We could... and someone will or has. It will start out as a niche, and might stay that way. I won't prognosticate the demise of Facebook, like some did for Microsoft. Especially since they seemed to have bought up all their nascent competitors... but given the ease of entry into the market, and the fact that using a set of secure, ad-free communications protocols to share with your friends and family could be highly appealing compared to the business model, platform, and UI limitations of Facebook. I think it is inevitable that these sorts of standardized social networking apps based on open standard protocols start emerging with more prominence.
Coming up with the protocols and architecture is one thing... I can imagine a Facebook killing set of open standard protocols to allow people to build interoperable services that would enable Facebook like services without one centralized provider.
The next thing is coming up with the business model to keep people employed or focused in open source projects on providing that simplified UI experience that will enable multiple independent software/systems projects that give people a richer set of options (including simpler UI) than the proprietary social networks.
Take Firefox for example... great browser use it daily. Chrome is better, faster. I think Firefox is probably one of the most successful open source projects on the planet which revolutionized web browsing and saved the Internet from an almost assured slow death due to IE dominance and the embrace, extend and monopolize Microsoft doctrine. At least Chrome is in part based on open source so you do have options and Google has remained mostly dedicated to supporting open web standards and interoperable communications protocols... with some waning of emphasis over the years.
Just the broader point remains... to move from a worthy concept and vision to executing an open source project (or in the case of Facebook replacement and open source ecosystem of products) takes organization, resources and steady leadership at multiple levels. It ain't easy for Facebook and it ain't going to be easy to replace Facebook...
Oh and this tunnel was neither dug faster nor cheaper than any other tunnel.
For a better comparison Super Excavators (the previous owners of Godot) used the exact same machine to build a 1,640 ft sewer overflow tunnel for $12.4 million, or scaling up $38 million/mile, right up there with Elon's $40 million cost, and the contract had profit factored into it as well and was done in a more challenging geology and included digging deeper access shafts that what Elon did. So I guess the Proof of Concept is that Elon can spend more money digging a tunnel using the exact same machine at a shallower depth and easier ground than an existing tunneling contractor.
.
Yes, I am going to hold Musk to the numbers if he wants cities to allow these sorts of tunnel networks. But a one off prototype tunnel is going to have higher costs than if you just keep digging a network of tunnels. And the comparison you have is with a sewer tunnel. No he has not innovated in tunnel building, but this is a transportation systems problem not merely a tunnel building problem
The basic principle of cost reduction is sound... we need to use smaller tunnels that are cheaper to build like this for our transportation systems. Otherwise you are going to continue to have demand outpacing transportation capacity because our infrastructure is too expensively designed.
I am Boston based and I can tell you we spent decades and tens of billions on the Big Dig. Extrapolate that costs and then think how maybe it would have been better to spend a billion or two on multiple smaller tunnels compared to the tens of billions spent on the big multi-lane tunnels.
And there has been another decades old debate about spending about ten billion to connect our North and South commuter rail networks with a mile long tunnel. Again bigger tunnels with multiple rail lines and stations and higher spot capacity than car tunnels... but still the cost has meant that it hasn't been approved in the decades that it has been on the drawing board.
If cities, especially the ones that haven't got an established subway network... which is most US cities. IF these cities can organically build out these sorts of tunnel systems from the urban core outward then it will fill in the needed gap between the high capacity subway systems and the lower density cities and areas around cities which face congestion issues, but not enough proven demand or money to fund big ticket mass transit upgrades.
The thing that Elon Musk does is drive down cost to enable scalability. This isn't about a bumpy prototype tunnel, this is about looking at the tradespace and finding the combination of attributes that may enable this architecture to be affordable when it is scaled.
Dear Amazon, How about, for Prime Customers especially since you now have Whole Foods and other local brick and mortar stores, just tell customers when they are better off driving over to Whole Foods. If you know who we are, where we are shopping from then how about give us a break and straight up tell us when we can find a better price local without the overhead of curbside shipping.
Some things will likely always be cheaper to ship bulk and then pick up local.
Sometimes I need a space for Collaboration and Communication. And sometimes I need to be on the phone. A small break-out conference room is usually good for collaboration and communication. Having enough spaces like that so you don't have to book a week in advance is the trick and keeping them from becoming de facto offices seems nearly impossible. And then sometimes I need to just sit (or stand) and do some typing without distraction, so either use one of those break-out rooms or work from home.
I think what concerns me most about this economy is how much of it seems wrapped up in the Federal Reserve banks handing out cheap money to a select few big city banks from which it is further doled out with bankers and investors taking up the largest share until what trickles down is not nearly enough to capitalize the actual economy.
Agree with some of that, but inflation is actually pretty low and I don't think the increase in the money supply has been keeping up with our trade deficits. The Fed has been keeping the dollar strong when we would really need a weak dollar and more money in our economy widely distributed. When a lot of that "money" is concentrated or overseas or coming back into the US economy in investments that will eventually return profits back overseas or into the hands of a small elite. Raising some costs like housing, but keeping money out of the pockets of most people.
That was almost a complete fiasco. It hobbled US academia and US based software with export of fully functional US software effectively banned putting us at a big disadvantage. A lot of open source software projects moved overseas as the US didn't ban imports of that technology and it was just easier to host overseas.
NASA clearly cannot afford to just blow money on SLS
NASA is being required to develop the SLS. They have no say in the matter, and moreover they have no say in many of the technical choices such as which engines to use.
Hence the moniker "Senate Launch System".
They should make that even more clear in their budget requests by requesting zero funding for SLS. It is one thing to be "required" by Congress... it is another to regularly include SLS in the budget request to Congress. I realize the politics, but when the music stops someone needs to stop dancing.
NASA should reallocate the billions of dollars which are being spent on a launch system which nobody expects to be useful or affordable and instead use those billions to put out RFPs for milestone missions that will further incentivize those private industry projects to get off the ground. NASA clearly cannot afford to just blow money on SLS and also pay to perform the space missions that would be required to do useful things in space.
NASA should be moving the ball forward, not reinventing the wheel for every mission.
automated kill bots would be my #1 priority. Throughout history the one thing that has consistently challenged my rule has been the military I use to keep power. Specifically charismatic leaders I needed to whip the troops into the kind of frenzy they need to die for me.
Kill bots let me do away that problem. Now all I need is a couple of geeky engineers to run my military and oppress everybody else. Mix in automated factories for making my stuff and I don't even need consumers. I can just own everything and use the ownership to decide who lives and who dies, giving me ultimate power.
And as a member of the ruling class, what else is there for me?
As a geeky engineer I hope they buy that line of reasoning.
China obviously wants war. Why else would they put their country right next to so many American military bases?
I think it is past time that the US substantially reduces its troop presence in Japan and Korea (as well as Germany, Italy and the UK). Yes, the US does have worldwide interests and might want a few bases overseas and forward deployed supplies for logistical reasons, but WWII is long over and the level of troop presence is clearly reflective of post WWII occupation rather than modern military requirements for keeping the peace.
We don't need to break them up, we only need to mandate interoperability between the platforms.
Let's start with video calling so I can video call with my kids from my android phone or desktop or Skype or Facetime or whatever Amazon calls their service. It is completely absurd that there is no standard interoperability in common use to be able to video call between platforms. This is a real failure.
Then let's reinvent social platforms to be blockchain based, open source and encrypted so you can share your contacts with other contacts and selectively and securely communicate and filter without reliance on a third party provided like Facebook.
And then let's embrace decentralized AI and decentralized search indexes to reduce reliance on centralized providers like Google. I want my personal AI assistants to exist on local hardware without spying on me and relaying that information to big corporations and the government. And gigabytes of search indexes can be seeded, shared and synced by your personal preference without reliance on a centralized repository.
And then let's work on making all the lessons of Amazon work with an efficient decentralized supply chain, delivery system and decentralized e-commerce ecosystem.
We knew the day was coming when our collective laziness would be exploited by eager corporations and their well earned successes would make the winners so big that they become systemic risks. The day is here.
Managing an open source project appears to be difficult enough. Try having two masters one in the open source project community and one in the company that writes your pay checks. I think maybe open source is best when companies just contribute money to the projects and let the projects themselves figure out how to distribute money to whomever is providing the most value.
The exception I could see would be when a company itself controls the open source project and is merely contributing the source code back to the community because of the terms of the license.
Somewhere in the middle, it seems that letting your employees contribute to open source as a small fraction of their time would seem to work. Kinda in the same way that in some industries, publishing to technical, scientific or business journals is normal and important.
Overall, just need to make sure the value flows make sense and are sustainable for the company, the employees and the open source projects.
Today's VR presents our eyes and brain with an uncanny valley that is different enough from reality that the brain strains and rejects the result. I know a lot of smart people are working on this. But some pieces of the puzzle are still missing.
That said, the perfect is the enemy of the good. VR is plenty good enough to be fun and even useful and products can be successful.
I think Hollywood reality with its portrayals of VR and even the name "Virtual Reality" itself have been artificially constraining enthusiasm for these products. And setting the bar so high that to be considered successful we apparently need to see products and a VR ecosystem that matches the fiction.
Organized targeted campaigns backed by financial resources are going to be tangibly effective at influencing people. And I would observe that the Internet influence landscape is really not all that vaste and insurmountable as you are suggesting.
There are some obvious actors, such as the two opposition sides pretending to be the other side in order to make them look bad which are somewhat effective at being divisive.
But the foreign interference has the hallmark of pretending to be both sides fighting in order to spur people on both sides to fight not just to harness or supress fundraising or voting, but to undermine American society more broadly. Quite a bit more insideous than Americans simply messing with one another.
Yes we are doing quite a bit of that divide and conquer thing for partisan political reasons, but in the
I watch a TED talk by the head of googles driverless car project. He said in the talk that you cant partially automate a car for exactly this reason. Has to be all or nothing. Google new this years ago. See here https://www.ted.com/talks/chri...
I disagree to some extent. You can and should automate the absolute safety features. Making a car try to not hit other things will reduce accidents, injuries and fatalities.
I think from there is the leap point. If your car is very very good at preventing you from hitting things, then it can also be relied upon by a navigation system to go in a certain direction and towards a destination without hitting things. Then worst case the navigation system screws up and you have to manually intervene to direct the car where to go.
I think however collision avoidance systems need to reliably prevent collisions that would otherwise be the drivers fault and additionally help mitigate collisions that wouldn't be the drivers fault. Practically speaking they will be held to a higher standard than humans are.
From that sociological perspective the system should be able to do everything a human actually does to avoid a collision (not just what we think we do after the fact through false memories).
The social problem it seems today, as reflected in the headline and discussion, is that a system can be scientifically proven to make driving 30% to 40% safer and the headline and most of the story is apparently about the downside risks rather than the opportunity to save thousands or even tens of thousands of people through wider adoption of this technology. 30% of a big number is a big number.
Put another way and it seems that people are recognizing that the technology makes driving safer and they are slacking off a bit. Unfortunate, but even with this human factor they are reporting a 30% to 40% risk reduction which is huge.
> having a human in the loop is a setup for failure.
No, having a BAD DRIVER in the loop is a setup for failure. The problem at least in the USA is that the driving test is pretty much only focussed on your ability to follow road signs and laws. it does almost nothing to test your actual ability to properly control the vehicle itself, especially in loss of traction type situations.
That's the problem? You speak as if you can test for a bad driver? How many times do people drive and not get enough sleep, or are sick, or have a heart attack mid trip with little or no warning... oh and how do you account for the learning process of either becoming a better driver or learning bad habits?
You can probably envision a world with far fewer and just the most capable drivers on the road. I can envision a much better and safer system where people are not driving at all.
I just posted a similar reaction... poster really misused that citation. I give some credit for citing a document. But the numbers show the complete opposite of what they said. Nuclear clearly has lower total lifecycle CO2 emissions than solar according to that document.
Lifetime emissions of a nuclear plant are around 100g/kWh. Better than coal but considerably worse than wind/solar+battery.
I just read your linked pdf... Table A.III.2 | Emissions of selected electricity supply technologies shows that nuclear is much much better than solar. Lifecycle emissions are 2x or 3x less than solar. Closer to wind and hydro. According to that chart, only onshore wind and hydro beat out nuclear in terms of CO2 emissions. But both onshore wind and hydro are very limited by geography.
The US Federal Reserve can create as much money as the US Treasury needs to borrow and is obligated to buy US Treasury bonds from the US Federal government as a buyer of last resort... meaning unlimited money with the "cost" of free money being the potential for inflation, especially on imported goods.
And before people get all snippy with me... that is exactly what the Federal Government has been doing up to hundreds of billions of dollars or even a trillion dollars each year for a period of time without raising taxes on anyone. Just tapping the Federal Reserve and almost never borrowing less than is needed to pay back the Federal Reserve.
0 on the Federal budget for all practical purposes is somewhere in the range of a $300 to $400 billion deficit. If we run less than that deficit then we risk taking a net amount of money out of the economy as most of it would go back to the Federal Reserve.
As we come to rely on imports less and less it might make more and more sense to inflate our way out of debt. And a good equitable way to do that would be to just start giving people money as tax refunds or higher deductions or even giving people money as a Universal Basic Income.
I am a big believer in the power of free market capitalism to create an efficient non-crony economy... but in order to have demand in a market you need to have the ability to pay for goods and services. As the value of many people's labor has fallen below the cost of living in America we face a fundamentally broken free market moving forward that relies a great deal on government subsidies. And will more so in the future. It is way too late to worry about paying back the Federal Debt, might as well embrace that fact, understand the societal impact and make the best of an economic situation where we have a big enough economy to be able to manage the downsides of inflation.
Tablets do not replace PCs and laptops. They just aren't as functional. Tablets are nice for reading and doing light work but for anything that requires real heavy-weight work, the PC reigns king.
Tablets aren't as functional because manufacturers haven't made them as functional. The hardware in high end tablets like the ipad or mid to high end smartphones are capable of driving a desktop experience. What is lacking is the seamless docking for a large screen area and a keyboard and mouse for higher productivity and ergonomics. Some of those are design choices that it seems are being made in order to drive PC/Mac sales.
But people aren't going to want to spend on two high cost computing devices for very long. If prices come down then sure why not have two devices as long as they are easy to keep in sync using the cloud, but if your iPhone is pushing $1000, then why can't I just dock it (or place next to a desktop station) and get a desktop experience from it. Or at least be able to do some coding and productivity apps even if you still need a larger form factor for computing applications requiring greater capacity.
But yes at $50 for a cheap tablet and $100 to $200 for a cheap PC or laptop equivalent then sure whey not have multiple devices tailored to each use.
Slashdot Mirror
We could... and someone will or has. It will start out as a niche, and might stay that way. I won't prognosticate the demise of Facebook, like some did for Microsoft. Especially since they seemed to have bought up all their nascent competitors... but given the ease of entry into the market, and the fact that using a set of secure, ad-free communications protocols to share with your friends and family could be highly appealing compared to the business model, platform, and UI limitations of Facebook. I think it is inevitable that these sorts of standardized social networking apps based on open standard protocols start emerging with more prominence.
^This
Coming up with the protocols and architecture is one thing... I can imagine a Facebook killing set of open standard protocols to allow people to build interoperable services that would enable Facebook like services without one centralized provider.
The next thing is coming up with the business model to keep people employed or focused in open source projects on providing that simplified UI experience that will enable multiple independent software/systems projects that give people a richer set of options (including simpler UI) than the proprietary social networks.
Take Firefox for example... great browser use it daily. Chrome is better, faster. I think Firefox is probably one of the most successful open source projects on the planet which revolutionized web browsing and saved the Internet from an almost assured slow death due to IE dominance and the embrace, extend and monopolize Microsoft doctrine. At least Chrome is in part based on open source so you do have options and Google has remained mostly dedicated to supporting open web standards and interoperable communications protocols... with some waning of emphasis over the years.
Just the broader point remains... to move from a worthy concept and vision to executing an open source project (or in the case of Facebook replacement and open source ecosystem of products) takes organization, resources and steady leadership at multiple levels. It ain't easy for Facebook and it ain't going to be easy to replace Facebook...
it will happen, but it ain't going to be easy.
Oh and this tunnel was neither dug faster nor cheaper than any other tunnel.
For a better comparison Super Excavators (the previous owners of Godot) used the exact same machine to build a 1,640 ft sewer overflow tunnel for $12.4 million, or scaling up $38 million/mile, right up there with Elon's $40 million cost, and the contract had profit factored into it as well and was done in a more challenging geology and included digging deeper access shafts that what Elon did. So I guess the Proof of Concept is that Elon can spend more money digging a tunnel using the exact same machine at a shallower depth and easier ground than an existing tunneling contractor.
.
Yes, I am going to hold Musk to the numbers if he wants cities to allow these sorts of tunnel networks. But a one off prototype tunnel is going to have higher costs than if you just keep digging a network of tunnels. And the comparison you have is with a sewer tunnel. No he has not innovated in tunnel building, but this is a transportation systems problem not merely a tunnel building problem
The basic principle of cost reduction is sound... we need to use smaller tunnels that are cheaper to build like this for our transportation systems. Otherwise you are going to continue to have demand outpacing transportation capacity because our infrastructure is too expensively designed.
I am Boston based and I can tell you we spent decades and tens of billions on the Big Dig. Extrapolate that costs and then think how maybe it would have been better to spend a billion or two on multiple smaller tunnels compared to the tens of billions spent on the big multi-lane tunnels.
And there has been another decades old debate about spending about ten billion to connect our North and South commuter rail networks with a mile long tunnel. Again bigger tunnels with multiple rail lines and stations and higher spot capacity than car tunnels... but still the cost has meant that it hasn't been approved in the decades that it has been on the drawing board.
If cities, especially the ones that haven't got an established subway network... which is most US cities. IF these cities can organically build out these sorts of tunnel systems from the urban core outward then it will fill in the needed gap between the high capacity subway systems and the lower density cities and areas around cities which face congestion issues, but not enough proven demand or money to fund big ticket mass transit upgrades.
The thing that Elon Musk does is drive down cost to enable scalability. This isn't about a bumpy prototype tunnel, this is about looking at the tradespace and finding the combination of attributes that may enable this architecture to be affordable when it is scaled.
Dear Amazon, How about, for Prime Customers especially since you now have Whole Foods and other local brick and mortar stores, just tell customers when they are better off driving over to Whole Foods. If you know who we are, where we are shopping from then how about give us a break and straight up tell us when we can find a better price local without the overhead of curbside shipping.
Some things will likely always be cheaper to ship bulk and then pick up local.
Thanks,
Pat
Sometimes I need a space for Collaboration and Communication. And sometimes I need to be on the phone. A small break-out conference room is usually good for collaboration and communication. Having enough spaces like that so you don't have to book a week in advance is the trick and keeping them from becoming de facto offices seems nearly impossible. And then sometimes I need to just sit (or stand) and do some typing without distraction, so either use one of those break-out rooms or work from home.
I think what concerns me most about this economy is how much of it seems wrapped up in the Federal Reserve banks handing out cheap money to a select few big city banks from which it is further doled out with bankers and investors taking up the largest share until what trickles down is not nearly enough to capitalize the actual economy.
Agree with some of that, but inflation is actually pretty low and I don't think the increase in the money supply has been keeping up with our trade deficits. The Fed has been keeping the dollar strong when we would really need a weak dollar and more money in our economy widely distributed. When a lot of that "money" is concentrated or overseas or coming back into the US economy in investments that will eventually return profits back overseas or into the hands of a small elite. Raising some costs like housing, but keeping money out of the pockets of most people.
export regulations worked so well with crypto...
That was almost a complete fiasco. It hobbled US academia and US based software with export of fully functional US software effectively banned putting us at a big disadvantage. A lot of open source software projects moved overseas as the US didn't ban imports of that technology and it was just easier to host overseas.
NASA clearly cannot afford to just blow money on SLS
NASA is being required to develop the SLS. They have no say in the matter, and moreover they have no say in many of the technical choices such as which engines to use.
Hence the moniker "Senate Launch System".
They should make that even more clear in their budget requests by requesting zero funding for SLS. It is one thing to be "required" by Congress... it is another to regularly include SLS in the budget request to Congress. I realize the politics, but when the music stops someone needs to stop dancing.
NASA should reallocate the billions of dollars which are being spent on a launch system which nobody expects to be useful or affordable and instead use those billions to put out RFPs for milestone missions that will further incentivize those private industry projects to get off the ground. NASA clearly cannot afford to just blow money on SLS and also pay to perform the space missions that would be required to do useful things in space.
NASA should be moving the ball forward, not reinventing the wheel for every mission.
automated kill bots would be my #1 priority. Throughout history the one thing that has consistently challenged my rule has been the military I use to keep power. Specifically charismatic leaders I needed to whip the troops into the kind of frenzy they need to die for me.
Kill bots let me do away that problem. Now all I need is a couple of geeky engineers to run my military and oppress everybody else. Mix in automated factories for making my stuff and I don't even need consumers. I can just own everything and use the ownership to decide who lives and who dies, giving me ultimate power.
And as a member of the ruling class, what else is there for me?
As a geeky engineer I hope they buy that line of reasoning.
China obviously wants war. Why else would they put their country right next to so many American military bases?
I think it is past time that the US substantially reduces its troop presence in Japan and Korea (as well as Germany, Italy and the UK). Yes, the US does have worldwide interests and might want a few bases overseas and forward deployed supplies for logistical reasons, but WWII is long over and the level of troop presence is clearly reflective of post WWII occupation rather than modern military requirements for keeping the peace.
We don't need to break them up, we only need to mandate interoperability between the platforms.
Let's start with video calling so I can video call with my kids from my android phone or desktop or Skype or Facetime or whatever Amazon calls their service. It is completely absurd that there is no standard interoperability in common use to be able to video call between platforms. This is a real failure.
Then let's reinvent social platforms to be blockchain based, open source and encrypted so you can share your contacts with other contacts and selectively and securely communicate and filter without reliance on a third party provided like Facebook.
And then let's embrace decentralized AI and decentralized search indexes to reduce reliance on centralized providers like Google. I want my personal AI assistants to exist on local hardware without spying on me and relaying that information to big corporations and the government. And gigabytes of search indexes can be seeded, shared and synced by your personal preference without reliance on a centralized repository.
And then let's work on making all the lessons of Amazon work with an efficient decentralized supply chain, delivery system and decentralized e-commerce ecosystem.
We knew the day was coming when our collective laziness would be exploited by eager corporations and their well earned successes would make the winners so big that they become systemic risks. The day is here.
Managing an open source project appears to be difficult enough. Try having two masters one in the open source project community and one in the company that writes your pay checks. I think maybe open source is best when companies just contribute money to the projects and let the projects themselves figure out how to distribute money to whomever is providing the most value.
The exception I could see would be when a company itself controls the open source project and is merely contributing the source code back to the community because of the terms of the license.
Somewhere in the middle, it seems that letting your employees contribute to open source as a small fraction of their time would seem to work. Kinda in the same way that in some industries, publishing to technical, scientific or business journals is normal and important.
Overall, just need to make sure the value flows make sense and are sustainable for the company, the employees and the open source projects.
Today's VR presents our eyes and brain with an uncanny valley that is different enough from reality that the brain strains and rejects the result. I know a lot of smart people are working on this. But some pieces of the puzzle are still missing.
That said, the perfect is the enemy of the good. VR is plenty good enough to be fun and even useful and products can be successful.
I think Hollywood reality with its portrayals of VR and even the name "Virtual Reality" itself have been artificially constraining enthusiasm for these products. And setting the bar so high that to be considered successful we apparently need to see products and a VR ecosystem that matches the fiction.
Organized targeted campaigns backed by financial resources are going to be tangibly effective at influencing people. And I would observe that the Internet influence landscape is really not all that vaste and insurmountable as you are suggesting.
There are some obvious actors, such as the two opposition sides pretending to be the other side in order to make them look bad which are somewhat effective at being divisive.
But the foreign interference has the hallmark of pretending to be both sides fighting in order to spur people on both sides to fight not just to harness or supress fundraising or voting, but to undermine American society more broadly. Quite a bit more insideous than Americans simply messing with one another.
Yes we are doing quite a bit of that divide and conquer thing for partisan political reasons, but in the
So you want to introduce additional cost and delay (all additional decision making causes delay) into collision avoidance?
That's unethical and dumb.
I watch a TED talk by the head of googles driverless car project. He said in the talk that you cant partially automate a car for exactly this reason. Has to be all or nothing. Google new this years ago. See here https://www.ted.com/talks/chri...
I disagree to some extent. You can and should automate the absolute safety features. Making a car try to not hit other things will reduce accidents, injuries and fatalities.
I think from there is the leap point. If your car is very very good at preventing you from hitting things, then it can also be relied upon by a navigation system to go in a certain direction and towards a destination without hitting things. Then worst case the navigation system screws up and you have to manually intervene to direct the car where to go.
I think however collision avoidance systems need to reliably prevent collisions that would otherwise be the drivers fault and additionally help mitigate collisions that wouldn't be the drivers fault. Practically speaking they will be held to a higher standard than humans are.
From that sociological perspective the system should be able to do everything a human actually does to avoid a collision (not just what we think we do after the fact through false memories).
The social problem it seems today, as reflected in the headline and discussion, is that a system can be scientifically proven to make driving 30% to 40% safer and the headline and most of the story is apparently about the downside risks rather than the opportunity to save thousands or even tens of thousands of people through wider adoption of this technology. 30% of a big number is a big number.
Put another way and it seems that people are recognizing that the technology makes driving safer and they are slacking off a bit. Unfortunate, but even with this human factor they are reporting a 30% to 40% risk reduction which is huge.
> having a human in the loop is a setup for failure.
No, having a BAD DRIVER in the loop is a setup for failure.
The problem at least in the USA is that the driving test is pretty much only focussed on your ability to follow road signs and laws. it does almost nothing to test your actual ability to properly control the vehicle itself, especially in loss of traction type situations.
That's the problem? You speak as if you can test for a bad driver? How many times do people drive and not get enough sleep, or are sick, or have a heart attack mid trip with little or no warning... oh and how do you account for the learning process of either becoming a better driver or learning bad habits?
You can probably envision a world with far fewer and just the most capable drivers on the road. I can envision a much better and safer system where people are not driving at all.
Elon Musk apparently reads Slashdot: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/s...
Of course he does. Great minds crowdsource and synthesize other great (and mediocre) minds.
Come on Elon... come clean, what is your handle?
I just posted a similar reaction... poster really misused that citation. I give some credit for citing a document. But the numbers show the complete opposite of what they said. Nuclear clearly has lower total lifecycle CO2 emissions than solar according to that document.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess...
Lifetime emissions of a nuclear plant are around 100g/kWh. Better than coal but considerably worse than wind/solar+battery.
I just read your linked pdf... Table A.III.2 | Emissions of selected electricity supply technologies shows that nuclear is much much better than solar. Lifecycle emissions are 2x or 3x less than solar. Closer to wind and hydro. According to that chart, only onshore wind and hydro beat out nuclear in terms of CO2 emissions. But both onshore wind and hydro are very limited by geography.
The US Federal Reserve can create as much money as the US Treasury needs to borrow and is obligated to buy US Treasury bonds from the US Federal government as a buyer of last resort... meaning unlimited money with the "cost" of free money being the potential for inflation, especially on imported goods.
And before people get all snippy with me... that is exactly what the Federal Government has been doing up to hundreds of billions of dollars or even a trillion dollars each year for a period of time without raising taxes on anyone. Just tapping the Federal Reserve and almost never borrowing less than is needed to pay back the Federal Reserve.
0 on the Federal budget for all practical purposes is somewhere in the range of a $300 to $400 billion deficit. If we run less than that deficit then we risk taking a net amount of money out of the economy as most of it would go back to the Federal Reserve.
As we come to rely on imports less and less it might make more and more sense to inflate our way out of debt. And a good equitable way to do that would be to just start giving people money as tax refunds or higher deductions or even giving people money as a Universal Basic Income.
I am a big believer in the power of free market capitalism to create an efficient non-crony economy... but in order to have demand in a market you need to have the ability to pay for goods and services. As the value of many people's labor has fallen below the cost of living in America we face a fundamentally broken free market moving forward that relies a great deal on government subsidies. And will more so in the future. It is way too late to worry about paying back the Federal Debt, might as well embrace that fact, understand the societal impact and make the best of an economic situation where we have a big enough economy to be able to manage the downsides of inflation.
Tablets do not replace PCs and laptops. They just aren't as functional. Tablets are nice for reading and doing light work but for anything that requires real heavy-weight work, the PC reigns king.
Tablets aren't as functional because manufacturers haven't made them as functional. The hardware in high end tablets like the ipad or mid to high end smartphones are capable of driving a desktop experience. What is lacking is the seamless docking for a large screen area and a keyboard and mouse for higher productivity and ergonomics. Some of those are design choices that it seems are being made in order to drive PC/Mac sales.
But people aren't going to want to spend on two high cost computing devices for very long. If prices come down then sure why not have two devices as long as they are easy to keep in sync using the cloud, but if your iPhone is pushing $1000, then why can't I just dock it (or place next to a desktop station) and get a desktop experience from it. Or at least be able to do some coding and productivity apps even if you still need a larger form factor for computing applications requiring greater capacity.
But yes at $50 for a cheap tablet and $100 to $200 for a cheap PC or laptop equivalent then sure whey not have multiple devices tailored to each use.