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Robotics

The Best Robots of 2009 51

kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."
Movies

Hollywood Backs Swedish Movie Streaming Site 156

paulraps writes "Forget Spotify and Skype: the latest strangely-named-but-hey-it's-free service from Sweden offers users streamed on-demand movies free of charge, has deals with two major Hollywood studios, and is called Voddler. Since its launch two weeks ago, the service has signed up a quarter of a million users and has almost the same number queuing for an invitation. After signing deals with Disney and Paramount, the company provides access to thousands of films, which are shown uninterrupted after a barrage of ads. The target is the file-sharing generation: 'Our customers can be sure that Voddler is totally legal, secure, and that there are no risks of computer viruses infecting their machines from downloaded files,' says executive vice president Zoran Slavic."
Programming

An Experiment In BlackBerry Development 207

ballwall writes "We've all read the stories about how lucrative selling apps on the iPhone can be (or not), but what about other platforms? BlackBerry accounts for twice as many handsets shipped as Apple, according to Gartner, so I decided to find out. I wrote about my experiences developing my first BlackBerry application including sales, platform issues, and a bunch of other things I thought new mobile developers might want to know about."
Portables

OLPC Downsizes Half of Its Staff, Cuts Sugar 379

One Laptop Per Chewbacca writes "Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that the organization will be laying off half of its staff, cutting salaries of the remaining employees, and ending its involvement in Sugar development. The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows. Ars Technica concludes: 'The OLPC project's extreme dependence on economy of scale has proven to be a fatal error. The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology.'"
Apple

Apple Intros 17" Unibody MBP, DRM-Free iTunes 1079

Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.

Comment It really comes down to the parenting and parents (Score 1) 321

Kids are going to do what their parents do. If they are over-consuming then more than likely their parents are as well.
IMO, a major problem with the overweight issue in society is that food is used to fill missing holes, mostly those of a
spiritual and pyschological nature. It is also about the time that is spent in actually eating the food. I got in the bad
habit of wolfing down every meal after I went through Army Infantry basic back in 90 and over the years the calorie burning
fell off but the eating habits didn't. It takes a lot of work to break that kind of habit. A lot of people basically eat too fast
and don't give their systems time enough to deactivate the hunger signals.

It is up to parents to monitor the kid's habits and to guide them in healthy and positive ways (as well as leading by example, which is the most important)
which include all aspects of their existence. Sticking kid's in front of television to keep them busy while they are toddlers usually
ends up developing a kid that has a need to watch tv all the time and I think without moderation of virtual environments you develop kids
that can't function well in non-vr or projected environments. I think that this is the reason for so many kids being prescribed Adderal and Ritalin
in order to keep them "calm". I think the most important way to handle these issues (too much immersion in video based play or watching, overeating and
the inability to function in group environments) is through guidance and moderation. It will take a holistic approach that I believe should include
meditation and quiet time for introspection without the constant onslaught of our media saturated world. I also think that kids have to be shown how important
exercise and outdoor/nature play is to a healthy mind and body.

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