Fully autonomous vehicles are scary for manufacturers because they potentially shift all liability to the manufacturer.
Not "potentially". Really. If your autonomous vehicle will not let you control it, then how can you be at fault when it goes "out of control"?
even if the machine is 100x more reliable than a human.
A machine that has actually failed in some way has proven that it is not "100x more reliable" than anything. It is broken. It is no longer a matter of probabilities.
This is a mindset that will have to change as machines become more aware of their surroundings
Believing that machines can be "aware" is the failure here. Machines do what they are programmed to do, making decisions based on rules produced by people who aren't involved in the problem and cannot possibly consider every criterion. Here's just one simple example. I've got a passenger who is having a stroke in the back seat and I'm heading to the hospital. The car is "aware" that the GPS or video sensors or some other "critical" sensor system has failed and won't let me take control.
Now imagine that it is you in the back seat. Would you rather I be perfectly safe in a disabled autonomous vehicle, or would you rather I be able to get you to the hospital?
I expect autonomous cars to pull over and refuse to continue the moment they become impaired.
And what if "refuse to continue" isn't the proper response to the problem? OMG, the camera watching to the rear failed, I better pull over and stop. Right here, on the freeway. With 65 or 75 MPH traffic going by just a few feet away. So I can sit here and wait with my wife who is in labor for an hour or two for a tow truck to show up.
Or I'm just ahead of a triple bottom 18 wheeler and the car thinks the right solution is to slow down and stop so he has to slam on the breaks to keep from running me over. And the failure is in the lane edge detector, so the autonomous vehicle can't really tell when it is off the road. It can't pull over very far -- or it pulls over too far on a section of road that has little or no shoulder.
And it is 105F in the shade, but the air conditioning requires the engine and it won't "continue" because an emission sensor failed and the programmer sitting in his office decided the right solution was to shut the engine down.
Or it's -20F in the shade at 2AM in the middle of nowhere Nebraska or Colorado in winter on a remote two lane road, and the car decides that the 'right response' to some failure is to stop right there, with no cell service to call for help, and no source of heat for the useless human occupants of the vehicle. All because the GPS receiver stopped working, or some other sensor failed that the car needs but a human could easily do without.
Yeah, every response to this would be "but the programmers will think of these problems and do the right thing." Somehow the car will know that there is a medical emergency aboard and the "right thing" is to continue under human control instead of "refuse to continue" until it's little problem is fixed. Such naive optimism regarding technological utopias is the scary thing, not that a human might actually drive a car sometime in the future.
A child running into the street in front of you is not "peripheral vision".
Humans are very adaptable however the most important need for directing a single purpose automobile is choosing the right response and executing in a correct manner,
And when the "right response" hasn't been pre-programmed into the computer, the human is much better at finding a solution. To assume that autonomous vehicles will have every problem and a "right response" in their database so there is no need for human supervision is just lunacy. To assume that some programmer who is sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office can determine the "right response" to every situation you might experience in the middle of traffic on a congested freeway is just lunacy.
Everyone seems to understand that human error is responsible for most road casualties but we will not trust a computer replacement system unless its proven completely infallible.
That may be your criterion. If so, that's ok. My criterion is that it doesn't fail in majestic and fatal ways for simple problems. And that there be some full scale data that indicates that it isn't going to fail in majestic and fatal ways when the emergent behavior of the collective is considered.
Wouldn't it start saving lives even if it was just much less error prone than humans?
Well, that's the hope. But wouldn't it be nice to have some evidence before it turns out that the system doesn't work as well as every optimist evangelist tells us it will? Is it too much to ask for a human fallback to deal with unanticipated failure modes? Have we really learned NOTHING AT ALL from all the existing examples of system failure that were unanticipated? I keep mentioning Risks Digest. It's a good read for anyone who thinks "sensors and computerized systems excel at that". Imagine when HeartBleed isn't a cute term for a computer failure and actually refers to the human ex-passengers of an autonomous vehicle.
I really don't understand the need of having the human ready to take over in a emergency.
Because the "emergencies" that an autonomous vehicle will have will mostly be created by the autonomous vehicle system itself. Like not correctly detecting a small human darting into the street ahead of it, coming to a halt in the middle of traffic because it lost communication with a critical sensor, etc. And because the computer, no matter how well programmed by the smartest people in the room, will not have covered every contingency that could pop up in real life. Humans are just more adaptable than fixed-programmed computers.
Yeah, humans fail. We understand. Computers fail, too, which is something that the autonomous vehicle proponents tend to forget. And hyping the perfection of a system that is not yet in existence and hasn't been tested at full scale is how the material in Risks Digest gets created.
You must excuse me, you see we in the US have never really had any experience with that sort of thing - a company doing something that's good for the consumer... wow, I wonder how that feels like.
I'm a T-Mobile US customer, and considering they recently dropped "overages", I know what it feels like. Yeah, it's rare.
If Free buys T-Mobile and implements a 20Eu service, my bill will drop by something less than $10. Less, because I assume the 20Eu service will still have federal taxes/fees.
Had you gotten the joke, you wouldn't have lectured me on what you think I needed to do about the situation. Nor would you have lectured me on your interpretation of what the error message actually says.
It's a 'whoosh' for you because you didn't read the entire comment, which included the sentences: "So no, you don't have to scream at it or plug in a mouse, just press F1. Do'h!"
"Just press F1". Read all the words. You seem pretty clear on the idea that you can't "just press F1", you need to find a working keyboard first, and you thought you needed to lecture me on the issue because YOU DIDN'T GET THE JOKE. Admit it.
"The keyboard is missing; I'm currently configured to ensure that one is attached, so please attach one, and then press F1 on it to continue"
Had the BIOS authors intended the error to say that, they would have written the error to say that. Or to say something shorter like "Keyboard error. Attach working keyboard". They did not. You read much more into what the error says than the authors wrote into it.
At which point you plug in a working keyboard and press F1.
No, at which point you plug in a keyboard, reboot, press DEL or Fwhatever (2?) to go into the BIOS setup, fix the stupid "stop on keyboard error" or similar setting, save and exit, and then pull the keyboard back off.
I develop embedded/standalone systems that won't have a keyboard on them. I usually remember to set the BIOS as one of the first things on any new system, but many times I've gotten the "press F1" instruction when I get to final testing in target configuration.
And if it's your first keyboard, how do you answer? Scream "YES" at it, or plug in the compromised mouse?
I've lost track of the times I've had a BIOS report:
"Keyboard failure. No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue...". So no, you don't have to scream at it or plug in a mouse, just press F1. Do'h!
What they are talking about here infects on firmware/driver level initialization between USB device and computer when plugged in that is an inherent part of the USB standard, before and invisible to any user mode (software) inspection (and how do you plan to see/test that the usb firmware is not infected?).
Actually, this sounds like an interesting job for a Pi. I just checked the latest raspbian on my Pi and USB is compiled into the kernel (no USB modules, at least nothing obviously so). Recompile the kernel so USB is all loadable modules, then modify the base USB code to report transactions.
Plug your USB stick or disk or keyboard into the Pi, and if it reports that there's a new not-a-USB-stick/disk/keyboard, you know there's malware on the device.
On a different note, does anyone know of any modified firmware for any USB disk or stick that makes it look like a CD-R? (Preferably, a dozen at the same time.) I'd like to get around having to burn an actual CD-R when exporting audio books from Overdrive and then importing them into grip or itunes. And, unfortunately, many of the books I'm trying to write are JUST a bit larger than a CD-RW can handle.
Just because someone is talking about manipulating the voters in a vote that did not go their way does not mean that they are citing merely that outcome as the sole evidence of the manipulation... especially in the comments on a article that is *specifically about the hard evidence of manipulation*.
TFA didn't have hard evidence of manipulation. They reported one survey from well before the referendum. Surveys are not votes. Surveys often, as the article points out, ask questions in a way designed to get the answer the pollster desires. I've yet to hear a survey ask "if the ballot contained the question... would you vote yes?", it is always biased towards whoever pays for the survey. It is so common there is a term for it: push-polling. The article tells us that the cable company survey asked "should taxpayers fund pornography...", but they don't tell us what the survey that had a 72% favorable rate asked. How biased was the survey in favor of the referendum?
The result of the vote didn't match the survey data, so yes, the fact that the result didn't go the way they wanted it to is being used as proof that there was manipulation. And it didn't go they way they wanted it to not once, but twice.
By the way, someone else claimed that a municipal internet service would never be sold. TFA talks about one such service that was sold out to a commercial provider when it discusses the systems that the cable companies claim failed. So that BIG consideration isn't valid.
In order to get approved for debt, you must have debt.
No, to get approved for debt you need one of two things:
1. A credit history. That's not necessarily debt, it is a history of handling small debts that you've paid off.
2. Belong to a demographic that the credit companies are chasing.
When I was in college, the stores were deluging me with offers of credit cards because of my age/college while the credit union followed rule 1 and repeatedly denied me a credit card.
In recent years, the largest flood of credit card offers were when I had no debt at all, but had a paid-off car loan.
It's a SCAM! A scheme to make sure that you are constantly in debt,
All that writing and you never covered the fact that no one will buyout a municipal ISP. Or "merge" and that's a BIG consideration.
Why wouldn't anyone ever buy one out? Privatization is not a new buzzword. If an entire country's telecom can be privatized, why couldn't a municipal internet system? I've heard of cities selling off public utitlites before. Our trash collection used to be public, now it isn't.
And it is a BIG consideration for whom?
Why the negativity and 'speaking for us' Slashdotters???
I'm not speaking for/.rs. I'm pointing out that/.rs speaking for the voters (by deciding what is "better", or your "BIG consideration") is the problem.
I think a lot of these responses are from paid employees of the providers, Eh?
Right. If you can't argue facts, argue the person. There's a latin word for this that I cannot ever spell correctly, so I won't try now.
And what are they so afraid of...it failing? No it might be what we actually need for balance.
No government utility exists "for balance". It either uses the general tax fund so it can run cheaper and drive out the competition, is created explicitly as a monopoly, or it is run so incompetently that it becomes a white elephant. But "balance"? No.
And this is not "health care" so why even try to scare people by mentioning it.
I wasn't trying to scare people, and I wasn't talking about "health care". I was pointing to one recent, very glaring example of a failure of government to provide services to the taxpayers that cost a lot of money and did diddly squat, in contrast to the implicit assumption that a government service would be cheaper and better. (And, in fact, providing services for lower cost is a driving force behind privatization of government services. Were government services always cheaper, privatization would have no impetus.)
If your argument is "that was 'health care' and this is internet service so it will be different", I find it to be very very unconvincing. You'd have to come up with so many "that was X and this is different" excuses that Occam's Razor would say that the obvious answer is probably the right one: government management of complex systems is usually inefficient and costly.
You mean, I did not bother to provide evidence for either one of those in this case.
No, I mean that the term "better" is a subjective term that depends on what weight and value one puts on objective measures, and in many cases, includes subjective measures like "happy with service".
"Better" is not a fact. "Meets specified connection speeds 95% of the time" is a fact. "Costs less than other similar services" is a fact. You assume that "faster and cheaper" (facts) means "better" is a fact, but that's simply not true.
But you didn't provide contrarian evidence either.
I didn't try to show you that something wasn't "better" because "better" is subjective. The point is that the VOTERS who voted down the municipal service can, and do, have their own views of "better" that may not align with yours.
Unlike your example of education, internet service has objective measures of success - uptime, bandwidth, latency, peering.
And those may be called "facts", but then you have to weigh the facts to come up with the subjective evaluation of "better". What is better for me may be a service that isn't as fast but comes with a static IP. Or I may consider it better if the service comes over existing wiring because I don't want installers mucking about my house and property. I may consider it better if I'm not forced as a taxpayer to fund a service for you because in your opinion the existing options are too slow/too expensive/provided by a company you hate.
As opposed to private utilities like Comcast that care? And why can't you vote them out? At least you have some choice there. I pity the person at the mercy of monopolistic private utilites.
1. Comcast has a financial interest in keeping customers, even if it is a small one. A government-run service has no financial interest in keeping subs. Any cost overruns will just be pulled from the general fund.
2. You can't vote out a civil service employee because their position isn't an elected one. I shouldn't have to point that out.
3. If the government is the ISP and has driven the competition out, then you have no choice. If the government has forced the competition to raise prices, then your choice is more expensive. And even if the competition is the same price, you're paying twice for service.
4. I pity more the people who face a true government monopoly on service. They have two choices: use the government service or go without. Why is a government monopoly better than this alleged private one (that really doesn't exist)?
You would never be convinced to vote against your own interests.
This/. attitude that we're all smarter than the average voter and know what is "better" for him, to the point of calling your opinion of "better" an objective fact, is pretty arrogant. The point I'm trying to get across is that the voters have the right to decide what is best for them and what is "better". Saying that they're voting against their own best interests is rather presumptive, since I'm sure that many of the voters simply don't care about internet service or paying taxes so that you can get your downloads faster than you can already get them through any of the existing commercial services. And I expect that many of them do not share the "fuck Comcast" reason that apparently makes "anything else" a better choice.
Because there is a right answer.
In your opinion, there is a right answer. In their opinion, there is a different right answer.
First, they would be in different unions.
Sorry, but no. AFSCME and SEIU are very large unions that cover a very large number of state, county, and municipal employees. It is most likely that all the unionized employees in a municipality are members of one of those two, except perhaps for specialized unions that cover specific oc
4. Why can't the government just include suitable performance metrics and penalties for failing to meet them when handing out the franchise? Including a regular review cycle?
Every franchise I've seen has them. Because of the changes to the federal laws for local regulation of such companies, the local municipalities have very little stick anymore.
The underlying figure of merit once you cut through the bullshit is r / log t. r is the compression ratio (unitless) and log t is log seconds. So yes, the units of the underlying figure of merit are reciprocal log seconds.
The fact that the actual equation is a ratio between a proposed compression implementation and a reference is a hint that it is not a "figure of merit" in absolute terms, but only with respect to some common standard. Yeah, you get to pick your standard, but simply reporting r/log(t) is meaningless. The actual measurement is unitless simply because, as you point out, units of 1/log(s) is meaningless.
It's done that way so things can be repeatable. If I create a compressor and report a Weissman of 3, then you should be able to repeat that on your computer, even if you've got a 3GHz I7 and mine is only 2.7GHz. Here's the data I used, here's the executables for both compressors, you run it. Now you can play with the source and see what happens. But first you need to be able to reproduce my results. That's called "scientific method".
You need learn to cut through the hocus pocus and analyze the actual underlying equation
The underlying equation is a ratio between two compression implementations, not an absolute measure of one.
You can well imagine that those who actually understand programming metrics are holding their sides laughing at those who are taking it seriously.
I'm not here to argue whether the metric is meaningful or not. The value of a metric is in the eye of the beholder. You don't think it has any value, and I really don't care if it does or not. I'm just pointing out that the actual metric is unitless. You can't throw half an equation out and then complain that the units on the result don't mean anything. Sometimes equations are constructed the way they are so that the units DO come out right, and there are many examples of equations that have empirical constants that have meaningless units just so the equation they are used in come out right. That's especially true in physical modeling where someone sees a relationship between the data and tries to create an equation to represent that. If the fit is best with some variable taken to the 8/3 power, that's how it winds up, and the constants get units to make it all come out right. A more common example is R in PV=nRT.
Now, you're correct, the alpha constant is useless because the only purpose it could serve is to correct the units, and since it is unitless it doesn't even do that. So laugh at that part of it, but don't throw out the important parts and laugh at what's left when the units don't work anymore.
You myopic asshole. The site was contracted out to a private company. The 'gubbmint' didn't do the coding, didn't build the pages, didn't accept $134 million in payment and then deliver a turd pile in return.
No, the government just failed to manage the project to a successful completion, like they would have to manage a municipal internet service.
And let's not forget to mention the crony that ORACLE CORPORATION had in place,
You mean, someone in the government? The same government that would create a perfect internet service?
I'm pointing to repeated examples of government failure to do technological things, you don't see it, and I'M myopic?
It's rare to find internet users who think slower speeds and greater congestion are "in their interest."
I would have thought it rare to find a/. user who believes the promises of the government and thinks that the government handling all his data is a good thing, but there sure seem to be a lot of them posting today.
You seem to assume that a government-run ISP would be cheaper and better (e.g. faster and less congested) just because they say it would be. You seem to ignore all the examples of cost overruns and incompetence that government systems demonstrate on a regular basis and think that just this once it will be different. You seem to ignore that it is not just "internet users" who pay for a government-run internet service, and there are those who don't care if you can't download the latest warez or movie torrent as fast as you'd like. Those are the people who have other considerations than just "congestion and download speed" that you limit yourself to.
And you seem to think that reducing competition in an already limited market is a good thing. I find that an interesting shift in the environment here.
For instance, democracies suck when voting on a question of fact. If something is better and cheaper
Neither of those are fact. "Better" is a purely subjective term, and there is no evidence that a government-run anything will be automatically cheaper. When you say "cheaper", you mean it may cost direct users less. That's not the total cost of the product, however. A "company" that can simply dip its hand into the general fund of a city when revenues don't cover expenses isn't worried too much about keeping costs down and those costs wind up coming from people who have no desire to be subscribers. A government-run anything is typically run by civil servants covered by a union, so they have no reason to care about the service they provide and have a union driving up the costs of their employment. (In our fair town, the largest cost increase in government is the increase in cost of union employees, most specifically for their pension and healthcare.)
The fact that this is all taxpayer supported means you lose choice. If you think having a choice between several commercial ISPs is too little choice, then consider that every taxpayer in that city will be an involuntary subscriber to what will probably become the defacto monopoly. If they don't manage to drive all the other players out by being able to undercut the prices, then the prices for all the others will have to go up to cover the fixed costs spread over fewer subscribers. (Do you see the parallel to the school system here? I do. You want to send your kids to a private school for a better education? You get to pay twice.)
I think less choice and forced participation is not better. I think having to get service from someone who doesn't really care is not better, especially when their supervisor will also be a civil servant who doesn't have to care. Example? I had a water leak. I got my bill and it said I had consumed some ridiculous amount of water. I did the calculations -- the volume of water they said I used would have covered my property to a depth of about a foot. It would have required a ridiculous flow. I got to fill out a report, they came out to calibrate my meter, and I... heard nothing back ever. That's a government-run utility. Nobody cared because they didn't have to. I can't vote them out, they can't get fired, and I can't get service from anyone else.
Here in Oregon we've just lived through the Cover Oregon fiasco. A government-run website that was supposed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. It cost millions of dollars yet never managed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. You could download the forms, fill them in, then talk to an agent to find out what it would cost, but you couldn't sign up online. They could tell you the "partners" you could talk to -- mine was a three hour drive away in another state! They dumped a lot of money into cute jingles and ads months before the site was supposed to go online, but couldn't manage to get the job done. Better? Cheaper? Right.
Yes, democracy sucks. But as someone once said, it sucks less than everything else. The point I made, however, is that everyone is assuming that the voters were coerced into voting against their best interests, and that is not a fact in evidence.
why shouldn't the government supply it?
Because the voters of those cities said they didn't want the government supplying it.
Here's a point I haven't seen anyone raise. When your ISP is managed by the same government that manages the police department, where do you think your right to privacy winds up? In the hands of someone who likely belongs to the same union that the police clerical staff belong to, and are probably on the same bowling team. And their paychecks come from the same mayor's office.
When they vote against their interests, they're not being clever.
You mean when they vote against what you think their interests ought to be, you don't think they are "clever".
Not everyone believes that a government run ISP using taxpayer dollars to make up revenue shortfalls and to deliberately undercut the commercial providers is "in their interest".
And look at the units of the ratio: reciprocal log seconds.
The Weissman score is actually unitless. When one divides "log seconds" by "log seconds" the units cancel.
It also conveniently sidesteps the variability with different architectures.
If one measures the compression ratios and times for the same data on different architectures, one is measuring the score of the different architecture, not "sidestepping" it.
Maybe SSE helps algorithm A much more than it does algorithm B.
Then algorithm A compared to B would have a higher Weissman score on a system with SSE.
Or B outperforms A on AMD, but not on Intel.
Then the score would favor B over A when comparing the two processors. That's what the score is supposed to do. It compares two things.
In real life, for some compression jobs you don't CARE how long it takes, and for other jobs you care very much.
Then for the former you would not care what the Weissman score is, and for the latter you would care.
Or imagine an algorithm that compresses half as fast but decompresses 1000 times faster. That doesn't even register in the score.
That's not what the score measures. It also doesn't measure price (for commercial implementations of code), executable size, or whether the software salesman has BO or not.
Or it could have been that the referendum would have gone the same way it did without the advertising. Just because a lot of people didn't vote the way you think they should have isn't proof that they were coerced by people who disagree with you.
It's pretty insulting to the democratic process to accuse the winners of being "[expletive deleted] sheeple" when you don't agree with a result.
I have no trouble seeing through corporate fear mongering.
I suspect there are a lot of people who feel the same way. Some of them may have participated in the vote and not voted the way you wanted them to.
If a corporation is a person, can it hold a government office?
Were a corporation a person, it certainly could hold public office.
However, the people who make up corporations and who retain their civil and Constitutional rights despite being part of a corporation can, and sometimes do, hold public office. On our local city council, we've had people who work for the local newspaper, the local university, the local large manufacturer, and other corporations.
Not to just give it away for free as in beer. But to provide freedom.
I was using "free" as in "freedom". How is it "freedom" if you start putting restrictions on who can use the software and for what purposes? And who decides what those disallowed purposes are? The programmer or someone else? Suppose I'm a programmer who doesn't like abortions. Can I say "you can use free software unless you are an abortion clinic" because I've got some patches in some free software packages?
Does "free software" truly represent free software if there are so many limits on who can use it that nobody can use any of it?
For that reason we ask people to release the changes to the code back to our collection of software which provides more freedom.
That is not a restriction on who can use the code and for what purposes. The Army is not changing the code, they are using the code to produce other things. I have a router or two that has FOSS code in them, but that doesn't mean that I have to send hand all the data I send through those routers off to the EFF for their use. I have programs I compile with gcc, but that doesn't mean I have to hand over that code to everyone who asks for it. And IIRC, even the GPL doesn't require release of local modifications to GPL code unless you're trying to distribute that code. I could be wrong, I don't care, the point is irrelevant to this discussion. The Army isn't writing code.
We limit the freedom of people who want to use our code without giving back, so we can ensure a future in which we can access data without having to depend on one company.
I'm sorry, what? The GPL doesn't say that any data that you manage or create using GPL code must be released back to the community. Not even close. You speak very fancy words, but I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
Yet we see that our code is being used for mass surveillance.
Yes. So? Freedom means freedom. Freedom doesn't mean "anyone except YOU can use this code".
I don't want to contribute to such a future.
Then don't do any of those things. But when you create a free tool you give up the right to say "you may not use my tool", because that is in itself a lack of freedom.
Why don't you test your ability to keep people you don't like from using your "tools"? I betcha there are a lot of Apache web servers in use by the military. That's a clear violation of "freedom", isn't it? Why are you not in court today? I know there are linux systems in.mil domains. Get your lawyer busy.
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Fully autonomous vehicles are scary for manufacturers because they potentially shift all liability to the manufacturer.
Not "potentially". Really. If your autonomous vehicle will not let you control it, then how can you be at fault when it goes "out of control"?
even if the machine is 100x more reliable than a human.
A machine that has actually failed in some way has proven that it is not "100x more reliable" than anything. It is broken. It is no longer a matter of probabilities.
This is a mindset that will have to change as machines become more aware of their surroundings
Believing that machines can be "aware" is the failure here. Machines do what they are programmed to do, making decisions based on rules produced by people who aren't involved in the problem and cannot possibly consider every criterion. Here's just one simple example. I've got a passenger who is having a stroke in the back seat and I'm heading to the hospital. The car is "aware" that the GPS or video sensors or some other "critical" sensor system has failed and won't let me take control.
Now imagine that it is you in the back seat. Would you rather I be perfectly safe in a disabled autonomous vehicle, or would you rather I be able to get you to the hospital?
I expect autonomous cars to pull over and refuse to continue the moment they become impaired.
And what if "refuse to continue" isn't the proper response to the problem? OMG, the camera watching to the rear failed, I better pull over and stop. Right here, on the freeway. With 65 or 75 MPH traffic going by just a few feet away. So I can sit here and wait with my wife who is in labor for an hour or two for a tow truck to show up.
Or I'm just ahead of a triple bottom 18 wheeler and the car thinks the right solution is to slow down and stop so he has to slam on the breaks to keep from running me over. And the failure is in the lane edge detector, so the autonomous vehicle can't really tell when it is off the road. It can't pull over very far -- or it pulls over too far on a section of road that has little or no shoulder.
And it is 105F in the shade, but the air conditioning requires the engine and it won't "continue" because an emission sensor failed and the programmer sitting in his office decided the right solution was to shut the engine down.
Or it's -20F in the shade at 2AM in the middle of nowhere Nebraska or Colorado in winter on a remote two lane road, and the car decides that the 'right response' to some failure is to stop right there, with no cell service to call for help, and no source of heat for the useless human occupants of the vehicle. All because the GPS receiver stopped working, or some other sensor failed that the car needs but a human could easily do without.
Yeah, every response to this would be "but the programmers will think of these problems and do the right thing." Somehow the car will know that there is a medical emergency aboard and the "right thing" is to continue under human control instead of "refuse to continue" until it's little problem is fixed. Such naive optimism regarding technological utopias is the scary thing, not that a human might actually drive a car sometime in the future.
Small unexpected objects in peripheral vision
A child running into the street in front of you is not "peripheral vision".
Humans are very adaptable however the most important need for directing a single purpose automobile is choosing the right response and executing in a correct manner,
And when the "right response" hasn't been pre-programmed into the computer, the human is much better at finding a solution. To assume that autonomous vehicles will have every problem and a "right response" in their database so there is no need for human supervision is just lunacy. To assume that some programmer who is sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office can determine the "right response" to every situation you might experience in the middle of traffic on a congested freeway is just lunacy.
Everyone seems to understand that human error is responsible for most road casualties but we will not trust a computer replacement system unless its proven completely infallible.
That may be your criterion. If so, that's ok. My criterion is that it doesn't fail in majestic and fatal ways for simple problems. And that there be some full scale data that indicates that it isn't going to fail in majestic and fatal ways when the emergent behavior of the collective is considered.
Wouldn't it start saving lives even if it was just much less error prone than humans?
Well, that's the hope. But wouldn't it be nice to have some evidence before it turns out that the system doesn't work as well as every optimist evangelist tells us it will? Is it too much to ask for a human fallback to deal with unanticipated failure modes? Have we really learned NOTHING AT ALL from all the existing examples of system failure that were unanticipated? I keep mentioning Risks Digest. It's a good read for anyone who thinks "sensors and computerized systems excel at that". Imagine when HeartBleed isn't a cute term for a computer failure and actually refers to the human ex-passengers of an autonomous vehicle.
I really don't understand the need of having the human ready to take over in a emergency.
Because the "emergencies" that an autonomous vehicle will have will mostly be created by the autonomous vehicle system itself. Like not correctly detecting a small human darting into the street ahead of it, coming to a halt in the middle of traffic because it lost communication with a critical sensor, etc. And because the computer, no matter how well programmed by the smartest people in the room, will not have covered every contingency that could pop up in real life. Humans are just more adaptable than fixed-programmed computers.
Yeah, humans fail. We understand. Computers fail, too, which is something that the autonomous vehicle proponents tend to forget. And hyping the perfection of a system that is not yet in existence and hasn't been tested at full scale is how the material in Risks Digest gets created.
You must excuse me, you see we in the US have never really had any experience with that sort of thing - a company doing something that's good for the consumer... wow, I wonder how that feels like.
I'm a T-Mobile US customer, and considering they recently dropped "overages", I know what it feels like. Yeah, it's rare.
If Free buys T-Mobile and implements a 20Eu service, my bill will drop by something less than $10. Less, because I assume the 20Eu service will still have federal taxes/fees.
Bye.
Its not a 'whoosh'
It's a 'whoosh' for you because you didn't read the entire comment, which included the sentences: "So no, you don't have to scream at it or plug in a mouse, just press F1. Do'h!"
"Just press F1". Read all the words. You seem pretty clear on the idea that you can't "just press F1", you need to find a working keyboard first, and you thought you needed to lecture me on the issue because YOU DIDN'T GET THE JOKE. Admit it.
"The keyboard is missing; I'm currently configured to ensure that one is attached, so please attach one, and then press F1 on it to continue"
Had the BIOS authors intended the error to say that, they would have written the error to say that. Or to say something shorter like "Keyboard error. Attach working keyboard". They did not. You read much more into what the error says than the authors wrote into it.
Overdrive will only burn CD-R as audio disks. I've tried using a DVDxR (both + and -, and RW and RAM) and it will not burn to those.
At which point you plug in a working keyboard and press F1.
No, at which point you plug in a keyboard, reboot, press DEL or Fwhatever (2?) to go into the BIOS setup, fix the stupid "stop on keyboard error" or similar setting, save and exit, and then pull the keyboard back off.
I develop embedded/standalone systems that won't have a keyboard on them. I usually remember to set the BIOS as one of the first things on any new system, but many times I've gotten the "press F1" instruction when I get to final testing in target configuration.
But mostly I would say ... "whoosh".
And if it's your first keyboard, how do you answer? Scream "YES" at it, or plug in the compromised mouse?
I've lost track of the times I've had a BIOS report: "Keyboard failure. No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue...". So no, you don't have to scream at it or plug in a mouse, just press F1. Do'h!
What they are talking about here infects on firmware/driver level initialization between USB device and computer when plugged in that is an inherent part of the USB standard, before and invisible to any user mode (software) inspection (and how do you plan to see/test that the usb firmware is not infected?).
Actually, this sounds like an interesting job for a Pi. I just checked the latest raspbian on my Pi and USB is compiled into the kernel (no USB modules, at least nothing obviously so). Recompile the kernel so USB is all loadable modules, then modify the base USB code to report transactions.
Plug your USB stick or disk or keyboard into the Pi, and if it reports that there's a new not-a-USB-stick/disk/keyboard, you know there's malware on the device.
On a different note, does anyone know of any modified firmware for any USB disk or stick that makes it look like a CD-R? (Preferably, a dozen at the same time.) I'd like to get around having to burn an actual CD-R when exporting audio books from Overdrive and then importing them into grip or itunes. And, unfortunately, many of the books I'm trying to write are JUST a bit larger than a CD-RW can handle.
Just because someone is talking about manipulating the voters in a vote that did not go their way does not mean that they are citing merely that outcome as the sole evidence of the manipulation... especially in the comments on a article that is *specifically about the hard evidence of manipulation*.
TFA didn't have hard evidence of manipulation. They reported one survey from well before the referendum. Surveys are not votes. Surveys often, as the article points out, ask questions in a way designed to get the answer the pollster desires. I've yet to hear a survey ask "if the ballot contained the question ... would you vote yes?", it is always biased towards whoever pays for the survey. It is so common there is a term for it: push-polling. The article tells us that the cable company survey asked "should taxpayers fund pornography ...", but they don't tell us what the survey that had a 72% favorable rate asked. How biased was the survey in favor of the referendum?
The result of the vote didn't match the survey data, so yes, the fact that the result didn't go the way they wanted it to is being used as proof that there was manipulation. And it didn't go they way they wanted it to not once, but twice.
By the way, someone else claimed that a municipal internet service would never be sold. TFA talks about one such service that was sold out to a commercial provider when it discusses the systems that the cable companies claim failed. So that BIG consideration isn't valid.
In order to get approved for debt, you must have debt.
No, to get approved for debt you need one of two things:
1. A credit history. That's not necessarily debt, it is a history of handling small debts that you've paid off.
2. Belong to a demographic that the credit companies are chasing.
When I was in college, the stores were deluging me with offers of credit cards because of my age/college while the credit union followed rule 1 and repeatedly denied me a credit card. In recent years, the largest flood of credit card offers were when I had no debt at all, but had a paid-off car loan.
It's a SCAM! A scheme to make sure that you are constantly in debt,
Nobody can force you to go into debt.
All that writing and you never covered the fact that no one will buyout a municipal ISP. Or "merge" and that's a BIG consideration.
Why wouldn't anyone ever buy one out? Privatization is not a new buzzword. If an entire country's telecom can be privatized, why couldn't a municipal internet system? I've heard of cities selling off public utitlites before. Our trash collection used to be public, now it isn't.
And it is a BIG consideration for whom?
Why the negativity and 'speaking for us' Slashdotters???
I'm not speaking for /.rs. I'm pointing out that /.rs speaking for the voters (by deciding what is "better", or your "BIG consideration") is the problem.
I think a lot of these responses are from paid employees of the providers, Eh?
Right. If you can't argue facts, argue the person. There's a latin word for this that I cannot ever spell correctly, so I won't try now.
And what are they so afraid of...it failing? No it might be what we actually need for balance.
No government utility exists "for balance". It either uses the general tax fund so it can run cheaper and drive out the competition, is created explicitly as a monopoly, or it is run so incompetently that it becomes a white elephant. But "balance"? No.
And this is not "health care" so why even try to scare people by mentioning it.
I wasn't trying to scare people, and I wasn't talking about "health care". I was pointing to one recent, very glaring example of a failure of government to provide services to the taxpayers that cost a lot of money and did diddly squat, in contrast to the implicit assumption that a government service would be cheaper and better. (And, in fact, providing services for lower cost is a driving force behind privatization of government services. Were government services always cheaper, privatization would have no impetus.)
If your argument is "that was 'health care' and this is internet service so it will be different", I find it to be very very unconvincing. You'd have to come up with so many "that was X and this is different" excuses that Occam's Razor would say that the obvious answer is probably the right one: government management of complex systems is usually inefficient and costly.
You mean, I did not bother to provide evidence for either one of those in this case.
No, I mean that the term "better" is a subjective term that depends on what weight and value one puts on objective measures, and in many cases, includes subjective measures like "happy with service".
"Better" is not a fact. "Meets specified connection speeds 95% of the time" is a fact. "Costs less than other similar services" is a fact. You assume that "faster and cheaper" (facts) means "better" is a fact, but that's simply not true.
But you didn't provide contrarian evidence either.
I didn't try to show you that something wasn't "better" because "better" is subjective. The point is that the VOTERS who voted down the municipal service can, and do, have their own views of "better" that may not align with yours.
Unlike your example of education, internet service has objective measures of success - uptime, bandwidth, latency, peering.
And those may be called "facts", but then you have to weigh the facts to come up with the subjective evaluation of "better". What is better for me may be a service that isn't as fast but comes with a static IP. Or I may consider it better if the service comes over existing wiring because I don't want installers mucking about my house and property. I may consider it better if I'm not forced as a taxpayer to fund a service for you because in your opinion the existing options are too slow/too expensive/provided by a company you hate.
As opposed to private utilities like Comcast that care? And why can't you vote them out? At least you have some choice there. I pity the person at the mercy of monopolistic private utilites.
1. Comcast has a financial interest in keeping customers, even if it is a small one. A government-run service has no financial interest in keeping subs. Any cost overruns will just be pulled from the general fund.
2. You can't vote out a civil service employee because their position isn't an elected one. I shouldn't have to point that out.
3. If the government is the ISP and has driven the competition out, then you have no choice. If the government has forced the competition to raise prices, then your choice is more expensive. And even if the competition is the same price, you're paying twice for service.
4. I pity more the people who face a true government monopoly on service. They have two choices: use the government service or go without. Why is a government monopoly better than this alleged private one (that really doesn't exist)?
You would never be convinced to vote against your own interests.
This /. attitude that we're all smarter than the average voter and know what is "better" for him, to the point of calling your opinion of "better" an objective fact, is pretty arrogant. The point I'm trying to get across is that the voters have the right to decide what is best for them and what is "better". Saying that they're voting against their own best interests is rather presumptive, since I'm sure that many of the voters simply don't care about internet service or paying taxes so that you can get your downloads faster than you can already get them through any of the existing commercial services. And I expect that many of them do not share the "fuck Comcast" reason that apparently makes "anything else" a better choice.
Because there is a right answer.
In your opinion, there is a right answer. In their opinion, there is a different right answer.
First, they would be in different unions.
Sorry, but no. AFSCME and SEIU are very large unions that cover a very large number of state, county, and municipal employees. It is most likely that all the unionized employees in a municipality are members of one of those two, except perhaps for specialized unions that cover specific oc
4. Why can't the government just include suitable performance metrics and penalties for failing to meet them when handing out the franchise? Including a regular review cycle?
Every franchise I've seen has them. Because of the changes to the federal laws for local regulation of such companies, the local municipalities have very little stick anymore.
The underlying figure of merit once you cut through the bullshit is r / log t. r is the compression ratio (unitless) and log t is log seconds. So yes, the units of the underlying figure of merit are reciprocal log seconds.
The fact that the actual equation is a ratio between a proposed compression implementation and a reference is a hint that it is not a "figure of merit" in absolute terms, but only with respect to some common standard. Yeah, you get to pick your standard, but simply reporting r/log(t) is meaningless. The actual measurement is unitless simply because, as you point out, units of 1/log(s) is meaningless.
It's done that way so things can be repeatable. If I create a compressor and report a Weissman of 3, then you should be able to repeat that on your computer, even if you've got a 3GHz I7 and mine is only 2.7GHz. Here's the data I used, here's the executables for both compressors, you run it. Now you can play with the source and see what happens. But first you need to be able to reproduce my results. That's called "scientific method".
You need learn to cut through the hocus pocus and analyze the actual underlying equation
The underlying equation is a ratio between two compression implementations, not an absolute measure of one.
You can well imagine that those who actually understand programming metrics are holding their sides laughing at those who are taking it seriously.
I'm not here to argue whether the metric is meaningful or not. The value of a metric is in the eye of the beholder. You don't think it has any value, and I really don't care if it does or not. I'm just pointing out that the actual metric is unitless. You can't throw half an equation out and then complain that the units on the result don't mean anything. Sometimes equations are constructed the way they are so that the units DO come out right, and there are many examples of equations that have empirical constants that have meaningless units just so the equation they are used in come out right. That's especially true in physical modeling where someone sees a relationship between the data and tries to create an equation to represent that. If the fit is best with some variable taken to the 8/3 power, that's how it winds up, and the constants get units to make it all come out right. A more common example is R in PV=nRT.
Now, you're correct, the alpha constant is useless because the only purpose it could serve is to correct the units, and since it is unitless it doesn't even do that. So laugh at that part of it, but don't throw out the important parts and laugh at what's left when the units don't work anymore.
You myopic asshole. The site was contracted out to a private company. The 'gubbmint' didn't do the coding, didn't build the pages, didn't accept $134 million in payment and then deliver a turd pile in return.
No, the government just failed to manage the project to a successful completion, like they would have to manage a municipal internet service.
And let's not forget to mention the crony that ORACLE CORPORATION had in place,
You mean, someone in the government? The same government that would create a perfect internet service?
I'm pointing to repeated examples of government failure to do technological things, you don't see it, and I'M myopic?
It's rare to find internet users who think slower speeds and greater congestion are "in their interest."
I would have thought it rare to find a /. user who believes the promises of the government and thinks that the government handling all his data is a good thing, but there sure seem to be a lot of them posting today.
You seem to assume that a government-run ISP would be cheaper and better (e.g. faster and less congested) just because they say it would be. You seem to ignore all the examples of cost overruns and incompetence that government systems demonstrate on a regular basis and think that just this once it will be different. You seem to ignore that it is not just "internet users" who pay for a government-run internet service, and there are those who don't care if you can't download the latest warez or movie torrent as fast as you'd like. Those are the people who have other considerations than just "congestion and download speed" that you limit yourself to.
And you seem to think that reducing competition in an already limited market is a good thing. I find that an interesting shift in the environment here.
For instance, democracies suck when voting on a question of fact. If something is better and cheaper
Neither of those are fact. "Better" is a purely subjective term, and there is no evidence that a government-run anything will be automatically cheaper. When you say "cheaper", you mean it may cost direct users less. That's not the total cost of the product, however. A "company" that can simply dip its hand into the general fund of a city when revenues don't cover expenses isn't worried too much about keeping costs down and those costs wind up coming from people who have no desire to be subscribers. A government-run anything is typically run by civil servants covered by a union, so they have no reason to care about the service they provide and have a union driving up the costs of their employment. (In our fair town, the largest cost increase in government is the increase in cost of union employees, most specifically for their pension and healthcare.)
The fact that this is all taxpayer supported means you lose choice. If you think having a choice between several commercial ISPs is too little choice, then consider that every taxpayer in that city will be an involuntary subscriber to what will probably become the defacto monopoly. If they don't manage to drive all the other players out by being able to undercut the prices, then the prices for all the others will have to go up to cover the fixed costs spread over fewer subscribers. (Do you see the parallel to the school system here? I do. You want to send your kids to a private school for a better education? You get to pay twice.)
I think less choice and forced participation is not better. I think having to get service from someone who doesn't really care is not better, especially when their supervisor will also be a civil servant who doesn't have to care. Example? I had a water leak. I got my bill and it said I had consumed some ridiculous amount of water. I did the calculations -- the volume of water they said I used would have covered my property to a depth of about a foot. It would have required a ridiculous flow. I got to fill out a report, they came out to calibrate my meter, and I ... heard nothing back ever. That's a government-run utility. Nobody cared because they didn't have to. I can't vote them out, they can't get fired, and I can't get service from anyone else.
Here in Oregon we've just lived through the Cover Oregon fiasco. A government-run website that was supposed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. It cost millions of dollars yet never managed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. You could download the forms, fill them in, then talk to an agent to find out what it would cost, but you couldn't sign up online. They could tell you the "partners" you could talk to -- mine was a three hour drive away in another state! They dumped a lot of money into cute jingles and ads months before the site was supposed to go online, but couldn't manage to get the job done. Better? Cheaper? Right.
Yes, democracy sucks. But as someone once said, it sucks less than everything else. The point I made, however, is that everyone is assuming that the voters were coerced into voting against their best interests, and that is not a fact in evidence.
why shouldn't the government supply it?
Because the voters of those cities said they didn't want the government supplying it.
Here's a point I haven't seen anyone raise. When your ISP is managed by the same government that manages the police department, where do you think your right to privacy winds up? In the hands of someone who likely belongs to the same union that the police clerical staff belong to, and are probably on the same bowling team. And their paychecks come from the same mayor's office.
When they vote against their interests, they're not being clever.
You mean when they vote against what you think their interests ought to be, you don't think they are "clever".
Not everyone believes that a government run ISP using taxpayer dollars to make up revenue shortfalls and to deliberately undercut the commercial providers is "in their interest".
And look at the units of the ratio: reciprocal log seconds.
The Weissman score is actually unitless. When one divides "log seconds" by "log seconds" the units cancel.
It also conveniently sidesteps the variability with different architectures.
If one measures the compression ratios and times for the same data on different architectures, one is measuring the score of the different architecture, not "sidestepping" it.
Maybe SSE helps algorithm A much more than it does algorithm B.
Then algorithm A compared to B would have a higher Weissman score on a system with SSE.
Or B outperforms A on AMD, but not on Intel.
Then the score would favor B over A when comparing the two processors. That's what the score is supposed to do. It compares two things.
In real life, for some compression jobs you don't CARE how long it takes, and for other jobs you care very much.
Then for the former you would not care what the Weissman score is, and for the latter you would care.
Or imagine an algorithm that compresses half as fast but decompresses 1000 times faster. That doesn't even register in the score.
That's not what the score measures. It also doesn't measure price (for commercial implementations of code), executable size, or whether the software salesman has BO or not.
It's pretty insulting to the democratic process to accuse the winners of being "[expletive deleted] sheeple" when you don't agree with a result.
I have no trouble seeing through corporate fear mongering.
I suspect there are a lot of people who feel the same way. Some of them may have participated in the vote and not voted the way you wanted them to.
If a corporation is a person, can it hold a government office?
Were a corporation a person, it certainly could hold public office.
However, the people who make up corporations and who retain their civil and Constitutional rights despite being part of a corporation can, and sometimes do, hold public office. On our local city council, we've had people who work for the local newspaper, the local university, the local large manufacturer, and other corporations.
We make software for a reason.
"We" make software for many reasons.
Not to just give it away for free as in beer. But to provide freedom.
I was using "free" as in "freedom". How is it "freedom" if you start putting restrictions on who can use the software and for what purposes? And who decides what those disallowed purposes are? The programmer or someone else? Suppose I'm a programmer who doesn't like abortions. Can I say "you can use free software unless you are an abortion clinic" because I've got some patches in some free software packages?
Does "free software" truly represent free software if there are so many limits on who can use it that nobody can use any of it?
For that reason we ask people to release the changes to the code back to our collection of software which provides more freedom.
That is not a restriction on who can use the code and for what purposes. The Army is not changing the code, they are using the code to produce other things. I have a router or two that has FOSS code in them, but that doesn't mean that I have to send hand all the data I send through those routers off to the EFF for their use. I have programs I compile with gcc, but that doesn't mean I have to hand over that code to everyone who asks for it. And IIRC, even the GPL doesn't require release of local modifications to GPL code unless you're trying to distribute that code. I could be wrong, I don't care, the point is irrelevant to this discussion. The Army isn't writing code.
We limit the freedom of people who want to use our code without giving back, so we can ensure a future in which we can access data without having to depend on one company.
I'm sorry, what? The GPL doesn't say that any data that you manage or create using GPL code must be released back to the community. Not even close. You speak very fancy words, but I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
Yet we see that our code is being used for mass surveillance.
Yes. So? Freedom means freedom. Freedom doesn't mean "anyone except YOU can use this code".
I don't want to contribute to such a future.
Then don't do any of those things. But when you create a free tool you give up the right to say "you may not use my tool", because that is in itself a lack of freedom.
Why don't you test your ability to keep people you don't like from using your "tools"? I betcha there are a lot of Apache web servers in use by the military. That's a clear violation of "freedom", isn't it? Why are you not in court today? I know there are linux systems in .mil domains. Get your lawyer busy.