Please explain why heavy traffic around LAX is relevant to the discussion, seeing that both established cab companies and ride companies want to brave the heavy traffic to pick up passengers at the airport.
The city in fact is trying to keep ride companies out.
The amount of cabs in the airport at any given moment is strictly regulated. They can't do that with ride-share apps. More cars = more traffic.
In the 1960's the prevailing opinion about Japanese quality is that it was inferior in every way except cost, and there was ample justification for that opinion. Then the same thing happened again a couple decades later, but this time it was Taiwan. In the early 1900's? Germany was the dog-shit bottom-feeder of manufacturing.
All three of the above are now considered to be among the highest-quality manufacturers in the world.
Things change.
I take it you don't fly in or out of LAX very much? Traffic is a nightmare. It can take 30-45 minutes to simply loop through the terminals a single time when it's busy, which is damn near every night. I'm not saying that these rules don't defend taxi's turf, but there is more reason to it than just that.
...few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them...
Well, there are the millions that visit China each year, and anyone who's ever bothered setting up a VPN connection so they could FaceTime with family or whatever.
Wouldn't the release of the software and/or documentation need to predate the patents for that to work? I'm not sure how this would work.
There could be a number of reasons why they don't want the info public
1) It doesn't work that well, or there is an obvious defense against it they don't want public.
2) They've been abusing their power some how by collecting info on people not really suspects, and don't want to be hit up by every divorce lawyer in the country. ( not sure if that's really illegal).
3) They're idiotic power tripping jerks that think its an ultra secret thing that will cause all law enforcement to lose its effectiveness if more people know about it.
4) It contains evidence of alien life forms visits to our planet, and their preference for blackberry cell phones.
5) They've been using it to track some for-real bad guys, and the release of the documents would compromise an ongoing investigation or investigations.
I suspect it's a combination of mostly (2), some (5), and a sprinkling of (3).
First, in order for airport wi-fi to not-suck, you'll need a massive subnet with a TTL of no more than 30 minutes. Yes, I've been in airports where a
Second, everyone who's in an airport seems to want to stream Netflix or something like that; I do hope that Netflix throws a peering widget their way, because the thousands of iPads in that airport will strain the pipe pretty efficiently.
Third, you're on a single collision domain, half-duplex, along with everyone else. 5GHz may help matters, but 2.4 will still be needed for compatibility, and if you're stuck on it, you'll probably get useful speed out of a dial-up optimized RDP session an an SSH window, but the only way regular web browsing is ever worth it is if you have some absurdly early flight (5AM takeoff or similar), at which point 'using my computer' plays second fiddle to the better activity: sleep.
Sorry, I've just never seen it worth it. I always load up my hard drive before I go, and I've never regretted it.
The airport: the worst place to be in the cloud.
It's an oversimplification to say that it's a single collision domain. Any decent enterprise wireless network uses overlapping access points that will automatically select and change channels based on automated detection of congestion and interference. Yes, there is always some level of frequency overlap, but that is easily addressed.
As far as address spacing goes, there's a number of scenarios in which a
Enterprise mesh wireless has come a long way in the last five or ten years. Shopping malls and airports have wifi networks with multiple hundreds of APs in very high density so that they can gather wifi device location analytics via triangulation in addition to providing guest wireless access. They use it for determining foot traffic patterns and also storefront dwell time and conversion rates. For example, an airport will be interested in knowing where wireless devices are detected at a standstill in high densities, because they may be able to move things around or otherwise modify the physical environment to make it easier for folks to get to where they want to go. Interesting and also somewhat scary stuff.
That's probably where they got this anyway.
Why wouldn't an autonomous car be able to avoid potholes?
I really don't know, can they?
It seems reasonable to me that they easily could, although I don't know if they do already. A lot of the data input for automation comes from cameras, programming pothole detection would be trivial compared to what they've already accomplished.
well do you want to pay $10 GB in data and $15-$20 roaming?
it better have XM as well.
I just plug in a memory stick to a USB port. I think this is becoming fairly standard these days?
Every car maker is going to start losing market share to Google unless they offer this. Google's head start combined with their better engineers means that Google might become the dominant software provider to cars. Unless car manufacturers come up with software that is equally safe, Google will soon start making more money per car sale than the manufacturers.
Google isn't interested in manufacturing cars. Google is interested in licensing their technology to other companies that already do. This is how it works today. Most of the Japanese companies use Denso. Ford used to use Microsoft but will be using Blackberry/QNX going forward. Google wants to compete with those guys, not with the auto manufacturers themselves.
One thing I like about driving is that I can choose my route. Go new places. Will the self-driving car give me any choice of route, or will it always take the same boring route to a given destination?
I've seen this question a lot on this story. I can't imagine it would be in Google's (or anyone else's) interest to not provide the driver with complete control over every aspect of the journey. Many of the assertions I've seen today are just silly. Of course the car will allow you to stop and pee, or change the route, or cancel it and go somewhere else, or avoid your ex-girlfriend's street, or whatever. They're still hauling bags of meat around and the entire point is to service their transportation needs.
That said, Google/Waze + autonomous car = commute nirvana.
At least put in a CD / CD changer.
People still use CDs?
There are far too many scenarios on public roads where a self drive car wouldn't know what to do and would require human intervention. At the very least it requires an unimpaired, conscious, qualified human being with their own set of controls who can take over if the need arises or if the car does something dumb.
If these become shuttles or taxis it would have to be in carefully controlled conditions where it is highly unlikely that some event would occur that leaves the vehicle stuck and unable to move. And even there, it's possible that there would have to be a a human sitting in a booth nearby who could override the system if it became stuck.
And yet Google has clocked over 700,000 autonomous miles on public roads already, in uncontrolled conditions. The pool of unforeseen scenarios is finite and shrinking. I do agree that manual controls should remain in place as the technology matures.
An example: The train you're on is running 30 minutes late, and you need a cab to get you to the day's last ferry, or you will have to wait until morning. That's when you'll really appreciate what a skilled cabdriver can do for you. Not to mention a human driver can avoid potholes, at least until the Google Hover Taxi comes along...
Why wouldn't an autonomous car be able to avoid potholes?
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
