On Sun, 7 Mar 2004, murdoch wrote: > http://www.nature.com/nsu/040301/040301-15.html > > They're pretty much what you'd think, from the name. > > Just saw an ABC news presentation on this contest and the vehicles. > By 2015 apparently the Pentagon has said that 1/3 of military vehicles > must drive themselves, or some such. We're spending $1 billion per > day on the military, one spokesperson said, and they're looking for > ways to cut that. Since a lot of that goes to the personnel, ways to > stop them from getting into costly accidents and-or take care of tasks > for them are on the agenda. I wasn't 100% clear on this last part (as > to what exactly is the money-saving aspect of robotizing the driving > task.)
To start with, if we designed cities to have all public transportation robotized (eg using guide wires under the roads), traffic fatalities would be a rarity. In a city the size of Vancouver (about 6 miles x 6 miles with 550,000 people) that means 30 lives a year saved. Sky Train, operating here since 1986 has had only one accident and that was when a construction crew dropped an object onto it. It has no human operator. POC Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/