I wouldn't call this a flying car, I would call this a quadcopter with wheels.
While the prospect of having less traffic jams is desirable, the odds of being T-boned from above or below by a distracted pilot become greater than zero.
I think we'll need Type 5-and-then-some AI pilots before any of this becomes a reality in day to day commutes.
> I think we'll need Type 5-and-then-some AI pilots before any of this becomes a reality in day to day commutes.
Wouldn't AI in flight become much easier to create compared to driving AI on the ground? I mean don't planes already have somewhat of an autopilot.
I have no experience or knowledge on the matter, but common sense seems to indicate that air-flight has considerably less environmental variables and could be significantly easier in most cases.
> air-flight has considerably less environmental variables
Does it? Instead of routing in two dimensions you now need to do it in three. You then also need to take into account other actors who are also routing in three dimensions. There are no road delineators in the sky.
There's also the rather obvious safety concern that in the event of a malfunction, an accelerating, out of control thousands-of-pounds mass accelerating forwards becomes an accelerating, out of control thousands-of-pounds mass accelerating forwards and coming down due to gravity.
Routing is much easier when you can basically go from point A to B directly. Coordination would be required to prevent collisions with other vehicles, but evasion in 3D just means changing to an uncontended altitude. I think the extra dimension actually makes it easier.
Planes have had autopilot systems for a while now where they basically fly themselves.
The big tech firms have been struggling to make a fully autonomous no-human-needed driving car for a while now. So many variables to deal with. Watch Tesla videos on YouTube and you'll see them still struggling on certain types/conditions of roads etc.
Large planes fly themselves on planned routes which avoid incursions by other planes by design: the function of air traffic control is to assign the routes such that incursions don't occur. In the event that the onboard collision avoidance system projects that another aircraft will come too close the warns the pilot with a recommended action. There is also a ground proximity warning system which issues warnings about collision with ground/mapped obstacles but again leaves it to the pilot to take the necessary action.
ATC relies upon surveillance radar that won't provide adequate coverage at low elevations (too many obstructions). ATC is also badly overstretched in busy airspaces coping with existing traffic. Adding a large number of new low-altitude aircraft will require new navigation technology (e.g. coordinating a swarm of vehicles in close proximity, relaying warnings about dangerous wind conditions or uncontrolled vehicles, etc)
Conditions in the air can be more treacherous than on a road: although there are more degrees of freedom the supporting air is also more variable than a road: wind shear and clear air turbulence can be perilous even for large aircraft, icing can quickly cripple aerodynamics, and in the event of failure safely halting can be problematic.
> Does it? Instead of routing in two dimensions you now need to do it in three. You then also need to take into account other actors who are also routing in three dimensions. There are no road delineators in the sky.
Well, the 3rd dimension is likely to remain fairly static for most of the trip. I don't see personal flying cars going up and down repeatedly for no reason unless there is an obstacle in the front and once high enough, there shouldn't be many of those.
Flying from point A to point B while avoiding collisions is relatively straightforward. The really hard part is dealing with in-flight emergencies like mechanical failures or sudden weather changes. It's impossible to predict and program for every failure mode which could happen in the real world. A human ATP rated pilot has enough experience to solve problems in real time but current AI technology is incapable of that.
Air conditions are significantly more complex than road conditions, I would guess - wind direction, temperature differentials, air density may all vary and I imagine they could affect flight characteristics.
It's true that you won't encounter pedestrians, and congestion will be much less of a problem initially, but birds are still a major concern.
> I wouldn't call this a flying car, I would call this a quadcopter with wheels.
It looks to me like a quadcopter with a secret weapon. Like Christian Bale's Batmobile could spit out a crazy motorcycle, this looks like it would spit out a bicycle with a stupid trailer.
On second thought, maybe it's more like an RC tricycle with a detachable quadcopter.
IMHO, it feels like just another hamfisted way to get the adoption of Windows 10 to increase. The whole point of Windows used to be that it would run on nearly every system, with most overhead being reactivating the license, now you'll actually find yourself re-installing an OS that refuses to work on a newer processor.
They're closing the gates to their pseudo-walled garden. Windows 7/8 don't have permanent revenue streams, WIndows 10 does (or will).
For all the song and dance of Windows 10 being superior, Linux seems to not care at all about what processor it runs on.
Linux seems to not care at all about what processor it runs on
That's not true, there definitely are unsupported (Intel/x64) CPUs for Linux. It even prints a lovely warning on boot to not file any bug reports because you're using an unsupported CPU.
But, what Linux does (often) do is make it possible to get a kernel patch or upgrade to add the missing support.
Outside of an all-volunteer ecosystem, like Linux or the BSDs, supporting and validating software on a particular processor family costs time, money, and ties up engineering resources, you know.
This feels eerily reminiscent of my own dilemma 4 years ago: The lack of direction and leadership coming from within Microsoft when it comes to building software, the willy-nilly changing of core development strategies, creating unnecessary risk (learning curves, time, money) by getting a developer to invest in something that might be relegated to the dustbin by tomorrow (including his/her paycheck). Worst of all, you are to find out about that fact yourself, no announcements, just silence, and vague PR about the-next-big-thing, to lead you on once more. It just felt like they were flailing, thinking up something new well before the last new thing had decent support or community behind it.
I also wondered how a programmer used to strong-typed languages (like C#) and a robust IDE/debugger (like Visual Studio) would fare in the hell that was a browser 4 years ago, the joyful world of JS (vanilla + frameworks) debugging and the always entertaining fight with CSS (in)compatibility, (where IE in particular has caused many a dev to utter a sigh).
I ran as hard as I could from Microsoft and picked up Linux Ubuntu and Android development.
I'm a full-time Java developer now (on Ubuntu as we speak) and very happy with that.
I wonder if it'd be possible to either blackhole all this nonsense, or to "quasar" their data servers with preset queries like "I like my privacy", "mind your own business" instead of your original query.
Do a Google search on "Jim Hood vs Google", see who he colluded with, and then come read your own post here again. In short: The MPAA/RIAA hates Google. To top it off, you name Chrome/Chromium as if it's the same product, and then go off on a tangent about a binary blob (voice recognition) that was included. Other comments would have gotten away with that, was it not that the whole issue here _is_ the distinction between Chrome and Chromium, the latter being an FOSS project, which has no place for closed source binary blobs. (And that was the underlying issue, not its functionality.) Some people need to be protected against themselves, for some this protection is a site block, for others it's reading more before writing drivel in the HN comment section.
The block was put in place because of malware being served by those domains, blocking them is by far the easiest response and _also_ the most motivating for its hosts to undertake action. Occam's Razor seems to agree that this was a bad advertising being blocked rather than "ebil guggle conspirucy".
I see what you did there. However, I think they do see the big picture. VR is a huge threat to their marketshare; if relatively small screens and a couple nice lenses can give an experience people find comparable, it's going to be a lot harder to sell their gear at their current price points. The fact that VR's getting to the point where some people are finding it comparable to the "IMAX Experience" is showing that in a generation or two, it will be there for the majority of people.
No, no... IMAX are developing a competing VR system and only want to drive people to adopt VR too early, so they can swoop in and grab the already cultivated market with their product, of course.
Exactly my thought when I saw the line "to produce beautiful display text" with an example that would have been atrocious on any GeoCities page.
OTOH, the time on the internet when GeoCities was hot was a wild time. I wouldn't mind if the web would get a bit less serious and more light-heartened again. :)
I taught myself coding HTML by hand using Hippie. I regressed and switched to Frontpage because it was so "easy". I then went over to the Dreamweaver and stayed there until I learned server-side programming, which put me back in the text editor, where I've happily been since.
Even with my stupid page of links nobody other than me cared about, it was still exciting learning HTML and being able to publish whatever dumb things I came up with online on Geocities.
Image counters, web rings, and that analytics company that gave you free analytics but you had to put there little square logo on the bottom of the page and anybody could click on it to see your stats. Those are some fun memories of my fledgling web years, circa the mid-90's.
Don't forget that Rift also seemed to support Linux, but then decided to push that to the back of their planning. So even if it's in the list of things to do, that doesn't mean it will happen in the near future, or even at all.
While the prospect of having less traffic jams is desirable, the odds of being T-boned from above or below by a distracted pilot become greater than zero.
I think we'll need Type 5-and-then-some AI pilots before any of this becomes a reality in day to day commutes.