You assert that people paying a ransom are victims, but I think there are a lot of people in the world who agree that they are literally assisting the perpetrators to benefit from their crime. Which literally makes them an accomplice under existing law in most places, even if it isn't prosecuted that way. Why is a kidnapping victim under threat in the first place? Because the last asshole's family paid them for doing it.
The word I would use is enticing. They're enticing the criminals to commit the crimes. If they didn't make money doing this, they wouldn't do it. If it becomes illegal to help them, and if people are aware that it is illegal to do so then that will make those sorts of criminal behavior much less effective, and fewer people will bother.
At least that's the GP's theory. Personally, I think that there's a sucker born every minute, so making it a crime to pay a ransom won't make a dime's worth of difference.
The real question is why those systems weren't configured to refuse to run unsigned apps and/or apps signed with a different key than the last time you ran them. This sort of attack should be almost impossible on any modern desktop OS.
That problem is easily solved. Bankrupt a dozen such companies and publish articles that make it really clear that the reason they went bankrupt is that they refused to implement the security that their techs recommended. Then, when the idiot MBAs tell you to pound sand, you can show them case files of companies that made the same decisions and lost everything. Then, their irrational fear of what is probably a relatively low risk (but high cost if they're wrong) will cause them to throw money at the problem, just like our government does with the TSA.
This isn't surprising. Some states are calling for more funding of STEM and less funding of the humanities. If the degree doesn't lead to a high-paying job, it shouldn't be funded.
That would be what happens when you let people who know nothing about an industry decide how we should educate students who will work in that industry.
First, we don't need to double the number of STEM majors. There aren't jobs for them.
Second, even if you get past that, what they're missing is that having a major in those other subjects means that you have faculty who can teach classes in those areas. If you stop funding the French major, you aren't going to have more than the first year of French, and eventually you won't even have that. So how will students in STEM majors take French?
The reality is that almost nobody wants programmers who just know how to code. Software engineers need knowledge of other subjects so that they have a better understanding of the real world. Those outside interests are a big part of what drives innovation—new ideas from people with different perspectives arising out of different experiences. The more you cut education for non-STEM majors, the more you end up with a monoculture—people who have exactly the same perspective, and who do things the same way they have always been done, solely because that's the way they've always done it. The only possible end result is an America that cannot compete in the global market, that can only be a mindless producer of works designed by people in other countries.
College is not supposed to be a trade school. It is supposed to prepare you for the real world. If you want a trade school, go to a trade school. If you want to be a well-rounded STEM major who won't be stuck competing with foreign programmers for low-end jobs until the day you die, go to a college and take as many classes beyond the STEM curriculum as you possibly can.
"The well-known U.S. wage gender gap is 76 cents for every dollar men earn." No, it's been disproven. Over and over again. Stop posting this incorrect crap.
The summary makes it clear that the difference mostly disappears after correcting for other variables. The fact that the uncorrected wage gap is what it is has not been disproven. The only problem I see here is that it calls it a 76-cent wage gap when it is really a 24-cent wage gap—that (prior to correcting for other differences) women earn 76 cents for every dollar that men earn.
They never made an Intel-Based XServe. In fact, the point at which they killed the product line was when they would have logically upgraded XServe to Intel.
Really? Wikipedia would disagree with you, and I seem to recall encountering them personally, so I disagree with you, too. In fact, the last model (released in 2009) is able to run El Capitan. XServe wasn't discontinued until January of 2011 (announced in late 2010 to give folks a couple of months to buy up as much hardware as they needed).
It makes a big difference. ARM has always been way behind Intel, whereas at the time when Apple was building PPC-based servers, it was kicking the living snot out of Intel in floating-point performance, though a bit slower at integer performance. So for some types of workloads, it was considerably better than an Intel server would have been (assuming a similar number of cores). Unfortunately for Apple, 3D-rendering compute farms aren't a top seller.:-)
Besides, servers don't run off-the-shelf Windows in any sane universe. Yes, you can build a server to run Windows, but that's a bit like building a Ferrari that runs on diesel. It just isn't a good match for the job. If you're going to run servers, you should use an OS that is actually designed for servers, e.g. Linux, *BSD, etc. And Linux ran pretty well on PowerPC systems, in two different forms—MkLinux, which ran Linux on top of OSFMK (Mach 3), and LinuxPPC, which ran Linux natively on the hardware. The XServe hardware never supported MkLinux, and for performance reasons, you probably would not have wanted to go that way anyway, but LinuxPPC should have been solid, I think. (By that time, I was mainly using OS X, and thus wasn't paying much attention to the Linux world.) NetBSD and OpenBSD also had PPC ports, though I never ran them, so I can't comment on them.
OS X is a decent server OS, though IIRC Linux tended to have better raw performance—particularly on PowerPC. It all depends on what you're trying to do, and on whether being able to run Mac software on your server is of any benefit. Of course, with the Intel transition, that entire question becomes moot. If you need to run Windows or Mac software, you just run Linux on your server box as the main OS, and run an OS X or Windows guest on top of it. But that is a pretty unusual requirement unless your server is also somebody's desktop PC in an office somewhere....
The thing is, build quality has always been part of what made Apple great. They build products that last. That's a big part of why people are willing to pay a premium for them. Sure, Apple could start building junk that doesn't last, but the moment they do, they stop being Apple, and all that's left is a race to the bottom.
The real problem is that nothing has really changed since the first model other than CPU speed and RAM. What would make me consider upgrading an iPad? Make it just a little thicker and double the battery life. Give it front-facing stereo speakers. Beyond those missing features, until the CPU requirements of apps exceeds the hardware's capabilities, a tablet is like a TV set. It is going to get many years of use, and unless you drop and break it, upgrades are unlikely.
So if Apple really wants to drive people to upgrade hardware, they have to provide a reason for developers to build serious, CPU-hungry apps for the devices. That means they need more storage to accommodate such apps. They need better ability to import and/or acquire media. And so on. And realistically, the sorts of apps that demand this don't lend themselves to tablets very well, so they'll probably need to add a full-size slide-around keyboard, too. By the time you get to that point, you basically have a laptop. In other words, an iPad is unlikely to ever truly be "pro" by the traditional definition. The very core of its design is contrary to things like video editing, RAW photo editing and photo library management, etc.
In other words, I don't think there's anything Apple can do about this. The nature of markets is that they eventually mature into a zero-sum game, and this market is there already. The best thing Apple can do is come up with new product categories, whether we're talking about accessories, cases, thermostats, lighting control systems... things that integrate well with iPad, and use those both as additional sources of revenue and as ways of selling more iPads.
That could still work and be easy to deal with, though I would prefer to also replace the locking mechanism with something that lets go instead of breaking.
You could do that with the existing connector. AFAIK, there's nothing in the spec that explicitly prevents you from using a metal spring loop.
I can't say how many times I got into trouble for taking apart radios or clocks or vacuum cleaners when I was a kid. A lot of times when I was very young, I'd watch my dad take apart something and once asked him if he had instructions on how to fix something to which he replied, no you just look at it and see how it is put together. We built all kinds of things together.
I terrified the folks at my nursery school by taking apart and putting back together rotary-dial phones. Sometimes, I even fixed them. I don't think it has anything to do with whether people actually tinkered, though. I think that's just a symptom of an underlying curiosity about how things work. People who have that curiosity—we'll call it "the knack"—are inherently drawn to engineering, and tend to be good at it.
Hence, the giant robot army. And, of course, building a giant robot army that is capable of feeding and caring for hamsters is a particularly brutal technical challenge, which is why Facebook has such a hard time finding qualified engineers.
Or maybe it's just because the commute to Menlo Park is unholy from pretty much everywhere. Either way.
A 100% discount is still a discount. Besides, car insurance pays for more than just wrecks. It also pays for things like a tree falling on your car. So even if the automakers cover the cost of wrecks, most people will still carry insurance, just at a deep discount.
Actually, they don't. That's why driving hasn't already been replaced, unlike say, computing a FFT by hand or screwing on a million bottle caps. For example, in the US we're down to about 11 deaths [caranddriver.com] and 1850 crashes per billion vehicle miles.
Just because humans suck at something, that doesn't necessarily imply that computers are any better at it. Most humans suck at singing. Computers don't do it very well, either.
We've only just recently gotten to the point where computers might have a prayer of matching human drivers. If somebody had tried to create self-driving cars in 1978, they'd have been using an 8086 at.33 MIPS. Now, even a Raspberry Pi will give you 4,744 MIPS, and an eight-core i7 will net you up to 238,310 MIPS. So computers are almost a million times faster than they were in 1978. That makes a lot of things possible that were laughable even ten years ago.
First, it isn't one light programmed stupidly. It is darn near every light around here. I'd estimate that I waste at least half an hour per day waiting at traffic lights, and that the vast majority of that time was wasted waiting for nobody. And yes, you bet your ass I'd pay to get them fixed. With that said, I'm already paying for those lights to be maintained, in the form of property tax, gasoline tax, and who knows what else. And so are fifty or sixty thousand other people in my city.
The most egregious lights I've seen cause an extra two or three minutes of delay for about 3-4,000 residents on a daily basis thanks to poor programming (unnecessary red left arrow when there are only two or three cars per hour coming in the opposite direction, not counting the people who drive straight, turn around in a parking lot, and come back because of the stupid red left arrow). Add that up, and that's 8,000 minutes of time per day, or more than 5 1/2 years per year.
Assuming an average of about one liter per 30 minutes of idling, that's an estimated 26,000 gallons of wasted gasoline every year just from one minor city street light. Fixing that one light would be like taking 66 cars off the road permanently. If even 5% of the 300,000+ traffic lights in this country have similar efficiency problems, then fixing them would be like taking two million cars off the roads, or almost a 10% reduction in automotive fuel consumption.
It's not just about my time. It's about the time spent by every single driver times the number of poorly programmed lights. It adds up to a huge economic cost, a huge environmental cost, and a huge time sink, on top of being annoying. I really think that this issue deserves more attention than it gets.
Interesting, I moved to CA about 3 years ago, and I'm not sure I've seen a 2 way stop since coming. If it were like you said, here, it would be entirely sane.
It might depend on the particular city. I can list a bunch of streets with 2-way stop in the South Bay.:-)
Or, just make it a passively controlled junction - i.e. a roundabout.
Space permitting, sure, except that many of those lights are there to guarantee that cars can actually get out onto roads when otherwise cars would be backed up through the intersection from the next red light....:-)
Yes. Try going off-roading with that feature, and you'll see the problem.:-D
What about ABS?
Yes, but only to a very limited degree. There are situations where ABS makes accidents more likely. They're just far less common than situations where ABS reduces the risk of accidents.
Traction control?
Again, yes, but only to a very limited degree, by reducing the amount of power to the wheels. And again, there are rare cases where this is the wrong decision.
Power steering?
Of course not. Power steering is a purely passive system that converts mechanical motion into stronger mechanical motion.
Speed/Rev limiters?
Yes. Massively, yes.
CTA?
California Teachers Association? I have no idea what you mean here.
Cruise control?
Nope. It does precisely what you tell it to do.
The only difference is in the exceptional case where the dumbass alert goes off people don't end up in hospitals or morgues.
The original question was what prevents computers from rendering manual driving safe, which I read to mean "as safe as computer driving". Although there are some limited automated safety systems that are less complex than full computer driving (e.g. automated emergency braking), those limited features won't get you to that point. The only thing that will get you all the way there is a computer that monitors your driving, doing basically the same things that it would do if it were driving, but only taking control if necessary to prevent a collision. If the computer is that advanced, then it is also capable of driving for you. So why would you want the hassle of driving when you can just let the computer do it and be free to spend that time relaxing and/or doing something more productive?
More to the point, why would any car manufacturer spend the extra expense of adding a steering wheel, gas pedals, brake pedals, a gear shift, a handbrake, turn signals, manual wiper and headlight controls, etc. when 99% of users will just put it on autopilot anyway? Maybe a few car makers will initially, but I'd expect them to quickly taper off, as those things greatly increase the complexity and cost of the vehicle, while providing little benefit.
Also, it is probably physically impossible to make manual driving as safe as computer driving will eventually be. Why? Steering wheels kill. In an accident, if everything else is equal, you're less likely to die in the passenger seat than in the driver's seat, because of that unmoving object right in front of your body. Steering wheels are a lot safer than they used to be, mind you, but the added risk is still decidedly nonzero and probably always will be (where "always" is defined as "until steering wheels go away" in this case).
Where I disagree is the assertion manual driving will be necessarily denied because it is deemed to be unsafe.
It is also massively inefficient. Do you know how much money we spend on traffic lights every year, both in terms of maintenance and power bills? Just putting one in will cost you $80-100k, plus about $1,400 per year in electricity, plus having to rewire it every time you do any minor road paving work, plus other maintenance. There are over 300,000 traffic lights in the U.S., which means we spend about half a billion dollars every year just keeping them lit. The only reason they exist is to limit the flow of non-automated vehicles. Get rid of the manual drivers, and you can see some significant cost savings.
Knowing government, that alone is sufficient reason to assume that manual driving will eventually be highly restricted or eliminated.:-)
After reading that, I'm downright horrified. That further supports the common argument that responsible disclosure without a mandatory end date is irresponsible. If these people found those holes in Firefox, odds are pretty good that other people did, too, and that those people didn't have our best interests at heart.
At least in my mind, it's really simple. If you agree to maintain something, you should maintain it. If you aren't going to maintain it, don't promise to maintain it. You may choose one or the other. You may not choose both at the same time. Not cool.
You're operating under the mistaken notion that the primary purpose of traffic lights is to increase safety and maximize throughput. In reality, the primary purpose of traffic lights is to make city streets so annoyingly slow that drivers will be forced to get on the freeway as soon as possible, then sit there at 3 MPH. It's called "traffic calming", mostly ironically, as the primary effect appears to be an uptick in road rage....:-D
Seems to me they left out a rather important thing about intersections - the humans using them are inherently unpredictable.
Not at all. When you're driving and you see a pedestrian walking up to the intersection, you have several seconds of visibility before he or she reaches the edge of the curb. If you'll arrive first, you keep driving. If the pedestrian will arrive first, you stop. If you aren't sure, you stop.
And with computers driving, the car five cars ahead of you spots the pedestrian, and your car knows that it will have to stop, so it starts slowing down ahead of time to minimize or avoid the stop, as do the cars behind yours. By the time your car reaches the intersection, if the pedestrian has already crossed in the gap, your car speeds back up. If not, it stops and waits for the intersection to be clear, then speeds up.
The only really unpredictable things are A. whether the pedestrian will recognize that your car is slowing down or will wait for you to completely stop, B. whether the pedestrian will speed up or slow down between first detection and arrival at the curb, and C. whether the pedestrian will ever finish crossing the road or die of a heart attack in the middle of the driving lane. And all of these things are detectable with cameras, and can be compensated for, at least to some extent.
The only way to do that would be to allow the computer to override your decisions. If the electronics are able to take control over the car without your permission, you aren't really in control; you just have the illusion of control. At that point, you might as well just let the computer drive so you can kick back and check your email, send text messages to your friends, and make out in the back seat... or whatever.
Grand Rapids, Michigan is built that way. In fact, lots of other northern cities are also built that way for temperature/snow reasons; that's just the only one that I have personal experience with.
Basically, in Grand Rapids, buildings are connected together at the second floor level. There are periodic pedestrian tunnels connecting across streets to adjacent buildings as well, also on the second(-ish) floor. As a result, you can walk from your hotel for a dozen blocks and never even see the street. Of course, sometimes, you have to go up or down a ramp that compensates for height differences, and if there's enough of a height difference, you might leave the second floor of one building and end up in the third floor of another, IIRC, but either way, you stay indoors.
It would be nice if that practice would spread to the rest of the U.S., because it is much safer than having pedestrians and cars share the same space.
While you're right - roundabouts are much better than light controlled junctions, the thing I don't understand is why the US insists on using 4 way stops for small junctions, rather than just having a major/minor road configuration like in the UK. A 4 way stop results in everyone having to stop all the time, rather than allowing the 90% case (the more major road having cars on it) to work efficiently. In practice, because the more major road flows more smoothly, the minor roads get cars out quickly too.
Statistically, most U.S. road intersections with stop signs actually are two-way stops rather than four. Typically, every fourth or fifth intersection is a four-way stop to ensure that people who are afraid to pull out into traffic have at least one path that guarantees them the ability to get on the road.:-)
The more annoying thing to me is the overuse of traffic lights. There are many, many intersections near me where I wait for an average of a minute or more per trip and watch two cars pass. Now granted, a few of those intersections are busy enough at certain times of day to warrant a traffic light. Those lights should ideally go into a two-way-stop (flashing red), two-way-yield (flashing yellow) configuration except during rush hour.
Slashdot Mirror
The word I would use is enticing. They're enticing the criminals to commit the crimes. If they didn't make money doing this, they wouldn't do it. If it becomes illegal to help them, and if people are aware that it is illegal to do so then that will make those sorts of criminal behavior much less effective, and fewer people will bother.
At least that's the GP's theory. Personally, I think that there's a sucker born every minute, so making it a crime to pay a ransom won't make a dime's worth of difference.
The real question is why those systems weren't configured to refuse to run unsigned apps and/or apps signed with a different key than the last time you ran them. This sort of attack should be almost impossible on any modern desktop OS.
That problem is easily solved. Bankrupt a dozen such companies and publish articles that make it really clear that the reason they went bankrupt is that they refused to implement the security that their techs recommended. Then, when the idiot MBAs tell you to pound sand, you can show them case files of companies that made the same decisions and lost everything. Then, their irrational fear of what is probably a relatively low risk (but high cost if they're wrong) will cause them to throw money at the problem, just like our government does with the TSA.
That would be what happens when you let people who know nothing about an industry decide how we should educate students who will work in that industry.
First, we don't need to double the number of STEM majors. There aren't jobs for them.
Second, even if you get past that, what they're missing is that having a major in those other subjects means that you have faculty who can teach classes in those areas. If you stop funding the French major, you aren't going to have more than the first year of French, and eventually you won't even have that. So how will students in STEM majors take French?
The reality is that almost nobody wants programmers who just know how to code. Software engineers need knowledge of other subjects so that they have a better understanding of the real world. Those outside interests are a big part of what drives innovation—new ideas from people with different perspectives arising out of different experiences. The more you cut education for non-STEM majors, the more you end up with a monoculture—people who have exactly the same perspective, and who do things the same way they have always been done, solely because that's the way they've always done it. The only possible end result is an America that cannot compete in the global market, that can only be a mindless producer of works designed by people in other countries.
College is not supposed to be a trade school. It is supposed to prepare you for the real world. If you want a trade school, go to a trade school. If you want to be a well-rounded STEM major who won't be stuck competing with foreign programmers for low-end jobs until the day you die, go to a college and take as many classes beyond the STEM curriculum as you possibly can.
The summary makes it clear that the difference mostly disappears after correcting for other variables. The fact that the uncorrected wage gap is what it is has not been disproven. The only problem I see here is that it calls it a 76-cent wage gap when it is really a 24-cent wage gap—that (prior to correcting for other differences) women earn 76 cents for every dollar that men earn.
I asked it:
I can't tell if CleverBot has gotten into S&M or if it thinks I'm Donald Trump speaking about myself in the third person. Either way, creepy.
Really? Wikipedia would disagree with you, and I seem to recall encountering them personally, so I disagree with you, too. In fact, the last model (released in 2009) is able to run El Capitan. XServe wasn't discontinued until January of 2011 (announced in late 2010 to give folks a couple of months to buy up as much hardware as they needed).
It makes a big difference. ARM has always been way behind Intel, whereas at the time when Apple was building PPC-based servers, it was kicking the living snot out of Intel in floating-point performance, though a bit slower at integer performance. So for some types of workloads, it was considerably better than an Intel server would have been (assuming a similar number of cores). Unfortunately for Apple, 3D-rendering compute farms aren't a top seller. :-)
Besides, servers don't run off-the-shelf Windows in any sane universe. Yes, you can build a server to run Windows, but that's a bit like building a Ferrari that runs on diesel. It just isn't a good match for the job. If you're going to run servers, you should use an OS that is actually designed for servers, e.g. Linux, *BSD, etc. And Linux ran pretty well on PowerPC systems, in two different forms—MkLinux, which ran Linux on top of OSFMK (Mach 3), and LinuxPPC, which ran Linux natively on the hardware. The XServe hardware never supported MkLinux, and for performance reasons, you probably would not have wanted to go that way anyway, but LinuxPPC should have been solid, I think. (By that time, I was mainly using OS X, and thus wasn't paying much attention to the Linux world.) NetBSD and OpenBSD also had PPC ports, though I never ran them, so I can't comment on them.
OS X is a decent server OS, though IIRC Linux tended to have better raw performance—particularly on PowerPC. It all depends on what you're trying to do, and on whether being able to run Mac software on your server is of any benefit. Of course, with the Intel transition, that entire question becomes moot. If you need to run Windows or Mac software, you just run Linux on your server box as the main OS, and run an OS X or Windows guest on top of it. But that is a pretty unusual requirement unless your server is also somebody's desktop PC in an office somewhere....
The thing is, build quality has always been part of what made Apple great. They build products that last. That's a big part of why people are willing to pay a premium for them. Sure, Apple could start building junk that doesn't last, but the moment they do, they stop being Apple, and all that's left is a race to the bottom.
The real problem is that nothing has really changed since the first model other than CPU speed and RAM. What would make me consider upgrading an iPad? Make it just a little thicker and double the battery life. Give it front-facing stereo speakers. Beyond those missing features, until the CPU requirements of apps exceeds the hardware's capabilities, a tablet is like a TV set. It is going to get many years of use, and unless you drop and break it, upgrades are unlikely.
So if Apple really wants to drive people to upgrade hardware, they have to provide a reason for developers to build serious, CPU-hungry apps for the devices. That means they need more storage to accommodate such apps. They need better ability to import and/or acquire media. And so on. And realistically, the sorts of apps that demand this don't lend themselves to tablets very well, so they'll probably need to add a full-size slide-around keyboard, too. By the time you get to that point, you basically have a laptop. In other words, an iPad is unlikely to ever truly be "pro" by the traditional definition. The very core of its design is contrary to things like video editing, RAW photo editing and photo library management, etc.
In other words, I don't think there's anything Apple can do about this. The nature of markets is that they eventually mature into a zero-sum game, and this market is there already. The best thing Apple can do is come up with new product categories, whether we're talking about accessories, cases, thermostats, lighting control systems... things that integrate well with iPad, and use those both as additional sources of revenue and as ways of selling more iPads.
You could do that with the existing connector. AFAIK, there's nothing in the spec that explicitly prevents you from using a metal spring loop.
I terrified the folks at my nursery school by taking apart and putting back together rotary-dial phones. Sometimes, I even fixed them. I don't think it has anything to do with whether people actually tinkered, though. I think that's just a symptom of an underlying curiosity about how things work. People who have that curiosity—we'll call it "the knack"—are inherently drawn to engineering, and tend to be good at it.
Of course, for probably 99% of CS jobs, they aren't particularly important, which makes it kind of disappointing that she didn't say that. :-)
Hence, the giant robot army. And, of course, building a giant robot army that is capable of feeding and caring for hamsters is a particularly brutal technical challenge, which is why Facebook has such a hard time finding qualified engineers.
Or maybe it's just because the commute to Menlo Park is unholy from pretty much everywhere. Either way.
A 100% discount is still a discount. Besides, car insurance pays for more than just wrecks. It also pays for things like a tree falling on your car. So even if the automakers cover the cost of wrecks, most people will still carry insurance, just at a deep discount.
Just because humans suck at something, that doesn't necessarily imply that computers are any better at it. Most humans suck at singing. Computers don't do it very well, either.
We've only just recently gotten to the point where computers might have a prayer of matching human drivers. If somebody had tried to create self-driving cars in 1978, they'd have been using an 8086 at .33 MIPS. Now, even a Raspberry Pi will give you 4,744 MIPS, and an eight-core i7 will net you up to 238,310 MIPS. So computers are almost a million times faster than they were in 1978. That makes a lot of things possible that were laughable even ten years ago.
First, it isn't one light programmed stupidly. It is darn near every light around here. I'd estimate that I waste at least half an hour per day waiting at traffic lights, and that the vast majority of that time was wasted waiting for nobody. And yes, you bet your ass I'd pay to get them fixed. With that said, I'm already paying for those lights to be maintained, in the form of property tax, gasoline tax, and who knows what else. And so are fifty or sixty thousand other people in my city.
The most egregious lights I've seen cause an extra two or three minutes of delay for about 3-4,000 residents on a daily basis thanks to poor programming (unnecessary red left arrow when there are only two or three cars per hour coming in the opposite direction, not counting the people who drive straight, turn around in a parking lot, and come back because of the stupid red left arrow). Add that up, and that's 8,000 minutes of time per day, or more than 5 1/2 years per year.
Assuming an average of about one liter per 30 minutes of idling, that's an estimated 26,000 gallons of wasted gasoline every year just from one minor city street light. Fixing that one light would be like taking 66 cars off the road permanently. If even 5% of the 300,000+ traffic lights in this country have similar efficiency problems, then fixing them would be like taking two million cars off the roads, or almost a 10% reduction in automotive fuel consumption.
It's not just about my time. It's about the time spent by every single driver times the number of poorly programmed lights. It adds up to a huge economic cost, a huge environmental cost, and a huge time sink, on top of being annoying. I really think that this issue deserves more attention than it gets.
It might depend on the particular city. I can list a bunch of streets with 2-way stop in the South Bay. :-)
Space permitting, sure, except that many of those lights are there to guarantee that cars can actually get out onto roads when otherwise cars would be backed up through the intersection from the next red light.... :-)
Yes. Try going off-roading with that feature, and you'll see the problem. :-D
Yes, but only to a very limited degree. There are situations where ABS makes accidents more likely. They're just far less common than situations where ABS reduces the risk of accidents.
Again, yes, but only to a very limited degree, by reducing the amount of power to the wheels. And again, there are rare cases where this is the wrong decision.
Of course not. Power steering is a purely passive system that converts mechanical motion into stronger mechanical motion.
Yes. Massively, yes.
California Teachers Association? I have no idea what you mean here.
Nope. It does precisely what you tell it to do.
The original question was what prevents computers from rendering manual driving safe, which I read to mean "as safe as computer driving". Although there are some limited automated safety systems that are less complex than full computer driving (e.g. automated emergency braking), those limited features won't get you to that point. The only thing that will get you all the way there is a computer that monitors your driving, doing basically the same things that it would do if it were driving, but only taking control if necessary to prevent a collision. If the computer is that advanced, then it is also capable of driving for you. So why would you want the hassle of driving when you can just let the computer do it and be free to spend that time relaxing and/or doing something more productive?
More to the point, why would any car manufacturer spend the extra expense of adding a steering wheel, gas pedals, brake pedals, a gear shift, a handbrake, turn signals, manual wiper and headlight controls, etc. when 99% of users will just put it on autopilot anyway? Maybe a few car makers will initially, but I'd expect them to quickly taper off, as those things greatly increase the complexity and cost of the vehicle, while providing little benefit.
Also, it is probably physically impossible to make manual driving as safe as computer driving will eventually be. Why? Steering wheels kill. In an accident, if everything else is equal, you're less likely to die in the passenger seat than in the driver's seat, because of that unmoving object right in front of your body. Steering wheels are a lot safer than they used to be, mind you, but the added risk is still decidedly nonzero and probably always will be (where "always" is defined as "until steering wheels go away" in this case).
It is also massively inefficient. Do you know how much money we spend on traffic lights every year, both in terms of maintenance and power bills? Just putting one in will cost you $80-100k, plus about $1,400 per year in electricity, plus having to rewire it every time you do any minor road paving work, plus other maintenance. There are over 300,000 traffic lights in the U.S., which means we spend about half a billion dollars every year just keeping them lit. The only reason they exist is to limit the flow of non-automated vehicles. Get rid of the manual drivers, and you can see some significant cost savings.
Knowing government, that alone is sufficient reason to assume that manual driving will eventually be highly restricted or eliminated. :-)
After reading that, I'm downright horrified. That further supports the common argument that responsible disclosure without a mandatory end date is irresponsible. If these people found those holes in Firefox, odds are pretty good that other people did, too, and that those people didn't have our best interests at heart.
At least in my mind, it's really simple. If you agree to maintain something, you should maintain it. If you aren't going to maintain it, don't promise to maintain it. You may choose one or the other. You may not choose both at the same time. Not cool.
You're operating under the mistaken notion that the primary purpose of traffic lights is to increase safety and maximize throughput. In reality, the primary purpose of traffic lights is to make city streets so annoyingly slow that drivers will be forced to get on the freeway as soon as possible, then sit there at 3 MPH. It's called "traffic calming", mostly ironically, as the primary effect appears to be an uptick in road rage.... :-D
Not at all. When you're driving and you see a pedestrian walking up to the intersection, you have several seconds of visibility before he or she reaches the edge of the curb. If you'll arrive first, you keep driving. If the pedestrian will arrive first, you stop. If you aren't sure, you stop.
And with computers driving, the car five cars ahead of you spots the pedestrian, and your car knows that it will have to stop, so it starts slowing down ahead of time to minimize or avoid the stop, as do the cars behind yours. By the time your car reaches the intersection, if the pedestrian has already crossed in the gap, your car speeds back up. If not, it stops and waits for the intersection to be clear, then speeds up.
The only really unpredictable things are A. whether the pedestrian will recognize that your car is slowing down or will wait for you to completely stop, B. whether the pedestrian will speed up or slow down between first detection and arrival at the curb, and C. whether the pedestrian will ever finish crossing the road or die of a heart attack in the middle of the driving lane. And all of these things are detectable with cameras, and can be compensated for, at least to some extent.
The only way to do that would be to allow the computer to override your decisions. If the electronics are able to take control over the car without your permission, you aren't really in control; you just have the illusion of control. At that point, you might as well just let the computer drive so you can kick back and check your email, send text messages to your friends, and make out in the back seat... or whatever.
Grand Rapids, Michigan is built that way. In fact, lots of other northern cities are also built that way for temperature/snow reasons; that's just the only one that I have personal experience with.
Basically, in Grand Rapids, buildings are connected together at the second floor level. There are periodic pedestrian tunnels connecting across streets to adjacent buildings as well, also on the second(-ish) floor. As a result, you can walk from your hotel for a dozen blocks and never even see the street. Of course, sometimes, you have to go up or down a ramp that compensates for height differences, and if there's enough of a height difference, you might leave the second floor of one building and end up in the third floor of another, IIRC, but either way, you stay indoors.
It would be nice if that practice would spread to the rest of the U.S., because it is much safer than having pedestrians and cars share the same space.
You don't need a full stop light for that. A button-operated lighted crosswalk system (lights going across the roadway that flash) is sufficient.
Statistically, most U.S. road intersections with stop signs actually are two-way stops rather than four. Typically, every fourth or fifth intersection is a four-way stop to ensure that people who are afraid to pull out into traffic have at least one path that guarantees them the ability to get on the road. :-)
The more annoying thing to me is the overuse of traffic lights. There are many, many intersections near me where I wait for an average of a minute or more per trip and watch two cars pass. Now granted, a few of those intersections are busy enough at certain times of day to warrant a traffic light. Those lights should ideally go into a two-way-stop (flashing red), two-way-yield (flashing yellow) configuration except during rush hour.