If Uber wasn't using lidar sensors yeah... that's entirely on Uber.
If the software failed catastrophically, can't they figure out why it did?
It's a computer... they should be able to run simulations to figure out what went wrong, and then be able to to alter the software to account for the possibility so that at least there can be some assurance that it won't happen again.
No, the question you answered was more along the lines of "how could this have happened?", a far more general question and has nothing to do with why the software in the car did not work in the expected manner.
That you'd find it more straightforward to suggest that I am being obtuse or asking an idiotic question and try to make yourself sound superior than it is to ignore a question that you clearly don't know the real answer to is quite beyond me.
if Oracle wins this, the software development industry as we know it will come crashing down[/quote]
So what good does becoming king of the world do if you have to kill all the taxpayers in the process?
Your response has nothing to do with the question.... I asked why the car didn't see her. By all rights, it should have, so why didn't it? If they don't know yet, what are they doing to find out?
Was it a sensor malfunction? Did the software in the car fail to recognize her as something on the road? If not, what did it see her as? Can this situation be recreated in simulation to figure out what the car did wrong, and corrected in the future so that there can be some assurance it won't happen again if or when autonomous cars are allowed again?
This is not a person who suddenly jumped out onto the road here.... while she was jaywalking, she was also *WALKING*... I've seen an overhead view of the section of road where the incident occurred, and there's no significant occlusions there; ordinarily, vision seems that it would be pretty good there in daylight conditions. It's my understanding that self-driving cars use lidar sensors, and should even be able to detect a person in an absence of any visible light at all, so the fact that it was night should be immaterial. Reasonably, the car should have seen that she was on the sidewalk long before she stepped out into the road, and the very *instant* that she started to go off of the sidewalk should have been detected by the car, and the car should immediately begin to slow down.
Yet, by all reports I've heard, the car did not even see this pedestrian at all, and had not even tried to slow down until after the collision. Why? What the fuck happened?
The biggest problem I have with swallowing this is that when I was student. and living off of student loans, money was *FAR* too hard to come by to take a risk like this on it... if you happened to lose money because bitcoin went down, it could mean that you don't get to keep eating or have a place to live before the school term is over.
As for using "extra" money? That's just as much bullshit... my experience with student loans is that they afford you pretty close to exactly what you'd need, and sometimes not even that, forcing you to cut financial corners well below any normal standards of comfort. The term "starving student" is not a false stereotype... I've been there, as have many others that I know.
Holding you in jail doesn't give them the password though... so locking you up doesn't give them anything to go on other than that you didn't want to give out your password. What I think would be particularly interesting is to tie some sort of dead-man's switch to the password so that if you have to surrender the device, then you no longer have the ability to unlock it for them either. Can they still hold you in contempt for that?
I've known people who've spent 10 to 15 minutes dealing with the security checkpoints simply because they had their device set to fingerprint unlock, even though they didn't have anything in particular on the phone that security would have been interested in.
That's why, about 30 minutes or so before I'm going through a security checkpoint where my belongings may be searched, I will unlock my phone so that it does not require any kind of password to turn on and navigate the home screen and applications. When they've asked to see the phone, I've simply handed it to them, they turned it on, saw that they had access to everything, and immediately handed it back without even trying to find anything or asking me any questions.
It seems that simply having a device that is locked at all gives them enough reason to want to search it, while having a device that is not leaves them giving the device back right away with no questions asked.
This also has the advantage that I will not be put in the position of even being asked for my password at all. Even though I may not legally have to tell them my passwords, I think that not cooperating with them, or even creating the appearance that I don't want to cooperate with them has some non-zero potential of making my life a whole lot more complicated than it needs to be, so unlocking the device beforehand so that it requires no such passcode avoids the matter entirely.
Or, you know, I could be only human, and simply not have realized all these years where the option was. As it turns out, the only way to apparently set this feature on is to enable it when you specifically select the option to change the passcode on the device. As I rarely change my passcode, I had not noticed this facility until it was explicitly pointed out to me in a comment above.
But perish the notion that I am fallible, and that I wouldn't know something.... Clearly I have to be feigning ignorance, because it's so obvious that anyone would have realized it.
Although I'm sure that someone who is as perfect as yourself wouldn't understand that.
I have an iPhone6+, running iOS11 and I cannot find anything called "passcode options" anywhere on my phone. The only thing that is even close to that is "passcode settings" in the guided access settings under accessibility, and that is a 6-digit password as well.
Could you tell me where, exactly, this option is supposed to be, because even the search function on my phone isn't finding anything like what you describe?
... is to understand why, exactly, the car's sensors did not respond to the pedestrian as they should have.
Figure that out, program that into part of the car's repertoire of situations to handle, appropriately, and at the very least, you'll have made future cars that much safer.
If software was supposed to do X, and didn't do X, then the designers need to find out what is wrong with their assumptions about what the software is doing, and come to a resolution, so that software can behave as intended by its designers.
This is basic debugging, for fucks sake. Instead of throwing around a blame game, they should be fucking trying to find out what, exactly, went wrong in the first place. They should have the car sensor logs.... why didn't the car see her? If she came out of "nowhere", why was the place that she came from not visible to the car? If there's no way it could have been because of heavy occlusion or low visibility in general, then why was the car moving so fast it couldn't stop in the event of something unexpected suddenly moving into visibility?
People have been saying that about it for a while now.... how "soon" is "soon" supposed to be?
I think we're long past the point where we can take any prediction that facebook will end soon seriously, not because it won't but because any appearance of being right after having been apparently wrong for as long as we've been hearing this can be attributed to well within the parameters for random chance. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, after all.
They are making a cheaper, and inferior ipad to try and capture a piece of the market that isn't otherwise willing to spend the kind of money that an ipad goes for when an android tablet will do the trick just fine.
You don't need to call the AAA if you are low on gas, unless you don't even have enough to make it to a gas station (which in many cities is often not very far... I think the furthest I've ever lived from a gas station was about 2 miles). If you don't have enough electric charge in an EV to get to where you want to ultimately go, however.... you're in for a bit of a wait as you recharge, however.
And I'm not anti-electric at all.. I've presented what I think are the biggest objections to electric cars at the moment, and if those barriers can be overcome at some point, I don't see any remaining reason why they would not become mainstream. They all ultimately boil down to one thing:: inconvenience.
No, but one might need to charge it every 3rd or 4th day or so.... and if they were to forget to do so overnight when I need to, I'm not getting to work on time that morning at all.
With an ICE vehicle, at worst, one would need to make a pit stop for gasoline, which in large urban areas is not usually out of one's way at all owing to how common gas stations are in cities, and adding at most 5 minutes to a commute.
People get EV's right now because they think that the inconveniences of it* are offset by the benefits... and I don't deny the importance of those benefits, but the threshold of additional people that are willing to do that is eventually going to be reached, and soon, unless those inconveniences are addressed.
*eg: much more expensive initial purchase, offsetting the money saved between the cost of electricity and gasoline for many years, taking a long time to completely recharge compared to gasoline fill up, sparseness of rapid charging stations (which still take 5 or more times longer to recharge than it does to fill up a car), having to have recharging facilities at home where you park your car to be even *REMOTELY* practical, and others.
Or maybe you should bother to read what I wrote instead of throwing terms like 'strawman' around, and perhaps while you're at it, check a dictionary and look up the word, because nothing that I've said here would qualify as such. I have not taken anyone's arguments out of context, nor attacked my own interpretation of such an argument, so there's been no strawman here from my side.
I've never claimed any position beyond the one I began with which is that EV's need to be more convenient for people to own before they will actually become mainstream. If you believe otherwise that's great for you... but I have as much right to be skeptical of that as you do of my claims. If there's any winner I'd put money on for the future, it is on human laziness, and if something isn't going to appeal to that by being at least as convenient as what people are already used to, I'm not putting any bets on it taking off anytime soon until there is no other choice.
And I am not discouraging anyone from getting one or suggesting they are making any kind of error in judgement for wanting one, so I'm not sure where you think I'm coming from any kind of "anti-electric" point of view.
Besides, even the staunchest EV advocates will admit they are not practical for people who do not have access to charging facilities where they park their vehicle at home. The number of people in this position is not small.... more than a third of them in my city, and I'm one of them.
If short charges like that did not impact the battery life, it would be fine... but it does, so it's not. Do it too often, and you pay for that forgetfulness with the price of having to buy a new battery long before you would have otherwise.
If it can be determined that the car *should* have seen her, then what was going on that time that the car didn't see her?
It's a freakin' computer... you can go through its logs and track what it saw and what it didn't see, and figure out based on the logic in the code why it didn't respond to the pedestrian appropriately.
Figure that out, and then add it to repertoire of situations that the car knows about to at least make it safer for the future.
By usable level, I meant usable in any practical sense. If you frequently charge your car minimally like what you are suggesting, it will utterly destroy your battery capacity. Charging an electric vehicle to a usable level if you are wanting to still have prolonged use of it afterwards generally means getting it to at least 80% capacity.
If one lives in a relatively high-density populated area, there's a pretty good chance that they live within a mile of a gas station.
Ideally a person could just take public transit to work in such areas, but in my experience public transit rarely adequately services industrial park areas where a lot of people have to go to work, and where driving might take only 20 to 30 minutes, taking public transit can push that closer to 90 minutes, each way... in some cases as long as 2 hours.
Slashdot Mirror
If the software failed catastrophically, can't they figure out why it did?
It's a computer... they should be able to run simulations to figure out what went wrong, and then be able to to alter the software to account for the possibility so that at least there can be some assurance that it won't happen again.
No, the question you answered was more along the lines of "how could this have happened?", a far more general question and has nothing to do with why the software in the car did not work in the expected manner.
That you'd find it more straightforward to suggest that I am being obtuse or asking an idiotic question and try to make yourself sound superior than it is to ignore a question that you clearly don't know the real answer to is quite beyond me.
And of course there's no option on the website for people to point out factual inaccuracies such as this.
How to tell a reputable news source from an unreputable one.
Your response has nothing to do with the question.... I asked why the car didn't see her. By all rights, it should have, so why didn't it? If they don't know yet, what are they doing to find out?
Was it a sensor malfunction? Did the software in the car fail to recognize her as something on the road? If not, what did it see her as? Can this situation be recreated in simulation to figure out what the car did wrong, and corrected in the future so that there can be some assurance it won't happen again if or when autonomous cars are allowed again?
This is not a person who suddenly jumped out onto the road here.... while she was jaywalking, she was also *WALKING*... I've seen an overhead view of the section of road where the incident occurred, and there's no significant occlusions there; ordinarily, vision seems that it would be pretty good there in daylight conditions. It's my understanding that self-driving cars use lidar sensors, and should even be able to detect a person in an absence of any visible light at all, so the fact that it was night should be immaterial. Reasonably, the car should have seen that she was on the sidewalk long before she stepped out into the road, and the very *instant* that she started to go off of the sidewalk should have been detected by the car, and the car should immediately begin to slow down.
Yet, by all reports I've heard, the car did not even see this pedestrian at all, and had not even tried to slow down until after the collision. Why? What the fuck happened?
The biggest problem I have with swallowing this is that when I was student. and living off of student loans, money was *FAR* too hard to come by to take a risk like this on it... if you happened to lose money because bitcoin went down, it could mean that you don't get to keep eating or have a place to live before the school term is over.
As for using "extra" money? That's just as much bullshit... my experience with student loans is that they afford you pretty close to exactly what you'd need, and sometimes not even that, forcing you to cut financial corners well below any normal standards of comfort. The term "starving student" is not a false stereotype... I've been there, as have many others that I know.
But would you be obligated to explain that *before* they ask for the device or take it from you?
Holding you in jail doesn't give them the password though... so locking you up doesn't give them anything to go on other than that you didn't want to give out your password. What I think would be particularly interesting is to tie some sort of dead-man's switch to the password so that if you have to surrender the device, then you no longer have the ability to unlock it for them either. Can they still hold you in contempt for that?
I've known people who've spent 10 to 15 minutes dealing with the security checkpoints simply because they had their device set to fingerprint unlock, even though they didn't have anything in particular on the phone that security would have been interested in.
That's why, about 30 minutes or so before I'm going through a security checkpoint where my belongings may be searched, I will unlock my phone so that it does not require any kind of password to turn on and navigate the home screen and applications. When they've asked to see the phone, I've simply handed it to them, they turned it on, saw that they had access to everything, and immediately handed it back without even trying to find anything or asking me any questions.
It seems that simply having a device that is locked at all gives them enough reason to want to search it, while having a device that is not leaves them giving the device back right away with no questions asked.
This also has the advantage that I will not be put in the position of even being asked for my password at all. Even though I may not legally have to tell them my passwords, I think that not cooperating with them, or even creating the appearance that I don't want to cooperate with them has some non-zero potential of making my life a whole lot more complicated than it needs to be, so unlocking the device beforehand so that it requires no such passcode avoids the matter entirely.
Or, you know, I could be only human, and simply not have realized all these years where the option was. As it turns out, the only way to apparently set this feature on is to enable it when you specifically select the option to change the passcode on the device. As I rarely change my passcode, I had not noticed this facility until it was explicitly pointed out to me in a comment above.
But perish the notion that I am fallible, and that I wouldn't know something.... Clearly I have to be feigning ignorance, because it's so obvious that anyone would have realized it.
Although I'm sure that someone who is as perfect as yourself wouldn't understand that.
Thank you... never saw that before.
I have an iPhone6+, running iOS11 and I cannot find anything called "passcode options" anywhere on my phone. The only thing that is even close to that is "passcode settings" in the guided access settings under accessibility, and that is a 6-digit password as well.
Could you tell me where, exactly, this option is supposed to be, because even the search function on my phone isn't finding anything like what you describe?
What does it mean for a passcode to be particularly strong or weak when the passcode must be all digits and must be some fixed number of digits long?
Figure that out, program that into part of the car's repertoire of situations to handle, appropriately, and at the very least, you'll have made future cars that much safer.
If software was supposed to do X, and didn't do X, then the designers need to find out what is wrong with their assumptions about what the software is doing, and come to a resolution, so that software can behave as intended by its designers.
This is basic debugging, for fucks sake. Instead of throwing around a blame game, they should be fucking trying to find out what, exactly, went wrong in the first place. They should have the car sensor logs.... why didn't the car see her? If she came out of "nowhere", why was the place that she came from not visible to the car? If there's no way it could have been because of heavy occlusion or low visibility in general, then why was the car moving so fast it couldn't stop in the event of something unexpected suddenly moving into visibility?
People have been saying that about it for a while now.... how "soon" is "soon" supposed to be?
I think we're long past the point where we can take any prediction that facebook will end soon seriously, not because it won't but because any appearance of being right after having been apparently wrong for as long as we've been hearing this can be attributed to well within the parameters for random chance. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, after all.
They are making a cheaper, and inferior ipad to try and capture a piece of the market that isn't otherwise willing to spend the kind of money that an ipad goes for when an android tablet will do the trick just fine.
You don't need to call the AAA if you are low on gas, unless you don't even have enough to make it to a gas station (which in many cities is often not very far... I think the furthest I've ever lived from a gas station was about 2 miles). If you don't have enough electric charge in an EV to get to where you want to ultimately go, however.... you're in for a bit of a wait as you recharge, however.
And I'm not anti-electric at all.. I've presented what I think are the biggest objections to electric cars at the moment, and if those barriers can be overcome at some point, I don't see any remaining reason why they would not become mainstream. They all ultimately boil down to one thing:: inconvenience.
I didn't even know that whales could use cell phones.
I know they make them waterproof now, but sheesh!
No, but one might need to charge it every 3rd or 4th day or so.... and if they were to forget to do so overnight when I need to, I'm not getting to work on time that morning at all.
With an ICE vehicle, at worst, one would need to make a pit stop for gasoline, which in large urban areas is not usually out of one's way at all owing to how common gas stations are in cities, and adding at most 5 minutes to a commute.
People get EV's right now because they think that the inconveniences of it* are offset by the benefits... and I don't deny the importance of those benefits, but the threshold of additional people that are willing to do that is eventually going to be reached, and soon, unless those inconveniences are addressed.
*eg: much more expensive initial purchase, offsetting the money saved between the cost of electricity and gasoline for many years, taking a long time to completely recharge compared to gasoline fill up, sparseness of rapid charging stations (which still take 5 or more times longer to recharge than it does to fill up a car), having to have recharging facilities at home where you park your car to be even *REMOTELY* practical, and others.
Or maybe you should bother to read what I wrote instead of throwing terms like 'strawman' around, and perhaps while you're at it, check a dictionary and look up the word, because nothing that I've said here would qualify as such. I have not taken anyone's arguments out of context, nor attacked my own interpretation of such an argument, so there's been no strawman here from my side.
I've never claimed any position beyond the one I began with which is that EV's need to be more convenient for people to own before they will actually become mainstream. If you believe otherwise that's great for you... but I have as much right to be skeptical of that as you do of my claims. If there's any winner I'd put money on for the future, it is on human laziness, and if something isn't going to appeal to that by being at least as convenient as what people are already used to, I'm not putting any bets on it taking off anytime soon until there is no other choice.
And I am not discouraging anyone from getting one or suggesting they are making any kind of error in judgement for wanting one, so I'm not sure where you think I'm coming from any kind of "anti-electric" point of view.
Besides, even the staunchest EV advocates will admit they are not practical for people who do not have access to charging facilities where they park their vehicle at home. The number of people in this position is not small.... more than a third of them in my city, and I'm one of them.
If short charges like that did not impact the battery life, it would be fine... but it does, so it's not. Do it too often, and you pay for that forgetfulness with the price of having to buy a new battery long before you would have otherwise.
If it can be determined that the car *should* have seen her, then what was going on that time that the car didn't see her?
It's a freakin' computer... you can go through its logs and track what it saw and what it didn't see, and figure out based on the logic in the code why it didn't respond to the pedestrian appropriately.
Figure that out, and then add it to repertoire of situations that the car knows about to at least make it safer for the future.
By usable level, I meant usable in any practical sense. If you frequently charge your car minimally like what you are suggesting, it will utterly destroy your battery capacity. Charging an electric vehicle to a usable level if you are wanting to still have prolonged use of it afterwards generally means getting it to at least 80% capacity.
If one lives in a relatively high-density populated area, there's a pretty good chance that they live within a mile of a gas station.
Ideally a person could just take public transit to work in such areas, but in my experience public transit rarely adequately services industrial park areas where a lot of people have to go to work, and where driving might take only 20 to 30 minutes, taking public transit can push that closer to 90 minutes, each way... in some cases as long as 2 hours.