A, but keep reading this story, and you will see I've been bitch slapped as being responsible for what my computer driven car decides to run over or crash into while I do the responsible thing and surrender the driving to the computer.
They want to make cars like elevators. Step in push the button regardless of how drunk you are. But they also seem to believe you bear total responsibility for anything that car might do whether you are awake or not.
The car hate lobby wants to deprive you of driving, and still keep you liable. And they see nothing wrong or inconsistent with those two positions. Their clear message is you shouldn't own a car. You probably shouldn't take elevators either. And mass transit is your fault too.
No doubt Hydro changes ecosystems, but unless you are damming very large rivers and endangering fish runs, the ecosystem changes are not significantly different than what was there, (larger lakes where smaller ones were).
The single most significant impact seems to be on certain species of ocean going fish. As often as not fish and bird populations are improved by lakes forming upstream of dams.
The alleged damage is merely change, and not irreversible change, but some people won't accept any change. They bitch long and loud about it while sitting in their houses built on huge tracts covering vast regions of prime farmland, prairies and forest.
In many regions, we are tearing out no longer needed dams:
Like the GP suggested: Motherships. What better space ship can you conceive of than traveling with an entire solar system? Who knows how many worlds they might have seeded.
Some seem to be passing by our neighborhood. Mom? Where are you going?
Refuse to accept new release that don't support backward compatibility of existing code. Every other sane programming language does this to the fullest extent possible. Seems Python likes to just cut the cord.
Stop obsoleting code on a 3 year cycle and you wouldn't have so many stragglers. Programming languages need stability and backward compatibility. You can't rebuild the world each time someone decides to issue a point release. Handle it in the compiler.
Its not like there is any rush. This has been done many times, for other mines. Some cities in Northern Minnesota have been moved for open pit mines. You simply forbid building where the danger zone.
Just put up a couple big malls in the desired spot and the downtown will more or less move itself.
All the galaxies in our neighborhood are also rushing at a speed of nearly 1,000 kilometers per second (2,236.936 miles per hour) towards a structure called the Great Attractor, a region of space roughly 150 million light-years away.
In addition, our solar system--Earth and all--whirls around the center of our galaxy at some 220 kilometers per second, or 490,000 miles per hour.
The earth is moving toward the Constellation Leo at the dizzying speed of 390 kilometers per second. (872,405 miles per hour).
Lots stuff going places fast.
Now if you find an inhabitable planet orbiting one of these stars let me know. That would be the mothership of all motherships.
Yeah, I'm not sure I'm ready to have cost issued decided by a judge.
In what may be the first time a U.S. solar power project has been declared cost-competitive against natural gas in a competitive bidding process, a judge has said solar is cheaper than natural gas. The ruling could be a road map for avoiding a new fossil fuel age dominated by big natural gas.
He can declare all he wants. When it comes to the issue of cost, a legal jurist is seriously outside his area of competence. Solar in Minnesota is asinine. I lived there for may years.
Generally planes don't fall out of the sky just because the pilot has control again when he didn't expect it.
Well they would be falling out of the sky by the hundreds if plane density was anything like automotive density.
Its a whole different thing. The autopilot does't alarm you 1.5 seconds before you slam into the ground. And they are never the sole control method used in high density airspace where planes are plentiful (meaning closer than a couple miles). You've got ATC calling traffic for you, your own radar and eyes constantly scanning.
But driver-less cars are billed as being able to removing any any interaction with steering, acceleration, or braking, in dense traffic, on city streets.
Even it its testing state, driver-less cars are miles ahead of auto-pilots, even those doing 0-0 automated landings.
I doubt the utilities would like this, but for the average home dweller with solar panels it would be useful.
Or we could use the battery in cars, so that while we charge our car in it's garage, when the sun goes down, it can power the house back the other way.
Which makes it really difficult to get to work the next morning.
Actually neither the summary or the article state that it could be used large scale, they merely speculate. Their test unit is no bigger than a toaster, and they haven't run it for very long. They are just beginning their investigation.
One wonders if they are allowing for the amount of energy used to pump this stuff around in their calculations, and the degree to which it is affected by temperature etc.
In short, there are one of these announcements appearing on Slashdot on an average of once a month. There is a lot of research being done, but none of these have reached large scale deployment or even production status.
These are all 20 years in the future solutions. Sort of like wind farms and desert solar plants were 20 years ago.
Bart Korman is the sponsor of House Bill 44 (HB44). The bill would allow Missouri utilities – including Ameren, Kansas City Power & Light, and Empire Electric Company – to count ancient hydroelectric plants like the 83 year-old Bagnell Dam towards compliance with the RES.
Clue: Hydro Power IS Renewable Power. Its perfectly appropriate.
In addition, HB44 would allow these utilities to purchase “renewable energy credits” from hydropower from anywhere in the world, of any size. If HB44 goes into law, utilities will change nothing about where their power comes from, and instead Missouri ratepayers would literally be subsidizing large hydropower from faraway places like the Hoover.
In the large picture, it doesn't matter where the power enters the GRID. We've been "wheeling" power for close to a hundred years. There isn't wind power everywhere, so getting those areas that do have it to put it on the grid makes sense. If there is nobody living in a a windy area, there would be little reason to build a wind farm there unless you could find remote purchasers.
Your example is seriously flawed. Your understanding of power generation is seriously lacking. But I gotta say, your tinfoil hat is bright and shiny.
Suse, and Novel before them, have stated for years that OS is supported to vet new releases of Opensource software prior to its inclusion into the paid SLED/SLES products. It is independent, only in name, and as soon as SUSE stops supporting them financially and with infrastructure it folds like a wedding tent in a windstorm.
It is on a forced quick-march into new kernels and packages and also short time frame obsolescence of its releases, and this is forced on them by the need to vet packages for production use. The userbase has for years been complaining about the short obsolescence of its releases, and the absence of any Long Term Support releases (other than the single man unofficial Evergreen release). If it were truely community based stability would be the first thing it fixed.
It may appear to be independent, but it still gains most of its support from Suse/Attachmate for infrastructure and payroll. This has become somewhat less obvious now that Attachmate owns Suse, but it is still true.
Perhaps you missed the copyright on the bottom of the opensuse web page?
The inaction by the doctor is required by law. (More than a few doctors have or would have taken matters into their own hands).
So the situation is quite different. The simulation presents false choices in unrealistic situations, and therefore you can't attribute much insight to the study, and would probably learn more watching a few rounds of team Capture the Flag.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power to prevent the five deaths at the cost of one other. Inaction is also an action by itself.
And thinking outside the box is an action as well. Like maybe shouting and blowing the train horn, throwing rocks, depending on where said witness stands. Even deaf people react to being it with a rock.
The dilemmas shown are false, and Its amazing that the participants would even take the simulation seriously enough to give meaningful results.
So, we're assuming that all participants considered the death of (virtual) humans to be a bad thing?
Not only that, but we are assuming that how humans in obvious simulations of one sort or another has any bearing on situations in the real world.
As best I can fathom, the report suggests people are less bored and more willing to play along in a VR simulation than they are when reading (and trying to imagine) text based scenarios.
Probably explains (yet again) more about why text based MUDs are entering extinction while every one and their brother is coming out with another on-line virtual reality game.
Drivers detect the possibility of kid running out in the street way better and way more often than you give them credit for.
The kids behind that row of parked cars, tossing that Frisbee having a game of catch alert even the student driver to the possibility. That you are unaware of this suggest you've never taken a defensive driving course, and are probably talking about your own skill set when you consistently denigrate human drivers.
The vast majority of drivers go many years without even a close call, many decades between fender benders. While its all the rage these days to spread fear and loathing about human drivers, the facts are that highway accident statistics have been falling for decades. Both in total numbers, and in crash rates, even as our population grows and we swamp the roads with ever more cars. Fatalities per hundred million vehicle miles traveled are at all time lows.
If you want to make an improvement in lives saved, invent a better car interlock. Thirty-one percent of all fatal crashes involved alcohol-impaired driving (over the.08 limit). 31% is a big number. Teaching people how to drive in the rain would take out another 9 or 10%.
The sats that are small (Doves) get only 3-5 meter resolution. The much larger Skybox 1 meter resolution are not that small, weighing 100kg.
3 to 5 meters misses car sized objects, or at best maps them into a single pixel. (Although by combining many subsequent frames you could achieve a better simulated resolution).
So this is not likely to be useful for much besides measuring snowfall, forest fires, and storms. The 1 meter Skybox may be of greater interest, because you could track cattle and traffic in real time given enough of them in orbit.
But 24 or 28 units aren't going to be able to support much useful coverage, as they would be hard pressed target more than a couple location of interest at a time. (Which is a good thing, in light of all the governmental spying).
The fact they haven't published figures indicates it happens all the time. Not the opposite.
They have a human driver ready to take over because they would all be wrecked otherwise.
I suspect you are correct, and I suspect driver less cars are a lot less advanced and capable than the cheerleaders would like you to believe. There is a reason they are testing these things only in sunny Arizona.
If a roof tile drops on you, its only because I didn't maintain the house. I have control of my house. If a tornado blows it off, its not my fault, (act of god) and your own insurance handles it.
Slashdot Mirror
A, but keep reading this story, and you will see I've been bitch slapped as being responsible for what my computer driven car decides to run over or crash into while I do the responsible thing and surrender the driving to the computer.
They want to make cars like elevators. Step in push the button regardless of how drunk you are.
But they also seem to believe you bear total responsibility for anything that car might do whether you are awake or not.
The car hate lobby wants to deprive you of driving, and still keep you liable. And they see nothing wrong or inconsistent with those two positions. Their clear message is you shouldn't own a car. You probably shouldn't take elevators either. And mass transit is your fault too.
No doubt Hydro changes ecosystems, but unless you are damming very large rivers and endangering fish runs, the ecosystem changes are not significantly different than what was there, (larger lakes where smaller ones were).
The single most significant impact seems to be on certain species of ocean going fish.
As often as not fish and bird populations are improved by lakes forming upstream of dams.
The alleged damage is merely change, and not irreversible change, but some people won't accept any change.
They bitch long and loud about it while sitting in their houses built on huge tracts covering vast regions of prime farmland, prairies and forest.
In many regions, we are tearing out no longer needed dams:
Cool Video Condit Dam: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/environment-news/us-condit-dam-breach-vin/
Time lapse Elwa Dam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUZE7kgXKJc
NYT Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/us/30dam.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Maine: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/us/maine-dam-removal-a-start-to-restoring-spawning-grounds.html
Maybe they already did that.
Like the GP suggested: Motherships.
What better space ship can you conceive of than traveling with an entire solar system?
Who knows how many worlds they might have seeded.
Some seem to be passing by our neighborhood. Mom? Where are you going?
Should have been all commas. Doh.
At least for those of us on this side of the pond.
Exactly.
Refuse to accept new release that don't support backward compatibility of existing code.
Every other sane programming language does this to the fullest extent possible.
Seems Python likes to just cut the cord.
Just look at the time line:
(2.4 in 2008, 2.5 in 2011, and 2.6 last October),
Stop obsoleting code on a 3 year cycle and you wouldn't have so many stragglers.
Programming languages need stability and backward compatibility. You can't rebuild the world each time
someone decides to issue a point release. Handle it in the compiler.
Exactly.
Its not like there is any rush. This has been done many times, for other mines. Some cities in Northern Minnesota have been moved for open pit mines. You simply forbid building where the danger zone.
Just put up a couple big malls in the desired spot and the downtown will more or less move itself.
A million miles per hour is not all that much.
All the galaxies in our neighborhood are also rushing at a speed of nearly 1,000 kilometers per second (2,236.936 miles per hour) towards a structure called the Great Attractor, a region of space roughly 150 million light-years away.
In addition, our solar system--Earth and all--whirls around the center of our galaxy at some 220 kilometers per second, or 490,000 miles per hour.
The earth is moving toward the Constellation Leo at the dizzying speed of 390 kilometers per second. (872,405 miles per hour).
Lots stuff going places fast.
Now if you find an inhabitable planet orbiting one of these stars let me know. That would be the mothership of all motherships.
Yeah, I'm not sure I'm ready to have cost issued decided by a judge.
In what may be the first time a U.S. solar power project has been declared cost-competitive against natural gas in a competitive bidding process, a judge has said solar is cheaper than natural gas. The ruling could be a road map for avoiding a new fossil fuel age dominated by big natural gas.
He can declare all he wants. When it comes to the issue of cost, a legal jurist is seriously outside his area of competence. Solar in Minnesota is asinine. I lived there for may years.
Generally planes don't fall out of the sky just because the pilot has control again when he didn't expect it.
Well they would be falling out of the sky by the hundreds if plane density was anything like automotive density.
Its a whole different thing. The autopilot does't alarm you 1.5 seconds before you slam into the ground. And they are never the sole control method used in high density airspace where planes are plentiful (meaning closer than a couple miles). You've got ATC calling traffic for you, your own radar and eyes constantly scanning.
But driver-less cars are billed as being able to removing any any interaction with steering, acceleration, or braking, in dense traffic, on city streets.
Even it its testing state, driver-less cars are miles ahead of auto-pilots, even those doing 0-0 automated landings.
But those big units are capable of around 2-10 centimeter resolution.
Not to mention multiple wavelength capabilities. (IR, UV, etc).
Of course we could never afford more than a couple at any given time.
I doubt the utilities would like this, but for the average home dweller with solar panels it would be useful.
Or we could use the battery in cars, so that while we charge our car in it's garage, when the sun goes down, it can power the house back the other way.
Which makes it really difficult to get to work the next morning.
Actually neither the summary or the article state that it could be used large scale, they merely speculate.
Their test unit is no bigger than a toaster, and they haven't run it for very long.
They are just beginning their investigation.
One wonders if they are allowing for the amount of energy used to pump this stuff around in
their calculations, and the degree to which it is affected by temperature etc.
In short, there are one of these announcements appearing on Slashdot on an average of once
a month. There is a lot of research being done, but none of these have reached large scale
deployment or even production status.
These are all 20 years in the future solutions.
Sort of like wind farms and desert solar plants were 20 years ago.
Yeah, go read what your own post actually says.
Bart Korman is the sponsor of House Bill 44 (HB44). The bill would allow Missouri utilities – including Ameren, Kansas City Power & Light, and Empire Electric Company – to count ancient hydroelectric plants like the 83 year-old Bagnell Dam towards compliance with the RES.
Clue: Hydro Power IS Renewable Power. Its perfectly appropriate.
In addition, HB44 would allow these utilities to purchase “renewable energy credits” from hydropower from anywhere in the world, of any size. If HB44 goes into law, utilities will change nothing about where their power comes from, and instead Missouri ratepayers would literally be subsidizing large hydropower from faraway places like the Hoover.
In the large picture, it doesn't matter where the power enters the GRID. We've been "wheeling" power for close to a hundred years.
There isn't wind power everywhere, so getting those areas that do have it to put it on the grid makes sense. If there is nobody living
in a a windy area, there would be little reason to build a wind farm there unless you could find remote purchasers.
Your example is seriously flawed. Your understanding of power generation is seriously lacking.
But I gotta say, your tinfoil hat is bright and shiny.
And comprehensive insurance (if purchased) would see reductions due to the overall adoption of self-driving cars
You say that as if it is settled science.
If the car moves at all in driver-less mode, when it is in an un-maintained state, then the manufacturer is still responsible.
I push elevator buttons too. Am I liable for that?
Not true at all.
Suse, and Novel before them, have stated for years that OS is supported to vet new releases of Opensource software prior to its inclusion into the paid SLED/SLES products. It is independent, only in name, and as soon as SUSE stops supporting them financially and with infrastructure it folds like a wedding tent in a windstorm.
It is on a forced quick-march into new kernels and packages and also short time frame obsolescence of its releases, and this is forced on them by the need to vet packages for production use. The userbase has for years been complaining about the short obsolescence of its releases, and the absence of any Long Term Support releases (other than the single man unofficial Evergreen release). If it were truely community based stability would be the first thing it fixed.
It may appear to be independent, but it still gains most of its support from Suse/Attachmate for infrastructure and payroll.
This has become somewhat less obvious now that Attachmate owns Suse, but it is still true.
Perhaps you missed the copyright on the bottom of the opensuse web page?
The inaction by the doctor is required by law. (More than a few doctors have or would have taken matters into their own hands).
So the situation is quite different.
The simulation presents false choices in unrealistic situations, and therefore you can't attribute much insight to the study, and would probably learn more watching a few rounds of team Capture the Flag.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power to prevent the five deaths at the cost of one other. Inaction is also an action by itself.
And thinking outside the box is an action as well. Like maybe shouting and blowing the train horn, throwing rocks, depending on where said witness stands. Even deaf people react to being it with a rock.
The dilemmas shown are false, and Its amazing that the participants would even take the simulation seriously enough to give meaningful results.
Maybe, I, don't know, read the summary, (since the article is pay walled) ?
I know, right, read something more than the title on Slashdot? What was I thinking?!
So, we're assuming that all participants considered the death of (virtual) humans to be a bad thing?
Not only that, but we are assuming that how humans in obvious simulations of one sort or another has any bearing on situations in the real world.
As best I can fathom, the report suggests people are less bored and more willing to play along in a VR simulation than they are when reading (and trying to imagine) text based scenarios.
Probably explains (yet again) more about why text based MUDs are entering extinction while every one and their brother is coming out with another on-line virtual reality game.
Drivers detect the possibility of kid running out in the street way better and way more often than you give them credit for.
The kids behind that row of parked cars, tossing that Frisbee having a game of catch alert even the student driver to the possibility. That you are unaware of this suggest you've never taken a defensive driving course, and are probably talking about your own skill set when you consistently denigrate human drivers.
The vast majority of drivers go many years without even a close call, many decades between fender benders. While its all the rage these days to spread fear and loathing about human drivers, the facts are that highway accident statistics have been falling for decades. Both in total numbers, and in crash rates, even as our population grows and we swamp the roads with ever more cars. Fatalities per hundred million vehicle miles traveled are at all time lows.
If you want to make an improvement in lives saved, invent a better car interlock. Thirty-one percent of all fatal crashes involved alcohol-impaired driving (over the .08 limit). 31% is a big number. Teaching people how to drive in the rain would take out another 9 or 10%.
You're taking the train like a good boy, so they don't have to worry about you. You are already under control.
The sats that are small (Doves) get only 3-5 meter resolution.
The much larger Skybox 1 meter resolution are not that small, weighing 100kg.
3 to 5 meters misses car sized objects, or at best maps them into a single pixel.
(Although by combining many subsequent frames you could achieve a better simulated resolution).
So this is not likely to be useful for much besides measuring snowfall, forest fires, and storms.
The 1 meter Skybox may be of greater interest, because you could track cattle and traffic in real time given enough of them in orbit.
But 24 or 28 units aren't going to be able to support much useful coverage, as they would be hard pressed target more than a couple location of interest at a time. (Which is a good thing, in light of all the governmental spying).
The fact they haven't published figures indicates it happens all the time. Not the opposite.
They have a human driver ready to take over because they would all be wrecked otherwise.
I suspect you are correct, and I suspect driver less cars are a lot less advanced and capable than the cheerleaders would like you to believe. There is a reason they are testing these things only in sunny Arizona.
If a roof tile drops on you, its only because I didn't maintain the house. I have control of my house.
If a tornado blows it off, its not my fault, (act of god) and your own insurance handles it.