Category Archives: Robots

Quick links while uploading

An assortment of things I’ve read while I’ve been uploading things today

  • The golden age of Chicago prostitution – The Everleigh sisters are respoinsible for the term “get laid”. An interesting read – the more things change…
  • Rifle Robots!
  • John Allen Paulos has a new book out soon, I think it’s going to a more civil (and knowing Paulos well written and interesting) version of the recent Richard Dawkins screed. My favorite blurb from the Amazon page “A Lifelong Unbeliever Finds No Reason to Change His Mind”
  • How to build your business without quitting your day job
  • Firefox tune-ups
  • Conan O’Brian hates my homeland – favorites

    Brazil
    Home to more than 800 species of unregulated breast implants.

    Burkina Faso
    In the traditional tribal language, that’s Burkina for “land of” and Faso for “people who want to get the hell out of Burkina Faso.”

    Colombia
    You’ll come for the enticing beauty of the Caribbean Sea. You’ll stay because you’ve been kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a Dodge Dart.

    East Timor
    It takes a lot to admit you live on the bad side of Timor.

Saturday night reading

Monday link roundup

Tuesday Rapid Fire

Quick Monday rapid fire – fun addition

  • On the matter of remittances by immigrants to foreign countries

    Moreover, remittances are far more likely to make their way to people who actually need them. American aid tends to be received by governments, which in most third world countries are not especially honest. So the majority of American foreign aid never makes it to actual poor people in the developing world. In contrast, Latino immigrants are wiring money directly to their mothers. They know exactly who’s getting the money, and they’d hear about it if the government stole it from them. It probably even has foreign policy benefits, as the remitters are likely to have a generally positive impression of America and to transmit that impression along with their remittances.

    And the best part about all this is that it doesn’t cost us a dime! All we have to do is let them scrub our toilets and pick our strawberries. We get lower prices on the goods and services we buy and we get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing we’re helping to alleviate Latin American poverty. It’s such an incredible win-win arrangement that I find it rather depressing that it’s considered controversial in American politics. Increased immigration is a cause that should unite liberals (with their concern for social justice) and conservatives (with their belief in hard work and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, that’s not how the issue has played out in the real world.

    Very well put.

  • Gun toting robots!
  • From the mouths of ad executives
  • An original knife holder
  • Easily the best use of Flash I’ve seen in months
  • Quotes from Jim Webb, the Marine veteran and aspiring Democratic Senator from Virginia. Though nothing beats him saying “I wouldn’t walk across the street to watch Jane Fonda slash her wrists.”
  • A FoxNews empolyee gets waterboarded, sadly it’s not their web designers (their site gets worse by the day, though, still no Lou Dobbs, happily)
  • Iron Man is about to be real!
  • This looks quite interesting

Quick rapid fire

I hope to have my election predictions tommorow, but in the meantime…

Robots!

Sweet!

Microsoft Unveils Robotics Studio

The early release targets academic, hobbyist and commercial developers with a toolset for building applications that can run on a variety of robotics computing platforms.
Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday launched a technology preview of Robotics Studio, a Windows-based development environment for creating robotic applications.

The early release targets academic, hobbyist and commercial developers with a toolset for building applications that can run on a variety of robotics computing platforms, the company said. Early partners include the LEGO Group.

“We’ve reached out to a broad range of leading robotics companies and academics early on in the development process and are thrilled with the positive response from the community,” Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group, said in a statement.

The Microsoft site is located here.

On the other hand, some people are concerned with Robot Sex.

Thursday Rapid Fire

The rapid fire is almost a daily feature now.