Readit NewsTell me, where am I right now? I traveled there recently.
Governments certainly can find out that information, as my recent flights are recorded in lots of databases accessible to the. But it's much harder for non-government entities not directly involved in the travel to find this out due to privacy laws (particularly in the EU).
Probably, but the FAA and aviation in general leans towards "use the dumbest, most reliable technology possible" (for good reason, this isn't a dig at that). A relatively cheap wing-attachable beacon that beep boops on a frequency with no handshakes, encryption, etc. is one of the simplest possible thing.
Look at the fact that piston engines in aircraft still use magnetos and manual mixture controls. :) There's a ton of literature on that, we've had real world examples of more reliable alternatives, and yet... Luckily magento replacements such as SureFly are making some headway (after long, long long last). But they're a tiny tiny part of aviation today.
But, even then, there may still be something clever that can be done to improve privacy without something as heavy-weight as, say, encryption. We should be open to the possibility.
So, perhaps to reword my “imagine:” imagine the government required a tracker on every car, AND that data would be available to anyone in the entire world who wants it at anytime with no restrictions whatsoever.
There's probably a way that the system could achieve the same safety benefits without invading privacy. Obviously, this FAA list is part of that. But there's probably even better tech that could achieve this too.
I'm not an aviation expert so I'll leave the details to those people. But we should be trying to find ways to improve the privacy of this system.
Give it time and people will try to justify real time tracking of all car traffic for "safety" reasons too...
I'm not happy with the level of travel privacy out there and it would be definitely in my interests for it to be better. I have a very real risk that someone thinks I'm Satoshi and tries to track me down to get billions in BTC that I don't have.
It seems though that simple elimination would reveal the "flights we're not supposed to know about". Or perhaps we'll get actual human "plane spotters" around the airports to log these radio-silent flights.
The status quo is you or I can travel without significant non-government privacy concerns, as we blend into the crowd of millions of normal air travelers. Celebrities can't do that, as they get noticed by the public. Keeping the movements of their planes private just helps celebrities get to enjoy a similar level of privacy as the rest of us. I see nothing wrong with that.
Furthermore, it's good that celebrities value their privacy. Everyone should. We can all members of society to value privacy and for those values to filter down into laws that also protect it.
But yes, certainly poorly managed solar/wind that doesn't have good mechanisms to turn off in response to lack of demand is mainly the issue. In the future, when control systems are better, I'm sure negative pricing will be much less common.
I'd recommend digging elsewhere for conspiracy bait. This is a mild curiosity at best.
Exactly. There are genuine economic/engineering reasons for negative prices to occasionally exist. But in a well-designed, well-run, grid price will be negative only a small minority of the time. It just doesn't make sense to install a bunch of expensive equipment to provide this service when sufficient capacity exists from "happy accidents" like spare battery storage.
In the long run, better managed solar and wind should make negative prices a fairly rare event.
A neat example of regenerative braking being important is the London Underground: they've had a persistent problem with high temperatures in the subway, of which a decent % is actually heat from trains braking. By using regenerative braking rather than putting that energy into the tunnels as heat, they can transport that energy outside the tunnels, keeping them cooler.
The pilot could eject at any time. Still dangerous, but more of a debugging session to avoid other similar costly in the future than a Hollywood-like "if we don't solve this now the pilot dies"