And, they need the humans for more than just washing the windows.
From TFS:
Another reason for the sparse use of robots is that buildings require a lot more maintenance than just window cleaning. Equipment is needed to lower people to repair facades and broken windows
So, your Skyscraper Edition Roomba still doesn't cover all the needs of buildings like this, and you'll still need to be able to get people there for other tasks. Someone still needs to be able to physically get there anyway.
Me, no way I'd do that job. So any company who has to pay humans to get out and do this needs to man up and realize their multi-billion dollar penis in the sky needs people willing to get up there and do this.
Because it takes some serious intestinal fortitude to be hanging that high up in the sky.
Isn't the whole problem that they assumed a softer (ice) surface?
Look, unless you're a friggin' rocket scientist, or believe they had additional information they didn't use... summarizing anything as "the whole problem" is kind of childish.
Based on your vast experience of landing on comets after a 10 year journey, do you think you have a better sense of what the assumptions about the hardness of the ice should have been? Maybe you should have shared that with them.
Lots of smart people worked on this, took all they knew and could surmise, and made choices with the best available information, and using the technology and money available to them.
I'm sure as heck not going to say "well, if only they'd done this it would have worked". I know I'm not qualified to do that, and I'm quite certain most of us on Slashdot aren't either. In fact, I'm betting the people who are qualified are all thinking this was a monumentally difficult task. NASA isn't sitting around going "Ha ha!"
To me, even what they did is some pretty mind-boggling engineering. But in interviews I heard over the last few weeks, they still knew there were risks and uncertainties.
It sucks, but unless you're more qualified than the entire team who did this, you have to realize this is still an incredible feat.
I won't even claim this to be an accurate analogy: But this is kind of like hitting a target in China from New York, using a home made gun, in the dark, and while both you and the target are moving.
Me, I'll applaud the ESA and everyone involved. Success for this kind of engineering includes all of the stuff that got you there. Getting far enough to have a failed landing is still a huge undertaking.
It seems to me the design and/or planning of this mission were poorly thought out, it's obvious the comet has a rough surface, they knew there would be shadows.
I think that's pretty unfair.
It was launched 10 years ago, and has been spiraling around the solar system doing fly-bys to get going fast enough to match speed... and then it got close enough to land, even though it wasn't perfect.
I'm more inclined to think this is a demonstration of just how damned hard something like this is, and that no matter how much you try to plan for stuff, you can't know everything until after it's happened.
I think a bunch of whiny nerds saying this was poorly thought out is some pretty lame arm chair quarterbacking.
Tell you what, when your probe lands on a comet, we'll all line up to tell you what a shitty job you've done.
Oh, wait, you don't have a probe and wouldn't know how to make one, right?
Well, really, this has been Sony's MO for years -- they are entirely about vendor lock in, pushing their own proprietary crap, and refusing to use anybody else's technology.
Which is precisely why many of us won't buy anything from Sony.
Between Beta, their mini disc format, stripping Linux functionality from the PS3, and now this... Sony has more or less demonstrated them to be entirely "our stuff shall have supreme dominance at the expense of the consumer".
Sorry Sony, not interested in your crap, and haven't trusted you for 15+ years.
But far be it for me to advocate the constitution, because that's illegal...
You sound like you're having subversive thoughts, citizen.
A car has been dispatched to bring you to the nearest thought re-alignment camp, where you will realize the government is here to serve you, and these are necessary steps.
Your kitchen should be dispensing a nice, tasty glass of Kool Aid for you.
Don't you Remember, The Fifth of November, 'Twas Gunpowder Treason Day, I let off my gun, And made'em all run. And Stole all their Bonfire away.
No 9/11 didn't cause anything. This has been going on for ever just not to the "right" race. 9/11 just caused it to apply to all races.
I do not disagree.
But 9/11 caused the passage of the PATRIOT act with very little thought for the consequences, and moved the "security at any cost" mentality into the daylight. And that was the one which gave them the keys to the kingdom to pretty much do anything they wanted.
Before 9/11, they had to at least pretend. After, they can do anything they want to in the light of day.
People try to hide the fact that this is the doing of Obama and his cronies.
Some of this was started by Shrub. Some of this had been in the works for years before 9/11. Much of this was legalized in the days after 9/11 as everyone was in a panic. Some of it has been expanded since.
Now, all of the advisers are saying "gotta do this". All of the spy agencies are saying "fuck it, we're doing it anyway, even if we do have to lie to Congress".
When you create a climate of paranoia and hysteria, and suddenly decide your founding principles are optional... this is what you get.
There have been people who have wanted these powers for decades. And one day they got handed the best justification for it they could hope for.
Yes, Obama has failed to stop it. But he didn't initiate it.
And, quite frankly, I suspect a lot of people welcome this crap with open arms because they believe this shit will keep them safe from the terrorists.
When your population is reduced to cowering in fear, they tend to back a lot of things they can't see the consequences of.
Sadly, when 9/11 happened, they pretty much decided that the niceties of the Constitution and the law were far too dangerous to allow, and went straight to the fascism.
Essentially, the terrorists won, because they've more or less caused governments around the world to start ignoring our rights.
Now it's security at any costs, and since we're already tracking you, we'll pass that onto law enforcement and teach them how to hide the source of intelligence. Oh, and we'll share it among a bunch of other countries, and secretly enlist the corporations to hand over their data.
So, now we'll monitor everything you do, using laws we said we'd only use for terrorism, and then have the police perjure themselves to make it look like they obtained the information legally.
Papers please, comrade.
I wonder how long before they no longer feel the need to give us the illusion of freedom?
I'm sorry, but this is blanket surveillance, without warrant, probable cause, or oversight.
At a certain point, the court needs to weigh in on this, because DoJ and the rest of law enforcement are completely ignoring the Constitution, the law, and pretty much everything else.
Why is this not landing these clowns in jail?
When your government becomes hostile to your rights, it's time to become hostile to your government.
Because when we network speeds are fast enough, this WILL be the best possible user experience.
As long as bandwidth is charged for by ISPs, then I disagree.
See, everyone has said "ZOMG, the cloud and teh streaming". Meanwhile, your ISP is thinking "go ahead, suckers, stream all you want, it only makes us money".
Cloud gaming is the way of the future.
We shall see.
Me, I'll stick with an XBox 360 disconnected from the interwebs.
Don' need no steenking cloud. Don' need to steenking interweb connection. Don' need no steenking ads.
For the best possible user experience, streaming games from the cloud
is a dumb idea?
Sorry, but why would I want to stream the damned game every time I play it?
No, I like the model where I download once, and ideally can play while my tablet is in airplane mode. In fact, any game I can't play in airplane mode gets deleted.
I wonder how many people are interested in this tablet, or if it's likely to be a complete failure as everyone things "who cares?".
The opinion widely held in the USA and UK seems to be that it's nipples that cause the downfall of society
That's a provably false statement: a shirtless man does not cause the downfall of society. Yet, he has nipples.
Dogs and cats have nipples. Those, also do not cause the downfall of society.
Krusty the Klown has a superfluous third nipple (a trope borrowed from Goldfinger)... again, no downfall of society. Yet you'd think if two are bad, three must be the sign of end-times, right?
This comes from puritanical people who believe that the sight of a woman's nipples would send humanity into fits of uncontrolled boobies, and that we'd be forced to face the fact that, yes, women have breasts, are in charge of those breasts, and that this is a perfectly normal fact.
This pretty much comes from religion, and nowhere else. You don't see "Atheists Against Boobies" campaigns.
You pretty much just see "God Will Punish You For Boobies" campaigns.
I know a lot of guys don't even wear their wedding ring because it's annoying when you're not used to it ( I know it took me a while to get used to wearing a ring ) and no one really raises an eyebrow.
Well, yeah.. but you're not breastfeeding in public.;-)
Do that sometime, you'll definitely raise a few eyebrows.
Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.
Look, let's be honest here.
Bennett isn't doing a survey. He isn't doing science. He isn't even doing journalism.
He looked at pictures of tits on the interwebs, wrote a blog entry about an article someone else did, and looked at more tits on the interweb.
Timothy, who apparently is the dedicated handler for this click-baiting automaton which is Bennet Haselton, duly posts the crap onto Slashdot so he can tell his bosses he works had to be an editor and deserves his paycheck.
People come into the article, gripe about how inane and pointless Bennett's drivel is... Dice sees page traffic and gets ad impressions.
But on the vast majority of them you can simply go to the settings, check the option to "allow installation from unknown sources," and you are outside the walls.
Until you want to do something which requires root.
And then you realize the walls are still there.
If it's so damned open and free, provide me with a factory method of rooting the device.
I'm not quite ready to risk bricking my tablet. And I'm betting the latest update will make it even harder to root, not easier.
And, really, having preinstalled apps I can't delete? How is that even defensible? It's my device. I own it. WTF do you mean I can't uninstall this app??
Want to talk parity? Android is a walled garden too - just with different types of walls.
Exactly.
Sure, my Nexus 7 tablet will allow me to sideload apps.
But there are some apps which want to give me functionality Google won't which would require me to root the device. Like granular permissions control.
Sorry, but if I have to risk bricking the device in order to root it, where's this vaunted openness of Android? It isn't there by default if I don't already have root access to my phone.
My wife's Nexus 5 phone? The only texting app is Google's hangouts.. which means I assume all text messages are handed off to Google, and your contacts are tracked as well. Because, why? Oh, right, so Google can make even more money.
I fired up the YouTube app once, instead of asking me if I'd like to log in, it created me an account on YouTube. I don't want a YouTube account. I don't want to be logged into YouTube.
And then there's the constantly trying to get me to change my account to Google+. I don't want Google+ either, stop trying to shove it down my throat.
I've got crap on my phone I can't uninstall because my carrier put it there. I can disable Facebook, but I can't delete the fscking thing.
So all this talk about "ZOMG, teh Apple is teh closed and teh Android is teh freedom" is completely overstating the facts.
I currently own both Android and iOS devices. They have their strengths and weaknesses. Neither of them is 100% perfect, and neither of them covers all my use cases.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL ... you really think he doesn't know you're there?
He's just messing with you.
Why am I picturing Wall-E with a fire extinguisher all of a sudden?
I'll be the first to admit "I'm no rocket scientist", but I'm curious how this works.
I assume this is a very limited amount of thrust, and can be powered by solar ... but just how much can they do with this?
Always cool to see they're still doing new stuff, even if I don't know what it means. :-P
Not sure about the rouge, but there could have been some guy-liner.
Perhaps you meant rogue?
And, they need the humans for more than just washing the windows.
From TFS:
So, your Skyscraper Edition Roomba still doesn't cover all the needs of buildings like this, and you'll still need to be able to get people there for other tasks. Someone still needs to be able to physically get there anyway.
Me, no way I'd do that job. So any company who has to pay humans to get out and do this needs to man up and realize their multi-billion dollar penis in the sky needs people willing to get up there and do this.
Because it takes some serious intestinal fortitude to be hanging that high up in the sky.
I get ring-twitter just thinking about it.
Look, unless you're a friggin' rocket scientist, or believe they had additional information they didn't use ... summarizing anything as "the whole problem" is kind of childish.
Based on your vast experience of landing on comets after a 10 year journey, do you think you have a better sense of what the assumptions about the hardness of the ice should have been? Maybe you should have shared that with them.
Lots of smart people worked on this, took all they knew and could surmise, and made choices with the best available information, and using the technology and money available to them.
I'm sure as heck not going to say "well, if only they'd done this it would have worked". I know I'm not qualified to do that, and I'm quite certain most of us on Slashdot aren't either. In fact, I'm betting the people who are qualified are all thinking this was a monumentally difficult task. NASA isn't sitting around going "Ha ha!"
To me, even what they did is some pretty mind-boggling engineering. But in interviews I heard over the last few weeks, they still knew there were risks and uncertainties.
It sucks, but unless you're more qualified than the entire team who did this, you have to realize this is still an incredible feat.
I won't even claim this to be an accurate analogy: But this is kind of like hitting a target in China from New York, using a home made gun, in the dark, and while both you and the target are moving.
Me, I'll applaud the ESA and everyone involved. Success for this kind of engineering includes all of the stuff that got you there. Getting far enough to have a failed landing is still a huge undertaking.
I think that's pretty unfair.
It was launched 10 years ago, and has been spiraling around the solar system doing fly-bys to get going fast enough to match speed ... and then it got close enough to land, even though it wasn't perfect.
I'm more inclined to think this is a demonstration of just how damned hard something like this is, and that no matter how much you try to plan for stuff, you can't know everything until after it's happened.
I think a bunch of whiny nerds saying this was poorly thought out is some pretty lame arm chair quarterbacking.
Tell you what, when your probe lands on a comet, we'll all line up to tell you what a shitty job you've done.
Oh, wait, you don't have a probe and wouldn't know how to make one, right?
Well, really, this has been Sony's MO for years -- they are entirely about vendor lock in, pushing their own proprietary crap, and refusing to use anybody else's technology.
Which is precisely why many of us won't buy anything from Sony.
Between Beta, their mini disc format, stripping Linux functionality from the PS3, and now this ... Sony has more or less demonstrated them to be entirely "our stuff shall have supreme dominance at the expense of the consumer".
Sorry Sony, not interested in your crap, and haven't trusted you for 15+ years.
I seem to recall a period of time where the Republicans more or less shut down government as they threw a major temper tantrum.
Are you honestly claiming that support for this crap doesn't enjoy support in both parties?
Because I'm afraid I'm going to call bullshit on that one. I'm not hearing Republicans saying this should stop.
BOTH parties are supporting this crap.
You sound like you're having subversive thoughts, citizen.
A car has been dispatched to bring you to the nearest thought re-alignment camp, where you will realize the government is here to serve you, and these are necessary steps.
Your kitchen should be dispensing a nice, tasty glass of Kool Aid for you.
I do not disagree.
But 9/11 caused the passage of the PATRIOT act with very little thought for the consequences, and moved the "security at any cost" mentality into the daylight. And that was the one which gave them the keys to the kingdom to pretty much do anything they wanted.
Before 9/11, they had to at least pretend. After, they can do anything they want to in the light of day.
Some of this was started by Shrub. Some of this had been in the works for years before 9/11. Much of this was legalized in the days after 9/11 as everyone was in a panic. Some of it has been expanded since.
Now, all of the advisers are saying "gotta do this". All of the spy agencies are saying "fuck it, we're doing it anyway, even if we do have to lie to Congress".
When you create a climate of paranoia and hysteria, and suddenly decide your founding principles are optional ... this is what you get.
There have been people who have wanted these powers for decades. And one day they got handed the best justification for it they could hope for.
Yes, Obama has failed to stop it. But he didn't initiate it.
And, quite frankly, I suspect a lot of people welcome this crap with open arms because they believe this shit will keep them safe from the terrorists.
When your population is reduced to cowering in fear, they tend to back a lot of things they can't see the consequences of.
Sadly, when 9/11 happened, they pretty much decided that the niceties of the Constitution and the law were far too dangerous to allow, and went straight to the fascism.
Essentially, the terrorists won, because they've more or less caused governments around the world to start ignoring our rights.
Now it's security at any costs, and since we're already tracking you, we'll pass that onto law enforcement and teach them how to hide the source of intelligence. Oh, and we'll share it among a bunch of other countries, and secretly enlist the corporations to hand over their data.
So, now we'll monitor everything you do, using laws we said we'd only use for terrorism, and then have the police perjure themselves to make it look like they obtained the information legally.
Papers please, comrade.
I wonder how long before they no longer feel the need to give us the illusion of freedom?
Unreasonable search and seizure.
I'm sorry, but this is blanket surveillance, without warrant, probable cause, or oversight.
At a certain point, the court needs to weigh in on this, because DoJ and the rest of law enforcement are completely ignoring the Constitution, the law, and pretty much everything else.
Why is this not landing these clowns in jail?
When your government becomes hostile to your rights, it's time to become hostile to your government.
So, does that mean those games are badly written, or that the next gen consoles are underpowered crap?
I think I've seen several things now which suggest the latter.
(Honest question, I'm sticking with my XBox 360 for now, so I've never seen the new ones.)
As long as bandwidth is charged for by ISPs, then I disagree.
See, everyone has said "ZOMG, the cloud and teh streaming". Meanwhile, your ISP is thinking "go ahead, suckers, stream all you want, it only makes us money".
We shall see.
Me, I'll stick with an XBox 360 disconnected from the interwebs.
Don' need no steenking cloud. Don' need to steenking interweb connection. Don' need no steenking ads.
is a dumb idea?
Sorry, but why would I want to stream the damned game every time I play it?
No, I like the model where I download once, and ideally can play while my tablet is in airplane mode. In fact, any game I can't play in airplane mode gets deleted.
I wonder how many people are interested in this tablet, or if it's likely to be a complete failure as everyone things "who cares?".
That's a provably false statement: a shirtless man does not cause the downfall of society. Yet, he has nipples.
Dogs and cats have nipples. Those, also do not cause the downfall of society.
Krusty the Klown has a superfluous third nipple (a trope borrowed from Goldfinger) ... again, no downfall of society. Yet you'd think if two are bad, three must be the sign of end-times, right?
This comes from puritanical people who believe that the sight of a woman's nipples would send humanity into fits of uncontrolled boobies, and that we'd be forced to face the fact that, yes, women have breasts, are in charge of those breasts, and that this is a perfectly normal fact.
This pretty much comes from religion, and nowhere else. You don't see "Atheists Against Boobies" campaigns.
You pretty much just see "God Will Punish You For Boobies" campaigns.
Well, yeah .. but you're not breastfeeding in public. ;-)
Do that sometime, you'll definitely raise a few eyebrows.
Look, let's be honest here.
Bennett isn't doing a survey. He isn't doing science. He isn't even doing journalism.
He looked at pictures of tits on the interwebs, wrote a blog entry about an article someone else did, and looked at more tits on the interweb.
Timothy, who apparently is the dedicated handler for this click-baiting automaton which is Bennet Haselton, duly posts the crap onto Slashdot so he can tell his bosses he works had to be an editor and deserves his paycheck.
People come into the article, gripe about how inane and pointless Bennett's drivel is ... Dice sees page traffic and gets ad impressions.
Dude, seriously, it's the internet. Do you actually require assistance to see breasts?
If so, well, there's google.
Something about a B Ark ...
Depends on the tat ... I've got a nude pinup tat ... I'm 100% guaranteed to see tits. ;-)
In general, however, it may not get you any closer to actually touching any real ones.
Until you want to do something which requires root.
And then you realize the walls are still there.
If it's so damned open and free, provide me with a factory method of rooting the device.
I'm not quite ready to risk bricking my tablet. And I'm betting the latest update will make it even harder to root, not easier.
And, really, having preinstalled apps I can't delete? How is that even defensible? It's my device. I own it. WTF do you mean I can't uninstall this app??
Exactly.
Sure, my Nexus 7 tablet will allow me to sideload apps.
But there are some apps which want to give me functionality Google won't which would require me to root the device. Like granular permissions control.
Sorry, but if I have to risk bricking the device in order to root it, where's this vaunted openness of Android? It isn't there by default if I don't already have root access to my phone.
My wife's Nexus 5 phone? The only texting app is Google's hangouts .. which means I assume all text messages are handed off to Google, and your contacts are tracked as well. Because, why? Oh, right, so Google can make even more money.
I fired up the YouTube app once, instead of asking me if I'd like to log in, it created me an account on YouTube. I don't want a YouTube account. I don't want to be logged into YouTube.
And then there's the constantly trying to get me to change my account to Google+. I don't want Google+ either, stop trying to shove it down my throat.
I've got crap on my phone I can't uninstall because my carrier put it there. I can disable Facebook, but I can't delete the fscking thing.
So all this talk about "ZOMG, teh Apple is teh closed and teh Android is teh freedom" is completely overstating the facts.
I currently own both Android and iOS devices. They have their strengths and weaknesses. Neither of them is 100% perfect, and neither of them covers all my use cases.