Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

DMCA Mystery: Did Epic Games Send a Takedown to Itself? Welcome to a brand new kind of whodunnit. This one has everything: an extremely popular game, a short-lived takedown, and so very many memes. The ways of the DMCA and YouTube are unknown and unknowable. Trailers are a time-tested and proven way of getting attention for a new piece of media—movies, television, video games, whatever. If it’s a highly-anticipated or very popular title, you can get a whole bunch of free press with a trailer as everyone shares and analyzes it. And so it is unusual, in that situation, for a trailer to be officially released without every bit of it being vetted and approved. (Unusual, but not unheard of .) And even if a company uploaded the wrong trailer to YouTube or Twitter or wherever, they could always delete it from their own account. And then, sure, use the DMCA to keep people from uploading copies. That’s what makes what happened with Fortnite so weird. Fortnite is a staggeringly popula...

Elevated levels of asset performance are being attained for non-industrial assets. Look at the progress made with autonomous automobiles. Twenty years ago, how many would have guessed there would be self-driving cars on non-intelligent roadways today? Yet there are! There are many other examples of asset performance improvements. Why is the performance of industrial assets so far behind? Real-time controls have been effectively applied to improve the efficiency of industrial operations for over a century. The result has been industrial assets pushed to their operating limits through better control. As efficiency increased and equipment was driven harder, reliability declined. Industry reacted by focusing on maintenance management to improve the asset reliability as can be seen by the broad emergence of sophisticated asset reliability measurements, such as vibration, ultrasound, casing temperature, and sound devices for predictive failure analysis. Over the past 2 decades the sophisti...

Aracruz Celulose Pulp Mill in Espírito Santo, Brazil uses eucalyptus trees for making pulp, which is shipped around the world to paper producers who make tissue, fine printing, writing, and specialty paper products. The advantage of eucalyptus trees is that they grow so quickly, reaching about 35 meters in just seven years. This means that they can be harvested more frequently than slow-growing pine forests. In addition, eucalyptus fiber, originally considered to be secondary quality, is now is sought after because it provides high opacity, softness and good absorption of inks. A remarkable performance history with Foxboro® For all of these reasons, the Aracruz pulp mill grew to be the largest single pulp production facility in the world, capable of producing more than two million tons of market pulp per year. Beginning in 1976 with the building of Fiberline A, capable of producing 400,000 tons a year of bleached pulp, this first line was controlled by Foxboro PCI-100 pneumatic inst...

Blunt Policies and Secretive Enforcement Mechanisms: LGBTQ+ and Sexual Health on the Corporate Web The free and open Internet has enabled disparate communities to come together across miles and borders, and empowered marginalized communities to share stories, art, and information with one another and the broader public—but restrictive and often secretive or poorly messaged policies by corporate gatekeepers threaten to change that. Content policies restricting certain types of expression—such as nudity, sexually explicit content, and pornography—have been in place for a long time on most social networks. But in recent years, a number of companies have instituted changes in the way policies are enforced, including demonetizing or hiding content behind an age-based interstitial; using machine learning technology to flag content; blocking keywords in search; or disabling thumbnail previews for video content. While there are some benefits to more subtle enforcement mechanisms—age rest...

What if You Had to Worry About a Lawsuit Every Time You Linked to an Image Online? A photographer and a photo agency are teaming up to restart a legal war against online linking in the United States. When Internet users browse websites containing images, those images often are retrieved from third-parties, rather than the author of the website. Sometimes, unbeknownst to the website author, the linked image infringes someone else’s copyright. For more than a decade, courts have held that the linker isn’t responsible for that infringement unless they do something else to encourage it, beyond linking. Liability rests with the entity that hosts it in the first place—not someone who simply links to it, probably has no idea that it’s infringing, and isn’t ultimately in control of what content the server will provide when a browser contacts it. Justin Goldman, backed by Getty Images, wants to change that. They’ve accused online publications, including Breitbart, Time, and the Boston G...

EFF and ACLU Ask Appeals Court to Find Section 702 Surveillance Unconstitutional As Congress considers reforming Section 702 , the NSA’s warrantless surveillance authority, EFF and ACLU are asking a federal court of appeals in New York to find this surveillance unconstitutional. Section 702 allows the government to collect billions of electronic communications—including those of Americans—and to use these communications in criminal investigations, all without a warrant. Our amicus brief  in United States v. Hasbajrami argues that this practice represents an end run around the Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of e-mail and other electronic communications. Agron Hasbajrami is a U.S. resident who was arrested at JFK airport in 2011 on his way to Pakistan and charged with providing material support to terrorists. Although the government used Section 702 to build its case against Hasbajrami, it withheld this fact from his lawyers. Only after the Snowden revelation...

Public Money, Public Code: Show Your Support For Free Software in Europe The global movement for open access to publicly-funded research stems from the sensible proposition that if the government has used taxpayers’ money to fund research, the publication of the results of that research should be freely-licensed. Exactly the same rationale underpins the argument that software code that the government has funded to be written should be made available as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Public Money, Public Code is a campaign of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) that seeks to transform that ideal into European law. An open letter at the center of the campaign reads in part: Public bodies are financed through taxes. They must make sure they spend funds in the most efficient way possible. If it is public money, it should be public code as well! That is why we, the undersigned, call our representatives to: “Implement legislation requiring that publicly financed sof...

Oil and gas exploration is expensive, with the location of the drill site driving a considerable portion of the cost. For example, the cost of a typical shallow shelf oil well runs between 10 – 30 million USD, but a deep water well can cost more than $ 100 million USD before producing a single drop of crude. Given such costs and the fact that the price of crude has been bumping along at less than $50 a barrel, many shale oil drillers are being challenged to reduce exploration budgets . Fortunately, thanks to a number of recent technological breakthroughs, there are new ways to reduce the cost of exploration. Any savings in this area falls directly to the bottom line regardless of what happens to the price of oil. Two emerging cost cutting technologies that should be examined more closely in the context of oil & gas exploration include edge computing and drones. Both are core technologies that are contributing to the accelerating Internet of Things (IoT) trend, which promise...

Welcome to my 4th blog in this “Why Become an EcoXpert” series ! Question : What’s more important to your business–technology or people? Answer : Yes. It’s a trick question of course. In the business of energy efficiency and building management, you need strong technology innovation to provide the best solutions. And you need highly-skilled people to design, install, and support those solutions. Training is key. But when you think about it, technology is a lot easier to find than people. The latest smart building management or power management technology is available from many technology providers, or soon will be. The real issue is the people on your team who must first learn, then master, then deploy that technology efficiently, reliably, and knowledgeably…and stay up-to-date as technology advances. So, the question is: How do you keep your team on the cutting edge of evolving technologies and digital innovations, year after year? This answer is: Schneider Electric’s EcoXpert Pa...

Earlier this year, the National Electrical Contractors Association forecasted that the U.S. should “expect to see gains and progress of varying degrees across all construction sectors …”. From a global, long-term perspective, the future seems bright for some regions. PwC is predicting “the volume of construction output will grow by more than 70% to $15 trillion worldwide by 2025. The meteoric growth , which outpaces that of global GDP, will be concentrated in three countries: China, the US and India.” As electrical contracting firms look forward to these potential opportunities, there will continue to be a focus on risk management and project cost optimization, continually striving for higher productivity and better results. During the commissioning phase of an installation, there are still many challenges in achieving these goals. For example, different communication interfaces for different devices, and separate supporting software for different devices, makes testing and configur...