Take into account that Apple is going to do the transition Intel -> ARM real soon now,.
To be fair, that's only a rumour, and could be just a tweet to tell Intel that the missiles are on the way,
On the other hand, a "purge" of old software, riddled with hardware-dependent code instead of working through the OS frameworks, will help clear the decks for an ARM transition, too. Today, we ought to be at the point where the majority of applications (obviously, drivers, hypervisors etc, may be a different kettle of fish) will re-compile for x86, AMD64 or various ARM flavours at the flick of a switch. If, in 2018, your application cares whether the CPU is little- or big- endian, presumes the length of an int, or relies on a particular processor's SIMD rather than calling the Accelerate framework, you're holding it wrong.
If it were just affecting new applications entering the App store and otherwise stuck at a once-per-app warning for the next few years, I wouldn't complain - if they're going to axe 32 bit with the next MacOS release well, that's a bit premature.
Applications without 64bit binaries available should be considered abbandoned or dead. Depending on this kind of software is irresponsible and should be avoided at all cost.
Yeah, its irresponsible because the OS provider might suddenly pull support for them, preventing you from applying future OS upgrades - unless you're talking about internet-facing applications that need continual security patches.
Oh, wait, that's everything now, because everything comes with with cloud-y features you don't want (usually as an excuse to turn the app into a subscription service) - which is one reason why you might want to hang on to your old 32-bit software. That and the new "worse is the new better" design philosophy: We got away with perpetual betas, so let's see how far we can get with perpetual alphas... (a.k.a. Agile).
...partly because of technology, but also because they were running existing software designed to be mouse driven, with buttons and widgets far to small to operate by touch alone. Microsoft's business model was totally dependent on being able to support the vast range of existing Windows software - if users got the idea that they could live without legacy Windows software then they might could ditch WIndows for Mac or Linux. Apple designed the whole iOS software stack to be finger-operated.
The main problem now is there's a split in the market: laptops are for productivity while tablets are for consumption.
...which is only a problem if your name is Microsoft and you find that your legacy-software advantage doesn't work on mobile...
"Autopilot" is about right -- aircraft autopilots are designed to be used under human management.
Not according to Hollywood. 70% of the population's first thought when "autopilot" is mentioned will be the inflatable doll in Airplane! For that matter, I've seen documentaries where the pilot is doing paperwork while the plane is on autopilot. The people who named Tesla's self-drive system "autopilot" knew exactly what the majority of non-pilot's-license-holding customers would understand by the term.
Anyway, the "autopilot" concept in aviation relies on highly trained pilots backed up by air-traffic control who hit the panic button if two planes get within a quarter mile of each other. Joe & Jill averages in cars passing within inches of other cars and pedestrians at 30-70mph is a far tougher challenge.
Sorry, but the dust from all those straw men is getting up my nose.
Until recently, the formula was "Apple may not have invented x but they took and idea that was 'bubbling under', refined it into an attractive and easy-to-use consumer product and marketed the fuck out of it"... because, lets face it, Creative Nomads, LG Pradas and Windows XP Tablet Edition systems weren't exactly flying off the shelves. Marketing is part of innovation - deal with it.
The "innovation" of the iPhone was not "we're going to bolt a capacitative touch sensor onto a phone" but that Apple decided "right - this phone is going to have touch input, only touch input and we're going to design the whole UI to work really well with touch input for everything." I know I had a pre-iPhone Windows Mobile smartphone that included every input device imaginable (touch, stylus, joystick, jog/menu wheel, slide-out qwerty keyboard and so many dedicated buttons that you couldn't pick it up without triggering something) - all coupled with a generic OS that was optimised for none of them. NB: this was the sort of "toothpick" stylus - that you needed because the on-screen keyboard and some of the buttons were too small for fingers - that Jobs was talking about when he derided the idea of styluses on phones.
Oh, and don't forget the Newton - the 1990s iPad predecessor killed by a Doonsbury cartoon. At the very least, Apple invented the funny AutoCorrect snafu meme.
However, recently, its all a bit sadder - lets make it 10% thinner, lets see how big you can make the trackpad before it gets too big, lets totally fuck up the keyboard to shave off a few mm... The "notch" (or "ears" if you're a glass-half full person) basically says "Whoops - Samsung had beaten us to removing the left and right bezels and we couldn't come up with through-display cameras and fingerprint sensors in time". Then there's the whole iPhone 7 fiasco - lets release a phone where the only feature of note is the removal of the headphone jack, rather than wait and bury that "unfeature" in a radical re-design. I suspect that it was only exploding Samsungs that saved Apple's bacon on that one. Maybe that would have happened if Jobs was still around but man would he have gone mediaeval on some poor sod over it...
...and, yeah, Widgets kinda mark the point where Android stopped copying Apple and Apple started copying Android.
When was the last time you had an outage because the UI didn't work right?
Outright outage? Maybe not, but with a buggy or badly-designed UI, you just get a less spectacular, day-to-day loss of productivity due to improper/inefficient use of the system, tech support time wasted hand-holding users, mistakes made by operators and pissed-off customers... worst case: for a commercial product, people don't buy it. For a corporate system: users make the minimum use of the system they can get away with and rely on their own ad-hoc paper solutions and spreadsheets to get the job done - possibly a massive liability n the making. All less "visible" than the lights going out (figuratively) for a few hours but potentially far worse/more expensive in the long term.
If you're only going to hire one developer then (obviously) they need to be "full stack" - and have actual experience. If you have a team then maybe you can afford the luxury of a backend expert and a UI expert - but you also need a generalist - who understands the whole problem and can at least communicate with both specialists to keep them working together. Otherwise, you get the usual bullshit where each one thinks that they're the only one with a hard job and lives in a dream world where both parts of the project can be designed in perfect isolation (good aspiration, but probably not going to happen). Of course, I'm assuming "UI expert" means "actually experienced in solving practical problems in the field" not "word perfect in UX jargon" - but a similar caveat applies to all fields of development.
I think this is a terrible flaw in our legal/traffic system. If what you say is true, just about everyone on that road should be equally guilty and all should be punished.
Well, yes - if anybody out there thinks they're a perfect driver who has not and/or never will suffer a potentially dangerous brainfart then they're the ones to watch out for. If you treat every other road user as a potential idiot then that's a start, but you've missed out one potential idiot.
...and what do you mean "if what I say is true?" Surely you don't actually think a 40mph limit is a guarantee that its safe to do 39mph? Its an arbitrary limit dreamed up by a committee using some simplistic rules and heavily influenced by politics and statement making (locally to me, a supermarket firm paid to "enhance local road safety" by sponsoring a 20mph zone as a sweetener to get council permission to build a new store). On a nice bright, dry day its probably quite safe to do 50 along that road - if its dark/foggy/icy or the local school has just turned out then 20 might be pushing it.
This is one of the other hurdles that self-driving cars are going to face: if they're going to be safer than human drivers then the things are going to have to drive around like they're taking a driving test - and we're all going to realise how many "calculated risks" we take when driving around the real world. We all know that observing the speed limit earns you an Audi* up the tailpipe (sure, its his fault if you have to brake and he hits you, but you still get hit) and I'm sure we all know a few junctions where, if you wait until it s totally safe to pull out you'd better have brought sandwiches (at least in a self-driver you might be able to eat them without breaking the law). Its gonna be really, really irritating for many people... (I'd vote for rear-facing seats so I don't have to pay any attention to the driving, and can just have fun flipping the bird at the fuming Audi driver behind...)
* Apologies to the careful and responsible Audi drivers out there - all six of them.
I don't think a human driver would be deemed at fault if they had dash cam footage similar to the video we saw.
I wouldn't like to bet either way (and it might depend on jurisdiction) - if it had been in the UK - where its generally considered the driver's responsibility not to hit things in front of them - I suspect the driver (or their insurance) - would bear the civil liability and the question of a "causing death by careless/reckless/dangerous driving" charge would at least be considered. However, the USA is the world leader in regulatory capture.
Had the video shown the pedestrian dash out from behind an obstacle then that would have been different - but what it actually shows is that 5s before the impact, the only thing rendering her "invisible" was the apparent lack of light - so the car was outdriving its headlamps - i.e. speeding. If (if!) the video was accurate, the speed limit was irrelevant: a 40mph limit doesn't give you the right to drive at 40mph in poor visibility and, AFAIK, even in the US, "jaywalking" doesn't make you a legitimate target.
I freely admit it's still a "There but for the grace of the sky fairy go I" type of accident - but I'm not testing experimental vehicles under special dispensation.
Here's a proposal: "safety drivers" in these tests should have some sort of professional driving qualification beyond a regular license - e.g. certified driving instructor, police driving training, or the US equivalent of the UK "advanced driving test" if there is one. Apart from being less likely to get distracted - and being better able to anticipate danger and intervene before the emergency (which would have saved the day here), they'll be able to give much better feedback on the car's performance. Of course, that would mean paying a decent wage, and create the danger of getting feedback on inconvenient truths...
The safety driver was not looking through the windshield at the road.
Well, yes, that's rather the point...
I saw a person wearing a black hoodie
Look again. Sure, its some kind of dark top, but If its a hoodie, the hood is down and she has what looks like light brown or ginger hair (or headgear), blue jeans, shoes with a lot of white on them and is pushing a red bike with shiny wheel-rims. So "black hoodie" is pure spin - she wasn't exactly in stealth mode.
But it wasn't at all like the person was visible from a distance where a human driver would have always done better.
Sigh... lets try this one last time: if that video (filmed on a camera which couldn't see anything not in the direct beam of the dipped headlights) was representative of the actual visibility at the time then the car was driving too fast for the conditions. You're not supposed to drive hell-for-leather into a featureless dark void with your fingers crossed that there's nothing lurking in there. Sure its a mistake that a human driver might make - but its one for which they would be taken to task for afterwards. Not saying that I would definitely have done better, but I'd have been easing up on the juice and tensing up if I saw that pool of darkness ahead (assuming that wasn't an artefact of the dashcam). This car is supposed to have infra-red LIDAR and a computer with superhuman reflexes...
Meanwhile, the third party videos of the road that have since appeared show - at the very least - that you can't judge the actual visibility from a video recording with undefined gain/white balance/contrast settings. They don't prove anything absolutely but they do appear to show a well-lit stretch of road where a human eye could easily have seen someone pushing a red bike across the road from the left-hand side.
This was a slamming on the brakes and pray situation and it isn't clear from the video alone when the car or the safety driver slammed on the brakes.
Actually, its not evident from the video that the car slammed on its brakes at all (which would noticeably dip the car's nose) - nor does there seem to be anything coming the other way that would have prevented the car driving around the woman.
At the very least, this fails to live up to the promise of self-driving cars as safer than human drivers - in a very simple scenario (human crossing an otherwise clear road at night) that should have had the fuck simulated out of it before being let loose on the road, and should be bread and butter for a car that can see by infra-red. There will be far tougher challenges for self-driving cars.
Since the driver was unable to detect this incident too, they better remove all drivers as well!
If a driver was caught behaving like the one in the Uber video - not holding the wheel, concentrating on something in their lap and only glancing occasionally at the road, or otherwise not fully in control of their vehicle - they probably would be removed (and/or have their house removed by the civil courts if death/injury was involved).
Why are people implying that there is some double standard being applied against Uber here? They were already granted an exception that allowed them to test cars in "hands off" mode provided theyn had a safety driver ready to intervene - they've blown that by not taking steps to ensure that their safety drivers stayed on task (which anybody with a grain of nous knew was likely to be an issue).
Option A: the dashcam shows that there was nothing physically blocking the pedestrian from view, and in a street-light area either the driver's Mk1 eyeball or the car's sensors should have spotted them long before the low-sensitivity dashcam or, Option B: Uber's dashcam video does give an accurate impression of visibility at the time (flap, oink) - in which case the car was dangerously outdriving its headlamps and should have slowed down (or been slowed down by the driver) without needing to see the pedestrian. Pick one. If a human-driven car had had that accident, the driver would stand a good chance of facing - at least - careless charges and/or a civil lawsuit.
According to the Arizona Department of Transportation, at least as of 2016 [azdot.gov], there were 952 fatalities in car accidents in Arizona, or approximately 2.61 deaths per day.
So far so good - now look up the number of cars in Arizona (about 2.4 million) and the number of Uber self-driving cars (200 across 4 cities). Now apply "appropriate precision" in Uber's favour - 200 out of 2 million = 1/10,000 of AZ cars are uber self-drivers. So, with 1000 fatalities/year, Uber get to kill someone every 10 years - they've used that up in one. (Of course, that's an unspeakably crude and dubious calculation, but its better than yours).
Then, of course, of those 1000 regular fatalities, many will be attributed to drunk-driving, speeding, texting (or other forms of reckless driving), non-roadworthy vehicles etc. all of which carry potential criminal penalties - including possible driving bans - so its not the case that nothing is being done about them.
Uber were allowed to test experimental vehicles on the condition that they'd have a safety driver ready to take over - and one thing that the video clearly shows was that the safety driver was not paying attention (to the surprise of absolutely nobody except, apparently, Uber). The video also shows that the pedestrian was crossing the road in clear line-of-sight, in a street-lit area, from left-to-right yet the car made no attempt to brake or swerve. If you believe that the video truly represents what the Mk 1 eyeball and/or the car's sensors could "see" then all that proves is that the car was going too fast for the conditions - outdriving its headlights - and the driver should have taken action to slow it down.
Haven't listened to the original radio series or the LP.
There was a second 'original' radio series - starting with Ford and Arthur being rescued from prehistoric Earth - which is probably the most divergent from the other versions, so when the BBC did radio versions of the later books they had to pull a major Bobby-Ewing-in-the-shower to get around it - but the events in the second radio series were kinda amenable to that.
but when you start out with, "throw away the entirety of the previous books,"
What, a bit like Douglas Adams did when he produced multiple radically different versions of the story for the original radio play, the LP, the book, the TV series, (and the play? - and ISTR he was at least partly responsible for the film version), or the big chunk of the story that turned out to have taken place in a virtual reality universe in the HHGTTG offices? The unresolved cliffhanger at the end of the second radio series where Arthur runs off in the Heart of Gold with a rather nice archaeologist? Or book 4-5 when it turns out that there are parallel universes in which the earth wasn't demolished? Or the lampshading of how an exploding computer transports the gang to the end of the universe (in the versions where that happened)?
Seriously, the HHGTTG doesn't have "canon" - it has "cannelloni" that you ordered in that odd little bistro that wasn't there when you went back, and if you're going to worry too much about a consistent story, then you'd better put your analyst on danger money,
um... Star wars was not owned by Disney when I was a child... Disney bought Lucasfilm in Oct 2012 So for Star wars to be part of your "Disney childhood", you'd have to be less than 6 years old...
<sarcasm>But Disney could now re-write history by taking the old, beloved films, drastically re-editing them to remove moral ambiguity, add unnecessary flashy effects and retcon characters, then try to ensure the classic versions were no longer available. Lucasfilm would never have done that.</sarcasm>
Copyright is about the right to copy (there's a cunningly hidden clue in the name) - in this case, Redbox haven't copied a thing - just re-sold original goods they've bought from Disney or their authorised distributors, so there's no obvious copyright violation. I think that's the 'copyright abuse'. The Judge has found that the text on the box doesn't create an enforceable contract not to re-sell the codes - but its not clear from TFA that this is a general finding or if Disney just stuffed-up the wording in this case.
I guess the case is equivalent to buying a "DVD + Blu Ray" bundle and selling on the DVD (can any experts answer that?) - Disney need some legal argument to make that enforceable. Note that the case hasn't beed dismissed yet so we don't know what else the Jedi Mouse has up its sleeve.
Also, the case says nothing about whether someone who buys one of the codes from Redbox has legally acquired the right to download a copy of the film from Disney, or has just bought a pretty bit of paper that lets them get away with it.
Unfortunately, it seems to have been pretty solidly established that, with computer software, that end-user licenses are enforceable in general - although individual clauses may be deemed unenforceable - and that even if you have a copy of the software you need an additional license from the copyright holder before you load it up and run it (which entails making further copies). Please don't shoot the messenger.
so I should have the right to get out restore disks with old computers
If you legally purchased physical copies of each of the restore disks you give out then maybe... but if you took it upon yourself to make thousands of unauthorised copies (complete with copies of the official label) and set out to sell them then no, sorry (I assume that's the case you are referring to).
...of course, if they simply stick to the book, in which we're seeing one side from the POV of a mercenary working for the other side, and the filmmakers resist the temptation to tell us what to think by (e.g.) having one side wear black leather with red and white badges, that will be left for the viewer to decide... except we'll then get lots of people tweeting that its rubbish because they can't understand it and nobody told them who to cheer for.
Although Banks was quite open about being a socialist, the books are not propaganda: many (most?) of the stories are about the Culture trying to impose its moral ideals on other civilizations, often with disastrous results and buckets of blood.
However I don't like this continuous push in favor of Swift (a chiefly Apple development platform)
I think the one thing that is most likely to thwart efforts to get coding on the school curriculum is the cursed language wars. Get them coding. Apple have some nice tools for learning Swift interactively. Anybody who turns out to have an otherwise undiscovered aptitude for it will have no difficulty learning other languages before they start looking for coding jobs. Everybody else will just learn a bit about computers and maybe relate it to how you can use mathematics to do useful things and planning/organisation skills.
But why train them then? Why not just save the time and money by hiring at the higher level?
...because if nobody trains people, there won't be anybody at the higher level. What you're saying is that you want other companies to train people and put up with them leaving as soon as they are trained - that's not sustainable. It's called either "social responsibility" or "enlightened self-interest" depending on which side you part your hair.
Plus, you get to train them specifically for your needs. Anybody from outside will take some time to get up to speed.
Seeing that Marvel is first and foremost a graphic novel distributor, I really don't know why they just don't use all that marvelous Pixar tech they bought and push out animated versions. I know Spiderman is slated for the end of the year, and the trailers look ok, but seeing all these movies get storyboarded to begin with, why not just continue with a toon?
I wonder how the cost of producing top quality animation (Classic DIsney/Pixar at the top of their game/Aaardman/Studio Ghibli and other top-drawer anime studios) compares with live action?
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Take into account that Apple is going to do the transition Intel -> ARM real soon now,.
To be fair, that's only a rumour, and could be just a tweet to tell Intel that the missiles are on the way,
On the other hand, a "purge" of old software, riddled with hardware-dependent code instead of working through the OS frameworks, will help clear the decks for an ARM transition, too. Today, we ought to be at the point where the majority of applications (obviously, drivers, hypervisors etc, may be a different kettle of fish) will re-compile for x86, AMD64 or various ARM flavours at the flick of a switch. If, in 2018, your application cares whether the CPU is little- or big- endian, presumes the length of an int, or relies on a particular processor's SIMD rather than calling the Accelerate framework, you're holding it wrong.
If it were just affecting new applications entering the App store and otherwise stuck at a once-per-app warning for the next few years, I wouldn't complain - if they're going to axe 32 bit with the next MacOS release well, that's a bit premature.
Applications without 64bit binaries available should be considered abbandoned or dead. Depending on this kind of software is irresponsible and should be avoided at all cost.
Yeah, its irresponsible because the OS provider might suddenly pull support for them, preventing you from applying future OS upgrades - unless you're talking about internet-facing applications that need continual security patches.
Oh, wait, that's everything now, because everything comes with with cloud-y features you don't want (usually as an excuse to turn the app into a subscription service) - which is one reason why you might want to hang on to your old 32-bit software. That and the new "worse is the new better" design philosophy: We got away with perpetual betas, so let's see how far we can get with perpetual alphas... (a.k.a. Agile).
(PS: Kids! Get off my lawn!)
The touchscreens required a stylus to work
...partly because of technology, but also because they were running existing software designed to be mouse driven, with buttons and widgets far to small to operate by touch alone. Microsoft's business model was totally dependent on being able to support the vast range of existing Windows software - if users got the idea that they could live without legacy Windows software then they might could ditch WIndows for Mac or Linux. Apple designed the whole iOS software stack to be finger-operated.
The main problem now is there's a split in the market: laptops are for productivity while tablets are for consumption.
...which is only a problem if your name is Microsoft and you find that your legacy-software advantage doesn't work on mobile...
"Autopilot" is about right -- aircraft autopilots are designed to be used under human management.
Not according to Hollywood. 70% of the population's first thought when "autopilot" is mentioned will be the inflatable doll in Airplane! For that matter, I've seen documentaries where the pilot is doing paperwork while the plane is on autopilot. The people who named Tesla's self-drive system "autopilot" knew exactly what the majority of non-pilot's-license-holding customers would understand by the term.
Anyway, the "autopilot" concept in aviation relies on highly trained pilots backed up by air-traffic control who hit the panic button if two planes get within a quarter mile of each other. Joe & Jill averages in cars passing within inches of other cars and pedestrians at 30-70mph is a far tougher challenge.
Sorry, but the dust from all those straw men is getting up my nose.
Until recently, the formula was "Apple may not have invented x but they took and idea that was 'bubbling under', refined it into an attractive and easy-to-use consumer product and marketed the fuck out of it"... because, lets face it, Creative Nomads, LG Pradas and Windows XP Tablet Edition systems weren't exactly flying off the shelves. Marketing is part of innovation - deal with it.
The "innovation" of the iPhone was not "we're going to bolt a capacitative touch sensor onto a phone" but that Apple decided "right - this phone is going to have touch input, only touch input and we're going to design the whole UI to work really well with touch input for everything." I know I had a pre-iPhone Windows Mobile smartphone that included every input device imaginable (touch, stylus, joystick, jog/menu wheel, slide-out qwerty keyboard and so many dedicated buttons that you couldn't pick it up without triggering something) - all coupled with a generic OS that was optimised for none of them. NB: this was the sort of "toothpick" stylus - that you needed because the on-screen keyboard and some of the buttons were too small for fingers - that Jobs was talking about when he derided the idea of styluses on phones.
Oh, and don't forget the Newton - the 1990s iPad predecessor killed by a Doonsbury cartoon. At the very least, Apple invented the funny AutoCorrect snafu meme.
However, recently, its all a bit sadder - lets make it 10% thinner, lets see how big you can make the trackpad before it gets too big, lets totally fuck up the keyboard to shave off a few mm... The "notch" (or "ears" if you're a glass-half full person) basically says "Whoops - Samsung had beaten us to removing the left and right bezels and we couldn't come up with through-display cameras and fingerprint sensors in time". Then there's the whole iPhone 7 fiasco - lets release a phone where the only feature of note is the removal of the headphone jack, rather than wait and bury that "unfeature" in a radical re-design. I suspect that it was only exploding Samsungs that saved Apple's bacon on that one. Maybe that would have happened if Jobs was still around but man would he have gone mediaeval on some poor sod over it...
...and, yeah, Widgets kinda mark the point where Android stopped copying Apple and Apple started copying Android.
When was the last time you had an outage because the UI didn't work right?
Outright outage? Maybe not, but with a buggy or badly-designed UI, you just get a less spectacular, day-to-day loss of productivity due to improper/inefficient use of the system, tech support time wasted hand-holding users, mistakes made by operators and pissed-off customers... worst case: for a commercial product, people don't buy it. For a corporate system: users make the minimum use of the system they can get away with and rely on their own ad-hoc paper solutions and spreadsheets to get the job done - possibly a massive liability n the making. All less "visible" than the lights going out (figuratively) for a few hours but potentially far worse/more expensive in the long term.
If you're only going to hire one developer then (obviously) they need to be "full stack" - and have actual experience. If you have a team then maybe you can afford the luxury of a backend expert and a UI expert - but you also need a generalist - who understands the whole problem and can at least communicate with both specialists to keep them working together. Otherwise, you get the usual bullshit where each one thinks that they're the only one with a hard job and lives in a dream world where both parts of the project can be designed in perfect isolation (good aspiration, but probably not going to happen). Of course, I'm assuming "UI expert" means "actually experienced in solving practical problems in the field" not "word perfect in UX jargon" - but a similar caveat applies to all fields of development.
I think this is a terrible flaw in our legal/traffic system. If what you say is true, just about everyone on that road should be equally guilty and all should be punished.
Well, yes - if anybody out there thinks they're a perfect driver who has not and/or never will suffer a potentially dangerous brainfart then they're the ones to watch out for. If you treat every other road user as a potential idiot then that's a start, but you've missed out one potential idiot.
...and what do you mean "if what I say is true?" Surely you don't actually think a 40mph limit is a guarantee that its safe to do 39mph? Its an arbitrary limit dreamed up by a committee using some simplistic rules and heavily influenced by politics and statement making (locally to me, a supermarket firm paid to "enhance local road safety" by sponsoring a 20mph zone as a sweetener to get council permission to build a new store). On a nice bright, dry day its probably quite safe to do 50 along that road - if its dark/foggy/icy or the local school has just turned out then 20 might be pushing it.
This is one of the other hurdles that self-driving cars are going to face: if they're going to be safer than human drivers then the things are going to have to drive around like they're taking a driving test - and we're all going to realise how many "calculated risks" we take when driving around the real world. We all know that observing the speed limit earns you an Audi* up the tailpipe (sure, its his fault if you have to brake and he hits you, but you still get hit) and I'm sure we all know a few junctions where, if you wait until it s totally safe to pull out you'd better have brought sandwiches (at least in a self-driver you might be able to eat them without breaking the law). Its gonna be really, really irritating for many people... (I'd vote for rear-facing seats so I don't have to pay any attention to the driving, and can just have fun flipping the bird at the fuming Audi driver behind...)
* Apologies to the careful and responsible Audi drivers out there - all six of them.
Remember folks - Demolition Man was a warning, not an instruction manual - plus, its funnier than 1984 and you don't need to be able to read...
I don't think a human driver would be deemed at fault if they had dash cam footage similar to the video we saw.
I wouldn't like to bet either way (and it might depend on jurisdiction) - if it had been in the UK - where its generally considered the driver's responsibility not to hit things in front of them - I suspect the driver (or their insurance) - would bear the civil liability and the question of a "causing death by careless/reckless/dangerous driving" charge would at least be considered. However, the USA is the world leader in regulatory capture.
Had the video shown the pedestrian dash out from behind an obstacle then that would have been different - but what it actually shows is that 5s before the impact, the only thing rendering her "invisible" was the apparent lack of light - so the car was outdriving its headlamps - i.e. speeding. If (if!) the video was accurate, the speed limit was irrelevant: a 40mph limit doesn't give you the right to drive at 40mph in poor visibility and, AFAIK, even in the US, "jaywalking" doesn't make you a legitimate target.
I freely admit it's still a "There but for the grace of the sky fairy go I" type of accident - but I'm not testing experimental vehicles under special dispensation.
Here's a proposal: "safety drivers" in these tests should have some sort of professional driving qualification beyond a regular license - e.g. certified driving instructor, police driving training, or the US equivalent of the UK "advanced driving test" if there is one. Apart from being less likely to get distracted - and being better able to anticipate danger and intervene before the emergency (which would have saved the day here), they'll be able to give much better feedback on the car's performance. Of course, that would mean paying a decent wage, and create the danger of getting feedback on inconvenient truths...
The safety driver was not looking through the windshield at the road.
Well, yes, that's rather the point...
I saw a person wearing a black hoodie
Look again. Sure, its some kind of dark top, but If its a hoodie, the hood is down and she has what looks like light brown or ginger hair (or headgear), blue jeans, shoes with a lot of white on them and is pushing a red bike with shiny wheel-rims. So "black hoodie" is pure spin - she wasn't exactly in stealth mode.
But it wasn't at all like the person was visible from a distance where a human driver would have always done better.
Sigh... lets try this one last time: if that video (filmed on a camera which couldn't see anything not in the direct beam of the dipped headlights) was representative of the actual visibility at the time then the car was driving too fast for the conditions. You're not supposed to drive hell-for-leather into a featureless dark void with your fingers crossed that there's nothing lurking in there. Sure its a mistake that a human driver might make - but its one for which they would be taken to task for afterwards. Not saying that I would definitely have done better, but I'd have been easing up on the juice and tensing up if I saw that pool of darkness ahead (assuming that wasn't an artefact of the dashcam). This car is supposed to have infra-red LIDAR and a computer with superhuman reflexes...
Meanwhile, the third party videos of the road that have since appeared show - at the very least - that you can't judge the actual visibility from a video recording with undefined gain/white balance/contrast settings. They don't prove anything absolutely but they do appear to show a well-lit stretch of road where a human eye could easily have seen someone pushing a red bike across the road from the left-hand side.
This was a slamming on the brakes and pray situation and it isn't clear from the video alone when the car or the safety driver slammed on the brakes.
Actually, its not evident from the video that the car slammed on its brakes at all (which would noticeably dip the car's nose) - nor does there seem to be anything coming the other way that would have prevented the car driving around the woman.
At the very least, this fails to live up to the promise of self-driving cars as safer than human drivers - in a very simple scenario (human crossing an otherwise clear road at night) that should have had the fuck simulated out of it before being let loose on the road, and should be bread and butter for a car that can see by infra-red. There will be far tougher challenges for self-driving cars.
Since the driver was unable to detect this incident too, they better remove all drivers as well!
If a driver was caught behaving like the one in the Uber video - not holding the wheel, concentrating on something in their lap and only glancing occasionally at the road, or otherwise not fully in control of their vehicle - they probably would be removed (and/or have their house removed by the civil courts if death/injury was involved).
Why are people implying that there is some double standard being applied against Uber here? They were already granted an exception that allowed them to test cars in "hands off" mode provided theyn had a safety driver ready to intervene - they've blown that by not taking steps to ensure that their safety drivers stayed on task (which anybody with a grain of nous knew was likely to be an issue).
Option A: the dashcam shows that there was nothing physically blocking the pedestrian from view, and in a street-light area either the driver's Mk1 eyeball or the car's sensors should have spotted them long before the low-sensitivity dashcam or, Option B: Uber's dashcam video does give an accurate impression of visibility at the time (flap, oink) - in which case the car was dangerously outdriving its headlamps and should have slowed down (or been slowed down by the driver) without needing to see the pedestrian. Pick one. If a human-driven car had had that accident, the driver would stand a good chance of facing - at least - careless charges and/or a civil lawsuit.
According to the Arizona Department of Transportation, at least as of 2016 [azdot.gov], there were 952 fatalities in car accidents in Arizona, or approximately 2.61 deaths per day.
So far so good - now look up the number of cars in Arizona (about 2.4 million) and the number of Uber self-driving cars (200 across 4 cities). Now apply "appropriate precision" in Uber's favour - 200 out of 2 million = 1/10,000 of AZ cars are uber self-drivers. So, with 1000 fatalities/year, Uber get to kill someone every 10 years - they've used that up in one. (Of course, that's an unspeakably crude and dubious calculation, but its better than yours).
Then, of course, of those 1000 regular fatalities, many will be attributed to drunk-driving, speeding, texting (or other forms of reckless driving), non-roadworthy vehicles etc. all of which carry potential criminal penalties - including possible driving bans - so its not the case that nothing is being done about them.
Uber were allowed to test experimental vehicles on the condition that they'd have a safety driver ready to take over - and one thing that the video clearly shows was that the safety driver was not paying attention (to the surprise of absolutely nobody except, apparently, Uber). The video also shows that the pedestrian was crossing the road in clear line-of-sight, in a street-lit area, from left-to-right yet the car made no attempt to brake or swerve. If you believe that the video truly represents what the Mk 1 eyeball and/or the car's sensors could "see" then all that proves is that the car was going too fast for the conditions - outdriving its headlights - and the driver should have taken action to slow it down.
Haven't listened to the original radio series or the LP.
There was a second 'original' radio series - starting with Ford and Arthur being rescued from prehistoric Earth - which is probably the most divergent from the other versions, so when the BBC did radio versions of the later books they had to pull a major Bobby-Ewing-in-the-shower to get around it - but the events in the second radio series were kinda amenable to that.
Its great that the radio version is now complete.
I hate wet paper bags.
but when you start out with, "throw away the entirety of the previous books,"
What, a bit like Douglas Adams did when he produced multiple radically different versions of the story for the original radio play, the LP, the book, the TV series, (and the play? - and ISTR he was at least partly responsible for the film version), or the big chunk of the story that turned out to have taken place in a virtual reality universe in the HHGTTG offices? The unresolved cliffhanger at the end of the second radio series where Arthur runs off in the Heart of Gold with a rather nice archaeologist? Or book 4-5 when it turns out that there are parallel universes in which the earth wasn't demolished? Or the lampshading of how an exploding computer transports the gang to the end of the universe (in the versions where that happened)?
Seriously, the HHGTTG doesn't have "canon" - it has "cannelloni" that you ordered in that odd little bistro that wasn't there when you went back, and if you're going to worry too much about a consistent story, then you'd better put your analyst on danger money,
So goatse.cx was a honey trap for alien hackers then...?
Don't get stroppy mate, because <sub>I Said, I've got a Big Stick</sub>.
um... Star wars was not owned by Disney when I was a child... Disney bought Lucasfilm in Oct 2012 So for Star wars to be part of your "Disney childhood", you'd have to be less than 6 years old...
<sarcasm>But Disney could now re-write history by taking the old, beloved films, drastically re-editing them to remove moral ambiguity, add unnecessary flashy effects and retcon characters, then try to ensure the classic versions were no longer available. Lucasfilm would never have done that.</sarcasm>
Not an expert, but:
Copyright is about the right to copy (there's a cunningly hidden clue in the name) - in this case, Redbox haven't copied a thing - just re-sold original goods they've bought from Disney or their authorised distributors, so there's no obvious copyright violation. I think that's the 'copyright abuse'. The Judge has found that the text on the box doesn't create an enforceable contract not to re-sell the codes - but its not clear from TFA that this is a general finding or if Disney just stuffed-up the wording in this case.
I guess the case is equivalent to buying a "DVD + Blu Ray" bundle and selling on the DVD (can any experts answer that?) - Disney need some legal argument to make that enforceable. Note that the case hasn't beed dismissed yet so we don't know what else the Jedi Mouse has up its sleeve.
Also, the case says nothing about whether someone who buys one of the codes from Redbox has legally acquired the right to download a copy of the film from Disney, or has just bought a pretty bit of paper that lets them get away with it.
Unfortunately, it seems to have been pretty solidly established that, with computer software, that end-user licenses are enforceable in general - although individual clauses may be deemed unenforceable - and that even if you have a copy of the software you need an additional license from the copyright holder before you load it up and run it (which entails making further copies). Please don't shoot the messenger.
so I should have the right to get out restore disks with old computers
If you legally purchased physical copies of each of the restore disks you give out then maybe... but if you took it upon yourself to make thousands of unauthorised copies (complete with copies of the official label) and set out to sell them then no, sorry (I assume that's the case you are referring to).
Cause realistically, it's gotta be both.
...of course, if they simply stick to the book, in which we're seeing one side from the POV of a mercenary working for the other side, and the filmmakers resist the temptation to tell us what to think by (e.g.) having one side wear black leather with red and white badges, that will be left for the viewer to decide... except we'll then get lots of people tweeting that its rubbish because they can't understand it and nobody told them who to cheer for.
Although Banks was quite open about being a socialist, the books are not propaganda: many (most?) of the stories are about the Culture trying to impose its moral ideals on other civilizations, often with disastrous results and buckets of blood.
What is the Trade Surplus? Is there any Profit Margin in this?
I think Its a bit of a Grey Area and the whole enterprise is Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall.
However I don't like this continuous push in favor of Swift (a chiefly Apple development platform)
I think the one thing that is most likely to thwart efforts to get coding on the school curriculum is the cursed language wars. Get them coding. Apple have some nice tools for learning Swift interactively. Anybody who turns out to have an otherwise undiscovered aptitude for it will have no difficulty learning other languages before they start looking for coding jobs. Everybody else will just learn a bit about computers and maybe relate it to how you can use mathematics to do useful things and planning/organisation skills.
But why train them then? Why not just save the time and money by hiring at the higher level?
...because if nobody trains people, there won't be anybody at the higher level. What you're saying is that you want other companies to train people and put up with them leaving as soon as they are trained - that's not sustainable. It's called either "social responsibility" or "enlightened self-interest" depending on which side you part your hair.
Plus, you get to train them specifically for your needs. Anybody from outside will take some time to get up to speed.
Seeing that Marvel is first and foremost a graphic novel distributor, I really don't know why they just don't use all that marvelous Pixar tech they bought and push out animated versions. I know Spiderman is slated for the end of the year, and the trailers look ok, but seeing all these movies get storyboarded to begin with, why not just continue with a toon?
I wonder how the cost of producing top quality animation (Classic DIsney/Pixar at the top of their game/Aaardman/Studio Ghibli and other top-drawer anime studios) compares with live action?