Because, as multi-billion earning international corporations, BMW (and the others developing this tech) don't have anyone on staff to raise concerns about bystander vision safety, nor the procedural government to make sure that these concerns reach decision making levels of management.
Seriously, if you go ripping laser diodes out of compact projectors and play around with them and some lenses, you might do some serious maiming.
Before a product like this reaches the hands of Bubba the shadetree tinkerer, it will be damn near impossible to modify it to make it in any way more dangerous than the current 65W incandescent high beams - or, if such a modification is conceivable, there will be educational warnings about it plastered on every imaginable surface of the product (car), including under the hood and the sun-visors.
But, then again, hundreds of professional, experienced engineers paid for thousands of hours to think about this might miss something, but odds are that at least a few of them read Slashdot, so they'll probably find that last little bit of eye safety wisdom they were overlooking here.
We've found a lot of fossils, from thousands of sites like this one around the world.
Take nets the size of an average fossil site, scatter 10,000 of them at random sites around the planet today, look at what you just caught. Now, take one more net and throw it at a new location - did you just catch anything new or different? Now, throw in the dimension of time - this site is geographically close to other well studied fossil sites, but displaced 100,000 years in time.
Satellite communications and jet travel make the world seem much smaller than it actually is, and 100,000 years can make a big difference in the local food-web.
Yep, I've had "kickback cards" for nearly 10 years now - 1% back on everything (no limit) and up to 4% back on things like gasoline. It's an obvious scam, I'd much rather the system shake out all of this complexity and just let money be money.
For people who pay off their balance within 1 cycle, they're getting an average of 30 days credit, and the merchant is usually paying 2+% for processing fees and that credit - if it's mostly about the credit, that's over 20% per year... garbage. Then, of course, if the consumer fails to pay on-time, the same kind of rates are charged to them.
After 30 years of paying my bills on-time, I and my merchants shouldn't have to pay these kinds of rates for credit. It only stands because the industry is anti-competitive. 3 cents per transaction sounds like what it _should_ cost to handle a card swipe, at that rate, I don't really care who has to pay it. If somebody proves to be a bad credit risk, then start charging them like one.
I did read a blog-post from someone who bought a bunch of those smart-bulbs and programmed them to follow a specific schedule, like e.g. slowly rising in brightness when it's time to wake up in the morning, turning off automatically during work-hours, automatically setting a specific mood in the workroom and so on, but all that really works only for people who have very strict schedules. It's hard to think of cases where all the hassles of keeping the things working, updated and secure is worth the trouble in our daily lives.
I put bunch of X-10 stuff in my house in 1994, including a system that would fade up lights at programmed times, or on demand, etc. It was all very cool, and worked well for about a year, until the widgets started crapping out - relays went bad, comm links never were terribly reliable, etc. By 1996, I had deactivated all circuits but one - the 220V relay that switched my AC unit off/on by schedule was both reliable, and worth fixing if it ever broke (though it never did) due to the energy savings.
Meanwhile, I have a lamp that my Grandfather brought back from India in the 1940s - the power cord insulation is rotted and unsafe, but if I can ever get the bulb holder unscrewed, it can all be replaced with new insulated cord using a flathead screwdriver and some insulation strippers. Built to last, and be easily repaired when it finally does die after 60 years - when IoT gadgets reach that level of durability, I won't mind diving in again and setting up some "smart" systems in the house. Right now, I'm not interested in investing the time for something that is going to need replacing in a year or two, regardless of initial monetary cost.
There's a giant warehouse looking building on the Miami river - prime, high dollar real-estate. At one time, it housed a Visa clearinghouse - where they would process all the credit card slips, by hand labor - reading the imprints and keypunch entering them into the computer. That building still has no windows facing the river.
Handling money is huge business, they've gotten more efficient over the years, but the basic rates that are charged for processing the transactions are still more or less intact, 2ish % per transaction, though minimum processing fees are largely gone now. With all that extra operating capital from increases in efficiency, they cover the fraud and just let the machine roll on, making money.
If there ever is a big shake-up, 2% could plummet to less than 1/2%, although the economy as a whole would benefit marginally, a large industry would have to shrink and become much more efficient with that change.
I learned to code on my own from 10th grade onward (I didn't have access to programmable computers before then...)
In 1982, my high school CompSci teacher was pretty cool and realistic about his skillz, there were a group of about 10 of us who he gave "independent study" access to the machines so we could teach ourselves - the stuff in the lecture class would take us about 2 weeks to finish the year's material.
I took the curriculum courses in University Computer Engineering, but, strangely, they never offered a course in C programming, even though they had a mandatory course that used C language to implement the term project (write an assembler...)
And, I've spent the 20+ years following graduation gradually learning how to "do it right..." I'm a little further along than most other programmers I meet, but I still learn new "better practices" as time goes on.
My version of "Hacker boot camp" wouldn't focus on "how to code" or "how to look up & hook up a library function that does an optimal sort" - you're going to need to figure that out for yourself when Java/Python becomes the next latest and greatest thing. It would focus on best practices, communicating with your customers and coworkers, documentation, source control, and transparency.
Back in 1983, I thought it was really cool that I could implement the entire CompSci semester project in program with 4 short lines, using the same language and machine they were using. And, I must admit, at 15 years old, I thought it was also kinda cool that nobody, instructor included, had the faintest clue how it actually worked. Today, I'd still implement it in 4 short lines, but I would only think it is cool if the comments explained how it worked in a way that anybody who understood the math could understand the code, and I'd probably throw in a little explanation of the math too if I thought it might help.
I'd also throw in, we're still writing text based messages - even though competing pictogram systems have been developed, none seem to have caught on well enough to displace the written word, composed of characters from a relatively small alphabet.
I made a LabViewLike graphical system for compiling algorithms into parallel processors as part of my Masters' thesis. It used a schematic capture program to build the hierarchical graphic "data flow" - but at their core, the basic modules were still short text based programs.
Some "programmers" might operate at an entirely graphical connect the lego blocks level, but sooner or later it comes down to 1s and 0s, and somewhere along that chain (several somewheres in modern practice) it will be represented in text based languages.
I think the graphic based systems haven't taken over for the heavy lifting because they're all too specialized, my thesis included. Most "real jobs" need more flexibility than the non-text based systems can provide. Having said that, I use 100% graphic based UI design, even though the tools translate to.xml for me, I almost never "get my hands dirty" on the text based code for my UIs, anymore.
What you're talking about is practical - what Renault is showing is a concept car.
Concepts usually include highly desirable (at first glance) features that never become practical enough for production. There are exceptions, but they are rare.
I seem to recall sketching up this idea when I was 10 years old, just after watching Smokey and the Bandit. No drones then, so the passenger (navigator) in the car flew an RC plane ahead to look for Smokey...
As I read the terms, they only allow you to "Hotspot" 500Meg on the unlimited plan, so I suppose they would continue 4G service to the phone but somehow throttle hotspot service.
However, as I read the terms, there was no Hotspot service at all on our 500Meg limited data plan, and yet, there it worked, right up until we slammed into the limit. If you want to eat data fast, try jumping around fast forward and rewind in video, that's what the kids love to do. I let my wife be the guinea pig - see if she notices a problem with 2G speeds for the next 10 days until our month rolls over - she's already noticed the "you're over your data limit, would you like to buy an upgrade" beg messages, but I think I've got her convinced that they don't mean anything when we're home on WiFi, and don't matter much on the road.
I got the Nexus 5, and I don't think they (TMo) really know where my data goes, nor would they have a way to shut off only hotspot functionality... I see how they could do it on the other phones with their custom firmware installed. I suppose they could tell when I consume data faster than a phone can by itself (though, Chromecast could get pretty hungry...), and send me nastygrams telling me to stop it, but if they want to throttle the Nexus 5, I think they'll have to throttle the whole connection?
Same reason "we" rarely take away drivers' licenses. Sure they're liable to slaughter innocent people if we let them back on the road, but if we take their license away they won't be able to earn money (and pay taxes.)
For what it's worth, we just did this with our Family plan (ditch V for Tmo) - and, can verify, 2 weeks of normal 4G data usage on TMo totalled about 20 Meg, setup as a mobile hotspot and give the kids tablets with Netflix - ran through 480 Meg of data in like 5 minutes - I don't think there's any throttling going on there...
No wonder it's popular.... No, I've never watched, though I did hear something about a homosexual scandal getting one of the bearded ones chucked from the show.
I bought a couple of "NetTop" boxes back when "Netbooks" were a thing... they were competent little things, kind of painfully slow with the Atom chips, but did what they did well and in a very nice form factor.
Too bad the power supplies were crap and when they died, they were gone.
This is assuming some kind of perfect positioning system - if you take a hard look at GPS reliability, you won't want it to be responsible for your life-safety.
There are many paths to not needing to earn a living - while 99% of the world may not have the luxury of "room and board, including broadband, covered without working for a paycheck" - that still leaves tens of millions who do.... now, whether or not these are the people you want developing your OS kernel is another question, but if you throw another 99% filter on them, there may still be thousands of people out there who have the means, ability and disposition to write high quality FOSS, and, thankfully, the internet has given them the means to collaborate.
A few mm per km of distance, this is theoretical colimation limits you are talking about? Do 30kW lasers even approach that level of coherence in practical implementations?
I was doing good to keep a spot size under 2m at a distance of roughly 300m when trying to collimate a foot long HeNe tube laser with a pair of lenses.
Actually, yes, happiness has a floating baseline. You can be made to shovel poo 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, and find things to be happy about, even cheerful most of the day. You can also be part of the 0.1% most wealthy and successful people in the most wealthy and prosperous country on the planet, living in the most amazingly "great to be a homo-sapiens" time in known history and be so inconsolably unhappy that you take your own life.
Slavery, serfdom, sweatshops aren't happiness problems, they are fairness problems, though I will grant that having unfairness thrown in your face is a good way to become unhappy, unless you can somehow deflect it.
Life is still far from fair, but we are mostly, improving.
I worked somewhere that had access badges, "listening device" phones, cameras, etc. 99.9% of the time, they were ignored, unused - people went about their business as if they didn't exist, because, except for one instance every 3 years or so, quietly affecting one of 1000 employees, the systems were a non-issue in daily "business life."
However, the people at the top had the means, if they ever felt the itch to exercise it.
The qualification part for jobs like that has always mystified me... I suppose you can be Vice CEO for 20 years and get some experience, but that rarely seems to be how it happens.
It's always easy to second guess the top decision maker, but I get the impression that very few of these top decision makers have anything approaching a quantifiable skill or talent for the position.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, as multi-billion earning international corporations, BMW (and the others developing this tech) don't have anyone on staff to raise concerns about bystander vision safety, nor the procedural government to make sure that these concerns reach decision making levels of management.
Seriously, if you go ripping laser diodes out of compact projectors and play around with them and some lenses, you might do some serious maiming.
Before a product like this reaches the hands of Bubba the shadetree tinkerer, it will be damn near impossible to modify it to make it in any way more dangerous than the current 65W incandescent high beams - or, if such a modification is conceivable, there will be educational warnings about it plastered on every imaginable surface of the product (car), including under the hood and the sun-visors.
But, then again, hundreds of professional, experienced engineers paid for thousands of hours to think about this might miss something, but odds are that at least a few of them read Slashdot, so they'll probably find that last little bit of eye safety wisdom they were overlooking here.
Gotta get these on the Hyundai Tiburons!
We've found a lot of fossils, from thousands of sites like this one around the world.
Take nets the size of an average fossil site, scatter 10,000 of them at random sites around the planet today, look at what you just caught. Now, take one more net and throw it at a new location - did you just catch anything new or different? Now, throw in the dimension of time - this site is geographically close to other well studied fossil sites, but displaced 100,000 years in time.
Satellite communications and jet travel make the world seem much smaller than it actually is, and 100,000 years can make a big difference in the local food-web.
Yep, I've had "kickback cards" for nearly 10 years now - 1% back on everything (no limit) and up to 4% back on things like gasoline. It's an obvious scam, I'd much rather the system shake out all of this complexity and just let money be money.
For people who pay off their balance within 1 cycle, they're getting an average of 30 days credit, and the merchant is usually paying 2+% for processing fees and that credit - if it's mostly about the credit, that's over 20% per year... garbage. Then, of course, if the consumer fails to pay on-time, the same kind of rates are charged to them.
After 30 years of paying my bills on-time, I and my merchants shouldn't have to pay these kinds of rates for credit. It only stands because the industry is anti-competitive. 3 cents per transaction sounds like what it _should_ cost to handle a card swipe, at that rate, I don't really care who has to pay it. If somebody proves to be a bad credit risk, then start charging them like one.
I did read a blog-post from someone who bought a bunch of those smart-bulbs and programmed them to follow a specific schedule, like e.g. slowly rising in brightness when it's time to wake up in the morning, turning off automatically during work-hours, automatically setting a specific mood in the workroom and so on, but all that really works only for people who have very strict schedules. It's hard to think of cases where all the hassles of keeping the things working, updated and secure is worth the trouble in our daily lives.
I put bunch of X-10 stuff in my house in 1994, including a system that would fade up lights at programmed times, or on demand, etc. It was all very cool, and worked well for about a year, until the widgets started crapping out - relays went bad, comm links never were terribly reliable, etc. By 1996, I had deactivated all circuits but one - the 220V relay that switched my AC unit off/on by schedule was both reliable, and worth fixing if it ever broke (though it never did) due to the energy savings.
Meanwhile, I have a lamp that my Grandfather brought back from India in the 1940s - the power cord insulation is rotted and unsafe, but if I can ever get the bulb holder unscrewed, it can all be replaced with new insulated cord using a flathead screwdriver and some insulation strippers. Built to last, and be easily repaired when it finally does die after 60 years - when IoT gadgets reach that level of durability, I won't mind diving in again and setting up some "smart" systems in the house. Right now, I'm not interested in investing the time for something that is going to need replacing in a year or two, regardless of initial monetary cost.
There's a giant warehouse looking building on the Miami river - prime, high dollar real-estate. At one time, it housed a Visa clearinghouse - where they would process all the credit card slips, by hand labor - reading the imprints and keypunch entering them into the computer. That building still has no windows facing the river.
Handling money is huge business, they've gotten more efficient over the years, but the basic rates that are charged for processing the transactions are still more or less intact, 2ish % per transaction, though minimum processing fees are largely gone now. With all that extra operating capital from increases in efficiency, they cover the fraud and just let the machine roll on, making money.
If there ever is a big shake-up, 2% could plummet to less than 1/2%, although the economy as a whole would benefit marginally, a large industry would have to shrink and become much more efficient with that change.
Cheaper and easier than using plastic surgery to make a double that looks like you to take the bullet.
I learned to code on my own from 10th grade onward (I didn't have access to programmable computers before then...)
In 1982, my high school CompSci teacher was pretty cool and realistic about his skillz, there were a group of about 10 of us who he gave "independent study" access to the machines so we could teach ourselves - the stuff in the lecture class would take us about 2 weeks to finish the year's material.
I took the curriculum courses in University Computer Engineering, but, strangely, they never offered a course in C programming, even though they had a mandatory course that used C language to implement the term project (write an assembler...)
And, I've spent the 20+ years following graduation gradually learning how to "do it right..." I'm a little further along than most other programmers I meet, but I still learn new "better practices" as time goes on.
My version of "Hacker boot camp" wouldn't focus on "how to code" or "how to look up & hook up a library function that does an optimal sort" - you're going to need to figure that out for yourself when Java/Python becomes the next latest and greatest thing. It would focus on best practices, communicating with your customers and coworkers, documentation, source control, and transparency.
Back in 1983, I thought it was really cool that I could implement the entire CompSci semester project in program with 4 short lines, using the same language and machine they were using. And, I must admit, at 15 years old, I thought it was also kinda cool that nobody, instructor included, had the faintest clue how it actually worked. Today, I'd still implement it in 4 short lines, but I would only think it is cool if the comments explained how it worked in a way that anybody who understood the math could understand the code, and I'd probably throw in a little explanation of the math too if I thought it might help.
Car analogy:
https://www.google.com/search?...
It's not even new for uBlox, I was reading about their dead reckoning systems in their (existing, shipping) product literature 5 years ago...
I'd also throw in, we're still writing text based messages - even though competing pictogram systems have been developed, none seem to have caught on well enough to displace the written word, composed of characters from a relatively small alphabet.
I made a LabViewLike graphical system for compiling algorithms into parallel processors as part of my Masters' thesis. It used a schematic capture program to build the hierarchical graphic "data flow" - but at their core, the basic modules were still short text based programs.
Some "programmers" might operate at an entirely graphical connect the lego blocks level, but sooner or later it comes down to 1s and 0s, and somewhere along that chain (several somewheres in modern practice) it will be represented in text based languages.
I think the graphic based systems haven't taken over for the heavy lifting because they're all too specialized, my thesis included. Most "real jobs" need more flexibility than the non-text based systems can provide. Having said that, I use 100% graphic based UI design, even though the tools translate to .xml for me, I almost never "get my hands dirty" on the text based code for my UIs, anymore.
What you're talking about is practical - what Renault is showing is a concept car.
Concepts usually include highly desirable (at first glance) features that never become practical enough for production. There are exceptions, but they are rare.
I seem to recall sketching up this idea when I was 10 years old, just after watching Smokey and the Bandit. No drones then, so the passenger (navigator) in the car flew an RC plane ahead to look for Smokey...
As I read the terms, they only allow you to "Hotspot" 500Meg on the unlimited plan, so I suppose they would continue 4G service to the phone but somehow throttle hotspot service.
However, as I read the terms, there was no Hotspot service at all on our 500Meg limited data plan, and yet, there it worked, right up until we slammed into the limit. If you want to eat data fast, try jumping around fast forward and rewind in video, that's what the kids love to do. I let my wife be the guinea pig - see if she notices a problem with 2G speeds for the next 10 days until our month rolls over - she's already noticed the "you're over your data limit, would you like to buy an upgrade" beg messages, but I think I've got her convinced that they don't mean anything when we're home on WiFi, and don't matter much on the road.
I got the Nexus 5, and I don't think they (TMo) really know where my data goes, nor would they have a way to shut off only hotspot functionality... I see how they could do it on the other phones with their custom firmware installed. I suppose they could tell when I consume data faster than a phone can by itself (though, Chromecast could get pretty hungry...), and send me nastygrams telling me to stop it, but if they want to throttle the Nexus 5, I think they'll have to throttle the whole connection?
we have never simply revoked Corporate Charters.
Same reason "we" rarely take away drivers' licenses. Sure they're liable to slaughter innocent people if we let them back on the road, but if we take their license away they won't be able to earn money (and pay taxes.)
For what it's worth, we just did this with our Family plan (ditch V for Tmo) - and, can verify, 2 weeks of normal 4G data usage on TMo totalled about 20 Meg, setup as a mobile hotspot and give the kids tablets with Netflix - ran through 480 Meg of data in like 5 minutes - I don't think there's any throttling going on there...
No wonder it's popular.... No, I've never watched, though I did hear something about a homosexual scandal getting one of the bearded ones chucked from the show.
I bought a couple of "NetTop" boxes back when "Netbooks" were a thing... they were competent little things, kind of painfully slow with the Atom chips, but did what they did well and in a very nice form factor.
Too bad the power supplies were crap and when they died, they were gone.
This is assuming some kind of perfect positioning system - if you take a hard look at GPS reliability, you won't want it to be responsible for your life-safety.
There are many paths to not needing to earn a living - while 99% of the world may not have the luxury of "room and board, including broadband, covered without working for a paycheck" - that still leaves tens of millions who do.... now, whether or not these are the people you want developing your OS kernel is another question, but if you throw another 99% filter on them, there may still be thousands of people out there who have the means, ability and disposition to write high quality FOSS, and, thankfully, the internet has given them the means to collaborate.
A few mm per km of distance, this is theoretical colimation limits you are talking about? Do 30kW lasers even approach that level of coherence in practical implementations?
I was doing good to keep a spot size under 2m at a distance of roughly 300m when trying to collimate a foot long HeNe tube laser with a pair of lenses.
>Do you think slaves were happy?
Actually, yes, happiness has a floating baseline. You can be made to shovel poo 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, and find things to be happy about, even cheerful most of the day. You can also be part of the 0.1% most wealthy and successful people in the most wealthy and prosperous country on the planet, living in the most amazingly "great to be a homo-sapiens" time in known history and be so inconsolably unhappy that you take your own life.
Slavery, serfdom, sweatshops aren't happiness problems, they are fairness problems, though I will grant that having unfairness thrown in your face is a good way to become unhappy, unless you can somehow deflect it.
Life is still far from fair, but we are mostly, improving.
I worked somewhere that had access badges, "listening device" phones, cameras, etc. 99.9% of the time, they were ignored, unused - people went about their business as if they didn't exist, because, except for one instance every 3 years or so, quietly affecting one of 1000 employees, the systems were a non-issue in daily "business life."
However, the people at the top had the means, if they ever felt the itch to exercise it.
Libertarians own their own businesses, or wish they did.
The qualification part for jobs like that has always mystified me... I suppose you can be Vice CEO for 20 years and get some experience, but that rarely seems to be how it happens.
It's always easy to second guess the top decision maker, but I get the impression that very few of these top decision makers have anything approaching a quantifiable skill or talent for the position.