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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.
...but can she run Linux?
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
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
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....
She doesn't know how to say 'no' either.
We don't click those kind of links... That's a bad link.
The Furby can run PicoGUI.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
No, maybe we shouldn't
"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
Indeed. Let's see Cindy get around:
"I like to swallow"
"Do me by the backdoor"
"Call the football team I'm wet"
"Daddy likes to do me too"
and so on...
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
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.
You have an interesting point, but I doubt that every day English users are thinking about the linguistic roots of words when making such value judgements.
I think that the value people place on words is influenced only very indirectly by past usage. People think "intelligent" sounds more sophisticated than "smart" because "smart" is used more commonly. It's a bit circular, I know, but I think it's true.
Remember the first time you heard the word "epiphany"? Since its meaning is so specific, you probably thought it was a sophisticated word. Once you found out that everyone and their mother was using it, it probably lost its lustre. The word "perogative" lost all its dignity when Will Smith explained it to the masses. I guess I just think that language snobbery is a facet of generalized snobbery: things that are common are looked down upon, while esoteric things are elevated. I think there's also a point to be made about polysyllabic words sounding more sophisticated than monosyllabic ones, but I don't think I need to prove it.
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As for your story about your experience in that class, I agree with you completely. However, your professor has a point--linguistic connotations can creep in subconsciously, and really affect the way a particular question or statement is framed. While "native South Africans" sounds innocuous, "the natives" might be a bit problematic. For example, "native New Yorkers" would sound fine, but referring to the citizens of New York as "the natives" would only be done as a joke. What your professor probably should have done instead would be to point out some of the negative connotations of that word in order to make people aware of them. Censorship, though, is almost always counterproductive.
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/
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
Please don't have kids.
Why the hell shouldn't he have kids? I grew up with ample access to nails, bits of wood and hammers. The ONLY thing that ever got hurt was my pride when I'd ask for an honest opinion of what I'd created.
We need more parents who are willing to let their kids grow up and experience things first hand. I'm not saying that it's a good idea to give a kid a box of matches, a gallon of gas and tell them to have a good time in their bedroom. That sort of thing should done outside after all.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
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.
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.