You are quite correct - the pedestrian should have been on the lookout, for their own safety at least even if the law might be on their side (though I am not sure of the state and local laws there). Moreover they could have been wearing a reflective vest or helmet, had reflective strips on the bike, not been wearing a black shirt, had a headlight on the bike, etc... things that may not have made a difference here, but are generally good ideas (and in some places legally required) when using a bicycle at night.
Given the lack of precautions on the part of the pedestrian, the choice of crossing location and time, and the lack of attentiveness for oncoming cars... I think she should get a Darwin award and Uber should be let off with a warning to improve sensor technology outside of normal color vision. It might not have changed anything, but the backup driver should probably be reprimanded and maybe reassigned for spending so much time looking away from the road. In the end, I know that is the goal of self-driving cars - that people can move about without needing to actively drive - but while testing them, drivers should be paying more attention rather than less.
Moreover, she (the bike-walker) could have seen the car coming *way* before it (driver or computer) could see her. Why would she continue walking across when she should have seen the headlights coming many seconds away? And why *walking* a bike? Wouldn't *riding* it across have been faster? Or, you know, just riding with the traffic like I presume laws say she should have? (at least in my state, bikes on the road are supposed to follow most of the same rules as cars in terms of lanes, turning, etc)
Yeah, honestly, crossing a street with 35-40mph traffic at night in dark clothes and not at a crosswalk or intersection?
This isn't a self driving car problem, this is a Darwin award winner.
And this is *only* national news because it was a self-driving car. Had it been a normal motorist, it wouldn't have gone past the local scene.
With that said, I would expect that a self-driving car would have sensors beyond RGB. Any of IR / thermal, radar, or lidar should have been able to pick her and the bike up, even in the dark. So there are lessons to learn here, but I don't think either Uber or the backup driver should be at fault.
You are correct that some people decide to take their own lives, but there is a difference between that and making the decision for them (taking someone's life without their consent).
As for the argument itself, the idea is not that avoiding conception is a problem. If they can screen people for whatever genes contribute to Downs, and inform those people, and they choose not to have kids because of that (to abstain from sex, take birth control, get a vasectomy, etc) then that is fine! The trouble I see is conceiving a child - a new human life, with its own unique DNA, identity, etc - and then choosing to kill it because it has a condition that someone else (society, the parents, or whomever) thinks makes the life not worth living. That choice shouldn't be anyone else's to make.
Have you asked folks with Down's syndrome if they'd prefer to be dead? Or to have never been born? Who are you to judge whether they should be given the chance to live, once conceived?
Now mind you, I don't think Facebook should have banned you for discussing this. Freedom of speech, the ability to discuss ideas (good or bad), and open dialog about even the hardest subjects is critical to having a free society. I may oppose your view, and I might after a while choose not to listen, but you absolutely should be able to voice it!
Throwing a shoe into machinery actually stops the machinery (unless the gears and engines are strong enough to just chew through the shoe and keep functioning - unlikely in that early period of industrialization). What was described in the article doesn't sound like it was enough to stop either of these cars from what they were doing immediately. Cutting a tire, for example, would have been more effective... if that is what their goal was.
It sounds more like just people venting frustration, but I still don't understand the specific actions as a way to do that reasonably. Maybe they were trying to make it look (to sensors and cameras in the vehicles) like they were pedestrians being struck by the car? I dunno, but it just seems... pathetic.
I wonder what good they think that will do? Its not going to offend the car, or cause it to retaliate. Its also not going to stop progress on this front.
That isn't the only problem, though. What about collecting / remitting taxes? Is a small business supposed to file taxes in 50 different states (well, 50 minus the ones that don't have a sales tax)? What about states where the tax varies by county and city? Its something a company like Amazon could handle, but smaller mom and pop shops likely couldn't.
There are likely other 'problems' / issues to be determined besides these. It makes things messy, for sure.
I've been considering a smart watch to go along with my Android phone for some time, but the quality and functionality of many seem to be poor (or at least scored lower than I'd like by reviewers). Since it sounds like you've got a lot of experience with this, may I ask what brand and model of smart watch you use currently? Or what you would recommend, if you do not currently own what you consider to be the best option?
I don't worry about Google stealing my identity, though. On the other hand, a backdoor could be abused by malware authors - even if the company that built it isn't doing anything too horrible.
A quick look over the article didn't seem to name phones or brands, but this is one of the reasons I stick to Google's Nexus / Pixel devices. I am hoping that they do a good job of keeping third party stuff off their phones. 'Better the devil you know' and all that sort of stuff.
The big difference here, and something that most Quadro cards don't even have, is the high double-precision (FP64) performance. The original Titan had good performance there too, for its time, but later Titans were more like the GeForce cards: they had crippled FP64. Most Quadro cards do as well, though there have been some of the top-end models that had good FP64. Tesla cards are normally the ones that specialize in that, but those are far more expensive than the Titan V and they don't have video outputs. They also often require specialized cooling. Being able to bring massive FP64 performance to a desktop / workstation will be really good for some users!
The addition of Tensor Cores in Volta (and thus the Titan V) could also be nice... but not much uses that yet. It will likely be restricted to inference engines, but being able to test those quickly without additional hardware could be handy.
For more 'normal' applications, the Titan V also does really well with GPU based rendering. Maybe not well enough to justify the price, but if you need the most performance from just 1-2 cards (in a compact system, for example) it is a great performer. See the results in this article from V-Ray and Furryball:
Not me! I was going to post a similar response, but figured it better to just reply to yours.
I did return two small (~$10) items to Amazon last month, but those were the only things I've returned in recent memory... and I've probably bought 100 or more items on Amazon since the last time I returned anything before that.
1/3rd feels absurdly high to me, but then again even the 9% for brick-and-mortar stores that the summary quotes seems crazy high. I maybe return 1-3% of items bought in stores, and most of the time it is an exchange because something was broken or the wrong size rather than a refund.
Sadly, I am inclined to agree with you. My wife has had two LG phones (G2 and G4, I believe) and neither was very good. Both had to be retired well before what I consider normal for a smart phone (2-3 years of use, ideally).
I got the Pixel 2 XL, and while I think I am going to stick with it I have decided that we won't be getting any more LG (branded or manufactured) phones going forward. There is so much that is great about the Pixel 2 XL, but the screen is lower quality than my 3 year old Nexus 6 (made by Motorola)... and in some ways, worse than the Moto X and Galaxy Nexus phones I had before that.
Right, because no one ever died in car accidents before the invention of the cell phone.
Now mind you, I don't know that I liked the idea of V2V communication anyway. It sounds cool in theory, but the more complex we make all these systems the more chances there are for people to manipulate things to cause harm. If self-driving cars depend on such technology, then messing with it could cause as many problems as it solves. I'd prefer that each self-driving car be able to do its job without inter-car communication, which seems doable given the way that tech is evolving today.
My Pixel 2 XL yesterday, and turning that off was one of the first things I did:)
I've got a lot of thoughts about this phone, having read so much ahead of time and now having hands-on experience. If it just had the same quality of screen as the other Android phones I've owned (all Samsung-built AMOLED in the last 8 years) then I'd be very happy, despite some other oddities about the size and aspect ratio. But man, the screen... I just don't know yet. Very glad to have 15 days to decide.
Interesting - thank you for sharing that video! I couldn't make out what he said he was seeing on the 2 XL, but I don't doubt him. However, it looks to me like the same grey image at 100% brightness on the 2 XL is a LOT lighter / brighter looking than it is on the V30. Compare at about 2 minutes in (for the 2 XL) versus 4:15 for the V30 and you will see what I mean.
In my own tests (just today) with my Nexus 6, I cannot see burn-in on black or dark grey images, but as things get closer to light grey or white (or just plain brighter) it starts to become visible. I wonder if the V30 is calibrated to be darker, even on max brightness? Or if the color settings they use (which are clearly different from Google's) make it less visible?
I'm going to have to think hard about this. My 2 XL has already shipped, so at this point there is no reason not to open it and try it out for myself... but without knowing how bad the burn-in could get over the course of 2-3 years... I'll have to really ponder whether it is worth the risk. Thank you for your input!
Ah, good tip on trying an app! I tried one that flashed colors (presumably to fix this sort of thing, over time) and I could make out some ghosting. I then found a YouTube video, which I could make full screen, that had solid colors cycling much more slowly... and there it was quite apparent. Interesting that I never noticed it in normal usage!
I will say that now that I know what to look for I *can* sometimes see the faint ghosting in other videos, most notably when there is a near-white background (cloudy sky, for example). I have to be looking in the right spot, so I don't think it will impact my experience on the current phone... but this is also after 2.5 years. If the Pixel 2 XL is showing this after mere days or weeks... I wonder how bad it will be after 2-3 years?
Um, the V30 reviews are actually what got me worried about the 2 XL before people started posting hands-on info about it. The V30 certainly seems to have the same off-angle blue tint, and also a lot of reports of blotchy colors (which have *not* shown up in any reviews I have seen of the 2 XL, thankfully). Here are some quotes:
"You may be wondering why I have left discussion of the LG V30’s display for last. Well, that’s because I wanted you to understand the essential strengths and weaknesses of this phone before I told you the ultimate deal-breaker for me. The OLED screen of the V30 is just bad. There’s no dodging this issue, and there’s no making excuses for it. This isn’t a good display, and if your phone doesn’t have a good display it might as well be a Nokia 5110.
Areas of the same color on the V30 appear blotchy: when I open up a Google Keep note, I don’t get a flat white canvas as I should, but instead I see streaks of gray, looking as if there’s an inconsistent backlight. This being an OLED display, there’s no backlight to speak of, so it’s just poor brightness uniformity across those light-emitting diodes. The same unhappy effect is even more pronounced with darker grays and colors like navy blue, and it’s amplified by the V30’s apparent inability to render color gradations smoothly. Gradients appear grainy and I see unpleasant color banding, exactly the same issues that Ars Technica encountered with a preproduction V30 device last month." (https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/16/16457544/lg-v30-review-design)
"The OLED panel on my pre-production unit still has the same issues as the LG G Flex. In low brightness in a dark room, the screen is grainy and has "dirty" looking horizontal banding all over it. The light level is also woefully uneven, with hotspots blazing out of the left and right corners." (https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/09/lg-v30-hands-on-display-quality/)
When I started reading reviews of the 2 XL I was at first relieved, as the blotchiness issues do *not* appear to be happening in the Pixel. The color calibration I am less worried about too: true to life colors instead of over saturated will be different than my past phones, but not a deal breaker. But I am worried about how it will look when viewing from off-center (if I am watching something with my kids, and have the phone positioned so that we can all see the screen but none of us are viewing it from perfectly in front). I am even more worried about burn-in showing up just days or weeks into usage, though, since I plan to keep my next phone for at least 2 years, and ideally 3 or more.
Slashdot Mirror
You are quite correct - the pedestrian should have been on the lookout, for their own safety at least even if the law might be on their side (though I am not sure of the state and local laws there). Moreover they could have been wearing a reflective vest or helmet, had reflective strips on the bike, not been wearing a black shirt, had a headlight on the bike, etc... things that may not have made a difference here, but are generally good ideas (and in some places legally required) when using a bicycle at night.
Given the lack of precautions on the part of the pedestrian, the choice of crossing location and time, and the lack of attentiveness for oncoming cars... I think she should get a Darwin award and Uber should be let off with a warning to improve sensor technology outside of normal color vision. It might not have changed anything, but the backup driver should probably be reprimanded and maybe reassigned for spending so much time looking away from the road. In the end, I know that is the goal of self-driving cars - that people can move about without needing to actively drive - but while testing them, drivers should be paying more attention rather than less.
Moreover, she (the bike-walker) could have seen the car coming *way* before it (driver or computer) could see her. Why would she continue walking across when she should have seen the headlights coming many seconds away? And why *walking* a bike? Wouldn't *riding* it across have been faster? Or, you know, just riding with the traffic like I presume laws say she should have? (at least in my state, bikes on the road are supposed to follow most of the same rules as cars in terms of lanes, turning, etc)
Yeah, honestly, crossing a street with 35-40mph traffic at night in dark clothes and not at a crosswalk or intersection?
This isn't a self driving car problem, this is a Darwin award winner.
And this is *only* national news because it was a self-driving car. Had it been a normal motorist, it wouldn't have gone past the local scene.
With that said, I would expect that a self-driving car would have sensors beyond RGB. Any of IR / thermal, radar, or lidar should have been able to pick her and the bike up, even in the dark. So there are lessons to learn here, but I don't think either Uber or the backup driver should be at fault.
You are correct that some people decide to take their own lives, but there is a difference between that and making the decision for them (taking someone's life without their consent).
As for the argument itself, the idea is not that avoiding conception is a problem. If they can screen people for whatever genes contribute to Downs, and inform those people, and they choose not to have kids because of that (to abstain from sex, take birth control, get a vasectomy, etc) then that is fine! The trouble I see is conceiving a child - a new human life, with its own unique DNA, identity, etc - and then choosing to kill it because it has a condition that someone else (society, the parents, or whomever) thinks makes the life not worth living. That choice shouldn't be anyone else's to make.
I suspect I am just feeding a troll here, but where in my post (or the OP before it) did inbreeding come up? Also, I don't have a sister.
You are quite correct! I am opposed to abortion in all forms, save perhaps for when carrying the child is a direct threat to the life of the mother.
Have you asked folks with Down's syndrome if they'd prefer to be dead? Or to have never been born? Who are you to judge whether they should be given the chance to live, once conceived?
Now mind you, I don't think Facebook should have banned you for discussing this. Freedom of speech, the ability to discuss ideas (good or bad), and open dialog about even the hardest subjects is critical to having a free society. I may oppose your view, and I might after a while choose not to listen, but you absolutely should be able to voice it!
In Soviet California, pedestrian runs into you!
Throwing a shoe into machinery actually stops the machinery (unless the gears and engines are strong enough to just chew through the shoe and keep functioning - unlikely in that early period of industrialization). What was described in the article doesn't sound like it was enough to stop either of these cars from what they were doing immediately. Cutting a tire, for example, would have been more effective... if that is what their goal was.
It sounds more like just people venting frustration, but I still don't understand the specific actions as a way to do that reasonably. Maybe they were trying to make it look (to sensors and cameras in the vehicles) like they were pedestrians being struck by the car? I dunno, but it just seems... pathetic.
I wonder what good they think that will do? Its not going to offend the car, or cause it to retaliate. Its also not going to stop progress on this front.
*Life
I wish there was an edit button :/
"How many millions of dollars does it take to build a clock that will keep time for 10,000 years?"
42
"PM1643, why aren't you at your post? PM1643, do you copy?"
"Hydra...without the scary red skull looking guy."
Are you *sure*? Have you seen what Mr. Zuckerberg looks like when he takes his face off?
Hail Facebook!
[just kidding, of course]
That isn't the only problem, though. What about collecting / remitting taxes? Is a small business supposed to file taxes in 50 different states (well, 50 minus the ones that don't have a sales tax)? What about states where the tax varies by county and city? Its something a company like Amazon could handle, but smaller mom and pop shops likely couldn't.
There are likely other 'problems' / issues to be determined besides these. It makes things messy, for sure.
I've been considering a smart watch to go along with my Android phone for some time, but the quality and functionality of many seem to be poor (or at least scored lower than I'd like by reviewers). Since it sounds like you've got a lot of experience with this, may I ask what brand and model of smart watch you use currently? Or what you would recommend, if you do not currently own what you consider to be the best option?
I don't worry about Google stealing my identity, though. On the other hand, a backdoor could be abused by malware authors - even if the company that built it isn't doing anything too horrible.
A quick look over the article didn't seem to name phones or brands, but this is one of the reasons I stick to Google's Nexus / Pixel devices. I am hoping that they do a good job of keeping third party stuff off their phones. 'Better the devil you know' and all that sort of stuff.
The big difference here, and something that most Quadro cards don't even have, is the high double-precision (FP64) performance. The original Titan had good performance there too, for its time, but later Titans were more like the GeForce cards: they had crippled FP64. Most Quadro cards do as well, though there have been some of the top-end models that had good FP64. Tesla cards are normally the ones that specialize in that, but those are far more expensive than the Titan V and they don't have video outputs. They also often require specialized cooling. Being able to bring massive FP64 performance to a desktop / workstation will be really good for some users!
The addition of Tensor Cores in Volta (and thus the Titan V) could also be nice... but not much uses that yet. It will likely be restricted to inference engines, but being able to test those quickly without additional hardware could be handy.
For more 'normal' applications, the Titan V also does really well with GPU based rendering. Maybe not well enough to justify the price, but if you need the most performance from just 1-2 cards (in a compact system, for example) it is a great performer. See the results in this article from V-Ray and Furryball:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/b...
Not me! I was going to post a similar response, but figured it better to just reply to yours.
I did return two small (~$10) items to Amazon last month, but those were the only things I've returned in recent memory... and I've probably bought 100 or more items on Amazon since the last time I returned anything before that.
1/3rd feels absurdly high to me, but then again even the 9% for brick-and-mortar stores that the summary quotes seems crazy high. I maybe return 1-3% of items bought in stores, and most of the time it is an exchange because something was broken or the wrong size rather than a refund.
Sadly, I am inclined to agree with you. My wife has had two LG phones (G2 and G4, I believe) and neither was very good. Both had to be retired well before what I consider normal for a smart phone (2-3 years of use, ideally).
I got the Pixel 2 XL, and while I think I am going to stick with it I have decided that we won't be getting any more LG (branded or manufactured) phones going forward. There is so much that is great about the Pixel 2 XL, but the screen is lower quality than my 3 year old Nexus 6 (made by Motorola)... and in some ways, worse than the Moto X and Galaxy Nexus phones I had before that.
Right, because no one ever died in car accidents before the invention of the cell phone.
Now mind you, I don't know that I liked the idea of V2V communication anyway. It sounds cool in theory, but the more complex we make all these systems the more chances there are for people to manipulate things to cause harm. If self-driving cars depend on such technology, then messing with it could cause as many problems as it solves. I'd prefer that each self-driving car be able to do its job without inter-car communication, which seems doable given the way that tech is evolving today.
My Pixel 2 XL yesterday, and turning that off was one of the first things I did :)
I've got a lot of thoughts about this phone, having read so much ahead of time and now having hands-on experience. If it just had the same quality of screen as the other Android phones I've owned (all Samsung-built AMOLED in the last 8 years) then I'd be very happy, despite some other oddities about the size and aspect ratio. But man, the screen... I just don't know yet. Very glad to have 15 days to decide.
Interesting - thank you for sharing that video! I couldn't make out what he said he was seeing on the 2 XL, but I don't doubt him. However, it looks to me like the same grey image at 100% brightness on the 2 XL is a LOT lighter / brighter looking than it is on the V30. Compare at about 2 minutes in (for the 2 XL) versus 4:15 for the V30 and you will see what I mean.
In my own tests (just today) with my Nexus 6, I cannot see burn-in on black or dark grey images, but as things get closer to light grey or white (or just plain brighter) it starts to become visible. I wonder if the V30 is calibrated to be darker, even on max brightness? Or if the color settings they use (which are clearly different from Google's) make it less visible?
I'm going to have to think hard about this. My 2 XL has already shipped, so at this point there is no reason not to open it and try it out for myself... but without knowing how bad the burn-in could get over the course of 2-3 years... I'll have to really ponder whether it is worth the risk. Thank you for your input!
Ah, good tip on trying an app! I tried one that flashed colors (presumably to fix this sort of thing, over time) and I could make out some ghosting. I then found a YouTube video, which I could make full screen, that had solid colors cycling much more slowly... and there it was quite apparent. Interesting that I never noticed it in normal usage!
I will say that now that I know what to look for I *can* sometimes see the faint ghosting in other videos, most notably when there is a near-white background (cloudy sky, for example). I have to be looking in the right spot, so I don't think it will impact my experience on the current phone... but this is also after 2.5 years. If the Pixel 2 XL is showing this after mere days or weeks... I wonder how bad it will be after 2-3 years?
Um, the V30 reviews are actually what got me worried about the 2 XL before people started posting hands-on info about it. The V30 certainly seems to have the same off-angle blue tint, and also a lot of reports of blotchy colors (which have *not* shown up in any reviews I have seen of the 2 XL, thankfully). Here are some quotes:
"You may be wondering why I have left discussion of the LG V30’s display for last. Well, that’s because I wanted you to understand the essential strengths and weaknesses of this phone before I told you the ultimate deal-breaker for me. The OLED screen of the V30 is just bad. There’s no dodging this issue, and there’s no making excuses for it. This isn’t a good display, and if your phone doesn’t have a good display it might as well be a Nokia 5110.
Areas of the same color on the V30 appear blotchy: when I open up a Google Keep note, I don’t get a flat white canvas as I should, but instead I see streaks of gray, looking as if there’s an inconsistent backlight. This being an OLED display, there’s no backlight to speak of, so it’s just poor brightness uniformity across those light-emitting diodes. The same unhappy effect is even more pronounced with darker grays and colors like navy blue, and it’s amplified by the V30’s apparent inability to render color gradations smoothly. Gradients appear grainy and I see unpleasant color banding, exactly the same issues that Ars Technica encountered with a preproduction V30 device last month." (https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/16/16457544/lg-v30-review-design)
"The OLED panel on my pre-production unit still has the same issues as the LG G Flex. In low brightness in a dark room, the screen is grainy and has "dirty" looking horizontal banding all over it. The light level is also woefully uneven, with hotspots blazing out of the left and right corners." (https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/09/lg-v30-hands-on-display-quality/)
When I started reading reviews of the 2 XL I was at first relieved, as the blotchiness issues do *not* appear to be happening in the Pixel. The color calibration I am less worried about too: true to life colors instead of over saturated will be different than my past phones, but not a deal breaker. But I am worried about how it will look when viewing from off-center (if I am watching something with my kids, and have the phone positioned so that we can all see the screen but none of us are viewing it from perfectly in front). I am even more worried about burn-in showing up just days or weeks into usage, though, since I plan to keep my next phone for at least 2 years, and ideally 3 or more.