I completely agree, for so many reasons, robotics is usually not something you can just create a standard API or OS and expect it to be immediately useful. The whole point of robotics is generally to invent new methods of controlling a robot, or to invent new hardware for a robot. There are already various robotics libraries around, such as:
Player/Stage
ActivMedia ARIA
YARP
MRVL
Yobotics Construction Set
URBI
Microsoft Robotics Studio
plus other libraries that are used for AI (such as OpenCV) and also various hardware libraries. The problem is that when you are working with a complete robot (not just researching 1 element of a hypothetical robot), the different parts of the robot (such as the motors, the low-level sensors, the high-level sensors, the hardware controllers, the computer OS & drivers, the robot software architecture and the AI of the robot, and even the physical environment that the robot is placed in, are usually very dependent on each other. If just one of those items/modules is behaving strangely, the problem can show up in any of the other items.
For example, imagine you have a robot using a Neural-Network based AI brain running Microsoft Robotics Studio on Windows XP to drive a 6-legged robot around a room without crashing into the wall. If you build the whole thing and then test it and find out that it usually avoids the walls but occasionally it runs into a wall, the problem might be that the wall is partially invisible to your type of sensors (eg: a black wall is barely visible to InfraRed sensors), it might be that one of your sensors is misaligned, or a wire is loose or has inadequate electrical shielding, or one of your 6 robot legs can't turn the robot fast enough to avoid the wall, or one of your motor controllers isn't powerful enough for the manoeuvre, or your batteries or power wires are overloaded, or your microcontroller board can't communicate with your main computer fast enough, or Windows XP is causing an occasional delay in processing, or Microsoft Robotics Studio has a bug, or your Neural-Network AI library has an occasional bug in it, or the way you've configured the AI library isn't quite correct, or the way your code is controlling the whole AI and robot has a bug in it.
With all of these potential problems, NOT ONE of these can always be debugged in isolation by thinking of it as a robot made of completely separate modules, because if you move something in the robot you might make a loose wire become temporarily connected, or by testing it on the bench it might not cause the same power problems, or your Neural Network system might act strange only to something in your environment, etc.
Whether you used a robotics library to make things easier or you invented everything from scratch, wont necessarily make much difference overall, because you have so many problems to solve, and a typical robotics library will only solve a small part of it. If the robotics libraries or OSes were perfectly bug-free and were open-source and provided a solution to the majority or things you would need to do in robotics, then they would be extremely useful, to stop people from reinventing the wheel everytime. But recently I've worked on 3 different research robots that were did use large robotics libraries / operating systems, and in all 3 cases, the libraries were useful for a large part of what was needed, but there was always something that needed to be slightly different, or some rare bug in the library, and so in all 3 cases we spent so much trouble getting the libraries to do the task the exact way we needed it, that it would have been just as easy to create the whole thing from scratch ourselves.
Those are just some of the reasons why robotics libraries or operating systems are a LOT harder to standardise than something like a PC library or operating system! I would consider robotics to be closer to where the computer industry was about 70 years ago, when very little of the problems had been solved, and everything was very expensive and required a lot of difficulty to design, and everything was still being trialled and invented from scratch by hand.
It is also a very repressive, very corrupt, Fascist state and people blinded by dollar signs seem to keep forgetting that. The Chinese State, party officials and their families own huge chunks of most of the important Chinese corporations and they don't believe in level playing fields for anyone competing against them.
Everything and everyone is heavily censored and it is extremely common for censorship to be used to conceal the widespread corruption at all levels of society. I seriously doubt any state will be successful long term if its foundation is based on concealment, deceit and suppression of truth.
But the same could be said about the USA and the Bush government! (assuming ur not American) The difference is that with China is more obvious where the problems are, where as within America its a lot more hidden.
I actually agree with a lot of what you're saying, that its strange that these days its so hard to interface your software to the real-world. Back in the 80's or 90's, if you wanted to write a simple program to read the temperature of the room or switch something in your house on or off, it didn't need much knowledge in computers, because you could just write a few lines of code in BASIC or whatever language you wanted and it would happen easily.
Now that there has been so much development in the pure software areas and in internet based software, if you want to do the same task using Visual Basic or Java, it actually requires a lot more knowledge, to buy a USB interface device, understand the internals of USB device drivers and Windows (or Linux or Mac) device drivers, and the (usually somewhat tricky) method of accessing that stuff from your VB or Java code through libraries & hacks!
But what has emerged since the 90's is the rise of microcontrollers, for doing those type of tasks, where you want to interface with sensors and devices. Now, if you want to write simple software to control something, you would write it for a microcontroller, and microcontrollers are getting much better each year. Unfortunately, they aren't nearly as sophisticated or as easy to use as a PC computer, but they are approaching the computing power of a typical PC of the early 90's now anyway, and there is slowly becoming more development languages and libraries, so you will soon be able to program a tiny microcontroller in a language like BASIC and use simple statements for I/O access, and still have the computational power of the PC, while being a tiny device instead of a large PC.
So the new microcontroller paradigm has the advantages of being tiny in size and approaching the simplicity that PC's had in the 80's / 90's, but the disadvantage of not having things like a direct text console / video screen / keyboard / mouse input without some extra hacking. But if you still want to access hardware easily, yesterdays solution was DOS or Apple IIe, whereas todays solution is the microcontroller (such as Atmel, PIC, PicAxe, Arduino, etc).
It's too bad there is no single replacement for Slashdot. This place is toast.
If you miss the old Slashdot so much and there's no replacements for it, why don't you make your own? Seems like a good way to make money doing something you like.
Otherwise, stop bitching, because the point of reading tech blogs like Slashdot is to see how things are changing because of technology. If you don't like that everything under us is changing with technology, then why are you reading Slashdot and not an old book that will never change?
Yeah thats why I worked on the project, thinking that advances in military robots might also advance peaceful robots. But a big difference is that military robots are nearly always controlled by humans remotely, whereas household & friendly robots are nearly always using AI to control themselves.
So to reply to your statement, if you replace a gun on a military robot with a gripper arms, you end up with a very heavy & expensive robot that doesn't move!
AI (or the brains of the robot) is the least developed part of robotics, and all the billions of $$$ spent on military robots is not going to help that much all.
Sure, a lot of information technology was originally designed for military purposes, but that doesn't mean it will also apply to all technology. eg: killer robots?!
Two years ago I built a killer robot for DARPA / US Military, that was literally for the purpose of driving into standard houses in Iraq, climbing up any stairs, killing anyone in the house and then moving on to the next house. Whether you see this as a life-saving robot (since it saves US human soldiers from doing the same job) or as a killing robot (since the robot is designed to kill both guilty and innocent people) is just a point of view, cos at the end of the day it saves US soldiers but kills innocent people.
After that project, I've promised myself that I'm never going to work on a military robot again! But the point is that the US military has somewhere between 5,000 - 10,000 robots in Iraq, mainly spying robots such as flying UAV's or wheeled spy robots. Nearly ALL of those robots are remotely controlled by humans. So obviously USA is leading the world's military robot market, but USA doesn't have nearly as much emphasis on intelligent robots or non-military robots anymore, besides the Roomba vacuum cleaners, and even the Roomba company has sold 2500 military robots in Iraq & Afghanistan! (http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=109)
<begin hippie speech> With all the advances in military robots, its mainly just giving more power to the already most-powerful USA, while trying to reduce the power of the rest of the world. It hasn't helped people much outside of the military. Meanwhile, Japan is by far the leader when it comes to non-military, household and intelligent robots. Even though Japan also tries to keep its technology closed from the rest of the world, but atleast they're not just concentrating on how to kill foreign humans with the least political impact! <\end hippie speech>
Please direct me to the nearest available powerpoint at your convenience. Thanks you for your assistance.
Well sorry, but for my Masters thesis I made a robot that can find its own battery charger and plug itself in and then continue doing stuff, potentially forever! (http://www.araa.asn.au/acra/acra2005/papers/emami.pdf)
So we are getting closer to robot world domination, sorry:-)
Maybe they don't know how to use Linux so they use WINE instead.
A lot of academics use Windows because they don't want to spend time learning Linux, even if it suits them much more than Windows does. I've worked in 3 robotics labs now that run Windows XP on robots because the academics don't want to learn Linux!
It's not like there is an official meaning of the word Robot that has been clearly defined for hundreds of years. Basically if people want to call it a robot then its a robot. I've built both autonomous and human controlled robots before and even if there's no autonomous functionality at all in a robot, it can still have a lot of similar problems to autonomous robots, which is why its generally classified as a robot, as opposed to "machine" or "remotely operated vehicle".
I mean you wouldn't call a computer printer a robot, even though it has a level of autonomy and motors and sensors and feedback loops and embedded processor, but if it was in a factory and was 10 times larger and had a plastic cutting tool instead of a ink dropping tool, then some people would call it a factory robot.
Somehow I doubt anyone has complained to Gmail that the 7+ GB of free mail storage is too limiting! Maybe people will in 5-10yrs but who can predict that far into the future of the technology?! (Obviously not Bill Gates, and his never-ending "replacement of the keyboard & mouse with speech recognition in 5yrs")
I disagree that you should teach them about an oscillator circuit. When I first learn about electronics in 8th grade at school, our 1st project was to simply turn an LED on with a battery, and the 2nd one was to solder an astable multivibrator that flashes an LED. There was just so much more complexity between the 1st project and the 2nd project that almost no-one managed to get the flashing circuit to work, and definitely no-one could understand how it worked, no matter how many times the teacher tried to explain it to us. Also, because it was so hard for us to make such a complex circuit (obviously its a very simple circuit for an engineer, but for someone who has spent just a few hours learning about electronics, it feels like it takes forever to build), it was hard to see why it was such a big deal.
I think its a much better idea to get them to work with something simpler to understand, build, modify, and view something useful. Sure its hard to find such a simple circuit that would suit this, but I think there are better options than trying to understand an astable multivibrator or 555 timer IC.
I think making batteries out of house-hold items like potatoes or coca-cola is going to impress a lot of students, like the potato powered clock here: "http://www.kidzworld.com/article/4726-how-potato-batteries-work"
Maybe you could get the students to power their mobile phones using 2 or 3 potatoes in series, which they might remember for example if they sleep at a friend's house and their mobile phone runs out of batteries so they try solving their actual problem with things in the kitchen.
Another idea is a Crystal radio (that makes a very soft sounding radio that doesn't even need a battery!) or a simple AM radio out of a few parts, as explained in this website with a lot of really cool science projects, including some different ways to make an AM radio: "http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/radio/ten_minute_radio.html"
Sure, its also hard to understand how an AM radio works, but its very satisfying to see a human voice come out of something using just 3 or 4 components simple components!
By "increased security", they seem to mean that its less likely the whole browser with all your tabs and data is going to suddenly crash. Which can be useful, for example you might be in the middle of filling out an intense job application form on one tab and suddenly the youtube video you were loading in the background takes down your whole session.
But I think calling it "security" just makes everyone assume they mean it will be harder for people to hack their system.
Surely if it takes 16MB of RAM just to load up the Google website (one of the simplest websites there is!) it's going to bring lots of new ways to crash or hack the system!!
I think most people would agree that for some types of games, like Crysis, new high-res & realtistic graphics are very useful, whereas for other types of games like Tetris or Nintendo games, old & simple graphics is equally suitable.
But the crazy thing is that it seems that game designers think they can only sell the types of games that need high quality graphics. How often do you hear of a new 2D platform game on Xbox 360 or PS3? You don't, because its assumed that these days no-one would want to play those type of games if there's games around with more realistic graphics, but I don't think that's true. Nintendo Wii proves that you can still sell new games with lower quality graphics. And look at the whole genre of Street Fighter style games, they have barely changed at all in nearly 20 years and are still very popular!
Basically what I'm saying is that if some games are suited to high 3D graphics and other games are suited to cartoon or 2D graphics, then why do people almost only every make the high 3D graphics type games now?
But if they are giving the laptops to the students to use & take home, isn't it the students themselves that are expected to fix their own problems, not the schools that must provide the support?
Interesting point, because it could be used for by the government to control you. But your examples are incredibly unlikely. Just to stop an under 21yr old from picking up alcohol, it would have to know the person's age, plus have either an alcohol detector in the hand or all alcohol bottles would need barcodes or similar to identify that its alcohol. But the person could either "hack their hand" to make it think they're 21, or just drink the beer from a plastic cup:-)
Obviously, the government has MANY ways of controlling the public, but this one doesn't seem like one if u ask me! The bigger concern would be if the government only allowed certain types of people to obtain the new arms, and therefore keep people they don't like from having them.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree, for so many reasons, robotics is usually not something you can just create a standard API or OS and expect it to be immediately useful. The whole point of robotics is generally to invent new methods of controlling a robot, or to invent new hardware for a robot. There are already various robotics libraries around, such as:
Player/Stage
ActivMedia ARIA
YARP
MRVL
Yobotics Construction Set
URBI
Microsoft Robotics Studio plus other libraries that are used for AI (such as OpenCV) and also various hardware libraries. The problem is that when you are working with a complete robot (not just researching 1 element of a hypothetical robot), the different parts of the robot (such as the motors, the low-level sensors, the high-level sensors, the hardware controllers, the computer OS & drivers, the robot software architecture and the AI of the robot, and even the physical environment that the robot is placed in, are usually very dependent on each other. If just one of those items/modules is behaving strangely, the problem can show up in any of the other items.
For example, imagine you have a robot using a Neural-Network based AI brain running Microsoft Robotics Studio on Windows XP to drive a 6-legged robot around a room without crashing into the wall. If you build the whole thing and then test it and find out that it usually avoids the walls but occasionally it runs into a wall, the problem might be that the wall is partially invisible to your type of sensors (eg: a black wall is barely visible to InfraRed sensors), it might be that one of your sensors is misaligned, or a wire is loose or has inadequate electrical shielding, or one of your 6 robot legs can't turn the robot fast enough to avoid the wall, or one of your motor controllers isn't powerful enough for the manoeuvre, or your batteries or power wires are overloaded, or your microcontroller board can't communicate with your main computer fast enough, or Windows XP is causing an occasional delay in processing, or Microsoft Robotics Studio has a bug, or your Neural-Network AI library has an occasional bug in it, or the way you've configured the AI library isn't quite correct, or the way your code is controlling the whole AI and robot has a bug in it.
With all of these potential problems, NOT ONE of these can always be debugged in isolation by thinking of it as a robot made of completely separate modules, because if you move something in the robot you might make a loose wire become temporarily connected, or by testing it on the bench it might not cause the same power problems, or your Neural Network system might act strange only to something in your environment, etc.
Whether you used a robotics library to make things easier or you invented everything from scratch, wont necessarily make much difference overall, because you have so many problems to solve, and a typical robotics library will only solve a small part of it. If the robotics libraries or OSes were perfectly bug-free and were open-source and provided a solution to the majority or things you would need to do in robotics, then they would be extremely useful, to stop people from reinventing the wheel everytime. But recently I've worked on 3 different research robots that were did use large robotics libraries / operating systems, and in all 3 cases, the libraries were useful for a large part of what was needed, but there was always something that needed to be slightly different, or some rare bug in the library, and so in all 3 cases we spent so much trouble getting the libraries to do the task the exact way we needed it, that it would have been just as easy to create the whole thing from scratch ourselves.
Those are just some of the reasons why robotics libraries or operating systems are a LOT harder to standardise than something like a PC library or operating system! I would consider robotics to be closer to where the computer industry was about 70 years ago, when very little of the problems had been solved, and everything was very expensive and required a lot of difficulty to design, and everything was still being trialled and invented from scratch by hand.
It is also a very repressive, very corrupt, Fascist state and people blinded by dollar signs seem to keep forgetting that. The Chinese State, party officials and their families own huge chunks of most of the important Chinese corporations and they don't believe in level playing fields for anyone competing against them.
Everything and everyone is heavily censored and it is extremely common for censorship to be used to conceal the widespread corruption at all levels of society. I seriously doubt any state will be successful long term if its foundation is based on concealment, deceit and suppression of truth.
But the same could be said about the USA and the Bush government! (assuming ur not American) The difference is that with China is more obvious where the problems are, where as within America its a lot more hidden.
I actually agree with a lot of what you're saying, that its strange that these days its so hard to interface your software to the real-world. Back in the 80's or 90's, if you wanted to write a simple program to read the temperature of the room or switch something in your house on or off, it didn't need much knowledge in computers, because you could just write a few lines of code in BASIC or whatever language you wanted and it would happen easily.
Now that there has been so much development in the pure software areas and in internet based software, if you want to do the same task using Visual Basic or Java, it actually requires a lot more knowledge, to buy a USB interface device, understand the internals of USB device drivers and Windows (or Linux or Mac) device drivers, and the (usually somewhat tricky) method of accessing that stuff from your VB or Java code through libraries & hacks!
But what has emerged since the 90's is the rise of microcontrollers, for doing those type of tasks, where you want to interface with sensors and devices. Now, if you want to write simple software to control something, you would write it for a microcontroller, and microcontrollers are getting much better each year. Unfortunately, they aren't nearly as sophisticated or as easy to use as a PC computer, but they are approaching the computing power of a typical PC of the early 90's now anyway, and there is slowly becoming more development languages and libraries, so you will soon be able to program a tiny microcontroller in a language like BASIC and use simple statements for I/O access, and still have the computational power of the PC, while being a tiny device instead of a large PC.
So the new microcontroller paradigm has the advantages of being tiny in size and approaching the simplicity that PC's had in the 80's / 90's, but the disadvantage of not having things like a direct text console / video screen / keyboard / mouse input without some extra hacking. But if you still want to access hardware easily, yesterdays solution was DOS or Apple IIe, whereas todays solution is the microcontroller (such as Atmel, PIC, PicAxe, Arduino, etc).
It's too bad there is no single replacement for Slashdot. This place is toast.
If you miss the old Slashdot so much and there's no replacements for it, why don't you make your own? Seems like a good way to make money doing something you like.
...
Otherwise, stop bitching, because the point of reading tech blogs like Slashdot is to see how things are changing because of technology. If you don't like that everything under us is changing with technology, then why are you reading Slashdot and not an old book that will never change?
Just my opinion
Ah, but most of the consoles people care about these days haven't reached the age of consent...
Nintendo is over a hundred years old.
Nintendo the company is. But the Gamecube is... what, eight? And the Wii is like two or three?
Yes but the Super Nintendo is 19 :-)
Yeah thats why I worked on the project, thinking that advances in military robots might also advance peaceful robots. But a big difference is that military robots are nearly always controlled by humans remotely, whereas household & friendly robots are nearly always using AI to control themselves.
So to reply to your statement, if you replace a gun on a military robot with a gripper arms, you end up with a very heavy & expensive robot that doesn't move!
AI (or the brains of the robot) is the least developed part of robotics, and all the billions of $$$ spent on military robots is not going to help that much all.
I will be seriously impressed though when we see a biped that can lock its knees.
You mean like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPM_uiPxLtY
But wouldn't a lazy nerd way rather sit ontop of a robot that does the running instead?
Sure, a lot of information technology was originally designed for military purposes, but that doesn't mean it will also apply to all technology. eg: killer robots?!
Two years ago I built a killer robot for DARPA / US Military, that was literally for the purpose of driving into standard houses in Iraq, climbing up any stairs, killing anyone in the house and then moving on to the next house. Whether you see this as a life-saving robot (since it saves US human soldiers from doing the same job) or as a killing robot (since the robot is designed to kill both guilty and innocent people) is just a point of view, cos at the end of the day it saves US soldiers but kills innocent people.
After that project, I've promised myself that I'm never going to work on a military robot again! But the point is that the US military has somewhere between 5,000 - 10,000 robots in Iraq, mainly spying robots such as flying UAV's or wheeled spy robots. Nearly ALL of those robots are remotely controlled by humans. So obviously USA is leading the world's military robot market, but USA doesn't have nearly as much emphasis on intelligent robots or non-military robots anymore, besides the Roomba vacuum cleaners, and even the Roomba company has sold 2500 military robots in Iraq & Afghanistan! (http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=109)
<begin hippie speech>
With all the advances in military robots, its mainly just giving more power to the already most-powerful USA, while trying to reduce the power of the rest of the world. It hasn't helped people much outside of the military. Meanwhile, Japan is by far the leader when it comes to non-military, household and intelligent robots. Even though Japan also tries to keep its technology closed from the rest of the world, but atleast they're not just concentrating on how to kill foreign humans with the least political impact!
<\end hippie speech>
KNEEL BEFORE YOUR NEW MASTERS!!!
*BEEEeeeeep*
Please direct me to the nearest available powerpoint at your convenience. Thanks you for your assistance.
Well sorry, but for my Masters thesis I made a robot that can find its own battery charger and plug itself in and then continue doing stuff, potentially forever! (http://www.araa.asn.au/acra/acra2005/papers/emami.pdf) So we are getting closer to robot world domination, sorry :-)
Sort of like Slashdot with an auto-Refresh feature!
that raises the question: why use WINE?
Maybe they don't know how to use Linux so they use WINE instead. A lot of academics use Windows because they don't want to spend time learning Linux, even if it suits them much more than Windows does. I've worked in 3 robotics labs now that run Windows XP on robots because the academics don't want to learn Linux!
It's not like there is an official meaning of the word Robot that has been clearly defined for hundreds of years. Basically if people want to call it a robot then its a robot. I've built both autonomous and human controlled robots before and even if there's no autonomous functionality at all in a robot, it can still have a lot of similar problems to autonomous robots, which is why its generally classified as a robot, as opposed to "machine" or "remotely operated vehicle".
I mean you wouldn't call a computer printer a robot, even though it has a level of autonomy and motors and sensors and feedback loops and embedded processor, but if it was in a factory and was 10 times larger and had a plastic cutting tool instead of a ink dropping tool, then some people would call it a factory robot.
IK isn't used too often, since it takes a lot of processing power, and isn't always guaranteed to give you good results!
Somehow I doubt anyone has complained to Gmail that the 7+ GB of free mail storage is too limiting! Maybe people will in 5-10yrs but who can predict that far into the future of the technology?! (Obviously not Bill Gates, and his never-ending "replacement of the keyboard & mouse with speech recognition in 5yrs")
I'm sure when the world gets taken over by futuristic super-intelligent tree-climbing octopii, they'll find it useful.
Trust me, in another 10 years you'll be wondering how people lived without 128 bit credit limits.
It gives a new meaning to the common $Hex notation, like $FF :-)
I disagree that you should teach them about an oscillator circuit. When I first learn about electronics in 8th grade at school, our 1st project was to simply turn an LED on with a battery, and the 2nd one was to solder an astable multivibrator that flashes an LED. There was just so much more complexity between the 1st project and the 2nd project that almost no-one managed to get the flashing circuit to work, and definitely no-one could understand how it worked, no matter how many times the teacher tried to explain it to us. Also, because it was so hard for us to make such a complex circuit (obviously its a very simple circuit for an engineer, but for someone who has spent just a few hours learning about electronics, it feels like it takes forever to build), it was hard to see why it was such a big deal.
I think its a much better idea to get them to work with something simpler to understand, build, modify, and view something useful. Sure its hard to find such a simple circuit that would suit this, but I think there are better options than trying to understand an astable multivibrator or 555 timer IC.
I think making batteries out of house-hold items like potatoes or coca-cola is going to impress a lot of students, like the potato powered clock here: "http://www.kidzworld.com/article/4726-how-potato-batteries-work"
Maybe you could get the students to power their mobile phones using 2 or 3 potatoes in series, which they might remember for example if they sleep at a friend's house and their mobile phone runs out of batteries so they try solving their actual problem with things in the kitchen.
Another idea is a Crystal radio (that makes a very soft sounding radio that doesn't even need a battery!) or a simple AM radio out of a few parts, as explained in this website with a lot of really cool science projects, including some different ways to make an AM radio:
"http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/radio/ten_minute_radio.html"
Sure, its also hard to understand how an AM radio works, but its very satisfying to see a human voice come out of something using just 3 or 4 components simple components!
By "increased security", they seem to mean that its less likely the whole browser with all your tabs and data is going to suddenly crash. Which can be useful, for example you might be in the middle of filling out an intense job application form on one tab and suddenly the youtube video you were loading in the background takes down your whole session.
But I think calling it "security" just makes everyone assume they mean it will be harder for people to hack their system.
Surely if it takes 16MB of RAM just to load up the Google website (one of the simplest websites there is!) it's going to bring lots of new ways to crash or hack the system!!
I think most people would agree that for some types of games, like Crysis, new high-res & realtistic graphics are very useful, whereas for other types of games like Tetris or Nintendo games, old & simple graphics is equally suitable. But the crazy thing is that it seems that game designers think they can only sell the types of games that need high quality graphics. How often do you hear of a new 2D platform game on Xbox 360 or PS3? You don't, because its assumed that these days no-one would want to play those type of games if there's games around with more realistic graphics, but I don't think that's true. Nintendo Wii proves that you can still sell new games with lower quality graphics. And look at the whole genre of Street Fighter style games, they have barely changed at all in nearly 20 years and are still very popular! Basically what I'm saying is that if some games are suited to high 3D graphics and other games are suited to cartoon or 2D graphics, then why do people almost only every make the high 3D graphics type games now?
But if they are giving the laptops to the students to use & take home, isn't it the students themselves that are expected to fix their own problems, not the schools that must provide the support?
Interesting point, because it could be used for by the government to control you. But your examples are incredibly unlikely. Just to stop an under 21yr old from picking up alcohol, it would have to know the person's age, plus have either an alcohol detector in the hand or all alcohol bottles would need barcodes or similar to identify that its alcohol. But the person could either "hack their hand" to make it think they're 21, or just drink the beer from a plastic cup :-)
Obviously, the government has MANY ways of controlling the public, but this one doesn't seem like one if u ask me! The bigger concern would be if the government only allowed certain types of people to obtain the new arms, and therefore keep people they don't like from having them.
Do you seriously think Vista could handle 768 processors?
Besides, slashdotters already have the ultimate way of dividing up images, video, etc.
haha true!It's binary: Everything is either "pOrn" or "recycle bin."