Ideally you'd want the combo printer-scanners that are starting to come out, combined with something as simple and intuitive as SketchUp (but volumetric "clay" instead of shell/boundary) to let users modify the model by stretching, patching, or copying elements. That might have been something that Jobs' Apple could have done, but Jobs is dead.
A number of patents exist for metal sintering 3d printers that have restricted development to a few licensees. It means that they haven't had the same cost reducing competition that plastic extruding printers have had recently. Some patents are approaching expiry (the biggest one just expired this year), and everyone's hoping...
The devs are rolling out a patch for an issue where an external hardware crash caused a loss of system integrity. While no personal data has been lost to date, the vendor apparently wants to reduce the recovery time and inconvenience for early adopters.
Fanbois coo admiringly. Critics snipe cynically. Nihilists whine about the story appearing at all.
Manufacturers receive detailed scores on individual tests as part of the report, including comparison with other vehicles. The Tesla scored higher than any previous car.
[Then Musk, being a nerd, did what any of us would do when give two data-sets converted by an unknown factor, he back-calculated from the detailed test scores the conversion factor for the "star" rating, in order to decimalise the "star" rating. Then he tweeted it, and everyone went stupid.]
I think a Ford Mustang has since tested higher, and is the current record holder.
Wasn't quibbling over the claim that small aircraft are more dangerous than driving (see my reply to immerman). Only with the claim that weather isn't a danger to road users. It's clearly a major factor in road crashes, just as it's a major factor in air crashes.
Bill said the avg number of passengers in the stats he posted was 3. Not 200.
So your numbers are: 0.44% of car accidents had fatalities / 1.5 people = 0.293% chance of fatality per person in accident 20.2% of plane accidents had fatalities * num_fatalities_per_accident / 3 people = 6.73%*num_fatalities_per_accident chance of fatality per person in accident
2% of cars and 1% of aircraft in this class have accidents, Bill also claimed. And I would think that a small aircraft accident that kills 1 passenger would kill most or all passengers. So per_accident fatality rate is likely to be close to 100%, but let's say 2.3rds.
Then you get:
2.93 fatalities per 1000 registered road vehicles. 134 fatalities per 1000 registered aircraft in this class.
"Twenty-three percent of road crashes—nearly 1,312,000—are weather-related. On average, 6,250 people are killed and over 480,000 people are injured in weather-related crashes each year." - www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/weather.
The Matrix The Matrix Reloaded The Matrix Revolutions The Matrix Replicated The Matrix Revenge The Matrix Relapsing The Matrix Regurgitated The Matrix Rewindings The Matrix Reconjiggered The Matrix Repugnant The Matrix Revenue
You know they react like this to every crashed plane? Normally they find it on a mountain within a day or two and the media loses interest. This one is only odd because the plane was lost at sea; which only happens every 5 years or so.
The "panic" is really only coming from the internet conspiracy machine and the media which, for some reason, takes idiotic internet conspiracy theories seriously when they have nothing to report (instead of, you know, stopping reporting until something actually happens.) The actual S&R is exactly the same as every other air crash S&R. [In the Air France crash, they didn't stop looking for the black boxes for two years.]
Heh, I guess this is the difference between nerds like me and regular consumers. What I want is a screen that shows me, at a glance, everything around me. What I get is a blinky light that comes on at a pre-defined distance set by the manufacturer.
[Most cars now have tyre pressure warning lights. The sensors are providing continuous independent pressure readings. In most models, all the driver is allowed to see a blinky warning light when the pressure of any tyre drops below a predefined level.]
I usually drive older cars, typically 8-15 years behind current, and I've had more issues with faulty sensors/switches than faulty mechanical parts. And they are usually bastards to replace.
OTOH, over my life (including when I was a kid), I've seen one side mirror break ($50, 30min replacement) and one rear-view mirror-mount fall off (some glue, like $2.) And it didn't affect any of the other mirrors. [I've also had the electric motor (or switch or something) in the mirror adjustment fail. But it failed in place, which meant you could still manually adjust it. And the failure didn't affect the opposite mirror (nor the rearview mirror).]
I'm always deeply suspicious (like many technically-minded people, I've noticed) when someone replaces a simple, reliable mechanical or electric part on a long-life heavy-use device with a deeply interwoven electronic equivalent. My first thought is, yes but what happens in ten-fifteen-twenty years? And how does the rest of it work when these parts start to fail?
Often it's not the failure itself, it's the way the rest of the systems react to the failure.
If the water-valve on your old washing machine fails, you can hover over it and turn it off by hand, the rest of the wash cycle works fine. If the electronic sensor/switch assembly fails, the machine will usually prevent itself from even starting, even though the mechanical parts (pump/motor/etc) still work. I have a treadmill over there which has a perfectly working motor, gearing, belt, rollers, etc, but a single (low speed) sensor is faulty causing the electronic controller to shut off power. Now the treadmill won't work at all until I get a replacement part that is worth more than the 2nd hand price of the entire treadmill. [The low speed sensor is meant to detect when the treadmill-belt is jammed/overloaded and shut off juice to the motor before the motor is fried. Sounds good. But no way to override it when it is the point of failure. Instead the entire treadmill becomes an inert lump. And you can't replace the sensor, you have to replace the entire control board. Guess what the most common fault is when I google my model of treadmill? (Or other treadmills, for that matter.)]
My old car had a separate switch for the wipers and washers. When the washer motor was glitchy, I could run it for awhile to pump up water before hitting the wipers (or if it didn't work today, not hit them). My current car has a combined system so the wipers come on whenever you hit the washers, whether any water is pumping or not. Scratch, scratch, scratch. My next car will inevitably have rain-sensor-wipers or something else which no longer works properly by the time I get it, and causes stupid, expensive and easily-avoided problems.
Mirrors are zero latency, ultra-high-resolution, always-on, variable-angle 3D, low-light, independent displays. So it's bad enough replacing that with separate low-res cameras directly fed into a medium-res screen. It's a whole other level when you've got preprocessed multi-camera views, eye tracking systems, in a single complex interwoven system. One fault would take out the whole "mirror" system, or render it useless.
A good sideview camera would let you see places a sideview mirror won't. Use a fishbowl lens, multiple camera's, perhaps even eye-tracking. Software can composite it any way you need.
And what do you think the odds are it will be done well?
(And done in a way that is as reliable as a mirror over the life of the car.)
I'd be happy just to get a good rearview camera on my motorbike.
Not a rider, but is there any reason why you can't use at least one of the many different styles of after-market rear-view cameras? Some are ridiculously cheap. Some are wireless.
If mirrors are so good at depth perception, why do they all have "objects in mirror are closer than they appear" printed on them?
Specifically because people were so used to the depth perception with flat mirrors. So when manufacturers introduced convex mirrors, they added a visual indicator to remind people not to trust their subconscious perception of depth/distance.
(The existence of such labels actually proves Roger and RightwWing's points.)
You could also imagine a virtual-reality approach which at the limit could provide a virtual mirror in the location you expect,
An array of ultra-sound sensors around the car, compiled into a simple birds-eye-view display. Like a storm radar image. You'd see at a glance the car (or motorbike) in your blindspot. Dramatically improved situational awareness.
You'd then only need mirrors (or cameras) to see things beyond the range of the sensors, which may make side-mirrors redundant. A single wide-angle view from the back.
Yeah, it's BS; we have systems now that can react in tens of microseconds
Yep. And yes, the exploding consoles. And the lack of targeting systems on their hand-held phasers.
TNG and later series used portable force-field generators that were the size of three foot posts. But wearable shield-generators were Borg-magic, impossible for any other species. Portable holo-emitters were similarly sized, yet a wearable "cloak". Impossible!
And those portable holo-emitters included touch, but a remote "away" teleoperation system is unthinkable. "Let's beam down to the dangerous place". Errr, no. Let's beam down a holo-sensor system and just watch it on the holo-deck. Even Stargate had a RC-robot with a camera go first, and that was meant to be contemporary level technology.
[I have a theory that Star Trek is a post-scarcity (thanks to replicators) version of Idiocracy. Stupid people having adventures. It would explain the bad plots, awful technological inconsistencies, that they had no apparent culture of their own. And damn it would explain a lot about the reboot movies. "You are suspended cadet." "I am the Captain now!" "Duh, okay." Later:"You were good captain, you keep ship now, 'k?")]
And I'll be the third type of guy and point out that the reason they say "micro-gravity" instead of "zero g" is because across larger man-made structures, such as the ISS, there is sufficient tidal force for different ends to experience more than one millionth of 1g of force.
Engineers and controllers need to remember this when they design and use reaction-control systems - because the station wants to "hang" perpendicularly to the ground, its most stable position.
Likewise researchers need to know what force is experienced in different parts of the station to reduce (or control) the effect on their experiments.
Then there are the insultingly stupid sound effects usually present where there is NO MEDIUM to carry sound. I know Star Trek exterior shots had a swishing sound, but I always considered that an artistic license to satisfy viewers who had little understanding of science.
Ah. So when Star Wars did it, it was "insultingly stupid". But when Star TREK did it, it was "artistic license".
No double standard there, no sirree.
Just how do you maneuver in space? Certainly not with wings and aerodynamic surfaces
Instead Star Trek had ships bank to turn, and magically slow and stop in space when their engines died. Totally realistic.
Face it. They were both stupid. Neither even attempted to do space seriously. Neither applied their own in-universe "science" or technology consistently.
B5 came a little closer with the star-furies. Firefly figured out how to do silence poetically. But no one has ever made a consistent hard SF TV show or movie.
"inertial dampers", apparently some sort of force-field, probably the same as the artificial gravity but in other directions besides vertical, used to counteract the huge accelerative forces experienced during maneuvers which would othewise cause people to become splats on the bulkheads.
It could handle warp speed and high-g manoeuvres (and high-g manoeuvres at warp speed), but the small shock of an impact (which barely budged the ship when viewed from outside) threw them all over the bridge.
They don't have to be spinning that fast. Instead of generating a 1G equivalent force, generate 1/6, or 1/4.
Except you don't know whether that solves the problem. We've never done the experiment, not even on animals. 60 years of human space-flight, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we still only have two data points, 0 and 1.
I'd prefer a camera on the driver's side, rear bumper, looking perpendicular - not behind. (Errr, so for US vehicles, left side rear quarter, looking leftwards.)
That lets you see around other vehicles when you are parked between SUVs or any cars with tinted windows. Otherwise you have to reverse so far out into (potential) traffic just to be able to see if it's clear enough to reverse that far out. (The other way is easier, you're looking more diagonally. But a camera on the passenger side would be nice too. Perhaps a toggle on the indicator stalk to flip the view.) It would be the difference between sticking a foot or so of bumper out into traffic versus sticking two-thirds of the car out into traffic.
Ideally, some system to give you a birds-eye-view of all traffic around you, regardless of vehicles blocking your actual view. [But that would require external cameras/sensors, possibly sharing between vehicles, plus cameras and sensors on posts and buildings. And it's not like that will remain free of the Record-Everything-Forever mentality for long. So no.]
Hmmm, how much does a 360 degree, mm-wave scanning system cost?
Slashdot Mirror
Ideally you'd want the combo printer-scanners that are starting to come out, combined with something as simple and intuitive as SketchUp (but volumetric "clay" instead of shell/boundary) to let users modify the model by stretching, patching, or copying elements. That might have been something that Jobs' Apple could have done, but Jobs is dead.
A number of patents exist for metal sintering 3d printers that have restricted development to a few licensees. It means that they haven't had the same cost reducing competition that plastic extruding printers have had recently. Some patents are approaching expiry (the biggest one just expired this year), and everyone's hoping...
The devs are rolling out a patch for an issue where an external hardware crash caused a loss of system integrity. While no personal data has been lost to date, the vendor apparently wants to reduce the recovery time and inconvenience for early adopters.
Fanbois coo admiringly. Critics snipe cynically. Nihilists whine about the story appearing at all.
And the beat goes on...
Manufacturers receive detailed scores on individual tests as part of the report, including comparison with other vehicles. The Tesla scored higher than any previous car.
[Then Musk, being a nerd, did what any of us would do when give two data-sets converted by an unknown factor, he back-calculated from the detailed test scores the conversion factor for the "star" rating, in order to decimalise the "star" rating. Then he tweeted it, and everyone went stupid.]
I think a Ford Mustang has since tested higher, and is the current record holder.
Wasn't quibbling over the claim that small aircraft are more dangerous than driving (see my reply to immerman). Only with the claim that weather isn't a danger to road users. It's clearly a major factor in road crashes, just as it's a major factor in air crashes.
Bill said the avg number of passengers in the stats he posted was 3. Not 200.
So your numbers are:
0.44% of car accidents had fatalities / 1.5 people = 0.293% chance of fatality per person in accident
20.2% of plane accidents had fatalities * num_fatalities_per_accident / 3 people = 6.73%*num_fatalities_per_accident chance of fatality per person in accident
2% of cars and 1% of aircraft in this class have accidents, Bill also claimed. And I would think that a small aircraft accident that kills 1 passenger would kill most or all passengers. So per_accident fatality rate is likely to be close to 100%, but let's say 2.3rds.
Then you get:
2.93 fatalities per 1000 registered road vehicles.
134 fatalities per 1000 registered aircraft in this class.
"Which presents a very different picture."
"Twenty-three percent of road crashes—nearly 1,312,000—are weather-related. On average, 6,250 people are killed and over 480,000 people are injured in weather-related crashes each year." - www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/weather.
Have I just blown the protocol?
The Matrix
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
The Matrix Replicated
The Matrix Revenge
The Matrix Relapsing
The Matrix Regurgitated
The Matrix Rewindings
The Matrix Reconjiggered
The Matrix Repugnant
The Matrix Revenue
What if you end up in the control group?
You know they react like this to every crashed plane? Normally they find it on a mountain within a day or two and the media loses interest. This one is only odd because the plane was lost at sea; which only happens every 5 years or so.
The "panic" is really only coming from the internet conspiracy machine and the media which, for some reason, takes idiotic internet conspiracy theories seriously when they have nothing to report (instead of, you know, stopping reporting until something actually happens.) The actual S&R is exactly the same as every other air crash S&R. [In the Air France crash, they didn't stop looking for the black boxes for two years.]
Heh, I guess this is the difference between nerds like me and regular consumers. What I want is a screen that shows me, at a glance, everything around me. What I get is a blinky light that comes on at a pre-defined distance set by the manufacturer.
[Most cars now have tyre pressure warning lights. The sensors are providing continuous independent pressure readings. In most models, all the driver is allowed to see a blinky warning light when the pressure of any tyre drops below a predefined level.]
Not to mention several years doing pretty much nothing but training in failure scenarios.
I usually drive older cars, typically 8-15 years behind current, and I've had more issues with faulty sensors/switches than faulty mechanical parts. And they are usually bastards to replace.
OTOH, over my life (including when I was a kid), I've seen one side mirror break ($50, 30min replacement) and one rear-view mirror-mount fall off (some glue, like $2.) And it didn't affect any of the other mirrors. [I've also had the electric motor (or switch or something) in the mirror adjustment fail. But it failed in place, which meant you could still manually adjust it. And the failure didn't affect the opposite mirror (nor the rearview mirror).]
I'm always deeply suspicious (like many technically-minded people, I've noticed) when someone replaces a simple, reliable mechanical or electric part on a long-life heavy-use device with a deeply interwoven electronic equivalent. My first thought is, yes but what happens in ten-fifteen-twenty years? And how does the rest of it work when these parts start to fail?
Often it's not the failure itself, it's the way the rest of the systems react to the failure.
If the water-valve on your old washing machine fails, you can hover over it and turn it off by hand, the rest of the wash cycle works fine. If the electronic sensor/switch assembly fails, the machine will usually prevent itself from even starting, even though the mechanical parts (pump/motor/etc) still work. I have a treadmill over there which has a perfectly working motor, gearing, belt, rollers, etc, but a single (low speed) sensor is faulty causing the electronic controller to shut off power. Now the treadmill won't work at all until I get a replacement part that is worth more than the 2nd hand price of the entire treadmill. [The low speed sensor is meant to detect when the treadmill-belt is jammed/overloaded and shut off juice to the motor before the motor is fried. Sounds good. But no way to override it when it is the point of failure. Instead the entire treadmill becomes an inert lump. And you can't replace the sensor, you have to replace the entire control board. Guess what the most common fault is when I google my model of treadmill? (Or other treadmills, for that matter.)]
My old car had a separate switch for the wipers and washers. When the washer motor was glitchy, I could run it for awhile to pump up water before hitting the wipers (or if it didn't work today, not hit them). My current car has a combined system so the wipers come on whenever you hit the washers, whether any water is pumping or not. Scratch, scratch, scratch. My next car will inevitably have rain-sensor-wipers or something else which no longer works properly by the time I get it, and causes stupid, expensive and easily-avoided problems.
Mirrors are zero latency, ultra-high-resolution, always-on, variable-angle 3D, low-light, independent displays. So it's bad enough replacing that with separate low-res cameras directly fed into a medium-res screen. It's a whole other level when you've got preprocessed multi-camera views, eye tracking systems, in a single complex interwoven system. One fault would take out the whole "mirror" system, or render it useless.
A good sideview camera would let you see places a sideview mirror won't. Use a fishbowl lens, multiple camera's, perhaps even eye-tracking. Software can composite it any way you need.
And what do you think the odds are it will be done well?
(And done in a way that is as reliable as a mirror over the life of the car.)
I'd be happy just to get a good rearview camera on my motorbike.
Not a rider, but is there any reason why you can't use at least one of the many different styles of after-market rear-view cameras? Some are ridiculously cheap. Some are wireless.
If mirrors are so good at depth perception, why do they all have "objects in mirror are closer than they appear" printed on them?
Specifically because people were so used to the depth perception with flat mirrors. So when manufacturers introduced convex mirrors, they added a visual indicator to remind people not to trust their subconscious perception of depth/distance.
(The existence of such labels actually proves Roger and RightwWing's points.)
You could also imagine a virtual-reality approach which at the limit could provide a virtual mirror in the location you expect,
An array of ultra-sound sensors around the car, compiled into a simple birds-eye-view display. Like a storm radar image. You'd see at a glance the car (or motorbike) in your blindspot. Dramatically improved situational awareness.
You'd then only need mirrors (or cameras) to see things beyond the range of the sensors, which may make side-mirrors redundant. A single wide-angle view from the back.
Yep. And yes, the exploding consoles. And the lack of targeting systems on their hand-held phasers.
TNG and later series used portable force-field generators that were the size of three foot posts. But wearable shield-generators were Borg-magic, impossible for any other species. Portable holo-emitters were similarly sized, yet a wearable "cloak". Impossible!
And those portable holo-emitters included touch, but a remote "away" teleoperation system is unthinkable. "Let's beam down to the dangerous place". Errr, no. Let's beam down a holo-sensor system and just watch it on the holo-deck. Even Stargate had a RC-robot with a camera go first, and that was meant to be contemporary level technology.
[I have a theory that Star Trek is a post-scarcity (thanks to replicators) version of Idiocracy. Stupid people having adventures. It would explain the bad plots, awful technological inconsistencies, that they had no apparent culture of their own. And damn it would explain a lot about the reboot movies. "You are suspended cadet." "I am the Captain now!" "Duh, okay." Later:"You were good captain, you keep ship now, 'k?")]
And I'll be the third type of guy and point out that the reason they say "micro-gravity" instead of "zero g" is because across larger man-made structures, such as the ISS, there is sufficient tidal force for different ends to experience more than one millionth of 1g of force.
Engineers and controllers need to remember this when they design and use reaction-control systems - because the station wants to "hang" perpendicularly to the ground, its most stable position.
Likewise researchers need to know what force is experienced in different parts of the station to reduce (or control) the effect on their experiments.
Then there are the insultingly stupid sound effects usually present where there is NO MEDIUM to carry sound. I know Star Trek exterior shots had a swishing sound, but I always considered that an artistic license to satisfy viewers who had little understanding of science.
Ah. So when Star Wars did it, it was "insultingly stupid". But when Star TREK did it, it was "artistic license".
No double standard there, no sirree.
Just how do you maneuver in space? Certainly not with wings and aerodynamic surfaces
Instead Star Trek had ships bank to turn, and magically slow and stop in space when their engines died. Totally realistic.
Face it. They were both stupid. Neither even attempted to do space seriously. Neither applied their own in-universe "science" or technology consistently.
B5 came a little closer with the star-furies. Firefly figured out how to do silence poetically. But no one has ever made a consistent hard SF TV show or movie.
"inertial dampers", apparently some sort of force-field, probably the same as the artificial gravity but in other directions besides vertical, used to counteract the huge accelerative forces experienced during maneuvers which would othewise cause people to become splats on the bulkheads.
It could handle warp speed and high-g manoeuvres (and high-g manoeuvres at warp speed), but the small shock of an impact (which barely budged the ship when viewed from outside) threw them all over the bridge.
They don't have to be spinning that fast. Instead of generating a 1G equivalent force, generate 1/6, or 1/4.
Except you don't know whether that solves the problem. We've never done the experiment, not even on animals. 60 years of human space-flight, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we still only have two data points, 0 and 1.
Jesus, overreact much? They cost about $50 for colour + IR, including 5" screen. $70 for the 7" rearview-mirror-screen version.
I'd prefer a camera on the driver's side, rear bumper, looking perpendicular - not behind. (Errr, so for US vehicles, left side rear quarter, looking leftwards.)
That lets you see around other vehicles when you are parked between SUVs or any cars with tinted windows. Otherwise you have to reverse so far out into (potential) traffic just to be able to see if it's clear enough to reverse that far out. (The other way is easier, you're looking more diagonally. But a camera on the passenger side would be nice too. Perhaps a toggle on the indicator stalk to flip the view.) It would be the difference between sticking a foot or so of bumper out into traffic versus sticking two-thirds of the car out into traffic.
Ideally, some system to give you a birds-eye-view of all traffic around you, regardless of vehicles blocking your actual view. [But that would require external cameras/sensors, possibly sharing between vehicles, plus cameras and sensors on posts and buildings. And it's not like that will remain free of the Record-Everything-Forever mentality for long. So no.]
Hmmm, how much does a 360 degree, mm-wave scanning system cost?