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Submission + - Nine Months And GM Can't Supply A Bumper (battleswarmblog.com)

schwit1 writes: In December 2023, Levan Azrumelashvili bought a Cadillac EV Lyriq, an all-electric vehicle that cost nearly $86,000. It would be the heart of his brand-new limousine business.

He invested in livery plates and limousine insurance, which is more costly than insurance for a personal car.

The Fair Lawn man’s new venture was off to a solid start. But in April, he had what appeared to be a relatively minor accident — Azrumelashvili said his insurance company agreed it was not his fault — but the damage was more than cosmetic.

The car couldn’t be driven.

And now, nine months later — that’s 279 days as of Sunday since the accident — the vehicle remains at the body shop. Cadillac and its parent company General Motors (GM) haven’t been able to get one of the parts needed for the repairs — a bumper — despite multiple promises.

“At this point, my business is destroyed, I have not been able to drive my limousine for nine months, and I am told by GM that they can’t get my parts, yet they continue to build the cars, which obviously contain the parts my car needs,” Azrumelashvili said, noting that he’s still paying $1,100 a month for insurance and $1,437 a month on the vehicle loan.

“It seems unconscionable that a company would sell cars for which they cannot get parts within the first year,” he said.

Submission + - Disney says Disney+ TOS means man can't sue for wife's fatal allegic reaction 1

beamdriver writes: As is being reported in Newsday , Disney has asked a Florida court to dismiss a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the husband of a Carle Place physician who suffered a fatal allergic reaction after eating at a Disney Springs restaurant.

The company cited legal language agreed to years earlier when Jeffrey Piccolo, widower of Kanokporn Tangsuan, 42, of Plainview, signed up for a one-month trial of the Disney+ streaming service that requires users to arbitrate all disputes with the company, records show.

Kanokporn Tangsuan, died in October after dining with her husband, Jeffrey Piccolo, at a restaurant in a section of the Walt Disney World Resort. Despite informing the waitstaff several times of her severe peanut and dairy allergies and receiving assurances that her meal would be allergen-free, she began having severe difficulty breathing shortly after dinner. She self-administered an epi-pen and was transported to a hospital, where she later died.

A medical examiner attributed her death to anaphylaxis due to elevated levels of dairy and nuts in her system, according to the suit.

Submission + - Mozilla enables ad-tracking by default in Firefox 128

An anonymous reader writes: A couple of years ago, Mozilla acquired Anonym, an adtech firm started by two Meta employees that claims to anonymize user ad tracking including information on when they click on ads. Mozilla calls this feature Privacy Preserving Attribution and as of Firefox 128, it is enabled by default. Mozilla claims it's an experiement but further justfies enabling it by default as a user-hostile distraction. Now, the problem is not the technology — but Mozilla keeps advertising their browser as the most privacy protecting browser over its competitors. To disable this ad-tracking, in Firefox, go to Settings, select Privacy and Security and scroll down to Website Advertising Preferences. Uncheck "Allow websites to perform privacy preserving ad measurement".

Comment Re:Ahh, lenticular displays (Score 1) 50

Geekwire has a much better article with interviews that explain a bit more whats going on, although still not in great detail. In particular this section makes me really interested in whats going on.

Unlike traditional pixels, each of which emit one color of light in all directions, Misapplied Sciences says its pixel can send different colors of light in tens of thousands or even millions of directions. “Multiple people can be looking at the same pixel at the same time, and yet perceive a completely different color,” Albert Ng, the company’s CEO and co-founder, previously told GeekWire. “That’s each individual pixel. Then, we can create displays by having arrays of these multi-view pixels, and we can control the colors of light that each pixel sends. After coordinating all those light rays together, we can form images at different locations.”

https://www.geekwire.com/2022/...

Comment Re:Autopilot (Score 3, Informative) 102

Apparently not, they only modified them to have a slower terminal velocity while in a dive. During the performance, one of the planes started to corkscrew uncontrollably after the pilot left and only the other plane was able to be re-entered and successfully flown away (from what I can read anyway, its georestricted to paying only in the USA and im too lazy to pirate it). Here's a youtube clip of the just a small bit where they jump out: ?v=ODCzlEyaSDM Maybe they should have done SOMETHING of an autopilot, or maybe it malfunctioned.

Comment Re:IP addresses? (Score 5, Insightful) 143

There are two IP addresses in question. The public IP which matched this student, another student, and the attackers. And the private IPs which the accused student's attorney is using to show the attackers and the student had different private IPs (and presumably on a different subnet so they can't easily say it was the same router).

Sounds like either Zoom's logging of public IPs isnt working properly or the attackers are other students in the class and being geographically local they may be under the same carrier-grade NAT public IP address (if their ISP is using carrier grade NAT).

Comment Re:What mystery? (Score 4, Informative) 102

Yeah here's a frightening piece of potentially salient information from the prion wiki page:

It came to light in August 2019 that prior to 2014 in Canada, all animals on CWD-infected farms were buried or incinerated. But in a mysterious change of policy, since then the CFIA has allowed animals from CWD-infected farms to enter the food chain because there is "no national requirement to have animals tested for the disease". From one CWD-infected herd in Alberta, 131 elk were sold for human consumption

Comment Re:How Will the Electrical Power Grid be Upgraded? (Score 1) 294

Just realized they split the BEV category into greater than 200m range and less than. So if we only consider BEVs with a range greater than 200 miles we get a better number at 233k. Using the same maths as above that gives us 13.98gWh total battery capacity, 10% of which gives us 1.398gWh (battery capacity reserved for grid use). Finally, with our arbitrary 10% plugged in at any given time we get 139.8mWh.

Comment Re:How Will the Electrical Power Grid be Upgraded? (Score 1) 294

An interesting side effect of increased EV sales would potentially also increase our electrical grid capacity and ability to absorb peak usages IF car-makers were "encouraged" to do so (which is by no means a stretch for California). Allowing the energy stored in a car's battery to be fed back into the grid if its ever needed would do a lot to smooth out brown/blackouts. If we use the Chevy Bolt's battery capacity as our starting point (60 kWh, the Nissan Leaf has a similar configuration) and say we dedicate just 10% of its capacity to use by the electrical grid if needed. I'm going to use data from California's Zero Emission Vehicle and Charger Statistics [1] page for the number of Battery-Electric Vehicles (BEV). So roughly 308k BEVs with 60kWh batteries (which is optimistic), if they were all plugged in at once, gives us 18.48gWh. Since we only get 10% of that it comes down to a mere 1.84gWh. Now this is still a massive overestimation since not all EV's will have 60kWh batteries and certainly they won't be all plugged in at once. If we arbitrarily decide that maybe only 10% of those EV's will be plugged in at any given time we still have ~185mWh of energy available. That doesn't really tell us the instantaneous current we can draw (which is important) but It still puts things in perspective. If its mandated that all new cars sold in CA must be EV this untapped grid capacity only goes up. I doubt people would accept such a system though, even an opt-in one.

Disclaimer: Math isn't my strong subject so you may want to recheck my numbers to be sure but I think its mostly right. The arbitrary number selections spoil the results a bit though. If I had numbers on the average number of cars on the road at any given time I might get a better estimate of the average number of parked (and potentially charging) EVs. Boredom only motivates me so far however and I'm not in the mood to dive that deep today.

[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data...

Comment Re:What is this thing exactly? (Score 3, Insightful) 81

The reason for only a single rocket motor here is because you can only throttle down rocket engines so much. If they used more than a single engine they wouldnt be able to gently bring it down or hover. Their later design SN8 is supposed to use 3 raptor engines in its "belly flop" test from a much higher altitude (1200m instead of 150m). The rocket engine design is also very new with lots of untested technology (full flow staged combustion cycle, 3d printed parts) so SpaceX is taking their time to make sure they get things like procedure and ground support equipment worked out. If you watch the first starship hop test with SN5 you can see some of the ground support equipment exploding and being sent skyward. In this latest SN6 test I didnt see any exploding equipment and they were able to launch much quicker and with less delays than SN5. Despite what some ardent detractor(s) in this comment section would say, these tests are on the path towards a full scale launch system which consists of the first stage "Super Heavy" and the second stage "Starship" which is designed to take astronauts and equipment to destinations like Mars and farther. What can cause confusion is that the second stage is also supposed to be able to launch and land alone, unlike more traditional second stages that are designed for vacuum operation only.

Comment Misleading summary (Score 2) 24

I like how the summary conveniently omits the fact that the very same day their app was reinstated, which is in the very beginning of the story. You kinda had to go out of your way to omit that information. The line that starts "On Wednesday, the antitrust subcommittee..." is well below the statement that the app was reinstated so you had to of read it but chose not to include it. Or you just copy and pasted someone elses summary with zero effort whatsoever. Who can tell anymore on this site. Quite a bit of dishonest reporting in my opinion. Seems like msmash has a bias against Google or they would have included Google's side of the story in their summary as well out of fairness.

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