Oh for heaven's sake. The driver depended on a poorly designed and oversold collision avoidance system that failed to notice a truck and trailer blocking the road. (The system apparently never did try to stop the vehicle even after the collision -- fortunately, some trees did that). Depending on Autopilot may have been unwise, but it's not cockpit error. And exactly what does having hands on the wheel have to do with it anyway? What was needed was for the driver to understand the substantial limitations of the system he was using and apply his foot to the brake.
I'll give Tesla full credit for voluntarily redesigning their system after this incident. Good for them. Really.
But if this is the level of analysis we're going to get for autonomous and quasi-autonomous car accidents, the road to safe autonomous vehicles is going to be long and bloody.
Sounds like kids could still use dumb phones (including most burner phones) to make calls and send/receive texts? The issue seems to be access to the Internet? I can see benefits to little Bobbie being able to tell mom where he/she ended up after the school bus broke down. Not owning a smartphone myself, I have no idea what evil influences smartphones expose pre-teens to.
I tend to think that agile methods would produce less secure software...
Couldn't agree more. The notion that the road to computing security runs through agile and Devops seems to me to be as unlikely as the notion that the way to get you and your bicycle from New York to Bermuda is to head off on said bike for the Bering Strait (in Winter) so you can get to Singapore then think out your next step.
FWIW, I think the road to computing security probably is ill paved, difficult, unpleasant and involves shrinking attack surfaces by eliminating unneeded capabilities (e.g. #@$%^ Javascript) . It probably also requires shrinking the toolset to a bare minimum of proven libraries and protocols. That's not much fun, so it probably won't happen until we've exhausted the long list of entertaining but ineffective alternatives.
"It also means the NSA can add hardware at the factory and nobody will ever know."
The factory is probably in East Asia so it's likely not the NSA adding stuff there. That said, the NSA is probably one of the few entities with the resources to prize this monstrosity apart, change something, put it back together, and have it work.
There were mobile radio services as early as the 1950s. Mostly used in cars/boats because of the weight of batteries required to power vacuum tube technology. Technically not cellular and therefore needing higher transmitter power to cover the greater distances from the user to the phone company. And they were expensive.
The limiting factor for mobile phones wasn't spectrum, it was the mass of the mobile transceiver one had to lug around. Once practical handheld transcievers shrank to something that could fit into a (large) pocket around 1970 cell service came into being in about a decade.
Yep. I've been spraying vinegar on weeds in sidewalk cracks and similar places for a couple of years. Cheap, biodegradeable, easy to apply, doesn't usually kill in one application, so accidental overspray isn't a disaster.
Would it work on weeds in a lawn without excessive collateral damage? I don't know, but it's probably worth trying.
Or one can just adopt the anything_that_can_survive_occasionally_being_mowed_is_welcome_to_grow_here approach. It's not like lawns are useful for much of anything.
"While you're wishing, ask for an FTL drive. Batteries will never come close to a tank full of gasoline when it comes to energy storage"
You're correct. BUT batteries don't have to have higher energy density than hydrocarbons for most applications. They just have to be a lot better than they are now -- which will probably happen... over the course of maybe 30 years.
"Full time, autonomous, no 'driver' controls, computer driving is a pipe dream."
Probably not a pipe dream. But it's a whole lot harder than most people -- including a lot of highly paid analysts managers and experts -- seem to think. The number of things that can potentially go wrong on even a short trip -- say from my driveway to the nearest market -- is enormous. And one itsy mistake and you've got a dead car. Or two dead cars or a dead bicyclist or...
And probably the computer is ALWAYS going to get the blame no matter what.
OTOH, expressway driving looks pretty straighforward except for construction,accidents, and weather and a few hundred other exceptions. So likely it'll get fully automated well before anything else.
“If a capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk back in the early 1900s he should’ve shot Orville Wright; he would have saved his progeny money.” Warren Buffett.
That said, Buffett has recently pumped $10B or so into airline stocks.
"Having said that I wonder if self-driving tech will really be profitable either. Most major manufacturers seem to be working on it and it will likely become fairly standard, a more or less commodity item within a couple of decades."
I think you're mostly correct. But I also think holders of a couple of dozen key technology patents that can't be worked around will probably profit hugely from a very modest up front investment -- at least for a decade or so before the patents expire. And of course the folks who manage to build the industry standard software will make a mint if they aren't sued out of existence by the victims of the inevitable accidents.
I have no idea what the risk/reward rations look like. I assume that Apple, Google, Ford, etc do. Or at least they think they do.
"Hardly anyone is doing research on breakthrough battery technology."
You're kidding, right? DARPA alone is funding nearly 50 projects. The reason that we don't have dirt cheap batteries the size of a pencil eraser that last forever, charge quickly, don't use exotic materials, don't explode, don't leak charge, don't lose capacity over time, operate over a wide temperature range, etc,etc,etc. isn't that no one is trying. It's that batteries are hard and -- as with many things technical -- progress comes in small increments.
"You would need to have the air really friggin cold for that."
Which introduces other problems, It's possible to design electronics that runs fine at subreezing temperatures. If it weren't, modern cars would be useless in cold weather. But having occasionally had occasion to try to boot up PCs in unheated spaces in Vermont in Winter, I can testify that getting the boxes and peripheral you buy at Best Buy or Walmart to start at temps below a couple of degrees C is problemetic.
A couple of decades ago when removing CPU heat in PCs first became an issue, a number of people built mineral oil cooled computers. They worked fine. At least some of them did. But they were messy. For example oil was said to work it's way out wires, traveling between the wires and their insulation to power switches and other externally devices. Probably could be overcome with proper design hardware selection. But overall not much fun to work on I expect.
"I'm not sure how much Gene Farrell is worth, but as long as it's in the multi-million dollar level then I believe the courts are an appropriate way to settle this matter fairly."
Thermonuclear warheads at 20 paces might be more entertaining and result in more social benefit, but yeah courts might work also.
Seriously, I don't really have any problem with **SHORT** shell scripts. I actually use them fairly often. But if there is anything other than trivial logic involved, shell scripting is the road to eternal damnation. At least it seems so to me.
Yes, Tcl/Tk is built in and there are modules for other graphical libraries. GUI code is still tedious, annoying, buggy and a general PITA, but I think no more so than in other languages.
Being as the world seems to be heading toward "thousands of languages but when people need to communicate, they'll use English and/or Spanish and/or Mandarin" I'm not sure defaulting to ASCII is that big a deal. Of course, you can't really write East Asian languages very well in ASCII. But are there Kanji (to use the Japanese term) based programming languages?
(BTW, A few years ago, I was treated to the spectacle of two Chinese in a Chinese take out place in Vermont struggling to communicate in different Chinese dialects then finally giving up and switching to English -- which neither spoke all that well.)
Guido von Rossum has said that Perl and Python are pretty much the same language. And that seems correct. I don't see a lot of difference in coding in either language. But I personally prefer Python because when I can't remember syntax, I'm more likely to get Python right on my first guess. And I find Python to be a bit more readable six weeks or six months later. I think I have a lot of company on that.
"(and bash to some intent)."
Why would anyone want to reinvent the unix shell or any of its deformed children? About the best you can say for the shell is that it isn't as awful as IBM's OS/360 JCL. But few things other than the US Internal Revenue code, are.
But yes, Python scripts can (mostly) replace shell scripts
So, unfortunately, are zillions of easily mismatched, hard to read, bracket pairs. Whitespace is widely (nearly universally one hopes) used to make code readable because bracketing is only readable by machines and perhaps a very few, very odd, people. Python simply makes readable use of whitespace mandatory and throws out a lot of the bracket pairing.
It's a tradeoff
That said, Python has some other problems -- speed, threading, and a number of niche issues that occasionally rise up to bite one. But as a first computer language or an only language for folks who make their living doing something other than programming, there's a lot to bet said for Python.
And it's not like everyone else's favorite languages don't suck in a few (often more than a few) ways.
I think you've confused panel power output with power per square meter. The former is a measure of capacity, the latter is a measure of efficiency. Solandri's computation needs w/m^2 and 160 w/m^2 appears to be reasonable for typical current panels. see http://news.energysage.com/wha... (BTW -- Solar World Panels don't appear to be especially efficient -- at least not if you believe energysage.com)
Probably. There might be some problems. For example, GPS likely wouldn't work all that well under a solar panel roof. Likewise satellite radio. But it sounds like a lot better idea than say "solar roads"
Slashdot Mirror
Oh for heaven's sake. The driver depended on a poorly designed and oversold collision avoidance system that failed to notice a truck and trailer blocking the road. (The system apparently never did try to stop the vehicle even after the collision -- fortunately, some trees did that). Depending on Autopilot may have been unwise, but it's not cockpit error. And exactly what does having hands on the wheel have to do with it anyway? What was needed was for the driver to understand the substantial limitations of the system he was using and apply his foot to the brake.
I'll give Tesla full credit for voluntarily redesigning their system after this incident. Good for them. Really.
But if this is the level of analysis we're going to get for autonomous and quasi-autonomous car accidents, the road to safe autonomous vehicles is going to be long and bloody.
Sounds like kids could still use dumb phones (including most burner phones) to make calls and send/receive texts? The issue seems to be access to the Internet? I can see benefits to little Bobbie being able to tell mom where he/she ended up after the school bus broke down. Not owning a smartphone myself, I have no idea what evil influences smartphones expose pre-teens to.
And don't forget that two of the big three US car companies have been through bankruptcy in the past decade.
Couldn't agree more. The notion that the road to computing security runs through agile and Devops seems to me to be as unlikely as the notion that the way to get you and your bicycle from New York to Bermuda is to head off on said bike for the Bering Strait (in Winter) so you can get to Singapore then think out your next step.
FWIW, I think the road to computing security probably is ill paved, difficult, unpleasant and involves shrinking attack surfaces by eliminating unneeded capabilities (e.g. #@$%^ Javascript) . It probably also requires shrinking the toolset to a bare minimum of proven libraries and protocols. That's not much fun, so it probably won't happen until we've exhausted the long list of entertaining but ineffective alternatives.
"It also means the NSA can add hardware at the factory and nobody will ever know."
The factory is probably in East Asia so it's likely not the NSA adding stuff there. That said, the NSA is probably one of the few entities with the resources to prize this monstrosity apart, change something, put it back together, and have it work.
"By 1948, AT&T's network coverage extended to around 30 cities and busy sections of the major interstates on the East and West coast"
Ahem. No interstates in 1948. There were a few miles of freeway in California and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That looks to be about it.
There were mobile radio services as early as the 1950s. Mostly used in cars/boats because of the weight of batteries required to power vacuum tube technology. Technically not cellular and therefore needing higher transmitter power to cover the greater distances from the user to the phone company. And they were expensive.
The limiting factor for mobile phones wasn't spectrum, it was the mass of the mobile transceiver one had to lug around. Once practical handheld transcievers shrank to something that could fit into a (large) pocket around 1970 cell service came into being in about a decade.
"For a robot, high test vinegar would work well,"
Yep. I've been spraying vinegar on weeds in sidewalk cracks and similar places for a couple of years. Cheap, biodegradeable, easy to apply, doesn't usually kill in one application, so accidental overspray isn't a disaster.
Would it work on weeds in a lawn without excessive collateral damage? I don't know, but it's probably worth trying.
Or one can just adopt the anything_that_can_survive_occasionally_being_mowed_is_welcome_to_grow_here approach. It's not like lawns are useful for much of anything.
It does appear at times that Slashdot is a working example of Artificial Stupidity in action.
"While you're wishing, ask for an FTL drive. Batteries will never come close to a tank full of gasoline when it comes to energy storage"
You're correct. BUT batteries don't have to have higher energy density than hydrocarbons for most applications. They just have to be a lot better than they are now -- which will probably happen ... over the course of maybe 30 years.
"Full time, autonomous, no 'driver' controls, computer driving is a pipe dream."
Probably not a pipe dream. But it's a whole lot harder than most people -- including a lot of highly paid analysts managers and experts -- seem to think. The number of things that can potentially go wrong on even a short trip -- say from my driveway to the nearest market -- is enormous. And one itsy mistake and you've got a dead car. Or two dead cars or a dead bicyclist or ...
And probably the computer is ALWAYS going to get the blame no matter what.
OTOH, expressway driving looks pretty straighforward except for construction,accidents, and weather and a few hundred other exceptions. So likely it'll get fully automated well before anything else.
“If a capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk back in the early 1900s he should’ve shot Orville Wright; he would have saved his progeny money.” Warren Buffett.
That said, Buffett has recently pumped $10B or so into airline stocks.
"Having said that I wonder if self-driving tech will really be profitable either. Most major manufacturers seem to be working on it and it will likely become fairly standard, a more or less commodity item within a couple of decades."
I think you're mostly correct. But I also think holders of a couple of dozen key technology patents that can't be worked around will probably profit hugely from a very modest up front investment -- at least for a decade or so before the patents expire. And of course the folks who manage to build the industry standard software will make a mint if they aren't sued out of existence by the victims of the inevitable accidents.
I have no idea what the risk/reward rations look like. I assume that Apple, Google, Ford, etc do. Or at least they think they do.
"Hardly anyone is doing research on breakthrough battery technology."
You're kidding, right? DARPA alone is funding nearly 50 projects. The reason that we don't have dirt cheap batteries the size of a pencil eraser that last forever, charge quickly, don't use exotic materials, don't explode, don't leak charge, don't lose capacity over time, operate over a wide temperature range, etc,etc,etc. isn't that no one is trying. It's that batteries are hard and -- as with many things technical -- progress comes in small increments.
"You would need to have the air really friggin cold for that."
Which introduces other problems, It's possible to design electronics that runs fine at subreezing temperatures. If it weren't, modern cars would be useless in cold weather. But having occasionally had occasion to try to boot up PCs in unheated spaces in Vermont in Winter, I can testify that getting the boxes and peripheral you buy at Best Buy or Walmart to start at temps below a couple of degrees C is problemetic.
A couple of decades ago when removing CPU heat in PCs first became an issue, a number of people built mineral oil cooled computers. They worked fine. At least some of them did. But they were messy. For example oil was said to work it's way out wires, traveling between the wires and their insulation to power switches and other externally devices. Probably could be overcome with proper design hardware selection. But overall not much fun to work on I expect.
"I'm not sure how much Gene Farrell is worth, but as long as it's in the multi-million dollar level then I believe the courts are an appropriate way to settle this matter fairly."
Thermonuclear warheads at 20 paces might be more entertaining and result in more social benefit, but yeah courts might work also.
Seriously, I don't really have any problem with **SHORT** shell scripts. I actually use them fairly often. But if there is anything other than trivial logic involved, shell scripting is the road to eternal damnation. At least it seems so to me.
Yes, Tcl/Tk is built in and there are modules for other graphical libraries. GUI code is still tedious, annoying, buggy and a general PITA, but I think no more so than in other languages.
You go around beating people/things with snakes, and you'll have PETA to answer to.
Being as the world seems to be heading toward "thousands of languages but when people need to communicate, they'll use English and/or Spanish and/or Mandarin" I'm not sure defaulting to ASCII is that big a deal. Of course, you can't really write East Asian languages very well in ASCII. But are there Kanji (to use the Japanese term) based programming languages?
(BTW, A few years ago, I was treated to the spectacle of two Chinese in a Chinese take out place in Vermont struggling to communicate in different Chinese dialects then finally giving up and switching to English -- which neither spoke all that well.)
"Congratulations, you've successfully re-invented Perl"
Guido von Rossum has said that Perl and Python are pretty much the same language. And that seems correct. I don't see a lot of difference in coding in either language. But I personally prefer Python because when I can't remember syntax, I'm more likely to get Python right on my first guess. And I find Python to be a bit more readable six weeks or six months later. I think I have a lot of company on that.
"(and bash to some intent)."
Why would anyone want to reinvent the unix shell or any of its deformed children? About the best you can say for the shell is that it isn't as awful as IBM's OS/360 JCL. But few things other than the US Internal Revenue code, are.
But yes, Python scripts can (mostly) replace shell scripts
"Whitespace which has meaning is just nasty"
So, unfortunately, are zillions of easily mismatched, hard to read, bracket pairs. Whitespace is widely (nearly universally one hopes) used to make code readable because bracketing is only readable by machines and perhaps a very few, very odd, people. Python simply makes readable use of whitespace mandatory and throws out a lot of the bracket pairing.
It's a tradeoff
That said, Python has some other problems -- speed, threading, and a number of niche issues that occasionally rise up to bite one. But as a first computer language or an only language for folks who make their living doing something other than programming, there's a lot to bet said for Python.
And it's not like everyone else's favorite languages don't suck in a few (often more than a few) ways.
"Check your idiot assumptions 1st"
I think you've confused panel power output with power per square meter. The former is a measure of capacity, the latter is a measure of efficiency. Solandri's computation needs w/m^2 and 160 w/m^2 appears to be reasonable for typical current panels. see http://news.energysage.com/wha... (BTW -- Solar World Panels don't appear to be especially efficient -- at least not if you believe energysage.com)
"it could be a 'roof' over the road on highways."
Probably. There might be some problems. For example, GPS likely wouldn't work all that well under a solar panel roof. Likewise satellite radio. But it sounds like a lot better idea than say "solar roads"