Except the car won't leave until you're ready, you don't have to share it with 50 other gross diseased people hacking and coughing all over you, you'll actually be able to take your coffee to work with you, you won't have to make 100 stops between where you work and your house, the vehicle will go from point A to point B without having to drive all over the city first, you can get dropped off at your front door rather than a stop two blocks away, the last three mean the trip will be 15 minutes instead of 2 hours, there's much less risk of being mugged or raped (rare, but it happened), you won't have to deal with a asshat driver on a power trip, the car will go when you want rather than shutting down at 11PM leaving you stranded, car pooling with people will actually reduce the cost of owning the vehicle instead of everyone paying $60 each for a pass and then being charged municipal property taxes whether you use the bus or not, the car won't have that human fallibility current bus drivers are still susceptible to.
There are a lot more, but lunch is almost over. Suffice it to say, public transit is not always great or a good option in every city. I bought my first car specifically because of all the draw backs with transit in my city. On top of that my wife and I were paying $60 each for a pass to use transit, then another $120 a month to travel to and from her parents place twice a month by provincial bus. Meaning we were paying over $4,300 a year, to be told when we had to be somewhere, when we had to leave and be forced to travel with people we didn't want to be around. I bought a car for $18,000, paid it off in 5 years, $4000 a year (because of interest), and now the cost of the car is on average $175/month in gas and maintenance, even with high gas prices. In another two years I'll have saved enough by not using transit to buy another new car.
With the added bonus that I can go where I want, when I want, with who I want. My commute to work use to be 2 hours one way, my wife's was 3 hours. Now we drop our daughter off at daycare on the way to work, wife drops me off at my office and continues on. Then does the revers in the afternoon the whole commute one way for her is 30 minutes, for me it's 15, for our daughter it's about 10. So for us owning a car is cheaper and easier than taking transit.
1. insurance includes mandatory and included in your premium sensor/systems maintenance
The advantage to this would be everyone pay's the same rate, it won't matter if you're male or female, young or old. All cars will have the same, tiny, equal chance of failure so the insurance company won't be able to get away with the, "You're a male so you pay twice as much as your wife, even though she's had three claims in the last year and you've never had so much as a warning in your life."
What's that? We haven't been able to figure out how to secure anything that's biological against random heart attacks, strokes, drunkenness, fatigue, drug impairment, or stupidity and someone behind the wheel of a car can kill the occupants? Lalalalalala! I can't hearrrrr you!
You make a very good point with the 911 option, that would be a very nice feature to have in case you were already on route to the hospital, or just out and about, and something causes a situation to become even worse, like in the case of someone all the sudden suffering from a heart attack or stroke. Also imagine driverless ambulance, with paramedics in the back, where the ambulance could signal to other cars wirelessly what route it's going to take to an emergency. Then cars either pull over or just reroute to continue on without getting in the way.
I would like to see speed limits done away with if speed is no longer a factor for safty, but I think you'd still have to consider fuel economy. The faster a vehicle travels the more fuel it has to consume. So there probably will still be some "fuel optimal" speed limit.
Just not having to worry about some crazy b*$%) who's doing her makeup on the highway on the way to work ramming into the side of my car, which has happens to me, is enough to sell me on driverless cars. I mean, she was passing me on a single lane highway doing 80Km/h with on coming traffic while putting on mascara. I looked over right at her and thought, this is it, I'm toast. I went off the shoulder of the road and took my foot off the gas while working hard not to tense up and keep the car going straight on the gravel shoulder while it slowed down, got out and promptly threw up. Luckily I got away with just a few scratches to my driver side, $2,700 to fix. Cops never caught her, I gave a description of her and the car, but was a little busy focusing on not dying to get her license plate. <== This is why we need driverless cars.
I don't know if I'd call three cars catching fire after being in accidents "a spectacularly catastrophic event". It's certainly more publicized, but it seems to me there are gas cars that catch fire, which does happen much more frequently.
Kind of funny you brought that up. I came across a line of five cars trying to get out of the parking garage downtown a couple years ago. I waited for 15 minutes before getting out to see what the hold up was. Someone had tied the arm for the exit down and the person at the front of the line was just sitting there. I knocked on her window and asked what she was waiting for. She told me she wasn't sure if it was ok for her to untie the arm so she was waiting for someone to come. I assumed she had called someone so I asked her how long she had been waiting there, two hours. I asked when and who she called and she said she hadn't called anyone. I walked over and pulled the rope of the arm which lifted up and I went back to my car. She may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed, but what does that say about the other four cars behind her that also didn't bother to do anything about it. If I hadn't gotten out we might have sat there all evening.
I live in Atlantic Canada and have had brakes seize because of salt corrosion on the calipers, which isn't a fun thing to discover when you live in a city that's primarily one big hill. I already had a appointment to have my brakes serviced for the following day, but I wish I hadn't put it off that long. Luckily no one was hurt when I ran a stop sign and was able to eventually stop the car using the emergency brake and pushing really hard on the pedal. The brakes engaged, but then seized in the engaged position.
I imagine for the first few generations of self driving cars there will be a safety override, just for peoples piece of mind, or at the vary least the car will fail in a safe way. The engineers that build these things aren't stupid and I'm sure any companies making self driving cars realize they're going to be under a microscope. One accident that was the cars fault and it'll be in every paper around the world.
It's actually interesting because we're seeing this right now with Tesla and the three or four cars that caught fire after being in crashes. It's actually much more common for a non-electric car to catch fire, but Tesla is being called out on it after the battery pack in a couple cars ruptured in crashes. Why all the fuss when it's not all that uncommon for a gas car to catch fire *while idle*? because it's an electric car, people are wary of them and are looking for something to be horrendously wrong to prevent change. The media prints it because people eat up fear in the news.
We are all going to be much better off with self driving cars. There might be some growing pains, no tech is perfected out of the gate, but no more inexperienced teens, drunks, old or distracted people ruining someone else's day seems worth it to me.
The computer the sensors are connected to will know when the sensor isn't functioning. Cars from the last seven years, at least, have had this feature along with just about any machinery on assembly lines that work at high speeds. When the brake sensor on my 2007 Yaris goes a light tells me I need to take my car in.
Aside with that what's wrong with redundancy? What you don't carry a spare tire in case you have a blowout while you're on the highway? Seems like a good safe idea to me to make sure there's an alternate or backup sensor of some kind that'll get you to the dealership for repairs.
I'm sorry for that, I was writing on my phone and/. mobile really sucks. I have a Galaxy Note II, writing with a stylist, phone does auto correct and when I go back to correct spelling the phone sometimes goes into epileptic seizure with the scribe area popping up and disappearing randomly, conveniently over the submit button. There's no preview on/. mobile, it just posts.
Ubuntu for Android and a docking station. Android phone when you're on the move, drop it in to the docking station and it's a full blown desktop. With the added bonus that you don't have a crappy tablet UI on your desktop or a complex desktop UI on your phone.
I was referring to last gen and my four year old laptop, which is actually closer to five, that's sitting in my closet as a media server now. Although my current laptop, just about a year old, with the exception of the GDDR5 ram in the PS4, is still more powerful that the either of this gens consoles. I certainly don't think it'll have an issue playing games for this gen. And basically halfway through this gen I'll be replacing my current laptop, I expect with one that'll be double the power of this gen consoles.
I don't see that as any different than someone not properly maintaining their manual car. I know lots of people that have been in accidents because of bad breaks or bawled tires.
Labor last for hours after contractions first start. Trust me you'd have time. My first one was 16 hours from the initial cramping. My cousins wife was 36. I could go on, but I'm writing on my phone. Despite what TV and Movies tell you labor is no excuse to speed to the hospital, putting both your wife, kid and others in danger. If you really feel time is of the essence, call an ambulance, let the pros handle it.
You forgot to add the "including for gaming" at the end of that.
FTFY, I haven't come across a game I wanted to play yet that my laptop couldn't handle. Sure you may still get marginally better performance out of a desktop, but a modern laptop is going to be good enough. After all most games now are targeted at console hardware, which is seriously lacking when compared to a laptop from just four years ago.
I use to build my own PC, but the convenience of being able to take my laptop wherever I wanted to go started to trump how powerful my PC was. Mainly because I started spending months at a time at sea, but I'm not doing that anymore.
With laptops becoming more powerful all the time it's becoming much less of an issue and I'm not tied to a desk. If I want a big screen I use HDMI to hook my laptop up to my living room TV and use a wireless mouse and keyboard to game from my recliner. It works really well. With emulators for games I own on Super Nintendo, N64, PS1, PS2 and DosBox, GOG.com and Wine for older PC games and Steam releasing a Linux port I've been hard pressed to find a game I *want* to play that wouldn't run on my System 76 laptop running Ubuntu 13.10 64bit.
Same idea though, just get some coloured plastic or fancy stickers and decorate the underside of the trays. You're pretty limited in what you do here, WiFi or Cables.
I didn't count those. I know my wife has an iPod she won, which has been sitting in the box on her dresser for three years now. My younger sister has had both an iPod and an iPod touch. My brother has had an iPod with a PDA, I don't remember what kind of PDA. I think all of those were over six years ago, I could be mistaken, I only started paying attention when the iPad became a thing and my friends and family were all getting them. I said it was a fad. Imagine, a $500-$700 computer that all you can do with it is play crappy disposable games and surf the net, you could have bought a netbook or a cheap laptop for $400-$500 to do the same thing... But I can admit when I'm wrong and, although I'm not entirely sure if I was wrong yet, the evidence is suggesting tablets aren't going to disappear tomorrow.
I'd have to argue that PCs last longer. I've never replaced a desktop or laptop more than once every four years. Using my family, which I understand is a very small non-representative sample.
I've had two laptops in the last 6 years, one is sitting in a closet being used as a media server for my house the other is my primary. I've never owned a tablet, but I'm thinking of getting one. I just don't know if I can justify it for the stuff I want to use it for (games and programming). It might be alright to take to the in-laws to read the morning news or surf the web rather than lugging my laptop back and forth. Or I could give one to my wife, since all she does is surf the web and play facebook games, and save some money on replacing her three year old over powered laptop, which I might turn into a Minecraft server.
I digress, In the last six years:
My brother has gone through three tablets and is looking at another one. iPad, playbook, iPad2, now looking at a Transformer. (3 tablets)
My younger sister took one of his old ones as her first tablet, but has since gone through two more and currently has an iPad2. iPad (hand-me-down lasted 3 months), iPad (dropped in pool), Kindle (not a hand-me-down), iPad2 (3 tablets, I didn't count the first iPad since it was a hand-me-down)
My Step-mother has had two tablets (one was a Kindle replaced by her kindle fire) (2 tables)
My mom, who lives in the states, has had more tablets than I care to mention, she comes to visit every year and for the last five years has a different model every time she's here. (5 tablets)
My Dad did get one, but he's barely touched it in three years. He's an old school developer and prefers something with a keyboard and mouse. iPad (1 tablet)
My older sister has had an iPad and a Kindle and currently has a surface RT. Her BF gave it to her two weeks ago and she hates it, too slow, too heavy, doesn't run the software she expected it to (because she thought she was getting a surface pro). Supposedly the BF is taking it back this week, but she wants another tablet to replace her original iPad, which runs like crap now. I recommended a Nexus if she didn't want iPad2 or iPad Air. I think she'll probably be going with the iPad Air since carrying weight matters to her as she travels a lot for her job. iPad, Kindle, Surface RT, TBA (3 tablets)
My Mother in-law is getting her first tablet for Christmas. ASUS Transformer Prime (1 tablet)
So of the people I know who have/use tablets that's about 2.5 tablets per person over the last six years. Where as between me an my wife three laptops over the last six years and the laptops get repurposed until the literally don't function anymore so they really last me between six to eight years. Tablets get handed down or tossed out because once they're not useful for everyday tasks anymore they sit around collecting dust.
Figuring out who's simply walking by on the sidewalk and who's going to make a panic dash across the crossing - or not the crossing - to catch his bus or is absent-mindedly talking on his cell phone on the other hand without going into ultra-paranoid mode will be tougher.
Something human drivers can't do anyway. If a pedestrian bolts out and there's nothing an autonomous car can do to avoid them, reaction time measured in milliseconds, then there is nothing a human with much slower reaction time, measured in seconds, will be able to do to avoid them. I'd also trust an autonomous car to behave better than a human would, so many times I've seen a person slam on their breaks to avoid someone or something in the road only to spin out of control and end up on a side walk or off in the woods causing significantly more damage than just hitting the person that wasn't smart enough to pay attention to the ton of metal hurdling down the road at them.
People seem to think avoiding random or unexpected obstacle is something only humans can do, but it's so common place for humans to fail at it, it doesn't even make the news above the local level anymore. My city has a HUGE problem with pedestrians getting hit, just in crosswalks and not counting ones that are jay walking. Part of the problem as I see it is pedestrians are trained to think they have the right of way at all times so they don't bother thinking about if a car is watching for them, autonomous cars might change this and pedestrians will be required *by law* to only cross at designated locations after activating the proper signal.
The other part of the problem is drivers don't pay enough attention and don't follow the rules, which wouldn't be an issue with autonomous cars. It'll be really hard to explain how a vehicle with millisecond reaction time and sensors out the wazoo designed to avoid obstacles in front of them didn't yield the right of way when you gave the appropriate signal, flashing lights, hands out, someone standing facing the road at a crosswalk, all things I've seen human drivers mostly just ignore anyway.
Baring electronic/software failure, which can be linked back to maintenance team, or lack there of, or manufacture defect, or tampering. So nothing different from existing cars, with the exception that the operator won't be at fault for being over tired, not paying attention, not following the rules, being overly aggressive, refusing to yield the right of way, being drunk, and the list goes on.
but a "dumb" autonomous car is equivalent to the worst-case human driver -- it wouldn't even try to yield, traffic law notwithstanding.
Where did you get this gem from?
By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards, like deer and pedestrians, than people are. Seeing as people can only rely on what they see where as the cars use a whole host of sensors to detect objects that may not even be visible, like when it's foggy and/or at night).
There could be a big payoff there, as human operators are pretty bad at dealing with ice.
Human drivers are bad in every condition. An individual human may be an ok driver, but for every one competent person there's 20 more that should just drive into a tree to preemptively save someone else's life.
It really isn't that hard to make a system that drives better than the average person. People just don't want to accept that computers are, or could be made, better than us at just about everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the car won't leave until you're ready, you don't have to share it with 50 other gross diseased people hacking and coughing all over you, you'll actually be able to take your coffee to work with you, you won't have to make 100 stops between where you work and your house, the vehicle will go from point A to point B without having to drive all over the city first, you can get dropped off at your front door rather than a stop two blocks away, the last three mean the trip will be 15 minutes instead of 2 hours, there's much less risk of being mugged or raped (rare, but it happened), you won't have to deal with a asshat driver on a power trip, the car will go when you want rather than shutting down at 11PM leaving you stranded, car pooling with people will actually reduce the cost of owning the vehicle instead of everyone paying $60 each for a pass and then being charged municipal property taxes whether you use the bus or not, the car won't have that human fallibility current bus drivers are still susceptible to.
There are a lot more, but lunch is almost over. Suffice it to say, public transit is not always great or a good option in every city. I bought my first car specifically because of all the draw backs with transit in my city. On top of that my wife and I were paying $60 each for a pass to use transit, then another $120 a month to travel to and from her parents place twice a month by provincial bus. Meaning we were paying over $4,300 a year, to be told when we had to be somewhere, when we had to leave and be forced to travel with people we didn't want to be around. I bought a car for $18,000, paid it off in 5 years, $4000 a year (because of interest), and now the cost of the car is on average $175/month in gas and maintenance, even with high gas prices. In another two years I'll have saved enough by not using transit to buy another new car.
With the added bonus that I can go where I want, when I want, with who I want. My commute to work use to be 2 hours one way, my wife's was 3 hours. Now we drop our daughter off at daycare on the way to work, wife drops me off at my office and continues on. Then does the revers in the afternoon the whole commute one way for her is 30 minutes, for me it's 15, for our daughter it's about 10. So for us owning a car is cheaper and easier than taking transit.
1. insurance includes mandatory and included in your premium sensor/systems maintenance
The advantage to this would be everyone pay's the same rate, it won't matter if you're male or female, young or old. All cars will have the same, tiny, equal chance of failure so the insurance company won't be able to get away with the, "You're a male so you pay twice as much as your wife, even though she's had three claims in the last year and you've never had so much as a warning in your life."
What's that? We haven't been able to figure out how to secure anything that's biological against random heart attacks, strokes, drunkenness, fatigue, drug impairment, or stupidity and someone behind the wheel of a car can kill the occupants? Lalalalalala! I can't hearrrrr you!
FTFY
Missed this gem from back in 2010 did you?
You make a very good point with the 911 option, that would be a very nice feature to have in case you were already on route to the hospital, or just out and about, and something causes a situation to become even worse, like in the case of someone all the sudden suffering from a heart attack or stroke. Also imagine driverless ambulance, with paramedics in the back, where the ambulance could signal to other cars wirelessly what route it's going to take to an emergency. Then cars either pull over or just reroute to continue on without getting in the way.
I would like to see speed limits done away with if speed is no longer a factor for safty, but I think you'd still have to consider fuel economy. The faster a vehicle travels the more fuel it has to consume. So there probably will still be some "fuel optimal" speed limit.
Just not having to worry about some crazy b*$%) who's doing her makeup on the highway on the way to work ramming into the side of my car, which has happens to me, is enough to sell me on driverless cars. I mean, she was passing me on a single lane highway doing 80Km/h with on coming traffic while putting on mascara. I looked over right at her and thought, this is it, I'm toast. I went off the shoulder of the road and took my foot off the gas while working hard not to tense up and keep the car going straight on the gravel shoulder while it slowed down, got out and promptly threw up. Luckily I got away with just a few scratches to my driver side, $2,700 to fix. Cops never caught her, I gave a description of her and the car, but was a little busy focusing on not dying to get her license plate. <== This is why we need driverless cars.
I don't know if I'd call three cars catching fire after being in accidents "a spectacularly catastrophic event". It's certainly more publicized, but it seems to me there are gas cars that catch fire, which does happen much more frequently.
Kind of funny you brought that up. I came across a line of five cars trying to get out of the parking garage downtown a couple years ago. I waited for 15 minutes before getting out to see what the hold up was. Someone had tied the arm for the exit down and the person at the front of the line was just sitting there. I knocked on her window and asked what she was waiting for. She told me she wasn't sure if it was ok for her to untie the arm so she was waiting for someone to come. I assumed she had called someone so I asked her how long she had been waiting there, two hours. I asked when and who she called and she said she hadn't called anyone. I walked over and pulled the rope of the arm which lifted up and I went back to my car. She may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed, but what does that say about the other four cars behind her that also didn't bother to do anything about it. If I hadn't gotten out we might have sat there all evening.
I live in Atlantic Canada and have had brakes seize because of salt corrosion on the calipers, which isn't a fun thing to discover when you live in a city that's primarily one big hill. I already had a appointment to have my brakes serviced for the following day, but I wish I hadn't put it off that long. Luckily no one was hurt when I ran a stop sign and was able to eventually stop the car using the emergency brake and pushing really hard on the pedal. The brakes engaged, but then seized in the engaged position.
I imagine for the first few generations of self driving cars there will be a safety override, just for peoples piece of mind, or at the vary least the car will fail in a safe way. The engineers that build these things aren't stupid and I'm sure any companies making self driving cars realize they're going to be under a microscope. One accident that was the cars fault and it'll be in every paper around the world.
It's actually interesting because we're seeing this right now with Tesla and the three or four cars that caught fire after being in crashes. It's actually much more common for a non-electric car to catch fire, but Tesla is being called out on it after the battery pack in a couple cars ruptured in crashes. Why all the fuss when it's not all that uncommon for a gas car to catch fire *while idle*? because it's an electric car, people are wary of them and are looking for something to be horrendously wrong to prevent change. The media prints it because people eat up fear in the news.
We are all going to be much better off with self driving cars. There might be some growing pains, no tech is perfected out of the gate, but no more inexperienced teens, drunks, old or distracted people ruining someone else's day seems worth it to me.
The computer the sensors are connected to will know when the sensor isn't functioning. Cars from the last seven years, at least, have had this feature along with just about any machinery on assembly lines that work at high speeds. When the brake sensor on my 2007 Yaris goes a light tells me I need to take my car in.
Aside with that what's wrong with redundancy? What you don't carry a spare tire in case you have a blowout while you're on the highway? Seems like a good safe idea to me to make sure there's an alternate or backup sensor of some kind that'll get you to the dealership for repairs.
We do have those in Canada. I primarily hear them on Metro Transit buses around my city, which is kind of unsettling.
I'm sorry for that, I was writing on my phone and /. mobile really sucks. I have a Galaxy Note II, writing with a stylist, phone does auto correct and when I go back to correct spelling the phone sometimes goes into epileptic seizure with the scribe area popping up and disappearing randomly, conveniently over the submit button. There's no preview on /. mobile, it just posts.
Ubuntu for Android and a docking station. Android phone when you're on the move, drop it in to the docking station and it's a full blown desktop. With the added bonus that you don't have a crappy tablet UI on your desktop or a complex desktop UI on your phone.
I was referring to last gen and my four year old laptop, which is actually closer to five, that's sitting in my closet as a media server now. Although my current laptop, just about a year old, with the exception of the GDDR5 ram in the PS4, is still more powerful that the either of this gens consoles. I certainly don't think it'll have an issue playing games for this gen. And basically halfway through this gen I'll be replacing my current laptop, I expect with one that'll be double the power of this gen consoles.
I don't see that as any different than someone not properly maintaining their manual car. I know lots of people that have been in accidents because of bad breaks or bawled tires.
Labor last for hours after contractions first start. Trust me you'd have time. My first one was 16 hours from the initial cramping. My cousins wife was 36. I could go on, but I'm writing on my phone. Despite what TV and Movies tell you labor is no excuse to speed to the hospital, putting both your wife, kid and others in danger. If you really feel time is of the essence, call an ambulance, let the pros handle it.
You forgot to add the "including for gaming" at the end of that.
FTFY, I haven't come across a game I wanted to play yet that my laptop couldn't handle. Sure you may still get marginally better performance out of a desktop, but a modern laptop is going to be good enough. After all most games now are targeted at console hardware, which is seriously lacking when compared to a laptop from just four years ago.
OH CRAP!!!! They're going to hit the bulls-eye, quick move the target over there!!!
I use to build my own PC, but the convenience of being able to take my laptop wherever I wanted to go started to trump how powerful my PC was. Mainly because I started spending months at a time at sea, but I'm not doing that anymore.
With laptops becoming more powerful all the time it's becoming much less of an issue and I'm not tied to a desk. If I want a big screen I use HDMI to hook my laptop up to my living room TV and use a wireless mouse and keyboard to game from my recliner. It works really well. With emulators for games I own on Super Nintendo, N64, PS1, PS2 and DosBox, GOG.com and Wine for older PC games and Steam releasing a Linux port I've been hard pressed to find a game I *want* to play that wouldn't run on my System 76 laptop running Ubuntu 13.10 64bit.
Same idea though, just get some coloured plastic or fancy stickers and decorate the underside of the trays. You're pretty limited in what you do here, WiFi or Cables.
I didn't count those. I know my wife has an iPod she won, which has been sitting in the box on her dresser for three years now. My younger sister has had both an iPod and an iPod touch. My brother has had an iPod with a PDA, I don't remember what kind of PDA. I think all of those were over six years ago, I could be mistaken, I only started paying attention when the iPad became a thing and my friends and family were all getting them. I said it was a fad. Imagine, a $500-$700 computer that all you can do with it is play crappy disposable games and surf the net, you could have bought a netbook or a cheap laptop for $400-$500 to do the same thing... But I can admit when I'm wrong and, although I'm not entirely sure if I was wrong yet, the evidence is suggesting tablets aren't going to disappear tomorrow.
I'd have to argue that PCs last longer. I've never replaced a desktop or laptop more than once every four years. Using my family, which I understand is a very small non-representative sample.
I've had two laptops in the last 6 years, one is sitting in a closet being used as a media server for my house the other is my primary. I've never owned a tablet, but I'm thinking of getting one. I just don't know if I can justify it for the stuff I want to use it for (games and programming). It might be alright to take to the in-laws to read the morning news or surf the web rather than lugging my laptop back and forth. Or I could give one to my wife, since all she does is surf the web and play facebook games, and save some money on replacing her three year old over powered laptop, which I might turn into a Minecraft server.
I digress, In the last six years:
My brother has gone through three tablets and is looking at another one. iPad, playbook, iPad2, now looking at a Transformer. (3 tablets)
My younger sister took one of his old ones as her first tablet, but has since gone through two more and currently has an iPad2. iPad (hand-me-down lasted 3 months), iPad (dropped in pool), Kindle (not a hand-me-down), iPad2 (3 tablets, I didn't count the first iPad since it was a hand-me-down)
My Step-mother has had two tablets (one was a Kindle replaced by her kindle fire) (2 tables)
My mom, who lives in the states, has had more tablets than I care to mention, she comes to visit every year and for the last five years has a different model every time she's here. (5 tablets)
My Dad did get one, but he's barely touched it in three years. He's an old school developer and prefers something with a keyboard and mouse. iPad (1 tablet)
My older sister has had an iPad and a Kindle and currently has a surface RT. Her BF gave it to her two weeks ago and she hates it, too slow, too heavy, doesn't run the software she expected it to (because she thought she was getting a surface pro). Supposedly the BF is taking it back this week, but she wants another tablet to replace her original iPad, which runs like crap now. I recommended a Nexus if she didn't want iPad2 or iPad Air. I think she'll probably be going with the iPad Air since carrying weight matters to her as she travels a lot for her job. iPad, Kindle, Surface RT, TBA (3 tablets)
My Mother in-law is getting her first tablet for Christmas. ASUS Transformer Prime (1 tablet)
So of the people I know who have/use tablets that's about 2.5 tablets per person over the last six years. Where as between me an my wife three laptops over the last six years and the laptops get repurposed until the literally don't function anymore so they really last me between six to eight years. Tablets get handed down or tossed out because once they're not useful for everyday tasks anymore they sit around collecting dust.
That's just my take on it though.
If I could blow shit up with my wand I wouldn't be posting on /., I'd be out blowing shit up.
Figuring out who's simply walking by on the sidewalk and who's going to make a panic dash across the crossing - or not the crossing - to catch his bus or is absent-mindedly talking on his cell phone on the other hand without going into ultra-paranoid mode will be tougher.
Something human drivers can't do anyway. If a pedestrian bolts out and there's nothing an autonomous car can do to avoid them, reaction time measured in milliseconds, then there is nothing a human with much slower reaction time, measured in seconds, will be able to do to avoid them. I'd also trust an autonomous car to behave better than a human would, so many times I've seen a person slam on their breaks to avoid someone or something in the road only to spin out of control and end up on a side walk or off in the woods causing significantly more damage than just hitting the person that wasn't smart enough to pay attention to the ton of metal hurdling down the road at them.
People seem to think avoiding random or unexpected obstacle is something only humans can do, but it's so common place for humans to fail at it, it doesn't even make the news above the local level anymore. My city has a HUGE problem with pedestrians getting hit, just in crosswalks and not counting ones that are jay walking. Part of the problem as I see it is pedestrians are trained to think they have the right of way at all times so they don't bother thinking about if a car is watching for them, autonomous cars might change this and pedestrians will be required *by law* to only cross at designated locations after activating the proper signal.
The other part of the problem is drivers don't pay enough attention and don't follow the rules, which wouldn't be an issue with autonomous cars. It'll be really hard to explain how a vehicle with millisecond reaction time and sensors out the wazoo designed to avoid obstacles in front of them didn't yield the right of way when you gave the appropriate signal, flashing lights, hands out, someone standing facing the road at a crosswalk, all things I've seen human drivers mostly just ignore anyway.
Baring electronic/software failure, which can be linked back to maintenance team, or lack there of, or manufacture defect, or tampering. So nothing different from existing cars, with the exception that the operator won't be at fault for being over tired, not paying attention, not following the rules, being overly aggressive, refusing to yield the right of way, being drunk, and the list goes on.
but a "dumb" autonomous car is equivalent to the worst-case human driver -- it wouldn't even try to yield, traffic law notwithstanding.
Where did you get this gem from?
By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards, like deer and pedestrians, than people are. Seeing as people can only rely on what they see where as the cars use a whole host of sensors to detect objects that may not even be visible, like when it's foggy and/or at night).
There could be a big payoff there, as human operators are pretty bad at dealing with ice.
Human drivers are bad in every condition. An individual human may be an ok driver, but for every one competent person there's 20 more that should just drive into a tree to preemptively save someone else's life.
It really isn't that hard to make a system that drives better than the average person. People just don't want to accept that computers are, or could be made, better than us at just about everything.
+1 informative. Good stuff to know.