Here in Australia, we would suggest that comparing a fire in a non-bushfire/wildfire prone country through all but medieval structures probably doesn't tell you much about bush fire impacting modern dwellings at the urban edge.

In Australia the normal construction method is brick veneer with either ceramic tile or colourbond (steel sheet) cladding for roofing. Houses are well separated, typically on 1/4 acre blocks. On the face of it, this should offer very good protection against fire - bricks and ceramic tiles/steel sheeting with decent separation. But the mechanisms of the bush/wild fire are complex.

For example, a study of the Canberra bushfires in 2003, where a firestorm impacted the urban edge (400 homes lost), found that most dwellings were lost due to ember attack rather than direct flame attack, with a typical weak point being hot embers falling into gutters, particularly if there are any dry leaves or other combustible material there, then licking under the roof cladding/tiles into the insulation and roof frames (normally timber).

This is exacerbated when a firestorm hits an urban edge. Firefighters/resources are overwhelmed. Water pressure disapears as so many taps are turned on simultaneously.In the end, even those who stay to defend often run out of water (or don't have pressure to get the water where it is needed) and time to fight the small fires that start. The small fires become big fires, consuming their houses. As for those that don't stay and defend, their houses catch slowly, and burn slowly, but with no one there to do anything about it, they eventually catch properly alight and burn to the ground.

We understand at least some of your experience with these sorts of situations (although the continuous, dry, 100km/hr+ winds, in the middle of winter, are something else again). For any of you impacted by this, FWIW, we are definitely thinking of you here in Oz - deeply troubled that you are having this fire in the middle of our fire season.

So, they use bias on three occasions to describe the fact that a system was not designed to accommodate Chinese requirements, which on even a minor technical analysis of the problem, are quite different.

You mean it was designed to print Latin alphabet characters, and not Kanji or Chinese characters, which are a lot more complicated and diverse.

But my favourite.

Even the metal was biased! The world hates China (and Japan, but the Chinese are mostly specialising in being outraged at the moment).

An interesting story of innovative adaptation of existing technology outside it's original design parameters to meet a similar, but not designed for, need. It didn't the faux outrage.

I'm sure you will find theft in your local "Criminal Code" or equivalent.

Exploiting software vulnerabilities is perhaps an interesting place to consider parallels. Laws about exploiting them vary, but in a lot of the examples I have looked at over the years the interpretation tends to land somewhere between illegal being "using a software vulnerability to make a computer do something that the system owner was trying to stop you from doing" (somewhat explicit) to "using a software vulnerability to make a computer do something that the system owner probably wouldn't want you to do." (more implicit).

Interestingly, the quality of the implementation is never the issue. Rather intent, whether you were warned (or should have known), whether you achieved what you were trying to do are all important.

But I suspect the prosecutors will try and keep this away from electronics/code/security controls as much as possible and instead make the point that the carelessness of the victim is irrelevant - If you left a stack of $100 notes sitting on a table on the street it's still theft to take them.

Sure - let's pick the first one and dive a little deeper:

The problem isn't the truck needing to run on batteries in the overtaking lane (I'd already assumed your trucks had capacity to operate at least momentarily, and probably for some time/distance, away from the power lines).

At highway speed you are going to have trucks entering and leaving contact with the overhead wires (it will need to be a two wire system as their is no "rail" to return current along the road). In any particular span you may have more than one vehicle doing this simultaneously. This coming into, and leaving contact with the wires will create lateral forces that cause oscillation in the wire. Because of the wide variety of possible configurations of spans (as each truck's "trolley pole" effectively creates a new span) this may prove to be very hard to anticipate.

Harmonic frequencies getting frequently hit could well prematurely wear the line (or much worse). The tension on the lines might have to be super tight to stop active and neutral slapping into each other and tripping the whole system when these lateral forces are introduced - that's all extra wear/more gantries/more cost.

Perhaps the trucks have a retractable trolley pole(s) - drivers will need to remember to retract it when overtaking and any emergency maneuvers or even just drifting in the lane by too much might "twang the wires" by drifting and having the wires slip off, or even just move on, the trolley pole.

Oscillation in the wires could cause it to come off one trucks trolley pole and snag the pole and will create a tipping force if the truck moves laterally towards the snagged wire.

From engineering perspective these are not easy problems to solve - at the end of the day the relatively weak electrical wires can co-exist with the high speed/high momentum train/tram because the train is always in exactly the same spot, laterally, with respect to those wires. The forces against those wires created by maintaining contact with them at high speed are significant (the friction created by the movement of the trolley pole etc) but they are *very* predictable which makes managing those forces practical. I don't know how you would achieve the same with what you are envisaging without tethering the truck to the lane (not to the wire - the wire isn't strong enough to prevent the truck from leaving it's path - that's kind of the problem). Super accurate self-driving? Emergency maneuvers are still a problem.

If you are aware of an example where it has been tried that would be very interesting.

We'll get to 50%, then we will get to 70, and 80 and things might slow down between there and 100 as we start to shake out the few genuine use cases where electric vehicles really can't cut it. Like much technical change were we take a position on it, it will seem impossible, stupid or dumb until suddenly it seems like everyone is doing it.

Near Chicago, just to pick one major US city I see second hand electric cars starting at $6,000 USD - undamaged, functional cars. Once upon a time that simply wasn't a thing, or they all had 15K price tags etc. It's going to keep getting cheaper as the fleet starts to build out and the scarcity pricing goes away. Yes, plenty of people wont be able to afford a new electric car, just like they can't afford a new ICE car, but before there can be a second hand market there has to be a first hand market.

It's just infrastructure and as the demand increases it will get built. One of the great things about apartment living is you often don't need a car everyday/at all. If you don't need car everyday it certainly doesn't need to be charged everyday. And I'm not saying that some apartment dwellers don't need their car everyday - I'm sure some do, but there are plenty of apartment dwellers who get their daily commutes etc sorted using PT/walking/etc - if they even have a car they probably only need to charge it every few weeks at the most

Yes - well that is true - winning against vested interests is hard, but the impacts of climate change are starting to be impossible to ignore.

I think "unworkable fantasy" is pretty hyperbolic. Like I said above " it will seem impossible, stupid or dumb until suddenly it seems like everyone is doing it".

How does a truck with such an arrangement change lanes? What height do we want the wire at so that it suits all vehicles that might want to use it? How do we make sure the many private operators keep the connectors in good enough condition to not damage the overhead wire? How do we meter use? How do we account for the variations in tension between different gantries (like there is usually only one train between gantries, but there might be half a dozen trucks)? etc etc.

I think in the end the idea would not work because there will be too many and too broad a set of requirements to build an effective system. As one of your other respondents suggested - just build an electric freight train.

Hey Joe,

That's an extreme interpretation of 202a I think, but maybe (I'm relying on an English translation here which can sometimes miss important points). To understand if it is used that way you would need to see the case law. In this case I don't think obtaining the password was the offence, it was accessing the database.

(1) Anyone who gains unauthorized access for themselves or another person to data that is not intended for them and that is specially secured against unauthorized access by overcoming the access security will be punished with a prison sentence of up to three years or a fine. (Google translation of 202a(1)) - accessing the data in the database was probably where they crossed the line in the court's opinion. As I said though - I think at that point they probably would have been forgiven if they stopped and responsibly disclosed the issue to BSI etc.

Interesting question. Is the data encrypted on the wire? If it is then it could be argued that you have accessed data by overcoming a security control (the encryption). Here (I don't know about Germany) a network owner's permission to inspect data crossing a network they own is not total, although inspection done for network security is normally given quite a bit of freedom.

There will be lots of terrible stuff like this out there. A lot of business software probably follows a similar pattern - it's fast and easier than having clients with individual authentication details - it's straightforward DB client style software. It's less complicated than having business rules in the database. It's also just dreadful security and I agree with the many people who have suggested the company should also be made to answer a case under GDPR.

They didn't give him (or his customer) a password - they gave him client software. The client software was (probably) their property. He ran strings and realised he had the username and password because the software had dreadful, but unfortunately all too typical, security.

He connected to the database using the username and password he found in the client software. I don't know the intricate detail of the German law, but I imagine by now he has probably broken it. As a general rule you aren't allowed to circumvent shit security and access data you aren't authorised to just because the security is shit.

He bypassed the access controls in the client (which is part of their solution). Yes it is shit security to make software that runs in an uncontrolled environment part of your security perimeter and responsible for access control. Yes it is shit security to have important credentials unprotected in your binary. Yes it is shit security to grant shared accounts excessive privilege, but, at the risk of repeating myself, just because it is shit security doesn't mean you are allowed to circumvent it.

He probably would have been forgiven for everything up to this point. He probably would have even been forgiven for running a few queries that gave him some sense of how much data was there. But going to the press with it, rather than responsible disclosure - that was a bridge too far. By making the vulnerability public he effectively weaponised it - albeit for a short time. Maybe it was inexperience or a desire for attention that made him think he should go to the press straight away. I imagine the BSI would have happily brokered his disclosure if he thought the company couldn't be trusted to do the right thing and I'm confident that if he went to them he wouldn't be in this situation.

Given the law has up to one year imprisonment (assuming I'm looking at the right one), a 3000 euro fine sounds like a fairly light touch.

I don't agree, but just for the sake of discussion, what's the alternative?

Continuing to pour CO2 into the atmosphere won't work.

We can't wait 15 years for the first SMR to come online and then another 15 years for the buildout (I assume you know the nuscale project got cancelled).

We can't even wait the multi-decades for a conventional LWR rollout.

I think renewables are getting held to a higher standard for externalities than fossil fuels ever were, and nuclear has also had to be heavily subsidised to make it seem even remotely affordable.

There's a really good chance we will come up with decent recycling processes, particularly for panels, but even if we don't, we will build new panels and turbines as we have to and junk the old ones, if we have to. It will still be cheaper the nuclear, and less likely to kill us than fossil fuels.

Storage backed renewable generation is now the cheapest option for making electricity (and has been for a few years - but markets are starting to believe it). Electric vehicles are well on their way to being the cheapest form of (relatively) high speed motion (obviously bikes are cheaper, but not as fast). Finally we do have ways to draw down the carbon in the atmosphere which are scalable and could be run off renewable electricity.

Don't worry too much about what the crazy oil-company led fuckers at COP28 said. They (particularly the middle eastern oil cartel) are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that their wealth is becoming a stranded asset. Worry about your own politicians and making sure they know that you want the cheapest electricity, not the one that props up fossil fuel extraction industries and corrupt regimes.

Your pessimism is not unjustified, but it is also not terribly helpful. The worst thing we can do is let people slip from a denialist mindest into a fatalist one.

In the shorter term (100-200 years) we will see whether the human civilisation will persist, in any form approximating what we have now. In the longer term, the planet will likely recover, albeit into something different perhaps.

It's isn't going to matter what the capital cost is, because fuel is the biggest cost and the savings of running on electricity versus diesel are going to give a great ROI, and the further you drive every day, the sooner you are going to get that ROI.

From TFA: But, not long after that, she went through a three-month bout of forgetfulness and worsening depression. Brain magnetic resonance imaging found a growing lesion in her right frontal lobe. In June 2022, she went under the knife for a biopsy—and that's when the neurosurgeon pulled out the live, writhing parasite from her brain.

So MRI was the tool that identified the problem area but wasn't fine enough to see the worm.

I think the issue was asymptomatic presentation and a novel disease, not restricted access to services - that's not how things work here.