I like the discussion at the end about the difficulties on delivering the busses long distance, and the lack of chargers big enough to recharge them. If the Tesla Semi actually launches at some point, perhaps that will change and we will get city-to-city electric busses too. Battery ranges should improve to the point where that becomes practical over the next few years too.
What a great market that would be for Waymo. Predictable routes of mostly highway driving would be right up their alley.
With electric buses, at least, you can put the chargers at end point stations, which is a cost but one bussing agencies can handle. Also, they cost much less than the overhead wires electric trolley buses currently use.
One idea I've read is to use those overhead wires for BEV busses, but only on certain segments. Most bus lines loop through a central area, so could charge along a section of a few blocks that feature the overhead wires.
Wire attachment is a big problem even for bus line me that are fully overhead. Before the buses had batteries, a detachment often required shutting down the road and bringing out a big truck to reattach the bus.
Seattle used to run dual gas/electric (not really hybrids since no battery) in the downtown tunnel by having them attach going in and Unattach going out. Great when it worked, but it often didn’t, so they just use cleaner emission buses now instead.
You can't get people to ride buses now, often for reasons like fear of crime, not wanting to associate with "those people", perceived low status. So somehow a driver less bus is going to be _more_ appealing? A big box full of strangers with no supervision or authority figure? Lord of the Flies on Wheels? I think this is going to be a hard sell.
To me buses and truck market seems niche as compared to personal cars for companies looking to build electric tech to drive them. Number of state departments and businesses willing to pay for electric vehicle are fewer compared to electric car customers.
Trucks and busses often follow centrally planned routes without much deviation, they're too large to be sent down narrow lanes or poorly maintained roads, and the people who buy them are ready to spend a six-figure sum.
Some companies might have autonomous tech that's a good match for those constraints, despite the much smaller market.
And airlines are niche compared to mass market cars too, but they're still a good business!
One thing I think most people don't appreciate is that the switch to self-driving cars will transform America into a mostly-transit society. Once you don't need a car to live from day to day, you sell it. Then you take a self-driving Lyft from your house to the bus depot, train station, or airport.
The market for self-driving busses between cities will grow alongside the market for self-driving cars within cities.
The prediction is that ride-hailing taxis will be ubiquitous and cheap once we have self-driving cars. Companies will be able to flood the city streets with them once they are purely a capital expenditure and they don't have to pay human drivers.
If self-driving taxis are ubiquitous enough, there could be very little wait time between hailing a taxi from an app on your smartphone and the taxi arriving at your location.
At some price point, it will stop making sense to spend $20,000-$30,000 to buy a car. And you won't have to pay for insurance or gas or wear-and-tear or parking. The car could be out making money instead of being parked 22 hours a day.
Businesses and apartments and home developers will stop building parking spaces and parking lots once self-driving taxis hit a sufficient threshold.
Finally, cars will solve transit's "last mile" problem. Instead of paying for a taxi from home to work, you can pay for a taxi from home to the Light Rail station.
They're not a legal immigrant, because they lied on their immigration papers, making their immigration invalid.
If they're an illegal immigrant, their children would be granted citizenship.
If they're a diplomat, their children would not be granted citizenship. The child of the Russian Ambassador does not become a Canadian citizen even if born and raised in Toronto.
I think the government's argument that they're more like a diplomat (an agent of a foreign country) than an undocumented resident (e.g., someone who's entered the country of their own volition for work) is pretty sound.
My god. It's an actual, blatant violation of the Rule Against Perpetuities. [0] And here I thought I'd never use this knowledge outside of a Property Law exam.
The idea that humans shouldn’t expand into the cosmos for fear of displacing some xenoplanktons is nuts. I’m not anti-xenoplankton, but I’m very pro-human. We will inherit the stars.
This article has it completely backwards. As is often the case, (just as Paul Krugman gets basic tech facts wrong) tech people often don't understand economics.
This has ALWAYS been the problem with "ASIC resistant" coins. "ASIC Resistant" just means that you can rent an AWS instance to attack the coin because any generic CPU or GPU will work.
Bitcoin isn't safe just because it's big. It's safe because Bitcoin mining hardware has no purpose other than to mine Bitcoin. Which means the economics are such that Bitcoin mining is only profitable on the fully amortized lifetime cost of the miner, not on the marginal rental cost.
(That's because competition between miners drives the difficulty so high that marginal revenues fall until they equal long-term marginal costs, which are (land rent + labor + fully amortized hardware + electricity))
ASIC driven Proof-of-Work is fine as long as your coin's POW is unique. Only by forcing miners to make a 3-5 year investment in mining hardware can you align the long term incentives of miners and end-users.
I can't parse what you are saying, sorry. The point author is making is, if bitcoin mining asics were available to rent or buy at some cost X, if the mining fees are too low, it may be more profitable to attack than to mine
So much work and waste. By design it tends towards a specialized group controlling the system. Large miners just replace bankers and it cost more to do anything.
it's an alternative currency, it's point is exactly the same as any other currency. What's the point of euros ? why can't they just use dollars like we do.
The point of Euros and Dollars is so a nation or group of nations has democratic power over their own monetary policy. Bitcoin originally presented the idea of a never changing monetary policy but as forks have come and gone and power is beginning to concentrate in career miners that no longer seems to be the case.
There's more to safety statistics than just the mortality rate. We should be able to look at frequency and severity of non-fatal accidents too. Those happen a lot more often.
For example, accidents that occur at 35 MPH or less are much less likely to result in a fatality or major injury, due to the amount of kinetic energy that a human body can safely dissipate. So if Google cars have even slightly better braking or speed control, you're going to see an improvement. Looking at the average speed at which accidents occur would be useful information.
>> There's more to safety statistics than just the mortality rate. We should be able to look at frequency and severity of non-fatal accidents too. Those happen a lot more often.
When the industry or the press discuss the safety of self-driving cars, they almost always do it in terms of fatality rates. Not general accident rates.
"they almost always do it in terms of fatality rates"
That's an element of right-wing policy created to fight safety regulation. The position is that since the severity of non-fatal workplace injuries is hard to measure, only fatal accidents should be recorded.[1][2] Then there's too little data to make policy.
"Disengagements" are a measure of how close we are to a self driving car. I.e. one that doesn't need a human sitting in the drivers seat to handle these disengagements, not a measure of safety.
Right. Only Waymo has disengagement numbers that are even vaguely decent.
The CA DMV data has enough info that you can distinguish between "driver had to take over to avoid crash" vs. "vehicle was unable to proceed due to problem ahead and needed help". The first number needs to get very low before self-driving can work. The second, Waymo proposes to handle by having a very limited remote control capability, so remote support can get a vehicle past a strange problem.
I wonder if there will be a psychological factor too. If SDV really manage to get better, during the transition, will the remaining human drivers improve to avoid feeling beaten by a machine ?
I personally think, during a transition to an SDV majority, human drivers will get worse.
Mainly because good driving is often synonymous with defensive driving. And you don't need to drive defensively if there's a large number of cars on the road which won't unexpectedly change lanes, turn right from the left lane or wildly change speed for no reason. If anything, human drivers might start doing unsafe maneuvers more as they see SDVs around them react quicker and safer to their bad driving. Why bother getting in the correct lane when you can pick the less congested one and rely on SDVs to move out of your way when you barge past?
There's also the issue of people switching from SDV to manually operated vehicles. What if someone uses an autonomous car for commuting on weekdays and gets used to the car acting for them, then uses a normal car on the weekends? They might expect the car to emergency brake for them when a pedestrian steps out into the road, and in the split second it takes them to realise the car will not do that for them they've already traveled too far to stop in time.
More to the point, the EU didn't say "Google can't monetize Android". It just said that this tying arrangement between Google Search and Android is too anti-competitive.
Android could find other, more transparent and competitive, revenue models.
Google does not even want or need to make money from Android they were/are afraid that iPhone and Windows mobile devices would not default to Google search, having all the mobile devices not defaulting to google gave them nightmares.
Remember that article about how they acted like a toddler to Microsoft when the latter wanted to have a YouTube app?[1] All to keep WP from being viable enough to have a significant market share of users, especially users that didn't know or care enough to swap out bing search for Google.
Google not allowing WP to have a YouTube app that purposely stripped out the ads and ignored various other aspects of the ToS is nowhere near the reason why WP wasn't viable.
Careful now, can't be criticizing Google too much on HN, they send the wolves for you.
I'd love to know how many of the people rallying around Google's defenses now were anti-Microsoft back in the day for doing what is basically the same damn thing they were doing with Internet Explorer, only IMHO worse because Google didn't even develop Android, they just picked it up and filled it to the brim with their software.
>Google didn't even develop Android, they just picked it up and filled it to the brim with their software.
What Google initially bought was no where near a commercially viable product and any remnants of that legacy code probably don't even even exist in the Android code base of today.
>only IMHO worse because Google didn't even develop Android
Sort of like how Microsoft bought MS-DOS, the foundation for Windows 1.0, from Seattle Computer Products. Except for the part where Microsoft then tried to screw them over by suing them and ultimately settling out of court.
You neglected to mention that Microsoft employees reverse engineered the YouTube API's and then, for good measure, prevented ads from appearing in the app. They also had no permission to use someone else's IP.
>All to keep WP from being viable enough to have a significant market share
This is a company that not only had to pay developers to write apps for their platform, but would also offer to write it for them. They were never going to have a significant market share because of their incompetence.
That's basically what the EU is demanding. The EU has handed down what is an anti-tying decision. "You can't tie Android to Google Search, because that prevents competition in Search."
Okay then, but Google Search is what paid for Android development, so if you can't tie them together, Android needs to seek other sources of funding. The most obvious one is some sort of licensing fee.
(It could also possibly fund itself from search revenue (like Firefox) and App Store fees, although the second one could be broken up by the EU too on anti-tying grounds)
It's no different from when Windows was prevented from tying Windows to Internet Explorer. It opened competition in browsers (and we now have Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Brave, etc.), but it also forced browsers to find independent business models.
Okay then, but Google Search is what paid for Android development, so if you can't tie them together, Android needs to seek other sources of funding. The most obvious one is some sort of licensing fee.
A licensing fee would be a valid and reasonable outcome. It probably can even work without making Android closed-source, by choosing the licenses accordingly or maybe have some kind of early-access or migration-support agreements (IANAL).
The main point is that Google is using a monopoly in one market to retain a monopoly in another market, and this is illegal. As far as I'm reading the press release, Google is not barred from developing and offering Android for free, if they wish so - they are only disallowed to abuse their monopoly.
but it also forced browsers to find independent business models
It stopped Microsoft from preventing independent business models for browsers; it was just too late already for the commercial browser vendors of the time. And the current EU ruling will hopefully allow other mobile OS developers (or startups) to compete on more equal grounds.
Of course we still have the network effect of Google Play, featuring a market dominance over Android apps and Android users. I wouldn't be too surprised to see another future EU ruling requiring Google to unbundle Google Play from all but technical requirements, possibly allowing users to legally get access to Google Play on AOSP-based devices, or using alternative clients.
> The main point is that Google is using a monopoly in one market to retain a monopoly in another market, and this is illegal. As far as I'm reading the press release, Google is not barred from developing and offering Android for free, if they wish so - they are only disallowed to abuse their monopoly.
I agree with this and it's a good thing, but where does it ends? When can we say this is another market, don't touch it?
Qualcomm is pretty much the standard on cellphone processor. Their processor include a GPU, called Adreno. I want to manufacture GPU for phone. By including it on their processor and not offering it without one, they essentially force their buyer to ignore my offering. Are they trying to illegally retain monopoly over GPU for phones? CPU and GPU are 2 different market (desktop PC prove this pretty clearly).
> Android closed-source, by choosing the licenses accordingly or maybe have some kind of early-access or migration-support agreements (IANAL).
Absolutely. Something akin to https://licensezero.com might fit the bill. There’s plenty of innovation left to do in the space of source code licensing.
> It opened competition in browsers (and we now have Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Brave, etc.)
MS all but ceasing development on IE after version 6 is what opened competition in browsers, not any government action. Remember from IE4 to 6 before Firefox was released Internet Explorer really was the best browser out there. MS used their Windows monopoly to aid distribution and their huge piles of cash to make it free (vs paid-for Netscape), but it wasn't like it was crap software that was only being used because MS force-fed it to everybody. At least not until they (probably intentionally) let it wither and die and Firefox and then Chrome ate their lunch.
Was about to disagree but on closer reading I agree.
I'll still say the browser choice thing was a good thing as it spread the message, and helped get a critical mass of users to use other browser so that web developers had to design cross browser solutions for a while until they got lazy again and started only designing for Chrome.
Is there any evidence the EU's mandated browser choice thing had that effect at all? IIRC what moved the needle on Firefox was huge grassroots campaigns, and what moved the needle on Chrome was advertising it on the Google home page. I've never heard any argument that the Windows choice box made any impact.
It was intentional, the even disbanded the development team. Even in the mid 90s it was obvious to everyone that web apps would be the future. If web apps were the future then win32 didn't matter and their grip on computing would be lost. IMO the mistake they made was not doubling down and turning IE into the next windows. Instead they tried to bring win32 to the web.
IE was terrible for anyone not using Windows. They encouraged ActiveX and didn't keep to web specs.
Imagine if they'd kept their monopoly and we'd all had to stay on Vista and Windows Mobile because it was the only way to browse the web. Flash would still be a thing. The iPhone could have failed because it couldn't load most websites. We might still have keypads on our phones.
I used other browsers on Windows before Internet Explorer ever existed, and even on Windows versions that came with IE in the box, either it was the age where we still used Netscape Navigator CDs to install it (and all your mime type handlers would change from IE to Navigator), or later or, I used IE to just download installers for other browsers.
It didn't open competition at all, it just made Microsoft pay for what every OS does today: it includes a browser by default. OSX, iOS, Android, multiple game consoles, and even some TVs.
They got punished for innovation, and no one else had to pay the fine for copying their behavior.
Microsoft wasn't punished for bundling the browser with the OS.
They were punished because they did that while IE and MS both had major market positions.
The game consoles are split between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, you have choice there. OSX and iOS are only shipped on Mac devices which don't have major marketshares either.
When you have a majority marketshare then you can't do what you want, there is rules. Especially when it comes to abusing your major position to leverage other positions (Sony and Nintendo are hardly pushing their browser products)
Apple abuses its market position as being the only vendor authorized to ship devices with iOS and OSX. I cannot buy, say, an LG or Samsung iPhone. They abuse their market position by not allowing third party core functionality on their phone at all, nor third party devices at all.
Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony abuse their market positions via exclusive AAA titles that will never come to other platforms, without a valid technological limitation being available (Nintendo owns emulators for tons of past systems, that can work on x86 and ARM fine; Switch internally is 100% the same SoC as the Shield TV; XBOne and PS4 are both AMD APUs and involve no Microsoft or Sony magic in the core hardware).
Phones nor game consoles are not equivalent: when I buy them, I am not buying a device, I am buying a member of an ecosystem. Apple 100% dominates the Apple ecosystem, Microsoft 100% the Xbox ecosystem, Sony 100% the Sony ecosystem, Nintendo 100% of the Nintendo ecosystem.
They have committed far more sins against their own customers than Google has for not dominating the Android ecosystem (as they do not make any Android devices (Pixel does not count, it is an LG and HTC product line)), and the EU has fined Google for an unrelated domination in the search market (of which, Google has no realistic competitors, and not because Google somehow prevented the development of other search engines magically).
In comparison to Microsoft /w MSIE, the MSIE team did not abuse their customers by including a browser by default. They allowed people in the Windows ecosystem to connect to the Internet (a much larger ecosystem) with no additional software for free.
MSIE-era Microsoft and Google were fined for allowing choice, and by allowing choice their platforms (and thus ecosystems) became popular.
DoJ vs Microsoft and EU vs Google both have illustrated that the governments prefer Equality of Outcome over Equality of Opportunity. This tells big business, don't bother innovating, don't bother taking advantage of first mover strategies, don't bother doing anything that might benefit your customers; just lock them into little walled gardens, because you'll make a lot of money but not risk becoming popular enough to get fined.
Apple certainly learned from this, iPhones aren't popular, iMacs and MBPs aren't popular, but Apple will probably be the first company ever with a $1T market cap.
Apple does not have a major position in smartphones or search engines.
Their only monopoly is to sell their own devices, which is totally okay. You can compete by making a YouPhone that's better than the iPhone.
>Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony abuse their market positions
Again, neither has a major market position over the other and it does not prevent any of the other from competing. As you mention, each is capable of putting out exclusives just fine.
>when I buy them, I am not buying a device, I am buying a member of an ecosystem
You seem under the false impression that this is about you. This is purely about competition. As long as any of those vendors do not prevent the others from fairly competing on the market, the EU won't lift a finger.
>They have committed far more sins against their own customers than Google has for not dominating the Android ecosystem
Google is dominating the mobile browser and internet search markets, which, if you check the EU ruling, is the markets this is about.
The android market itself is irrelevant.
>They allowed people in the Windows ecosystem to connect to the Internet (a much larger ecosystem) with no additional software for free.
And google allows vendors to ship phones that can connect to the internet with no additional software for free.
>MSIE-era Microsoft and Google were fined for allowing choice, and by allowing choice their platforms (and thus ecosystems) became popular.
Completely false, they were fined for disadvantaging competitors who would not be able to compete on a fair market.
>DoJ vs Microsoft and EU vs Google both have illustrated that the governments prefer Equality of Outcome over Equality of Opportunity.
Atleast in the EU case, false again. The EU favors a market in which everyone has a level playing field, primarly enforced by having additional rules for any major players in a market. This doesn't tell business to not innovate or first mover advantage, both are allowed.
It's not disallowed to have a major market position but it's disallowed to abuse it to either disadvantage other competitors in the same or other markets.
Otherwise MS would have been fined for producing windows and selling it in the EU, which has not been the case to my knowledge.
Having OEMs pay a licensing fee to Google seems better than having Google stiffle competition by bundling Google Play and Search and requiring OEMs to not ship alternative non-Google AOSP products.
Okay then, but Google Search is what paid for Android development, so if you can't tie them together, Android needs to seek other sources of funding. The most obvious one is some sort of licensing fee.
And that’s a good thing. I prefer simple transactions. I give a company money and they give me stuff. It’s very transparent business model.
Yeah, that's why I'm favor of this decision. I think it's reasonable for regulators to have an anti-tying bias and make companies prove that the tying is somehow necessary. Because the alternative to tying (as you say) is a more open, competitive, and transparent "cash for stuff" market.
But then Android wouldn't be open source anymore. That would be a big shame and it's bizarre to see HN commenters arguing after so many years of shitting on things like Play Services that, in effect, they want Android to become entirely proprietary.
It'd also send a powerful signal to lots of other companies - don't create open platforms monetized through additional services. As so much open source code is funded by companies, that'd be a huge blow.
What most people think of “Android” has never been open source. Android has always been the unusable AOSP part + Google Play Services + proprietary binary drivers. Google has over the years abandoned much of the open source parts and created proprietary versions.
No one is saying that they want Android to become proprietary. There are plenty of open source projects supported by major corporations - Angular, React, NodeJS, WebKit, CUPS, Java, .Net Core, Swift, etc.
If a company only wants to license part of Google Play Services they should be able to pay for just that. If Android is so valuable, other companies should be willing to contribute to AOSP. How healthy is a piece of open source software if it completely dies once one corporate benefactor abandons it?
That's simply not true is it - there are plenty of people who have made their own Android ROMS using the released code, and Android still comes with the same set of apps it always did. Yes, Google has often made better apps that compete with the built in open source ones, but you can still get a very capable and powerful mobile OS for free just by downloading it. And as for proprietary drivers, well that's the hw vendors not Google doing that.
Everyone does. Hell, I do too. But it's not realistic to expect this music to keep playing. The ratio of workers to retirees keeps getting worse, from 10:1 in the 1950s to 3:1 today, and falling.
The economy can grow over time, but on any given day it's a fixed pie, and it has to be divided among workers (who are doing the labor now) and retirees (who accumulated the capital in previous decades that today's labor uses to magnify their productivity).
Everyone is feeling squeezed as individuals because of falling incomes, but the real culprit is a falling ratio of income-makers (labor) to income-takers (capital, whether retired individuals or just wealthy).
This cannot last. The ratio of labor income to capital income will eventually be restored (hopefully in a peaceful manner, but we can't rule out alternatives). The reasonable fix will be raising retirement ages, but good luck getting a sufficient raise there to restore a 10:1 ratio.
What a great market that would be for Waymo. Predictable routes of mostly highway driving would be right up their alley.