Hulleye Comes By!

another robot story. this time, the president of japan gets attacked. sign of the times?

over up at the keyhole community, we get wind of the fact that over a 100 new cities have been remapped for google earth. this time it includes karachi which is at 1 foot per pixel. thats mighty darned sharp.

here is my home in karachi. unfortunately the resolution on google maps isn’t as great as it is on google earth. so anyone who has google earth, give it a shot.

cities added include:

0 .7m/pixel
Aguas Calientes, Amman, Anchorage, Athens, Baghdad, Barcelona, Basra, Belgrade, Belo Horizonte, Boise City, Brasillia, Brisbane, Canberra, Cape Town, Casablanca, Durban, Fairbanks, Fortaleza, Guadalajara, Halifax, Helena, Honolulu, Istanbul, Karachi, Las Vegas, Lima, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Madrid, Naples, Perth, Quebec, Regina, Reval, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, San Antonio, San Jose (CA), San Salvador, Santiago, Santo Domingo, Saskatoon, Skopje, Spokane, Tunis, Vancouver, Windhoek, Winnipeg

Mt. Everest

Berlin, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Hamburg, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Mexico City

1ft/pixel
Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Kansas City, Long Beach, Memphis, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Niagara, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, St. Louis, Washington DC

San Francisco, Cleveland, Lexington, Mobile, Seattle, Sea Island, Harrisburg, Salt Lake City

6in/pixel
Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, Jersey City, Las Vegas,Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, St. Paul, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Washington DC

Finally, the Google Mountain View Campus is at 1in/pixel.

maybe i should stop signing up at all these weird sites. a friend got this in the mail today. click on the image to enlarge. i found it rather amusing. i guess i should also change my status to married. heh.

so that high school that got free laptops, is in for some trouble. turns out that there is a school district near philadelphia who had a similar pilot project going on and had handed over iBook’s to all of it’s students. unfortunately 13 of the kids are being charged with felonies.

They’re being called the Kutztown 13 — a group of high schoolers charged with felonies for bypassing security with school-issued laptops, downloading forbidden internet goodies and using monitoring software to spy on district administrators.

The students, their families and outraged supporters say authorities are overreacting, punishing the kids not for any heinous behavior — no malicious acts are alleged — but rather because they outsmarted the district’s technology workers….

The trouble began last fall after the district issued some 600 Apple iBook laptops to every student at the high school about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The computers were loaded with a filtering program that limited Internet access. They also had software that let administrators see what students were viewing on their screens.

But those barriers proved easily surmountable: The administrative password that allowed students to reconfigure computers and obtain unrestricted Internet access was easy to obtain. A shortened version of the school’s street address, the password was taped to the backs of the computers.

The password got passed around and students began downloading such forbidden programs as the popular iChat instant-messaging tool.

At least one student viewed pornography. Some students also turned off the remote monitoring function and turned the tables on their elders_ using it to view administrators’ own computer screens.

Here is some good commentary on the issue.

What the parents don’t mention — but the school did in a press release— is that it wasn’t as if the school came down with the Hammer of God out of nowhere.
These kids were caught and punished for doing this stuff, and their parents informed.

Over and over.

Quoth the release:

“Unfortunately, after repeated warnings and disciplinary actions, a few students continued to misuse the school-issued laptops to varying degrees. The disciplinary actions included detentions, in-school suspensions, loss of Internet access, and loss of computer privileges. After each disciplinary action, parents received either written notification or telephone calls.”

What was the parents’ reaction those disciplinary actions? Some of them complained that — despite signing a document agreeing to the acceptable use policy — the kids should be able to do whatever they wanted to with the free machines.

“We signed it, but we didn’t mean it”?

Yes, the kids should be punished. No, a felony comviction is not the way to punish them.

The problem is that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Breaking the rules is what kids do. Society needs to deal with that, yes, but it needs to deal with that in a way that doesn’t ruin lives. Deterrence is critical if we are to ever have a lawful society on the internet, but deterrence has to come from rational prosecution. This simply isn’t rational.

thanks bruce.

so first we had the the female android. next we came to the robot roommate. after that we brought you the robot to play catch with. now it seems that robots can fall and get up all on their own with no prob. you think that it seems like childplay, not really for a humanoid robot weighing in at 60 kg named R. Daneel. here is a link to the new scientist article about the bot, and here is a link to the 13MB mpg video.