Exactly the feeling I got. We don't even have an Federal Internet Commission, and don't seem to need one.

We do need to have the Consumer Product Safety Commission setting safety standards for the Internet of Things. They're properly the lead agency of safety issues. That will probably happen after the first few deaths due to cloud-based control of home devices.

Careful what you wish for. With the current generation, you might end up with iWar instead.

The problem here is that Literature != Liberal Arts, even though some wish to classify it as such. A Liberal Arts degrees should require Philosophy I and II, Ethics, Logic, and Symbolic Logic. Not that long ago, the heavy focus on Philosophy was what defined the degree.

If a person has Liberal Arts degree with all of the Philosophy classes they do get better at critical thinking and detecting irrational and illogical thought. Just like a person with a Math degree gets better at solving equations. I have a degree in both Liberal Arts and Mathematics, and yes my Liberal Arts required everything I stated above.

A "STEM" degree on it's own presents some basic critical thinking problems, as I would say all education does. These are not exercises focused on critical thinking in a broad sense, but rather linear logic. "Critical thinking" in a traditional sense is not the same as the critical thinking in Math. For example, in politics one must take into account human nature, which is a variable set of rules. People often lie, tell partial truths, and use broken logic to make conclusions. Critical thinking in Math always works toward a single mathematical truth. With that in mind, a person can be very intelligent in programming logic, but be very poor in overall critical thinking abilities.

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.

Pretty much any independent computer shop will toss together an OS-less machine upon request. All but the tiniest towns have one. And, of course, there are any number of OEM's that will sell them via mail-order.

Given that Boeing will already be 3 years late to the party, when SpaceX has manned capability up and running this coming January? We're supposed to wait another couple of years for manned launch capability, when the Russians have already said they wouldn't be hailing our asses into orbit any more? I don't think "Time To Market" is a difficult argument.

Many of the current non-lethal weapons have long lasting side effects. Such as severe pain lasting up to a days after the person is exposed (Lasers/Taser), vomiting and nausea (LRAD), loss of equilibrium (Lasers/LRAD), and if you read warnings you will find more. Side effect durations often vary, so giving 24 hours was not intended as a literal (we know bob can't fight for 23 hours and 59 seconds after he left the field).

Tear gas as a non-lethal weapon is actually not that bad assuming exposure is short and concentrations don't remain consistently high. Long term exposure can cause tissue damage in high concentrations. Short term exposure to tear gas actually gives many people an energy boost due to increased oxygen levels and adrenaline. It's amazing how much fluid your body can hold in the lungs and sinuses, and tear gas causes it all to be expelled.

Fine, I'll take you as literally as you claim. Your claim, even as a potential is completely without basis. I have worked extensively with VR technology, including motion tracking so can back my perspective.

First, shame on you for not reading. Second, the education system in the US is a horrible mess. Every time some new technology arrives, someone attempts to claim that it benefits education without any proof (and I'll add tremendous evidence to the contrary) and "sells" a sham system to the US Government. These are then sold to the public under a "save the children" fallacy to ensure that some people make lots of cash while the system continues to deteriorate.

These false claims started with radio, extended to television, then again with computers. Funding some new VR initiative will surely make some company money on the tax payers back, but won't correct issues with education.

There is enough material out there where you don't need to take my word for it, and I sure hope that you will go investigate.

One thing Swift will address... There are currently 3 memory management models in use in Objective-C, and for some of those models, you don't get a retain count automatically (for example, this is the case for a number of collection objects when doing an insertion).

Swift has the opportunity to rationalize this, which is not something you could do with the Objective-C libraries themselves, since doing so would change historical APIs and thus break old code.

It wasn't really until Metrowerks basically became incompatible with the Intel switchover and the 64 bit support had to drop certain types of support from Finder due to 64 bit inode numbers, and while I happily would have made them new header files so that they would have continued to work with the UNIX Conformance work, where Ed Moy and I basically broke their local private copies of their header files, since Motorola sold off the Intel version of the Metrowerks C the week because Apple announced Intel, it was pretty much DOA at that point.

So it basically took an Act Of God to get some people to get the hell off some of the old APIs we had been dooming and glooming about for half a decade.

Swift is another opportunity for that type of intentional non-exposure obsolescence to clean up the crappy parts of the APIs and language bindings that haven't been cleaned up previously due to people hanging onto them with their cold, dead hands. Hopefully, they will advantage themselves of this opportunity.

That article is written as if that crowd invented running using force control. Of course you use force control. Everybody in the field knows that by now. I patented that 20 years ago. The Scout II robot at McGill, developed by Prof. Martin Buehler, used that approach. Buehler went on to become the designer of BigDog, but never got much public credit for it and quit to work for iRobot.

The key to legged running in non-trivial situations is careful management of ground traction. Traction is first priority, then balance, then foot placement. Historically, everybody worried about foot placement first, but that turns out to be backwards. As soon as you get off flat surfaces with good traction, traction control dominates.

The next unsolved problem in that area is not going fast. It's starting, stopping, and turning fast. Most of the legged robots accelerate very slowly, and don't make abrupt high-speed turns. Big Dog starts by trotting in place, then extending the gait out. Starting fast, stopping fast, and turning fast are all facets of the same problem. You have to take one stride using completely different control algorithms than you use for normal locomotion. That's all I'm going to say about this for now.

Well, actually it's the Supreme Judicial Court, or SJC.

Right, because the military is the worst possible place to learn about the military. I'm better asking Richard Jewel about 2 man tactics than I am reading a military TM, which provides the history and theory as well as the tactics.

Just like your stupid ass bayonet claim, it's fucking wrong. The US Military does not have any serrations on their weapons because of Geneva conventions. It can not be used as a multipurpose tool, and has not been issued as a multipurpose tool for that exact reason. If you need to saw rope, you have to use an entrenching tool.

Contrary to your pathetic attempt at an ad hominem, the source is usually the best way to get information. Not always, but military doctrine and principles are very well documented and available to every soldier that wants to go read. Those same books are not always available to the public, so your Wiki page != US Military Libraries.

Lastly, before you go another round of pathetic fallacy, learn what "one of many" means and then reread the post.