I fully expect the data to be de-anonymized and then used against people that have familial links to those who have donated their data.
"Oh, your great great-great-grandfather had <disease>, so now you're classified as a high-risk individual and you have to pay a higher monthly fee for insurance"
Only they won't tell you why you have to pay more, just that you do.
That is essentially why HIPAA exists. And the negative and limiting effects of HIPAA on clinical trials is well acknowledged and is considered as an acceptable cost of HIPAA.
HIPAA was written in 1996. The human genome project was completed in 2003, and WGS wasn't in the clinic for another decade. Nothing about HIPAA is considered or intentional in the context of current medical practice or research. It's just an old law that carries forward mindlessly like all laws do.
1. It's illegal, and insurance company employees aren't suicidal.
2. If health insurance companies wanted to break the law, they would simply violate the existing prohibition on discriminating on preexisting conditions, which gives them vastly more actionability than some tenuous, diluted link to a relative.
This is all frankly nonsensical because insurance companies charge people within tightly-regimented tiers, there's no wiggle room for mystery +30% fee increases.
Thousands of Wells Fargo employees would like to have a word with you about #1. “Illegal” is outweighed easily if there’s a bonus to be earned by doing something that everybody says you won’t be caught for doing. Plus, the company itself can’t be put in prison and the employees whose bad idea it was will probably get a slap on the wrist. And if it’s a big enough company, they won’t endanger it by truly hurting it with fines.
#2 is a pretty good point though.
I use the N64 controller with my PC, it's available for purchase by anyone who subscribes to NSO. It connects via bluetooth (the USB connection is for charging only).
If you were standing on top of Mt. Elbrus (elevation: 5.6km above sea level), you could see the horizon roughly 271km away (assuming the horizon was at sea-level, there were no obstructions, atmospheric or otherwise, etc). The inverse of this is that if you were at sea level, 271km away from the peak of Mt. Elbrus, you could theoretically see the peak of the mountain.
So, assuming you weren't at sea-level, it's reasonable that you could see the peak of this mountain from 300km away.
However, seeing the peak of a mountain on the horizon isn't sufficient. You'd need to see a large portion of the mountain on the horizon in order to determine that it's actually the mountain you see in the distance, and not a closer peak that's less tall. This means that the observer would need to be at sufficient altitude themselves in order to view the mountain from this distance. I don't know enough about the math to calculate the necessary altitude required by the observer, but I would estimate an elevation of many hundreds of meters above sea level to be necessary. If anyone else can calculate this better, I would love to know how to find the answer myself.
Without knowing the general area of where you were, all I can say is that it sounds very unlikely.
There have been photos even from Rize, Turkey 300km, albeit very-very blurry.
But I think you are most definitely right: I checked and it’s only 240 from the straight line in my case (my memories of something closer to 290 is more about road distance)
I wonder what the efficiency losses become in this configuration; using the grid to charge a battery to charge a vehicle.
A quick google query says that efficiency of L2 residential EV chargers is somewhere in the neighborhood of 85%, and for DC-DC chargers the efficiency is in the order of 90%. I don't know nearly enough about this to state anything definitively, but it sounds like the efficiency losses start to accumulate pretty quickly.
I wonder what the break-even point is in terms of cost compared to an average ICE vehicle.
Apply a healthy dose of "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough" of course, but I am curious about the economics at play.
I don't think the efficiency can be partitioned like that. An L3 charger is supposed to output the same electricity that goes directly into the car's battery, with no additional conversion. An L1 or L2 charger has no conversion inside the charger - it's just a wire and a little electronic tag that says what the amperage is.
In the L3 case there is still a voltage conversion because the input voltage needs to be higher than the battery voltage in order to put energy into the battery. There will be a loss at that stage.
But a big part of the loss during L3 charging is in the battery chemistry. The relatively high charging rate is less efficient than slower charging rates. The high powers involved also generate heat, which often requires active cooling which is an additional reduction in plug-to-wheel efficiency.
In the L1/L2 case there is a conversion from ~240v AC to DC but it's inside the vehicle. Plus the battery chemistry charging losses, but they are much lower than in the L3 case.
These are all ballpark numbers anyhow, so you are welcome to suggest difference values which you believe are supported.
With something like this, throwing in solar makes a lot of sense (IMO). There are already batteries involved so you could use solar as the primary recharge mechanism with the grid as a backup.
That's the neat thing, it doesn't have to. Every kWh that goes into these batteries is a kWh not purchased from the grid. The payback for the solar panels would very quickly add up.
In fact, trying to 100% charge the batteries via solar would not be the most economical way to operate as then you are just wasting money sending power back to the grid.
This Reddit thread seems to suggest that it's from an early production run of the game. (though that seems strange to me as normally the glob top chips come as a cost-cutting measure on later revisions of a chip.)
I replied "Can I see my dog first?"
It just shows that there's an expectation, and at that point it should simply be built into the advertised price.
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