August 26, 2003

It’s Looking More Like the Future Every Day.

I’m looking at this and I still think it’s gotta be some sort of a put-on. Is this for real?

Japan ready to market “robot suit”

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese companies are preparing for the commercial launch of a “robot suit” that helps aged or physically disabled people walk, get up the stairs or seat themselves to relax without a chair.

In science fiction, this sort of thing has been called an exoskeleton. There was one in ALIENS. Ripley gets into it to fight the alien mother bug at the end of the movie. (If anyone has a picture of it, send it to me and I’ll post it here for comparison.)

via GeekPress.

Update: Here’s a pic of the exoskeleton from ALIENS, thanks to Bryon Scott.

What hasn’t been widely appreciated yet about Arnold’s press conference last week:

he said that the state’s own documentation of the state budget is so screwed up that none of the experts he consulted could even tell what it was saying.

[Arnold] said that when his council sat down and looked at the state budget, they were floored by what they saw.

“No one … could figure out or make heads or tails of the state budget. We don’t know what is being spent and we don’t know where.

He wasn’t talking about the budget itself—he was talking about the documentation of the budget. He said:

One thing I have learned in business is you can’t make sound decisions with faulty information.

That’s why the first thing he’s going to do, if he gets elected, is have an audit done so that people can figure out where our money is going.

If that was the only thing he did, it would be a huge contribution, and enough reason to vote for him.

Contrast that with Cruz Bustamante, who evidently thinks he can fix a $38 billion deficit with $8 billion in new taxes and $5 billion in spending cuts. That doesn’t even add up. Cruz is offering only more of the same.