That's certainly a concern, but the GP was positing a conspiracy to protect the people from the dangers of tech we aren't "ready" for. I agree that liability is a problem, but it's not an insurmountable one. Autonomous vehicles *are* coming. They won't be approved for public roads until the government is convinced of their (relative) safety, but they are coming.
No one is avoiding this research because of liability concerns.
Maybe, but I doubt it. Sensors are precision instruments and each one has to be calibrated and tested to within an inch of it's life. That process only becomes "cheap" when you can afford to massively parallelize it. If you sell ten of these sensors a year and each one takes a week to be tested/calibrated properly by a trained engineer, they certainly cost a pretty penny. But you can't just pump out 10K and expect the engineer's time to suddenly get cheaper.
8^) For obvious reasons, we couldn't do very extensive testing with pedestrian detection. Suffice it to say that HR felt compelled to convene a meeting with the engineers regarding the proper usage of interns...
From what *ahem* testing we were able to perform, out system detected pedestrians just fine. We were using a laser-based detector from whose data we used to create a 3d mesh of the world in real time. The mesh was then compared with camera images to determine the location of obstacles and roads. If I recall correctly, I believe Stanford's solution only used lasers to determine "flat surface" vs "non-flat surface" and mainly relies on their cameras to determine the location of the road. So it may have trouble detecting a narrow moving obstacle ahead of (or just on a collision course with) the vehicle.
As for "the most part, anyway" we did have some situations in which our detectors failed. Chain-link fences were tricky (we almost always detected them, but not 100% of the time) and - though other types of vehicles presented no problems - our VP's new Mustang was consistently invisible.:)
Yeah, we have the tech now for cars to drive themselves. I used to work for a robotics company and we made a number of vehicles that could drive themselves safely (for the most part, anyway).
Anyway, the main thing keeping autonomous cars off the roads today is not some secret government conspiracy, but cost. We built a car for the Darpa Urban Challenge which was capable of driving safely in normal traffic conditions at speeds up to 40mph (and several of our engineers felt confident that it could have handled itself safely all the way up to around 100mph!) The final cost of the car was a little over 1.5Million dollars. A good portion of that cost went into the varied and *extremely* expensive sensors the car required. Our main sensor sensor alone cost about $600,000!
We don't need society to "be ready" for autonomous cars - we need mass production of parts which are currently very, very specialized and costly.
Just so you're aware, the word in the bible which has been translated into English as "day" actually means "period of time" in Hebrew. A better translation might have been that the Earth was created in six "stages" instead of "days."
In other words, it's only been since the King James version of the bible that the world was created in 6 days.
I don't know where you got these ideas, but as someone who was home schooled, let me assure you - they're wrong.
I usually started school around 10am (after eating breakfast and finishing whatever my household chores were) and finished by 2pm. After that, I'd usually either play with my siblings (hardly anti-social) or read a book (okay, it's a solitary activity, but hardly harmful) until the neighborhood kids got home from school. After that, I'd often go play with the other kids - just like anyone else.
Did your parents lock you in the basement after school? Why would you assume that school is the only possible place for social activities?
Gahhh! Don't remind me. I carried that stupid gnome all the way to the Ant Lion caves. I had to set it down for just one second to use the gravity gun to smash some grubs... and I hit the wrong button. Instead of gently dropping the gnome at my feet, I launched the little bastard right out into the depths. of course, then I panicked and hit the Quick Save button instead of Quick Load.
...I can still see his cheeky grin as he tumbles end over end into the darkness.:(
Sure, it's slow, but I imagine the inconvenience of being in a wheelchair (faster, but you can't reach anything) isn't much better. I'd imagine it's faster on the stairs than dragging himself up them, anyway.
Plus, you saw how happy that guy was to be standing and walking, even if he was walking very slowly. Don't underestimate the psychological benefits of being able to stand upright, even assisted. People will respond much more positively to someone in an exoskeletal support suit than someone in a wheelchair.
I don;t think you're far off. Windows has the benefit of being available on multiple oem pcs - that is going to increase the installed base. It is also its weakness (although not a crippling one) in that you have a varied platform that you need to manage. The benefit of OS X is the very small set of hardware that OS X runs on. Advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but that's just how it is.
Also... Where is this "porn market" for android? I've been using Android phones since the G1. I can remember when there were few enough apps on the market that I was literally able to examine them all. I've never seen or even heard of anything like a porn market for Android. Steve is involved in libel here, plain and simple.
First off, let me state that I do want to see copyright reform. It's overlong and seems to protect the interests of large corporations over the interests of our culture.
Having said that, sites like IsoHunt don't have to prove their innocence, but it sure helps to have a defense shown to stand up in court. For those accused of profiting by facilitating copyright infringement the best defense has been to show that their technology has significant non-infringing uses. This defense is why we have technology like the (now outdated) VHS recorder or DVR systems.
As a company, IsoHunt was shown to a) be making a profit and b) derive a large portion of their traffic (and thus, indirectly, profit) from infringing materials. In order to have any chance of not being found guilty they would have to show that their platform was used more for good than not. They were unable to convince the court that they were totally innocent, but they're not being summarily closed, only ordered to remove all infringing materials they can find.
That difference is important because it shows that the court does believe that IsoHunt has non-infringing uses! They just also believe that IsoHunt needs to do a better a job keeping its nose clean as the infringing uses were (in the court's mind) more significant than the non-infringing ones.
The thing that accused infringement-aiding sites have to prove is that they have significant non-infringing uses. This is obviously true for Google. It is not so obviously true for IsoHunt and others. Sure, you can find legal content (like the latest Linux distros and so forth) - but IsoHunt and its brethren are a) not the sole distribution method for aforementioned legal content and b) the amount of illegal content is significantly larger than the amount of legal content.
Another vote for Boxee. I'm running an old P4 dual core 2.1Ghz box with an NVidia 5200 on Ubuntu. Instead of a standard IR remote though, I use cWiid and an old Wiimote. Since it's bluetooth, I don't have to worry about setting up finicky IR receivers or line of sight. 8^)
I always got the impression that it was because trading systems work - but only as well as the trader using them. I've found that knowing when *not* to follow your system is more important than whatever system you happened to be employing. That's knowledge that only comes with time and (often painful) experience.
Your system could be excellent at predicting market movements, but you may just not be cut out to be a trader. In such a situation, selling the system itself could very well make more economic sense than using it yourself.
You're right, that's phrased poorly. What it *should* say is that "markets are not random although they do not appear to be entirely predictable either".
No one can 100% predict the movements of the market - but because it's not actually random, you can predict correctly better than half the time - which means you can make money.
Your comment reminds me of this (admittedly long, but funny) beat poem about meeting someone with an evangelical zeal for all such hokum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s
Slashdot Mirror
That's certainly a concern, but the GP was positing a conspiracy to protect the people from the dangers of tech we aren't "ready" for. I agree that liability is a problem, but it's not an insurmountable one. Autonomous vehicles *are* coming. They won't be approved for public roads until the government is convinced of their (relative) safety, but they are coming.
No one is avoiding this research because of liability concerns.
Maybe, but I doubt it. Sensors are precision instruments and each one has to be calibrated and tested to within an inch of it's life. That process only becomes "cheap" when you can afford to massively parallelize it. If you sell ten of these sensors a year and each one takes a week to be tested/calibrated properly by a trained engineer, they certainly cost a pretty penny. But you can't just pump out 10K and expect the engineer's time to suddenly get cheaper.
8^) For obvious reasons, we couldn't do very extensive testing with pedestrian detection. Suffice it to say that HR felt compelled to convene a meeting with the engineers regarding the proper usage of interns...
:)
From what *ahem* testing we were able to perform, out system detected pedestrians just fine. We were using a laser-based detector from whose data we used to create a 3d mesh of the world in real time. The mesh was then compared with camera images to determine the location of obstacles and roads. If I recall correctly, I believe Stanford's solution only used lasers to determine "flat surface" vs "non-flat surface" and mainly relies on their cameras to determine the location of the road. So it may have trouble detecting a narrow moving obstacle ahead of (or just on a collision course with) the vehicle.
As for "the most part, anyway" we did have some situations in which our detectors failed. Chain-link fences were tricky (we almost always detected them, but not 100% of the time) and - though other types of vehicles presented no problems - our VP's new Mustang was consistently invisible.
Yeah, we have the tech now for cars to drive themselves. I used to work for a robotics company and we made a number of vehicles that could drive themselves safely (for the most part, anyway).
Anyway, the main thing keeping autonomous cars off the roads today is not some secret government conspiracy, but cost. We built a car for the Darpa Urban Challenge which was capable of driving safely in normal traffic conditions at speeds up to 40mph (and several of our engineers felt confident that it could have handled itself safely all the way up to around 100mph!) The final cost of the car was a little over 1.5Million dollars. A good portion of that cost went into the varied and *extremely* expensive sensors the car required. Our main sensor sensor alone cost about $600,000!
We don't need society to "be ready" for autonomous cars - we need mass production of parts which are currently very, very specialized and costly.
Just so you're aware, the word in the bible which has been translated into English as "day" actually means "period of time" in Hebrew. A better translation might have been that the Earth was created in six "stages" instead of "days."
In other words, it's only been since the King James version of the bible that the world was created in 6 days.
I don't know where you got these ideas, but as someone who was home schooled, let me assure you - they're wrong.
I usually started school around 10am (after eating breakfast and finishing whatever my household chores were) and finished by 2pm. After that, I'd usually either play with my siblings (hardly anti-social) or read a book (okay, it's a solitary activity, but hardly harmful) until the neighborhood kids got home from school. After that, I'd often go play with the other kids - just like anyone else.
Did your parents lock you in the basement after school? Why would you assume that school is the only possible place for social activities?
getting the gnome in HL2: Episode 2 into space.
Gahhh! Don't remind me. I carried that stupid gnome all the way to the Ant Lion caves. I had to set it down for just one second to use the gravity gun to smash some grubs... and I hit the wrong button. Instead of gently dropping the gnome at my feet, I launched the little bastard right out into the depths. of course, then I panicked and hit the Quick Save button instead of Quick Load.
:(
...I can still see his cheeky grin as he tumbles end over end into the darkness.
Sure, it's slow, but I imagine the inconvenience of being in a wheelchair (faster, but you can't reach anything) isn't much better. I'd imagine it's faster on the stairs than dragging himself up them, anyway.
Plus, you saw how happy that guy was to be standing and walking, even if he was walking very slowly. Don't underestimate the psychological benefits of being able to stand upright, even assisted. People will respond much more positively to someone in an exoskeletal support suit than someone in a wheelchair.
Ah yes, the N64 gamepad. The first gamepad to require three hands to operate. :)
Amen! Moving that damn cursor around with the d-pad was horrible!
I don;t think you're far off. Windows has the benefit of being available on multiple oem pcs - that is going to increase the installed base. It is also its weakness (although not a crippling one) in that you have a varied platform that you need to manage. The benefit of OS X is the very small set of hardware that OS X runs on. Advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but that's just how it is.
Hasn't seemed to to do Microsoft any harm...
Virii is not the plural of virus.
It will be if you wait a little while - language being what it is.
Fine, so in software, they disable the switch that enables the heated seats/AC. You still can't use the feature you paid for.
Also... Where is this "porn market" for android? I've been using Android phones since the G1. I can remember when there were few enough apps on the market that I was literally able to examine them all. I've never seen or even heard of anything like a porn market for Android. Steve is involved in libel here, plain and simple.
Two words. Splash. Damage.
Why do you think testing "less than 11" would be more efficient than testing "less than or equal to 10"?
These go to 11. /nigel
There are Riff Trax for all of the Star Wars movies.
First off, let me state that I do want to see copyright reform. It's overlong and seems to protect the interests of large corporations over the interests of our culture.
Having said that, sites like IsoHunt don't have to prove their innocence, but it sure helps to have a defense shown to stand up in court. For those accused of profiting by facilitating copyright infringement the best defense has been to show that their technology has significant non-infringing uses. This defense is why we have technology like the (now outdated) VHS recorder or DVR systems.
As a company, IsoHunt was shown to a) be making a profit and b) derive a large portion of their traffic (and thus, indirectly, profit) from infringing materials. In order to have any chance of not being found guilty they would have to show that their platform was used more for good than not. They were unable to convince the court that they were totally innocent, but they're not being summarily closed, only ordered to remove all infringing materials they can find.
That difference is important because it shows that the court does believe that IsoHunt has non-infringing uses! They just also believe that IsoHunt needs to do a better a job keeping its nose clean as the infringing uses were (in the court's mind) more significant than the non-infringing ones.
Focus.
The thing that accused infringement-aiding sites have to prove is that they have significant non-infringing uses. This is obviously true for Google. It is not so obviously true for IsoHunt and others. Sure, you can find legal content (like the latest Linux distros and so forth) - but IsoHunt and its brethren are a) not the sole distribution method for aforementioned legal content and b) the amount of illegal content is significantly larger than the amount of legal content.
Another vote for Boxee. I'm running an old P4 dual core 2.1Ghz box with an NVidia 5200 on Ubuntu. Instead of a standard IR remote though, I use cWiid and an old Wiimote. Since it's bluetooth, I don't have to worry about setting up finicky IR receivers or line of sight. 8^)
*BOOOOM*
(That's the sound of a whoosh breaking the sound barrier...)
I always got the impression that it was because trading systems work - but only as well as the trader using them. I've found that knowing when *not* to follow your system is more important than whatever system you happened to be employing. That's knowledge that only comes with time and (often painful) experience.
Your system could be excellent at predicting market movements, but you may just not be cut out to be a trader. In such a situation, selling the system itself could very well make more economic sense than using it yourself.
piqued, not peaked
To be fair, his email could just be the most interesting thing to ever happen in the recipient's life. ;)
*Note for Grammar Nazis: I am aware I have split an infinitive. So you all can just sic it. :P
You're right, that's phrased poorly. What it *should* say is that "markets are not random although they do not appear to be entirely predictable either".
No one can 100% predict the movements of the market - but because it's not actually random, you can predict correctly better than half the time - which means you can make money.
Your comment reminds me of this (admittedly long, but funny) beat poem about meeting someone with an evangelical zeal for all such hokum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s