The solution: leave the phone at work when you are off duty.
That would work...except that the employer insisted that she keep the phone with her and powered on at all times. According to the claim, she was on call for client emergencies, even when off the clock.
... the real question is, "Were the accidents something a human driver could have avoided?"
It's an interesting question. On the other hand, most collisions are something a human driver could have avoided somehow...but didn't.
Sometimes you have to yield right-of-way because it's clear the other driver isn't going to. Do autonomous cars know that?
I would be shocked if they didn't "know" something like it. I can't imagine any car (let alone the entire group of 44 which didn't have a collision) doing a full year of city driving without encountering multiple situations where another driver failed to appropriately yield the right of way.
The headline is: noooklear boogity boogity boogity.
It should be: large steam units have forced outages, and the grid is designed to handle them.
My point is this: we hear all the time "what good is solar power at night? Wind turbines when it's not windy?" I ask you: what good is a nuclear power station when the transformer blows up and it safely disengages from the grid for hours, days, or weeks? Think of this incident next time folks talk about how some renewable generator is unreliable. No generating unit is 100% reliable, and because big ones break, the grid must have substantial capacity available as backup. Far more than is necessary when it's unexpectedly cloudy or not windy.
buy a lottery ticket and hope to get run over by a rich guy so you can sue them
And the latter part of that dream manages to be an even worse proposal than the former:
As a New Yorker, I much prefer LaGuardia, and strongly disagree with calls for its closing.
The point is, I think, that in exchange for an improvement (real or hypothetical) in convenience for a small fraction of total air travellers, there is a substantial and arguably unnecessary burden of cost and inconvenience to the entire system (which is ultimately paid for out of everyone's pockets--and user experiences).
I would love to see these large airports replaced with multiple smaller airports. A larger percentage of the population would have an airport nearby, and average travel times would be reduced significantly.
Well no, it wouldn't. A fully-served point-to-point network with n nodes (cities served) has on the order of n squared links between nodes. The number of passengers desiring each direct link gets to be very small, very quick, meaning infrequent scheduled flights on small, underfilled, costly-per-seat aircraft. So what happens is that airlines adopt (to one extent or another) a hub-and-spoke model. Most direct point-to-point routings are dropped. If I want to fly from East Podunk, NY (POD) to Los Angeles, I can't get a direct flight POD-LAX. Instead, I get a hop to an airline's hub (JFK or ORD or DTW or wherever), and a connection from that hub to LA: POD-JFK-LAX, or POD-DTW-LAX, or POD-ORD-LAX.
If I want to go to a destination served by a smaller airport (let's call it West Lemon, CA: LEM), then I'm taking three flights: spoke to hub, hub to hub, hub to spoke: POD-JFK-LAX-LEM. And each of those flights carries with it the time penalties associated with loading and unloading passengers and cargo, and a risk of delays or cancellations due to weather and other circumstances--plus the plain old waiting for connections, because service to and from the small airports at POD and LEM is infrequent.
Worse still, all those little commuter flights linking the regional airports to the major hubs are going to take up gates and takeoff and landing slots at those busy airports, slowing down the whole system and/or pushing those less-important flights to less-desirable times of day. Taken all together, offering frequent (or even just daily) service to a lot of small airports is going to mean a lot more flights of a lot more smaller aircraft, and/or passengers frequently making multiple connections. It would be expensive per-seat and vulnerable to failures and delays.
Now, La Guardia is an interesting case. Since it's right next to downtown New York, it draws a substantial number of departing or arriving passengers, and enjoys a kind-of-weird pseudo-hub status for historical reasons. Practically speaking, though, it means that there are effectively two hubs (LGA and JFK) or even three (if we count EWR) serving the same area, resulting in needless duplication of services. Routes that could enjoy frequent service with inexpensive (per-seat) full-sized jets get less-full or more-expensive aircraft, or less-frequent services divided between two or three New York destinations. Local New Yorkers enjoy the appearance of convenient, direct flights, at the cost of making the rest of the system a bit worse and a bit more expensive for everyone.
police injury rates are _much_ higher than most work
Welp...sort of. The U.S. BLP recently published their 2013 census of fatal occupational injuries. The overall fatality rate for the workforce was 3.3 fatal injuries for every 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers per year. Management employees averaged 2.4; sales 1.6--no surprises there, really.
For employees in the "protective service occupations" - police, firefighters, correctional services, animal control, security guards, and so forth - the rate was 6.9 fatalities per 100,000 FTE. (I haven't been able to find data broken out by occupation within the category. If someone can find that, that would be great.) So that's what we expect--police, firefighters, and others do have a riskier job than the average, and riskier than the typical office worker. Somewhat surprisingly, the relative risk is only a factor of three or four different when comparing a police officer to, say, an IT manager.
But...there's the rest of the table. "Intallation, maintenance, and repair" occupations? 7.2 fatalities per 100,000. "Construction and extraction"? 12.2. "Transportation and material moving"? 14.9. "Farming, fishing, and forestry"? 23.9.
The real manly men, in real danger on the job, are apparently out there working with tools, building stuff, drilling for oil, driving big rigs, and cutting down trees.
And let's be honest--a lot of the injuries and fatalities sustained by police officers aren't directly attributable to violent suspects. A big chunk of them come from the fact that the typical frontline officer spends a lot of time moving around--in a patrol car, on a motorcycle, on foot, or on a bicycle. Special laws protecting police officers from insults don't actually reduce their likelihood of being in a vehicular accident, or getting clipped by a passing car during a traffic stop, or slipping on an icy sidewalk in the winter. Looking at the last ten years' police fatalities for the United States, the total number of officers killed in motor vehicle incidents (car and motorcycle crashes; hit by car) is 605. The total number of officers fatally shot, strangled, or stabbed is 553. (And I suspect that the proportion who get shot is even lower in Canada.)
even though the shuttle didn't have an equivalent system for many conditions - see challenger
That was true for 1986 NASA, certainly. Post-Challenger there were major changes (extensions) to the list of abort options - including a new bail-out capability - which made the loss of two engines crew-survivable for the entire ascent, and the loss of all three main engines survivable for most of the ascent. (See the Wikipedia article for details.) As it turns out, we have higher expectations 30 years on. Whodathunkit?
Liberals wanted hard limits on CO2 emissions, no exceptions. Credits were a conservative-proposed, market-based alternative. Liberals weren't that fond of the idea--allowing swaps makes it more difficult to pinpoint violations and takes longer to hit the desired total CO2 decreases--but it had bipartisan support so could actually be enacted, and would make a measurable improvement. So we agreed that it was an acceptable compromise. At which point conservative politicians and their owners and media outlets howled that CO2 credits were the worst socialist plot since Red October, and the goalpost shifted again.
A commercial plane will most probably undergo through several maintenance events and checks during that sort of time frame, where cycling the power is part of the procedure.
It's very reassuring to know that it probably won't happen.
As other posters have noted, 248 days of operation means skipping twenty-plus maintenance and inspection cycles, plus missing one or more engine overhauls. That sucker's going to fall out of the sky due to a hardware problem before the software error gets the chance.
Even in the absence of regular, scheduled, required maintenance, there will be hardware failures due to stuff wearing out, with sufficient frequency to force reboots at less-than-eight-month intervals. Honestly, the FAA is going to ground any airline that was so lax as to get within six months of tripping over this bug.
That's not to say that this bug is a good or acceptable thing, nor that something like it couldn't have much more serious effects. But this particular error is a non-issue from a real-life consequences standpoint.
I don't know about the technology or the algorithm(s), but the linked article is certainly nonsense.
“You could use the same basic framework to do robust decision making like trying to come up with insulin and glucose monitoring plans [for diabetes patients],” says Neil Burch, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta who helped design a poker-playing AI earlier this year. “You get regular snapshots of glucose levels, and you have to decide how much insulin you should take, and how often.”
Look, I get it. Nobody wants to admit that they're spending their grant money this way because it's fun to get a computer to play Hold 'em. But that's got to be the dumbest justification I've ever read. Human metabolism is complex, but the pancreas doesn't bluff.
This is basically a beginning poker player (fresh blood) but who is more consistent. A pro will absolutely clobber it.
In other words, either the researchers involved are complete idiots, or a Slashdot poster jumped to a useless conclusion based on a strawman argument spun from the summary. Hm.
Being against the death penalty is not an extreme progressive position, it's the default position of the civilized world. The only places with the death penalty are totalitarian China, Islamist hell holes, and third-world African countries. And the US.
Better check the documentation on your safe. Many are not designed to resist heat. They provide an oxygen sparse environment such that paper won't burn. Thats why you have to let them cool off afterwards, if you open them too soon the oxygen from outside hits very hot paper and it lights on fire.
No.
Underwriters' Laboratories (UL) certifications for fire are based on not exceeding a specified internal temperature (or humidity level) for a specified period of time. UL Class 350 safes, for instance, will maintain an internal temperature below 350 F, and humidity below 85%. This is fine for paper, but not for digital media. For those, you're looking for a safe (or safe + internal container) rated for Class 150 or Class 125 (150 F or 125 F), depending on your specific application.
An airtight safe that still got hot inside wouldn't protect paper. Pyrolysis still takes place in the absence of oxygen, carbonizing any organic matter--including paper. (Heating wood under oxygen-starved conditions is how charcoal is made.)
This is still done, because large commercial sites don't have rates in the same structure as residential. Large commercial and industrial have demand charges -- they pay for energy (kWh) but also a rate according to their peak demand in the month (kW). By making ice at night, they help reduce their peak demand (kW), and so even if they don't have time-based energy charges, they make their savings by saving on the demand charge.
> A few days ago I saw a nice graph showing PG&E's averaged output power during a typical 24h. It's a slanted U-shape, with the bottom somewhere around noon, then a sharp increase between 6PM and 9PM, tapering off after midnight and dropping slightly after 7AM.
No you didn't. That's not their curve. What you may have seen is the so-called California Duck, which is a different thing entirely -- a projection of a March weekend day in 2022 where there's tons more solar and no other changes to the generating capacity (which, of course, doesn't match reality). The CAISO (most of California -- PG&E, SoCal Ed, SDG&E, but not LADWP) daily demand curve can be found at:
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/S...
Careful -- today is Saturday, where demand is far lower than M-F workdays. Notice that on a Spring weekend, there's a local maximum at around 11am-noon, and then the daily peak in the late evening. On a weekday, you'll see a big peak in the late afternoon, sometimes before 5pm, sometimes after. Nevetheless, it never bottoms out around noon.
"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai
