I'm not sure. I just read SuperFreakonomics and IV is featured (quite positively, I might add) in the book.

According to the authors, IV exists to provide a mass market for IP by acting as a clearinghouse. They purchase patents (from anyone, but that does include small-time engineers/inventors without the capital to develop their creation) and solicit other companies to license them. They also do a fair bit of inventing themselves (including some awesome environmental engineering devices intended to stop global warming and reduce the effects of hurricanes!) so it's not clear to me that they exist *only* to troll.

That being said, it *is* clear that their primary source of income is the licenses from their patents and it's *not* clear what percentage of their profitable patents are things invented in house or externally.

Not that I'm doubting you, but I hadn't seen this reported. Citation?

I used to work for a robotics company. Some of the engineers felt that trains would make an excellent target for automation. Obstacle detection and avoidance is simple (only need to worry about things near the tracks and our only response is to slow down/stop). Smarter trains enable smarter trainyards and thence, more efficient shipping.

So what you're saying is, if you want to avoid detection, the data must only be sniffed, not consumed.

FTA:

0xFA0^2 = 0xFA0 Or did you mean pow(0xFA0, 2)?

Honestly, I'm more excited by FF4. I've been using the beta for some time now and I love it. :) On the other hand, I find OO.o to be more than sufficient for my meager word processing needs. I just don't really *care* if someone reinvents the office suite yet again.

Oh you poor thing... no one told you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_2

True, you could do all that... or you could pick up a working used one for like $20 at your local used game store/ebay. :)

Personally, I grabbed 3 partially busted DCs at a local thriftshop for $5 apiece and then combined them into a single working unit. Took about 30 minutes and all I needed was a screwdriver.

Cicero managed it once. That's why the next bout of conspirators offed him before they tried again.

About $15-$20 (US) per CD. Cheaper if you can find them used.

I take it you haven't seen this then. :)

That's certainly a concern, but the GP was positing a conspiracy to protect the people from the dangers of tech we aren't "ready" for. I agree that liability is a problem, but it's not an insurmountable one. Autonomous vehicles *are* coming. They won't be approved for public roads until the government is convinced of their (relative) safety, but they are coming.

No one is avoiding this research because of liability concerns.

Maybe, but I doubt it. Sensors are precision instruments and each one has to be calibrated and tested to within an inch of it's life. That process only becomes "cheap" when you can afford to massively parallelize it. If you sell ten of these sensors a year and each one takes a week to be tested/calibrated properly by a trained engineer, they certainly cost a pretty penny. But you can't just pump out 10K and expect the engineer's time to suddenly get cheaper.

8^) For obvious reasons, we couldn't do very extensive testing with pedestrian detection. Suffice it to say that HR felt compelled to convene a meeting with the engineers regarding the proper usage of interns...

From what *ahem* testing we were able to perform, out system detected pedestrians just fine. We were using a laser-based detector from whose data we used to create a 3d mesh of the world in real time. The mesh was then compared with camera images to determine the location of obstacles and roads. If I recall correctly, I believe Stanford's solution only used lasers to determine "flat surface" vs "non-flat surface" and mainly relies on their cameras to determine the location of the road. So it may have trouble detecting a narrow moving obstacle ahead of (or just on a collision course with) the vehicle.

As for "the most part, anyway" we did have some situations in which our detectors failed. Chain-link fences were tricky (we almost always detected them, but not 100% of the time) and - though other types of vehicles presented no problems - our VP's new Mustang was consistently invisible. :)