In my experience, the biggest problem that's hindering development of anthropomorphic robots is lack of standardized parts, and their likelihood of being affordable. Most amateur robot builders start from the very scratch and work their way up and in this process find that, while they can themselves afford to take some shortcuts, many have to waste their budgets on what seems the silliest of things in the great scheme of things. In the end, the enthusiasm behind robot building ends up in the designer spreading themselves thin across the details of a project.
For example, they might have wanted to create a robot that will locate a TV's well-used remote controller once everyone leaves the house, and put it on a designated area on the living room table and then plug themselves into the wall to recharge.
This task is fairly easily defined in pseudo-code and by use of common sense, sensors can be used to simplify the execution of this task. The problem is, the designer would have to work on mechanical and electrical issues such as H-bridges for motors or motor controllers, instead of just software to make the robot do what it is supposed to. That spreads their patience thin and causes them to give up on the project at some point or settle for a quality they wanted to avoid in the first place.
So.. as a good example, the DARPA challenge that took place a few years ago showed us what happens when you have to deal with both hardware (vehicles) and computers (software-figuratively speaking, I know it's technically hardware as well..). If my memory serves me correctly, a great deal of competitors ended up with disabled vehicles from purely mechanical reasons. Imagine what would have happened if all the competitors had the exact same vehicles in exact same conditions, exact same sensors, and were just left to develop software to guide it? I suspect the contest would have yielded better results.
So the question is, how much of your time do you spend actually designing what the robot will do, and how much of your task do you deal with its hardware and how it will perform its tasks? In my humble opinion, I believe that the hardware development is causing a major slowdown in robotics. It would help if some affordable standardization existed.
I would be more productive if I purchased a "blank mac-formatted robot" (ala Futurama) and spent my time writing software for it instead of working out on just how to make a 2KB PIC microcontroller communicate with 20 sensors and 10 actuators using one signal wire and I2C.
Someone should fund me so I can start an open-source robotics project: to make geeks of the world unite in our struggle against physical labor!
Sure, I agree with your analysis whole-heartedly. It is not always profitable to take something in its current state and make it work for you. However, a person with some guile could turn the castle into a profit. Just imagine the possibilities: Transylvania could well be the new Disneyland (hopefully not another Euro Disney). Or they could make Romania into anther New Zealand: a haven for cinematographers. Or even just a Bagel shop.
A vampire version of Mickey Mouse.. this could work.
Well, unless you know something I don't, I partly disagree with one point on your #1: bricking. I thought you would be interested to see a related example of chip hacking, which can be applied to smart-cards using a PIC chip:
Clearly those cards use different technology but -- caveat emptor! A PIC wasn't meant to be hacked either - with microscopic physical protection in place. The example was in DIP form but there is virtually nothing different from the guts of a DIP chip and QFN.
Also, given enough time, boredom or economic motivation anything is possible. I have seen hackers decrypt things that shouldn't be possible to decrypt...and I have seen them do this for me for $50.
Not that I have a better suggestion, but, I don't believe in being too assured- paranoia is a healthy component of my life.:)
Alongside computer experts, I think that a lot of normal users would have the urge to buy a blank laptop simply because it is cheaper and might find themselves in this same situation.
(Or MPT) is an actual working technology already in use - I seem to recall a small experimental, remotely controlled, airplane that was powered this way. A ground microwave dish followed it as it moved across the sky and that powered the motors and other scientific experiments. On the other hand, a stationary object such as a cell phone shouldn't have a problem being powered in a dedicated recharge zone (such as a counter or shelf that would be designated as a human-unsafe area). Wikipedia claims that power transmission efficiencies and radiation are mostly negligible -- if so, does that mean that we should be going after it or is there inherent danger to the process?
In theory, one could use that money to purchase World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade. If this Windows refund effort is done on a "patch Tuesday", even the time could be justified in lieu of Blizzard maintenance down-time.
Sure, a UFO is a bone fide sighting. It means exactly what it stands for: Unidentified Flying Object. Only an idiot would jump to some kind of a conclusion that it's the master alien race visiting Earth under the command of god-king Marduk without concrete evidence.
"Along with this FREE trial CD comes a sample trial dose of Xanax (tm). Our quality AMA-approved representatives are standing by to take your subscription order!"
One simple answer: shared documents. Sure, I have five+ computers at home and one of them is a dedicated linux machine that I use for file storage and whatnot. The problem is, it is a multi-step process for anyone living in my house to access these files at work. While I have no problem of whatsoever establishing file shares and so forth, not everyone is as comfortable with the idea.
Luckily Google spreadsheets solved at least one problem for me - maintaining a shopping list. I can pop on any computer with internet access and be able to see what my better half added to it. Any other features? I don't need or want them.
Actually, you didn't seem to read anything I wrote with any kind of academic scrutiny. Entire books can be written about this subject but I will leave it at a tentative glance. If you want to research this topic further, you will discover that slaves were actually the first "slaves to the clock" - as referenced by my previous posting.
Research indicates that southern colonies were among the first to embrace the clock for the purpose of increasing efficiencies of plantations. One freed slave reflected on his experience : "the bell called and said, get up I'm coming to get you" (Bill Collins, Virginia). Another one put it a more painful light, "Maybe dey puts you on a task dis mawnin' and dat dere task got to be finished by seben o'clock dis evenin' and' if it ain't, dey whip you." (John Barker, Virginia.)
So, it wasn't just one race that was affected. The clock made conditions MUCH WORSE for slaves. Furthermore, many academics blame industrialization for prolonging slavery, which would precede advent of clocks. Change in time measurement affected lives of everyone in some way and it would be improper of me to ignore one mistreated group of people in favor of another for my previous posting. There were groups of people suffering on both hemispheres and both sides of the continent around this time. Please keep in mind that people are still suffering today as they always have.
Thanks for being passionate about the subject but please be more informed before responding.
Around 1700, it was very rare for a person to own a clock or a watch - something on the order of 1 in 35 prominent white males owned one. By 1800, most cities in New England had clock makers. These clock makers could produce only around a dozen clocks per year and they never did so preemptively. They would wait for an order to be placed and then take their sweet time to produce a clock. There was an old saying about the craft.. "No two clocks tell the same time," indicating their accuracy. An interesting fact was that most of these clock makers could not live on making clocks alone: they had day jobs to support them. Clock making was merely a bonus.
Then good old American manufacturing kicked in and production blew up to 1000 clocks a year made by one skilled worker, requiring nothing but ordinary laborers instead of master clock makers. Prices dropped around 1820s and it seems like the market was for once flooded with clocks. Some speculate that this cheaper price and wide availability created a market demand for clocks. Otherwise- why weren't they producing more of them?
These are of course, clocks.. not just watches. Around this time (1750-1850), the clock stopped being a measuring device. Instead, it became a control device. Entire lifestyles changed - masters were replaced with factory workers. Time discipline became heavily monitored and for the first time ever the society went from an ephemeral lifestyle to one controlled by a machine.
So here is an interesting question to ask Slashdotters:
If a clock changed way of life in the 19th century, what is happening with our lives in the 21st century?
Will we ever go back to a relaxed setting of working at our own pace or will we be slaves to the clock for some time to come? Why would we need a clock (or a watch) anyway? It seems like we have plenty of other semaphores to regulate our lives.
For all the people who care about which way their heads, feet, et al face during sleep, will they now be in a spiritual predicament? In other words, will they also need to get rotating beds that would counteract the rotation of the building?
- North America cultures (Pueblo) - Mesoamerica cultures (Aztec,.., Maya,...) - South American cultures (.., Inca,..)
You are pretty much calling modern Turkey part of the ancient near east. Such claim is not only anachronistic but also taken out of context. You can't separate geography from history.
Ask an actual scholar if they would call Maya a North-American culture. That is the main issue.
All of "Apocalypto" takes place in North America, not in any part of South America. Check the IMDB entry. It refers to the Maya kingdom, which was in what is now Mexico [wikipedia.org], "...a located in North America"
I am really not certain why you are replying. If you dig further inside your trusty wikipedia, you will see just how uninformed you are. You can't redraw historical and geographical lines as you see fit. My original comment was referring to the parent poster's ignorance of both history and geography and I see that my comment has trapped more than one person in a loop from which they can't break out.
America has more parts than just North and South. You can't (even just for the sake of argument) choose to arbitrarily polarize a unique, rich culture. The original poster decided to call all North American natives as savages and proceeded to claim that they sacrificed people and did not care about life. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. In his rants, he may have been referring to the stereotypical mesoamerican view of the indigenous people, NOT Northern.
If you think I am splitting hairs- I am not. This is an actual scholarly division of archaeological and historical evidence.
Well, that's great and all, but please check your geography. Mesoamerican is not the same as North-American. The parent post was talking about something they really didn't know much about.
Of course, the northern part of the South American continent used to basically be an unmitigated hell of human sacrifice that valued individual human life less than China (or the US, for that matter) does today.
Who exactly is your source of information on American history, Mel Gibson?
Is to use images instead of text. For example, out of three images, two are alike. Third one isn't. User has to pick the mismatching one to activate his/her account. Here is a really good example:
Now I can definitely pat myself on the back for not having a myspace account. Another freedom of ours eroded away - the ability to infringe copyright, ignoring the consequences. It's kind of like the seat belt thing. I don't have to wear it (if I'm stupid enough) but no one else gets hurts in the process.
As a point of amusement, you should look into just how much energy it takes to just purify raw ore into something usable. Abundant? -Yeah. Usable? -Not until you blow more energy on it than the solar panel might collect in 7 or so years of average daylight. Sucks.
Obviously facial recognition is a bit more complex than my example, but, the process is similar. Programmers take on a task, realize how much work it is, find a quicker way to go about doing it, and then take that shortcut that dooms them into claiming victory.
In my example, I wrote a program to play Solitaire. It used a primitive form of optical recognition to identify numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 and rest of the board from examining screenshots. The algorithm was a bit slow (after all, this was only a prototype) but it did the job just perfectly.
Then I realized that I could take a shortcut. In Windows' Solitaire, the field numbers are color coded; therefore, I reduced my "pattern recognizing" algorithm into a color-recognizing one and improved gaming efficiency at expense of being cheap about it.
After I had developed rest of the game and made it work, I realized that couple of situations were unaccounted for : blank fields, and marked fields. At this point in time, it was miserable to go back and try to rewrite the recognition algorithm to help identify the board so instead I started taking more shortcuts and making assumptions.
End result? Lets say that a human is still reigning champion of the Solitaire world.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, the biggest problem that's hindering development of anthropomorphic robots is lack of standardized parts, and their likelihood of being affordable. Most amateur robot builders start from the very scratch and work their way up and in this process find that, while they can themselves afford to take some shortcuts, many have to waste their budgets on what seems the silliest of things in the great scheme of things. In the end, the enthusiasm behind robot building ends up in the designer spreading themselves thin across the details of a project.
For example, they might have wanted to create a robot that will locate a TV's well-used remote controller once everyone leaves the house, and put it on a designated area on the living room table and then plug themselves into the wall to recharge.
This task is fairly easily defined in pseudo-code and by use of common sense, sensors can be used to simplify the execution of this task. The problem is, the designer would have to work on mechanical and electrical issues such as H-bridges for motors or motor controllers, instead of just software to make the robot do what it is supposed to. That spreads their patience thin and causes them to give up on the project at some point or settle for a quality they wanted to avoid in the first place.
So.. as a good example, the DARPA challenge that took place a few years ago showed us what happens when you have to deal with both hardware (vehicles) and computers (software-figuratively speaking, I know it's technically hardware as well..). If my memory serves me correctly, a great deal of competitors ended up with disabled vehicles from purely mechanical reasons. Imagine what would have happened if all the competitors had the exact same vehicles in exact same conditions, exact same sensors, and were just left to develop software to guide it? I suspect the contest would have yielded better results.
So the question is, how much of your time do you spend actually designing what the robot will do, and how much of your task do you deal with its hardware and how it will perform its tasks? In my humble opinion, I believe that the hardware development is causing a major slowdown in robotics. It would help if some affordable standardization existed.
I would be more productive if I purchased a "blank mac-formatted robot" (ala Futurama) and spent my time writing software for it instead of working out on just how to make a 2KB PIC microcontroller communicate with 20 sensors and 10 actuators using one signal wire and I2C.
Someone should fund me so I can start an open-source robotics project: to make geeks of the world unite in our struggle against physical labor!
Sure, I agree with your analysis whole-heartedly. It is not always profitable to take something in its current state and make it work for you. However, a person with some guile could turn the castle into a profit. Just imagine the possibilities: Transylvania could well be the new Disneyland (hopefully not another Euro Disney). Or they could make Romania into anther New Zealand: a haven for cinematographers. Or even just a Bagel shop.
.. this could work.
A vampire version of Mickey Mouse
Well, unless you know something I don't, I partly disagree with one point on your #1: bricking. I thought you would be interested to see a related example of chip hacking, which can be applied to smart-cards using a PIC chip:
0
:)
http://www.bunniestudios.com/wordpress/?page_id=4
Clearly those cards use different technology but -- caveat emptor! A PIC wasn't meant to be hacked either - with microscopic physical protection in place. The example was in DIP form but there is virtually nothing different from the guts of a DIP chip and QFN.
Also, given enough time, boredom or economic motivation anything is possible. I have seen hackers decrypt things that shouldn't be possible to decrypt...and I have seen them do this for me for $50.
Not that I have a better suggestion, but, I don't believe in being too assured- paranoia is a healthy component of my life.
Sure, but that was a propulsion mechanism, not a way to power your cell phone. Perhaps a way to launch your cell phone into space?
This one is a classic -- take a look at the "blank laptop" screen in this picture.
e /sts-98/hires/s98e5004.jpg
n oone_can_hear/
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttl
A well-written story about it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/02/14/in_space_
Alongside computer experts, I think that a lot of normal users would have the urge to buy a blank laptop simply because it is cheaper and might find themselves in this same situation.
(Or MPT) is an actual working technology already in use - I seem to recall a small experimental, remotely controlled, airplane that was powered this way. A ground microwave dish followed it as it moved across the sky and that powered the motors and other scientific experiments. On the other hand, a stationary object such as a cell phone shouldn't have a problem being powered in a dedicated recharge zone (such as a counter or shelf that would be designated as a human-unsafe area). Wikipedia claims that power transmission efficiencies and radiation are mostly negligible -- if so, does that mean that we should be going after it or is there inherent danger to the process?
s mission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_power_tran
I am shocked that you would even ask. A true anti-Microsoft Linux geek runs WoW under emulated/wine/accelerated environment. Is this not correct?
In theory, one could use that money to purchase World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade. If this Windows refund effort is done on a "patch Tuesday", even the time could be justified in lieu of Blizzard maintenance down-time.
See for yourself. No story needed.
http://www.cardope.com/weird/DSC00006.jpg
Just imagine what that thing was hooked up to.
Sure, a UFO is a bone fide sighting. It means exactly what it stands for: Unidentified Flying Object. Only an idiot would jump to some kind of a conclusion that it's the master alien race visiting Earth under the command of god-king Marduk without concrete evidence.
"Along with this FREE trial CD comes a sample trial dose of Xanax (tm). Our quality AMA-approved representatives are standing by to take your subscription order!"
One simple answer: shared documents. Sure, I have five+ computers at home and one of them is a dedicated linux machine that I use for file storage and whatnot. The problem is, it is a multi-step process for anyone living in my house to access these files at work. While I have no problem of whatsoever establishing file shares and so forth, not everyone is as comfortable with the idea.
Luckily Google spreadsheets solved at least one problem for me - maintaining a shopping list. I can pop on any computer with internet access and be able to see what my better half added to it. Any other features? I don't need or want them.
Actually, you didn't seem to read anything I wrote with any kind of academic scrutiny. Entire books can be written about this subject but I will leave it at a tentative glance. If you want to research this topic further, you will discover that slaves were actually the first "slaves to the clock" - as referenced by my previous posting.
Research indicates that southern colonies were among the first to embrace the clock for the purpose of increasing efficiencies of plantations. One freed slave reflected on his experience : "the bell called and said, get up I'm coming to get you" (Bill Collins, Virginia). Another one put it a more painful light, "Maybe dey puts you on a task dis mawnin' and dat dere task got to be finished by seben o'clock dis evenin' and' if it ain't, dey whip you." (John Barker, Virginia.)
So, it wasn't just one race that was affected. The clock made conditions MUCH WORSE for slaves. Furthermore, many academics blame industrialization for prolonging slavery, which would precede advent of clocks. Change in time measurement affected lives of everyone in some way and it would be improper of me to ignore one mistreated group of people in favor of another for my previous posting. There were groups of people suffering on both hemispheres and both sides of the continent around this time. Please keep in mind that people are still suffering today as they always have.
Thanks for being passionate about the subject but please be more informed before responding.
At least clock making in the U.S. history..
Around 1700, it was very rare for a person to own a clock or a watch - something on the order of 1 in 35 prominent white males owned one. By 1800, most cities in New England had clock makers. These clock makers could produce only around a dozen clocks per year and they never did so preemptively. They would wait for an order to be placed and then take their sweet time to produce a clock. There was an old saying about the craft.. "No two clocks tell the same time," indicating their accuracy. An interesting fact was that most of these clock makers could not live on making clocks alone: they had day jobs to support them. Clock making was merely a bonus.
Then good old American manufacturing kicked in and production blew up to 1000 clocks a year made by one skilled worker, requiring nothing but ordinary laborers instead of master clock makers. Prices dropped around 1820s and it seems like the market was for once flooded with clocks. Some speculate that this cheaper price and wide availability created a market demand for clocks. Otherwise- why weren't they producing more of them?
These are of course, clocks.. not just watches. Around this time (1750-1850), the clock stopped being a measuring device. Instead, it became a control device. Entire lifestyles changed - masters were replaced with factory workers. Time discipline became heavily monitored and for the first time ever the society went from an ephemeral lifestyle to one controlled by a machine.
So here is an interesting question to ask Slashdotters:
If a clock changed way of life in the 19th century, what is happening with our lives in the 21st century?
Will we ever go back to a relaxed setting of working at our own pace or will we be slaves to the clock for some time to come? Why would we need a clock (or a watch) anyway? It seems like we have plenty of other semaphores to regulate our lives.
Just something to ponder..
For all the people who care about which way their heads, feet, et al face during sleep, will they now be in a spiritual predicament? In other words, will they also need to get rotating beds that would counteract the rotation of the building?
Bah.. I am wasting my time here. Take a look at this entry, then scroll down to the bottom and see how history is academically divided:
.., Maya, ...) ..)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization
- North America cultures (Pueblo)
- Mesoamerica cultures (Aztec,
- South American cultures (.., Inca,
You are pretty much calling modern Turkey part of the ancient near east. Such claim is not only anachronistic but also taken out of context. You can't separate geography from history.
Ask an actual scholar if they would call Maya a North-American culture. That is the main issue.
Mesoamerican. Not North American.
I am really not certain why you are replying. If you dig further inside your trusty wikipedia, you will see just how uninformed you are. You can't redraw historical and geographical lines as you see fit. My original comment was referring to the parent poster's ignorance of both history and geography and I see that my comment has trapped more than one person in a loop from which they can't break out.
America has more parts than just North and South. You can't (even just for the sake of argument) choose to arbitrarily polarize a unique, rich culture. The original poster decided to call all North American natives as savages and proceeded to claim that they sacrificed people and did not care about life. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. In his rants, he may have been referring to the stereotypical mesoamerican view of the indigenous people, NOT Northern.
If you think I am splitting hairs- I am not. This is an actual scholarly division of archaeological and historical evidence.
Apocalypto
That IMDB entry speaks for itself. I'm not even going into historiography.
Well, that's great and all, but please check your geography. Mesoamerican is not the same as North-American. The parent post was talking about something they really didn't know much about.
g lish.PNG
Good map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mesoamerica_en
Who exactly is your source of information on American history, Mel Gibson?
Is to use images instead of text. For example, out of three images, two are alike. Third one isn't. User has to pick the mismatching one to activate his/her account. Here is a really good example:
Great Example
P.S. Some image categories can be confusing.. In this case, axe vs mace can make a human fail the test.
Now I can definitely pat myself on the back for not having a myspace account. Another freedom of ours eroded away - the ability to infringe copyright, ignoring the consequences. It's kind of like the seat belt thing. I don't have to wear it (if I'm stupid enough) but no one else gets hurts in the process.
As a point of amusement, you should look into just how much energy it takes to just purify raw ore into something usable. Abundant? -Yeah. Usable? -Not until you blow more energy on it than the solar panel might collect in 7 or so years of average daylight. Sucks.
Obviously facial recognition is a bit more complex than my example, but, the process is similar. Programmers take on a task, realize how much work it is, find a quicker way to go about doing it, and then take that shortcut that dooms them into claiming victory.
In my example, I wrote a program to play Solitaire. It used a primitive form of optical recognition to identify numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 and rest of the board from examining screenshots. The algorithm was a bit slow (after all, this was only a prototype) but it did the job just perfectly.
Then I realized that I could take a shortcut. In Windows' Solitaire, the field numbers are color coded; therefore, I reduced my "pattern recognizing" algorithm into a color-recognizing one and improved gaming efficiency at expense of being cheap about it.
After I had developed rest of the game and made it work, I realized that couple of situations were unaccounted for : blank fields, and marked fields. At this point in time, it was miserable to go back and try to rewrite the recognition algorithm to help identify the board so instead I started taking more shortcuts and making assumptions.
End result? Lets say that a human is still reigning champion of the Solitaire world.
Quoting the philosopher, wine connoseuir and two time Victorian dance ensemble champion:
l
"The big ones eat first and the small ones live off the remains and feces."
http://www.afireinside.org/spacemoose/to_sell.htm