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BT's Predictions for the Future
Saluton_Mondo writes "BT describes the future as looking "ever more exciting each year"... you won't be surprised if you read their white paper on a timeline of technological development in various aspects of human culture, running up to about 2100. It's a bit out of date, but still pretty funny. Some are reasonable predictions, like the introduction of ID cards in the UK by 2010, or the rise of an American dictator in 2000. Others are just funny, like an orgasm via e-mail in 2010, or a security Barbie which searches for lost offspring. I'll not even mention the emergence of the Borg in 2040... see what you think."
Whole generation unable to effectively read, write, think, and work ... 2050
Y do u h8 me?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Highest earning celebrity is synthetic ... 2010
The way I see it, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Britney Spears are synthetic already.
They're won't be billions and billions of people on the planet if there's not enough food to feed them all.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
So at some point I set up a few _really_ simple bots.
The first one only responded with the same line over and over again whenever it was msg'd. At least on person kept on messaging it regularly over a period of half an hour, getting more and more upset that it kept on saying the same thing, and after a while getting pissed off that it kept answering even when he asked it to shut up :)
The second one just cycled through 4-5 canned responses and started over. People kept talking to it, and pointing out that it had said the same things before, and started giving details about themselves.
The third one looked for a trigger word in the message it got, and chose a sequence of messages based on that, and then cycled through the sequence. If no trigger word was present, it would choose a random sequence. If a trigger word for a different sequence occured while cycling through a sequence, it would switch sequences.
All in all it had a grand total of 20-25 messages.
The record conversation (based on a run of a couple of days) was one and a half hours... At that point I became disillusioned and dropped the whole thing. I still think that a few weeks of work and I'd easily have a chatterbot capable of picking up real women and getting their phone numbers in droves...
Now, imagine how long people will speak to Eliza or a chatterbot that someone actually make an effort on.
The reason bots fail the Turing test is because the judges know there's a chance they are talking to a machine. In chat rooms, most users are clueless that a bot could be capable of actually engaging them in something that seems like a conversation, and most people make so many mistakes, evade questions, give weird answers, have problems with the language etc., that people are VERY forgiving of the answers they get.
From watching one of the girls I met on IRC years ago chatting, I first realized why that is so: The typical "normal" user often follow conversations very superficially. They switch a lot between different conversations, but often seem not to put any effort in keeping track of the overall flow of a specific conversation. So if your bot get into trouble, it can get itself right out of trouble by simply ignoring "difficult" messages and answering something completely unrelated and randomly changing subjects and a large part of the people it talks to won't react at all, because they do the same thing themselves all the time.
*cough* Innocent until proven guilty *cough... *cough* fair trial *cough* *cough*...
They could have been holding people responsible for genocide and the treatment would still not be justified.
While Bush may not make use of it, through the laws passed after 9/11 combined with the legal precendent that Guantanamo Bay is not subject to US law, he has effectively created a situation where government agencies can seize anyone they want, prevent them access to lawyers, and move them to a location where they have no rights and no legal protection whatsoever.
Bush might not make full use of them, but having established the situation, a future president, or even lower level government officials can, giving a very strong incentive for people with aspirations to power for seeking out the "right" positions.
If not fascist by itself, it's certainly a gift package to anyone who wish to further limit peoples freedom.
Bullshit. Your children are free to pray in school at any time as long as they don't interfere with school activity. What you really want is organized religious activity in school. That's using government to force your religion on others which is unconstitutional. Either deal with it or organize to excise the first amendment from the constitution.
Since Atheism is also a Faith lets outlaw the expressions of statements that support your philosophical position.
Using schools to promote atheism is already outlawed by the first amendment. What you're opposed to is actually called secularism which makes you a religious extremist, alligned with groups such as the Taliban and al Quaida who also oppose secular governments.
The Framers knew what they meant and they practiced what they meant...
The framers were primarily Deists, not Christians.
You're a total extremist, dude. You have severe hardening of the ideologies and need immediate treatment by your psychiatrist.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Is that after you have an accident, stalls or run out of gas the vehicle still has to land on something. It will bring a whole new meaning to the phrase multi car pile up. Air travel is very restrictive about where one can and cannot fly for a reason.
The early adopters would fall under the FAA immediately because safety concerns are so great that flying cars would simply be regulated as private planes.
JACEM
DOC Disinformation Obfuscation and Confusion
The carrot to FUD's stick