Willow Garage To Give Away 10 Open Source Robots 44
kkleiner writes "Open source robotics received a huge momentum boost last Friday. Willow Garage, one of the driving forces behind the Robot Operating System, announced that it would be giving away ten of its new and extraordinary PR2 Beta Robots. Willow Garage has an open call for proposals, so that any research group can apply to receive one of the PR2 Betas free of charge. Applicants will have to release their research with the PR2 freely and under standard open source agreements. In this way, Willow Garage is accelerating the field of robotics, not just by making their PR2 Betas available, but by encouraging the shared development of robots and advocating an open source approach."
Linux should be banned (Score:0, Funny)
Women make up 51 percent of the population, and because of this, Linux
should be banned in government. Operating Systems like Linux discriminate
against women because of a built in difficulty compared with Windows and
Apple's OS X.
Women pay taxes, and therefore shouldn't be discriminated against in getting
employment with government agencies. If these agencies had used Windows or
OS X, more women would be able to persue dreams of a full time job in
government. Linux is by its nature a man's domain. Women are designed to use
social interaction and emotions to deal with complex tasks, things the
command line are ill suited.
OS X, and Windows have friendly and female-intuitive designs that take into
account a woman's understanding of objects, ie. folders, desktops, Clippy,
the XP search dog. These help women operate the computer by giving her a
relationship with these icons, and helpful animated pets. It makes a woman
feel at home with her computer by allowing her to relate to it.
Linux, on the other hand is designed for command line and programming. Sure,
it may have a fugly GUI to hide its true being, but to get any serious work
done you must know a bunch of arcane commands with hundreds of options that
change with every command. Something like this: chmod a+rwx. Only engineers
can understand this. And most engineers are still men. This puts the female
population at a great disadvantage when applying for work. Men know this,
and that's why they deliberately try to install linux in the workplace.
How would women's groups react when they read the studies that are being
commissioned by industry on this very subject? Surely, women, when they
learn of this, will outvote men and ban linux from the government.
What kind of shape is that (Score:3, Funny)
You can't put a very realistic human face/body over that robot to make a Terminator. How exactly is one to start the apocalypse without an army of humanoid robots?
Re:Free? (Score:4, Funny)
I wouldn't use such sophisticated machines for something as trivial as a prom! I have a driveway that needs shovelling!
Shover Bot (Score:1, Funny)
I notice that Willow Garage is near a large VA Hospital. Perhaps the robot could be used to push old people out of harms way?