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Comment Re:The important thing (Score 1) 132

This particular study didn't seem to ask the question of whether or not the 'contamination' actually matters. Does it hurt or does it help? I for one like having an immune system and living in a bacteria free house is not going to help.

Very good question!

I remember in the 70's and early 80's it was common practice to have carpets with a special cut-out shape to fit the toilet base and sometimes even synthetic fur on the outside of the lid. This was obviously a trap for bacteria and particles. Another time with other rules.

I feel no nostalgia for this overuse of carpeting in the wrong places, but fact is that we had no worse health, maybe even better health than nowadays. Possibly related to sane exposure to bacteria overall.

Submission + - As solar capacity grows, duck curves are getting deeper in California (renewableenergyworld.com)

AmiMoJo writes: As solar capacity in California continues to grow, the midday dip in net load (or duck curve) is getting lower, presenting both economic and grid stress challenges for grid operators, according to the California Independent System Operator (CAISO).

The duck curve presents two challenges related to increasing solar energy adoption. The first challenge is grid stress. The extreme swing in demand for electricity from conventional power plants from midday to late evenings, when energy demand is still high but solar generation has dropped off, means that conventional power must quickly ramp up electricity production to meet consumer demand.

That rapid ramp up makes it more difficult for grid operators to match grid supply with grid demand in real time. In addition, if more solar power is produced than the grid can use, operators might have to curtail solar power to prevent overgeneration.

The other challenge is economic. The dynamics of the duck curve can challenge the traditional economics of dispatchable power plants because the factors contributing to the curve reduce the amount of time a conventional power plant operates, which results in reduced energy revenues.

Comment Wanted for the whole World (Score 3, Interesting) 56

The EFF probably has not enough volunteers and funding to expand this to the whole World. Although it would be very useful and appreciated as surveillance is not specific to the USA.

Even in Europe those tight privacy policies are under constant attack and evaporate like snow in a sunny spring day.

France's government passed laws to allow AI-assisted facial recognition to be used massively "because" of Paris Olympics. And these are likely to stay after the Olympics. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

Comment Re:Not true... PV and battery revolution.. (Score 0) 426

EVs pollute more nano particles because of more weight and subsequent tire wear.
EVs batteries production and disposal is highly pollutant and they need replacement before the vehicle end of life. This can potentially shorten the whole vehicle affordable lifespan.
EVs uses a lot of online computerized, monitoring, maintenance and upgrades. Support and online computer tech create a very short term obsolescence. This also greatly impairs the second-hand market and sharply shorten vehicle life.

A lot of people uses 15-25 years old vehicles. It is clear that there will be no affordable, still supported 20+YO EVs which rely on battery replacement, online computer systems and working/responsive servers to support all tech and software.

I predict that most EV sold today will be junk by 10-15 years. And this is one big nasty waste and pollution source.

I also predict that we will deal with more critical problems than EVs mobility in the near future. EVs will be the least of our concern when we will be battling for water, food, energy or just our lives and the already growing world-wide wars, revolts and oppressive governments trying to mitigate those while protecting the happy few privileged super riches from the growing mess.

Submission + - OpenAI Suspends Developer Behind Dean Phillips Bot

theodp writes: OpenAI has banned the developer of a bot that mimicked Democratic White House hopeful Rep. Dean Phillips, the first known instance where the maker of ChatGPT has restricted the use of artificial intelligence in political campaigns. OpenAI suspended the account of the start-up Delphi, which had been contracted to build Dean.Bot, which could talk to voters in real-time via a website.

"Anyone who builds with our tools must follow our usage policies," a spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement shared with Axios on Sunday. "We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent." OpenAI apparently is not a fan of Richard Stallman's 'freedom 0' tenet, which argues software users should have the freedom to run programs as they wish, in order to do what they wish (Stallman is careful to note this freedom doesn't make one exempt from laws).

The suspension and subsequent bot removal occurred ahead of Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, where Phillips continues his long-shot presidential bid against President Biden.

Comment The real concern is unrestricted access to sensors (Score 2) 11

This convoluted proof of concept with the light sensor is not the real issue.

The real issue is that the web or 3rd-party via App can acquire data from a device without device user or owner explicit consent and interaction.

Usually acquiring keyboard, mouse or screen touch data require specific focus on the application in a defined domain like window focus. And unless user explicitly perform actions on these devices on focus to the application, there is no possible background data acquisition.
Even the display device has a defined domain. Application cannot draw outside window or area they registered their own.
Even acquisition of device characteristics shall require user consent. Website have no legitimate business known the screen size, pixel ratio and other characteristic without user consent. Knowing available draw area or window size is ok, but physical size and resolution is not without consent.

Submission + - Hertz rental selling EVs to buy gas powered instead (cnn.com)

quonset writes: Hertz rental has announced they are selling off one third of their 20,000 electric vehicle fleet and replacing them with gas powered vehicles. The reason? It's costing them too much to repair damaged EVs and their deprecitation is hurting the bottom line.

“[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle,” Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call.

Hertz expects to take a loss of about $245 million due to depreciation on the EVs, an average of about $12,250, per vehicle the company said in an SEC filing.

While Hertz isn’t directly pointing a finger, it appears that Tesla has been largely to blame.

Tesla makes up about 80% of Hertz’s EV fleet, and, altogether, EVs make up about 11% of Hertz’s total rental fleet. Tesla has been aggressively cutting its vehicle prices leading other automakers to do the same for their electric vehicles. When automakers reduce the prices of new vehicles, that pushes down the value of those models in the used car market, causing rapid depreciation.

Comment Next challenge (Score 1) 30

Now that someone made a wholly transparent screen. Lets add new features that would make it more useful:

Challenging but possibly useful:
* Add per-pixel alpha-channel control so the screen has variable transparency so that the screen can be selectively become opaque.
* Add per-pixel RGB filtering control, so that it can be seen by incoming light, (like classic LCD panels without backlight)

Now with that, it could become a useful HUD panel. No need to replace the windshield. It would work as sun screen, work in plain daylight as well as during night without blinding.

Anyway, the usefulness of such a screen is really questionable in its current state and current period. Lets try to revisit this in a few decades if we don't have more important problems to solve by that time.

Comment Woah! and so what? (Score 1) 30

It is sure an attraction.

As for car windshield, possibly for luxury cars. Otherwise, who need their windshield replacement to cost even more than plain film-layered glass?

Car insurance prices are already skyrocketing with electric cars.

Driving assistance or autonomous driving or you know, that thing called mass transit systems is what future generation will need, because having individuals moving in personal vehicle weighting tons and needing mating huge amount of Watt to move is not sustainable at all.

This screen is a nice demo and that's it.

Comment Re:I am not... (Score 1) 34

This no way this demo was played on a legacy Apple II. The sound at least seems to be handled by one of C64's Audio controller.
The Apple II only had a CPU driven flip-flop, at best you could do square wave and if you were clever you'd be able to run two counters and produce duo tones like with the Electric Duet sequencer.

In 1986 I was able to code a proof of concept text scrolling in a sine form. A lot of it was flattened pre-mapped STA ADDR.x with a specially designed font to be always aligned on a 7 pixels boundary. The text scrolled on a VSYNC 7 pixels at a time (a whole octet in the graphic memory 8192 area). So it was very smooth, but required at least a IIe as the plain II or II+ did not have this VBL mapped at a memory address.

Comment Re:Safety rules where violated (Score 1) 86

The problem is well, it's South Korea. Granted it's a fairly prosperous country, but well, safety standards aren't really where they are with western nations. That an labor standards.

I get your point but I think it is a quite misplace presumption. Even so-called Western Countries have good amount of reports for fatal or critical work-environment related incidents. Often this can be summed-up as down the responsibility chain, someone cut corners to save cost, time or both and "those spurious security margins and procedures" that looks overkill or in the way of rushed maintenance are just ignored. South Korea has all the technology and procedures one can have in other countries.

There are also some possible bias elsewhere, as most western countries have decades of decreased industry, so much less occasions of industrial incidents.

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