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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pltodms who wrote (33839)	6/1/2010 4:49:10 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 46821

I spent a decade working for BP Oil. It's working out very well. The BP shareholders and world at large have done very very well from BP: <In fact, we already have non-loving, non-empathetic autonomous creations that function by using humanlike intelligence. They're powerful and growing, and they operate along perfectly logical lines in order to ensure their own survival and well-being. Here are two of them: British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs. Each of them is an artificially intelligent "being" (whose intelligence is borrowed from a number of human brains), designed by humans but now acting strictly in their own self-interests. How's that working out? > I can pull into high quality petrol stations and fill 'er up conveniently and cheaply [apart from the huge government taxes - take those away and the fuel would be almost free]. I can buy my product "Ultimate" which I designed in 1986 and the formulation is near enough to how it was meant to be. The intelligence is rented rather than borrowed. BP paid me quite well for my applied intelligence. <In fact, we already have non-loving, non-empathetic autonomous creations that function by using humanlike intelligence. They're powerful and growing, and they operate along perfectly logical lines in order to ensure their own survival and well-being. Here are two of them: British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs. Each of them is an artificially intelligent "being" (whose intelligence is borrowed from a number of human brains), designed by humans but now acting strictly in their own self-interests. How's that working out? > While I was pushing BP in that direction [computers and communications galore and would have been flat out pushing the cyberspace dimension if it had existed then] BP is just an oil company with negligible autonomous intelligence. BP isn't powerful. It digs holes where allowed after paying various fees and agreeing to everything governments stipulate then gets oil, processes it and sells it, paying huge taxes to governments. The governments are powerful. BP didn't say "We have our boot on Obama's throat and we are in charge". BP shareholders are powerless and panicking at such talk with many $billions wiped off the market capitalisation. BP's management is struggling to find a way to stop the spill. The reason for the shareholder panic is because the boot will be on their throats and it's not the cost of fixing up the mess, which is not a big deal compared with $1 trillion Iraqi war run by government which was based on false ideas about WMDs. Imagine if BP had said "Oh dang, guess we made a mistake. No WMDs after all. Too bad about thousands of dead soldiers, many thousands maimed and any amount of Iraqi death and disaster, not to mention bankruptcy for the USA". Now THAT's power. That's a human catastrophe. So far, there are 11 dead people [similar to one helicopter crash in Iraq and not as bad as a bus crash or train crash], a sunk platform and about $1 billion in spill costs. No biggie. The Iranian airliner mistakenly shot down by the USA navy was a worse disaster. All that has happened in the Gulf of Mexico is that a well sprung a leak and now there's a bit of a mess to clean up. No biggie. On the empathy business, big companies have to be much more empathic and certainly not pathetic or empathetic. Big companies are very vulnerable to political and public attack. You don't see so-called "anti-trust" attacks against small company monopolists making big heaps of profit. It's only when there is a big pile of money to attack that the kleptocrats move in for a piece of the action. Look at Neelie Kroes for example whacking Microsoft and showing Intel who is boss. She goes for the big loot. All the big companies can do is whimper and retreat. Google is now out of China and Bidu is cheering and making heaps while backing the Evil-doing regime. I was discussing something far far many orders of magnitude more than a trivial legal construct [BP is just a legal construct allowing shareholders to do certain things, until they aren't and their assets are confiscated]. Humans as mitochondria for It won't be answerable to any silly government or people. We are taking over!!! Bwahahaha..... Mqurice

To: pltodms who wrote (33839)	6/7/2010 1:52:59 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Review: Ooma Telo is great Internet phone device AP \| MIT Technology Review \| June 03, 2010 NEW YORK (AP) -- I've tried many gadgets that send my home phone calls over the Internet, but only one has really done a good job of it: the Ooma. Although it has been around for a couple of years, it recently trotted out an upgrade that promises even better call quality, plus some other bells and whistles. That intrigued me enough to take a look at the latest model. My verdict: For most home users, Ooma may not have gotten much better, but it's still the best one I know of. When the first Ooma device, the Hub, came out in 2007, its core proposition was this: Pay $250 for a box that's the size of an answering machine, hook it up to your broadband line and home phone, and get unlimited domestic calls for free -- for life. That was a good deal, especially since the Ooma had stellar audio quality and reliability, something the other Internet phone services lacked. Being a techno-optimist, I had dragged home a succession of other phone devices over the years, only to have them all nixed by my wife, who uses the home line more than I do. "Horrible" was her judgment on Internet telephony. The Hub passed the wife test, and I have been using it at home for more than a year, feeling confident enough to ditch my traditional phone line. There were two service outages early on, but since then, it's worked great, and it's already paid for itself. Cont.: technologyreview.com An independent, InfoNOTmercial review on YouTube: youtube.com -- fac: I don't use an Ooma, but I've spoken multiple times over long distance to someone who does own one; the quality was superb, despite the PSTN in the middle, on every occasion ... ------