Army going electric for light-use vehicles

Chrysler's General Electric Motorcar delivered the first six, out of the thousands of NEVs the U.S. Army plans to lease in the coming years.

(Credit: U.S. Army/General Electric Motorcars)

The Big 3 of Detroit aren't the only ones singing t new balance 800 he praises of electric vehicles this week.

The U.S. Army on Monday announced an initiative to potentially replace up to 28,000 gas-powered vehicles at more than 155 Army installations with Neighborhood Electr new balance 645 ic Vehicles (NEVs) in the coming years.

NEVs are not highway-legal electric vehicles, but rather light-use electric vehicles with a maximum speed of 25 mph. The Army intends to use them for nontactical things new balance 700  like on-base transportation for visitors, or maintenance personal and their equipment, according to Paul Bollinger, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Energy & Partnerships.

Plans are already in  new balance 840 the works to replace 4,000 gas-powered vehicles over the next three years with leased NEVs through a partnership with the General Services Administration (GSA), the U.S. government's main procurement agency.

 new balance 1225 Global Electric Motorcar (GEM), a division of Chrysler, delivered the first six NEVs to Fort Myer, Virginia on Monday. Two of the NEVs are four-seat sedans. The other four are two-seat trucks with flatbeds and a pa new balance 1003 yload capacity of 1,000 pounds. Both models have a range of 30 miles at 25 mph on a full eight-hour battery charge, and cost about $10,200 each.

While GEM is the first manufacturer to have won a contract for new balance 826  this initiative, it will not be the only supplier. Contracts are still open for bid to any company on the GSA's approved vendor list, Bollinger said.

The Army expects to replace a total of 800 army vehicles new balance 909  with NEVs this year, and replace 1,600 per year for 2010 and 2011.

By replacing 4,000 gas-powered vehicles with NEVs the Army will save 11 million gallons of fuel and 115,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions new balance 1306  over the 6-year life of each vehicle, according to a statement from U.S. Army.

As part of the lease agreement, GEM will take care of battery replacement and maintenance costs.

One of the leading reas new balance 817 ons the U.S. Army ultimately decided to go with NEVs as opposed to hydrogen or another alternative fuel vehicle, according to Bollinger, is that NEVs require little infrastructure to implement.

"These plug in new balance 1010 to any three-prong electrical outlet. There's nothing big or complicated about it whatsoever. Most will go into depots where they come into a central area to be charged," Bollinger said during a press teleconferenc new balance 990 e.

The Army has estimated no more than $200 per vehicle for implementation, in the event that a three-prong electrical outlet is not readily available for the NEV to plug into and needs to be installed. And i new balance slides t expects to pay about $400 in electrical power for each vehicle per year, according to Bollinger.

While a potential 28,000 vehicles is good news for those electric vehicle manufacturers on the GSA's list  new balance made usa of approved vendors, there could be even more orders soon up for grabs from two other branches of the military.

"No one from the Air Force has told me face-to-face that they would like to move in this ar new balance 8511 ea, but I've heard it in back channel communications. But the Navy has told me. They are interested in piggy-backing on the Army's order," said Bollinger.

GEM's four-seater sedan.

(Credit: U.S. Army/Gene 

 ral Electric Motorcars) Candace Lombardi, a freelance journalist based in the Boston area, focuses on the evolution of green and otherwise cutting-edge technologies, from robots to cars to scientific innovation. She 

  is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. E-mail Candace. Topics: Cars, Green tech, Military tech Tags: U.S. Army, GEM, Chrysler Share: Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Facebook Twitter

Army backs the hydrogen highway

(Credit: Proton Energy Systems)

In a side bet on "green power," the U.S. Army has awarded a $ nike air 90 1.8 million contract to develop hydrogen filling stations for military vehicles, hoping it pays off with reduced fossil-fuel consumption and increased efficiency.

At first glance, this nike 360  may appear to be a throwaway investment for the Army. Hydrogen fuel requires such a large amount of energy to separate it from water and to compress or liquefy before it's delivered to the user, nike air max 360 women  that it has been criticized as neither sustainable nor an economic alternative to fossil fuels.

However the contractor, Proton Energy Systems claims its patented prot nike air max 360 black on exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis technology produces hydrogen at 200 psig, eliminating the need for mechanical compression and the weighty high-pressure storage tanks that ma nike 2009 ke the fuel so noncompetitive. (PDF)

The Wallingford, Conn.-based company also claims its on-site hydrogen production is a "zero pollution process." This addresses another issue. Hydroge nike air max 360 iii men's running shoe n, as fuel, is not naturally occurring-it can't be mined or pumped out of the ground- it must be synthesized, and that takes electricity, which means that it is com tn requin peting with its own energy source. Proton Energy Systems counters by pointing out that its hydrogen generators can integrate with renewable electricity or hybrid power sources.

Critics sco nike air max 360 basketball shoes ff that if renewable and hybrid power sources were so dependable and readily available, we wouldn't be wasting time on hydrogen.

Still, to many the hydrogen highwa nike air flight 90 y sounds like--if not a sure bet, at least a safe one. (PDF)

"The United States military is dedicated to developing the latest technology that will ultimately enable the realizat air 360 ion of a state-of-the art hydrogen powered installation vehicle fleet which supports our petroleum reduction goals," Proton quotes Paul Skalny, director of the U.S. Army's National Automotive Cent air 180 er, in its announcement this week.

Mark Rutherford is a West Coast-based freelance writer. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Email him at [email protected]. Disclosure. Topics: Motor Pool Tags: Proton Energy Systems, proton exchange membrane, PEM, hydrogen fuel, Hydrogen Highway, US Army National Automotive Center, TRADOC Share: Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Facebook Twitter

ARM Cortex-based Netbooks due soon

Netbooks using ARM's next-generation processor architecture will be announced soon, according to a senior executive at the company.

Rob Coombs, director of mobile solutions at the U.K. processor design company, told ZDNet UK on Wed cheap shoes online nesday that Cortex-A8- and Cortex-A9-based application processors would find their way not only into smartphones--as with most ARM architecture--but also into small, low-cost subnotebooks.

"In the future black adidas samoa , we're going to be in Netbooks," Coombs said. "Expect announcements in the next few months."

Currently ubiquitous ARM-based smartphone processors are commonly based on the company' adidas nizza lo s ARM11 microarchitecture. The successor to ARM11 will be Cortex-A8, and processors based on this architecture are scheduled to find their way into handsets next year.

Coombs said ther black long sleeve t shirts e are "people playing around with gigahertz speeds" using Cortex-A8 architecture.

Cortex-A9 is the multicore sister to Cortex-A8, and it is likely to go into use around 2010. Multicore processors  adidas jeremy scott shoes provide power advantages, as multiple cores running at a lower speed can process more instructions per watt than can single high-speed cores.

Coombs declined to explic puma ferrari shoes red itly name manufacturers that might be gearing up to announce Netbooks using Cortex-based chips, instead referring to a published list of ARM's licensees. Cortex-A8 licensees include Sams adidas nizza hi ung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, PMC-Sierra, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), and Freescale Semiconductor. Those signed up to license the Cortex-A9  gucci man shirt architecture include NEC, Nvidia, STMicroelectronics, TI, and Toshiba.

Nvidia has already announced its intention to put ARM11-based processors into mobile Internet devices (MIDs), which range between smartp adidas originals jeremy scott hones and Netbooks in size.

ARM's move into Netbook territory puts it in strong competition with Intel, itself an ARM licensee. Intel processors, including its Ato gucci shirt m low-power x86 design, are currently very common in Netbooks, a category Intel itself named. Intel also hopes to move into smartphone territory with its next generation of Atom chipsets, with chief executive Paul Otell juicy couture socks  ini predicting products in late 2009.

While Microsoft has not produced an ARM-compatible version of its mainstream Windows operating system, the chip architecture is suppo adidas nizza shoes rted by Windows CE, multiple Linux distributions, and a version of Apple's OS X.

Apple itself is strongly rumored to have an ARM license. It recently acquired P.A. Semi, a chip desi puma ferrari sneakers gn company with extensive experience of designing with that architecture.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Topics: Laptops Tags: ARM, Netbooks, Cortex, chip architecture Share: Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Facebook Twitter CNET HOLIDAY TECH GUIDE

ARM chip camp sees Google Chrome as opportunity

Texas Instruments and Qualcomm executives talked Wednesday about the opportunities they see for the just-announced Google Chrome operating system.

Prototype Qualcomm Snapdragon processor-based device

(Credit: Qualcomm)

The Chrome operating system is "lightweight," a term juicy couture replica  that Google uses, meaning the OS runs fine on less hardware. Chrome will initially be targeted at Netbooks--essentially ultra-small laptops--that will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010,  pumas sneakers according to Google.

Both TI and Qualcomm believe the Google OS will provide more opportunity for new-fangled devices to gain wider acceptance. And both believe this is an opportunity for their respective ARM proc pumashoes essors--which power many of the world's cell phones--to gain more ground.

Analysts see the makings of a broad realignment in the computer industry. "What Google is betting on with the Chrome OS (is a) shift in computing cheap juicy couture necklaces  and consumer behavior," Charles King, president and principal analyst at Pund-IT, wrote in a research note on Wednesday. "If that scenario truly comes to pass, it cou mens pumas shoes ld disrupt the efforts of virtually every vendor focused on personal computing."

Texas Instruments, which has been working with Google on the Chrome OS, expects big changes in the design of devices, according to black pumas shoes  Ramesh Iyer, TI's head of worldwide business development for mobile computing.

"Netbooks are really the tip of the iceberg. We need to fast forward into the future and think of things beyond the Netbook thanks juicy couture earring  to this initiative from Google," Iyer said in a phone interview. TI's OMAP ARM processor powers a number of cell phones and smartphones including the recently-announced Palm  women puma sneakers Pre.

"We see the future being cloud computing really. You are walking around with a simple tablet, that is probably no thicker than the thickness of your display. It may have a (physical) keyboard, it may hav men puma sneakers e a soft keyboard. A world where you're no longer carrying around a two-pound or five-pound notebook but a small tablet," he said.

These handheld computers, sometimes called mobile Internet devices, physically  juicy couture charm bracelets differentiate themselves from high-end handsets, like Apple's iPhone, by their size. They typically have screens about 1.5 to 2 times the size of an iPhones's and, in red puma sneakers  some cases, come with keyboards.

Qualcomm is already seeing new designs in the pipeline. "We've seen designs that are so thin that when people pick them up for the first time they're shocked by how light they  blue puma sneakers are," Rob Chandhok, vice president of software strategy for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, said in a phone interview.

For these devices, the focus will be the browser, not the OS underneath. "Probably one of the  buy puma shoes biggest things you can read into the Chrome announcement is that in this proposed world the browser is the platform," he said. "In Smartbooks (Qualcomm's terminology for a Netbook) you need a little bit more screen becaus juicy couture bangles e you're reading documents and doing a lot of typing but not carrying around a four-pound laptop. In that environment, the most important platform is the browser," he said.

Chandhok also spoke to how the platform is different from Google's Android OS. "In Chrome, it is written as Java Script application," he said. "The difference is that the Gmail application on the Android phone is a s juicy bracelets eparate application. (But) the way you would do that on a Chrome OS device is you would run that in a browser window. More of the computational environment is in the Web browser, l puma easy rider shoes ike Google Maps."

None of this is lost on Intel. The world's largest chipmaker has been successful so far at squeezing its silicon into most of the world's Netbooks. And Intel is n men Round neck T shirt ow going after the ultra-small device and smartphone market by hooking up with companies like Nokia and LG Electronics.

"We welcome Google's move. More choice in this area will benefit the industry and adidas jeremy scott  help to speed innovation," an Intel spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Will Google's Chrome technology result in a precipitous end to the domination of Windows-Intel-based laptops juicy couture gold necklace  and Netbooks? King cautioned that Google has a lot of catching up to do. "We believe those assessments are deeply premature. By the time Chrome OS-enabled products (and women pumas shoes  their still-unknown tools and applications) reach the market Windows 7-based netbooks will have been available for the better part of a year," he wrote.

Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, a 

 n analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. H 

 e writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. Topics: Communications, ARM, Ultramobile Tags: Texas Instruments, TI, OMAP, Palm Pre, Qualcomm, Snapdragon, Google Chrome OS Share: Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Facebook Twitter

Argentine judge Google, Yahoo must censor searches

Caption: Results for a search of soccer star Diego Maradona on Yahoo Argentina only bring up news results and a notification that the search has been filtered.

If an Argentine sports fan tried searching Yahoo Argentina for one of his countr laser max 90 y's most beloved athletes--soccer star Diego Maradona--these days, he'd be out of luck.

Both Yahoo and Google are locked in a legal battle with dozens of fashion models and other public mens huarache  figures like Maradona over whether the Internet companies should have to censor search results relating to those persons' names.

The result so far: since last year, Internet use huarache sneakers rs have been left with abbreviated search results from Yahoo Argentina and Google Argentina, as a result of temporary restraining orders handed down by Argentine judges.

 The restraining orders against Google and Yahoo mean the search companies must censor search results from their Argentine sites for information about the plaintiffs, such as their names. T 

 he court orders do not apply to the U.S. sites Google.com and Yahoo.com.

The move effectively holds the search companies responsible for content on other Web sites, a legal mane nike air max 90 premium uver that would not be possible in the United States or the European Union, according to a Google representative. In the United States, federal law generally says that search engines nike air max 90 leather men's  are not responsible for the content of pages they index.

Google first received an injunction to block references to the individuals on its Argentina search engine in m women's nike air max 90 id-2007, after refusing to do so voluntarily, said Alberto Arebalos, Google's director of Latin America global communications and public affairs. A group of about 70 fashion models,  nike air max represented by the same lawyer, initially asked the Internet company to block all search results with their names with the intent of blocking pornographic sites that used the models' pictures. Google responded that it  custom air maxes would only block specific problematic links, provided it could notify users, Arebalos said.

The matter was taken to court, and judges in Argentina have so far sided with the models. Other public figures--i nike air max 180 ncluding Maradona and Judge María Servini de Cubría--have in recent months sought out the same lawyer to successfully block search results about them on Google and Yahoo as well.  nike air max shoes 

The move amounts to a class action suit against the Internet companies, although there's technically no such thing as a class action suit in Argentina. The lawyer representing all the plaintiffs, Martin Le air maxes 95 guizamon Peña, has sought damages between 100,000 and 400,000 pesos for his clients (about $30,000 to more than $121,000).

Both Google and Yahoo have unsuccessfully appealed the res nike air max trailbreak training orders and are now complying with them while the underlying lawsuits filed by Peña's clients are pending.

Peña probably "thought we'd make a deal o air classic ut of court, but we don't want to do that because it's not a good deal," Arebalos said. "We will fight because we think this is a good fight."

Multiple restraining orders have been filed for some individuals. In nike air max tailwind  some cases, the restraining orders require the search engines to censor results for certain keywords or URLs. In other instances, however, they call for broad restrictions such a air max90 s censorship of "scandalous material."

Such broad restraining orders compelled Yahoo to remove all search results for certain plaintiffs such as Maradona, the soccer star. A search for "D cheap air max shoes iego Maradona" on Yahoo Argentina brings up only news results and a notification that--translated from the Spanish--reads, "On the occasion of a court order sought by private parties, we have been forced to temp air solas orarily remove some or all of the search results relating to it."

The notice was implemented early this week, according to Yahoo representative Tracy Schmaler, after it was engineered in nike air max wright to the search results.

Arebalos said Google is appealing the court orders because it amounts to "censorship if we block all references to a person, because a lot of those can be lawful."

"Our posi air 97 tion always has been we are not going to be the censor of the Internet," Arebalos said. "If you go to a newsstand and tell the owner he's responsible for reading every paper and finding the articles  airmax95 that could impact somebody, that doesn't make any sense. We are the newsstand."

While laws in the U.S. and E.U. make it clear that whoever posts content to the Internet is responsible for it nike air max tn shoes , Arebalos said, no such laws exist in Argentina.

Google is working with Argentine government officials and the congress, Arebalos said, to fill the "legal vacuum" that allows f airmax90 or Internet companies to be held responsible for content. Other Latin American countries, such as Chile and Colombia, have made progress on that front, he said.

Arebalos said he did not kno air 95 w of any other cases in which a search engine had been asked by an individual to censor search results with his or her name. Searches have been limited in some other countries, however. German law, fo air 90 r instance, has forbidden searches for neo-Nazi material, and in France, auction sites have been barred from allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia. In the U.S., copyright holders have forced Google t nike air max 90 vivid blue o remove search results.

Google and Yahoo recently joined forces with other companies and human rights groups to create the Global Network Initiative, a framework for comm nike air max women unications technology companies to follow in response to laws in various countries that may interfere with an Internet user's privacy or freedom of expression. The guidelines are i women's nike air max 97 ntended for these types of situations, Schmaler said, and encourage principles such as transparency when complying with local law.

CNET's Declan McCullagh contributed air max tn 360  to this report.

Stephanie Condon is a staff writer for CNET News focused on the intersection of technology and politics. She is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail Stephanie. Topics: Privacy, Censorship, Regulation Tags: Google, Yahoo Share: Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Facebook Twitter