> Uber's algorithms responded but I would argue there was nothing correct about their response. At MINIMUM Uber should donate any extra profit generated to help offset the costs to the victims and/or refund the extra charges to those who sought out their service.
This is something that would be determined after the fact. For the first hour or two nobody knew what was actually happening, and sure as shit nobody was telling the Uber server farm about it so how is their system to know it's profiting off "terrorism"? For that matter as of this posting the authorities still haven't labeled it a terror attack.
Not to mention there's literally no reason for "them" to conquer Earth. Pretty much everything any conquering species in scifi has wanted already exists outside our gravity well in easy to acquire form for an interstellar travelling race. Independence Day they wanted resources and minerals, there's way more of that in the asteroid belt than you'll ever round up on Earth. ID2 they wanted "heat from the core of Earth"? What the hell man? You guys somehow miss the massive nuclear furnace in the center of the star system? Old school V lizards wanted water and food? Go round up a couple of nice sized comets and if us lowly humans can figure out cloning I'm pretty sure they can too.
> in fact for many people their daily commute will get slower as autonomous cars will follow all the laws (no sneaky 10 KPH over in light traffic)
That's not what causes rush hour traffic. What causes rush hour traffic is 20 cars at a red light each waiting.5 to 1.5 seconds for the car in front to observably start rolling through the light before the next one starts. When the cars can do that in.05 seconds, a lot more will make it through the traffic light.
On the highway many jams are "phantom" traffic jams caused by idiots spiking brakes and not allowing for proper following distances. Both of which SDCs will eliminate.
You are making a whole raft of incorrect assumptions. 500ms for an automated car to react to a car in front of it braking? Seriously? The cars are already constantly observing through both cameras and radar/lidar all other vehicles around them and tracking their positions. I would be astonished if the car couldn't react in 10ms to a change in one of the other cars' velocities. Hell, my dad's Acura has automatic braking that does better than a human if needed. It observes the car in front through radar and if the meatbag behind the wheel doesn't respond within a sufficient threshold to brake, the car does it for them.
You say "processing needs to be on-board". It already is. And nobody is even talking about centralized network control of cars. That's going to be a long time off, if ever. Centralized car control would make a really juicy terrorist target if nothing else - "Hey let's have every 4th car cross the centerline and have a head-on at 12:14pm". There will NOT be a "server" for the foreseeable future, if ever. The most you're going to get is cars communicating with each other short range within a couple hundred meters and stating their intentions and possibly negotiating minor alterations to those intentions like 'This vehicle needs to use the turn off in 600m, request clearance for lane change' and the like.
>and i don't want to be greeted by puke on the seat I want to sit down on
People already make extensive use of the carshare programs in the city I live in, this sort of thing is very rare as everything is logged and any offenders are simply reported by the next person to potentially use the car, the car is cleaned and a substantial cleaning fee is extracted from the offender's credit card. That seems to encourage good behavior. Plus I am sure in the SDC future there will probably be several tiers of these services and if someone doesn't want to deal with cars shared by the unwashed masses there will almost certainly be a service you can pay more for that also has the fancier Benzes and Audis with leather interiors, etc.
You're ignoring two aspects of the SDC though. One is what I alluded to - more automatic cars make for less congestion due to precision. The roadways can easily handle double or triple the volume of cars as they currently are if they were being driven by steely eyed robotic drivers instead of jittery mistake prone humans.
Secondly, a thing that will actually reduce road use is the increased use of transit. Right now a lot of people don't take the subway, LRT, train or even a bus because they would have to take a secondary transit connection to get there or drive and then have to deal with their car being parked all day. With self driving cars, the car can drop you off right at the subway entrance and then go park itself at home, and then you can summon it to meet you at the subway again on the way home. Or even better, you might not even own a car directly any longer and instead subscribe to an autonomous car-share service that will route a car to your house on demand in the morning to drop you off and another to pick you up at night.
I used to think that as well, but the stuff I've seen happen in the last 5 years makes me think it will be here a lot sooner than that. It wasn't that long ago that the DARPA challenge was looking to give a huge cash prize to someone who could build an autonomous vehicle that would do the stuff that the Google self driving car does daily now. Autonomous vehicles are getting way better very quickly. When Amazon announced their drone delivery testing I seriously thought it was some sort of viral markting joke/gimmick but they *are serious*. It's crazy how fast the tech has advanced in the past few years and now that the major carmakers have seen the writing on the wall and are throwing billions into the effort as well it's only going to accelerate.
Ding ding ding. Plus, what some people will actually do in a given situation *the first few times* vastly differs from what they will do afterward. Examples:
When I first flew in a plane I was glued to the window the whole trip. Now I take aisle seats.
I have a fear of heights and rented an apartment in a high rise on the 11th floor with a small balcony. When I first moved in I didn't even like going out the door onto the balcony because of my fear of heights. The railing looked too low and it didn't "feel" safe. By the time I moved out I would walk out onto the balcony without a second thought and even lean over the edge to look down without concern.
Nearly everyone who has anxiety about self driving cars will go through the same sort of process. What at first terrifies will quickly become boring when nothing bad happens. Then they will start looking around when they get driven, then they will get bored of that and engage in other diversions - watching video, reading, catching up on paperwork, etc.
Plus, even more importantly the statement "Autonomous Vehicles Won't Give Us Any More Free Time" is patently wrong. Once the roads are filled with autonomous cars, even the miniscule percentage of people whose anxiety doesn't get blunted by the boredom of familiarity will still get more time back in their day as the sheer number of automated cars cause traffic flow to be more efficient. I lived in a place once where it was a 45 minute drive downtown without traffic and 2 hours during rush hour. It would be entirely reasonable to expect that trip to be less than 75 minutes during rush hour once automation takes over so that guy gets a straight 1.5 hours of his day back.
However, it's a much more complex issue than that if you dig into it. According to copyright law, the photographers are the creators of those photos and have control over them. The subject was a minor and as such didn't have the authority to assign consent for use of them in the photos for various purposes - that falls to the parent or guardian who just happens to also be the content creator so naturally they would approve. And seeing as this is a non-commercial use, the previous point probably doesn't even apply.
It's annoying, but then again this is a world where there is a potentially valid argument being put forth that because a primate grabbed a camera that was pointed in its direction and in the process of handling the camera, pressed the shutter button, the primate in question "owns" the photo. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/08/06/monkey_selfie_who_owns_the_copyright.html
Except that the rope and brick method isn't intended to be an autopilot. More of a kinetic payload strike, so the fault would lie with the meatbag who sent the brick car on its course.
> The problem with waiting around for better data is that you're asking consumers to be the guinea pigs for an untested and potentially dangerous device.
Counterpoint: You HAVE seen the roads being filled with potentially dangerous and unqualified meatbags driving multi ton objects at lethals speeds, yes?
An autopilot car has never crashed because it was doing its makeup, talking on a cellphone, had too many at the local bar, fell asleep, argued with its wife and jerked the wheel around to punctuate a salient point, confused the gas and brake and run through a farm market crowd, or just straight up had a psychotic break and decided that running over a sidewalk full of people was a cool thing to do. All of the former have been done by meatbags, who will continue to do so.
>So again, can you explain me why Apple needs to remove functionality that is used everywhere (just go to any student party and watch how often people plug their smartphones with their music playlists into the analog jack of whatever speaker system is laying around*) just in the name of making the damn thing splash resistant ?
Because they're lying? Their true objective is multi pronged and appears to be all about pushing their own wireless standard for audio, with the secondary goal of encouraging re-purchase of wireless versions of accessories from their recently purchased Beats division.
I love people like you. You want to live somewhere that you don't need to pay taxes to support a society? Move to Somalia and fill your boots. Enjoy a "country" that doesn't have a functioning legal system, civil defense system, or law enforcement system. A few weeks there and it'll become really obvious what those "stolen" taxes pay for and why you want it.
Unfortunately it won't beyond the limited Apple scope. There's just way too many Bluetooth devices out there for audio. Headsets, portable speakers, car audio systems, even speaker-enabled light bulbs(!), all supporting a decade plus old standard and 90+% of the users think it's good enough for the job. Coming in and saying "this is a little better on audio quality and a little lighter on battery but you have to re-buy EVERYTHING and it'll be more expensive because of the Apple cut" is a non starter.
No standard Apple has come up with and licensed has ever made serious inroads outside of their own ecosystem where they can control/force its use. Firewire was better than USB, arguably Lightning was better and more convenient than USB 3 until C came along and neither of those went anywhere in the non Apple world. Most of the "innovation" that we credit Apple with pushing were not Apple tech at all, like ditching 5 1/4 in favor of 3 1/2 floppies, then getting rid of floppy drives altogether when thumb drives became cost competitive and better (and which relied on USB - a non Apple standard)
How so? Maybe his concern isn't stated elegantly, but it's a legitimate once regardless. The dongle is inconvenient and is far more prone to getting lost, misplaced or forgotten at home/work/somewhere than a device with a built in jack. I've stated it elsewhere. This is a cash grab/control play by Apple. They want to push their new W1 wireless tech (and collect licensing fees), they want to lock down the iPhone to a single port they fully control (and collect license fees on the Lightning accessories), and they wouldn't mind seeing how many Beats sets they can re-sell to people with W1 tech now that they bought Beats for $3B.
Actually it doesn't dispel the theory at all. They know damn well that people will lose the adapter and will buy others, either from Apple or their licensed vendors (who will pay licensing fees like Belkin). Furthermore they built in a NEW wireless tech called W1 that they are also rolling into the Beats line that they hope iPhone 7 owners will replace their existing wired Beats sets with. Anyone else who wants to use the W1 tech also will be paying licensing fees to Apple. And any Lightning device by a 3rd party will pay those same fees.
It's a great sentiment but a lot of people are simply not in a position to turn down even a paltry severance package. Some people have kids to feed, some people are bad with money, some people just have rotten luck and get hit with expenses they can't ignore.
For current x86 we may have hit a plateau of sorts yes, but there are still potentially game changing things off in the distance. If HP or someone else ever brings The Machine (memristors) to life that will be revolutionary, as well as quantum computing potentially holds a lot of promise. But both of those are a ways off in practical terms.
Nexus 7 2012 was... OK. Nexus 7 2013 was a huge improvement. I still have mine and use it daily. I was looking forward to a replacement in 2014 or 2015 but they brought out the Nexus 9 - which is too big for my jacket pocket - and wanted twice as much for it so I passed. If this new one is in the $250 range again, I might finally consider a replacement for my 2013 7.
The problem is it's the mindset and everyone seems to have it these days. "Oh, bandwidth isn't limited" "processors are more powerful" etc. You get a program built with 10 pieces of separate code that everyone failed to optimize and suddenly it's sucking 3x the bandwidth and 5x the processing power that it would have if everyone involved actually thought about optimization.
Where I work we go back and refactor a lot of our code and queries when we have opportunities to do so and in some cases it's horrifying the waste that's been put up with. A SQL query that "works" but takes 30 seconds gets rewritten properly and now takes.3 seconds. Back when that was the only app on that server it ran faster so it was "no big deal" but now it saves hours of batch processing time per day. And this is EVERYWHERE. People wonder why their octa-core phones run barely faster than phones from 3 years ago? Shitloads of wasteful coding in those app design tools is my guess.
> x265 is not very important except for 4K content and mobile phones.
This is exactly the mindset that leads to waste, inefficiency and bloat. If you can save even 5% on bandwidth, which is a limited resource, WHY NOT DO IT? And this is way more than 5%.
Nope, you can't. However, what's to day we *know* all of them yet? If he's right and this works, then it means we have to examine why it does and possibly adjust our understanding to date. If it doesn't, carry on as usual.
Slashdot Mirror
No, there is zero news or information on that.
There is an article on Sony buying Valve from April 1, 2014, but that lacks credibility for obvious reasons.
> Uber's algorithms responded but I would argue there was nothing correct about their response. At MINIMUM Uber should donate any extra profit generated to help offset the costs to the victims and/or refund the extra charges to those who sought out their service.
This is something that would be determined after the fact. For the first hour or two nobody knew what was actually happening, and sure as shit nobody was telling the Uber server farm about it so how is their system to know it's profiting off "terrorism"? For that matter as of this posting the authorities still haven't labeled it a terror attack.
Not to mention there's literally no reason for "them" to conquer Earth. Pretty much everything any conquering species in scifi has wanted already exists outside our gravity well in easy to acquire form for an interstellar travelling race. Independence Day they wanted resources and minerals, there's way more of that in the asteroid belt than you'll ever round up on Earth. ID2 they wanted "heat from the core of Earth"? What the hell man? You guys somehow miss the massive nuclear furnace in the center of the star system? Old school V lizards wanted water and food? Go round up a couple of nice sized comets and if us lowly humans can figure out cloning I'm pretty sure they can too.
> in fact for many people their daily commute will get slower as autonomous cars will follow all the laws (no sneaky 10 KPH over in light traffic)
That's not what causes rush hour traffic. What causes rush hour traffic is 20 cars at a red light each waiting .5 to 1.5 seconds for the car in front to observably start rolling through the light before the next one starts. When the cars can do that in .05 seconds, a lot more will make it through the traffic light.
On the highway many jams are "phantom" traffic jams caused by idiots spiking brakes and not allowing for proper following distances. Both of which SDCs will eliminate.
http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160428-how-ai-will-solve-traffic-part-one
You are making a whole raft of incorrect assumptions. 500ms for an automated car to react to a car in front of it braking? Seriously? The cars are already constantly observing through both cameras and radar/lidar all other vehicles around them and tracking their positions. I would be astonished if the car couldn't react in 10ms to a change in one of the other cars' velocities. Hell, my dad's Acura has automatic braking that does better than a human if needed. It observes the car in front through radar and if the meatbag behind the wheel doesn't respond within a sufficient threshold to brake, the car does it for them.
You say "processing needs to be on-board". It already is. And nobody is even talking about centralized network control of cars. That's going to be a long time off, if ever. Centralized car control would make a really juicy terrorist target if nothing else - "Hey let's have every 4th car cross the centerline and have a head-on at 12:14pm". There will NOT be a "server" for the foreseeable future, if ever. The most you're going to get is cars communicating with each other short range within a couple hundred meters and stating their intentions and possibly negotiating minor alterations to those intentions like 'This vehicle needs to use the turn off in 600m, request clearance for lane change' and the like.
>and i don't want to be greeted by puke on the seat I want to sit down on
People already make extensive use of the carshare programs in the city I live in, this sort of thing is very rare as everything is logged and any offenders are simply reported by the next person to potentially use the car, the car is cleaned and a substantial cleaning fee is extracted from the offender's credit card. That seems to encourage good behavior. Plus I am sure in the SDC future there will probably be several tiers of these services and if someone doesn't want to deal with cars shared by the unwashed masses there will almost certainly be a service you can pay more for that also has the fancier Benzes and Audis with leather interiors, etc.
You're ignoring two aspects of the SDC though. One is what I alluded to - more automatic cars make for less congestion due to precision. The roadways can easily handle double or triple the volume of cars as they currently are if they were being driven by steely eyed robotic drivers instead of jittery mistake prone humans.
Secondly, a thing that will actually reduce road use is the increased use of transit. Right now a lot of people don't take the subway, LRT, train or even a bus because they would have to take a secondary transit connection to get there or drive and then have to deal with their car being parked all day. With self driving cars, the car can drop you off right at the subway entrance and then go park itself at home, and then you can summon it to meet you at the subway again on the way home. Or even better, you might not even own a car directly any longer and instead subscribe to an autonomous car-share service that will route a car to your house on demand in the morning to drop you off and another to pick you up at night.
I used to think that as well, but the stuff I've seen happen in the last 5 years makes me think it will be here a lot sooner than that. It wasn't that long ago that the DARPA challenge was looking to give a huge cash prize to someone who could build an autonomous vehicle that would do the stuff that the Google self driving car does daily now. Autonomous vehicles are getting way better very quickly. When Amazon announced their drone delivery testing I seriously thought it was some sort of viral markting joke/gimmick but they *are serious*. It's crazy how fast the tech has advanced in the past few years and now that the major carmakers have seen the writing on the wall and are throwing billions into the effort as well it's only going to accelerate.
But we're not talking about today. If we were having this conversation about aircraft in 1912 you could say exactly the same thing.
Once the tech is mature enough to be widely used it will be as safe or safer than flying is today.
Exactly this. If they put it in their company or product's name, you can be quite sure that it's lacking in the company or product.
Ding ding ding. Plus, what some people will actually do in a given situation *the first few times* vastly differs from what they will do afterward. Examples:
When I first flew in a plane I was glued to the window the whole trip. Now I take aisle seats.
I have a fear of heights and rented an apartment in a high rise on the 11th floor with a small balcony. When I first moved in I didn't even like going out the door onto the balcony because of my fear of heights. The railing looked too low and it didn't "feel" safe. By the time I moved out I would walk out onto the balcony without a second thought and even lean over the edge to look down without concern.
Nearly everyone who has anxiety about self driving cars will go through the same sort of process. What at first terrifies will quickly become boring when nothing bad happens. Then they will start looking around when they get driven, then they will get bored of that and engage in other diversions - watching video, reading, catching up on paperwork, etc.
Plus, even more importantly the statement "Autonomous Vehicles Won't Give Us Any More Free Time" is patently wrong. Once the roads are filled with autonomous cars, even the miniscule percentage of people whose anxiety doesn't get blunted by the boredom of familiarity will still get more time back in their day as the sheer number of automated cars cause traffic flow to be more efficient. I lived in a place once where it was a 45 minute drive downtown without traffic and 2 hours during rush hour. It would be entirely reasonable to expect that trip to be less than 75 minutes during rush hour once automation takes over so that guy gets a straight 1.5 hours of his day back.
However, it's a much more complex issue than that if you dig into it. According to copyright law, the photographers are the creators of those photos and have control over them. The subject was a minor and as such didn't have the authority to assign consent for use of them in the photos for various purposes - that falls to the parent or guardian who just happens to also be the content creator so naturally they would approve. And seeing as this is a non-commercial use, the previous point probably doesn't even apply.
It's annoying, but then again this is a world where there is a potentially valid argument being put forth that because a primate grabbed a camera that was pointed in its direction and in the process of handling the camera, pressed the shutter button, the primate in question "owns" the photo.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/08/06/monkey_selfie_who_owns_the_copyright.html
Except that the rope and brick method isn't intended to be an autopilot. More of a kinetic payload strike, so the fault would lie with the meatbag who sent the brick car on its course.
> The problem with waiting around for better data is that you're asking consumers to be the guinea pigs for an untested and potentially dangerous device.
Counterpoint: You HAVE seen the roads being filled with potentially dangerous and unqualified meatbags driving multi ton objects at lethals speeds, yes?
An autopilot car has never crashed because it was doing its makeup, talking on a cellphone, had too many at the local bar, fell asleep, argued with its wife and jerked the wheel around to punctuate a salient point, confused the gas and brake and run through a farm market crowd, or just straight up had a psychotic break and decided that running over a sidewalk full of people was a cool thing to do. All of the former have been done by meatbags, who will continue to do so.
Look into their W1 tech. It's Bluetooth "with more". As we know, that always works out well for global compatibility...
>So again, can you explain me why Apple needs to remove functionality that is used everywhere (just go to any student party and watch how often people plug their smartphones with their music playlists into the analog jack of whatever speaker system is laying around*) just in the name of making the damn thing splash resistant ?
Because they're lying? Their true objective is multi pronged and appears to be all about pushing their own wireless standard for audio, with the secondary goal of encouraging re-purchase of wireless versions of accessories from their recently purchased Beats division.
Basically it's all about money.
I love people like you. You want to live somewhere that you don't need to pay taxes to support a society? Move to Somalia and fill your boots. Enjoy a "country" that doesn't have a functioning legal system, civil defense system, or law enforcement system. A few weeks there and it'll become really obvious what those "stolen" taxes pay for and why you want it.
Unfortunately it won't beyond the limited Apple scope. There's just way too many Bluetooth devices out there for audio. Headsets, portable speakers, car audio systems, even speaker-enabled light bulbs(!), all supporting a decade plus old standard and 90+% of the users think it's good enough for the job. Coming in and saying "this is a little better on audio quality and a little lighter on battery but you have to re-buy EVERYTHING and it'll be more expensive because of the Apple cut" is a non starter.
No standard Apple has come up with and licensed has ever made serious inroads outside of their own ecosystem where they can control/force its use. Firewire was better than USB, arguably Lightning was better and more convenient than USB 3 until C came along and neither of those went anywhere in the non Apple world. Most of the "innovation" that we credit Apple with pushing were not Apple tech at all, like ditching 5 1/4 in favor of 3 1/2 floppies, then getting rid of floppy drives altogether when thumb drives became cost competitive and better (and which relied on USB - a non Apple standard)
How so? Maybe his concern isn't stated elegantly, but it's a legitimate once regardless. The dongle is inconvenient and is far more prone to getting lost, misplaced or forgotten at home/work/somewhere than a device with a built in jack. I've stated it elsewhere. This is a cash grab/control play by Apple. They want to push their new W1 wireless tech (and collect licensing fees), they want to lock down the iPhone to a single port they fully control (and collect license fees on the Lightning accessories), and they wouldn't mind seeing how many Beats sets they can re-sell to people with W1 tech now that they bought Beats for $3B.
Actually it doesn't dispel the theory at all. They know damn well that people will lose the adapter and will buy others, either from Apple or their licensed vendors (who will pay licensing fees like Belkin). Furthermore they built in a NEW wireless tech called W1 that they are also rolling into the Beats line that they hope iPhone 7 owners will replace their existing wired Beats sets with. Anyone else who wants to use the W1 tech also will be paying licensing fees to Apple. And any Lightning device by a 3rd party will pay those same fees.
Basically it's a cash grab.
It's a great sentiment but a lot of people are simply not in a position to turn down even a paltry severance package. Some people have kids to feed, some people are bad with money, some people just have rotten luck and get hit with expenses they can't ignore.
For current x86 we may have hit a plateau of sorts yes, but there are still potentially game changing things off in the distance. If HP or someone else ever brings The Machine (memristors) to life that will be revolutionary, as well as quantum computing potentially holds a lot of promise. But both of those are a ways off in practical terms.
Nexus 7 2012 was ... OK. Nexus 7 2013 was a huge improvement. I still have mine and use it daily. I was looking forward to a replacement in 2014 or 2015 but they brought out the Nexus 9 - which is too big for my jacket pocket - and wanted twice as much for it so I passed. If this new one is in the $250 range again, I might finally consider a replacement for my 2013 7.
The problem is it's the mindset and everyone seems to have it these days. "Oh, bandwidth isn't limited" "processors are more powerful" etc. You get a program built with 10 pieces of separate code that everyone failed to optimize and suddenly it's sucking 3x the bandwidth and 5x the processing power that it would have if everyone involved actually thought about optimization.
Where I work we go back and refactor a lot of our code and queries when we have opportunities to do so and in some cases it's horrifying the waste that's been put up with. A SQL query that "works" but takes 30 seconds gets rewritten properly and now takes .3 seconds. Back when that was the only app on that server it ran faster so it was "no big deal" but now it saves hours of batch processing time per day. And this is EVERYWHERE. People wonder why their octa-core phones run barely faster than phones from 3 years ago? Shitloads of wasteful coding in those app design tools is my guess.
> x265 is not very important except for 4K content and mobile phones.
This is exactly the mindset that leads to waste, inefficiency and bloat. If you can save even 5% on bandwidth, which is a limited resource, WHY NOT DO IT? And this is way more than 5%.
Nope, you can't. However, what's to day we *know* all of them yet? If he's right and this works, then it means we have to examine why it does and possibly adjust our understanding to date. If it doesn't, carry on as usual.