If you bothered to ask iPhone owners, you would find three things:
1. They enjoyed the same 30-pin connector for nearly a decade (a decade!) while other handset makers changed their connector and chargers for every new handset. They will likely enjoy the clearly superior Lightning connector for another decade.
2. They have no beef with their connector, or the cable - it works really well.
3. They don't care what Android is using or dream of having a compatible connector because they don't have an Android handset.
I did.
1. They're upset that they have to buy all new cables and that the cheap cables they enjoyed for years are now gone.
2. They dont actually use it for anything more than charging. You have a point here.
3. This is flat out wrong. They hate the fact that they have to have a separate cord for their phone compared to all of their other portable devices (camera, storage, etc...) which all run off the one MicroUSB cable.
Looks like you haven't actually done any research. With Android becoming more ubiquitous with more tablets and phones it's only a matter of time. A lot of cameras and other devices also use MicroUSB. The MicroUSB connector isn't perfect but it's got two huge advantages, it's used by almost everything and it's dirt cheap.
Unless you're trying to make an interconnect that is media independent, like GBIC or SFP, or running such large distances that you need active repeaters, why would you put any smarts in your cable? That's just retarded. Why can't you simply place the logic inside the phone in the same manner you have dual-mode USB/PS2 mice and keyboards?
Because it allows you to lock out third party cables.
You really need to stop thinking logically about Apple.
Well, no, they wouldn't. They stayed with the old connector for ages. They replaced it because third party cables were becoming to cheap and ubiquitous.
Fixed that for you.
They cant let you use a $5 cable with your $900 phone. No, no, no, no, no, you must buy their $40 cable (which is just a $5 cable with a huge markup) to fully experience the definition of the bits.
With the way you mistreat your devices you must go through a new Iphone every 2nd day.
I've been using the same Micro USB cable for the last 3 years. It came with my Moto Milestone in 2010, still has the Motorola sticker on it. I dont handle it with kid gloves (in fact I'm a bit rough) and it hasn't failed. Micro-USB isn't fragile. I've seen more people go through genuine Apple connectors because the wiring becomes lose over time.
I've still got a working Micro USB charger from 2008 from a Nokia 6500C (I've still got the phone which also works).
If you find yourself breaking Micro USB cables, you'll find yourself breaking the more fragile devices they plug into a lot more often.
I feel the same about it, but I think it would be fun to fuck with them by making it a point to pick up every item on the shelf. You could walk all over the store picking up items with no intention of buying them.
Take the items of a smart shelf, replace them on a competitors smart shelf.
This is a procure I call being a smart arse.
There will no doubt be a million ways to hack these shelves, unfortunately the majority of people are dumbarses who will just accept the shelves and advertising.
I hate to be sexist, but I avoid lines that have women in them because most won't even start looking for their card until the last item is scanned (also they are more likely to write checks) even though one can swipe a card after the first item is scanned.
I'd love cash only lines.
No body would use them and cash is a hell of a lot quicker than waiting for people to fumble with their cards, wait for approval, declined and start all over again because they fat fingered the 4 digit pin they cant remember unless its written down in their wallet.
When they ask for your phone number instead of the card use (321) 123-4567. There are several hundred (if not more) people around the country using that number. Works almost everywhere, if it doesn't work at some chain fill out a card. I've noticed QFC and Radio Shack will occasionally remove it, so I just fill out another form with the same number and a different name and it starts working again for another year or two.
As an added benefit, it's amusing as all hell to see how many cashiers think that's my actual phone number.
This,
If you want to have the cards and not give away your personal details, fake them.
Nando's honestly doesn't care that I signed up as:
Shogoth The Destroyer
12 Blah St, Blahville, WA. 9999
They didn't even bother checking the postal code (WA in Australia is 6xxx, the 9 series is not in use) and the staff get a kick out of calling out an order for Shogoth The Destroyer.
It'll never happen, but I'm sure they've been used as an end-around credit card privacy laws. I remember when my local grocer first introduced them. The prices of everything went up overnight, then you needed their card to get the same old prices. The thought that they might make advertising to me even more interactive isn't at all appealing.
And, as for just switching grocery stores, I don't know where most of you live but here in KC I only have 2 practical choices (without a long drive).
In Australia, they aren't allowed to offer discounts in this fashion... Rather they have a "points" system where you can trade the points in for stuff. It's basically a way of collecting info on you and not giving you anything for it (your points expire).
Supermarkets in Oz also offer their own credit cards, however this means they are now bound by the same privacy laws and they're just rebranded products from another financial services provider. This is more about locking people into a single source, so you have a Coles credit card, you buy groceries at Coles, petrol at Coles Express, alcohol at Liquor Land (owned by Coles). People get so blinded by the "Points" they get that they dont even bother looking at prices. In the end it's a losing proposition as the money they've wasted by buying more expensive alternatives for FlyBuy's points is greater than the cost of the airfare they got for free*.
* Not actually free, taxes and fees apply. You also spent $1000 to save $100.
I'm much more bothered by science adding fiction to their work by providing an 'Artist Rendition" of a planet that might be like Earth. NASA sees a reddish speck near a star and suddenly the article has a picture of terrain, instead of a picture of a speck. That is a crime.
Blame the mainstream media for that one.
They've trained their audience to have such a short attention span that they cant focus on a story for more than 4 seconds without a pretty picture.
If you did, you wouldn't rely on the Daily Tele(graph) for accurate information.
In the UK, they wont send you home to die simply because your employer doesn't have insurance, or enough insurance. This is what people in the US want. Basic care in the UK or Australia isn't glamorous, but it's far cheaper than the most basic care in the US. In fact top hospital cover in Australia is far cheaper than the most basic care in the US.
People want to know they can go to a hospital with serious problem and not have to worry if they have the cash to pay for it. This is the assurance you have in Canada, the UK or Australia.
Also, you'll find the vast majority of people travelling overseas (out of the country) will be for elective surgery which is usually not covered or not covered completely and optional.
Finally, am I the only one who sees the notion of your employer providing health care akin to indentured servitude? Preventing you from changing employers at will or even taking time off (a sabbatical)?
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
The problem with contracting to the government is that any company looks at government contracts as a license to print money.
Whenever a government tender goes out, their eyes light up and the start seeing dollar signs everywhere. Practically no-one signs a fixed price contract unless they've got an off the shelf product with a no-modifications clause otherwise it's time and materials in which case expect every little thing to take longer and cost extra... Why? because it's the government and they're an endless bucket of money... at least according to the people who do government contracts.
There's an old saying about contracting, "If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem" and this is extremely true with government contractors.
In a perfect libertarian world, an insurance company offering you a policy would have to abide by the terms of the policy, and if the terms prohibited them from kicking you off, then they couldn't do so.
In this world they would never have to pay out because your flying unicorn would never crash.
Honestly, I just can't figure out whats wrong with GM, BMW, Motorola (before being bought - the Moto-X rocks), Sony, and so many other large iconic corporations. It's one thing to lack a marketing genius like Steve Jobs. It's another to be so incredibly stupid that even the average slashdot geek can see your product will be a dismal failure. There is simply no way that this car, or BMW's freak-show of an electric car will succeed. Why are they wasting their time and money? Why are they so stupid?
When you consider the tax and govt funding benefits it makes a lot of sense. The German and US govts throw huge amounts of money at car makers, GM is one of the biggest offenders. In order to get more money they have to do certain things that governments want them to, electric vehicles are one of these things. So they take the money and produce a mediocre EV, because the EV doesn't sell they claim this against the tax the govt asks them to pay.
So a failed product can actually be quite profitable when there's govt money involved.
People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday,
Why is it that a convenience -- our credit cards, are able to weather a failure like this by simply allowing all purchases, but our food stamp cards simply stop working? Credit card systems are, at every level, designed to cope with a failure by simply authorizing the purchase. Only a very small number of transactions would have been failed anyway for insufficient funds, etc., and these are reconciled when that part of the system is restored to service... meaning there's very little loss to the provider for this.
You dont know much about how EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) systems work.
Yes, some EFTPOS terminals can store card details when the network is down and reconcile the transactions later. Some cant. However if the transaction fails it's the merchant who's left holding the bag.
The EFTPOS system is designed to make sure that the merchant shoulders as much of the cost as possible. This is not a good system for a food stamp program.
When I set up stores with EFTPOS, I always set up a redundant network connection with an automatic failover. The cost of this was in excess of A$50 per month, per store but the losses from declined transactions were worse.
Your computer is broken. Have it repaired. (Or stop trolling... Sometimes it's hard to tell so apologies for giving a serious answer if so)
The typical Win 7 machine is impressively stable. I haven't seen a blue screen in years.
As was XP.
It was almost always shitty drivers that bought down Windows. This is still occurring with Windows 7 but not as often as Windows comes with more default drivers which are more stable than the crappy vendor drivers of yore. I only need to install drivers for my wireless card and video card these days, I still put the mobo drivers on out of habit and they do improve the sound.
Actually, Apple's share of the tablet market has dropped to 32% this year, with Android now commanding 63%. Almost an exact reversal of 2012. These are sales of new units though, so Apple may still have >50% of the tablets which are currently in use. But the trend is pretty clear.
So it's pretty much a repeat of what happened in the Phone market.
I predicted this years ago when the Apple fanboys were claiming Android tablets wouldn't sell.
Ah yes, the old fire and police argument. Guess who runs those? Hint: unless you live on a military base or in DC, it's not the federal government.
This is a terrible idea. Allow me to explain how this will actually work in practice. Doctors will be given a massive set of questions to ask (but they won't be paid more for the extra time it takes to ask them), they will be given a new set of tests to run (wasn't the point of this to cut healthcare costs?), and they'll have to switch to fully electronic medical records of the sort that don't really exist today - the kind where every diagnosis a patient has is properly coded in ICD-10, along with initial diagnosis dates, therapeutic intervention, and outcome.
Amazing that these systems work in Canada, Australia and the UK and for less than the US government OR public spend on healthcare.
And of course you want the data to be mined, that's how we find the main causes of common medical issues and can implement defences against them (prevention is better than cure).
Most folks can do any of those repairs. They might lack the tools, but with a chiltons book just about any car repair is doable. None of it is any more complex than putting a computer together. It might be dirtier and more dangerous, but none of it requires more skill.
You've clearly never seen someone with zero experience trying to weld.
I was taught to weld in high school, I'm not that good at it so I generally let someone who is a professional welder do that kind of work. That whole amateurs are dangerous and professionals are predictable thing.
That being said, things like changing your own oil or a tyre, replacing brake pads, basic scratch repair and other simple jobs are basic knowledge. If you cant learn to do them with 1 hour on YouTube you need to reconsider car ownership.
However who's responsible for a self driving car? Do I (or more accurately, my insurer) sue the owner (who was not in control of the vehicle at the time) or the car company (who has no doubt waived responsibility for this with a ream of paperwork when they sold it).
I'm sure that lawyers everywhere are salivating at the thought of self-driving cars but I fail to see why we should ban them for that reason. Road safety can't possibly go downwards simply because we took humans out of the equation.
Who suggested banning them?
I simply pointed out that it's a legal nightmare.
Road safety can't possibly go downwards simply because we took humans out of the equation.
Actually it can when you combine humans and computers that cant predict what humans do.
(i.e., you don't have to squeeze your way out of your vehicle while trying not to bang the next car's door)
That brilliant plan has two massive shortcomings:
1) You still need to squeeze back into the car when you're ready to leave (assuming there is no "unpark" feature)
2) What are the odds that the driver of the car parked NEXT to your in your overly narrow space will ding your passenger side door trying to get into HIS car?
I'm more worreid that the technology does not work as advertised and will end up crashing into my parked non-autonomous car because it didn't detect it and through the space was empty (If you believe the advertising, I have a bridge to sell you... It comes with several cars). Seeing as I almost always reverse park, a bump is enough to kick start the dash cam. A driverless car should make for some interesting footage.
However who's responsible for a self driving car? Do I (or more accurately, my insurer) sue the owner (who was not in control of the vehicle at the time) or the car company (who has no doubt waived responsibility for this with a ream of paperwork when they sold it).
Beyond this, does the vehicle have the capacity to deal with arsehole parkers. People who are across multiple bays or cut in and steal parking spaces. I can see the first law suit now when Andy Arsehole cuts off an autonomous car to steal the parking bay and gets T-boned by it. However, knowing Ford the system is probably designed to be an arsehole parker.
Slashdot Mirror
If you bothered to ask iPhone owners, you would find three things:
1. They enjoyed the same 30-pin connector for nearly a decade (a decade!) while other handset makers changed their connector and chargers for every new handset. They will likely enjoy the clearly superior Lightning connector for another decade.
2. They have no beef with their connector, or the cable - it works really well.
3. They don't care what Android is using or dream of having a compatible connector because they don't have an Android handset.
I did.
1. They're upset that they have to buy all new cables and that the cheap cables they enjoyed for years are now gone.
2. They dont actually use it for anything more than charging. You have a point here.
3. This is flat out wrong. They hate the fact that they have to have a separate cord for their phone compared to all of their other portable devices (camera, storage, etc...) which all run off the one MicroUSB cable.
Looks like you haven't actually done any research. With Android becoming more ubiquitous with more tablets and phones it's only a matter of time. A lot of cameras and other devices also use MicroUSB. The MicroUSB connector isn't perfect but it's got two huge advantages, it's used by almost everything and it's dirt cheap.
Unless you're trying to make an interconnect that is media independent, like GBIC or SFP, or running such large distances that you need active repeaters, why would you put any smarts in your cable? That's just retarded. Why can't you simply place the logic inside the phone in the same manner you have dual-mode USB/PS2 mice and keyboards?
Because it allows you to lock out third party cables.
You really need to stop thinking logically about Apple.
Well, no, they wouldn't. They stayed with the old connector for ages. They replaced it because third party cables were becoming to cheap and ubiquitous.
Fixed that for you.
They cant let you use a $5 cable with your $900 phone. No, no, no, no, no, you must buy their $40 cable (which is just a $5 cable with a huge markup) to fully experience the definition of the bits.
Micro-USB, while ubiquitous, is rather fragile
You think Micro-USB is fragile?
With the way you mistreat your devices you must go through a new Iphone every 2nd day.
I've been using the same Micro USB cable for the last 3 years. It came with my Moto Milestone in 2010, still has the Motorola sticker on it. I dont handle it with kid gloves (in fact I'm a bit rough) and it hasn't failed. Micro-USB isn't fragile. I've seen more people go through genuine Apple connectors because the wiring becomes lose over time.
I've still got a working Micro USB charger from 2008 from a Nokia 6500C (I've still got the phone which also works).
If you find yourself breaking Micro USB cables, you'll find yourself breaking the more fragile devices they plug into a lot more often.
I feel the same about it, but I think it would be fun to fuck with them by making it a point to pick up every item on the shelf. You could walk all over the store picking up items with no intention of buying them.
Take the items of a smart shelf, replace them on a competitors smart shelf.
This is a procure I call being a smart arse.
There will no doubt be a million ways to hack these shelves, unfortunately the majority of people are dumbarses who will just accept the shelves and advertising.
I hate to be sexist, but I avoid lines that have women in them because most won't even start looking for their card until the last item is scanned (also they are more likely to write checks) even though one can swipe a card after the first item is scanned.
I'd love cash only lines.
No body would use them and cash is a hell of a lot quicker than waiting for people to fumble with their cards, wait for approval, declined and start all over again because they fat fingered the 4 digit pin they cant remember unless its written down in their wallet.
When they ask for your phone number instead of the card use (321) 123-4567. There are several hundred (if not more) people around the country using that number. Works almost everywhere, if it doesn't work at some chain fill out a card. I've noticed QFC and Radio Shack will occasionally remove it, so I just fill out another form with the same number and a different name and it starts working again for another year or two.
As an added benefit, it's amusing as all hell to see how many cashiers think that's my actual phone number.
This,
If you want to have the cards and not give away your personal details, fake them.
Nando's honestly doesn't care that I signed up as: Shogoth The Destroyer 12 Blah St, Blahville, WA. 9999 They didn't even bother checking the postal code (WA in Australia is 6xxx, the 9 series is not in use) and the staff get a kick out of calling out an order for Shogoth The Destroyer.
It'll never happen, but I'm sure they've been used as an end-around credit card privacy laws. I remember when my local grocer first introduced them. The prices of everything went up overnight, then you needed their card to get the same old prices. The thought that they might make advertising to me even more interactive isn't at all appealing.
And, as for just switching grocery stores, I don't know where most of you live but here in KC I only have 2 practical choices (without a long drive).
In Australia, they aren't allowed to offer discounts in this fashion... Rather they have a "points" system where you can trade the points in for stuff. It's basically a way of collecting info on you and not giving you anything for it (your points expire).
Supermarkets in Oz also offer their own credit cards, however this means they are now bound by the same privacy laws and they're just rebranded products from another financial services provider. This is more about locking people into a single source, so you have a Coles credit card, you buy groceries at Coles, petrol at Coles Express, alcohol at Liquor Land (owned by Coles). People get so blinded by the "Points" they get that they dont even bother looking at prices. In the end it's a losing proposition as the money they've wasted by buying more expensive alternatives for FlyBuy's points is greater than the cost of the airfare they got for free*.
* Not actually free, taxes and fees apply. You also spent $1000 to save $100.
I'm much more bothered by science adding fiction to their work by providing an 'Artist Rendition" of a planet that might be like Earth. NASA sees a reddish speck near a star and suddenly the article has a picture of terrain, instead of a picture of a speck. That is a crime.
Blame the mainstream media for that one.
They've trained their audience to have such a short attention span that they cant focus on a story for more than 4 seconds without a pretty picture.
For some reason people want health care that won't bankrupt them. They look at what citizens of other industrialized nations get and want the same.
You mean eight hour waits in ambulances to game national healthcare system metrics, going to the US for treatment to avoid waits, and crackdowns on treatment for immigrants? Americans don't want the first, the second is redundant, and Obamacare will probably rule out the third.
You dont know much about the UK.
I wasn't asking.
If you did, you wouldn't rely on the Daily Tele(graph) for accurate information.
In the UK, they wont send you home to die simply because your employer doesn't have insurance, or enough insurance. This is what people in the US want. Basic care in the UK or Australia isn't glamorous, but it's far cheaper than the most basic care in the US. In fact top hospital cover in Australia is far cheaper than the most basic care in the US.
People want to know they can go to a hospital with serious problem and not have to worry if they have the cash to pay for it. This is the assurance you have in Canada, the UK or Australia.
Also, you'll find the vast majority of people travelling overseas (out of the country) will be for elective surgery which is usually not covered or not covered completely and optional.
Finally, am I the only one who sees the notion of your employer providing health care akin to indentured servitude? Preventing you from changing employers at will or even taking time off (a sabbatical)?
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
The problem with contracting to the government is that any company looks at government contracts as a license to print money.
Whenever a government tender goes out, their eyes light up and the start seeing dollar signs everywhere. Practically no-one signs a fixed price contract unless they've got an off the shelf product with a no-modifications clause otherwise it's time and materials in which case expect every little thing to take longer and cost extra... Why? because it's the government and they're an endless bucket of money... at least according to the people who do government contracts.
There's an old saying about contracting, "If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem" and this is extremely true with government contractors.
In a perfect libertarian world, an insurance company offering you a policy would have to abide by the terms of the policy, and if the terms prohibited them from kicking you off, then they couldn't do so.
In this world they would never have to pay out because your flying unicorn would never crash.
"confirms there is no longer any debate about the benefits of the vaccine."
How can anyone be stupid enough to believe that a judge ruling has any effect on medical science?
The judge was not ruling _ON_ medical science, he was ruling _WITH_ medical science.
You know, exactly how a judge is meant to work in these cases, examines the evidence and selects the best outcome.
Honestly, I just can't figure out whats wrong with GM, BMW, Motorola (before being bought - the Moto-X rocks), Sony, and so many other large iconic corporations. It's one thing to lack a marketing genius like Steve Jobs. It's another to be so incredibly stupid that even the average slashdot geek can see your product will be a dismal failure. There is simply no way that this car, or BMW's freak-show of an electric car will succeed. Why are they wasting their time and money? Why are they so stupid?
When you consider the tax and govt funding benefits it makes a lot of sense. The German and US govts throw huge amounts of money at car makers, GM is one of the biggest offenders. In order to get more money they have to do certain things that governments want them to, electric vehicles are one of these things. So they take the money and produce a mediocre EV, because the EV doesn't sell they claim this against the tax the govt asks them to pay.
So a failed product can actually be quite profitable when there's govt money involved.
People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday,
Why is it that a convenience -- our credit cards, are able to weather a failure like this by simply allowing all purchases, but our food stamp cards simply stop working? Credit card systems are, at every level, designed to cope with a failure by simply authorizing the purchase. Only a very small number of transactions would have been failed anyway for insufficient funds, etc., and these are reconciled when that part of the system is restored to service... meaning there's very little loss to the provider for this.
You dont know much about how EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) systems work.
Yes, some EFTPOS terminals can store card details when the network is down and reconcile the transactions later. Some cant. However if the transaction fails it's the merchant who's left holding the bag.
The EFTPOS system is designed to make sure that the merchant shoulders as much of the cost as possible. This is not a good system for a food stamp program.
When I set up stores with EFTPOS, I always set up a redundant network connection with an automatic failover. The cost of this was in excess of A$50 per month, per store but the losses from declined transactions were worse.
Your computer is broken. Have it repaired. (Or stop trolling... Sometimes it's hard to tell so apologies for giving a serious answer if so)
The typical Win 7 machine is impressively stable. I haven't seen a blue screen in years.
As was XP.
It was almost always shitty drivers that bought down Windows. This is still occurring with Windows 7 but not as often as Windows comes with more default drivers which are more stable than the crappy vendor drivers of yore. I only need to install drivers for my wireless card and video card these days, I still put the mobo drivers on out of habit and they do improve the sound.
I can't decide if this is brilliant or stupid. Perhaps Apple could one day create a laptop shell fitted for a phone
You mean like the Asus FonePad?
Actually, Apple's share of the tablet market has dropped to 32% this year, with Android now commanding 63%. Almost an exact reversal of 2012. These are sales of new units though, so Apple may still have >50% of the tablets which are currently in use. But the trend is pretty clear.
So it's pretty much a repeat of what happened in the Phone market.
I predicted this years ago when the Apple fanboys were claiming Android tablets wouldn't sell.
Ah yes, the old fire and police argument. Guess who runs those? Hint: unless you live on a military base or in DC, it's not the federal government.
This is a terrible idea. Allow me to explain how this will actually work in practice. Doctors will be given a massive set of questions to ask (but they won't be paid more for the extra time it takes to ask them), they will be given a new set of tests to run (wasn't the point of this to cut healthcare costs?), and they'll have to switch to fully electronic medical records of the sort that don't really exist today - the kind where every diagnosis a patient has is properly coded in ICD-10, along with initial diagnosis dates, therapeutic intervention, and outcome.
Amazing that these systems work in Canada, Australia and the UK and for less than the US government OR public spend on healthcare.
And of course you want the data to be mined, that's how we find the main causes of common medical issues and can implement defences against them (prevention is better than cure).
Evidently the Starfleet Corps of Engineers designed your BS-o-meter, since it didn't have any circuit breakers. ;-)
It did have a fuse, but the GPP didn't reverse the polarity in time.
And you don't have one in 2013 either! ;)
We do, you just cant do anything with it without sacrificing battery life.
This is wrong.
Parking is a very necessary skill. Every time you stop driving the car, you park it.
Also most of the accidents people will have are in car parks. These may be minor dings and scratches, but they're far too frequent.
Most folks can do any of those repairs. They might lack the tools, but with a chiltons book just about any car repair is doable. None of it is any more complex than putting a computer together. It might be dirtier and more dangerous, but none of it requires more skill.
You've clearly never seen someone with zero experience trying to weld.
I was taught to weld in high school, I'm not that good at it so I generally let someone who is a professional welder do that kind of work. That whole amateurs are dangerous and professionals are predictable thing.
That being said, things like changing your own oil or a tyre, replacing brake pads, basic scratch repair and other simple jobs are basic knowledge. If you cant learn to do them with 1 hour on YouTube you need to reconsider car ownership.
However who's responsible for a self driving car? Do I (or more accurately, my insurer) sue the owner (who was not in control of the vehicle at the time) or the car company (who has no doubt waived responsibility for this with a ream of paperwork when they sold it).
I'm sure that lawyers everywhere are salivating at the thought of self-driving cars but I fail to see why we should ban them for that reason. Road safety can't possibly go downwards simply because we took humans out of the equation.
Who suggested banning them?
I simply pointed out that it's a legal nightmare.
Road safety can't possibly go downwards simply because we took humans out of the equation.
Actually it can when you combine humans and computers that cant predict what humans do.
(i.e., you don't have to squeeze your way out of your vehicle while trying not to bang the next car's door)
That brilliant plan has two massive shortcomings:
1) You still need to squeeze back into the car when you're ready to leave (assuming there is no "unpark" feature)
2) What are the odds that the driver of the car parked NEXT to your in your overly narrow space will ding your passenger side door trying to get into HIS car?
I'm more worreid that the technology does not work as advertised and will end up crashing into my parked non-autonomous car because it didn't detect it and through the space was empty (If you believe the advertising, I have a bridge to sell you... It comes with several cars). Seeing as I almost always reverse park, a bump is enough to kick start the dash cam. A driverless car should make for some interesting footage.
However who's responsible for a self driving car? Do I (or more accurately, my insurer) sue the owner (who was not in control of the vehicle at the time) or the car company (who has no doubt waived responsibility for this with a ream of paperwork when they sold it).
Beyond this, does the vehicle have the capacity to deal with arsehole parkers. People who are across multiple bays or cut in and steal parking spaces. I can see the first law suit now when Andy Arsehole cuts off an autonomous car to steal the parking bay and gets T-boned by it. However, knowing Ford the system is probably designed to be an arsehole parker.