> Beijing has also imposed a 13% value-added tax on contraceptives this year.

Tax contraceptives so your poorest people have more unwanted pregnancies...
What could possibly go wrong?

Adapting a famous quote, "Agile is the worst form of project management, except for everything else that has ever been tried."

What a waste!
Bitcoin mining could solve this and monetize the unused energy -- oh right, it's California. So for political reasons, bitcoin is probably off the table. And so it's better to just throw all that power away?

An order of magnitude is a power of 10.
47 is exactly ONE order of magnitude more than 7, NOT "a couple of orders of magnitude more."

Everything is fine.
(Picture the dog in the burning room cartoon. Very apt considering this product. Lol)

But only proof of work mining has the energy consumption characteristics that allow mining projects to improve the economic fundamentals of building new renewable energy supplies/storage. This is what makes Bitcoin mining a useful tool to solve the gap described in the California energy market.

Proof of stake validators can't act as a buyer of last resort to make new renewables profitable to build, as we've seen happening in Africa and Texas already:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...

Africans Are Pioneering The Bright, Yet Complicated, Green Future Of Bitcoin Mining

Bitcoin mining—the process that appends transactions to the bitcoin blockchain and secures the overall network—can offer a way to scale energy storage and demand in lockstep with growing communities. In short, it's easy to turn bitcoin mining hardware on and off to suit demand.

Many hydropower bitcoin miners provide an always-on-demand buyer of first and last resort for energy projects in developing areas.

While challenges still need to be addressed and questions answered, such as regulatory requirements for bitcoin-powered companies and the steep hardware costs, Africans are already pioneering the future of sustainable bitcoin mining methods and systems.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Can Bitcoin mining increase renewable electricity capacity?

Demand for electricity from Bitcoin miners can lead to an increase in renewable electricity capacity. We estimate a Bitcoin electricity demand curve and include this demand curve in a long-run model of the Texas electricity market. We find that Bitcoin mining can indeed increase renewable capacity, and when Bitcoin miners provide grid management services in the form of demand response, their emissions impact is largely mitigated.

Bitcoin/crypto mining also would solve this. Run miners when the rates turn negative, turning the excess electricity into compensation. This is economic incentive could replace the curtailed net metering discounts and preserve the ROI parameters needed to continue the solar build out.

Exactly my question... I have a quite cheap camera from Wansview that includes a microSD card for local storage. (The cloud app only allows
an interface to access that local storage, unless you buy a subscription for cloud storage.) So it seems this is at least not susceptible to wifi jamming destroying the evidence, as described in the article. Or am I incorrectly understanding the attack in the article?

The artcle mentions Ring, Nest, and Blink (big brands!) as being vulnerable to this jamming. Does this mean they don't have local storage at all?! That really surprises me, given the capabilities of the cheaper brand I have.

Of course, an intruder could always gain physical access and steal the card or destroy the camera.

The headline sounds excessive until you learn that the guy has 29 previous felonies and therefore can't possess firearms. After that, 10 years sounds like not enough.

29 felonies! Can you imagine? Then he goes and shoots a drone from his yard?! Not a good decision maker. Lol

You are partially correct. The idea that we are ruining the planet is also a human conceit. Anthropogenic climate change is only adversely affecting the habitability of the Earth for ourselves and thousands of our fellow species. But the Earth will continue just fine without us. And many other life forms will continue after we're gone.

In the deep geologic past, there have been periods where the climate was even more inhospitable than the worst that is coming from the atmospheric forcing we are currently undertaking. I mean, at one point Earth didn't even have an atmosphere; it's hard to beat that. Of course, don't forget that mankind, mammals, or even other animals didn't exist at those times however.

But your statement that there are no weather events out of line with historical norms depends on what time scale you are considering. As just stated, this is true on geologic time scales in which humans are but a blink of an eye. But on the time scale of human history or mammalian biology, it's a different story. On these time scales (which don't matter much to the Earth but certainly do to our lives and those of future generations), what we are seeing is unprecedented. Literally. As in, we are writing new history with fresh records this week itself, as you presumably know from the articles covered here on Slashdot. And in the near future looking back, today will be the best of all the conditions to follow.

But you are right that the Earth won't care. It's endured mass extinctions before and been fine. The only negative impacts will be to us humans and the life forms we bring down with us. For me, that's sufficient motivation to be selfishly concerned. :-)

The idea of the Anthropocene as a geological ***epoch*** is a conceit showing mankind's self delusions of grandeur. Geological time is deep beyond all comprehension. If you were to run a 26.2-mile marathon spanning the entire retrospective sweep of Earth’s history in reverse, the first five-foot stride would land you two Ice Ages ago and more than 150,000 years before the whole history of human civilization. In other words, geologically and to a first approximation, all of recorded human history is irrelevant: a subliminally fast 5,000-year span that is over almost as soon as you first lift up your heel.

The only potential usefulness of the "Anthropocene" concept is as a tool to raise urgent awareness (already too late) of the perils of climate change.

But to the concepts behind the proposal, here is what traditional geological thinking has to say about it:

-- Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years, we are told this new epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes. This is a laughably tiny amount of time that would barely even qualify to be designated an "event" in geologic terminology.

-- Geology typically deals with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates — single-frame snapshots from deep time — can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene proposal.

-- Plutonium is proposed here as the start of the Anthropocene's mark on the geologic record. Ignore plutonium for a moment, because even the longest-lived radioisotope from radioactive fallout, iodine-129, has a half-life of less than 16 million years. That is tiny in geologic time scales. If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it today because no trace would remain.

-- The presence of plastic fibres and fragments is also offered as a possible marker of our impact. How about that instead? Indeed small samples from our tiny geologic stratum that interrupts mile-thick formations of otherwise normal rock might be detectable. However, a few thousand years — or even a few tens of thousands of years — will be virtually indistinguishable in the rocks a hundred million years hence. The clear-cutting of the rain forest to build roads and palm-oil plantations, the plowing of the seabed on a continental scale, the rapid changes to the ocean and atmosphere’s chemistry, and all the rest would appear ***simultaneous*** with the extinction of the woolly mammoth. To future geologists, the modern debate about whether the Anthropocene started 10 minutes ago or 10,000 years ago will be a bit like arguing with your spouse on your 50th wedding anniversary about which nanosecond you got married.

The following article is recommended reading to get a true grasp on the staggering time scale of deep geologic time and the arrogant folly of the idea of an Anthropocene epoch:

www theatlantic com /science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/

The source article contains a small typo with a HUGE difference in meaning. 83% use HTTPS, not HTTP!

From the original report (PDF):

"The first quarter of 2021 was the first quarter in which we did not see an
increase in the number of phishing sites using SSL. The percentage has leveled off at about 83 percent for
two quarters in a row.”

Wait, what is illegal about connecting users who want to exchange bitcoins. ?!

Addendum: Note that all data in #3 (my on-site USB hard drive snapshot backups) is stored in a VeraCrypt encrypted volume.

I have four components of my backup solution:

1) Automated daily device backups to Google Drive containing new or updated critical files, including my encrypted password safe, which contains passwords and keys essential for recovery.

2) CrashPlan (small business) continuous automated encrypted cloud backup, which includes versioning and deleted files retention policies for recovering from data corruption and mistaken deletes in addition to catastrophic loss.

3) Weekly manual snapshot backup of personal directories to a local USB hard drive stored on-site. All data is stored in a VeraCrypt encrypted volume. In the event of anything but a full on-site disaster or theft, this would be the primary recovery source, then followed by restoring the deltas saved to the cloud since the last snapshot backup.

4) Yearly or so, duplicate the encrypted hard drive snapshot and place it into a bank vault safe deposit box on another continent. (Currently overdue because of Covid.)