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Towards Self-Replicating Rapid Prototypers
Neil Halelamien writes "Researchers at the University of Bath are developing a rapid prototyping machine capable of making copies of itself and other products, reminiscent of the Universal Constructor proposed by von Neumann. The so-called Replicating Rapid-Prototyper (or RepRap) would produce items from raw materials and small components like microchips. If successful, this could make rapid prototyping cheap enough for regular in-home usage, especially since the project's lead, Dr. Adrian Bowyer, will be releasing his project's designs under the GNU GPL. It's previously been proposed that a similar system would be useful for space exploration and industrialization."
The RIAA has finally met their match...
Black holes mentioned earlier, now self-replicating robots. We're screwed.
Man, this is eerily like the Terminator plot...
imagine if a newly duplicated item had some punch to it, and went really fast.
Is anybody else thinking of the replicators from Stargate SG-1? But assuming we find the weapon of the ancients in time, then yes, this sounds awesome.
I for one welcome our new self-replicating... Ah, screw it.
Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, I have always been interested in applying evolution to computer chips - the randomness and efficiency of evolution is going to find better ways of doing things than our current methods, and is also just damn cool to know your computer chip is analogous to a living 'species'.
This will be GPL'd. I don't know how the copyright cartels would react if a machine could make illegal copies of itself.
What?
I, for one, welcome our RepRap overlords.
Rapid lost sock replacement.
You heard it here first.
I'll be the first to market - better watch out!
I hope this becomes a reality soon. Nothing says power to the people like the people being able to build anything we want ourselves.
The Village People have finally met their match...
I for one welcome our cliche producing overlords. sorry about the trip everyone.
If the good doctor were to suddenly die in the next four years, I'd start lining my baseball caps.
In Soviet Russia, replicator prototypes YOU! (Sorry, shoot me now)
I'd welcome somebody with an original joke.
I'm thinking that this technology would be very useful in exploration. One or two prototypes + raw materials = an efficient way to store and transport exploratory machines.
Especially efficient when they become sentient and self-replicate us all to annihilation. But that'll never happen...
JUST when Apothis regains control of the only weapon with which to defeat the Replicators.
Oh darn... the editors cut out my link to the Wikipedia article on von Neumann's Universal Constructor (i.e. clanking replicator). Here it is:
...
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Constructor
From the article:
A clanking replicator is an artificial self-replicating system that relies on conventional large-scale technology and automation. The term evolved to distinguish such systems from the microscopic "assemblers" that nanotechnology may make possible.
Such a machine violates no physical laws, and we already possess the basic technologies necessary for some of the more detailed proposed designs.
A self-replicating machine would need to have the capacity to gather energy and raw materials, process the raw materials into finished components, and then assemble them into a copy of itself. It is unlikely that this would all be contained within a single monolithic structure, but would rather be a group of cooperating machines or an automated factory that is capable of manufacturing all of the machines that make it up. The factory could produce mining robots to collect raw materials, construction robots to put new machines together, and repair robots to maintain itself against wear and tear, all without human intervention or direction. The advantage of such a system lies in its ability to expand its own capacity rapidly and without additional human effort; in essence, the initial investment required to construct the first clanking replicator would have an arbitrarily large payoff with no additional cost.
On a completely different note, does anyone else remember the Slylandro probes from Star Control 2?
Unless it can make me tea, I can't say I'm interested... then again... think about the new abilities to piss the RIAA/MPAA/USGOV off with this? It would make downloading music seem like childs play next to making an all plastic car **cough** **cough** saturn **cough** **cough** that I downloaded the blue prints from alt.binaries.replicator.cars.
Really though, I find the adoption timeline to bit a little bit optomistic... 5 to 10 years for it to become common place in homes? It's taken 5 to 10 years for the internet to catch on, and that doesn't require bulky equipment. Perhaps in the next 50 years before I'm gone, but not in 5 to 10.
My 2cents...
But man, I'd live a childhood fantsay to order my tea from a replicator.
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
Bah, buy an FPGA, those can already do this for the most part since their hardware interactions are software driven...
The only thing that worries me about self replicating machines is the "grey goo" problem. This is pretty much only an issue with nanotech replicators, I don't see it happening with this approach. For those not familiar with the term, the grey goo issue is when self replicating machines go out of control and turn everything into copies of themselves, rather than the target material. Altho the approach described in the article won't work with all metal alloys or glass, it's very likely that this type of machine could make molds. Making a negative of a 3d model isn't that much harder than making a positive. Anyone who's ever done any sand casting of metal will get the idea. Although the seed cost of 25k (pounds? what is that, about 40k usd?) might sound prohibitive to get the ball rolling, keep in mind that the cost of rapid prototyping machines has hit that price point only a short time after they cost millions. One of the great benefits of fabs like this would be a shift from mass production to single person production. Once everyone has a fab on their desktop, and a supply of low cost feedstock, the economy of scale that makes mass production a good idea no longer comes into play. If you want a set of plastic bowels, plastic toys, or whatever, they don't have to be the same as the rest of the production run, they can be made special just for you. If this is the case, perhaps the design behind the objects will become valuable. Anyone with a pc and the right software could become and industrial designer. I'm still eagerly awaiting the arrival of nanoassemblers, which I think will be bigger than fire, but this is an exciting development that could change a lot of things.
Finally, I can get to work.
A rapid prototyping machine that can reproduce itself is a kind of holy grail. When we get that, we have something that can bootstrap itself. This would be the Santa Claus machine that we have long dreamed of. One of the major proponents of this has been Don Lancaster. His site is the link below.
www.tinaja.com/santa01.html
Once everyone has a machine in their basement, the economy of the world will be turned on its ear. Consumer goods will cost only the price of their materials. The cheap labor advantage of India and China will vanish. The nature of products will change. Right now, it makes no sense to make something repairable. It is cheaper to build something that can't be fixed and throw it away. When we get very distributed manufacturing however, things will be built with only one or two raw materials. Things will be built so they are easy to assemble. It would make sense to build a new heating element for your coffee pot. Waste would go down. Recycling would become much more immediate and local. People would share designs the way we now share open source software. Quite a different world would result.
I'm sure there's plenty of SG-1/Terminator/Borg/Matrix/{insert sci-fi show here} comparisons that will be made, but let's keep in mind that this technology is a very distant cousin, if anything.
- "I reject your reality and substitute it with my own", Adam Savage
will be releasing his project's designs under the GNU GPL
:)
The GPL is not for matter, it's for bits.
This is aweomse, now the farmer can just replicate anything he need, and doesnt have to waste all his time growing me food to eat! Woohoo! Not that I'll be able to pay for food anyway, since noone will have any need to bu yanything I make either.
That said, this is still decades away
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
It might take a while.. but think of the possibilities. If you have enough raw materials around, you just program it to replicate and build a house, or anything. The possibilities seem endless.
This
You're new here, aren't you?
Didn't we learn anything from our 'bout with the Replicators the first time around? Only an ancient weapon was able to stop them.
:)
Wait, what do you mean it's just a television show?
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
More than likely, it'd make a liquid that is almost but not quite entirely unlike tea.
Okay so this replicating robot walks into a bar, right... Sorry, man, I got nothing...
Without reading every overblown word on this guys website, I don't exactly see where he answers what I'd think would be the two most important questions:
1) What is this thing capable of making (besides itself)?
2) How much human effort is involved in getting it to make anything? (ie: what resources are required, how must they be arranged, can this thing build several instances at once, or must it be "refilled" every go round...)
3) How many of us (if any) got viruses from downloading and reading that word document on his website?
Here is a picture of one.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
All I can think of is the ValueRep from System Shock 2, *horrible screech* *happy female voice* Thank you for choosing VaueRep! Brr. Chills.
Yes, but this one actually works and is funny!
Currently there's one faculty and one undergraduate in the project. So the manpower is rather light. But even so the project appears useful and maybe achievable even with that little manpower. Anyone with experience with this sort of rapid prototyping want to comment? I like the idea of first building a self-replicating machine (presumably with some human labor still required) and then refining it. This seems a good approach to me and it's exciting that we're actually as close as we are to doing this.
Apparently there already is a self-replicating system out there; the system is capable of manufacturing virtually any kind of tool, machine or technology known. To make new copies of itself, it uses only common materials from the environment- water, oxygen, vegetable matter, protein, and that kind of thing. Unfortunately, top computer scientists and engineers are having trouble figuring out the self-replication process. Apparently, it involves some mysterious mechanism known as "sex", which takes place with a "woman". Anyone else know any more about this?
In all seriousness, though, this project is awesome, and I really hope it works out. This could potentially result in as big a change as the industrial revolution.
I feel like I'm in an episode of StarGate.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
In order to distribute derived works, you must allow anyone to derive from your work and distribute their works that were derived from yours.
Oh yeah, and throw in a copy of the license.
There is the one anecdote about the old woman who attended one of Fenyman's lectures and afterwards told him that the earth was held upon the shell of a giant turtle. When Fenyman replied "what holds up the turtle?" the woman replied "It's turtles, all the way down!".
Does this qualify as an Origin-al Joke?
Well, if we used this machine to replicate those miniature black holes the British made, we could have the Earth reduced to a singularity in no time!
This is my sig.
If the human package came with this feature.
/.ers would boast of being family men too.
So this is how the Feed and Seed start? I haven't RTFA yet, so I don't know if it mentions that besides the "grey goo" problem there's the danger Neal Stephenson mentions in his book, that without extremely powerful encryption controls in the hands of some authority, people might create dangerous objects or materials (weapons, explosives, etc.)
The Feed principle was the centrally controlled replicator technology where the Seed was the independent, anything-goes approach.
- Structure: The core parts of the device need a strong, stable material that can hold everything together.
- Motion: The device needs materials that convert energy into mechanical motion. These materials might include electromagnetics, electrostatics, piezoelectrics, shape-memory alloys, chemo-dynamic protein muscles, thermodynamic cycle systems, etc. Each of these types of motion-creating materials has special needs/chemicals that might require special handling devices that, in turn, must be made out of the materials in the self-replicating device. Motion is often tricky because it requires specialized assemblies of materials (think of the complexity of a simple DC electric motor or the gears and linkages in a robotic arm).
- Control: The device needs some form of logic that can read some analog of a blue-print, ROM, DNA, etc. and direct the fabrication process. If based on standard electronics, this would include materials that act as insulators, conductors, and semiconductors.
- Power: This may be the trickiest because creating sufficient power requires purified, highly engineered materials. Self-replicating a modern alkaline battery would be quite a feat. Perhaps the semiconductor technology of the control materials could be leveraged for solar panels.
I suspect that one of the trickiest part of all this is in handling and converting bulk materials (usually a liquid, powder, or solid ingot) into a shaped and controlled component or assembly. The replicator must interface with raw materials supplies, move bulk materials to a fabrication point, and convert the bulk material into a usable component in its offspring. Space exploring self-replicators face an even greater challenge of processing raw space materials (moon rock, asteroidal metals, etc.) into refined feed-stocks for replication.Its a tricky problem, but one that we will eventually solve.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What's big, green, and would kill you if it fell out of a tree?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
The US have already set that ball a rollin' and it's just a matter of time now.
Share and enjoy!
You can make any car you want, and you're going to get a Saturn???
If you need me, I'll be in alt.binaries.replicator.cars.james.bond, grabbing the blueprints for a Lotus that's also a submarine, and a BMW with an invisibility device.
...this is how tribbles got started.
While the idea of a 3D printer cheap enough for personal use /is/ going to revolutionize the world by making certain real items as cheap as software, the part about it being a von Neumann machine is overrated. The article just mentions it in passing and there is no evidence that he's actually figured out how to do that. That's been one of the holy grails of engineering since it was proposed. The article doesn't mention whether the materials used will be recyclable. Since everyone and their grandmother will start spitting out objects if they have this and since it would probably be cheaper to build a new object rather than repairing an old one, mass use of UCs will produce tons of waste. Imagine if you could never delete any file on your computer but could create more easily. You would run out of space very quickly.
BTW, for a good book on the social implications of cheap universal constructors, I suggest the Stephenson's book Diamond Age.
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
You go into Macy's and they don't have your size shirt (after all- you are a Slashdotter who doesn't have time to exercise- you fat bastard)- and they say- hold on- measure you- and they manufacture one in the basement for you while you wait.
People complain about manufacturing jobs going overseas- but they are simply going away. There is no labor cheaper than no labor. At some point- the cost of transportation comes into play.
Seems inevitable, I for one..
Louis Riel walks into a taxidermist and gets arrested. There was a mounted police officer inside.
http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/doc/vinge
and then chose the html document.
Soon your sixteen-year-old will not only be busted for downloading music, but for downloading the RepRap code to build his own Sony MP3 player. But on the other hand, I can't find my keys... hmmm...
I want this account deleted.
The one or two raw materials that I mentioned are a requirement for the process to be feasible. If you need more than a couple of raw materials to create something then it makes rapid prototyping much more difficult.
Consider the coffee maker. To be easy to construct using a rapid prototyping system it would have to be totally re-designed. You would at least need a conductor and a non-conductor. I've been thinking about this for a long time and I think you could produce such a design.
What I have been working on is furniture using pressed wood sheets and rapid prototyping of sheet metal products. Both are quite feasible but, of course, not self-replicating.
The trick is not to produce some kind of super magical rapid prototyping system. The trick is to re-design a lot of common things such that they are easy to build using a system that we can build now. In this respect, your comment misses the basic problem by a country mile but it isn't wrong! From your perspective, the idea is ridiculous. It's just that what you thought I meant isn't what I did mean.
All this was done in a very crude way, as if they were developing a process for home use. Their metal casting technique is scary. They used "Wood's Metal", which is a solder-like alloy of tin, lead, cadmium, and bismuth. All of which are toxic. Lead and cadmium cause heavy-metal poisoning, and the body won't clear either of them. No serious precautions seem to have been taken against inhalation - they just used gloves. At one point they tried powdered metal, which is much more of an inhalation hazard than molten liquid. They need to run their people through the usual checks for heavy-metal poisoning.
There are rapid prototyping machines that deposit metal, and that's probably a more useful direction.
All this is a long, long way from self-replication.
... about 4.5 billion years before. Geez.
I'm not sure what the big deal is about this particular rapid prototyping machine at Bath. Hod Lipson's lab at Cornell, for instance, has been able to create a solid freeform fabrication system which can print plastic, metal, circuits, actuators, and even batteries! They are, in my opinion, much further along than the referenced article. Other related projects of include Chrikjian's work at Johns Hopkins, and Jordan Pollack's DEMO Lab at Brandeis University.
This will disappear in a month and never be heard from again, like that guy who made easy efficient power and bought 10000 electric fans in Japan.
1. You buy an appliance that can manufacture a hell of a lot of stuff you use on a daily basis.
Plus it can manufacture itself, so if you really want to, you can make a couple more. Personally, I think it'll take a while before a commercial entity will offer a product that will compete with it. It makes no financial sense. They'd sooner make an appliance that can manufacture anything *but* itself. But let's skip to the point where someone built a self-replicating machine, and much like gmail accounts, sooner than not everybody's got one for himself and 6 or 50 to give out to his friends.
2. You stop buying a major percentage of the stuff you use on a daily basis.
3. Some companies, from many sectors, who make stuff that you've been using go out of business. Not a bad thing in itself. Many whip-makers went out of business when cars were invented and horses stopped being the preferred means of travel. It's the natural course of technology.
4. People make more and more stuff that they need out of raw materials.
5. Raw materials become more scarce. No more plastics in the bin. Plastic Recycling plants get no more plastic cuz nobody's throwing it away anymore. The price on anything made from materials useable at home rises dramatically.
6. Things we cannot manufacture at home yet which we still buy and are made of said materials, say your car, go up in price due to higher material costs.
So you pay less for your plates and but more for your car.
7. New content market: Designs. Expect the DIAA (you heard it here first).
We'll be pirating our dishwasher plans from P2P, paying for raw materials, making it at home. Designers will be watermarking (plasticmarking) their designs. Ripping groups will be removing the marks. Machines whose designs we steal and which we built will call home over the net to activate unless we download a hacked version.
This time around, it won't be just the music industry clinging to their antiquated business model. Suddenly every company that sold you a plate, cup, PDA case or pen will want to sell you PENS (where you pay per item) rather than a design of a pen (where you pay once to get the design). First they'll laugh at you, then they'll fight you (and this time around will probbably have a humongous lobby compared to what the RIAA has today), and then you'll win of course, those of the companies that managed to strip off the bulk of the no longer neccesary manufacturing from the price of what you buy making it to the next round.
Change indeed.
Like software or music, all over again.
-
According to the Wikipedia definition of Life, consuming and using resources sounds a lot like metabolism. The "ability to expand its own capacity" sounds like growth. It can rebuild and maintain itself, and assuming this could also be in response to external, environmental factors, it can respond to stimuli. It can make a copy of itself, which seems to fit the definition of asexual reproduction.
Of course, the biggest differences when compared to biological "life" seems to be being mechanical rather than molecular in nature. However, such a machine could almsot be thought of as a "macro-cell" could it not? Does it have the ability to change and adapt to its environment? If so, then it sounds quite close to "life."
interesting...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Already exists, it's called life. Took us ... a few million years but we finally got around to getting to what life has had since well... 3 point something billion year ago.
This is Sci-Fi fluff, and this researcher knows it. It'd be one thing if this prof. was anywhere near reality, but he isn't. Sure mobile factories are inevitable, but technology isn't anywhere near this level today, as I believe this guy is proposing. I'm offended at his "press release" since he isn't releasing anything, much less an original idea.
Our capitalism is based on scarcity: perception of scarcity relative to demand determines value. Capitalists get nervous when that is replaced by other dynamics. Our own economy is still failing to recover from the nervous breakdown it started having 10 years ago, when the "network effect" introduced the possiblity of inverting the traditional "minimized marginal ROI from market saturation". When Nikola Tesla proposed to JP Morgan to energize the ionosphere so power could be consumed anywhere on Earth by tuning a radio antenna, the ubercapitalist declined to invest, asking "but where do you put the meter"?
--
make install -not war
Actually what you really want to do is to build a set of evolving self-assembling robots that get their parts by disassembling other robots. That way there is evolutionary pressure to evolve faster and faster self-assemblers.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No thanks! I'll stick with my nice, organic, fleshy colon, thank you very much!
If it was a real self replicator, wouldn't they just use it to make a copy of itself and sell you that?
Anyone else read that as "Torvalds Self-Replicating Rapid Prototypers?" For a moment I thought Linus had found a better way to maintain the kernel.
A von Neumann machine is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. Create one of these that subsists almost entirely on iron, magnesium, aluminium and silicon, the major elements found in Earth's mantle and core. It doesn't matter how big it is as long as it can reproduce itself exactly in any period of time. Release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow it to fend for itself. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then they create two more, then they create four more. As the population of machines doubles repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of potentially sextillions of machines. Technically your objective would now be complete - no more Earth - but if you want to be thorough then you can command your VNMs to hurl themselves, along with any remaining trace elements, into the Sun. This hurling would have to be achieved using rocket propulsion of some sort, so be sure to include this in your design. * Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of iron sinking into the Sun. * Comments: randombit suggests that nanobots, as opposed to macroscopic VNMs, are the way to go. They consume raw materials and build new nanobots and/or nanoassemblers. "I suppose a giant killer robot that built more copies would work to, but doing it at the molecular level seems easer." Good thinking, randombit! Of course, there's no reason why your VNM needn't be the size of the Moon or so. Obviously, if you have the technology to take a body the size of the Moon apart and make a machine out of it, you have the technology to take the Earth apart and leave it in pieces, but there are a lot of sizes between microscopic and Moon-sized - car-sized, house-sized, city-sized, continent-sized and everything in between. Basically the lesson learned here is not to be too narrow-minded: if it is truly a von Neumann Machine, size doesn't matter.
Yeah, I think the most common use will look something like this:
while(1)
{
ReplicateSelf_Fork();
BuildSoldierRobot();
SendSoldierRobotOffToFightEastasia();
}
(cyni cal? who, me?)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Maybe this is where we came from. Seriously, Greg Bear is the shizzle pa'nizzle!
And I'm sure as he!! ain't not spelling it out for y'all. Gosh darnit you need to read some.
If you want a set of plastic bowels, plastic toys, or whatever, they don't have to be the same as the rest of the production run, they can be made special just for you.
Um, I'll pass on the plastic bowels, thanks.
Freedom: "I won't!"
http://www.berserker.com/story-wolfcover.htm No one really knew who unleashed the machines.
it isn't self-replicating in any way that should make you nervous until it is creating its own energy to operate. as long as you have to plug it in, we're more than safe... we're dissapointed.
But just look at how our DNA is duplicated...
Torvalds self-replicating rapid prototypers
It's only me or the headline give a good feeling about our new kernel releases?
Till they can run their own refinery, why don't they just integrate with the environment like everybody else?
I suggest auctioning themselves on e-bay for money to by parts. ABILITIES REQUIRED:
Of course that's just one possible solution.
"We come in peace"
Dammit, now I have to go play Starcon 2 again...
this sounds alot like a story i read a long time ago in a mag called OMNI (now out of print). it was a story of a robot that was capable of reparing as well as making replicas of itself from the raw materials around it. think the story took place on some planet like mars. to to the task at hand, more robots were needed so it used the minerals in rock formations to clone itself. it was a facinating story and now i guess, a few years later, someone has taken a scifi story and made an attempt at it in the real world.
I worked for five years for a company that made rapid prototyping milling machines for circuit boards.
The circuit board rapid prototyping machine was basically an X-Y plotter with a Dremell tool motor that moved up and down. It cut lines on the surface of a copper-coated fiberglass board.
The cheapest machine to do this still cost about $10,000. Plus you had to have the PCB all ready laid out and ready for manufacture. It was slow, loud, and difficult to calibrate. I did a rewrite of the manual in English in order to clarify lots of little details needed for efficient operation. My rewrite came to 40 pages. And this is just to make a simple circuit like an op-amp buffer.
The machine 'ate' milling tools like gumdrops, at about $17 each. One tiny mistake, and your board was toast. Our fearless leader couldn't grasp that our primary competition wasn't the other circuit board milling machine maker, it was SPICE and the offshore inexpensive board houses where you could e-mail your Gerber files and get back finished professional PCBs by FedEx letter within a few days at much less cost than the materials alone would cost for the milling machine.
A great idea and product turned into a dead-end job, a white-elephant product, and a brick wall of cement-head management.
The point is, any 'rapid prototyping' machine will have a long way to go before it does anything relevant and productive. It will be many decades before any machine attempting to claim to be a 'general-purpose' rapid-prototyping machine will be anything more than a very expensive laboratory curiosity; the subject of speculative psuedo-scientific articles just this side of the science-fiction line.
First generation self-replicating machines will simply consider electronic components (or DC motors) "natural ressources".
You as the user will buy 1 pack of plastic, one pack of metal and one pack of varied electronic components (expect many flavors to this kind of pack).
Those pack will be extremely useful for other gpl-hardware writers (don't forget that anything that uses the code of the original machine is GPLed too!).
As the system gets more evolved you might have to buy 7 different metals and then make your own electronic components on the spot, but it's not necessary at the begining.
How interesting.
New archeological evidence seems to confirm the idea that our race was actually created by some ancient living things called "humans".
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
...welcome our self-replicating, destruction oriented, society overthrowing overlords. Just let me have one of these replicators first!
Hmm these machines could totally change the nature of rebellions. Right now guns are cheap but hard to smuggle in. What if you could essentially download them? Kind of a nightmare for some governments.
Slashcode has been behaving interestingly for a few years now.
Using only Plain Old Text you can insert any of the allowed
HTML tags.
me
- to show
you.If you will.
Note
how
these last two spaces happened without any formatting tags.
This kind of renders HTML format obsolete, code format redundant, and extrans just a variant of code. And all of those options are functionally available under the increasingly misnamed "Plain Old Text." Of course this was a big improvement over the old method, and is an improvement that should stay. But the option menu should go, as many people get stuck in HTML mode and don't know how to get out, and other don't realize that you can use the allowed HTML tags in plain old text mode.Showing that this is, indeed, Plain Old Text mode.
The ______ Agenda
I'm sorry mate, you gtot that all wrong. It should be :
In Soviet Russia, prototypes replicate YOU!
I have read about a paradox in one of the classic sci-fi novels (Stanislaw Lem's) i presume...
To cut hte story short they (constructors) had a machine which could do anything (including replicating items etc) . The machine was set on an a nearly impossible task and rather then trying to solve it it started making copies of itself to bum off that job on the next one in line ad infinitum.
I foresee a grey goo future.
YES, but do they have to use *.doc format?
I think this topic is the most urgent area that needs gov't regulation - before even the stem cell stuff, because stem cell tinkering can only create chemical machines like we are, and it's relatively hard to beat millions of years of self-tinkering. But once raw materials like steel, semiconductors, diamond, etc. are made available to an evolutionary process,who knows what kind of thing evolution can come up with: imagine a scary 2 ton metal bug that has an IQ of 1,600,000. Would such a creature like, and cherish us, humans, like we cherish and protect the amimals, plants and the environment?
Because that's the only thought that keeps popping in my head.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Compared to some yes, but not really, which is why I'm sick of most of the Slashdot memes. They're funny the first few times, then you start to realize that maybe there's a reason funny moderations don't give karma...
"My God! It's full of stars!"
Everyone quotes Terminator and Stargate, but the classic cinematic portrayal of a von Neumann machine was the Monolith as seen in "2010: The Year We Made Contact".
The Monolith turned out to be a self-replicating multipurpose tool, and was described by Dr. Floyd as a von Neumann machine.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
What I just said was a slashdot Meme. I too would appreciate a new joke - but they just don't catch on at all. I tried "Soviet Korea" but nobody else uses it. Ah well. A comic's work is never ending.
I can vaguely remember some Hugo or Nebula awarded SciFi short story, which was exactly about self-replicating machines. Too bad, I can't remember the name.
Story goes like this: three men sail to a lonely island somewhere in the caribic. One of them is a researcher (the "doctor") carrying huge boxes with him. Boxes contain self-replicating machines (the "bugs").
First, the bugs will only use sunlight as energy and metal provided by the doc. They will simply freeze in the evening and only continue the next morning. But you can already notice small modifications in newly built machines (evolution)
One day however, the doc feeds the bugs with a special metal (cobalt) ant they begin to use _every_ metal available to construct new bugs (including other bugs), which leads to cannibalism. They find a way to be independent from sunlight.
Evolution however goes the "wrong" way: instead of smarter bugs, only bigger and bigger bugs are created. The last scene if the last bug (huge like an ox) running after one the men to catch his marriage ring...
Does anybody know the title of this novel?
From Lexx!
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
These memes establish our sense of community identity. Think back to 1950's middle America: Jello-molds, white gloves, slick shit in your hair. Surely those memes (ok, products) were worse than /.'s, but they defined a subset of society. We are "Us to whom all your bases belong". You insensitive clod.
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My sister had 4 daughters in 3 years. It's been done already.
nice nick :D Iirc I saw someone nick'd pedxing recently. It warms my golden apple to see wilson getting around so well. hhhhhaaaaaiiiiilllll!!!!!
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"d'Oh!" ~Homer
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Look what happened to the last time the Hindenburg Disaster was linked on slashdot : Vandal link (Warning explicit anti-semitic content)
The wikipedia community has a lot of fast editor who dealt with all similar vandalisme. But it's still a lot of hasle for them. So that's why, it's better not to publish wikipedia links on slashdot.
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lol
I recall reading in my middle-school years (aka junior high) a rather unique story about replicating robots. The story was written in the 1960s-1970s
Essentially, the premise is that a meteor falls out of the sky one night, where it is observed by a few people. When they arive at the site, it is bustling with miniature robots. They call the government, and the gov shows up to observe, but by then the robots have built little buildings. Some robots are strip-mining, and they eventually build a little refinery, then more robots, then a bigger refinery... and a launch pad. By the end of the story (and by the time anyone realized they were in danger), the robots had built themselves little rockets, and were now shooting their seeds of new robot colonies around the country, soon to dominate the world, totally dispassionate for whatever was there to begin with... it just wasn't in their programming.
To boil the story down, some long forgotten alien race had created the ultimate automated factory, traveling from star system to star system to collect rare materials, and ship it back for the long ride home at sub-light speeds. Its a self propagating system, that as they spread from system to system, asteroid to moon to planet, the geometric growth would provide their civilization every material they would ever need...
...that(by reading this you agree to hold me blameless and without liability. By the way, i do not suggest anyone try this at home ever. it is dangerous and requires great care. so don't do it)
>>Although the seed cost of 25k (pounds? what is >>that, about 40k usd?)
not hardly!
See www.abymc.com or www.backyardmetalcasting.com. I have a furnace that cranks out about 6lb of molten aluminum in about 1/2 hour. It uses perlite and furnace cement cast inside of a popcorn tin with a pipe hole in the bottom for air blast. I use kingsford charcoal and a pipe crucible for fuel and melting area. The patterns can be made out of EPS--all of that polystyrene that you get when you unpack your monitors and such, using a hot wire cnc device as a cutter. This is rapid prototyping on the cheap. All together i have spent >$100 for the working furnace and the hot wire cutter. The cnc stuff will be more costly, but not much more than $500 for the driver and motors, unless i convert my sherline mill which would require me to include it's cost $800.
so:
$100 for cheap furnace and blower
$500 for driver and stepper motors
$800 for sherline, taig, or hf mini mill
$300 for cheap computer running linux and the free cnc driver package--i am not sure what it is yet.
$1700 dollars, if you are willing to work on the cheap and forgo alot of tools including grinders, drill presses--the sherline is just too slow--etc.
You may also need a good welder if you want to make your own crucible and sturdy crucible tongs as well as safety gear. Again, you can make a cheap welder out of microwave oven transformers and cheap harbor freight holders. Again, this stuff is all dangerous and I am not a professional, so do not attempt anything that I have just described here.
i am so very tired....
They Rebelled They Evolved They got a big TV contract from SciFi They sold their story to Arnold Swarzennegger to adapt to another storyline. Be careful what you prototype!
If it really can make anything, one of the first things to make would be solar panels and wind machines.
I can't wait for my replicator to be web enabled. It might catch a virus and start sending out killer bots from Robot Wars. I think I'll be a late adopter on this one.
But over the past few years we've seen a growing number of university teams approaching cheap personal prototyping from different angles. Each quietly adding to the pool of ideas from which the next efforts will draw.
Wired Magazine, in November 2004 covered Neil Gershenfeld's work at MIT. Slashdot discussion here
Gershenfeld's can produce solid objects like eyeglass frames, action figures and electronic devices like radios and computers.
Another approach to rapid prototyping and manufacturing uses inkjet technology. Inkjet Printers spitting out polymer instead of ink, manufacturing solar cells, batteries, complete working gadgets, human tissue and computer circuitry. (Disclosure: The above link is one of my BlogSpot articles on the acceleration).
Researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack at Brandeis University have coupled inkjet technology and software to autonomously design and fabricate robots without human intervention.
or
Google Search
The software simulates a variety of rudimentary virtual robots. In an accelerated Darwinian contest of survival over hundreds of generations, the most successful robotic designs are then physically prototyped. Robots autonomously designing, testing and manufacturing robots.
We're very close.
Ted
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
Imagine the replicator design equivilent of a trojan horse program, a virus, spam, or goatse...
students at nearby "shower state" continued to chase cheerleaders
Linus is having triplets or something?
Well, we ARE a type 13 planet.
Evil Space Monkeys could be stealing YOUR bandwidth!
I thought about building cheap self asembling and maintaining robots... they would mindlessly follow my orders and do whatever I wanted.
Then I started a company.
We have evolutionary pressure to cherish the animals and plants because we depend upon them to survive. A scary 2-ton metal bug would likely not.
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to mak
Wow. What planet do you live on, and how do I get there? Seriously, last I heard we were still on the fast track to destroying most life on this planet, including us. What makes you think WE cherish and protect anything except our MONEY?
Personally, I welcome our new metal robot overlords! Hail to the 2ton idiotsmasher! Lord knows, I'd probably be one of the first to go.
Don't use the Troll mod just because you disagree with me.