Here in Belgium too. Somehow they don’t properly work if you have other Bluetooth devices connected, so the app forces you to disconnect other devices. Then it needs access to precise geolocation, and not just because Bluetooth requires it - I have to turn on location services.
In the old system, I could just punch in the code or scan the QR code, but now I have to do this dance of “why won’t it connect?” every time
That's not how it works - the idea is your navigation app signals the lights in advance. If you will reach red lights in 1km, the app signals this and the lights will be green before you're there, so you don't need to slow down.
Flemish EMT here. There were a lot of privacy concerns for emergency services when this came out, and my service is in fact not using it on most ambulances. The same concerns were hand-waved away when it came to apps for regular drivers. It would not surprise me if that played a role for Google Maps/Waze not to support it. Or the market is too small here to be worth implementing.
In the US, there’s a thing called the Opticom. It’s just an extra light that is installed along with the normal light bar, and the traffic light recognizes the strobe pattern, and changes. https://www.fedsig.com/product/opticom/
But highly susceptible to unauthorized use. The app version can also alert drivers directly with an audible alert that an emergency vehicle is close by
Long ago I used to read i-hacked.com with great interest. They had an article about a DIY "MIRT" which produced the right infrared signal to trigger these:
Of course this article came with many disclaimers that to actually do this would be very illegal.
I was more than a little sad when I typed i-hacked.com into the browser and got redirected to some etsy page. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine, I guess.
Or by doing even a slight amount of encoding of the IR signal. Transmitting a single byte as a key (set by region, same as fire dept. elevator keys) would be enough to prevent people from using their TV remote controls or whatever to trip the preempt sensors.
That being said, this is kind of a non-issue already, I have heard a story about someone abusing the preempt sensors like 10 years ago and never since then. Maybe there already exists an encoding scheme.
Anecdotal of course, but in my 20 years of driving I've never once seen a vehicle activate the red light override sensors that wasn't obviously a legitimate emergency vehicle.
IMO a huge majority of people realize how illegal it would be to mess with these things, and the risk/reward is very low. Anyone who would take that risk would probably just run a red light instead.
Not really a real problem that actually happens, but you could fix it by only making it work with visible light pulses. Sure, people still might use it illegally, but you couldn’t be very subtle about it.
The concern was related to being able to know where emergency vehicles were. If you build a system that announces to traffic light “I’m police/fire/EMS, coming through”, you also build an early warning system for criminals and terrorists who either want to avoid or target you.
I think these systems used RF before, so anything in the vicinity could listen in. That said, if this new system is a phone app, it'll just be using phone data instead, so it'd be hard for that to be intercepted.
If we are assuming terrorists that can get real time access to government servers, we should assume they will access the servers used by the dispatchers and so can find out when an emergency vehicle leaves and where its destination is.
That is probably more useful for planning an attack on emergency vehicles.
Although why even bother with servers? Just call in a fake emergency (or cause a real emergency) at a place of your choosing, and the government will send emergency vehicles to you.
At least in the UK ambulance crews are extremely tightly monitored (mostly for good reasons) so surprised there would be any privacy concerns for crew on the clock.
This is my brother's job, testing for contaminants. He says it can be very boring. For example, they always test for lead, and it's always negative. But it's a necessary precaution when you're making medicine.
I think people don't really understand the requirements you need to meet to get and maintain FDA clearance. I think even under the current administration, you still could have an obligation to do that testing.
That’s all true when the medicine is made here. More and more of every day medicine these days is made in countries with fewer safety regulations like India and China. FDA may inspect them from to time but they have no jurisdiction to actually do anything about violations.
This is absolutely fantastic! I have been looking on and off for something like this for years (some of the things I have used are CouchDB, command/event sourcing, and ditto.live).
I have not been able to read the docs fully, but some questions:
* How do you handle state that is too big to send to the client fully? In a chat application, does the client need to have the whole channel history, or is syncing a subset of that supported?
* Does permissioning support partial CoValues? For example, "You can edit the contents but not the title of the 'blog post #11' object"
* Do you have resources about the suggested data modelling? Things like how granular should a CoValue be and what the trade-offs are.
* How do you handle deletion? Do you tombstone? Is there a way to fully scrub a value from history (to support, for example, GDPR's right to erasure)?
- Jazz is built with granular syncing in mind. CoValues are meant to be small (think one level of a JSON tree) and then reference each other. You only resolve references and sync as far down as you need / in lists you can do pagination.
- CoValues can reference CoValues that belong to a different group and thus have different permissions. In your example the title would need to live in its own CoValue and group compared to the content, which is a tiny bit more setup, but totally viable
- no resources for data modelling yet, but the guide + example apps should give you a very good idea. If you have any questions, please ask on Discord! https://discord.gg/sesjU2W5
- deletion is typically soft-deletion with tombstones. Total erasure of entire CoValues is coming soon but should only be needed in compliance situations (such as GDPR)
Can't say for Las Vegas, but we do here (in Belgium). There's a dedicated responsibility during mass casualties to distribute leaving ambulances over hospitals, also taking into account hospital specialties and facilities, such as a burn unit. The closest hospital is usually skipped because victims who self-transport will usually go there.
Interesting that he had to do so much thinking and improvising. I'm an EMT in Belgium, and every hospital here has to have plans for mass casualty events. Ambulance bays are built to be transformed into a triage ward, spare beds are kept close, often there's a dedicated command room, ...
As Eisenhower put it: "Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable."
In other words, the act of planning means you're better prepared for specific contingencies, so you'll hopefully be better prepared for whatever actually happens, but some improvisation will always be necessary.
100%. As another wise man once said, "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
The planning may be directly applicable in whole, is almost certainly applicable in part but in my opinion the main thing is that it provides a template for thinking about what things are important and which are expendable when you're operating in an environment with a greater tolerance for risk.
There is a rather large difference to having plans and dealing with an actual incident. Not to bicker, but a dedicated command room sounds like a fun plan but the opposite of what was needed in the incident described in this story.
Events like this are much more common than you may think, though rarely as severe as this shooting. From fires at retirement homes and even at an ED once, bus crashes, WWII bombs surfacing during construction, floods… it almost becomes routine. I can assure you the plans are not built not academics but are refined through experience. And in a weird way, disaster response almost becomes routine.
At the Luton airport they have these big "mass casualty event" supply boxes on the walls. Presumably full of supplies to provide efficient first aid after such an event on the spot.
It always happens eventually in discussions like this. "I'm from <country in Europe> and I don't get why y'all are so stupid, unlike us."
The US healthcare system is worthy of critique for many things, most of all cost, but the quality of care is just as good as every other western nation. Doctors are quite skilled, just like they are in Belgium I assume. And of course hospitals plan for mass casualty events. All of them, I bet, if they have an ER.
I wonder if OpenStreetMap has historical information easily available and easily queryable. It'd be interesting to see the evolution of the number of benches in cities and parks. My feeling is that they have been disappearing in my area, and it feels harder to find good spots to sit and read a book.
