Except the part in the video where they have it go in a constant direction in a forest using on board magnetometers.

Perhaps this could be used to figure out exactly how deadly limnic eruptions are triggered.

Given that the average body weight in the United States is 164 pounds and we have 6 passengers, we have an added weight of 984 pounds. Less than the 1200 pounds saved. This does not take into account the weight of luggage however.

Now ideally one would have the passengers pay according to their weight at takeoff, but I'm sure many people would find this unacceptable.

There is no such thing as negligible weight on an aircraft.

Indeed there is quite a bit of variance in vegetables and meat, but judgement to choose the right approach to cook is not the hard part, we have AI approaches that can deal with this. While one may not be able to have a robot autonomously generate new menu items, it should be possible for a robot to cook menu items and make them tasty despite variance.

However, we don't have good enough manipulation approaches for doing the actual cooking. We can easily teach a robot that tomatoes go good with basil, but we don't know how to teach a robot to pick up a tomato and slice it(at least without programming specific to the task of slicing tomatoes). This is mainly due to the fact that we don't know how we pick up a tomato or slice it, because much of what happens when we do so is unconscious.

Dealing with soft objects is currently a big problem in robotics, once it's solved there will be very few manual jobs that won't be doable by robots.

Actually, part of the reasons for the Japanese making humanoid robots are:
1. Humanoid robots are good for advertising because people think they are cool and they're good for showing off technology made by a particular company.
2. Japanese companies own a pretty big share of the industrial robotics market, not only that, they tend to be pretty forward thinking. So you'd better believe that they're trying to crack the robotic worker problem.
3. A lot of Japanese engineers grew up watching Astroboy.

Now, I'm willing to bet that the Japanese will have a humanoid robot carry the Olympic torch, and not only that, I'll bet they're gonna have it run with the torch.

The interesting thing is, we will probably replace the Grade-A-B gourmet chefs first.

Automation does not make sense for a place like Mcdonalds today. Currently, the product Mcdonalds makes is cheap and the people making that product are cheap, so one would lose money automating Mcdonalds.

But, in automating one can produce higher quality products that one can sell for a higher price and actually pay off the automation. So it makes more sense to highly skilled, high paid workers like the Grade A-B chefs.

This has happened before, CNC machines were initially used to replace highly skilled machinists and robot welders were initially used to replace highly skilled welders.

Humans are messy and carrying a bunch of biosphere from Earth to support them could potentially end up disrupting Europa's biosphere if it has one.

One can easily sterilize an unmanned space probe, but preventing even the slightest smallest leak of sewage, spacesuit leak, or the one little bit of plant waste that gets accidentally vented from a greenhouse is probably more challenging than actually sending humans to Europa.

Well, we still don't have a good theory of quantum gravity.

Someone has actually done this, sans switchable nozzles or gel. They were able to make centimeter high objects of decent resolution in minutes.

As this is a line scanning process, it will probably take just as scanning a laser to build up an object layer by layer.

Though the laser would probably be faster, even with resin recoat time, typical laser scan for stereolithography are around 4-25 meters per second.

I doubt there is any robot that can go that fast and maintain 0.1 mm accuracy.

Gravity is not the reason why supports are used in stereolithography type 3d printing, shrinkage is.

When a photopolymer solidifies it shrinks, and I'd imagine that this process would have many of the same shrinkage issues.

Clearly they have violated Standard NASA Ames Procedures for dealing with this sort of thing.

They failed to fill out a both the DARC-820AD -- 'Identifying a Barbarian Attack' and FF-1066AD -- 'Report of Viking Raid' forms.

It appears you are correct, Microsoft's new file 3d printing file format specification is explicitly designed to allow for "content protection."

I wouldn't be surprised if microsoft starts their own 3d printing "app-store."

Reminds me of the Russian's "expedient space exposure experiment with a flag." The Russians decided to put a flag, just a regular nylon plastic flag, out in space, because it looked cool or something.

Upon retrieval a year or so later, there really wasn't to retrieve, the thing was practically gone and was left was bleached white.

I hope they are able to do some cool science with it too. It'd be great if they could teach it to autonomously do zero angular-momentum maneuvers, IE reorientate itself the same way a cat does. Or see if they can get it to do
zero gravity jump "walking." Think Ender's Game.

The former should be easy to accomplish with what they are up-porting, while the latter could probably be done if they send up a motion capture set up.

At the very least, it should help cancel out the creepiness of Robonaut's new slenderman space legs. Robonaut is going to be 'walking' around the space station SOON.