This is not a patent on autonomous driving. That would be very hard to do given the extensive prior art. Instead, the patent is basically focused the vehicle switching modes or executing an autonomous motion based on a QR code or some other infrastructure based marker that points at an URL. Many other teams have used infrastructure markers to indicated a change in vehicle mode. For example, California PATH encodes a binary 0101 signal using N-S-N-S magnet orientation, several Japanese teams use RF-based roadway beacons, and a variety of teams use painted markings (e.g., Civis bus in Las Vegas). However, most of these use internally stored references and maps on the vehicles. Also, some of the DSRC implementations conceived by US DOT include autonomous actions based on information received over RF from nearby vehicles. The difference here is that this patent is about using the reference to look up a command over the internet. It is a small delta on existing work.

Having said this, the idea raises all sorts of questions about man-in-the-middle attacks.

Actually, the flagship Borders in Ann Arbor was notoriously difficult to get hired at. They had a hard core literature test for prospective employees. I know English majors who failed the test.

I got crumbs on my keyboard...

Everyone is looking at the tree, not the forest. While everyone is going to jump on the "Apple did this to make money" argument, you know a major reason for this key was Apple's way of keeping content providers happy. Now that it's broken, there is a new "analog hole" for audio and video content. It is easy to imagine a computer using this to create a digital media file rather than routing to speakers. I suspect it won't be long before content providers pressure Apple into using secondary data to confirm iTunes is talking to a legit device.

Google actually built an all-star team. They hired the tech leads for both the Carnegie Mellon team (top finisher for 1st Grand Challenge and won the Urban Grand Challenge) and the Stanford team (won the 2nd Grand Challenge). They also hired a bunch of the other developers from each team. I was at Chris Urmson's recent presentation at Carnegie Mellon about the Google cars. The approach the Google team is using looks predominately like the CMU method but with key features of the Stanford team.

Some well known facts within the robotics community, but not outside: The Stanford team was a former CMU prof (Thrun) and his technical lead (Montemerlo) was still finishing his CMU PhD while working for Stanford. His co-advisor was the prof running the CMU team (Whittaker) and his CMU classmate was the technical lead for CMU's teams (Urmson). Google hired three out of four on this list.

3, 2, 1...

Yep, and autonomous driving in mixed traffic was done for No Hands Across America in 1995. Also, SARTRE is very similar to the CHAUFFEUR I and II European Commission projects in the 90's and early 00's.

The AHS History 1939 - 1997 movie (RealPlayer) is awesome.

Clearly, GP is not familiar with the Mother of All Demos. The main computer was on the other end of a 1968 modem.

Urmson (PhD, faculty on leave), Montemerlo (PhD), and Thrun (former faculty) all have ties to Carnegie Mellon. Autonomous driving has been a steady effort at CMU. For example, No Hands Across America was in 1995.

Mmm... Duff's.

Here is a comment from someone with a higher digit number telling a lower digit person "you must be new here"

I've been telling people that Cameron got Avatar "right" in terms of 3D exactly for this reason. There is such a stark contrast between it and other 3D movies in that there were only a couple scenes where it was clear they were showing off the 3D. Even those had reasons where the scene kind of made sense (like refocusing on near/far during the diary videos). I think Avatar will be a real benchmark in 3D strictly because it shows you can do well with 3D without being an eye-poker movie. It will be interesting to see how many other directors learn from Cameron's willingness to try to do it right.

Don't post media on unprotected pages. No big loss behind this step. Friends and family can handle a simple user/password combination - we've been doing this for years. Trust me, the rest of the world doesn't really want to see your pictures of the kids at their friend Joey's birthday party.

Grandparent: There is a pretty big difference between CC and subtitles. The former can be manipulated in format, font, etc and often include details like "Phone Ringing" that are left out of subtitles. Even subtitles that are supposedly for the deaf and hard of hearing often lack these audible descriptors. Subtitles also don't move based on the scene.. For example, text for edited CC is often positioned from side to side to match two people bantering or italicized for an off screen speaker (example). Real-time CC, which is not typical in movies, is the stuff you see scrolling at the top or bottom of screens in bars during sports and news. That's closer to subtitles due to the time pressure the captioner is under.

Parent: There is a digital CC spec but, like line21, it basically gets hosed by HDMI.