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lost_soul

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I saw this today, and while transmitting data over light is nothing new, the interesting part is concerning cars. What if every car had a few LEDs on the front, back, and sides, along with a computer and respective photodiodes? They would be able to communicate with eachother and it would decrease the chances of accidents.

 

For example, the computer in your car has determined the current speed to be 30 mph. Now there's some moron driving up behind you at a speed of 50 mph. Your car can detect this by communicating with the other car and automatically take evasive action or trigger the other car to do so. The distance between vehicles is determined by the time it takes the signal to ping.

 

So, a car is coming up behind you at 50 mph and your car has detected that there is nothing in front of you. Your car automatically accelerates temporarily and tells the other car to slow down when it gets in a certain range to avoid a crash.

 

This should be simple to do.

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--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Congrats on making me laugh. Seriously though. I know someone who has been known to sit in the front passenger chair of the car with their legs *resting on the dashboard*. Its like they don't realize what will happen if the airbag deploys.

 

... the things people don't even think about when they're young...

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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  • If speed = 30 and followingCarSpeed = 50 then let speed = 60
  • If speed = 50 and followingCarSpeed = 70 then let speed = 80
  • If speed = 80 and followingCarSpeed = 100 then let speed = 120
  • If speed = 120 and followingCarSpeed = 140 then let speed = 160 call evasiveManoeuvre
  • If oncomingTruckTonnage > 4 then call prayerSubroutine

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To prevent attacks, it would force the other car's speed down for a wile so they couldn't just make you accelerate. :) Also, if there was an oncoming vehicle and the LEDs detect nothing on your side or behind you, it could make a hard turn and have the other car do the same if appropriate. The idea is, computers react much faster than humans to things like this.

 

I've heard in some cars, they can already remotely stop your engine.

 

I'm assuming there would be two versions of the firmware. The standard edition only protects against smaller cars, and the Ultimate one protects against trucks and busses.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Instead of airbags, an automatic spear impalement system should be installed on the driving wheel. That would then be deployed upon impact. Maybe with that kind of system people would not drive 120km/h during a blizzard with frozen roads.

 

Mwah!

 

'Strict liability' is the thinking man's equivalent, though I prefer your version. The idea that if you do something that's known to be risky, if you fuck up and hurt someone it's assumed you should have been more careful - it's for you then to prove that you weren't at fault, not for the victim to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they didn't throw themselves under your car.

 

Here's what the Danish Road Traffic Act (ammended 1986) has to say.

 

 

 

"Any person in charge of a power driven vehicle shall be liable for any damage caused by such vehicle by a traffic accident or by an explosion or a fire arising from fuel‐feeding installations in the vehicle."

 

All civilised countries should do it. Those that do have impeccable records for road safety. The UK isn't amongst them - here they just let you run over cyclists, pedestrians, kids, you name it - it's all fair game. Hell, the current tour de france champion and the Olympic cycling coach are both currently hospitalized - it's like fucking dodgems out there - only with consequences.

Edited by jay pettitt
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Me thinks vehicles already have automatic safety systems to the degree that morons with false feeling of security drive their big and expensive cars recklessly because of them.

 

Instead of airbags, an automatic spear impalement system should be installed on the driving wheel. That would then be deployed upon impact. Maybe with that kind of system people would not drive 120km/h during a blizzard with frozen roads.

 

lol What a great post!

You do have a point. However, accidents frequently involves two cars, one could be an idiot doing something reckless and the other a careful driver and his/her family. Besides, some safety systems go beyond the protection of the passengers and could benefit passengers of other vehicles or pedestrians.

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While walking home the other day, somebody was coming towards me with their headlights off after dark. I've also been with a driver who was texting while driving before. There are a lot of really stupid people out there.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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This thread of computerized cars has reminded me of a video "The coming war on general computation" that I saw a few months ago (it was probably on this forum, actually.) Where a pretty fine writer Cory Doctorow writes against all the attempts at limiting the functionality of general computers. That's not just an mp3 player, it's a general computer that has been limited to only perform a certain action. That's not a CD, that's a bunch of data files with purposeful corruption to make sure that you can't play it without special proprietary software. And that's not a gaming console, it's a fully functional computer with rootkits, code signing, and spyware right out-of-the-box.

 

"Can't you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an internet that transmits and message over any protocol between two points unless it upsets us?" (26:59) "As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I get into a car -- a computer I put my body into -- with my hearing aid -- a computer I put inside my body -- I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests." (27:07) I think he also makes mention somewhere of the implications of user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc

 

A heavy emphasis against SOPA/PIPA as well as the America's DMCA, and a connection to general computing that I had never seen before.

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"Autonomous cars are coming -- and they’re going to drive better than you"

 

 

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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What if every car had a few LEDs on the front, back, and sides, along with a computer and respective photodiodes?

What if every car just had the much more robust WLAN for doing that. Oh wait, THAT is actually being researched... ;) We've been doing some experiments with GPS for WLAN-handovers and tried some car2car adhoc connetions for such things a few years back. It is a known thing that WLAN will come to local car2car communication.

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Oak Ridge Claims No. 1 Position on Latest TOP500 List with Titan

 

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—Advanced reports that Oak Ridge National Laboratory was fielding the world’s fastest supercomputer were proven correct when the 40th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 List of the world’s top supercomputers was released today (Nov. 12, 2012). Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge, achieved 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. Titan has 560,640 processors, including 261,632 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.

 

In claiming the top spot, Titan knocked Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia out of No. 1 and into second place. Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system, was No. 1 in June 2012 with an impressive 16.32 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark. With 1,572,864 cores, Sequoia is the first system with one million or more cores.

 

Rounding out the top five systems are Fujitsu’s K computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan (No. 3); a BlueGene/Q system named Mira at Argonne National Laboratory (No. 4); and a BlueGene/Q system named JUQUEEN at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany (No. 5), which was upgraded and is now the most powerful system in Europe.

 

The other new system in the Top 10 is Stampede, a Dell PowerEdge C8220 system installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas in Austin. It uses the brand new Intel Xeon Phi processors (previously known as MIC) to achieve its 2.6 Petaflop/s.

 

In all there are 23 systems with Petaflop/s performance on the latest list, just four-and-a-half years after the debut of Roadrunner, the world’s first Petaflop/s supercomputer. In spite of delivering petascale performance on applications, the Cray Blue Waters system at NCSA at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, chose not to submit a Linpack benchmark performance figure.

Here are additional highlights from the 40th list, which can be found at www.top500.org:

  • A total of 62 systems on the list are using Accelerator/Co-Processor technology, including Titan and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system (No. 8), which use NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation and Stampede and six others, which are accelerated by the new Intel Xeon Phi processors. Six months ago, 58 systems used accelerators or co-processors.
  • Systems with multi-core processors dominate the list—84.6 percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores and 46.2 percent with eight or more cores.
  • Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (76 percent) of TOP500 systems. Intel is followed by the AMD Opteron family with 60 systems (12 percent), the same as six months ago. IBM Power processors are used in 53 systems (10.6 percent).
  • InfiniBand technology now provides interconnects on 226 systems, up from 209 systems, making it the most-used internal system interconnect technology. Gigabit Ethernet interconnects are now found on 188 systems, down from207 six months ago.
  • The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 250 of the 500 systems (compared to 252 on the June 2012 list). The European share (105 systems—down from 106 last time) is still lower than the Asian share (124 systems – 122 last time).
  • The number of systems installed in China has now stabilized at 72, compared with 68 and 74 on the last two lists. China occupies the No. 2 position as a user of HPC, ahead of Japan, UK, France, and Germany. When it comes to performance share of the list, however, Japan holds the No. 2 position, ahead of China.
  • European presence on the list is almost equal among UK, France, and Germany, with 24, 21 and 20 systems respectively.
  • The entry level to the list moved up to the 76.5 Tflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 60.8 Tflop/s six months ago. The entry point for the TOP100 increased to 241.3 Tflop/s from 172.7 Tflop/s in six months.

20 Years of the TOP500 List

 

With the release of the 40thlist, the TOP500 project marks its 20th anniversary of providing insight into HPC performance. The first version of what became today’s TOP500 list started as an exercise for a small conference in Germany in June 1993. Out of curiosity, the authors decided to revisit the list in November 1993 to see how things had changed. About that time they realized they might be on to something and decided to continue compiling the list, which is now a much-anticipated, much-watched and much-debated twice-yearly event. To mark the 20th anniversary and the 40th edition of the list, A special poster display highlighting each of the 15 systems to top the list will be featured at the SC12 conference (Booth 1925) held Nov. 10-16 in Salt Lake City.

 

About the TOP500 List

 

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Edited by jaxa
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  • 1 year later...

Well now here we go... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/03/us_feds_want_cars_conversing_by_2017/

 

 

Sadly though, I wonder whether this will be used to keep people safe, or keep tabs on them? Think of it, even if your car isn't connected to the cloud, they can constantly track your position using this...

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Me thinks vehicles already have automatic safety systems to the degree that morons with false feeling of security drive their big and expensive cars recklessly because of them.

 

Instead of airbags, an automatic spear impalement system should be installed on the driving wheel. That would then be deployed upon impact. Maybe with that kind of system people would not drive 120km/h during a blizzard with frozen roads.

 

Hail False sense of security!! Hail Insurance companies!!

 

And most importantly, HAIL FIGHT CLUB!!

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