No, because Waymo cars are actually autonomous and thus don't have a human driver in them. The only thing they can do is phone home and ask a human to plan a path for them or otherwise tell them what to do. And that takes longer than if a human were in the car driving. There's no real-time remote driving (for obvious safety reasons).

It's very relevant. It means that they don't have to care about safety. They can drive through the down light without stopping and trust a human to intervene. They can stop without going and trust a human to intervene.

But more than that, they have the luxury of treating it as a stop sign without worrying about whether the traffic light really is out or just not being detected because of a regression in their image recognition model, because if they are wrong, a human will intervene.

So having a system that is human-supervised relieves Tesla and Cruise of a lot of the responsibility for mistakes and makes them able to enable riskier features.

Apparently you have never driven in San Francisco. These aren't freeways, and these aren't suburbs. They're mostly dense urban streets a la Manhattan. You either have a continuous row of cars parked along one side or both, or you'll have driving lanes. There are no shoulders. If you get very lucky, there might be one spot free, but not enough spots for four cars at a single intersection — probably not at any time, day or night, realistically.

So in situations where stopping in the middle of the street is safer than continuing, then it is, in fact, a safety feature, because there is rarely (if ever) a third choice.

The safe fallback on the freeway is typically to pull over onto the shoulder. Unfortunately, city streets in SF do not have those. If they did, they would have been turned into a parking lane or another driving lane already.

Job Market.

Let's get real here. I live near a light rail line, and that's still a 15-minute walk, plus five minutes at the other end. And the closest light rail stop to my office is about a ten-minute drive on city streets, and it takes twenty or thirty minutes to get there on the light rail. So add it up and yeah, I could walk for 20 minutes, then take public transit for 20 minutes, then take some kind of shuttle for 10 minutes.

Or I can spend fifteen minutes, ten of which are on the freeway, and drive myself. The walking portion of the trip alone exceeds the total length of my commute.

Rail only makes sense if traffic is so bad that cars are completely infeasible. Otherwise, they're the wrong tool for the job.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but for me, it depends on where I'm going. To a scheduled appointment? No. I plan it out. On a long trip? Also, no. To the grocery store? Yes, of course. It's a five-minute drive on city streets. I'm sure not going to spend a minute on Google Maps to see if traffic is bad and I could save one or two minutes by waiting an hour. That wouldn't make sense.

My last shopping trip involved stopping at three different Lowe's and Home Depot stores because the website availability was so detached from reality that they had zero of something that they supposedly had 16 of in one instance. It's not random, but that doesn't mean the plan doesn't have to change at a moment's notice. Doing it by car took an hour. Doing it by public transit would have taken the better part of a day, because the second and third stores would have closed before I could have gotten to them.

So yeah, having to make unexpected changes to your plans is more common than you think.

And for long trips, food stops and restroom stops tend to also be random (though long-distance train systems often have those onboard, making that not a particularly interesting point). On the flip side, for long-distance trains, the interval is usually anywhere from several hours up to a whole day, so if you do have a planned stop for some other reason, it's going to be a long stop, and will usually require a hotel stay.

Sadly, that's not most places with trains. Subways, maybe, but surface trains tend to be more like every 15 minutes or more.

I'm okay with drivers having to pay for cellular communications for updates or pay to have Wi-Fi access within range of their cars. But otherwise, yes, map updates should be free forever. If that means the government has to pay to maintain the servers that provide the map updates, fine.

What does that mean?

Doing something like that would already violate any number of state and federal laws, at least in the United States.

Won't work. Shouldn't try. There are fundamental security reasons why trusting data from outside the car is unsafe.

Assuming LED tail lights (nanoseconds from dark to light), camera latency is one frame (which should ideally be 1/60th of a second, but in practice, is usually closer to 1/30th of a second) plus processing time of maybe another 1/60th of a second, for a total of < 100 ms.

Time to transmit that signal over a radio, do the public key crypto to verify that it was actually sent by a car and isn't noise, perform checksums on the packet, decode it, and figure out what to do is likely to be a decent fraction of that time, because it may require multiple retries to get the packet, you're going to have a nasty collision domain with multiple devices transmitting on the same frequency, etc. You *might* get average latency under 100 ms, but with exponential backoff, worst-case will still be well over 100 ms, realistically, given how many cars would be within the collision domain.

So you're not actually getting the information there noticeably more quickly by using a radio. What you are doing is making it possible for a malicious person to stick a radio transmitter on a bridge or light post and tell every car that passes by that the vehicle in front of them is braking.

This does not improve anything, but adds considerable risk, making it a bad idea.

And no, this is not a solvable problem. There's no way to prevent these transceivers from being in the control of the general public, because they are, by definition, in cars that are owned by the general public.

This one is at least theoretically feasible, as long as every device has a unique public key, and as long as stolen devices are immediately added to a revocation list that gets propagated to every car in the world.

However, unless there are zero human-driven cars (where you would gain a fraction of a second from not having to wait for the green light to light up), there's zero advantage to doing this over just using cameras and stopping at the stop line. If your car is stopping six feet into it, it is almost certainly because a human driver is incompetent. Even Tesla's nowhere-near-fully-self-driving tech doesn't make that mistake.

Mind you, when lights are out and other cars do things that are unsafe, self-driving cars may panic and phone home to ask for help, and that might occur inside the interaction, but that's not the same thing as making their initial stop six feet over the limit line. If there is a limit line visible on the street, self-driving cars stop at it, period. This isn't even hard.

Also, if the light is out, the transponder will also be out, so you'll be in the same situation that you're in now.

There's no advantage to this, either. First, it's a massive security risk. You're trusting data from the lead car to tell you what to do. If it says, "Speed up to 80 MPH," the back car is going to do it even if the car in front is going 20 MPH, and you're going to have an accident. Any hardware that is in the hands of consumers fundamentally cannot be trusted to provide valid data to hardware in the hands of other consumers. Such a trust model cannot reasonably exist in the real world.

Second, you have computational ability in the cars anyway. So the only advantage would theoretically be conserving the CPU utilization required for driving the car safely, and because you cannot trust that the data coming in is valid, you cannot reasonably stop doing what is necessary to avoid causing a wreck.

Even things like obstacle detection can't be trusted until you observe the obstacle. However, you can observe the car in front of you dodging an obstacle and take similar action. But you don't need communication to do that — only cameras. And unlike what you're proposing, cameras work without the car in front of you having to have special hardware, making them a far superior vehicle-to-vehicle communication system.

Therefore, again, this is useless technology that provides zero benefit over not having it.

The only possible advantage any of this expensive complexity could have would be enabling braking for cars that lack any other driving assistance, but even that would not fully work until the last non-transmitting car dies in 30+ years. Meanwhile, putting camera-based driver assistance in the car will fully work immediately.

This is the sort of thing that only makes sense to companies that sell overpriced electronics to car companies, plus the government bureaucrats who have fallen victim to their lobbying efforts. From a trust and security perspective, inter-vehicle communication makes zero sense. It is fundamentally impossible for such technology to provide actionable data without verifying that data using cameras, and if you already have the data from the cameras, you don't need a second source for the same data, which makes it completely and utterly useless. Thus, it provides no meaningful benefit over camera-based technology, but adds significant expense to *every* car, all so that the cheapest camera-free cars can be only slightly cheaper than they would be if they put cameras and a computer in them instead. It's false economy.

So sure, if you want every car to cost an extra thousand bucks for no reason, push for these silly laws. As for me, I'd rather have technology that actually does something useful, rather than padding the pockets of vehicle OEM component manufacturers.

It's post-prop-13 California. We're lucky there are paved roads.

DJI drones phone home with location information as part of their basic functionality, so for these devices it's a valid concern.

Outside of these custom all-in-one ready to fly drones, drone motors are ALREADY like that. They come in well-defined sizes, they are rated by kV (thousands of RPM per volt) and they have standard mounting holes. If you just don't screw with the fully preassembled drones up front you can easily get that kind of parts interchangeability. You can also buy controller/radio combos which provide the same or superior range to what DJI offers, so the only benefit to buying a prebuilt drone is that you don't have to do anything, and it comes with a number of down sides.

I built my first quadcopter for under $200 all in, including a Devo 5 radio which I could load alternate firmware and an additional $10-ish radio transceiver module into so that it supports all of the major protocols. That's a price with regular range and without FPV, but the point remains — you don't need DJI.

A named drink?

Perhaps a refreshing Johnny Silverhand or David Martinez?

Nah, that's the reason for the moral. The actual moral is: don't fuck with Apple gift cards — neither a buyer nor a redeemer be. Apple has certainly taught us all a lesson, and that lesson is that their gift card system is insecure and they will punish legitimate customers for their lack of security. Whether it's even possible to make a gift card secure is irrelevant to that lesson.

Here's why

Will the spotify year in review be updated to tell you how many children were trafficked as the result of the ICE ads they carry?

IOW undoing the works of Bill Clinton.

If only more people understood how the TCA led to the rise of Faux News we might have some clarity.