Energy storage can change electricity’s status as the ultimate ‘just-in-time’ product, where supply and use have to be matched in real-time, but this won’t be possible without increasingly sophisticated software solutions.

Four industry representatives with expertise in software spoke last week at an energy storage event hosted online by Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of global investment and advisory services firm Guggenheim Partners.

The introduction of scalable energy storage solutions is a new fundamental technical capability in electricity, the first time — with the exception of limited quantities of pumped hydro energy storage —that the model has been changed in over 100 years, Larsh Johnson, CTO of distributed energy storage company Stem Inc said.

Software enables that new storage, mostly from lithium-ion batteries, to react quickly, flexibly and be adaptable to changing market conditions, Johnson said. At the same time, more and more variable wind and solar resources are coming onto grids all over the world, requiring integration and balancing.

The energy industry has to deliver instantly and can’t always count on suppliers. Johnson compared the predicament to what online retail giant Amazon faced when rolling out its Amazon Prime Plus subscription model.

Amazon, he said, solved its problems with massive software investments. That software is underwritten by artificial intelligence (AI) that predicts customers’ future needs and behaviour while also projecting the retailer’s own supply and delivery constraints. Thus ensuring marketplace inventory and on-time deliveries.

“It’s the same with directing resources into real-time power markets,” the Stem CTO said.

Energy storage can provide workarounds to what Johnson called “some rigid power grid situations,” allowing energy to be flexibly transacted when it’s needed.

Not only that, but software is adaptable. With regulators and policymakers under continuous pressure to evolve their market design rules governing energy assets that may have useful lifetimes decades long, software can help shape those rules too.

Ben Irons, founder of Habitat Energy, a company specialising in software-backed optimisation of energy storage and renewable energy assets in markets including the UK, Australia and Texas, noted that “there’s no other traded commodity where you would see low prices every evening and high prices every night,” without seeing arbitrage and traders spotting the opportunity to trade.

Energy storage has revolutionised that, Irons said, adding that even five years ago, there weren’t “physical assets that could store electrical power in an efficient way at a reasonable price” the way lithium-ion can.

Up to 350 MHz analog bandwidth with 1 GaSa/s sample rate streamed to a PC at 1 Gb/s. //

ThunderScope comes in an unassuming box that is just large enough to house 4 BNC connectors, a compensation output, four fully-functional front-end stages, an ADC, and an Artix-7 FPGA to capture the data and transfer it to the PC.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope

Regulations are expected to impact 75 coal-fired power plants //

Climate change isn’t what’s driving some U.S. coal-fired power plants to shut down. It's the expense of stricter pollution controls on their wastewater.

Dozens of plants nationwide plan to stop burning coal this decade to comply with more stringent federal wastewater guidelines, according to state regulatory filings, as the industry continues moving away from the planet-warming fossil fuel to make electricity.

The new wastewater rule requires power plants to clean coal ash and toxic heavy metals such as mercury, arsenic and selenium from plant wastewater before it is dumped into streams and rivers. The rule is expected to affect 75 coal-fired power plants nationwide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. //

Those plants had an October deadline to tell their state regulators how they planned to comply, with options that included upgrading their pollution-control equipment or retiring their coal-fired generating units by 2028.

The national impact of the wastewater rule is still coming into focus, but at least 26 plants in 14 states said they will stop burning coal, according to the Sierra Club, which has been tracking state regulatory filings. Twenty-one of the plants intend to shut down, and five indicated they may switch to natural gas, the environmental group said.

If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," another Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch, told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.

tobybrut
26 minutes ago
These cases are superficially similar but have a huge difference between them. In the Coffee case, Coffee was considered the bad guy and was arrested and tried. In the Taylor case, the police were assumed to be the bad guys with lies about Taylor being innocently in bed being thrown around in order to railroad the police officers. In both cases, you saw criticism by conservatives on the policies surrounding how these officers ended up getting in shootouts. Whether it was lies about no-knock warrants or whatever, it wasn’t the officers who screwed up. It was the people who put them in that position. The left kept lying about the Taylor case, yet the right pointing out the lies are somehow hypocrisy when there were no such dynamics in the Coffee case. There were no leftist lies to debunk because the left was utterly silent on the case. In that respect, politically, these cases are not remotely similar.

In both cases, conservatives were fine with the outcome. Both boyfriends got off on murder charges, where people understood in both cases, self-defense was an issue. The boyfriends didn’t know they were cops shooting at them and had legitimate rights of self-defense. In the Taylor case, one officer was charged with indiscriminately shooting into the next apartment. Whatever happens to him is fine with whatever the law says. If he goes to prison according to the law, that’s the way it should be. Coffee is going to prison for a gun charge, which is fine because it has nothing to do with his right of self-defense.

The big difference in the Taylor case was that the left was trying to destroy the cops before the case was even investigated. In the case of Coffee, nobody had heard of the case until a few days ago, so people had a different perspective with which to decide since the jury had already resolved it. We saw the Coffee case, heard the jury’s decision, and thought, good, it seems the law was followed and the right decision was made. There were no politics about anti-cop versus pro-cop surrounding that case, merely the right of self-defense. The only reason conservatives brought it up was to fight the politics surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse and how both were self-defense cases. The only reason Coffee’s race mattered was because the left accused Kyle of white supremacy. If the left had said nothing about Kyle, no one would have ever mentioned the Coffee case as it likely would not have generated any controversy. Was the Coffee case opportunistic for refuting the left’s arguments against Rittenhouse? Yes, because the same result happened for people of different races as it should. Opportunistic is not the same as hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is saying Coffee was innocent while Rittenhouse was guilty. The hypocrisy is all on the left.

Absent the Rittenhouse case, I can say conservatives would have responded to the Coffee case the same as they did with the Rittenhouse case. Justice was done and the right decision was made. The Taylor case was different in that the emphasis was on the cops, not the boyfriend, as to who did wrong. The boyfriend was practically an afterthought while the left demanded the cops be charged. But in all three cases, it seems justice was done. Where is the hypocrisy on the right?

LGB //

VRW
28 minutes ago
I think the real question is why is the Left choosing to use the Taylor case to push their race-baiting defund the police systemic racism narrative, but not the Coffee case.

It’s always a good thing to evaluate why the Left supports an issue since generally the “issue” is not the issue.

You seem to be painting with a very broad brush, Scott, and it’s not a good look. As for the Taylor case, why is a no-knock raid that ends tragically a sign of systemic racism? I keep hearing about this system that is racist, but no one can ever give specifics. It’s so tiresome. Is it a system in desperate need of reform? Absolutely. That doesn’t make it racist. Is it a system that disproportionately affects poor people negatively? Absolutely. It doesn’t make it racist.

Ask yourself this, Scott, had Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend been white would we have ever heard about them? Nope. No one would give a sh** about her. This constant pandering to race is muddying the waters to a real problem this country has, that problem being an ever increasing descent into totalitarian government control.

the same people who find George Floyd a problematic hero for the left, are suddenly foisting felony-convicted police assaulter Andrew Coffee IV upon a tower and claiming “justice was done!” The same people who claimed Breonna Taylor got what she deserved for formerly dating a drug dealer, are the same people ignoring that Alteria Woods was in bed next to Andrew Coffee IV. The same people saying Gaige Grosskreutz shouldn’t have been in possession of a firearm without a license, are praising a man who shot at police with an illegally possessed firearm. Here, they are cheering Andrew Coffee IV, who is still going to prison for possession of a firearm as a convicted felon, but should you ask these same people the name of Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend, they wouldn’t have the first clue. Can you blame me for thinking the only reason they care about this case is that Coffee’s blackness could be weaponized against claims regarding Rittenhouse? If it isn’t, why do they support Coffee and not Walker?

This brand of conservatives is so laser-focused on opposing the left that they are willing to sacrifice truth and justice at the altar of “owning libs.” Instead of taking a look at the facts of cases and making their own determination as to what “justice” looks like, they look to the left to see what they are doing so that they can do the exact opposite. Instead of taking a moment to acknowledge that we are failing at “liberty and justice for all,” they are busy googling “black guy self-defense acquittal.” They aren’t choosing what to support. They are choosing to oppose BLM and the left at all costs.

Both of these cases are tragedies. Both of these cases are examples of injustice. Both deserve our support and outrage and not just when it serves our narrative. If anything, the Breonna Taylor case is more of an injustice and something for which we should be more outraged, but I guess there were no white kids recently acquitted of self-defense at the time.

Furthermore, two innocent women are dead as the result of the incompetence of police officers, and no one is being held accountable. That is the biggest injustice. //

Being at war with the left should also be a war against the type of tactics they employ. Not the use of them. Being glad that Coffee was acquitted is commendable. I am glad to see conservatives supporting it. I just wish it was because they understood the case and agreed with it and not because they are using it to dunk on liberals.

Many security-conscious people probably think they’d never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. //

Mitch’s bank managed to reverse the unauthorized wire transfer before it could complete, and they’ve since put all the stolen funds back into his account and issued a new card. But he said he still feels like a chump for not observing the golden rule: If someone calls saying they’re from your bank, just hang up and call them back — ideally using a phone number that came from the bank’s Web site or from the back of your payment card. As it happened, Mitch only followed half of that advice.

There was a time when I was content to let my bank authenticate me over the phone by asking for some personal identifiers (SSN/DOB) that are broadly for sale in the cybercrime underground. At some point, however, I decided this wasn’t acceptable for institutions that held significant chunks of our money, and I began taking our business away from those that wouldn’t let me add a simple verbal passphrase that needed to be uttered before any account details could be discussed over the phone.

Most financial institutions will let customers add verbal passwords or personal identification numbers (PINs) that are separate from any other PIN or online banking password you might use, although few will advertise this.

Even so, many institutions don’t properly train their customer support staff (or have high turnover in that department). This can allow clever and insistent crooks to coax customer service reps into validating the call with just the SSN and/or date of birth, or requiring the correct answers to so-called knowledge-based authentication (KBA) questions. //

A few years ago, I began testing financial institutions that held our personal assets. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that most of them were happy to add a PIN or pass phrase to the account. But many of the customer service personnel at those institutions failed in their responses when I called in and said I didn’t remember the phrase and was there any other way they could verify that I was me?

Ultimately, I ended up moving our investments to an institution that consistently adhered to my requirements. Namely, that failing to provide the pass phrase required an in-person visit to a bank branch to continue the transaction, at which time ID would be requested. Their customer service folks consistently asked the right questions, and weren’t interested in being much helpful otherwise (I’m not going to name the institution for obvious reasons).

Not sure whether your financial institution supports verbal passwords? Ask them. If they agree to set one up for you, take a moment or two over the next few days to call in and see if you can get the customer service folks at that institution to talk about your account without hearing that password. //

Even if your institution offers voice biometrics, adding a verbal password/passphrase is still a good idea.

One of the more common ways cybercriminals cash out access to bank accounts involves draining the victim’s funds via Zelle, a “peer-to-peer” (P2P) payment service used by many financial institutions that allows customers to quickly send cash to friends and family. Naturally, a great deal of phishing schemes that precede these bank account takeovers begin with a spoofed text message from the target’s bank warning about a suspicious Zelle transfer. What follows is a deep dive into how this increasingly clever Zelle fraud scam typically works, and what victims can do about it.

Last week’s story warned that scammers are blasting out text messages about suspicious bank transfers as a pretext for immediately calling and scamming anyone who responds via text.

Anyone who responds “yes,” “no” or at all will very soon after receive a phone call from a scammer pretending to be from the financial institution’s fraud department. The caller’s number will be spoofed so that it appears to be coming from the victim’s bank.

To “verify the identity” of the customer, the fraudster asks for their online banking username, and then tells the customer to read back a passcode sent via text or email. In reality, the fraudster initiates a transaction — such as the “forgot password” feature on the financial institution’s site — which is what generates the authentication passcode delivered to the member.

Ken Otsuka is a senior risk consultant at CUNA Mutual Group, an insurance company that provides financial services to credit unions. Otsuka said a phone fraudster typically will say something like, “Before I get into the details, I need to verify that I’m speaking to the right person. What’s your username?”

“In the background, they’re using the username with the forgot password feature, and that’s going to generate one of these two-factor authentication passcodes,” Otsuka said. “Then the fraudster will say, ‘I’m going to send you the password and you’re going to read it back to me over the phone.'”

The fraudster then uses the code to complete the password reset process, and then changes the victim’s online banking password. The fraudster then uses Zelle to transfer the victim’s funds to others.

An important aspect of this scam is that the fraudsters never even need to know or phish the victim’s password. By sharing their username and reading back the one-time code sent to them via email, the victim is allowing the fraudster to reset their online banking password. //

“Consumers — many who never ever realized they had a Zelle account – then call their banks, expecting they’ll be covered by credit-card-like protections, only to face disappointment and in some cases, financial ruin,” Sullivan wrote in a recent Substack post. “Consumers who suffer unauthorized transactions are entitled to Regulation E protection, and banks are required to refund the stolen money. This isn’t a controversial opinion, and it was recently affirmed by the CFPB here. If you are reading this story and fighting with your bank, start by providing that link to the financial institution.”

“If a criminal initiates a Zelle transfer — even if the criminal manipulates a victim into sharing login credentials — that fraud is covered by Regulation E, and banks should restore the stolen funds,” Sullivan said. “If a consumer initiates the transfer under false pretenses, the case for redress is more weak.” //

Anyone interested in letting the CFPB know about a fraud scam that abused a P2P payment platform like Zelle, Cashapp, or Venmo, for example, should send an email describing the incident to BigTechPaymentsInquiry@cfpb.gov. Be sure to include Docket No. CFPB-2021-0017 in the subject line of the message.

In the meantime, remember the mantra: Hang up, Look Up, and Call Back. If you receive a call from someone warning about fraud, hang up. If you believe the call might be legitimate, look up the number of the organization supposedly calling you, and call them back.

Kyle Rittenhouse: "This case has nothing to do with race."

Watch our exclusive interview, tomorrow at 8pm ET on @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/vXLEVtfycc

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 22, 2021 //

Tucker Carlson
@TuckerCarlson
"It wasn't Kyle Rittenhouse on trial in Wisconsin. It was the right to self-defense on trial."

Tonight at 8pm ET on @FoxNews

11:10 AM · Nov 22, 2021

Today, twin-engine airliners routinely fly routes that were once reserved for the jumbos, and those routes take them from one so-called “feeder” airport to another—“point-to-point” flights—bypassing the congested hubs, shortening travel time for passengers, saving money for the airlines, and—increasingly importantly to regulators and the flying public—reducing carbon emissions. Moreover, those smaller airliners are easier to fill with paying customers than the enormous A380. When the giant flew with only 70 percent of its seats occupied, it cost almost the same to operate as a full flight did.

Foreseeing the shift in the air travel industry, Boeing lost faith in the market for a superjumbo and in 1995 withdrew from discussions it had been having with Airbus about a partnership to produce a mega-airliner. Boeing eventually turned to the much smaller but enormously successful 787. Airbus continued alone.

Frank Vermeire defends the decision. “Every 15 years traffic doubles,” he says. “The problem is the biggest growth is at the major global hubs—London, Los Angeles, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore—which were already getting more and more congested. They were also unable to expand, so the only way to grow was to have larger aircraft delivering more people with each flight. The question was how to use the existing infrastructure more efficiently, and the only way to do that was with larger aircraft.”

Vermeire believes that, no matter how many hub-bypass routes there are, the mega-hubs still need the A380.

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One of Only Two Surviving 1934 Auburn 652X Broughams Now on Display in Indiana

While you're there, don't miss the other 140 or so vintage cars in a restored Art Deco building that used to be Auburn Automobile's showroom. //

Nearly 90 years later, only two remain. Now, one of those extremely rare vehicles will now be on display at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum in Auburn, Indiana after a donation from a couple in Baltimore, Maryland. //

In 1934, Donald Duck was introduced to the world as Mickey Mouse’s comedic sidekick and the Auburn Company was still in business designing gorgeous pre-World War II builds. Long before Toyota made the bZ4X and BMW launched the X5 xDrive 45e, Auburn was all in on using numbers as names and they weren’t any less confusing: in 1934, the company was making the 850X and 850Y with a powerful straight eight under the massive hood and the 652X and 652 Y with an inline six. The X and Y referred to the trim.

Justin Hart
@justin_hart
Did you hear of the guy who was acquitted of murder by pleading self-defense today? No not that guy Kyle… This guy…
8:10 PM · Nov 19, 2021 //

It is interesting that there are no cries of injustice, systemic racism, or a weighted judicial system on the Andrew Coffee IV trial. In fact, it didn’t even hit the national press, mainly because it does not fit their chosen narrative of gun control and dangerous white men with guns.

But the same trial-by-jury system, and the same gun freedoms and gun laws upheld the rights of two young men: one White, the other Black, to defend themselves. The same American court system in different states affirmed those rights for both men. It is absolutely schizophrenic, not to mention disingenuous, to cry that the system worked for one person because of their race, but didn’t work for another in spite of theirs.

And remember the lesson of the Fauxnly Ones, just in case your legal defense is that you weren't sure the scary person you resisted was really an "Only One."

are 5 levels of emergency department services represented by CPT codes 99281 – 99285. The ED codes require all three key components (history, examination and medical decision-making) to be met and documented for the level of service selected.

Today I will write about silent fanless FreeBSD desktop or server computer … or NAS … or you name it, it can have multiple purposes. It also very low power solution, which also means that it will not overheat. Silent means no fans at all, even for the PSU. The format of the system should also be brought to minimum, so Mini-ITX seems best solution here.

Looking for an elite performance PC that you offers the best in silent computing? Our QuietElite™ PCs feature the top-of-line quiet PCs, on the cutting-edge for performance, compared to any PC available.

I am known as a strong ZFS Boot Environment supporter … and not without a reason. I have stated the reasons ‘why’ many times but most (or all) of them are condensed here – https://is.gd/BECTL – in my presentation about it.

The upcoming FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE looks very promising. In many tests it is almost TWICE as fast as the 12.2-RELEASE. Ouch!

Having 12.2-RELEASE installed I wanted to check 13.0-BETA* to check if things that are important for me – like working suspend/resume for example – work as advertised on the newer version. It is the perfect task that can be achieved by using ZFS Boot Environments.

In the example below we will create entire new ZFS Boot Environment with clone of our current 12.2-RELEASE system and upgrade it there (in BE) to the 13.0-BETA3 version … and there will only be required on reboot – not three as in typical freebsd-update(8) upgrade procedure.

I assume that you have FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE installed with ZFS (default ZFS FreeBSD install) and its installed in UEFI or UEFI+BIOS mode.

Here are the steps that will be needed.

We should be able to look back at these things in the forms that they are, remember the lessons they had to impart (if they had one), and move forward with new creations and ideas. This nostalgia trip we’re on as a society is just an attempt at reawakening the dead, but it is dead and we need to let it rest. We’re doing it, and us, a disservice by trying to bring them back and make them work in a time they weren’t meant for.

What I’m really trying to say is that I’m super mad at Netflix for making a live-action Cowboy Beebop.