Tag Archives: news

Green trucks at the LA port

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As a great example of how state investment can really spur the development of better technology, take a look at this story from Los Angeles:

On Tuesday, the first of 25 heavy-duty all-electric trucks rolled off a new Los Angeles assembly line. All are slated to work at the Port of Los Angeles or to make short hauls to and from the harbor… Balqon Chief Executive Balwinder Samra received $527,000 from the L.A. port and the air board to fund development of the electric truck. As part of the deal, Samra moved his company from Orange County to Harbor City, near the port, and he will pay a royalty of $1,000 to the port and the air board for every truck he sells that isn’t used at the port. “We had made equipment for trucks and buses before, but we could never afford to build a whole truck before this,” Samra said. “Now, we’ve proven we can do it.”

The city had the money, invested it, and although they aren’t getting the kind of return that a private investor would ask for, I doubt this technology would have gotten off the ground otherwise. Some more details on the specs are available. The company is run by a desi! Sepia Mutiny should do an interview or something.

Krugman on Interstellar Trade

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While reading the comments over at Crooked Timber, I saw a link to one of our new Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s more insightful papers: The Theory of Interstellar Trade. The abstract reads:

This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

more on the FCC auction

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Even the NY Times had an article in the Friday issue about it, but the new focuses on the main business point, which is that Verizon and AT&T basically snapped up the lion’s share. Hopefully it won’t be “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” but I’m a little less sanguine. Floating under the radar was an attachment from Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, who said:

It’s appalling that women and minorities were virtually shut out of this monumental auction. It’s an outrage that we’ve failed to counter the legacy of discrimination that has kept women and minorities from owning their fair share of the spectrum. Here we had an enormous opportunity to open the airwaves to a new generation that reflects the diversity of America, and instead we just made a bad situation even worse. This gives whole new meaning to “white spaces” in the spectrum.

I usually think of Commissioners as a little less fiery, but I guess that’s just a stereotype. Maybe he was inspired to speak out by Obama’s call for more dialogue about race, but after looking at his record it seems totally consistent. Personally, I think that he’s just the kind of guy we need at the FCC!

FCC closes 700 MHz auction

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The FCC just announced the closure of the spectrum auction for the 700 MHz TV bands.

The Commission has announced the closing of Auction 73, assigning over 1,000 licenses for much of the 700 MHz band, at just under $19.6 billion in final bids. This impressive sum is almost double the amount that was estimated for this auction, and it exceeds the final receipts of all previous U.S. spectrum auctions combined.

My reaction is : holy crap. Hopefully there will be a similar amount of financial interest in research directed at utilizing that shared spectrum efficiently…

freezing attacks

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The NY Times has an article about compromising data on DRAMs via freezing them and reading the bits off. This would let someone read your encryption keys right off the chip.

It’s kind of funny — all of these crazy-complicated cryptographic schemes can be compromised by what amounts to breaking and entering. I’m sure someone will end up writing a paper entitled “Baby It’s Cold Outside : Zero-Knowledge Proofs With Freezing Verifiers.” Actually, that’s not a bad title…

The FCC and buttocks

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I get the FCC’s daily email updates, which mostly contain links to boring procedural documents, but occasionally are a source of amusement. They decided to fine [pdf] ABC for the Feb. 25, 2003 episode of NYPD Blue in which a woman’s buttocks are shown. On pages 4-5, they state:

As an initial matter, we find that the programming at issue is within the scope of our indecency definition because it depicts sexual organs and excretory organs – specifically an adult woman’s buttocks. Although ABC argues, without citing any
authority, that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, we reject this argument, which runs counter to both case law and common sense.

I remember that episode causing a bit of an uproar at the time, but it took almost 5 years for this decision to come out, so I suppose they have been thinking really hard about butts over at the FCC. Perhaps they are getting a bit obsessed.

UPDATE : Language Log has more.