Well the 7-11/grocery divide is perfectly healthy -- they provide essentially the same service but with different benefits (one's open 24hr with higher prices to cover the cost of keeping employees around/etc while the other has lower prices and generally a better selection but you're running on their clock.)
The problem with having that level of competition in the communications market is the excessively high cost of entry. Simply running that much wire is an enormous price and then you have to factor in regulatory BS, right-of-ways, challenges from incumbents every step of the way, etc.
The wiring issues in particular make communications a bit of a natural monopoly. Yes you technically CAN run parallel lines everywhere as the cable companies have done but its extremely inefficient when you look at it from the perspective of society as a whole rather than any single company.
Up here in Canada there's an (unfortunately small) push to separate the lines from the service providers (I don't see it happening any time soon but its been brought up a few times.) Of course given the current political climate up here, I'm sure they'd just pass the lines to some new private company even if they did that and all we'd be doing is shifting the problem rather than solving it.
I've always maintained that natural monopolies should lie in the governments' hands. Sure they might not be the most efficient profit-wise but they tend to be a hell of a lot more trustworthy when it comes to not screwing their customers over just because they can (that's what tax increases are for!) If for no other reason than because their books are open and everyone can see if they're charging 10000% markups (being a monopoly, natural or otherwise, there is no free market to prevent this so other forces need to step in to fill that void. Namely, government oversight.)
For the same reason things at 7-11 cost more than your average grocery store -- people are willing to pay a premium for convenience and there's not enough competition to have market forces driving prices down.
That's something that amused me when we had a minority govt up here in Canada.. you were starting to hear people complaining about how "slow" government was with a minority. Which to my ears basically sounded like "WTF they're actually spending time debating the bills? Outrageous!" Couldn't believe my ears when I heard that complaint the first time.
As long as dvds are $5-10 cheaper than the bluray equivalent, you can bet people will still buy them. I'm not entirely sure why they don't just price the two the same and drive dvds out of the market -- I can't imagine its cheap to run two production streams for basically the same thing never mind the shelf space issues for retailers. I understand trying to bilk early adopters but bluray is long past the "early adopter" phase.
I could kind of understand it if they were just hoping the late adopters would turn around and re-buy all of their movies on bluray when they finally make the switch but that seems like a dead-end thought pattern. These are the people who were too cheap to buy a bluray in the first place so at best they're going to wait until things are on sale and basically not be paying much more than the initial price difference except delayed by potentially years.
But whatever. In the meantime I just have to be careful to get the right damned version of things. Amazon in particular is horrible for trying to sell me the dvd versions of whatever even though I buy exclusively bluray titles (and obviously own a ps3 based on my game purchases.. if their algorithms were smart enough to realize that the ps3 can play blurays.) That is, I mostly buy bluray titles. Occasionally they'll catch me when I'm not paying enough attention and I'll end up buying the wrong version. That's a right pissoff when that happens.
In particular, what is "Government"? Any organizationâ"any organization at allâ"that confiscates resources by threat of strike-first violence is a "governmental" organization. When one such organization becomes a monopoly, we call that organization "Government".
No, an organization that confiscates resources by threat of violence could be any organization whatsoever. Do you consider the drug cartels in Mexico to be the "government?" Absolutely not. They have their own democratically elected government, for better or worse.
"The government" is the body that makes the laws. Yes in some cases that happens to also be the violent warlords, cartels, etc but that's by no means a necessity. And yes, a government of any type requires a means to enforce said laws. There's a huge difference between using the threat of violence for legal enforcement vs using the threat of violence for confiscation. (Or using the threat of violence to stifle dissent or any other purpose.)
Government inevitably becomes just another bad company in the market place
I imagine most governments are terrible companies in the market place because that's not their realm of operation. They exist to oversee the public good (definition of "public" being the general distinction between types of government -- from monarchs who think they are the public to fully democratic systems where the public tries to protect itself to fully social system where big brother tries to protect his "siblings." All in theory of course!)
one that doesn't go out of business because it is able to confiscate your resources by threat of violence
You have to go a LONG way down the tax evasion line before actual violence is threatened. At some base level yes, the police will enforce the laws, but from a higher level perspective tax isn't a "confiscation" its a shared pool of resources that is (supposed to be) used for the purpose of keeping all other shared resources healthy for the public to use.
it doesn't give you the goods and services for which you personally think you are paying, but you have to pay them anyway
I suppose you never drive on a road, are perfectly happy if your house burns down and nobody comes to rescue you, don't care if children get educated, don't care if your country gets invaded and you can't defend yourself, don't care if your air gets polluted as per my previous theoretical situation, etc. Its absolutely true that the US government in particular has been using tax money to further the ends of individuals and corporations who hold too much sway over Washington for the past few decades but that's mainly because the US government is too close to the free market, not because its too far away. The free market equates money with power and that's not an system any government should run under if they are intending to provide services for the entire public rather than just the rich.
it's totally absurd and unconscionable.
Why do you think that? Because you don't like paying taxes? Most people don't like paying taxes but luckily the majority of us understand that our governing bodies don't operate in a magic land where everything is free only for them. They have to obtain operational money from somewhere.
It is not a modern value to coerce resources from people by threat of violence. So, in fact, Government is actually the last barbaric vestige of a pre-modern civilization.
The only reason its not a modern value is because we've invented governmental systems that allow deterrents to arbitrary violence. I'm not entirely sure what your alternative is. A purely free market cannot exist (at least in the real world) as I've previously stated even on its own merits, never mind taking into consideration in the guy who happens to be able to afford the biggest club and decides he's not a fan of anyone besides him being free, markets included -- and a guy like with always come around sooner or later unless someone manages to genetically engineer the asshole gene out of our species.
However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual!
This statement is absurdly false. If this were true, there would be no tragedy of the commons to talk about because everyone would be on the look out for such situations.
The tragedy of the commons happens because somebody does benefit from screwing everyone else over. In this particular case, if the beef industry was at all concerned with the tragedy of the commons, they would have abandoned antibiotic over-application years ago when resistant bacteria were first discovered.
The free market fails because some things simply are necessarily shared -- the air we breathe for example. By your "free" market, you're perfectly free to pollute the air above your land as much as you want. But unless you've figured out how to control the wind, that polluted air is going to affect all of your neighbors.
You, being the awesome capitalist that you are, see no reason to spend money installing air filters because what do you care? If you don't like the pollution yourself you just go ahead and use the money you saved on air filtering to buy a nice house a few miles away where it doesn't affect your personally.
So now we're in a situation with one of three outcomes: - Your neighbors coerce you into installing air filters against your will. - Your neighbors have to install their own air filters (essentially being coerced by your lack of care, to use your terminology.) - Your neighbors just have to live with it (essentially being coerced to breathe bad air by your lack of care.)
In all of those cases, some form of market-breaking coercion is in effect. And its unavoidable as long as air is able to freely move across our arbitrarily defined boundaries.
Now you might say this is just an opportunity for more capitalism -- someone can just start producing air filters and make a fortune! This is true but it doesn't negate the fact that we're buying those air filters due to an initial breakdown in the market caused by you damaging an unavoidably shared resource.
And that's an example with fairly immediate and obvious impacts. Something like the antibiotic resistance is neither immediate nor obvious, so you don't even have to be a complete jerk to screw up the free market -- you can manage to do so completely unintentionally.
The free market works great under perfect conditions with a complete lack of externalities and a complete lack of barriers to entry. Unfortunately the real world doesn't have such conditions. The free market can still work well in the real world but some control must be influenced in order to prevent destroying public resources, prevent unnatural monopolies, keep natural monopolies in check and so forth. As usual, its very debatable exactly how much control is necessary for these purposes but it should be fairly obvious that the answer is neither "none" nor "total" but somewhere in between.
Fishing instructions are worthless to anyone who can't read or doesn't have a fishing boat.
I'm sure you can get instructions on the basics of boat design if you looked. Probably with pictures.
Pharmaceutical information is worthless to anyone who is 1,000 kilometers away from the nearest pharmacy.
Learning natural alternatives might be possible though. And learning concepts like lobbying to have a pharmacy built locally.
New farming techniques are worthless to anyone that is unable to farm because all the fertile land has been seized by the local warlord.
But learning that there exists a life where such warlords don't exist (or at least have significantly less power) can lead to revolutionary ideals being born.
Knowledge is nice, but it isn't quite as powerful as you might think.
Only because you're trying to answer the wrong question. The question shouldn't be "will this specific knowledge help this specific scenario at this specific time?" You never know what knowledge may come in handy tomorrow or next year or twenty years from now.
That's the great thing about knowledge. It may not always help but it never hurts. Somebody is always thinking up a new way to use their knowledge that nobody else has thought of. Really, teaching any specific piece of knowledge isn't an end goal -- the end goal is getting people to enjoy learning and be able gain additional knowledge on their own (whether by further learning or by discovering things themselves.) "Knowledge is empowering" is perhaps a better catch phrase.
Of course depending on how dire the immediate situation is in whatever target area you're looking at, knowledge alone might not be sufficient as several commenters have pointed out. It doesn't matter how brilliant a girl could be when she grows up if she dies of starvation or a terrorist act or whatever before she gets there.
You're dealing with a slightly different definition of "public." In your case, it appears you mean "public" in the sense that "anyone can view it."
This isn't quite the same as what someone means when they say posting on Facebook is "public." In that case, the definition is slightly changed to "people I have no control over can view it," which does not necessarily imply anyone but its certainly no longer just a private message between yourself and the intended recipients. FB retains the right to pass it along to their business partners, police organizations, random government agencies or whoever else they feel like (and that's just assuming they don't violate their own privacy policy!)
Not to mention anyone who hacks into FB's servers, the government servers, the business partners' servers or any of the transmission lines. And anyone who may in the future buy out FB and/or one of those business partners -- and could additionally have completely different privacy policies that expose your message even more parties you have no control over.
And on top of having no control over any of that, you also don't even have any way to find out that its happened. At this point though, you may as well just assume that it has as soon as you hit the post button.
All of those "privacy" controls these websites give you really only let you control whats visible via the web interface itself -- there's little, if any, guarantee that those controls have any effect on all of that behind-the-scenes sharing.
Your mom may not ever get to see that video of you smoking the foot long doobie but you can bet the FBI will have the ability to dig it up if they decide they need a vague but plausible reason to get a search warrant for your house or something.
while (1) {// Do something
if (condition) break;// Do more stuff }
Is perfectly valid and used frequently. Basically instead of having the loop conditional at the beginning (while(){}) or at the end (do{}while()) you want it somewhere in the middle. Sure there may be ways to transform the loop to move the condition to one end or the other but in many cases all you're really accomplishing is making the code harder to understand.
The problem usually isn't with removing lines like that on its own, its when those kind of lines are "created" by other optimizations in ways that the programmer isn't expecting that leads to problems.
I don't think that's the problem the OP is referring to. The problem is that the compiler assumes *a is invalid and "optimizes" it even if the realloc returned the same memory address, making (a==b) true. If the compiler did nothing (*a==*b) should also be true but because the compiler replaced it with something incorrect, (*a!=*b) ends up being true instead.
That's the problem with loose standards -- if the behavior is undefined, there will be people who through ignorance or "cleverness" will end up abusing the undefined behavior of a specific system (in this case compiler) and have their code break in ways that are sometimes extremely difficult to debug -- especially if its been working that way so long that you've forgotten its technically an undefined behavior -- you end up completely overlooking the culprit line of code because it looks correct to you.
Could replace it with a 300kg moose if you like and still run into the same problem. If you're going highway speeds (100km/h say) with a gap of only 1m, you have 0.036 seconds to react to whatever the car in front of you is doing. That's certainly plenty of time for the computers to calculate what they need to do but if the lead car suddenly gets slowed down by the force of impact to say 90km/h, is the braking of the car behind it going to be able to detect and adjust for that 10km/h within the given 0.036s? Seems like a heck of a speed decrease for a car's braking system but I don't know all of the equations involved so maybe it is..
The rocks the guy below mentioned (or a tree or something) are also a possibility, but one would hope that they'd only fall under this scenario if you happened to be driving through right as a rock slide started or the tree fell. I would hope that if the situation was pre-existing, the autonomous system in the lead car would notice and do something about it (stop and/or avoid) long before it fell under the scenario being described.
I agree though that overall, the autonomous system is likely to do better at a 1m gap between cars than humans would. I'm just not convinced that "better" is going to be good enough to justify tailgating that close in the first place.
And not only that, but the current gapping recommendations (2-4s depending on weather and road conditions) includes a fair bit of time for a human to notice, process and react to a problem -- most of that time could probably be done away with so the gapping could theoretically decrease by quite a bit and retain current safety standards if the computer program is only just as good as a human (but much faster.)
Weather and construction will definitely have to be figured out before these go mainstream no question about it.
As for "odd situations.." The question isn't "can it handle every odd situation better than a person" but "can it handle more odd situations better than a person?" Or at least a comparable amount. They don't even have to be the same odd situations. A child running out from behind a car is something the human would have to predict but the car could potentially measure. In the human's case, you don't even know the child is there and have to rely on secondary information ("hmm a soccer ball just came flying out from behind that car maybe I'd better stop") while the computer could potentially be using primary information (using IR cameras for example it could actually see the child and make a measurement of the child's movements in addition to also seeing the soccer ball.)
All of that would require incredibly complex and intelligent software no question about it and I can't begin to guess how far along Google or anyone else really is with such software.
All I can really say is we need to stop coming up with one-off "what ifs" that we (in general) assume the computer can't handle and start measuring the aggregate total situations and their probabilities. If the car is going to do better than me (or as good) in 9 out of 10 "odd" situations, I'll happily take that over the 1 out of 10 where I'd do better.
Even if we're equal on 8 of those 10 and each of us is only better in one situation, its still a win in my book as it means I don't have to deal with those other 8 myself and can focus my energy on other things.
If it was cheap enough, this wouldn't necessarily be horrible (well, assuming they had some competition in the market of course..)
If we take an average of say $16k for a low-mid range new vehicle and fully depreciate it over 10 years (ie: equivalent to $1600/yr or a bit over $30/wk or a bit over $4/day.) Add fuel and insurance costs to that $4/day and you could probably have $10-15/day worth of alternative transportation before you start really losing money on the deal.
Of course that's still far far less than current taxi services are willing to offer for any significant trip (at least any I've seen) and also ignores the possibility of picking up a much cheaper used car and additionally ignores the requirement of having enough taxis in service to actually get everyone where they need to go when they need to get there (that last one being the biggest stumbling block by far -- needing thousands upon thousands of vehicles in service for rush hour each day.. all just sitting there idle the rest of the time.)
This fails miserably when both parties are accusing each other of the offense -- at least one of the parties is going to have to offer up some evidence and that's where "the data" comes in.
That is, they aren't trying to prove their own innocence directly -- they're trying to prove the other party's guilt (which generally also "proves" their innocence to be sure, as we don't often hear much about shared liability cases.)
How well that would work in practice vs how much is just marketing BS is up for grabs (and most likely can only be answered by having a few such cases go to trial -- so several years from now at best.)
No, but the cameras could be equipped to look into the IR spectrum and see a child (or dog or other such heat profile) and attempt to determine whether its moving into the street or not.
Can never predict 100% of everything of course and even if you predict it you might be too late to prevent it but the computer's got far far more sensory input (potentially) available and is significantly faster at making mathematical calculations such as "trajectory of that IR blob that's behind the vehicle." than any human.
At the end of the day, there's not really any question about these vehicles having the potential to be safer than human drivers -- its basically all about the software implementation. If they can do enough stuff and handle enough special cases in the software, then as a human you will simply be outclassed in every situation except one -- having a "bad feeling" and stopping for only that reason. I would hazard to say that the number of times that's used as a successful accident avoidance mechanism pales a lot in comparison to the more common scenario of just not noticing something in time.
The software designed for your average Corolla certainly won't (well, I'm sure some company will take a shortcut and try to leave the code there but "disabled" -- which will immediately be reenabled by somebody who's got more brains than survival instinct.)
But there's nothing stopping us from having a different set of software for fire trucks, ambulances, big rigs, buses, etc. All of these different vehicles have different usage patterns and assuming that there would be a one-size-fits-all software product is pretty naive.
Of course, that's probably a bit further in the future. The initial goal is to replace the 90% of vehicles that are used purely for daily commuting. Once that's down, they can start looking into the more specialized vehicles and we'll just have to trust our ambulance drivers until then.
Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if they start equipping ambulances (and such) with a transmitter of some sort to inform the autonomous vehicles that its coming through -- same as they're already equipped with lights and sirens to inform other humans that its coming through. The software might not be setup to drive an ambulance but you can be pretty sure it'll have some functionality to allow for ambulances sharing the road with it.
Huge difference though: - Both you and the cop have a copy of the ticket, so he can't pull you over for a 10mph ticket and then secretly write it up as 25mph after he's done with you. Nor could you take your copy and do the opposite.
- Police officers in general are in a position of trust (whether its warranted isn't always clear, but its necessary nonetheless for them to do their jobs.) That includes trusting that the officer won't try and do something like this (on the threat of losing their jobs and potentially facing civil or criminal charges themselves if they're caught.)
None of that is really relevant to whether or not its possible to have an open source and still tamper-proof data log. But the answer is "sure why not." Just have the log storage in a "black box" with a tamper-proof seal and an external interface that only allows appends and reads (no modify or delete.)
All of the components could be completely open source / open hardware as long a sufficiently tamper-proof seal can be designed in such a way that it couldn't be re-built without detection should someone attempt to tamper. I'm sure someone clever could come up with such a thing (and probably already has long ago, though I wouldn't know where to look for one, open or not.)
Of course, you probably don't want users being able to muck around with their car's software anyway if safety is a concern (which it is!) Hacking a 1-2ton machine that barrels down the highway at 80mph is a bit more serious of a risk to yourself and others than hacking at Linux kernel on your test box where the worst that happens is you have to hit the power button and try again.
So you could STILL have open everything -- but the implementation would have to be further locked down to prevent unproven hacks from being installed on actual vehicles. Which kind of defeats the purpose to some degree (still leaves the "many eyes" bug-hunting argument for open source but not the "anyone can muck with it" argument.)
Then again, that's kind of needed for closed software as well since there's enough smart people out there who are able to reverse-engineer and start hacking at damned near anything without the source!
Not to mention a well designed autonomous program is likely far better at handling wear and tear situations than human drivers to boot. At the very least, it could simply pop up a warning telling the user that the car is unsafe and refuse to go anywhere until its repaired.
More to the point, it makes a lot of assumptions about the car's computer being able to identify and predict _everything_. If a deer jumps out in front of the lead car that for whatever reason didn't register on camera half a mile back, that lead car is likely to hit it. And if they're running bumper-to-bumper, all of the cars behind the lead will in turn pile up.
160km/h safely works fine when the lead car can predict a stopping point and notify the cars behind it that its time to hit the brakes, but the best written and most well maintained computerized vehicle in the world isn't going to be able to predict 100% of everything so your only option is to leave enough spacing to compensate.
You like your computer networks decentralized, why not your government? Local is better.
Exactly what part of the common network protocol specifications is decentralized? Last I checked all of the globally useful protocols were defined by a very centralized standards organization. The endpoints might be decentralized but if there wasn't some form of governing body to make sure it all works together, then you wouldn't have things like this forum to post stupid comments on -- or at least you'd only have a significantly smaller "local" version.
Yes, too much government can be bad. Not enough government is worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the 7-11/grocery divide is perfectly healthy -- they provide essentially the same service but with different benefits (one's open 24hr with higher prices to cover the cost of keeping employees around/etc while the other has lower prices and generally a better selection but you're running on their clock.)
The problem with having that level of competition in the communications market is the excessively high cost of entry. Simply running that much wire is an enormous price and then you have to factor in regulatory BS, right-of-ways, challenges from incumbents every step of the way, etc.
The wiring issues in particular make communications a bit of a natural monopoly. Yes you technically CAN run parallel lines everywhere as the cable companies have done but its extremely inefficient when you look at it from the perspective of society as a whole rather than any single company.
Up here in Canada there's an (unfortunately small) push to separate the lines from the service providers (I don't see it happening any time soon but its been brought up a few times.) Of course given the current political climate up here, I'm sure they'd just pass the lines to some new private company even if they did that and all we'd be doing is shifting the problem rather than solving it.
I've always maintained that natural monopolies should lie in the governments' hands. Sure they might not be the most efficient profit-wise but they tend to be a hell of a lot more trustworthy when it comes to not screwing their customers over just because they can (that's what tax increases are for!) If for no other reason than because their books are open and everyone can see if they're charging 10000% markups (being a monopoly, natural or otherwise, there is no free market to prevent this so other forces need to step in to fill that void. Namely, government oversight.)
For the same reason things at 7-11 cost more than your average grocery store -- people are willing to pay a premium for convenience and there's not enough competition to have market forces driving prices down.
* vs. plowing the resources that would be used to maintain POTS into executives' pockets*.
FTFY.
That's something that amused me when we had a minority govt up here in Canada.. you were starting to hear people complaining about how "slow" government was with a minority. Which to my ears basically sounded like "WTF they're actually spending time debating the bills? Outrageous!" Couldn't believe my ears when I heard that complaint the first time.
Just use the internet kill switch.. that'll unpublish it fast enough!
As long as dvds are $5-10 cheaper than the bluray equivalent, you can bet people will still buy them. I'm not entirely sure why they don't just price the two the same and drive dvds out of the market -- I can't imagine its cheap to run two production streams for basically the same thing never mind the shelf space issues for retailers. I understand trying to bilk early adopters but bluray is long past the "early adopter" phase.
I could kind of understand it if they were just hoping the late adopters would turn around and re-buy all of their movies on bluray when they finally make the switch but that seems like a dead-end thought pattern. These are the people who were too cheap to buy a bluray in the first place so at best they're going to wait until things are on sale and basically not be paying much more than the initial price difference except delayed by potentially years.
But whatever. In the meantime I just have to be careful to get the right damned version of things. Amazon in particular is horrible for trying to sell me the dvd versions of whatever even though I buy exclusively bluray titles (and obviously own a ps3 based on my game purchases.. if their algorithms were smart enough to realize that the ps3 can play blurays.) That is, I mostly buy bluray titles. Occasionally they'll catch me when I'm not paying enough attention and I'll end up buying the wrong version. That's a right pissoff when that happens.
In particular, what is "Government"? Any organizationâ"any organization at allâ"that confiscates resources by threat of strike-first violence is a "governmental" organization. When one such organization becomes a monopoly, we call that organization "Government".
No, an organization that confiscates resources by threat of violence could be any organization whatsoever. Do you consider the drug cartels in Mexico to be the "government?" Absolutely not. They have their own democratically elected government, for better or worse.
"The government" is the body that makes the laws. Yes in some cases that happens to also be the violent warlords, cartels, etc but that's by no means a necessity. And yes, a government of any type requires a means to enforce said laws. There's a huge difference between using the threat of violence for legal enforcement vs using the threat of violence for confiscation. (Or using the threat of violence to stifle dissent or any other purpose.)
Government inevitably becomes just another bad company in the market place
I imagine most governments are terrible companies in the market place because that's not their realm of operation. They exist to oversee the public good (definition of "public" being the general distinction between types of government -- from monarchs who think they are the public to fully democratic systems where the public tries to protect itself to fully social system where big brother tries to protect his "siblings." All in theory of course!)
one that doesn't go out of business because it is able to confiscate your resources by threat of violence
You have to go a LONG way down the tax evasion line before actual violence is threatened. At some base level yes, the police will enforce the laws, but from a higher level perspective tax isn't a "confiscation" its a shared pool of resources that is (supposed to be) used for the purpose of keeping all other shared resources healthy for the public to use.
it doesn't give you the goods and services for which you personally think you are paying, but you have to pay them anyway
I suppose you never drive on a road, are perfectly happy if your house burns down and nobody comes to rescue you, don't care if children get educated, don't care if your country gets invaded and you can't defend yourself, don't care if your air gets polluted as per my previous theoretical situation, etc. Its absolutely true that the US government in particular has been using tax money to further the ends of individuals and corporations who hold too much sway over Washington for the past few decades but that's mainly because the US government is too close to the free market, not because its too far away. The free market equates money with power and that's not an system any government should run under if they are intending to provide services for the entire public rather than just the rich.
it's totally absurd and unconscionable.
Why do you think that? Because you don't like paying taxes? Most people don't like paying taxes but luckily the majority of us understand that our governing bodies don't operate in a magic land where everything is free only for them. They have to obtain operational money from somewhere.
It is not a modern value to coerce resources from people by threat of violence. So, in fact, Government is actually the last barbaric vestige of a pre-modern civilization.
The only reason its not a modern value is because we've invented governmental systems that allow deterrents to arbitrary violence. I'm not entirely sure what your alternative is. A purely free market cannot exist (at least in the real world) as I've previously stated even on its own merits, never mind taking into consideration in the guy who happens to be able to afford the biggest club and decides he's not a fan of anyone besides him being free, markets included -- and a guy like with always come around sooner or later unless someone manages to genetically engineer the asshole gene out of our species.
However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual!
This statement is absurdly false. If this were true, there would be no tragedy of the commons to talk about because everyone would be on the look out for such situations.
The tragedy of the commons happens because somebody does benefit from screwing everyone else over. In this particular case, if the beef industry was at all concerned with the tragedy of the commons, they would have abandoned antibiotic over-application years ago when resistant bacteria were first discovered.
The free market fails because some things simply are necessarily shared -- the air we breathe for example. By your "free" market, you're perfectly free to pollute the air above your land as much as you want. But unless you've figured out how to control the wind, that polluted air is going to affect all of your neighbors.
You, being the awesome capitalist that you are, see no reason to spend money installing air filters because what do you care? If you don't like the pollution yourself you just go ahead and use the money you saved on air filtering to buy a nice house a few miles away where it doesn't affect your personally.
So now we're in a situation with one of three outcomes:
- Your neighbors coerce you into installing air filters against your will.
- Your neighbors have to install their own air filters (essentially being coerced by your lack of care, to use your terminology.)
- Your neighbors just have to live with it (essentially being coerced to breathe bad air by your lack of care.)
In all of those cases, some form of market-breaking coercion is in effect. And its unavoidable as long as air is able to freely move across our arbitrarily defined boundaries.
Now you might say this is just an opportunity for more capitalism -- someone can just start producing air filters and make a fortune! This is true but it doesn't negate the fact that we're buying those air filters due to an initial breakdown in the market caused by you damaging an unavoidably shared resource.
And that's an example with fairly immediate and obvious impacts. Something like the antibiotic resistance is neither immediate nor obvious, so you don't even have to be a complete jerk to screw up the free market -- you can manage to do so completely unintentionally.
The free market works great under perfect conditions with a complete lack of externalities and a complete lack of barriers to entry. Unfortunately the real world doesn't have such conditions. The free market can still work well in the real world but some control must be influenced in order to prevent destroying public resources, prevent unnatural monopolies, keep natural monopolies in check and so forth. As usual, its very debatable exactly how much control is necessary for these purposes but it should be fairly obvious that the answer is neither "none" nor "total" but somewhere in between.
Write in Edward Snowden. Imagine what it would say about the current state of affairs if even a couple % of the people did that.
Fishing instructions are worthless to anyone who can't read or doesn't have a fishing boat.
I'm sure you can get instructions on the basics of boat design if you looked. Probably with pictures.
Pharmaceutical information is worthless to anyone who is 1,000 kilometers away from the nearest pharmacy.
Learning natural alternatives might be possible though. And learning concepts like lobbying to have a pharmacy built locally.
New farming techniques are worthless to anyone that is unable to farm because all the fertile land has been seized by the local warlord.
But learning that there exists a life where such warlords don't exist (or at least have significantly less power) can lead to revolutionary ideals being born.
Knowledge is nice, but it isn't quite as powerful as you might think.
Only because you're trying to answer the wrong question. The question shouldn't be "will this specific knowledge help this specific scenario at this specific time?" You never know what knowledge may come in handy tomorrow or next year or twenty years from now.
That's the great thing about knowledge. It may not always help but it never hurts. Somebody is always thinking up a new way to use their knowledge that nobody else has thought of. Really, teaching any specific piece of knowledge isn't an end goal -- the end goal is getting people to enjoy learning and be able gain additional knowledge on their own (whether by further learning or by discovering things themselves.) "Knowledge is empowering" is perhaps a better catch phrase.
Of course depending on how dire the immediate situation is in whatever target area you're looking at, knowledge alone might not be sufficient as several commenters have pointed out. It doesn't matter how brilliant a girl could be when she grows up if she dies of starvation or a terrorist act or whatever before she gets there.
You're dealing with a slightly different definition of "public." In your case, it appears you mean "public" in the sense that "anyone can view it."
This isn't quite the same as what someone means when they say posting on Facebook is "public." In that case, the definition is slightly changed to "people I have no control over can view it," which does not necessarily imply anyone but its certainly no longer just a private message between yourself and the intended recipients. FB retains the right to pass it along to their business partners, police organizations, random government agencies or whoever else they feel like (and that's just assuming they don't violate their own privacy policy!)
Not to mention anyone who hacks into FB's servers, the government servers, the business partners' servers or any of the transmission lines. And anyone who may in the future buy out FB and/or one of those business partners -- and could additionally have completely different privacy policies that expose your message even more parties you have no control over.
And on top of having no control over any of that, you also don't even have any way to find out that its happened. At this point though, you may as well just assume that it has as soon as you hit the post button.
All of those "privacy" controls these websites give you really only let you control whats visible via the web interface itself -- there's little, if any, guarantee that those controls have any effect on all of that behind-the-scenes sharing.
Your mom may not ever get to see that video of you smoking the foot long doobie but you can bet the FBI will have the ability to dig it up if they decide they need a vague but plausible reason to get a search warrant for your house or something.
while (1) // Do something // Do more stuff
{
if (condition) break;
}
Is perfectly valid and used frequently. Basically instead of having the loop conditional at the beginning (while(){}) or at the end (do{}while()) you want it somewhere in the middle. Sure there may be ways to transform the loop to move the condition to one end or the other but in many cases all you're really accomplishing is making the code harder to understand.
The problem usually isn't with removing lines like that on its own, its when those kind of lines are "created" by other optimizations in ways that the programmer isn't expecting that leads to problems.
I don't think that's the problem the OP is referring to. The problem is that the compiler assumes *a is invalid and "optimizes" it even if the realloc returned the same memory address, making (a==b) true. If the compiler did nothing (*a==*b) should also be true but because the compiler replaced it with something incorrect, (*a!=*b) ends up being true instead.
That's the problem with loose standards -- if the behavior is undefined, there will be people who through ignorance or "cleverness" will end up abusing the undefined behavior of a specific system (in this case compiler) and have their code break in ways that are sometimes extremely difficult to debug -- especially if its been working that way so long that you've forgotten its technically an undefined behavior -- you end up completely overlooking the culprit line of code because it looks correct to you.
Could replace it with a 300kg moose if you like and still run into the same problem. If you're going highway speeds (100km/h say) with a gap of only 1m, you have 0.036 seconds to react to whatever the car in front of you is doing. That's certainly plenty of time for the computers to calculate what they need to do but if the lead car suddenly gets slowed down by the force of impact to say 90km/h, is the braking of the car behind it going to be able to detect and adjust for that 10km/h within the given 0.036s? Seems like a heck of a speed decrease for a car's braking system but I don't know all of the equations involved so maybe it is..
The rocks the guy below mentioned (or a tree or something) are also a possibility, but one would hope that they'd only fall under this scenario if you happened to be driving through right as a rock slide started or the tree fell. I would hope that if the situation was pre-existing, the autonomous system in the lead car would notice and do something about it (stop and/or avoid) long before it fell under the scenario being described.
I agree though that overall, the autonomous system is likely to do better at a 1m gap between cars than humans would. I'm just not convinced that "better" is going to be good enough to justify tailgating that close in the first place.
And not only that, but the current gapping recommendations (2-4s depending on weather and road conditions) includes a fair bit of time for a human to notice, process and react to a problem -- most of that time could probably be done away with so the gapping could theoretically decrease by quite a bit and retain current safety standards if the computer program is only just as good as a human (but much faster.)
Weather and construction will definitely have to be figured out before these go mainstream no question about it.
As for "odd situations.." The question isn't "can it handle every odd situation better than a person" but "can it handle more odd situations better than a person?" Or at least a comparable amount. They don't even have to be the same odd situations. A child running out from behind a car is something the human would have to predict but the car could potentially measure. In the human's case, you don't even know the child is there and have to rely on secondary information ("hmm a soccer ball just came flying out from behind that car maybe I'd better stop") while the computer could potentially be using primary information (using IR cameras for example it could actually see the child and make a measurement of the child's movements in addition to also seeing the soccer ball.)
All of that would require incredibly complex and intelligent software no question about it and I can't begin to guess how far along Google or anyone else really is with such software.
All I can really say is we need to stop coming up with one-off "what ifs" that we (in general) assume the computer can't handle and start measuring the aggregate total situations and their probabilities. If the car is going to do better than me (or as good) in 9 out of 10 "odd" situations, I'll happily take that over the 1 out of 10 where I'd do better.
Even if we're equal on 8 of those 10 and each of us is only better in one situation, its still a win in my book as it means I don't have to deal with those other 8 myself and can focus my energy on other things.
If it was cheap enough, this wouldn't necessarily be horrible (well, assuming they had some competition in the market of course..)
If we take an average of say $16k for a low-mid range new vehicle and fully depreciate it over 10 years (ie: equivalent to $1600/yr or a bit over $30/wk or a bit over $4/day.) Add fuel and insurance costs to that $4/day and you could probably have $10-15/day worth of alternative transportation before you start really losing money on the deal.
Of course that's still far far less than current taxi services are willing to offer for any significant trip (at least any I've seen) and also ignores the possibility of picking up a much cheaper used car and additionally ignores the requirement of having enough taxis in service to actually get everyone where they need to go when they need to get there (that last one being the biggest stumbling block by far -- needing thousands upon thousands of vehicles in service for rush hour each day.. all just sitting there idle the rest of the time.)
This fails miserably when both parties are accusing each other of the offense -- at least one of the parties is going to have to offer up some evidence and that's where "the data" comes in.
That is, they aren't trying to prove their own innocence directly -- they're trying to prove the other party's guilt (which generally also "proves" their innocence to be sure, as we don't often hear much about shared liability cases.)
How well that would work in practice vs how much is just marketing BS is up for grabs (and most likely can only be answered by having a few such cases go to trial -- so several years from now at best.)
No, but the cameras could be equipped to look into the IR spectrum and see a child (or dog or other such heat profile) and attempt to determine whether its moving into the street or not.
Can never predict 100% of everything of course and even if you predict it you might be too late to prevent it but the computer's got far far more sensory input (potentially) available and is significantly faster at making mathematical calculations such as "trajectory of that IR blob that's behind the vehicle." than any human.
At the end of the day, there's not really any question about these vehicles having the potential to be safer than human drivers -- its basically all about the software implementation. If they can do enough stuff and handle enough special cases in the software, then as a human you will simply be outclassed in every situation except one -- having a "bad feeling" and stopping for only that reason. I would hazard to say that the number of times that's used as a successful accident avoidance mechanism pales a lot in comparison to the more common scenario of just not noticing something in time.
The software designed for your average Corolla certainly won't (well, I'm sure some company will take a shortcut and try to leave the code there but "disabled" -- which will immediately be reenabled by somebody who's got more brains than survival instinct.)
But there's nothing stopping us from having a different set of software for fire trucks, ambulances, big rigs, buses, etc. All of these different vehicles have different usage patterns and assuming that there would be a one-size-fits-all software product is pretty naive.
Of course, that's probably a bit further in the future. The initial goal is to replace the 90% of vehicles that are used purely for daily commuting. Once that's down, they can start looking into the more specialized vehicles and we'll just have to trust our ambulance drivers until then.
Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if they start equipping ambulances (and such) with a transmitter of some sort to inform the autonomous vehicles that its coming through -- same as they're already equipped with lights and sirens to inform other humans that its coming through. The software might not be setup to drive an ambulance but you can be pretty sure it'll have some functionality to allow for ambulances sharing the road with it.
Huge difference though:
- Both you and the cop have a copy of the ticket, so he can't pull you over for a 10mph ticket and then secretly write it up as 25mph after he's done with you. Nor could you take your copy and do the opposite.
- Police officers in general are in a position of trust (whether its warranted isn't always clear, but its necessary nonetheless for them to do their jobs.) That includes trusting that the officer won't try and do something like this (on the threat of losing their jobs and potentially facing civil or criminal charges themselves if they're caught.)
None of that is really relevant to whether or not its possible to have an open source and still tamper-proof data log. But the answer is "sure why not." Just have the log storage in a "black box" with a tamper-proof seal and an external interface that only allows appends and reads (no modify or delete.)
All of the components could be completely open source / open hardware as long a sufficiently tamper-proof seal can be designed in such a way that it couldn't be re-built without detection should someone attempt to tamper. I'm sure someone clever could come up with such a thing (and probably already has long ago, though I wouldn't know where to look for one, open or not.)
Of course, you probably don't want users being able to muck around with their car's software anyway if safety is a concern (which it is!) Hacking a 1-2ton machine that barrels down the highway at 80mph is a bit more serious of a risk to yourself and others than hacking at Linux kernel on your test box where the worst that happens is you have to hit the power button and try again.
So you could STILL have open everything -- but the implementation would have to be further locked down to prevent unproven hacks from being installed on actual vehicles. Which kind of defeats the purpose to some degree (still leaves the "many eyes" bug-hunting argument for open source but not the "anyone can muck with it" argument.)
Then again, that's kind of needed for closed software as well since there's enough smart people out there who are able to reverse-engineer and start hacking at damned near anything without the source!
Not to mention a well designed autonomous program is likely far better at handling wear and tear situations than human drivers to boot. At the very least, it could simply pop up a warning telling the user that the car is unsafe and refuse to go anywhere until its repaired.
More to the point, it makes a lot of assumptions about the car's computer being able to identify and predict _everything_. If a deer jumps out in front of the lead car that for whatever reason didn't register on camera half a mile back, that lead car is likely to hit it. And if they're running bumper-to-bumper, all of the cars behind the lead will in turn pile up.
160km/h safely works fine when the lead car can predict a stopping point and notify the cars behind it that its time to hit the brakes, but the best written and most well maintained computerized vehicle in the world isn't going to be able to predict 100% of everything so your only option is to leave enough spacing to compensate.
what constitutes "proper [or appropriate or suitable] testing"?
Not this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9StzVy9jgY
Thoughtcrime. Icky icky thoughtcrime in this case.
You like your computer networks decentralized, why not your government? Local is better.
Exactly what part of the common network protocol specifications is decentralized? Last I checked all of the globally useful protocols were defined by a very centralized standards organization. The endpoints might be decentralized but if there wasn't some form of governing body to make sure it all works together, then you wouldn't have things like this forum to post stupid comments on -- or at least you'd only have a significantly smaller "local" version.
Yes, too much government can be bad. Not enough government is worse.