Slashdot Mirror
Lego Segway
Jeff Lalo writes "This Guy has built a Lego version of Dean Kamens Segway Human Transporter. This thing was constructed using only Legos, two cheap (~$40) custom sensors and some smart programing using the open source BrickOS for the Lego RCX. The LegWay, as the creator calls it, can balance itself on two wheels and follow a line. Pretty cool for few lego blocks!"
Was I the only one expecting to see a life-sized segway? I thought this guy was riding around in one!
> Two sensors? For an object to maneuver itself in 3D space it would need 3 sensors
Counter-proof: You only have 2 eyes, yet you can.
Funny, the only video I've seen of the segway involves a guy falling off it (it was linked to boingboing.net a while ago). You can cram it all you like with gyroscopes and the best software to predict what a person might be doing and how to correct it and still get crummy results. This is one of the many reasons the segway will be an industrial only toy. Its far cheaper to use a working inner-ear mixed with simple but effective technology like a bicycle or a scooter to fulfill urban transportation needs. I wouldn't be surprised to see if the learning curve to ride the segway properly is somewhere around learning to ride a bike properly.
The segway is a great gee-whiz high-tech toy, but that doesn't necessarily make it practical for more than a couple different applications and it certainly isn't the fix-all DeKa would have the public believe.
Given the ease at which GeoCities bandwidth limits are exceeded, maybe Slashdot could host a mirror to link to from here. This would be in case the person in question needs his site for the rest of the month.
I really think this is starting to become a problem for people doing really cool stuff who don't have the money for a really good webserver. If slashdot thinks that a 20MB site is cool enough to post, surely Slashdot has that 20 MB of space on the its webserver to donate for a limited time. This would ensure that people like me can get to the site and people who do the cool shit aren't punished for doing cool shit.
SetupWeasel
why not set up something like google's cache? they don't seem to need permission to archive previous copies of websites. Nor does anyone seem to be threatening to sue www.archive.org.
Perhaps make the "cache" portion of the submission perl script check robots.txt, so site admins can forbid slashdot to archive an article..
-gleam
this