The truck issue is primarily just on roads that are only two-lanes in each direction, such as that long I-5 stretch between SF and LA.

There are a number of issues in LA that are plainly obvious to any daily driver---including [as your point out] huge numbers of people not keeping to the right as they should. in many cases I find it's more common that people are passing on the right than the other way around. Not fun in 5+ lanes of traffic.

More rigorous enforcement of current rules (and perhaps fixing issues like the multiple drivers I see every night with no head/tail lights, or those crossing double solid lines to switch in/out of the carpool lane---a constant source of near-misses) would certainly help the situation.

No one ever seems to want to actually use the rules we have rather than adding to the complexity with more poorly thought-out rules. It's sad.

You're clearly not an antenna engineer. From the way you talk, I think probably not even an RF engineer. You do sound a lot like comm engineers I know that seem to think that everything is done with SDRs and the antennas are just trivial things to be purchased, though.

If indeed you actually do make a living doing this (as you claim), you need to catch up with the state of the art... because you clearly don't understand what's going on here.

The main idea is that it's a reconfigurable surface---you can change the properties of the antenna radiation by low-power electrical control of the surface itself (as opposed to a pile of power-hungry phased-array elements), and you can independently control aspects of the wave that are difficult to control without a substantial phased array. Really, it's an incremental improvement on our ability to shape EM waves however we like.

It's not particularly directional--size does matter for that. Instead, their security claim is about being able to radiate in such a way that the antenna pattern sidelobes [which are a typical attack vector for an eavesdropper] don't actually contain the same signal as in the direction of the intended recipient.

There are actually useful advances in antenna engineering here that are things you can't just do in software.

Of course! ... But beamforming antennas at frequencies that low would be _extremely_ large, so you probably wouldn't want it!

(Additionally, atmospheric propagation at those frequencies is very different than in the GHz or THz, so it would be less useful to you, anyway.)

These types of antennas typically have narrow bandwidths. That's fine for some applications, but not others. In general, antennas can be scaled to a wide range of different "center frequencies", but you care about the bandwidth a lot depending on your application. (There's a relationship between your maximum data transfer rate and the frequency range over which you need to be able to operate.)

I just skimmed the paper, but it looks like they're showing modulation on the order of a half-dozen megahertz of bandwidth. That's very narrow, but it's also impressive considering the degree of [independent] control they're claiming. Note that the researchers themselves aren't heralding this as the most amazing thing ever---in fact, they don't even mention 6G in the paper (even though this type of technology is fundamentally important in both 5G and 5G). This is an interesting advance, but it's the marketing people that are making it sound ground-breaking, as is often the case.

You still need an RF signal to drive it (since it's just an antenna), even if it could somehow be very wideband. As it stands right now, the frequency range of that signal source is the main thing the FCC would be angry about, but that's separate from the antenna.

You don't _need_ multiple antennas to do beamforming, you just need a region of space over which you control the EM field. That's most often accomplished with multiple antennas, but you can also do it in other ways, including the sort of metasurface leaky-wave approach they're using in this paper.

As for security, if you look at the actual paper, that's more of an afterthought. Somebody on here commented that beamforming doesn't get you security, and that's partially true. However, what they're claiming here is that, due to the ability to send beams with different modulation in different directions (which is something you can't typically do easily without separate arrays), they can reduce an eavesdropping attacker's ability to listen through antenna sidelobes since the signal they'd receive there isn't the same as at the intended receiver's location. This as least means that the eavesdropper has to be located "near" the intended direction of the receiver, which often isn't the case.

And that worked out so well for Hong Kong.

A similar serious issue with financial credit scores, though, is that they are in fact quite opaque.

Both systems need to have transparency into the way the score is derived in order to be of any use whatsoever.

Oh, and avoiding having the system controlled by an autocratic ruler is usually a good thing, too.

I guess the fundamental difference here is that I believe a person does not have a right to be offended over something that has no basis in reality. It may be "understandable" but certainly not "rightful".

Glad we agree about the political aspect at least. Cheers.

There's absolutely nothing "rightful" or "understandable" when that government never actually controlled the territory in question.

If that ruler wants to be delusional, that's his problem. Not everyone else's.

Indeed. With these black-box credit agencies, how would any of us ever even know if there was a "wrong score" issued for us? We don't have any standard against which to compare. Regulators need to force credit agencies to have full transparency about how scores are calculated.

It would be nice if they wrote bills that contained only one major issue so the nuances were easier to debate and understand.

I think you're mistaking someone sharing some opinions with right-wing extremists with someone actually being a right-wing extremist. I could make a similar [bad] argument for people that share some ideas with the radical left. In both cases, sharing some opinions is not a sufficient reason to attack them as belonging to a particular group.

Free speech used to be a core component of democratic societies. It scares me to see people grouping anyone supporting actual free speech with extremists plotting insurrections. Please try to regain some sense of perspective.

Maybe you have a specific example of Musk censoring left-wing opinions while claiming to support free speech? I haven't seen that anywhere.

Nah, I'm fine, thanks. I just think you're acting like a petulant child. But, by all means, carry on.

Actually, you dragged partisan politics into the conversation... and got modded up for it. You weren't even arguing about the same issue, but then tried to make it seem as though you "won" the argument.
Not really very impressive.