That's the full story. Petrol engines are really inefficient, and can't save more energy by doing things like regenerative braking. Even if your electric car is powered by 100% fossil fuel plants, you are way ahead because the power stations are much more efficient. And you can do more flue gas cleaning at a large power station than you can do on a million car's exhaust pipes. And then, with every extra bit of renewable power that hits the grids, your EV becomes even cleaner.
Yup. You still hear old school car manufacturers saying 'Our EV's will be suitable for most people's daily commute.' You don't sell cars for people's 'daily commute'. That's a time of drudgery you don't want to think of. Mentioning it is saying, 'Yes, this will do this boring thing, but if you want to do anything interesting, you'll want one of our 'real cars' over there. Ones that use Petrol."
Meanwhile, Tesla has shown us how to build an electric car. Build it with a hyperspace trigger instead of a gas pedal, build it to charge fast, build lots of stations to charge it fast, and sell people the exciting road trip to anywhere. And make it a nice, pleasant, relaxing place for your daily commute, too, while selling the dream that one day, this car will do the daily commute for you.
For heating - make sure the car is well insulated, and you don't need as much heat as you might think. A car is a small volume, after all, and the electric drivetrain does still produce heat. Teslas are being used, now, in nordic countries very sucessfully. Same goes for A/C.
And for charging - they have enough range to do a full morning and afternoon drive. Leave the car at a supercharger while you get lunch, and take a 20 minute break at another one during the afternoon, and you'll do your 600 mile roadtrip. Small price to pay for never seeing the inside of a gas station!
Fully agree with you. I don't see how it is legal for a company to ever stop patching security flaws in their software. These aren't problems newly created - they are flaws in the original product that make it 'not fit for the purpose for which it was sold' - which means they should either provide a patch, or give everyone a full refund.
While things are now highly integrated, very often the faults are in those power supply parts of a product. But with multilayer boards, tracing the power components is near impossible, without schematics and board layouts
The main impediment to repair of electronics is simply lack of information - that schematics and board overlays are simply unavailable. Without them, a repair person is flying blind. With them, they can determine the fault by measuring voltage rails around the board, and the repair is often replacing jelly bean parts that are worth pennies - or just bypassing broken board connections.
The other thing we lack is source code. manufacturers abandon products as soon as they are sold, and withhold source code (as well as locking the device up with code signing) so users cannot fix their bugs.
'Right to repair' legislation should address these problems first.
My point isn't that we should grow biomass to run the power plant. Farming plants to power a power station is ridiculously impractical.
But it is exactly what you are trying to do - in reverse - if you capture the CO_2_ and feed it to plants, with the intent of consuming all the CO_2_ the power plant produces. You are trying to use plants to un-burn the fuel you used to run the power plant - and the scale is the same as trying to grow the fuel.
Look at it this way - If you grow plants to absorb all the CO2 a power plant produces, you would be growing enough plant matter to run the plant on the biomas. That's going to be a lot of farms under plastic.
Lignite, or brown coal, is the worst - well, maybe oil sands and shale are worse fossil fuels, but for power generation, brown coal has to be the most dirty form of energy around.
So it's 17% black coal, 25% much-worse-than-coal, 9% gas and 54% sane.
The written warranty gives the customer additional rights, such as replacement where the law only specifies repair, or give you a repair for something that could be normal wear-and-tear. But this is about 'implied warranties', such as a warranty of fitness, which the manufacturer or retailer cannot annul with pieces of paper. So they can write what they want, it doesn't matter.
If you were sold a device to do a certain thing, and it was suitable for it, then you are due a refund.
There is no possible argument against this - a device that is built to be connected to the internet, but has a remotely accessible security flaw, cannot be deemed to be 'fit for the purpose for which it was sold', and so the customer is entitled to a full refund, if they desire, regardless of how old the device is.
Arguably, you could consider installing available security updates within a reasonable timeframe - say, a few weeks after the customer has been informed of them - could be considered basic maintenance, as long as the procedure for applying the update is something that an ordinary user could do. In that case, the manufacturer and retailer could get away with an exchange program for bricked devices, where the devices are sent to a shop with JTAG, serial or other in-circuit programming equipment, or even just providing full instructions on how to unbrick, if this can be done without any additional hardware.
But if the manufacturer has not provided such updates, then full refund must be paid. And it is the retailer who is on the hook for this - they then have to get recompensed from their wholesaler, etc.
It isn't. Let's say, at the beginning of the season, with populations low at 100 males and 100 females, you release 1000 sterile males. Of the 100 females who try to breed, only 10 of them will do so with a fertile male, leading to a lot less mosquitoes. This can be even more effective if your sterile males, grown in perfect lab conditions, are healthy and strong, but the viable males who grew up in the wild, with limited food and water as well as sub-optimal temperature and humidity, are weak.
If you instead release 1000 female mosquitoes, the 100 fertile female mosquitoes will still find mates and breed normally, as mosquitoes aren't monogamous. Sterile females will have little effect.
The change does not prevent the sterile males from seeking out females and mating. It just prevents the eggs being properly fertilized. If you can get your sterile males released in enough of a quantity, the almost all the fertile males will be out-competed by the infertile ones, leading to almost no successful breedings and almost no mosquitoes in the next generation. You have to keep up your production and release of sterile males, but this is very good at short-term control.
I wouldn't consider this a realistic case - it is having almost all your power being used by cheap lights connected to chopper dimmers, turned down low. The result of this is that the power is all delivered in a sequence of sharp spikes, and that is all. Houses draw most of their power with normal appliances, or lights without dimmers turned down low. This normal load would reduce the effect of the current spikes, meaning that the meters would measure more accurately - probably within the proper margin for error.
The solution to this problem, if a problem it is, is to properly label energy saving lights so people won't use them with dimmers, unless they are built for this. (Inductor before the filter capacitor to eliminate that current spike, together with circuitry to measure the setting of the chopper dimmer, and adjust the LED current appropriately, or lights that come with their own dimmer units, which just communicate with the light using X-10-like protocols.)
(Footnote: The chopper dimmers consist of a timer that is triggered when the mains waveform drops to zero, and it holds the power off until the timer expires, when it turns the output on with a triac, which remains on until the waveform drops back to zero, when the timers is triggered again. You end up powering the device with something like a short-risetime sawtooth wave, which, powering a capacitor, charges it almost instantly with a huge current spike. There are few things that can measure such a waveform accurately.)
These tests are done using cheap switchmode power supplies and maybe even capacitative droppers, behind horrible 'chopper' dimmers. The power waveform in that setup would be horrid, and really hard to measure. It is also wrong, as those sort lights should no be used with dimmers.
Incidentally, problems with measuring works like this are the secret behind 'free energy' demonstrations!
Actually following through with the threat to disclose in 90 days (which is far too long in my opinion) is the only way to get corporations to take vulnerability reports seriously.
Microsoft made a choice - to push their big marketing and style changes to all their users by bundling them with necessary security updates. This bad decision means that they can't push out small security-only, no-reboot-required updates on an as-needed basis. It is this profit-driven motive that makes a short disclosure period hard for them. The right way for the world deal with this is keep up the pressure, so they switch back to pushing out small security-only updates as needed when needed; to rebuild their customer's trust that Microsoft's updates won't break people's systems, won't suddenly uninstall legacy software, that sysadmins don't have to put updates through verification because they'll probably break something. This way, vulnerabilities in windows are fixed within days of them being reported.
There is zero excuse for not fixing a vulnerability for 90 days. If something makes it hard for a corporation to fix vulnerabilities quickly, then it is that something that needs to change. Responsible disclosure like this pushes corporations to make such changes.
Normally, the sea ice freezes over the water, capping it off and insulating it. Heat soaks only slowly through the ice, cooling the water under the ice and freezing it, slowly.
Instead, if we pump seawater up and drop it on the top of the ice, it will freeze quickly. So we can increase the thickness of the ice, so it will, hopefully, last longer.
If done on a large scale, however, it will warm the arctic winter, as heat is added to the system in the form of liquid water to be frozen, water surface that is 0 degrees C instead of solid ice at maybe -20 degrees C. The increased ice is probably a net positive for the artctic, but I dislike all these goengineering kludges.
If a third-party does a repair, an that repair causes a problem, then it is the responsibility of the person who did the repair.
But that doesn't absolve the manufacturer of their responsibility to fix manufacturing and design flaws not related to the repair, for the working life of the product.
There is no point in not using something for good because it could be also used for bad. The existence of CRISPR is known, so the genie is out of the bottle.
However, these techniques can't cause the nightmare you are considering. You need to inoculate the embryo to change it's genetics. So 'jumping species lines' would only be possible if the two species naturally interbred.
So, enjoy your fictional nightmares - but we will remain in the real world, where only possible scenarios need to be considered.
Honestly, there are few places on this planet that couldn't do with a good eradication of the European Black Rat. Even if they did this with the domestic Cat - if every male cat was either neutered, a professional breeding animal or a GE males only animal - a whole lot of the world's feral cat problems would be solved.
The only issue would be with animals that are potentially at risk in their native habitats - such as the possum.
The main reason why crossfeed isn't being worked on is that the extra capacity it would deliver isn't needed by any customers. The heavy is already a beast of a launcher without it. But, if someone came up with a mission that required the extra capacity and was willing to pay for its development, then they would restart work on crossfeed.
Normal disposal of placing the waste into a pond really encourages anaerobic bacteria, which produce methane, which is an important greenhouse gas.
Any handling method that prevents that is a nice plus. Even if it converts it to CO2 instead. If they capture the energy and use it to replace fossil fuels - hey, big plus.
Knowledge of what the Sun is doing is essential for anything we do in space, including studying the weather and climate, because solar radiation is dangerous to equipment as well as people. And down here on earth - someday there is going to be a solar storm such as happened in 1859, which set telegraph cables sparking across the planet. Today, such a thing would fry our phone and electric systems if we can't predict it with the certainty needed to, literally, shut down and disconnect our electricity and copper communication networks while it passes by.
And of course, while it is CO and methane that are driving climate change, the heat it traps comes from the Sun, so good knowledge of what the Sun is doing is needed to understand our measurements of temperature.
Data doesn't ever get 'un-stolen'. That database is out there, maybe for a price, or maybe posted for anyone with access to the right dark website.
Basically, this should mean that G.M. should now be recalling their entire fleet to reencrypt all their vehicle's remote locking equipment, unless they can prove that some of their vehicles cannot have been in that database.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the full story. Petrol engines are really inefficient, and can't save more energy by doing things like regenerative braking. Even if your electric car is powered by 100% fossil fuel plants, you are way ahead because the power stations are much more efficient. And you can do more flue gas cleaning at a large power station than you can do on a million car's exhaust pipes. And then, with every extra bit of renewable power that hits the grids, your EV becomes even cleaner.
Yup. You still hear old school car manufacturers saying 'Our EV's will be suitable for most people's daily commute.' You don't sell cars for people's 'daily commute'. That's a time of drudgery you don't want to think of. Mentioning it is saying, 'Yes, this will do this boring thing, but if you want to do anything interesting, you'll want one of our 'real cars' over there. Ones that use Petrol."
Meanwhile, Tesla has shown us how to build an electric car. Build it with a hyperspace trigger instead of a gas pedal, build it to charge fast, build lots of stations to charge it fast, and sell people the exciting road trip to anywhere. And make it a nice, pleasant, relaxing place for your daily commute, too, while selling the dream that one day, this car will do the daily commute for you.
For heating - make sure the car is well insulated, and you don't need as much heat as you might think. A car is a small volume, after all, and the electric drivetrain does still produce heat. Teslas are being used, now, in nordic countries very sucessfully. Same goes for A/C.
And for charging - they have enough range to do a full morning and afternoon drive. Leave the car at a supercharger while you get lunch, and take a 20 minute break at another one during the afternoon, and you'll do your 600 mile roadtrip. Small price to pay for never seeing the inside of a gas station!
Fully agree with you. I don't see how it is legal for a company to ever stop patching security flaws in their software. These aren't problems newly created - they are flaws in the original product that make it 'not fit for the purpose for which it was sold' - which means they should either provide a patch, or give everyone a full refund.
While things are now highly integrated, very often the faults are in those power supply parts of a product. But with multilayer boards, tracing the power components is near impossible, without schematics and board layouts
The main impediment to repair of electronics is simply lack of information - that schematics and board overlays are simply unavailable. Without them, a repair person is flying blind. With them, they can determine the fault by measuring voltage rails around the board, and the repair is often replacing jelly bean parts that are worth pennies - or just bypassing broken board connections. The other thing we lack is source code. manufacturers abandon products as soon as they are sold, and withhold source code (as well as locking the device up with code signing) so users cannot fix their bugs. 'Right to repair' legislation should address these problems first.
My point isn't that we should grow biomass to run the power plant. Farming plants to power a power station is ridiculously impractical.
But it is exactly what you are trying to do - in reverse - if you capture the CO_2_ and feed it to plants, with the intent of consuming all the CO_2_ the power plant produces. You are trying to use plants to un-burn the fuel you used to run the power plant - and the scale is the same as trying to grow the fuel.
Look at it this way - If you grow plants to absorb all the CO2 a power plant produces, you would be growing enough plant matter to run the plant on the biomas. That's going to be a lot of farms under plastic.
Lignite, or brown coal, is the worst - well, maybe oil sands and shale are worse fossil fuels, but for power generation, brown coal has to be the most dirty form of energy around.
So it's 17% black coal, 25% much-worse-than-coal, 9% gas and 54% sane.
The written warranty gives the customer additional rights, such as replacement where the law only specifies repair, or give you a repair for something that could be normal wear-and-tear. But this is about 'implied warranties', such as a warranty of fitness, which the manufacturer or retailer cannot annul with pieces of paper. So they can write what they want, it doesn't matter.
If you were sold a device to do a certain thing, and it was suitable for it, then you are due a refund.
There is no possible argument against this - a device that is built to be connected to the internet, but has a remotely accessible security flaw, cannot be deemed to be 'fit for the purpose for which it was sold', and so the customer is entitled to a full refund, if they desire, regardless of how old the device is.
Arguably, you could consider installing available security updates within a reasonable timeframe - say, a few weeks after the customer has been informed of them - could be considered basic maintenance, as long as the procedure for applying the update is something that an ordinary user could do. In that case, the manufacturer and retailer could get away with an exchange program for bricked devices, where the devices are sent to a shop with JTAG, serial or other in-circuit programming equipment, or even just providing full instructions on how to unbrick, if this can be done without any additional hardware.
But if the manufacturer has not provided such updates, then full refund must be paid. And it is the retailer who is on the hook for this - they then have to get recompensed from their wholesaler, etc.
It isn't. Let's say, at the beginning of the season, with populations low at 100 males and 100 females, you release 1000 sterile males. Of the 100 females who try to breed, only 10 of them will do so with a fertile male, leading to a lot less mosquitoes. This can be even more effective if your sterile males, grown in perfect lab conditions, are healthy and strong, but the viable males who grew up in the wild, with limited food and water as well as sub-optimal temperature and humidity, are weak.
If you instead release 1000 female mosquitoes, the 100 fertile female mosquitoes will still find mates and breed normally, as mosquitoes aren't monogamous. Sterile females will have little effect.
The change does not prevent the sterile males from seeking out females and mating. It just prevents the eggs being properly fertilized. If you can get your sterile males released in enough of a quantity, the almost all the fertile males will be out-competed by the infertile ones, leading to almost no successful breedings and almost no mosquitoes in the next generation. You have to keep up your production and release of sterile males, but this is very good at short-term control.
I wouldn't consider this a realistic case - it is having almost all your power being used by cheap lights connected to chopper dimmers, turned down low. The result of this is that the power is all delivered in a sequence of sharp spikes, and that is all. Houses draw most of their power with normal appliances, or lights without dimmers turned down low. This normal load would reduce the effect of the current spikes, meaning that the meters would measure more accurately - probably within the proper margin for error.
The solution to this problem, if a problem it is, is to properly label energy saving lights so people won't use them with dimmers, unless they are built for this. (Inductor before the filter capacitor to eliminate that current spike, together with circuitry to measure the setting of the chopper dimmer, and adjust the LED current appropriately, or lights that come with their own dimmer units, which just communicate with the light using X-10-like protocols.)
(Footnote: The chopper dimmers consist of a timer that is triggered when the mains waveform drops to zero, and it holds the power off until the timer expires, when it turns the output on with a triac, which remains on until the waveform drops back to zero, when the timers is triggered again. You end up powering the device with something like a short-risetime sawtooth wave, which, powering a capacitor, charges it almost instantly with a huge current spike. There are few things that can measure such a waveform accurately.)
These tests are done using cheap switchmode power supplies and maybe even capacitative droppers, behind horrible 'chopper' dimmers. The power waveform in that setup would be horrid, and really hard to measure. It is also wrong, as those sort lights should no be used with dimmers.
Incidentally, problems with measuring works like this are the secret behind 'free energy' demonstrations!
Actually following through with the threat to disclose in 90 days (which is far too long in my opinion) is the only way to get corporations to take vulnerability reports seriously.
Microsoft made a choice - to push their big marketing and style changes to all their users by bundling them with necessary security updates. This bad decision means that they can't push out small security-only, no-reboot-required updates on an as-needed basis. It is this profit-driven motive that makes a short disclosure period hard for them. The right way for the world deal with this is keep up the pressure, so they switch back to pushing out small security-only updates as needed when needed; to rebuild their customer's trust that Microsoft's updates won't break people's systems, won't suddenly uninstall legacy software, that sysadmins don't have to put updates through verification because they'll probably break something. This way, vulnerabilities in windows are fixed within days of them being reported.
There is zero excuse for not fixing a vulnerability for 90 days. If something makes it hard for a corporation to fix vulnerabilities quickly, then it is that something that needs to change. Responsible disclosure like this pushes corporations to make such changes.
Normally, the sea ice freezes over the water, capping it off and insulating it. Heat soaks only slowly through the ice, cooling the water under the ice and freezing it, slowly.
Instead, if we pump seawater up and drop it on the top of the ice, it will freeze quickly. So we can increase the thickness of the ice, so it will, hopefully, last longer.
If done on a large scale, however, it will warm the arctic winter, as heat is added to the system in the form of liquid water to be frozen, water surface that is 0 degrees C instead of solid ice at maybe -20 degrees C. The increased ice is probably a net positive for the artctic, but I dislike all these goengineering kludges.
If a third-party does a repair, an that repair causes a problem, then it is the responsibility of the person who did the repair.
But that doesn't absolve the manufacturer of their responsibility to fix manufacturing and design flaws not related to the repair, for the working life of the product.
There is no point in not using something for good because it could be also used for bad. The existence of CRISPR is known, so the genie is out of the bottle.
However, these techniques can't cause the nightmare you are considering. You need to inoculate the embryo to change it's genetics. So 'jumping species lines' would only be possible if the two species naturally interbred.
So, enjoy your fictional nightmares - but we will remain in the real world, where only possible scenarios need to be considered.
"I Still Call Australia Home".
Honestly, there are few places on this planet that couldn't do with a good eradication of the European Black Rat. Even if they did this with the domestic Cat - if every male cat was either neutered, a professional breeding animal or a GE males only animal - a whole lot of the world's feral cat problems would be solved. The only issue would be with animals that are potentially at risk in their native habitats - such as the possum.
The main reason why crossfeed isn't being worked on is that the extra capacity it would deliver isn't needed by any customers. The heavy is already a beast of a launcher without it. But, if someone came up with a mission that required the extra capacity and was willing to pay for its development, then they would restart work on crossfeed.
Normal disposal of placing the waste into a pond really encourages anaerobic bacteria, which produce methane, which is an important greenhouse gas.
Any handling method that prevents that is a nice plus. Even if it converts it to CO2 instead. If they capture the energy and use it to replace fossil fuels - hey, big plus.
You have to be trolling.
Knowledge of what the Sun is doing is essential for anything we do in space, including studying the weather and climate, because solar radiation is dangerous to equipment as well as people. And down here on earth - someday there is going to be a solar storm such as happened in 1859, which set telegraph cables sparking across the planet. Today, such a thing would fry our phone and electric systems if we can't predict it with the certainty needed to, literally, shut down and disconnect our electricity and copper communication networks while it passes by.
And of course, while it is CO and methane that are driving climate change, the heat it traps comes from the Sun, so good knowledge of what the Sun is doing is needed to understand our measurements of temperature.
Data doesn't ever get 'un-stolen'. That database is out there, maybe for a price, or maybe posted for anyone with access to the right dark website. Basically, this should mean that G.M. should now be recalling their entire fleet to reencrypt all their vehicle's remote locking equipment, unless they can prove that some of their vehicles cannot have been in that database.