I figure the chances of there being a god is pretty much exactly the same as that the god is me as all evidence to the existance of god applies equally to me being that god.
That is the point. Human exacerbate a problem of not enough road for the number of vehicles. Then people assume that it is the humans that are the root of the problem. When you are on a 4 lane road that is at or near capacity and traveling at the speed limit, and then the road narrows to two lanes, there is no amount of perfect driving that will keep the traffic from backing up. It will back up for humans, and it will back up for computer controlled cars. It will back up faster for humans than computer controlled cars, but it will still back up.
On the plus side, if the cars are computer controlled, maybe we can get the roads fixed where it is the design that causes the congestion.
I am not convinced we will see a big difference in congestion. Some improvement yes, but not as much as many people think. Of course, it is improbable that we will see an increase in congestion either. All the other reasons I agree with, and still make me want a self driving car.
I got the chicken pox numbers from the CDC. Technically, it was off the internet, since the CDC publishes this data online, but the CDC is about as reliable of a source as we are going to get, and I'm pretty sure that they don't fall into the 'anti-vaxxer' camp.
The home cooked meal death by fire rate can be found in many places. FEMA, another government site that we should be able to take statistics from will give you numbers on home cooked meal fire deaths.
The current vaccine does prevent shingles when given as a high dosage to people who are already immune to chicken pox. In fact, the only real problem with the current vaccine is that it is given to children instead of adults. 5% of all chicken pox cases are in adults. 50% of all deaths are in adults. The vaccine should be given to adults who failed to catch the disease as a child.
The current vaccine given to children is often claimed to prevent shingles, but it hasn't been in use nearly long enough to really determine that to be the case.
Personally, I would much rather see the research go into a vaccine for herpes. It is already a closely related disease, and all of our children are far more likely to suffer far worse effects from that than chicken pox.
My child's chicken pox makes your child's vaccine more effective. One of the problems with the vaccine is that with a reduction of exposure to wild strains of chicken pox, the vaccinated children don't get the natural boosters that the vaccine makers counted on for the vaccine to work.
So, unless your child is so immune compromised that he cannot get vaccinated (in which case, being in a public school is going to be a big problem for your kid anyway) you are welcome for my contribution to making your child safer from the disease.
I left out the "in a nation that does not vaccinate against it" because I specifically referenced the summary as the source of that comment. The summary basically stated that the 500 number was measles vaccine United States. I referenced the summary with the specific phrase of "If the summary is correct" specifically because I have not verified those numbers, and I wanted that to be clear.
My information on Measles is definitely less than that on chicken pox. I also only looked up the death rate of burning to death due to home cooked meals for the U.S., so your countries rate of home cooked meal related deaths could be vastly different as well.
You are a perfect example of the "if it is called a vaccine it stick it in" are just as bad as the "vaccines are evil" crowd. At best you are looking at saving ~50 kids a year. At worst, you are dooming hundreds to die of chicken pox in adulthood. Your murderous intent doesn't get a pass because "hey, we delayed their death into adulthood."
You are a perfect example of the "My shade of grey is better than your shade of grey." You could save more children's lives and reduce the number that are permanently injured by advocating the banning of kitchens in homes than by advocating the chicken pox vaccine. Have you done this? Will you start advocating the banning of home kitchens? Of course not. Because your child killing activity doesn't count. Right?
As long as you have a kitchen in your home, you are nothing more than a hypocrite. A hypocrite that is spewing dogma instead of looking at the data.
Wrong. Shingles is the new stick to beat the chicken pox vaccine drum with, since the vaccine is a failure on it's own. First, shingles just isn't that bad. Unpleasant, sure. But, just not that bad. Most people never get it. That is why it is so easy to scare people with it. They are unfamiliar with it, or anyone who has had it. So, "doomed" is simply a ridiculous word to use.
Second. The chicken pox vaccine is a live virus vaccine. It protects you by giving you the disease. It has been modified so that the symptoms are minimal to non-existent. The vaccine has not existed long enough to have any evidence as to whether it will have any effect on the likelihood of getting shingles late in life.
Third. The vaccine does not offer life long immunity, so you are not really less likely to get chicken pox anyway. You are just less likely to get it as a child. The next 10 to 15 years will be interesting, as there is a good probability that we will have a vulnerable adult population that is larger than our nation has ever seen.
Fourth. The chicken pox vaccine can be given to people who have gained life long immunity through catching chicken pox. This effectively becomes a shingles vaccine, and is in fact sold and administered as such as we speak.
Obviously you didn't look very close at the data before you started calling people asshole.
Well, that's just not true. Since 20 years ago, virtually 100% of pregnant women were exposed to the virus, we would have had a 1 in 50 birth defect rate from chicken pox alone. That didn't happen, so clearly you are wrong. Unless you are talking about women who contract chicken pox while pregnant. If that is the case, the vaccine is doubly bad. Since it does not offer life long immunity, we are facing a greater number of women who are vulnerable to catching the chicken pox while pregnant.
A clear sign that someone isn't rational is when they believe a huge crater in the surface of the moon is a majestic landscape when it is created by a random rock, but is a ravaged landscape if it is created by man.
This is part of my complaint against the chicken pox vaccine. Home cooked meals are over 3x more dangerous than Chicken Pox in a nation that does not vaccinate against it. If the number in the summary is correct, Measles is only about 1 1/2 times as dangerous as home cooked meals. The press these diseases get when someone catches them just feeds into the suspicion that some people have of vaccinations.
While my child got most of his vaccines, I specifically opted out of the chicken pox vaccine. The reason is that when the numbers are hashed out, there is more danger from chicken pox if everyone gets the vaccine than if no one does. This is because of exactly what arth1 said. People don't get it as children when it is a mild disease that has a death rate similar to riding a bus to school or high school football. Instead, the vaccine which is well known to not offer life long immunity, protects the person just long enough for them to fall into a group that has 10x the risk from the disease.
What we consistently hear though is that "Chicken Pox is deadly." People advocate forcing the use of the vaccine, or taking children away from parents that this poor quality vaccine. Images of Polio are called out as arguments to vaccinate against chickenpox.
True. I don't know if interference would be a concern in real world scenarios or not. I think it is a good question though. You likely wouldn't see 100 cars at a time, but you would be transmitting all of the time, and I would assume, transmitting at a higher power than a TV remote. Of course all of that is moot if cars are relying on vision systems. I am also pretty sure that the reason lidar took over for radar was because lidar could be more narrowly focused.
It will do the right thing, which will frequently be to run over that squirrel instead of slamming on the breaks causing humans to be the ones that get injured or killed.
I want a self-driving motorhome. I telecommute, and it would be awesome to be able to travel around the country working from the back of an RV while the RV automatically takes me to cool places around the country. I have done some road trips with my wife and kid like this, but she would be much happier and willing to do it more if she wasn't the one that had to do all of the driving.
If you have one remote it works great. If you have two remotes it will still work good. If you put 100 remotes in a room and had each of them pressing buttons at the same time, you would likely start to run into unreliability due to interference from each other. (Someone more familiar with the protocol should be able to tell us how many remotes it would take to be a problem) One problem with early CFL bulbs was that they emitted IR and would sometimes cause problems with IR remotes for TVs.
Traffic jams are almost a sole function of human deficiencies through overreaction and slow reaction.
No they are not. That is a myth. Traffic jams are almost a sole function of not enough road for the number of cars. Once a road is at capacity, no amount of 'perfect' driving is going to prevent the addition of more cars from causing traffic slowdowns and eventually traffic jams.
And with that, a self driving car can avoid more accidents than a human because the self driving car can work from more information than a human is physically capable of gathering in any car produced to date.
a) there is enough excess profit in the contracts that it is not an issue, or b) the risk calculations from the other insurer for the locale being covered are similar enough for the company in question.
It is a little bit of each of these. Insurance companies are not businesses that usually start up on a shoestring. While things may have changes somewhat since I was in the industry, when a new insurer would enter the business, they would look at their competitor's policy manuals and pick one that looked like it would work for them. They would then make a few minor tweaks, and start writing policies. The fact that the competitor was still in business was a pretty good sign that the policy calculations would produce a profit, or at least wouldn't lead to huge losses. Then, as they gain experience in the market, they would make tweaks and adjustments based the experience they get. If they calculate wrong, they might have some short term losses, but they then just increase rates to a point that they are not losing money again. So, all of the accounting worries that you point out end up having no real bearing on the price of the product.
Thus when people think that 19-25 year olds have 30% higher rates because of some the auto insurance companies did some kind of thorough analysis of driving ability and likelihood of getting in an accident, they are wrong. Analysis might have been done at one time, a long long time ago. But, after hundreds or thousands of copy, paste, and gut feeling kludges, they now have only a passing relationship to any real world statistics.
Why wouldn't a car have 360 vision? You also wouldn't need 10 feet. People back into things because they don't see them. Someone diving for the wheel is going to be pretty rare. A kid riding a bike along the sidewalk and the driver who is 6 feet into the driveway not seeing the kid and hitting them with the back of the car that is on the sidewalk is going to be much much more common.
All of that is non-sequitur to the fact that their rates are not based on good math. The accountants don't care how you determine your price. They just care that the amounts coming in and going out are what has been declared as the amounts that should be coming in and going out.
Voice recognition is harder than collision avoidance. There is also nothing stopping the cab company from making a video conference connection to the cab when a new passanger enters the cab. Having a couple of dispatchers back at the office replacing several dozen cabbies is a big cost savings. Humans at the office can do the voice recognition and type in the address on behalf of the passanger.
The two way video/audio system used above would prevent virtually all of the 'inappropriate' behavior. Of course, you are making the assumption that stuff doesn't happen in the back of cabs with human drivers now.
The place that I would expect to see self-driving make a good start is in high end RVs. If the cost of the self driving system is (pulls number out of a hat) $20k, adding the cost to a $40k car prices it out of reason. Put that $20k self driving system in a $120k+ RV and you have a close enough wiggle room in the price to get it through. People buying $100k to $200k motor homes, also have enough room in their entertainment budget that an extra $20k isn't going to shock them. Then consider that RVs are going to be used by people who really want to spend time in the back of their vehicle. For most vehicles, while it would be nice to sleep or read while traveling to your destination, motorhome owners would be at their destination during the drive if the vehicle could drive itself.
While they are at it, they should make the RVs electric to boot. RVs already carry a huge amount of weight in batteries and they frequently carry a generator to charge those batteries.
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I figure the chances of there being a god is pretty much exactly the same as that the god is me as all evidence to the existance of god applies equally to me being that god.
You may all bow down before me now.
They still happen here in the U.S. too, but you have to look for them.
That is the point. Human exacerbate a problem of not enough road for the number of vehicles. Then people assume that it is the humans that are the root of the problem. When you are on a 4 lane road that is at or near capacity and traveling at the speed limit, and then the road narrows to two lanes, there is no amount of perfect driving that will keep the traffic from backing up. It will back up for humans, and it will back up for computer controlled cars. It will back up faster for humans than computer controlled cars, but it will still back up.
On the plus side, if the cars are computer controlled, maybe we can get the roads fixed where it is the design that causes the congestion.
I am not convinced we will see a big difference in congestion. Some improvement yes, but not as much as many people think. Of course, it is improbable that we will see an increase in congestion either. All the other reasons I agree with, and still make me want a self driving car.
I got the chicken pox numbers from the CDC. Technically, it was off the internet, since the CDC publishes this data online, but the CDC is about as reliable of a source as we are going to get, and I'm pretty sure that they don't fall into the 'anti-vaxxer' camp.
The home cooked meal death by fire rate can be found in many places. FEMA, another government site that we should be able to take statistics from will give you numbers on home cooked meal fire deaths.
The current vaccine does prevent shingles when given as a high dosage to people who are already immune to chicken pox. In fact, the only real problem with the current vaccine is that it is given to children instead of adults. 5% of all chicken pox cases are in adults. 50% of all deaths are in adults. The vaccine should be given to adults who failed to catch the disease as a child.
The current vaccine given to children is often claimed to prevent shingles, but it hasn't been in use nearly long enough to really determine that to be the case.
Personally, I would much rather see the research go into a vaccine for herpes. It is already a closely related disease, and all of our children are far more likely to suffer far worse effects from that than chicken pox.
My child's chicken pox makes your child's vaccine more effective. One of the problems with the vaccine is that with a reduction of exposure to wild strains of chicken pox, the vaccinated children don't get the natural boosters that the vaccine makers counted on for the vaccine to work.
So, unless your child is so immune compromised that he cannot get vaccinated (in which case, being in a public school is going to be a big problem for your kid anyway) you are welcome for my contribution to making your child safer from the disease.
I left out the "in a nation that does not vaccinate against it" because I specifically referenced the summary as the source of that comment. The summary basically stated that the 500 number was measles vaccine United States. I referenced the summary with the specific phrase of "If the summary is correct" specifically because I have not verified those numbers, and I wanted that to be clear.
My information on Measles is definitely less than that on chicken pox. I also only looked up the death rate of burning to death due to home cooked meals for the U.S., so your countries rate of home cooked meal related deaths could be vastly different as well.
You are a perfect example of the "if it is called a vaccine it stick it in" are just as bad as the "vaccines are evil" crowd. At best you are looking at saving ~50 kids a year. At worst, you are dooming hundreds to die of chicken pox in adulthood. Your murderous intent doesn't get a pass because "hey, we delayed their death into adulthood."
You are a perfect example of the "My shade of grey is better than your shade of grey." You could save more children's lives and reduce the number that are permanently injured by advocating the banning of kitchens in homes than by advocating the chicken pox vaccine. Have you done this? Will you start advocating the banning of home kitchens? Of course not. Because your child killing activity doesn't count. Right?
As long as you have a kitchen in your home, you are nothing more than a hypocrite. A hypocrite that is spewing dogma instead of looking at the data.
Wrong. Shingles is the new stick to beat the chicken pox vaccine drum with, since the vaccine is a failure on it's own. First, shingles just isn't that bad. Unpleasant, sure. But, just not that bad. Most people never get it. That is why it is so easy to scare people with it. They are unfamiliar with it, or anyone who has had it. So, "doomed" is simply a ridiculous word to use.
Second. The chicken pox vaccine is a live virus vaccine. It protects you by giving you the disease. It has been modified so that the symptoms are minimal to non-existent. The vaccine has not existed long enough to have any evidence as to whether it will have any effect on the likelihood of getting shingles late in life.
Third. The vaccine does not offer life long immunity, so you are not really less likely to get chicken pox anyway. You are just less likely to get it as a child. The next 10 to 15 years will be interesting, as there is a good probability that we will have a vulnerable adult population that is larger than our nation has ever seen.
Fourth. The chicken pox vaccine can be given to people who have gained life long immunity through catching chicken pox. This effectively becomes a shingles vaccine, and is in fact sold and administered as such as we speak.
Obviously you didn't look very close at the data before you started calling people asshole.
Well, that's just not true. Since 20 years ago, virtually 100% of pregnant women were exposed to the virus, we would have had a 1 in 50 birth defect rate from chicken pox alone. That didn't happen, so clearly you are wrong. Unless you are talking about women who contract chicken pox while pregnant. If that is the case, the vaccine is doubly bad. Since it does not offer life long immunity, we are facing a greater number of women who are vulnerable to catching the chicken pox while pregnant.
A clear sign that someone isn't rational is when they believe a huge crater in the surface of the moon is a majestic landscape when it is created by a random rock, but is a ravaged landscape if it is created by man.
It is evil because mining the moon for He3 is for Nazis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py_IndUbcxc&feature=player_embedded
This is part of my complaint against the chicken pox vaccine. Home cooked meals are over 3x more dangerous than Chicken Pox in a nation that does not vaccinate against it. If the number in the summary is correct, Measles is only about 1 1/2 times as dangerous as home cooked meals. The press these diseases get when someone catches them just feeds into the suspicion that some people have of vaccinations.
While my child got most of his vaccines, I specifically opted out of the chicken pox vaccine. The reason is that when the numbers are hashed out, there is more danger from chicken pox if everyone gets the vaccine than if no one does. This is because of exactly what arth1 said. People don't get it as children when it is a mild disease that has a death rate similar to riding a bus to school or high school football. Instead, the vaccine which is well known to not offer life long immunity, protects the person just long enough for them to fall into a group that has 10x the risk from the disease.
What we consistently hear though is that "Chicken Pox is deadly." People advocate forcing the use of the vaccine, or taking children away from parents that this poor quality vaccine. Images of Polio are called out as arguments to vaccinate against chickenpox.
True. I don't know if interference would be a concern in real world scenarios or not. I think it is a good question though. You likely wouldn't see 100 cars at a time, but you would be transmitting all of the time, and I would assume, transmitting at a higher power than a TV remote. Of course all of that is moot if cars are relying on vision systems. I am also pretty sure that the reason lidar took over for radar was because lidar could be more narrowly focused.
It will do the right thing, which will frequently be to run over that squirrel instead of slamming on the breaks causing humans to be the ones that get injured or killed.
I want a self-driving motorhome. I telecommute, and it would be awesome to be able to travel around the country working from the back of an RV while the RV automatically takes me to cool places around the country. I have done some road trips with my wife and kid like this, but she would be much happier and willing to do it more if she wasn't the one that had to do all of the driving.
If you have one remote it works great. If you have two remotes it will still work good. If you put 100 remotes in a room and had each of them pressing buttons at the same time, you would likely start to run into unreliability due to interference from each other. (Someone more familiar with the protocol should be able to tell us how many remotes it would take to be a problem) One problem with early CFL bulbs was that they emitted IR and would sometimes cause problems with IR remotes for TVs.
Traffic jams are almost a sole function of human deficiencies through overreaction and slow reaction.
No they are not. That is a myth. Traffic jams are almost a sole function of not enough road for the number of cars. Once a road is at capacity, no amount of 'perfect' driving is going to prevent the addition of more cars from causing traffic slowdowns and eventually traffic jams.
And with that, a self driving car can avoid more accidents than a human because the self driving car can work from more information than a human is physically capable of gathering in any car produced to date.
a) there is enough excess profit in the contracts that it is not an issue, or b) the risk calculations from the other insurer for the locale being covered are similar enough for the company in question.
It is a little bit of each of these. Insurance companies are not businesses that usually start up on a shoestring. While things may have changes somewhat since I was in the industry, when a new insurer would enter the business, they would look at their competitor's policy manuals and pick one that looked like it would work for them. They would then make a few minor tweaks, and start writing policies. The fact that the competitor was still in business was a pretty good sign that the policy calculations would produce a profit, or at least wouldn't lead to huge losses. Then, as they gain experience in the market, they would make tweaks and adjustments based the experience they get. If they calculate wrong, they might have some short term losses, but they then just increase rates to a point that they are not losing money again. So, all of the accounting worries that you point out end up having no real bearing on the price of the product.
Thus when people think that 19-25 year olds have 30% higher rates because of some the auto insurance companies did some kind of thorough analysis of driving ability and likelihood of getting in an accident, they are wrong. Analysis might have been done at one time, a long long time ago. But, after hundreds or thousands of copy, paste, and gut feeling kludges, they now have only a passing relationship to any real world statistics.
Why wouldn't a car have 360 vision? You also wouldn't need 10 feet. People back into things because they don't see them. Someone diving for the wheel is going to be pretty rare. A kid riding a bike along the sidewalk and the driver who is 6 feet into the driveway not seeing the kid and hitting them with the back of the car that is on the sidewalk is going to be much much more common.
All of that is non-sequitur to the fact that their rates are not based on good math. The accountants don't care how you determine your price. They just care that the amounts coming in and going out are what has been declared as the amounts that should be coming in and going out.
The best part is that those people that still insist that not owning your own vehicle is a good idea can use the self driving taxis.
Voice recognition is harder than collision avoidance. There is also nothing stopping the cab company from making a video conference connection to the cab when a new passanger enters the cab. Having a couple of dispatchers back at the office replacing several dozen cabbies is a big cost savings. Humans at the office can do the voice recognition and type in the address on behalf of the passanger.
The two way video/audio system used above would prevent virtually all of the 'inappropriate' behavior. Of course, you are making the assumption that stuff doesn't happen in the back of cabs with human drivers now.
The place that I would expect to see self-driving make a good start is in high end RVs. If the cost of the self driving system is (pulls number out of a hat) $20k, adding the cost to a $40k car prices it out of reason. Put that $20k self driving system in a $120k+ RV and you have a close enough wiggle room in the price to get it through. People buying $100k to $200k motor homes, also have enough room in their entertainment budget that an extra $20k isn't going to shock them. Then consider that RVs are going to be used by people who really want to spend time in the back of their vehicle. For most vehicles, while it would be nice to sleep or read while traveling to your destination, motorhome owners would be at their destination during the drive if the vehicle could drive itself.
While they are at it, they should make the RVs electric to boot. RVs already carry a huge amount of weight in batteries and they frequently carry a generator to charge those batteries.