Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Does this Policy Work? (Score 3, Interesting) 26

The impact of these laws is far larger than a single VPN vendor. Switzerland has long been regarded as a neutral, safe place for data flow, but that reputation has taken some hits from the Proton mail fail and the attacks on bank privacy and now these new laws. I suppose the largest danger here is that Switzerland gets passed up as an AI hub in favor of less repressive governments, in terms of data privacy.

So, financially it's a bust. Surely there is some compensatory social value? But I can't really credit that. It's just too easy to add another encryption layer for sensitive information flow for the really bad guys with the incentive to do so. At this point, you're just compromising regular citizens, catching some low-level criminals, and harming your economy. What am I missing? If anything, it pays to remember that people are generally stupid and that politics are a force multiplier in that respect.

Comment Viable? (Score 1) 34

I'm always excited by the practical application of science, so I gave this some thought. In my estimation, the biggest impediment to this process is going to be the heavy metal concentration. It might be possible to use the resultant fertilizer for non-food crop use like forestation or biofuel production, but it becomes a problem if you ever want to convert those regions since the metals will mainly remain in the soil.

Another issue is that collecting human urine prior to wastewater dilution isn't really practical. On a commercial scale, you could probably substitute livestock urine as that is easier to control and collect at the source.

Once the material separation processes for heavy metals matures a little bit, this seems like a pretty neat idea.

Comment Re:NO, CA is not overflowing with solar energy (Score 1) 83

Right now, CA is curtailing energy at times and in quantities of hundreds of terawatt-hours, exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars of potential in many months. So, I don't think "overflowing" is a misstatement. The overflow of just 2 years would have paid the entire 2 billion dollars for this project. It isn't chump change at all.

Now, grid problems I can understand. These are challenging times for the grid as consumption spikes due to evolving technology and state policy; however, supersaturating the grid with even more power at this time seems premature. I'd rather see a focus on infrastructure.

Comment What's the ROI? (Score 1) 83

The timing for this seems poor as California is currently overflowing with solar energy. At least the storage capacity will help shift some of that from (currently) useless to useful. Maybe they're hoping to build a few AI centers with it? I wasn't able to dig up any plans for that with a casual search, though. As it stands, I don't think they'll be able to recoup the costs of the project within the lifetime of the equipment unless the price of energy suddenly skyrockets.

Comment Re:Fine (Score 1) 132

It's still a bit early to call the results, but it seems like both Canon and Sony are taking advantage of Fujifilm's large price increases to pad their own pockets, strategically. Well, businesses being opportunistic and cutthroat is certainly no surprise. Fujifilm is just creating a vacuum for greed to fill. At least they are diversified enough to hold the line, probably. I think the US part of their revenue is only about 15-20%.

Comment Click X to Pay (Score 1) 245

I wonder if this kind of thing will make it easier for something like X Money to slide into the competition mix. Although since it's in partnership with Visa, it seems like there could be problems on that front. Elon Musk has expressed displeasure with the practice of payor censorship especially as it affects the cultural exports of Japan and other vendors of anime and anime-styled games.

Comment Say What? (Score 1) 138

Sure, there is plenty of systemic failure within the legal system. Good luck stamping that out, and I would welcome the news. However, the sheer hubris of Mrs. Holmes applying herself to the task as if she were any kind of victim doesn't sit well with me. The hallucination she's presenting makes me wonder if she uses some AI copilot for making her press releases.

Comment Just Why? (Score 4, Insightful) 78

Wow. How do you have an e-commerce site with an improperly configured robots.txt file? It sounds like they learned a relatively inexpensive lesson. Perhaps robots.txt should have a configuration to limit bandwidth and/or access frequency. That would allow crawlers to have responsible access without having to lock them out entirely. Still, a large crawler like OpenAI also needs some self-throttling heuristics to keep from crushing poorly-configured Websites. It's pretty easy to tell when your latency suddenly increases or packets start getting dropped that you might be stressing a target. For that matter, why not interleave queries rather than dropping the bomb site by site?

Anyway, it's good to see these stories every once in a while so that those who learn by example have some grist for their mills.

Slashdot Top Deals

Live within your income, even if you have to borrow to do so. -- Josh Billings

Working...