550K miles doesn't even begin to cover the fender-bender rate. You're quoting a number similar to *police-reported* accidents. According to the DOT "In 2016, there were an estimated 7,277,000 police-reported motor vehicle crashes in the United States, resulting in 37,461 fatalities and 3,144,000 people injured." That's roughly 440K miles per _police-reported_ crash, not 550K.
Think about this: 550K miles is roughly a lifetime of driving for most people, yet I don't know anyone who's never had an accident of any sort. With an average accident rate of 550K miles as you state, accident-free driving would be routine. Yet, commercial drivers get safety awards and bonuses for 500K accident-free miles. Let's just say that many pro drivers never see that bonus money.
How many times have you gotten burned by a defective piece of debug code or hardware setup? Because it's a one-shot thing, you just hack it together. No serious design. Then you end up wasting days because that throwaway is buggy and giving you bad info. Or blowing out the piece of hardware you're debugging.
Here you're saying is that the developers are just dropping in bodies as safety drivers without engineering that temporary job. The difference being that cars driving in public are a loaded gun. It's not a controlled lab at all.
Training? Judging by the driver's panicked inaction in the video, they don't even train them in simulators for surprises.
Inattention is indeed well-studied. Has been for over 50 years. There are experts--often industrial psychologists--you can hire to design tasks like this. Same goes for training people to not freeze when they're in a pinch.
Safety drivers smack of "I know my system won't fail, but I'll quickly throw in something for show just to shut up the critics."
The video of the driver is IR. The "light" you're seeing is heat.
HOWEVER, she's clearly looking down at a screen which *is* emitting visible light. This causes night blindness, in which case it's true that there's no way she could have seen the rider in the shadows. Otherwise... let's just say that RIGHT NOW there's surely a driver somewhere on the planet successfully dealing with something similar.
Seems to me that--even if you call her just window dressing--the driver remains the driver of record. If any driver is texting & driving, just that fact alone puts them on a weak legal footing because it apparently constitutes negligence on its face.
Extremely valid point since e.g. mass shootings are done by 0.000001% of the population, yet the study was explicitly designed to NOT include people who would likely be part of that:
were screened for pre-existing psychological problems before the tests
The study's saying that healthy people were studied and found to be basically healthy. Wow! I'd have never guessed.
Imagine a "study" declaring that peanut allergies don't exist because 99 out of 100 people were fine after eating peanuts, and that rose to 99.9% when you screened out people with any other ("co-morbid") allergy. There are a lot of vital truths buried in "non-significant" minorities and co-morbidity.
This study (and many others) simply have the wrong design and tooling to inform the debate about mass shootings since those are already extremely rare events.
Since it only takes ONE statistically insignificant whacko to kill me, I'm not interested that 99.9999% of people are healthy. Not while I'm looking down the wrong end of a gun.
Hubris? Nah... Reusable rocket boosters landing on retractable stilts -- on a pitching & rolling barge -- now, THAT'S tech hubris. Silly, unrealistic 1940's pulp science fiction. It'll never, ever happen.
Seriously, several real manufacturers have announced (and Tesla claims to be actually selling) convoying 18-wheelers. They will make it work 'coz the payoff is too huge to ignore.
Hubris? I'll thank you to skip the personal stuff, though I'll admit I thought the same thing about the idea of soft-landing rocket boosters with folding legs. On a rolling and pitching barge.
However, I'll point out that several companies are demonstrating (Tesla claims to be actually selling) exactly this for interstate 18-wheelers. They will make this work; the payoff is just too huge.
Note that there's a whole continuum between "shorter" and "longer" trips. Flying LA to NYC is a clear-cut win, but with any scheduled mass transit there's a whole set of tradeoffs due to the fixed overheads and allowances for delays between legs involved in actually going door to door. Even flying commercial jets where the actual flight takes only 1 hour, I have to leave my house in LA well before 6 to reliably make a 10 AM meeting in San Jose. Yet, it's not quite a 5 hour drive. And those 4+ hours are shot into little pieces. That might be different if I could afford to fly private, but an autonomous car will certainly be within my budget before too long.
Security checks: sooner or later trains'll have their own 9/11 on US soil. Stuff happening in far-off lands is one thing, but a single major US incident is all it'll take. Security checks will then become imperative just to get people back to riding the trains.
In California, the majority of people have cars. I'd guess the rate of car ownership is over 90% for the top 90% of San Francisco - LA travellers. Those nasty cars & batteries are going to be produced whether people take their cars or the train to travel North-South.
Rails are far from foolproof. Trains are currently only 10x safer per mile than human-guided cars. This will improve very significantly with automation, But forget all that: people have long ago made up their minds that auto safety is acceptable.
Note that the quality of train maintenance has its ups & downs, depending on availability of money due to sporadic budget cuts, ridership, recency of accidents, subsidies, government policy, etc.
At 100+ mph, rolling resistance of rubber vs. steel is the least of your efficiency concerns. Air resistance is well over an order of magnitude more important. The big efficiency for rail in CA is ridership, and a 75% empty train cannot be efficient. The "build it and they will come" gamble sure hasn't panned out for the LA subway!
It's a safe assumption that autonomous cars will be networked very soon. I fully expect that network to allow exchanging some kind of maintenance info or other proxy for reliability. I don't know about you, but I'd instruct my car to never join any convoys with substandard vehicles in it. Likewise, I'd expect a pack would get to decide on which other cars will be allowed to join it.
Large-scale pileups? Like train derailments? Doubtful. (a) You only need 10 - 15 cars in a pack to get almost all your efficiency. Obviously you limit pack size to make them generally more manageable & also limit pileups, especially when the tech is young. Packs are intentionally separated by some distance for the same reasons. (b) Our current understanding of freeway pileups is not useful in this context. Convoying functions of the cars will act to greatly limit the extent of any pileup. Don't forget, we're discussing cars with very fast "reflexes." And they're all networked -- not watching the tail lights of the car in front of them. Let's say a car in the middle of the pack misbehaves. Or danger increases for any reason. Every car in the network knows instantly. This allows cars at the rear to very quickly brake in a coordinated manner, and the pack spreads apart almost instantly.
Trains are obsolete for the US. The future is automated, convoyed electric automobiles driving at 120+ mph. And that future will be here before the CA bullet train. The technology's inevitable, just a matter of time.
Going, say, from LAX to SFO is 380 miles, so call it 3.25 hrs @ 120 mph, realistically 3.5 - 4.0 to allow for slower urban traffic at each end. Faster in the future as the tech improves. Hell, we already drive 80 - 85 on that stretch of road most of the time.
Cars convoying almost bumper-to-bumper can be impressively energy efficient, especially electric ones, and they don't travel when they're empty. Vehicle efficiency just keeps going up and up. Speaking of schedules, individual cars don't have 'em. They leave when it's convenient for you and run door to door. Don't have a car? Take a 120 mph convoying bus, Uber, or Uber Pool.
Look at the numbers: trains aren't that energy-efficient per passenger mile IRL since they don't usually run full. They're also a very inefficient way to use land if you don't happen to already own the rights of way. Trains have high recurring costs: they require crew, people at the stations, management, sales & marketing, parking, their own dedicated maintenance operation, etc, etc. Maintaining RRs is very expensive, especially to bullet-train standards.
We already have the real estate to do convoying. A reserved lane on the I-5 would do the trick. We already pay to maintain that road quite nicely, so no extra recurring cost there. If you want to get fancy, widen the I-5 to add a special lane for convoyed vehicles for pennies on the dollar we're spending for the bullet train.
Which would you prefer? i) Sit down in your autonomous car, work or sleep *uninterrupted* for 3 - 4 hours and you're there, or ii) Shop for dececently-priced tickets, drive to station stressed because you're late as usual, go thru security, hang around waiting room, board the train and find a place, work or sleep for a while, find transportation to your final destination. Don't forget, you're messing with your luggage the whole while.
We're going to end up implementing this, train or no train, if only to relieve commuter-traffic congestion. It's just a matter of time. Seeing as bullet-trains are 50-year investments, does this train make any sense at this stage of technology?
The better question is whether we want to teach our kids that early in life to prize the superficial, no-strings, unfulfilling "connections" that Facebook, etc. enable.
If you're fed nothing but processed white bread when you're a kid, chances are you'll carry that into adulthood.
The union knows all too well that automation is inevitable. UPS' R&D of automated delivery shows that they realize they'll be roadkill if they don't get out in front ot the automation juggernaut, and the union sees that too.
What they really want is a guarantee that no jobs will be lost and no pay cuts, e.g. drivers will be retrained as drone wranglers.
The problem is that, say, an experienced driver makes $30-40/hour. As a driver, he's worth it because of high productivity and safety. However, as a drone wrangler he's starting from scratch and no more valuable than a newbie making $14/hour. Structurally high labor costs could put UPS at a huge disadvantage in the upcoming drone delivery price wars.
Mapping kernel memory into userland is just an insecure software performance hack that was waiting to bite. It just did. Again! I'm referring to Meltdown--not Spectre--but that's a big reason for the immediacy of this problem.
PTKI, the "workaround" to Meltdown, is actually a commonsense security hardening measure that OS makers should have aggressively rolled out long ago. That goes double for processes hosting dangerous processes like web browsers. And, PTKI heads off many threats we don't even know about yet.
Instead,we've been wishfully tiptoeing around PTKI (e.g. kernel ASLR, etc.) hoping to avoid it. Yes, there's a performance hit but it's greatly mitigated by PCID (i.e. ~29% greater syscall overhead on Intel) which has been available since 2013. But, we've just been putting it off for another day.
Now, at least on Windows and MacOS we're going to get stuck with a rush job implementation that will kill performance in many cases. Hopefully this will work out in time as future versions of OSs get optimized, e.g. bypass PTKI for certain low-risk, high syscall frequency processes like the cores of DB managers.
I guess you forgot to read the source article. It says the researcher has started looking into ways to build a pacemaker-like device to resynchronize the brain waves.
OP also fails to mention that to save some part of those 20 minutes s/he is likely driving while eating & drinking. Great move!...or bringing brekkie to work and stealing their employer's time to eat it. Yeah, f@#k da man!
Really, is this a way to live? If that short on sleep, turning off whatever device & going to bed earlier might be the saner strategy.
In addition to being very invasive (phone number's often as good as a street address), this is a scheme to easily find all non-hermits at fault after they inevitably fail to list a phone number or email.
Could you conceivably remember every time you've ever picked up a phone, including i) *all* your old phone numbers, ii) the phone numbers of every hotel,hospital or home where you've been a guest, iii) anywhere else you've been reached or used the phone, iv) all remote work-related locations' or customer sites' numbers, v) any mobile phone you've momentarily used or borrowed, vi) any public phone, vii) technically, the actual outbound trunks used in multi-line commercial locations? For many people, analogous comments apply for email.
This is a remake of a 1999 movie. Plot summary: AMD had a chronically weak offering, Intel was in the habit of dribbling out the performance gains. AMD suddenly came on very strong with Athlon, a completely new chip which was arguably faster than Intel and definitely cheaper. Almost overnight, Intel suddenly figured out how to make much faster chips, and so did AMD. Performance doubled, tripled, with AMD being the first to crack the 1GHz barrier the next year. That spiral continued for a few years and the users were happy, but AMD ultimately fell behind and Intel went back to their old tick-tock.
The remake is guaranteed to make money. Knowing that the remake is going to make money, it can budget for big stars, etc. to further increase the boxoffice. All-new movies are a crapshoot at best, where breaking even or making very modest money is a "very good" outcome. Sure, a few movies make great money, but they're outliers. Why take an unnecessary gamble, seeing that studios are businesses organized to make $ -- not great movies.
A parliamentary system is...similar to the Electoral College, except the MPs do the voting.
Huge difference is that each riding (think electoral district) independently elects its own Member of Parliament. It's not winner-take-all for the entire state/province/whatever, but rather more like how the US chooses Congress(wo)men.
The industry is secretly hoping for a must-use technology that will break in 5 years. Does this accomplish that business goal?
That's an ancient dream. According to an old-time engineer who was an early transistor user in the early 60s, that was the industry's goal back then: purposefully only slightly longer life than vacuum tubes.
He told me a story of meeting strong criticism from the semiconductor vendor when they found out his company was dipping transistors in paint to color-code parts that they (the customer) tested as better or worse. Device quality/performance was very uneven back then. The vendor's opposition to dipping didn't quite hold water. Turned out that the hollow metal packages weren't airtight as to allow in oxygen that would eventually degrade them. Dipping in paint sealed them. Foiled again!!
"the countdown timer will disappear several seconds before the red light changes to green" Better make that interval random, folks. Otherwise people will just learn to complete the countdown in their heads, then step on the gas without quite yet looking up.
Slashdot Mirror
550K miles doesn't even begin to cover the fender-bender rate. You're quoting a number similar to *police-reported* accidents. According to the DOT "In 2016, there were an estimated 7,277,000 police-reported motor vehicle crashes in the United States, resulting in 37,461 fatalities and 3,144,000 people injured." That's roughly 440K miles per _police-reported_ crash, not 550K.
Problem is most accidents aren't police reported, and certainly not fender benders. Apparently, the average driver has an accident every 18 years. 18 x 12K miles is 200K miles.
Think about this: 550K miles is roughly a lifetime of driving for most people, yet I don't know anyone who's never had an accident of any sort. With an average accident rate of 550K miles as you state, accident-free driving would be routine. Yet, commercial drivers get safety awards and bonuses for 500K accident-free miles. Let's just say that many pro drivers never see that bonus money.
How many times have you gotten burned by a defective piece of debug code or hardware setup? Because it's a one-shot thing, you just hack it together. No serious design. Then you end up wasting days because that throwaway is buggy and giving you bad info. Or blowing out the piece of hardware you're debugging.
Here you're saying is that the developers are just dropping in bodies as safety drivers without engineering that temporary job. The difference being that cars driving in public are a loaded gun. It's not a controlled lab at all.
Training? Judging by the driver's panicked inaction in the video, they don't even train them in simulators for surprises.
Inattention is indeed well-studied. Has been for over 50 years. There are experts--often industrial psychologists--you can hire to design tasks like this. Same goes for training people to not freeze when they're in a pinch.
Safety drivers smack of "I know my system won't fail, but I'll quickly throw in something for show just to shut up the critics."
The video of the driver is IR. The "light" you're seeing is heat.
HOWEVER, she's clearly looking down at a screen which *is* emitting visible light. This causes night blindness, in which case it's true that there's no way she could have seen the rider in the shadows. Otherwise... let's just say that RIGHT NOW there's surely a driver somewhere on the planet successfully dealing with something similar.
Seems to me that--even if you call her just window dressing--the driver remains the driver of record. If any driver is texting & driving, just that fact alone puts them on a weak legal footing because it apparently constitutes negligence on its face.
any non-stupid criminal.
Probably a _lot_ more stupid petty criminals than smart, educated ones.
Extremely valid point since e.g. mass shootings are done by 0.000001% of the population, yet the study was explicitly designed to NOT include people who would likely be part of that:
were screened for pre-existing psychological problems before the tests
The study's saying that healthy people were studied and found to be basically healthy. Wow! I'd have never guessed.
Imagine a "study" declaring that peanut allergies don't exist because 99 out of 100 people were fine after eating peanuts, and that rose to 99.9% when you screened out people with any other ("co-morbid") allergy. There are a lot of vital truths buried in "non-significant" minorities and co-morbidity.
This study (and many others) simply have the wrong design and tooling to inform the debate about mass shootings since those are already extremely rare events.
Since it only takes ONE statistically insignificant whacko to kill me, I'm not interested that 99.9999% of people are healthy. Not while I'm looking down the wrong end of a gun.
Hubris? Nah... Reusable rocket boosters landing on retractable stilts -- on a pitching & rolling barge -- now, THAT'S tech hubris. Silly, unrealistic 1940's pulp science fiction. It'll never, ever happen.
Seriously, several real manufacturers have announced (and Tesla claims to be actually selling) convoying 18-wheelers. They will make it work 'coz the payoff is too huge to ignore.
Hubris? I'll thank you to skip the personal stuff, though I'll admit I thought the same thing about the idea of soft-landing rocket boosters with folding legs. On a rolling and pitching barge.
However, I'll point out that several companies are demonstrating (Tesla claims to be actually selling) exactly this for interstate 18-wheelers. They will make this work; the payoff is just too huge.
Note that there's a whole continuum between "shorter" and "longer" trips. Flying LA to NYC is a clear-cut win, but with any scheduled mass transit there's a whole set of tradeoffs due to the fixed overheads and allowances for delays between legs involved in actually going door to door. Even flying commercial jets where the actual flight takes only 1 hour, I have to leave my house in LA well before 6 to reliably make a 10 AM meeting in San Jose. Yet, it's not quite a 5 hour drive. And those 4+ hours are shot into little pieces. That might be different if I could afford to fly private, but an autonomous car will certainly be within my budget before too long.
Security checks: sooner or later trains'll have their own 9/11 on US soil. Stuff happening in far-off lands is one thing, but a single major US incident is all it'll take. Security checks will then become imperative just to get people back to riding the trains.
In California, the majority of people have cars. I'd guess the rate of car ownership is over 90% for the top 90% of San Francisco - LA travellers. Those nasty cars & batteries are going to be produced whether people take their cars or the train to travel North-South.
Rails are far from foolproof. Trains are currently only 10x safer per mile than human-guided cars. This will improve very significantly with automation, But forget all that: people have long ago made up their minds that auto safety is acceptable.
Note that the quality of train maintenance has its ups & downs, depending on availability of money due to sporadic budget cuts, ridership, recency of accidents, subsidies, government policy, etc.
At 100+ mph, rolling resistance of rubber vs. steel is the least of your efficiency concerns. Air resistance is well over an order of magnitude more important. The big efficiency for rail in CA is ridership, and a 75% empty train cannot be efficient. The "build it and they will come" gamble sure hasn't panned out for the LA subway!
It's a safe assumption that autonomous cars will be networked very soon. I fully expect that network to allow exchanging some kind of maintenance info or other proxy for reliability. I don't know about you, but I'd instruct my car to never join any convoys with substandard vehicles in it. Likewise, I'd expect a pack would get to decide on which other cars will be allowed to join it.
Large-scale pileups? Like train derailments? Doubtful. (a) You only need 10 - 15 cars in a pack to get almost all your efficiency. Obviously you limit pack size to make them generally more manageable & also limit pileups, especially when the tech is young. Packs are intentionally separated by some distance for the same reasons. (b) Our current understanding of freeway pileups is not useful in this context. Convoying functions of the cars will act to greatly limit the extent of any pileup. Don't forget, we're discussing cars with very fast "reflexes." And they're all networked -- not watching the tail lights of the car in front of them. Let's say a car in the middle of the pack misbehaves. Or danger increases for any reason. Every car in the network knows instantly. This allows cars at the rear to very quickly brake in a coordinated manner, and the pack spreads apart almost instantly.
Trains are obsolete for the US. The future is automated, convoyed electric automobiles driving at 120+ mph. And that future will be here before the CA bullet train. The technology's inevitable, just a matter of time.
Going, say, from LAX to SFO is 380 miles, so call it 3.25 hrs @ 120 mph, realistically 3.5 - 4.0 to allow for slower urban traffic at each end. Faster in the future as the tech improves. Hell, we already drive 80 - 85 on that stretch of road most of the time.
Cars convoying almost bumper-to-bumper can be impressively energy efficient, especially electric ones, and they don't travel when they're empty. Vehicle efficiency just keeps going up and up. Speaking of schedules, individual cars don't have 'em. They leave when it's convenient for you and run door to door. Don't have a car? Take a 120 mph convoying bus, Uber, or Uber Pool.
Look at the numbers: trains aren't that energy-efficient per passenger mile IRL since they don't usually run full. They're also a very inefficient way to use land if you don't happen to already own the rights of way. Trains have high recurring costs: they require crew, people at the stations, management, sales & marketing, parking, their own dedicated maintenance operation, etc, etc. Maintaining RRs is very expensive, especially to bullet-train standards.
We already have the real estate to do convoying. A reserved lane on the I-5 would do the trick. We already pay to maintain that road quite nicely, so no extra recurring cost there. If you want to get fancy, widen the I-5 to add a special lane for convoyed vehicles for pennies on the dollar we're spending for the bullet train.
Which would you prefer? i) Sit down in your autonomous car, work or sleep *uninterrupted* for 3 - 4 hours and you're there, or ii) Shop for dececently-priced tickets, drive to station stressed because you're late as usual, go thru security, hang around waiting room, board the train and find a place, work or sleep for a while, find transportation to your final destination. Don't forget, you're messing with your luggage the whole while.
We're going to end up implementing this, train or no train, if only to relieve commuter-traffic congestion. It's just a matter of time. Seeing as bullet-trains are 50-year investments, does this train make any sense at this stage of technology?
The better question is whether we want to teach our kids that early in life to prize the superficial, no-strings, unfulfilling "connections" that Facebook, etc. enable.
If you're fed nothing but processed white bread when you're a kid, chances are you'll carry that into adulthood.
The union knows all too well that automation is inevitable. UPS' R&D of automated delivery shows that they realize they'll be roadkill if they don't get out in front ot the automation juggernaut, and the union sees that too.
What they really want is a guarantee that no jobs will be lost and no pay cuts, e.g. drivers will be retrained as drone wranglers.
The problem is that, say, an experienced driver makes $30-40/hour. As a driver, he's worth it because of high productivity and safety. However, as a drone wrangler he's starting from scratch and no more valuable than a newbie making $14/hour. Structurally high labor costs could put UPS at a huge disadvantage in the upcoming drone delivery price wars.
The big diffrence is that MS isn't heavy into the media business.
Technology may generate pots of money, but influencing the minds behind the eyeballs gives you POWER.
Mapping kernel memory into userland is just an insecure software performance hack that was waiting to bite. It just did. Again! I'm referring to Meltdown--not Spectre--but that's a big reason for the immediacy of this problem.
PTKI, the "workaround" to Meltdown, is actually a commonsense security hardening measure that OS makers should have aggressively rolled out long ago. That goes double for processes hosting dangerous processes like web browsers. And, PTKI heads off many threats we don't even know about yet.
Instead,we've been wishfully tiptoeing around PTKI (e.g. kernel ASLR, etc.) hoping to avoid it. Yes, there's a performance hit but it's greatly mitigated by PCID (i.e. ~29% greater syscall overhead on Intel) which has been available since 2013. But, we've just been putting it off for another day.
Now, at least on Windows and MacOS we're going to get stuck with a rush job implementation that will kill performance in many cases. Hopefully this will work out in time as future versions of OSs get optimized, e.g. bypass PTKI for certain low-risk, high syscall frequency processes like the cores of DB managers.
The problem is that craft beers (for me) and wine (for her) taste too damn good.
Betcha they'd lose much of their appeal without the magic ingredient, even if they tasted 100% identical to the original.
I haven't not had a drink in a long time...
You think that fact might be a clue about something?
Wow! What city do you practice in? Do you take Blue Cross PPO? I've been looking for a doc like you!
I guess you forgot to read the source article. It says the researcher has started looking into ways to build a pacemaker-like device to resynchronize the brain waves.
OP also fails to mention that to save some part of those 20 minutes s/he is likely driving while eating & drinking. Great move! ...or bringing brekkie to work and stealing their employer's time to eat it. Yeah, f@#k da man!
Really, is this a way to live? If that short on sleep, turning off whatever device & going to bed earlier might be the saner strategy.
Looks like blockchain is this year's marketing "it" word, just in time to replace cloud. E.g. "our new word processor is powered by blockchains."
In addition to being very invasive (phone number's often as good as a street address), this is a scheme to easily find all non-hermits at fault after they inevitably fail to list a phone number or email.
Could you conceivably remember every time you've ever picked up a phone, including i) *all* your old phone numbers, ii) the phone numbers of every hotel,hospital or home where you've been a guest, iii) anywhere else you've been reached or used the phone, iv) all remote work-related locations' or customer sites' numbers, v) any mobile phone you've momentarily used or borrowed, vi) any public phone, vii) technically, the actual outbound trunks used in multi-line commercial locations? For many people, analogous comments apply for email.
This is a remake of a 1999 movie. Plot summary: AMD had a chronically weak offering, Intel was in the habit of dribbling out the performance gains. AMD suddenly came on very strong with Athlon, a completely new chip which was arguably faster than Intel and definitely cheaper. Almost overnight, Intel suddenly figured out how to make much faster chips, and so did AMD. Performance doubled, tripled, with AMD being the first to crack the 1GHz barrier the next year. That spiral continued for a few years and the users were happy, but AMD ultimately fell behind and Intel went back to their old tick-tock.
The remake is guaranteed to make money. Knowing that the remake is going to make money, it can budget for big stars, etc. to further increase the boxoffice.
All-new movies are a crapshoot at best, where breaking even or making very modest money is a "very good" outcome. Sure, a few movies make great money, but they're outliers.
Why take an unnecessary gamble, seeing that studios are businesses organized to make $ -- not great movies.
"Whatever most people will quietly settle for is exactly what they will get." -- Corporate America
A parliamentary system is ...similar to the Electoral College, except the MPs do the voting.
Huge difference is that each riding (think electoral district) independently elects its own Member of Parliament. It's not winner-take-all for the entire state/province/whatever, but rather more like how the US chooses Congress(wo)men.
The industry is secretly hoping for a must-use technology that will break in 5 years. Does this accomplish that business goal?
That's an ancient dream. According to an old-time engineer who was an early transistor user in the early 60s, that was the industry's goal back then: purposefully only slightly longer life than vacuum tubes.
He told me a story of meeting strong criticism from the semiconductor vendor when they found out his company was dipping transistors in paint to color-code parts that they (the customer) tested as better or worse. Device quality/performance was very uneven back then. The vendor's opposition to dipping didn't quite hold water. Turned out that the hollow metal packages weren't airtight as to allow in oxygen that would eventually degrade them. Dipping in paint sealed them. Foiled again!!
"the countdown timer will disappear several seconds before the red light changes to green"
Better make that interval random, folks. Otherwise people will just learn to complete the countdown in their heads, then step on the gas without quite yet looking up.