and repair during non-peak times. So as long as the bus batteries are big enough that all buses can be on the road during peak times and others can be rotated in during off-peak times while the rest of the fleet charges, there should be zero downtime for charging.
If somehow bus systems actually did need to recharge buses during times when they really need to be operating, there are several other options as well, because electricity is extremely flexible. One option is oOverhead power lines on some parts of the bus routes. Buses powered by overhead electric lines have long been used in some locations, but have the disadvantage that they can only operate where the lines exist. Battery-powered buses have no such limitation, but can still take advantage of overhead power where available.
Another option is the one mentioned at the top of the thread, battery swapping. Batteries on small trailers would make for extremely easy swaps, but swappable batteries packs in the undercarriage would also be fairly easy to engineer.
Yet another option is to put small (compared to bus engines) diesel or natural gas-powered generators on board as range extenders, perhaps roof-mounted. I really doubt that would be necessary, but it could be done and wouldn't be particularly expensive. For that matter, given the very large surface area of a bus roof, solar panels could provide a small range extension as well, though probably only on the order of 5%.
The option of buying a few more buses might also be perfectly acceptable, given the lower operational costs of EVs. According to this report on Florida buses, fully 20% of a bus system's operating budget is spent on maintenance and repair. With no oil changes, less brake wear (due to regenerative braking) and a far simpler and more reliable power train, those costs should decrease significantly. There will be fuel savings as well, since -- at least in most places -- electricity is significantly cheaper than diesel fuel, particularly since the bus systems will be buying mostly at commercial, off-peak rates.
However, I really doubt that any of that would be necessary. Just charging the buses during normal, expected downtimes should be sufficient.