Re: What a delicious typo
NASA’s administrator Robert Lightfood
Well, he's on a diet.
4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
@bombastic bob,
I suppose that accident WOULD have been avoided by a human driver? And how many accidents are avoided by ROBOT drivers by comparison?
I think you misunderstood my point. In the Tesla incident the human involved appears to have had incorrect expectations of the level of autonomy the vehicle actually had, and was therefore not paying attention to the road. He was therefore unable to avoid the accident.
Had he been monitoring what the vehicle was doing, and moreover been looking out of the windows, then the chances are he could have avoided the accident.
The original point I was making is that none of the vehicles currently available are actually autonomous, and require that the human occupant monitors and manages the journey, and has to be ready to take over if the AI surrenders.
This doesn't match the hype, and if people buy the cars on the assumption that the vehicle will drive itself, then a lot more people are going to be killed because they are not expecting to have to dig the AI out of the shit.
I think it is commendable, and surprisingly forward thinking for governments to introduce legislation regarding autonomous vehicles before they come into widespread use.
However, I question quite why governments, not just in the US but in Europe too, are pushing the adoption of autonomous vehicles so enthusiastically.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the presently available vehicles meet SAE level 4 or 5, which means they still rely on the human occupant to take control in certain circumstances, and are therefore not able to be classed as fully autonomous.
Unless this is made unequivocally clear to the general public, and prospective owners of these vehicles, I foresee a marked increase in the sort of accidents typified by the recent Tesla fatality.
well dendrochronology is as good as independent evidence and can go back 12-13000 years
It's not as unreliable as human written evidence that may not have been using the same standards of accuracy we demand today...
Just to play devil's advocate here, dendrochronology cannot help with dates in the "billions of years" category that this article is talking about.
And actually, the science of dendrochronology is based very much on assumptions made by humans, so the standards of accuracy are not exemplary, by any means.
At the end of the day, dendrochronological evidence is not based on a primary source for dates older than 1000 years or so, and is merely extrapolated from more recent samples.
No, you are quite correct, broadcasting the limit direct to autonomous cars doesn't help manual drivers, but I envisaged it as being added to existing signage, rather than outright replacing it.
However you raise an interesting point that whilst ever there is a mix of autonomous and manually driven cars on the road, there is more potential for conflict over speed limits.
If it's a given that autonomous cars will always stick to the mandated speed limits, it is equally a given that manually driven cars (in general) will not, let's be honest, very few human drivers obey temporary speed restrictions, and you will have the situation where autonomous cars will all slow down to match the temporary limit, and manually driven cars will not, creating the potential for far more accidents.
No it needs to use visual clues to determine things such as temporary speed restrictions (e.g. motorways).
On the contrary, I would expect temporary speed restrictions to be broadcast direct to the car's AI, not have to be picked up from signs designed for humans to read.
On the other hand, I didn't see any mention of liability in the proposed laws, so have they not tackled the thorny problem of whose fault it is if an autonomous car is involved in an accident?
If the intention is that the car (and by extension the manufacturer) are at fault, then insurance companies access to "black-box" data from the vehicle at the time of the incident would be required, I would have thought.
things like setting a maximum speed, even if the vehicle can reliably spot speed-limit signs
Surely autonomous cars won't rely on visual cues or manually entered speed data, but will either have that data as part of the satnav feed or a built in database of all mandated limits.
I'm also quite sceptical about these alleged attacks, primarily because I really can't see what the motive would be.
Cuba and America have only recently re-established diplomatic relations after decades of sanctions, and I don't understand why it would be of benefit to Cuba to piss of the Americans again.
The other problem is that as a modern airliner flies, it gets lighter (you're burning off the fuel as you go) and thus the aircraft becomes slightly more efficient (same power output hauling less weight around). Battery-powered aircraft do not have this useful feature.
And this also means that the aircraft has a landing weight almost the same as its take-off weight, which makes it much harder to land safely.
Back in the early eighties, I worked on communications links for radio repeaters for public utilities and emergency services radios.
We had a rural repeater site on top of a hill, which had a microwave link to another repeater site on another hill about ten miles away. in between the two were a number of other ranges of hills, but all just low enough that line-of-sight was maintained.
This microwave link worked fine for a number of years, and then suddenly began to fail intermittently but always around the same time on a Thursday afternoon. It didn't happen every week, but say every two weeks.
After a lot of investigation, and a compete replacement of equipment at both ends, it was discovered that on one of the intervening hills was a small country lane which went over the brow of the hill more or less in line with the line-of-site link.
Off that lane was a sort of lay-by or turning circle, which was used by the local bus service to turn round at the end of one of their routes.
The buses would drop off at their last stop lower down the valley, and drive up and turn round, and then wait for half an hour before starting the next run.
Turns out that most of the time, they used a single decker bus on that route, but Thursdays were market day, so they used to put a double-decker on the route on that day. If it happened to park at a certain spot in the lay-by, it used to neatly break the line of site between the two repeater towers.
The only reason we found out about this was that we set up a temporary intermediate link (a van with a couple of dishes on it) in that lay-by whilst we were testing, and the bloke saw the bus come and park up whilst he was there, otherwise we could still have been looking!
The microwave antenna on both of the masts was at the very top of the mast, so couldn't be raised, but we managed to build an extension for the antenna on the other mast, and re-align the path just enough that it would be above the possible obstruction.
So, Gareth, are you suggesting that Bombardier should shut up and accept a 220% tax on their sales to the US, even though Boeing have no comparable aircraft to the C series, and therefore there is no valid conflict of interest?
Do you think that the British government should not protest such a blatant misuse of power?
@Rich 11
Nice one :)
I was actually thinking of this bit though:
A team will also test how to grow food under Martian conditions
which is bollocks unless you simulate the lesser gravity - plants will surely grow in a completely different manner in low gravity conditions.
@Big John
Okay, but I was also alluding to liberal vs. conservative politics in general. Does that not exist in Britain?
No, in Britain we have the Conservative party, who are traditionally thought of as right leaning, the Labour party, who are left leaning, and the Liberal Democrats, who are inconsequential but probably centerist.
If it does, I'd be willing to bet that the same effect applies there too, since the media there seems to be quite similar as in the US.
It depends on which bit of the British media you want to look at. The BBC is almost always toeing the party line of the establishment, which may or may not echo the views of the current ruling party.
The Times, once considered to be the most rigorously balanced newspaper, is now owned by Murdoch, along with the Sunday Times and The Sun, and they are all broadly supportive of the Conservative viewpoint.
The Daily Mail, the Independant, and The Telegraph are strong Conservative supporters. The Daily Mirror and The Guardian are strong supporters of a Labour view.
So by far the majority of British newspapers are right-wing.
Smith is due to appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on October 3 to answer questions about the hack. It's not immediately clear whether or not do Rego Barros will take his place.
I suppose it doesn't matter, really, they could both say "I have no recollection of these events" with equal clarity...
"I never used it, well possibly once, but never been near a keyboard so couldn't really, well let me tell you.... their numbers are WAAYY WAAYY down, by the way, they won't be around much longer....We're going to build a beautiful... and Mexico is going to pay...covfefe..."
Spot on...
Deserves one of these at least