Looks like a high school science project....being highly NON technical, I always find these things fascinating. 'course, I guess it might have been better it the thing had not fallen down just as the voice-over was describing how it would stand up and continue with its task.
Robot bipeds are still really hard to make and the biped movement was not the primary intention in this project.
While this may look a bit silly it is actually basic research that may be applied to autonomous modular systems, like an auto assembling space station, or maintenance units that have to fit through small access ports.
bug....as noted, I am fascinated - perhaps overly - by such things. You clearly are experienced and appreciate the potentials for this sort of engineering far more than I might. I simply marvel at what it is and does...all the product of clever innovation.
Dey awreddy gots microscopic robuts. It be called "nanotechnology". Dem doktors awreddy be able to injek U wit thangs dat can maybe kure diseases. I red a book called "Prey" by Michael Crichton. He talkt about robuts aktin like doze bird swarms. Look at dis video.
If da robuts funkshun lika a team in yo body den dey can maybe kura illness. Dem folks makin' deez thangs be skarry smarrt. Of koarse da military alreddy be usin' dis teknologee, be makin' s**t to kill other people. But I likes da natural beauty in da system.
Lookout the nanoprobes! No-wonder the flu shot didn't work this year..cuz it wasn't a flu shot.....it was a nanoprobe injection with telemetry and voice monitoring! Big brother is here! Pimp, them grillz may be suspect as well!
I be pikin' up radio waves frum outta space wit my grillz. An sumtimes I gits sekret messages frum da SIS, FBI, CIA, NSA and BET. I likes da lass 1 best.
"The system stands up and continues it's task".....what exactly was it's task...walking really slow and serving no purpose? I'll be impressed when they can self replicate...
infant....I think it might have been gymyg who noted you were talking to yourself. Insightful, I thought.
It has been said that some folks are in love with the sound of their own voices, critical of those high sounding talkers who propound and pronounce and posture, but may do little else other than to revel in their public notoriety....you seem in love with the words of your own postings...prolific, but afflicted with a paucity of substance.
I thought you might have moved back to your nether world of make-believe, but like a wart, you are a lingering lesion.
Please, as you recently remarked relative to your internet preferences....find your happiness on the gaming sites. There is little here to keep you entertained, as it is mostly aimed at thinking adults.
If your Dad knew you were swearing on the Internet, he'd take away your controller and headset, make you go outside, breathe fresh air and feel the warmth of sunshine on your puffy vitamin D deprived flesh.
...why do I even bother to respond...maybe because I think you have so much more to offer than what we have seen from you so far.
"instigating people"...that would mean moving others to some sort of action. If you are "instigating people", it might mean you are persuading them to ignore your vapid posts.
"Fuck you" - frankly, I use that phrase conservatively, so that when I do use it, it means something beyond common banality.
Besides, you have neither the freedom to do that, nor the ability, nor, I suppose, the physical capacity, Mr. Infantasy.
And THAT, little boy, is likely the last time I address you directly. Indirectly, I may have more to say, depending on the vacuousness of you future posts.
On the other hand, post substance, positive notions, information, fun, wit, and you will not only avoid criticsm, you may even draw the most rewarding of all glumbertdom....thanks, admiration, laughter, and, in the extreme, even praise.
Don't give up infant....success is within your reach...but first you must extend yourself beyond the verbal arena you have thus far defined...or, just watch for a while until your inspiration to maturity arrives.
hi caddy....welcome to a veritable buffet of buffoonery. Actually, some really smart stuff here, mixed with a ration of not-so-smart stuff...sometimes it blends, other times, not.
my brother is an engineer, his speciality is robotics .
he has told me thousands of jobs have been lost to robots ,the restof the jobs went to china . labour rate is 60 cents an hour.
The sad thing is our Canadian athletes going to china Olympics are wearing clothes made in China....SAD SAD>>
We have to boycott walmart check it out see if you can find one thing that is made in the USA or Canada!
Even the frozen fish comes from the polluted waters of china. SAD.
I used to think America made crappy products. But China has everybody beat for junk.
I try to buy products that are not made in China, but everything is made in China. Even our food is being made in China? WTF! Is there really any benefit to making marshmallow peeps in China?
Everything they make is either cheap and toxic, or just toxic.
I am awaiting the day when we ship our apples over to China to have them packaged in toxic goo, and then ship them back again. Most of it just does not make any sense at all.
I quess everything is made somewhere else. I dont know what america makes anymore except GM and Ford. In my nieghborhood half the people are unemployed . I work in construction its a pain in the ass to have to go up against mexican labor every dam job. If the labor union folds people like me are screwed. You can say whatevr about union but without them I would be making about half. Everybody in mexico wants to move here. And I don't blame them my mom and dad came from mexico but they will take all our jobs its probably going to happen anyway and not much you can do about it. I dont know.
"The end of civilization as we know it" were the predictions years ago if the Chinese were to raise their standard of living even by a small amount. Do the math, with close to 1.5 BILLION people it's not hard to imagine how they could consume most of the worlds food, medicine and oil, and now at a time when oil production is, or is close to, not being able to keep up with world demand, add to that food shortages due to many reasons, it isn't going to be pretty!
Remember how the corporate media labeled Ross Perot as a "Crazy man" ranting about: "The Devil is in the details", "A giant sucking sound of jobs leaving the US", "Entitlements are destroying the economy"...
Yes how mad he was.
Thank god we have the big three candidates saving the economy by discussing Hanna Montana, more oil drilling, or suspension of the gas tax.
There is another "crazy man" who has been marginalized this time too, because he is never going to discuss the "need of a magic wand to fix the economy", that Mr. Bush says is required.
...and lets not forget India. The country that destroyed the US software industry, due to out sourcing, and worse yet insourcing. There is very little left of the non-union American programmer, and the jobs left without the government even noticing.
US companies hire these work visa folks at 1/4 of the pay, of which they send most back to India, and they require no medical insurance.
yeah...we're screwed. From what I've seen and heard and read, the only guy out there trying to actually address our economic problems realistically is Ron Paul...call him crazy or insane, but to me, he's the only one making any kind of economic sense.
I have a good friend I work with on occasion. It so happens I worked with him on Thursday in Manhattan.e lived and worked in china for over ten years married a Chinese woman divorced her 5 months ago but has a beautiful girl from this woman, This man was ingrained into the Chinese culture and politics so much that when he speaks on this I tend to listen!!
Anyway, I made mention that china would soon rule the world. He was driving and gave me a sideways glance and chuckled.
I asked what he thought and He told me This, Very simply that in 20 years China will have such an Ecological Disaster on its hand that The ruling the world thing would be far from happening!!
The water is so polluted in some major provinces that they're most likely going to run out!? We have to keep in mind they have around 26 or so provinces and some of them have a population of up and over 300,000,000.? Thats the population of the whole United States of America!!
The desert is encroaching in the north at a rate of (thirty?)miles a year due to deforestation,and every time the government has the people plant more trees the peasant populace cut them down to help them from freezing to death!!
Bottom line is China has put themselves in such a hole all that money they maybe sitting on if it is not spent on cleaning up after their own mess it will then surely snowball into something of a more Revolutionary scale?Please try and remember I'm quoting all this from memory of a conversation I had Thursday in NY am traffic, so although I'm certain that the gist of what I wrote is mostly factual there is most likely much room for fine tunning!
I think there is little doubt that China will either explode outside their borders in search of new resources, and or implode into civil war. It is really just a matter of timing.
Their history has been both, but as you say with the pollution, and depletion, they will have a well equipped army to take more than Taiwan and Tibet.
I would guess that they will take Mongolia next, and the US cannot, and will not do anything to stop them because they own our economy.
Geezus! don't go giving them ideas Pod! :P But yeah...I don't think they'll ever be able to take over the world, but they can certainly take a lot of us down with them. We borrow so much money from them right now to keep this BS in Iraq going, that should they decide to stop all loans and start collecting debt, we'd go 3rd world nation in about a year. This is of course they don't just give the whole world lead poisoning and pick through the rubble and carry on... (I'm only partly serious about that part)
Not only are the Chinese making most things sold in N America ,they have sent over industrial spies to work in our companies to suck out the future ,so they can do it all.
They do not care about pollution and loosing 500,000,000 people they have more.
The scariest thing for you folks in the states is the Chinese hold billions of green backs and at any time can devalue the American dollar to 25 cents. Where is chucknorris with a connection to an email so this can be substantiated.
TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW, TELL THEM TO TELL EVERYONE THEY KNOW TO STOP THE ERADICATION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS IN AMERICA!
Americans will go back to working for $2.75 per hour. Do you want that ? I don't think so.
The Chinese don't need to send industry spies any more. If a foreign corporation sets up a plant in China they are required to transfer know how. I am constantly marveling about the companies stupid enough to do that.
Randal is on the point about the ecological problems, I wrote about that here a few months ago. In addition they are running into a demographic problem with their population getting older due to the overpopulation control measures. And they are depleting their natural resources.
Some products that come from China are sold for a price lower than the cost of the raw materials.
Canadaman, if a country has 10% or more of their population going sick or dying the whole country gets dysfunctional.
Pod, unless the Chinese soldiers are more than world class swimmers they will never take Taiwan, they simply donīt have enough ships to land a force that can do anything but die immediately. If they happen to try to expand to the north I guess the Russians have some comments on that and they do not have critical economic connections regarding China.
My prediction is that the dragon will either learn to play nice and purr, or it will get horribly sick. We just have to hope that either thing happens before our western economies go totally bonkers.
I think we all make the mistake of underestimating China see what they did and have done to get the Olympics a third world country doesn't do all that just because they want to host a sporting event. I think we have all been lucky that they have not had a leader like Kim Jong-il. Short of nuking the place no army can beat the Chinese if they wanted to invade any country. Look at what the insurgents have done in Iraq to the most advanced military on the planet.
Plus remember the gooks were always good at maths at school but there ingrish was worse than mine and they are crap drivers so maybe we do stand a chance.
Pod, missiles are only one segment of military operations. You can not invade a country with missiles, you need foot troops to do that and Taiwan has more than 370,000 soldiers plus an impressive air force. China does of course have a lot more troops and material, but they can not throw it all against Taiwan or they will get problems on their borders. So any reasonable force they could muster would be outgunned by Taiwan bacause of the sea distance that has to be crossed.
thebug you are a smart guy and all but I disagree about China and their ability to invade/take back Taiwan/Chinese Taipei if their Airforce and Naval fleet was not up to the task they would build it up (we have seen what they can achieve in such a short time building for the Olympics they may have had to paint the grass green which they did but it was still green grass).
As to their borders the only countries that could pose a threat is India and Pakistan and they are to busy fighting over Kashmir and both sides are to weak to finish that off.
Sorry guys but China can pretty much take Taiwan whenever it chooses... Not my words by the way but those of the DIA back in 1999
Yongan is something like 200 miles from Taiwan. Xianyou is only about 130 miles away. Both are mainland Chinese missile bases.
"Chinese missiles will be able to overwhelm any planned Taiwan missile-defense system in the not-too-distant future," according to Pentagon officials back nwarly 10 years ago. Patriot batteries ain't gonna do it now guys.
That said the apparent entente cordial breaking out between the two suggests China is starting to make some decent money out of Taiwan and we can but hope it lets its little brother carry on.
No point in fighting them when they can help prop up your economy is there?
Mako, this is a valid point and one that is true in all of the world: Make sure people have a decent living and they stop thinking about bombing the neighbour. If you have stron economic ties you will not likely go to the battle field.
Cman, when that happens we'll stop buying all the crap we now buy and the east will go under. It's more scary that the east is using/buying up all the oil and running out of drinking water, has anyone seen the new nation geo,,,,,,now that is scary.
yeah but your times were comer if you took out vietnam,north korea, russia. At your college time you could go out on a date for $5.00.now a coffee costs more.
Incomes are a bit higher today too. That effect is called inflation.
gymyg is quite right, it is amazing at what speed technology is evolving these days.
At about 8th grade I started to use one of the early programmable pocket calculators (TI57), then a bit later got one of the early personal computers (Apple II). Today I have a pocket computer (Palm T3) that outperforms the fastest available computer of that old time and it is already an outdated model.
Part of that electronic block was a 113kg computer that is slower than the chip that today works in your computer mouse and had less than a tenth of the memory a 4Mpixel digital camera uses to store a picture.
Bug - How far we have come. Even back in the 80's we were producing 3d backplanes for mini computers, that had to be designed by computers. And now that 3D layering is applied to CPUs as well.
3D chips are still not at product stage, the only 3D integration is in DRAMs where the transistor sits on top of the capacitor on the silicon. But you are right, the layout of high end chips has been too complex for manual design for a long time now.
Here is something interesting to watch. If you think this robot is a pipe dream check out what Charles Babbage came up with in the 1840s but could not build with the technology available then:
What I find most intriguing about this is what it could have lead to if Babbage had the mechanics technology to turn his design into a working unit. Information technology could have started 60 to 80 years earlier than it actually did. The kind of designs he did came into use during the 2nd world war.
Since I have been asked what the show stoppers were for Babbage: It is not 100% sure what actually stopped him, some reports say that part of the problems was his personality. He was also trying to work on multiple projects at the same time.
The replica (is that the right term for something that was not actually built?) was allegedly built with the same tolerances that were typical in the 1840s, though I would guess that this can only be an estimation. Fact is that except for an early calculation machine Babbage never finished building any of his complex designs.
BB, this "self assembly" is just one isolated aspect of robotics which is under study now. Think a couple years ahead and the pieces may be smaller by a factor of ten, assemble within seconds, and work in redundant swarms that can tolerate a high damage ratio. Nice assassine robot that can fit through a small pipe, assemble, kill, disassembe, vanish.
Pod, Germany is currently doing quite well with buying the toothbrush from China and making the robots to sell. If it were not for the automobile and automation industry German economy would be down, but it is not due to high quality high tech exports.
You can simply not compete with a nation that is willing to exploit itself to make cheap crappy products, you can only make smarter products and wait for them to collapse in the hope that this collapse will not cause to much of an earth quake.
thebug what you are describing sounds very impressive and if this video shows the early part of that - but I still think the robodog is sensational now.
You are right, the two legged terminator may not ever become reality since its military worth is doubtable. But swarms of relatively simple robots that can combine to fulfill a task are a nightmare that will come true.
Yupp, except for the fact that we are still lightyears from building anything that is actually intelligent. But if an autonomous weapons system decides to kill you it makes no difference if that was just a bit being set due to some pattern matching going the wrong way or a conscious decision.
China will become not only the strongest economy in the world, but will also have the most advanced military within ten years.
How do I know this? I eat in Chinese restaurants.
The Chinese gladly accept $60,000,000/ year from the Canadian taxpayers in financial aid. Meanwhile the Chinese emit more pollution into the air and waterways than any other country on this planet. The World Health Organization report estimates that diseases triggered by indoor and outdoor air pollution kill 656,000 Chinese citizens each year, and polluted drinking water kills another 95,600. There is a film called "Industrial Landscapes" that is worth viewing. I try not to buy anything that's made in China, it is difficult and sometimes you don't have a choice but to buy something from there. They exploit their workers and have no regard for the enviroment, plus most of the products are crap!!
If Canada is giving them that much, I bet the US is giving them 10 times that in "Aid". The US needs to retract from most foreign aid, and let China give aid to everyone. The US is broke, and the wealthy economies of the world should step up and take control, we never wanted the job, and will be happy to stand back and let China run things for the next 300 years.
Guys, your perception of the US foreign aid is very much overblown. Many countries do more there relative to their size, count in all western Europe countries. But you have a point about asking how stupid it is to "help" poor China (oh, thank you for the few dollars, please put on them to the big heap over there...).
Web, death due to polluted water is likely to rise...
I sniffed a lion's vag at the zoo once. It was sleeping against the bars of its cage. The zoo keeper shouted at me but it was worth it. He didn't understand.
What...like the OBL t-shirts I see being worn by some in my neck of the woods. Some think it's just cool and ironic, but if you go down to songkla, pattani or narathiwat then they wear them because they would happily kill the likes of you, me and any infidel.... BTW the numbers dead in these three provinces equal the number of US soldiers over the last 4 years
Strange... no one really hears about that
That said there IS some awesome fishing in Cuba. Maybe it would be re-habilitative for the inmates there?
Welcome back C - just be aware that the Daily Mail is simply a trashy tabloid dressing itself up as a respectable mid-market newspaper; take much of what it says with a BIG pinch of salt
Well........so many heady, informed, incisive posts, amidst minor detritus deposited by those whose collective IQ barely reaches midway on the scale for bipedal mammals.
I think I have learned more in this thread than any other I can recall. Don't exactly agree with some (the Gitmo report especially), but all were illuminating. Gotta love this site when it works its best.
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