Ding dong merrily on high. In Berkeley, the bots are singeing: Self-driving college cooler droid goes up in flames A Kiwibot delivery robot unexpectedly self-immolated last week at the University of California, Berkeley, due a defective battery, the company said over the weekend, attributing the incident to human error. Like competing cargo-bots from Postmates and Starship Technologies, Kiwibots are intended to carry deliveries …
WTF has this thing got to do with a kiwi? It doesn’t look or act like one. This is theft of Maori words.
Note most of the birds in NZ will tell you what their names are, the kiwi really does go ‘ki-wi’. When the Maori arrived they sensibly took the names the birds told them and used them. btw the native owl though is heard differently by different races. Us Europeans hear it saying ‘More Pork’ so we call it the Morepork. To Maori it’s the ruru which it definitely doesn’t say. The rule is not absolute.
Bloody Yanks going about stealing other people’s IP. Mind you a certain brand of British shoe polish started it.
Well, regarding the ruru, it depends on how you "hear" it. It doesn't say "more pork" either, to my ear.
In French, a dog says "waouh" and in Japanese, they say "wan". Onomatopoeic words are all really in the ear of the beholder.
(And yes, as a fellow NZer, it give me the sh*ts to when international companies co-opt words that have nothing to do with their busines or origins. I even find "Ubuntu" somewhat irritating.)
"Note most of the birds in NZ will tell you what their names are"
Well, Tuis make their own damn songs up anyway, moreporks/ruru certainly do (boo-boo?) but kiwis are more ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-EE-EE-EE-ee-ee-ee. None of that short restraint nonsense, at least around Karori.
Alas the best singers often get et. Unless Morgan is in charge and it's open season on moggies :D
Siri et. al. are very bland. And not hard to do. This is long overdue, probably blocked by some patent. Long ago there was a program Jive that made boring text hot. Not hard to do.
I want Contrary Siri, that never does what you actually want it to. Wait...
The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation has clearly been contracted to program the self service tills in Poundland. At Halloween they had a Dracula voice telling you about the "unexpected item in the bagging area" and right now it's Santa doing the same.
Up against the wall with the lot of them, I say!
>>>to better assess the state of its machines<<< - really? this wasn't in from the start? after all the not funny Li-ion problems of the last decade.
>>>implementing a different procedure for managing battery swaps<<< would this be 'connect red wire to the +'?
This thing even looks like a high school robo-project in a better finished box.
Should this icon be prominently dispayed on the kiwibot?
I'm not altogether happy about the idea of these unmanned bomb delivery vehicles being allowed free run of our cities and everywhere. At least with left luggage there is an unaccompanied suitcase, and with a suicide bomber you have to figure in a certain commitment to a cause.
This would appear to offer potential malefactors the ability to wreak death and destruction with relative impunity. These coolers appear none too stable, even when delivering a couple of cheese and onion baps - who knows how it will all turn out when they are co-opted into delivering a cargo of Semtex and rusty nails.
I for one welcome our new self-immolating, death-dealing, super-cool,er sandwich-toting overloards.
Wot? C'mon now.. you can't tell me that an open public space like that has one or several fire extinguishers casually dotted around the place? If that was Britain.. something something tealeaf ..
I couldn't tell if that was just a water bottle in the picture though
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