Posts by GettinSadda 615 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2007
Hang on... but your logic seems incomplete.
You claim that something that costs the utility company (such as a smart meter) is really costing me.
But surely this means that something that saves a utility company money (such as not needing to employ meter readers) saves me money too?
You can't claim one without accepting the other... unless you are simply looking for a Daily Mail friendly way to bash the utility companies!
Having read through a good deal of the report it seems that the main reason that the figures are so high is what is categorised as a "security breach". As well as the sort of stuff you would expect (websites attacked by SQL injection, competitors getting private data by some means) you find that "confidential data e-mailed to a personal account" counts too... ok, perhaps. Then computers inside the organisation encountering a virus, even if immediately dealt with by anti-virus software (um, perhaps... but is this really a breach?), laptops being stolen (ok - um, but a security breach?), disc drive failures (er, hang on here - drive failures are now a security breach?) and the icing on the cake - data corruption caused by software bugs (WT-actual-F?)
The article is now corrected, but even so it won't be a $1.6bn hit.
Whatever is wrong with those phones it won't be every component that is faulty. 8 million items is enough to set up a workshop to replace the faulty parts with new ones and return the fixed items to Apple.
I know quite a bit about the internals of EV chargers... and they are probably one of the most pointless devices to attempt to hack. About the worst you could manage is causing drivers to resort to slower 13A charging until a widespread network outage is cleared. If you expend loads of time and effort. And are very bored. I have never seen any charger systems that talk to each other either - they don't mutually balance their loads.
You could not use them to "take down the grid" any more than you could use street-lights to take down the grid. EV chargers are basically a fancy socket with the on/off switch controlled by a small computer. If someone wants to damage the grid they just need to damage a substation - quick, easy and hundreds of times more effective (with a risk of blowing yourself up - but hey go have fun!!)
You think they are a convenient place to steal electricity? Really? So you are going to break into a locked device, hack the internal computer (that you have spent ages studying) and then get perhaps 32A out of the connector (to do what with I'm not sure!). Look at all those houses sown the road there - see all those little white plastic doors on the front? Behind each one is a meter and connectors that can supply you 100A with no hacking required... why not use one of them!
Yes, they connectors lock when plugged in, and yes most EVs will send a message to the driver's phone if it stops charging. Also... most modern EVs have external video cameras - they aren't currently set to do anything while charging, but a simple software update could get them to record if there is an unexpected unplugging.
Actually the reason that the 1541 drive is a computer rather than just a dumb bit of hardware is that it is basically a cut-down version of the PET 4040 disk drive which was an IEEE 488 (aka GPIB) devices. The concept is very much like IDE drives, which are what all modern hard drives are at heart.
The disk interface on the C64 is a serialized version of the parallel IEEE 488 bus and this meant that I was able to build a small interface board for my PET and convert the driver code in the ROM to use this rather than the native interface so I could run a 1541 from my PET.
EE: So, are you going to buy our new 4G service?
Cust: No, I'm fine on 3G
EE: {fiddle-fiddle-tweak} So are you sure you don't want 4G?
Cust: Hmm, 3G seems a bit slower these days, but it's good enough
EE: {more-tweaking} You sure?
Cust: Wow it's slow on 3G these days, but still OK
EE: {clunk-fiddle-kludge} Absolutely sure?
Cust: What the... this 3G is useless! How much did you say 4G was?
It's fun and it is related to how you can end up with malicious code in a compiler that does not exist in the source. Once you have a working C compiler (from anywhere) you can then compile your "written in C" C compiler and get a C compiler, now you have a C compiler! If you write a C compiler that injects malicious code into certain object code - such as a C compiler - then you can use that to compile a clean C compiler and distribute the clean sources with malicious object code. Check the sources really carefully and they are safe. Compile them and the object code is nasty!!
>"So the whole NYT article is faked but they're still going to provide new chargers to close the gap ?"
So by that logic, if petrol cars can go 400 miles between filling up, why would anyone put filling stations closer together than 400 miles?
Tesla are not adding more Super Charger stations because of the NYC article, they were always planning to add more to allow for more flexibility for drivers.
"I don't buy that they can't make them faster - plenty of people in the US looking for work, plenty of factories in mothballs, and rivers of cash are flowing out the white house trying to get the economy going - Tesla could open a second facility in a heartbeat. The fact they haven't says a lot..."
Setting up a modern auto factory is not a small task! It took 18 months to move from empty space to production at their current plant then another 6 months to ramp up to full capacity last month. If they started building a new line now I wouldn't expect to see production until the end of this year at the earliest. I suspect they will start on the new line towards the end of this year.
"...which will significantly reduce the working life of your $7000-$10,000 battery, making each rapid charge significantly more expensive than you imply here."
Not according to the manufacturers of these cars, or those who drive them daily and use such chargers regularly. Also, battery packs currently cost about $5000-$6000 and manufacturers are generally giving them a 5-year performance warranty so any problems between now and 2018 are covered.
>> Tesla are currently selling 400 Model S electric cars per week
>Yes, but that's California. Hardly representative of the real world.
They may be based in California (as are companies like Apple) but their cars are currently selling well across the USA and there are lots in other countries with pre-orders waiting for some to be exported.
Three supporters? Tesla are currently selling 400 Model S electric cars per week, despite them being as expensive as a BMW 5 or 7 series. The only reason they aren't selling more is that they can't currently make them any faster.
Why don't you see if you can get an extended test drive of an EV (Nissan do 24-hour test drives of the Leaf) and see how impractical it ends up being.
It's not "Electric Cars" that are failing in Oz and the USA, it is the champion of one particular EV technology. Battery replacement only works if you can get all EV manufacturers to agree to use the same battery pack (or one of a very limited selection). Of course manufacturers being what they are did not want to work together on their car designs so Better Place basically ended up with just Renault - and only one of their four electric models. It also turns out that the Renault Fluence ZE is not that good by EV standards.
What the Better Place model also required was for battery-change stations to be not too expensive when compared to rapid charging stations. This all falls apart when you find that a DC rapid charging station can be bought for as little as $13000 but a battery change-station can set you back tens of millions. This then got even worse when the EV manufacturer that made Better Place's Fluence ZE, switched to AC rapid charging for its new Zoe model - meaning that rapid chargers could easily cost less than $1500 each.
Actually, what happens if in a few years to F-35B turns out to be a dead-end and either none are shipped, or those that are shipped fail so often that we end up with no usable S/VTOL aircraft. I suppose we could just fill the carriers with... erm... ah...
> downgrade. No you try and fix the fault with a freezer or a hairdryer.
You cannot downgrade the firmware in a iPhone without a special file that you can't make yourself - Apple have to make it, and generally won't. There are some dodgy solutions for extracting that file from the phone itself, but only if you do that before applying the original update - once you have updated the file is forever destroyed!
Yes, make something that is a revamped iPhone 3GS, perhaps called the iPhone 3X or something, basically the same but with the internals cost-reduced and maybe a slightly better CPU. And of course the new dock connector! Non-retina screen, plastic back, 8GB limit, cheap-as-chips (relatively)
Build exactly as per original spec, but instead of the lightning connection, include an internal USB connector with a cable hole and offer it with or without a separate USB->Lightning cable (made by someone else?) that connects to this makes the whole combination exactly as per the original idea.
Virtually impossible to block - but easy to ban.
There are unlimited ways to sneak a VPN through disguised as allowed traffic, but if the punishment for getting caught doing so is high enough, few will take the risk.
This is a really dangerous situation and I wish western politicians will do something to prevent it - unfortunately I actually expect they are taking notes on how to do similar over here!
I was inspired by this game and a while afterwards decided to write a Lord of the Rings adventure on the commodore PET (because that was what I owned). The game had each character doing its own thing as you played the game and wandering around the map trying to achieve their own goals. I got quite far before running out of memory and realising that my design would never fit in 32K. The autonomous non-player characters also lead to some problems, but could be quite amusing. One of the first attempts at playing it worked well as I was progressing towards Weathertop, but every now and then I would get a description of the location followed by: "Here there is a dead Nazgul" then when I got to Weathertop I was greeted by "Here there is a dead Gandalf".
Current countermeasures include methods (which I won't go into any detail about) for telling which cinema, which screen and which showing a 'cammed' movie is shot in. There are also some clever methods for determining the location of the camera in the room. Then you add the fact that 'fully equipped' cinemas now film everyone entering and throughout the showing (from cameras concealed near the screen) and it only takes a few minutes to isolate a picture of the 'cammer'.
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