True but top officials and contract officers, even brokerage employees are monitored for this type of behavior. Most govt employees and military are not actively monitored because they donâ(TM)t have enough authority to make financial decisions.
We also saw a case recently where someone won $400k betting Maduro would not be in office and itâ(TM)s thought they are likely a DOD or Trump admin insider.
Polymarket and other betting sites have basically become a way for insiders to profiteer on non public information but in a way that endangers states by adding a personal profit motive to govt policy that extends far beyond actual decision makers or those in a position to award govt contracts and now anyone around the water cooler can do it.
Meanwhile Ireland which likes to style itself an independent country is completely dependent on its neighbors for defense against Russia which is now routinely flying sea-launched drones over Irish territorial waters and airspace. The aggression spiked during President Zelensky's recent visit to Ireland where at least 4 military grade suspected Russian drones flew near the President's aircraft.
Ireland pretends it is what Israel actually is, an independent sovereign state participating in the global technology and trade economy without entangling alliances like NATO. In reality, Ireland is effectively protectorate of its own former colonial empire, the UK and the USA and because it is not a member of NATO, the Russians see it as an obvious target of military escalation that Russia could attack but not trigger NATO Article 5.
It's become a pretty common tactic, particularly with Qatari state-run and Hamas supporting media outlet Al-Jazeera to preface everything the state of Israel does with "illegal." Meanwhile Qatar is an absolute monarchy with a citizen population of only about 300k people, of which half are women who have virtually no legal rights, and the state holds about 2M mostly South Asian enslaved workers for most of the low level and domestic labor. Qatari media lecturing Israel on civil rights is beyond absurd.
Israel is a sovereign state. It decides what is legal to do with the data it collects via its intelligence and police services. Now it is fine if cloud providers operating outside of Israel don't want their business but Microsoft and Amazon have contracts with the Israeli govt for a variety of cloud infrastructure projects including an Israeli version of similar government-owned cloud partitions including some hosted physically inside Israel.
The Guardian fails to explain adequately but the court in question is likely the US Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act court (FISA) that approves warrants either for US persons (citizens anywhere or residents domestically) or for foreign assets on US soil like an Israeli partition in AWS. Those court orders often have gag orders attached that prevent service providers from disclosing them to the targets of the warrant.
There is also quite a bit of lawfare going on lately by a group called the Hind Rajab foundation with ties to Hezbollah in Europe that has been abusing courts in several countries by making evidence-free complaints against random Israelis, alleging war crimes without actually specifying any particular crime, mostly just part of their insane hatred of Jews.
That's apparently what this NIMBUS contract was about. The cloud providers would help Israel build out that private cloud on Israeli soil.
Most of the infrastructure in question under this NIMBUS contract, are in an Israeli govt data center operating as a private partition in AWS/Gcloud. This is similar to US Govt contracts with cloud providers. The idea is to use the cloud's interface to build up govt IT worker skill sets so they are more portable and to make hiring out of the private sector easier. The exception apparently is the AI infrastructure which is in high demand and very expensive if you can even get your order filled plus US govt export restrictions like those recently waived for the UAE.
The Guardian is almost a self-parody when it comes to their conspiratorial tone when writing about Israel. The court orders or other legal processes that might be used to gain Israeli govt data are more likely to be FISA Court orders in the US or similarly in Europe, secret spy courts, basically. Allies do spy on each other. The Guardian uses a conspiratorial framing to seem like there is some World Police out there with the right to violate the sovereignty of one particular country that they don't like.
I am a owner of a FutureHome Smarthub 2 (soon to be sold), and my home transitioned to Home Assistant a few days ago. I have been following closely the situation for a few months now, including the reactions of the user community.
What is especially worrying is that the monthly fees are only nominally monthly - they are to be paid in advance for a full year. If they had been truly monthly I might have been tempted to test it for a month or two, but with this much money being asked up front I am not only worried about the actual value of the service (am I going to save that much on electricity?), I am worried that so few people will take up the offer that the company will be instantly wiped out.
Among the further genius decisions of new owners, this transition period was placed in July: the traditional Norwegian summer month, when half the country is in Spain or Greece, especially a lot of people with larger homes, children and available income (the key target customer group). A lot of them probably never noticed the change and will come home next week thinking the hub broke.
Now, while the TFA claims the MSRP of the FH Hub is $275, it is actually far cheaper - it is about $100, which means the annual fee is more expensive than the hub.
You need to understand that electricity in Norway is laughably cheap (no matter what Norwegians tell you). Today's average price I am paying is 7.81 USD per MWh, as an example. Electricity is so cheap that Norwegians use it directly for heating (even heat pumps are a dubious economic case). Some, including the guy who built my house, use direct electric heating to de-ice stairs (so that's what I am stuck with).
This means that the savings you can achieve with FutureHome are very limited. My largest successes in cost reduction were using a more careful planner for the entry stair de-icing resistance, which used to run anytime temperatures were low and now only runs when there are the right conditions of temperature and humidity. Electric cars (very common here) can also be scheduled to charge at nighttime, and the same goes for water boilers, with simple timers that can be bought for $5.
So the question FH users have been asking: what exactly am I getting for well over $100 a year? It is very unlikely that you would save that amount of money with the FH hub in Norway.
Lots of inaccuracies here.
Firstly it takes far longer to fill a hydrogen car than a gas car due to the careful rate control needed to fill the tank. If you have appropriate cooling and heating systems to maximise density while filling while also preventing the handle from freezing in place it still takes you >6min to fill a car.
Filling time for hydrogen cars is 3 minutes per industry standard. Also, the handle would not freeze in place, because hydrogen heats up when expanding (reverse Joule-Thomson effect): if anything it would warm up. And that happens only for specific pressure ranges (mostly from very high to almost empty tank).
On top of that hydrogen refueling stations do not store hydrogen at bulk pressures required for vehicles since having a large 700bar tank is hugely expensive and dangerous, instead bulk hydrogen is stored at a lower pressure and compressed before being put into small temporary storage and loaded into your car.
It's more complicated than that. There are often multiple tanks at different pressure, and they will be used sequentially to maximise efficiency. First the one with lowest pressure, then top-up with the higher-pressure tank. Promptness of refilling the high-pressure top-up tank is only related to compressor capacity, and this is easily upgraded when customer base increases; hydrogen compressors are off-the-shelf technology.
Also: tanks are not especially dangerous, the tricky parts are usually valves and flanges. Tanks are fairly standardised and are safe ex works; flanges are installed on site and that's where there is potential for errors to creep in. That's why a standing recommendation is to use hydrogen pipes that are "as small as you can get away with" for high-pressure lines.
... You do realise that Toyota has already developed this concept?
I am a researcher on hydrogen technologies at an independent institute and I have led EU projects for about 30 million euros, so I can claim I have some inside knowledge of the industry.
Stellantis never had any significant activity in hydrogen, so they are not really giving up anything. Of all the brands of the Stellantis group I have never met one at the meetings of the EU's Fuel Cell & Hydrogen Joint Undertaking; the only one that was ever active was FIAT, not very convincingly and very long ago: they bailed from the H2moves project more than 10 years ago, never heard from them since.
Other companies have much better developed hydrogen programs: BMW, Daimler, Volvo, each with its ups and downs. Volkswagen and their controlled Scania have a schizophrenic relationship to hydrogen since a previous CEO, Diess, was very much against, but a lot of engineers were in favour. Outside the EU it is of course Toyota and Hyundai that lead worldwide.
In any case, it has been clear for years that it is a lot easier to electrify cars for personal use with batteries, and hydrogen FCs have repositioned themselves for the heavy-duty market (trucks, trains, ships). Stellantis does not have any significant activity in this sector, so it makes sense for them to focus what little resources they have on batteries. Of course, if they had any competence in batteries, since they suck at them too.
I have been an EV driver for about 10 years (Nissan Leaf and Tesla M3). What Brembo is not commenting on is how the usage pattern of brake discs of EVs (including hybrids with enough battery) is radically different from ICE vehicles.
ICE vehicles use their brakes continually, every time they slow down. EVs regenerate the energy instead to refill the battery, that's why several models can be driven with a single pedal (raising the foot will slow down the car). Brakes in EVs tend to be used mostly for stationing (which does not wear the pads) and emergency braking or other special cases (very steep downhill, battery 100% full and few others). This means that particulate emission from EV brakes is already negligible.
This also means that, while ICE brakes wear regularly, EV brakes wear so slowly that they sometime rust instead, resulting in lower performance when an emergency occurs and they are suddenly needed. Here in Norway, automobile clubs and insurance companies actually recommend EV drivers to speed and brake hard once in a while to maintain brake pads efficiency.
So I would be more impressed if Brembo had produced a more rust-resistant brake pad that maintains performance even after being subject to salt and other corrosive conditions for weeks, because I never remember to do that hard brake thing (which implies finding a place where you can do it safely). That would be a brake pad that lasts a lot longer, possibly the entire life of the vehicle.
This looks like an alarming extension of copyright overreach if such restrictions are applied to AI. AI reads content (which may be copyrighted, as this post you are reading is, as nearly everything on the Internet is) and learns from it, and that's how it can process a book and provide a summary within a few minutes.
If this were an infringement of copyright, basically any form of human learning would also be. Just reviewing a book, a game, anything copyrighted could be constructed as infringement and prosecuted. Parodies, tributes, quotations. Imagine Leni Riefenstahl suing George Lucas for the final scene of the original Star Wars.
If an AI generates text that is substantially a copy of a copyrighted training input, that's a copyright breach; but AIs can be trained to avoid this, just like people can - learn the concept, avoid copying the form.
The report of the Copyright Office contains the following statement on page 26:
The steps required to produce a training dataset containing copyrighted works clearly implicate the right of reproduction. Developers make multiple copies of works by downloading them; transferring them across storage mediums; converting them to different formats; and creating modified versions or including them in filtered subsets. In many cases, the first step is downloading data from publicly available locations, but whatever the source, copies are made—often repeatedly.
That's the same way any browser operates. For that sake, a lot of browsers pre-download links on a page, so that copies are made locally before any action is taken by the user. Proxy servers also make local copies of often-requested files. If this is infringement, anyone who ever accessed the Internet is a criminal. What if you move a legally-owned copyrighted file from one hard disk partition to another? That would technically require creating a copy.
In practice, the line is drawn when you start distributing (other people's) copyrighted works, which also is the only enforceable one. That is what should be required of AI engines.
Obviously the reason is another: owners of copyrighted work do not want AI to learn their concepts and re-express them (which has always been legal for humans), because their customers will find it easier to ask the AI rather than pay/read the original documents themselves, busting their business model.
This is the old vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept that has been studied several times; there are actually already some 2-way connectors like ChaDeMo.
Of course this availability of battery power should be compensated somehow, and I can imagine a catchy program like "1 kWh free for every hour you make your car battery available". That would make car charging essentially free for almost anyone, which is not that far-fetched considering how badly California's grid needs flexibility.
However, this is done at the expense of battery lifetime. Several people have already indicated that studies have proven most EV batteries will survive the vehicle they are installed in, but that's because they are normally slow-charged at night and only discharged when used. If they are charged and discharged several times a day, this lifetime will plummet rapidly. When charging an EV battery, you only see the electricity price, but the depreciation of the battery is often much larger (depending on temperature, charging rate, current state of charge and of course enegy & battery prices).
Most EV owners (including myself!) have a very faint feeling for this depreciation when charging their car, so they may be willing to participate to such a scheme. However, if this scheme was profitable overall - why wouldn't utilities just buy their own batteries?
"Would I turn on the gas if my pal Mugsy were in there?" "You might, rabbit, you might!" -- Looney Tunes, Bugs and Thugs (1954, Friz Freleng)
