* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Jaywalking

"No they don't. But it helps save lives if drivers think that."

Run one over and find out how long your point of view lasts.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Driver in charge?

"If you have any degree of assist beyond basic lane following you start getting bored off your tits and doing other stuff. As recent crashes with Tesla demonstrate as well."

At least the Tesla (and the unmodified Volvo) will attempt to avoid pedestrians.

in the case of Joshua Brown (and the chinese crash into a road-cleaning vehicle a week or so later), it's worth noting that Tesla manuals explicitly warn that the driver aids WILL NOT protect against stationary objects in the roadway ahead when travelling in excess of 50mph.

Yes I know that Joshua's Tesla interpreted the side of the trailer as an overhead gantry sign. What's of more interest to me is that he never went anywhere without his dashcam and that device has never been found. There's a lot that isn't explained about the crash and its aftermath.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Driver in charge?

"People when sitting for hours doing nothing, as was this safety passenger (NOT a driver), become bored and disengaged from their surroundings. "

The US Government contracted Disney to produce a bunch of road safety and Driver Ed films in the 1950s and 1960s - they may be 50+ years old, but they show this problem has been around for at least as long as freeways have existed. (it used to be called highway hypnosis and distracted driving)

You can find them on Youtube without much difficulty

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: with no light

"if you could use your own car to drop you when going out or pick you up then Uber is mostly redundant"

Except that once self-driving cars become the norm, the paradigm shift is that taxis become so cheap that it's not worth having your own car. In addition, a slightly larger taxi (6-8 seats) displaces busses (entrained for peak services), breaking away to shuttle or taxi operation (or simply parking) outside of peaks - which removes the vast inefficiency of bus routes outside peak periods.

Uber thinks it's going up against taxi companies when in fact it's going up against bus operators, taxi operators, car makers and other consortia. Self-driving vehicles is an inflection point that turns the entire transportation market on its head.

The advent of the affordable robocar means that personal vehicles will once again be something that only 10% of the population own. The difference is that they'll be something that 90% of the population USE.

The problem at the moment is companies like Uber whose aim is to "break taxi monopolies" and make a quick buck - mostly from investors - are focussed on profit instead of R&D. We're heading into Railway Mania territory.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"and with no light but the cars "

As other people have demonstrated on Youtube, Uber have cranked the gamma of their video HARD to make it appear like an unlit rural road when in fact it's a relatively well lit urban one.

I was fooled too, as what I saw was on par with what my own smartphone camera DOES show on unlit rural roads, however when there's even a single streetlight around it's far more like the other youtuber videos than the Uber one.

They've done everything they can to try and blame the victim on this one and it's backfired. Despite the stupid american anti-pedestrian laws the fact remains that a human will react to and avoid a pedestrian being where they shouldn't. Uber fucked up on an epic scale and instead of putting up their hands to the fact, tried to weasel out of it by doctoring the video and failing to release the sensor data (which would have shown the cycle being detected at least 150-200 feet out)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Proper road crossings were two miles either side of where she crossed, if only she had a bike."

At which point, AC demonstrates the car-centric american point of view of the world, with rules that "though shalt ONLY cross at designated points and thou SHALT give way to vehicles" that gave rise to the programming mindset which killed this pedestrian.

A "self driving" vehicle programmed like this would last less than 30 seconds in test mode in any european city before being ordered off the road.

Scratch that - It would never pass the initial hazard testing required to be allowed ON the road in the first place.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: cost-effective but results in a blind spot low to the ground all around the car .

"Kittens!!!! You forgot kittens!!! Thank deity this isn't FB or you'd be toast."

For a more pragmatic approach (and a significant statistic): Toddlers playing on driveways

Not a problem at the moment, but it will be when robocars are the norm.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "...a [Lidar] blind spot low to the ground all around the car."

"Near the ground? Like where the pedestrians are?"

Near the ground and close to the vehicle.

Like where pedestrians are, after you've run them over.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Swiss are in it

"I don't recall remain saying that... Farage certainly did"

Yes, I did mean leave.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A very big catapult should do it...

"we are the only country to develop orbital capability and then kill it off..."

We actually officially killed it off BEFORE the first launch was achieved.

The launch was a case of "Well, we've almost completed the job now, so let's go ahead and do it anyway"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Swiss are in it

"ESA is an intergovernmental organisation, whereas the EU is supranational"

ESA contracts are awarded based on a formula heavily dependent on which country provides what percentage of the funding.

The UK hasn't been meeting its obligations in this respect for a long time (and the situation has steadily been getting worse) which has meant that contracts have been going to other countries for some time.

It may be a supranational organisation, but the funding model makes it effectively an EU-controlled organisation.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Swiss are in it

"your vote only counts in a few marginal constituencies. "

Exactly this.

The government of the UK is decided in a small number of marginal seats, by the "swing voters" and the "non voters"

Nothing terrifies the establishment more than the prospect of the great unwashed actually bothering to head to the polling booth.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: World-leading space sector?

>Two words; "Beagle 2"

That it failed was more attributable to the funding bodies than Colin PIlinger's team.

You can't suddenly make scads of money available far too late for anything other than the prototypes to be sent (no time to build flight models) and expect miracles. Knowing the provenance of the airbag (used for prototype testing, patched, badly overweight and still containing atmospheric moisture when packed for flight) I'm surprised that it didn't leave a deep impact crater, let alone manage to partially open its shell. It probably hit hard enough to bust a gear, which is a hell of a lot less hard than I was expecting.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Galileo was just a Gallic thumb-nose to the US anyway."

The French already have a working military positioning system. They weren't driving Galileo.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Bits like the ECJ which provided a modicum of restraint on some of the more swivel-eyed ideas of various govts."

You mean the one that's the subject of this wee video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Swiss are in it

"Just 52% or those who could be bothered to get out and vote. "

A lot of people were under the impression that the votes would be counted on a seat-by-seat basis and thought they were in safe "remain" areas, so their "leave" vote would be a suitable protest.

The fact that it was an advisory referendum, with fast-and-loose advertising rules (a binding one would have had much stricter ones) and that the remain camp were openly threatening that a 52:48 vote the other way would result in them continuing to force more referendums until they got their own way are all factors which need to be taken into account.

The country didn't so much shoot itself in the foot as blow its leg off and the politicians "in charge" are doing nothing to staunch the bleeding.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Hopefully not a sign of things to come for the UK space industry"

"If you have a language, a masters degree , then you must go now to start establishing rights, you will likely only get a working residence card for a single EU country after a few years of residence."

Some of the most critical staff in the space arena have neither. Engineering matters just as much as the theory.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Hopefully not a sign of things to come for the UK space industry"

"If you work with this stuff in Stevenage (BAE) or even at Surrey Uni in Guildford then you should be wary about making long term plans."

Or at any of the UK's other space science establishments. (MSSL, RAL, Harwell, etc)

The future of most ESA-partnered programs appears doubtful, despite soothing noises from Whitehall. The UK has been felt to be laggardly in its contributions for a long time and this is a perfect opportunity to get rid of it. The academics can easily find work elsewhere but engineering staff are a lot harder to replace or rehome and their knowledge plus experience is absolutely critical. Lose them and you put things back 20+ years.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Swiss are in it

"Now England will pay a price for such self-serving petty politics, and it is anyone's guess how united the kingdom will be when the dust finishes settling."

If history is any guide, it's worth remembering that in 1971 the UK was Europe's sick man, with an economy down the shitter and a population that was in freefall - with the skilled and talented leaving in droves (leaving the unskilled and untalented behind - who make up large tracts of the aging population that voted "leave"). Joining the EU saved the country, but at cost of tearing up all existing trade agreements with former colonies, many of whom suffered very badly as a result.

Memories are long. Mother England is a distant memory. New trade agreements may be brokered, but Boris and his Etonian chums are about to find out that when you're over a barrel, the terms negotiated will not be in your favour. This isn't the old days of empire and the British Army/British Navy can't come in to enforce Pax Brittania to keep those pesky natives down and get trade deals on terms which suit the Empire.

Software gremlin robs Formula 1 world champ of season's first win

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Follows old adage...

There was also the (never raced) CVT that had circuit times that were utterly unbelieveable and was banned before the season even started.

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If we avoid US "English", will we be OK?

You can always substitute "falcon"

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I Believe that "Mellon Farmer" is the accepted replacement."

Flip you, Muddy funster!

Fatal driverless crash: Radar-maker says Uber disabled safety systems

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Human-To-Vehicle communications

"The answer is to fit not just bicycles, but all persons with human-to-vehicle location transponders."

Um yeah. Good luck fitting that to a moose. Or a bear, 14 point stag, black cow, wild boar, sheep or horse

All of which I've encountered on the road. None of which I'd like to drive into.

Some of the larger hazards in some countries take offence at being driven into and may sit on your car, vs merely coming through the windscreen and killing you.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Shape of Things to Come...

What it needs is a couple of major motor insurers to stand up and say "on the present showing we will not be quoting to insure automomous vehicles".

Not quite.

If robocars can show that they will react to obvious hazards (and there are several standardised hazard courses that they can be tested on), then they can graduate to public roads for further testing. But what's clear is that they must NOT be allowed to run freely on roads when they're not going to react to a clear and present hazard in front of them that they need to stop for.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"nowadays there are very few accidents attributable to human error...."

Actually, almost all aircraft crashes are attributable to human error and have been since the 1960s.

EG: Pilots are supposed to know what an iced-up pitot messing up the instruments looks like. They even train for it. That didn't stop them getting confused and fighting over the controls on AF447

Likewise they're supposed to divert and fly somewhere else if the weather is marginal, but pressure means that too many (usually ex-military) pilots will try to land in poor conditions and miss.

The number of actual genuine equipment failure crashes only accounts for about 10% of aircraft crashes in the last 40 years (and only about 1% of car crashes)

The study of "human factors" (Transportation psychology) has been the thing that's had the greatest effect towards the reduction of aircraft crash rates in the last 40 years (and one of the direct results of that study has been the discovery that military pilots make _lousy_ civilian ones as the mindsets required are diametrically opposed tpo each other). This study has only recently started being applied to road transport and is still not accepted by many people, particularly those in UK county councils - who need to take on board that traffic psychology starts with roadside markings and furniture.

Any Robocar maker who doesn't have a bunch of people heavily involved in this field of study is going to kill a lot of people. Human-machine interactions is a complex field and assuming _anything_ is guaranteed to be a fuckup waiting to happen.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Humans are able to anticipate potential risks. Self-driving cars can only react."

Self driving cars with knowledge of road conditions and hazards ahead can also anticipate.

If a ball rolls onto the road, a robot can anticipate a child following as easily as a human, likewise if children are playing on the footpath, or small feet are visible under parked cars at the roadside.

If anything, a well-programmed robocar should be able to track and react to far more simultaneous hazards than a human (humans are only capable of handling a couple - concentrating on that wobbly cyclist may mean entirely missing a pedestrian stepping onto a crossing, etc) and predicting intended paths of even stationary pedestrians is something AIs have proven surprisingly good at.

The average speed of traffic in dense urban areas and shopping zones is only 10-15mph. I would have no qualms at all about recommending that cars be limited to this for such areas. Taking impatient human drivers out of the mix would probably result in faster overall progress whilst simultaneously allowing pedestrians to freely cross the roads.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cause of Death: Ostrich Algorithm

"Jaywalking is...."

A uniquely American concept created by a century of lobbying by the motor industry, along with a raft of other state-level laws that mandate that pedestrians shall yield to motor traffic other than at designated crossing points. (Ie, the best laws that money can buy)

The car didn't react to the pedestrian because it wasn't expecting to see one at this point and it wasn't expecting one because it wasn't programmed to expect one. In any other country it would be expecting pedestrians or other obstacles at all times. Uber's level of FAIL is more epic than a Cecil B de Mille Bible movie.

Humans might not expect to see an obstacle here, but they will process the exception and react to the error condition.

What's an RDBMS? Don't ask the UK's data protection watchdog

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: He's not wrong...

"The ICO was set up as a noddy little civil service body with a focus on process and paper-based exercises."

More importantly, the ICO was setup so that the UK government could be SEEN to be complying with EU directives on data privacy directives, but was deliberately underfunded and nobbled so that it would be unable to actually _do_ anything.

It was a very transparent and cynical move and the whole thing needs to be redone properly.

In addition there needs to be a right of private action and statutory damages for breaches so that individuals can deal with offending outfits - if you want to make companies toe the line then the fear of a death of one million paper cuts is a far more terrifying prospect than facing down a regulator.

UK.gov: Here's £8.8m to plough into hydrogen-powered car tech

Alan Brown Silver badge

"said salesmen were also selling a largely unwanted by-product at the time"

Funnily enough, petrol was an unwanted byproduct of its time too, whilst the market wanted kerosene (for lighting) for the first 100 years of the oil industry's lifespan.

Some years later, kerosene was the byproduct and sales were petrol and diesel for motive power. As such it was a cheap fuel to run gas turbines (and rockets!) on.

If the fuel is cheap enough, someone will develop an engine that will use it.

That said, highly compressed hydrogen will NEVER be cheap, because of the production costs.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"we haven't really had consumer EVs for long enough to see what the costs are going to be to replace the batteries when they reach the end of their life."

Actually, we have. The original scare figures have dropped by 75% and are still falling.

The actual cycle designs in cars are so conservative that few of them have actually needed more than a couple of cells changed out and so far that's proven doable with crash-salvage items.

LI-ion batteries are 100% recycleable and have a fairly good scrap value.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Are there any unbiased, layman-friendly explanations of the challenges kicking around?

> There is a (relatively) low pressure system using metal alloys that absor/desorb GH2 but people seem to think it's heavy.

The bigger problem is that a usable fuel tank made of the stuff would be worth substantially more than the rest of the vehicle.

The even bigger problem is that the total annual production of such alloys is only enough for a few tens of thousands of vehicles per year and I understand it's limited by availability of raw materials.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ' Current industrial production of hydrogen gas'

"Are there any unbiased, layman-friendly explanations of the challenges kicking around?"

Youtube: Search for "CNG tank explosion" - and realise this will be an even more common even with hydrogen.

There's a reason that hydrogen test vehicles are only ever leased by manufacturers. They simply don't want the liabilities associated with sales and consequent poor maintenance/old age.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ' Current industrial production of hydrogen gas'

"the thermodynamics of making, storing, transporting and using hydrogen are lousy in comparison to battery technology."

And that's without even going into the problems with hydrogen embrittlement, pressure cycling effects on tankage/pipework and the fact that the stuff simply _leaks_ through most containment when pressurised no matter how much wishful thinking is applied

Hydrogen is a useful process gas, but a LOUSY transport fuel.

Slap visibility beacons on bikes so they can chat to auto autos, says trade body

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Yeah, I've noticed that...

"I'm wondering whether the low accident rate in the Netherlands is related to more drivers also having significant cycling experience"

Or experience of dented roofs when they piss off cyclists.

Perhaps UK cyclists should try that more often.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Newfoundland called...

"mooses? meese?"

A moose bit my sister once.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Traffic Light Detection

"As for the short horn detectors I see adorning many pedestrian crossings today, your best chance to achieve detection on bicycle apart from wearing a microwave diode singing around 12.5ghz would be a catapult & well aimed coke can."

You don't need anything so crude as the can or as whizzy as the diode. A corner reflector works perfectly.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Traffic Light Detection

"Given that (in a lot of cases) the vehicle detectors are pressure-plates in the road"

Um, no. They're tuned inductive loops. And the problem is that the cycle is a tiny fraction of the metal of a car.

Sometimes just passing the cycle frame sideways over the loop works. But so does an electromagnet or a suitable permanent magnet slung low under the frame.

This problem with not detecting cycles and other low-metal objects is why traffic lights are _supposed_ to change direction every couple of minutes when idle.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Uh yeah, right

And while you're at it, put beacons on moose, cows and pedestrians too.

I've already posted elsewhere about why USA-programmed road robots are inherently unsafe due to cultural assumptions ingrained by a century of lobbying by the motor industry that have resulted in road priority rules that thankfully haven't spread much beyond those shores.

In some parts of the world if a motorist runs someone over, bystanders will beat him or her to death (the motorist, not the traffic victim). It makes for far more cautious driving.

India: Yeah, we would like to 3D-print igloos on the Moon

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: igloo

"there are better materials than ICE"

Not for absorbing radiation. The others work but not nearly as well.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Rubbish disposal?

"thrones where one defecates into a cavernous area underneath"

aka "Long drop" or pit latrine - like what your great-great-great-grandfather/mother used to use. (and some of us who are much younger remember from our childhoods along with telephones that had crank handles)

In general you toss lime into them regularly and periodically dig a new hole. A sense of smell is definitely a handicap.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: RE: ArrZarr

"Railguns are still only found as prototypes "

Railguns have a tendency to self destruct (magnetic flux forcing the rails apart), but their top speed is only limited by atmospheric friction. That "blowing themselves apart" problem has been around since the Nazis started playing with them in the 1930s and the USA hasn't solved the problem yet (although China may have done. They're not publicly claiming it yet, but it looks like they've actually put a railgun on a ship, which nobody else has ever done.)

Linear accelerators don't go quite so fast but they don't tend to fly apart. They can go more than fast enough to reach lunar escape velocity.

None of this matters for the subject at hand. Biological waste is valuable enough that you'd want to retain and recycle it on a lunar colony, not dump it. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and There Aint No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.

Uber's disturbing fatal self-driving car crash, a new common sense challenge for AI, and Facebook's evil algorithms

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: That video has been doctored

"I highly doubt that any recent vehicle has such abysmal lighting abilities "

It doesn't, but the footage looks more or less what the quality of dashcam videos from my system look like under zero external lighting conditions. I can usually see twice or further than the camera can. They simply can't handle the dynamic range.

Those headlights weren't dipped either, but that camera quality is about what you'd expect from a standard dashcam. They're simply not that great under rural lighting conditions, especially with those tiny lenses out front.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The thing with this crash is it's one of the simpler situations that a self driving car should be able to deal with, yet it failed so spectacularly"

A large part of this is cultural norms. I've written about this in detail elsewhere.

The short version is: 'A century of lobbying has made the USA a country which is extremely pedestrian hostile, with road rules that essentially prohibit pedestrians on the road in most states and dictate "the pedestrian shall give way to the vehicle"

That gives rise to an assumption that pedestrians won't be on the road except where authorised, which in turn leads to programming assumptions that they don't need to be scanned for and taken into account.'

This is how one creates a fleet of robotic killing machines. No malice needed, just no notice taken of obstacles. It could have been a pedestrian, or just as easily it could have been a cow - in which case we'd be reading about an Uber driver and passenger being killed.

The USA authorities have compounded the problem by blaming the victim for crossing the road - something that in most countries is perfectly legal and she did so perfectly safely. The instruments will have picked her up quite well, but the ROBOT failed to react. This is a programming fuck up and the best thing that can happen right now is for insurance companies to decline to cover any self-driving vehicle developers unless they can demonstrate their abilities to cope with these most basic of scenarios BEFORE they're let loose on public roads.

(I'm thinking that the obstacle course from "Britain's worst drivers" would be a good _starting_ point for them to pass.)

NAND chips are going to stay too pricey for flash to slit disk's throat...

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Reliability of SSD vs spinning metal?

"Has anyone assessed the reliability improvements in solid state drives?"

Firstly, the vast majority of data access is write once read mostly (or even read occasionally), with some bursts of "read many")

SSDs faced with this kind of usage pattern do just fine thanks - MUCH better than HDDs do.

This means the driving factors for SSDs moving into the bulk storage market become longevity (reliability) and power consumption (Wh/TB as one commenter put it).

If I can stick my big arrays into MAID mode with a sub 5 minute "spindown" time, know that when poked they'll respond in less than 3 seconds, be immune to rack vibrration - AND live a decade or more, then they're going to cost me a lot less than spinning rust over the same period just in drive replacements and probably 1/10 as much in power consumption.

This is the part that Gartner failed to take into account.

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: All together now:

"640k ought to be enough for everybody"

And 4 billion IP addresses ought to be enough whilst we wait for IPX to be released.

Didn't you ever wonder why there's no IPv5?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Feeling Old...

"Because every packet was a broadcast. In DooM 1.0 you could have 3 computers on a network act as left / front / right views, so everything was broadcast."

Doom wasn't the only thing doing this.

NetBeui was wire broadcast. Netbeui over TCP/IP was "only" network broadcast. Any machine with netbeui installed would prefer to use it over all other protocols.

This is one of the reasons why edge switches have broadcast limit settings per port.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Feeling Old...

"Then the config guy cheerfully told me he'd run "memmaker"* to ensure DOS loaded the network stuff optimally."

And you laughed as you copied the old config in from backups elswehere on the disk.

Except you didn't do that, did you?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Feeling Old...

"And a card to connect the networking!"

As one of the magazines of the day put it (more or less)

One day the PC makers woke up to find a 900 Pound Gorilla sitting on their lawn. The "PC XT" was laughably slow and had a derisory amount of memory, didn't have sound or graphics and literally everything was an added-cost plugin extra. But what it did have was three magic letters on the front: "IBM"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Feeling Old...

If you're even older you'll remember it as a D&D games company