...but Outlook gets this right. When mail arrives, you get a transparent popup in the lower right corner where you can glimpse who the message is from, the subject, and maybe the first bit of body text (depends how long the subject is). If you don't click on it within a few seconds, it goes away again and you can open it on your own time when you feel the need. It is a distraction, yes, but not a huge one since it appears and disappears with no intervention from you. If you want to field it immediately, you can. If you don't, don't. It could stand to be slightly more intelligent -- if you're working in the lower right then it should pop up somewhere else -- but aside from that, they really did put together a good implementation.
This is not to say that Outlook as a whole is a solid product. It's feature-packed to be sure, but it looks like the work of a thousand hands that it is. It's surprisingly good at some things and surprisingly bad at others, and of course security has always been a SERIOUSLY low priority. I'm just pointing out one of the things it does well that could stand to be imitated.
So they'll do what I always do when confronted with age checks on places like ogrish.com -- pick January 1, 1900 because it's the first thing on each list. (Or use whatever is the first thing on the list.) Or pick randomly beyond the year, since it really doesn't matter. I don't NEED to lie to them, but I also don't have much incentive to waste time telling the truth.
This also can be caused by a small bit of something stuck to a lens element acting as a seed for condensation, which is why you get stars and blobs instead of just an overall loss of contrast and resolution (optical, not digital). You can tell if it's close to the aperture or not because if it is, stopping down won't help much (assuming you have the ability to directly select the aperture). If it's on or near the front element, where you might be able to get at it, it will mostly go away when you stop down.
How many times have you bought a DVD for someone else, then had to borrow it back to watch it (or watch it with them)? This sounds like a good way to get a gift for someone else while getting to watch it yourself once. And if it sucks, pass it off at the office Secret Santa.
I'm sure Comcast sees this as an alternative to a trip to the video store when you want a DVD right now, and it is a perfectly good one for most situations. But it also has the bonus that you can take the viewing for yourself and give away (or sell) the DVD without opening it. There may be some sort of agreement that you won't do this, but unless you're auctioning them off, who is ever going to notice?
Sure it's our tax dollar, but at least we got to see it! That's an improvement over how many of our tax dollars get spent... bridge to nowhere, anyone? Illegal wars? If the military wants to practice by watching people fuck in a car, and willing to share the tape, I can think of worse ways to blow the money (heh).
Imagine if corporations could be not only fined, but jailed for their behaviour? And the stockholders would have to serve that time proportionately to their share of interest in the corporation. Imagine Microsoft gets a year and you own 1/25,000,000 of it? You have to serve 1.26 seconds. Might as well just go to the station with a box of donuts and call it served. Own half of it? Now you're paying attention.
Why do the destroyed structures need to be rebuilt in exactly the same place? Why not build them twenty feet higher? If the entire infrastructure of the area is destroyed (sewers, plumbing, electrical cables, etc.) then why not haul in massive quantities of fill earth and build on top of THAT? Put it well above sea level and you've done two things:
1. Prevented flooding in the near term, even without levees. 2. Made it possible to hold out with levees for centuries beyond that, as the ground continues to sink.
Either that or they're gonna have to build everything on stilts like the barrier islands -- and we all know how well THAT holds up to 140 mph winds.
Oh god no... don't go putting up barriers or the players will stay away in droves. The fact is, folding 4 out of 5 hands you're dealt (or more) leads directly to playing multiple tables so as to actually have something to DO once in a while. If you interrupt that flow with captchas all the time, it will make it incredibly annoying to play those multiple tables and people won't want to play at all. I know some people are content to chug away at one table, but spreading out is essential to increasing profits while keeping a rein on variance. You will take much smaller swings from bad luck playing four.10/.25 tables at once than you will from playing a single.50/$1 table.
If you start modifying the cards in a captcha-like way, that too will be extremely annoying for people playing at multiple tables. You expect the ace of spades to look the same no matter where or when it appears. Same with any other card. If you just start juggling filenames, that won't affect the human players at all... but it won't affect screen-scraping bots either, only ones that depend on constant filenames. Those that do would quickly be replaced by those that can "read" directly from the data in video RAM. And I really can't see a way to stop people from running the bot on a second computer which controls the first over a VNC connection.
Even chat queries are spotty. Playing four tables at once (as I often do) doesn't leave a whole lot of time for witty banter. I keep the dealer in Verbose mode where every action of every player is announced, allowing me to look over the history of that hand quickly when it's my turn to act at a given table. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of scrolling chat text off the screen very quickly, and I've pretty much given up on trying to be sociable while playing. If you want to talk to me, that's what IRC is for. Then I don't have to worry about tables stealing focus while I'm trying to type.
For those of you that don't play (or don't play multiple tables), any table will steal focus when it is your turn to act. It doesn't matter if you are typing into another table's chat box, you are forcibly taken to the one where it is your turn. This often leads to half-formed thoughts being uttered at the wrong table and the first half never being said at all. I find this focus jumping to be worse than any other aspect of trying to chat with other players. The tables will steal focus from ANY app, not just other poker tables, but somehow they don't steal the input devices. If you keep typing, your text will still go where you intended (provided it's not another table). This means I'll happily blather away in IRC while playing poker, but won't talk to the other players much if at all.
If a song is not popular, it will be hard to find on a P2P network, and you may well have to wait for it if/when you do find it. Certainly you'd pony up a quarter or two to get it from iTunes.
But once a fair number of people have done that and found the song is greatly underrated, it will get passed around. Pretty soon it's on the very P2P networks that failed it the first time around (even if only 1 in 10 buyers strips the DRM by some means)... and legal download demand goes back down. For truly good product, this isn't going to stop that many people from buying it. For stuff on the fringe it isn't either. It's the mediocre but broad-market corporate pap that's going to eat its own lunch when it shows up on Soulseek. Certainly the record labels won't like this -- they really don't care what you're buying, only that you buy it. But for the artist, it cuts both ways. The great but undiscovered will benefit from such a model. The great and promoted (rare that they are) will lose slightly but not catastrophically -- though they could perhaps compensate by trimming the ad budget. The awful might actually see a few pennies pitched their way where they didn't before, or even become the next William Hung. It's the Average Clone Band (and there are an awful lot of Average Clone Bands) that are going to be pirated. They'll have the critical mass to stay on P2P networks, but not be good enough to be on most buying lists.
For the listener, this is a net win, as it greatly reduces the financial incentive to be just another Average Clone Band. Some still will be, either because that's all they CAN do, or that's all they WANT to do (for reasons other than money). But a bit of the current bored session player crowd will find it worthwhile to try and make something original for a change, which is good for everyone in the long run.
It may not be worth spotting early if it turns out to be curable after the fact, which it might ultimately be. Though I would imagine that if swelling of the pancreas can be spotted on an MRI, so can a lot of other things they haven't yet thought to look for. This might end up being a broad, multi-purpose diagnostic that is cost-justified because it eliminates so many other procedures.
That's why I documented it with a link, so you wouldn't think I was making it up myself. I was listening to the track as I posted though, so my description is my own.
Aphex Twin was commissioned to do a track for Virgin Airlines, which ended up being called "Aphex Airlines", but it ended up being rejected because he decided to end the track with what sounds like a plane's engines cutting out, followed by a nose dive (and something resembling praying). It's also far from melodic (it's damn close to a detuned radio) and had virtually no chance of being accepted for any commercial purposes. Sort of like the Family Learning Channel spots in "Rejected", you just get the feeling he didn't WANT this to get off the ground.
Wouldn't it be ironic indeed if it helped keep planes in the air?
The control for too much atmospheric O2 is relatively simple, and something we're already good at. You just have to burn stuff. If the level gets really extreme, stuff will burn on its own. It would be preferable to do it ourselves though, because with proper scrubbers we could sequester the CO2 output.
I wouldn't worry too much about excess O2, that's something we know how to control.
Not only that, but the waste products would be water and carbon dioxide. CO2 is of course a greenhouse gas, but one far less potent than methane. IIRC, it's a factor of about 100 to 1, which means that if one molecule of methane produces one molecule of CO2 when burned, you're solving 99% of the problem.
It is debatable whether 99% remediation is sufficient, but surely it's a good start. At the very least, it would be nice to use some of the energy produced in combustion to sequester the CO2 rather than dump it into the atmosphere.
There have been many times when I have known what something is or does (since I've seen it in action), but not what it is called. If I could search for information on the basis of known facts, rather than just guessing at search terms, I think I would have much quicker success at such searches. I can usually find whatever I needed to know, but it can take weeks if I don't know the words to search for. Sometimes it takes joining mailing lists or asking people personally. Yeah it works, and the current system is immensely better than going to a library to hunt for something, but it can still be improved upon.
For example, I was looking for a particular type of flute, smaller than a normal flute but larger than a piccolo, but with the same standard keywork and fingering system. I knew such a thing existed, having seen it in use in a flute choir, but I didn't know it was called a "treble G flute". Instead I had to search on what I did know -- it's a flute, and used in a flute choir -- and pick through the truly staggering number of hits myself in hopes of finding what I'm looking for. If I could have automagically narrowed that down with specifications such as "smaller than a concert flute", "larger than a piccolo", "made of metal", and "has Boehm system closed keywork", I would have had very few hits to search through and most of them would have been relevant. Google reduced the whole world down to a haystack to search for that elusive needle. Searching by facts might have reduced that down to a teacup.
In the video, the robotic hand is catching the ball with its fingertips, which to a human would be an incredibly difficult thing to do -- akin to catching a fly with chopsticks. A human would wait until the object being caught is somewhat within the opened hand before grasping and making the catch, which is probably more secure. However, I can certainly understand the need to catch the ball BEFORE it impacts the visual sensors in the palm of the robot hand.
Also, the idea of putting the sensors in the hand itself is nothing short of brilliant -- no more parallax correction to worry about. This is something our wetware is quite capable of dealing with, it's a survival function of just about every animal with eyes. Sometimes you just don't WANT your eyes and your hands (or paws) in the same plane. For one thing, eyes are delicate. For another, it's much easier to determine the distance to something if you've got a slight angle on it as you watch.
This makes me wonder -- is there another sensor outside the hand to assist in calculating the trajectory of the inbound ball? Or is there still a need to pre-select the ball size and speed?
Also, it seems to me that if you can make a robot catch a ball, you can also make a robot hit, kick, or punch a ball. These methods may lead to considerable improvements in "sporting" robots in general, such as those used in the Robocup. It was probably possible to build a golfbot before, since the ball isn't moving when you hit it, but this would broaden the potential applications to sports using a moving ball. I'd imagine such a robot would make an incredible table tennis player, since that game is all about reactions and doing something with the ball at the moment you hit it (impart spin, "deaden" the shot, take sharp angles) and doesn't require much running around. If said robot can keep the ball down, it's not going to be involved in the slamfests you see on ESPN2 with players running around 20 feet behind the table. That doesn't happen until someone makes the mistake of elevating the ball.
I too had one of the infamous Deathstars. When it died after a mere 4 months of service, I went ahead and bought another drive, but still returned the first one. Since it was within the first year, I was able to return it to the point of purchase, and they shipped it back with their weekly "batch" of dead drives (as any large distibutor will have). I got a replacement two weeks later, and it has seen far more than the 4 months the first one did, with nary a hiccup. It's sitting on a shelf because it's relatively small now, but last I checked, it worked just fine. I'll be using it soon to restore a Norton Ghost image that has some critical data, since I'd rather now overwrite any of the partitions on my main drive.
Not every HD return and replace story is a hideous one.
Now if the detonators went off but the explosives didn't because of some fuck-up in converting metric units to Imperial... then maybe you could believe the U.S. was involved.
The audio tour for Bodyworlds 2 just had a handheld device with a numeric keypad, and each display had a two digit number. You punch in that number, it tells you what you're looking at. This should be comprehensible to anyone able to use a telephone. I believe there were also pause, seek, and repeat functions, but anyone should be able to repeat the whole loop without asking for help (just punch in the number again). Not only that, but the same text was printed on a paper sign within the exhibit, along with the number in large print. There weren't any accommodations that I can recall for the blind, but I'm not sure how much they would get out of an exhibit you can't touch. There were some items not behind glass, but I'm not sure anyone wants to wander around feeling up plastinated bodies.
Anyhow, there was really no forced movement through the exhibit, and in some places not even a sense of direction of flow. There were many looping paths you could take that eventually covered everything in a theme before moving onto the next major portion. The only restriction was that once you left the first half of the display (they were in separate halls) you couldn't return there. Other than that, you were free to wander around within the current hall. The staff seemed much more preoccupied with keeping fingerprints (and kid noseprints) off the glass than with keeping any turnover rate. Everyone else crowded around the muscular and skeletal exhibits, but I was more interested in the neural exhibit in the opposite corner.
Sometimes dead simple really is better. Don't overthink the problem.
While your idea is solid (I've done the same), I would recommend also imaging to a DVD, or DVD9 if necessary (yes there is a good use for them, expense and all). Since the machine you're supporting may not have a DVD burner, you may need to pull the drive and burn an image of it on one of your own boxes, but this also gives you a chance to keep an image on your own network. If you keep a copy and have a sandbox machine around, you can even follow along on your end when it comes time to walk the user through restoring the image.
When it's economically feasible to move large masses around at will in space (like asteroids), perhaps they can just be gathered at the L4 and L5 points. If they smash into each other and get pulverized, or if they end up sticking together like snowballs, that's fine -- it changes what we could do with them (or at least how), but the building blocks remain the same. By the time there's enough mass to create small planets, we'll probably have figured out how. Even then, more mass can be accumulated in orbit around the new planets.
If these new planets get Moon-sized, they probably are going to have their own Lagrange points (I don't know how the leading or trailing Earth will screw this up), which means more places to build artificial planets in stable orbits. Even if each new planet "loses" an L4 or L5 point because the Earth is already occupying it, they should open up at least one new one each. Planets on opposite sides of the sun might have to communicate with each other via a repeater at another planet's L1 (it's the shortest path I can think of that dodges the Sun) or via one of the other planets, but that's hardly a catastrophe. Eventually there would be a whole Token Ring of planets -- whether this is a good or bad development is left to the reader -- or even a ringworld.
Slashdot Mirror
...but Outlook gets this right. When mail arrives, you get a transparent popup in the lower right corner where you can glimpse who the message is from, the subject, and maybe the first bit of body text (depends how long the subject is). If you don't click on it within a few seconds, it goes away again and you can open it on your own time when you feel the need. It is a distraction, yes, but not a huge one since it appears and disappears with no intervention from you. If you want to field it immediately, you can. If you don't, don't. It could stand to be slightly more intelligent -- if you're working in the lower right then it should pop up somewhere else -- but aside from that, they really did put together a good implementation.
This is not to say that Outlook as a whole is a solid product. It's feature-packed to be sure, but it looks like the work of a thousand hands that it is. It's surprisingly good at some things and surprisingly bad at others, and of course security has always been a SERIOUSLY low priority. I'm just pointing out one of the things it does well that could stand to be imitated.
Mal-2
So they'll do what I always do when confronted with age checks on places like ogrish.com -- pick January 1, 1900 because it's the first thing on each list. (Or use whatever is the first thing on the list.) Or pick randomly beyond the year, since it really doesn't matter. I don't NEED to lie to them, but I also don't have much incentive to waste time telling the truth.
Mal-2
This also can be caused by a small bit of something stuck to a lens element acting as a seed for condensation, which is why you get stars and blobs instead of just an overall loss of contrast and resolution (optical, not digital). You can tell if it's close to the aperture or not because if it is, stopping down won't help much (assuming you have the ability to directly select the aperture). If it's on or near the front element, where you might be able to get at it, it will mostly go away when you stop down.
Mal-2
How many times have you bought a DVD for someone else, then had to borrow it back to watch it (or watch it with them)? This sounds like a good way to get a gift for someone else while getting to watch it yourself once. And if it sucks, pass it off at the office Secret Santa.
I'm sure Comcast sees this as an alternative to a trip to the video store when you want a DVD right now, and it is a perfectly good one for most situations. But it also has the bonus that you can take the viewing for yourself and give away (or sell) the DVD without opening it. There may be some sort of agreement that you won't do this, but unless you're auctioning them off, who is ever going to notice?
Mal-2
Sure it's our tax dollar, but at least we got to see it! That's an improvement over how many of our tax dollars get spent... bridge to nowhere, anyone? Illegal wars? If the military wants to practice by watching people fuck in a car, and willing to share the tape, I can think of worse ways to blow the money (heh).
Mal-2
Imagine if corporations could be not only fined, but jailed for their behaviour? And the stockholders would have to serve that time proportionately to their share of interest in the corporation. Imagine Microsoft gets a year and you own 1/25,000,000 of it? You have to serve 1.26 seconds. Might as well just go to the station with a box of donuts and call it served. Own half of it? Now you're paying attention.
Mal-2
Why do the destroyed structures need to be rebuilt in exactly the same place? Why not build them twenty feet higher? If the entire infrastructure of the area is destroyed (sewers, plumbing, electrical cables, etc.) then why not haul in massive quantities of fill earth and build on top of THAT? Put it well above sea level and you've done two things:
1. Prevented flooding in the near term, even without levees.
2. Made it possible to hold out with levees for centuries beyond that, as the ground continues to sink.
Either that or they're gonna have to build everything on stilts like the barrier islands -- and we all know how well THAT holds up to 140 mph winds.
Mal-2
It could be written in Perl. Try reading THAT over the phone.
Mal-2
Oh god no... don't go putting up barriers or the players will stay away in droves. The fact is, folding 4 out of 5 hands you're dealt (or more) leads directly to playing multiple tables so as to actually have something to DO once in a while. If you interrupt that flow with captchas all the time, it will make it incredibly annoying to play those multiple tables and people won't want to play at all. I know some people are content to chug away at one table, but spreading out is essential to increasing profits while keeping a rein on variance. You will take much smaller swings from bad luck playing four .10/.25 tables at once than you will from playing a single .50/$1 table.
If you start modifying the cards in a captcha-like way, that too will be extremely annoying for people playing at multiple tables. You expect the ace of spades to look the same no matter where or when it appears. Same with any other card. If you just start juggling filenames, that won't affect the human players at all... but it won't affect screen-scraping bots either, only ones that depend on constant filenames. Those that do would quickly be replaced by those that can "read" directly from the data in video RAM. And I really can't see a way to stop people from running the bot on a second computer which controls the first over a VNC connection.
Even chat queries are spotty. Playing four tables at once (as I often do) doesn't leave a whole lot of time for witty banter. I keep the dealer in Verbose mode where every action of every player is announced, allowing me to look over the history of that hand quickly when it's my turn to act at a given table. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of scrolling chat text off the screen very quickly, and I've pretty much given up on trying to be sociable while playing. If you want to talk to me, that's what IRC is for. Then I don't have to worry about tables stealing focus while I'm trying to type.
For those of you that don't play (or don't play multiple tables), any table will steal focus when it is your turn to act. It doesn't matter if you are typing into another table's chat box, you are forcibly taken to the one where it is your turn. This often leads to half-formed thoughts being uttered at the wrong table and the first half never being said at all. I find this focus jumping to be worse than any other aspect of trying to chat with other players. The tables will steal focus from ANY app, not just other poker tables, but somehow they don't steal the input devices. If you keep typing, your text will still go where you intended (provided it's not another table). This means I'll happily blather away in IRC while playing poker, but won't talk to the other players much if at all.
Mal-2
If a song is not popular, it will be hard to find on a P2P network, and you may well have to wait for it if/when you do find it. Certainly you'd pony up a quarter or two to get it from iTunes.
But once a fair number of people have done that and found the song is greatly underrated, it will get passed around. Pretty soon it's on the very P2P networks that failed it the first time around (even if only 1 in 10 buyers strips the DRM by some means)... and legal download demand goes back down. For truly good product, this isn't going to stop that many people from buying it. For stuff on the fringe it isn't either. It's the mediocre but broad-market corporate pap that's going to eat its own lunch when it shows up on Soulseek. Certainly the record labels won't like this -- they really don't care what you're buying, only that you buy it. But for the artist, it cuts both ways. The great but undiscovered will benefit from such a model. The great and promoted (rare that they are) will lose slightly but not catastrophically -- though they could perhaps compensate by trimming the ad budget. The awful might actually see a few pennies pitched their way where they didn't before, or even become the next William Hung. It's the Average Clone Band (and there are an awful lot of Average Clone Bands) that are going to be pirated. They'll have the critical mass to stay on P2P networks, but not be good enough to be on most buying lists.
For the listener, this is a net win, as it greatly reduces the financial incentive to be just another Average Clone Band. Some still will be, either because that's all they CAN do, or that's all they WANT to do (for reasons other than money). But a bit of the current bored session player crowd will find it worthwhile to try and make something original for a change, which is good for everyone in the long run.
Mal-2
It may not be worth spotting early if it turns out to be curable after the fact, which it might ultimately be. Though I would imagine that if swelling of the pancreas can be spotted on an MRI, so can a lot of other things they haven't yet thought to look for. This might end up being a broad, multi-purpose diagnostic that is cost-justified because it eliminates so many other procedures.
:/
I can see it going either way.
Mal-2
That's why I documented it with a link, so you wouldn't think I was making it up myself. I was listening to the track as I posted though, so my description is my own.
Mal-2
Aphex Twin was commissioned to do a track for Virgin Airlines, which ended up being called "Aphex Airlines", but it ended up being rejected because he decided to end the track with what sounds like a plane's engines cutting out, followed by a nose dive (and something resembling praying). It's also far from melodic (it's damn close to a detuned radio) and had virtually no chance of being accepted for any commercial purposes. Sort of like the Family Learning Channel spots in "Rejected", you just get the feeling he didn't WANT this to get off the ground.
Wouldn't it be ironic indeed if it helped keep planes in the air?
Mal-2
Actually they look stretchy, like bicycle shorts. This means they should be able to accommodate either a cameltoe or a buck-knuckle.
Mal-2
I mean, doesn't 15 centimeters sound a lot more impressive than 6 inches?
Mal-2
The control for too much atmospheric O2 is relatively simple, and something we're already good at. You just have to burn stuff. If the level gets really extreme, stuff will burn on its own. It would be preferable to do it ourselves though, because with proper scrubbers we could sequester the CO2 output.
I wouldn't worry too much about excess O2, that's something we know how to control.
Mal-2
Not only that, but the waste products would be water and carbon dioxide. CO2 is of course a greenhouse gas, but one far less potent than methane. IIRC, it's a factor of about 100 to 1, which means that if one molecule of methane produces one molecule of CO2 when burned, you're solving 99% of the problem.
It is debatable whether 99% remediation is sufficient, but surely it's a good start. At the very least, it would be nice to use some of the energy produced in combustion to sequester the CO2 rather than dump it into the atmosphere.
Mal-2
There have been many times when I have known what something is or does (since I've seen it in action), but not what it is called. If I could search for information on the basis of known facts, rather than just guessing at search terms, I think I would have much quicker success at such searches. I can usually find whatever I needed to know, but it can take weeks if I don't know the words to search for. Sometimes it takes joining mailing lists or asking people personally. Yeah it works, and the current system is immensely better than going to a library to hunt for something, but it can still be improved upon.
For example, I was looking for a particular type of flute, smaller than a normal flute but larger than a piccolo, but with the same standard keywork and fingering system. I knew such a thing existed, having seen it in use in a flute choir, but I didn't know it was called a "treble G flute". Instead I had to search on what I did know -- it's a flute, and used in a flute choir -- and pick through the truly staggering number of hits myself in hopes of finding what I'm looking for. If I could have automagically narrowed that down with specifications such as "smaller than a concert flute", "larger than a piccolo", "made of metal", and "has Boehm system closed keywork", I would have had very few hits to search through and most of them would have been relevant. Google reduced the whole world down to a haystack to search for that elusive needle. Searching by facts might have reduced that down to a teacup.
Mal-2
In the video, the robotic hand is catching the ball with its fingertips, which to a human would be an incredibly difficult thing to do -- akin to catching a fly with chopsticks. A human would wait until the object being caught is somewhat within the opened hand before grasping and making the catch, which is probably more secure. However, I can certainly understand the need to catch the ball BEFORE it impacts the visual sensors in the palm of the robot hand.
Also, the idea of putting the sensors in the hand itself is nothing short of brilliant -- no more parallax correction to worry about. This is something our wetware is quite capable of dealing with, it's a survival function of just about every animal with eyes. Sometimes you just don't WANT your eyes and your hands (or paws) in the same plane. For one thing, eyes are delicate. For another, it's much easier to determine the distance to something if you've got a slight angle on it as you watch.
This makes me wonder -- is there another sensor outside the hand to assist in calculating the trajectory of the inbound ball? Or is there still a need to pre-select the ball size and speed?
Also, it seems to me that if you can make a robot catch a ball, you can also make a robot hit, kick, or punch a ball. These methods may lead to considerable improvements in "sporting" robots in general, such as those used in the Robocup. It was probably possible to build a golfbot before, since the ball isn't moving when you hit it, but this would broaden the potential applications to sports using a moving ball. I'd imagine such a robot would make an incredible table tennis player, since that game is all about reactions and doing something with the ball at the moment you hit it (impart spin, "deaden" the shot, take sharp angles) and doesn't require much running around. If said robot can keep the ball down, it's not going to be involved in the slamfests you see on ESPN2 with players running around 20 feet behind the table. That doesn't happen until someone makes the mistake of elevating the ball.
Mal-2
I too had one of the infamous Deathstars. When it died after a mere 4 months of service, I went ahead and bought another drive, but still returned the first one. Since it was within the first year, I was able to return it to the point of purchase, and they shipped it back with their weekly "batch" of dead drives (as any large distibutor will have). I got a replacement two weeks later, and it has seen far more than the 4 months the first one did, with nary a hiccup. It's sitting on a shelf because it's relatively small now, but last I checked, it worked just fine. I'll be using it soon to restore a Norton Ghost image that has some critical data, since I'd rather now overwrite any of the partitions on my main drive.
Not every HD return and replace story is a hideous one.
Mal-2
Now grandma can push herself outside into the snow!
Mal-2
Now if the detonators went off but the explosives didn't because of some fuck-up in converting metric units to Imperial... then maybe you could believe the U.S. was involved.
Mal-2
The audio tour for Bodyworlds 2 just had a handheld device with a numeric keypad, and each display had a two digit number. You punch in that number, it tells you what you're looking at. This should be comprehensible to anyone able to use a telephone. I believe there were also pause, seek, and repeat functions, but anyone should be able to repeat the whole loop without asking for help (just punch in the number again). Not only that, but the same text was printed on a paper sign within the exhibit, along with the number in large print. There weren't any accommodations that I can recall for the blind, but I'm not sure how much they would get out of an exhibit you can't touch. There were some items not behind glass, but I'm not sure anyone wants to wander around feeling up plastinated bodies.
Anyhow, there was really no forced movement through the exhibit, and in some places not even a sense of direction of flow. There were many looping paths you could take that eventually covered everything in a theme before moving onto the next major portion. The only restriction was that once you left the first half of the display (they were in separate halls) you couldn't return there. Other than that, you were free to wander around within the current hall. The staff seemed much more preoccupied with keeping fingerprints (and kid noseprints) off the glass than with keeping any turnover rate. Everyone else crowded around the muscular and skeletal exhibits, but I was more interested in the neural exhibit in the opposite corner.
Sometimes dead simple really is better. Don't overthink the problem.
Mal-2
While your idea is solid (I've done the same), I would recommend also imaging to a DVD, or DVD9 if necessary (yes there is a good use for them, expense and all). Since the machine you're supporting may not have a DVD burner, you may need to pull the drive and burn an image of it on one of your own boxes, but this also gives you a chance to keep an image on your own network. If you keep a copy and have a sandbox machine around, you can even follow along on your end when it comes time to walk the user through restoring the image.
Mal-2
When it's economically feasible to move large masses around at will in space (like asteroids), perhaps they can just be gathered at the L4 and L5 points. If they smash into each other and get pulverized, or if they end up sticking together like snowballs, that's fine -- it changes what we could do with them (or at least how), but the building blocks remain the same. By the time there's enough mass to create small planets, we'll probably have figured out how. Even then, more mass can be accumulated in orbit around the new planets.
If these new planets get Moon-sized, they probably are going to have their own Lagrange points (I don't know how the leading or trailing Earth will screw this up), which means more places to build artificial planets in stable orbits. Even if each new planet "loses" an L4 or L5 point because the Earth is already occupying it, they should open up at least one new one each. Planets on opposite sides of the sun might have to communicate with each other via a repeater at another planet's L1 (it's the shortest path I can think of that dodges the Sun) or via one of the other planets, but that's hardly a catastrophe. Eventually there would be a whole Token Ring of planets -- whether this is a good or bad development is left to the reader -- or even a ringworld.
Mal-2