If you hit me with a good sized drone you might give me a good cut and maybe a goose egg from the battery. If I hit you with a good sized (can fly type) goose, I will knock you over and could potentially break your neck.
Going to a car style speed. A drone may or may not even penetrate a windshield completely. A goose could easily go through and potentially kill the driver.
If you go to any drone forum you will see people taking pictures of the broken remains of their drones from fairly small crashes.
Where the main drone injuries come from are those whirling blades; most of which would just shatter on the skin of an airplane.
And much like those idiots with laser pointers, I couldn't think of a much worse place to fly a drone than near an airport.
Then there is another interesting question. As drones become far more important to the economy which would we rather have flying: police/news helicopters or something that makes our economy stronger?
Drones are interesting but beyond their scary name they are just the classic tool. Like knives, gasoline, matches, and leaf blowers there are the vast majority of people who will do good with them and a tiny few who will do bad things.
Fertilizer monitoring probably is a good thing as a single bad person can do a tremendous amount of damage. But right now a drone is going to give someone a bad cut or maybe take out an eye.
What I do smell is the government getting really pissed off that drones are being used to inform. That is their worst nightmare. Drones monitoring police, or fire is not what they want. They love when they have an excuse to push the public back and exert their authority. They love when they can put armed patrols around a pollution site where some big donor has been given cart blanche to pollute their way to another billion dollars. They hate when a drone flies overhead and exposes the truth.
As for drones interfering with flight operations, have you ever met a goose? If you are a pilot and your choices are to hit a goose or to hit a drone pretty much every pilot will chose the drone.
But sadly various criminals are going to buy better and better drones and come up with better and better ways to use them. So drug deliveries, even armed robberies are coming.
So this is going to be the classic war on drugs stupidity where they don't have any impact on the criminals while having a massive impact on the benefits that drones could provide the public.
I also wonder if some of these regulations are coming from the really big aviation companies who have pretty much entirely missed out on the commercial drone market and they know that if they craft the regulations carefully enough they will shut out the innovations pouring out of small companies all over. This way it will end up only being large corporations selling to the police, the military, and other large corporations? This completely screws the little guy. But at what point has government taken the needs of the little guy into serious consideration in the last 50 years when it came up against huge corporations?
This is giving me a headache. I had better take one of my cheap aspirin before the TPP allows Bayer to somehow renew their patent.
I was talking about 20 years ago when the only access to great simulators would be airline pilots. I suspect the changed the rules as soon as a valid simulator became available to a "regular" pilot. The key being that buying time on the good simulators was something running into the many many thousands per hour.
I have been in modern simulators but never for a little plane. There are many things that I would wonder if they would get right. For instance the trim wheel is slightly easier to trim when the trim isn't fighting what the plane wants to do. But the more you trim the harder it gets. So if you trimmed one way, and pushed the yoke to compensate, both become harder and harder. So when trimming the plane you need less and less input on the yoke.
Then there are the sounds. For instance many planes make a very specific sound as they are about to go into a spin. Often the metal in the tail kind of makes a pop-can bending sound just as the spin starts.
And taxiways, they are kind of bumpy and can move you around. Also when landing on wet runways the paint is much slippier than the runway. This is very important when practising short landings. To put it on the paint could cost you 100 or more feet and be very hard to control.
I suspect that modern flight schools can make great use of a simulator but the real thing is hard to beat in many ways. Except that around 20 years ago there may have been a tiny window when you, in theory only, could have skipped that whole annoying leaving the ground part.
This may have changed in the 20 years since I knew it to be a factoid. But in the world of simulators there were classes. I forget how they classed but let's assume that 1 is pretty much the instructor sitting behind you in a chair while you both made brruuum brrrumm noises and class 4 is one that moves and carefully simulates a plane.
Well for airline pilots who couldn't exactly go out in the 747 and so spins and stalls the class 4 simulator was legally considered to be flying.
Thus, in theory, a student could start on an airline simulator and get their private pilot's licence without ever leaving the ground. Maybe the DOT (at the time in Canada) might have insisted that the flight test be taken in a real plane. So that would be the first time they actually took off.
But quite possibly, if the DOT cooperated, someone could go from non-pilot to airline pilot without ever leaving the ground. Then they could build up a pile of hours until they qualified to be the pilot in command or Captain. Thus it might have been possible for that person to just walk into the cockpit pick up the mike and say, "This is Captain EOC and I will be your pilot today. We will be flying at an altitude of 32,000 feet for a flight time of 6 hours. I thank you for flying Oceanic Airways and by the way you might be interested to know that this is not only my first time flying a real airplane but amazingly is the first time I have actually ever been in an airplane."
Where it could get weird is that during a normal flight test you must have things like a first aid kit onboard, have checked the oil, done a walkaround, etc. So I guess you could have a first aid kid, check the hydraulic fluids, and walk around the room that contains the flight simulator.
I have only seen this a million times. But the only places that I see this function for long is in companies where there is no natural competition. So monopolies or situations where a few companies have effectively formed a cartel such as some groups of telcos.
But in companies where they are facing nimble upstarts this sort of thinking is often what leads to their demise. I have watched as companies would suddenly start looking at their solid AS300 and wonder, "Maybe that might kind of be a sort of liability?"
Then their upstart competitor does an online store and the company discovers that step one in getting their AS300 stored product database is to get rid of the AS300. By the time they are ready for step two their competitor has IPO'd and has withdrawn any offers to merge. Step 3 is getting bought out by a vaguely more nimble company that looks like they might survive the onslaught of the nimble upstart. For this story see Compaq vs Dell, and then the dead corpse of Compaq being absorbed by HP.
Or look at Sun being beaten to death by Linux and then their corpse being eaten by Oracle.
But again if your business model is predicated on stupid companies that your very product then kills how is it that they are still trucking along? Especially since they are swimming in a sea of nimble upstarts.
When are they going to die? My dream is an accounting scandal.
I have a slightly different take on this. The Oracle sales people do their damnedest to cut the technical people out of the loop. Thus the sales take place with top executives, even board members, just not those damn fact spouting technical people.
For many years I did the PL/SQL thing to separate the "business logic" and I built fairly large systems for fairly huge companies. I can make three very qualified statements:
One is that I never really liked working with Oracle as a developer or a DBA. The install was damn easy but configuring and tweaking the DB was a pain on a single machine and a huge pain on multiple machines. Backups and their restoration could easily go very wrong unless you had experienced people and still only after triple checking that things were properly being backed up. The same with any kind of failover etc.
Second is that while I am not too bad at estimating I pretty much refused to guess as to how much an Oracle licence was going to be. Getting a straighforward answer out of Oracle was actually a dangerous move careerwise as they would often want to send in salesmen when they would hear the names of the companies I was working for. They would basically then try to pull shit that would make me very unhappy. I was fairly certain that they were trying to do things such as replace me with more Oracle friendly consultants once they started to buy whole SaaS companies I cut oracle out of my life.
My last and most important statement is that at this point in history anyone using Oracle is a fool. MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, or just about any one of a zillion good datastores out there is so much better than Oracle that I simply don't know why anyone would use Oracle even if Oracle was free I would still use the others. If someone said that I had two choices Amazon Aurora or Oracle I would use Aurora even though I have never used it before. I will simply assume that it is easier to use, faster, cheaper, and less dangerous to my career.
I will give a classic Oracle use case that I did maybe 15 years ago. My client (fortune 50) wanted a system built that would allow you to browse their catalogue and buy stuff online (radical idea at the time). With about 200 main products and an estimated 200,000 to 1 million sales per year estimated (it was 15 years ago) everyone here can guess as to what kind of DB back end we are looking at. Transactional, reliable, blah blah. So we are putting this on a small cluster of machines with about 4 processors each. They insisted upon Oracle as they had been snowed by Oracle into thinking that to have Oracle plus another DB in the same company would blow them up. So I build the system which will then go onto about $400,000 worth of hardware. The entire development time was also spent trying to get Oracle to give them a price which I had said could be insane. So we deliver and the DB licensing was going to be $800,000.
I had seen this coming so our SQL was completely abstracted and very generic. There was no lock in PL/SQL.
The client basically loses their crap thinking that this project was going to make them look like a fool in their company and that this could be a career damaging move. So I point out that we saw this coming and have developed the system so that we can swap it over to an Open Source database that not only will be better but runs much faster meaning a more responsive website combined with lower harware costs because they now had more effective hardware capacity than they had with it running Oracle.
So since that project I have done zero Oracle work and will only do projects that either don't use Oracle or the project involves converting an Oracle database to something else; anything else.
The odd thing is that out of about maybe 300 developers with whom I have discussed Oracle as a DB 3 or so might have defended it. Without exception they were fully certified in using some Oracle product or another. The other 99% hated Oracle and everything it stood for. As in people who dropped MySQL soon after Oracle bought it. So how on earth is Oracle still in business? How is it that every time that Oracle is brought up in a technical discussion that the experts don't say. "Why don't we just hire people to punch us in the face while we develop the system? For using Oracle is about an equal act of self loathing."
I watched an interesting video of the Google car handling a 4 way stop. First it waited for its proper turn. Then if other people were being ass-hats it would then start to edge out to signal its intent to proceed.
Interestingly enough the primary cause of accidents involving driverless vehicles is that people aren't anticipating them to follow the rules.
Where I live has stupid slow speed limits combined with aggressive speeding cameras. It is actually very creepy to crawl along with everyone else crawling along when in most other locations everyone would be going around 50% faster. (no exaggeration)
Slashdot claims that it is more signal than noise but it is becoming more shill than signal. This is another article written with a clear agenda in mind. This is to promote cars that fit the model of the traditional car companies. They are beginning to freak out at what the driverless car will really look like and are beginning to sponsor anyone who will say that it will look like more of the same.
Here is the driverless car of the future (not the next generation but a few generations of development away). First the car is on the road with all automatic cars, there are no manually driven cars because they have been proven to be more of a burden to society than we were willing to put up with. Crashes are pretty much a thing of the past. The cars have shed nearly all their safety gear and no longer have to pass onerous safety tests. The only remaining safety tests are that the cars need to go a certain number of miles while not breaking down.
So the driverless car uses one of a handful of off the shelf autonomous systems all of which are battle tested and battle hardened. The cars are of a variety of shapes and sizes with many tiny single user cars popular among commuters who are one of the last bastions of private car ownership. Most people couldn't tell you one brand of car from another as they just call them on their phone and it shows up. They no more pay attention to brand or model than people do now with uber or taxi cars. Someone might notice if the taxi were a hummer but any boring midsized sedan and they can't even tell you the manufacture let alone model.
So looking at the manufacturers they are plenty in this world of SDCs. This is because the large companies have lost their competitive advantages starting at the moment that self driving cars began to rapidly evolve. The old car companies were very good at tooling up very cost efficient assembly lines and then making roughly the same car for nearly a decade. But the SDC evolved very quickly much like the cellphone which resulted in whole assembly lines being completely out of date in less than 6 months. Also the delay of the assembly line allowed complete upstarts to pound out whole new generations of cars in less time than it took the old companies to get a single, out of date, model to market.
Then in the end with only bulk fleet buyers making up the market the traditional skill of mass marketing was just another department that needed to be shuttered by the old car companies while the new companies didn't have the same liabilities. Also the new companies integrated every modern manufacturing technology possible without "Proper" testing and review by the senior engineers. This meant that most of the upstarts failed but left knowledge in their wakes that other startups built on resulting in fantastic new cheap ways to make very high quality low cost cars.
But the worst insult to the old car companies will be that as the kids start using self driving fleet vehicles their desire to own a car or even give a crap about a car will approach zero. There won't be 16 year olds with posters of a car that the car company can sell to them when they are 50. Movies like the fast and the furious will make no sense and thus won't sell a single car.
This whole allowing people to override the robot will very quickly be proven entirely stupid when the stats will show that cars in manual mode are some massive multiple more likely to crash than cars in fully automatic mode. Also they will be able to run simulations against the manual mode accidents to show that had the car been in control there would have been no accident.
So to allow people to continue to have any control over what is really a robotic car is the rough equivalent of those steering wheels we buy children for their car seats so they can go vroom vroom and stay out of our hair while we drive.
The mathematics of economics appear to be very similar to the mathematics of weather. There are elements that are predictable do to natural climatic conditions. Some elements are driven by distant events such as the formation of hurricanes. There are even black swan events such as volcanoes.
Thus it is very tempting to begin to look at people in a very statistical way just like the weather. In Canada is is probably a good idea to buy a snow shovel in the fall and a bathing suit in the spring. Not always, but a good plan.
Economists can very easily see that most people spend their time living most of their lives in a very simple statistical ebb and flow. Except there is one huge problem with this:
Assholes. Unlike the weather, the world is filled with assholes. This is where economists such as Milton Friedman get it exactly wrong. He seems to think that people will all work together in harmony in an invisible hand sort of way making the world a better place. Except that this is where you get complete assholes such as the people who put melamine into milk to improve its apparent protein levels. Why did they put melamine in milk, because they had previously been watering it down so the milk companies started testing for nitrogen as a way to test for protein. Assholes.
If you haven't dealt with people on Wall Street before then you simply can't take to heart the levels that genuine psychopaths will stoop in order to make a buck. People often think of not playing fair in ways such as deflategate or someone putting their toe over the line when serving at tennis. No, on Wall Street they will happily destroy an entire country and all it's industries so that they can make a few million dollars. They will guide regulations so as to ban competition. They will pay off politicians to empty the government treasuries in their favour.
Think about the rolling brownouts and massive increases in power costs in California, all so that Enron could make a tiny amount of money (vs the costs). By some estimates California lost over 40 billion dollars because of those exploits.
So unlike the weather and the nice pretty mathematics that surround it, economics forgets that these asshole hailstorms will take out all the car windows a week after the asshole tornado targeted the competing glass factory.
Some economists are pointing to game theory to explain even the assholes. But again, here they get it wrong. Take the prisoner's dilemma. But there are all kinds of other players in that game. First there is the DA who will hide exonerating evidence to make a name for himself. Then there is the prisoner who has the other prisoner shanked so that there is now only one player in the game. There is the corrupt police chief who arrested the two prisoners in the first place because he is in the pocket of a competing crime boss. Then there is the private prison system that has pushed the laws and courts so that the bail for the two prisoners is so high they can't afford it and the courts so overbooked that they will then spend months or maybe years in a private jail awaiting trial.
So if you want to win a Nobel in economics and actually come up with a system that has at least weather level predictive abilities then figure out how to model the impact of psychopathic assholes.
The handful of twitter employees that I met were Type A arrogant twats. These were the sort who within 10 minutes of meeting them would tell you all the different ways they were better than you. First it would be the uber degree from the uber university. Then of course it was that they worked for twitter. Then it was their near perfect SAT that got them into that degree. Then it was where they described that they were doing stats except that they wouldn't even use such a pedestrian word such as ML but had to state it like the title of a serious research paper. Then they might tell you their name but not before telling you all the famous people they had recently met.
The feeling I got from them was that there was a coked up arrogance to them. That sort of god's gift to mankind attitude.
What would burn their balls though was when I would say, "Seeing that twitter will eventually peak in usage what comes next to justify that massive valuation? Surely tiny blogging doesn't justify that much value with so little revenue and pretty much no profit."
Usually they would tell me that it was secret. I would then ask if they were working on the secret. This is where their balls got scorched as if they were so important then why were they just working on a bit of data mining?
I met exactly one twitter guy who was only somewhat arrogant and he quit. Still a twat though.
So if I had to guess what their failing was; I would say that it was that they had a tiger by the tail. So they hired people with awesome resumes who went around telling people (and each other) how awesome they all were and thus it became a circle jerk as to how they were going to succeed. But the people they hired were more expert at pleasing teachers and going through checklists in life rather than actually producing anything of value. Had someone of genius assigned them a task they all probably could have done it very well. But on their own they could only massage what already existed.
Basically these were the kids with an A+ in chemistry and memorized the period table at the beginning of the year but had never just blown shit up in their back yard.
Actually other than it being by Microsoft that is pretty damn close. The key is that the docking hardware is of such a common standard that I could hook up my iPhone, android, MS phone, etc and they would just go, "Oh look a docking station; now I'm a desktop,"
If I had to make a prediction this hardware probably costs way too much and thus it would be cheaper to go get a halfway decent laptop and/or the thing is going to be so proprietary that it will only work for even a limited number of MS phones of a single brand let alone other OS based phones.
Yet this would be a brilliant thing for them to licence to the other companies, they could have the standard on connecting phones like this.
I want a pc that fits in my pocket and has a touchscreen. It needs to be able to make phone calls and receive texts. It would be nice if I could also listen to music and if it could connect to things via bluetooth. Wi-fi would also be a good feature.
Someone told me that such a PC might already exist.
But in reality there is a PC that I would like that is close to the above. I want a PC basestation that is effectively my phone. Something that is just a keyboard, mouse and monitor but gets its computing power from my phone. I would snap the phone in and boop, I have a good computer, I pull it out and I have a good phone. Ideally though when it was a computer it would actually be a computer with proper mouseclicks, complicated interfaces, and whatnot. But when it was a phone it wouldn't be a crappy little computer but a good phone. But the real killer is that the basestation would not be proprietary to just that company or even just that phone series but general to all makes and models that supported the standard.
Oddly enough one of the things that has hurt the PC market is that about 8 or so years ago most cheap laptops and desktops were good enough for most people's purposes. They could watch 1080 videos without stuttering, they could connect to Wi-fi faster than their ISP would feed them data, and the USB standard means that few devices shortly before or anytime after wouldn't work. Unlike the 90s when this year's computer could do things that last year's couldn't we have nearly a straight decade where 99% of people don't need more power than is available in any of the latest machines.
We are now crossing that threshold with phones. They are crossing a power demand for most people. More than 1080 on a typical phone is nonsense, more than a quadcore 1.5ghz processor is nonsense, more than G wi-fi is nonsense, more than LTE data is nonsense. The few features that people really want are more battery, more durability, and lower price.
So why not take this ever growing pile of power and combine it with the generally minimal needs of the laptop/desktop world?
With a proper keyboard, mouse, and interface tied into a smartphone I know of few people who would need anything more than that.
Then the era of the PC would simply have a new chapter.
OK here are the players. One is a consumer who has a VW that will consume 20% more fuel if they get the modification but will generate negligibly less pollutants for themselves.. If they don't get the modification the amount of pollution they will generate for themselves is negligible but they won't use way more fuel. They are the only player in this game, what will most decide?
I have found that most companies where managers are multi tiered and plentiful are typically run by mostly MBAs. Often these MBAs have VP titles in their name and they too are multi-tiered with SVP VP and even JVP. But the classic sign is wonderfully summed up in the movie Office Space with the TPS report. I will be dealing with some manager who will say that they are 6 months behind on their XYZ reports. I will then say, "What value do these XYZ reports have then?" Sometimes they might provide a better trail if there is a future fraud investigation or whatnot but in most cases it is just complete BS information being gathered that does not relate in any real way to the day to day operations or the company's goals.
So you will have this XYZ report that a manager is expected to spend about 1 hour per day working on. They in turn expect their underlings to spend 10+ minutes a day on the report and of course this gets passed up the chain. So a company with 5,000 employees might be effectively dedicating 50-100 employees to the XYZ report. But it isn't just a waste of time but adds stress to the employees and takes away from having a clear sense of purpose. To make it worse there might not be only one; there could also be the ABC report and the LMN training.
The way I like to boil things down is to say, OK what does this company do? Thus is removing XYZ going to impact doing that? I am often building systems for large companies and thus I am often automating the XYZ report. But suddenly I discover that not only is the XYZ report just busy work but the managers who are dedicated to it also would prefer if I would prioritize automating the XYZ report over say the billing system for selling widgets, which is what the company does. So I come back with a cost analysis that shows the value of the XYZ report is negative whereas the improved billing system will generate X extra revenue every week.
But I only do this presentation to the CEO and or board level. I would never tell the managers that the XYZ report is not needed because many of them know that their job is total BS.
One great description that I heard years ago and live by for a long time was that a good manager is there to protect their underlings from the upper management. But then I realized a greater issue. The underlings shouldn't need protection from upper management.
I am setting up a website where I am going to allow online betting based on the weight of Steven King's next bowel movement. I need to sneak into his house tonight to put pressure sensors under his throne and a turd cam just under the seat.
It must suck for any genuine scientist who might come up with an interesting idea as it relates to small scale or cold fusion. I can just see the grant request meeting:
So you have filed a grant form on researching neutron production at low temperatures?
Yes
Isn't that cold fusion by another name?
Not really but...
You're fired, we are stripping your PhD, and we are having the art department make funny cartoons about how much of a loser you are.
But I only asked for a $2 grant.
We are also requesting retractions on all your papers including ones that have been lab verified by over 1000 independent researchers.
But.
We also just burned your house down and killed your dog.
I don't have a dog.
I can point to my family. We moved to a location where nearly unlimited wireless is not a terrible price. There is no need beyond me, the software developer, to have a huge connection. If I had genuinely unlimited LTE or better then I would switch in a heartbeat. I am a pretty demanding data user so if I could cut then few couldn't.
If my siblings lived where I live then I would have helped them all cut their internet by now. My mother has netflix but barely even uses that. I think her monthly data usage is around 2Gigs a month or less. I think that a typical Netfllix family uses around the 300Gig mark in Data.
Where wireless gets interesting is when the antenna is also directional. In some countries where they leapfrogged that last mile of wire they combine cool telco antennas with these can things on the houses that allow for wireless highspeed internet for very little money.
The key is that the cable companies are only seeing the cusp of this trend. They are trying to cut it off before it becomes a problem. Every day they can delay the progress of wireless data for the masses is a huge pile of money. So it is worth it for them to put a huge amount of effort into this project even if it only buys them a year or two.
Now it's not perfect. Ping times go up so gamers wouldn't be happy. But I can use products such as skype and facetime on my data plan and I can't tell the difference between that and a wired internet connection.
It is also very cool when I am in a park and can download a new version of some SDK that I use without really thinking about it.
But the independent evidence shows that there is no problem. They are trying to convince the public that their Wi-fi will be imperilled by the evil telcos. When one large group of companies are battling with another group of large companies their lobbying suddenly cancels out and they have to turn to the voter.
If the project is the equivalent of moving dirt from pile A to pile B then then many hands make light work until it gets to a point where people are just getting in each other's way. So 20 might be 4 times better than 5 but 1,000 is just a huge waste of resources as maybe 950 would be best kept out of the way.
Then there is the statistical genius issue. If you have one good programmer trying to solve a horrific problem then two or so programmers might allow for some interesting insights that one might not have. But this sort of hits a rate of diminishing returns in that the average programmer isn't that much smarter than any other programmer. Thus 10 might not be much better than 2. Except that if you have 1,000 programmers the simple probability is that one of them is a genius and thus the program might be solved more than 1000 times faster than a single programmer or more realistically it may have never been solved by a handful of programmers, ever.
Then there are the classic programs where people try to architect it into wonderfully separate abstract sections where individual programmers or small groups can work on each piece. This might sound good in reality but all projects have a certain amount of spaghetti to them and thus their reaches a point where each new programmer isn't able to hive off a part very easily without excessive communications with other programmers and thus not really help that much. This is a fairly typical corporate project flow and thus the Mythical Man month does apply to many projects, just not all projects.
Holy crap. This is completely disproved cable company funded research. Basically the cable companies are not only seeing cord cutting in the realm of people cutting their TV cables but also now many people are going with tablets and phone only internet connections and are cutting their local wi-fi/cable internet connection. This is a disaster for the cable companies.
So they are doing their damnedest to keep the wireless companies from being able to use the bandwidth that is becoming available as various old technologies such as analog broadcast TV frees up more and more of the spectrum.
On top of that any new frequency opened up to wireless will often then be used by the newest and best data technologies so a given bit of spectrum used in 4G will of course pack in way more data than a 3G spectrum of the same "size" and 5G will probably pack in just that much more into anything that newly opens up for it.
Eventually the 2G spectrum will be retired for use for maybe 6G sort of stuff but it is the new spectrums now that are used for the newest and best data streaming.
If you look at a graph of the spectrum opening up, combined with existing spectrum being re-purposed, combined with the ability to not only send data down that spectrum, but cool things like phased array antennas that can basically laser the data directly at a customer that graph will actually show that the typical netflixing customer could potentially go entirely wireless in not that many years.
This basically takes the whole "last mile" concept out and shoots it in the face. Then the last-mile turns into the-last-pile-of-expensive-crap.
Yes there will be some customers who need such absurd amounts of bandwidth that wireless really won't be it but for the average person watching netflix; they really will hit a limit where they then only slowly increase their demands.
So again I cry a little bit for slashdot to see this sort of corporate shilling happening again.
One thing has nothing to do with the other. This is just misleading propaganda from companies that have dropped the driverless ball. This is about lying cheating executives. Executives can lie and cheat about anything. Are those tires safe? Is the gasoline really unleaded? Do the ignition switches kill people?
If anything the companies that are leading the charge with driverless don't have a long track record of cheating and killing their customers. The reality is that they are going into this new arena with unblemished records. This probably scares the crap out of the old companies.
For instance, anything that Ford, GM, or Chrysler tell me is probably a lie or an exaggeration. I don't really trust any of the Japanese Manufacturers and even the Koreans aren't looking too good with the emissions testing. Thus I am far more likely to believe a Tesla, Google, Apple, etc. If they say their car can go 200 miles on a charge I will actually plan on going roughly 200 miles on a charge. If GM tells me that I can go 200 miles on a charge I will assume that they lobbied the government to allow them to have a tail wind and go downhill the whole time. Plus they won't mention that the battery caught fire 3 times each test and the driver's seat is the battery.
So this straw man argument is just pure PR being put out to distract us from the fact that the old school car companies are run by a bunch of psychopathic MBA types. And instead of changing their ways they are trying to paint the aggressive young newcomers with the same brush.
I don't call for full deregulation. I mostly call for an end to any quota system. I also call for the lightest touch possible in any remaining regulations in that if the regulation doesn't have a clear purpose then can it.
No system with Taxis is going to be perfect. But as the internet comes to have an ever greater impact competition is going to be key to keep everyone on their yelp inspired toes. Present regulations have allowed taxies to pretty much ignore the customer.
A great example of where technology can make a difference was when a regular taxi company went with a computerized dispatch system. One driver told me that it pretty much eliminated the older drivers and the older dispatchers. What had evolved over the years was that the older drivers were giving kickbacks to the older dispatchers to get the best rides. So the drivers could hear a taxi being called who was clear across town with a fare in the car for another fare if that fare was a damn good one. So the customer had to wait and the other drivers would know that this damn good fare was going some old fart.
But the computerized dispatch system queued the drivers based on geo location and whatnot so there was no room left for kickbacks and whatnot. Also it turned out that many of the older drivers were illiterate and thus couldn't work the system.
So the driver told me that overnight his wages more than doubled because he was getting his fair share of the rides. Then the near monopolistic cab companies significantly upped the cost to rent one of their roof lights.
So a few regulations that I would be happy with would include rate limits but not minimums. But beyond that there needs to be very few regulations and only those that are called for by customers, not by cab companies or cab drivers. I really don't care what their problems are. In crafting the new regulations there should be zero input from the existing companies and only representatives of the cab using public.
I kinda preferred the book's ending but my main (and still tiny) quibble is that when they are walking on the ring they were definitely walking down a slope, instead of around a ring that was spinning to provide gravity. Along side this they were able to redirect themselves unnaturally in zero g. They could just make a course change without touching anything.
So pretty much the special effects people on set simply had no idea about how things work in a zero G environment. These slipups weren't momentary but repeated many times. It kind of ruined the whole suspension of disbelief for a moment. I noticed that when on mars, that there was a scene here and there where they would make a nod to the lower gravity of mars but then go right back to 1G. But most annoyingly there were moments where I could effectively imagine the wires and others where I could picture the ring movie set and which actors were in earth's gravity and which actors were pretending not to be.
Slashdot Mirror
If you hit me with a good sized drone you might give me a good cut and maybe a goose egg from the battery. If I hit you with a good sized (can fly type) goose, I will knock you over and could potentially break your neck.
Going to a car style speed. A drone may or may not even penetrate a windshield completely. A goose could easily go through and potentially kill the driver.
If you go to any drone forum you will see people taking pictures of the broken remains of their drones from fairly small crashes.
Where the main drone injuries come from are those whirling blades; most of which would just shatter on the skin of an airplane.
And much like those idiots with laser pointers, I couldn't think of a much worse place to fly a drone than near an airport.
Then there is another interesting question. As drones become far more important to the economy which would we rather have flying: police/news helicopters or something that makes our economy stronger?
Drones are interesting but beyond their scary name they are just the classic tool. Like knives, gasoline, matches, and leaf blowers there are the vast majority of people who will do good with them and a tiny few who will do bad things.
Fertilizer monitoring probably is a good thing as a single bad person can do a tremendous amount of damage. But right now a drone is going to give someone a bad cut or maybe take out an eye.
What I do smell is the government getting really pissed off that drones are being used to inform. That is their worst nightmare. Drones monitoring police, or fire is not what they want. They love when they have an excuse to push the public back and exert their authority. They love when they can put armed patrols around a pollution site where some big donor has been given cart blanche to pollute their way to another billion dollars. They hate when a drone flies overhead and exposes the truth.
As for drones interfering with flight operations, have you ever met a goose? If you are a pilot and your choices are to hit a goose or to hit a drone pretty much every pilot will chose the drone.
But sadly various criminals are going to buy better and better drones and come up with better and better ways to use them. So drug deliveries, even armed robberies are coming.
So this is going to be the classic war on drugs stupidity where they don't have any impact on the criminals while having a massive impact on the benefits that drones could provide the public.
I also wonder if some of these regulations are coming from the really big aviation companies who have pretty much entirely missed out on the commercial drone market and they know that if they craft the regulations carefully enough they will shut out the innovations pouring out of small companies all over. This way it will end up only being large corporations selling to the police, the military, and other large corporations? This completely screws the little guy. But at what point has government taken the needs of the little guy into serious consideration in the last 50 years when it came up against huge corporations?
This is giving me a headache. I had better take one of my cheap aspirin before the TPP allows Bayer to somehow renew their patent.
I was talking about 20 years ago when the only access to great simulators would be airline pilots. I suspect the changed the rules as soon as a valid simulator became available to a "regular" pilot. The key being that buying time on the good simulators was something running into the many many thousands per hour.
I have been in modern simulators but never for a little plane. There are many things that I would wonder if they would get right. For instance the trim wheel is slightly easier to trim when the trim isn't fighting what the plane wants to do. But the more you trim the harder it gets. So if you trimmed one way, and pushed the yoke to compensate, both become harder and harder. So when trimming the plane you need less and less input on the yoke.
Then there are the sounds. For instance many planes make a very specific sound as they are about to go into a spin. Often the metal in the tail kind of makes a pop-can bending sound just as the spin starts.
And taxiways, they are kind of bumpy and can move you around. Also when landing on wet runways the paint is much slippier than the runway. This is very important when practising short landings. To put it on the paint could cost you 100 or more feet and be very hard to control.
I suspect that modern flight schools can make great use of a simulator but the real thing is hard to beat in many ways. Except that around 20 years ago there may have been a tiny window when you, in theory only, could have skipped that whole annoying leaving the ground part.
This may have changed in the 20 years since I knew it to be a factoid. But in the world of simulators there were classes. I forget how they classed but let's assume that 1 is pretty much the instructor sitting behind you in a chair while you both made brruuum brrrumm noises and class 4 is one that moves and carefully simulates a plane.
Well for airline pilots who couldn't exactly go out in the 747 and so spins and stalls the class 4 simulator was legally considered to be flying.
Thus, in theory, a student could start on an airline simulator and get their private pilot's licence without ever leaving the ground. Maybe the DOT (at the time in Canada) might have insisted that the flight test be taken in a real plane. So that would be the first time they actually took off.
But quite possibly, if the DOT cooperated, someone could go from non-pilot to airline pilot without ever leaving the ground. Then they could build up a pile of hours until they qualified to be the pilot in command or Captain. Thus it might have been possible for that person to just walk into the cockpit pick up the mike and say, "This is Captain EOC and I will be your pilot today. We will be flying at an altitude of 32,000 feet for a flight time of 6 hours. I thank you for flying Oceanic Airways and by the way you might be interested to know that this is not only my first time flying a real airplane but amazingly is the first time I have actually ever been in an airplane."
Where it could get weird is that during a normal flight test you must have things like a first aid kit onboard, have checked the oil, done a walkaround, etc. So I guess you could have a first aid kid, check the hydraulic fluids, and walk around the room that contains the flight simulator.
I have only seen this a million times. But the only places that I see this function for long is in companies where there is no natural competition. So monopolies or situations where a few companies have effectively formed a cartel such as some groups of telcos.
But in companies where they are facing nimble upstarts this sort of thinking is often what leads to their demise. I have watched as companies would suddenly start looking at their solid AS300 and wonder, "Maybe that might kind of be a sort of liability?"
Then their upstart competitor does an online store and the company discovers that step one in getting their AS300 stored product database is to get rid of the AS300. By the time they are ready for step two their competitor has IPO'd and has withdrawn any offers to merge. Step 3 is getting bought out by a vaguely more nimble company that looks like they might survive the onslaught of the nimble upstart. For this story see Compaq vs Dell, and then the dead corpse of Compaq being absorbed by HP.
Or look at Sun being beaten to death by Linux and then their corpse being eaten by Oracle.
But again if your business model is predicated on stupid companies that your very product then kills how is it that they are still trucking along? Especially since they are swimming in a sea of nimble upstarts.
When are they going to die? My dream is an accounting scandal.
I have a slightly different take on this. The Oracle sales people do their damnedest to cut the technical people out of the loop. Thus the sales take place with top executives, even board members, just not those damn fact spouting technical people.
For many years I did the PL/SQL thing to separate the "business logic" and I built fairly large systems for fairly huge companies. I can make three very qualified statements:
One is that I never really liked working with Oracle as a developer or a DBA. The install was damn easy but configuring and tweaking the DB was a pain on a single machine and a huge pain on multiple machines. Backups and their restoration could easily go very wrong unless you had experienced people and still only after triple checking that things were properly being backed up. The same with any kind of failover etc.
Second is that while I am not too bad at estimating I pretty much refused to guess as to how much an Oracle licence was going to be. Getting a straighforward answer out of Oracle was actually a dangerous move careerwise as they would often want to send in salesmen when they would hear the names of the companies I was working for. They would basically then try to pull shit that would make me very unhappy. I was fairly certain that they were trying to do things such as replace me with more Oracle friendly consultants once they started to buy whole SaaS companies I cut oracle out of my life.
My last and most important statement is that at this point in history anyone using Oracle is a fool. MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, or just about any one of a zillion good datastores out there is so much better than Oracle that I simply don't know why anyone would use Oracle even if Oracle was free I would still use the others. If someone said that I had two choices Amazon Aurora or Oracle I would use Aurora even though I have never used it before. I will simply assume that it is easier to use, faster, cheaper, and less dangerous to my career.
I will give a classic Oracle use case that I did maybe 15 years ago. My client (fortune 50) wanted a system built that would allow you to browse their catalogue and buy stuff online (radical idea at the time). With about 200 main products and an estimated 200,000 to 1 million sales per year estimated (it was 15 years ago) everyone here can guess as to what kind of DB back end we are looking at. Transactional, reliable, blah blah. So we are putting this on a small cluster of machines with about 4 processors each. They insisted upon Oracle as they had been snowed by Oracle into thinking that to have Oracle plus another DB in the same company would blow them up. So I build the system which will then go onto about $400,000 worth of hardware. The entire development time was also spent trying to get Oracle to give them a price which I had said could be insane. So we deliver and the DB licensing was going to be $800,000.
I had seen this coming so our SQL was completely abstracted and very generic. There was no lock in PL/SQL.
The client basically loses their crap thinking that this project was going to make them look like a fool in their company and that this could be a career damaging move. So I point out that we saw this coming and have developed the system so that we can swap it over to an Open Source database that not only will be better but runs much faster meaning a more responsive website combined with lower harware costs because they now had more effective hardware capacity than they had with it running Oracle.
So since that project I have done zero Oracle work and will only do projects that either don't use Oracle or the project involves converting an Oracle database to something else; anything else.
The odd thing is that out of about maybe 300 developers with whom I have discussed Oracle as a DB 3 or so might have defended it. Without exception they were fully certified in using some Oracle product or another. The other 99% hated Oracle and everything it stood for. As in people who dropped MySQL soon after Oracle bought it. So how on earth is Oracle still in business? How is it that every time that Oracle is brought up in a technical discussion that the experts don't say. "Why don't we just hire people to punch us in the face while we develop the system? For using Oracle is about an equal act of self loathing."
I watched an interesting video of the Google car handling a 4 way stop. First it waited for its proper turn. Then if other people were being ass-hats it would then start to edge out to signal its intent to proceed.
Interestingly enough the primary cause of accidents involving driverless vehicles is that people aren't anticipating them to follow the rules.
Where I live has stupid slow speed limits combined with aggressive speeding cameras. It is actually very creepy to crawl along with everyone else crawling along when in most other locations everyone would be going around 50% faster. (no exaggeration)
Slashdot claims that it is more signal than noise but it is becoming more shill than signal. This is another article written with a clear agenda in mind. This is to promote cars that fit the model of the traditional car companies. They are beginning to freak out at what the driverless car will really look like and are beginning to sponsor anyone who will say that it will look like more of the same.
Here is the driverless car of the future (not the next generation but a few generations of development away). First the car is on the road with all automatic cars, there are no manually driven cars because they have been proven to be more of a burden to society than we were willing to put up with. Crashes are pretty much a thing of the past. The cars have shed nearly all their safety gear and no longer have to pass onerous safety tests. The only remaining safety tests are that the cars need to go a certain number of miles while not breaking down.
So the driverless car uses one of a handful of off the shelf autonomous systems all of which are battle tested and battle hardened. The cars are of a variety of shapes and sizes with many tiny single user cars popular among commuters who are one of the last bastions of private car ownership. Most people couldn't tell you one brand of car from another as they just call them on their phone and it shows up. They no more pay attention to brand or model than people do now with uber or taxi cars. Someone might notice if the taxi were a hummer but any boring midsized sedan and they can't even tell you the manufacture let alone model.
So looking at the manufacturers they are plenty in this world of SDCs. This is because the large companies have lost their competitive advantages starting at the moment that self driving cars began to rapidly evolve. The old car companies were very good at tooling up very cost efficient assembly lines and then making roughly the same car for nearly a decade. But the SDC evolved very quickly much like the cellphone which resulted in whole assembly lines being completely out of date in less than 6 months. Also the delay of the assembly line allowed complete upstarts to pound out whole new generations of cars in less time than it took the old companies to get a single, out of date, model to market.
Then in the end with only bulk fleet buyers making up the market the traditional skill of mass marketing was just another department that needed to be shuttered by the old car companies while the new companies didn't have the same liabilities. Also the new companies integrated every modern manufacturing technology possible without "Proper" testing and review by the senior engineers. This meant that most of the upstarts failed but left knowledge in their wakes that other startups built on resulting in fantastic new cheap ways to make very high quality low cost cars.
But the worst insult to the old car companies will be that as the kids start using self driving fleet vehicles their desire to own a car or even give a crap about a car will approach zero. There won't be 16 year olds with posters of a car that the car company can sell to them when they are 50. Movies like the fast and the furious will make no sense and thus won't sell a single car.
This whole allowing people to override the robot will very quickly be proven entirely stupid when the stats will show that cars in manual mode are some massive multiple more likely to crash than cars in fully automatic mode. Also they will be able to run simulations against the manual mode accidents to show that had the car been in control there would have been no accident.
So to allow people to continue to have any control over what is really a robotic car is the rough equivalent of those steering wheels we buy children for their car seats so they can go vroom vroom and stay out of our hair while we drive.
The mathematics of economics appear to be very similar to the mathematics of weather. There are elements that are predictable do to natural climatic conditions. Some elements are driven by distant events such as the formation of hurricanes. There are even black swan events such as volcanoes.
Thus it is very tempting to begin to look at people in a very statistical way just like the weather. In Canada is is probably a good idea to buy a snow shovel in the fall and a bathing suit in the spring. Not always, but a good plan.
Economists can very easily see that most people spend their time living most of their lives in a very simple statistical ebb and flow. Except there is one huge problem with this:
Assholes. Unlike the weather, the world is filled with assholes. This is where economists such as Milton Friedman get it exactly wrong. He seems to think that people will all work together in harmony in an invisible hand sort of way making the world a better place. Except that this is where you get complete assholes such as the people who put melamine into milk to improve its apparent protein levels. Why did they put melamine in milk, because they had previously been watering it down so the milk companies started testing for nitrogen as a way to test for protein. Assholes.
If you haven't dealt with people on Wall Street before then you simply can't take to heart the levels that genuine psychopaths will stoop in order to make a buck. People often think of not playing fair in ways such as deflategate or someone putting their toe over the line when serving at tennis. No, on Wall Street they will happily destroy an entire country and all it's industries so that they can make a few million dollars. They will guide regulations so as to ban competition. They will pay off politicians to empty the government treasuries in their favour.
Think about the rolling brownouts and massive increases in power costs in California, all so that Enron could make a tiny amount of money (vs the costs). By some estimates California lost over 40 billion dollars because of those exploits.
So unlike the weather and the nice pretty mathematics that surround it, economics forgets that these asshole hailstorms will take out all the car windows a week after the asshole tornado targeted the competing glass factory.
Some economists are pointing to game theory to explain even the assholes. But again, here they get it wrong. Take the prisoner's dilemma. But there are all kinds of other players in that game. First there is the DA who will hide exonerating evidence to make a name for himself. Then there is the prisoner who has the other prisoner shanked so that there is now only one player in the game. There is the corrupt police chief who arrested the two prisoners in the first place because he is in the pocket of a competing crime boss. Then there is the private prison system that has pushed the laws and courts so that the bail for the two prisoners is so high they can't afford it and the courts so overbooked that they will then spend months or maybe years in a private jail awaiting trial.
So if you want to win a Nobel in economics and actually come up with a system that has at least weather level predictive abilities then figure out how to model the impact of psychopathic assholes.
I like that app. I did sort of worry, while typing, that uber had that whole new meaning.
The handful of twitter employees that I met were Type A arrogant twats. These were the sort who within 10 minutes of meeting them would tell you all the different ways they were better than you. First it would be the uber degree from the uber university. Then of course it was that they worked for twitter. Then it was their near perfect SAT that got them into that degree. Then it was where they described that they were doing stats except that they wouldn't even use such a pedestrian word such as ML but had to state it like the title of a serious research paper. Then they might tell you their name but not before telling you all the famous people they had recently met.
The feeling I got from them was that there was a coked up arrogance to them. That sort of god's gift to mankind attitude.
What would burn their balls though was when I would say, "Seeing that twitter will eventually peak in usage what comes next to justify that massive valuation? Surely tiny blogging doesn't justify that much value with so little revenue and pretty much no profit."
Usually they would tell me that it was secret. I would then ask if they were working on the secret. This is where their balls got scorched as if they were so important then why were they just working on a bit of data mining?
I met exactly one twitter guy who was only somewhat arrogant and he quit. Still a twat though.
So if I had to guess what their failing was; I would say that it was that they had a tiger by the tail. So they hired people with awesome resumes who went around telling people (and each other) how awesome they all were and thus it became a circle jerk as to how they were going to succeed. But the people they hired were more expert at pleasing teachers and going through checklists in life rather than actually producing anything of value. Had someone of genius assigned them a task they all probably could have done it very well. But on their own they could only massage what already existed.
Basically these were the kids with an A+ in chemistry and memorized the period table at the beginning of the year but had never just blown shit up in their back yard.
Actually other than it being by Microsoft that is pretty damn close. The key is that the docking hardware is of such a common standard that I could hook up my iPhone, android, MS phone, etc and they would just go, "Oh look a docking station; now I'm a desktop,"
If I had to make a prediction this hardware probably costs way too much and thus it would be cheaper to go get a halfway decent laptop and/or the thing is going to be so proprietary that it will only work for even a limited number of MS phones of a single brand let alone other OS based phones.
Yet this would be a brilliant thing for them to licence to the other companies, they could have the standard on connecting phones like this.
I want a pc that fits in my pocket and has a touchscreen. It needs to be able to make phone calls and receive texts. It would be nice if I could also listen to music and if it could connect to things via bluetooth. Wi-fi would also be a good feature.
Someone told me that such a PC might already exist.
But in reality there is a PC that I would like that is close to the above. I want a PC basestation that is effectively my phone. Something that is just a keyboard, mouse and monitor but gets its computing power from my phone. I would snap the phone in and boop, I have a good computer, I pull it out and I have a good phone. Ideally though when it was a computer it would actually be a computer with proper mouseclicks, complicated interfaces, and whatnot. But when it was a phone it wouldn't be a crappy little computer but a good phone. But the real killer is that the basestation would not be proprietary to just that company or even just that phone series but general to all makes and models that supported the standard.
Oddly enough one of the things that has hurt the PC market is that about 8 or so years ago most cheap laptops and desktops were good enough for most people's purposes. They could watch 1080 videos without stuttering, they could connect to Wi-fi faster than their ISP would feed them data, and the USB standard means that few devices shortly before or anytime after wouldn't work. Unlike the 90s when this year's computer could do things that last year's couldn't we have nearly a straight decade where 99% of people don't need more power than is available in any of the latest machines.
We are now crossing that threshold with phones. They are crossing a power demand for most people. More than 1080 on a typical phone is nonsense, more than a quadcore 1.5ghz processor is nonsense, more than G wi-fi is nonsense, more than LTE data is nonsense. The few features that people really want are more battery, more durability, and lower price.
So why not take this ever growing pile of power and combine it with the generally minimal needs of the laptop/desktop world?
With a proper keyboard, mouse, and interface tied into a smartphone I know of few people who would need anything more than that.
Then the era of the PC would simply have a new chapter.
OK here are the players. One is a consumer who has a VW that will consume 20% more fuel if they get the modification but will generate negligibly less pollutants for themselves.. If they don't get the modification the amount of pollution they will generate for themselves is negligible but they won't use way more fuel. They are the only player in this game, what will most decide?
I have found that most companies where managers are multi tiered and plentiful are typically run by mostly MBAs. Often these MBAs have VP titles in their name and they too are multi-tiered with SVP VP and even JVP. But the classic sign is wonderfully summed up in the movie Office Space with the TPS report. I will be dealing with some manager who will say that they are 6 months behind on their XYZ reports. I will then say, "What value do these XYZ reports have then?" Sometimes they might provide a better trail if there is a future fraud investigation or whatnot but in most cases it is just complete BS information being gathered that does not relate in any real way to the day to day operations or the company's goals.
So you will have this XYZ report that a manager is expected to spend about 1 hour per day working on. They in turn expect their underlings to spend 10+ minutes a day on the report and of course this gets passed up the chain. So a company with 5,000 employees might be effectively dedicating 50-100 employees to the XYZ report. But it isn't just a waste of time but adds stress to the employees and takes away from having a clear sense of purpose. To make it worse there might not be only one; there could also be the ABC report and the LMN training.
The way I like to boil things down is to say, OK what does this company do? Thus is removing XYZ going to impact doing that? I am often building systems for large companies and thus I am often automating the XYZ report. But suddenly I discover that not only is the XYZ report just busy work but the managers who are dedicated to it also would prefer if I would prioritize automating the XYZ report over say the billing system for selling widgets, which is what the company does. So I come back with a cost analysis that shows the value of the XYZ report is negative whereas the improved billing system will generate X extra revenue every week.
But I only do this presentation to the CEO and or board level. I would never tell the managers that the XYZ report is not needed because many of them know that their job is total BS.
One great description that I heard years ago and live by for a long time was that a good manager is there to protect their underlings from the upper management. But then I realized a greater issue. The underlings shouldn't need protection from upper management.
I am setting up a website where I am going to allow online betting based on the weight of Steven King's next bowel movement. I need to sneak into his house tonight to put pressure sensors under his throne and a turd cam just under the seat.
So everyone come check out http://scaryturdbetting.com/ and give me all your money.
It must suck for any genuine scientist who might come up with an interesting idea as it relates to small scale or cold fusion. I can just see the grant request meeting:
So you have filed a grant form on researching neutron production at low temperatures?
Yes
Isn't that cold fusion by another name?
Not really but...
You're fired, we are stripping your PhD, and we are having the art department make funny cartoons about how much of a loser you are.
But I only asked for a $2 grant.
We are also requesting retractions on all your papers including ones that have been lab verified by over 1000 independent researchers.
But.
We also just burned your house down and killed your dog.
I don't have a dog.
I can point to my family. We moved to a location where nearly unlimited wireless is not a terrible price. There is no need beyond me, the software developer, to have a huge connection. If I had genuinely unlimited LTE or better then I would switch in a heartbeat. I am a pretty demanding data user so if I could cut then few couldn't.
If my siblings lived where I live then I would have helped them all cut their internet by now. My mother has netflix but barely even uses that. I think her monthly data usage is around 2Gigs a month or less. I think that a typical Netfllix family uses around the 300Gig mark in Data.
Where wireless gets interesting is when the antenna is also directional. In some countries where they leapfrogged that last mile of wire they combine cool telco antennas with these can things on the houses that allow for wireless highspeed internet for very little money.
The key is that the cable companies are only seeing the cusp of this trend. They are trying to cut it off before it becomes a problem. Every day they can delay the progress of wireless data for the masses is a huge pile of money. So it is worth it for them to put a huge amount of effort into this project even if it only buys them a year or two.
Now it's not perfect. Ping times go up so gamers wouldn't be happy. But I can use products such as skype and facetime on my data plan and I can't tell the difference between that and a wired internet connection.
It is also very cool when I am in a park and can download a new version of some SDK that I use without really thinking about it.
But the independent evidence shows that there is no problem. They are trying to convince the public that their Wi-fi will be imperilled by the evil telcos. When one large group of companies are battling with another group of large companies their lobbying suddenly cancels out and they have to turn to the voter.
If the project is the equivalent of moving dirt from pile A to pile B then then many hands make light work until it gets to a point where people are just getting in each other's way. So 20 might be 4 times better than 5 but 1,000 is just a huge waste of resources as maybe 950 would be best kept out of the way.
Then there is the statistical genius issue. If you have one good programmer trying to solve a horrific problem then two or so programmers might allow for some interesting insights that one might not have. But this sort of hits a rate of diminishing returns in that the average programmer isn't that much smarter than any other programmer. Thus 10 might not be much better than 2. Except that if you have 1,000 programmers the simple probability is that one of them is a genius and thus the program might be solved more than 1000 times faster than a single programmer or more realistically it may have never been solved by a handful of programmers, ever.
Then there are the classic programs where people try to architect it into wonderfully separate abstract sections where individual programmers or small groups can work on each piece. This might sound good in reality but all projects have a certain amount of spaghetti to them and thus their reaches a point where each new programmer isn't able to hive off a part very easily without excessive communications with other programmers and thus not really help that much. This is a fairly typical corporate project flow and thus the Mythical Man month does apply to many projects, just not all projects.
Holy crap. This is completely disproved cable company funded research. Basically the cable companies are not only seeing cord cutting in the realm of people cutting their TV cables but also now many people are going with tablets and phone only internet connections and are cutting their local wi-fi/cable internet connection. This is a disaster for the cable companies.
So they are doing their damnedest to keep the wireless companies from being able to use the bandwidth that is becoming available as various old technologies such as analog broadcast TV frees up more and more of the spectrum.
On top of that any new frequency opened up to wireless will often then be used by the newest and best data technologies so a given bit of spectrum used in 4G will of course pack in way more data than a 3G spectrum of the same "size" and 5G will probably pack in just that much more into anything that newly opens up for it.
Eventually the 2G spectrum will be retired for use for maybe 6G sort of stuff but it is the new spectrums now that are used for the newest and best data streaming.
If you look at a graph of the spectrum opening up, combined with existing spectrum being re-purposed, combined with the ability to not only send data down that spectrum, but cool things like phased array antennas that can basically laser the data directly at a customer that graph will actually show that the typical netflixing customer could potentially go entirely wireless in not that many years.
This basically takes the whole "last mile" concept out and shoots it in the face. Then the last-mile turns into the-last-pile-of-expensive-crap.
Yes there will be some customers who need such absurd amounts of bandwidth that wireless really won't be it but for the average person watching netflix; they really will hit a limit where they then only slowly increase their demands.
So again I cry a little bit for slashdot to see this sort of corporate shilling happening again.
One thing has nothing to do with the other. This is just misleading propaganda from companies that have dropped the driverless ball. This is about lying cheating executives. Executives can lie and cheat about anything. Are those tires safe? Is the gasoline really unleaded? Do the ignition switches kill people?
If anything the companies that are leading the charge with driverless don't have a long track record of cheating and killing their customers. The reality is that they are going into this new arena with unblemished records. This probably scares the crap out of the old companies.
For instance, anything that Ford, GM, or Chrysler tell me is probably a lie or an exaggeration. I don't really trust any of the Japanese Manufacturers and even the Koreans aren't looking too good with the emissions testing. Thus I am far more likely to believe a Tesla, Google, Apple, etc. If they say their car can go 200 miles on a charge I will actually plan on going roughly 200 miles on a charge. If GM tells me that I can go 200 miles on a charge I will assume that they lobbied the government to allow them to have a tail wind and go downhill the whole time. Plus they won't mention that the battery caught fire 3 times each test and the driver's seat is the battery.
So this straw man argument is just pure PR being put out to distract us from the fact that the old school car companies are run by a bunch of psychopathic MBA types. And instead of changing their ways they are trying to paint the aggressive young newcomers with the same brush.
I don't call for full deregulation. I mostly call for an end to any quota system. I also call for the lightest touch possible in any remaining regulations in that if the regulation doesn't have a clear purpose then can it.
No system with Taxis is going to be perfect. But as the internet comes to have an ever greater impact competition is going to be key to keep everyone on their yelp inspired toes. Present regulations have allowed taxies to pretty much ignore the customer.
A great example of where technology can make a difference was when a regular taxi company went with a computerized dispatch system. One driver told me that it pretty much eliminated the older drivers and the older dispatchers. What had evolved over the years was that the older drivers were giving kickbacks to the older dispatchers to get the best rides. So the drivers could hear a taxi being called who was clear across town with a fare in the car for another fare if that fare was a damn good one. So the customer had to wait and the other drivers would know that this damn good fare was going some old fart.
But the computerized dispatch system queued the drivers based on geo location and whatnot so there was no room left for kickbacks and whatnot. Also it turned out that many of the older drivers were illiterate and thus couldn't work the system.
So the driver told me that overnight his wages more than doubled because he was getting his fair share of the rides. Then the near monopolistic cab companies significantly upped the cost to rent one of their roof lights.
So a few regulations that I would be happy with would include rate limits but not minimums. But beyond that there needs to be very few regulations and only those that are called for by customers, not by cab companies or cab drivers. I really don't care what their problems are. In crafting the new regulations there should be zero input from the existing companies and only representatives of the cab using public.
I kinda preferred the book's ending but my main (and still tiny) quibble is that when they are walking on the ring they were definitely walking down a slope, instead of around a ring that was spinning to provide gravity. Along side this they were able to redirect themselves unnaturally in zero g. They could just make a course change without touching anything. So pretty much the special effects people on set simply had no idea about how things work in a zero G environment. These slipups weren't momentary but repeated many times. It kind of ruined the whole suspension of disbelief for a moment. I noticed that when on mars, that there was a scene here and there where they would make a nod to the lower gravity of mars but then go right back to 1G. But most annoyingly there were moments where I could effectively imagine the wires and others where I could picture the ring movie set and which actors were in earth's gravity and which actors were pretending not to be.