jawfish

Robot Cars in Traffic: DARPA Urban Challengecomments
john posted in rides, technologies on October 31st, 2007

The DARPA Urban Challenge is the third in a series of DARPA sponsored contests for robot cars. Except for a remote kill switch the cars are totally autonomous once turned loose. The first two contests were on remote dirt roads with no traffic. This time the test is in simulated urban traffic, with stop signs, turns, and moving vehicles in both directions.

Stanford’s entry waits to turn left ( blue Passat with Red Bull logo)

The qualifying rounds are just finished at abandoned George AFB in Victorville California and the finals are on November 3.

Video of the Stanford entry. The horn you hear is a safety device sounded by the robot car ( blue Passat with Red Bull logo) the other cars have human drivers.

All videos by Matt

More video, text and pictures after the jump…

read on …

If Bush Came to Your Neighborhoodcomments
john posted in politics & culture on October 25th, 2007

We’ve been having a few fires lately in Southern California. It happens. The apocalyptic smoky red skies make for some good writing ( see Didion et al). Like the fires, but lacking the drama, politicians also blow in for some photo ops.

photo by Ashlie at LAT

George Bush Tours Fires in Southern California seen in headlines from all over

photo by LAT

On hearing about the Bush tour, I thought: Oh great, first he threatens to send FEMA, and now he comes himself. Just what we need right now, a phalanx of Secret Service guys and the Presidential entourage clogging traffic and wasting the time of people who actually do something.

But then I got to daydreaming about what I’d say to Bush if he showed up in my neighborhood .
Would I shake his hand? Look him in the eye? Thank him for “low-cost loans for uninsured losses” and “debris removal” by the feds? What would I say in the one tiny moment when I could actually influence him?

What would you do?
If you had 30 seconds with George Bush what would you say to him?

Leave a comment.

Toyota 1/x Concept: Vaporware or Hypercar?comments
john posted in rides, technologies on October 11th, 2007

Yesterday Toyota displayed a stunning new concept car at the Tokyo Motor Show. It’s not subject to gushing praise because it is weirdly beautiful or powerful, but because it follows the plan of Amory Lovin’s Hypercar concept. Just this week I wrote that the Frankfurt show had remarkable green cars, which together, constitute a turning point in low-emission, low GHG ( greenhouse gas) cars. Well this concept car is the next step beyond that.

Toyota 1/x concept ( all 1/x photos by Toyota)

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Suddenly It’s Good Car Business to Go Greencomments
john posted in rides, technologies on October 8th, 2007

This year’s Frankfurt auto show brings a deluge of new green or greener concept cars, most of which look like production-ready chassis with new drive systems. Normally, concept cars have a host of features which the manufacturer never intends to build, but is using to test public’s fickle taste. At this show the news has been more pragmatic, and the volume of new ideas makes me feel like this is a turning point in transportation history.

Peugeot-Citroen
Citroen Cactus, not bound for the US.
The Peugeot-Citroen conglomerate may have the greenest fleet of cars in a few years, relying on tiny high-efficiency diesels.

Quite suddenly its good business to build green. Comparable moves are happening in heavy trucks, bio-fuels, and even in ships and planes. There are startups, small companies and bike makers such as Phoenix, Zenn, Zap, Vectrix, and the Chinese and Indian makers. Interesting green cars from Brazil, Norway, and France are also available outside the US.

Obvio from Brazil

About a year ago I started looking at green vehicles, with an eye toward getting or building something for local commuting. There was much talk about various bio-fuels like ethanol and there is a dedicated bunch of bio-diesel advocates around. On the road, the hybrid Prius is popular, along with the Honda hybrids and a Ford Escape hybrid with more modest mileage improvement. There is little else on the market today, and none of the hybrids support pluggable electric drive where you recharge your batteries from the grid instead of your gas engine. Until this summer there hasn’t been much talk about the future from the existing automakers. Or so it seemed. It turns out the R&D boffins were hard at work, and racing for market introduction in secret.

Chevrolet started touting its Volt concept car, an advanced series hybrid, and Ford its fuel-cell cars, but both seem to be vaporware from companies that may well not be around in 2010. The low-production Tesla BEV sports car came out to great and well-deserved fanfare, but extreme performance prices it into the celebrity owner category.

Tesla

Tesla lithium BEV ( battery electric vehicle - look Ma no gas! )

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Let Them Eat Cakecomments
john posted in politics & culture, technologies on October 4th, 2007

After yesterday’s Jawfish piece about inexorable corporate aggrandizement , comes the news that one of the record industry’s lawsuits has netted an initial fine of $222,000 against a woman who shared files on the Kazaa p2p network. A clear case of robbing the poor to pay the lawyers, and likely yet another jury which doesn’t understand the issues of the case.

The RIAA is the recording industry trade group. They have been suing users (their own customers, really) who share music over the Internet. See Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and others. While this is technically legal, it’s the product of tortured logic from a dying industry who can still command legislators to bail them out. The size of the judgment is ridiculous on the face of it, but the law is often, and famously, an ass.

Daily Tech says:

The RIAA adds a notch to its belt of legal victories

“This is what can happen if you don’t settle,” said RIAA attorney Richard Gabriels, speaking to reporters just outside the Duluth, Minnesota Courthouse, minutes after Jammie Thomas was found liable for copyright infringement to the tune of $222,000.

Thomas, a single mom with two kids, left the courthouse without comment and did not speak with reporters.

Under the username “Tereastarr,” Thomas was found sharing just over 1,700 files via the Kazaa network on February 21, 2005. Of those 1,700 tracks, 24 were named – including music from popular artists such as AFI, Green Day, and Aerosmith – and for each one she was held liable for $9,250 worth of damages, coming to a grand total of $222,000….

the article

Background:
Kazaa is a file sharing network. It’s a very clever idea: in essence users agree to store and share files with other users and central servers keep databases of what files are available and where they are. This benefits the server organization by greatly reducing load; it benefits the Internet by increasing efficiency; and users get the enhanced service for free. There is not a city block in America without a teenager sharing 1000’s of files on these networks, and the software industry uses bitTorrent a more sophisticated version to share files. If you want to argue that sharing music files without charge is like stealing a physical CD from the record store, then you have to explain why streaming music over the Internet or broadcasting it from a radio isn’t. Using the same sort of tortured logic as the industry, I’ll point out that since the files have all been ripped to MP3s, they aren’t even the same ( in the binary sense) as the original.

In the this same week a well-known band ( even I have heard of them) Radiohead announced it would sell its new album over the Internet and allow users to pay nothing or whatever they want.

Most independent industry observers and Internet gurus are firmly against the RIAA and the Brahmins of the record business. I see the conflict as the fallout from a huge change in all the media from traditional business models to Internet-based models. The Phil Spectors do not go gently into the night.

Further Reading:
The defender of Internet user’s rights, Electronic Frontier Foundation
an article on the bad business of RIAA suing its own customers, Motley Fool

What’s your view?