Daily Technology News

NASA tests the Lunar Chariot on a simulated moonscape.

(Credit: NASA)

It has six wheels, all-wheel-drive, all-wheel-steering, and it’s a concept of a 2020 model year car. Oh, and it’s designed to drive on the moon. NASA has been working on a vehicle, the Lunar Chariot, for astronauts to use on a planned return to the moon in 2020. The design for the Lunar Chariot was influenced by the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which proved the usefulness of having multiple driven wheels over an incredibly hostile landscape. With its all-wheel-steering, it can drive in a crab-like sideways motion, further improving its mobility over difficult surfaces. The Chariot lacks a seat, instead relying on a stand-up position for controlling the vehicle, affording a 360 degree view which will help the astronaut driver to look out for obstacles. NASA points out in its news release that the original Lunar Rover couldn’t be driven in reverse because the astronauts couldn’t see behind them. We assume the Lunar Chariot is electrically driven, given that gasoline won’t combust all that well on the moon.

New Scientist published the following driving video of the Lunar Chariot. In these tests, the Chariot has been equipped with a blade so astronauts can excavate the surface of the moon, we assume in preparation for building a permanent base.

Southern California Edison (SCE) on Thursday launched a program to build the equivalent of a small power plant on commercial rooftops with thousands of solar panels.

The program calls for SCE to put enough solar photovoltaic panels on commercial buildings to turn out 250 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply about 162,000 homes.

Got roof space? Southern California Edison has some solar power for you.

(Credit: Southern California Edison)

Once completed, the panels will take up 65,000,000 square feet of roofs in Southern California, or two square miles.

The total cost would be about $875 million and is projected to take about five years.

The utility, which has the backing of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that it will help it meet California’s mandate of generating 20 percent of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2010.

Commercial rooftops are a relatively attractive place to put large-scale solar panel installations.

Typically, businesses do not own those panels. Instead, they contract with an outside provider who sells electricity that the panels generate back to the business owner at a predetermined rate.

SCE said that the panels will help alleviate the stress on the grid during the hottest times of the day.

When Microsoft and Yahoo were basically not speaking to one another, there was plenty of chatter and posturing from both sides.

Since that primping and posturing has largely died down (save Yahoo’s recent road show with investors), does that mean the two companies are finally getting down to business?

Now it could be that the two companies have nothing to say because each is waiting for the other. But even that would be something to talk about. What makes companies really quiet is when there is something, but things are still fragile.
I’m not claiming inside info on this, just saying that the silence has been eerie, particularly since the two sides had a preliminary meeting two weeks ago and then Yahoo went on its “Why we’re worth more” road show.

There have been plenty of reporters and analysts arguing that Microsoft and Yahoo should just get on with it, the logic being that Yahoo doesn’t really have any better offers and Microsoft can afford an extra billion or two, if necessary, to get a deal done.

At the same time, there are some factors that have set the stage for this slow-motion stage fight. One is that Microsoft, while definitely interested in Yahoo, does not appear interested in bidding against itself.

Kara Swisher notes that raising one’s own bid may help win a charity auction, but it is not a very good strategy at a charity auction or when running a big business. And as those in the Microsoft camp point out, every dollar a share Microsoft were to add to its offer translates to well north of a billion dollars.

Yahoo, meanwhile, lifted the only pressing time limit when it delayed the deadline for nominating directors.

Here’s the rub though: Microsoft says it’s buying Yahoo to compete with Google. Every day that goes by is a day where Google is continuing to kick both company’s online rears and the two companies are left to pursue their separate strategies. It’s going to take time for a deal to get done even assuming they can come to terms, and then time once the deal gets done to get rid of all the overlap and get folks working on new projects.

The question is how much Microsoft values that time. The answer depends on just what kind of silence we are hearing.

The Solstice grows a removable roof.

Click here for more 2008 New York auto show coverage.

Texas Instruments wants to export what it knows about curbing power consumption in phones to the world outside.

The Dallas-based company has already come up with a series of chips that can be inserted into portable ultrasound devices to cut power consumption by up to 20 percent. The new chips also reduce signal noise by 40 percent.

The idea behind the push is fairly simple. The company has already made the silicon, and with some tweaks, can sell it to other customers. Much of the work TI has conducted in power management for cell phones was not performed because of high electricity prices, said Bill Krenik, chief technical officer of the wireless terminal business unit at TI.

TI later this year hopes to make a splash with the third generation of its OMAP platform, a collection of chips for making cell phones.

Cell phones used to be huge and batteries are one of the more costly components. (Remember Michael Douglas with that shoe phone in the movie Wall Street? He probably gave himself radiation therapy.) TI thus originally concentrated on energy efficiency to reduce the size and costs associated with lithium ion battery packs. Carriers also continued to want longer run times on their phones, he added.

“In a phone, you are limited to a couple of watts,” Krenik said during a visit Monday to CNET News.com. “There is a thermal limit too.”

Along with medical equipment, the company will also look at digital TVs. No one wants to put a 50-inch plasma on the wall that’s blowing more heat than the furnace, after all. TI has come up with one component that cuts digital TV power by 6 watts, said Dave Freeman, system engineering manager at TI. (Freeman further added that TI sells a lot of digital signal processors, the same chips TI sells for cell phones, and for the inverters that go with solar panels.)

Plug-in hybrids get far better mileage than standard cars or regular hybrids–and emit far less pollution.

But they are also tough to justify economically at the moment with existing technology, according to the first several months of data from RechargeIT.org, which is studying how well plug-in hybrids work in real-world circumstances.

Plug-ins, in fact, only cut gas consumption by about 88 gallons a year over regular Priuses in urban driving. That comes to an annual savings of $158 to $250 (when you factor in the cost of electricity too). With the conversion running around $15,000, the payoff would take decades.

RechargeIT, part of Google.org, has converted four Priuses and two Ford Escapes so they can be charged from a wall socket. These cars are then used by Google employees as fleet vehicles. RechargeIT monitors the performance of the cars and then compares the data with standard Priuses in the corporate fleet as well as government data on standard cars. Data has been collected since May. There’s enough data to bolster arguments for both supporters and critics of plug-ins.

Chevy’s plug-in Volt.

(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)

First, the good news. Plug-ins pollute far less than regular cars or hybrids, noted Alec Proudfoot, an engineering product manager at Google working on RechargeIT. The plug-ins emit on average 4,623 pounds of carbon dioxide for 12,000 miles of driving, which is close to 50 percent better than standard Priuses, which might emit 6,924 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to the organization.

Both plug-ins and standard hybrids also get far better mileage than standard cars. RechargeIT’s plug-ins are getting 66.2 miles per gallon, about 50 percent better than the 44.6 miles per gallon the group gets with its regular Priuses. The U.S. fleet average is 19.8 miles per gallon, so the plug-ins are more than three times better than that. The plug-ins will use 425 fewer gallons of gas than a standard car in a year while a standard Prius will use 337 fewer.

The 66.2 miles per gallon is actually somewhat low because Google’s cars typically go only short distances, Proudfoot said. In the first five minutes of driving a Prius, plug-in or otherwise, the gas engine comes on to power certain internal systems.

If the cars get driven for 40- to 50-mile trips, the mileage goes into the 70 miles to 100 miles per gallon range.

“We’re sensitive to the fact that the mileage looks low and we believe it is lower than what consumers will experience,” Proudfoot said, adding that he gets about 80 miles to 85 miles per gallon when he takes the car out for longer trips.

When do you break even?

Now the more difficult issue–cost. A plug-in costs a driver $1,168 to operate for 12,000 miles (with gas at $3 a gallon plus electricity at 8 cents a kilowatt hour) while a regular Prius costs $1,010 for the same distance, according to RechargeIT. Because a retrofit costs about $15,000, that means drivers don’t break even for 95 years, assuming gas hovers at $3.

In a rosier scenario (gas at $5 a gallon and a $10,000 retrofit with no inflation in electricity prices), the payoff drops to just under 30 years. That’s shorter, but about 20 years longer than most people own their cars, making plug-ins a tough sell.

“They (owners) are never going to pay off the price” of a retrofit, Proudfoot acknowledged. “But the big focus for RechargeIT is on the CO2 savings, not the cost savings.”

Like in the electric car market, the hitch is the cost of the batteries. Southern California’s AC Propulsion, for instance, offers a service for converting a gas-burning Scion into an all-electric car. The Scion costs $13,000 to $18,000. The conversion costs $55,000 plus tax. Oops.

Put the plug-in numbers another way. Let’s say you had $20,000 and a Prius. If gas costs $4, you could drive it 223,000 miles (5,000 gallons x 44.6 miles per gallon). If you converted the Prius to a plug-in for $10,000, you’d go 165,500 miles. (2,500 gallons x 66.2 miles per gallon). That doesn’t include the price of electricity, so you’d have to reduce the number of miles the plug-in would go for that amount.

The good news is that the costs of plug-ins are expected to decline, particularly when manufacturers make cars as plug-ins at the factory. If the premium drops to $5,000 or so, a plug-in fares better in terms of dollars. “You could pay it off in seven or eight years,” Proudfoot said.

General Motors has said it wants to sell the Chevy Volt, a type of plug-in hybrid, for around $30,000. For a standard sedan, that’s not outrageous. (A serial hybrid like the Volt will also get better mileage than a retrofit hybrid.) The plug-in nature of the Volt could be seen as an interesting, affordable luxury. Carbon taxes will also shorten any payoff time.

Batteries, meanwhile, continue to improve. Argonne National Labs is working on batteries that could let plug-ins hit the fabled and touted 100 miles per gallon standard, according to Ron Gremban at CalCars.

When you put all of these factors together, plug-in hybrids, along with cleaner diesel cars that can get 60 miles to 100 miles per gallon, remain the best ideas for cutting transportation fuel and emissions.

The individual plug-ins, by the way, range in mileage from 69.9 (Comoe) to 65.1 (Galapagos). One car, Macchu Picchu, is rated at 54.4 miles per gallon, but RechargeIT wants to study what’s going on with that one in a little more depth.

On May 7 of last year, Great Barrier, one of the plug-ins, hit 124 miles per gallon on an 18.9-mile jaunt. (One day a car got only 32.7 miles per gallon because the battery switched off.)

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

In January 2008, Mio Technology and Navman formally merged under the Mio name, and we’re now seeing the first products of that marriage: the Mio Moov line. The series birthed four little Mio newborns–the Mio Moov 200, the Moov 210, the Moov 300, and the Moov 310–and combines Navman’s software with Mio’s hardware.

Alas, these cuties aren’t easy children. CNET’s Bonnie Cha spent some time with the Mio Moov 310 Car GPS and had high hopes for a nice bonding experience. The Mio Moov 310 came with a promising bundle of navigation features, including text-to-speech functionality and a free year’s subscription to the Traffic Messaging Channel, all for the bargain-basement $249.95. Unfortunately, the Moov 310 dillydallied like a reluctant teenager, suffering from sluggish performance and slow route calculations. Did its features make up for the poor behavior in the long run? Read the review.

So much for taking the bus in the People’s Republic.

In its latest airport development plan, the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) says the country will erect 97 new airports before 2020, according to the People’s Daily, a prominent, unbiased, and properly licensed source of news in China.

The number of airports will increase to 192 by 2010 and rise to 244 by 2020, it said. Right now, there are 147 airports in China, with 45 of those serving civilian and military purposes. Building these airports will cost $64 billion, but once complete, 81 percent of the population will live within 100 kilometers of an airport.

How that will affect pollution remains to be seen. Planes emit large amounts of pollutants. Several airlines, however, are experimenting with cleaner fuels.

Delphi booth with XM Skyfi2 satellite radio (File photo)

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com)

CNET News.com’s Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache wrote this article.

It may seem that the Bush administration’s approval of the Sirius-XM merger should invite a rush of deals before the next presidential administration, which could be Democratic and therefore more hostile to billion-dollar corporate combinations.

After all, Democrats have spent years alleging that the Bush crowd is overly merger-happy–with the corollary implication that a Clinton or Obama administration won’t be. One 2006 column in the New York Times charged that there was a “lack of interest in antitrust enforcement these days,” and one frequent liberal lament has been that the incoming Bush Justice Department settled too quickly with Microsoft in late 2001.

But academics who have compared the antitrust enthusiasm of Democratic and Republican administrations have found that the reality of antitrust challenges is more complex, and perhaps even a bit counterintuitive. (This matters for mergers including Microsoft’s planned purchase of Yahoo, which is already facing antitrust scrutiny.)

A 2001 study by economics professors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Cincinnati found that “politics, as measured by the party of the president and the Republican versus Democrat composition of the House and the Senate, does not have a clear impact” on the number of antitrust cases filed by the government.

Subsequent research by economists Tom Fomby and Dan Slottje of Southern Methodist University arrives at the same conclusion by analyzing criminal and civil antitrust filings by the Justice Department from 1925 to 2002. They found that the political party in the White House doesn’t matter; neither does whether it’s an election year or not.

What does seem to matter is economic activity. When unemployment is increasing, they concluded, Justice Department officials are less likely to bring antitrust cases (perhaps for fear of creating more unemployment). When inflation is increasing, on the other hand, antitrust litigation is more likely (perhaps based on the belief that monopolies cause inflation). They dubbed this the “Economic Reticence Index,” and believe that unemployment is a more important factor than inflation.

If that’s true, and if the Bush administration is no different from its Republican predecessors, a housing-led recession dragging on through 2009 and 2010 could yield relatively easier approvals for Microsoft-Yahoo and other possible mergers. The bust following the unsustainable boom–created by an expansion of the money supply–has already caused layoffs in the housing sector, and greater overall unemployment seems likely to follow.

But the assumption that the Bush Justice Department is similar to other Republican Justice Departments may not be true. Vivek Ghosal, the Georgia Tech professor who co-authored the 2001 study, told CNET News.com in an e-mail message on Monday that the Bush administration “has been a true outlier with a very low level of merger scrutiny and challenges.”

Translation: Any two companies eyeing a wedding had better hurry up with the nuptials.

“The Bush administration has apparently never seen a telecommunications merger it doesn’t like,” said Rep. Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who leads a House of Representatives telecommunications and Internet panel. “Its decision to approve the XM-Sirius merger without conditions is therefore unsurprising.”

Sen. Herbert Kohl, the Wisconsin Democrat who leads the Senate’s antitrust
panel, similarly accused the Bush administration’s Justice Department of
repeatedly “failing to oppose numerous mergers, which reduced competition in key
industries” and “not bringing a single contested merger case in nearly four years.”

“You’re certainly not going to be better off waiting for another administration,
and you may very well be worse off,” said Mark Ostrau, co-chairman of the
antitrust and unfair competition group at Fenwick & West in Mountain View,
Calif. “I think (Bush administration officials) have been, on the margin, more permissive than others.”

Ostrau said he thought that if, for example, the XM-Sirius or the Whole
Foods-Wild Oats mergers had been subject to scrutiny by the Clinton
administration’s Justice Department, it would have “either challenged or sought
some concessions,” although he acknowledged that the Federal Communications
Commission, which is still reviewing the satellite radio deal, may still do that.

In the communications sector alone, the Bush administration has approved the sizable mergers of AT&T and BellSouth, AT&T and SBC Communications, Verizon and MCI, Google and DoubleClick, and Microsoft and
Aquantive, to name a few.

“The general attitude among antitrust professionals today is that the Bush
administration has been less aggressive in its merger policy than prior
Democratic administrations,” added Albert Foer, an attorney who serves as
president of the American Antitrust Institute, a think tank that supports more
extensive use of antitrust law. “This is borne out in the numbers and in surveys
of practitioners and seems unrelated to the rise or decline in numbers of mergers.”

Should a Democratic president be elected this fall, his or her Justice Department might require companies to acquiesce to more regulatory demands to get mergers approved, and where the situation might be a close call, it might be more inclined to stop the merger than the current administration would, Foer said.

Some mergers, such as Microsoft’s Aquantive deal, have been allowed to proceed
without an extended probe. One way of gauging the merger-friendliness of an
administration is whether it opts to open such a review, said John M. de Figueiredo, a professor of law and strategic management at the University of California at Los Angeles.

“If one looks at the number of cases…it is generally seen that Republican
administrations, when backed up by a Republican Congress, are more favorable to
mergers and acquisitions than is a Democratic president when it’s a Democratic
Congress,” he said in a telephone interview.

Still more research suggests that, when it comes to the Federal Trade Commission, the likelihood of merger challenges is related to interactions between the White House and the U.S. Congress–which oversees the Justice Department and the FTC and approves their budgets. (The two agencies share responsibility for challenging mergers.)

“A company wanting to press a questionable merger might want to time it to be
handled by the current administration,” Foer said. “But many other
considerations besides antitrust policy go into the strategic decisions that
corporations make.”