Any country with laws not inline with ours are just backwater dictatorships.
Who do our companies need to freaking read up about their stuff. That's like asking us to read a few hundred country's laws and these shitty dictatorships would probably have consumer protection laws in their traffic laws just to make us pay.
If they play punch with us we should just stop trading with them and see what happens to their economy.
These assholes are biting the hand who feeds them.
While the AC is obviously a troll, there are some aspects of this ruling which seem a bit odd. For one, Steam was called out for not having "minimum quality guarantees." How exactly do you DEFINE "quality" for a video game? Do Australian laws really require this of all vendors...so that if you buy a book from a bookstore, and don't like it, you can say it had "poor quality," and get your money back? (Or, more to the point, you can claim that it had "poor quality" and get your money back even though you liked it?) Why is Steam the one that would have to be accountable for enforcement? Steam is a distributor.
The way business operates these days, it's unrealistic for a distributor to be held directly and solely accountable for maintaining quality standards on all products. Imagine Amazon having to test everything for quality...and keep testing, lest that quality change over time? Just setting standards for "quality" across things like books, movies, games, TV shows, sex toys, crafting supplies, etc....an impossible challenge. Testing against those standards? Incredibly difficult. And for what, an economy of 23 million people?
Add to that the fact that while a bit more than 21,000 tickets were opened that contained the word "refund" (not the best standard for determining how many refunds were warranted, mind you), Steam offered over 15,000 refunds. To me, this is a company that IS giving out refunds. And going further...how many of those tickets had a phrase like "if you can't fix this, I want a refund," only to have the problem fixed? How many of those were duplicates? How many of them didn't take the next step provided to start the refund process? How many of them were situations where a refund simply wasn't even warranted?
General Counsel for Steam was stupid not to get legal help when doing business there. He was even dumber to act like that was no big deal. But yeah...this ruling seems a bit excessive, if only because the laws there are nuts.
I believe he's reading into the fact that "socialist" is part of the term, "national socialist," which is the formal term for "nazi." Of course, national socialism is not at all socialist in that way...
the article outlines the general process of how a phone is intercepted and the software is applied, but it obviously does not go into details of how the data is found or transferred. my guess is these portable tablets cellbrite has developed contain ADB and developer tools to pull off what to a seasoned slashdotter is just a parlor trick, but to a police department is nothing short of magical CSI hacking.
as hackers ourselves we need to ask more questions. what is the inner machination of this tablet? how do we defeat it? can it defeat password encryption? how about Signals password-based authentication? Is there a means by which contact lists can be hardened and encrypted? All of these questions are crucial in the next 10 years as most law enforcement does not bother with a warrant when theyre halfway through your roadsite fishing expedition.
As I understand it, from what I've read, the software essentially does an unencrypted backup of the phone and then analyzes the data to produce the report. It also appears to only work on older iPhones that do not require a pass code to backup; thus rendering it useless on newer models.
You hit the nail on the head.
(Love your account name, by the way...epic!)
For one thing, there was no passcode on the device. That's the reason for no encryption...all iPhones of this generation were encrypted so that you couldn't pull the data directly from memory storage. But since the phone was never locked, it was trivial to simply ask the phone to divulge all of its contents as a backup, which it did. No hacking, no exploitation...just like opening a shoebox to see what's inside.
For another, you're right in that later models (if locked) would be harder to get into. Starting with one model later...the iPhone 5s...iPhones have had a separate trusted module known as "Secure Enclave." Basically, Secure Enclave is the vault that stores all the cryptographic material. The iPhone puts the keys to all of its eggs in that one basket, and then secures the bejezus out of that basket. The 5s has the A7 processor...and the A7 was the first processor to use Secure Enclave. The iPhone 5 has the A6.
What's to stop people from going online and submitting bogus feedback. For example, demanding so much carbonation that all you ever get is a glass of foam?
I don't think there's a problem with this happening...especially if it does happen. Why? Because if that many people deliberately sabotage the outcome, then that's what people want...and the market has succeeded. Right?
What I think is more likely is this: different people have different tastes in beer. Because (I presume) the input would be provided anonymously, you've got a situation where you can't tell when the population giving you feedback changes. So you end up with something akin to shifting winds that are difficult to follow instead of usable machine-learning input.
Another thing that I would hope it does is direct users...they will produce four types of beer. What if what a person asks for from Beer #1 is actually much like what Beer #2 already is? In that case, I would drop the data set and politely recommend that the person try Beer #2, to prevent accidental convergence between any of the four styles.
This seems odd. For one thing, this is a set of creds from 2013; didn't Yahoo! force a password reset in 2014+, after the most recent (admitted) breach? I don't quite see what the value would be in that case, though there might be some password reuse value. For another, that seems like a pretty high price compared to other databases that have been on the market, when valuation is done on a per-account basis...and the other databases are from more recent breaches as well.
Are you factoring in the long term costs of continuing to use coal-fired power plants?
No, because nobody has ever been able to produce a reliable number for that, especially when you try to break it out on a nation-by-nation basis as would be necessary here. We're not discussing wind farms in China, just in the US.
But have you factored in the long-term costs of pushing the grid past a point of stability in a highly-industrialized nation that is wholly dependent on electricity to function? Have you factored in the fact that electricity is the common thing upon which nearly ever aspect of our lives depends, and that to increase the cost of it exponentially would savage our economy?
The "what if" game is bullshit; I prefer to make decisions on what is known. And what is known is this: there are technologies out there. They need improvement, but that improvement is happening. The way our grid operates currently, it could not withstand widespread and sudden implementation anyways, even if the technologies were cost-effective today. But the grid is also being improved and upgraded (oversimplifying a bit here) so that down the road it will be ready. But today, renewable tech is too expensive to adopt on a massive scale, and current grid operations cannot withstand either the distributed nature of renewable generation nor the lack of direct, positive control of generation on a scale that would result from massive scale adoption.
It's not an easy problem, despite what you may think/wish. So it's not solved yet. But they're working on it, and getting closer. Just keep your panties out of a wad in the meantime, ok? It annoys people who are actually solving a problem when people in the cheap seats keep blaming them for the problem not being solved yet.
Some perspective here, as someone who has done work in the power industry.
30 MW is a very, very small amount of generation capacity. I have been to a generation facility where a 25MW diesel generator was the thing used to jump-start the rest of the plant...which was only about a 450 MW facility. 30 MW is pocket change in the power industry, a rounding error. Even small "peaker" CT plants typically produce at least 10x that amount when in service.
Now, for the cost per KWh. The price cited above is what National Grid is paying; it's wholesale. Do not compare it to your final KWh price from your electric bill; those rates are not equivalent, as the one on your bill includes T&D fees, some profit for the power company that serves you, and other things. According to the New England ISO (the regional authority that includes Rhode Island), a good example is (scroll down to see it) a bit more than four cents per KWh. So, this electricity is about 10x the cost of current generation.
Now...why am I pointing this out? Context. People in Slashdot have been going on and on like renewable energy is all good to go, and they can't possibly figure out why power companies aren't letting everyone just build turbines and solar panels all over the place. They see how the cost of solar panels is going down, but don't take into account the anti-islanding gear that is mandatory, the most expensive part of a solar installation, and which is static in price. They think about how windmills can generate power like crazy, but don't think about problems like VARS support needed to move the electricity from far away...since wind farms are noisy, real estate-intensive, and distant because reliable wind is often not near population centers. They want everyone to just put solar panels on their homes, but don't take into account what Hawaii found out...that doing so, even under the very best of circumstances, can be incredibly destabilizing to the power grid due to the need to balance sink and generation.
Yes, these technologies are needed. Yes, they will be improved. But for God's sake, please do keep in mind that they are NOT ready to supplant nuclear or fossil generation capabilities just yet. And you have to consider the whole situation...you don't just stand up a wind turbine and plug it into the grid. It's a hell of a lot more complicated than that and it's crazy expensive.
On a brighter and final note...if it turns out to be a truly viable product, I'm planning to get a Tesla solar roof in the next 5-10 years. When you consider the fact that it serves a dual purpose of both roof and solar generation unit, the cost impact flips from being more expensive than simply buying all my power to cheaper than buying both a roof and all of my power. This is the kind of innovation that will make things work. As for the destabilizing effects, power companies are rolling out WAMPAC (which is a small constellation of technologies and capabilities) that help with that by providing better visibility into grid operations along with automation to manage issues as they arise. So we are headed in the right direction, and will get there.
I worked for a US company, as a software developper, that decided to block all the "shareware" "freeware" open source" and al websites, so we had no access to github, stack overflow, forums or anything interesting for developpers. We had to fight HR (it seems HR head had the decision to unblock site, try to explain what open source is...) to access them. It was a true nightmare, they were control freak of the web. The number of times you did a search, click on the answer you were looking for and bam! blocked! We had bypass using different DNS or 3G on our phone, etc.
I think you fail to grasp the totality of it in China...and the implication of it being done by a government rather than simply an employer.
For one thing, there's no amount of web surfing you could have possibly done at your job that would have gotten you in prison...short, that is, of going after child porn. But in China, people have been arrested for comments posted online, participation in certain groups, etc. And even without arrest, you have to worry about being under investigation.
Then, consider the fact that the first two words of your post, "I worked," indicate that you could escape that inanity simply by changing jobs. In China, there's no place to go. Oh, and also...you wouldn't be able to get around it as simply as using a 3G phone or changing your DNS either. And simply trying to do so would have increased the risk of coming under scrutiny.
There are, as described above, many reasons...but I think the "main" reason for any particular person will depend upon the person.
I was once contacted by Huawei about becoming an executive at their organization, in Beijing. Now..this is curious to me since I neither speak Mandarin nor Cantonese. I find it hard to imagine that I would make a very effective VP in a technical role, without even a basic conversational grasp of their language. (And don't even think about reading...)
However, interestingly enough, I also have a background in doing cyber security for the military in which role I got access to quite a lot of things. So...yeah. NO WAY was I going to entertain the job offer, for even a millisecond.
But you know what? Even without that creepiness, I wouldn't have considered it because of the air pollution. I can't imagine exercising outdoors in a place where the air is so filthy you can taste it. Hell no.
For some people, a reason not to go would be the culture shock...but for me, that's actually a plus. Or maybe the food? Nope...I love exploring new cuisines, and have always been fantastically happy getting authentic local food in any country I've visited. The crowding? Uh uh...I'm a hardcore urbanite. But for some others, these would be downsides instead of upsides...it all depends on the person.
A larger bit of context here is that this wasn't a business unit that makes hockey pucks. This was a business unit that is involved in cybersecurity. So for them to show ignorance of how things should be done with regard to this...ugh.
On the other hand, PwC is a partnership organization, not a corporation. As such, a lot of control is decentralized; partners are responsible for the business beneath them and while that responsibility does run upwards, with every step up there's an order of magnitude by which detail is removed. So fundamentally this could be one guy getting his panties in a wad over things.
The Russian economy contracts 0.6% and somehow Russia is insolvent? LJL. Sorry to break it to you but the Kremlin is still sitting on $390 billion in hard currency and a mere 3% budget deficit. Russia is in a mild recession but insolvent it is not.
I don't know where this 0.6% number is coming from, but it's not an annual figure.
For Makerbot to assume that they would revolutionize the world by selling a 3D printer at a low cost point is like someone assuming that houses will suddenly become super-cheap because they teach widespread classes on how to nail 2x4s together with a hammer and nails.
Let's start with the first problem...so Suzy Homemaker buys a 3D printer and brings it home to her family. Now what? "oh, it can make stuff." How do you define that 'stuff?' You have to design it, using 3D software...ah, whoops. Hm, bit of a learning curve there...and even if their son Bobby is plenty good with computers, you end up with a child who has the technical knowledge and adults who own the use cases...and let's face it, in almost no family is anyone good at packaging either the knowledge or the use cases so that others could make use of them. So you end up with parents who have a vague idea of what they would like but can't communicate it, and a kid who can probably figure things out but doesn't know how to teach it. (This is the "knowing how to build framing doesn't mean you have a design for a house to work from" part of the analogy.)
Then, let's look at the limitations...the material can only do certain things. You can basically make little plastic widgets. (This is the "houses have a lot more than 2x4s in them" part of the analogy.) You can't replicate a broken part very easily either...you're kind of focused down into a world where you're going to have to invent things for this to be useful. So add another necessary skill set to Suzy Homemaker's family for this whole thing to work.
I think MakerBot was a success...just not the kind of success they thought they would be. They helped put 3D printing on the map for Suzy Homemaker. People have gone into Home Depot and watched 3D printers at work, creating things...that's not a small accomplishment. The price of printing continues to come down, even for technologies that remain out of reach but are far more useful (being able to 3D print with metal is very important if you want to be real about this, because only toys are only made of plastic) and now the public is a bit better-prepared for a near future where they actually *can* print things. And now, there's an awareness that the printers are just the razor blade handles...and the designs are the razor blades. Once truly useful printing becomes accessible, there will be business activity that addresses that problem. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes the same kind of shift that Eli Whitney created when he began the manufacture of devices that had interchangeable parts.
The moral of the story: massive shifts in society resulting from singular technologies are, in essence, Black Swan events. You cannot reliably predict them, no matter how badly you want VCs to give you money so that you can become the next Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook billionaires. Aim for major increments of change, and your business plans will be more viable.
Actually, I was thinking it was a false flag explanation to give them cover for the growing insolvency of their own financial system. Blame it on the West, and all of a sudden Putin isn't running Russia into the ground...he's mounting an intrepid defense against a global conspiracy against Russia!
A major issue is that everyone is talking about "the" problem. There is no "the" problem...there's an entire ecosystem that includes entities that are wont to do bad things, economic and social drivers that incentivize them to do these bad things, and technological functionality that empowers them to do these bad things. Social media sites and apps...in their current incarnation (including the entire ecosystem of supporting back-end processes, business arrangements, etc.)...fall into the latter. Social media is a valid place to go after the problem, even though it's not the only one; like most significant problems, what works best is a multi-pronged effort to address as much of the end-to-end chain as possible.
It has "a mechanism" to detect RNA...but only one specific kind of RNA? They didn't come up with a broader approach to detect, say, many kinds of viruses? And it's so commoditizable that it's a USB stick?
This is dead on arrival, as Facebook is poisoned brand with gamers. They might attract casual Facebook gamers, Farmville and the like, but they already have these.
Indeed. My first thought after reading this was, "There's no way I'm going to let those privacy-rapist cunts get their hooks into any part of my life...and Steam works just fine."
Seriously, this study is skewed. It only covers people who would consent to walk down the street wearing google glass.
Very true, but there's also another effect: the "observer effect." Basically, if someone is aware that their behavior is being observed and monitored, that often has an impact on the behavior itself. The 800-pound gorilla equivalent of this is the exercise in acting class where a student is made to sit down on a solitary chair facing the rest of the class...and is told to "just relax and be yourself."
I have to think that strapping a Google Glass onto someone's head and making them walk down the street is going to have an impact on their behavior...especially if they A), are very uncomfortable wearing it, or B) are very happy about wearing it. I could see how both groups would look away from people they saw as being less-privileged, for ironically different reasons. I could see how group A would feel uncomfortable displaying an item that conveys a certain "elitist piece of shit" image, while group B might embrace the image and consider themselves above the peons as a result.
That's a big "if", is currently false and will be false for hundreds of years still. This is declared intent to cause injury, making it a bit past borderline illegal. It is poorly thought through immoral marketing buzz. There is no positive angle to this "story" or even much to say except Mercedez-Benz has decided to let the interns do PR.
Actually, it's not that big an if.
Earlier this year, at a roundtable on connected car security headed up by the NHTSA, the chairman of the NHTSA stood up and cited some interesting numbers. A bit more than 32,000 people had died in vehicle-related accidents the prior year, and about 97% of those were the direct result of, and I quote, "driver error or driver choice." He went on to point out that autonomous vehicles would, if done correctly, eliminate most of those deaths. A car that will refuse to drive in certain conditions if, for example, the tire pressure is too low on one or more tires, or the brakes require more than a certain amount of force to slow the car to a certain standards...these are the less-obvious ways in which such cars are safer. Obviously, they can't drive drunk, don't commit road rage, and don't have any sense of ego about saying that they are having trouble with their eyesight. The car can be objective about its limits, its skills, and any impairment it suffers due to weather, maintenance issues, or any other potential problems. Just the degree of data logging alone that is inherent to autonomous vehicles is already producing useful information about how to prevent crashes, and that's before there are any such vehicles for sale. (And I hear it now..."Tesla sells autonomous vehicles!...but Tesla's system doesn't count, as evidenced by the fact that the maker of that system has cut ties with Tesla, basically saying "It's not supposed to be used that way!") Cars have reached the point where humans are the main source of the risk, and while the technology isn't quite ready-for-market, it's not "hundreds of years" away and it's very, very promising.
And no, what Mercedes is saying is not intent to cause injury. It's a statement about which injury to try and prevent in situations where...as this has been discussed for quite some time now...an injury is deemed inevitable. They have not said, "our cars will drive through schools for no particular reason, just to annoy Jzanu,." They have said, "our car's logic knows what's in the car, what's going on with the car, and can directly control the car. It does not know that much about the rest of the world, so we believe the odds of the best possible outcome in a situation with no good outcomes lies with letting the car preserve its own passengers."
And there is absolutely nothing illegal about that whatsoever. It's the same logic behind why paramedics don't run, ambulances slow down through intersections where they can't see past a certain distance, and a whole bunch of other situations where you have to weigh risk of one bad outcome against risk of another one.
"Melinda Gates was encouraged to use what is now a nearly 40-year-old computer and the best language that was available back then in 1980. Her kids have been exposed to much more modern stuff."
And seriously...why does this turn into a discussion over why "there's no beginner's programming language currently shipping with Macs"? The OP seems to have no opinion on what SHOULD be but certainly seems to think it's a shame that Melinda Gates doesn't do something about Apple's policies on programming languages.
Never mind that it's incredibly easy to install the dev tools needed to start working with Swift...or that many kids that I know have started experimenting with that, even going so far as to put apps on the App Store, which even generate a bit of revenue and expose them to the full end-to-end system of software development. It's not "included" as a "beginner's programming language," so let's call out Melinda Gates over it.
I know Microsoft isn't exactly considered saintly here at Slashdot, but seriously?
It seems to me that 90 percent of people will gorge on Cool Ranch Doritos when given the chance, too...that doesn't mean that eating healthy is a flawed proposition.
The fundamental issue is that these trackers were put forth as a magic bullet, with the implicit promise that they will replace willpower, discipline, and self-determination. "Wear our tracker and you'll magically start exercising more and keeping fit," as the implicit promise goes. In truth, they're just another tool...like a jumprope, running shoes, a bicycle, a scale, etc. Having the tool around doesn't mean you will use it correctly. But here's what else is happening: the sales of this tool depend upon keeping the people who buy it happy. So there's a market driver towards devices that overstate activity without doing it to such a degree that you know how much it's lying to you.
Example: Fitbit's products originally were worn on the waist. This way, the activity monitors were actually accurate; they'd measure when you were moving with your whole body, not just your wrist. Now, they're all wrist-worn, and sometimes they think you're exercising when really you're sitting at a bar having two beers. An example of this being so un-subtle as to render the device clearly untrustworthy is the Nike Fuelband, which showed ridiculous amounts of activity in the above-listed scenario. The Fitbit, Withings, and other related devices have slightly better logic but they still false-positive.
So, you get overstated exercise...which makes the wearer feel good (regardless of whether they're really trying or not), but in the long term there's bound to be a bit of "Heyyy..." when clothes don't start getting looser and that number on the scale doesn't really go down much.
These devices are tools, nothing more. There are good ones and bad ones, and both kinds can be used improperly.
Slashdot Mirror
Any country with laws not inline with ours are just backwater dictatorships.
Who do our companies need to freaking read up about their stuff. That's like asking us to read a few hundred country's laws and these shitty dictatorships would probably have consumer protection laws in their traffic laws just to make us pay.
If they play punch with us we should just stop trading with them and see what happens to their economy.
These assholes are biting the hand who feeds them.
While the AC is obviously a troll, there are some aspects of this ruling which seem a bit odd. For one, Steam was called out for not having "minimum quality guarantees." How exactly do you DEFINE "quality" for a video game? Do Australian laws really require this of all vendors...so that if you buy a book from a bookstore, and don't like it, you can say it had "poor quality," and get your money back? (Or, more to the point, you can claim that it had "poor quality" and get your money back even though you liked it?) Why is Steam the one that would have to be accountable for enforcement? Steam is a distributor.
The way business operates these days, it's unrealistic for a distributor to be held directly and solely accountable for maintaining quality standards on all products. Imagine Amazon having to test everything for quality...and keep testing, lest that quality change over time? Just setting standards for "quality" across things like books, movies, games, TV shows, sex toys, crafting supplies, etc....an impossible challenge. Testing against those standards? Incredibly difficult. And for what, an economy of 23 million people?
Add to that the fact that while a bit more than 21,000 tickets were opened that contained the word "refund" (not the best standard for determining how many refunds were warranted, mind you), Steam offered over 15,000 refunds. To me, this is a company that IS giving out refunds. And going further...how many of those tickets had a phrase like "if you can't fix this, I want a refund," only to have the problem fixed? How many of those were duplicates? How many of them didn't take the next step provided to start the refund process? How many of them were situations where a refund simply wasn't even warranted?
General Counsel for Steam was stupid not to get legal help when doing business there. He was even dumber to act like that was no big deal. But yeah...this ruling seems a bit excessive, if only because the laws there are nuts.
Nazis are leftist.
Really? Do tell!
I believe he's reading into the fact that "socialist" is part of the term, "national socialist," which is the formal term for "nazi." Of course, national socialism is not at all socialist in that way...
the article outlines the general process of how a phone is intercepted and the software is applied, but it obviously does not go into details of how the data is found or transferred. my guess is these portable tablets cellbrite has developed contain ADB and developer tools to pull off what to a seasoned slashdotter is just a parlor trick, but to a police department is nothing short of magical CSI hacking.
as hackers ourselves we need to ask more questions. what is the inner machination of this tablet? how do we defeat it? can it defeat password encryption? how about Signals password-based authentication? Is there a means by which contact lists can be hardened and encrypted? All of these questions are crucial in the next 10 years as most law enforcement does not bother with a warrant when theyre halfway through your roadsite fishing expedition.
As I understand it, from what I've read, the software essentially does an unencrypted backup of the phone and then analyzes the data to produce the report. It also appears to only work on older iPhones that do not require a pass code to backup; thus rendering it useless on newer models.
You hit the nail on the head.
(Love your account name, by the way...epic!)
For one thing, there was no passcode on the device. That's the reason for no encryption...all iPhones of this generation were encrypted so that you couldn't pull the data directly from memory storage. But since the phone was never locked, it was trivial to simply ask the phone to divulge all of its contents as a backup, which it did. No hacking, no exploitation...just like opening a shoebox to see what's inside.
For another, you're right in that later models (if locked) would be harder to get into. Starting with one model later...the iPhone 5s...iPhones have had a separate trusted module known as "Secure Enclave." Basically, Secure Enclave is the vault that stores all the cryptographic material. The iPhone puts the keys to all of its eggs in that one basket, and then secures the bejezus out of that basket. The 5s has the A7 processor...and the A7 was the first processor to use Secure Enclave. The iPhone 5 has the A6.
I know Mark wants to be Tony Stark... but he is more akin to Gus Gorman
Kind of my thought.
"I am Iron Douche."
What's to stop people from going online and submitting bogus feedback. For example, demanding so much carbonation that all you ever get is a glass of foam?
I don't think there's a problem with this happening...especially if it does happen. Why? Because if that many people deliberately sabotage the outcome, then that's what people want...and the market has succeeded. Right?
What I think is more likely is this: different people have different tastes in beer. Because (I presume) the input would be provided anonymously, you've got a situation where you can't tell when the population giving you feedback changes. So you end up with something akin to shifting winds that are difficult to follow instead of usable machine-learning input.
Another thing that I would hope it does is direct users...they will produce four types of beer. What if what a person asks for from Beer #1 is actually much like what Beer #2 already is? In that case, I would drop the data set and politely recommend that the person try Beer #2, to prevent accidental convergence between any of the four styles.
This seems odd. For one thing, this is a set of creds from 2013; didn't Yahoo! force a password reset in 2014+, after the most recent (admitted) breach? I don't quite see what the value would be in that case, though there might be some password reuse value. For another, that seems like a pretty high price compared to other databases that have been on the market, when valuation is done on a per-account basis...and the other databases are from more recent breaches as well.
Are you factoring in the long term costs of continuing to use coal-fired power plants?
No, because nobody has ever been able to produce a reliable number for that, especially when you try to break it out on a nation-by-nation basis as would be necessary here. We're not discussing wind farms in China, just in the US.
But have you factored in the long-term costs of pushing the grid past a point of stability in a highly-industrialized nation that is wholly dependent on electricity to function? Have you factored in the fact that electricity is the common thing upon which nearly ever aspect of our lives depends, and that to increase the cost of it exponentially would savage our economy?
The "what if" game is bullshit; I prefer to make decisions on what is known. And what is known is this: there are technologies out there. They need improvement, but that improvement is happening. The way our grid operates currently, it could not withstand widespread and sudden implementation anyways, even if the technologies were cost-effective today. But the grid is also being improved and upgraded (oversimplifying a bit here) so that down the road it will be ready. But today, renewable tech is too expensive to adopt on a massive scale, and current grid operations cannot withstand either the distributed nature of renewable generation nor the lack of direct, positive control of generation on a scale that would result from massive scale adoption.
It's not an easy problem, despite what you may think/wish. So it's not solved yet. But they're working on it, and getting closer. Just keep your panties out of a wad in the meantime, ok? It annoys people who are actually solving a problem when people in the cheap seats keep blaming them for the problem not being solved yet.
Some perspective here, as someone who has done work in the power industry.
30 MW is a very, very small amount of generation capacity. I have been to a generation facility where a 25MW diesel generator was the thing used to jump-start the rest of the plant...which was only about a 450 MW facility. 30 MW is pocket change in the power industry, a rounding error. Even small "peaker" CT plants typically produce at least 10x that amount when in service.
Now, for the cost per KWh. The price cited above is what National Grid is paying; it's wholesale. Do not compare it to your final KWh price from your electric bill; those rates are not equivalent, as the one on your bill includes T&D fees, some profit for the power company that serves you, and other things. According to the New England ISO (the regional authority that includes Rhode Island), a good example is (scroll down to see it) a bit more than four cents per KWh. So, this electricity is about 10x the cost of current generation.
Now...why am I pointing this out? Context. People in Slashdot have been going on and on like renewable energy is all good to go, and they can't possibly figure out why power companies aren't letting everyone just build turbines and solar panels all over the place. They see how the cost of solar panels is going down, but don't take into account the anti-islanding gear that is mandatory, the most expensive part of a solar installation, and which is static in price. They think about how windmills can generate power like crazy, but don't think about problems like VARS support needed to move the electricity from far away...since wind farms are noisy, real estate-intensive, and distant because reliable wind is often not near population centers. They want everyone to just put solar panels on their homes, but don't take into account what Hawaii found out...that doing so, even under the very best of circumstances, can be incredibly destabilizing to the power grid due to the need to balance sink and generation.
Yes, these technologies are needed. Yes, they will be improved. But for God's sake, please do keep in mind that they are NOT ready to supplant nuclear or fossil generation capabilities just yet. And you have to consider the whole situation...you don't just stand up a wind turbine and plug it into the grid. It's a hell of a lot more complicated than that and it's crazy expensive.
On a brighter and final note...if it turns out to be a truly viable product, I'm planning to get a Tesla solar roof in the next 5-10 years. When you consider the fact that it serves a dual purpose of both roof and solar generation unit, the cost impact flips from being more expensive than simply buying all my power to cheaper than buying both a roof and all of my power. This is the kind of innovation that will make things work. As for the destabilizing effects, power companies are rolling out WAMPAC (which is a small constellation of technologies and capabilities) that help with that by providing better visibility into grid operations along with automation to manage issues as they arise. So we are headed in the right direction, and will get there.
I worked for a US company, as a software developper, that decided to block all the "shareware" "freeware" open source" and al websites, so we had no access to github, stack overflow, forums or anything interesting for developpers. We had to fight HR (it seems HR head had the decision to unblock site, try to explain what open source is...) to access them. It was a true nightmare, they were control freak of the web. The number of times you did a search, click on the answer you were looking for and bam! blocked!
We had bypass using different DNS or 3G on our phone, etc.
I think you fail to grasp the totality of it in China...and the implication of it being done by a government rather than simply an employer.
For one thing, there's no amount of web surfing you could have possibly done at your job that would have gotten you in prison...short, that is, of going after child porn. But in China, people have been arrested for comments posted online, participation in certain groups, etc. And even without arrest, you have to worry about being under investigation.
Then, consider the fact that the first two words of your post, "I worked," indicate that you could escape that inanity simply by changing jobs. In China, there's no place to go. Oh, and also...you wouldn't be able to get around it as simply as using a 3G phone or changing your DNS either. And simply trying to do so would have increased the risk of coming under scrutiny.
There are, as described above, many reasons...but I think the "main" reason for any particular person will depend upon the person.
I was once contacted by Huawei about becoming an executive at their organization, in Beijing. Now..this is curious to me since I neither speak Mandarin nor Cantonese. I find it hard to imagine that I would make a very effective VP in a technical role, without even a basic conversational grasp of their language. (And don't even think about reading...)
However, interestingly enough, I also have a background in doing cyber security for the military in which role I got access to quite a lot of things. So...yeah. NO WAY was I going to entertain the job offer, for even a millisecond.
But you know what? Even without that creepiness, I wouldn't have considered it because of the air pollution. I can't imagine exercising outdoors in a place where the air is so filthy you can taste it. Hell no.
For some people, a reason not to go would be the culture shock...but for me, that's actually a plus. Or maybe the food? Nope...I love exploring new cuisines, and have always been fantastically happy getting authentic local food in any country I've visited. The crowding? Uh uh...I'm a hardcore urbanite. But for some others, these would be downsides instead of upsides...it all depends on the person.
A larger bit of context here is that this wasn't a business unit that makes hockey pucks. This was a business unit that is involved in cybersecurity. So for them to show ignorance of how things should be done with regard to this...ugh.
On the other hand, PwC is a partnership organization, not a corporation. As such, a lot of control is decentralized; partners are responsible for the business beneath them and while that responsibility does run upwards, with every step up there's an order of magnitude by which detail is removed. So fundamentally this could be one guy getting his panties in a wad over things.
But still...he should know better.
The Russian economy contracts 0.6% and somehow Russia is insolvent? LJL. Sorry to break it to you but the Kremlin is still sitting on $390 billion in hard currency and a mere 3% budget deficit. Russia is in a mild recession but insolvent it is not.
I don't know where this 0.6% number is coming from, but it's not an annual figure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
For Makerbot to assume that they would revolutionize the world by selling a 3D printer at a low cost point is like someone assuming that houses will suddenly become super-cheap because they teach widespread classes on how to nail 2x4s together with a hammer and nails.
Let's start with the first problem...so Suzy Homemaker buys a 3D printer and brings it home to her family. Now what? "oh, it can make stuff." How do you define that 'stuff?' You have to design it, using 3D software...ah, whoops. Hm, bit of a learning curve there...and even if their son Bobby is plenty good with computers, you end up with a child who has the technical knowledge and adults who own the use cases...and let's face it, in almost no family is anyone good at packaging either the knowledge or the use cases so that others could make use of them. So you end up with parents who have a vague idea of what they would like but can't communicate it, and a kid who can probably figure things out but doesn't know how to teach it. (This is the "knowing how to build framing doesn't mean you have a design for a house to work from" part of the analogy.)
Then, let's look at the limitations...the material can only do certain things. You can basically make little plastic widgets. (This is the "houses have a lot more than 2x4s in them" part of the analogy.) You can't replicate a broken part very easily either...you're kind of focused down into a world where you're going to have to invent things for this to be useful. So add another necessary skill set to Suzy Homemaker's family for this whole thing to work.
I think MakerBot was a success...just not the kind of success they thought they would be. They helped put 3D printing on the map for Suzy Homemaker. People have gone into Home Depot and watched 3D printers at work, creating things...that's not a small accomplishment. The price of printing continues to come down, even for technologies that remain out of reach but are far more useful (being able to 3D print with metal is very important if you want to be real about this, because only toys are only made of plastic) and now the public is a bit better-prepared for a near future where they actually *can* print things. And now, there's an awareness that the printers are just the razor blade handles...and the designs are the razor blades. Once truly useful printing becomes accessible, there will be business activity that addresses that problem. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes the same kind of shift that Eli Whitney created when he began the manufacture of devices that had interchangeable parts.
The moral of the story: massive shifts in society resulting from singular technologies are, in essence, Black Swan events. You cannot reliably predict them, no matter how badly you want VCs to give you money so that you can become the next Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook billionaires. Aim for major increments of change, and your business plans will be more viable.
Or a false flag justification for their attacks.
Actually, I was thinking it was a false flag explanation to give them cover for the growing insolvency of their own financial system. Blame it on the West, and all of a sudden Putin isn't running Russia into the ground...he's mounting an intrepid defense against a global conspiracy against Russia!
Now I'll have to eat nearly twice as much to maintain my obesity.
You laugh...but that's exactly what some people will do if this goes to market.
A major issue is that everyone is talking about "the" problem. There is no "the" problem...there's an entire ecosystem that includes entities that are wont to do bad things, economic and social drivers that incentivize them to do these bad things, and technological functionality that empowers them to do these bad things. Social media sites and apps...in their current incarnation (including the entire ecosystem of supporting back-end processes, business arrangements, etc.)...fall into the latter. Social media is a valid place to go after the problem, even though it's not the only one; like most significant problems, what works best is a multi-pronged effort to address as much of the end-to-end chain as possible.
It has "a mechanism" to detect RNA...but only one specific kind of RNA? They didn't come up with a broader approach to detect, say, many kinds of viruses? And it's so commoditizable that it's a USB stick?
*cough*Theranos*cough*
This is dead on arrival, as Facebook is poisoned brand with gamers. They might attract casual Facebook gamers, Farmville and the like, but they already have these.
Indeed. My first thought after reading this was, "There's no way I'm going to let those privacy-rapist cunts get their hooks into any part of my life...and Steam works just fine."
He was saying:
"Mind you don't walk into my fist, glasshole".
Seriously, this study is skewed. It only covers people who would consent to walk down the street wearing google glass.
Very true, but there's also another effect: the "observer effect." Basically, if someone is aware that their behavior is being observed and monitored, that often has an impact on the behavior itself. The 800-pound gorilla equivalent of this is the exercise in acting class where a student is made to sit down on a solitary chair facing the rest of the class...and is told to "just relax and be yourself."
I have to think that strapping a Google Glass onto someone's head and making them walk down the street is going to have an impact on their behavior...especially if they A), are very uncomfortable wearing it, or B) are very happy about wearing it. I could see how both groups would look away from people they saw as being less-privileged, for ironically different reasons. I could see how group A would feel uncomfortable displaying an item that conveys a certain "elitist piece of shit" image, while group B might embrace the image and consider themselves above the peons as a result.
That's a big "if", is currently false and will be false for hundreds of years still. This is declared intent to cause injury, making it a bit past borderline illegal. It is poorly thought through immoral marketing buzz. There is no positive angle to this "story" or even much to say except Mercedez-Benz has decided to let the interns do PR.
Actually, it's not that big an if.
Earlier this year, at a roundtable on connected car security headed up by the NHTSA, the chairman of the NHTSA stood up and cited some interesting numbers. A bit more than 32,000 people had died in vehicle-related accidents the prior year, and about 97% of those were the direct result of, and I quote, "driver error or driver choice." He went on to point out that autonomous vehicles would, if done correctly, eliminate most of those deaths. A car that will refuse to drive in certain conditions if, for example, the tire pressure is too low on one or more tires, or the brakes require more than a certain amount of force to slow the car to a certain standards...these are the less-obvious ways in which such cars are safer. Obviously, they can't drive drunk, don't commit road rage, and don't have any sense of ego about saying that they are having trouble with their eyesight. The car can be objective about its limits, its skills, and any impairment it suffers due to weather, maintenance issues, or any other potential problems. Just the degree of data logging alone that is inherent to autonomous vehicles is already producing useful information about how to prevent crashes, and that's before there are any such vehicles for sale. (And I hear it now..."Tesla sells autonomous vehicles!...but Tesla's system doesn't count, as evidenced by the fact that the maker of that system has cut ties with Tesla, basically saying "It's not supposed to be used that way!") Cars have reached the point where humans are the main source of the risk, and while the technology isn't quite ready-for-market, it's not "hundreds of years" away and it's very, very promising.
And no, what Mercedes is saying is not intent to cause injury. It's a statement about which injury to try and prevent in situations where...as this has been discussed for quite some time now...an injury is deemed inevitable. They have not said, "our cars will drive through schools for no particular reason, just to annoy Jzanu,." They have said, "our car's logic knows what's in the car, what's going on with the car, and can directly control the car. It does not know that much about the rest of the world, so we believe the odds of the best possible outcome in a situation with no good outcomes lies with letting the car preserve its own passengers."
And there is absolutely nothing illegal about that whatsoever. It's the same logic behind why paramedics don't run, ambulances slow down through intersections where they can't see past a certain distance, and a whole bunch of other situations where you have to weigh risk of one bad outcome against risk of another one.
Foxconn make iphones too fruit fag lover.
So...humor? Ever heard of it? :)
This is why I carry an iPhone. That way, I don't have to worry about a backdoor pork explosion in my pants. It's the little things, you know...
"Melinda Gates was encouraged to use what is now a nearly 40-year-old computer and the best language that was available back then in 1980. Her kids have been exposed to much more modern stuff."
And seriously...why does this turn into a discussion over why "there's no beginner's programming language currently shipping with Macs"? The OP seems to have no opinion on what SHOULD be but certainly seems to think it's a shame that Melinda Gates doesn't do something about Apple's policies on programming languages.
Never mind that it's incredibly easy to install the dev tools needed to start working with Swift...or that many kids that I know have started experimenting with that, even going so far as to put apps on the App Store, which even generate a bit of revenue and expose them to the full end-to-end system of software development. It's not "included" as a "beginner's programming language," so let's call out Melinda Gates over it.
I know Microsoft isn't exactly considered saintly here at Slashdot, but seriously?
It seems to me that 90 percent of people will gorge on Cool Ranch Doritos when given the chance, too...that doesn't mean that eating healthy is a flawed proposition.
The fundamental issue is that these trackers were put forth as a magic bullet, with the implicit promise that they will replace willpower, discipline, and self-determination. "Wear our tracker and you'll magically start exercising more and keeping fit," as the implicit promise goes. In truth, they're just another tool...like a jumprope, running shoes, a bicycle, a scale, etc. Having the tool around doesn't mean you will use it correctly. But here's what else is happening: the sales of this tool depend upon keeping the people who buy it happy. So there's a market driver towards devices that overstate activity without doing it to such a degree that you know how much it's lying to you.
Example: Fitbit's products originally were worn on the waist. This way, the activity monitors were actually accurate; they'd measure when you were moving with your whole body, not just your wrist. Now, they're all wrist-worn, and sometimes they think you're exercising when really you're sitting at a bar having two beers. An example of this being so un-subtle as to render the device clearly untrustworthy is the Nike Fuelband, which showed ridiculous amounts of activity in the above-listed scenario. The Fitbit, Withings, and other related devices have slightly better logic but they still false-positive.
So, you get overstated exercise...which makes the wearer feel good (regardless of whether they're really trying or not), but in the long term there's bound to be a bit of "Heyyy..." when clothes don't start getting looser and that number on the scale doesn't really go down much.
These devices are tools, nothing more. There are good ones and bad ones, and both kinds can be used improperly.
I also make popcorn, and get ready to watch the (rightfully earned) invective fly :)