I'm in the middle of an open-source project to implement Disposable Phone Numbers to complement my current long list of disposable email addresses. Just like the email addresses, all the phone numbers will point to the same destination, but I can turn them on and off as desired. There are also some commercial services that offer this capability.
I'm also implementing Stop Rude Calls to act as a captcha for incoming calls, but that's a longer-term project.
The streets, sidewalks, bridges, and traffic lights in my town were also built by the government. By your logic, the government should be able to institute price controls on all goods and services in my town because all of them ultimately depend in some manner on the road network, and the road network was funded by "massive public subsidies."
A while back the FCC wanted to require that all television sets include technology to receive emergency broadcasts, even when off, and turn themselves on to display the broadcast. Whatever happened to that proposal?
I agree that sending SMS messages to everyone in the US might be amusing, but that requires hacking into the telco network. Cruising through the streets to activate the neighorhood's TV sets in the middle of the night would probably only require a hand-held transmitter.
With blogging software built into Word 2007, Microsoft can make signing up for a blog part of the Windows/Word registration process. This will make Microsoft Live the "worlds largest blogging site," even if only a small fraction of people ever post more than once.
The result will be
A steady stream of revenue from subscriptions to MS Live
Increased advertising revenue to MS advertising/search
Towards the end of the article, they note that 50% of the people in a supposedly blind test noticed improvements when EM filters were in place. That means that 50% did not notice improvements. Or, put a bit more plainly, the results were indistinguishable from random coin flips. (Of course we'd need more information about the design of the test to understand the results that were reported, but I find the result less than believeable.)
Another indicator that this article has to be taken with a huge grain of salt: the only experts whom the article cites as opposed to the results of the research are the representatives of the utility companies. This implies, of course, that the only opponents to this viewpoint have an economic agenda.
I expect to hear more about this new malady. The first wave will be a proliferation of quack devices to "filter out harmful harmonic energies." The second wave would be pointless regulations imposed by local governments. The third wave may very well be lawsuits against utilty companies for harming the US populace...
ViaVoice Embedded, the product that they're releasing, works on limited-domain problems: for example, tasks related to control of your car's peripherals. When the vocabulary and grammars are constrained it's possible to acheive very decent accuracy.
Dictation, however, is a completely different problem. There are far fewer constraints on what can be said, and the system makes errors as it picks through the possible choices. As a result, most dictation software requires training: the system will use your voice to train its recognition models to improve its word selection. Dictation systems also ask for samples of your documents to train its language models on how you put words together; that also helps determine the probabiity of proper word choice. (Example of how you put words together: "Peanut butter sandwich" is a much more likely choice than "peanut butter sand," and will get a higher score.)
The IBM announcement is about embedded, task-oriented speech recognition. It's not "superhuman," according to the article's text and ignoring its headline. I'll have an opportunity to see it in action next week at SpeechTek West. Expect to see other product announcements about speech technology in the next few days as the conference approaches.
As for the TV translation software, it's still in the research stage according to the article. I've seen BBN's version of this software, and frankly it's amazing how good real-time translation can be.
Bell Canada deployed Emily a few years back, and the results to date have been excellent. A top-level question of "How can I help you?" replaces several layers of DTMF auto-attendant complexity.
If you're interested in trying speech recognition and text-to-speech out for yourself, you can use Voxeo's servers, program in VoiceXML, and my Voice Conference Manager app as a starting point (yeah, VCM needs a new release, and it's getting one soon).
I have to wonder if this law can be used (or is intended to be used) as part of a SLAPP strategy, also known as "strategic lawsuit against public participation." If a blogger posts a comment that's uncomplimentary about a company — and therefore annoying — then that unflattering remark now becomes a criminal matter.
By stripping away anomynity, the law will definitely chill whistleblowing, compaints, and other comments that aggressive companies attempt to supress.
Edward Whitacre, the CEO of SBC, explicitly discussed the idea of charging Google for access, or blocking Vonage's audio packets; it's a consistent corporate message. I discussed Whitacre's statement at length back on 1 Nov -- see http://www.pebbleandavalanche.com/weblog/2005/11/0 1/blog-20051101T0531.
If you're producing this data, I strongly suggest that you make the data useful. Will you be able to feed it into Google Maps, or Yahoos's mapping service, or others?
I suggest you find out from Google Maps how to create data that's compatible with their systems. In fact, maybe they (or a competitor) are willing to help sponsor your trip, if you can explain how your maps will help the Africans.
What's keeping people from using Linux is not lack of apps: it's lack of usability, be it Gnome or KDE.
Example: stability. I'm reluctantly using KDE as my windows manager, and KDE crashes on a regular basis when an application tries something "difficult," such as switching window focus or managing the sound card.
By way of contrast, I have a lot of (reluctant) experience with Microsoft. Win2K is far more stable.
Example: fonts. No doubt I will eventually figure it out (or realize that it can't be fixed), but I cannot get decent font rendering on my installation, whether I use Gnome or KDE. I've finally settled on KWord under KDE as the "least bad" word processor. Oh, and KDE suddenly can't find the Helvetica font; I can't figure out why, there's no documentation, and you can imagine the fun I had with my apps when the default font vanished. I'm willing to fiddle around (to some extent) with config files until I figure this out, but your average user isn't going to "find / -exec grep" in the forlorn hope of finding the right config file!
Linux isn't a viable candiate for the desktop until it actually works on the desktop.
I don't really have the inclination to do the proper back-of-the-envelope, but consider the amount of electromagnetic energy contained in a half-sphere several miles in diameter; and consider the amount of energy in an artillery shell. There's simply not enough energy available for the effects claimed.
In addition, I remind everyone that military equipment undergoes rigorous testing for EMP. At one point in time the world's largest wooden structure was a ramp used by the US military to elevate airplanes during EMP testing. And the size of the generators needed to generate a sufficiently large EMP burst is nothing to sneeze at.
I have seen demonstrations of very small-scale EMP burst devices that could generate sufficient power to disable a single vehicle -- if the device is adjacent to the vehicle. A stand-off device requires a van full of equipement. Again, nothing that would fit into an artillery shell.
Slashdot Mirror
Greek religions had "mysteries" that were available only to the initiated -- and to this day we don't know what some of them were.
I'm in the middle of an open-source project to implement Disposable Phone Numbers to complement my current long list of disposable email addresses. Just like the email addresses, all the phone numbers will point to the same destination, but I can turn them on and off as desired. There are also some commercial services that offer this capability.
I'm also implementing Stop Rude Calls to act as a captcha for incoming calls, but that's a longer-term project.
The streets, sidewalks, bridges, and traffic lights in my town were also built by the government. By your logic, the government should be able to institute price controls on all goods and services in my town because all of them ultimately depend in some manner on the road network, and the road network was funded by "massive public subsidies."
A while back the FCC wanted to require that all television sets include technology to receive emergency broadcasts, even when off, and turn themselves on to display the broadcast. Whatever happened to that proposal?
I agree that sending SMS messages to everyone in the US might be amusing, but that requires hacking into the telco network. Cruising through the streets to activate the neighorhood's TV sets in the middle of the night would probably only require a hand-held transmitter.
- A steady stream of revenue from subscriptions to MS Live
- Increased advertising revenue to MS advertising/search
I blogged about Word 2007 here.Towards the end of the article, they note that 50% of the people in a supposedly blind test noticed improvements when EM filters were in place. That means that 50% did not notice improvements. Or, put a bit more plainly, the results were indistinguishable from random coin flips. (Of course we'd need more information about the design of the test to understand the results that were reported, but I find the result less than believeable.)
Another indicator that this article has to be taken with a huge grain of salt: the only experts whom the article cites as opposed to the results of the research are the representatives of the utility companies. This implies, of course, that the only opponents to this viewpoint have an economic agenda.
I expect to hear more about this new malady. The first wave will be a proliferation of quack devices to "filter out harmful harmonic energies." The second wave would be pointless regulations imposed by local governments. The third wave may very well be lawsuits against utilty companies for harming the US populace...
ViaVoice Embedded, the product that they're releasing, works on limited-domain problems: for example, tasks related to control of your car's peripherals. When the vocabulary and grammars are constrained it's possible to acheive very decent accuracy.
Dictation, however, is a completely different problem. There are far fewer constraints on what can be said, and the system makes errors as it picks through the possible choices. As a result, most dictation software requires training: the system will use your voice to train its recognition models to improve its word selection. Dictation systems also ask for samples of your documents to train its language models on how you put words together; that also helps determine the probabiity of proper word choice. (Example of how you put words together: "Peanut butter sandwich" is a much more likely choice than "peanut butter sand," and will get a higher score.)
The IBM announcement is about embedded, task-oriented speech recognition. It's not "superhuman," according to the article's text and ignoring its headline. I'll have an opportunity to see it in action next week at SpeechTek West. Expect to see other product announcements about speech technology in the next few days as the conference approaches.
As for the TV translation software, it's still in the research stage according to the article. I've seen BBN's version of this software, and frankly it's amazing how good real-time translation can be.
Bell Canada deployed Emily a few years back, and the results to date have been excellent. A top-level question of "How can I help you?" replaces several layers of DTMF auto-attendant complexity.
If you're interested in trying speech recognition and text-to-speech out for yourself, you can use Voxeo's servers, program in VoiceXML, and my Voice Conference Manager app as a starting point (yeah, VCM needs a new release, and it's getting one soon).
I have to wonder if this law can be used (or is intended to be used) as part of a SLAPP strategy, also known as "strategic lawsuit against public participation." If a blogger posts a comment that's uncomplimentary about a company — and therefore annoying — then that unflattering remark now becomes a criminal matter. By stripping away anomynity, the law will definitely chill whistleblowing, compaints, and other comments that aggressive companies attempt to supress.
Edward Whitacre, the CEO of SBC, explicitly discussed the idea of charging Google for access, or blocking Vonage's audio packets; it's a consistent corporate message. I discussed Whitacre's statement at length back on 1 Nov -- see http://www.pebbleandavalanche.com/weblog/2005/11/0 1/blog-20051101T0531.
If you're producing this data, I strongly suggest that you make the data useful. Will you be able to feed it into Google Maps, or Yahoos's mapping service, or others?
I suggest you find out from Google Maps how to create data that's compatible with their systems. In fact, maybe they (or a competitor) are willing to help sponsor your trip, if you can explain how your maps will help the Africans.
What's keeping people from using Linux is not lack of apps: it's lack of usability, be it Gnome or KDE.
Example: stability. I'm reluctantly using KDE as my windows manager, and KDE crashes on a regular basis when an application tries something "difficult," such as switching window focus or managing the sound card.
By way of contrast, I have a lot of (reluctant) experience with Microsoft. Win2K is far more stable.
Example: fonts. No doubt I will eventually figure it out (or realize that it can't be fixed), but I cannot get decent font rendering on my installation, whether I use Gnome or KDE. I've finally settled on KWord under KDE as the "least bad" word processor. Oh, and KDE suddenly can't find the Helvetica font; I can't figure out why, there's no documentation, and you can imagine the fun I had with my apps when the default font vanished. I'm willing to fiddle around (to some extent) with config files until I figure this out, but your average user isn't going to "find / -exec grep" in the forlorn hope of finding the right config file!
Linux isn't a viable candiate for the desktop until it actually works on the desktop.
I don't really have the inclination to do the proper back-of-the-envelope, but consider the amount of electromagnetic energy contained in a half-sphere several miles in diameter; and consider the amount of energy in an artillery shell. There's simply not enough energy available for the effects claimed.
In addition, I remind everyone that military equipment undergoes rigorous testing for EMP. At one point in time the world's largest wooden structure was a ramp used by the US military to elevate airplanes during EMP testing. And the size of the generators needed to generate a sufficiently large EMP burst is nothing to sneeze at.
I have seen demonstrations of very small-scale EMP burst devices that could generate sufficient power to disable a single vehicle -- if the device is adjacent to the vehicle. A stand-off device requires a van full of equipement. Again, nothing that would fit into an artillery shell.