The biggest thing is that people drive when they shouldn't. Sometimes your car just isn't going to do it. All season tires, 2WD, ice storm. Yeah that's when you see people sliding down hills. There's no traction and no automation is going to fix that. The best thing it will do, no joke, is just not start the car in those conditions.
You do see a spike of people who don't do well to adjust to winter driving. They don't give longer gaps, make sure they have more time before crossing intersections than they do. Computers will do that much better, eventually. I can't wait to go to work or drive around the city and not have to worry about someone texting, doing makeup or making poor driving decisions. Have a nap on long trips, watch a movie, finish up some work.
I can see computers having an amazing reaction time to some kid running into the street to catch a ball. An animal running in front of you at night. It's going to take awhile though. I wouldn't trust it right now to safely take me anywhere. There are just so many variables that the engineers have to account for. Weather conditions, people conditions, car conditions and on and on. It's nuts.
> The biggest thing is that people drive when they shouldn't.
It is extremely common to drive beyond your actual "in complete control" speed.
You are supposed to drive slowly enough in snow so that you can correct for unexpected patches of black ice or rocks in the snow slush. You are supposed to leave a long enough gap to be able to react and stop if the car in front of you unexpectedly fully slams on their brakes. You are supposed to drive slowly enough to stop if a kid runs out between parked cars.
Humans almost never do, because unexpected things almost never happen. Traffic flows faster and perhaps smoother, because we willingly accept driving at speeds where we can avoid most, but not all hazards.
But if we expect self-driving cars to always put safety first, then we will find them to be "tediously" slow, even if they have better sensors and faster reaction speed than us.
I don't think we'll care quite so much that a 20 minute drive is now 25 minutes when we have wifi and sitting in the car is basically like sitting in our living room. Driving slow is only tedious when you're doing it, not when you're able to get work done or be entertained throughout.
Yeah the norms will be completely different. If an adult kept asking a bus driver or airline stewardess "are we going to be there soon?" while fidgeting and straining to look out the front windows, most people would consider that adult to be poorly adjusted to modern living. It will be the same for robocars.
I don't mind stringent enforcement of life saving measures on a place as dangerous as the road, even if it means everybody moving at 10kph in bad conditions. Roads are the biggest killer of youth globally[1], minor emotional factors such as 'tediousness' should not be allowed to get in the way of solving such a big problem
I drive at a "correct" following distance. Way back when I took my driving test I was told to allow 1 car length for every 10 MPH speed. So on the highway I leave at least 6 car lengths.
I constantly need to tap the brake and back away as a car cuts into the lane. Almost no one on the highway leaves adequate space for human reaction times.
I would say that 1 car length / 10 mph is actually a very short following distance. If an average car is 15 feet in length, at 60 mph, that is only 90 feet. At 60 mph, 90 feet of following distance is only 1.02 seconds. (1 mph == 1.4667 fps)
When I was taught to drive, we were told that 2 seconds of following distance was appropriate.
This just reinforces your point that the typical human driver leaves insufficient following distance.
Some of the roads in the UK have chevrons painted on them at intervals. The idea is that at a normal speed for that road, if you can see two chevrons between you and the car in front, you're leaving the right distance.
It's a good idea; the distance is always bigger than you think.
Not bad, but you need an element from the square of velocity (for kinetic energy/braking distance) there to be safe. 1 second is fairly okay at low speeds, but at 60 mph (~100 km/h, 27 m/s) two seconds is shortish and if you are doing 200 km/h (as on a German Autobahn) then 2 seconds (100 m) is not safe in my opinion.
(Although the penalty line in Germany is just this, half the speed in km/h to get meters, i.e. driving closer than 100 meters if going 200 km/h gives you a ticket for tailgating)
Completely agree with you. Should have stated that i was taught in the US, where it would be ... slightly atypical to be going 200km/h ;) At the time that I took drivers education classes, the US national speed limit was still 55mph, about 88km/h. At that speed, 2 seconds is probably a good rule of thumb for something that's pretty easier for a driver to observe.
True of course. At low speeds, the braking distance is negligible, and the margin is needed for driver reaction. When exceeding 60-80 km/h, the amount of kinetic energy and correspondingly the braking distance will start to dominate what is necessary for safety margin.
When I'm not in heavy traffic I give even more space. But unfortunately at a certain density of traffic the aggression caused by a safe distance actually makes it unsafe as people cut you off and try to "retaliate" for the imagined insult.
This incidentally is also (in my opinion) the hardest skill in general aviation. Knowing when not to fly a small plane because the weather is unsuitable seems to be very difficult for people to master.
The difference is, in aviation, when you get this wrong you will very quickly no longer be a pilot. Or alive.
DS9 needs to watched in sequential order, TOS doesn't, TNG to a certain extent should be watched in order, but doesn't have to be. Some major arch's rely on character points or what has happened with say the borg.
Voyager and Enterprise aren't as sequential as DS9 but should be watched in order. There are a significant number of episodes in each you can drop from your watching order, but I couldn't tell you which ones. They both have very low points in my opinion.
As for the movies I'm sure there's a watching order. Some of the movies are very meh. If you look online you might find a good order, but if you get really into just watch them in order.
Weird I've done that before but I didn't even know until i went back to the other device. It's only happened twice that I left it running on a radio station though.
Did you read the part in the article where he his legal forbidden from starting up a company or even working at a startup?
He should have just stuck with the job until he found another one that would support his green card efforts. Switching careers part way through he should have known was risky. The lack of information that is presented on him for his reasoning besides "Well they weren't sponsoring me anyways" seems pretty lack luster and not well thought out for someone who is well educated and as intelligent as himself. This article seems like a desperate plea after making a mistake.
I hope he finds a legal way to stay in the country, or come back but the article was pretty whiny about something he already should have known.
If the contest doesn't specify how often you may enter then, I see no problem with it. It may not be exactly ethical, and really shitting thing to do if you were an adult in what appears to be a kids contest. If the contest doesn't specify the number of entries go for it, you've done nothing wrong.
If the contest did specify and the kid stuffed the ballot that's pretty low, but at least a kid who was super dedicated and excited got it. I wouldn't do it but I would definitely shrug it off if that were the case. I would be angry as hell if an adult did it, or encouraged a kid to do it.
There is a lot of things in life that aren't explicitly disallowed but make you a selfish asshole if you do them. If a kid was brought up properly by there parent and can assess right or wrong and then sees other kids being unethical and then winning, it only promotes negative behavior.
I think we should be safe but I do think we should let people explore. It's crazy to think what I did just 20 years ago is now something people would be frightened of(run off and play with friends). I didn't have play dates I didn't have boundaries, I had parents who gave me morals and let me guide myself. I had adventures with friends I will never forget, I had games where we ruled until we went home. If someone got hurt(and it did) we got an adult, it was a simple concept.
I have kids now and while they aren't as old as I was when I started roaming the neighborhood it saddens me that I'm frightened to let them. Not because I'm worried someone will harm them and/or kidnap them, but because I'm worried someone will call the cops and CPS will come. That I will have a blip on a piece of paper(or electronic file these days) and that it could lead to court orders and in an extreme my kid taken away if only for a little while.
I know that the police have to do their job and if someone reports a kid wonder around they should respond. I just wish that they weren't forced to call CPS in every instance(they are required any time a minor is involved here), like they aren't capable of assessing a situation.
We live in a different world, but I don't believe it is any less safe than it was 20 years ago.
You do see a spike of people who don't do well to adjust to winter driving. They don't give longer gaps, make sure they have more time before crossing intersections than they do. Computers will do that much better, eventually. I can't wait to go to work or drive around the city and not have to worry about someone texting, doing makeup or making poor driving decisions. Have a nap on long trips, watch a movie, finish up some work.
I can see computers having an amazing reaction time to some kid running into the street to catch a ball. An animal running in front of you at night. It's going to take awhile though. I wouldn't trust it right now to safely take me anywhere. There are just so many variables that the engineers have to account for. Weather conditions, people conditions, car conditions and on and on. It's nuts.