Frolix-8

Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

Frolix_8 will be in cold-pac for a short while, to undergo essential body maintenance. Re-entry is scheduled for June.

Ubik - "A friend of mine, who went to college at MIT around 1980, had a classmate who was the son of an undertaker..."
Second Variety - "Some robots are already stronger, faster and smarter than humans. We want to do better than people, to ultimately save more lives."

The Electric Ant - "That something tragic and overwhelming is about to happen is the feeling which grips you at once when, in the opening scene of R.U.R., you behold the automatic girl typist at work, with her uncanny efficiency and inhumanly expressionless white face; and when you hear her say, in even tones, to a sympathetic human girl, that she will "cease to move" after they have cut her open."

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Walt Whitman's Best Friend Wrote The First Robot Revolution Story

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Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

Twitter Tuesday. Unlikely.

The Unreconstructed M - "The robots are intended to be about 1 pound each, be smart enough to detect and navigate around obstacles and ultimately cheap enough to be considered disposable."
Second Variety - "The "uncanny valley" refers to robots that remind us of corpses and zombies. So it's partly the stiffness and jerky motion, as well as the feeling of deadness, that creep us out."

The Crack In Space - "This does not prove we systematically eradicated the Neanderthals or that we regularly ate their flesh. But it does add to the evidence that competition from modern humans probably contributed to Neanderthal extinction."

Radio Free Albemuth - "One mention of Sylvester McCoy and it all kicks off."

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Bow Down Before Your Killer Robot Overlords

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Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

Out In The Dark-Haired Girl Day Fields

VALIS - "A regular pulse, amid the random clatter of the cosmos, suggests that someone very smart at the other end is sending a message."

The Hood Maker - "When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds."

Piper In The Woods - "Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness...But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream – much more active than when we focus on routine tasks."

Radio Free Albemuth - "I don't have three hands."

A Scanner Darkly - "Over the last decade, CCTV accounted for more than threequarters of total spending on crime prevention by the British Home Office."

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Is Sci-Fi TV Too Scary For British Kids?

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Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

The Electric Ant - "They call Lara autonomous, but state that she can only move her limbs based on commands. Their reason for calling her autonomous is that she doesn’t need to be tethered to a computer to do this. Does that really qualify as autonomy?"

We Can Build You - "Robots use mathematics internally to navigate, but that's not the way you want them to relate to people cohabiting with a machine."

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Was 1971 the best year to be born a geek?

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Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

The Unreconstructed M - "Coupled with a dramatically different leg mechanism and unique gaited behavior, this robot exhibits rapid climbing (upwards of 22 cm/s) up a vertical surface such as a telephone pole. "

The Ganymede Takeover - "Instead of steering light to make a region of space look empty, the illusion cloak manipulates light in a way that makes a region of space look as if it contains a specific object. So any object within that region of space, a mouse say, takes on the appearance of an elephant."

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General: We Just Might Nuke Those Cyber Attackers

For Building DIY Droids, It Helps to Live In Japan

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Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

Radio Free Albemuth - "Not too surprisingly, one finds China, North Korea, Belarus, and Russia at the top of the list. But the next slots are occupied by the UK (England and Wales), the US, Singapore, Israel, France, and Germany."

The Hood Maker - "Distinctive brain patterns could become the latest subject of biometric scanning after EU researchers successfully tested technology to verify ­identities for security checks."

Stability - "The public should be able to identify streets where they don't feel safe and get their local force or council to take action."

The Ganymede Takeover - "Just imagine dosing people at a party, or using it as a weapon to cause confusion among our enemies."

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Flow Our Money, The Dick-Heads Say

So the merry fellows over at Halcyon are movie-fying Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said after their new Terminator skin-job. So says Alex Billington over at firstshowing.net :

'The Halcyon Co. guys are very smart and they know how to handle a good story and take care of a franchise,' states Alex, in what one hopes is not premature optimism. The Jason Taverner celebrity-wakes-up-to-find-he's-nobody plotline should be fairly straightforward. What they make of Felix Bowman's secret incestuous marriage to his reality-warping, bisexual, nymphomaniac, sado-masochistic, junkie sister remains to be seen. The merch deal with McDonald's should be interesting... don't all good films have those these days?

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Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

Twitter Tuesday Can Damage Your Health

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer - "The opening copy is pretty terrific. Unfortunately, the text grows clunky and wearisome and, almost as if to alleviate the boredom, horrifyingly violent."

Pay For The Printer - "The D_Shape Mega Scale 3DPrinter uses a special structure and print head to "print out" three-dimensional structures up to 6x6 meters in size."

James P. Crow - "HIRO is primarily intended as a development platform; the company believes that it is necessary to challenge roboticists to create a new generation of robot technology that will lead to save human/robot work environments."

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Robots crash into dummies, identify human weaknesses

The Sun Is Weaker Than It's Been In 80 Years, Apparently

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Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

Float Away On Dark-Haired Girl Day

Martian Time-Slip - "...Saya needs to work on improving her classroom management skills. At present, she can’t do much more than call out names and shout orders like “Be quiet.” But that does not make her any less popular with the kids."

The Minority Report - "...up to now it has been very difficult for neuroscientists to deal with the idea of intentions or wishes or will."

A Scanner Darkly - "The Mexican drug cartel? Absolutely not. Never would. That is something absolutely foreign to everything in my body."

Radio Free Albemuth - "He was pretty much inciting the crowd. He could not be called an observer. I don't believe in conspiracy theories but this really struck me."

Vulcan's Hammer - "More than just computers that think, Darpa wants to re-envision how thought works — and then design computers whose thought processes are governed by the same laws as our own."

Nanny - "Designers of the spiffy little guy seem to think that owners will bond to it as if it were a pet."

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These scams are atrocious. Worse is the lack of remorse

New Surrogates Video Peels Back The Fleshy Robot Skin For Further Investigation

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Which PKD Story Are We In Today ?

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep ? - "...a new study that follows in the steps of celebrated neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield - directly stimulating patients' brains with electrodes and observing the effects on behaviour and sensation."

We Can Build You - "RoMeLa researchers envision CHARLI one day roaming the VT campus making friends with students and visitors."

The Zap Gun - "It’s the closest thing we have right now to the phasers on the television series 'Star Trek'."

Now Wait For Last Year - "Of course, the whole thing becomes a really interesting study in human cooperation, machine-human relationships, as well as how a piece of technology's cuteness is a big determining factor in whether it gets what it wants."

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Every President But Bush Is a Godless Heathen

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