Citation? A cone that has been run over is no longer a cone shape. How about a plastic bag? Of a small branch? These problems have not been solved and no amount of wishing they were will change this. If they have then I await you link to the relevant research.
A public road is not a controlled environment.
Computer image recognition is not at the early attempt stage, there are decades of research and is still shit. There has been zero success in getting a computer "eye" to function like an animal equivalent.
Until either of those two things change dramatically, it won't happen.
Just wishing it will get better won't make it so. That is emotion, not logic.
I have read about mandatory voting in other countries... what can happen is that in elections that people really don't care about, they wind up voting for Mickey Mouse, the FSM, or some other character just for kicks.
I live in one of those countries yet Mickey Mouse has never been elected. In fact, I could argue that the closest thing to Mickey Mouse holding office is over there in the good old US of A.
Generally a percentage of people will always not care. With mandatory voting you at least force people to participate, a side-effect of which is people do become more interested in the process.
However, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and maybe it might be a wise idea to at least get people to the polls somehow, even if they just play Tetris with the checkboxes on the voting machines, just to get rid of voter apathy.
A watch is a mechanical timepiece you wear on your wrist. The Apple product mentioned is a small computer you wear on your wrist.
And let's face it, the Apple watch is a copy of existing Samsung/LG/Pebble device (even if Apple thought it up first), and now Google is playing me too. there's Nothing says luxury like copying a copy...
The biggest hurdle to take is to correctly measure the surroundings. If you did that via image recognition, then yes, AI would be important. But there is laser, radar, GPS and so many other sensors involved that do nothing more than note distances to targets, location on road etc.
And this is impossible IMO. On a busy road you are only centimetres from other vehicles doing 60km/h, 120km/h for oncoming traffic. A human accepts that the car next to him probably won't change lanes suddenly and crash, so accepts the risk knowing that there is a chance it could happen. A computer needs AI to decide which of those risks are acceptable. When you come around a slight bend and a car is coming straight at you, you know they are likely to miss (still might hit, but that is the risk you accept) because of the bend in the road means the driver will veer past you. How does a computer work whether that is an acceptable risk, or an actual impending collision which requires emergency braking? The public road has too many variables. Too many risks that a human accepts that a computer won't be allowed to.
I don't think that we'll ever become so densely populated that the world is one big city, but I'll bet that we'll see large high-rise condos become much much more common, and then it'll be a ride down an elevator to do your shopping and a walk or train ride to school.
It's not that suburbia isn't awesome. It's just the direction I kind of envision things going in. I could be wrong. This sort of radical shift in urban planning would take centuries, to take hold in the west.
This already exists in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, and is starting to take hold elsewhere. The exodus to the suburbs in the 60's is slowly being reversed as people appreciate the convenience of living close to amenities. Inner cities are being gentrified, more people are choosing apartment living, because convenience beats everything. Being within walking distance to everything means never having to worry about a car, self-driven or not.
We already have self-driving vehicles, an elevator and some trains are examples. So the concept can work, I just don't think the environment of a public street is ever going to be viable. Should someone have the vision and finances to build a new city from scratch and skip human driven cars altogether, and design infrastructure specifically around automated transport, then and only then could I see it working.
When a human causes an accident, it is almost always something that would have been obvious to another human driver, resulting in the general opinion that humans are stupid. Most people are intelligent enough to realize that SDCs will not be perfect, but they will prevent a lot more accidents that they will cause, and the tradeoff is worth it. Seat-belts and airbags also occasionally kill people, but they save ten lives for every one they take, and people accept the tradeoff.
Your logic is not quite right there. Firstly a seat belt or airbag is not a decision making piece of machinery. A self-drvie car actually has to make decisions. Is that a plastic bag, or a cat? Each decision is a risk of a crash. You're also assuming that if human crash rate is x, then as long as automaton crash rate is less than x then everything is fine. But it doesn't work like that.
People believe it is only other stupid people that crash, and as long as they're in control they have a say in whether they crash or not. Handing over control to an automaton takes away that control. So your perceived risk goes from zero to something greater than zero.
Put this in with the flying car. Even if it did actually work, it's too expensive/impractical/risky to ever get approved anywhere public.
Your calculation implies that everyone replaces their car within a 5 year period.
That may be true in Beverly Hills, but it's certainly not true in the rest of the US.
It also implies these wonders of technology will cost the same as a regular car. A cheap aircraft cost $300k. An automated drone costs a couple of million. If those costs translate to cars then they're guaranteed to never be mainstream.
How do you define better? I'd love to see what maths you'd use to tell a computer the difference between a plastic cone and a small dog. Image recognition is the elephant in the room for self-controlling robots. Until that is solved then they'll never be allowed on the streets.
The biggest problem with public transport atm is that trains and buses are too inflexible - they don't go exactly to where people need them,
The biggest problem with public transport is the lack of support from govt to implement it properly. If you design and zone your city around your public transport then it does indeed go everywhere you need it. The problem in the West is we planned cities around the dream of the motor car and sprawling suburbs, then when we finally realised that that design doesn't scale well, tried to tack some buses and trains in where could and ended up with a mess.
If you've ever been to Hong Kong or Singapore, they have good examples of Public Transport done right. High Density stations with cheap and rapid transport.
The problem is that in the big city with all sorts of chaos, your self-driving car is going to crawl at 5km/h to avoid *every* possible hazards. Part of a successful commute is to accept some of those risks, but a computer won't be legally allowed to permit that.
You've never seen a machine attempt any sort of image recognition then. Spoiler: They suck at it. Google make a car that behaves according to a set of known and understood circumstances in a controlled environment. I've never driven on a public road that exhibited those characteristics.
Interesting comment. Here in the UK, I'd say laptops have been ubiquitous (meaning that anyone who had a plausible need for one would probably have one) since the early 2000s. Certainly that was true at every employer I worked for back then and more recently for every client I work with today. By 6-7 years ago, even the students all seemed to have laptops.
The Desktop was still a mainstream device in 2008. Vendor sales figures back that up. Unlike now when they are pretty much dead.
An iPad is far more portable:
As portable as a Surface Pro. Get it now?
We are living in different worlds. I have just looked up what I could buy if I walked to multiple stores within 15 minutes of where I'm sitting now and picked something up off the shelf.
There are numerous models of laptop, from well-known brands such as those you mentioned, with at least
You seem to be unaware of what constitutes "business-grade". Please list the actual models for comparison. For example, a Dell Latitude 7000 is a standard business laptop.
Business grade means long term vendor hardware support and warranty, robust chassis, and high res screen as a minimum. These things alone can double the price.
If you an unsure ask any vendor Account Manager for details
Of course if you do want to spend silly money, you can buy a laptop with a 300dpi class screen or go with Apple products, and they'll happily double the price or more, but that is totally unnecessary for a basic office system.
It is completely necessary if you work with professionals who spend 40 hours plus/week using their machines productively.
Because bitcoin is secure against government seizure, and it's secure against theft.
Er did you RTFA? Or follow the Silk Road story? Coins stolen, Govt seized. Next
Because bitcoin is secure against local fiat hyperinflation. Bitcoin, over the past few months, has actually been more stable than my home currency ($CDN), which has lost 30% of its value in that time.
Ok you can't mention the value of currency unless you have a reference. This is why Forex is traded in pairs. So 30% against what? the USD? Maybe the USD rose and CDN stayed the same? Can't possibly tell with the limited info you provided. BTC has swung up and down over 20% in the last two months. So much for that theory.
Because I can bring more than $10,000 of bitcoin into any country I like without needing to fill out forms or risk the government taking a cut of it if I forget.
Because that's an everyday issue for most people. What if you forget to declare anything on your customs form, how does BTC solve that?
Because microtransactions are cheap, and big transactions are also cheap.
Unlike say cash in which it costs... ???
Because I'm tired of carrying a pocketful of change to put in vending machines, and a walletful of paper bills to pay for things.
Your vending machine accepts BTC? Mine accept paypass, no coins or notes and the transaction is protected by the govt.
I'm equally tired of giving the debit company a major cut of every small purchase every time I decide I don't want to do this, or a credit company a major cut of every large purchase.
You want their service but you don't want to pay for it? Would you also like to ride the train for free?
But yes, one of the big reasons is fuck government,
Oh now we see the real reason. An anarchist who enjoys the freedoms and luxuries civilisation provides, but doesn't want to contribute to it.
nobody wants to have their money seized because they are rich enough to afford a large cash holiday.
I can only assume you aren't rich enough to do this? I am, and you tick the box in the form and nothing else happens. You can untwist your knickers now
But the bigger reason is to have a currency that you can treat like cash, that is secure like cash, but can work on the internet, just like cash.
And, just like cash, when your money is stolen because you left it out in the open, nobody is going to cry for you. Life sucks, move on.
An even better thing would be something that works like cash but has governance and insurance built-in wouldn't it? Say just like a credit card for example?
What I don't get is why people blame bitcoin. Did you blame the insecurity of the US dollar when Bernie Madoff conned people out of $65B. Yeah, that's right, $65 BILLION, not $12 million.
Who is blaming BTC? The story mentions that BTC was stolen, but I didn't see anything blaming BTC? It does however highlight the flaws with an unregulated currency, and that seems to have hit a soft spot with you.
IMO, it's inappropriate to treat all illegal drugs as the same thing. Marijuana and Ecstasy are not in the same ballpark as Ice and Heroin, yet both sides will happily cloud the distinction to suit their own argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in an uncontrolled environment they haven't.
If you think simple trigger logic and advanced visual recognition AI are the same problem then I can't help you.
Not sure of your definition of "unprepared" is. Clearly it's different from the rest of us.
Citation? A cone that has been run over is no longer a cone shape. How about a plastic bag? Of a small branch? These problems have not been solved and no amount of wishing they were will change this. If they have then I await you link to the relevant research.
A public road is not a controlled environment.
Computer image recognition is not at the early attempt stage, there are decades of research and is still shit. There has been zero success in getting a computer "eye" to function like an animal equivalent.
Until either of those two things change dramatically, it won't happen.
Just wishing it will get better won't make it so. That is emotion, not logic.
I have read about mandatory voting in other countries... what can happen is that in elections that people really don't care about, they wind up voting for Mickey Mouse, the FSM, or some other character just for kicks.
I live in one of those countries yet Mickey Mouse has never been elected. In fact, I could argue that the closest thing to Mickey Mouse holding office is over there in the good old US of A. Generally a percentage of people will always not care. With mandatory voting you at least force people to participate, a side-effect of which is people do become more interested in the process.
However, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and maybe it might be a wise idea to at least get people to the polls somehow, even if they just play Tetris with the checkboxes on the voting machines, just to get rid of voter apathy.
You got it.
If you are interested in Politics you'll know there is no such thing as an informed decision.
A watch is a mechanical timepiece you wear on your wrist. The Apple product mentioned is a small computer you wear on your wrist.
And let's face it, the Apple watch is a copy of existing Samsung/LG/Pebble device (even if Apple thought it up first), and now Google is playing me too. there's Nothing says luxury like copying a copy...
Thanks for your expert opinion... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
The biggest hurdle to take is to correctly measure the surroundings. If you did that via image recognition, then yes, AI would be important. But there is laser, radar, GPS and so many other sensors involved that do nothing more than note distances to targets, location on road etc.
And this is impossible IMO. On a busy road you are only centimetres from other vehicles doing 60km/h, 120km/h for oncoming traffic. A human accepts that the car next to him probably won't change lanes suddenly and crash, so accepts the risk knowing that there is a chance it could happen. A computer needs AI to decide which of those risks are acceptable. When you come around a slight bend and a car is coming straight at you, you know they are likely to miss (still might hit, but that is the risk you accept) because of the bend in the road means the driver will veer past you. How does a computer work whether that is an acceptable risk, or an actual impending collision which requires emergency braking? The public road has too many variables. Too many risks that a human accepts that a computer won't be allowed to.
I don't think that we'll ever become so densely populated that the world is one big city, but I'll bet that we'll see large high-rise condos become much much more common, and then it'll be a ride down an elevator to do your shopping and a walk or train ride to school.
It's not that suburbia isn't awesome. It's just the direction I kind of envision things going in. I could be wrong. This sort of radical shift in urban planning would take centuries, to take hold in the west.
This already exists in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, and is starting to take hold elsewhere. The exodus to the suburbs in the 60's is slowly being reversed as people appreciate the convenience of living close to amenities. Inner cities are being gentrified, more people are choosing apartment living, because convenience beats everything. Being within walking distance to everything means never having to worry about a car, self-driven or not.
We already have self-driving vehicles, an elevator and some trains are examples. So the concept can work, I just don't think the environment of a public street is ever going to be viable. Should someone have the vision and finances to build a new city from scratch and skip human driven cars altogether, and design infrastructure specifically around automated transport, then and only then could I see it working.
When a human causes an accident, it is almost always something that would have been obvious to another human driver, resulting in the general opinion that humans are stupid. Most people are intelligent enough to realize that SDCs will not be perfect, but they will prevent a lot more accidents that they will cause, and the tradeoff is worth it. Seat-belts and airbags also occasionally kill people, but they save ten lives for every one they take, and people accept the tradeoff.
Your logic is not quite right there. Firstly a seat belt or airbag is not a decision making piece of machinery. A self-drvie car actually has to make decisions. Is that a plastic bag, or a cat? Each decision is a risk of a crash. You're also assuming that if human crash rate is x, then as long as automaton crash rate is less than x then everything is fine. But it doesn't work like that.
People believe it is only other stupid people that crash, and as long as they're in control they have a say in whether they crash or not. Handing over control to an automaton takes away that control. So your perceived risk goes from zero to something greater than zero.
Put this in with the flying car. Even if it did actually work, it's too expensive/impractical/risky to ever get approved anywhere public.
Your calculation implies that everyone replaces their car within a 5 year period.
That may be true in Beverly Hills, but it's certainly not true in the rest of the US.
It also implies these wonders of technology will cost the same as a regular car. A cheap aircraft cost $300k. An automated drone costs a couple of million. If those costs translate to cars then they're guaranteed to never be mainstream.
How do you define better? I'd love to see what maths you'd use to tell a computer the difference between a plastic cone and a small dog. Image recognition is the elephant in the room for self-controlling robots. Until that is solved then they'll never be allowed on the streets.
The biggest problem with public transport atm is that trains and buses are too inflexible - they don't go exactly to where people need them,
The biggest problem with public transport is the lack of support from govt to implement it properly. If you design and zone your city around your public transport then it does indeed go everywhere you need it. The problem in the West is we planned cities around the dream of the motor car and sprawling suburbs, then when we finally realised that that design doesn't scale well, tried to tack some buses and trains in where could and ended up with a mess.
If you've ever been to Hong Kong or Singapore, they have good examples of Public Transport done right. High Density stations with cheap and rapid transport.
The problem is that in the big city with all sorts of chaos, your self-driving car is going to crawl at 5km/h to avoid *every* possible hazards. Part of a successful commute is to accept some of those risks, but a computer won't be legally allowed to permit that.
You've never seen a machine attempt any sort of image recognition then. Spoiler: They suck at it. Google make a car that behaves according to a set of known and understood circumstances in a controlled environment. I've never driven on a public road that exhibited those characteristics.
You are better off because you rode the backs of the victors.
Um, this is true for everybody, which is kind of my point. Progress doesn't come for free..
And that is something that is new to you too?
Interesting comment. Here in the UK, I'd say laptops have been ubiquitous (meaning that anyone who had a plausible need for one would probably have one) since the early 2000s. Certainly that was true at every employer I worked for back then and more recently for every client I work with today. By 6-7 years ago, even the students all seemed to have laptops.
The Desktop was still a mainstream device in 2008. Vendor sales figures back that up. Unlike now when they are pretty much dead.
An iPad is far more portable:
As portable as a Surface Pro. Get it now?
We are living in different worlds. I have just looked up what I could buy if I walked to multiple stores within 15 minutes of where I'm sitting now and picked something up off the shelf.
There are numerous models of laptop, from well-known brands such as those you mentioned, with at least
You seem to be unaware of what constitutes "business-grade". Please list the actual models for comparison. For example, a Dell Latitude 7000 is a standard business laptop. Business grade means long term vendor hardware support and warranty, robust chassis, and high res screen as a minimum. These things alone can double the price. If you an unsure ask any vendor Account Manager for details
Of course if you do want to spend silly money, you can buy a laptop with a 300dpi class screen or go with Apple products, and they'll happily double the price or more, but that is totally unnecessary for a basic office system.
It is completely necessary if you work with professionals who spend 40 hours plus/week using their machines productively.
Because bitcoin is secure against government seizure, and it's secure against theft.
Er did you RTFA? Or follow the Silk Road story? Coins stolen, Govt seized. Next
Because bitcoin is secure against local fiat hyperinflation. Bitcoin, over the past few months, has actually been more stable than my home currency ($CDN), which has lost 30% of its value in that time.
Ok you can't mention the value of currency unless you have a reference. This is why Forex is traded in pairs. So 30% against what? the USD? Maybe the USD rose and CDN stayed the same? Can't possibly tell with the limited info you provided. BTC has swung up and down over 20% in the last two months. So much for that theory.
Because I can bring more than $10,000 of bitcoin into any country I like without needing to fill out forms or risk the government taking a cut of it if I forget.
Because that's an everyday issue for most people. What if you forget to declare anything on your customs form, how does BTC solve that?
Because microtransactions are cheap, and big transactions are also cheap.
Unlike say cash in which it costs... ???
Because I'm tired of carrying a pocketful of change to put in vending machines, and a walletful of paper bills to pay for things.
Your vending machine accepts BTC? Mine accept paypass, no coins or notes and the transaction is protected by the govt.
I'm equally tired of giving the debit company a major cut of every small purchase every time I decide I don't want to do this, or a credit company a major cut of every large purchase.
You want their service but you don't want to pay for it? Would you also like to ride the train for free?
But yes, one of the big reasons is fuck government,
Oh now we see the real reason. An anarchist who enjoys the freedoms and luxuries civilisation provides, but doesn't want to contribute to it.
nobody wants to have their money seized because they are rich enough to afford a large cash holiday.
I can only assume you aren't rich enough to do this? I am, and you tick the box in the form and nothing else happens. You can untwist your knickers now
But the bigger reason is to have a currency that you can treat like cash, that is secure like cash, but can work on the internet, just like cash.
And, just like cash, when your money is stolen because you left it out in the open, nobody is going to cry for you. Life sucks, move on.
An even better thing would be something that works like cash but has governance and insurance built-in wouldn't it? Say just like a credit card for example?
What I don't get is why people blame bitcoin. Did you blame the insecurity of the US dollar when Bernie Madoff conned people out of $65B. Yeah, that's right, $65 BILLION, not $12 million.
Who is blaming BTC? The story mentions that BTC was stolen, but I didn't see anything blaming BTC? It does however highlight the flaws with an unregulated currency, and that seems to have hit a soft spot with you.
That says more about them than the definition of a free market.
IMO, it's inappropriate to treat all illegal drugs as the same thing. Marijuana and Ecstasy are not in the same ballpark as Ice and Heroin, yet both sides will happily cloud the distinction to suit their own argument.
Yeah because as alcohol demonstrates, easy access to brain stimulants never causes any problems... .