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U.S. Will Use Robots to Patrol Water Supply
bl8n8r writes "By the summer of 2005, the United States will have an underwater network of robots monitoring the nations fresh water supply. Realtime environmental details will be used to help safeguard the nations drinking water. The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms."
I've been saying over and over that our enviromental problems can be solved by technology, rather than by painful asceticism, and things like this are constantly proving me right. A perfect example of how robots are working behind the scenes to ensure that we remain protected and healthy.
One of the best things about this system is its ability to track pollution as it occurs, letting scientists manage it and make informed, on-the-spot decisions. Though from what I understand, it's not quite ready as an early warning system.
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
Let's certainly hope not.
The Army reading list
The article only mentions a project to monitor the Seneca River, some connected lakes, and an existing system that monitors part of the water supply for New York City. That's not quite "the nation's fresh water supply," although it is certainly a promising technology.
Wouldn't it be easier to just use sharks mounted with lasers on their friggin' heads?
Are these robots going to be powered by fish flatulence, by chance?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Oh please, will someone please think of the robots!
Wait till they unionize, we're fucked.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Are robots any more trustworthy than humans, and less likely to pee in the water just to get back at their fleshy masters?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
From the terrible secret of space!^W Water!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Carbon based life forms use water for proper functioning and have a vested interest in maintaining a good water supply. What does a robot care about our water? A bit of charging and the occasional oil and they're happy.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I have this image of a man pulling over to pee in a resevoir, only to have a many tentacled robot emerge from the water to cut off the source of pollution.
i've said it before, and i'll say it again--i'm a bioengineered superbeing bent on collecting all the mod canisters and ammo clips hidden under the water. how come nobody is protecting my rights??! how the hell am i supposed to take out mj-12 and merge with helios if there are ROBOTS under the water?!
alright. i've been playing too much deus ex. but that doesn't mean if you prick me i won't pull out my crossbow and totally tranquilize your ass.
I just hope these robots arent made with anything that can contaminate the water supply if they malfunction/leak/blow up.
With all the robots patrolling US waters, who's going to play chess against the humans?
I hope they run FreeBSD in lieu of Windows NT. We've only had about four stalled destroyers due to that operating system. They'll probably end up running something like QNX or VxWorks, though, which are realtime operating systems. Still much better choices than Windows NT/2K/XP.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
we can't give them the leverage of controlling our water supply. i can just imagine them saying:
"all your water are belong to us. har har har"
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Step #1: Don't pollute it.
So we don't have to worry as much about the spread of Nazi propoganda. But take a look at the story icon. That's definitely a robot giving a Sig-Heil salute. Now, I realize that by talking about the topic I'm probably far too on-topic here, but seriously, could we find a non-Nazi robot for our stories?
Ahh but can these robots protect us from those deadly water striders that make us thirsty? They don't break the surface of the water, you know.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
...welcome our new robotic underlords.
You've been watching too much hentai. No more anime for YOU!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
welcome our new underwater robot overlords!
Hell yeah we finally turned the tide on those pesky machines in Revolutions. There is a spoon!
Millions die from water contaminated by rusty robots.
Keep in mind who these robots masters will be. No possibility of whistleblowers here, the robot outside the big fiberglass battery separator plant doesn't care what's in the water coming from the big drain pipe.
I don't know if it will make the US's lakes and rivers safer but I bet they'll be less skinny dipping.
history?
...to actually implement and enforce some decent environmental standards? AFAIK, the past four years has been a tremendous step backwards regarding water quality regulations.
In other words, patrolling the rivers isn't going to do a goddamn bit of good when whatever minimal laws don't even have any teeth.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Finally, something patrolling our waters that can have laser's mounted on their heads!
It's a sound principle, but remember to cover your asses just in case things go wrong!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
the robots will leak radioactive compounds into the water - hence mutating all of us into water elemental beings and we will become 90% water instead of 80% - hence causing a bigger problem then we started with. But! It will make an excellent movie 2 years after it happens.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
cripes - does no one see anything creepy about this. I'd be worried about sitting on the toilet, you might get a nasty (painful) surprise.
Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government." - Lenny Bruce
National Security brought to you by Aibo.
Big deal - there was a robot patrolling our waterways years ago. I believe its name was Bruce.
BaaaDa...baada...dadadadadadadada...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You know you've been reading too many Web pages when you're disappointed that "carbon based lifeforms" wasn't used as hyperlink text to an example of one.
I had a conversation with these robots, and they explained to me how they will protect me from water-borne pollutants.
The first one declared that his function was to push a water sample into a purification chamber. The second one then declared that his function was to shove pollutants out of the water.
After a brief debate over which function was superior, they agreed that water-borne pollutants have a terrible power. Then they politely asked me to go stand by the stairs. That was weird.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
By the summer of 2005, the United States will have an underwater network of robots monitoring the nations fresh water supply
Hah, they have robots in there now.
I've been slowly leeching arsenic into my pipes trying to lure it to my workshop.
-Adam
When will this outsourcing madness end?!?!
Don't they realize that our economy is just going into the toilet when you take jobs currently done by humans and replace them with cheaper robots?!?
robot 1: "You seen Sarah Connor?" robot 2: "No, just more farkin water"
--Gentoo Baby!
And, in the robots' off-time, they can also teach the nations youth proper language:
Kid: Shut you face!
Lingo: No, shut up your face.
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
Holy crap those things are UGLY! And from the picture it looks like they're meant to float on the water? That's just asking for trouble. "Mom, I'm gonna go climb on that yellow floating thing in the lake. Oh, and I'm gonna pee next to it and cause a terrorist scare. OK? Bye!"
"... task of collecting water samples..."
We have been using 'robots' to collect water samples for many years - I believe the article states that the new breed of robots will directly sense the water quality, with no sampling required. A small but important semantic difference.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Recently in Canada a good number of weather stations went from human operated to just a set of instruments and a network connection. It does save money but you occasionally get wonky readings like a "Recent snowshower" in July which a human would never report. Perhaps better programming could be used to ensure that multiple readings are used to filter out extraneous data but there will always be a need for at least a few carbon-based testers to go out there and install them, maintain them and check them when they act up. Similar issues will likely appear with robotic water testing.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
So, I guess someone seriously modded and subsequently cloned Koolio?
You're making this sound much more interesting than it is >:)
I want killer robots running around killing anyone that approaches their precious water, not some weak water sample collecting robots a 3 year old baby can beat!!
You _ARE_ my trolling hero!
Nice touch regurgitating the article and getting modded up. Combined with this I say you are unstoppable!
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
Breakfast served all day!
Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face. A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Stranded.org
"The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms."
I'm sure these carbon based lifeforms are happy they are having their jobs outsourced to robots next year. Why make it sound like we are doing these divers a favor by taking away their work?
Lake Powell Article
Lake Powell Photo
Lake Powell Satellite Image
Ipswich River in Mass
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Apparently, they are afraid to outright ban someone due to their twisted views of censorship.
Or possibly because they know if they outright ban the account, he'll just sign up for another one. Or maybe buy one on Ebay.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Isn't this how the Matrix got started?
In the spokane river, the maximum amount of fish you can eat is 2 per year.
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
You're talking to someone with a name of "EDITOR ABUSE" and a fresh user ID. He did just sign up for another one :)
The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms.
You know, "carbon based lifeform" is just so much cooler than saying the word "people" or "humans". It just makes this entire story 100x better.
This article should be flagged with a "WARNING: SUBMITTER IS A GIANT DORK" tag.
offtopic!? wtf, this article is about ROBOTS PATROLLING THE WATER. Offtopic would be if this were posted in the extremely exciting thread about Metric Paper Sizes...
some mods... it makes me wonder how they got mod points. time to metamoderate, i hope i get this message.
All posts start at 0. Your Slashdot settings assign specific weights to people with good/bad karma. You can change this in your user profile.
So it went something like this:
1. Troll posted
2. You loaded the page and your settings showed the 0 post at -1 due to parent's bad karma.
3. A moderator modded it down to "-1 offtopic".
4. You reloaded the page and jumped to a conclusion.
5. Profit
I see we have learned nothing from Hollywood. Anybody remember The Matrix, Terminator, etc.? Robots should NOT have control of the water supply!
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
How will these robots be able to distinguish between a terrorist attack and the republicans' rollback of environmental regulations?
Jeeze... We are right here. You dont need to talk about us like that.
I'm sure that John and Sarah Conner and Neo all felt that way. At first!
As we're marched off to our pods to provide energy for our robot overlords, in a dazed stupor because their water monitoring robot cohorts slipped us a collective mickey, I hope you have enough consciousness to remember this moment.
"We were the ones who blocked all the toilets"
"I'm sure that John and Sarah Conner and Neo all felt that way. At first! "
I know this is meant as a joke, but it's hard to laugh after reading so much Asimov lately.
"Derp de derp."
while it may seem to be a good idea to use robots for this, i just hope that they are attache via cable, in case some of the malfunction.
there's nothing like losing a few robots, and having their batteries and other materials leeching into the water supply!
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
..needs to watch their water...for..it might be contaminated by evildoers
"The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms."
No more rounding up chimps and forcing them into the water to test it for me!
Personally, the thought of the water supplies being patrolled by robots controlled by the New American Nazi Nation (i.e. the present government) doesn't fill me with confidence. I would guess the robots could be used as a relatively precise delivery agent for psychoactive drugs (compared to the old "dump 'em in the reservoir" trick the US Government usually pulls).
Score +5: Paranoid!
It was an effective method, except for the fact that the water tests always showed unusually high amounts of e coli and chimp hair. If you get convince the robots to wear diapers and hair-nets, you might be on to something.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Sorry, I thought it said "U.S. Will Use Robots to Petrol Water Supply", referring to a military plan to contaminate water supplies with gasoline. My mistake.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
All the while the US moves closer and closer to the Terrible Secret of Space!
I have well water you insensitive clod!!
Of course my supply has to come from somewhere but I'd assume the public supply would be tainted and noticed loooong before anything reached my own private well. I occasionally get some sand and grit but I'll take that over a blistering agent any day.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
thank goodness... now these robots can replace the humans who before were exposed to deadly dihydrogen monoxide every time they took a sample!
thank you, robots, for doing such dangerous work!
(Referring to Sideshow Bob)
Bart: He's planning something evil, I know it. It must have something to do with the town's water supply.
Milhouse: Maybe he's gonna pee in the river!
Bart: Mmm, nah, that's not his style.
"Brother from Another Series", from snpp.com
Get off my lawn.
"Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok in an orgy of blood and kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving" -Professor Frink
the robots will be remotely controlled by operators in India.
This is crazy. You're talking about millions of gallons of water. Do you know how much it'll take to pollute that? Maryland wastr treatment plants are known to be dumping 8x the legal limit of fecal bacteria, and they have yet to have anythign happen to them.
Poinsoning the nations drinking supply can only be effectively done in an area close to a user. Maybe a city block or street at most. Anything else would take HUGE amounts and would definately be suspicious.
If you really want to protect the country from terrorism, get us off a centralized power grid. And get off petrol. The day american homes supply the businesses with power, (with the power company securly locked int he middle to manage it) will th the day that we'll be safe. Unless you can't telecommute. Which is when you should be driving an electric vehicle. Hell your house will prooduce your own fuel for the car. It's "free" energy.
Water can be purified from almost any kind of contaminant. Energy can only be made (currently) at dams, reactors and windmills. (Solar is not big in the US, and nat-gas fuel cells still need a central line to the fuel company)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Ironic
And they'll be able to run for years at a time by utilizing nuclear reactors.
One person said they believe all of our environmental problems can be solved by technology and this is a perfect example of that......... What part of "Monitoring" has anything to do with solving environmental problems?
Hey, look there's an environmental problem! Call in the "We can do anything we please environmental squad!"
"Hi there, you'll have to stop producing steel, and you sir, you'll have to stop fertalizing your farm. And you ma'm, we're going to ban you from flushing bleach cleaning water down your toilet"
Doug
infofile systems inc.
Ace
...which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms.
Ah, carbon based lifeforms. You are the weakest link. Goodbye!
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
will do it cheaper. The Indian robots would do it too but they're all busy programming...
protecting us against the terrible dangers of dihidrogen monoxide in our water supply. Our water needs to be clean and safe from all impurities!
I'm looking to get rich. I've got steps #2 (????) and #3 (PROFIT!) planned out, but am having trouble coming up with #1.
1) Create in the general population a sense of fear of something. (It can be an irrational fear)
2) Make a product or service that helps reduce that fear. (And patent it)
3) Call the government and make them buy your patented product or service
4) Profit!
Or alternatively
1) Make a product or service. (And patent it)
2) Create in the general population a sense of fear of something so your product or service helps reduce the fear.
3) Sell the product or service for a reasonable price
4) Profit!
If we buy the idea that anything is at risk, that terrorists can do anything and I mean anything, there's nothing we can affor not buying to help us feel safer.
Fear and shopping, great combination. An it is good for businiess too!
By the way, who was the one sending anthrax in letters back in 2001, remember?
And I don't buy a plane crashed in the pentagon. Too much evidence against it.
My computer will do precisely as it's told, barring hardware failure. Whatever instructions I feed it, it will execute faithfully. However, it has no concept of if what it is doing is right or wrong. If my instructions are bad, even just one of them, it can go off and do something totally undesirable. Compare that to a human. If my instructions aren't perfectly clear, or one is wrong, they can usually figure that out and either correct it or ask for clarification.
Computers are much more reliable than humans at doing a task right, but onyl one you are absolutly sure they will do it right. You have to test ALL contengencies. Humans can react to unexpected situations, computers can't. Every situation must be expected and must have code to deal with it, or there can, and probably will, be problems.
As for people getting unemployed, while this is bad in the short term for those that it happens to, it is good in the long term for scoiety and the economy. The more machines free us from menial and even not so menial tasks, the more efficent we are and the more we can apply ourselves to tasks they can't do.
Agriculture is the best example. With no machines (and we are counting even simple ones that grant mechnical advantage like a plow) nearly all of your labour force must involve themselves in food production. It is so inefficient that there isn't much left over for other labour. Now we can maintain the food supply with a tiny percentage of our labour force, machines have taken most of the menial jobs, which frees people up to do other things, like invent Nerf balls.
One of the emerging technologies in preheating water are the drainwater heat recovery (DHR) systems...
l /h c_drain_water_heat_recovery.html
D =2 134&CategoryID=1402
http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumerinfo/heatcoo
http://www.toolbase.org/tertiaryT.asp?DocumentI
http://gfxtechnology.com/
For those too lazy to click, basically these systems coil the pipe that goes to the input water feed of your hot water heater around the drain pipe so when hot water goes down the drain (eg. shower, dishwasher, washing machine, etc) some of the heat is exchanged with the cold water coming into the hotwater heater recycling some of the energy...
Current systems can recover up to about 85% of the heat energy that would have gone down the drain. To bad we all aren't using such systems yet...
Looks like they are trying to tell us something.
The International Brotherhood of Robots, Automatons, and Intelligent Devices - local 00110000111 (underwater workers), announced today that they will be working to organize the robots involved into a collective bargaining unit.
In a related story, a huge outcry from the environmental lobby about the increased lead, nickle and lithium in the National water supply due to leaky robot batteries.
Robots can pee
but you still have to find a power source that won't pollute the source that the robots are trying to monitor, not to mention one that's effective underwater.
My agency bought these not long ago, and while they have collected thousands of data points, they are not robots (as they were first touted here), and they are not worth this sort of story on CNN. First off, they are poorly built, definately not designed for life on water. They remain more like something you or I would build as a hobbyist. Not something that I would issue as a commercial product. The real story here is in the sensors that are made by other compaines. That is pretty nifty stuff, being able to detect nutrients in water. But it is really far from true pollution. There is no sensor for benzene, chlorine, gasoline, copper, and a myriad of other chemicals that form the true group of water pollutants. There is a second generation buoy being turned out by one of their competitors. And that's what I am looking at in order to keep our program running, and more dependable.
Just poison the water supply, and voila!
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
What's not to like? A robot protecting the environment. But do they have to shove in the word "terrorism" into the first few phrases of the article?
Different polutants threaten and sometimes really do contaminate water supplies now and then (the latest example I can remember was MTBE-containing unleaded fuel from a largish tank), but it's almost always been about accidents. Does every new piece of tech have to be a weapon in the war on terrorism too, atleast in the media?
Are you suggesting we make these robots capable of enforcing water regulations when they find violations? Cuz that'd be cool, especially if water polution were made a capital offense...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
*wipes mt dew off monitor*
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
They'll get a lot of bang:buck from these robots when they patrol the corporate offices of Wal-Mart and the other polluters which dump into our increasingly stressed water supplies.
--
make install -not war
The HIV virus is reworking the environment, clearing the planet of its filthy homo sapiens infestation. Within a few centuries, the worst polluter and ecology upsetter will be eradicated by its top predator. Lakes will clear, skies will return to a sunny, UV-shielded balance, grassy byways will positively glow with a healthy, litter-free sheen.
"There are none so green as the dead." - Viridian Design
--
make install -not war
When you play russian roulette, bullets don't always blow away your skull. Of course you now have a worthwhile weekend hobby. The rest of us who survive you (and the shots through the air that miss you) will apply our remaining skull capacities to eliminating the poisons making their way more slowly towards those skulls.
--
make install -not war
Backup the claptrap with a reference, please? Or spend some time patrolling the bottom of a reservior in an SUV yourself.
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make install -not war
While this proposal is a natural winner here at /., it's sad that only a combination of terror hype and hi-tech government contracts have attracted a defense of an essential natural resource. Decades of obvious noxious pollution have scored only infrequently adequate committments to guard against the polluters, almost invariably domestic corporations. Even the landmark Superfund has been abandoned by BushCo.
While we're on a roll, how about expanding the robot corps, patrolling all public territory for polluters, under the direction of a team of government rangers? Roll the healthcare and liability/damages savings into constructive public safety jobs for Americans without guns, at the cutting edge of communications and automation.
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make install -not war
What is this "terrorist" crap? As the article states, these robots have been developed to patrol such waterways as "Onondaga Lake, a federal Superfund site that is considered the nation's most polluted waterway". Is terrorist poison more poisonous than industrial poison? These robots are a welcome safeguard, but let's not pretend we're not under siege by domestic corporations, without hyping the terrorist bugbear.
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make install -not war
So when I'm hiking in the wilds, fording a muddy stream, and something heavy grabs my leg...
Well, I'll react exactly they way I would have had I not read the story, but at least now I know who to send the pieces and check to.
I sure hope there is some truly secure system planned for the transfer of water supply data. When terrorists, which they are clearly trying to defend against, figure out how to imitate signals these guys send then I have a feeling we'll be sensing dangerous water all the time due hacked bots. After all a terrorists goal is only to cause terror, it doesn't require actually poisoning the water.
As electronic prices go down, so will the sales on robots.
See linux powered robots.
Subzerorz
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Check this out:a y_micr obetrap.htm?list925135
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/14m
With Bush in control its likely going
to be a win-ce device.
You can still attack the nation's water supply with the other 26 methods that we're vulnerable on.
I say this as someone who used to be a Water Services Engineer and then worked in the military, sometimes with water supplies (diatomaceous earth, anyone?).
The illusion of safety is exactly that: an illusion. When you harden one point, the other points become more vulnerable to attack, especially if you don't have to worry about escaping afterwards.
> --- All Of The Above --- >