Anyone ever notice in their electric toothbrush commercial that when they do the water turbulence/frothing test that they fully submerge the competitor’s brush while they only submerge half of bristles for their brush in the water? I get the feeling that if their’s was fully submerged, it’d disturb the water just as much as the other brush. That’s false advertising, no?
I get the feeling that if implemented, will just be the beginning of a slippery slope. What’s next, automatic speeding monitors that issue you a ticket when you break the speed limit? Etc.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
— M. Friedman
This is way cool…
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency started a project called GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) which will translate Chinese and Arabic text and speech into English. The three parts — text to english, speech to english, and a distillation engine — will work together to answer inquiries made by operators. The three current contractors have to meet performance goals starting at 65-75% and finishing at 95% accuracy.
This would have a lot of civilian applications in addition to the main purpose of intelligence gathering.
source:ars
And I’m back from SEMA. In case you aren’t familiar, it’s the biggest show for aftermarket car parts and accessories. Lots of high profile manufacturers and tuners showcase their latest and greatest. Didn’t get to spend much time at the Las Vegas Convention Center where the SEMA side of thing were held, but I did spend a few hours on the first day taking some pictures. Those should be up shortly. Most of my time was spent in the B2B oriented AAPEX side of things. That’s where all the foreign undercutters were displaying their wares. Cheap labor = low prices. Overabundance of cheap labor = long term low prices.
Firefox 2.0 came out last week. The spell check feature is nice. It works like the auto spell checker in MS Word. And it works in any text box you can type in. Now I don’t have to try and hack the TinyMCE editor in Wordpress to get spell checking to work.
A tip: You can get rid of the green Goto button by going typing in about:config in the address bar and double clicking on browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to change it to true.