Except that Cloudprint sends the printjob to google, which then sends it to the printer. It means that both the printer and computer needs internet connectivity, not merely network connection.

It's because the working class organizations (consumer organisations, trade unions) are so strong in most parts of the EU and especially Norway, they have gained a lot of rights and limitations to the powers of capital.

Indeed. We have fought for our rights, and we've won them over time. And we've made a soceity where fear is not a driving power.

Just looking at things like the recent uprise in USA about police shootings is shocking in most of Europe. Here, police does normally not shoot people. In Norway, it's literaly years between when the police shoots and kills someone. In most of Europe it's major news when it happens. In a country like Germany, with 80 million people, it happens 3-4 times a year.

I would claim that Europe is freer than America. Granted, we can't carry guns where we want, but the risk of crime is lower, and the living standard is on average higher.

I agree with the concepts your are talking about, but I cannot imagine an IT shop failing to check the background of a system administrator who will be working with banking systems, for example. Think about the fallout if Deutsche Bank hired a database administrator with prior convictions for banking fraud, only to see that employee steal 100 million from the bank.

Of course it's checked for some positions, and finance is one of those. But in general, it's not legal to ask about it. If you apply as a programmer the employer can generally not even ask.

I'm going to bet that criminal convictions are pretty important in the relevant areas, even in Europe. They probably do a better job of discriminating which information is relevant and which positions are sensitive.

In general no. For the jobs I've applied to (electrical engineering for some pretty big companies) it's not been asked about. They have no right to ask, and no right to know. On defence projects the individuals participating has had background checks by the intelligence service, but failing that would not mean losing job - only not being allowed to work on defense projects.

In Europe they might not have to ask before running a criminal background check. And lying on the application might not make a difference when it comes time to terminate an employee.

In most European countries the employee have to sign and/or submit the application for a background check. The result will be sent straight to the employer, but the application has to be filed by the employee.

In Norway, I can not even get a written copy of my record unless I provide a valid reason. I can get it read out to me, but not in writing. That is to stop companies from asking without reason. The reason is printed on the record, and misuse is illegal. So if I get one for a visa application, and my employer uses that for anything but visa application, they look at civil liability for the information misuse, and criminal liability for the failure of threating information in the proper way.

Now, while this sucks for the felon trying to land a job, it also sucks for the company, and lets face it, the recidivism rate among past felons is generally pretty high. Why should a company want to risk it's own livelihood or existence just to give you a second chance?

I think there's a circular logic somewhere there. If you don't have a job, I guess you have a lower threshold for crime. If you have a job, and everything to loose, I guess crime is not so tepmting.

In most of Europe, criminal convictions is simply irrelevant to jobs. Some jobs require your record, but mostly not the full - only a limited record. For instance, if you work with kids, you need a record clean of child abuse and sexual assaults. But for a general job in IT? Noone would even ask about your record. I have not been asked ever - except for a visa application to the USA.

I believe the European system is better at integrating convicts back into soceity, stopping them from committing more crime.

A smart grid will help. If you're able to serve up 20-30 percent of the supply from batteries (EV's can be batteries in a SG system too), you can reduce the grid. They can also serve as UPS systems, effectively smoothing out dips as switchgear changes layout of the grid.

So yes, smart grid with energy storage can help by averaging load over time. For an EV you can configure it to be fully charged at 4, when you leave work, and let it feed the grid in the meantime. You can supplement this with stationary batteries. As EV's become more common, used batteries from EV's which are unsuitable for the size constraints of the EVs can be repurposed to fixed location storage, where size is not as big concern.

When peak power is occuring is less interesting. The interesting thing is that using a conventional grid it happens - time waries.

Power grids does not need to be dimensioned for peak power - provided you have local energy storage. 1MWh of Lithium batteries will weigh in at approx. 10T, and will fit in a small garage, and will be able to supply a peak power of 2MW for half an hour. During periods of lower use, they can be recharged - bringing the peak load on the grid down. They can also assist in smoothing power production. Have an excess gigawatt? Put it into your batteries around the neighbourhood.

The project is definitively not backyard. I cannot tell details, but it is supplying a power in the megawatt range twice an hour, and then recharging using the power grid - enabling huge peak loads that the local grid cannot support. It is a project you've read about in Wired...

If you google smart grid you'll see that it's a big thing. Siemens, ABB, Schneider Electric and many other big companies are working on it. So your comment smells of trolling with no real insight in the field.

It's true that renewable power levels like wind-power rise and fall, but once you look at a larger area then it pretty much evens out.

But dimensioning the grid for average power draw is cheaper than dimensioning the grid for peak power. During the night, power consumption is low, and batteries can be recharged. When everyone wakes up, and makes coffee peak power occurs. With local storage the consumption can always be kept at the average level.

This also means that when there's good wind, you can save the energy for consumption later, without transporting it. Yes, batteries have a 5% energy loss, but so do long haul transmission. And long haul transmission technologies like HVDC costs a lot of money when you get into high effect converters.

I'm currently involved in a project where the conclusion was that a local battery storage was cheaper than renewing the power grid for peak load. The point where it's cheaper to install a Smart Grid Solution instead of bigger grid is only gonna move in favour of smart grid the next few years...

Highspeed trains need special tracks. Creating these tracks involves confiscating a lot of land from people along the way.

Roads also need a lot of space. So I don't entirely see your point. Maybe roads need 20% less space or something, but it's not like they need no space.

Doing this creates many lovely opportunities for corruption in government as the route can go a lot of ways depending on who influences it.

We have solved huge parts of that in Europe. We do it with open goverment, post journals showing mail that has arrived to a government agency, political hearings were everybody can send in their opinion, and the agency has to comment and publish all hearing comments. This mostly works. In the cases where it doesn't work, a sufficiently pissed of party can take the case to court to have the process reviewed.

"It says something about the state of train travel in America" yeah it sure does. It says that people would rather drive than be subject to that TSA garbage.

Straw man. We don't have TSA garbage on european high speed railways. And while I can take the train for long distances in the Europe, I believe I'd be taking a plane in the USA, exposing me to that very TSA garbage.

Oh there's so many vulnerabilities with electric typewriters, especially the single-use ribbon. Manual typewriters with a fabric ribbon that is re-used might still need to be burned.

Yes, there is security vulnerabilities. But compared to a computer, containing millions of lines of code, and the capability of running arbitary software, a typewriter is a very simple envirorment, with fewer unknown and bugs.

Securing a simple envirorment is easier than securing the complex. Take a Selectric typewriter - you can check the software manually as it's probably quite short. You can easily verify it, and there is NO reason why any other software should be present. This is not the case with a computer.

Or mechanical typewriter - no software, so the only storage mechanism is the ribbon.

So yeah, a bit of physical security is needed. The ribbons needs to be handled as classified. The drums may contain imprints, and neads to destructed safely. Sound might reveal something, so the room needs soundproofing and checks for unwanted bugs. But compared to a computer, it's quite trivial, and the security is within the reach of even a small organization.

Or are they thinking they will go it alone and continue to update their Linux distro/kernel just because it is open source? Do they really think they are qualified to do that? Or is the hope that they can spend money to keep the OS in long-term-support status?

That is not as hard as it sounds. There's already tons of mission critical in-house applications in banks, some of them probably quite a lot more complex than an OS with some drivers and an application on top of it...

What you're asking for is basically an emergency stop. The problem is that in some cases this can be dangerous as well. What if there's a truck 30 feet behind you, and you suddenly by accident (or inherent fault) activate the emergency stop? Safety is complex, and I'm not sure emergency stop is a good idea here, as it introduces it's own problems.

I'd recommend using e-mail. It's open to everyone to use, and they probably already have registered one. They can provide any and all metadata in the free-form text field known as "body", and it even supports multiple file attachments!

But it also means getting the metadata as free-form-text, which is likely to need interpreting before processing. A HTML form on the other hand will provide, by comparison, quite standardised data format. It also provides an easy file upload facility.

Writing something in PHP/Python that accepts uploads and stores metadata in a database is not very much work to hack together. The main work will be deciding the fields and so on. A form can require an entry in the field for antenna type, whilst in e-mail it's easy to forget a field.

The main challenge I guess is to get people to submit information...

If they cared even remotely enough to do that, then they would have already hardwired the indicator light to the same power source as the camera so that one couldn't be run without the other regardless of the firmware.

This is essentially what apple did, according to the report. They connected the LED to the standby signal, which normally has to be disabled to read data from the camera chip. So far, so good.

But the camera chip also has a configuration register - and one of the register options are to disable listening to the standby signal, and go ahead without caring about this signal. So it looks like the designers overlooked that option, or didn't think about it as a serious scenario.

So my impression is that apple has gone further than I've imagined to make a good design, but sadly not a bugfree design. Remember that all designs, hardware or software, may have bugs.

This is wrong at two levels. First, when technology was new, a monopoly was sensible, to ensure access to telephone for most people, because building lines was expensive. Building lines in a city may be profitable, but not in rural areas. A monopoly can force a entity to provide coverage both places, in exchange for a (limited) monopoly. So yes, the community can indeed be better of by granting a monopoly in some situations. Second, even if it's a free market, the first actor will always have the upper hand, as they have more potential customers to pick from, and it is more unlikely that a customer will switch once they have a provider. Building a copper/fiber network to the curb is damn expensive, so not many players are able to this. So if we'd not have monopolies, we probably woudn't have as good coverage, and if we didn't have monopolies, the first player would still be favoured. Norway also had telco monopoly, building the network up to ca. 1995. But the government owned telco has been regulated into providing the copper for other DSL telcos, for a fixed price (~10$ month per customer), and the other DSL telcos can rent rack space in Telenor's facilities for installing DSLAMs and so on.