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Solar sail, Microbots stuffed into a small capsule, and you could get to Europa at very fast speeds.

Solar Sails at 150,000 mph, which is far faster than nuclear
Nuclear also has heat problems, and sure it can
Solar Sail
See how it works http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop19au g99_1.htm

Also we could use Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion

Plasma or ionized gas is trapped on the magnetic field lines generated onboard, and this plasma inflates the magnetic field much like hot air in a balloon.

See prototype

When you digitally rip a CD, you *ARE* making an exact copy. This is exactly the same process as if you were to copy software from a CD. You aren't going to tell me that the binary on the CD and the binary on my hard drive are different are you? If they were, CD's wouldn't work for software.

What you're talking about is analog playback. This allows for interpolation, concealment, and muting. Digital does not.

When I digitally rip a CD, it is an *exact* copy of what's on the CD. If a section of the disc cannot be read properly, you get skips and such in the resulting sound file, but no loss in quality elsewhere.

The link you *should* have posted was
http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/cdro m/95x8.htm. This is the behaviour of a digital rip.

UW-IMAPd is the defacto standard for mbox mail. Comes bundled with most (all?) linux distros and requires no configuration.

Also sad sad horrible news: the sky is falling, Pippy Longstocking's stripes are fading, Popeye's spinach is genetically altered, and computer monitors are making women grow mustaches.

This dude wants us to believe he's an expert because he's been a Greenpeace nut for 10 years. Some people have been in asylums for 10 years, that doesn't make them experts on much more than pudding.

Finally...who cares?! This story is such krunk. It's a prime example of the crap that makes me wonder why I bother with Slashdot. I hate browsing, so I prefer to visit a few bookmarked places...maybe time to bookmark something decent. Maybe this will be place I go. "news" for nerds??

Here

and the fifth link on google is for. Quite Slashdot.org today!

Congratulations. That was your third post ever, and you're still a fucking moron. That post will, however, still look interesting to potential moderators. So since it's 3:49am and I'm an insomniac so lemme do the work for you. MODERATORS: Read this before modding the parent, and I could care less about my own karma, but don't mod this down. Other moderators need to see this as well.

Post 1
He actually seems to know what he's talking about, but it's rare that someone not in the codec industry to know this much about codecs. This is most likely the search-copy-paste routine: Google the current story, clip what you find, post a reply. As proof, read his post and then read this. It's a direct rip.

Post 2
Wow! That's some heavy code he displays as a "hack I devised". Well then he may want to take a look here because it displays the exact same code. Somehow I don't think they are the ones performing the ripoff. Another classic search-copy-paste routine. He also makes references to coding a "next-gen" game engine for Cinemaware. Why? So they can make better versions of Wings, Defender of the Crown, and The Three Stooges?

Post 3
Off the bat it seems he's getting lazy. There don't seem to be any outside sources "cited". But he makes a fatal flaw and shows he's just a simple idiot, claiming to rm -rf / any offending mail server he chooses. That's not even worth the time to debunk.

If there ever was a good example of who to add to your Foe list, this is it. Yeah, I'm probably an idiot for even bothering with this, but I already do origami and listen to George Michael so why not nail the coffin shut.

When you create a work, like a computer program, or a novel, and so on, you automatically have a set of legal rights called copyright. This means that you have the right to forbid others to use, modify and redistribute your work. By default no-one, except you the owner, is allowed to do any of these things. To relax these restrictions, you need to enter into an agreement with other people individually when they receive a copy from you. Such an agreement is called a License Agreement, which potentially entails rights and obligations to both you and them. It is very important that the License is written by a lawyer, and invoked from every file that is part of the work, in order for that file to fall under the terms the License. This can be done either by including the full text of the license or by including a legalese reference to the full text of the License. In the free software community, we standardize on using primarily the GNU General Public License, which we will discuss in the next section.

Ok, initial comment on this story has been very negative, but... The original Pons et. al. findings also claimed neutron production.

The Pons and Fleischmann experiment, if it had actually worked as well as they said it did, would have killed them from the neutron radiation. They didn't bother to do even the most basic accounting of what was going where and when, and they never compared what they measured to what they would have expected to see had they actually produced fusion. Worse, they hid details from their experiment for a considerable period of time, before saying "Wait, you weren't doing it right!" and giving the details of their palladium electrodes when the evidence was mounting against them.

The current experiment, even if it is wrong, at least was performed by experimenters who appear to understand the importance of collecting as much information as possible before hypothesizing models that explain it. The trouble with reproducibility might indicate a problem with their instrument calibration, plus the measured neutron flux and the detected tritium are in disagreement on how much fusion is taking place. However, at least the experimenters acknowledge this, and give a detailed enough description of their setup that others can try to reproduce it. It probably won't pan out, but I won't hold it against them.

Gone offtopic, but i think the air-powered car is a better solution than a battery powered car.

Have you seen the liquid nitrogen car?

*sigh* saying M-x ispell-buffer is like saying M-x shell, then ispell filename. It's not an intrinsic, built-in function, in the same way that, say, echo is a built-in part of tcsh. tcsh can do echo "in its head," so echo is built-in. tcsh needs a fork(); exec() to run ispell, so ispell is not built into tcsh. I don't think Word requires a fork(); exec() to get to the spellcheck mode, so it seems safe to say that spell check is "built-in" to Word.

And for those of you who think that elisp == spell checker, I'll argue then that your CPU has a spell-checker, Postscript has a spell-checker, and the steam-powered Turing machine has a spell-checker...

Tom: "Grignr"?
Mike: Look, we're already on the second chapter. Get over it.
Tom: I know, I know, it's just... I'd like at least buy a vowel or something.

What if there was life outside slashdot? I asked myself this question and found the following link:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/slash dot.html#alternatives

Check it out and read it through, this guy makes some good points and gives some good ideas...

So, now that /. is going to be charging subscriptions, will readers be compensated for having highly modded stories?

This is done in the magazine business. Readers digest does this for their "Humor" section. Family Handyman does it for their "Tips" section. Almost every major magazine out there has a "Readers Comments" section and most pay the ppl that provide content. That being said, there are always alternatives to slashdot .

I came across this while looking for more information on a French project called Aramis (which was cancelled a while back). Aramis consisted of driverless pods running on tracks controlled by a central computer. Interestingly the Aramis people drew a parallel with packet switching technologies ... (i.e. the pods as addressed packets being directed to destinations at switches).

And it's hardly anything new, there is one that has been running for 30 years at the West-Virginia University, in Morgantown (WV - duh?). (Better pics here).

While ULTra can be deployed more easily for demonstrations, for city-wide deployment, Personal Rapid Transit, a wheel based monorail, seems better: it requires much less space on the ground and is probably overall cheaper. For more info, see CPRT and U. Washington.

If you look at Mars' atmosphere, you see a 50x higher concentration of carbondioxide compared to earth.

After an initial flurry of excitement, the original Miller-Urey experiments which produced some amino acids also highlighted a number of problems on the way along said road.

• The experiment was highly artifical, not at all a good representation of putative early Earth conditions
  
• despite this, we would expect some amino acids to form anyway, due to the chemical potentials involved (there is a dip in the road to life, into which some chemical processes will roll with very little pursuasion)
  
• the dip in potential has another side, and that looks kind of like the roads you see in some cartoons, which lead up to the base of a cliff, then trundle straight on up the face of it; what this means in real terms is that not only do some simple atoms/molecules find it relatively easy to become amino acids, but also more complicated molecules find it much easier to relapse to aminoness and it's very unlikely that aminos will self-assemble into anything much more complicated
  
• the acids formed were racemised, that is, about half of them were twisted the wrong way; with one exception, amino acids in living beings are twisted left-handed (are said to have left-handed chirality)
  
• the putative primitive conditions also destroy even the simple amino acids formed by the experiment very quickly
  
• the early conditions involve a heck of a lot of chemicals unlikely to exist in useful amounts on Mars
  
• for that matter, there is much evidence that Earth did not have a reducing atmosphere like the one used in the experiment, or at least did not have one for very long.
  

I think it's more important that the presence of water enables us to create colonies on Mars in the near future

Too bad Gnome is still slow as shit. I can see the windows and menus being drawn and the parent window being resized to accommodate more widgets. Fucking ugly.

This is my old physics professor talking, and he's also a sci-fi writer. He has many very interesting articles about sci-fi topics, and they're especially good since he actually DOES know physics quite well.

Good geek reading!

Professor Hank Levy has a whole bunch of interesting SMT papers; covering the architecture, performance analysis, compiler optimizations, etc.

Here is the presentation Prof Levy used during his guest lecture about SMT when I took the class.

Professor Hank Levy has a whole bunch of interesting SMT papers; covering the architecture, performance analysis, compiler optimizations, etc.

Here is the presentation Prof Levy used during his guest lecture about SMT when I took the class.

Professor Hank Levy has a whole bunch of interesting SMT papers; covering the architecture, performance analysis, compiler optimizations, etc.

Here is the presentation Prof Levy used during his guest lecture about SMT when I took the class.

Professor Hank Levy has a whole bunch of interesting SMT papers; covering the architecture, performance analysis, compiler optimizations, etc.

Here is the presentation Prof Levy used during his guest lecture about SMT when I took the class.

Professor Hank Levy has a whole bunch of interesting SMT papers; covering the architecture, performance analysis, compiler optimizations, etc.

Here is the presentation Prof Levy used during his guest lecture about SMT when I took the class.

Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.

Mark Weiser is the father of ubiquitous computing; his web page contains links to many papers on the topic.

Two recent papers express elements of the ubiquitous computing philosophy: "Open House" (also in a MS Word version) , and "Designing Calm Technology".

What Ubiquitous Computing Isn't

Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people. Virtual reality is primarily a horse power problem; ubiquitous computing is a very difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering, and social sciences.

Early work in Ubiquitous Computing The initial incarnation of ubiquitous computing was in the form of "tabs", "pads", and "boards" built at Xerox PARC, 1988-1994. Several papers describe this work, and there are web pages for the Tabs and for the Boards (which are a commercial product now):

Ubicomp helped kick off the recent boom in mobile computing research, although it is not the same thing as mobile computing, nor a superset nor a subset.

Ubiquitous Computing has roots in many aspects of computing. In its current form, it was first articulated by Mark Weiser in 1988 at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC. He describes it like this:

Early Work in Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous Computing #1

Inspired by the social scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists at PARC, we have been trying to take a radical look at what computing and networking ought to be like. We believe that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1" displays to wall sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas. We call our work "ubiquitous computing". This is different from PDA's, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.

Ubiquitous Computing #2

For thirty years most interface design, and most computer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest ideal is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. (I have also called this notion "Ubiquitous Computing", and have placed its origins in post-modernism.) I believe that in the next twenty years the second path will come to dominate. But this will not be easy; very little of our current systems infrastructure will survive. We have been building versions of the infrastructure-to-come at PARC for the past four years, in the form of inch-, foot-, and yard-sized computers we call Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Our prototypes have sometimes succeeded, but more often failed to be invisible. From what we have learned, we are now explorting some new directions for ubicomp, including the famous "dangling string" display.

========

"Dedicated to the memory of Mark Weiser and Alan Turing"

-Don

In cases where pervasive computing is really useful, the lab rats (e.g. underpaid graduate students) will not have a say in the matter.

Another paper that describes the hosts participating in Gnutella and Napster (2001) and how Gnutella's overlay can be easily shattered. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tzoompy/publica tions/mmcn/2002/abstract.html

Since there seem to be a ton of unthought-out posts on this I thought I'd lend some words. Although it's at the risk of only skimming most of the posts as I don't have the time.

The research for this, or at least the bulk of it, is being done at the University of Washington in the Human Interface Technology Lab (HITL). I've been to a presentation by the guy who heads the project and it actually is pretty cool. I first heard about it long ago. Another post said Microvision started talking about it in 1993 and I think that's about when I first heard about it. There's a large chunk of funding coming from the military, of course, and they'll have the first crack at it if not already. Also, Microvision had either a small prototype or a simulation of one at a job fair that I attend in the last year and it was pretty dang sweet I have to say. The prototypes that are at the UW (yes, they have in fact built them) use diode lasers in stead of LEDs. Truly, the diode lasers are fine as they put far less light in your eye than ambient light does but LEDs are more public-masses friendly. Anyway, the UW page for this is hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/. They've probably got more technical details than Microvision does.

How does this differ from the various *NIX flavors who attempt to mimic (for instance) System V behaviors?

FS layouts are part of SysV Layout (of course you also have BSD Layout).

I understand that *NIX variants with Sys V behaviors are largely inherited (Just their branch of the *NIX tree) but doesn't standarding on this behavior address some of this already. (Although maybe not libraries) I'm not arguing the points above -- I'm just looking for clarification

How does this differ from the various *NIX flavors who attempt to mimic (for instance) System V behaviors?

FS layouts are part of SysV Layout (of course you also have BSD Layout).

I understand that *NIX variants with Sys V behaviors are largely inherited (Just their branch of the *NIX tree) but doesn't standarding on this behavior address some of this already. (Although maybe not libraries) I'm not arguing the points above -- I'm just looking for clarification

Rather than relying on software to make your decisions for you, why don't you try this new thing called "thinking?" It doesn't require electricity, so all the communist "We shouldn't pollute the environment because that blue-green algae is so cute!" idiots dance and sing and don't wear deodorant in support of it.

Become a planetary activist too. Go hug a tree today (I'd recommend a Honey Locust.)

But yeah, in all honesty I knew about these things. Just use the leading spaces in your replace rules... (Replace " it" with " he") that should make things a bit easier.

Halting Problem Explination>

1. Suppliers

Digikey absolutely rules. Largest variety of everything electronic. Very easily-navigated site. No minimum order ($5 handling charge if your order is under $25).

Jameco is a good second choice. Especially good for lots of different cheap power supplies.

With Radio Shack, this should be all you need for now.

2. Learning Resources

Someone already pointed you to the various cookbooks. TTL cookbooks are especially good places to start at your level.

A great online resource used to be ePanorama.net, but they're 404ing at the moment, so maybe they're gone for good and they'll be back.

Circuits Archive has lots of simple circuits you can peruse to see how stuff gets done at the lowest level, just like the cookbooks.

3. Advice

Stay away from FPGAs initially. I think you'll find the architecture and associated design process too big a piece to bite off at this point, and not worth the effort.

Focus on TTL and learning what functions are available in various packages (track down an old "TTL Databook" from TI; they don't print them anymore but they're much handier for learning and browsing than online equivalents, which assume youknow what you're looking for). See this for high-level descriptions and this for pdfs of actual datasheets.

When you're ready (which might be immediately) choose a microcontroller family to bone up on and stick with it. It's a huge waste of effort relearning architectures, instruction sets, and development tools for different families. For your purposes, either the PIC (from Microchip), 8051 (Intel et al.), or AVR (Atmel) will do fine (and they're all available from Digikey). I chose the AVR for the following reasons:

a) Wide (enough) range of parts, from 8-pin to 64-pin, 1K ROM to 128K ROM, various arrangments of on-chip peripherals (including A/D).

b) Cheap, from under $2/chip (single-piece) to under $30 for their fanciest.

c) ALL members of the AVR family contain on-chip FLASH ROM for program storage and can be programmed in-system directly via your PC serial port. This makes a HUGE difference (compared to external ROMs or on-chip EPROM) during prototyping.

Some people will suggest the BASIC Stamp from Parallax, which is a fine product which I've played with. My beef with it is it's expensive ($30 or so, I think) and all you really get for the money is a Basic intepreter. I think you'll find assembler for these chips so simple you don't need Basic. You can also get separate free Basic compilers for all of them.

Good luck.

Look here. This is with the version of mozilla included in Debian unstable, patched to work with the gdkxft hack. The real question is will this new patch actually be included in any commonly distributed Mozilla binaries. Because if it isn't, I don't think many are going to recompile the whole damn thing just for anti-aliasing (but that won't stop people from complaining about the lack of it!).

I spent some time working on a similar project at the University of Washington in the Aero-Astro department. It was part of a group of nanosats funded by the AFOSR and DARPA.

These small satellite projects are good for design classes because they are small enough that one year's class can complete the design and the simplicity of the satellites makes for cheap overall costs. Thus, the university can usually afford to fund the construction of the satellite. Actually seeing your hard work being launched on a mission is quite fullfilling.

I spent some time working on a similar project at the University of Washington in the Aero-Astro department. It was part of a group of nanosats funded by the AFOSR and DARPA.

These small satellite projects are good for design classes because they are small enough that one year's class can complete the design and the simplicity of the satellites makes for cheap overall costs. Thus, the university can usually afford to fund the construction of the satellite. Actually seeing your hard work being launched on a mission is quite fullfilling.

I spent some time working on a similar project at the University of Washington in the Aero-Astro department. It was part of a group of nanosats funded by the AFOSR and DARPA.

These small satellite projects are good for design classes because they are small enough that one year's class can complete the design and the simplicity of the satellites makes for cheap overall costs. Thus, the university can usually afford to fund the construction of the satellite. Actually seeing your hard work being launched on a mission is quite fullfilling.

"Kirby sucks up to 3 times as much as any other vacuum."

And, speaking of sucking, I bring you: Grignr?

The single gap puckered repeatedly

Crow [falsetto]: "Come on, kiss your Aunt Ethel!"

emitting a ghastly sucking sound.

Tom [Perot]: "--as American jobs leave for Mexico!"

Also, think for a moment that you (YANAAE) are disputing the word of an aerodynamics engineer who works with this stuff every day.

I'm afraid being an engineer doesn't give you the key to absolute truth. Engineers are given equations and taught the traditional explanation for lift. Since the equations do in fact work, the engineer can do his job even though his understanding of the mechanism is a little flawed.

Having a curved upper surface doesn't magically exempt you from the laws of physics. The basic physics behind lift are the same as everything else. The upward force of lift must be generated by something moving downwards. The only candidate when you're flying is 'air', so the wing must somehow be pushing air downwards in order to generate lift. This is acheived using the vortices the earlier poster mentioned and, at high angles of attack, by deflecting the air downwards.

For more information, check out this interesting article (unfortunately it's a PDF).

It has links to a number of debates, history, etc.

It has links to a number of debates, history, etc.

The version I read basically took your car, and moved it along like a horizontal escalator (such as you see in some airports), at speeds of ~200 mph and with only a couple of feet between them. Since you're not relying on your own power (other that to get to the on-ramps and once you get off the off-ramps), maintenance of the vehicle isn't an issue. The article also mentioned valet-type capability for dense populations (such as downtown areas), so it would drop you off at your office door, park your car, and then you could call for it to come pick you up when you get off work (or done shopping/whatever).

Ah - I just remembered I happened to bring the magazine to work with me. Francis Reynolds is his name. Use this link for his ideas and this link for debate about them.

The version I read basically took your car, and moved it along like a horizontal escalator (such as you see in some airports), at speeds of ~200 mph and with only a couple of feet between them. Since you're not relying on your own power (other that to get to the on-ramps and once you get off the off-ramps), maintenance of the vehicle isn't an issue. The article also mentioned valet-type capability for dense populations (such as downtown areas), so it would drop you off at your office door, park your car, and then you could call for it to come pick you up when you get off work (or done shopping/whatever).

Ah - I just remembered I happened to bring the magazine to work with me. Francis Reynolds is his name. Use this link for his ideas and this link for debate about them.

I am putting this idea out for two reasons - to get people thinking, and also to act as a sort of "prior art" for patent reasons (not really sure it would count, though).

Ok, so they are wondering how to power this thing, while keeping it small, right? Well, that little Sarcos blurb got me thinking:

Sarcos's suit will incorporate a separate, hydrogen- or petroleum-fired piston at every joint, an approach that aims to avoid the losses that plague distributed-power systems.

...and here is what I came up with:

You know those pneumatic contraction muscles that exist out there (I think there is also a hydraulic version as well)? They use something akin to a mesh, sorta like a "chinese handcuffs" weave, and a bladder inside that when filled with air (or hydraulic fluid), causes the weave to shorten, contracting the muscle - let me see if I can find a link... Ah, here we are:

McKibben Artificial Muscles

Notice the simple construction (hell, it is a construction article!) - some flexible tubing, braided sheathing, and a little simple work, and you can build these yourself!

Ok - now for the unique part (or, at least I think it is unique - I may be wrong, my idea may already be patented or something - I haven't checked - if you know, post here!):

These things use pumps, right? They need something to expand the bladder. Well, typically pneumatic or hydraulic pressure is used - which is all fine and well, except for an exoskeleton app, that power supply tends to be huge. So, let's shrink it!

Instead of generating pressure using a motor power ed compressor - why not generate it using an engine?! How, you may ask? Look at this:

Pulse Two - Performance of a Hydraulic Free Piston Engine

These engines have been around for a while - I have an old Popular Mechanics from 1950 that shows one on the front cover in the use of driving a large freight truck. Essentially, instead of using explosions to drive pistons that turn crankshafts and gears - the movement of the pistons is harnessed directly to pump a working fluid - in most cases hydraulic fluid, I would imagine air could be pumped as well.

Such a power plant could be built small and relatively light weight (I would say lighter in weight and as powerful as a backpack leaf blower engine). Lines could be ran from the engine to the air or hydraulic muscles at the joints.

Now, you may say - why not use regular hydraulic/pneumatic cylinders instead of these "muscles"? This seems to be Sarco's approach, as far as I can tell. Maybe, maybe not. Glad you asked. I wanted to present another power alternative...

Remember that engine - what are we doing: Exploding a fuel in a container causing it to expand greatly, producing power. That power is transmitted in some way to where it is needed - in conventional machines via gears and shafts, in our recently designed exoskeleton via hydraulic/pneumatic lines. But what if you used that exploding gas to drive the muscles? You could hook the lines directly to the combustion chamber, and route the gasses to the muscles - but think outside the box...

Run the fuel lines to the muscles - add an injector at one end, a spark plug at the other, and some kind of exhaust valve system. Make the muscle out of some braided titanium or something (the bladder was just there to keep the working fluid in one place - it isn't a needed device for these muscles - it is the braid that when it expands radially, it contracts laterally) to resist the heat of the explosions. Use a PWM format to "pulse" the explosions in the muscle to vary its "strength". Add some kind of heat dumping system to keep it from overheating.

At that point, the muscles ARE the power source, and the backpack contains control electronics and the fuel tank, etc - ignition coils and such could be built into the spark plug assembly, and the thing becomes a complete fuel/electric machine.

Does any of this sound "do-able"? Does it seem sound reasoning? Is anybody researching this direction? Would anybody be willing to give me a grant to try this out? Sarcos, want to hire me?

Seriously - other than the titanium braid, most of this could be easily fabricated in a home shop! Stick with steel braid and an external combustion chamber, and you could easily do this in a home shop! Maybe I SHOULD DO IT? What do you think? Hmmm...???

The most comprehensive info on PRT is available at Jerry Schneider's Innovative Transportation Technologies site in the section on Personal Rapid Transit (PRT). The site has a much broader scope and compares PRT with several other systems as well.

The most comprehensive info on PRT is available at Jerry Schneider's Innovative Transportation Technologies site in the section on Personal Rapid Transit (PRT). The site has a much broader scope and compares PRT with several other systems as well.

CPRT is an organization dedicated to promoting these kinds of transportation systems, and Taxi2000 is one commercial system being developed. The washington.edu evaluate many different systems.

Note that it is essential for these kinds of systems that cabs are small--if they hold many people, they either need to stop a lot (=longer travel times), or they waste a lot of space and resources.

• Innovative Transportation Technologies - Descriptions of over 40 electric, automated transport technologies, ranging from conceptual to operational. Includes people movers (supported and suspended systems: monorails) and automated freight systems.
• Monomobile: Electric Rail Car - Lightweight electric car that attaches to suspended monorail for long trips and can run independently of the rail for local trips.
• RUF: Rapid Urban Flexible - Hybrid car/monorail: you drive it on and off roads and monorail tracks as needed.

I've heard about something like this before, it is a mass-transit train system that runs on "streets" rather than tracks. Interesting, to say the least.

Here's a good link about Tokyo Teleport Town Transit System (whew!)

What is a Teleport you ask?