Joe Levi presents Greener Living through Technology

Voice Recognition is getting pretty good these days… so is Text-to-Speech… but what would happen if you combined them?

Imagine a world where you could have 95% accuracy in voice recognition, and 95% intelligible text-to-speech. We’re pretty close to that now.

Add one other component: I’ll call it Voice Font(tm). Imagine a text-to-speech “font” of your own voice. Where anything you type can be run through a font and made to sound as if you’d said it, just like a Font applied to plain text might make something appear in calligraphy.

Tie it all together: Talk into your phone, your phone converts your voice into text then sends your Voice Font and message to the recipient. The recipient’s phone (computer, whatever) then receives text and converts it into YOUR voice. They respond in kind.

The potential bandwidth savings by sending text only is staggering. We’ve been focusing on how to expand our bandwidth, we can just optimize our bandwith usage.

The U.S. Supreme court, in a 5-4 decision, earlier this week the the FIFTH AMENDMENT to the U.S. Constitution, which states “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation,” shall be interpreted differently.

Now, “Public Use” is better defined as “Public Benefit.” In otherwords, if some developer wants to build supermarket in your neighborhood, but 50 houses have to be demolished to be able to do it, they can petition to the local government on the grounds that the public will benefit more from the supermarket than they would from those 50 houses.

In short, private property rights have been all but eliminated by this ruling!

The assurance of private property and the rights that accompany it are one of the planks in something that we call the free-enterprise system, it’s what encourages (by protection) individuals (and firms) to improve a plot of land and thereby grow the economy. Without this protection, the incentive is removed, and the risks associated with investing escalate.

It’s time to contact your U.S. Representative and Senators and urge them VERY STRONGLY to act now to overthrow the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Or you could do nothing… and wish you had when they’re bulldozing your house to put up a strip mall.

I’ve been using Panda Antivirus for a while now. At first I was impressed by their white-paper on AV technologies, and how their software sat under the application layer for better-than-realtime protection (unlike McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc.; which sit ON the application layer).

With their most recent version they’ve added malware protection as well, which has been VERY good at catching adware/spyware before it does any harm.

Until today… just moments ago Panda thought NOTEPAD.EXE was adware, and decided to delete it from my SYSTEM32 folder… and from my CACHE… so now I’m NOTEPAD.EXE-less! Thanks Panda!