• 2 Posts
  • 568 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoPrivacy@lemmy.world•Cars are scaryEnglish
    5·
    7 hours ago

    There’s also Bluetooth radios all over, and those tire pressure monitoring systems, which I understand are legally-mandated on new cars, broadcast a unique identifier.

    https://askmyauto.com/are-tire-pressure-sensors-required-by-law/

    Are Tire Pressure Sensors Required by Law? A Comprehensive Guide

    October 15, 2024

    Yes, tire pressure sensors (TPMS) are required by law in several countries. In the United States, TPMS has been mandatory for all new passenger vehicles since 2007 under the TREAD Act. Similarly, the European Union mandates TPMS in new cars sold after 2014.

    https://medium.com/@doctoreww/day-2-your-car-is-trackable-by-law-1d5f74388850

    To prevent TPMS systems from mixing up which tire goes to which vehicle, each TPMS sensor has a unique ID. The transceiver module in the car is told which sensor ID’s go to which tire and displays tire pressure accordingly. TPMS sensors can be forced to immediately send the tire pressure (and thus their ID) when the receive a particular signal. This signal is used in products like this to send pair the TPMS to the car.

    Problem

    Although a unique ID can be used to avoid other TPMS sensor’s messages on the road, this unique ID can also be used by an attacker to track a vehicle’s movements. This ID is broadcasted unencrypted and, therefore can be used to track when a particular vehicle has passed nearby.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Texas Senate passes anti-solar, wind billEnglish
    6·
    10 hours ago

    Solar is booming out here in the sticks.

    I was gonna say that people in Florida hit hurricanes a lot and also need some kind of local power generation — be it gasoline or whatever — to help mitigate outages from those.

    But according to this, in 2021 — not a big hurricane year, admittedly:

    https://generatordecision.com/states-with-the-most-least-reliable-power-grids/

    Florida had the second-most-reliable power grid of any state in the US, with an average of 80 minutes of downtime per user per year, or 99.98% uptime.

    EDIT: It’s kind of amazing how California manages to have almost the most expensive-in-the-US and fairly unreliable electricity.

    EDIT2: They even comment on Florida and hurricanes:

    Florida scores well in all three power grid reliability categories.

    These are impressive statistics considering this state has to deal with so many hurricanes.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Texas Senate passes anti-solar, wind billEnglish
    4·
    13 hours ago

    So, IIRC that’s basically what happened in California some years back — California put a lot of restrictions on coal generation in California, and Nevada ramped up coal generation and sold it to California.

    Texas, however, has a fairly-unique situation. The federal government doesn’t generally have authority to regulate trade internal to states, but does — via the Commerce Clause — have authority to regulate commerce that crosses state lines. They’ve leveraged that into a lot of control over regulatory authority over state power grids — if a state has a power grid that crosses state lines, then they’re subject to federal regulation, which affects all sorts of things interior to the state. Texas decided that it wasn’t going to be subject to that, so it refused to connect its power grid to those of other states (though there was one rogue operator that did so until it was discovered and the rest of the Texas power industry made it disconnect; Planet Money had a podcast on it a while back). So you can’t just generate power across the border and then provide it to Texas consumers. If Texas changes the viability of a form of power generation in Texas, it changes what the Texas power consumer market has on offer.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

    I’d guess that the same situation probably also applies to Hawaii and Alaska, though in their case, it’d be one imposed by geographic necessity rather than wanting to avoid federal regulation.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Texas Senate passes anti-solar, wind billEnglish
    11·
    13 hours ago

    Setting aside whether it’s a good or bad idea on its own, if the Trump administration is going to have heavy tariffs on solar panels and batteries out of China, my guess is that deploying solar right now is probably not economically viable, or at least considerably less so than it has been.

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-dominates-solar-trump-tariffs-133600511.html

    China dominates solar. Trump tariffs target China. For US solar industry, that means higher costs

    https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/qa-solar-tariffs-and-the-us-energy-transition/

    The US has taken aggressive actions to diminish the role of Chinese producers in solar supply chains. The costs of solar modules are already two to three times higher[22] in the US than those in Europe. A recent study in Nature[23] estimates that cutting China out of supply chains increases solar module prices 20 to 30 percent compared to a scenario with globalized supply chains. US climate goals are premised on the strategy of making solar and other clean energy technologies cheap; all else equal, more expensive solar makes those targets more difficult to achieve.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-09/trump-tariffs-threaten-spread-of-big-batteries-on-us-power-grid

    Trump Tariffs Threaten Spread of Big Batteries on Power Grid

    President Donald Trump’s trade war threatens to slow down a fast-growing technology that’s key to the clean-power transition and preventing blackouts — big batteries.

    Energy storage devices large enough to feed the electric grid have been spreading across the US, with deployments surging 33% last year. Officials in California and Texas credit them with helping prevent blackouts during heat waves, when electricity demand soars, and integrating variable solar and wind power onto the grid. But despite efforts by former President Joe Biden to build a domestic supply chain, the US still relies heavily on imported lithium-ion batteries — with 69% of the imports made in China, according to the BloombergNEF research provider.

    Whether-or-not Texas adds additional barriers on top of that may not matter all that much.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•INTERVIEW: Blow up safety rules to boost defence, French gunpowder chief says - EuractivEnglish
    12·
    4 days ago

    “If we were at war, these topics would no longer be relevant”, said Eurenco CEO.

    I’ll do you one better. A past European peacetime incident: a large explosion that occurred when someone was throwing sticks of dynamite into a silo full of explosive to help free it up:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion

    The Oppau explosion occurred on September 21, 1921, when approximately 4,500 tonnes of a mixture of ammonium sulfate and ammonium nitrate fertilizer stored in a tower silo exploded

    Compared to ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate is strongly hygroscopic, thus the mixture of ammonium sulfate and nitrate compresses under its own weight, turning it into a plaster-like substance in the 20-metre-high (66 ft) silo. The workers needed to use pickaxes to get it out, a problematic situation because they could not enter the silo and risk being buried in collapsing fertilizer. To ease their work, small charges of dynamite were used to loosen the mixture.

    The explosions were heard as two loud bangs in north-eastern France and in Munich, more than 300 km away, and are estimated to have contained an energy of 1–2 kilotonnes TNT equivalent.

    About 80 percent of all buildings in Oppau were destroyed, leaving 6,500 homeless. The pressure wave caused great damage in Mannheim, located just across the Rhine, ripped roofs off up to 25 km away, and destroyed windows farther away, including all the medieval stained-glass windows of Worms cathedral, 15 km (9.3 mi) to the north. In Heidelberg (30 km (19 mi) from Oppau), traffic was stopped by the mass of broken glass on the streets, a tram was derailed, and some roofs were destroyed.

    Risk tolerance used to be a lot higher.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•The US Secretary of Education referred to AI as ‘A1,’ like the steak sauceEnglish
    141·
    8 days ago

    Wikipedia has that this is not the common-use definition of “acronym”, though some argue for it. In the common-use sense, an initialism is just one type of acronym.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

    For some, an initialism or alphabetism, connotes this general meaning, and an acronym is a subset with a narrower definition: an acronym is pronounced as a word rather than as a sequence of letters. In this sense, NASA /ˈnæsə/ is an acronym but USA /juːɛsˈeɪ/ is not.

    The broader sense of acronym, ignoring pronunciation, is its original meaning and in common use. Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and they do not agree on acronym spacing, casing, and punctuation.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNonCredibleDefense@sh.itjust.works•F/A-XX? More like F-14XEnglish
    14·
    21 days ago

    Might complicate reducing radar signature.

    Also, it seems like kind of a specialized tool. You want it to have a low stall speed but also high maximum speed. The F-14 was a naval interceptor – intended to take off from and land on carriers at low speed, buy also dash out quickly enough to intercept incoming strikes against that carrier.

    I don’t know if there are many situations that have that combination of characteristics.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAnd Finally...@feddit.uk•Islanders told not to gather around squirrel spotted in GuernseyEnglish
    2·
    26 days ago

    The grey squirrel has been classed as an invasive non-native species to the island and the States’ spokesperson said no decision had been made about what the next steps would be if the squirrel was safely caught.

    But the spokesperson added: "Every avenue will be explored to try to return the squirrel to a more suitable environment.

    Return it? Isn’t it invasive in all of Europe, with all of the countries in Europe that have it spreading through them trying to get rid of it too? Like, are you literally going to convey a squirrel across the Atlantic?

    Then once you get there:

    https://www.aphis.usda.gov/live-animal-import/guidance-importing-or-transiting-live-animals

    Import requirements for live animals vary by species but may include an import permit, health certificate, import inspection, quarantine, and in some cases, a contingency plan. Some aspects of the import process require payment for services rendered.

    I mean, I hope that “more suitable environment” is a euphemism for a taxidermist’s office or something.