Posted by Eugene Volokh:
It's a bicycle! No, it's a printer!
My friend Haym Hirsh points to [1]this story:
Josh Kinberg . . . [has developed] a bicycle that receives text
messages and prints them in foot-high chalk letters, then blogs a
digital photo and GPS map of the printing, all while the rider
cruises along. . . .
Kinberg will officially roll out the bike during August's
Republican National Convention in New York, but he says the project
is as much performance art as protest. The project homepage can be
found at bikesagainstbush.com. See video of it in action in
QuickTime or Real Video. . . .
I doubt that this will get mass-produced, but if it does, expect the
billboardization, especially for commercial advertising, of yet
another surface. (Of course, people have chalked messages in the past,
but the difficulty of doing many readable, appealing-looking messages
has been a natural check on that.)
For those interested in the legal angle, I expect that right now there
isn't one -- my guess is that writing in chalk on a sidewalk is
generally legal (though if you have positive evidence -- rather than
just rumor or vague memory -- of some prohibitions on it, please let
me know).
References
1. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/computers/article/0,12543,662876,00.html
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