American robotics research is focused more on military applications, while the Japanese seem to be more focused on creating robots for consumer and industrial use.
We don't hear as much about them as we do about Qrio et al, but projects like Boeing's X-45 UCAV http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/x-45/ flash.html/ are being agressively pursued, you can bet. These robots can't walk and talk, but they can fly and drop bombs, and eventually will be able to do so semi- or fully autonomously.
Actually, caffeine is better known for its ability to relieve headaches. Just check the ingredients on a bottle of Excedrin. Caffeine withdrawal headaches are very common in post-operative hospitalized patients who might not be getting the amount of coffee to which they are accustomed.
Hear, hear. My wife and I moved into a shady neighborhood in Chicago about 3 years ago. We considered buying a gun, just in case any of the neighborhood crackheads decided to let themselves in. Turns out, we've never needed a gun. Our two medium-sized (but very scary-sounding) dogs are more than enough deterrrent. Plus, they hear everything. The moment any passer-by ventures off the sidewalk and into our yard, the dogs know about it. If we hear a suspicious sound in the middle of the night, and the dogs ignore it, we know that it's safe for us to ignore it, too.
Passengers? Payload? How about a camera and a big *ol'* lens? This thing is for imaging, you know, like a satellite, only much closer to the Earth.
Nove 2 - we're in for a wild ride!
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Before last year's election, I happily, ignorantly assumed that our election process was about as fair and unsullied as could be. Sure, there were stories of vote-selling here and there, especially in the South (I'm a GA native), but most of that was assumed to have taken place in the past, and the effect of any isolated fraud was imagined to be negligible.
Since the last election, we no longer assume that the election process is infallible. Already, we're hearing stories of falsified registrations and registrations being destroyed. I'm guessing that starting around mid-day on Nov. 2 we'll begin hearing about proposed legal challenges to district election results. Not just a few, but hundreds. By Nov 7, the whole situation will be hopelessley confused, with legions of lawyers working to resolve irregularities and simultaneously raising new challenges to whatever result has been handed us.
For my part, living in IL, I'll cast my vote for W, not because I don't think that he's a moron, but rather because, after weeks of deliberation, I cannot, as an OB/Gyn practicing in a doctor-unfriendly state, cast a ballot in favor a ticket which includes a personal injury lawyer who made his fortune exploiting my profession.
Of course, IL will be won by Kerry, so the only reason for me or any other Illini to go to the polls is for the sake of participating.
All's I'm saying is, whether you're following Iraq or Scott Peterson or football or whatever, get ready to refocus on the post-election debacle, as it promises to be a good show indeed.
Here's a studypublished this year which confirms an association between video gaming prowess and laparoscopic surgical skills.
When laparoscopy was first developed, the surgeon would peer directly through a rigid fiberoptic laparoscope to visualize structures within the body, both for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Nowadays, we just stick a video camera over the eye-hole on the laparoscope, and watch the pictures in real time on an attached monitor. The hardest part about learning laparoscopy is training your brain and hand so that regardless of the orientation, you can move the instruments in your hand such that they travel onscreen in the direction you intend. It's like using a mouse in three dimensions, but with the additional difficulty that moving the mouse "up" in physical space won't necessarily translate into one's instrument moving "up" on the monitor (and within the patient's abdomen). Once you get the hang of it, it's second nature, and you don't even think about the disconnect between what your hands are doing, and what the instrument is doing onscreen.
Even before this study was released, I realized that perhaps by playing more video games I could become a better laparoscopist, with the video game controller forcing my mind to overcome the disconnect between my hand movements and the movements of instruments on the monitor.
Alas, I've never been into video games. I sold my copy of Halo because I could never get past the first level. Now my Xbox just chugs happily along as a media receiver.
Can anyone tell me if the PStwo can, with additional software/hardware, be used as a streaming media receiver? As small as it is, I would like to be able to use it to stream music and video over my home network, as I've been doing with my modded Xbox. The Xbox worked great, but its cooling fans were kind of noisy, the case is kind of clunky and awkward, and now it also just happens to be broken.
Isn't it strange how, when we look at designs for future vehicles realized by past designers, the pictures look old-fashioned to us? Why does the 1950s vison of a futuristic hovercar look like nothing more than a 1950s automobile without wheels? Surely, to the contemporary viewer, these vehicles looked futuristic, but to us, they just look old-fashioned. Why does it seem that the 1950s futurists were unable to come up with an image of something resembling, say, a 2004 BMW 3-series, or even a 1990s Dodge Intrepid?
The corollary to this is that, our current interpretations of what future vehicles might look like (imagine the Audi in I, Robot or the Lexus in Minority Report), will probably look hopelessly dated when 2030 rolls around.
The problem, I suspect, lies largely in our inability to predict what styling cues future consumers will find appealing.
Is it impossible for us, as non-clairvoyants, to imagine what manufactured goods might look like in the future? Can anyone cite any examples of past designers who were able to successfully envision the future of industrial design?
It may happen sooner than you think. This news is a few weeks old, but Toyota has something similar in the works, to debut in 2005. Unlike Sony and Honda, Toyota is planning mass production, and if a Toyota robot is smart enough to take care of my grandmother, surely it can fetch drinks and go check to see what the hell the dog is barking at.
Don't worry, it's not going to cut military spending. It is military spending! What do you think the potential military implications of this project and its progeny are? Like it or not, amazing things have been done, militarily, and protection of self-interests won't be limited to Earth's surface in the future. Do you really think the federal government would consider spending a dime on anything if it were just for curiosity's sake?
Patent is one of the most fundamental concepts to the very philosophy that gives us just about all the benefits that makes living in the modern world. Being entitled to compensation for your own ideas and work is not just about greed, it also makes good sense. Otherwise, we'd all be living like characters in some Ayn Rand novel, marching to work every morning to spend 16 hours threshing wheat by hand.
This looks just like my old Compaq aero contura 4/25. Very svelte and a fine performer, at least until Win95 came along. It even runs linux.
See the resemblance?
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~hp6y-isym/Aero4_33C.jp g
Sorry to tell you this, but the Xbox doesn't make that great of a DVD player. I don't know if it's because the particular DVD drive in my unit is crap, but only rarely will it play DVD-R discs that I've recorded (granted, I'm not using top-quality media). After using my Xbox as my primary DVD player for about a year, I finally buckled and purchased a cheap ($60) Apex progressive-scan player that runs circles around my Xbox as a DVD player. To be fair, my Xbox does just fine with commerically-produced DVDs. And you don't need Xbox media player. The Evolution X dashboard includes region-free playback capability.
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American robotics research is focused more on military applications, while the Japanese seem to be more focused on creating robots for consumer and industrial use. We don't hear as much about them as we do about Qrio et al, but projects like Boeing's X-45 UCAV http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/x-45/ flash.html/ are being agressively pursued, you can bet. These robots can't walk and talk, but they can fly and drop bombs, and eventually will be able to do so semi- or fully autonomously.
That is one of the best sigs I've ever read. Thanks!
Actually, caffeine is better known for its ability to relieve headaches. Just check the ingredients on a bottle of Excedrin. Caffeine withdrawal headaches are very common in post-operative hospitalized patients who might not be getting the amount of coffee to which they are accustomed.
Hear, hear. My wife and I moved into a shady neighborhood in Chicago about 3 years ago. We considered buying a gun, just in case any of the neighborhood crackheads decided to let themselves in. Turns out, we've never needed a gun. Our two medium-sized (but very scary-sounding) dogs are more than enough deterrrent. Plus, they hear everything. The moment any passer-by ventures off the sidewalk and into our yard, the dogs know about it. If we hear a suspicious sound in the middle of the night, and the dogs ignore it, we know that it's safe for us to ignore it, too.
Passengers? Payload? How about a camera and a big *ol'* lens? This thing is for imaging, you know, like a satellite, only much closer to the Earth.
Since the last election, we no longer assume that the election process is infallible. Already, we're hearing stories of falsified registrations and registrations being destroyed. I'm guessing that starting around mid-day on Nov. 2 we'll begin hearing about proposed legal challenges to district election results. Not just a few, but hundreds. By Nov 7, the whole situation will be hopelessley confused, with legions of lawyers working to resolve irregularities and simultaneously raising new challenges to whatever result has been handed us.
For my part, living in IL, I'll cast my vote for W, not because I don't think that he's a moron, but rather because, after weeks of deliberation, I cannot, as an OB/Gyn practicing in a doctor-unfriendly state, cast a ballot in favor a ticket which includes a personal injury lawyer who made his fortune exploiting my profession.
Of course, IL will be won by Kerry, so the only reason for me or any other Illini to go to the polls is for the sake of participating.
All's I'm saying is, whether you're following Iraq or Scott Peterson or football or whatever, get ready to refocus on the post-election debacle, as it promises to be a good show indeed.
When laparoscopy was first developed, the surgeon would peer directly through a rigid fiberoptic laparoscope to visualize structures within the body, both for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Nowadays, we just stick a video camera over the eye-hole on the laparoscope, and watch the pictures in real time on an attached monitor. The hardest part about learning laparoscopy is training your brain and hand so that regardless of the orientation, you can move the instruments in your hand such that they travel onscreen in the direction you intend. It's like using a mouse in three dimensions, but with the additional difficulty that moving the mouse "up" in physical space won't necessarily translate into one's instrument moving "up" on the monitor (and within the patient's abdomen). Once you get the hang of it, it's second nature, and you don't even think about the disconnect between what your hands are doing, and what the instrument is doing onscreen.
Even before this study was released, I realized that perhaps by playing more video games I could become a better laparoscopist, with the video game controller forcing my mind to overcome the disconnect between my hand movements and the movements of instruments on the monitor. Alas, I've never been into video games. I sold my copy of Halo because I could never get past the first level. Now my Xbox just chugs happily along as a media receiver.
Can anyone tell me if the PStwo can, with additional software/hardware, be used as a streaming media receiver? As small as it is, I would like to be able to use it to stream music and video over my home network, as I've been doing with my modded Xbox. The Xbox worked great, but its cooling fans were kind of noisy, the case is kind of clunky and awkward, and now it also just happens to be broken.
The corollary to this is that, our current interpretations of what future vehicles might look like (imagine the Audi in I, Robot or the Lexus in Minority Report), will probably look hopelessly dated when 2030 rolls around.
The problem, I suspect, lies largely in our inability to predict what styling cues future consumers will find appealing. Is it impossible for us, as non-clairvoyants, to imagine what manufactured goods might look like in the future? Can anyone cite any examples of past designers who were able to successfully envision the future of industrial design?
It may happen sooner than you think. This news is a few weeks old, but Toyota has something similar in the works, to debut in 2005. Unlike Sony and Honda, Toyota is planning mass production, and if a Toyota robot is smart enough to take care of my grandmother, surely it can fetch drinks and go check to see what the hell the dog is barking at.
Don't worry, it's not going to cut military spending. It is military spending! What do you think the potential military implications of this project and its progeny are? Like it or not, amazing things have been done, militarily, and protection of self-interests won't be limited to Earth's surface in the future. Do you really think the federal government would consider spending a dime on anything if it were just for curiosity's sake?
Patent is one of the most fundamental concepts to the very philosophy that gives us just about all the benefits that makes living in the modern world. Being entitled to compensation for your own ideas and work is not just about greed, it also makes good sense. Otherwise, we'd all be living like characters in some Ayn Rand novel, marching to work every morning to spend 16 hours threshing wheat by hand.
This looks just like my old Compaq aero contura 4/25. Very svelte and a fine performer, at least until Win95 came along. It even runs linux. See the resemblance? http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~hp6y-isym/Aero4_33C.jp g
Sorry to tell you this, but the Xbox doesn't make that great of a DVD player. I don't know if it's because the particular DVD drive in my unit is crap, but only rarely will it play DVD-R discs that I've recorded (granted, I'm not using top-quality media). After using my Xbox as my primary DVD player for about a year, I finally buckled and purchased a cheap ($60) Apex progressive-scan player that runs circles around my Xbox as a DVD player.
To be fair, my Xbox does just fine with commerically-produced DVDs. And you don't need Xbox media player. The Evolution X dashboard includes region-free playback capability.
Dude, you shouldn't be buying pantyhose for your girlfriend. The only thing more emasculating than that, is buying her tampax or whatever.