I think that's pessimistic. That might be how they work NOW but there's no reason that an end-to-end secure cellphone network cannot exist.
Security of the conversation is basically guaranteed using TLS etc. Provide a certificate to your contacts, instead of a phone number. That certificate can encrypt communications to yourself so only you can decrypt them.
The biggest problem is routing, but that's something that can be layered over using the data network facilities and software like Tor.
The problems all along are really metadata related. If your contact is caught, gives up the phone and all his access details, you can be linked to have communicated with him (but with perfect-forward-secrecy, hopefully the contents of those communique will remain secret). Correlation attacks, etc. also exist and would be your biggest attack.
And, at some point, someone is providing the service you use and you're paying them somehow. Total anonymisation is possible, but difficult.
But if your definition of security is "no-one can know what I said to Fred on the phone when I know Fred and I are both in secure (un-eavesdrop-able) locations" then - yes - that can be done. Now. Today. Using existing technologies. I'd be amazed if there were thousands of people doing just that, especially given the sheer existence of things like PGP etc. many decades ago.
Absolute security is possible. And most realisitic definitions of security are more possible. It's really the trade-off between practicality, side-channel attacks (just following you and hearing what you said), and how much technology you want to use.
Physical access to any electronic device is basically an avenue for compromise. You really can't avoid it - at that point, it's no longer a question of "is the device secure?" as "is is STILL secure"... the only factors are how long it's out of your possession and how many obstacles are in the way of compromising it.
Same as anything with computers - physical access to the machine means it's game over. This applies for everything from games consoles to dvd players to phones to DRM schemes to "secure boot".
Physical access is game over. If you're lucky, you've used perfect forward secrecy and implemented it perfectly and know the device is missing and immediately blacklist it from your systems. Anything else (like real-life) is a security hole.
1) If something requires a government subsidy (which is the selling point of every solar installation in my country), then it's haemorrhaging money but someone, somewhere "wants" it to do that. (In the EU, that's normally governments doing it to meet their "green" obligations at whatever cost is cheaper than the "fine" for not doing so).
2) The electricity companies are not under any obligation that I know of to take your electricity. In the same way that you can't just turn on a generator and demand they let you sell the excess electricity back to them, you can't just slap a solar installation on your house and demand they take your excess. Certainly not "for free". Hell, you can be charged £10,000 to run a broadband cable to a town that isn't wired already, so I'm sure the cost of a "one-off" solar installation to feed back to the grid from wherever you are is MUCH more expensive.
3) If they are paying (or, more accurately, being forced to pay) retail price for your spare electricity, it's a con. They should be paying you no more than it costs for them to buy an equivalent amount of electricity to send that same wattage back to your house. Which, en masse, is literally pence. If they're paying you more than that, you have to wonder why, especially when they are private companies run by shareholders. Hint: Green credentials, government subsidies.
4) The cost of taking your crappy, varying pittance of power, cleansing it, transmitting it back to somewhere they can distribute it (even back to the end of your road, and probably on a separate cable to normal), and sending it on to another customer safely basically means that it's probably not worth their effort to even LOOK at it, unless they are forced.
5) Yes, there are countries/states that pay for your solar "overspill". There are countries that will pay YOU to install solar to save YOU money on your bills (does that not just set off alarm bells in your head about their current marketability / profitability?). It doesn't mean that it's anywhere near a sensible thing to do. And even with those subsidies and cost reduction, sometimes the maths STILL doesn't work out - certified electrical installation costs alone can obliterate a year's operational "profit".
Personally, every setup that someone has tried to sell me or my workplaces (private schools with large roofing surface area, large attached land ownership, desire for green credentials, high electrical demands, lots of spare cash, etc.) has been one that WOULD NOT give them profit even with all the incentives in the world.
Entire finance departments have sat and pored over the numbers in every school I work in. And then the one install I've personally seen, when I ask the bursar about it, there's lots of shifty eyes and "Yeah, I know, don't ask" when profitability of it is mentioned. They just aren't ever going to pay back the installation costs, let alone profit from the energy, but they have a pretty meter ticking up a "KWh" number that impresses visitors.
Like the petroleum industry in the US... complaining about your gas prices starting to catch up to the rest of the world. We set them that high to discourage you from using it, because it's a limited resource. We set solar prices to be profitable because we want YOU to buy them so we meet EU and other pollution obligations. But when we have to PAY YOU to make them work profitably, they are just a waste of plastic.
As stated below by others, just because it's "dark" doesn't mean it's not just ordinary matter.
It's just that we can't actually see it.
Given the twists and turns of galaxy-sized gravitational pulls, it's hardly surprising that there's stuff out there that we can't directly or indirectly observe (but that we believe has to be out there for other things to look like they do).
The only reason that something is "dark" is because we think it should be there but can't actually find it. Having 95% dark matter/energy just means that we know LESS about the universe than we did before - which is not at all unusual when you've just passed a cusp of understanding.
When we "knew" everything was atoms, we thought we had 100% knowledge. When we split the atom, we then realised that we knew only 1% of what was happening. Then we caught up again to something approaching 100% "understanding". And hit a wall. When we scale that wall, our "understanding" will drop dramatically.
That's what's happened with dark energy/dark matter. Think of it as our ignorance quotient increasing because of the discovery of new evidence. Not as some vast debunking of existing science - that's like saying "atoms don't exist" and abandoning all the working atomic science we already have just because we find out that the atom isn't the complete story, or abandoning all Newtonian physics because of the discovery of quantum physics.
It just doesn't work like that. The best bit of dark matter science is ahead of us. We're in ignorance, looking for the light. Or, in this case, the dark.
Maybe buy an OS that lets you configure some of the basics of where you store things?
Hell, most of my users don't even know where their profiles, documents, favourites, etc. actually end up unless they bother to look into it. And you can set whatever you want to be an SSD and store whatever you want on it.
The biggest thing I hate about MacOS is "we know better, so you don't get the option".
From what I can tell, a mail server has two options when receiving this mail:
Accept it. Reject it.
The default, with software that doesn't understand this RFC yet (which seems to be... just about everything), is to reject. So trying to use this as an email is not only going to mess up every form you try to fill in online (because they won't see it as an email address either), but quite likely just gets you bouncebacks from everyone you email.
What was needed was surely a system similar to the IDN system for internationalisation, which would allow those with ASCII-only DNS servers etc. to STILL WORK, by converting the Unicode characters to ASCII subsets and then sending the email as normal, through the entire PLANET-worth of working email servers out there that could accept it.
Having a content negotiation option at the SMTP level, that mail servers have to implement and handle specifically, is just ridiculous, and even with GMail's kickstart it could be decades before you can guarantee that your UTF-8 email address will work across the Internet and even then there'll be some old legacy server that will just bounce all your email BECAUSE of that character set in your address. And it will be perfectly legitimate to do so.
However, as others have pointed out, if this goes through, it will be nigh-on impossible to spot phished/faked email addresses, just like it is with IDN links unless you know how to find the original ASCII-encoding of them.
I've seen any number of products use the word "free" when they quite clearly aren't. Free* (Postage & Packing not included). Free to play. Buy one, get one free* (cheapest one only, some products not eligible, etc.). Free phone on our monthly contract.
The problem is not using the word "unlimited" or "free". It's not clarifying what you mean. Technically, an "unlimited" connection would have no upper speed limit either (that's a limit, isn't it?). One person could buy an "unlimited" account and supply the entire world.
It's deceptive business practice to use Unlimited or Free without clarifying what's unlimited or free. And there are advertising laws that say exactly how that has to be done. As a rule, any text larger than 12pt is probably not the complete truth, and anything less than 12pt will explain why.
Sure, it sucks, but "free" was already destroyed many decades ago. Unlimited is just the new free.
In my field, education, it's quite common for the IT guy to be the one with absolute access to more things than anyone else. Nobody else, not even the data-protection officer, or the people on the senior management team, or the people ultimately in charge of the school (the heads and governors) has as much access to information as the IT guy.
Senior-management team files, HR databases, etc. are part and parcel of the job. The web filter logs are generally very revealing and, hence, why I anonymise them by default (Usually squid logs - which only contain source IP addresses, which can only be correlated to a machine using the DHCP logs, which can only be correlated to a user using the Windows event logs on the AD servers - NOT something you can do accidentally, but also allows you to analyse, spot trends and find dodgy things without immediately revealing the source. When I come upon something that worries me, I go to my boss, ask permission to de-anonymise those records, provide them with my results. I've had to do it a couple of times and it turned out to be nothing, but I've also worked with colleagues who've spotted a paedophile on the staff that way and got them prosecuted).
Despite all that data access, tou don't look. It's that simple. If I'm asked to work on a confidential file or database, that's what you do. It's just data. What you see is just numbers and letters and then forgotten. You do not dig. Not only are there alerts and warnings for digging into certain things (and I don't want to KNOW what triggers those alerts or warnings necessarily, but I know that they are in place on the MIS databases, for example - I only trigger them when it's been part of my job to go into that part of the databases), but it's a matter of professionalism.
If I become "exposed" to salary details, or witness protection details (children in schools rarely have as simple a home life as they might at first appear to have), or that some child's father is a Colonel in the Army who's asked for his address details to be maintained private, or whatever... that's what you do. You're not there to suck up data, you just treat it like anything else and move on.
If I suspect illegal activity - there's a lot of activity you CANNOT ignore in a school - I'd go through the proper channels and report it however I'm supposed to. It came up as part of my job, it's not like I was snooping for it.
I *STILL*, fifteen years into my career, look away when I ask people to set their passwords. I don't WANT to know. I want the deniability if someone gets into their account to say "There is no way I could know their password, without triggering a reset of their account, which would lock them out and inform them immediately anyway". My boss keeps trying to tell me his password "to save time". I don't want it. With it, I could - in theory - change my own salary, or modify any amount of details. Chances are it would get picked up eventually but if you were clever enough, you could get away with an awful lot very quickly, or very discretely.
Hence, I don't WANT to know those things. I choose to forget them, unless there is a reason to immediately report them. I suggest you get into the habit of doing the same.
Microsoft Ireland is incorporated in Ireland. Which is in the EU. They are therefore separate companies. And thus a binding agreement on one does not form a binding agreement on the other.
Even if it did, the act of exporting personal data of EU citizens FROM the EU without due EU process is a criminal offence in the EU. Which is where Microsoft Ireland are based. Thus anyone in Ireland that facilities or colludes to make this offence happens will stand before an EU court, for trying to comply with a US courts ruling that DOES NOT apply to them.
I work in independent (private) schools. We have a few "star" pupils who want to be coders. They generally don't become them, not because they're not skilled, or couldn't do it, but because they've never sat down and done it outside of lessons that they waltz through. Following a course by-rote isn't learning.
I also get asked an awful lot (by the younger years) how I type so fast and how they can "learn" to type that fast. Type. For years. Bang, you've learned. This is no shortcut, there is little technique, no amount of learning the home keys will help you type fast. You just have to type, lots, all the time.
Same for coding. You can learn some theory. But to learn to code, you have to code. And with kids it's really easy - pick a game, program it. They know every kind of game, they will rarely fully complete anything approaching a full game before they get bored, disillusioned or just plain hit the limit of their skill level. The way past that point is determination and learning what to do. And that comes by just demanding that you code and discipline yourself.
The true "stars" are the ones that persevere through those problems, solve them and come out the other end with ANYTHING approaching a complete program that isn't entirely trivial. Next time they have a coding problem, they know they just have to work at it to get past it.
There's datacentre-level maintenance but otherwise, yes.
However, where you get rich is not in mining the coins for yourself - have you not seen the "mine your own bitcoins, just $X/month" adverts? You lease that crap out to people hoping to make a fast buck and/or hide their trail somewhat in converting currency to Bitcoins (sure, they bought a Bitcoin server - but which Bitcoin did they actually MINE? - it's quite difficult to trace if the hosting firm is willing to not keep traffic logs).
But then, there are multitude of companies that employ other companies to do things that they could do themselves, and pay for the full cost + that intermediary's profit in order to do so.
And when you have no customers? Well, you're not "losing" much on the business operation and always have a stock of "cash" coming in even with zero customers....
Whereupon his European colleagues, knowing they might face charges of collusion otherwise, report his presence and intentions to the police, deny him access, and ask a court to bar his leaving the country with that data or access to transmit it.
If Microsoft comply, they will be sued by their EU customers and maybe even the EU governments themselves.
There's a reason that jurisdiction applies. You can't be legally required to do something in one country, and then legally required by another country to not do it.
Sorry, US, but if Microsoft comply without getting it right, the EU are likely to fine them into oblivion, and the EU is JUST AS BIG, if not larger, a market as their US market.
In the UK there is no compulsory identification. My brother does not have a single identification document. No driving license, no passport, no "ID card" (we've never really issued them since WW2 except for a brief, abandoned, experiment*). He has a normal life.
So, what are you going to use for ID? National Insurance Number? It's meaningless and doesn't correspond to much. It's not even CLOSE to the American SSN, and you can freely give it away without fear.
Driving license number? Some people don't drive. Passport number? Some people don't have a passport at all, and may never have had one.
Then, you're into pseudo-ID that isn't definitive and isn't legally required.
The UK is one of the few countries in the world where it's perfectly legal to NOT CARRY ANY ID WHATSOEVER. If you're ever challenged by police, they can ask you to prove who you are but that "proof", because of the "no ID card" thing, can be as low as someone recognising you. Precisely because there is no single definitive means of identification.
So, in that atmosphere, how any single website would ever be able to "authenticate" your ID, I have no idea. Banks generally require two forms of ID to open a bank account, which can include things like bills addressed to you, and a wage slip. Neither are actually proof of ID, but you can get a bank account with them.
My brother ran into no more trouble than usual getting a bank account. He has no definitive form of ID in existence. How does that translate to a non-anonymous Internet?
*We had a voluntary ID card scheme a couple of years ago. It was completely abandoned and all the people that paid for the cards wasted their money and never got a refund. The cards are useless and now not accepted as proof of ID, despite a hugely complicated sign-up process. I can just imagine the response to "another" ID card fiasco....
It was common in the 80's with software houses, looks like people don't learn.
Sure, I'm willing to help out a company I work for that is struggling - that's only sensible self-preservation. But if you miss a single payment, and generally people are paid a month in arrears at least - then it means that I've worked a month "for free" already. If you didn't bother to notify me, I'm out the door straight away and will take you to court for that unpaid month.
If you came and said "We can't pay you this month", I'd want to be privy to the expense accounts and financial arrangements that make it impossible to pay me. If you don't want to share those with me, I'm out of the door - and will assume it's because you've creamed off and are trying to not pay me, so will still sue.
If you share those with me, and I believe that money is coming soon, there's a small possibility - in a firm that I really love and trust - that I might continue for that one month. And then that's it.
Sorry, but you're not asking a personal favour, you're not being a friend, you're not helping me at all by forcibly stopping me paying my household bills for a month. I wouldn't ask that of my closest friend or family. For a company I work for? I'm out of there.
Someone, somewhere, will be a willing scapegoat - no doubt - especially if you promise them shares, an executive title, etc. even if it's only going to last a month before they are up before a court explaining why they're the one holding the hot potato.
A company that cannot pay salary is dead in the water. It will probably never recover. And an employee working for that company is stupid to think otherwise.
Maybe, if it was a family business, and a close member of family ran it, and I was privy to all the information, and I genuinely believed there could be no doubt about the money arriving, and I've been kept in the loop at all points, and it doesn't go on more than one month. Anything else? Bye...
Though I agree in sentiment, there's still the case that if you don't eat more than X weight of food, you can't put on more than X amount of weight.
The ones who are happy being fat, fine. The ones who are trying to lose weight and can't because of their "hunger"... that's the problem. Because it's hardly ever a celery that they pig out on, but chocolate and other high-fat foods.
It's still down, in the end, to a question of willpower. If you want to slim, you'll allow yourself to feel a little more hungry and - at the same time - find ways to cure the hunger that don't involve fat.
Your gut is just as adaptable as any other part of you - it can learn, given time. And though I don't want to trivialise the effort of losing weight, especially if you have medical conditions or even just suffer from the inherent medical conditions of being overweight (such as it being more difficult on your joints to exercise), there's still a willpower game at play here.
I'm sure there are people who struggle 24 hours a day against hunger and lose. And I'm sure there are a hundred times as many who win for as long as they want to and then give up. And I'm sure there are a hundred times as many again who say they are trying, and don't even bother.
There are weight-loss TV programs where they "stalk" the contestants. They know they could be watched. They know they have cameras in their house. They know they have to cut down. But still they have midnight snacks and go shopping for high-calorie food (if it's not in the house, at least you have to expend more effort than normal to go get it if you have a craving!).
Not everyone is a lard-ass. But equally not every overweight person struggles against an unbeatable desire to eat only high-calorie food.
Bought a no-moving-parts power supply back in... oh, I don't know, 2003 or something. Sold as "cooled by heatpipes", pretty much the same principle - silent, no moving parts, passively cooled, no fans, huge surface areas.
They also did kits for the processor itself but I've also bought P2-era motherboards that were designed to be passively cooled too (same thing, huge heatsink, no fan).
So this is certainly not "the first" in the PC world (unless we're talking about "the first" to use some particular technology that just about replicates what I bought over 10 years ago). Not even close. In fact, it's over a decade out. And going outside the PC world, passively cooled chips are pretty common - you have a tablet or smartphone without a huge stonking fan, no?
The PSU is still working 10 years on if you'd like me to dig it out. I'm sure it wouldn't take much to butcher it to do the same job to the processor, especially if you can safely have it clock itself down to prevent heat being generated in the first place.
Agreed, in principle, but we're still allowed opinions based on experience.
When I've worked in primary and secondary education, state and private, deprived areas and the exact opposite, it's hard to see where the advantage is at all. The above is not a post from ignorance, it's a post from someone deep inside IT inside education, who has had phone calls in my professional position from parents of deprived children begging for technical support (and they got a lot more than they hoped for, and it didn't cost them a bean).
I'm not claiming to know everything, but what I've seen shows an inherent flaw in the "let's give kids computers" charities - they are starting from entirely the wrong premise - that access to even the cheapest of hardware is why the children are having problems. It's not.
I've only ever worked in IT in schools (or colleges, or tuition centres...).
School computers do not make better students. Home computers do not make better students. Personal computers do not make better students.
If anything, the opposite unless they are regulated... by a teacher... in a classroom... and they have the will to learn. Guess which are the magic factors and which aren't?
Sure, there are disadvantaged children that don't have an Internet connection, a PC, time on it, and can't fill in their homework that the school provides on its website. The number of them is VANISHINGLY small. And, usually, because of much bigger problems that have nothing to do with technology - i.e. the kinds of families that you would find had sold the PC the next week for money to buy something else. They are dozens of charities, government schemes and even schools that do this. It's not taken up en-masse unless you are giving SILLY amounts of money to it, and then it's taken up to save them paying a bill that you could have just paid for them twice over.
And then, when I was a kid 15-20 years ago, I didn't have much access to a PC either. I came out near the top of my school. In IT. It wasn't a burden. In fact, my teachers fretted about my wasting so much time on the computers when they did come in.
Let's get this straight - giving an old recycled PC that someone was throwing out to a kid does not give them anything. I can't give this stuff away, when I throw out dozens of desktops a year, for a reason: you can run old stuff on it, if you're careful. So instead of "no PC", they have "slow PC full of junk that either can't run or is ancient". They're better off with no PC. Sticking it onto the Internet is, again, just a recipe for disaster. Now all that rich online content, tied into the school's cloud systems, requiring all kinds of plugins... they still can't view as intended.
Sticking them on Linux isn't going to help either. I speak as someone who HAS deployed Linux machines in schools, is never without a Linux server somewhere, and has Linux at home. And Windows. And (spit) Macs. And I was an early backer of the Raspberry Pi project. All it means is they won't be able to read their homework in a format that the teacher can send or send their homework in a format that the teacher can read. I *know* that you and *I* can do that, but this are disadvantaged kids with no PC skills stuck on an unfamiliar system that few people can help them with.
STOP GIVING THIS CRAP TO CHILDREN in the first world. Nothing is actually *better* - they then might have to come into school and do stuff like learn. And if the kid is that disadvantaged but able to learn, there are libraries, after-school clubs, lunchtime clubs, or they can negotiate after-hours access with their schools direct - which might just help those parents struggling to leave work in order to pick them up...
Sending this stuff to the third world doesn't help either. They have the same problems, and have to deal with too much junk.
On top of all that, unless you're online it's pointless. The Linux educational software is NOT educational software. It's some geek's idea of educational, conforms to no curriculum whatsoever and, if you're lucky, can be crowbarred to fulfill two or three curriculum requirements over the course of a year. And if you have to put these kids online to do what they need, THAT is the cost and the expense and the problem, not what device they happen to access it from (by the time you are then, any kind of thin-client would work, backed by their school).
Really, we need to find other ways to solve this problem, not just throw old computers at kids. It's not even as useful as throwing old library books at kids.
"You can buy our products individually" "You can subscribe to all our products for one fee" "You can buy our special title by subscribing and paying a premium for that one title" "You can buy our products individually"
Sorry. I don't "subscribe". The value of it rarely lasts long enough to be of any value at all to me.
Magazines? They tend to repeat themselves after a year, then you realise that all the "new" stuff, you now know where to find out. (Did this for PC magazines, Linux magazines, Astronomy magazines, even New Scientist is ludicrously expensive for what it is).
Movies? You get all of the crap, nothing that you actually want. I did the test subscription to Amazon Prime Instant Video. 30 days of "free" movies. We watched 4. Stopped one within ten minutes. Spent HOURS looking through what they had. All the interesting ones were "not included" so you had to buy them anyway. The subscription didn't make it out of the trial period. Was the same back when video rental was the thing - the good movie that you'd been waiting for was unavailable or more expensive, all you could book out was the dross you'd seen a hundred times.
Games? I have Steam. But I don't have a single subscription game. There are even Steam games that I regularly plug money into for DLC and extras, and I have my own personal "monthly Steam allowance". To be honest, not one of the subscription games (or software) have I even looked at past the word "subscription". Nope, never played WoW either. Sorry, but I invest enough back into games I play (by running servers, helping out on the forums, bug-fixing, or buying DLC / extra copies for friends), I'm not paying every month "just because".
I tried OnLive, mostly to prove that it wasn't a sustainable business model to be honest. I played a full-price game on there for free, then went and bought it cheaper elsewhere. The technology worked but was nowhere near the claims they made. And the "lifetime" (3 years only) pass to the game cost more than my buying it outright on Steam.
I don't see any subscription as worthwhile. Once they have your first month of money, they can destroy the value of what you have overnight and you'll feel obliged to keep paying until renewal. It's just not worth it.
If you want to subscribe to EA games, stick some money in a tin every month. Then when EA only have the same crap as usual, you can go elsewhere, and when you have a month without playing, you're under no obligation, still have your money and can play twice as much next month.
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I think that's pessimistic. That might be how they work NOW but there's no reason that an end-to-end secure cellphone network cannot exist.
Security of the conversation is basically guaranteed using TLS etc. Provide a certificate to your contacts, instead of a phone number. That certificate can encrypt communications to yourself so only you can decrypt them.
The biggest problem is routing, but that's something that can be layered over using the data network facilities and software like Tor.
The problems all along are really metadata related. If your contact is caught, gives up the phone and all his access details, you can be linked to have communicated with him (but with perfect-forward-secrecy, hopefully the contents of those communique will remain secret). Correlation attacks, etc. also exist and would be your biggest attack.
And, at some point, someone is providing the service you use and you're paying them somehow. Total anonymisation is possible, but difficult.
But if your definition of security is "no-one can know what I said to Fred on the phone when I know Fred and I are both in secure (un-eavesdrop-able) locations" then - yes - that can be done. Now. Today. Using existing technologies. I'd be amazed if there were thousands of people doing just that, especially given the sheer existence of things like PGP etc. many decades ago.
Absolute security is possible. And most realisitic definitions of security are more possible. It's really the trade-off between practicality, side-channel attacks (just following you and hearing what you said), and how much technology you want to use.
Physical access to any electronic device is basically an avenue for compromise. You really can't avoid it - at that point, it's no longer a question of "is the device secure?" as "is is STILL secure"... the only factors are how long it's out of your possession and how many obstacles are in the way of compromising it.
Same as anything with computers - physical access to the machine means it's game over. This applies for everything from games consoles to dvd players to phones to DRM schemes to "secure boot".
Physical access is game over. If you're lucky, you've used perfect forward secrecy and implemented it perfectly and know the device is missing and immediately blacklist it from your systems. Anything else (like real-life) is a security hole.
1) If something requires a government subsidy (which is the selling point of every solar installation in my country), then it's haemorrhaging money but someone, somewhere "wants" it to do that. (In the EU, that's normally governments doing it to meet their "green" obligations at whatever cost is cheaper than the "fine" for not doing so).
2) The electricity companies are not under any obligation that I know of to take your electricity. In the same way that you can't just turn on a generator and demand they let you sell the excess electricity back to them, you can't just slap a solar installation on your house and demand they take your excess. Certainly not "for free". Hell, you can be charged £10,000 to run a broadband cable to a town that isn't wired already, so I'm sure the cost of a "one-off" solar installation to feed back to the grid from wherever you are is MUCH more expensive.
3) If they are paying (or, more accurately, being forced to pay) retail price for your spare electricity, it's a con. They should be paying you no more than it costs for them to buy an equivalent amount of electricity to send that same wattage back to your house. Which, en masse, is literally pence. If they're paying you more than that, you have to wonder why, especially when they are private companies run by shareholders. Hint: Green credentials, government subsidies.
4) The cost of taking your crappy, varying pittance of power, cleansing it, transmitting it back to somewhere they can distribute it (even back to the end of your road, and probably on a separate cable to normal), and sending it on to another customer safely basically means that it's probably not worth their effort to even LOOK at it, unless they are forced.
5) Yes, there are countries/states that pay for your solar "overspill". There are countries that will pay YOU to install solar to save YOU money on your bills (does that not just set off alarm bells in your head about their current marketability / profitability?). It doesn't mean that it's anywhere near a sensible thing to do. And even with those subsidies and cost reduction, sometimes the maths STILL doesn't work out - certified electrical installation costs alone can obliterate a year's operational "profit".
Personally, every setup that someone has tried to sell me or my workplaces (private schools with large roofing surface area, large attached land ownership, desire for green credentials, high electrical demands, lots of spare cash, etc.) has been one that WOULD NOT give them profit even with all the incentives in the world.
Entire finance departments have sat and pored over the numbers in every school I work in. And then the one install I've personally seen, when I ask the bursar about it, there's lots of shifty eyes and "Yeah, I know, don't ask" when profitability of it is mentioned. They just aren't ever going to pay back the installation costs, let alone profit from the energy, but they have a pretty meter ticking up a "KWh" number that impresses visitors.
Like the petroleum industry in the US... complaining about your gas prices starting to catch up to the rest of the world. We set them that high to discourage you from using it, because it's a limited resource. We set solar prices to be profitable because we want YOU to buy them so we meet EU and other pollution obligations. But when we have to PAY YOU to make them work profitably, they are just a waste of plastic.
Alienware laptop.
'Nuff said.
As stated below by others, just because it's "dark" doesn't mean it's not just ordinary matter.
It's just that we can't actually see it.
Given the twists and turns of galaxy-sized gravitational pulls, it's hardly surprising that there's stuff out there that we can't directly or indirectly observe (but that we believe has to be out there for other things to look like they do).
The only reason that something is "dark" is because we think it should be there but can't actually find it. Having 95% dark matter/energy just means that we know LESS about the universe than we did before - which is not at all unusual when you've just passed a cusp of understanding.
When we "knew" everything was atoms, we thought we had 100% knowledge. When we split the atom, we then realised that we knew only 1% of what was happening. Then we caught up again to something approaching 100% "understanding". And hit a wall. When we scale that wall, our "understanding" will drop dramatically.
That's what's happened with dark energy/dark matter. Think of it as our ignorance quotient increasing because of the discovery of new evidence. Not as some vast debunking of existing science - that's like saying "atoms don't exist" and abandoning all the working atomic science we already have just because we find out that the atom isn't the complete story, or abandoning all Newtonian physics because of the discovery of quantum physics.
It just doesn't work like that. The best bit of dark matter science is ahead of us. We're in ignorance, looking for the light. Or, in this case, the dark.
Maybe buy an OS that lets you configure some of the basics of where you store things?
Hell, most of my users don't even know where their profiles, documents, favourites, etc. actually end up unless they bother to look into it. And you can set whatever you want to be an SSD and store whatever you want on it.
The biggest thing I hate about MacOS is "we know better, so you don't get the option".
From what I can tell, a mail server has two options when receiving this mail:
Accept it.
Reject it.
The default, with software that doesn't understand this RFC yet (which seems to be... just about everything), is to reject. So trying to use this as an email is not only going to mess up every form you try to fill in online (because they won't see it as an email address either), but quite likely just gets you bouncebacks from everyone you email.
What was needed was surely a system similar to the IDN system for internationalisation, which would allow those with ASCII-only DNS servers etc. to STILL WORK, by converting the Unicode characters to ASCII subsets and then sending the email as normal, through the entire PLANET-worth of working email servers out there that could accept it.
Having a content negotiation option at the SMTP level, that mail servers have to implement and handle specifically, is just ridiculous, and even with GMail's kickstart it could be decades before you can guarantee that your UTF-8 email address will work across the Internet and even then there'll be some old legacy server that will just bounce all your email BECAUSE of that character set in your address. And it will be perfectly legitimate to do so.
However, as others have pointed out, if this goes through, it will be nigh-on impossible to spot phished/faked email addresses, just like it is with IDN links unless you know how to find the original ASCII-encoding of them.
Sorry, but do you live in the real world?
I've seen any number of products use the word "free" when they quite clearly aren't. Free* (Postage & Packing not included). Free to play. Buy one, get one free* (cheapest one only, some products not eligible, etc.). Free phone on our monthly contract.
The problem is not using the word "unlimited" or "free". It's not clarifying what you mean. Technically, an "unlimited" connection would have no upper speed limit either (that's a limit, isn't it?). One person could buy an "unlimited" account and supply the entire world.
It's deceptive business practice to use Unlimited or Free without clarifying what's unlimited or free. And there are advertising laws that say exactly how that has to be done. As a rule, any text larger than 12pt is probably not the complete truth, and anything less than 12pt will explain why.
Sure, it sucks, but "free" was already destroyed many decades ago. Unlimited is just the new free.
In my field, education, it's quite common for the IT guy to be the one with absolute access to more things than anyone else. Nobody else, not even the data-protection officer, or the people on the senior management team, or the people ultimately in charge of the school (the heads and governors) has as much access to information as the IT guy.
Senior-management team files, HR databases, etc. are part and parcel of the job. The web filter logs are generally very revealing and, hence, why I anonymise them by default (Usually squid logs - which only contain source IP addresses, which can only be correlated to a machine using the DHCP logs, which can only be correlated to a user using the Windows event logs on the AD servers - NOT something you can do accidentally, but also allows you to analyse, spot trends and find dodgy things without immediately revealing the source. When I come upon something that worries me, I go to my boss, ask permission to de-anonymise those records, provide them with my results. I've had to do it a couple of times and it turned out to be nothing, but I've also worked with colleagues who've spotted a paedophile on the staff that way and got them prosecuted).
Despite all that data access, tou don't look. It's that simple. If I'm asked to work on a confidential file or database, that's what you do. It's just data. What you see is just numbers and letters and then forgotten. You do not dig. Not only are there alerts and warnings for digging into certain things (and I don't want to KNOW what triggers those alerts or warnings necessarily, but I know that they are in place on the MIS databases, for example - I only trigger them when it's been part of my job to go into that part of the databases), but it's a matter of professionalism.
If I become "exposed" to salary details, or witness protection details (children in schools rarely have as simple a home life as they might at first appear to have), or that some child's father is a Colonel in the Army who's asked for his address details to be maintained private, or whatever... that's what you do. You're not there to suck up data, you just treat it like anything else and move on.
If I suspect illegal activity - there's a lot of activity you CANNOT ignore in a school - I'd go through the proper channels and report it however I'm supposed to. It came up as part of my job, it's not like I was snooping for it.
I *STILL*, fifteen years into my career, look away when I ask people to set their passwords. I don't WANT to know. I want the deniability if someone gets into their account to say "There is no way I could know their password, without triggering a reset of their account, which would lock them out and inform them immediately anyway". My boss keeps trying to tell me his password "to save time". I don't want it. With it, I could - in theory - change my own salary, or modify any amount of details. Chances are it would get picked up eventually but if you were clever enough, you could get away with an awful lot very quickly, or very discretely.
Hence, I don't WANT to know those things. I choose to forget them, unless there is a reason to immediately report them. I suggest you get into the habit of doing the same.
Microsoft Ireland is incorporated in Ireland. Which is in the EU. They are therefore separate companies. And thus a binding agreement on one does not form a binding agreement on the other.
Even if it did, the act of exporting personal data of EU citizens FROM the EU without due EU process is a criminal offence in the EU. Which is where Microsoft Ireland are based. Thus anyone in Ireland that facilities or colludes to make this offence happens will stand before an EU court, for trying to comply with a US courts ruling that DOES NOT apply to them.
Precisely.
I work in independent (private) schools. We have a few "star" pupils who want to be coders. They generally don't become them, not because they're not skilled, or couldn't do it, but because they've never sat down and done it outside of lessons that they waltz through. Following a course by-rote isn't learning.
I also get asked an awful lot (by the younger years) how I type so fast and how they can "learn" to type that fast. Type. For years. Bang, you've learned. This is no shortcut, there is little technique, no amount of learning the home keys will help you type fast. You just have to type, lots, all the time.
Same for coding. You can learn some theory. But to learn to code, you have to code. And with kids it's really easy - pick a game, program it. They know every kind of game, they will rarely fully complete anything approaching a full game before they get bored, disillusioned or just plain hit the limit of their skill level. The way past that point is determination and learning what to do. And that comes by just demanding that you code and discipline yourself.
The true "stars" are the ones that persevere through those problems, solve them and come out the other end with ANYTHING approaching a complete program that isn't entirely trivial. Next time they have a coding problem, they know they just have to work at it to get past it.
There's datacentre-level maintenance but otherwise, yes.
However, where you get rich is not in mining the coins for yourself - have you not seen the "mine your own bitcoins, just $X/month" adverts? You lease that crap out to people hoping to make a fast buck and/or hide their trail somewhat in converting currency to Bitcoins (sure, they bought a Bitcoin server - but which Bitcoin did they actually MINE? - it's quite difficult to trace if the hosting firm is willing to not keep traffic logs).
But then, there are multitude of companies that employ other companies to do things that they could do themselves, and pay for the full cost + that intermediary's profit in order to do so.
And when you have no customers? Well, you're not "losing" much on the business operation and always have a stock of "cash" coming in even with zero customers....
Ah, the American answer-to-everything.... :-)
Whereupon his European colleagues, knowing they might face charges of collusion otherwise, report his presence and intentions to the police, deny him access, and ask a court to bar his leaving the country with that data or access to transmit it.
If Microsoft comply, they will be sued by their EU customers and maybe even the EU governments themselves.
There's a reason that jurisdiction applies. You can't be legally required to do something in one country, and then legally required by another country to not do it.
Sorry, US, but if Microsoft comply without getting it right, the EU are likely to fine them into oblivion, and the EU is JUST AS BIG, if not larger, a market as their US market.
Seriously, America, you do not own the world.
Worse,
In the UK there is no compulsory identification. My brother does not have a single identification document. No driving license, no passport, no "ID card" (we've never really issued them since WW2 except for a brief, abandoned, experiment*). He has a normal life.
So, what are you going to use for ID? National Insurance Number? It's meaningless and doesn't correspond to much. It's not even CLOSE to the American SSN, and you can freely give it away without fear.
Driving license number? Some people don't drive.
Passport number? Some people don't have a passport at all, and may never have had one.
Then, you're into pseudo-ID that isn't definitive and isn't legally required.
The UK is one of the few countries in the world where it's perfectly legal to NOT CARRY ANY ID WHATSOEVER. If you're ever challenged by police, they can ask you to prove who you are but that "proof", because of the "no ID card" thing, can be as low as someone recognising you. Precisely because there is no single definitive means of identification.
So, in that atmosphere, how any single website would ever be able to "authenticate" your ID, I have no idea. Banks generally require two forms of ID to open a bank account, which can include things like bills addressed to you, and a wage slip. Neither are actually proof of ID, but you can get a bank account with them.
My brother ran into no more trouble than usual getting a bank account. He has no definitive form of ID in existence. How does that translate to a non-anonymous Internet?
*We had a voluntary ID card scheme a couple of years ago. It was completely abandoned and all the people that paid for the cards wasted their money and never got a refund. The cards are useless and now not accepted as proof of ID, despite a hugely complicated sign-up process. I can just imagine the response to "another" ID card fiasco....
It was common in the 80's with software houses, looks like people don't learn.
Sure, I'm willing to help out a company I work for that is struggling - that's only sensible self-preservation. But if you miss a single payment, and generally people are paid a month in arrears at least - then it means that I've worked a month "for free" already. If you didn't bother to notify me, I'm out the door straight away and will take you to court for that unpaid month.
If you came and said "We can't pay you this month", I'd want to be privy to the expense accounts and financial arrangements that make it impossible to pay me. If you don't want to share those with me, I'm out of the door - and will assume it's because you've creamed off and are trying to not pay me, so will still sue.
If you share those with me, and I believe that money is coming soon, there's a small possibility - in a firm that I really love and trust - that I might continue for that one month. And then that's it.
Sorry, but you're not asking a personal favour, you're not being a friend, you're not helping me at all by forcibly stopping me paying my household bills for a month. I wouldn't ask that of my closest friend or family. For a company I work for? I'm out of there.
Someone, somewhere, will be a willing scapegoat - no doubt - especially if you promise them shares, an executive title, etc. even if it's only going to last a month before they are up before a court explaining why they're the one holding the hot potato.
A company that cannot pay salary is dead in the water. It will probably never recover. And an employee working for that company is stupid to think otherwise.
Maybe, if it was a family business, and a close member of family ran it, and I was privy to all the information, and I genuinely believed there could be no doubt about the money arriving, and I've been kept in the loop at all points, and it doesn't go on more than one month. Anything else? Bye...
"Fat? No, I'm efficient!"
Though I agree in sentiment, there's still the case that if you don't eat more than X weight of food, you can't put on more than X amount of weight.
The ones who are happy being fat, fine. The ones who are trying to lose weight and can't because of their "hunger"... that's the problem. Because it's hardly ever a celery that they pig out on, but chocolate and other high-fat foods.
It's still down, in the end, to a question of willpower. If you want to slim, you'll allow yourself to feel a little more hungry and - at the same time - find ways to cure the hunger that don't involve fat.
Your gut is just as adaptable as any other part of you - it can learn, given time. And though I don't want to trivialise the effort of losing weight, especially if you have medical conditions or even just suffer from the inherent medical conditions of being overweight (such as it being more difficult on your joints to exercise), there's still a willpower game at play here.
I'm sure there are people who struggle 24 hours a day against hunger and lose. And I'm sure there are a hundred times as many who win for as long as they want to and then give up. And I'm sure there are a hundred times as many again who say they are trying, and don't even bother.
There are weight-loss TV programs where they "stalk" the contestants. They know they could be watched. They know they have cameras in their house. They know they have to cut down. But still they have midnight snacks and go shopping for high-calorie food (if it's not in the house, at least you have to expend more effort than normal to go get it if you have a craving!).
Not everyone is a lard-ass. But equally not every overweight person struggles against an unbeatable desire to eat only high-calorie food.
Don't see what the hell #4 is supposed to do, to be honest.
But the rest is easier solved with "don't allow in-app purchases".
And so the article, and the quote in the summary, are just plain lying:
"The Silent Power PC is claimed to be the first high-end PC able to ditch noisy electric fans in favor of fully passive cooling."
Bought a no-moving-parts power supply back in... oh, I don't know, 2003 or something. Sold as "cooled by heatpipes", pretty much the same principle - silent, no moving parts, passively cooled, no fans, huge surface areas.
They also did kits for the processor itself but I've also bought P2-era motherboards that were designed to be passively cooled too (same thing, huge heatsink, no fan).
So this is certainly not "the first" in the PC world (unless we're talking about "the first" to use some particular technology that just about replicates what I bought over 10 years ago). Not even close. In fact, it's over a decade out. And going outside the PC world, passively cooled chips are pretty common - you have a tablet or smartphone without a huge stonking fan, no?
The PSU is still working 10 years on if you'd like me to dig it out. I'm sure it wouldn't take much to butcher it to do the same job to the processor, especially if you can safely have it clock itself down to prevent heat being generated in the first place.
Agreed, in principle, but we're still allowed opinions based on experience.
When I've worked in primary and secondary education, state and private, deprived areas and the exact opposite, it's hard to see where the advantage is at all. The above is not a post from ignorance, it's a post from someone deep inside IT inside education, who has had phone calls in my professional position from parents of deprived children begging for technical support (and they got a lot more than they hoped for, and it didn't cost them a bean).
I'm not claiming to know everything, but what I've seen shows an inherent flaw in the "let's give kids computers" charities - they are starting from entirely the wrong premise - that access to even the cheapest of hardware is why the children are having problems. It's not.
A UK-based school IT guy asks:
Which company?
And do they collect?
I work in schools.
I work in IT in schools.
I've only ever worked in IT in schools (or colleges, or tuition centres...).
School computers do not make better students. Home computers do not make better students. Personal computers do not make better students.
If anything, the opposite unless they are regulated... by a teacher... in a classroom... and they have the will to learn. Guess which are the magic factors and which aren't?
Sure, there are disadvantaged children that don't have an Internet connection, a PC, time on it, and can't fill in their homework that the school provides on its website. The number of them is VANISHINGLY small. And, usually, because of much bigger problems that have nothing to do with technology - i.e. the kinds of families that you would find had sold the PC the next week for money to buy something else. They are dozens of charities, government schemes and even schools that do this. It's not taken up en-masse unless you are giving SILLY amounts of money to it, and then it's taken up to save them paying a bill that you could have just paid for them twice over.
And then, when I was a kid 15-20 years ago, I didn't have much access to a PC either. I came out near the top of my school. In IT. It wasn't a burden. In fact, my teachers fretted about my wasting so much time on the computers when they did come in.
Let's get this straight - giving an old recycled PC that someone was throwing out to a kid does not give them anything. I can't give this stuff away, when I throw out dozens of desktops a year, for a reason: you can run old stuff on it, if you're careful. So instead of "no PC", they have "slow PC full of junk that either can't run or is ancient". They're better off with no PC. Sticking it onto the Internet is, again, just a recipe for disaster. Now all that rich online content, tied into the school's cloud systems, requiring all kinds of plugins... they still can't view as intended.
Sticking them on Linux isn't going to help either. I speak as someone who HAS deployed Linux machines in schools, is never without a Linux server somewhere, and has Linux at home. And Windows. And (spit) Macs. And I was an early backer of the Raspberry Pi project. All it means is they won't be able to read their homework in a format that the teacher can send or send their homework in a format that the teacher can read. I *know* that you and *I* can do that, but this are disadvantaged kids with no PC skills stuck on an unfamiliar system that few people can help them with.
STOP GIVING THIS CRAP TO CHILDREN in the first world. Nothing is actually *better* - they then might have to come into school and do stuff like learn. And if the kid is that disadvantaged but able to learn, there are libraries, after-school clubs, lunchtime clubs, or they can negotiate after-hours access with their schools direct - which might just help those parents struggling to leave work in order to pick them up...
Sending this stuff to the third world doesn't help either. They have the same problems, and have to deal with too much junk.
On top of all that, unless you're online it's pointless. The Linux educational software is NOT educational software. It's some geek's idea of educational, conforms to no curriculum whatsoever and, if you're lucky, can be crowbarred to fulfill two or three curriculum requirements over the course of a year. And if you have to put these kids online to do what they need, THAT is the cost and the expense and the problem, not what device they happen to access it from (by the time you are then, any kind of thin-client would work, backed by their school).
Really, we need to find other ways to solve this problem, not just throw old computers at kids. It's not even as useful as throwing old library books at kids.
"You can buy our products individually"
"You can subscribe to all our products for one fee"
"You can buy our special title by subscribing and paying a premium for that one title"
"You can buy our products individually"
Sorry. I don't "subscribe". The value of it rarely lasts long enough to be of any value at all to me.
Magazines? They tend to repeat themselves after a year, then you realise that all the "new" stuff, you now know where to find out. (Did this for PC magazines, Linux magazines, Astronomy magazines, even New Scientist is ludicrously expensive for what it is).
Movies? You get all of the crap, nothing that you actually want. I did the test subscription to Amazon Prime Instant Video. 30 days of "free" movies. We watched 4. Stopped one within ten minutes. Spent HOURS looking through what they had. All the interesting ones were "not included" so you had to buy them anyway. The subscription didn't make it out of the trial period. Was the same back when video rental was the thing - the good movie that you'd been waiting for was unavailable or more expensive, all you could book out was the dross you'd seen a hundred times.
Games? I have Steam. But I don't have a single subscription game. There are even Steam games that I regularly plug money into for DLC and extras, and I have my own personal "monthly Steam allowance". To be honest, not one of the subscription games (or software) have I even looked at past the word "subscription". Nope, never played WoW either. Sorry, but I invest enough back into games I play (by running servers, helping out on the forums, bug-fixing, or buying DLC / extra copies for friends), I'm not paying every month "just because".
I tried OnLive, mostly to prove that it wasn't a sustainable business model to be honest. I played a full-price game on there for free, then went and bought it cheaper elsewhere. The technology worked but was nowhere near the claims they made. And the "lifetime" (3 years only) pass to the game cost more than my buying it outright on Steam.
I don't see any subscription as worthwhile. Once they have your first month of money, they can destroy the value of what you have overnight and you'll feel obliged to keep paying until renewal. It's just not worth it.
If you want to subscribe to EA games, stick some money in a tin every month. Then when EA only have the same crap as usual, you can go elsewhere, and when you have a month without playing, you're under no obligation, still have your money and can play twice as much next month.