I've been in lots of places including places that are dark and crowded where someone has yelled fire to be "clever" or even pulled the fire alarm.
Lots? Who the hell do you hang out with?
The "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" example dates back to 1919. A time when theatres didn't have convenient "break glass" fire alarms all around, and without today's health and safety and buiilding regs, theatres burning down with audiences unable to escape wasn't that uncommon. Back then if someone shouted fire, you'd have been well advised to get the hell out as soon as possible - very much more so than if a fire alarm rang today.
It survives as a metaphor, long after it was a literal real life danger.
Occam's razor - a felon who violated his parole was punished for violating his parole. There's no need to add the unnecessary step of the government looking for excuses.
Good point. Normally they never arrest people for probation (parole) violations.
Of course they do. *IF* their parole officer gets to hear about them. And in this case it was impossible for the parole officer NOT to hear about the violations. Thus incarceration for violation of parole was inevitable.
Team Google doesn't have all those wacky spy cars running around purely for their novelty value
No indeed, they have them for their Street View feature. The confirmation of road data via GPS log came as a bonus extra. But Apple get that benefit and more from the fact that every iPhone that's using navigation is regularly pinging the GPS position back to Apple. This will give very clear heat-maps of where the navigable roads are, one way systems, and restricted turns. More accurate in fact than the single sample of a Google car driving down a road once.
that's a generalization that has as more to do with the strength of socio-cultural influences than anything.
That's true. We see it often in western Jews and Muslims, where they still identify themselves as part of their religious group, and follow some of the practices, even when many of them don't actually believe in a god.
(otherwise how do new religious movements form and grow and in some small cases, go on to become world religions?)
That's an interesting question. Let's ignore the ones that sprung up before modern science, as without scientific understanding, mysticism was the only explanation on offer for many things. Origin of species was in 1859, but it took some time to become accepted as mainstream science, so lets say religions in the 20th century.
So what have we got? Scientology, Thelema and Wicca.
Oops, battery on laptop running low... will come back to this...
We all know what desktop is, so let's not waste time defining it.
The GP didn't say Linux could not be used on the desktop. Indeed some people do use it as a desktop. Something less than 1%. He pointed out that Linux has been tried for years in the court of public opinion, and it's failed to gain any kind of widespread favour. And there's no sign it ever will. OS X has taken it's place as the alternative desktop for people that want to get away from Windows.
The fact that you are one of those few that do use Linux for the desktop makes no difference to his point.
If we're doing anecdotes, mine is similar to the OP, in that I wanted to get off Windows, and tried Linux many times over the years, but always found it lacking. Then tried OSX and it was so much better. I haven't looked back since.
Just playing the odds. The vast majority of religious people believe whatever it was their parents believe. Religions survive through indoctrination, rather then being chosen on their merits.
There's hate speech every bit as much as there is something called a love letter. Just as a love letter is there to communicate a feeling of love and hopefully inspire that feeling in another person, hate speech is there to communicate a feeling of hate, and to inspire (incite) hatred in others.
before we start limiting speech that may be controversial
The problem with hate speech is not that it is controversial. It's that it's intent is to incite hatred in others. At it's most classic and extreme, you have hate speech from leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, resulting in the people listening to the speech going out and lynching people for nothing other than their skin colour. That's happened many times over the years.
Clearly hate speech exists and is a problem. Whether than problem is more important than a principle of complete free speech is debatable. But don't pretend that a problem that can cause people's deaths, as well as many lesser harms doesn't exist.
There is in any case no absolute right to free speech anywhere in the world. There's the classic of not being free to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre. Then there's laws of defamation, slander and libel. etc.
Hate speech exists. The absolute right to free speech doesn't.
Assuming that both companies get error reports and follow up on them, Google will stay ahead just because of the head start that they've had.
If that logic was true, Google would never have got ahead of the other mapping companies that were in the game before Google.
It depends on how much investment they make in it, and how well they execute. And Apple has a lot of money to invest, and executes well more often than not.
Google has more users for its maps, and it will continue to have more users even if every single iOS user switches to Apple maps on their mobile devices.
You don't. Just because there are more Android phones doesn't mean people are using maps on them. For example more people appear to be browsing the web with iPhones than Androids, given the web traffic data.
Why are you a mormon? Is it because you looked at all available religions and selected the one that seemed closest to the truth as you see it? Or was it because your parents are mormon?
Look - there is nothing in the Constitution about being guaranteed a right to not be uncomfortable with what someone else says, but rather the guarantee is to the person causing the discomfort!
Hate speech isn't about people being uncomfortable or offended. It's about inciting other people.
If someone chooses to make an extreme comment - then judge them as you will, but it shouldn't be a crime unless someone is harmed physically, or property is destroyed by the person doing the speaking!
In hate speech the purpose is to get other people to do the harming. So no, it shouldn't only be prosecuted when the speaker himself does the harm.
Discussions like this are how we figure out what might go wrong, what to test for, which I for one am happy to be part of. Better to discuss the potential outcomes like adults, than engage in the proverbial dick-swingin' contests and hyperbolic nonsense that does no good for either camp.
If we were in the business of designing such systems, sure. But any potential problem thought up by a non-domain expert on Slashdot will be old news to the people actually designing these systems.
I only see that as an intermediate step, whilst people become comfortable with the concept of auto-drivers. Of course that may require a generational shift of the population, rather the changing the minds of he current population of drivers.
1) Reaction time to a specific, anticipated event, you're likely right. But there's one crucial element to navigation that humans can do that computers currently can't - make arbitrary, seemingly illogical decisions in the heat of the moment. Take GP's hypothetical about the cliffside road - most humans, thanks to self-preservation instinct, will choose to rear-end the other car rather than drive off the ledge; what would a computer that is programmed to "avoid contact with other cars at all costs" do in that situation? Hyperbole aside, there's no way of knowing until we put one in that real world situation.
The concept that an auto-driver would be programmed to "avoid contact with other cars at all costs" and not have a concept of cliffs vs level verges is not a sensible one.
3) If vision is the only sense you use when driving, you shouldn't be driving.
Well lets see. Apart from vision we have hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste, temperature, pain, balance, acceleration. Some of these are of little use in driving, and some of them are compromised in human drivers (e.g. soundproofing in modern cars, and the playing of music largely dicards sound as a useable sense by the average driver. But of all the driver-useful ones, technology gives us better sensors then the human ones.
What happens when the auto-car's front facing range finder gets just enough mud on it to make the car think there's an object.2mm from the front end of the vehicle?
Not being a designer of such systems I can't answer that. But it is a pretty obvious hazard, and can be assumed to be dealt with in a reasonable way. I do know that there is the principle of fail-safe and redundancy, so I'd expect a car with the loss of one of it's sensors to still be able to function safely, but to alert the human to the fault, and possibly to drive to a safe parking place and refuse to continue on automatic until the fault has been rectified.
5) A hacker doesn't need to gain access to the actual auto-driving mechanism to cause problems (though, considering the fact these things use Wifi and other forms of RF communication betwix themselves, it wouldn't be a stretch to think they could be compromised), all the perp would need to do is provide enough false or junk data to confuse the auto-driving algorithm into abnormal behavior. This can be done with readily available, off the shelf electronics.
I'd expect information fed via radio from other auto-drivers to be treated like the information a good human driver receives from other car's turn signals. Useful advisory information for maintaining a smooth drive, but not to be relied upon as totally reliable. So a safety margin is still left, regardless of what the other car actually does. If the information is wrong, I'd expect it to result in an emergency stop, rather than a collision.
When I say "I'd expect" what I mean is that unless and until such systems behave like this or better, I wouldn't expect them to pass the safety tests and be licensed for consumer use. And I mean that I believe these things are possible with today's technology.
In other words I don't see anything that's been suggested here as showstoppers, but just statements of some already known parts of the problem-domain.
Liability is easily managed by using insurance. And insurance companies are excellent at gauging risk. If an auto-car system passes the test for being statistically safer than a human driver, then for sure there will be insurance companies willing to take on that liability.
I don't know why you think any of those are difficult situations.
* Emergency vehicles in general
They're just other vehicles - they might be doing unusual things, but any auto-driver system has to allow for the fact that any vehicle may do unusual things. They are only limited by the laws of physics not the rules of the road. And it's easy to detect flashing blue lights and sirens and give priority.
* Vehicles on the side of the road. In general you move over to the other side (road,next lane etc) to give them some room. But where I am (VA) its an offense if you fail to move over when passing a cop car on the side of the road.
Stationary vehicles are the very simplest vehicles to avoid.
Temporary speed limits posted during road works
The technology for vision systems to interpret road signs is already there. Google already reads speed limit and restricted turn signs from their street-view cars to add to their ground-truth database for navigation.
* School zones
Signs as above. And schools don't tend to move so will be in the navigation database anyway.
Really bad weather where you can't even see 20 feet ahed of you
Auto-drivers aren't limited to the visible light spectrum as human drivers are, and are thus potentially able to see better in poor visibility scenarios. And of course would have more discipline to adjust the speed appropriately to the weather and visibility than the average human.
* Looking down the road and predicting that there will be an issue and doing your best to avoid it (ie slowing down/lane changing to avoid the person on the phone who is weaving from side to side)
People expect other drivers to be sensible and obey the rules of the road far too often. I'd expect an auto-driver to always allow for the possibility that another car may do something unpredictable. And if and when they do so, the auto-drivers reaction time would be quicker than a human.
* Crap lying all over the road (saw lots of rocks on a mountain road yesterday)
If a human can see an obstacle, an auto-driver will be able to see it.
I'm not saying all these things actually exist in an auto-driver yet. But they are all achievable with current technology. And I'd expect them to all be there in any system that actually passed the test-plan suggested.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been in lots of places including places that are dark and crowded where someone has yelled fire to be "clever" or even pulled the fire alarm.
Lots? Who the hell do you hang out with?
The "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" example dates back to 1919. A time when theatres didn't have convenient "break glass" fire alarms all around, and without today's health and safety and buiilding regs, theatres burning down with audiences unable to escape wasn't that uncommon. Back then if someone shouted fire, you'd have been well advised to get the hell out as soon as possible - very much more so than if a fire alarm rang today.
It survives as a metaphor, long after it was a literal real life danger.
I believe you're a conspiracy nut.
Occam's razor - a felon who violated his parole was punished for violating his parole. There's no need to add the unnecessary step of the government looking for excuses.
An investigation into a perfectly legal video isn't "evidence obtained illegally".
If a fire alarm goes off, I recommend you don't go looking for the fire, but exit the building. Many people have died going looking for the fire.
Good point. Normally they never arrest people for probation (parole) violations.
Of course they do. *IF* their parole officer gets to hear about them. And in this case it was impossible for the parole officer NOT to hear about the violations. Thus incarceration for violation of parole was inevitable.
Team Google doesn't have all those wacky spy cars running around purely for their novelty value
No indeed, they have them for their Street View feature. The confirmation of road data via GPS log came as a bonus extra. But Apple get that benefit and more from the fact that every iPhone that's using navigation is regularly pinging the GPS position back to Apple. This will give very clear heat-maps of where the navigable roads are, one way systems, and restricted turns. More accurate in fact than the single sample of a Google car driving down a road once.
that's a generalization that has as more to do with the strength of socio-cultural influences than anything.
That's true. We see it often in western Jews and Muslims, where they still identify themselves as part of their religious group, and follow some of the practices, even when many of them don't actually believe in a god.
(otherwise how do new religious movements form and grow and in some small cases, go on to become world religions?)
That's an interesting question. Let's ignore the ones that sprung up before modern science, as without scientific understanding, mysticism was the only explanation on offer for many things. Origin of species was in 1859, but it took some time to become accepted as mainstream science, so lets say religions in the 20th century.
So what have we got? Scientology, Thelema and Wicca.
Oops, battery on laptop running low... will come back to this...
We all know what desktop is, so let's not waste time defining it.
The GP didn't say Linux could not be used on the desktop. Indeed some people do use it as a desktop. Something less than 1%. He pointed out that Linux has been tried for years in the court of public opinion, and it's failed to gain any kind of widespread favour. And there's no sign it ever will. OS X has taken it's place as the alternative desktop for people that want to get away from Windows.
The fact that you are one of those few that do use Linux for the desktop makes no difference to his point.
If we're doing anecdotes, mine is similar to the OP, in that I wanted to get off Windows, and tried Linux many times over the years, but always found it lacking. Then tried OSX and it was so much better. I haven't looked back since.
Just playing the odds. The vast majority of religious people believe whatever it was their parents believe. Religions survive through indoctrination, rather then being chosen on their merits.
There is no such thing as hate speech.
There's hate speech every bit as much as there is something called a love letter. Just as a love letter is there to communicate a feeling of love and hopefully inspire that feeling in another person, hate speech is there to communicate a feeling of hate, and to inspire (incite) hatred in others.
before we start limiting speech that may be controversial
The problem with hate speech is not that it is controversial. It's that it's intent is to incite hatred in others. At it's most classic and extreme, you have hate speech from leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, resulting in the people listening to the speech going out and lynching people for nothing other than their skin colour. That's happened many times over the years.
Clearly hate speech exists and is a problem. Whether than problem is more important than a principle of complete free speech is debatable. But don't pretend that a problem that can cause people's deaths, as well as many lesser harms doesn't exist.
There is in any case no absolute right to free speech anywhere in the world. There's the classic of not being free to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre. Then there's laws of defamation, slander and libel. etc.
Hate speech exists. The absolute right to free speech doesn't.
Sorry, no, I completely misread what you wrote. You made a good point.
Assuming that both companies get error reports and follow up on them, Google will stay ahead just because of the head start that they've had.
If that logic was true, Google would never have got ahead of the other mapping companies that were in the game before Google.
It depends on how much investment they make in it, and how well they execute. And Apple has a lot of money to invest, and executes well more often than not.
Google has more users for its maps, and it will continue to have more users even if every single iOS user switches to Apple maps on their mobile devices.
You don't. Just because there are more Android phones doesn't mean people are using maps on them. For example more people appear to be browsing the web with iPhones than Androids, given the web traffic data.
And your parents being Mormon was just a coincidence?
Why are you a mormon? Is it because you looked at all available religions and selected the one that seemed closest to the truth as you see it? Or was it because your parents are mormon?
In your final paragraph you attribute your views to science and not politics. But it's very clear your views are very political.
Look - there is nothing in the Constitution about being guaranteed a right to not be uncomfortable with what someone else says, but rather the guarantee is to the person causing the discomfort!
Hate speech isn't about people being uncomfortable or offended. It's about inciting other people.
If someone chooses to make an extreme comment - then judge them as you will, but it shouldn't be a crime unless someone is harmed physically, or property is destroyed by the person doing the speaking!
In hate speech the purpose is to get other people to do the harming. So no, it shouldn't only be prosecuted when the speaker himself does the harm.
Are you sure you are not confusing reality with something you saw on tv?
Tell me which of those things you think isn't possible, and we'll talk about it.
Discussions like this are how we figure out what might go wrong, what to test for, which I for one am happy to be part of. Better to discuss the potential outcomes like adults, than engage in the proverbial dick-swingin' contests and hyperbolic nonsense that does no good for either camp.
If we were in the business of designing such systems, sure. But any potential problem thought up by a non-domain expert on Slashdot will be old news to the people actually designing these systems.
So what you are saying is that you drive closer than is safe to the car in front in order to stop other cars going into your lane.
Will...
Why not? All of these things are individually possible with today's technology.
I only see that as an intermediate step, whilst people become comfortable with the concept of auto-drivers. Of course that may require a generational shift of the population, rather the changing the minds of he current population of drivers.
1) Reaction time to a specific, anticipated event, you're likely right. But there's one crucial element to navigation that humans can do that computers currently can't - make arbitrary, seemingly illogical decisions in the heat of the moment. Take GP's hypothetical about the cliffside road - most humans, thanks to self-preservation instinct, will choose to rear-end the other car rather than drive off the ledge; what would a computer that is programmed to "avoid contact with other cars at all costs" do in that situation? Hyperbole aside, there's no way of knowing until we put one in that real world situation.
The concept that an auto-driver would be programmed to "avoid contact with other cars at all costs" and not have a concept of cliffs vs level verges is not a sensible one.
3) If vision is the only sense you use when driving, you shouldn't be driving.
Well lets see. Apart from vision we have hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste, temperature, pain, balance, acceleration. Some of these are of little use in driving, and some of them are compromised in human drivers (e.g. soundproofing in modern cars, and the playing of music largely dicards sound as a useable sense by the average driver. But of all the driver-useful ones, technology gives us better sensors then the human ones.
What happens when the auto-car's front facing range finder gets just enough mud on it to make the car think there's an object .2mm from the front end of the vehicle?
Not being a designer of such systems I can't answer that. But it is a pretty obvious hazard, and can be assumed to be dealt with in a reasonable way. I do know that there is the principle of fail-safe and redundancy, so I'd expect a car with the loss of one of it's sensors to still be able to function safely, but to alert the human to the fault, and possibly to drive to a safe parking place and refuse to continue on automatic until the fault has been rectified.
5) A hacker doesn't need to gain access to the actual auto-driving mechanism to cause problems (though, considering the fact these things use Wifi and other forms of RF communication betwix themselves, it wouldn't be a stretch to think they could be compromised), all the perp would need to do is provide enough false or junk data to confuse the auto-driving algorithm into abnormal behavior. This can be done with readily available, off the shelf electronics.
I'd expect information fed via radio from other auto-drivers to be treated like the information a good human driver receives from other car's turn signals. Useful advisory information for maintaining a smooth drive, but not to be relied upon as totally reliable. So a safety margin is still left, regardless of what the other car actually does. If the information is wrong, I'd expect it to result in an emergency stop, rather than a collision.
When I say "I'd expect" what I mean is that unless and until such systems behave like this or better, I wouldn't expect them to pass the safety tests and be licensed for consumer use. And I mean that I believe these things are possible with today's technology.
In other words I don't see anything that's been suggested here as showstoppers, but just statements of some already known parts of the problem-domain.
Why do Luddites chose to come to Slashdot?
Liability is easily managed by using insurance. And insurance companies are excellent at gauging risk. If an auto-car system passes the test for being statistically safer than a human driver, then for sure there will be insurance companies willing to take on that liability.
I don't know why you think any of those are difficult situations.
* Emergency vehicles in general
They're just other vehicles - they might be doing unusual things, but any auto-driver system has to allow for the fact that any vehicle may do unusual things. They are only limited by the laws of physics not the rules of the road. And it's easy to detect flashing blue lights and sirens and give priority.
* Vehicles on the side of the road. In general you move over to the other side (road,next lane etc) to give them some room. But where I am (VA) its an offense if you fail to move over when passing a cop car on the side of the road.
Stationary vehicles are the very simplest vehicles to avoid.
Temporary speed limits posted during road works
The technology for vision systems to interpret road signs is already there. Google already reads speed limit and restricted turn signs from their street-view cars to add to their ground-truth database for navigation.
* School zones
Signs as above. And schools don't tend to move so will be in the navigation database anyway.
Really bad weather where you can't even see 20 feet ahed of you
Auto-drivers aren't limited to the visible light spectrum as human drivers are, and are thus potentially able to see better in poor visibility scenarios. And of course would have more discipline to adjust the speed appropriately to the weather and visibility than the average human.
* Looking down the road and predicting that there will be an issue and doing your best to avoid it (ie slowing down/lane changing to avoid the person on the phone who is weaving from side to side)
People expect other drivers to be sensible and obey the rules of the road far too often. I'd expect an auto-driver to always allow for the possibility that another car may do something unpredictable. And if and when they do so, the auto-drivers reaction time would be quicker than a human.
* Crap lying all over the road (saw lots of rocks on a mountain road yesterday)
If a human can see an obstacle, an auto-driver will be able to see it.
I'm not saying all these things actually exist in an auto-driver yet. But they are all achievable with current technology. And I'd expect them to all be there in any system that actually passed the test-plan suggested.