The PR2 is nearly there. It can already recharge itself, avoid obstacles, fold laundry, etc. Right now the only thing preventing the PR2 from being sold for the tasks you describe is price, and prohibitively high maintenance costs.

I'm surprised they picked the PR2 from Willow Garage and compared with the Anybot. Willow Garage also makes the Texai robot, which has almost identical capabilities as the Anybot, and fulfills the same kind of role. PR2 and HRP are not designed for offices, but are research robots which are loaned out to universities and other institutions. Neither is designed to be a commercial robot, while Texai and Anybot are commercial products.

Disclaimer: I work for Willow Garage

This is why black lists and branding shouldn't be used as punishments. I can imagine there are several innocent people convicted of some kind of sexual crime now on a hiring black-list, putting signs in front of their houses, being tracked by GPS, etc.

If we're going to brand citizens convicted of sexual crimes, why not also brand all other criminals. After all, you wouldn't want to do business with someone convicted of thievery, right?

The modern Scarlett Letter. What a sick, sad joke.

Yep. And for Jupiter-like planet we'd need to be watching it for hundreds, if not thousands of years if we were to use this method.

Then we would never detect it via this method.

It depends on how well they are aligned. Even if they're perfectly aligned, we're liable to see the first one before the second or third one as it passes in front of the star. If they are even slightly out of phase, they will eventually be in an orbit in which we see all three distinctly. In any case, the radius and shape of the occlusion in front of the star is determined by the shape of the light intensity vs. time graph. Circular disks have a very specific light occlusion shape, while abberant occlusions have different shapes.

Two ways:

1. The graph of light intensity vs. time has a particular shape for perfectly spherical objects such as planets passing in front of a star.

2. Those doppler shifts would not be affected by a sun-spot, and measurements of this kind aren't always verified by doppler shift methods.

Yes, that is true. Kepler just happens to be looking at a hell of a lot of stars at once, with computer vision algorithms constantly checking each star to look for variations in light intensity. To discover other planets (whose plane of the ecliptic doesn't line up with our field of view), we would need to use other methods, such as gravitational wobble, gravitational lensing, direct imaging, etc.

Notice the little weasel word there, SHOULD. This makes it not a scientific question, but a philosophical question. If we were to accept dolphins as people, then it would raise many other moral dilemmas with respect to other animals. What exactly would be the dividing line between "person" and "non-person?" How could we make such a line non-arbitrary? It's an interesting question which should be pursued in philosophical circles.

I, personally, would like to take a view of personhood which only looks at the functional aspects of the agent -- what it can do, and particularly what it can think. Unfortunately, this view lends itself to many undesirable situations, such as treating apes as people, but not severely mentally handicapped humans, or young babies, as people.

Honestly, during my university education in computer science I haven't once been taught a Microsoft language. On the contrary, since my earliest intro classes I've been required to code in a Linux environment (my intro to C class even required me to code in either Vim or Emacs!). The languages I've been required to use are as follows: C, C++, Python, Java, SML, Perl, and Shell, all in a Linux environment.

In fact, the UNIX environment is emphasized so heavily at my university that in my free time I learned .NET just because I felt that I wasn't getting a well rounded education!

Sorry, but it's already been tried. It's called communism. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky -- they all made exactly the same arguments you are now making about Capital (machines) creating an environment of abundance, and how capitalism had buried itself, becoming outdated. It needed to be replaced by a more "realistic" economic paradigm, one of abundance. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Sound familiar?

As it turns out, capital didn't produce abundance. Scarcity still existed, resources could not, as a rule, be sufficiently distributed so that every man could be satisfied. There were bread lines, there were ten year waiting lists for shitty cars, there was corruption. As you state, resources are finite. Labor is finite. Even in a world totally automated by robots, the economy is fundamentally limited by its natural resources and the currently existing capital. In other words, scarcity. There is an interesting phenomenon in capitalism called "manufactured scarcity." New goods don't appear in the market because there is a need for them. They appear in the market because somebody wants to SELL them. They then convince you that you need them through advertising. Without this driving force, an economy goes stagnant. Innovation flounders. This is the reason that command economies don't work, and why no matter what Mr. Marshall Brian says about economic alternatives, he is almost certainly oversimplifying things.

DARPA has been funding a lot of robotics projects recently. It seems they're very keen on producing robotic soldiers. This comes on the tail of a recently-announced DARPA robotics project called the DARPA ARM project, which I'm heavily involved in. http://www.thearmrobot.com/ I was kind of disappointed not to see it slashdotted when we did a press release about it! The obvious benefit of doing competitions rather than first-party research is that you get the same results for a fraction of the cost. This is especially true of competitions like this, where the goal is to produce software or a procedure, rather than a physical robot, since the winning entry can be copied for free!