connsmythe96 - Slashdot User

Androids at China's Robot Expo 80

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 15, 2006 @12:18PM from the realistic-flesh? dept.

eldavojohn writes "China's 2006 Robot Expo has wrapped up. Even though there is little information on it online, there has been much attention given to Zou Renti's android. It seems that everyone cool is making androids of themselves these days. There's a decent article on the state of androids in Japan but unfortunately, the concentration isn't on functionality, it's on fooling the humans the robot interacts with: "The key to a successful android, according to Dr. Ishiguro, is both very humanlike appearance and behaviour. One of his early android creations was cast from his then four-year-old daughter. While it looked like her, it had few actuators and its dull facial expressions and jerky movements proved so uncanny that the girl later refused to go to her father's lab because her scary robot double was lurking there." The latest robot he's built has 42 actuators, allowing it to wow many spectators at the expo. I wonder how much longer it will be before we see Blade-Runner-like cases on the evening news?"

Element 118 Created 244

Posted by kdawson on Sunday October 15, 2006 @01:28AM from the this-time-for-sure dept.

BuzzSkyline writes, "The heaviest element yet, Element 118, has been created in Dubna, Russia by a collaboration of researchers from Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US. They created the new element by fusing together Californium (element 98) and Calcium atoms. The achievement comes five years after the scandal-plagued retraction of an earlier claim, which was based on fabricated data, that three atoms of element 118 had been produced at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The achievement was reported on October 9 in the journal Physical Review C (subscription needed to read more than the abstract)."

iPod Killers For the Holidays 344

Posted by kdawson on Saturday October 14, 2006 @10:30PM from the or-not dept.

An anonymous reader writes, "MP3 Newswire has an excellent rundown of 29 new digital portables for the upcoming season. From the article: 'We have run the iPod Killers for Christmas/Summer series since 2004. In that time we [have] reported on 149 portable players and NOT one iPod killer from the bunch. That said, [this time] we may actually have a couple of genuine challengers to Apple. This holiday season will see Microsoft pump tens-of-millions of dollars to hawk their new Zune portable, and SanDisk's 8GB e280 flash unit is compelling high-end users. Both can realistically grab double-digit market share from the iPod... Whether they do or not waits to be seen.' The article also makes a good case as to why the Sony PSP should be included in market figures for digital media portables."

Comment Not the same (Score 1) 803

by connsmythe96 on Monday May 01, 2006 @12:44PM (#15237976) Attached to: Microsoft's IE7 Search Box Bugs Google

Google didn't write Firefox. Microsoft did write IE7 AND MSN Search. If Google wrote Firefox and put their search in, that would be hypocritical. That's not the case.

This is another instance of Microsoft using its dominance in one market to force its way into another market. They used Windows to force themselves into the browser market, and now that they dominate the browser market they're using it to force themselves into the search market.

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