Was a human misclassified as a cat? or vice versa?
For a self-driving car, it's not so much of a problem if a pedestrian is misclassified as some other kind of hazard, as long as it reacts the same way when the hazard gets in the way.
"waste fuel" - isn't and shoudln't be buried. in 300 years it will be a valuable plutonium source when the shortlived radionucleides have boiled down to safe emission levels. It will probably be a valuable fuel source far sooner than that if/when MSTRs start becoming ubiquitous.
Waste "other stuff" probably is waste (neutron absorbtion) and the only approach there is to minimise volumes before disposing, or hold past several hafllives.
It's probably arguable that current approaches to radiation levels are overly cautious, given we have 60 years of jet aircraft aircrew being exposed to substantially higher radiation levels than nuke plants workers with few rad-linked ill effects.
(Disclosure: A researcher at my current employer ran a study of the levels of hard radiation received at normal flight levels which involved stowing instruments commercial passenger 747 flights for several years during 2000-2005 (the instruments were onboard for months at a time). No results have ever been published, but apparently cosmic ray (essentially high speed neutrons) levels were 3-4 times higher than expected, as was gamma exposure.)
"TEPCO has a history of lying about the safety of its reactors and the management can't be trusted to run a ramen stand much less a nuclear reactor. So it doesn't matter what experts say,"
TEPCO engineers are OK, if isolated from management. The problem is that in Japan's highly hierarchical militaristic culture they will not break ranks if ordered to do something stupid by management. It's the same culture which has co-pilots regularly sit quietly by whilst pilots crash aircraft instead of intervening to countermand stupid decisions.
Fukushima was saved by a senior engineer who finally said "fuck this shit" and got on with saving the thing instead of listening to management with no engineering experience who were telling him what to do.
The best thing which could be done is to break the cozy relationship that Japan's nuclear inspectorate has with the plant management, but it needs to be understood that BWR reactors are potential steam bombs and unsafe by design, no matter how many mitigation measures are put in place.
Saint Assgunge(*) seems to be confusing "censorship" with "snooping". Those calls aren't being arbitrarily shut down by a govt agency.
It's a given that the NSA is snooping what it can - that's its job.
The shock comes from how easily it (and other intel agencies) are able to hoover up _everything_ (once you can snoop everything, the stuff that stands out for further targetting is encrypted conversations). If the NSA is doing it you can be pretty much assured everyone else is doing it too.
One of the more surprising things is how useless all that snooping is proving to be. Given the DEA is getting a feed, if it was more useful than random chance, the enormous wholesale(**) illegal drug trade would have been shut down already simply by following the money.
If intelligence agencies were properly accountable for their actions, most of their employees would be out on their ear as utterly useless and unemployable in the outside world.
FWIW it used to be said that the most effective form of espionage involved sitting in the reading room of public libraries, collating reports from local newspapers. It's still pretty much true.
(*)wikileaks == useful. Assange =- egotistical prick who's conflated his own importance. Best to discard him and find someone else to carry the flag.
(**) for all the publicity, seizures amount to less than 0.1% of overall traffic. There are hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of tons of illegal narcotics being shipped around the globe annually in order to account for known addiction statistics.
"As such, it is positioned to dominate the publishing and distribution vertical completely, and people are worried about this, for good or ill. This story is less about what Amazon is doing today than what they might do tomorrow."
The USA has a history of breaking up effective vertical monpolies. (Eg: Boeing/United airlines). Other countries, less so, but in many cases while they have large vertically integrated industries, there are several of them competing (and not allowed to merge).
These days I suspect the USA would roll over and allow monopoly activity. It's become a wonderful example of "the best laws that money can buy"
Air resistance isn't a major issue until you hit about 45mph. The vast majority of the world's motoring fleet spends the vast majority of its time well below that speed (which isn't to say the gains aren't worthwhile above that speed, but there are better targets to aim for)
Modifications which improve efficiency at low speeds and in stop-start traffic have the greatest overall effect.
How much did it cost? Was it a refurb or replacement?
Example of costs from manufacturers:
I had a power steering seal fail in my IC car at about 4 years old, thanks to poor roads.
Nissan quoted $1500 for a new rack (yes really) and $1200 to fit it (Non stealership pricing was more-or-less the same)
A local outfit removed/refurbed/replaced the existing unit for about $900 - it turned out an inadequately rated o-ring had popped out on the input shaft. They machined a second groove onto the shaft and fitted an extra o-ring to ensure the fault wouldn't happen agian.
Had I taken the more expensive solution, I would have had an inferior repair which would have failed under the same circumstances in about the same amount of time. The enhancement has lasted 8 years and counting, whilst other parts of the suspension are starting to fail under the constant pounding they take.
EVs are extremely reliable and have longer service lives than IC vehicles. I'd be extremely surprised to see them dying before 250k miles.
The standard reason IC cars are scrappedat abvout 10 years old in europe is that their catalytic converters need replacement to maintain emissions requirements.
Even in Europe, fuel is less than half a car's overall operational expense. Once factoring in vastly reduced maintenance costs your 136k miles is probably more like 60-70k
They make up for the loss on the EV with a higher sticker price on the IC model. No manufacturer is going to sell across the range at an overall loss or they'd be out of business.
The EV price is legally capped, else they _would_ sell it at a higher price.
If a robot capable of the dexterity and reliability needed costs $1million then you need to turn out a hell of a lot of motors before the investment is paid off.
If you're a small manufacturer you probably can't stand the debt exposure to overcome that hurdle.
Once you have a robot, it can work 365*24 with the lights off, but the sale price isn't going to change until the initial investment is paid off, especially if the manufacturer has more orders than he can keep up with.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were (and are) intensively studied for cancer and the general conclusion is that the slow-grow cancer fear is vastly overblown.
Current rates in both cities are 1-3% above background levels (ie, statistically irrelevant)
Minamata has had much larger long-term effects.
If radiation was as big a threat as is often made out, air crews worldwide would be dying young in statistically significant numbers. Low doses aren't cumulative.
If Chernobyl was going to cause lots of extra cancers, they'd already be starting to occur. (There are some amongst former inhabitants of the area but the rate isn't statistically different to people living anywhere else)
"Doubling the risk of cancer" ofen means the odds go from 1 in 100,000 to 2 in 100,000. That's not much but dressing it the other way lacks drama.
The containment buildings are there to contain the nuclear fuel if it manages to melt through the bottom of the steam reactor vessel, not to contain gas pressure. Older-style buildings which are designed for that are speherical steel spheres accessed through airlocks for a reason.
The buidling overpressure from ignition of accumulated hydrogen which blew the roof off was a direct result of attempts to retain gasses in contravention of the operating manual, which says "vent that stuff" - it goes pretty much straight up anyway and the gasses only had trace amounts of radioactives, with a very short halflife measured in minutes. (The buildings were close to bursting in any case)
The containment systems worked as designed. They broke when someone tried to push them beyond their design capabilities in a misguided attempt to prevent the release of minor radioactive components and as a result made the problem much much worse.
BWRs are intrinsically crap. Water is highly reactive at high temperature and pressure (even at room temperature it's sometimes known as the universal solvent) - and a high pressure environment is intrinsically dangerous - plus they simply don't run hot enough to be efficient(*) or provide the kinds of heat many industrial processes need.
(*) Efficiency is a function of delta-T over the heat engine. With high (1100C+) input temperatures one can do away with the need for heatsinking to large bodies of water and derating output during hot weather in favour of simple air cooling, which in turn means the plants can be sited in safer positions than near rivers/lakes/sea - and with such high temperatures one can also directly smelt metals, make glass or operate kilns - currently highly carbon intensive activities.
Even when you do include Chernobyl, nuclear is the safest of the lot
People die each year falling off roofs whilst installing solar and wind has killed a surprising number of installation/maintenance techs. The numbers are even higher if you include road crashes travelling from depot to operational site (with or without the start/end of work commute).
If the other energy industries had to comply with the same safety standards as nuclear they'd be shut down overnight - and that's even with the "lax standards" that operators apply to old gen1 plants.
On the topic of 1960s computers, you'd be surprised how many major banks are still runnning 40-year old mainframes because the legacy code works and noone remains who understands it enough to migrate to newer systems.
"Because they cost a fortune and coal is a hell of a lot more profitable. "
Only until you're forced to pay the cleanup costs.
The biggest US-environmental disaster of the last decade wasn't Deepwater Horizon. It was a pond of coal ash slurry breaking loose - and it was a small one in comparison to some of the (increasingly unstable) ones dotted across the USA.
"For example, suppose there is a car full of 5 kids stuck on a railroad track."
This simply isn't going to happen. An automated vehicle won't stop on the railroad track in the first place and a non-automated vehicle isn't going to register as a distress call for automated vehicles to rescue.
Virtually every single case I've seen of non-deliberate "car on tracks" has been because the driver proceeded onto the line without a clear exit path (just about every country's highway code says something along the lines of "DO NOT enter an intersection if you cannot exit it" and humans in just aboue every country regularly ignore that rule - which is one of the prime causes of traffic jams.)
The few remaining cases have been where the driver ignored engine trouble warnings signs and pressed on regardless.
A robot isn't going to selectively ignore safety rules or proceed if there is that kind of issue.
"If you have tons of if-then branches, they're not all going to be correct (in the spec), and the robot will almost certainly do something wacko under some circumstances"
Yes, and once such circumstances are analysed there will be new rulesets to apply.
One of the things that isn't being taken into account is that given large scale traffic automation, speeds could be lowered and overall travel time would still be quicker than it is now, because full optimization will include elimination of stop-start traffic.
Bear in mind that a properly setup car with ABS can stop in about its own length at 25-30mph _once the brakes are applied_
Bear in mind also that human reaction times plus changing pedals means that the car will probably travel 2-3 times that distance before the brake pedal is even touched.
Also: Humans usually just slam on the brakes, rather than trying to steer around an obstacle if it "suddenly" looms in front of them.
A robot car reacts faster to obstacles and it's always paying attention, whereas humans get complacent. A robot might not outdrive a very good driver who's paying full attention to the road but most drivers are merely "average" and even the best drivers get distracted. What that means is that the car will notice the pedestrians and react to their movements _BEFORE_ they've even stepped into the roadway. Drivers are notorious for ignoring pedestrians and/or assuming they won't do stupid things. A machine doesn't have that luxury.
This is all algorthmic. nothing to do with "ethics". In the absence of Asimov's "positronic brains", robots are dumb machines which simply do what's programmed and the safest programming action is to slow down if there are multiple obstacles or stop entirely - any other action will leave the designers susceptable to litigation.
Humans are impatient and will try to push through regardless of dangers, which is the second-highest cause of crashes (The first is inattention and the 3rd is driving beyond your abilities. True "accidents" - as in unforseen events - are fairly rare and most crashes can be predicted by observation of the driver in the preceeding period. I really am surprised that insurance companies/police don't use automotive black boxes more when investigating). As one of my friends says "Crashes usually happen because cars know the laws of physics far better than most drivers".
As an example of the kind of thing a robot won't do: If you're on a band and the car coming the other way loses control, crossing the road in front of you, the "average driver" is highly likly to steer _into_ the crash whilst attempting to avoid, instead of aiming for where the oncoming car won't be - without specific training and practice, people tend to steer to avoid where the obstacle is now instead of predicting its path. A robot programmed with avoidance manouevres will speed up or slow down enough to miss the crash.
the fun part is that melting antarctic ice may result in significant rises in antarctic sea levels, penned in by the circumpolar current, which then "sloshes" outwards periodically.
"Sea level" is far from uniform in any case. Currents and prevailing winds have quite an effect over large areas.
The far greater short-term danger than ocean levels rising is more (and more violent) storms, coupled with higher storm surges, along with other extreme weather events.
It's trivial to get a court order blocking XYZ website hosting illegal material. RIAA and MPAA do it all the time.
By only requiring executive order, the way is clear to ban websites containing such contentious issues as "dissent" and "democracy", etc etc.
"Think about the children" is a smokescreen. Judges wouldn't stand for banning a lot fo the stuff politicians are afraid of and the numpties in Westminster know it.
Slashdot Mirror
Was a human misclassified as a cat? or vice versa?
For a self-driving car, it's not so much of a problem if a pedestrian is misclassified as some other kind of hazard, as long as it reacts the same way when the hazard gets in the way.
"waste fuel" - isn't and shoudln't be buried. in 300 years it will be a valuable plutonium source when the shortlived radionucleides have boiled down to safe emission levels. It will probably be a valuable fuel source far sooner than that if/when MSTRs start becoming ubiquitous.
Waste "other stuff" probably is waste (neutron absorbtion) and the only approach there is to minimise volumes before disposing, or hold past several hafllives.
It's probably arguable that current approaches to radiation levels are overly cautious, given we have 60 years of jet aircraft aircrew being exposed to substantially higher radiation levels than nuke plants workers with few rad-linked ill effects.
(Disclosure: A researcher at my current employer ran a study of the levels of hard radiation received at normal flight levels which involved stowing instruments commercial passenger 747 flights for several years during 2000-2005 (the instruments were onboard for months at a time). No results have ever been published, but apparently cosmic ray (essentially high speed neutrons) levels were 3-4 times higher than expected, as was gamma exposure.)
The US system is known as Navstar GPS. See http://www.space.com/19794-nav...
"GPS" _is_ generic
"TEPCO has a history of lying about the safety of its reactors and the management can't be trusted to run a ramen stand much less a nuclear reactor. So it doesn't matter what experts say,"
TEPCO engineers are OK, if isolated from management. The problem is that in Japan's highly hierarchical militaristic culture they will not break ranks if ordered to do something stupid by management. It's the same culture which has co-pilots regularly sit quietly by whilst pilots crash aircraft instead of intervening to countermand stupid decisions.
Fukushima was saved by a senior engineer who finally said "fuck this shit" and got on with saving the thing instead of listening to management with no engineering experience who were telling him what to do.
The best thing which could be done is to break the cozy relationship that Japan's nuclear inspectorate has with the plant management, but it needs to be understood that BWR reactors are potential steam bombs and unsafe by design, no matter how many mitigation measures are put in place.
Saint Assgunge(*) seems to be confusing "censorship" with "snooping". Those calls aren't being arbitrarily shut down by a govt agency.
It's a given that the NSA is snooping what it can - that's its job.
The shock comes from how easily it (and other intel agencies) are able to hoover up _everything_ (once you can snoop everything, the stuff that stands out for further targetting is encrypted conversations). If the NSA is doing it you can be pretty much assured everyone else is doing it too.
One of the more surprising things is how useless all that snooping is proving to be. Given the DEA is getting a feed, if it was more useful than random chance, the enormous wholesale(**) illegal drug trade would have been shut down already simply by following the money.
If intelligence agencies were properly accountable for their actions, most of their employees would be out on their ear as utterly useless and unemployable in the outside world.
FWIW it used to be said that the most effective form of espionage involved sitting in the reading room of public libraries, collating reports from local newspapers. It's still pretty much true.
(*)wikileaks == useful. Assange =- egotistical prick who's conflated his own importance. Best to discard him and find someone else to carry the flag.
(**) for all the publicity, seizures amount to less than 0.1% of overall traffic. There are hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of tons of illegal narcotics being shipped around the globe annually in order to account for known addiction statistics.
> Is selling an item at a loss illegal? no - lots of stores use "loss leaders"
"loss leading" is illegal in a number of countries. The argument is that it allows large companies a huge unfair advantage over smaller players.
"As such, it is positioned to dominate the publishing and distribution vertical completely, and people are worried about this, for good or ill. This story is less about what Amazon is doing today than what they might do tomorrow."
The USA has a history of breaking up effective vertical monpolies. (Eg: Boeing/United airlines). Other countries, less so, but in many cases while they have large vertically integrated industries, there are several of them competing (and not allowed to merge).
These days I suspect the USA would roll over and allow monopoly activity. It's become a wonderful example of "the best laws that money can buy"
You mean like Dos4 and Lotus 123?
"So in this scenario, they become lowest cost seller of everything? And this is harmful to customers, how? "
In the same way Microsoft became harmful.
Once you have established a de-facto monopoly via attrition/buyouts, you are free to charge whatever you want.
Air resistance isn't a major issue until you hit about 45mph. The vast majority of the world's motoring fleet spends the vast majority of its time well below that speed (which isn't to say the gains aren't worthwhile above that speed, but there are better targets to aim for)
Modifications which improve efficiency at low speeds and in stop-start traffic have the greatest overall effect.
"That's what HVDC is for, but of course you need a shitload of copper to build very long transmission lines. "
Or just use a greater cross-sectional area of aluminium.
How much did it cost? Was it a refurb or replacement?
Example of costs from manufacturers:
I had a power steering seal fail in my IC car at about 4 years old, thanks to poor roads.
Nissan quoted $1500 for a new rack (yes really) and $1200 to fit it (Non stealership pricing was more-or-less the same)
A local outfit removed/refurbed/replaced the existing unit for about $900 - it turned out an inadequately rated o-ring had popped out on the input shaft.
They machined a second groove onto the shaft and fitted an extra o-ring to ensure the fault wouldn't happen agian.
Had I taken the more expensive solution, I would have had an inferior repair which would have failed under the same circumstances in about the same amount of time. The enhancement has lasted 8 years and counting, whilst other parts of the suspension are starting to fail under the constant pounding they take.
EVs are extremely reliable and have longer service lives than IC vehicles. I'd be extremely surprised to see them dying before 250k miles.
The standard reason IC cars are scrappedat abvout 10 years old in europe is that their catalytic converters need replacement to maintain emissions requirements.
Even in Europe, fuel is less than half a car's overall operational expense. Once factoring in vastly reduced maintenance costs your 136k miles is probably more like 60-70k
They make up for the loss on the EV with a higher sticker price on the IC model. No manufacturer is going to sell across the range at an overall loss or they'd be out of business.
The EV price is legally capped, else they _would_ sell it at a higher price.
The issue with deploying robots is initial price.
If a robot capable of the dexterity and reliability needed costs $1million then you need to turn out a hell of a lot of motors before the investment is paid off.
If you're a small manufacturer you probably can't stand the debt exposure to overcome that hurdle.
Once you have a robot, it can work 365*24 with the lights off, but the sale price isn't going to change until the initial investment is paid off, especially if the manufacturer has more orders than he can keep up with.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were (and are) intensively studied for cancer and the general conclusion is that the slow-grow cancer fear is vastly overblown.
Current rates in both cities are 1-3% above background levels (ie, statistically irrelevant)
Minamata has had much larger long-term effects.
If radiation was as big a threat as is often made out, air crews worldwide would be dying young in statistically significant numbers. Low doses aren't cumulative.
If Chernobyl was going to cause lots of extra cancers, they'd already be starting to occur. (There are some amongst former inhabitants of the area but the rate isn't statistically different to people living anywhere else)
"Doubling the risk of cancer" ofen means the odds go from 1 in 100,000 to 2 in 100,000. That's not much but dressing it the other way lacks drama.
Please go back under your bridge.
The containment buildings are there to contain the nuclear fuel if it manages to melt through the bottom of the steam reactor vessel, not to contain gas pressure. Older-style buildings which are designed for that are speherical steel spheres accessed through airlocks for a reason.
The buidling overpressure from ignition of accumulated hydrogen which blew the roof off was a direct result of attempts to retain gasses in contravention of the operating manual, which says "vent that stuff" - it goes pretty much straight up anyway and the gasses only had trace amounts of radioactives, with a very short halflife measured in minutes. (The buildings were close to bursting in any case)
The containment systems worked as designed. They broke when someone tried to push them beyond their design capabilities in a misguided attempt to prevent the release of minor radioactive components and as a result made the problem much much worse.
BWRs are intrinsically crap. Water is highly reactive at high temperature and pressure (even at room temperature it's sometimes known as the universal solvent) - and a high pressure environment is intrinsically dangerous - plus they simply don't run hot enough to be efficient(*) or provide the kinds of heat many industrial processes need.
(*) Efficiency is a function of delta-T over the heat engine. With high (1100C+) input temperatures one can do away with the need for heatsinking to large bodies of water and derating output during hot weather in favour of simple air cooling, which in turn means the plants can be sited in safer positions than near rivers/lakes/sea - and with such high temperatures one can also directly smelt metals, make glass or operate kilns - currently highly carbon intensive activities.
Even when you do include Chernobyl, nuclear is the safest of the lot
People die each year falling off roofs whilst installing solar and wind has killed a surprising number of installation/maintenance techs. The numbers are even higher if you include road crashes travelling from depot to operational site (with or without the start/end of work commute).
If the other energy industries had to comply with the same safety standards as nuclear they'd be shut down overnight - and that's even with the "lax standards" that operators apply to old gen1 plants.
On the topic of 1960s computers, you'd be surprised how many major banks are still runnning 40-year old mainframes because the legacy code works and noone remains who understands it enough to migrate to newer systems.
"Because they cost a fortune and coal is a hell of a lot more profitable. "
Only until you're forced to pay the cleanup costs.
The biggest US-environmental disaster of the last decade wasn't Deepwater Horizon. It was a pond of coal ash slurry breaking loose - and it was a small one in comparison to some of the (increasingly unstable) ones dotted across the USA.
"For example, suppose there is a car full of 5 kids stuck on a railroad track."
This simply isn't going to happen. An automated vehicle won't stop on the railroad track in the first place and a non-automated vehicle isn't going to register as a distress call for automated vehicles to rescue.
Virtually every single case I've seen of non-deliberate "car on tracks" has been because the driver proceeded onto the line without a clear exit path (just about every country's highway code says something along the lines of "DO NOT enter an intersection if you cannot exit it" and humans in just aboue every country regularly ignore that rule - which is one of the prime causes of traffic jams.)
The few remaining cases have been where the driver ignored engine trouble warnings signs and pressed on regardless.
A robot isn't going to selectively ignore safety rules or proceed if there is that kind of issue.
"If you have tons of if-then branches, they're not all going to be correct (in the spec), and the robot will almost certainly do something wacko under some circumstances"
Yes, and once such circumstances are analysed there will be new rulesets to apply.
One of the things that isn't being taken into account is that given large scale traffic automation, speeds could be lowered and overall travel time would still be quicker than it is now, because full optimization will include elimination of stop-start traffic.
Bear in mind that a properly setup car with ABS can stop in about its own length at 25-30mph _once the brakes are applied_
Bear in mind also that human reaction times plus changing pedals means that the car will probably travel 2-3 times that distance before the brake pedal is even touched.
Also: Humans usually just slam on the brakes, rather than trying to steer around an obstacle if it "suddenly" looms in front of them.
A robot car reacts faster to obstacles and it's always paying attention, whereas humans get complacent. A robot might not outdrive a very good driver who's paying full attention to the road but most drivers are merely "average" and even the best drivers get distracted. What that means is that the car will notice the pedestrians and react to their movements _BEFORE_ they've even stepped into the roadway. Drivers are notorious for ignoring pedestrians and/or assuming they won't do stupid things. A machine doesn't have that luxury.
This is all algorthmic. nothing to do with "ethics". In the absence of Asimov's "positronic brains", robots are dumb machines which simply do what's programmed and the safest programming action is to slow down if there are multiple obstacles or stop entirely - any other action will leave the designers susceptable to litigation.
Humans are impatient and will try to push through regardless of dangers, which is the second-highest cause of crashes (The first is inattention and the 3rd is driving beyond your abilities. True "accidents" - as in unforseen events - are fairly rare and most crashes can be predicted by observation of the driver in the preceeding period. I really am surprised that insurance companies/police don't use automotive black boxes more when investigating). As one of my friends says "Crashes usually happen because cars know the laws of physics far better than most drivers".
As an example of the kind of thing a robot won't do: If you're on a band and the car coming the other way loses control, crossing the road in front of you, the "average driver" is highly likly to steer _into_ the crash whilst attempting to avoid, instead of aiming for where the oncoming car won't be - without specific training and practice, people tend to steer to avoid where the obstacle is now instead of predicting its path. A robot programmed with avoidance manouevres will speed up or slow down enough to miss the crash.
the fun part is that melting antarctic ice may result in significant rises in antarctic sea levels, penned in by the circumpolar current, which then "sloshes" outwards periodically.
"Sea level" is far from uniform in any case. Currents and prevailing winds have quite an effect over large areas.
No, we haven't evolved for cold conditions.
If we had, we woudln't need clothing.
The far greater short-term danger than ocean levels rising is more (and more violent) storms, coupled with higher storm surges, along with other extreme weather events.
But deliberately so.
It's trivial to get a court order blocking XYZ website hosting illegal material. RIAA and MPAA do it all the time.
By only requiring executive order, the way is clear to ban websites containing such contentious issues as "dissent" and "democracy", etc etc.
"Think about the children" is a smokescreen. Judges wouldn't stand for banning a lot fo the stuff politicians are afraid of and the numpties in Westminster know it.