Posts by Terry Barnes

Re: Really?

just what are the advantages of business broadband access to the internet over domestic access to the internet if you are on a best speed possible tariff?

Usually things like a fixed rather than dynamic IP address, more subnets available and faster repair times.

Re: @Terry Barnes (again) --Not a problem solved

"Ah, yes, that ol' chestnut "sufficient resources". The one thing that our Corporate Overlords will do everything in their power to not provide, because...well, providing "sufficient resources" is bad for business, as it doesn't increase Shareholder Value™.

You really aren't from around here, are you?"

Not finishing or launching a project because of penny-pinching is even worse for shareholder value. Why would any leader deliberately not provide the resources required - man or machine - to get the job done?

You write a business case and it gets approved or not. The time to penny pinch is before the approval not after - if you can't afford the project don't start it. Elon Musk doesn't strike me as a leader who starves his teams of whatever it is they need to get something out of the door.

Re: @AC w.r.t AF447

"But what I am absolutely certain of is that having an autonomous system throw back the controls to humans under "difficult" conditions is a recipe for disaster. And equally for cars the conditions that are unlikely to be handled well, such as an unexpected conflict of sensors while approaching a junction, blind bend, etc, will leave the human operator with bugger-all time to come to terms with being in control, let alone to apprise the situation and react accordingly."

I believe drivers are taught a manoeuvre known as the "emergency stop" to deal with such incidents. An advantage a car has over a flying thing is that such a thing is even possible. Why would a self-driving car not just implement an emergency stop in such situations?

Re: @Crisp

"all a crim has to do is step out in front of your (ignorant) AI car and it will very nicely stop so you can be robbed or kidnapped. "

Your argument being that a human would just mow them down and kill them?

Re: Not a problem solved

"Aircraft and Power stations are hardly consumer products. If you are expecting future autonomous vehicle software to be designed using the same technologies (and budgets) as Airbus and Boeing, you are misguided."

VW spent $17Bn on R&D last year. Toyota and Ford aren't far behind. Toyota's revenue was $26Bn. I think they can afford to do this properly.

Re: Not a problem solved

"Yet in these very pages day after day we have bug after bug surfacing, sometimes years old."

In real-time safety critical systems developed and maintained by certified teams? Not so much. Airplanes and nuclear power stations tend not to get BSODs, for obvious reasons and by design.

Re: Not a problem solved

"What happens when an autonomous car is approaching an accident and only has a choice between mounting the pavement and possibly killing many pedestrians, or going into the accident and killing the driver?"

The range of sensing inputs are so much greater that it would stand a far better chance of stopping before it got to the accident - these cars can, for example, see much farther ahead, they can see round corners before a human eye could, and they're tracking the movement of every vehicle around them.

Re: Not a problem solved

"The reason why computers aren't as adaptable as human brains is the human brain cheats. It doesn't process every bit of information, it does not evaluate every possibility, it takes short cuts and uses steriotypes to get to a conclusion quickly"

And that's why it's often wrong. Wrong enough that 100 people die on US roads every single day.

I'd understand some of these arguments if humans were provably perfect, or near to it, but we're not. Limited sensory input, slow operation of the 'observe, assess, plan, act' cycle (the basis of a safe system of driving) and an unconscious decision making bias that is exacerbated by tiredness and mood. Travelling at motor vehicle speeds is something relatively new in human experience and we've not evolved adequate sensory and decision making systems to be very good at it.

Re: Not a problem solved

"but the fact is that people are lazy and will always try to save costs where ever possible."

I think the ownership model changes when self driving vehicles become commonplace. Why would you need to own one? I know there are some specific use cases where having access to a specific vehicle is important - my son for example is a wheelchair user and has lots of kit to carry around with him and it's far easier to just leave most of that kit in the car.

In the main though, why own something that gets used for a tiny portion of the day? I trhink a lot of the legla questions about using these things get solved in a lease model too - even if you lease something to be permanently available to you, having it owned and maintained by the manufacturer gets rid of all the problems you list.

As for duff kit and dirty sensors - I'd pretty much expect these vehicles to refuse to depart if they don't have a defined minimum set of kit available, and I'd expect them to take themselves off to be fixed or call for service when things do go awry.

Re: Not a problem solved

"Whenever I hear "it's just an engineering problem" I draw my own conclusions concerning the speaker"

I think it's pretty widely used to mean that a problem isn't impossible - the laws of physics don't preclude the thing under discussion being done, the science that underpins any solution is known and that applying sufficient resources will thus solve it.

Once it's known that something is possible, the discussion moves to how engineering principles should be applied to arrive at a solution. If I was addressing a group of engineers in a business context it would be shorthand as well for telling them that budget and resource issues are taken care off - go do your thing.

"I can't wait to see a self-drive car in a rush hour at a big intersection or roundabout..."

Your wait is over;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEsvQOHreg4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrmorE5W1tM

Re: Not a problem solved

"a self drive car cannot possibly arrive at the correct solution every time."

That's a bold claim.

It's far more likely to do it reliably and regularly than a human. It will take statistically proven decisions, and it will do that from a much broader array of sensing inputs than a human could.

I struggle with seeing how people who work in computing could see this as unsolvable. It's simply an engineering problem - the right inputs processed at the right time, matched against a statistically driven decision tree. How is any of that impossible?

An large number of possible input variables just needs more resources than a small number - it doesn't make the problem unsolvable.

Re: Am I the only one...

" I know driving standards are pretty poor, but I still don't trust a 'puter to do it instead of a human."

Almost every accident is down to human error. Some are down to our inherent sensory limitations.

Self driving vehicles can operate on a co-operative basis with other vehicles, taking input from a much broader range of sensing devices, networked between vehicles. They'll make reliable decisions based on statistically proven outcomes and won't get tired or cranky or drunk.

More people die on the roads every month in the US than were killed in 9/11 - in 2012, 33.5k people died in road accidents. I'll take the computer every time.

Re: @45rpm

"A lot of people don't like the LGBT community not because of their sexual preference but because they use their current advantage in the workforce to screw over everyone else, and complain about discrimination at the same time."

It certainly seems like you don't.

Swap LGBT for black and sexual preference for colour, and then think about how bigoted your statement is.

If a minority group had an advantage - guess what - they wouldn't be a minority. That's kind of how it works. Stop whining because someone tipped the scales ever so slightly away from being completely in your favour, in all cases, all the time.

Re: I wasn't under the impression that they were being argued for/against

"No, of course you weren't. Except that's effectively what Comcast and Verizon are charging Netflix for: QoS from Netflix to the Comcast servers."

They'll just achieve the same end with a private line between the Netflix servers and Comcast routers. Anything that gets outlawed on a public network will just move to a private one - nothing will change.

Re: He seems to have failed to understand

" If VOIP packets get priority then ALL VOIP packets are treated equal, no matter where they came from."

Even if the network is congested and one of the calls is an emergency call?

And wouldn't giving VOIP priority at all provide me with an incentive to game the system by marking my packets as being VOIP, regardless of the real content?

"Surely then it's for the hospital to pay for a better connection?"

No, in the definition of net neutrality most activists are using, that would be illegal. They can pay for a faster access service, but if that connection hits the public Internet, the packets have to take their chances with the rest.

Re: surely this is discrimination?

" if it happens to be your whole office is full of white males, then so what?"

Then it means your recruitment process is sexist and racist, because society isn't made up of white males. That won't be fixed by the magic equality fairy and so action has to be taken - like this one by Intel - to redress the balance.

Re: Forget true equality

"Those figures reflect the fact that less females, and less non whites have put themselves through the education required to get these jobs."

...because all the evidence available to them suggests that there's no job at the end of it for them if they do. That's the problem.

Re: This is the only reasonable way it works

Not every battery will be empty when it's swapped and there's plenty of capacity at night for charging.

Re: Hazard

"That doesn't stop governments from installing them as revenue-generators. I always said, if there was a genuine hazard and the intention was to really slow motorists down, you would have a highly visible camera housing, painted in bright orange."

That makes no sense though. Apart from specific junctions on some roads, it's stretches of road that are dangerous. It's impossible to have a camera that covers the whole stretch, though I suppose we could start to use average speed cameras instead and time people in and out of the dangerous section.

Stats show that people who have points for speeding are roughly twice as likely to have an at fault accident than a driver without, so there's clearly some merit in the cameras. they're unlikely to work as revenue raisers though as 1) in the UK all the fines go on driver awareness courses and 2) you only need to catch someone four times and the revenue the exchequer receives from a driver in terms of fuel tax (and sometimes income tax) tends to decline rather rapidly.

I avoid any problem by simply never speeding. I don't have camera warnings on my satnav, I just have it set to alert me if I exceed the limit by 1MPH.