"CMU, for tenured folks, ain't a bad place, but it can't compete for 25-35 year old engineers at their prime."
Why it should!? Isn't it the point of a Engineering School or University to put 25-35 year old engineers at their prime so they can go to private companies to do their magic?
"The point there appeared to be "sending a message" by using an incredibly rare and easily identified poison that only comes from one place."
Nevertheless there was the tactical point about how to do it. The way they did it left traces that were usable both by the press and the other side's intelligence. Imagine for a moment they were able to give him the Plutonium (or Thorium, or whatever it was) without the need to expose both the agent or the infection path. Everybody (in the knowledge) still would have known who was the hand after the issue, but still they'd have no card to play against him. Think, say, about Stuxnet: everybody "knew" who did it but, without traces, everybody was hesitant to act.
And, of course, as you say, it's another vector for the "make it look like an accident" case.
"You could never give someone food poisoning by hacking their fridge."
In fact, you can.
Remember Alexander Litvinenko? It would have been tad more easy to kill him and avoid the diplomatic repercussion if you learn from his fridge that he buys, say, strawberries and cream from the same provider twice a month.
"Don't blame the consumer when the mfgr is putting out shit product."
Of course you can blame the customer.
The only thing you can't blame the customer is for the thingie being there (I wanted X but X came with a, b and c tied to it) as soon as they buy something on purpose, customers are the ones to blame.
What you can't do is just the opposite, blame the vendor. You know for sure the vendor will try to sell you the cheapest shit that maximizes their revenue. Heck, it's their damn job to do so! And the vendor is incurring costs when trying to sell you their new thingie, so the only way they'll continue selling it is if they in fact profit from that. They are selling that crap, sure indication they are profitting from it -and that's because of the customers, not the other way around.
"So you've been out of the market for 20 years and have no idea what's going on."
Women don't work or evolution the way your iPhone does. No: women 20 years ago, or 200 years ago, or 2000 years ago for that matter are not any different than today's. Neither are men. Yes, some external looks do change, just like you can put a new cover to your old mobile, but the motherboard and the WiFi chip stays the same.
"I see. Since you, specifically, don't have a problem that a whole lot of other people complain about, obviously the problem simply doesn't exist."
When it is not simply "other people" but a specific subset of biased people, well, yes, it may very well be that the problem simply doesn't exist outside that group.
"... pedestrians aren't an unrelated externality."
No, they aren't. That's exactly why the study takes them into account. It is still you the one failing to tell how the way the study takes care of pedestrians can't be put into practice.
"I'm not sure if you're a high-quality idiot or a low-quality troll."
You see? You are doing it again: "I addressed why half of my arguments have nothing to do with traffic lights" and then " the "problem" under discussion is traffic lights" (even qualified to "...is traffic lights on roads and pedestrians").
Well, another bad news for you: no, the problem under discussion is certainly NOT traffic lights on pedestrians side but traffic lights on road side, specifically how a fully surrounds-aware system (vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X)) could get rid of traffic lights (or any other slot-based traffic management system on intersections) *on the traffic side*. It even goes to specifically explain about the existence of a 'pedestrian' button since pedestrians, as long as they also share access to the intersection, would need a slot-based pass-through (not necessarily in the form of traffic lights on their side -and only on their side).
"A real engineer, someone cut from the right cloth for it, considers such externalities as they actually affect the problem"
You said it: as they actually affect the problem. They don't come with unrelated externalities just waving hands to make them into the problem realm.
"You're the one grasping at straws to apply a theoretical study to the real world"
What I see is you trying to debunk the theoretical study by putting into the scenario "real world circumstances" that somehow make it impossible to put it in practice, failing to both clearly state what those circumstances exactly are and how exactly they break any of the study conditions.
"The study, in all honesty, amounts to "if there were no people, we wouldn't need traffic lights""
No. Even at that very high level, the study amounts to "if there were no pedestrians (not "people"), we would increase load capacity getting rid of time-slotting traffic flow management systems (not just "traffic lights")".
"Go back and read, I addressed why half of my arguments have nothing to do with traffic lights."
Yes, you have been jumping from an irrelevant topic to another all thread. So just to recap:
No, what you think it will happen, it won't happen. And even if it happened, it wouldn't be relevant. And even if it were relevant, it would be easily coped with. And even if it weren't possible to deal with, it wouldn't be any different to something already happening today and accepted.
Be it traffic lights, motion sickness, people jumping into the road, bicycles trumping into rocks or whatever.
Sorry being me the one bringing you the bad news but no, today is not the day you find a critical flaw in the study it took a MIT team to come with.
"as motion sickness is triggered when they do not"
There it comes again... How the heck do traffic lights relate to motion sickness!!!??? Specifically, how the heck should the relationship between traffic lights and motion sickness for an occupant of a self-driving car in a future scenario would be any more relevant than the traffic lights to motion sickness relationship for the holder of a seat in the fifteenth row of a human-driven bus on a present-day one?
"You are free to request this information of the companies producing food you would like to purchase."
Yes, and given my understanding of how much it could cost to me act that way and how much it would cost to me to read the label, I take another path I'm also free to take: requesting my representatives to pass a law for such information to be in the label.
"Why is it so hard to take personal responsibility for your life choices?"
Why is it so hard for some pseudo-liberals to understand how representative democracy works?
"as I explained (and you ignored), the circuit is a much longer path and the delay is measurable."
It _is_ mensurable, yes; it is also non-significant: human average reaction time for an unexpected circumstance on-road: around 1,25 s (yes, *that* bad). Even reaction time for an *expected* event on road is like 0,250s.
Time for light to linearly cover 100m: 0,0003s. Time to cover 1000m: 0,003s. So the travel part, even with cable being 100 times longer than line sight, is like 0,25% of total time. In other words: irrelevant. Heck, even over standard Internet the round trip from my position to a well known site about 6000 miles afar, with its hops and routers in the way, is like 0,160s!
"You pick the points I am making, rather than the facts that back them up"
I pick the points because your overall position (even if you made it clear, which you do not, as far as I can get it) is ludicrous. At least your intents on fine points are clearly questionable: trying to debunk "waving hands in your general direction" is much more difficult, I confess, than trying to set why self-aware cars, driven in a full-aware environment don't need traffic lights nor time-managed traffic slides. Just to pick one, the argument that sorroundings-aware cars still need traffic lights in order for their occupants not to crush their heads against the bodywork is probably the most ludicrous of all.
"Also, you can compromise an automatic door with $20 worth of electronics"
Yes. And how many times have you seen an automatic door compromised? How many times, in fact, do you see compromised a door with a simple "do not trespass" panel on it? Having a door, or a swinging barrier is not in order to make them invulnerable but to provide an obvious semantic context (just like a traffic light does) -in this case minimizing the inconvenience of a dumb child jumping over just because he knows the cars in front will forcibly and reliably brake.
"Where is that radio wave coming from? You can approximate the direction and guess, but you can actually see where the light is. The same applies to cars."
Ok: so the problem here is that you just lack the required modicum of engineering knowledge or how -even current, traffic signaling works. It is not a problem: not everybody should know about everything. It's just that it makes this conversation tad non-productive.
"If the discussion is about whether or not we'll need traffic lights in the future, the fact that people need them is extremely relevant."
Not that I ever said otherwise since that was not what this thread was about: "It's not about the device, it's about the people _inside_ the device.". That's what you said.
"let's consider the ones outside, who will still be riding bikes, running, jogging, and walking."
So you change the issue, then. OK, I'll tell you are not starting right: there're two different sets there: the ones within the road and the ones not in the road. Different sets will probably be managed in different ways.
"let's consider the ones outside, who will still be riding bikes, running, jogging, and walking. All of this will occur adjacent to, on, or across roadways and any of it could result in abrupt speed deltas"
So what? I already concluded that speed/direction deltas and traffic lights have no relationship.
"think cyclist hits small rock"
I do. How in hell any traffic light can have any relationship with that?
"And pedestrians needing to cross? Lights."
Yes, traffic lights *can* be a solution, it doesn't mean it's the only one. And given the perspective of autonomous vehicles in the road, it's probably a very bad one in fact, since it's utterly opened to sabotage and disruption. Think a bit yourself about the issue and you'll understand why and you also see around you solutions that are already in place, albeit not in street cross-sections (hint: automatic doors).
"A window solves that and a light helps"
A window is something that just has appeared on your argumentation *now* and even then, all you are using "your" window for is for "everything *but* the traffic lights", so now I don't really now what your point is: are traffic lights needed or are windows? Or both? And by the way, signals on wire will go basically at the speed of light (moreso if we are talking about fiber optics or wireless), just the same speed than the one going through the windows and then, you have the computer's reaction time versus the human's reaction time, and the computer assisted mechanical interface versus the human-actioned interface. Can you bet which is faster?
"The next logical step from "the cars don't need lights" is "people in the cars don't need to see where they're going. These are both false statements."
They are *so* false that passengers in a bus *already* don't see where they are going and what happens?... Uh, nothing at all.
"or a pedestrian with a smartphone ans $20 worth of electronics sends a BRAKE HARD signal) and the vehicle fucks up."
Or a pedestrian just makes a sudden movement into the road (either maliciously or not) and the current very human driver also fucks up. So?
"You must be a Democrat, because you obviously don't understand how things work. Doing things in business is forced on you"
I understand what's the meaning of "to be forced on you" you try to set, what you don't understand is that, even if I accept your definition, you still are not forced to engage into business if you don't want to. You get into some kind of business because you don't give a damn about the kind of things you will be "forced" to do which in turn means for the external observer that he can very much anticipate what will happen when the same kind of things happen in a different decision realm.
Just to revisit the example: I have no problems accepting that, once you had a plantation in USA in the XVIII century, you would be basically forced to own slaves if you wanted to remain profitable (not that I know for certain, but let's assume that's the case). What it is obvious is that, if even as a last resort, you still could very well *not* to own a plantation and that, by owning it, you are making also obvious that the money outcome from the plantation is more important to you than the slavery issue just like, by entering into unsustainable debt and then using it to leverage your creditors into giving you more money you are making obvious that you don't give a damn about the output of your actions nor the results on those not being you yourself.
"as far as Trump doing anything for the big corporations, remember that he cannot be bought - he has all the money he needs already."
Ha! Do you *really* think people that reach to billionaire status do it for the money? He's a weasel, and he *enjoys* being a weasel; he *enjoys* looking at the face of those he has weaseled in and he obviously doesn't give a damn about his promises. There's a lot of Trumps in the world, even a bunch of them as successful as Trump himself and that's just the way they are: you can't blame the scorpion for stinging the frog -what you do is making damn sure you don't get within a scorpion's reach.
"It's not about the device, it's about the people inside the device."
Yeah, I know: that's why I said it's irrelevant.
"They still need the cues to avoid injury"
On one hand, no, they don't. It is not cues what avoids injuries, but low deltas on speed/direction vector changes, which only depends on the driver's -either human or artificial, ability to anticipate and react on its surroundings. On the other, *even* if cues are in fact needed (say, once it's admitted there will be situations where awareness/reaction speed is not guaranteed to be below a required threshold) why do you think the cues need to come from an specific external device, be it traffic lights or any other, when the vehicle itself has already gathered all the required info and this is in fact, the very reason why it can go without external traffic lights? For all that matters, the car could very well be completely opaque and create all kind of cues on a 360Â screen.
"and/or motion sickness"
The way a car is driven and/or gathers information about its surroundings in order to take some action is, again, orthogonal to the visibility it offers to their passengers.
"You're not qualified to talk about traffic if you don't realize that putting pedestrian crossings at intersections is the most efficient way to let pedestrians navigate the cities."
Putting pedestrians crossing on intersections *with* traffic lights is quite convenient. Putting pedestrians crossings on intersections *without* traffic lights is quite efficient... if you want to get rid of pedestrians.
You are right about qualifications. Basically everything is already invented, so what I've seen is like some 80% of people commenting here seemingly haven't driven beyond their suburbs since the various designs for roundabouts, where to put -or not, traffic lights and pedestrian crosses depending on the kind of crossing, number of branches intersecting, with how many lanes, pedestrian flow and relative priority... all seem to be novelties to them.
"That's not efficient. Right now pedestrians don't have to press a button"
No, they have to wait for the green light, disregarding if there's traffic or not. Much more efficient. And of course, the fact that there already *are* traffic lights of this kind on places with low pedestrian traffic (with retention times studied for the standard flow) shouldn't concern you. And the fact that whenever something like this is applied, it'll be because *everything* will be much more connected, so pedestrians arriving will also be detected by the system, shouldn't be a concern for you either.
"Except wouldn't slowing down the cars or making them stay apart by "safe distances" decrease the traffic flow anyways?"
In practice, no. Human reflexes are a bit slow when compared to traffic speeds so under changing environmental conditions (like crosses and intersections, or even on almost saturated straight highways) amplified waves tend to appear and going slower almost always guarantee better throughput)
"IMHO problem is not only the timid drivers but also the aggressive drivers inside de roundabout."
Nailed.
While not difficult to grasp, roundabouts are quite demanding on the politeness (meaning in this case, "please follow the rules to the dot") of its users. Driving and politeness have come basically antonyms, so go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
"CMU, for tenured folks, ain't a bad place, but it can't compete for 25-35 year old engineers at their prime."
Why it should!? Isn't it the point of a Engineering School or University to put 25-35 year old engineers at their prime so they can go to private companies to do their magic?
"The point there appeared to be "sending a message" by using an incredibly rare and easily identified poison that only comes from one place."
Nevertheless there was the tactical point about how to do it. The way they did it left traces that were usable both by the press and the other side's intelligence. Imagine for a moment they were able to give him the Plutonium (or Thorium, or whatever it was) without the need to expose both the agent or the infection path. Everybody (in the knowledge) still would have known who was the hand after the issue, but still they'd have no card to play against him. Think, say, about Stuxnet: everybody "knew" who did it but, without traces, everybody was hesitant to act.
And, of course, as you say, it's another vector for the "make it look like an accident" case.
"You're working with the wrong vendors if you think it's their job to sell you the cheapest shit possible."
That's not what I said. I said "the cheapest shit that maximizes their revenue".
"They have obviously never had botulism."
There's no food that I can think of that can both induce botulism and requires a fridge, so I don't see what's your point.
"You could never give someone food poisoning by hacking their fridge."
In fact, you can.
Remember Alexander Litvinenko? It would have been tad more easy to kill him and avoid the diplomatic repercussion if you learn from his fridge that he buys, say, strawberries and cream from the same provider twice a month.
"Don't blame the consumer when the mfgr is putting out shit product."
Of course you can blame the customer.
The only thing you can't blame the customer is for the thingie being there (I wanted X but X came with a, b and c tied to it) as soon as they buy something on purpose, customers are the ones to blame.
What you can't do is just the opposite, blame the vendor. You know for sure the vendor will try to sell you the cheapest shit that maximizes their revenue. Heck, it's their damn job to do so! And the vendor is incurring costs when trying to sell you their new thingie, so the only way they'll continue selling it is if they in fact profit from that. They are selling that crap, sure indication they are profitting from it -and that's because of the customers, not the other way around.
"So you've been out of the market for 20 years and have no idea what's going on."
Women don't work or evolution the way your iPhone does. No: women 20 years ago, or 200 years ago, or 2000 years ago for that matter are not any different than today's. Neither are men. Yes, some external looks do change, just like you can put a new cover to your old mobile, but the motherboard and the WiFi chip stays the same.
"I see. Since you, specifically, don't have a problem that a whole lot of other people complain about, obviously the problem simply doesn't exist."
When it is not simply "other people" but a specific subset of biased people, well, yes, it may very well be that the problem simply doesn't exist outside that group.
"... pedestrians aren't an unrelated externality."
No, they aren't. That's exactly why the study takes them into account. It is still you the one failing to tell how the way the study takes care of pedestrians can't be put into practice.
"I'm not sure if you're a high-quality idiot or a low-quality troll."
What a coincidence!
"The only way to meaningfully improve the healthcare of aspies is to empower them to take direct control"
Looking at your account, induced comma probably would also work.
You see? You are doing it again: "I addressed why half of my arguments have nothing to do with traffic lights" and then " the "problem" under discussion is traffic lights" (even qualified to "...is traffic lights on roads and pedestrians").
Well, another bad news for you: no, the problem under discussion is certainly NOT traffic lights on pedestrians side but traffic lights on road side, specifically how a fully surrounds-aware system (vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X)) could get rid of traffic lights (or any other slot-based traffic management system on intersections) *on the traffic side*. It even goes to specifically explain about the existence of a 'pedestrian' button since pedestrians, as long as they also share access to the intersection, would need a slot-based pass-through (not necessarily in the form of traffic lights on their side -and only on their side).
"A real engineer, someone cut from the right cloth for it, considers such externalities as they actually affect the problem"
You said it: as they actually affect the problem. They don't come with unrelated externalities just waving hands to make them into the problem realm.
"You're the one grasping at straws to apply a theoretical study to the real world"
What I see is you trying to debunk the theoretical study by putting into the scenario "real world circumstances" that somehow make it impossible to put it in practice, failing to both clearly state what those circumstances exactly are and how exactly they break any of the study conditions.
"The study, in all honesty, amounts to "if there were no people, we wouldn't need traffic lights""
No. Even at that very high level, the study amounts to "if there were no pedestrians (not "people"), we would increase load capacity getting rid of time-slotting traffic flow management systems (not just "traffic lights")".
"Go back and read, I addressed why half of my arguments have nothing to do with traffic lights."
Yes, you have been jumping from an irrelevant topic to another all thread. So just to recap:
No, what you think it will happen, it won't happen. And even if it happened, it wouldn't be relevant. And even if it were relevant, it would be easily coped with. And even if it weren't possible to deal with, it wouldn't be any different to something already happening today and accepted.
Be it traffic lights, motion sickness, people jumping into the road, bicycles trumping into rocks or whatever.
Sorry being me the one bringing you the bad news but no, today is not the day you find a critical flaw in the study it took a MIT team to come with.
"as motion sickness is triggered when they do not"
There it comes again... How the heck do traffic lights relate to motion sickness!!!??? Specifically, how the heck should the relationship between traffic lights and motion sickness for an occupant of a self-driving car in a future scenario would be any more relevant than the traffic lights to motion sickness relationship for the holder of a seat in the fifteenth row of a human-driven bus on a present-day one?
"Some people believe that you only truly die when your name is uttered for the last time."
Some people also believe an old white-bearded Man of Sky opened the Red Sea waters for another old white-bearded man to pass through, so go figure!
"You are free to request this information of the companies producing food you would like to purchase."
Yes, and given my understanding of how much it could cost to me act that way and how much it would cost to me to read the label, I take another path I'm also free to take: requesting my representatives to pass a law for such information to be in the label.
"Why is it so hard to take personal responsibility for your life choices?"
Why is it so hard for some pseudo-liberals to understand how representative democracy works?
"as I explained (and you ignored), the circuit is a much longer path and the delay is measurable."
It _is_ mensurable, yes; it is also non-significant: human average reaction time for an unexpected circumstance on-road: around 1,25 s (yes, *that* bad). Even reaction time for an *expected* event on road is like 0,250s.
Time for light to linearly cover 100m: 0,0003s. Time to cover 1000m: 0,003s. So the travel part, even with cable being 100 times longer than line sight, is like 0,25% of total time. In other words: irrelevant. Heck, even over standard Internet the round trip from my position to a well known site about 6000 miles afar, with its hops and routers in the way, is like 0,160s!
"You pick the points I am making, rather than the facts that back them up"
I pick the points because your overall position (even if you made it clear, which you do not, as far as I can get it) is ludicrous. At least your intents on fine points are clearly questionable: trying to debunk "waving hands in your general direction" is much more difficult, I confess, than trying to set why self-aware cars, driven in a full-aware environment don't need traffic lights nor time-managed traffic slides. Just to pick one, the argument that sorroundings-aware cars still need traffic lights in order for their occupants not to crush their heads against the bodywork is probably the most ludicrous of all.
"Also, you can compromise an automatic door with $20 worth of electronics"
Yes. And how many times have you seen an automatic door compromised? How many times, in fact, do you see compromised a door with a simple "do not trespass" panel on it? Having a door, or a swinging barrier is not in order to make them invulnerable but to provide an obvious semantic context (just like a traffic light does) -in this case minimizing the inconvenience of a dumb child jumping over just because he knows the cars in front will forcibly and reliably brake.
"Where is that radio wave coming from? You can approximate the direction and guess, but you can actually see where the light is. The same applies to cars."
Ok: so the problem here is that you just lack the required modicum of engineering knowledge or how -even current, traffic signaling works. It is not a problem: not everybody should know about everything. It's just that it makes this conversation tad non-productive.
"Maybe they've realized that you can't take money with you when you check out, and they've decided to pursue a longer-term impact."
Maybe but then... didn't they realize that you can't take long-term impact with you when you check out either?
"If the discussion is about whether or not we'll need traffic lights in the future, the fact that people need them is extremely relevant."
Not that I ever said otherwise since that was not what this thread was about: "It's not about the device, it's about the people _inside_ the device.". That's what you said.
"let's consider the ones outside, who will still be riding bikes, running, jogging, and walking."
So you change the issue, then. OK, I'll tell you are not starting right: there're two different sets there: the ones within the road and the ones not in the road. Different sets will probably be managed in different ways.
"let's consider the ones outside, who will still be riding bikes, running, jogging, and walking. All of this will occur adjacent to, on, or across roadways and any of it could result in abrupt speed deltas"
So what? I already concluded that speed/direction deltas and traffic lights have no relationship.
"think cyclist hits small rock"
I do. How in hell any traffic light can have any relationship with that?
"And pedestrians needing to cross? Lights."
Yes, traffic lights *can* be a solution, it doesn't mean it's the only one. And given the perspective of autonomous vehicles in the road, it's probably a very bad one in fact, since it's utterly opened to sabotage and disruption. Think a bit yourself about the issue and you'll understand why and you also see around you solutions that are already in place, albeit not in street cross-sections (hint: automatic doors).
"A window solves that and a light helps"
A window is something that just has appeared on your argumentation *now* and even then, all you are using "your" window for is for "everything *but* the traffic lights", so now I don't really now what your point is: are traffic lights needed or are windows? Or both? And by the way, signals on wire will go basically at the speed of light (moreso if we are talking about fiber optics or wireless), just the same speed than the one going through the windows and then, you have the computer's reaction time versus the human's reaction time, and the computer assisted mechanical interface versus the human-actioned interface. Can you bet which is faster?
"The next logical step from "the cars don't need lights" is "people in the cars don't need to see where they're going. These are both false statements."
They are *so* false that passengers in a bus *already* don't see where they are going and what happens?... Uh, nothing at all.
"or a pedestrian with a smartphone ans $20 worth of electronics sends a BRAKE HARD signal) and the vehicle fucks up."
Or a pedestrian just makes a sudden movement into the road (either maliciously or not) and the current very human driver also fucks up. So?
"You must be a Democrat, because you obviously don't understand how things work. Doing things in business is forced on you"
I understand what's the meaning of "to be forced on you" you try to set, what you don't understand is that, even if I accept your definition, you still are not forced to engage into business if you don't want to. You get into some kind of business because you don't give a damn about the kind of things you will be "forced" to do which in turn means for the external observer that he can very much anticipate what will happen when the same kind of things happen in a different decision realm.
Just to revisit the example: I have no problems accepting that, once you had a plantation in USA in the XVIII century, you would be basically forced to own slaves if you wanted to remain profitable (not that I know for certain, but let's assume that's the case). What it is obvious is that, if even as a last resort, you still could very well *not* to own a plantation and that, by owning it, you are making also obvious that the money outcome from the plantation is more important to you than the slavery issue just like, by entering into unsustainable debt and then using it to leverage your creditors into giving you more money you are making obvious that you don't give a damn about the output of your actions nor the results on those not being you yourself.
"as far as Trump doing anything for the big corporations, remember that he cannot be bought - he has all the money he needs already."
Ha! Do you *really* think people that reach to billionaire status do it for the money? He's a weasel, and he *enjoys* being a weasel; he *enjoys* looking at the face of those he has weaseled in and he obviously doesn't give a damn about his promises. There's a lot of Trumps in the world, even a bunch of them as successful as Trump himself and that's just the way they are: you can't blame the scorpion for stinging the frog -what you do is making damn sure you don't get within a scorpion's reach.
"It's not about the device, it's about the people inside the device."
Yeah, I know: that's why I said it's irrelevant.
"They still need the cues to avoid injury"
On one hand, no, they don't. It is not cues what avoids injuries, but low deltas on speed/direction vector changes, which only depends on the driver's -either human or artificial, ability to anticipate and react on its surroundings. On the other, *even* if cues are in fact needed (say, once it's admitted there will be situations where awareness/reaction speed is not guaranteed to be below a required threshold) why do you think the cues need to come from an specific external device, be it traffic lights or any other, when the vehicle itself has already gathered all the required info and this is in fact, the very reason why it can go without external traffic lights? For all that matters, the car could very well be completely opaque and create all kind of cues on a 360Â screen.
"and/or motion sickness"
The way a car is driven and/or gathers information about its surroundings in order to take some action is, again, orthogonal to the visibility it offers to their passengers.
"You're not qualified to talk about traffic if you don't realize that putting pedestrian crossings at intersections is the most efficient way to let pedestrians navigate the cities."
Putting pedestrians crossing on intersections *with* traffic lights is quite convenient. Putting pedestrians crossings on intersections *without* traffic lights is quite efficient... if you want to get rid of pedestrians.
You are right about qualifications. Basically everything is already invented, so what I've seen is like some 80% of people commenting here seemingly haven't driven beyond their suburbs since the various designs for roundabouts, where to put -or not, traffic lights and pedestrian crosses depending on the kind of crossing, number of branches intersecting, with how many lanes, pedestrian flow and relative priority... all seem to be novelties to them.
"That's not efficient. Right now pedestrians don't have to press a button"
No, they have to wait for the green light, disregarding if there's traffic or not. Much more efficient. And of course, the fact that there already *are* traffic lights of this kind on places with low pedestrian traffic (with retention times studied for the standard flow) shouldn't concern you. And the fact that whenever something like this is applied, it'll be because *everything* will be much more connected, so pedestrians arriving will also be detected by the system, shouldn't be a concern for you either.
Your lack of imagination is daunting.
"eventually pedestrian crossing could be completely eliminated since anyone could just hop in a driverless car and go a couple blocks away"
I don't want to go two blocks away, I just want to cross the street, dammit.
"Except wouldn't slowing down the cars or making them stay apart by "safe distances" decrease the traffic flow anyways?"
In practice, no. Human reflexes are a bit slow when compared to traffic speeds so under changing environmental conditions (like crosses and intersections, or even on almost saturated straight highways) amplified waves tend to appear and going slower almost always guarantee better throughput)
"IMHO problem is not only the timid drivers but also the aggressive drivers inside de roundabout."
Nailed.
While not difficult to grasp, roundabouts are quite demanding on the politeness (meaning in this case, "please follow the rules to the dot") of its users. Driving and politeness have come basically antonyms, so go figure.