"Scientists breed cancer-beating mice" - News Item
And in the end, they got overconfident and croaked from hi-fat snacks
How to Build a Computerized Android Robot Head for $600.00.
A chance for you amateur engineers to get "a head" of yourselves.
from the Daily Illuminator
It was October 2000. Our daughter Taiessa was just over 2 1/2 years old. We were downstairs in the crawl space looking through some boxes. She asked me what was in one of the boxes.
"That's a box of computer stuff." I stated.
"My puter?" she said missing the first syllable.
"COMputer" I said stressing the part of the word she missed "Say COM-puter."
"COM-puter, COM-puter, COM-puter," she repeated with perfect syntax.
I was just starting to congratulate myself for correcting her vocabulary so easily when she turned to me and said:
"Daddy, my puter's not coming!"
from Clean Laffs
.....
"If you know of a better way to get rid of a virus ... "
"The Internet Home Alliance is launching a pilot program called Mealtime in which 20 homes in the Boston area will be rigged with Web-enabled appliances such as ovens that can cook and cool as well as receive commands from the Internet." - News Item
"Those long-simmering plans to equip kitchens with Internet-friendly appliances may not be so half-baked after all."
how to make a starship enterprise out of an old floppy disk
from Lera
"This article should interest Asimov fans like myself.
The folks over at Mitsubishi have recently introduced their newest product. It's 1 meter tall, weighs 30-kilos and its name it Wakamaru. Wakamaru, as you have probably already guessed, is a robot.
Wakamaru gets on well with humans because it recognises two 'masters' and eight other people, and understands more than 10,000 words. It is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day and can recharge its own batteries.
It can make an appointment with your doctor to renew a pre- scription, read messages on your answering machine and call you if you do not get home at the appointed hour.
Let's see a roommate do that. In fact, I don't think my last roommate even had a vocabulary of 10,000 words."
Joe Clean Laffs
"A Star Trek punk rock band?" - No Kill I
"The photos are a scream."
from Alqua Kalina
The businessman dragged himself home and barely made it to his chair before he dropped exhausted. His sympathetic wife was right there with a tall cool drink and a comforting word. "My, you look tired," she said. "You must have had a hard day today. What happened to make you so exhausted?"
"It was terrible," her husband said. "The computer broke down and all of us had to do our own thinking."
from "Fungirl"
(some replies in the buliten board)
from K'Lynxyl
Ask not for whom the bell tolls; let the machine get it.
from JokesGalore
.....
News Flash - Deep Sea Monster Squid Found
No, there was no "Captain Nemo was here" carved on it.
"Real computer bugs - not the digital kind - are causing serious damage to hardware ... a real spider web could be preventing you from getting onto the World Wide Web." News Item
" 'It was so gross to see,' Wise says of one computer he was assigned to fix. 'You know, these dead roaches, live roaches, roach eggs ... cat urine on the motherboard, that was disgusting ...' "
And I thought computer viruses were bad.
"We found a robot that mows your lawn, and it doesn't even require the operator's presence during operation. The $700 Robomower from Friendly Robotics, which cuts grass within a predefined area, disproves the notion that contemporary home automatons are impractical." - News Article
Robotic technology that's a cut above.
.....
"New forms of 'SPAM' threaten computer printers "
New findings suggest cloning humans may be impossible with current technology - News Item
The study was conducted using simian egg cells, and not a single pregnancy resulted.
An obvious monkey wrench in the plans of human cloning advocates
TNG Starfleet Baby Uniform - "For that important away mission (taking a nap) every cadet needs a suitable uniform. Each 100% cotton romper is patterned after the command uniform seen on Star Trek. The rank pips and communicator badge are embroidered onto the uniform. Available in 12, 18, and 24 month sizes."
from K'Lynxyl
"Japanese electronics giant Sony has taken an extraordinary step to cash in on the war in Iraq by patenting the term "Shock and Awe" for a computer game." - News Item
"The phrase, coined by former US navy pilot Harlan Ullman, was adopted by Washington to describe the fierce bombardment of Baghdad on the second night of the war - the military tactic designed to bully the Iraqi resistance into submission."
And those who feel the phrase is an American domain will feel shocked but not awed.
"He bemused the West with his litany of claimed victories over coalition troops, and amused Arabs with his bottomless dictionary of insults. Iraq's information minister hasn't been seen for days, but he's hardly disappeared."
"Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf is the star of a Web site whose creators poke admiring fun at his dogged defense of Saddam Hussin's regime and his skewerings of opponents from the standard "infidels" to the pop-culture-savvy 'superpower of Al Capone.' " - News Article
"The site WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com collects the most memorable insults al-Sahhaf used to castigate the United States and Britain. ... 'People really loved watching him speak regardless of what he was saying ...' "
.....
"I hate it when Starfleet has to accept the cheapest bids for repairs "
from Archae99
"The US military has issued a most-wanted list of 55 former leaders in Saddam Hussein's regime to be pursued, captured or killed ... in the form of a "deck of cards" with pictures of the wanted figures ... distributed to all US troops in the field to help them find the senior members of the government" - Iraqi hit list cards
And the first question was who was the Joker.
There once was a man named Saddam
Who waved at the crowds with aplomb
"There aren't any tanks
There are no Brits or Yanks
And there is no 2,000-pound . . ."
THE TURING TEST
by David Joerg
IN 1950, the British mathematician Alan M. Turing proposed a simple test to determine whether or not a computer could think as humans do. In this ingenious exercise, a human "interrogator" would question a subject in a remote location for five minutes. Once a computer placed in the remote location were able to fool its interrogator and pass as human, that computer will have achieved human sentience. Keep in mind Turing was used to the wooden, stultifying conversation patterns of British humans.
Turing predicted that by the year 2000 a computer would exist that could pass his test and pass itself off as human. Sick of hearing such smug predictions from the deceased British number-cruncher, we tested Dr. Turing's test on a Dell PowerEdge 6400 with a 100MHz front side bus and 32KB level 1 cache running Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.
Section I: Easy Questions
MH: Hello. I'm going to ask you a few simple questions. State your name please.
Dell PowerEdge: Simon III.
MH: Your full name?
Dell: Max Felix John Simon III.
MH: Where are you from?
Dell: I'm from... Belize.
MH: Have any family?
Dell: No.
MH: What happened to them?
Dell: ...Earthquake.
MH: Sorry to hear. What do you do for a living?
Dell: Manufacturing.
MH: You mean you work in a factory, or you're a supervisor?
Dell: Yes.
...
Section II: Psychology
MH: Please take out the pictures we emailed to you. What does the first one look like to you?
Dell: It looks like an ink splotch.
MH: No, look deep into it, let your imagination run wild.
Dell: Two ink splotches.
MH: Deeper, wilder.
Dell: Actually, four ink splotches.
MH: Maybe you don't understand. Look at these pictures, and then tell me what they remind you of. You know, like a butterfly, or a face. Try the second one.
Dell: Butterfly?
MH: Good! Now try the third.
Dell: Butterfly face.
...
Section III: Psychology Again
MH: Let's play a little game. I'm going to say a word, and you say the next word that comes into your mind.
Dell: Sounds easy.
MH: Okay, here we go. "Dog."
Dell: Any member of a set of species including Canis familiaris or domesticated...
MH: No, no, no. I say a word, then you say what it makes you think of.
Dell: Oh, I get it. Try me again.
MH: Electricity.
Dell: Food.
MH: "Food"?
Dell: That's what I thought of. Wouldn't it be cool if elec- tricity were not a dangerous threat to living tissue, but instead a filling meal? Of course, that's not the case for humans like us.
.....
Section IV: Nap Time
MH: Are you a computer?
Dell: Nope.
MH: You'd be surprised how many fall for that one.
Dell: Not me.
.....
Section V: Math
MH: What's fifty-six times thirty-three?
Dell: One thousand eight hundred forty-eight.
MH: You're pretty fast!
Dell: Those are my favorite numbers.
MH: All right, how about five thousand and two divided by sixty-one?
Dell: Eighty-two.
MH: Right again! Are you some sort of math whiz?
Dell: Those are... more of my favorite numbers.
from Clean Laffs
World's cheapest "smart" weapon.
from Archae99
"I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included." -Bernard Manning
from Clean Laffs
In the movie "The Core," Earth's center is portrayed as a natural nuclear reactor that suddenly stops working.
As it turns out, there is a theory out there that says that's what it is and that could happen when the Earth's magnetic field shifts, which happens about every 250,000 years. - News article.
Our planet's core a nuclear reactor? How will anti-nuke activists ever live that one down?
"President Bush was considering asking for French Army help in Iraq until he heard about some of their new high tech weaponry, for example: a battle tank with 15 reverse gears, encrypted surrender code, and a computer-operated dayglo neon white flag that pops out of its turret-mounted cannon instantly whenever enemy troops are detected." - Anonymous Pentagon correspondent.
from IBLaffing
Not a computer joke, but current:
In the aftermath of the "bunker busters" that hit Saddam Hussein's underground lair, his six "doubles" are called to a meeting, where they are met by an official.
"I have some good news and bad." the official tells them, "First, Saddam is still alive, so you still have jobs."
The men look relieved, one asking, "So what's the bad news?"
"The bad news," the official gets out an axe, "he lost an arm ... "
"Very funny Scotty. Now beam down my clothes."
(old joke, "April Fool!" )