ZDNet Exclusive: Gene Simmons rocks Social Media with Ortsbo

How well does that ever work?

At the very, very best, it will work about as well as IBM's Watson. But the constraints for Watson's impressive Jeopardy performance were quite artificial, and the consequences for Watson getting it wrong (or even not quite right) were intrinsically trivial.

They've been working on machine translation for several decades (yes, decades), and it is still not something you can rely on. There is no magic wand for real communication across linguistic (not to mention cultural) boundaries.

Arguably, the most successful project in this area so far is far and away that of Esperanto -- yet that project (though in active development and actual use for well over a century) still requires participants/users to actually learn something. But it's much harder to promote a working solution that requires some effort, than a techno-magical fantasy that promise to skip right past all that actual learning stuff.

What Ortsbo seems to be promising, is something they can't actually deliver. If they could, the guys in Stockholm and Oslo would be figuring out some way to give the Ortsbo team a Nobel Prize.

there will be many more attempts like this one before the world will realize that learning a common language is the only solution. in fact i believe the language problem will be the last to be solved, after we have a world currency, a world government, and abolished all borders. language will be the last thing that separates us into different groups. but this too, will pass.

greetings, eMBee.

.......but this too, will pass

Are you smoking pot again ? :-)

before the world will realize that learning a common language is the only solution.

Yep.....ordered my Rosetta Stone for Chinese last week....

> Yep.....ordered my Rosetta Stone for Chinese last week....

Which Chinese? There are many variants. It's almost as bad as English. :)

From Wikipedia:

Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (50 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility.

Quoting:in fact i believe the language problem will be the last to be solved, after we have a world currency, a world government, and abolished all borders.

Yeah, that push for a new world order thingie is working out really well ;(

JD, it was meant as a joke to point out our huge debt to them and infer that we might have to learn Chinese when they take over our economy.

> JD, it was meant as a joke

Oh, I figured that Ken. I was being equally facetious.

I wouldn't worry though. Debts are only a problem if you intend to pay them back. I don't think our political class ever intends for them to be repaid.

> I wouldn't worry though. Debts are only a problem if you intend to pay them back. I don't think our political class ever intends for them to be repaid.

Or at least, not repaid by themselves. :-/

Quoting:I wouldn't worry though. Debts are only a problem if you intend to pay them back.

But I worry about the interest, and may be selling Alaska just like the Russian Czars sold it to us after being in huge debt, just like were are now. It is conceivable with the politician we keep electing.