I thought the whole point of "in car entertainment systems" was for the passengers, hence why you have displays in the back of the front seats and so on. For the kids to watch DVDs during long drives or whatever. To me that sounds much more useful than a system that only plays when stationary, because it's only occasionally that one sits in a stationary car for the duration of a TV episode.

Plenty of systems also provide a screen for the front seat passenger.

Playing videos while the car is in motion is a required feature for entertaining the kids during long drives. That's why there's nothing stopping videos playing while the vehicle is in motion.

Granted, there's a risk that by having the system in the driver's field of view they could become distracted by it, but the summary acts like there's no possible explanation for this feature, which I don't think is true.

Plenty of supermarkets ask customers to drive at a low speed in their car parks, and use speed bumps to encourage this.

How is this any different?

If you were going to slow the car down anyway, what does it matter if you get some additional use out of the kinetic energy the car loses?

For a first year course entitled "data structures and algorithsm" isn't this kind of unavoidable?

I mean, consider some of the projects on this student's website; things like sparse matricies, longest common substring, recursively solving an occupancy grid map, and so on.

How much variety can you put into an assignment to implement sparse matricies?

Of course, even without this student posting his assignments online, students could still google the problems and probably find working solutions, so taking down this one student's assignments isn't going to stop those who feel so inclined from just copying implementations they find through Google, so I'm not sure the teacher would have achieved much even if he had got this stuff taken down.

I'm going to leave aside the wisdom of doing this, and focus on the practical aspects.

An Android phone hooked up to Google Latitude would meet most of your requirements - small, accessible anywhere you've got an internet connection, accessible on mobile phones, phone can be turned off, phone is linux based.

There's OpenGTS, an Open GPS Tracking System. However, it's not obvious from their website what trackers it works with.

People have home-made basic versions. GPS modules can be purchased which give a reasonably accurate location once per second, or on demand, over a serial, usb, or bluetooth link; many mobile phones have gps modules already built in. Most tracking systems communicate over the cell phone system, either by SMS or mobile data connections. Of course, many mobile data connections are firewalled/NATed, so the benefit of SMS is you can transmit a query to the tracker. The disadvantage is the per-message cost, especially if you want regular location updates, and that it's easier to program the PC end of a mobile data connection. Cell companies also offer "machine to machine" data plans, but it's unlikely they'll want to deal with you if you're making a one-off homebrew system.

You could get a separate cell phone and GPS and make a homebrew device, like the one linked above, but you're unlikely to get things much more compact than buying a mobile phone with both built in.

If you're a programmer, my suggestion would be a mobile phone running Android, and using the GPS APIs to read the location and send it off to your server.

Pretty much every mobile tracking system uses the cell phone network for connectivity, because it's more widely available than WiFi, and more affordable than a satellite connection. If you're paranoid about privacy, you should be worried about cell phone triangulation, as that would be the most practical way for "big brother" to track people; so to be paranoid, you can't use a cell phone connection, which will make your design task substantially more difficult. It would be far easier to get a mobile phone, set it up with Google Latitude, turn it off, and tell your daughter to turn it on if she gets lost.

When I worked at (UK-based processor designers) ARM, Verilog was the language of choice. I've been told VHDL is popular in academia, while Verilog is more popular in industry.

That said, the underlying concepts are pretty similar, and those are what you're teaching really, so either choice would be reasonable.

Well, plenty of laptop computers have built in 3G modems, but inserting a SIM card and using the 3G connection is optional. And it's not like they found it hard to get people to buy the iPhone, even though there was a telecom charge involved.

I think most people accustomed to one internet connection shared with a router already have a wired internet connection. Given that a 3G connection costs more per megabyte, and may be less reliable, I don't think many people accustomed to wired internet would switch to a 3G connection for their home internet connection.

Now, people who travel around with a laptop, I can understand. But why would such a person choose a 'personal hotspot' with its size, and its own battery in need of charging, when they could have the 3G modem built into their laptop?

Granted, there might be a market where groups of people were travelling for business, or for individuals who preferred WiFi to USB or Bluetooth as a means of connecting to a modem, but if I was Apple a laptop with a 3G modem in it would be a much more logical thing to release than what's being proposed here.

The broadest claim the patent makes (bullet points mine):

Could one not simply have the client software send a request to the server software saying "send me the stored version, if it is modified since version 12.34"

Hence it would not be the current version carrying out the action of determining whether a the newest version of the program is more recent than the current version of the program; rather it would be being performed at the server.

Indeed, HTTP already includes an "If-Modified-Since" header the client can send to the server, though the HTTP header uses a date rather than a version number.

There's a risk that if a big foreign corporation blackmails a country to release an executive arrested on low-quality charges; that people would infer the big foreign corporation would also blackmail a country to release an executive arrested on high-quality charges for real, serious crimes.

I mean, the only difference is one violates 'don't be evil' and the other doesn't. I can understand why the Italian government might not want their entire justice system to depend on Google following their motto.

It seems to spending a night or two in jail while this mess gets cleaned up; would be a better choice than giving Google a reputation for blackmailing entire countries to prevent their executives being investigated for crimes; because the latter would be a sure way get european regulators on Google's back like they're on Microsoft's back about antitrust.

Furthermore, Google wants to expand google docs, google mail etc by saying they are as reliable as locally hosted solutions. You know, 99.9% uptime SLA and that. Throwing a few days of politically-motivated downtime into the mix would be a great way to prove google hosted apps can't be relied upon.

If I were Google I wouldn't cut access to Google from Italy. Instead, I would recruit a team of competent Italian lawyers to defend the executive.

For sure, there are some applications that make sense to run locally; or to use special local software in combination with a server, rather than a web-browser-based interface. 'World of Warcraft' won't be implemented in AJAX any time soon.

On the other hand if you want to sell 'software as a service' it's going to be easier if you're supplying ongoing services other than fixing bugs of your own creation. Furthermore, in stagnant markets (*cough*MSOffice*cough*) it could enable new features compelling enough for people to upgrade. What's more, a dependency on your data centre makes piracy practically impossible.

Not everything suits being on the web, or in the web browser. But the benefits to software companies are hard to ignore.

I have a two-stage plan, which I thought was a fairly common technique:

1. Make sure my flash cards have sufficient memory that I will not need to switch between cards for the same device. You know, 1000 full quality photos or whatever.

2. Leave the cards in their devices and keep track of the devices by normal means.

I was recently at a presentation where one of the speakers demonstrated some Siemens PLM software - high detail 3D CAD models, stuff like that. One of the benefits they pointed out was that it ran well even on the demonstrator's laptop computer - you didn't need a big workstation to run it on.

However, the demonstrator's laptop was a huge 17" desktop replacement thing.

That's the market I see for these things - mobile workstations that let you run workstation software at client sites and trade show booths, without needing to muck around with carrying and powering a second monitor along with your laptop.

Furthermore, computer companies derive some benefit from holding the "performance crown" even if it's with a product hardly anyone would buy. For example, you can load your computer with two $500 graphics cards or an "extreme" $1600 CPU but probably few people do. I think the idea is to get news coverage for your product line and demonstrate how cutting edge your product line is.

Or, given that we're comparing price and performance, a scatter plot.

I decided to replot some of the graphs properly. Here are the results.

Those are some impressive technologies, but the poster above was talking about charging from home electrical sockets - where the limiting factor isn't the battery but the power supply.

Let's say you wanted to make a 100 mile round trip, driving for 2 hours at 50mph. Wikipedia tells me a car cruising at 50mph needs about 10 horsepower, or 7.5kw, to overcome drag. So, 7.5kw for 2 hours.

A socket providing 110 volts, 15 amps gives 1650 watts - so charging would take 2*7500/1650 = 9 hours. If that was a 240 volt 13 amp socket (like in the UK) you get 3120 watts - charge in 4.8 hours. The power switchboard for my house can take at most 100 amps at 240 volts - 24,000 watts, for a charging time of 37 minutes. A typical industrial socket might give 400 volts and 40 amps on each of 3 phases. That's 48,000 watts and you could charge in 18 minutes.

And that's one reason people talk about special electric car power infrastructure: A 400 volt 3 phase 40 amp supply to every house would need a major infrastructure upgrade. You can do clever things like only charging during periods of high supply/low demand, but that requires control infrastructure too.

And of course, the figures given above are for a 10 horse power car. And let's be honest here - even small cars like the Ford Ka have 50 horsepower engines.

Well, a community is one way to prevent spamming, but is it the only way?

I mean, Wikipedia goes for a very transparent structure. If Wikipedia added secret algorithms to selectively display only certain users' contributions, they would probably be criticised by people on Slashdot, and elements of the Wikipedia community.

On the other hand, Google already uses secret automated moderation techniques for search results, and they are also pretty good at filtering spam in gmail. Both with no need for a community of volunteers doing filtering manually.

Furthermore, Google has not committed to using this user-generated data at all, let alone in an unmoderated form.

Now, I agree with you that Google hasn't got a track record of building user communities like Wikipedia. However, I think they could make user-moderated search work without one.

The end user retains the freedom to use the BSD code. The fact that someone has released a proprietary product based on the BSD code does not diminish the BSD code.