And a physical meetup between individuals is pretty hard to regulate with or without an internet.
And even harder to regulate when one of those people has a gun
Seems likely a risky move to take some cash to a meet up with a stranger who you know will be bringing a gun.
And at least the ones we met with (my wife enjoys interaction with the staff) a lot of students who wre saving for college.
The ones you met, were the top level of the cruise employee chain. Everyone you didn't meet work all the shit jobs, and are generally the cheapest immigrants you can find.
There's no reason at all a ship of this size shouldn't have a reactor for its fuel. There are no safety precautions that aren't acceptable for the loss of a reactor that are acceptable for the loss of 8000 souls, so safety shouldn't be an issue.
The reason military vessels have nuclear power is that they are secured by military force.
It's very possible for some incident to occur involving a privately owned reactor that doesn't involve the loss of 8000 people, thus the risk profile is much, much greater.
i didn't say everyone would be happy. this is the real world, that will never happen. i'm not offering happiness. i said there are solutions and they are simple.
government force is simple. it may not be right, but it's simple.
you read too much into my comment.
Because "government force" isn't simple, it comes with all-sorts of complexities which is why force is vary rarely used as an option.
I think this is just temporary - or as in Washington, DC a reflection on the crappiness of the automation. In Singapore they operate fully automated trains.
I used to live in Singapore. They have some automated trains, but not all. And the reason they and others don't is because of safety concerns. A fully isolated train line, ie in a tunnel or overhead track can be fully controlled. A line on ground level doesn't offer the same assurances, hence the requirement for an "observer".
There are no other alternatives - modern planes don't just break up mid flight
Air France Flight 447 just disappeared of the radar just like this. Cause was found (years later) to be mechanical failure (which led to incorrect crew reaction causing a stall)
Almost everywhere is safe. there are tens of thousands of flights a day, one in a month is odds I'll take. It's better odds than me being killed by some moron in a SUV on my drive to work.
I think I read somewhere that 1 million people are in the air at any one time. Assuming you stick with non-Russian/African/Third World Airlines, out of hundreds of millions of man-days in the air each year, we lose only a few hundred to accidents. That's better odds than pretty much anything else you do including getting into and out of bed.
There are other possibilities: a suicide, thrust reverser suddenly opening, rudder torn off...
Anything like that though and you'd think they'd be able to track the plane as it descended. The pilots would be able to get out an 'oh fuck' etc. From what I gather it just sorta disappeared from 40 odd thousand feet. I think we must follow logic and conclude...aliens.
I've watched almost every episode of Air Crash Investigations. Planes falling out of the sky from mechanical error without pilot comms has happened a few times. (The Air France disappearance over the Atlantic a few of years ago comes to mind)
Our left loves to mock every other religion, but curiously not this particularly bad example of one.
I wonder what base of measurement you use to come up with this conclusion?
As someone who finds all religion ridiculous, I find Islam equally ridiculous as any other. The difference is that I see idiot Christians pushing their shit on me everyday, which creates more opportunity to mock such activity. I can't recall any other religion, be it Islam, Jewish, Buddhist or whatever pushing their shit on me anywhere near as badly.
The nearest mosque is the other side of the city, the Jews all live in their own suburb and keep to themselves mostly, and the Buddhists you wouldn't even know who they are because they don't feel the need to tell you about all the time. If Christians behaved as equally as obscurely, maybe they'd get more peace.
Jesus, look at you guys - even your strawmen have strawman arguments now. If you want to know what somebody thinks, try asking them instead of playing your six degrees of imaginary argument bullshit.
It seems Slashdot is reaching that point where the people who like to discuss things are now outweighed by the people who just come for a fight.
It's a very real phenomenon with any public forum, and the mod system works ok most of the time, but sometimes I think about how this could be improved but there's no easy answers.
Maybe like cool nightclubs, the sensible people need a new secret web forum every few months that the idiots can't keep up with? How else do you solve this?
No harder than figuring out how to legalize and regulate the autonomous cars themselves.
Exactly my point. It's politically hard, extremely difficult even, yet a lot of comments in here speak as if it's a given.
Robot cars are not just a technology problem.
If your vision of the future is the correct one and people flock to self-driving cars creating traffic nightmares, this is something that can be attacked using existing tools, and new tools if need be. But that's a big "if".
It's quite a small if actually. Urban traffic modelling is well understood, and in large cities the only transport solution that scales is trains, and to a lesser extent buses.
The average road lane carries bout 2000 people per hour (on average), while the highest capacity rail lines carry up to 80000 people per hour. No amount of robot car AI is getting anywhere near that level of capacity, so it doesn't actually solve the key issues facing urban transport, ie capacity and scale.
Automatic trains and buses will absolutely be valuable. I can't imagine that self-driving cars will be a thing, but not trains - the problem is much, much simpler to solve.
You would think that, but robot trains already exist but are not permitted to run fully automatically because of safety issues (in my country we have robot trains that have a "driver", who is really just an "observer/safety officer".
Given this information, if robot trains are not allowed to be fully automated, do you really think in this legal/risk averse climate, that robot cars will be?
I still don't see people who formerly took a bus or some other form of mass transit suddenly abandoning that for a more expensive option.
Some will, some won't. And for every person that does it's one more car required on the road, which adds to congestion.
I can see people using the robotic cars to get to a transportation hub.
If we have robot cars, we can have robot buses that extend services closer to each street, so there's no need for car. Walk/bus or walk/train is the most efficient option that exists
But this is all mental masturbation. If these things cause congestion, we fix it by changing the costs. Easy.
Eh what? Just change costs? Good luck getting that one across the next election
The technology itself is just a tool and does not present problems by itself.
Yes it does. If your tool solves one problem but then creates another, that is a problem.
You realise this is just some guy's opinion right?
And everyone in the finance game has an opinion, and all of them are wrong sometime or another.
Remember, when the housing bubble went in the US and Europe went, wages weren't keeping pace.
The GFC was a complex thing that can't be explained away in a one line statement. But the fact is that prices are higher now than pre-crash.
There is no law of nature that says houses must be a certain price.
Supply and demand is as close as it gets, and last time I checked global population is up, global wealth is up, especially among the billions in developing nations, immigration is up, land is finite, but desirable land is get less and less.
There is no rule saying how much a house should cost, but based on the facts above, I'm willing to literally bet my house that prices in good cities/suburbs will always be expensive from now on. This might just be the new normal.
Ok, sharing cars with strangers is a service now, and almost no-one uses it. So we know that doesn't work
The most realistic model for robot cars is the same as now, roughly one person per vehicle. Under that model, vehicle numbers will increase, this causing congestion to increase.
No, that's exactly what it means. There is no problem. A service is offered that he does not take advantage of. No harm, no foul. There is no problem with lamb being offered at the grocery store even if you personally hate lamb.
But there are laws about drugs, guns, sex, and yes many, many laws about traffic behaviour, including what types of vehicles are allowed where and when because of their impact to congestion.
Just because you don't believe it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
A ride to the local park-n-ride will be cheaper (and no parking fee!) than a ride into the downtown. A direct economic incentive like this will surely reduce congestion.
Ok, let's break this down a bit. If robot rides are cheaper, more people will use them right?
More people means more vehicles.
More vehicles means more congestion.
Robot AI may improve traffic flow a little, but since most major city roads are already past capacity at peak hour, no amount of maths solves this. And the added vehicles counter any efficiency gain.
You either need more roads (no-one wants that in their neighbourhood), or more people per vehicle (we already have that solution, it's called buses and trains - and the majority of people won't feel comfortable sharing a small car with strangers)
In summary, the solution is not robot cars, although robot uber might play a part, but robot buses and trains.
And with detailed trip logs, road planning and taxing can be made far fairer and more effective.
I don't think anyone is saying that you won't be able to own a car.
You won't own a SDC it will be a shared resource.
The robot car fan boys are envisaging some robot car utopia where cars behave like a perfectly configured IP network. As someone who's made a living out fixing poorly configured networks, you'll excuse me if I'm a little cynical.
Yes, but those cars will be driving for less than 1/4th the time it would take you to normally commute, so it evens out, surely.
Er, the argument is that robot cars will be so awesome, no-one will need to own a car or take a bus, Robot uber would be much cheaper, and door to door service, so people would just use them instead.
So based on this assumption, Many more people choose Robot Uber, hence more cars on the road (and less full buses and trains).
Unless you are saying that each journey would take the same amount of time as all 4 journeys together?
Different people travel at different times. So the 4x 30 minute trips are still 4x 30 minute trips. Except instead of 3 of those people on 3 buses that takes up the space of about 8 cars, there are now 300 more robot cars on the streets (our buses have a 100 person capacity).
Slashdot Mirror
And a physical meetup between individuals is pretty hard to regulate with or without an internet.
And even harder to regulate when one of those people has a gun
Seems likely a risky move to take some cash to a meet up with a stranger who you know will be bringing a gun.
And at least the ones we met with (my wife enjoys interaction with the staff) a lot of students who wre saving for college.
The ones you met, were the top level of the cruise employee chain. Everyone you didn't meet work all the shit jobs, and are generally the cheapest immigrants you can find.
There's no reason at all a ship of this size shouldn't have a reactor for its fuel. There are no safety precautions that aren't acceptable for the loss of a reactor that are acceptable for the loss of 8000 souls, so safety shouldn't be an issue.
The reason military vessels have nuclear power is that they are secured by military force.
It's very possible for some incident to occur involving a privately owned reactor that doesn't involve the loss of 8000 people, thus the risk profile is much, much greater.
i didn't say everyone would be happy. this is the real world, that will never happen. i'm not offering happiness. i said there are solutions and they are simple.
government force is simple. it may not be right, but it's simple.
you read too much into my comment.
Because "government force" isn't simple, it comes with all-sorts of complexities which is why force is vary rarely used as an option.
I think this is just temporary - or as in Washington, DC a reflection on the crappiness of the automation. In Singapore they operate fully automated trains.
I used to live in Singapore. They have some automated trains, but not all. And the reason they and others don't is because of safety concerns. A fully isolated train line, ie in a tunnel or overhead track can be fully controlled. A line on ground level doesn't offer the same assurances, hence the requirement for an "observer".
I assume you mean robot car AI? Because automatic mass transit already exists.
Er yeah, that's my argument. This thread is about how robot cars will make life better, which TFA and me have presented counter arguments to.
I would seriously doubt that statistical models can cope with a transition from car ownership to on-demand car rental services,
There's no stats required. A car is fixed size, so you know the upper limit of cars that that fit on a road at any given time.
Planes just do not disappear suddenly.
Like Air France Flight 447 you mean?
There are no other alternatives - modern planes don't just break up mid flight
Air France Flight 447 just disappeared of the radar just like this. Cause was found (years later) to be mechanical failure (which led to incorrect crew reaction causing a stall)
Almost everywhere is safe. there are tens of thousands of flights a day, one in a month is odds I'll take. It's better odds than me being killed by some moron in a SUV on my drive to work.
I think I read somewhere that 1 million people are in the air at any one time. Assuming you stick with non-Russian/African/Third World Airlines, out of hundreds of millions of man-days in the air each year, we lose only a few hundred to accidents. That's better odds than pretty much anything else you do including getting into and out of bed.
There are other possibilities: a suicide, thrust reverser suddenly opening, rudder torn off...
Anything like that though and you'd think they'd be able to track the plane as it descended. The pilots would be able to get out an 'oh fuck' etc. From what I gather it just sorta disappeared from 40 odd thousand feet. I think we must follow logic and conclude...aliens.
I've watched almost every episode of Air Crash Investigations. Planes falling out of the sky from mechanical error without pilot comms has happened a few times. (The Air France disappearance over the Atlantic a few of years ago comes to mind)
Or maybe because blowing yourself up in the check in area (where the line is) gets you the most bang for your buck, casualty wise. TSA take note.
TSA have taken note and will be around to arrest you shortly.
Our left loves to mock every other religion, but curiously not this particularly bad example of one.
I wonder what base of measurement you use to come up with this conclusion?
As someone who finds all religion ridiculous, I find Islam equally ridiculous as any other. The difference is that I see idiot Christians pushing their shit on me everyday, which creates more opportunity to mock such activity. I can't recall any other religion, be it Islam, Jewish, Buddhist or whatever pushing their shit on me anywhere near as badly.
The nearest mosque is the other side of the city, the Jews all live in their own suburb and keep to themselves mostly, and the Buddhists you wouldn't even know who they are because they don't feel the need to tell you about all the time. If Christians behaved as equally as obscurely, maybe they'd get more peace.
Jesus, look at you guys - even your strawmen have strawman arguments now. If you want to know what somebody thinks, try asking them instead of playing your six degrees of imaginary argument bullshit.
It seems Slashdot is reaching that point where the people who like to discuss things are now outweighed by the people who just come for a fight.
It's a very real phenomenon with any public forum, and the mod system works ok most of the time, but sometimes I think about how this could be improved but there's no easy answers.
Maybe like cool nightclubs, the sensible people need a new secret web forum every few months that the idiots can't keep up with? How else do you solve this?
You don't need probability to predict human behaviour. Basic biology will suffice.
What did I have for breakfast, what time and where did I eat it?
And you're calling me stupid?
No harder than figuring out how to legalize and regulate the autonomous cars themselves.
Exactly my point. It's politically hard, extremely difficult even, yet a lot of comments in here speak as if it's a given.
Robot cars are not just a technology problem.
If your vision of the future is the correct one and people flock to self-driving cars creating traffic nightmares, this is something that can be attacked using existing tools, and new tools if need be. But that's a big "if".
It's quite a small if actually. Urban traffic modelling is well understood, and in large cities the only transport solution that scales is trains, and to a lesser extent buses.
The average road lane carries bout 2000 people per hour (on average), while the highest capacity rail lines carry up to 80000 people per hour. No amount of robot car AI is getting anywhere near that level of capacity, so it doesn't actually solve the key issues facing urban transport, ie capacity and scale.
Automatic trains and buses will absolutely be valuable. I can't imagine that self-driving cars will be a thing, but not trains - the problem is much, much simpler to solve.
You would think that, but robot trains already exist but are not permitted to run fully automatically because of safety issues (in my country we have robot trains that have a "driver", who is really just an "observer/safety officer".
Given this information, if robot trains are not allowed to be fully automated, do you really think in this legal/risk averse climate, that robot cars will be?
I still don't see people who formerly took a bus or some other form of mass transit suddenly abandoning that for a more expensive option.
Some will, some won't. And for every person that does it's one more car required on the road, which adds to congestion.
I can see people using the robotic cars to get to a transportation hub.
If we have robot cars, we can have robot buses that extend services closer to each street, so there's no need for car. Walk/bus or walk/train is the most efficient option that exists
But this is all mental masturbation. If these things cause congestion, we fix it by changing the costs. Easy.
Eh what? Just change costs? Good luck getting that one across the next election
The technology itself is just a tool and does not present problems by itself.
Yes it does. If your tool solves one problem but then creates another, that is a problem.
There is literally nothing in the world more easily predicted.
I don't think you understand what the word literally means. Or the basics of probability. And you're calling me stupid?
Really want to know?
You realise this is just some guy's opinion right?
And everyone in the finance game has an opinion, and all of them are wrong sometime or another.
Remember, when the housing bubble went in the US and Europe went, wages weren't keeping pace.
The GFC was a complex thing that can't be explained away in a one line statement. But the fact is that prices are higher now than pre-crash.
There is no law of nature that says houses must be a certain price.
Supply and demand is as close as it gets, and last time I checked global population is up, global wealth is up, especially among the billions in developing nations, immigration is up, land is finite, but desirable land is get less and less.
There is no rule saying how much a house should cost, but based on the facts above, I'm willing to literally bet my house that prices in good cities/suburbs will always be expensive from now on. This might just be the new normal.
Ok, sharing cars with strangers is a service now, and almost no-one uses it. So we know that doesn't work
The most realistic model for robot cars is the same as now, roughly one person per vehicle. Under that model, vehicle numbers will increase, this causing congestion to increase.
No, that's exactly what it means. There is no problem. A service is offered that he does not take advantage of. No harm, no foul. There is no problem with lamb being offered at the grocery store even if you personally hate lamb.
But there are laws about drugs, guns, sex, and yes many, many laws about traffic behaviour, including what types of vehicles are allowed where and when because of their impact to congestion.
Just because you don't believe it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
A ride to the local park-n-ride will be cheaper (and no parking fee!) than a ride into the downtown. A direct economic incentive like this will surely reduce congestion.
Ok, let's break this down a bit. If robot rides are cheaper, more people will use them right?
More people means more vehicles.
More vehicles means more congestion.
Robot AI may improve traffic flow a little, but since most major city roads are already past capacity at peak hour, no amount of maths solves this. And the added vehicles counter any efficiency gain.
You either need more roads (no-one wants that in their neighbourhood), or more people per vehicle (we already have that solution, it's called buses and trains - and the majority of people won't feel comfortable sharing a small car with strangers)
In summary, the solution is not robot cars, although robot uber might play a part, but robot buses and trains. And with detailed trip logs, road planning and taxing can be made far fairer and more effective.
You think human behavior, AI and traffic are "the most predictable things in the world". And you're calling me stupid?
I don't think anyone is saying that you won't be able to own a car.
The robot car fan boys are envisaging some robot car utopia where cars behave like a perfectly configured IP network. As someone who's made a living out fixing poorly configured networks, you'll excuse me if I'm a little cynical.
Yes, but those cars will be driving for less than 1/4th the time it would take you to normally commute, so it evens out, surely. Er, the argument is that robot cars will be so awesome, no-one will need to own a car or take a bus, Robot uber would be much cheaper, and door to door service, so people would just use them instead.
So based on this assumption, Many more people choose Robot Uber, hence more cars on the road (and less full buses and trains).
Unless you are saying that each journey would take the same amount of time as all 4 journeys together?
Different people travel at different times. So the 4x 30 minute trips are still 4x 30 minute trips. Except instead of 3 of those people on 3 buses that takes up the space of about 8 cars, there are now 300 more robot cars on the streets (our buses have a 100 person capacity).