Doesn't that depend on your breakfast? Sure, a bowl of cereal would be a problem, but a power bar or a sausage biscuit? You pick it up once, you eat it without having to look at it, you drop the wrapper in your trash. Done.
I think when driving through residential neighborhoods, (and even commercial districts) it might be a good idea to have no unnecessary distractions. Ideally, that means no unnecessary conversations with the driver as well.
On the open highway it's different. That's where the hypnotic states develop.
phones traveling greater than so many feet per second are disable for texting or phone needs to be in one place for longer than so many seconds before texting is enabled.
So, you think passengers in a car or bus (or cab, or other commercial vehicle) must be prevented from texting too? Why?
But I do wonder how many state texting bans are written to be inappliable to, say, police officers' habits of typing (on their laptops) while driving.....
Surely you see the difference between texting and talking on a CB radio? If not, try it sometime. In a simulator.
I think texting is inherently dangerous in a way that cell phone use is not. As for CB radio? If non-hands-free cell phone use is banned, why not ban all such radio traffic as well?
In fact, why not ban all cell phone and two-way radio entirely, and make cops pull over before they talk into them?
Most of your job while driving is not keeping the vehicle running down the street straight. A six year old can do that (there are a number of COPS episodes that prove that). Most of your job as a driver is making sure you are not going to run into someone else, or that someone else is not going to run into you. It doesn't take a PHD in statistics to recognize that any activity that requires your entire attention, and requires you to remove your eyes from the road, is going to prevent you from doing your job as a driver. It isn't rocket science.
Ok, when I used to work at Microsoft, I worked a graveyard shift four days a week and would then drive and visit my parents after working all night for three days a week. The drive was about 3.5 hours each way. More than one, I got to my destination realizing that there were significant gaps in my memory getting there (in particular I would have no memory of driving through several small towns along the way). I wasn't overly sleep deprived or to the point of falling asleep behind the wheel but driving a familiar stretch of road over and over when mentally tired from a demanding work schedule lead to a form of hypnosis and accompanying amnesia.
I bring this up because I think it gets at something important which is related to this discussion: when we are driving long distances, keeping one's entire focus on the road at all time is actually dangerous as it induces these sorts of hypnotic states. What's the first thing a hypnotist does? Get your entire attention on a focused task. Getting rid of all distractions is actually something I would be worried about. The two automobile accidents I was involved in as a driver (and the at-fault one) involved these hypnotic states.
So while I think it is dangerous to, say, grab your breakfast to eat in the car on your 15 min. drive to work, having a number of small and largely harmless distractions on the open road on a long drive may provide a net safety benefit. Currently the bans on texting and cell phone use while driving haven't lowered the accident rate. That means I will reserve the right to eat, drink coffee (or tea), talk on the speakerphone, do CD-based foreign language courses via the car stereo (no reasn to see this as functionally different from cell phone use w/hands free), etc. when I am driving long distances (more than about an hour each way). I do this in part because I think it makes me a safer driver.
Well, there's this little pesky document called the Constitution. Banning texting on the road would be about as Constitutional as a federal ban on violence against women..... I am pretty sure that would fall outside the bounds of the Commerce Clause.....
book them if they were changing song or looking at their phone book. who gives a fuck they are still piloting 1 tonne of speeding metal without looking where they are going.
I am pretty sure that these are more than 1-T trucks....
However by your view the truck driver who glances at the spedometer is guilty of reckless driving, right?
I mean- if you really want safe driving, then you put people in single passenger vehicles and don't allow them to eat or drink either.
And install Cabin Voice Recorders (CVR's of this sort are not new technology), and take away the radio. No unnecessary distractions while operating a motor vehicle........
Let's face it: nobody is willing to say "no phone use at all" while driving. So we have an entirely ineffective compromise which requires hands-free devices. This is a great way to pretend to do something while not actually doing any of it.
However, far worse, I think there is another factor here: If avoid all distractions while driving on a long trip one of two things will get you: highway hypnosis (a real form of hypnosis sometimes including post-hypnotic amnesia) or your brain will make up its own distractions. Really, has anyone here not had the experience of driving somewhere, getting there, and realizing that there is a chunk of time missing in your memory for part of the drive? While it is profoundly stupid to talk on the phone while navigating through a school zone crowded with students just released from school and their parents picking them up, I am not sure one can make a case that it is a net safety hazard to use a cell phone (hands-free or otherwise) driving down he freeway in the middle of nowhere. In fact, insofar as it prevents more dangerous hypnotic states from developing, it might be a net safety win to talk on the phone.
A much better approach would be to ban all use of cell phones while driving through residential and school zones, ban most cell use while elsewhere within city limits, and allow driving and talking on the phone on open roads in the country. That's not a popular view tough.
When I transitioned from Solaris and AIX to supporting RH and SuSE several years ago, I experienced somewhat of a shock: servers hanging on shutdown, lousy NFS performance, Samba slowing down to a crawl under moderately heavy load and a crapload of other issues I never thought a unixoid OS can suffer from. All these problems coupled with consumer-grade hardware and what you get is one big, never-ending downtime. Something is always down or barely limping along.[emphasis added]
I dunno how many years this was ago but in the time I have been using Linux (since 1999), scalability and performance on the server-side have improved greatly, in large part due to IBM's interest in trying to bring Linux up to the level of AIX in these areas..... Comparing Linux to Solaris in 1999 would have been like comparing Windows ME to Linux at the same time. However things have improved a great deal. In particular the schedular wars have left us with a far better OS than we ha before.
I have generally found Linux to be the most admin-friendly OS out there. This is reason to use it where it works well. More recently Linux has gotten a lot of effort in resolving those very problems you mention.
I have often joked that if Time is the fourth dimension identical to space, than the fifth dimension must be the Dow Jones Industrial Average since that is very frequently plotted as perpendicular to time;-)
It's more complex than that. In addition to controlling the electric motor, it ALSO has to determine whether to engage the internal combustion engine...... I can't think of a way of doing this purely mechanically.....
Also I just came across something about the cruise control input system. Apparently it is easy to increase the accelleration through the cruise control system much further than intended. Is this user error? Or software error? Either way it's bad design:-)
You are quite sure the problem doesn't exist between the chair and the pedals?
Ok, so I suppose you could add as a possibility: non-garbage input because of bad interface design leads to undesirable results. If the problem is driver error it is clearly an interface design problem (as it was in the 1980's with Audi). However, in this case, I don't think it is. A lot is made of the demographics of the people making these complaints. However without knowing more it is hard to know much. However, the Prius has had other issues with key control systems. For example last month we saw another recall but this one was aimed at an ABS flaw that caused the brakes to delay their engagement on rough roads.
The problem is a design one. Occam's razor suggests software involvement given the complexity of that part of the system. It could be a human interface design error though, I suppose.
This is what I have been getting at. You can't just say "it's software." I think you can say "it's software related" though. When we look at similar problems that airplanes and other automated vehicles have had one thing that crops up again and again is some erroneous input that is inappropriately acted on. For this reason I am actually surprised they went with NASA instead of the NTSB's aircraft incident branch.....
This could be anything like the possibility that a faulty sensor is causing a cascade error elsewhere in the system. This is why symbolic validation of safety-critical code is so important: You can validate what happens when every sensor fails in every expected way.
Of course, if a sensor is failing in an unexpected way you may have a problem......
Garbage in, Garbage out...or more accurately in this case, non-garbage in, Garbage out.
You are assuming you get non-garbage in. One possibility is that some set of garbage input is not properly handled properly and the result is unsafe garbage out. This would be similar to the Malaysia Airlines Flight 124's issues (faulty altimeter readings inappropriately used by ADIRU due to software error).
As I tell people regarding software, "there's user error, and then there's user error that could be better handled." If the user error could be better handled, the software vendor should handle the user error properly.
The same goes for cars. If the pedal design in certain Audis was a contributing factor to the accidents, then the pedal design should be changed (and was). If Toyota makes the same mistakes years later it too should be accountable for error-prone designs.
However my guess is it's some sort of cascade failure from elsewhere. Some device fails in a way that is out of spec, a piece of solder cracks, something gets inadvertently grounded out, and suddenly the software is doing the wrong things.....
make the acceleration on the Prius purely mechanical? I mean you have all this fancy electronic stuff that has to go on to make the hybrid work correctly. How do you use traditional accelerator designs in such a thing? I don't think you can.
Of course, that doesn't mean traditional cars which are purely gas-powered should have DBW systems....
Mechanical throttles are conceptually simpler and have more obvious and obviously testable failure cases. It's not that hard to deal with them.
However, drive by wire introduces a number of layers of complexity and abstraction. In addition to mechanical failure cases, now you have electronic (hardware) and logical (software) problems as well. The added complexity makes all of this much more difficult to address, and it insulates the driver from the overall control of the vehicle.
This being said, I think it is obvious that where you have a hybrid car, purely mechanical acceleration is simply not an option. The complexity of the hybrid system itself requires electronic control, which more or less requires drive by wire of an equivalent. So this isn't an unconditional opposition. I just don;t think it is appropriate for traditional, gas-powered cars.
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Check your state assault laws first. ;-)
I think when driving through residential neighborhoods, (and even commercial districts) it might be a good idea to have no unnecessary distractions. Ideally, that means no unnecessary conversations with the driver as well.
On the open highway it's different. That's where the hypnotic states develop.
So, you think passengers in a car or bus (or cab, or other commercial vehicle) must be prevented from texting too? Why?
Sorry for the snark at the end.
But I do wonder how many state texting bans are written to be inappliable to, say, police officers' habits of typing (on their laptops) while driving.....
I think texting is inherently dangerous in a way that cell phone use is not. As for CB radio? If non-hands-free cell phone use is banned, why not ban all such radio traffic as well?
In fact, why not ban all cell phone and two-way radio entirely, and make cops pull over before they talk into them?
Ok, when I used to work at Microsoft, I worked a graveyard shift four days a week and would then drive and visit my parents after working all night for three days a week. The drive was about 3.5 hours each way. More than one, I got to my destination realizing that there were significant gaps in my memory getting there (in particular I would have no memory of driving through several small towns along the way). I wasn't overly sleep deprived or to the point of falling asleep behind the wheel but driving a familiar stretch of road over and over when mentally tired from a demanding work schedule lead to a form of hypnosis and accompanying amnesia.
I bring this up because I think it gets at something important which is related to this discussion: when we are driving long distances, keeping one's entire focus on the road at all time is actually dangerous as it induces these sorts of hypnotic states. What's the first thing a hypnotist does? Get your entire attention on a focused task. Getting rid of all distractions is actually something I would be worried about. The two automobile accidents I was involved in as a driver (and the at-fault one) involved these hypnotic states.
So while I think it is dangerous to, say, grab your breakfast to eat in the car on your 15 min. drive to work, having a number of small and largely harmless distractions on the open road on a long drive may provide a net safety benefit. Currently the bans on texting and cell phone use while driving haven't lowered the accident rate. That means I will reserve the right to eat, drink coffee (or tea), talk on the speakerphone, do CD-based foreign language courses via the car stereo (no reasn to see this as functionally different from cell phone use w/hands free), etc. when I am driving long distances (more than about an hour each way). I do this in part because I think it makes me a safer driver.
Why not everybody?
Well, there's this little pesky document called the Constitution. Banning texting on the road would be about as Constitutional as a federal ban on violence against women..... I am pretty sure that would fall outside the bounds of the Commerce Clause.....
I am pretty sure that these are more than 1-T trucks....
However by your view the truck driver who glances at the spedometer is guilty of reckless driving, right?
And install Cabin Voice Recorders (CVR's of this sort are not new technology), and take away the radio. No unnecessary distractions while operating a motor vehicle........
Does this mean no two-way radio for police while they are driving?
Is this a blanket ban? Does it apply to similar technologies too? Does it apply to law enforcement?
If police can have cell phones they can answer while driving the rest of us should too.
Let's face it: nobody is willing to say "no phone use at all" while driving. So we have an entirely ineffective compromise which requires hands-free devices. This is a great way to pretend to do something while not actually doing any of it.
However, far worse, I think there is another factor here: If avoid all distractions while driving on a long trip one of two things will get you: highway hypnosis (a real form of hypnosis sometimes including post-hypnotic amnesia) or your brain will make up its own distractions. Really, has anyone here not had the experience of driving somewhere, getting there, and realizing that there is a chunk of time missing in your memory for part of the drive? While it is profoundly stupid to talk on the phone while navigating through a school zone crowded with students just released from school and their parents picking them up, I am not sure one can make a case that it is a net safety hazard to use a cell phone (hands-free or otherwise) driving down he freeway in the middle of nowhere. In fact, insofar as it prevents more dangerous hypnotic states from developing, it might be a net safety win to talk on the phone.
A much better approach would be to ban all use of cell phones while driving through residential and school zones, ban most cell use while elsewhere within city limits, and allow driving and talking on the phone on open roads in the country. That's not a popular view tough.
I have heard of all manner of evil things one can do to printers by sending malicious Postscript documents to them.....
So in answer to your question, "yes."
For those who think the GPL matters in this case, how will it be different when Oracle discontinues development efforts on MySQL?
I dunno how many years this was ago but in the time I have been using Linux (since 1999), scalability and performance on the server-side have improved greatly, in large part due to IBM's interest in trying to bring Linux up to the level of AIX in these areas..... Comparing Linux to Solaris in 1999 would have been like comparing Windows ME to Linux at the same time. However things have improved a great deal. In particular the schedular wars have left us with a far better OS than we ha before.
I have generally found Linux to be the most admin-friendly OS out there. This is reason to use it where it works well. More recently Linux has gotten a lot of effort in resolving those very problems you mention.
I have often joked that if Time is the fourth dimension identical to space, than the fifth dimension must be the Dow Jones Industrial Average since that is very frequently plotted as perpendicular to time ;-)
It's more complex than that. In addition to controlling the electric motor, it ALSO has to determine whether to engage the internal combustion engine...... I can't think of a way of doing this purely mechanically.....
Also I just came across something about the cruise control input system. Apparently it is easy to increase the accelleration through the cruise control system much further than intended. Is this user error? Or software error? Either way it's bad design :-)
Ok, so I suppose you could add as a possibility: non-garbage input because of bad interface design leads to undesirable results. If the problem is driver error it is clearly an interface design problem (as it was in the 1980's with Audi). However, in this case, I don't think it is. A lot is made of the demographics of the people making these complaints. However without knowing more it is hard to know much. However, the Prius has had other issues with key control systems. For example last month we saw another recall but this one was aimed at an ABS flaw that caused the brakes to delay their engagement on rough roads.
The problem is a design one. Occam's razor suggests software involvement given the complexity of that part of the system. It could be a human interface design error though, I suppose.
It looks like in 2005, this was relaxed to R-18 instead of X-18. That removes some of those restrictions, as I understand it.
This is what I have been getting at. You can't just say "it's software." I think you can say "it's software related" though. When we look at similar problems that airplanes and other automated vehicles have had one thing that crops up again and again is some erroneous input that is inappropriately acted on. For this reason I am actually surprised they went with NASA instead of the NTSB's aircraft incident branch.....
This could be anything like the possibility that a faulty sensor is causing a cascade error elsewhere in the system. This is why symbolic validation of safety-critical code is so important: You can validate what happens when every sensor fails in every expected way.
Of course, if a sensor is failing in an unexpected way you may have a problem......
You are assuming you get non-garbage in. One possibility is that some set of garbage input is not properly handled properly and the result is unsafe garbage out. This would be similar to the Malaysia Airlines Flight 124's issues (faulty altimeter readings inappropriately used by ADIRU due to software error).
As I tell people regarding software, "there's user error, and then there's user error that could be better handled." If the user error could be better handled, the software vendor should handle the user error properly.
The same goes for cars. If the pedal design in certain Audis was a contributing factor to the accidents, then the pedal design should be changed (and was). If Toyota makes the same mistakes years later it too should be accountable for error-prone designs.
However my guess is it's some sort of cascade failure from elsewhere. Some device fails in a way that is out of spec, a piece of solder cracks, something gets inadvertently grounded out, and suddenly the software is doing the wrong things.....
make the acceleration on the Prius purely mechanical? I mean you have all this fancy electronic stuff that has to go on to make the hybrid work correctly. How do you use traditional accelerator designs in such a thing? I don't think you can.
Of course, that doesn't mean traditional cars which are purely gas-powered should have DBW systems....
Mechanical throttles are conceptually simpler and have more obvious and obviously testable failure cases. It's not that hard to deal with them.
However, drive by wire introduces a number of layers of complexity and abstraction. In addition to mechanical failure cases, now you have electronic (hardware) and logical (software) problems as well. The added complexity makes all of this much more difficult to address, and it insulates the driver from the overall control of the vehicle.
This being said, I think it is obvious that where you have a hybrid car, purely mechanical acceleration is simply not an option. The complexity of the hybrid system itself requires electronic control, which more or less requires drive by wire of an equivalent. So this isn't an unconditional opposition. I just don;t think it is appropriate for traditional, gas-powered cars.