> Electrical transmission systems are roughly 85% efficient to the consumer;
Electrical generation itself isn't a 100% efficient. For example a gas powered electricity plant is about 60% efficient for generating electricity. Generating heat from gas is far more efficient.
Then again if you use the electricity not for direct heating but for example to power a heatpump on the other end (i.e. you use the electricity to extract heat from the air) then it could be more efficient.
This wasn't someone posting just a meme online or anything. The guy was posting racist shit during civil unrest [1]. Literally throwing oil on a fire. Yeah, you are going to get prosecuted for that.
"In those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors."
- Benjamin Franklin
This is why we fought a war to be separate from your "wretched" country. You're justifying jail time for racist speech!
Ironic coming from a future slave owner. He did become an abolitionist, after travelling to France and England and being exposed to some, for Americans, pretty radical ideas.
I'm wondering if using an imsi catcher is still effective? Most of the time I'm using calling over wifi (VoLTE) or I'm in a car (where an imsi catcher isn't really practical).
The purpose is to track the location of a specific phone using triangulation based on the closes cell towers which receive the phone’s signals. The phone maintains a connection to the nearest cell tower(s) to be on the network in case a call is initiated.
It’s not necessarily intended to intercept, although I believe there were some that downgraded G3 to G2 to be able to potentially do that.
I don’t know whether downgrade attacks are still viable (or needed).
Note that if you are being specifically targeted then a warrant to the provider would presumably net the equivalent of real time 911 location data.
As far as I understand, outside of active interception the only use for these things is warrantless dragnet surveillance of location. (And active interception is increasingly not possible due to better security practices.)
From what Ive read about stingrays here on HN, the device is fooling your cell phone to make a tower connection using the movile network. This does not depend on you making a call, the cell phone is normally doing background activity to connect to cell towers all the time.
IIRC even with airplane mode the stingray can capture phone info, IMEI, GPS location, etc.
> IIRC even with airplane mode the stingray can capture phone info, IMEI, GPS location, etc.
No. Airplane mode turns off the cellular radio's emissions, that's the whole point. A cellular base station emulator isn't going to do anything in that situation.
Indeed. I use both Unbound and NSD quite heavily as do at least four of the Internet's root DNS servers. I use it for some of my authoritative DNS servers.
Unbound is used by many on HN that block ads and malicious sites on their home router.
the Netherlands has nukes in loan from the US. They are at Volkel Airbase. Officially it's a secret, but it's common knowledge and was also confirmed by a former prime-minister. In exchange for these loaned nuclear weapons the Netherlands promised not to develop nuclear weapons of their own.
With the US now showing they are not afraid of doing a "rug pull" on agreements, one starts to wonder if the Netherlands shouldn't start development of nuclear weapons again.
Belgium is the same, and I don't know about you, but F16's and F35's are the only ones that can carry those bombs. That's why Belgium ordered a bunch of them and not some European planes.
It's too late to cancel now, but I guess in the future we will have to reconsider the true value of these bombs and airplanes. Once we really need them, US might "force us into peace".
> With the US now showing they are not afraid of doing a "rug pull" on agreements, one starts to wonder if the Netherlands shouldn't start development of nuclear weapons again.
This discussion is already looming in Germany, especially now that Elon Musk openly wants the US to leave NATO. There is a standing offer by Macron for Germany to go under French nuclear protection. The UK also appears to be more than willing to fill in the nuclear vacuum left by the US. If things continue the path of the last 2-3 weeks, I am sure that at some point there will be a discussion about whether Germany should prepare to be able to at least build nuclear weapons quickly.
I have a feeling that Canada has similar thoughts. I wonder what would happen if they started developing nuclear weapons. The US president already announced he would make Canada the 51st state, and around 25% of Canadians saw the US as an enemy country 2 weeks ago [0]
Strategically, it does not make any sense to me. I am pretty sure that the Russians are just as confused. I wonder if there is a historic precedent of a country giving up a functioning empire voluntarily, without any internal or external pressure to do so.
Canada has been refused nuclear submarines by the US which are an absolute necessity to patrol the Canadian arctic. But the US also decided Australia should get American nuclear subs and cancel their order of French nuclear subs. I believe the French would be more than happy to build a few subs for their Western NATO friends for a reasonable price.
There is a lot of planning going on now in Europe, both on international (EU, UK) and national level, that would've been politically impossible just a few months ago.
Was DOGE able to affect the Pentagon or three-lettered security agencies yet? I would assume anything defense-related is kept separate from civilian government structures and may not be as collapsible. Some may even have internal plans to defend against a take over from the top.
If by "resolving" a war you mean forcing the victim into a surrender and making the agressor a victor than sure.
You seem to forget the obligations the US has when they signed (and made Ukraine sign) the Budapest memorandum. In which Ukraine gave up the world's third largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for protection of their sovereignty. The US since 2014 (invasion of Crimea) failed to uphold their part of the deal.
> If by "resolving" a war you mean forcing the victim into a surrender and making the agressor a victor than sure.
What other option is there? In all options, Ukraine loses territory in order to stop the fighting. NATO is not going to escalate with Russia, so clearly Ukraine won't be kicking Russia out.
And even if Ukraine did kick Russia out, then what? Russia can just invade again a year later. Is this just an endless war? Is the West going to pay for an endless war?
Seems like the better approach is for Ukraine to get the best deal with Russia they can.
> You seem to forget the obligations the US has when they signed (and made Ukraine sign) the Budapest memorandum. In which Ukraine gave up the world's third largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for protection of their sovereignty. The US since 2014 (invasion of Crimea) failed to uphold their part of the deal.
The US had an obligation not to expand NATO to Ukraine, but hey, here we are.
> The US had an obligation not to expand NATO to Ukraine, but hey, here we are.
Both Gorbachev (the leader of the USSR at the time) and Jasow (higest military leader of the USSR at the time) both say this was never promised to them [1].
And also; Do you really think they would have just let it out the agreement if this was really promised to them? The USSR just forgot to ask to put it on paper?
> And even if Ukraine did kick Russia out, then what? Russia can just invade again a year later. Is this just an endless war?
So what is the difference exactly with a "peace deal" now? Russia did exactly the same thing with Crimea. They invaded, signed a cease fire and then broke it. Whats going to be different this time?
> Seems like the better approach is for Ukraine to get the best deal with Russia they can.
They had a deal in 2014 after Russia invaded Crimea. And Russia chose to break it. That's besides all the deals (such as the Budapest Memorandum) Russia decided to break when they invaded Crimea in the first place.
> Is the West going to pay for an endless war?
Purely from a military perspective, the west is getting a pretty sweet deal with Russia putting it's army in the wood-chipper.
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and
other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition,
stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat.”
Despite Russia sharing its redlines with the West in 2008 NATO continued to expand its sphere of influence into Ukraine including backing the coup in 2014.
So yeah, it’s unsurprising that Russia escalated each step of the way as well.
I’m not arguing Russia is right, I’m arguing a war was an obvious outcome.
Russia has already paid a price in the war and clearly it seeks some sort of solution.
You know Ukraine could have sided with Russia and avoided this saga the whole time, right? The real victim are the Ukrainians that had the suffer this war because Zelinski and their deep state sold the country to Biden’s team interests. As a civilian, I’d rather live in an authoritarian and peaceful Russia than a war torn Ukraine where I am forced to be drafted.
They do not have that option. You know who died by the thousands in meat wave attacks on Mariupol, armed with decades-old rifles? Citizens of the "Donetsk People's Republic" and "Luhansk People's Republic" who were forcibly drafted.
Can you prove they don't? Right now Google is losing in the AI space. I wouldn't be surprised if they went with "it's better to ask for forgiveness later than permission upfront".
Look at all their legal cost contracts like terms of service.
Then also consider how all of their enterprise customers would switch to MS/AWS in a heartbeat if they found out Google was training on their private, proprietary data.
Google Cloud has been a gigantic investment they've been making for well over a decade now. They're not going to throw away consumer and enterprise trust to train on a bunch of e-mail.
> Then also consider how all of their enterprise customers would switch to MS/AWS in a heartbeat if they found out Google was training on their private, proprietary data.
Enterprise customers are one thing, but private customers of ordinary Gmail? Completely another thing.
> Google Cloud has been a gigantic investment they've been making for well over a decade now. They're not going to throw away consumer and enterprise trust to train on a bunch of e-mail.
Consumers barely trust Google any more these days, not with the frequent stories about arbitrary bans, and corporations shy away from Google Cloud due to the same reason plus the service quality being way lower than AWS.
It's probably more of cultural difference. It's common in the US to build companies like a lot of houses are build in the US.
In the US houses are often build from wood and plaster and have a high chance of being knocked down by a storm. Companies in the US are often build on a ton of dept (and never making a profit is not considered "weird") and have a high chance of being knocked down by a storm.
In Europe people like to build houses from brick and concrete. Companies in Europe are often expected to be profitable at some point and be able to wither a storm.
US vs. EU building materials is actually locally determined - there's a lot more forest in the vast empty spaces of the US and Canada, hence all the cheap wood.
Same for oil. Same for e.g. the UK steel industry. I think people underestimate the extent to which the EU either doesn't have the same level of natural resources, or has used them up. There's a reason the last time that Germany got serious about resource independence it tried to invade Azerbaijan despite the USSR being in the way.
He didn't kill the funding, he's just violating the US Constitution by deliberately failing at his job to enforce the laws. We should avoid phrasing that makes it sound normal. (Congress can "kill" a law, he can't.)
That said, it's hard to say what motive might be going on. Did someone just convince him that it was a safe thing to target? Does he think his actions will frustrate or hurt Democratic states? Or maybe he just needs something in jeopardy that he can hold above Elon as a form of extortion.
I think it impacts others more. Tesla has already built the experience and scale to beat other US manufacturers at EV’s. It’s harder to follow without subsidies.
And one of the disadvantages is that you can't solve problems by just spending more. It's a real trade-off, and too often is simplified to one option being obviously better.
Why would you spend more if it's not solving problems?
You can certainly spend more, but on-prem/self-hosted, time is usually the limiting factor, either directly or through opportunity cost. Contrary to popular belief, time does not always equal money, if you need more storage and the blocker is that you need to build out an S3 equivalent (rather than just paying for S3), then you'll be blocked by hiring, by hardware lead times, etc.
Maybe I'm misreading what you mean, but I don't understand why it's not solving problems. Lack of capactiy solved buy buying more hardware or replacing existing hardware with more powerful hardware. In the datacenter you need to have capacity planning pretty early on, while in the cloud you can get by until reaching very large cloud bill.
I also don't think that every organisation that needs file storage must build a storage solution that should compete the reliabiltiy and features of S3. Most of the times you can get by just fine at fraction of the cost.
Take file storage for example. Going from one server, to one with backups, to N, to big-N, are all points of inflection where significant engineering is required for on-prem/self-hosted file storage. With a cloud solution none of these are inflection points, none require additional work, they only require additional money.
Assuming you have infinite time, you can just funnel money into things like hardware upgrades and hiring engineers to build these things, but if you don't assume infinite time, time is often as strong or even stronger a factor than money.
At my last company we had a bunch of servers in colo, and could not throw money at solving problems there. Getting a new machine took 2+ days and a bunch of emails, not an API call. We moved to the cloud mostly because the opportunity cost, i.e. the time spent by engineers on toil scaling things on physical machines, was higher than the monetary cost that we could pay on a cloud provider.
This won't be the same for everyone, but the point is that money is roughly the only consideration in cloud, but not the only consideration on-prem, at least when you discount common factors between the two.
If you are at the point of having to deal with individual servers and have a very fast-paced development (startup), or have to deal with very burstable traffic spikes (say e-commerce), cloud is probably your friend.
But sometimes you just need more compute and you are the type of organization that buys compute by the floor space and power consumption...
Regardless of the nuances of each situation, I think jsiepkes's comment meant to say that in the data center you can buy pretty killer hardware that will be totally overkill for the moment and won't require you to count active timeseries in order to not pay $300k a month for your metrics, and at the same time will last you for the next couple of years.
Also, for most companies, the next point of inflection will never come and this server will probably last them for a very, very long time.
I'm sharing my point of view as someone who works at an organization that took money as the only consideration and managed to grow over the years to now having to start taking both time and money into consideration because taking only money into consideration proves to be too expensive.
And you don't have to pick just cloud or on-prem, you can utilize both. Use cloud for your bursty workloads, or for it's CDN/edge, and then your on-prem for consistent workloads. As long as you're not using cloud specific services you can run open source versions on-prem (such as minio for S3, or your own Postgres cluster, or kubernetes + what ever operator)
We recently switched from Grafana to Prometheus. Reason being that a license refresh took longer to process on their end. What happens when a license expires on Grafana? They fucking shut down all your shit cold turkey. Don't care if you're in prod or have a dedicated guy on their end for support or whatever. So you're happily churning along and then suddenly you're blind. Nice FinOps. With Prometheus there's a grace period where they'll happily overcharge you. But we've never had a product absurdly blow up on us like this before. It's truly mind boggling that they're out here talking about 'FinOps' now.
Electrical generation itself isn't a 100% efficient. For example a gas powered electricity plant is about 60% efficient for generating electricity. Generating heat from gas is far more efficient.
Then again if you use the electricity not for direct heating but for example to power a heatpump on the other end (i.e. you use the electricity to extract heat from the air) then it could be more efficient.
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