Comments on: Advertisers kill Mythbusters spy-chip story

By: c'mon

c'mon — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:51:10 +0000

Wow! You can’t get anything by the Internet Grammar Police these days. Ever vigilant, the IGP scan the internet for the most awful of all crimes: poor grammar. While they feel quite superior to the criminals that they hunt, they almost never comment on the story in which the infractions occurred.

P.S. This story seems typical of how big business operates. The consumer is put at risk, but is at the mercy of corporate greed.

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:51:50 +0000

@ Andy

“mechanical dictation, where a word such as âhackableâ can be transliterated as âa coupleâ and pass âinto printâ

Sorry, Andy. It was just me. I got ‘reliable’ and ‘hackable’ the wrong way around (fixed), and in between trying to get my daughter’s new laptop up and running (she paid for it herself), and doing a few other things on this supposed holiday day, I keyed in what I thought I heard without checking the sense, something I admit I’m prone to do all too often.

As far as ‘mechanical dictation’ goes, I bought the IBM voice-to-text converter many moons ago for $200, I think it was (that was back when I had an income), and it was next to useless. It’s still sitting in its box somewhere, unused and unloved. I can’t bear to throw it out. Maybe one day ………

Cheers!
Jon

By: Gr33n3gg

Gr33n3gg — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:23:29 +0000

Sad, that was the last HOPE conference…..

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:13:17 +0000

Is this the next phase in the trend of computer-generated typographical errors? First, we had the wonderful spelling checker which could correct our spelling, and yet, bad grammar and homophones which are not homonyms would get through. Now, we appear to have mechanical dictation, where a word such as “hackable” can be transliterated as “a couple” and pass “into print” without anyone noticing that it bears no resemblance to the correct word.