Safety and building standards are obsolete; lets repeal them so anyone can build whatever structure they wish on their property and rent it out.
??? What the hell does that have to do with regulating and taxing hotels? Building standards apply to both types of buildings, and should continue to apply. Apartments for rent are held to a higher standard than owner occupied properties, and in most places you have to maintain a certificate of occupancy on any rental property. This is not being disputed.
Minimum wage laws, insurance requirements and background checks on cab drivers are obsolete, so lets get rid of them.
Wow, you went off the reservation on that one. Those things have nothing to do with the discussion at hand. If you're implying that by eliminating one useless bit of regulation, then all regulation is bad, then you are either a blithering idiot, or are trying to put words in someone else's mouth. Either way, your arguments are entirely without merit.
In an era where terrorists rent trucks and use them as weapons of mass destruction to mow down crowds of helpless people, assault weapons bans and laws banning sale of munitions such as TOW missiles are outdated and should be repealed. Think about how many people would have been saved in Nice if one or more frenchmen had TOW missiles in hand.
I thought your last paragraph was out there. This takes the cake! Are you trying to imply that people who rent rooms on airbnb are terrorists? or are you suggesting that a terrorist is planning some nefarious plot where access to airbnb rooms is somehow central to their ability to perpetrate and attack? Either way, any attempt to relate the two concepts is laughable at best.
You might want to try having someone else proof read your posts for sanity before hitting the submit button next time. Trying to follow any semblance of a thought process in your post is like looking for reason at a political debate: it might be there somewhere, but who has time to sift through all the crap to find it.
How would an immediately available customer rating know if the carpets were fire retardant or not? That all the electrical items were tagged and tested regularly?
In a free standing apartment, two, or even a four unit building, there simply is not the danger from fire that exists in a large hotel. even in a 5000 square foot house, you are never more than a short sprint from an exit. Hotels on the other hand, you could often be a long hallways from safety, with scores of other people competing with you for limited evacuation routes. When a house burns down, it is pretty rare for there to be an actual fatality from the fire or smoke. Burns and ailments yes, fatalities, not that much. With Hotel fires, there is a lot more potential for death, especially in multistory buildings. All in all, you're safer staying at an ancient run down bed and breakfast where the whole place is wired with lamp cord, and the carpets are made out of a combination of jet fuel and matches, than you are on the 30th floor of a high rise hotel...
If "fairness" is a concern, the hotels should be left alone — and unregulated — too.
I'm not normally one to drink the "regulation is bad" coolaid, but in this case, the regulation serves a function that has been deprecated by the new instant availability of information. This is definitely one of those cases where technology has rendered moot the underlying reality that forced the need for regulation in the first place. The only problem is that regulation in the hotel industry lines the pockets of the already established players as well as the town and cities doing the regulating. Just like the cab industry, its time for an overhaul of these regulations and a thorough re-examination of the underlying realities. I find it overwhelmingly likely that its time to give that regulation the axe, and free up hotels and motels to be more cost competitive with airbnb. There will still be a market for hotels, just not nearly such a big one, which seems only fair, as all of the hotels near where I live sit mostly empty most of the time. They can afford that business model because most of their costs come from actually renting the room (aka taxes contingent upon occupancy). This kind of a change will start a culling in the hotel industry that, frankly, its about time we actually got around to. Free up some of that prime real estate in and around hotels, train stations, and major venues for things that provide more social value to the local residents.
is the per-mile-driven accident rate greater or less with Autopilot (or equivalent) enabled? Basically, it's a "perfect is the enemy of the good" situation whereby some folks seem to want to limit autonomous driving until it is 100% perfect when we all know that humans are far, far less reliable.
The national average fatalities was 1.08 per 100M miles driven in 2014. The Tesla autopilot has driven approximately 50M miles with 2 fatalities. So far, the autopilot has about 4x the fatality rate as over the road drivers. If this statistic were to continue, then I would be both appalled and surprised. It took from 1987 until now to reduce fatalities in over the road from 4 per 100M miles down to todays 1.08 per 100M. I would expect that improvements to autopilot to address each of the specific cases that comes up, and stops those cases from happening again will reduce this number fairly rapidly, and within 2 or 3 years I would expect parity. Soon thereafter, I would expect rapid improvement in autonomous vehicles compared to overall statistics, since like airline safety, the process ensures that the systems can only get safer. The most encouraging aspect is that in every case where a Tesla vehicle is in an accident, Tesla actively retrieves the logs to find out what happened. This feedback is a fundamental part of defect reduction. How often do you hear about Ford or Chevy digging into an accident to find out why it happened? Hell, most of their products aren't even designed to be able to provide such logs, even though the prevalence of drive by wire, and various electronic systems means there is more than enough opportunity to maintain useful logs. For some reason, Tesla seems to be the only one actually doing so.
So true. Corporations and their CEOs have a long history of being 100% honest. Why there's no way that a single case in centuries could be shown where one has ever lied about anything.
The part you missed is that it is very unlikely that Musk even knows any details about how the logging works, or how to retrieve the information. For that, he has a VP, and that VP has a department head, and that guy has a project lead who may or may not have included several people who actually acquired the log files, and decoded them to present it in a format that Musk could easily relate. All of that requires that many people at many levels of the company be involved. The larger the group of people involved, the more difficult it would be to keep one or more of them from voicing concerns over an ethical concern of this magnitude, especially since it would already be clear to all involved that there is expected to be a government investigation which would expose complicity...
No, the logs are genuine. If there is a technical problem, it is more likely to relate to how the driver is informed of autopilot status. Some of the more useful features of autopilot (like collision avoidance) should never turn off, even if the driver wants them off.
The autopilot should NOT turn off until the car is either stopped or it detects that the driver is controlling the vehicle (hands on the wheel).
The autopilot didn't turn off. It was fully prepared to stop gracefully, and was doing so until the diver stepped on the accelerator and applied manual steering control. Any competent driver knows that when you manually command a vehicle of any kind to do something by applying inputs, it is going to do what you tell it. If he had simply kept his hands and feet off the controls, the car would have come to a complete stop, and this guy would still be driving his Tesla with no injuries other than his pride at having come to a complete stop in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.
This story like so many others I have read recently just seem to re-iterate the point that the vast majority of drivers are simply not qualified to operate a motor vehicle at all, as they have not had sufficient training, and do not know what to do in unexpected situations. Fully autonomous vehicles can't come quickly enough. Even in their present state, they probably save more lives than they take.
"well it's only in beta". In which case it should never have been out on the public road.
Engineering doesn't work that way. Driving is a complicated enough task that working out the majority of the kinks in an autopilot system will requires billions of miles of road testing to start approaching "perfect". That would require hundreds of billions of dollars in testing costs. In the mean time, tens of thousands of drivers per year get killed in avoidable accidents. At some point, you have to stop and realize that the cost of "perfect" far exceeds the cost of getting it on the road in an unpolished state. You also have to realize that some part of that cost will be in human lives (on both sides of the equation).
If the airline manufacturers had to get it perfect, we would still be testing aircraft today, and the only air travel we would have would be blimps. Instead, we have the NTSB and FAA, which work to ensure that air traffic safety improves as time goes by. There is no guarantee that you won't die tomorrow in a horrible plane crash. The guarantee you do get is that the engineers will figure out why it happened and take steps to prevent further occurrences. The same approach has been true for automobiles, and cars today are the safest they have ever been, but like controlled flight, the most dangerous component is the pilot/driver. Autopilots on planes have been improving rapidly over the last 20 years, and even the pilot induced crashes are less frequent than they used to be. The sooner we can begin this iterative improvement process for over the road vehicles, the sooner we can start to see a reduction in auto accidents. Even if autonomous vehicles are worse today, if they end up reducing automobile fatalities by as little as 10% per year when they are mature, then having them kill an excess of 15,000 people over that 5 year span while they are still being "perfected", is a break even as far as human lives are concerned. In that time, Tesla has killed an average of 4 per year, or 20 lives paid for the technology that will save thousands per year when it is fully mature. You would have to be an idiot not to take that deal.
Given the stakes, Congress should take steps today to structure the process in exactly the same way as the very successful air safety system the whole world uses to reduce airline crashes. As part of that, I would take it one step further, and automatically indemnify any auto manufacturer that releases their system designs for public scrutiny.
Although to be fair, my first question is: why ST? I have looked at them before, and every time I look, I can get a 32 bit uC from Cypress with more IO, and pay less unit cost than the cost of the 8 bit ST chips.
Erm, what has the dev tool chain to do with accessing a processor register from C?
The "standard dev env" supported by the manufacturer will include libraries that provide all of the control access you need. These are typically provided as C libraries (written in assembly, but with a C interface).
To use these, just copy the libraries and.h files into your dev environment of choice, and done.
Then tell us how you do it, so we learn something;D
For most chips, it is good enough to use the dev environment the manufacturer recommends. If you want to use your own dev env, the easiest way is to locate the hardware libraries from within the recommended dev env. Simply copy the libraries and headers. Most manufacturers will actually make this easier by providing those libraries and headers upon request. In the rarest of circumstances, the manufacturer will refuse or ignore the request. That is the time to re-evaluate the total cost of development with that chip, because they have just added a very large amount of work to your project, so the chip better provide some extraordinary value to offset this additional development cost.
For every "embedded" processor I have seen in the last 15 years, the manufacturer has a preferred dev toolchain. Don't fall into the trap of paying for it either. Almost all of the toolchains I use are free because the manufacturers understand that toolchains represent a limited form of lock in. The very idea that a vendor would charge you for the toolchain on top of the other benefits they get from you using it is insulting. To my knowledge the only major player left that does this is Freescale, and fortunately, there are other compelling reasons not to use their processors as well, so they never even make it into the later rounds of processor selection.
The difference is, the above comment which was being responded to, "Police don't expect to get shot by members of the public during every shift they work", is idiotic, unless the poster thinks the cops can single out *specific shifts* where they might get shot at, in which case they could simply call in sick for those shifts and cops would never get shot at all. TLDR, police work is deadly and cops risk death by gunshot at all times even if they're not on the SWAT team. One of the 5 sniper victims on Friday was a transit cop.
Cops in this country are increasingly at risk of being shot specifically *because* of the shoot first ask questions later mentality. When one side of a conflict is perceived as being trigger happy, the other side has to up their game in self defense. The only solution is to DE-escalate, and the criminals are not the ones who are supposed to be the professionals. If you want to reduce the number of police involved shootings, disarm the police completely, and make killing and unarmed officer an automatic capitol offense, with mandatory death penalty. Then the police will actually be safer since shooting a cop will effectively mean a death sentence for the shooter. How often do British police get shot? How often do they shoot anyone, innocent or otherwise? British cops are a hell of a lot safer than US cops specifically *because* they are not armed. There have been more than a dozen cops shot in the line of duty in the US just this year so far. Thats is about the same number of PCs in Britain that have ever been shot in the last century. The number of people who have been shot by British cops is zero because they don't have anything to shoot people with. Compare that to the US where cops have killed an average of 500 people per year. Its high time we disarmed the front line police in this country: For their protection and ours.
(manipulating machine state registers, implementing barriers, etc.).
Funny, I never had trouble accessing registers using C. And if you're dealing with a processor that is powerul enough to be doing instruction re-ordering, you're probably not working in the embedded space anymore, and will almost definitely have an actual OS on your device which can and will handle those details for you.
Then I assume you're paying a third party to supply libraries for you, operating systems, startup code, BSPs, etc. Which means those third parties are using the assembler even if you aren't. I do embedded for a living, and I have to do assembler - not everyone working on the software does but some people do.
As a contractor, I have seen a large number of projects where the client wanted optimizations done for both space and performance so they could try to squeeze one more feature into an already barely capable processor. In all but one of those cases, it turned out to be more cost efficient to replace the microcontroller with a more modern one. In about a third of the cases, my solutions actually *reduced* unit cost because the client had been paying a higher per unit price for their uCs than what is currently available for much more powerful options. The most extreme example was stripping an old Freescale processor out of a product and replacing it with a modern cypress PSOC. The old processor cost $11.03 per unit, and the PSOC cost $1.57. The per unit savings paid for my contract cost in less that 2 years (including the new features they wanted). It almost never makes sense to resort to assembly unless there is a reasonable expectation of selling millions of units per year, and even then, it'll be close because powerful uCs have become so damn cheap lately. I can do it if thats what the customer really wants, but my job is to maximize the customers return on their investment in my time. I do very well because my customers get what they really want, not necessarily what they initially come to me asking for.
If you're out of compute power, your best bet is to look into getting a faster uC, or getting a PSOC, where you can offload a significant portion of your compute expense into programmable hardware.
Karma applies to everyone and Alton Sterling was hardly a stand-up, do-right kind of person.
The man was pinned to the ground and incapable of anything more than a token fight.
The video clearly shows the officer pull his gun, point it at Sterling, and after a delay of a few seconds, he shot the man in cold blood. This officer is guilty of 1st degree murder, plain and simple. There is pretty much no way you can misinterpret that video. The officer used deadly force with absolutely no good reason to do so. Sterling was effectively subdued, and the officer had no remotely justifiable reason to pull the trigger. A good cop would have cuffed Sterling right then. A murderer does what this guy did.
nothing less than a 100% reliable, full-time autopilot function is acceptable
Basic engineering and continuous improvement engineering needs to be taught in grammar school so that people don't continue to believe in that kind of crap.
There is no such thing as 100%. The best you can do is the way the airline industry functions. When something happens, you investigate it thoroughly, and make necessary changes to avoid a recurrence. That is the only sane way to engineer any system. The general public doesn't have the IQ to understand this principle, and as soon as a relatively few people die, there is a public outcry. If we used your 100% method, there would be absolutely nothing because everything would still be in development. You wouldn't dare get on a plane. They still crash occasionally, sometimes due to design faults. You couldn't get in a car because there are occasional safety related faults with the vehicles that didn't show up during prototype.
In the end, the most fundamental problem is that nothing is ever solved by people getting on a soap box and decrying the evil companies, and how they're killing people to make a buck. If you want to help make a difference, become a volunteer firefighter, or apply to work at one of these car companies and help improve the technology. If you want to contribute nothing of value, continue what you're doing.
Hey Anonymous Coward, quick question. My brother is an author. How does he get paid for 'performing' his work?
The same way artists through the ages have earned a living: Through the patronage of wealthy benefactors. It was one of the basic ways that the wealthy could give back to society. It is a component of the social contract that has been falling into disuse lately, and we are definitely not better off with copyright as its replacement.
Just because you lack the imagination and foresight to see a viable way to earn a living from it doesn't mean that others are similarly handicapped. Please refrain from imposing your own shortsightedness and lack of historical awareness onto my society.
Some people start off in a situation where extra loans to dig them further in the hole won't be the best choice. But you can't even think of such a situation.
Sure, but 5 million people in Spain alone? I strongly doubt that. If they are currently unemployed, why not go back to school? Even in the US, where you have to pay, there are tons of programs out there to get unemployed people into higher education. If said person was managing family care while holding down a full time job, I'm 100% certain that they could manage university while managing that same family care. They just don't, thats why they remain chronically unemployed.
The proof is in the pudding, the number of people starting college increased by huge numbers starting in 2008. The number of people graduating? not so much. Most of those people who started, gave it up as soon as they could find the same type of crap work they had been doing. Either they're too stupid to realize they are still backed into the same corner, they chose dumb majors that would not fulfill the obvious need for tech workers, or they couldn't hack it and dropped out. End result, we're still not graduating any more STEMs than we were. The simple truth is that the majority of people simply cant handle high tech work. The sooner this reality is accepted, the sooner we can start looking at what we want the post labor world to look like.
And how was that not the fault of his manager/boss, which surely earned tad more?
I didn't say it wasn't his boss' fault. His boss was one of the owners of the company. They needed a programmer, and didn't have much money, and didn't want to give up any equity. They hired him. It worked out OK for the first 5 years. In the end, it cost them. It might even cost them the company if they cant get things turned around. The lessons they learned the hard way, are: if you're not willing to pay for quality, you're not going to get quality, and anyone without experience and/or the degree is an awfully big risk.
You don't fathom how incredibly hypocritical and incompetent the hiring/corporate part of the labour system is here in Spain.
I do in fact understand the problem, its not that bad here in the states, but it isn't much better in the grand scheme of things. From a hiring managers perspective, there are a lot of desperate people out there throwing their resumes at any job the sounds like it will pay decent, whether they are remotely qualified or not. In the end, the labor laws in much of Europe make it very difficult for a company to get rid of the low performing people, so they would much prefer to not hire them in the first place. The best way to avoid hiring bad performers is to hire only people with a strong track record, and that necessarily precludes a large portion of the population. People don't end up layed off and looking for work because they were the most valuable employee...
So in the end, companies don't train, they hire. They only hire sure bets, and close to sure bets (phd recipients and those with 20 years experience are a good start). Everyone elses resume goes in the shit can with the other 50,000 garbage resumes they received. Its an overwhelming amount of work to sift through that much crap to find the diamond in the rough.
For every 1 person like you out there submitting resumes, there are 20 absolutely useless nitwits out there. Sure you can tell pretty quick in an in person interview, but if I'm hiring, its because I don't have enough time to get all the work done that needs to be done; I can't exactly afford to spend 3-4 man hours of labor per candidate x 20 candidates, just hoping there will be a decent applicant in the mix.
Why are you assuming that the *majority* of these uneducated unemployed people are uneducated because they're stupid rather than because they can't afford university?
Because higher education can be had in the United states with enough effort and ability to demonstrate decent grades. You can get loans. It will cost you, but if the alternative is a $35k job vs a $200k job, I will state with certainty, that you will not find anyone in those $35k jobs that is, or ever was capable of being trained to do the $200k jobs. If they were, they would have started night classes somewhere to that effect. Do well enough in earning a bachelors degree, even from a community college, and you will be able to get into a masters or phd program. You might have to take out massive loans, but even $200k in loans gets paid down quick when you're making an extra $80k per year after taxes.
In much of europe, higher education is paid for by the state, which renders your argument even less relevant
The problem isn't that workers lack the skills needed. It's the fact that the companies are looking for the perfect candidates. They have no interest in training people to do the job. When entry level programming positions require compsci degrees and 3 years experience in 5 different languages/libs you know the barrier to entry is a bit too high...
I have personally had to deal with the work product of an individual who had no formal training in computer science. He had built an entire product almost by himself. While the product did work, maintenance was such a nightmare, that implementing new features that should have been done within a single sprint could take as much as 6 months (I'm talking about 6 months of his time, not mine, I quit and got another job rather than deal with that mess). I have been told by a few friends of mine, that after he had left, his replacement informed his superiors that refactoring was the only practical way forward (same thing I had told them). Evidently they are trying to do that right now, but the inability to do new feature releases in the mean time is costing them millions.
That kid who wrote the original system was smart. He did in fact get the original product working pretty much on his own. What he lacked was formal training, and experience. Either one of those two things would have done wonders for this particular project.
Most jobs out there are smaller companies that only have one or two key people. If they get the wrong people, it can kill the company. Big companies can afford to use a more hierarchical team, but this makes the process slow and more expensive. In the end, they tend to get trounced by the startups being created by the relatively small set of very smart and very lucky folks who can handle a large project with limited resources, and manage to find the funding they need to get from zero to initial product offering.
it also puzzles me why the Spanish government and employers association are not actively providing facilities to educate unemployed workers to take the vacant positions.
Because you don't train someone, who has been manufacturing doorknobs for the last 20 years, to now be an electrical engineer. The majority of these unemployed people are incapable of developing the skillset necessary to handle the work that is available. Given the extremely high payscales listed in TFA, if the unemployed people were capable of learning it at all, they would have already availed themselves of the higher education system to achieve those degrees.
There is a fallacy in this world that anyone can be anything they want. The sad reality is that most people simply don't have the basic talent to become a rocket scientist. Pretending that we can fill an urgent need for rocket scientists by retraining a bunch of gas station attendants is just stupid.
Its time the world faces the reality that there is already an entire class of people who have such a low value to society that the only reason they can survive is because governments artificially maintain minimum wages. Every advance in technology renders an ever larger subset of the population into this class. It is time that humanity stops and decides what the future of the race is going to look like, because if we don't, then the matter will decide itself, and will do so the way it always has: through warfare.
What's the average pay for American engineers in fantasy land?
Same as it was ten years ago, and only marginally higher than it was 20 years ago.
When I graduated in '01, the median starting pay in my field was $65k, and average pay was $91k. Today, the median starting pay is $70k, and average pay is $93k. That is an average annual increase in starting pay of 0.45% per year. The increase in average pay across the whole field has only increased by 0.133% per year. Meanwhile, unemployment in my field is pretty close to zero. There are almost no qualified applicants out of the hundreds of resumes we receive for any given opening. In spite of the incredibly low unemployment, there has been no increase in salaries, due to several factors. First, employers know that their employees will not be able to get significantly better elsewhere, so they do not offer any better than they have to. Second, filling open positions is typically done by job postings, and referrals, not by "poaching". What this means is that the company has to wait longer to find a qualified applicant, but they don't have to pay the premium in cost that is associated with poaching employees (10-20% higher salary than the poached employees current salary). It is the effect of poaching that significantly drives salary increases. When companies have to resort to poaching to achieve staffing levels, industry salaries rise fast. That is why the anti-poaching agreements between silicon valley companies should have been punished by virtue of an automatic 15% raise for all of their current employees. This would have been sufficient punishment to make the companies rethink that policy, and also would have effectively undid the damage that had been caused by the anti-poaching in the first place.
The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.
So what you are really saying is that laws shouldn't exist and only a jury should decide if something is a crime or not?
That's lynch mob justice.
Thats largely what we have anyways. The illusion that there is something more there has been repeatedly exposed. Laws and governments can't change the fundamental mob justice of the world, only assign more influence to some individuals and less to others.
The closest any government ever came to perfect justice was the old soviet union where punishment was far more severe and certain, thus deterring crime more effectively. Even there, the system got gamed pretty hard and fast.
The reality of the matter is that the only way to stop a lynch mob is to break the mentality. In the history of the world, a few exceptional people have managed to defy a mob, but they did so, not with the help of laws, but with the gift of compassion, and the willingness to put themselves in harms way for the sake of the accused. They appeal to the reason and the emotion of the mob, but mobs do not respond to the threat of law.
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Safety and building standards are obsolete; lets repeal them so anyone can build whatever structure they wish on their property and rent it out.
??? What the hell does that have to do with regulating and taxing hotels? Building standards apply to both types of buildings, and should continue to apply. Apartments for rent are held to a higher standard than owner occupied properties, and in most places you have to maintain a certificate of occupancy on any rental property. This is not being disputed.
Minimum wage laws, insurance requirements and background checks on cab drivers are obsolete, so lets get rid of them.
Wow, you went off the reservation on that one. Those things have nothing to do with the discussion at hand. If you're implying that by eliminating one useless bit of regulation, then all regulation is bad, then you are either a blithering idiot, or are trying to put words in someone else's mouth. Either way, your arguments are entirely without merit.
In an era where terrorists rent trucks and use them as weapons of mass destruction to mow down crowds of helpless people, assault weapons bans and laws banning sale of munitions such as TOW missiles are outdated and should be repealed. Think about how many people would have been saved in Nice if one or more frenchmen had TOW missiles in hand.
I thought your last paragraph was out there. This takes the cake! Are you trying to imply that people who rent rooms on airbnb are terrorists? or are you suggesting that a terrorist is planning some nefarious plot where access to airbnb rooms is somehow central to their ability to perpetrate and attack? Either way, any attempt to relate the two concepts is laughable at best.
You might want to try having someone else proof read your posts for sanity before hitting the submit button next time. Trying to follow any semblance of a thought process in your post is like looking for reason at a political debate: it might be there somewhere, but who has time to sift through all the crap to find it.
How would an immediately available customer rating know if the carpets were fire retardant or not? That all the electrical items were tagged and tested regularly?
In a free standing apartment, two, or even a four unit building, there simply is not the danger from fire that exists in a large hotel. even in a 5000 square foot house, you are never more than a short sprint from an exit. Hotels on the other hand, you could often be a long hallways from safety, with scores of other people competing with you for limited evacuation routes. When a house burns down, it is pretty rare for there to be an actual fatality from the fire or smoke. Burns and ailments yes, fatalities, not that much. With Hotel fires, there is a lot more potential for death, especially in multistory buildings. All in all, you're safer staying at an ancient run down bed and breakfast where the whole place is wired with lamp cord, and the carpets are made out of a combination of jet fuel and matches, than you are on the 30th floor of a high rise hotel...
If "fairness" is a concern, the hotels should be left alone — and unregulated — too.
I'm not normally one to drink the "regulation is bad" coolaid, but in this case, the regulation serves a function that has been deprecated by the new instant availability of information. This is definitely one of those cases where technology has rendered moot the underlying reality that forced the need for regulation in the first place. The only problem is that regulation in the hotel industry lines the pockets of the already established players as well as the town and cities doing the regulating. Just like the cab industry, its time for an overhaul of these regulations and a thorough re-examination of the underlying realities. I find it overwhelmingly likely that its time to give that regulation the axe, and free up hotels and motels to be more cost competitive with airbnb. There will still be a market for hotels, just not nearly such a big one, which seems only fair, as all of the hotels near where I live sit mostly empty most of the time. They can afford that business model because most of their costs come from actually renting the room (aka taxes contingent upon occupancy). This kind of a change will start a culling in the hotel industry that, frankly, its about time we actually got around to. Free up some of that prime real estate in and around hotels, train stations, and major venues for things that provide more social value to the local residents.
is the per-mile-driven accident rate greater or less with Autopilot (or equivalent) enabled? Basically, it's a "perfect is the enemy of the good" situation whereby some folks seem to want to limit autonomous driving until it is 100% perfect when we all know that humans are far, far less reliable.
The national average fatalities was 1.08 per 100M miles driven in 2014. The Tesla autopilot has driven approximately 50M miles with 2 fatalities. So far, the autopilot has about 4x the fatality rate as over the road drivers. If this statistic were to continue, then I would be both appalled and surprised. It took from 1987 until now to reduce fatalities in over the road from 4 per 100M miles down to todays 1.08 per 100M. I would expect that improvements to autopilot to address each of the specific cases that comes up, and stops those cases from happening again will reduce this number fairly rapidly, and within 2 or 3 years I would expect parity. Soon thereafter, I would expect rapid improvement in autonomous vehicles compared to overall statistics, since like airline safety, the process ensures that the systems can only get safer. The most encouraging aspect is that in every case where a Tesla vehicle is in an accident, Tesla actively retrieves the logs to find out what happened. This feedback is a fundamental part of defect reduction. How often do you hear about Ford or Chevy digging into an accident to find out why it happened? Hell, most of their products aren't even designed to be able to provide such logs, even though the prevalence of drive by wire, and various electronic systems means there is more than enough opportunity to maintain useful logs. For some reason, Tesla seems to be the only one actually doing so.
So true. Corporations and their CEOs have a long history of being 100% honest. Why there's no way that a single case in centuries could be shown where one has ever lied about anything.
The part you missed is that it is very unlikely that Musk even knows any details about how the logging works, or how to retrieve the information. For that, he has a VP, and that VP has a department head, and that guy has a project lead who may or may not have included several people who actually acquired the log files, and decoded them to present it in a format that Musk could easily relate. All of that requires that many people at many levels of the company be involved. The larger the group of people involved, the more difficult it would be to keep one or more of them from voicing concerns over an ethical concern of this magnitude, especially since it would already be clear to all involved that there is expected to be a government investigation which would expose complicity...
No, the logs are genuine. If there is a technical problem, it is more likely to relate to how the driver is informed of autopilot status. Some of the more useful features of autopilot (like collision avoidance) should never turn off, even if the driver wants them off.
The autopilot should NOT turn off until the car is either stopped or it detects that the driver is controlling the vehicle (hands on the wheel).
The autopilot didn't turn off. It was fully prepared to stop gracefully, and was doing so until the diver stepped on the accelerator and applied manual steering control. Any competent driver knows that when you manually command a vehicle of any kind to do something by applying inputs, it is going to do what you tell it. If he had simply kept his hands and feet off the controls, the car would have come to a complete stop, and this guy would still be driving his Tesla with no injuries other than his pride at having come to a complete stop in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.
This story like so many others I have read recently just seem to re-iterate the point that the vast majority of drivers are simply not qualified to operate a motor vehicle at all, as they have not had sufficient training, and do not know what to do in unexpected situations. Fully autonomous vehicles can't come quickly enough. Even in their present state, they probably save more lives than they take.
"well it's only in beta". In which case it should never have been out on the public road.
Engineering doesn't work that way. Driving is a complicated enough task that working out the majority of the kinks in an autopilot system will requires billions of miles of road testing to start approaching "perfect". That would require hundreds of billions of dollars in testing costs. In the mean time, tens of thousands of drivers per year get killed in avoidable accidents. At some point, you have to stop and realize that the cost of "perfect" far exceeds the cost of getting it on the road in an unpolished state. You also have to realize that some part of that cost will be in human lives (on both sides of the equation).
If the airline manufacturers had to get it perfect, we would still be testing aircraft today, and the only air travel we would have would be blimps. Instead, we have the NTSB and FAA, which work to ensure that air traffic safety improves as time goes by. There is no guarantee that you won't die tomorrow in a horrible plane crash. The guarantee you do get is that the engineers will figure out why it happened and take steps to prevent further occurrences. The same approach has been true for automobiles, and cars today are the safest they have ever been, but like controlled flight, the most dangerous component is the pilot/driver. Autopilots on planes have been improving rapidly over the last 20 years, and even the pilot induced crashes are less frequent than they used to be. The sooner we can begin this iterative improvement process for over the road vehicles, the sooner we can start to see a reduction in auto accidents. Even if autonomous vehicles are worse today, if they end up reducing automobile fatalities by as little as 10% per year when they are mature, then having them kill an excess of 15,000 people over that 5 year span while they are still being "perfected", is a break even as far as human lives are concerned. In that time, Tesla has killed an average of 4 per year, or 20 lives paid for the technology that will save thousands per year when it is fully mature. You would have to be an idiot not to take that deal.
Given the stakes, Congress should take steps today to structure the process in exactly the same way as the very successful air safety system the whole world uses to reduce airline crashes. As part of that, I would take it one step further, and automatically indemnify any auto manufacturer that releases their system designs for public scrutiny.
Lack of data isn't a good argument for not trusting someone.
Yes it is. There is an age old adage the goes "Trust isn't given, its earned". There is 10,000 years of wisdom in that expression.
How many free compilers are there for stm8? Just sdcc :-( so we chose to pay $5000 for iar which im not happy about.
I would start here
Although to be fair, my first question is: why ST? I have looked at them before, and every time I look, I can get a 32 bit uC from Cypress with more IO, and pay less unit cost than the cost of the 8 bit ST chips.
Erm, what has the dev tool chain to do with accessing a processor register from C?
The "standard dev env" supported by the manufacturer will include libraries that provide all of the control access you need. These are typically provided as C libraries (written in assembly, but with a C interface).
To use these, just copy the libraries and .h files into your dev environment of choice, and done.
Then tell us how you do it, so we learn something ;D
For most chips, it is good enough to use the dev environment the manufacturer recommends. If you want to use your own dev env, the easiest way is to locate the hardware libraries from within the recommended dev env. Simply copy the libraries and headers. Most manufacturers will actually make this easier by providing those libraries and headers upon request. In the rarest of circumstances, the manufacturer will refuse or ignore the request. That is the time to re-evaluate the total cost of development with that chip, because they have just added a very large amount of work to your project, so the chip better provide some extraordinary value to offset this additional development cost.
For every "embedded" processor I have seen in the last 15 years, the manufacturer has a preferred dev toolchain. Don't fall into the trap of paying for it either. Almost all of the toolchains I use are free because the manufacturers understand that toolchains represent a limited form of lock in. The very idea that a vendor would charge you for the toolchain on top of the other benefits they get from you using it is insulting. To my knowledge the only major player left that does this is Freescale, and fortunately, there are other compelling reasons not to use their processors as well, so they never even make it into the later rounds of processor selection.
The difference is, the above comment which was being responded to, "Police don't expect to get shot by members of the public during every shift they work", is idiotic, unless the poster thinks the cops can single out *specific shifts* where they might get shot at, in which case they could simply call in sick for those shifts and cops would never get shot at all. TLDR, police work is deadly and cops risk death by gunshot at all times even if they're not on the SWAT team. One of the 5 sniper victims on Friday was a transit cop.
Cops in this country are increasingly at risk of being shot specifically *because* of the shoot first ask questions later mentality. When one side of a conflict is perceived as being trigger happy, the other side has to up their game in self defense. The only solution is to DE-escalate, and the criminals are not the ones who are supposed to be the professionals. If you want to reduce the number of police involved shootings, disarm the police completely, and make killing and unarmed officer an automatic capitol offense, with mandatory death penalty. Then the police will actually be safer since shooting a cop will effectively mean a death sentence for the shooter. How often do British police get shot? How often do they shoot anyone, innocent or otherwise? British cops are a hell of a lot safer than US cops specifically *because* they are not armed. There have been more than a dozen cops shot in the line of duty in the US just this year so far. Thats is about the same number of PCs in Britain that have ever been shot in the last century. The number of people who have been shot by British cops is zero because they don't have anything to shoot people with. Compare that to the US where cops have killed an average of 500 people per year. Its high time we disarmed the front line police in this country: For their protection and ours.
(manipulating machine state registers, implementing barriers, etc.).
Funny, I never had trouble accessing registers using C. And if you're dealing with a processor that is powerul enough to be doing instruction re-ordering, you're probably not working in the embedded space anymore, and will almost definitely have an actual OS on your device which can and will handle those details for you.
Then I assume you're paying a third party to supply libraries for you, operating systems, startup code, BSPs, etc. Which means those third parties are using the assembler even if you aren't. I do embedded for a living, and I have to do assembler - not everyone working on the software does but some people do.
As a contractor, I have seen a large number of projects where the client wanted optimizations done for both space and performance so they could try to squeeze one more feature into an already barely capable processor. In all but one of those cases, it turned out to be more cost efficient to replace the microcontroller with a more modern one. In about a third of the cases, my solutions actually *reduced* unit cost because the client had been paying a higher per unit price for their uCs than what is currently available for much more powerful options. The most extreme example was stripping an old Freescale processor out of a product and replacing it with a modern cypress PSOC. The old processor cost $11.03 per unit, and the PSOC cost $1.57. The per unit savings paid for my contract cost in less that 2 years (including the new features they wanted). It almost never makes sense to resort to assembly unless there is a reasonable expectation of selling millions of units per year, and even then, it'll be close because powerful uCs have become so damn cheap lately. I can do it if thats what the customer really wants, but my job is to maximize the customers return on their investment in my time. I do very well because my customers get what they really want, not necessarily what they initially come to me asking for.
If you're out of compute power, your best bet is to look into getting a faster uC, or getting a PSOC, where you can offload a significant portion of your compute expense into programmable hardware.
Karma applies to everyone and Alton Sterling was hardly a stand-up, do-right kind of person.
The man was pinned to the ground and incapable of anything more than a token fight.
The video clearly shows the officer pull his gun, point it at Sterling, and after a delay of a few seconds, he shot the man in cold blood. This officer is guilty of 1st degree murder, plain and simple. There is pretty much no way you can misinterpret that video. The officer used deadly force with absolutely no good reason to do so. Sterling was effectively subdued, and the officer had no remotely justifiable reason to pull the trigger. A good cop would have cuffed Sterling right then. A murderer does what this guy did.
nothing less than a 100% reliable, full-time autopilot function is acceptable
Basic engineering and continuous improvement engineering needs to be taught in grammar school so that people don't continue to believe in that kind of crap.
There is no such thing as 100%. The best you can do is the way the airline industry functions. When something happens, you investigate it thoroughly, and make necessary changes to avoid a recurrence. That is the only sane way to engineer any system. The general public doesn't have the IQ to understand this principle, and as soon as a relatively few people die, there is a public outcry. If we used your 100% method, there would be absolutely nothing because everything would still be in development. You wouldn't dare get on a plane. They still crash occasionally, sometimes due to design faults. You couldn't get in a car because there are occasional safety related faults with the vehicles that didn't show up during prototype.
In the end, the most fundamental problem is that nothing is ever solved by people getting on a soap box and decrying the evil companies, and how they're killing people to make a buck. If you want to help make a difference, become a volunteer firefighter, or apply to work at one of these car companies and help improve the technology. If you want to contribute nothing of value, continue what you're doing.
Hey Anonymous Coward, quick question. My brother is an author. How does he get paid for 'performing' his work?
The same way artists through the ages have earned a living: Through the patronage of wealthy benefactors. It was one of the basic ways that the wealthy could give back to society. It is a component of the social contract that has been falling into disuse lately, and we are definitely not better off with copyright as its replacement.
Just because you lack the imagination and foresight to see a viable way to earn a living from it doesn't mean that others are similarly handicapped. Please refrain from imposing your own shortsightedness and lack of historical awareness onto my society.
Some people start off in a situation where extra loans to dig them further in the hole won't be the best choice. But you can't even think of such a situation.
Sure, but 5 million people in Spain alone? I strongly doubt that. If they are currently unemployed, why not go back to school? Even in the US, where you have to pay, there are tons of programs out there to get unemployed people into higher education. If said person was managing family care while holding down a full time job, I'm 100% certain that they could manage university while managing that same family care. They just don't, thats why they remain chronically unemployed.
The proof is in the pudding, the number of people starting college increased by huge numbers starting in 2008. The number of people graduating? not so much. Most of those people who started, gave it up as soon as they could find the same type of crap work they had been doing. Either they're too stupid to realize they are still backed into the same corner, they chose dumb majors that would not fulfill the obvious need for tech workers, or they couldn't hack it and dropped out. End result, we're still not graduating any more STEMs than we were. The simple truth is that the majority of people simply cant handle high tech work. The sooner this reality is accepted, the sooner we can start looking at what we want the post labor world to look like.
And how was that not the fault of his manager/boss, which surely earned tad more?
I didn't say it wasn't his boss' fault. His boss was one of the owners of the company. They needed a programmer, and didn't have much money, and didn't want to give up any equity. They hired him. It worked out OK for the first 5 years. In the end, it cost them. It might even cost them the company if they cant get things turned around. The lessons they learned the hard way, are: if you're not willing to pay for quality, you're not going to get quality, and anyone without experience and/or the degree is an awfully big risk.
You don't fathom how incredibly hypocritical and incompetent the hiring/corporate part of the labour system is here in Spain.
I do in fact understand the problem, its not that bad here in the states, but it isn't much better in the grand scheme of things. From a hiring managers perspective, there are a lot of desperate people out there throwing their resumes at any job the sounds like it will pay decent, whether they are remotely qualified or not. In the end, the labor laws in much of Europe make it very difficult for a company to get rid of the low performing people, so they would much prefer to not hire them in the first place. The best way to avoid hiring bad performers is to hire only people with a strong track record, and that necessarily precludes a large portion of the population. People don't end up layed off and looking for work because they were the most valuable employee...
So in the end, companies don't train, they hire. They only hire sure bets, and close to sure bets (phd recipients and those with 20 years experience are a good start). Everyone elses resume goes in the shit can with the other 50,000 garbage resumes they received. Its an overwhelming amount of work to sift through that much crap to find the diamond in the rough.
For every 1 person like you out there submitting resumes, there are 20 absolutely useless nitwits out there. Sure you can tell pretty quick in an in person interview, but if I'm hiring, its because I don't have enough time to get all the work done that needs to be done; I can't exactly afford to spend 3-4 man hours of labor per candidate x 20 candidates, just hoping there will be a decent applicant in the mix.
Why are you assuming that the *majority* of these uneducated unemployed people are uneducated because they're stupid rather than because they can't afford university?
Because higher education can be had in the United states with enough effort and ability to demonstrate decent grades. You can get loans. It will cost you, but if the alternative is a $35k job vs a $200k job, I will state with certainty, that you will not find anyone in those $35k jobs that is, or ever was capable of being trained to do the $200k jobs. If they were, they would have started night classes somewhere to that effect. Do well enough in earning a bachelors degree, even from a community college, and you will be able to get into a masters or phd program. You might have to take out massive loans, but even $200k in loans gets paid down quick when you're making an extra $80k per year after taxes.
In much of europe, higher education is paid for by the state, which renders your argument even less relevant
The problem isn't that workers lack the skills needed. It's the fact that the companies are looking for the perfect candidates. They have no interest in training people to do the job. When entry level programming positions require compsci degrees and 3 years experience in 5 different languages/libs you know the barrier to entry is a bit too high...
I have personally had to deal with the work product of an individual who had no formal training in computer science. He had built an entire product almost by himself. While the product did work, maintenance was such a nightmare, that implementing new features that should have been done within a single sprint could take as much as 6 months (I'm talking about 6 months of his time, not mine, I quit and got another job rather than deal with that mess). I have been told by a few friends of mine, that after he had left, his replacement informed his superiors that refactoring was the only practical way forward (same thing I had told them). Evidently they are trying to do that right now, but the inability to do new feature releases in the mean time is costing them millions.
That kid who wrote the original system was smart. He did in fact get the original product working pretty much on his own. What he lacked was formal training, and experience. Either one of those two things would have done wonders for this particular project.
Most jobs out there are smaller companies that only have one or two key people. If they get the wrong people, it can kill the company. Big companies can afford to use a more hierarchical team, but this makes the process slow and more expensive. In the end, they tend to get trounced by the startups being created by the relatively small set of very smart and very lucky folks who can handle a large project with limited resources, and manage to find the funding they need to get from zero to initial product offering.
it also puzzles me why the Spanish government and employers association are not actively providing facilities to educate unemployed workers to take the vacant positions.
Because you don't train someone, who has been manufacturing doorknobs for the last 20 years, to now be an electrical engineer. The majority of these unemployed people are incapable of developing the skillset necessary to handle the work that is available. Given the extremely high payscales listed in TFA, if the unemployed people were capable of learning it at all, they would have already availed themselves of the higher education system to achieve those degrees.
There is a fallacy in this world that anyone can be anything they want. The sad reality is that most people simply don't have the basic talent to become a rocket scientist. Pretending that we can fill an urgent need for rocket scientists by retraining a bunch of gas station attendants is just stupid.
Its time the world faces the reality that there is already an entire class of people who have such a low value to society that the only reason they can survive is because governments artificially maintain minimum wages. Every advance in technology renders an ever larger subset of the population into this class. It is time that humanity stops and decides what the future of the race is going to look like, because if we don't, then the matter will decide itself, and will do so the way it always has: through warfare.
What's the average pay for American engineers in fantasy land?
Same as it was ten years ago, and only marginally higher than it was 20 years ago.
When I graduated in '01, the median starting pay in my field was $65k, and average pay was $91k. Today, the median starting pay is $70k, and average pay is $93k. That is an average annual increase in starting pay of 0.45% per year. The increase in average pay across the whole field has only increased by 0.133% per year. Meanwhile, unemployment in my field is pretty close to zero. There are almost no qualified applicants out of the hundreds of resumes we receive for any given opening. In spite of the incredibly low unemployment, there has been no increase in salaries, due to several factors. First, employers know that their employees will not be able to get significantly better elsewhere, so they do not offer any better than they have to. Second, filling open positions is typically done by job postings, and referrals, not by "poaching". What this means is that the company has to wait longer to find a qualified applicant, but they don't have to pay the premium in cost that is associated with poaching employees (10-20% higher salary than the poached employees current salary). It is the effect of poaching that significantly drives salary increases. When companies have to resort to poaching to achieve staffing levels, industry salaries rise fast. That is why the anti-poaching agreements between silicon valley companies should have been punished by virtue of an automatic 15% raise for all of their current employees. This would have been sufficient punishment to make the companies rethink that policy, and also would have effectively undid the damage that had been caused by the anti-poaching in the first place.
The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.
So what you are really saying is that laws shouldn't exist and only a jury should decide if something is a crime or not? That's lynch mob justice.
Thats largely what we have anyways. The illusion that there is something more there has been repeatedly exposed. Laws and governments can't change the fundamental mob justice of the world, only assign more influence to some individuals and less to others.
The closest any government ever came to perfect justice was the old soviet union where punishment was far more severe and certain, thus deterring crime more effectively. Even there, the system got gamed pretty hard and fast.
The reality of the matter is that the only way to stop a lynch mob is to break the mentality. In the history of the world, a few exceptional people have managed to defy a mob, but they did so, not with the help of laws, but with the gift of compassion, and the willingness to put themselves in harms way for the sake of the accused. They appeal to the reason and the emotion of the mob, but mobs do not respond to the threat of law.