drive

STANFORD, Calif. -- Self-driving cars are expected to save lives: a vehicle driven by a human will experience, on average, a crash every 160,000 miles or so. It's only a matter of time, advocates say, before robots become better drivers than us.

That is, if the lawyers let them. Industry insiders are already fretting about a host of legal problems that could bedevil robot car makers once a sufficient number of their creations take to the roads. Product liability, tort law, negligence, foreseeable harm, patent encumbrance, and design defects are only some of the concerns.

"The longer … Read more

The flexibility of Thunderbolt storage has just taken a new turn, thanks to G-Technology.

The storage vendor announced today its new Evolution Series of portable and desktop storage devices, which comprises a Thunderbolt dual-bay docking station called G-Dock Ev, and two interchangeable and expandable storage modules that carry the names G-Drive Ev and G-Drive Ev Plus.

Both the G-Drive Ev and the G-Drive Ev Plus hard-drive modules can also work individually as USB 3.0 portable drives. The G-Drive Ev is bus-powered, comes in either 500GB or 1TB capacity, and is slated to provide some 135MBps data throughput. The 1TB … Read more

Drivers who use mapping software on their phones to find out where they're going may not be paying enough heed to where they're going.

At least that's one way of characterizing a recent ruling by a California court.

Issued late last month and made more widely known by a tweet today from law professor Orin Kerr, the ruling says handling a cell phone while driving, even if "solely for its map application," is every bit as illegal in the Golden State as holding the phone to your ear while talking, or using your thumb (or … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions on whether it is possible to prevent drives from spinning up at boot, system fans increasing noise when watching video files, and options for managing birthday events in the OS X calendar. I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Prevent drive spin-up at boot. MacFixIt reader Samuel asks:

I am bracing myself for a knee-jerk reaction here.

For this is the story of a man who is said to have taken multi-tasking to an entirely exalted level.

The scene, as painted by the Mobile County Sheriff's Office in Alabama, is that 19-year-old Dandre Moore drove a car while texting.

Actually, the police say he steered the car while texting with both hands.

So how did he steer the car? Well, police say that he used his knees and told them he'd been doing so since he was 15.

As the Alabama Press Register directs the story from earlier this week, … Read more

A crowded hard drive slows you down and stops you from fully enjoying all your favorite programs. Duplicate Cleaner helps you make some more room by removing unnecessary or copied files in bulk. This program delivers exactly what you would expect based on its name, and it does it quickly and effectively. You won't believe how much space it frees up.

The program's slick interface is a welcome change compared to what you might expect from utility programs. Scanning any drive or file location takes only one or two clicks. It only took the program about 90 seconds … Read more

Amazon's Cloud Drive is one of many online storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft's SkyDrive where you can save pictures and documents for access on another system with Internet access.

While the Cloud Drive service has been available for a while, one of its lacking features has been a well-integrated file sync option that makes use of the online storage seamless. Additionally, Amazon's older tools for accessing the drive were written in Java, which is no longer included in OS X and which many are avoiding because of security issues.

To bring its service up … Read more

Microsoft released an update of its SkyDrive for iOS app today, indicating that Apple is no longer blocking the app's updates from the App Store.

Until today, Microsoft hadn't updated its cloud storage service app since June 1. This was reportedly due to a dispute between Microsoft and Apple over fees. The app's 3.0 version includes support for iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini, and the ability to download full resolution photos to an iPhone or iPad.

In December, a report surfaced that Microsoft allegedly didn't want to pay Apple a 30 percent fee for … Read more