Tag: TRAFFIC

By now, you should know that every technological advancement comes with a major downside. The assembly line brought cheap motorized transport to the masses, but pumped countless tons of atmosphere-destroying pollutants into the sky. While lithium-ion batteries gave our cell phones and laptops the ability to last all day, they have an unsettling tendency to burst into flames when you least expect ...

It's only been a couple of days since Facebook revealed that it had topped 350 million users -- exceeding the population of the United States. But that wasn't the end of the shocking statistics about Facebook usage. While speaking to journalists at the social network's U.K. headquarters, Facebook revealed that its 350 million members were producing 200 billion page views per month and uploading ...

In the battle to keep listeners from turning that dial, some radio stations are ditching traffic reports. The trend is largely a result of the struggling economy, which has forced stations to downsize, and of technological advancements that allow people to instantly access information with their GPS units or smartphones. According to USA Today, the top-rated pop station in Los Angeles, KISS ...

O, mighty gods of technology! How beholden to you we are! You hold every facet of our lives in your cold, digital paws. And to remind us of just how much control you wield over our fragile lives, you decided to bring all of Montgomery County, Maryland to a standstill this week. County technicians are still trying to figure out why a computer that controls all 750 traffic lights in the area ...

Let's say that a new traffic light is installed at an intersection. On one side of the light is a car dealership, and the light in front of the dealership leads onto a highway. Now, let's say that when the light was programmed, a mistake was made -- and every time the light changes, it is actually green in all directions for seven seconds. How long do you think such a mistake would go unnoticed? ...

In the occasional rush to get to the office on time, just about all of us have either illegally driven in the carpool lane or exceeded posted speed limits. Sometimes, you get caught and pay a fine, and sometimes, you get away scot-free. Call it luck and thank the Lord, but drivers in Manchester, England have something else to thank for eluding recent traffic fines -- the Conficker worm. The ...

The Internet is a seemingly endless resource for our watching, listening, and chatting needs. Bandwidth, however, is not. Cisco Systems, the mobile networking company, released a report earlier this week suggesting that global Internet traffic is growing exponentially. Scientific American said that Cisco needed a newer term -- zettabyte, or one trillion gigabytes -- to measure both the amount of ...

There's no denying that Twitter has exploded. In fact, despite our love for the service, we're getting a little tired of reporting every tiny little piece of info that is even vaguely Twitter-related (at least we're done reporting on every celebrity that signs up for the service). But today, we got a genuinely interesting piece of news; Twitter's traffic boom has not been driven by the usual ...

This soooo should have been a scene in 'Revenge of the Nerds.' On Wednesday, someone was able to hack into a road safety sign in the Boston area, alerting drivers to the undead. It's been done before, but never so hilariously! According to the blog i-hacked.com, some road signs are easily hacked thanks to unlocked instrument panels and an easily accessible text-entry system. And while in the ...

At year-end (2008), Internet traffic figures file into newsrooms, social networking site Facebook stands victorious over its peers, according to BizJournals.com. Undergoing a growth spurt of 127-percent over the course of 2008, Facebook finally overtook social networking giant MySpace by drawing 222 million users to Facebook.com in December. Facebook's first month to beat out MySpace was last ...

Traffic lights exist to control the flow of traffic, ensuring that we don't all go driving like maniacs on the road. But what if there was a technology that made it so we never had to stop at a light -- ever? Believe it or not, that's the idea behind Audi's new Travolution device -- and if early test results are to be believed, the wireless attachment could significantly reduce traffic ...

We dig the idea in theory, we really do, but we can definitely see this causing more harm than good. Starting this fall, San Francisco will begin a trial involving wireless parking sensors in 6,000 of its 24,000 metered spaces, enabling antsy drivers to be alerted via street signs or cell phones when a spot becomes available. Only one problem -- give 50 anxious motorists the same message that a ...

We have all ideas (okay, so we know it for a fact) that the Los Angeles Traffic Cam was designed for those living in LA, but we can't help but imagine how drivers in less congested cities could use this to make their own daily commute not seem so bad. NBC4 and 3rd Dimension have teamed up to beam out live video and nearly live still shots from some 270 LA-area traffic cameras to those with ...

Free advice from Switched: Don't moon traffic cameras. Not only is it juvenile, but it could quite possibly get you in trouble with the law, at least in the UK. Yes, that image on the right is of a man's rear end. The man thought he'd have a little fun with the speed camera in Cramlington, England, but we guess he was unaware that the police could snap a picture at anytime with the camera, not ...

Microsoft has announced a new tool for drivers to avoid traffic jams. The service, called "Clearflow", calculates how tie-ups affect backups on local city streets which could mean more accurate rerouting along busy routes. There's no word yet on how this could be integrated into personal portable navigation devices. According to a report in the New York Times, Microsoft's new Clearflow is the ...