Personally, I am not convinced Toyota has found the root cause of this unintended acceleration. I am waiting until they do before taking this car in to the dealer. My wife who drives the car 99% of the time (I drive a Honda Fit 2009 manual transmission) knows to be ready to put the car into neutral if it starts to take off. So I'm fairly confident this wouldn't cause her to get into an accident.
Also, before I take her car into the dealer, I would really like to be able to download a snapshot of the computer's firmware. That way I could use diff to check whether or not the dealer secretly changed the computer inside her car in order to fix a problem like this.
In my opinion, the fix Toyota is currently talking about "update the computer so that whenever both the brake and accelerator are pressed at the same time, the brake will win, not the accelerator" is a bandaid fix and doesn't address the root cause of why the unintended acceleration happened in the first place. Having worked on many software projects, I hate it when developers implement band aid fixes rather than putting forth the effort and time to discover and fix the root cause of a problem.
I'm also a software developer, and an owner of a Camry 2009. I suspect a software or computer glitch is the root cause. I've experienced unintended acceleration in my Camry twice while I was cruising on a flat straight road going about 38MPH. Both my feet were completely motionless both times it happened. While my right foot was steady on the accelerator, the car just sped up (by about 1 to 2MPH/second) for about 2.5 seconds. I was like WTF was that!?!?! So far, I've only had it happen a few times, but I know it wasn't caused by the fricking floor mat. Last year when I heard Toyota blame it on the floor mat I got so upset because, based on my experience, I knew it wasn't caused by the floor mat. I don't know why Toyota is so reluctant to audit their computer hardware/software. Toyota should be forced to release all the code that is in any way/shape/form connected to the throttle and accelerator pedal for public scrutiny. It will cost them essentially nothing to post the code on their website, so there is no reason not to do this. Since buggy code could jeopardize the safety of the public, the code should be publicly available. Read my post from last year about this here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=29976746&art_pos=18 My guess is that is probably some stupid divide by zero or integer overflow glitch.
Mod parent up. Modern nuclear reactors are clean and can reliably produce lots of power. It is high time that the FUD surrounding nuclear power be dispelled.
Cost/kWh: From the article "We have reached a point where, in the next five years, we could build something which is in the order of 10-20 kW to transmit useful energy to the ground." Are you kidding me? 10-20kW? Pfft. That is very little power -- thats like powering 3 or 4 houses. The cost of the energy, materials, and time to design, build, launch, maintain (ground based monitoring, ground based photodiodes used to capture the laser light), a system like this would probably all cost at least 150 million dollars. I doubt a satellite like this would last more than 50 years. 150 million bucks for 10-20kW? What kind of a joke is that. Ground based solar/wind would me much more cost effective and just as clean.
Space Garbage: Do we really need more junk in geosynchronous orbit? Launching satellites may create space junk.
Safety: Do we really want a high powered laser beam (10-20kW) continuously aimed at earth? What happens if the devices on the satellite that control orientation fail? Then the beam might hit something else if it wasn't immediately powered off. I don't care what wavelength of light is used -- microwaves, infrared, UV, whatever -- if it is sufficiently concentrated by the time it reaches the Earth's surface, it can be harmful/unsafe. This technology has military applications.
Venture Capitalists, don't let yourselves be fooled...
Scooters compared to an electric bike are bad because:
Scooters are loud. Electric bikes are generally very quiet.
Scooters have small wheels, making it more dangerous for the rider if he hits a pothole, stone, bump, etc. Small wheels also make it more difficult to balance on a scooter. Large wheels are better for so many reasons -- easier to balance, goes over bumps better, etc.
Don't you need to pay insurance and registration fees for a scooter? I'm pretty sure you have to do that for mopeds. You don't need to insure or register your bicycle.
You don't need a drivers license to ride a bicycle.
You can power your electric bike just by pedaling when you run out of "fuel" (low battery). You can't do that on a scooter.
The Volt is a heavy car for its size. This is good and bad. Good because it probably increases the survivability of the driver during a collision with another car (conservation of momentum, p=mv). Bad because it probably makes the car more difficult to drive in slippery conditions, especially while making turns. An electric car like this also begs the question, how much electrical energy is wasted to heat the interior of the car in the dead of winter while the gasoline engine is turned off? Also, until more of our electricity comes from greener energy sources (wind, nuclear, solar, etc) is this car really better for the environment? The good thing about this car is it means less money going to fund terrorists in foreign lands.
I'll start playing Dragon Age when they unlock the camera on the PC version so I can tilt anywhere from 90 to 0 degrees. I hate not being able to zoom all the way out and tilt the camera down so I can see the horizon. They should have just made the camera control like the same as what was used in Neverwinter Nights. Mod me a troll if you like, but I doubt I'm the only one who got frustrated with the artificially restricted camera control.
Great... So now instead of hogging too many CPU resources, IE will just hog resources on my GPU.
Drawbacks:
1) Slows down my other applications that use my GPU (Solidworks, games, etc)
2) Causes my system to consume more electricity than if I had used a faster (more CPU or hardware resource efficient) browser.
3) Means my framerate is going to decrease if I browse the web while using IE while playing a windowed game or watching a 1080p video. This is something I actually do since my wife sometimes likes to watch a video on display #2 while I use display #1 for other stuff.
Benefit:
1) Faster (more responsive) web experience.
Does this single benefit outweight the disadvantages? Perhaps, but I prefer the rival browser's approach to speedier browsers -- build a browser that renders pages more intelligently so that rendering requires fewer CPU/GPU/whatever resources.
I played through all the BG series and NWN series games. Loved them all, but Dragon Age has a really annoying "feature" with its camera that I have been unable to figure out how to disable. If you zoom out all the way, you cannot tilt the camera down to see the horizon. This makes it tough to see enemies far in the distance. Someone needs to make a hack that unlocks the camera in Dragon Age and makes it like the camera in NWN or Fallout 3.
In NWN, you had full control over the camera. In Dragon Age, you only have full control when it is zoomed in about 50%. Anything between 0% and 50% zoomed in is locked so you can't tilt the camera down towards the ground. It is really annoying.
The camera problem is the only gripe I have against the game. Otherwise, it is very polished and stable. The graphics are awesome -- you can see the pores in the skin of people's faces, and the lips move in a pretty realistic fashion and in sync with the speech. They also implemented non-verbal communication (facial expressions, mannerisms, etc) that are quite good. The voice acting is excellent. The sound and music are good. The story is pretty good. The engine and abilities/spells/skills are good, especially considering that Bioware developed them from scratch (probably so that they don't have to pay licensing fees for the Dungeons and Dragons rules). It would be nice if the character wasn't so locked into following a linear quest series. Baldurs Gate was more open ended -- you could just wander all over the land and explore whatever looked interesting to you.
We got rid of that car for other reasons, not just because of the sticky gas pedal. It would have cost about $2k to get it to pass NY state auto inspection, and it got really bad gas mileage (14 miles/gallon).
If it were just the gas pedal that was the problem, then yes, I would have fixed it.
As an owner of a 2009 Toyota Camry LE, I can confirm that my car will occasionally (maybe once every 30 minutes on average) start accelerating (not fast, maybe 1 mile per hour per second) for about 2.5 seconds, even when my foot is steady on the gas pedal, and even when I'm driving on a completely flat surface, with the cruise control off, and with no external forces like wind outside or gravity pulling the car up/down a hill. This absolutely has nothing to do with the floor mat because it happens when my feet are not shifting at all. I'm a test engineer and have a good sense of cause and effect, how changes on the inputs to a system affect the outputs. The next thing I'm going to do is remove the floor mat and see if it still happens.
Anytime your car starts to accelerate when you don't want it to, you can always just put the car in neutral. You have to train your brain to do this automatically and quickly, because if you start accelerating rapidly, you will also need to focus on the road and not cause an accident. My wife almost got in an accident several years ago because our old 1993 Ford Explorer had a sticky gas pedal. We've since gotten rid of that clunker (thank goodness), but when it was happened I told her it was important for her to train her "muscle memory" to put the car in neutral. Many people who don't know how to drive a manual transmission also don't ever use the neutral on their automatic transmission vehicles.
No, it will not result in less DRM. Microsoft will just license this digital restrictions management technology to other mega corporations. So Microsoft will just get even more money to finance their evil agendas.
Software patents must die!
The article says that the the ABL uses a COIL laser which has an output wavelength of 1.315 Âm, the wavelength of transition of atomic iodine. What reflects light well at that infrared wavelength? Gold. Yup, just plate your missile with gold and it might be able to survive hits from a laser like this. They probably use gold on the mirror(s) used to aim this laser. The reflectivity of gold at 1.315 microns is about 98%.
So if this really is a 1MW laser, then only 20kWatts of energy gets through. Plus, the beam diverges, so at a long distance the beam diameter might be something like 1meter. The USAF probably can't even run this laser for very long or else it will self destruct. So, 20kWatts of energy that is pulsed for a few seconds over a 1meter area? You can design a missile to withstand that. Just plate it with gold, and put on some aerodynamic heat sinks and/or shield and/or insulation.
RTFA. This is about drives that they don't want to use again.
I understand that. My point is, by securely erasing the drive rather than destroying it, you're helping the environment by allowing someone else (probably in a 3rd world country that imports e-waste) to have a working hard disk rather than a dead one. If the hard disk arrives smashed, all they can do is just recycle the metals, probably in a very environmentally unfriendly way. If the hard disk arrives in working condition, they'll use/sell it. By selling it they can make money to buy food. So by exporting working electronics instead of dead ones you're doing the world a favor.
Obviously, if the drive has already died of natural causes and cannot be secure erased, then the best way to ensure that no one resurrects the drive and recovers the data would be to destroy the drive..
By destroying the drive, you make it so that the drive cannot be re-used. Why not just secure erase the entire drive? I bet it takes less time to plug the machine in and boot off a CD than it does to open the case, remove the drive, and then smash it. Isn't there some free software that you can use to securely erase all the data on a drive with minimal effort?
From the article it says, "At Sumitomo Electric, they have overcome this problem by developing a GaN crystal which inhibits the efficiency drop, resulting in room temperature pulse operation of a laser diode emitting in the pure-green region at 531nm."
Having worked on development of GaN blue lasers, there are a lot of challenges to getting a reliable, continuous wave (CW) diode laser that operates at this wavelength. My guess is they hammered their green diode laser with very short high power pulses just to get it to lase. So it is probably not a very useful laser if it cannot operate in CW mode.
...translates to:
"Only really stupid paranoids think that there is a secret society trying to get them. People in general are too lazy to act en-masse' to disrupt things if they are comfortable. If you are creating misery and death for a group, then by all means worry.
But these people are simply clutching at straws.."
From TFA:
"Just like the Eee, the Elonex achieves cost savings by bundling freely redistributable open source software including, of course, the Linux operating system (specifically, Linos 2.6.21)"
Linux is just the kernel, GNU is the operating system.
From TFA:
"Unlike the Eee, however, the native resolution is a more regular (though narrower) 640x480 instead of the bizarre 640x400 ASUS offer."
This is false. I own the Asus Eee PC 701. It has a resolution of 800x480, not "640x400".
From TFA:
"Now, returning to hardware, although I commented on how much the ONE seems reminiscent of the Eee there are some differences. I already mentioned the resolution which while taller is narrower."
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I am not convinced Toyota has found the root cause of this unintended acceleration. I am waiting until they do before taking this car in to the dealer. My wife who drives the car 99% of the time (I drive a Honda Fit 2009 manual transmission) knows to be ready to put the car into neutral if it starts to take off. So I'm fairly confident this wouldn't cause her to get into an accident.
Also, before I take her car into the dealer, I would really like to be able to download a snapshot of the computer's firmware. That way I could use diff to check whether or not the dealer secretly changed the computer inside her car in order to fix a problem like this.
In my opinion, the fix Toyota is currently talking about "update the computer so that whenever both the brake and accelerator are pressed at the same time, the brake will win, not the accelerator" is a bandaid fix and doesn't address the root cause of why the unintended acceleration happened in the first place. Having worked on many software projects, I hate it when developers implement band aid fixes rather than putting forth the effort and time to discover and fix the root cause of a problem.
I'm also a software developer, and an owner of a Camry 2009. I suspect a software or computer glitch is the root cause. I've experienced unintended acceleration in my Camry twice while I was cruising on a flat straight road going about 38MPH. Both my feet were completely motionless both times it happened. While my right foot was steady on the accelerator, the car just sped up (by about 1 to 2MPH/second) for about 2.5 seconds. I was like WTF was that!?!?! So far, I've only had it happen a few times, but I know it wasn't caused by the fricking floor mat. Last year when I heard Toyota blame it on the floor mat I got so upset because, based on my experience, I knew it wasn't caused by the floor mat. I don't know why Toyota is so reluctant to audit their computer hardware/software. Toyota should be forced to release all the code that is in any way/shape/form connected to the throttle and accelerator pedal for public scrutiny. It will cost them essentially nothing to post the code on their website, so there is no reason not to do this. Since buggy code could jeopardize the safety of the public, the code should be publicly available. Read my post from last year about this here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=29976746&art_pos=18 My guess is that is probably some stupid divide by zero or integer overflow glitch.
Mod parent up. Modern nuclear reactors are clean and can reliably produce lots of power. It is high time that the FUD surrounding nuclear power be dispelled.
Venture Capitalists, don't let yourselves be fooled...
The Volt is a heavy car for its size. This is good and bad. Good because it probably increases the survivability of the driver during a collision with another car (conservation of momentum, p=mv). Bad because it probably makes the car more difficult to drive in slippery conditions, especially while making turns. An electric car like this also begs the question, how much electrical energy is wasted to heat the interior of the car in the dead of winter while the gasoline engine is turned off? Also, until more of our electricity comes from greener energy sources (wind, nuclear, solar, etc) is this car really better for the environment? The good thing about this car is it means less money going to fund terrorists in foreign lands.
I'll start playing Dragon Age when they unlock the camera on the PC version so I can tilt anywhere from 90 to 0 degrees. I hate not being able to zoom all the way out and tilt the camera down so I can see the horizon. They should have just made the camera control like the same as what was used in Neverwinter Nights. Mod me a troll if you like, but I doubt I'm the only one who got frustrated with the artificially restricted camera control.
Wouldn't a fake feed would consume precious over-the-air bandwidth?
More people need to recognize that Stallman has done more for free software than Torvalds.
Mod parent up. This is the solution to the root cause of IE slowness.
Great... So now instead of hogging too many CPU resources, IE will just hog resources on my GPU.
Drawbacks:
1) Slows down my other applications that use my GPU (Solidworks, games, etc)
2) Causes my system to consume more electricity than if I had used a faster (more CPU or hardware resource efficient) browser.
3) Means my framerate is going to decrease if I browse the web while using IE while playing a windowed game or watching a 1080p video. This is something I actually do since my wife sometimes likes to watch a video on display #2 while I use display #1 for other stuff.
Benefit:
1) Faster (more responsive) web experience.
Does this single benefit outweight the disadvantages? Perhaps, but I prefer the rival browser's approach to speedier browsers -- build a browser that renders pages more intelligently so that rendering requires fewer CPU/GPU/whatever resources.
Mod parent up. 7-zip is a lot better than WinZIP and 7-zip is free software.
I played through all the BG series and NWN series games. Loved them all, but Dragon Age has a really annoying "feature" with its camera that I have been unable to figure out how to disable. If you zoom out all the way, you cannot tilt the camera down to see the horizon. This makes it tough to see enemies far in the distance. Someone needs to make a hack that unlocks the camera in Dragon Age and makes it like the camera in NWN or Fallout 3.
In NWN, you had full control over the camera. In Dragon Age, you only have full control when it is zoomed in about 50%. Anything between 0% and 50% zoomed in is locked so you can't tilt the camera down towards the ground. It is really annoying.
The camera problem is the only gripe I have against the game. Otherwise, it is very polished and stable. The graphics are awesome -- you can see the pores in the skin of people's faces, and the lips move in a pretty realistic fashion and in sync with the speech. They also implemented non-verbal communication (facial expressions, mannerisms, etc) that are quite good. The voice acting is excellent. The sound and music are good. The story is pretty good. The engine and abilities/spells/skills are good, especially considering that Bioware developed them from scratch (probably so that they don't have to pay licensing fees for the Dungeons and Dragons rules). It would be nice if the character wasn't so locked into following a linear quest series. Baldurs Gate was more open ended -- you could just wander all over the land and explore whatever looked interesting to you.
We got rid of that car for other reasons, not just because of the sticky gas pedal. It would have cost about $2k to get it to pass NY state auto inspection, and it got really bad gas mileage (14 miles/gallon).
If it were just the gas pedal that was the problem, then yes, I would have fixed it.
As an owner of a 2009 Toyota Camry LE, I can confirm that my car will occasionally (maybe once every 30 minutes on average) start accelerating (not fast, maybe 1 mile per hour per second) for about 2.5 seconds, even when my foot is steady on the gas pedal, and even when I'm driving on a completely flat surface, with the cruise control off, and with no external forces like wind outside or gravity pulling the car up/down a hill. This absolutely has nothing to do with the floor mat because it happens when my feet are not shifting at all. I'm a test engineer and have a good sense of cause and effect, how changes on the inputs to a system affect the outputs. The next thing I'm going to do is remove the floor mat and see if it still happens.
Anytime your car starts to accelerate when you don't want it to, you can always just put the car in neutral. You have to train your brain to do this automatically and quickly, because if you start accelerating rapidly, you will also need to focus on the road and not cause an accident. My wife almost got in an accident several years ago because our old 1993 Ford Explorer had a sticky gas pedal. We've since gotten rid of that clunker (thank goodness), but when it was happened I told her it was important for her to train her "muscle memory" to put the car in neutral. Many people who don't know how to drive a manual transmission also don't ever use the neutral on their automatic transmission vehicles.
No, it will not result in less DRM. Microsoft will just license this digital restrictions management technology to other mega corporations. So Microsoft will just get even more money to finance their evil agendas. Software patents must die!
The article says that the the ABL uses a COIL laser which has an output wavelength of 1.315 Âm, the wavelength of transition of atomic iodine. What reflects light well at that infrared wavelength? Gold. Yup, just plate your missile with gold and it might be able to survive hits from a laser like this. They probably use gold on the mirror(s) used to aim this laser. The reflectivity of gold at 1.315 microns is about 98%.
So if this really is a 1MW laser, then only 20kWatts of energy gets through. Plus, the beam diverges, so at a long distance the beam diameter might be something like 1meter. The USAF probably can't even run this laser for very long or else it will self destruct. So, 20kWatts of energy that is pulsed for a few seconds over a 1meter area? You can design a missile to withstand that. Just plate it with gold, and put on some aerodynamic heat sinks and/or shield and/or insulation.
flubber?
RTFA. This is about drives that they don't want to use again.
I understand that. My point is, by securely erasing the drive rather than destroying it, you're helping the environment by allowing someone else (probably in a 3rd world country that imports e-waste) to have a working hard disk rather than a dead one. If the hard disk arrives smashed, all they can do is just recycle the metals, probably in a very environmentally unfriendly way. If the hard disk arrives in working condition, they'll use/sell it. By selling it they can make money to buy food. So by exporting working electronics instead of dead ones you're doing the world a favor.
Obviously, if the drive has already died of natural causes and cannot be secure erased, then the best way to ensure that no one resurrects the drive and recovers the data would be to destroy the drive..
By destroying the drive, you make it so that the drive cannot be re-used. Why not just secure erase the entire drive? I bet it takes less time to plug the machine in and boot off a CD than it does to open the case, remove the drive, and then smash it. Isn't there some free software that you can use to securely erase all the data on a drive with minimal effort?
What does a Doctor gain by prescribing you a treatment that isn't needed?
Defensive Medicine (CYA for doctors)
From the article it says, "At Sumitomo Electric, they have overcome this problem by developing a GaN crystal which inhibits the efficiency drop, resulting in room temperature pulse operation of a laser diode emitting in the pure-green region at 531nm." Having worked on development of GaN blue lasers, there are a lot of challenges to getting a reliable, continuous wave (CW) diode laser that operates at this wavelength. My guess is they hammered their green diode laser with very short high power pulses just to get it to lase. So it is probably not a very useful laser if it cannot operate in CW mode.
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...translates to: "Only really stupid paranoids think that there is a secret society trying to get them. People in general are too lazy to act en-masse' to disrupt things if they are comfortable. If you are creating misery and death for a group, then by all means worry. But these people are simply clutching at straws.."
I also took this course at Cornell from Land. The things I learned in his class were incredibly valuable. It was a lot of work but very fun.
Linux is just the kernel, GNU is the operating system.
From TFA: "Unlike the Eee, however, the native resolution is a more regular (though narrower) 640x480 instead of the bizarre 640x400 ASUS offer."
This is false. I own the Asus Eee PC 701. It has a resolution of 800x480, not "640x400".
From TFA: "Now, returning to hardware, although I commented on how much the ONE seems reminiscent of the Eee there are some differences. I already mentioned the resolution which while taller is narrower."
Again, this is false.