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Comment Re:Maybe you should have read more than one senten (Score 1) 264

And this is why the "channel" Internet is a horrible, horrible idea, which needs to be nuked from orbit, just to be safe. It'll be the return of corporate-interest TV, with all the propaganda that comes with it - but with the veneer of "it's on the Internet, so people checked it!".

Comment Re:How many minutes until this is mandatory? (Score 1) 287

That's not even the worst offender. CA has lots of freeways that sit right next to frontage roads and on the same level as them. The only thing that separates the two is a bit of chain link fence and about 10 feet of grass. Guess what those frontage roads have? Yep, speed signs. Guess what a car I test drove picked up on as the speed limit for the freeway? Yep, the speed on the frontage road.

This is a terribly thought out idea. I'd rather trust a GPS map that has the speedlimits assigned to it.

Comment Re:Kill them all. (Score 1) 336

You mean, like how we effectively nuked Saddam's army and occupied Iraq? Your only way to continue is by actually turning all of Iraq into a glass desert. Then all of the Middle East. Then all of North Africa. And when the Russians and Chinese start calling, you'll have to turn the world into a glass desert.

Yeah, no thanks. I'd rather deal with a few crazies killing a few locals by taking a few potshots at them from a distance.

Comment Re:Kill them all. (Score 1) 336

Let me ask you this: if a country would come into the US and start razing cities and towns, would that break your will to fight? Or would that just inflame your desire to see of the invaders dead?

The problem with your approach is that it defeats the purpose of killing terrorists: it creates more than it kills. The only way you can actually succeed is if you wipe out every opposing person - and in today's connected world, that will very quickly be everybody but you and your buddies. Are you willing to go to war with the entire world? Even if they drop nukes on you?

Carthage worked because it was a city state surrounded by a desert. There were not enough people to take the side of Carthage once it was destroyed. But you won't find that today anymore.

WW1 and WW2 are interesting examples, where a local superpower thought it could win a total war.

Comment Re:I'm one of those engineers... (Score 1) 341

On the speed detection: TSR is not just improving the accuracy of the speed detection. How do I know? The Tesla read a sign on the side of the freeway, and thought it was the speed limit for the freeway. It wasn't. It was the speed limit for the frontage road next to the freeway, and I was about 30 mph over that speed. So whatever they're doing, they're not just doing a tree search weighted with the currently known speed.

But yes, that's 101-level.

Fair enough that the hard issue is the amount of time the lane analysis needs to be right. Here's something though that doesn't make sense to me in your problem description: why in god's name would you ever consider a discrete change in assessment of where the lane is to be valid? Specifically, why would you perform an action based on a sudden change in where the lanes are? Granted, I'm making an assumption about continuous lanes, but the scenario you're describing is that the car is humming along in the right lane just fine and dandy, and then, due to bug/memory corruption/light glare off of the cameras, the algorithm thinks it needs to move exactly one lane over. Yes, it's hard to get the TP rate up to 5 nines, but then again, the decision process should never be such that a jump in lane condition results in an immediate action.

There's a separate problem with line markings disappearing, but I contend that that's a problem even human drivers struggle with.

Finally, I don't think that I can solve this - I've seen it solved: by Google and Audi, specifically. Now, how "solved" this is? Google has a few 100k miles under the belt of its autonomous cars, Audi quite a bit less. But both have navigated in traffic, with passengers inside. My incredulity doesn't come from me having solved it, it comes from having used other people's work 20 years ago to answer the question "what am I looking at", and having seen it progress from edge detection in a jpg to cars driving on their own in a fenced-off terrain 10 years ago, and now have seen driverless cars on the road. Doing what you're describing as not solved.

Maybe you should talk to the Google engineers. Or the Audi ones. Or the Tesla ones. I hear Tesla opened up all its patents anyway. Maybe they opened up how they do their lane detection and decision process.

Comment Re:I'm one of those engineers... (Score 1) 341

Seriously? It's called OCR. That's being done for things way harder than lines on the road. To the point that the Teslas today will display what the speed is on the road that they read from the sign off towards the side.

As others pointed out, you don't just use one signaller. You use multiple ones, chained. The odds that all are wrong in the same exact way will be much, much less than 10%.

Furthermore, you don't need to be perfect to improve road safety. You just need to improve on the average driver. Which is much, much easier than perfection.

Japan

No Fuel In the Fukushima Reactor #1 234

An anonymous reader writes To nobody's surprise, the Japanese press reports that a new way to look at the inside of one of the Fukushima 1 damaged reactors has shown the fuel is not in place. Engineers have not been able to develop a machine to directly see the exact location of the molten fuel, hampered by extremely high levels of radiation in and around the reactors, but a new scan technique using muons (details on the method in the media are missing) have shown the fuel is not in its place. While Tepco's speculation is that the fuel may be at the bottom of the reactor, it is a safe bet that at least some of it has burned through and has gone on to create an Uruguay syndrom.

Comment Why are they talking about call center turn over? (Score 4, Insightful) 127

The reason call center turn over is so huge is because the job sucks. Low pay, tough hours, no control over what you do, little chance for success, and career means becoming a manager who has no training and needs to explain to his/her bosses why the peons are leaving in droves.

The summary shows the problem with big data: it's not the data that counts, it's what you do with it. And no algorithm in the world can make you make good decisions.

Microsoft

Is Microsoft Trying to Become "King of Search" With Cortana Strategy? 107

New submitter Ammalgam writes: Microsoft recently announced that they were porting Cortana over to both Apple and iOS. This move seems to be puzzling to the larger Microsoft community because on it's face, Cortana is not per se a commercial product. But there is an interesting theory emerging. Windows10update.com is speculating that the insertion of Cortana into other platforms is a "Trojan Horse" strategy that will ultimately have Windows, iOS and Android users sending their search requests to Bing. The theory is that enough of those requests will bring Bing to Google's level.
Businesses

Uber Rival Lyft Raises $530M, Will Beef Up IT 54

jfruh writes "Uber may seem like an unstoppable juggernaut, but its main carhailing service rival Lyft isn't giving up. The company just raised half a billion dollars in funding, much of it from Japanese investors. From the article: "Lyft has raised US$530 million in its latest funding round, and plans to use the money to beef up its IT staff, expand its footprint and boost existing services. Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten led the round. With the latest cash infusion, Lyft has raised a total of $862 million from investors. The ride-hailing company is now reportedly valued at $2.5 billion."

Comment Re:Full blooded American here (Score 2, Insightful) 671

Yes, because writing an opinion that differs from yours is clearly only possible by being paid to do so. *eyeroll*

Making public a lot of things that people suspected but didn't quite know did indeed damage relationships. Had he not released the documents, the relationships would have continued as before.

Whether or not the secret actions should have been authorized in the first place is an entirely different issue. From my perspective, having to stamp "secret" on an authorization to do things that you know would piss off your friends is a sign that you probably should not be doing these things, or make you re-evaluate who your friends are.

Comment Re:never again (Score 1) 64

At least in 2nd Edition, you're supposed to re-draw a new character at random if you die. This only stops once a player has reached the center space (Crown of Command by default).

You generally don't want to leave the Outer Region until you've gotten a pretty powerful character. If you do want to cross the river, you can buy an axe for 3 gold and build a raft. Bags of gold are easy to come by - you're practically stubbing your toes on the things if you're going around drawing Adventure cards.

The main knock on 2nd Edition is that it does take a really long time to play. But it's still fun once in a while.

Comment Re:That is okay (Score 1) 301

There is a simple way to prevent unions from gaining a foothold in your company: stop treating your employees like crap. Stop implementing life-sapping schedules that prevent workers from having meaningful relationships, give them solid healthcare that they don't want to trade away, give them a paycheck that allows them to live within a decent distance of their work, and don't treat them like meatbags whose sole purpose is to make you more money. If they still want to unionize after that? Fine, throw 'em to the wolves. But quite frankly, reading through the description of what the bus drivers get, the company had this coming.

That said, fuck the unions as well. No, a bus driver isn't the same thing as a programmer. Stop pandering to your audience and do something useful instead.

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