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Robotics

Robots Ride Camels in Kuwait 50

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the camel-jewelry dept.
naken writes to tell us that Kuwait recently held its first regional camel race using robot jockeys. The change was made after human rights groups got child jockeys banned in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE."
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Robots Ride Camels in Kuwait More

Robots Ride Camels in Kuwait

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  • ...one giant leap for mankind.

  • They got it wrong... (Score:5, Funny)

    by DavidHOzAu ( 925585 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @12:52AM (#14648446)
    From the Article:
    child jockeys were banned from the lucrative sport following criticism by human rights groups.

    Great. If I'm under four and know how to ride a camel better than anyone else, I can't race. My rights have been infringed to protect human rights. Way to go, guys.

    • Re:They got it wrong... (Score:5, Informative)

      by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @01:03AM (#14648496)
      The problem was that many kids were bought from their parents in other countries and brought for the races, maltreated with too little food and so on.. to be as low weight as possible.

      That was a horrible practice.

    • Screw the children. Think of the robots! It's one thing to stick one, miniature meatbag on another, bigger meatbag and make him ride around on it. But making a finely tuned robot, a champion among his kind, clatter along on an ugly bag of mostly water merely for our amusement? Disgusting.
  • Honestly, I'm sure there are a number of human rights violations in the Middle East right now, but was this really one of them? It's a sport like any other. Are children in the US not going to be allowed to ride horses anymore? or play soccer or little league? Somehow I doubt the kids were being tortured, although their parents might have been the soccer-mom equivalents of Kuwait.

    • Re:Human rights? (Score:3, Informative)

      by magefile ( 776388 )
      Wrong. These jockeys were slaves; beaten, starved, forced to throw up so they'd lose weight, etc. Horse racing in this case was not a sport for pleasure; it was a business, and the child jockeys were held hostage to the financial gain of their owners.

      • Re:Human rights? (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I bet these owners are pissed off about the Danish cartoon of Muhammed.

    • Re:Human rights? (Score:3, Informative)

      by nursegirl ( 914509 )
      The issue is that human rights groups had found that the vast majority of these kids had been abducted from their families and put into forced slave labour [cameljockeys.org] on these camel farms. So yes, if US soccer teams start abducting kids to play little league, maybe the human rights groups should get involved.

      Particularly if they use electric shocks on kids if they don't do their work properly.

    • In the middle east, this is not a recreational activity. It's a business. Children are exploited. They are undernourished and left uneducated.

      In the US children ride horses on weekends for fun.

      Somehow I doubt the kids were being tortured, although their parents might have been the soccer-mom equivalents of Kuwait.

      The severe beatings that some of the children endure certainly do qualify as torture.

      I don't know if you're a troll or just ignorant, but these children were being mistreated.

      LK
  • I could have sworn CNN had a Reuters article on this very same thing over a year ago. Could anyone help prove me with a link?
    Maybe I'm just losing it...

    ...though some would argue I never had it in the first place.

    • Re:How odd... (Score:4, Informative)

      by smilingman ( 942304 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @01:19AM (#14648578) Homepage
      I could have sworn CNN had a Reuters article on this very same thing over a year ago. Could anyone help prove me with a link? Maybe I'm just losing it... ...though some would argue I never had it in the first place.

      You probably have seen it before, it's a dupe [slashdot.org].

      • Re:How odd... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by DavidHOzAu ( 925585 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:06AM (#14648792)
        You probably have seen it before, it's a dupe.

        Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just gone off topic, but what you've read so far speaks for itself. The innocent discussion has apparently been taken over - 'conquered' if you will - by an inferior race of photographic-memory slashdotters. It's difficult to tell at the moment whether they will troll the entire website or merely flame it.

        I am certainly not surprised: the prior article was in April last year; dupes will inevitably be here. And I, for one, will never welcome our photographic-memory overlords. I'd like to remind our editors that as an average slashdotter with common sense, I can be helpful in rounding up other idiots to languish in the off topic viewing range.
    • I could have sworn CNN had a Reuters article on this very same thing over a year ago. Could anyone help prove me with a link? Maybe I'm just losing it...

      At least we know CNN has someone reading Technocrat.net [technocrat.net] looking for story ideas.
  • These camels actually have CO2 emissions and thus are not as good as hydrogen-fueled camels!

  • Wired News has an article about this... (Score:4, Informative)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:00AM (#14648772) Homepage Journal
    See here [wired.com].
  • "The remote-operated robots are shaped like small boys."

    Why? Do they really need that much emulated gender anatomy? Just make them shaped like "small kids".
               
    • Why? Do they really need that much emulated gender anatomy?
      The camels would know the difference.

      Okay, just kidding.

      They're shaped like small 'boys', because camel jockeys have always been boys.

      Bonus Fact: The camels wouldn't accept the robotic jockeys until they had been shaped in a vaguely human fashion.
    • The gender roles in the area are still quite clear.. would not do to have a "girl".
    • Why? Do they really need that much emulated gender anatomy?

      Because it's Kuwait you dumb ass. In some parts of the world, gender still plays a big part in what role you fill in society.

      LK
    • It was to increase the bidding between the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson.
  • ...although it's almost a year old. Nonetheless, it goes into the details a lot more.

    http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/robotics/2005-04 -19-qatar-camalbots_x.htm [usatoday.com]

    I remember it because I thought it was so bizzare, and because I had no idea there was a black market in young boys who were good camel jockeys. Weird.

  • I split (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kurt Russell ( 627436 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @02:56AM (#14648982)
    some acid with my girl in Mexico. A couple of pieces of blotter, I think it had the "freak brothers" on it. We tripped for hours in a little park in Matamoros watching a guy that had 3 monkeys riding dogs. It was fucking great, they were hauling ass screaming and jumping through hoops.

    Tiny robots on robot dogs would be cool. Damn, I feel like dropping a tab or two.

  • I happen to do a lot of translation work for a French agency that raises funds to finance organisations that combat child abuse. They do so by establishing full-blown infrastructures to attack the reasons why kids are vulnerable in the first place, as well as setting up rehabilitation programmes for rescued kids who are traumatised for life.
    Their grant applications, notably to the European Union, go into all the sordid details about trafficking in children. In Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, tens of thousa
  • but what about the other versions,

    In Soviet Russia, Camel rides you.

    In Korea, only old robots ride camels.

    In Planet of the Clams, lobster is slave to clam...

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