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!".

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.

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.

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.

If brutality would work, ISIS would be in complete control of the Middle East. But it doesn't, and that's why ISIS is being battered by both Western and Middle Eastern States.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who the fuck QAs this? This is literally the second most important function on the site, after being able to comment. How the fuck did this make it into production?

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.

You're quoting a parliamentarian from 19th century France. Which had some very specific issues that the socialists were trying to address, and where a lack of state intervention indeed would mean nothing of that sort happening (see specifically education).

And just to pile on your vaccine statement: I am damn sure in my right to force you to not be the carrier of a disease that can infect me 2 hours after you passed through the room.

That's a (deliberate, I frequently think) misunderstanding of the liberal position. The reason that there's a lot of talk about outcomes is because it is the single clearest and simplest metric we have about success. If a group is represented at 5% in a field where we suppose that equal opportunities should lead to something more like 50%, the conclusion is that the initial assumption of equal opportunities is wrong. Measuring opportunity is incredibly hard, consists of hundreds, if not thousands of factors, is impacted by the cultural biases of the investigator, and some impacts to opportunity are so embedded in the culture that they are quite literally invisible to the investigator. As a result, outcome is frequently used as a proxy for opportunity.

Is it right to make it a 100% proxy? No. But it is a valid starting point to look into opportunities.

Which sometimes is a good thing. See for example the "local" Alabama Chief Justice who just gave the finger to gay people because he doesn't like what he's being told to do. Sometimes, the big stick of the uninvolved far away helps to knock sense in the locals. Sometimes, the locals do know best. But blanket statements like "local government is much more often best" is trivially proven to be wrong.

You make the mistake of listening to articles about scientific research instead of actually reading the research. Additionally, you make the mistake of thinking that one study == Truth. Especially in biology and medecine, with hugely complicated machines and enormous difficulty setting up good controls, a single study is almost meaningless.

Wait for studies to confirm others, wait for things to percolate through the scientific community, then start paying attention to it.

Oh - is that why all the posts about "SJWs are ruining Slashdot and the world" regularly sit at +5?