Posts by Alan Brown 15093 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Heavy loads" is relative.
Pavements will take pressures of up to 200kg or so. Cars are generally ok, 4wds and heavier vehicles are not - but a more compelling reason not to park on the bloody footpath is that it obstructs disabled users who frequently aren't able to move onto the road due to the curb.
weight damage is one of the reasons parking a HGV on a footpath is a higher level parking offence (3 points on licence) anywhere in the UK, not just in London.
"These are 3.5" drives, according to the article. How exactly are they planning to fit 990 of them into a single rack?"
1: How deep is your rack?
2: How wide is your rack?
I have 1.2 metre deep Netshelters at the moment and I can't be the only one who remembers 1.6metre deep PR1ME cabinets.
19 inches isn't the only width you can get - 22 and 26" are also available.
Even at 4U 19" - see https://www.ixsystems.com/ix-server-family/server-jbod-enclosures/ and the ix4090jtl
"Lithium and rare earth mining is by no means environmentally friendly"
That's fairly fallacious.
Lithium is extracted from seawater or brine lakes (potash) in the same process that's used to make fertilizers and is fairly clean.
Rare earth mining is also clean. There's ONE problematic byproduct that's very slightly radioactive - Thorium - and that shouldn't actually BE a problem if you look up what thorium is and what it can be used for (Hint, if it was used correctly, they would be Thorium mines producing rare earths as a byproduct)
Lithium-ion batteries are 100% recyclable, so there's no excuse for throwing them away.
There are definitely issues associated with cobalt, but different chemistries don't need it and it can also be extracted from seawater at a slightly higher cost than current methods.
"you will probably be doing less than walking space as the road is chocker with polluting parked Chelsea tractors of parents driving their offspring to the school gates."
Which gives rise to the other problem in the UK.
Speed humps are installed to protect children walking to school from being run over by cars containing those being driven to school.
"Why do supercars have huge actively cooled carbon fibre discs?"
Because kinetic energy is proportional to the _square_ of velocity and you dissipate 4 times as much energy going from 200km/h to 100km/h as from 100km/h to 50km/h
If they weren't well cooled the brakes would stop being effective partway through slowing down from maximum speed (which used to happen in 1970s muscle cars and wasn't pleasant to experience)
Below 100km/h they make very little difference at all.
"Good point. You would expect a human to be aware "
That's all you need to say.
Humans are terrible at focussing on more than 2 hazards at a time. Most people develop tunnel vision and completely fail to notice the kids playing on the footpath UNTIL they step out onto the road, by which point it's far too late.
"That was my impression of New York City, at least where the taxis were concerned."
You'll be happy to know that NYC has been installing cameras specifically to nail drivers who barge their way through pedestrians on crossings and they've taken at least 100 taxi drivers off the road amongst others.
"If they do so when the physics precludes the vehicle stopping, then yes, absolutely."
Fuck you.
If a ball bounces onto the road, you KNOW a small child is likely to run out after it. I learned that by observation when I was ten years old (and at the same time I also learned it was a bad idea to run after balls if they went onto the road)
As such, slowing down IMMEDIATELY, is the logical course of action (which is what my mother did), rather than waiting for the child to appear (which is what the driver coming the other way did)
Failure to do so and then hitting the child at speed will get you a "careless driving causing injury" charge at the very least in most countries, if not vehicular manslaughter (The child survived, the driver lost his license for 2 years)
"I read somewhere she decided to cross the road suddenly at a non-crossing place"
Which shows the implicit assumption that people are only allowed to cross at designated locations, which translates to the programmed assumption that people WILL only cross at designated locations.
"giving no time for both the human and robotic operators to react."
The robotic failure was the fault of the progammer(s) fucking up.
The human supervisor failing to notice and react to someone standing on the median shows what google found - human supervisors simply "switch off" after a while. I'll bet he or she wasn't even looking out the window.
"There are far more cyclists and far fewer cars there, and, as a result, their towns are far more pleasant places than our car-congested British towns."
Until the 1970s, the Netherlands' roads were just as cycle-unfriendly and child-killing as the UK's.
They decided they'd had enough of it and that they wanted to change it. So they did.
"It sounds like the vehicle was operating in a lane where the probability of pedestrians or bicyclists was lower than, for example, curb lanes."
In a country where pedestrians are second class citizens, and where road rules against crossing like this are generally enforced vigorously as an income earner for the local authority.
All of which adds up to programmers making assumptions that turn into clusterfucks.
"a flying pedestrian, that cannot stop and appears in front of you. It has in a 32mph zone"
Was the speed limit appropriate for the street?
Of course not.
30mph was an entirely arbitrary speed chosen in the early 1930s when a period of no speed limits resulted in a rapidly increasing number of crashes and pedestrian deaths. An urban limit had to be set and 30mph was chosen as a compromise between those wanting to return to the old 20mph limit and politically-connected advocates for 40-50mph on urban roads.
There's a more basic fail in the assumption being shown by motorists that they have more right or priority to use the road than anyone else. In law, they don't and in most countries, motor is required to give way to non-motor which is required to give way to animal or foot traffic - and using vehicle size to intimidate is a serious criminal offence.
"Maybe cities will start installing "safety" fences to protect autonomous vehicles from random human behaviour."
Like that works well....
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pedestrian-guardrailing-ltn-209
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/guidance-on-assessment-of-pedestrian-guardrail.pdf
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/Item09-Guardrail-Removal-Programme.pdf
"Somewhere closer never becomes occupied unexpectedly. It always becomes occupied because something a little further away moved there (time travel excepted). Just as traffic lights never go red unexpectedly."
I am surprised Adam52 has so many downvotes. He is completely accurate in this observation.
There must be a lot of absolutely bloody awful drivers on this forum if they don't agree with his statement and all I can say is that the sooner insurance companies notice that robocars have lower crash/claim rates and start making human drivers pay much higher premiums unless they pass advanced tests, with mandatory retesting to _keep_ those lower premiums, the better.
There's an old joke that most cars know the laws of physics better than most drivers and it predates the use of computerised driver aids.
"Even with a backup driver, the AI really needs to be very, very, good at avoiding accidents. This is going to require some rethinking of test protocols, even if AI surpass regular human drivers in safety"
Many of us have been expecting something like this to happen sooner or later if automated vehicles were allowed to be programmed by american drivers, due to the uniquely pedestrian-hostile environments and laws in that part of the world.
Humans don't like running things over (even animals), but if you program your vehicle with an assumption that legal road rules are really the way things are then you'll get robotic killing machines if people don't do as 'expected' and only cross at "crosswalks", or with lights.
Programmers from other countries know that pedestrians have priority on the road at all times and are legally allowed to step onto the road from anywhere, so will make sure the machines are setup to react accordingly - and ensure that if a pedestrian 40 metres ahead looks to be about to step onto the road, that the vehicle is already slowing down.
Arizona is one of those states which is one of the shittier places for pedestrian safety, which makes it a lousy place for testing robot cars - sure you can test how they go when things are 'normal', but you have very few exception conditions appearing to exercise the "non-normal" testing space and that means the supervising hoomun gets complacent, sleepy and too slow to react when things go pear-shaped.
"why was the pedestrian-cyclist crossing the road that that point?"
Unlike the USA, in most of the rest of the world a motorist is required to avoid running over pedestrians on the road no matter whether they're meant to be there or not.
If the car could have predicted the collision and pulled up then it should have. Even if it couldn't have stopped in time, it should have attempted an emergency stop.
38mph impact = 95% chance of death
35mph=50%,
30mph=5%
20mph=1%
At 38mph, most cars can stop in around 2-3 car lengths once the brakes are applied on dry road. It takes a significantly longer distance for a human to react and get foot from accelerator to brake.
Laws giving cars priority, 'jaywalking' and general pedestrian hostility on US roads are a direct result of decades of lobbying by the US car industry. The USA used to have the best public transport system in the world until it was systematically targetted and destroyed by General Motors between the late 1920s and 1955. They collected a couple of antitrust convictions for it, but that didn't stop the activity.
Labour or Conservative as party labels don't align well with the 4-dimensionality of actual political alignments. Nor do simple "left/right" labels.
The vast majority of voters are centrist, however whoever's actually _in_ government is controlled by a very small number of people in a very small number of seats - the "swing voters"
It's the swing group who have marched to the right/authoritarian/neoliberal policies. The question is whether they led or followed the political parties in that direction.
"a report of 1.4Kg of Californium being found in the back of a Car in Turkey."
The BBC says it's Californium-252 - which has a half-life of 2.6years and it's a _very_ strong neutron emitter
Wikipedia says: "Only two sites produce californium-252: the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, and the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad, Russia. As of 2003, the two sites produce 0.25 grams and 0.025 grams of californium-252 per year, respectively"
If it was really that much in that small a space, then there are going to be a lot of dead journalists and police in a short period of time and we have a lot more to worry about than people running around with 1.4kg of the stuff - like where 1.4kg of the stuff was MADE.
"Oak is a particularly fire-resistant timber because it is very strong and dense so that it chars rather than burns"
There's at least one type of eucalypt so dense that it's known as "firebricks" - it's almost impossible to work as it ruins metal tools and it's around twice the density of water.
"I wonder how common this was."
Very. Prior to Telcos taking over ISPs mostly grew out of hobbyist BBSes and to be frank it's easier to have a bunch of cheap, redundant desktop systems than a few expensive servers, especially when in the 1990s getting parts for said desktop systems was usually much faster (read: less than two hours) than for the servers (read: weeks)
"On opening the door the engineers discovered that the internal rack was no longer a neat rectangle - it was now a diamond rhombus. "
On a similar shipping note, a newspaper in a town I lived in acquired a "new" (secondhand) computer markup and typesetting system from another country for a "not insubstantial" sum of money. This was shipped internationally in a 20 foot container and then for reasons only known to the shipping company, unpacked on the dock and loaded into the back of a large open topped truck for the last 400 miles.
Apart from the issues of things moving around during the trip on the twisty roads in that part of the world (did someone mention sliding across the deck?), the icing on the cake was that the truck had so much extra space compared to the container that the company packed out the load by adding extra cargo headed in the same direction - large bags of superphosphate fertilizer.
By the time the shipment arrived, the system was not only battered and bent, but there was a fine coating of corrosive powder in every single part of the entire system. The entire thing had to be written off at a seven figure cost.
The kicker is that the delivery contract specified container service door to door (to ensure things arrived in good shape, everything was well packed inside the container), so legal claims went in against the haulier - who promptly went out of business and then phoenixed - meantime the seller demanded payment for what was a working system when it left their premises. It took several years to resolve.
What I remember from the bad old days was how every ISP wanted customers to manually configure their settings and provided CDroms or floppy installers which did this without telling the poor user what had happened - effectively nobbling their connections if they were jumping around between ISPs.
Which led to "interesting" fun'n'games with queries to or from other outfits' DNS servers. I took the simple option of redirecting locally-originated queries using competitor ISP DNS to the local servers (for speed) and blocking remote queries after I found an entire Australian ISP using my servers for DNS to the tune of about 1/4 of my total bandwidth at the time.
Even Trumpet Winsock understood PPP server-provided options and if you told users to "just leave it alone" things usually worked better than when anyone attempted configuration.
"You are mistaking the DEFEAT of the Soviet Union with the WIN when it fell. These two events while coinciding in time were not exactly the same."
There's also the issue that the cold war itself was arguably ended in the early 1960s when Krushev refused to let let soviet scientists built a world-ending nuclear bomb out of a cargo ship that would cruise up and down the US eastern seaboard - the tsar bomba would have been tiny by comparison.
"So economics really won the cold war/technological war, and not political values."
Something which is so well known that the USA has been frantically attempting to hide its _real_ military GDP spend for quite some time (officially it's 5%, practically it's a lot higher than that) in order to avoid spooking markets.
Occasionally things leak, like the US army managing to misplace $6 trillion in one year on a $800 million annual budget.
"IIRC it was nonstop Trump-bashing once he started winning primaries. "
Who was it who said "there's no such thing as bad publicity" ?
One of the more paradoxical things about negative media reports about companies (eg, XYZ gets hacked, billions of user records leaked) is that it results in a spike in customer numbers for that company in the ensuing weeks.
The more interesting thing to note is that even if you have never setup a facebook account, there's a(t least one) facebook profile for you in existence already.
FB have been data stalking people for a long time and putting together profiles based on what they can assemble. One of the more interesting questions is how accessible these ghost profiles are to the APIs.
"Can't see any legal training mentioned."
_Most_ law school graduates don't go on to become lawyers - Being a legal specialist M.Law/PhD(Law) is actually a better career choice and the bar is for people who like being showy.
"Often fixing the symptom rather than the underlying problem."
Apart from having just described Microsoft's model for the entire 1990s-2000s, in a lot of cases the underlying problem WAS the style and intent of the original author.
On more than one occasion the correct fix was to replace the code entirely.
"What's easier to store for later? Gas or heat?"
That depends what you're doing, but one of the bigger problems with solar thermal plants is that they've generally turned out to be prodigious consumers of natural gas to keep them warm/hot overnight, else they have a large startup lag in the morning.
The Nevada plant apparently uses 2/3 of the amount of gas that a purely gas-driven power station would consume, with a much higher capital and maintenance cost.
I don't know how the Spanish plant is managing to stay hot enough to keep its salts molten all night but the bigger problem is that even if it works as claimed, such plants simply can't scale to provide existing power demands, let alone replace carbon emissions in transportation and domestic heating, because the amount of suitable land isn't there (the Spanish plant consumes a lot of cooling water, which is ok due to its location. Most solar plants don't have readily available water sources)
"how the fuck are we ever going to safely decommission all those nuclear power stations?"
More easily than all those coal ash ponds across the USA (the 2 largest environmental disasters in the USA so far this century have been coal ash pond dam breaks).
Highly radioactive stuff is easy to deal with - "Wait a while". Three Mile Island's melted-down reactor is being diassembled at the moment. Chemical poisons are the gift that keeps on giving.
The better question to ask is why we're still using nuclear power systems that involve radioactive material being plonked in the middle of a steam boiler (bomb) instead of using a safer heat transfer medium/moderator proven in the 1960s by the same guy who invented the steam boiler method for a submarine and realised that scaling it up to power station sizes was too dangerous to contemplate.
"Try melting the ice in the condensate drain pipe with a kettle of hot water."
Yeah, that works - for about fifteen minutes, then it just freezes up again.
As a practical matter (as miniBeast is on its way) it's easier to disconnect the drain and attach a temporary hose to a bucket. You can sort out the run so it won't get exposed to freezing weather at a later date.
This kind of thing is an installation FAIL, usually justified by "It doesn't get cold enough to freeze pipes around here mate"
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