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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 23 2018, @02:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the building-a-more-robotic-tomorrow dept.

Hadrian is not the first large-scale industrial robot that can complete a whole build from start to finish. It's not even the first outdoor construction robot.

What's remarkable is it's both. As Mike told me, "Anything you can build inside a factory ... we're getting really, really good at. Trouble is, nothing's happening outdoors."

That's because environmental factors like wind and temperature variations can make life difficult for robots outdoors.

Most robots can't adjust to small, quick changes in wind or temperature fast enough to keep up.

That's fine if little wobbles won't make a big difference. But when you're working on something as large-scale as building a house and a light breeze could lead to bricks being laid way out of position, it can get very dangerous.

So up till now, any robot building on such large scales had to be indoors in minutely controlled environments.

Hadrian has overcome this problem using the precision technology Dynamic Stabilisation Technology (DST). DST was developed in Perth by Mike's cousin, Mark Pivac, back in the early 2000s. The computer program measures environmental factors an astounding 2000 times per second, then accounts for them in real time.

If robots replace the construction workers, who then will wolf whistle?


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:39PM (17 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:39PM (#627177) Journal

    What an enormous moving of the goalposts there! Of course, it's vacation. Of course, I'm not paid. And nobody gave me a unicorn either, the cheapskates!

    Not at all. Congratulations for reaching that point in your life when you can do such a thing. Double congratulations if you're not eating government cheese or planning on drawing social security in the future because you've been lucky enough to amass self-sustaining wealth - that puts you in a lucky minority. Point remains, you're not employed.

    Do you not take pride in well-made and well-founded arguments? Let's review what you wrote:

    Try doing just what you want to do, when you want to do it, with no regard to your employer's needs or desires, for a month and tell me how employed you are after that.

    I showed not only that one could do it for a month, but one could do it for a whole six months! Now it supposedly doesn't count because I'm not currently getting paid to not work (even though I go back to the same employer, with a promotion no less, yay me). That ignores that I got paid earlier and thus don't need to get paid now. That's the power of saving money.

    But that leads us to the second problem, namely, you turned a reasonable question into an argument that has no point to it. We were speaking of freedom of action, not a fixed captive stream of money. Even with a UBI, I wouldn't be getting paid as much as if I had a job too. So not working would still be less money and thus, by your earlier reckoning, still not count.

    Control is relative. Merely paying someone doesn't give business ultimate command of them.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:50PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:50PM (#627183)

    Let's review what you wrote:

    Try doing just what you want to do, when you want to do it, with no regard to your employer's needs or desires, for a month and tell me how employed you are after that.

    You were neither employed when you started, nor employed when the month finished, from my perspective no execution of the exercise was even attempted, much less demonstrated.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:13PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:13PM (#627226) Journal

      You were neither employed when you started, nor employed when the month finished

      Both which are entirely irrelevant both to the subject of control by an employer and your earliest statement which didn't have that as a condition. Again, you moved the goalposts to a silly argument.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:58PM (14 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:58PM (#627191)

    Control is relative. Merely paying someone doesn't give business ultimate command of them.

    Absolutely, control is relative.

    For people who start out life with nothing, they do need to work for some kind of business to survive. No single business controls a person's life, but the collection of potential employers do, and when that system traces its control back to a tiny group of people who have nothing in common with the people who start out life with nothing... tales of the self-made billionaires are widely heralded, but the self-made are in a small minority, and they didn't get where they are without a very rare string of lucky events, usually combined with some skill, but the luck is much rarer than the skill.

    I'd like to see the tables slanted more toward tales of the self-made comfortable / reasonably well off being more common than the tales of the abject poor.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:14PM (13 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:14PM (#627228) Journal

      No single business controls a person's life, but the collection of potential employers do

      A collection is not an entity capable of control.

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:54PM (12 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:54PM (#627253)

        A collection is not an entity capable of control.

        Oh, how they love your kind of thinking.

        Note the first statement: "producer (or group of producers)"

        http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/monopoly.html [businessdictionary.com]

        Illegal, yes, enforcement is difficult, at best.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation [wikipedia.org]

        --
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        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:20PM (11 children)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:20PM (#627267) Journal

          Note the first statement: "producer (or group of producers)"

          You just made "monopoly" a meaningless distinction since any producer now belongs. Thus, you are part of the group of producers. Enjoy your monopoly hiring privileges!

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:10PM (2 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:10PM (#627298)

            Only when a group colludes to be anti-competitive (like OPEC) does it fall afoul of monopoly definitions.

            I think we had the idiot trucker discussion where that particular group can't help but race itself to the bottom, creating a stream of bankruptcies because there's always another idiot willing to do the job for a loss.

            And this [youtube.com] is always a problem.

            --
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            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:18PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:18PM (#627385) Journal

              Only when a group colludes to be anti-competitive (like OPEC) does it fall afoul of monopoly definitions.

              The term you're looking for is "oligopoly".

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 26 2018, @03:25PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 26 2018, @03:25PM (#628282) Journal
              Reading this again, a group here acts as a single competitor. Hiring collusion, OPEC, and other cartel behavior doesn't count because the members of the group have conflicts of interest and thus, can and do cheat and compete with each other. That's why we don't just have one word for oligopoly and monopoly.
          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:19PM (7 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:19PM (#627309)
            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:19PM (6 children)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:19PM (#627386) Journal
              But not a monopoly. Words have meaning.
              • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:21PM (5 children)

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:21PM (#627424)

                Monopoly (mono - singular) is the extreme form of anti-competitive, counter-free-market business practice, and doesn't exist in pure form in the real world. Even when AT&T "owned" telecoms in the U.S. they did not have a full unqualified monopoly.

                --
                🌻🌻 [google.com]
                • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:09AM (4 children)

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:09AM (#627471) Journal

                  Even when AT&T "owned" telecoms in the U.S. they did not have a full unqualified monopoly.

                  Except that they did. They were the sole provider of local phone networks throughout most of the US. That makes them a monopoly in truth.

                  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:05AM (3 children)

                    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:05AM (#627490)

                    For most definitions of most.

                    OPEC was a cartel, they only controlled a large fraction of the market, but by (legal in their countries) collusion they manipulated the market price - when they could manage to not undercut one another.

                    --
                    🌻🌻 [google.com]
                    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:09AM (2 children)

                      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:09AM (#627491) Journal

                      For most definitions of most.

                      By population. You're not going anywhere with the AT&T meander.

                      OPEC was a cartel, they only controlled a large fraction of the market, but by (legal in their countries) collusion they manipulated the market price - when they could manage to not undercut one another.

                      And no one here disagrees with that. A cartel is not a monopoly because it consists of multiple competing members.

                      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:32AM (1 child)

                        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:32AM (#627505)

                        A cartel with enough market share to manipulate market prices, acting together to manipulate the market does run afoul of US anti-trust laws - when anybody steps up to enforce them.

                        --
                        🌻🌻 [google.com]
                        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:17AM

                          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:17AM (#627527) Journal
                          Nobody is quibbling over the definition of cartel. And OPEC, despite being a cartel, isn't running afoul of US anti-trust laws because it is not subject to US jurisdiction.