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Wanted: Home for Adventurous Robots
mr.crutch writes "According to an article by the Associated Press, Carnegie Mellon University is actively seeking at least 600 acres of abandoned land in Western Pennsylvania on which to test robots developed by the National Robotics Engineering Consortium. Land speculators may want to contact real estate agents in the Pittsburgh area to cash in!"
i guess conventions are too dangerous and judges are too fragile :-(
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
they can come over my house (masteryoda)
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
wow. slashdot has ad's as news articles now....
can i post my apartment wanted ad here?
vv
Insert Terminator reference here...
Is why they keep buzzing my house,
and probing me anally.
Oops, I meant banally.
They'd fit right in, poor language, bad dress sense. Only problem is that like the slots they are miles more intelligent than the punters who play on them.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Just one day a year, could Battlebots fans please use those 600 acres? I'd really like to see how far Nightmare's blade sends shrapnel.
No disassemble number five!
600 seems like a lot of land to me. what type of bots do they need to test on such an expanse? I understand if they wanted to build a lot of buildings and differnet environs - but seriously... I think that regardless of the reasons why they tell you they want 600 acres - they are probably hoping to have the 600 acres donated to them so they can just use it to expand their campus, and that not all of that land would be dedicated to testing bots. But they are using the robot testing argument so as to convince some donor that is interested in robots that they are doing a "good thing" for robotics research...
all educational institutions do this. they ask for a large X for project A when they really want to use X for proj ABCDEFG or even just A and Z.
(And, no, there's no way I could possibly move into my neighborhoood today - so don't ask to borrow any money, OK?).
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I'd like to see a place where hobyists could send their robots on a survival trip. Just plug in a wireless card (or wathever) and follow your robot via the internet. Now that would be cool/nerdisch.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Go CMU. On the upside, they've got a lot better chance of getting their 600 acres than many other urban universities. There's tons of land out in Western PA, if you get 30 miles or so out of Pittsburgh (which I don't think would be too inconvenient). However, the suburbs are growing very quickly...especially Cranberry Township, which is one of the top 5 regions in the United States for growth in the past couple of years, from what I've heard.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Q: How many Carnegie Mellon Ph.D.s does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Two. One to change the bulb, and one to pull the chair out from under him.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Bender!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I doubt they're looking for land right in Pittsburgh/near campus...in the article they mention strip mines/quarries...they'd have a hard time getting 600 acres in Pittsburgh, but like I say in another post, go 30 miles out and they've got plenty of space for testing grounds. Especially if they want rough terrain...there are a few abandoned coal mines about and my grandparents live near a strip mining region.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
If they need a place to test these things why not send them the Afghanastan or Iraq? That way they have rough terrain, and they get to kill bad guys too.
can you imagine being some hunter or hiker who misses the "verboten! cyborg proving grounds, blah blah etc..." signs and sees one of those things in the woods? just as the military secrecy around area 51 has become a sort of touchstone for all sorts of modern myths about ufos, can you imagine what kind of folklore will develop amongst accidental visitors and curious but uninformed local teenagers about this "area T2" (i guess you could call it that)? ;-P
;-P
2012, two teenagers creeping through the underbrush in western pennsylvania, near dusk:
teen1: dude! we gotta get home.. they dug old mines here too deep and let loose shape-shifting metal men from deep in the crust
teen2: no way man, i heard a colony of ants developed sentience around here and are building six-legged attack drones in their image to mount an assault on humans!
teen3, running by real fast: i'm gonna shit in my pants dudes! this cold dead looking thing just told me her name was Grace and wanted to register for the next pennsylvania geocaching association dinner!
5 years after that, they'll make a "blair witch" knockoff in which 3 lost teenagers are presumed to be killed and eaten by long-lost golem men brought to life in decaying blast furnaces and steel mill ruins by 19th century satanists
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why would someone simply abandon 600 acres of land in western Pennsylvania? Perhaps because it has been strip mined?
The robots should have fun in that terrain.
tato (and tato only)
This post is strictly opinion, including the spelling.
How cool would it be to use Centraila? An abandoned town with underground mine fires buning since '61. Sounds like a cool robot proving ground.
i a2.htm
Pics of Centralia: http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/central
Talk about potenitally noisy neighbors though... "Sorry our 500kg robot tore down your fence and let the animals out. It was only our of sight for a few minutes."
I bet they'll still check for abandoned mine shafts and wells just as carefully as anyone else.
------------------------
Jack not name, jack job!
This is one of the bots that will be tested.
ObFuturama reference:
I think they'll end up letting the expanding campus encroach upon these 600 acres. Maybe they could put a robot frat there along with some robot lecture halls.
...the area previously used for underground nuclear weapon testing?
Hate me!
Maybe my company would like to sell them their "wasteland" of dead computers that they refuse to hand over to geeks like me...
They are clearly out to (ahem) immanentize the eschaton. The authorities are helpless; our only hope is for hordes of Battlebot operators to bring their robots and fight the deltas to a standstill. Botniks, this is your hour!
(Sadly, the guy who approved the script for "Mortal Kombat: The Movie" is probably stroking his chin right now, going "hmm...")
I just read your journal posting and I'm glad you're not in a position of power.
While the current situation isn't great, it sure is better than your whacked out ideas.
Find a solution that doesn't lower the standard of living for everyone AND brings everyone else's up and then I'll listen.
You need a system where excess goods (and services?) are given to the people that need them the most, but you also need enough incentives to get those people to work their way out of poverty.
Lowering the standard of living for "Americans" doesn't solve anything, it just makes it suck for everyone.
Come back when you've got something creative instead of all this useless jiberish.
hmmmm, I got at least 700 acres of various terrains upon the death of a certian relitive who was rather fond of me....... Don't like that Durnk much either...
(Score:0, Interesting)
To counteract some of the (apparently uninformed) negative comments I've seen, check out this article on the same subject from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Just make sure you land is actually *in* Pennsylvania and will remain there... those crazy New Englanders keep changing the boundaries....
Dad: Clean up these robots for testing before dinner.
Son: But I was going to the tashi station to pick up some power converters!
600 acres is roughly one square mile, or about a half-square mile per site. That's not an enormous amount of land for a robotics testing facility, especially for groups such as CMU and NREC. If you want a good amount of varied terrain, you're asking for a lot of space, particularly when dealing with larger/faster robots. Considering they're looking for "junk" land, I think it's a great use of otherwise abandoned space ...
The link is supposed to be here, but the server is down.
Screw robots, what about the saga of lobsterboy? Can you believe this is a respected CS school? My parents called, they want their $120,000 back.
Intrigue
Drunken Misadventure
Vow of silence broken
a new beginning
It's all fun and games until a rampaging robot destroys half your city. . .
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
Wanted: home for amorous robots
if they're willing to travel a couple of hours, maybe the Rigas family or Adelphia would be willing to part with some of their holdings. There's ton's of land for sale around Coudersport.
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog