Submission + - Meet Meka's anime robot girl (extremetech.com)

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Wednesday October 12, 2011 @10:27AM

MrSeb writes: "It seems, as a culture, we have a deep-seated interest in robots and automatons, and if we can love an animal or other non-humanoid creature, what’s to stop us from falling in love with a robot? Introducing Meka Robotics’ S2 Humanoid Head: It has seven degrees of freedom, high-resolution FireWire cameras in each eye, zero-backlash Harmonic Drive gearing in the neck, and a ton of unnervingly-human movements and postures. She weighs 7.6kg (16.7lbs), has a pair of luminous, waggling doggy-like ears, and can be attached to a Meka torso and arm, if you prefer your robots to be slightly more corporeal. The girly, anime face is just a custom skin, incidentally: Meka will customize the shell to look like anything you desire. We’re told that they value their client’s confidentiality — and more importantly they don’t judge. Powered by the open-source and extensible M3 control software, the S2 head (and body and arm) could be quite easily upgraded to use Hooman Samani's artificial endocrine and psychological models — and if you had the choice of falling in love with an amorphous, decidedly odd-looking furball, or a cute, perky anime girl, which would you choose?"

Submission + - Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by oker on Friday September 30, 2011 @04:42AM

oker writes: From the article: "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (...) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities. (...) we predicted the interests and Social Security numbers of some of the participants (...) the goal of Experiment 3 was to show that it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data 'accretion.' ". Do we really enter "Minority Report"-like world?

Comment Missing option: the Neighborhood (Score 2) 283

by Orbity on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @03:00PM (#36826876) Attached to: I get most of my books...

I love to patrol yard sales, so I get most of my books used... from my neighbors, for on average about $.25 USD apiece.

Submission + - Hell Freezes over, Duke Nukem Forever Demo Release (itproportal.com)

Submitted by uslinux.net on Friday June 03, 2011 @01:13PM

uslinux.net writes: After more than a decade, it looks like Duke Nukem Forever will actually hit stores this month. After 12 years in development, will it live up to the hype?

Submission + - Viewing the Ultra-fast (stanford.edu)

Submitted by umarkalim on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @12:25PM

umarkalim writes: Staff Scientist Apurva Mehta says, "For 40 years at Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), we have been taking very high-resolution photographs-photographs of atoms in molecules and crystals and of electronic structures. But now we want to make movies." He and his colleagues are developing a new "pump-probe" facility that promises to expand SSRL's capabilities and complement those of SLAC's X-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source.

Lost Online Games From the Pre-Web Era 186

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 02, 2010 @01:42AM from the you-are-no-match-for-my-imperial-starship dept.

harrymcc writes "Long before the Web came along, people were playing online games — on BBSes, on services such as Prodigy and CompuServe, and elsewhere. Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a dozen RPGs, MUDs, and other fascinating curiosities from the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s — and the cool part is: they're all playable on the Web today." What old games were good enough for you to watch them scroll by on your 300 baud modem?

Comment Atrophy (Score 1) 520

by Orbity on Thursday August 13, 2009 @08:42PM (#29060401) Attached to: My sense of direction is ...

I used to have a great sense of direction until I met my wife. She also has a great sense of direction, but with the added need to find the "shortest" or "most-stoplight-free" route. Constantly refining these routes, she also constantly changes how she wants to get places. Being a good doobie, the most frequent driver, and the desirer of positive attention, I learned early on to go whichever way my beloved wanted to go.

Now, years later, my ability to derive my own directions has completely atrophied. I miss landmarks, road signs, turns, etc. I am a hazard to myself and others! When backing out of the driveway, I simply ask, "which way this time, honey?"

Ask for directions? Don't do it! That's like asking for help with your push-ups and sit-ups. All you end up with is flab.