I find IPv6 is worse than CGNAT for these anti-bot measures. YouTube is a good example. With IPv6 enabled all I ever see is "log in to prove you are not a bot". With it disabled and sitting behind CGNAT, I can usually watch some videos.

It already has been making false positive matches. There have been several stories about people randomly accosted as they entered stores like B&M, with the security staff claiming they were criminals and often breaking the law themselves in the process.

Because the database is shared by several different chains, it's something that you can't ignore if it falsely flags you. You need to get them to remove your face from it, and ideally claim some compensation for the misuse of your biometric data. The baseline is £250, but I'd be looking for at least £750 due to the hassle and embarrassment caused.

And as usual they claim that China is only capable of stealing and copying. It's always the same mistake, and the same outcome.

It's because they think they can launch capacity faster than they can built it on Earth. Instead of dealing with local government, grid energy supply availability, water and so on, they can just launch it into orbit. It's all about being the first to deploy the compute capacity and cornering the market.

Of course it also creates lots of business for SpaceX, so a lot of it could be a Hyperloop-style scam.

Thing is they need to deal with the pollution it will create (stuff burning up on re-entry doesn't just vanish), frequency allocations for the comms, and the fact that now everyone wants their own 50,000 satellite constellation in those prime orbits.

The technical hurdles are relatively trivial in comparison.

Yeah, no naturally it was modded down. There are some real luddites around here.

Sure, but thinking further ahead, e.g. the plan for Starship is to land vertically on the moon and then lift off again. The renders they have produced show landing struts, presumably derived from the booster ones.

The Chinese lander shown off a few years ago looks to be more like the Apollo LM and planned Soviet LK, so they don't need that capability to hit their "before 2030" goal.

Presumably that's why they envision having 50,000 of them. One alone won't do much, dozens or even hundreds of them all reflecting at the same spot...

Depends, is the amount of solar it generates at night going to offset more heating than it causes?

In fact China has brought in a lot of fairly strict environmental policies in the last few decades, which often have quite dramatic effects on local industry. For example, no factories within half a kilometre of most rivers, and no discharging untreated waste into them.

Then there is the massive and frankly staggering rate at which they have adopted renewables. Hit their Paris targets 5 years early, and those were considered too ambitious to be realistic at the time.

"But China" was never a good argument, but these days it's laughable.

TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

All the EU has to do is hold its nerve until he relents.

Mamdani hasn't been in long but has already

- Froze rent for 2 million New Yorkers
- Cut subway fares in half for low-income riders
- Fully funded NYC parks
- Added $680M for public schools
- Launched free child care for 2-year-olds

All things that we were assured were impossible, would crash the economy, would bankrupt the state etc. Oh, and he balanced the budget.

Politicians absolutely can help the people they are supposed to work for. Socialism absolutely does work. It's just that it works for you, not billionaires, so they are very keen to convince that they you can't possible have it and it's all just a fantasy.

They drive themselves most of the time, and on the odd occasion when they are unsure or the passenger calls for assistance, a human can intervene. They don't drive the car directly, they just tell it if it can proceed, which route to take, that kind of thing.

It helps deal with the corner cases that are hard to engineer general solutions for.

The main difference between that and driver aid systems is that the car doesn't need immediate intervention to be safe. It will stop and call for help. Driver aids need the driver to be paying constant attention, which is why the Tesla ones result in so many injuries and fatalities.

It's mostly better. While the barge has to be a bit more complex because it has to have the lattice of ropes (it's not a net), it means that the booster doesn't have to have landing struts. That's a significant weight saving, which means less propellant needed too.

It likely also means that the system is less dependent on good weather, and better able to recover from small issues that would tip self supporting boosters over. IIRC the Blue Origin system actually welds itself to the deck when it lands to help with that, which obviously makes the legs disposable.

The only real downside is that it does require that barge to land, so to land on the moon you would need to first land a landing station. That won't be an issue for the first manned trips, and longer term it may have advantages because the vehicle's engine can be shut off at higher altitude and kick up less regolith.

Exciting times and another technique added to the list of options. We will see which becomes the preferred one, but competition in this area is going to be good for getting costs down.

Citation needed.

Google doesn't even have self-driving cars. Maybe you're thinking about Waymo (which is part of Alphabet, not Google).

Regardless, no, to the best of my understanding, they cannot be driven remotely at all, at least by any normal person's definition of the word "drive". When intervention is required, the remote operators get a dump of camera images to review, and then they draw a proposed path on a map. The car then tries to follow it, and aborts if doing so would result in hitting anything. This may have to be done more than once to get it out of the problem situation. When the vehicle says that it is comfortable proceeding on its own, the remote operator tells it to go ahead, and it takes over path planning again.

At no point is any remote operator in direct control over the vehicle. All they can do is propose an alternative path when the vehicle's path planner gets stuck trying to figure out how to safely extricate itself from some situation. At all times, the vehicle's software is the driver. The remote operator is just hinting that it should go to the left of safety cone A, to the right of cone B, etc. (or whatever the situation happens to be). This is why it takes so long to extricate a stuck car. If there were an actual remote driver that could take real-time control, it would take just a few seconds.

From what I've read, when a Waymo car sees emergency lights, it stops driving and gets out of the way. I do see one (presumably) recent video where a Waymo stopped in a place that actually delayed an ambulance from getting past it on a narrow street, so unless that's an old video, I'm guessing there's still a bit more tweaking required in terms of recognizing whether the right choice is to stop or to move out of the way. I'd imagine someone is already working on making sure that particular edge case doesn't happen again.

What I'm not seeing is evidence of some widespread problem with autonomous vehicles in general. There's an edge case here or an edge case there where something didn't work as expected. And they'll complain about it, and the AV company in question will figure out why the car did the wrong thing, update their training sets, and that specific scenario won't happen again.

(This, of course, ignores Tesla, because the emergency vehicle drivers can't tell if the vehicle is being driven by the car or by a human, making any sort of reporting problematic at best.)

So realistically, I suspect that the answer to a vague demand from a government agency demanding to know what AV companies will do to prevent bad interactions with emergency vehicles will always be "exactly what we're already doing", because apart from coming up with new simulated situations to test (which they're always doing), there's really nothing they can do to prevent the car from behaving the wrong way in some vague unspecified future situation that nobody has thought of yet. And the answer to what they're doing to prevent a specific situation will usually be "We've already updated our training sets and that won't happen again."

To that end, I'm really not sure what they're trying to accomplish with sending a letter like that. Seems more like political posturing than any actual attempt at solving a problem. *shrugs*

You're such a sad little man