I converted my house to Linux around the time of the Fiesty Fawn Beta. I did keep one XP partition to keep my wife (and my games) happy. At first, my wife hated Linux and refused to use it. However, over time it grew on her, especially once I showed her the ease and flexibility of the Synaptic package manager.
After awhile, she began to really value the power Linux provided to her over the hand-holding Windows takes. We recently purchased a Eee for her. She installed KDE on it herself. Her only complaint so far? It wasn't obvious how to open a terminal from within the initial setup. 8^)
My wife's not a technical person (horticulture major), she needed Linux to pass a certain threshold of "ease of use" before she could get into it - but once she did she came to appreciate that Linux exposes more control to the user than Windows and as a result feels easier to use.
SHAME ON THOSE OF YOU WHO WENT OUT AND BOUGHT PS3s Amen! Sony has proven time and again with their anti-consumer practices that they do not deserve your money! Stick it to the man! Buy an XBox!
I was one of the unfortunate few blocked by Napster for sharing Metallica tunes. The thing that really pissed me off was that the two Metallica songs I was sharing were fan-recorded bootlegs and thus (to my understanding) were not copies of copyrighted material (Please correct me if I'm wrong).
Either way, I deleted my Metallica songs and never listened to their shit again.
Will I be buying their new "look-at-us-we're-on-the-internet" album? Not bloody likely.
Check out Worms: Armageddon. I think it's the strongest in the series and has provided my wife and I with many hours of fun. It's a 2D tactical shooter akin to the old Scorched Earth, but you're controlling cute (heavily armed) worms. The weapons are silly and the violence cartoony, but the mechanics of the game are excellent. The weapons are well-balanced and provide many different creative uses.
Later entries in the series (especially the 3D varieties) stumble a bit and the early games look *really* dated. WA though, strikes a very nice balance between graphics and playability.
I apologize, it was not my intention to cast aspersions on the abilities or competency of the engineers who have worked on SWORDs. My comment was intended to communicate my experiences with the TALON and express my concern over attaching a weapon to any robotic platform.
I work in the industry and have yet to see any robot which never moves when it's not supposed to. Robotic control is a non-trivial problem and though I don't doubt the abilities of the engineers at Foster-Miller, I have not yet seen any robotic platform I would trust implicitly with a lethal weapon.
I work for a robotics company and (among other things) have worked on modifying a TALON (on which these SWORD robots are based) to work with our control software.
if the bit that makes it swivel engages without being told, what on Earth makes you so confident that the bit that makes it shoot will not engage without it being told? To answer your question, not a damn thing. The TALON I worked with was really flaky. It shook and twitched so frequently the guys who owned the TALON referred to the bot has having the "Foster-Miller shakes."
I hope the SWORD bots are much better quality than the TALON bot, because, quite frankly, there is no fraking way I'd trust one of those things with a gun.
Disclaimer: I haven't worked on SWORD robots, but I have worked with the TALON on which the SWORDS are based.
The sort of scenario you describe is prevented with a heartbeat based killswitch. E.g. a signal is sent to the robot at a regular interval. If, for some reason, the heartbeat is not received, the robot immediately shuts down and stops moving. So, as you said, the robot "stops cold any time the transmission is having a hiccup." It can be a pain sometimes, but it's hell of a lot better than the alternative.
In the same way, dangerous commands (such as "shoot gun") require the robot to receive said command constantly in order to continue that action. So a robot being commanded to turn and fire just before losing comms would at worst, just turn, and typically do nothing.
Disclaimer: I've worked on TALONs for the military, though not on SWORDS. Unless they differ greatly in their comms setup, these things are probably set up to communicate on one frequency, in the clear. Right now, bandwidth is such a problem for these sorts of machines that - in order to maintain real-time response - there is no encryption or any other security on these things - it takes too long. All one would need to take over (or just interfere with) one of these things would be a semi-decent transmitter and a good understanding of the comms protocol being used.
It scares the living hell out of me, but right now it would be *trivially* easy to take over one of these things. In all actuality, what likely caused the robot to move was radio interference that *just happened* to be similar enough to a real command that it made the thing twitch.
I work in the robotics industry. FWIW most robots use a heartbeat based kill-switch. e.g. the control center sends out a regular message to anything it's controlling. If the robot doesn't receive that message every so often (usually 1Hz) it shuts down.
people that only use the internet for email and light web surfing are charged less than people who troll Youtube all day. Exactly. This is probably why ISPs have not yet adopted a pay as you go approach. I used to work for a webhosting company and we oversold our service by about 80% (e.g. we only had 20% of the total advertised capacity) but that was okay, because 90% of our customers only used 5% of their purchased package (of course, the other 10% tried to use 150% and complained when their site went down after burning through their alloted bandwidth). If the ISP business is anything like it, they're making money like mad on the e-mail only crowd. They're not going to be happy about killing that golden goose, even if they get to charge the heavy users more.
Heh. In my high school electronics class, when the teacher was absent for any amount of time, we'd entertain ourselves by spreading the leads on some of the LEDs wide enough to fit a standard wall socket. We'd set them just in the socket so that they were supported, but not yet closing the circuit and then flick them inwards. The resulting 125v across the 3v-rated LEDs was usually sufficient to cause them to explode. Good times. 8^)
Actually, I just lucked into one of these for $70 when my local CompUSA closed it's doors last weekend. It is *really* cool, but I haven't been able to get it to work properly with Half-Life 2 yet... I think I may also need a faster comp.
You miss the point. The government isn't asking ISPs to filter anything, they're just creating a superfluous marker to identify those that do. The ISPs are *already* providing "family safe" internet plans out here. All this does is simply add a government stamp of approval. As for ISPs not offering an unfiltered version - despite all the claims to the contrary, there are plenty of non-conservative/techy types out here that would kick up a major fuss. I don't know of any ISPs offering non-filtered net access, only a few that offer a filtered option for those who don't know about or can't use local filtering software.
I agree that any filtering higher than the local level is a 'Bad Thing', but this isn't an example of that filtering being applied, only advertised with our tax dollars (still a 'Bad Thing' but not the same one).
Heh, I used to work for a webhosting company that hosted (among many other sites, naturally) a legit (or at least, as legit as these things get) Russian bride service. Our TOS disallowed gambling, spam and "adult" sites, but selling young foreign women to dysfunctional American men? No problem.
This won't really have any effect. The government isn't going to *mandate* filtering, only provide some sort of "stamp-of-approval" to services that do. Since (one presumes) there is a market for such filtered services, the companies that provide them are *already* advertising them. All this does is provides a chance for the local politicos to look pro-family (a major voter priority here in Happy Valley ^W^W Utah) while not *actually* having to change anything.
Yes and no. We competed in both but were not among the finalists. During the off-road competition, a grad-student from a partnering university changed vehicle code ten minutes before the competition began so that his (non-debugged, non-field-tested) perception algorithm would be used and he could get a paper out of it. The car drove off the road after 7 minutes.
The recent competition we were among the last of the vehicle's cut. We never came close to any of the other vehicles (in fact, some of the stuntmen they had driving around the vehicles commented that they felt comfortable driving around our entry!), but we scraped against a chain link fence during the parking lot test.
I work for a company[1] that (among other automation projects) is working on driverless cars. Interestingly, the biggest problems we face are not those of perception (though there's more work to do there as well), but of the cost of the necessary sensors / processing power. We have a car now that can drive up to 70 mph safely (detecting obstacles, other traffic, etc) and we think we can get it up to 100 mph. However, it has a rack of four powerful servers where the back seats used to be and a price tag of over $750,000 - just for parts; labor is extra.
With the speed with which processing power and sensors become cheaper and more widely available, I think 10 years is definitely attainable. The tech is here, most of the problems are solved, we just have to wait for the price point to come down.
[1] I was going to put our URL here, but the IT dept will kill me if the servers get/.ed.;)
who said anything about the same keyword? From TFA: "[The users' adjustments] will be stored along with the users' own personal information for the next time they search for this word or phrase" (Emphasis mine, for the record.)
If it did actually learn about your preferences, that would be awesome, but such a feature would require an incredibly powerful AI to infer your preferences for future unrelated searches from your changes made.
So, you can adjust your personal search results, which are then saved for your use next time... How is this useful? If the search results aren't what I want the first time, I'm not likely to dig through them looking for better links - I'm going to try a different search phrase.
On top of that, once I find what I'm looking for, I'm either going to bookmark it or forget about it. I'm not going to search on the same keyword/phrase every time I want to visit a website.
I realize this is just a trial, but seriously, can anyone explain to me how this a good idea?
I agree. I do (and have done) my best to avoid being trivially findable. I don't understand why anyone would willingly give out personal information... After all, that's the first step on the road to being seen by someone.
In all seriousness though, these sorts of services make finding people trivially easy. That's great if only your friends are looking for you. Not so great otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
I converted my house to Linux around the time of the Fiesty Fawn Beta. I did keep one XP partition to keep my wife (and my games) happy. At first, my wife hated Linux and refused to use it. However, over time it grew on her, especially once I showed her the ease and flexibility of the Synaptic package manager.
After awhile, she began to really value the power Linux provided to her over the hand-holding Windows takes. We recently purchased a Eee for her. She installed KDE on it herself. Her only complaint so far? It wasn't obvious how to open a terminal from within the initial setup. 8^)
My wife's not a technical person (horticulture major), she needed Linux to pass a certain threshold of "ease of use" before she could get into it - but once she did she came to appreciate that Linux exposes more control to the user than Windows and as a result feels easier to use.
I was one of the unfortunate few blocked by Napster for sharing Metallica tunes. The thing that really pissed me off was that the two Metallica songs I was sharing were fan-recorded bootlegs and thus (to my understanding) were not copies of copyrighted material (Please correct me if I'm wrong).
Either way, I deleted my Metallica songs and never listened to their shit again.
Will I be buying their new "look-at-us-we're-on-the-internet" album? Not bloody likely.
Check out Worms: Armageddon. I think it's the strongest in the series and has provided my wife and I with many hours of fun. It's a 2D tactical shooter akin to the old Scorched Earth, but you're controlling cute (heavily armed) worms. The weapons are silly and the violence cartoony, but the mechanics of the game are excellent. The weapons are well-balanced and provide many different creative uses.
Later entries in the series (especially the 3D varieties) stumble a bit and the early games look *really* dated. WA though, strikes a very nice balance between graphics and playability.
I apologize, it was not my intention to cast aspersions on the abilities or competency of the engineers who have worked on SWORDs. My comment was intended to communicate my experiences with the TALON and express my concern over attaching a weapon to any robotic platform.
I work in the industry and have yet to see any robot which never moves when it's not supposed to. Robotic control is a non-trivial problem and though I don't doubt the abilities of the engineers at Foster-Miller, I have not yet seen any robotic platform I would trust implicitly with a lethal weapon.
if the bit that makes it swivel engages without being told, what on Earth makes you so confident that the bit that makes it shoot will not engage without it being told? To answer your question, not a damn thing. The TALON I worked with was really flaky. It shook and twitched so frequently the guys who owned the TALON referred to the bot has having the "Foster-Miller shakes."
I hope the SWORD bots are much better quality than the TALON bot, because, quite frankly, there is no fraking way I'd trust one of those things with a gun.
Disclaimer: I haven't worked on SWORD robots, but I have worked with the TALON on which the SWORDS are based.
The sort of scenario you describe is prevented with a heartbeat based killswitch. E.g. a signal is sent to the robot at a regular interval. If, for some reason, the heartbeat is not received, the robot immediately shuts down and stops moving. So, as you said, the robot "stops cold any time the transmission is having a hiccup." It can be a pain sometimes, but it's hell of a lot better than the alternative.
In the same way, dangerous commands (such as "shoot gun") require the robot to receive said command constantly in order to continue that action. So a robot being commanded to turn and fire just before losing comms would at worst, just turn, and typically do nothing.
Also: +1 Ironic Sig.
Can we start with Redmond?
Disclaimer: I've worked on TALONs for the military, though not on SWORDS. Unless they differ greatly in their comms setup, these things are probably set up to communicate on one frequency, in the clear. Right now, bandwidth is such a problem for these sorts of machines that - in order to maintain real-time response - there is no encryption or any other security on these things - it takes too long. All one would need to take over (or just interfere with) one of these things would be a semi-decent transmitter and a good understanding of the comms protocol being used.
It scares the living hell out of me, but right now it would be *trivially* easy to take over one of these things. In all actuality, what likely caused the robot to move was radio interference that *just happened* to be similar enough to a real command that it made the thing twitch.
I know you're trying to be funny, but actually, the Foster-Miller TALON (on which these machines are based) does run Linux.
I work in the robotics industry. FWIW most robots use a heartbeat based kill-switch. e.g. the control center sends out a regular message to anything it's controlling. If the robot doesn't receive that message every so often (usually 1Hz) it shuts down.
Heh. In my high school electronics class, when the teacher was absent for any amount of time, we'd entertain ourselves by spreading the leads on some of the LEDs wide enough to fit a standard wall socket. We'd set them just in the socket so that they were supported, but not yet closing the circuit and then flick them inwards. The resulting 125v across the 3v-rated LEDs was usually sufficient to cause them to explode. Good times. 8^)
Actually, I just lucked into one of these for $70 when my local CompUSA closed it's doors last weekend. It is *really* cool, but I haven't been able to get it to work properly with Half-Life 2 yet... I think I may also need a faster comp.
You miss the point. The government isn't asking ISPs to filter anything, they're just creating a superfluous marker to identify those that do. The ISPs are *already* providing "family safe" internet plans out here. All this does is simply add a government stamp of approval. As for ISPs not offering an unfiltered version - despite all the claims to the contrary, there are plenty of non-conservative/techy types out here that would kick up a major fuss. I don't know of any ISPs offering non-filtered net access, only a few that offer a filtered option for those who don't know about or can't use local filtering software.
I agree that any filtering higher than the local level is a 'Bad Thing', but this isn't an example of that filtering being applied, only advertised with our tax dollars (still a 'Bad Thing' but not the same one).
Heh, I used to work for a webhosting company that hosted (among many other sites, naturally) a legit (or at least, as legit as these things get) Russian bride service. Our TOS disallowed gambling, spam and "adult" sites, but selling young foreign women to dysfunctional American men? No problem.
This won't really have any effect. The government isn't going to *mandate* filtering, only provide some sort of "stamp-of-approval" to services that do. Since (one presumes) there is a market for such filtered services, the companies that provide them are *already* advertising them. All this does is provides a chance for the local politicos to look pro-family (a major voter priority here in Happy Valley ^W^W Utah) while not *actually* having to change anything.
Neat trick.
Yes and no. We competed in both but were not among the finalists. During the off-road competition, a grad-student from a partnering university changed vehicle code ten minutes before the competition began so that his (non-debugged, non-field-tested) perception algorithm would be used and he could get a paper out of it. The car drove off the road after 7 minutes.
The recent competition we were among the last of the vehicle's cut. We never came close to any of the other vehicles (in fact, some of the stuntmen they had driving around the vehicles commented that they felt comfortable driving around our entry!), but we scraped against a chain link fence during the parking lot test.
With the speed with which processing power and sensors become cheaper and more widely available, I think 10 years is definitely attainable. The tech is here, most of the problems are solved, we just have to wait for the price point to come down.
/.ed. ;)
[1] I was going to put our URL here, but the IT dept will kill me if the servers get
Just watch out for that socket. Trust me, don't try it!
Lose the "o" next time.
Though, to be fair, you might have been asking the GP to unleash further italics on the unsuspecting world, as in "Loose the dogs of war."
If it did actually learn about your preferences, that would be awesome, but such a feature would require an incredibly powerful AI to infer your preferences for future unrelated searches from your changes made.
So, you can adjust your personal search results, which are then saved for your use next time... How is this useful? If the search results aren't what I want the first time, I'm not likely to dig through them looking for better links - I'm going to try a different search phrase.
On top of that, once I find what I'm looking for, I'm either going to bookmark it or forget about it. I'm not going to search on the same keyword/phrase every time I want to visit a website.
I realize this is just a trial, but seriously, can anyone explain to me how this a good idea?
I agree. I do (and have done) my best to avoid being trivially findable. I don't understand why anyone would willingly give out personal information... After all, that's the first step on the road to being seen by someone.
In all seriousness though, these sorts of services make finding people trivially easy. That's great if only your friends are looking for you. Not so great otherwise.