old man emu

Do you want a list?

Which means the system is faulty. The solution is to go back to the original thinking of what the system is intended to do, then throw scenarios like the one you describe at it to see how it responds. I have a friend who was working on the periphery of Volvo's collision avoidance system. It was trialed in Australia and found nt to be able to decide what to do when a kangaroo hopped across the path of the car from one side of the road to another. I was wondering today as I drove the 60-odd Ks home from Dubbo, "What steering input would such a system make if a kangaroo did jump across the road?" A driver experienced with the motion of a roo would steer around behind it, but a collision avoidance system would see that such a move would cause the vehicle to cross the marked centreline of the road, so it might steer to the left, into the projected path of the roo. Also, I'd hate to see what such a car would do if it was rolling along at 100 ks and came up on a wombat waddling across the road. Would it try an emergency stop? I really don't want to bag the system. We must remember that it is in its development stage. Maybe the unique situational problems will be solved; maybe not. One problem solving difficulty I see is that the software designers are not likely to have had the driving experiences that exist in Australia with regard to wild animals around our roads.

Such would be one unique possibility in a probability distribution Not a sensible tactic in Real World situations. Increasing the separation distance increases the probability of successful stopping before a rear-end collision.

Agreed. It would delete the distance covered during the response time of a driver who did not have that automatic system. BUT!!! What is "a car length" in metres? The average length of a car is 4.9 metres. That figure comes from averaging the length of popular vehicle types spanning the Australian new car market. For the sake of making the calculations easier, let's say that it is 5 metres. That means that 2 car lengths is 10 metres. From 60 kph, with full wheel lock, it takes about 16 to 18 metres to completely stop on the average urban road. I know that few modern cars do not have ABS braking, so brake lock up does not occur, but the stopping distance of and ABS-equipped vehicle is much the same as one without.

When I was needing strippers on a plane, I called in the Ketone sisters, Methyl and Ethyl.

The Y model seems to be a car that got it right. Soon after its original release, Volkswagen Group Chair, Herbert Diess, wrote about the Model Y: "This car is for us in many aspects (not in all!) a reference: user experience, updatability, driving features, performance of the top of the range models, charging network, range. Big advantage: Model Y was/is thought through as an electric car – as is the ID.3. Many of our competitors still using their ICE platforms. The result: They aren’t getting the best EVs." Like any first generation object, the Y has had some glitches which seem to relate to the bells and whistles and not the basic functions of a transportation device, but TESLA seems to be reacting quickly to identified problems through software updates. One thing that I cannot accept is the minimum, two car-length following distance programmed into the current TESLA Vision system. When a vehicle is moving, it should not be closer that the distance required (on average) to stop from the speed it is travelling at. That means that the faster the vehicle is going, the longer the distance from the vehicle in front. It would not be difficult to program the software controlling that feature to adjust the following distance according to the speed. Obviously, the software would have to accept an average road/tyre Coefficient of Friction and have a warning system to tell the driver to override the system when on wet, icy or unsealed surfaces.

I had looked it up and found the metric equivalent, but thanks for the link as I found that the correct pronunciation is "jill", which throws a whole new meaning for the cause of Jack's broken crown.

I've been struggling to convert measurements in an old recipe book to Metric. What's a "gill" if not a fish's respiratory device?

Quite simply the reason is cultural. The Americans crave "BIG". They had to be dragged, kicking and screaming from their post WWII Yank tanks into what they call "medium-size" passenger cars, but we called "family-sized" when the oil crisis hit in 1973. The majority of EVs are typically small vehicles that are the norm in Europe and Asia, including Australia and New Zealand.

My 2005 car has cruise control that I can manually override to suit my needs for a particular situation. It has an airbag deployment system. It has a computerised engine management system. It has switches with knobs I can feel for to change air conditioning settings, or buttons to change radio stations. If I need navigation assist, I have a mobile phone with Google Maps sitting in a holder. And the instrument panel has a number of warning lights that are specific to the component they are monitoring. Things I'd really like: 1. Blind spot warning 2. A rock stadium speaker system that pumps out "Hey! I'm backing out of a parking spot beside a bloody great SUV. Watch out for me until I can see you!"

Hey! They are mine! Except I'm 6 months behind with the reno becasue I spend too much time on this forum!

Here we go again. A new calendar to put up and a pocketful of good intentions. My first resolution for 2024: There are times when I am doing a mundane task and my thoughts are free to wander randomly over a wide range of topics. Unfortunately, new thoughts tend to erase the earlier ones and when I try to recall them, they fail to answer the call. I've often thought of some cracking Quickies while pushing the mower, or sanding a window frame, but by the time I get back inside, they are forgotten So from now on, I am going to follow Santa's lead: make a list and check it twice. When I think of something worthy sharing, I'm going to drop everything and rush to my desk to write it down. The same is going to apply when those thoughts relate to things I need to get at Bunnings or the supermarkets. My second resolution for 2024: Remember to check that I have the list of things I need to get at Bunnings or the supermarkets in my wallet, with my plastic, before I leave the house.

Perhaps manufacturers are misleading themselves by taking a proven basic design for a personal transport vehicle (power/transmission system, collision resistant body and ergonomic design for occupants) and stuffing the vehicle with a lot of whizz-bangery that most often is there simply to let the owner become one of the Joneses that the rest try to keep up with. Until the computer chip began to be used in cars to control everything from fuel/air ratios to detecting raindrops on windscreens, manufacturers had gone from providing things like oil and water temperature gauges to simple "idiot lights". The removal of the gauges did not detract from the functioning of the vehicle. Modern vehicles, no matter whether ICE or EV or some combination have, as KGW says Not only water, but vibration can also break connections, leading to unserviceability. Vehicles now have a plethora of "anti-collision" devices which can either alert the driver, or take control of the vehicle. For once I'll not bag the TESLA motor company with an example. In an effort to be ahead of the pack, TESLA installs "Autopilot". As a result of several fatal and serious injury collisions TESLA has been sued. While evidence in these cases has tended to indicate that the claimed abilities of the Autopilot were involved, recent court decisions have held that, no matter what sort of anti-collision warning systems is installed in a vehicle, the ultimate responsibility for operating the vehicle is the driver. It is not TESLA's engineers who are at fault, but its advertising department who have implied that a vehicle with Autopilot can drive itself and the driver does not have to do anything. In a recent Florida case, the judge cited a 2016 video showing a Tesla vehicle driving without human intervention as a way to market Autopilot. The beginning of the video shows a disclaimer which says the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. “The car is driving itself,” it said. The judge said that “absent from this video is any indication that the video is aspirational or that this technology doesn’t currently exist in the market”. Another example of TESLA's advertising department pissing before the engineering department could make the water.

Is that " + a little" the same "little" that's left in the bottle after the 100 ml and several quality control samples have been removed by the Chef de Partie?

Back in the day, the Chief Engineer at Air Ag at Bankstown loved over ripe bananas and kept a box of them in his office.The stench was overpowering.

Since the publication of Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, which criticized the automotive industry for its safety record and helped lead to the passage of the USA's National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966 the passive safety features of motor vehicles have lead to dramatic reductions in road fatalities. I remember back to 1980 when the annual NSW road toll was in the vicinity of 1200. To date (28/12/2023) the toll is 350. I attribute this reduction to: Introduction of Random Breath Testing with the Prescribed Concentration of Alcohol at 0.08 gms alcohol/100 ml blood. Reduction of PCA to 0.05 gms alcohol/100 ml blood Upgrading of rural and urban road standards to separate vehicles travelling from opposite directions. Inclusion of passive safety features engineered into the vehicle, including crumple zones, passenger compartment rigidity, seatbelt pretensioners and air bags. There are three components in road safety: Driver, Vehicle and Road. The only thing that has really impinged on "Driver" has been the effort put into the detection of intoxicated drivers and the subsequent heavy penalty for being intoxicated at the wheel. Otherwise, there has been no real effort to improve driver competency.

But Parramatta is the great multicultural focus of the duopolis.

No Jaffas, No Fantails. No Winning Post chocolates. And they call that Progress!!!?????

Yesterday I parked my car nose-to-nose with a Tesla. I have a Hyundai Tiburon, so in a small country town both cars are very rare. Sort of like being I noticed the bonnet badge on the Tesla and thought it was very close to mine It probably explains why my car seems to attract a bit of attention when I go into Dubbo. Although it is a 2005 model, its design is fairly up to date:

Yes, you can - if you want to shadow box.

Surely you could have grabbed one of the buckets it was coming down in? On the flat lands beyond the Great Divide it was another day of scattered Cu and light winds. Pleasantly cool for this time of year, but how I miss the smell of the first rains on dry earth.

As I was writing the above post, ABC Classical was playing the theme from the movie Exodus. The music is quite nice, but I wonder how many people's thoughts turned to current events.

Netanyahu has become the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Christians could not gather in Bethlehem this year due to the risk to safety in a war zone.

We just got this in NSW. The Crimes Legislation Amendment (Assaults on Retail Workers) Bill 2023. The bill creates three new offences into the Crimes Act 1900. It is now an offence to: assault, throw a missile at, stalk, harass or intimidate a retail worker in the course of the worker’s duty, even if no actual bodily harm is caused to the worker, with a maximum penalty of 4 years’ imprisonment. assault a retail worker in the course of the worker’s duty and cause actual bodily harm to the worker, with a maximum penalty of 6 years’ imprisonment. wound or cause grievous bodily harm to a retail worker in the course of the worker’s duty, being reckless as to causing actual bodily harm to the worker or another person, with a maximum penalty of 11 years’ imprisonment. But a bank teller is not covered: Retail worker is defined as a person whose duties primarily involve working in an area of a shop open to the public. Shop is defined as the whole or a part of a building, place, stall, structure, tent, vehicle or yard in which goods are sold, or offered or exposed for sale, by retail, including by auction. I would imagine that over the coming months there will be requests from employee associations to have the definition amended to include any employee of a business whose duties require face-to-face contact with a member of the public, such as receptionists in real estate agencies and bank tellers or cashiers in so many places.

Dose that mean that a "bad egg" is a liar?