That's how it was for me - one exam per course at the end of each semester. To qualify for the exam you had to do take-home assignments. Didn't pass? Try again next semester. Was it easy? Hell no, but I learned a lot.
The vast majority of all of those casualties throughout the years is the poorest rural population not being able to afford wood for heating, so they try to get some from the forests in their areas that nobody lays a claim on. You can explain pretty much every uptick by looking at how well the country's economy is doing.
Another common reason for some of the upticks are natural disasters (most frequently floods or landslides) hitting known minefields, which then makes the position more difficult to assess.
There's also a very particular type of mine that doesn't explode on the spot, but shoots ~1m into the air before exploding and sending shrapnel in a large radius which is by far the most deadly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROM-1). The reason I'm mentioning it is that there was one particular incident with 5 casualties at a scrapyard that year. That same mine is also responsible for the only casualty last year, when a 19-yo goat herder tried to get his goats back on the road.
It adds enough of a barrier to be worth it. In the way I have implemented it, you can only have one account per ID (for example passport). Yes, you can buy fake passports, but it's prohibitively expensive. Read my blog post for more info.
This is not a technical issue - it's a societal one. Do we want online ID verification? Are the trade-offs worth it? Do we want to make the internet a place that requires an ID everywhere for age verification or to prove that you're human? What would the implications be?
Regarding your implementation: Most people don't have a passport, so it's a non-starter - but again, this topic is not a technical issue.
I think that it is a technical issue to a certain extent. Governments could make it very easy to prove humanity (and age) in a secure manner that doesn't leak your personal details to the third party that wants to perform the verification.
I don't see that as "requiring ID".
I think the real question is how much do we care that our online spaces are composed of not just AI bots, but also sock puppet accounts controlled by various people (from governments, rich people, all the way to harassers that use alt accounts) wanting to trick us.
You're still arguing from a technical perspective while not addressing the societal issues that online ID verification leads to. Do we as society really want an internet that resembles a gated community where you can only enter with an ID? What about the people we exclude? Should we abandon the free internet just because of bots and sock puppet accounts? What about other ways to address the issue?
I mean, reddit accounts are valued based on the identity they have built. Its not farfetched to imagine uninterested users making and selling a single account each.
I think that not doing partial-identity checks invite bot noise into conversations. We could have id checks that only check exactly what needs to be checked. Are you human? Are you an adult? And then nothing else is known.
Identity checks do not prevent bot noise. They just increase the difficulty for bot operators a bit (steal / buy identities or verified accounts). Added bonus for them: Their bot comments now appear more authentic.
With the upcoming MCS charging standard you won't need battery swaps for trucks or busses. Even today you have trucks that can charge with up to 400 kW, which is good enough for charging during mandatory pauses or downtimes.
>Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen [...]
They won't, why would they? The number of hydrogen gas stations is going down and the price is going up. Batteries are good enough already - the Mercedes eActros 600 with its 600 kWh battery has a range of 500 km.
Around where I live, we have electric car ferries.
To avoid having to upgrade the grid massively, we use large battery banks shoreside which are being charged at a sustainable (to the grid) rate, then the ferry charges rapidly by depleting the battery bank, leaving the grid alone.
Electrifying all transport in the nation would increase electricity load by 20%.
But even if 100% of all vehicles sold today was electric, it would still take ~20 years before almost 100% of vehicles on the road were electric. And it's not, so we're probably looking at > 30 years to increase electricity load by 20%.
That annual increase is far less than the increase caused by data centers. It's about the same as the annual increase in load caused by increased use of air conditioning.
Life expectancy. A hydrogen tank can be refilled forever. A battery is normally limited to a few thousand cycles. A truck, or airplane, is expected to be fueled/recharged daily for decades. A car is designed to survive the length of a standard lease. Those running fleets of trucks/aircraft will always care more than car owners about long-term ownership costs.
Yeah, Li-ion batteries already have comparable life cycles to hydrogen tanks 1-2k fills/recharges, _but_ batteries are improving rapidly and tanks are already a mature technology.
This isn't necessarily true. Most cylinders storing compressed gasses need to be hydrostatically tested in regular intervals to ensure continued safety and will need replacement when they fail. Other kinds of composite cylinders have fixed ages where they should be replaced.
Inspection is expected. In the transport industry, all sorts of parts need regular inspection. Batteries are different. Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it. Lots of parts have time limits, especially in aerospace, but few degrade. Those running fleets see this as unussual and unpredictable which, at scale, means extra expense. A tank that needs inspection every decade is a known problem. A battery that looses 1% to 5% capacity every year, depending on weather/use factors, is harder math.
I'm not in the transport industry, I just want to go to the grocery store.
> Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it.
Tires? Brake pads? Lubricants? Belts? Springs? Bearings? Bushings? Seals? There's tons of parts on my cars that have expected wear intervals that will need replacing after x number of miles with performance that changes with the wear of the part, there's a whole service manual of when to replace certain parts.
Nope. All those parts work at basically 100% until failure or replacement. Some even improve with a bit of use (tires, brake pads, seals). They wear, they dont degrade. Batteries drop in performance from day one.
So tires with 2/32nds will have better grip in the rain than warmed up fresh ones? They just get better until they pop? That must be the reason why race cars only use heavily worn tires instead of fresh ones when they race. Engine lubricant is better at 5,000mi than 1mi?
You only bother buying heavily used motor oil and tires right? After all they perform so much better.
And springs and shocks are perfect examples of things that start to lose their effectiveness on a curve instead of necessarily just all at once. You can tell the dampening effects get worse and worse, the car might start sagging more, etc. They have a whole range of performance before they need to be replaced.
Even the motor itself will often slowly have reduced compression due to slowly looser fitting parts before actual failure, fuel injectors will slowly get more gummed up over time, valves might get gunked up having reduced airflow, spark plugs are slowly vaporizing themselves and can have worse spark characteristics throughout their life, etc. Its not like everything just continues working 100% until they snap. Everything that's moving or reacting is slowly wearing itself out.
Mold release needs to be rubbed off. And the bead needs a few weeks to harden. That's why the tire people tell you to go easy on new tires. As for other stuff, work on cars for few decades and you will learn which parts are more reliable once proven than when brand new, which need time before being pushed to limits.
> As for other stuff, work on cars for few decades
That's the experience I'm drawing from when I point out that "virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it" isn't based in reality. Everything is constantly wearing out. Anything rubbing on another thing, any fluid being pushed through a hole, anything that might be reacting with another thing, its all slowly getting more and more out of spec. And when it gets more and more out of spec, its performance gets worse. You might not immediately notice it, that performance might not be in the go go kind of performance, but it isn't working as well as it used to.
Are you really going to tell me a car with a couple hundred thousand miles on it running all original parts (assuming they didn't literally break apart yet) is likely to be anywhere near the same performance as when the car had 200 miles on it? Its not. Its almost like there's a reason why mileage is considered when people price cars. The suspension isn't going to keep the wheels as well planted, the cylinders likely don't have the same compression, those fuel injectors are likely tired and aren't spraying optimally, that coolant pump is worn down and barely able to pump coolant anymore, your timings are likely not optimal anymore due to slack in the timing chain or belt, your spark plugs aren't making as full or reliable of spark, etc.
If your response is "well you would have replaced those by now"...well, why would you have to do that? Because they...had their performance reduce over the life of the part?
And even then, a part of that break-in period of those parts is the part's performance actively changing over the life of the part with pieces of the part literally degrading, just pretty quickly and positively for performance as opposed to negatively. That positive slope of performance change is a pretty early hump though, otherwise as I mentioned you'd be taking me up for ensuring all your tires are near-bald (but not quite, they haven't actually failed yet!) all the time and you'd be dumpster diving for the good stuff out behind your auto parts store.
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