Here's 2018 in a nutshell for you... Russian super robot turns out to be man in robot suit Every year Russia holds – and broadcasts on state television – a tech showcase of its latest products for an audience of hundreds of school kids. This year's PROJECT show, which took place on Tuesday, was dominated by Boris the Robot, who was able to not just walk and talk but also dance and do math. He was, the show and the …
This quote is often wrongly attributed to either Lenin or Goebbels. While this was surely Goebbels credo, I believe it is actually from the novel “The Crown of a Life” (1869) by Isa Blagden.
Btw., Russians are rather surprised when you attribute this to Lenin. Even in the Western countries this misconception has only come up about a decade ago. But I guess if you repeat it often enough...
There's your Goebbels again. ;-P
"And that is the world in 2018: where people go to great lengths to persuade you of one reality and then, when it is exposed, insist that they never did any such thing and it's all of you that are at fault for claiming it ever happened like that in the first place"
And that has been Russia since 1917.
"The fact that he had no external sensors and danced like, well, a man stuck inside of robot suit trying to dance like a robot, rather than a machine trying to approximate human dancing"
Indeed. They should have got Tik and Tok out of retirement (assuming they're not still going!) instead.
(Anyone else remember trying to do that "robotic head movement" thing as a kid in the early 80s?)
>Wasn't Putin in there, was it? Make a change if someone else pulled HIS strings!
A 9-year-old using email? I don't believe it! I didn't think they'd even know what that is nowadays...
("It was like Instagram, dearie, except that you didn't need to include a heavily-doctored selfie or an artfully-arranged picture of your lunch with every message")
At least she has a healthy sense of scepticism.
If by "indoctrinated", you mean she is encouraged to think for herself, then I'm guilty as charged. However, I must take offense at your characterization of email as "archaic", Sir or Madam. Unless, of course, you can name a single Fortune-1000 that doesn't list email as one of their most important business tools. Until then, I expect a full and complete retraction of your heinous comment.
There is a very BIG incentive to rig things in state "tech" competitions in (ex) Eastern Europe. The tradition goes back decades :) If you win your school gets a massive chunk of funding direct or indirect in the next academic year. If you are somewhere in the middle of nowhere in a bankrupt region somewhere in the middle of Siberia the incentive to cheat is immense
I have seen it myself and I have had blazing rows with refs myself as a part of a student team who tried to win fair and square in similar events (not in USSR, another Eastern Block country).
"Either way, it's bye-bye Boris and our hopes for a dancing robot this year."
We still have the dancing Maybot. As she won her leadership ballot by a good margin tonight then Boris might still rue the day he supported misleading "facts" on the side of a bus.
When someone apparently makes something difficult look easy - you need to examine their calculations.
"More like 67:33 - an entire 3rd of the party don't support her - hardly a ringng endorsement"
It is more than the 66% majority that is usually reckoned to be the sensible threshold for major constitutional changes.
The problem for many years has been the First Past The Past election system for Westminster. To game the FPTP system you need to be a large party. Such a party then necessarily combines many competing factions. Both the Tory and Labour parties are riven with civil wars between their factions. Often extreme minorities seek to hold the executive levers of power to implement their policies.
In Europe various Proportional Representation systems allow the factions to be individual parties. A government therefore combines these as needed - usually producing more gentle shifts in overall left/right positioning. Unfortunately even PR governments can be dependent on an small extreme party - if there are one or two large parties dependent on their voting cooperation.
"PR allowed the Nazi party to gain a toe hold in Government, the rest is history!"
The PR system then had a weakness that allowed very small parties to get a toe-hold - modern PR avoids that. The Nazi party was actually quite successful in elections at a time when there was violent conflict between extreme right and left groups in society - but its share of the votes was starting to decline. People caught in the middle, and business leaders, wanted stability.
The big mistake was that politicians and business leaders thought that they could control the almost civil war situation by inviting the Nazis to join the government. In the meantime they had already passed an "Enabling Act" - only to be activated if the civil disturbances became worse and quick drastic action would be needed.
When they gave Hitler the role of Chancellor they lost control of the situation. He activated the "Enabling Act" that then allowed him to rule by decree. From then on all branches of the government were purged and filled with Nazi appointees - especially the judiciary so that anything could be interpreted as legal.
That precedent is what worried a lot of observers when the GOP supported Trump no matter how much they had to hold their noses.
Poland's right-wing governing party have tried to bias the judiciary in the same way - except the EU has ruled it not permissible.
The merit and strength of first past the post is that successful parties have to have broad appeal and therefore can't be focusse don single issues but address most issues and the trade offs between them. The public vote based on these compromise positions and understand at least broadly and most of the time the general approach and platforms concerned. In PR systems, and this is worse the more faithfully proportional the system is, mainstream parties more or less draw and the power is given to minor often single issue or group focussed parties who are often quite unpopular. The decisions about broad policy are taken as part of coallition negotiations with the result often being directly against strong public opion with policies supported by as little as 5 or 10% of the population becomming the price for forming a coallition. It is not so bad when systems prevent very small minority parties getting representation but these are by definition not proportional systems. True PR is a democratic nightmare handing power to small minorities, encouraging political fragmentation and discouraging any real debate about priorities and trade offs.
"The problem with PR can be, small extremist parties can hold a lot of power disproportional to their actual size. As an example look at Germany in the 1930's."
ahh, that explains why the damn tory party keep winning. but actually have less than 100,000 members..
either that or I'm surround on this island by idiots.
"[...] to agree, support, and vote for a party."
What a voter believes they will get by voting for a particular party is open to debate. Manifesto promises are just that - promises that can be discarded, postponed, or re-interpreted once they are in power. Sometimes that is because they don't see the practical difficulties until later.
For the bigger parties - the local MP that the voter enables to be elected may be of a minority faction that has quite contrary ideas. Should that minority faction gain executive power then voters will rue the day they voted that way.
There used to be a time when our local candidates or party activists would knock on doors. For the last few decades round here the most one gets is a leaflet headlining some of their "promises" in a PR biased style.
I always try to dig deeper - and it is surprising how often an apparently anodyne party candidate turns out to have some personal incompatible ideas.
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And presumably there were some credulous people back in 1977 when they saw R2D2 and C3P0 for the first time? Or others who think that Eastenders depicts "real life"?
Personally I am surprised they had to put someone inside. CGI / deepfake is so good at producing realistic stuff that a completely virtual robot (and probably the whole show) could be whipped up on a render farm.
> Personally I am surprised they had to put someone inside. CGI / deepfake is so good at
> producing realistic stuff that a completely virtual robot (and probably the whole show) could
> be whipped up on a render farm.
Well, it has to appear before the studio audience and interact with them. I don't think holographic technology is perfect enough yet. I'd be really worried if the Russians have holographic technology that surpasses those used in other parts of the world tho.
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Darn, now I'll have that song stuck in my head all morning
You have to appreciate the sheer cheek of it. Somewhere someone looked at the cool robots everyone else has been making and said "I want some of that - but I've got no money.....I know I'll C3-PO this thing!"
It reminds me of the time I found out a traveller camp in Cardiff had been but right next door to a metal recycling centre. So they made a hole in the fence - backed up lorries - filled them up with pre-sorted metal and drove it round to the front gate and sold it back to them! Naughty - but so cheeky you have to admire it a bit.
a traveller camp in Cardiff
The traveller site is still there, but I think the scrap metal site has closed or moved.
Both links are to Google Street View.
Geograph overview of the sites.
M.
"but so cheeky you have to admire it a bit."
Nothing that is pikey related is in any way shape or form "admirable" , I live in a town that is like fucking catnip to them and they are without fear of contradiction the most unpleasant people it's been my misfortune to stumble across. They are a crime wave, they are violent, they intimidate normal people just trying to go about their business. The women are as bad as the men and when they arrive in any pub en mass pretty much everyone else leaves (generally for their own safety) and more often than not the night will end with the publican having no choice but to call the police.
I was once followed into a pub by several pikeys , when the barman asked me what I wanted to drink the pikeys immediately kicked off because they wanted to be served first, threatening all and sundry and me in particular.
In short they are a scourge.
Not that I disbelieve you but..yeah whatever.
What town exactly is it that you live in? The one you've carefully avoided mentioning. Just so we can check your claims. If things are so bad as you say, it must be all over the local media! Perhaps we could ask the police as well if they think there's a major problem?
Or it could be you're talking out of your hate-filled arse...
Uhuhuhu, the poor stupid Russians! *FeelingBetterAboutSituationHereAlready*
This was children’s television. Of course, it’s not real. Do you seriously think, they’d introduce top-notch technology in a children’s show?!?
Wake up, YOU ARE THE ONE falling for a really dumb propaganda story.
"When you run out of arguments, you make a fool of your opponent."
Who is the 'opponent' here? The article is just highlighting the volte face of a broadcaster you might reasonably expect to check it's fact prior to transmission.
A little touchy aren't we?
As I understand it there was no attempt to pass off the robot as a real mechanoid. But western media outlets are attempting to spin this against Russia as an example of their dishonesty.
I would be interested to know where their motivation for doing this is coming from.
So, next up on a children's show, the fake cook who serves mud pies to everyone? No problem with it being fake, but it's how it's presented. I doubt any of the children there were thankful for someone wasting all that time in a robot suit... to what affect on their education?
"So, next up on a children's show, the fake cook who serves mud pies to everyone?"
Food advertising has done that for a long time. It is an art form to make a food display that photographs like (or better than) the real thing. Appearing "steaming hot" can actually be as cold as dry ice.
The Japanese "robot" ASIMO was a similar deception, only that was a double bluff - a real robot passed off as a Japanese child in a plastic costume pretending to be a robot. Their major mistake was the clumsy way the legs were attached to the torso, which led observers to conclude that no real child could have worn that "robot suit". Also, as the years of "development" rolled by, any real child would have outgrown the suit.
In the UK schoolchildren were similarly deceived by Ken Dodd and his "Diddy Men", who were supposed to be a miniature race of people from Knotty Ash (actually a real place deliberately chosen for its daft sounding name) and were famously not the inspiration for Roald Dahl's Oompa Loompas. The Diddy Men all had convincing sounding names such as: Dicky Mint, Sid Short and Hamish McDiddy, and they danced around and sang in chipmunk style voices. But it eventually came to light that it was all a clever conspiracy perpetrated on the nation's school kids and that the "Diddy Men" were actually just children dressed up.
"Metal Mickey"
A few years ago BBC TV had a documentary about a USA robot made in the 1930s. A one-man invention - possibly this one demonstrated by Westinghouse at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
'The Diddy Men all had convincing sounding names such as: Dicky Mint, Sid Short and Hamish McDiddy, and they danced around and sang in chipmunk style voices. But it eventually came to light that it was all a clever conspiracy perpetrated on the nation's school kids and that the "Diddy Men" were actually just children dressed up.'
I am gobsmacked! You have just confirmed my long held suspicion.
So they weren't real after all!
I remember them so clearly and was totally taken in by their names, dancing, singing and dressing up. Tell me, when did it 'eventually come to light' for you?
As a six year old it was about twenty seconds after seeing them my suspicions were aroused, how about you?
To make the American's think Russia is more advanced than they are. Obviously failed here but you never know, maybe that was the idea. Like their space program with almost exact copies of the shuttles but then abandon when the USSR collapsed.
Watch the documentary about Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World. Really interesting. Considering he prevented a nuclear war, by not firing back when their systems incorrectly detected nukes coming in from America. It's bad the way he ended up in Russia. Appears to have just been left in his modest flat, with what looked like not much money. When taken over to the US to see the old silos where the nukes would of come from, he got angry. He essentially said the only reason Russia has nukes is to prevent itself from being attacked or invaded by America. He said they never had any intention of using theirs, it was all just to stop them being attacked. Maybe that's what he believed, possibly not what the higher ups in Russia thought/think.
On a side note, maybe that documentary/film also explains why we shouldn't leave AI in charge of important things. I suspect AI would of fired back in that incident, where as the human didn't and essentially saved the world.
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"Either way, it's bye-bye Boris and our hopes for a dancing robot this year."
No, he'll just ruffle his unruly blond mop, spout a bit of Latin, pluck another invented statistic out of thin air and continue to whiff-waff us with his piffle in his Telegraph columns
(someone has pointed out that he's had his hair cut/tamed recently and that it was 'a waste of £7.50')
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