"Without HTTPS anyone between your web browser and the web server at Megofan can inject HTML, including JavaScript, into the HTTP connection and cause your browser to execute the code they want it to."
Lest anyone scoff at this, it's already been happening. A lot of ISPs force all port 80 traffic via transparent proxies and some started doing this kind of man-in-the-middle attack as far back as the late 1990s.
"It may be a "human error" to crash as a result of blinding fog"
This is one of the classic illustrations of why humans are unsuited to driving.
Virtually every country has 2 speed limits defined in law - the posted maximum speed for the road AND the speed at which you can stop in the available visible distance (half that distance where there is no centreline, because the road is technically a single lane) - and the prevailing limit is the LOWER of the two.
When you read crash analysis reports that state "excessive speed" as the cause they don't necessarily mean "breaking the posted speed limit" . Fog is one such example - there was a 60+ car smashup in the UK a couple of years back, where cars were travelling at the 70mph posted speed limit in fog - whilst the _SAFE_ and maximum speed was closer to 15-20mph. When drivers came across already-crashed cars they added to the crash before they could even react.
This is very much "human error", where one of the classic human errors is to vastly overstimate one's abilities whilst vastly underestimating stopping distances. I'll repeat my assertion that hanks to millions of years of evolution we simply are not wired to handle anything happening at faster than walking pace and we are genetically predisposed to taking too many risks - at a lower speed you'd simply bounce off a tree, recover your step or miss that fish but the consequences at higher speeds are much more severe thanks to energies increasing with the square of the velocity.
_YOU_ may be fine with the reasonable failure of another human being. I am not.
I've seen too many people die as a result of momentary lapses of concentration or thinking they can beat that red light (or train at a crossing) and quite frankly the day-to-day driving ability of at least 75% of the population is cause for despair. For every Lewis Hamilton (and even Lewis makes errors), there are a few tens of thousands of Mr Beans. I've sat behind many cars where the driving style leads me to predict they're going to crash sooner or later simply because it;s clear the driver is not paying attention to what's going on around them - and in some cases been proven correct shortly afterwards.
Automated vehicles bring something to the equation that humans do not - consistency and repeatability - and that's something that insurance actuaries can relate to. Despite Joshua Brown and a few other cases, it's already statistically clear that Tesla's existing driver aids have reduced the incidence of crashes by 40% - the US NTHSA has already noted this. Other driver aids such as automatic emergency braking has reduced the number of nose-to-tail crashes involving such vehicles AND substantially reduced the impact energies/human injuries involved in the ones that have crashed.
Within a very short time after level 5 automated vehicles start hitting the road you'll see insurance premiums for human drivers start skyrocketing, mainly due to medical expenses in human-fault crashes (remember, robocars will already be travelling at speeds appropriate for the conditions and can react 500ms faster than humans, so the energies involved in any crash are lower). Shortly after that, robocars will be the norm on most roads.
You may not trust machines, but the harsh reality is that when it comes to roads, humans are the least reliable, least trustworthy part of the entire package.
In another arena - railways - one of the single greatest illustrations of how bad humans are at driving is the massive reduction in crashes that came with the adoption of simple mechanical systems to automatically trigger train brakes if a signal is passed at red (SPAD). This usually takes the form of a mechanical stopcock being knocked open by a retractable post beside the line which is only retracted when the signal is green (dead signal == red signal).
"just about 2018, and the brownouts and blackouts promised years back if we don't build more nuc plants haven't materialized."
So far, renewables have been able to fill small amounts of the demand increase. There's a lot more grid trading going on, but more worryingly there's also a lot less spare capacity in the systems than there used to be and it's decreasing year on year.
Additionally, "increased industrial demand" is on average, not in any given area - most of the increases are happening in China, whilst manufacturing is declining across the USA and Europe. While that's happening the existing western distribution systems are relatively stable and it pushes off the inevitable a few years but the hard uncomfortable fact is that despite better control systems and processes, the overall resiliance of US and european power grids is slowly decreasing.
On top of this, once intermittent uncontrollable sources reach a threshold they further destabilise the grid. South Australia's recent statewide power outages are the canary in the coal mine in this respect.
Elon's battery farms help a lot by stabilising the sources and allowing riding out failures until backup systems can fire up but they're not a universal panacea - and it's worth noting that the first major power outage wasn't due to equipment failure, but because the drop in wind energy was predicted to be so shortlived that the costs associated with firing up a peaker plant wouldn't be covered before the wind energy component was restored (ie, it became uneconomic to cover the gap, thanks to "Must take, must pay premium rate" voodoo economics associated with wind power.)
Without nuclear energy filling the gaps, you can expect your electricity to start getting a lot more expensive at a rate far outstripping normal inflation indexes. When you're paying 50-60c/kWh you're going to be a lot more frugal about using it, but at the same time carbon-intensive alternatives such as gas heating are also going to get expensive (or, worse, stay cheap and then snap to an expensive or shortage pricing structure when everyone is locked in on dependency to them)
The single biggest problem isn't the nuclear part, it's that they're a gigantic steam bomb waiting to go off. The fact that some radioactives might be mixed into that just adds to the excitement.
"I missed the other half of the equation, the consumption end."
No you didn't.
Despite the use of more energy efficient devices in domestic environments, domestic power demands are increasing. Industrial power demands are also increasing.
If electric cars become the norm, then the electrical generation capacity of a country like the UK will need to _at least_ double to keep up. Factor in elimination of gas/oil heating systems and you add more demand for heat pumps, etc. Now start moving to electrical heating in steel foundries, cement making and other high-temperature requirements for industrial use.
The renewables industry is almost entirely about farming _subsidies_(*). When push comes to shove and the pressure to reduce carbon emissions really comes on strong(**) you'll find that they aren't up to the task.
(*) In europe, the costs of operating windpower systems are high enough when all factors are considered, that the only way to make money is not to have them running. The bigger turbines have a nasty habit of eating expensive gearboxes and sometimes those gearboxes catch fire in the process, throwing blades a mile downwind. If you stop your turbine, you don't have any wear and you aren't getting any electricity money but the subsidies come in regardless - and to underscore the problematic nature of intermittent sources, you can get paid even more by the grid operators to NOT connect your wind farm to the grids, than the combined subsidies and power income, so many landowners do just that (IMO a strong argument for mandatory battery farms on every windfarm)
(**) Electricity only accounts for about 30% of carbon emissions. Renewables can sometimes generate more power than demand (on a quiet day, usually a sunday) but only for brief periods and not for consistent 24*7*365 use. Factor in a probable increase in electrical demand of 6-8 times currrent levels along with grid transport limitations and renewables simply can't step up to the task (and that's not even taking developing countries into account. Their carbon emissions could more than make up for the developing world if we all stopped tomorrow, just whilst playing catchup - so whatever _we_ come up with needs to be deployed to these countries too, to avert the oncoming ecological bomb (global warming is only the opening short film, anoxic oceanic events are the main feature if oceans get warm enough to trigger methane clathrate eruptions - and that might have already started in shallow waters off the north coast of Siberia (Leptav sea methane emissions)
Ex-military boys tended to have more sunlight exposure due to spending much more time on the flight line than any civil pilot would, and it isn't manly to cover up.
my father isn't a pilot, but so far he's had 4 melanomas cut out of his face - a product of spending far too much time climbing mountains with inadequate sunscreen and thinking sunburn is manly.
Those studies showed increase in cancer rates in populations downwind (prevailing winds) of coal plants.
Other studies showed detectably increased levels of radioactivity downwind of coal plants.
Fly ash filters and electrostatic filters have reduced the levels but not eliminated them, and you might want to factor in the point that the _2_ largest environmental disasters in the USA so far this century were coal ash pond dam breaks, plus there are around 5000 abandoned coal ash slurry ponds the EPA is trying to deal with and more being discovered every year (they weren't notifiable until the 2000s and many were abandoned decades ago)
Muller's prize was for showing the link between _high levels_ of radiation exposure and cancers.
That was in an era where Xrays were being used willy-nilly for shoe fittings, but those same Xray machines (and many other items) were riddled with stuff like Beryllium and other carcinogenic nasties.
There is no doubt that excessive and prolonged exposure to ionising radiation can cause cancers, but bear in mind that by the 1970s, the cancer rates at Nagasaki and Hiroshima were only 0.25% above "background" levels when compared to any other city around the world.(*)
On the other hand there's plenty of evidence that low level exposure causes no issues at all (unsurprising, as life evolved in a much higher radiation environment than we currently live in) and slightly higher levels seemed to cause a _reduction_ in cancers by stimulating the immune system (possibly in the same way that added dither noise to a CD bitstream causes a reduction in output noise at the end of the process)
(*) one of the byproducts of massive radiation exposure is suppression of the immune system. This made the victims susceptable to dying of the common cold, but also meant that mothers immune systems weren't naturally aborting unviable embryos and immune systems weren't killing off pre-cancerous cells. A decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a slight observable blip in the cancer rates of survivors compared to the unexposed, but people who'd moved to the cities in the aftermath of the bombs weren't getting those cancers so it's unlikely to have been in the environment.
Who remembers the studies that linked Flourescent lights to skin cancers, despite the melanomas being on areas of the body not exposed to the light? (The real cause: Office workers getting out in the sun on vacation and overexposing themselves)
Or the cancer blip in the old nuclear research labs used by Rutherford at Oxford (Real cause: 19th century mercury spills in the then-chemisty labs oxidising and becoming organic volatiles over the decades)
Or the cancer risk for makers of RF transmitter valves using thoriated tungsten heaters/cathodes? (Real cause: beryllium particles from the insulation)
etc etc.
The real importance of the uncontrolled exposure of aircrew to relatively high levels of radiation over the last 60 years is to quantify that the levels they're exposed to are "safe". Rates of cancers are at most 1-2% higher than non-exposed occupational classes and tend to be things like melanomas which are more likely caused by sunbathing. There are even medical claims going through for medical cases related to oil fumes from the engines (pressurisation systems) producing toxic fumes - which are regarded as more likely a cancer cause than the radiation exposure.
Disclosure: My employer was involved in quantifying air crew exposure in the 2000s. We put a bunch of loggers on a lot of aircraft and let them collect for several years. The results were significantly higher than expected - and yet, as I point out, aircrew seem to show few to no ill-effects.
If you want reactors to be safe, get rid of the water, and don't be stupid enough to use coolants that can catch fire.
Seriously. Just about every single nuclear accident in the civil arena (and most of the military ones) had water as a substantial causative or contributory factor.
Apart from the issue of contaminated water getting to the biosphere, there's the high pressure/high temperature "flash to steam if there's a leak" risk. The "flash to steam if the reactor goes prompt critical" risk, the "corroding pipework from the inside" issue, the "generates hydrogen gas in a meltdown scenario" risk and the fact that due to all these risks, the water temperature is "only" about 450C, which makes for highly (thermally) inefficient thermal turbines which need massive heatsinks (rivers or seas), and in turn means placing the generation plant at risk of tsunami or earthquake (hint: rivers tend to follow faultines)
Molten sodum catches fire and I'm tired of all the claims that "it won't leak, we're making sure all the engineering is perfect so it can't" - the fact is that EVERY SINGLE molten sodium cooled system has had a fire. The sodium at Monju might not have been radioactive (secondary loop), but sodium fires melt steel and destroy concrete - they're still trying to dig a few hundred tons of the stuff out of the basement more than a decade on from the leak.
Gases are "almost" tolerable, but they leak too and they have to be pressurised which comes with its own sets of problems.
The safety issues were mostly solved in 1964 with the Oak Ridge Experiment. It's not a coincidence that the chinese are putting huge amounts of R&D into reviving this technology whilst simultanously building a bunch of new light water plants - by the time those plants reach end of life, MSRs should be mature and they can digest "high level nuclear waste" - which solves the waste problem whilst extracting some energy along the way. (and to counter one dickhead who keeps demanding I produce examples of dedicated designs: They're not intended to be dedicated DU/Pu/HLNU digestors. They can eat _some_ of the waste as a sidestream fuel in the same way a gas-fired power station can burn solid waste as a supplementary fuel and making a dedicated nuclear waste eater would be stupidly complicated)
"Uranium for nuclear energy is only enriched to approximately ~1%-4%. "
Conventional light water reactors generally require 3% for sustainable fission reactions.
That means that just shy of 90% of the raw uranium metal which was mined is thrown out (actually, used for h-bomb casings - it improves the yield. Or used for DU bullets - which result in heavy metal poisoning in the areas they're used)
"Weapon materials needs to be enriched to ~80%+. So they are different."
Yes: in that case 99%+ of the mined metal is thrown out.
In both cases, you have a byproduct which is basically only usable for military applications and just happens to be one of the more nasty toxic heavy metals from a biological point of view. (Yes, I know some 747s used DU weights in their tails, look how well that played out in the Schipol-Bilmer crash and ensuing fire)
In both cases you need to use obnoxious amounts of energy to enrich the uranium and a shedload of centrifuges - so much energy that the USA regards the information on the energy requirements to produce uranium for the civil nuclear program as a military classified secret, but the forest of power cables feeding into the plants in Tennessee are a good indicator that's it's extremely high.
Incidentally, it's much easier to kick start a civil reactor with a small core of 50% enriched uranium. Iran has several tens of tons of this, according to a reliable source (Mossad), but that same reliable source goes on to point out that if the Iranians wanted to make a nuclear device they could have done so 20 years ago.
Uranium is a good material for making bombs (kind of - it's better for breeding the right plutonium isotopes to make bombs)
Thorium is more readily available, much easier to process (no enrichment needed) and in molten salt systems lends itself well to online reprocessing systems (you don't need to reprocess everything, only enough to stop the reactor choking on its wastes) whilst being incredibly difficult to weaponise (the plutonium produced is a bastard mix of isotopes including several high emission types that would make any bomb fizzle, and interrupting the americium-u233 step will both drastically cut output and affect breeding abilities, resulting in the reactor stopping fairly quickly or output dropping so low that it's blindingly obvious that material is being diverted)
Alvin Weinberg made the first practical submarine nuclear reactor/steam turbine system using uranium because that was what was available. He would have preferred Thorium, but it wasn't. He looked on the scaled up versions of his design with increasing worry due to the exponentially increasing engineering requirements (pressure vessel stresses go up as a multiplier of size and pressure).
His answer was the Oak Ridge Molten Salt experiment, which worked successfully during the 1960s and got shitcanned by Nixon for political reasons in favour of a breeder system using molten sodium coolant (which rather predictably kept catching fire). Weinberg's design was intrinsically safe and eliminated the safety problems inherent in using water around reactions which can go up to 1150C (they're self-limiting about this point) and has a nasty habit of flashing to steam if released from pressure or a reactor goes prompt-critical (this is what happened at Snake River and killed 3 people (one skewered by the control rods, the others crushed by flying metal) and at Chernobyl (blew the roof off the building))
Even if you include everyone killed/injured at Nagasaki/Hiroshima AND everyone killed or injured in civil or military nuclear programs (military tended to play fast and loose with safety) AND everyone killed by nuclear hysteria at Fukushima (about 1500 died), nuclear power still has the best safety record of _ANY_ electrical power generation system when compared to the amount of energy generated.
Nuclear hysteria is actually far more dangerous than anything else. We need sane statistically-based approaches to radiation.
"The ONE exception is black on orange. This means the sign is a temporary construction sign."
In the US/CA AU/NZ - it's different in countries using UN-standard signage, but the point is that there ARE signage standards and not that many individual signs in the databases - few enough that a robocar can keep the entire world database on board and still have capacity to spare.
In virtually _all_ parts of the world, temporary signs are in the local traffic authority's database, because they need to know where they are - and failure by construction crews to note their locations when placed/removed can result in hefty fines already. Moving to near-realtime updates in a world with data communications everywhere (if not cellular, then there are already 3 different LEO satellite phone/datacom networks and Iridium has had 40 new birds launched this year alone) is a nobrainer at fairly low cost.
" there are always traffic accidents or highway construction where you can unexpectedly encounter a hand-held stop sign."
In an era of uboquitous communications systems, there's no such thing as "unexpectedly encountering" anything. Apart from warning signs which humans see, such works are notified and in transport databases as road works and therefore are transmittable to autonomous vehicles.
The "guy holding a sign" can and will in future be required to be using a transponder (wearing one plus one in the sign itself) which advertises its presence to autonomous vehicles - it'll be a part of his safety kit like HiVis and a walkie-talkie.
A car "unexpectedly" encountering any kind of road hazard (eg, cows on the road) can be counted on to immediately upload that hazard to online databases. The next car won't be surprised - and the first car has good enough night vision + reactions to actually stop before it hits the animals.
Virtually _all_ road crashes and incidents are caused by human driver failure.
Virtually _all_ of what's left is caused by "road engineering failure" - ie, poor placement of lines or signs, causing confusion. These show up as statistical black spots. - this is also a human failure and is frequently made worse by traffic engineers refusing to acknowledge they screwed up (there's a layer of politics and liability evasion in that too.
A vanishingly small number are actual "honest to goodness" accidents (mechanical or roading failure, or things like a cow on the road, or a tree falling in the carriageway)
Interestingly, it usually takes at least 2 serious (usually 3 or more) errors to cause a crash, even when only a single vehicle is involved. Our road rules have huge safety margins in them because of the fallibility and unreliability of human drivers.
Getting humans out of the control loop will be one of the biggest steps in road transportation safety ever done. We simply are not equipped to handle anything that happens at faster than walking speed and everything we do when driving is necessarily an approximation because of it.
A stop sign is defined by its size, shape and colour. (Hexagonal and red), which is the same virtually everywhere in the world, but the word stop is not.
Similarly, all other road signs have legal definitions of size, shape, colour, border colours, reflectivity and artwork.
Fooling a general purpose recognition algorithm is one thing, but there are enough cues in the sign's shape and size to hand off to specific "regulatory/advisory signs" routines in the first instance and generate an exception report for signs which appear "odd" (a robo version of "fixmystreet.com")
if anything I'd expect vandalised signs (or illegal/unauthorised speed limit signs - something which is happening a lot in the UK at the moment) to be reported far quicker by a robocar than by humans.
Only a reckless autonomous vehicle programmer would rely on general purpose recogntion algorithms for processing regulatory/advisory signboards. This kind of sensationalist article headline is clutching at straws, whilst the actual autonomous vehicle researchers are shaking their heads and tutting at the idiots who believe them.
Sign vandalism is and will be a minor issue. Regulation might be needed for the display of signs which might be confused with regulatory signage - but unsurprisingly this is already in place in most parts of the world because they fool human drivers too and have been known to cause crashes.
"Ethnicity plays too large a role in committing the crimes in the first place."
When it comes to drug offences, they're committed in roughly equal numbers across all ethnic groups, with a higher rate in higher socioeconomic groups.
That isn't reflected _at all_ in US criminal charging and conviction rates, with high status individuals usually being able to get off with a warning or by paying their way free, whilst low status individuals are more likely to both be convicted for the same crime and get substantially higher sentences for the exact same conviction.
When it comes to other crimes, the distribution is socioeconomic with skin colour playing almost no part in it at any given socioeconomic level. The question is WHY does the USA still have functional apartheid, treat its black citizens like 3rd class people and get away with it?
"Automated cars have already shown that they are very poor at dealing with humans when they do unexpected things."
Actually, they've been coping quite well with this (like making illegal turns in front of the robocar), whilst I can show you any number of human drivers who can't even cope with having to pass an opposing car on a narrow country lane because they're pathologically unaware of the width of their vehicle and refuse to proceed unless they have 6 feet clearance on either side.
Unlike humans, who need to be individually taught to recognise each new hazard, you only need to teach one AI and that programming can be shared to all of them almost instantly.
A robocar doesn't need to be perfect, just better than most humans are (most of the time), all of the time. That isn't a particularly hard threshold to hit. Most humans make 2-5 driving errors PER MINUTE (lapsed concentration, tunnel vision, fixation, flat-out rulebreaking, etc etc) and they aren't looking in all directions at once _AND_ humans can only cope with a couple of simultaneous hazards at once. (EG, watching the wobbly cyclist in front of you along a lane of cars at a shopping area where car doors are opening and cars are pulling out may result in completely missing the pedestrian who just stepped out onto a crossing in front of you)
Insurance companies will drive robocar adoption. It's already been noted that robocars have lower incident rates than humans _AND_ they don't trigger incidents like some humans do ("I've never had a crash but I've seen plenty as people try to pass me", etc). When this trend is played out in statistically large numbers you'll see insurance premiums for manual driving skyrocket _AND_ insurance companies start to demand that drivers pass more stringent tests, more regularly - which will trickle into government requirements for driving licenses becoming both more stringent and with regular retests (this is already happening in europe anyway.)
Robocars will rapidly penetrate the professional driving fields, leading to lower taxi fares (the most expensive part of a hire vehicle is the driver) and once these become lower than the standing costs of keeping a car, you'll see a radpid dropoff in personal vehicle ownership. This is already happening in urban areas, with many urban dwellers not bothering to get driving licenses because they don't need them. Expect it to spread to towns and suburban areas too. Busses are likely to disappear thanks to the road damage they do, coupled with the high operating costs out of peak periods, being replaced with 6-8 seat transport (this is about the optimum size) which may entrain during peaks.
Removing human drivers is likely to virtually eliminate traffic jams, because the single biggest CAUSE of traffic jams is impatient drivers following too closely (phantom jams on freeways disspate within minutes if only 10% of drivers adopt legal following distances) or trying to queue jump, not clear intersections, etc etc.
Reducing car ownership is likely to be coupled with lower urban speed limits, but paradoxically we're likely to see transport speedups as traffic will be freer flowing (the journey average speed in central London is under 10mph and outside the central part it's still less than 20mph).
Parking problems will virtually disappear - both because of fewer cars competing for parking and because if parking is too expensive in any given area, personally-owned transports can be ordered to go park somewhere cheaper. Governments which have large parts of their income geared around parking income should be preparing for this (In the UK it's illegal for councils to use parking/fines income (on or offstreet) for general revenue, but many launder it in ways so that they can - Westminster being the stellar example of "a parking company with a local government attached"
Signs are there for hoomans. Transports will note them, but already ubiquitous communications nets mean that changed limits will be flooded across an area quickly - and to counter
Yes, but in a real world situation, when you moved your head the illusion would be shattered.
In the real world, images aren't static. They move or you move - illusions created by arrangements of 3D objects transposed into a 2D field are relatively easy to make, but in a 3D world they only exist when you're lined up "just so"
The real test of renewables is when they're called upon to replace not just current electricity production (only 30% of carbon emissions), but also for increased electrical demands as direct carbon sources are re[;aced with electrical ones (eg, gas heating systems, more-electric transportation, etc)
Right now, renewables can just about replace all carbon sources on a good day with low power demands, In the future they may be able to replace all carbon-sourced generation 24*7*365 - but replacing other carbon-emitting energy sources with electrical capacity is going to see a 6-8 fold increase in demand and there is no way they could achieve that even with 100% efficiencies. (There are safety aspects to consider, given windmill blades have been known to fly over a mile when they break - and they do break, there are environmental aspects to solar PV manufacture, plus the generation in high latitudes in winter isn't worthwhile, plus electricity can only be economically transported over grids for about 1500 miles before you run into practical and economic limitations - ideally you only want a maximum 2-500 miles between source and load)
Renewables are a stepping stone. The future is nuclear by necessity - and once you have "enough" nuclear to be able to supply the grid and load follow (the french load follow with nukes already), you no longer need the renewables as they cost more than nuclear sources.
Water-moderated nuke plants are 300,000 times safer than coal, but molten salt tech would be a few thousand times safer than that and reduces waste at output by 99%, waste at input by 90% and energy waste in fuel enrichment/refining by 99% to boot.
Fusion might be economic one day, but not in our grandchildren's lifespans and likely not in their grandchildren's lifespans.
It should be noted that China is the largest renewables market in the world - but they're also engaging in a massive program of building (conventional) nuclear energy plants AND ploughing billions into nuclear research, with a heavy emphasis on molten salt technologies.
Alvin Weinberg would be pleased that his research is being used 45 years after Nixon killed off the USA molten salt program, which was opposed by US vested interests primarily because it was good at producing heat for energy, but lousy at producing bomb-grade plutonium.
The REAL problem with radiation is an utterly irrational approach to "it" and panicmongering groups with various vested interests which refuse to acknowledge the statistical realities. We have been treated to a kneejerk "all radiation bad" mantra for decades, or even worse "natural radiation is ok but all manmade radiation bad" mantra (there's no difference in the ionising effects at any given energy level.)
High levels of radiation die down quickly.
The vast majority of high level radiation from nuclear waste is from caesium. This has a relatively short half life, such that high level nuclear waste is safe to physically handle in about 300 years.
At that point what you have is trace levels of caesium and some strontium, plus a bit of plutonium and a lot of U238. This can be re-refined and reused (more worryingly, it is trivially stolen, because the radiation levels are low enough to be safely handleable)
Isolating for 10k years for radiation reasons is just plain silly. The chemical toxicity of plutonium and uranium are another matter, but that's essentially "forever" in any case.
Bear in mind that the entire high level waste output from a 800MWe nuclear light water-moderated reactor over its 60 year period is about enough to comfortably fit in an olympic size swimming pool - which is more or less what it's held in. The best way to treat it if you aren't reusing in a molten salt reactor is to leave it in there for 3 centuries as water is the best moderating mechanism available (modulo corrosion issues, but those can be mitigated with appropriate approaches), then tossed back into a nuclear reactor.
In the case of a light meltdown (fukushima, etc) where only a few radioactives escape, they can be detected and collected (unlike chemical toxins) and they'll break down over time, unlike many (heavy metal) chemical toxins.
It doesn't help that there's absolute panicmongering about radioactivity. It's clear from studies at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and of areas with naturally high radiation levels (granite or altitude - many areas are naturally far more radioactive that Fukushima ever was), as well as 60 years of high altitude aircrew (who are exposed to the highest occupational radiation levels of any population - only exceeded by the radiation levels encountered by smokers), that exposure is far more complex than "no safe minimum dose" and further that there's a clear threshold dose below which things don't seem to matter at all.
Correlation is not causation.
Once upon a time there was a clearly noticeable spike in skin cancers being suffered by office workers. This was shortly after the widespread introduction of flourescent lighting and as these give off ultraviolet light and as ultraviolet light is known to cause skin cancers, these lights were blamed as the logical source for the cancers, but the odd thing that was noticed by researchers as time went on was that many skin cancers were appearing in regions of the body which were not exposed to the lighting - and more importantly the UV wavelengths of these lights don't usually trigger skin cancers of the types seen. Deeper research showed that these were the kinds of body areas exposed by sunbathing - and the actual link was that office workers were increasingly having more leisure time and more income, so were able to afford to take more holidays where they could lay about on beaches - where prolonged exposure to high energy UVB and UVC in sunlight due to inadequate sunscreen formulations turned out to be the actual culprit (there were also some cancers traced to the sunscreen compounds themselves!)
In another case, at Oxford university: Cancer clusters were noticed for staff in offices which were the former laboratories used by Rutherford and other nuclear researchers. This was worrying as they'd been deep cleaned and swept thoroughly for any radioactives before renovation. They were swept again and no radiation sources located. Even the air ducts and water pipes were checked in case it was coming from somewher
"They havn't programmed in a silly algorithm yet. "
The other point of note is that the classifier doesn't do the machine equivalent of turning its head to verify the image.
Note that the tabby in the first example was correctly classified when the image was rotated.
I see this a lot when tracking social messaging scammers. The "clever" ones mirror or slightly rotate stolen images that the classifier knows about, so that a well-known photo of Brianna Lee becomes something completely new to the classifier. (the fun part is then matching/tracking the altered images and seeing which groups of scammers are using them, as that allows you to see the connection paths between them)
The short answer is that the image classifier is trivially defeatable and has been for a while. This isn't news. The newsworthy part is fooling it into misclassifying an image as something completely different - and that would be solved in large part by running the image through more angles/transformations.
Google/Tineye/Facebook and others could do better. IF they chose to.
Slashdot Mirror
"Without HTTPS anyone between your web browser and the web server at Megofan can inject HTML, including JavaScript, into the HTTP connection and cause your browser to execute the code they want it to."
Lest anyone scoff at this, it's already been happening. A lot of ISPs force all port 80 traffic via transparent proxies and some started doing this kind of man-in-the-middle attack as far back as the late 1990s.
Until they do.
And most of the time it's still none of their fucking business.
"It may be a "human error" to crash as a result of blinding fog"
This is one of the classic illustrations of why humans are unsuited to driving.
Virtually every country has 2 speed limits defined in law - the posted maximum speed for the road AND the speed at which you can stop in the available visible distance (half that distance where there is no centreline, because the road is technically a single lane) - and the prevailing limit is the LOWER of the two.
When you read crash analysis reports that state "excessive speed" as the cause they don't necessarily mean "breaking the posted speed limit" . Fog is one such example - there was a 60+ car smashup in the UK a couple of years back, where cars were travelling at the 70mph posted speed limit in fog - whilst the _SAFE_ and maximum speed was closer to 15-20mph. When drivers came across already-crashed cars they added to the crash before they could even react.
This is very much "human error", where one of the classic human errors is to vastly overstimate one's abilities whilst vastly underestimating stopping distances. I'll repeat my assertion that hanks to millions of years of evolution we simply are not wired to handle anything happening at faster than walking pace and we are genetically predisposed to taking too many risks - at a lower speed you'd simply bounce off a tree, recover your step or miss that fish but the consequences at higher speeds are much more severe thanks to energies increasing with the square of the velocity.
_YOU_ may be fine with the reasonable failure of another human being. I am not.
I've seen too many people die as a result of momentary lapses of concentration or thinking they can beat that red light (or train at a crossing) and quite frankly the day-to-day driving ability of at least 75% of the population is cause for despair. For every Lewis Hamilton (and even Lewis makes errors), there are a few tens of thousands of Mr Beans. I've sat behind many cars where the driving style leads me to predict they're going to crash sooner or later simply because it;s clear the driver is not paying attention to what's going on around them - and in some cases been proven correct shortly afterwards.
Automated vehicles bring something to the equation that humans do not - consistency and repeatability - and that's something that insurance actuaries can relate to.
Despite Joshua Brown and a few other cases, it's already statistically clear that Tesla's existing driver aids have reduced the incidence of crashes by 40% - the US NTHSA has already noted this. Other driver aids such as automatic emergency braking has reduced the number of nose-to-tail crashes involving such vehicles AND substantially reduced the impact energies/human injuries involved in the ones that have crashed.
Within a very short time after level 5 automated vehicles start hitting the road you'll see insurance premiums for human drivers start skyrocketing, mainly due to medical expenses in human-fault crashes (remember, robocars will already be travelling at speeds appropriate for the conditions and can react 500ms faster than humans, so the energies involved in any crash are lower). Shortly after that, robocars will be the norm on most roads.
You may not trust machines, but the harsh reality is that when it comes to roads, humans are the least reliable, least trustworthy part of the entire package.
In another arena - railways - one of the single greatest illustrations of how bad humans are at driving is the massive reduction in crashes that came with the adoption of simple mechanical systems to automatically trigger train brakes if a signal is passed at red (SPAD). This usually takes the form of a mechanical stopcock being knocked open by a retractable post beside the line which is only retracted when the signal is green (dead signal == red signal).
"just about 2018, and the brownouts and blackouts promised years back if we don't build more nuc plants haven't materialized."
So far, renewables have been able to fill small amounts of the demand increase. There's a lot more grid trading going on, but more worryingly there's also a lot less spare capacity in the systems than there used to be and it's decreasing year on year.
Additionally, "increased industrial demand" is on average, not in any given area - most of the increases are happening in China, whilst manufacturing is declining across the USA and Europe. While that's happening the existing western distribution systems are relatively stable and it pushes off the inevitable a few years but the hard uncomfortable fact is that despite better control systems and processes, the overall resiliance of US and european power grids is slowly decreasing.
On top of this, once intermittent uncontrollable sources reach a threshold they further destabilise the grid. South Australia's recent statewide power outages are the canary in the coal mine in this respect.
Elon's battery farms help a lot by stabilising the sources and allowing riding out failures until backup systems can fire up but they're not a universal panacea - and it's worth noting that the first major power outage wasn't due to equipment failure, but because the drop in wind energy was predicted to be so shortlived that the costs associated with firing up a peaker plant wouldn't be covered before the wind energy component was restored (ie, it became uneconomic to cover the gap, thanks to "Must take, must pay premium rate" voodoo economics associated with wind power.)
Without nuclear energy filling the gaps, you can expect your electricity to start getting a lot more expensive at a rate far outstripping normal inflation indexes. When you're paying 50-60c/kWh you're going to be a lot more frugal about using it, but at the same time carbon-intensive alternatives such as gas heating are also going to get expensive (or, worse, stay cheap and then snap to an expensive or shortage pricing structure when everyone is locked in on dependency to them)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... is useful
The single biggest problem isn't the nuclear part, it's that they're a gigantic steam bomb waiting to go off. The fact that some radioactives might be mixed into that just adds to the excitement.
"I missed the other half of the equation, the consumption end."
No you didn't.
Despite the use of more energy efficient devices in domestic environments, domestic power demands are increasing. Industrial power demands are also increasing.
If electric cars become the norm, then the electrical generation capacity of a country like the UK will need to _at least_ double to keep up. Factor in elimination of gas/oil heating systems and you add more demand for heat pumps, etc. Now start moving to electrical heating in steel foundries, cement making and other high-temperature requirements for industrial use.
You get the idea.
The renewables industry is almost entirely about farming _subsidies_(*). When push comes to shove and the pressure to reduce carbon emissions really comes on strong(**) you'll find that they aren't up to the task.
(*) In europe, the costs of operating windpower systems are high enough when all factors are considered, that the only way to make money is not to have them running. The bigger turbines have a nasty habit of eating expensive gearboxes and sometimes those gearboxes catch fire in the process, throwing blades a mile downwind. If you stop your turbine, you don't have any wear and you aren't getting any electricity money but the subsidies come in regardless - and to underscore the problematic nature of intermittent sources, you can get paid even more by the grid operators to NOT connect your wind farm to the grids, than the combined subsidies and power income, so many landowners do just that (IMO a strong argument for mandatory battery farms on every windfarm)
(**) Electricity only accounts for about 30% of carbon emissions. Renewables can sometimes generate more power than demand (on a quiet day, usually a sunday) but only for brief periods and not for consistent 24*7*365 use. Factor in a probable increase in electrical demand of 6-8 times currrent levels along with grid transport limitations and renewables simply can't step up to the task (and that's not even taking developing countries into account. Their carbon emissions could more than make up for the developing world if we all stopped tomorrow, just whilst playing catchup - so whatever _we_ come up with needs to be deployed to these countries too, to avert the oncoming ecological bomb (global warming is only the opening short film, anoxic oceanic events are the main feature if oceans get warm enough to trigger methane clathrate eruptions - and that might have already started in shallow waters off the north coast of Siberia (Leptav sea methane emissions)
Look at the history of those pilots.
Ex-military boys tended to have more sunlight exposure due to spending much more time on the flight line than any civil pilot would, and it isn't manly to cover up.
my father isn't a pilot, but so far he's had 4 melanomas cut out of his face - a product of spending far too much time climbing mountains with inadequate sunscreen and thinking sunburn is manly.
"Airline pilots have some higher risk of skin cancer but not other cancers."
Pilots, but not crew. Which points to the factor of being in the pointy end exposed to largely unfiltered sunlight.
Except that the locations of the cancers on those pilots tends to be inconsistent with wearing clothing and more consistent with sunbathing.
Those studies showed increase in cancer rates in populations downwind (prevailing winds) of coal plants.
Other studies showed detectably increased levels of radioactivity downwind of coal plants.
Fly ash filters and electrostatic filters have reduced the levels but not eliminated them, and you might want to factor in the point that the _2_ largest environmental disasters in the USA so far this century were coal ash pond dam breaks, plus there are around 5000 abandoned coal ash slurry ponds the EPA is trying to deal with and more being discovered every year (they weren't notifiable until the 2000s and many were abandoned decades ago)
Muller's prize was for showing the link between _high levels_ of radiation exposure and cancers.
That was in an era where Xrays were being used willy-nilly for shoe fittings, but those same Xray machines (and many other items) were riddled with stuff like Beryllium and other carcinogenic nasties.
There is no doubt that excessive and prolonged exposure to ionising radiation can cause cancers, but bear in mind that by the 1970s, the cancer rates at Nagasaki and Hiroshima were only 0.25% above "background" levels when compared to any other city around the world.(*)
On the other hand there's plenty of evidence that low level exposure causes no issues at all (unsurprising, as life evolved in a much higher radiation environment than we currently live in) and slightly higher levels seemed to cause a _reduction_ in cancers by stimulating the immune system (possibly in the same way that added dither noise to a CD bitstream causes a reduction in output noise at the end of the process)
(*) one of the byproducts of massive radiation exposure is suppression of the immune system. This made the victims susceptable to dying of the common cold, but also meant that mothers immune systems weren't naturally aborting unviable embryos and immune systems weren't killing off pre-cancerous cells. A decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a slight observable blip in the cancer rates of survivors compared to the unexposed, but people who'd moved to the cities in the aftermath of the bombs weren't getting those cancers so it's unlikely to have been in the environment.
Who remembers the studies that linked Flourescent lights to skin cancers, despite the melanomas being on areas of the body not exposed to the light? (The real cause: Office workers getting out in the sun on vacation and overexposing themselves)
Or the cancer blip in the old nuclear research labs used by Rutherford at Oxford (Real cause: 19th century mercury spills in the then-chemisty labs oxidising and becoming organic volatiles over the decades)
Or the cancer risk for makers of RF transmitter valves using thoriated tungsten heaters/cathodes? (Real cause: beryllium particles from the insulation)
etc etc.
The real importance of the uncontrolled exposure of aircrew to relatively high levels of radiation over the last 60 years is to quantify that the levels they're exposed to are "safe". Rates of cancers are at most 1-2% higher than non-exposed occupational classes and tend to be things like melanomas which are more likely caused by sunbathing. There are even medical claims going through for medical cases related to oil fumes from the engines (pressurisation systems) producing toxic fumes - which are regarded as more likely a cancer cause than the radiation exposure.
Disclosure: My employer was involved in quantifying air crew exposure in the 2000s. We put a bunch of loggers on a lot of aircraft and let them collect for several years. The results were significantly higher than expected - and yet, as I point out, aircrew seem to show few to no ill-effects.
"The radioactivity of the radio-isotopes that were release will still be energetic and toxic long after all of us here are dead. "
You really don't understand how radioactivity works and what a half-life is, do you?
Radioactivity is fleeting. Chemical toxins are the gift that keeps on giving.
If you want reactors to be safe, get rid of the water, and don't be stupid enough to use coolants that can catch fire.
Seriously. Just about every single nuclear accident in the civil arena (and most of the military ones) had water as a substantial causative or contributory factor.
Apart from the issue of contaminated water getting to the biosphere, there's the high pressure/high temperature "flash to steam if there's a leak" risk. The "flash to steam if the reactor goes prompt critical" risk, the "corroding pipework from the inside" issue, the "generates hydrogen gas in a meltdown scenario" risk and the fact that due to all these risks, the water temperature is "only" about 450C, which makes for highly (thermally) inefficient thermal turbines which need massive heatsinks (rivers or seas), and in turn means placing the generation plant at risk of tsunami or earthquake (hint: rivers tend to follow faultines)
Molten sodum catches fire and I'm tired of all the claims that "it won't leak, we're making sure all the engineering is perfect so it can't" - the fact is that EVERY SINGLE molten sodium cooled system has had a fire. The sodium at Monju might not have been radioactive (secondary loop), but sodium fires melt steel and destroy concrete - they're still trying to dig a few hundred tons of the stuff out of the basement more than a decade on from the leak.
Gases are "almost" tolerable, but they leak too and they have to be pressurised which comes with its own sets of problems.
The safety issues were mostly solved in 1964 with the Oak Ridge Experiment. It's not a coincidence that the chinese are putting huge amounts of R&D into reviving this technology whilst simultanously building a bunch of new light water plants - by the time those plants reach end of life, MSRs should be mature and they can digest "high level nuclear waste" - which solves the waste problem whilst extracting some energy along the way. (and to counter one dickhead who keeps demanding I produce examples of dedicated designs: They're not intended to be dedicated DU/Pu/HLNU digestors. They can eat _some_ of the waste as a sidestream fuel in the same way a gas-fired power station can burn solid waste as a supplementary fuel and making a dedicated nuclear waste eater would be stupidly complicated)
"Uranium for nuclear energy is only enriched to approximately ~1%-4%. "
Conventional light water reactors generally require 3% for sustainable fission reactions.
That means that just shy of 90% of the raw uranium metal which was mined is thrown out (actually, used for h-bomb casings - it improves the yield. Or used for DU bullets - which result in heavy metal poisoning in the areas they're used)
"Weapon materials needs to be enriched to ~80%+. So they are different."
Yes: in that case 99%+ of the mined metal is thrown out.
In both cases, you have a byproduct which is basically only usable for military applications and just happens to be one of the more nasty toxic heavy metals from a biological point of view. (Yes, I know some 747s used DU weights in their tails, look how well that played out in the Schipol-Bilmer crash and ensuing fire)
In both cases you need to use obnoxious amounts of energy to enrich the uranium and a shedload of centrifuges - so much energy that the USA regards the information on the energy requirements to produce uranium for the civil nuclear program as a military classified secret, but the forest of power cables feeding into the plants in Tennessee are a good indicator that's it's extremely high.
Incidentally, it's much easier to kick start a civil reactor with a small core of 50% enriched uranium. Iran has several tens of tons of this, according to a reliable source (Mossad), but that same reliable source goes on to point out that if the Iranians wanted to make a nuclear device they could have done so 20 years ago.
Uranium is a good material for making bombs (kind of - it's better for breeding the right plutonium isotopes to make bombs)
Thorium is more readily available, much easier to process (no enrichment needed) and in molten salt systems lends itself well to online reprocessing systems (you don't need to reprocess everything, only enough to stop the reactor choking on its wastes) whilst being incredibly difficult to weaponise (the plutonium produced is a bastard mix of isotopes including several high emission types that would make any bomb fizzle, and interrupting the americium-u233 step will both drastically cut output and affect breeding abilities, resulting in the reactor stopping fairly quickly or output dropping so low that it's blindingly obvious that material is being diverted)
Alvin Weinberg made the first practical submarine nuclear reactor/steam turbine system using uranium because that was what was available. He would have preferred Thorium, but it wasn't. He looked on the scaled up versions of his design with increasing worry due to the exponentially increasing engineering requirements (pressure vessel stresses go up as a multiplier of size and pressure).
His answer was the Oak Ridge Molten Salt experiment, which worked successfully during the 1960s and got shitcanned by Nixon for political reasons in favour of a breeder system using molten sodium coolant (which rather predictably kept catching fire). Weinberg's design was intrinsically safe and eliminated the safety problems inherent in using water around reactions which can go up to 1150C (they're self-limiting about this point) and has a nasty habit of flashing to steam if released from pressure or a reactor goes prompt-critical (this is what happened at Snake River and killed 3 people (one skewered by the control rods, the others crushed by flying metal) and at Chernobyl (blew the roof off the building))
Even if you include everyone killed/injured at Nagasaki/Hiroshima AND everyone killed or injured in civil or military nuclear programs (military tended to play fast and loose with safety) AND everyone killed by nuclear hysteria at Fukushima (about 1500 died), nuclear power still has the best safety record of _ANY_ electrical power generation system when compared to the amount of energy generated.
Nuclear hysteria is actually far more dangerous than anything else. We need sane statistically-based approaches to radiation.
Cosmic radiation for
"The ONE exception is black on orange. This means the sign is a temporary construction sign."
In the US/CA AU/NZ - it's different in countries using UN-standard signage, but the point is that there ARE signage standards and not that many individual signs in the databases - few enough that a robocar can keep the entire world database on board and still have capacity to spare.
In virtually _all_ parts of the world, temporary signs are in the local traffic authority's database, because they need to know where they are - and failure by construction crews to note their locations when placed/removed can result in hefty fines already. Moving to near-realtime updates in a world with data communications everywhere (if not cellular, then there are already 3 different LEO satellite phone/datacom networks and Iridium has had 40 new birds launched this year alone) is a nobrainer at fairly low cost.
" there are always traffic accidents or highway construction where you can unexpectedly encounter a hand-held stop sign."
In an era of uboquitous communications systems, there's no such thing as "unexpectedly encountering" anything. Apart from warning signs which humans see, such works are notified and in transport databases as road works and therefore are transmittable to autonomous vehicles.
The "guy holding a sign" can and will in future be required to be using a transponder (wearing one plus one in the sign itself) which advertises its presence to autonomous vehicles - it'll be a part of his safety kit like HiVis and a walkie-talkie.
A car "unexpectedly" encountering any kind of road hazard (eg, cows on the road) can be counted on to immediately upload that hazard to online databases. The next car won't be surprised - and the first car has good enough night vision + reactions to actually stop before it hits the animals.
Virtually _all_ road crashes and incidents are caused by human driver failure.
Virtually _all_ of what's left is caused by "road engineering failure" - ie, poor placement of lines or signs, causing confusion. These show up as statistical black spots. - this is also a human failure and is frequently made worse by traffic engineers refusing to acknowledge they screwed up (there's a layer of politics and liability evasion in that too.
A vanishingly small number are actual "honest to goodness" accidents (mechanical or roading failure, or things like a cow on the road, or a tree falling in the carriageway)
Interestingly, it usually takes at least 2 serious (usually 3 or more) errors to cause a crash, even when only a single vehicle is involved. Our road rules have huge safety margins in them because of the fallibility and unreliability of human drivers.
Getting humans out of the control loop will be one of the biggest steps in road transportation safety ever done. We simply are not equipped to handle anything that happens at faster than walking speed and everything we do when driving is necessarily an approximation because of it.
A stop sign is defined by its size, shape and colour. (Hexagonal and red), which is the same virtually everywhere in the world, but the word stop is not.
Similarly, all other road signs have legal definitions of size, shape, colour, border colours, reflectivity and artwork.
Fooling a general purpose recognition algorithm is one thing, but there are enough cues in the sign's shape and size to hand off to specific "regulatory/advisory signs" routines in the first instance and generate an exception report for signs which appear "odd" (a robo version of "fixmystreet.com")
if anything I'd expect vandalised signs (or illegal/unauthorised speed limit signs - something which is happening a lot in the UK at the moment) to be reported far quicker by a robocar than by humans.
Only a reckless autonomous vehicle programmer would rely on general purpose recogntion algorithms for processing regulatory/advisory signboards. This kind of sensationalist article headline is clutching at straws, whilst the actual autonomous vehicle researchers are shaking their heads and tutting at the idiots who believe them.
Sign vandalism is and will be a minor issue. Regulation might be needed for the display of signs which might be confused with regulatory signage - but unsurprisingly this is already in place in most parts of the world because they fool human drivers too and have been known to cause crashes.
"Ethnicity plays too large a role in committing the crimes in the first place."
When it comes to drug offences, they're committed in roughly equal numbers across all ethnic groups, with a higher rate in higher socioeconomic groups.
That isn't reflected _at all_ in US criminal charging and conviction rates, with high status individuals usually being able to get off with a warning or by paying their way free, whilst low status individuals are more likely to both be convicted for the same crime and get substantially higher sentences for the exact same conviction.
When it comes to other crimes, the distribution is socioeconomic with skin colour playing almost no part in it at any given socioeconomic level. The question is WHY does the USA still have functional apartheid, treat its black citizens like 3rd class people and get away with it?
"Automated cars have already shown that they are very poor at dealing with humans when they do unexpected things."
Actually, they've been coping quite well with this (like making illegal turns in front of the robocar), whilst I can show you any number of human drivers who can't even cope with having to pass an opposing car on a narrow country lane because they're pathologically unaware of the width of their vehicle and refuse to proceed unless they have 6 feet clearance on either side.
Unlike humans, who need to be individually taught to recognise each new hazard, you only need to teach one AI and that programming can be shared to all of them almost instantly.
A robocar doesn't need to be perfect, just better than most humans are (most of the time), all of the time.
That isn't a particularly hard threshold to hit. Most humans make 2-5 driving errors PER MINUTE (lapsed concentration, tunnel vision, fixation, flat-out rulebreaking, etc etc) and they aren't looking in all directions at once _AND_ humans can only cope with a couple of simultaneous hazards at once. (EG, watching the wobbly cyclist in front of you along a lane of cars at a shopping area where car doors are opening and cars are pulling out may result in completely missing the pedestrian who just stepped out onto a crossing in front of you)
Insurance companies will drive robocar adoption. It's already been noted that robocars have lower incident rates than humans _AND_ they don't trigger incidents like some humans do ("I've never had a crash but I've seen plenty as people try to pass me", etc). When this trend is played out in statistically large numbers you'll see insurance premiums for manual driving skyrocket _AND_ insurance companies start to demand that drivers pass more stringent tests, more regularly - which will trickle into government requirements for driving licenses becoming both more stringent and with regular retests (this is already happening in europe anyway.)
Robocars will rapidly penetrate the professional driving fields, leading to lower taxi fares (the most expensive part of a hire vehicle is the driver) and once these become lower than the standing costs of keeping a car, you'll see a radpid dropoff in personal vehicle ownership. This is already happening in urban areas, with many urban dwellers not bothering to get driving licenses because they don't need them. Expect it to spread to towns and suburban areas too. Busses are likely to disappear thanks to the road damage they do, coupled with the high operating costs out of peak periods, being replaced with 6-8 seat transport (this is about the optimum size) which may entrain during peaks.
Removing human drivers is likely to virtually eliminate traffic jams, because the single biggest CAUSE of traffic jams is impatient drivers following too closely (phantom jams on freeways disspate within minutes if only 10% of drivers adopt legal following distances) or trying to queue jump, not clear intersections, etc etc.
Reducing car ownership is likely to be coupled with lower urban speed limits, but paradoxically we're likely to see transport speedups as traffic will be freer flowing (the journey average speed in central London is under 10mph and outside the central part it's still less than 20mph).
Parking problems will virtually disappear - both because of fewer cars competing for parking and because if parking is too expensive in any given area, personally-owned transports can be ordered to go park somewhere cheaper. Governments which have large parts of their income geared around parking income should be preparing for this (In the UK it's illegal for councils to use parking/fines income (on or offstreet) for general revenue, but many launder it in ways so that they can - Westminster being the stellar example of "a parking company with a local government attached"
Signs are there for hoomans. Transports will note them, but already ubiquitous communications nets mean that changed limits will be flooded across an area quickly - and to counter
Yes, but in a real world situation, when you moved your head the illusion would be shattered.
In the real world, images aren't static. They move or you move - illusions created by arrangements of 3D objects transposed into a 2D field are relatively easy to make, but in a 3D world they only exist when you're lined up "just so"
The real test of renewables is when they're called upon to replace not just current electricity production (only 30% of carbon emissions), but also for increased electrical demands as direct carbon sources are re[;aced with electrical ones (eg, gas heating systems, more-electric transportation, etc)
Right now, renewables can just about replace all carbon sources on a good day with low power demands, In the future they may be able to replace all carbon-sourced generation 24*7*365 - but replacing other carbon-emitting energy sources with electrical capacity is going to see a 6-8 fold increase in demand and there is no way they could achieve that even with 100% efficiencies. (There are safety aspects to consider, given windmill blades have been known to fly over a mile when they break - and they do break, there are environmental aspects to solar PV manufacture, plus the generation in high latitudes in winter isn't worthwhile, plus electricity can only be economically transported over grids for about 1500 miles before you run into practical and economic limitations - ideally you only want a maximum 2-500 miles between source and load)
Renewables are a stepping stone. The future is nuclear by necessity - and once you have "enough" nuclear to be able to supply the grid and load follow (the french load follow with nukes already), you no longer need the renewables as they cost more than nuclear sources.
Water-moderated nuke plants are 300,000 times safer than coal, but molten salt tech would be a few thousand times safer than that and reduces waste at output by 99%, waste at input by 90% and energy waste in fuel enrichment/refining by 99% to boot.
Fusion might be economic one day, but not in our grandchildren's lifespans and likely not in their grandchildren's lifespans.
It should be noted that China is the largest renewables market in the world - but they're also engaging in a massive program of building (conventional) nuclear energy plants AND ploughing billions into nuclear research, with a heavy emphasis on molten salt technologies.
Alvin Weinberg would be pleased that his research is being used 45 years after Nixon killed off the USA molten salt program, which was opposed by US vested interests primarily because it was good at producing heat for energy, but lousy at producing bomb-grade plutonium.
The REAL problem with radiation is an utterly irrational approach to "it" and panicmongering groups with various vested interests which refuse to acknowledge the statistical realities. We have been treated to a kneejerk "all radiation bad" mantra for decades, or even worse "natural radiation is ok but all manmade radiation bad" mantra (there's no difference in the ionising effects at any given energy level.)
High levels of radiation die down quickly.
The vast majority of high level radiation from nuclear waste is from caesium. This has a relatively short half life, such that high level nuclear waste is safe to physically handle in about 300 years.
At that point what you have is trace levels of caesium and some strontium, plus a bit of plutonium and a lot of U238. This can be re-refined and reused (more worryingly, it is trivially stolen, because the radiation levels are low enough to be safely handleable)
Isolating for 10k years for radiation reasons is just plain silly. The chemical toxicity of plutonium and uranium are another matter, but that's essentially "forever" in any case.
Bear in mind that the entire high level waste output from a 800MWe nuclear light water-moderated reactor over its 60 year period is about enough to comfortably fit in an olympic size swimming pool - which is more or less what it's held in. The best way to treat it if you aren't reusing in a molten salt reactor is to leave it in there for 3 centuries as water is the best moderating mechanism available (modulo corrosion issues, but those can be mitigated with appropriate approaches), then tossed back into a nuclear reactor.
In the case of a light meltdown (fukushima, etc) where only a few radioactives escape, they can be detected and collected (unlike chemical toxins) and they'll break down over time, unlike many (heavy metal) chemical toxins.
It doesn't help that there's absolute panicmongering about radioactivity. It's clear from studies at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and of areas with naturally high radiation levels (granite or altitude - many areas are naturally far more radioactive that Fukushima ever was), as well as 60 years of high altitude aircrew (who are exposed to the highest occupational radiation levels of any population - only exceeded by the radiation levels encountered by smokers), that exposure is far more complex than "no safe minimum dose" and further that there's a clear threshold dose below which things don't seem to matter at all.
Correlation is not causation.
Once upon a time there was a clearly noticeable spike in skin cancers being suffered by office workers. This was shortly after the widespread introduction of flourescent lighting and as these give off ultraviolet light and as ultraviolet light is known to cause skin cancers, these lights were blamed as the logical source for the cancers, but the odd thing that was noticed by researchers as time went on was that many skin cancers were appearing in regions of the body which were not exposed to the lighting - and more importantly the UV wavelengths of these lights don't usually trigger skin cancers of the types seen. Deeper research showed that these were the kinds of body areas exposed by sunbathing - and the actual link was that office workers were increasingly having more leisure time and more income, so were able to afford to take more holidays where they could lay about on beaches - where prolonged exposure to high energy UVB and UVC in sunlight due to inadequate sunscreen formulations turned out to be the actual culprit (there were also some cancers traced to the sunscreen compounds themselves!)
In another case, at Oxford university: Cancer clusters were noticed for staff in offices which were the former laboratories used by Rutherford and other nuclear researchers. This was worrying as they'd been deep cleaned and swept thoroughly for any radioactives before renovation. They were swept again and no radiation sources located. Even the air ducts and water pipes were checked in case it was coming from somewher
"They havn't programmed in a silly algorithm yet. "
The other point of note is that the classifier doesn't do the machine equivalent of turning its head to verify the image.
Note that the tabby in the first example was correctly classified when the image was rotated.
I see this a lot when tracking social messaging scammers. The "clever" ones mirror or slightly rotate stolen images that the classifier knows about, so that a well-known photo of Brianna Lee becomes something completely new to the classifier. (the fun part is then matching/tracking the altered images and seeing which groups of scammers are using them, as that allows you to see the connection paths between them)
The short answer is that the image classifier is trivially defeatable and has been for a while. This isn't news. The newsworthy part is fooling it into misclassifying an image as something completely different - and that would be solved in large part by running the image through more angles/transformations.
Google/Tineye/Facebook and others could do better. IF they chose to.