WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
In this week’s issue we take a look at a few of the problems with driverless cars (more on that next week), the EU ‘Right to be Forgotten’, tape storage for backup, particle accelerators, a virtual universe, and a roundup of URLs on the thorny topic of the FCC’s new ‘Net Neutrality’ proposals.
Driverless cars: Part 1
Stories on driverless cars seem to be all the rage at the moment. Not everyone is that enthusiastic about the idea. For instance ‘The Register’ has an interesting piece from Chris Mellor, who normally writes about disk drives, suggesting that the main effect of driverless cars would be to just block the roads. It’s an interesting idea, and he makes a reasonable case, even if his version is a little on the sensational side.
Meanwhile, over on Slashdot, there is a piece asking what happens if an accident is unavoidable – how does the software decide which car to crash into if there is more than one? It’s an interesting ethical dilemma, which is likely to lead to some heavy duty legal proceedings from the car chosen for the crash!
My take on this? I think the problem is one that’s not being defined properly, because there are two different cases here. The first is a situation where there is a mixture of driverless cars and cars with drivers (drivermore cars?). The second is a case where there are only driverless cars.
The first case is the one that people are concentrating on. In that case you will be putting software controlled cars into unpredictable situations caused by human drivers. Although it’s possible to make general predictions about what most people will do in a given situation, it’s not possible to predict what any specific driver picked at random will do. And that is what will cause the problems that people are discussing.
In the second case you have everyone being driven around by software. You don’t have to deal with unpredictable humans, and a whole class of problems will go away. However, a totally software driven traffic scene has its own implications, which I’ll deal with in part 2 next week. (And, by the way, any email suggesting that the issue is being ‘driven’ by Google will result in the purveyor being made to stand in the corner wearing a bad puns hat...)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/29/google_driverless_car_its_all_drivel/
http://beta.slashdot.org/story/201695
Shorts:
The fallout from the decision of the highest European Court that Europeans have the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ rumbles on. Lotsa people are getting very worked up about the whole issue, but I suspect that in the end the decision will be remembered for its role in proving that you can’t legislate meaningfully on international issues unless you have an international legislature, and an international enforcement body.
I’m reminded of one of the first sci-fi stories I read way back in the 1960’s. It was called Code Three, and it was about policing a future superhighway system with very fast vehicles. Not only did the system have its own police force, but there was a highway judiciary as well, completely separate from state and federal judiciaries. It had its own crimes, and its own punishments.
Do I think that there will be a similar system for the internet? Probably not. I think it’s more likely that it will be broken up into small national chunks and subject to local laws. And we will all be poorer intellectually, economically, and socially for that happening...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/08/fcc_commissioner_speaks_up_as_calls_for_net_neutrality_get_louder/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/14/google_eu_ruling/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/europes-troubling-new-right-to-be-forgotten/370796/
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001077.html
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/raphael_rick
Homework:
A lot of people don’t realize it, but tape storage is a very important part of modern computing. All those petabytes of information have to be backed up somewhere, and the solution is tape cartridges. As the amount of data has grown, techniques have been developed to try and reduce the amount of information that has to be stored.
Probably the best known is the technique of data deduplication. The idea is that in any large amount of data there is a lot of duplicated data. Imagine, for instance, you are trying to back up a large company’s data. If someone has circulated (say) 20 copies of a 150 page document, then there will be 20 copies of the same document in the data to be backed up. Deduplication tries to spot these duplicates and only make one copy on the tape with a just pointer to that one copy in the case of all the other copies.
Compression also helps keep the size of backups down, but ultimately all these tricks are a losing proposition – you still have a large amount of data that needs storing. Given that the most current tapes can store is about 2.5 TB you still need an awful lot of them to store petabytes of data. Until now. Enter Sony, with a new tape technology that can store a huge 185 TB of data on a single tape. Have a look at the article pointed to by the URL for the details.
And my prediction of what this means for the storage backup business? Customers will produce even more data to be backed up...
http://www.gizmag.com/sony-185-tb-magnetic-tape-storage/31910/
You can count the number of really big particle accelerators on one finger – the LHC of Higgs Boson fame. There’s a reason for this scarcity. It cost in the region of US$9 billion to build. Unfortunately, as the size of accelerators goes up, the cost to build them goes up even faster.
Now, however, help is on the horizon, even if only the distant horizon. A new study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center indicates that it might be possible to use lasers to develop a new way of accelerating particles to high speeds. In fact, if it proves practicable, you could shrink the LHC’s 17 mile tube into something the size of a football field. Hopefully, the theory can be turned into something practical in the not too distant future, since the likelihood of building something bigger than the LHC seems very small.
http://www.gizmag.com/laser-particle-accelerator/32265/
For Geeks:
Researchers at MIT and Harvard announced earlier this month that they have created an entire virtual universe 350 million light years square that can be used to simulate the early development of our own universe. Apparently it uses an impressive 8,000 processors running in parallel. Its first cut at mimicking the universe took three months.
Far be it from me to be anything but modest <polishes fingernails on shirt> but I did write a virtual universe myself, some 28 years ago on an Atari ST computer – it’s called Federation 2 – and it’s been available continuously online ever since!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/08/scientists_build_virtual_universe_model_from_postbig_bang_to_present_day/
http://www.ibgames.com/
Net Neutrality round up:
Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
http://www.cringely.com/2014/05/06/14890/
FCC must protect net neutrality to preserve America, say Google et al
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/08/fcc_commissioner_speaks_up_as_calls_for_net_neutrality_get_louder/
ISPs threaten to stop building infrastructure if new Net Neutrality proposal passes
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/05/14/isps-threaten-stop-building-infrastructure-if-new-net-neutrality-proposal-passes#.U3RJZPldW5c
What the FCC’s Net neutrality proposal really means
http://www.infoworld.com/t/net-neutrality/what-the-fccs-net-neutrality-proposal-really-means-242610?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_am_2014-05-15
Who’s against Net neutrality? Follow the money
http://www.infoworld.com/t/net-neutrality/whos-against-net-neutrality-follow-the-money-242706
The FCC’s Net neutrality plan is much worse than it looks
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/the-fccs-net-neutrality-plan-much-worse-it-looks-243027?page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2014-05-26
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Asti, Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
1 June 2014
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
