Being one of these "younger" workers I think the article is referring to, I can definitely relate. I don't enjoy working in a solitary office, find that having a colleague in close proximity helps me out when I'm stuck, etc... I recently had a 10m^2 office, shared with one other researcher, and I definitely miss it. My wife has the ability to have a decent sized office with a window view, but she prefers to share a 50% bigger office with a second colleague. They get more done that way.

Of course, others would prefer anything but, and I respect that, too, but this isn't necessarily as Orwellian a quote as that.

This is only related because it was said in my hackerspace, this morning:

Q: How many hackers does it take to... do anything?
A: Three. Two to watch and one to demonstrate.

P.S.: If you happen to be in Luxembourg, we're selling chocolate keyboards this weekend.

So, wait, let me get this straight. Reverse-engineering the drivers for use on non-Xboxes is "hacking" and "unintended" use of a Microsoft product, but Microsoft is only too happy to sell this product to advertisers? Because you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the advertisers will not be using an Xbox.

We've fielded quite a few safety critical systems that perform well. In fact, large commercial aircraft are landing autonomously these days, a feat well beyond high speed parallel parking with a puny little car. :-)

Err, no it's not. Landing large aircraft is easy, that's why we did it first.

Don't confuse easy with complex. An aircraft model might be complex, but it is understood, and thus the math makes it easy. Sliding an arbitrary car across arbitrary ground is NOT easy, as we don't understand the math behind it. Without a model, it's very hard to implement closed-loop controls. What's interesting here is that they mix an open-loop control that works in a particular situation with a closed-loop control that doesn't and get a system that is capable of correcting itself but works with arbitrary situations.

This would be the equivalent of landing the aircraft in some unmodeled phase of flight, such as in a spin. Now *that* would be impressive.

1) Yeah, that's just wrong, and missing the point. We can guide missiles into tiny spots because we have incredibly good models of their flight path. We can drive a car into a tiny spot in exactly the same way. What's interesting here is that they mix together a LQR controller with open-loop, in a way that does not require hand-tuning and gives excellent, repeatable results.

If we had a dynamic model of the car as it were sliding sideways, I'm sure we could use Lie brackets to discover all sorts of interesting accessible trajectories. But we don't. So this is pretty good control, and might quite possibly be a step toward the type of controller we have in our brain (able to use a combination of open-loop (I did this last time and it worked) and closed-loop (what I'm doing isn't working, I need to adjust) controls)

2) True, but even more likely: if your automatic-parking Mercedes scratches my car while parallel parking, who's responsible for the damage? You (as the driver) or Mercedes (who promised that this feature would work)?

3) As another poster stated, since you don't mean it, it must come naturally. I think many people find parallel parking a chore and would rather have a machine do it for them.

4) Yup, tough toodles, kid. Your freedom to kill others is only a freedom to the point at which we cannot find a better solution. If you were complaining about not being able to go somewhere you want, I would be behind you 100%. However, you seem to be complaining that you consider it a freedom to drive how *you* want to. Considering the atrocious results (both accident rates and people making moronic decision to buy tank sized SUVs because "they're safer"), this "freedom" is pretty poorly exercised.

How this post got modded up is beyond me. It demonstrates the most amazing lack of knowledge on the subject. What is impressive here is that we have a computer doing something a human does. That's always impressive when it's done the first time, and you get mad street cred when it's reproduceable. There are many, many things humans do that we do not understand how to model and thus cannot yet control. Heck, we don't even know how to tell a robot to walk through a crowded room of people (do I ask my boss to pull back from the table, or brush up against my mother-in-law?), so parroting that someone can do it better is hardly impressive. "Someone" cannot be manufactured, micronized, improved on, or reproduced countless millions of times.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice, the last author of this paper is Sebastian Thrun, head of the Stanford project that won the DARPA Grand Challenge and took second place in the DARPA Urban Challenge. I suggest you read the paper in order to understand what's being proposed here, and then we can talk shop.

IAACE. (I Am A Controls Engineer)

Oh, I completely understand why you like it. The function itself doesn't even bother me. What bothers me is the name. If I say "you've got a range of options to choose from when programming, from C++ to Python," 100% of people would understand both C++ and Python to feature in the list. When we talk about functional programming, I understand programming that can be read outloud. This might be incorrect, but it's the way I imagine it should be.

So, really, it's not a programming problem at all, it's just a terrible syntax problem. There's a myriad of bad and confusing function names that can be imagined, and more than a few seem to have wound up in Python.

P.S. I'll have to look into the advantages range gives you. What you describe makes it seem like a nice function, in spite of the name.

You say you don't like 'len' as a name for a length function, that you would prefer using the name 'length'. Well, python is so superior, that you can fix that problem really fast in your code:

length = len

That *is* a neat feature.

My only beef is that it can't help to solve the mess that is everyone else's Python code. Once I'm programming in Python, all these things will seem very natural. (It can't be worse than C!) But for people who are new to Python, and just want to modify a tiny section of code in someone's script because it almost, but not quite, does what they want it to, all the myriad Python bizarreness jumps up and bites them.