Author: Serkadis

After their successful collaboration debut with the SYNC, Microsoft and FoMoCo are back with Microsoft Hohm, a new solution that will make electric vehicle ownership easier and more affordable for consumers.

The Microsoft Hohm application will help owners determine when and how to most efficiently and affordably recharge battery-electric and plug-in hybrids. It also should help utility companies manage the added demands of electric vehicles on the electric grid.

“Ford and Microsoft both share a strong commitment to contributing to a better world. Today, we begin the next major step in our working together and leading the way for energy efficiency and environmental sustainability,” said Alan Mulally, Ford Motor Company president and CEO. “For Ford, this is a needed step in the development of the infrastructure that will make electric vehicles viable.”

Ford will offer Microsoft Hohm with the Focus Electric next year. Ford also has plans to introduce the Transit Connect Electric later this year and a plug-in hybrid in 2012.

Microsoft Hohm:

-By: Omar Rana

I believe that much of what makes us angry about our challenges in life is having a LIFE PLAN A we fall in love with—which then does not work out—and so we’re pissed off that we have to pursue a LIFE PLAN B.

If you want to tame your inner demons, you must consciously choose to never become too obsessively attached to a particular LIFE PLAN A.

Embracing detachment as a way of life will always give you a healthier sense of peacefulness when you land plunked into life’s potholes!

In a way, the definition for enlightenment is: The quiet acceptance of what is—and an open mind to embrace LIFE PLAN B!

I personally have found that I can more readily accept not getting a LIFE PLAN A, when I get myself excited about a new LIFE PLAN B!

I also remind myself how often enough my LIFE PLAN B turns out to be something far better than my original LIFE PLAN A was ever going to be!

– EXCERPTED FROM “PRINCE HARMING SYNDROME” — a book with praise on the back cover from BOTH Deepak Chopra and Jon Stewart! For more helpful advice for dealing with Prince Harmings (and Princess Harmings, as well!) CLICK this line, right here, right now!

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Filed under: Motorsports, Mazda, Celebrities, Event Alert, Racing

Actor Patrick Dempsey is no stranger to racetracks, nor to the pages of Autoblog. We’ve run into the Gray’s Anatomy star at various races and automotive events over the past few years, most recently piloting a ’90s Mazda RX-792 LeMans racer in the Historics at Laguna Seca. We’ve even seen him run at Long Beach, although that was in their annual Toyota Pro/Celebrity race that usually features as many crashes and spins as a roller-derby match.

This year, Dempsey is set to return to the streets of Long Beach, but not in a Scion tC, nor even his usual ride, the Mazda RX-8 he runs in the Rolex Grand-Am GT series. No, Patrick will instead be driving the wheels off a 2010 Mazda3 prepared by Tri-Point Motorsports for the World Challenge race during the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach weekend. So what was it like going from a push-me to a pull-me? Dempsey says he was impressed with the Mazda3, the first front-driver he’s ever raced, though not surprised, as his daily driver is a Mazdaspeed3.

We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for him when we head to Long Beach in a couple of weeks to cover the racing activities, which will include IndyCar, World Challenge and ALMS action. There’s a longer press release from Mazda after the jump, with more details about the weekend of racing from Long Beach.

[Source: Mazda]

Continue reading Patrick Dempsey to race at Long Beach… but not in the Toyota Pro/Celebrity Race

Patrick Dempsey to race at Long Beach… but not in the Toyota Pro/Celebrity Race originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With a more powerful graphics and animation engine, jQuery is slowly being chosen more and more over Flash to replace element dynamics and animation effects on websites. Following the trend set by the web community, Template Monster is getting on board the jQuery bandwagon and has recently announced they are launching a special category on their site for… (read more)

Filed under: Europe, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce, Peugeot, Design/Style

Still thinking of the Rolls-Royce Ghost as a mini-me Phantom? Think again. The design is apparently standing on its own merits, and has won the praise of the Red Dot jury. Considered one of – if not the – definitive awards for superior design, the Red Dot is awarded every year to an array of products, from furniture and office supplies to electronics and passenger vehicles.

This year the award was given to a wide range of automobiles, including the Skoda Yeti and Superb Combi, BMW 5 Series and X1, Volkswagen Polo, Kia Venga, Mercedes E-Class Cabriolet and Opel Astra. The “best of the best” designation, however, was reserved for the Rolls-Royce – which follows the prize awarded to the Phantom Drophead Coupe two years ago – along with the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and Peugeot RCZ. Follow the jump for more details.

[Source: Rolls-Royce, Red Dot]

Continue reading Red Dot design award honors Rolls-Royce Ghost, others

Red Dot design award honors Rolls-Royce Ghost, others originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yahoo is introducing some new search tools for a couple of its sites in a move to reverse or at least stop the bleeding-search-users trend that has been plaguing it for many months now. Who knows if it will work, but it can’t hurt either and the new tools look interesting enough. The latest Yahoo search properties to get revamped are Yahoo Sp… (read more)

Justin Levine highlights the ridiculousness of the patent system today by noting that it took the court system eight years to determine that attaching memorabilia to a trading card shouldn’t be patentable (pdf)… and even then, a CAFC judge dissented, claiming that the patents could be valid. The patents in question, 5,803,501 and 6,142,532 are pretty straightforward. Basically, they’re about taking some piece of memorabilia and attaching it to a trading card (for example, attaching a piece of a jersey worn in a baseball game to a baseball card of the player).

While it’s great that CAFC reasonably recognized that this concept should be considered obvious and non-patentable, I find the reasoning of the dissenting judge, Judge Rader, quite troubling. I saw Judge Rader speak at an event a few months ago, and the man is quite outspoken and opinionated (which is a good trait), but at times he seems to lose sight of what’s actually at stake. When I saw him speak, he attacked the Supreme Court for some of its recent decisions that helped return a bit of sanity to the patent system. In this dissent, he seems so focused on nitpicking that he misses the big picture (which is the kind of thing that the Supreme Court has appeared to be annoyed about in its recent rulings repeatedly slapping down CAFC). His argument is that because no one had tried to sell cut up memorabilia with trading cards before (and some even thought it was a bad idea) that made it not obvious.

Judge Rader, with all due respect, appears to be confusing some rather important things. The fact that many companies thought that this was a bad business idea does not make it any less obvious. Judge Rader seems to think that because no one did it before, that means that it’s a new “invention” that deserves a government granted monopoly. But, he ignores the possibility that, while the idea was obvious, most people just didn’t think it made much sense as a business, until one company tried it out and saw that it worked. That’s how business works. Even ideas that are “obvious” aren’t tried because people think they won’t work — until eventually someone decides to test them out — not because of a patent or some burst of genius, but because they decide to just try something new to see what happens. In the case of baseball cards and jerseys, it worked. But that doesn’t mean the idea was some brilliant invention that requires exclusivity — or that needs “disclosure” via the patent system to exist. It’s just business — which is helped along by competition and a desire to out-innovate the competition, not the desire to get a monopoly right from the government.

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Facebook has finally addressed a need that arose soon after Facebook Pages were launched. Pages, by definition, are meant for brands, celebrities, businesses and so on to serve as their official representation on the social network. However, the feature is often ‘abused’ as people set up all sorts of unofficial or just plain insane Pages. Facebook is now intr… (read more)

How long has it been since we last saw Oglops, Chocographs, and stage-performing kidnappers? The next run won’t be for long Zidane, Garnet, and their Trance-gifted crew are on their way back to mainstream, courtesy of

	Plug-in vehicle industry responds to Nissan Leaf’s low price Who’s worried, who’s not.		New Federal CAFE standards officially released, 34.1 mpg by 2016 Spend an extra $1,000 up front, get $3,000 more later.
	New York 2010: VW BlueMotion brand wins 2010 World Green Car Diesels FTW. Again.	Other news: Nissan Leaf available in two well-equipped packages, SV and SL Aptera clarifies production plans, will not export Chinese-built vehicles to U.S. Coda secures $394 million in capital for joint battery venture, expansion

AutoblogGreen for 04.02.10 originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 05:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google has announced the finalists of the Model Your Town Competition that challenged people around the world to create a replica of their city or town in 3D. The idea, which is obvious when you look at the prizes, was to get the community involved and perhaps turn this into a school project. The competition ran since Dece… (read more)

The EFF is helping out in a case to look at whether or not you have an expectation of privacy in your email. The details of the case itself are really quite stunning, so I’ll just repeat the EFF’s summary:

The whistleblower, Charles Rehberg, uncovered systematic mismanagement of funds at a Georgia public hospital. He alerted local politicians and others to the issue through a series of faxes. A local prosecutor in Dougherty County, Ken Hodges, conspired with the hospital and used a sham grand jury subpoena to obtain Mr. Rehberg’s personal email communications. The prosecutor then provided that information to private investigators for the hospital and indicted Mr. Rehberg for a burglary and assault that never actually occurred. All the criminal charges against Mr. Rehberg were eventually dismissed. Hodges is currently running for Attorney General of Georgia in the Democratic primary.

Mr. Rehberg filed a civil suit against the prosecutors and their investigator for their misconduct, but the appeals court erroneously ruled that he did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his private email.

Scary stuff. And it gets worse, too, as apparently the court gave “immunity to county prosecutors and their investigators for manipulating and fabricating “evidence” and defaming Mr. Rehberg as a felon in comments to the press.”

This seems like a massive abuse of power to punish a whistleblower, using emails obtained via questionable means. Bad news all around.

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Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.0 is here and it’s a solid improvement over the 1.x series. It’s still an evolutionary release, but there are a significant number of improvements and changes to warrant the major version update. It also incorporates support for some of the newer cloud services like Google Docs’ new universal storage.

The client app has g… (read more)

HTLM5 is heralded by many as the savior of the open Internet and the destroyer of the evils of Adobe and its Flash platform. Perhaps some people are taking things to the extreme, but one thing’s for sure, the proposed HTML5 standard is shaping up quite well. In the video department, one of Flash’s major markets, the open standard is looking solid e… (read more)

The Scott Roeder sentencing occurred yesterday for the murder of Dr. George Tiller and it would be nice to think this horrid affair is at the end. But it will not be.

The whole matter sunk to another disturbing new level:

Roeder accused [Judge] Wilbert of “duplicity” and said his trial was a miscarriage of justice because he wasn’t allowed to present testimony about the evils of abortion. He also said God’s judgment against the U.S. will “sweep over this land like a prairie wind.”

“He will avenge every drop of innocent blood,” Roeder said.

The fact that these words were uttered in Kansas and how they sound just like another self-described avenging angel of the state indicates there will be more Scott Roeders and more cold-blooded murder.

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

John Brown’s last letter, the day he was hanged.
December 2, 1859

In a rational world, there is no comparison between slavery and reproductive rights, but there are people like Scott Roeder out there and some of them are determined to have their John Brown moment. And we seem determined as a society to blithely pretend they do not exist, except in benign form.

Kratos, for all the hyped up wait, sure is delivering on its promise of greatness. Sony’s VP of Marketing, Peter Dille, has confirmed that God of War III has racked up over a million units sold

The power of Adsense is that the ads are targeted at the content of your website, and thus, normally, at the interest of the viewer.
However, depending on your website setup, this can give some problems sometimes. For instance, if you have a photoblog, there isn’t much text for Adsense to see what topic your blog is about. Same goes for other sites that do not have alot of text, or where the real content can be overwhelmed by other content, such as comments, navigation, other ads etcetera.

Now, there is a solution to this problem, since you can suggest to Google Adsense which parts of your website you would like to have your ads targeted on. This is called section targeting.
The html code to put an emphasis on a certain part of your website is this:
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
Your content you want targeted goes here!
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

In fact, the code takes a parameter, weight, which you can set to “ignore” (standard it is set not to ignore, but to emphasize):
<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

You can use this around the html code for your menu, or other advertisers.

The section targeting code can be used in a single page as much as you want. However, it must match the content of your site. If you use it to drive other topic (probably higher paying) ads to your site by targeting false keywords, you are working against the Google policy, and you could get your account closed.

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Google is taking us back to our childhood today with a gorgeous series of doodles dedicated to Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author famous for his children’s stories, who would have celebrated his 205th birthday today. And Google is not stopping at just one doodle, as it would normally do, the homepage features a series of f… (read more)

Allen Harkleroad alerts us to the news that a company called CyberDefender is a bit upset at Harkleroad’s recent stories that pointed out that two brands, advertising heavily about cleaning up your computer (MyCleanPC and DoubleMySpeed), appear to be connected to CyberDefender, despite attempts to hide the connection. He then highlighted some complaints against all three brands. CyberDefender responded by sending a legal threat letter, claiming defamation, and demanding the removal of the original posts.

Now, as is typical in such letters, the lawyers don’t actually state what is defamatory. However, the press release they point to concerning another website that was forced to “apologize” for calling MyCleanPC a “fake antispyware program,” does make it clear that MyCleanPC is, in fact, a product of CyberDefender. So, that’s clearly not the defamatory part. Everything else in the post is pretty much opinion. The only potential issue I can see is what he claims at the end of the post: “Like I said, same old scam, same old company,” which is similar to the title of the post as well. I could see how the company might be claiming that the use of the term “scam” is defamatory — and, you would think that before making that claim, Harkleroad would back it up with a bit more detail beyond just a link to a Google search page listing complaints. That said, as you start to dig through the complaints, I’m finding a pattern with a fair number of them (though certainly not all) “removed” for some reason or another.

I have no idea if any of these products/companies are really a “scam,” but I would imagine that trying to silence a consumer advocate for talking about their products might attract more attention from people who might start investigating how well their products work. If the products really do have problems, I would imagine that those problems are about to get a lot more attention.

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