Expanding on that, the US Navy (and I'm sure other nation's ship fleets) have excellent nuclear reactors. Even with current technology, thermal depolymerization wouldn't be that hard to do, especially near the Pacific Gyre with the large amount of floating waste available there. Then said ship either stays put, transferring the recovered crude to another vessel, or returns to harbor with useful resources.
I do a similar version of this. I have a few document escrow services and a couple friends that have pieces of my master keys. It is a system that requires "x out of y" pieces to re-assemble the keys, so if one person is out, the key can still be recovered.
I have a couple symmetric keys and a private key. That way, if RSA or ECC get broken, the core data is still protected until all the escrow places plop down their segment of the keys.
To be safe, the key part and the SSSS (Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme) utility is not just stored on an archival grade DVD and a USB flash drive, but also UUencoded and printed out (with a QuickPAR recovery record just in case.)
Some Android devs are trying to do their best to work around it. It requires root, but I highly recommend the XPrivacy tool, which will allow you to restrict what apps can actually contact. I also like using a DroidWall successor as a thing of last resort, especially with apps that are bandwidth hungry, so they get forced to Wi-Fi only and not on the cellular network.
LBE Privacy Guard used to be a good tool, but the successor has yet to be officially translated to English yet.
The bad thing is that apps from the Play Store are all or nothing. The good thing is that the people at xda-developers and other sites have spent many man-hours to rectify that.
We are getting some advances in that direction (where people/organizations want to cover a large surface area cheaply, so they get some energy coming in, even though it may not be as much as panels that are more expensive, but are made for getting as many watts per square centimeter as possible.
Flexible panels come to mind. Similar with window film that might get 5%, but covers a large expanse on a building. Flexible panels still have a ways to go, but they are getting there. For RVs, they are a lot easier to mount than a rigid PV panel (no holes need to be drilled for the panel's mountings, as the flexible panels are taped into place with double-sided adhesive.)
What I'd like to see are not just solar roof tiles, but the corrugated fiberglass or polycarbonate panels that are used for carports have some sort of solar capability. It won't be near as much as having dedicated panels, but it will bring in some electricity on otherwise wasted space.
I see two types of panels being sold:
One type that is used for limited space, engineered to get as many watts from each square centimeter as possible, even if it is more costly. RV-ers come to mind, because for most rigs, space is at a premium.
The second type is to obtain a decent amount of watts, but be cheaper, for larger areas such as a roof. Here, price per watt is more important.
In both cases, reliability is very important and not to be overlooked. Panels don't take much to maintain once in place, but are expensive to install and replace if something breaks.
I have found that the cost and quality of solar deployments can vary tremendously. For example, I can buy panels at 75 cents per watt. However, if I go for a kit, that cost jumps up significantly. If I let a "solar installer" do it, that might bump costs up a good amount too.
I have found that solar can be used in increments, so a starting investment can be relatively small. For example, having a 15 amp circuit or two in a house that runs off of batteries is a good way to keep the parasitic devices that draw a 10-20 watts, but draw that 24/7, off the electric bill. It doesn't sound like much, but the watts used by the little devices (battery chargers for example) can add up. If one buys a high quality pure sine wave inverter, it also prolongs the life of devices on that line as well because they don't eat power transients or surges/sags that might come from the utility company. In fact, one's computer might be able to be put on one of these circuits, so a UPS wouldn't be needed, barring a direct lightning strike.
As part of a new house, I see solar as a "why not" as opposed to a "why bother" item. With a PV cut switch so that a fire causes the panels to automatically disconnect, safety issues are mitigated. Plus, with hybrid grid systems, it can be used for feeding the grid, providing UPS power, or both.
I think the key is how the solar install is packaged and sold. There is a wide price range and wide quality range [1]. I'm hoping as companies get more experience with this that install quality becomes more consistent and improves overall.
[1]: One thing often neglected or skimped on in solar installs is wire thickness. Too skinny wires between the charge controller and batteries, and the batteries will never be completely charged.
Spam has shifted gears. Before, it was mainly advertising and "chop your dollar" scams. Now, I mainly see phishing attempts either to get people to give up data or to go to a site that would attempt a large number of exploits (even trying to offer bogus "securityscan.apk" files on Android.) This isn't surprising because getting a victim's computer on a botnet is far more lucrative for a spammer than actually getting them to buy some pills or fall for yet another 419 scam.
Watt/hours do add up. Fridges, water heaters, and HVAC systems do slurp up electricity, but don't run all the time. However, what can be a factor in the bill are devices that have 5-20 watts... but run 24/7.
For things like that, it may not hurt to drop in a small solar charging system to put those parasitic devices on their own circuit. It wouldn't be cheap (a couple thousand to do the job right [1]), but it would move all the parasitic devices (whose energy use does add up over time) off the mains power. As another benefit, those devices get very clean power [2], and would still function if the mains power goes off. How long until a system like this pays for itself? If mains power is dirty, it might pay for itself fairly quickly since power bricks and devices would need to be replaced less often.
[1]: Doing it right would mean a pure sine wave inverter, a set of decent AGM batteries, a MPPT charge controller and good panels. It also would mean having a charge controller that attaches to the mains power, so if the batteries get too low and the solar power isn't charging, the batteries still will get charged, keeping the appliances on that circuit still operable. The cost of all this is about the same as a true online UPS.
[2]: Assuming a good quality PSW inverter. A MSW inverter is cheap, but will barbecue components in no time.
The power supply on one of my servers is rated at 800 watts. Does it mean the machine uses 800 watts 24/7? Definitely not. In fact, I should hook it up to a Kill-O-Watt meter, as I'm not sure if it even would get past 100-200 watts, other than the inrush current from the hard disk array spindles starting.
Refrigerators can be surprisingly thrifty. In fact, when RV-ing, a dorm fridge can be run from a battery bank, inverter, and a decent (250 watts) solar panel setup. Yes, the compressor does take energy... but it only runs a fraction of the time, so if it takes 350 W/h to run at a 100% duty cycle, it might only use 75-100 W/h realistically.
Electric water heaters are also decently efficient. They take a good chunk of energy to get the water to the set temperature... but once the water is heated, they tend not to use that much over time due to the decent insulation used.
I'm surprised because Kingston so far has had an extremely good name, especially when it came to RAM. PNY wasn't up there, but at least from what I read, it was decent.
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I believe in the KISS principle. Even though people say that a hacker with the 0-days to go after IoT devices won't go after individual users... I will agree there. Individually, they won't bother with people. However, their script that walks the Internet and seizes control of devices, is what would be done, with that info being sold to another party, just like credit card dumps. In fact, a list of vulnerable/cracked devices a person owns might even be in the same database tuple as their name, social security number, and other item sold on the black market.
There are some things I don't need. I can look at the date of items in my fridge and tell they are going to expire. I don't need to have a fancy infrastructure in place so that some company can sell me milk in the next round of banner ads. I can look near the commode and tell how many rolls of TP that I have, and don't need to upload that info somewhere. I don't need a toilet which checks sugar levels, but quietly uploads that to health insurance companies so they have an excuse to raise premiums. If I'm worried about sugar levels, I can always get a meter and a roll of test strips and do the job right.
We do not need an IoT. We are being sold this shit because "market expansion" balloons stock prices even though it may or may not make revenue.
IoT devices will be engineered to be as cheap to produce as possible. They will be coming out of the cheapest factory in China, and engineered to barely work. At best, they will barely pass UL standards, if they don't just come with a fake UL tag in the first place. It will be a given that there will be little thought to security [1], and the only way to fix them will be replacing them with devices that are even buggier and more expensive.
If we want monitoring, the parent had one way to do it "right". I'd prefer a wired bus that is engineered the reverse of early USB. Devices can send info, but the top node that gets the info cannot initiate or send data... just send an ack that it got received. Even with this, there are still ways to hack it, so the ideal is no system at all.
Because it be connected to the Internet, doesn't mean it should. Take the Internet connected deadbolt. We don't need junk like that. Instead, the time it takes to engineer that should have been spent making a better locking mechanism/door/jamb system to help against actual threats like lock bumping and kick-ins.
[1]: I've heard "security has no ROI" many a time, coupled by "Infosys/Geek Squad can fix anything if we get hacked", when I ask the followup question about contingency plans.
Microsoft has two technologies in Windows Server 2012: Storage Spaces (which is LVM level), and ReFS. Both when used together can detect bit rot, but IIRC, only when the Storage Space volume is set to mirroring, nor parity.
This is similar with ZFS. RAID-Z will detect bit rot, but won't fix it. RAID-1, RAID-Z2, and RAID-Z3 will detect and fix bit rot on a scrub. One can also use copies or ditto blocks.
Linux, there isn't much either way. I have no clue if LVM2 + btrfs will do anything about bit rot, assuming it has the ability to repair it from a mirror or a RAID 6 volume. This seems to be one of those "ask four people, get five answers" type of items.
If I were setting up a file server or backend RAID, I'd probably will go with Linux and ZFS (from the zfsonlinux projects.) The / and
This might be another good reason to learn kanji or traditional Chinese as a character set. This definitely would get the amount of characters needed per slot down by quite a number.
I think it might have a niche utility, but to use a car example, this is like making a very top tier points/condensor/magneto system for a car's engine... while the world has moved on to common rail EFI.
I am glad it got released (I remember it being the dream of document presentation well before Mosaic appeared on the NeXT), but there are many other document utilities out there with similar function. PDF and HTML come to mind, perhaps nroff on a limited basis. However, the world has moved on. On the other hand, Xanadu deserves its place in history, just for the concept.
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky
