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Comment Re:Very import research (Score 1) 33

by jacquesm (#25857361) Attached to: Electron Strobe Makes Movies of Atoms

some guy here on /. pointed me to 'accelerando', it's a neat sf book that deals with the 'omega point', the singularity at which the rate of change of technology becomes so high that there is no more relation between 'before' and 'after'.

While I'm not sure I buy the premise of the book it is still quite interesting to see how fast tech is now changing. It used to be possible to be more or less current, I don't think that is possible any more.
Media

Submission + - mit makes video lectures searcheable (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
jacquesm
jacquesm writes: "MIT presents a tool that allows students to efficiently review lectures. The tool combines speech recognition and time stamps to create the 'MIT Lecture Browser': http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/ . This is a fantastic companion to MIT's open courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm , it will greatly ease searching for a passage explaining a certain detail."
Programming

Submission + - Indian AI unmasked using second order turing test (daz.com)

Submitted by
jacquesm
jacquesm writes: "Indian IT experts have been testing a new generation of highly intelligent bots in IRC channels. One such bot was unmasked in an irc room after failing to pass a second order Turing Test. The bot had to be tricked into accepting the challenge and tried every trick in the book to avoid detection.

The full transcript of the interaction with the bot (called 'asterix') is here : http://ww.com/asterixbot.html , the really interesting breakthrough I think is the fact that the bot uses 'broken english' to masquerade its lack of genuine understanding, but we have become so accustomed to that because of the outsourcing of jobs that it is no longer politically correct to accept nothing less than passable english. This psychological loophole has been used to great profit by the team involved.

It's only a matter of time before you'll have to administer Turing Tests to your chat room friends to see if they are not too tired of communicating with you face to face and have replaced their online identities with bots to keep up appearances."
Privacy

Submission + - Americans no longer dating abroad ?

Submitted by
jacquesm
jacquesm writes: "According to this press release it is now illegal for Americans to date foreign women online without first going through a detailed background check. The law was challenged and upheld by a federal judge. This means that before you even get the chance to talk to person from abroad you will have to divulge all kinds of very sensitive personal information. And all this ostensibly to protect the foreign women from abuse by potential American spouses. Never mind that according to this study the rate of such abuse is only 1/7th the rate of domestic abuse by Americans vs other Americans."

Feed RIAA: Pay $3,000 for Song Swaps (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
The music industry group dangles fat settlement offers in front of 50 Ohio University students who face lawsuits for allegedly sharing music illegally. By the Associated Press.


Media

Journal Journal: The best media codec for general use 2

Journal by Gavin Hyde

As a general rule I rip all cd's into the FLAC format for archiving. However, that takes up too much space on my computer's disk when my collection grows (I currently have 12,000+ tracks I've ripped from my cd's) so I store those on an external hard drive and re-encode them into a more compact format for usage on my machine. For now I've been using the OGG format but my question is with the sheer number of portable music players that play mp3 and the popularity of the iPod should I be using a

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