TENxOXR - Slashdot User

US Embassy Categorizes Beijing Air Quality As 'Crazy Bad' 270

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday November 21, 2010 @01:21PM from the it-totally-sucks dept.

digitaldc writes "Pollution in Beijing was so bad Friday the US embassy, which has been independently monitoring air quality, ran out of conventional adjectives to describe it, at one point saying it was 'crazy bad.' The embassy later deleted the phrase, saying it was an 'incorrect' description and it would revise the language to use when the air quality index goes above 500, its highest point and a level considered hazardous for all people by US standards. The hazardous haze has forced schools to stop outdoor exercises, and health experts asked residents, especially those with respiratory problems, the elderly and children, to stay indoors."

Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect To See World 124

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday November 18, 2010 @02:59AM from the gesticulating-at-robots dept.

kkleiner writes "A student at MIT's Personal Robotics Group is going to put Microsoft's Kinect to a good use: controlling robots. Philipp Robbel has hacked together the Kinect 3D sensor with an iRobot Create platform and assembled a battery-powered bot that can see its environment and obey your gestured commands. Tentatively named KinectBot, Robbel's creation can generate some beautifully detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements to understand where they want it to go." In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."

Comment Hmm (Score 0) 627

by TENxOXR on Thursday December 27, 2007 @04:41PM (#21833042) Attached to: Is the Dell XPS One Better than the Apple iMac?

My personal choice would fall with the Dell, in that it presents more options than the Mac does *for what I use a computer for*.

I am not saying that the Mac doesn't have its own usefulness, that it is in some way lesser than the Dell, simply that it can't fulfil all the things that I need to accomplish when I use a computer. For that, I'm willing to pay that little bit more.

Submission + - Recording all human knowledge (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by TENxOXR on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @12:39PM

TENxOXR writes: UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is recorded on devices the size of a grain of sand.

We've had agriculture for about 12,000 years, towns for eight to 10,000 years, and writing for about 5,000 years. But we're still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history.

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