Car mode looks fine, but the humanoid mode looks like the robot is standing in the unaltered rear third of the car, and the arms and head look useless.

If it can't walk or pick up things, it's not good enough yet.

This one looks like it's not quite as advanced as this one: http://mashable.com/2014/10/23...

Only a human-sized model last I checked, but far more functional.

I think people make tubes because a normal person can with some combination of money and effort - used vacuum pumps aren't that hard to rebuild. You could cheap out and use fixtures, but a reasonable quality glass lathe is something like $14k. It would be a relatively expensive hobby, but still cheaper than cars.

I love that first link, but I notice he doesn't include a getter, which would reduce the life of his tubes. The second guy uses getters that still have some life from broken tubes..

Risky doesn't mean impossible.

We can go to Mars if we want to throw enough money at it. Living there in a self-sustaining colony of healthy human beings is probably awaiting several engineering and medical breakthroughs, though.

If you're willing to risk a roughly 99% chance of dying in flight due to environmental failure, we could manage an interstellar generation ship - again, by throwing enough money at it.

Actually, San Francisco used to have a cash payment program for General Assistance. Somebody noticed the city was employing a lot of bureaucrats to provide services, and that it would be far more efficient to hand out cash instead of housing vouchers and meal tickets. What the GP said is exactly what happened. People spent their assistance on booze and drugs and then begged for food. Gavin Newsom made his political bones replacing the cash program with something very similar to the one that preceded it.

I'm not wrong. Change does happen faster than expected. But long, long after it was expected. Certainly we can build single-purpose machines, in some cases, cheaply enough to use. That's automation. But we're not even close to a self-repairing machine that has the coordination, stamina, and sensory capabilities of a person, and that's what it's going to take to displace people entirely from productive work.

We're still a long way from general purpose robots, and even longer from general purpose robots that are cheaper to operate than employing a person. Nobody alive today is going to see this.

This. What did central bankers expect to happen when they started giving away money for almost free? They made it mandatory for corporations to automate everything that can be automated - if you don't do it your competition will.

Nobody starves to death in the US either. When they talk about people "having hunger" the standard is exactly that - being involuntarily hungry at least once that year.

I would think the line would be drawn will below $40m. If it's enough money that a group of ten people would be willing to work full time for a year to set up a scam, it's worth a ten minute phone call.

> If you don't take a Hollywood shower,

Wet skin. Lather soap. Rinse.

If you really had to shower daily (which is nice in close quarters but not exactly required to sustain life), you could get by on maybe 30 seconds of water.

If you have a system to instantly recycle the shower water for the 'wet' part, you could use the entire 30 seconds for the 'rinse'.

Hillary's defenders seem to engage in a lot of this tu quoque stuff when the facts don't even rise to the level they can reasonably employ a fallacy.

There's a time component involved here. It may be the Russians compromised it easily a few years ago, but she wiped the data when it became clear it would be subpoena'd.

Destruction of evidence is itself a crime. The difficulty is always in proving that's what happened - by definition you're missing a key piece of evidence.

Health care is a huge potential cost if you're in the US.