Defective Video
Related Videos
The FIRST Robotics Competition takes place all over the world and showcases high school students passionate about robotics. Watch their contraptions in action as they compete under this year's theme: "Aim High," a combination of basketball, soccer and hockey--with robots as the players.
Robots. Giant robots. Giant robots fighting each other--just one of the many things to expect from the upcoming Gundam World title.
Rafe and I get in a fight over Windows 7's loose activation policy. Brian suggests we hug out. Rafe and I seem to prefer stabbing it out. We also take Flickr to task for censoring images and wonder why the Internet addiction center is so expensive.
"ATL" tells the story of four teens coming of age in a working class Atlanta neighborhood where hip-hop music and roller skating rule. As the group prepares for life after high school, challenges on and off the rink bring about turning points in each of their lives. The film is loosely based on Dallas Austin and Tionne Watkins' experiences growing up in Atlanta and hanging out at a local skating rink called Jellybeans.
RoboGames: a fight 'til the death
It's the Robot Fighting League's largest contest and CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi has a look at the action. Teams from Australia, Brazil, and elsewhere around the world battle for robot glory.
'60 Minutes': Revolutionizing prosthetics
In the past, building a robotic arm with a fully functioning hand has not been remotely possible, but that is starting to change with the DEKA arm.
Craving NYC: Dancing with the robotic stars
We look inside the LEMURplex art and performance space in Brooklyn, N.Y., where the artists are techies and the performers are robot.
From the RoboDevelopment Conference and Exposition in San Jose, Calif., CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos takes a look at the show's most impressive robotic developments, including a robotic hand for the disabled.
Deep-diving robot takes to the bottom of Crater Lake
On a followup to our previous video on the moss research happening at Crater Lake, CNET News.com was on hand for the official 'dive' of the latest rover to explore the depths of one of the clearest bodies of water in the world. Join News.com's Stefanie Olsen to see live footage from the rover as it grabs moss samples, and hear from the research crew as well as the team behind the operations of the robot.
The Juan Maclean: "Give Me Every Little Thing"
"It's been a bit of a sore spot," laughs Juan Maclean, "sitting on this album and seeing this robot stuff pop up all over the place. I have serious robot credentials that go back years and years. Like, a decade! But Daft Punk beat me to the punch." He may be joking, but the man's right. If anyone's earned the right to call their debut album "Less Than Human" and imagine a love triangle consisting of a man, a woman and the man's gay robot friend (as in "Shining Skinned Friend"), it's Maclean. He was guitarist and synth player with acclaimed but obscure, gonzo electro-punk band Six Finger Satellite, who began formulating their blend of rigidly mechanised disco beats, oddly sumptuous synth melodies and razor-shredded guitar work in the early 90s. The brutish but groovy result suggested a cross between Devo, Kraftwerk and Big Black. Then, America was mired in grunge, the famous French robots were still in short pants and the "punk-funk revival" was in the unimaginable future. Six Finger Satellite were just too far ahead of their time and perished accordingly. With "Less Than Human" Maclean has created a precision-tuned rekindling of his love affair with everything from Kraftwerk to Juan Atkins and Derrick May, Funkadelic to Giorgio Moroder and Lipps Inc, DAF to Talking Heads and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It's full of tics (sin drums, cow bells, Bootsy Collins bass lines, Moog Liberation motifs) borrowed from dance music history, but refuses to engage with retroism, nostalgia or any notion of "the classic." Opener "AD2003" tracks back to Kraftwerk via Orbital, buoyed up by bubbles of percolating glitch. "Give Me Every Little Thing" rewinds through Underworld and Talking Heads en route to Studio 54. "Tito's Way" contrasts acid-house synth squelches and rave whistles with clattering, tribal percussion. There's a constant, though. Even the LP's euphoric epic "Dance With Me," is poignantly subdued, touched by a melancholy that reflects Maclean's own world view. "It doesn't seem incongruous to me to have a lot of that stuff in there," he says of the album's sadness, "because I made a big effort to make an album, rather than a collection of tunes with just one good track that everybody knows. So I never really set out to say, "this is a song that will played for the dance floor," or whatever. "When I started on it, I don't think I had any pre-conceived notions at all, except that I knew I'd always be operating under the same aesthetic principles that I'd held in making music my whole life."
