3.) You suggest that Putin didn't have an impact, and that's clearly a debatable point. We simply don't know. What are almost certain of is that Putin attempted to have an impact on the election, and if a nation-state dedicated resources towards that goal then I'd certainly say it's plausible.
But by what means is he accused of having an impact on the election? Did he rig the election process so the votes weren't counted correctly? Did he inundate the people with lies? Or did he arrange to have true (but hidden) information discovered and published?
The last I heard, nobody is accusing him, other state actors, or even script kiddies in basements, of either tampering with the vote count or spreading false information. The only accusation is that he was behind the cracking of the Democratic Party's emails and their delivery to WikiLeaks (which Assange denies).
IMHO, even if he did the latter, so what? It just means the real opinions and actions of the people running the Democratic Party machine were exposed. That's called "investigative reporting", and what the news media SHOULD have been doing (when the leaks show the mainstream media were colluding with the party, instead).
So if it was really Putin's cyberspies, and not an internal leaker, random partisan, or lucky computer geek, who did the Media's job of exposing the Democratic Party's corruption for us, we should THANK him. B-)
The electrical system is well-established, but that means nothing, except that it's difficult to get rid of. It is well-understood,
The Electoral College was set up by the Framers specifically to keep a handful of states with large urban populations from running roughshod over the interests of a bulk of rural states with small populations and different interests. This was done in order to allay the concerns of the small states and entice them into joining the ratification of the Constitution (as it was being foisted as a replacement for the Articles of Confederation). This election is a perfect example of it doing what it was intended to do: protect the interests of those in "Flyover Country" from bashing by the bi-coastal urban power center states.
In a close election it also serves as a firewall against two additional problems:
1) When there is a dispute requiring a recount, it restricts the recount to the state with a close result. (Imagine if the Bush/Gore presidential election were by popular vote. Instead of recounting Miami we'd have been recounting the ENTIRE COUNTRY!)
It limits the extent a corrupted election run by a political machine (such as Tammany Hall or Daley's Chicago) can influence the presidential election. With a popular vote, in a close election they can manufacture, destroy, or flip enough votes to override the margin countrywide. With the EC they are limited to flipping their state's electors - who could be expected to already be in their pocket anyhow.
and people who understand it the most (constitutional scholars and such) say it's no longer a good idea.
ORLY? References or it didn't happen.
I have no doubt that substantial numbers of left-wing academics are slamming the Electoral College, during this "anger" period after their side's loss, and that those of them with appropriate credentials are playing the "expert" card. But I'd be interested in WHICH "experts" you're referencing.
I'd also be interested in whether they're citing Hamilton as a source. B-)
Most of the states are "winner take all" for the electors. Among those, many have sufficiently lopsided preferences that those on the minority side have no hope of swinging the state to their candidate. (This includes three of the four most populous states: California, New York, and Texas.)
Oops. Meant Illinois, not Texas.
(Texas is the second most populous state. But it was a "battleground" / "swing" state this time around. Illinois is number four and Chicago puts it solidly in the Democratic camp.)
1.) The popular vote may or may not be relevant to the current American political system, but it certainly seems like an appropriate and relevant response to determine what the U.S. population's preference is, which is exactly the subject of the comment he was replying to.
The popular vote for president in the 2016 election has little to do with with the US population's preference, specifically because of the Electoral College. The best that can be inferred from it (46% to 48%) was that the election was reasonably close (and there were significant numbers of people who didn't like either of them).
Most of the states are "winner take all" for the electors. Among those, many have sufficiently lopsided preferences that those on the minority side have no hope of swinging the state to their candidate. (This includes three of the four most populous states: California, New York, and Texas.) These people have little incentive to vote for president (and typically to vote at all, since they usually also can't affect state or local elections either - even in those voting districts that are lopsided the other way from the state as a whole). Similarly, the candidates lave little incentive to campaign in such states. They spend their money and effort elsewhere, where it can be more useful. Typically that is in the handful of "battleground states" - close enough to swing, big enough to swing a lot of electors.
If the President were elected by popular vote, especially in a close election, both the voters and the candidates would have different incentives. Voters opposed to the plurality candidate in lopsided states would still have as much effect on swinging the election. So they'd have more incentive to vote, and the candidates would have more incentive to woo them. So the popular vote outcome could be expected to be very different.
Trump concentrated his efforts where he could swing more electors, because that was what counted, and handily beat the candidate of the most powerful political machine, who had raised over a BILLION dollars and had the mainstream media in her pocket. Yet the popular vote was within a couple percent, despite large numbers of people not voting and/or not wooed. Don't you think that, if what counted was the popular vote, The Donald had campaigned differently, and the people had turned out differently, he might have been able to win that election, too?
Sun Tsu's art of war dictates that a general must publicly execute one of his men so the others fall in line. We need to kill... subway for poisoning our population...
Huh? Poison?
Subway is one of the more nutritious purveyors of fast food out there. (A bit bland, and not as good a nutritional deal, by a long shot, as Extreme Pita, but nutritious nonetheless.)
Just get your sandwich (such as a philly cheesesteak) "as a salad" and add a bunch of veggies, including peppers to spice it up.
Google is obligated to let the government access records that show its hiring doesn't discriminate based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender and more.
It will be powered by renewable... energy that has been fabricated by minerals and ores extracted by, and processed in plants powered by, fossil fuels.
Last I heard, solar panels pay off their manufacturing energy costs in less than a year.
BUT no one in their right mind uses the high-quality photovoltaic power for the bulk of the ore processing and other manufacturing processes, especially those that require heat. (If you want to power THAT by the sun you use a thermal collector. You get several times the power that way. Or you go ahead and use fuel if it's cheaper.) So the payback in post-carnot-cycle electricity is very short.
Photovoltaics are not just generation. They're generation on site. So they have to be compared to a grid plant AND the grid itself: In the fossil fuel case the fuel drives a heat engine (with the carnot cycle losses and other penalties), then transmission losses. That's FAR less than 100%.
Then there's their share of building the grid itself: Plant construction (and mining and processing raw materials for it), transformers, wires, insulators, meters, and so on. Cutting trees for poles. Cutting trees for clearance for the wires. Fuel for the machinery that did it, and for taking workers to/from the sites. Using up land for grid right-of-ways.
All of that is replaced by the panels and their supporting storage and inverter/control electronics.
God: "No, you can't get past the fucking 2nd law.
Second law has nothing to do with the ratio of manufacturing energy to collected energy, any more than the starter battery provides the power to drive a gasoline or diesel engine vehicle down the road. Solar panels are not energy storage devices. They're energy collection, conversion, and delivery devices.
Sometimes the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" comes from some small handful of active companes, as they bring their breakthroughs into public use. Sometimes it has been AMD, Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and so on.
Right now Tesla is big, as they finally bring the battery breakthroughs Slashdotters have been lamenting as "always N years off", to market, for electric cars and energy storage for taking houses off the grid and onto self-generated renewable energy.
Remember all the lamenting, just yesterday, about how the price breakthrough in photovoltaic solar would be useless because of the cost of storage (for night and dark weather periods) and voltage conversion? Remember how I pointed out that voltage conversion has already succumbed to Moore's Law and the battery breakthroughs were just about to come on line?
The future came today. Look out, grid utilities!
C'mon, editors, *dig* a little! The Web is a big place, cast your story nets a l'il bit wider...
The editors don't dig. The slashdot users dig and the editors chose. IMHO they were right on to post this one.
It will be dangerous. People will get their files deleted, and then they will get angry. Even if the author's actions may be legal within the jurisdiction in which he lives (which is doubtful)... he will have made himself a target. Delete the files of the wrong person, and he might end up with a busted skull with his blood on the pavement.
Delete (or even delay access to) the wrong file and he might just kill somebody, too.
Even if he really wants his victims to read the ransomware rants, putting a time limit on this and deleting the files if the time limit is not met is stupid. Just leaving them encrypted and inaccessible until they've put in their time-as-a-slave to do his bidding leaves the incentive in place. Deleting the files after a time limit causes additional gratuitous harm.
As I read behind the headline, "small" means "small number of changes".
As I read the headline itself, "small" sounds like "tiny memory footprint".
Reading the headline I expected it to be notice that Linus had released a stripped down kernel for platforms that need a minimal functionality kernel because they have limited resources or need substantial security auditing and thus a kernel with no unnecessary code to be examined for security issues. That's not what I find the article to be about, at all.
Dang!
Can someone retroactively update the article title to clarify this?
Solar activity predicted to fall 60% in 2030s, to 'mini ice age' levels:
Solar "activity" is not the same as solar output. It's the sunspot / solar flare / solar wind output. Last I heard the main issue was ts effects on weather (mainly via changes in cloud cover), not a reduction in insolation. (The sun cools VERY gradually, due to heating from gravitational contraction. If all nuclear processes stopped the sun would still be good for millenia.)
A maunder minimum doesn't appreciably reduce the amount of power from a solar panel.
Remember that the cosmic background is about 4 degrees Kelvin, and room temperature nearly 300. A few percent drop in solar output can cause a lot of cooling but only about the same few percent of impact on solar panel output. (Less, actually, or maybe even a gain, because the panels are a lot more efficient when they're cooler.)
And superflywheels (of glass fiber) were considered for hybrid electric vehicles, decades ago. (They might even have been practical then. And might have gotten to market if the bogus silicon-breast-implant suits hadn't broken Dow Corning.)
But the battery technology just coming on line (driven by the electric and hybrid autos) will eat flywheels' lunch.
What kind of solar are they talking about? Photovoltaic? Surely this doesn't include storage or converting to AC does it? The article doesn't say.
DC/AC/voltage conversion is semiconductor technology. It has been, and still is, benefiting from Moore's Law.
A few years back I worked with a networking equipment manufacturer which put at least two (and sometimes three) layers of voltage-conversion regulators (DC/AC/DC) on a board: One to down-convert 48V (needed to get enough power through a few pins to run the power-hungry board), another near the load - because the conversion losses were far less than the resistive losses in the board would have been if the primary converters dropped to the loads' required voltages. I'm currently working with chips that stretch lithium battery life. They cost tens of cents and have efficiencies in the 90s%. AC/DC/AC converters have been in every compact fluorescent for years. Most wall-warts these days, and all laptop cord-bulges, are switching regulators, which is the same basic technology as an inverter. Getting a good sine wave to keep non-electronics loads (like motors) happy is only slightly more complicated than a basic switcher's sawtooth, and the bulk of the complication lives in a simple chip.
Fifteen years ago a house-sized inverter was in the $5K range. By now the price, like that of home computers, is more determined by the market size and the costs of marketing and fulflillment than the electronics itself. With the generation down to cheaper-than-grid, economies of scale will kick in big time.
Storage battery performance and potential price breakthroughs are coming so fast that the main problem is whether you can recover a battery plant's cost before the product is obsoleted by something better. Nevertheless, the electric auto industry (and to a lesser extent portable equipment like laptops) is driving the new tech into the market. (Expect a big downside hit on prices and upside hit on availability when Tesla and a couple other battery plants go into production.)
I don't see any problem with the cost of conversion electronics or storage for nighttime and cloudy weeks inhibiting the deployment of photovoltaic, now that the basic panels are coming into competitive-with-grid prices.
Your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired.
- Under some circumstances, a somewhat relaxed form of tit-for-tat, used by both sides (and with a low profile), leads to deescalation and stable boundaries.
- But under other circumstances and/or against a number of other strategies, it leads to escalation (and that leads to high-profile reportage of the ongoing conflict). If you limit yourself to ONLY tit-for-tat or a variation of it, the exponential rises into general war - and you've set up your opponent so he CAN'T back down and remain in power.
I have some bad news regarding the 10th amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. They have no teeth and are effectively meaningless.
I have some good news regarding the Bill of Rights. They have teeth, in the form of the Second Amendment - and a population that is at LEAST half armed (and with enough extra guns to arm the rest.)
While we can't be sure how much they've acted as a deterrent to tyranny and contributed to the Republic that Jefferson though needed a revolution ever twenty years lasting, with much of the citizens' freedom intact, lasting over 11 times that long so far (1788 to 2016 = 228 years), there are at least two explicit episodes we're sure about:
- At the county level: The Battle of Athens.
- At the federal level: Nixon's commissioning of a think tank to examine what would happen if he suspended the presidential elections with the Vietnam War as an excuse - and being told the population would treat this as the trigger to rise up to overthrow him - and was well enough armed to succeed handily.
Claiming handguns are useless against a modern us army (turned on its own population) is a crock, too:
- See the Russian adventure in Afghanistan.
- See the US adventure in Vietnam.
- See the instruction manual included with the Liberator pistols in WWII, or the Warsaw Uprising (which started with a handful of handguns):
- Sneak up on an enemy soldier.
- Shoot him.
- Take HIS weapons and ammo.
- Hand the little gun to the next not-yet-armed resistance fighter in line to repeat the procedure.
- In addition to the US soldiers that take their oaths seriously (Look up "Oath Keepers") and can be expected to turn, sabotage the attacks on the population, or help them arm, many of the population are themselves ex-military, with lots of experience handling current military issue weapons (and how to get in and out of where they're stored.)
- To quote McClary: "You can't stop a bullet with a bigger bullet.", i.e. more powerful weaponry does squat against an opponent with ENOUGH weaponry and the determination to use it, and use it in time.
... when is the Whitehouse going to issue apologies and offer reparations to all the countries where it directly interfered and even overthrew or attempted to overthrow democratically elected governments, such as...
Or helped a puppet government rig an election, such as Vietnam.
I have issued an executive order that provides additional authority for responding to certain cyber activity that seeks to interfere with or undermine our election processes and institutions, or those of our allies or partners. Using this new authority,...
Since when can a President grant himself new authority? The Constitution enumerates his powers, and the Tenth Amendment says:
Reserved Powers. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Granting himself additional power, and establishing the precedent for himself and his successors to continue that in the future, is not the act of a President of a Constitutional Republice. It is the act of a tyrant.
THIS is one of the factors in Trump's win: He ran against Hillary and successfully portrayed her as a continuation, and escalation, of Obama's style of rule.
One decision that has been made, they said, speaking on the conditiopn of anonymity, is to avoid any moves that exceed the Russian election hacking and risk an escalating cyber conflict that could spiral out of control.
Shades of Vietnam! This is how minor conflicts escalate into major wars.
The government may be able to handle bothersome individuals by spanking them once when "they're bad", like a parent disciplining a disobedient child, and expect it to stop there. But try that as foreign policy and it's more like slapping the drunken gangster in front of his cohorts.
By only giving a "proportional response", the leader(s) of the opposite side are put on the spot. They HAVE to retaliate in turn, or be viewed as weak. If it is perceived that you intend to avoid a serious conflict (ESPECIALLY if you have ACTUALLY ANNOUNCED that!), you are a "Paper Tiger" and they have no excuse to back down without losing face. So they retaliate a little harder, and you retaliate in proportion, and it ramps up into war. It goes on for years. If you're not willing to put in the effort and take the risk of trying to win it as a war, you fight on and on until your infrastructure is too damaged and your population is sick of it, and then you lose.
Once you have to go to war, if you want to win, the way to do it is with overwhelming force: "rapid dominance" (coned in 1996 but practiced at least since the Roman Empire), also known as "Shock and Awe." This gives the opponent the opportunity to withdraw and still save face, and minimizes casualties on your side. It may also massively reduces casualties on the other side, in comparison to a dragged-out, escalating, conflict. (But even if it doesn't, "... You [win the war] by getting the other poor bastard to die for HIS country.")
Tit-for-tat, with a little forgiveness to compensate for noise in the system, can lead to stabilization. But never-more-than-tit-for-tat, when confronting a strategy of a-bit-more-than-tit-for-tat, grows without bound. You have to switch to "pound-them-into-the-ground" or "surrender" at some point, or a determined opponent will debilitate you until the latter is the de facto result of your collapse. So if you're going to engage in tit-for-tat on the foreign policy level, you have to be ready to go to all-out war or all-out surrender. (You also have to be enough stronger than your opponent to make it work, or at least strong enough, AND appearing determined (and/or crazy) enough, to take them down with you, "Mutual Assured Destruction" style, if they keep pushing.)
In the Vietnam case, US involvement started in 1950, as a sidelight of the Korean conflict and the Cold War. The proportional response policy was implemented in 1961 by Kennedy and the escalation started. By the time the conflict ended the low-end estimates were about half a million dead and a million and a half wounded. (By contrast, the Iraq War had well under an order of magnitude less casualties.)
So now Obama wants to give Trump a going-away present: A shiny new, Vietnam-style, ever-escalating war with Russia, and a public perception that, if he tries to end it, or even keep it from escalating, it's because he's a Russian puppet.
Ever wonder why such switches (along with hardware write protect switches, camera and/or microphone disable switches, etc.) went away?
If you're building four million units a year, and including the switch costs an extra nickle per unit, you can afford to hire two full-time engineers, forever, to figure out how to save that nickle per unit.
I guess it is possible to infect a TV through the HDMI cable if it acts as an Ethernet cable, but can it infect it through the other bits that flows through it? Maybe something in CEC or a video/sound that causes an buffer overflow.
Though I haven't seen news of an initial exploit via crafted video streams, I recall an article where some security researchers did a proof-of-concept where, once the set was infected, it could receive command-and-control through not-particularly-noticeable steganographic flickering of a designated pixel by video stream information.
That still leaves getting the initial infection done. But it provides another path to control, and maintain control, once an exploit is in place.
I fail to understand the behavior of companies like LG, Samsung, Comcast, Verizon, etc. when they seem to act obnoxiously just because they can - i.e. they are in control, and because they can screw you, the customer, they will screw you, just because they can.
It's called "a free market". The vendors are free to act like idiots and shaft their customers. The customers are free to stop buying their products and switch to vendors who don't act like idiots. (Appeals to the government are limited to enforcing contract claims - which any good marketing weasel can design to promise nothing of substance.)
Unfortunately, if the government makes barriers to entry high enough, there are few vendors. Then it may be in the interest of the small group of them to all act like idiots and split the swag, laughing all the way to the bank.
How 'bout you just don't plug it into the network or configure the wifi?
What do you do if the set's "unconfigured" WiFi looks around for anything claiming to be an open WiFi hotspot, hooks up to that, and tries to "phone home" for the latest upgrade. And keeps trying this in the background, over and over, until it gets something claiming to be what it wants to see? And that something is a ransomware server on a neighbor's machine...
How do you even know it's DOING this?
This scenario is reminiscent of how Intel's AMT seems to work:
- When configured, firmware in an auxiliary processor built into the chipset listens for and intercepts connection requests (on Ethernet or WiFi) from the remote administrative center. (It can be configured to "phone home" to get through firewalls and NAT.)
- When "virgin" it also listens, intercepts, and obeys. But in this case it presumes it's a new machine at a big company with the hardware tools from the vendor, and it accepts ANY claimant with enough credentials to appear to be such an IT department worker.
- You can't turn it off. "Deconfiguring" it resets it to the factory state of accepting the first good-looking bad-guy and doing whatever he wants.
There's been multiple examples of people deploying their own connectivity solution and starting local broadband services.
It was like that in the early days of the Internet, too. I recall one of the first ISPs in Silicon Valley was a guy with a bunch of equipment in his spare bedroom.
Instead of actual 19" "relay racks" to hold the rack-mount electronics, he built a frame out of two-by-fours, spaced appropriately, and used wood screws to hold the equipment to the frame. Worked like a charm.
I used to call them "Mom and PoPs". ("PoP" = "Point of Presence" - the local place where the wires/fibers/etc. run to and hook up to the networking equipment.)
Slashdot Mirror
3.) You suggest that Putin didn't have an impact, and that's clearly a debatable point. We simply don't know. What are almost certain of is that Putin attempted to have an impact on the election, and if a nation-state dedicated resources towards that goal then I'd certainly say it's plausible.
But by what means is he accused of having an impact on the election? Did he rig the election process so the votes weren't counted correctly? Did he inundate the people with lies? Or did he arrange to have true (but hidden) information discovered and published?
The last I heard, nobody is accusing him, other state actors, or even script kiddies in basements, of either tampering with the vote count or spreading false information. The only accusation is that he was behind the cracking of the Democratic Party's emails and their delivery to WikiLeaks (which Assange denies).
IMHO, even if he did the latter, so what? It just means the real opinions and actions of the people running the Democratic Party machine were exposed. That's called "investigative reporting", and what the news media SHOULD have been doing (when the leaks show the mainstream media were colluding with the party, instead).
So if it was really Putin's cyberspies, and not an internal leaker, random partisan, or lucky computer geek, who did the Media's job of exposing the Democratic Party's corruption for us, we should THANK him. B-)
The electrical system is well-established, but that means nothing, except that it's difficult to get rid of. It is well-understood,
The Electoral College was set up by the Framers specifically to keep a handful of states with large urban populations from running roughshod over the interests of a bulk of rural states with small populations and different interests. This was done in order to allay the concerns of the small states and entice them into joining the ratification of the Constitution (as it was being foisted as a replacement for the Articles of Confederation). This election is a perfect example of it doing what it was intended to do: protect the interests of those in "Flyover Country" from bashing by the bi-coastal urban power center states.
In a close election it also serves as a firewall against two additional problems:
1) When there is a dispute requiring a recount, it restricts the recount to the state with a close result. (Imagine if the Bush/Gore presidential election were by popular vote. Instead of recounting Miami we'd have been recounting the ENTIRE COUNTRY!)
It limits the extent a corrupted election run by a political machine (such as Tammany Hall or Daley's Chicago) can influence the presidential election. With a popular vote, in a close election they can manufacture, destroy, or flip enough votes to override the margin countrywide. With the EC they are limited to flipping their state's electors - who could be expected to already be in their pocket anyhow.
and people who understand it the most (constitutional scholars and such) say it's no longer a good idea.
ORLY? References or it didn't happen.
I have no doubt that substantial numbers of left-wing academics are slamming the Electoral College, during this "anger" period after their side's loss, and that those of them with appropriate credentials are playing the "expert" card. But I'd be interested in WHICH "experts" you're referencing.
I'd also be interested in whether they're citing Hamilton as a source. B-)
Most of the states are "winner take all" for the electors. Among those, many have sufficiently lopsided preferences that those on the minority side have no hope of swinging the state to their candidate. (This includes three of the four most populous states: California, New York, and Texas.)
Oops. Meant Illinois, not Texas.
(Texas is the second most populous state. But it was a "battleground" / "swing" state this time around. Illinois is number four and Chicago puts it solidly in the Democratic camp.)
1.) The popular vote may or may not be relevant to the current American political system, but it certainly seems like an appropriate and relevant response to determine what the U.S. population's preference is, which is exactly the subject of the comment he was replying to.
The popular vote for president in the 2016 election has little to do with with the US population's preference, specifically because of the Electoral College. The best that can be inferred from it (46% to 48%) was that the election was reasonably close (and there were significant numbers of people who didn't like either of them).
Most of the states are "winner take all" for the electors. Among those, many have sufficiently lopsided preferences that those on the minority side have no hope of swinging the state to their candidate. (This includes three of the four most populous states: California, New York, and Texas.) These people have little incentive to vote for president (and typically to vote at all, since they usually also can't affect state or local elections either - even in those voting districts that are lopsided the other way from the state as a whole). Similarly, the candidates lave little incentive to campaign in such states. They spend their money and effort elsewhere, where it can be more useful. Typically that is in the handful of "battleground states" - close enough to swing, big enough to swing a lot of electors.
If the President were elected by popular vote, especially in a close election, both the voters and the candidates would have different incentives. Voters opposed to the plurality candidate in lopsided states would still have as much effect on swinging the election. So they'd have more incentive to vote, and the candidates would have more incentive to woo them. So the popular vote outcome could be expected to be very different.
Trump concentrated his efforts where he could swing more electors, because that was what counted, and handily beat the candidate of the most powerful political machine, who had raised over a BILLION dollars and had the mainstream media in her pocket. Yet the popular vote was within a couple percent, despite large numbers of people not voting and/or not wooed. Don't you think that, if what counted was the popular vote, The Donald had campaigned differently, and the people had turned out differently, he might have been able to win that election, too?
Sun Tsu's art of war dictates that a general must publicly execute one of his men so the others fall in line. We need to kill ... subway for poisoning our population ...
Huh? Poison?
Subway is one of the more nutritious purveyors of fast food out there. (A bit bland, and not as good a nutritional deal, by a long shot, as Extreme Pita, but nutritious nonetheless.)
Just get your sandwich (such as a philly cheesesteak) "as a salad" and add a bunch of veggies, including peppers to spice it up.
Google is obligated to let the government access records that show its hiring doesn't discriminate based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender and more.
Missed two biggies:
Age.
National origin.
It will be powered by renewable ... energy that has been fabricated by minerals and ores extracted by, and processed in plants powered by, fossil fuels.
Last I heard, solar panels pay off their manufacturing energy costs in less than a year.
BUT no one in their right mind uses the high-quality photovoltaic power for the bulk of the ore processing and other manufacturing processes, especially those that require heat. (If you want to power THAT by the sun you use a thermal collector. You get several times the power that way. Or you go ahead and use fuel if it's cheaper.) So the payback in post-carnot-cycle electricity is very short.
Photovoltaics are not just generation. They're generation on site. So they have to be compared to a grid plant AND the grid itself: In the fossil fuel case the fuel drives a heat engine (with the carnot cycle losses and other penalties), then transmission losses. That's FAR less than 100%.
Then there's their share of building the grid itself: Plant construction (and mining and processing raw materials for it), transformers, wires, insulators, meters, and so on. Cutting trees for poles. Cutting trees for clearance for the wires. Fuel for the machinery that did it, and for taking workers to/from the sites. Using up land for grid right-of-ways.
All of that is replaced by the panels and their supporting storage and inverter/control electronics.
God: "No, you can't get past the fucking 2nd law.
Second law has nothing to do with the ratio of manufacturing energy to collected energy, any more than the starter battery provides the power to drive a gasoline or diesel engine vehicle down the road. Solar panels are not energy storage devices. They're energy collection, conversion, and delivery devices.
Same corporations, day in day out.
Sometimes the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" comes from some small handful of active companes, as they bring their breakthroughs into public use. Sometimes it has been AMD, Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and so on.
Right now Tesla is big, as they finally bring the battery breakthroughs Slashdotters have been lamenting as "always N years off", to market, for electric cars and energy storage for taking houses off the grid and onto self-generated renewable energy.
Remember all the lamenting, just yesterday, about how the price breakthrough in photovoltaic solar would be useless because of the cost of storage (for night and dark weather periods) and voltage conversion? Remember how I pointed out that voltage conversion has already succumbed to Moore's Law and the battery breakthroughs were just about to come on line?
The future came today. Look out, grid utilities!
C'mon, editors, *dig* a little! The Web is a big place, cast your story nets a l'il bit wider...
The editors don't dig. The slashdot users dig and the editors chose. IMHO they were right on to post this one.
It will be dangerous. People will get their files deleted, and then they will get angry.
Even if the author's actions may be legal within the jurisdiction in which he lives (which is doubtful)... he will have made himself a target.
Delete the files of the wrong person, and he might end up with a busted skull with his blood on the pavement.
Delete (or even delay access to) the wrong file and he might just kill somebody, too.
Even if he really wants his victims to read the ransomware rants, putting a time limit on this and deleting the files if the time limit is not met is stupid. Just leaving them encrypted and inaccessible until they've put in their time-as-a-slave to do his bidding leaves the incentive in place. Deleting the files after a time limit causes additional gratuitous harm.
As I read behind the headline, "small" means "small number of changes".
As I read the headline itself, "small" sounds like "tiny memory footprint".
Reading the headline I expected it to be notice that Linus had released a stripped down kernel for platforms that need a minimal functionality kernel because they have limited resources or need substantial security auditing and thus a kernel with no unnecessary code to be examined for security issues. That's not what I find the article to be about, at all.
Dang!
Can someone retroactively update the article title to clarify this?
Solar activity predicted to fall 60% in 2030s, to 'mini ice age' levels:
Solar "activity" is not the same as solar output. It's the sunspot / solar flare / solar wind output. Last I heard the main issue was ts effects on weather (mainly via changes in cloud cover), not a reduction in insolation. (The sun cools VERY gradually, due to heating from gravitational contraction. If all nuclear processes stopped the sun would still be good for millenia.)
A maunder minimum doesn't appreciably reduce the amount of power from a solar panel.
Remember that the cosmic background is about 4 degrees Kelvin, and room temperature nearly 300. A few percent drop in solar output can cause a lot of cooling but only about the same few percent of impact on solar panel output. (Less, actually, or maybe even a gain, because the panels are a lot more efficient when they're cooler.)
[startup with concrete flywheels]
And superflywheels (of glass fiber) were considered for hybrid electric vehicles, decades ago. (They might even have been practical then. And might have gotten to market if the bogus silicon-breast-implant suits hadn't broken Dow Corning.)
But the battery technology just coming on line (driven by the electric and hybrid autos) will eat flywheels' lunch.
What kind of solar are they talking about? Photovoltaic? Surely this doesn't include storage or converting to AC does it? The article doesn't say.
DC/AC/voltage conversion is semiconductor technology. It has been, and still is, benefiting from Moore's Law.
A few years back I worked with a networking equipment manufacturer which put at least two (and sometimes three) layers of voltage-conversion regulators (DC/AC/DC) on a board: One to down-convert 48V (needed to get enough power through a few pins to run the power-hungry board), another near the load - because the conversion losses were far less than the resistive losses in the board would have been if the primary converters dropped to the loads' required voltages. I'm currently working with chips that stretch lithium battery life. They cost tens of cents and have efficiencies in the 90s%. AC/DC/AC converters have been in every compact fluorescent for years. Most wall-warts these days, and all laptop cord-bulges, are switching regulators, which is the same basic technology as an inverter. Getting a good sine wave to keep non-electronics loads (like motors) happy is only slightly more complicated than a basic switcher's sawtooth, and the bulk of the complication lives in a simple chip.
Fifteen years ago a house-sized inverter was in the $5K range. By now the price, like that of home computers, is more determined by the market size and the costs of marketing and fulflillment than the electronics itself. With the generation down to cheaper-than-grid, economies of scale will kick in big time.
Storage battery performance and potential price breakthroughs are coming so fast that the main problem is whether you can recover a battery plant's cost before the product is obsoleted by something better. Nevertheless, the electric auto industry (and to a lesser extent portable equipment like laptops) is driving the new tech into the market. (Expect a big downside hit on prices and upside hit on availability when Tesla and a couple other battery plants go into production.)
I don't see any problem with the cost of conversion electronics or storage for nighttime and cloudy weeks inhibiting the deployment of photovoltaic, now that the basic panels are coming into competitive-with-grid prices.
Eisenhower was President when the plebiscite was cancelled.
Care to go back that far.
Yes, I'm aware of that. Eisenhower estimated that the vote would be 80-20 in favor of voting for the "communist side".
The Democrats may do a lot of bad stuff in international relations, but they don't have a monopoly on it.
So which is it?
Your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired.
- Under some circumstances, a somewhat relaxed form of tit-for-tat, used by both sides (and with a low profile), leads to deescalation and stable boundaries.
- But under other circumstances and/or against a number of other strategies, it leads to escalation (and that leads to high-profile reportage of the ongoing conflict). If you limit yourself to ONLY tit-for-tat or a variation of it, the exponential rises into general war - and you've set up your opponent so he CAN'T back down and remain in power.
I have some bad news regarding the 10th amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. They have no teeth and are effectively meaningless.
I have some good news regarding the Bill of Rights. They have teeth, in the form of the Second Amendment - and a population that is at LEAST half armed (and with enough extra guns to arm the rest.)
While we can't be sure how much they've acted as a deterrent to tyranny and contributed to the Republic that Jefferson though needed a revolution ever twenty years lasting, with much of the citizens' freedom intact, lasting over 11 times that long so far (1788 to 2016 = 228 years), there are at least two explicit episodes we're sure about:
- At the county level: The Battle of Athens.
- At the federal level: Nixon's commissioning of a think tank to examine what would happen if he suspended the presidential elections with the Vietnam War as an excuse - and being told the population would treat this as the trigger to rise up to overthrow him - and was well enough armed to succeed handily.
Claiming handguns are useless against a modern us army (turned on its own population) is a crock, too:
- See the Russian adventure in Afghanistan.
- See the US adventure in Vietnam.
- See the instruction manual included with the Liberator pistols in WWII, or the Warsaw Uprising (which started with a handful of handguns):
- Sneak up on an enemy soldier.
- Shoot him.
- Take HIS weapons and ammo.
- Hand the little gun to the next not-yet-armed resistance fighter in line to repeat the procedure.
- In addition to the US soldiers that take their oaths seriously (Look up "Oath Keepers") and can be expected to turn, sabotage the attacks on the population, or help them arm, many of the population are themselves ex-military, with lots of experience handling current military issue weapons (and how to get in and out of where they're stored.)
- To quote McClary: "You can't stop a bullet with a bigger bullet.", i.e. more powerful weaponry does squat against an opponent with ENOUGH weaponry and the determination to use it, and use it in time.
... when is the Whitehouse going to issue apologies and offer reparations to all the countries where it directly interfered and even overthrew or attempted to overthrow democratically elected governments, such as ...
Or helped a puppet government rig an election, such as Vietnam.
I have issued an executive order that provides additional authority for responding to certain cyber activity that seeks to interfere with or undermine our election processes and institutions, or those of our allies or partners. Using this new authority, ...
Since when can a President grant himself new authority? The Constitution enumerates his powers, and the Tenth Amendment says:
Granting himself additional power, and establishing the precedent for himself and his successors to continue that in the future, is not the act of a President of a Constitutional Republice. It is the act of a tyrant.
THIS is one of the factors in Trump's win: He ran against Hillary and successfully portrayed her as a continuation, and escalation, of Obama's style of rule.
One decision that has been made, they said, speaking on the conditiopn of anonymity, is to avoid any moves that exceed the Russian election hacking and risk an escalating cyber conflict that could spiral out of control.
Shades of Vietnam! This is how minor conflicts escalate into major wars.
The government may be able to handle bothersome individuals by spanking them once when "they're bad", like a parent disciplining a disobedient child, and expect it to stop there. But try that as foreign policy and it's more like slapping the drunken gangster in front of his cohorts.
By only giving a "proportional response", the leader(s) of the opposite side are put on the spot. They HAVE to retaliate in turn, or be viewed as weak. If it is perceived that you intend to avoid a serious conflict (ESPECIALLY if you have ACTUALLY ANNOUNCED that!), you are a "Paper Tiger" and they have no excuse to back down without losing face. So they retaliate a little harder, and you retaliate in proportion, and it ramps up into war. It goes on for years. If you're not willing to put in the effort and take the risk of trying to win it as a war, you fight on and on until your infrastructure is too damaged and your population is sick of it, and then you lose.
Once you have to go to war, if you want to win, the way to do it is with overwhelming force: "rapid dominance" (coned in 1996 but practiced at least since the Roman Empire), also known as "Shock and Awe." This gives the opponent the opportunity to withdraw and still save face, and minimizes casualties on your side. It may also massively reduces casualties on the other side, in comparison to a dragged-out, escalating, conflict. (But even if it doesn't, "... You [win the war] by getting the other poor bastard to die for HIS country.")
Tit-for-tat, with a little forgiveness to compensate for noise in the system, can lead to stabilization. But never-more-than-tit-for-tat, when confronting a strategy of a-bit-more-than-tit-for-tat, grows without bound. You have to switch to "pound-them-into-the-ground" or "surrender" at some point, or a determined opponent will debilitate you until the latter is the de facto result of your collapse. So if you're going to engage in tit-for-tat on the foreign policy level, you have to be ready to go to all-out war or all-out surrender. (You also have to be enough stronger than your opponent to make it work, or at least strong enough, AND appearing determined (and/or crazy) enough, to take them down with you, "Mutual Assured Destruction" style, if they keep pushing.)
In the Vietnam case, US involvement started in 1950, as a sidelight of the Korean conflict and the Cold War. The proportional response policy was implemented in 1961 by Kennedy and the escalation started. By the time the conflict ended the low-end estimates were about half a million dead and a million and a half wounded. (By contrast, the Iraq War had well under an order of magnitude less casualties.)
So now Obama wants to give Trump a going-away present: A shiny new, Vietnam-style, ever-escalating war with Russia, and a public perception that, if he tries to end it, or even keep it from escalating, it's because he's a Russian puppet.
The obvious approach is a switch which ...
Ever wonder why such switches (along with hardware write protect switches, camera and/or microphone disable switches, etc.) went away?
If you're building four million units a year, and including the switch costs an extra nickle per unit, you can afford to hire two full-time engineers, forever, to figure out how to save that nickle per unit.
I guess it is possible to infect a TV through the HDMI cable if it acts as an Ethernet cable, but can it infect it through the other bits that flows through it? Maybe something in CEC or a video/sound that causes an buffer overflow.
Though I haven't seen news of an initial exploit via crafted video streams, I recall an article where some security researchers did a proof-of-concept where, once the set was infected, it could receive command-and-control through not-particularly-noticeable steganographic flickering of a designated pixel by video stream information.
That still leaves getting the initial infection done. But it provides another path to control, and maintain control, once an exploit is in place.
I fail to understand the behavior of companies like LG, Samsung, Comcast, Verizon, etc. when they seem to act obnoxiously just because they can - i.e. they are in control, and because they can screw you, the customer, they will screw you, just because they can.
It's called "a free market". The vendors are free to act like idiots and shaft their customers. The customers are free to stop buying their products and switch to vendors who don't act like idiots. (Appeals to the government are limited to enforcing contract claims - which any good marketing weasel can design to promise nothing of substance.)
Unfortunately, if the government makes barriers to entry high enough, there are few vendors. Then it may be in the interest of the small group of them to all act like idiots and split the swag, laughing all the way to the bank.
How 'bout you just don't plug it into the network or configure the wifi?
What do you do if the set's "unconfigured" WiFi looks around for anything claiming to be an open WiFi hotspot, hooks up to that, and tries to "phone home" for the latest upgrade. And keeps trying this in the background, over and over, until it gets something claiming to be what it wants to see? And that something is a ransomware server on a neighbor's machine...
How do you even know it's DOING this?
This scenario is reminiscent of how Intel's AMT seems to work:
- When configured, firmware in an auxiliary processor built into the chipset listens for and intercepts connection requests (on Ethernet or WiFi) from the remote administrative center. (It can be configured to "phone home" to get through firewalls and NAT.)
- When "virgin" it also listens, intercepts, and obeys. But in this case it presumes it's a new machine at a big company with the hardware tools from the vendor, and it accepts ANY claimant with enough credentials to appear to be such an IT department worker.
- You can't turn it off. "Deconfiguring" it resets it to the factory state of accepting the first good-looking bad-guy and doing whatever he wants.
There's been multiple examples of people deploying their own connectivity solution and starting local broadband services.
It was like that in the early days of the Internet, too. I recall one of the first ISPs in Silicon Valley was a guy with a bunch of equipment in his spare bedroom.
Instead of actual 19" "relay racks" to hold the rack-mount electronics, he built a frame out of two-by-fours, spaced appropriately, and used wood screws to hold the equipment to the frame. Worked like a charm.
I used to call them "Mom and PoPs". ("PoP" = "Point of Presence" - the local place where the wires/fibers/etc. run to and hook up to the networking equipment.)