California scraps rule requiring drivers in driverless cars

The self-driving autos of tomorrow are one step closer to being a reality of today. From the NYT:

The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles said Monday that it was eliminating a requirement for autonomous vehicles to have a person in the driver’s seat to take over in the event of an emergency. The new rule goes into effect on April 2.

California has given 50 companies a license to test self-driving vehicles in the state. The new rules also require companies to be able to operate the vehicle remotely — a bit like a flying military drone — and communicate with law enforcement and other drivers when something goes wrong.

The changes signal a step toward the wider deployment of autonomous vehicles. One of the main economic benefits praised by proponents of driverless vehicles is that they will not be limited by human boundaries and can do things like operate 24 hours in a row without a drop-off in alertness or attentiveness. Taking the human out of the front seat is an important psychological and logistical step before truly driverless cars can hit the road.

The requirement to have a human operator in a self-driving auto has been more a matter of politics and PR than science for a while now - all the available data showed that autonomous cars were safer when humans weren't able to override them, and all of the reported accidents involving autonomous autos have, so far anyway, been attributed to driver errors on the part of the humans in the other vehicles on the road. After all, with human driver error killing thousands of people each year in the U.S. alone, self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than us, and the technology is already there.

At this point, it's worth remembering that California is typically more strict when it comes to automobile safety legislation than most other U.S. states. If CA is already on board with truly autonomous Autos, then it really is just a matter of time until self-driving Autos are on roads all over North America. And I, for one, will welcome our robot overlords.

I now return you to the Singularity, already in progress...

"Real life Tony Stark" gives zero fucks

I'm not entirely sure what I'd be doing if I was a tech billionaire with my own rocket and car companies, but whatever it is that I might do, given that chance, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be doing it as entertainingly as Elon Musk.

From Business Insider:

Instead of putting a standard "mass simulator" or dummy payload atop Falcon Heavy, Musk — who once launched a wheel of cheese into orbit — will put his personal 2008 midnight-cherry-red Tesla Roadster on top of the monster rocket.

In an Instagram post over the weekend, Musk also revealed that the car would carry a dummy driver, which Musk is calling "Starman," wearing a SpaceX space suit.

"Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring," Musk said in an Instagram post in December, adding that the company "decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel." 

Oh, man, I'd forgotten about the cheese...

Now, I'm not saying that everything Elon Musk does is necessarily wise, or good, or even (in some cases) entirely legal, but it sure does look like he's having fun doing it all, doesn't it? Seriously, I'm not sure that it would even occur to me to sell US$500 Boring Company-branded flamethrowers (in California, natch, and after the wild fire season they've just had), or to start digging a tunnel from my house to my office (whether or not local regulations actually allow for that sort of thing) just because commuting sucks, but Musk not only thinks of these things, he goes ahead and does them, and damn the torpedoes.

In a world of carefully-crafted PR strategies, where every aspect of everything a big corporation does is run past both PR and legal before daring to show its boring, homogenized face to the world, the sheer fuck-you exuberance of half of what Musk does is just so... refreshing. And fun, dammit. Selling flamethrowers because why not? and then launching your own sports car into space is just giddy, childish fun. Even if it is somewhat irresponsible. Musk has succeeded in making private-sector space launches a thing, he's succeeded in making electric cars a thing, he's helping to make cleaner energy storage a thing, and he's living like a comic book superhero's secret identity at the same time.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Do you remember when Microsoft's vision for Windows 10 involved blocking normal program installation by default? When they had to make a big deal of the ability for users to enable "side loading," as if it was some sort of fucking gift that Microsoft were giving us out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than because Windows Store was a wasteland of shit that consumers wanted no part of?

They didn't stay backed down for long, though. It was only six months later that they were announcing Windows 10 S, a gimped version of the OS which didn't even allow the option of turning side-loading on unless you paid to upgrade from WX S to WX Pro. They ended up making upgrades free for the rest of 2017, because the Windows (later Microsoft) Store was still a wasteland of shit that consumers wanted no part of. Oh, and WX S was also unusably bad, because there were no apps for fucking thing.

Well, it turns out Microsoft still isn't done trying to force Windows users onto their horrible, horrible digital storefront for fucking everything, because they're trying yet again to do exactly that. Just, you know, not with people who've already switched over. No, it's only new WX users who'll get fucked.

From Tech Republic:

Windows 10: Get ready for more PCs that only run Microsoft Store apps by default

Microsoft is planning to update all versions of Windows 10 to incorporate S Mode, which will limit the machine to only installing apps from the Microsoft Store, according to a leaked roadmap.

Because of course they are. This has always been the plan.

English & Windows 10 gain some Steam

The Steam Hardware & Software Survey for January is out, and it would seem that the Steam community has finally stopped bucking the overall OS market trend: WX's share of Steam users is up, and substantially, from last month, even as Windows' overall share of Steam declined in favour of MacOS:

Interestingly, W7's losses to WX track pretty closely with another trend that Steam Survey watchers have been keeping an eye on in recent months: the rise (and now fall) of Simplified Chinese as Steam users' language of choice:

The last few months' surge in Steam market share of both W7 and Chinese had been attributed to the surging popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) in China.

PUBG is still the top-selling game on Steam, a position that it's now held for nearly a year, and it's unlikely that we'd have heard anything about declining PUBG concurrency numbers, since attention tends to be paid only when concurrency records are being broken, but it's possible that PUBG's popularity has finally cooled the slightest little bit, allowing market norms to reassert among Steam's users. Keep an eye peeled in the coming weeks for stories about PUBG "dying," though, since the other thing that media outlets of all types love is a good "falling from grace"narrative.

Still, it looks like WX is finally starting to climb back towards parity with W7 among Steam users, even as Windows overall loses users to OS X, which is exactly what we see in the broader OS market, too. For a change. This is just one month's data, though, and you know what they say about once being a freak occurrence; I'll want to see three months' of consecutive WX gains in the Steam Software Survey before I'll call this a real trend.

There's no denying that these numbers fit with the overall trend, though. We'll just have to wait and see if the trend continues into next month, or if WX starts to eat into W7's overall market share more in coming months than it's done to date.

Do you remember when WX was supposedly on pace to surpass W7 by November?

NMS's end-of-January numbers are out, and once again, WX has managed modest gains at the expense of Windows XP, while W7 and W8.1 remain mostly unchanged. And, no, WX still hasn't caught up to its nine-year-old rival.

WX gained, of course, from 32.93% to 34.29% (+1.36); W7 ticked down, from 43.08% to 42.39% (-0.69); W8.1 ticked down slightly, from 5.71% to 5.56% (-0.15); and XP slid the most, from 5.18% to 4.05% (-1.13). Except for W8.1's, all of these results are above the ±0.5% "noise threshold," but WX's gains are not enough to encompass the losses of W7, W8.1, and XP. Some of those former Windows users are going elsewhere.

Where are they going, you ask? By the looks of it, Apple. Windows' overall market share slid from 88.51% to 87.79% (-0.72), while MacOS grew its overall market share from 9.02% to 9.95% (+0.93), propelled by MacOS X 10.13 (from 3.53% to 4.46%, +0.93). An overall decline in Windows' user base probably isn't something that Microsoft want to see; yes, WX gained more than a percentage point to start the year, but the fact that those gains are mostly coming at the expense of the 16½ year old XP, rather than the market-leading W7, can't be good news, either.