Why do you think that a vehicle that can see in 360 degrees around it in the visible spectrum, infrared spectrum, and LIDAR
Sounds like you've got zero experience using these technologies in the real world.
The first problem you have is that these technologies aren't as good as you think. Rain and snow tends to have a very negative effect on the LIDAR, IR and Visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (which are actually quite close to each other). There's some very good reasons Google is testing their cars in sunny, clement California.
The second problem you have is that these systems have a lag when decisions need to be made in real time. I've dealt with LIDAR terrain mapping, It takes hours for an analyst to get a good capture into a usable state. A capture that has a lot of cloud (most of the imagery I deal with is aerial) will take a lot longer. Sure you dont need that level of precision, but you're still going to end up with the computer being presented with incomplete data.
The third problem you have is that computers aren't predictive, humans are. The computer reacts to what has just happened. A human looks at the risks and evaluates them before they happen. Computers are reactive.
Something that always gets pointed out in favour of autonomous cars is the fact that they're predictable... Which is actually a bad thing when you're putting them into inherently unpredictable situations. So if a computer encounters a problem, it's designed to stop, that is predictable. When you're driving up a mountain road or even in moderate traffic, suddenly freezing is a very bad thing. Humans may not be as predictable but at least they have a chance of being able to make the right decision in an complex and unpredictable emergency, we can guarantee current software cant precisely because it's so predictable.
Please note, this isn't an argument against autonomous cars. It's an argument against the misconceptions people have about autonomous vehicles. We haven't even come close to replacing human controlled vehicles in areas that can be controlled to a pathological level like mine sites (and I've been hearing about the autonomous mine site since 1994) because the technology isn't as reliable as a human even after decades of development... And here's a news flash, it will be decades before you see fully autonomous vehicles on the road. We've come a long way, but there is still a long way to go before they're usable.
Your next car wont be autonomous, your next, next, next car wont be autonomous (and before you say that Mercedes has said... remember how many concept cars the industry puts out that never make it into production).
People who come up with this crap usually live in urban areas and have never driven on anything but city streets and urban highways. I somehow don't see the autonomous car getting me up an old mining road in the Colorado Rockies that doesn't show up on any road map. I also don't see me trusting said car to pick it's way around, over and between the various obstacles like wash outs and large lose rocks that take some very careful driving to get over or around. Especially when there's a 1,000 foot drop on one side and a cliff face on the other. Routes like the Alpine Loop between Silverton and Lake City or the "road" to Argentine Pass to name just two places I've driven.
Cheers,
Dave
Whoa, hold on, that's getting way to advanced for autonomous cars. They're going to suck in city traffic too.
What the proponents of autonomous cars often ignore is the fact that they'll all be using the same navigation data, so that means they're all going to pick the same route without manual human intervention. Anyone who drives in a city who has half a brain knows that sometimes a longer route gets you where you want to go faster because it avoids congestion.
Say you live in the UK and want to watch Game of Thrones. You choice is to pay hundreds of pounds and see adverts with Sky or Virgin Media, wait for box sets and not be able to join in the conversations at work or on social media, or pirate. I'm not saying piracy is morally justified or anything, only that I can understand why people do it. The alternatives suck.
Its the same in Australia, if you want to watch Game of Thrones you have two choices, $45 a month to Murdoch or pirate.
Given the fact that Rupert Murdoch is a vile, irreprehensible and morally perverse person and this perversion is pervasive throughout all his organisations, paying him is supporting that moral perversion.
Ultimately, things like Netflix are going to kill Foxtel in Oz. Not even having a stranglehold on live sports is going to be enough to save it considering you have to pay extra to get sports and the Netflix restrictions are easy to bypass (and it's fairly obvious Netflix are turning a blind eye to the whole thing).
English is NOT a "constructed" language, because that implies intent.
English is more of a trash heap of things we borrowed from all those other languages that over time people have grafted rules onto to try to decode and standardize.:-P
But (and I say this in the nicest possible way because it's my native language), English is a dog's breakfast of bits and pieces string together with loose rules and exceptions which require you to know from which language we stole the various bits and pieces.
That was his point.
Languages evolve. Every single language has idiosyncrasies like English, dialects, slang and so on so forth. No language is pure.
Words and definitions change over time because their usage and the requirements of them change over time. Fantastic used to literally mean "out of a fantasy" as in it cannot be real, not simply "really, really good" as it does now. If an ordered, constructed language like Esperanto caught on, within a generation or four it too will have irregularities due to colloquial usage, slang, misunderstandings and people who haven't learned the language properly (especially children and infants).
Also, its not just English that adopts words from other languages, you'll find whole English words inserted into other languages.
In fact, it's English's ability to survive being mangled that leads to its popularity. Get an American, Indian and Cockney in the same room and they can still communicate despite using radically different dialects and styles. English is a very fault tolerant language.
they'll sell information to criminals using the information for identity theft instead of unlocking stolen phones.
AT&T didn't sell the information this time. Some AT&T employees stole the information and sold it. AT&T is being fined for having lax procedures that allowed the original theft.
What is your solution?
Disallow the companies from keeping this information.
This is how it works in Australia. My ISP is not permitted to keep or even ask for certain bits of information. Your SSN is roughly equivalent to my TFN (Tax File Number) and they cant ask for that, they aren't even allowed to keep my drivers license number on file. They only really have my card number and there is a metric shitload (oops, profanity, we'll you'll just have to get over it) of laws regarding how that information can be kept and where (as in you cant send it to India).
Organisations allowed to collect sensitive information like my TFN have a responsibility to keep it secure. Penalties for not doing so are harsh, penalties for a breach of security are even harsher.
Companies can avoid taxes (perfectly legal) and evade taxes (perfectly illegal).
The world is not as black and white as you pretend.
Lets look at another crime, speeding.
Many would argue that doing 10 over on a near empty motorway is harmless, but perfectly illegal. However trying to do the speed limit on a congested city street is dangerous, but perfectly legal.
Tax laws are inherently complex, ergo they are going to have exploitable bugs. I know your response is "well you need to fix all the bugs" but that would simply make the tax code more complex and introduce more bugs for exploitation by people who can afford throngs of lawyers whilst punishing smaller operators who cant. So we need to rely on a concept from criminal law, the spirit of the law. You can be 100% within the letter of the law and still violate the spirit of the law (hence the speeding example). This is basically what tax dodging is (to dodge is to avoid an obstacle, so it's not a meaningless term) its using the letter of the law to avoid the spirit of the law.
A law that is genuinely beneficial to many companies such as allowing costs like license fees from overseas to be deducted from your taxable income are being abused by the few who are essentially paying license fees to itself in another jurisdiction to avoid paying tax on money earned locally.
That's not true. Companies charge what the market can bear, and if they had lower taxes, they'd mostly just reap higher margins. Do you really think Apples prices would significantly rise if their tax burden went up? That's certainly not true of all markets.
Of course they'd raise their prices when their tax burden goes up and they'll cry foul "B-B-B-but it's the ebil gubbermint thats making us raise our prices" before doing another line of coke off a high end escort's arse with rolled up $100 note that is then used to light a cigar.
What they wont do is lower their prices when their tax burden is lessened.
Its the same with airlines and fuel costs. When fuel costs go up they add extra charges, when the fuel costs went down recently most didn't remove them.
Mis-reporting income and expenses is fraud last time I looked. This goes for businesses where one division over-charges another to shift profits from one country to another. These practices are coming under increasing scrutiny globally.
Want to straighten the ad problem out fast? Sales tax in the country/state/county of purchase.
Sales tax is exactly what they're avoiding.
Australia has a GST (Goods and Services Tax) which is pretty much the same as VAT in other countries, it's 10% on any purchase in Australia with a few items that are GST free (I.E. basic food). Its this tax that Apple and others are avoiding by making the transaction take place overseas. So Apple Australia takes in 20 million from Australia (obviously its more, but I cant be arsed looking it up) but then pays GST on 1 million because most transactions were with Apple Singapore or Ireland.
But I expect nothing to come of this. Its just the Abbott government trying to distract people from it's horrible economic policies.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
That is until George Brandis gets his way and the "speculative invoicing" (which is a wonderful marketing term for rent seeking) becomes perfectly acceptable.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
A DSL connection is $60 a month, adding on another $20 for VPN or a seedbox is not much at all.
Since when is merely downloading something an offense? I think the article is most likely full of shit.
Sadly since the conservative government took power in late 2013 they've had a hard on for helping out big business in any way possible. As such we've gotten new draconian laws and signed secret treaties giving away any rights they couldn't take away.
Its not like the Abbott government cares about being unpopular.
In the mean time, I'm just going to get a seedbox and recommend other Aussies do the same.
You think he was steering that thing like the Wright Flier? The A320 is a highly automated plane. The decision to land in the Hudson was his, but everything else was fly-by-wire - yes, in glide mode too.
Sigh,
It looks like you dont know what "fly by wire" is.
Fly by wire is simply replacing mechanical controls (as in pneumatics, cables, pulleys and so forth) with electronic ones (as in sensors and solenoids). Modern cars are the same with "drive by wire". It simply means your go pedal isn't attached to the throttle body by a cable like it is in my old Nissan.
If Sully had done absolutely nothing from the time the plane lost power, you know what would have happened?
We'd be calling it a tragedy instead of a miracle because the plane would have landed in the middle of a bunch of houses... and by landed we mean crashed in a spectacular fireball.
What sensor suite would that be? Even military systems find it inordinately difficult to discriminate between ground targets amongst ground clutter, and thats with human guidance.
This.
The systems I've seen have a DEM of the terrain it's flying over and uses that against altitude and positioning sensors... You have to pray that its reading the right altitude or the ground might be 20 feet above/below where the drone thinks it is.
Even LIDAR isn't that good at detecting where solid ground is, especially if there's foliage or a body of water (not sure how well they deal with snow and ice, we dont have much of that in Oz but I cant imagine it would help).
Why wouldn't it go: "no runways in range, consult chart for alternate landing zones"? I'm thinking that the Hudson (or any other large body of water) would be on the alternates chart.
The best GPS on the market cant even figure out the best way around traffic conditions when given a link to my cities live traffic monitoring system.
Further more, do you know how much work would go into developing a map that would have potential alternate landing zones... Because we dont have a way to automatically determine them, it will need a massive amount of human intervention to create (and a GIS analyst is more expensive than a pilot). By the time you've finished making one for the UK or Germany alone, it would be horribly out of date. Imagine a nation the size of the United states with all of it's flight paths.
The plot was to impersonate the tower, not take it over. Taking over the tower of a western airport is pretty stupid as they know exactly where you are and how to cut off your access.
A bigger threat is someone simply buying the access codes and/or authorised device from a country with less scruples.
The Mustang is barely more advanced than a horse and doesn't smell much better (although that last point is mainly due to the odour of the owner).
When Chevrolet relaunched the Camaro, they didn't do what Ford had been doing with the Mustang for 40 odd years by bolting it together out of old bits of Detroit. Instead they went overseas to find the talent and ingenuity needed to make a semi modern car. Yes, they went to Australia. The Camaro was based on a mediocre Australian car called the Commodore which had strange and wondrous things like multi-link suspension and a limited slip differential.
And the Holden Commodore draws its roots back to the European Opel Senator which wasn't a good car at the best of times.
You do realize that mere days ago someone used the autopilot to crash an Airbus into a mountain, while also overriding the cockpit door locks? How is that not the "Boeing [idea] of automation?"
As tragic as the Germanwings accident was, it should really be the last nail in the coffin that Airbus automation overrides the pilot.
It was the same with AF447 (Airbus A330). The pilots turned off the autopilot and stall warning, then increased the angle of attack until it stalled. Both accidents were pilot error.
That being said, Airbus and Boeing are both great manufacturers and anyone who'd hesitate to get on either one out of sheer fanboyism is a complete idiot and should be forced to fly on an old Tupolev.
I have a Mercedes that already has this feature for the most part (won't hit the car in front of you and buzzes on lane markers if the turn signal isn't on). It's very relaxing. This car is NOT boring to drive by any stretch, but just being able to take my mind off the road except for emergency situations is very relaxing and I get home with less stress.
Driving isn't boring,
People are boring and they bring their boringness into everything they do. Anyone who cant have fun driving an old Hyundai Getz to the raggedy edge has problems (in fact there are racing leagues based on Hyundai Getz's).
Half the problem people having with driving is that they buy automatics and other features that deliberately disconnect them from the driving experience. I've driven automatic supercars around a track, A Nissan GTR and McLaren MP4, neither of them were as connected as a Honda Integra in a manual. Porsche and BMW still make their performance cars with a manual and a big part of the reason why they're considered the epitome of a drivers car.
Even using a flappy paddle gearbox that has it's auto mode completely disconnected (as a GTR can), changing gear is still done by the computer and it's feels a lot like saying "mummy, may I please have another gear, I promise to clean my room later".
But I still see front-wheel drive American cars with the hump in the back seat where a drive shaft used to go, or a live-rear axle in a front-wheel drive so that the car can flail about as much as possible when going over uneven terrain.
You mean a Torsion bar? That Civic that spanks the 'ring like a bitch has one of those in the back. You don't even.
A Torsion bar is not a live rear axle, especially in an FWD car where the entire rear axle is dead.
A live axle in this context is literally a bit of pig iron connecting the two wheels usually suspended by leaf springs. The reason it is bad is because there is a lot of sideways play and dont move independently so when the right wheel digs in during a tight turn, the left wheel is lifted off the tarmac. Torsion bars allow more vertical play in the axle, obviously not as much as independent rear suspension like double wishbones but far better than leaf springs.
That being said, the old Civic type R and its relative, the Integra (Acura RSX) had double wishbones at the back (and a McPherson strut on the front) so you had to be cornering very hard to cock a leg.
It is not intended for passenger transportation. It is for things like cargo to remote areas, or reconnaissance.
Again, there are cheaper alternatives.
Also, a lot of remote areas are remote because of weather, not terrain. If you cant get a helicopter in there, a blimp is just asking to crash.
then it can use hydrogen rather than helium, since there will be no risk to human life.
In order for this to be true, it would need to be loaded, unloaded and operated away from populated areas. This gives it a very erratic (ergo, longer) flight path as you cant fly it over cities and a huge logistic cost to get the goods to a remote location for loading and unloading (and these facilities do not already exist). The extra cost does not make sense.
Beyond this, it's daft. The airship cost $90,000,000 (90 million) to build. You dont want it exploding before it returns that 90 mil.
The Hindenburg always gets brought up here - I'm sure it was a big thing half a century ago. Now, much of the general public probably doesn't know what "Hindenburg" is, and the ones who are scared of airships are the same group who are scared of normal aircraft. I think the bigger thing here, in terms of travel, is that it only goes 80 knots. You can do 80 knots easily in an economy car. Legally too, in many places. 747s cruise at several hundred knots, around 250 IIRC. There's no reason to take this airship for long distance travel unless your goal is chillin' on the ship and looking out the window.
The Hindenburg and other airships were filled with volatile hydrogen, modern airships use inert helium. The problem is, helium is quite expensive in that volume. The fear at hydrogen airships was well founded, the Hindenburg wasn't even the worst airship disaster, that only killed 36, the worst disaster was the R101 which killed 48. Airships were not only vulnerable to explosion, they were unstable in high winds and storms. After the Hindenburg airships by and large stopped using hydrogen but there were still a lot of crashes due to weather.
The design in the article uses helium which isn't unstable like hydrogen but the problem of weather still remains. But that isn't what will kill it, it's economics as helium is going to be expensive in the quantities they need and who is going to pay for an airship to freight something at 80 knots when if it isn't time critical, a bulk carrier will do it for less.
Well, it may be poorly worded, but I have seen several places which have the blanket policy of not keeping people around for their last two weeks.
Sounds like some shitty places to work.
Everywhere I've worked they've kept people around until their last day as the two weeks to a months notice they have to give (in Australia, your notice is defined by your pay period, so companies who pay monthly can ask for a months notice). This is because a month, let alone a week is not enough time for most people to fully hand over all their projects and work. It costs a lot to get another person started on a project from scratch with no hand over.
Then again, employers aren't allowed to be abusive to employees in Australia so there tends to be a lot of trust between employers and employees because either side will lose if they act like arseholes.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you've got zero experience using these technologies in the real world.
The first problem you have is that these technologies aren't as good as you think. Rain and snow tends to have a very negative effect on the LIDAR, IR and Visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (which are actually quite close to each other). There's some very good reasons Google is testing their cars in sunny, clement California.
The second problem you have is that these systems have a lag when decisions need to be made in real time. I've dealt with LIDAR terrain mapping, It takes hours for an analyst to get a good capture into a usable state. A capture that has a lot of cloud (most of the imagery I deal with is aerial) will take a lot longer. Sure you dont need that level of precision, but you're still going to end up with the computer being presented with incomplete data.
The third problem you have is that computers aren't predictive, humans are. The computer reacts to what has just happened. A human looks at the risks and evaluates them before they happen. Computers are reactive.
Something that always gets pointed out in favour of autonomous cars is the fact that they're predictable... Which is actually a bad thing when you're putting them into inherently unpredictable situations. So if a computer encounters a problem, it's designed to stop, that is predictable. When you're driving up a mountain road or even in moderate traffic, suddenly freezing is a very bad thing. Humans may not be as predictable but at least they have a chance of being able to make the right decision in an complex and unpredictable emergency, we can guarantee current software cant precisely because it's so predictable.
Please note, this isn't an argument against autonomous cars. It's an argument against the misconceptions people have about autonomous vehicles. We haven't even come close to replacing human controlled vehicles in areas that can be controlled to a pathological level like mine sites (and I've been hearing about the autonomous mine site since 1994) because the technology isn't as reliable as a human even after decades of development... And here's a news flash, it will be decades before you see fully autonomous vehicles on the road. We've come a long way, but there is still a long way to go before they're usable.
Your next car wont be autonomous, your next, next, next car wont be autonomous (and before you say that Mercedes has said... remember how many concept cars the industry puts out that never make it into production).
Fixed that or you.
People who come up with this crap usually live in urban areas and have never driven on anything but city streets and urban highways. I somehow don't see the autonomous car getting me up an old mining road in the Colorado Rockies that doesn't show up on any road map. I also don't see me trusting said car to pick it's way around, over and between the various obstacles like wash outs and large lose rocks that take some very careful driving to get over or around. Especially when there's a 1,000 foot drop on one side and a cliff face on the other. Routes like the Alpine Loop between Silverton and Lake City or the "road" to Argentine Pass to name just two places I've driven.
Cheers,
Dave
Whoa, hold on, that's getting way to advanced for autonomous cars. They're going to suck in city traffic too.
What the proponents of autonomous cars often ignore is the fact that they'll all be using the same navigation data, so that means they're all going to pick the same route without manual human intervention. Anyone who drives in a city who has half a brain knows that sometimes a longer route gets you where you want to go faster because it avoids congestion.
Say you live in the UK and want to watch Game of Thrones. You choice is to pay hundreds of pounds and see adverts with Sky or Virgin Media, wait for box sets and not be able to join in the conversations at work or on social media, or pirate. I'm not saying piracy is morally justified or anything, only that I can understand why people do it. The alternatives suck.
Its the same in Australia, if you want to watch Game of Thrones you have two choices, $45 a month to Murdoch or pirate.
Given the fact that Rupert Murdoch is a vile, irreprehensible and morally perverse person and this perversion is pervasive throughout all his organisations, paying him is supporting that moral perversion.
Ultimately, things like Netflix are going to kill Foxtel in Oz. Not even having a stranglehold on live sports is going to be enough to save it considering you have to pay extra to get sports and the Netflix restrictions are easy to bypass (and it's fairly obvious Netflix are turning a blind eye to the whole thing).
English is NOT a "constructed" language, because that implies intent.
English is more of a trash heap of things we borrowed from all those other languages that over time people have grafted rules onto to try to decode and standardize. :-P
But (and I say this in the nicest possible way because it's my native language), English is a dog's breakfast of bits and pieces string together with loose rules and exceptions which require you to know from which language we stole the various bits and pieces.
That was his point.
Languages evolve. Every single language has idiosyncrasies like English, dialects, slang and so on so forth. No language is pure.
Words and definitions change over time because their usage and the requirements of them change over time. Fantastic used to literally mean "out of a fantasy" as in it cannot be real, not simply "really, really good" as it does now. If an ordered, constructed language like Esperanto caught on, within a generation or four it too will have irregularities due to colloquial usage, slang, misunderstandings and people who haven't learned the language properly (especially children and infants).
Also, its not just English that adopts words from other languages, you'll find whole English words inserted into other languages.
In fact, it's English's ability to survive being mangled that leads to its popularity. Get an American, Indian and Cockney in the same room and they can still communicate despite using radically different dialects and styles. English is a very fault tolerant language.
they'll sell information to criminals using the information for identity theft instead of unlocking stolen phones.
AT&T didn't sell the information this time. Some AT&T employees stole the information and sold it. AT&T is being fined for having lax procedures that allowed the original theft.
What is your solution?
Disallow the companies from keeping this information.
This is how it works in Australia. My ISP is not permitted to keep or even ask for certain bits of information. Your SSN is roughly equivalent to my TFN (Tax File Number) and they cant ask for that, they aren't even allowed to keep my drivers license number on file. They only really have my card number and there is a metric shitload (oops, profanity, we'll you'll just have to get over it) of laws regarding how that information can be kept and where (as in you cant send it to India).
Organisations allowed to collect sensitive information like my TFN have a responsibility to keep it secure. Penalties for not doing so are harsh, penalties for a breach of security are even harsher.
The world is not as black and white as you pretend.
Lets look at another crime, speeding.
Many would argue that doing 10 over on a near empty motorway is harmless, but perfectly illegal. However trying to do the speed limit on a congested city street is dangerous, but perfectly legal.
Tax laws are inherently complex, ergo they are going to have exploitable bugs. I know your response is "well you need to fix all the bugs" but that would simply make the tax code more complex and introduce more bugs for exploitation by people who can afford throngs of lawyers whilst punishing smaller operators who cant. So we need to rely on a concept from criminal law, the spirit of the law. You can be 100% within the letter of the law and still violate the spirit of the law (hence the speeding example). This is basically what tax dodging is (to dodge is to avoid an obstacle, so it's not a meaningless term) its using the letter of the law to avoid the spirit of the law.
A law that is genuinely beneficial to many companies such as allowing costs like license fees from overseas to be deducted from your taxable income are being abused by the few who are essentially paying license fees to itself in another jurisdiction to avoid paying tax on money earned locally.
That's not true. Companies charge what the market can bear, and if they had lower taxes, they'd mostly just reap higher margins. Do you really think Apples prices would significantly rise if their tax burden went up? That's certainly not true of all markets.
Of course they'd raise their prices when their tax burden goes up and they'll cry foul "B-B-B-but it's the ebil gubbermint thats making us raise our prices" before doing another line of coke off a high end escort's arse with rolled up $100 note that is then used to light a cigar.
What they wont do is lower their prices when their tax burden is lessened.
Its the same with airlines and fuel costs. When fuel costs go up they add extra charges, when the fuel costs went down recently most didn't remove them.
Mis-reporting income and expenses is fraud last time I looked. This goes for businesses where one division over-charges another to shift profits from one country to another. These practices are coming under increasing scrutiny globally.
Want to straighten the ad problem out fast? Sales tax in the country/state/county of purchase.
Sales tax is exactly what they're avoiding.
Australia has a GST (Goods and Services Tax) which is pretty much the same as VAT in other countries, it's 10% on any purchase in Australia with a few items that are GST free (I.E. basic food). Its this tax that Apple and others are avoiding by making the transaction take place overseas. So Apple Australia takes in 20 million from Australia (obviously its more, but I cant be arsed looking it up) but then pays GST on 1 million because most transactions were with Apple Singapore or Ireland.
But I expect nothing to come of this. Its just the Abbott government trying to distract people from it's horrible economic policies.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
That is until George Brandis gets his way and the "speculative invoicing" (which is a wonderful marketing term for rent seeking) becomes perfectly acceptable.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
A DSL connection is $60 a month, adding on another $20 for VPN or a seedbox is not much at all.
Since when is merely downloading something an offense? I think the article is most likely full of shit.
Sadly since the conservative government took power in late 2013 they've had a hard on for helping out big business in any way possible. As such we've gotten new draconian laws and signed secret treaties giving away any rights they couldn't take away. Its not like the Abbott government cares about being unpopular. In the mean time, I'm just going to get a seedbox and recommend other Aussies do the same.
Sigh,
It looks like you dont know what "fly by wire" is. Fly by wire is simply replacing mechanical controls (as in pneumatics, cables, pulleys and so forth) with electronic ones (as in sensors and solenoids). Modern cars are the same with "drive by wire". It simply means your go pedal isn't attached to the throttle body by a cable like it is in my old Nissan.
We'd be calling it a tragedy instead of a miracle because the plane would have landed in the middle of a bunch of houses... and by landed we mean crashed in a spectacular fireball.
What sensor suite would that be? Even military systems find it inordinately difficult to discriminate between ground targets amongst ground clutter, and thats with human guidance.
This. The systems I've seen have a DEM of the terrain it's flying over and uses that against altitude and positioning sensors... You have to pray that its reading the right altitude or the ground might be 20 feet above/below where the drone thinks it is.
Even LIDAR isn't that good at detecting where solid ground is, especially if there's foliage or a body of water (not sure how well they deal with snow and ice, we dont have much of that in Oz but I cant imagine it would help).
Why wouldn't it go: "no runways in range, consult chart for alternate landing zones"? I'm thinking that the Hudson (or any other large body of water) would be on the alternates chart.
The best GPS on the market cant even figure out the best way around traffic conditions when given a link to my cities live traffic monitoring system.
Further more, do you know how much work would go into developing a map that would have potential alternate landing zones... Because we dont have a way to automatically determine them, it will need a massive amount of human intervention to create (and a GIS analyst is more expensive than a pilot). By the time you've finished making one for the UK or Germany alone, it would be horribly out of date. Imagine a nation the size of the United states with all of it's flight paths.
Wasn't that pretty much the plot from Die Hard 2?
The plot was to impersonate the tower, not take it over. Taking over the tower of a western airport is pretty stupid as they know exactly where you are and how to cut off your access.
A bigger threat is someone simply buying the access codes and/or authorised device from a country with less scruples.
I hear the Mustang is nice.
The Mustang is barely more advanced than a horse and doesn't smell much better (although that last point is mainly due to the odour of the owner).
When Chevrolet relaunched the Camaro, they didn't do what Ford had been doing with the Mustang for 40 odd years by bolting it together out of old bits of Detroit. Instead they went overseas to find the talent and ingenuity needed to make a semi modern car. Yes, they went to Australia. The Camaro was based on a mediocre Australian car called the Commodore which had strange and wondrous things like multi-link suspension and a limited slip differential.
And the Holden Commodore draws its roots back to the European Opel Senator which wasn't a good car at the best of times.
You do realize that mere days ago someone used the autopilot to crash an Airbus into a mountain, while also overriding the cockpit door locks? How is that not the "Boeing [idea] of automation?"
As tragic as the Germanwings accident was, it should really be the last nail in the coffin that Airbus automation overrides the pilot.
It was the same with AF447 (Airbus A330). The pilots turned off the autopilot and stall warning, then increased the angle of attack until it stalled. Both accidents were pilot error.
That being said, Airbus and Boeing are both great manufacturers and anyone who'd hesitate to get on either one out of sheer fanboyism is a complete idiot and should be forced to fly on an old Tupolev.
I have a Mercedes that already has this feature for the most part (won't hit the car in front of you and buzzes on lane markers if the turn signal isn't on). It's very relaxing. This car is NOT boring to drive by any stretch, but just being able to take my mind off the road except for emergency situations is very relaxing and I get home with less stress.
Driving isn't boring,
People are boring and they bring their boringness into everything they do. Anyone who cant have fun driving an old Hyundai Getz to the raggedy edge has problems (in fact there are racing leagues based on Hyundai Getz's).
Half the problem people having with driving is that they buy automatics and other features that deliberately disconnect them from the driving experience. I've driven automatic supercars around a track, A Nissan GTR and McLaren MP4, neither of them were as connected as a Honda Integra in a manual. Porsche and BMW still make their performance cars with a manual and a big part of the reason why they're considered the epitome of a drivers car.
Even using a flappy paddle gearbox that has it's auto mode completely disconnected (as a GTR can), changing gear is still done by the computer and it's feels a lot like saying "mummy, may I please have another gear, I promise to clean my room later".
But I still see front-wheel drive American cars with the hump in the back seat where a drive shaft used to go, or a live-rear axle in a front-wheel drive so that the car can flail about as much as possible when going over uneven terrain.
You mean a Torsion bar? That Civic that spanks the 'ring like a bitch has one of those in the back. You don't even.
A Torsion bar is not a live rear axle, especially in an FWD car where the entire rear axle is dead.
A live axle in this context is literally a bit of pig iron connecting the two wheels usually suspended by leaf springs. The reason it is bad is because there is a lot of sideways play and dont move independently so when the right wheel digs in during a tight turn, the left wheel is lifted off the tarmac. Torsion bars allow more vertical play in the axle, obviously not as much as independent rear suspension like double wishbones but far better than leaf springs.
That being said, the old Civic type R and its relative, the Integra (Acura RSX) had double wishbones at the back (and a McPherson strut on the front) so you had to be cornering very hard to cock a leg.
Step 2: Add a child-resistant packaging for the button, so your 2-year-old doesn't order you fifty jugs of Tide.
RTFA. The button is idempotent, so multiple pushes result in only one shipment. It resets when your package arrives.
So the child only gets to order a new jug of dishwashing liquid every day or so.
Stop already. In the UK the joke doesn't count if it's after mid-day anyway.
Well it's already 2 April in Australia.
/. at the moment are people having a big cry that someone is trying to have a sense of humour.
But seriously, the only thing ruining
Again, there are cheaper alternatives.
Also, a lot of remote areas are remote because of weather, not terrain. If you cant get a helicopter in there, a blimp is just asking to crash.
In order for this to be true, it would need to be loaded, unloaded and operated away from populated areas. This gives it a very erratic (ergo, longer) flight path as you cant fly it over cities and a huge logistic cost to get the goods to a remote location for loading and unloading (and these facilities do not already exist). The extra cost does not make sense.
Beyond this, it's daft. The airship cost $90,000,000 (90 million) to build. You dont want it exploding before it returns that 90 mil.
The Hindenburg always gets brought up here - I'm sure it was a big thing half a century ago. Now, much of the general public probably doesn't know what "Hindenburg" is, and the ones who are scared of airships are the same group who are scared of normal aircraft. I think the bigger thing here, in terms of travel, is that it only goes 80 knots. You can do 80 knots easily in an economy car. Legally too, in many places. 747s cruise at several hundred knots, around 250 IIRC. There's no reason to take this airship for long distance travel unless your goal is chillin' on the ship and looking out the window.
The Hindenburg and other airships were filled with volatile hydrogen, modern airships use inert helium. The problem is, helium is quite expensive in that volume. The fear at hydrogen airships was well founded, the Hindenburg wasn't even the worst airship disaster, that only killed 36, the worst disaster was the R101 which killed 48. Airships were not only vulnerable to explosion, they were unstable in high winds and storms. After the Hindenburg airships by and large stopped using hydrogen but there were still a lot of crashes due to weather.
The design in the article uses helium which isn't unstable like hydrogen but the problem of weather still remains. But that isn't what will kill it, it's economics as helium is going to be expensive in the quantities they need and who is going to pay for an airship to freight something at 80 knots when if it isn't time critical, a bulk carrier will do it for less.
Well, it may be poorly worded, but I have seen several places which have the blanket policy of not keeping people around for their last two weeks.
Sounds like some shitty places to work.
Everywhere I've worked they've kept people around until their last day as the two weeks to a months notice they have to give (in Australia, your notice is defined by your pay period, so companies who pay monthly can ask for a months notice). This is because a month, let alone a week is not enough time for most people to fully hand over all their projects and work. It costs a lot to get another person started on a project from scratch with no hand over.
Then again, employers aren't allowed to be abusive to employees in Australia so there tends to be a lot of trust between employers and employees because either side will lose if they act like arseholes.
Or trademark issue? Nintendo is using the DMCA here, but if the work contains none of Nintendo's code, then why would copyright apply?
Certainly I can see trademarks being an issue here, and it's only right that Nintendo try and put a stop to it.
Copyright would have more to do with art assets.
Even if the developer cleanroomed every texture and model from scratch, it was clearly intended to be a copy.
If the developer had just built the "super mario 64" engine and made his own game assets (erm, Super Silvio 64) he'd have a leg to stand on.
In the time it took you to explain that you didn't know whether Meccano is still in toy stores, you could have found out :)
In the time it took you to type that, you could have wrote "I'm an idiot" more than 6 times.
I dont even know what country the GP is in, let alone what toy stores are around his local area.
OTOH, he now knows what to Goolge/ask for.