Hasta La Gadget!

CNET’s How To expert Sharon Vaknin explains how to transfer the music on your iPod to your computer.

I loved that little OCD cleaner bot MO in WALL-E. I also love dogs. But somehow, combining the two just ends up…weird.

I’m talking about the “Puppy Robotic Vacuum Cleaner,” whose name is actually a bit misleading. Puppy Robotic is composed of several parts: A “mother dog” base — complete with “docking tits” (seriously!) — and four mini-Roomba style “puppy” cleaners with “docking mouths” (how else would they suckle power from their mother unit?).

Each puppy has a rolling brush and suction hole for cleaning, and a display screen that relays whether it’s in cleaning mode (a smiley face), entertainment mode (a music note), or feeding mode (what appears to be a nipple). The antenna is appropriately implemented as a tail.

From the images, it also looks like you can hook a remote control on your actual dog’s collar so that the cleaner pups trail it, sweeping up the animal’s muddy footprints as it trots along.

There’s a lot of animal-inspired robotics out there: robot smartbirds, baby robo dinos and sneaky robot snakes, to name a few. The Puppy Robotic Vacuum Cleaner appears to be the first to utilize a “docking tit” though, as far as I’m aware.

The Puppy Robotic Vacuum Cleaner is thankfully only a concept.

Puppy Robotic Vacuum Cleaner [Yanko Design]

The FCC may be sticking with its target of 4Mbps broadband for everyone in the United States, but it looks like the CRTC thinks Canada can do one (megabit) better. The regulatory agency has just set its own target of 5Mbps download speeds and 1 Mbps upload speeds for all Canadians — a goal that it says must be met by 2015. Those speeds, the agency notes, must be actual speeds not advertised ones, although it’s not yet going as far as to declare internet access a basic service to ensure that happens. The CRTC says instead that it prefers to rely on “market forces” for the time being, rather than subsidies that would come with such a declaration. Of course, while 5Mbps is faster than the FCC’s target, it’s still well short of some of the more ambitious broadband goals of other countries around the world — Finland, for instance, has already declared that 1Mbps broadband a legal right and is promising to bring 100Mbps speeds to everyone by 2015.

CRTC sets target of 5Mbps broadband for all Canadians by 2015 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 May 2011 18:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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