Comment: Accent (Score 1) 674
A common drawback with speech recognition seems to be the accent the AI is trained with. I wonder how well Watson would fare with, say, a British host ..
Comment: Re:Thieves (Score 2) 845
I'm not defending apples decision here, but calling this theft is going a bit far. You hand in your broken device to have things replaced. With the same logic, would you call theft if you couldn't have your broken disk/screen/battery/whatever back after you handed in a device for repair?
Comment: Re:Until I can buy one it doesnt exist (Score 1) 603
I read a few German press releases about this story and also the website of DBM Energy itself and nowehere could I find the claim that they charged the car in 6min. All I could find was that the breakthrough they achieved was driving a 'standard' car (i.e. same equipment, same amount of space) for 600km with a single charge. The average driving speed appears to have been 130km/h, but references are not really clear (they could have meant a top speed of 130km/h).
All in all, still great news if you ask me, but just horrible tech journalism :(
Comment: Re:Here We Go Again (Score 3, Insightful) 238
Well, frankly, I don't understand it either. You're applying information theory to lines of code
Kurzweil doesn't advocate the use information for understanding or modeling the brain. He only used it in combination with other methods to get an estimate on how complex the brain actually is (whether his methods and estimates are correct I can't tell).
That was, imo, the whole point of the paragraph you quoted
Comment: Re:On Other Phones (Score 1) 133
I agree with the previous post. Where is the generic translator where you speak(!) an arbitrary word/sentence in one language and it comes out in another? From what I can tell speereo only lets you select from predefined phrases and plays you a little audio clip of them.
Comment: Re:Am I missing something. (Score 2, Informative) 304
address space layout randomization I though this was a feature in OS X 10.5? Was it not implemented or just not implemented as well as other OS's? I remember hearing about it as a feature for 10.5.
From TFA:
Two years ago, Miller and other researchers criticized Apple for releasing Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, with half-baked ASLR that failed to randomize important components of the OS, including the heap, the stack and the dynamic linker, the part of Leopard that links multiple shared libraries for an executable.
Microsoft, Nokia plan mobile Office deal
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FelxH
FelxH writes "via cnet:
Microsoft has confirmed a press conference to discuss an alliance with Nokia to help get its Office software onto that company's mobile phones. So far, the only phones that have their own native versions of Office have been those running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software. Together with planed browser-based versions of several Office apps, this constitutes Microsoft's attempt to expand its productivity suite market to the phone and the web."
Microsoft has confirmed a press conference to discuss an alliance with Nokia to help get its Office software onto that company's mobile phones. So far, the only phones that have their own native versions of Office have been those running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software. Together with planed browser-based versions of several Office apps, this constitutes Microsoft's attempt to expand its productivity suite market to the phone and the web."
Comment: Re:Lots can be done... (Score 4, Interesting) 254
According to the previous article, they have found a way to send sms messages without any provider:
"This method does not use the carrier and so is free (and invisible to the carrier)". So blocking at the provider level won't work unfortunately
Alarming Trends for Airline Safety
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FelxH
FelxH writes "In a review of airline accidents over the last decade, flightglobal finds that the the number of fatalities in 2009 is the highest since 2002 (this is mostly because two accidents this year involved wide-body aircrafts). Moreover, 2001-10 might be the first decade since World War II where global airline accident rates do not show improvement."
Comment: Re:I'm dubious (Score 1) 834
I had similar thoughts, especially since the beauty ideal for women has changed a lot over the years, while the ideal for men has stayed virtually the same (look at ancient greek/roman statues for example)