Posts by Cylindric 8 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Feb 2010
Easy to try for yourself in your own car with your own reflexes. Get a friend to be a passenger. Chose a quiet road somewhere or a carpark. Drive along at 20MPH and get your friend to pick a spot ahead (without telling you) and then shout "stop!" when you reach that point. Measure the distance from that spot, to where you stopped.
RAC say that at 20mph, it takes about 3 car lengths (12m) to stop, in an average family car in normal weather.
At 30 it's 6 lengths (23m)
What do you think runs on a PIC or Arduino? Code. That hardware still needs to be protected from someone dumping arbitrary firmware on it. It's not the 80's any more, the line between "dumb hardware" and "complex OS" has moved on, and shouting into the coming wind is not going to protect you. Security is not just a case of smugly mocking MS any more.
Do you have any specific data to back that up? We seem to be surviving in droves, despite the constant rain of failing equipment and technology. Oh wait. That's not happening, despite the increasing complexity of the world we live in.
I suspect that since we started rubbing sticks together to make fire, someone has been lamenting the impending doom almost guaranteed by the new-fangled complexities.
Lucas isn't claiming to own all lasers, or contest their creation of all devices not much more reminiscent of a Lightsaber than a torch - so all you Geostationary Satellite folks can get a grip and calm down.
This is a design thing - if you make a device and design the appearance of it to be exactly like a Lucas Lightsaber, then you're in the wrong. So yes, if you invent a robotic protocol robot, but make it look exactly like C-3PO, you'll be in trouble too.
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