What you're all missing with regards to stopping an autonomous vehicle is that there is already an override in place for the autonomous systems. It's called the steering wheel. In the current Google cars, the driver (that is, the person sitting in the driver's seat -- there still has to be a licensed human operator in the driver's seat) can take full control of the vehicle at any time by simply applying control inputs. If you're chilling out in your autonomous car and a police car is clearly trying to pull you over like any other car, you pull the hell over. No dystopian remote control systems required.
Personally, I'd prefer the drowsy types and the like to be evolutionary selected away.
bjd
What about the people they crash into? Think about this in terms of drunk drivers for a moment. When drunk drivers crash, they quite frequently kill people who committed no crime other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Does that qualify them for being evolutionarily selected?
Just tried it in Comodo Dragon, no dice. On the plus side, Adblock for Opera does in fact kill embedded video ads properly. I hadn't given Opera a try in a few years, definitely worth looking into if you're considering ditching FF. The UI is pretty similar as well.
I have... whatever version of FF, I lost track, still installed because both versions of Adblock for Chrome don't block embedded video ads. Granted, this is apparently a technical issue that would require a patch to Chrome rather than crappy plugin porting. Does anyone happen to know if this is the case for Chromium (I'm assuming Adblock works for Chromium)?
Have you ever bought anything from Amazon's store? They do have the qualities mentioned above, but the actual audio quality is so atrocious that I could never justify paying for it. I'm no FLAC-loving audiophile, but being able to buy a non-DRM MP3 with no hassle isn't worth it when you're paying for an MP3 file with a bitrate of 128 or below.
I honestly lost track of what the latest release of FF is since Tuesday. I saw this headline and said to myself, "wait, I thought FF9 came out earlier this week?".
Toughbooks can take an assault rifle round. I don't have a link, but the story goes something like this:
It was early in the Iraq invasion, when unarmored humvees were still common. The soldier was in one of said humvees with his Toughbook at his hip. They started taking AK fire, and a round ripped through the door, went through the laptop screen, and cratered in the keyboard. They replaced the screen and the keyboard and sent him on his merry way.
As a robotics person, I really, REALLY, want to see autonomous variants of these. I imagine it already has some kind of GPS onboard that would be the primary means of navigation. The rest is basically a much easier version of all of the design challenges of Google's self-driving cars. You see the runway to take off/land the same way the cars see lanes on the road. You can interface with existing air traffic control infrastructure instead of dealing with the chaos of public roads.
There's absolutely no reason we shouldn't have these flying themselves all over the place carrying cargo that's normally (in the US/Canada at least) shipped via truck or rail. If the speed estimates people have come up with here based on the range are any good, shipping time would be reasonably competitive given that aircraft don't have to deal with road traffic, weigh stations, etc.
If the aircraft needs no fuel to stay aloft what is placing the limit on the range? At some point it would have to come down of course but why couldn't it stay up for 10,000 km instead of just 1000 km?
Ignoring the hybrid models, the big question here is how much power the solar arrays bring in on a good day compared to how much is required for forward propulsion since it's heavier than air. If propulsion costs more energy than the sun gives, your batteries eventually drain, albeit far slower than they would without the solar panels. If not, your batteries eventually drain anyways after the sun goes down.
Now, if it were lighter than air, you could stay afloat with dead batteries but you would be adrift at the mercy of the wind until you could recharge the batteries. If I were to design such a vehicle, I'd have a backup battery system in place to allow for a safe landing.
This is interesting, but I have to ask, why is Google doing this? What is in it for them?
It's nice that they are doing it, but as a business, they can't be sinking money into it (and risking being sued or damaging their reputation) without the expectation of a reasonable return.
So, how are they making money on this? Perhaps while you are driven around you have more time to make use of Google ad-supported services?
The first thing that comes to mind is Street View. Beyond that, licensing it to car manufacturers and promptly building yourself a solid gold house with a fraction of the profits.
After IBM PCD was sold off to Lenovo, the quality has decreased.
Their well-known Thinkpad product line transitioned from a no compromise option to a lesser product. First, the high-quality Flexview displays went. Next was any non-widescreen display, followed by the split into the current models seen today. In trying to globalize a US brand, they killed what made the Thinkpads unique - being able to pay a good amount of money, and get a no-nonsense, no-compromise product.
The difference is that you could literally bash a DV9000 to pieces with an old Thinkpad and the Thinkpad would probably still work.
Semi-related: IE9 is apparently still so tied into Windows Explorer that Windows Update killed explorer.exe on me while IE9 was installing. Shady browser code? What shady browser code?
If you don't want to get into pyrotechnics but you have firearms: A.308 will do the trick.
This. My boss at my old IT job used to go out to a firing range with one of the server guys on their lunch break and shoot old drives with a bunch of different guns. It makes a pretty awesome looking exit wound.
Gasification using a waste product would be more renewable and green. But coffee requires significant water, pesticides, and human intervention to grow. This is probably no better than corn ethanol fueling a vehicle. Ho hum. I could power a car by burning diamonds, too...interesting, yes...efficient, no.
They're using old coffee grounds. As in the coffee was already brewed and made into a cup of coffee. It's like the people that run their cars on old grease from restaurants, you could swing by the local Starbucks and get their old waste grounds to fill up your car.
I don't get this huge hate for any and all regulation. Sometimes it is necessary. To say it is always necessary or that it is never necessary just makes you sound like a jackass. Come over here and live in the real world with the rest of us, please.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think one of the big reasons regulation gets so much hate is poorly implemented regulations giving the broader concept a bad rap. In general terms I think the right way to regulate is to establish minimum standards that give a baseline of what is acceptable behavior. Behavior below that standard is in some way harmful to the public, which is what prompted the creation of regulation in the first place. Regulation should focus on what one should NOT do ("don't poison people's drinking water, through whatever means are required/logical for your situation") as opposed to spelling out specific things that one MUST do in order to be considered compliant. The latter tends to have a higher cost of implementation due to effective alternatives not being considered compliant, as well as having more potential for the regulation just plain not being effective at it's underlying goal: the public welfare. The former reflects a healthy role of government in society: protect its citizens from harm while restricting its citizenry in as few was as possible.
In this case, good regulation would make companies liable for patently bad security practices such as:
-Passwords written down on a post-it note under the keyboard (OK, you obviously can't really regulate this one reliably, but if you could somehow prove it in a negligence lawsuit it would be pretty awesome)
-Failure to install critical security patches in a timely fashion
-Not performing some basic level of testing systems against a simulated attack, especially for attacks that are very easy to perform like SQL injects
-Failure to secure systems in response to previous breaches (Sony servers from various business divisions being hit by SQL injects all over the world over a significant time period)
-Storing things like credit card numbers, passwords, etc in plain text
-Very weak passwords, especially for sensitive logins. Things like passwords being 6 or less characters, all lowercase, password=username, or passwords that are based on easily obtainable information about the user of the account (wife/pet's name, etc)
The following would be bad things to require as part of regulations. They could possibly be published alongside the regulations as recommendations/guidelines, but keep in mind here that the goal is to establish a baseline for what should be considered negligence.
-Use of third party security software from an approved list. These kinds of schemes are bad because a sysadmin could take perfectly reasonable steps to secure systems without using "approved" software (good luck keeping that list up to date anyways), but in the event of a breach they get crucified for not installing Norton Antivirus 2001.
-Although I did mention SQL injects as an example of stupid easy things you shouldn't get hit by, there should be little emphasis on specific vulnerabilities. As we're all quite aware here, technology changes far faster than laws.
-Convoluted requirements about the complexity/periodic changing of passwords. A lot of people on this site have probably worked at *that company* where you have to change your 20+ password every 15 minutes to something you've never used as your password before involving most of the symbols on their keyboard. Yes I'm hyberolizing like there's no tomorrow, but anything in that vein shouldn't be government-mandated.
Unfortunately, I don't have much in the way of purely "bad" examples of existing regulation on hand (Obama's health care reforms requiring the purchase of health insurance is VERY bad, but those reforms also implemented a bunch of good protections that are all rolled up in the same law), but TubeSteak gave some good examples of the right way to implement regul
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What you're all missing with regards to stopping an autonomous vehicle is that there is already an override in place for the autonomous systems. It's called the steering wheel. In the current Google cars, the driver (that is, the person sitting in the driver's seat -- there still has to be a licensed human operator in the driver's seat) can take full control of the vehicle at any time by simply applying control inputs. If you're chilling out in your autonomous car and a police car is clearly trying to pull you over like any other car, you pull the hell over. No dystopian remote control systems required.
The lobbying isn't bribery on its own, what makes it bribery is when lobbying involves a financial incentive (campaign contributions).
If ease of use is your concern, there's the Maple, which is basically an Arduino with a Cortex-M3 instead of an AVR: http://leaflabs.com/
If you end up wanting to go to school here (they give a LOT of financial aid for exchange students), these camps are an easy foot in the door.
Personally, I'd prefer the drowsy types and the like to be evolutionary selected away.
bjd
What about the people they crash into? Think about this in terms of drunk drivers for a moment. When drunk drivers crash, they quite frequently kill people who committed no crime other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Does that qualify them for being evolutionarily selected?
Just tried it in Comodo Dragon, no dice. On the plus side, Adblock for Opera does in fact kill embedded video ads properly. I hadn't given Opera a try in a few years, definitely worth looking into if you're considering ditching FF. The UI is pretty similar as well.
I have... whatever version of FF, I lost track, still installed because both versions of Adblock for Chrome don't block embedded video ads. Granted, this is apparently a technical issue that would require a patch to Chrome rather than crappy plugin porting. Does anyone happen to know if this is the case for Chromium (I'm assuming Adblock works for Chromium)?
You forgot the outer while(1) block.
One. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tessa-blake/miscarriage-at-occupy-sea_b_1109211.html
It would be better to control the robot via 802.11
That requires an 802.11 network as well as 802.11 hardware on your robot, which costs significantly more than the onboard microcontroller.
You mean exactly like Amazon's music store?
Have you ever bought anything from Amazon's store? They do have the qualities mentioned above, but the actual audio quality is so atrocious that I could never justify paying for it. I'm no FLAC-loving audiophile, but being able to buy a non-DRM MP3 with no hassle isn't worth it when you're paying for an MP3 file with a bitrate of 128 or below.
I honestly lost track of what the latest release of FF is since Tuesday. I saw this headline and said to myself, "wait, I thought FF9 came out earlier this week?".
Toughbooks can take an assault rifle round. I don't have a link, but the story goes something like this:
It was early in the Iraq invasion, when unarmored humvees were still common. The soldier was in one of said humvees with his Toughbook at his hip. They started taking AK fire, and a round ripped through the door, went through the laptop screen, and cratered in the keyboard. They replaced the screen and the keyboard and sent him on his merry way.
You're assuming they have a job to come back to.
That's assuming that the "worst case scenario" predictions were correct.
You have spectrometers built into your eyes? I wasn't aware that Geordi LaForge posted here.
As a robotics person, I really, REALLY, want to see autonomous variants of these. I imagine it already has some kind of GPS onboard that would be the primary means of navigation. The rest is basically a much easier version of all of the design challenges of Google's self-driving cars. You see the runway to take off/land the same way the cars see lanes on the road. You can interface with existing air traffic control infrastructure instead of dealing with the chaos of public roads.
There's absolutely no reason we shouldn't have these flying themselves all over the place carrying cargo that's normally (in the US/Canada at least) shipped via truck or rail. If the speed estimates people have come up with here based on the range are any good, shipping time would be reasonably competitive given that aircraft don't have to deal with road traffic, weigh stations, etc.
If the aircraft needs no fuel to stay aloft what is placing the limit on the range? At some point it would have to come down of course but why couldn't it stay up for 10,000 km instead of just 1000 km?
Ignoring the hybrid models, the big question here is how much power the solar arrays bring in on a good day compared to how much is required for forward propulsion since it's heavier than air. If propulsion costs more energy than the sun gives, your batteries eventually drain, albeit far slower than they would without the solar panels. If not, your batteries eventually drain anyways after the sun goes down.
Now, if it were lighter than air, you could stay afloat with dead batteries but you would be adrift at the mercy of the wind until you could recharge the batteries. If I were to design such a vehicle, I'd have a backup battery system in place to allow for a safe landing.
This is interesting, but I have to ask, why is Google doing this? What is in it for them?
It's nice that they are doing it, but as a business, they can't be sinking money into it (and risking being sued or damaging their reputation) without the expectation of a reasonable return.
So, how are they making money on this? Perhaps while you are driven around you have more time to make use of Google ad-supported services?
The first thing that comes to mind is Street View. Beyond that, licensing it to car manufacturers and promptly building yourself a solid gold house with a fraction of the profits.
After IBM PCD was sold off to Lenovo, the quality has decreased.
Their well-known Thinkpad product line transitioned from a no compromise option to a lesser product. First, the high-quality Flexview displays went. Next was any non-widescreen display, followed by the split into the current models seen today. In trying to globalize a US brand, they killed what made the Thinkpads unique - being able to pay a good amount of money, and get a no-nonsense, no-compromise product.
The difference is that you could literally bash a DV9000 to pieces with an old Thinkpad and the Thinkpad would probably still work.
Carly.
Semi-related: IE9 is apparently still so tied into Windows Explorer that Windows Update killed explorer.exe on me while IE9 was installing. Shady browser code? What shady browser code?
If you don't want to get into pyrotechnics but you have firearms: A .308 will do the trick.
This. My boss at my old IT job used to go out to a firing range with one of the server guys on their lunch break and shoot old drives with a bunch of different guns. It makes a pretty awesome looking exit wound.
Gasification using a waste product would be more renewable and green. But coffee requires significant water, pesticides, and human intervention to grow. This is probably no better than corn ethanol fueling a vehicle. Ho hum. I could power a car by burning diamonds, too...interesting, yes...efficient, no.
They're using old coffee grounds. As in the coffee was already brewed and made into a cup of coffee. It's like the people that run their cars on old grease from restaurants, you could swing by the local Starbucks and get their old waste grounds to fill up your car.
I don't get this huge hate for any and all regulation. Sometimes it is necessary. To say it is always necessary or that it is never necessary just makes you sound like a jackass. Come over here and live in the real world with the rest of us, please.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think one of the big reasons regulation gets so much hate is poorly implemented regulations giving the broader concept a bad rap. In general terms I think the right way to regulate is to establish minimum standards that give a baseline of what is acceptable behavior. Behavior below that standard is in some way harmful to the public, which is what prompted the creation of regulation in the first place. Regulation should focus on what one should NOT do ("don't poison people's drinking water, through whatever means are required/logical for your situation") as opposed to spelling out specific things that one MUST do in order to be considered compliant. The latter tends to have a higher cost of implementation due to effective alternatives not being considered compliant, as well as having more potential for the regulation just plain not being effective at it's underlying goal: the public welfare. The former reflects a healthy role of government in society: protect its citizens from harm while restricting its citizenry in as few was as possible.
In this case, good regulation would make companies liable for patently bad security practices such as:
-Passwords written down on a post-it note under the keyboard (OK, you obviously can't really regulate this one reliably, but if you could somehow prove it in a negligence lawsuit it would be pretty awesome)
-Failure to install critical security patches in a timely fashion
-Not performing some basic level of testing systems against a simulated attack, especially for attacks that are very easy to perform like SQL injects
-Failure to secure systems in response to previous breaches (Sony servers from various business divisions being hit by SQL injects all over the world over a significant time period)
-Storing things like credit card numbers, passwords, etc in plain text
-Very weak passwords, especially for sensitive logins. Things like passwords being 6 or less characters, all lowercase, password=username, or passwords that are based on easily obtainable information about the user of the account (wife/pet's name, etc)
The following would be bad things to require as part of regulations. They could possibly be published alongside the regulations as recommendations/guidelines, but keep in mind here that the goal is to establish a baseline for what should be considered negligence.
-Use of third party security software from an approved list. These kinds of schemes are bad because a sysadmin could take perfectly reasonable steps to secure systems without using "approved" software (good luck keeping that list up to date anyways), but in the event of a breach they get crucified for not installing Norton Antivirus 2001.
-Although I did mention SQL injects as an example of stupid easy things you shouldn't get hit by, there should be little emphasis on specific vulnerabilities. As we're all quite aware here, technology changes far faster than laws.
-Convoluted requirements about the complexity/periodic changing of passwords. A lot of people on this site have probably worked at *that company* where you have to change your 20+ password every 15 minutes to something you've never used as your password before involving most of the symbols on their keyboard. Yes I'm hyberolizing like there's no tomorrow, but anything in that vein shouldn't be government-mandated.
Unfortunately, I don't have much in the way of purely "bad" examples of existing regulation on hand (Obama's health care reforms requiring the purchase of health insurance is VERY bad, but those reforms also implemented a bunch of good protections that are all rolled up in the same law), but TubeSteak gave some good examples of the right way to implement regul