Slashdot Mirror
Segway Polo
ctwxman writes "Sure you've got a Segway - now what? How about Segway Polo from the Bay Area Segway Enthusiasts Group? Yes, they do fall off from time-to-time, though they're getting better! Spectators are welcome for the two events each month in San Fransisco. Be there and be square."
Segway Revolutionizes Polo
:)
On July 29th, 2004 with 242 comments
Mirkon writes "The Register is carrying a story on an example of how technology is making sports better: Segway Polo. The San Francisco Bay Area Segway...
Main > It's funny. Laugh., Toys
Score: 1.7
I love working saturdays! Oh well... I'm hourly
Segway Jousting. Need I say any more?
:)
(Come on, you know you want to see it, too
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
this thread is a dupe yes. but its competing with the old one!
Watching the last guy fall off of his segway, I belive i speak for all of us when I say "OWNED"
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Doesn't the Woz play Segway polo?
Location: Mt. Xinu
Another sport for the rich.
Stuff from six months ago.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Sure you've got a Segway - now what?
Suicide?
But if they step on that Segway, you're going to have to pull out a pistol and shoot your horse.
Besides, a Segway isn't going to move all that far when all you hit it with is a little polo mallet.
Can we just copy all the comments from when this was posted here in July rather than having everyone comment over again?
and getting to really whack at a Segway with a mallet is appealing, I really don't think it would hold my interest long enough to consider it as a sport.
KFG
Segway football? Could we be seeing the SFL (Segway Football League) anytime in our future? Technology and sports seem to be starting to integrate, and Segway Polo seems to be an interesting first step.....if you don't count Doom. On a side note, can I referee?
This is for chumps. No where near as cool as:
Unicycle basketball. Or better yet, unicycle jousting. More than one wheel is cheating.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't own a Segway and No it didn't change the world.
I didn't know enough people actually own a segway to form a polo team, let alone an enthusiasts group.
and we wonder why they hate us
So, they build a city around these things yet?
Just askin'....
It's just my opinion, but I think the Segway is a great metaphor for the 21st century American. Its introduction was preceeded by a plethora of sensationalism about how it was going to "change the world", and then it turned out to be only mildly interesting, yet profoundly impractical, expensive, buggy and high maintenance. This of course, didn't stop some people from plunking down five grand for this vanity-driven embarassement of a vehicle, who now desperately seek to find realistic use or justification for their decision.
The Segway epitomizes the concept of the consumer economy, not unlike the Hummer. A piece of vanity equipment whose ultimate underlying purpose is to project the owner's own sense of insecurity upon others.
This is the legacy of the baby boomers in America. In their quest to prove to others (as well as themselves) that money and materialism = happiness, they've perfected this growing trend of high-end vanity-oriented accessories. I hope it works out for 'em.
---
I concur.
--Anonymous Coward
Rich yuppies with too much money and too much time on their hands getting hurt! What could be better?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
How long before someone cuts down the handlebars and mounts something like a surfboard or oversized skateboard deck to it?
Now that might actually be interesting.
Polo, feh.
Segway is going to take over the sports world. I can't wait for the toothless hillbillies having Segway Pulls...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
NERDS! =)
Can you ping me now? Gooood! | Manhappenin.Net - Things to do
When you get right down to it, the Segway is quite simple. It is a closed loop feedback control system that corrects error in the device angle. Not too difficult for any electrical or computer engineering student. However, a one wheeled segway is a very different story. I'd like to see polo played on that thing.
Take it like a man! When you are going to do something stupid like play polo with expensive equipment go all the way. Joust with your bike and a 2x4 or play some polo with mountain bikes. What's the fun if i can't make my friend break something.
... and hate them.
A bunch of local businessmen donated segways to the local police department earlier this year. I was talking to one of the officers who is using them now, and he says it is the worst waste of money he's ever seen. The segways are not as manuverable/fast as a bike, need batteries, and are just wierd around town. Sounds about right to me.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
"...making it the latest Segway Scooter accident to claim over 1000 lives"
- Kent Brockman reporting
bit trollent
I guess none of the owners wanted to have their closeups available to the General Public due to the following reasons..
(a) avoid being ostracized by the public/friends/family etc.
(b) lose their job for being a wealthy loser who should rather be exercising
(c) lose their girl friend who now knows what he is doing on Sunday afternoons.
Real men ride horses.. and also run circles around these wimps before finally running over them and breaking their five grand bikes.
...but with pillows rather than lances. It made sense because:
The aim was simply to knock the other person off of their unicycle. So, you'd start with a run at each other, and then it was a free for all until somedbody fell off.
Ahh, fun times .oO(me wonders whether to blow the dust off and see if I can still ride the thing).
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
did you just get laid off by cisco? :P
That the Segway didn't get back up at the end of that video clip... ^_^
Donating their extra time and money to charity?
This of course, didn't stop some people from plunking down five grand for this vanity-driven embarassement of a vehicle, who now desperately seek to find realistic use or justification for their decision.
That's funny, I just see some people having fun.
Be honest. Riding the Segway looks like a blast, and if it only cost $100, we'd all buy one.
A piece of vanity equipment whose ultimate underlying purpose is to project the owner's own sense of insecurity upon others.
Who's more insecure? The folks riding around, having fun with their new toys, or the Anonymous Coward on Slashdot gnashing his teeth and condemning them for it?
How nice, and I suppose after the game, we're all off to lord it over the losers working at Starbucks.
Ok, this is supposed to be a tech forum, but really what's left to say about these things? They're an over-engineered solution to a non-problem, fancy electonics easily replaced by a third wheel, a vertical scooter, etc.
I for one welcome our two wheeled... Oh never mind.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
the Segway will forever be known as Gob's favourite mode of transportation.
to piss off the islamists. Perhaps next we can put criminals and prisoners of war on them and send them into the LA Coliseum complete with lions and a few battle bots thrown in for good measure.
Wow, that's gotta be a new one! A Dupe of another comment in a Dupe of another story. Not bad, Mister Coward!
Of course, it was suggested...
Unicycle seqway polo..
http://tlb.org/eunicycle.html
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
To bad you need earplugs to ride it.
Remember when golf was an exclusively rich person's sport? Yes I know, the average golfer playing on the greens is probably a yuppie, much richer than a bunch of people "shooting hoops" in the a ghetto b-ball court, but even golf being a "yuppie sport" is an improvement of what it used to be.
There was a time when only the real rich (i.e. richer than the yuppies) and that was for one single reason - to play golf, you had to afford caddies to carry around all of your clubs (unless you seriously wanted to carry around your clubs everywhere on the course.)
With the introduction of golf carts, you don't have to pay a bunch of people to carry around all of your stuff, and golf has gotten a bit more cheaper. Same thing may happen with polo; segways are expensive but they are probably cheaper than horses are.
The matches will be hard to watch from San Francisco - if you RTFM, you'll find the matches are actually held in Sunnyvale, CA (about 40 mins south of the city).
..With some of those big mamas.
Better yet. Put some washed up celebrities on the segways and make it a "celebrity challenge".
I misread the title... A self-correcting pogo stick would be cool, though.
Segway polo, next stop solid platinum iPod Stadium Concerts.
And in the meantime, my Apple Developer Dashboard Widget Contest news submission from November 8th is still pending approval
Good thing you can submit your entry up until January 5th.
what a bunch of fagots.
how about elephant polo?
...the first thing I thought was:
In related news, the sport of polo is still less accessible to non-'rich bastards'.
Seriously, though the players may or may not be paying for their own rides, that's still a lot of money rolling around out there.
Its a pretty dangerous machine, I'm not sure how you consider it so simple. See for example, http://www.bikexprt.com/witness/product/images/bus hfalls.jpg
I wish I lived in Silly Valley, and were rich and had a Segway. Then I could hang out with The Woz and my nerddom would be complete :-D.
.. seriousy.. mount a golf bag in the front, put wider tyres on it (to stop it from chewing up the green).. and there ya go. one man, highly maneuverable, golf cart. hell get longer clubs and you don't even have to get off the cart to swing /me runs off to the patent office
suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Need I say more?
This came out several weeks ago and was reported by (belive it or not) ./ back then.
After the last few years it looks like time to move on.
[ Looks like my last post and last site view too. ]
Alas, c'est la vie,
djve
"There is magic in the web." - Othello Act 3 Scene 4.
will have to be redesigned around these things. ;-)
Be a corporate exec, live on the bay, offshore your labor, buy a dozen seqways, fall into the grass laughing like a giddy school girl as your buddies nudge you off your digital steed in a friendly game of polo. Ahhhh.. capitalism...
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
"Virgin Polo"
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Someone, somewhere, will sue Segway for damages from some abnormal activity.
You all were duped, and not just because of this. You were duped to think that Segway is nothing more than a silly toy and you all were happy to change from the speculation-bandwagon to bashing-bandwagon after it was released. You are not alone, but please, don't just follow the flock, think for yourself. And, while we are at it, get the relevant facts.
:( And it has costed us our bright future of clean, fun and enjoyable transportation in cities. :(
I suggest you read the Code Name Ginger, that famous book published by Harvard Business Press, that was part of the hype and whose leak became a major factor (though it's unclear, positive or negative) in the product's failure.
Everyone who ever rode Segway, fell in love with the device in the first minutes (or, for the sake of accuracy, a vast majority of those people). Very smart people saw amazing potential in the device - you know them. Bezos, Jobs, Doerr and many others were completely fascinated with the endless possibilities of the Segway.
But Dean Kamen, a paranoid secretive moron, who was almost as bad as a manager as he was brilliant as an inventor managed to completely fuck up the product launch. There was almost no user testing, there was almost no marketing done, because that greedy loser didn't want to pay enough for this and because he was obsessed with his delusion that Honda sleeps and dreams of stealing his invention.
As a result, the device was a flop. Don't be deceived, it's still a brilliant piece of engineering, the users still love it, and it still makes perfect business sense - the trials by several organisations who were not afraid to test it despite the bad publicity showed that money can be saved by using Segways and that it's practical to use. But this excellent product was introduced to the market in the worst possible way.
Steve Jobs was willing to fund almost half of the project, he wanted ardently to participate in the project in any way Kamen let him. Invest 50 million USD? OK. You don't want to alienate other investors, so only a minority share of 10 million is possible? OK. You can't sell me shares? OK, I am willing to be an advisor, sit on board, do anything, without pay and despite being a big name with two extremely successful companies to run.
But Kamen would not listen to anyone but his own oversized ego. Some of you may read the Chapter 15 about the meeting with Bezos, Jobes and Doerr (published somewhere online), but the whole development was like this. Kamen wanted to micromange his 250+ people company, didn't want to pay decent bucks to employees, refused to give stock options to compensate for low salaries and made a million of other business mistakes. All that have costed Segway the market.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
All the people in the Bay Area Segway Loser group look a bit overweight...
Me, I would go to the polo match on a good old-fashioned bicycle.
I'd be wearing a backpack with the large batteries, coils and capacitors needed to produce a powerful EMP.
During the match, the EMP would be 'released' at a key point in order to watch the polo-droids all fall on their faces simultaneously.
Fun!
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
Who would have thought that around Christmas time, Slashdot would be Astroturfing the Segway? They have done it before, and I guess they will do it again. The Segway is an overpriced overhyped failure. Just get a scooter or bike instead. You will save thousands of dollars and have something just as effective.
You know who I want to flip off? Pampered Western liberals who think their choice in vehicles makes them morally pure. Most especially, Hollywood liberals who drive around in electric cars, except when they are taking their private jets to mansions they use six weeks out of the year
Everybody has a right to be happy.
The "pursuit" of happiness, you mean (as defined by the pursuer.) There's no right to BE happy.
But once you've got more than enough,
Who decides what's enough, or more than enough? Any self-appointed commissar of how much is "enough" for me and my family can go fuck himself.
what's the point of getting more and never giving it, and it's tasteless to flaunt it when most of the world is still living in poverty.
Even the most monastic liberal do-gooder in the West lives a lifestyle utterly beyond the reach of 90% of the world's population.
Smug Volvo drivers differ from selfish Humvee drivers by only a minor degree, from the point of view of a Third World garbage picker.
That's just being a selfish bastard.
Yup. So what, everybody else in the world would do the same if they had the chance. Good luck to them, and devil take the hindmost.
Too much Law; not enough Order.