smart computer use?

From day to day, our lives are constantly in the hands (virtual hands) of computers.

A Qantas Airbus recently did a nose dive due to a computer malfunction. Scary! Investigators have recently released the information about the nose dive indeed being caused by the computer malfunction, but Qantas has said this is a unique event and that there is nothing that should cause people to think this will happen on other Airbus jets.

From Australian IT:

EUROPEAN plane-maker Airbus has warned A330 operators around the world to guard against potential computer problems after last week’s roller-coaster ride by a Qantas jet.

The global alert comes after investigators found that a faulty unit that provides information about the plane’s movement and position resulted in the autopilot disconnecting and prompted flight control computers to pitch the plane’s nose downward.

More than 70 people were injured, 14 seriously, when they were thrown around the cabin as the plane pitched down violently near Learmonth, in Western Australia northwest, while en route from Singapore to Perth.

It has been found that no pilot error was to blame for the incident. Blame it on the computers. In this case the blame is legit.

We’re getting very close to the day where a computer can converse like a human effectively.

From Top Tech News:

He’s not HAL, but Elbot the computer program came closest to chatting like a human, fooling three of 12 texting judges at the Loebner Prize competition. That’s not enough to pass the Turing test, but machines are getting closer to having intelligent conversations with humans. Elbot was written by Fred Roberts of Germany.

Alan Turing said in the 1950′s that he figured in the year 2000 a computer would be able to fool 30% of judges during a Turing Test that lasts 5 minutes. Considering that the Elbot fooled 25% of judges in 2008, his prediction wasn’t too far off.

Can your computer fool you into thinking it’s human? Mine can’t. I fear the day that it can. That’s when I’ll need to stop blogging and start arguing with my computer instead.

Good stuff.

Just recently, Darwin has experienced the powers of the Internet and has found his papers published upon it.

The first draft of Charles Darwin’s “On The Origin Of Species” is among a wealth of papers belonging to the intensely private man who changed science being published on the Internet on Thursday for the first time.

Comprising some 20,000 items and 90,000 images, the release on http://darwin-online.org.uk is the largest in history, according to the organizers from Cambridge University Library which holds all the Darwin papers.

The rest of the article, titled “Darwin’s private papers get Internet launch“, can be read at newsdaily.com.

Why would you want to get a measly little 32″ HDTV? You can’t hardly see anything on that screen. You need at least 110 inches of screen space. Your HDTV should cover up the entire south wall of your 2 bedroom apartment’s living room.

The opening keynote address from the president of Panasonic, Toshihiro Sakamoto, had one thing that Bill Gates’ keynote yesterday lacked: A monstrous 150-inch plasma screen Panasonic calls the Life Screen. In Las Vegas and at CES, nothing counts quite so much as excess, so it looks like Panasonic has bragging rights for this year.

When it comes to electronics, smaller is better. Except for Speakers, TV’s and Monitors.

Read the rest here.

Dig inside the mind of a MySpace hacker.

If Samy Kamkar plays his cards right, he may be allowed to visit MySpace again in just a few months. For the time being, however, he’s not even allowed to touch a computer, following a January 2007 guilty plea for creating what many consider to be the first Web 2.0 worm: the Samy worm.

Samy’s worm wasn’t malicious, but it did force News Corp.’s MySpace social-networking site to shut down in late 2005 after forcing more than 1 million users to declare Samy a “hero” on their profile pages.

Read the rest here.