Posts by Moz
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Would a driverless car respond to a police officer asking it to pull over and stop. If so who or what gets the offence notice.
The car, obviously, since that's the thing operating the vehicle and in possession of the driver's license. The bit that I want to see is the car going for the driving test, specifically the eye test and the oral questions.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
"switch from trolley buses to battery buses"
have seen no evidence that fossil fuel usage will be reduced rather than increased by the introduction of hybrid buses.Do you know what a non sequitur is?
My point was that building a trolley bus network is probably more expensive than buying latest-gen battery ones that are already running in some parts of the world (list is long). In the foreseeable future running them will be cheaper than maintaining the trolley wires and buses, and given the new trolley buses mostly have batteries to let them route around wiring problems, they may even "evolve" bigger batteries over time until the "trolley" part means a charging connector on top of the bus.
Then there's the one someone recently drove from Melbun to Sydney (900km) without recharging. Sure, that's not a full day on the road by any means, but it suggests that for some routes battery would work now. And it was a long-haul bus not an inner-city one.
What's happening in Wellington, IIRC, is a fight between council/public who want trolley buses, and bus company(s) who don't, but have been compelled to operate them by the nasty taxpayer forcing money on them for the service. My expectation is that to get electric buses working the council will have to run them themselves.
The fine print of where they charge comes down to cost of extending the grid vs cost of moving the depot (political cost as well as financial).
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Anything could happen…
They look so young :) Also, can we call him BoSco or RoSco to fit in with the latest young kids?
If we're going to do freaky stuff on roads, I like the pedal powered monorail guy at http://shweeb.co.nz/ Utterly impractical, more than slightly nuts, but also funny. To be all boring about it, I suspect the switch from trolley buses to battery buses is happening about now, and hopefully the switch away from diesel starts soon. Buy Ben's right, it's hard to beat steel wheels on steel rails for efficiency on a whole range of measures.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Ben Austin,
I've sort of assumed that this kind of technology would be designed for broad, well designed and laid out motorways
That would be where assume makes an ass, then. The old DARPA challenge was almost all off road, for example, and the current problems mostly involve situations where many human drivers struggle (and fail). Stuff like driving into a setting sun, black ice, heavy rain. Where humans are "better" is mostly in taking risks/"knowing" that other human drivers will do certain things. Where AI is better is not driving the wrong way on the motorway and other trivia.
We're not at the stage where you can leave the steering wheel at home, but 289 people died last year because we're not at the stage where the steering wheel is enough to operate the vehicle safely. I still find it bleakly amusing that we refer to that as "the road toll", I have a mental image of feeding people into a Pink Floyd style meat grinder at a toll booth on the road. Maybe if we did that people would take it more seriously?
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
You may be confusing the underlying blockchain tech with its first example, bitcoin. Other methods are sprouting.
From a quick skim round the web my understanding seems to be common.
If they don't have the mining element, they're very hard to distinguish from generic cryptographic signing, where for example the ye olde PGP is used to sign a document that includes new content plus a summary or hash of previous content, thus proving the chain. It does that automatically in my email client (which I've been using with this feature since before blockchain was invented). An answer on Quora suggests that approach was devised around 1991.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Sacha,
Blockchain may solve that part of the problem somehow.
I think that's an excellent summary of blockchain in general.
Unfortunately it comes with the cost that blockchain is inherently about waste. It's not so much that encryption is wasteful per se, it's that blockchain is built around a race to see who can waste the most resources, biggest waster wins. The more people mine, the higher the operator needs to crank the cost of mining, because if someone gets over 50% of the total ability-to-mine, they get control over what's written into the blockchain and it stops being secure..
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Legal Beagle: The law to make it easier…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
It does meet the most important test for a piece of legislation: First, do no harm.
No it doesn't. It has already caused harm just by being drawn, and causing the media and politicians to spend time talking about it. Everything starts with -100 points. To get to neutral, it has to have enough positive points to outweigh the time and money required to pass a bill.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
. Given that such a thing already exists and is not popular at all, what evidence is there that it will suddenly become a whole lot more popular?
You're actually describing a velomobile, except for half the negatives. One serious issue with velomobiles is the risk of getting rear-ended because they outbrake most motor vehicles, and most of them have at least enough luggage space for a briefcase. There's only one made that doesn't have suspension, AFAIK (Trisled Rotovelo from Oz, but it's $AU6000 rather than EUR 6000).
The real issue is cost, because you pay the whole lot up front, and it's about $NZ10,000+. People really struggle with "$10k up front, $200/year running costs" vs "I can get a car for $5 grand and it's only $2000 a year for rego and insurance, plus $0.50 a kilometre". You've seen that with the Uber earnings figures. Even with an electric assist using current batteries (1000 cycles for $500), it still only costs you 50c every time you recharge it.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
(800m from a train station) Yes, funny isn't it. That's a 5 minute ride on a $50 second hand POS bike
Which is exactly how my partner and her sister get there. It's not hard, but it's also not huge fun late on a rainy night. There's a bus route that gets closer to our house if you get off the train a couple of stops earlier and they do that sometimes. As well, the cost of a taxi from the rank outside the station to our place is about $5 and most of the drivers seem happy to do those trips. In winter the bikes can spend days left at the train station.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
Most passenger cars are not ... 2m long (that's about the length of my body, so if I'm to fit inside it, it's going to have to have literally nothing else inside)
People sit up in cars rather than lying down. A Smart is just over 2m long (2695 x 1663 x 1552 mm), so that's not a useful objection. And safety tests suggest that small cars well designed are much safer than big cars operated outside their design environment (for example, a big 4WD used in the inner city). The problem here is not technological, it's cultural.