It's thanks to assholes like you that most people involved in dangerous situations don't want to talk about them and share that knowledge because of the stigma of being labelled a "bad driver".
It is interesting that for aviation there is a website administered by NASA where anybody can just post and describe situations they've been in where there was a risk of an accident. While the FAA hasn't made any absolute promises, their policy is to avoid prosecuting anybody who admits to violating regulations there. The result is that when pilots realize they've done something wrong it is in their interest to just post on the site and confess it, especially since they have no way of knowing whether their behavior was observed and just grinding its way through the bureaucracy before they get a letter in the mail.
The own-up-to-your-mistakes culture contributes to making aviation safer. That said, it is still full of people suing plane manufacturers anytime somebody crashes, and if anything this is a bigger problem than with cars (where the owners are the ones who get sued).
As someone who's been involved in multiple MVAs, both at-fault and not, I can assure you that in the panic of the moment, saving your own ass is always the first priority. CYA is human nature.
Easy to argue ethics when you're not smack in the middle of an emergency situation.
Sure, but an automated car would have the luxury of not being able to panic and having plenty of time to evaluate the situation and make the best decision.
We overlook the behavior of drivers in accident situations that they did not cause because we understand their fallibility.
Why would I be walking with my children in front of a moving car?
Simple - a truck swerves into the path of the moving car, so the moving car swerves in your direction, calculating that its owner will fare far better in a collision with your kids than with the truck.
Or maybe a rock falls out of the truck and threatens to crack the windshield, so the car employs its twisted logic to run over your kid while dodging it. A rock hitting the window would result in a loss to the owner, but running over your kid probably wouldn't even dent the fender and their life isn't worth anything to the car owner in this sociopath's paradise.
What idiot would get into a machine that values there life less than others? Worse yet if you have this in place how easy is it to game the system aka take an old beater and swerve in front of an autonomous car and have it go kill/injure the occupant or others.
Why not just pull out a gun and shoot them? If your goal is to murder somebody there are far more reliable ways to go about it than to try to crash into a car that is designed to avoid collisions and has instant reflexes.
Now if the laws/tech get updated so that...
For automated cars to ever take off the laws will certainly need to be updated. Most likely you won't get any choice in how your car behaves when you go to buy one. Of course, most likely the soccer mom in your scenario wouldn't be able to buy a car that could be manually operated in the first place, so most accidents would be prevented just by virtue of eliminating stupid drivers.
Now if you want to be altruistic that is your choice, as to sociopath that is more about lack of regret than not choosing the most altruistic option. Expecting/requiring people to not take the best choice for them is broken by design.
So, if I live next door to somebody who I hear keeps a lot of cash under their mattress and doesn't own a gun, should I make what is clearly the best choice for me and kill them in their sleep and take their money? Besides, they're clearly idiots and have it coming anyway...
If society could function with everybody just making the "best choice for them" then we wouldn't need laws in the first place.
Then perhaps the solution is to let the driver choose beforehand. The default option being to prioritize the lives of the vehicle's occupants, but a second option would allow the "driver" to prioritize the lives of others if he is the sole passenger.
So, give the driver the ability to choose whether they'd prefer to die or be charged with murder? Does that make the manufacturer an accessory to murder? Clearly the offering of the feature and enabling of it were pre-mediated.
Sure, you won't get arrested for murder for letting them step out onto the street, but you certainly let them die. To me, what is moral is helping when you have the ability to help.
Honestly, I'd call this a bug in our legal system. We focus way to much on direct causation, and not enough on intent/etc. This is probably because the first is much easier to prove than the latter. However, the concept of having an "attempted murder" crime that is punished differently from "homicide" seems really odd to me. If I set out to kill somebody, why should the fact that I was thwarted have an impact on how society treats me?
There is an amazing imbalance in the cost of shipping an item from China and in the cost of sending it back to China and the sellers know and exploit this.
Hmm, wonder if Chinese customs actually express skepticism at all those envelopes stamped with "gift?" Anytime I order something on Amazon that takes weeks to arrive for two cents plus $4 shipping it almost always includes a false customs declaration as an added bonus.
Granted, when I get them on Amazon I tend to get what was promised, so the only people getting ripped off are the taxpayers, and those who work in US manufacturing who the tariffs are supposed to help.
Now what happens when Cogent goes and sells a bunch of cheap bandwidth to various providers like Netflix and begins flooding relatively one way traffic onto Verizon's network? Well they saturated the 100 megabit connection in one direction. Verizon who isn't anywhere close to the saturation point on their side says hey if you want more bandwidth you have to pay for it because we're not using anywhere near what you are and these agreements are supposed to be fairly equal with respect to traffic flows.
So, if I go download 47 movies from Netflix can I point out to Verizon that they're dumping 50Mbps of data onto my LAN with nothing but ACKs going in the other direction? How much is Verizon supposed to pay me for my FIOS connection, since I'm doing them the favor of taking all that video traffic off of their network?
Of course the ISPs have more data going in than out - they are full of customers who only download data. Their customers have already paid for the expense of transferring all that data.
Paying to transmit packets made more sense for Tier-1 networks that only route between other networks, since they don't actually create demand for traffic. That model doesn't make sense for networks that actually contain clients that create demand for data - they wouldn't be receiving data if they didn't ask for it.
If you want Internet, you have plenty of choices depending on where you live. DSL from your telco. DSL on the telco wires from someone else, broadband wireless, 3G/4G via usually more than one cell carrier. Satellite. And if you live so far out in the sticks that there are none of those options, then it is doubtful that Comcast has wired your neighborhood anyway.
I live in the outskirts of a major US city, and I have exactly two choices for broadband - Comcast and Verizon. Well, that is unless I want to pay somebody to run a wire to my house for heavens-knows how much. Satellite and 4G really aren't in the same realm - the cost of both are orders of magnitude higher for the same level of service.
Both Verizon and Comcast probably pull these kinds of stunts, so I don't really have any choice in the matter.
If there was no reason to fear a backlash, then yeah, the people didn't care one way or another.
So, which are you in favor of - locking up black people or killing them?
My point is that many might be opposed to the very holding of the vote in the first place.
Also, if I put an ad in the paper saying that you can show up at my house on Tuesday and vote on whether my city should secede from the US, does the outcome of the 15 votes I collect mean anything?
This is only true if there is no sampling bias. If people opposed to the secession were more likely to boycott the vote than those who were in favor of it, then the result of the vote would be skewed.
Whether or not that is actually what happened is impossible to say without a better survey.
I suspect that there are plenty of ordinary people living in these areas, but as things escalate everybody gets pushed towards taking a side.
Police are sent in to deal with pro-whoever rebels, and they just make a token effort and give up because they're sympathetic. So, then they get fired and replaced with more radical anti-whoever paramilitary and they go shoot up all the pro-whoever rebels. Then the pro-whoever rebel's families get all upset and start giving money to the pro-whoever cause. They shoot up the local anti-whoevers and before you know it you have civil war.
You can only have a democratic resolution if all sides are willing to seek and abide by one. Otherwise it ends up coming down to whoever has the most guns, or friends who are willing to use their guns.
If the actual poll results are true, it suggest Ukraine is not that divided fundamentally at all, and that a small group of pro-Russian agitators lead by Russian military personnel out of uniform are creating this civil war.
And if actual poll results are true, it would make them like a lot of US elections, where most people sit it out and the fringes determine how the country will be run.
If this were just about electing a mayor I'd agree. However, the referendum was controversial and many boycotted it.
If the local KKK had a referendum on whether black people should be placed in concentration camps or just shot on sight, and only 0.001% of the population turned out, would the conclusion be that most people don't care about black people being shot on sight?
Yup, and on the newer ones the switches just tell the computer to turn on/off the engine - just about everything else is automatic. Sure, the pilot does need to have conditions right for a start (bleed air available if not in flight, etc).
rich farmers? I have never heard of a rich farmer. Either the farmer makes that season or not. Farming is a lot like the lottery on if your crops grow or not.
You obviously never heard of most of the companies that you buy your food from, then. The financial interests behind the farms are quite well-off. Heck, they and others in the industry paid billions in fines/judgments just over the lysine price-fixing scandal, and they're still in business...
The problem is that some of the sites that require the extra security are ones where I don't care to have it. I don't get to pick the level of security a site requires - the site does.
If slashdot required two-factor to log in, that would be a major annoyance.
Most likely the scientist wants to study some kind of gene manipulation or whatever, and the way to get funding for something these days is to tie it to global warming.
If the Republicans take over down the road, we'll be talking about engineered chickens that can locate landmines.
The issue is probably more that MS promotes its platform better, and also the fact that the XBox does not support OpenGL. It is popular for the same reason that Win32 is popular - network effects.
Every website rolling out its own clumsy two-factor approach is not the right solution either.
As I navigate from site to site I don't want to have to get up and walk over to get my cell phone from its charger in the other room 5 times an hour to look up a PIN. Even if it were right in front of me I don't want to have to transcribe whatever number it gives me.
What is wrong with using federated identity management of some kind? You can have one layer of strong authentication, and then after that the user can move around freely. Right now I just do that via LastPass, and sites that force two-factor or anti-screen-scraping technology annoy me to no end, because they force me to either go get my phone, or pick a weaker but easy-to-memorize password.
I don't really buy the whole cost of enforcement argument.
Enforcing the law almost always costs more than the actual crimes do when looked at in isolation. However, enforcing the law is still important, because it can prevent crime.
If everybody knows that you can rob somebody in broad daylight and nobody will do anything about it, then society will rapidly devolve into crime and vigilantism. On the other hand, if everybody knew that even stealing a piece of candy from a store would result in a near-certainty of arrest, then you'd see almost all crime go away. People commit crimes because they perceive the reward as being greater than the risk.
So, by spending $8k to recover a $500 phone and make the life of the guy who stole it miserable can go a long way to preventing phone theft. Do that thoroughly enough, and suddenly you don't find yourself having to spend all that much money on enforcement because people stop breaking the law.
Of course, for phones there is a simpler and cheaper technological solution and that is IMEI blacklisting. However, the argument still stands for other forms of petty crime. If I were in charge and somebody reported their radio stolen from their car, I'd dust the car for prints, check camera footage, and when I track down the teenager who stole the phone they'd be showing up at a labor camp for 6 hours a day for two years, while attending classes to learn something productive for another 4 hours a day, and then they'd be sent home with a monitoring anklet and an MRE in payment for their labor. Sure, it would cost more than just letting them play loose on the street, but taxpayers would save money on repairs, and maybe society would benefit from more skilled laborers and fewer leaches.
Those artificial ones that simulate some zoom lens with 47 elements with an diffused point source of light (as if in space) look a bit neat the first 35 times around.
However, for the typical cell phone camera, a lens flare just means that half the picture looks like it is covered in haze. It is really annoying trying to take pictures while holding your hand over the top of it just outside the field of view...
The capped recording time is actually the fault of the European Union's import duties, which charge a higher tax rate for anything that can record 30 minutes or longer. Blame excessive government bureaucracy for your DSLR being crippled.
I'm actually impressed that the manufacturer figured out that legal optimization and applied it. Many companies seem to struggle just to figure out what tariff to use for their products, let alone optimizing the design of the product in order to match a particular tariff...
Let's also see which one fits in your pocket, making it available at all times..
Cell phone cameras have their place. However, if you're actually going someplace to take photos, they're not the tool you should be reaching for.
I have a leatherman for situations where I just need a bunch of tools handy, but when I do maintenance on my car, I grab my toolbox and not my leatherman. Sure, I could probably manage to get the oil plug out using the pliers tool on it, but I own a socket wrench and a set of metric sockets for a reason. When I'm going to change tires, I grab my breaker bar too, and my torque wrench for putting them back on.
That doesn't mean that there aren't situations where the leatherman is handy to have.
The galaxy note will record crap, because it has CRAP lens compared to even a $99 Canon 50mm 1.8 prime.
To be fair - that lens can outperform many lenses that cost 5-10 times as much, BECAUSE it is a prime. Any lens with a zoom is an optical compromise. In order to get zoom lenses with that kind of performance you end up spending well north of $1k, and even then you only get a focal range of around 3x. The convenience zooms with 8-12x ranges always suffer from aberrations (and if they don't they're REALLY expensive).
If you have the time to switch lenses, a variety of fairly inexpensive prime lenses will outperform even a $20k camera bag full of top-of-the-line zooms. Of course, if you're taking pictures of a football game, the players aren't going to stand around while you pick the right lens.
Slashdot Mirror
It's thanks to assholes like you that most people involved in dangerous situations don't want to talk about them and share that knowledge because of the stigma of being labelled a "bad driver".
It is interesting that for aviation there is a website administered by NASA where anybody can just post and describe situations they've been in where there was a risk of an accident. While the FAA hasn't made any absolute promises, their policy is to avoid prosecuting anybody who admits to violating regulations there. The result is that when pilots realize they've done something wrong it is in their interest to just post on the site and confess it, especially since they have no way of knowing whether their behavior was observed and just grinding its way through the bureaucracy before they get a letter in the mail.
The own-up-to-your-mistakes culture contributes to making aviation safer. That said, it is still full of people suing plane manufacturers anytime somebody crashes, and if anything this is a bigger problem than with cars (where the owners are the ones who get sued).
As someone who's been involved in multiple MVAs, both at-fault and not, I can assure you that in the panic of the moment, saving your own ass is always the first priority. CYA is human nature.
Easy to argue ethics when you're not smack in the middle of an emergency situation.
Sure, but an automated car would have the luxury of not being able to panic and having plenty of time to evaluate the situation and make the best decision.
We overlook the behavior of drivers in accident situations that they did not cause because we understand their fallibility.
Why would I be walking with my children in front of a moving car?
Simple - a truck swerves into the path of the moving car, so the moving car swerves in your direction, calculating that its owner will fare far better in a collision with your kids than with the truck.
Or maybe a rock falls out of the truck and threatens to crack the windshield, so the car employs its twisted logic to run over your kid while dodging it. A rock hitting the window would result in a loss to the owner, but running over your kid probably wouldn't even dent the fender and their life isn't worth anything to the car owner in this sociopath's paradise.
What idiot would get into a machine that values there life less than others? Worse yet if you have this in place how easy is it to game the system aka take an old beater and swerve in front of an autonomous car and have it go kill/injure the occupant or others.
Why not just pull out a gun and shoot them? If your goal is to murder somebody there are far more reliable ways to go about it than to try to crash into a car that is designed to avoid collisions and has instant reflexes.
Now if the laws/tech get updated so that...
For automated cars to ever take off the laws will certainly need to be updated. Most likely you won't get any choice in how your car behaves when you go to buy one. Of course, most likely the soccer mom in your scenario wouldn't be able to buy a car that could be manually operated in the first place, so most accidents would be prevented just by virtue of eliminating stupid drivers.
Now if you want to be altruistic that is your choice, as to sociopath that is more about lack of regret than not choosing the most altruistic option. Expecting/requiring people to not take the best choice for them is broken by design.
So, if I live next door to somebody who I hear keeps a lot of cash under their mattress and doesn't own a gun, should I make what is clearly the best choice for me and kill them in their sleep and take their money? Besides, they're clearly idiots and have it coming anyway...
If society could function with everybody just making the "best choice for them" then we wouldn't need laws in the first place.
Then perhaps the solution is to let the driver choose beforehand. The default option being to prioritize the lives of the vehicle's occupants, but a second option would allow the "driver" to prioritize the lives of others if he is the sole passenger.
So, give the driver the ability to choose whether they'd prefer to die or be charged with murder? Does that make the manufacturer an accessory to murder? Clearly the offering of the feature and enabling of it were pre-mediated.
Sure, you won't get arrested for murder for letting them step out onto the street, but you certainly let them die. To me, what is moral is helping when you have the ability to help.
Honestly, I'd call this a bug in our legal system. We focus way to much on direct causation, and not enough on intent/etc. This is probably because the first is much easier to prove than the latter. However, the concept of having an "attempted murder" crime that is punished differently from "homicide" seems really odd to me. If I set out to kill somebody, why should the fact that I was thwarted have an impact on how society treats me?
There is an amazing imbalance in the cost of shipping an item from China and in the cost of sending it back to China and the sellers know and exploit this.
Hmm, wonder if Chinese customs actually express skepticism at all those envelopes stamped with "gift?" Anytime I order something on Amazon that takes weeks to arrive for two cents plus $4 shipping it almost always includes a false customs declaration as an added bonus.
Granted, when I get them on Amazon I tend to get what was promised, so the only people getting ripped off are the taxpayers, and those who work in US manufacturing who the tariffs are supposed to help.
Now what happens when Cogent goes and sells a bunch of cheap bandwidth to various providers like Netflix and begins flooding relatively one way traffic onto Verizon's network? Well they saturated the 100 megabit connection in one direction. Verizon who isn't anywhere close to the saturation point on their side says hey if you want more bandwidth you have to pay for it because we're not using anywhere near what you are and these agreements are supposed to be fairly equal with respect to traffic flows.
So, if I go download 47 movies from Netflix can I point out to Verizon that they're dumping 50Mbps of data onto my LAN with nothing but ACKs going in the other direction? How much is Verizon supposed to pay me for my FIOS connection, since I'm doing them the favor of taking all that video traffic off of their network?
Of course the ISPs have more data going in than out - they are full of customers who only download data. Their customers have already paid for the expense of transferring all that data.
Paying to transmit packets made more sense for Tier-1 networks that only route between other networks, since they don't actually create demand for traffic. That model doesn't make sense for networks that actually contain clients that create demand for data - they wouldn't be receiving data if they didn't ask for it.
If you want Internet, you have plenty of choices depending on where you live. DSL from your telco. DSL on the telco wires from someone else, broadband wireless, 3G/4G via usually more than one cell carrier. Satellite. And if you live so far out in the sticks that there are none of those options, then it is doubtful that Comcast has wired your neighborhood anyway.
I live in the outskirts of a major US city, and I have exactly two choices for broadband - Comcast and Verizon. Well, that is unless I want to pay somebody to run a wire to my house for heavens-knows how much. Satellite and 4G really aren't in the same realm - the cost of both are orders of magnitude higher for the same level of service.
Both Verizon and Comcast probably pull these kinds of stunts, so I don't really have any choice in the matter.
If there was no reason to fear a backlash, then yeah, the people didn't care one way or another.
So, which are you in favor of - locking up black people or killing them?
My point is that many might be opposed to the very holding of the vote in the first place.
Also, if I put an ad in the paper saying that you can show up at my house on Tuesday and vote on whether my city should secede from the US, does the outcome of the 15 votes I collect mean anything?
This is only true if there is no sampling bias. If people opposed to the secession were more likely to boycott the vote than those who were in favor of it, then the result of the vote would be skewed.
Whether or not that is actually what happened is impossible to say without a better survey.
I suspect that there are plenty of ordinary people living in these areas, but as things escalate everybody gets pushed towards taking a side.
Police are sent in to deal with pro-whoever rebels, and they just make a token effort and give up because they're sympathetic. So, then they get fired and replaced with more radical anti-whoever paramilitary and they go shoot up all the pro-whoever rebels. Then the pro-whoever rebel's families get all upset and start giving money to the pro-whoever cause. They shoot up the local anti-whoevers and before you know it you have civil war.
You can only have a democratic resolution if all sides are willing to seek and abide by one. Otherwise it ends up coming down to whoever has the most guns, or friends who are willing to use their guns.
If the actual poll results are true, it suggest Ukraine is not that divided fundamentally at all, and that a small group of pro-Russian agitators lead by Russian military personnel out of uniform are creating this civil war.
And if actual poll results are true, it would make them like a lot of US elections, where most people sit it out and the fringes determine how the country will be run.
If this were just about electing a mayor I'd agree. However, the referendum was controversial and many boycotted it.
If the local KKK had a referendum on whether black people should be placed in concentration camps or just shot on sight, and only 0.001% of the population turned out, would the conclusion be that most people don't care about black people being shot on sight?
Jet aircraft do not have mag switches.
Yup, and on the newer ones the switches just tell the computer to turn on/off the engine - just about everything else is automatic. Sure, the pilot does need to have conditions right for a start (bleed air available if not in flight, etc).
More like you get rid of the subsidies so that water costs $20/barrel and suddenly people won't waste so much of it, and the well will never run dry.
rich farmers? I have never heard of a rich farmer. Either the farmer makes that season or not. Farming is a lot like the lottery on if your crops grow or not.
You obviously never heard of most of the companies that you buy your food from, then. The financial interests behind the farms are quite well-off. Heck, they and others in the industry paid billions in fines/judgments just over the lysine price-fixing scandal, and they're still in business...
The problem is that some of the sites that require the extra security are ones where I don't care to have it. I don't get to pick the level of security a site requires - the site does.
If slashdot required two-factor to log in, that would be a major annoyance.
Most likely the scientist wants to study some kind of gene manipulation or whatever, and the way to get funding for something these days is to tie it to global warming.
If the Republicans take over down the road, we'll be talking about engineered chickens that can locate landmines.
The issue is probably more that MS promotes its platform better, and also the fact that the XBox does not support OpenGL. It is popular for the same reason that Win32 is popular - network effects.
Every website rolling out its own clumsy two-factor approach is not the right solution either.
As I navigate from site to site I don't want to have to get up and walk over to get my cell phone from its charger in the other room 5 times an hour to look up a PIN. Even if it were right in front of me I don't want to have to transcribe whatever number it gives me.
What is wrong with using federated identity management of some kind? You can have one layer of strong authentication, and then after that the user can move around freely. Right now I just do that via LastPass, and sites that force two-factor or anti-screen-scraping technology annoy me to no end, because they force me to either go get my phone, or pick a weaker but easy-to-memorize password.
And all that at the lowly sum of $ka-ching/hour.
I don't really buy the whole cost of enforcement argument.
Enforcing the law almost always costs more than the actual crimes do when looked at in isolation. However, enforcing the law is still important, because it can prevent crime.
If everybody knows that you can rob somebody in broad daylight and nobody will do anything about it, then society will rapidly devolve into crime and vigilantism. On the other hand, if everybody knew that even stealing a piece of candy from a store would result in a near-certainty of arrest, then you'd see almost all crime go away. People commit crimes because they perceive the reward as being greater than the risk.
So, by spending $8k to recover a $500 phone and make the life of the guy who stole it miserable can go a long way to preventing phone theft. Do that thoroughly enough, and suddenly you don't find yourself having to spend all that much money on enforcement because people stop breaking the law.
Of course, for phones there is a simpler and cheaper technological solution and that is IMEI blacklisting. However, the argument still stands for other forms of petty crime. If I were in charge and somebody reported their radio stolen from their car, I'd dust the car for prints, check camera footage, and when I track down the teenager who stole the phone they'd be showing up at a labor camp for 6 hours a day for two years, while attending classes to learn something productive for another 4 hours a day, and then they'd be sent home with a monitoring anklet and an MRE in payment for their labor. Sure, it would cost more than just letting them play loose on the street, but taxpayers would save money on repairs, and maybe society would benefit from more skilled laborers and fewer leaches.
but lense flares add atmosphere!
Those artificial ones that simulate some zoom lens with 47 elements with an diffused point source of light (as if in space) look a bit neat the first 35 times around.
However, for the typical cell phone camera, a lens flare just means that half the picture looks like it is covered in haze. It is really annoying trying to take pictures while holding your hand over the top of it just outside the field of view...
The capped recording time is actually the fault of the European Union's import duties, which charge a higher tax rate for anything that can record 30 minutes or longer. Blame excessive government bureaucracy for your DSLR being crippled.
I'm actually impressed that the manufacturer figured out that legal optimization and applied it. Many companies seem to struggle just to figure out what tariff to use for their products, let alone optimizing the design of the product in order to match a particular tariff...
Let's also see which one fits in your pocket, making it available at all times..
Cell phone cameras have their place. However, if you're actually going someplace to take photos, they're not the tool you should be reaching for.
I have a leatherman for situations where I just need a bunch of tools handy, but when I do maintenance on my car, I grab my toolbox and not my leatherman. Sure, I could probably manage to get the oil plug out using the pliers tool on it, but I own a socket wrench and a set of metric sockets for a reason. When I'm going to change tires, I grab my breaker bar too, and my torque wrench for putting them back on.
That doesn't mean that there aren't situations where the leatherman is handy to have.
The galaxy note will record crap, because it has CRAP lens compared to even a $99 Canon 50mm 1.8 prime.
To be fair - that lens can outperform many lenses that cost 5-10 times as much, BECAUSE it is a prime. Any lens with a zoom is an optical compromise. In order to get zoom lenses with that kind of performance you end up spending well north of $1k, and even then you only get a focal range of around 3x. The convenience zooms with 8-12x ranges always suffer from aberrations (and if they don't they're REALLY expensive).
If you have the time to switch lenses, a variety of fairly inexpensive prime lenses will outperform even a $20k camera bag full of top-of-the-line zooms. Of course, if you're taking pictures of a football game, the players aren't going to stand around while you pick the right lens.