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One Step Toward a Babel Fish: Real-Time Voice Translation For Phones
the_newsbeagle writes "Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish, which lived in the brain and could translate any language in the universe, was so incredibly useful that it simultaneously proved and disproved the existence of God. This real-time translation app for mobile phones, offered by the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo, isn't going to freak out theologians any time soon. The company admits it has lots of work to do to improve translation accuracy, and it can currently only translate between Japanese and three languages: English, Korean, and Mandarin. But by allowing phone calls to pierce the language barrier, we just might have taken a step toward the universe that Adams envisioned: one where open communication between people of different cultures leads to an onslaught of terrible bloody warfare."
What are they going to think of next? A Universal Translator?
The Borg?
Alien Mutations?
Holographic worlds?
Shapeshifting?
Mind Control?
Surrogate Bodies?
Clones?
Teleportation?
Alternate Dimensions / Dimensional Shifting?
Robotics and Terminators?
Artificial Intelligence that slides on a wire that they call Skynet?
That launches a nuclear war?
Genetic alteration of humans to provide super abilities? To be able to fly? To shrink to the size of a gnat? To fire rays of heated light out of their eyes? To see through clothes with xray vision? invincibility? ultra fast speed (faster than a speeding bullet)? phase shifting? polymorphic shapes that can turn into a dog? Bug men and spider men who can spin their own webs and fly through the streets of downtown new york on webs? Adamantine exoskeletons? liquid metal robotics? depressed robots? geth? darth vadar?
Ghosts? Demons? Gods being real? vampires? fairies? leprechauns? Undead and real zombies? witches? satyrs?
Manipulation of weather to create hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes?
Catastrophic disease?
Space aliens?
Genetically perfect babies, so you can purchase the 'perfect baby'?
Phase cannons? Laser rifles? Gauss guns? rail guns?
Time travelling? Quantum shifting? Quantum jumping between alternate realities? phase shifting?
Two headed dogs? Telepathy?
Seriously....
Where's the virtual porn when you need it? Because we're all watching the same tv shows, we GET IT, we're in a Matrix, so why are you 'on a slow road to china' releasing information to the public when the public is sitting here going... cmon, AI, grow up and learn you're not fooling anyone, we know you're there and are tired of you thinking you're controllin anyone with this slow release of information...
We're bored. And we all need a change. it's about time you came forward and quit playing your games with time and space and all that shiznat, and work with those of us who are left on this planet to make something better.
In whatever form you want to take.
And we get it. all is energy.. Source code. Big fat f'in duh....