the wealth of data accessible in the cloud (by which we basically mean the Internet).

Then why on earth didn't they just say "the Internet"?!? Are we really going to see the term "cloud" replace "Internet"?

It is -- actually it's what first got 14-year-old me interested in learning more about computers and networking. Thanks Cliff!

Wow. Mod parent "Should have been the summary".

FWIW, your curiosity is actually piqued, not peaked.

The only danger here is that robots will be so good at developing their own shared language that they might outpace humans at being able to understand one another. A world full of robots that understand information and abstract concepts could be a world full of artificial intelligences secretly laughing behind our backs for our fascination with cat pictures on the internet.

Where's the danger? I think that would be amazing.

Cliff Stoll was a sysadmin at Berkeley, not a grad student.

* May or may not have actually been Craig who wrote their blog post...

Best parts:

AIM Group facetiously writes “we understand thousands or even tens of thousands of transactions happen safely between Craigslist aficionados.” THOUSANDS??? Shame on you AIM Group (and Oodle). You know better. Try HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS or BILLIONS of safe transactions.

and

AIM omits to mention craigslist is likely also safer than Oodle in terms of crime rate, or incidence of crime, when you compare the usage between the two sites. ... Such that if so much as ONE (1) crime was connected with an Oodle listing over the past 12 months, the crime rate for Oodle would exceed by almost two times the crime rate that AIM Group claims for CL.

http://blog.craigslist.org/2011/02/more-pay-to-play-research-from-aim/

You're in luck, pretty soon flying via an American airport will include a prostate exam!

It sorta works with written Chinese. It's not uncommon to see a different but homophonic character sneak into a multi-character word which has no homonyms itself. Then one of the characters is wrong, but it's clear what the intended word is, because the pronunciation is the same.

You just need to learn which language each word comes from, then the spelling makes sense. "Chair" is related to the French "chaise", whereas "chlorine" was formed from the Greek root "khloros".

Yeah, not very much help in figuring out how to pronounce things, but maybe helpful in remembering how they're pronounced?