Apparently Russian society has gotten a whole lot more lenient about morality lately as I've found an image of people rioting there to support the giving away of free p ... wait, I'm sorry, I misread the story entirely. It seems Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that he will free two jailed members of a punk feminist group called Pussy Riot as part of a broader amnesty program in the lead-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were sentenced to two years in prison in 2012 for participating in an anti-Putin "punk prayer," part of what's seen as a larger crackdown on protest and political speech. Now, they're expected to be free several months ahead of the end of their sentences, released alongside the "Arctic 30," a group of crew and protesters on a Greenpeace ship who were jailed after ignoring orders to stay out of a Russian shipping route.
The decision was all but final yesterday, when Russia's parliament passed a Putin-supported amnesty bill aimed at first-time offenders, but it wasn't absolutely clear who was going to be released. NBC News reports that Putin still maintains that the protest, not the prison sentence, was the real problem. "I feel sorry for Pussy Riot not for the fact that they were jailed, but for disgraceful behavior that has degraded the image of women," he said. The releases, meanwhile, will likely lighten scrutiny of Russia's prison system, which was widely criticized last year after Tolokonnikova announced a hunger strike in an open letter that described brutal living and working conditions at her penal camp; she was later hospitalized and moved to another prison.
I was a car nut back in the 70's when the government imposed the National Maximum Speed Law that prohibited speed limits higher than 55 miles per hour. The law was widely disregarded by motorists, and most states subversively opposed the law. I had a subscription to one of the leading car magazines of the time, Car and Driver, and remember when the editor, a rather notorious gentleman by the name of Brock Yates, proposed an annual race called "The Cannonball Run" which would be held starting in New York and ending in Los Angeles. Burt Reynolds made a movie about it in 1981 and now Ed Bolian, from Atlanta, set out last month to beat the existing record. The mark he wanted to beat? Alex Roy and David Maher's cross-country record of 31 hours and 4 minutes, which they set in a modified BMW M5 in 2006.
Ed went into preparation mode about 18 months ago and chose a Mercedes CL55 AMG with 115,000 miles for the journey. The Benz's gas tank was only 23 gallons, so he added two 22-gallon tanks in the trunk, upping his range to about 800 miles. To foil the police, he installed a switch to kill the rear lights and bought two laser jammers and three radar detectors. He commissioned a radar jammer, but it wasn't finished in time for the trek. There was also a police scanner, two GPS units and various chargers for smartphones and tablets - not to mention snacks, iced coffee and a bedpan. His total time: 28 hours, 50 minutes and about 30 seconds. When they were moving, which, impressively, was all but 46 minutes of the trip, they were averaging around 100 mph. Their total average was 98 mph, and their top speed was 158 mph, according to an onboard tracking device."
Autonomous driving is every car manufacturer's immediate R&D project. In car-building terms, even if a new technology isn't due for 10 years - since that's just two full vehicle generations away - it has to be developed now. So now it is for autonomous car research and testing, and this week Ford revealed a brand new Fusion Hybrid research vehicle built for autonomous R&D with some interesting tech capabilities. Technologies inside the new Fusion Hybrid research vehicle include LIDAR (a light-based range detection), which scans at 2.5 million times per second to create a 3D map of the surrounding environment at a radius of 200 feet. Ford says the research vehicle's sensors are sensitive enough to detect the difference between a small animal and a paper bag even at the maximum range of 200 feet. More road-ready differentiations include observation and understanding of pedestrians, cyclists, and plain old stationary objects. Ford is working on this project in cooperation with the University of Michigan.
On the windshield wiper front, it looks like the old-school windshield wiper we're so used to using is about to be replaced by new technology — but not until 2015. British car-maker McLaren is apparently developing a new window cleaning system that is modeled from fighter jet technology. The company isn't revealing exactly how it will work, but the
idea comes from the chief designer simply asking a military source why you don't see wipers on jets as they land.
Experts expect McLaren to use constantly active, high-frequency sound waves outside the range of human hearing that will effectively create a force field across a car's windshield to repel water, ice insects and other debris. Similar sound waves are used by dentists to remove plaque from teeth.
The Washington Examiner reports, 'Oregon ... signed up just 44 people for insurance through November, despite spending more than $300 million on its state-based exchange. The state's exchange had the fewest sign-ups in the nation, according to a new report by the Department of Health and Human Services. The weak number of sign-ups undercuts two major defenses of Obamacare from its supporters. One defense was that state-based exchanges were performing a lot better than the federal healthcare.gov website servicing 36 states. But Oregon's website problems have forced the state to rely on paper applications to sign up participants. Another defense of the Obama administration has attributed the troubled rollout of Obamacare to the obstruction of Republican governors who wanted to see the law fail as well as a lack of funding. But Oregon is a Democratic state that embraced Obamacare early and enthusiastically.'
Thieves in London apparently were searching for copper cables to steal when they cut through a British Telecom manhole cover to reach underground cables. Service to about 37,000 phone customers was cut off for two days after the theives cut a “large number” of cables at the site on Great West Road. Unscrupulous recycling companies will pay up to £4 for a kilogram of copper (about $12 a pound), melt it down and then sell it. However, instead of copper, the thieves could only find fiber optic cable and took it instead, apparently not realizing the difference between fiber optic cables and copper. While copper is increasingly valuable, cable made from fiber optic cannot be melted down and is useless to anyone outside of of the networking industry.
And now on the religious front, the Tulsa World reports that in their zeal to tout their faith in the public square, conservatives in Oklahoma may have unwittingly opened the door to a wide range of religious groups, including satanists who are now seeking to put their own statue next to a Ten Commandments monument on the Statehouse steps. The Republican-controlled Legislature in Oklahoma authorized the privately funded Ten Commandments monument in 2009, and it was placed on the Capitol grounds last year despite criticism from legal experts who questioned its constitutionality. But the New York-based Satanic Temple saw an opportunity and notified the state's Capitol Preservation Commission that it wants to donate a monument too. 'We believe that all monuments should be in good taste and consistent with community standards,' Lucien Greaves wrote in letter to state officials. 'Our proposed monument, as an homage to the historic/literary Satan, will certainly abide by these guidelines.' Brady Henderson, legal director for ACLU Oklahoma, said if state officials allow one type of religious expression, they must allow alternative forms of expression, although he said a better solution might be to allow none at all on state property. 'We would prefer to see Oklahoma's government officials work to faithfully serve our communities and improve the lives of Oklahomans instead of erecting granite monuments to show us all how righteous they are,' says Henderson. 'But if the Ten Commandments, with its overtly Christian message, is allowed to stay at the Capitol, the Satanic Temple's proposed monument cannot be rejected because of its different religious viewpoint.' Amen.
