Outlander Online

Gavin you are doing good work. Arm your vehicle with dashcams rear front and sideways including microphone. The way I see it there needs to be a system for immediate automatic constitution violation detection, which would automatically allow to sue the agent and take class action at any such encounter.

Consider this. You stop your car and your car loudspeaker will identify itself to the agent, allow the agent to identify himself. Read the agent his rights and wait for further actions. As soon there is a violation the agent will be notified by the car, fined and sued. All done by the robotic voice overlay. Robocop comes to mind.

Lets keep the good fight.

Guys, I just logged into a car, remotely. I drove it for 1 minute and 30 seconds. I used my keyboard to do that. The car was on the other side of the earth. Think of the implications.

When can I log into my car? I want to drive it remotely, too. We know that cars with all their electronics will be fully capable in doing that in near future.

This is me, logged in as alias Kevin Sutherland, driving around on my Dell Latitude XT with an Outlander!

We already knew there were drones patrolling around desert Nevada . Exactly how long will it take to have remote controlled taxi service or public transport in general? We know that some trains already rely on automation.

Skynet?

Update: Without the code, can you trust them?

2013-09-28: surgical kinetic air strikes has a whole new meaning

See also:

• SmartBird via Festo
• SkyNET – Spy drones in US
• Future for drones
• Terminator Center
• He doesn’t like the word drone, because he says it implies that the vehicle has its own will or ego
• Remote Controlled Boeing 720 takes off from Edwards Air Force Base in 1984
• Pentagon developing humanoid Terminator robots
• Face recognition by privacysos.org
• Is The Machine Already Awake

• SKYNET is Real!

• Audi reveals a smartwatch that lets you talk to your car

Code maturity

A nice blog post for levels of making code work was brought to my attention. Here is a quick reminder cheatlist:

1. Make it work
2. Make it work well
3. Make it work automatically
4. Make it work invisibly

[…] “Good enough” is a programming concept that varies a lot from project to project, but overall it broadly fits into four categories.  Understand which one you’re aiming for and whether it might be useful to try to progress your code to a higher level of “Good enough”.

I have already posted about code quality earlier.

Update: A quoute from Proccessing.org:

The argument is not to avoid continually rewriting, but rather to delay engineering work until it’s appropriate

 

[…] That fact that the code performs it’s function is the first economic value of the code. But an equally large, and perhaps greater economic value (or cost) is how well another human can read and comprehend that code later on when managers decide to add pointless features or remove useful features.
Most code is written for economic reasons of some type. Writing code for another human to easily comprehend later increases the economic value of that code — possibly greatly. – http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/01/21/1847217/code-is-not-literature

 

See also:

• Sexify your source-code by Adam
• About Code, Quality and General Hackability by Andreas
• How to write unmaintainable code  by Roedy
• Software Horror Stories
• Bugs in open source projects by Andrey
• What Castles Can Teach by Matt

Code Quality

Here is a nice list to indicate the intended code quality from Phil Haack:

• Prototype Code – Code used to hash out an idea to see if it’s feasible or as a means of learning a new technology. Often very ugly throwaway code with little attention paid to good design.
• Demo Code – Code used to illustrate a concept, especially in a public setting. Like prototype code, solid design is sometimes sacrificed for clarity, but these sacrifices are deliberate and intentional, which is very important. My jQuery Grid demo above is an example of what I mean.
• Sample Code – Very similar to demo code, the difference being that good design principles should be demonstrated for the code relevant to the concept the sample is demonstrating. Code irrelevant to the core concept might be fine to leave out or have lower quality. For example, if the sample is showing a data access technique, you might still leave out exception handling, caching, etc… since it’s not the goal of the sample to demonstrate those concepts.
• Production Code – Code you’re running your business on, or selling. Should be as high quality as possible given your constraints. Sometimes, shortcuts are taken in the short run (incurring technical debt) with the intention of paying down the debt ASAP.
• Reference Code – This is code that is intended to demonstrate the correct way to build an application and should be almost idealized in its embracement of good design practices.

See also:

• Recklessly Going Into Debt by Chris
• What level programmer are you by Daniel