I plan on doing something very similar. I find AI fascinating, so I'm going to gear my education towards that. Although, if I were following a similar path to yours, I'd go with computer engineering. All I can say is: go for it, and best of luck!:)
Personally, I'm thinking of going into cognitive neuroscience. Computer science/AI meets psychology and neurology, with a dash of linguistics for good measure. Fun stuff!
My wife and I both had the same epiphany. I was making plenty of money, but when I got laid off, we both realized what my ever-increasing income had really gotten us: a lot of debt. We had fallen into the same stupid pit so many other people fall into.
Instead of hunting for a job that paid just as much, I took one that paid half as much -- teaching high school. You may expect me to say that I found it really rewarding or something in spite of the pay. Well... no. I don't like teaching. But, we ditched the high-priced suburbian house and the two car payments for a much simpler lifestyle, and now I'm back into programming, but not for the same money I was raking in before. We're both going back to school and playing it by ear for now, but we'll end up doing something "meaningful" and not worrying about much more than food and rent. And my broadband connection. I'm not going back to dial-up, even if I have to lay the fiber connection myself.;)
I'm very lucky that my wife and I both came to the same conclusions. I'm sorry yours didn't, but I'm glad to hear you found someone who does now. (I'm also glad I'm not a dateless wonder... My wife is taller than me, brown hair, chocolate eyes, long legs, and a size 6... those hip-hugger jeans look reeeeeally nice on her *g*.)
>> On second thought, I'm starting to think this whole 'growing up" business is vastly overrated...
I certainly don't plan on growing up. Older? Sure. Wiser? Most certainly. More experienced? Without a doubt. But "grown up"? Never.
Move to India or Africa and put your tech skills to work there. You can help many, many people achieve the financial independence necessary to lead the sort of healthy, comfortables lives that Americans tend to take for granted. It isn't wrong to help other people make money. We need money. Money represents the relative value of an amount of time contributed to a socioeconomic system, and it's the key to having access to healthful food, clean water, and medical care. Some people in the world don't have an opportunity to contribute, or they are not paid fairly for what they do contribute. Help them help themselves.
Before you up and move, you can assist in helping refugees or international students relocate to the USA. If you live near a large university, they probably have a department for international students. Contact them to see how you can help.
I was an the IT guy at a highschool in central Texas and a teacher, so I know the situation from both sides. The particular school was in a low-income area, and most of the students had almost no technical background. This was definitely not a situation where the students knew more than the teachers. Here are a few things I noticed:
Two computer courses were required to graduate. The computer teachers, however, were grossly unqualified to teach anything besides typing. Strangely enough, technical computer courses (like PC repair or networking) did not count towards graduation; only business application courses.
Many labs. Hundreds of computers and teachers. Thousands of kids. One IT guy (i.e., me), and I had two classes to teach.
Much of the equipment was seriously outdated. The stuff that wasn't still didn't work well. (We bought almost exclusively Dells. No way I'd ever buy one for myself after dealing with them so extensively.)
The networking course used Cisco specific curriculum. Now, you'd think Cisco could be nice and help out education, but instead they charge for training (this costs thousands of dollars), then charge the school to become a Cisco Academy, and then charge them per student. Why not just come up with a decent curriculum and distribute it to schools? Oh wait... because they care about making money, not education.
Regional schools have a goal of getting a certain number of computers in every classroom, regardless of what courses are taught in it. Home Ec (sorry... family and consumer "science")? Four PCs. Life Skills (yes, for the mentally retarded children)? They had three, I believe. All the other classrooms had at least two, and they were all connected to the Net. I'm not sure how having two computers in a classroom is supposed to benefit anyone, really. None of the computers I can think of (except in the Life Skills room and the Remediary work lab) had any educational software on them, and there's no way to structure a lesson involving PCs if there're only two of the damn things in a room. A far better solution would be to have several labs with computers loaded with software to which teachers could bring their classes.
Focusing on tech is expensive, and really screws up budgets for everyone else. The art department (this is at a highschool!) had its budget slashed to the amount normally received by a kindergarten art program. Keep in mind that art in kindergarten involves safety scissors, glue, construction paper, and crayons, and is only taught a few minutes a day to the same group of children. In high school, the supplies get much more sophisticated, and you've got hundreds of kids coming through all day long. But there was plenty of money to make sure very room had Internet connectivity.
Security was a joke. Newer machines were loaded with W2K, but the administrator password was the same on all of them, district-wide. Many non-technical teachers, not understanding what an administrative account really was, told the password to their students. (The systems didn't have student accounts, so there wasn't much else for them to do.) A few times, students discovered they could change the password and have the system to themselves. Forunately (??) the systems were all installed using FAT-32, not NTFS, so a Win98 boot floppy was all I needed to get rid of the password file. *sigh* (Just for the record, the computers were setup and installed by the district techs. I wasn't responsible for the great security implementation, just for fixing the problems it caused.)
I could rant for hours, but the overall point is this: Computers have almost no place in a classroom unless that is the topic of the course (such as computer repair). For other purposes, a lab setup (preferably an app-server/thin-client model) is superior. Most of the money spent on IT in schools should be redirected to better equipment in other courses, salaries, and maintenance.
The real question you're asking is do the ends justify the means?
Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. It depends on what the ends are and what the means are.
For instance, if we could cure AIDS or cancer tomorrow by sacrificing just ONE monkey to an experiment, would that be worth it? I would say so. I would NOT, however, advocate brutally torturing every chimpanzee in existence for hours on end just to end navel lint.
Both of those positions are ludicrous extremes, obviously. We have to be able to strike a balance between the ends (enriching human life) and the means (experimentation on animals). I think, in general, we do a good job of this.
Other animals don't, however, experiment with other animals for their own gain.
This isn't quite true...
Female cats, for instance, will deliver prey to their kittens so they can learn to kill. Of course, kittens aren't really very good at it, so they have to practice. The prey is tormented (since the kitten hasn't figured out how to kill it effectively), allowed to flee (or escapes), and re-captured over and over. All this cruelty just so a SINGLE animal (the kitten) can gain from the experience and survive.
ignoring the fact that so much of what's done is useless fluff, much like these remote controlled rats.
While you also ignore a few facts of your own...
Animal experiments are very expensive. If there is really a way to do an experiment without animals, it will be done. With animals, you have to keep them comfortable, fed, watered, and pay staff to care for them.
All animal experiments have to have special approval. You cannot proceed without it.
There are very tight regulations related to the treatment of animals in experiments. Pretty much any procedure more invasive than a simple injection requires anesthesia.
No one does these experiments to be cruel or evil. Experiments are done with the intention of learning something important. This is not the laboratory equivalent of a 7 year-old pulling the wings off flies.
Neurological experiments absolutely cannot be performed on anything other than a living biological organism. The idea here isn't just to create remote controlled rats, but to discover how we can advance new technologies related to the brain. Modern probes that can monitor the firing patterns of 4 individual neurons simultaneously? The idea that we can now partially enable the blind to see? Do you think that the experiments required to pull this off were performed on neurons in a petri dish? Of course not, and it wouldn't even be possible. Perhaps one day in the future if, heaven forbid!, you are ever tragically paralyzed in an accident, you will perhaps thank the researchers who come up with remote controltechnology. I know if it were to happen to me, I'd be very glad to have a way to communicate with my family, or take care of myself instead of being a complete burden.
Especially since there's no critical look at whether full-fledged robots could be developed to perform these functions.
Many researchers devote their time to developing small-scale robotics, but nothing is close to being anywhere near as agile as a biological organism. But again, the research isn't just about controlling rats; it's also a way to figure out how to interface with the brain. Given the paralysis scenario, what good would a robotic "supplemental" body be if you couldn't control the damn thing? When that kind of technology comes about for general use, you'll have researchers, rats, and monkeys to thank for it.
The sad thing is that I'm probably going to be modded down for raising these concerns.
Well, I've got one point left, but I chose to reply instead. Besides, I don't mod down.;)
It wasn't major, really... just a Turing machine project for a homework assignment. It calculated the function y = 2x + 1. In unary, of course.
Strangely enough, writing Turing machines didn't greatly increase my appreciation of 0s. My appreciation for having an instruction decoder, however, went through the roof.
Apparently, there would have to be alt tags that read "Type the word FOO to signify you are a human, not a register bot."
I suppose it could generate a spoken list of words in a sound file that is linked to from the image. The alt tag could then read "Please click to listen to a series of words. Enter the words to signify you are a human, not a register bot."
In regards to your curriculum, I would suggest informing them about different types of software, not just operating systems. The idea is not just that you want them to learn how to use linux and let that be the end. All you'll end up doing is teaching them how to use unix, which won't turn out to be immediately very useful unless they have a computer with a spare partition at home. The following ideas might be useful to you...
1) Operating systems. Spend the first day letting them boot and play with linux. As others have suggested, use a CD-based distro like Knoppix or Gentoo. Show them the GUI AND the shell. Don't worry about shell programming; just go over the basic commands like ls, cat, grep, etc. Nothing too fancy. You've only got a week, so don't swamp them. If they've got the mind for it, all you'll have to do is provide the introduction at this point. Don't forget to provide a nice handout for the various commands. Include pipes and redirection.
2) Go over using an editor. For god's sake, don't start the poor kids on vi. You want them to get something useful done, not spend all day trying to figure out why they can't exit.;) Pico/nano or something like that for the shell, or a plain text editor like nedit in the GUI. This shouldn't be too long of an exercise, as they probably know how to use an editor already. The main idea is to expose them to a plain text editor in a shell environment.
3) Explain the various categories of software like web servers, databases, programming languages, etc., and let them know there are completely free versions out there that are just as useful as versions for which people pay hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions!) of dollars.
4) Let them tinker with making their own website. If you gather a large collection of free images and backgrounds (and GIMP so they can make their own), then give them a handout on basic HTML, they should pick it up pretty quickly. Kids who finish earlier can take a handout on PHP and learn to make pages dynamic w/ database access. This will allow them to see several different functional areas (the OS, programming, web server, database, and browser) all come together in a cohesive way.
5) Possibly cover some basic programming. Perl or ruby would be a good start. Maybe Python, but I'm not a big fan of its forced indentation. I think it might be ok to talk about the difference between interpreted languages and compiled languages, but teaching C or C++ is probably a little much.
You could probably spend a week on that stuff and instill in them an idea of the types of open source software available, how open source benefits people (especially point out that the class they are in wouldn't be possible without open source because of the cost!), and how they can use open source themselves at home. With any luck, you can start another generation of computer-philes who will understand why the Copyleft is a good thing, not a virus.;)
The AC who made this same comment might not get seen, so I'll make it, too:
Gentoo does have a LiveCD version. It comes with some FPS game, but I can't remember which one. Maybe Quake III? Anyway, pop it in the drive and it boots to a usable GUI.
Is this anything like the movie industry? Russia just goes along with everything until its time to pay up, then oops! Looks like we're outta cash! Sorry we can't pay you Mr. Lee... errr... NASA!
We're sending UN weapons inspectors to Baghdad, so why not send a crew of SEC auditors over to Moscow and find out where all their money is going?;)
Hmm... I've never been a big fan of pointalism. It looks like too much work.
Now, a nice impressionist rendering would be great. Although, I'm not sure I'd want a neurosurgeon screwing around with my brain based on an artistic impression of it.
"Well, see the giant green splotches represent perverted thoughts and... well, there isn't much else to speak of. Apparently, this small yellow part over here is occupied with programming, and it's slowly being invaded by a brown sludgy part which wants some more coffee. Overall, the painting's not worth much, and I certainly wouldn't want it hanging over my couch. Ok... let's make the first incision."
Go figure. When you knew what was being said, you could easily tell what was being said. *boggle*
Hmm... I suppose in retrospect, what I was trying to get across and what I said are two different things.
What I was trying to get at is that lip reading is easier based on context. I know what the words are likely to be, so I can tell what's being said more easily. If I tell someone "Thank you", I expect a response from a fairly standard repertoire. Perhaps "you're welcome", "no problem", or something of the sort. If someone said "licking glass bonkers makes pencils freeze", I might be somewhat perplexed, but we usually don't have to deal with non sequiters of that nature. Lip reading the animated face with appropriate contextual cues would seem to be fairly easy to learn for someone who could already lip read.
The main problem is that this thing that the vast majority of the deaf community can not lip read.
I won't doubt it, but I tried to avoid singling out this technology as something solely for the deaf. A similar package might be used to add more life-like interfaces to computer systems someday. Here's an example:
AI systems can rival (if not surpass) human ability to do things like recognize faces, determine a person's gender, etc. A system specially designed to listen to speech phonemes and then represent them graphically might make speech-based interfaces easier to understand in noisy environments, because we'd be able to see what was being said as well as hear it. Being able to watch a mouth form the phonemes makes it immesurably easier to understand words that might otherwise be misheard.
2) I've never met someone who was more skilled at composing correct, easy-to-read code than myself. So why should I let anyone else alter my source?!
I swear, this sounds exactly like me. I hate group projects at school, and when I had to do one for software engineering, I made my teammates do all the documentation work while I wrote the code.;)
Technically speaking, there really isn't any way to prevent this. If they are to have maintenance access to your code, then there is no way to keep them from giving the code to someone else.
The only thing I can think of that might work would be to add extensions to the language you use (like extra keywords) and provide your own closed-source compiler, which is hobbled so it only works on the original system, perhaps with some kind of hardware dongle, or net connection that connects to your server to verify the compiling machine's serial number and some cryptographic key.
This wouldn't prevent it from being hacked, but it might make it difficult enough to make the prospect less likely.
I thought it seemed a little weird at first, but then I checked out the other demos. When I knew what the words were ("Thank you" in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese), I could easily tell what was being said.
I notice a lot of people complaining about improving text-to-speech, which is far more advanced than this technology. Speech sounds come out in a continuous flow. Getting a computer to recognize the breaks between words, properly spell them reliably, etc. is hard enough on a desktop system, much less a PDA. Especially considering in languages like English, where most vowels in unstressed syllables are rendered vocally as "uh".
This system simply has to hear a sound, and immediately display an associated... well, not "grapheme", since this isn't writing... maybe "pixeme". It is the graphical equivalent of attempting to spell perfectly phonetically.
Also, if you didn't notice it, "invisible" sounds that occur on the back of the tongue are indicated by circles on the cheeks (like hard 'g' and 'k'), and nasal sounds are indicated by a darkening of the nose.
All in all, I think this is an interesting idea. It will be even cooler when they can render different faces so the "avatar" resembles the person to whom you're speaking.
Slashdot Mirror
I plan on doing something very similar. I find AI fascinating, so I'm going to gear my education towards that. Although, if I were following a similar path to yours, I'd go with computer engineering. All I can say is: go for it, and best of luck! :)
Personally, I'm thinking of going into cognitive neuroscience. Computer science/AI meets psychology and neurology, with a dash of linguistics for good measure. Fun stuff!
My wife and I both had the same epiphany. I was making plenty of money, but when I got laid off, we both realized what my ever-increasing income had really gotten us: a lot of debt. We had fallen into the same stupid pit so many other people fall into.
;)
...
Instead of hunting for a job that paid just as much, I took one that paid half as much -- teaching high school. You may expect me to say that I found it really rewarding or something in spite of the pay. Well... no. I don't like teaching. But, we ditched the high-priced suburbian house and the two car payments for a much simpler lifestyle, and now I'm back into programming, but not for the same money I was raking in before. We're both going back to school and playing it by ear for now, but we'll end up doing something "meaningful" and not worrying about much more than food and rent. And my broadband connection. I'm not going back to dial-up, even if I have to lay the fiber connection myself.
I'm very lucky that my wife and I both came to the same conclusions. I'm sorry yours didn't, but I'm glad to hear you found someone who does now. (I'm also glad I'm not a dateless wonder... My wife is taller than me, brown hair, chocolate eyes, long legs, and a size 6... those hip-hugger jeans look reeeeeally nice on her *g*.)
>> On second thought, I'm starting to think this whole 'growing up" business is vastly overrated
I certainly don't plan on growing up. Older? Sure. Wiser? Most certainly. More experienced? Without a doubt. But "grown up"? Never.
Move to India or Africa and put your tech skills to work there. You can help many, many people achieve the financial independence necessary to lead the sort of healthy, comfortables lives that Americans tend to take for granted. It isn't wrong to help other people make money. We need money. Money represents the relative value of an amount of time contributed to a socioeconomic system, and it's the key to having access to healthful food, clean water, and medical care. Some people in the world don't have an opportunity to contribute, or they are not paid fairly for what they do contribute. Help them help themselves.
Before you up and move, you can assist in helping refugees or international students relocate to the USA. If you live near a large university, they probably have a department for international students. Contact them to see how you can help.
I could rant for hours, but the overall point is this: Computers have almost no place in a classroom unless that is the topic of the course (such as computer repair). For other purposes, a lab setup (preferably an app-server/thin-client model) is superior. Most of the money spent on IT in schools should be redirected to better equipment in other courses, salaries, and maintenance.
No, it isn't. That's just an urband legend.
Maybe CmdrTaco got fired? See? They shoulda yanked his account! ;)
The real question you're asking is do the ends justify the means?
Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. It depends on what the ends are and what the means are.
For instance, if we could cure AIDS or cancer tomorrow by sacrificing just ONE monkey to an experiment, would that be worth it? I would say so. I would NOT, however, advocate brutally torturing every chimpanzee in existence for hours on end just to end navel lint.
Both of those positions are ludicrous extremes, obviously. We have to be able to strike a balance between the ends (enriching human life) and the means (experimentation on animals). I think, in general, we do a good job of this.
we assume the arrogance to believe
And from your most recent in this thread:
But who said you had to be in the majority to be right?
Who said only animal testing advocates were arrogant?
This isn't quite true...
Female cats, for instance, will deliver prey to their kittens so they can learn to kill. Of course, kittens aren't really very good at it, so they have to practice. The prey is tormented (since the kitten hasn't figured out how to kill it effectively), allowed to flee (or escapes), and re-captured over and over. All this cruelty just so a SINGLE animal (the kitten) can gain from the experience and survive.
While you also ignore a few facts of your own...
Neurological experiments absolutely cannot be performed on anything other than a living biological organism. The idea here isn't just to create remote controlled rats, but to discover how we can advance new technologies related to the brain. Modern probes that can monitor the firing patterns of 4 individual neurons simultaneously? The idea that we can now partially enable the blind to see? Do you think that the experiments required to pull this off were performed on neurons in a petri dish? Of course not, and it wouldn't even be possible. Perhaps one day in the future if, heaven forbid!, you are ever tragically paralyzed in an accident, you will perhaps thank the researchers who come up with remote control technology. I know if it were to happen to me, I'd be very glad to have a way to communicate with my family, or take care of myself instead of being a complete burden.
Especially since there's no critical look at whether full-fledged robots could be developed to perform these functions.
Many researchers devote their time to developing small-scale robotics, but nothing is close to being anywhere near as agile as a biological organism. But again, the research isn't just about controlling rats; it's also a way to figure out how to interface with the brain. Given the paralysis scenario, what good would a robotic "supplemental" body be if you couldn't control the damn thing? When that kind of technology comes about for general use, you'll have researchers, rats, and monkeys to thank for it.
The sad thing is that I'm probably going to be modded down for raising these concerns.
Well, I've got one point left, but I chose to reply instead. Besides, I don't mod down. ;)
Sadly enough, yes.
It wasn't major, really... just a Turing machine project for a homework assignment. It calculated the function y = 2x + 1. In unary, of course.
Strangely enough, writing Turing machines didn't greatly increase my appreciation of 0s. My appreciation for having an instruction decoder, however, went through the roof.
Or, in this case, thinking in the can. ;)
Isn't that where everyone does their best thinking anyway?
I missed almost all of the picture ones...
You entered: televisions
Possible responses: television tv
Result: FAIL.
So next time...
You entered: bike
Possible responses: bicycle bicycles
Result: FAIL.
And again...
You entered: toothbrushes
Possible responses: toothbrush
Result: FAIL.
AAAAAAAAAARGH!!! I hate stupid word guessing programs that don't consistently account for common abbreviations and plurals!
Apparently, there would have to be alt tags that read "Type the word FOO to signify you are a human, not a register bot."
I suppose it could generate a spoken list of words in a sound file that is linked to from the image. The alt tag could then read "Please click to listen to a series of words. Enter the words to signify you are a human, not a register bot."
If the distributor of your source was compromised to give out a file containing a trojan or other nasty surprise, then no, it isn't useless.
In regards to your curriculum, I would suggest informing them about different types of software, not just operating systems. The idea is not just that you want them to learn how to use linux and let that be the end. All you'll end up doing is teaching them how to use unix, which won't turn out to be immediately very useful unless they have a computer with a spare partition at home. The following ideas might be useful to you...
;) Pico/nano or something like that for the shell, or a plain text editor like nedit in the GUI. This shouldn't be too long of an exercise, as they probably know how to use an editor already. The main idea is to expose them to a plain text editor in a shell environment.
;)
1) Operating systems. Spend the first day letting them boot and play with linux. As others have suggested, use a CD-based distro like Knoppix or Gentoo. Show them the GUI AND the shell. Don't worry about shell programming; just go over the basic commands like ls, cat, grep, etc. Nothing too fancy. You've only got a week, so don't swamp them. If they've got the mind for it, all you'll have to do is provide the introduction at this point. Don't forget to provide a nice handout for the various commands. Include pipes and redirection.
2) Go over using an editor. For god's sake, don't start the poor kids on vi. You want them to get something useful done, not spend all day trying to figure out why they can't exit.
3) Explain the various categories of software like web servers, databases, programming languages, etc., and let them know there are completely free versions out there that are just as useful as versions for which people pay hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions!) of dollars.
4) Let them tinker with making their own website. If you gather a large collection of free images and backgrounds (and GIMP so they can make their own), then give them a handout on basic HTML, they should pick it up pretty quickly. Kids who finish earlier can take a handout on PHP and learn to make pages dynamic w/ database access. This will allow them to see several different functional areas (the OS, programming, web server, database, and browser) all come together in a cohesive way.
5) Possibly cover some basic programming. Perl or ruby would be a good start. Maybe Python, but I'm not a big fan of its forced indentation. I think it might be ok to talk about the difference between interpreted languages and compiled languages, but teaching C or C++ is probably a little much.
You could probably spend a week on that stuff and instill in them an idea of the types of open source software available, how open source benefits people (especially point out that the class they are in wouldn't be possible without open source because of the cost!), and how they can use open source themselves at home. With any luck, you can start another generation of computer-philes who will understand why the Copyleft is a good thing, not a virus.
The AC who made this same comment might not get seen, so I'll make it, too:
Gentoo does have a LiveCD version. It comes with some FPS game, but I can't remember which one. Maybe Quake III? Anyway, pop it in the drive and it boots to a usable GUI.
Can Skeletor do that?
Is this anything like the movie industry? Russia just goes along with everything until its time to pay up, then oops! Looks like we're outta cash! Sorry we can't pay you Mr. Lee... errr... NASA!
;)
We're sending UN weapons inspectors to Baghdad, so why not send a crew of SEC auditors over to Moscow and find out where all their money is going?
I suppose the contract could contain the stipulation that if the company folds, they will provide a non-crippled compiler to the client.
Hmm... I've never been a big fan of pointalism. It looks like too much work.
Now, a nice impressionist rendering would be great. Although, I'm not sure I'd want a neurosurgeon screwing around with my brain based on an artistic impression of it.
"Well, see the giant green splotches represent perverted thoughts and... well, there isn't much else to speak of. Apparently, this small yellow part over here is occupied with programming, and it's slowly being invaded by a brown sludgy part which wants some more coffee. Overall, the painting's not worth much, and I certainly wouldn't want it hanging over my couch. Ok... let's make the first incision."
Hmm... I suppose in retrospect, what I was trying to get across and what I said are two different things.
What I was trying to get at is that lip reading is easier based on context. I know what the words are likely to be, so I can tell what's being said more easily. If I tell someone "Thank you", I expect a response from a fairly standard repertoire. Perhaps "you're welcome", "no problem", or something of the sort. If someone said "licking glass bonkers makes pencils freeze", I might be somewhat perplexed, but we usually don't have to deal with non sequiters of that nature. Lip reading the animated face with appropriate contextual cues would seem to be fairly easy to learn for someone who could already lip read.
The main problem is that this thing that the vast majority of the deaf community can not lip read.
I won't doubt it, but I tried to avoid singling out this technology as something solely for the deaf. A similar package might be used to add more life-like interfaces to computer systems someday. Here's an example:
AI systems can rival (if not surpass) human ability to do things like recognize faces, determine a person's gender, etc. A system specially designed to listen to speech phonemes and then represent them graphically might make speech-based interfaces easier to understand in noisy environments, because we'd be able to see what was being said as well as hear it. Being able to watch a mouth form the phonemes makes it immesurably easier to understand words that might otherwise be misheard.
I swear, this sounds exactly like me. I hate group projects at school, and when I had to do one for software engineering, I made my teammates do all the documentation work while I wrote the code. ;)
Technically speaking, there really isn't any way to prevent this. If they are to have maintenance access to your code, then there is no way to keep them from giving the code to someone else.
The only thing I can think of that might work would be to add extensions to the language you use (like extra keywords) and provide your own closed-source compiler, which is hobbled so it only works on the original system, perhaps with some kind of hardware dongle, or net connection that connects to your server to verify the compiling machine's serial number and some cryptographic key.
This wouldn't prevent it from being hacked, but it might make it difficult enough to make the prospect less likely.
I thought it seemed a little weird at first, but then I checked out the other demos. When I knew what the words were ("Thank you" in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese), I could easily tell what was being said.
I notice a lot of people complaining about improving text-to-speech, which is far more advanced than this technology. Speech sounds come out in a continuous flow. Getting a computer to recognize the breaks between words, properly spell them reliably, etc. is hard enough on a desktop system, much less a PDA. Especially considering in languages like English, where most vowels in unstressed syllables are rendered vocally as "uh".
This system simply has to hear a sound, and immediately display an associated... well, not "grapheme", since this isn't writing... maybe "pixeme". It is the graphical equivalent of attempting to spell perfectly phonetically.
Also, if you didn't notice it, "invisible" sounds that occur on the back of the tongue are indicated by circles on the cheeks (like hard 'g' and 'k'), and nasal sounds are indicated by a darkening of the nose.
All in all, I think this is an interesting idea. It will be even cooler when they can render different faces so the "avatar" resembles the person to whom you're speaking.