fwd: Canadian gov't eavesdropping

[FutureNerd Steve Witham]

Mike Markley says-

> I'd be curious to see how they are going to do voice recognition on 
> random conversations. Unless I am very sadly out of date you need to 
> teach the pattern matcher individual voices.

I remember a story from a conference in the sixties where someone 
wanted to prove the point that it's much easier to make a recognizer 
for all voices if you're only looking for a certain word.  So he built 
a "watermelon" box.  He sits this up on the podium with him and gives 
his talk, which naturally at some point gets to...

"...a single word, for instance 'watermelon.'" *beep!*

Then later there's a Q&A period, of course...

A: Please step up to the microphone...
Q: You mean all this thing does is recognize the word "watermelon,"
   *beep!* and that it can recognize the word "watermelon" *beep!*
   no matter who says it?
A: That's right, it's an any-speaker, "watermelon" *beep!* recognizer.
Q2: Why the word... "watermelon" *beep!* exactly?
...

-fnerd *BZZZT! AAAAARRRRROOOOGAH!*
quote me
- -
cryptocosmology- sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable
                 from noise - god is in the least significant bits
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