This is a natural extension to being the first robot to qualify for a boat loan.

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/

The Dept of Health and Human Services has released guidelines to prevent this phenomenon.
The General Order Lessening Dirty Elevated Nozzles is now in effect and mandatory for all.

Everyone will be required to take G.O.L.D.E.N showers henceforth.

How is anyone being forced to upgrade to Snow Leopard?

You have it easy, moans Frank Herbert, as his ghost is violated by Kevin J Anderson and Brian Herbert...

Hoist by his own petard, you might say...

"the money spent on migrating to alternative energy sources certainly wouldn't be wasted."

I would like to see alternative energy sources developed, but the questions raised below must be addressed first. I'm not convinced it's possible, to be honest.

http://chizumatic.mee.nu/ghosts_of_my_past

From the link:
        In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

        1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
        2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
        3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
        4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
        5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

        If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can't scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

        The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

        My rule of thumb is that I'm not interested in any "alternate energy" until someone shows me how to scale it to produce at least 1% of our current energy usage. America right now uses about 3.6 terawatts average, so 1% of that is about 36 gigawatts average.

        Show me a plan to produce 36 gigawatts (average, not peak) using solar power, at a price no more than 30% greater than coal generation of comparable capacity, which can be implemented at that scale in 10-15 years. Then I'll pay attention.

        Since solar power installations can only produce power for about 10 hours per day on average, that means that peak power production would need to be in the range of about 85 gigawatts to reach that 1%.

        Without that, it's just religion, like all the people fascinated with wind and with biomass. And even if it did reach 1%, that still leaves the other 99% of our energy production to petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

The problems facing "alternate energy" are fundamental, deep, and are show-stoppers. They are not things that will be surmounted by one lone incremental improvement in one small area, announced breathlessly by a startup which is trying to drum up funding.

The way you can tell that a fan of "alternate energy" is a religious cultist is to ask them this question: If your preferred alternate source of energy is practical, why isn't it already in use?

Why not? Because of The Conspiracy(TM). The big oil companies don't want it to happen, and have been suppressing all this live-saving green people's energy all this time for their own nefarious purposes.

As soon as you hear any reference to The Conspiracy(TM), you know you're talking to someone who is living in a morality play. That isn't engineering any more, that's religion. And while religion is an important part of many people's lives, it has no place in engineering discussions.

UPDATE: There's actually another common answer to the "Why not" question. It's because you engineers are just too hidebound and conservative and unimaginative. If you'd just get on board and recognize how utterly cool and romantic these other ways of producing energy would be, then you could wave your magic engineering wand and make it happen.

That's another kind of religion. It's not a religious struggle against evil (as personified by Big Oil) so much as a religious image of paradise. If the adherents of this kind of religion can just convert enough doubters, then paradise can happen. If you just believe, we can all be saved! Hallelujah, baby! Praise Gaia and pass the biodiesel!

Thanks, but no thanks. My "conservatism" on this subject is due to my understanding of the laws of physics and the principles of engineering, not to me being hidebound and unimaginative.

I'll just pull a Ferris Bueller and drive everywhere in reverse! They'll owe me money every year! Ha!

I don't believe that is true, at least not according to this:

In 1984, the Grace Commission was formed by President Reagan to examine where tax revenues disappear to inside the great government money maw. The commission reported that none of the money collected by income taxes paid for services - all income-tax revenue serviced the national debt. The commission said that one third of income taxes,

        . . . is consumed by waste and inefficiency in the Federal Government as we identified in our survey. Another one-third of all their taxes escapes collection from others as the underground economy blossoms in direct proportion to tax increases and places even more pressure on law abiding taxpayers, promoting still more underground economy - a vicious cycle that must be broken.

        With two-thirds of everyone's personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government.

http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2009/06/duty-of-wealthy-is-to-be-robbed-by.html

Granted, its a 25 year old study, but I don't imagine the situation has improved.

Jesus, what did your poor grandmother do to you?

Lee Iacocca isn't dead. He may wish he was, seeing what has happened to Chrysler, just so he could spin in his grave, but he ain't dead.

"Example - Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash"

Meh. Get back to me when they make a robot that qualifies for a boat loan.

It seems Chen used an old article to quote Hayashi thusly, "Hayashi's cellular weapon of choice? A Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a 3-inch TV. It also features 3-G, GPS, a 5.1-megapixel camera and motion sensors for Wii-style games."

The none-too-happy Hayashi reports, "My cellular weapon of choice, of course is an iPhone... I can't agree with what Brian's article had to say and here is how I view the iPhone market in Japan."
http://blog.nobi.cc/2009/02/my-view-of-how-iphone-is-doing-in-japan-by-nobi-nobuyuki-hayashi.html/

iPhone Mattters today also has a related report, "The Japanese hate the iPhone so much they start four iPhone magazines."
http://www.iphonematters.com/article/the_japanese_hate_the_iphone_so_much_they_start_four_iphone_magazines_173/#When:12:42:00Z/