It's more than just the right of first sale; with software that is licensed via server-side communication, nothing prevents the company from terminating your authorization for any reason, and you have basically no recourse at that point, other than to sue.

There's a lot wrong with software in the modern era.

I disagree. It's not up to a college to get you a degree. If the college deems you to have failed to pass the standard, you should get NO degree.

Why would they have a patch? Sounds like a systemic problem. Maybe think out of the box and add human drivers to supplement the algos? Passengers could take over driving and get a discount on the fare.

We found out in a congressional hearing that the dirty Little secret of Google is that their self-driving cars are actually just remote controlled cars that occasionally use some fancy Lane assist features. But when anything needs to be done that's even slightly complicated it's a human being in the Philippines driving the car.

I don't want the damn things on my road not that it matters. There is so much money involved I don't get a say and neither do you. So I've got remote control cars being piloted by people in foreign countries over high latency internet connections and I just got a kind of accept that that's a thing I need to worry about now.

The original guy got to keep using it. There was someone else hired for a brief time.

I remember the author's name but he really doesn't want to use it, so that's OK to respect. He's given me a lot to think about over the years. I remember when he wrote on his PBS site about unicast becoming cheaper than radio broadcast for TV, predicting that it would overtake by 2012 (IIRC). Youtube became huge around then. We were smart folks around the water cooler in the late 90's who could follow the math but had nagging skepticism. He wss right.

I think I have one of his science writing books under his real name about atomic energy somewhere. You can find it if necessary.

Nice to see Bob back on the Dot.

Except neural networks currently control the lane keep assist in modern cars, never mind self drive ones. So clearly they now do work for process control.

This is slashdot, we all know who Alan Turing was.

But who is this Turinga T. M. person?

Whenever self-driving cars are criticized, the standard argument served by the defenders is almost always "Yeah but self-driving cars today already drive better than the average human driver", which, to a certain point, might very well be true.

But this argument falls flat under scrutiny. See, like most things concerning humans, the quality of human drivers follows a bell curve; There are a few superb drivers, a few shitty drivers, and most drivers are average. But with self-driving cars, all vehicules drive exactly the same way, since they all have the same software. If one of them zooms past a school bus with its stop signals on, they all do. So, for example, if self-driving cars today drive 10% better than the average driver, this also means that they all drive worse than 40% of human drivers out there.

To be clear: I'm all in favor of self-driving cars, even though I'm among those who criticize them regularly. I've been dreaming of self driving cars since I was a child, and as I'm getting older, I would hope that self-driving cars would allow me to keep my autonomy as my eyesight is getting weaker and my reflexes slower. What I'm saying is that the current approch for self-driving cars is the wrong approch, and the solution is not more sensors, 5G network everywhere, etc. Furthermore, I considers these vehicules, in their current state to be too dangerous to be on public roads.

But I'm sure the usual binary-thinking simpletons will simply put me in their little "against" box anyway, just like they do when I criticize the current technology of nuclear reactors, so who am I kidding.

This way the headline sounds SCARY!

It is technically a recall by the NHTSA definition, even if the fix is just an OTA software update.

Having grown up in a PAL country and worked in the TV industry I was told that NTSC stands for "Never Twice the Same Colour".

"Adjustments?! How backwards!" What?!

In Chernobyl all three of those groups were fine and trustworthy. They weren't the source of the problem. Bureaucrats in the soviet union were.

You're relying on a very loose interpretation there. France is not energy independent. They have a lot of local storage to ride them through troubles but they are 100% dependent on other countries even in their nuclear energy sector. Most of France's uranium for example comes from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Namibia which represent 50% of total uranium supplies.

They did. And that industry exists today due entirely to a massive government bail out of the sector which went bankrupt years ago. It's easy to say you have employment when it's socialised.

I agree with you on waste though - the concerns there are stupidly overblown. I'd just wish that nuclear was financially viable instead of being the single most expensive way to produce energy (yes even in China, this is not a western problem).

The difference is that it's not mass transit. It arguably should have been regulated more though, because and only because it cost The People money to chase after the dead.

Makes me think of that saying, "A man with one watch knows the time, a man with two is never sure."