What people forget is that AI is not computers, but instead is just human programmers, who know very little about cars.
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What people forget is that AI is not computers, but instead is just human programmers, who know very little about cars.
Virginia / Published July 3, 2026 9:45am EDT
Virginia county urges power saving measures amid 25% electricity rate hike, data center growth
County manager cites Great Recession era austerity as power bills climb 25% in data center capital
By Robert McGreevy FOX BusinessJohn Vithoulkas, the county manager in Virginia's Henrico County, is asking county employees to cut back on power usage as electricity rates soar 25% across Virginia, the state with by far the most data centers.
Virginia county urges power saving measures amid 25% electricity rate hike, data center growth
Virginia's Henrico County is implementing energy austerity measures to combat a $5 million spike in utility costs as the state's data center industry explodes.
www.foxbusiness.com
"AI is not computers" alone. BUT !
These data center computers are guzzling electrons on industrial scale, not only jostling commercial electric power markets,
but also computer hard-drive, and Silicon computer chip markets too. The result, the cost of smart-phones and consumer grade computers is increasing, after decades of progressive price decrease.
The "A" in "AI" stands for "artificial". That means Silicon which eats electrons, not Carbon, which eats pizza. BUT !
Yeah, firing hundreds of human engineers is premature, the result of non-technical management making management decisions.
Virginia / Published July 3, 2026 9:45am EDT
Virginia county urges power saving measures amid 25% electricity rate hike, data center growth
County manager cites Great Recession era austerity as power bills climb 25% in data center capital
By Robert McGreevy FOX Business
John Vithoulkas, the county manager in Virginia's Henrico County, is asking county employees to cut back on power usage as electricity rates soar 25% across Virginia, the state with by far the most data centers.
Virginia county urges power saving measures amid 25% electricity rate hike, data center growth
Virginia's Henrico County is implementing energy austerity measures to combat a $5 million spike in utility costs as the state's data center industry explodes.
"AI is not computers" alone. BUT !
These data center computers are guzzling electrons on industrial scale, not only jostling commercial electric power markets,
but also computer hard-drive, and Silicon computer chip markets too. The result, the cost of smart-phones and consumer grade computers is increasing, after decades of progressive price decrease.
The "A" in "AI" stands for "artificial". That means Silicon which eats electrons, not Carbon, which eats pizza. BUT !
Yeah, firing hundreds of human engineers is premature, the result of non-technical management making management decisions.
In general, brains and computers are just binary switches, with on/off.
But human brains have about 4 million more of these switches than our largest computers.
And we do not know well how to program reality into the computers, while humans have a billion years of natural selection programming.
So the current assumption that computers can do anything better than humans is incredibly premature.
For example, there now have been hundreds of airplane crashes due to the autopilot anti-stall programming that causes planes to go into steep dives that are often fatal.
Here is an example:
{...
On the afternoon of April 28, 2009, a Cirrus SR22 took off into a 200-foot overcast from Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County Airport. It crashed four and a half minutes later, killing both on board. The pilot acknowledged the tower controller’s hand-off, but never made contact with departure control.
The Cirrus was cleared to take off from Runway 6 with instructions to fly runway heading and climb to 3,000 feet msl. Data recovered from its avionics suite showed that it began turning right almost immediately. The right turn continued through about 540 degrees—one and a half complete revolutions—before the airplane finally rolled out on a southerly heading. It then climbed from 1,200 feet msl to 2,700 feet msl in 17 seconds as its airspeed decayed to 50 knots before it fell back to 1,600 feet msl, reversing heading yet again.
During the next two minutes, it climbed and dropped two more times, reaching a peak altitude of 3,200 feet msl. Pitch angle ranged from 50-degrees nose up to 60-degrees nose down and airspeed varied between 50 knots and 172 kt. Bank angles reached 75 degrees. The final data point showed the airplane pitched 30 degrees nose down and partially inverted, banked 120 degrees over the right wing.
The data logger also recorded that the autopilot was engaged about five seconds after takeoff at an altitude of 940 feet msl, just 61 feet above field elevation. However, instead of altitude preselect mode (already programmed for 3,000 feet with an 850 fpm rate of climb), it was set for altitude hold. This automatically set the altitude bug to 940 feet msl, which the autopilot attempted to recapture as the airplane climbed. The series of inputs recorded during the subsequent oscillations led the NTSB to conclude that “the pilot never adequately regained control of the airplane” while attempting to reset the altitude and heading bugs.
Of course, he had alternatives. The most obvious would have been to disconnect the autopilot and hand-fly the climb.
...}
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www.aopa.org
The point being that human programmers lack expertise, subtlety, and understanding how to really program physical events into computers.
Which was my specialty for over 50 years.
4 million times more?
That would be an example of artificial incompetence / stupidity.
The challenge is auto-pilot engineering is not to create an auto-pilot that's nearly as good as a human.
The challenge is to create pilot automation that is superior.
This has already been ably demonstrated by NASA's now retired shuttle fleet.
Humans aren't good enough to pilot such a glider (a rocket ship in unpropelled descent). [NASA shuttles may have been spacecraft in orbit, but they were glider aircraft after re-entry.]
So the NASA shuttle fly by wire system provided the human "pilot" controls, not directly to the flight control surfaces such as rudder and elevator,
but to the spacecraft's piloting parliament, four separate computers that each received the human's input. The four then calculated from there.
Some may consider this an intrinsic limitation of the technology, of the concept.
I can not.
Instead I consider it unambiguous evidence the technology reached the market prematurely.
As a code writer? In what language?
Or as a code writer specializing in aviation? If so, which aircraft? DC8 ?
uh oh
Are the Dems. careening toward yet more electoral catastrophe in 2026, & 2028?
In light of another DSA-backed candidate defeating an incumbent Democratic candidate in the Colorado primary elections, "MS NOW Reports" host Antonia Hylton asked Gordillo if his organization had begun any work on the 2028 presidential election.
"I think that we will be trying to influence the next presidential primary," Gordillo answered. "And it’s still too soon to say how...to say who."
NYC Mayor Mamdani endorsed 3 far left candidates, each of whom won their primary contests. Good?
What matters is who wins this November.
Is the U.S. electorate ready to leap left in 2026, & 2028?
It's understandable that the GOP is in ideological & leadership shambles.
But the Democrats too ?
Are the Dems. careening toward yet more electoral catastrophe in 2026, & 2028?
Democratic Socialists of America leader says ‘many’ in group would be 'thrilled' at AOC in 2028
Gustavo Gordillo's comments followed a string of DSA-backed primary wins over veteran Democratic incumbents
By Lindsay Kornick Fox News / Published July 3, 2026 9:31am EDTNYC DSA co-chair pushes AOC for president in 2028
New York City DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo told "MS NOW Reports" that his organization would be "thrilled" if Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., decided to run for president in 2028.In light of another DSA-backed candidate defeating an incumbent Democratic candidate in the Colorado primary elections, "MS NOW Reports" host Antonia Hylton asked Gordillo if his organization had begun any work on the 2028 presidential election.
"I think that we will be trying to influence the next presidential primary," Gordillo answered. "And it’s still too soon to say how...to say who."
NYC Mayor Mamdani endorsed 3 far left candidates, each of whom won their primary contests. Good?
What matters is who wins this November.
Is the U.S. electorate ready to leap left in 2026, & 2028?
It's understandable that the GOP is in ideological & leadership shambles.
But the Democrats too ?
Total memory size of computers has grown so fast that these days some computers make claims of being similar size as human brain in total memory.
But I am not impressed with computers because they have very little parallelism, so even if they have 8 processors, only 1 is really doing most of the work.
Most programmers do not know how to start and stop parallel processors.
While with humans, there are literally tens of thousands of parallel processes all going on at the very same time.
With the shuttle, I would assume the on board pilot would not have much feel for things like speed, angle, distances, etc. , so remote telemetry would be more important?
I started out way back with COBOL and Fortran, but mostly programmed in C++.
Embedded programming was in plain C or assembly language. But I also did html programming with JavaScript, Python, PHP, XML, Java, CSS, XML, etc.
Shiftless2
Well-known member
"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty is in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed,
and in the next place, oblige it to control itself." James Madison
I agree all these surveillance cameras and tracking methods all seem totally illegal to me.
I am going to fight a camera speeding ticket since it did not warn me when it happened, and I am not allowed to "face my accuser" in court.
The camera legally is just 2nd hand "hearsay".
I am going to fight a camera speeding ticket since it did not warn me when it happened, and I am not allowed to "face my accuser" in court.
The camera legally is just 2nd hand "hearsay".
Considered purely as a hypothetical I can find no obvious error in #409. BUT !
It's a two-edged sword.
IF that were the legal standard, then how would home owners make use of doorbell cams, and dash-cams, and home security cameras, for matters as simple as "porch pirates" (stealing a UPS delivery)
or simple vandalism caught on a home security camera?
As a matter of pure logic, makes sense to me.
But as we know these government surveillance / enforcement cameras have been in operation for decades.
If government were not consistently getting away with this already, such equipment would not likely still be in operation. Not sure even a "good lawyer" can help here.
I did not detail enough.
It is not the camera I actually object to, but the attempt to claim they can accurately detect the speed, and that they record surveillance.
With speed, they use doppler radar I believe, and that is notoriously inaccurate.
All metal acts as an antenna and has built in harmonic resonance that is not based on the speed of the vehicle at all.
You can aim doppler radar at a fence and get an incredible speeds back.
The surveillance aspect seems a violation of privacy.
{...
SUFFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — A man faces possible jail time after he was accused of damaging more than a dozen license plate readers from the North Suffolk area and stealing parts from them.
Jefferey S. Sovern, 41, was arrested in October after detectives say he “intentionally destroyed” 13 Flock Safety cameras between April and October of this year. He was charged with 13 counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny and six counts of possession of burglary tools.
Sovern admitted to the crimes, according to a criminal complaint filed in Suffolk General District Court, going as far as to say he used vice grips to help him disassemble the tow-piece polls. He also admitted to keeping some of the wiring, batteries and solar panels taken from the cameras. Some of the items were recovered by police after they searched the property.
The news, first reported by the Suffolk News-Herald, comes as lawsuits have been filed questioning the legality of the cameras that are used to track vehicles.
...}
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I'm not sure there's any statute or precedent protecting privacy in public, specifically on public roadway.
There may be a warrantless search / probable cause angle. BUT !
Again, I suspect such argument has already been tried, and rejected.
"There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer's orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves.
But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else's employee."
Excerpt from Unabomb Manifesto: author convict Theodore Kaczynski; sentenced to Lifetime imprisonment without possibility of parole
R5,
Got a radar detector?
I run both a radar detector, and a 4k dashcam.
I'd love to have a 20 megapixel camera for that, have been culling the Internet for years. The specs are listed for such cameras:
BUT !
I haven't found a single vendor.
You might want to look at Temu, Ali Baba, LightInTheBox, etc.
They are all cheapie mail order from Asia, but some of their stuff seems to be a very good deal?
Some is junk however.
Here is a link to Temu, then search for dashcams.
This one is $54.
https://www.temu.com
{...
Description
This dash cam captures video in Full High Definition 1080p resolution for clear footage of your journeys.
Features two lenses that can be adjusted left and right to capture a wider field of view from the driver's side.
Provides video recording during nighttime driving with night vision capability.
...}
I've ordered from Temu, occasional annoyances; example, a zippered jacket with the slider designed for left-hand operation.
The cam in #413 is about the exact opposite of what I'm looking for.
I need no bells & whistles. And 1080P is tolerable for broadcast TV. But not good enough for this install.
The Blackvue dashcam I use is UHD / 4K. It's pretty good.
20MP or 40MP would be better.
- - - - -
What I'd like is a security style dome camera ~20MP with PTZ mounted on the car roof near the windshield.
So far, no such camera, and even if there was, not sure how difficult it would be to playback the vid right-side up.
Shiftless2
Well-known member
A UK lawyer friend tells me that those speed cameras take 100's of pictures on a roll of film. It's a given that there will be pictures of a number of police cruisers speeding on any given roll and, since they're all time stamped it's an easy matter to confirm whether or not they were on call so their speeding was justified. It's a given that at least a few (if not most) of those speeding cruisers were simply late for their coffee break. So the obvious defense is "why was my client ticketed when the officer were not?"
BUT !
Even if we consider it a probability this government video record of "speeding cruisers", it is not a certitude.
If there's government video evidence of "speeding cruisers" they may have legal defense that may apply if it was the $taxpayer that is accused. "Flow of traffic", one such example.
Unless the defendant has specific knowledge of a time / date / location of a government violation, obtaining the evidence is a fishing expedition.
FOIL may ostensibly enable that, but in practical terms, government can and has stonewalled such citizen inquiries. Institutional anal-retentalism.
And the State has developed viable agility in dodging / circumventing such legal application.
Example: speed limits apply only to automobiles, and a police car is not an automobile.
Shiftless2
Well-known member
Those pics are all time and date stamped so it's a simple matter to determine what cruiser and who was driving AND whether they were on call or just late to coffee.
And, as my lawyer friend said - it's easier (and cheaper) for them to simply drop the charges than it is to defend every case of a cruiser speeding - there will be dozens on any single roll of film.
Indeed,
once duplicate evidence is in the custody of the legal team processing it.
Applying for the vids may be as simple as completing a one page government form. BUT !
Getting government to cooperate is vastly easier said than done.
BUT !
If it were actually that simple, as likely to succeed as a defense against a traffic summons, one or more practicing trial attorneys would have learned this, and developed a reputation for beating such charges.
I'm not sure about elsewhere, but in New York State attorneys can and do advertise. We get more than our share of "ambulance chasers" claiming generous settlements, etc.
The result would soon be government would have little if anything to gain with such camera operation, and suspend / discontinue the practice.
That government has NOT done this is enough evidence for me to conclude it may not be as simple as #417 suggests.
End part I of II.
Part II of II can be found here: https://citizenvoice.us/threads/topic-drift-overflow.531/page-3 post #43
BUT !
Even if we consider it a probability this government video record of "speeding cruisers", it is not a certitude.
If there's government video evidence of "speeding cruisers" they may have legal defense that may apply if it was the $taxpayer that is accused. "Flow of traffic", one such example.
Unless the defendant has specific knowledge of a time / date / location of a government violation, obtaining the evidence is a fishing expedition.
FOIL may ostensibly enable that, but in practical terms, government can and has stonewalled such citizen inquiries. Institutional anal-retentalism.
And the State has developed viable agility in dodging / circumventing such legal application.
Example: speed limits apply only to automobiles, and a police car is not an automobile.
I would think speed limits apply to protect others from danger, and a speeding police car is as much of a danger as anyone else.
Maybe even more so, since everyone else is forbidden to be distracted by things like cellphones, while police access their radio, radar, and laptop computer while driving.
I looked at dashcams, security cameras, and even trail cameras, and did not find any above 6 MP.
I suppose cameras for professionals like the media or movies would go much higher, but these cheap import places are not going to stock them.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FK4HYCR...asc_df_B0FK4HYCR5&plpRedirect=mhFallback&th=1
This one from Amazon claims:
{...
4K Video Camera Camcorder 64MP Vlogging Camera for YouTube 3.0" Touch Screen 18X Digital Zoom IR Night Vision with External Stereo Microphone,Remote,Lens Hood,Handheld Stabilizer,32G Card &2 Batteries
...}
And its only $100.
The handle and microphone appear to be removable easily.