Your friend was very very stupid or he got VERY bad legal and financial advice.
He should have given the wife her half of the 401k then declared bankruptcy to wipe out the legal fees. He would have lost all cash savings, but he would have kept his car and house (if he still owned one). This type of civil financial verdict can be wiped out with a bankruptcy claim and 401k's are protected from Legal judgements until the funds are withdrawn. He basically fucked himself over.
these USB killers do way more than a hundred volts. IIRC it was in the thousands and it usually hits them multiple times before you can yank the usb, cycling about once a second. Though there is no amperage behind it the volts come in so quickly that I doubt even ESD protection could block it. When this was demoed it killed even protected computers because it slams it 3-4 times before the person can react and yank it out of the slot.
His confession (recording of the act) makes it unlikely prosecutors will make any deal of any kind. All his bargaining power is gone with that confession. They tend to throw the book at people when they have a confession. If he pleads guilty the Judge might have some sympathy, but if he fights it he'll get the full kit.
If you are going to do something both stupid and illegal don't record yourself doing it.
The recordings are essentially a confession, it's a slam dunk case and he's going to go to jail as a result of his stupidity in doing the action and stupidity in recording it. Had he not recorded it proving this would have been harder and he might have got a plea. With a solid confession on board the DA has no reason to plea and they will throw the book at him.
There's nothing more silly than calling competitive open bidding for power purchase contracts a hair brained idea.
You clearly don't understand either the power market, competitive commercial bidding or how any of this works. Either that or you are a communist who hates the free market. Take your pick.
That $2 billion number you are quoting is bullshit.
Two reactors in under construction in the US in 2016, one at a TVA facility and one in Georgia. Both were on existing nuclear sites, have had approval to build since 1970 and are using existing designs (no regulatory cost whatsoever). Both were canceled half built after they blew through the $2billion projected cost to $4-5billion and were canceled midway through when the in construction cost estimates showed $12-16 billion to finish them after Westinghouse went bankrupt on their fix price contracts.
The under construction reactor in (either Finland or Sweden) is projecting costs of about 8-12 billion euro's or approximately the same range and a similar facility in England came in around the same range.
This is what it costs to build a nuclear reactor. It's not a one off and it's not regulatory costs as all the reactors are on existing sites using already approved designs and sites.
I installed a 9.5KV solar system in 2017. My ROIC (return on invested capital) is running 9.25% with the tax credits and 5.25% without. Both are far better returns then I could get putting the money in the bank or long term deposits. As power cost increases over the years to follow my return will increase. At my current rate of return my system will be paid for in 10 years and I have a 25 year warranty on the panels.
The only thing that would beat that return is investing in the market with significant additional risk.
Xcell energy last summer received competitive bids for 25 year energy supply contracts for Solar and Wind Plus storage that was lower than gas, coal and all other forms of energy.
The Wind + storage bids were at ~3cents/kwh, significantly less than the ~4cents/kwh than a modern combined stage gas generator bid. Solar with storage was nearly the same cost at natural gas. And again, that cost is fixed one constructed and is not dependent on an input fuel cost.
Not much different than the Georgia reactor canceled last year. An already approved location, design and layout.
It was canceled after spending $8billion and it was projected to need another $8billion to finish it. The Georgia rate payers are now paying a couple hundred a year every year for the next 30 years for a reactor that never got built.
This isn't any different than the reactor under construction in Scandinavia (Sweden I think) that's projected cost is nearly 8 billion euro's (roughly $12billion US). Again, sited on an existing reactor site, using an approved design in a country that has little NIMBY opposition.
NIMBY doesn't stop nuclear, cost does. You all want to blame regulation but the simple fact is nuclear reactors are expensive and the only way to make them cheap is to get rid of the containment vessel and anti-terrorist protections.
A modern nuclear reactor using proven 3rd generation technology costs upwards of $16billion dollars to build. A 4th gen reactor or experimental design will likely cost significantly more.
With a $16 billion dollar construction cost, even amortized over 75 years (way longer than feasible given licenses are only 30years) that generates power prices that are near $0.30 a kwh. That price isn't even competitive in Hawaii or Alaska let alone anywhere else. Hell even carbon capture coal where they spend 30% of the energy capturing the C02 is cheaper than nuclear at this point.
You are incorrect and your numbers are a decade old. Gas is only even competative because it's are record low prices of ~$2/mbtu. Historic prices for gas are triple that.
Wind generated power is already cheaper than the average natural gas price generated power without subsidy. And at the rate both Wind and PV solar are dropping in price both will be cheaper than gas generated power (using average gas prices not spot lows) when both subsidies expire in 2024.
And of course gas prices aren't stable, they can fluctuate quite a bit. Though we may have an oversupply of natural gas at the moment which has driven gas prices to record lows, the export terminals that are constructed and under construction are sure to reverse the trend and $6/mbtu gas is probably right around the corner.
One of the strengths of renewable energy is the lack of an input cost, once the facility is constructed the power generated will only be a function of the capital installation costs and maintenance, there is no fuel input cost. So that super cheap wind power built today will be even cheaper in 25 years when the construction costs are amortized out.
There are plenty of Android phones you can buy with unlocked roms (Like Google's own pixel phones) that makes it trivial to install a clean ROM with no google integration.
You could even pay someone to do it for you if you are terrified of flashing a ROM image.
Cost will depend on street type and paving life cycle.
On low traffic streets they can go back and pull the cable out and fill the slot with an elastomeric tar. This will work reasonably well until it's time to mill and fill the surface as part of their pavement maintenance as long as they keep re-sealing it every year it should be fine. Given the local climate they probably don't crack seal yearly like the northern states with freeze thaw cycles so this will likely cost the city more than it would elsewhere where annual crack sealing is common. But even 2 inch wide cracks can be sealed, and the linear cut will make it easier once the cable is gone (the cable would expand/contract at different rates than the surrounding asphalt and sealant).
Two inches isn't far enough down to mill and repave the roadway surface, you'd need to be 4-6 inches down to make that feasible. That's what's so stupid about what they did. They thought you could cut this slot two inches deep and drop a cable in it and it would stay there with different thermal expansion and everything.
Do you believe the ISS is basically a bare room or do you think UV light penetrates into compartments, computers, and the various layers of the station?
Ozone is highly corrosive, if would be a very bad thing to be making it on the space station.
The appropriate response to this issue is simply to examine the colonies of microbiological life and determine if any of them are a threat to the station or it's occupants. You can't sterilize anything humans interact with on a daily basis. It would be an utterly pointless action because the first human back in would immediately recontaminate everything. We are covered in microbiological life, its all over us and we transfer it to everything we touch and with every breath we take, not to mention the toilet transfer issue.
You can't eliminate bacteria and fungi from Humans. Out GI tract is totally dependent on a microbiological fauna. If you kill off that ecosystem you'll die. This isn't an exaggeration, those bacteria are absolutely essential to your ability to digest food and without them you'd either starve to death or die from diarrhea as your GI tract ecosystem collapsed.
Our very lives are dependent on these ecosystems. And as the original author noted it's very very difficult to eliminate micro-biological life from stuff. It's actually a huge process to sterilize space probes so we don't drop microbes on other planetary bodies. The Cassini probe was dropped into Saturn to make sure it didn't contaminate Saturn's moons with microbes because it had not gone through the level of sterilization procedures necessary to guarantee sterility. Some of the Mars rovers didn't go through the level of sterilization that prior probes had and there is a fear in the astronomical community that we could have already contaminated mars with earth life.
In a closed environment like the ISS you're going to end up with everything inside it covered in human bearing bacteria. Not just because of toilet facilities but because our very skin is covered in microbiological life We transfer this ecosystem to everything we touch. The issue is only if these bacteria are harmful, and that is a totally different issue than whether the bacteria exist.
It's kind like the stories you hear on the news where they dramatize how many bacteria are on the sponge in your kitchen sink is higher than your toilet. Because they are trying to scare you into watching the segment they don't bother explaining that the number of bacteria doesn't matter, it's the type of bacteria that is far more important and the bacteria in your kitchen sink are vastly different than the ones in the toilet.
For the truly computer illiterate using Ubuntu is no different than using Linux. The only difference really is that's its easier for the windows user to get substandard help from someone in their family or neighborhood of friends.
I'd actually argue it's far easier to get someone who's totally computer illiterate going on Linux than on Windows precisely because all the major Linux distributions have package managers and distribution systems that make all the common and supported FOSS software available at the click of a button.
We'll see how well your prophecy holds up when you boot that computer in the 2020's and it asks for a credit card for the new monthly windows 365 license you agreed to when you installed Windows 10.
Maybe you're right and no one will have an issue paying MS $10 a month to use windows but I suspect it's going to drive even more people to Chromebooks or Linux.
Congress is doing no such thing. Congress is mixing a pot of shit to inflame perceptions and increase the political divide. They are doing so deliberately by confusing the issue of censorship among the impressionable and stupid.
Any private company has the right to control the views expressed on their private web platforms in any way they see fit. If you are arguing otherwise you are arguing for government control of these platforms, a position that is NOT in the least a conservative platform. The congress critters mixing up this pile of shit are doing so knowing they absolutely intend to block any attempt for legislation that would mandate fair treatment, such as resurrecting the prior federal laws requiring what was called the "fairness doctrine" and hence it's NOTHING but theater meant to stir up feeling in those that don't know any better.
If you don't like these platforms controlling offensive content create your own platform. Any industry funded by advertising (like all these web based platforms) will always be beholden to advertisers and will avoid all controversy including speech that inflames attitudes and/or is offensive.
The current occupant of the whitehouse believes that the best technology is that invented over 100 years ago. It doesn't matter to him that technology has moved on and that BEV's are better than petrol vehicles in almost every way.
The funny thing is, that if the US government pushed BEV's a little harder the US could dominate the world wide automative industry. But because of the current Whitehouse occupant the US is likely to give the BEV and future car market entirely to China.
The Job losses will be phenomenal when China takes over the automotive market due to this shortsided attempt to prop up the fossil fuel industry.
Right to repair was in the past a very bi-partisan issue. In fact there is already legislation requiring it for automobiles that covered tractors in the past. But under the Bush admin when Republicans controlled congress they wrote an exception for Tractors into the law after Deere funneled a bunch of money into Congress. Now Republicans are trying to defend this exception to keep the Deere money flowing even though their constituents want the exception ended.
Deere created this exception and I have no doubt they will fight tooth and nail to avoid the exception being lifted. They make very good money using software and copyright to prevent people from doing something completely legal. It's an abuse of copyright by using the copyright to gain control of another market in the same vein as using a monopoly to gain control of a separate market. This is exactly the same type of abuse the anti-trust laws were created to address in normal markets but copyright abuse makes this possible while laying outside the anti-trust laws protections.
The penalty of abusing a copyright like this should be revocation of the copyright. Deere should lose copyright on all their software for doing this along with any other manufacturer engaged in similar behavior. On top of that it should be perfectly legal for anyone to break their software locks and provide tools to do so.
The important bit is that right to repair should apply to all machinery and transport like this. It's inexcusable that this isn't an abuse of copyright that IMO should terminate the copyright. It's exploiting copyright to provide an additional legal protection to the seller that they wouldn't otherwise have which is a textbook example of abusing the law.
There are legitimate rights that need to be respected, but any customer should be able to modify or break software on any product they buy, as long as they aren't doing so to abuse a warranty or to abuse the copyright (using the software on another unaffiliated product or something similar) beyond repairing, servicing or upgrading a product you own.
The problem here is that Deere and the other companies (like apple) that are opposed to this make massive political donations to make sure these laws die. We need more congress critters that are willing to stand up to these entrenched interests when they are abusing the law to get protections they were never supposed to get.
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Your friend was very very stupid or he got VERY bad legal and financial advice.
He should have given the wife her half of the 401k then declared bankruptcy to wipe out the legal fees. He would have lost all cash savings, but he would have kept his car and house (if he still owned one). This type of civil financial verdict can be wiped out with a bankruptcy claim and 401k's are protected from Legal judgements until the funds are withdrawn. He basically fucked himself over.
these USB killers do way more than a hundred volts. IIRC it was in the thousands and it usually hits them multiple times before you can yank the usb, cycling about once a second. Though there is no amperage behind it the volts come in so quickly that I doubt even ESD protection could block it. When this was demoed it killed even protected computers because it slams it 3-4 times before the person can react and yank it out of the slot.
His confession (recording of the act) makes it unlikely prosecutors will make any deal of any kind. All his bargaining power is gone with that confession. They tend to throw the book at people when they have a confession. If he pleads guilty the Judge might have some sympathy, but if he fights it he'll get the full kit.
If you are going to do something both stupid and illegal don't record yourself doing it.
The recordings are essentially a confession, it's a slam dunk case and he's going to go to jail as a result of his stupidity in doing the action and stupidity in recording it. Had he not recorded it proving this would have been harder and he might have got a plea. With a solid confession on board the DA has no reason to plea and they will throw the book at him.
There's nothing more silly than calling competitive open bidding for power purchase contracts a hair brained idea.
You clearly don't understand either the power market, competitive commercial bidding or how any of this works. Either that or you are a communist who hates the free market. Take your pick.
That $2 billion number you are quoting is bullshit.
Two reactors in under construction in the US in 2016, one at a TVA facility and one in Georgia. Both were on existing nuclear sites, have had approval to build since 1970 and are using existing designs (no regulatory cost whatsoever). Both were canceled half built after they blew through the $2billion projected cost to $4-5billion and were canceled midway through when the in construction cost estimates showed $12-16 billion to finish them after Westinghouse went bankrupt on their fix price contracts.
The under construction reactor in (either Finland or Sweden) is projecting costs of about 8-12 billion euro's or approximately the same range and a similar facility in England came in around the same range.
This is what it costs to build a nuclear reactor. It's not a one off and it's not regulatory costs as all the reactors are on existing sites using already approved designs and sites.
I installed a 9.5KV solar system in 2017. My ROIC (return on invested capital) is running 9.25% with the tax credits and 5.25% without. Both are far better returns then I could get putting the money in the bank or long term deposits. As power cost increases over the years to follow my return will increase. At my current rate of return my system will be paid for in 10 years and I have a 25 year warranty on the panels.
The only thing that would beat that return is investing in the market with significant additional risk.
Xcell energy last summer received competitive bids for 25 year energy supply contracts for Solar and Wind Plus storage that was lower than gas, coal and all other forms of energy.
The Wind + storage bids were at ~3cents/kwh, significantly less than the ~4cents/kwh than a modern combined stage gas generator bid. Solar with storage was nearly the same cost at natural gas. And again, that cost is fixed one constructed and is not dependent on an input fuel cost.
Not much different than the Georgia reactor canceled last year. An already approved location, design and layout.
It was canceled after spending $8billion and it was projected to need another $8billion to finish it. The Georgia rate payers are now paying a couple hundred a year every year for the next 30 years for a reactor that never got built.
This isn't any different than the reactor under construction in Scandinavia (Sweden I think) that's projected cost is nearly 8 billion euro's (roughly $12billion US). Again, sited on an existing reactor site, using an approved design in a country that has little NIMBY opposition.
Nuclear isn't cost effective.
NIMBY doesn't stop nuclear, cost does. You all want to blame regulation but the simple fact is nuclear reactors are expensive and the only way to make them cheap is to get rid of the containment vessel and anti-terrorist protections.
A modern nuclear reactor using proven 3rd generation technology costs upwards of $16billion dollars to build. A 4th gen reactor or experimental design will likely cost significantly more.
With a $16 billion dollar construction cost, even amortized over 75 years (way longer than feasible given licenses are only 30years) that generates power prices that are near $0.30 a kwh. That price isn't even competitive in Hawaii or Alaska let alone anywhere else. Hell even carbon capture coal where they spend 30% of the energy capturing the C02 is cheaper than nuclear at this point.
You are incorrect and your numbers are a decade old. Gas is only even competative because it's are record low prices of ~$2/mbtu. Historic prices for gas are triple that.
Wind generated power is already cheaper than the average natural gas price generated power without subsidy. And at the rate both Wind and PV solar are dropping in price both will be cheaper than gas generated power (using average gas prices not spot lows) when both subsidies expire in 2024.
And of course gas prices aren't stable, they can fluctuate quite a bit. Though we may have an oversupply of natural gas at the moment which has driven gas prices to record lows, the export terminals that are constructed and under construction are sure to reverse the trend and $6/mbtu gas is probably right around the corner.
One of the strengths of renewable energy is the lack of an input cost, once the facility is constructed the power generated will only be a function of the capital installation costs and maintenance, there is no fuel input cost. So that super cheap wind power built today will be even cheaper in 25 years when the construction costs are amortized out.
There are plenty of Android phones you can buy with unlocked roms (Like Google's own pixel phones) that makes it trivial to install a clean ROM with no google integration.
You could even pay someone to do it for you if you are terrified of flashing a ROM image.
Cost will depend on street type and paving life cycle.
On low traffic streets they can go back and pull the cable out and fill the slot with an elastomeric tar. This will work reasonably well until it's time to mill and fill the surface as part of their pavement maintenance as long as they keep re-sealing it every year it should be fine. Given the local climate they probably don't crack seal yearly like the northern states with freeze thaw cycles so this will likely cost the city more than it would elsewhere where annual crack sealing is common. But even 2 inch wide cracks can be sealed, and the linear cut will make it easier once the cable is gone (the cable would expand/contract at different rates than the surrounding asphalt and sealant).
Two inches isn't far enough down to mill and repave the roadway surface, you'd need to be 4-6 inches down to make that feasible. That's what's so stupid about what they did. They thought you could cut this slot two inches deep and drop a cable in it and it would stay there with different thermal expansion and everything.
At least the proved the way not to do it.
Do you believe the ISS is basically a bare room or do you think UV light penetrates into compartments, computers, and the various layers of the station?
You don't think the ISS is actually made of steel or iron based products do you?
The ISS is constructed of plastic and aluminum. I'd be surprised if there was more than 100lbs of steel on the whole station.
Ozone is highly corrosive, if would be a very bad thing to be making it on the space station.
The appropriate response to this issue is simply to examine the colonies of microbiological life and determine if any of them are a threat to the station or it's occupants. You can't sterilize anything humans interact with on a daily basis. It would be an utterly pointless action because the first human back in would immediately recontaminate everything. We are covered in microbiological life, its all over us and we transfer it to everything we touch and with every breath we take, not to mention the toilet transfer issue.
You can't eliminate bacteria and fungi from Humans. Out GI tract is totally dependent on a microbiological fauna. If you kill off that ecosystem you'll die. This isn't an exaggeration, those bacteria are absolutely essential to your ability to digest food and without them you'd either starve to death or die from diarrhea as your GI tract ecosystem collapsed.
Our very lives are dependent on these ecosystems. And as the original author noted it's very very difficult to eliminate micro-biological life from stuff. It's actually a huge process to sterilize space probes so we don't drop microbes on other planetary bodies. The Cassini probe was dropped into Saturn to make sure it didn't contaminate Saturn's moons with microbes because it had not gone through the level of sterilization procedures necessary to guarantee sterility. Some of the Mars rovers didn't go through the level of sterilization that prior probes had and there is a fear in the astronomical community that we could have already contaminated mars with earth life.
In a closed environment like the ISS you're going to end up with everything inside it covered in human bearing bacteria. Not just because of toilet facilities but because our very skin is covered in microbiological life We transfer this ecosystem to everything we touch. The issue is only if these bacteria are harmful, and that is a totally different issue than whether the bacteria exist.
It's kind like the stories you hear on the news where they dramatize how many bacteria are on the sponge in your kitchen sink is higher than your toilet. Because they are trying to scare you into watching the segment they don't bother explaining that the number of bacteria doesn't matter, it's the type of bacteria that is far more important and the bacteria in your kitchen sink are vastly different than the ones in the toilet.
For the truly computer illiterate using Ubuntu is no different than using Linux. The only difference really is that's its easier for the windows user to get substandard help from someone in their family or neighborhood of friends.
I'd actually argue it's far easier to get someone who's totally computer illiterate going on Linux than on Windows precisely because all the major Linux distributions have package managers and distribution systems that make all the common and supported FOSS software available at the click of a button.
We'll see how well your prophecy holds up when you boot that computer in the 2020's and it asks for a credit card for the new monthly windows 365 license you agreed to when you installed Windows 10.
Maybe you're right and no one will have an issue paying MS $10 a month to use windows but I suspect it's going to drive even more people to Chromebooks or Linux.
Congress is doing no such thing. Congress is mixing a pot of shit to inflame perceptions and increase the political divide. They are doing so deliberately by confusing the issue of censorship among the impressionable and stupid.
Any private company has the right to control the views expressed on their private web platforms in any way they see fit. If you are arguing otherwise you are arguing for government control of these platforms, a position that is NOT in the least a conservative platform. The congress critters mixing up this pile of shit are doing so knowing they absolutely intend to block any attempt for legislation that would mandate fair treatment, such as resurrecting the prior federal laws requiring what was called the "fairness doctrine" and hence it's NOTHING but theater meant to stir up feeling in those that don't know any better.
If you don't like these platforms controlling offensive content create your own platform. Any industry funded by advertising (like all these web based platforms) will always be beholden to advertisers and will avoid all controversy including speech that inflames attitudes and/or is offensive.
My credit score doesn't affect my ability to ride public transit, travel get healthcare or do other things the Chinese social credit system does.
The only thing the US credit score affects is your ability to borrow money in all it's many forms.
The current occupant of the whitehouse believes that the best technology is that invented over 100 years ago. It doesn't matter to him that technology has moved on and that BEV's are better than petrol vehicles in almost every way.
The funny thing is, that if the US government pushed BEV's a little harder the US could dominate the world wide automative industry. But because of the current Whitehouse occupant the US is likely to give the BEV and future car market entirely to China.
The Job losses will be phenomenal when China takes over the automotive market due to this shortsided attempt to prop up the fossil fuel industry.
Right to repair was in the past a very bi-partisan issue. In fact there is already legislation requiring it for automobiles that covered tractors in the past. But under the Bush admin when Republicans controlled congress they wrote an exception for Tractors into the law after Deere funneled a bunch of money into Congress. Now Republicans are trying to defend this exception to keep the Deere money flowing even though their constituents want the exception ended.
Deere created this exception and I have no doubt they will fight tooth and nail to avoid the exception being lifted. They make very good money using software and copyright to prevent people from doing something completely legal. It's an abuse of copyright by using the copyright to gain control of another market in the same vein as using a monopoly to gain control of a separate market. This is exactly the same type of abuse the anti-trust laws were created to address in normal markets but copyright abuse makes this possible while laying outside the anti-trust laws protections.
The penalty of abusing a copyright like this should be revocation of the copyright. Deere should lose copyright on all their software for doing this along with any other manufacturer engaged in similar behavior. On top of that it should be perfectly legal for anyone to break their software locks and provide tools to do so.
The important bit is that right to repair should apply to all machinery and transport like this. It's inexcusable that this isn't an abuse of copyright that IMO should terminate the copyright. It's exploiting copyright to provide an additional legal protection to the seller that they wouldn't otherwise have which is a textbook example of abusing the law.
There are legitimate rights that need to be respected, but any customer should be able to modify or break software on any product they buy, as long as they aren't doing so to abuse a warranty or to abuse the copyright (using the software on another unaffiliated product or something similar) beyond repairing, servicing or upgrading a product you own.
The problem here is that Deere and the other companies (like apple) that are opposed to this make massive political donations to make sure these laws die. We need more congress critters that are willing to stand up to these entrenched interests when they are abusing the law to get protections they were never supposed to get.