It is not abuse. You are using the platform, the platform is monetized through ads. You requested it when you agreed to view any content on their platform.
Seizures and strokes behind the wheel is far more prevalent then people think. I can't speak for the entire USA, but having had a family member who suffered for that for years, the second someone has seizures, doctors usually work to revoke their licenses immediately.
So yes, Autopilot does saves lives. We know how many people have died with autopilot on, and I suspect it's a fraction of thoose who die with it off. Autopilot does some things poorly, somethings far better then a human can do. It's a technology with it's strengths and weaknesses. In my case, I was on autopilot driving through Denver, when the car suddenly swerved out of the lane into a adjacent lane. I freaked out thinking the system was going wonky.
Turns out that some drunk "street driving enthusiasts" decided to have a Race on I-70, and one of them missed that the lane he was trying to merge into from my rear right was occupied by a truck. It was in my blind spot, so while I was paying attention to the front of the car, autopilot was monitoring where my eyes could not.
In californium, I was driving a Tesla in Cueprtino on a fairly busy highway but late at night. The car started doing it's "pay attention now" beeps, a second before I realized that someone was driving the wrong way on my side of the freeway.
Would either of these been a fatality? Probably not, but possibly so.
People fall asleep all the time behind wheels. They plot into parked cars all the time. They drive in the wrong side of the road. They plow into emergency vehicles.
Anything we can that makes things safer is nothing but good.
I bought a early Model 3 - and i will tell you that Autopilot is night and day better now then it was. The evolution wasn't in hardware, but in software. As more people use it, the software and hardware get bigger.
I have no technical understanding of fiber networks. The explanation that this was caused by one fiber line in Brooklyn being severed seems unlikely. Curious to see what the experts think.
So, for clarity, it's never one fiber line being cut. It's a big massive bundle of fiber carrying different circuits for different carriers different places that were run in the same trench and all got cut at once.
Then they get to dig it out better and someone gets to get down in the hole and figure out which piece of fiber needs to be spliced to which other one.
Because of DWDM, some of those individual fibers may each be carrying 64 channels that in turn each carry 400gbit/sec for different providers/services/etc.
And when it's a large bundle cut, it's going to take a bit before service is restored. I have been told that a highly skilled tech can splice a single strand in a matter of minutes. Looking it up, I find figures of an average of 30 minutes per joint for 4-strand bundles, and slowing down from there. So if you have a 144-strand bundle to repair, or multiple 144-strand bundles, it's going to take several hours to effect the repair, and you're probably going to have to rotate through techs to avoid fatigue-induced errors slowing things down even more.
It is also, as a matter of practicality, going to be very difficult to find 144 colors that can‘t be mistaken for one another, particularly in conditions that i would imagine wouldn‘t have great lighting.
If they’re all in use and it’s point to point, might be easier connecting whatever to whatever. Then simultaneously swap line cards around as they get lit up or letting IP do its thing.
Not as feasible as it sounds initially. I don't know if you've ever looked inside a cat-5/6/whatever networking cable[1], but if you do, you'll see that it is actually a bundle of 8 individual wires, in 4 twisted-together pairs, color coded. Those different wires carry different electrical signals, and if the various signals are not supposed to be on the various wires they are supposed to be on, the connection won't work.
So imagine if you cut a Cat6 cable in half, and then spliced the individual wires back together without regard to which wires you connected. Very likely, Pair 1 negative is connected Pair 3 negative, Pair 2 has its polarity reversed, etc, and so the network link never comes online.
At the individual device level, fiber cables are connected in pairs, in a crossover fashion. Device A Tx connects to Device B Rx, and vice versa. So with a random splicing, you would end up with pairs getting crossed or broken up, invalidating the connections and labeling of every patch panel downstream, making for yet more work than the initial work of splicing the cut bundle.
1. Not impugning your intelligence, knowledge, or character here, some people never have because they've never needed or wanted to, and that's totally okay.
This. Even if you have redundant lines with multiple providers there is a good chance they are part of the same fiber bundle. It can be really difficult to get providers to admit who they are leasing from and what the physical runs are.
While I'm also not qualified to diagnose the problem, I would imagine it's something like this...
The major internet connections are like superhighways, with major central routers acting like exchanges. If a major superhighway had an accident blocking traffic, there would be personnel stationed at exchanges to help re-route the traffic, though that often occurs too late to prevent a bunch of backups. At any rate, people using Google Maps, Waze, etc. would see the accident and would likely be redirected to alternate routes that would normally be much slower - and would also be slowed down by the influx of higher than normal traffic.
The fact that the internet still worked albeit much slower than usual leads me to believe that something similar happened. While normally my internet traffic might go through a major hub in NYC and then onward to various carriers and hosts, etc. it had to be re-routed around that hub that is normally sub-optimal, and also ill-equipped to handle the spillover. (And in some cases, bandwidth was saturated, and failed altogether for some users for certain usage.)
The odd thing about this situation though is the geographic location of Brooklyn: on an island. Why would a significant amount of traffic from outside Long Island be going across the harbor to Brooklyn, especially given all the major switching facilities in Manhattan (closer to shore).
What makes you think it is only connected to Manhattan? Long Island has submarine cables connected to New England, various points along the East Coast south of NYC, and several transatlantic cables.
My naive explanation: fiber networks handle incredible loads, and a single fiber line might correspond to 10+ Tbs (terabytes per second). So all that data needs to go somewhere else, and if it gets shunted, packets get backed up, resulting in a cascading failure.
Note: I am not a fiber technician nor do I work for a large ISP.
If a 100 Gbps link goes down, and all the other links that could carry that route are only 10 Gbps... it goes downhill quickly.
Too much traffic is concentrated at the major carriers which carry a large amount of traffic over relatively little fiber (cause its cheaper) and when that fiber disappears we lose a massive amount of capacity...
Just to add to that, sometimes the redundancy doesn't work out as planned, maybe another weird set of circumstances, or some routers can't handle spikes in load as the network reconverges, causing other reconverges, confusing bgp routing peers, etc. Fun stuff!
I'm sure this is a valid point, but I think it is overemphasized.
Much of that tribal knowledge would have been very esoteric and focused on technologies that are no longer critical. for example, fabricating magnetic core memory. I'm sure some of the required skill is gone, but we don't need to use that memory technology anymore.
having been involved in spacecraft operations, it has nothing to do with how the memory is wired up.
there would've been a huge amount of knowledge about how to operate apollo spacecraft in general. there is no way it is preserved.
and this thread is beneath a comment suggesting that we don't start from scratch, and reuse apollo designs. as you point out, we can make better stuff now. the only value to the apollo designs would be if we had operational experience to go with them.
Tell that to Boeing. Thier last flight didn't make it to the space station because of two computer errors. Had that happened over the moon, people likely would have died.
One half of Orbital Index here… I highly recommend The Prepared as well. I happen to be guest editing it next month while the normal writer is on paternity leave, so I might be biased (but also a longtime happy reader :-).
I recently found this list of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents. There are some truly harrowing experiences, including an astronaut whose helmet began to fill with water during an EVA. He was having difficulty speaking by the time he was removed from the suit.
> By December, 2013, NASA had determined the leak to have been caused by a design flaw in the Portable Life Support System liquid coolant. The designers failed to take into account the physics of water in zero-g, which unintentionally allowed coolant water to mix with the air supply.
They did not take into account that a space suit will primarily be used in… space. wat?!?
>> The designers failed to take into account the physics of water in zero-g, which unintentionally allowed coolant water to mix with the air supply.
> They did not take into account that a space suit will primarily be used in… space. wat?!?
That's not entirely fair. It's easy enough to know that something will be used in particular circumstances, but not to realise all of the consequences. Water behaves very, very weirdly in microgravity as compared with here on Earth, and unless you, personally, have experienced it and experimented with it, it's very, very easy not to notice something, or to expect something other than what actually happens.
Since KSP is, of course, the Korellia Secret Police (who can be identified by a 'KSP' tattoo on the hand, which is only visible under ultraviolet light.)
As others have mentioned, taxing efficient cars doesn't seem to make much sense. Maybe tax actual miles traveled instead? That would solve the problem of increasing efficiency and also decrease the value of loitering and cruising in-between pick-ups.
I'm real curious as to how taxing miles travelled would work, especially if you travel between states. Would you have to keep track of how many miles you drove in State A and State B, and how would you pay State B if you lived in State A? Since we'd need to replace the federal fuel tax as well, would the federal government require states to hold yearly odometer inspections, or would you have to fill out a form on your yearly taxes stating how far you drove? I supposed that these questions could be solved by utilizing GPS, but I'm not sure I like the idea of the government tracking the movements of my vehicle.
In Norway the use of GPS has been discussed for a few years, and as far I understand the newest solutions being discussed have been approved by the data privacy watchdog, which generally tends to be very negative to government surveillance.
There are many options there, at the cost of making audits/complaints harder, such as e.g. only keeping GPS traces for a very short time (or not at all), and gradually overwrite more and more details, such as coordinates, reducing time precision, and finally consolidate to amounts owed. Those settings could be left under the control of the car owner as well, or let you dump a signed record of the precise data if you as the owner suspect inaccuracies and want to collect evidence, and then allow you to wipe the details from the device and only leave aggregate numbers.
The point is if the device is tamper-proof enough, you don't need it to record your movements, you just need it to monitor your movements and location with sufficient precision to decide what amounts should be added to running totals of tax.
Of course there is a risk some governments will decide they'd really like more detailed records.
There are experiments with this sort of system in my state in the US. In our case, the car owner signs up with a private firm that does the data collection and only reports the total distance driven to the government, not the actual locations.
I would assume that there is some law which requires the detailed data to be deleted, but I'm not sure about that.
I'm real curious as to how taxing miles travelled would work, especially if you travel between states.
Trucks have been doing it for years with transponders in the cabs. That's how when a semi fills up with fuel in one state and ends its trip in another state the state in between still gets some fuel tax to pay for road maintenance.
It would make sense to use a differentiated sales tax for car for hire services. That'd be proportional with usage. It would also tax people who don't have a car and externalize car taxes and maintainance costs by using these services. EU countries already do ths for things like food, books, accomodation and restaurant services. Usually the sales tax is smaller for these sectors.
If you want usage fees to be proportionate, I think you'd need to tax according to the maintenance costs caused by the vehicle per mile (eighteen wheelers cause vastly more road wear than cars). That's really all you need, except perhaps for some fixed cost per mile for the size of the vehicle, to tax congestion.
Cool. I'm more of a mechanical designer so it is hard for me to understand why this is an improvement because I'm used to requiring a lot of precision in my modeling. That said when he mentioned the ability to get line-of-sight on different curves I could appreciate it a bit more.
I still don't think that the hand controllers they're using are the best input device. I can imagine a hybrid approach where design teams are using standard surface modeling like Alias/3Ds Max/Blender for the bulk of the design work and then VR systems like this for review.
