I think the problem is that people expect machine intelligence to look like human intelligence. Machine intelligence exists and is strong in some areas. Modern chess programs are an example. They can play unique games and be stronger than any human player. Yes, they are given the rules of chess and machines did not invent chess. But they have passed beyond human abilities and it is at the point where some programs are coded to only make move patterns that humans would tend to make. Learning how to adapt machine intelligence to our real world problems is challenging. But we are in for a fright when computers get really good at analyzing human problems and applying better solutions that we now have at hand.
The problem isn't technology, it is people. We already have human intelligence and it is relatively cheap to procure. They are called people... you know actual human beings. Hire one. Make a baby. Go find an actual friend.
Try selling a product or service based on blank slate human intelligence. Sure there are aspects of the human brain that we are eager to replicate, simulate and make into a reproducible machine, such as image recognition or some other pattern recognition... But the marketability of human intelligence is upwardly bound by the availability of actual humans to do whatever it is you want them to do.
And in most cases you aren't going to want a generalized intelligence for a specific set of tasks, you want specialized and reproducible programming. Like the chess example, you want the chess computer to play chess and not day dream about some far off place while they are losing the game. Generalized intelligence slows down the processing. Generalized intelligence will keep trying to learn even after reaching an optimally efficient state or just get bored and go learn something else. And any semblance of uniqueness or "original thinking" requires a variety of experiences and slow development and redevelopment of neural pathways and even sometimes error and imprecision which are very much undesirable traits in technology.
Think of how many years it takes to teach a child. We spend literally decades training and retraining the human mind to know things and think about things. Who would buy that kind of technology that takes a decade or two before it is ready to do something useful?
Until the cost of simulating a human brain comes down to something that can be done on a very small budget, just because, then it won't get funded. And even then we aren't just a brain, we are a brain connected to a body with a full set of human senses and biologically driven needs. If you want human intelligence you need to have a human experience.
And even then would it even be ethical to start up a simulation of child's brain, teach it, train it, give it emotional response and physical form? Just because you can? Because you want a companion you can control? Because you want genius that you can turn off? At some point you have to realize you are playing God out of excessive pride and not furthering any good. Come up with a use case where you want to simulate a complete person, create a person, where an actual person just won't work.
I think the only reason to do so, ethically, would be for space exploration or working in other environments where an android would not be harmed and could survive and perform some useful tasks. But once you recreate human intelligence in android form, then you need to give that creation respect, status, some form of equality and free will. Or else you are not adding value to society, but undermining our values.
Hyperloop isn't a replacement for buses or city cars. It's a replacement for airplanes. Supersonic travel with high initial but low unit cost - airplanes are very wasteful because they need to use a lot of energy just to prevent falling. Hyperloop train, once running, keeps running with only minimal friction losses and can recuperate most of energy used on acceleration during braking.
That still needs to be proven out, but yes it could be theoretically more efficient and therefore less expensive than air travel.
Solar pollution from just that article: "The state records show the 17 companies, which had 44 manufacturing facilities in California, produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge and contaminated water from 2007 through the first half of 2011. Roughly 97 percent of it was taken to hazardous waste facilities throughout the state, but more than 1.4 million pounds were transported to nine other states: Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Nevada, Washington, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona."
"Solyndra, the now-defunct solar company that received $535 million in guaranteed federal loans, reported producing about 12.5 million pounds of hazardous waste, much of it carcinogenic cadmium-contaminated water, which was sent to waste facilities from 2007 through mid-2011."
That 12.5 million pounds of waste was from panels that could power 100,000 homes for about 20 years... During the day when it isn't cloudy and then they need fossil fuel power plants to come online
Yes, I read the article.... And you blatantly lied about it. It mentioned specific toxic/carcinogenic wastes produced as a byproduct of the manufacturing of solar panels and specific amounts of millions of tons of toxic waste in California alone...
Solar is probably closer to a thousand times the toxic waste of nuclear. Strip mines, industrial solvents, you name it... solar panels are an environmental disaster compared with nuclear.
I think bottom line is that it is too expensive and therefore not sustainable to settle or explore space much further either funded through taxation, private fundraising or speculative investment. If launch costs come down and other technology makes it easier then either public or private efforts can do it. In terms of speculative investment... I agree there is no prospect for financial returns on any reasonable time frame so things like asteroid mining are not going to attract large investment until the math checks. And there is no business case to be made for investors to fund the settling the moon or mars or anywhere else. But neither is there a real case to be made to the public. Space exploration was the first thing to get axed in the 1970s when the US couldn't afford it. And the likelihood is that there will be additional times where funding for space exploration from the government coffers just won't be viable. Space exploration as a point of national pride only works for missions that can begin and end in a decade or so.
The one case of government funded exploration of the moon wasn't even sustained for ten years. I think what we can say now is that with currently available or even planned technology that space colonization just isn't going to happen regardless of the funding mechanism.
Yes, but if it isn't eventually economical for private investors then it isn't sustainable for government funded adventurism either. Government needs to have a return on investment more than turning over more rocks on barren worlds. At some point economics really is a reflection of resource utilization and availability and not just some abstract concept where the Federal Reserve can just add a few zeros on the computer for some spreading around money.
But in the end, these court orders and government actions do little. These organizations are almost clandestine in nature and are just going to do what they want.
The point of the law, as always, isn't about some wishful thinking about those who would choose to violate the law. It applies to how we want to act within the law. Murder, rape, theft, fraud, are all illegal and yet still happen far too often. The point of having a clearly defined line is to let people know when they have crossed over it.
I really hope one of the other fusion projects succeeds before then. The earlier we get it, the better.
Lockheed claim they might have a prototype by 2019 and a commercial unit by 2024.
Then you have the likes of the Focus Fusion thing, shooting for the big prize, proton-boron fusion (less neutrons, no need to breed tritium, efficient solid-state energy conversion), that has made more progress (in terms of particle energy * confinement time) in the last 5 years on a few million bucks than ITER has in 8 with billions.
Both approaches are a lot smaller than the aircraft-carrier sized reactor (no, not sized for an aircraft carrier, as big as an aircraft carrier) that tokamak designs predict will be useful ; a bunch of small, municipal reactors the size of shipping containers will make for a more robust, more democratic, less monopolistic and corrupt energy generation system.
In addition to continuing with the big research reactors, I'd like to see more smaller scale funding for this kind of multimillion dollar scale development. Success or failure could come down to very very very minute differences in reactor design and operation and the more teams that are working on this and sharing results and techniques the more likely we can make faster progress.
This is normal. This is how technological development generally works. You have to gather knowledge and sometimes wait for other technologies to catch up to what you need
A good example in my mind was Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter drawings. He had the concept of a vehicle with an air screw on top pushing air down, but he didn't have a light enough engine to power it. If he had that engine and access to the right materials he would have likely built it or someone would have built it and then proceeded to solve further problems with stability and control through an iterative process. W
With fusion power we are well past the drawing board stage and further development is about making it practical.
these attacks rely on the user leaving their device unlocked and unattended.......
What exactly is the story here?
That people might have been under the already clearly false illusion that their data was protected when the laptop wasn't shutdown properly. I could see people closing a laptop lid and the laptop goes to sleep (but not shutdown) and people think they are being protected by an encrypted drive... when really the simple rule to follow with an encrypted drive is that you need to fully shutdown your laptop if you are going to leave it unattended.
What we need is a case like this that does not involve national security where overly broad warrants are issued very much like the warrants that are possibly secretly being issued under the Patriot Act. That is the only way we can get the constitutional issues resolved because at every turn the Federal Courts are running up against state secrets privileges when dealing with these terrorism warrants.
Either way, going with nuclear is a good hedge with multiple benefits. It is also less polluting of the atmosphere which we do know causes lung health issues. It takes up less land area (less arable and livable land area) than pretty much all the other energy sources. It is reliable... you load up with a relatively small amount of uranium fuel rods and you can run a plant for years. And fossil fuels will eventually become harder (and therefore more taxing on the economy) to extract after some number of decades. Yes, with current technology you do start running low on usable uranium fuel after a certain number of decades or centuries, but with new generations of reactors you could stretch out that fuel for millennia. You don't need Global Warming to justify nuclear becoming a larger part of the energy supply, but if you are trying to mitigate Global Climate Change or doing so just in case, then nuclear power becomes essential.
In different words "impose a billion dollars of additional regulations on us and then subsidize us by a billion dollars" is a good deal for a regulated industry.
At this point I'd rather just see it get done rather than worry about sifting through the regulatory process to see what is necessary and what is lining the pockets of regulators and lawyers. It would take years to sift through the red tape just to make what are probably going to be minor improvements.
I think Global Climate Change is either something that we have to deal with right now in an earnest way or we need to just stop all the BS flim flam selling and just hope our grand kids and great grand kids can just live with whatever end up being the consequences. Because causing major societal and environmental disruption with half cocked plans and then not achieving any meaningful result is actually worse than doing nothing.
We know what needs to be done to solve the CO2 problem, it is nuclear now, but most of the people who claim they are fighting Global Climate change also seem to be the same ones fighting to shut down nuclear power plants while new coal plants are being built.
2) We can be carbon neutral in 30 years if we create large scale subsidies in existing state of the art in nuclear power.
The reason nuclear power plants aren't successful or competitive is massive NIMBYism and a suppression of efficient and clean nuclear power technologies because they might be used to generate weapons-grade material. Neither of those can be solved with more subsidies.
Of course, that's still better than "renewables", which simply aren't cost effective at all.
The subsidies are needed because of the cost of delays caused by regulation and lawsuits and to make it competitive with coal and natural gas. Basically most of the private sector capital investment is going into natural gas power generation and natural gas pipelines now because there is a natural gas glut in the market and it doesn't face as much opposition because it isn't as much of a polluter as coal.
Natural gas is better than coal, but it won't get us to the carbon neutrality needed to mitigate Global Climate Change.
None of what you are saying is doable. You can't rest the fate of hundreds of millions of people on a bunch of theoretical wishful thinking. Pick a city of 50,000 people and actually disconnect from the grid and go with 100% solar and wind. You need to disconnect from the non-renewable grid to demonstrate a viable proof of concept because once you force solar and wind to provide base load capacity you explode your costs because you need large scale storage. The cities that are going to "100%" are really just buying the equivalent power from renewable sources which gets dumped into the grid. Which is fine until the fossil fuel power plants start going offline and you can't actually get that electricity all the way from your solar power stations reliably.
With the smart grid where you plan to just somehow have enough solar and wind scattered around the planet to shift electricity around when regions don't have solar or wind.... How long is it going to take you to boot strap using fossil fuels? Probably a couple hundred years.... which is too late for carbon reduction.
Like I've said before: Just prove me wrong. And prove me wrong without wrecking the environment with more pollution than nuclear would. And prove me wrong now not 30 years from now when it is probably too late to stop another few degrees of warming.
it is a false statement that only nuclear will meet those needs. it is equally false that renewables are only pet projects and cannot meet those needs.
Nuclear is the only proven technology. With nuclear power you have France having demonstrated for many decades that nuclear can provide nearly all the electrical power for a large modern country. Hydro is a proven technology, but it has already been largely tapped out in much of the world and hydro can disrupt river ecosystems. Solar and Wind just don't cut it without either some other large scale supplies of energy... which hydro can't provide... or a massive overbuilding of Solar and Wind to account for the variability. Solar and Wind just can't cut it alone by a long shot, so its either Natural Gas, then coal or Nuclear.
If you can't offer a realistic solution then you are part of the problem.
1) Global Climate change is disruptive and people will unnecessarily die or live worse-off because of the resulting displacement of peoples. 2) We can be carbon neutral in 30 years if we create large scale subsidies in existing state of the art in nuclear power. (oh and throw in a few renewable sources for up to about 30% of the total requirements)
And
3) If you think we can be carbon neutral and meet the energy needs of civilization with just subsidized renewables then you are the same as a "climate denier" because pretending to solve a problem (to get your extremely inadequate pet projects funded) is in effect no better than denying the problem and just waiting to run out of economically viable fossil fuels.
Google has always been driven by mission and "robotics" isn't a mission it is like saying we want to make software and hardware without a clear customer and purpose. Robots need a clear purpose.
Off hand I would realign Google Robotics (Need a better name than Replicant... don't want "cant" in the name) along mission areas for intance:
1) Sensing (Streetview and aerial sensing drones) 2) Transportation (autonomous cars and such) 3) Productive automation (Consumer/light industrial/healthcare/military - non-lethal to go along with the do-no-evil mantra) 4) Robotics R&D (the core area that will bridge research with application in order to validate novel robotics technology and place it into the pipeline of development for the other mission areas).
Good, hope this will accelerate a CableCard-like standard for IPTV like it did for cable systems. I love my home-brew DVR, and I'm not willing to switch to Google Fiber or AT&T UVerse until third-party TV equipment can work with their service.
Yes, paying $18 per month "rental" for a $100 device really sucks and it feels like the bad old days of Grandma renting her phone from The Phone Company for $10 per month. The encryption keys can and should be simply software based...forget the CableCard, they still have those supposedly and nobody uses them because they don't offer key services such as the channel guide, VOD, etc. It could be so much simpler and you could just register your device ID and an open standard protocol negotiates the keys to unlock any encrypted content and the cable companies could provide the other services in a more standard way that encourages hardware competition.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem is that people expect machine intelligence to look like human intelligence. Machine intelligence exists and is strong in some areas. Modern chess programs are an example. They can play unique games and be stronger than any human player. Yes, they are given the rules of chess and machines did not invent chess. But they have passed beyond human abilities and it is at the point where some programs are coded to only make move patterns that humans would tend to make. Learning how to adapt machine intelligence to our real world problems is challenging. But we are in for a fright when computers get really good at analyzing human problems and applying better solutions that we now have at hand.
The problem isn't technology, it is people. We already have human intelligence and it is relatively cheap to procure. They are called people... you know actual human beings. Hire one. Make a baby. Go find an actual friend.
Try selling a product or service based on blank slate human intelligence. Sure there are aspects of the human brain that we are eager to replicate, simulate and make into a reproducible machine, such as image recognition or some other pattern recognition... But the marketability of human intelligence is upwardly bound by the availability of actual humans to do whatever it is you want them to do.
And in most cases you aren't going to want a generalized intelligence for a specific set of tasks, you want specialized and reproducible programming. Like the chess example, you want the chess computer to play chess and not day dream about some far off place while they are losing the game. Generalized intelligence slows down the processing. Generalized intelligence will keep trying to learn even after reaching an optimally efficient state or just get bored and go learn something else. And any semblance of uniqueness or "original thinking" requires a variety of experiences and slow development and redevelopment of neural pathways and even sometimes error and imprecision which are very much undesirable traits in technology.
Think of how many years it takes to teach a child. We spend literally decades training and retraining the human mind to know things and think about things. Who would buy that kind of technology that takes a decade or two before it is ready to do something useful?
Until the cost of simulating a human brain comes down to something that can be done on a very small budget, just because, then it won't get funded. And even then we aren't just a brain, we are a brain connected to a body with a full set of human senses and biologically driven needs. If you want human intelligence you need to have a human experience.
And even then would it even be ethical to start up a simulation of child's brain, teach it, train it, give it emotional response and physical form? Just because you can? Because you want a companion you can control? Because you want genius that you can turn off? At some point you have to realize you are playing God out of excessive pride and not furthering any good. Come up with a use case where you want to simulate a complete person, create a person, where an actual person just won't work.
I think the only reason to do so, ethically, would be for space exploration or working in other environments where an android would not be harmed and could survive and perform some useful tasks. But once you recreate human intelligence in android form, then you need to give that creation respect, status, some form of equality and free will. Or else you are not adding value to society, but undermining our values.
Hyperloop isn't a replacement for buses or city cars. It's a replacement for airplanes. Supersonic travel with high initial but low unit cost - airplanes are very wasteful because they need to use a lot of energy just to prevent falling. Hyperloop train, once running, keeps running with only minimal friction losses and can recuperate most of energy used on acceleration during braking.
That still needs to be proven out, but yes it could be theoretically more efficient and therefore less expensive than air travel.
Solar pollution from just that article: "The state records show the 17 companies, which had 44 manufacturing facilities in California, produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge and contaminated water from 2007 through the first half of 2011. Roughly 97 percent of it was taken to hazardous waste facilities throughout the state, but more than 1.4 million pounds were transported to nine other states: Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Nevada, Washington, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona."
"Solyndra, the now-defunct solar company that received $535 million in guaranteed federal loans, reported producing about 12.5 million pounds of hazardous waste, much of it carcinogenic cadmium-contaminated water, which was sent to waste facilities from 2007 through mid-2011."
That 12.5 million pounds of waste was from panels that could power 100,000 homes for about 20 years... During the day when it isn't cloudy and then they need fossil fuel power plants to come online
Yes, I read the article.... And you blatantly lied about it. It mentioned specific toxic/carcinogenic wastes produced as a byproduct of the manufacturing of solar panels and specific amounts of millions of tons of toxic waste in California alone...
You are lying
Yup, Solar is still less polluting than coal... Just not less polluting than nuclear:
http://news.yahoo.com/solar-in...
Solar is probably closer to a thousand times the toxic waste of nuclear. Strip mines, industrial solvents, you name it... solar panels are an environmental disaster compared with nuclear.
Solar panel manufacturing creates much more toxic waste than nuclear power.
I think bottom line is that it is too expensive and therefore not sustainable to settle or explore space much further either funded through taxation, private fundraising or speculative investment. If launch costs come down and other technology makes it easier then either public or private efforts can do it. In terms of speculative investment... I agree there is no prospect for financial returns on any reasonable time frame so things like asteroid mining are not going to attract large investment until the math checks. And there is no business case to be made for investors to fund the settling the moon or mars or anywhere else. But neither is there a real case to be made to the public. Space exploration was the first thing to get axed in the 1970s when the US couldn't afford it. And the likelihood is that there will be additional times where funding for space exploration from the government coffers just won't be viable. Space exploration as a point of national pride only works for missions that can begin and end in a decade or so.
The one case of government funded exploration of the moon wasn't even sustained for ten years. I think what we can say now is that with currently available or even planned technology that space colonization just isn't going to happen regardless of the funding mechanism.
Yes, but if it isn't eventually economical for private investors then it isn't sustainable for government funded adventurism either. Government needs to have a return on investment more than turning over more rocks on barren worlds. At some point economics really is a reflection of resource utilization and availability and not just some abstract concept where the Federal Reserve can just add a few zeros on the computer for some spreading around money.
Approx. 2 month cycle for minor versions. 12 months for major versions. Bug fix versions out in a week or two. That is some aggressive development.
http://tools.android.com/download/studio/stable
But in the end, these court orders and government actions do little. These organizations are almost clandestine in nature and are just going to do what they want.
The point of the law, as always, isn't about some wishful thinking about those who would choose to violate the law. It applies to how we want to act within the law. Murder, rape, theft, fraud, are all illegal and yet still happen far too often. The point of having a clearly defined line is to let people know when they have crossed over it.
I really hope one of the other fusion projects succeeds before then. The earlier we get it, the better.
Lockheed claim they might have a prototype by 2019 and a commercial unit by 2024.
Then you have the likes of the Focus Fusion thing, shooting for the big prize, proton-boron fusion (less neutrons, no need to breed tritium, efficient solid-state energy conversion), that has made more progress (in terms of particle energy * confinement time) in the last 5 years on a few million bucks than ITER has in 8 with billions.
Both approaches are a lot smaller than the aircraft-carrier sized reactor (no, not sized for an aircraft carrier, as big as an aircraft carrier) that tokamak designs predict will be useful ; a bunch of small, municipal reactors the size of shipping containers will make for a more robust, more democratic, less monopolistic and corrupt energy generation system.
In addition to continuing with the big research reactors, I'd like to see more smaller scale funding for this kind of multimillion dollar scale development. Success or failure could come down to very very very minute differences in reactor design and operation and the more teams that are working on this and sharing results and techniques the more likely we can make faster progress.
This is normal. This is how technological development generally works. You have to gather knowledge and sometimes wait for other technologies to catch up to what you need
A good example in my mind was Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter drawings. He had the concept of a vehicle with an air screw on top pushing air down, but he didn't have a light enough engine to power it. If he had that engine and access to the right materials he would have likely built it or someone would have built it and then proceeded to solve further problems with stability and control through an iterative process. W
With fusion power we are well past the drawing board stage and further development is about making it practical.
these attacks rely on the user leaving their device unlocked and unattended.......
What exactly is the story here?
That people might have been under the already clearly false illusion that their data was protected when the laptop wasn't shutdown properly. I could see people closing a laptop lid and the laptop goes to sleep (but not shutdown) and people think they are being protected by an encrypted drive... when really the simple rule to follow with an encrypted drive is that you need to fully shutdown your laptop if you are going to leave it unattended.
What we need is a case like this that does not involve national security where overly broad warrants are issued very much like the warrants that are possibly secretly being issued under the Patriot Act. That is the only way we can get the constitutional issues resolved because at every turn the Federal Courts are running up against state secrets privileges when dealing with these terrorism warrants.
Either way, going with nuclear is a good hedge with multiple benefits. It is also less polluting of the atmosphere which we do know causes lung health issues. It takes up less land area (less arable and livable land area) than pretty much all the other energy sources. It is reliable... you load up with a relatively small amount of uranium fuel rods and you can run a plant for years. And fossil fuels will eventually become harder (and therefore more taxing on the economy) to extract after some number of decades. Yes, with current technology you do start running low on usable uranium fuel after a certain number of decades or centuries, but with new generations of reactors you could stretch out that fuel for millennia. You don't need Global Warming to justify nuclear becoming a larger part of the energy supply, but if you are trying to mitigate Global Climate Change or doing so just in case, then nuclear power becomes essential.
The reason nuclear power plants aren't successful or competitive is massive NIMBYism and a suppression of efficient and clean nuclear power technologies because they might be used to generate weapons-grade material. Neither of those can be solved with more subsidies.
Of course, that's still better than "renewables", which simply aren't cost effective at all.
The subsidies are needed because of the cost of delays caused by regulation and lawsuits and to make it competitive with coal and natural gas. Basically most of the private sector capital investment is going into natural gas power generation and natural gas pipelines now because there is a natural gas glut in the market and it doesn't face as much opposition because it isn't as much of a polluter as coal.
Natural gas is better than coal, but it won't get us to the carbon neutrality needed to mitigate Global Climate Change.
None of what you are saying is doable. You can't rest the fate of hundreds of millions of people on a bunch of theoretical wishful thinking. Pick a city of 50,000 people and actually disconnect from the grid and go with 100% solar and wind. You need to disconnect from the non-renewable grid to demonstrate a viable proof of concept because once you force solar and wind to provide base load capacity you explode your costs because you need large scale storage. The cities that are going to "100%" are really just buying the equivalent power from renewable sources which gets dumped into the grid. Which is fine until the fossil fuel power plants start going offline and you can't actually get that electricity all the way from your solar power stations reliably.
With the smart grid where you plan to just somehow have enough solar and wind scattered around the planet to shift electricity around when regions don't have solar or wind.... How long is it going to take you to boot strap using fossil fuels? Probably a couple hundred years.... which is too late for carbon reduction.
Like I've said before: Just prove me wrong. And prove me wrong without wrecking the environment with more pollution than nuclear would. And prove me wrong now not 30 years from now when it is probably too late to stop another few degrees of warming.
it is a false statement that only nuclear will meet those needs.
it is equally false that renewables are only pet projects and cannot meet those needs.
Nuclear is the only proven technology. With nuclear power you have France having demonstrated for many decades that nuclear can provide nearly all the electrical power for a large modern country. Hydro is a proven technology, but it has already been largely tapped out in much of the world and hydro can disrupt river ecosystems. Solar and Wind just don't cut it without either some other large scale supplies of energy... which hydro can't provide... or a massive overbuilding of Solar and Wind to account for the variability. Solar and Wind just can't cut it alone by a long shot, so its either Natural Gas, then coal or Nuclear.
If you can't offer a realistic solution then you are part of the problem.
So what?
1) Global Climate change is disruptive and people will unnecessarily die or live worse-off because of the resulting displacement of peoples.
2) We can be carbon neutral in 30 years if we create large scale subsidies in existing state of the art in nuclear power. (oh and throw in a few renewable sources for up to about 30% of the total requirements)
And
3) If you think we can be carbon neutral and meet the energy needs of civilization with just subsidized renewables then you are the same as a "climate denier" because pretending to solve a problem (to get your extremely inadequate pet projects funded) is in effect no better than denying the problem and just waiting to run out of economically viable fossil fuels.
Google has always been driven by mission and "robotics" isn't a mission it is like saying we want to make software and hardware without a clear customer and purpose. Robots need a clear purpose.
Off hand I would realign Google Robotics (Need a better name than Replicant... don't want "cant" in the name) along mission areas for intance:
1) Sensing (Streetview and aerial sensing drones)
2) Transportation (autonomous cars and such)
3) Productive automation (Consumer/light industrial/healthcare/military - non-lethal to go along with the do-no-evil mantra)
4) Robotics R&D (the core area that will bridge research with application in order to validate novel robotics technology and place it into the pipeline of development for the other mission areas).
Good, hope this will accelerate a CableCard-like standard for IPTV like it did for cable systems. I love my home-brew DVR, and I'm not willing to switch to Google Fiber or AT&T UVerse until third-party TV equipment can work with their service.
Yes, paying $18 per month "rental" for a $100 device really sucks and it feels like the bad old days of Grandma renting her phone from The Phone Company for $10 per month. The encryption keys can and should be simply software based...forget the CableCard, they still have those supposedly and nobody uses them because they don't offer key services such as the channel guide, VOD, etc. It could be so much simpler and you could just register your device ID and an open standard protocol negotiates the keys to unlock any encrypted content and the cable companies could provide the other services in a more standard way that encourages hardware competition.
The cable companies are too big.