Works like this - first the permafrost/ice melts...this reduces/removes the main barrier that keeps the underlying water and sea floor at one relative temperature. Once that barrier is removed, the water and sea floor heat up, with the result being an increase in the release of otherwise captured methane.
It is actually a very simple, process...one that we could perhaps do without, of course, but hey - the times they are a change'n and Mother Nature is making the calls.
Back when mainframes were King, the 'operators' wore white lab coats and worked in their own cleaner-than-average, air conditioned rooms - if you needed a 'job' run, you had to meet with the programmers and negotiate your place in the queue.
I called these types 'Programmer Priests'. Their style seemed reminiscent of history lessons that described Incan temple rites where the head priest would routinely trundle up the local pyramid, telling the villagers and King to wait while he consulted the Gods concerning whatever tragedy needed divine intervention that month.
Outside of a good view and a supply of virgins, nice clothes and fresh fruit from the village, of course the Incan priests had nothing to do at the top... beyond theater.
The early white coated programmers felt this same power. Everyone was at their whim - even their superiors. 'Be nice' or you'd wait for an eternity before the computer gods sent your answer back with the priests.
That particular IT style persists today.
I make it a habit to kick dirt on those types every chance I get...
By BENEDICT CAREY Published: September 5, 2008 For the first time, scientists have recorded individual brain cells fetching a spontaneous memory. For free access to this article and more, you must be a registered member of NYTimes.com
Allow me to translate:
The TOTEM Experiment will measure the total pp cross-section with the luminosity-independent method and study elastic and diffractive scattering at the LHC.
> We will be really disappointed if we don't blow stuff up with this thing. We like bright things.
To achieve optimum forward coverage for charged particles emitted by the pp collisions in the interaction point IP5, two tracking telescopes, T1 and T2, will be installed on each side in the pseudorapidity region 3.1 || 6.5, and Roman Pot stations will be placed at distances of ±147 m and ±220 m from IP5.
> We've already determined that our faked fast area is just outside the event horizon of the bag-azz black hole that is bound to occur.
Being an independent experiment but technically integrated into CMS, TOTEM will first operate in standalone mode...
> We're not stupid. We know this thing will blow, in grand style, and we plan on being far away when it does.
...to pursue its own physics programme and at a later stage together with CMS for a common physics programme. This article gives a description of the TOTEM apparatus and its performance."
> We're hoping that people will fall for the phrase 'common physics programme' and overlook the fact that the biggest risk with this entire project is that we've decided to use Vista 'Provisional'.
The patient was attacked in 2004. The transplant didn't take place until 2006. The corrected version should be:
>The Chinese team led by Shuzhong Guo of the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi'an, is the first to include facial bone in a face transplant, carried out 13 April 2006.
Use Acrobat to crawl your Google content. If you need to extract from that, there are several options.
But hey - part of buying into the Google cloud is letting them worry about backups. I'm fairly sure they are much more concerned and adept than you will ever be:)
As long as the next plot doesn't rely on yet-another-alternate-reality scheme, where, say, Jones spends most of the movie in a coma, dreaming about Stonehenge or the Giza plateau or Atlantis, only to suddenly wake up after drifting off in a bathtub somewhere in Berkeley, I'm in.
Wait....we're done w/Shia, right? No more Mutt? Mutt is off w/J.J. Binks somewhere? Permanently? Promise?
Ok, then...please proceed.
Supercomputer Confirms Standard Model Theory Of The Universe, Deepens Puzzle
ScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2008) -- Scientists have used a supercomputer to shed new light on one of the most important theories of physics, the Standard Model, which encapsulates understanding of all the material that makes up the universe. This 30-year-old theory explains all the known elementary particles and three of the four forces acting upon them - however, it excludes the force of gravity, which is its shortcoming.
Physicists have been trying to find the missing pieces in the jigsaw that would extend the Standard Model into a complete theory of all the forces of nature. However, the landmark findings by researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton, and their partners in Japan and the US, confirm the Standard Model to even greater precision than before, deepening the puzzle.
The project's enormously complex calculations relate to the behaviour of tiny particles found in the nuclei of atoms, known as quarks. In order to carry out these calculations, the researchers first designed and built a supercomputer that was among the fastest in the world, capable of tens of trillions of calculations per second. The computations themselves have taken a further three years to complete.
Their result shows that the Standard Model's claim to be the best theory invented holds firm. It raises the stakes for the riddle to be solved by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which will switch on later this year. Physicists' efforts to confront Standard Model predictions using the most powerful computers available with the most precise experiments offer no clues about what to expect.
Professor Chris Sachrajda of the University of Southampton's School of Physics and Astronomy said: 'Modern supercomputers and improved theoretical techniques are allowing us to explore the limits of the Standard Model to an unprecedented precision. The next stage will be to combine such computations with new experimental results expected from the Large Hadron Collider to unravel the next level of fundamental physics.'
Professor Richard Kenway of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics added: 'Although the Standard Model has been a fantastic success, there were one or two dark corners where experimental tests had been inconclusive, because vital calculations were not accurate enough. We shone a light on one of these, but to our enormous frustration, nothing was lurking there.'
The research, published in Physical Review Letters, was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.
"We ran an article about the new Air Force Cyber Command and its recruiting efforts on February 13, 2008."
See, this is the issue with/.
Wired ran an article, and/. simply rode those coattails. Claiming otherwise isn't trivial, is open to legal action and...assumes that/. readers are pretty dumb as a group, when the opposite is actually the truth. The dolts that run/. are the dumb ones.
US, Canadian agencies seize counterfeit Cisco gear Grant Gross 02.29.2008
U.S. and Canadian law enforcement authorities have seized more than US$78 million worth of counterfeit Cisco Systems networking equipment in an ongoing investigation into imports from China, the U.S. Department of Justice and other agencies announced Friday.
The coordinated operation, begun in 2005, has resulted in more than 400 seizures of Cisco hardware and labels, the DOJ said in a news release. The operation targets the illegal importation and sale of counterfeit network hardware such as routers, switches and network cards. One of the operation's goals is to protect the public from network infrastructure failures associated with the counterfeits, the DOJ said.
"Counterfeit network hardware entering the marketplace raises significant public safety concerns and must be stopped," Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher of the DOJ's Criminal Division, said in a statement. "It is critically important that network administrators in both private sector and government perform due diligence in order to prevent counterfeit hardware from being installed on their networks."
The agencies that worked together on the operation included the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
The FBI named its portion of this ongoing initiative Operation Cisco Raider, an investigation involving nine FBI field offices and help from several other agencies. Over the last two years, the FBI's operation has resulted in 36 search warrants that identified about 3,500 counterfeit network components with a retail value of more than $3.5 million, the DOJ said. The FBI's work has led to 10 convictions and $1.7 million in restitution.
ICE and CBP have opened 28 investigations in 17 field offices since 2005. ICE has conducted 115 seizures of counterfeit Cisco products, with an estimated retail value of $20.4 million. ICE's investigation have lead to six indictments and four felony convictions. CBP has made 373 seizures of counterfeit Cisco hardware since 2005, and 40 seizures of Cisco labels for counterfeit products.
ICE and CBP seized more than 74,000 counterfeit Cisco networking products and labels with a retail value of more than $73 million.
On Friday in Toronto, the RCMP charged two people and a company with distributing large quantities of counterfeit network components to companies in the U.S. through the Internet. The RCMP seized approximately 1,600 pieces of counterfeit network hardware with an estimated value of $2 million.
Other recent cases:
-- On Feb. 14, Todd Richard, 33, was sentenced to 36 months in prison and ordered to pay $208,440 in restitution to Cisco by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. From late 2003 to early 2007, Richard imported shipments of counterfeit Cisco computer components from China, and separate shipments of counterfeit Cisco labels. He then affixed the fake labels to the fake components and sold the products on eBay, the DOJ said.
Richard sold more $1 million worth of counterfeit Cisco products, the DOJ said.
--On Jan. 4, a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas indicted Michael Edman, 36, and his brother Robert Edman, 28, for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco products. The indictment alleges that the Edmans purchased and imported the counterfeit computer network hardware from an individual in China, then selling the products to retailers across the U.S. The Edmans shipped some of the counterfeit hardware directly to the U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, FBI, defense contractors, universities and financial institutions, according to the indictment. These organizations had purchased the product from a computer retailer serving as a middleman, which in turn purchased the products from the Edmans.
A new look at the trajectories for various spacecraft as they fly past the Earth finds in each case a tiny amount of surplus velocity. For craft that pursue a path mostly symmetrical with respect to the equator, the effect is minimal. For craft that pursue a more unsymmetrical path, the effect is larger. In the case of the NEAR asteroid rendevous craft (), for instance, the velocity anomaly amounts to 13 mm/sec. Although this is only one-millionth of the total velocity, the precision of the velocity measurements, carried out by looking at the Doppler shift in radio waves bounced off the craft, is 0.1 mm/sec, and this suggests that the anomaly represents a real effect, one needing an explanation.
Some ten years ago another anomaly was identified for the Pioneer 10 spacecraft (see http://www.aip.org/pnu/1998/split/pnu391-1.htm) and a certain amount of controversy has clung to the subject since then. One of the researchers on that earlier measurement is part of the new study, conducted by Jet Propulsion Lab scientists. John D. Anderson (jdandy@earthlink.net, 626-449-0102) says that the JPL scientists are now working with German colleagues to search for possible velocity anomalies in the recent flyby of the Rosetta spacecraft. (Anderson et al., Physical Review Letters, upcoming article; designated as an editor's suggested articlePhysical Review Letters)
Bypassing the ever-silly:/.Soulskill/anonymous(again/.)/PM biz...enjoy.
-=-=-= -=-=-=
Scooter with ITRI and Sanyang Motors
RoboScooter - Clean, Green Mobility for Today's Crowded Cities
The RoboScooter is a lightweight, folding, electric motor scooter. It is designed to provide convenient, inexpensive mobility in urban areas while radically reducing the negative effects of extensive vehicle use - road congestion, excessive consumption of space for parking, traffic noise, air pollution, carbon emissions that exacerbate global warming, and energy use. It is clean, green, silent, and compact.
People
Ryan Chin, PhD Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab
Yaniv Fain, Sloan School
Michael Chia-Liang Lin, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab
Arthur Petron, Mechanical Engineering
Raul-David "Retro" Poblano, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab
Andres Sevtsuk, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Urban Studies & Planning
SYM/Sanyang Motors
Grand Wu
Wan Ching Chang
ITRI
Wen-Jean Hsueh
Eugene Hsiao
Ying-Tzu Lin
Barbara Yeh
"And then, there's the inevitable bad news: The first-gen RoboScooter will not be very robotic. The original concept developed by the Media Lab's Smart Cities research group called for wheels that were essentially self-contained robots, with dedicated processors that could optimize braking and suspension. In a four-wheel configuration, these wheeled bots would also control steering. The group's City Car design, for example, allows each wheel to turn independently. For a scooter, computer-controlled steering isn't necessarily more efficient than old-fashioned handlebars. But for now, the point is moot, because the first RoboScooters to hit the streets won't have wheels any more intelligent than a Vespa's."
Does the 2035 RoboScooter sound a bit too much like a SegWay?
Slashdot Mirror
Works like this - first the permafrost/ice melts...this reduces/removes the main barrier that keeps the underlying water and sea floor at one relative temperature. Once that barrier is removed, the water and sea floor heat up, with the result being an increase in the release of otherwise captured methane.
It is actually a very simple, process...one that we could perhaps do without, of course, but hey - the times they are a change'n and Mother Nature is making the calls.
...since the Chinese are already putting together the ground systems - WIMAX, etc. ZTE has been there since 2006...
>I mean, any liquid helium spilled, even jus a measly ounce, to me seems like a big deal considering how expensive and, well, cold it is
According to a LHC staffer blog, they capture the helium and reuse...
Back when mainframes were King, the 'operators' wore white lab coats and worked in their own cleaner-than-average, air conditioned rooms - if you needed a 'job' run, you had to meet with the programmers and negotiate your place in the queue.
I called these types 'Programmer Priests'. Their style seemed reminiscent of history lessons that described Incan temple rites where the head priest would routinely trundle up the local pyramid, telling the villagers and King to wait while he consulted the Gods concerning whatever tragedy needed divine intervention that month.
Outside of a good view and a supply of virgins, nice clothes and fresh fruit from the village, of course the Incan priests had nothing to do at the top... beyond theater.
The early white coated programmers felt this same power. Everyone was at their whim - even their superiors. 'Be nice' or you'd wait for an eternity before the computer gods sent your answer back with the priests.
That particular IT style persists today.
I make it a habit to kick dirt on those types every chance I get...
> "...and yes, I do know what I'm talking about..."
Thank you, Mr. Balmer. That will be all for now - You can step down...
For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: September 5, 2008
For the first time, scientists have recorded individual brain cells fetching a spontaneous memory.
For free access to this article and more, you must be a registered member of NYTimes.com
Waiting for someone to post the content to yet-another-register-to-read-linked-article....
'Introducing the Book'
Feb. 24, 2007...
http://billsnyder.vox.com/library/video/6a00c2251f31f3f21900d414217eb96a47.html
Allow me to translate:
...to pursue its own physics programme and at a later stage together with CMS for a common physics programme. This article gives a description of the TOTEM apparatus and its performance."
The TOTEM Experiment will measure the total pp cross-section with the luminosity-independent method and study elastic and diffractive scattering at the LHC.
> We will be really disappointed if we don't blow stuff up with this thing. We like bright things.
To achieve optimum forward coverage for charged particles emitted by the pp collisions in the interaction point IP5, two tracking telescopes, T1 and T2, will be installed on each side in the pseudorapidity region 3.1 || 6.5, and Roman Pot stations will be placed at distances of ±147 m and ±220 m from IP5.
> We've already determined that our faked fast area is just outside the event horizon of the bag-azz black hole that is bound to occur.
Being an independent experiment but technically integrated into CMS, TOTEM will first operate in standalone mode...
> We're not stupid. We know this thing will blow, in grand style, and we plan on being far away when it does.
> We're hoping that people will fall for the phrase 'common physics programme' and overlook the fact that the biggest risk with this entire project is that we've decided to use Vista 'Provisional'.
Every program is a part of some other program, and rarely fits.
Zoom - right over my head - time for more meds, thanks.
The patient was attacked in 2004. The transplant didn't take place until 2006. The corrected version should be:
>The Chinese team led by Shuzhong Guo of the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi'an, is the first to include facial bone in a face transplant, carried out 13 April 2006.
Use Acrobat to crawl your Google content. If you need to extract from that, there are several options. But hey - part of buying into the Google cloud is letting them worry about backups. I'm fairly sure they are much more concerned and adept than you will ever be :)
As long as the next plot doesn't rely on yet-another-alternate-reality scheme, where, say, Jones spends most of the movie in a coma, dreaming about Stonehenge or the Giza plateau or Atlantis, only to suddenly wake up after drifting off in a bathtub somewhere in Berkeley, I'm in. Wait....we're done w/Shia, right? No more Mutt? Mutt is off w/J.J. Binks somewhere? Permanently? Promise? Ok, then...please proceed.
ScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2008) -- Scientists have used a supercomputer to shed new light on one of the most important theories of physics, the Standard Model, which encapsulates understanding of all the material that makes up the universe. This 30-year-old theory explains all the known elementary particles and three of the four forces acting upon them - however, it excludes the force of gravity, which is its shortcoming.
Physicists have been trying to find the missing pieces in the jigsaw that would extend the Standard Model into a complete theory of all the forces of nature. However, the landmark findings by researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton, and their partners in Japan and the US, confirm the Standard Model to even greater precision than before, deepening the puzzle.
The project's enormously complex calculations relate to the behaviour of tiny particles found in the nuclei of atoms, known as quarks. In order to carry out these calculations, the researchers first designed and built a supercomputer that was among the fastest in the world, capable of tens of trillions of calculations per second. The computations themselves have taken a further three years to complete.
Their result shows that the Standard Model's claim to be the best theory invented holds firm. It raises the stakes for the riddle to be solved by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which will switch on later this year. Physicists' efforts to confront Standard Model predictions using the most powerful computers available with the most precise experiments offer no clues about what to expect.
Professor Chris Sachrajda of the University of Southampton's School of Physics and Astronomy said: 'Modern supercomputers and improved theoretical techniques are allowing us to explore the limits of the Standard Model to an unprecedented precision. The next stage will be to combine such computations with new experimental results expected from the Large Hadron Collider to unravel the next level of fundamental physics.'
Professor Richard Kenway of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics added: 'Although the Standard Model has been a fantastic success, there were one or two dark corners where experimental tests had been inconclusive, because vital calculations were not accurate enough. We shone a light on one of these, but to our enormous frustration, nothing was lurking there.'
The research, published in Physical Review Letters, was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Southampton .
It's Giggity.
Waltrip - NASCAR - ring a bell? Maybe the op sleeps until the race starts on Sunday...
"We ran an article about the new Air Force Cyber Command and its recruiting efforts on February 13, 2008."
/.
/. simply rode those coattails. Claiming otherwise isn't trivial, is open to legal action and...assumes that /. readers are pretty dumb as a group, when the opposite is actually the truth. The dolts that run /. are the dumb ones.
See, this is the issue with
Wired ran an article, and
Redundant? that's funny!
/. is redundant...the original article stands on its own :)
/. staffers
hey, kdawson...tip:
kettle calling the pot, eh?
karma: excellent, w/flexibility beyond steamed
"So that's why my router keeps crapping out on me.... Fake chips!!!"
No.
Fake cables.
US, Canadian agencies seize counterfeit Cisco gear
Grant Gross 02.29.2008
U.S. and Canadian law enforcement authorities have seized more than US$78 million worth of counterfeit Cisco Systems networking equipment in an ongoing investigation into imports from China, the U.S. Department of Justice and other agencies announced Friday.
The coordinated operation, begun in 2005, has resulted in more than 400 seizures of Cisco hardware and labels, the DOJ said in a news release. The operation targets the illegal importation and sale of counterfeit network hardware such as routers, switches and network cards. One of the operation's goals is to protect the public from network infrastructure failures associated with the counterfeits, the DOJ said.
"Counterfeit network hardware entering the marketplace raises significant public safety concerns and must be stopped," Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher of the DOJ's Criminal Division, said in a statement. "It is critically important that network administrators in both private sector and government perform due diligence in order to prevent counterfeit hardware from being installed on their networks."
The agencies that worked together on the operation included the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
The FBI named its portion of this ongoing initiative Operation Cisco Raider, an investigation involving nine FBI field offices and help from several other agencies. Over the last two years, the FBI's operation has resulted in 36 search warrants that identified about 3,500 counterfeit network components with a retail value of more than $3.5 million, the DOJ said. The FBI's work has led to 10 convictions and $1.7 million in restitution.
ICE and CBP have opened 28 investigations in 17 field offices since 2005. ICE has conducted 115 seizures of counterfeit Cisco products, with an estimated retail value of $20.4 million. ICE's investigation have lead to six indictments and four felony convictions. CBP has made 373 seizures of counterfeit Cisco hardware since 2005, and 40 seizures of Cisco labels for counterfeit products.
ICE and CBP seized more than 74,000 counterfeit Cisco networking products and labels with a retail value of more than $73 million.
On Friday in Toronto, the RCMP charged two people and a company with distributing large quantities of counterfeit network components to companies in the U.S. through the Internet. The RCMP seized approximately 1,600 pieces of counterfeit network hardware with an estimated value of $2 million.
Other recent cases:
-- On Feb. 14, Todd Richard, 33, was sentenced to 36 months in prison and ordered to pay $208,440 in restitution to Cisco by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. From late 2003 to early 2007, Richard imported shipments of counterfeit Cisco computer components from China, and separate shipments of counterfeit Cisco labels. He then affixed the fake labels to the fake components and sold the products on eBay, the DOJ said.
Richard sold more $1 million worth of counterfeit Cisco products, the DOJ said.
--On Jan. 4, a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas indicted Michael Edman, 36, and his brother Robert Edman, 28, for trafficking in counterfeit Cisco products. The indictment alleges that the Edmans purchased and imported the counterfeit computer network hardware from an individual in China, then selling the products to retailers across the U.S. The Edmans shipped some of the counterfeit hardware directly to the U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, FBI, defense contractors, universities and financial institutions, according to the indictment. These organizations had purchased the product from a computer retailer serving as a middleman, which in turn purchased the products from the Edmans.
More likely than not, they've simply missed when it comes to measuring detected gravities...remember, space is curved.
Number 857 #2, February 28, 2008 by Phil Schewe
More Spacecraft Velocity Anomalies
A new look at the trajectories for various spacecraft as they fly past the Earth finds in each case a tiny amount of surplus velocity. For craft that pursue a path mostly symmetrical with respect to the equator, the effect is minimal. For craft that pursue a more unsymmetrical path, the effect is larger. In the case of the NEAR asteroid rendevous craft (), for instance, the velocity anomaly amounts to 13 mm/sec. Although this is only one-millionth of the total velocity, the precision of the velocity measurements, carried out by looking at the Doppler shift in radio waves bounced off the craft, is 0.1 mm/sec, and this suggests that the anomaly represents a real effect, one needing an explanation.
Some ten years ago another anomaly was identified for the Pioneer 10 spacecraft (see http://www.aip.org/pnu/1998/split/pnu391-1.htm) and a certain amount of controversy has clung to the subject since then. One of the researchers on that earlier measurement is part of the new study, conducted by Jet Propulsion Lab scientists. John D. Anderson (jdandy@earthlink.net, 626-449-0102) says that the JPL scientists are now working with German colleagues to search for possible velocity anomalies in the recent flyby of the Rosetta spacecraft. (Anderson et al., Physical Review Letters, upcoming article; designated as an editor's suggested articlePhysical Review Letters)
Link to the original 7.2007 funding announcement WORD doc directly from DARPA...
Gotta' get going on that marine turtle study grant before they give that one away to someone looking to make soup...darn!
Link directly to the cities.media.mit.edu info/scoot photo...
/.Soulskill/anonymous(again /.)/PM biz ...enjoy.
Bypassing the ever-silly:
-=-=-= -=-=-=
Scooter with ITRI and Sanyang Motors
RoboScooter - Clean, Green Mobility for Today's Crowded Cities
The RoboScooter is a lightweight, folding, electric motor scooter. It is designed to provide convenient, inexpensive mobility in urban areas while radically reducing the negative effects of extensive vehicle use - road congestion, excessive consumption of space for parking, traffic noise, air pollution, carbon emissions that exacerbate global warming, and energy use. It is clean, green, silent, and compact.
People Ryan Chin, PhD Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Yaniv Fain, Sloan School Michael Chia-Liang Lin, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Arthur Petron, Mechanical Engineering Raul-David "Retro" Poblano, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Andres Sevtsuk, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Urban Studies & Planning
SYM/Sanyang Motors Grand Wu Wan Ching Chang
ITRI Wen-Jean Hsueh Eugene Hsiao Ying-Tzu Lin Barbara Yeh
"And then, there's the inevitable bad news: The first-gen RoboScooter will not be very robotic. The original concept developed by the Media Lab's Smart Cities research group called for wheels that were essentially self-contained robots, with dedicated processors that could optimize braking and suspension. In a four-wheel configuration, these wheeled bots would also control steering. The group's City Car design, for example, allows each wheel to turn independently. For a scooter, computer-controlled steering isn't necessarily more efficient than old-fashioned handlebars. But for now, the point is moot, because the first RoboScooters to hit the streets won't have wheels any more intelligent than a Vespa's."
Does the 2035 RoboScooter sound a bit too much like a SegWay?