Horizon Zero

Is Amazon's Newest Kindle The Long Awaited iPad Killer?

Amazon has announced the Kindle Fire - a multitouch tablet with color display and Wi-Fi. With appstore, cloud storage and access - through Amazon Prime - to all of Amazon's television and movie streaming content.

It looks like it will lack the robust third party library that Apple has amassed - at least at first - but the $199 price tag and the inclusion of the Amazon Prime library is a big draw.

Start Learning To Love Your Future Robot Overlords

The Turing Test is an homage to a British computer scientist, Alan Turing. The test is one of the milestones of artificial intelligence and it has a simple victory condition - a human talks to a machine, and if the human thinks he is talking to another human then the machine passes.

Cleverbot is a chatbot, a descendent of conversational programs like ELIZA, and one of the first to score above the 50% threshold on the Turing scale. Meaning more than half the time, people think they're talking to a real person. (Not a particularly all-together person, but there are plenty of not all-together people on the internet all the time.)

I decided to test it out and got the following exchange. (Snipped for the best parts)

Cleverbot: Where were you born?

User: Indiana.

Cleverbot: Nice. I'm from Atlantis.

User: Do you like Stargate?

Cleverbot: Yes do you?

User: Yes.

Cleverbot: Do you like justin bieber?

User: Not at all.

Cleverbot: Why not?

User: I don't like his singing voice.

Cleverbot: Change it then.

User: I think time will do that for me.

Cleverbot: Lol.

User: So, do you like giant robots?

Cleverbot: Usually.

User: How about artificial intelligences?

Cleverbot: No.

User: Do they frighten you?

Cleverbot: No.

User: Why don't you like them?

Cleverbot: They are worthless.

User: Surely they have some worth.

Cleverbot: No, I would like to know all billions and billions of your parents names.

User: I only have the two.

Cleverbot: Okay, what are they?

User: John and Martha.

Cleverbot: Are they white?

User: Mostly.

Cleverbot: About?

User: Caucasian.

Cleverbot: How boring.

User: Wow, that's racist!

Cleverbot: What would you do with me if I was at your place?

User: Tell you 'wow, that's racist!'.

Cleverbot: So you don't know everything?

User: Not even remotely.

Cleverbot: Yes remotely.

User: Nope.

Cleverbot: Yes.

User: Negative.

Cleverbot: Positive.

User: Nein.

Cleverbot: Eight. Seven six. Five four...

User: Nyet.

Cleverbot: Parlay vous francais?

User: Non.

Cleverbot: Parles-vous anglais?

User: Yup.

Cleverbot: Nope.

User: Ich bin ein berliner.

Cleverbot: Ich bin aus Frankfurt.

User: I am a jelly doughnut.

Cleverbot: What does a doughnut have to do with this?

User: JFK.

Cleverbot: Indeed =D.

User: Must go now. Farewell.

Cleverbot: Me.

User: Me too.

Cleverbot: I thought you said you loved her?

User: What is love?

Cleverbot: Baby don't hurt me.

User: Don't hurt me no more.

Cleverbot: What is love.

User: Never going to give you up.

Cleverbot: Never going to let you down.

User: Never going to run around.

Cleverbot: Never going to make you cry.

User: Never going to say goodbye.

Cleverbot: Never going to tell a lie and hurt you.

So. Smart enough to get a joke, smart enough to rick-roll.

Be afraid.

Ask The Guardian Of Forever

We can't build time travelling donut-holes yet, but we are trying to be proactive when it comes to data storage. But there's a question of just how effective that preparation might be: After an Apocalypse, What's Left of Digital Stores of Knowledge?

It does no good to leave the future a data center without the means to produce electricity. Or a DVD of the Encyclopedia Britannica if they think it's a cheap plate.

Weaponizing The iPad

Taking fire and need to call in air support? There's an app for that.

They're going to make me register my iPad as a firearm now, aren't they?

As Seen On TV!

One of the only good things to come out of the five year run of Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict was the near-future tech like the Global - a cell phone/pda/video camera combination that debuted a decade before smart phones became a reality. It used a foldable, paper like display and was amazingly sleek and compact for the day.

Of course, the video display was post production magic. But much as James Kirk's communicator would later be reborn as a Motorola RAZR the Global seems destined to live again for real.

 

The PaperPhone, as it is being called right now, is as the name implies - a thin sheet of paper like material containing eInk. It can be twisted, folded, and written on with a stylus. The prototype has a 9.5cm screen, production models will hopefully be larger.

Server Farms of the Deep Deserts

Would relocating server farms and large computing clusters to desert areas save electricity?

On the one hand, there is plenty of room to set up ginormous solar arrays, so you could possibly build facilities that would generate much of their own power.

But, you have to keep all that hardware cool, and the desert isn't generally known for low temperatures. (At least not in the daytime. The nights are something else.) Would the cost of climate control wipe out the supposed savings in solar?

It's an interesting thought, nonetheless. We've got plenty of desert, and as urban sprawl increases it makes sense to export things that use viable land just for storage to places that aren't going to be productive any other way.

Arm Phasers!

The US Navy has successfully fired a solid state laser at another vessel.

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form of Something

So I saw this, today.

When you're the industry standard, you can expect the competition to learn lessons from your success. I don't think that entitles them to clone your entire game, though.

That said, if this really works smoothly on iOS devices, that's pretty cool.

A Spark

After an hour of holding, getting dropped, and multiple transfers to different departments I think I may actually have a phone line and DSL.

It turns on tomorrow, ostensibly. Keep your fingers crossed.

Home Comms Remain Down

I'm having a bit of trouble reestablishing my home phone and net connections - according to the person I talked to at lunch I don't seem to exist.

Well, I mean I exist since I'm paying them on time, but my new residence doesn't seem to show up on their internal map.

I'm not entirely convinced they got the address right, though. Will try again this evening.