alexeckermann

Some insight into the change year-on-year to the South Australian negative pricing; the change may be due to more active management by AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator). Wind is now mostly curtailed at ~1.2GW and a minimum quantity of synchronised gas generators operating. This was in response to a system security scare in 2016 where the entire state experienced a 'Black System' event where we lost all power -- lights out in the entire state. That was caused by a storm taking out some primary transmission lines on top of a less-than-ideal market generation mix causing a chain of events but it put focus and revealed the bigger security issue everyone ignored -- higher risk figures were reported but nobody cared until it was a problem.

Whilst we have enough wind and solar to take the state to 100% renewable (at times) it is not secure enough to provide industrial contracts or services like FCAS (Frequency Control Ancillary Service). With dwindling industrial contracts for energy providers the generation market has gotten smaller, primarily supplying domestic load/customers. That on top of a privatised market lacking responsibility for planning ahead has left the local market in a flux. The spot market has become so unreliable that some businesses have opted for their own on-site diesel generation.

One may assume that this would mean our power prices are pretty low. But that isn't the case. It has been said we have some of the highest electricity prices in the world. In context, this has been because of waining industrial load contracts and profit focussed privatised generators. We just also happen to have a high-wind generator mix.

So whilst living in a state with a high % of renewables is great, the lack of planning in a privatised market has left everything a bit messed up. Businesses looking outside the highly variable spot market into the hands of fossil fuel generators, domestic customers paying some of the highest power prices in the world, and nobody is really responsible/accountable for keeping the lights on.

* after one hour of inactivity.

The vulnerability may still be present in the allowed timeframe. This could just lead the investigators to carry around portable cracking devices to use at the earliest moment they can. A kind of technology arms race?

This might come across as a bit 'gushy' but it really has had a massive impact on what I am working on and what it enables us to do.

I've been evaluating WYSIWYG editors to use in one of our main products for about a year now. I stopped looking when I saw CK5 back in Alpha 1.

It ticked all of the boxes: modern build architecture, easily extensible, diffs/deltas/transform-ops at the core for collaborative services -- it's made for today and the future. And so much more than that. Where CK4 was great for what is now legacy browsers, CK5 is completely fresh and new for current & future browsers.

I highly recommend checking it out and to absolutely consider using it in a project that needs any form of rich text editing.

Around 2011+ we saw not only quiz apps but also offerings such as "See who views your profile" that would result in an OAuth authorisation. How long were those authorisations active before being revoked? How much data was exfiltrated, then and since, and to whom?

If it wasn't for recent changes to authorisations being suspended after a period of time these tokens could be seemingly worth something to the right person.

The root problem being, average users don't know what they're giving access to and know why its important to be critical of such access.

They were prepared for it to RUD right there on the pad, losing one booster is pretty much one away from a flawless mission. I've been on previous live streams when an anomaly occurs, this was no different and what I come to expect — the moment they didn't cut back to a video feed it was very obvious what had happened and that they'd need time to figure it out.

Doubt any thought of 'Public Relations' went through the minds of any of the presenting engineers. Clearing the launch tower was a massive achievement, everything else was a bonus. Loved seeing the engineers all beaming at the end with John joining in — away from a desk!

But at the same time, radiation and exposure is more nuanced than when and where an event happened that might coincide with some later generalised health effects. Not all radiation is the same and radiation exposure does not always lead to negative health effects. Cancers occurring in a geo-specific region in correlation to an event don't point to one source.

The radionuclides expelled from Chernobyl are known and traceable, not being found in nature they can be detected easily. Knowing their decay chain over time and, later, the bioaccumulation of those isotopes (based on how people will come in to contact with them) you can start to figure out how tissues that bioaccumulate or come into contact with an alpha source could react.

What I am saying is, it's important to understand that its not just about 'radiation' may equal 'cancers'. We know how to understand this deeper than that, on how to measure and calculate health effects based on the specific isotopes and their related exposures on tissues, primarily internally — because alpha decay has the highest energy but is easily absorbed by paper or the outer epidermis, to do damage it has to be in close proximity to sensitive tissues. So its important to stick to those more calculable and verifiable hypothesis rather than broad 'radiation' and 'cancer' labels.

Theres some studies done of the effects of Chernobyl over the years since. Of note are the WHO and the Chernobyl Tissue Bank.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ http://www.chernobyltissuebank.com

I went to a talk by Prof Geraldine Thomas, of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank and Imperial College London, sharing her insights and research into radiation and its effects on the body. The key takeaway from the talk is to take into account the type of release, what radionuclides were exposed to the public and their half-life, and then what the passage of that particular element is through the body to determine what damage can be done.

A notable example is of Iodine-131 causing of thyroid lesions and cancers in the direct aftermath of an event because of its short half life of alpha decay directly into tissue that bioaccumulates Iodine, keeping the alpha decay focussed on a very specific tissue. Other heavier elements tend to (I am not a biologist or nuclear scientist, paraphrasing from a talk a couple years ago) can leave the body without being bioaccumulated, having only released 'tolerable' amounts of alpha decay into a broad area of tissue.

It would be interesting to know if those "unusual cancers" were in some part a result of radionuclide exposure from Chernobyl or the result of other factors. But I — a nobody with a causal subject matter interest — would be hesitant to suggest that there was causation in absence of a hypothesis based on biology tied to the known Chernobyl emissions. Either way, we can find out more about radiations effect on biology if a study takes place — or if there is already one out there?

Lights for taxiway C were also on and set to default settings that included centerline lights (green) along its length. Default settings also included edge lights (blue) and centerline lights (green) illuminating the transition or stub taxiways from the runway to the taxiway.

Runway and approach lighting for runway 28R were on and set to default settings, which included a 2,400-foot approach lighting system, a precision approach path indicator, touchdown zone lights (white), runway centerline lights (white at the approach end), runway threshold lights (green), and runway edge lights (white at the approach end).

Taxiway: centre green along length, blue edge lights. Can have planes on it. Runway: centre white along length and edges (also landing zone), perpendicular green at end thresholds. Should not have planes on it.

Im CTO at a startup that is working in that space — https://tablo.io

We currently offer a way to streamline creation, sharing and publishing of work through to the iBooks Store. Going forward we are focusing on being a new home for publishing.

Authorities said there was "no nuclear risk" following the blast in Flamanville shortly before 10am local time (9am GMT) on Thursday.

Officials said the blast took place in the turbine hall and confirmed there was no radioactive leak.

Absolutely. After 3 months of using it I have only withdrawn cash from an ATM twice.

It's slightly amusing to watch the cashier have a moment of confusion as I ask to 'pay by card' then proceed to do nothing whilst I wait for them to get the EFTPOS terminal ready. They expect some kind of shuffling to produce a card instead I extend my wrist out to pay with an Apple Watch.

Can't wait to see what numbers come out from this, interested to know % of Apple Pay transactions on activated cards.

I remember in September 2014 when Apple announced Apple Pay watching the keynote live on TV. I was visiting San Francisco at the time, staying in SoMa, and out the window adjacent I had a clear view of the Coin office. To be a fly on the wall during that time…

That assertion is incorrect. There were other Nuclear Power Plants that were closer to the Tōhoku earthquake epicentre and just as affected by the proceeding tsunami. Of note is the Onagawa NPP which was used as a refuge to house residents (in the site gymnasium) during the event. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...]

To say that the plants construction in an earthquake prone environment, solely, would inevitably lead to the incident is false. Just like with most incidents (e.g aircraft) it is a compound of faults but most importantly obtuse human error and/or mishandling.

I don't agree with that. It may be the case that Android might bake it into the OS and most likely have a trademark agreement with Apple. There is no non-conspiratorial reason why Apple should completely shun iBeacon's on Android. All it will need is respect of the trademark — love them or hate them its the game we have to play at the moment.

Are there any non-commercial, open source iBeacon-compatiable libraries out there for Android? It would be handy to know if there are.

I haven't been able to find definitive reports of this — I wasn't aware of it when it happened and am piecing together details I can find. If Radius Networks was producing commercial iBeacon products (SDK's) then Apple was within their rights to stop that.

To be honest, I think that is fair. I can't imagine this is preventing Android from using iBeacons. My opinion would be that it is preventing profiteering from something Apple a) has a trademark on and b) might want available for free.

I assume AltBeacon is the fallout from this. It would be nice if Radius and Apple could work together on Android support. Could be likely that its happening in Android OS already?

If the thing the beacon is attached to moves the co-ordinates would need to update and would not be of use because its just GPS. Static beacons are useful where GPS resolution isn't great (concrete canyons), in buildings/structures or an area where theres a high density of beacons that GPS can't resolve quickly or finely enough.

A beacon represents a thing and not a fixed location. A beacon on a vehicle would say "hi I'm vehicle ABC123…" rather than trying to find that vehicle by 2D geospatial resolve from a GPS fix referencing a known database of last locations of vehicles.

Interested to know how you intend to do that with all the advertising space already used up by one of the beacon advertisements?

This is entirely dependant on the beacon antenna design and its configuration. I have tested various beacons and have found that beacons using ceramic chip antennas do give these wild and unpredictable ranging values where as a trace antenna, especially the ones provided by TI, are exceptionally good once configured with correct TX power settings.

Using Apple's devices as iBeacons are very accurate. I usually have an margin of error in the region of +/- 10cm at its worst.

But the point of beacons is that they represent a physical thing. "A thing is here. Have its identifier" rather than using GPS or a-GPS to resolve a 2D coordinate that then needs geospatial querying to find an object "closest" to that reported position. No matter how good 2D coordinates are if the thing doesn't stay in one spot or if the accuracy is not great (indoors) then its just a guessing game.

Simple answer: Available advertising space.

The identifier field in the iBeacon spec is a 16-byte UUID and no longer than that, AltBeacon has a 20-byte space but its because it includes an unstructured major, minor (compared to iBeacon). If your example was to be represented it would be 22-byte in length which is outside the bounds available — granted that I took the number of X literally and could be shortened multiple ways.

Moreover, the UUID is described as a region identifier where, in your scenario, all the beacons for the bus company would have the same region identifier but each individual beacon representing a stop would have an individual major and minor identifier (2-byte each) to uniquely identify that particular stop. So the way in which the iBeacon spec and somewhat AltBeacon are authored don't really allow for that kind of implementation because of the limitations imposed by the small advertising packet space. Its intended that the identifier space be used for something like a UUID with a set of supporting identifiers (major, minor).

As you can see from the AltBeacon spec diagram; there is only 28-bytes available for advertisable data on a Bluetooth Smart peripheral. So there is not a lot of room to play with.

Video playback on the web is such a farce.

Luckily with some poking around you can find the m3u8 playlist URL in the HTML source in plain sight: http://ipad-streaming.cbsnews.com/media/mpx/2014/03/30/21153...

01010011 - 8-bit mode

01110101 - bowling

00101010 - space

00111001 - burger

01111111 - ascii (via heelhook)

01000101 - rocket

10001000 - synth

11011011 - song

11010011 - simone

11100111 - cat

10000001 - pong

10010000 - bacon

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

No mention of an International roadmap or trialing in any other country but the US, or on any other device or network for that matter. This has started to annoy me about Google product releases, as I am Australian. Are they releasing too early? Trying to generate hype and be called the first to do something? Why wont they work on things for another 6 months to get it right?

"If you’re in the U.S., you’ll also be able to download the Videos app, rent movies, and buy books once you receive the new Android Market."

I know that content licensing is an issue but out of the last few "major" products Google has released, a majority have been US only.

When will we get to the point where Google gives enough effort into something that can go more than US-only?

For me it just feels like they are throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks. Then when it does stick go and find out how to roll it out to a few more countries and do that. Not a lot of effort or confidence in what they release.

Edit: Just to add, I live in Australia. So you can see my real frustration with releases like this.

Dude Im sorry about that, my bad. Used the HTML5 Boilerplate and didn't remove it before going live. I feel your pain. Iw anted to do a full mobile skin but time ran out.

Yup, Keith created that. Its a test record. Because we created this for a coding competition we need people to be able to judge the site and make bookings without actually making a real life booking.

I agree that might be the case but actually the Twitter and OpenID authentication is much safer.

1) When you authenticate with Twitter or OpenID its all done on Twitter or your OpenID providers site. We cant snoop your credentials at all, you dont enter it on our site. 2) Sure authentication is an easy feature but this way we dont need to ask you for your details again, you let us talk to your service and use your existing information. 3) You can kick us off from your Twitter account from Twitter itself and at any time, see Connections section under settings.

Some people might be conscious about us being able to access your Twitter or OpenID information but its mostly available to the world on these services anyway. OAuth (which is the underlying technology behind this authentication) is being used more and more. It's much better and safer for end users, its just that initial hurdle to get mass adoption. Its the end users decision if they trust the site or not. Most people have trusted us today :)

We cant make any changes to the app whilst its being judged, not one line of code. I do agree that we should look at implementing a base user signup sans-OAuth provider but we cant do anything until Rails Rumble has been judged and voted. It was a 48 hour coding competition with many other developers around the world, see www.railsrumble.com

We are back online and ready to take your search queries. But dont all geocode at once ;)

Yup we will be expanding the site soon. We built the site in 48 hours for the Rails Rumble competition. We kept it light as we could. After the judging and voting we will be adding in more features and options for login :)

Although we think using Twitter or OAuth is the easiest way. 1 Auth and your email address, thats it.

Thanks for your feedback.

Just a note to anyone visiting the site. We are currently having issues with the mass demand of visits and going over our Google API request limit.

Currently in a team Skype call trying to resolve the issue. You can still see all the workplaces available via the "Workplaces" link. Search and creating workplaces are the pages that are affected.

Thanks to everyone for checking us out. We will keep @desksnearme updated with the progress.

Cheers.