That's at max charge/discharge rates.

Discharging a 70kWh battery pack by 70% at 5kW (the p90 of the power draw of my house) is 0.1C.

EV-class batteries used in residential solar systems with discharge at up to 1C and charging at 0.5C have warranties covering 3500+ cycles.

The price difference between peak and off-peak on PG&Es EV-A rate plan is at least 20c/kWh (partial peak) and up to 31c/kWh, for EV-B it's between 11c to 31c/kWh (at least in summer).

"nobody is going to want to use their expensive to replace EV battery in this way."

Surely that would depend on the rates offered?

If time-of-use rates were updated accurately reflect energy costs, it might become advantageous to do this (and fund battery replacements from grid credits).

Alternatively, in countries where feed-in tariffs are much lower than consumption tariffs, use the V2G to power the house and lower the electricity bill, reducing demand on the grid.

The summary says:

"Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late afternoons in the summer. Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity."

This is non-sensical.

The whole point of time-of-use rates is to encourage energy use when it is most abundant.

If the time-of-use rates were updated to reflect the times when excess energy is available, this "problem" would simply disappear, as EVs set to charge at the lowest price would do the right thing.

Someone here isn't thinking, but I'm not sure if it's the author or whoever sets the time-of-use rates.

This is not the case in South Africa, where SARS is one of the most well-funded Government entities.

So even if they managers completely understand the pitfalls of this approach, they have to make the thing work until their next system upgrade grant comes along. This is why they adopt this interim solution. It's not *always* ignorance of technology. On the other hand, your comment betrays an ignorance of logistics and economics.

I think in this case, it *is* ignorance. If you don't agree, watch this interview with a previous head of IT at SARS (had been there for over a year at the time of the interview). You may want to start here and watch about 5 minutes, from where she talks about the migration off of Flash to where she says their "level of functionality is an uptime of 99.6%".

No, if you can't file online, you would have to complete submission on paper forms. Paper-based filing has an earlier deadline, so if you only realise when trying to file online, you would have to also pay a penalty. Also, South Africa's public services aren't very well run, so filing on paper will probably require spending 2 days waiting to be served at a SARS office.

> As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time-bomb mechanism, and starting that day, the agency was unable to receive any tax filings via its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets.

The actual tweet says "SARS is aware of certain forms not loading correctly due to Adobe Flash.".

It doesn't say that all tax filing is affected.

Actually, October 2020 was the first time I haven't needed Flash to submit my personal taxes to SARS. For the past few years I have had to use Chrome, and in 2019 also jump through some hoops in Chrome to enable Flash, to submit my personal tax information, but this year I could just use Firefox.

There are other tax types that are impacted, but not all tax filing is impacted.

Not the government, but the courts:

'Rights like the freedom of speech "can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature -- not according to a corporate decision."'

As someone living in the southern hemisphere (South Africa) who has regular (multiple times per week) meetings/conference calls with people in the U.S., DST is irritating enough as-is (with meetings scheduled to be at convenient times for 3 time zones, two of which are in the northern hemisphere and use DST and the other which doesn't use DST), where meetings move by an hour twice a year for participants living in a different timezone than the meeting organiser.

This 10-minute change every month obviously hasn't considered the impact on such meetings, which would drift by 20 minutes every month.

Two of my 3 sons are currently doing "light therapy" (among a number of other things including eye excercises), which involves:
* for one child, looking at a red light for 10m and a green light for 10m, daily
* for the other, looking at a green light for 20m, daily

This is treatment by a well-respected opthalmologist for heridirory conditions (which if untreated can lead to lack of depth perception due to the brain rejecting one eye).

Since I am finding it more difficult to read small text in poor lighting (even with glasses I mainly to prevent eye strain from working on a computer all day), maybe I should try the red light...

> Not sure why you think that's relevant though,

I think it's relevant to the discussion of why Windows 10 update quality seems to be worse than the average Linux desktop updates.

Microsoft seems to have no incentive in providing a great experience to home users, as opposed to Apple (who still seems to be doing a better job, even if they have also let quality slide a bit recently).

> the GP was postulating that Microsoft was mismanaged, but clearly throwing Windows to the dogs and betting the house on the cloud was an excellent managerial decision and continues to support my point.

From the perspective of a shareholder, Microsoft may not appear to be mismanaged, but from the perspective of a "Home PC" user (the customer segment that allowed them to succeed in the 80s and 90s) they definitely don't seem to be adequately managing the quality of the product they provide.

Unless of course the user is the product ...

The original post inferred that, because Linux is not able to play Netflix etc. At 4K, AnonymousCoward cannot use Linux for anything, even though he wants to.

Widevine provides a CDM allowing playback of video streams with encryption as mandated by the copyright owners and they already provide a version for Linux, that as far as I know is technically capable of 4K playback.

Widevine indicates that 4K requires "Verified Media Path" to be implemented. VMP basically can't be implemented in a Free operating system as it requires the OS to provide a fully secure path from the point of decryption to the point of display. If an OS allows the user to replace their display server, display drivers, or install arbitrary kernel drivers, this cannot be guaranteed. If it can be guaranteed, it's not a Free operating system.

Some of the reasons Linux is successful are the same reasons the content owners don't want it to be able to play back 4K content.

AnonymousCoward has a very cheap option to watch 4K Netflix while using Linux: buy a Fire TV Stick 4K (there may be other options, but as far as I know, that's the cheapest one). But, for some reason, people such as Cipheron don't seem to understand that the differences are ideological and not technical, and the best alternative available is to separate the want to watch Netflix in 4K from the need for a secure and stable desktop operating system by using/buying a cheap separate device for watching Netflix.

> Can't even watch Netflix/Hulu/Crunchyroll at 1080p on Linux, let alone 4k.

My $35 Fire TV Stick 4K proves otherwise ...

Oh, you meant that 4k-playback via open-source software isn't permitted by the content monopolies? That's not a technical limitation ...

> As for right now, Microsoft is the only US tech company that has a market cap of more than $1tn.

Wrong, Amazon's market cap is currently $1.2T, and first exceeded $1T around the beginning of Feb 2020.

https://ycharts.com/companies/...

As far as I know, Microsoft's recent growth is based more on their businesses that aren't directly tied to Windows on the desktop, namely hosting mailboxes and offering online file storage (sometimes sold as "Office 365") and hosting Linux VMs (Azure). This is borne out in their recent financial statements, where the only rapidly-growing business is (according to Microsoft themselves) "intelligent cloud".

Which runs as an unprivileged user, with privilege escalation mitigations in place (e.g. separate namespace, or SELinux protections etc.) which aren't practical for ssh when used for remote administration.

Sure, but your firewall doesn't have any open ports facing the internet, so now we're talking mainly about kernel vulnerabilities. Better to have firewall appliances on separate devices running a different kernel/OS in addition to host-based firewalls on your web servers, so that you have some protection while one has a vulnerability.

And that's defense-in-depth is important.

Note: I didn't say to not implement key-only auth (possibly restricting how authorized keys are deployed), it is useful, but not always sufficient.

In secure networks I have designed, this was not the case.

That's a possibility, but not necessarily a certainty.

I would typically have a monitoring agent installed on all servers, which would alarm on any unplanned ports listening, to mitigate this (among many other controls, such as host-based firewall rules, auditing etc.).

"Continuing to blame Google when an ISP allows that ISPs traffic destined towards Google to be hijacked to Russia does not sound like a good idea to me.
Why blame Google for something out of their control? Only an ISP can control their own network, and when the ISP allows any random actor on the Internet to redirect it, this is clearly and completely the fault of the ISP."

But, can we blame Google for being on the "unsafe ISP" list (since they are)?