We'll see! I'm pretty confident about that. I'll try to get a sample of ATTs speech system, wanna hear now it feels like. Thanks.

This is a big blow for future development of AI!

As with everything in capitalistic scientific advancement, and foremost in the military, development works best if there is a future practical application in sight. So far NLP (NOT [god beware] Neurolinguistic Programming, but Natural Language Processing) and AI research didn't make big strides because they are just fiddling around with no real idea what to use this for. But with the Kindle 2, we have the first actual application which would benefit from near-perfect text-to-speech. So this will (or would have, or still will, after Amazon now caved in?) spur development of t2s systems that can actually understand what they are saying, on a certain level. And further from that, that's my prophecy, true AI systems will develop because you just have to start somewhere. But now.. well I guess they will still do research on how to read the books that they may the best way.

"A careful balance must be struck between providing information and not irritating the customer." Says it all to me. They're not users, they're all just customers.

So if i put on Jamiroquai and dance really really fast, I can have Christmas all the time?

You mean different than a 6 year old stealing a car and (I'm sure) trying to jump ahead in time to see how he'll turn out once he's 14...

The summary implies that they created a conventional MRI that has nanoscale resolution, as if they can now image a person's brain and pick out individual cells and molecules. That is not the case! And that is likely to never be possible (given the frequencies of radiation that MRI uses and the diffraction limit [wikipedia.org] that applies to far-field imaging.

I say 'never say never'! An MRI is Star Trek-ish enough as it is.

It's because it already was true with XP.

The point about XP is interesting indeed. I've installed Win 7 yesterday in VirtualBox and so far I "like" it (that means, I don't particularily hate anything specific about it [yet..]), but it's nothing exciting (mind I haven't used Vista much, but a little I did, and I like Win 7 somewhat better).

It feels to me like M$ really blew it with Vista, and they have to start from scratch again.

Maybe Win "8" or "9" will be another big bang for them like Windows 95 was, but if Apple keeps the pace with OS X how they did up 'til now, I think Microsoft might just never be able to catch up.

I guess once you set foot on the planet with dedication to permanently stay there it doesn't matter. It's only a matter for the cases (which have been so far, all) in which you fly there in a "want-to-look-only" mode, and forces you to keep that promise.

"$30B IT Stimulus Will Create Almost 1 Million Jobs" No wonder it cost him some proteins. Cloning ain't soft on the body.

So what are these people going to do? And how are they going to get jobs.

Maybe try to snatch him off airports. Perhaps they already have him: look who's responsible for the layoffs. Doesn't that just smell like the rejuvenator's iron fist! err...

It's still so unbelievable to me that we actually have a satellite and stationary vehicles on another planet and are using them to do stuff there. If you really think about this for a moment in terms of what has to be accomplished for this to work it's just mind-blowing.

Where's their "pre-determined path to a completed human state"?
Terence McKenna would hate ya :P

Quote:
Animal life has been transfused with something either willfully descended into matter or trapped by some cosmic drama. Something in an unseen dimension is acting as an attractor for our forward movement in understanding. [...] It's a point in the future that affects us in the present. For example, if you were to do your Christmas shopping in July, then Christmas is an attractor for your summer shopping habits. Our model that everything is pushed by the past into the future, by the necessity of causality, is wrong. There are actual attractors ahead of us in time -- like the gravitational field of a planet. Once you fall under an attractor's influence, your trajectory is diverted.

No, it just means they are all different... wait! Hmmmmm...

Abit will cease to exist entirely after midnight on the last day of 2008 because the owner of the brand, Universal Scientific Industrial, is in the process of restructuring and cutting their costs.

Ow, and i thought that was Massive Dynamic.. seems like even they need to cut costs these days. Do they still make those USB-attachable drug submersion brain interconnection tanks?