Radar is coming along nicely. There's some good 77GHz phase array radars coming out from Delphi and Bosch that do decent object detection and tracking. Flat transmitter panel, can see through plastics (so can be mounted behind bumpers), generally dirt resistant.
Add computer vision on top and you'd probably have something that can do a reasonable job.
I deal with Lidars a lot, on self-driving loaders in an underground mining environment. It's pretty much the worst place for them - dusty, wet, hot, lots of vibration, you name it. Even though they are sealed to IP67, with o-rings on sealing surfaces & etc, they get water in them on a regular basis - IP67 is no match for even the mild pressure from a garden hose, let alone a pressure cleaner. The recommendation from the manufacturer is to send them back to the factory when they get wet, we generally take them apart and dry them out because a visit to the factory costs upwards of $5,000 (and six weeks delay) for an $10,000 device.
They mostly need to be cleaned about once a shift if the conditions are average. They need to be cleaned hourly if conditions are terrible. Failure to clean them gives us missing portions of scans if a mud splatter hits the lens, or a general loss of distance if it's just grime. Both of those things upset the self-driving software eventually, and then it's tedious manual control until someone can go clean it.
A dirty lens used to give us a "pollution error", but we changed the settings in the firmware of the lidars to turn that function off because we were sick of regular halts for errors that had yet to make an impact on the machine's operation. That is, what the manufacturer thinks is a critical pollution fault is actually about halfway to being unusable.
Lenses on our machines typically last about a couple of thousand hours of operation - probably a year or so if you translate that to a passenger vehicle. And of course, when cleaning them the instructions say to use a mild detergent and a clean, lint free cloth, gently buffing to a sparkling result. In reality, that is usually windex (or contact cleaner if there's grease on the lens) and any sort of material that can be found to wipe it with - paper towel, the sleeve of your shirt, a thumb, etc. Needless to say, this generally transforms the finely polished plastic lenses into a hazy scratched mess fairly quickly, especially if people spray and then wipe the lens without actually rinsing the crud off. So expect this to happen to consumer gear as well. And you can't just directly hose them, because hey, they aren't that waterproof either.
As long as there's plastic lenses in use, there's not really much manufacturers can do about this, other than have a secondary, cheap, external covering that can be unclipped and swapped out quickly. Or something like peel-off stickers like motorbike riders have for their helmets. They could shift to proper glass lenses, but even though they'd be much more durable, they would also be much more expensive to make.
(And what's going on with your backend, Slashdot? Heaps of timeouts and errors today.)
If people stop using the dollar as a currency, it doesn't have any intrinsic value. So what keeps that from collapsing in on itself?
A nation's military, political, and manufacturing power. Things that Bitcoin lacks.
So let's look at it from Bitcoin's point of view:
Unless you and a lot of other people are willing to go to war for Bitcoin, or you pass laws regarding the mandantory use of Bitcoin for all government transactions, or you refuse to buy goods and services unless it's a Bitcoin transaction..... well, don't go putting all your eggs in the one Bitcoin basket, that's all I'm saying.
i promise i will buy all the bitcoins before it hits zero.
No you won't, because there'll be people who still insist that their coins are worth $10,000 and refuse to sell them. What you'll have is a giant gap between sellers and buyers, zero trading, no way to judge the worth of the coins (because there's no transactions), and thus no effective net worth as a currency or store of value.
Then trial him for copyright infringement in his own country. There's no need for extradition if reciprocal obligations are in place.
Oh wait, then the punishment would be much less severe and US corporations would not be able to have the satisfaction that they so urgently demand.
This is the bit that sticks in most people's throats I think. The pandering to US corporate interests. Sure, the guy is a dick. But due process was not followed, and that dick has had his reputation trashed, his assets seized, and his company ruined. Not cool, guys, not cool at all.
his criminal activity Please define his criminal activity that he has committed under NZ law.
While you're at it, mull over this hypothetical:
Homosexuality and the depiction of such is illegal in some countries. If someone performs in and distributes gay porn on the internet, should they be summarily extradited to one of those countries and suffer the consequences if that country demands it?
You can be damn sure your car's owner's manual mentions that you need to remain aware of your surroundings when using cruise control. I suspect there might even be big, bold warnings and exclamation marks in triangles around it.
It was more of a "Stand next to the engine bay of a running car and feel the amount of heat coming off it" comparison.
Anyway, dumping that heat straight out to the environment is very wasteful, much better to use it for heating your habitat and then melting ice or what-not with the remainder.
It's not massively powerful, we're talking kilowatts, not megawatts here. Think of the amount of heat that a radiator of a car engine deals with, if that's any help. Possibly might be able to get away with radiators.
Or that waste heat can be used for habitat heating, or you can just bury some pipes and sink that heat into the ground. Might be handy to melt local subsurface ice with perhaps.
Challenger's boosters are an excellent case for automated range safety.
How long did they spin out of control for? Video suggests 15 to 20 seconds. Or about a hundred times longer than an automated range safety device would have let them, greatly increasing the debris field.
Well, I'm guessing the approach was more along the lines of "an abundance of caution with the X86 ISA" as opposed to deliberate malice towards AMD.
Whilst no doubt there's some Intel guys with a very good working knowledge of AMD CPU internals, you'd really want to get direct confirmation from the actual AMD hardware guys that their hardware is immune to this.
Presumably they enabled the software workaround and ran it on a bunch of CPUs. Then they picked the most alarming slowdown they could find, regardless of whether that CPU needed the workaround or not.
Or perhaps they were just unaware at the time that AMD CPUs are not at risk.
Going to Mars means taking lots of equipment with you. All that stuff doesn't magically appear in low Earth orbit.
A big rocket to launch stuff to LEO means that you can sling a larger amount of payload (+fuel + transfer vehicle) to Mars in one go. Otherwise you need more launches, and have to fiddle about with the costs of multiple Mars transfer vehicles and etc. It's cheaper to go bigger, basically.
Grid voltage is generally maintained easily enough by the other power sources.
But the frequency drops due to the other spinning generators being under heavier load and slowing down. As you drop the frequency, AC synchronous motors (fans, refrigerators, older/larger A/C units, etc etc) also slow down and use less power. So there's a balance point where the 600MW loss is offset by the drop in grid frequency.
If you had a system comprised entirely of non-spinning sources of power (eg Tesla's battery, or flow batteries, or solar) in an emergency overload situation they would also lower the grid frequency to reduce load.
Grid operators try very hard to maintain a certain number of cycles per day though as it frequency variations make mains-powered clocks drift. So this drop in frequency would be offset by a rise in frequency later on when the system load was lower to make sure clocks read the correct time. (and it's not just wall clocks, it's timers for lights, off-peak power usage, etc etc)
In the 80's in Australia there was a lot of strikes and industrial action in the power sector which caused a lot of shutdowns - power stations at the time deliberately ran at a lower frequency to reduce load without load shedding and maintain supply.
I can send a simple http request to your server, and
Your server sends me the information without doing its homework, then
Sucks to be you.
Don't want your information to be scraped? Have it behind a login - free or otherwise - then ban accounts that are slurping down 10,000 pages a day.
Ohhhhh then it wouldn't be easily indexed by search engines and thus findable by the general public and your site would fade into obscurity. What to do!? Courts to the rescue, it seems!
I don't understand how Bitcoin and it's blockchain arrangement is ever going to be scaleable.
Currently we're running at a global rate of four transactions a second. Four. Just the everyday transactions at my local shopping centre would run above that rate.
How is this whole "ubiquitous Bitcoin economy" thing supposed to work again?
Wouldn't want your kids getting robbed by thrives with spray paint.
Lots of things can wreak havoc with just about every navigation approach that self-driving cars can use.
- Spray paint on cameras if you're using optical recognition. - Same can be done with lidars, and there hasn't been much talk of the interference you get with multiple lidars in view of each other. - Radar sensors can be stopped with mylar party balloons or anything metallic. - Ultrasonic sensors can be stopped with just cardboard, or even chewing gum on the sensor. - A metallic blanket thrown over the top of a car can stop GPS (eg, an alfoil windscreen sunshade that you can buy for $2, if you place it in the right spot).
Thinking about that, I reckon you could get a big painter's drop sheet, spray it with metallic paint, weight the corners, and then you would have effectively made a large "net" that you could use to catch self-driving cars for fun and profit.
So what's left? Hopefully a pop-out joystick that an occupant can grab and drive the car with when it all goes pear-shaped.
I have a Chrome photo editing app called "Polarr" - when I run it under Chrome on linux, it spawns a new window and then looks and behaves very much like its Windows and Android variants.
So it tells me that developers can do some pretty nice things with the technology, but the quickest way to do anything with it (read: monetize) is to just package up some web 2.0 and call it a day.
Slashdot Mirror
Radar is coming along nicely. There's some good 77GHz phase array radars coming out from Delphi and Bosch that do decent object detection and tracking. Flat transmitter panel, can see through plastics (so can be mounted behind bumpers), generally dirt resistant.
Add computer vision on top and you'd probably have something that can do a reasonable job.
Well the main reasons are cost, cost, cost, cost and practicality.
Try making a 270 degree sapphire crystal hemispherical lens to suit this ladar, for example.
Or, you make a plastic lens that costs $50 to replace, and replace them on a regular basis.....
I deal with Lidars a lot, on self-driving loaders in an underground mining environment. It's pretty much the worst place for them - dusty, wet, hot, lots of vibration, you name it. Even though they are sealed to IP67, with o-rings on sealing surfaces & etc, they get water in them on a regular basis - IP67 is no match for even the mild pressure from a garden hose, let alone a pressure cleaner. The recommendation from the manufacturer is to send them back to the factory when they get wet, we generally take them apart and dry them out because a visit to the factory costs upwards of $5,000 (and six weeks delay) for an $10,000 device.
They mostly need to be cleaned about once a shift if the conditions are average. They need to be cleaned hourly if conditions are terrible. Failure to clean them gives us missing portions of scans if a mud splatter hits the lens, or a general loss of distance if it's just grime. Both of those things upset the self-driving software eventually, and then it's tedious manual control until someone can go clean it.
A dirty lens used to give us a "pollution error", but we changed the settings in the firmware of the lidars to turn that function off because we were sick of regular halts for errors that had yet to make an impact on the machine's operation. That is, what the manufacturer thinks is a critical pollution fault is actually about halfway to being unusable.
Lenses on our machines typically last about a couple of thousand hours of operation - probably a year or so if you translate that to a passenger vehicle. And of course, when cleaning them the instructions say to use a mild detergent and a clean, lint free cloth, gently buffing to a sparkling result. In reality, that is usually windex (or contact cleaner if there's grease on the lens) and any sort of material that can be found to wipe it with - paper towel, the sleeve of your shirt, a thumb, etc. Needless to say, this generally transforms the finely polished plastic lenses into a hazy scratched mess fairly quickly, especially if people spray and then wipe the lens without actually rinsing the crud off. So expect this to happen to consumer gear as well. And you can't just directly hose them, because hey, they aren't that waterproof either.
As long as there's plastic lenses in use, there's not really much manufacturers can do about this, other than have a secondary, cheap, external covering that can be unclipped and swapped out quickly. Or something like peel-off stickers like motorbike riders have for their helmets. They could shift to proper glass lenses, but even though they'd be much more durable, they would also be much more expensive to make.
(And what's going on with your backend, Slashdot? Heaps of timeouts and errors today.)
No you won't, because all the buyers will have to offer is millions and millions of useless crypto-coins.
If people stop using the dollar as a currency, it doesn't have any intrinsic value. So what keeps that from collapsing in on itself?
A nation's military, political, and manufacturing power. Things that Bitcoin lacks.
So let's look at it from Bitcoin's point of view:
Unless you and a lot of other people are willing to go to war for Bitcoin, or you pass laws regarding the mandantory use of Bitcoin for all government transactions, or you refuse to buy goods and services unless it's a Bitcoin transaction ..... well, don't go putting all your eggs in the one Bitcoin basket, that's all I'm saying.
i promise i will buy all the bitcoins before it hits zero.
No you won't, because there'll be people who still insist that their coins are worth $10,000 and refuse to sell them. What you'll have is a giant gap between sellers and buyers, zero trading, no way to judge the worth of the coins (because there's no transactions), and thus no effective net worth as a currency or store of value.
Bollocks.
Go and be an insufferable elitist boor elsewhere.
Then trial him for copyright infringement in his own country. There's no need for extradition if reciprocal obligations are in place.
Oh wait, then the punishment would be much less severe and US corporations would not be able to have the satisfaction that they so urgently demand.
This is the bit that sticks in most people's throats I think. The pandering to US corporate interests. Sure, the guy is a dick. But due process was not followed, and that dick has had his reputation trashed, his assets seized, and his company ruined. Not cool, guys, not cool at all.
his criminal activity
Please define his criminal activity that he has committed under NZ law.
While you're at it, mull over this hypothetical:
Homosexuality and the depiction of such is illegal in some countries. If someone performs in and distributes gay porn on the internet, should they be summarily extradited to one of those countries and suffer the consequences if that country demands it?
You can be damn sure your car's owner's manual mentions that you need to remain aware of your surroundings when using cruise control. I suspect there might even be big, bold warnings and exclamation marks in triangles around it.
It was more of a "Stand next to the engine bay of a running car and feel the amount of heat coming off it" comparison.
Anyway, dumping that heat straight out to the environment is very wasteful, much better to use it for heating your habitat and then melting ice or what-not with the remainder.
It's not massively powerful, we're talking kilowatts, not megawatts here. Think of the amount of heat that a radiator of a car engine deals with, if that's any help. Possibly might be able to get away with radiators.
Or that waste heat can be used for habitat heating, or you can just bury some pipes and sink that heat into the ground. Might be handy to melt local subsurface ice with perhaps.
would like to have a wa-oh, oh-wa-wa-word with you.
Challenger's boosters are an excellent case for automated range safety.
How long did they spin out of control for? Video suggests 15 to 20 seconds. Or about a hundred times longer than an automated range safety device would have let them, greatly increasing the debris field.
I was going put in a Trump-esque 'Intel? Great company. Super-great, best company, great people too' kind of spiel here.
But then I was worried that someone might take me seriously.
Well, I'm guessing the approach was more along the lines of "an abundance of caution with the X86 ISA" as opposed to deliberate malice towards AMD.
Whilst no doubt there's some Intel guys with a very good working knowledge of AMD CPU internals, you'd really want to get direct confirmation from the actual AMD hardware guys that their hardware is immune to this.
Presumably they enabled the software workaround and ran it on a bunch of CPUs. Then they picked the most alarming slowdown they could find, regardless of whether that CPU needed the workaround or not.
Or perhaps they were just unaware at the time that AMD CPUs are not at risk.
Going to Mars means taking lots of equipment with you. All that stuff doesn't magically appear in low Earth orbit.
A big rocket to launch stuff to LEO means that you can sling a larger amount of payload (+fuel + transfer vehicle) to Mars in one go. Otherwise you need more launches, and have to fiddle about with the costs of multiple Mars transfer vehicles and etc. It's cheaper to go bigger, basically.
Grid voltage is generally maintained easily enough by the other power sources.
But the frequency drops due to the other spinning generators being under heavier load and slowing down. As you drop the frequency, AC synchronous motors (fans, refrigerators, older/larger A/C units, etc etc) also slow down and use less power. So there's a balance point where the 600MW loss is offset by the drop in grid frequency.
If you had a system comprised entirely of non-spinning sources of power (eg Tesla's battery, or flow batteries, or solar) in an emergency overload situation they would also lower the grid frequency to reduce load.
Grid operators try very hard to maintain a certain number of cycles per day though as it frequency variations make mains-powered clocks drift. So this drop in frequency would be offset by a rise in frequency later on when the system load was lower to make sure clocks read the correct time. (and it's not just wall clocks, it's timers for lights, off-peak power usage, etc etc)
In the 80's in Australia there was a lot of strikes and industrial action in the power sector which caused a lot of shutdowns - power stations at the time deliberately ran at a lower frequency to reduce load without load shedding and maintain supply.
If:
I can send a simple http request to your server, and
Your server sends me the information without doing its homework, then
Sucks to be you.
Don't want your information to be scraped? Have it behind a login - free or otherwise - then ban accounts that are slurping down 10,000 pages a day.
Ohhhhh then it wouldn't be easily indexed by search engines and thus findable by the general public and your site would fade into obscurity. What to do!? Courts to the rescue, it seems!
One of the central tenets around Bitcoin is that every transaction is logged in the blockchain and thus verifiable and unchangeable forever more.
I'm not sure how abstracting that away with a currency "on top" is going to make it any better than gold, or oil, or whatever.
I don't understand how Bitcoin and it's blockchain arrangement is ever going to be scaleable.
Currently we're running at a global rate of four transactions a second. Four. Just the everyday transactions at my local shopping centre would run above that rate.
How is this whole "ubiquitous Bitcoin economy" thing supposed to work again?
Wouldn't want your kids getting robbed by thrives with spray paint.
Lots of things can wreak havoc with just about every navigation approach that self-driving cars can use.
- Spray paint on cameras if you're using optical recognition.
- Same can be done with lidars, and there hasn't been much talk of the interference you get with multiple lidars in view of each other.
- Radar sensors can be stopped with mylar party balloons or anything metallic.
- Ultrasonic sensors can be stopped with just cardboard, or even chewing gum on the sensor.
- A metallic blanket thrown over the top of a car can stop GPS (eg, an alfoil windscreen sunshade that you can buy for $2, if you place it in the right spot).
Thinking about that, I reckon you could get a big painter's drop sheet, spray it with metallic paint, weight the corners, and then you would have effectively made a large "net" that you could use to catch self-driving cars for fun and profit.
So what's left? Hopefully a pop-out joystick that an occupant can grab and drive the car with when it all goes pear-shaped.
I have a Chrome photo editing app called "Polarr" - when I run it under Chrome on linux, it spawns a new window and then looks and behaves very much like its Windows and Android variants.
So it tells me that developers can do some pretty nice things with the technology, but the quickest way to do anything with it (read: monetize) is to just package up some web 2.0 and call it a day.
In this case the general agreement is that you just use a single full-stop.
http://www.grammar-monster.com...