On a more pleasant note...

[maradydd]

... woot.com had the Roomba Discovery 4220 SE on special yesterday for $150 plus $5 shipping, so I did a little budget-checking and decided it was time to start establishing my robot vacuum cleaner army. (Ever since the Bluetooth-enabled Roomba cockfight at ETech back in March, I've been thinking it would be cool to get a bunch of Roombas and write

Comments

[maradydd]

Hah! I'd be reluctant to wander through the halls with it, since someone might just pick the poor thing up and run off with it, but that would be a great draw for a talk!

I'd probably still want to bring a paintball gun, though. (Although Nevada is an open carry state, I suspect the hotel might look poorly on me bringing Emma as a theft deterrent.)

[grepmaster]

Mwahahahaha!

[phoenixalpha]

Might want to keep out of the reach of cats...

[sclerotic_rings]

"ROOMBAS DO NOT HAVE INDIVIDUAL NAMES! ANYONE ATTEMPTING TO DO SO WILL BE EX-TER-MI-NA-TED!"

The naming of bots is a difficult matter

[allonymist]

I need a naming convention for robot vacuum cleaners!

Well, there are some obvious choices, like fictional robots (Olivaw, Robbie, Bender, Futura, Annalee (no, not that Annalee, this Annalee) ...). You could probably narrow that down to fictional sexbots (Cherry 2000, Sy Borg, ARPA-01) or fictional battle robots (T-800, Jet Jaguar).

I don't know if there are enough cleaning bots to fill up the names for a robot army. There's Rosie from the Jetsons, and a zillion relatively forgettable scrubbots from PARANOIA, and I'm kind of drawing a blank after that.

Hm. Maybe fictional janitors? Fictional maintenance personnel? Ah, I know! Economically exploited children in 19th Century literature! I love the idea of you being trailed by Ragged Dick and Oliver Twist and all rest of the cast of Dickens and Alger and their imitators.

Or maybe famous laborers? Or famous labor organizers?