*lol* stop it, some people are actually stupid enough to believe that! At least put a '*lol*' at the end or something or;-) or something, like every single fox news item should have:-)
Cuz only idiots make "whoosh!" posts, so you can bet that a fair % of the time the "whoosh!" is going to be idiotic as what they think they are "whoosh!"ing.
Yep that's right, saying "whoosh!" is not inventive, imaginative, funny, insightful, helpful, and just makes you look like a dick saying "hey everyone else, look, I got something that this person didn't, haha look I'm not stupid because he didn't read something the way I did, please look, mommy please look at how high I can swing, please mommy, why won't you look?".
Your Mommy needed a break from having to deal with you constantly, she's seen people on swings before, get over it.
"Why do we only find the branches? Why have not found a single spot where these branches meet?"
Why do you think there must be a single spot where they meet? Chances are it's not the case where things like mammals had offspring, of which one offspring went on to create one species and another created another, because a few generations down the line, a decendant of one of the original offspring may mate with a decendant of the other. The change from one species to another therefore cannot be tracked to a single animal, as it was more a blurring effect, as genes from one side start to be displaced as decendants of group A mate less and less with group B.
But, that of course doesn't mean that all decendants of either group A remain in group A, or those in group B remain in group B.
Turkey has more evolution unbelievers than the states... but other polled countries have less with America being the 2nd stupidest by this metric of 33 other countries.
(insert usual stuff about sample sizes, polling methods, etc etc)
"So far, 100% of those evolutionary ancestors went extinct. Why?"
Natural selection... the thing that was born with the advantage could compete (and win) with the one born without the advantage, which would therefore die out.
"So far, we have found the fossils from 0% of them. Why?"
If that is true, I'd hazard a guess at the fact that in Earths lifetime, there have been a -massive- number of creatures born(/hatched/whatever) and died. Like, however many fossils we've studied times billions or trillions or whatever big. Genetic mutations will often not be advantagous to the creature, resulting in shorter lifespan, stunted growth, stunted immune system, whatever, so of all the creatures that have died in the past, it stands to reason that a high % of them weren't the most adapted of their generation (or less able to adapt to future changes), which would be reflected in the fossils found. Like a pin in a haystack... sometimes things are hard to find simple because they're hard to find.
"From the article, it appears that they started doing this 5 years ago and have made significant progress"
Research in this area has made significant progress, yes, but still a long long way to go. There will probably be milestones along the way though, where a partially successful device may have lesser uses, but uses nontheless. There are already nanostructures that 'swim' using energy (eg, sugars) in the liquid they are put in, but when I saw those, they were just dumb self propelling motors, there was no control element to it.
"I wonder if the iRobot technology is similar?"
I don't know about other iRobot tech, but this stuff isn't. The video explains how it works.
"There's reasons large animals abandoned amoeboid motion in favor of crawling or slithering"
Oh and yes there was... big things are harder to organise and maintain... from the tiny (when atoms get too big they split) to the large (when civilisations get too large they split, we have seen this happen many times). Cells are the same... to become big animals, you have to go from being single celled to multiple celled, to multiple celled with specialist cells to perform different functions better than a single cell could perform all of them. Arranging that into a fluidic mass is much harder than giving it structure and legs and muscles etc. That doesn't mean that legs are better; just easier for nature to come up with.
It's research, which is the act of converting questions that you may not even know yet into answers.
It may perfectly well turn out that your question is correct (heh) and there is no benefit to a robot made entirely out of this technology... or it may turn out that it's very good at getting into small spaces and lifting (may have post earthquake uses?) or that this material on the end of something has uses that it perhaps wouldn't do on its own.
Some people have no sense of cool... I tend to ignore them, occasionally trying to convince the odd one or two to quit being little bitches, but it rarely changes anything. Occasionally it does though, and new people find excitement in cool things, that's pretty cool, and then they start hunting for cools things themself, and sometimes share with you something cool that you didn't already know. But there's still a huge amount of people out there are dumb, panicky, phobic, short sighted, closed minded, with internet connections and even slashdot accounts.
They may even outnumber us, but it is our visions and dreams that live on. You are not alone:-)
Cuz the legs on this thing do look a scary thing to have tugging away on your insides! I'm sure they've thought of that and it's actually fine, but still... look at it... eek! There's gotta be better ways of moving than that!
No it's not. A thing that you can change the shape of is different to a thing that can change its own shape. The second can surely benefit from the first (flexible circuit board printing & components etc) but the first is only really likely to benefit from the second as two things spending money researching one problem may yield twice the results (or patents, of course)
Thanks, it still surprises me how many people decide to have a problem with it, and will actively defend a misspelling as it's their right to misspell stuff if they want to, which is fine, it is, but don't pretend it's any more than a spelling mistake because it's not. I'm in fact more conscious of the mistake as I made it once around 10 years ago and someone pointed it out to me. I didn't hate them for it. I didn't try defend my use of the word. I just went "oops", perhaps slightly embarrassed, and fixed it. People seem to have a resistance to knowing things, like it makes you "square", I find the whole notion quite perplexing, cuz it's not like I'm being a dick about it. I just share stuff that's shared with me, cuz that's what I'd want other people to do for me.
"as a verb it completely changes the meaning of a sentence, which is worse"
Yeah you're absolutely correct. I didn't think you were picking fault with my sig; just as you brought it up gave me an opportunity to vent the various things that I'd thought of since the last time it was brought up (ya know the "oh I wish I had've said..." thing:-))
Sure, but that doesn't mean that when people spell "lose" and "loose" that "loose" is what they meant. In my experience use of 'loose' as a verb in that way is rare; people are more likely to use "let loose" (eg, "I let my dog loose"), and people will write the word loose when they mean lose... constantly. In fact it seems to be one of the most commonly misspelt words. It's like "there/their/they're" - just because "there" is a real word, doesn't mean that when someone writes "it's theres" is correct if what they meant was "it's theirs". Ducking out of learning how to spell the word you mean correctly by stating that the misspelling "is also a verb" is not something I'd encourage (not that I'm suggesting that that is what you're suggesting, just stating it here as it has been used as a defense for misspelling of lose here before)
Precisely. Except it's not so much the pot calling the kettle black, as the pot looking in the mirror and calling its own reflection black, and then insulting its reflection for calling itself black. I guess like an anorexia type thing but for pots. "I hate you, you're ugly and black!"
FGS what's wrong with you, this is slashdot, a place for wild comparisons by people who know no better, kindly check in your "real experience" at the door, you can collect it on your way out.
"oh wait, you can't because GRUB isn't part of the kernel"
I don't boot my kernel with GRUB.
I think the whole thing's just silly anyway... people who need to be told "it's linux/gnu" because linux isn't the thing and the whole thing so help me god, are people who are less likely to understand the difference anyway, and aren't going to be looking at it going "wow Linus Torvalds wrote all of this by himself? Wow he must be a god... nobody else, just him, I must give all my credit for doing this to him". No. So putting "gnu" in the name isn't going to make them instead go "Oh it's written by this one guy called Linus and some guy who's parents hated him and called him GNU or something... but still, they're gods and get my respect".
It's just marketting, and one thing that Linux has accomplished that GNU hasn't, is in having a name that people like. You could replace the ENTIRE stack above the Linux kernel with a much nicer all tied together polished system, call it "DogShitOS" and people are still going to called it Linux. Want people to call it your own name? Come up with something like Ubuntu, Debian, people have no problem saying those. But GNU? People just don't like it... you can't force them to.
Even apple fans like "apple" or "mac", maybe running "leopard" or whatever. But they're just PC's in "pretty" cases, the main difference now is the operating system: OSX. But who says "I like OSX" rather than "I like apple"? *Not* the general public, they like names, not letters.
RMS (which for some reason I always read as "root me silly") should just get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Of course, most potential users won't use them, and many will die. This I'm easy with - as long as they die without descendants"
Nah most of the time their descendants will die right there with them :-p
*lol* stop it, some people are actually stupid enough to believe that! At least put a '*lol*' at the end or something or ;-) or something, like every single fox news item should have :-)
Cuz only idiots make "whoosh!" posts, so you can bet that a fair % of the time the "whoosh!" is going to be idiotic as what they think they are "whoosh!"ing.
Yep that's right, saying "whoosh!" is not inventive, imaginative, funny, insightful, helpful, and just makes you look like a dick saying "hey everyone else, look, I got something that this person didn't, haha look I'm not stupid because he didn't read something the way I did, please look, mommy please look at how high I can swing, please mommy, why won't you look?".
Your Mommy needed a break from having to deal with you constantly, she's seen people on swings before, get over it.
"Why do we only find the branches? Why have not found a single spot where these branches meet?"
Why do you think there must be a single spot where they meet? Chances are it's not the case where things like mammals had offspring, of which one offspring went on to create one species and another created another, because a few generations down the line, a decendant of one of the original offspring may mate with a decendant of the other. The change from one species to another therefore cannot be tracked to a single animal, as it was more a blurring effect, as genes from one side start to be displaced as decendants of group A mate less and less with group B.
But, that of course doesn't mean that all decendants of either group A remain in group A, or those in group B remain in group B.
Turkey has more evolution unbelievers than the states... but other polled countries have less with America being the 2nd stupidest by this metric of 33 other countries.
(insert usual stuff about sample sizes, polling methods, etc etc)
"So far, 100% of those evolutionary ancestors went extinct. Why?"
Natural selection... the thing that was born with the advantage could compete (and win) with the one born without the advantage, which would therefore die out.
"So far, we have found the fossils from 0% of them. Why?"
If that is true, I'd hazard a guess at the fact that in Earths lifetime, there have been a -massive- number of creatures born(/hatched/whatever) and died. Like, however many fossils we've studied times billions or trillions or whatever big. Genetic mutations will often not be advantagous to the creature, resulting in shorter lifespan, stunted growth, stunted immune system, whatever, so of all the creatures that have died in the past, it stands to reason that a high % of them weren't the most adapted of their generation (or less able to adapt to future changes), which would be reflected in the fossils found. Like a pin in a haystack... sometimes things are hard to find simple because they're hard to find.
I prefer this bible reading :-)
Aye, just notice the use of semicolons and commas in the sentence :-)
Becomes:
Numerous improvements to: (packet filtering, software RAID, routing daemons, and the TCP stack);
(but yes I did read it for a moment as saying that one of the new things was a TCP stack!)
"From the article, it appears that they started doing this 5 years ago and have made significant progress"
Research in this area has made significant progress, yes, but still a long long way to go. There will probably be milestones along the way though, where a partially successful device may have lesser uses, but uses nontheless. There are already nanostructures that 'swim' using energy (eg, sugars) in the liquid they are put in, but when I saw those, they were just dumb self propelling motors, there was no control element to it.
"I wonder if the iRobot technology is similar?"
I don't know about other iRobot tech, but this stuff isn't. The video explains how it works.
"There's reasons large animals abandoned amoeboid motion in favor of crawling or slithering"
Oh and yes there was... big things are harder to organise and maintain... from the tiny (when atoms get too big they split) to the large (when civilisations get too large they split, we have seen this happen many times). Cells are the same... to become big animals, you have to go from being single celled to multiple celled, to multiple celled with specialist cells to perform different functions better than a single cell could perform all of them. Arranging that into a fluidic mass is much harder than giving it structure and legs and muscles etc. That doesn't mean that legs are better; just easier for nature to come up with.
It's research, which is the act of converting questions that you may not even know yet into answers.
It may perfectly well turn out that your question is correct (heh) and there is no benefit to a robot made entirely out of this technology... or it may turn out that it's very good at getting into small spaces and lifting (may have post earthquake uses?) or that this material on the end of something has uses that it perhaps wouldn't do on its own.
Will never know without the research.
Some people have no sense of cool... I tend to ignore them, occasionally trying to convince the odd one or two to quit being little bitches, but it rarely changes anything. Occasionally it does though, and new people find excitement in cool things, that's pretty cool, and then they start hunting for cools things themself, and sometimes share with you something cool that you didn't already know. But there's still a huge amount of people out there are dumb, panicky, phobic, short sighted, closed minded, with internet connections and even slashdot accounts.
They may even outnumber us, but it is our visions and dreams that live on. You are not alone :-)
A suicide bummer?
"We can't just keep building larger and larger robots and bins"
Isn't that Apple's main business model? :-p
Cuz the legs on this thing do look a scary thing to have tugging away on your insides! I'm sure they've thought of that and it's actually fine, but still... look at it... eek! There's gotta be better ways of moving than that!
No it's not. A thing that you can change the shape of is different to a thing that can change its own shape. The second can surely benefit from the first (flexible circuit board printing & components etc) but the first is only really likely to benefit from the second as two things spending money researching one problem may yield twice the results (or patents, of course)
Thanks, it still surprises me how many people decide to have a problem with it, and will actively defend a misspelling as it's their right to misspell stuff if they want to, which is fine, it is, but don't pretend it's any more than a spelling mistake because it's not. I'm in fact more conscious of the mistake as I made it once around 10 years ago and someone pointed it out to me. I didn't hate them for it. I didn't try defend my use of the word. I just went "oops", perhaps slightly embarrassed, and fixed it. People seem to have a resistance to knowing things, like it makes you "square", I find the whole notion quite perplexing, cuz it's not like I'm being a dick about it. I just share stuff that's shared with me, cuz that's what I'd want other people to do for me.
"as a verb it completely changes the meaning of a sentence, which is worse"
Yeah you're absolutely correct. I didn't think you were picking fault with my sig; just as you brought it up gave me an opportunity to vent the various things that I'd thought of since the last time it was brought up (ya know the "oh I wish I had've said ..." thing :-))
Sure, but that doesn't mean that when people spell "lose" and "loose" that "loose" is what they meant. In my experience use of 'loose' as a verb in that way is rare; people are more likely to use "let loose" (eg, "I let my dog loose"), and people will write the word loose when they mean lose... constantly. In fact it seems to be one of the most commonly misspelt words. It's like "there/their/they're" - just because "there" is a real word, doesn't mean that when someone writes "it's theres" is correct if what they meant was "it's theirs". Ducking out of learning how to spell the word you mean correctly by stating that the misspelling "is also a verb" is not something I'd encourage (not that I'm suggesting that that is what you're suggesting, just stating it here as it has been used as a defense for misspelling of lose here before)
Precisely. Except it's not so much the pot calling the kettle black, as the pot looking in the mirror and calling its own reflection black, and then insulting its reflection for calling itself black. I guess like an anorexia type thing but for pots. "I hate you, you're ugly and black!"
Thanks for weighing in :-)
FGS what's wrong with you, this is slashdot, a place for wild comparisons by people who know no better, kindly check in your "real experience" at the door, you can collect it on your way out.
That didn't look like his point to me at all...
"My guess is that you're not the guy who offers solutions"
*coughs* projecting!!!!!!
foo/bar/gnu please
Absolutely, that's why I call my Windows installation "Windows/VisualStudio"
I wonder what toolchain OSX is built with... cuz it's not in the title.
"oh wait, you can't because GRUB isn't part of the kernel"
I don't boot my kernel with GRUB.
I think the whole thing's just silly anyway... people who need to be told "it's linux/gnu" because linux isn't the thing and the whole thing so help me god, are people who are less likely to understand the difference anyway, and aren't going to be looking at it going "wow Linus Torvalds wrote all of this by himself? Wow he must be a god... nobody else, just him, I must give all my credit for doing this to him". No. So putting "gnu" in the name isn't going to make them instead go "Oh it's written by this one guy called Linus and some guy who's parents hated him and called him GNU or something... but still, they're gods and get my respect".
It's just marketting, and one thing that Linux has accomplished that GNU hasn't, is in having a name that people like. You could replace the ENTIRE stack above the Linux kernel with a much nicer all tied together polished system, call it "DogShitOS" and people are still going to called it Linux. Want people to call it your own name? Come up with something like Ubuntu, Debian, people have no problem saying those. But GNU? People just don't like it... you can't force them to.
Even apple fans like "apple" or "mac", maybe running "leopard" or whatever. But they're just PC's in "pretty" cases, the main difference now is the operating system: OSX. But who says "I like OSX" rather than "I like apple"? *Not* the general public, they like names, not letters.
RMS (which for some reason I always read as "root me silly") should just get over it.