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Submission + - "No one was driving the car": 2 men killed when driverless Tesla crashs & bu (click2houston.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Two men were killed when a driver-less Tesla crashed into a tree and burned. Harris County, Texas Constable Mark Herman said that the investigation showed “no one was driving” the 2019 Tesla when the crash occurred. There was a person in the passenger seat of the front of the car and a person in the rear passenger seat of the car.

KPRC 2 reporter Deven Clarke spoke to one victim's brother-in-law who said the victim was taking the car out for a spin with his best friend, so there were just two in the vehicle. The owner backed out of the driveway and then may have hopped in the back seat only to crash a few hundred yards down the road. He said the owner was found in the back seat upright.

Authorities said they used 32,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames because the vehicle’s batteries kept reigniting. At one point, Herman said, deputies had to call Tesla to ask them how to put out the fire in the battery.

Submission + - Cyberware Attack Shuts Down Vehicle Emissions Testing in Seven States (wsbtv.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Georgia is waiving vehicle emissions checks because a cyberware attack has halted all emission testing across Georgia and seven other states. The CEO of Applus Technologies, whose software runs the system, apologized during the emergency meeting Monday.

The outages are delivering a huge blow to small business owners. “All of the sudden, we were doing emissions testing just like normal and the system just kind of shut down,” said James Baxter, who owns BP Car Care Tire Pros. “We haven’t been able to do emissions since.” Baxter said before the cyberattack, his full service automobile shop conducted more than 100 vehicle emissions tests per day. “Emissions is $25. You can imagine the revenue loss. We have employees that are out of work because of this,” he said.

Georgia's Department of Revenue issued a Press Release that omitted mention of the attack:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
March 31, 2021

ATLANTA – Due to a system outage with the Vehicle Emissions Inspection and Maintenance Program, the Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR) is notifying motor vehicle owners that they are currently unable to obtain vehicle emissions tests. As such, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) has issued an emissions test waiver for motorists who need to register or renew their vehicle registrations until further notice.

Motorists granted this emissions test waiver must still provide all other necessary registration documentation, meet insurance requirements, and comply with all other state rules and regulations regarding the vehicle other than timely emissions testing. As soon as the Vehicle Emissions Inspection and Maintenance Program’s functionality has been restored, emissions testing will be required as normal.

Motor vehicle owners with a valid emissions test can renew their registration online at dor.georgia.gov/motor-vehicles, at their county tag office, or at a kiosk location.

https://dor.georgia.gov/press-...
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Article:
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/loc...

Submission + - Oh Ship: Suez Canal blocked after 400-m long vessel turned sideways, ran aground (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: A giant container ship has run aground in the Suez canal, causing a traffic jam of vessels at either end of the vital international trade artery.

The 220,000-tonne, 400m-long Ever Given became stuck in the canal on Tuesday and several attempts to refloat it failed.

The Ever Given, which is carrying hundreds of containers bound for Rotterdam from China, is owned by the Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen and registered in Panama.

The shipping monitoring site Vesselfinder (https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000) shows the stricken ship and the traffic jam of other vessels at either end of the canal. The trade site Tanker Trackers reported that there were “a lot of fully-laden” tankers stuck at either end of the canal carrying Saudi, Russian, Omani and US oil.

Submission + - Cold weather in Texas knocks 30 gigawatts of generation capacity offline (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Monday morning, as a jet stream brought frigid air south to the central United States, Texas residents found themselves facing rolling blackouts as the statewide grid struggled to meet demand amid a large shortfall in generating capacity. As the day wore on, many saw these blackouts extend for ever longer periods of the day, and grid authorities are expecting problems to extend into at least Tuesday. As of noon local time on Monday, the Southwest Power Pool, which serves areas to the north of Texas, also announced that demand was exceeding generating capacity.

The shortfalls appear to be widespread, affecting everything from wind turbines to nuclear plants. One source of trouble may be an increased competition for natural gas, which is commonly used for heating in the United States.

Texas is unusual in that almost the entire state is part of a single grid that lacks extensive integration with those of the surrounding states. That grid is run by an organization called ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, a nonprofit controlled by the state legislature.

According to a statement released today by ERCOT, the grid entered a state of emergency shortly after 1am on Monday, meaning it could no longer guarantee enough power generation to meet customer demands. This is because roughly 30 gigawatts of generation capacity has been forced offline.

While some early reports indicated that frozen wind turbines were causing significant shortfalls, 30GW is roughly equal to the entire state's wind capacity if every turbine is producing all the power it's rated for. Since wind in Texas generally tends to produce less during winter, there's no way that the grid operators would have planned for getting 30GW from wind generation; in fact, a chart at ERCOT indicates that wind is producing significantly more than forecast.

Submission + - Tesla Pays Employees To Bike To Work After Slew Of Parking Problems (cbslocal.com) 1

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Crammed, slammed, riding the curb. No amount of creative parking seems to change the basic calculus for Tesla employees. Way too many cars are trying to squeeze into too few spots and it adds up to quite a problem. CBS technology analyst Larry Magid said, “It is ironic. This is a car company that doesn’t have enough space for the cars.”

A Tesla spokesperson acknowledged the problem saying the company is urging employees to use public transportation, is running their own private shuttles and even paying people to ride their bikes to work.

Submission + - Reginald Foster, official Latinist of the Vatican, has died. He was LXXXI. (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The NY Times is reporting that Reginald Foster, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Foster_(Latinist)) has died. Father Foster was a former plumber’s apprentice from Wisconsin who, in four decades as an Official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Christmas Day at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI.

His death was confirmed by the Vatican. He had tested positive for the coronavirus two weeks ago, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

A Roman Catholic priest who was considered the foremost Latinist in Rome and, quite possibly, the world, Father Foster was attached to the Office of Latin Letters of the Vatican Secretariat of State from 1969 until his retirement in 2009. By virtue of his longevity and his almost preternatural facility with the language, he was by the end of his tenure the de facto head of that office, which comprises a team of half a dozen translators.

If, having read this far, you are expecting a monastic ascetic, you will be blissfully disappointed. Father Foster was indeed a monk — a member of the Discalced Carmelite order — but he was a monk who looked like a stevedore, dressed like a janitor, swore like a sailor (usually in Latin) and spoke Latin with the riverine fluency of a Roman orator.

Submission + - Edmund Clarke, 2007 winner of the ACM A.E. Turing Award, dies of Covid-19 (post-gazette.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Edmund M. Clarke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_M._Clarke), the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, has died of Covid-19.

Professor Clarke was best known for his work in model checking, an automated method for detecting design errors in computer hardware and software. CMU president Farnam Jahanian said the world had “lost a giant in computer science” with Mr. Clarke’s death. “Ed’s pioneering work in model checking applied formal computational methods to the ultimate challenge: computers checking their own correctness,” Mr. Jahanian said in a statement. “As systems become ever more complex, we are just beginning to see the wide-reaching and long-term benefits of Ed's insights, which will continue to inspire researchers and practitioners for years to come.”

In the early 1980s, Mr. Clarke and his Harvard University graduate student, E. Allen Emerson — as well as Joseph Sifakis of the University of Grenoble, who was working separately — developed model checking, which has helped to improve the reliability of complex computer chips, systems and networks. For their work, the Association for Computing Machinery gave the three scientists the prestigious A.M. Turing Award — computer science’s Nobel Prize — in 2007.

Mr. Clark’s citation on the Turing Award website said Microsoft and Intel and other companies use model checking to verify designs for computer networks and software. “It is becoming particularly important in the verification of software designed for recent generations of integrated circuits, which feature multiple processors running simultaneously,” the citation page said. “Model checking has substantially improved the reliability and safety of the systems upon which modern life depends.”

Comment Waymo is an awful driver compared to CDL holders (Score 2) 57

18 crashes in 6.1 million miles traveled is a rate of 1 crash per 338,888 miles traveled.

That is an awful safety performance compared to the crash rates of experienced Commercial Drivers License (CDL) holders, many of whom drive more than a million miles without a single crash.

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