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Lisa, I would like to buy your bridge...

Pumping the brakes always causes brake failure in cars with power assist braking. It always has. That's why no one teaches you to do it anymore.

You are completely and totally fucking wrong. Shut the fuck up before you tell someone something that may KILL THEM.

Pumping the brakes causes failure in the vast majority of vehicles equipped with ABS. It doesn't actually break anything, but you can't stop effectively while both you and the brake system are reducing braking force in order to try to modulate braking. SOME of the newest ABS-equipped vehicles can still work fine if you are pumping the brakes. These systems are most likely to be used in conjunction with traction or yaw control, because THESE are the vehicles with powerful pumps that can brake without you even pressing the pedal, unlike typical ABS such as that found in my '93 Impreza or on the back of my '92 F250. They need this functionality in order to be able to apply the brakes on an individual wheel, in order to yaw the vehicle.

Power-assisted braking almost always uses a brake booster installed between the firewall and master cylinder, whose only purpose is to help you press the pedal. It does this either by using engine vacuum (or on the case of a turbo diesel or even most normal diesels, a vacuum pump) to pull on the M/C side, or by using hydraulic fluid pushed by the power steering pump to push on the firewall side. Either way, "pumping" the brakes happens in a TINY range of actuation, causing less than a quarter-inch of travel in the master cylinder, because you're really not pumping them. You're just modulating, letting up a tiny bit basically, then returning your foot to a braking position. Even if you were REALLY pumping the brakes (like you might do to build up pressure when braking, if there is a problem with your brake system) the booster would work fine so long as the engine was running.

Thus, under this classification, most of these technology demonstrators are actually drones. They act as we tell them to act, and that's all they are capable of. Real robotics research, on the other hand, is more about artificial intelligence and autonomous goal achievement. Thus, though they can't walk, talk, and shake our hands, the machines entered in the DARPA Grand Challenge are more robots than these walking contraptions are.

Will they have big, yellow billboards along the way there?

SOUTH OF THE BORDER

9 in 10 Saturnian Amigos agree: Pedro has Best Tacos beyond Asteroid Belt!

16,847,104,433 miles

There is a Boring, Oregon.

There is a city nearby called Oregon City which leads us to this wonderful sign.

Now, ideally, these parts will not be too terribly difficult to replace...

I don't know about that... the facility where they were built (by The Marion Power Shovel Company of Marion, OH, since bought out by Dresser Industries) has been shut down for quite some time now. Marion Power Shovel appears to still exist, but their website says they work with large mining equipment. Any parts needed for these things may have to be custom machined, which will be a cast-iron bitch (pardon the pun).

I lived ~10 miles south of Marion when I was growing up and just loved the idea of the 'strong shoulders' for NASA were built nearby. The facility is HUGE (well, in 70's standards.. nowadays it probably doesn't rival many large mfg facilities).

Its been done before (without the level of detail of this endeavor)... Did you know that the London Bridge is now located in Arizona?