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Comment Re:Am I missing something? (Score 2) 61

by Kenoli (#45282345) Attached to: Insect-Inspired Flying Robot Handles Collisions And Keeps Going

The 30 dollar RC helicopters at Wal*Mart already have a plastic cage around them so they hit walls and such without snapping the rotors off.
This doesn't seem all that different to me, aside from an outer cage on bearings. So what's the big deal?

A fixed cage can protect from damage, but does little to prevent crashes, since collisions will still affect the orientation of the rotor.

I saw nothing in the videos leading me to believe these weren't rc controlled. You can even see a the small orange 4 channel receiver on the supposed bot.
Why does an autonomous robot need a 4 channel receiver, unless it's being flown by a pilot?

How they're controlled isn't relevant. The point is that collisions don't interrupt their flight.

Comment Re:Cool (Score 3, Interesting) 341

by Kenoli (#44330793) Attached to: Colorado Town Considers Drone-Hunting Licenses

How are drones supposed to fight forest fires? With missiles? They sure can't carry enough retardant aloft to even put out a sizable bonfire.

Sure they can. There's no reason a drone couldn't carry as much as any manned aircraft.
The RQ-4 is designed for high altitude and long endurance, rather than heavy payload, but even so it can carry 3000 lbs, which is comparable to existing light firefighting aircraft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_firefighting

Its surveillance capabilities have already been used to assist firefighters:
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123073731

Comment Image quality (Score 3, Informative) 79

by Kenoli (#43430067) Attached to: High-Speed Camera Grabs First 3D Shots of Untouched Snowflakes

Comment Re:The real tragedy here... (Score 1) 743

by Kenoli (#42053627) Attached to: Student Refusing RFID Badge Now Fights Expulsion Order

Carrying an ID is normal and acceptable. Pretty much everyone, everywhere, already carries one or more ID, such as a driver's license, with them on a routine basis.

The school wants its students to carry their IDs, and the students complied. So what? There is no tragedy or controversy there.

TFA is ridiculous. Especially the video. It sounds like something from The Onion.

Although we have all been conditioned to accept that technology will be spying on us all the time in this police state control grid we now find ourselves living in...

Are you fucking kidding me?

No, the tragedy is that these backwards morons don't even understand what they're talking about in the first place.

I think that until we have a health impact study that determines that it is safe for our children, we should not be subjecting them to experimental technology.

"Down with the magical RFID chips! Evil wizard summoned them from hell!", they seem to say.

Comment Re:I'm still not coinvinced... (Score 4, Insightful) 174

by Kenoli (#42017359) Attached to: Just In Time for the Holidays, Nintendo Wii U Gets Its US Release

After all, it's Nintendo--a company that simply refuses to let go of its, "Super Mario plus other cartoony games," forumula. Why would any other software shop take their platform seriously when Nintendo itself does not.

They're not going to just let go of Mario. That's the best selling video game franchise in the world.

Hundreds of millions of sales sounds pretty serious to me.

Comment Re:plz not pedantics (Score 1) 475

by Kenoli (#41929885) Attached to: On Daylight Savings Time:

"but they could achieve this simply by **getting up earlier**."

not everyone has the kind of lifestyle that allows that flexibility...**most** working people and virtually **all** students do NOT have that kind of lifestyle...
daylight savings time is for those people who don't want to get up earlier...the vast majority of people in the US

Nonsense. Shifting a clock forward is the same as shifting a schedule backwards. Getting up earlier is exactly what people already do under DST.

Comment Re:Old news (Score 3, Informative) 147

by Kenoli (#41461365) Attached to: MIT Researchers Show Dash Font Choice Affects Distraction

This isn't exactly a new finding. Typographers have known this for over a century, if not multiple centuries. Why do you think newspapers are printed in seriffed typefaces?

This research deals with the shapes, proportions, and spacing of characters in square grotesque and humanist typefaces. It doesn't have anything to do with serifs.

Comment Re:Morons (Score 1) 288

by Kenoli (#41228955) Attached to: Social Robots May Gain Legal Rights, Says MIT Researcher

We haven't the foggiest idea whether anyone other than ourselves is capable of suffering. At best we can say that they appear to understand suffering. With animals, we can only say they appear to suffer. The reason is that we don't have a fundamental understanding of consciousness and perception. Until we do, we can only make an educated guess as to the capacity for others to experience suffering.

Because we lack this understanding, we cannot be certain that our own creations lack consciousness. So we must again judge based on the appearance of suffering.

Ergo, any robot which appears to suffer must have at least the same rights as an animal.

Grating rights to robots based on the appearance of suffering is ridiculous.

Harming an animal may cause it to suffer, but harming a robot only causes it to do whatever it was programmed to do in the event it was harmed. Whether or not that involves the robot appearing to suffer is just a decision made by its designers. A robot can be made to appear to suffer, or to appear to not suffer, independently of its actual function.
The Internet

ICANN Mistakenly Publishes Applicant Addresses 52

Posted by samzenpus from the was-that-wrong? dept.
angry tapir writes "ICANN's program to expand the number of domains on the internet has suffered another embarrassing setback. The organization has been forced to temporarily take down details of domain suffix applications after it inadvertently published the addresses of applicants. In April, ICANN was forced to suspend the application process after it was found that its system could reveal details about top-level domain applicants. The organization is already facing criticism for its proposal to deal with TLD applications in batches of 500 instead of all at once."

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