To ease the often overwhelming costs of higher education, select popular college textbooks are set to become available as free online downloads. More than 50 common textbooks for University of California, California State University and California Community College students should be posted in an online database by the start of the 2013-2014 school year.
Young undocumented Californians will be eligible for driver’s licenses beginning next year if they qualify for a new federal work program. Gov. Brown’s signing of the law followed in the steps of President Obama’s decision to stop deporting young undocumented immigrants if they meet certain requirements, including if they are 30 years old or younger and came to the United States by the age of 16.
For parents who decide not to have their children vaccinated, they’ll need a signed waiver from a doctor verifying that they were warned of risks and benefits associated with opting out of vaccinations before registering their children for school.
Homeowners on the brink of losing their homes gained stronger protections, with state legislators banning banks from practicing “dual tracking” — renegotiating mortgage payments with struggling homeowners while simultaneously pursuing foreclosure against the homeowner.
California will hold party bus operators to the same standards as limousine drivers, making them legally responsible for drinking by underage passengers. The law is named for Brett Studebaker, a 19-year-old from San Mateo who died in 2010 after drinking on a party bus and crashing his own vehicle while driving home later.
Juveniles sentenced to lifetime prison stints in California have a chance of release after serving 25 years if they show remorse and spend time in rehabilitation programs. Supporters of the bill argued that the United States is the only country in the world that sentences teenagers to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A new bill outlaws openly carrying shotguns and rifles on the streets and in the malls of California cities. A similar law last year banned the open carrying of handguns. The new bill does not apply to hunters, law enforcement personnel and others with specified licenses.
AB 1536 clarifies existing law by allowing drivers to dictate, send or listen to text-based communications while driving as long as they do so using technology specifically designed and configured to allow fully voice-operated, hands-free operation. Drivers under age 18 are still prohibited from using any electronic device while driving.
It seems it wasn’t purely coincidental that this happened at more-or-less the same time as French regulators began to delve into Free’s alleged degradation of YouTube traffic. An email sent to a journalist by Xavier Niel, founder of Free parent Iliad, strongly suggested that the ad-blocking was just a warning shot in an ongoing war with Google. Indeed, it appears that only Google ads were blocked.
So, with its ad-blocking turned off again, Free has done what it intended to do, namely to demonstrate to Google that it can hurt the company’s core activities in France. However, Free also managed to get the relevant government minister to come out in favor of net neutrality, which is precisely what the ISP is trying to do away with. In soccer terms, this was what you might call an own goal.
The case exposes a deep irony in the treatment Google has received in France. Bear in mind that, just months ago, the French government was siding with the nation’s publishers in a bid to get Google to pay licensing fees for reproducing snippets of text in Google News. As in Germany, opponents of that stance pointed out that publishers benefited from Google News, which sends traffic their way. Now the French government and publishers are effectively holding hands in defence of Google.
Haiku is not only a Japanese short poem with a defined structure—it's also the name of an open-source recreation of BeOS, an alternative operating system originally developed in the mid-1990s. It was the brainchild of Jean-Louis Gassée, a flamboyant, enthusiastic manager and head of Apple France. He climbed his way up the executive ladder to become the head of “advanced product development and worldwide marketing” before being forced out of the company by then-CEO John Sculley in 1990.
Undaunted, Gassée decided he would create a brand new computer platform from scratch, including both custom hardware and a new operating system. Gassée was following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, who had attempted the same thing in with NeXT in 1985 when he was ousted from Apple.
The BeBox was released in October 1995. It was a curious beast, sporting dual 66MHz PowerPC 603e processors, a “GeekPort” for attaching custom electronic devices, and vertical “Blinkenlights,” LED strips that showed CPU usage. Only 1,800 BeBoxes were sold in total before Be, Inc. discontinued all hardware manufacturing and concentrated on selling the operating system by itself, initially for PowerPC Macintoshes.
In 1996, Apple was searching for a new operating system to replace its failed “Copland” project, and for a while BeOS was at the top of the list (this list included both Windows NT and Solaris, neither of which would have been especially appetizing for Apple fans). While negotiating a sale price, Gassée, exuding his typical bombastic confidence, told a reporter that “we’ve got Apple by the balls and we’re going to squeeze until it hurts.” Someone at Apple got wind of this and phoned a guy, who phoned another guy... who phoned up Steve Jobs at NeXT. The rest is history. “C’est la vie,” said Gassée, and switched the focus of BeOS to x86-based PCs.
BeOS reached its pinnacle of success in 2000 when the R5 version was released as a free download. However, few people upgraded to the $99 “Professional” version, and a last-ditch attempt to save the company by bundling BeOS with the Sony eVilla Internet Appliance failed to bring in the necessary cash. Be, Inc. sold all its assets to Palm, Inc. in November 2001 for $11 million.
Since then, a German company, yellowTAB, released a “new” version of BeOS called Zeta in 2005 (which I reviewed). However, the company never confirmed whether or not it had access to the BeOS source code. The company discontinued Zeta in 2007, stating that sales failed to live up to expectations.
With the legal status of the BeOS source code in limbo, it was up to an open-source group of hackers to try to recently keep the BeOS dream alive. Their project was originally named OpenBeOS, but trademark issues forced a name change. Haiku was chosen as a callback to the old error messages in BeOS’s built-in Web browser, which were delivered (appropriately) in haiku form. Today, the Haiku group aims not only to rebuild that operating system, but to also run application binaries originally designed for BeOS. With the team recently releasing version R1/Alpha 4.1, Ars decided to take the OS for a test drive.
The latest iterations of the self-driving car have come to CES. Audi and Toyota are displaying cars that are self-driving at times, and showcase the building-block technologies available today that can assist drivers, especially on limited access roads or on crowded city streets. Audi is showing the Audi Pikes Peak TTS research car that has climbed Pikes Peak, and Toyota is exhibiting a gear-laden Lexus LS research vehicle. The building blocks help avoid accidents in urban areas; on limited access highways, they guide, correct and warn. Both automakers are also trying to control expectations for anywhere, anytime self-driving cars. Lexus likens its robocar to a “co-pilot” while Audi talks about “piloted driving,” as in auto-pilot functions on a plane.
Toyota’s Lexus division tricked out a Lexus LS sedan (pictured above) as an Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle with multiple sensors to “observe, process and respond to the vehicle’s surroundings.” In other words, it could be a self-driving car, but for now Lexus sees the components as assisting in specific tasks. Mark Templin, Lexus general manager, sounded the usual let’s-not-get-ahead-of-ourselves warning: “We believe the driver must be fully engaged … a driverless car is just a part of the story. Our vision is a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive co-pilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.” Lexus calls it the Integrated Safety Management Concept as well as the Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle.
The production LS you can buy as a 2013 model incorporates most of the tech available on high-end cars: lane keep assist (that is, lane departure warning plus steering corrections), blind spot detection, rear cross traffic alert (crossing vehicles when backing), and adaptive cruise control. Lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control are rudimentary self-driving tools.
Much of the Toyota/Lexus research is at the company’s nine-acre Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) proving grounds in Susona City, Japan. As you might guess from a test track the size of nine football fields, it replicates urban roads, not interstate highways. Toyota also does R&D in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Audi has already shown it can get a self-driving car packed full of electronics up the 152 turns of Pikes Peak (12.5 miles or 20 km) in 27 minutes. That’s about 28 mph or 45 kph. Not bad for a road with thousand-foot dropoffs and no guardrails. At CES, it’s showing off piloted driving and piloted parking. In a statement, Audi says, “The term ‘piloted’ is used advisedly, as Audi envisions motorists enjoying the convenience of allowing the car to handle mundane stop-and-go driving conditions, for example, while still being able to take control of the car when needed. In this way, the technology is similar to auto-pilot systems found on jetliners.”
Audi has most of the adaptive cruise and lane departure warning features found in the Lexus and the BMW-Cadillac-Mercedes competition. It’s also talking up piloted parking. Where Americans are learning to like the convenience of hands-off parallel parking, Audi is taking that one step further at CES. By that, Audi means you hop out of the car and it finds a space in a parking lot and eases in.
Audi also has been awarded the second license for road-testing autonomous vehicles on public roads in Nevada, after Google. Nevada is the ideal testbed for self-driving cars. Once you’re a few miles outside Vegas, there are miles and miles of uncrowded roads. It’s also close to California and the automaker R&D facilities there, and most of the state is snow-free year-round. Although the permit is for autonomous driving cars, for the most part there’s still a driver behind the wheel to take control in case something goes awry.
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