Technology

ᔥ Slate

Not only will autonomous cars see the end of out-dated transport systems like rail, but will also seriously impact things like parking. I have always said that the ideal public transport system is one that has little vehicles that pull up outside your house, take you to where you want tot go then disappear until you need them again to go somewhere else. We kind of already have that system, they are called taxis. But imagine if all those taxis were autonomous and cheap?

…every metropolitan area in the United States contains many, many more parking spaces than automobiles. When you’re at work, the space allocated for your vehicle at home sits there empty. When you’re at home, the space allocated for your vehicle at the office sits empty. Malls build parking to accommodate demand during peak hours, and the spaces mostly sit empty off-peak. But if the cars could drive around without a human pilot, there’d be no need for such lavish supplies of vehicle storage. In principle, a metro area could get by with fewer than one parking space per car since even at minimum-demand times a nonzero quantity of vehicles would be in use. That’s probably extreme, but right now depending on how you count we have somewhere between three and eight parking spaces per car. If the cars don’t need to sit idly waiting for you until you want to leave (imagine a world of cheap, ubiquitous taxis) that number is going to become totally ridiculous. After exploding for about 60 years, the torrent of parking construction is going to halt very suddenly and then start shifting into reverse.

Ironically it could make silly rail lines useful:

Commuter rail stations, for example, will no longer need to choose between park-and-ride and transit-oriented development models. Every station will be a little TOD neighborhood, and people from further away will get dropped off and picked up at the station without needing to worry about storing a car there.

It would be far more logical for Auckland COuncil to invest in the technologies and infrastructure that make autonomous cars possible than in rail.

ᔥ Sydney Morning Herald

When I run training sessions for candidates about social media I tell them to avoid it all. Mainly because your audience is only two types of people. Committed supporters and sycophants or people like me waiting to smash you up for stupidity.

Fortunately for me not many politicians heed my advice and so I get to smash them up endlessly, like Andrew Little or Trevor Mallard.

The second worst thing any politician can do is decid to sue someone for what they said in social media.

A Liberal Party candidate in Tasmania has threatened to contact the employers of Facebook users who “liked” a satirical article posted about him online.

Andrew Nikolic, the Liberal candidate for Bass, has since reneged on the threats after initially denying to Fairfax Media that he had even made them.

The New Examiner is an online satirical blog operating on Facebook and Twitter.

The story, posted by the New Examiner on Thursday afternoon, creates a satirical scenario in which Mr Nikolic is caught out claiming to have been “heroically killed in action during services in Afghanistan”. It then goes on to state that he claims to have suffered “a slow, painful death by torture at the hands of Tamil militants in 2002″.

Mr Nikolic informed the New Examiner last week that if the offending article was not taken down he would write to the employers of all the individuals who had “liked” the story.

“I hope the employers and influencers of your satirical group will be amused by the formal letters of complaint I will now send them on this issue,” wrote Mr Nikolic in a Facebook comment that has since been deleted.

The New Examiner refused to back down and retract the article.

“Threatening to contact employers is simply confirmation that Nikolic’s first response to pressure is to go on the attack, rather than consider the political implications of his actions,” the editor-in-chief, known only under the pseudonym Martin Gaylord, told Fairfax Media.

Mr Nikolic also named and shamed Facebook users who had reposted the article, in a message on his own Facebook page, which was later deleted.

“He doesn’t appear to understand that individuals [who] use social media do so for a variety of reasons, but certainly not to [expose] themselves to vindictive behaviour of this nature,” the editor-in-chief said.

ᔥ The Telegraph

Len Brown should be looking at this initiative in Nevada instead of wasting billions on a silly trainset:

Driverless cars are to be allowed on the roads of Nevada, which has become the first state in America to allow the vehicles to licence their use.

Google which has embarked on an extensive testing programme of the cars secured the approval of the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

Motor manufacturers have been working on taking human error out of driving for more than a decade with innovations such as lane departure warning, self applying brakes and cars which park themselves.

Google, however, has come up with the ultimate version of cruise control, by removing the driver completely with the help of video cameras, lasers and radar sensors.

It relies on mapping which is created by Google’s own staff who drive the route filling in the location of lane markings and road signs.

Despite being controlled by a computer, two people must sit in the car at all times.

They will be held responsible for the car’s behaviour. As the vehicle will only be able to break the speed limit if the driver takes control, he or she would receive the speeding fine.

But he or she will be able to spend the journey on the phone or even texting without putting other road users at risk.

A test car, which has already been tested in California, has already covered 140,000 miles without any mishap – apart from being nudged from behind at a set of traffic lights.

Fun with iPhones

Absolut combines advertising and Augmented Reality for a new ad and social media campaign:

ᔥ Andrew Sullivan

Apparently if the 40% of US workers who could, worked from home just two days a week, we could help save the environment by reducing yearly carbon emissions by 53 million metric tons. But there is a catch:

[O]ne spam message produces the equivalent of 0.3 grams of CO2 … And what about the 62 trillion emails sent each year? Those emails produce as much CO2 as 1.6 million cars driving around the earth.

Now if only the Greens would help by stopping their own spamming or work towards a global ban on spam…they want to ban everything else after all.

Check out this guy, he has built a Star Trek Phaser, which can pop balloons…looks like he made the room smoky so we can see the laser.

Heh.. “set phasers to pop”

ᔥ NZ Herald

I pointed out with a video yesterday that James Cameron is a climate hypocrite.

And now he is set to mine asteroids in a new venture:

A US company, backed by film director James Cameron and Google’s top executives, has unveiled bold plans to mine asteroids for precious minerals and water.

Heralding a new frontier in space exploitation, Planetary Resources announced plans to send a swarm of robot miners into space to prospect resource-rich chunks of rock not far from Earth.

The firm’s co-founder Peter Diamandis said he wanted to “make the resources of space available to humanity”, and add trillions of dollars to global wealth in the process.

Among the goodies to be found on near-Earth asteroids are much-sought-after platinum, iron, nickel and sulfur as well as more obscure minerals that make excellent semi-conductors.

The equipment could also harvest water, which scientists believe holds the key to building propellants that will allow deep space exploration.

The first step will be to send a telescope into space within the next 18 to 24 months that can spot which asteroids may be useful.

Admitting the project was “difficult”, Diamandis and his colleagues tried to silence claims that it was a flight of fantasy, assembling a veritable fantasy team of investors.

They include Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt andTitanic filmmaker Cameron, as well as the son of one-time presidential candidate Ross Perot.

Quite how they are going to get all that stuff into space with out burning tonnes of noxious chemicals in fueling rockets is beyond me.

Perhaps James Cameron might like to tell us what the carbon footprint of this new venture will be?