85% of the power delivered to my house is zero-carbon-emission, with 58% of it being categorized as "renewable" (wind, solar, and small hydro). 27% is from large hydro. 15% is "unspecified", likely purchased on the open market to cover spikes in demand.
The local power company will be offering 100% carbon-free power later this year for an extra cent-per-kilowatt hour. I intend to switch to that, as well as adding a grid-tied solar system to the roof of my house (at the very least, it'd lower my bill and make using air conditioning much less expensive).
So, while there's likely still some carbon emission due to constructing the various generating stations, and in the 15% of "unspecified" sources of power, the electricity I use to power my Chevy Bolt is dramatically cleaner than burning gasoline, and any emissions take place relatively far from where I live, drive, and work. More effective emissions controls can be installed on a stationary power plant far more easily than on size-and-weight-constrained mobile vehicles. Charging at night, during off-peak times, can be considerably cheaper and help balance power consumption, thus increasing the efficiency of the whole system.
Electric vehicles have a dramatic advantage over gas-powered vehicles, in that the sources of electric power can be incrementally changed and improved over time without needing to change anything on the consumer's end. For example, coal power plants could be gradually shut down and replaced with natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. Thus, the energy used to power people's home, work, and vehicles would become incrementally cleaner. That's not really feasible with gas or diesel vehicles, since any replacement fuel would need to be compatible with existing engines, widely available, etc. So far, that's not really happened.
From that 75 pounds of coal, only 55.2kwh make it to the battery.
Fair enough. Of course, the well-to-wheel costs for gasoline is non-trivial either. In California, for example, coal only makes up a fraction of the total power supply, at least from PG&E, so the electricity is relatively clean.
" "unspecified" other sources. Sounds much less polluting than gasoline."
Such sources include bagasse or other crop waste, sewage and landfill gas, sawdust/wood waste (from wood manufacturing) and black liquor (paper production). Don't confuse renewable with clean.
True, but renewable stuff is generally closer to CO2-neutral than gasoline production and use: crops will still get harvested, sewage and landfills will still get used, wood products and paper will still get manufactured, etc., so using the waste streams from those things as fuel for power generation makes a lot of sense. Additionally, power plants can be built or refitted with pollution controls that wouldn't be effective on millions of small, mobile engines and, as I mentioned before, electrons are fungible and it's possible to incrementally improve the cleanliness of the power generated for the grid without having to make wholesale changes on the consumer side once EVs are more widely used.
To me, that latter part is the key advantage of EVs: even in areas that generate power from relatively polluting sources now, the deployment of EVs will centralize emissions at large power plants with better pollution controls and that are typically relatively far from populated areas rather than right at in areas where people live. Over time, those polluting sources can be upgraded or replaced and all EVs on the road would immediately benefit.
"switching all gasoline cars to something that's compatible with their engines and fuel systems but is less polluting and damaging to the environment would be quite difficult."
? Ethanol... E85 and flex fuel cars already exist, most modern cars are already E10 or more compatible.
Sure, but E85 sucks for reasons that "drinkypoo" mentions in this thread. I like the idea of biodiesel that's drop-in compatible with existing engines, but that doesn't seem to have panned out as expected, plus it does little for the particulate emissions from diesel engines. Liquid fuels have many advantages for cars (e.g. fast fill-ups, high energy density, etc.), and gasoline has the advantage of essentially-universal availability in terms of gas stations being available in every little town across the country, but that also means there's a lot of inertia to switching to other fuels that becomes problematic.
As battery tech improves and the grid becomes cleaner in more areas, EVs look to be more and more practical for more and more users. That has a big appeal to me.
Probably takes 2000 pounds of coal to make the electricity to charge it up once?
Especially the coal electricity California imports from Utah.
The math's pretty easy: according to http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm, it takes about one pound of coal to generate one kilowatt hour of electricity. The long range battery has a capacity of 75kWh, so that'd be about 75 pounds of coal. Assuming a gas vehicle gets 50mpg, the gasoline needed to travel 310 miles weighs 39 pounds, a far cry from your 2000 pounds claim. Either way, a centrally-located power plant would be able to more readily control its emissions than a smaller, mobile gasoline engine.
Depending on your power mix, that's a worst-case scenario. In California, which you mention, PG&E generates ~70% of its power from renewable and greenhouse gas-free sources, like nuclear, hydro, and unspecified "renewable" sources. 17% is from natural gas, which is very much cleaner than gasoline or coal, and "unspecified" other sources. Sounds much less polluting than gasoline.
EVs have the advantage that the source of the power feeding the grid can be changed without requiring all users to switch to something else: switching all gasoline cars to something that's compatible with their engines and fuel systems but is less polluting and damaging to the environment would be quite difficult. Replacing aging coal power plants with cleaner-burning natural gas plants dramatically reduces emissions while still pushing the same electrons through wires. Adding nuclear, wind, solar, etc. can further improve the cleanliness of electricity supply without any change from consumers.
This. I used to have a 125cc scooter back in my college days. Very handy and efficient, to be sure, but it was also lacking in emissions controls. I think it had a very basic catalytic converter in the exhaust system, but nothing near as advanced as a standard car, and so the emissions were considerably greater.
My Honda generator which I use in emergencies is similar: it has no emissions control whatsoever, though it's exempted from even California's strict emissions-control regime because it's a very small, portable engine and is not intended for continuous use.
In the next few months I may be moving to California for work (if I get the job I've applied to, fingers crossed!) and am seriously looking at electric vehicles. They work well with my commute and my wife would have a standard gas-powered hybrid for longer-range trips that may be impractical for the EV (though my hope is charging infrastructure will improve in the next few years). The electric company there provides a power mix that's about 70% renewable or greenhouse-gas-free in terms of how it's generated: 12% large hydro, 24% nuclear, and 33% "renewable" (without additional details). The rest is a mix of natural gas (17%, and which is far cleaner-burning than gasoline), and "unspecified" (14%). That's not bad. In addition, as the power sources to the grid get cleaner, EVs automatically get cleaner.
Only downside: California electricity is considerably more expensive than in the rest of the country (though still cheaper than gasoline on a per-mile basis) unless I get a special time-of-use plan with cheap night-time charging rates. We'll see. I may end up being able to charge at work for free.
Agreed. I liked Fallout 3 a lot (1 and 2 are great as well, but aren't FPS). Fallout New Vegas was nice, but got really repetitive after a while. I played it all the way through, but it didn't really have the replay value I wanted.
I started playing Fallout 4, and it looks promising, but the "fuel" mechanics for the power armor is a bit annoying (though not deal-breaking). Alas, finishing my PhD got in the way, so I haven't had a chance to play it. Elite: Dangerous, a space sim, has my current attention but I'll likely rotate to another game soonish.
I concur. Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 are a lot of fun, though I prefer 1 and 2 over 3 most days. I really enjoy the character development and the environments, though I admit some of the levels on ME1 are a bit "cookie-cutter" (you find yourself storming the same planetary bases over and over), but otherwise the games are a ton of fun. I keep going back to them every year or so.
ME: Andromeda is, so far, less enjoyable than the earlier ones.
The original Deus Ex and its modern sequels are great fun, as are the Half Life series.
Borderlands and its sequels are a hell of a lot of fun, and a lot more casual.
If they want it gone, they can simply seize the domain name or add filters. I keep hearing news about "controversial" sites which "somehow" are still up no matter how many news articles are written about them about how illegal they are. If they actually want a site done, it's gone within seconds.
Under what jurisdiction would they seize the domain names? Sci-Hub operates under many domains, including those in.ac (Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, a group of islands in the South Atlantic),.bz (Belize, a Central American country),.cc (the Cocos/Keeling Islands in the Pacific), among others. Of those,.ac has a connection to the UK due to the islands being a UK territory, and.cc's operations are run by VeriSign, a US company.
The site itself is hosted in Russia, who is unlikely to care about US or EU takedown requests.
Yes, I understand that the peer review and publication process has to be paid for, but restricting access to the fruits of scientific progress -- and therefore also limiting further progress! -- is the wrong way to do it.
In my field (physics and meteorite research), peer reviewers work for free. They're not paid by the journal, though I'd argue that they should be paid at least a reasonable fee for their time and expertise.
And yes, the publication process must be paid for, and that's quite reasonable. Still, the journals charge far more for subscriptions than the cost of typesetting, printing, binding, distribution, and a modest profit.
Personally, I prefer to publish in the journal maintained by the scholarly society relevant to my field rather than the other major journal in the field that's published by Elsevier, even though the latter has a slightly higher impact factor. The society journal is essentially the journal-of-record for the field and their publication costs are quite minimal. They contract with an outside publisher (one of the big publishers, but who's remarkably non-gangster-like in their operations) to actually handle the printing, distribution, and online access, but otherwise maintain control of the content and policies, and strongly push for open access.
Yeah, it's very strange. I contacted a few of the people sending out CVs, and they seem legitimate if a bit naive. From what I can gather, most tend to be either Indian or Pakistani, are in the UAE on a short-term visa, and are looking for employment. Most tend to be engineering-types, while some have been for administrative office staff. There seems to be no specific type of employment that they're looking for: they're not all, for example, civil engineers, electrical engineers, etc. -- the applicants have a wide variety of skills and aren't looking for a specific project.
They either send their CVs directly to me from their own mail accounts or, more commonly, there appears to be some mailing list host to which they submit their message and CV and it sends it out to a bunch of (presumed) employers. The host inserts some footers (e.g. "To unsubscribe, click here...) but it changes every week or two, while keeping the same style, suggesting the same sending organization is just rotating through things in a shady way. Very weird. The ones who send me their CVs directly can't provide any specific details as to where they collected my address.
While I don't have a LinkedIn profile, I'm not particularly careful about where I publicly post my email address (see this post, for example), so I get a fair bit of spam and rely on my spam filters to do their thing (which they do). Still, I thought this was a bit odd as it wasn't the typical pharma spammers, Nigerian scammers, etc., but seemingly-ordinary people (and sometimes a shady mailing list provider).
I have [firstname]@[myslashdotusername].com. My domain name is now 18 years old and, outside of certain administrative addresses like postmaster@, abuse@, etc. (all of which forward to my address), mine is the only email address that has ever existed on the domain.
Even so, I occasionally get seemingly-legitimate people entering my address for things like an appointment at an Apple Store to get their iDevice repaired and for other purposes. Fortunately not as much as the original poster, but it does happen on occasion. I usually end up canceling the appointments and whatnot just so they stop. Very odd, as they have very different names than I.
Also annoying: somehow my email address has gotten around as someone in Dubai who is a position to offer employment, so I get tons of unsolicited CVs and cookie-cutter job applications from people living in Dubai. When asked, they say they received my email address at a job fair, trade show, etc. I've not yet had the pleasure of visiting the UAE, so I have no idea how my email has gotten around in those circles. Somehow it's also been picked up by those offering real estate and other services in the UAE, so I get a bunch of spam relating to that. Very odd.
I also have [myslashdotusername]@ and [myslashdotusername1]@gmail.com, and have had them since Gmail first started (both were invite accounts). I mostly got them to reserve the name and, later, for other Google services like YouTube and Google Voice. I occasionally get some guy in Australia, oddly enough, who has [myslashdotusername01]@gmail.com, but either he or the people he correspond with omit the digit 0 and I get his mail. I contacted him through other means (one of the emails "he" received included his phone number) and he is more careful now, but there's occasional screw-ups. Since I don't use the email address for email, I have an auto-responder set saying "If you're trying to reach [guy] in Australia, you have the wrong address."
And yet, my u-Blox NEO-M8T module can receive GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo signals simultaneously, compute a fix, and provide a timing signal +/- 50ns, and still draws less than 67 mA as an absolute maximum. GPS ASICs use surprisingly little power.
Assuming the iPhone battery is 2000 mAh and isn't using other power (a poor assumption, but we'll go with it), the battery has enough energy to power such a GPS receiver for over a day.
Let's say someone uses their iPhone enough to drain the battery in 12 hours. That's an average current of 166 mA. With the GPS enabled and using 67 mA, that's a total of 233 mA: a 40% increase in the amount of power used, and would drain the battery in 8.6 hours.
I have no idea what GPS is used in the iPhone, and assume it's built into the CPU...but it really shouldn't use more power than the M8T. The fact that it does -- as do those in most (all?) Android phones -- surprises me.
Windows started with a brain-damaged USB subsystem that wants to freaking re-install a driver completely if you merely plug a device into another port. Sometimes that's useful when a particular driver instance gets fucked. Windows has maintained that brain damage for over 15 years since then.
Even worse, if the USB subsystem needs to assign a 'Com' port to a USB connection, it will assign a new Com port (Com4, Com5, Com6... Com28) to the same peripheral each time it's plugged into a different USB port on the machine. This can get ridiculous if you, say, are working with an Arduino and lose track of which USB connector you plugged it into last.
It also creates a mess if you have USB to RS-232C adaptors that you mix-and-match to get legacy ports. Eventually you have to dig into the 'Device Manager' and force it to display unconnected drivers to clear out a bunch of the old driver instances.
Depends on the USB-to-Serial converter. My PL2303-based ones get new COM port numbers whenever I switch physical USB ports, as do my CH340s, but my FTDI and CP2102 based adapters have per-device unique serial numbers, so the system can recognize it's the same device even when you switch USB ports. Very handy.
Some versions of the PL2303 will let you define a unique serial number (by default the option is to not have a unique serial number).
Your bank makes you fill out and sign a form for that? Shit, I have cards with 4 different banks (5 if you count store cards through Synchrony, but I've never dealt with fraud on those cards) and all 4 of them call me if they think a transaction is fraudulent; I can press 1 to verify the transaction or 2 to speak with a representative about potential fraud. All 4 banks I deal with have this system, and it works well; I've encountered actual fraud on cards from each of those banks and it's always been a matter of simply telling them the transaction wasn't initiated by me. Transaction immediately reversed, new card arrives in 2 days, nothing to fill out or sign.
Of course, due diligence, when they call I refuse to provide any account details and I check my account online to ensure what they're saying matches what I'm seeing before I confirm or deny anything. If they ask for account details, I ask their extension and tell them I'll call back at the number on the back of my card. Never provide personal information or payment/account details on an incoming call, because caller ID can be faked.
To be fair, I haven't had any fraudulent charges in several years: it's quite possible my bank may have such a system now, but I haven't ever had to use it (fingers crossed). The last time was something like 10 years ago, and they immediately froze the account when I called (or did they call me? I don't recall the exact details.) and sent me a new card. The new card came with a little form that itemized the disputed charges and wanted me to (a) verify that those are the charges in question, (b) sign at the bottom to attest to that, and (c) mail it back at their expense (they included a prepaid envelope). I'm sure it was just for the lawyers. Either way, it only took a moment.
I, too, refuse to provide account details to random callers for the same reason you do.
Although somewhat snarky, the subject line sums up my opinion pretty succinctly: as an individual, does it really matter much?
If my credit card gets compromised, by law the most I'm liable for is $50 (and my bank's policy is that I have $0 liability for fraudulent charges). On the few occasions, when my card information has been misused, the transactions were reversed and a new card in my wallet within a day or two. All I had to do was fill out a form saying "I didn't make these charges.", sign it, and send it to the bank. A mild irritation, to be sure, but hardly a big deal. With chip cards now commonplace in the US, simple cloning of cards is less of an issue than it was.
Legally, I seem to recall that debit cards have somewhat less protection, but banks often extend their $0 liability policy to them as well, so long as you report it being lost or stolen within a reasonable time. Still, I dislike these since one is not merely disputing whether or not one owes money to the bank, but rather if one should get one's own money back.
As for bank transfers and the like, I'd like it if the US would add "push" transfers like European banks do, rather than the "payee pull" system it currently has. Still, my understanding is that one is still protected from unauthorized withdraws from one's bank account.
In short: I'm not terribly concerned about my financial information being abused by criminals, as the law and bank policies offer significant legal protections from fraudulent activity. Any such issues are a minor inconvenience. Of course, one should take reasonable precautions, but in general it's not a big deal. I'm a lot more concerned about criminals gaining access to difficult-to-change/cancel things like one's social security number, with which they could apply for new, unknown-to-you accounts in your name. That's much more of a hassle to resolve than simply having a credit card stolen or a bad guy making an unauthorized debit from one's account.
For example, I can look at my old university's computer society's CT log and see that they switched from StartCom to Let's Encrypt when everyone stopped trusting StartCom last year and see that their last three certificates all have different public keys, which implies that either someone is rapidly rolling over certs for no reason and is a numpty, or that someone else is playing silly buggers.
That seems pretty reasonable: all of the listed certs from 2016-09-23 to the present (except on 2017-05-21, I have no idea what's going on there) have been replaced at 2-month intervals, which is in line with the recommendations and when the reference implementation of their ACME client (certbot) renews certs (the certs are valid for 90 days and are renewed after 60 days). Each renewal involves the generation of a new public/private keypair. All in all, seems pretty reasonable.
While I appreciate the necessity for manually adding roots (e.g. for internal, corporate resources), I dislike HTTPS snooping and its ability to override baked-in protections against phishing and impersonation of major sites like Google (among many other reasons to oppose such things).
That said, it's one thing for a company to deploy such a system with a corresponding company-owned root across company-owned computers, but another thing entirely for a government to do the same thing to all (or a substantial fraction of) people within its borders. The latter is, with the exception of China and maybe North Korea, bordering on infeasible.
An individual user affected by a one-time event probably won't know, but depending on the remote site and browser used by the user, it may be still be detectable, particularly if used on a larger scale.
For example, Chrome comes with information about authorized CAs and intermediates used by Google baked-into the browser itself, and has since 2011. It will refuse to connect to a "Google" site using an unauthorized certificate (unless manually added by an administrator, for things like SSL interceptors used at businesses, but unlikely in use on a wide scale on the general internet). It sends telemetry back to Google about any bad certs that it sees for Google properties (that's one of the ways they learned about the DigiNotar compromise), and I wouldn't be surprised if such information was also checked for other major sites.
Many CAs also submit records to public Certificate Transparency logs. Google, in particular, uses its standard web crawlers to feed data about certificates it sees into CT logs and has been strongly encouraging (and requiring, in some cases) CAs to submit data to CT logs. This makes detection of falsely-issued certificates quite easy. Perhaps not detectable fast enough to stop an individual, targeted attack, but it should be enough to detect any medium-scale attack on the public internet.
I have Huawei USB cellular modem that identifies itself simultaneously as: 1. USB mass storage, if one has a microSD card in the internal slot. This is handy for storing files and whatnot on the stick. 2. As a CD-ROM drive with a virtual CD containing the drivers needed for the cellular modem functionality, so the user can install the drivers needed while only possessing the stick itself (e.g. no real CD, no internet download, etc.). 3. As a cellular modem.
PAR2 not a filesystem, but rather a means of generating error-correction codes to detect and repair damage to files.
The actual PAR2 algorithm hasn't changed, though development for PAR3 is ongoing. It's simply that one particular implementation, QuickPar, is obsolete, while MultiPar, a similar program that is completely compatible is more modern.
But for infrequently accessed data, AWS Glacier offers the same durability of S3 for only $0.004/GB or $4/TB/month. There's an infrequent access tier in between those two for $12.50/TB/month.
Volume discounts kick in above 50TB.
Online.net's C14 service is even cheaper, at EUR 0.002/GB/month plus EUR 0.01/GB for "operations" (such as creating an archive from the temporary staging area, manually verifying archives on demand, or recovering an archive), and offers the same 99.999999999% durability as Glacier. No bandwidth costs and no complicated retrieval speed costs like Glacier, and you can use rsync to upload to the staging area. Naturally, they perform behind-the-scenes error checking and repair, but the manually-selected verification process is nice to explicitly verify that things are intact.
They offer an "Enterprise" level with even more durability for increased costs (EUR 0.004/GB/month + EUR 0.025/GB for operations), as well as a new "Intensive" level that costs EUR 0.005/GB/month with no operations fees (it's intended for more frequent accesses to backed-up data).
Online.net is owned by Iliad, who in turn is owned by Free, a major French telecom, so the risk of suddenly going out of business is low.
Disclosure: I'm a happy C14 user, but otherwise have no connection to the company.
Seriously 0.2 is nothing and if that's thrice the limit, then the limit is ridiculously low.
Love from Germany, where the limit is 0.5.
According to this site, the blood alcohol limit in Germany is 0.05%, not 0.5%. That's a factor of ten difference. The limit in the US, according to the same site, is 0.08%, which is even higher than Germany.
The driver described in this article had a BAC four times the legal limit in Germany.
Because that's how they did it before and they consider it "safer" in the context of not making uneccessary changes this soon to the leap second. In the future they plan to do it 24 hours in advance:
Although we decided it would be safest for Google's infrastructure to handle the 2016 leap second using a 20-hour smear, the same way we handled the leap seconds in 2012 and 2015, this is not the only smear that works well. Many organizations use smeared clocks, and it would be helpful if the smears were the same. After all, the purpose of clocks is to read the same time in different places.
We would like to propose to the community, as the best practice for leap seconds in the future, a 24-hour linear smear from noon to noon UTC. We plan to use this smear starting from leap second #38, which is likely to be in 2018.
Slashdot Mirror
85% of the power delivered to my house is zero-carbon-emission, with 58% of it being categorized as "renewable" (wind, solar, and small hydro). 27% is from large hydro. 15% is "unspecified", likely purchased on the open market to cover spikes in demand.
The local power company will be offering 100% carbon-free power later this year for an extra cent-per-kilowatt hour. I intend to switch to that, as well as adding a grid-tied solar system to the roof of my house (at the very least, it'd lower my bill and make using air conditioning much less expensive).
So, while there's likely still some carbon emission due to constructing the various generating stations, and in the 15% of "unspecified" sources of power, the electricity I use to power my Chevy Bolt is dramatically cleaner than burning gasoline, and any emissions take place relatively far from where I live, drive, and work. More effective emissions controls can be installed on a stationary power plant far more easily than on size-and-weight-constrained mobile vehicles. Charging at night, during off-peak times, can be considerably cheaper and help balance power consumption, thus increasing the efficiency of the whole system.
Electric vehicles have a dramatic advantage over gas-powered vehicles, in that the sources of electric power can be incrementally changed and improved over time without needing to change anything on the consumer's end. For example, coal power plants could be gradually shut down and replaced with natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. Thus, the energy used to power people's home, work, and vehicles would become incrementally cleaner. That's not really feasible with gas or diesel vehicles, since any replacement fuel would need to be compatible with existing engines, widely available, etc. So far, that's not really happened.
From that 75 pounds of coal, only 55.2kwh make it to the battery.
Fair enough. Of course, the well-to-wheel costs for gasoline is non-trivial either. In California, for example, coal only makes up a fraction of the total power supply, at least from PG&E, so the electricity is relatively clean.
" "unspecified" other sources. Sounds much less polluting than gasoline."
Such sources include bagasse or other crop waste, sewage and landfill gas, sawdust/wood waste (from wood manufacturing) and black liquor (paper production). Don't confuse renewable with clean.
True, but renewable stuff is generally closer to CO2-neutral than gasoline production and use: crops will still get harvested, sewage and landfills will still get used, wood products and paper will still get manufactured, etc., so using the waste streams from those things as fuel for power generation makes a lot of sense. Additionally, power plants can be built or refitted with pollution controls that wouldn't be effective on millions of small, mobile engines and, as I mentioned before, electrons are fungible and it's possible to incrementally improve the cleanliness of the power generated for the grid without having to make wholesale changes on the consumer side once EVs are more widely used.
To me, that latter part is the key advantage of EVs: even in areas that generate power from relatively polluting sources now, the deployment of EVs will centralize emissions at large power plants with better pollution controls and that are typically relatively far from populated areas rather than right at in areas where people live. Over time, those polluting sources can be upgraded or replaced and all EVs on the road would immediately benefit.
"switching all gasoline cars to something that's compatible with their engines and fuel systems but is less polluting and damaging to the environment would be quite difficult."
? Ethanol... E85 and flex fuel cars already exist, most modern cars are already E10 or more compatible.
Sure, but E85 sucks for reasons that "drinkypoo" mentions in this thread. I like the idea of biodiesel that's drop-in compatible with existing engines, but that doesn't seem to have panned out as expected, plus it does little for the particulate emissions from diesel engines. Liquid fuels have many advantages for cars (e.g. fast fill-ups, high energy density, etc.), and gasoline has the advantage of essentially-universal availability in terms of gas stations being available in every little town across the country, but that also means there's a lot of inertia to switching to other fuels that becomes problematic.
As battery tech improves and the grid becomes cleaner in more areas, EVs look to be more and more practical for more and more users. That has a big appeal to me.
So how much actual coal is that per mile?
Probably takes 2000 pounds of coal to make the electricity to charge it up once?
Especially the coal electricity California imports from Utah.
The math's pretty easy: according to http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm, it takes about one pound of coal to generate one kilowatt hour of electricity. The long range battery has a capacity of 75kWh, so that'd be about 75 pounds of coal. Assuming a gas vehicle gets 50mpg, the gasoline needed to travel 310 miles weighs 39 pounds, a far cry from your 2000 pounds claim. Either way, a centrally-located power plant would be able to more readily control its emissions than a smaller, mobile gasoline engine.
Depending on your power mix, that's a worst-case scenario. In California, which you mention, PG&E generates ~70% of its power from renewable and greenhouse gas-free sources, like nuclear, hydro, and unspecified "renewable" sources. 17% is from natural gas, which is very much cleaner than gasoline or coal, and "unspecified" other sources. Sounds much less polluting than gasoline.
EVs have the advantage that the source of the power feeding the grid can be changed without requiring all users to switch to something else: switching all gasoline cars to something that's compatible with their engines and fuel systems but is less polluting and damaging to the environment would be quite difficult. Replacing aging coal power plants with cleaner-burning natural gas plants dramatically reduces emissions while still pushing the same electrons through wires. Adding nuclear, wind, solar, etc. can further improve the cleanliness of electricity supply without any change from consumers.
This. I used to have a 125cc scooter back in my college days. Very handy and efficient, to be sure, but it was also lacking in emissions controls. I think it had a very basic catalytic converter in the exhaust system, but nothing near as advanced as a standard car, and so the emissions were considerably greater.
My Honda generator which I use in emergencies is similar: it has no emissions control whatsoever, though it's exempted from even California's strict emissions-control regime because it's a very small, portable engine and is not intended for continuous use.
In the next few months I may be moving to California for work (if I get the job I've applied to, fingers crossed!) and am seriously looking at electric vehicles. They work well with my commute and my wife would have a standard gas-powered hybrid for longer-range trips that may be impractical for the EV (though my hope is charging infrastructure will improve in the next few years). The electric company there provides a power mix that's about 70% renewable or greenhouse-gas-free in terms of how it's generated: 12% large hydro, 24% nuclear, and 33% "renewable" (without additional details). The rest is a mix of natural gas (17%, and which is far cleaner-burning than gasoline), and "unspecified" (14%). That's not bad. In addition, as the power sources to the grid get cleaner, EVs automatically get cleaner.
Only downside: California electricity is considerably more expensive than in the rest of the country (though still cheaper than gasoline on a per-mile basis) unless I get a special time-of-use plan with cheap night-time charging rates. We'll see. I may end up being able to charge at work for free.
Agreed. I liked Fallout 3 a lot (1 and 2 are great as well, but aren't FPS). Fallout New Vegas was nice, but got really repetitive after a while. I played it all the way through, but it didn't really have the replay value I wanted.
I started playing Fallout 4, and it looks promising, but the "fuel" mechanics for the power armor is a bit annoying (though not deal-breaking). Alas, finishing my PhD got in the way, so I haven't had a chance to play it. Elite: Dangerous, a space sim, has my current attention but I'll likely rotate to another game soonish.
I concur. Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 are a lot of fun, though I prefer 1 and 2 over 3 most days. I really enjoy the character development and the environments, though I admit some of the levels on ME1 are a bit "cookie-cutter" (you find yourself storming the same planetary bases over and over), but otherwise the games are a ton of fun. I keep going back to them every year or so.
ME: Andromeda is, so far, less enjoyable than the earlier ones.
The original Deus Ex and its modern sequels are great fun, as are the Half Life series.
Borderlands and its sequels are a hell of a lot of fun, and a lot more casual.
If they want it gone, they can simply seize the domain name or add filters. I keep hearing news about "controversial" sites which "somehow" are still up no matter how many news articles are written about them about how illegal they are. If they actually want a site done, it's gone within seconds.
Under what jurisdiction would they seize the domain names? Sci-Hub operates under many domains, including those in .ac (Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, a group of islands in the South Atlantic), .bz (Belize, a Central American country), .cc (the Cocos/Keeling Islands in the Pacific), among others. Of those, .ac has a connection to the UK due to the islands being a UK territory, and .cc's operations are run by VeriSign, a US company.
The site itself is hosted in Russia, who is unlikely to care about US or EU takedown requests.
It's also available over Tor, so good luck.
Seizing the names isn't really feasible.
Yes, I understand that the peer review and publication process has to be paid for, but restricting access to the fruits of scientific progress -- and therefore also limiting further progress! -- is the wrong way to do it.
In my field (physics and meteorite research), peer reviewers work for free. They're not paid by the journal, though I'd argue that they should be paid at least a reasonable fee for their time and expertise.
And yes, the publication process must be paid for, and that's quite reasonable. Still, the journals charge far more for subscriptions than the cost of typesetting, printing, binding, distribution, and a modest profit.
Personally, I prefer to publish in the journal maintained by the scholarly society relevant to my field rather than the other major journal in the field that's published by Elsevier, even though the latter has a slightly higher impact factor. The society journal is essentially the journal-of-record for the field and their publication costs are quite minimal. They contract with an outside publisher (one of the big publishers, but who's remarkably non-gangster-like in their operations) to actually handle the printing, distribution, and online access, but otherwise maintain control of the content and policies, and strongly push for open access.
Yeah, it's very strange. I contacted a few of the people sending out CVs, and they seem legitimate if a bit naive. From what I can gather, most tend to be either Indian or Pakistani, are in the UAE on a short-term visa, and are looking for employment. Most tend to be engineering-types, while some have been for administrative office staff. There seems to be no specific type of employment that they're looking for: they're not all, for example, civil engineers, electrical engineers, etc. -- the applicants have a wide variety of skills and aren't looking for a specific project.
They either send their CVs directly to me from their own mail accounts or, more commonly, there appears to be some mailing list host to which they submit their message and CV and it sends it out to a bunch of (presumed) employers. The host inserts some footers (e.g. "To unsubscribe, click here...) but it changes every week or two, while keeping the same style, suggesting the same sending organization is just rotating through things in a shady way. Very weird. The ones who send me their CVs directly can't provide any specific details as to where they collected my address.
While I don't have a LinkedIn profile, I'm not particularly careful about where I publicly post my email address (see this post, for example), so I get a fair bit of spam and rely on my spam filters to do their thing (which they do). Still, I thought this was a bit odd as it wasn't the typical pharma spammers, Nigerian scammers, etc., but seemingly-ordinary people (and sometimes a shady mailing list provider).
I have [firstname]@[myslashdotusername].com. My domain name is now 18 years old and, outside of certain administrative addresses like postmaster@, abuse@, etc. (all of which forward to my address), mine is the only email address that has ever existed on the domain.
Even so, I occasionally get seemingly-legitimate people entering my address for things like an appointment at an Apple Store to get their iDevice repaired and for other purposes. Fortunately not as much as the original poster, but it does happen on occasion. I usually end up canceling the appointments and whatnot just so they stop. Very odd, as they have very different names than I.
Also annoying: somehow my email address has gotten around as someone in Dubai who is a position to offer employment, so I get tons of unsolicited CVs and cookie-cutter job applications from people living in Dubai. When asked, they say they received my email address at a job fair, trade show, etc. I've not yet had the pleasure of visiting the UAE, so I have no idea how my email has gotten around in those circles. Somehow it's also been picked up by those offering real estate and other services in the UAE, so I get a bunch of spam relating to that. Very odd.
I also have [myslashdotusername]@ and [myslashdotusername1]@gmail.com, and have had them since Gmail first started (both were invite accounts). I mostly got them to reserve the name and, later, for other Google services like YouTube and Google Voice. I occasionally get some guy in Australia, oddly enough, who has [myslashdotusername01]@gmail.com, but either he or the people he correspond with omit the digit 0 and I get his mail. I contacted him through other means (one of the emails "he" received included his phone number) and he is more careful now, but there's occasional screw-ups. Since I don't use the email address for email, I have an auto-responder set saying "If you're trying to reach [guy] in Australia, you have the wrong address."
And yet, my u-Blox NEO-M8T module can receive GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo signals simultaneously, compute a fix, and provide a timing signal +/- 50ns, and still draws less than 67 mA as an absolute maximum. GPS ASICs use surprisingly little power.
Assuming the iPhone battery is 2000 mAh and isn't using other power (a poor assumption, but we'll go with it), the battery has enough energy to power such a GPS receiver for over a day.
Let's say someone uses their iPhone enough to drain the battery in 12 hours. That's an average current of 166 mA. With the GPS enabled and using 67 mA, that's a total of 233 mA: a 40% increase in the amount of power used, and would drain the battery in 8.6 hours.
I have no idea what GPS is used in the iPhone, and assume it's built into the CPU...but it really shouldn't use more power than the M8T. The fact that it does -- as do those in most (all?) Android phones -- surprises me.
Windows started with a brain-damaged USB subsystem that wants to freaking re-install a driver completely if you merely plug a device into another port. Sometimes that's useful when a particular driver instance gets fucked. Windows has maintained that brain damage for over 15 years since then.
Even worse, if the USB subsystem needs to assign a 'Com' port to a USB connection, it will assign a new Com port (Com4, Com5, Com6... Com28) to the same peripheral each time it's plugged into a different USB port on the machine. This can get ridiculous if you, say, are working with an Arduino and lose track of which USB connector you plugged it into last.
It also creates a mess if you have USB to RS-232C adaptors that you mix-and-match to get legacy ports. Eventually you have to dig into the 'Device Manager' and force it to display unconnected drivers to clear out a bunch of the old driver instances.
Depends on the USB-to-Serial converter. My PL2303-based ones get new COM port numbers whenever I switch physical USB ports, as do my CH340s, but my FTDI and CP2102 based adapters have per-device unique serial numbers, so the system can recognize it's the same device even when you switch USB ports. Very handy.
Some versions of the PL2303 will let you define a unique serial number (by default the option is to not have a unique serial number).
Your bank makes you fill out and sign a form for that? Shit, I have cards with 4 different banks (5 if you count store cards through Synchrony, but I've never dealt with fraud on those cards) and all 4 of them call me if they think a transaction is fraudulent; I can press 1 to verify the transaction or 2 to speak with a representative about potential fraud. All 4 banks I deal with have this system, and it works well; I've encountered actual fraud on cards from each of those banks and it's always been a matter of simply telling them the transaction wasn't initiated by me. Transaction immediately reversed, new card arrives in 2 days, nothing to fill out or sign.
Of course, due diligence, when they call I refuse to provide any account details and I check my account online to ensure what they're saying matches what I'm seeing before I confirm or deny anything. If they ask for account details, I ask their extension and tell them I'll call back at the number on the back of my card. Never provide personal information or payment/account details on an incoming call, because caller ID can be faked.
To be fair, I haven't had any fraudulent charges in several years: it's quite possible my bank may have such a system now, but I haven't ever had to use it (fingers crossed). The last time was something like 10 years ago, and they immediately froze the account when I called (or did they call me? I don't recall the exact details.) and sent me a new card. The new card came with a little form that itemized the disputed charges and wanted me to (a) verify that those are the charges in question, (b) sign at the bottom to attest to that, and (c) mail it back at their expense (they included a prepaid envelope). I'm sure it was just for the lawyers. Either way, it only took a moment.
I, too, refuse to provide account details to random callers for the same reason you do.
Although somewhat snarky, the subject line sums up my opinion pretty succinctly: as an individual, does it really matter much?
If my credit card gets compromised, by law the most I'm liable for is $50 (and my bank's policy is that I have $0 liability for fraudulent charges). On the few occasions, when my card information has been misused, the transactions were reversed and a new card in my wallet within a day or two. All I had to do was fill out a form saying "I didn't make these charges.", sign it, and send it to the bank. A mild irritation, to be sure, but hardly a big deal. With chip cards now commonplace in the US, simple cloning of cards is less of an issue than it was.
Legally, I seem to recall that debit cards have somewhat less protection, but banks often extend their $0 liability policy to them as well, so long as you report it being lost or stolen within a reasonable time. Still, I dislike these since one is not merely disputing whether or not one owes money to the bank, but rather if one should get one's own money back.
As for bank transfers and the like, I'd like it if the US would add "push" transfers like European banks do, rather than the "payee pull" system it currently has. Still, my understanding is that one is still protected from unauthorized withdraws from one's bank account.
In short: I'm not terribly concerned about my financial information being abused by criminals, as the law and bank policies offer significant legal protections from fraudulent activity. Any such issues are a minor inconvenience. Of course, one should take reasonable precautions, but in general it's not a big deal. I'm a lot more concerned about criminals gaining access to difficult-to-change/cancel things like one's social security number, with which they could apply for new, unknown-to-you accounts in your name. That's much more of a hassle to resolve than simply having a credit card stolen or a bad guy making an unauthorized debit from one's account.
For example, I can look at my old university's computer society's CT log and see that they switched from StartCom to Let's Encrypt when everyone stopped trusting StartCom last year and see that their last three certificates all have different public keys, which implies that either someone is rapidly rolling over certs for no reason and is a numpty, or that someone else is playing silly buggers.
That seems pretty reasonable: all of the listed certs from 2016-09-23 to the present (except on 2017-05-21, I have no idea what's going on there) have been replaced at 2-month intervals, which is in line with the recommendations and when the reference implementation of their ACME client (certbot) renews certs (the certs are valid for 90 days and are renewed after 60 days). Each renewal involves the generation of a new public/private keypair. All in all, seems pretty reasonable.
I agree.
While I appreciate the necessity for manually adding roots (e.g. for internal, corporate resources), I dislike HTTPS snooping and its ability to override baked-in protections against phishing and impersonation of major sites like Google (among many other reasons to oppose such things).
That said, it's one thing for a company to deploy such a system with a corresponding company-owned root across company-owned computers, but another thing entirely for a government to do the same thing to all (or a substantial fraction of) people within its borders. The latter is, with the exception of China and maybe North Korea, bordering on infeasible.
An individual user affected by a one-time event probably won't know, but depending on the remote site and browser used by the user, it may be still be detectable, particularly if used on a larger scale.
For example, Chrome comes with information about authorized CAs and intermediates used by Google baked-into the browser itself, and has since 2011. It will refuse to connect to a "Google" site using an unauthorized certificate (unless manually added by an administrator, for things like SSL interceptors used at businesses, but unlikely in use on a wide scale on the general internet). It sends telemetry back to Google about any bad certs that it sees for Google properties (that's one of the ways they learned about the DigiNotar compromise), and I wouldn't be surprised if such information was also checked for other major sites.
Many CAs also submit records to public Certificate Transparency logs. Google, in particular, uses its standard web crawlers to feed data about certificates it sees into CT logs and has been strongly encouraging (and requiring, in some cases) CAs to submit data to CT logs. This makes detection of falsely-issued certificates quite easy. Perhaps not detectable fast enough to stop an individual, targeted attack, but it should be enough to detect any medium-scale attack on the public internet.
[citation needed]
Sarcasm aside, I'm really interested in reading more about that.
I have Huawei USB cellular modem that identifies itself simultaneously as:
1. USB mass storage, if one has a microSD card in the internal slot. This is handy for storing files and whatnot on the stick.
2. As a CD-ROM drive with a virtual CD containing the drivers needed for the cellular modem functionality, so the user can install the drivers needed while only possessing the stick itself (e.g. no real CD, no internet download, etc.).
3. As a cellular modem.
PAR2 not a filesystem, but rather a means of generating error-correction codes to detect and repair damage to files.
The actual PAR2 algorithm hasn't changed, though development for PAR3 is ongoing. It's simply that one particular implementation, QuickPar, is obsolete, while MultiPar, a similar program that is completely compatible is more modern.
But for infrequently accessed data, AWS Glacier offers the same durability of S3 for only $0.004/GB or $4/TB/month. There's an infrequent access tier in between those two for $12.50/TB/month.
Volume discounts kick in above 50TB.
Online.net's C14 service is even cheaper, at EUR 0.002/GB/month plus EUR 0.01/GB for "operations" (such as creating an archive from the temporary staging area, manually verifying archives on demand, or recovering an archive), and offers the same 99.999999999% durability as Glacier. No bandwidth costs and no complicated retrieval speed costs like Glacier, and you can use rsync to upload to the staging area. Naturally, they perform behind-the-scenes error checking and repair, but the manually-selected verification process is nice to explicitly verify that things are intact.
They offer an "Enterprise" level with even more durability for increased costs (EUR 0.004/GB/month + EUR 0.025/GB for operations), as well as a new "Intensive" level that costs EUR 0.005/GB/month with no operations fees (it's intended for more frequent accesses to backed-up data).
Online.net is owned by Iliad, who in turn is owned by Free, a major French telecom, so the risk of suddenly going out of business is low.
Disclosure: I'm a happy C14 user, but otherwise have no connection to the company.
QuickPar on Windows is long-obsolete. MultiPar is the more modern variant.
Seriously 0.2 is nothing and if that's thrice the limit, then the limit is ridiculously low.
Love from Germany, where the limit is 0.5.
According to this site, the blood alcohol limit in Germany is 0.05%, not 0.5%. That's a factor of ten difference. The limit in the US, according to the same site, is 0.08%, which is even higher than Germany.
The driver described in this article had a BAC four times the legal limit in Germany.
Because that's how they did it before and they consider it "safer" in the context of not making uneccessary changes this soon to the leap second. In the future they plan to do it 24 hours in advance:
Source: https://developers.google.com/time/smear.
By "shorter keys" I mean "shorter certificate validity periods". Sorry for the confusion.