There was also a previous discussion about the report that Uber may not be at fault, though unlike this post the linked article was not the original source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16624814
In the /r/SelfDrivingCars discussion RIGradStudent pointed out that the article's statement about the Uber car going 38mph in a 35mph zone may be a typo, since Street View shows a 45mph speed limit sign: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/85ozqr/exc...
According to the article:
> From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said.
That wouldn't affect LIDAR, would it? The safety driver may not have been able to avoid the collision, but what about the self-driving car itself? I would like to know more before ruling out Uber's fault.
> That wouldn't affect LIDAR, would it? The safety driver may not have been able to avoid the collision, but what about the self-driving car itself? I would like to know more before ruling out Uber's fault.
That's actually an interesting question, I think: should we assign (formal, legal) fault to self-driving cars based on their actual capabilities, or on the capabilities of an average human driver in similar circumstances? What do we currently do when humans of very unequal skill (e.g., a race car driver vs daily commuter) have an accident -- does the race car driver potentially shoulder more of the blame? If not, should self-driving cars be treated differently?
Honest questions, I'm not sure how I'd answer them myself.
Yeah, that's the real question. Especially since, according to the article, Swarm was already planning to make their future satellites larger after the smaller design was rejected. Why jeopardize that by launching the previously rejected units?
It's not clear to me inteleng is objecting to any possible religious connotations, so much as saying that astrobiology's success is far from assured and that much work needs to be done to prevent progress from being derailed.
That's great for material that's public domain or out of copyright, but the Authors Guild settlement could have digitized and made accessible orphan works that are still under copyright. It would have complemented the public domain projects, not supplanted them.
But instead academic opponents of the deal seriously thought they would have better luck pursuing copyright reform in Congress (!), and helped kill the settlement. Of course, in reality Congress did no such thing, and so the chance to rescue orphan works was lost.
While a good step, this only makes up for a portion of what the settlement would have allowed. (Most obviously, it appears this only covers books from a 20 year period and it takes more work to ascertain that the books are not being sold.)
Moreover, this does not contradict the idea that the Authors Guild settlement could have complemented public domain efforts. Even today some of the books saved on the Internet Archive were retrieved via Google Books: https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about
Funnily enough, that's also how the original article described the opposition to the Authors Guild settlement. As it turned out, killing the Google Books project didn't really move us closer to copyright reform.
