Posts by Christoph 3317 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007
"The entire purpose of a safety driver is as a backstop for catastrophic technology failure," said Tindell.
Quite. And if the technology failure is that the system has crashed or seized up so badly that the remote link no longer works, just exactly what is the remote safety driver supposed to do?
Or the incredibly rare circumstance that the car is under a bridge, among tall buildings, or in a tunnel so that the link doesn't work?
And never mind trivial details like the massive consensus of nearly all the people who have actually studied this and investigated it and know about it that the warming is happening, is very rapid, and is quickly getting worse.
You know, the people that use data instead of handwaving and wishful thinking.
Trump got elected with a promise to build the wall, the Democrats got elected with a promise to block the wall.
Yes, the Democrats could end the crisis in an instant. All they would have to do is abjectly surrender to whatever Trump has a whim for. They would betray their principles, they would betray the people who elected them. But they would end the crisis.
They would also have made Trump an absolute dictator. Whatever whim he has, they vote for to avoid a shutdown. Then in the afternoon they vote again because he's changed his mind again.
If you have told a bully that you will abjectly surrender to his demands if he makes threats, he will NOT then go away and leave you in peace. He will make more and more and more demands, never-ending.
If once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane.
That story isn't very clear. Since the LMC is far smaller than the Milky Way, how will it "swell our black hole by a factor of eight and the stellar halo, ... will increase fivefold"?
It may contribute to the halo as yet another star stream like the existing Sagittarius Stream and several others, but it will take a very long time before its core merges with our central black hole - and how can that core be seven times the size of our own?
Last time they tried this the police attacked the demonstrators and then claimed the demonstrators were rioting.
This time everyone is carrying a video camera. They can't confiscate all of the videos showing gangs of police charging down the street attacking everyone in sight including bystanders. Or of someone chucking a stone in the general direction of the police, then calmly walking up to and into the police lines before the police charge the crowd for throwing stones at them.
"because we're not going to go home and leave the Australian people on their own over Christmas.”
Why all this whinging about Australian software? If they can get this designed, coded, tested, and up and running on all the multitude of different systems and have that all in place well before this Christmas, Australian software must be by far the best in the world. No other country could even begin to do anything so complex in that timescale.
They want this in place before the next election.
They are making it illegal to reveal the existence of interceptions.
Will they be able to prove that they are not intercepting the communications of the opposing parties?
Since they have deliberately made it impossible to prove that they are doing such interception, the burden of proof falls on them to show that they are not doing so.
"Which is why you do not say yes to any opportunistic requests for a vehicle search."
Which annoys the police because they now have to keep you hanging around while a drug-detecting dog is fetched, so they can give it the covert signal telling it to do a false 'alert' and then have 'reasonable suspicion' to do a forced search of the vehicle.
The outcome of annoying the police is not likely to be fun for you.
It is still claimed that we will soon have fully automatic driverless cars. These will be operating in a vastly more complicated environment, with far less time to sort out problems. And there will be far more of them. What are the chances that nothing like this will happen?
A plane can in emergency hand control over to the pilots. A car may have no driver, or the driver may be asleep, drunk, and/or distracted. In any case if they are suddenly given control they will not have time to assess a situation which is so complicated that the car has given up.
Car automation can do a lot, but I cannot accept that full automation will come any time soon - and it will at the least require a major rebuild of all the roads, together with new signage designed for automatic reading.
Changing the user interface can have major unexpected consequences.
Back in the 80s, the company internal telephone system was updated. The new system examined external calls and sent them by the cheapest route - BT, Mercury, or up the leased line to head office.
Old system: Pick up phone, get internal dial tone. Dial 9, external dial tone. Dial number.
New system: Pick up phone, get internal dial tone. Dial 9, system waits for the external number with no dial tone then works out the cheapest route.
Nobody, not even the switchboard, was warned in advance about this change.
In a large office building, large numbers of people thought there was a fault. Many of them tried pressing the 9 key again and again to try to get the external dial tone.
The telephone system watched the key presses until it recognised a valid number, then dialled that number.
Note to non-UKans: The UK emergency number, roughly equivalent to the US '911', is '999'.
The trick of using part of the sail to decelerate the remainder was devised by Robert Forward, and detailed in his novel Rocheworld about a crewed voyage to Barnard's Star.
He even found a way to bring the ship back again, still using only the Earth-based lasers.
His scientific paper describing the system seems to be behind a paywall, but here's the abstract
Those people risked their lives to help the USA, and the USA blew their cover and got them killed through sheer bloody incompetence, and managers covering their own arses rather than doing their job and protecting their people.
You do not do that in intelligence work. At all costs you do NOT jeopardise your people. This is unbelievably bad.
"Education is getting more messed up by the day. Why can't the people in charge that want this country to prosper see that by making education out of reach we are going to become a joke or is that the plan?"
The people in charge want themselves to prosper, and one of their definitions of success is being far better off than other people. So keeping the oiks down by denying them an education is a desired outcome.
Coming up the stairs to the office I met the secretary coming down towards the washroom, with her entire face blackened by toner except a streak under each eye cleared by tears.
The (very old) copier was refilled by spooning the toner into it. The toner had got clogged up. She had realised an instant too late that the way to deal with this is NOT to bend down close to the toner holder and blow hard.
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