Bill Vlasic:

The engineers working on Honda’s new Acura MDX luxury sport utility vehicle were obsessed with giving customers more — more space in the rear seat, more fuel economy from a high-tech engine, and above, all, more apps, maps and connectivity.

But there was one feature they wanted less of: buttons.

In an effort to simplify the newest Honda vehicle, which went on sale in June, the product team was determined to streamline the instrument panel. For the new MDX model, more than 30 buttons have been eliminated. The change was emblematic of the challenge confronting automakers in the age of the connected car. How does a car company give customers the technology they crave without overwhelming them with complicated controls that can impair their ability to drive safely?

“We are trying to give our customers what they want in a way that’s going to be safe and make sense,” said Steven Feit, a senior Honda engineer on the project. “That’s the balance we are trying to get to.”

Ethan Zuckerman:

The NSA documents Edward Snowden leaked have sparked a debate within the US about surveillance. While Americans understood that the US government was likely intercepting telephone and social media data from terrorism suspects, it’s been an uncomfortable discovery that the US collected massive sets of email and telephone data from Americans and non-Americans who aren’t suspected of any crimes. These revelations add context to other discoveries of surveillance in post 9-11 America, including the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, which scans the outside of all paper mail sent in the US and stores it for later analysis. (The Smoking Gun reported on the program early last month – I hadn’t heard of it until the Times report today.)

The Obama administration and supporters have responded to criticism of these programs by assuring Americans that the information collected is “metadata”, information on who is talking to whom, not the substance of conversations. As Senator Dianne Feinstein put it, “This is just metadata. There is no content involved.” By analyzing the metadata, officials claim, they can identify potential suspects then seek judicial permission to access the content directly. Nothing to worry about. You’re not being spied on by your government – they’re just monitoring the metadata.

Tom Foremski:

In 2005, Mr Engelbart confided to me: “I sometimes feel that my work over the past 20 or so years has been a failure. I have not been able to get funding and I have not been able to engage anybody in a dialogue.”

Power to be people…

His funding was based on the use of large computers connected to personal workstations that looked very much like PCs, a computer architecture called time-sharing. But the microcomputer and its promise of being self-sufficient, unconnected to anything, was thought to be the future at the time. And the counter-culture with its hatred of “the Man” and centralized systems of power and oppression, rejected the time-sharing mainframe based computer architecture that underpinned the work of Mr. Engelbart and his colleagues. Big centralized systems were out.

The promise of the individual, power to the people, the ideals of self-sufficiency that ruled the counter-culture movement became enshrined in the promise of the stand-alone Personal Computer. It’s an example of how popular culture can affect something as seemingly distant and unconnected as computer architecture.

Associated Press:

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that “whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that don’t go through American servers.”
Friedrich says German officials are in touch with their U.S. counterparts “on all levels” and a delegation is scheduled to fly to Washington next week to discuss the claims that ordinary citizens and even European diplomats were being spied upon.

Bad for US Tech firms and political leaders to sell out on privacy. Big Government + Big Tech firms = Big Contract$. Not necessarily good for global business.

Slavoj Žižek:

In his early writings, Marx described the German situation as one in which the only answer to particular problems was the universal solution: global revolution. This is a succinct expression of the difference between a reformist and a revolutionary period: in a reformist period, global revolution remains a dream which, if it does anything, merely lends weight to attempts to change things locally; in a revolutionary period, it becomes clear that nothing will improve without radical global change. In this purely formal sense, 1990 was a revolutionary year: it was plain that partial reforms of the Communist states would not do the job and that a total break was needed to resolve even such everyday problems as making sure there was enough for people to eat.

Where do we stand today with respect to this difference? Are the problems and protests of the last few years signs of an approaching global crisis, or are they just minor obstacles that can be dealt with by means of local interventions? The most remarkable thing about the eruptions is that they are taking place not only, or even primarily, at the weak points in the system, but in places which were until now perceived as success stories. We know why people are protesting in Greece or Spain; but why is there trouble in such prosperous or fast-developing countries as Turkey, Sweden or Brazil? With hindsight, we might see the Khomeini revolution of 1979 as the original ‘trouble in paradise’, given that it happened in a country that was on the fast-track of pro-Western modernisation, and the West’s staunchest ally in the region. Maybe there is something wrong with our notion of paradise.

Jeremy Korzeniewski:

It’s cheaper to drive a diesel-powered vehicle than a gas-powered vehicle over the course of three to five years, according to a new study commissioned by Robert Bosch LLC – a company that makes plenty of diesel engine parts – using data compiled by The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. The savings stem not just from improved fuel efficiency but also overall fuel costs and better retention of value, and take into account the added purchase price of a diesel engine over its gasoline counterpart.

According to the study, “most of the savings are in the $2000 to $6000 range.” The highest return on investment comes from the Mercedes-Benz GL-Class. Buyers of a diesel GL will save a shocking $13,514 over the course of three years and $15,619 in five. Another star performer is the Volkswagen Golf TDI, which can save its owner more than $5,000 over three years. The full study can be found in PDF form at this link, and a press release with a summary of some of its findings can be seen below.

Andrew Hill:

He said GE “might be paying no taxes because they’ve got special crony capitalistic favours from the government, and [are earning] certain tax credits because they’re investing in alternative energy”. In response, GE said it paid “significant income taxes in the US, and our US tax rate reflects laws that encourage investments supporting US jobs and economic growth”.

Mr Mackey, whose conservative views have in the past placed him at odds with customers of his food stores, said he thought Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, should have been “more aggressive” in laying out the company’s position at a US Senate committee hearing in May into corporate tax.

Ed Wallace:

Today few people would ever refer to the gasoline-powered engine in their automobiles as a Langen, a de Rochas, or an Otto, the gas engine’s inventors and early pioneers in internal combustion, respectively. But the Diesel’s name lives on, not just for his compression-ignition engine, but for the very fuel that powers it. In fact, from the day he designed it, his engine’s elegant beauty lay not just in its incredibly efficient use of thermal energy, but also in the fact that each new generation of engineers and scientists could improve it even more — meanwhile finding new uses for its low rpm and high torque output.

Even in his own time, Diesel saw wide adaptation spread his engine’s popularity. By the time of his death in September of 1913, 70,000 Diesel engines were in operation around the world. In fact, Diesel was traveling to England to open yet another manufacturing plant for production of his engine, meanwhile attending meetings to discuss the British Navy’s use of his engine in its vessels.

Much more on Rudolph Diesel, here.

Thomas Content

Look at a U.S. map for hybrid car sales hot spots and you’ll see they’re all the rage in California, the Pacific Northwest and some pockets of the East Coast.

Peer a little closer, and you’ll find just one spot in the rest of the country where hybrids are big sellers: Madison, Wis.

While the number of hybrids sold compared with all cars remains small, it’s growing fast. Between 2011 and 2012, hybrids’ share of new-vehicle sales nationally rose from 2.4% to 3.4%, according to registration data analyzed by Edmunds.com.

Places like Madison lead the charge.

In Madison, hybrids accounted for 4.2% of new-vehicle sales last year. And so far this year, hybrids are even more popular, accounting for 4.7% of registrations.

To be sure, Wisconsin’s capital city has some of the key hallmarks of a hybrid hub — university town, progressive tradition.

In college towns, buyers are “a lot more inclined to try hybrid technologies,” said Jeremy Acevedo, automotive analyst at Edmunds.com.

Among top hybrid cities, other college towns that appear on the list include Charlottesville, Va., Eugene, Ore., and Gainesville, Fla.

Malte Spitz:

That was my motivation for publishing the metadata I received from T-Mobile. Together with Zeit Online, the online edition of the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit, I published an infographic of six months of my life for all to see. With these 35,830 pieces of data, you can follow my travels across Germany, you can see when I went to sleep and woke up, a trail further enriched with public information from my social networking sites: six months of my life viewable for everybody to see what exactly is possible with “just metadata.”

Three weeks ago, when the news broke about the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata in the United States, I knew exactly what it meant. My records revealed the movements of a single individual; now imagine if you had access to millions of similar data sets. You could easily draw maps, tracing communication and movement. You could see which individuals, families or groups were communicating with one another. You could identify any social group and determine its major actors.

All of this is possible without knowing the specific content of a conversation, just technical information — the sender and recipient, the time and duration of the call and the geolocation data.

With Edward J. Snowden’s important revelations fresh in our minds, Germans were eager to hear President Obama’s recent speech in Berlin. But the Barack Obama who spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate to a few thousand people on June 19 looked a lot different from the one who spoke in front of the Siegessäule in July 2008 in front of more than 200,000 people, who had gathered in the heart of Berlin to listen to Mr. Obama, then running for president. His political agenda as a candidate was a breath of fresh air compared with that of George W. Bush. Mr. Obama aimed to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, end mass surveillance in the so-called war on terror and defend individual freedom.