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Comment Re:When they test these autonomous cars... (Score 1) 167

by Bonobo_Unknown (#48750131) Attached to: Mercedes-Benz's Self-Driving Concept Car Is Here

That's why there's still controls to drive it non autonomously.

And if that is the response, that is why autonomous cars will NEVER work on public roads.

Either the car drives itself 100% of the time, or I drive it 100% of the time.

If someone thinks that you're going to be driving along in your car not paying attention to the road, and suddenly the computer is doing to say "fuck it, I don't know, you do it" they're complete morons.

It sounds silly but that's exactly how autopilot and fly by wire systems work in Airbus and Boeing aircraft and they have hundreds of passengers at a time.

Comment Re:When they test these autonomous cars... (Score 1) 167

by Bonobo_Unknown (#48750115) Attached to: Mercedes-Benz's Self-Driving Concept Car Is Here
>If someone thinks that you're going to be driving along in your car not paying attention to the road, and suddenly the computer is doing to say "fuck it, I don't know, you do it" they're complete morons. It sounds silly but that's exactly how autopilot and fly by wire systems work in Airbus and Boeing aircraft and they have hundreds of passengers at a time.

Comment Re: Its a cost decision (Score 1) 840

It's not about cost. It's about design. They used to build things to last.

Did they really? Then why isn't our world still full of old working things that require no maintenance? I mean I can agree with the impression that things used to be built to last, but I think it might have more to do with the fact that old things were put together by hand, and were very big and electronic components were big and simple. It used to be easy to find a faulty component and fix it, but now that everything's been shrunk and stuck on a chip it's no longer simply a matter of replacing a universally available component, you have to find and buy the correct chip, which can cost more than just going down to the shop and getting a new entire product. Old things are still around and have the fame of being reliable because they are simple to fix.
Cellphones

Kodak-Branded Smartphones On the Way 94

Posted by samzenpus from the shake-to-call dept.
An anonymous reader sends news about Kodak's latest attempt to come back from the grave. "For a while there it looked like Kodak's moment had come and gone, but the past few months have seen the imaging icon fight back from the brink of irrelevance. Now the company's planning to push a Kodak-branded smartphone, and thankfully it's not going to sue everyone in the business along the way this time. To be clear, Kodak won't actually make its own devices — instead, it's going to farm out most of the development work to an English company called Bullitt."
Robotics

The Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots 391

Posted by Soulskill from the quick-destroy-all-the-remaining-copies-of-Battlebots dept.
Jason Koebler writes: If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won't look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It's likely they won't be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper "Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.
Australia

New Cargo Ship Is 488 Meters Long 116

Posted by Soulskill from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports on the construction of Prelude, a new ship that will be the world's longest vessel. It is 488 meters long and 74 meters wide, built with 260,000 tons of steel and displacing five times as much water as an aircraft carrier. Its purpose is to carry an entire natural gas processing plant as it sits over a series of wells 100 miles off the coast of Australia. Until now, it hasn't been practical to move gas that comes out of the wells with ships. The gas occupies too much volume, so it is generally piped to a facility on shore where it is processed and then shipped off to energy-hungry markets. But the Prelude can purify and chill the gas, turning it into a liquid and reducing its volume by a factor of 600. It will offload this liquid to smaller (but still enormous) carrier ships for transport.

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