A driver may make his own choice to put himself into a certain-death brick wall in order to avoid probable death of self + the other car's passengers. Nobody and nothing else ever has the right to force it upon him. Irrespective of how logical and regardless of any "choice" previously input into the auto-auto preferences screens.
The problem is, the same applies to the other cars passengers. And Joe Driver had a choice to ride with whatever automation his car has, while the people in the other car had no choice over what automation Joe's car has. So why should they suffer just because Joe was a cheapass and chose the last years model with insufficient processing power to figure out a way to get out of this situation without harming anyone?
And this gets us to the real problem with self-driving vehicles: a vehicle that only thinks of its owner is unacceptable in public roads because it's a public hazard, and a vehicle that thinks of things besides its owner is likely to be unacceptable to a lot of people because people are selfish.
Of course, we could simply demand that the auto insurance pays a (huge) fee for each person killed in an accident involving self-driving cars and let the insurance companies sort it out. You want a car that prioritizes you over others, fine; how much extra are you willing to pay to be allowed in public roads in it?
If all cars on the road are autonomous why don't we just have trains, light rail and subways?
Rail is more expensive to build than asphalt. In fact, where I live, some roads are still just flattened dirt surfaces, and will likely stay that way in the foreseeable future. Also, light rail is not very fast, and the lighter the vehicle the greater the chances of derailment. Not to mention that it's impossible to make emergency dodges when you're on rail.
A well installed [hardware] microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
It's also almost impossible to write. A simple one will be found, since it'll end up inserting weird bugs to programs (or be so conservative that a change in compiler options will defeat it), and a complex one would need to perform high-level code function analysis and adaptive rewriting - and if you can write that in microcode, why are you wasting your time with cloak-and-dagger business? You'd do much better for yourself and your country by running a legit business.
Otherwise, we have to ask, how much are your dreams worth to the entire United States?
Potentially its entire existence, the next time a killer asteroid heads for Earth. An even ignoring that, there's China, India, and whatever aliens might be out there, all eager to establish their own empires in the sky and reduce the US into irrelevance.
Not that manned spaceflight is likely to be the most effective way to go about it at the moment; basic research into propulsion, material science, self-sustaining biospheres, small-scale manufacturing of high-tech items from raw materials, etc. should be the focus for now, especially since they all have a pretty much guaranteed high return of investement in purely economic terms.
Everything I've read suggests the opposite: that manned spaceflight is hugely more expensive that unmanned, and I've never seen any evidence that suggests that any space flights had to be redone to correct robot error.
Is it inherently more expensive, or simply because you need to send up more mass? A satellite needs neither life support or a re-entry capsule. And it's not like you can reduce safety on unmanned missions either, because then you'll risk a $100+ million dollar satellite or whatever going up in flames the wrong way.
But quoting an unnamed person making a wild guess about a specific instance and drawing an absolute, generalized conclusion to be used for life-or-death decisions apparently does.
The Python installers on Windows install to (by default) C:\Python$MAJOR$MINOR (Python 2.7 installs to C:\Python27, Python 3.2 installs to C:\Python32). For scripts that require a certain version of Python, you may have to open it with the proper version yourself, because (obviously).py files can only be associated with one program at a time. But for scripts made to be run by end-users, (assuming they don't ship their own Python runtime in the first place) a simple EXE wrapper can use the right interpreter. What part of this isn't easy?
The part where you need an EXE wrapper to do something the Python executable could itself do: get the version by parsing the first line of the script and delegate to another version if it's requested.
That's why the jQuery team is going to provide security fixes for 1.9 for a while.
Wait, what? JQuery is a Javascript library, which means that neither the client (because it's loaded from a remote machine) nor the server (because it runs in the client machine) can trust it. So how can it possibly have any security to fix?
The point is that if government is small and their power is strictly limited (as it should be!) then it doesn't really matter how evil and corrupt a certain group of politicians become because they can do minimal damage.
Limited by whom? Stop using the passive and name the entity that will stop the government from simply assuming more power yet fails to use dictatorial power itself. A civic-minded populace can do it, sure, but it also tends to extend the role of the government to help further various agendas, resulting in Nordic welfare countries at best and the corrupt American mess at worst.
Also, in your model, who will build all the infrastructure that's enormously important to the society but can take a decade or more to begin turning a profit? The free market is notoriously bad at long-term planning. For that matter, who will force the re-internalization of externalities (such as pollution controls), without which the free market gets twisted in an outright psychotic manner (whoever cares the least makes the most profit)? A strictly limited government cannot do either of these, nor can it deal with whatever future issues come up unless its scope can extend (in which case it will extend right back to where it's now).
The left refuses to accept the fact that power is an inherently corrupting influence. Strip the politicians of the power and the corruption (and resulting damage) diminishes. Big powerful government is a failed institution.
The right refuses to accept the fact that power cannot be destroyed, just shifted around. Strip the politicians of the power and the wealthy will wield it directly, like they did in the past. Big powerful government is the only institution standing between us and feudalism.
And then there's the assholes on both sides who simply want power for themselves and advance whatever agenda they think will get it.
What about private companies that run CRITICAL infrastructure, like ISP data centers?
What about them? If you give your CRITICAL infrastructure to be run by someone else, then you are a moron. This obviously goes even more strongly for actually critical emergency response functions where outages will cost lives rather than mere money.
The flip side is, that if you "did the crime" you'd be offered two choices. Plead or trial, with much stiffer penalties for trial than for pleading.
What purpose would basing sentences on intimidation, rather than actual trials, serve? If anything, it's plea bargaining and settling out of court that should be made illegal, since it's those aspects of current system that get most consistently abused. Why do you want to penalize people for defending themselves? Is this some kind of authoritarian bullshit where those accused by their betters should just grab their ankles and take it?
Rather than go to all the trouble of risking long term data storage, and whether or not someone is going to find and decode the warning before they dig into the burial vault, why not just dig a really deep hole or two and bury it? At 10+ km down, it's not going to be affecting anyone's drinking water.
Because we don't have the technology to make large holes 10+ km deep, and if we did, we could simply tap geothermal energy and not have this problem in the first place.
One picture is case civilization has collapsed - skulls, and people on fire.
If civilization has collapsed, I find it highly unlikely that anyone will be poking around in a vault located hundreds of meters beneath solid rock, with the ramp filled with crushed rocks and concrete.
You seem to have a lot in common with THESE people. They didn't prevail either.
While Luddites didn't prevail, they were entirely correct: Industrial Revolution was incredibly painful, and many people's quality of life plummeted. This was mainly due to the weak or nonexistent labour movements of the time, which allowed robber barons to take all the profits while the masses were left with the cost. And since the conditions are similar nowadays, one shouldn't really be surprised that ludditism is on a rise again - it is, after all, merely a response to a perceived threat.
I dunno - considering the level of catastrophe that happens to vehicles going 4000 miles through air when a paint chip strikes them, making a vehicle that operates a minuscule fraction of a millimeter from walls going by at that speed without turning into molten slag seems pretty difficult.
The difference is that this is a train, so weight is not going to be a problem. So make the outer shell out of solid steel 10 centimeters thick, and it's going to be fine.
The fact that the corona is much hotter contradicts well-known facts of thermodynamics. Sunspots are dark because they are holes in the solar atmosphere allowing the cooler solar interior to be seen through them.
A fun thermodynamical fact: if you surround a cold object with an envelope of hot gas, that object will heat to the same temperature as the gas. So it's not like the EU explains this either.
If Slashdot commenters admit that data projections can be massively wrong, then they must admit that climate projections (the favorite topic around here) could be wrong.
The difference is that here, the observations contradict the projections, while with the climate the observations confirm the projections.Yearly average temperatures are climbing, species are spreading north, arctic ice is shrinking...
It's the climate "scepticists" who deny observed reality, not scientists.
There's nothing wrong with casual gaming, other than where is hard core gaming or has is been pushed away?
Well, there's Europe Universalis and Victoria 2, which are basically world simulations. There's the Tropico series, which while not exactly hardcore is a pretty decent banana republic simulation. There's been an announcement of a new SimCity, which looks a bit like it'll be more like SimCity and less like Societies. And of course there's Super Meat Boy, Spacechem and other indie games Steam and other online retailers have given a publication channel to.
No, because the usb port will fail to load anything but keyboard and mouse drivers per Active Directory.adm rules.
Having a USB device pose as a keyboard and thus able to send keypresses could still be a security threat. Granted, it's not quite as efficient as two-way communications, but could still cause quite a bit of damage.
The parent has a point: if you don't want people plugging in USB devices, just physically disable the ports.
They don't want to have one of their employees make a disparaging remark about BMWs when the CEO of BMW is looking at a car advert in their in-flight magazine either.
Wouldn't it be far simpler and safer to simply tell the staff to not chat with the passengers? You never know what weird triggers some self-important douchebag might have, so why risk hitting any of them?
And the price of bread/underwear/soap/videogamesetcetcetc.
Yes, governments at wartime are usually quite concerned with keeping their population fed, clothed, clean and entertained, because it's pretty hard to win a war with one that's starving, freezing, diseased and demoralized. And naturally you need to see to these in peacetime too if you want to have a functional defence. You are entirely right.
Swoosh.
I'm afraid you'll need to elaborate a bit. What is the point I'm missing? Why do you imply that ensuring sufficient supply of vital strategic resources, such as food and healthcare, is not part of a national defence strategy?
Slashdot Mirror
Which it can't do because deer will enter the road by surprise from the forest on the side.
The problem is, the same applies to the other cars passengers. And Joe Driver had a choice to ride with whatever automation his car has, while the people in the other car had no choice over what automation Joe's car has. So why should they suffer just because Joe was a cheapass and chose the last years model with insufficient processing power to figure out a way to get out of this situation without harming anyone?
And this gets us to the real problem with self-driving vehicles: a vehicle that only thinks of its owner is unacceptable in public roads because it's a public hazard, and a vehicle that thinks of things besides its owner is likely to be unacceptable to a lot of people because people are selfish.
Of course, we could simply demand that the auto insurance pays a (huge) fee for each person killed in an accident involving self-driving cars and let the insurance companies sort it out. You want a car that prioritizes you over others, fine; how much extra are you willing to pay to be allowed in public roads in it?
Rail is more expensive to build than asphalt. In fact, where I live, some roads are still just flattened dirt surfaces, and will likely stay that way in the foreseeable future. Also, light rail is not very fast, and the lighter the vehicle the greater the chances of derailment. Not to mention that it's impossible to make emergency dodges when you're on rail.
It's also almost impossible to write. A simple one will be found, since it'll end up inserting weird bugs to programs (or be so conservative that a change in compiler options will defeat it), and a complex one would need to perform high-level code function analysis and adaptive rewriting - and if you can write that in microcode, why are you wasting your time with cloak-and-dagger business? You'd do much better for yourself and your country by running a legit business.
Potentially its entire existence, the next time a killer asteroid heads for Earth. An even ignoring that, there's China, India, and whatever aliens might be out there, all eager to establish their own empires in the sky and reduce the US into irrelevance.
Not that manned spaceflight is likely to be the most effective way to go about it at the moment; basic research into propulsion, material science, self-sustaining biospheres, small-scale manufacturing of high-tech items from raw materials, etc. should be the focus for now, especially since they all have a pretty much guaranteed high return of investement in purely economic terms.
Is it inherently more expensive, or simply because you need to send up more mass? A satellite needs neither life support or a re-entry capsule. And it's not like you can reduce safety on unmanned missions either, because then you'll risk a $100+ million dollar satellite or whatever going up in flames the wrong way.
A suicidal thrill-seeker is pretty much worthless as an astronaut.
But quoting an unnamed person making a wild guess about a specific instance and drawing an absolute, generalized conclusion to be used for life-or-death decisions apparently does.
The part where you need an EXE wrapper to do something the Python executable could itself do: get the version by parsing the first line of the script and delegate to another version if it's requested.
Wait, what? JQuery is a Javascript library, which means that neither the client (because it's loaded from a remote machine) nor the server (because it runs in the client machine) can trust it. So how can it possibly have any security to fix?
I have never once seen documentation written in English that didn't leave something important unclear.
Limited by whom? Stop using the passive and name the entity that will stop the government from simply assuming more power yet fails to use dictatorial power itself. A civic-minded populace can do it, sure, but it also tends to extend the role of the government to help further various agendas, resulting in Nordic welfare countries at best and the corrupt American mess at worst.
Also, in your model, who will build all the infrastructure that's enormously important to the society but can take a decade or more to begin turning a profit? The free market is notoriously bad at long-term planning. For that matter, who will force the re-internalization of externalities (such as pollution controls), without which the free market gets twisted in an outright psychotic manner (whoever cares the least makes the most profit)? A strictly limited government cannot do either of these, nor can it deal with whatever future issues come up unless its scope can extend (in which case it will extend right back to where it's now).
The right refuses to accept the fact that power cannot be destroyed, just shifted around. Strip the politicians of the power and the wealthy will wield it directly, like they did in the past. Big powerful government is the only institution standing between us and feudalism.
And then there's the assholes on both sides who simply want power for themselves and advance whatever agenda they think will get it.
What about them? If you give your CRITICAL infrastructure to be run by someone else, then you are a moron. This obviously goes even more strongly for actually critical emergency response functions where outages will cost lives rather than mere money.
What purpose would basing sentences on intimidation, rather than actual trials, serve? If anything, it's plea bargaining and settling out of court that should be made illegal, since it's those aspects of current system that get most consistently abused. Why do you want to penalize people for defending themselves? Is this some kind of authoritarian bullshit where those accused by their betters should just grab their ankles and take it?
Because 4G providers are corporations, while taxpayers are mere humans, and poor humans at that.
Because we don't have the technology to make large holes 10+ km deep, and if we did, we could simply tap geothermal energy and not have this problem in the first place.
If civilization has collapsed, I find it highly unlikely that anyone will be poking around in a vault located hundreds of meters beneath solid rock, with the ramp filled with crushed rocks and concrete.
While Luddites didn't prevail, they were entirely correct: Industrial Revolution was incredibly painful, and many people's quality of life plummeted. This was mainly due to the weak or nonexistent labour movements of the time, which allowed robber barons to take all the profits while the masses were left with the cost. And since the conditions are similar nowadays, one shouldn't really be surprised that ludditism is on a rise again - it is, after all, merely a response to a perceived threat.
The difference is that this is a train, so weight is not going to be a problem. So make the outer shell out of solid steel 10 centimeters thick, and it's going to be fine.
A fun thermodynamical fact: if you surround a cold object with an envelope of hot gas, that object will heat to the same temperature as the gas. So it's not like the EU explains this either.
The difference is that here, the observations contradict the projections, while with the climate the observations confirm the projections.Yearly average temperatures are climbing, species are spreading north, arctic ice is shrinking...
It's the climate "scepticists" who deny observed reality, not scientists.
Well, there's Europe Universalis and Victoria 2, which are basically world simulations. There's the Tropico series, which while not exactly hardcore is a pretty decent banana republic simulation. There's been an announcement of a new SimCity, which looks a bit like it'll be more like SimCity and less like Societies. And of course there's Super Meat Boy, Spacechem and other indie games Steam and other online retailers have given a publication channel to.
Having a USB device pose as a keyboard and thus able to send keypresses could still be a security threat. Granted, it's not quite as efficient as two-way communications, but could still cause quite a bit of damage.
The parent has a point: if you don't want people plugging in USB devices, just physically disable the ports.
Wouldn't it be far simpler and safer to simply tell the staff to not chat with the passengers? You never know what weird triggers some self-important douchebag might have, so why risk hitting any of them?
Yes, governments at wartime are usually quite concerned with keeping their population fed, clothed, clean and entertained, because it's pretty hard to win a war with one that's starving, freezing, diseased and demoralized. And naturally you need to see to these in peacetime too if you want to have a functional defence. You are entirely right.
I'm afraid you'll need to elaborate a bit. What is the point I'm missing? Why do you imply that ensuring sufficient supply of vital strategic resources, such as food and healthcare, is not part of a national defence strategy?