Posts by Catkin 681 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2023
I think that differs from a navigation error. It's not so much 'handing back control' as it is highlighting that the navigation is out of whack. There would be plenty of time to follow a procedure to fix location (e.g. entering the control area of a ground-based radar) as opposed to suddenly having to deal with readings that make staying in the air challenging.
Think back to Korean Air Lines 007, which prompted Reagan to make GPS available to public aviation. Putting aside the shoot-first attitude of the Soviets, there would have been plenty of opportunity to avoid Soviet airspace if they'd been alerted to their loss of heading.
There are certainly some politicians with this fault but some are still fortunately intelligent and self aware enough to only ban things that are actively harmful and enticing to the point that personal decision making is largely ineffective at preventing large amounts of harm. This is more like charging an extreme authoritarian (irregardless of political wing) with identifying and banning anything they regard as lacking value to society.
"Pretty sure the only people allowed to operate the reactors on navy subs are.. The navy."
Pick a US submarine, any submarine and look at the reactor designation. The suffix letter designates which private company developed and built that reactor.
I was going to say that it looks AI generated but the filename includes the word 'shutterstock'. That doesn't preclude it bring AI generated (SS have their own generator) but I've noticed some article image file names include 'AI', which I presume are ones that reg writers have generated themselves. I've also noticed file names that include the names of other AI image generators.
Why I look at this sort of thing isn't clear to me.
I don't feel adequately well read to debate whether they're on course to succeed but a small point of accuracy: only the inertial confinement lot are trying to 'imitate' the sun because they're the only ones using appreciable pressure to trigger fusion. The Tokamak/Stellerator/other magnetic confinement lot are using heat (far hotter than the core of the Sun) to cause sufficiently energetic collisions. In the middle is the Fusor, that's sort of like inertial confinement but not really (apologies for the wooly explanation, it's complicated).
Both have their own reasons for doing what they're doing, inertial confinement is theoretically more efficient while magnetic confinement is theoretically easier to achieve mechanically.
One thought to ponder: we could have fusion power tomorrow and we've had the technology for decades. All that needs to be done is set off a thermonuclear device in a deep hole, pump water down and generate power from the resulting steam. Canakin demonstrated that 5Mt can be contained underground with reasonable effectiveness, though your 'power plant' would have to be a long way from civilisation because it generates quite an earthquake.
The sort of fusion we could produce in the foreseeable future will produce nuclear waste because of neutron activation. This isn't a significant problem any more than it is in civilian fission reactors as, outside of weapons production, the amount of nuclear waste is fairly small. It's just that people who work for the interests of fossil fuel producers (knowingly or not) have convinced us it's a show stopper.
I do envy the "only criminals need it" crowd. It must be relaxing to unwaveringly trust the current and all future governments to both restrain their use of invasive powers and trust that said powers are effective at stopping criminals. Plus the dopamine rush from straddling that moral high horse.
I'd say it's probably "best" to fool them when they're at the development stage, rather than widely rolled out. Imagine, for example, an attacker taking advantage of different detection systems (e.g. LIDAR and image sensors) to cause some vehicles on a motorway to slow down abruptly while others behind them kept merrily moving along.
I realise that sounds a bit outlandish and that this research doesn't fully encapsulate possible threats but how bad actors might interfere with autonomous vehicles is definitely something the industry and regulators should be thinking about. I would be amazed if people with malicious intent weren't already thinking hard about this topic.
SSN is a good way to uniquely identify US residents without the pitfalls of things like the birthday paradox and culturally common names. The problem is that it's grown legs and become a form of ID verification, which is terrible. Because of said leg growing, it's a bad idea for it to be held by a shop but, in the long term, businesses need to move away from using it as a verification code.
There will be outliers in all cases but I think you're being excessively dour. I think that there will be broad trends of use that mean an automatic adjustment upon encountering a novel monitor (to that system) will satisfy the majority of users. This will be helped by all that telemetry Microsoft love to slurp.
That's letting perfect be the enemy of good. There are cases where help is indeed required immediately but there are also cases where people have survived for a few days before dying. Why let the latter die because you can't help the former?
As for cost, I don't have that information. At the moment, terrestial telephone carriers offer their networks up for free use for calls to emergency services and, as you said, it's good advertising if someone is saved.
Thanks for clarifying. I thought you meant that they were taking them down willy-nilly to tinker. I think that with the planned deorbits, that could be built into the almanac and, by offering the next two possible transmission windows (on two different satellites) that drops the risk of a broken one ruining everything to a margin I'd consider acceptable.
Thanks for sticking with me, I hadn't considered that part. I suppose the solution is to combine approximating checking the signal attenuation with the user making reasonable steps to secure their phone somewhere with a view of the sky or being able to set a wakeup time themselves.
Though the frequencies are different (meaning different attenuation characteristics), I could see a potential way to accomplish this without additional infrastructure using GPS satellites. Check that one which is overhead (ignoring those at low elevation) is being received with sufficient strength that the Starlink signal will also be transmissible. This could also help with easy mistakes like holding the phone under a thermal blanket.
The aim here isn't to be perfect, it's to offer something that might save a life ASAP. The ideal endpoint is to get more satellites up there so a device that a lot of people have can offer additional help in emergencies.
I missed the edit window but, to add, informing the user of the time until broadcast isn't for their triggering the broadcast, just so they have an idea about how long it might take to get a message out. The idea is that the CPU clocks down to a super low frequency with just enough processing power for the RTC to wake it ahead of the transmit window.
Do you have a source on the 'sending down' part? I can understand new launches but I can't imagine that, even with the incredibly low cost to orbit that SpaceX has achieved, they'll be arbitrarily taking them out of service. Further, given the tiny amount of data, it seems like something that could easily update daily for negligible impact.
I imagine that, prior to greater coverage, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to program an emergency mode. Almanacs (files that can be used to calculate when a satellite will be over a given location, as used in GPS) are trivially small and could easily be cached for months in advance. After snagging the location through GPS, the phone could work out when the next one would be overhead, inform the user of the expected delay and go into a deep sleep until then.
The same almanac could also inform the user if they're in a position where transmission isn't possible, so that better decisions can be made.
I think that with so few satellites, the need to be overhead (given the low altitude) and an inclined orbit, to be reasonably certain (outside high latitudes) some rotation of the Earth relative to the orbit is needed. Probably not 24h but perhaps not just one orbit of the satellite either.
Hertz didn't help themselves by requiring a vehicle to be returned charged or face hefty charging fees, plus a base payment. When I'm on a trip, sitting around to charge up a vehicle (close enough to the return location, no less) is costing me and/or my employer not insignificant amounts of money.
If a future law or judgement is in their favour, it seems like robots.txt would be a perfect existing solution that would require no further work on the part of a website (as opposed to having to check) and wouldn't be as damaging to model producers or the environment (from having to recompute an entire model).
Wouldn't splitting the profits (at a negotiated percentage) clear this up? Personally, I find most news sites unreadable without an ad blocker. The last time I peeked, I was greeted with a banner ad taking up the top third, inline ads that take up half of the remaining space and a pop up, auto playing video; all of them pushing utter rubbish. Not that it diminishes their legal standing but if publishers are concerned that their target audience would rather read the output of a hallucination-prone text mincer, then perhaps they should examine why that is.
On that note, kudos to The Register for having manageable ads.
I agree on the "opposite" and I'm not on the opposite side of the fence from you by any measure, I've just seen too many rights disappear under the thunderous cheers of a populist oversimplification.
For the compute costs, unlike the IP, I'd have to firmly disagree. Websites are entitled to use measures to control access but I don't think that anyone but the host should have to bear the cost of non malicious access (malicious being DoS and similar), any more than ISPs should demand that websites fund the cost of delivering their content to the user.
That seems a little tinfoil. Elon may not be the shrewdest businessman but I expect he would understand that this would produce a brief spike at best. There's also the issue that we know Tesla's wallet addresses so a sell off would be obvious.
Even if all the BTC Tesla sold off a while back went into some mysterious highly laundered account owned by Elon and he managed to sell them all at the top of the jump (remember, a pump and dumper only knows a spike will occur), the profit would only amount to around $53m or about 2 days of profit (not revenue) from Tesla alone. Considering the consequences, I'm not sure why he'd undertake such a risky operation with so many failure points and such a huge penalty if caught for a relatively minor payout.
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