Just watch out for the mutant Kangaroos and the hot girl driving the tank.

You are comparing Apples to Oranges, by saying you are fluent in english, but just get by in other languages. This Skype system has the potential to enable you to communicate fluently in other languages.

And yes I know what it is like to get by in other languages vs fluency having previously gotten by in Russian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish and suffered various misadventures because of it.

You actually understood what he said? I thought his automatic translator had taken a wrong turn when avoiding the hovercraft full of eels.

And BTW that should be

How many years did it take you to learn to speak english? Because that is at least what you will require to learn another language to the same fluency. And that's not accounting for not being embedded in the language or that children are wired to learn language more easily than an adult can.

So it's about $120 for and 8.1 license from Amazon vs a significant amount of time to learn that second language. Your choice.

Yeah .. but everybody gets sump'n from Sump'n Claus

Yep that would be it.

pig/dog talk/walk whatever .. lol

Except that this is not translation of chat messages, but live translation of spoken word coupled with voice synthesis in the translated language.

You can't tell from the video how "real-time" it is, but it seems fast enough for a basic conversation. Also there is nothing I saw that indicates how much training the speech recognition needs.

An old joke about a talking pig (which I can't remember - may not have even been a pig) had a punch line along the lines of "ignore the fact that the pig speaks badly, what's amazing is that the pig speaks in the first place"

I laughed when the interviewer asked what happens if someone tries to steal a robot. The guy answering started off by saying it would be really hard as they weigh 92 pounds. Oh that's sooooo heavy.

But my first impression was that the robots were too short for the sales experience. The customers in the store would have had to stoop or bend over to be "face to face" with the telepresence operators. I'm guessing that the height was a compromise between a robot "sitting at a desk" and "walking around".

One thing I did think of was that for a series of retail stores you only need to "staff" all the stores for the average number of customers across the total number of stores.

Ignorant? yes. American? Well that I don't know.

My understanding is that it is related to where the car was manufactured. I found this thread that talks about it Why are New Zealand turn signal controls backwards?. (And from my point of view, "backwards" is a contextual adjective ;-) )

If you watch the video in TFA, when the driver turns right at an intersection, the windscreen wipers come on (even though it is not raining). This is a major indication that the driver did not know on what side of the steering column the control for the indicator lights was. Given that he is turning right I bet that for that car the indicator light controls are on the left of the column.

I know all about this as I have done it so many times myself when changing different brands of cars.

That was my first thought when I read this in TFS:

There were plans in WW2 to drop phony counterfeit currency to disrupt markets, and I wonder why flooding underground markets with phony products isn't widespread. Why don't credit card companies manufacture fake lists of stolen credit card numbers, or phony social security numbers, for illegal trading sites? For that matter, would fake ivory, fake illegal porn, and other "false positives" discourage buyers? Or create alibis?

Oh shit, did I just give him an idea? !?!?!

I don't know, but there may be a few convicted pedophiles who disagree with you as to beliefs not being criminal.