The reason google is getting all the glory is because they are going big and aiming for the moon - automated driving. The reason Volvo will beat them to market and turn a buck before google is because Volvo, like the other automakers who are working on it (Daimler, Toyota) are taking an incremental approach, and adding automation a little at a time. They want to make a more moderate investment and make money on it sooner, and who would blame them for it?
But google's long-shot may well pay off, too. If google can get just a few thousand highly-instrumented, networked cars driving around, they will have the world's most detailed and up-to-date multi-sensor maps of the roadways by a HUGE margin. This may enable cheaper cars with fewer sensors to be viable, because all they have to do is a sanity-check on the high resolution map and monitor obstacles such as cars and pedestrians. But they will download (on the fly) the location of every stop light, detour, pothole, school zone, you name it. By linking to google's data center, each car will be as familiar with its surroundings as you would be if you drove up and down the same street all day. Thus it is possible all car makers will end up paying google handsomely if they want a competitive automated car.
They will still be expensive at first, but getting critical mass is the hard part. After that, roads will be instrumented and detailed real-time maps will be maintained, so the cars won't need such high-end sensing capabilities in the long run.
Google maps is far more accurate and up-to-date than Garmin and TomTom maps (the two that I've used), probably since more people use google and because google is more responsive in updating it. Yet clearly it's imperfect.
That said, staying on the road vs. navigation are two different things for the self-driving car, just as they are for you. The fact that a GPS thought you could take a route that is actually blocked by a concrete barrier, does NOT mean a self-driving car would have plowed into the barrier. It looks where it's going, more or less like you do.
Volvo is just now putting autonomous cars on public streets, so google is getting all the glory for a good reason - they are years ahead. Google had logged 300,000 miles by 2012, and now have reached 700,000 miles. And in contrast to highway driving like in this blurb (lane following, merging), google is way beyond that; highway driving is almost a given and google has moved on to construction sites, pedestrians, cyclists...
What makes the i3 different from every other car on the market is under the skin - it's almost entirely made out of plastic. This is no ordinary plastic, mind you - it's carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic. It's basically the same stuff used to make Formula One cars and stealth bombers. What's remarkable about the i3 is that it's the first mass-market car made out of carbon fiber. There's no metal in the car's body - all the bumpers, doors and skins are plastic as well. The only major metal parts are the drive unit and suspension components. The result is a four-seat, four-door city car that weighs only about 2,700 pounds - or nearly 500 pounds less than a BMW 1 Series.
This actually quite a bold and innovative new product. It's a shame they made it so ugly. I'm really curious to see crash test results.
Even dedicated Scion iQ fans are unlikely to see the little electric iQ version; that's because it will only be offered to fleets that can use a very short-distance electric car. Its EPA-rated range of just 38 miles isn't likely to appeal to many buyers, so Toyota's zero-emission "compliance car" will instead be the Toyota RAV4 EV with a range of 103 miles from its Tesla-engineered electric powertrain.
The Tesla is a much larger car all around, not just the battery.
A better comparison to the BMW i3 might be the Fiat 500e (sold only in California). It's even a bit smaller than the BMW, and gets "only" 122/108 MPGe vs the 138/111 for the BMW. So, I do find the BMW impressive. However the Fiat starts at $32K which almost $10K less than the BMW. Making a car light without other sacrifices does require more expensive materials, so I would expect more from the BMW than the Fiat, and evidently it delivers.
I think reboots are for successive generations of moviegoers, moreso than for lifelong fans of a given franchise. If that were not true, the characters and plots would age and mature. (And by "generation," I just mean "people too young to see the previous iteration when it was new", not necessarily the children of the people who watched it new).
There are only so many people with press passes. I think a valid concern is that there will simply be too many drones buzzing around disaster areas, creating hazards for rescue operations (especially helicopters and planes). Beyond the vicinity of airports, aircraft traffic has largely been handled by "everybody keep your eyes peeled and don't hit each other, mmmmkay?" But that is going to break down in the near future if there is a big increase in the number of aircraft, particularly small ones that can't be seen for a long distance.
maybe the problem is that you are trying to solve this problem with the wrong tool.
Obviously. And probably 99% of the messages to follow will just rant about the stupidity of thinking an app will fix this. Which leaves the actual issue of distracted driving unresolved. Most of the other 1% of posts will amount to "Just Say No," which is also a proposal to do nothing about it.
It would be better to propose some constructive measures.
Personally I think we need to re-visit the evidence on specific types of usage while driving, since so much of it comes from synthetic studies on a simulator or closed track which are highly questionable for that reason.
I'm curious how this will work for internet transactions though, unless they expect everybody to have smartcard readers
My guess: more businesses will be pushed towards PayPal, which will not use the extra verification, the PayPal fees amounting to a "security surcharge" / insurance policy for the extra risk of such unverifiable transactions.
If you ask me, odds are 70% he was just using "Screen Size" as a proxy for "Resolution" in the first place, either because he doesn't know the difference, or (more likely) was talking down to the audience. In any case, it is one person's speculation about the future, nothing more.
High-frequency traders are spending untold millions of dollars to lay new fiber and pay analysts to develop competing algorithms that are totally divorced from anything of value. I don't want my savings dumped into perfecting this stupid game, I want it fixed.
It would depend what you want to do. A person doing neuroscience would usually want to make their own neuron model, which is bound to differ from what is hard-coded in this device. A neuron model can be anything from a simple sigmoid function (but you can handle tens of millions) to a detailed electrochemical simulation.
9000 times faster than a PC, if that PC happens to be running the specific artificial neural network simulation implemented in hardware by this chip.
Not that I'm knocking it. A GPU implements specific algorithms to great effect. But a GPU's algorithms are ones that are interesting for a specific application (drawing texture-mapped polygons), whereas an artificial neural network still needs another layer of programming to do something useful. In other words, a Word Processor implemented on this chip would not be 9000x faster than a Word Processor implemented on a CPU. A face recognition algorithm, on the other hand, might see a decent fraction of that 9000x, although it remains to be seen whether this chip would be a better fit for any particular application than a GPU (for example).
Meh. It's an edge case that won't even arise for years and years, until driving is mostly automated, such that people start to get out of practice. I would guess that by then roads will be instrumented with special reflectors on the signs, or markers embedded in the surface, so all these fancy sensor systems aren't even needed any more.
People who want a smartwatch, for whatever reason. Problem is, they still mostly look like crap, aren't exactly cheap and aren't really more accurate than a regular quartz watch.
Connected watches actually do keep time better, because they can re-sync with a source every day. A have a Garmin running watch that even sets the time zone automatically, including daylight savings. I set all my other watches and clocks by it. (But except for running I normally wear a Casio because it's plenty accurate, doesn't need recharging, and to avoid wear and tear on the expensive Garmin.)
Well I read it, and I genuinely do not see anything new in it. "Use monads." "Functional programming didn't fail us, we failed it. It's be best thing since sliced bread and the only reason it's not used much is because people are too lazy and uninformed to use it. If only they knew." I'm sorry, but that is (still) not it.
Maybe the studios should separate licensing from distribution. You buy a license to play a certain DRM'd file for $1. Then you pay to stream it in real-time from Netflix for another $1, or bittorrent it for free - legally, since it won't play without the license. (This is all based on an imagined scenario in which DRM works and/or people choose to obey the law, neither of which is entirely true, but current systems have the same assumptions).
That's why I said "even" John Kerry, I was surprised he said it. Vietnam was a flareup of the Cold War and killed about 60,000 of us and about 1,500,000 million of them. In absolute terms, what is going on now that compares?
Slashdot Mirror
But google's long-shot may well pay off, too. If google can get just a few thousand highly-instrumented, networked cars driving around, they will have the world's most detailed and up-to-date multi-sensor maps of the roadways by a HUGE margin. This may enable cheaper cars with fewer sensors to be viable, because all they have to do is a sanity-check on the high resolution map and monitor obstacles such as cars and pedestrians. But they will download (on the fly) the location of every stop light, detour, pothole, school zone, you name it. By linking to google's data center, each car will be as familiar with its surroundings as you would be if you drove up and down the same street all day. Thus it is possible all car makers will end up paying google handsomely if they want a competitive automated car.
They will still be expensive at first, but getting critical mass is the hard part. After that, roads will be instrumented and detailed real-time maps will be maintained, so the cars won't need such high-end sensing capabilities in the long run.
That said, staying on the road vs. navigation are two different things for the self-driving car, just as they are for you. The fact that a GPS thought you could take a route that is actually blocked by a concrete barrier, does NOT mean a self-driving car would have plowed into the barrier. It looks where it's going, more or less like you do.
Volvo is just now putting autonomous cars on public streets, so google is getting all the glory for a good reason - they are years ahead. Google had logged 300,000 miles by 2012, and now have reached 700,000 miles. And in contrast to highway driving like in this blurb (lane following, merging), google is way beyond that; highway driving is almost a given and google has moved on to construction sites, pedestrians, cyclists...
This actually quite a bold and innovative new product. It's a shame they made it so ugly. I'm really curious to see crash test results.
A better comparison to the BMW i3 might be the Fiat 500e (sold only in California). It's even a bit smaller than the BMW, and gets "only" 122/108 MPGe vs the 138/111 for the BMW. So, I do find the BMW impressive. However the Fiat starts at $32K which almost $10K less than the BMW. Making a car light without other sacrifices does require more expensive materials, so I would expect more from the BMW than the Fiat, and evidently it delivers.
Why does that matter? Unless the Microsoft update site hosts the exploit?
I think reboots are for successive generations of moviegoers, moreso than for lifelong fans of a given franchise. If that were not true, the characters and plots would age and mature. (And by "generation," I just mean "people too young to see the previous iteration when it was new", not necessarily the children of the people who watched it new).
There are only so many people with press passes. I think a valid concern is that there will simply be too many drones buzzing around disaster areas, creating hazards for rescue operations (especially helicopters and planes). Beyond the vicinity of airports, aircraft traffic has largely been handled by "everybody keep your eyes peeled and don't hit each other, mmmmkay?" But that is going to break down in the near future if there is a big increase in the number of aircraft, particularly small ones that can't be seen for a long distance.
Obviously. And probably 99% of the messages to follow will just rant about the stupidity of thinking an app will fix this. Which leaves the actual issue of distracted driving unresolved. Most of the other 1% of posts will amount to "Just Say No," which is also a proposal to do nothing about it.
It would be better to propose some constructive measures.
Personally I think we need to re-visit the evidence on specific types of usage while driving, since so much of it comes from synthetic studies on a simulator or closed track which are highly questionable for that reason.
+1
Some would choose to phrase that "charging what the market will bear," but yeah, same thing.
My guess: more businesses will be pushed towards PayPal, which will not use the extra verification, the PayPal fees amounting to a "security surcharge" / insurance policy for the extra risk of such unverifiable transactions.
If you ask me, odds are 70% he was just using "Screen Size" as a proxy for "Resolution" in the first place, either because he doesn't know the difference, or (more likely) was talking down to the audience. In any case, it is one person's speculation about the future, nothing more.
High-frequency traders are spending untold millions of dollars to lay new fiber and pay analysts to develop competing algorithms that are totally divorced from anything of value. I don't want my savings dumped into perfecting this stupid game, I want it fixed.
It would depend what you want to do. A person doing neuroscience would usually want to make their own neuron model, which is bound to differ from what is hard-coded in this device. A neuron model can be anything from a simple sigmoid function (but you can handle tens of millions) to a detailed electrochemical simulation.
Not that I'm knocking it. A GPU implements specific algorithms to great effect. But a GPU's algorithms are ones that are interesting for a specific application (drawing texture-mapped polygons), whereas an artificial neural network still needs another layer of programming to do something useful. In other words, a Word Processor implemented on this chip would not be 9000x faster than a Word Processor implemented on a CPU. A face recognition algorithm, on the other hand, might see a decent fraction of that 9000x, although it remains to be seen whether this chip would be a better fit for any particular application than a GPU (for example).
Studies keep showing it is worse than drunk driving, and that everybody is doing it... yet remarkably, overall accident rates fail to skyrocket.
Meh. It's an edge case that won't even arise for years and years, until driving is mostly automated, such that people start to get out of practice. I would guess that by then roads will be instrumented with special reflectors on the signs, or markers embedded in the surface, so all these fancy sensor systems aren't even needed any more.
Connected watches actually do keep time better, because they can re-sync with a source every day. A have a Garmin running watch that even sets the time zone automatically, including daylight savings. I set all my other watches and clocks by it. (But except for running I normally wear a Casio because it's plenty accurate, doesn't need recharging, and to avoid wear and tear on the expensive Garmin.)
Well I read it, and I genuinely do not see anything new in it. "Use monads." "Functional programming didn't fail us, we failed it. It's be best thing since sliced bread and the only reason it's not used much is because people are too lazy and uninformed to use it. If only they knew." I'm sorry, but that is (still) not it.
Maybe the studios should separate licensing from distribution. You buy a license to play a certain DRM'd file for $1. Then you pay to stream it in real-time from Netflix for another $1, or bittorrent it for free - legally, since it won't play without the license. (This is all based on an imagined scenario in which DRM works and/or people choose to obey the law, neither of which is entirely true, but current systems have the same assumptions).
Ok, in reading the article, I probably let my knee-jerk "Whiplash!" response kick in a little too much.
That's why I said "even" John Kerry, I was surprised he said it. Vietnam was a flareup of the Cold War and killed about 60,000 of us and about 1,500,000 million of them. In absolute terms, what is going on now that compares?