Why hasn't phone company greed solved the problem by now? This seems like the perfect opportunity for the cell phone network to switch to caller pays, and bill for every single call attempt, even if it doesn't connect.
This is proof positive that phone companies aren't motivated solely by greed—they're also actively working to piss off as many people as possible.
That's not the only gap. When I'm working on a piece of kit at 2:00 a.m. I don't want to have to call for a quote, email a gerber file, and wait for a salesperson. This is 2019. Online quoting and ordering should be a thing.
So much this.
American manufacturing can and should be just as automated as Chinese manufacturing. But for some reason American manufacturers feel obliged to maintain these parasitic, slow, inefficient, error prone, redundant, and worst and most importantly expensive sales monkeys in the middle of a process that practically never benefits from their presence. The number of times that the sales droid knows his own company's products well enough to offer a correction to a possible mistaken order is so slim that it's not worth having them in the way of all the many many times they gum up the works, screw up the order themselves, and cost far far too much. Their sole purpose seems to be to obfuscate prices in some misguided attempt to maximize profits by haggling over every fucking sale. It's borderline dishonest and it's definitely obnoxious.
I have a question for anyone who has read more about survivable systems than I have.
Does it make sense to design a remotely operated system to attempt to reestablish communication on its own if its primary communication channel is disrupted? Specifically, to do things like what Opportunity is being commanded to do manually, such as trying to use a backup radio, switching to a different frequency radio, and resetting its clock. These seem like the sorts of things that should be automated. It should be rate limited, and aware of how much on board power it has, so it avoids going into an infinite battery draining loop trying desperately to phone home, but shouldn't it actively try to reestablish communication?
The Internet has a protocol for this problem: Pics or it didn't happen.
Video is even better.
When you get right down to it, trust is a valuable, important thing. Civilizations that learn how to cultivate and protect it do better than those which don't. US media once knew this. Then they discovered they could lie for money, and burned all the trust they'd ever had (except among the elderly who are no longer capable of detecting that their once cherished institutions have turned into money-grubbing liars). I would have called them lying whores, but whores at least provide a useful service.
This is an opportunity for some Venezuelans to become a reporters. Real reporters. If they live through it, they could win the Pulitzer prize. Odds aren't good they'll live through it. Speaking truth to power in such places is hazardous to one's health.
Now we can look forward to an endless series of tweets claiming "NO COLLUSION" from Ajit Pai and the FCC too -- sigh.:-)
Nah. Pai knows the fix is in. The Trump Justice Department will never charge him with anything. The House will puff and bluster and hold hearings, then do nothing. Even if they decide to impeach, the Senate will never convict (yes, impeachment applies to more than just the president). We all know beyond a shadow of a doubt those gutless partisan fucks will toe the party line no matter what. Pai can do any fucking thing he wants, including outright criminal conspiracy, and get away with it. And he knows it. On the contrary, not only will he not suffer consequences, he'll accept a cushy job from Verizon once he leaves the FCC.
Interesting how when it's Liberals who send classified information to WikiLeaks, it's OK and even a brave and noble thing for them to do. Fine for them to use said information against the other side. But when it's Conservatives who use this information to determine how hacked emails were used, it's suddenly a crime.
Are you stupid? Or just stupid. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in Fort Leavenworth. Obama commuted that sentence to 7 years, but she was still busted down to Private, forfeited all US Army pay and allowances, and was dishonorably discharged from the Army. She was convicted of 21 different charges. She spent nearly a year in torture prison at Quantico as part of her sentence under conditions that arguably violated her Constitutional right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The conditions were so bad that Army Colonel Denise Lind, who sentenced her after her court martial, reduced her sentence by 112 days in compensation.
Sending classified information to WikiLeaks isn't now "suddenly" a crime. It's been a crime since 2013.
Why are we (as a species, and civilization) regressing to such low levels?
We're not. The bottom quintile of intelligence has always been with us. They were never visible before because they were surrounded by people smarter than them and had no way to reliably connect with other people as feeble-minded as them. Now they do.
They're still human. They still have human rights, including all their Constitutional rights. And they need adult supervision. They're not going to get adult supervision. I'm certainly not volunteering, and I don't really want to pay taxes to support adult supervision, but the bottom quintile undeniably needs it. For lack of it (and because it so frequently goes wrong), we just have to put up with their wild denunciations on the Internet. And build automated systems to reduce the noise level somewhat.
It licenses the interface to develop compatible software and Google refused to license.
Licensing something to me that you don't own because you can't own it is fraud, not some ex post facto justification that a thing can be owned.
SCO spent years trying that shit, and ultimately lost, on every front. Their very last attempt was shut down in 2016, dismissed with prejudice, which means they're not allowed to ever make the argument again.
Freely-available UNIX implementations have been available for DECADES . BSD. Linux. Hell, Solaris was open-sourced at one point.
And the owners of what you call "the UNIX kernel API" did NOTHING.
Doesn't matter. Estoppel doesn't apply. Novell didn't make any promises not to exert their copyright. They didn't know they could exert their copyright, until the Federal Circuit starting blathering around in not one but two idiot rulings. Depending on who you ask, they still can't. The Second, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits all say APIs aren't copyrightable at all, so the whole question of fair use is moot. The Third and Federal Circuits say they are copyrightable. The Federal Circuit went even farther, saying they're copyrightable and there's no way to make fair use of any API.
I read the 21 relevant pages from Google's writ, and I'd say it'll be granted. The second half of it hinges on fair use, and it's a weaker argument. The first half is all about the disagreements among the circuit courts, and that always attracts the attention of the Supreme Court.
Google's lawyers did attempt to address the earth-shattering ramifications if the Federal Circuit's ruling is allowed to stand, but not as much as I'd like. Hopefully they were saving the best parts of that for oral arguments. This Supreme Court has spent years asking, "Where's the harm?" and if you can't answer, you lose. If Google's lawyers successfully convey the harm, they have a good chance. They'd better describe the harm to all software everywhere though, not just the harm to Google software.
Google did point out that the Federal Circuit (full name United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) is disingenuous at best, malicious at worst, in their second overturning of the jury verdict that declared Google's use of Java APIs fair use. The Federal Circuit said that they assumed all findings of fact were completed by the jury (as they're required to do), then they contradicted both themselves and the jury and tossed out the verdict. I'm starting to wonder if the Federal Circuit botched their ruling on purpose in order to precipitate intervention by the Supreme Court.
Good joke. As if Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are going to vote against corporate interests.
It's Google v Oracle. There's a megacorporation on both sides of the courtroom. The Supreme Court is going to vote against someone's corporate interest, if they grant the writ at all.
Google had better have been eloquent beyond all measure. Their lawyers have been working on this writ of certiorari since before October. If they fail to convince the Supreme Court to grant a hearing, it's all over and Oracle wins and software as an industry basically ends, swallowed by lawyers.
For those playing along at home, if the last ruling in Oracle's favor stands, Novell essentially owns the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel reimplements the UNIX kernel API. If the ruling by the blithering idiots in the Court of Appeals is allowed to stand, that's illegal without a license. Novell's lawyers would have to write a license to allow Linux to continue to exist. All of the standard system libraries, especially things like libc, would become embroiled in legal battles to determine who owes what to whom. Odds are, Microsoft's implementation of libc is too new, and Microsoft would require a license from someone else to keep it. But the parts that are C99 were developed jointly, so it could take centuries of lawyer-time to figure out who owns what.
We're going to hope that Google's lawyers were able to convey all of this to the Supreme Court. They'd better. There were 11 lawyers involved and the writ is 343 pages.
We need a Creative Commons sci/fi universe that people can create from instead of using some copyrighted story. We need a pallet to paint from.
There is one. Orion's Arm has been around more than a decade and anyone can contribute.
It began life as a fan site for Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep but has since morphed into something a good deal bigger. It has sucked in everything from Iain Banks' Culture novels to Ad Astra to Niven's Ringworld and Dyson's Sphere, not to mention the neofeudal societies of Frank Herbert's Dune and Jordan Weisman's Battletech.
Unfortunately the quality of visual artist it attracts is decidedly subpar. The fan fiction contributed is tolerable. There are a number of Patreon projects based on it, and many many pages of text on the site itself. The site tends to go offline for extended periods of time, as there's no money behind it to speak of, and the attention it attracts waxes and wanes.
PG&E was prevented from trimming trees. It's a common thing to protest and sue PG&E for doing what they're supposed to do. To the point that councilwomen and citizens watch each and every cut to condemn PG&E for being too aggressive in their clearance trims.
Meanwhile here in a flyover state, my electric co-op solved the trees downing powerlines problem by cutting down every single tree within 30 feet of the powerlines and grinding out the stumps. We haven't had a weather-related power failure since. And it looks great. No mangled trees by the side of the road.
By the way, I wonder what wind and solar (and tidal in the case of the Orkenys) has done to the cost of electricity?
Made it cheaper, for people living in the Orkneys. Tiny little islands the world over typically generate electricity using imported diesel. It's expensive. It's stupidly expensive. It's permanently stupidly expensive. Solar is cheaper. Wind is much much cheaper.
In the next decade, there's going to be a glut on the market of used tanker ships that formerly delivered diesel to islands that don't need it anymore.
Thats the rub. I personally gave up on FoxNews in Nov 2001. There are no good conservative view points. It is not because conservative news is 'bad'. It is because no one wants to hire good people to do it. They do not have the money to do it.
Try Reuters. They've been suffering from a small SJW streak, but it's very very isolated. They have a lot of real reporters, world wide.
Can an explosive-sniffing dog detect a ceramic knife, or even a box cutter?
No jetliner will ever be forced to do anything ever again with just a sharp implement. They should let all knives through. They're irrelevant to air safety. Shit, the boxcutter thing failed on the day of the attack that started all the bullshit. The passengers of Flight 93 fought back and succeeded in preventing their plane being used as a missile. Now with reinforced cockpit doors, passengers fighting back in that circumstance will nearly all survive, since the plane won't be crashed during the fight.
I'm sure that helps B no end, cutting views too. How stupid do they think we are? Don't answer that, it's obvious and rhetorical. Government finding ever new ways to steal from all while saying it's for our best interest. Riiiiiiight.
The link tax was not a literal tax. It was directly from aggregator A to news publisher B, by government mandate, but the government does not collect or remit any money in the process. It would have just enforced the payments.
Thankfully the stupid ideas, which the directive was jammed full of, will all be going away for a while. Until the next time when the prop-up-my-obsolete-business-model brigade returns to try again. I might have some shred of sympathy if they weren't also bedfellows with the greedy-fuck-gimme-more-money-for-nothing brigade.
So some civilization created a probe that can last in interstellar space for tens of thousands of years? Wow. I would like to meet them. Do they make cars?
As usual you're so lost in snark you can't see the forest for the trees.
Nobody said it was an operational probe. Quite the opposite. Nobody detected any physical or energy activity on or near it, so if it was a probe using any sort of physics we understand, it was probably a dead one. This is not difficult to comprehend.
Voyager I will one day go careening through a solar system that isn't this one. It won't be operational when it does, but to the locals, it will most definitely be an alien probe. Our civilization could have collapsed or evolved into something unrecognizable to the civilization that launched it by then. Our species might be extinct by then. It will be 40,000 years before it even makes it closest approach to AC +79 3888 and at 1.7 light years from the star it's likely no one will notice. But it will keep going after that. One day our probe will go through an alien solar system. Whichever solar system that is is far enough away that the locals have plenty of time to evolve into telescope builders who can build big enough telescopes to see an 815 kg chunk of metal pass by. They can probably start from something that doesn't have very good opposable thumbs right now and still be ready in time.
Unless it smacks into a rock somewhere in the vast reaches of interstellar space. As far as astronomers can tell, the odds of that are vanishingly small.
Pick up a glass of water, lift a fork: you automatically figure out the best way to grasp each object.
No you don't. You spend weeks learning, as a child. These researchers have completely forgotten that humans don't know these things. They learn them, with lots of spills along the way. Then they relearn them as their musculature changes as they grow older. The robot gets to skip that second part, but the human doesn't get the skip the first part any more than the robot does. They both have to perform the "more than 1600 pickups" before they can make a reasonable prediction of the best way to grasp something, and then succeed in the attempt on the first try. I don't know if anyone has counted how many pickup attempts a baby makes before it gets good at picking things up, but I'm betting it's at least 1600 attempts, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's many more.
There's been years and years of development in picker robots, and they're still pretty bad. Let's face it, a 95% success rate is pretty terrible. The researchers shouldn't feel bad about their continued failures though. Picking things up is hard for humans too. Hell, for some humans it's permanently hard. Even with adult-sized hands, a developmentally disabled human may never get good at picking things up.
Considering there are more than 1000 laptops in the $1250-$1500 price bracket alone on NewEgg, not to mention thousands more cheaper than $1250, I fail to see the utility of a laptop-priced clamshell device (so innovative) that doesn't have a keyboard and has a dinky screen. How many people can there possibly be with that much stupid money to spend on a non-Apple product?
We've always been anti-drone. Slashdot is a community of Luddites, who are always ready to take off their nice sabots. The only futuristic things we like are vaporware and glorified PR.
Slashdot Mirror
Why hasn't phone company greed solved the problem by now? This seems like the perfect opportunity for the cell phone network to switch to caller pays, and bill for every single call attempt, even if it doesn't connect.
This is proof positive that phone companies aren't motivated solely by greed—they're also actively working to piss off as many people as possible.
That's not the only gap. When I'm working on a piece of kit at 2:00 a.m. I don't want to have to call for a quote, email a gerber file, and wait for a salesperson. This is 2019. Online quoting and ordering should be a thing.
So much this.
American manufacturing can and should be just as automated as Chinese manufacturing. But for some reason American manufacturers feel obliged to maintain these parasitic, slow, inefficient, error prone, redundant, and worst and most importantly expensive sales monkeys in the middle of a process that practically never benefits from their presence. The number of times that the sales droid knows his own company's products well enough to offer a correction to a possible mistaken order is so slim that it's not worth having them in the way of all the many many times they gum up the works, screw up the order themselves, and cost far far too much. Their sole purpose seems to be to obfuscate prices in some misguided attempt to maximize profits by haggling over every fucking sale. It's borderline dishonest and it's definitely obnoxious.
I have a question for anyone who has read more about survivable systems than I have.
Does it make sense to design a remotely operated system to attempt to reestablish communication on its own if its primary communication channel is disrupted? Specifically, to do things like what Opportunity is being commanded to do manually, such as trying to use a backup radio, switching to a different frequency radio, and resetting its clock. These seem like the sorts of things that should be automated. It should be rate limited, and aware of how much on board power it has, so it avoids going into an infinite battery draining loop trying desperately to phone home, but shouldn't it actively try to reestablish communication?
The Internet has a protocol for this problem: Pics or it didn't happen.
Video is even better.
When you get right down to it, trust is a valuable, important thing. Civilizations that learn how to cultivate and protect it do better than those which don't. US media once knew this. Then they discovered they could lie for money, and burned all the trust they'd ever had (except among the elderly who are no longer capable of detecting that their once cherished institutions have turned into money-grubbing liars). I would have called them lying whores, but whores at least provide a useful service.
This is an opportunity for some Venezuelans to become a reporters. Real reporters. If they live through it, they could win the Pulitzer prize. Odds aren't good they'll live through it. Speaking truth to power in such places is hazardous to one's health.
Now we can look forward to an endless series of tweets claiming "NO COLLUSION" from Ajit Pai and the FCC too -- sigh. :-)
Nah. Pai knows the fix is in. The Trump Justice Department will never charge him with anything. The House will puff and bluster and hold hearings, then do nothing. Even if they decide to impeach, the Senate will never convict (yes, impeachment applies to more than just the president). We all know beyond a shadow of a doubt those gutless partisan fucks will toe the party line no matter what. Pai can do any fucking thing he wants, including outright criminal conspiracy, and get away with it. And he knows it. On the contrary, not only will he not suffer consequences, he'll accept a cushy job from Verizon once he leaves the FCC.
Calling Ajit Pai a whore is an insult to whores.
At least with a whore, there's a happy ending.
Interesting how when it's Liberals who send classified information to WikiLeaks, it's OK and even a brave and noble thing for them to do. Fine for them to use said information against the other side. But when it's Conservatives who use this information to determine how hacked emails were used, it's suddenly a crime.
Are you stupid? Or just stupid. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in Fort Leavenworth. Obama commuted that sentence to 7 years, but she was still busted down to Private, forfeited all US Army pay and allowances, and was dishonorably discharged from the Army. She was convicted of 21 different charges. She spent nearly a year in torture prison at Quantico as part of her sentence under conditions that arguably violated her Constitutional right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The conditions were so bad that Army Colonel Denise Lind, who sentenced her after her court martial, reduced her sentence by 112 days in compensation.
Sending classified information to WikiLeaks isn't now "suddenly" a crime. It's been a crime since 2013.
Why are we (as a species, and civilization) regressing to such low levels?
We're not. The bottom quintile of intelligence has always been with us. They were never visible before because they were surrounded by people smarter than them and had no way to reliably connect with other people as feeble-minded as them. Now they do.
They're still human. They still have human rights, including all their Constitutional rights. And they need adult supervision. They're not going to get adult supervision. I'm certainly not volunteering, and I don't really want to pay taxes to support adult supervision, but the bottom quintile undeniably needs it. For lack of it (and because it so frequently goes wrong), we just have to put up with their wild denunciations on the Internet. And build automated systems to reduce the noise level somewhat.
So yeah, it's basically a domain for narcissists to show off. It is totally ridiculous, and I can't imagine anyone getting this.
Have you met the US President?
It licenses the interface to develop compatible software and Google refused to license.
Licensing something to me that you don't own because you can't own it is fraud, not some ex post facto justification that a thing can be owned.
SCO spent years trying that shit, and ultimately lost, on every front. Their very last attempt was shut down in 2016, dismissed with prejudice, which means they're not allowed to ever make the argument again.
Freely-available UNIX implementations have been available for DECADES . BSD. Linux. Hell, Solaris was open-sourced at one point.
And the owners of what you call "the UNIX kernel API" did NOTHING.
Doesn't matter. Estoppel doesn't apply. Novell didn't make any promises not to exert their copyright. They didn't know they could exert their copyright, until the Federal Circuit starting blathering around in not one but two idiot rulings. Depending on who you ask, they still can't. The Second, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits all say APIs aren't copyrightable at all, so the whole question of fair use is moot. The Third and Federal Circuits say they are copyrightable. The Federal Circuit went even farther, saying they're copyrightable and there's no way to make fair use of any API.
I read the 21 relevant pages from Google's writ, and I'd say it'll be granted. The second half of it hinges on fair use, and it's a weaker argument. The first half is all about the disagreements among the circuit courts, and that always attracts the attention of the Supreme Court.
Google's lawyers did attempt to address the earth-shattering ramifications if the Federal Circuit's ruling is allowed to stand, but not as much as I'd like. Hopefully they were saving the best parts of that for oral arguments. This Supreme Court has spent years asking, "Where's the harm?" and if you can't answer, you lose. If Google's lawyers successfully convey the harm, they have a good chance. They'd better describe the harm to all software everywhere though, not just the harm to Google software.
Google did point out that the Federal Circuit (full name United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) is disingenuous at best, malicious at worst, in their second overturning of the jury verdict that declared Google's use of Java APIs fair use. The Federal Circuit said that they assumed all findings of fact were completed by the jury (as they're required to do), then they contradicted both themselves and the jury and tossed out the verdict. I'm starting to wonder if the Federal Circuit botched their ruling on purpose in order to precipitate intervention by the Supreme Court.
Good joke. As if Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are going to vote against corporate interests.
It's Google v Oracle. There's a megacorporation on both sides of the courtroom. The Supreme Court is going to vote against someone's corporate interest, if they grant the writ at all.
Google had better have been eloquent beyond all measure. Their lawyers have been working on this writ of certiorari since before October. If they fail to convince the Supreme Court to grant a hearing, it's all over and Oracle wins and software as an industry basically ends, swallowed by lawyers.
For those playing along at home, if the last ruling in Oracle's favor stands, Novell essentially owns the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel reimplements the UNIX kernel API. If the ruling by the blithering idiots in the Court of Appeals is allowed to stand, that's illegal without a license. Novell's lawyers would have to write a license to allow Linux to continue to exist. All of the standard system libraries, especially things like libc, would become embroiled in legal battles to determine who owes what to whom. Odds are, Microsoft's implementation of libc is too new, and Microsoft would require a license from someone else to keep it. But the parts that are C99 were developed jointly, so it could take centuries of lawyer-time to figure out who owns what.
We're going to hope that Google's lawyers were able to convey all of this to the Supreme Court. They'd better. There were 11 lawyers involved and the writ is 343 pages.
I often wonder what the morons that mod you up are like in real life. Probably spend a lot of their time scrubbing a carrot. Like you.
Is that a euphemism? 'cause it sounded like a euphemism. I think it's a euphemism.
We need a Creative Commons sci/fi universe that people can create from instead of using some copyrighted story. We need a pallet to paint from.
There is one. Orion's Arm has been around more than a decade and anyone can contribute.
It began life as a fan site for Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep but has since morphed into something a good deal bigger. It has sucked in everything from Iain Banks' Culture novels to Ad Astra to Niven's Ringworld and Dyson's Sphere, not to mention the neofeudal societies of Frank Herbert's Dune and Jordan Weisman's Battletech.
Unfortunately the quality of visual artist it attracts is decidedly subpar. The fan fiction contributed is tolerable. There are a number of Patreon projects based on it, and many many pages of text on the site itself. The site tends to go offline for extended periods of time, as there's no money behind it to speak of, and the attention it attracts waxes and wanes.
PG&E was prevented from trimming trees. It's a common thing to protest and sue PG&E for doing what they're supposed to do. To the point that councilwomen and citizens watch each and every cut to condemn PG&E for being too aggressive in their clearance trims.
Meanwhile here in a flyover state, my electric co-op solved the trees downing powerlines problem by cutting down every single tree within 30 feet of the powerlines and grinding out the stumps. We haven't had a weather-related power failure since. And it looks great. No mangled trees by the side of the road.
By the way, I wonder what wind and solar (and tidal in the case of the Orkenys) has done to the cost of electricity?
Made it cheaper, for people living in the Orkneys. Tiny little islands the world over typically generate electricity using imported diesel. It's expensive. It's stupidly expensive. It's permanently stupidly expensive. Solar is cheaper. Wind is much much cheaper.
In the next decade, there's going to be a glut on the market of used tanker ships that formerly delivered diesel to islands that don't need it anymore.
Thats the rub. I personally gave up on FoxNews in Nov 2001. There are no good conservative view points. It is not because conservative news is 'bad'. It is because no one wants to hire good people to do it. They do not have the money to do it.
Try Reuters. They've been suffering from a small SJW streak, but it's very very isolated. They have a lot of real reporters, world wide.
Can an explosive-sniffing dog detect a ceramic knife, or even a box cutter?
No jetliner will ever be forced to do anything ever again with just a sharp implement. They should let all knives through. They're irrelevant to air safety. Shit, the boxcutter thing failed on the day of the attack that started all the bullshit. The passengers of Flight 93 fought back and succeeded in preventing their plane being used as a missile. Now with reinforced cockpit doors, passengers fighting back in that circumstance will nearly all survive, since the plane won't be crashed during the fight.
Knives on planes are fine. Even steel ones.
Forget super babies, can they make catgirls yet?
That's the Japanese, not the Chinese. Or at least not so much...
I'm sure that helps B no end, cutting views too. How stupid do they think we are? Don't answer that, it's obvious and rhetorical.
Government finding ever new ways to steal from all while saying it's for our best interest. Riiiiiiight.
The link tax was not a literal tax. It was directly from aggregator A to news publisher B, by government mandate, but the government does not collect or remit any money in the process. It would have just enforced the payments.
Thankfully the stupid ideas, which the directive was jammed full of, will all be going away for a while. Until the next time when the prop-up-my-obsolete-business-model brigade returns to try again. I might have some shred of sympathy if they weren't also bedfellows with the greedy-fuck-gimme-more-money-for-nothing brigade.
So some civilization created a probe that can last in interstellar space for tens of thousands of years? Wow. I would like to meet them. Do they make cars?
As usual you're so lost in snark you can't see the forest for the trees.
Nobody said it was an operational probe. Quite the opposite. Nobody detected any physical or energy activity on or near it, so if it was a probe using any sort of physics we understand, it was probably a dead one. This is not difficult to comprehend.
Voyager I will one day go careening through a solar system that isn't this one. It won't be operational when it does, but to the locals, it will most definitely be an alien probe. Our civilization could have collapsed or evolved into something unrecognizable to the civilization that launched it by then. Our species might be extinct by then. It will be 40,000 years before it even makes it closest approach to AC +79 3888 and at 1.7 light years from the star it's likely no one will notice. But it will keep going after that. One day our probe will go through an alien solar system. Whichever solar system that is is far enough away that the locals have plenty of time to evolve into telescope builders who can build big enough telescopes to see an 815 kg chunk of metal pass by. They can probably start from something that doesn't have very good opposable thumbs right now and still be ready in time.
Unless it smacks into a rock somewhere in the vast reaches of interstellar space. As far as astronomers can tell, the odds of that are vanishingly small.
Pick up a glass of water, lift a fork: you automatically figure out the best way to grasp each object.
No you don't. You spend weeks learning, as a child. These researchers have completely forgotten that humans don't know these things. They learn them, with lots of spills along the way. Then they relearn them as their musculature changes as they grow older. The robot gets to skip that second part, but the human doesn't get the skip the first part any more than the robot does. They both have to perform the "more than 1600 pickups" before they can make a reasonable prediction of the best way to grasp something, and then succeed in the attempt on the first try. I don't know if anyone has counted how many pickup attempts a baby makes before it gets good at picking things up, but I'm betting it's at least 1600 attempts, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's many more.
There's been years and years of development in picker robots, and they're still pretty bad. Let's face it, a 95% success rate is pretty terrible. The researchers shouldn't feel bad about their continued failures though. Picking things up is hard for humans too. Hell, for some humans it's permanently hard. Even with adult-sized hands, a developmentally disabled human may never get good at picking things up.
Considering there are more than 1000 laptops in the $1250-$1500 price bracket alone on NewEgg, not to mention thousands more cheaper than $1250, I fail to see the utility of a laptop-priced clamshell device (so innovative) that doesn't have a keyboard and has a dinky screen. How many people can there possibly be with that much stupid money to spend on a non-Apple product?
We've always been anti-drone. Slashdot is a community of Luddites, who are always ready to take off their nice sabots. The only futuristic things we like are vaporware and glorified PR.
And the sex robots. Don't forget the sex robots.
Ahem - at least one person in the FA was riding his scooter on the sidewalk.
There's always one.