Yes, but, as others have pointed out: If the power rails supplying the thing are fluctuating and/or there are temperature extremes and/or there is radiation of one flavor or another sleeting through the thing, is it going to keep running reliably, or is it going to latch up on you, or reset, or maybe execute an instruction incorrectly, sending it off in a totally unexpected direction? If the ECC in your car screws up and the engine quits, you pull over to the side of the road and call a tow truck. If you're in a spacecraft, and on launch or re-entry when it screws up on you, you are probably going to be dead.
Truth be told: I work at a *ahem!* major microprocessor manufacturer, and even the cutting-edge SoC's we're working on right now, that are not even close to being at a stepping ready to be released into the market, still have an embedded 8051 in them. Being myself old enough to have had a CDP1802-based computer, built entirely by hand on perfboard when I was back in high school, I just have to laugh at anyone who actually believes that you have to have multi-core, multi-gigahertz-clocked processors with gigabytes of memory for any given application. I laugh even harder at kids who think you have to have at least a microcontroller, if not a Raspberry Pi board, to make an LED blink on and off; they think I'm trolling them when I tell them that two bipolar transistors and a few passive components will do the same job.
There's a good reason to keep a grid connection even if most of the year you're drawing nothing from it.
..which is why I said in my comment:
Only throw the switch on the grid connection when necessary
All this amounts to just more growing pains. The energy industry is reacting much like the music industry has when confronted by the reality of digital music: Try to get it declared illegal, and sue the crap out of everyone involved with it. Problem is they're trying to hold back floodwaters with a broom, and I think they know it. Alternative energy is here to stay, and the sooner they embrace that, the better for them and everyone else. I can't even imagine how many of them would slit their wrists if cheap, clean, safe fusion power became a reality.
'Fuck the police'.
Install solar, including storage, on your house. Get grid electric service to satisfy their 'requirements'. Connect a single light bulb to it, run the house off your own setup 99% of the time. Only throw the switch on the grid connection when necessary.
I just wanted to take this opportunity to express how much I've cringed this week every single time an NPR newsreader mispronounced 'Orion' -- except Jack Speer, who actually pronounced it correctly.
What if I don't? Is it going to be forced on me? I think not. What about poor people?
There will always be legal currency issued by your country, it will never be done away with completely, and I'll be DAMNED if I'm going to have every single financial transaction I make, no matter how small, tracked by someone.
It seems that the smarter our devices get, the dumber we get.
You're not the only one who sees that. They're making people dumber and dumber because they aren't required to actually learn to do anything anymore, there's always a machine to do it for them. They don't even have to remember anything, because there's always the Internet and Google to look it up on. Many people will say 'what's the problem with that?' because they forget: These things can be taken away in a heartbeat, then you're left knowing nothing, and being able to do nothing yourself. Couple that with the fact that people are getting physically lazier and lazier, fatter and fatter, more and more diseased, and you have an entire population that is completely helpless. Conspiracy? Don't know if I want to go there or not, but regardless it's not a good trend at all.
Yes, I did just say that. Got a problem with it? Tough shit. We're living in a world where there are assholes out there right now who are cutting off people's heads, ostensibly because of their 'religious war', throwing acid in the faces of little schoolgirls, because they have the gall to actually want to learn to read, write, do math, and learn history, and exterminate entire populations, just because they don't believe in some 'god' the same exact way that they do, and in general be violent pieces of shit, all in the name of some so-called 'god'. Now, here in the United States, a country that is supposedly a top-tier first-world nation, a country that peoples from all over the Earth go out of their way to come to to get an education, we're intentionally vandalizing textbooks because something in it 'offends someones religion'. Note also that we're living in a Nation where a certain state government wanted to 'officially' make Pi equal to 3 instead of 3.1415.. because the actual value was too complicated for them. I'm sorry, but it's official: The human race is getting stupider, not smarter; we apparently are descending back into superstition, ignorance, and barbarism, and I am at a loss to explain why this is happening or what to do about it. I guess I can just hope that it doesn't all go so completely to hell during what's left of my lifetime that all of our civilization collapses under it's own deadweight.
..and this is what I've been saying, and will KEEP saying. No lack of full manual controls. No lack of an unimpeachable manual override of automated control. Preferably, no wireless way to access the vehicles' systems at all. All operators of 'autonomous' cars still required to be trained and certified for full manual control of the vehicle.
I was chomping at the bit for all three Lord of the Rings movies, and for every single Harry Potter movie, and I certainly enjoyed the original Star Wars trilogy as a kid.. but not so much the 'prequels', and my subject line pretty much sums up my level of enthusiasm for this. It just seems like so much piling-on the Star Wars gravy train. Also I'm still pissed at J.J. Abrahms for his piss-poor attempt at making Star Trek movies, and over time have become a little disgruntled over how Lost ended, although I rather liked Fringe. I think the man should stick to television, and I'll wait to see what other people say about this new Star Wars before I bother myself to go see it. Chances are about 50/50 that I'll end up waiting for it to be rentable on-demand and watch it at home instead of going to a theatre.
This is what we will be faced with in a world with 'autonomous' cars, but even worse if they have no manual controls and people don't know how to drive a car: Some script kiddie (or actual criminal/criminal organization) will take control of your vehicle with you in it, and you will have no way to take control back. So-called 'autonomous' vehicles must have full manual controls with an unimpeachable manual override and there must be a trained, certified, licensed driver at those controls at all times!
Yeah, great, just what the world needs: The MPAA lawyers flying around in helicopters, noting the address of everyone with solar panels on their house, sueing them for copyright violations. Nice job, scientists!
Don't forget to ban anything that could be used as a weapon. Since that pretty much covers everything in the world, including rocks lying around on the ground, people's limbs, their teeth, and even their own body mass (could drop yourself from a height intentionally onto someone and hurt them!), we'd better ban the entire human race, immediately. Line up for the disintegrator chambers, people, it's Closing Time..
David Cameron is an asshole. He'd completely ruin the internet for everyone, permanently, and it wouldn't do Jack Shit to solve the 'problem' he's so concerned about, the terrorists and criminals would just shift to different methods to communicate with each other.
Yeah? Take off your rose-colored glasses. I keep saying this over and over and over again and there's always some guy like you who doesn't see what's right in front of them: You ride around in an 'autonomous' car with no manual controls, in a world where everything and anything can be hacked remotely? You're asking to get sent to who-knows-where, maybe to be kidnapped, maybe to be robbed, maybe to be run into a stationary object and killed. At the very least don't you understand such vehicles will by default have remote control capability by law enforcement? Do you really want some cop to have the ability to automatically pull you over regardless of the circumstances? And do you not understand that this capability will be hacked by criminals to hijack your car? Do you not see why I would never want anything to do with such vehicles? Don't even bother responding with 'oh that won't happen' because it will. The difference between me and a Luddite is a Luddite rejects ALL technology, whereas I only reject stupid or dangerous technology, or 'technology' that restricts my basic human rights and freedoms. Then there's people like you who may well have never had anything bad happen to them their entire lives, so you can't even conceive of what could go wrong (or be made to go wrong, or have a wrong done to you). Then there's people like me, who apparently have a duty to educate people who can't see what bad things could happen. You're welcome.
You can keep your 'future' where people are just herd animals being shuttled around from place to place, not actually being in control of where they're going and when. I can think of nothing worse than not being able to transport myself from place to place as my will and whim seems fit. No, I am not trying to be funny here, not in the least. I have said it before, I will keep saying it, and I am certain I am not anything like alone in this sentiment: I will not own or even ride in an 'autonomous automobile', not unless it's just a feature that can be turned off, and there are standard manual controls to operate the vehicle with. I am no Luddite, I've worked in technology since I was 12 years old, I fully and completely understand everything that's being developed in the field -- and therefore I know enough to not trust it with my life, even if I wished to relinquish my personal freedom to something that can be hacked or otherwise controlled remotely at the whim of police or governments. Not on my watch, and not during my natural life, thank you very much. I sure as hell don't want to live in a world where your only choice amounts to 'public transportation', either; I have used public transportation in situations where it was apporpriate, and may have to again over the course of my life, but given a choice I'd rather not. Aside from the 'personal freedom' aspect, I find myself living in a world where people are increasingly becoming less knowledgeable, less skilled, and less physically fit, instead relying on 'convenience technologies' and the Internet, instead of actually moving their bodies, learning physical skills, and acquiring actual knowledge. Remember the movie "WALL-E"? Rememeber the fat, weak, uneducated people living in that ship, never even standing on their own two feet their entire lives? Did you think that imagery was just meant to be funny or something? It's a cautionary tale: That's what the Human race is headed for, if we don't take steps to avoid it, starting right now. How many of you saw the news story from this week about how 2.1 BILLION people in the world are obese, and the cost of that in trillions of dollars? How can you take this as anything other than a sign that things are going very, very wrong with the human race in general? How about other various recent news I've been seeing where programs to outright give schoolchildren computers or tablets have not improved their test scores, or even made them worse? Think about it: We're teaching them to rely on Google instead of actually learning anything for themselves; why bother retaining knowledge when you can just go look it up on the Internet? How many of you, if you lost your cellphone, can remember the phone numbers of your friends and family? I'm betting not many of you. This is the phenomenon I'm talking about: Why bother learning anything yourself when you can just look it up on the Internet? Similarly, why bother learning to drive a car when it can just drive itself? Why bother learning to drive a car with a manual transmission when there's automatic transmission? Why bother going to the gym, or even bothering yourself to go for a brisk walk for an hour a day, when you have vehicles, or for that matter why bother even getting off your couch to leave your home at all when you can just click a button and have everything delivered to your door? Why bother learning how to cook decently nutritious foods for yourself when you can just have food delivered, or throw something in the microwave, or (if you're adventurous enough, in this dystopian future) go through the drive-thru and get whatever food-substitute they're selling? Meanwhile on the other side of the equation there are violent groups out there in the world that are not only shunning so-called 'progress' but that want to turn back the clock by anywhere from 50 to 1000 years. If the human race, especially in 1st-world countries keeps going in the direction I see them going, the assholes of the world who go around cutting people's heads off and posting it on YouTube are going to just waltz
I have Adblock and Flashblock installed so I don't see ANY ads, I just came up with probably the most annoying type of ad I could conceive of to make a point. Next time I'll make up an 'anonymous cowardice' ad to use as an example instead, since now that I think about it that would be even more annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but, as others have pointed out: If the power rails supplying the thing are fluctuating and/or there are temperature extremes and/or there is radiation of one flavor or another sleeting through the thing, is it going to keep running reliably, or is it going to latch up on you, or reset, or maybe execute an instruction incorrectly, sending it off in a totally unexpected direction? If the ECC in your car screws up and the engine quits, you pull over to the side of the road and call a tow truck. If you're in a spacecraft, and on launch or re-entry when it screws up on you, you are probably going to be dead.
Truth be told: I work at a *ahem!* major microprocessor manufacturer, and even the cutting-edge SoC's we're working on right now, that are not even close to being at a stepping ready to be released into the market, still have an embedded 8051 in them. Being myself old enough to have had a CDP1802-based computer, built entirely by hand on perfboard when I was back in high school, I just have to laugh at anyone who actually believes that you have to have multi-core, multi-gigahertz-clocked processors with gigabytes of memory for any given application. I laugh even harder at kids who think you have to have at least a microcontroller, if not a Raspberry Pi board, to make an LED blink on and off; they think I'm trolling them when I tell them that two bipolar transistors and a few passive components will do the same job.
There's a good reason to keep a grid connection even if most of the year you're drawing nothing from it.
..which is why I said in my comment:
Only throw the switch on the grid connection when necessary
All this amounts to just more growing pains. The energy industry is reacting much like the music industry has when confronted by the reality of digital music: Try to get it declared illegal, and sue the crap out of everyone involved with it. Problem is they're trying to hold back floodwaters with a broom, and I think they know it. Alternative energy is here to stay, and the sooner they embrace that, the better for them and everyone else. I can't even imagine how many of them would slit their wrists if cheap, clean, safe fusion power became a reality.
'Fuck the police'.
Install solar, including storage, on your house. Get grid electric service to satisfy their 'requirements'. Connect a single light bulb to it, run the house off your own setup 99% of the time. Only throw the switch on the grid connection when necessary.
Do everyone a favor and go back to /b/ where you belong.
We don't have enough sourpuss punkasses like you on the Intarweb. Please kill yourself.
I just wanted to take this opportunity to express how much I've cringed this week every single time an NPR newsreader mispronounced 'Orion' -- except Jack Speer, who actually pronounced it correctly.
Oh, you mean like targeted ad injection and other MITM type garbage? That's fine, you can keep those anyway.
What if I don't? Is it going to be forced on me? I think not. What about poor people?
There will always be legal currency issued by your country, it will never be done away with completely, and I'll be DAMNED if I'm going to have every single financial transaction I make, no matter how small, tracked by someone.
If you raise the limit to 85, people will be driving 100. They'd be better off leaving it at 70 and not pulling anyone over until they were going 90.
It seems that the smarter our devices get, the dumber we get.
You're not the only one who sees that. They're making people dumber and dumber because they aren't required to actually learn to do anything anymore, there's always a machine to do it for them. They don't even have to remember anything, because there's always the Internet and Google to look it up on. Many people will say 'what's the problem with that?' because they forget: These things can be taken away in a heartbeat, then you're left knowing nothing, and being able to do nothing yourself. Couple that with the fact that people are getting physically lazier and lazier, fatter and fatter, more and more diseased, and you have an entire population that is completely helpless. Conspiracy? Don't know if I want to go there or not, but regardless it's not a good trend at all.
I seem to be seeing a trend of technology making people dumber, lazier, and more unskilled than ever before, and it really disturbs me.
Yes, I did just say that. Got a problem with it? Tough shit. We're living in a world where there are assholes out there right now who are cutting off people's heads, ostensibly because of their 'religious war', throwing acid in the faces of little schoolgirls, because they have the gall to actually want to learn to read, write, do math, and learn history, and exterminate entire populations, just because they don't believe in some 'god' the same exact way that they do, and in general be violent pieces of shit, all in the name of some so-called 'god'. Now, here in the United States, a country that is supposedly a top-tier first-world nation, a country that peoples from all over the Earth go out of their way to come to to get an education, we're intentionally vandalizing textbooks because something in it 'offends someones religion'. Note also that we're living in a Nation where a certain state government wanted to 'officially' make Pi equal to 3 instead of 3.1415.. because the actual value was too complicated for them. I'm sorry, but it's official: The human race is getting stupider, not smarter; we apparently are descending back into superstition, ignorance, and barbarism, and I am at a loss to explain why this is happening or what to do about it. I guess I can just hope that it doesn't all go so completely to hell during what's left of my lifetime that all of our civilization collapses under it's own deadweight.
..and this is what I've been saying, and will KEEP saying.
No lack of full manual controls.
No lack of an unimpeachable manual override of automated control.
Preferably, no wireless way to access the vehicles' systems at all.
All operators of 'autonomous' cars still required to be trained and certified for full manual control of the vehicle.
Anything else would be utter madness.
I was chomping at the bit for all three Lord of the Rings movies, and for every single Harry Potter movie, and I certainly enjoyed the original Star Wars trilogy as a kid.. but not so much the 'prequels', and my subject line pretty much sums up my level of enthusiasm for this. It just seems like so much piling-on the Star Wars gravy train. Also I'm still pissed at J.J. Abrahms for his piss-poor attempt at making Star Trek movies, and over time have become a little disgruntled over how Lost ended, although I rather liked Fringe. I think the man should stick to television, and I'll wait to see what other people say about this new Star Wars before I bother myself to go see it. Chances are about 50/50 that I'll end up waiting for it to be rentable on-demand and watch it at home instead of going to a theatre.
Sex is 6.
You're wrong, though: I had sex with them more than six times! *drum hit*
:-)
Thanks for being my 'straight man', friend!
This is what we will be faced with in a world with 'autonomous' cars, but even worse if they have no manual controls and people don't know how to drive a car: Some script kiddie (or actual criminal/criminal organization) will take control of your vehicle with you in it, and you will have no way to take control back. So-called 'autonomous' vehicles must have full manual controls with an unimpeachable manual override and there must be a trained, certified, licensed driver at those controls at all times!
Yeah, great, just what the world needs: The MPAA lawyers flying around in helicopters, noting the address of everyone with solar panels on their house, sueing them for copyright violations. Nice job, scientists!
You learn something new every day! I always thought 'sextuplets' were what you called nymphomaniac twin sisters!
install Windows
Oh, you use Linux exclusively, that explains so much.
Don't forget to ban anything that could be used as a weapon. Since that pretty much covers everything in the world, including rocks lying around on the ground, people's limbs, their teeth, and even their own body mass (could drop yourself from a height intentionally onto someone and hurt them!), we'd better ban the entire human race, immediately. Line up for the disintegrator chambers, people, it's Closing Time..
David Cameron is an asshole. He'd completely ruin the internet for everyone, permanently, and it wouldn't do Jack Shit to solve the 'problem' he's so concerned about, the terrorists and criminals would just shift to different methods to communicate with each other.
Yeah? Take off your rose-colored glasses. I keep saying this over and over and over again and there's always some guy like you who doesn't see what's right in front of them: You ride around in an 'autonomous' car with no manual controls, in a world where everything and anything can be hacked remotely? You're asking to get sent to who-knows-where, maybe to be kidnapped, maybe to be robbed, maybe to be run into a stationary object and killed. At the very least don't you understand such vehicles will by default have remote control capability by law enforcement? Do you really want some cop to have the ability to automatically pull you over regardless of the circumstances? And do you not understand that this capability will be hacked by criminals to hijack your car? Do you not see why I would never want anything to do with such vehicles? Don't even bother responding with 'oh that won't happen' because it will. The difference between me and a Luddite is a Luddite rejects ALL technology, whereas I only reject stupid or dangerous technology, or 'technology' that restricts my basic human rights and freedoms. Then there's people like you who may well have never had anything bad happen to them their entire lives, so you can't even conceive of what could go wrong (or be made to go wrong, or have a wrong done to you). Then there's people like me, who apparently have a duty to educate people who can't see what bad things could happen. You're welcome.
If it bothers you so gods-be-damned much then copy and paste it into Notepad and add them yourself, smartass.
You can keep your 'future' where people are just herd animals being shuttled around from place to place, not actually being in control of where they're going and when. I can think of nothing worse than not being able to transport myself from place to place as my will and whim seems fit. No, I am not trying to be funny here, not in the least. I have said it before, I will keep saying it, and I am certain I am not anything like alone in this sentiment: I will not own or even ride in an 'autonomous automobile', not unless it's just a feature that can be turned off, and there are standard manual controls to operate the vehicle with. I am no Luddite, I've worked in technology since I was 12 years old, I fully and completely understand everything that's being developed in the field -- and therefore I know enough to not trust it with my life, even if I wished to relinquish my personal freedom to something that can be hacked or otherwise controlled remotely at the whim of police or governments. Not on my watch, and not during my natural life, thank you very much. I sure as hell don't want to live in a world where your only choice amounts to 'public transportation', either; I have used public transportation in situations where it was apporpriate, and may have to again over the course of my life, but given a choice I'd rather not. Aside from the 'personal freedom' aspect, I find myself living in a world where people are increasingly becoming less knowledgeable, less skilled, and less physically fit, instead relying on 'convenience technologies' and the Internet, instead of actually moving their bodies, learning physical skills, and acquiring actual knowledge. Remember the movie "WALL-E"? Rememeber the fat, weak, uneducated people living in that ship, never even standing on their own two feet their entire lives? Did you think that imagery was just meant to be funny or something? It's a cautionary tale: That's what the Human race is headed for, if we don't take steps to avoid it, starting right now. How many of you saw the news story from this week about how 2.1 BILLION people in the world are obese, and the cost of that in trillions of dollars? How can you take this as anything other than a sign that things are going very, very wrong with the human race in general? How about other various recent news I've been seeing where programs to outright give schoolchildren computers or tablets have not improved their test scores, or even made them worse? Think about it: We're teaching them to rely on Google instead of actually learning anything for themselves; why bother retaining knowledge when you can just go look it up on the Internet? How many of you, if you lost your cellphone, can remember the phone numbers of your friends and family? I'm betting not many of you. This is the phenomenon I'm talking about: Why bother learning anything yourself when you can just look it up on the Internet? Similarly, why bother learning to drive a car when it can just drive itself? Why bother learning to drive a car with a manual transmission when there's automatic transmission? Why bother going to the gym, or even bothering yourself to go for a brisk walk for an hour a day, when you have vehicles, or for that matter why bother even getting off your couch to leave your home at all when you can just click a button and have everything delivered to your door? Why bother learning how to cook decently nutritious foods for yourself when you can just have food delivered, or throw something in the microwave, or (if you're adventurous enough, in this dystopian future) go through the drive-thru and get whatever food-substitute they're selling? Meanwhile on the other side of the equation there are violent groups out there in the world that are not only shunning so-called 'progress' but that want to turn back the clock by anywhere from 50 to 1000 years. If the human race, especially in 1st-world countries keeps going in the direction I see them going, the assholes of the world who go around cutting people's heads off and posting it on YouTube are going to just waltz
I have Adblock and Flashblock installed so I don't see ANY ads, I just came up with probably the most annoying type of ad I could conceive of to make a point. Next time I'll make up an 'anonymous cowardice' ad to use as an example instead, since now that I think about it that would be even more annoying.