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Britain is considering introducing criminal sanctions against energy firms that manipulate the market at the expense of consumers, energy minister Ed Davey said on Thursday.
The announcement follows decisions by four of the six largest suppliers unveiling steep price rises.
Energy policy has shot up the political agenda after the opposition Labour party promised in September to freeze energy prices if it won power in elections in 2015, stirring a debate about squeezed living standards.
Pledging to take a tough line against Britain's big six energy companies, who together control 99 percent of the retail market, Davey said the government was considering ways to punish any firm that abused its dominant market position.
"I intend to consult on the introduction of criminal sanctions for anyone found manipulating energy markets and harming the consumer interest," Davey told parliament.
Such market abuse is currently a civil offence. But if the government made it a criminal one energy executives could be jailed if their company was found guilty of market manipulation.
That would bring it into line with rules governing financial markets, where manipulation is already considered a criminal offence.
Lawmakers have accused the "big six" energy firms of colluding to produce above-inflation price rises which they unveiled just as Britain entered its coldest months.
Bosses from RWE nPower, EDF Energy, Centrica, SSE, E.ON. and Scottish Power, a unit of Spain's Iberdrola, dismissed those claims earlier this week.
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It must get boring and lonely spending your days in a lab, mixing up slightly different plastics, epoxies and composites. Perhaps that's why BASF is making a push to get out in front of the world and show what these materials can really do. Prior to the Concept 1865 plastic bike, the German company updated a 1958 BMW Isetta "bubble car" with some of its materials and coatings. The car, which makes the Smart ForTwo look rather roomy, also gets a unique home entertainment system.
BASF selected the BMW Isetta because the front-hatched microcar from the 50s and 60s is still a head-turner today. It makes the perfect canvas for making auto materials and coatings seem way more interesting than they really are. Nicknamed the MySetta, the 1958 Isetta 250's chassis, body and interior have been refurbished.
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Having revised the auction rules for its long-running sale of 800MHz frequencies in September 2013 with a view to speeding up the process, Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) has now announced the winners.
With the auction having concluded yesterday, following nine months of bidding, the MoTC has confirmed that in total the sale will generate EUR108.1 million (USD146 million) for state coffers, with DNA Finland, Elisa and TeliaSonera Finland named as the three companies to walk away with spectrum. With all three operators laying claim to 2×10MHz in the 800MHz band, TeliaSonera will pay the most for its new frequencies, having agreed to shell out EUR22.20 million for ‘Frequency Pair 3’ and EUR18.90 million for ‘Frequency Pair 4’. DNA meanwhile will pay a total of EUR33.57 million for Frequency Pairs ‘1’ and ‘2’ (EUR16.9 million and EUR16.7 million, respectively), and rounding out the winners, Elisa bid EUR16.7 million apiece for ‘Frequency Pair 5’ and ‘Frequency Pair 6’.
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Edward Snowden's leaks show that the NSA and GCHQ have been systematically subverting key technologies that underlie the Internet. That betrayal of trust has prompted some soul-searching by the Net engineering community, which realizes that it needs to come up with more surveillance-resistant approaches. This story from Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) provides information about the kind of thing they are working on in one key group, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It reports on a speech given by the IETF's chair, Jari Arkko, at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Bali, Indonesia.
Firstly, the IETF wants to eventually apply encryption to all web traffic.
"Today, security only gets switched on for certain services like banking," Arkko explained, referring to IETF-developed standards like SSL -- the little lock that appears in the upper left corner of your browser to secure online purchases. "If we work hard, we can make [the entire internet] secure by default." To this end, the IETF might make encryption mandatory for HTTP 2.0, a new version of the basic web protocol.
Secondly, the IETF plans to remove weak algorithms and strengthen existing algorithms behind encryption. This means that the US National Security Agency and other surveillors will find it harder to crack current forms of encryption.
Putting that in context, Axl Pavlik, the managing director of Europe's Internet Registry (RIPE NCC), notes that you can never stop surveillance completely, but you can make it more expensive:
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Former chairman, CEO and founder of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy was recently hosted by the HK General Chamber of Commerce and the HK Jockey Club.
He shared his views with local venture capitalist Andy Lau, on how to fuel technology innovation and the government's next edition of the Digital 21 Strategy -- the technology blueprint for Hong Kong currently undergoing public consultation.
Scott, would you mind to sharing with us about what's been keeping you busy since you sold Sun Microsystems to Larry Ellison and Oracle?
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Over the past few weeks, the new flavor of outrage has been the issue of whether or not the NSA (or the U.S. government in general) is spying on America's allies.
Reports have cropped up about American electronic eavesdropping on current German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Mexican President Filipe Calderon.
Additionally, HuffPo reports that "French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault pronounced himself 'shocked'" when he learned that the U.S. allegedly infiltrated French computers in embassies.
The French outrage goes beyond shock. According to HuffPo, Ayrault stated, "It is unbelievable that an ally country such as the United States is capable to go as far as to spy on private conversations that have no strategic rationale and no impact on the national defense."
Yeah, well.
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AT&T's attempts to move into Europe by acquiring local telecoms could be stymied by the recent leaks of NSA surveillance data, European officials tell The Wall Street Journal. Along with Sprint and Verizon, AT&T is implicated in the Obama administration's widespread data collection: the FISA Amendments Act allows the NSA to request all phone metadata records from the companies. A potential expansion, officials fear, could turn local carriers into data siphons for American intelligence agencies. That means they're likely to heavily scrutinize or outright block any potential deals. "We'd need to have a concrete discussion to make sure that European data wouldn't be leaving Europe," one official tells the Journal.
The stream of leaked documents have revealed tight collaboration between the NSA and other intelligence agencies, as well as routine wiretapping of government leader's phones. Since it was revealed that the US had collected phone data from German chancellor Angela Merkel starting in 2002, tensions between the two countries have been particularly high, with both German parliament members and the generally pro-surveillance Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) calling for an investigation.
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17,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from an eight-inch pipeline owned by Koch Pipeline Company on Tuesday, the Railroad Commission of Texas reportedWednesday.
The spill impacted a rural area and two livestock ponds near Smithville and was discovered on a routine aerial inspection, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
Details are scarce regarding the cause of the spill and cleanup measures underway but, as UPI reported, “Koch Pipeline Co. said it notified the appropriate federal and state regulators but had no estimated time for repairs. Neither Koch nor the Texas Railroad Commission had a public statement about the incident.”
According to its website, Koch Pipeline Company, L.P. is an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, Inc., the company controlled by billionaire petrochemical giants Charles and David Koch. Koch Industries has also come under fire recently for dumping petroleum coke, a byproduct of tar sands refining, along riverfronts in both Detroit and Chicago.
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After a five-year battle by Access Info Europe, Europe's highest court has made an important ruling that will help boost transparency in the European Union:
the European Court of Justice today rejected arguments by the Council of the European Union that it should be able to keep secret the identities of Member States making proposals in the context of negotiations on future EU legislation.
The Council of the European Union had fought to defend its policy of releasing legislative drafting documents with the names of Member States tabling amendments blacked out.
"Access Info Europe won access to the document it requested before the General Court in March 2011 but the Council appealed, joined by the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Spain and the UK."
The Council of the European Union is one of three bodies that jointly run the European Union, along with the European Parliament and European Commission. Some countries wanted their names blacked out from official Council of the European Union documents because it would have revealed which of them had blocked or tried to water down proposals they were hostile to. Now that it will be possible to name and shame Member States that act in this way, they will probably be less willing to be seen objecting to important and popular measures.
As Access Info Europe explains:
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Internet giant Google has sought to dispel what is says is a "myth" that consumers don't want, won't pay for or don't need high-speed, gigabit broadband.
Speaking at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam on Tuesday, Kevin Lo, general manager of Google Fibre, said he'd heard the argument bandied around about broadband circles "quite a bit" but that it wasn't true. He based his assertion on Google's recent foray into building privately backed gigabit fibre-to-the-premises networks in Kansas City; Austin,Texas; and Provo, Utah, in the US.
"I can say with full confidence [it] simply isn't true," he said. "There is huge consumer demand... for faster internet and we believe that faster internet speeds will lead to what we call the next chapter of the internet."
"We're confident that the next 100x improvement in speeds will lead to more innovation... and our goal at Google is really to give our users and entrepreneurs alike ubiquitous access to high-speed broadband.
"And we know that they will rise to that occasion and build those next set of gigabit applications that we can't even imagine at this point."
His comments came as NBN Co, the company charged with rolling out Australia's national broadband network, begins trialling technology to connect apartments and other multi-dwelling units, such as shopping centres, to its network "node" using a building's existing copper wiring. At present, the fibre-to-the-basement technology can't deliver gigabit speeds, though this is likely to change with the advent of VDSL coupled with vectoring technology.
The new Australian government has based its broadband policy on the assertion that lower broadband speeds would fulfil most users' needs and could be delivered faster and cheaper. It has opted for fibre-to-the-node plus existing copper to the premises for the majority of the population, instead of Labor's original fibre-to-the-premises network.
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We’re big fans of shipping container-based architecture here at Gizmag, and the latest such project to grab our attention comes via JYA-RCHITECTS and its Low Cost House. The budget-friendly dwelling features three shipping containers placed within a surrounding structure in order to provide a safe and attractive home for a family of seven.
Based in a small rural village in South Korea, the Low Cost House is the second in a series of inexpensive homes from JYA-RCHITECTS to be sponsored by the Korea Child Fund in a bid to improve the living conditions of low-income families.
Though the plot originally held a previous property, it was in such a state of disrepair – and so blighted by rats – that any notion of undertaking a renovation was sensibly jettisoned in favor of a fresh start.
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In 2007, mathematicians from the University of Exeter showed that the freeway traffic jams that appear to occur for no reason are actually the result of a "backward traveling wave" initiated when a driver slows below a critical speed. This sets off a chain reaction that ultimately results in traffic further down the line coming to a complete standstill. An MIT professor has now developed an algorithm that could be applied to a modified Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system to help eliminate such traffic jams.
Last year, Honda announced plans to conduct public-road testing of technology that detects whether a person's driving style is likely to create traffic jams and encourages them to adopt a driving style that would avoid this. At the time, Honda said it would be possible to further improve this system by connecting it to cloud servers that would allow a vehicle's ACC system to automatically sync with the driving patterns of vehicles further up the road.
Berthold Horn, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has come up with a somewhat similar approach that would also rely on a vehicle's ACC system, but without the need for the system to connect to the cloud. However, it would require current ACC systems, which only monitor the speed and distance of vehicles in front, to be modified to also take into account the speed and distance of the vehicle traveling directly behind.
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As a European, I’ve always been struck by the harsh reality that our region of the world has so much going for it in terms of ideas and intellectual property and sheer inventiveness, but has tragically lacked the necessary support from investors and from the market to become a tech powerhouse.
For decades the way for a European tech company to thrive was to fly under a flag of convenience in the US. I recall the days (far too long ago now for comfort) of one UK-based company that managed to make inroads into the US corporate market, but only by pitching itself as a Dallas-based firm to the IT decision makers and the media.
We can argue that SAP breaks the rules here, although the company’s joint-citizenship as US and German firm perhaps challenges that argument, and of course there are exceptions out there.
For example, UK firm Huddle is doing rather nicely in the US federal government market right now for instance, but it remains a rare example of such a phenomenon. More typically tech market dominance travels east from the US to Europe rather than the other way around.
And so we get those who bemoan US dominance of the technology markets in Europe and urge the miraculous creation of a domestic industry to counter what they see as a stranglehold on the region.
Problem One: there’s a perilously fine line between championing the European economy as a potential global powerhouse and coming across as jealous of the success of the US technology marketplace.
Problem Two: Problem one has some very powerful advocates.
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Using solar power to promote healthcare and education is the concept behind Samsung’s Digital Villages, a project recently launched in South Africa as the kick-off a larger plan that includes units in Ethiopia and Gabon by the end of 2013. The Digital Village is also designed to help local traders develop their business with a sustainable and low-cost alternative to fossil fuels.
One of Digital Villages' components is called Tele-Medical Center to provide healthcare to inhabitants of remote villages who lack access to this type of service. The center covers basic operations such as diagnosis and prescription. As it is connected to a database and a server, patient data can be shared and managed online.
Another section, Health Center, provides more technical health care with eye, ear and dental treatment, blood analysis and diagnosis. Education is also part of the project with the Internet School. Teachers have touchscreens at their disposal, which are powered by the solar panels installed on the roof. Students have access to solar-powered netbooks for their multimedia classes.
Samsung is not working alone on this initiative, having forged several partnerships to carry out the project. It has drafted in support from government, civil organizations, local health authorities, universities, relief NGO World Vision (healthcare) and UNESCO (education).
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A corridor of Tesla Supercharger DC fast-charging stations along Interstate 5 and U.S. Highway 101 is complete, allowing owners of the company’s luxury all-electric sedan to drive from San Diego, Calif. to Vancouver, Canada for free.
More than 99 percent of Californians and 87 percent of Oregon and Washington owners now live within 200 miles of a supercharger.
Tesla’s 120 kilowatt superchargers, which only work with the Tesla Model S, provide half a charge in about 20 minutes. The chargers work by delivering direct current power to the battery using special cables that bypass onboard charging equipment. And using them is free for all Tesla Model S owners.
To commemorate the completed West Coast Supercharger Corridor, two Model S sedans left San Diego for a 1,750-mile #DriveFree road trip to Vancouver.
There are 31 stations in North America with plans to expand to most metropolitan areas this fall. By winter 2013, enough Tesla superchargers will be installed to enable coast-to-coast U.S. travel. Tesla plans to to have superchargers within reach of 80 percent of the U.S. population and parts of Canada by 2014 (see graphic below).
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According to new data from TeleGeography’s Global Bandwidth Forecast Service, Africa is expected to lead the world in international bandwidth demand growth in the coming years. Africa’s international bandwidth demand is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 51% between 2012 and 2019. At this rate, African demand would outpace that of both Latin America and the Middle East, which are each projected to rise 37% annually.
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, especially, will contribute to the continent’s appetite for international bandwidth. Among those with the fastest growing demand are Angola, which is projected to grow 71% annually over the next seven years, Tanzania, which is projected to grow 68%, and Gabon, which is expected to rise 67%.
While Africa’s demand for international bandwidth is growing rapidly, it remains very small by comparison with other world regions. African demand is projected to reach 17.2Tbps in 2019, which equates to only one-fourth the projected demand of Latin America, and less than that of Canada alone.
Nevertheless, international capacity connected to Africa will increase tremendously via upgrades to existing submarine cable systems and new cable builds, and bandwidth prices on these routes will fall accordingly.
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The widespread surveillance of Spanish citizens by the US National Security Agency, which caused outrage when it was reported this week, was the product of a collaboration with Spain's intelligence services, according to one Spanish newspaper.
In the latest revelations to emerge from the documents leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Spanish agents not only knew about the work of the NSA but also facilitated it, El Mundo reports.
An NSA document entitled "Sharing computer network operations cryptologic information with foreign partners" reportedly shows how the US relies on the collaboration of many countries to give it access to intelligence information, including electronic metadata.
According to the document seen by El Mundo, the US classifies cooperation with various countries on four different levels. In the first group – "Comprehensive Cooperation" – are the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The second group – "Focused Cooperation" – of which Spain is a member, includes 19 countries, all of them European, apart from Japan and South Korea. The third group – "Limited cooperation" – consists of countries such as France, Israel, India and Pakistan; while the fourth – "Exceptional Cooperation" – is made up of countries that the US considers to be hostile to its interests.
The reports come a day after the director of the NSA, General Keith B Alexander, testified before the US house intelligence committee that suggestions the agency monitored millions of calls in Spain, France and Italy were "completely false" and that this data had been at least partially collected by the intelligence services of those countries and then passed on to the NSA.
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In early September 2013, the UK’s top cable company, Virgin Media, announced that it had signed a distribution agreement with Netflix, the globe’s leading subscription VoD (video on demand) service.
The deal aimed at TiVo owners marks a turning point, both for Virgin Media which is opening the doors to a pay-TV competitor, and for Netflix which is entering into a guaranteed bitrate rather than over-the-top distribution . Up until then, only Google Fiber in the US had penned a similar deal. Sweden’s Com Hem too recently announced a similar partnership with Netflix to coincide with the its own TiVo rollout.
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Last week we wrote about the rising threat of corporate sovereignty, known more obscurely as "investor-state dispute settlement", that allows companies to sue countries for alleged loss of future profits. Just how grave that threat is for developing nations can be gauged by the following, reported by Tico Times:
Canadian gold-mining company Infinito Gold Ltd. announced its intentions to go forward with a $1 billion lawsuit against Costa Rica over the retracted Las Crucitas open-pit gold mining concession in northern Costa Rica, in a statement released on Friday.
The contract was withdrawn for largely environmental reasons:
"Costa Rica and the Canadian mining company have been ensnarled in a protracted legal battle over the canceled Las Crucitas project in Cutris de San Carlos, Alajuela, since environmentalists and locals decried the loss of virgin forest and health concerns over leeching chemicals contaminating drinking water."
Initially, the company fought the decision using local courts, but when it lost there, it made use of corporate sovereignty to take its complaint to a supra-national tribunal, the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID):
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Al Gore has been everywhere lately. Just last week he presided over his "24 Hours of Reality" project which was seen by millions globally! And without even taking a nap the very next day he gave a talk at Making Progress, where he was fired up, more so than many had ever seen him.
He touched on many subjects:
"He spoke about how income inequality threatened the American Dream, subprime mortgage systems helped start the Great Recession, and how the world is still dealing with the credit crisis as a fallout."
But unsurprisingly, he reserved his passion for his signature issue; the environment:
“Now we have, on the books of the large, public multinational energy companies, $7 trillion of subprime carbon assets,” he said. “Their valuation is based on an assumption that is even more ridiculous and absurd than the assumption that these people that couldn’t make a downpayment or monthly payments were good risks for home mortgages. The assumption is that those $7 trillion can be sold and burned.”
“They will not be sold and burned. They cannot be sold and burned.”
Gore went on to describe how humans are putting 90 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day, “as if it is an open sewer.” That pollution traps the same amount of heat as the energy from “400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs going off every 24 hours.”
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Bitcoin shares with drones the unhappy distinction of being the subject of almost exclusively negative reports. Just as drones are usually doing bad things to people, so Bitcoins are usually helping people do bad things because of their supposed untraceability. So it makes a pleasant change to come across an upbeat Bitcoin story like this, as told by the Guardian:
Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.
In those four years, his Bitcoin holding had become worth around $886,000 -- a rather nice gain on the original outlay. But the real moral here is not, as it might appear, that you should rush out and buy Bitcoins in the hope that they will be worth fabulous sums in a few years' time -- the continuing fluctuations in Bitcoin's value and doubts about its underpinnings make that a very risky proposition. Rather, the key thing to note is the following:
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Li-Fi, an alternative to Wi-Fi that transmits data using the spectrum of visible light, has achieved a new breakthrough, with UK scientists reporting transmission speeds of 10Gbit/s – more than 250 times faster than ‘superfast’ broadband.
The fastest speed previously reported was 3Gbit/s, achieved earlier this year by the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Germany. Chinese researchers also claimed this month to have produced a 150Mbp/s connection, but some experts were doubtful without seeing further proof.
The term Li-Fi was coined by Edinburgh University's Prof Harald Haas during a TED talk in 2011 (see below for video) though the technology is also known as visible light communications (VLC).
Many experts claim that Li-Fi represents the future of mobile internet thanks to its reduced costs and greater efficiency compared to traditional Wi-Fi.
Both Wi-Fi and Li-Fi transmit data over the electromagnetic spectrum, but whereas Wi-Fi utilises radio waves, Li-Fi uses visible light. This is a distinct advantage in that the visible light is far more plentiful than the radio spectrum (10,000 times more in fact) and can achieve far greater data density.
Li-Fi signals work by switching bulbs on and off incredibly quickly – too quickly to be noticed by the human eye. This most recent breakthrough builds upon this by using tiny micro-LED bulbs to stream several lines of data in parallel.
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Researchers at one of the world’s oldest universities, Cambridge, have come up with a prototype for a possible future internet infrastructure that does away with the need for servers. This could help solve the network capacity problems that arise out of the profusion of bulky online content such as video.
The way the internet currently works, content is mostly delivered to client devices such as PCs and smartphones from powerful computers called servers, which are generally housed in data centers. This represents a centralization of computing power and storage that some argue is becoming outdated, what with the beefy processors and (sometimes) capacious storage devices we carry around in our pockets these days.
The Cambridge University prototype would represent a dramatic revamp of that way of doing things. Part of a wider EU-funded project called Pursuit, the putative protocol operates more like the popular filesharing mechanism BitTorrent, in that users share information directly with one another, rather than through a server. Simplistically put, Person B might receive content from Person A’s device, then become a source for that data so Person C could then download it, and so on.
Fragments of the same data might be replicated all over the place, in order to make re-assembly as quick and efficient as possible. So, for example, if you want to watch a TV show online, you would get its fragments from people nearby who have already downloaded and watched it, rather than from the provider’s server or content delivery network.
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After the credit crisis and Great Recession, it seemed ridiculous to have thought that investing in subprime mortgages was a good idea. As with most market "bubbles," the risk of giving 7.5 million mortgages to people who couldn't possibly pay them off was somehow invisible to many investors at the time.
One reason such bubbles form is the tendency by many investors to confuse "risk" with "uncertainty." As the economist Frank Knight established, there is a subtle but crucial distinction between the two: Uncertainty is what good investors usually fear the most, because it cannot be measured or priced as risk can be. But when investors mislabel risk as uncertainty, they become vulnerable to the assumption that since it cannot be measured, they might as well ignore it.
That is exactly what is happening with the subprime carbon asset bubble: It is still growing because most market participants are mistakenly treating carbon risk as an uncertainty, and are thus failing to incorporate it in investment analyses. By overlooking a known material-risk factor, investors are exposing their portfolios to an externality that should be integrated into the capital allocation process.
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Hardly anybody fully grasps how the internet works. Even Google's executive chair wrote in his book The New Digital Age, "The internet is among the few things humans have built that they don’t truly understand."
But here's an attempt: It consists of tens of thousands of interconnected networks run by service providers, individual companies, universities, and governments. There are three major parts to its construction: the networks that physically connect to each other (with about 12 that are particularly significant); the data-storing centers; and the architecture that lies in between. That is where it gets really interesting.
There are more than 550,000 fiber optic cables laid along the ocean floor that transmit trillions upon trillions of interactions per day. According to the Washington Post, these cables "wrap around the globe to deliver emails, web pages, other electronic communications and phone calls from one continent to another."
These utterly phenomenal underwater and long-haul fiber optic cables send information from virtually any point in the world to another at the speed of light — 186,000 miles per second. The circumference of the Earth is only 24,000 miles at the equator, which means these messages could technically circle the globe about eight times in one second. All from the bottom of the ocean.
Connections around the world are now run primarily on these undersea cables that link every continent and most island nations, with the exception of Antarctica. Here are some images of them.
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