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Robotics

Silicon Valley Library Tests Book-Returning Robot Created By Google (siliconvalley.com) 44

Posted by EditorDavid from the I'm-feeling-lucky dept.
What if a robot came to your house to retrieve library books? An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup: Residents in downtown Mountain View have gotten their first peek at the future with the debut of BookBot, the library's newest non-human helper. A creation of Google's Area 120 -- an experimental division of the technology juggernaut -- the bot is the company's first personal delivery robot to hit the streets and begin interacting with the public, said Christian Bersch, the project's team lead. It's part of a program to test the waters of what could be possible for autonomous, electric robots, he said...

The pilot will run for nine months with a human handler following behind the BookBot for the first six months, he said. That's just to make sure it's operating as planned, get it out of trouble as needed and observe how people are responding. After that, a human will sit behind the controls remotely. And, on a recent Thursday, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Children shrieked at the sight of the robot and immediately jumped in its path to see if it would stop. (It does...) Users must schedule the pickup time in advance, which -- because the bot is fairly popular -- means planning at least a week ahead. It can carry up to about 10 items, Bersch said, depending on the size of the books.

Comment Or... (Score 2) 121

Or, you could tell your future-self to have your new robot hack Jibo to refer to a virtual server spun up ad-hoc by the new unit instead of the long-dead remote servers. PRESTO, your new robot has 2 avitars instead of one. ( ok, one has a lot less capacity than the other. But a hack that was set up with a long-game of years is always worth doing)
Power

Scientists Create Super-Thin 'Sheet' That Could Charge Our Phones (theguardian.com) 116

Posted by BeauHD from the energy-harvesting dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created super-thin, bendy materials that absorb wireless internet and other electromagnetic waves in the air and turn them into electricity. The lead researcher, Tomas Palacios, said the breakthrough paved the way for energy-harvesting covers ranging from tablecloths to giant wrappers for buildings that extract energy from the environment to power sensors and other electronics. Details have been published in the journal Nature. Palacios and his colleagues connected a bendy antenna to a flexible semiconductor layer only three atoms thick. The antenna picks up wifi and other radio-frequency signals and turns them into an alternating current. This flows into the molybdenum disulphide semiconductor, where it is converted into a direct electrical current. [M]olybdenum disulphide film can be produced in sheets on industrial roll-to-roll machines, meaning they can be made large enough to capture useful amounts of energy.

Ambient wifi signals can fill an office with more than 100 microwatts of power that is ripe to be scavenged by energy-harvesting devices. The MIT system has an efficiency of between 30% and 40%, producing about 40 microwatts when exposed to signals bearing 150 microwatts of power in laboratory tests. "It doesn't sound like much compared with the 60 watts that a computer needs, but you can still do a lot with it," Palacios said. "You can design a wide range of sensors, for environmental monitoring or chemical and biological sensing, which operate at the single microwatt level. Or you could store the electricity in a battery to use later."
Television

Ask Slashdot: Is Today's Technology As Cool As You'd Predicted When You Were Young? 352

Posted by EditorDavid from the back-to-the-future dept.
"How does the actual, purchaseable consumer technology available in 2019 compare to what you -- back in the 1960s, '70s, '80s or '90s -- thought consumer technology might look like around the year 2020?" asks Slashdot reader dryriver. Is today's consumer technology as advanced, inventive, groundbreaking and empowering as you imagined it would be 30, 40, 50 years ago? Or is the "technological future that has now actually arrived" different, in various ways, from how you'd hoped/imagined it might be a few decades back?

If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.

"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?

Comment Re:Avoid American-made chipsets and phones (Score 0) 112

Actually, no... The whole point is that you CAN prove ( in a court of law) that the GPS data in the phone is also tied by various bio-markers to the Person who owns the phone. With gyro-metric information about the person's gate ( yes, just like the scene from a Mission Impossible movie lately... it IS real tech) , and micro-measure pressure on keystrokes providing fingerprint-like confidence in identity. That's actually the WHOLE POINT of this technology. ( but full disclosure: I didn't read the article, but I DID attend a briefing about this project less than a week ago. -- The briefing wasn't at the classified level, but there was an attendance fee, so it wasn't quite "open to the public")

Comment why I don't use the app.. (Score 1) 183

Firefox for android works fine for when I choose to brows Facebook from my phone. -- you can no longer send messages without the separate massager app (so, I don't use them). I've just told my friends not to use that method to get a hold of me and Presto! ... I know that any message showing there is from somebody who doesn't know me.

Comment Re:this is why... (Score 3, Insightful) 66

by RobertNotBob (#56222353) Attached to: Leaked Files Show How the NSA Tracks Other Countries' Hackers
What? Why?... The only actual content from this article that I can see is that WHEN the NSA has compromised a system, they look to see if anybody else has also owned the box. ... That's not untrustworthy Government, that is sound, logical procedure. And every single White-Hat organization does this. --- Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for the NSA, but I'm not going to blame them for using industry recognized Best Practices.

Comment Is that wisdom? (Score 1) 15

by RobertNotBob (#56203277) Attached to: Best Buy To Close All 250 of Its Smaller, Mobile Phone Stores
Sometimes, citing justification for your actions calls attention to the wisdom of your actions. - Sure. - But sometimes, it just calls attention to how foolish that you have been all along. -- quote :: "85 percent of existing standalone Mobile stores are within three miles of a Big Box store." :: - Who allowed that to happen in the First Place?

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