Putting aside "we-will-all-be-replaced-by-robots-soon", this is actually a good idea, and the company making them has the right strategy; much better to charge an hourly rent instead of a huge upfront fee!
Apart from the employment issue, I can see a lot of benefits, robots aren't racist and robots aren't rude, and I assume security to actually be better with the robots in place.
I can't figure out why you need a "robot". If this thing in watching a car park, can't you put in lots of fixed cameras, sensors and alarms? Why the need for Wall-E type thing that moves?
Accountant here. No the burden rate for an hourly employee is NOT "3-4X" their take home pay. Generally speaking it is around a 50% markup of their gross (pre tax) salary. So if you pay someone $10/hour their real cost is probably $13-18 depending on the benefits offered and insurance costs.
You might work for different employers than me. I was regularly charged out at 2-3x my actual rate doing IT consulting. I know because I saw the invoices.
From the article
As for better than a security guard, that remains to be seen. But between an overweight, mouth drooler with a can of pepper spray meandering a parking lot and a mobile recording device capable of blaring noise, flashing lights and bringing lots of unwanted attention, the latter seems better to me.
Just for starters, the latter has a perfect recall of the preceding events. Good luck getting the height or sex or anything useful from the security guards story.
But if you've had any experience with existing automated security measures, you will know the biggest weakness is false positives.
Once the robot has set off 10 false alarms that night, the humans ignore it. Then someone steals a car and you miss the whole thing.
Any crook with half a brain will build this into the plan. Trigger false alarms in days leading up the the big event, so when it comes time, no-one pays attention to the real alarms.
Several states, including California, implemented 3 strikes laws during the 1990s. In the following decades, it had no effect on crime rates compared to states that did not implement such laws.
It's funny one isn't it? The natural reaction against crime is to punish or lock up the offender, especially in the US. But if you are interested in reducing crime (rather than punishing people), then rehabilitation results in much better outcomes overall
But tough-on-crime makes for better political campaigns, so we end up in the vicious cycle.
When stuff gets stolen, the cops will fill out a report so you can file an insurance claim. That is _all_ they will do. If you bitch, you might get a little 'stick time' yourself.
The cops like it this way.
What do you expect? Mobilisation of a special task force to conduct an investigation costing millions of dollars just for you?
It might sound bad, but in most cases there really is nothing practical that can be done. Most non-violent crimes are really just insurance issues, so this makes sense to me.
People quickly learn how useless the cops are, they stop filing reports and the crime statistics get better.
This doesn't follow from your first statement. People have to file reports in order to claim insurance. So the stats should accurately reflect crime for items that have insurable value.
Come back with deaths per mile of people driving high end, less than 10 year old vehicles, and exclude miles driven in snow, ice or other treacherous conditions and also eliminate passenger deaths. That's just for starters.
It's funny how the Tesla fanboys start throwing around these numbers if road deaths are decided by purely by random ballot.
The single biggest contributor to road safety is driver awareness. As a driver I have control over that. When I hand that responsibility over to a program then all bets are off.
I've been speaking American English all of my life and in my experience "highway" pretty much exclusively refers to "divided highway".
That's nice, but is "your experience" the same as the the definition used by the people compiling the statistics?
I don't know or care either way. In my experience, I'm smart enough not to drive into a truck, as demonstrated by 30 years of me not driving into trucks. The Tesla isn't, so any other stat trying to justify a product that just killed it's owner is completely meaningless.
If you live in the city center of a major city then public transport is good so you rarely need a car.
It also depends on which city you live. I've noticed American cities are mostly designed around suburbs and cars which is a poor design for efficient public transport networks. Europe and Asia tend to have most densely packed, geographically smaller cities that evolved around pedestrian and cycle transport, so it's more conducive to public transport.
If you were to design a city from scratch today, I very much doubt you would build as many roads. Cars simply do not scale in large cities, so the most future proof design would include plenty of public transport options.
Because Apple Corps (of Beatles fame) made sure that Apple Computer/Inc. could never ever launch their own record company. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Um I think you've missed how this works. Apple buys the entire record industry, Apple Corps is part of that acquisition, so would own the trademark along with it.
Apple can pay all the royalties it likes to itself.
It doesn't matter, people are just as blinded by the rising / setting sun in their eyes. Not to beat a dead horse, but as long as the system proves more safe to operate than people per mile traveled it should be a beaming success (pun intended).
Wearing a helmet while driving has already proven itself safer than not wearing a helmet, yet the world isn't flocking to helmet wearing in cars.
This is why nerds get picked on, not everything in this world is solvable with pure logic.
What really will make this system come into its own are three things:
1. Having non-vision sensors installed which will happen at some point (RADAR, LIDAR, sound based sonar, etc etc etc)
Doesn't the Google version already have this?
2. Having the fleet of autonomous systems communicate with the network / roadway and other vehicles. This will make vehicle-to-vehicle accidents far less likely.
Until there is a bug or crash in the system, then it instantly affects EVERYBODY.
Of course no-one will try to exploit such a system either.
3. Having the major thoroughfares autonomous-mandatory...
George Orwell would be rolling in his grave...
Robot cars are an interesting novelty, but lets not pretend they are going to save the world.
Now when there's too much sunlight we can have Teslas not recognise traffic lights, and drive straight through intersections causing T-bone accidents and pileups.
It's a shame their programmers who work on this full time will never think of this problem and add detection and maps/GPS augmentation. You should probably call them up and offer your advice.
Just because someone is "working on it" doesn't mean it can be solved.
We all know cameras are crap at image recognition. Why do Tesla/Google Car fans pretend this problem will just go away if someone thinks about it hard enough?
Not really, or should Bill Gates have a car worth a billion dollars, and should my teenage kids have a car worth $100?
In the GP's example, A family earning $50k can spend $10k/year on a car. Well my last car cost $30k, I kept it for 8 years and sold it for $10k. So it cost me $2.5k/year. Closer to 2% than 20%.
Even with insurance, maintenance and running costs, you're probably still under $5k/year. So 20% is a ridiculous figure.
No, in this case people, including you evidently, are just passing blame to evade responsibility for their personal choices. If you are coming out against the concept of free will, spit it out... I'm not interested in charades.
Black, White. What a boring world you must live in.
CSGO is an FPS game, (ie shoot the other guys before you get shot). Your in-game gun is a standard bland military looking colour, but you can win or buy 'skins' in-game which turn your gun into something more aesthetically appealing, and make other players jealous of your shiny.
Players have the ability to sell or trade skins, so there is a real market for them (just like any other vanity object) which fluctuates depending on demand.
CSGO has a professional players league, so people can bet skins on pro games, to win other more valuable skins. And I'm imaging this "skin lotto" is some sort of lottery where you buy tickets with cheap skins, in order to win more expensive skins.
So skins act exactly like a currency, casino chip, or jewellery, except it's not regulated by any government agency.
Skins look pretty and so some people will pay money for them. They serve no other purpose other than vanity and resale. Pretty much identical in nature to jewellery.
A friend of mine won $1,000,000 playing the lottery, at least that's what he was told. All he got was a piece of paper that he had to take to the bank to get turned into $$$.
And even then the bank only swapped his piece of paper for other pieces of paper which he was told is worth something too.
It's tortoises all the way down!
Yeah, and a lot more people should probably go that route of they can't afford a car. My income is ~80k/yr and I've never owned a new car in my life.
I earn a lot more than that and I don't buy new cars either, it's such a poor use of money.
Buy second hand, keep it for a long time, and spend your money on more useful things (investments and travel).
Slashdot Mirror
My opinion is worth just as much as yours. Just because it's your opinion doesn't make it magically become fact.
Anyone can 'get away' from the robot. It has no ability to stop them. All it does is roam around, take pictures, and call for help.
Um, don't CCTV cameras already do that? I'm pretty sure a few extra fixed cameras would be cheaper and have much more coverage than an R2-D2 wannabe.
Putting aside "we-will-all-be-replaced-by-robots-soon", this is actually a good idea, and the company making them has the right strategy; much better to charge an hourly rent instead of a huge upfront fee! Apart from the employment issue, I can see a lot of benefits, robots aren't racist and robots aren't rude, and I assume security to actually be better with the robots in place.
I can't figure out why you need a "robot". If this thing in watching a car park, can't you put in lots of fixed cameras, sensors and alarms? Why the need for Wall-E type thing that moves?
Accountant here. No the burden rate for an hourly employee is NOT "3-4X" their take home pay. Generally speaking it is around a 50% markup of their gross (pre tax) salary. So if you pay someone $10/hour their real cost is probably $13-18 depending on the benefits offered and insurance costs.
You might work for different employers than me. I was regularly charged out at 2-3x my actual rate doing IT consulting. I know because I saw the invoices.
No its not. Car alarms have been proven to be poor deterrent. Their only benefit is to make the owner FEEL safer. .
And to piss the neighbours off.
From the article As for better than a security guard, that remains to be seen. But between an overweight, mouth drooler with a can of pepper spray meandering a parking lot and a mobile recording device capable of blaring noise, flashing lights and bringing lots of unwanted attention, the latter seems better to me. Just for starters, the latter has a perfect recall of the preceding events. Good luck getting the height or sex or anything useful from the security guards story.
But if you've had any experience with existing automated security measures, you will know the biggest weakness is false positives.
Once the robot has set off 10 false alarms that night, the humans ignore it. Then someone steals a car and you miss the whole thing.
Any crook with half a brain will build this into the plan. Trigger false alarms in days leading up the the big event, so when it comes time, no-one pays attention to the real alarms.
Several states, including California, implemented 3 strikes laws during the 1990s. In the following decades, it had no effect on crime rates compared to states that did not implement such laws.
It's funny one isn't it? The natural reaction against crime is to punish or lock up the offender, especially in the US. But if you are interested in reducing crime (rather than punishing people), then rehabilitation results in much better outcomes overall
But tough-on-crime makes for better political campaigns, so we end up in the vicious cycle.
When stuff gets stolen, the cops will fill out a report so you can file an insurance claim. That is _all_ they will do. If you bitch, you might get a little 'stick time' yourself.
The cops like it this way.
What do you expect? Mobilisation of a special task force to conduct an investigation costing millions of dollars just for you?
It might sound bad, but in most cases there really is nothing practical that can be done. Most non-violent crimes are really just insurance issues, so this makes sense to me.
People quickly learn how useless the cops are, they stop filing reports and the crime statistics get better.
This doesn't follow from your first statement. People have to file reports in order to claim insurance. So the stats should accurately reflect crime for items that have insurable value.
Come back with deaths per mile of people driving high end, less than 10 year old vehicles, and exclude miles driven in snow, ice or other treacherous conditions and also eliminate passenger deaths. That's just for starters.
It's funny how the Tesla fanboys start throwing around these numbers if road deaths are decided by purely by random ballot.
The single biggest contributor to road safety is driver awareness. As a driver I have control over that. When I hand that responsibility over to a program then all bets are off.
I've been speaking American English all of my life and in my experience "highway" pretty much exclusively refers to "divided highway".
That's nice, but is "your experience" the same as the the definition used by the people compiling the statistics?
I don't know or care either way. In my experience, I'm smart enough not to drive into a truck, as demonstrated by 30 years of me not driving into trucks. The Tesla isn't, so any other stat trying to justify a product that just killed it's owner is completely meaningless.
If you live in the city center of a major city then public transport is good so you rarely need a car.
It also depends on which city you live. I've noticed American cities are mostly designed around suburbs and cars which is a poor design for efficient public transport networks. Europe and Asia tend to have most densely packed, geographically smaller cities that evolved around pedestrian and cycle transport, so it's more conducive to public transport.
If you were to design a city from scratch today, I very much doubt you would build as many roads. Cars simply do not scale in large cities, so the most future proof design would include plenty of public transport options.
Well that's your opinion...
Because Apple Corps (of Beatles fame) made sure that Apple Computer/Inc. could never ever launch their own record company. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Um I think you've missed how this works. Apple buys the entire record industry, Apple Corps is part of that acquisition, so would own the trademark along with it.
Apple can pay all the royalties it likes to itself.
Reading the signs is not particularly complex. My BMW i3 reads the speed limit signs and duplicates them on the dashboard.
What about if I print off my own version of a road sign with 5km/h on it? Because no-one would ever think of doing that for a laugh...
It doesn't matter, people are just as blinded by the rising / setting sun in their eyes. Not to beat a dead horse, but as long as the system proves more safe to operate than people per mile traveled it should be a beaming success (pun intended).
Wearing a helmet while driving has already proven itself safer than not wearing a helmet, yet the world isn't flocking to helmet wearing in cars.
This is why nerds get picked on, not everything in this world is solvable with pure logic.
What really will make this system come into its own are three things: 1. Having non-vision sensors installed which will happen at some point (RADAR, LIDAR, sound based sonar, etc etc etc)
Doesn't the Google version already have this?
2. Having the fleet of autonomous systems communicate with the network / roadway and other vehicles. This will make vehicle-to-vehicle accidents far less likely.
Until there is a bug or crash in the system, then it instantly affects EVERYBODY.
Of course no-one will try to exploit such a system either.
3. Having the major thoroughfares autonomous-mandatory...
George Orwell would be rolling in his grave...
Robot cars are an interesting novelty, but lets not pretend they are going to save the world.
Now when there's too much sunlight we can have Teslas not recognise traffic lights, and drive straight through intersections causing T-bone accidents and pileups.
It's a shame their programmers who work on this full time will never think of this problem and add detection and maps/GPS augmentation. You should probably call them up and offer your advice.
Just because someone is "working on it" doesn't mean it can be solved.
We all know cameras are crap at image recognition. Why do Tesla/Google Car fans pretend this problem will just go away if someone thinks about it hard enough?
Who cares? It is a good idea anyway.
Not really, or should Bill Gates have a car worth a billion dollars, and should my teenage kids have a car worth $100?
In the GP's example, A family earning $50k can spend $10k/year on a car. Well my last car cost $30k, I kept it for 8 years and sold it for $10k. So it cost me $2.5k/year. Closer to 2% than 20%.
Even with insurance, maintenance and running costs, you're probably still under $5k/year. So 20% is a ridiculous figure.
No, in this case people, including you evidently, are just passing blame to evade responsibility for their personal choices. If you are coming out against the concept of free will, spit it out... I'm not interested in charades.
Black, White. What a boring world you must live in.
CSGO is an FPS game, (ie shoot the other guys before you get shot). Your in-game gun is a standard bland military looking colour, but you can win or buy 'skins' in-game which turn your gun into something more aesthetically appealing, and make other players jealous of your shiny.
Players have the ability to sell or trade skins, so there is a real market for them (just like any other vanity object) which fluctuates depending on demand.
CSGO has a professional players league, so people can bet skins on pro games, to win other more valuable skins. And I'm imaging this "skin lotto" is some sort of lottery where you buy tickets with cheap skins, in order to win more expensive skins.
So skins act exactly like a currency, casino chip, or jewellery, except it's not regulated by any government agency.
Skins look pretty and so some people will pay money for them. They serve no other purpose other than vanity and resale. Pretty much identical in nature to jewellery.
A friend of mine won $1,000,000 playing the lottery, at least that's what he was told. All he got was a piece of paper that he had to take to the bank to get turned into $$$.
And even then the bank only swapped his piece of paper for other pieces of paper which he was told is worth something too.
It's tortoises all the way down!
That still doesn't make the casino's fault. The gambler is only person to hold responsible, regardless who his "victims" are.
Only if you live in a black and white universe. Fortunately for the rest of us, most people have the ability to see a lot of different colours...
Plenty of people in cities get by on taxis and car-share, self driving cars will expand that to suburban areas.
Plenty of people in cities get by on public transport, and it's generally quicker in a lot of major cities.
You should never spend more than 20% of you annual income on a car.
Where did that rule come from?
He just made it up just now. That's how the Internet works.
Yeah, and a lot more people should probably go that route of they can't afford a car. My income is ~80k/yr and I've never owned a new car in my life.
I earn a lot more than that and I don't buy new cars either, it's such a poor use of money.
Buy second hand, keep it for a long time, and spend your money on more useful things (investments and travel).