Most often, children aren't hit directly from behind but glance off the rear fender and fall beneath the wheel. It is hard to see how a google car will prevent that.
Maybe they use a camera with a wide angle, or multiple cameras/radars, or some other obvious solution to an obvious problem.
So you are saying that the 300,000 miles is in a laboratory controlled environment instead of a real world environment?
No. I am saying 300K miles as a mixture of highway and test track. There has been plenty of both.
Agreed, 300,000 miles without an accident isn't that awesome.
Yes it is! Many of those miles are not cruising the freeway, but on a test track under conditions that were designed to cause an accident. Test dummies have been used to simulate pedestrians stepping into traffic. Other cars pull in front, or cut off the Google car, or drop objects onto the road. The self driving cars have been able to avoid thousands of accidents where a human would likely not have been able to react in time.
Not that this will stop anyone the first time the car backs over a kid, despite their excellent safety record.
The Google cars have backup cameras, radar, and bump sensors. They have been specifically designed and tested to not run over kids/pets while backing, under many different light and weather conditions. So your scenario is very unlikely to happen.
A much more likely scenario: After self driving cars are common, some human driver backs over a kid, and people ask why we should continue to allow humans to drive.
That's selection bias at work. It's extremely hard for a woman to land a job in this field
I completely disagree. I have worked at many tech companies over a thirty year career, and my experience has been the exact opposite. Many companies bend over backwards to hire more women programmers and engineers. I have heard many male engineers say that they would prefer a more gender balanced workplace, and have never heard any say they wouldn't like that. When I have hired women, the male engineers have always treated them with decency and professional respect.
On the other hand, I have never had any problem hiring saleswomen, or even female forklift drivers. The shipping crew at my last employer was 60% female, despite the crude sexism of their male coworkers that complained about too many "bitches" in the warehouse.
I think the dearth of female programmers is simply that women are not attracted to a career that involves sitting in a cubicle interacting with a computer. Women have broken into many male dominated professions. A majority of new lawyers are women. Nearly half of medical students are women. Unlike programming, those careers are perceived to have a lot of human interaction.
...promoted to his/her level of incompetence...
What did Timothy do before he was promoted to Slashdot editor?
And this is not an expenditure, it's an investment.
Nope. If tax dollars are being spent, it is an expenditure. If it was an investment, it would be funded by private investors risking their own money.
Yeah we could have 50 of theses for the price of the iraq war.
It is a logical fallacy to attempt to justify an expenditure by pointing to something else even stupider. This project should be funded if, and only if, it is a good idea, not because it is merely less stupid than something else.
One of the risks of working on DoD projects is they have a nice little loophole in patent law that allows them to take IP from one company and give it to another
Yet a Google search brings up nothing. Do you have a citation?
There have been quite a few documented cases over the years
Pet peeve: People that claim there are "quite a few" documents, but fail link to even one.
Spying is an act of WAR.
Spying is almost never considered an act of war. Although it has at times lead to war, for instance the Ems Dispatch and the Zimmermann Telegram.
Don't forget about us pedophiles.
Pedophilia is an attraction to prepubescent children, not teenagers. If you are an adult male and feel sexually attracted to teenage women, you are normal. Acting on that attraction may make you a criminal, but it will not make you a pedophile.
Can someone please explain to me what the point of this is?
The point is to give someone an excuse to post a link to the relevant xkcd.
isn't there prior art in head-up displays used by airforce pilots for decades?
These aren't patents for the general concept of HUD. They are patents for specific implementation methods. ProTip: To understand a patent, you need to actually look at the patent and read the claims. The Slashdot summary is seldom sufficient.
Seems the concept of lack through fortune or obstruction is well known throughout history.
Yes, it is pretty silly to think that no one ever noticed before that information and knowledge can be beneficial.
Once there's a wikipedia article, with content, and page views, the movie's already made.
Maybe they should put up some content before the movie is made. For instance, they could put potential movie ideas on Kickstarter, and get people to pre-pay for tickets. If there is not enough interest, cancel the movie and refund the money. Even better, would be customer input on casting and plot elements. They could pay extra if, and only if, certain actors are in the movie. My daughter would definitely pay extra if Channing Tatum is in star.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
