You know that it was basically sold to be able to claim a more responsible budget that year? Basically selling off of an asset to record higher revenue. Like selling your building fire extinguishers to claim that you were able to pay off your credit card bill, and who cares what those were originally meant for.
I thought that the idea of roundabouts was that they lead to slightly more accidents than before, but they are of much lower severity than before (the 90 degree intersections they replace).
Has anyone come across a good semi-technical description of "how your node knows that its message got sent and reached its destination and can stop sending"? I'm interested in how this logic is executed when you can't be sure (I assume) that knowledge of the result will get back to you in a certain amount of time.
In short, all messages are sent within windows, which include waiting periods within which the broadcasting node listens for any other node to rebroadcast the same message. Upon seeing the message be rebroadcast, it stops attempting to send.
I am severely tempted to hop on a flight to go and see it, but wondering if it's such a "once in a lifetime" thing to go see? That, and if it'll peter out by the time I get there, and $500+ to just fly on a whim and stay overnight.
It seems to me an analogy that as a product is increasingly complex, the ultimate consumer/demander of it becomes more and more disconnected from maintenance, operations, etc. considerations and whether that system is well designed and serviceable.
Cars of a past generation were able to be owner-maintained (or understood), and therefore the owner had some interest in knowing that it was easy to maintain and would buy (at least partly) on that premise. Something that was a nightmare to maintain would not be so easily bought because the owners would soon realize how hard they were to fix.
Now, with a car that is so complicated, the owner is far distant from being the fixer of it until years later seeing a surprise repair bill. Even the maintainers are not even directly knowledgeable about the design and how to repair. And the information about its maintainability is a low factor on the buying considerations list. But by then you've already given the company the money and incentive to keep on building this way. And rarely (or extremely/too "laggily" does that information feed back).
It seems to me enterprise software systems have this problem as well.
I wonder how the incident was diagnosed? Does the FDR record low level errors that might've contributed to this? I thought that it only recorded certain input parameters and high-level flight metrics but I'm no expert.
If a radiation event caused some bit-flip, how would you realize that's what triggered an error? Or maybe the FDR does record when certain things go wrong? I'm thinking like, voting errors of the main flight computers?
"Had the same problem with low power CMOS 3 transistor memory cells used in implantable defibrillators in the 1990s. Needed software detection and correction upgrade for implanted devices, and radiation hardening for new devices. Issue was confirmed to be caused by solar radiation by flying devices between Sydney and Buenos Aires over the south pole multiple times, accumulating a statistically significant different error rate to control sample in Sydney."
I was surprised too at the 2nd sentence: "The project will have a heating power of 2MW and a thermal energy storage (TES) capacity of 250MW..."
and how a news outlet about energy could get such a fundamental unit wrong.
But given that later in the article it does revert to correct units (and the numbers are plausibly proportional), I assume it's just a typo. Strange that it hasn't been corrected even now.
"...It follows Polar Night Energy completing and putting a 1MW/100MWh Sand Battery TES project into commercial operations this summer..."
Assuming you aren't looking for an exact millimeter-for-millimeter version of the spiral condenser, I bet you could find someone to make it in the US quite easily.
It's still one of the major glassblowing countries. In fact, if you remember when folks were worried about those two quartz mines in Spruce Pine, NC that are the only place with pure enough quartz for chips? That's also the home of Spruce Pine Batch, one of the big glass suppliers in America.
Hey, I heard about how utility pole inspecting helicopters are able to tell the good/rotten state of wooden telephone poles by the reverb pattern of sound waves coming off the poles from the rotors -- it seems to me the whole field of non-invasive sensing (and using existing/ambient emission sources) is getting pretty impressive.
> Hey, I heard about how utility pole inspecting helicopters are able to tell the good/rotten state of wooden telephone poles by the reverb pattern of sound waves coming off the poles from the rotors
There is a whole field dedicated to this, called non-destructive testing. Modal response (i.e., monitor how a structure vibrates in response to an excitation) is a basic technique that features in multiple areas such as structural health monitoring and service life estimations.
Some mechanics also do this by placing the tip of a screwdriver against a point in an engine and place their ear against the screwdriver's handle. If it's not sounding right, the engine has problems.
Even pottery. You should hear the sound of a pot after you tap it. If it's muffled then odds are it has internal cracks.
In telecommunications construction we are taught to make ample use of the "hammer test" when working on and around poles. The difference in sound between a good pole, a marginal pole and a completely rotten pole is quite significant.
In outdoor rock climbing smacking rocks is an integral part of ensuring the rock you're trusting your life with is in fact worth trusting your life with.
Only if you go outside well-secured sport climbs where you don't have to think about that (but still its a good idea to check the state of bolts for any visible damage due to rot and rust). And even then, some rocks are hollow and still can sustain next 5000 years of literally any climbing on them, some are more solid and will come off if somebody over 80kg hangs on them. So its more about calming one's mind rather than objective good quality test.
Most folks in Europe climb only sport routes, or then do some variant of proper alpinism once on wild unsecured terrain.
Too expensive where I live. Rocks, hills and trees: the natural enemies of buried fibre and wireless networks. One of my competitors took 6 months to bury a cable in granite that would've been a 5 day aerial job.
I'm so glad you say that. Resi aerial is perfect in most locations. No dig, no service boxes in front yards, under someone's unpermitted driveway pour, ample power easily, a guy in a bucket truck is all you need.
Trenchless works well when it can, but even reasonable infrastructure underground is twice as expensive.
I love seeing a neighborhood lit up in fiber in 2-5 days and subscribers online at 1-10Gb in soooo many places. Keeps crews busy either way :D
Downside is: a drunk guy in a truck is all you need to tear it down, not to mention natural disaster influence. And it's unsightly AF.
Yes, it's fast and cheap. That's how we got the situation that a backwater village in the midst of the "anus mundi" of Romania has XGPON for a few dozen euros a month, while you're lucky to get anything above 50M VDSL in Germany outside of large urban areas and 200M VDSL in urban areas.
But holy hell it's an eyesore to be in said village in Romania, look out the window and look at a bunch of fiber strung not even from a proper pole but from a tree. Takes the German expression "Kabelbaum" to a whole new level.
Even if a pole is taken out by a drunk driver that does not mean the cables are going to be severed. I've seen plenty of times when poles had to be replaced, but the communications cables remained undamaged in place due to the strength and tension of the supporting strand.
The bigger issue over the last 5 years in the area where my company operates is the number of dump trucks that leave the bed up. Given the weight of dump truck it is easy for them to pull down multiple poles when they catch the cables, although perhaps they are drunk drivers...
And outdoor DSLAMs are invulnerable, to cars, vandalism, dog-piss, whatever? Ever walked by one in the middle of the night, when its cooling fans hum? Wanna live near that?
Yes. But you've written about ugly and vulnerable infrastructure am "Arsch der Welt"/"JWD" first, and lamented about limited availability and performance of pink Telecomicstan VDSL in Teutonistan second. I've written about the latter, since I've heard them, because they are not passive.
Also where I live (a karst region) other expensive things we deal with are frost lines (frost heave is a real issue; water expands as it freezes, things in the ground don't stay in the ground if ice is expanding into their space) and limestone rock underfoot (sinkholes are a real issue; dig wrong or too deep or not carefully enough and cave in the ground right under you, or worse, someone's house right next to you).
Google Fiber wrecked entire city streets relearning these things the dumbest way possible (then left the street repair bills to the us the taxpayers, because of course they did).
Come on. This is Hacker News: criticism is fine, but make it constructive. No need to make such a dismissive comment. The other replies were also critical of it, but they all gave reasons. Please be better next time, and I hope you have an otherwise great day, friend!
When I lived in the countryside on a bit of land and needed to get fiber from the road to my house on my own dime, burying the line was 5-10x as expensive as suspending it.
And look where that got Germany;
my hometown and neighbouring towns are mostly on ADSL or rarely VDSL if you’re lucky, because the big players don’t want anything to do with the cost and legal side.
Local municipalities establish de-facto monopolies and drive prices up, because they offer slightly faster and stable lines.
There is a joint effort by local utility companies in Mecklenburg and they’re trying to make things better, but anecdotally are also challenging to deal with.
My now residence here in the UK is not really rural and for years Giganet/CityFibre/toob promised gigabit soonTM for years and the date got delayed and delayed and delayed.
At least here in Denmark, they seem to have opted for installing bigger "pipes", instead of just laying down some fiber cables. Then in the future they can just push new cables through the pipes. An idea I bet they wish they had gotten the first time around.
That is not the reason that got Germany to have poor telecom infrastructure. We also have poor 4G/5G coverage without the need of any FTTH setups.
There is a common case of excessive bureaucracy and extremely conservative population (thank you, low birth rates) which is hindering any significant development in the country.
Yeah the reason ain't so much some cables in the ground but general byzantine bureaucratic obscurity of a state that you germans created (or allowed to be created) and maintain for yourself. Its far from the only issue stemming form it, and all are just symptoms of underlying dysfunctionalities. Also the population seems to mostly sit around waiting for politicians to fix all problems.
The GDR was deploying fiber, but the west is using capitalism as underlying mechanism so the fiber was left unused and even replaced by copper after reunification because why use the latest technology just yet when you can get people to pay both for the downgrade and the upgrade some decades later!
There was fiber deployment in the GDR and plans to extend it already before the OPAL project, which came after reunification. I remember our East German CS network professor talking about it with passion but fail to find information online. Which doesn’t surprise me, since history is written by the winners. I trust his personal stories more than the lack of information online.
It could be. Even much stuff from the 'winners' from before common internet access is lost ;->
OTOH, considering how well the 'megabit-chip' went, I'm wondering wtf they'd do with fiber, at the times? For the military, agencies, ministries and some universities maybe, but for the masses? How common was the 'stinknormales telephon' in households, back then?
I can’t tell if this ever became a reality; I know of more modern approaches attempting to use thermal and multi spectral imaging to achieve the same goal.
I live near a helicopter factory and when the spinning towers are in use, you hear all sorts of auditory patterns as you move around the town. When they are test flying - similar and the Police have one and there is an air ambulance too. My Dad's other staff car in the '80s was a Gazelle and in the '70s he whizzed around in a Sioux. I've seen and heard a lot of helos!
I have absolutely no doubt that with some funky signal processing you can do all sorts of things.
Its much less disturbing than living under a flight path to an airport. I actually like the sound of a helo - its variable and interesting, as is a piston powered fixed wing aircraft.
Mind you I also lived near RAF, USAAF and Luftwaffe bases back in the day and several flights of Phantoms, Starfighters, Jaguars and Tornadoes and the rest can make quite a din. Phantoms were pretty huge engined beasts with minimal effort made for noise reduction. A "finger four" lighting up their after burners to gain altitude really fast is ear splitting.
HV transmission line inspection routinely has the linesmen crawl out of helicopters onto the lines and back. Granted, as far as I know its the highest skill and most difficult helicopter job.
I've seen that in person while in Canada and it is most impressive. The moment they discharge the differential between the helicopter and the line is just awesome. The firebreak clearing operations are also something to behold. From a very safe distance.
That makes sense. It's probably less "doing crazy convolution calculations on how sampled ambient noise changes as the helicopter gets close to a pole", and more "rotten wood vibrates slower"
A typical CT scan delivers enough radiation to give a healthy person a 1/500 chance of getting a cancer in their lifetime that they otherwise would not have gotten. The risk is higher for children.
We have people working around low-flying aircraft all the time. I’m guessing the associated job risks are better.
When you take those jobs, it’s because you want to make money, not because your life is at risk, there’s information asymmetry between you and the medical provider who is indirectly rewarded for billing for scans, and the overarching medical system prioritized CT scans over MRIs while our engineering culture failed to establish something safer and cheaper.
Would you play Russian Roulette with a revolver with 500 chambers and 1 bullet? What if by doing so a hospital would receive thousands of dollars, and would go on to be paid many more thousands of dollars if you got unlucky?
The cost-benefit trade-off is there, and the powers that be are prioritizing cancer.
Fascinating---I appreciate you raising awareness. This information was a big update for me, so I looked for a source and found roughly the same numbers (though my numbers were 1/1000, possibly because newer CT exams seem to be slightly safer). From [1]:
> ...93 million CT examinations performed ... projected to result in approximately 103 000 future cancers ... cancer risk was higher in children ... CT-associated cancers could eventually account for 5% of all new cancer diagnoses annually.
Although keep in mind that these numbers do need context. cancer != death. That ranges from cold comfort (in the case painful chemo treatment & years of fear) to a critical factor (based on how the USA diagnoses it, approximately 6% of men will have prostate cancer that does not require treatment).
Based only on these numbers above and my prior beliefs, I would say that that either
A) CT scans are a necessary evil that haven't been adequately replaced
or
B) These numbers less problematic than one might expect, due to some quirk of the data
I generally trust the USA's medical establishment on new treatment, though I've heard that they're slow to clamp down on outdated treatments.
I appreciate you looking into the numbers to verify. The 1/1000 odds seem better, though still important.
Also, framed another way, 5% of cancer cases caused by CT scans would mean that 1 in 20 people in the cancer ward were placed there by a CT scan. Or alternatively, phasing out CT scans would prevent 1 in 20 cancer cases, with prevention being worth more than a cure for every 1 cancer patient in 20.
Do you have any other wavelenghts of radiation that pass through flesh but not bone and metal we can use instead? If so speak up please, otherwise we need to keep using x rays because, physics.
Yeah but that's different. It's great for soft tissue (that has water which can be vibrated by the magnetic field) buy less great for things like bone. Hence why CTs are still used. Also, the magnetic field makes it so things like intraoperative imaging is very difficult.
When bone is what needs attention, you can use conventional x-rays in all but specialist cases. A single x-ray image is typically far less radiation than a whole CT scan.
And yes, you can still see bone in an MRI. A related question is, how well can you see soft tissue in a CT scan?
CT scans are routinely used to diagnose soft tissue problems, where they are the wrong tool for the job: an MRI would be more ideal. CT scans in these situations expose the patient to avoidable cancer risks while compromising the level of insight provided to the medical provider.
Interoperative imaging is another specialist use case. The need for CT scans in specialist situations speaks to the failure to develop alternatives with lower cancer risks. Also, the need to use a CT scan in certain situations does not mean that the CT scans should be used in other situations.
