- A number of parts of the underground already have platform edge doors, and train stopping locations are tightly controlled regardless of the presence of platform edge doors.
- > so I wonder if the tube stuff is just a weak public cover for the military/civil emergency applications that make the technology actually interesting.
The project is quite explicitly a defence project. IanVisits is just a transport blog, so the article focus on the transport aspect of this project. But reporting else where makes it quite clear this a defence project.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/15/lond...
The only reasons for the Tube being involved is as a test bed for the technology. It’s cheaper to put this box on a train and test it, than it is to put it on a boat or a submarine. It’s also handy that the researchers involved are based in London, so the commute to their test bed is nice and short.
- The accumulation might be from the integration, but the error is clearly from the accelerometers. Smaller error means smaller accumulated error, which means your magic box is usefully accurate for longer.
- 100%, but smoke screen is over selling it. From the article
> The project is being carried out in collaboration with Transport for London, QinetiQ, PA Consulting, Imperial College London and University of Sussex.
QinetiQ is a UK weapons developer, probably the UKs largest. So the defence angle isn’t really being hidden.
Older articles on this project from elsewhere outline the defence angle even more explicitly:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/15/lond...
But IanVisits is a transport focused blog, so the article has a transport focus, rather than a defence focus.
As to why any of this is happening on the underground, that’s pretty simple. Tube trains are a good real world test bed for this technology. Shove your quantum box on an existing train, drive it through the existing tunnels a few times as part of a normal tube service. Compare the run result and validate how accurate your technology is.
It’s a lot cheaper than putting it on a boat or a submarine. Not to mention Imperial College London is based in… London. They’re literally a five minute walk from a tube station.
- > I would wager that actually this is probably just a way of funnelling money into research around quantum rather than genuinely trying to solve this specific problem.
You’re absolutely correct, from the government’s perspective the interest in the technology is for high accuracy inertial navigation systems for defence purposes, not for the London Tube. If you look at the other companies involved in this project, there’s a number of defence contractors involved.
This project isn’t really new, and historically the pitch has always been: We want to develop GPS grade navigation that doesn’t depend on satellites, and is smaller and better existing inertial navigation units. Oh look the London Underground is the perfect test bed for our technology!
It’s underground, so no GPS or many external signals. It’s already well mapped so we have something to compare against. Tube trains are loud, hot and vibrant a lot, which makes it a challenging environment for inertial systems. Plus it’s cheap and very easy to roll a box on an existing train, drive a few km under the city, and then compare your results to GPS from when you go underground, to when you surface again.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/15/lond...
The idea of using it map the underground I think is a bit of a red herring. Makes a good story, and TfL will probably be grateful for the data. But it’s not the kinda thing anyone thinks is worth developing quantum accelerometers for.
- That is an unusual luxury, especially mobile providers still using IPv4.
Mobile providers have been the first and most aggressive to migrate to IPv6. Probably helped along by the cost and difficulty of running CGNATs when your network clients are constantly moving around. At least in the UK all the mobile providers are IPv6, and I think a handful are IPv6 only.
- Using a normal ISP issued router, wouldn’t make a lick of difference if it was IPv4 with a NAT or IPv6 without a NAT. They’re all configured out-of-the-box with a default deny firewall. I’m not actually aware of any residential grade router that doesn’t come configured like this.
Of course if the router is misconfigured, then all bets are off. But that’s true regardless of IPv4 vs IPv6, because people will just compromise your router first and use that as a launch pad for the rest of your network. Just like to do today with plenty of old residential routers.
- You literally can. You can just use local link addresses, IPv6 routers are guarantee not to forward those packets out of the network, or forward traffic into the network addresses to one of those IPs. Devices within the network can all still talk to each other.
If you really want to do the full Monty, add a NAT to your IPv6 router to have it translate to the local-link addresses, just like it would on IPv4.
I would highlight this is also identical to IPv4, which notably is also a standard built around the idea that every device in the world can, and should, be given a publicly addressable IP. Many large corporations and universities with /8 IP blocks do exactly this. Unfortunately when they originally wrote the IPv4 standard they slightly underestimated how many devices would eventually connect to the internet.
- The early teens didn’t have huge proliferation of ISPs using CGNATs.
These days ISP can’t get hold of new IPv4 blocks, and increasingly don’t provide public IP addresses to residential routers, not without having to pay extra for that lowly single IPv4 address.
Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.
- No the author is highlighting the fact that the aspect ratio a video is stored in doesn’t always match the aspect ratio a video is displayed in. So simply calculating the aspect ratio based on the number of horizontal and vertical pixels gives you the storage ratio, but doesn’t always result in the correct display ratio.
- Where else are they going to come from? They’re all basic elements, either you separate them from air, or you have to go through an energy intensive process to liberate them from various chemicals they’ve been compounded into.
But guess what, all of those chemicals are extremely valuable, such as nitrates for fertiliser, water, and Argon does really react with anything (it’s a noble gas), which is why we use it as a shield gas in processes like welding.
So producing enough of those gases to somehow offset CO2 production would first require ludicrously large amounts of energy, and if we had access to that amount of clean energy we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Plus it requires breaking down really valuable chemicals that we spend quite a lot of energy trying to produce or preserve anyway.
- There is an effective duopoly in the smartphone OS market. iOS and Android, that’s what’s makes Apple a gatekeeper.
Duopolies are just as dangerous as monopolies. Basically anything where there is a dozen or so competitors tends to be dangerous, as the US loves to demonstrate in as many industries as possible.
- Most people also complain about how pharmaceuticals are greedy corporations that seek to exploit monopoly status for profits above human health. Hardly a good example of a well functioning market.
- That’s probably related to transactions large enough to warrant immediate settlement via a US federal reserve bank. Given US federal reserve banks sit at the heart of US dollar transactions (pretty much by definition, they’re the only entities actually capable of creating US dollars), very large transactions that create significant flow imbalances between two banks trading US dollars anywhere in the world, will result in a settlement at a federal reserve.
But that only applies to transactions happening in US dollars, and SWIFT deals in far more than US dollars. For US dollar transactions it’s easy to imagine federal reserve banks slowing the settlement process and demanding extra data. Something that would be very annoying for foreign banks to deal with, but hardly unexpected. The US does ultimately control the US dollar after all, and at least for now the US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, which naturally gives the US an outsized influence in world financial markets. But Trump also seems hell bent on testing that privilege to breaking point.
- Doesn’t really matter does it? Belgium was a founding member of the EU, and still strongly supports it. There’s a reason why Belgium has been at the centre of the debate around frozen Russian assets, if they really didn’t care, they would just release the funds and wash their hands of the whole affair.
- And my point is that V1 technology for credit cards happened in the 1950s, V2 in the 1970s and by the time chip and pin came around, credit cards were hardly new technology anywhere in the western world.
Claiming that the US had too large of an install base for chip and pin to work would be like claiming the US had too large of a propeller air craft install base to adopt jet engines (also developed in Europe), but somehow the US managed that transition just fine. Americas failure to adopt chip and pin has nothing to do with legacy, and everything to do with US culture has a different relationship which money and how it’s spent.
In Europe people generally expect to be challenged when spending money using credit cards, and that’s always been true. So chip and PIN was always an easy to sell to consumers. In the US, people simply don’t expect to be challenged, and even get up upset when challenged, when using a credit card. So selling chip and PIN to consumers is much harder, especially when the US so happy to accept exploitative banking practices, and crazy high fraud rates.
- > Americans are not used to the pin concept.
Nobody was. That's what happens when something new is invented, nobody is familiar with it until they're educated. Nobody in Europe were not used to the pin concept when Chip & PIN was originally created (except of course for access to ATMs, which I assume also existed in the US).
> my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I don't know why you think Europe was any different, credit card adoption and acceptance in Europe matched that of the US in the 90s. Europe did take longer to hit the same levels of adoption as the US, but remember credit cards have been around since the 1950s, and were computerised in the 1970s. By the time you get to the 1990s, credit cards were pretty much ubiquitous across the entire western world. The US wasn't some futuristic bastion of banking technologies, if any thing, it was starting to fall behind. Today, US banking systems look comically outdated compared to anything you find in Europe.
Your "belief" for the reasons US banking tech lags so far behind the rest of the world are pretty easy to disprove with some fairly superficial research.
- No the US stuck with signature for profit and cultural reasons. Europe also had a huge install of mag stripe equipment, and has the same fraud systems, what else do you think Europe was using before EMV was developed?
But Chip-and-PIN makes using credit cards marginally less convenient, and forces people to authenticate themselves to perform transactions, unlike swipes and signatures, something that many Americans don't like. The US is happy with crazy high fraud rates, and crazy high interchange rates (fees for using credit cards). Those interchange rates also fund all the fancy points and rewards programs in the US, and primarily are paid for by the poorest in society (who can't access those programs, but are still paying the interchange rates). Plus high interchange rates mean more money for banks and the card networks themselves.
The EU on the other hand capped interchange rates, so either banks had to get fraud under control, or pay for fraud out of their own pockets. I'll give you two guess which route they chose.
- > Device manufacturers could pay Apple to register their devices to be recognized by the iPhone that they know how to use the advanced features it is capable of, for example.
Maybe if Apple actually offered that at a reasonable price, and to be clear they have never offered this at any price, the EU wouldn’t have felt compelled to act. AirPods have been around for a decade now, the DSA has been in the works for five years. So it’s not like Apple hasn’t had time to act. They chose to do nothing, so now the EU is removing their right to choose.
> Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.
This would require support from Apple, which notably, it doesn’t provide.
> I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.
We’re talking about Apple here, one of the richest companies on the planet. I think it can survive. The DSA only applies to companies that achieve gatekeeper status, which basically means they’re an effective monopoly in a market that many people are forced to participate in (in this case smartphones). It’s a heck of bar to cross, and something that only been achieved by unbelievably profitable companies.
- Last I checked Belgium was a member of the EU. Heck Brussels, generally considered the de-facto “capital” of the EU, is in Belgium.
It’s pretty hard to get more hardcore EU than Belgium.
- That is not how SWIFT works at all. SWIFT is basically a peer to peer financial network between banks. Any bank can send any amount of money to any other bank, without any kind of approval from the US, provided they have an appropriate common facility. Which could be anything from both banks having accounts at a different common bank, or both banks holding accounts at a common national bank, which allows them to transact directly.
- > See thats why one needs a sovereign financial and banking system.
You mean a sovereign financial and banking system like the one currently freezing some $200B of Russian assets? Yeah I think the EU already has one of those.
- We’re talking about a UI interface here. How exactly would you ask Apple to “license its technology” there? Apple needs tell people how to trigger that interface, and Apple needs to support 3rd parties trigging that interface.
Apple could “license its technology”, but what use would that be. Having other phone manufacturers implement the same UI doesn’t change the market distorting effects of the iPhone.
- Are you trying suggest that Apple’s margins are so small that they need state protection? Or that Apple can’t compete if they’re not able to tightly lock down every aspect of their ecosystem?
- That’s a rather silly view to take. We have a phenomenon called “the first mover advantage” for a reason.
Plenty of other markets and businesses operate just fine while operating in an environment that makes protecting individual innovation functionally impossible. Just look at any related to fast fashion (not that I think the fast fashion market is a healthy phenomenon) or any commodities market. Or for that matter, most of the software industry.
The incentive for creating features should be to remain relevant and competitive. It shouldn’t be to build moats and war chests.
- > ALL OF THE LEGALLY SANCTIONED GOVERNMENT MONOPOLIES HERE.
This is the kinda claim that really needs citations, and ideally some commentary on how the examples demonstrate the point you’re trying to make. Otherwise it’s impossible to reply to, and just comes across a little shrill and conspiratorial. Which I don’t think is your goal.
- > You can have a reasonable requirement where Apple should not be able to block other companies from providing similar services based on an iphone.
This is what the requirement is. The EU isn’t demanding that Apple provide the same experience for 3rd Party and 1st Party products. It only requires that Apple allow 3rd Parties access to the same capabilities as 1st Party products, so 3rd Parties could build 1st Party quality experiences.
Nobody is asking Apple to degrade their own products. They’re just demanding that Apple don’t artificially degrade other people’s products.
> That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.
This is the only point of discussion here. Because all the EU requires is that Apple open up their internal protocols so others can implement them.
- There’s a big difference between a change which modifies the languages API, and one that just modifies the implementation of the API.
Given GoLangs compatibility guarantee, any mistake in the design of a language API has to be preserved forever, and is very difficult to improve.
But implementations of the GoLang spec and language APIs are much easier to evolve. There’s nothing preventing the Go team rolling out future improvements to deal with this issue, without having to worry about long term consequences. There’s also nothing preventing other implementations of the GoLang spec choosing a different approach.
- > Building a wall and shooting on site anyone who crosses it is a very simple and effective method of keeping immigration in check.
Ah yes a wall, like that famously effective one that Trump built. Tell me has US managed to actually finish it yet?
Apparently our standards have dropped so low that spray painting a couple of planes and embarrassing the UK military now puts you on par with those other organisations.