Today, corporations can be pretty evil, but they don't generally go out of their way to kill innocent people.
No of course not, that would be ridiculous.
They will however kill inocent prople if they're in the way, if they can make money doing so or if it's simply a consequence of doing business a bit more cheaply.
You don't need to take a moral stand against murder to find it inconvenient. There are economic effects to murder.
And why do economic affects matter? There is no universal truth of correctnes, ultimately it comes down to you assigning some sort of value to that. And that is entirely equivalent to a moral judgement. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Well, remember more carefully. The polls showed Clinton to win early, but as the election wore on, they shifted. The DNC assumed that Clinton could win, just like Clinton did (and then failed to campaign in key states.) But they always showed that Sanders could beat Trump.
Well, not exactly, there are polls that showed Hillary winning. And none of the later polls (after he dropped out) involved Sanders either. And as we both know, polls are something of an er inexact art.
People don't want centrism. If the DNC pushes centrism, it will fail again and again. Centrism has only led us further down the spiral.
But the DNC doesn't represent the people, like any party it represents its members.
There is accounting for idiots, and if the DNC hadn't ignored the many voices clearly visible in social media loudly stating that they would rather vote for Trump than Clinton,
Social media only tells you about noisy people on social media.
The DNC spoiled for Hillary every step of the way.
The died in the wool Democrats prefered a Democrat to some rando wo signed up just for the election.
The polls said that Clinton couldn't beat Trump.
I remember different polls from the election cycle.
What if the DNC had embraced leftist ideals, and actually supported Sanders?... so some rando who doesn't have remotely the same poltical affiliation either. The Democrat is on the right end of centre right, not left.
Some 10% of Sanders supporters ended up voting for Trump
Tell me again,please, how stupid, unfriendly, obnoxious, and otherwise unpleasant America is, and how badly degrading and oppressive and otherwise unfortunate the life here...
Hey bro, heads up: you appear to be replying to the voices in your head rather than anyone in the thread.
couldn't even get enough support to overcome a little back stabbing from his party (which let's remember Trump easily did).
It wasn't his party. He has always been an independent. It's not terribly surprising that switching allegience for 5 minutes to Democrat just so he could run as president with a party didn't convince the Democrat party members.
I'm cautiously optimistic on this. While it sounds like progress toward restoring our rights at the boarder, I wonder what the definition of "suspicion" is in this case.
If it's anything like the definition of the border (most of the US), then it'll probably be something like "cellphone belongs to a person".
One example is "Weapons of Mass Destruction" fake news which was publicized by almost all main stream media
I remember it being all over the news that that was a fake claim by the government. it seems you've fallen into the "fake news" trap by believing fake claims about the media.
I check at least one contrary argument before making my mind.
I love how you complain about the lack of trust in the "MSM" and how they post factually incorrect statements by linking to a place which does that way more and has a way worse record on corrections.
If you're taking Breitbart's word on, well, anything then you are very much part of the problem.
If history is any indication, they will damn the security, and go full speed ahead.
That unfortunately seems more than likely. Damn security or quality or playing nicely with others in any regard. My guess is that what will happen in that adoption will be slow but steady until the point where it starts causing problems (it's only a problem when the number gets large enough). I think the general crappiness will initially be the dominant factor not security.
At that point, either power companies will start enforcing "standards" on what can be connected to the grid or possibly change the charging structure so they charge for bad behaviour. I think the former is most likely and you'll wind up with power company controllers.
Naturally being from one company they'll be (a) a monoculture and (b) come from the lowest bidder guaranteeing (c) terrible security[*]. It'll probably be OK for a bit, then the proverbial will hit the fan. I mean it won't be a doom and gloom scenario, but things will be a bit crappy for a while, the government will have to step in and bail things out (people kind of need electricity in the current world) and the executives will still get huge bonuses for saving money on the meters.
Eventually it will slouch towards some sort of workable solution, except a bit less good in every way than it could be.
[*] I would place even bets on a script kiddy doing it for the lulz, insider trading, someone with a grudge, or someone at the power company forgetting to renew a domain and the meters completely shitting themselves when they start getting a 300 family status code from whoever is parking the domain.
Industrial AC units are already being controlled by power companies, who determine when thou shalt have cooling based on aggregate demand.
And they're much more expensice and tightly controlled than domestic units. The problem isn't the technology for remotely switching on and off power based on demand (or even switching from demand to supply). The problem is scaling it up to a substantial fraction of domestic users without causing serious problems due to nasty cheap low security units.
I think it will happen, and soon.
I disagree. I think we're much more likely to get nasty cheapass units with poor security which read prices off the internet then adjust the charge/discharge accordingly without any real oversight. The problems will probably creep up slowly as they're slowly adopted and point solutions and mitigations will happen.
I really doubt there'll be a separation into a robust, low function control unit and the inevitable low security user interface part.
While I appreciate your single-minded dedication to the natural numbers, you should probably know that a while back, some people discovered fractional numbers which have the amazing property that if you multiply by one you can get less than the number you started with!
The world has of course moved on since then (we're well out of the stone age now) and understand them a lot better, bht the basics are the same.
I love NASA threads for comments like this: I love the displays of angry ignorance form armchair engineers people who have no clue about actual engineering or anything to do with space.
Yo umight be called an engineer, but writing dubious javascript code doesn't actually make you knowledgable about, well, any of these things as is abundantly clear from your post.
I don't doubt it's possible and it's not even hard from a technical point of view. It's just that with tens of gigawatts with subsecond response time responding to on-demand pricing (which has a lag), there could be problems with grid-scale oscillations. And that's ignoring the problems with poor security and potential for maniuplation.
No, actually, it is a proposed ban by the City of London. The Government.
The City? Are you sure about that? Saddiq and TFL have nothing to do with the City. Plus tht's local government not "the government" which is almost always used to refer to Westminster. To double down it's certainly not the same government that has anything to do with the NHS.
It's not a ban on advertising from "global megacorps", it's a ban on fast food advertisements "from companies like McDonalds".
Which is totaly not a global megacorp. Neither is BurgerKing or KFC.
A large percentage of the advertising that would be affected comes from 'a handful' of major companies and brands," which means a large percentage would be for a lot of small companies -- not "global megacorps".
So? Small companies can't advertise cigarettes either.
Also from TFS: "Mayor Khan also proposed a ban on new hot food takeaway stores opening within 400 meters (1,300 feet) of schools." That would include Uncle Bill's Chippy Shop, run by Uncle Bill and his family. Clearly not "global megacorps".
Yep. Uncle Bill can't get a free pass either. While the global fast food megacorps are extremely harmful, the food isn't less so just because it comes fom uncle bill.
You need to rein in your hatred for "global megacorp" and your attempt to justify stupid laws because they would only impact those you hate, because those stupid laws will hurt a lot of small players, too.
It's part of why we can't have nice things. Anytime there's an oppostunity to make money doing harm people will do so. Preventing them will never be perfectly precise, but it's worse to do nothing.
MS's handling of Skype is "good" example of how to run a product right into the ground:
You forgot a few earlier steps.
1. Upgrade it so the audio quality becomes imcredibly shitty
I used to use Skype for cheap calls to international landlines from my mobile. It used to be flawless over s 3G connection. This is not surprising, POTS is 64kbit/s uncompressed audio which is fine. 3G has vastly higher bandwidth.
Then they shittified it so it could not manage a call without dropouts on anything less than 4G. What good is HD voice if you can't fucking hear the other person.
2. break screen sharing so it tries to share the screen as degraded res full framerate video rather than full res degraded framerate video, the former being utterly useless. Why yes, I can see the blurry blob of your xerm in glorious 30FPS. And I can certainly tell you're typing... something?
3. Make it so people with a paid account can't send SMSs from the mobile client.
If more cars were electric, the utilities could store all that surplus power in the cars' batteries, no?
Ideally yes. In practice it comes with a number of technical difficulties all of which can eventually be overcome.
What I'm pituring here is some sort of smart meters (not the current gen of wifi connected dumb meters with crappy security), but ones which are aware of the demand in realtime and can instrcut devices to either draw electricity from the grid or put it back.
First, they need top notch security. If they're hacked, imagine the damage you could do by flipping 20 million meters from charge to discharge rapidly. Or, (ore likely), imagine how much money you could make if you shorted electricity then flipped all the meters to discharge, creating a huge glut.
The other thing is a control problem: these things respond pretty fast, but with some latency. Anyone who's done control theory will tell you that high bandwidth and latency is a recipe for oscillations. In general it's going to be a pretty difficult control problem to marshall all of those thing in the giant feedback loop.
I think it's all achievable, while the basics of "connect to the internet and decide whether to charge or discharge" is more than solved, the practical case of doing that grid scale is much more difficult and not yet solved.
Part of the solution is going to be to build s different kind of robustness into the grid. Generally it's been assumed that anyone large enough to have a measurable effect is a good actor and that badness comes from damage. No one's built in robustness to those other kinds of problems since it has never been a concern.
The other problem is software. We're more than capable of building secure meters that can do the job. Except we won't. People are going to want the cheapest one then they're going to want a shitty android app to change the buy/sell level and so on. Given that the costs of bad security will only be bourne potentially years after s sale and not by the meter vendor, I do not think the free market is a great solution.
These meters, or at least the base control unit need to be VERY locked down. Maybe a 2 part solution where a relatively expensive, inflexible, locked down unit reads prices and levels and turns on charge/discharge using a simple serial protocol. It could also restrict control input such that it couldn't change set points more than once per hour or so.
The inevitable bad security cheap nasty crappy UI part which people will inevitably want can be restriced to changing the setpoints. Poor security on tht end would be somewhat mitigated by the conservative control unit.
I don't think it will ever happen this way though.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, corporations can be pretty evil, but they don't generally go out of their way to kill innocent people.
No of course not, that would be ridiculous.
They will however kill inocent prople if they're in the way, if they can make money doing so or if it's simply a consequence of doing business a bit more cheaply.
You don't need to take a moral stand against murder to find it inconvenient. There are economic effects to murder.
And why do economic affects matter? There is no universal truth of correctnes, ultimately it comes down to you assigning some sort of value to that. And that is entirely equivalent to a moral judgement. And there's nothing wrong with that.
A popular conspiracy theory states that governments across the world have been putting fluoride in our water supply to tranquilize the masses,
Jesus those people! Don't they know it's there to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluid? WAKE UP SHEEPLE
Android is of course not GNU/Linux. They use busybox to provide the typical userland utilities. But it's clearly still Linux
And this is why RMS was right: you'd be pretty pissed off if your shiny new Linux laptop arrived and you found it was running Android.
Because GNU is still the base system. My servers don't have firefox, Xorg or Java on them because they don't need it. The base is still GNU/Linux.
What kind of arrogant, benighted, sheltered, pampered, pompous jackass equates something like running Windows 10 with being subjugated?
I dunno, someone who has to use it?
meh, I'm more into eighties reruns than nineties...
OK...
System V or BSD?
That's dyed.
It is indeed, my bad.
Well, remember more carefully. The polls showed Clinton to win early, but as the election wore on, they shifted. The DNC assumed that Clinton could win, just like Clinton did (and then failed to campaign in key states.) But they always showed that Sanders could beat Trump.
Well, not exactly, there are polls that showed Hillary winning. And none of the later polls (after he dropped out) involved Sanders either. And as we both know, polls are something of an er inexact art.
People don't want centrism. If the DNC pushes centrism, it will fail again and again. Centrism has only led us further down the spiral.
But the DNC doesn't represent the people, like any party it represents its members.
There is accounting for idiots, and if the DNC hadn't ignored the many voices clearly visible in social media loudly stating that they would rather vote for Trump than Clinton,
Social media only tells you about noisy people on social media.
What is it with your kind insisting on calling strangers "bro"?
Because it annoys them.
The DNC spoiled for Hillary every step of the way.
The died in the wool Democrats prefered a Democrat to some rando wo signed up just for the election.
The polls said that Clinton couldn't beat Trump.
I remember different polls from the election cycle.
What if the DNC had embraced leftist ideals, and actually supported Sanders? ... so some rando who doesn't have remotely the same poltical affiliation either. The Democrat is on the right end of centre right, not left.
Some 10% of Sanders supporters ended up voting for Trump
No accounting for idiots, I guess!
Uh, no. He DID convince the Democrat party members.
No he didn't.
The polls clearly showed that Democrats wanted to vote for Sanders.
Except they didn't vote for him in the primaries.
They subverted the democratic process
By usin the normal mechanisms rather than going off opinion pieces based on internet polls.
Tell me again,please, how stupid, unfriendly, obnoxious, and otherwise unpleasant America is, and how badly degrading and oppressive and otherwise unfortunate the life here...
Hey bro, heads up: you appear to be replying to the voices in your head rather than anyone in the thread.
couldn't even get enough support to overcome a little back stabbing from his party (which let's remember Trump easily did).
It wasn't his party. He has always been an independent. It's not terribly surprising that switching allegience for 5 minutes to Democrat just so he could run as president with a party didn't convince the Democrat party members.
I'm cautiously optimistic on this. While it sounds like progress toward restoring our rights at the boarder, I wonder what the definition of "suspicion" is in this case.
If it's anything like the definition of the border (most of the US), then it'll probably be something like "cellphone belongs to a person".
One example is "Weapons of Mass Destruction" fake news which was publicized by almost all main stream media
I remember it being all over the news that that was a fake claim by the government. it seems you've fallen into the "fake news" trap by believing fake claims about the media.
I check at least one contrary argument before making my mind.
Not every story has two sides.
truths are being suppressed.[breitbart.com]
I love how you complain about the lack of trust in the "MSM" and how they post factually incorrect statements by linking to a place which does that way more and has a way worse record on corrections.
If you're taking Breitbart's word on, well, anything then you are very much part of the problem.
If history is any indication, they will damn the security, and go full speed ahead.
That unfortunately seems more than likely. Damn security or quality or playing nicely with others in any regard. My guess is that what will happen in that adoption will be slow but steady until the point where it starts causing problems (it's only a problem when the number gets large enough). I think the general crappiness will initially be the dominant factor not security.
At that point, either power companies will start enforcing "standards" on what can be connected to the grid or possibly change the charging structure so they charge for bad behaviour. I think the former is most likely and you'll wind up with power company controllers.
Naturally being from one company they'll be (a) a monoculture and (b) come from the lowest bidder guaranteeing (c) terrible security[*]. It'll probably be OK for a bit, then the proverbial will hit the fan. I mean it won't be a doom and gloom scenario, but things will be a bit crappy for a while, the government will have to step in and bail things out (people kind of need electricity in the current world) and the executives will still get huge bonuses for saving money on the meters.
Eventually it will slouch towards some sort of workable solution, except a bit less good in every way than it could be.
[*] I would place even bets on a script kiddy doing it for the lulz, insider trading, someone with a grudge, or someone at the power company forgetting to renew a domain and the meters completely shitting themselves when they start getting a 300 family status code from whoever is parking the domain.
This kind of technology already exists.
Yep.
Industrial AC units are already being controlled by power companies, who determine when thou shalt have cooling based on aggregate demand.
And they're much more expensice and tightly controlled than domestic units. The problem isn't the technology for remotely switching on and off power based on demand (or even switching from demand to supply). The problem is scaling it up to a substantial fraction of domestic users without causing serious problems due to nasty cheap low security units.
I think it will happen, and soon.
I disagree. I think we're much more likely to get nasty cheapass units with poor security which read prices off the internet then adjust the charge/discharge accordingly without any real oversight. The problems will probably creep up slowly as they're slowly adopted and point solutions and mitigations will happen.
I really doubt there'll be a separation into a robust, low function control unit and the inevitable low security user interface part.
You cannot multiply and get a lower result.
While I appreciate your single-minded dedication to the natural numbers, you should probably know that a while back, some people discovered fractional numbers which have the amazing property that if you multiply by one you can get less than the number you started with!
The world has of course moved on since then (we're well out of the stone age now) and understand them a lot better, bht the basics are the same.
I love NASA threads for comments like this: I love the displays of angry ignorance form armchair engineers people who have no clue about actual engineering or anything to do with space.
Yo umight be called an engineer, but writing dubious javascript code doesn't actually make you knowledgable about, well, any of these things as is abundantly clear from your post.
I don't doubt it's possible and it's not even hard from a technical point of view. It's just that with tens of gigawatts with subsecond response time responding to on-demand pricing (which has a lag), there could be problems with grid-scale oscillations. And that's ignoring the problems with poor security and potential for maniuplation.
No, actually, it is a proposed ban by the City of London. The Government.
The City? Are you sure about that? Saddiq and TFL have nothing to do with the City. Plus tht's local government not "the government" which is almost always used to refer to Westminster. To double down it's certainly not the same government that has anything to do with the NHS.
It's not a ban on advertising from "global megacorps", it's a ban on fast food advertisements "from companies like McDonalds".
Which is totaly not a global megacorp. Neither is BurgerKing or KFC.
A large percentage of the advertising that would be affected comes from 'a handful' of major companies and brands," which means a large percentage would be for a lot of small companies -- not "global megacorps".
So? Small companies can't advertise cigarettes either.
Also from TFS: "Mayor Khan also proposed a ban on new hot food takeaway stores opening within 400 meters (1,300 feet) of schools." That would include Uncle Bill's Chippy Shop, run by Uncle Bill and his family. Clearly not "global megacorps".
Yep. Uncle Bill can't get a free pass either. While the global fast food megacorps are extremely harmful, the food isn't less so just because it comes fom uncle bill.
You need to rein in your hatred for "global megacorp" and your attempt to justify stupid laws because they would only impact those you hate, because those stupid laws will hurt a lot of small players, too.
It's part of why we can't have nice things. Anytime there's an oppostunity to make money doing harm people will do so. Preventing them will never be perfectly precise, but it's worse to do nothing.
True and honestly I like institutional cooking (other than the carrots).
Pizza and chips followed by a slab of sponge with custard. Cannot be beaten.
MS's handling of Skype is "good" example of how to run a product right into the ground:
You forgot a few earlier steps.
1. Upgrade it so the audio quality becomes imcredibly shitty
I used to use Skype for cheap calls to international landlines from my mobile. It used to be flawless over s 3G connection. This is not surprising, POTS is 64kbit/s uncompressed audio which is fine. 3G has vastly higher bandwidth.
Then they shittified it so it could not manage a call without dropouts on anything less than 4G. What good is HD voice if you can't fucking hear the other person.
2. break screen sharing so it tries to share the screen as degraded res full framerate video rather than full res degraded framerate video, the former being utterly useless. Why yes, I can see the blurry blob of your xerm in glorious 30FPS. And I can certainly tell you're typing... something?
3. Make it so people with a paid account can't send SMSs from the mobile client.
If more cars were electric, the utilities could store all that surplus power in the cars' batteries, no?
Ideally yes. In practice it comes with a number of technical difficulties all of which can eventually be overcome.
What I'm pituring here is some sort of smart meters (not the current gen of wifi connected dumb meters with crappy security), but ones which are aware of the demand in realtime and can instrcut devices to either draw electricity from the grid or put it back.
First, they need top notch security. If they're hacked, imagine the damage you could do by flipping 20 million meters from charge to discharge rapidly. Or, (ore likely), imagine how much money you could make if you shorted electricity then flipped all the meters to discharge, creating a huge glut.
The other thing is a control problem: these things respond pretty fast, but with some latency. Anyone who's done control theory will tell you that high bandwidth and latency is a recipe for oscillations. In general it's going to be a pretty difficult control problem to marshall all of those thing in the giant feedback loop.
I think it's all achievable, while the basics of "connect to the internet and decide whether to charge or discharge" is more than solved, the practical case of doing that grid scale is much more difficult and not yet solved.
Part of the solution is going to be to build s different kind of robustness into the grid. Generally it's been assumed that anyone large enough to have a measurable effect is a good actor and that badness comes from damage. No one's built in robustness to those other kinds of problems since it has never been a concern.
The other problem is software. We're more than capable of building secure meters that can do the job. Except we won't. People are going to want the cheapest one then they're going to want a shitty android app to change the buy/sell level and so on. Given that the costs of bad security will only be bourne potentially years after s sale and not by the meter vendor, I do not think the free market is a great solution.
These meters, or at least the base control unit need to be VERY locked down. Maybe a 2 part solution where a relatively expensive, inflexible, locked down unit reads prices and levels and turns on charge/discharge using a simple serial protocol. It could also restrict control input such that it couldn't change set points more than once per hour or so.
The inevitable bad security cheap nasty crappy UI part which people will inevitably want can be restriced to changing the setpoints. Poor security on tht end would be somewhat mitigated by the conservative control unit.
I don't think it will ever happen this way though.