Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Self-Driving Car - the Race gets Electric

From Reuters News Service: Electric car company Tesla Motors is working to produce a car capable of running on "auto-pilot" within the next three years, CEO Elon Musk said, joining tech giant Google and rival carmakers in the race to roll a driverless car into the market. The California-based company's autonomous car would allow the driver to hand 90 percent of the control of the car over to the vehicle's computer system, Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper.

The electric automaker posted a job opening for an Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Controls Engineer that will help the company develop technology for fully autonomous vehicles. The listing says the engineer "will be responsible for developing vehicle-level decision-making and lateral and longitudinal control strategies for Tesla's effort to pioneer fully automated driving." Tesla wants this engineer to not only develop self-driving features for future electric cars, but also retrofit such systems to its Model S sedan.

Wired first reported the listing, Tesla has plenty of catching up to do when it comes to automation. The Model S lacks features that are commonplace in many other top-tier luxury vehicles such as adaptive cruise control, automated lane changing, and self-parking.

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Friday, September 6, 2013

Tired of the NSA reading your emails? Go quantum

Toshiba has invented a quantum cryptography network that even the NSA can’t decrypt. Quantum cryptography harnesses the baffling world properties of quantum physics to ensure that information sent from point A to point B isn’t intercepted. The laws of physics dictate that no oecan measure a quantum system without disrupting it.

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