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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

More Signs of the Singularity!

SFGate:
[A] north Georgia high school went on lockdown thanks to an auto correct error in a text message that was sent by a student to a wrong number... [when] a student at Lanier Technical College sent a text message that meant to say "Gunna be at West Hall this afternoon" but auto correct changed the first word to "Gunman."

5 comments:

jimf said...

> [A] north Georgia high school went on lockdown. . .

Well, considering the events of earlier this week, I suppose
they can be excused the panic.

I'll be interested to find out, in the end, whether
T. J. Lane was a bullied loner, as all the initial media
reports seemed to suggest, or whether he was in fact
a narcissistic psychopath like Eric Harris of Columbine.
The alleged quote from Facebook, "I want the world to
bow at my feet!" certainly, at least out of context,
suggests the latter. (Of course, out of context,
so would Dale's occasional facetious suggestion,
"Bow, minions!").

Irenist said...

Yet another reason to prefer the spelling "Gonna."

Dale Carrico said...

No doubt the authorities would be alerted instead to dire threats being made against gonads.

jollyspaniard said...

I was thinking the other day that surely the Singularity hype was fading. A mate sent me a link to a TED talk on the end of growth. So here I thought perhaps elite opinion is shifting. But no that talk was immediately followed by that X prize Singularity University guy who immediately set to belittle the previous speaker's Talk and ran off a bunch of buzzwords "3D printing! Synthetic Biology!" He came off as an obnoxious prick and he got a standing ovation.

jimf said...

> I was thinking the other day that surely the Singularity
> hype was fading.

No doubt for some people who get caught up in it, it's
just a phase, and the hype eventually fades **for them**.

But no, this sort of thing is a congenital weakness for
some folks, and it's not likely to go away, any more than
Scientology or Mormonism are likely to go away. Especially
in the good ol' US of A.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Malignant%20Optimism
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Say-Die-Myth-Marketing/dp/0307377946
http://www.amazon.com/Bright-sided-Relentless-Promotion-Positive-Undermined/dp/0805087494