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Comment Re:Yawn (Score 1) 157

They could make a bundle consulting for Hollywood space opera movies or pro sound designers maybe.
And how about Google... what will the clanging feel like when they bump into and drill into that asteroid? Will it drive the miners or their robots insane??

Comment Re:Jupiter Tape? (Score 1) 621

Don't be silly. Current natural language processing (NLP) technology allows the extraction of significant proper names and subject matter which effectively compresses the data to its salient points. A very simple consumer version exists in the Summarize context menu service in my MacBook Pro.

Without much brains it at least picked the central sentence correctly to get this:

Current natural language processing (NLP) technology allows the extraction of significant proper names and subject matter which effectively compresses the data to its salient points.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing#Major_tasks_in_NLP

Comment Scrap it. (Score 1) 140

I don't get it. Sure if you think of spectrum as gold veins and you are selling mining rights.
But it is artificial. The government pays these companies to develop something, then charges them for spectrum.
It becomes a billions of dollars business for the government, and for the carriers who only have to pay a bit less than they receive.
The point IIRC was to deliver low-cost, high quality applications. That has nothing to do with paying for spectrum and the phone companies have shown they don't put the money they get to use building infrastructure, which is why an upstart like Google can parachute in and deliver high quality fiber connectivity.
How about we just scrap the whole thing and start over again?

Comment Re:Sample data... (Score 1) 124

well they probably would want to keep the data as a corpus of text that can be further analyzed or used to guide further searches. It's just that it can be quite abused... and many people these days would rather have the data deleted immediately rather than improve a service that is less than crucial to one's life, so far.

Comment Re:Sample data... (Score 1) 124

Anonymize means to make anonymous. Not the vocal pattern. Simply the user id is not tied to it after 6 months.
    A corpus (large body of annotated text and/or voice) is a necessary part of natural language recognition, which is a type of artificial intelligence, but usually you tell me people that is what will happen to the data.
      The 6 month window during which you ID is tied to your voice record, is likely very useful for AI such as being able to understand a given person's accent better, or perhaps providing context (they know your email and surfing habits) to understand your query better (perhaps if you are travelling, you want to know about a train schedule, etc.).
      However it also means law enforcement could: easily read all the searches a user has done; force collection with ID beyond 6 months; automatically scan siri requests to fish for suspicious activity; or even tick the checkbox that turns your phone into a 24x7 eavesdropping device based on those automated scans, which of course are becoming more intelligent thanks to having all this corpus data and economic activity (cashflow) attached to this business of making AI smarter for mobile devices.

Comment Versant (Score 1) 253

I was surprised the other day when helping another friend prepare for a test on English speaking proficiency (for foreigners to join the U.S. government). One of the applicable tests is Versant, which does this. It is a verbal test. You call a phone number, enter your ID and then do tasks including: read sentences, give one or two word answers, create sentences by reordering and linking three phrases, retell a story with as many as possible of the characters, actions and situation; and finally give your opinion about a concept (like, "Do you think children should be able to decide when and how much to study?"). The system grades you not on individual questions but gives you a general score in areas like vocabulary, pronunciation, and fluency. The problem is it is very rapid-fire so you can't really pass it unless you are close to a native. The grades can be viewed on the web in a few minutes.
On one practice test I typed what he should say live during the test, which gave him an idea of how much work he has cut out for himself to achieve a passing score.
http://www.versant.jp/e_about.html

Comment Tax break (Score 2) 312

I was wondering about whether computing resources could be donated and you get a tax break. Found this related thread.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=7201
Key is as others have mentioned that your resources are most likely using minimum power when idle and increasing use will increase electrical fees, air conditioning fees, and might I suppose also wear them out sooner if it uses disk space.
Also imagined you might have enough scale to sell elastic computing services but there is a competitive market for that too.

Comment Infrared vision (Score 1) 375

Make a third-party, augmented reality platform for driving, platform independent so it drives competition to quickly improve.
Will improve safety, driver wakefulness, driver awareness of environment, and so on. Also may provide an open platform on which to develop smart systems (like following other cars or warning about road conditions in the next mile that other cars have seen) that work on any brand of car.
Components:

- Imaging sensors such as infrared, microwave or something else distributed mostly in front of the car, some behind, a little on the sides. Use something that cuts through mist, snow, rain, smog so you can see the sides of the road in freezing mist or see a deer in the road far away at night. Also some low light sensors might be good to pick up where the taillights of cars in front of you are.

- Displays: Google Glass might be perfect. HUD might be useful or something else. I like the idea of being able to take glasses off but an HUD that always will tell any driver what is standing in the road waiting for you to hit it at night would be a very good idea.

- Processing hardware: competition among 3rd party manufacturers. Best if not tied to a certain model car, though BMW or Mercedes can certainly add more expensive sensors, etc.

- Processing software framework: Open platform

- Processing algorithms and engine: Similar competition, though if Google can't win this they better send their guys back to Carnegie Mellon
I am willing to bet the insurance companies will love you to death and then get that stupid law deleted, all you need to do is disable messaging and go into a drive mode as someone else mentioned when you are in motion. Though reading text aloud or letting you send voice messages via voice controlled functionality sounds like it would be not as bad as talking to someone in the car who is with you.

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