My first ride in Google’s self-driving car was, all at the same time, thrilling, fascinating and a little disappointing.
The car was in Washington DC where Google (, Fortune 500) representatives met with groups like the AARP and the National Council for the Blind, groups which might have an interest in cars that that could act as chauffeurs for those who, for one reason or another, can’t drive themselves.
I got to ride along on a loop around several DC blocks with two Google engineers in the front seats. Google’s "self-driving cars" must always have someone seated at the controls, whether in Nevada — which recently licensed Google’s cars — or anywhere else.
The drive was thrilling and fascinating because, come on, the car drives itself. In traffic! Disappointing because it’s clearly not going to be ready for public use for years and years.
For now, at least, the car only drives routes it’s been trained to drive. My ride in Washington DC was along a route that Google engineers had driven with the car earlier. Google refused to allow the car to be driven anywhere beyond this well-studied environment, at least not with the media tagging along.
Still, that doesn’t mean it was a cake walk.
No Google engineer taught the car that a bunch of kids on a field trip would march out in front of it at an intersection. It stopped and waited for them on its own. And no-one told it that, right after that, another car would run the four-way stop sign right in front of it. It handled that, too, avoiding a collision all on its own.
At first, those interactions seemed boringly normal to me until I remembered… no-one was driving! The car had done that all itself while the man in the driver’s seat sat passively watching.
All of this is made possible by an array of sensors that would make a spy satellite jealous. The Google car has three GPS antennae, radar systems, cameras to read street signs and traffic lights and it’s topped with fast-spinning laser eye that looks like something out of a cheap ’50s sci-fi movie. That all-seeing eye scans for cars, pedestrians and obstacles.
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Google doesn’t make cars or sensors, though, so the part the California tech company is really interested in is the software that ties all this together to let it make — we hope — safe and rational driving decisions.
Since the Google car only just got its learner’s permit, it drives accordingly faxless cash advances. During our test loop, it stopped a few times for phantom threats, like a parked truck that was just a little wider than the cars around it. Then there was the jerking halt on a side street caused by a car that stopped a little abruptly almost two car lengths ahead.
When it wasn’t sure what to do, the car would hand control back to the driver, announcing it was doing so in a friendly female voice. (The driver can always take control at any time by just by moving the steering wheel or touching the pedals, even slightly.) "Self driving" was resumed by pushing a big green button on the Prius’s center console near the even bigger red "kill switch."
Surprisingly, one thing the car can’t do all on its own is use the turn signals. The driver still has to do that.
"That’s been on our to-do list for a long time now," said the engineer riding shotgun.
Back-seat "driver": I had to ride in the back. A second Google engineer rode in the shotgun seat with a laptop computer. On his screen was a triangle — representing us — surrounded by a vast army of colored boxes, representing cars, people and stationary objects, all sliding across a black screen. It was reminiscent of the old arcade game "Tank Commander," minus the explosions.
Times when the car lost its nerve and let the engineer take over, such as when it encountered an on-coming car on a narrow street and wasn’t sure there was room to get around it, weren’t just useless glitches, I was assured. The data from each situation would be ingested and analyzed so the car could learn what to do in the future. Those lessons could, hopefully, be applied to a broad range of driving conundrums.
Before Google realizes the dream of a truly "driverless car" there are many steps yet to be taken and some of those steps remain far off. The first will be allowing the car to stray from routes that it has been specifically trained to drive. Until then, this is all just baby steps.
But the biggest step will be to create a car that will let me just sit in the back seat with no-one at all in the driver’s seat. That step still seems — to me — many years off. If Google can get there before a major automaker beats them to it, I’ll be really impressed.
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An Egyptian court has acquitted 14 policemen charged with killing protesters during last year’s popular uprising.
The verdict is the latest in what activists claim to be a pattern of acquittals for police blamed for the deaths of nearly 850 people during the 18-day revolt that toppled longtime leader Hosni Mubarak.
A Cairo court on Thursday found the policemen not guilty of shooting protesters in front of police stations on Jan. 28, 2011, one of the most violent days of the uprising.
The 14 are among nearly 200 security officers and former regime officials _ including Mubarak himself _ who face trial for the deaths of protesters during the uprising.
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Stock futures are rising ahead of economic data focusing on consumers and businesses.
Dow Jones industrial average futures are up 57 points to 12,712. Standard & Poor’s 500 futures are up 7.9 points to 1,342. Nasdaq composite futures are up 19.25 points to 2,604.25.
The Commerce Department is expected to report Tuesday that consumer spending growth slowed to 0.2 percent in April after a very strong start to the year.
And economists expect the Labor Department will report that spending cooled even though prices likely increased only modestly last month. Consensus estimates are for a consumer price index increase of only 0.1 percent in April.
The government also releases business inventory data from March. Predictions are that companies likely restocked at a slower pace.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is widely expected to be kicked out of office in elections Sunday. If he goes, he’ll be in good company: Almost every crisis-hit European country that has held an election since disaster struck in 2009 has thrown out its leader.
Here’s a look at countries where political cadavers litter the landscape.
_ SPAIN: A burst real estate bubble also deflates faith in a Socialist government, which is nonetheless reluctant to admit Spain has problems. Blips of good economic news are seized upon as “green shoots” pointing to recovery. Wrong. Stimulus measures are enacted, then crushing austerity. Unemployment soars. The Socialists of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero are wiped off the map in November 2011 elections; Mariano Rajoy’s conservatives take over.
_ ITALY: Silvio Berlusconi, the long-serving Teflon leader accused of everything from bedding escorts to serial corruption, finally bites the dust in November 2011. He resigns to cheers and jeers as investors lose confidence in his ability to spur economic growth and rein in debt. It’s the end of a political era. Mario Monti, a former European Commissioner, is named to replace him and lead a technical government until elections in 2013.
_ BRITAIN: Gordon Brown leads the Labour Party to defeat in the May 2010 election; Conservative Party leader David Cameron becomes leader of a coalition government. Brown had been finance chief for a decade before succeeding Tony Blair in 2007. Brown had boasted endlessly of ending the cycle of boom and bust _ but as prime minister he presided mostly over bust.
_ IRELAND: Brian Cowen, promoted to prime minister in 2008 after being finance minister, doesn’t even get to run. He resigns as leader of the Fianna Fail Party weeks before the February, 2011 election. It doesn’t help his party, which suffers its worst ever defeat. Cowen was finance minister during Ireland’s banking crisis and the collapse of its housing bubble.
_ GREECE: Greek Socialist leader George Papandreou swept to power in October 2009 over conservative opponents, pledging to spend his way out of a deteriorating economic situation. Two years later, at the height of Greece’s worst financial crisis since World War II, Papandreou’s own deputies force him out after he endangers a hard-won bailout by announcing he would put it to a referendum. He’s replaced by caretaker Prime Minister Lucas Papademos.
_ PORTUGAL: A month after Portugal requests a 78 billion-euro bailout, the center-left Socialist government of Jose Socrates is voted out of power in June, 2011. Portugal’s woes stemmed from a decade of feeble growth as it failed to modernize amid increasing global competition and dug itself deeper into debt.
_ DENMARK: A center-right government in Denmark loses power in September in part due to discontent over austerity measures introduced amid the debt crisis. It is replaced by a center-left coalition.
_ FINLAND: Finland’s government is reconfigured after June elections following a sharp surge in support for nationalists who oppose bailouts for debt-stricken eurozone countries. A conservative-led coalition spanning left and right is formed to keep the nationalist True Finns out of power.
Bucking the Trend:
_ ROMANIA: Romanian President Traian Basescu wins re-election in 2009, the year Romania’s economy shrinks by 7 percent and Romania takes a 20 billion-euro bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Union. Basescu, a former ship captain, prevails because he is seen as a strong leader in a time of crisis.
_ POLAND: This has been a rare European success story: It’s the only European Union country that did not to slip into recession during the global crisis of 2008-2009. Last fall the center-right party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk wins a second straight term in parliamentary elections, making history by becoming the first government since the fall of communism in Poland in 1989 to be re-elected.
_ ALSO: Sweden’s prime minister is re-elected in 2010 and the prime ministers of Latvia and Estonia are re-elected in 2011.
For Pennsylvanians with natural gas wells on their land, chances are they won’t know if a safety violation occurs on their property.
That’s because the state agency charged with regulating the wells — the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) — does not have to notify landowners if a violation is discovered. Even if landowners inquire about safety violations, DEP records are often too technical for the average person and incomplete.
While some landowners would like more transparency around safety issues, as a group they are not pushing for stronger regulations. Landowners, who are paid royalties by the companies that drill on their property, generally want the drilling to proceed.
Violations: In February, CNNMoney spoke with four families in Lycoming County, Pa., about violations issued against natural gas wells on or near their property.
The families have a total of 26 natural gas wells among them. They’ve received royalties from the wells, ranging from the low hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last few years.
How fracking works
Yet none said they had ever been notified by the DEP or any of the well operators that wells near their homes had been cited for what DEP’s website said were 62 safety violations over four years.
"We had no idea that there were any violations," said Dan Bower, who lives next door to his mother, Jane, and her five wells.
"We should have been contacted or something," echoed Neil Barto, another well owner.
DEP says that in cases in which violations pose risk to human health, they "certainly notify landowners."
The violations range from simple things such as improper signage to serious infractions such as subpar cementing — which according to DEP can allow gas to seep out of a well and in some cases "has the potential to cause a fire or explosion."
While the violations are posted online, the digital records are short on specifics — most importantly whether a violation poses a health risk.
A time consuming process: If landowners want to inquire about all violations on their property, DEP says they should do an in-person file review of the state regulator’s documents relating to each well.
The agency declined multiple interview requests, but assured CNNMoney that an in-person review would contain records of any communication with landowners about violations. CNNMoney conducted a file review in late March.
The process required a visit to the regional DEP office, which had to be scheduled weeks in advance.
But even then, the details discovered were largely in legal and technical language.
In approximately 1,000 pages of documents for the 26 permitted wells, there was only one record of any communication DEP had with a landowner about a violation.
A letter was sent to indicate that a spill of fluid used for drilling on Jane Bower’s property had been cleaned up, but the recipient’s name was redacted.
Both Jane and Dan say they never received such a letter, even though DEP fined Chief Oil and Gas, the operator of the well at the time, $2,100 for the five barrel spill. There were no details of this spill on the DEP website.
The file review revealed there was also a spill of 294 gallons of ‘frac fluid’ at the same Bower well. The fluid is what is used in hydraulic fracturing, a process where water, sand and a small amount of chemicals, are injected into shale deep underground to fracture the rock and release gas.
There was no mention of this spill in DEP’s online records, and the paper records did not clearly indicate whether the ground water was tested after the spill.
It is not clear from the physical records whether these spills, or any other violations reviewed, ever posed a threat to human health.
Obama tightens oil and gas drilling regulations
The well operator at the time, Chief, said it did not.
But David Yoxtheimer, a hydrogeologist at Penn State’s Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research, said there’s not enough information to say for certain.
He said that if the Bower spills had gotten into surface or ground water then they "could have a water quality impact of low to moderate severity," but that such a risk would depend on site-specific factors not available in the files.
Landowner apathy: Despite the violations, it’s not clear that the landowners are doing all in their power to check for violations on their property.
Neither the Bowers nor the Bartos have a computer to check for violations, and neither plans on changing that.
"I sure as hell am not gonna buy one to check DEP," Neil Barto said.
All four families continue to support the drilling and note it has been a boon to the local economy. The Bartos, who have six wells on their property, say they have made about $150,000 in royalties off of the wells on their property in the last three years.
Plus, increased regulation is not a priority for them. That’s a fairly common viewpoint among landowners.
"In our experience, landowner groups have been focused on advancing expanded drilling to maximize royalty payment opportunities, and have generally been opposed to increased regulation," said Kate Sinding at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
And that, says the NRDC, could be delaying further regulation for the industry, or taking pressure off regulators to report violations more clearly.
"Advocacy for those kinds of protections would undoubtedly carry more weight were they to come from landowners themselves, as opposed to the environmental community," Sinding said.
– with additional reporting by CNN’s Poppy Harlow
A new report says Apple Inc. uses subsidiaries in Ireland, the Netherlands and other low-tax nations as part of a strategy that enables the technology giant to cut its global tax bill by billions of dollars every year.
A New York Times article published Sunday outlines legal methods used by Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple to avoid paying millions of dollars in federal and state taxes.
It cites a study by a former Treasury Department economist that estimates Apple’s federal tax bill would have been $2 payday loans.4 billion higher last year without such tactics.
The newspaper says Apple paid $3.3 billion in cash taxes globally on $34.2 billion in profits last year. That’s a tax rate of 9.8 percent.
Apple tells the Times that it complies with all laws and accounting rules.
Dow Chemical’s first-quarter earnings fell 50 percent after it took a pre-tax charge of $357 million to close some of its plants.
The nation’s largest chemical maker reported income of $412 million, or 35 cents per share, from January to March. That compares with $625 million, or 54 cents per share, for the same part of 2011.
Excluding restructuring costs related to the plant closures and other special items, Dow said it earned 61 cents per share. Revenue was flat at $14.7 billion.
Analysts, who typically exclude special items, expected earnings of 59 cents per share and revenue of $14.96 billion, according to FactSet.
The Midland, Mich., company has benefited from growth in emerging economies in the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America. But sales have weakened in Europe, where a growing debt crisis is pushing parts of the eurozone back into recession. In March, Dow decided to restructure its international business to account for the slowdown in Europe.
Dow cut 900 jobs, closed plants in Charleston, Ill., Portugal, Hungary and Brazil, and it idled operations at a plant in the Netherlands. The changes are expected to cut costs by about $250 million each year.
Dow Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris said that Western Europe will continue to deal with “recessionary conditions” this year. The economic picture is better in the U.S., thanks to cheap natural gas prices. Natural gas prices have a huge influence on company margins because it’s such a big input in the process.
China’s economy appears to be moderating and Germany is showing signs of improvement, he said.
Shares of The Dow Chemical Co. fell by 59 cent to $35.49 in premarket trading.
The Senate on Wednesday passed a plan to save the struggling U.S. Postal Service, an effort that could save thousands of jobs and 100 mail processing plants now slated to be closed or consolidated next month.
In an unusual showing of bipartisanship, the Senate voted 62-37 to throw a lifeline to the indebted Postal Service. Without help, the Postal Service would otherwise cut Saturday service, delay mail delivery and close hundreds of postal processing plants and post offices, triggering thousands of job cuts nationwide.
"My hope is that our friends over in the U.S. House, given our bipartisan steps we took this week, will feel a sense of urgency," said Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat, one of the Senate bill’s co-sponsors. "The situation is not hopeless, the situation is dire."
The House has yet to take up a different bill to reform the Postal Service. However, Rep. Darrell Issa, a key Republican on postal service legislation, called the Senate bill "wholly unacceptable," in a statement released Wednesday.
Congress faces a deadline of May 15, when a moratorium on postal closures expires.
The recession, declining mail volume and a congressional mandate to prefund retirement health care benefits have put the service in a bind. It reported a $5.1 billion loss for the year ended Sept. 30.
The Senate bill, offered by members in both parties, forces the Postal Service to ease off part of its plan to slow down the delivery of first-class mail, the kind of mail that most consumers use.
Postal Service: We need more junk mail
The bill makes controversial changes, including cuts to workers’ compensation benefits, as well as a transition from door-to-door delivery to curbside delivery in some areas, such as suburban neighborhoods.
The Senate bill also prevents the Postal Service from cutting Saturday delivery for two years, until the agency can prove such a cut is needed as a "last resort."
During debate on the postal bill the past two days, the Senate agreed to order the Postal Service to postpone the May 15 expiration of a moratorium on closures until the House passes a postal service bill.
The Senate also agreed to cap executive pay of high-ranking postal officials to that of Cabinet officials, $199,000 cheap credit report. (Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe made $384,000 last year.)
The cost of the Senate bill could prove a major sticking point with the House. The Congressional Budget Office says the bill would cost $33.6 billion over 10 years.
The tab comes from increased borrowing authority for the Postal Service, allowing it to borrow $11 billion more from Treasury. The Postal Service can currently borrow up to $15 billion, and has tapped $12 billion of that loan.
The other cost comes from elimination of regular billion-dollar payments, now required by law, to Treasury to pre-fund health care benefits for retirees. That $23 billion would ease financial pain for the Postal Service, but it also means less revenue to ease federal deficits.
Several Senate Republicans, including Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, said they voted against the bill, because it wasn’t paid for in an appropriate way.
Earlier this year, the Postal Service said it was doing away with overnight delivery of many kinds of first-class mail, opening the door for closing 223 mail processing plants at a cost of 35,000 jobs.
The Senate bill would force the Postal Service to maintain some one-day delivery of first-class mail, mostly for items mailed within the same processing area — saving 100 mail processing plants.
The Senate bill would also tap most of an estimated $10.9 billion overpayment in the Federal Employees Retirement System to pay down postal service debt and use up to $2 billion on buyout packages to entice long-time employees to retire.
Unions oppose the Senate bill, saying it doesn’t provide a good long-term business model.
"We are very disappointed that the Senate approved such a flawed bill, but we are determined to continue the fight for legislation that will provide a path to long-term viability for the Postal Service," said Fredric V. Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
The U.S. Postal Service is, by law, an "independent establishment" of the executive branch. The agency doesn’t normally use tax dollars for operations, except for its $12 billion loan from Treasury.
United Technologies Corp. says net income from continuing operations rose more than 19 percent during the first quarter, factoring out the businesses that the manufacturer put up for sale.
That would equate to earnings of $1.26 billion, or $1.31 per share, compared with earnings from those same operations last year of $1.05 billion, or $1.06 per share.
That tops the $1.21 expected on Wall Street, according to a poll by FactSet.
The parent company of jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney, Otis elevator, Carrier heating and cooling and other aerospace and building systems companies said Tuesday that revenue was $12 payday loan.42 billion in the January-March quarter, down 2 percent from the same period last year.
Including the discontinued operations, net income fell to $330 million, compared with $1.01 billion last year.
Spain’s central bank says the country is now in a technical recession as the economy contracted 0.4 percent in the first quarter of the year.
The drop, published in a Bank of Spain report Monday, follows a 0.3 percent quarterly decline in the fourth quarter. A technical recession is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.
The Bank of Spain figure comes as no surprise, however. The government has said the economy is shrinking and forecasts it will contract 1.7 percent this year.
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