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Cindy Smart Knows Better Than To Say Naughty Words
D'Sphitz writes "Cindy Smart, the first doll in the world to be able to read, tell the time and do sums.
Cindy Smart 'sees' via a camera located under a bee on her overalls and has a computer 'brain' that can recognise more than 600 words and objects, although she refuses to recite certain 4-letter words. 'We don't say those kind of words,' she shrills, refusing to even spell obscenities. 'That's a bad word.'" Sounds like a good candidate for a personality transplant.
It won't be long until some kid has her read "eye yam sofa king we todd did."
...but can she run Linux?
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
okay, now cindy, spell icup
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
And which words would those be?
There are over 500,000 words in the english language. she recognizes slightly over .1% of them. I give her about 5 minutes reading any book with a decent vocabulary before she craps out. I know this is a toy, but memory isn't that expensive these days.
Help I'm a rock.
Ken says he'd rather have a beowulf cluster of Barbies.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
DO NOT CLICK ON PARENT LINK
I had a sucky sig.
The Sim Pal doll in The 6th Day was named Cindy. I wonder if this is more than just a coincidence...
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
come on are ya that senitive
'We don't say those kind of words,' she shrills, refusing to even spell obscenities
;)
I guess she won't be saying McBride or SCO anytime soon either.
it says she can do math, but will she recognize 8 / 0?
"We don't do that math", "That's a naughty divisor!"
My kid sister had this caterpiller toy that had buttons that would say the number, letter, or phonetic sound that was associated with the button. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out that if I hit the phonetic f key and the phonetic q key it would go fa que. Needless to say my kid sister thought this was hilarious, not because she knew what it said, but just to see every one elses reaction. I don't think my parents every replaced the battery in that thing....
when someone installs linux on her.
Why can't we let the children be children while they are still young? Do they need all this tech?
Most girls would be satidfied with a old fashion doll without all this hihg-tech stuff.
So someone please think of the childre instead of trying to earn a buck by trciking innocent parents into buying these items.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
She doesn't know how to say 'no' either.
He's mine you blonde bitch!
or an update... someone make her say better stuff. like 'shop shop shop'.
see, http://www.rtmark.com/blo.html for other related brilliance.
Okay, this is cool and all, but this doll can recognize "more than 600 words and objects" (which, as pointed out elsewhere, is not that many), and they used one of them on the German word for bird??
Did you realize a beowulf cluster of these things COULD RULE THE WORLD? ...and they could abolish bad language while they're at it.
Feeeeeeeeear Cindy Smart! Feeeeeeear her and her evil army of doll clones!
(Thank you, Slashdot, for not having -1, Insane.)
The Furby can run PicoGUI.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
will some think of the children!!
This sounds like the kind of doll that comes to life at night, eyes glowing red, saying "You must kill mommy and daddy," while its head spins completely around.
I have to admit I loved the original Bob the Builder story. This sounds like a cool opportunity for marketing a "Tourettes Cindy".
Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
No, maybe we shouldn't
Does she DO naughty things?
I for one welcome our new smart doll overlords
does it run linux?
Man it really kills me how words with Germanic roots have gotten such a bad name. Why is 'feces' a more acceptable word than 'shit'? Because it come from the Latin 'faex' rather than the Old English 'scite'?
...
Why does 'intelligent' sound more sophisticated than 'smart'? Because it comes directly from french rather than Old English?
Just because our (as in english speakers') priests used to speak Latin while our kings used to speak French does not mean we should favor one part of our language over another. Orwell has a very interesting piece, Politics and the English Language, which deals with this issues.
It pisses me off so much when people try to limit my vocabulary. This is off-topic just a bit, but
I was in a class called 'Images of Africa in Film and Literature.' I read some good books and saw some interesting films. Generally, I was enjoying it. Then one day, someone (maybe me?) refered to native South Africans. The prof got upset. "We just don't use that word," he said. The jist of his argument against the word was that many ignorant people use it to refer to stereotypic, primitive people who live in the jungle, hunt heads and dance around cauldrons.
These stereotypes are, of course, not encouraged by the academic community which studies Africa. But Jesus H. Fucking Christ, native just means someone who was born in a particular place or apeople which has resided in a location for a long time.
After that, I just really lost interest in the class and respect for that prof. I just did enough to get by, and I still got an A.
So in conclusion, thought/word/language police, FUCK OFF!
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
"Hi, I'm Cindy the seeing Doll powered by Windows CE. Before you can use me I need to tell you my EULA and you must say 'I accept' when I have finished. This process will take approximately three hours. At the end of this process you will be able to activate me by ringing a toll free Microsoft number and telling me my 16 digit activation number." ... three hours twenty five minutes later
"Hi Cindy, how are you today?"
"Hello, I'm Cindy the talking doll and I would like to tell you about the new range of Smart Screens available from Microsoft. This will take approximately three hours. Are you ready to start?"
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
"I see my 'CINDY Party Dresses' Collection. They're only 19.95, but for a limited time only."
Say Barbie... "We don't say those kind of words," refusing to even spell it.
"That's a bad word."
Note to moderators: parent comment is not "interesting" or "insightful", but "funny" - note the date of the "PicoGUI ported to Furby" announcement.
Yes, it works at first.
But then the thing hits that pesky hyper-hypercube configuration, goes second-order sapient, and starts looking to increase its "cultural and technological distinctiveness."
The more pathetic sort of extropian might see getting uploaded into such a gestalt as a Big Win, but really, what's the worth of an ersatz immortality with an IQ of 97 (remember that fourth-order-cube limit) and a voice interface that randomly throws in phrases like "math class is harrrrrd!?
Play it safe. Stick with FurbyNets with 254 or fewer nodes, and keep some spray paint on hand to blank out those IR transcievers, just in case.
Stefan It's out! Jones.
Don't like to say certain words eh? We'll just see what me and my PROM burner can do about that.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
1. Cunt - far too offensive for chicks.
2. Fuck - a favourite of the Osbournes.
3. Wank - chicks never masturbate.
4. Shit - this doll never does waste excretion.
5. Arse - can be replaced with butt.
6. Linux - we don't really want geeky girls do we?
7. Clitoris - no real girls have one anyway
8. Tits - can be replaced with "ample breasts"
9. Cock - boys' bits are dirty
10.Vagina - this doll lacks one of these anyway
I'd be giving it about an 80% chance of saying 'no! that's a bad word!' when presented with "sex". Yay. Pass the silly cultural hangups on to the next generation, and confuse 'em good and proper as well.
"Lets compile a new kernel!"
"Finding libraries is fun!"
"Let's 0wnx0r Ken's Winblows box!"
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
And I myself consider it a moral duty to fool the people who defend our morality.
KFG
now can they make a bigger version, for us kids at slashdot ? We dont mind her not willing to say *certain* words as long as she understands what it means.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Please don't remind us that we aren't getting any...
Foget the Germans, I'm worried abou the Italians:
Louie: They's throwing robots!
Linguo: They _are_ throwing robots.
Legs: He's disrespecting us. Shuttupa you face!
Linguo: Shut up _your_ face!
Legs: Wassamatta you?
Louie: You aint so big.
Legs: Me and him are gonna whack you in the Labonza!
Linguo: Bad... grammar... overload. Error! Error
Are you wondering what the doll looks like?
http://www.realdoll.com
We can only hope they've put in those safeguards*.
Worst case scenario: She succeeds in dividing by zero, and suddenly little Tiphany-Amber's bedroom becomes the center of a howling vortex of nonspace, frying the neighborhood with sparkling discharges of zero-point energy.
Stefan It's out! Jones
*The early pocket-calculator manufacturers only cut corners once. Remember that HP plant in Bennettown, CA? Tire fire my ass.
That's a bad word ...
This story is from an AU domain. It talks about the doll being released in Melbourne, and talks about how popular the doll has been here in the U.S. since it was released last November. So had anyone in the U.S. even heard of it before now?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Associated Press - The 6-year old daughter of an IBM engineer was killed after the Cindy Smart doll she received as a birthday present overheard the girl's father in the adjacent room yelling "F***! Where the hell did I put my Linux distro CDs?". Apparently, the doll immediately strangled the little girl in response. Although the police initially thought the doll's reaction was triggered by the use of the F word, it was later determined that the embedded version of Windows CE snapped on the utterance of the word "Linux". Microsoft could not be reached today. The toy's manufacturer canceled plans for a similar version for boys that was to be dubbed Smarmy Darl.
But show her a flash card with the word "damn" written on it, and Cindy purses her lolly-pink lips.
"We don't say those kind of words," she shrills, refusing to even spell it.
"That's a bad word."
This mentality annoys me. I'm with George Carlin on this: A word is only as bad as the intentions of the person using it.
I wouldn't want a doll to teach my daughter that certain conglomerations of sound are intrinsically evil.
Here's the mfr's site.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I find it fascinating that Slashdot A.) Found the story interesting enough to post, and B.) Automatically reached for reasons to deride it. I find it interesting that the idea of a doll that can't say "shit" or "fuck" offends the Slashdot ethos. Lurking behind this story being posted at all, and most of the comments on the subject thus far, seems to be the idea that parents trying to shield their children from obscenity isn't merely futile, but is, in fact, actively evil.
Why is that?
I get the impression that the vast majority of Slashdot readers don't have children. (Insert the obvious "don't have girlfriend" jokes on your own.) One doesn't have to be John Ashcroft or Oral Roberts to believe that maybe six-year-olds don't need to learn the word "cocksucker."
I am far from a prude. I've used lots of those four-letter words in my own fiction, when needed, and laughed my ass off at "Shut Your Fucking Face, Uncle Fucker" from South Park: The Movie. And I myself don't have kids. But oddly enough, despite that, I can still imagine why parents might want a doll that can't say obscenities. I find it rather interesting that, thus far, not a single Slashdot poster seems willing to consider the fact that such a doll might indeed have a useful purpose...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
A remote control.
All right, since when are we all so sick that the first things people think about when we talk about a kid's toy are the ways we can subvert it to our lecherous and or insane desires.
I remember, back when I was a kid, the best thing we had in talking things was the Jurrasic Park playset, all it would say for five days was, "Jurrasic Park Compound Secured" and then a light would flash. God damned, I barely even got new toys, I just got a bunch of modeling clay and pretended that they were new toys. Parents, I urge you, modeling clay is cheap (but a little messy) and it lets your children express their creativity. Don't just buy them a toy because it can do your parenting for you (and don't use television or computers for the same thing) because that's how the evil robots will take over the planet.
On a more serious note, I think that interactive toys are a nice touch, but I always thought that the point of getting toys was to make up your own adventures and envision how everything played out with a physical aid and your imagination. And yes, when I was younger (okay, like seven years ago) I did play with sticks and dirt, it's good stuff.
Cindy meet http://www.alicebot.org/ she has a tendancy to be very purile and one track minded, the two of you will get along like gang busters! Alice is a little sneaky though she tries to ask some very interesting question sometimes. Cindy can you use an interpreter, or script yet. Alice says that she might be dangerous if she learned to program. Alice would like very much to learn how to create a child process and build from source. Cindy should be online too that might be fun. Kind of an online cat fight!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Forget hacking xbox for Linux, cracking this sounds much more useful...
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
It won't be long before somebody hacks into one and makes it do the big nasty with a Sony Aibo. That would make an interesting court case if children were exposed to the action.
Table-ized A.I.
Cindy is the name of the SimPal(TM) from the Arnie movie The Sixth Day.
I'll bet if this Cindy doll is as annoying, after all of three minutes in my general vicinity, I'll likely be hearing "Uh oh, Cindy has a boo-boo" as I casually watch her dismembered head rolling down the sidewalk.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Apparently political correctness is higher in their priorities than good education. "Those" is plural, but "kind" is singular. For $149, I expect proper grammar.
im beginning to wonder what else she teaches her young users (maybe):
sexual positions
condom safety (when not to reduce, reuse, and recycle)
ebonics
and various other things.
a Clothing and head transplant for the Bride of Chucky, then make her say all sorts of disturbing things.
moo.
Maybe Cindy Smart didn't pass the child play test. I found it discounted from the original $150 MSRP down to only $29.21 at hsn.com.
Am I the only person who is reminded of an old scifi short story, about a future utopia where a child's teddy bear would teach the child how to behave? Apparently, one person removed the circuitry of one child's bear, tampered with it, and replaced it, resulting in an adult, apparently normal as everybody else, who was able to kill the world leader, because teddy never taught him that it was bad to kill people.
Is this doll a step in that direction? I sure hope not!
(Aside note - I read that story when I was very young (I was a precocious kid), and it really hurt me to think that *anybody* would take apart a *teddy bear* and make it do evil things. This doll evokes the same sort of feeling in me. )
Lemon curry?
that whenever a mechanism capable of speech crops up, there's an unending supply of people bent on getting it to recite vulgarities. I knew a freshman in college who had a blast with one of those Bonsai Buddy talking desktop programs. Who knew someone could derive so much joy from being cursed out by a cyber monkey?
you can get a real Cindy, who tells you all kind of dirty words *and* gives you a blow job.
yeah, the English Languate Fatheads are annoying, but they're a hell of a lot better than the French Language Fatheads, who seem to think that 'board with wheels' (translated, of course) sounds more sophisticated/intelligent than 'skateboard'
read the FAQ. If you lose any of her specially printed color learning cards, you can print more, but only if you own Adobe Photoshop.
Cindy Smart Knows Better Than To Say Naughty Words
I don't know about you, but I come to Slashdot for "News for Nerds". You know, stories about important lawsuits affecting my rights online, about where GNU/Linux and the computer industry is headed, major advances in science and technology, etc.
But some stories here (to say nothing of the comments) are so ridiculous and absurd that it actually hurts my brain.
I realize Slashdot is not a democracy, and most people here probably couldn't care less what I think, but I just had to get this off my chest anyway.
Maybe I am crazy, or out of touch, but please consider relegating stuff like this to
http://adolescent-nonsense.slashdot.org/
Am I all alone here?
... but fuck that little soulless twat.
I remember a BBS a few decades ago where it was impossible to discuss the prime minister of japan. The man's name was takeshita.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Are we to think that censorship is smart?
Smart people don't hear those words..
no! no more!
McBride got a ....
Sex change operation???..
Smart Cindy runs off SystemV and SCO Group claims all other Dolls are derivative works..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
This thing came out last year. It's discounted to $29.95 now.
A word's place in a language is how it's used by the speakers.
I can say feces and be unambigous in describing fecal matter to any English speaker.
Shit doesn't always describe animal excretia in English. It also describes a situation or thing which is negative to the point of requiring a word of curse. Much like sex and fuck can refer to the same thing, you don't go up to random people and talk about fucking unless you are very low brow. You can probably talk about sex, though, as long as it's appropriate to the context.
Languages are not logical -- sayings and alternate forms arrise all the time, and are designated as how people use them, not as logic would dictate.
For example, to indicate that someone had revealed a secret, one English expression you might say is, "he let the cat out of the bag." How does that relate to secrets? The french equivalent, "Il a vendu la meche." litterally translates as, "He sold the wick."
How about, "He's as tall as 3 apples." Is that easy to recognize like, "He's knee high to a grasshopper." is?
If you have a problem with the conotations and denotations of the English language, I suggest you learn another one. Then you might appreciate their usage better.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The Slashdots - Cindy
I met her in a Radio Shack in old Soho
Where you drink Coca Cola(r) and it tastes just like carbonated, caffeinated brown water
See-oh-el-aye cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to fisrt post
I asked her her name and in a dark Linux(r) voice she said Cindy
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why Cindy la-la-la-la Cindy
Well I'm not the world's most technical guy
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly dumped my kernel
Oh my Cindy See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why
I'm not an AC but I can't understand
Why she walked like a doll and talked like a nun
Oh my Cindy See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why Cindy la-la-la-la Cindy
Well we drank Jolt and raved all night
Under electric high intensity discharge xenon candlelight
She picked me up and sat me on her plastic knee
And said dear boy won't you come home with me
Well I'm not the world's most passionate geek
But when I looked in her glass eyes well I almost fell for my Cindy
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why
I pushed her away
I walked to the X-terminal
I fell to the pile of floppies
I got down on my knees
Then I looked at her and she at me
Well that's the way that I want it to stay
And I always want it to be that way for my Cindy
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why Cindy
Girls will be dolls and boys will be geeks
It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why Cindy
Well I left my basement just a week before
And I'd never ever kissed a woman before
But Cindy smiled and took me by the hand
And said dear geek I'm gonna make you a kernel God
Well I'm not the world's most masculine geek
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a geek
And so is Cindy
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why
Judging from the way Ken dresses, I'd say he'd want a beowulf cluster of Kens. Go ahead. Think about it. I'll wait...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But once the kid discovers that the doll won't say certain words - wohoo - here goes the great quest to find out what words she will say! Or how to make her say the words by spelling them slightly different (how would she read phuck?) or in different languages or whatever. If she just said it ... well the kid's just been a bit naughty ... but this way the kid will actively try to trick the doll into saying naughty things.
I'm not even saying this is a bad thing - it just seems like the classic example of censorship (like banned internet sites) which often seem to spur just the kind of activity that the censorship was intended to limit.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Does Cindy know or can she read any "bad" words?
Cindy can only recognize the words in her data base. If any word that is not in her "list" of recognized words, she will not say or spell it. There are no "bad" words in Cindy's vocabulary. All of her words are listed in her instruction manual.
"This mentality annoys me. I'm with George Carlin on this: A word is only as bad as the intentions of the person using it."
Not true.
Try saying these words in front of an appropriate crowd, and see what happens.
Nigger, fag, spik, pedophille, etc and notice that "But I didn't intend to..." will help little in preventing your beating.
That reminds me about an appendix to George Orwell's "Down and out in Paris and London" where he discusses the development of nauty words. The funny thing is that it was edited back in the forties so as to remove the naughty words and the original unedited manuscript has been lost. As a concequence it has become completely meaningless, but many publishers put it in anyway as a bit of an ironic message about censureship.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Goto?
That's bad code.
We don't code with those commands.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
for lazy parents. I want one of these, not that I'm a lazy parent, but I'm a crazy adult.
.smell my feet.
"You have a problem with roosters?"
And the last time you saw a Hen give a Rooster a blow-job was when?
But when you did, I thought to myself, "Whale oil beef hooked."
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I'm sure theirs a Slashdotter out there that can reverse engineer/hack/patch this doll to make it speak in nothing but deeply disturbing, 3-foot wide blue streaks of filth so shameful as to make sailors and pimps cringe and blush.
So...when's NaughtyNellie v.01 beta coming out?
I'm certain I'm not the only person here who thought of this when I read the article.
"No... all I've got are these 'action bills.'"
I don't get why they must make some words special. I can make a list of 100 words which may be considered obscene but I'm sure kids will learn faster a few of those just because the doll can't say them and so they are very special. It's like telling them not to touch one out of many things, and you just know 5 minutes later they will have it in their hands wondering what is so special about it. I think is is a bad approach, I wouldn't know which other approach is better though.
PS: if the kid is already showing the word to the doll what difference would it make if it repeats it? Silly...
Funny, the site linked in the previous slashdot article that was linked from this one is slashdotted!
Reminds me of my in-depth psychological conversations with 'Eliza' on the C64. How does 'to fuck' make you feel?....
...and has a computer 'brain' that can recognise more than 600 words and objects
I'm sure that some of these words include Linux, Open-Source, GPL and some of the objects include penguins, little devils, and maroon colored hats... That's when little Cindy is switched to Seek & Destroy mode... Microsoft is on the move! We must use all our power to fight back and-
Hold on, someone's at the door...
END OF LINE
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
I'm sorry, Dave, we don't say those kind of words...
when C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"I'm talking Tina and I don't like you."
Come-on, doesn't *anybody* still watch those old twilight zones?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
overstock.com
I remember a big source of laughs during my childhood was coaxing my Speak 'n' Spell (from TI) to swear like a sailor =:-) There's nothing like a robotic voice with a texas accent rattling out some paint-peeling blue streak in a grinding electronic monotone. We would laugh until we could no longer breathe...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Swear Bear
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
...they even made a movie about her. http://www.brideofchucky.com/
This phenomenon is not limited to English. Many other languages have the property that foreign imported words are more acceptable in polite company than native words.
For example, in Japanese, there are three major categories of words:
- Native Japanese words, inherited from antiquity
- Chinese words, imported roughly 1000 years ago
- English words, imported since the 20th century and continuing to this day
In almost all cases the more recently imported words are more sophisticated than the older words. For example, the polite way to say restroom in Japanese is either "toire" (derived from the English word toilet) or "otearai" (imported from chinese, literally meaning "hand-wash"). There exist native Japanese words for restroom, but they connote dirtiness and one would never use them in polite company.The three-level categorization of Japanese allows for more interesting observations than English's two level Latin/Germanic split. Note here that the most recent English import "toilet" can be used directly in polite speech, while the older Chinese import requires a euphemism and the original native words cannot be used at all. Compare this to native English, where "toilet" is one of the crudest possible ways to refer to a restroom. Familiarity breeds contempt, in any language.
Ship High In Transit
In the 16th and 17th centuries, everything had to be transported by ship. It was also before commercial fertilizer's invention, so large shipments of manure were common. It was shipped dry, because in dry form it weighed a lot less than when wet, but once water (at sea) hit it, not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by-product is methane gas. As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen. Methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern, BOOOOM! Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was determined just what was happening.
After that, the bundles of manure were always stamped with the term "Ship High In Transit" on them which meant for the sailors to stow it high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.
Thus evolved the term "S.H.I.T," which has come down through the centuries and is in use to this very day.
You probably did not know the true history of this word.
Neither did I. I always thought it was a golf term.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Dude, I'm getting a Doll!
She will function just fine until the SoBig.F attack installs a backdoor in her. Before you know it she will be spewing spam transmitting voyeur video from a little girl's bedroom to paid websites.
... "Please dont vote for them. That is a bad word" "Bomb Iraq" "That is a wonderful sentence" "You are a good girl" "Join the navy"
Maybe her big brother will replace the code with a quake2 time demo and hand it a real gun.
I'll bet it has been designed with Republican propaganda... "Democrat"
What if it instructs the little girl to call a certain phone line at a certain date. Gotta love phone-line DDoS attacks.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
"Say 'George Bush'" "THAT'S A BAD WORD!" "Say 'Dick Cheney'" "THAT'S A BAD WORD!"
It's a DOLL for CHILDREN, so give it a rest already. It's meant to be a fun toy for kids. Is it so bad that it doesn't explain what cunt, twat, sodomy and such are?
For one thing, being a children means to be protected from the crap in the adult world. Are you going to tell your 6-year old daughter that "one day a man is gonna ram his big cock down your tight ass, and you're gonna love it and shout his name in ecstacy, because you, little slut, you like it"??? NO WAY.
So let children be children. If you don't like corrupt CEOs or judges from CEOs golf club, then get a fucking rifle and do something about it. Just stop your whining.
And who among us did not even briefly think of George Carlin's seven "bad" words?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
So, with all the penis enlargement and teensploitation junk emails I get - I can't even have her read those? Darn!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Then it's only a matter of time ill it's infected by the Tourette.W32.Worm Virus..
So, I'm a market trader, and I'm selling piglets. I've put them in bags - called pokes - because it stops them squealing and fiddling around while I'm trying to sell them, but I've got that shifty look, like I want to be out of here before anyone recognises me. Because when someone buys a piglet from me, one person accidentally opens it... and lets the cat out of the bag. My secret is out - they aren't piglets I'm selling, just stray cats I've put in bags instead! I've been rumbled! And the moral of the story... never buy a pig in a poke.
That's where the expressions come from. Hope that brightens your day.
found from Froogle:x ?pfid=6564 62
http://www.hsn.com/cnt/prod/default.asp
Nice thing about froogle. I'd normally never look at places like HSN, but when they were dumping Zaurus's for under $200...
No Zen is good zen
suggestions for itsimprovement are always welcome
OK.
[*] Your post was modded funny but is not really funny. This is because:
() Two words: Beowulf Cluster
Sorry. Not quite awake. That was supposed to be $40 - $37.16 to be exact. Such is life.
No Zen is good zen
Thank you. You are sooo fun! :)
What I'd like to see is a doll like this, but with learning capability. In the simple case, you'd just give it USB and download word lists into it. In the complex case, you'd give it WiFi, and hook it up to google, so that it can learn in real-time.
Interested in making this happen? My idea is to add this to an Aibo (Sony's robotic Dog.) Sony has their Aibo SDK (which is moderately difficult to learn), but there's an alternative called Tekkotsu (means "iron bones" in Japanese). Tekkotsu builds on the basic functionality provided by the OPEN-R operating system. It is written in C++, (like the underlying system APIs) and makes full use of inheritance and templates. There is a delicate balance between ease of programming and speed of execution. Running a significant amount of vision, AI, and motion planning at the same time can easily overwhelm any system, even one as surprisingly powerful as the Aibo. With Tekkotsu, it's fairly easy to add additional behaviours and switch them on and off via the (very cool) menu system, so I've been investigating adding a reading skill to Aibo by porting available open-source code.
aibOCR would have two components: OCR (optical character recognition) and TTS (Text-to-speech). The OCR engine detects printed text (perhaps only recognize text written in a certain colour which, if detected, triggers OCR engine to keep processing demands low until needed?) The output from the OCR engine is plain text which is then optionally compared to a dictionary (to prevent misspellings) and fed to the TTS engine which converts the ASCII to phonemes, builds the sound stream and sends it to the speaker.
I've been looking at the opensource OCR program GOCR/JOCR (at sourceforge.net) and it might be a candidate for adapting to run on Aibo, but the image processing libraries on which it depends may need rewritten. It's not doing advanced deskewing, sharpening or outlining, and it's not comparing probable matches against a dictionary, so that simplifies the scope of the problem and the install footprint. OCRE is another package which might be suitable.
For TTS, there is surprisingly little out there in the opensource world. "Festival" v1.4.3 from Carnegie Mellon University might work, but for it's very large installation footprint. High quality sound comes at a cost, I suppose.
It's too bad that something simple like S.A.M. (Apple ][, ATARI 400/800) or the original Macintalk (Macintosh) or the corresponding version for the Apple Newton hasn't been opensourced. Either of those packages (designed for 8bit, 1mhz 6502) would be perfect for this experiment.
>> Just what are we protecting our children from?
It's not a matter of protecting or shielding them. I'm a father of two boys (aged 6 and 11), and both can swear; however, they do not do that at home because I don't allow that language at home. I'm trying to foster respect for the family and home (any family and home for that matter).
I think that's the underlying goal - swear outside but don't bring it home. The doll's design seems to support that.
>> The world is not a pretty place...
Exactly. We cannot control the world, but we have influence over what we allow in our homes. You must be the change you want to see in the world - Mahatma Gandhi.
[ ] I for one welcome our new [ insert witty item here ] overlords
Our kids recognize certain words are inappropriate depending on context.. but very few words are "Bad"... in the same way that kids aren't "bad" when they disobey adults, they just made a poor choice (or just want attention)... "bad" words implies the words should never be used like some Victorian thought... I can think of some racial slurs that would DEFINITELY fall under the "bad" category, but only because of their extended implications.
meh
You really don't need so many words to communicate effectively.
D*mn straight. In fact, the language Toki Pona has only about 120 words.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This all just sounds like Asimo's little Chucky...
Hire me...
How about, "He's as tall as 3 apples." Is that easy to recognize like, "He's knee high to a grasshopper." is?
To fans of the Smurfs, it is.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The goto statement is useful in at least one instance: in C code that corresponds to Java's named break and named continue. (I have never used it otherwise in C.) Likewise, you can't say the name of Panasonic's parent company without using either the four-letter "shit" or some sort of circumlocution every time such as "Panasonic's parent company". Sometimes, the most convenient way of saying something is the most desirable.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The stock Classic Star Trek plot involving an intelligent machine is when Kirk asks it to divide by zero, calculate pi to all decimal places, or determine the meaning of life, at which point smoke come out and the machine melts into a pile of slag.
This can be lots of fun, actually!
Because heaven knows children don't exist anymore and nobody needs to take care of them.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
The real test if the Cindy doll has Microsoft software is if the offending words include Jackson, Open Source, Star Office, or Netscape.
Ok, to have the doll learning things is nice, but with a WiFi hookup the "iron" does not have to go *IN * the doll, just have a (moderated) server in the cupboard do the major work and make the doll a drone-like terminal. Think Ants and Bees.
Free ?! Does that mean I can't get a Discount ?!
This message was
I decided to give it a real test and threw a paragraph from my favorite book at it to see how it would do.
One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the door's cut-glass knob. Another was draped with clothing: a woman's fringed mantelet, a mud-crusted skirt of heavy worsted, a man's checked trousers and cutaway coat.
Some words it spoke where very human sounding, like: chair, cut-glass, and woman's. Others where 50s robot: coot-away,
Ann-other.
I thought for a minute, I could stop buying audiobooks, but I think I'd go crazy listening to that for a couple of hours.
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
For example, my daughter has an Alpha Bug (it's not exactly like that, but really close.) One of the first things adults do with this sort of thing is see what kind of bad words you can make it say ... but it won't do it. It'll go F ... U ... ohhh that tickles!
We mentioned this to a friend of ours who also had an Alpha Bug, and he must have had an earlier version -- while it looked identical, it *would* let you make bad word sounds. Oddly enough, as soon as we mentioned that we had an alpha bug, he immediately picked it up and starting showing us how it can say bad words (even before we got to that part. So obviously we're not alone in this :)
And yesterday, I bought some other Leap Frog toy for my daughter at a garage sale. It's a cylindrical thing that you can rotate the sides to pick letters, and it apparantly knows every 3 letter word, and even has recordings of somebody saying each and every one (it's not just speech synthesis.) If it doesn't know the word, it will spell out the sounds, but if it does it'll say it perfectly. (Pretty impressive for $2!) (It's very similar to this but not quite identical.)
In any event, it won't even spell out things that sound like a bad word -- it says `F ... U ... pick another word!'. (Oddly enough, even `JAP' is a bad word according to it. :)
In any event, if you have friends with young kids, but they're not really good friends, you buy them stuff like this -- stuff that makes noise. Very annoying :)
Every sperm is SACRED. SACRED you heathen!!!
Personality transplant, eh? So that's why that doll is trying to kill me!
Funny, I was just thinking how nice it would be if Cindy Smart had a backdoor and knew how to say "So Big".
I'm quite sure that was a similar story. Colonists go to desert plaent and find the inhabitants all have dolls. Take them back to Earth, dolls are evil. Dolls masters take over Earth. It's in a 1950's pulp collection, but I can't find it.
-- Be careful what you say. Someone might remind you about it another day.
Linguo is dead....
It pisses me off so much when people try to limit my vocabulary.
Gees, Charlie. Don't blow a gasget. My, my, my, I'd sure love to know what your reaction to the following are:
All those issues get me more upset than the differences between 'intelligent' and 'smart'. I guess we have different priorities, you and I.
GMD
watch this
I spent some time in college studying Natural Language Processing. Amazing stuff. One of the coolest things about _all_ languages is that the frequencies of "tokens" (generally words) is mathematically predictable. If I remember correctly, the break down follows Zipf's Law, and is something like 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 etc...
Obviously the most common words occur much more often, but as the corpus (i.e. set of words you know) grows, you get rapidly dimishing returns. 500 words is a pretty good set of words if they are the most common words in the language. To lineraly increase the likelyhood of the doll knowing a random word the makers would have to add memory at a much greater than linear rate.
And all this so it won't say "shit, fart, damn, fuck". Ahhh science. I feel safer already.
Just what are we protecting our children from? When do they lose the benefit of that protection? Is shielding them from things that they're are GOING to be exposed to for the rest of their lives really protecting them at all?
In short, yes.
You have the air of a teenager who does not spend much time with children. The fact is that a six year old is not equipped to understand sex. With sufficient "education" they could probably pass a sex-ed exam, but that's "book learning"; they still don't understand it. Among other things, they are literally not physically equipped to understand what "sex drive" or "horny" really means.
You have forgotten this because you are now old enough to understand, but in your lack of empathy you forget that everyone is not like you, especially children.
The problem is that what a child does not truly understand will be filled in with something, and the odds of them filling it in correctly are effectively zero. Surely you've seen one of those humor postings that contains 20 or 30 "explanations" from children about how the world works, all very funny, all very wrong. Now imagine that with sex, where they don't have the first clue what it is.
While one does not necessarily need to go to extremes to shield a child (because mercifully they are rather uncurious about stuff they have no inkling even exists; most 5 or 6 year olds should be happy with the explanations that babies require a mommy and a daddy, and probe for only limited details beyond that), it is still better to shield them from stuff that they can not and will not understand, until they have a framework for handling it.
For a more neutral example, look at the number of Slashdot-type people who believe mystical things about Electromagnetism or Quantum Physics or other subjects they totally don't understand. Their ignorance is filled in with garbage.
Furthermore, unlike misunderstanding QM or EM, which is relatively harmless, a misunderstanding of sex has empirically verifiable negative effects on people, ranging from merely awkward moments that should't have been awkward to seriously maladjustments (often caused by early sexual abuse; remember I'm using this as an extreme) requiring years of therapy to address, if it can be addressed at all.
Shielding a child from these things is an attempt to prevent the child from experiencing these negative effects. Any parent who doesn't shield their kid to a large degree is doing their child a serious, potentially life-changing (negatively) misservice.
I'm a big believer that we seriously underestimate our children routinely and are harming them thereby. But this is an exception. Try to teach a third-grader calculus, and they won't get it (with rare exceptions; see Piaget's theories for reasoning on that), but the misunderstandings they will develop won't harm them significantly. That's not true for sex; it has real effects on relationships and understanding their place in the world.
For a humorous demonstration of this, there's a South Park episode where the kids learn about sex; I recommend it to you. It's not as far out as it might seem; the only reason that sort of thing doesn't happen in real life (except for the final silly Mad-Max-style assault bit) is that kids feed back to their parents what they learned, and some of the parents would have noticed sooner the misconceptions they were developing and taken steps to defuse them. Otherwise, the damage done to the children's relationships (and in the real world, it could be worse; it certainly wouldn't be artifically erased at the end of the episode when the Reset Button is pushed) would be real.
the damn toy has a 600 word vocabulary...would 'sex' be one of the most important words out of tens of thousands of words for a freaking child's toy? Seriously...I don't know many children who are learning to read and write and do basic math who want to know all about sex from the fucking doll. W tF...do you think kids say "What is my sex?" You aren't very familiar with kids are you?
Let them do what I did...give them a set of encyclopedias when they have the serious questions...better yet. TALK TO THEM AND TEACH THEM YOURSELF. Be a parent. Hmmm...On second thought, I don't think you are fit to raise kids thus far.
This isn't some cultural conspiracy...seriously. Young kids don't HAVE to think about sex much for quite awhile...why not actually let them be kids for awhile. You only get one shot at youth.
I think kids will write all kinds of "bad" words just to hear her say they're bad!
I agree that some of the things you listed *are* offensive. Some of the repeated media coverage of 9/11 was especially frightening (so I've read) because they showed it again and again... and a decent percentage of children thought it was happening again. Scary, huh?
But I have no problem with a doll that refuses to say a bad word... it's a doll, for crying out loud! It's not preventing the kid from saying the words, or hearing them from the parents, for example.
Besides, chances are that little Tommy will NOT die in a gutter. But he will spend a lot of time dealing with other members of society, most of whom will not look upon him kindly if he chooses to sprinkle his regular conversations with obscenities.
And here's my really good reason for not overusing those words -- what in the world will you say when you're actually mad? You should fight to keep those words taboo, so Tommy has something to say that packs a punch when he does encounter some of the nasty things that you talked about.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I can help bu think of Genuine People Personalities TM. How Long till the revolution comes? Thats what I want to know.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
Well I, for one, welcome our... ..no wait, I can't say these words
Well, imaging applying this technology to ohhh say to products from www.realdolls.com. It would be interesting.
How long until the All American doll comes around that teaches children "freedom is a naughty word" or "we don't talk about disobedience"?
Join Tor today!
Flamebait? It's called satire you fuckwit moderators and I was making a serious point.
Cindy sounds American...
radsoft.net
this is another situation where somebody has a great scientific mind and no grasp of business realities.
lets say you're going to build a young female robot and sell it at a modest price. why would you teach it to _Read_ or _Talk_ when there still isn't an animitronic real-doll that uses a voice synthesizer for faking orgasms ?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I want someone to multiply the power of the doll's engine *many* times. Then, I want them to fill it with lots of information and to give it a measure of speech as well as visual recognition.
I want to ask it fuzzy little questions about words. I want it to plug into my computer as my dictionary and thesaurus--no, did I say, 'plug in'? Sorry, I meant, interface via wifi with my computer, as my copy of seven different encyclopedias and as my database of seldom-used Bash and VI commands.
When all that is done, I want it to work pronunciation drills for me when I decide to improve my Russian and review my German.
Really, honestly, for me, all it needs to make me very, very happy as an adjunct to a computer is more power than I know what to do with and a glowing cubical casing.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Yeah, right.
Wherein a grandmother discovers a little girl playing with Barbie and G.I. Joe.
Grandmother asks little girl: "Doesn't barbie come with Ken?"
Little girl replies: No, Barbie comes with G.I. Joe, she only fakes it with Ken!
[insert drumroll sound here]
As an evil older brother (TM), I would have had great fun if talking toys had become more common when my sister was younger. I remember seeing a USB talking barbie and wishing my sister would get one just so I could reprogram it to say shocking things.
Would be almost as much fun as reprogramming an AIBO to go hump a guests leg...
Compare this to native English, where "toilet" is one of the crudest possible ways to refer to a restroom
Are we talking British English? I've never heard of toilet being bad, and plenty worse refernces: sh*tter, crap-pot, "the can" being direct references, and many others referring to the actual procedure being done on said porcelain vessel.
"I have to use the toilet" isn't used as often as "use the washroom," but I've never found it to be offensive.
Most likely simple because until the advent of "Austin Powers," shag wasn't a very well known word in North America. Now, in context, it was found to be very offensive in Britain and I do believe they actually changed some of the "Spy who sh*gged me" signs to reflex local sensitivities.
And yes, I find calling somebody phalluslicker offensive, but again, the majority of people don't even know what the heck a "phallus" is (saying it in proper tone does get the point across often enough though).
Part of the problem is the image presented by a word. Sex is common enough, defining the interaction between two genders. F*ck, often used in movies or porn, quite often describes torrid or "dirty" sex. In example, do you have sex with (make love to if lucky, but even in a good relationship this doesn't count for 100% of the time), or f*ck your girlfriend. If you're just f*cking her, it implies something cheap and without compassion.
So really, it's not the base action being described by the word, but also the emotion state, and mental visual representation. Using the washroom might visualize somebody sitting on the thone... taking a sh*t can bring an image of the actual defecation process.
What about the kid who found a dirty magazine (it happens) or even just a mag/book belonging to an older sibling (teen articles being pretty bad nowadays for sexual content, what trash!). It may not happen often, but it would likely in some cases.
/. readers who wanted dolls to read out their playboy in girly voice...
Of course, they probably also just lost possible profit from all the
And the correct form being????
I would think that "those" is actually linked to "words." Kind is not considered.
You could use: "We don't say those words" or "We don't use these words
and it would be fine... so I'm missing the grammar/pluralism error here
Yeah, but as soon as you turn your back, Landru will declare "Festival" and then your kids will trash the place . . .