It's been my experience with A/C outages that people function better than desktop PCs, many of which apparently assume no more than 80F ambient temperature.
What's this about radius of a black hole? Circumference or surface area makes better sense to us, radius of an object with such intense gravity is difficult to comprehend due to the relativistic effect on distance, so comparing radii is not helpful to most of us.
So don't sit down or run around in a 5x5 space and play. Augment the reality of running around a parking garage, the woods, whatever, with enemies, enhanced surfaces, objects, obstacles you won't be touching, etc., but let the player's motion be real. Then we'll benefit from the exercise, too. From the opposite perspective, that of making exercise less boring, wouldn't you run better if someone was chasing you or you were chasing someone? I know it's going to look hilarious to those around you without the AR gear, but that's a temporary situation. The funny part will be when you see an armed human coming toward you and another person sees you, a different type of dinosaur trying to steal the carcass they're dragging around.
One problem with auto usage now is the cost of a short trip isn't paid at the beginning or end of it, but rather earlier or later when the tank's filled. Most won't bother to calculate each trip's cost. Cars need to display the approximate cost of each little trip so the owners will easily be able to decide whether sending their car to pick up a froyo is worth the cost. That'll result in a lot more trip consolidation.
In general I dislike the idea of sending your empty car back home to pick someone else up. However, doing that just occasionally is probably more energy efficient than manufacturing more cars so another one's in the driveway and only slightly adds to congestion. I understand the concern about driverless bombs, but it isn't that difficult to accomplish now. Mules? FBI might be worried there won't be anyone to arrest, but the human mule isn't a decent catch anyhow, and they generally can't lead back to the source any better than a driverless vehicle. Organized crime doesn't have a hard time finding human mules. Driverless mules will be used, no doubt, but won't much affect either the crime rate or the conviction rate.
A huge advantage of everyone having their own auto-valet will be the reduction in nicks and scrapes from the cars parked in adjacent spaces (OK, I'm obsessed with that). Auto-valets will also be able to park much closer together, so parking lots will not eat as much space. One issue I anticipate is a long line of cars waiting to pick up their drivers which have been summoned too far ahead of time. We'll have to have some method of limiting the waiting time at the department store's front curb. If you order your car too soon, after it waits a minute for you it will circle around to the back of the line. Ha!
Another issue will be that some pedestrians already walk in front of cars, assuming they won't be hit. Knowing the driverless cars won't strike them, many more pedestrians will walk in front of them, seriously hampering traffic flow. Somebody's going to have to arrest those jaywalkers. Barney Fife, we need you back!
Yeah, I'm thinking that shooting at pursuers from a self-driven vehicle isn't going to work so well when it stops at redlights and won't ram other vehicles that are in the way. But then, catching every criminal will suggest that their budget is too big, so maybe the real goal is to let some get away to justify increased expenditures.
I also live in NC. I don't observe any random speeding up, only the random slowing and stopping. You've incorrectly assumed those people are otherwise normal just because there are so many of them. Self-driving cars will be wonderful. People will be able to do the same things they already do—eat, drink, apply eyeliner, read, text, etc.—but won't be bothered by occasional collisions.
Construction zones... instead of starting 1,000 projects and completing them in a month, NCDOT starts 100,000 and still doesn't complete them in 10 years. So only 1 of 10 zones actually have anything going on or even any workers present (not necessarily the same thing). Besides, someone has to test those construction zones at highway speeds.
I've appointed myself spokesman for all those who don't want to talk to their cars. We still don't want to.
MyDash carried on a phone, however, I can really get behind. I get to keep my interface regardless of the car, and it can look like anything I want. There could be a variety of customizable "themes" available. I like it. Makes driving my car to the store and back while I stay home easier.
If patents were only assigned to citizens and could not be transferred to but other than another citizen. Only licensing to corporations for time periods of a year at a time would be allowed.
Sounds like conclusions from big utilities, GE, and Westinghouse. Nuclear fission will not grow to be that big a part in that short of a time. Wind and solar will continue to grow exponentially, and will supply a large percentage of our electricity. We'll still be using natural gas, but coal usage will be chiefly metallurgical. There'll be a lot of electric cars on the road, but it won't be 100% battery powered. 99% might have batteries or capacitors with some capacity, but many will have another power source on board, and many of them will be some type of ICEs. Maybe many will have fuel cells with sources of hydrogen on board (via a chemical reaction that releases it from some type of room-temperature liquid or solid-liquid combination). More than anything else, to cut back on CO2, there'll be higher energy efficiencies in buildings and vehicles. There'll be very little soot from man-made sources, and man-made surfaces will be more reflective. Burning petroleum will be far less common. Liquid biofuels will play a significant part. Much to my chagrine, though, most all of this will be under the control of large entities, not individuals making their own power. The big guys won't go away, they'll just switch business models and products.
A few years ago I read that some were working on systems where people's personal data is never decrypted yet some types of analytics can be performed on it. Has this work died or is it still ongoing and does it lead to anything useful from a privacy perspective?
Most of the recent changes I've seen to driver controls seem wrong-headed. So many require the driver to look down at some screen or closely-spaced identically-feeling buttons. Only a few decades ago, car makers began moving functions to stalks to put them within easy reach, but the makers' usage is so different that it's more confusing than ever, particularly in this day when people are more likely to drive several different vehicles in a single day. I like steering wheel-mounted buttons, but now there are so many it has again become confusing, and again, makers refuse to adopt any standard placements/usage. Can we have programmable controls that follow a driver from car to car, always working the way that particular driver prefers? Must we resort to voice control? I despise talking to my car or any other device, including my phone. Is there no solution until cars can be controlled by thought?
I was going to argue that in the 70s things were moving in the right direction while in the 80s the reverse was true. But then you brought up Disco. Oh well.
True, but it does matter. Profits flow to headquarters and to the owners, and HQ employees and residents of their locations are affected by that. There are good reasons communities bid against one another to become the locations of corporate headquarters. "Prestige" isn't the only reason.
Sounds about like what kind of boxed-in thinking I'd expect from a bond manager. Maybe he could stretch himself a little and suggest golf carts.
Tesla's success in making very good cars surprised me, given how many failed to build cars in the past. But there's an important difference—most of those who failed were originally from the automaking industry. Looks like having that experience is more of a negative than a positive.
While giving $100M for such a cause sounds great, I would either study the issues or hire someone I trusted to study them and direct my money where it would do the most good.
Rewarding teachers for results is one of those things that sounds good until you start looking at how you're going to measure results. The standardized test craze of this millennium has done far more harm than good, focusing attention on those things easy to measure rather than those that are the most important. Good teachers recognize other good teachers. Students recognize good teachers. Sometimes parents do. But administrators only do if they know what a good teacher is—if they were once a good teacher, and many education administrators were not.
Tire manufacturers in the US resist tires having expiration dates. Why would they mind, since that might increase demand for replacements? Distributors and retailers might mind since it means their inventory loses market value quicker than it would otherwise. Supposedly the manufacturers fear that having an expiration date will imply to consumers that their tires should last until that date. The lifetime might be set at 6 years, which is longer than most tires' tread lasts.
To some degree I'd expect this sort of thinking to apply here.
Pretty much nailed it. In theory, we can build fail-safe reactors, but it wasn't done. It's nearly impossible to overestimate a life-cycle cost for a reactor, given that there'll be many decades of stuff to deal with even after it's shut down. In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn't fulfilled its original mission faithfully. Why would we expect it to do otherwise now? Properly licensed, designed, built, regulated, and inspected reactors are very expensive. Economically, particularly taking into account the uncaptured costs of using nukes and fossil fuels, reducing usage and utilizing renewables just makes sense. Save the nukes for spacecraft, other planets and moons, and submarines, if we must have them.
Here's a thought... Who profits from building reactors? Who profits from operating them? Often not the same entities. If the operators fail to operate them safely, the builders suffer from loss of future jobs. Maybe if the builders retained some say-so over operation, there'd be more safety. Of course, that fails to account for the effect of prioritizing quarterly profits ahead of long-term viability.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been my experience with A/C outages that people function better than desktop PCs, many of which apparently assume no more than 80F ambient temperature.
What's this about radius of a black hole? Circumference or surface area makes better sense to us, radius of an object with such intense gravity is difficult to comprehend due to the relativistic effect on distance, so comparing radii is not helpful to most of us.
So don't sit down or run around in a 5x5 space and play. Augment the reality of running around a parking garage, the woods, whatever, with enemies, enhanced surfaces, objects, obstacles you won't be touching, etc., but let the player's motion be real. Then we'll benefit from the exercise, too. From the opposite perspective, that of making exercise less boring, wouldn't you run better if someone was chasing you or you were chasing someone? I know it's going to look hilarious to those around you without the AR gear, but that's a temporary situation. The funny part will be when you see an armed human coming toward you and another person sees you, a different type of dinosaur trying to steal the carcass they're dragging around.
One problem with auto usage now is the cost of a short trip isn't paid at the beginning or end of it, but rather earlier or later when the tank's filled. Most won't bother to calculate each trip's cost. Cars need to display the approximate cost of each little trip so the owners will easily be able to decide whether sending their car to pick up a froyo is worth the cost. That'll result in a lot more trip consolidation.
A whole new category for HackADay
In general I dislike the idea of sending your empty car back home to pick someone else up. However, doing that just occasionally is probably more energy efficient than manufacturing more cars so another one's in the driveway and only slightly adds to congestion. I understand the concern about driverless bombs, but it isn't that difficult to accomplish now. Mules? FBI might be worried there won't be anyone to arrest, but the human mule isn't a decent catch anyhow, and they generally can't lead back to the source any better than a driverless vehicle. Organized crime doesn't have a hard time finding human mules. Driverless mules will be used, no doubt, but won't much affect either the crime rate or the conviction rate.
A huge advantage of everyone having their own auto-valet will be the reduction in nicks and scrapes from the cars parked in adjacent spaces (OK, I'm obsessed with that). Auto-valets will also be able to park much closer together, so parking lots will not eat as much space. One issue I anticipate is a long line of cars waiting to pick up their drivers which have been summoned too far ahead of time. We'll have to have some method of limiting the waiting time at the department store's front curb. If you order your car too soon, after it waits a minute for you it will circle around to the back of the line. Ha!
Another issue will be that some pedestrians already walk in front of cars, assuming they won't be hit. Knowing the driverless cars won't strike them, many more pedestrians will walk in front of them, seriously hampering traffic flow. Somebody's going to have to arrest those jaywalkers. Barney Fife, we need you back!
Yeah, I'm thinking that shooting at pursuers from a self-driven vehicle isn't going to work so well when it stops at redlights and won't ram other vehicles that are in the way. But then, catching every criminal will suggest that their budget is too big, so maybe the real goal is to let some get away to justify increased expenditures.
Yeah but they leave streaks, like when a lit firefly hits your windshield.
I also live in NC. I don't observe any random speeding up, only the random slowing and stopping. You've incorrectly assumed those people are otherwise normal just because there are so many of them. Self-driving cars will be wonderful. People will be able to do the same things they already do—eat, drink, apply eyeliner, read, text, etc.—but won't be bothered by occasional collisions.
Construction zones... instead of starting 1,000 projects and completing them in a month, NCDOT starts 100,000 and still doesn't complete them in 10 years. So only 1 of 10 zones actually have anything going on or even any workers present (not necessarily the same thing). Besides, someone has to test those construction zones at highway speeds.
I've appointed myself spokesman for all those who don't want to talk to their cars. We still don't want to.
MyDash carried on a phone, however, I can really get behind. I get to keep my interface regardless of the car, and it can look like anything I want. There could be a variety of customizable "themes" available. I like it. Makes driving my car to the store and back while I stay home easier.
Yep. I was just thinking of how convincing a villain was Gene Simmons.
If patents were only assigned to citizens and could not be transferred to but other than another citizen. Only licensing to corporations for time periods of a year at a time would be allowed.
Sounds like conclusions from big utilities, GE, and Westinghouse. Nuclear fission will not grow to be that big a part in that short of a time. Wind and solar will continue to grow exponentially, and will supply a large percentage of our electricity. We'll still be using natural gas, but coal usage will be chiefly metallurgical. There'll be a lot of electric cars on the road, but it won't be 100% battery powered. 99% might have batteries or capacitors with some capacity, but many will have another power source on board, and many of them will be some type of ICEs. Maybe many will have fuel cells with sources of hydrogen on board (via a chemical reaction that releases it from some type of room-temperature liquid or solid-liquid combination). More than anything else, to cut back on CO2, there'll be higher energy efficiencies in buildings and vehicles. There'll be very little soot from man-made sources, and man-made surfaces will be more reflective. Burning petroleum will be far less common. Liquid biofuels will play a significant part. Much to my chagrine, though, most all of this will be under the control of large entities, not individuals making their own power. The big guys won't go away, they'll just switch business models and products.
A few years ago I read that some were working on systems where people's personal data is never decrypted yet some types of analytics can be performed on it. Has this work died or is it still ongoing and does it lead to anything useful from a privacy perspective?
One question per post... OK, so, Where are automotive interfaces headed?
Most of the recent changes I've seen to driver controls seem wrong-headed. So many require the driver to look down at some screen or closely-spaced identically-feeling buttons. Only a few decades ago, car makers began moving functions to stalks to put them within easy reach, but the makers' usage is so different that it's more confusing than ever, particularly in this day when people are more likely to drive several different vehicles in a single day. I like steering wheel-mounted buttons, but now there are so many it has again become confusing, and again, makers refuse to adopt any standard placements/usage. Can we have programmable controls that follow a driver from car to car, always working the way that particular driver prefers? Must we resort to voice control? I despise talking to my car or any other device, including my phone. Is there no solution until cars can be controlled by thought?
To those who modded this one: Whoosh!
I can think of a couple of of important differences off the bat...
1) spewing oil wells very quickly displace hot oil with cool oil, while a forest fire fuel just sits there, remaining hot
2) burning oil gushers are very compact, while forest fires are generally spread out
Reminds me of Idiocracy, Robocop, and a number of other films featuring dystopian futures.
I was going to argue that in the 70s things were moving in the right direction while in the 80s the reverse was true. But then you brought up Disco. Oh well.
as much as
True, but it does matter. Profits flow to headquarters and to the owners, and HQ employees and residents of their locations are affected by that. There are good reasons communities bid against one another to become the locations of corporate headquarters. "Prestige" isn't the only reason.
Sounds about like what kind of boxed-in thinking I'd expect from a bond manager. Maybe he could stretch himself a little and suggest golf carts.
Tesla's success in making very good cars surprised me, given how many failed to build cars in the past. But there's an important difference—most of those who failed were originally from the automaking industry. Looks like having that experience is more of a negative than a positive.
While giving $100M for such a cause sounds great, I would either study the issues or hire someone I trusted to study them and direct my money where it would do the most good.
Rewarding teachers for results is one of those things that sounds good until you start looking at how you're going to measure results. The standardized test craze of this millennium has done far more harm than good, focusing attention on those things easy to measure rather than those that are the most important. Good teachers recognize other good teachers. Students recognize good teachers. Sometimes parents do. But administrators only do if they know what a good teacher is—if they were once a good teacher, and many education administrators were not.
Tire manufacturers in the US resist tires having expiration dates. Why would they mind, since that might increase demand for replacements? Distributors and retailers might mind since it means their inventory loses market value quicker than it would otherwise. Supposedly the manufacturers fear that having an expiration date will imply to consumers that their tires should last until that date. The lifetime might be set at 6 years, which is longer than most tires' tread lasts.
To some degree I'd expect this sort of thinking to apply here.
Pretty much nailed it. In theory, we can build fail-safe reactors, but it wasn't done. It's nearly impossible to overestimate a life-cycle cost for a reactor, given that there'll be many decades of stuff to deal with even after it's shut down. In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn't fulfilled its original mission faithfully. Why would we expect it to do otherwise now? Properly licensed, designed, built, regulated, and inspected reactors are very expensive. Economically, particularly taking into account the uncaptured costs of using nukes and fossil fuels, reducing usage and utilizing renewables just makes sense. Save the nukes for spacecraft, other planets and moons, and submarines, if we must have them.
Here's a thought... Who profits from building reactors? Who profits from operating them? Often not the same entities. If the operators fail to operate them safely, the builders suffer from loss of future jobs. Maybe if the builders retained some say-so over operation, there'd be more safety. Of course, that fails to account for the effect of prioritizing quarterly profits ahead of long-term viability.