Think on GM's range anxiety trademark: "their technology is limited"

It's ok to be scared, but clearly NORMAL consumers will respond to an interim solution better than settling for less until we get to the future (as far as batteries go). That's why the Prius has been a runaway success. It was as close to the future as one could get without sacrificing the present. Tesla is probably as close as one could get now, but most people can't afford supercar prices. For the NORMAL folk, the Volt will be the new bar. For the overly Eco conscious, sure, Think! Has a niche, just like Tesla has with the Eco conscious rich. But Chevy isn't a niche brand. Like Ford or Toyota, they are a mass market Everyman brand. Pandering to extremes will sell fewer cars, not more. You have to understand your market. Clearly Think! knows it's market, but it clearly doesn't know GM's.

From the article:

Filed under: EV/Plug-in, Hybrid, GM, Th!nk (Think)

Think City - Click above for high-res image gallery

General Motor's attempt to trademark the term "range anxiety" is generating some critical heat. The first to attack was Tesla Motors, which basically told GM to go ahead and associate itself with the term. Later, the global marketing director for Think EV, Michael Lock, told AutoblogGreen that:

While I have no interest in bashing GM, it is clear that their technology is limited and their car can only travel about 40 miles without the need for a gasoline engine. This is patently not what the environmentally motivated customer wants. It's classic defensive marketing to try and divert attention away from your weaknesses and this is typical of the battle cry, 'the best defense is offense'.

However, the early adopter end of the market is well educated and, as you may see from the blogs, are already decrying this. It may frighten some of the mass market, but they are not going to build the market over the next 12-18 months anyway and it may actually cement their view that GM is not enthusiastic or invested in pioneering this new market. I think that's a big risk.

Our marketing of the Think brand starts in earnest over the next 6 months and we are confident in the technology and the message. If anything, this presents a great opportunity for us to differentiate from the legacy manufacturers earlier and clearer than we had hoped for.

Lock also issued a statement to the media that said:

At Think, we are, frankly, a little bemused by GM's recently released 'range anxiety' campaign. It strikes me as 'kindergarten marketing' and can only be designed to confuse the public at a time when we should all be concentrating on education. The flaw in the GM Volt is that their hybrid arrangement carries enormous excess weight by needing both a power generation and a bulky power storage device.

For many customers, it is a bogus argument that the 100 mile range, in a Think City for example, will cause the driver to run out of charge on the way home from work. Most work commutes are comfortably within that range and new 'fast-charging' technology that enables a 0-80% charge in 15 minutes debunks the myth that a pure EV car is a limited niche option for America's needs. We welcome the late entry by giants like GM to the clean tech debate, but are hoping for a more positive contribution.

No interest in bashing GM, indeed.

Gallery: Think City in Finland

[Source: Think]

Think on GM's range anxiety trademark: "their technology is limited" originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Religious leaders hit back at Hawking

Hawking: God didn't create universe

1UP's Cross Country Tour: Kudo's Office, Kinect in the Future, Beards, Photoshop Video from GameVideos

Kathryn's boyfriend's beard (not attached to Kathryn's boyfriend) makes an appearance in this video.

From the article:

Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda explores the future, talks about the past, and dives into the surreal in his office. See more videos from our Cross Country Game Tour.

Roku Drops Player Prices & Promises 1080p Streaming This Year

Our Roku just died (or maybe it is the power brick). I just got out of my mouth that we need a new one. Sweeeet!

From the article:

Citing upcoming competition from Google TV and other streaming devices, Roku today dropped prices on all three Roku Player models:

 

Roku also announced that they will offer 1080p streaming later this year, but it will be limited to local USB storage since most Roku partners are only offering 720p.

Thanks to Jay for sending this in.

Nope

Yeah, every jailbreaker is a pirate. I usually agree with Gruber, but he's seriously a step away from calling jailbreakers Nazis for no reason at all. Apple blocking jailbreaks / downgrading has to do with vulnerabilities, sure, but I'd bet that they think blocking jailbreaks is a fortunate consequence, not an unfortunate consequence. If they didn't, they'd open the platform like Mac OS X is open. Period. They don't want people jailbreaking.

(Furthermore, I think chpwn's point is that they make an effort to prevent downgrading. They could have just allowed it and not spent the time writing blocks to downgrading. What normal person knows how to select their own firmware, anyway?)

From the article:

Put another way: I know that many App Store developers wish that Apple were “fighting jailbreaking”, because App Store piracy depends upon it.

Monday Goodness: True Story.

Many Hackers Accidentally Send Their Code To Microsoft

This is what separates the hackers from thenscript kiddies, I'd guess. Quality of work.

From the article:

joshgnosis writes "When hackers crash Windows in the course of developing malware, they'll often accidentally agree to send the virus code straight to Microsoft, according to senior security architect Rocky Heckman. 'It's amazing how much stuff we get.' Heckman also said Microsoft was a common target for people testing their attacks. 'The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com. On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Court reaffirms: fourth amendment rights not violated if the police install a GPS device on your car when it's not in your garage

Seems like a different version of warrantless wiretaps to me.

From the article:

Back in January, a court in Portland, Oregon ruled that the Fourth Amendment rights of one Juan Pineda-Moreno had not been violated by the police when they tracked him using various GPS devices they installed on the underside of his Jeep with magnets. You see, the police suspected that Pineda-Moreno was growing Marijuana somewhere, and they really didn't like that. Eventually, Pineda-Moreno was arrested and convicted of crimes involving the growth of said Marijuana -- but he appealed the decision because he thought that his Fourth Amendment rights (the one which guards against unreasonable search and seizure) had been violated. The appeals court has recently upheld the original decision, but there were five dissenting votes, meaning that the case is anything but cut and dried. Now, what's obvious is that the police didn't have to traverse into "private" space to attach the tracking device to the suspect's car, but clearly it's debatable -- even as far as the judges are concerned -- what constitutes private and public space. The case is surely not going to end here, so we'll keep you updated. In the meantime, watch your back.

Court reaffirms: fourth amendment rights not violated if the police install a GPS device on your car when it's not in your garage originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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World War II

MPEG-LA makes H.264 video royalty-free forever, as long as it's freely distributed

I'm not convinced that this will convince Opera and Mozilla. They aren't distributing free H.264 video. They are decoding it, and at least as far as Opera is concerned, they are selling browsers that decode video, not creating H.264 encoded content. Free to me-and-you does not equal free to browser vendors. Until I read otherwise, I doubt this will change the less-than-ideal H.264+Ogg fallback encoding scheme that WebDevs have to deal with now (insofar as HTML5 video implementations are concerned). This doesn't yet seem like a death blow to FLV, and I really doubt WebM will be picked up by Apple and Microsoft. So, we aren't any better off unless MPEG-LA makes a deal with the W3C's licenses. Unless I missed something.

From the article:

The H.264 codec that makes a good deal of digital video possible has actually been free to use (under certain conditions) for many years, but following recent controversies over the future of web video, rightholders have agreed to extend that freedom in perpetuity. Whereas originally standards organization MPEG-LA had said it wouldn't collect royalties from those freely distributing AVC/H.264 video until 2016, the limitless new timeframe may mean that content providers banking on WebM and HTML5 video won't have an expensive surprise in the years to come. Then again, patent licensing is complicated stuff and we'd hate to get your hopes up -- just know that if you're an end-user uploading H.264 content you own and intend to freely share with the world, you shouldn't expect a collection agency to come knocking on your door. PR after the break.

Continue reading MPEG-LA makes H.264 video royalty-free forever, as long as it's freely distributed

MPEG-LA makes H.264 video royalty-free forever, as long as it's freely distributed originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So Much for the H.264 ‘Bait and Switch’ Licensing Theory

MPEG LA:

MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as “Internet Broadcast AVC Video”) during the entire life of this License. MPEG LA previously announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015, and today’s announcement makes clear that royalties will continue not to be charged for such video beyond that time.