Mudslinger's Corner

Solar cars still a way off – CNN.com

 (CNN) — Toyota’s third-generation Prius, due at dealerships this spring, will have an optional solar panel on its roof. The panel will power a ventilation system that can cool the car without help from the engine, Toyota says.

But it’s a long way from the 2010 Prius to a solar-powered car, experts told CNN. Most agree that there just isn’t enough space on a production car to get full power from solar panels.

“Being able to power a car entirely with solar is a pretty far-reaching goal,” said Tony Markel, a senior engineer at the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado.

In the new Prius, the solar panel will provide energy for a ventilation fan that will help cool the parked car on sunny, hot days. The driver can start the fan remotely before stepping into the car. Once the car is started, the air conditioning won’t need as much energy from a battery to do the rest of the cooling.

“The best thing about using solar is that regardless of what you end up using it for, you’re trying to use it to displace gasoline,” added Markel.

The question is, how much gasoline can solar power offset? Markel said his lab has modified a Prius to use electricity from the grid for its main batteries and a solar panel for the auxiliary systems. He believes the car gets an additional 5 miles of electric range from the panel.
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According to recent articles in Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, Toyota has bigger plans for harnessing power from the sun. Nikkei reports that Toyota hopes to develop a vehicle powered entirely by solar panels. The project will take years, the paper reported.

When contacted by CNN, however, a Toyota spokeswoman denied the existence of the project.

“At this time there are no plans that we know of to produce a concept or production version of a solar-powered car,” said Amy K. Taylor, a communications administrator in Toyota’s Environmental, Safety & Quality division.

Motorists don’t have to wait for a 2010 Prius to drive a solar-enhanced car, however. Greg Johanson, president of Solar Electric Vehicles in Westlake Village, California, said his company makes a roof-mounted panel for a standard Prius that enables the car to travel up to 15 additional miles a day.

The system costs $3,500, and it takes about a week to make one, Johanson said. Billy Bautista, a project coordinator at the company, said Solar Electric Vehicles gets so many requests for the system that there is a backlog of several months.

The company’s Web site says motorists can install the panels themselves, although it recommends finding a “qualified technician.”

The system delivers about 165 watts of power per hour to an added battery, which helps powers the electric motor, Johanson said.

But others said it would take a lot more power than that to replace an internal combustion engine.

Eric Leonhardt, director of the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University, said that even if solar cells worked far better than they do today, they wouldn’t generate enough power for driving substantial distances. The best cells operate at about 33 percent efficiency, but the ones used on vehicles are only about 18 percent efficient, he said.

Leonhardt said it would be more practical to use solar power to help charge a car’s battery and use the more efficient panels mounted on a roof or over a parking area to supply the rest of the electricity needed to drive the engine.

“Solar panels really need a lot of area,” he said.

Leonhardt thinks Toyota’s new Prius is a good first step toward using renewable energy. Some cars get hotter than 150 degrees inside when parked in the sun, so reducing the temperature could mean Toyota could use a smaller AC unit, he added.

Johanson of Solar Electric Vehicles said he’d like to see Toyota bring the weight of a Prius down from 3,000 pounds to 2,000. He also hopes for a small gasoline engine and a larger electric motor. That will probably come in the future, when Toyota unveils a plug-in engine.

In the meantime, Solar Electric Vehicles sells its version of a plug-in Prius, with a solar panel installed, for $25,000, Bautista said.

Toyota is the largest automaker to incorporate solar power into a mass-produced car. But its solar panel is not the first for a car company. Audi uses one on its upscale A8 model, and Mazda tried one on its 929 in the 1990s.

In addition, a French motor company, Venturi, has produced an electric-solar hybrid. The Eclectic model costs $30,000, looks like a souped-up golf cart and uses roof-mounted solar panels to help power an electric engine. It has a range of about 30 miles and has a top speed of about 30 mph.

LiveLeak.com – CAT VS HELICOPTER

NIN to Mars – b3ta.com links

YouTube – The Technical Hitch

Article From: Australia’s Internet Censorship Scheme Takes Money Allocated to Pursue Pedophiles

The Great Firewall of Australia, the Australian Government’s Internet censorship scheme that is being sold as protecting children has resulted in significant budget cuts to a dedicated anti online child abuse police team.

$2.8 million AUD ($1.86m USD) originally allocated to the Australian Federal Police’s Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team (OCSET) has instead gone towards Internet censorship. A small figure perhaps, but the total budget for the team in 2007 (without the $2.8m) was $7.5 million AUD ($5m USD).

But it gets better: according to research from Stilgherrian, without that money, OCSET simply doesn’t have the staff to investigate all of the suspected pedophiles it already knows about. Some cases get palmed off to the states — that is, to police who don’t have the specialist training and experience of OCSET, and the rest are simply dropped.

So the Australian Government, in the name of protecting children with a scheme that blocks millions of sites, has created a situation where pedophiles get away, even when they are known to exist, because funding that would have been allocated to pursuing them has been spent on internet censorship.

Won’t somebody think of the children?

I’ve said it before, but this whole scheme is a farce and the Minister should be removed from his position. Even the do-gooders who are backing the censorship regime should be disgusted by this gross misallocation of funds by the Australian Government, as most Australian’s will be. Imagine inversely if the $44 million allocated to censorship was given to this taskforce, and the real outcomes that could be achieved.

Original Article From: Rudd & Conroy On Wrong Side Of Net Censorship Debate – Smarthouse

By Computer Daily News | Thursday | 15/01/2009
Are you listening down there in Australia, Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd? A new US report has found there is no simple technology solution to protect children from bullying, pornography, sexual predation and other online threats.

The report was to be issued today by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, led by Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, but a copy found its way to The Wall Street Journal.

It says the 278-page report is a boon for Web companies, which have long argued that technology isn’t the sole solution to the dangers kids face online. And it is a disappointment for those in favor of stricter technological controls, such as age-verification and filtering tools.

In Australia, the Rudd Government is moving to introduce a controversial, expensive system – at a cost of up to $128 million – that will filter the Internet in a bid to protect children. A trial is due to start this month.

The “clean feed” Internet scheme would impose national content filtering for all Internet connections and would bar Web pages detailed in two blacklists operated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

The proposal has been rejected as draconian, unworkable and a potential invasion of privacy by ISPs, the Internet Industry Association, Digital Liberty Coalition, Electronic Frontier Association and other interested parties.

Just like the real world

The US report was complied by a taskforce that included representatives of several top Internet and security companies, including News Corp.’s MySpace, Google, AOL and Facebook.

They reviewed several types of technologies, including age and identity verification, filtering and auditing, text analysis and biometrics, and found they came up short of a comprehensive way to protect children and teens.

The report also found that deploying these technologies would be costly and could create broader privacy and security problems; and that the risks that minors face on the Web ­ including bullying and harassment by peers ­ aren’t very different from those they face in the real world.

YouTube – NINJA KITTEN gatito de ninja

domain-b.com : India may see the Tata – MDI Air Car this year

13 January 2009      
    
Forget hybrid vehicles, forget electric cars. How can any of them match up to a car that runs on next to nothing? Ladies and gentleman, presenting the Air Car, made by French company MDI in collaboration with India’s Tata Motors. Running on compressed air, the revolutionary vehicle may be introduced in India before the end of this year.

Although the car consumes no fuel, yet there is a cost associated with filling its tanks with compressed air. However, considering the mileage that the vehicle delivers, the running costs are extremely low.

Furthermore, with no combustion there is no emission – an extremely important trait in the currently pollution-conscious world.

Although the Air Car doesn’t require traditional fuel options like petrol, diesel, or gas and is driven primarily by compressed air. However, the company has also developed an alternative means to power the car using a combination of air and petrol, diesel or ethanol, just like a hybrid.

MDI has officially said that they ”will release in France the first cars for the Air France company before June 2009. The cars will be available for the public at the end of 2009.”

Mumbai-based Tata Motors, India’s third biggest car manufacturer had signed a licensing agreement with MDI for manufacturing the car in India. The agreement between the two envisages development and refinement of the technology. (See: And now, a car that runs on air from the Tata stable)

“Tata Motors has not finalised any timeframe for deployment of the technology of engines powered by compressed air. Tata Motors is licensed to deploy the technology only in India. As and when we have any details of deployment in India, we will share them with you,” MDI added.

MDI has developed several models of the Air Car designed to accommodate two to six passengers.

A typical three-seater car, which had been unveiled earlier, is about 2.65 metres in length (smaller than the Tata Nano’s 3.1 metres) and 1.62 metres wide (wider than Nano).

The price of the car will be unveiled at the launch, but, according to the company’s website, the  price may range from Rs2.33 lakh to Rs8.69 lakh.

Article from:
DailyTech – 2009: The Year of the Thought Criminal

Give those in power an inch, and they’ll take a mile

Barely a week in, 2009 is shaping up to be an interesting – if somewhat depressing – year for opponents of internet censorship and overpowered copyright enforcement. These last few weeks we’ve seen a number of troubling initiatives from India, Australia, the U.K., and New Zealand, among others, which seek to curtail the delightfully double-edged freedom of information that makes our Internet so great.

While diverse in purpose, each of these initiatives bear a common thread: increased government control in things that it lacks the business, the discipline, and the authority to regulate. Whether it’s heightening the reign of censorship in Australia, disconnecting the internet of anyone even remotely suspected of file sharing in New Zealand, or the increase in police cybersnooping powers in India and the U.K., it appears that many of this world’s governments have had enough of the open internet and now intend to take over and regulate.

The reasons why these developments are a genuinely Bad Thing™ should be both multitude and obvious. The internet gives us, as a people, an almost unthinkably powerful weapon – a weapon of minds, of expression, and of intellectual freedom – that we are free to wield against ourselves, each other, and those who govern over us. In no other time have we had such a power, and yet under the guise of fear – excuses range everywhere from “protecting public morality” to “saving the children” – we allow lawmakers to siphon it away from us.

Clearly, our governments are envious.

The range between these initiatives, in terms of simple power, is wide: while the “Constable HaX0r” police-hacker scare in the U.K. seems largely the result of media hysteria – British police have had the ability to remotely investigate suspects’ computers for quite some time, as Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez points out – a two-year-old Indian bill, which was finally approved last month, gives Indian authorities a sudden and substantial increase in their ability regulate the private lives of Indian citizens.

“Any email you send, any message you text [is] now open to the prying eyes of the government,” writes Indian blogger Binu Karunakaran, as is “the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.”

Binu writes of the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill of 2006, which passed Indian parliament late last month. It grants authorities practically unrestricted authority to monitor all electronic communication, the ability to block any website at will, and the authority to break into someone’s home and inspect their computer – in addition to imposing “Victorian” moral sensibilities on an already conservative culture. Banned activities include e-mailing anything (even jokes) that might be considered offensive or false, surfing celebrity “Bollywood” news, or watching porn.

Meanwhile, bloggers’ christening of the “Great Firewall of Australia” seems to have gained additional relevance, after the Australian government announced intentions to introduce worldwide, ISP-level internet filtering upon its inhabitants. Labor party minister Stephen Conroy writes – in an open-comment blog post, paradoxically – that the move is necessary to maximize the “participation of Australian businesses and individuals in the digital economy,” so that they conduct themselves online as they do offline. Open censorship isn’t an attack on free speech, he writes, because the government doesn’t acknowledge it as such; censors are ordered to avoid blocking any forms of “political speech” while little is said about any of the other kinds.

More troubling, however, is how quickly we’re sleepwalking into the arms of a Big Brother-esque surveillance state. Indian citizens may have had little debate over their Big Brother bill, but voters in the U.K., Australia, the United States, and elsewhere have – and yet we continually ignore the warning signs: Warrantless wiretapping in the U.S. continues to gather indifference from most of the voting public, and most of the lukewarm attempts to slow the rampant spread of traffic, speed, and public surveillance cameras in the U.S. and U.K. have thus far failed. Most people I’ve talked to seem to shrug their shoulders and say that they have nothing to hide – and then go on with their business. Nobody seems to care.

(There’s an excellent counterpoint to the “nothing to hide” argument, by the way, and if that’s your mantra then I demand that you read this.)

It is for these reasons that I wish to tentatively declare 2009 as the Year of the Thought Criminal, because these people will be the only ones worth placing any hope on. They are the people sneaking past the censors, foiling government inspectors, and reporting all things hidden. They are the hackers, reporters, intellectuals, and gatekeepers who safeguard our minds so that we may use them to wander in whatever direction we see fit. They are anyone who actually gives a damn.

There’s a story floating around that says a frog will allow itself to be boiled alive if it is put in a pot of cold water slowly heated. If it’s dropped in a boiling pot, it will jump out. A clichéd slippery slope argument, for sure, but there exists no better imagery to illustrate my point.

My question to you is this: are we the unsuspecting frog? Could you comfortably stand naked before the eyes of your government?

That future might be nearer than we think.

YouTube – Stupid Cat FAIL

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