At the end of April, Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency tools shook the advertising industry to its core. iPhone and iPad owners could now stop apps from tracking their behavior and using their data for personalized advertising. Since the new privacy controls launched, almost $10 billion has been wiped from the revenues of Snap, Meta Platform’s Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Now, a similar tool is coming to Google’s Android operating system—although not from Google itself. Privacy-focused tech company DuckDuckGo, which started life as a private search engine, is adding the ability to block hidden trackers to its Android app. The feature, dubbed “App Tracking Protection for Android,” is rolling out in beta from today and aims to mimic Apple’s iOS controls. “The idea is we block this data collection from happening from the apps the trackers don’t own,” says Peter Dolanjski, a director of product at DuckDuckGo. “You should see far fewer creepy ads following you around online.”

The vast majority of apps have third-party trackers tucked away in their code. These trackers monitor your behavior across different apps and help create profiles about you that can include what you buy, demographic data, and other information that can be used to serve you personalized ads. DuckDuckGo says its analysis of popular free Android apps shows more than 96 percent of them contain trackers. Blocking these trackers means Facebook and Google, whose trackers are some of the most prominent, can’t send data back to the mothership—neither will the dozens of advertising networks you’ve never heard of.

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.

michaeltherobot Seniorius Lurkius et Subscriptor

NOV 22, 2021 2:05 PM

Printzer wrote:
My back-of-the-envelope math shows Minotaur IV having a TWR of ~2.6 at liftoff. And to be fair, those things scoot when they head out.

Which means it rises as fast as if it were falling in 1.6x Earth gravity! TWR was always an abstract number to me until I learned to subtract 1 to imagine the gravity under which it is falling upside down

Statistical Ars Legatus Legionis et Subscriptor
NOV 22, 2021 12:33 PM

DStaal wrote:

jbode wrote:
Damn, that thing was in a hurry to get off the pad.

One thing I've learned from KSP that was mildly surprising, and I believe translates to real life: Higher TWR rockets are more efficient to launch. The less time you have to burn at full thrust the less fuel you need to carry, which means less fuel used, etc.

To a degree. Higher TWR also means mass used for additional engines which could just be used for more for more propellant. When you consider economics not just raw performance that is even more important. One ton of engines cost far more than one ton of propellant. Higher TWR also means higher drag losses. Higher TWR means you will hit max Q sooner in thicker atmosphere which may require more aggressive throttling (and thus losing some of the benefit of the mass you paid for).

All that means most orbital rockets tend to fall into a TWR range of 1.2 to 1.6 although there are notable exceptions at either end. Saturn V is sluggish off the pad at a initial TWR of 1.14. Electron has a TWR of 1.8. ///

[TWR: Thrust-Weight Ratio]

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

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.

Glorified Desktop Support Wise, Aged Ars Veteran

NOV 22, 2021 12:56 PM

Cathbadhian wrote:

flerchin wrote:
Congrats Astra. Y'all beat Bezos to the club.

BO's perpetual planning has really left them in a terrible place right now. Reputationally, the accumulation of lost contracts, scheduling delays, competitor successes, and rocket delivery complaints (unofficial, of course), don't add up to a company you want to throw cash at.

Well done, Astra.

Now, there could be a question of if BO (and ULA) can reach orbit before one of the small launch companies scale up like SpaceX did. It almost seems like there should be an equation where time to reach orbit is some function of funding, development time, and number of blown up rockets. Surprisingly, too much funding and not enough blown up rockets seems to greatly increase development time, perhaps exponentially.

"I think that this flight really does prove out the approach we've taken." //

Astra never sought to build the best rocket, the biggest rocket, or the safest rocket. The California-based space company simply wanted to build a rocket that was just good enough, and to do it fast.

Early on Saturday morning, Astra proved the value of this philosophy by successfully launching a stripped-down rocket for the first time. The mission hefted a small test payload for the US Space Force into an orbit 500 km above the planet.

The launch came five years and one month after Astra was founded by Chris Kemp and Adam London in October 2016. With this weekend's success, Astra became the fastest company to reach orbit with a privately developed liquid-fueled rocket. With its Falcon 1 rocket, SpaceX required six years and four months. Firefly, Virgin Orbit, and Rocket Lab all needed seven or more years to successfully reach orbit.

To go fast, Astra decided to spend less time designing its rocket and more time testing it in real-world conditions. A first suborbital launch attempt was completed within two years of the company's founding, and Astra has been iterating on the vehicle's design since then. By using iterative design, Astra has had to stomach several failures along the way.

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.

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.