Saturday Staminiferous Stadial

Everyone is subject to the laws

Our lives are on our laptops – family photos, medical documents, banking information, details about what websites we visit, and so much more. 

Thanks to protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the government generally can’t snoop through your laptop for no reason. 

But those privacy protections don’t safeguard travelers at the U.S. border, where the U.S. government can take an electronic device, search through all the files, and keep it for a while for further scrutiny – without any suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever.

 For now, a border agent has the legal authority to search your electronic devices at the border even if she has no reason to think that you’ve done anything wrong.

Anthony Silva, the mayor of Stockton, California, recently went to China for a mayor's conference. On his return to San Francisco airport he was detained by Department of Homeland Security, and then had his two laptops and his mobile phone confiscated. 

They refused to show him any sort of warrant (of course) and then refused to let him leave until he agreed to hand over his password.

Perhaps he should have visited this site before his travels:

 https://www.eff.org/wp/defending-privacy-us-border-guide-travelers-carrying-digital-devices

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The VW Conspiracy Has More Implications of Collusion By More Than A Few Individuals

 
 Physics Today's Charles Day takes a look at how diesel engines work, and why it's clear it's not just a lone software engineer who came up with the cheat. "...Software is impotent without hardware. 

To recognize when a car was being tested and not driven, the defeat device required data from a range of sensors -- sensors that a noncheating car might not need....

 Whereas it's conceivable that a single software engineer, directed by a single manager, could have secretly written and uploaded the code that ran the defeat device, installing its associated hardware would require a larger and more diverse team of conspirators," he says.

I would venture to guess more voluntary job quitting will take place at VW in light of this development.


A new report suggests that continuing cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget contributed to Volkswagen being able to cheat on its emissions tests. 

When the test scripts were developed the department — which can still only conduct 'spot tests' on 20% of all qualifying vehicles — was forced to concentrate on heavy machinery and truck manufacturers, which at the time had a far higher incidence of attempting to cheat on vehicle standards tests. 

 Discounting inflation the EPA's 2015 budget is on a par with its 2002 budget (PDF), and has been cut by 21% since 2010.

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 Perhaps a feeble attempt by software to prolong battery life and make it appear as if the phone has a longer power cycle? Dunno...

 
Apple's iPhone 6s and 6s Plus were two of the most highly anticipated smartphones to launch so far this year.

 The excitement surrounding Apple's new refresh cycle flagships was so great that Apple reported record first weekend sales, with 13 million devices finding their way to customers. 

However, it appears that some of those customers are having a puzzling issue with their brand new iPhones. 

Owners are reporting that their phones are turning off randomly when left alone — even when the smartphones have sufficient battery remaining. 

"New Phone 6s 128GB turned off for no reason the last two nights," wrote Joachim Frey in an Apple discussion thread. 

"In the morning you then have to push the power-on button for a long time to get it started."

Really glad the wife and I decided to wait this phone upgrade out....

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Steve Jobs The Shark!

 Carly Fiorina likes to boast about her friendship with Apple founder Steve Jobs but Fortune Magazine reports that it turns out Carly may have outfoxed of by Apple's late leader.

 In January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina cut a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple's wildly successful iPod and sell it through HP retail channels but HP still managed to botch things up. 

 The MP3 player worked just like a regular iPod, but it had HP's logo on the back and in return HP agreed to continue pre-loading iTunes onto its PCs. 

According to Steven Levy soon after the deal with HP was inked, Apple upgraded the iPod, making HP's version outdated and because of Fiorina's deal HP was banned from selling its own music player until August 2006. 

 "This was a highly strategic move to block HP/Compaq from installing Windows Media Store on their PCs," says one Apple source.

 "We wanted iTunes Music store to be a definitive winner. 

Steve only did this deal because of that." 

 In short, Fiorina's "good friend" Steve Jobs blithely mugged her and HP's shareholders. 

By getting Fiorina to adopt the iPod as HP's music player, Jobs had effectively gotten his software installed on millions of computers for free, stifled his main competitor, and gotten a company that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was a superior inventor.

The shark of sharks.


Speaking of Carly

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I am waiting for solar panels to improve in their efficiency before committing to a roof top array.
 
SolarCity, one of the country's leading solar panel makers and installers, today said it has been able to create a product that has a 22.04% efficiency rating, topping its closest competitor SunPower, by about one percent. 

While the percentages may appear small, SolarCity said the new panels, which will go into pilot production later this month, will produce 30% to 40% more energy with the same footprint as its current panels, and they will cost no more to make. 

Still waiting.

I think that the day will come when someone figures out God's design for storing red and blue wavelengths of electromagnetic energy from the sun in the form of sugar molecules like plants do.

Chlorophyll is the magic compound that can grab that sunlight and start the whole process.



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Hey Laird Hamilton!

A new experimental facility at Deltares, a research institute in the Netherlands, has begun producing the largest humanmade waves in the world.

 Like kids building sandcastles below the tideline on the beach, scientists will let the walls of water crash on dikes of different designs and other structures—sometimes until they're destroyed.

 The Delta Flume, to be inaugurated on 5 October, is a 300-meter-long water-filled trough that is 9.5 meters high and 5 meters wide. 

At one end sits a gigantic metal plate called a wave board; four pistons move it back and forth to whip up the kind of waves that the sea can unleash. 

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