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Comment: Re:Rich people don't like to go slow? (Score 1) 650

by darrint (#40642381) Attached to: Will Speed Limits Inhibit Autonomous Car Adoption?

Roads are something we all own and have a right to. So it hope it remains possible to manually drive a car on them, if for no other reason than for transportation during emergencies.

However, everyone here seems to assume that an auto-car has a driver in the driver's seat. Why exactly?

In my auto car I will turn the driver's seat around and talk to people. Or I'll sit in the passenger seat so I have lap room to do some work on the way to work. I may not even be in it. My car will drop me off at the front door of my office. I don't care where it parks. It can go fill up or charge somewhere far away from my office. It can go run errands for me to pick up stuff I bought online and/or rent itself out to make deliveries or taxi for awhile.

In fact, we may have destroyed the mass market for individual car ownership.

Space

+ - Voyager 2 finds solar system's shape is 'dented'->

Submitted by
Selikoff
Selikoff writes "NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has found that our solar system is not round but is "dented" by the local interstellar magnetic field of deep space, space experts said on Monday. The data was gathered by the craft on its 30-year journey into the edge of the solar system when it crossed into a sweeping region called the termination shock, they said. It showed that the southern hemisphere of the solar system's heliosphere is being pushed in or "dented." Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to enter this region of the solar system behind Voyager 1, which entered the northern region of the heliosheath in December 2004."
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Patents

+ - LOTR Actor Slays Amazon 1-Click Patent

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes "A reexam initiated by Lord of the Rings motion capture performer Peter Calveley's do-it-yourself legal effort has prompted the USPTO to reject 21 of the 26 Amazon 1-Click Patent claims. A USPTO Examiner found a 1995 Newsweek article on Digicash submitted by Calveley sufficient to quash a number of the claims, while many others were rejected in light of an e-shopping patent flagged by Calveley. Interestingly, additional claims were rejected by the Examiner in light of a TV remote control patent that was deemed to be unsuitable 1-Click prior art (for not being specific to the Web) in a contest run by the Tim O'Reilly and Jeff Bezos-bankrolled BountyQuest (Amazon last year testified to Congress that the contest failed to find prior art for Bezos' patent). Unfortunately, the action is non-final, so Amazon's high-priced law firm will get another chance to crush Calveley's PayPal-financed effort."
Censorship

+ - Bloggers who risked all to reveal Junta in Burma 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Internet geeks share a common style, and Ko Latt and his four friends would not be out of place in cyber cafés across the world. They have the skinny arms and the long hair, the dark T-shirts and the jokey nicknames. But few such figures have ever taken the risks that they have in the past few weeks, or achieved so much in a noble and dangerous cause. Since last month Ko Latt, 28, his friends Arca, Eye, Sun and Superman, and scores of others like them have been the third pillar of Burma's Saffron Revolution. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2563937.ece"
Space

+ - "Solar rainstorm" filled the first oceans-> 1

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes "The origin of the oceans is a major mystery for planetary geologists. Now a new analysis by Japanese scientists indicates that the most likely source of water is the cloud of dust and gas from which the solar system formed, the so-called solar nebula. That means the oceans were filled when the Earth passed through a cloud of water causing a "solar rainstorm" of fantastic proportions"
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The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. -- Sagan

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