Can we please stop treating the Roomba as a harbinger of the inevitable robot apocalypse?

It's just about the most trivial "robot" you can imagine, it's been around for over a decade, and in that time, there hasn't been a single new development in the "robotic home automation" market that it was supposed to usher in.

It's just a silly gimmick - it does a good enough job of vacuuming your Cheetos crumbs (though not nearly as well as getting off your ass for 5 minutes would), and that's about it.

From what I remember, yes, his work was slightly later, but he also published it earlier. Stands to reason that this would happen a lot - the only alternative is that different people discover something at the exact same time.

Not a nit that I would pick on any other site, but Leibniz invented/discovered calculus independently.

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Humans aren't special. Get over yourselves.

Don't see any chimps or dolphins wringing their hands/flippers over who has what rights. That seems to be a pretty special human trait.

*runs*

Plastidip!

My nephew has been into Minecraft since he was 3/4 .. and now a few years later, he is modding, watching HOWTOs on YouTube and loving the Minecraft music videos (he even wants to produce his own) and has gotten a fantastic amount of experience with basic programming logic through pistons and redstone. The social aspect has even been positive--he enjoys joining servers and helping others.

As someone that learned to program at the age of 4/5 in C64 BASIC (copying games out of magazines line-by-line), I feel that Minecraft is the perfect avenue for empowering the developing mind in a way that will allow them to step back and consider a program's architecture/structure. Something that I feel is much more important than shoving syntax down someone's throat. (i.e. no kid likes cursive)

I think the solution will be power-assist trailers that use hub motors. Your trailer should be stacked with solar panels and charge itself and the truck continuously and potentially includes a generator already.

What an idiotic thing to say.

I don't really care what people on the street do - programmers think in types.

So I'm picking between the US/UK/Canadian signals intelligence, and the Russian security service? I'll go with the sigint guys.

Spetssvyaz is the Russian communications security agency (part of FSO).

Apparently "knee-jerk response" now means "opinion I disagree with". Good to know!

In the US, 56.49 billion potatoes are sold per year. If potatoes caught fire at the same rate, we would all be dead.

They certainly don't use the word "baffled", but for all the scientist I know, the standard response to new data is "WTF is this shit?!"