In the UK: "A record for all vehicles passing by a camera is stored, including those for vehicles that are not known to be of interest at the time of the read. At present ANPR cameras nationally, submit on average around 60 million ANPR ‘read’ records to national ANPR systems daily." [1] (ANPR = Automatic Number Plate Recognition)
The data is kept for 12 months. So basically if you get onto the police radar for whatever reason they can roughly see how you used your car, and others they know you had access to, in the last 12 months (just saying, hum, hum).
1) If your car is stolen, suddenly none of this capability exists, or is inaccessible to police for some reason. No one can actually just type in your reg and see where it was last seen, seemingly, even though it would be an easy way to locate criminals. And if you think well, thieves will just change the plates - no, stolen vehicles are frequently recovered on their original plates.
2) I keep saying various FB Police pages posting "we found this car X without MOT or tax, last time it was taxed in 2023!" so like...it's been driving for 3 years without anyone noticing? What are all those ANPR cameras for then??
Regarding your second point, I don't think you'd go scotch free but the police wouldn't bother coming to the registered keeper's address and attempt to seize the car. I believe you'd simply get automatic fines for no MOT or no insurance (plus penalty points).
So that's that as long as you don't tweet tendencious things because then they might send several cars to arrest you /s
I have seen this complaint a lot but I think it is misplaced because it is frankly common sense to keep an update-to-date passport of the country you are a citizen of... People will have to apply for a passport and be done with it, nothing to see here...
Also, I suppose that the complaint comes only from people who live in countries that have visa-free travel to the UK and/or EU countries and who were just saving a little/money hassle otherwise they would already have an up-to-date British passport.
I'm a dual US/UK citizen, and the US has always required citizens to present their US passport to enter the US. The UK is doing the same. It's not a big ask.
Most years I don't visit the UK. My european passport is far more useful to me.
Note that this is an active change to the status quo. Up to and including today I had no need for my UK passport when entering the UK on my Swedish passport. From tomorrow I cannot do that and there's no reasonable explanation given for why this must change.
Edit: And while obviously this is not a big deal for me financially, there are a bunch of pensioners in the 3 million Brits living abroad and for many of them the £100 fee is a significant and unnecessary outlay.
Cynically, my view is that this is actually on purpose and pushed by the EU itself. My is happening in with Russia, Ukraine, the US is used as a narrative tool to push for EU federalisation. This means pushing for more EU control, which we are seeing, and minimising references to individual countries. Even the "sovereignty" push is fully through the lens of more EU oversight (which is oxymoronic but a powerful political narrative).
I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon. First thing the EU is that it needs to be reformed from the ground up and have elections for the general commissioner and its cabinet. Commissioner positions should be handed over to every country just because. The whole of Europe should vote who they want for agriculture, who they want for foreign relations and so on. The way it works now is very very wrong and a big disservice to EU citizens.
IMHO not using lidars sounds like a premature optimisation and a complication, with a level of hubris.
This is a difficult problem to solve and perhaps a pragmatic approach was/is to make your life as simple as possible to help get to a fully working solution, even if more expensive, then you can improve cost and optimise.
That's parenting. Parents used to limit their children's TV time, too. It's their job as parents. The same applies now to smartphones, social media, etc.
My understandung is that the US Supreme Court is a "passive judicial body". It cannot take the initiative and must wait until a case is put before it like is usual for a court.
The new 15% tariffs are apparently according to the 1974 Trade Act which allows the President to increase tariffs up to 15% for up to 150 days.
The Supreme Court can just make up its own rules. It made up its power of judicial review. Who's going to decide that they can't take initiative if they decide to?
“Passive” in the sense there’s no rule they can’t “actively” take bribes then make decisions to passively allow unconstitutional action by the other branches of the “checks and balances”
They do but the industry and regulations are such that this is usually led by people who have medical degrees or, say, phds in relevant fields. A "software guy" can then be up to VP level and lead the software aspect. This makes a lot of sense considering the credibility and expert knowledge required.
Such folk (medical degrees; phd's) are notoriously hard to pin down and finish a product. Been part of more than one; after years of unfocussed effort they failed to deliver.
Re. mobile phones it is because it allows sleeker and thinner design, and IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
But, really this is a non-issue because if you need a new battery for you phone, including iphone and samsung, just get it replaced. That's not super common to need it (again) but there is no issue having it done. I had it done before.
So overall I am skeptical that it will make a difference or that people will keep devices like phones longer because of this new mandate. I also doubt that the EU Parliament has data on this because many of those new regulations seem very hand-wavy to me and usually presented as obvious.
If you can quickly swap out an old phone battery with one you can purchase in a store, it's as easy as doing groceries.
If on the other hand you need to hand off your phone to a third party for repairs, and require people to make a backup of important data, maybe factory reset just in case, get a replacement device for the time without it, tell people you'll be unavailable for a bit... It's a big enough hurdle for people to think "well, guess it's a good enough excuse to upgrade to a new model". I've heard the latter too many times in my surroundings purely due to battery life issues.
The point being made is that if batteries can be replaced without specialized tools and training, the chances of that being done could be higher, potentially leading to longer usage time and reduced e-waste.
Consider that modern Li-ion batteries are better than older Li-ion batteries (and much better than nickel-metal-hydrides). The need for user-replaceable batteries in modern phones is on par with (or realistically a lot lower) than the need for user-replaceable screens.
My point is that things are rarely obvious. As you say, it "could". It is not obvious that it will make a difference and it might also increase the materials needed on both phones and battery.
I think the EU and European countries have much bigger fish to fry, including with regards to the environment.
> IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
Different phone users have very different usage patterns, in my experience.
I don't use my smartphone at home (I have a PC), at work (I have a PC, and a sense of professionalism), in between (can't use a phone while driving or cycling), while exercising or while socialising (it'd defeat the purpose). I'm basically checking public transit schedules, calling taxis, making payments, and occasionally taking a photo or sending a message.
My phone's still at 80% when I put it to charge while I sleep.
On the other hand, a person who spends a load of time on public transit, streaming netflix the whole time? A person who listens to music all day while they work? A delivery/uber driver? A teenager without a computer of their own, who uses their phone for games and social media? And maybe they're on a budget so they have an older device and/or a smaller battery?
These folks are cycling their battery twice a day. Buying portable power banks. Getting fast chargers, for an early evening battery top-up.
It's these people who need to replace their batteries.
> On the other hand, a person who spends a load of time on public transit, streaming netflix the whole time? A person who listens to music all day while they work?
That could be me. I am amazed at the battery life of my iPhone 16e. I have no need for daily battery swaps.
(Apple claims something like 21 hours of video streaming on a full charge -- that's on Apple's own streaming service but it is still many hours on Netflix and Youtube.)
The "fast charger" is a tiny 20W USB-C charger that I no longer remember if I bought separately or not. It's nice and fast.
Modern phones are really good at not using much power. Modern batteries are remarkably energy dense. They also degrade slower than older batteries, among other reasons because we have better (and cheaper and greener) additives now. Thank you, Dalhousie and Tesla!
This is legislation that would have made a lot of sense 10-15-20 years ago. It is symbolic now (and likely to be slightly worse for the environment).
> IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
Well, it was the most common thing to do for me - after a couple of years, you notice the battery performs worse, so you order a new one and enjoy brand new performance. Now it's hard to do even for laptops, especially some brands.
Replaceable batteries mean that you can just buy two or more and just carry them around so you can charge them less often. Alternatively you can charge the battery at home while you are away with the phone and have no down time for charging. (Down time meaning you can't carry the phone around.)
Interestingly if people start to buy extra batteries as you suggest then this will completely defeat the stated purpose of having replaceable batteries!
That being said, now they buy external power banks...
No it won't.
It's about reducing eWaste from the devices itself. Throwing away a whole device just because the battery is bad is much worse than just throwing away a worn out battery.
My 9 year old ThinkPad T470 is doing well with his 3rd or 4rd battery (and a new SSD and more RAM).
Also external powerbanks are pretty unpractical compared to a fresh new internal battery.
I can't believe you're arguing in good faith. Obviously just replacing the battery is better than replacing the whole device and all it's components just because the battery is bad.
The User above also said he bought two or three batteries, so he can swap them out when the battery is empty (I've also done this with my laptop) and distributing the charging cycles between the batteries, so they will all last longer.
If he wasn't a power user, he wouldn't drop money on two or three batteries in the beginning, and just buy a new one when the old goes bad.
The mistake in your argument is thinking that buying batteries results directly in e-waste. It first results in more working batteries being used over the lifetime of a device. Whether that results in more or less waste batteries in wallclock time depends on how that affects the time the device is used. If batteries are also standardized and thus device independent, the device becoming waste also doesn't mean the battery becoming waste automatically.
> My 9 year old ThinkPad T470 is doing well with his 3rd or 4rd battery (and a new SSD and more RAM).
But would it be doing well with only a new battery? Chances are a regulation that only regulates batteries won’t do much for tech that still is improving at a fairly decent rate.
It's running now with Fedora Linux, but it's still doing everything with 32GB RAM, and it's 2TB SSD what I need. (Editing Documents, doing some light coding, Python, R and browsing the Internet)
I also still get 10hrs battery life out of it.
I've thought already about replacing it, but it doesn't make any sense for me.
Especially that new ThinkPads in the T-Series have worse battery Life than I get right know due to their batteries being smaller and not anymore hot swappable.
Buying an extra battery is very different from buying an entire new phone and in no way it would offset the environmental gain of not buying an entire new phone.
Please don't engage in argument for argument's sake.
Pre-Regulation you couldn't even buy a genuine spare part, and they even did part pairing with batteries. Bothering you with stupid Nags when you went with the 3rd party shop
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