"ANYONE can sit and take notes on your movements and locations."
They can, however under California's GDPR laws - as with Europe's - they must have your explicit written permission to sell that information to 3rd parties - and those 3rd parties must have explicit written permission to sell it to 4rd parties. etc.
Permission is not fungible and as with Europe, long-arm statute provisions mean that trading the information gained in California outside of California is not a way of performing an end run around the legal requirements.
I'm waiting for this same law to be used against Linkedin - who despite GDPR laws in europe, haven't stopped their spamming.
Under CA's GDPR you have a good case against them as illegal merchandising of your PII.
It will be interesting to see how the marketroids react to this threat to their income stream - and quite frankly the death of 1,000,000 papercuts is more terrifying to them than taking on a state entity or the ACLU.
"California seems highly permissive and tolerant of illegals"
California (and a number of other states) used to be part of Mexico until it was forcibly taken by the USA in a war that Mexico didn't start. It was Mexican for a LOT longer than it's been part of the USA and it has a widespread Mexican heritage.
Bear that in mind when you start talking about "illegal migrants". There's a prevailing view amongst many that the label should be applied to the WASPs.
"there are plenty of stories of legal aliens being arrested and detained for months because they're mistaken as illegals."
There are also instances of _native born_ citizens being arrested and even deported because they're mistaken as illegals.
There are also at least 2 cases of ICE having detained and separated children from _citizen_ families that are currently winding their way through the federal court system and it's not working out well for ICE, with repeated rulings of contempt being entered against them (then again, no ICE officials are being jailed for contempt, which is what actually needs to happen in order to wake them up)
This kind of stuff has echoes of another country in the 1930s up to the point where the judiciary got purged.
At that point law enforcement can request the footage - and will need to, in order to trace paths and see _which_ vehicles are involved (if any, the perp may have arrived/left on foot) and what the registrations are. Only then do they have cause to lookup the registration.
"Collect the usual suspects" is fine if you live in a stratified, biased plutocracy with an aggressive paramiltary police force working on the presumption that "XYZ done it" before they even set foot out of the police station door, don't actually care about catching the actual perpetrator and are prone to doling out extrajudicial executions like some south american shithole of old. But then again if you live in the USA the evidence is increasingly clear that's exactly the kind of society that you do live in, just with a slightly shinier veneer than most.
GDPR-using countries have repeatedly ruled that license plates are personally identifying information.
California now has its own version of GDPR.
A quick summary of the rules is that PII-type data is only used for purposes relevant to the business operation, is not retained longer than necessary and is NOT passed to 3rd parties without explicit _written_ consent - signs at the parking entrance don't cut it.
I kept running into problematic non-secured systems in the 1990s which turned out to be on military or other sensitive sites
In one case script kiddies had taken up residence on a NASA computer which was being used for command/control of the original Mars pathfinder/soujurner rover.
Back then, DISA was pretty good about getting them fixed when notified, but they didn't scan for them.
NASA learned from the soujourner (and a couple of other) experiences and now has pretty good security practices, including preemptive scanning for vulnerabilities inside their networks.
Fast forward 20+ years and the same problems keep cropping up with minor variations in the US MIlitary network - and DISA _STILL_ isn't scanning for anything, on top of that, they stopped being approachable by 3rd parties about problems not long after 9/11 (which has made reporting detected infestations nearly impossible)
Coal is being shut down for a number of reasons - gas plants are substantially cheaper to run, cheap coal is mostly gone and in some cases (germany's extremely dirty lignite stations) the coal resources are entirely gone.
Coal and (PWR/BWR) nuclear plants are baseline generators. You can load follow a little bit (France does this about 20% with its nukes) but the idea of using them for peaking plant is sheer folly. (MSRs have a great deal of thermal buffering and can't overheat, plus are immune to neutron poisoning, so they can peak follow to a much greater extent)
Battery-backing a coal plant to cover offpeak output when not enough is being consumed is possible but probably not economic.
On the other hand, from direct experience of living in cities such as Yangon where the problem isn't generation capacity, but carrying capacity of the distribution grid (this is a common problem in SE Asia), a battery farm could be used to flatten the peaks and lift the dips, and thus avoid rolling blackouts. The problem is that people would simply increase their consumption until the blackouts resumed.
As a RF technician in the early-mid 1980s I found the same thing. The stuff I was doing with my work was far in advance of what hams were doing - apart from the packet radio contingent, the vast majority were hiding from the march of technology, not leading it. As such I didn't have much to do with them.
" Currently cheap LIDAR sucks. 4 beams. Useless. "
The issue of "X sucks, useless" is about how they're used, not what they're capable of.
If output from N cheap LIDAR units can be stitched together to provide the same coverage as a unit costing more than N units, then the tradeoff is worthwhile - furthermore, it gives better depth perception. and those expensive units are somewhat vulnerable + mechanically complex, which is not a good thing in an automotive environment.
It's a good idea to read "Superiority" by Arthur C Clarke.
"The number of cars on the road may increase, but the number of cars in the heavily trafficked direction will not."
More interestingly the number of cars PARKED in the heavily targetted direction will decline dramatically and outfits which profit from parking will rapidly find their income stream being kneecapped as vehicles either stay working through the day or park in lower-charging areas.
This will result in less-cluttered, more pedestrian-friendly streets in most european cities.
"Actually, several studies have shown that having as few as 30% of the vehicles on the road being autonomous will have a "moderating" influence on traffic patterns."
Not that surprising: At around 10% of human drivers maintaining 2 second following distances, freeway snarlups evaporate in less than 5 minutes.
IE: the best thing to do when you encounter one is to ensure your following distance is adequate.and _DON'T_ let the asshole tailgating you force you to close that gap.
"Mainly AVs need some good cameras to the sides to spot deer. That said even a human driver is in peril when it's dark or foggy and there are deer near the road."
My suspicion is that robodrivers will handle this better than humans.
"You know, with the stupid shit I see on a daily basis while driving, I've begun thinking about buying a dashcam... because if any of those idiots causes an accident I want some proof of their stupidity."
I have a dashcam because if any of those twats crash into ME, without one it's their word against mine and the insurance companies aren't going to give mine any more weight than his.
"the common trick of undercover traffic officers sitting in the center lane doing 10 under, intentionally annoying traffic, and then speeding up to the limit as someone tried to underpass them, to push that person faster, and then give them a double ticket for both underpassing and speeding. Its quite a common trick around here."
That kind of stunt is police corruption at its finest and _should_ be something that the ACLU would be happy to drop a ton of shit on from a great height if someone had dashcam evidence of it.
" Folks here sometimes draw police attention for going slow in the fast lane."
"sometimes" should be "ALWAYS" - it's one of the most dangerous things that anyone can do on a multilane road because it forces every other driver to go around them.
"If you're going less than the speed limit you should probably move over to an appropriate lane to let past people who are doing the speed limit. "
Actually, it's:
"You MUST keep right unless passing" (for right side driving countries, Keep left unless passing for left side driving countries)
Depending on the jurisdiction, lane hogging can get you anything from a "lanehogging" ticket, "failure to keep left/right", careless driving, all the way up to dangerous driving, depending on how much of a mobile hazard you are. Speed spread is the most dangerous phenomenon on the road and slow drivers travelling 10-15mph below the limit are _far_ more dangerous than ones travelling 10-15mph above the limit when on single carriageway roads or failing to stay in the rightmost(leftmost) lane.
"The problem is specific to Australia. The article questions "why" over and over again"
It's not specific to Australia. It happens in Europe, the USA and the UK too.
The Australian socket is virtually identical to a 1920s US 230V socket and they use NEMA box dimensions. Europe uses 86mm boxes. The fun starts when wall warts and other things all use oddball dimensions which step outside the 65mm that's allowed for a plug body and cable and the solution is to use wider socket spacing.
As for wall warts - if you need to use a bunch of them, then it's time to look at using a larger PSU. It's usually more efficient.
"I just can't understand why so many people on Slashdot seem to be obsessed with nuclear despite the alternatives."
Simple:
With the absolute best will in the world, Renewables can almost replace existing carbon emitting electric power generation capacity. There are limits on the distances that it can be transmitted, so paving deserts isn't practical (and in any case the usual proposals smack of neocolonialism and subjugation of the people who actually OWN those areas)
The problem is that electricity generation only accounts for 25-35% of carbon emissions worldwide.
In order to cater for increases in electricity demand resulting from reducing/eliminating carbon emissions from transportation, heatng, industrial processes, etc etc, electrical generation capacity is going to need to increase by a factor of between 6-8
See the first point.
Nuclear is the only way we can make up the difference - and the current water-based reactor systems are bloody awful. They'll have to go away, but they're all we have at the moment. In any case, for all the fuss made about nuclear waste the entire waste output of a 1000MWe nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is enough to fill a single olympic size swimming pool and is safe to handle in 300 years,
Thorium-fuelled molten salt plants are viable and can break down current "waste" (input and output waste), but they'll still take 20 years to deploy.
Bans on carbon emission WILL come. The methane emissions in the Leptav sea area are spreading. We're on the brink of an oceanic food chain collapse and anoxic event. Having our oxygen level fall below 19% will be a wakeup call. Having it fall below 18% will start killing people and below 17% will cause mass dieoffs.
"OK, let's ask! How long do those batteries work before they have to turn on gas turbines to compensate? "
But that's not what the batteries are there for. The SA grid scale battery has proven invaluable for riding out glitches and brownouts of a few minutes and is specced to last long enough to bring up backup power generation from a cold start. That in turn means you don't need to have as much hot-standby on your backing systems.
Windfarms _SHOULD_ be required to have batteryfarms to buffer their output and to pay for it themselves. This kind of shit comes under "not my monkeys, not my circus" for grid operators, but they're being forced to support the massive loss-making circus of "renewables" whilst trying to keep the grid operational. In some countries (EG: the UK) wind operators are being paid substantial amounts to NOT connect to the grid.
"Nuclear availability factor for 1 year can be 98%, but for a 3 year period, it is basically never that high"
However it is still higher than other plants, particularly when it comes to _unplanned_ downtime, which is far more important than scheduled maintenance unless you have a particularly poor type of machine (a reactor is a steam generator and multiple reactors mean your turbines can be kept running regardless)
Lumping in planned vs unplanned downtime is just as pernicious as not doing it - if you do that with wind or solar then your availability factor drops even further. They need to be stated as separate line items.
PWR/BWR nuclear is a Rube-Goldberg design in any case. It was OK at small size for a submarine power plant as Alvin Weinberg designed it (and with infinite heatsinking around the vessel), but scaling it up to civilian power generation is quite frankly dangerous due to both environmental contamination risks and the engineering requirements of the pressure vessel increasing with the cube of the generation capacity. Weinberg realised that and developed Molten Salt Thorium (which is both safer and was his preferred fuel in the first place), but ended up getting shitcanned for political reasons, not technical ones. Water has played a fundamental role in every civil nuclear power accident so far (contamination of the biosphere, steam explosions ensuing from prompt criticality, hydrogen explosions from water/izrconium interaction during meltdowns - which only happen because the things were allowed to boil dry), so getting rid of the water makes technical sense.
Molten salt fuel systems don't need to be shut down for fuelling - you do need to shutdown periodically to replace the graphite moderator core of the original 1950s design but that was an experimental system and the expectation was that production ones would use a more robust moderator design. In any case, being non-pressurised makes the reactor vessel so small you can have several in the same space as a conventional system and they run much hotter, which means far greater thermal efficiency of the turbines. Corrosion due to Flibe has been raised but even in the original system it was almost non-existent after several years of operation and better hastalloys have been developed since then. Compare with PWR systems which are loaded with boric acid, pressurised and actively trying to eat their way out of their containment.
Slashdot Mirror
"ANYONE can sit and take notes on your movements and locations."
They can, however under California's GDPR laws - as with Europe's - they must have your explicit written permission to sell that information to 3rd parties - and those 3rd parties must have explicit written permission to sell it to 4rd parties. etc.
Permission is not fungible and as with Europe, long-arm statute provisions mean that trading the information gained in California outside of California is not a way of performing an end run around the legal requirements.
I'm waiting for this same law to be used against Linkedin - who despite GDPR laws in europe, haven't stopped their spamming.
Under CA's GDPR you have a good case against them as illegal merchandising of your PII.
It will be interesting to see how the marketroids react to this threat to their income stream - and quite frankly the death of 1,000,000 papercuts is more terrifying to them than taking on a state entity or the ACLU.
"California seems highly permissive and tolerant of illegals"
California (and a number of other states) used to be part of Mexico until it was forcibly taken by the USA in a war that Mexico didn't start. It was Mexican for a LOT longer than it's been part of the USA and it has a widespread Mexican heritage.
Bear that in mind when you start talking about "illegal migrants". There's a prevailing view amongst many that the label should be applied to the WASPs.
"there are plenty of stories of legal aliens being arrested and detained for months because they're mistaken as illegals."
There are also instances of _native born_ citizens being arrested and even deported because they're mistaken as illegals.
There are also at least 2 cases of ICE having detained and separated children from _citizen_ families that are currently winding their way through the federal court system and it's not working out well for ICE, with repeated rulings of contempt being entered against them (then again, no ICE officials are being jailed for contempt, which is what actually needs to happen in order to wake them up)
This kind of stuff has echoes of another country in the 1930s up to the point where the judiciary got purged.
"Basic response [imgur.com] from any US company to the GPDR folks"
Except that California (as of about 10 days ago) now has a GDPR law too.
Straw man.
At that point law enforcement can request the footage - and will need to, in order to trace paths and see _which_ vehicles are involved (if any, the perp may have arrived/left on foot) and what the registrations are. Only then do they have cause to lookup the registration.
"Collect the usual suspects" is fine if you live in a stratified, biased plutocracy with an aggressive paramiltary police force working on the presumption that "XYZ done it" before they even set foot out of the police station door, don't actually care about catching the actual perpetrator and are prone to doling out extrajudicial executions like some south american shithole of old. But then again if you live in the USA the evidence is increasingly clear that's exactly the kind of society that you do live in, just with a slightly shinier veneer than most.
GDPR-using countries have repeatedly ruled that license plates are personally identifying information.
California now has its own version of GDPR.
A quick summary of the rules is that PII-type data is only used for purposes relevant to the business operation, is not retained longer than necessary and is NOT passed to 3rd parties without explicit _written_ consent - signs at the parking entrance don't cut it.
Who wants to buy some popcorn shares?
I kept running into problematic non-secured systems in the 1990s which turned out to be on military or other sensitive sites
In one case script kiddies had taken up residence on a NASA computer which was being used for command/control of the original Mars pathfinder/soujurner rover.
Back then, DISA was pretty good about getting them fixed when notified, but they didn't scan for them.
NASA learned from the soujourner (and a couple of other) experiences and now has pretty good security practices, including preemptive scanning for vulnerabilities inside their networks.
Fast forward 20+ years and the same problems keep cropping up with minor variations in the US MIlitary network - and DISA _STILL_ isn't scanning for anything, on top of that, they stopped being approachable by 3rd parties about problems not long after 9/11 (which has made reporting detected infestations nearly impossible)
"Incompetent people washed out of school. Only 10% of us made it all the way through, both times."
That was then, this is now.
In northern parts of Europe such as Finland, DST is a 2 hour jump.
Some southern countries don't bother with it at all.
Coal is being shut down for a number of reasons - gas plants are substantially cheaper to run, cheap coal is mostly gone and in some cases (germany's extremely dirty lignite stations) the coal resources are entirely gone.
Coal and (PWR/BWR) nuclear plants are baseline generators. You can load follow a little bit (France does this about 20% with its nukes) but the idea of using them for peaking plant is sheer folly. (MSRs have a great deal of thermal buffering and can't overheat, plus are immune to neutron poisoning, so they can peak follow to a much greater extent)
Battery-backing a coal plant to cover offpeak output when not enough is being consumed is possible but probably not economic.
On the other hand, from direct experience of living in cities such as Yangon where the problem isn't generation capacity, but carrying capacity of the distribution grid (this is a common problem in SE Asia), a battery farm could be used to flatten the peaks and lift the dips, and thus avoid rolling blackouts. The problem is that people would simply increase their consumption until the blackouts resumed.
"and if they don't, they do if you just spin them."
Try doing that in France. That earth pin is problematic.
As a RF technician in the early-mid 1980s I found the same thing. The stuff I was doing with my work was far in advance of what hams were doing - apart from the packet radio contingent, the vast majority were hiding from the march of technology, not leading it. As such I didn't have much to do with them.
" Currently cheap LIDAR sucks. 4 beams. Useless. "
The issue of "X sucks, useless" is about how they're used, not what they're capable of.
If output from N cheap LIDAR units can be stitched together to provide the same coverage as a unit costing more than N units, then the tradeoff is worthwhile - furthermore, it gives better depth perception. and those expensive units are somewhat vulnerable + mechanically complex, which is not a good thing in an automotive environment.
It's a good idea to read "Superiority" by Arthur C Clarke.
"The number of cars on the road may increase, but the number of cars in the heavily trafficked direction will not."
More interestingly the number of cars PARKED in the heavily targetted direction will decline dramatically and outfits which profit from parking will rapidly find their income stream being kneecapped as vehicles either stay working through the day or park in lower-charging areas.
This will result in less-cluttered, more pedestrian-friendly streets in most european cities.
"Actually, several studies have shown that having as few as 30% of the vehicles on the road being autonomous will have a "moderating" influence on traffic patterns."
Not that surprising: At around 10% of human drivers maintaining 2 second following distances, freeway snarlups evaporate in less than 5 minutes.
IE: the best thing to do when you encounter one is to ensure your following distance is adequate.and _DON'T_ let the asshole tailgating you force you to close that gap.
"Mainly AVs need some good cameras to the sides to spot deer. That said even a human driver is in peril when it's dark or foggy and there are deer near the road."
My suspicion is that robodrivers will handle this better than humans.
"You know, with the stupid shit I see on a daily basis while driving, I've begun thinking about buying a dashcam ... because if any of those idiots causes an accident I want some proof of their stupidity."
I have a dashcam because if any of those twats crash into ME, without one it's their word against mine and the insurance companies aren't going to give mine any more weight than his.
"the common trick of undercover traffic officers sitting in the center lane doing 10 under, intentionally annoying traffic,
and then speeding up to the limit as someone tried to underpass them, to push that person faster, and then give them a double ticket for
both underpassing and speeding. Its quite a common trick around here."
That kind of stunt is police corruption at its finest and _should_ be something that the ACLU would be happy to drop a ton of shit on from a great height if someone had dashcam evidence of it.
" Folks here sometimes draw police attention for going slow in the fast lane."
"sometimes" should be "ALWAYS" - it's one of the most dangerous things that anyone can do on a multilane road because it forces every other driver to go around them.
"If you're going less than the speed limit you should probably move over to an appropriate lane to let past people who are doing the speed limit. "
Actually, it's:
"You MUST keep right unless passing" (for right side driving countries, Keep left unless passing for left side driving countries)
Depending on the jurisdiction, lane hogging can get you anything from a "lanehogging" ticket, "failure to keep left/right", careless driving, all the way up to dangerous driving, depending on how much of a mobile hazard you are. Speed spread is the most dangerous phenomenon on the road and slow drivers travelling 10-15mph below the limit are _far_ more dangerous than ones travelling 10-15mph above the limit when on single carriageway roads or failing to stay in the rightmost(leftmost) lane.
"The problem is specific to Australia. The article questions "why" over and over again"
It's not specific to Australia. It happens in Europe, the USA and the UK too.
The Australian socket is virtually identical to a 1920s US 230V socket and they use NEMA box dimensions. Europe uses 86mm boxes. The fun starts when wall warts and other things all use oddball dimensions which step outside the 65mm that's allowed for a plug body and cable and the solution is to use wider socket spacing.
As for wall warts - if you need to use a bunch of them, then it's time to look at using a larger PSU. It's usually more efficient.
"I just can't understand why so many people on Slashdot seem to be obsessed with nuclear despite the alternatives."
Simple:
With the absolute best will in the world, Renewables can almost replace existing carbon emitting electric power generation capacity. There are limits on the distances that it can be transmitted, so paving deserts isn't practical (and in any case the usual proposals smack of neocolonialism and subjugation of the people who actually OWN those areas)
The problem is that electricity generation only accounts for 25-35% of carbon emissions worldwide.
In order to cater for increases in electricity demand resulting from reducing/eliminating carbon emissions from transportation, heatng, industrial processes, etc etc, electrical generation capacity is going to need to increase by a factor of between 6-8
See the first point.
Nuclear is the only way we can make up the difference - and the current water-based reactor systems are bloody awful. They'll have to go away, but they're all we have at the moment. In any case, for all the fuss made about nuclear waste the entire waste output of a 1000MWe nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is enough to fill a single olympic size swimming pool and is safe to handle in 300 years,
Thorium-fuelled molten salt plants are viable and can break down current "waste" (input and output waste), but they'll still take 20 years to deploy.
Bans on carbon emission WILL come. The methane emissions in the Leptav sea area are spreading. We're on the brink of an oceanic food chain collapse and anoxic event. Having our oxygen level fall below 19% will be a wakeup call. Having it fall below 18% will start killing people and below 17% will cause mass dieoffs.
"OK, let's ask! How long do those batteries work before they have to turn on gas turbines to compensate? "
But that's not what the batteries are there for. The SA grid scale battery has proven invaluable for riding out glitches and brownouts of a few minutes and is specced to last long enough to bring up backup power generation from a cold start. That in turn means you don't need to have as much hot-standby on your backing systems.
Windfarms _SHOULD_ be required to have batteryfarms to buffer their output and to pay for it themselves. This kind of shit comes under "not my monkeys, not my circus" for grid operators, but they're being forced to support the massive loss-making circus of "renewables" whilst trying to keep the grid operational. In some countries (EG: the UK) wind operators are being paid substantial amounts to NOT connect to the grid.
"Nuclear availability factor for 1 year can be 98%, but for a 3 year period, it is basically never that high"
However it is still higher than other plants, particularly when it comes to _unplanned_ downtime, which is far more important than scheduled maintenance unless you have a particularly poor type of machine (a reactor is a steam generator and multiple reactors mean your turbines can be kept running regardless)
Lumping in planned vs unplanned downtime is just as pernicious as not doing it - if you do that with wind or solar then your availability factor drops even further. They need to be stated as separate line items.
PWR/BWR nuclear is a Rube-Goldberg design in any case. It was OK at small size for a submarine power plant as Alvin Weinberg designed it (and with infinite heatsinking around the vessel), but scaling it up to civilian power generation is quite frankly dangerous due to both environmental contamination risks and the engineering requirements of the pressure vessel increasing with the cube of the generation capacity. Weinberg realised that and developed Molten Salt Thorium (which is both safer and was his preferred fuel in the first place), but ended up getting shitcanned for political reasons, not technical ones. Water has played a fundamental role in every civil nuclear power accident so far (contamination of the biosphere, steam explosions ensuing from prompt criticality, hydrogen explosions from water/izrconium interaction during meltdowns - which only happen because the things were allowed to boil dry), so getting rid of the water makes technical sense.
Molten salt fuel systems don't need to be shut down for fuelling - you do need to shutdown periodically to replace the graphite moderator core of the original 1950s design but that was an experimental system and the expectation was that production ones would use a more robust moderator design. In any case, being non-pressurised makes the reactor vessel so small you can have several in the same space as a conventional system and they run much hotter, which means far greater thermal efficiency of the turbines.
Corrosion due to Flibe has been raised but even in the original system it was almost non-existent after several years of operation and better hastalloys have been developed since then. Compare with PWR systems which are loaded with boric acid, pressurised and actively trying to eat their way out of their containment.