] Move over Bionic Man and make room for BLEEX the
] Berkeley Lower Extremities Exoskeleton, with strap-on
] robotic legs designed to turn an ordinary human into a
] super strider.
]
] Ultimately intended to help people like soldiers or
] firefighters carry heavy loads for long distances, these
] boots are made for marching.
]
] "The design of this exoskeleton really benefits from
] human intellect and the strength of the machine," says
] Homayoon Kazerooni, who directs the Robotics and Human
] Engineering Laboratory at the University of
] California-Berkeley.
]
] The exoskeleton consists of a pair of mechanical metal
] leg braces that include a power unit and a backpack-like
] frame. The braces are attached to a modified pair of Army
] boots and are also connected, although less rigidly, to
] the user's legs.
]
] More than 40 sensors and hydraulic mechanisms function
] like a human nervous system, constantly calculating how
] to distribute the weight being borne and create a minimal
] load for the wearer.

USATODAY.com - Robotic legs could produce an army of super troopers

] Our system comes with its own "in-home" Hydrogen
] generator which allows you to manufacture fuel yourself
] at near zero cost.
]
] Our Hydrogen conversion is an intermediate approach
] that simply converts your existing vehicle to burn
] Hydrogen or Gasoline. The Gasoline fuel system remains
] intact and is not modified. This allows you to switch
] between running on Gasoline or Hydrogen at any time. The
] engine itself is only slightly modified, the conversion
] makes substantial changes to the computer & electrical
] system, ignition and cooling systems. Since they never
] have to be removed, Hydrogen fuel storage (Hydride tanks)
] can be installed in virtually any available space within
] the vehicle..
]
] The system consists of two parts, the Hydrogen fuel
] system in your vehicle, and a Hydrogen generating system
] that remains in your garage. The Hydrogen generator is
] either powered by solar panels on the roof of your house,
] a wind turbine set-up ( both of which makes your Hydrogen
] fuel at virtually no cost ) or with standard 110 volt AC
] power for rapid refueling. -LB

Hydrogen Fuel Systems

] There developers creating "virtual Earth"
]
] The Department of Defense is commissioning a re-creation
] of the entire planet from online-sim maker.
]
] As a rule, the developers of There prefer calling their
] creation a "virtual world" rather than a "game."
]
] Now it looks like that statement will no longer be
] hyperbole.
]
] According to a report on the BBC and HomeLAN Fed, the
] Department of Defense has commissioned the Menlo Park,
] California, company to create a replica of the entire
] planet. According to the report, the Earth sim will be to
] scale, featuring real-world distances--so if a user's
] avatar wanted to spend three months riding a bike around
] the Australian coastline, it could.
]
] Besides offering simulated warfare, the virtual Earth
] will also help soldiers hone their social interaction
] skills and practice noncombat duties like peacekeeping,
] policing, and reconnaissance. Although the only city
] currently in the sim is Kuwait City, the Defense
] Department plans to add many major metropolises by the
] time the Earth simulation goes live in September 2004

Cool! -LB

There developers creating 'virtual Earth'

"only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds."

the Polytron

] An MIT graduate student won the Lemelson-MIT Student
] Prize and $30,000 on Thursday for inventing a device that
] makes low-cost eyeglass lenses within 10 minutes. Saul
] Griffith, a 30-year-old doctoral candidate, also created
] electronic goggles that diagnose vision problems.
]
] Griffith, who grew up in Sydney, Australia, said that as
] a child he took apart anything he could %u2014 from
] Christmas toys to his mother's camera %u2014 to see how
] they worked.
]
]
] Saul Griffith holds an eyeglass lens made with the
] machine he invented which may allow the manufacture of
] lower-cost eyeglasses.
]
] Josh Reynolds, AP
]
]
] He tried a number of what he called "fairly crazy
] schemes" before coming up with a desktop printer-like
] device that uses liquid-filled molds to produce low-cost
] lenses quickly and cheaply.
]
] Griffith became interested the project after a Kenyan
] official told him that an eyeglass scarcity was one of
] that country's biggest problems.
]
] Mass-produced lenses are fairly cheap, but an inventory
] of thousands of lenses must be kept on hand to meet
] various vision problems. That's too expensive in some
] parts of the world.
]
] Griffith's invention uses baby oil to shape car window
] tinting film into a mold. A polymer is poured in between,
] and the lens is ready in five to 10 minutes.

Pretty cool application of technology. “Just in time” manufacturing has long fascinated me, but it seems to be better suited for small runs of a product like books or CD’s / DVD’s. Even with “thousands of prescriptions”, one finds it hard to believe acrylic lenses could not be made much cheaper (like for a few cents each) ‘en masse” using injection molds on assembly lines. Why must lenses be kept on hand in these 3’rd world areas themselves? Why not give these people vision tests, produce the prescriptions to order and ship them in? Further reduce costs by offering one style and size lens – plain round “Harry Potter / John Lennon” style (when glasses are a necessity half the world can’t afford, they are not a fashion statement). Besides, round lenses mean you can use the same lens for either eye, further reducing production and inventory costs. Once the economic model is established, it should be a simple matter of supply and demand.

With this lads system, you run into the problem of manufacturing TIME. 10 minutes per lens doesn’t sound like a lot of time, and it isn’t compared to the hand crafted lens shops that promise you glasses in about an hour. But compound it against a billion people who need glasses (that’s 2 billion lenses) and it works out to roughly 38,000 man-years. So put 10,000 of these systems in production, and you can outfit the entire world with glasses in under 4 years (of production time!) but is it really going to be cheaper than assembly lines with this kind of volume? It’s certainly not going to be faster - 2 billion units is a LOT of units.

I enjoyed the article and applaud this kid’s ability to think out of the box. I think the idea is a noble one, but it's not a sound business model.

LB

Student honored for device that makes quick, cheap eyeglass lenses

] The music industry, which this week filed suit against
] another 531 Internet users, says its tactics are slowing
] the tide of free downloads, citing cases like Kullberg's.
]
] A study released in January that surveyed 1,358 Internet
] users in late fall found the number of Americans
] downloading music dropped by half %u2014 17 million fewer
] countrywide %u2014 compared with six months earlier.
]
] But some experts and users say that file sharers are only
] being more secretive, and that file swapping is actually
] increasing. At least two research firms say more than 150
] million songs are being downloaded free every month.

The RIAA need only do the math to figure out why this is happening. A buck a track? 18 cuts will cost me $18??? There is no physical product to press, package, ship, distribute and stick on a retail rack. The irony is that several "middle men" have been cut from the equasion yet the labels have a larger profit margin (bandwidth/disk space = cheap). Drop the price per track to what it SHOULD cost - about 25 cents a pop and their online sales should soar.

Apparently they didn't think consumers were smart enough to figure out they were STILL being ripped off. The RIAA fucked up - again.

Download lawsuits scare some, but song trading still popular

A California inventor has developed a book-binding machine that makes it cheap and easy to print professional-quality books within minutes. Industry analysts say the device could make it possible for consumers to purchase previously hard-to-find texts at most bookstores.

Brewster Kahle likes it.

In a few years, the term "bookstore" may refer to one of those little kiosks in the mall, where today they sell incense, neckties, cheap jewelry, and what-not. It will consist of a keyboard, a plasma display, and a small box resembling an inkjet printer.

One could envision using this flexible technology to sell 'scalable' books. If the 1,181 page version of "The Codebreakers" is too much detail for you, perhaps you'd prefer the 500 page version, or the 250 page version with a focus on pre-20th century technology.

Interested in the latest Harry Potter book? Choose anywhere from 100 to 1,000 pages in length, depending on how much time you have to spend. Buying it for the kids, and want to delete the dark parts of the story? Easy.

How about a version of the LOTR trilogy without all of the poetry and the songs? Done. Care to drop the pages-long descriptions of minutia unrelated to the plot, too? Done. Illustrated, or text only?

Music retail outlets could do this today with audio CDs; it's not clear why they don't. There is simply no good reason why you should ever walk out of Tower Records empty handed because the clerk said, "we don't have that in stock, but we could order it for you and have it here in seven to ten business days."

A good-sized Tower Records has on the order of $1 million in inventory on hand. For a million dollars, the store could buy more than a petabyte of online disk storage, on which they could store more than two million different full length albums in CD quality (not MPEG encoded), along with high quality cover art and liner notes. By comparison, online music services like iTunes and Rhapsody offer only 30,000 to 40,000 different CDs.

Book-Binding Technique Could Revive Rare Texts

This is fun to watch, and doesn't take up *too* much bandwidth. It also lets you watch the NASA side of the broadcast as they're answering questions from foreign interviewers. Like I watched one segment, where I didn't get to hear the questions that were being asked, but did watch the NASA scientist reply to their questions in Spanish!

Today they're talking about how they're going to name the Mars Rover's landing site after the astronauts who died in the shuttle disaster: "Columbia Memorial Station".

Live stream from NASA TV

] Check the year-end reports from the various sectors of
] the entertainment industry, and it's clear that DVD
] stands alone as an unqualified sensation. It's such a
] success that it might even be eclipsing - and
] cutting into - other leisure pursuits.
]
] Each DVD amounts to a consumer devoting money and time to
] watching a movie at home, sometimes in lieu of going to a
] theater or watching TV or listening to a CD.

Are you listening to this RIAA? Its *NOT* only peer2peer trading that is responsible for your sagging sales. There are a number of factors, and probably the biggest is that other entertainment avenues are taking a larger slice of the pie.

If you'd listen, you'd hear consumers voting (with their cash) that other entertainment avenues currently represent a better value for the money then a mediocre CD with 2 good tracks.

LB

DVD's success steals the show

ryan is the supernicety wrote:
] ] AOL's 'Top 10 Spam Email Subject Lines' of 2003:*
] ]
] ] 1. Viagra online (also: xanax, valium, xenical,
] ] phentermine, soma, celebrex, valtrex, zyban, fioricet,
] ] adipex, etc.)
] ] 2. Online pharmacy (also: 'online prescriptions'; 'meds
] ] online')
] ] 3. Get out of debt (also: 'special offer')
] ] 4. Get bigger (also: 'satisfy your partner'; 'improve
] ] your sex life')
] ] 5. Online degree (also: 'online diploma')
] ] 6. Lowest mortgage rates (also: 'lower your mortgage
] ] rates'; 'refinance'; 'refi')
] ] 7. Lowest insurance rates (also: 'lower your insurance
] ] now')
] ] 8. Work from home (also: 'be your own boss')
] ] 9. Hot XXX action (also: 'teens'; 'porn')
] ] 10. As seen on oprah
]
] ] * - Source: AOL. This list is unscientific, and is not in
] ] any specific order. The cited email subject headers are
] ] not ranked by volume.
]
] Also noted in the press release-- AOL blocked nearly half a
] trillion spams this year.

AMAZING! I think I've seen all of these in my own iboxes at least a dozent times each!

RE: America Online | Press Releases