Recent Comments

Put the first foot down and whoops, there you go, sliding down at full speed.
Here's another organisation who absolutely 'must' have metadata - http://www.itnews.com.au/news/rspca-claims-metadata-critical-to-tackling-animal-cruelty-413817

This is why having this kind of data is bad in the first place and should not even be collected. Two years. Still no confirmation that the data is deleted after that time. So now the RSPCA wants to track your moments. Makes you wonder just how many organisations think that being able to find anyone anywhere at any point in time in the last two years is required for them to continue to their work.

It could be close to actual costs, but when the utility has different price structures for renters and homeowners (tiered rates), schools (max * $42), and I'm going to guess businesses have their own structure... well that starts to look more like profit maximizing than actual cost.

Plus, if actual costs were the policy, there would be no need for exorbitant fees on "break-even" solar customers.

So yes, while it's not necessarily true, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Not necessarily true. $42/kW could be close to their actual cost to deliver peak power. So they earn $30,000 less, but they don't have to pay out as much to the expensive peaking power plants, and/or they can sell that generation and transmission capacity to another business in the area to recoup the loss.

That said, I wouldn't put rate increases past SDG&E... Every electric utility out there is trying to kill off net metering and impose exorbitant fees on residential solar customers, even though the numbers say they generally break-even on the arrangement. Fortunately only Nevada has caved, while PUCs, legislators and similar have refused to allow those rate increases almost universally across the country.

1. Electric Co. multiplies peak usage by $42/kilowatt.

2. Consumer 1 installs batteries to reduce peak usage.

3. Consumer 1 figures out they can add solar for not much more.

4. Electric Co. adds surcharge of $41.87/kilowatt to remaining customers for "lost" income.

5. Consumer 2 installs batteries and solar.

I hate forced updates but, up until now, have only had to deal with that on my Playstations. This happened to me just the other day. I had long resisted giving out my personal information in order to use the Google Play app, for as long as I've had the Android phone, but I wanted a particular app, and could find no other way to get it on my phone. The minute I plugged my email address into Google Play, I got hit with a number of updates, and could do nothing about it. To top it off, I couldn't get the stupid app to work. By now, Google has undoubtedly scooped up all my contacts, and god knows what else. I swear, it's becoming very difficult to keep Google's tentacles out of all your shit. Do we really have to jailbreak Android now, too?

I don't know, I think this will be almost as successful as the Semantic Web

I can believe it would make sense economically for the user to do it.

That's what Tesla's betting on.

Somebody has to provide for peaking supply. Either the utility has to have nearline generation to bring online quickly/temporarily when needed, or borrowing over the grid, or some kind of storage system (battery, pumped storage, etc) - or the user can provide his own storage system.

There are pluses and minuses for the supplier handling it, and for the user handling it. The supplier can combine all the individual user peaks, which is a kind of economy of scale. The user handling it himself can put a known bound on peaking expense, whereas the supplier is free to change cost policy at any point.

If it's just an expense amelioration system, the user doesn't have to build his system to five nines reliability, or anything like that. Batteries are batteries. I can believe it would make sense economically for the user to do it.

I guess we'll see.

Data worth adding to a database somewhere

What you should try is:

youtube-dl

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl

A lot of people post here [at the Official Tor Blog] saying with each new TBB release, "Flash still doesn't work!" No kidding? We don't know that already?

Check youtube-dl's list of supported sites at their website. You don't need a browser plugin/addon/extension for this.

I don't know if torify/torsocks is included in the TBB*, but in TAILS I run at the command line (after downloading youtube-dl and a quick verify of the md5/sha1 or sha256 checksums):

chmod a+rx youtube-dl

^ the chmod command only once, then:

torsocks ./youtube-dl URLtovideoorpagewithvideo

Easy. There are other options such as the "User Agent" you may wish to use.

Again, if you use TBB instead of TAILS, programs like youtube-dl may need an additional option, the website for youtube-dl explains it very well.

Would vote for you if I could.

Yeah that's where it was going, and that web site was returning a branded "Not Found" page.

And yet today it works. Beats me. Carry on!

(Stock Android Browser, KitKat)

Yeah, I read it and got really confused because of that bit. Seems like a class act, that site.

Works well for me with Firefox on Android. Redirects to URL:

http://m.deccanherald.com/articles.php?name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deccanherald.com%2Fcontent%2F494474%2Foil-droplets-turn-cells-tiny.html

Very interesting. The article suggests to me that it would be possible, some day, to engineer living, flesh-driven laser beams. Just have to figure out how to generate that initial flash of light to start the amplification process. So, maybe we can start this research with lightning bugs, and create some soldier bugs that can shoot laser beams out of their butt.

At least that's what I thought of when I read the second sentence in paragraph five, which begins "The eggs of the spined soldier stink bug vary in colour depending on how much light is reflecting from the surface"

Then I realized that this and the remaining lines of TFA were part of a misplaced article on stink bugs that can manipulate the colors of their eggs.

Please accept my sincere apologies. Usually I check submitted URLs with mobile, hence why this was not a Forbes link.

You're advocating a [borrowed from an old email spam tempate]:

(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting data sharing. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(X) Scammers can easily use it to harvest personal data
(X) Existing DBs would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against the unethical
( ) Users will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it until they've made it their own
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Scammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority
(X) DBs in foreign countries
(X) Ease of searching
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment
(X) Susceptibility of protocols
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches
(X) Extreme profitability of unencrypted data
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with scammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of scammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering

"Not Found"

Living in the US I have slow internet anyway, but I took no speed hit by using a VPN, (vpn.ac). I still get my 2.6 MB/s download speed.

I recently tried to register with a forum which discusses recreational drugs, and was prevented, (even taunted!), by the site because of my use of a VPN. I wrote the administrators, asking why they would force their users to expose themselves, particularly those users living in censored or totalitarian-governed countries who can only obtain good information via VPN. They came back with "because:spammers". Seems like a lazy approach to me.

complains I have JS disable

For Firefox, go into about:config and set:
accessibility.blockautorefresh to true

Lots of sites are doing nasty stuff with meta redirects, so changing that setting is a good idea. You can still click on the pop-up notice if you want to follow it.

suggests I might like to download NETSCAPE... how old is that site???

They have a banner for Netscape 7.1, which was released in 2003-2004. Yeah, the site is a bit crufty, but I'll take that over the likes of Forbes' shiny new site that breaks if you have ad blocking enabled.

Site loads, complains I have JS disable and suggests I might like to download NETSCAPE... how old is that site???

Anything to do with a very similar sounding technology that has had a recent rise in popularity for mobile phone photography fans?

Strip the URI from the data and you are screwed. I can see why this did not take off.

Some have undetected configuration problems like out of phase audio.
I've seen one station that NEVER has had any audio,

Those problems likely have to do with station operators not wanting to pay any money to technician to properly set things up, and periodically maintain them. These are unlikely to be issues in Syria, where the guys setting these up are personally interested in having them work, and are not trying to make money on them (or just setting up the basics to maintain their FCC license), and everyone will work for food, anyhow. And with little competition on the air, listeners will no doubt tolerate whatever problems the broadcaster has, to get their news and entertainment fix.

Android doesn't have an EULA. You may have to agree to terms when linking your gmail account and first using the Play Store, but those things are optional. You can choose to use non-gmail accounts, and a 3rd party app store, without Google being involved at all, and never agreeing to their terms. The more intrusive part is OEM terms, which you can't always avoid. But since several companies make Android phones and tablets, you can shop around for the license you dislike the least.

So, how long until our mobile devices can detect this sort of spying and counter? Or, should we just end to end encrypt..

At a cost of hundreds of dollars. At least with Android you could switch to Cyan...

Amen to that!
+1 !!

>Seems like there must be more to the story. For example the autonomous operation is only "theoretical"?

One only has to look at some of the U.S. smaller market low-power tv signals to get an idea of what can go wrong. Some are really messed up, and even some of the better performing ones occasionally go down after a power outage or other disturbance and don't come back up unless someone calls the parent station to tell them to check it. Many operators can't see the output of their own transmitters and really don't know what is going on.
Many of the analog stations were rebroadcasting noisy signals from other other low-power stations or misaimed dishes. Some have undetected configuration problems like out of phase audio. (signal produced sound on a stereo tv, but it cancelled out on a mono set) If there is some overlap of coverage of low-power stations, there may still be some audience responses from an area with a sick site. I've seen one station that NEVER has had any audio, and the operator didn't fix it even after being told about it.

Simple things, like a strong wind gust (or sandstorm?) might knock the satellite dish out of alignment. A dish that's close-enough when set up in good weather might not always give adequate signal under other atmospheric conditions. High operating temperatures might contribute to r.f amp failure, or maybe the oscillator going out of lock. Maybe the box isn't quite weather-tight and some moisture gets in contributing to currents between circuit traces, or corrosion.
Old-school equipment would have used a crystal to set the desired transmit channel, but it's more likely there is a digital synthesizer (similar to what's in modern FM tuners) that makes it easy to change frequencies. While the added complexity adds flexibility, it also adds more failure modes. Who knows, a stray cosmic ray might cause the digital section to freeze up. A problem that could be cleared by a simple reset/reboot might persist if there's no one around to do it. If the solar power and battery voltage drops too low, will the equipment always go back to a controlled stable state after experiencing slow transitions through a below normal supply voltage range? Of course these sorts of potential problems apply to the satellite receiver too.

If the transmitter has a display, it's probably a design with a cpu in control of the frequency synthesizer, trim of output power, and monitoring of things like reflected power (an indication of how well the antenna is adjusted to transfer energy from the transmitter). Having a cpu generally lowers reliability, but a custom design might be set up to do intelligent things like adjust the operating hours and power level to make best use of the available power supply ability. I doubt that any custom development is being done.

What troubles me is the bait-and-switch nature of EULAs these days. I'm a big fan of Android and have a lot of time invested in the platform (curating my music and apps, for a start). If they introduce a term in the EULA that I object to at some point in the future, along with a "please don't use the platform if you don't want to comply" clause, my choices are either suck it up or stand by my value and abandon the platform - not an easy choice to make.
See also: "How to boil a frog"

Thank you Pipedot for being here so we can discuss this type of article because other places don't give us the facility to do so.

Actually, this is quite an achievement and worthy of reporting. I wouldn't have seen it if it wasn't on |.
It's good to see that they are making progress.

They cost $1500 http://store.rideonewheel.com/products/onewheel-ultracharger?variant=4937879172
or $500 for a knockoff - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/01/09/0012244 (thanks SN)

And... your comment about this news content would be what exactly?

Yes, this is intended to be funny.

If I wanted breaking news I would visit a news site like The Guardian or a science site.
Unfortunately, I probably not be able to comment about the news topic or participate in moderation.
Hence the story is here :-)

Because, according to people who say they know what they're talking about, doing the landing after actually reaching space and delivering a heavy payload is much, much harder and what the Bezos Phallus I team did was comparatively easy.

I'm pretty happy with both accomplishments. Also this is very old news, nearly a month now. :(

I'm sure Mr. Bezos' prior art seems a bit more recent.

Seriously though, why the uproar over SpaceX being an historic "first," when really it's just a "first" for them?

I get that it's the first to do so after launching satellites into orbit, and with a much larger rocket, but give credit where credit's due.

No biggie... They've been doing this on Twilight Zone and Lost in Space since the 60s.

Dev blog: https://yanderedev.wordpress.com/
Download the 'debug build': https://yanderedev.wordpress.com/downloads/
Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1EBJfK7ltjYUFyzysKxr1g
Wikia: http://yandere-simulator.wikia.com/wiki/Yandere_Simulator_Wiki

There's a lot of interest in this for a game which isn't anywhere near complete yet.

Company link is: http://www.kamigamirobots.com/
This technology came from a kickstarter project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2141368214/kamigami-worlds-first-diy-lightning-fast-origami-r which has a lot of information about this technology.
More information available on: https://www.dragoninnovation.com/projects/16-dash-the-diy-robot

The video links appears to be a copy of someone else's video.

What is the relevance today? Quadcopters are everywhere now.