Exactly. Any such remote control would have to be trivial for a cop to use, and also need to directly control only the car(s) the cop is currently interacting with. Think of a situation like this where a traffic light is disabled and a cop is there directing traffic. If driverless cars are approaching from multiple directions then how does the cop direct his commands to only the one he’s focusing on at the given moment? Not all that easy when you think about it…
It wasn’t a cloud failure. The self driving cars are highly dependent on traffic lights being red/yellow/green. With the signals inoperative the cars don’t know what to do. Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.
This is one of the many edge cases that I’ve been convinced will keep self driving cars from becoming mainstream unless/until true AGI is achieved.
A few years ago I stopped at a red light next to a construction site. I was watching the traffic light, so at first I didn’t notice a cop at the construction site trying to wave me through the red light. He finally took a few steps towards me and yelled to get my attention. Only then did I realize he was waving me through, so I did just that. I seriously doubt any current self driving car would recognize a police officer (and not just a random pedestrian) that’s overriding the traffic signal like that.
Another edge case, coincidentally at the same intersection a few years earlier was when there was a car fully engulfed in flames as I drove up. I could hear sirens in the distance, and the cars in every direction were making sure to safely get out of the way of the approaching fire trucks. At least one or two cars cautiously crossed on the red to get out of the way. Again, I doubt any current self driving car would have navigated that situation anywhere nearly as well as a human.
Not exactly 911, but somewhat similar. A few years ago my wife & I were in a rental SUV while on vacation. It was a fairly new car with only something like 2000 miles on it. We were in the third lane of a 4 lane highway when a drunk driver hit us from behind with almost no warning. It caused our car to spin 360 degrees across 3 lanes before coming to a stop in the breakdown lane.
Within about 5 seconds of the car coming to a stop we heard a voice asking if we’d been in an accident and were we ok. It turns out the rental car had one of those OnStar types of services. We were so pumped full of adrenaline that it was all just a blur as we tried to remember what highway we were on, near what exit, etc. We were so panicked… Luckily a state trooper on a routine patrol stopped maybe a minute later so we didn’t have to keep trying to figure out how to tell the OnStar person where we were.
Don’t forget that they are also reportedly squandering their gold reserves, and are losing a lot of revenue from Ukraines growing attacks on oil infrastructure. Russia isn’t going to be able to pay its soldiers or buy equipment if those two trends continue.
Came here to say this.
In response to a mass shooting in 1996 Australia passed strict gun regulations. Since then you can pretty much count the number of mass shootings in that country on one hand.
Compare that to Wikipedias list of mass shootings in the USA for just 2025. I stopped counting that list at 300.
Clearly some techbro wants to monetize buzzwords plus laptop.
IT professional for 20 years. C/C++ developer for 10 years prior to that.
My first job out of college was mostly luck. I took a job doing tech support but after a couple of years was able to transition into development work.
Virtually every job since that first one has been thanks to connections I made among coworkers. I got my current job because I knew two employees here. One of them was a co-founder of the company, and somebody I’ve known since the 1990’s and worked with at 3 other companies prior to this.
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Not to mention that it’s trivial to change your IP on most cloud providers. So if a VPN provider is using a cloud service for some of its gateways then it can quickly remember them if necessary.
Companies like Akamai already do this to an extent. My employer is an Akamai customer, and they’ve offered this service to us in the past when we saw a lot of malicious traffic originating from commercial VPN providers.
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Does anybody else miss Compuserve, Delphi, etc?
How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?
I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?
You would do well to go read up on the 1990 AT&T long distance network collapse. A single line of changed code, rolled out months earlier, ultimately triggered what you might call these days a DDoS attack that took down all 114 long distance telephone switches in their global network. Over 50 million long distance calls were blocked in the 9 hours it took them to identify the cause and roll out a fix.
AT&T prided itself on the thoroughness of their testing & rollout strategy for any code changes. The bug that took them down was both timing-dependent and load-dependent, making it extremely difficult to test for, and required fairly specific real world conditions to trigger. That’s how it went unnoticed for months before it triggered.
I’m guessing it was actually something internal. If you look at their status page you’ll notice the outage occurred smack in between some sort of maintenance work they seem to be rolling out to most/all of their edge locations. As soon as they resolved the outage they continued with the regional maintenance updates.
20k is a drop in a bucket when it comes to boats. The maintenance, etc. is a significant ongoing expense. And if it’s the kind of boat you keep at a marina and not on a trailer in your driveway then that’s another huge expense. There’s a reason people call boats a hole in the water that you throw money into…
I can recognize when a police officer is directing traffic at a dead traffic light. I can also recognize the intent of other drivers who may wave, flash their headlights, etc. I doubt any current self driving cars can accurately recognize any of those.