Comment relevant article (Score 2, Informative) 324
I'll just leave this right here. Seems relevant before we get more stupid than we already are.
Comment Re:Of course you use force control to run fast. (Score 2) 90
Pardon my ignorant question, but how is it a problem to have traction control? Wouldn't it be enough to glue traction strips to the feet or something?
That's like wearing shoes with golf spikes all the time.
Traction control for feet does roughly the same thing as automotive traction control for cars. The basic idea is to keep the sideways force below the break-loose point. This is the down force on the wheel times the coefficient of friction.
For car wheels, the down force is mostly constant. For a legged robot, it changes throughout the ground contact phase So the side force has to be actively controlled and changed throughout the ground contact. It's also necessary to compensate for leg angle.
Legs have an additional option. If a leg has three joints, you can adjust the angle at which the contact force is applied. This is a big win on hills.
I used to work on this stuff in the mid-1990s, but nobody was interested in building legged robots back then. It could be used for animation, but it was overkill for games. I never expected that DARPA would spend $120 million on BigDog. Robotics projects in the 1990s were tiny.
Submission + - What to Expect With Windows 9
snydeq writes: Two weeks before the its official unveiling, Woody Leonhard provides a roundup of what to expect and the open questions around Windows 9, given Build 9834 leaks and confirmations springing up all over the Web. The desktop's Start Menu, Metro apps running in resizable windows on the desktop, virtual desktops, Notification Center, and Storage Sense, are among the presumed features in store for Windows 9. Chief among the open questions are the fates of Internet Explorer, Cortana, and the Metro Start Screen. Changes to Windows 9 will provide an inkling of where Nadella will lead Microsoft in the years ahead. What's your litmus test on Windows 9?
New Global Plan Would Crack Down On Corporate Tax Avoidance 324
HughPickens.com writes:
Reuters reports that plans for a major rewriting of international tax rules have been unveiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that could eliminate structures that have allowed companies like Google and Amazon to shave billions of dollars off their tax bills. For more than 50 years, the OECD's work on international taxation has been focused on ensuring companies are not taxed twice on the same profits (and thereby hampering trade and limit global growth). But companies have been using such treaties to ensure profits are not taxed anywhere. A Reuters investigation last year found that three quarters of the 50 biggest U.S. technology companies channeled revenues from European sales into low tax jurisdictions like Ireland and Switzerland, rather than reporting them nationally.
For example, search giant Google takes advantage of tax treaties to channel more than $8 billion in untaxed profits out of Europe and Asia each year and into a subsidiary that is tax resident in Bermuda, which has no income tax. "We are putting an end to double non-taxation," says OECD head of tax Pascal Saint-Amans.For the recommendations to actually become binding, countries will have to encode them in their domestic laws or amend their bilateral tax treaties. Even if they do pass, these changes are likely 5-10 years away from going into effect. Speaking of international corporate business: U.K. mainframe company Micro Focus announced it will buy Attachmate, which includes Novell and SUSE.
For example, search giant Google takes advantage of tax treaties to channel more than $8 billion in untaxed profits out of Europe and Asia each year and into a subsidiary that is tax resident in Bermuda, which has no income tax. "We are putting an end to double non-taxation," says OECD head of tax Pascal Saint-Amans.For the recommendations to actually become binding, countries will have to encode them in their domestic laws or amend their bilateral tax treaties. Even if they do pass, these changes are likely 5-10 years away from going into effect. Speaking of international corporate business: U.K. mainframe company Micro Focus announced it will buy Attachmate, which includes Novell and SUSE.
Comment Re:So, a design failure then. (Score 1) 165
"If you can't save everybody, save who you can" seems like a reasonable addition to the program.
The problem isn't that you can't save everyone.
The problem is that you can save either of two people (hypothetical people, in this case). So, how do you code things to choose between the two, when you can do either, but not both?
Let me guess - a PRN?
Comment Re:Obama administration (Score 1) 200
Interesting...
Note that the President that got us into WW1 was a Democrat (Wilson).
As was the one that got us into WW2 (Roosevelt).
Then there's the Korean War (Truman).
And the Vietnam War (Kennedy/Johnson).
Carter was the only Democrat President of the 20th Century who didn't get us involved in a war.
And, as of last week, there are no Democrat Presidents this century that haven't gotten us involved in a war (or does anyone really think that this ISIS affair is really going to be a quick bombing campaign?).
Submission + - Ask slashdot: Remote support for disconnected, computer-illiterate relatives.
An anonymous reader writes: I use email to communicate with my folks overseas. Their "ISP" only allows dial-up access to their email account (there is no option of chaning ISP), that can receive messages no larger than 1MB nor hold more than 15MB (no hope of changing that either). They are computer-illiterate, click on everything they receive, and take delight on sending their information to any nigerian prince that contacts them, "just in case this one is true". Needless to say, thir PC is always full of viruses and spyware. In my next yearly visit, instead of just cleaning it up, I'd like to gift them with some "hardened" PC to use for email only that would hopefully last the year before someone has to fix it. So far, these are the things I have in mind:
- Some kind of linux distro, or maybe even mac. Most viruses over there are windows only and propagate via Autorun.inf or by email attachments, not having Windows could prevent both.
- Some desktop environment that hides anything unrelated to connecting to the net and accessing their account (dial-up software, email client, web browser, exchanging files between their hard disk/email attachments and USB drives). By "hide", I just want the rest to be out of the way, but not entirely removed, so that if necessary, I can guide them over the phone. For this, Ubuntu's Unity seems like a particularily bad solution, but a Gnome desktop with non-removable desktop shortcuts (is this possible?) for the file manager, browser, email client and dial-up program could work. An android system is unlikely to work (they have no wifi, and they were utterly confused with Android's UI).
- This could be a life saver: some kind of extension to the email client that executes commands on specially formated emails (e.g., signed with my private key), so that I can do some basic diagnostics or install extra software if I have to. This las point is important: they currently rely on aquaintances who may not be competent (they can't evaluate that) if something happens between my visits. They, most likely, wont know how to deal with anything non-windows, so all tech support would fall on me. (This is the reason I haven't moved them from windows yet.)
- Another very useful extension would be something to automatically re-assemble attachments split into several emails, to overcome the 1MB message limit.
Does any of that exist? If I have to build that system myself (or parts of it), do you have other suggestions? For the inevitable and completely reasonable suggestion of getting someone competent for tech support: I've tried that too. The competent ones don't last beyond the third visit.
Submission + - Neuroscientists Working to Push the Boundaries of Perception Through Wearables (kickstarter.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A pair of neuroscientists from Houston, Texas, Dr. David Eagleman and his graduate student, Scott Novich, have teamed up to work on the ultimate test of pushing the boundaries of our sensory perceptions: giving deaf individuals the ability to 'hear' through their sense of touch. The two are experimenting with raising funds for the project through a crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter. At the moment, it looks like they have a working prototype developed along with some preliminary data. If the science works out, they plan to utilize the technology to provide atypical information streams to people, like Twitter feeds or stock market data.
Comment Re:Nice one... (Score 1) 92
Your sig is amazingly appropriate. Now you know how to upgrade your project.
Comment Re:Downloading music for free? Scandelous! (Score 1) 323
If I came over and starting just randomly putting books into your bookshelves that publishers paid me to do without asking you, wouldnt you rightfully be a bit upset about it?
U2 fits comfortably into the iTunes demographic.
I expect to see many more free --- targeted ----promotional distributions of AAA list titles through channels like iTunes, Steam and the Kindle.
Comment Re:I'm not surprised (Score 1) 92
Or with the average laser printer, plug in printer, don't bother with the install disk, select whatever is the nearest version of the HPLJ that Windows happens to have handy. (This also works for older inkjets and some pin-impact printers.)
As to TFA, didn't you know that no device is complete until it can play DOOM?
But yeah, methinks if software started from the perspective of the douchebag, 90% of the hacks would go away and the rest wouldn't be worth the trouble.
Submission + - Ethical trap: robot paralysed by choice of who to save (newscientist.com) 1
wabrandsma writes: From New Scientist:
Can a robot learn right from wrong? Attempts to imbue robots, self-driving cars and military machines with a sense of ethics reveal just how hard this is
In an experiment, Alan Winfield and his colleagues programmed a robot to prevent other automatons – acting as proxies for humans – from falling into a hole. This is a simplified version of Isaac Asimov's fictional First Law of Robotics – a robot must not allow a human being to come to harm.
At first, the robot was successful in its task. As a human proxy moved towards the hole, the robot rushed in to push it out of the path of danger. But when the team added a second human proxy rolling toward the hole at the same time, the robot was forced to choose. Sometimes, it managed to save one human while letting the other perish; a few times it even managed to save both. But in 14 out of 33 trials, the robot wasted so much time fretting over its decision that both humans fell into the hole.
Winfield describes his robot as an "ethical zombie" that has no choice but to behave as it does. Though it may save others according to a programmed code of conduct, it doesn't understand the reasoning behind its actions. Winfield admits he once thought it was not possible for a robot to make ethical choices for itself. Today, he says, "my answer is: I have no idea".
As robots integrate further into our everyday lives, this question will need to be answered. A self-driving car, for example, may one day have to weigh the safety of its passengers against the risk of harming other motorists or pedestrians. It may be very difficult to program robots with rules for such encounters.
Can a robot learn right from wrong? Attempts to imbue robots, self-driving cars and military machines with a sense of ethics reveal just how hard this is
In an experiment, Alan Winfield and his colleagues programmed a robot to prevent other automatons – acting as proxies for humans – from falling into a hole. This is a simplified version of Isaac Asimov's fictional First Law of Robotics – a robot must not allow a human being to come to harm.
At first, the robot was successful in its task. As a human proxy moved towards the hole, the robot rushed in to push it out of the path of danger. But when the team added a second human proxy rolling toward the hole at the same time, the robot was forced to choose. Sometimes, it managed to save one human while letting the other perish; a few times it even managed to save both. But in 14 out of 33 trials, the robot wasted so much time fretting over its decision that both humans fell into the hole.
Winfield describes his robot as an "ethical zombie" that has no choice but to behave as it does. Though it may save others according to a programmed code of conduct, it doesn't understand the reasoning behind its actions. Winfield admits he once thought it was not possible for a robot to make ethical choices for itself. Today, he says, "my answer is: I have no idea".
As robots integrate further into our everyday lives, this question will need to be answered. A self-driving car, for example, may one day have to weigh the safety of its passengers against the risk of harming other motorists or pedestrians. It may be very difficult to program robots with rules for such encounters.
Comment Re:International Copyright (Score 1) 172
I think Australia just isn't big enough. It doesn't represent enough money or enough people. It's small enough that the gatekeepers might not give a damn. Screwing over the whole continent is not that big of a loss for them.
Comment Re:International Copyright (Score 1) 172
If the return on investment doesn't exceed the cost of setting up the licensing and distribution rights, it won't happen. Even then, it has to exceed costs by a high enough amount, otherwise the entities involved will focus their efforts on something else that's more lucrative. But they're not going to just let people access the content, because it might become profitable enough at some point.
To me, this is the biggest disappointment of the Internet. If I want to watch the local news in some other part of the country, why can't I? If I want to purchase music from iTunes France, why can't? If I want to buy a product from Amazon Japan, why can't I? Same thing with DVD and BluRay and their ridiculous region scheme. We've made it a lot easier to access goods and entertainment from a person's own country or continent, but it doesn't stretch much further than that in many cases.
The "global economy" isn't there at the consumer level.
Comment The type-casting is good (Score 1) 183
Type-casting -oh my lord type casting- is so astoundingly bad in Swift
What don't you like about it?
I like it because it precludes a lot of stuff from going wrong unless you are very explicit in telling swift how you would like to be shot in the foot.
