Free Republic

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 19 - Are movies growing bigger as theater audiences are becoming smaller? That's one conclusion to draw from the box-office results of 2004, as Hollywood pursued its penchant for big-budget event films - from Warner Brothers' "Troy" to 20th Century Fox's "I, Robot," to Sony Pictures' "Spider-Man 2" - but the number of moviegoers in the United States dropped for the second year in a row. With nearly two weeks to go before the end of 2004, domestic box-office receipts appeared likely to top last year's total of $9.27 billion, nearing $9.4 billion, according to Exhibitor Relations,...

BOSTON - In a trailblazing pairing of robotics and tractor companies, iRobot and John Deere announced plans Monday to build a 9-foot-long semi-autonomous battlefield vehicle. Burlington-based iRobot Corp. will adapt the artificial intelligence technology used in its Roomba vacuums and portable PackBot military robots for a two-seat John Deere utility vehicle similar to ones the Pentagon (news - web sites) already uses. The Military Robotic Gator, or R-Gator, will be the first of its kind to use off-the-shelf technology, making it easier and less expensive to produce than existing, custom-made vehicles, the companies said. While the Pentagon is expected to...

Isaac Asimov was the steak-and-buffet restaurant of American authors: What he lacked in quality, he made up for in volume. If you didn't like what he was serving, you could wait a few minutes for him to bring out something else. By the time he died in 1992, at the age of 72, Asimov had published more than 470 books, ranging from science-fiction classics to annotated guides of great literature to limerick collections to The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, a defense and celebration of lechery. "His first 100 books took him 237 months, or almost 20 years, until October 1969,...

<p>BURLINGTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- A U.S. robot manufacturer Monday hailed the destruction of one of its units in Iraq and said it showed how valuable the machines have become for the U.S. military.</p> <p>"It was a special moment -- a robot got blown up instead of a person," said iRobot CEO Colin Angle.</p>

The female mannequin at iRobot’s headquarters in Burlington, MA, is fairly typical: tall and thin, with perfect features and fingernails painted claret red. But instead of designer clothes, she’s modeling combat fatigues and a camouflage vest with a 500-megahertz computer system embedded in it. An eyepiece is mounted over one eye, and she holds a joystick to control the accompanying PackBot, a small, tanklike robot recently deployed in military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. “She’s looking particularly stylish for a soldier,” quips Helen Greiner ’89, SM ’90, president and cofounder of iRobot. Thanks to PackBot and the Roomba Intelligent FloorVac,...