What ? Simply in bizarre subdirectories with weird names on plain "normal" webservers ?~
But I though that the children-pedo-terrists were all hiding using Tor, GPG, end-to-end chat encryption, "China's Great Firewall"-busting VPNs, and all those other "anonymity-protecting" technologies that our governments want to rightfully take away from the evil hippies menacing us ~~
But would a bear watching it have a uncanny valley when seeing another bear?
It depends on two factor:
- which sense does the considered animal use to perceive the world and other individual of the same specie? As mentioned, we human are quasi exclusively visual, with some auditive perception (voice) thrown in too, whereas other animal rely on other sense or other interpretations of sense. (e.g.: some snakes have infrared perception and use it to recognise other animal. They would not recognize a mouse if it were cold)
- how is the social structure of the animal, how much does it need to recognise others and does it have a concept of "Uncanny valley". In humans, it plays (among other) a role of instinctive/inate xenophobia (due to the "US vs Them" mentality that played an important role back when we were living in small packs/tribes) : if it looks almost like us but not quite exactly, chances are that it comes from another pack/tribe, therefore it is a direct competitor to us and we must hate it/fight it. (Side note: sadly some of our stupidest contemporary brethren seem not to have evolved much since then and still believe racism is a thing, even now when the society has evolved and globalised to the point where "tribe" now covers nearly all the few billions humans on the planet, which should all stick together if we want to still have some hope to survive as a specie)
So it all boils down to: - will the considered animal recognise the CGI representation as another animal of the same specie? - and does is have an inate "uncanny valley" mechanism?
e.g: House cats. - House cats are enough visual (nearly like us) so they will also recognise movie depiction of cats as "cats" (and also other felidae, due to the scale on the TV screen. They will also recognise movie depiction of lions). - Cats have complex behaviour which, among other depends on the availability of resources. When there's enough shelter and food for everyone, they'll tolerate other individuals without excessive fuss. (That's how feral cat colonies form). They'll even collectively raise kittens (probable evolutionary explanation: due to the reproductive patterns of cats, when there are kittens around, chance are high that they're somewhat related, and helping raising them helps proliferate more copies of the same genes).
So house cats are likely to try calling movie representation of cats to play with them (in my experience) (they'll also try call lions).
And I'm sure about a dozen of internet companies with name containing elements like "X", "You", "Red", "Porn", "Tube", "Hub", "hasmter" - and various combinations thereof - will all be willing to pool the necessary money in exchange to the rights of streaming the content of the experiment's visual footage.
A point of comparison: - based on TNT content a hand grenade release between 400 and 800kJ when exploding. (example of source) - unit conversion: 1Wh battery = 3.6 kJ (and 1Ah or 1000mAh x 3.7 V = 3.7 Wh = 13.3 kJ)
So your garden variety ~3000mAh LiPo "18650" 3.7V cell holds a little bit under 40kJ. Your laptop long life 9-cell 8900mAh battery pack holds a little bit under 100Wh or nearly 360kJ, about the same ballpark range as a smaller grenade (hence the xkcd comic).
A long-ranged drone's (e.g.) 6s high voltage (= 6* 3.7V = 22V) 16000mah is 355 Wh or a whoping 1.2 MJ. This drone has a battery that gives of the same range of energy as two hand grenades.
Yup, this is dwarfed buy the combustion of kerosene: 1 liter gives of 37 Mj (or about the same as pile of about a thousand "18650" batteries - fuel is still a denser energy storage than lithium). And the combustion chamber of the jet engine will probably not even notice if a puny little drone battery went "poof" inside.
The thing is, an air-plane is far more than just the interior of the jet engine's combustion chamber. And there are a lot of parts of that air-plane that wont appreciate the explosion of a drone battery. Think of it, if you need to test it by throwing chicken at it (ball park estimate: an average chicken weights ~2.5 kg. I use an approximate speed difference of 500km/h. That gives us Ecin = 1/2mv^2 = about 25 kJ of cinetic energy), an air-plane is going to take some damage from the equivalent of 2 hand grenades lobed at it.
A single drone impact won't cause the plane to sustain a catastophic hull failure (as TFA points out, the plane successfully landed safely afterwards), but it's certainly going to do a lot more damage that fowl. When ingested by the engine, even if combustion chamber won't suffer much, the turbine is going to take quite some damage.
I know that I shouldn't be explaining my joke, but I was sarcastically referring that your "in linux, it's also possible to do lots of dammage without being root" instructions are nearly as complicate as the copy-pasta troll that was once popular on/. about the difficulty to get Quake running with openGL in Linux. (As opposed to Windows where such breakage happens almost entirely alone, without nearly any user intervention required).
Consider it as a variant of the "Does virus {NAME} runs under Wine? Nope? Exactly what I though: yet another part of the Windows experience we can't join..." joke.
It seems like one good use of this technology would be to integrate it with some sort of HUD overlay on the windshield so that a driver can see things in the dark. I would love to have a car that put red outlines around things like deer in the road or even the lines on the road.
Early prototype and concept cars using Forward Collision Warning Systems mused with the idea of red outlines/augmented reality. (There was even some such prototype mentioned here on/. but I can manage to find the proper link). With the idea, e.g.: to have a screen on the dashboard displaying a "night view" of the road ahead with silhouettes outlined.
In the end, I suspected that preliminary research has found it to be too much distracting. Car currently on the road seem to have gone for much simpler and primitive displays.
e.g: On Volvos, they use simply a line of LEDs behind the dashboard that get reflect in the windshield. You just see it as light bar hovering in front of the car. It gets progressively brighter orange as object get too much near your car. If the object is dangerously near the car, the light gets suddenly bright red, about right before the moment where the car will start autonomously hitting the brakes if no other input from the driver.
Seems to work better as, instead of having to recognize complex shapes (that in the end don't give any useful information. You don't mind if it's a deer or if it's a cyclist. you mind if it's in front of your and if your car is on a collision course with it) it's simple light. And driver have already taken the habit to react quickly to a red light suddenly shining somewhere in front of the car: that's what your peripheral vision perceives when the car in front of you brakes. You have an almost pavlovian reflex to hit the brakes when you see it. Works as well if it's actually a deer and the phantom light comes from your own FCWS/FCAS.
but many of these enhanced features like super accurate mapping of the roads
This has been already debunked by google engineer on TED talks: self driving cars DO NOT have a supper accurate map of the roads.
For this to work, you need an insanely high level of accuracy in your mapping of roads. Like down to the precise location of each orange cone on a construction site. And it needs to be extremely up-to-date. It doesn't matter if a couple of hours ago the lane was free, the important part is that right NOW the lane is closed and your self-driving car needs to avoid it.
At that point, just having an SSD in the car with insanely precise map isn't enough. You'll need to have some online connection, so the car gets continuous update. And to make this updates you need to gather as much information as you can. So you actually cover your self-driving car in sensors, so the car can continuously update the map and alert the other cars of any new construction cone or pothole on the road.
At that point, if the car has the necessary sensors to be able to update the maps in real time about any pothole or construction cone, you might as well completely skip the whole online and map part, and directly use the sensors to directly react to the environment around the car.
Self-driving cars (and for that matters, current cars with forward collision warning/avoidance systems, and adaptive cruise control) don't actually count on super accurate mapping of the roads.
They function in a manner very close to their human driver: they use GPS and maps to get the general idea of where they should be going (e.g.: according to the map, in about 2km, I need to continue toward City B. The exit is on the two right-most lanes of the highway), and used their perception of their surrounding for the actual minute details (e.g.: there are cones on the left of me. The lane is closed, I can't go there. Also the vehicle in front isn't moving any more, so I should hit the brakes before rear-ending it).
So in short, a self-drive car's GPS isn't much more different that the mundane one in your car. None of them has a "super accurate mapping of the roads". But the self-driving car has a huge array of sensors helping to super accurately *see* its environment on the roads.
This is not a detector, this is a jammer. Whenever a laser beam is shone from afar on the car (from a long distance, like when the cop start pointing the gun toward a car of which they want to measure the speed) at that distance the beam is diffused (even if only a bit), if it was visible light wavelenght, you the driver would see the laser gun glimering whenever it is pointed in the general direction of the vehicle.
This laser light is detected by the detector, which triggers an alarm (so the driver knows to react) and starts shining light from various emitter on the car. At that distance, the slight diffusion of light is enough that the emitter confuse the laser gun, slow down its measuring, and give some time for the driver to react.
Which I can only imagine would cause interesting readings on the LiDAR-equipped vehicle.
Nope.
The first and foremost reason: all vehicle use a combination of multiple sensors.
At the range concerned by jammer, cars don't use the lidar at all. They use mostly a conventional radar, and some also use visible light camera with optical recognition. None of which would be severly affected by the jammer (maybe the car will be seeming blinking in the distance, depending on the IR filters used by the camera).
The LiDAR in car is used for much shorter ranges. It's generally pointing slightly downward. It's not used to "see" cars hundreds of meters away (that's what the radar and/or camera are for, they are the main input for the adaptive cruise control). It's used to see object with more precision in the immediate vicinity of the car. It (combined with input from optical recognition from the camera) helps recognising pedestrian, cylcists, *nearby* car,... any object that is near the car that could collide with it so the car can autonomously break in reaction. LiDAR (and camera, and optionally sonars) are the main input for the forward collision avoidance systems.
At that distance, the effect isn't that much of a single light source shone in the general direction of an object from a distance (as is the case with a laser speed trap), but a cloud of lots of small points covering the object (used to recognize shape and size, in addition to distance and speed). The jammer will probably not see it as a big light exciting its detectors, put occasional small points crossing 1 or 2 sensors at a time. How it will react to this is an unknown to me, but I'll surely it will be more optimized for long range (to predict laser speed traps) and might (correctly) assume this to be useless noise. I don't own such a jammer (and not that much interested in that technology) so I can't test it.
Also at this distance, the emmiters will be probably seen as individual points of light. That will be probably seen as a couple of bogus point in the point cloud and *should probably* be ignored. Anyway, to avoid all the LiDAR cars (and other LiDAR based measuring instruments) jamming each-other, LiDAR usually use specific patterns (can't seems to find in the litterature if they are random, or if there's an ID encoded in it) so each LiDAR can successfully recognize it's own dots and ignore other LiDAR's. The LiDAR *should probably* refuse to take into acount the jammer's emitter as valid dots due to not being part of its specific pattern. The various LiDAR equipped cars' I've driven have never been jammed by any other light source be it a specific laser jammer or other cars' LiDAR. Granted, it's possible that I've been just lucky (radar jammers are considered illegal and banned in most european jurisdictions). But LiDAR-equipped cars are slowly satrting to get more frequent here around and I've never experienced or even heard about a car getting confused.
Last but not least, as I've said in the beginning, cars tend to integrate the input of numerous sensors a
More seriously, this laptop comes from a different era. Its keyboard was designed for more durability. (And older laptops even more so).
Nowadays, more laptops are designed more for shiny factor to attract customers. They tend to be less durable.
The laptops that take a lot of abuse tend to get broken keys and malfunctioning keyboard overtime.
Sample: Not some 25-year old IBM Thinkpad, that I have still lying around.
Sample instead is all the various laptops that I've seen at fellow students dorms the past years. They are often cheaper brands (or no-name brands), consumer oriented instead of professional oriented (the kind of laptop where the brand name and model name are useless to track a replacement part. There several revision of completely different internals that were released under the same "model name". Usually you need to track a few 4 digit long revision/submodels to find the exact thing you want). Malfunctionning keys is the top complain I've heard
And right next are: faulty audio connector that got partially desoldered from months of regular "Dorm-party abuse", and b0rked connection in the hinge between laptop body and screen leading to intermittent display artifacts. Failing cooling systems is also frequent, but far less problematic as nearly everybody seems to be okay buying a laptop cooling stand. In theory, CD-R tray drive failing is a recuring problem, but as none of my sample actually use discs for anything (MP3 is still the main medium for swapping music around, when it's not straigh streaming from youtube) they've never noticed. Failing audio ports, on the other hand, ARE serious business. Resoldering jacks has earning me quite a few favours from fellow students. (at least batteries and power blocks are replaceable)
So that's 100% bull droppings. {...} TL;DR keyboards doesn't fail mechanically in reality.
Yup. Your single datapoint about your laptop in your basement instantly renders non existent all the dozens of laptops I've seen at fellow students', at parties, at girl friends'/ex-girlfriends'/other random flings'...
Okay, I have no problem with that. Keep your belief that no mechanical part in any laptop has ever failed. And I'll keep helping fix old laptop for cheaper than buying a new, which has already earned me quite a lot of favour from (often female) fellow students.
(Sorry I only find this one with the infographics visuals. I didn't manage to find the original movie scene. I guess it's too long for Google/DMCA "fair use" criteria).
- What car company are you working for ? - Major one
it's the whole idea of Dawkins that we're slowly evolving from a situation were we animals are only vessels to help our DNA make sure there's more copy of it in the next generation,
to a situation where life helps evolve something much larger than the individuals: culture civilisation.
We evolved speech, we evolved passed knowledge (oral tradition and teaching). We evolved writing, we evolved stored knowledge (litterature and reference). We evolved communication, we evolved shared knowledge (internet and what some call "extelligence")
At that point, in the long term, what matters most is science and society. Not genetic traits.
Still in the meantime, we're animals carrying genes that evolved during million of years before the invention of the internet. We're bound to carry some left-over instincts.
Actually, your DNA doesn't give a shit. It's an encoding of a bunch of molecules - don't think it cares too much about anything
Look up the word "metaphore" in wikipedia, it might help.
DNA has not high level volition on its own.
But group of gene which produce a trait or a behaviour that is more likely to help have more copies of the DNA in the next generation are, over time, more likely to proliferate in the general population. (Darwinian genetics)
There is more to it, of course, but that would all seem to make sense from a DNA/evolution point of view.
Yup, there IS more to this. The thing is, we didn't evolve as loners. We did evolve living in small packs/tribes of more or less related individuals. (Or extended families a little bit later in history).
That adds a lot of complexity to the scheme. - That's why we evolved altruism (the individual you're helping is most likely to be from your tribe, and you're likely to be related to it. By being nice to people, you *are* actually helping passing around more copy of your genes (including the genes that shaped said altruism behaviour). You just happen not to be the actual vessel passing around the genes). - That's why adoption is a works very well with humans (the nearest child without parents is highly likely to be related to you. by raising the child, you increase the number of copies of your gene in the pool). - That's why we evolved grand-mothers (in most species, genetic defect that manifest after the end of the reproductive life aren't much selected against: by the time the age-related disease sets in, copie of the gene have already been passed. In most speice of apes to which we are closely related, senility is the normal way of things, nearly all ageing apes get senile. Not so in humans: senility are some specific diseases, but lots of individuals age nicely without getting alzheimer's, parkinson's, etc. because then these ageing individuals can help taking care of their grand-kids, and again helping more copies of their genes survive (including the beneficial gene that help in late age) even if they are not anymore biologically able to pass themselves first-hand). - That's saddly why we evolved "uncanny valley" (it also helps forming a genetic ground for xenophobia: if it looks almost like, but a little bit of what you've used to see while growing up, chances are that it comes from a different pack/tribe to which you aren't related to and is a competitor that you need to kill with fire). (NOTE: I'm not condoning xenophobia in any way. I'm just giving explanation why we did evolve such a stupid behaviour and "uncanny valley" might be the mechanism supporting it. It only explain, not justify. We must understand these mechanism and adapt to the fact that modern highly mobile and interconnect civilisation has grown to the point where "pack/tribe" covers about a dozen billion individual spread on a whole planet surface, and we must all stick together if we want to have a chance at surviving as a specie at whole)
And countless other example of special behaviour in humans that might seem counter intuitive in the first place, but start to make sense once you look at them through the lens of small pack/tribes/extended families (situation in which we've spent most of our evolution time).
You can find other similar behaviour in other animals that live in groups, from cats (not very social animals, but still can live in colonies) all the way up to ants and bees (all these kind of behaviours turned up to eleven. to the point where only 1 single individual - the queen - actually passes here gene around actively, and every other last one in the colony is indirectly helping more copies of their genes indirectly by helping their siblings - which makes even more sense when your do the mendelian genetics maths on their peculiar reproductive cycle)
Your DNA cares. You serve largely to pass it on, and if the kid isn't yours, and you pick up on the clues, you're probably hardwired to reject the little mite.
On the other hand, if the kid isn't yours, chances are high (back in the pack/tribe era of human evolution) that it comes from another individual of the pack to which you're related. By raising the kid, you're still helping passing more copies of your genes around. You just happen not to be the actual individual who inserted these specific copies of the gene into your mate.
Nope: your detector typically detect radio waves (as used by some doppler based speed traps).
It can't detect laser (in advance) because it's highly directional. The only situation where it could detect a laser is once the laser is already pointed at your car, at which point it is already too late, you're already being measured and eventually fined.
So no detector will try detecting lasers and thus no detector will get set of by a Ford.
Same with the other "avoid.speeding tickets" gadgets which are based on GPS technology (along tables of speed limitation for roads, and (hopefully kept up-to-date) tables of known radar positions). Those will alert you of laser-based or plate-reading camera-based speed-traps, even when it can't sense them.
Actually head-lights have the opposite effect to wild-life: they increase danger.
When they get shone on by the head-lights, wild animals get startled and most often their natural reaction is to freeze (hoping that the potential predator won't notice them ? i think that's a plausible explanation for the behaviour)
Standard procedure (as taught in driving course here around) is to hit the horn, so the noise will scare them into fleeing. (It works, in my personal experience)
No headlight could in theory avoid the deers freezing. Also the lidar can clearly recognize de obstacle and hit the breaks on time (though I have no first hand experience with that situation).
But in practice you'll probably have the headlights on (to be seen by other drivers, and also because the other technology used simultaneously by most system - camera - does need good lighting condition)
Still, the collision avoidance system is likely to hit the brakes in time.
That's why car with collision avoidance systems currently on the streets (e.g.: Volvo) combine the input from several sensors.
Not only do they use LiDAR (like TFA) and camera (also limited by visible light).
But also short-range sonars ("Parking sensors") that are less disturbed by snow (but are easier to disturb by air turbulence/compressed air). and long-range radars (the thing mainly used by adaptive cruise-control).
Driving at night should, for the most part, be easier for many systems than driving during the day.
Depends on the technology used.
The technology compete (or more often in practice: supplementing) with visible-light camera and image recognition. Either using simple perspective recognition in case of single cams (like on Tesla, etc.) or using stereo correlation with a pair of cams (like recent Mercedes, etc.) Such cameras work better with good lighting conditions, in complete dark they won't work.
Also, don't forget the main technology "competing" with such tools: the human driver. We human see badly in darkness, we see better in sun light. If the car uses technology that can see better in darkness it can react to things that the human driver might have missed.
By combining several technologies (e.g: lidar, camera, short range sonar, long range radar on Volvos) the car extends the range of situation where it can cleary "see" obstacles. And avoid them (for the current type of collision avoiding technologies already in cars on the streets for the past few years) or drive around them (for the upcoming self-driving cars that are slowly starting to appear).
Why would anyone think a buttonless keyboard would be a good idea?
Less moving parts => less parts that could break down => less warranty repairs or replacement costs for Apple. (Specially at a time where some territories like EU are going to put up more stringent and customer-oriented law regarding to warranty, and thus every maintenance cost that Apple can lower is a win against such future laws).
Compare with touch screen: how often did someone get a dead key on a virtual on-screen keyboard on a smartphone? breaking the whole screen is the only failure mode.
Compare to a laptop: after a couple of years, nearly every laptop has some problem in some mechanical part and a faulty key somewhere necessitating replacement.
In other words, it's a magic probable cause generator.
And instead of throwing money at some stupid device to help investigate a crash, wouldn't the money be better spent at some other kind of magic devices to prevent the crash happening in the first place ?
Magic devices such as adaptive cruise-control, forward collision warning with automatic braking, lane departure warning (with automatic trajectory correction)... Technologies under the brand name "City Safety". Or "Autopilot" if you're more Tesla-inclined. Used to be available in more expensive cars (e.g.: Volvo), now starts to show up even in more modest ones (e.g.: available even on VW's Up! serie) and several european automakers are vouching to make it default on their whole range.
The technology is here, already deployed on some of the car currently out on the streets.
Money would be better spent in perfecting that technology and/or helping it get more wide spread and affordable/available.
Money on technology that actively saves lives.
But no, let's instead blow money on little useless gadgets, just to help pin-point who's more likely to be guiltiest once the accident already happened.
So if SpaceX fails, the taxpayer picks up the cost,
...and also SpaceX would have foldded. This was their last chance.
Tax payers aren't the only one holding the burden.
But if SpaceX succeeds, they reap the profits?
As is the government (The whole point of financing projects like SpaceX is the prospect that the developed technology will help cheaper flights) and thus indirectly the tax payers (Less cost for NASA to be spent on launchers, and thus less costs to be passed to tax payers).
Though, given how NASA's budget is a drop in the bucket compared to all of your government spendings (e.g.: see all the "War on things") I don't think the taxpayers will notice it going either way.
with the billions we invested unlikely to ever be repaid.
In the grand scheme of things, NASA, ESA and all the various other space agencies *need* to advance the research and development of launcher technologies. As these technologies progress, overall cost of space (including scientific mission, but also telecoms putting sattelites, etc.) will definitely go lower. Also more possibilities will open. (Launching bigger scientific platform which weren't possible before, due to the cost of all the launchers to bring all the pieces in orbit).
And that requires investing money.
Some project will work (and currently, looks like SpaceX will eventually work), some other will fail. It's not possible to predict with 100% certainty in advance (otherwise, if it was already known to work, it would have been put into production).
But overall all these investment will eventually be worth, once some of the more successful projects brings new technology.
A couple of billion will get lost here and there on failed project, but in the end the overall science will advance.
And again, these billion are dwarfed by the trillion your government is spending elsewhere...
It's a good thing a female robot wasn't used in the experiment. The male engineers and Slashdot users would have run away in terror when asked to touch a female robot's private parts.
...all the while, all the femi-trolls of the internet would have run the opposite direction to start some outraged circus...
But don't worry too much. At least in the US, their chocolate eggs are banned because they contain toys (on the grounds of choking hasard). Fear not the horrible chocolate! Your kids can safely go back to playing with their pink-painted child-marketed riffles.
Slashdot Mirror
WHAT? I DIDN'T HEAR YOU... CAN YOU REPEAT?
(same filtering stuff ruinning the purpose of the joke...)
What ? Simply in bizarre subdirectories with weird names on plain "normal" webservers ?~
But I though that the children-pedo-terrists were all hiding using Tor, GPG, end-to-end chat encryption, "China's Great Firewall"-busting VPNs, and all those other "anonymity-protecting" technologies that our governments want to rightfully take away from the evil hippies menacing us ~~
But would a bear watching it have a uncanny valley when seeing another bear?
It depends on two factor:
- which sense does the considered animal use to perceive the world and other individual of the same specie?
As mentioned, we human are quasi exclusively visual, with some auditive perception (voice) thrown in too, whereas other animal rely on other sense or other interpretations of sense. (e.g.: some snakes have infrared perception and use it to recognise other animal. They would not recognize a mouse if it were cold)
- how is the social structure of the animal, how much does it need to recognise others and does it have a concept of "Uncanny valley".
In humans, it plays (among other) a role of instinctive/inate xenophobia (due to the "US vs Them" mentality that played an important role back when we were living in small packs/tribes) : if it looks almost like us but not quite exactly, chances are that it comes from another pack/tribe, therefore it is a direct competitor to us and we must hate it/fight it.
(Side note: sadly some of our stupidest contemporary brethren seem not to have evolved much since then and still believe racism is a thing, even now when the society has evolved and globalised to the point where "tribe" now covers nearly all the few billions humans on the planet, which should all stick together if we want to still have some hope to survive as a specie)
So it all boils down to:
- will the considered animal recognise the CGI representation as another animal of the same specie?
- and does is have an inate "uncanny valley" mechanism?
e.g: House cats.
- House cats are enough visual (nearly like us) so they will also recognise movie depiction of cats as "cats" (and also other felidae, due to the scale on the TV screen. They will also recognise movie depiction of lions).
- Cats have complex behaviour which, among other depends on the availability of resources. When there's enough shelter and food for everyone, they'll tolerate other individuals without excessive fuss. (That's how feral cat colonies form). They'll even collectively raise kittens (probable evolutionary explanation: due to the reproductive patterns of cats, when there are kittens around, chance are high that they're somewhat related, and helping raising them helps proliferate more copies of the same genes).
So house cats are likely to try calling movie representation of cats to play with them (in my experience) (they'll also try call lions).
And I'm sure about a dozen of internet companies with name containing elements like "X", "You", "Red", "Porn", "Tube", "Hub", "hasmter" - and various combinations thereof - will all be willing to pool the necessary money in exchange to the rights of streaming the content of the experiment's visual footage.
For science, you know...
A point of comparison:
- based on TNT content a hand grenade release between 400 and 800kJ when exploding. (example of source)
- unit conversion: 1Wh battery = 3.6 kJ (and 1Ah or 1000mAh x 3.7 V = 3.7 Wh = 13.3 kJ)
So your garden variety ~3000mAh LiPo "18650" 3.7V cell holds a little bit under 40kJ.
Your laptop long life 9-cell 8900mAh battery pack holds a little bit under 100Wh or nearly 360kJ, about the same ballpark range as a smaller grenade (hence the xkcd comic).
A long-ranged drone's (e.g.) 6s high voltage (= 6* 3.7V = 22V) 16000mah is 355 Wh or a whoping 1.2 MJ.
This drone has a battery that gives of the same range of energy as two hand grenades.
Yup, this is dwarfed buy the combustion of kerosene: 1 liter gives of 37 Mj (or about the same as pile of about a thousand "18650" batteries - fuel is still a denser energy storage than lithium). And the combustion chamber of the jet engine will probably not even notice if a puny little drone battery went "poof" inside.
The thing is, an air-plane is far more than just the interior of the jet engine's combustion chamber.
And there are a lot of parts of that air-plane that wont appreciate the explosion of a drone battery.
Think of it, if you need to test it by throwing chicken at it (ball park estimate: an average chicken weights ~2.5 kg. I use an approximate speed difference of 500km/h. That gives us Ecin = 1/2mv^2 = about 25 kJ of cinetic energy), an air-plane is going to take some damage from the equivalent of 2 hand grenades lobed at it.
A single drone impact won't cause the plane to sustain a catastophic hull failure (as TFA points out, the plane successfully landed safely afterwards), but it's certainly going to do a lot more damage that fowl.
When ingested by the engine, even if combustion chamber won't suffer much, the turbine is going to take quite some damage.
I know that I shouldn't be explaining my joke, but I was sarcastically referring that your "in linux, it's also possible to do lots of dammage without being root" instructions are nearly as complicate as the copy-pasta troll that was once popular on /. about the difficulty to get Quake running with openGL in Linux.
(As opposed to Windows where such breakage happens almost entirely alone, without nearly any user intervention required).
Consider it as a variant of the "Does virus {NAME} runs under Wine? Nope? Exactly what I though: yet another part of the Windows experience we can't join..." joke.
(naked) Maude Lebowksi: - Vagina !
Here's a hint: type Alt-F2, type "bash" there, and open a shell. Now, type {...}
Such a simple and straightforward procedure !
I wonder why everybody is complaining about Linux being hard to adapt to...
It seems like one good use of this technology would be to integrate it with some sort of HUD overlay on the windshield so that a driver can see things in the dark. I would love to have a car that put red outlines around things like deer in the road or even the lines on the road.
Early prototype and concept cars using Forward Collision Warning Systems mused with the idea of red outlines/augmented reality. /. but I can manage to find the proper link).
(There was even some such prototype mentioned here on
With the idea, e.g.: to have a screen on the dashboard displaying a "night view" of the road ahead with silhouettes outlined.
In the end, I suspected that preliminary research has found it to be too much distracting.
Car currently on the road seem to have gone for much simpler and primitive displays.
e.g: On Volvos, they use simply a line of LEDs behind the dashboard that get reflect in the windshield. You just see it as light bar hovering in front of the car.
It gets progressively brighter orange as object get too much near your car.
If the object is dangerously near the car, the light gets suddenly bright red, about right before the moment where the car will start autonomously hitting the brakes if no other input from the driver.
Seems to work better as, instead of having to recognize complex shapes (that in the end don't give any useful information. You don't mind if it's a deer or if it's a cyclist. you mind if it's in front of your and if your car is on a collision course with it) it's simple light.
And driver have already taken the habit to react quickly to a red light suddenly shining somewhere in front of the car: that's what your peripheral vision perceives when the car in front of you brakes. You have an almost pavlovian reflex to hit the brakes when you see it. Works as well if it's actually a deer and the phantom light comes from your own FCWS/FCAS.
but many of these enhanced features like super accurate mapping of the roads
This has been already debunked by google engineer on TED talks:
self driving cars DO NOT have a supper accurate map of the roads.
For this to work, you need an insanely high level of accuracy in your mapping of roads.
Like down to the precise location of each orange cone on a construction site.
And it needs to be extremely up-to-date. It doesn't matter if a couple of hours ago the lane was free, the important part is that right NOW the lane is closed and your self-driving car needs to avoid it.
At that point, just having an SSD in the car with insanely precise map isn't enough. You'll need to have some online connection, so the car gets continuous update.
And to make this updates you need to gather as much information as you can.
So you actually cover your self-driving car in sensors, so the car can continuously update the map and alert the other cars of any new construction cone or pothole on the road.
At that point, if the car has the necessary sensors to be able to update the maps in real time about any pothole or construction cone, you might as well completely skip the whole online and map part, and directly use the sensors to directly react to the environment around the car.
Self-driving cars (and for that matters, current cars with forward collision warning/avoidance systems, and adaptive cruise control) don't actually count on super accurate mapping of the roads.
They function in a manner very close to their human driver: they use GPS and maps to get the general idea of where they should be going (e.g.: according to the map, in about 2km, I need to continue toward City B. The exit is on the two right-most lanes of the highway), and used their perception of their surrounding for the actual minute details (e.g.: there are cones on the left of me. The lane is closed, I can't go there. Also the vehicle in front isn't moving any more, so I should hit the brakes before rear-ending it).
So in short, a self-drive car's GPS isn't much more different that the mundane one in your car. None of them has a "super accurate mapping of the roads".
But the self-driving car has a huge array of sensors helping to super accurately *see* its environment on the roads.
Unless he has one of these
This is not a detector, this is a jammer.
Whenever a laser beam is shone from afar on the car
(from a long distance, like when the cop start pointing the gun toward a car of which they want to measure the speed)
at that distance the beam is diffused (even if only a bit), if it was visible light wavelenght, you the driver would see the laser gun glimering whenever it is pointed in the general direction of the vehicle.
This laser light is detected by the detector, which triggers an alarm (so the driver knows to react) and starts shining light from various emitter on the car.
At that distance, the slight diffusion of light is enough that the emitter confuse the laser gun, slow down its measuring, and give some time for the driver to react.
Which I can only imagine would cause interesting readings on the LiDAR-equipped vehicle.
Nope.
The first and foremost reason:
all vehicle use a combination of multiple sensors.
At the range concerned by jammer, cars don't use the lidar at all.
They use mostly a conventional radar, and some also use visible light camera with optical recognition.
None of which would be severly affected by the jammer (maybe the car will be seeming blinking in the distance, depending on the IR filters used by the camera).
The LiDAR in car is used for much shorter ranges. It's generally pointing slightly downward. ... any object that is near the car that could collide with it so the car can autonomously break in reaction. LiDAR (and camera, and optionally sonars) are the main input for the forward collision avoidance systems.
It's not used to "see" cars hundreds of meters away (that's what the radar and/or camera are for, they are the main input for the adaptive cruise control).
It's used to see object with more precision in the immediate vicinity of the car.
It (combined with input from optical recognition from the camera) helps recognising pedestrian, cylcists, *nearby* car,
At that distance, the effect isn't that much of a single light source shone in the general direction of an object from a distance (as is the case with a laser speed trap), but a cloud of lots of small points covering the object (used to recognize shape and size, in addition to distance and speed).
The jammer will probably not see it as a big light exciting its detectors, put occasional small points crossing 1 or 2 sensors at a time. How it will react to this is an unknown to me, but I'll surely it will be more optimized for long range (to predict laser speed traps) and might (correctly) assume this to be useless noise.
I don't own such a jammer (and not that much interested in that technology) so I can't test it.
Also at this distance, the emmiters will be probably seen as individual points of light. That will be probably seen as a couple of bogus point in the point cloud and *should probably* be ignored.
Anyway, to avoid all the LiDAR cars (and other LiDAR based measuring instruments) jamming each-other, LiDAR usually use specific patterns (can't seems to find in the litterature if they are random, or if there's an ID encoded in it) so each LiDAR can successfully recognize it's own dots and ignore other LiDAR's.
The LiDAR *should probably* refuse to take into acount the jammer's emitter as valid dots due to not being part of its specific pattern.
The various LiDAR equipped cars' I've driven have never been jammed by any other light source be it a specific laser jammer or other cars' LiDAR.
Granted, it's possible that I've been just lucky (radar jammers are considered illegal and banned in most european jurisdictions).
But LiDAR-equipped cars are slowly satrting to get more frequent here around and I've never experienced or even heard about a car getting confused.
Last but not least, as I've said in the beginning, cars tend to integrate the input of numerous sensors a
My oldest notebook computer is from 2000
Let me guess, IBM ThinkPad T-serie ?
More seriously, this laptop comes from a different era.
Its keyboard was designed for more durability.
(And older laptops even more so).
Nowadays, more laptops are designed more for shiny factor to attract customers.
They tend to be less durable.
The laptops that take a lot of abuse tend to get broken keys and malfunctioning keyboard overtime.
Sample: Not some 25-year old IBM Thinkpad, that I have still lying around.
Sample instead is all the various laptops that I've seen at fellow students dorms the past years.
They are often cheaper brands (or no-name brands), consumer oriented instead of professional oriented (the kind of laptop where the brand name and model name are useless to track a replacement part. There several revision of completely different internals that were released under the same "model name". Usually you need to track a few 4 digit long revision/submodels to find the exact thing you want).
Malfunctionning keys is the top complain I've heard
And right next are: faulty audio connector that got partially desoldered from months of regular "Dorm-party abuse", and b0rked connection in the hinge between laptop body and screen leading to intermittent display artifacts.
Failing cooling systems is also frequent, but far less problematic as nearly everybody seems to be okay buying a laptop cooling stand.
In theory, CD-R tray drive failing is a recuring problem, but as none of my sample actually use discs for anything (MP3 is still the main medium for swapping music around, when it's not straigh streaming from youtube) they've never noticed.
Failing audio ports, on the other hand, ARE serious business. Resoldering jacks has earning me quite a few favours from fellow students.
(at least batteries and power blocks are replaceable)
So that's 100% bull droppings. {...} TL;DR keyboards doesn't fail mechanically in reality.
Yup. Your single datapoint about your laptop in your basement instantly renders non existent all the dozens of laptops I've seen at fellow students', at parties, at girl friends'/ex-girlfriends'/other random flings'...
Okay, I have no problem with that. Keep your belief that no mechanical part in any laptop has ever failed.
And I'll keep helping fix old laptop for cheaper than buying a new, which has already earned me quite a lot of favour from (often female) fellow students.
The car recall formula
(Sorry I only find this one with the infographics visuals. I didn't manage to find the original movie scene. I guess it's too long for Google/DMCA "fair use" criteria).
- What car company are you working for ?
- Major one
yup.
it's the whole idea of Dawkins that we're slowly evolving from a situation were we animals are only vessels to help our DNA make sure there's more copy of it in the next generation,
to a situation where life helps evolve something much larger than the individuals: culture civilisation.
We evolved speech, we evolved passed knowledge (oral tradition and teaching).
We evolved writing, we evolved stored knowledge (litterature and reference).
We evolved communication, we evolved shared knowledge (internet and what some call "extelligence")
At that point, in the long term, what matters most is science and society. Not genetic traits.
Still in the meantime, we're animals carrying genes that evolved during million of years before the invention of the internet.
We're bound to carry some left-over instincts.
Actually, your DNA doesn't give a shit. It's an encoding of a bunch of molecules - don't think it cares too much about anything
Look up the word "metaphore" in wikipedia, it might help.
DNA has not high level volition on its own.
But group of gene which produce a trait or a behaviour that is more likely to help have more copies of the DNA in the next generation are, over time, more likely to proliferate in the general population.
(Darwinian genetics)
There is more to it, of course, but that would all seem to make sense from a DNA/evolution point of view.
Yup, there IS more to this.
The thing is, we didn't evolve as loners.
We did evolve living in small packs/tribes of more or less related individuals. (Or extended families a little bit later in history).
That adds a lot of complexity to the scheme.
- That's why we evolved altruism (the individual you're helping is most likely to be from your tribe, and you're likely to be related to it. By being nice to people, you *are* actually helping passing around more copy of your genes (including the genes that shaped said altruism behaviour). You just happen not to be the actual vessel passing around the genes).
- That's why adoption is a works very well with humans (the nearest child without parents is highly likely to be related to you. by raising the child, you increase the number of copies of your gene in the pool).
- That's why we evolved grand-mothers (in most species, genetic defect that manifest after the end of the reproductive life aren't much selected against: by the time the age-related disease sets in, copie of the gene have already been passed. In most speice of apes to which we are closely related, senility is the normal way of things, nearly all ageing apes get senile. Not so in humans: senility are some specific diseases, but lots of individuals age nicely without getting alzheimer's, parkinson's, etc. because then these ageing individuals can help taking care of their grand-kids, and again helping more copies of their genes survive (including the beneficial gene that help in late age) even if they are not anymore biologically able to pass themselves first-hand).
- That's saddly why we evolved "uncanny valley" (it also helps forming a genetic ground for xenophobia: if it looks almost like, but a little bit of what you've used to see while growing up, chances are that it comes from a different pack/tribe to which you aren't related to and is a competitor that you need to kill with fire).
(NOTE: I'm not condoning xenophobia in any way. I'm just giving explanation why we did evolve such a stupid behaviour and "uncanny valley" might be the mechanism supporting it. It only explain, not justify. We must understand these mechanism and adapt to the fact that modern highly mobile and interconnect civilisation has grown to the point where "pack/tribe" covers about a dozen billion individual spread on a whole planet surface, and we must all stick together if we want to have a chance at surviving as a specie at whole)
And countless other example of special behaviour in humans that might seem counter intuitive in the first place, but start to make sense once you look at them through the lens of small pack/tribes/extended families (situation in which we've spent most of our evolution time).
You can find other similar behaviour in other animals that live in groups, from cats (not very social animals, but still can live in colonies) all the way up to ants and bees (all these kind of behaviours turned up to eleven. to the point where only 1 single individual - the queen - actually passes here gene around actively, and every other last one in the colony is indirectly helping more copies of their genes indirectly by helping their siblings - which makes even more sense when your do the mendelian genetics maths on their peculiar reproductive cycle)
Your DNA cares. You serve largely to pass it on, and if the kid isn't yours, and you pick up on the clues, you're probably hardwired to reject the little mite.
On the other hand, if the kid isn't yours, chances are high (back in the pack/tribe era of human evolution) that it comes from another individual of the pack to which you're related. By raising the kid, you're still helping passing more copies of your genes around. You just happen not to be the actual individual who inserted these specific copies of the gene into your mate.
Thus lasers don't need light, they are already a light source.
Nope: your detector typically detect radio waves (as used by some doppler based speed traps).
It can't detect laser (in advance) because it's highly directional. The only situation where it could detect a laser is once the laser is already pointed at your car, at which point it is already too late, you're already being measured and eventually fined.
So no detector will try detecting lasers and thus no detector will get set of by a Ford.
Same with the other "avoid.speeding tickets" gadgets which are based on GPS technology
(along tables of speed limitation for roads,
and (hopefully kept up-to-date) tables of known radar positions).
Those will alert you of laser-based or plate-reading camera-based speed-traps, even when it can't sense them.
Actually head-lights have the opposite effect to wild-life: they increase danger.
When they get shone on by the head-lights, wild animals get startled and most often their natural reaction is to freeze
(hoping that the potential predator won't notice them ? i think that's a plausible explanation for the behaviour)
Standard procedure (as taught in driving course here around) is to hit the horn, so the noise will scare them into fleeing.
(It works, in my personal experience)
No headlight could in theory avoid the deers freezing.
Also the lidar can clearly recognize de obstacle and hit the breaks on time (though I have no first hand experience with that situation).
But in practice you'll probably have the headlights on (to be seen by other drivers, and also because the other technology used simultaneously by most system - camera - does need good lighting condition)
Still, the collision avoidance system is likely to hit the brakes in time.
That's why car with collision avoidance systems currently on the streets (e.g.: Volvo)
combine the input from several sensors.
Not only do they use LiDAR (like TFA) and camera (also limited by visible light).
But also short-range sonars ("Parking sensors") that are less disturbed by snow (but are easier to disturb by air turbulence/compressed air).
and long-range radars (the thing mainly used by adaptive cruise-control).
Driving at night should, for the most part, be easier for many systems than driving during the day.
Depends on the technology used.
The technology compete (or more often in practice: supplementing) with visible-light camera and image recognition.
Either using simple perspective recognition in case of single cams (like on Tesla, etc.) or using stereo correlation with a pair of cams (like recent Mercedes, etc.)
Such cameras work better with good lighting conditions, in complete dark they won't work.
Also, don't forget the main technology "competing" with such tools: the human driver.
We human see badly in darkness, we see better in sun light.
If the car uses technology that can see better in darkness it can react to things that the human driver might have missed.
By combining several technologies (e.g: lidar, camera, short range sonar, long range radar on Volvos) the car extends the range of situation where it can cleary "see" obstacles.
And avoid them (for the current type of collision avoiding technologies already in cars on the streets for the past few years) or drive around them (for the upcoming self-driving cars that are slowly starting to appear).
Why would anyone think a buttonless keyboard would be a good idea?
Less moving parts => less parts that could break down => less warranty repairs or replacement costs for Apple.
(Specially at a time where some territories like EU are going to put up more stringent and customer-oriented law regarding to warranty,
and thus every maintenance cost that Apple can lower is a win against such future laws).
Compare with touch screen:
how often did someone get a dead key on a virtual on-screen keyboard on a smartphone?
breaking the whole screen is the only failure mode.
Compare to a laptop:
after a couple of years, nearly every laptop has some problem in some mechanical part and a faulty key somewhere necessitating replacement.
In other words, it's a magic probable cause generator.
And instead of throwing money at some stupid device to help investigate a crash,
wouldn't the money be better spent at some other kind of magic devices to prevent the crash happening in the first place ?
Magic devices such as adaptive cruise-control, forward collision warning with automatic braking, lane departure warning (with automatic trajectory correction)...
Technologies under the brand name "City Safety". Or "Autopilot" if you're more Tesla-inclined.
Used to be available in more expensive cars (e.g.: Volvo), now starts to show up even in more modest ones (e.g.: available even on VW's Up! serie) and several european automakers are vouching to make it default on their whole range.
The technology is here, already deployed on some of the car currently out on the streets.
Money would be better spent in perfecting that technology and/or helping it get more wide spread and affordable/available.
Money on technology that actively saves lives.
But no, let's instead blow money on little useless gadgets, just to help pin-point who's more likely to be guiltiest once the accident already happened.
So if SpaceX fails, the taxpayer picks up the cost,
...and also SpaceX would have foldded. This was their last chance.
Tax payers aren't the only one holding the burden.
But if SpaceX succeeds, they reap the profits?
As is the government (The whole point of financing projects like SpaceX is the prospect that the developed technology will help cheaper flights)
and thus indirectly the tax payers (Less cost for NASA to be spent on launchers, and thus less costs to be passed to tax payers).
Though, given how NASA's budget is a drop in the bucket compared to all of your government spendings (e.g.: see all the "War on things") I don't think the taxpayers will notice it going either way.
with the billions we invested unlikely to ever be repaid.
In the grand scheme of things, NASA, ESA and all the various other space agencies *need* to advance the research and development of launcher technologies.
As these technologies progress, overall cost of space (including scientific mission, but also telecoms putting sattelites, etc.) will definitely go lower. Also more possibilities will open. (Launching bigger scientific platform which weren't possible before, due to the cost of all the launchers to bring all the pieces in orbit).
And that requires investing money.
Some project will work (and currently, looks like SpaceX will eventually work), some other will fail.
It's not possible to predict with 100% certainty in advance (otherwise, if it was already known to work, it would have been put into production).
But overall all these investment will eventually be worth, once some of the more successful projects brings new technology.
A couple of billion will get lost here and there on failed project, but in the end the overall science will advance.
And again, these billion are dwarfed by the trillion your government is spending elsewhere...
It's a good thing a female robot wasn't used in the experiment. The male engineers and Slashdot users would have run away in terror when asked to touch a female robot's private parts.
...all the while, all the femi-trolls of the internet would have run the opposite direction to start some outraged circus...
this appears to be related to Kinder chocolates
But don't worry too much. At least in the US, their chocolate eggs are banned because they contain toys (on the grounds of choking hasard).
Fear not the horrible chocolate! Your kids can safely go back to playing with their pink-painted child-marketed riffles.