Posts by Orv 1976 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
Sure, but if you're just leaving them in a tape library they're not a "backup" by Doctor Syntax's definition, since they could be loaded and written to at any time. To meet their full definition the tapes have to be removed, write protected, and then hauled to another site.
Back in the 1990s, I used to work at a bank that dealt with this by having the sysadmin put the previous week's backup tape set in the trunk of his car every Friday. This did technically create off-site backups, but it always seemed to me that there were security implications. It also didn't do those fragile DDS tapes much good.
I disagree that backups are easy, at least not if you do it right. One of the drivers of cloud storage abuse where I work was people trying to set up off-site backups, which is not cheap or easy. We have an on-site data center but nothing off-site.
Probably not a concern. Any manned interplanetary mission is going to spend very little time at the altitudes where junk persists -- they'll start in low orbit, where junk de-orbits itself due to atmospheric drag, and then move to a transfer orbit that's well above any significant amount of junk.
The concern is that certain orbits useful for satellites could end up unusable, if it gets bad enough.
Yesterday I was driving on US-101 and noticing that my car was unable to provide lane assistance because of the lighting conditions -- the light reflecting off the lane striping was just right to make it blend into the concrete road surface. I could tell where the lanes were because of the catseye reflectors, but the car couldn't.
Interestingly, California used to use *only* catseyes or Botts' Dots as lane markings; they started painting them as a way to accommodate self-driving cars.
We can only go so far blaming drivers for this problem, because we know it's built in to the way that humans perceive the world. The longer things go without us having to provide any input, the more checked-out we become. This has been a well-known problem in aviation for decades; if an aircraft autopilot disengages during cruise flight, it takes a substantial amount of time for the pilots to identify the situation and get back into the loop. It's possible to deal with this at 30,000 feet, when you're a long distance from any obstacles and can afford the seconds or even minutes it might take to properly respond; but when you've been driving a Tesla on Autopilot for an hour and it disengages less than a second before a collision, it's not really reasonable to blame the driver, even though they were *technically* supposed to take over.
"Just as stupid as a human driver" is not the pitch for self-driving vehicles, though. They're supposed to be safer. If they're actually, as seems to be the case, much worse at actually navigating city traffic (and with the bonus of converting cell network congestion into traffic jams), what's the point? Just to remove more jobs from the market?
My guess is the speed difference was probably too high for an accurate cannon shot. I think there's also a question of whether it would come down quickly *enough* with just some slow leaks in the envelope. Ideally you want to be able to bring it down for a quick, controlled landing, so it doesn't drag across miles of power lines and such.
Nobody that doesn't want to be critically dependent upon an asset owned and maintained by a competitor, which was designed and built around that competitor's physical product.
The fact that everyone is switching to Tesla's chargers suggests this isn't a concern.
11 hours if you're lucky. Last time I tried to do part of that route (Santa Barbara to San Jose), the train was 8 hours late getting to the Santa Barbara station. I gave up after four hours and drove, eating the cost of the ticket. I haven't attempted to take Amtrak since.
The US moves more freight by rail than any of those countries, but these days it's mostly confined to large unit trains of bulk materials -- e.g., coal, grain, taconite -- for heavy industry, and intermodal freight between major ports. (It's often cheaper for a shipper to unload a ship on the West Coast, move the containers by rail to the Gulf, and load on a different ship there, instead of going through the Panama Canal. Railroads don't want to mess with switching individual cars to smaller businesses anymore; it's too slow and labor intensive.
I suspect it's a cost/availability thing. Kind of like how, when there was a shortage of chips for radars, he suddenly "discovered" that cars didn't need radar after all and eliminated it. Now they're starting to put it back in because -- guess what? -- it was important.
You talk about an AI Winter like it'd be a bad thing. So far AI doesn't seem to be good at anything except threatening people's jobs. It's not performing any function that we need and couldn't get any other way. This whole business is a bubble that needs to be punctured ASAP.
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