Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

It’s Time For California to Finally Give Internet Access to Youth In Detention and Foster Care In modern society, getting young people an education isn’t optional. For youths who are under the care of the state—whether in foster care, or in the juvenile justice system—it’s the state that must be responsible for making sure they get a proper education. While incarcerated youths don’t lose their right to an education, current law doesn’t guarantee them Internet access. That’s a serious problem. With so much information in our society moving online, the Internet has become a critical starting point for research of all kinds. Getting kids a proper education also maximizes their chance of making a successful integration back into society. For the second year in a row, the California legislature has moved to correct this problem. Last week, lawmakers passed A.B. 2448, a bill that would mandate that kids who are incarcerated or in foster care in California get Internet access ...

New Surveillance Court Orders Show That Even Judges Have Difficulty Understanding and Limiting Government Spying In the United States, a secret federal surveillance court approves some of the government’s most enormous, opaque spying programs. It is near-impossible for the public to learn details about these programs, but, as it turns out, even the court has trouble, too.  According to new opinions obtained by EFF last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) struggled to get full accounts of the government’s misuse of its spying powers for years. After learning about the misuse, the court also struggled to rein it in. In a trio of opinions, a judge on the FISC raised questions about unauthorized surveillance and potential misuse of a request he had previously granted. In those cases, the secrecy inherent in the proceedings and the government’s obfuscation of its activities made it difficult for the court to grasp the scope of the problems and to prevent them...

Wanting It Badly Is Not Enough: Real Problems For Creators Deserve Real Solutions As the European Parliament prepares for tomorrow’s vote on the new Copyright Directive with its provisions requiring mass-scale filtering of all public communications to check for copyright infringement (Article 13) and its provisions requiring paid permission to link to the news if you include as little as two words from the headline in your link text (Article 11), a dismaying number of “creators groups” are supporting it, telling their members that this will be good for them and their flagging financial fortunes. The real incomes of real creators are really important (disclosure: my primary income source comes from writing science fiction novels for Tor Books, a division of Macmillan). Improving the incomes of the creators who enliven our days, inform, shock, delight and frighten us is a genuine Good Thing. And creators are not faring well: as both the entertainment industry and tech industry hav...

In the previous two posts in this series , we’ve looked at the hidden risks that make managing critical power facilities so challenging. We’ve also seen how trends in digitizing electrical power distribution networks mean you no longer have to ‘work blind’. Connected smart devices sharing data with cloud or facility-based software and mobile apps help shine a bright light on risks while revealing opportunities to improve safety, reliability, efficiency, and compliance. Let’s have a closer look at how digitization helps deliver these benefits and, in turn, delivers a potential massive ROI against the cost of upgrading your infrastructure. Optimizing safety A digitized electrical system can include wireless thermal sensors in strategic locations to continuously sense for abnormal temperature rises. Personnel are alerted to any thermal problem before it results in an electrical fire destroying equipment or injuring people. In hospital operating rooms that depend on isolated power to ...

Very few pieces of technology from the 1970s are still in use today — and for good reason — think floppy discs and VCRs. Until recently, however, medium voltage switchgear designs had changed only minimally over the past 50 years. Now, advancements in urbanization and the growth of industry have made legacy switchgear models as useful as the pet rock. It’s going to take a different type of switchgear to handle today’s modern facilities.   We see common challenges with switchgear management — associated with old equipment — across our customers. Constrained capacity: Land cost isvery high in the densely populated regions where new substation or capacity addition is difficult. This is driving the demand for switchgear equipment with a smaller footprint in order to maximize available space. Cost management: Facility operations are under pressure to improve uptime while reducing both CAPEX project costs and recurring OPEX maintenance costs. Yet, they often lack the time, resourc...

How the EU’s Copyright Filters Will Make it Trivial For Anyone to Censor the Internet On Wednesday, the EU will vote on whether to accept two controversial proposals in the new Copyright Directive; one of these clauses, Article 13, has the potential to allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to effect mass, rolling waves of censorship across the Internet. The way things stand today, companies that let their users communicate in public (by posting videos, text, images, etc) are required to respond to claims of copyright infringement by removing their users’ posts, unless the user steps up to contest the notice. Sites can choose not to remove work if they think the copyright claims are bogus, but if they do, they can be sued for copyright infringement (in the United States at least), alongside their users, with huge penalties at stake. Given that risk, the companies usually do not take a stand to defend user speech, and many users are too afraid to stand up for their own speech becaus...