I can't remember which Highlander sequel it was, but obviously doing stuff in the atmosphere doesn't always work. Plus, you can't put some working group of multiple people together, dammit. There can be only ONE!

How is this different than what would come from interviewing a witness about her having been raped, who - in the course of talking about THAT case - says, "Yeah, I know her. I met her when she robbed that store liquor store down on Main Street." Why wouldn't the police follow such a lead?

There's more to it than that. Engineers can romp around in the production system - generally without leaving a trail that could get them in trouble - while doing a LOT more than just looking at web server log files. For example, he pointed out that half the company (some 4000 people) could send tweets from user accounts AS that user, and leave no trail. Multiply egregious stuff like that times dozens of other examples (like .. high level system engineers allowed to work remotely, directly in the production systems, without having to use devices/computers that are patched and up to date, security-wise).

Whew! What a relief that SpaceX is privately owned, then, and NOT publicly traded, right?

Which means abolishing the First Amendment. It guarantees that people can assemble into groups as they see fit (like, say, political parties). It guarantees that you can pay someone to speak on your behalf if they're better at it than you, or can do so on behalf of a larger group in order to be more effective (like, say, lobbyists).

If you think freedom of speech and assembly is no good, all you have to do is get a federal supermajority in the legislature to see your point and kill the entire Bill of Rights (it can't be picked apart on amendment at a time), and then get 37 states to ratify that alteration to the Constitution. Should be no problem.

Or ... you could explore how to get kids a decent education featuring things like critical thinking skills so they aren't as vulnerable to getting their entire world view and their eventual voting patterns set by under- and mal-informed people throughout the media/entertainment complex, to say nothing of higher education's toxicity on this topic.

The cooling inlet for a nuclear plant is barely big enough for a scuba diver to enter. It could probably be smaller, but they make it that big so a scuba diver can regularly go in there to clear it of fouling by biological organisms (mussels, seaweed, etc). What they're proposing here is on an entirely different scale. The marine industry spends billions on anti-fouling paint, and it still requires regular scraping (every few weeks to months) and repainting (every few years). It's a massive endeavor. I suspect the best solution is not going to be propeller-like turbines, but something more like a flapping tail. It will be less efficient but will continue to function even if heavily encrusted, allowing you to stretch out maintenance intervals to where they're economically feasible (it costs probably one or two orders of magnitude more to send a diver down to clean things than to send a maintenance worker to a wind turbine).

Diesels are already more efficient than EVs in most of the world (where electricity is predominantly generated from fossil fuels). Diesel cars can already hit 40% efficiency, trucks 50%, and ships 60% efficiency. Electricity generated from fossil fuels is about 40% efficient (coal) to 60% (gas). Call it 50%. Power lines have about 5% transmission loss, battery charging losses are about 15%, battery discharging losses about 15%, and electric motor efficiency about 90%. For an overall EV efficiency of (50%)*(95%)*(85%)*(85%)*(90%) = 31%.

That's actually pretty close to the efficiency of the gas engines used in cars. Years ago I backed out the efficiency of a Nissan Versa using the Nissan Leaf as an energy consumption equivalent (since they share the same chassis and thus aerodynamics), and it came out right around 30%. Those new 6-speed, 8-speed, 10-speed transmissions and CVTs help a lot. It's why I've been saying for over a decade now that the priority needs to be converting our power generation to renewables and nuclear, and shutting down fossil fuel power plants. If you don't do that first, switching from a gas vehicle to an EV may make you feel better, but doesn't really reduce carbon emissions. (The energy cost advantage of an EV isn't because of efficiency; it's because coal and natural gas are an order of magnitude cheaper per Joule than gasoline and diesel. MPGe does not take generation, transmission, nor charging efficiency into account. It can't because those will all be different depending on your local power plant's efficiency, your distance from the power plant, and type of charger you use. So you can't really compare MPGe to MPG.)

The USB-C spec includes something called alternate mode. That's where the four wires carrying high-speed data (mirrored so 8 wires total) plus 4 lower speed data wires in a USB-C cable can be repurposed to carry signals other than USB. Common alternate modes include HDMI, Displayport, and Thunderbolt (PCIe signals).

Lightning only uses 4 wires for data (not mirrored). It would be completely trivial for Apple to create a Lightning alternate mode, and have all iOS devices switch to USB-C connectors. They could've done it a decade ago when the USB-C spec was first being laid out (Apple is a member of the USB-IF, and in fact it holds one of the seven board member seats). The only thing preventing Lighting over USB-C is their own obstinance and greed (selling overpriced Lightning cables).

Our brains seem to function as a neural network. Their drawback is that the longer they spend repeatedly exposed to the same patterns, the harder time they have adjusting to changes or new scenarios. Stereotypes, discrimination, the crotchety old man/woman who won't change their ways. Death is nature's way of resetting those neural networks, so they're flexible and adaptable again.

In a world without aging, I suspect there will be a lot more wars (and deaths due to war, counteracting most of the increase in lifespan) due to fewer people changing their minds or compromising. If you thought today's politically polarized society was bad, this is going to make it a lot worse.

Heh. Back around 1992 I helped run a mail server that hosted a mailing list. One day I got a frantic call from a co-sysadmin that the system was down and he wasn't able to login remotely. Since I had local access, I began poking around the system to figure out what the problem was. Our server had a 512 MB HDD. Someone had scanned a photo he'd taken, converted it to a BMP instead JPEG so it was about 12 MB, and emailed it to everyone on our mailing list (about 150 people). The first few copies got sent OK. But as our network connection to back up (took about a minute to send 12 MB over DSL back then), the mail server began queuing copies of the mail for later delivery to other recipients - writing the 12 MB BMP to disk over and over. Until our 512 MB HDD was full and the server ground to a halt.

Anyway, if you have some large file(s) which you wish to email, the proper way to do it is to host it on a website or Dropbox or Google Photos or YouTube (for videos) or something similar, then email people the URL. That way they can grab the file(s) by opening the URL in their borwser, instead of it clogging up the Internet, mail servers, and people's 15 GB free Gmail or Hotmail storage limit (Yahoo's is 1 TB so less of an issue there).

Every nuclear plant operator pays a portion of their receipts into a decommissioning fund. The fund is enough that although San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was closed early (28 years instead of the expected 50), its decommissioning fund ($4.1 billion) is sufficient to handle the estimated decommissioning costs ($4.4 billion). (The fund amount is a current snapshot, while the decommissioning costs are spread over decades. So the current fund will accumulate interest over the decades, and will be more than sufficient to pay for costs).

If you add up the highest estimates I could find for the costs of the Fukushima and Chernobyl cleanups ($660 billion and $700 billion respectively), and divide it by the total sum of nuclear power generated (about 2300 TWh * 30 years + 2300 TWh/2 * 20 years), their cleanup only end up costing $1.46 trillion / 92000 TWh = about 1.5 cents per kWh. If you use average cleanup cost estimates, it's closer to 0.5 cents per kWh. If you ask me, I'm more than willing to pay that for nearly unlimited, on-demand, greenhouse gas-free electricity. Since the average U.S. household uses 10700 kWh/yr, it amounts to just $160 per household per year worst-case ($53.5 if you go with the average). By contrast, the $25 billion in forgiven student loan debt thus far has cost us ($25 billion / 144 million taxpayers) = $174 per taxpayer. The numbers are even more favorable for nuclear in other countries, where household electricity use is lower, and price is higher.

The only problem nuclear power has is that it's an incredible concentrated power source, so you don't need a lot of nuclear plants to supply a lot of power. This means when there's a single accident or disaster, its scope is correspondingly much bigger. But to properly assess the drawbacks, you need to compare the costs against the amount of power generated. Otherwise you get into the same situation as with car and plane crashes. Because the fatality figures are much higher when a plane crashes, people who don't think twice about getting into a car have an irrational fear of flying. Even though planes are much safer than cars.

This also affects the viability of insuring nuclear plants. Insurance requires large numbers to average out probabilities - as you increase the size of the insured population, the width of the bell curve shrinks. Insuring 3000+ gas and coal plants is easy - because there are so many of them their premium ends up close to the average cost of an accident. By contrast, insuring 55 nuclear plants is a lot harder, and their premium ends up being closer to the worst-case cost of an accident rather than the average cost. Normally in situations like this the government steps in an act as insurer, because it's for the long-term greater good. But unfortunately our policies regarding this are largely driven by people who evaluate it emotionally, rather than rationally and mathematically. This is largely what's driving the push to small modular reactors: not waste reduction, but as a workaround for the math which makes it more expensive to insure a few really large plants, compared to breaking up those plants into lots of smaller ones with the exact same risk.

Same problem as the U.S. The ISP owns the lines and provides the service, and local government regulations prohibit anyone else from laying down lines. Meaning you effectively have only one choice of ISP.

We need to change this to follow the gas company model. You probably only want one set of lines, so one company can own the lines. But it's prohibited from providing service. Instead, it leases the lines (under government oversight since it's a utility) to lots of companies which provide service. That breaks the vertical integration between line-owner and service-provider. The part of the service which should only have one company (laying down and maintaining the lines) has just one company. The part of the service which should have multiple companies providing service (ISPs) have multiple companies competing.

Vertical integration is desirable early on. When cable TV companies first began, nobody knew the best way to lay out wires to each home. Some sort of hub and spoke model was probably better than one central station with individual lines to each home. But how many hubs should there be? What's the optimal average length of the spokes? What sort of technology do you use to split and combine the signals at the hubs? These sorts of questions are better answered by competition with vertical integration. But today, all this has been sorted out. Competition has arrived at the best near-optimal solution. And in fact all the cable companies use the same hardware (following the DOCSIS standard) for cable modems. Once things reach that point, there's no longer any need for such vertical integration, and the economy is better served by eliminating vertical integration and splitting up ownership of the wires from providing the service.

Contrast this with cellular service space in the U.S. Unlike cable Internet, cellular technology is still developing, and tighter vertical integration is desirable when the technology is in its development stage. e.g. When 3G service rolled out, two of the carriers tried GSM, two tried CDMA. And in the end CDMA turned out to be superior (for those of you who still think GSM won, the GSM standard was updated to incorporate CDMA). Likewise when 4G service rolled out, Sprint tried WiMax (which used SOFDMA), while the others used LTE (which used fixed OFDMA). And in the end LTE turned out to be better. You want vertical integration when these sorts of things are being decided, so a mis-step at one end (GSM phone companies eschewing CDMA) does not necessarily sink the company since they have other sales providing them time and money to redirect (GSM phone companies survived from revenue for providing phone service, until they could implement UMTS based on wideband CDMA a year later). Likewise, although the WiMax debacle hurt Sprint (they basically had to pay to build a 4G network twice) to the point where it eventually had to be bought out by T-Mobile, it did not immediately kill the company since they still had significant revenue from service.

So there are development stages where vertical integration is desirable, and stages where it's no longer desirable. It's this transition we're getting caught on. Uncertainty over when we should transition, and people not understanding that this transition exists so the old regulatory ways may no longer be optimal.

Not that I condone the behavior. But Amazon took so long to begin cracking down on it that a lot of companies which wanted to be honest, may have begun "brushing" just to stay competitive. So except for a handful of big companies who already had brand recognition, all the honest Amazon sellers have either been driven out of business, or have begun "brushing" themselves just to stay in business. You need to nip this sort of stuff in the bud.

The spam calls in the U.S. (at least the ones I get) mostly aren't targeted. The spammers just randomly or systematically dial numbers, so something like the GDPR (preventing the sale of your phone number) wouldn't help.

The problem is the phone companies refuse to implement a system where the call recipient can verify the caller's phone number or ID. The caller ID system is laughably easy to spoof. Blocking the number doesn't help since it's not the number the spammer is actually calling from; and it may even wind up hurting you as you may end up blocking a legitimate number that you wish to receive calls from. The rationale for callers being able to change their caller ID on their own is that each phone line here has its own phone number. If a company has one main number but uses multiple lines for outgoing calls, it will probably want to assign the caller ID on all of them to show their main number. I wouldn't have a problem if that's all they were able to do - change the caller ID value to one of their other numbers. But there is nothing to prevent them from setting the caller ID number to anything they wish. It's even possible to get a spam call here, and the caller ID shows your own phone number.

This seems like it'd be an easy problem to solve with public/private keys. Assign each phone number a private key known only to the line owner, and add the corresponding public key to a global database. When someone calls you, they encode some changing value (e.g. the time of the call) with your public key and their private key, then send you their public key. Your phone sees their public key, decodes the message using that and your private key, to confirm the time of the call, thus confirming the caller is the person who owns the private key corresponding to that public key. That makes it impossible to spoof someone else's number (you'd need their private key to do that).

But the phone companies have zero interest in actually fixing this problem because they get so much money from the spammers. In fact several of them play both sides for profit. They sell service to the spammers, then sell spam-blocking upgrades to everyone else. I don't think it'll be fixed until we do the equivalent of the IPv4 => IPv6 transition but for phone numbers, and we all know how well the phase-out of IPv4 is going.

Apple CEO Tim Cook had his home blurred from mapping apps after issues with a stalker. [...] The case for blurring? "Having strangers from all over the world stare at your home isn't necessarily something you want to happen -- but it can be done in seconds on the mapping apps we all carry around on our phones." ("Stop people from peering at your place," suggests the article's subtitle.)"

Hate to break it to Mr. Cook. But if his home is visible to the public and a stalker knows his address, said stalker can just hire someone to take pictures of the house and email them back. And the stalker can then stare at those pictures as much as he wants, no matter how much Google et al blur the online pics.

They're trying to spin this as a right to privacy issue when it's not. If you don't want your house to be visible to the public, build a bigger wall in front of your house. Don't mess with new technologies which have revolutionized travel. If I'm asking a bunch of people to get together at a location many of them have never been to, I can send them a street view link so they'll know what it looks like when they get there. If I'm driving a long truck or a trailer and want to make sure I can get into and out of a location, I can check online without having to waste time and fuel going there to find out. Your right to privacy does not override the public's right to see things that are visible from public locations.