Canadian prairies? In that degenerate case (computationally speaking - no offense to our northern neighbors) I think you already have the technology. Just point the car straight, hit the cruise control, and set an alarm clock for a few minutes before you get to your destination. It's worked for me when I've driven on the American prairies.
Yeah, the active parking assist, which was on the Lincoln driven by the article's author. A quick search though suggests that the highway stuff on the Ford is also production. Unfortunately I don't have the time right now to be sure. Ok, score one (three?) for the bottom-up self-driving people.
I RTFA, and I think that's impressive. What struck me about Mercedes is they're actually going to be selling cars with those features in less than 6 months. I don't think the Ford features are going to be sold soon, though the article wasn't clear. The automated parallel parking has been around for a while, and in all fairness should count as a limited form of self-driving car.
It reinforces my point about Google. While they're hyping completely self-driving demos, various car makers have been doing the hard work of refining things they can really sell. Google reminds me of the old top-down AI guys, who spent decades claiming that with another few million lines of LISP and a few more orders of magnitude of computing power (damn those hardware guys for holding us back), they could create a program that would pass the Turing test. After a while, people who got tired of being laughed at for saying they were in AI, took the bottom up approach. Forget sparkling conversation - let's see if we can create a robot that can run down the hall without running over your thesis adviser, and plug itself into the wall. Who's gotten further?
I think we'll probably see self-driving cars in congested, relatively low-speed environments like inner cities before they're screaming down the highway at 75mph.
On the contrary, "screaming down the highway at 75mph" (never been on the Autobahn, have you?) is a lot easier to automate than driving around a city block. Similarly the easier part of a plane's autopilot is the part that handles cruising at 500mph at 30,000 feet. The numbers are impressive, but the control is comparatively easy.
On a highway there are no traffic lights or stop signs, and there are nicely marked lanes and shoulders. Just stay between the lines at a constant speed and hit the brakes if something appears in front. Compare that to trying to figure out if some guy who's not watching is going to step off the curb and into your way, or if the car pulling out of a parking spot is going to wait for you to pass.
What's that, Google's hype is just, well, hype? Say it ain't so.
Numerous car manufacturers have been working on self-driving cars for many years. In 2014 Mercedes will actually have a car with some very limited self-driving capabilities (sort of cruise control on steroids - you can use it on the highway when you stay in your lane). As limited as it is, that's a lot more real world application than you're likely to see out of Google anytime soon. Contrary to the beliefs of some Silicon Valley and Google hype artists, not everyone outside of those domains is an uncreative idiot. Even some car companies have good creative ideas. They're also constrained by being in the business of selling cars instead of hype.
Google has a habit of playing with a lot of cool science project type stuff. They have the cash to do that. Maybe someday something will come out of one of them, if they have the tenacity not to ditch it for the next shiny new toy to hype. However, there's no particular reason to think they'll be the innovative force behind self-driving cars.
It's not like people who read tech blogs are incapable of going to general news sites when they want general news, is it? Do technical people have some limit on how well they can navigate the net?
No, and presumably neither do you. So you're free to go to the political site if wish, and navigate away from a tech site that's trying to cover "politics" (actually breaking events). What's your problem with that? If anything the people reading the tech sites for breaking events will reduce the load on the political server sites that you want to visit.
Tech blog writers have no special credentials for politics or entertainment news, so why should they pretend they are the best source of information about either?
"Political and entertainment" sites (e.g. mainstream news outlets) cover tech news, even though they often clearly lack the ability to do so accurately. Often the authors don't understand the most elementary points, like the difference between power and energy. You'd flunk a high school science class that way. Makes me wonder what, if any, special expertise they have in covering politics.
But then Saturn V had a purpose to beat the Reds to the moon, performance at any cost. It may be very expensive but damned the costs if the Soviets beat us to the moon, plant the hammer and sickle flag that will enslave the world in communism.
Sure that was a lot of the political motivation for the space race, but it was a lot better than devising new and improved ways to turn the planet into a pile of radioactive rubble.
being stranded somewhere, tends to bring out the creative resources a lot more than being in a glass dome, where all you have to do is break the glass and your safe
Mars is not somewhere you can say "no timber, maybe we can make shelter out of sod" or "some of these berries must be edible - you try them first". Almost anywhere on Earth is a paradise for human habitation compared to Mars. You can literally catch your breath for a few minutes while thinking of what to do - try that on Mars!
Moreover, most of the basic techniques for surviving in various Earth environments were developed in prehistory. The European explorers generally copied what the natives were doing or paid the price. Eventually they'd modify things by bringing over the crops, livestock and building techniques they were used to, but that's about it.
If you were exiled to what's now Las Vegas 500 years ago, and had to somehow live off the land without external supplies or support, how many days do you think you'd have survived under the best and most optimistic possible circumstances?
Personally I'd give up hope if I couldn't get a cold drink in an air conditioned hotel. Hardier souls though have lived there for 10,000 years. It was a popular spot precisely because of the fresh water supplies. Unless you're a cold weather lover like me, it's very much a spot suitable for human habitation.
Congrats, you know how a dictionary works. Want to be insightful? Offer a solution to the problem.
Whatever the solution, it's certainly not dismissing the numerous complaints as needlessly redundant or trite. I'll be a lot more worried if Americans stop constantly complaining about the Constitution being shredded.
Its about building sustaining environments that don't require resupply from the earths biosphere... It is entirely possible that in 50-100 years this planet won't support human life any where near the scale it currently does. If we manage to survive climate change without huge population loss, then there are dozens of other catastrophic things that may do us in.
If that's the object, then it would make more sense to build "escape shelters" in places with a benign environment, like deep abandoned mine shafts (ala Dr. Strangelove) or the South Pole (ala The Thing). Both are far more benign than space, the moon or Mars. Mild temperatures, plenty of oxygen and water and easy supply routes until they become self-sustaining. With the right construction, and a little diversity to hedge our bets, they ought to survive global climate change, an eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, a meteorite impact of the scale that wiped out the dinosaurs, plague, nuclear war, you name it. Until the sun grows so much that it boils off the seas in a half-billion years or so, it should be good.
Nerds have weak social skills and just can't relate to things which have a social value.
What a ridiculous stereotype. We have no trouble at all socially, as long as we can socialize via a keyboard.
I asked my dad if he remembered the early days of space flight and landing the man on the moon
As a kid, I remember seeing the first man walk on the moon on TV and seeing the launch of Apollo 17 in person (only night launch of a Saturn V). Great stuff, but how much are people willing to pay for the voyeuristic human experience of having a few people bounce around on Mars? Apollo was cheap compared to what will be, as the moon is practically next door. As it is the majority of the American people never supported the cost of the moon program.
ISO9000 is simply a certification that says that you have a process defined and that you actually follow it. It doesn't say anything about whether the process is good, bad, efficient, inefficient, redundant, etc.
Absolutely right, and hence it's completely worthless. The ultimate fetishization, "we don't care what you have as long as it's documented". I wanted to document how to use a Ouija board to make engineering decisions.
Back when "ISO9000 Certified" was the hot thing, loads of time and money went into getting that certification. Lots of people never stopped to ask what it meant. Everyone I knew in engineering knew it meant squat. Oh well, at least it provided a living for a while for some ISO9000 consultants.
Ditto for hardware. I've used documentation over 10 years old. Usually the biggest problem is obsolete parts. In fact when I have used stuff that old, it's usually because somebody wants a tweak to some legacy design they're cranking out that still serves their purposes (hence not worth redesigning), and the tweak means working around some part that's no longer available. I've dropped in FPGA's or DSP's to replace some old chip that's no longer made.
No offense to the people of South Florida, but between this, pythons, gators, numerous poison snakes, etc., I'm glad I live up north. The most dangerous things we have up here are bears, you've generally got to go into the woods to find them, and somehow I'd rather be attacked by a fellow mammal. Hold it, you've got them too, right?
50 foot pythons in the sewers of New York might take care of the rat problem
Might take care of congestion on the subway lines as well...
You don't know New Yorkers very well, do you? The pythons would have to fight for a spot on a rush hour subway car, and I'm not sure the odds favor the snake.
"everyone west of the Mississippi would probably be speaking Japanese now"
Doubt it.
Don't be so skeptical. Ever work for a defense contractor? If the same approach was used in the 40's as today, the Arsenal of Democracy would still have been holding meetings while the invasion was underway.
What they did back then, and what they call "process" today, are two different things. Talk to some old timers. Here on Long Island I've met guys who worked on the LEM (built about five miles from where I grew up). Every engineer hates documentation, but good engineers appreciate that a certain level of formal specs and documentation (of designs, test procedures and test results) are necessary. There's an easy way to determine whether documentation serves a purpose or is just horse shit. Put yourself in the place of some poor slob picking up the documentation 5 or 10 (or even 50) years from now, and decide whether reading what you're writing would be useful to them. If it would be, it's useful. If you'd skip over it as something that was judged by how much it weighed, it's garbage.
I'm mostly a hardware guy. I've worked in places where the documentation was awful and caused many problems. I've also worked in places where there was endless procedure and process, and while the documentatin weighed enough to satisfy project managers and process fetishists, it was often wrong. My favorite was when I worked for a small East Coast subsidiary of a large West Coast (LA area) company. There was a heavy mil influence at the parent, and every drawing had more stamps, signatures and dates than the Declaration of Independence. It was also often wrong. Sometimes I'd hit a schematic I couldn't figure out, and feeling like an idiot, call the designer, only to have him tell me he knew it was wrong! Meanwhile our garage shop (50 people tops) had dead nuts accurate documentation. In some cases I had things like cable drawings on a piece of scratch paper, but they were accurate, had the proper revision and approval info, and were properly logged into documentation control. Ask for the complete set of drawings for one of our satcom terminals, and you'd get a copy of it. The right rev and completely accurate.
Documentation and procedures (oops, I mean process) has gone from something that's a means to an end, to a fetish that justifies the existence of buzzword spouters. ISO9000 anyone?
Another example where "forget those fragile humans" makes sense, and has been used without many tears shed, is extremely deep ocean research. If you wanna look a few miles under the sea, forget bathyscaphes and ultra-deep submersibles, and just send a "fish". I don't think anyone considers doing otherwise these days, even though men once visited the bottom of the Marianas trench.
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Idiot, the squirrel is part of the drive train.
Canadian prairies? In that degenerate case (computationally speaking - no offense to our northern neighbors) I think you already have the technology. Just point the car straight, hit the cruise control, and set an alarm clock for a few minutes before you get to your destination. It's worked for me when I've driven on the American prairies.
maximum speed is 25, and the risk of serious injury is minimal if I get in a collision
Warn me beforehand - I don't want to be a pedestrian in that city.
Yeah, the active parking assist, which was on the Lincoln driven by the article's author. A quick search though suggests that the highway stuff on the Ford is also production. Unfortunately I don't have the time right now to be sure. Ok, score one (three?) for the bottom-up self-driving people.
The fully automatic driving systems have real situational awareness - they're constantly watching in all directions with lidar, radar, and cameras.
They have the sensory information needed for situational awareness, which can be a long way from having situational awareness.
I RTFA, and I think that's impressive. What struck me about Mercedes is they're actually going to be selling cars with those features in less than 6 months. I don't think the Ford features are going to be sold soon, though the article wasn't clear. The automated parallel parking has been around for a while, and in all fairness should count as a limited form of self-driving car.
It reinforces my point about Google. While they're hyping completely self-driving demos, various car makers have been doing the hard work of refining things they can really sell. Google reminds me of the old top-down AI guys, who spent decades claiming that with another few million lines of LISP and a few more orders of magnitude of computing power (damn those hardware guys for holding us back), they could create a program that would pass the Turing test. After a while, people who got tired of being laughed at for saying they were in AI, took the bottom up approach. Forget sparkling conversation - let's see if we can create a robot that can run down the hall without running over your thesis adviser, and plug itself into the wall. Who's gotten further?
I think we'll probably see self-driving cars in congested, relatively low-speed environments like inner cities before they're screaming down the highway at 75mph.
On the contrary, "screaming down the highway at 75mph" (never been on the Autobahn, have you?) is a lot easier to automate than driving around a city block. Similarly the easier part of a plane's autopilot is the part that handles cruising at 500mph at 30,000 feet. The numbers are impressive, but the control is comparatively easy.
On a highway there are no traffic lights or stop signs, and there are nicely marked lanes and shoulders. Just stay between the lines at a constant speed and hit the brakes if something appears in front. Compare that to trying to figure out if some guy who's not watching is going to step off the curb and into your way, or if the car pulling out of a parking spot is going to wait for you to pass.
What's that, Google's hype is just, well, hype? Say it ain't so.
Numerous car manufacturers have been working on self-driving cars for many years. In 2014 Mercedes will actually have a car with some very limited self-driving capabilities (sort of cruise control on steroids - you can use it on the highway when you stay in your lane). As limited as it is, that's a lot more real world application than you're likely to see out of Google anytime soon. Contrary to the beliefs of some Silicon Valley and Google hype artists, not everyone outside of those domains is an uncreative idiot. Even some car companies have good creative ideas. They're also constrained by being in the business of selling cars instead of hype.
Google has a habit of playing with a lot of cool science project type stuff. They have the cash to do that. Maybe someday something will come out of one of them, if they have the tenacity not to ditch it for the next shiny new toy to hype. However, there's no particular reason to think they'll be the innovative force behind self-driving cars.
It's not like people who read tech blogs are incapable of going to general news sites when they want general news, is it? Do technical people have some limit on how well they can navigate the net?
No, and presumably neither do you. So you're free to go to the political site if wish, and navigate away from a tech site that's trying to cover "politics" (actually breaking events). What's your problem with that? If anything the people reading the tech sites for breaking events will reduce the load on the political server sites that you want to visit.
Tech blog writers have no special credentials for politics or entertainment news, so why should they pretend they are the best source of information about either?
"Political and entertainment" sites (e.g. mainstream news outlets) cover tech news, even though they often clearly lack the ability to do so accurately. Often the authors don't understand the most elementary points, like the difference between power and energy. You'd flunk a high school science class that way. Makes me wonder what, if any, special expertise they have in covering politics.
But then Saturn V had a purpose to beat the Reds to the moon, performance at any cost. It may be very expensive but damned the costs if the Soviets beat us to the moon, plant the hammer and sickle flag that will enslave the world in communism.
Sure that was a lot of the political motivation for the space race, but it was a lot better than devising new and improved ways to turn the planet into a pile of radioactive rubble.
being stranded somewhere, tends to bring out the creative resources a lot more than being in a glass dome, where all you have to do is break the glass and your safe
Mars is not somewhere you can say "no timber, maybe we can make shelter out of sod" or "some of these berries must be edible - you try them first". Almost anywhere on Earth is a paradise for human habitation compared to Mars. You can literally catch your breath for a few minutes while thinking of what to do - try that on Mars!
Moreover, most of the basic techniques for surviving in various Earth environments were developed in prehistory. The European explorers generally copied what the natives were doing or paid the price. Eventually they'd modify things by bringing over the crops, livestock and building techniques they were used to, but that's about it.
If you were exiled to what's now Las Vegas 500 years ago, and had to somehow live off the land without external supplies or support, how many days do you think you'd have survived under the best and most optimistic possible circumstances?
Personally I'd give up hope if I couldn't get a cold drink in an air conditioned hotel. Hardier souls though have lived there for 10,000 years. It was a popular spot precisely because of the fresh water supplies. Unless you're a cold weather lover like me, it's very much a spot suitable for human habitation.
Congrats, you know how a dictionary works. Want to be insightful? Offer a solution to the problem.
Whatever the solution, it's certainly not dismissing the numerous complaints as needlessly redundant or trite. I'll be a lot more worried if Americans stop constantly complaining about the Constitution being shredded.
Ok, it's been a bad idea to invade Russia ever since the Tartars (not that there was really a Russia then).
I thought the first rule of warfare is: "never get involved in a land war in Asia"
If Sun Tzu had written that, he would have put himself out of a job. That's a violation of his zero'th rule.
Its about building sustaining environments that don't require resupply from the earths biosphere ... It is entirely possible that in 50-100 years this planet won't support human life any where near the scale it currently does. If we manage to survive climate change without huge population loss, then there are dozens of other catastrophic things that may do us in.
If that's the object, then it would make more sense to build "escape shelters" in places with a benign environment, like deep abandoned mine shafts (ala Dr. Strangelove) or the South Pole (ala The Thing). Both are far more benign than space, the moon or Mars. Mild temperatures, plenty of oxygen and water and easy supply routes until they become self-sustaining. With the right construction, and a little diversity to hedge our bets, they ought to survive global climate change, an eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, a meteorite impact of the scale that wiped out the dinosaurs, plague, nuclear war, you name it. Until the sun grows so much that it boils off the seas in a half-billion years or so, it should be good.
Nerds have weak social skills and just can't relate to things which have a social value.
What a ridiculous stereotype. We have no trouble at all socially, as long as we can socialize via a keyboard.
I asked my dad if he remembered the early days of space flight and landing the man on the moon
As a kid, I remember seeing the first man walk on the moon on TV and seeing the launch of Apollo 17 in person (only night launch of a Saturn V). Great stuff, but how much are people willing to pay for the voyeuristic human experience of having a few people bounce around on Mars? Apollo was cheap compared to what will be, as the moon is practically next door. As it is the majority of the American people never supported the cost of the moon program.
ISO9000 is simply a certification that says that you have a process defined and that you actually follow it. It doesn't say anything about whether the process is good, bad, efficient, inefficient, redundant, etc.
Absolutely right, and hence it's completely worthless. The ultimate fetishization, "we don't care what you have as long as it's documented". I wanted to document how to use a Ouija board to make engineering decisions.
Back when "ISO9000 Certified" was the hot thing, loads of time and money went into getting that certification. Lots of people never stopped to ask what it meant. Everyone I knew in engineering knew it meant squat. Oh well, at least it provided a living for a while for some ISO9000 consultants.
Ditto for hardware. I've used documentation over 10 years old. Usually the biggest problem is obsolete parts. In fact when I have used stuff that old, it's usually because somebody wants a tweak to some legacy design they're cranking out that still serves their purposes (hence not worth redesigning), and the tweak means working around some part that's no longer available. I've dropped in FPGA's or DSP's to replace some old chip that's no longer made.
No offense to the people of South Florida, but between this, pythons, gators, numerous poison snakes, etc., I'm glad I live up north. The most dangerous things we have up here are bears, you've generally got to go into the woods to find them, and somehow I'd rather be attacked by a fellow mammal. Hold it, you've got them too, right?
Russian winters eat everybody, Germans, French even Swedes. About the only ones able to hack it are Finns and the Russians themselves.
Hence the first rule of warfare: never invade Russia (The Art of Warfare, Sun Tzu, revised edition).
50 foot pythons in the sewers of New York might take care of the rat problem
Might take care of congestion on the subway lines as well...
You don't know New Yorkers very well, do you? The pythons would have to fight for a spot on a rush hour subway car, and I'm not sure the odds favor the snake.
"everyone west of the Mississippi would probably be speaking Japanese now"
Doubt it.
Don't be so skeptical. Ever work for a defense contractor? If the same approach was used in the 40's as today, the Arsenal of Democracy would still have been holding meetings while the invasion was underway.
What they did back then, and what they call "process" today, are two different things. Talk to some old timers. Here on Long Island I've met guys who worked on the LEM (built about five miles from where I grew up). Every engineer hates documentation, but good engineers appreciate that a certain level of formal specs and documentation (of designs, test procedures and test results) are necessary. There's an easy way to determine whether documentation serves a purpose or is just horse shit. Put yourself in the place of some poor slob picking up the documentation 5 or 10 (or even 50) years from now, and decide whether reading what you're writing would be useful to them. If it would be, it's useful. If you'd skip over it as something that was judged by how much it weighed, it's garbage.
I'm mostly a hardware guy. I've worked in places where the documentation was awful and caused many problems. I've also worked in places where there was endless procedure and process, and while the documentatin weighed enough to satisfy project managers and process fetishists, it was often wrong. My favorite was when I worked for a small East Coast subsidiary of a large West Coast (LA area) company. There was a heavy mil influence at the parent, and every drawing had more stamps, signatures and dates than the Declaration of Independence. It was also often wrong. Sometimes I'd hit a schematic I couldn't figure out, and feeling like an idiot, call the designer, only to have him tell me he knew it was wrong! Meanwhile our garage shop (50 people tops) had dead nuts accurate documentation. In some cases I had things like cable drawings on a piece of scratch paper, but they were accurate, had the proper revision and approval info, and were properly logged into documentation control. Ask for the complete set of drawings for one of our satcom terminals, and you'd get a copy of it. The right rev and completely accurate. Documentation and procedures (oops, I mean process) has gone from something that's a means to an end, to a fetish that justifies the existence of buzzword spouters. ISO9000 anyone?
Another example where "forget those fragile humans" makes sense, and has been used without many tears shed, is extremely deep ocean research. If you wanna look a few miles under the sea, forget bathyscaphes and ultra-deep submersibles, and just send a "fish". I don't think anyone considers doing otherwise these days, even though men once visited the bottom of the Marianas trench.