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from the who's-gonna-drive-miss-daisy? dept.
The race to bring driverless cars to the masses is only just beginning, but already it is a fight for the ages. The competition is fierce, secretive, and elite. It pits Apple against Google against Tesla against Uber: all titans of Silicon Valley, in many ways as enigmatic as they are revered.
As these technology giants zero in on the car industry, global automakers are being forced to dramatically rethink what it means to build a vehicle for the first time in a century. Aspects of this race evoke several pivotal moments in technological history: the construction of railroads, the dawn of electric light, the birth of the automobile, the beginning of aviation. There's no precedent for what engineers are trying to build now, and no single blueprint for how to build it.
Self-driving cars promise to create a new kind of leisure, offering passengers additional time for reading books, writing email, knitting, practicing an instrument, cracking open a beer, taking a catnap, and any number of other diversions. Peope who are unable to drive themselves could experience a new kind of independence. And self-driving cars could re-contextualize land-use on massive scales. In this imagined mobility utopia, drone trucks would haul packages across the country and no human would have to circle a city block in search of a parking spot.
If self-driving vehicles deliver on their promises, they will save millions of lives over the course of a few decades, destroy and create entire industries, and fundamentally change the human relationship with space and time. All of which is why some of the planet's most valuable companies are pouring billions of dollars into the effort to build driverless cars.
After automation puts everyone out of work, will anyone need to drive anywhere anymore?
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday December 17 2015, @06:18AM
Yep it'll save lives...and every evening the corp that will own your car's software (you of course won't own it anymore than you own software now) will give a nice bullet pointed list of every place you went to everyone from your insurance company to the NSA, but saving lives, right?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:08PM
I think you're thinking about this issue the wrong way. You're tracked NOW by the NSA. Holding back automated cars for fear you'll be tracked is kind of ridiculous given you're using the internet.
The level to which they track you might vary and you can limit it, but if you're concerns are being tracked then maybe those are the concerns you should be addressing, not "don't make it because this might happen"
If we went with that line of reasoning, the internet, the single greatest tool to track you with, wouldn't exist. And as I've said multiple times, saving lives is only one of a lot of benefits automated cars have. I believe that out weights some people the paranoia.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @06:49PM
If you have a mobile phone that's on, you're already tracked.
If you have a laptop with wifi, the NSA can probably track you if they wanted to.
If you have a car with a license plate and you drive in certain areas, you're already tracked. Even if you have a fake license plate you're still being tracked.
And given you're a Windows user, even if you're not tracked (telemetry etc) you're probably pre-pwned. If the NSA has/gets a cert signed by Microsoft that your machine hasn't seen yet, you can't disable it (since it's not there yet), but if your machine ever encounters it, it will be automatically added and be trusted. Enjoy:
http://www.proper.com/root-cert-problem/ [proper.com]
Windows Vista does act like Windows XP SP2 in that when you try to validate a certificate that chains to a certification authority that is trusted by Microsoft but it is not in your root store, Windows Vista will silently add that certification authority. Like the other certificate authorities trusted by Microsoft, these cannot be removed.
After extensive searching, I could not find a way to remove certificate authorities trusted by Microsoft from Windows Vista. Even if there is a way to do this, there seems to be no equivalent of the Update Root Certificates program that can be turned off. There may be such functionality in Windows Vista, but neither searching in the built-in help nor on the Microsoft support site found anything about such functionality. I tried a few things that people familiar with Vista guessed at, but they were all unsuccessful at getting close to the Windows XP SP2 functionality.