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Do you really believe that future cars will have a kinect sitting in the grill for accident avoidance?

Actually they're using sensors from Velodyne, which are doing to LIDARs what the Kinect is doing to 3D sensors. It used to be that you needed an array of 2D LIDARS to create a 3D image. These could cost upwards of $100,000, where prone to failure, time consuming to create, and one of a kind. Then came Velodyne with their $70,000 3D LIDAR now being used on any serious autonomous vehicle. Of all the cars that finished the DARPA urban challenge, only one didn't use a Velodyne. Even Google's autonomous car has one. Now Velodyne released a new model for $20,000 the size of a coffee mug.

Yes in 2005 we could create a 3D image using lidars. That was 5 years ago, and at the time we couldn't get a car to drive through the desert. Now, because of Velodyne and the ubiquity of their sensors, cars are driving themselves through crowded streets.

Was the Velodyne revolutionary? Absolutely. Was it brand new? No, we had 3D sensors on our cars before. But it was smaller, cheaper, and easier to integrate, which is exactly what the kinect is.

No, you weren't... http://www.zdnet.be/zd_images/2010/48/opera11.jpg

n France all blank writable media is subject to a special tax.

In Belgium as well. What I once saw was a calculation of how much illegal music was downloaded and how many blank CD's were sold. Article in Dutch

A short resume of the numbers:
50M black CD's
19.4M CD's sold. 10% is to be illegal or 1.9M
That leaves 48M blanck CD's NOT for CD's

Some other info also in Dutch
A group like Clauseu (Very famous in Belgium) gets 2 EUR per sold CD. They sell about 60.000 where they would have sold 200.000 to 250.000 in the same period previously. 15 years ago when they startd they got 30 cents per album.

Yes, the second URL is extremely biassed. Yet it is still interesting enough to actually SEE the numbers.

Heh, oh and besides that one, this one with direct links to mirrored downloads in the article.
Can anyone tell the european stance about Microsoft? ;-)

News article :-)

being a Belgian as well, I feel your pain, new cards are 4 times as expensive as the old ones and only last for half their time (5 years to 10), and for the time being you have to have a paper with you with your adress and stuff because most administrations can't read the card
oh and Billy boy said it was "the most secure identityverifaction Microsoft ever saw ".

It used to be up till 2.1.0. Download v2.1.0 or you'll have to pay after 100 e-mails xfered.

I've used Yahoo!Pops for years to check my yahoo account (ever since they cut off free access to pop3). Too bad the parent's solution is shareware and not freeware.

Both work great, though. They use the standard HTTP interface like a webbrowser (http-get?) instead of that stupid WebDAV protocol. A little slower than WebDAV, probably, but better than using a browser.

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