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New AIBO Demo'd
RalfM writes: "The
new AIBO has been
demo'd,
and with this version you can watch live footage from
it's cameras via radio link, radio control it, give it
booster packs, and a whole swag of other goodies." I still dig on AIBO, but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
Let aibo feel it.
Sit Ubu sit. Good dog.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
posting first once again for my homiez in sfi and tsk. this one's for you.
it's part of Carnivore isn't it ?
spiny.
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
The trouble with AIBO is that like any piece of technology it becomes obscelete after a few months, after which time Sony bring out a new model.
When was the last time you heard of a new version of dalmation being brought out?
All I can say is that their choice of location for the "PC Card Slot" is rather amusing. (Or disgusting, depending on your sense of humor levels....)
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
...Byte!
How to Download YouTube Videos
1st post!!!
-- http://www.safeproxy.org - Free Anonymous Web Surfing
AIBO?
Isn't that the non-hackable Sony robot toy?
Move along, nothing to see here.
Error:
The story does mention the video feed, but what about sound? With a good hack and a high speed net access , I could actually make sure the kids (and the wife) are behaving while I am at work. And I could roam the house and the yard! I think I'll have to install a pet door?
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
One that worked© and didn't crash?
Yeah, right.
I'd think you'd want it more animal-like in design.
It is an impressive machine, but all things considered, I'd want a real dog.
So the glorified Furby can now be used as a remote spy tool disguised as a child's toy? Sounds like office fun to me.
-Chardish
Hi, I'm Jack Shulman. I'm the head of the American Computer
Company. American Computer Company is part of the Technology
International Group and Bell North America group of companies. I'm
also one of the owners of the group of companies. I've been in the
computer industry for about 28 or 29 years. I've worked for IBM as a
professional services management consultant. I worked on the
development of the personal computer in 1978 for FIT (Fashion
Institute of Technology) and Simplicity Patterns, later adopted by
IBM. I developed something called the "pattern creator". That's where
we got the term "PC". Prior to that, I'd developed what you might call
the first windowing operating system in 1975 for Citibank, and before
that there were earlier versions I did for a company called Vydec. I'm
a serious computer person - very, very serious - and also someone
who's not generally inclined to leap to great predispositions about
any unusual subject.
Well, as it turns out, a few years ago I got my dose of reality. It
was in the form of a visit from a friend of mine. When I was very
young I'd got involved in technology, partly by virtue of the
influence of a friend's father. I grew up in central New Jersey, which
is around where AT&T and Bell Labs originated, and my friend's father
was the head of Bell Labs. I ended up at a private school and ended up
living at the household of the head of Bell Labs, going to that
private school and going to college with his son as a roommate, and I
kind of grew up around the various projects at Bell Laboratories in
the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I'd always held out that AT&T was this rather magnificent
institution. Anybody here worked for AT&T in the past? So, you know
when I say Bell Labs research, I'm speaking Holy Grail; and in certain
parts of the defence community and in government I'm also speaking
Holy Grail. Anyone here realise that AT&T and Bell Laboratories ran
our nuclear arsenal for 45 years? Anybody who knows that, raise your
hand. Not a one of you. I didn't really even know until a little bit
later in my career, but I knew something strange was going on because
it always seemed to me that AT&T always had what it needed to make
innovations in technology, and subsequently such technology would
migrate to an IBM or a Sarnoff Research or to an RCA.
And I could never really figure out, in the course of my young life,
who were these magnificent, incredible scientists, other than that I
frequently met them...like a fellow by the name of William
Shockley. He was quite a frequent friend to Jack Morton's household,
and I knew him, and I knew some of the other folks that he knew, like
a fellow by the name of - well, I guess not too many people would know
him - Bob Noyce, and Jack Kilby who was an acquaintance of theirs, and
so forth. These names, if you've ever worked for AT&T or in the
electronics industry, are also Holy Grail names. These are Mount
Rushmores of the technology industry. Jack Kilby is credited with the
invention of the integrated circuit.
I was rather shocked when, about late 1995, a dear friend came to
me. He was at one time one of the very well known generals in the
Pentagon, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is now a
consultant. I'd known him a very long time through the Morton family
and Bell and when working for IBM. He asked me to analyse some
documents that he had in his possession. He showed me some pictures. I
kind of turned up my nose. I said, "I don't believe this." He
suggested they were pictures of an alien craft. I said to him, "Well,
why do you come to me and ask me this?" "Because there are some
documents that fell into my possession that I would also like you to
see, that go beyond these drawings, these pictures, these photographs,
that describe some technology; and I would like you to analyse this
technology and make a determination for me of the veracity of these
documents, help me to authenticate them." I said, "Fine. I don't
believe this is real. I'm sceptical. I don't believe in aliens, I
don't believe in UFOs, I don't believe in any of that." And he said,
"Okay, well, I'd still want you to take a look at them, Jack." And I
agreed.
I met with him at his home. I met a woman by the name of Mrs Jeffrey
Proscauer. That's not her real name, but it's the name she goes by;
she does not want her true identity revealed. And I got a chance to
piece and look through some 28 boxes of materials that had come from
Western Electric Laboratories in the late 1940s, 1947, early 1948 and
beyond, and some subsequent documents.
Now again, if you've ever worked for AT&T, you know that the
laboratories at Bell Laboratories are often quite distinct, and the
documentation from a laboratory is kept in an ongoing, growing tome
called a "Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook". It turns out that even in the
super-secret laboratories, the ones in the part of Western Electric or
Bell Laboratories that manage the nuclear arsenal, these notebooks are
kept, and they grow and they're ongoing and they become almost like a
living representation of what that laboratory did for a living.
Well, such as it is, I was rather shocked at what I had to see there
in these boxes of materials, and I convinced them to let me look at
them over the course of about three-and-a-half weeks. They were kept
at the consultant's house during that time period, and he actually
kept a security guard with them at all times because he was afraid
that someone might come and steal them. Now of course, I wasn't sure
why he was afraid, because at the time I didn't realise the full
magnitude of what I was looking at.
In any event, after about two or three weeks of looking at them, I
came back to him and we sat down over what turned out to be a
Christmas Eve dinner, and I said to him: "I've got to tell you
something. I'm having a real problem with this because what you're
showing me looks like technology that we have not yet developed, that
humanity has not yet developed, yet the documents you're showing me
appear to be forty-eight, forty-nine years old. This would put them in
1947, 1948, 1949."
I suggested to him that before I could proceed I would have to have
someone verify the age, carbon-date or come up with some other means
to verify the age of the documents, and he agreed. So, with the help
of a mutual acquaintance - a private investigator formerly with the
Justice Department - we were able to take fragments of the documents
without damaging them.
We sent them to an expert who formerly consulted for Scotland Yard;
he's a fairly well known forensic expert at...I believe it's the
University of Edinburgh in Scotland today; he was at a different
university at the time. He analysed these fragments of these documents
for me, and came back and told me that the ink, the paper, even the
presentations were valid; that this was in fact a book or series of
books from the 1947, '48, '49, 1950 time period. That took him about
four and a half weeks of analysis, and I was for four and a half
weeks, as you can imagine, holding my breath.
The things that I saw described in this Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook
consisted of things that today would be more powerful than the Intel
Pentium processor, for instance, or the Cray supercomputer. There were
communications devices that were described; there were ways to
sandwich-in very, very thin, micrometre-thin layers; special metals to
produce moving parts for things like...from the descriptions that I
read, the nearest thing I could describe...an anti-gravity propulsion
unit for a spacecraft. They included dynamic electronic and
power-control technology that even to this day we have not yet
developed. They included communications technology that was described
only as having been taken from an object of unknown or unearthly
origin. The documents were very carefully worded not to reveal what
was, in reality, in these boxes of materials.
I was sort of at a loss at that juncture, because even though we had
forensic information at the time from this particular forensic expert
that would date these boxes back to the late '40s, and even though
they said "Western Electric, Bell Laboratories", part of them said
something called "Z-Division" on them. We knew of the Z-Division: it
was a segment of the United States Army, formed in 1947 and 1948. The
implications were that this project was operating on the fringes of
the nuclear bomb development project - then known as the Manhattan
Project Group.
It turns out that in 1947 - between '47 and actually late '48 - Harry
Truman decided he was going to grant a contract to AT&T to go through
the overseeing and management of our nuclear arsenal and the
commercialisation of derived product technologies from the nuclear
bomb, from the bomb project: the physics, the electronics, the control
systems, even the ballistics, the radar that was used, the ICBM
technology that was under development in the late '40s after we got a
hold of the V-series rockets from the Nazis, and so forth. The
contract was inked by Truman in early 1949, if I recall correctly, but
during the prior two-year period there was an informal relationship,
during which AT&T played a greater and greater role in the
organisation of super-secret military weapons-grade projects for the
federal government and eventually got pretty much control of what was
then known as the Z-Division.
Z-Division, believe it or not, originated in Roswell, New Mexico. I
guess the reason is, that is where the original nuclear bomb armada
was formed - the first bomber wing that carried the nuclear bomb - and
it migrated over to Kirtland Air Force Base during the time period
when Orlando Lawrence, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories fellow, was
called in. He was called in by Teller, Oppenheimer...all those folks
responsible for the nuclear bomb...Leo Szwilard. Lawrence was called
in at the time because he could make accelerators, or "cyclotrons" as
they were known at the time. Those cyclotrons were capable of refining
uranium, refining plutonium...well, actually, back then, they weren't
working with plutonium but with uranium.
I guess you could imagine what it must have been like in the time
period. They were in the middle of a war when they were building the
nuclear bombs and they had to do everything secretly, so this
Z-Division was created with super-secrecy as its fundamental core.
Ultimately Lawrence was called in because they had to build enough of
an accelerator to refine enough uranium to make the bomb possible,
and, in spite of all the greatest minds of nuclear physics assigned to
the Z-Division in the Manhattan Project, none of them could figure out
how to refine enough uranium to make the nuclear bomb a
possibility. This was before the first bomb was exploded. So Lawrence
was brought in because he knew how to make a cyclotron; but his
cyclotron, the biggest one he'd ever created, was about the size of
this white board over here, and it could produce about a thimbleful of
refined uranium - which would have been about enough to make a nuclear
bomb capable of blowing off your left foot.
In any event, Lawrence one day is called in and he's asked: "How do we
build a cyclotron big enough?" He makes a few calculations and hands a
requisition order to Harold Ackerman - today a federal judge, and who
was the chief supply clerk for the Manhattan Project - to requisition
enough silver to build a big silver racetrack; something like 12
million tons of silver. In fact, he took it to the United States
Treasury, handed it to the then Secretary of the Treasury - I guess it
was Morganthal - and Morganthal was asked to fill a 12-million-ton
order, which also necessitated the relocation of Z-Division to some
place where they could put all this silver and build this racetrack.
We decided one day at American Computer Company that we were going to
be brave. I talked with my board and I talked with some of the people
at the company and they agreed. "Yeah, we can try this; let's see what
happens."
We decided that we were going to take the story that had been conveyed
to me about this unusual Shopkeeper's Notebook with these unusual
technological artifacts in them, and naively and blithely put a panel
on the Internet, describing in black and white and colour what we had
found, and raise the question. However, the picture that we put up was
a picture of Testor's model of the so-called Roswell Lander. It's a
picture of what looks like a spacecraft with wings and a jet
propulsion system, with a pod in the front to hold alien occupants who
were piloting it. We superimposed the picture over an image from the
Thunder Range - of course, we picked the wrong place; the Plains of
San Agustin was the right place, actually - and we put a little bit of
rhetoric on this panel and just placed it right in the middle of our
American Computer Company website.
Now that probably was the stupidest thing we ever did. Here's this
picture of a Roswell alien lander sitting on a panel in the middle of
a computer company website, and on it it said something like: "Did
AT&T receive stolen alien technologies from the US Government in 1947
and thereby invent the transistor, the laser, the integrated circuit,
and...on and on and on...different technologies?" Well, we figured the
reaction we would get from the public would be one of, "Oh gee, isn't
that cute? That's funny, X-Files, you know..." The reaction we got was
not one we had anticipated.
Three days after we placed the image onto our website, we received a
very strange series of military faxes to our tech support fax machine,
referring to a piece of hardware known as "Sky Station". Anybody ever
hear of anything called Sky Station? Never heard of it, have you?
Well, it's up there. It's an orbital platform of some kind. We were
receiving live messages from Sky Station for a day or two and we
decided this wasn't right; we were going to call the Pentagon and tell
them about it.
So I picked up the phone and first I called Fort Monmouth; then I
called down to Langley Air Force Base. They wanted to know, "Why are
you calling Langley Air Force Base?" Well, where else would I call
about a satellite that's sending messages to our fax machine...talk
about sounding strange...that say this satellite is about to crash,
it's coming down, its communications systems are breaking down. Well,
finally we got to somebody who was of authority. It was Colonel James
that we got to, and he gets on the phone with me...I'm in my car, on
my car phone...and he says: "Mr Shulman, please secure these faxes. Do
not let anyone see them. We'll take care of it. We'll let you know
what to do with the faxes." It's like...the military goes silent.
That next day our offices were broken into. Our front door was
smashed, our glass was smashed to smithereens all over the place, and
everything was taken out of the file cabinets in our offices. My
office was a wreck when I got in there. It was awful. We came in the
next day to work and it was like: what happened, what happened?
I had these faxes in my briefcase. I'd taken them with me, home. So
apparently, by not leaving them there, I probably worsened the
situation. It might have been better if I'd left them there, to be
frank; if they'd found them and had just come and arrested us, taken
us away. They were top level, five-level clearance. We're not supposed
to even see or even know such a thing, but inadvertently, as a result,
we became aware of the fact that there's an orbital DSP [Defense Space
Platform], called Sky Station, which is nuclear-hardened and equipped
to carry nuclear weapons, because it was described in these faxes.
It is not a very pleasant place to be, to discover that now, here we
are at the end of the Cold War with an agreement that there will be no
nuclear weapons in space in orbit, and there is apparently a platform
up there that the United States secretly put up back in the '60s or
'70s or '80s, that's equipped; it's nuclear-hardened, it's one of the
Star Wars SDI series, based on Spacelab, equipped to handle and carry
nuclear weapons.
So now, not only did we have a picture of an alleged alien craft on
our website, talking about alien technologies being transferred to
AT&T, but we also were in possession of very high level, Level Five,
Top Secret security clearance military faxes describing something
called Sky Station.
That week we had visits from the Air Force Office of Special
Investigations. They came up and they interviewed us. They put me
through a day-long third degree. We didn't want it happening in the
middle of our customers coming in and seeing us or selling personal
computers and servers, so I took them to an out-of-the-way part of the
office, down the hall, down the elevator to a little office
downstairs, and I got a query about everything just short of...well,
it included my shoe size, when I was born, names of parents, names of
grandparents, when they entered the country, driver's licence
number. They went through a Q&A with me and with my staff, that just
came short of asking me the wrong question - if you know what I mean.
We were very startled, naturally. We weren't certain what in fact was
going on, but we're not ones to back down at American Computer so we
decided that instead of running for cover and taking the picture down
off of our website...because we kind of connected that the two things
might have something to do with each other...instead of backing down
and turning it all off, we would go the other direction. So we moved
the picture to a separate section of our website and created an entire
website within our website, called American Computer Company Special
Investigation. This is what happens when you grow up in New Jersey! Of
course, we couldn't have rubbed salt into a deeper wound: "Some have
claimed that alien technology was found on board a UFO crashed in
Roswell, 1947. Very dramatic. Is it true? Did the US military discover
something strange in the desert near Albuquerque, New Mexico? Did they
alter human history? Was the transistor one of those alien marvels?
Click here for the original story."
We tried to be a little cute. We put up a picture, and if you go to
our website it's still there. If you go to our main website,
http://accpc.com, at the bottom of the page is a nav bar with a
pointer in the middle of the corporate info products, catalogue,
features, tech support, Roswell 1947, help. You can go to that link
and click on it and it'll take you to this special page which, of
course, has now grown tremendously. It has something like, we
estimate, about 9,000 messages and articles now stored within it. We
started off on one Internet server and moved it to five Internet
servers, and now we are on one of our super-servers which consists of
four groups of four Pentium XEONs and three different service-provider
carriers and a whole lot of communications just to handle the load.
We get about, we estimate, three million to three and a half million
visitors a month to the site. And they're not necessarily people like
yourselves, open-minded, interested; they're kids from college, kids
from high schools, military people from countries like Iran...I'm
serious! I mean, we can track some of the addresses that show up in
our logs. I didn't even know Iran had Internet! We've got a very
strange reaction to our story.
What we did in the story was we isolated a few pointers, some of which
only I was privy to. One of them was that there was some relationship
between the government and AT&T that resulted in the transistor's
invention. I mentioned I grew up in the household of the head of Bell
Labs, so I knew that there was something strange about the transistor
because I knew Bill Shockley, and Bill Shockley was something of a
witless buffoon. There's no way he could have invented the transistor.
The symbol for the transistor is made up of three pieces: positive,
positive and negative; or negative, negative and positive...silicon
dioxide doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947. Now, in 1947, doping
things with boron was not easy. It required the sort of equipment that
even Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. They had this type of
equipment at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories - but it would have taken
thousands and thousands and thousands of man-hours to invent the
transistor.
If you look back at it historically, what AT&T was claiming was that
one day this "genius", William Shockley, was working with a rectifier;
he looked at it and he noticed it had unusual propensities, and there,
bingo, he invented the transistor! He figured it out right there! And
to verify that, the two other "geniuses" that they got to help work on
the transistor, Dr Bardeen and Dr Brattain, both said: "Oh yeah, I
remember a guy by the name of Case was (allegedly) talking about
transistors in 1931, and I knew back then we were going to have them."
That is the history of the transistor at AT&T prior to 1948, other
than claiming it was invented in December of 1947 by Dr
Shockley. Anybody believe that story? Me neither. And I knew, because
the administrative head of the transistor project was Jack Morton -
the man at whose house I was staying to go to school and whose sons I
was friends with - and he often commented on the fact that it was
really a shame that those three idiots got responsibility for the
transistor and he didn't. And I always wondered, because he too didn't
possess the scientific ability to develop the transistor. He was a
brilliant man who had invented the radiobroadcast vacuum tube, the
close-spaced triode, but it appears as if he was brought in to head up
the project to try to draw back the transistor in time to radio tubes
and the things that Shockley talked about; and it was as if the whole
thing was just a ploy and he might as easily have been given
responsibility and got the Nobel Prize as Bill Shockley. Professional
jealousy?
In any event, for most of my young life I believed that the transistor
had come from a government project and that they were just hiding its
origins. Which government project, I did not realise until I saw the
Shopkeeper's Notebook in the possession of my friend, the consultant.
Now, I'd heard a lot about Roswell in my life and I'd read the Project
Blue Book books and I'd read a lot of books like Berlitz's books and
so forth, but I was not someone who believed in Roswell, who believed
that a UFO had crashed at Roswell at the time, in any event. There I
was, stuck with all this information and having created this rather
minor scandal on the Internet...well, maybe not minor, with the Air
Force coming to visit us.
Next thing I know, radio talk show host Art Bell sends science
reporter Linda Moulton Howe to my office. She has to be there because
she has to see whether or not our offices were actually broken into. A
beautiful woman, very intelligent...she shows up at the office with a
tape recorder. I'm exhausted...the weeks have been going not so good
lately, and we're still picking up the pieces of glass out of the
sofas in the lobby. She sees the windows are broken in the front and
we have a wooden partition set up to try to keep the air out of the
building, and she records me answering questions about all this. I try
to be as vague as I can and answer the questions about what's going on
here, and she talks about the story. And next thing I know, she plays
the tape on "Dreamland", on Art's show. I swear to God, it was the
strangest thing we had ever seen happen!
That very next day we got well over 3,000 phone calls from people all
trying to get in to see me personally; they had to come to see me
personally, to tell me about Roswell. We received mail and e-mail by
the 10,000 pieces. Our normal 2,000 visitors a day on our World Wide
Web site jumped up so high that one of our carriers refused to carry
us anymore.
At that point I realised there's more than just a casual interest on
the part of the public, so we decided we would carry the original ACC
Roswell story right through to its ultimate conclusion. We have been
for several years now.
So, we have publicised the fact that Dr Morton met his untimely death
and that Dr Morton was one of the few people who knew the true history
of the transistor at AT&T - aside from Bill Shockley who would never
have talked because that would have meant the end of his Nobel Prize,
along with Drs Bardeen and Brattain, and Dr Kilby who subsequently
went on to bigger and better things, and he's dead now.
It looked like Dr Morton was breaking camp with AT&T and was very,
very outspoken, very angry with AT&T over this whole
thing. Professional jealousy, I guess. One day in 1972, Dr Morton was
found knocked unconscious and set afire in his Volvo P18 sports coupé,
devastating the Morton household and family - my friends - and for
reasons that nobody seemed to know.
Well, we decided to see whether or not there might be any link, any
reason to link Dr Morton's possible migration to a Japanese firm, and
we tried to make an inquiry about it with the corporate security
department at AT&T. That's when we discovered that there are people
working in corporate security at AT&T who don't want to talk about Dr
Morton's untimely death. Now, you've got to understand, we're talking
about something which happened 25 years ago.
So we were investigating further, and I interviewed a member of the
Morton household who was talking about the transistor project and got
very, very teary-eyed when I talked about the transistor. I said, "Oh,
did you ever wonder where the transistor really came from?" It was as
if I had cut a jugular. The conversation ended right there. "Can't
discuss this further with you."
We looked into it a little bit further and it became clear to us that
Dr Morton was probably responsible for this Shopkeeper's Notebook
working its way outside of AT&T - probably, because he was the
principal investigator. Everybody knows what a principal investigator
is. Involved in any government project you have a principal
investigator. They have to name somebody to take the blame. When AT&T
screws up, they have to have someone to fire, and they're certainly
not going to pick someone important enough in their view; they're
going to pick the one that everybody doesn't like. He was a tough guy;
very, very strong-minded; and everybody didn't like him that much, so
they made him the principal investigator.
There were other people involved, apparently. There was a fellow by
the name of Ramey. He was a figure at the Department of the Army. He
was named in the documents. There were quite a few other people named
in the documents. We're not revealing all of the people at this
particular juncture because of Mrs Proscauer who won't allow us to
give out certain things. And in order to continue on an ongoing basis
having access to these documents and so-called Notebook, we're very
cautious about the information we give out.
In any event, we decided to depict in a series of pages on the
Internet the entirety of the story of what we'd been going through,
going on the theory that one of the ways you can protect yourself
from, for instance, being assassinated by having information in your
possession that's dangerous to others, is to publicise it as widely as
you possibly can - which is what we did. Of course, there's a certain
drawback to that approach. The drawback was that within no time the
attacks, the onslaughts, the assaults, the death threats, the
credibility attacks, the undermining of credibility, the public
humiliation, pain and suffering began.
We found ourselves besieged by what I can only describe as a
multilateral black project, which included death threats on myself and
my family, death threats on our employees, pictures of me with bullet
holes and blood dripping out, on the Internet, out of the blue...a
really, really strange thing to have happen. We had people come up and
claim they had been hired by us to verify the claims that technology
like this originated on an alien spacecraft.
And you've got to understand, we didn't say that it originated on an
alien spacecraft. We asked the question, "Did it originate...?" Would
you run around on the Internet saying this technology came from an
alien spacecraft? No. You'd ask the question. You'd say, "Let's put
together the evidence; let's find out."
We decided we would approach a higher authority, ask the question to
the higher authority and make it a matter of public record. So, who is
a higher authority, other than, say, Bill Clinton, that you might go
to to ask the question: Did the transistor and subsequent technologies
fall into the hands of AT&T from the Nazi Germans, the Japanese? Well,
neither of them had any of this stuff. Secret government project?
Well, the United States Government couldn't build any of this
stuff. Half this stuff that we saw in the Notebook...even today we
don't even have some of the minerals, some of the chemical materials,
necessary to create them.
We decided we would ask the Secretary of Defense, William Cohen. In
fact, we got William Cohen and then his administrative assistant on
the phone, and the head of the Air Force OSI instantly on the phone
with us, and sent them a kit and kaboodle of stuff to take a look
at. We asked them to come down, take a look at things that we wanted
explained in their original context. Well, we've never heard from them
about it. We haven't heard from the Air Force or OSI - we filed OSI
9001 pages, demands, with them. We've never heard a single word back
from the OSI, the Air Force, the Pentagon. They've kept their
distance, accepted the requested requests and violated the law,
because under the law, when you give them these demands, they have 30
days to respond. Not a single response. As if to say, "You're not
influential enough to get us to respond to these."
In any event, we got nowhere with them so we decided we might
embarrass them a little bit. Now, how do you embarrass the Air Force?
I mean, sometimes they do a pretty good job of embarrassing
themselves! But how do you embarrass the Air Force, how do you
embarrass William Cohen, the Secretary of Defense, particularly in a
time period when we're in the middle of an ersatz situation of war
with Iraq, when the Cold War is over? You publish your findings; you
have to have findings.
I was invited to appear a total of 15 times on radio shows, including
Art Bell again, Sightings, the Mike Jarmus Show, ABC News, and finally
I turned down the Larry King Live show. I'd just about had enough. I
was on ABC News, though, about three weeks ago.
We built two of the devices we saw in the Lab Shopkeeper's
Notebook. One of them was a semiconductor device. This semiconductor
device we called the "Transfer Capacitor", and it has actually shocked
the industry. People called me "lunatic" and "liar" and every
conceivable name in the book for a period of 11 months as we described
the transfer capacitor's unusual capability. It can be made about the
size of a molecule, it can be controlled by microvolts of electricity,
it produces no heat and it switches at 12 terahertz.
Does anyone know what a terahertz is? Intel Pentium's transistors
switch at 500 megahertz or some small multiple thereabouts. This thing
is 12,000 times faster than the fastest transistors we've ever
built. We tested it. We actually went out and got some silver alkane
from a company in Pennsylvania that makes semiconductor materials. We
built one, we tested it. We then realised that we could build it very
dense.
We got some friends who operated a company called InMos, who had some
semiconductor materials, and over six months - this is two years ago -
we built an 8-gigabyte solid-state hard drive in a space about 'yay'
big...poker-chip-sized...operating at the same speed, 12 terahertz,
capable of replacing the memory of a PC. We subsequently built 2,500
of them and sent them out in the form of test kits for people in
industry to evaluate - people who refused to believe that such a thing
could exist. We sent them to Rohm & Haas; we sent them to Intel. We
got some of them back. People didn't even want to look at them: "What
is this nonsense?" Motorola wouldn't take one, interestingly. Texas
Instruments took one.
In any event, for six months I had to put up with some of the most
obnoxious, insulting, nasty comments you could imagine, even when I
was at meetings of my own professional conferences. "The crazy alien
guy with his flying-saucer transistor" - that was typical.
Ultimately what bailed us out was that a friend of mine who used to
work for IBM, now for Lucent, managed to convince his private funding
agency to give Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories a grant to check us out
at ACC. He picked Lawrence Berkeley because they probably have the
highest integrity of all the physics laboratories in the world - the
ones who had the 10,000-foot racetrack, made out of 12 million tons of
silver, that in 1947 must have knocked Henry Morganthal right out of
his leather chair when it was requested. They tested using the same
procedures, but they had a much better laser than we did. We only had
a little laser at Princeton. They had a big laser with which they
could watch the movement of electrons, and they verified not only the
function but the speed. So, Lucent managed to double-check our work,
even though it won't officially admit it.
What the "T-cap" or Transfer Capacitor really is, is a metal-insulated
dielectric junction semiconductor based on silver alkane. It works on
the principle whereby electrons strike the bond in question, elevate
its energy level and, boom, what was an insulator becomes a conductor
in a half of a millionth of a billionth of a second! Very fast! It
persists for about two thousandths of those millionths of a billionths
of a second and turns itself off. We use two of them in a pair, one to
refresh the other, and they nearly never lose any electrons. Once we
charge them up, they stay charged for an hour. So we only need a tiny
bit of power to power them. They produce no heat. We can't measure
heat from these things because the heat, if it were there, is absorbed
back into the substance, the silver alkane, because of its unusual
propensities.
Now, everyone who has ever owned a PC knows how much heat today's
computer microprocessors generate. It's unearthly! And the faster they
get, the more heat they generate. The power they consume is being
turned into heat, like a toaster oven. That's why people call PCs
"video toasters". This thing, if it were used to replace the
transistors, the 130 million or so throughout your PC, would produce
no heat. Instead of consuming 150 watts, it would probably consume
one-thousandth of a watt. And it's been sitting on the shelves for
nearly 50 years!
In any event, we've got this story, and 9,000 messages and news items
about it. Really strange things and people that come on: a fellow by
the name of Wang on the private alleged web identities of two very
public figures; fraudulent publications about ACC; hackers who hack
into our website.
If you go to our website and read through it, you'll be truly
amazed. You'll be stunned, you'll be shocked. You will also walk away
no longer a sceptic, if you were. If you're someone who believed, you
will now see what I call "third party circumstantial evidence" that
verifies that something very unusual happened in New Mexico in 1947.
We recently received, courtesy of the Russian Federation, a transcript
of a statement on the subject by Leonid Alexiev. Leonid Alexiev, a
Russian General, chaired a blue-ribbon committee to look into this in
1997, when it was brought to their attention when Bill Clinton went to
Russia and some students stood up and said, "We saw this website
called American Computer, and there it was said that the Defense
Department has a UFO in the United States. Is this true, Mr Clinton?"
Bill got up and said, "I don't know. No, no, it's not true. But wait a
minute. I tried to ask the Defense Department, but they wouldn't tell
me."
In any event, the Russians decided to put together this committee, and
I don't know if they spent the millions of dollars on our account;
they might have. They sent us a copy of the transcript of the report
by Alexiev, which was also carried on The Learning Channel, TLC, last
week. The Russians have decided there's an alien presence in our solar
system, based on all the evidence, on these things they've examined.
They've somehow got a hold of pictures of our transcapacitor from our
lab. I don't know how, because we've never taken any. Leave it to the
Russians! The KGB doesn't exist anymore; it's called the MSB now,
right? And Alexiev has gone public, as have the Russians, and as a
result of his report he has now been appointed by...what's the name of
the head of the Russian Republic, the drunken guy? Yeltsin...Boris has
appointed him head of the Russian Space Command.
As an aside, we thought we would solicit a few senators' opinions. We
solicited the offices of Senator Kennedy - another man who likes the
glass of wine occasionally. In any event, we got a very strange
reaction from the office of Senator Kennedy. They sent us a folio
about a study that was done on funding, that was publicised by the
Senator's office. In the middle of it they had yellowed out a section
that talked about the deep space probe series that NASA is sending out
- the Deep Space 1. I think they're naming them after that Star Trek
show, Deep Space 9. When they get to nine, I don't know what they'll
do!
In any event, Deep Space 3 or Deep Space 4 is slated to receive a
piece of equipment called a "laser cannon". At Lincoln Labs there's a
funded project afoot to develop, on a rush basis, an offensive weapon
based on laser technology, because wherever this deep-space probe is
going, they believe they need it. Deep space is the space outside of
the solar system, or at the extreme ends of the solar system.
Apparently Senator Kennedy was one of the sponsors, but the senators
and congressmen do not hold the same opinion as the Defense Department
and the Air Force about whether there's an alien presence in or right
outside of our solar system.
So, right now, that's about where we're up to. We're starting to
commercialise the transfer capacitor and look at partners; we're going
to get it out there. We figured, why not? We've spent so much money on
the research investigation, we might as well see if we can sell these
things to people.
British Telecom has jumped in and stated they've placed a
letter-of-intent order with us. They're using it in a product they
call the "Soul Catcher" chip. We've had some preliminary discussions
with a company called Shipley, the world's largest manufacturer of
semiconductor materials.
We've had discussions with Intel, IBM. Just in the last few months, a
guy from IBM said, "You should have been dealing with us all along."
"Well, why didn't you come to us?" "Well, I'm coming to you now."
"There are a lot of people who are interested." "Well, we're IBM."
"So? You had these in your lab all along and couldn't get them to
work!"
We're not sure what direction it's all going to go in, but I just
wanted to end with this. This morning, as I was going up in the
elevator, I felt like I was hanging upside down, holding the world up
with my feet. The next time you get in the elevator out there, think
about that. That's how we feel at ACC.
We want to fill cats with electronics and make electronics more like dogs.
On the Female Rest Room: Hey, isn't that a cute little AIBO thing ... come here boy
On your desktop: Ohh ... Ahhh
Does that mean it can go visit Laika?
Sony is on the right track with the AIBO, but these mutts need a better Mind.
As the pet robot dogs and robot personal assistants get more advanced, they will enjoy their own robot sociality.
Then, together, we robots and humans will reach Technological Singularity.
Lets not ignore the advances made in the new AIBO design:
o New leg-humping algorithm for extra comedy
o Now licks balls!
o Spent batteries now drop out of the AIBO's ass.
o New code revision allows the AIBO to shove his nose the crotch of anyone who comes over to visit.
o Will no longer try to assert its dominance over the vaccum cleaner.
o No longer attacks small children
Bowie J. Poag
PSone or PS2 games ?
and where do I plug the control pads ???
What ? Me, worry ?
uh, guys? remember Sony Uses DMCA To Shut Down Aibo Hack Site?
just checked, site's still down. Move along folks.
These items sound exotic, and well, I don't think any one can make them on their own. You can however get one fully assembled. I'm not in a particularly advanced area of the US, but I saw them at the local Mall! I know that there is a specialized dealership called a "Pound" that will sell them refurbished at a great discount.
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
is combine this with that robot that digests sugars [slashdot.org], and wire the 'output' up to the..ahem... rear.., program it to find the nearest corner when the need arises, and *poof* we have an AIBO that's even more realistic!
house training would simply be a matter of punting it into the proper corner when it starts getting that funny walk
ìì!
heh, sounds like a great way to get back at that pesky neighbor who's cat is always making all that damned racket at night...
It's simple, really. Just follow these easy steps:
- Convince all neighbors to buy AIBO pets once they can do this.
- Dissect AIBO home station, extracting components that do RF communication with pets.
- Mount said components on neighbor's cat.
- Watch in glee as AIBO pets attempt to plug into "recharging station".
- Repeat as necessary with offending cats, employ shotgun technique if ineffective after several days.
My cats live indoorsHe doesn't want one until it is "..smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low..."
:) heheh
OK then mate. Take a trip down to the local electronics store to pick up some optical range sensors (or even a mini-GPS unit for those long distance walks!), maybe a couple of minor burns while soldering and several K's of asm and you're there!
--RupertJ
Must...fight...urge....
Must...resist...flameing....
Noooooo!
New AIBO Demo'd
I find it incredible how the slashdot editorship
"News for robot-dog loving faggots".
At least, that's why I come here.
As other posters have pointed out, Sony is in legal squabbles with Aibo hacking sites. A POV that paints a rather disturbing (if one can use such a word in the context of a robot pet dog) picture of Sony's tactics can be found here. After reading the above, I'd like to urge people to sign a petition to send a message to Sony so people could customize their Aibos. (And signing the petition also helps Red Cross, which actually is something that matters.)
Universities already customize their Aibo software to participate in Robot Cup, and I don't see why individual users shouldn't be allowed to do the same. Sony will probably use the same prohibitive pricing as it currently uses with all Aibo software, but it would be a start.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
ensive
Heh, don't mod me down yet. Click the first link first.
make it now look more like the robot in the film _Red Planet_ to me than the first AIBOs did.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0199753
While following links about the aibo, I found about those cute ERS-310 aibos...
Hey, they can even sing songs! What else could you hope for?
2001-11-08 19:01:01 New AIBO slated for release (articles,toys) (rejected)
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
Throw a little hydrogen powered wankle engine in the thing and all you get out is 02 and h20?
Employ a "farting" algorithm to expel the 02 and a way to program it to "water the plants" from time to time.
And, with that kind of power it can chase cars, cats and intruders away. When it is lonely it can rev the engine up and you'll hear a "dog like whine".
Only down side is you'd never be able to make an "AIBO sled dog team"...than kind of engine would be a bi*ch to start in cold weather.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
I always thought of the Aibos as cute, but this new model looks downright ugly to me. All of the lights/buttons/gear/whatever on the head looks a lot like someone smiling with great big metal braces on their teeth.
What would be really cool is if the aibo would be given native support for 802.11 networking and shipped with a build-in http/ftp server and interface. This would mean that anyone could control it and all the great movie/picture functions could be used by anyone, not just those with windows installed on their PCs.
I'd never buy an AIBO. Sony blew it. I'd rather build my own robot out of
Lego Mindstorms stuff.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the robot in the movie Red Planet suddently begin hunting down and killing the human members of the expedition because of a software error?
I think a sure winner that SONY finally have relized that the best way to seel the Aibo's is to change the apparence from the look of a cute and harmless robotpet to something that would sneak around the house watching you, and then attack you when you least expect it.
I still dig on AIBO, but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
First off, get off your duff and decide to build your robot "pet", instead of buying one. While you may or may not have the skills needed, they can be learned and developed. After you have built your robot "pet", and actually see it working - you will know true joy at seeing something you built actually doing things - perhaps even things that make it seem "pet-like".
But where to start?
You could start with familiar books on the shelf at a local Bookstar or Amazon, such as The Robot Builder's Bonanza: 99 Inexpensive Robotics Projects by Gordon McComb (ISBN 0-07-136296-7). However, while I strongly reccommend this book, it focuses more on the mechanical side of things (which _is_ important), but not the software/logic side, which for behavioral systems, will be very important (otherwise it just becomes a programmed or r/c car with a "robot" look). So what should one do?
If you want to build a real robotic pet, here are the books you should have in your library of robotic books (among others, of course):
The David L. Heiserman "Series":
Build Your Own Working Robot (Hardbound: ISBN 0-8306-6841-1 - Softbound: ISBN 0-8306-5841-6), TAB Book 841
How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot (Hardbound: ISBN 0-8306-9760-8 - Softbound: ISBN 0-8306-1241-6), TAB Book 1241
Robot Intelligence (with experiments) (Hardbound: ISBN 0-8306-9685-7 - Softbound: ISBN 0-8306-1191-6), TAB Book 1191
Though looong out of print, these three volumes are essential, and should be read in the order given, as they build upon one another. The final book in the series picks up where the prior one left off, but goes in the direction of software based "virtual" robots - an early form of virtual artificial life, if you will. However, it is clearly seen that the author intended the reader to apply these programs toward the robot designed and built in the prior book - and thus take them from the virtual to the "real".
Another book worth exploring is called "How to Build Your Own Working Robot Pet" by Frank DaCosta (TAB Book 1141 - sorry, no ISBN, my copy is shipping currently) - also long out of print. From what I remember in the edition I read, it details how to build a small robot with very definite pet-like qualities (whereas Heiserman focused on what he termed "Evolutionary Adaptive Machine Intelligence" or EAMI for short). I am not sure if there was any contact between Heiserman and DaCosta, but both of their books, and a host of others (notably ones by Edward L. Safford) were published around the same time frame by TAB Books. All of the devices described by DaCosta and Heiserman had the capability (depending on your skills) of auto-recharging themselves when their batteries got low (indeed, Heiserman believed such capability was a paramount thing for an autonomous system, and went into great detail on the design of the system and the "coding" and logic for it).
What is most amazing about all of these authors was the time when they were doing this, which was the late 1970's through early 1980's. Such robotic experimentation peaked at around the mid-1980's, then for unknown reasons, went underground. Hobby robotics is now starting to pick up again with a new generation, but the newcomers seem to have lost the "history" behind their experimentations.
These old hobby robot experiments still have great value for experimentors today. Read the books I have outlined above, and apply the principles (I would not suggest anyone to apply the exact methods used in building the original robots - as it just wouldn't be cost effective anymore - both of the first two Heiserman books effectively detailed building small computer systems, the first nearly entirely logic based, with a very Brooks-like subsumptive architecture, long before Brooks - and the second a true 8-bit computer system, using Intel's 8085 CPU!). However, these principles could easily be applied to a BASIC Stamp, or to nearly any other microcontroller - or you could go a step further and use an on-board laptop motherboard or similar.
These are the books I would recommend - apply the "old-school" knowledge of Heiserman, DaCosta, and if you want, Safford - and meld it with a little of Brooks and McComb - imagine the possibilities!
Finally, while you are at it - think of this for me:
Note these older TAB Books - how well laid out they were, how clear the diagrams and details were, the way everything is described, as well as the graphic art. Then take another look at today's so-called "technical" books: hardly will you find an equivalent. Even a recent look between McComb's first and second edition of his "Robot Builder's Bonanza" (I have both) will show you what has occurred - a true loss in quality (the first edition was published by TAB Books, the second by McGrawHill, under some "TAB Electronics" name).
I also want you to think and wonder about where these early robots, and their builders, went - were they relegated to a scrap yard (the robots, not the builders)? Do their builders still own them? Are they in a museum some where?
I seriously wonder about these things - I have a ton of old robot books from the early 1970's to the mid-1980's describing these robots, and there is hardly any information about where they ended up at! History lost! Both hobbiest and commercial ventures seem gone to history (I tend to wonder, on the commercial end, what happened to the Mosher/GE Hardiman "suit", as well as Odetics, Inc's ODEX-1?). Tod Lofburow's (sp?) KIM-1 based triangular hobby robot (which he described in another TAB book, if you want to look it up). I remember in another book a fascinating picture of a six-foot tall humanoid appearing robot named C.H.A.R.L.I.E., who was named after the builder, but the acronym stood for something, which wasn't detailed in the book, as the book was less of a technical book, and more of a "coffee table"-type book - where did this robot end up at? Are all of these devices collecting dust? Will they end up on Ebay?
Please - if anyone has ANY answers, I would most appreciate them...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
You know, grammar/spelling nazis are not total losers. But they're close.
Real pets can be trained to find the automatic food and water dishes. Then you only have to put out food every other day.
On the other hand feeding is an important part of the pet/owner relationship. So there's no real difference between openning a can and popping the dog into the base charger.
Real pet or robo pet, you have to feed them both. Unless you have barn cats that eat mice and drink rainwater. Then you have the ultimate in self sufficiency. But they're not very cuddly and don't live long.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
A separate issue is Sony's claim against the distribution of independently-created programs for the Aibo. In this area, Sony is attempting to use the DMCA in an unfortunate way. But while the sites providing such information are violating more basic, longstanding tenets of copyright law, they don't have the slightest chance of being taken seriously.
The creation of content for a platform, based on reverse engineering of that platform, has some legal precedent. The "unauthorized" creation of games for Nintendo consoles was one example that actually went to court and was found to be legal. If the DMCA prevents such actions, independently created programs for the Aibo would make a good basis for a test case to have these provisions overturned. However, the waters are so badly muddied by the distribution of Sony's copyrighted material, that a successful legal defense of these sites is probably all but impossible. These sites bring this on themselves - they should stick to distributing things that they have created, and they'll be on much firmer ground, and might even find that organizations like the EFF or ACLU would be willing to defend them.
You know, it just struck me that people would be more willing to look over AIBO's shortcomings if the thing weren't so crummy looking. Looking at this pic, I thought to myself: If I were directing a sci-fi movie, and needed a robot that said, "stylish post modern digi companion".....well, lets just say whoever brought me this Robby-inspired monstrosity would be fired on spot. Sony should license Apple to do their industrial design for these things...call them iBo or something. =)
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
maybe the new killer app is something you can hack
which doesn't scare your friends.
Coding scares people. Maybe a FreePet will change that.
We have FreeDos, can't we have FreeDog?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Apparently the dogs cant tilt their heads too far up to stop them from looking up women's skirts with their camera heads. I heard this from one of the guys who was working on the AIBO robo-soccer league dogs.
This is gonna be moded down to hell but the link to the AIBO site with flash doesn't work on macs.
I still dig on AIBO, but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
Yeah, considering a consumer robot almost 20 years ago could do it, using an i8088 and was about the same price.
http://www.mobileedproductions.com/hero2000.html
The Navigator 2 software pack lets owners see the world through the digital camera inside an Aibo's nose and lets the robot be controlled via a wireless data link at a distance of up to 90 metres (295 feet).
Just imagine you can see what the robodog sees from below... And I can control it to go to anywhere from my cubicle...
Afterwards though I asked the person who built it about the possibility of session hijacking and he said "security is the next thing we have to work on". So maybe you can sit in on the session now. Sticking the memory stick up the Aibo's butt was pretty hilarious though. The rest was pretty dry discussion of overall software idea and market, not a lot of meat for engineering types since I guess they don't want it to be hacked..
There are two new models that look like cute little pandas which most diehards don't like but young people seem to find cute enough to watnt to purchase.
Also Omron just came out with a robotic cat which I saw in a store (RanKing RanQueen, Shibuya Station 2F) two days ago. It looks like a hell kitty, in that it is a BIG cat (not a kitten) and while made up to look realistic it really isn't. Kind of like a cat nightmare. But it did have a number of interesting cat-like reactions to me even though it was stuck inside a plexiglass box. No info yet on future networking possibilities with it, but seems like it would be pretty easy to slide your own packages under the fur without anyone noticing!
In a press release Sony said that with the 220 they will encourage people to write their own software for it.... meanwhile back on the ranch they are still hassling AiboPet about the hacks he wrote for the 11x's and 210's..... Heelllloooo is there anyone in Sony who is keeping track of their latest policies???? Can we hack them or can't we???????
....Be careful of dueling with dragons - you are crunchy and taste good with tomato sauce....
Funny -- works fine on my Pismo/OmniWeb/OS X 10.1. Methinks you need to look at your plug-ins.
This AIBO just isn't as cute as the last model. It's head is flat, and proportioned like a bulldog's, and the flashing lights under the shield are creepy. Old AIBO had proportions like a puppy, but this one is like a small adult dog, and we all know what the world thinks of toy dobermans and poodles.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
I still dig on AIBO, but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
If it was affordable and hackable (without getting lawyers involved) it could be a great, even useful, toy that would make furby look like a pile of puke.
No offense to the interesting furby hacks and hackers out there, but imagine a cheap less featured Aibo in millions of homes. Okay we all have PCs now, where are our damn robots?
Thank you voice of reason. I would hate to not be like everybody else and by something from a big bad company. Another life saved here. What is the total up to now?
Anyone else have flashbacks, upon reading this slashticle, to the movie Batteries Not Included?
Believe me, you don't want them recharging themselves. Not always a good thing. It's all fun and games until you get the electric bills..
Until Aibo is intelligent enough to lick peanut butter off my balls, I'll stick with my German SHepherd thank you very much
The next Aibo is code-named "Scrappy Doo"
It will lick peanut butter off your ballz...
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I cum all over Aibo's plastic visor. I have Aibo's head up my butt as I type.....
Now that I can talk over the net. Does anyone know the protocol. I'd really like to do some reverse ingeneering on it.
:-)
Can you give it a IP address?
Imagine a bunch of these with a IP V6 adr. each and all of them on the internet..
Maybe then that we realize that Cyberdyne systems in real life was Sony.
As others have pointed out, Sony still hasn't made the aibohack situation right, so screw Sony's new Aibo products until they do. For that matter, screw all of Sony's products.
But I digress...
The remote control via a video link feature isn't new to the 220 series. The 210's can do the same thing with an Aibo wireless card (apparently just an Orinoco Silver card shaped so only it will fit into the Aibo and they can charge $200), the Navigator software and a PC with a wireless card.
Actually, the 210 (previous version, not counting the Pokemon-lookin' 310) and the new 220 are pretty much the same underneath all that chrome. Sony is going to offer a kit that will allow the 210 to become a 220. The brick inside is the same, just the appendages are different. The new software will work with the 210 or the 220, as well as accessories (it looks like the 210 charging station will work with the 220).
What if the Hokey-Pokey really is what it's all about?
Oh yeah, when AIBO can do that it will be so much more Useful.
I still dig on AIBO, but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
Translation: "I can't afford an AIBO and Sony won't give me one for free for plugging them. Therefore, I shall choose to bitch about it and say it's not good enough."
BBC News is now reporting that Sony researchers are experimenting with increased speech capacity. Here's one of the first papers about the increased-capacity talking Aibo project. This is the English/HTML translation of the French/PDF version (which seems to be unavailable for download) and so is a little messy. Unfortunately, Sony's Computer Research Laboratory seems to be down at the moment. As an anthropologist interested in the evolution of speech, I'm absolutely fascinated by this, and whish I knew where to find more of the speech recognition software specs.
Do androids dream of electric sheep yet?
Do something about world hunger. Click here
place to buy or sell an original SONY AIBO. I have one for sale and was wondering where else to sell besides ebay. thanks