Here's one example.
However, as this article notes, it turns out legislation going into effect in about six months is slated to provide a way for police to report the violation to the California DMV.
Windows is my daily driver for exactly one (well, two) reason(s) -- availability of software that is supported on Windows and not on Linux. I rely on Quicken Classic (a horrible product by the way, but the only game in town) and tax software (HR Block in my case).
Yes, both ran (slowly) on WINE when I tried them a few years ago. However neither vendor supports such use and April 15 at 23:59 is NOT a time that I want to discover that the latest HR Block fix "broke" the product on WINE (HR Block is already quite enough "broken", by my definition of "broken", on the supported Windows platforms).
The diversity of Linux desktop offerings likely makes it less likely that such software will ever be supported on Linux. If nothing else, the customer support costs of helping naive Linux users running on different distros probably insures this. Developing customer support scripts and training support personnel for multiple such environments is likely just too expensive for the relatively small gain. If 2199 actually turns out to be the year of the Linux desktop, perhaps the vendors will bite the bullet and support Linux -- but I'll be long dead before that happens.
The point is that in California there currently appears to be NO penalty or state-wide mechanism for addressing traffic violations by a robotaxi. Police apparently have little choice but to just let them go on their way without any action (at least that is what police are doing).
Perhaps it would be inappropriate to apply the current standard for human drivers to a robotaxi. Perhaps a robotaxi should be subject to higher standards as any failure to follow traffic rules is by design (it's software!) than due to limitations that humans have and can't change (such as occasional distraction/inattention as, for example, humans only can look one way at a time).
It appears that the issue was in many cases that the Waymos were so timid that they created a much worse traffic jam than humans would have - and excessively impacted hundreds of human drivers in the process. Driving too slow and impeding traffic can result in a moving violation, perhaps other irrational behavior by a human driver OR a robotaxi should as well.
This is actually going to be very interesting as robotaxis become more common and are operating during rush hour while trying to merge into freeway traffic from on-ramps. When traffic is flowing at, for example, 40 MPH, there's often little space between cars on the freeway (in some cases significantly less than the "recommended" number of "car lengths"). In such situations there's sometimes no "completely safe and legal" way to merge - one has to either "rely on the kindness of strangers" to slow down a bit to leave gaps for merging traffic OR "bully" their way in. When neither works, somehow humans (almost) always work it out using social cues and mores.
The lawyers at the robotaxi companies won't like the "bully in" approach so the robotaxis are likely to be very timid and end up not doing that. Human drivers on the freeway are likely to be much less sympathetic to the robotaxi (after all, it's just software, not human - esp. if it's "deadheading" and has no passengers).
This raises the specter of the robotaxis just giving up and stopping at the end of the merge lane (after all, that's the only completely safe thing to do). Once at a dead stop at the end of a merge lane, there's little hope they will find an opening big enough. After enough robotaxis are backing up an onramp, likely no traffic can use that onramp until rush hour ends (perhaps hours later).
Admittedly, this will be somewhat self limiting - when all the onramps are blocked, traffic on the freeway will dramatically drop and there will be room for a few "robotaxi road boulders" to "merge" onto the nearly empty freeway and perhaps the backed up cars will flood onto the freeway creating a convoy effect.
This will create interesting strategies for human (and robotaxies). In such a scenario it may make sense to drive away from your destination many miles to get on the freeway at an onramp that is "upstream" of most traffic to avoid being stuck for hours on a blocked onramp. This of course will just increase congestion yet more on surface streets due to the extra traffic.
I guess the good news is Caltrans could just eliminate metering lights - the stopped robotaxis would (very crudely) manage traffic as a side effect.
Accountability?
California seems to be far from making sure about that. In California it's still not clear who gets a ticket in case of a moving violation and who gets points on their record when autonomous cars violate the law and who pays the fines and fees - so nobody does.
Should all Waymo's lose their license to operate when, across all of them, they accumulate too many points on their record? After all they are all basically running the same software just an individual human brain is - and it is this negligent human brain that the DMV wants to get off the road.
The fact that Waymo cars, both individually and collectively, may drive more miles in California per year than the "typical" driver seems irrelevant. A driver who accumulates 12 points in a year while driving only 1000 miles in the year suffers the same restrictions that a driver who accumulates 12 points in a year while driving 30,000 miles.
The California legislature still has much to work out on this and, apparently, they really don't care to address the issue.
[And what's with the graying out on Slashdot? When I first saw the story it had only three comments but was unclickable. I'd think I should know after so many years, but...]
You have to click the title first to reveal the summary, then you can click the number of comments to see what people said. Caveat: any comment posted while the story is grey disappears when it is greenlit, tho an editor may reference some of them in the summary that gets the green.
It hasn't been proven in court, but there's been more solid evidence presented than there was against Cosby.
No fan of Darth Cheeto, but that is simply not true. Cosby was deposed in a civil suit and admitted in his testimony to drugging women so he could have sex with them.
Who, BTW, totally also did all that shit
He totally did (see above). It is, in fact, why he is not currently in prison because, despite the DA granting him immunity for said testimony to remove his 5th amendment protections, that deposition was used against him in his criminal trial and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his conviction as a result.
Yes, why would anyone think that invoking Nagasaki is fearmongering? It's crazy to think "Nagasaki" is anything but a reference the reader can identify with (like "as long as ten football fields" or "more books information than the library of congress") and the choice of the phrase "nuclear device" is anything other than the author's desire to be technically correct (the best kind of correct) in his descriptions.
Crazy, I say.
Also, the ruling is based on Kansas law so is not useful outside of Kansas, and even within Kansas, "precedent" is only applicable to this one court.
Should moderators here be liable for posts they upvote if those posts are libelous? Should
After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.
