Forget working or web surfing while the car drives you somewhere... why even be conscious and have to remember the time it takes to get somewhere?
I want self-driving sleeper cars.
Everywhere within 8 hours drive would be just a night's sleep away. Get off work on Friday, sleep, wake up in some mid-point town with a dozen friends from different cities, party for the weekend, as I sleep Sunday night the car gets me back to where I work.
Numerous social and economic knock-on effects follow from self-driving sleeper cars.
An interesting conjecture, but wouldn't anything using reaction drives light itself up quite nicely when it moved around? That is one of the conclusions over at Atomic Rockets.
Try AppBrain. It gives you online searching, an install queue, and user defined lists (which I find quite useful for managing possibilities/recommendations I might want to try later).
Largest app store by an order of magnitude (i seldom pay for anything, tons of free stuff available that do what I want)
Just to be a bit pedantic, "order of magnitude" is false. Android's Market has about 66000 applications, Apple's App Store has something just over 200000. So about three times larger. Three times is not an order of magnitude.
Hey, how is Jolicloud? I tried to run it on in virtual machine to try it out and something in the install hung up past my desire that day to look into it. What's your first hand review?
It's a pity the advertisers won (at least they seem to have done so at the moment) the race against micropayments for how to fund "progress" on the web. Great swaths of the web falling into TV2 type drivel seems almost inevitable now. [This comment brought to you by Folgers.]
Wouldn't it make the problem easier if the towels had some corner highlighting and a pattern to show the orientation? Then the company that sells you the towel folding robot can be sure to have a towel customer for a while.
Trough various bizarre turns of conversation that shall pass without enumeration, a friend and I thought of the answer for this the other day while at the pub. Gyroscopic prayer pod. Need I say more?
... I already have a intra-cranial provider with exclusive broadcast rights. If anyone starts using this techonology to insert messages that aren't approved by that provider, they will be opening themselves up to lawsuits. Maybe I should put a sticker on my ass warning them about this. Now if they are willing to pay for some broadcast rights, maybe we can talk.
How about just fixing the most broken metaphors of browsing that no longer fit how people use the browser? I'm looking at you History.
Now that tabbed browsing is the norm, it seems that the metaphors surrounding the browser's history are getting a bit dated. For one, it all looks so linearly organized. While over in reality, we have tabs spawning other tabs. When they are opened isn't necessarily at all when they are used (and thus remembered to be relevant). Some tabs are hubs that are returned to again and again, spawning the same or different pages each time there. Sometimes those spoke tabs last for one reading (or less). Sometimes they give rise to other tabs directly, with a middle click, other times indirectly (open new search on something related to the page's content).
All this rich information is completely lost in the current views of history. The complex path we took from then to now is all lost in a flat view that is only somewhat usable, largely because it has some search capability (but even that doesn't reach into the contents of the pages we are presumably searching for).
If there is a plugin for a richer history, I'd be happy to know.
The real problem seems to be the specificity of the ads. The ad in the example seems to assume that if you like foo, then you are ok with some particular way of getting foo. But that is a totally false assumption. If they could make these ads way more specific, would you still have a problem with them (I don't think I would)?
A dishwasher only really does the middle 1/3rd of the full dish task. It doesn't take the dishes from the eating area to the place where they are washed, nor does it put the clean dishes back in the storage areas where the user can select from them. Robotic dishwashing is incomplete mostly because it is still too hard a problem for cheap robots.
The same thinking applies to most programable coffee pots.
No kidding on that laundry folding one. Washing and drying machines are great and all, but they only really solve like 1/3rd of the laundry problem. The middle 1/3rd that is. The first 1/3rd, getting the laundry from where the user puts it to the washer is left undone, but shouldn't be too hard, just setup the laundry bin to feed the washer with some automated sorting to pick the right clothes/wash cycle. The last 1/3rd, getting the clean and dry laundry back to where the user can choose among it, is likely the hardest step since it needs gentle manipulation of the clothes and whatnot (which vary a great deal in their geometries) and then moving them to closets and dressers and the like.
As for bathroom/kitchen cleaning I think something like robotic ants would be ideal and totally doable. I'd like some of those for general tidying up around the place too (they could put the remotes and keys and pens and such where they are supposed to go and the like).
Preparing meals is likely solveable if the menu is very contrained and the input food stocks can be restricted to known packaging. Those two limitations pretty much kill the market for it though. If the labor price goes up for teens, then I'm sure the fast food companies will have such a robot off the drawing board pretty quick. I bet they have some numbers on what the cost of labor would have to be to make it worthwhile already.
Don't buy MeditationSensation's answers. At least not the $19.95 ones; they fall apart pretty quick. The $5 ones are maybe worth it, depending on just how much you feel you need to know.
So put some people in Mars orbit and send nice robots down to do the ground-work. Still cheaper than sending the people down, and you get the "human in the quick loop" advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget working or web surfing while the car drives you somewhere... why even be conscious and have to remember the time it takes to get somewhere?
I want self-driving sleeper cars.
Everywhere within 8 hours drive would be just a night's sleep away. Get off work on Friday, sleep, wake up in some mid-point town with a dozen friends from different cities, party for the weekend, as I sleep Sunday night the car gets me back to where I work.
Numerous social and economic knock-on effects follow from self-driving sleeper cars.
An interesting conjecture, but wouldn't anything using reaction drives light itself up quite nicely when it moved around? That is one of the conclusions over at Atomic Rockets.
Try AppBrain. It gives you online searching, an install queue, and user defined lists (which I find quite useful for managing possibilities/recommendations I might want to try later).
Just to be a bit pedantic, "order of magnitude" is false. Android's Market has about 66000 applications, Apple's App Store has something just over 200000. So about three times larger. Three times is not an order of magnitude.
Hey, how is Jolicloud? I tried to run it on in virtual machine to try it out and something in the install hung up past my desire that day to look into it. What's your first hand review?
Extreme love of Jailbreakers?
It's a pity the advertisers won (at least they seem to have done so at the moment) the race against micropayments for how to fund "progress" on the web. Great swaths of the web falling into TV2 type drivel seems almost inevitable now. [This comment brought to you by Folgers.]
"Potanets"
Wouldn't it make the problem easier if the towels had some corner highlighting and a pattern to show the orientation? Then the company that sells you the towel folding robot can be sure to have a towel customer for a while.
Here is the link for you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arCITMfxvEc
Very good. Thank you. Can hardly wait till all the Frontlines ever are there.
Something like this?
Contemplated a little wget rm sleep loop. But that just wouldn't be polite.
Trough various bizarre turns of conversation that shall pass without enumeration, a friend and I thought of the answer for this the other day while at the pub. Gyroscopic prayer pod. Need I say more?
... I already have a intra-cranial provider with exclusive broadcast rights. If anyone starts using this techonology to insert messages that aren't approved by that provider, they will be opening themselves up to lawsuits. Maybe I should put a sticker on my ass warning them about this. Now if they are willing to pay for some broadcast rights, maybe we can talk.
I want a bit that floats around and answers my questions.
How about just fixing the most broken metaphors of browsing that no longer fit how people use the browser? I'm looking at you History.
Now that tabbed browsing is the norm, it seems that the metaphors surrounding the browser's history are getting a bit dated. For one, it all looks so linearly organized. While over in reality, we have tabs spawning other tabs. When they are opened isn't necessarily at all when they are used (and thus remembered to be relevant). Some tabs are hubs that are returned to again and again, spawning the same or different pages each time there. Sometimes those spoke tabs last for one reading (or less). Sometimes they give rise to other tabs directly, with a middle click, other times indirectly (open new search on something related to the page's content).
All this rich information is completely lost in the current views of history. The complex path we took from then to now is all lost in a flat view that is only somewhat usable, largely because it has some search capability (but even that doesn't reach into the contents of the pages we are presumably searching for).
If there is a plugin for a richer history, I'd be happy to know.
Applying a degradation of service to subscribers in order to keep subscribers from suffering a degradation of service? Doing A to prevent A?
And how does it know I'm double-dosing, as opposed to needing another one because I dropped the first behind the cabinet (again)?
The real problem seems to be the specificity of the ads. The ad in the example seems to assume that if you like foo, then you are ok with some particular way of getting foo. But that is a totally false assumption. If they could make these ads way more specific, would you still have a problem with them (I don't think I would)?
A dishwasher only really does the middle 1/3rd of the full dish task. It doesn't take the dishes from the eating area to the place where they are washed, nor does it put the clean dishes back in the storage areas where the user can select from them. Robotic dishwashing is incomplete mostly because it is still too hard a problem for cheap robots.
The same thinking applies to most programable coffee pots.
No kidding on that laundry folding one. Washing and drying machines are great and all, but they only really solve like 1/3rd of the laundry problem. The middle 1/3rd that is. The first 1/3rd, getting the laundry from where the user puts it to the washer is left undone, but shouldn't be too hard, just setup the laundry bin to feed the washer with some automated sorting to pick the right clothes/wash cycle. The last 1/3rd, getting the clean and dry laundry back to where the user can choose among it, is likely the hardest step since it needs gentle manipulation of the clothes and whatnot (which vary a great deal in their geometries) and then moving them to closets and dressers and the like.
As for bathroom/kitchen cleaning I think something like robotic ants would be ideal and totally doable. I'd like some of those for general tidying up around the place too (they could put the remotes and keys and pens and such where they are supposed to go and the like).
Preparing meals is likely solveable if the menu is very contrained and the input food stocks can be restricted to known packaging. Those two limitations pretty much kill the market for it though. If the labor price goes up for teens, then I'm sure the fast food companies will have such a robot off the drawing board pretty quick. I bet they have some numbers on what the cost of labor would have to be to make it worthwhile already.
Don't buy MeditationSensation's answers. At least not the $19.95 ones; they fall apart pretty quick. The $5 ones are maybe worth it, depending on just how much you feel you need to know.
So put some people in Mars orbit and send nice robots down to do the ground-work. Still cheaper than sending the people down, and you get the "human in the quick loop" advantage.
So send better robots, and put some humans into Mars orbit to control them. Still no direct need to put people on the ground.