Ice forms on oceans fairly easily, but ice during arctic night paradoxically keeps the arctic warm(ish) by acting as an insulating blanket on top of the ocean. (the air's cold but life below the ice is busy)
Ice during the arctic day is a good light reflector but there's not so much of it anymore and the ice thickness is decreasing, meaning it disappears sooner in summer and takes longer to reform in winter. Both these add to the warming effects.
Snow on land needs moisture in the air and that comes from oceanic evaporation - mainly stuff bought northwards by the atlantic conveyor hitting cold polar air, so one of the effects in Europe can quite easily be colder, drier, less snowy winters - this was seen during the middle ages mini-ice age when the antlantic conveyor is believed to have slowed down. The effects included bringing cropping levels down by about 1000 feet across europe and generally moving agricultural bands southwards a couple of hundred miles.
Countering this is the heating effect of the oceans themselves. Air is a really poor heat carrier compared to water and it the real cause of concern should be small increases in water temperature. These have increased a fraction of a degree in the last 200 years, but that's equivalent to 1 degree or so of air temperature and makes it harder for ice to form (remember: it takes as much energy to melt 1kg of ice at 0C as it does to heat the resulting 1kg of water from 0C to 80C - and the same amount of energy needs to be extracted to freeze it - and that energy needs to be radiated into the air, which all things considered is actually a pretty good insulator.
This may be moot anyway, if the arctic ocean methane plumes(*) turn into a cascade failure or trigger a Storegga-style series of landslides(**). The effect of several Gigatonnes(***) of methane being dumped above the arctic ocean will be quite profound. it's probably not a coincidence that Storegga coincided with the knee point of the end of the last glaciation and rapid sea level rises over the following 3-4 centuries.
(*)Until 2006 the concensus was that methane clathrate plumes could never reach the ocean surface. News that they'd being doing that in the Leptav Sea (off the north coast of Siberia) since at least 2004 was met with widespread disbelief. By 2008 those plumes were over 1km wide in some areas and they're right on the edge of the continental shelf. Several climate physicists have summarised the news as "we're fucked", with the only questions being how badly and how soon.
(**) Storegga was a series of undersea landslides around 9000 years ago at the edge of the continental shelf off norway which released somewhere between 3 and 7GT of methane clathrates into the atmosphere. The heat forcing effect of methane is 20 times that of CO2 when averages over a century but it's more than 100 times higher in the first decade.
(***) Leptav clathrates are estimated at 1-5GT on the continental shelf. Noone knows how much is on the continental margins but a landslide or series of them could easily release 2-3GT in one go - and then there's the Tsunamis to contend with - Storegga sent enormous waves across Doggerland (now the north sea) and left scars across large chunks of Northern Europe. It looks like the impacts were around 1000 feet high in the northern parts of the British isles and Scandanavia.
If these are really the laws then they're vastly deficient.
As an example (New Zealand):
Rather than try and estimate distances, they're mesaure before hand and marked on the road.
As such, there's a diamond on the road ahead of the crossing. Pedestrians are not allowed to step onto the crossing if cars are between the diamond and the crossing. Cars before the diamond MUST stop if a pedestrian steps onto the crossing.
(If a pedestrian steps onto the road when the car is between the diamond and the crossing then the driver must use a judgement call as to whether he can stop or not.)
The car MUST pull up at least a metre clear of the crossing.
The car MUST NOT move off until the pedestrian is no longer on the crossing. (Previous law variants had it on the car's half of the road and within 4 metres, but these were found to be abused by drivers, so it was changed to the full crossing. )
Drivers MUST NOT attempt to pass a car which is stopped at a crossing. Doing so is an automatic 6 month driving ban (minimum)
Even if the pedestrian takes his/her time crossing or stops on the crossing, the car MUST NOT move off and attempting to intimidate a pedestrian with a vehicle is a serious criminal offence (You're driving a 1-2 ton weapon trivially capable of maiming and killing, never forget that).
Outside of crosswalks, cars are not required to stop unless the pedestrian is obstructing progress but cars don't have right of way and everyone is expected to use commonsense when both crossing the road and when driving amongst pedestrians crossing the road.
Note that there's no allowance to "move off" on your own judgement of what's safe or not. That was tried by setting a safe distance - it lasted less than a decade because _some_ drivers weren't stopping and passing less than two metres from crossing pedestrians and _some_ drivers were stopping but leaving less than a metre form crossing pedestrians.
A robot can judge it down to the millimetre, but a law requiring a judgement call about what's safe and what's not is highly subjective at the best of times and is going to end up regularly contested. USA pedestrian/cyclist safety laws are deeply flawed in most states thanks to motor industry lobbying and need inspection/revision at national level to remove the "sponsored" ones.
The problem (for Uber) is that it assumed it had right of way, therefore it did not need to yield.
The results were tragic for the pedestrian _THAT TIME_, but if the obstacle had been a half ton cow, it would have been tragic for the passengers.
In the case of the crosswalk it's going to be interesting and I want to see the data. "Too close" is a judgement call by the police officer but it also means the law is likely fuzzy and needs clarification.
"Jaywalking" is a uniquely american law. It was enacted because of widespread lobbying by the motor industry, as were almost all the other pedestrian-hostile road rules in that country and stands out as a good example of corrupt industry-driven laws pushed through for financial objectives (selling more cars).
Treating a red light as a "stop" sign is acceptable in situations where the cycle clearly hasn't been detected by the equipment, but riding through without stopping is dangerous at best and frankly suicidal if there's any traffic around. There are a lot of cyclists in London where I drive and 99.9% of them are safe/law abiding, but "lycra-louts" who flout the road rules ruin the perception of cycling for everyone.
Doctored or not, that footage showed more than enough for a criminal prosecution in most countries.
It shows the systems Uber had installed did not react or slow down for a pedestrian crossing a multilane road with several seconds' notice, that Uber had interfered with the car's built-in anti-collision system (which would had stopped before she was hit) and that the safety supervisor was not doing her job.
The factor of the "right of way" of vehicles over pedestrians or not doesn't enter into it. It is only the USA which has such laws on ordinary roads. Other countries have them in very well defined areas with restricted access, such as motorways - and even there, failing to see/avoid a pedestrian with several seconds notice is careless driving causing death or injury.
Failing to yield right of way is a minor traffic infringement, not a death sentence. The antics of USA drivers deliberately driving _at_ pedestrians on the road would be classified as somewhere between reckless endangerment, aggravated threats with a deadly weapon and attempted murder in many countries, depending on the jurisdiction.
"They are granted power, which in some people instills a great sense of responsibility but which other people sometimes abuse for personal profit or out of cruelty."
Power corrupts. Power also attracts the corruptible and those who wish to wield it for power's sake.
One of the primary functions of police training in most parts of the world is to _weed out_ those who are unsuited to the job. In my original country we had a police force and a traffic force - with the latter being made up mostly of rejects from the police college.
It showed in spades - the police tended to be reasonable, level-headed individuals whilst the traffic officers frequently acted like jackbooted thugs. One day the government decided to merge the two departments _without_ retraining the traffic officers. 15 years later there was a major problem with abuse of power in the police, mostly from ex-traffic enforcement, but this was spreading amongst newer recruits too.
If someone failed (or dropped out of) police college for anything other than physical reasons you should be looking very carefully at their profile if they're looking to work in security or related jobs. They failed for a reason and it may not be obvious up front.
This problem is showing up in the UK heavily with their increasing use of volunteers as "PSCO"s - these are untrained, unsworn officers (aka plastic policemen) who are not given the full barrage of tests that normal police are given and there have been a large number of cases of abuse and corruption involving them. It's even been found in a few cases that organised crime rings have sent in members to work as PSCOs in order to gain access to intelligence, etc.
"I find most cops are nice and honest, and I still value the services that they provide"
The fact that they _tolerate_ the bad cops in their midst is the problem.
Those who enforce the law must be held to a higher standard than the general public, not given a free pass and some handwaving when they do things that would result in anyone else being jailed.
"Dash cams do, but you better have one that can upload through your phone or dash cam will have an accident."
It's even more amusing when dashcam uploads footage of dashcam "having an accident" (it's happened)
The amazing thing is, when that kind of thing surfaces in europe the cops concerned are most likely to find themselves in jail for a very long time, simply because a public which has no confidence in the integrity and honesty of its police won't tolerate them (policing by consent). In the Land of the F(r)ee every excuse under the sun is used to avoid prosecution and your police are more akin to an occupying hostile paramilitary force than Sherriff Andy Taylor or deputies Maxine Stewart/Kenny Lacos. This goes doubly for law enforcement which engages in shakedowns of non-locals, which are likely to have national/international investigators quickly showing up to investigate.
It should be noted that the origin of the European Convention on Human Rights was in the aftermath of the chaos of World War 2 and it was drafted entirely by British and American lawyers.
If you want to pick holes in the wording, perhaps you should ask them what they meant. Many of them are still alive.
"they only pretend to give you free speech, but in reality, it doesn't exist. Not only for this, but for the way they also define hate speech:"
The USA has limits on free speech too. "Incitment to riot", "fighting words", "slander" various others.
_some_ european countries have restrictions on religion speech such as "blasphemy" or others, but rascist and other hate speech is widely banned because history has repeatedly shown that when tolerated it quickly escalates to violence, lynchings and occasionally genocide. As such it comes under breaching the peace or incitement to breach the peace.
One (NT1) was a multi-hundred million dollar investment fraud case (up to a billion dollars involved in the UK and USA, with thousands of victims affected) who discovered that whilst his white collar conviction was "spent", attempts to continue in the same line of business were thwarted because people kept looking him up, finding out about his past and his appeal against conviction (the conviction was upheld), then deciding they didn't want to do any investment business with him. (Strangely enough, leopards, spots and all that - the charges and convictions related to a prolonged fraud and company failure in the 1990s)
The other (NT2) was headline news at the time, the trial received national coverage, etc. He was charged and convicted with phone and other hacking (directly plus hiring others to do so) and gave several interviews about his conviction after release from prison, but (crucially) before the time expiry for his conviction was spent and those interviews are freely available online. Again, he kept finding that people who worked with him were looking him up, finding about his past and deciding he wasn't trustworthy. He not only wants details of the convictions suppressed from search results but also the media interviews.
In BOTH cases, the plaintiffs are obscenely wealthy individuals seeking to have details of quite serious crimes erased from their past.
The law was passed so that people who have a couple of minor convictions, or an old bankruptcy (that was the catalyst for the original spanish case) or a "misspent" youth could have a second chance. These two individuals were NOT what legislators had in mind and it was warned at the time the law was passed in the UK that it would eventually be misused by such people to achieve Orwellian ends.
The court has subsequently ruled. Interestingly that NT1 was cynically seeking to misuse the law to continue dodgy business activities and therefore was not covered by the right to be forgotten, whilst NT2 was genuinely sorry for his actions and therefore _was_ covered.
I doubt this ends here, but both individuals have discovered that the Streisand effect means they'll never get their names out of circulation no matter what further legal action they may take (I'm in Europe, know who they are but cannot say so. Anyone outside of Europe can post their names on a non-european website with no risk of penalty. the worst they'd face is seeing the authorities playing a game of Whack-a-mole trying to prevent local citizens seeing the names being mentioned, which would merely increase the publicity.)
The order only applied to Google in any case. Looking them up on Bing and friends got (and still gets) the expected results.
This requires active safety (ie, something attached to a kid), which already assumes you know the kid is in the area and near the pool.
The vast majority of child drownings tend to involve children who no one knew was anywhere near a pool in the first place. In the case of kids playing in pools supposedly supervised, wristbands come off (for that matter, children will take them off!). A lot of cases are neighbours kids playing around the pool and in some cases have scaled the security fence. (It's not going to help in the case of the neighbours' cat either)
This is the wrong solution to the problem and may actually make things worse by engendering a false sense of security. Short of some kind of retractable cover capable of being walked on and incapable of letting anything fall through I don't know what the solution is (and I suspect that such a solution would still not save everyone)
Neither of these are on the assembly line and neither of these should be affecting production schedules.
Just in time production methods mean that if you have scheduled downtime in the feedin lines, you overproduce slightly to ensure that you have sufficient buffer stock that final assembly isn't compromised, else you're faced with the spectre of unscheduled pausing of the line or sending incomplete items off the end and straight into rework, either is expensive.
The line machinery itself may need maintenance, but this is typically either done on the fly, at shift changes or in a monthly cycle, etc.
Anyway, Tesla getting their rates up is good, butspeaking as a european consumer having spent some tier looking over one of their vehicles they have the same problem as every other USA-built vehicle: Inferior fit, finish, panel alignment and final QC to virtually anything coming off a european or asian line. Tesla's execs could do with spending some time studying how the european majors do things.
"You can't both turn and accelerate very well, because you are using the same patches of tire to do both. Only so much friction to go around... and on slippery roads, not much of that."
Same on gravel roads. I used to do about 600 miles a month on unpaved roads and learned very quickly that in FWDs opening up the throttle on bends meant the car would start making a beeline for the ditch.
The importance of that observation is that the historic preference for RWDs is far more noticeable in countries with more rural unpaved roads. (Australia, New Zealand, most of Africa, USA) and spread out populations.
"The security is entirely up to them with no outside audit required."
This isn't just a tesla issue. GM and others were found to be doing OTA updates using HTTP instead of https a while back and then there was the issue of unsigned USB updates.
It's not just software issues either. The whole keyless entry system has been fatally flawed by manufacturers cheapskating and beginning with expensive rigs in the early 2000s to steal high end vehicles like mercedes that rapidly spread downmarket to the point today where a car thief can get a keyjacker system for a couple of hundred dollars that will breach the entry and keyless ignition systems of dozens of makers - the response from most has simply to try and reduce the active range of the electronic keys from 50-100 metres down to 1-2, but they haven't actually addressed the level of security (as in number of bits) until very recently and there are a LOT of vulnerable cars out there - it got to the point where insurance companies wouldn't cover things like Range Rovers unless they were securely garaged at all times when not in use as their onboard security was effectively useless.
Surprisingly, when questioned the reason most people seem to be holding out is that they're waiting for electric cars and/or robocars to hit mainstream and their old car is "reliable enough" in the meantime.
WRONG. Only the most serious recalls are forced by safety authorities.
For any given model there are usually dozens or recalls which are best described as "errata tweaks" such as fixes for bad earths, corrosion problems, fit, finish or details issue or other minor items (I saw one recall for a problem relating to the operation of interior courtesy lights as an example)
This power steering issue is certainly higher up on the level of seriousness and that's why they've publicised it. The bigger problem is for the garages if it breaks before they can change out the bolts as it goes from a simple fix to something more drawn-out.
I don't live in the USA either and I've been driving since I was 8 years old (on roads since 16).
The fact remains that kids don't appreciate the laws of physics (and nor, apparently do most drivers). They run out on the road often enough that you MUST assume it's going to happen. I live in Europe and in most cities I see it a couple of times per day, especially around school closing time.
I have a bunch of advanced driving qualificiations to my name, but more germane to this wee discussion I showed your anecdote to some driving testers I know in the UK and France. Every single one of them regard this poor a level of driving as an automatic fail - and two of them would have reported your poor driving abilities to the police for immediate action had they been observers - if you think that's an empty threat, an incident like that did occur in the UK in mid 2017 and the resulting dashcam video from a 3rd party resulted in the driver concerned getting a 6 month driving ban.
"This car was not ready for limited testing under these conditions WITH a safety driver."
Exactly this. As Google quickly discovered, a car which demonstrates even limited autonomy engenders so much overconfidence on the part of the safety overseer that they forget what their task is supposed to be and STOP PAYING ATTENTION. I look on driver assist technology as a way of allowing me to relax a little whilst expanding my scan around the instruments and whant's happening outside the vehicle but I've noticed most drivers use it as a way of paying less attention to what's going on outside the vehicle.
Human factors play into this in a vary large way. This is important in the same way that paying attention to Human Factors is what has reduced aviation incidents and fatalities the most since the 1960s, over any technical improvements (We've had civil aircraft that can fly themselves from runway to runway in full whiteout conditions since 1972. Nearly everything else has been about improving reliability and operational costs)
You can't put a car on the road which claims autonomy - even under test - if it fals the most basic of hazard perception tests. In other words an automated car has to be able to pass the most _advanced_ driving tests in the world, not the stupidly basic ones in a country where cars have effectively been given more rights than human beings. Furthermore, you need some way of ensuring that the surpervisors ARE paying attention and regularly testing them to ensure they know what to do when things go wrong. Aircraft are highly automated, which is why pilots are run through simulators to test worst-case scenario handling regularly and _DRILLED_ into what to do. The idea is that when they react, they react automatically, without going into "stunned mullet mode" watching the aircrash fly itself into the ground (or the car roll into the hazard) - as my flight line instructor use to put it. Even with that training, the Air France 447 pilots managed to fight each other and stall from 38,000 feet into the ocean before they realised what they were doing after the computer handed control back to them unexpectedly.
A safety driver/supervisor has a legal duty of care which has been repeatedly proven to be ignored by bored humans - to the point where Google actually gave up on the idea of even trying to rely on humans being supervisors, because the risk of them being 500 miles away with the fairies when the car asked them to take over was just too high (the classic example is the anecdote of the google employee (early on in trials), who was texting, found his phone was flat, turned around and reached into his backpack on the back seat, got out his laptop, set it up on the passenger seat, then got out a charge cable, plugged the phone in, booted up the computer, then plugged the computer into the car to charge, for a total eyes-off-road time of over a minute - at 75mph on the freeway. That was the point when Google realised that no matter what people are told and how much it is drilled into them that they are legally responsible for supervising the vehicle, they cannot be relied on to safely do so. (It wasn't the only such case, there were many more just like it).
A hazard or obstacle on the road is a hazard. Is that a paper bag or a cinder block?, does that piece of material flapping on the road, conceal an injured person? Do you really want to run it over to find out the difference? You go around it if you can, especially if there's plenty of road and distance to do so. You don't even want to run over small animals if you can avoid it, the panel damage can get expensive. Emphasis on if you canb avoid it. For the case in question there was no other traffic around and plenty of time+room to take evasive action.
It seems that a lot of the people trying to blame the pedestrian are flat out pathological arseholes who need psychatric evaluation and should NEVER be allowed behind the wheel of a 2 ton killing machine. They're exactly the kind of driver that robocars should be eliminating -
But that isn't enough by a long shot and here's why:
Electricity generation only accounts for about 30-40% of carbon emissions.
When you factor in replacing carbon used in domestic heating, transportation and industrial processes, electrical demands are set to rise by a factor of 6-8
Come back when solar and wind can fiil that gap. The problem is that they simply can't and the only way forward is nuclear - preferably Molten Salt as these can load-follow and virtually every commercial nuclear incident has been caused or exacerbated by water.
"Either that or the dashcam was misleading in terms of light levels"
They are. My commute is mostly unlit and what the camera sees on highbeam is about half (or less) what human eyes can see. on low beam it's even worse than that.
This is a serious (as in catastrophic level) failure on Uber's part. It doesn't _matter_ that the pedestrian was crossing illegally. The car needs to detect and avoid obstacles on the road.
Firstly: In most most countries what she did was perfectly legal and Uber wants to deploy this software outside the USA. This demonstration of incompetence has set back licensing of self-driving vehicles by a decade (thanks to public pushback) or more and will ensure higher levels of care in certification and more rigorous testing procedures.
Secondly: If that had been a cow or other large animal, it wouldn't be a dead pedestrian, it would be a set of dead car occupants. There's a reason that the "Moose Manouveure" is a required part of the finnish driving test.
Thirdly: Hazard perception is an important part of most countries' driving tests. The car utterly failed - but then again most american drivers utterly fail, which is why your USA license is generally not transferrable to another country without a full driving test.
Fourthly: Even if being on the road _is_ illegal, this kind of thing happens and humans take account of/react to it. If there's a crash or other hazard on a freeway I want my robocar to stop, not plow on and end up being part of the mayhem. Uber have demonstrated a 100% fail at hazard handling. California was right to order them off the road and Arizona should follow suit.
"There are plenty of times making turns where you have to assume the other driver will slow down rather than plow right into you."
Speak for yourself.
I assume he _will_ plow into me and make ready to stop, until I've assessed where his tyres are pointing and where he's looking. These tell me where he intends to go. Only when I'm happy that he's registered my presence is when I keep going.
"I had an incident a while back where I was driving on a residential road at fairly slow speed, there was a kid running all out on the sidewalk beside me,"
Which was your first warning sign.
"I was watching him."
And thinking what, exactly?
"I slammed on the brakes and barely stopped."
Why didn't you anticipate that he might do that?
Kids do this kind of thing.
If a ball bounces onto the road you need to assume that a child WILL follow it, because whilst it's not true most of the time, there are enough cases where it does happen that you can't take the chance.
If kids are playing on the sidewalk, you need to assume a high probability that one will run onto the road. Again, most of the time they won't, but sometimes one will.
If you're driving past parked cars, you need to be looking for feet in the gap underneath and anticpating what happens next.
Humans can only handle 2-3 hazards at most. Robocars can pay 100% attention 100% of the time, should be looking for all these hazards (and more) all the time and dealing with it accordingly. if that means slowing to a lower speed then so be it. 30mph is quite often dangerously fast in an urban/suburban environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Ice forms on oceans fairly easily, but ice during arctic night paradoxically keeps the arctic warm(ish) by acting as an insulating blanket on top of the ocean. (the air's cold but life below the ice is busy)
Ice during the arctic day is a good light reflector but there's not so much of it anymore and the ice thickness is decreasing, meaning it disappears sooner in summer and takes longer to reform in winter. Both these add to the warming effects.
Snow on land needs moisture in the air and that comes from oceanic evaporation - mainly stuff bought northwards by the atlantic conveyor hitting cold polar air, so one of the effects in Europe can quite easily be colder, drier, less snowy winters - this was seen during the middle ages mini-ice age when the antlantic conveyor is believed to have slowed down. The effects included bringing cropping levels down by about 1000 feet across europe and generally moving agricultural bands southwards a couple of hundred miles.
Countering this is the heating effect of the oceans themselves. Air is a really poor heat carrier compared to water and it the real cause of concern should be small increases in water temperature. These have increased a fraction of a degree in the last 200 years, but that's equivalent to 1 degree or so of air temperature and makes it harder for ice to form (remember: it takes as much energy to melt 1kg of ice at 0C as it does to heat the resulting 1kg of water from 0C to 80C - and the same amount of energy needs to be extracted to freeze it - and that energy needs to be radiated into the air, which all things considered is actually a pretty good insulator.
This may be moot anyway, if the arctic ocean methane plumes(*) turn into a cascade failure or trigger a Storegga-style series of landslides(**). The effect of several Gigatonnes(***) of methane being dumped above the arctic ocean will be quite profound. it's probably not a coincidence that Storegga coincided with the knee point of the end of the last glaciation and rapid sea level rises over the following 3-4 centuries.
(*)Until 2006 the concensus was that methane clathrate plumes could never reach the ocean surface. News that they'd being doing that in the Leptav Sea (off the north coast of Siberia) since at least 2004 was met with widespread disbelief. By 2008 those plumes were over 1km wide in some areas and they're right on the edge of the continental shelf. Several climate physicists have summarised the news as "we're fucked", with the only questions being how badly and how soon.
(**) Storegga was a series of undersea landslides around 9000 years ago at the edge of the continental shelf off norway which released somewhere between 3 and 7GT of methane clathrates into the atmosphere. The heat forcing effect of methane is 20 times that of CO2 when averages over a century but it's more than 100 times higher in the first decade.
(***) Leptav clathrates are estimated at 1-5GT on the continental shelf. Noone knows how much is on the continental margins but a landslide or series of them could easily release 2-3GT in one go - and then there's the Tsunamis to contend with - Storegga sent enormous waves across Doggerland (now the north sea) and left scars across large chunks of Northern Europe. It looks like the impacts were around 1000 feet high in the northern parts of the British isles and Scandanavia.
If these are really the laws then they're vastly deficient.
As an example (New Zealand):
Rather than try and estimate distances, they're mesaure before hand and marked on the road.
As such, there's a diamond on the road ahead of the crossing. Pedestrians are not allowed to step onto the crossing if cars are between the diamond and the crossing. Cars before the diamond MUST stop if a pedestrian steps onto the crossing.
(If a pedestrian steps onto the road when the car is between the diamond and the crossing then the driver must use a judgement call as to whether he can stop or not.)
The car MUST pull up at least a metre clear of the crossing.
The car MUST NOT move off until the pedestrian is no longer on the crossing. (Previous law variants had it on the car's half of the road and within 4 metres, but these were found to be abused by drivers, so it was changed to the full crossing. )
Drivers MUST NOT attempt to pass a car which is stopped at a crossing. Doing so is an automatic 6 month driving ban (minimum)
Even if the pedestrian takes his/her time crossing or stops on the crossing, the car MUST NOT move off and attempting to intimidate a pedestrian with a vehicle is a serious criminal offence (You're driving a 1-2 ton weapon trivially capable of maiming and killing, never forget that).
Outside of crosswalks, cars are not required to stop unless the pedestrian is obstructing progress but cars don't have right of way and everyone is expected to use commonsense when both crossing the road and when driving amongst pedestrians crossing the road.
Note that there's no allowance to "move off" on your own judgement of what's safe or not. That was tried by setting a safe distance - it lasted less than a decade because _some_ drivers weren't stopping and passing less than two metres from crossing pedestrians and _some_ drivers were stopping but leaving less than a metre form crossing pedestrians.
A robot can judge it down to the millimetre, but a law requiring a judgement call about what's safe and what's not is highly subjective at the best of times and is going to end up regularly contested. USA pedestrian/cyclist safety laws are deeply flawed in most states thanks to motor industry lobbying and need inspection/revision at national level to remove the "sponsored" ones.
The problem is not the concept of yielding.
The problem (for Uber) is that it assumed it had right of way, therefore it did not need to yield.
The results were tragic for the pedestrian _THAT TIME_, but if the obstacle had been a half ton cow, it would have been tragic for the passengers.
In the case of the crosswalk it's going to be interesting and I want to see the data. "Too close" is a judgement call by the police officer but it also means the law is likely fuzzy and needs clarification.
"Jaywalking" is a uniquely american law. It was enacted because of widespread lobbying by the motor industry, as were almost all the other pedestrian-hostile road rules in that country and stands out as a good example of corrupt industry-driven laws pushed through for financial objectives (selling more cars).
Treating a red light as a "stop" sign is acceptable in situations where the cycle clearly hasn't been detected by the equipment, but riding through without stopping is dangerous at best and frankly suicidal if there's any traffic around. There are a lot of cyclists in London where I drive and 99.9% of them are safe/law abiding, but "lycra-louts" who flout the road rules ruin the perception of cycling for everyone.
Doctored or not, that footage showed more than enough for a criminal prosecution in most countries.
It shows the systems Uber had installed did not react or slow down for a pedestrian crossing a multilane road with several seconds' notice, that Uber had interfered with the car's built-in anti-collision system (which would had stopped before she was hit) and that the safety supervisor was not doing her job.
The factor of the "right of way" of vehicles over pedestrians or not doesn't enter into it. It is only the USA which has such laws on ordinary roads. Other countries have them in very well defined areas with restricted access, such as motorways - and even there, failing to see/avoid a pedestrian with several seconds notice is careless driving causing death or injury.
Failing to yield right of way is a minor traffic infringement, not a death sentence. The antics of USA drivers deliberately driving _at_ pedestrians on the road would be classified as somewhere between reckless endangerment, aggravated threats with a deadly weapon and attempted murder in many countries, depending on the jurisdiction.
"They are granted power, which in some people instills a great sense of responsibility but which other people sometimes abuse for personal profit or out of cruelty."
Power corrupts. Power also attracts the corruptible and those who wish to wield it for power's sake.
One of the primary functions of police training in most parts of the world is to _weed out_ those who are unsuited to the job. In my original country we had a police force and a traffic force - with the latter being made up mostly of rejects from the police college.
It showed in spades - the police tended to be reasonable, level-headed individuals whilst the traffic officers frequently acted like jackbooted thugs. One day the government decided to merge the two departments _without_ retraining the traffic officers. 15 years later there was a major problem with abuse of power in the police, mostly from ex-traffic enforcement, but this was spreading amongst newer recruits too.
If someone failed (or dropped out of) police college for anything other than physical reasons you should be looking very carefully at their profile if they're looking to work in security or related jobs. They failed for a reason and it may not be obvious up front.
This problem is showing up in the UK heavily with their increasing use of volunteers as "PSCO"s - these are untrained, unsworn officers (aka plastic policemen) who are not given the full barrage of tests that normal police are given and there have been a large number of cases of abuse and corruption involving them. It's even been found in a few cases that organised crime rings have sent in members to work as PSCOs in order to gain access to intelligence, etc.
"I find most cops are nice and honest, and I still value the services that they provide"
The fact that they _tolerate_ the bad cops in their midst is the problem.
Those who enforce the law must be held to a higher standard than the general public, not given a free pass and some handwaving when they do things that would result in anyone else being jailed.
"Dash cams do, but you better have one that can upload through your phone or dash cam will have an accident."
It's even more amusing when dashcam uploads footage of dashcam "having an accident" (it's happened)
The amazing thing is, when that kind of thing surfaces in europe the cops concerned are most likely to find themselves in jail for a very long time, simply because a public which has no confidence in the integrity and honesty of its police won't tolerate them (policing by consent). In the Land of the F(r)ee every excuse under the sun is used to avoid prosecution and your police are more akin to an occupying hostile paramilitary force than Sherriff Andy Taylor or deputies Maxine Stewart/Kenny Lacos.
This goes doubly for law enforcement which engages in shakedowns of non-locals, which are likely to have national/international investigators quickly showing up to investigate.
It should be noted that the origin of the European Convention on Human Rights was in the aftermath of the chaos of World War 2 and it was drafted entirely by British and American lawyers.
If you want to pick holes in the wording, perhaps you should ask them what they meant. Many of them are still alive.
"they only pretend to give you free speech, but in reality, it doesn't exist. Not only for this, but for the way they also define hate speech:"
The USA has limits on free speech too. "Incitment to riot", "fighting words", "slander" various others.
_some_ european countries have restrictions on religion speech such as "blasphemy" or others, but rascist and other hate speech is widely banned because history has repeatedly shown that when tolerated it quickly escalates to violence, lynchings and occasionally genocide. As such it comes under breaching the peace or incitement to breach the peace.
These weren't small beer, or small crimes.
One (NT1) was a multi-hundred million dollar investment fraud case (up to a billion dollars involved in the UK and USA, with thousands of victims affected) who discovered that whilst his white collar conviction was "spent", attempts to continue in the same line of business were thwarted because people kept looking him up, finding out about his past and his appeal against conviction (the conviction was upheld), then deciding they didn't want to do any investment business with him. (Strangely enough, leopards, spots and all that - the charges and convictions related to a prolonged fraud and company failure in the 1990s)
The other (NT2) was headline news at the time, the trial received national coverage, etc. He was charged and convicted with phone and other hacking (directly plus hiring others to do so) and gave several interviews about his conviction after release from prison, but (crucially) before the time expiry for his conviction was spent and those interviews are freely available online. Again, he kept finding that people who worked with him were looking him up, finding about his past and deciding he wasn't trustworthy. He not only wants details of the convictions suppressed from search results but also the media interviews.
In BOTH cases, the plaintiffs are obscenely wealthy individuals seeking to have details of quite serious crimes erased from their past.
The law was passed so that people who have a couple of minor convictions, or an old bankruptcy (that was the catalyst for the original spanish case) or a "misspent" youth could have a second chance. These two individuals were NOT what legislators had in mind and it was warned at the time the law was passed in the UK that it would eventually be misused by such people to achieve Orwellian ends.
The court has subsequently ruled. Interestingly that NT1 was cynically seeking to misuse the law to continue dodgy business activities and therefore was not covered by the right to be forgotten, whilst NT2 was genuinely sorry for his actions and therefore _was_ covered.
I doubt this ends here, but both individuals have discovered that the Streisand effect means they'll never get their names out of circulation no matter what further legal action they may take (I'm in Europe, know who they are but cannot say so. Anyone outside of Europe can post their names on a non-european website with no risk of penalty. the worst they'd face is seeing the authorities playing a game of Whack-a-mole trying to prevent local citizens seeing the names being mentioned, which would merely increase the publicity.)
The order only applied to Google in any case. Looking them up on Bing and friends got (and still gets) the expected results.
This requires active safety (ie, something attached to a kid), which already assumes you know the kid is in the area and near the pool.
The vast majority of child drownings tend to involve children who no one knew was anywhere near a pool in the first place. In the case of kids playing in pools supposedly supervised, wristbands come off (for that matter, children will take them off!). A lot of cases are neighbours kids playing around the pool and in some cases have scaled the security fence. (It's not going to help in the case of the neighbours' cat either)
This is the wrong solution to the problem and may actually make things worse by engendering a false sense of security. Short of some kind of retractable cover capable of being walked on and incapable of letting anything fall through I don't know what the solution is (and I suspect that such a solution would still not save everyone)
Neither of these are on the assembly line and neither of these should be affecting production schedules.
Just in time production methods mean that if you have scheduled downtime in the feedin lines, you overproduce slightly to ensure that you have sufficient buffer stock that final assembly isn't compromised, else you're faced with the spectre of unscheduled pausing of the line or sending incomplete items off the end and straight into rework, either is expensive.
The line machinery itself may need maintenance, but this is typically either done on the fly, at shift changes or in a monthly cycle, etc.
Anyway, Tesla getting their rates up is good, butspeaking as a european consumer having spent some tier looking over one of their vehicles they have the same problem as every other USA-built vehicle: Inferior fit, finish, panel alignment and final QC to virtually anything coming off a european or asian line. Tesla's execs could do with spending some time studying how the european majors do things.
"You can't both turn and accelerate very well, because you are using the same patches of tire to do both. Only so much friction to go around... and on slippery roads, not much of that."
Same on gravel roads. I used to do about 600 miles a month on unpaved roads and learned very quickly that in FWDs opening up the throttle on bends meant the car would start making a beeline for the ditch.
The importance of that observation is that the historic preference for RWDs is far more noticeable in countries with more rural unpaved roads. (Australia, New Zealand, most of Africa, USA) and spread out populations.
All they need to do to avoid litigation is transfer the license to any new vehicle someone may buy, or offer a refund.
"The security is entirely up to them with no outside audit required."
This isn't just a tesla issue. GM and others were found to be doing OTA updates using HTTP instead of https a while back and then there was the issue of unsigned USB updates.
It's not just software issues either. The whole keyless entry system has been fatally flawed by manufacturers cheapskating and beginning with expensive rigs in the early 2000s to steal high end vehicles like mercedes that rapidly spread downmarket to the point today where a car thief can get a keyjacker system for a couple of hundred dollars that will breach the entry and keyless ignition systems of dozens of makers - the response from most has simply to try and reduce the active range of the electronic keys from 50-100 metres down to 1-2, but they haven't actually addressed the level of security (as in number of bits) until very recently and there are a LOT of vulnerable cars out there - it got to the point where insurance companies wouldn't cover things like Range Rovers unless they were securely garaged at all times when not in use as their onboard security was effectively useless.
Surprisingly, when questioned the reason most people seem to be holding out is that they're waiting for electric cars and/or robocars to hit mainstream and their old car is "reliable enough" in the meantime.
"In most cases, recalls are forced by the NHTSA"
WRONG. Only the most serious recalls are forced by safety authorities.
For any given model there are usually dozens or recalls which are best described as "errata tweaks" such as fixes for bad earths, corrosion problems, fit, finish or details issue or other minor items (I saw one recall for a problem relating to the operation of interior courtesy lights as an example)
This power steering issue is certainly higher up on the level of seriousness and that's why they've publicised it. The bigger problem is for the garages if it breaks before they can change out the bolts as it goes from a simple fix to something more drawn-out.
I don't live in the USA either and I've been driving since I was 8 years old (on roads since 16).
The fact remains that kids don't appreciate the laws of physics (and nor, apparently do most drivers). They run out on the road often enough that you MUST assume it's going to happen. I live in Europe and in most cities I see it a couple of times per day, especially around school closing time.
I have a bunch of advanced driving qualificiations to my name, but more germane to this wee discussion I showed your anecdote to some driving testers I know in the UK and France. Every single one of them regard this poor a level of driving as an automatic fail - and two of them would have reported your poor driving abilities to the police for immediate action had they been observers - if you think that's an empty threat, an incident like that did occur in the UK in mid 2017 and the resulting dashcam video from a 3rd party resulted in the driver concerned getting a 6 month driving ban.
"This car was not ready for limited testing under these conditions WITH a safety driver."
Exactly this. As Google quickly discovered, a car which demonstrates even limited autonomy engenders so much overconfidence on the part of the safety overseer that they forget what their task is supposed to be and STOP PAYING ATTENTION. I look on driver assist technology as a way of allowing me to relax a little whilst expanding my scan around the instruments and whant's happening outside the vehicle but I've noticed most drivers use it as a way of paying less attention to what's going on outside the vehicle.
Human factors play into this in a vary large way. This is important in the same way that paying attention to Human Factors is what has reduced aviation incidents and fatalities the most since the 1960s, over any technical improvements (We've had civil aircraft that can fly themselves from runway to runway in full whiteout conditions since 1972. Nearly everything else has been about improving reliability and operational costs)
You can't put a car on the road which claims autonomy - even under test - if it fals the most basic of hazard perception tests. In other words an automated car has to be able to pass the most _advanced_ driving tests in the world, not the stupidly basic ones in a country where cars have effectively been given more rights than human beings. Furthermore, you need some way of ensuring that the surpervisors ARE paying attention and regularly testing them to ensure they know what to do when things go wrong. Aircraft are highly automated, which is why pilots are run through simulators to test worst-case scenario handling regularly and _DRILLED_ into what to do. The idea is that when they react, they react automatically, without going into "stunned mullet mode" watching the aircrash fly itself into the ground (or the car roll into the hazard) - as my flight line instructor use to put it. Even with that training, the Air France 447 pilots managed to fight each other and stall from 38,000 feet into the ocean before they realised what they were doing after the computer handed control back to them unexpectedly.
A safety driver/supervisor has a legal duty of care which has been repeatedly proven to be ignored by bored humans - to the point where Google actually gave up on the idea of even trying to rely on humans being supervisors, because the risk of them being 500 miles away with the fairies when the car asked them to take over was just too high (the classic example is the anecdote of the google employee (early on in trials), who was texting, found his phone was flat, turned around and reached into his backpack on the back seat, got out his laptop, set it up on the passenger seat, then got out a charge cable, plugged the phone in, booted up the computer, then plugged the computer into the car to charge, for a total eyes-off-road time of over a minute - at 75mph on the freeway. That was the point when Google realised that no matter what people are told and how much it is drilled into them that they are legally responsible for supervising the vehicle, they cannot be relied on to safely do so. (It wasn't the only such case, there were many more just like it).
A hazard or obstacle on the road is a hazard. Is that a paper bag or a cinder block?, does that piece of material flapping on the road, conceal an injured person? Do you really want to run it over to find out the difference? You go around it if you can, especially if there's plenty of road and distance to do so. You don't even want to run over small animals if you can avoid it, the panel damage can get expensive. Emphasis on if you canb avoid it. For the case in question there was no other traffic around and plenty of time+room to take evasive action.
It seems that a lot of the people trying to blame the pedestrian are flat out pathological arseholes who need psychatric evaluation and should NEVER be allowed behind the wheel of a 2 ton killing machine. They're exactly the kind of driver that robocars should be eliminating -
This has been known for a while.
But that isn't enough by a long shot and here's why:
Electricity generation only accounts for about 30-40% of carbon emissions.
When you factor in replacing carbon used in domestic heating, transportation and industrial processes, electrical demands are set to rise by a factor of 6-8
Come back when solar and wind can fiil that gap. The problem is that they simply can't and the only way forward is nuclear - preferably Molten Salt as these can load-follow and virtually every commercial nuclear incident has been caused or exacerbated by water.
"Either that or the dashcam was misleading in terms of light levels"
They are. My commute is mostly unlit and what the camera sees on highbeam is about half (or less) what human eyes can see. on low beam it's even worse than that.
This is a serious (as in catastrophic level) failure on Uber's part. It doesn't _matter_ that the pedestrian was crossing illegally. The car needs to detect and avoid obstacles on the road.
Firstly: In most most countries what she did was perfectly legal and Uber wants to deploy this software outside the USA. This demonstration of incompetence has set back licensing of self-driving vehicles by a decade (thanks to public pushback) or more and will ensure higher levels of care in certification and more rigorous testing procedures.
Secondly: If that had been a cow or other large animal, it wouldn't be a dead pedestrian, it would be a set of dead car occupants. There's a reason that the "Moose Manouveure" is a required part of the finnish driving test.
Thirdly: Hazard perception is an important part of most countries' driving tests. The car utterly failed - but then again most american drivers utterly fail, which is why your USA license is generally not transferrable to another country without a full driving test.
Fourthly: Even if being on the road _is_ illegal, this kind of thing happens and humans take account of/react to it. If there's a crash or other hazard on a freeway I want my robocar to stop, not plow on and end up being part of the mayhem. Uber have demonstrated a 100% fail at hazard handling. California was right to order them off the road and Arizona should follow suit.
"I didn't anticipate it because it was an unlikely illegal event."
Unlikely: Hardly. Kids do it all the time.
Illegal: Only in the USA.
Grow up.
"There are plenty of times making turns where you have to assume the other driver will slow down rather than plow right into you."
Speak for yourself.
I assume he _will_ plow into me and make ready to stop, until I've assessed where his tyres are pointing and where he's looking. These tell me where he intends to go. Only when I'm happy that he's registered my presence is when I keep going.
"I had an incident a while back where I was driving on a residential road at fairly slow speed, there was a kid running all out on the sidewalk beside me,"
Which was your first warning sign.
"I was watching him."
And thinking what, exactly?
"I slammed on the brakes and barely stopped."
Why didn't you anticipate that he might do that?
Kids do this kind of thing.
If a ball bounces onto the road you need to assume that a child WILL follow it, because whilst it's not true most of the time, there are enough cases where it does happen that you can't take the chance.
If kids are playing on the sidewalk, you need to assume a high probability that one will run onto the road. Again, most of the time they won't, but sometimes one will.
If you're driving past parked cars, you need to be looking for feet in the gap underneath and anticpating what happens next.
Humans can only handle 2-3 hazards at most. Robocars can pay 100% attention 100% of the time, should be looking for all these hazards (and more) all the time and dealing with it accordingly. if that means slowing to a lower speed then so be it. 30mph is quite often dangerously fast in an urban/suburban environment.