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Robotics

Submission + - Garbage collection robot unveiled in Italy (bbc.co.uk) 1

Espinas217 writes: The BBC has a story about DustBot, from their page:
What is believed to be the world's first robot that comes to take away rubbish from your house when you want it to has been unveiled in Italy.
The Dustbot can be summoned to your address through a mobile phone any time of the day.
The robot works with a combination of GPS navigation and with a gyroscope to keep it upright. There are also a number of sensors on the machine so it does not bump into anything.

There's also a video of the bot doing it's job.

Comment Re:this is an insipid line of thought (Score 1) 405

Wrong, a human being takes a lot of time to develop and during this time the things it can tolerate are different. As a person grows it gets stronger and best prepared to deal with the world. A child is not ready to deal with sexuality, neither his mind nor his body are ready for that.
So, a person 5 years old is not the same as a person 30 years old and is not the same as a person 90 years old. The things that can harm them are as different as the things they can take without any danger.
You can argue all day about the exact number of years to put the line but you just can't say there is no difference.

Comment Re:Potato Blight for computers (Score 2, Informative) 273

I run an unpatched machine with an obscure system that some friend of mine wrote. Probably anything but secure, knowing his code, but oddly, no spyware, no malware, no nothing. Why? Because it's no market either.

When you have a hundred systems all having an equal market share, any given threat can only infect 1% of the existing machines (provided they are not binary compatible). That is economically uninteresting for the malware businesses.

It is also uninteresting for software developers so you have a system without malware and almost useless because you just don't have any software to run on it. Also you can't comunicate with other peoples systems because yours is incompatible and different. Unfortunately the malware is the price we have to pay for having access to such a big network. If we had hundred different incompatible systems it would be a nightmare to write any software that runs on all of them (be it good or bad software). With some sort of common standard is easy (for certain values of easy) to develop software that can run everywhere, good software and evil software.

Comment Re:april fools? (Score 1) 273

Half the world writes it 4/1 the other half 1/4, the one you use doesn't make it any better then the one they use.

Where I come from we write it dd/mm but after some thinking about it I realized that mm/dd is just easier to sort and compare.

Comment Re:The flip side of monopoly abuse (Score 1) 597

Liberalism is more advantageous for everybody and benefits nobody in particular, while all systems we currently experiment today are attempts to favor certain groups while necessarily screwing everybody else in the process. Which is kind of why they're so popular today. :-)

Do you really believe this? I think is just the opposite. The field is not leveled, there are (and always be) few people with a lot of power and a lot of people with little power. Without rules the ones standing on the top would remain there and increase their advantage over the others. Free markets leads to monopoly in most cases, and we know how that benefits us all.

Comment Re:Bad for Linux (Score 1) 289

Now let us think about the actual environment you get with each:

Linux - Arm processor ... limited applications. The non-techie won't know that they've been artificially limited by the laptop manufacturer. They're just going to know that "Linux is slow" and "I can't download new apps in Linux".

I think the point of putting Linux to do quick tasks is that it can let you do those tasks faster, not slower. So even if they see Linux as the limited choice it should be the faster way of doing those tasks. Besides if people start actually using Linux they may discover two important things: the Windows way is not the only one nor the easiest one; and Linux is a usable OS for them.

Comment Re:Why not linux wins then? (Score 1) 638

You forget something really important about the average person: they don't make decisions, they just do what they are told to do. More so in areas they don't understand. The average person goes to the store and buys a computer, he doesn't know what an OS is and doesn't care. At work he uses whatever machine the company gives him. So when you think about what the average person uses you have to think about what the tech/boss/vendor tells him.

Comment Re:Uncertainty and certainty (Score 1) 684

This is the only experiment in human history where we cannot learn from our mistakes. We have to be 100% certain it is safe, before each new step up is even attempted. (Too many mistakes have already been made and we have yet to even get into the more possible dangerous aspects of the experiments).

There are infinite mistakes they could make that won't lead to a massive destruction and we could learn from all of them. Maybe there are some chances that something really bad happens and the earth or humanity is destroyed, there are also some chances that nothing bad happens, and then you have a lot of middle ground. We can learn from this experiment just as we learnt from many others, all of them dangerous.

Comment Re:Wait another 4 years (Score 1) 122

Maybe because it would be the fastest, easiest and probably only way to do it. Historically it was the only way to really expand man frontiers, to take big risks. Even to die trying. If we keep thinking the way to go is with all the safety conditions and guarantees we won't be going anywhere. Of course everyone involved should be aware of the dangers and chances of success.
Biotech

Submission + - New results from Fight AIDS@Home (isgtw.org)

An anonymous reader writes: New results from the Fight AIDS@Home project allow faster and more reliable classification of molecules potentially able to bind to the HIV virus, and should speed the goal of finding new HIV therapeutics effective in the face of drug resistance. FightAIDS@Home is the first biomedical distributed computing project ever launched. It is run by the Olson Laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. We provide free software that you download and install. The software uses your computer's idle cycles to assist fundamental research in discovering new drugs, building on our growing knowledge of the structural biology of AIDS.
The Military

Submission + - 11 Finalists in Pentagon's Robotic Rally (wired.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A mere 11 driverless vehicles — not the 20 originally planned — will compete in this weekend's $3.5 million all-robot street rally, hosted by the Pentagon. After a series of crashes, dangerous turns, and aimless wanderings off of the course, the rest of the robo-cars in the "Urban Challenge" were deemed unsafe to compete.
Security

Submission + - Al Qaeda hacker attack scheduled to begin Nov 11

Stony Stevenson writes: An Israeli Web site is warning that al Qaeda hackers will attack Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate, and Shiite Web sites starting on Sunday, November 11th. "...al Qaeda is retaliating against Western intelligence agencies' tactics, which detect new terrorist sites and zap them as soon as they appear," reports DEBKAfile, a news site based in Israel.

How disruptive the attack will be has yet to be determined. It's not clear where DEBKAfile is getting its information and those in the government who worry about such things don't appear to be more worried than usual. A U.S. Secret Service agent who forwarded the report to a security mailing list cautioned that the news did not constitute an official USSS advisory and a spokesperson for the USSS said, "We didn't send out the bulletin." The Department of Homeland Security reiterated that message and declined to characterize how or whether the DEBKAfile report was being viewed by the US security community.
Businesses

Submission + - Two Dozen Projects Announce New ODF Support (techtarget.com)

Rob Isn't Weird writes: "The ODF Alliance is pleased to note that more than two dozen projects to add ODF support have been announced in the last three months, with almost as many big companies behind them. Almost all the big names are in there, including IBM, Sun, Adobe, Apple, Corel as well as many open source projects. About the only people not supporting ODF at this point are Microsoft and a certain misnamed two bit, two man foundation."

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