At SciFoo 2010, Yoshiuki Sankai of Tsukuba University gave a talk with videos of the varied robotic exoskeleton walking-prosthetics available from his company. The film included many examples of people who had not walked for years standing up and walking with these "legs". You could hear the doctors and nurses watching exclaiming their amazement and sometimes crying. Here is a 2006 biography of Sankai already discussing his exoskeletal robot, first demoed in 2005: http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/sankai.html
Their company page also seems to have more information in English: http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/index.html
For now, consumers' primary defense against wireless telemarketing will be the restraint of direct marketers. "The level of annoyance and antagonism [for wireless customers] would be extremely high, and our members realize that it's really not a good marketing tool," says the DMA's Conway.
Yes, and we know companies never use marketing tools that they fear we won't like. That's why webvertisers never use spam, pop-unders, stupid animated banners that cover the page....
How many millions did X-10 make from pop-unders? As they chuckled all the way to the bank, I somehow doubt they were shedding tears about my "annoyance and antagonism."
"Segway's Human Transporter, the self-balancing electric scooter that has kept technophiles abuzz for the last two years, ranks among the best-selling items on Amazon.com's Web site, the online retailer said Monday." Anybody else remember claim last December?
According to Wired, Kamen had predicted he'd be "stamping out 10,000 machines a week" by the end of 2002.
Pullleez---I'm speeding along the sidewalk, talking on my cellphone, checking my Palm Pilot, and now you expect me to keep an eye on the power indicator too?
Hey, I'm happy for your company--how soon do you think you'll be creating some of the 3.1. million jobs that disappeared during Bush's presidency? According to this recent news story, Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover whose term in office created a net loss of jobs....
And I'm also happy about your 401k--it went up last month, did it? How many more months will it have to go up at that rate to get up to where it was before Bush took office?
Telemarketers and the Bush administration are not good sources of unbiased information. And, in other news, a fortune is not waiting for you in some Nigerian bank.
Yes, the free version of Blogger has a big user base compared to blogware you have to pay for and install like Radio and Movable Type.
It's also true that people tend to like the software they are used to. If you look at the numbers for "I love xxx", you'd guess that for every 100 Manila users there are 160 Movable Type users, 210 Radio Users, and 230 Blogger users. These numbers are much more in the same ballpark than Microsoft versus Mac.
Now look at the "I hate xxx" numbers--the ratio of Blogger users to Manila and/or Movable Type just went to infinity! Instead of Radio and Blogger being almost the same, there are three times as many Blogger as Radio hits.
Is anybody else reminded of the way Microsoft "outcompeted" Netscape's much better browser software? First it started giving away its browser for free, and when that wasn't enough to switch people away from Netscape's (then better) browser, it went on from there.
Google bought Blogger, Google controls Blogger, and Google has an obvious stake in getting people to use its very own software. Is Blogger the best blogging software you can use? Consider this unscientific "Google research" of various strings:
"I hate xxx" + weblog
xxx = blogger 121
xxx = radio 39
xxx = manila 0
xxx = movable type 0
"I love xxx" + weblog
xxx = blogger 233
xxx = radio 212
xxx = manila 101
xxx = movable type 160
"xxx is down"
xxx = blogger 760
xxx = manila 1
"something is wrong with xxx"
xxx = blogger 27
xxx = radio 0
xxx = manila 0
xxx = movable type 1
"xxx just ate"
xxx = blogger 279
xxx = radio 2
xxx = manila 0
xxx = movable type 0
"xxx sucks"
xxx = blogger 1070
xxx = radio (here I added "userland" to eliminate stuff like "Denver radio sucks") 136
xxx = manila 45, many of them referring to a city in the Philippines
xxx = movable type 58
I've used both Blogger and Manila, and let me make that 1071 for the next google search: Blogger sucks.
I think you are talking about a battle between a skillful player and the inventor of the game. (From what I know of Khan, I would have been rooting for Captain Kirk.) What I'm talking about is a (hypothetical) situation where Kirk agrees to a sword fight, then pulls out an Uzi.
The skillful inventor of hacks and cheats on a game may be a cool guy in many ways. Even so, his triumphs spoil the fun of players who are paying to play the game as advertised.
I liked the idea that there could be rooms where cheating was advertised and legal.
The challenge here isn't to be better at Quake, but to be able to cheat the best at Quake, that in itself is a game.
Yes, but--suppose you're winning at chess and your opponent jumps up and skillfully whacks you with a hockey stick? Maybe in his own mind he is playing a different game of skill, but that doesn't mean you want to see him across the chessboard again.
To generalize this point--we need to build in redundancy for any systems that someone could decide to switch on-and-off at will. If Bush can decide whether GPS works or not, GPS is unreliable. (What next, no GPS for France?)
Similarly, the US government is building more of its own non-web internets to protect itself during DDOS attacks. Once the government is no longer a potential victim of DDOS attacks, a shut-down of the Internet could become yet another useful wartime tool.
The idea of presenting science as stories about real people, or fun mysteries students get to solve--okay, that sounds ideal for students who don't want to learn "boring facts." For kids who want to learn something, it also sounds like a way waste lots and lots of time.
[begin rant] When I was a kid, many teachers were very smart women who couldn't get other jobs. Such women now have better opportunities. Public school classes are taught by less-qualified teachers, teachers who want textbooks and methods aimed at entertaining the lowest common denominator, teachers who value their motivated students only for their docility.
Kids who are ready to learn about planetary motion are required to spend a week building papier-mache models of planets. Why? Partly because the teacher feels much more comfortable with papier-mache than with Kepler. But mostly because the teacher demands a "mixed grouping" where good students are used as makeweight to keep discipline problems quiet.
I would be willing to let teachers "dumb down" our public schools as much as they want if only they would let motivated students, formerly known as good students, study their subjects in a separate boring-but-informative track. But that's not going to happen anytime soon.[end rant. At least for now]
I ran a quick Google on "speed limit death statistics"--yep, I can back that up. Nice summary from an activist in NM:
"Speed interacts with injury in several ways, affecting both the risk of crashing and the severity once you do crash..... speed does not directly cause crashes, any more than drinking does. Higher speed makes staying in travelways and yielding to other road users more difficult."
But I admit I couldn't find pages proving my real contention--that speeders kill more folks than kids swapping mp3s.
Why are they screaming about P2P? What about radar detectors? Radar detectors are there to help drivers break laws--they have no other purpose. Breaking the speed-limit laws makes a driver much more likely to kill someone.
Unfortunately, people killed by speeding drivers don't make campaign contributions. File-sharing hasn't caused any deaths that I know about...
...with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. He was the shoeless "maid" with a Spanish accent who was supplying Lane with "pirin" tablets. He was soooooo funny--also (speaking for my two X chromosomes here) extremely cute.
Remember the WPA? That was one of Roosevelt's tools to fight the Depression by giving government jobs to unemployed people doing really useful work. I'm not just talking ditch-diggers here (no offense to ditch-diggers intended)--the WPA also hired tons of writers, photographers, etc.
Right now the job situation for us tech-folks really stinks. So how about paying at least some of us highly-educated-but-unemployed to work fulltime, hunting down those deceptive spammers and shutting them down?
Think of the many hours you've wasted fighting the spam in your inbox--wouldn't you be happy to see your tax dollars go to a project like this?
Half the slimeballs sending me spam are already claiming that I opted in--even those who send me spam at an address that I never, never use as a return address with any company. (That address is, unfortunately, on a couple of web pages where spambots found it.)
As a geekess, I want to add to this thread. We geekess-es do not necessarily have the world's top social skills any more than the guys we love do.
My husband gave me a wonderful present a couple of Christmases ago, though it looks funny in with your long list of X-rated suggestions. It was one of those "Fantazein" clocks you can program with messages. Anyway, he programmed it to say "Don't worry be happy", and later with other things he thought would amuse me, such as "Don't mess with Besty" (his favorite misspelling of my name.) I thought it was very romantic, and I still smile every time I see it, two years after he bought it.
My point has nothing to do with your long-winded post.
My point was that the scientists who worked on the bomb imagined it would be used against Hitler--they were wrong. They had no control over where their "baby" was used.
It always amuses me whenever I read these types of tirades. Your sense of superiority must indeed be a constant source of fun to you and to all those around you.
I hope this effort will focus on using known hacker techniques and avoid the temptation to start developing new and better ones.
Let me remind you of the origins of the atom bomb, and of Einstein's later remark that he wished he had cut off the hand that signed a letter to Roosevelt endorsing it. The scientists who knocked themselves out to build it were working to stop Hitler, but once the knowledge was out there, it was beyond their control.
In fact, the bomb got dropped on cities full of Japanese civilians.
In fact, the knowledge those scientists worked to build up became the property of US government officials including (for instance) GW Bush.
In fact, the atom bomb techniques have since been stolen by many rogue nations.
In fact, the atom bomb techniques were the basis for the even more destructive H bomb.
A government-sponsored development of hacking has enormously destructive potential for all of us who use the internet. Today Iraq is the target.
Tomorrow, the target could be domestic dissent. Isn't Ann Coulter already calling the Democrats who didn't cheer Bush's SOU traitors?
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At SciFoo 2010, Yoshiuki Sankai of Tsukuba University gave a talk with videos of the varied robotic exoskeleton walking-prosthetics available from his company. The film included many examples of people who had not walked for years standing up and walking with these "legs". You could hear the doctors and nurses watching exclaiming their amazement and sometimes crying. Here is a 2006 biography of Sankai already discussing his exoskeletal robot, first demoed in 2005: http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/sankai.html Their company page also seems to have more information in English: http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/index.html
Yes, and we know companies never use marketing tools that they fear we won't like. That's why webvertisers never use spam, pop-unders, stupid animated banners that cover the page....
How many millions did X-10 make from pop-unders? As they chuckled all the way to the bank, I somehow doubt they were shedding tears about my "annoyance and antagonism."
Can my brother-in-law please have your tech job when your pranks get you fired?
Oh darn, but I suppose a lot of your co-workers have their own out-of-work relatives in mind...
According to Wired, Kamen had predicted he'd be "stamping out 10,000 machines a week" by the end of 2002.
Oops, damn, there goes another pedestrian....
And I'm also happy about your 401k--it went up last month, did it? How many more months will it have to go up at that rate to get up to where it was before Bush took office?
Hmmm. Millions of people lost jobs since Bush took office, 93,000 more payroll jobs vanished last month, and consumer confidence just took another dive.
Telemarketers and the Bush administration are not good sources of unbiased information. And, in other news, a fortune is not waiting for you in some Nigerian bank.
It's also true that people tend to like the software they are used to. If you look at the numbers for "I love xxx", you'd guess that for every 100 Manila users there are 160 Movable Type users, 210 Radio Users, and 230 Blogger users. These numbers are much more in the same ballpark than Microsoft versus Mac.
Now look at the "I hate xxx" numbers--the ratio of Blogger users to Manila and/or Movable Type just went to infinity! Instead of Radio and Blogger being almost the same, there are three times as many Blogger as Radio hits.
Just my geeky two cents...
Google bought Blogger, Google controls Blogger, and Google has an obvious stake in getting people to use its very own software. Is Blogger the best blogging software you can use? Consider this unscientific "Google research" of various strings:
"I hate xxx" + weblog
xxx = blogger 121
xxx = radio 39
xxx = manila 0
xxx = movable type 0
"I love xxx" + weblog
xxx = blogger 233
xxx = radio 212
xxx = manila 101
xxx = movable type 160
"xxx is down"
xxx = blogger 760
xxx = manila 1
"something is wrong with xxx"
xxx = blogger 27
xxx = radio 0
xxx = manila 0
xxx = movable type 1
"xxx just ate"
xxx = blogger 279
xxx = radio 2
xxx = manila 0
xxx = movable type 0
"xxx sucks"
xxx = blogger 1070
xxx = radio (here I added "userland" to eliminate stuff like "Denver radio sucks") 136
xxx = manila 45, many of them referring to a city in the Philippines
xxx = movable type 58
I've used both Blogger and Manila, and let me make that 1071 for the next google search: Blogger sucks.
I agree, if the game is person vs. computer, the person gets to decide just what the rules are.
The skillful inventor of hacks and cheats on a game may be a cool guy in many ways. Even so, his triumphs spoil the fun of players who are paying to play the game as advertised.
I liked the idea that there could be rooms where cheating was advertised and legal.
Yes, but--suppose you're winning at chess and your opponent jumps up and skillfully whacks you with a hockey stick? Maybe in his own mind he is playing a different game of skill, but that doesn't mean you want to see him across the chessboard again.
Similarly, the US government is building more of its own non-web internets to protect itself during DDOS attacks. Once the government is no longer a potential victim of DDOS attacks, a shut-down of the Internet could become yet another useful wartime tool.
[begin rant] When I was a kid, many teachers were very smart women who couldn't get other jobs. Such women now have better opportunities. Public school classes are taught by less-qualified teachers, teachers who want textbooks and methods aimed at entertaining the lowest common denominator, teachers who value their motivated students only for their docility.
Kids who are ready to learn about planetary motion are required to spend a week building papier-mache models of planets. Why? Partly because the teacher feels much more comfortable with papier-mache than with Kepler. But mostly because the teacher demands a "mixed grouping" where good students are used as makeweight to keep discipline problems quiet.
I would be willing to let teachers "dumb down" our public schools as much as they want if only they would let motivated students, formerly known as good students, study their subjects in a separate boring-but-informative track. But that's not going to happen anytime soon.[end rant. At least for now]
Thanks to Zonker for posting this infor in a Metafilter thread.
Ummm--care to support that statement?
I ran a quick Google on "speed limit death statistics"--yep, I can back that up. Nice summary from an activist in NM:
But I admit I couldn't find pages proving my real contention--that speeders kill more folks than kids swapping mp3s.Why are they screaming about P2P? What about radar detectors? Radar detectors are there to help drivers break laws--they have no other purpose. Breaking the speed-limit laws makes a driver much more likely to kill someone.
Unfortunately, people killed by speeding drivers don't make campaign contributions. File-sharing hasn't caused any deaths that I know about...
Hard to convey these in a short, short trailer...
Good news for those of you of the male persuasion--a movie with Sean Connery is a movie your girlfriend would probably like to see.
...with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. He was the shoeless "maid" with a Spanish accent who was supplying Lane with "pirin" tablets. He was soooooo funny--also (speaking for my two X chromosomes here) extremely cute.
Right now the job situation for us tech-folks really stinks. So how about paying at least some of us highly-educated-but-unemployed to work fulltime, hunting down those deceptive spammers and shutting them down?
Think of the many hours you've wasted fighting the spam in your inbox--wouldn't you be happy to see your tax dollars go to a project like this?
My husband gave me a wonderful present a couple of Christmases ago, though it looks funny in with your long list of X-rated suggestions. It was one of those "Fantazein" clocks you can program with messages. Anyway, he programmed it to say "Don't worry be happy", and later with other things he thought would amuse me, such as "Don't mess with Besty" (his favorite misspelling of my name.) I thought it was very romantic, and I still smile every time I see it, two years after he bought it.
My point was that the scientists who worked on the bomb imagined it would be used against Hitler--they were wrong. They had no control over where their "baby" was used.
It always amuses me whenever I read these types of tirades.
Your sense of superiority must indeed be a constant source of fun to you and to all those around you.
Let me remind you of the origins of the atom bomb, and of Einstein's later remark that he wished he had cut off the hand that signed a letter to Roosevelt endorsing it. The scientists who knocked themselves out to build it were working to stop Hitler, but once the knowledge was out there, it was beyond their control.
A government-sponsored development of hacking has enormously destructive potential for all of us who use the internet. Today Iraq is the target. Tomorrow, the target could be domestic dissent. Isn't Ann Coulter already calling the Democrats who didn't cheer Bush's SOU traitors?
Bad, bad, bad idea