Thank you for pointing out the absurdity of those who are insisting on a manual override, as though they'll somehow be able to react better and faster than a computer during an emergency. I'd posit that people are much more likely to yank the steering wheel the wrong way just before an accident and cause more problems, not fewer.
The manual override will certainly exist in the first several generation of autonomous cars, but it will be there for navigating in car garages, off-road travel, poor visibility due to storms, or other situations where the computer won't initially be intelligent enough to solve.
Remember when we just had to worry about making things functional? It's hard to imagine that just a few decades ago, someone thought it was a great idea if, when you inserted a CD (later DVD, then USB drive) your computer would automatically execute binaries found on that media? Or that you could attach a random executable to an e-mail, send it to anyone in the world, and they could execute said binary with a single click? Remember when Windows computers were attached to the internet with default ports open, so anyone on the internet could see whatever drives and printers they decided to share? How about embedding scripting languages inside documents? Automatically executing binary plugins on the web? Neat stuff!
This was the era in which these technologies were born.
Take a look at this list of vulnerabilities in Acrobat Reader and just shake your head. 434 and counting. Since PDF was invented in 1991 (and presumably Acrobat came shortly after), that's on average a new vulnerability discovered every 20 days over the past 24 years.
Flash is already well ahead at 568 and counting. That's a new vulnerability found every 12 days over the past 19 years. Go Flash!
DRM works reasonably well in closed ecosystems and on closed hardware. That includes consoles, handhelds, phones, and so on. It can be bypassed, but it's a pain, and most people don't do so. This is because the DRM is implemented in hardware, and in ways that are extremely difficult to unravel, and so aren't really worth attacking except for people who are mostly doing it for the technical challenge.
Where DRM typically fails is on open platforms like the PC. There are only two forms (that I can think of offhand) of DRM to really succeed on the PC. One is the "leave most of the code on the server" sort of DRM, essentially online-only games, and that's a pretty draconian solution for single-player games. The other is high-end software that uses a hardware encryption dongle to protect it. Other than that, the only way to make software-based DRM work on the PC is to make it a closed device like consoles, and although I'm sure some companies wouldn't mind seeing that happen, with declining PC sales as is, I just don't see it happening.
DRM in JPEG images is a pipe dream. Even if it were technically possible in the first place, do you really think anyone and everyone is going to bother implementing whatever extensions would make it possible? It's ridiculous. Note that the ONLY way I can think to implement this would be an image handling library with root-level privileges on every computer system on the planet. Did we fucking learn nothing from Stagefright?
That's the whole point of the article - that getting a charger at work is anything but reliable once you have more EVs than chargers. Putting a few charging stations was fine when it was just a few early adopters buying them. Now that they're going mainstream, do you seriously expect a company to install chargers in a quarter of the stalls of the company garage? I seriously doubt it.
What's likely to happen is that people who need this service will be able to reserve a spot with a charger for fee. It has to be greater than the cost of the electricity, so it discourages people who don't really need it. That's the only way the chargers won't be constantly filled.
If someone can't drive to and from work with a single charge in their EV, then isn't an EV a rather terrible choice of vehicle for them? And of course, if that person can't get home without finding a charging station during the day, then things are naturally going to get ugly when they see someone park an EV in the only spot left at work, and you know that other person *could* get home without a recharge.
Whose fault is it really though, if someone made a bad purchasing decision? Are they then more "entitled" to that charging station?
This problem will work itself out as EV range is extended past the reasonable daily commute + after-work errands threshold. And I'm betting the vast majority of employers will probably not be installing a charger at every parking spot when the vast majority of them don't really need it, even if they are electric.
An app for this sort of thing is a cool idea, but of course, only if the app doesn't suck and the city actually makes an attempt to fix the issues it receives. Call me crazy, but I suspect the app's effectiveness will have a strong correlation with the local government's effectiveness in dealing with it's other day to day issues. Competent local governments will probably make good use of this technology. Incompetent local governments will continue to run things (including new programs like this) in a bumbling, half-assed fashion.
According to the article, in Detroit's system, the person who submitted the request can see the progress of the ticket item as it makes it's way through the system. That sort of feedback is important, as it lets people know they aren't being ignored. So, the city workers must have a way to update the status of individual requests as they process them. Seems like a reasonably good system.
I'm not sure how Boston's compared to that. It sounds like their system needs a way to allow users to give some feedback per ticket, so they can let the city know who's not actually doing their jobs.
It struck me that you seem to be making a distinction between "PC" and "laptop", whereas most discussions I've seen tend to lump them together. For instance, in the article listed, Microsoft is not building desktop machines. They're building laptops or hybrid laptop/tablets. The article is still calling those PCs.
So, even substituting "desktop PC" everywhere you said "PC"... I agree with everything except your conclusion. The PC (both desktop and laptop) isn't "dying". It's market is shrinking, but that's a far different thing, even if the curve looks the same. And add to this that hardware speeds have largely leveled off, no longer prompting sales to replace older "obsolete" computers.
The PC is now much more of a niche product, of course, in that it's mostly used by gamers, tech enthusiasts, content creators, businesses, and so on. There's a lot that PCs can do that no other form factor can do as well, and as long as that's the case, the PC will still have a home with those people.
When I want to see ads is when I'm shopping for something - specifically when I click on the "shopping" tab in Google search. Then and at no other time.
Even then, it can be annoying if it's done incorrectly. Amazon has been putting more and more ads inside their own web pages, and it's starting to irritate me. For heaven's sake, I'm already shopping with the intent to purchase something. Yet Amazon is still trying to monetize my eyeballs? Let's face it, they're simply cashing in on my bandwidth and wasted time that it takes me to skip over those "sponsored results". Why would I want to go to another website when I'm clearly intent on shopping at Amazon?
The problem is that it's clearly too tempting for the MBAs that make these decisions to turn down the extra cash this stuff generates for them. Unfortunately, they can't directly measure the ire it generates from their customers when they do this. It's that lack of consideration for the user experience (and safety) that's driving users to install ad-blockers.
Also, Mozilla, since when are advertisements called content? The content is what we're trying to get to. The ads are in the way of the content, sometimes literally.
For me, the issue is safety. The rest of the issues, while not unimportant, are secondary.
I won't allow some third-party advertisement company to run arbitrary scripting on my machine - or more accurately, allow them to run scripting that allows someone else who allows some criminal to run scripting on my machine. Until these ad-serving companies can make firm guarantees about the safety of the ads they serve, I'm not going to allow them. This point is simply non-negotiable to me.
How very Stalin-esque. You know he really wanted to send those people to the gulag, but for some bizarre reason, you can't do that to your peasants here in this country.
No games? Choplifter. Aztec. Wizardry. Karateka. Flight Simulator. There were *lots* of fantastic games for the Apple II.
I still learned AppleBASIC and made my own games though. Thirty years later, I'm still making games for a living. I have to admit, I'm sort of surprised it worked out as planned.
You're freakishly good at getting into their heads. Every time I try that, I get scared of losing my way in the eternal blackness and have to bring myself back.
Or maybe coding is something that when women try to get involved they discover they are unwelcome. There's the one guy who's just a dick to women. There's one who hasn't washed since 2004. There's one who has to one-up everything she says. There's several who have to hit on her because she's the only woman they get to talk to.
Let's put this another way... What makes the men who code so magical that women somehow just can't get past them in significant numbers, unlike nearly every other office-dwelling profession on earth? Do you really think that we're such troglodytes that these poor, fragile women are physically repelled from the building? I have to laugh if you really think we're all that special, or that they're so fragile.
And isn't it a bit demeaning to women to suggest that they can't make it in the world of programming if we men don't figure out a way to help them along, or become more welcoming, or whatever? Do you realize the incredible advantage a competent female programmer actually has right now, with all the recent focus on getting women into coding and other tech professions? Any company would absolutely *love* to hire good female programmers, and certainly don't want to lose the ones they have.
I'm actually fine with encouraging more women to get into coding and other tech professions. I get irritated with the constant accusation that it's somehow the fault of the people already in those professions. Personally speaking, the lack of female interest in programming has always been a significant negative for me. I'd love to see more women programming, and I've gotten along fine with the very rare female programmers I've worked with in the last several decades.
If it wasn't clear by reading between the lines, I consider a permissive license (like zlib, libPNG, BSD, etc) more suitable than GPLv3 for a reference library if your goal is to ensure broad, industry-wide adoption of a new file format. My assumption is that very few people or organizations will be interested in writing their own library from scratch simply to adopt someone's new file format. Your reasoning seems to be "if it's already difficult, why not make it more difficult still?" which seems a strange argument to make.
That the GPLv3 license hinders broad adoption should be self-evident, as the license specifically prohibits use of the code in non GPL projects. That hardly seems like a "vague claim". That's a simple fact. Perhaps you should read Richard Stallman's very pragmatic view on this matter, as I agree with his reasoning here.
As for the FOSS/GPLv3 thing... The GPLv3 is the most well-known copyleft FOSS license, which means that if you use that license, any FOSS software you release is guaranteed to remain as FOSS-only code. I admittedly could have worded that better.
The reference implementation is under GPLv3. Everyone is of course still free to create their own implementation and license it under whichever license they want.
Which, I'm betting, no one will care to do. Even when there is a permissive license, it's still incredibly difficult for a new file format to gain any traction. Think about how many years it took for PNG to take root with decent support in graphics tools and browsers.
If the ultimate goal is to promote this file format, this is not the best way of doing it. Apparently, keeping the software they wrote as FOSS/GPL is more important to the authors than broad adoption. That's fine, but just don't expect the rest of the world to come rushing to adopt this format. Sadly, it's probably going to be ignored, even if it's technically superior to PNG as claimed.
Tie some of their funding to the completion of their legal mandates, and they will become fearsome regulation-writing warriors. You just have to understand Bureaushido - the Way of the Bureaucrat.
I'd guess what you're trying to get at is that drivers are always obligated to yield to pedestrians, even if they cross the street illegally. That's a little different than claiming pedestrians have "right of way once they are on the road," which is technically incorrect.
Thank you, that's interesting to know. I guess it's perhaps not such an outlandish idea after all. Probably the biggest hurdle in getting a system like this would be inertia, and for the US government (well, probably any government), that can be pretty substantial. Well, probably once the rest of the world does something like that, we'll probably implement something similar after a decade or two. That's just how we seem to roll here in the US of A, I guess - incredibly high tech in some areas, but stupidly backwards in others.
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Thank you for pointing out the absurdity of those who are insisting on a manual override, as though they'll somehow be able to react better and faster than a computer during an emergency. I'd posit that people are much more likely to yank the steering wheel the wrong way just before an accident and cause more problems, not fewer.
The manual override will certainly exist in the first several generation of autonomous cars, but it will be there for navigating in car garages, off-road travel, poor visibility due to storms, or other situations where the computer won't initially be intelligent enough to solve.
Remember when we just had to worry about making things functional? It's hard to imagine that just a few decades ago, someone thought it was a great idea if, when you inserted a CD (later DVD, then USB drive) your computer would automatically execute binaries found on that media? Or that you could attach a random executable to an e-mail, send it to anyone in the world, and they could execute said binary with a single click? Remember when Windows computers were attached to the internet with default ports open, so anyone on the internet could see whatever drives and printers they decided to share? How about embedding scripting languages inside documents? Automatically executing binary plugins on the web? Neat stuff!
This was the era in which these technologies were born.
Take a look at this list of vulnerabilities in Acrobat Reader and just shake your head. 434 and counting. Since PDF was invented in 1991 (and presumably Acrobat came shortly after), that's on average a new vulnerability discovered every 20 days over the past 24 years.
Flash is already well ahead at 568 and counting. That's a new vulnerability found every 12 days over the past 19 years. Go Flash!
You realize that the phrase pissing contest is gender-exclusive, right? You should use a term like one-upmanship ... oh man! Wait... noooooo!
DRM works reasonably well in closed ecosystems and on closed hardware. That includes consoles, handhelds, phones, and so on. It can be bypassed, but it's a pain, and most people don't do so. This is because the DRM is implemented in hardware, and in ways that are extremely difficult to unravel, and so aren't really worth attacking except for people who are mostly doing it for the technical challenge.
Where DRM typically fails is on open platforms like the PC. There are only two forms (that I can think of offhand) of DRM to really succeed on the PC. One is the "leave most of the code on the server" sort of DRM, essentially online-only games, and that's a pretty draconian solution for single-player games. The other is high-end software that uses a hardware encryption dongle to protect it. Other than that, the only way to make software-based DRM work on the PC is to make it a closed device like consoles, and although I'm sure some companies wouldn't mind seeing that happen, with declining PC sales as is, I just don't see it happening.
DRM in JPEG images is a pipe dream. Even if it were technically possible in the first place, do you really think anyone and everyone is going to bother implementing whatever extensions would make it possible? It's ridiculous. Note that the ONLY way I can think to implement this would be an image handling library with root-level privileges on every computer system on the planet. Did we fucking learn nothing from Stagefright?
Someone either has a black sense of humor or doesn't remember another channel crossing operation dubbed Sea Lion.
That's the whole point of the article - that getting a charger at work is anything but reliable once you have more EVs than chargers. Putting a few charging stations was fine when it was just a few early adopters buying them. Now that they're going mainstream, do you seriously expect a company to install chargers in a quarter of the stalls of the company garage? I seriously doubt it.
What's likely to happen is that people who need this service will be able to reserve a spot with a charger for fee. It has to be greater than the cost of the electricity, so it discourages people who don't really need it. That's the only way the chargers won't be constantly filled.
If someone can't drive to and from work with a single charge in their EV, then isn't an EV a rather terrible choice of vehicle for them? And of course, if that person can't get home without finding a charging station during the day, then things are naturally going to get ugly when they see someone park an EV in the only spot left at work, and you know that other person *could* get home without a recharge.
Whose fault is it really though, if someone made a bad purchasing decision? Are they then more "entitled" to that charging station?
This problem will work itself out as EV range is extended past the reasonable daily commute + after-work errands threshold. And I'm betting the vast majority of employers will probably not be installing a charger at every parking spot when the vast majority of them don't really need it, even if they are electric.
So, what would happen if a scientist tried to teleport a lawyer from one pod to another, and a shark managed to sneak in?
I'm thinking the lawyer would become slightly less vicious.
An app for this sort of thing is a cool idea, but of course, only if the app doesn't suck and the city actually makes an attempt to fix the issues it receives. Call me crazy, but I suspect the app's effectiveness will have a strong correlation with the local government's effectiveness in dealing with it's other day to day issues. Competent local governments will probably make good use of this technology. Incompetent local governments will continue to run things (including new programs like this) in a bumbling, half-assed fashion.
According to the article, in Detroit's system, the person who submitted the request can see the progress of the ticket item as it makes it's way through the system. That sort of feedback is important, as it lets people know they aren't being ignored. So, the city workers must have a way to update the status of individual requests as they process them. Seems like a reasonably good system.
I'm not sure how Boston's compared to that. It sounds like their system needs a way to allow users to give some feedback per ticket, so they can let the city know who's not actually doing their jobs.
It struck me that you seem to be making a distinction between "PC" and "laptop", whereas most discussions I've seen tend to lump them together. For instance, in the article listed, Microsoft is not building desktop machines. They're building laptops or hybrid laptop/tablets. The article is still calling those PCs.
So, even substituting "desktop PC" everywhere you said "PC"... I agree with everything except your conclusion. The PC (both desktop and laptop) isn't "dying". It's market is shrinking, but that's a far different thing, even if the curve looks the same. And add to this that hardware speeds have largely leveled off, no longer prompting sales to replace older "obsolete" computers.
The PC is now much more of a niche product, of course, in that it's mostly used by gamers, tech enthusiasts, content creators, businesses, and so on. There's a lot that PCs can do that no other form factor can do as well, and as long as that's the case, the PC will still have a home with those people.
When I want to see ads is when I'm shopping for something - specifically when I click on the "shopping" tab in Google search. Then and at no other time.
Even then, it can be annoying if it's done incorrectly. Amazon has been putting more and more ads inside their own web pages, and it's starting to irritate me. For heaven's sake, I'm already shopping with the intent to purchase something. Yet Amazon is still trying to monetize my eyeballs? Let's face it, they're simply cashing in on my bandwidth and wasted time that it takes me to skip over those "sponsored results". Why would I want to go to another website when I'm clearly intent on shopping at Amazon?
The problem is that it's clearly too tempting for the MBAs that make these decisions to turn down the extra cash this stuff generates for them. Unfortunately, they can't directly measure the ire it generates from their customers when they do this. It's that lack of consideration for the user experience (and safety) that's driving users to install ad-blockers.
Also, Mozilla, since when are advertisements called content? The content is what we're trying to get to. The ads are in the way of the content, sometimes literally.
For me, the issue is safety. The rest of the issues, while not unimportant, are secondary.
I won't allow some third-party advertisement company to run arbitrary scripting on my machine - or more accurately, allow them to run scripting that allows someone else who allows some criminal to run scripting on my machine. Until these ad-serving companies can make firm guarantees about the safety of the ads they serve, I'm not going to allow them. This point is simply non-negotiable to me.
How very Stalin-esque. You know he really wanted to send those people to the gulag, but for some bizarre reason, you can't do that to your peasants here in this country.
No games? Choplifter. Aztec. Wizardry. Karateka. Flight Simulator. There were *lots* of fantastic games for the Apple II.
I still learned AppleBASIC and made my own games though. Thirty years later, I'm still making games for a living. I have to admit, I'm sort of surprised it worked out as planned.
You're freakishly good at getting into their heads. Every time I try that, I get scared of losing my way in the eternal blackness and have to bring myself back.
Given the topic at hand, this post is surprisingly relevant.
Or maybe coding is something that when women try to get involved they discover they are unwelcome. There's the one guy who's just a dick to women. There's one who hasn't washed since 2004. There's one who has to one-up everything she says. There's several who have to hit on her because she's the only woman they get to talk to.
Let's put this another way... What makes the men who code so magical that women somehow just can't get past them in significant numbers, unlike nearly every other office-dwelling profession on earth? Do you really think that we're such troglodytes that these poor, fragile women are physically repelled from the building? I have to laugh if you really think we're all that special, or that they're so fragile.
And isn't it a bit demeaning to women to suggest that they can't make it in the world of programming if we men don't figure out a way to help them along, or become more welcoming, or whatever? Do you realize the incredible advantage a competent female programmer actually has right now, with all the recent focus on getting women into coding and other tech professions? Any company would absolutely *love* to hire good female programmers, and certainly don't want to lose the ones they have.
I'm actually fine with encouraging more women to get into coding and other tech professions. I get irritated with the constant accusation that it's somehow the fault of the people already in those professions. Personally speaking, the lack of female interest in programming has always been a significant negative for me. I'd love to see more women programming, and I've gotten along fine with the very rare female programmers I've worked with in the last several decades.
Art strives to express the truth? Sure, I suppose that's what an artist might say.
I wouldn't mind a high quality picture of Buzz decking that moon-landing hoax dude who was harassing him.
If it wasn't clear by reading between the lines, I consider a permissive license (like zlib, libPNG, BSD, etc) more suitable than GPLv3 for a reference library if your goal is to ensure broad, industry-wide adoption of a new file format. My assumption is that very few people or organizations will be interested in writing their own library from scratch simply to adopt someone's new file format. Your reasoning seems to be "if it's already difficult, why not make it more difficult still?" which seems a strange argument to make.
That the GPLv3 license hinders broad adoption should be self-evident, as the license specifically prohibits use of the code in non GPL projects. That hardly seems like a "vague claim". That's a simple fact. Perhaps you should read Richard Stallman's very pragmatic view on this matter, as I agree with his reasoning here.
As for the FOSS/GPLv3 thing... The GPLv3 is the most well-known copyleft FOSS license, which means that if you use that license, any FOSS software you release is guaranteed to remain as FOSS-only code. I admittedly could have worded that better.
The reference implementation is under GPLv3. Everyone is of course still free to create their own implementation and license it under whichever license they want.
Which, I'm betting, no one will care to do. Even when there is a permissive license, it's still incredibly difficult for a new file format to gain any traction. Think about how many years it took for PNG to take root with decent support in graphics tools and browsers.
If the ultimate goal is to promote this file format, this is not the best way of doing it. Apparently, keeping the software they wrote as FOSS/GPL is more important to the authors than broad adoption. That's fine, but just don't expect the rest of the world to come rushing to adopt this format. Sadly, it's probably going to be ignored, even if it's technically superior to PNG as claimed.
Tie some of their funding to the completion of their legal mandates, and they will become fearsome regulation-writing warriors. You just have to understand Bureaushido - the Way of the Bureaucrat.
I'd guess what you're trying to get at is that drivers are always obligated to yield to pedestrians, even if they cross the street illegally. That's a little different than claiming pedestrians have "right of way once they are on the road," which is technically incorrect.
Here's a discussion about this topic which answers the question about pedestrians vs vehicles, at least in Seattle.
Thank you, that's interesting to know. I guess it's perhaps not such an outlandish idea after all. Probably the biggest hurdle in getting a system like this would be inertia, and for the US government (well, probably any government), that can be pretty substantial. Well, probably once the rest of the world does something like that, we'll probably implement something similar after a decade or two. That's just how we seem to roll here in the US of A, I guess - incredibly high tech in some areas, but stupidly backwards in others.