BT have been telling us for years that the digital network switchover in 2025 will kill faxes.

We use them for communicating with various government departments.

The UK already has a wholesale electricity market that varies cost based on supply, not demand, it's been running successfully for years.

The intention with Smart Meters and flexible tariffs is to reflect that wholesale cost to customers which then results in their usage better reflecting the available supply. Multiplied across millions of homes that will dramatically change demand and potentially avoid peaks in the first place, or reduce them to the point that storage can balance it. You can do it with smart devices today, EV chargers, battery smart inverters and similar. We already have tariffs that reduce during off-peak times and may even go negative at points so consumers are being paid to use electricity, smart devices poll the provider and flex usage based on that.

If you have inflexible need for electricity then it's not going to be turned off, that is nonsense, it'll just cost more. If you have a car that sits for 12 hours but takes 4 to charge then why would you care if it's smart charger moves the charging time around? If you have a well insulated house then why would you care if the heating stops working for any given 30 minute period and the temperature drops by 0.2 degrees. We're not at that point today with the UK housing stock or vehicle fleet, but this is a long term approach.

Storage is not the solution for intermittency, it's for local balancing. Running the entire grid from stores while the wind drops is not feasible. The current approach is a mixture of HVDC interconnectors, flexible usage, nuclear baseload, diverse generation sources and financial drivers to reduce the time that carbon creating generation methods are being used.

Yes there will be a cost to this, the current belief is that the cost of doing nothing will be far higher. If you don't believe that then no doubt the investment won't seem worthwhile.

I think part of the problem is that people use 3rd party analytics services because they're easy to set up and work very well, those 3rd party analytics services then use the data for commercial purposes as that's how they make money and they wouldn't exist otherwise.

Reddit is like /. with everyone having mods points, including anonymous cowards.

At least on /. the down-modding does tend to be used more for trolling or spamming, on reddit it's downvote = disagree. The irony is many of these subs claim to be against censorship and prejudice, yet will happily censor their own communities posts for not corresponding to their own prejudices.

Shame as there's a lot of clever folk there, but it kills real discussion a lot of the time.

Plenty of governments have the capability and some are known to be actively gaining access/capability.

The thing is doing this would be treated as an act of war, so they're no more likely to just do it out of the blue as they are to start dropping bombs on the capital.

Big concern is what happens if you do end up at war with them....

nc

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

It only mitigates some potential issues, like breach of the suppliers website.

If the suppliers code pipelines and PKI are owned then all bets are off, you're just getting signed malware at that point.

In addition to the devices talked about by this article, there are also things like gas recircs (EGR) particle filters (DPF) and the associated sensors. There is a small performance gain from removing the EGR but mainly it's a cost thing.

The EGR went in my wifes car, was ~£200 to replace it or £10 for a blanking plate. The DPF went in my car, was £500 to get a blank module installed and re-code the ECU, or ~£1500 worth of new DPF and sensors. In both cases we got the work done properly, but I suspect most people don't.

You do in the UK as well, even buying the phone on a credit card with rubbish rate is usually cheaper than getting a contract, there are plenty of telco who do one month rolling SIM contracts.

I don't think unlocking them will make any difference here as the contracts are usually 24-36 months to cover the cost of the handset, which seems to be about the length of time most people stay with the same phone anyway.

There are efficiency advantages too. If you're getting a data feed from the devices constantly then you can do condition monitoring and fix things pro-actively when they need doing, rather than based on manufacturers service intervals or just when it breaks, it's big business these days.

Also works the other way as can reduce maintenance by only doing it when necessary, for things like power stations that have huge outage windows then this can make a big difference.

Connectivity is usually provided for support, the companies that buy industrial equipment want to buy it as a service that includes the maintenance and often operation. The manufacturer either needs remote access, periodic visits or someone permanently on-site. The latter two are far more expensive and inflexible options.

Ideally the kit would be reporting only, but often that means "our intention is that it does reporting only" and a lot of the time that's just decided after it was developed.

One of my old clients had a few chemical storage tanks, they only found out the vendor had put 4G modems and monitoring kit on one when a tanker turned up unannounced to refill the tank one day, because it had phoned home and told them it was running low.

This has not really filtered through yet other than a bunch of privacy folk getting very excited.

The Schrems 2 case stated that NSA surveillance of EU citizens data is unlawful under GDPR because it is excessive and does not allow for redress via the courts. The USA did set up an ombudsman for it but this is not considered appropriate. This decision was stated in relation to Facebook transferring data back to the US, but the principles would seem to apply to any other data that is potentially under NSA surveillance scope.

Couple that with the US CLOUD act, which allow requesting information held by US cloud companies anywhere in the world.

The Schrems case said it is invalidating Privacy shield, but not the SCCs. However as the SCCs cannot override US law then anyone in the EU relying on SCCs to use a US cloud provider is on very dodgy ground. All of the US cloud providers are currently doing that, because frankly they have no option other than to spin up a new non-US company to run the Euro hosting side of things.

The big problem with all this, was that there's no realistic alternative in Europe unless all you want is basic server hosting....

Convincing people is one thing for sure, but even if you've convinced them then funding the change of vehicles to electric/hybrid and change of central heating from oil/gas over to things like Electric or preferably GSHP/ASHP/Solar and thermal stores is a big mountain to climb over too.

...for presidents who don't lead so good and want to learn to do other stuff good too