They should already be able to detect line breaks using old technology. They send current pulses down the line to detect stuck switches, since stuck switches can cause collisions. Also, the pulses are conducted through the wheels and axles of any trains, so they can use resistance and/or timing to figure out where the trains are.
Having said that, if it was 2020 and you told me that making photorealistic pictures of broken bridges was harder than spoofing the signals I just described, I’d say you were crazy.
The idea that a kid could do this would have seen even less plausible (that’s not to say a kid did it, just that they could have).
Anyway, since recently-intractable things are now trivial, runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.
> They should already be able to detect line breaks using old technology.
Yes. That doesn't do much to detect a stone from a parapet rolling onto the line though.
Hence the need for inspection.
> runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.
I'd argue not - whether it's an image of a damaged bridge, a phone call from a concerned person about an obstruction on the line, or just heavy rains or an earthquake .. the line should be inspected.
If anything urban rail is in a better position today as ideally camera networks should hopefully rapidly resolve whether a bridge is really damaged as per a fake image or not.
> I'd argue not - whether it's an image of a damaged bridge, a phone call from a concerned person about an obstruction on the line, or just heavy rains or an earthquake .. the line should be inspected.
Ideally? Sure.
But when someone can generate plausible disaster photos of every inch of every line of a country's rail network in mere minutes? And as soon as your inspection finishes, they do it again?
Yeah; it’s completely a matter of frequencies and probabilities. Also, technology keeps improving.
If I were working for the train line, and bridges kept “blowing up” like this, I’d probably install a bunch of cameras and try to arrange the shots to be aesthetically pleasing, then open the network to the public.
The runbook would involve checking continuity sensors in the rail, and issuing random pan/tilt commands to the camera.
> They send current pulses down the line to detect stuck switches, since stuck switches can cause collisions.
That's not done in any European rail network I am aware of. The switches have, well, switches that confirm if the mechanical end positions have been reached, but there is no confirmation by current pulses on the actual rails themselves.
> Also, the pulses are conducted through the wheels and axles of any trains, so they can use resistance and/or timing to figure out where the trains are.
That technology is, at least in Germany, being phased out in favor of axle counters at the begin and end of each section, partially because axle counters allow speed and direction feedback, partially because it can be unsafe - a single locomotive braking with sand may yield a false-free signal when sand or leaves prevent the current passing from one rail to the other.
If whatever technology they installed said everything was fine, I would still want them to do what they did because the costs of being wrong are so much higher than the costs of what they did.
The point of that technology needs to be to alert you when something is wrong not to assure you that everything is fine whenever some other telemetry indicates otherwise.
Any idea how the road barriers in the USA detect a train to lower themselves? I assume it's something to do with current passed from one rail to the other through the axle?
When I stuck train wheels on my DeLorean and rode it down the tracks it lowered the barriers automatically which caused a bit of a traffic incident in Oxnard.
There are sensor sections on both sides. If you short the tracks together with a large enough wire, it triggers the signal box. Actually learned this at the MIT swap fest when manning the back gate a decade ago. Got some cheap alligator clips and strung to them together, no luck.... Larger gauge copper did trigger it, and confused a ton of people when no train came by lol
Shingles attacks your nervous system. Avoiding shingles prevents it from damaging your brain, so it isn’t surprising the vaccine reduces dementia.
There are multiple causes for dementia. If I read figure 2 right, the vaccine slightly reduces the chance of mild cognitive impairment, but cuts the chances of dying from dementia by about a third(!)
Also interesting: The vaccine helps at different phases of disease progression.
The simplest explanation is that dementia is due to cumulative damage, not a single event, and that getting shingles is a big hit.
The vaccine probably prevents dementia in the same way staying out of planes makes you invulnerable to parachute failures.
What do they mean with 'dying from dementia'? As typically you don't die from dementia but something like pneumonia or something else. Personally, I wouldn't wish dementia on anyone and definitely wouldn't want to extend my life while having dementia.
Objectively, he was the most effective US president we’ve had in decades.
Trump’s campaign promises were all of the form “X is so bad it will destroy the country and I will fix X”!
Replace X with some problem that Biden had already fixed (factory investment, crime rate reduction, getting inflation under control after the previous president printed money for 4 yeara, etc, etc).
Around here, it’s Starlink >> Fiber >> Cable because our lines are above ground and outages are frequent.
Fiber is less expensive than and more than 10x faster than starlink, in fairness.
Our 5g towers seem to run off the fiber lines, so it’s not really a backup (and gets overwhelmed anyway).
I’m considering getting fiber in addition to starlink, but I wish they’d just buried the lines.
I see telephone trucks repairing downed lines we’d rely on many dozens of times a year. Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
> Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
I know some people running independent community fiber ISPs. Digging trenches can be a nightmare depending on the neighbourhood. You can have property ownership issues, other utilities being present, permit nightmares, different ground/soil types, etc. That ignores the fact that when somebody else digs they can hit your lines and repairing that is a pain.
Digging is better, though. But it’s not necessarily as easy as one may think.
Where I work just acquired new property and are deploying a new site. It took 9 months, from date of first contact, before the ISP could come out, bore under the road, and run fiber to our building from two poles away. And that's just a short ~500 feet underground run.
I couldn't imagine the amount of permitting and logistics involved in trying to bury an entire run across town.
My community did the big dig around 2001. They finished around 2010. It was a huge project that took hundreds if not thousands of man-hours. I'm not sure if anyone ever actually calculated the total cost. And this is for a pretty small town. Now the day-to-day connectivity is much better, and weather almost never knocks us out, but when something does get knocked out, it takes longer to fix.
Overall, it's much nicer. No ugly telephone poles, don't have to worry about weather, just reliable, strong service. But to think it pays for itself in 2 years is laughable.
If this goes like all the other media mergers this year, the only regulatory scrutiny will involve Netflix allowing the executive branch to install a censor / ombudsman that has final say on their news and documentary content.
On the planet I’m from, the pedophile in chief is already intentionally miscategorizing information so it can be censored using mechanisms like this, and is implementing a public playbook explaining how this is one pillar of a platform to force his particular brand of right wing christian “morality” on the rest of the population.
At best, you’re defending coordinated disinformation campaigns, though the article is about attempts to make compliance with the propaganda mandatory.
How did Uzbekistan increase their model’s global economic loss from 20% to 60%?
I really want to know what arithmetic error was made, and how it got past peer review.
Did it predict a China-size negative output in the future, or assume a current China-size economic output for that county?
(Having said that, 60% loss by 2100 seems completely plausible to me, and 20% sounds like wishful thinking. Big chunks of the US southwest have obviously lost more than 20% of their economies to climate change since 2000…)
Of course, that’s mostly because there are bigger problems this release cycle. For instance, they didn’t test Magnifier on 13 mini sized screens. Now that it doesn’t fit, the other app teams will probably make more stuff uselessly cluttered/embiggened, rendering Apple’s last phone-size devices useless.
Liquid Glass is actually very good design that addresses design problems that persisted since the switch to touchscreens in a very comprehensive way.
More specifically, the problem of how to have universally recognizable and standardized UI controls in every app without interfering with their design identity.
To me it’s just a logical conclusion in the UI design field, and I fully expect Google and others to adopt something like it eventually.
The implementation isn’t flawless though.
I’d love if an actual UX designer could comment here.
Having said that, if it was 2020 and you told me that making photorealistic pictures of broken bridges was harder than spoofing the signals I just described, I’d say you were crazy.
The idea that a kid could do this would have seen even less plausible (that’s not to say a kid did it, just that they could have).
Anyway, since recently-intractable things are now trivial, runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.