This may (although it doesn't, really) explain the decline of dinosaurs, but it says nothing about why thousands of other species (including all the ammonites) went extinct at the same time.
And the theory that dinosaurs were already dying off before the K/Pg boundary is hardly new. Part of that is an artifact of how fossils are formed and found. A species could have lasted several million years after its latest-known fossil, it just didn't happen to leave any fossils that have yet been found. (Conversely, the last surviving member of a species could have been fossilized. Unlikely though, except in the case of a mass extinction event.)
I think the summary is a bit of a misdirect, the paper isn't trying to claim that the asteroid didn't wipe out the dinosaurs, nor invent the idea that the dinosaurs were already in trouble. The papers is trying to come up with the reason they were already in trouble, which was the emergence of plant toxicity.
It seems quite plausible, at least for the larger herbivores, even if they could evolve fast enough to learn to avoid toxic plants they might not have been able to find enough non-toxic food, and when they go the large carnivores follow.
Smaller dinosaurs could adapt, but they'd be subject to increased competition from mammals, though birds apparently made it through.
I wonder if birds can taste the toxins then, since they're descended from dinosaurs and survived, though apparently at their worst they were down to a fairly small population on a remote island somewhere. (Can't remember where I read that...)
According to the summary at the link, no:
Gallup and Frederick examined whether or not birds (considered to be a descendant of dinosaurs) and crocodilians (also considered to be descended from dinosaurs) could develop taste aversions. They found that the birds, rather than forming aversions to taste, developed aversions to the visual features of whatever made them sick. Still, they knew what they shouldn't eat in order to survive.
The company in this case is making up a rule about the distance from the pedestrian being critical (and asking us to trust it's assessment that the ped was 10 feet away). The actually rules have nothing to do with distance:
Respect the right-of-way of pedestrians. Always stop for any pedestrian crossing at corners or other crosswalks, even if the crosswalk is in the middle of the block, a
[...] Remember, if a pedestrian makes eye contact with you, they are ready to cross the street. Yield to the pedestrian.
At this point we don't really have enough information to know if the car was doing something an average human would recognize as wrong, or if it was a fairly typical scenario but the officer in question thought it would be cool to ticket a self-driving car so they actually applied the rule for once.
Can't their AI tell when someone is making eye-contact? Japanese photo-booths have been able to find human eyes for years now.
This is something that hasn't been discussed much but as a pedestrian and driver I extract a lot of information with eye contact and body language.
I think self-driving cars are going to need some mechanism for telling pedestrians "I see you" or "I think you've past so I'm about to accelerate", or telling another driver "even though I got to the 4-way first someone looks like they're going to use my cross-walk so you can have the right of way".
I know this place has been going downhill for awhile but this is an especially shitty submission even by msmash standards. A handful of academics get a boatload of money to move to canada is proof of a net braindrain in canada's direction and somehow this extends to proof that this is all trump's fault based upon one random comment?
I agree the summary about 24 apparently strong academics largely unknown outside their field is underwhelming.
However, I do know of a lot of well-educated people who've either put off plans to move to the States or are in the process of trying to move back.
Imagine another country elected someone like Trump and he still had support of a substantial portion of the population, would you really feel comfortable moving there?
Any president has a year of overlap with the previous one with respect to economics. Trump was elected in November, generally wouldn't pass a budget until about March, and then you have 2-3 quarters before those policies are enacted and the economy feels those policies in earnest. Trump dragged his feet with respect to his first budget, so that shifts the curve. When the economy finally caught up to Trump's big mouth, you not only saw a decline in the market but chaotic fluctuations not seen since the global economic crisis of 2008 and a short hiccup in late 2016/early-2016.
You say that but imagine that in 2008 the economy held on to late November, or even February of '09.
How many people would still lay the blame for the meltdown on the Bush-era policies in that case?
You don't want to know how many accidents there were in cars with autopilot, that doesn't matter. What you want to know is miles per accident *with autopilot engaged.* Using the other number is highly misleading.
It's one of several statistics you're interested in.
Over time, frequent users of the autopilot may become worse drivers as their skills grow rusty (or they may get better as they become less complacent during their limited driving time).
And even then, what kind of conditions does the auto-pilot work in vs regular driving, how does it affect other drivers on the road, how do pedestrians and other drivers adjust their behaviour when the cars start to become ubiquitous, etc, etc.
Without overwhelming evidence one way or another the safety of the current generation of driverless cars needs proper academic study to evaluate.
It's not just a few whack-o's, over 30,000 Americans are killed by guns every year.
Look...you take that number and subtract the suicides (they don't really fit, we're talking about gun violence, one person on other people)....
Sure they fit, violence directed against oneself is still violence.
There's a valid question of how many suicides by gun would still happen without guns, but I see no justification for ignoring the suicides entirely, they're still dead.
You look at that remaining number, if is mostly gang violence..thug on thug. So, it is criminal use, and if the existing laws were enforced on those, then the rates would drop even further.
But often those caught criminally possessing, or attempting to posses, are not prosecuted.
Do you have evidence that there's large scale instances of gang members violating gun laws and not being punished?
I definitely agree with your last sentence, but at the same time I believe a desire to own a gun is "rational"
If the purpose of the gun is self-defence then for most people they're more likely to be hurt by the gun though accident, domestic conflict, or suicide, than be protected by it.
So if their only motive is self-defense then strictly speaking for them that desire to own the gun is irrational.
Of course, that doesn't mean mental illness and we do a lot of irrational things, and many people may find the false sense of security to be more valuable than the increase in actual risk. And if they have recreational or cultural motives then gun ownership is completely rational for them.
whereas a fear of guns is "irrational" (as are most phobias eg spiders).
Well a gun in your house does create a real risk of harm, it's small in most cases, but it's not illusory. As long as it's not excessive I'm not sure how I'd classify it as "irrational".
I'd hope the training includes storing in a case with a trigger lock and no ammo.
I'm not sure what kind of training you're going to perform without bullets or working triggers.
Either way, your high school training will increase the popularity of guns (as you surely intend). Making guns more popular means more accidents and suicides, especially if teenagers are the target audience.
A gun might be easier for suicide, but it's the tool not the cause.
Consider how easy it would be to kill yourself it you truly wanted to. Now consider the existence of suicide attempts.
Suicide is actually what difficult, that's why people have to try over and over, our brains have a lot of programming to stop us from doing things that look reliably fatal.
That's why guns are so dangerous, because they make something that should be really hard really easy.
I suspect you could probably cut that number by half if you got rid of guns.
I suspect you could cut that number in half with gun handling classes as part of high school.
Maybe you could cut the number of accidental deaths, but if your policy also leads to more guns in the hands of teenagers than both accidental deaths and suicides will be way up.
Don't take my word for it though. I did do a statistical analysis but so did a lot of other people with much more experience in this than I have.
Your cited article is actually about the relationship between gun laws and homicide in the US, which is a very different question since state-level gun laws may not be as effective as national laws, and state-level laws may become more restrictive in response to gun violence.
I don't care if the person got murdered with a gun, a knife, or by being tossed out a window. If we want to see murder go down then it can't be done with gun laws. We might see "gun deaths" go down but that's like saying "pool drownings" go down by banning pools while total drownings stay the same because now people go swim in a lake instead.
So your basic claim is that a more effective tool for doing X doesn't increase the rate of X?
In that case I'll replace your computer with a type writer, I expect you to maintain your current levels of productivity.
So, over all, things have gotten better, and yet...we're wanting to have law abiding Americans, the VAST majority of gun owners in the US, millions of them...give up their rights, to cater to the lowest denominator of a few whack-o's...right?
It's not just a few whack-o's, over 30,000 Americans are killed by guns every year. Sure some of those would still die without guns, but I suspect you could probably cut that number by half if you got rid of guns. Other forms of domestic violence and other suicide mechanisms don't really match the ease and effectiveness of a gun.
I won't even get into reasons pertaining to the founding fathers wanting us armed, against tyranny of government that could happen.
The tyranny of government is a valid concern, but the tyranny of a modern nation-state is not something you can fight with a gun.
The valid uses of a gun are recreation, hunting, and self-defence (though for the vast majority of people owning a gun makes them less safe).
Are those uses really worth the cost of that many lives?
In the US, people can freely cross borders between states. That's why Chicago has such terrible gun violence despite having strict(er) gun laws than neighboring states/cities.
Then why does Texas have so much less? Or New Hampshire?
Because a strong correlation does not preclude outliers.
I wasn't aware that apps, or programs, or code in general had sexual preferences. I think they mean the Grindr app used by homosexuals
It's an app intended for gay dating, "Gay Dating App Grinder" is a perfect way to describe it.
"Grindr app used by homosexuals" is both awkward to say and could just as well describe an app for grinding spices that happens to be popular among homosexuals.
is making data that ignorant people have inappropriately shared available to others which seems like a case of you get what you deserve for over sharing...
"Inappropriately shared"? We're talking about HIV status on a dating/hookup app. It's information that can literally saves lives.
Interesting! So since nearly every single country on this planet restricts immigration and makes getting a job nearly impossible without being a legal resident, does that mean the governments and leaders of each and every country are xenophobes?
Or do you restrict your criticism to only major white countries. Just making sure you are not the racist one.
Motives matter.
For instance wanting the finance industry to pay more taxes isn't racist.
But wanting the finance industry to pay more taxes because I think they're a bunch of Jews who are controlling everything is racist.
Similarly, managing immigration and foreign worker policy because you want to ensure smooth integration and avoid worker exploitation isn't racist.
Doing those things because you want fewer Muslims and brown skinned people is racist.
And the one thing we should know right now is that Trump is a racist.
I dunno, I miss when April Fools Day was Slashdot Shitpost Day. Yes, it meant Slashdot was entirely useless for a day, but it helped build a sense of community. There's a lot of dumb things about Slashdot that I end up missing, like coverage of anime or video games that no one cares about. Things that made it seem more like a site for nerds and not this weird corporate pseudo-open source thing it's become. The loss of incredibly stupid April Fools pranks doesn't help.
I agree, Slashdot is usually my first site of the day and as such were the one site who had a chance of actually getting me with a story before I clued into the calendar.
But the greatest Slashdot April Fools was the OMG Ponies theme from.... holy crap 12 years ago!
Reading and re-reading the quote from Tesla, I see I was mislead:
The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver's hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken."
This does not mean that the warning fired during the 6-seconds prior to the collision. It wasn't telling him a collision was imminent. It says that "earlier in the drive" it warned him. So the warning could have been 45 minutes prior. Also, it sounds like the autopilot warning happens any time the user takes their hands off the wheel, not just when it needs help. It might be that autopilot drivers have a tendency to ignore the warning, like a dialog box that comes up so often people just click "OK" to it.
I begin to think that a semi-autopilot is a bad idea. If it is not reliable enough that a person can take their hands off the wheel, and they still must pay full attention to the road in case it makes a mistake, then they might as well drive? It is very hard to pay attention to something you aren't actively involved in. Airline pilots and lifeguards and factory quality inspectors know this. Those industries have specific policies and practices designed to keep people engaged and aware.
Agreed, the hands things is next to useless.
A warning to touch the wheel every 6 seconds isn't a measure to make you're paying attention, it's a measure to ensure you touch the wheel every 6 seconds.
If they REALLY wanted people paying attention to the road they'd put in a camera staring at the driver with a view of their pupils, and if their eyes were directed away from the road for more than a second it would start nagging them.
Of course, if they did this then no one would use the auto-pilot, because staring at the road and not-driving is more boring than staring at the road and driving.
The "hands on wheel so you pay attention" is a feature designed to fail. They just want to sell a self-driving car without liability for crashes by insisting on impossible usage instructions.
I'm a big fan of Elon Musk but Tesla really needs to fess up about what they're actually selling.
Why are we allowing corporations to "debug" their cars on our roads? You have no concept of reality. 700 deaths on US roads. What would the number be if every car was using Tesla's autonomous technology? It might be 10,000 deaths per week. How would you know?
There are these things called multiplication and division. There are 250 M cars on the road according ot this:
so we would expect 0.08% of that in deaths with Teslas, so that is 32 deaths. So to a first approximation, Tesla is very safe, since you do not have another news story every other week about someone having died in a Tesla.
Now one might want to adjust for the type of driving done, where autopilot only drives well on high ways, where maybe the death rate is less. The number is knowable, though, and it is definitely not 10 000 per week.
You're comparing apples to oranges, under 24 and over 75 represent about 65% of road fatalities. Those aren't demographics who drive Teslas. Accidents also skew towards lower-income groups who tend to drive more irresponsibly (alcohol or speed), again not Tesla drivers.
You've also got single vehicle crashes that claim multiple lives. Driving with kids is dangerous because of the potential distraction they pose, but do you really think many Tesla drivers are using the auto-pilot with their kids? Or drive in fresh snow with poor traction?
The auto-pilot is overwhelmingly used by upper-middle class to wealthy people who are old enough to drive responsibly, young enough to drive competently, and are driving in ideal road conditions without occupants, and usually driven in cities (which highways are much more dangerous). Plus some of those cars are older and lack new safety features.
As you pointed out we don't know the proper adjustment, but I can see a lot of factors that should make Telsa owners responsible for far less than 32 deaths per year.
How does that cause net neutrality rules in one state to affect another state in a way that's different than California emissions rules affecting other states?
For vehicles it's easy to say if you want to register in state X you need to meet standard Y, other than affecting the market you don't really affect other states.
But for Net Neutrality what happens if the server and client are both in NN states but an intermediate network isn't, is that intermediate carrier allowed to slow down the traffic? What if the ISP and user are both in NN states but the ISP routes the traffic out of state, are they allowed to degrade the traffic there?
These aren't insurmountable problems by any means, but I could see the FCC being given the leeway to make those kinds of determinations, and if you care as little for evidence or proper procedure as Pai then you might take any excuse to block the states.
I like your optimism that the EPA will behave differently than the FCC.
The Internet is fundamentally cross-border, despite the ridiculousness of Pai I can see the FCC having legitimate cause to say that a state can't have their own set of Internet rules.
But cars are different, the EPA shouldn't have any pretext to overrule state regulations.
More importantly, California is a very big and very rich state, big and rich enough that car manufacturers might decide it's better just to make one model that hits California standards rather than investing in a second dirty model, especially when the federal standard is likely to revert once Trump is out.
Slashdot Mirror
This may (although it doesn't, really) explain the decline of dinosaurs, but it says nothing about why thousands of other species (including all the ammonites) went extinct at the same time.
And the theory that dinosaurs were already dying off before the K/Pg boundary is hardly new. Part of that is an artifact of how fossils are formed and found. A species could have lasted several million years after its latest-known fossil, it just didn't happen to leave any fossils that have yet been found. (Conversely, the last surviving member of a species could have been fossilized. Unlikely though, except in the case of a mass extinction event.)
I think the summary is a bit of a misdirect, the paper isn't trying to claim that the asteroid didn't wipe out the dinosaurs, nor invent the idea that the dinosaurs were already in trouble. The papers is trying to come up with the reason they were already in trouble, which was the emergence of plant toxicity.
It seems quite plausible, at least for the larger herbivores, even if they could evolve fast enough to learn to avoid toxic plants they might not have been able to find enough non-toxic food, and when they go the large carnivores follow.
Smaller dinosaurs could adapt, but they'd be subject to increased competition from mammals, though birds apparently made it through.
I wonder if birds can taste the toxins then, since they're descended from dinosaurs and survived, though apparently at their worst they were down to a fairly small population on a remote island somewhere. (Can't remember where I read that...)
According to the summary at the link, no:
Gallup and Frederick examined whether or not birds (considered to be a descendant of dinosaurs) and crocodilians (also considered to be descended from dinosaurs) could develop taste aversions. They found that the birds, rather than forming aversions to taste, developed aversions to the visual features of whatever made them sick. Still, they knew what they shouldn't eat in order to survive.
The company in this case is making up a rule about the distance
from the pedestrian being critical (and asking us to trust it's
assessment that the ped was 10 feet away). The actually rules
have nothing to do with distance:
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/...
At this point we don't really have enough information to know if the car was doing something an average human would recognize as wrong, or if it was a fairly typical scenario but the officer in question thought it would be cool to ticket a self-driving car so they actually applied the rule for once.
Can't their AI tell when someone is making eye-contact?
Japanese photo-booths have been able to find human eyes for years now.
This is something that hasn't been discussed much but as a pedestrian and driver I extract a lot of information with eye contact and body language.
I think self-driving cars are going to need some mechanism for telling pedestrians "I see you" or "I think you've past so I'm about to accelerate", or telling another driver "even though I got to the 4-way first someone looks like they're going to use my cross-walk so you can have the right of way".
For every EPA program cut, EPA directors add $75,000 bonuses to their salaries.
Reduce fraud, waste, and abuse then get some extra cash. An excellent incentive program.
Your pithy response would be more effective if the Scott Pruit wasn't so ridiculously corrupt and wasteful.
I know this place has been going downhill for awhile but this is an especially shitty submission even by msmash standards. A handful of academics get a boatload of money to move to canada is proof of a net braindrain in canada's direction and somehow this extends to proof that this is all trump's fault based upon one random comment?
I agree the summary about 24 apparently strong academics largely unknown outside their field is underwhelming.
However, I do know of a lot of well-educated people who've either put off plans to move to the States or are in the process of trying to move back.
Imagine another country elected someone like Trump and he still had support of a substantial portion of the population, would you really feel comfortable moving there?
Any president has a year of overlap with the previous one with respect to economics. Trump was elected in November, generally wouldn't pass a budget until about March, and then you have 2-3 quarters before those policies are enacted and the economy feels those policies in earnest. Trump dragged his feet with respect to his first budget, so that shifts the curve. When the economy finally caught up to Trump's big mouth, you not only saw a decline in the market but chaotic fluctuations not seen since the global economic crisis of 2008 and a short hiccup in late 2016/early-2016.
You say that but imagine that in 2008 the economy held on to late November, or even February of '09.
How many people would still lay the blame for the meltdown on the Bush-era policies in that case?
You don't want to know how many accidents there were in cars with autopilot, that doesn't matter. What you want to know is miles per accident *with autopilot engaged.* Using the other number is highly misleading.
It's one of several statistics you're interested in.
Over time, frequent users of the autopilot may become worse drivers as their skills grow rusty (or they may get better as they become less complacent during their limited driving time).
And even then, what kind of conditions does the auto-pilot work in vs regular driving, how does it affect other drivers on the road, how do pedestrians and other drivers adjust their behaviour when the cars start to become ubiquitous, etc, etc.
Without overwhelming evidence one way or another the safety of the current generation of driverless cars needs proper academic study to evaluate.
Look...you take that number and subtract the suicides (they don't really fit, we're talking about gun violence, one person on other people)....
Sure they fit, violence directed against oneself is still violence.
There's a valid question of how many suicides by gun would still happen without guns, but I see no justification for ignoring the suicides entirely, they're still dead.
You look at that remaining number, if is mostly gang violence..thug on thug. So, it is criminal use, and if the existing laws were enforced on those, then the rates would drop even further.
But often those caught criminally possessing, or attempting to posses, are not prosecuted.
Do you have evidence that there's large scale instances of gang members violating gun laws and not being punished?
I definitely agree with your last sentence, but at the same time I believe a desire to own a gun is "rational"
If the purpose of the gun is self-defence then for most people they're more likely to be hurt by the gun though accident, domestic conflict, or suicide, than be protected by it.
So if their only motive is self-defense then strictly speaking for them that desire to own the gun is irrational.
Of course, that doesn't mean mental illness and we do a lot of irrational things, and many people may find the false sense of security to be more valuable than the increase in actual risk. And if they have recreational or cultural motives then gun ownership is completely rational for them.
whereas a fear of guns is "irrational" (as are most phobias eg spiders).
Well a gun in your house does create a real risk of harm, it's small in most cases, but it's not illusory. As long as it's not excessive I'm not sure how I'd classify it as "irrational".
I'd hope the training includes storing in a case with a trigger lock and no ammo.
I'm not sure what kind of training you're going to perform without bullets or working triggers.
Either way, your high school training will increase the popularity of guns (as you surely intend). Making guns more popular means more accidents and suicides, especially if teenagers are the target audience.
A gun might be easier for suicide, but it's the tool not the cause.
Consider how easy it would be to kill yourself it you truly wanted to. Now consider the existence of suicide attempts.
Suicide is actually what difficult, that's why people have to try over and over, our brains have a lot of programming to stop us from doing things that look reliably fatal.
That's why guns are so dangerous, because they make something that should be really hard really easy.
I suspect you could probably cut that number by half if you got rid of guns.
I suspect you could cut that number in half with gun handling classes as part of high school.
Maybe you could cut the number of accidental deaths, but if your policy also leads to more guns in the hands of teenagers than both accidental deaths and suicides will be way up.
Don't take my word for it though. I did do a statistical analysis but so did a lot of other people with much more experience in this than I have.
Your cited article is actually about the relationship between gun laws and homicide in the US, which is a very different question since state-level gun laws may not be as effective as national laws, and state-level laws may become more restrictive in response to gun violence.
Other people do find that gun ownership correlates with violence crime. Though it's extremely difficult to prove causality.
I don't care if the person got murdered with a gun, a knife, or by being tossed out a window. If we want to see murder go down then it can't be done with gun laws. We might see "gun deaths" go down but that's like saying "pool drownings" go down by banning pools while total drownings stay the same because now people go swim in a lake instead.
So your basic claim is that a more effective tool for doing X doesn't increase the rate of X?
In that case I'll replace your computer with a type writer, I expect you to maintain your current levels of productivity.
So, over all, things have gotten better, and yet...we're wanting to have law abiding Americans, the VAST majority of gun owners in the US, millions of them...give up their rights, to cater to the lowest denominator of a few whack-o's...right?
It's not just a few whack-o's, over 30,000 Americans are killed by guns every year. Sure some of those would still die without guns, but I suspect you could probably cut that number by half if you got rid of guns. Other forms of domestic violence and other suicide mechanisms don't really match the ease and effectiveness of a gun.
I won't even get into reasons pertaining to the founding fathers wanting us armed, against tyranny of government that could happen.
The tyranny of government is a valid concern, but the tyranny of a modern nation-state is not something you can fight with a gun.
The valid uses of a gun are recreation, hunting, and self-defence (though for the vast majority of people owning a gun makes them less safe).
Are those uses really worth the cost of that many lives?
The sad fact is that most people who want to own a gun by definition have mental health issues.
Nope. The fact is people who are afraid of guns have an irrational phobia. And that is a mental issue.
Nope. The fact is you're both full of it.
Neither ownership of a gun, nor a fear of guns, is a sign of mental illness.
It's possible to debate a topic without claiming the other side only holds their position due to a mental defect.
Didn't California ban active shooters in the state?
Nope, too bad one of those "good guys with a gun" wasn't nearby and able to save the day...
The 23rd infantry of the U.S. Marines, which is about a block away, has been put on lockdown.
In the US, people can freely cross borders between states. That's why Chicago has such terrible gun violence despite having strict(er) gun laws than neighboring states/cities.
Then why does Texas have so much less? Or New Hampshire?
Because a strong correlation does not preclude outliers.
I wasn't aware that apps, or programs, or code in general had sexual preferences. I think they mean the Grindr app used by homosexuals
It's an app intended for gay dating, "Gay Dating App Grinder" is a perfect way to describe it.
"Grindr app used by homosexuals" is both awkward to say and could just as well describe an app for grinding spices that happens to be popular among homosexuals.
is making data that ignorant people have inappropriately shared available to others which seems like a case of you get what you deserve for over sharing...
"Inappropriately shared"? We're talking about HIV status on a dating/hookup app. It's information that can literally saves lives.
Interesting! So since nearly every single country on this planet restricts immigration and makes getting a job nearly impossible without being a legal resident, does that mean the governments and leaders of each and every country are xenophobes?
Or do you restrict your criticism to only major white countries. Just making sure you are not the racist one.
Motives matter.
For instance wanting the finance industry to pay more taxes isn't racist.
But wanting the finance industry to pay more taxes because I think they're a bunch of Jews who are controlling everything is racist.
Similarly, managing immigration and foreign worker policy because you want to ensure smooth integration and avoid worker exploitation isn't racist.
Doing those things because you want fewer Muslims and brown skinned people is racist.
And the one thing we should know right now is that Trump is a racist.
After months of wanting a DACA bill he's now on Twitter pretending he doesn't want DACA.
What a kidder! Like we'd really believe he'd just switch positions like that!!
I dunno, I miss when April Fools Day was Slashdot Shitpost Day. Yes, it meant Slashdot was entirely useless for a day, but it helped build a sense of community. There's a lot of dumb things about Slashdot that I end up missing, like coverage of anime or video games that no one cares about. Things that made it seem more like a site for nerds and not this weird corporate pseudo-open source thing it's become. The loss of incredibly stupid April Fools pranks doesn't help.
I agree, Slashdot is usually my first site of the day and as such were the one site who had a chance of actually getting me with a story before I clued into the calendar.
But the greatest Slashdot April Fools was the OMG Ponies theme from.... holy crap 12 years ago!
Reading and re-reading the quote from Tesla, I see I was mislead:
The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver's hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken."
This does not mean that the warning fired during the 6-seconds prior to the collision. It wasn't telling him a collision was imminent. It says that "earlier in the drive" it warned him. So the warning could have been 45 minutes prior. Also, it sounds like the autopilot warning happens any time the user takes their hands off the wheel, not just when it needs help. It might be that autopilot drivers have a tendency to ignore the warning, like a dialog box that comes up so often people just click "OK" to it.
I begin to think that a semi-autopilot is a bad idea. If it is not reliable enough that a person can take their hands off the wheel, and they still must pay full attention to the road in case it makes a mistake, then they might as well drive? It is very hard to pay attention to something you aren't actively involved in. Airline pilots and lifeguards and factory quality inspectors know this. Those industries have specific policies and practices designed to keep people engaged and aware.
Agreed, the hands things is next to useless.
A warning to touch the wheel every 6 seconds isn't a measure to make you're paying attention, it's a measure to ensure you touch the wheel every 6 seconds.
If they REALLY wanted people paying attention to the road they'd put in a camera staring at the driver with a view of their pupils, and if their eyes were directed away from the road for more than a second it would start nagging them.
Of course, if they did this then no one would use the auto-pilot, because staring at the road and not-driving is more boring than staring at the road and driving.
The "hands on wheel so you pay attention" is a feature designed to fail. They just want to sell a self-driving car without liability for crashes by insisting on impossible usage instructions.
I'm a big fan of Elon Musk but Tesla really needs to fess up about what they're actually selling.
Why are we allowing corporations to "debug" their cars on our roads? You have no concept of reality. 700 deaths on US roads. What would the number be if every car was using Tesla's autonomous technology? It might be 10,000 deaths per week. How would you know?
There are these things called multiplication and division. There are 250 M cars on the road according ot this:
https://www.statista.com/stati...
About 200k Teslas have been sold, which is recent enough that most of them should still be on the road. 200k / 250M = 0.08%
There are 40k deaths per year , according to this:
http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocumen...
so we would expect 0.08% of that in deaths with Teslas, so that is 32 deaths. So to a first approximation, Tesla is very safe, since you do not have another news story every other week about someone having died in a Tesla.
Now one might want to adjust for the type of driving done, where autopilot only drives well on high ways, where maybe the death rate is less. The number is knowable, though, and it is definitely not 10 000 per week.
You're comparing apples to oranges, under 24 and over 75 represent about 65% of road fatalities. Those aren't demographics who drive Teslas. Accidents also skew towards lower-income groups who tend to drive more irresponsibly (alcohol or speed), again not Tesla drivers.
You've also got single vehicle crashes that claim multiple lives. Driving with kids is dangerous because of the potential distraction they pose, but do you really think many Tesla drivers are using the auto-pilot with their kids? Or drive in fresh snow with poor traction?
The auto-pilot is overwhelmingly used by upper-middle class to wealthy people who are old enough to drive responsibly, young enough to drive competently, and are driving in ideal road conditions without occupants, and usually driven in cities (which highways are much more dangerous). Plus some of those cars are older and lack new safety features.
As you pointed out we don't know the proper adjustment, but I can see a lot of factors that should make Telsa owners responsible for far less than 32 deaths per year.
Congratulations! You have a predicted lifespan of 50 more years!
Establishing connection to driverless car... SUCCESS
Your remaining predicted lifespan is now 10 seconds....
Do you wish to extend your lifespan by upgrading to the paid version for $5000? y/n
How does that cause net neutrality rules in one state to affect another state in a way that's different than California emissions rules affecting other states?
For vehicles it's easy to say if you want to register in state X you need to meet standard Y, other than affecting the market you don't really affect other states.
But for Net Neutrality what happens if the server and client are both in NN states but an intermediate network isn't, is that intermediate carrier allowed to slow down the traffic? What if the ISP and user are both in NN states but the ISP routes the traffic out of state, are they allowed to degrade the traffic there?
These aren't insurmountable problems by any means, but I could see the FCC being given the leeway to make those kinds of determinations, and if you care as little for evidence or proper procedure as Pai then you might take any excuse to block the states.
I like your optimism that the EPA will behave differently than the FCC.
The Internet is fundamentally cross-border, despite the ridiculousness of Pai I can see the FCC having legitimate cause to say that a state can't have their own set of Internet rules.
But cars are different, the EPA shouldn't have any pretext to overrule state regulations.
More importantly, California is a very big and very rich state, big and rich enough that car manufacturers might decide it's better just to make one model that hits California standards rather than investing in a second dirty model, especially when the federal standard is likely to revert once Trump is out.