I just want a roomba.

Best comment yet.

I’ve thought for a while that the best robot for house-to-house MOUT fighting would be a swarm of small flying sensors that would all be linked to one brain. The troopies outside would have a live 3D model of the place and real-time intel on anybody moving around inside. Once you find the bad guys, send in the killer robot to seal the deal.

Get rid of the flippers and let one of these puppies run ahead of each humvee with a metal detector and cell-phone sniffer.
Right. Don’t forget to add an arm waving a slab of bacon. They’ll never touch em’.

BacaDog on November 9, 2007 at 8:04 PM

A slice will do, no need to waste a whole slab. Add a gun that fires through the bacon if the ‘bot “sees” a bad guy target. And let the bad guys know about that feature.

And also reminded me of the injector spiders from Runaway.

Reaps on November 9, 2007 at 11:22 PM

I was thinking more along the lines of an all-terrain lock-on.

And also reminded me of the injector spiders from Runaway.

- The Cat

I know there’s supposed to be an umlaut over the o in Mobius, but I don’t do cut and paste diacritical marks.

Just learn HTML Entities

Möbius => Möbius

The key to bypassing the spam filter’s prohibition against words like “socia‍list” (which contains the sequence “Cia‍lis“, a popular topic of spa‍ms) is there too.

I for one, welcome our new great-dane sized, smarter than kasparov robot overlords. what else are we gon’ do?

From the looks of things, the same thing we did millions of years ago -climb the nearest tree!

Moebius.

I know there’s supposed to be an umlaut over the o in Mobius, but I don’t do cut and paste diacritical marks.

(Or do you mean the Moebius Syndrome, of permanent facial paralysis?)

Or Moe Howard, known for fighting with machines in the 1930′s?

Get rid of the flippers and let one of these puppies run ahead of each humvee with a metal detector and cell-phone sniffer.

Right. Don’t forget to add an arm waving a slab of bacon. They’ll never touch em’.

…

I for one, welcome our new great-dane sized, smarter than kasparov robot overlords. what else are we gon’ do?

And from then on, God help us, we will have armed a Nemesis with all of our secrets …and none of our natural restraint.

(Since it is not “alive”, it will not care about “life”.)

profitsbeard on November 9, 2007 at 6:41 PM

With this:

I look forward to the 2008 model, with an indestructable, 360 degree, all-seeing, top-mounted, satellite controlled eye, and front and rear 50 calibre, fully automatic weapons and grenade launching capability.

Jaibones on November 9, 2007 at 6:52 PM

Me thinks this might end badly. Quickly! But badly.

…they just throw us a bone like this every once and a while to keep us appeased.

RightWinged on November 9, 2007 at 6:02 PM

And I, for one, am appeased.

That said, I look forward to the 2008 model, with an indestructable, 360 degree, all-seeing, top-mounted, satellite controlled eye, and front and rear 50 calibre, fully automatic weapons and grenade launching capability.

Do they know…?

Reflection, which is the essence of “knowing”, will only occur by accident.

A feedback loop / mobius strip / porous mirror event.

And from then on, God help us, we will have armed a Nemesis with all of our secrets …and none of our natural restraint.

(Since it is not “alive”, it will not care about “life”.)

As everyone from Mary Shelley, onward, has tried to warn.

(Asimov’s Laws of Robotics will be blown away like a quaint doily.)