The quotation in the summary and even a bit in the article are very misleading. The company seems to take full responsibility for the issue and are not passing blame. The line right after that quote is:
"We are regretful that this was not addressed immediately and adequately by our support team, when discovered. We have addressed this and made some internal changes."
They do however have a previous incident where the exact same thing happened, and in that case they apparently suggested it was because two completely unrelated users used the same user and password (which wasn't true).
So in other words, they are incompetent and there is about zero reason for me to trust them with access to a camera in my house.
My guess would be that 1 of the devices was the last of a production run, and the other was the first of the next run. A human error could cause them to have the same unique identifier. A minor mistake.
It could be as you say, but regardless, I don't see a reason anybody who isn't doing porn would want a networked camera inside their house. If it is for home security, then outside cameras would be sufficient for identifying someone breaking and entering.
Well, it estimates you can build up to pull in about $300K annually, even today that's not exactly chump change.
Is that sales/revenue? That actually isn't much considering you'll need 20 vehicles to get there. I would be surprised if you could pay yourself a $50k salary on that.
Trump talked tough on NK, which Kim took advantage of to demonstrate that it was all just bluster and ultimately there was little the US could do because of China and the fact that NK had a viable nuclear deterrent.
Kim was able to use that as a bargaining chip when opening a dialogue with South Korea and the US. De-nuclearization suits NK, because it will include US nuclear weapons in the area too.
Kim quickly made concessions and progress with SK, which put pressure on Trump to not waste the opportunity. So Trump went to that meeting ready to make big concessions - end the wargames, de-nuclearize, and start opening up NK's economy with sanctions relief. Kim has boosted himself to the level of international statesman, praised by the POTUS and with a path towards a post-dictatorship life that isn't rotting in jail or hanging from a noose.
There is a remarkable difference between Kim Jong Un and his father. He actually cares about his people. His actions are indeed self-serving to some extent, but there is no doubt that the north Korean people will benefit tremendously.
I can't think of a great reason why we need to be protecting South Korea militarily anyway. Wars in Asia between major powers aren't fought with guns anymore. They are fought with bankers, accountants, lawyers, and propagandists. As you said, the nuclear program was just a negotiating point. Even aside from that, South Korea is plenty corrupt, subsidizes their industries, tariffs US-made goods, and exports goods made with low-cost labor to the US. They also have a very strong military of their own.
The best and cheapest strategy for dealing with North Korea is to have someone else deal with the problem. The armistice should have been signed a long time ago. It hasn't been our conflict since the collapse of the USSR, and probably before that.
The cells have been produced in the "Gigafactory" for a year and a half now. Certainly Panasonic participates, but I'd say the cells are made by a partnership of Tesla and Panasonic now, and the packs are made by Tesla. Also note that Tesla is the only auto manufacturer to own a cell plant at all, all of the other manufacturers purchase cells.
If you look at SpaceX, they do a lot more in-house than any other rocket maker. So no surprise that Tesla would attempt to take into house the biggest blocker for electric cars - the batteries.
They own a big factory in a country with high manufacturing costs. There isn't much stopping Ford, GM, or anyone else from buying cells from a country with lower manufacturing costs.
Hint- Japan has lower manufacturing costs than the US for many articles of industrial equipment. Despite being a very developed country with a higher cost of living than the US, salaries are lower. Japanese companies often use sub-suppliers based in China. Unlike the US, Japan whips their Chinese sub-suppliers hard with the quality stick. They also basically practice colonialism in places like Indonesia, taking advantage of low labor costs but maintaining quality. I would not be at all surprised if Panasonic could deliver quality cells to any factory in the world cheaper than Tesla could.
How is the stock market different from the betting/gambling market.
Long-term positions are an investment vehicle. If you take a 30 year rolling average of the S&P 500, it has never lost money in any 30-year period.
If you take a 15 year rolling average, the 15-year periods ending around 1980 are basically neutral.
If you use 10 year rolling averages, only about 14 of the 10-year periods since 1925 have lost money.
Above accounts for inflation and assumes investment at the beginning of the period with compounded returns. On a 30 year timescale, there is (nearly) no risk. On a 15 year timescale, there is a very small amount of risk. As you consider shorter and shorter time periods, it does become risky as you are at the whim of the winds of the economy and a group of irrational + rational investors.
As far as I know, you can still text google (466453) on a dumb phone (or smartphone) with a query, and it will respond. I used it back in the RAZR days.
I have a couple disks on an unraid server that use ReiserFS. They were installed back when Unraid only supported ReiserFS. When they are replaced I will kill off my use of it.
This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.
Against the vastness of the ocean; underwater data centers are going to make no statistical difference to the temperature of the ocean.
Even if temperatures in the environment raise by the forecasted 2C- that's not going to drastically impact the cooling ability of the ocean either.
Of course, it would be even better if the data center was in low orbit.
A bigger point is that that heat would eventually be dispersed across the world anyway.
Current best environmental practice is to use air cooled heat exchangers, since everything else has been restricted. That is what power stations and datacenters are mostly doing these days.
It is more efficient to simply use seawater or river water at land installations as a heatsink to dump the AC rejected heat into. This was widely used in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, national/local environmental agencies put up regulations against this since you may disrupt the local environment. Therefore a very long pipe is needed, which periodically must be cleaned since marine life loves to attach itself to anything in the water.
The next best thing is to create an artificial lake- that used to be how power plants in the late 70s and 80s did things. But again, this is now frowned upon due to water consumption. Wet parabolic cooling towers were a good thing for a while, until the water usage environmental permits made those impractical as well. Now everybody uses air-cooled heat exchangers, which are less efficient than any of these options. I think people underestimate how much regulation has been put in place since the 1960s even for something as mundane as dumping excess heat.
Ultimately any energy savings to be had by sinking datacenters probably isn't worth the added infrastructure cost. Adding "marine" to anything tends to make the cost 3x what it would otherwise.
I'm surprised we keep seeing these stories. One of my professors told a story about the time he set up a pirate radio station. The FCC tracked him down within a week and told him to knock it off or they would levy a huge fine.
There are a few embassies around the White House I wouldn't think you would need to be within their fences in order to take care of the problem.
Would I rather play Elite where all real money will buy you is a sick paint job and people with nice ships actually have to work / farm / grind / cheat for it.
Or would I rather play Star Citizen where only rich elitists bastards with money and no brains get to have nice ships?
For me it's not a hard choice.
This may be a snarky response, but the Star Citizen model seems to be a more realistic simulation of space exploration. Maybe that is what they are going for.
Have you seen a factory at night before? Or even seen a factory in a movie at night? Most of them absolutely put out light at night (they're usually glittering beacons of light, in fact). In fact if they have smokestacks or chimneys they're required to or they're a huge safety risk to aircraft. Also lots (most?) factories in most climates run in mornings and evenings before/after sunrise, and it's not uncommon for them to run overnight: downtime is a huge waste of money when you have an expensive factory. In fact, factories not running overnight would be an indicator of economic weakness, such as happened to the US auto industry in the 2000s.
Not necessarily. Our manufacturing facility has about a dozen CNC machines. We load the machines up in the afternoon and let them run all night until they either complete the part or run into some kind of fault. Everybody leaves by 4:30PM. Not all manufacturing businesses are like this, but there are plenty of them, and likely more in 1st world countries than in 3rd world ones.
Of course not. But it is a rough proxy for GDP. Why would it systematically differ between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries? An obvious answer is data fudging.
Data fudging, maybe. Cultural differences, developmental differences, and about 100 other factors are probably better proxies. The light pollution methodology IS bullshit. Especially when we are talking about small changes in GDP like 3-7% growth.
Just as one example, in the US a substantial source of light pollution is car sales lots, which are lit up like daytime 365 nights a year. Countries in Europe don't generally have as many lots- they often order their cars from the factory. In Japan, theft is rare and land is expensive so the lots are much smaller and aren't well lit at night. Similarly, the US is heavilly car-dependent and we have huge parking lots of department stores, malls, and grocery stores, many of which are lit up at night. Most other countries have more concentrated population centers and less suburban sprawl.
Additionally, many places are actively trying to reduce light pollution, and in some countries it is normal to shutter most businesses in the evening.
Plus, in many developing countries the GDP growth may be concentrated in the top of the economic ladder, which is not very noticable from light pollution.
Unless the study corrected for factors like this (and they didn't) the correlation between GDP and light pollution is completely baloney.
There is little or no reason to have sub-second response time on a grid. Maintaining exactly 60hz is not necessary, current grids do "well enough", and anyone with a use case for exactly 60hz power (I can't think of any) already has their own equipment to make that happen.
I suspect that the main reason why some people are drooling over this is because it allows high-frequency trading on the energy market. The profit potential is very good, at the expense of all of the ratepayers, for something that isn't necessary.
The most logical solution is to fit out the existing power plant and interconnections. Solar panel every roof in the suburbs and double battery pack them and you are mostly done, by far the most competitive solution, especially financially speaking. This because the fit out can be financed in depth, for example some people who can afford it, can directly invest in it, by fitting out their own property to produce more electricity than they need, store the excess during the day and sell it at night. Others of course could lease to buy, still getting their electricity and selling the excess to help with the lease. The cheapest option, the home owner does nothing and simply allows it to be installed for a discount on their electrical price with an option to buy out the equipment in the future. For property investors, they can really effectively invest in their property by fitting it out, and selling electricity to their tenant at the market rate, whilst selling the excess back to the grid, a lot more people could become power plant operators.
This only really works in some countries (AU and US lots and lots and lots of burbs) and for the EU only some cities, most are built up with close in rural, not much suburbia. So on the whole a larger installation makes sense but in the smaller cities with a higher proportion of suburbia, that distributed power generation and storage makes much more sense.
Still the first company to jump and offer it, will win a decided lead in market share ie owning the solar system and batteries on other peoples properties and basically providing market access with collective bargaining. They can hit the market for a better price for their clients, a much better price and keep a percentage as ongoing sales, whilst of course generating much zero tax income. Zero tax because profits from sales of equipment would be covered by tax deduction by direct investment in equipment, poorer suburbs investment covering profits from middle class suburbs.
The power companies will be slow threatens existing power plant investments. Manufacturers of course not so much, it really suits them, hell, even a corporation like Amazon could jump into distributed power generation and storage, using their global buying power to generate that investment opportunity. This is a real snooze and you lose investment, those who get in first, will basically lock up the markets (specific cities, the best ones) they gain a market share lead in.
Coal is fucked.
It baffles me that people still think distributed generation is a good idea. Putting up solar panels on individual residential properties, with a grid-tie inverter at each one, in a city, is expensive and inefficient. It simply can not compare to building a large array on flat land in a rural area and minimizing the ancillary equipment by optimizing the number of inverters and busbars.
While there are many classically liberal views I agree with, sometimes I think they just go too far. National defense is a critical industry for the survival of the country and, although the United States is not perfect and certain has its share of blame for tragedies in the world, global dominance by Russia or China would be far, far worse..
In national defense, we've been falling backward (in relation to Russia and China) for the last few decades. Our main battle tanks are two generations behind Russia's and their air defense systems are also greatly enhanced. Iran successfully took over one of our most sophisticated drones and captured in, a couple years ago, using electronic warfare... Although we have the F-22 and the F-35 jets, we are falling in most other areas and are even behind in some.
Also, the cost of war is very prohibitive for us as Congress requires subcontractors in virtually every state to fund any new project. Both potential enemies can easily outlast us in a protracted war, financially.
And of course there is that AI in combat is not only inevitable but moving ahead at a very fast pace in both China and Russia. Although U.S. services still require a human in the loop of any kill decision, Russia absolutely does not. They are allowing agent kill decisions by default. This isn't a should we are shouldn't be ethical issue. This is about survival.
Not saying you're wrong on all points, but are tanks on a battlefield strategically important anymore? It seems like they are going more and more the way of the battleship - an expensive asset that is difficult to justify based on how war has evolved.
The power struggles in the world now are mainly economic and the use of strategic influence in parts of the world that have a net-positive return. This includes propaganda activities both on the ground and online. There are certainly proxy wars where weapons are fired but all-out war between major powers is bad for business, and neither Russian Oligarchs, the Chinese Communist Party, or Wall Street will accept a major conflict on superpower soil.
Seems like a bad idea to me. Grids rely on one entity being in control and calling the shots. When that control is lost and everyone starts doing their own thing, the potential for a mass blackout increases substantially.
This isn't even news. It would be news if they _weren't_ making phone hacking tools. This is just more propaganda to lead up to a war. Right now it's pretty innocuous because it's just getting started, but if the media keeps falling in line behind the administration we're gonna have Iraq II: Electric Boogaloo.
They're doing the same thing with Iran, btw. Don't fall for it.
It seems like a whole lot of propaganda to me. North Korea is apparently broke as hell, their people are starving, the economy is in shambles, their military is outdated, and the nuclear facility collapsed so that means their negotiation position is nothing. At the same time, they are cybersecurity masterminds, capable of cyber activities meeting or exceeding the CIA's. This dichotomy could be true, but it is more reasonable that it isn't.
If I was running a cyberwarfare program, North Korea would be the perfect continuous false flag. Nobody would be taken seriously if they said that the Democratic Republic of the Congo were cyber warfare experts. I'm sure North Korea has some capabilities but they are super small fry compared to Russia and China.
I've read this headline several times. My biggest question is, where is this taking place?
Southern GeorgiaSouthern Georgia
Apparently it's South Georgia. Which I thought I had never heard of, but my browser's search history tells me otherwise.
What the heck is up with all the ship propellers on the Stromness beach? I can't fathom any reason for this whatsoever.
And from the final report, this paragraph is interesting:
Over 4,600 inert devices, including chewsticks and tracking tunnels, were deployed and checked as part of the survey. The very best rodent detection experts were also brought in especially: three highly trained 'sniffer' dogs and their two skilled female handlers. In an incredible feat of endurance and teamwork reminiscent of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s epic crossing of the island just over a hundred years ago, the handlers walked a total of 1608km, with the dogs covering a total of 2420km, searching for signs of rats. This distance, roughly the equivalent of a return trip from London to Dundee, is all the more impressive given the rugged and challenging terrain of South Georgia.
Is it necessary for them to point out that the canine handlers were women?
The IAU isn't an official body with any authority other than what they have taken on themselves. And if they are going to let historical politics cloud scientific thinking, they certainly aren't going to speak for me. I'd like to see some textbook publishers take a stand too.
The thing is, if you don't accept the IAU's authority, then whose authority are you going to accept? Textbook publishers? They're one notch above those scammers who sell you the "right" to name a star.
The IAU's membership is over 12,000 professional astronomers, which as best as I can tell is a pretty good percentage of the people with careers in astronomy. The next largest professional group is the American Astronomical Society, with about 7,000 members all in the Americas. Their stance on the issue is decidedly neutral.
In the end, the definition of a planet is merely semantics. What's important is that whatever definition you decide to use is functional, allowing generalized statements to be made easily without running afoul of the terminology. In that respect, I don't have a problem with the division between "planet" and "trans-Neptunian object" and dwarf planet. They are different enough and the terms selected for them, although not perfect, are definitive enough to make statements and issue papers about them without tripping over the semantics.
And yet only 424 of them were allowed to vote on the matter, on the last day of a conference.
I can't find the source, but I read somewhere that a previous measure, agreed to by most, would have preserved Pluto as a planet. Thinking the matter settled, most of the delegation went to play golf or drink beer, and a small minority pushed their agenda through.
Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of Murray Energy, the owner of the largest number of coal fired plants in the country,...
Completely untrue. According to the April 2018 edition of Power magazine, Duke, Southern Company, and AEP are the top 3 operators of coal plants.
As far as I know, Murray Energy doesn't have any power stations, but recently stated that they want to. I'm not sure why they would be so stupid, as coal plants are nearly impossible to make money on currently.
The clean power plan is unviable not due to coal, but due to natural gas power. The clean power plan mandates CO2, which of course natural gas plants produce. CO2 capture has not been demonstrated at a useful scale yet, and I doubt they can ever be utility-scale. We are decades away (if ever) from having enough green power to not need fossil fuels. The Clean Power Plan can't realistically be met, so it is not crazy talk to repeal or change it.
The root of the problem is that the Obama administration set unachievable goals to satisfy their constituents, and the Trump administration kills it because of his constituents. The pendulum swings too far in both directions.
Slashdot Mirror
The quotation in the summary and even a bit in the article are very misleading. The company seems to take full responsibility for the issue and are not passing blame. The line right after that quote is:
"We are regretful that this was not addressed immediately and adequately by our support team, when discovered. We have addressed this and made some internal changes."
They do however have a previous incident where the exact same thing happened, and in that case they apparently suggested it was because two completely unrelated users used the same user and password (which wasn't true).
So in other words, they are incompetent and there is about zero reason for me to trust them with access to a camera in my house.
My guess would be that 1 of the devices was the last of a production run, and the other was the first of the next run. A human error could cause them to have the same unique identifier. A minor mistake.
It could be as you say, but regardless, I don't see a reason anybody who isn't doing porn would want a networked camera inside their house. If it is for home security, then outside cameras would be sufficient for identifying someone breaking and entering.
Well, it estimates you can build up to pull in about $300K annually, even today that's not exactly chump change.
Is that sales/revenue? That actually isn't much considering you'll need 20 vehicles to get there. I would be surprised if you could pay yourself a $50k salary on that.
Trump talked tough on NK, which Kim took advantage of to demonstrate that it was all just bluster and ultimately there was little the US could do because of China and the fact that NK had a viable nuclear deterrent.
Kim was able to use that as a bargaining chip when opening a dialogue with South Korea and the US. De-nuclearization suits NK, because it will include US nuclear weapons in the area too.
Kim quickly made concessions and progress with SK, which put pressure on Trump to not waste the opportunity. So Trump went to that meeting ready to make big concessions - end the wargames, de-nuclearize, and start opening up NK's economy with sanctions relief. Kim has boosted himself to the level of international statesman, praised by the POTUS and with a path towards a post-dictatorship life that isn't rotting in jail or hanging from a noose.
There is a remarkable difference between Kim Jong Un and his father. He actually cares about his people. His actions are indeed self-serving to some extent, but there is no doubt that the north Korean people will benefit tremendously.
I can't think of a great reason why we need to be protecting South Korea militarily anyway. Wars in Asia between major powers aren't fought with guns anymore. They are fought with bankers, accountants, lawyers, and propagandists. As you said, the nuclear program was just a negotiating point. Even aside from that, South Korea is plenty corrupt, subsidizes their industries, tariffs US-made goods, and exports goods made with low-cost labor to the US. They also have a very strong military of their own.
The best and cheapest strategy for dealing with North Korea is to have someone else deal with the problem. The armistice should have been signed a long time ago. It hasn't been our conflict since the collapse of the USSR, and probably before that.
The cells have been produced in the "Gigafactory" for a year and a half now. Certainly Panasonic participates, but I'd say the cells are made by a partnership of Tesla and Panasonic now, and the packs are made by Tesla. Also note that Tesla is the only auto manufacturer to own a cell plant at all, all of the other manufacturers purchase cells.
If you look at SpaceX, they do a lot more in-house than any other rocket maker. So no surprise that Tesla would attempt to take into house the biggest blocker for electric cars - the batteries.
They own a big factory in a country with high manufacturing costs. There isn't much stopping Ford, GM, or anyone else from buying cells from a country with lower manufacturing costs.
Hint- Japan has lower manufacturing costs than the US for many articles of industrial equipment. Despite being a very developed country with a higher cost of living than the US, salaries are lower. Japanese companies often use sub-suppliers based in China. Unlike the US, Japan whips their Chinese sub-suppliers hard with the quality stick. They also basically practice colonialism in places like Indonesia, taking advantage of low labor costs but maintaining quality. I would not be at all surprised if Panasonic could deliver quality cells to any factory in the world cheaper than Tesla could.
How is the stock market different from the betting/gambling market.
Long-term positions are an investment vehicle. If you take a 30 year rolling average of the S&P 500, it has never lost money in any 30-year period.
If you take a 15 year rolling average, the 15-year periods ending around 1980 are basically neutral.
If you use 10 year rolling averages, only about 14 of the 10-year periods since 1925 have lost money.
Above accounts for inflation and assumes investment at the beginning of the period with compounded returns. On a 30 year timescale, there is (nearly) no risk. On a 15 year timescale, there is a very small amount of risk. As you consider shorter and shorter time periods, it does become risky as you are at the whim of the winds of the economy and a group of irrational + rational investors.
Mine does not, and it has 100k employees. Hell, I don’t even have dental insurance.
They are stupid for not doing so. If people are willing to take legal stimulants, I (as the boss) am happy to facilitate that.
If adderall was OTC I would have a big bowl full of them in the break room.
As far as I know, you can still text google (466453) on a dumb phone (or smartphone) with a query, and it will respond. I used it back in the RAZR days.
They could use ReiserFS - that's not being used.
I have a couple disks on an unraid server that use ReiserFS. They were installed back when Unraid only supported ReiserFS. When they are replaced I will kill off my use of it.
This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.
Against the vastness of the ocean; underwater data centers are going to make no statistical difference to the temperature of the ocean. Even if temperatures in the environment raise by the forecasted 2C- that's not going to drastically impact the cooling ability of the ocean either.
Of course, it would be even better if the data center was in low orbit.
A bigger point is that that heat would eventually be dispersed across the world anyway.
Current best environmental practice is to use air cooled heat exchangers, since everything else has been restricted. That is what power stations and datacenters are mostly doing these days.
It is more efficient to simply use seawater or river water at land installations as a heatsink to dump the AC rejected heat into. This was widely used in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, national/local environmental agencies put up regulations against this since you may disrupt the local environment. Therefore a very long pipe is needed, which periodically must be cleaned since marine life loves to attach itself to anything in the water.
The next best thing is to create an artificial lake- that used to be how power plants in the late 70s and 80s did things. But again, this is now frowned upon due to water consumption. Wet parabolic cooling towers were a good thing for a while, until the water usage environmental permits made those impractical as well. Now everybody uses air-cooled heat exchangers, which are less efficient than any of these options. I think people underestimate how much regulation has been put in place since the 1960s even for something as mundane as dumping excess heat.
Ultimately any energy savings to be had by sinking datacenters probably isn't worth the added infrastructure cost. Adding "marine" to anything tends to make the cost 3x what it would otherwise.
I'm surprised we keep seeing these stories. One of my professors told a story about the time he set up a pirate radio station. The FCC tracked him down within a week and told him to knock it off or they would levy a huge fine.
There are a few embassies around the White House I wouldn't think you would need to be within their fences in order to take care of the problem.
Would I rather play Elite where all real money will buy you is a sick paint job and people with nice ships actually have to work / farm / grind / cheat for it.
Or would I rather play Star Citizen where only rich elitists bastards with money and no brains get to have nice ships?
For me it's not a hard choice.
This may be a snarky response, but the Star Citizen model seems to be a more realistic simulation of space exploration. Maybe that is what they are going for.
Have you seen a factory at night before? Or even seen a factory in a movie at night? Most of them absolutely put out light at night (they're usually glittering beacons of light, in fact). In fact if they have smokestacks or chimneys they're required to or they're a huge safety risk to aircraft. Also lots (most?) factories in most climates run in mornings and evenings before/after sunrise, and it's not uncommon for them to run overnight: downtime is a huge waste of money when you have an expensive factory. In fact, factories not running overnight would be an indicator of economic weakness, such as happened to the US auto industry in the 2000s.
Not necessarily. Our manufacturing facility has about a dozen CNC machines. We load the machines up in the afternoon and let them run all night until they either complete the part or run into some kind of fault. Everybody leaves by 4:30PM. Not all manufacturing businesses are like this, but there are plenty of them, and likely more in 1st world countries than in 3rd world ones.
GDP is NOT night time light volume.
Of course not. But it is a rough proxy for GDP. Why would it systematically differ between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries? An obvious answer is data fudging.
Data fudging, maybe. Cultural differences, developmental differences, and about 100 other factors are probably better proxies. The light pollution methodology IS bullshit. Especially when we are talking about small changes in GDP like 3-7% growth.
Just as one example, in the US a substantial source of light pollution is car sales lots, which are lit up like daytime 365 nights a year. Countries in Europe don't generally have as many lots- they often order their cars from the factory. In Japan, theft is rare and land is expensive so the lots are much smaller and aren't well lit at night. Similarly, the US is heavilly car-dependent and we have huge parking lots of department stores, malls, and grocery stores, many of which are lit up at night. Most other countries have more concentrated population centers and less suburban sprawl.
Additionally, many places are actively trying to reduce light pollution, and in some countries it is normal to shutter most businesses in the evening. Plus, in many developing countries the GDP growth may be concentrated in the top of the economic ladder, which is not very noticable from light pollution.
Unless the study corrected for factors like this (and they didn't) the correlation between GDP and light pollution is completely baloney.
There is little or no reason to have sub-second response time on a grid. Maintaining exactly 60hz is not necessary, current grids do "well enough", and anyone with a use case for exactly 60hz power (I can't think of any) already has their own equipment to make that happen.
I suspect that the main reason why some people are drooling over this is because it allows high-frequency trading on the energy market. The profit potential is very good, at the expense of all of the ratepayers, for something that isn't necessary.
The most logical solution is to fit out the existing power plant and interconnections. Solar panel every roof in the suburbs and double battery pack them and you are mostly done, by far the most competitive solution, especially financially speaking. This because the fit out can be financed in depth, for example some people who can afford it, can directly invest in it, by fitting out their own property to produce more electricity than they need, store the excess during the day and sell it at night. Others of course could lease to buy, still getting their electricity and selling the excess to help with the lease. The cheapest option, the home owner does nothing and simply allows it to be installed for a discount on their electrical price with an option to buy out the equipment in the future. For property investors, they can really effectively invest in their property by fitting it out, and selling electricity to their tenant at the market rate, whilst selling the excess back to the grid, a lot more people could become power plant operators.
This only really works in some countries (AU and US lots and lots and lots of burbs) and for the EU only some cities, most are built up with close in rural, not much suburbia. So on the whole a larger installation makes sense but in the smaller cities with a higher proportion of suburbia, that distributed power generation and storage makes much more sense.
Still the first company to jump and offer it, will win a decided lead in market share ie owning the solar system and batteries on other peoples properties and basically providing market access with collective bargaining. They can hit the market for a better price for their clients, a much better price and keep a percentage as ongoing sales, whilst of course generating much zero tax income. Zero tax because profits from sales of equipment would be covered by tax deduction by direct investment in equipment, poorer suburbs investment covering profits from middle class suburbs.
The power companies will be slow threatens existing power plant investments. Manufacturers of course not so much, it really suits them, hell, even a corporation like Amazon could jump into distributed power generation and storage, using their global buying power to generate that investment opportunity. This is a real snooze and you lose investment, those who get in first, will basically lock up the markets (specific cities, the best ones) they gain a market share lead in.
Coal is fucked.
It baffles me that people still think distributed generation is a good idea. Putting up solar panels on individual residential properties, with a grid-tie inverter at each one, in a city, is expensive and inefficient. It simply can not compare to building a large array on flat land in a rural area and minimizing the ancillary equipment by optimizing the number of inverters and busbars.
While there are many classically liberal views I agree with, sometimes I think they just go too far. National defense is a critical industry for the survival of the country and, although the United States is not perfect and certain has its share of blame for tragedies in the world, global dominance by Russia or China would be far, far worse..
In national defense, we've been falling backward (in relation to Russia and China) for the last few decades. Our main battle tanks are two generations behind Russia's and their air defense systems are also greatly enhanced. Iran successfully took over one of our most sophisticated drones and captured in, a couple years ago, using electronic warfare... Although we have the F-22 and the F-35 jets, we are falling in most other areas and are even behind in some.
Also, the cost of war is very prohibitive for us as Congress requires subcontractors in virtually every state to fund any new project. Both potential enemies can easily outlast us in a protracted war, financially.
And of course there is that AI in combat is not only inevitable but moving ahead at a very fast pace in both China and Russia. Although U.S. services still require a human in the loop of any kill decision, Russia absolutely does not. They are allowing agent kill decisions by default. This isn't a should we are shouldn't be ethical issue. This is about survival.
Not saying you're wrong on all points, but are tanks on a battlefield strategically important anymore? It seems like they are going more and more the way of the battleship - an expensive asset that is difficult to justify based on how war has evolved.
The power struggles in the world now are mainly economic and the use of strategic influence in parts of the world that have a net-positive return. This includes propaganda activities both on the ground and online. There are certainly proxy wars where weapons are fired but all-out war between major powers is bad for business, and neither Russian Oligarchs, the Chinese Communist Party, or Wall Street will accept a major conflict on superpower soil.
Seems like a bad idea to me. Grids rely on one entity being in control and calling the shots. When that control is lost and everyone starts doing their own thing, the potential for a mass blackout increases substantially.
This isn't even news. It would be news if they _weren't_ making phone hacking tools. This is just more propaganda to lead up to a war. Right now it's pretty innocuous because it's just getting started, but if the media keeps falling in line behind the administration we're gonna have Iraq II: Electric Boogaloo. They're doing the same thing with Iran, btw. Don't fall for it.
It seems like a whole lot of propaganda to me. North Korea is apparently broke as hell, their people are starving, the economy is in shambles, their military is outdated, and the nuclear facility collapsed so that means their negotiation position is nothing. At the same time, they are cybersecurity masterminds, capable of cyber activities meeting or exceeding the CIA's. This dichotomy could be true, but it is more reasonable that it isn't.
If I was running a cyberwarfare program, North Korea would be the perfect continuous false flag. Nobody would be taken seriously if they said that the Democratic Republic of the Congo were cyber warfare experts. I'm sure North Korea has some capabilities but they are super small fry compared to Russia and China.
I've read this headline several times. My biggest question is, where is this taking place? Southern Georgia Southern Georgia Apparently it's South Georgia. Which I thought I had never heard of, but my browser's search history tells me otherwise.
What the heck is up with all the ship propellers on the Stromness beach? I can't fathom any reason for this whatsoever.
And from the final report, this paragraph is interesting:
Over 4,600 inert devices, including chewsticks and tracking tunnels, were deployed and checked as part of the survey. The very best rodent detection experts were also brought in especially: three highly trained 'sniffer' dogs and their two skilled female handlers. In an incredible feat of endurance and teamwork reminiscent of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s epic crossing of the island just over a hundred years ago, the handlers walked a total of 1608km, with the dogs covering a total of 2420km, searching for signs of rats. This distance, roughly the equivalent of a return trip from London to Dundee, is all the more impressive given the rugged and challenging terrain of South Georgia.
Is it necessary for them to point out that the canine handlers were women?
I, personally, thought to the joke was funny enough, albeit off-color.
I don't care if they keep it in the documentation or not... but it seems like a rather pathetic attempt at humor.
Most jokes don't age well, and this one is about 30 years old.
The thing is, if you don't accept the IAU's authority, then whose authority are you going to accept? Textbook publishers? They're one notch above those scammers who sell you the "right" to name a star. The IAU's membership is over 12,000 professional astronomers, which as best as I can tell is a pretty good percentage of the people with careers in astronomy. The next largest professional group is the American Astronomical Society, with about 7,000 members all in the Americas. Their stance on the issue is decidedly neutral. In the end, the definition of a planet is merely semantics. What's important is that whatever definition you decide to use is functional, allowing generalized statements to be made easily without running afoul of the terminology. In that respect, I don't have a problem with the division between "planet" and "trans-Neptunian object" and dwarf planet. They are different enough and the terms selected for them, although not perfect, are definitive enough to make statements and issue papers about them without tripping over the semantics.
And yet only 424 of them were allowed to vote on the matter, on the last day of a conference.
I can't find the source, but I read somewhere that a previous measure, agreed to by most, would have preserved Pluto as a planet. Thinking the matter settled, most of the delegation went to play golf or drink beer, and a small minority pushed their agenda through.
Now they're worried about illegal aliens from other worlds.
More likely someone in the supply chain made a campaign contribution.
Ha ha! You morons fall for trumped-up reports of Apple sales declines like EVERY QUARTER so the short sellers can cash in.
It will be interesting to see if the common usage and meaning of "trumped up" changes after the current presidency.
Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of Murray Energy, the owner of the largest number of coal fired plants in the country,...
Completely untrue. According to the April 2018 edition of Power magazine, Duke, Southern Company, and AEP are the top 3 operators of coal plants. As far as I know, Murray Energy doesn't have any power stations, but recently stated that they want to. I'm not sure why they would be so stupid, as coal plants are nearly impossible to make money on currently.
The clean power plan is unviable not due to coal, but due to natural gas power. The clean power plan mandates CO2, which of course natural gas plants produce. CO2 capture has not been demonstrated at a useful scale yet, and I doubt they can ever be utility-scale. We are decades away (if ever) from having enough green power to not need fossil fuels. The Clean Power Plan can't realistically be met, so it is not crazy talk to repeal or change it.
The root of the problem is that the Obama administration set unachievable goals to satisfy their constituents, and the Trump administration kills it because of his constituents. The pendulum swings too far in both directions.