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Breakfast Topic: Does /spit need to go?
In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I should be totally honest with you all. I hate spitting. Of course, I know it has its uses -- one can't swallow toothpaste, after all -- but people spitting in the street? Gross, and completely unnecessary. When I used to cycle competitively, people did it all the time, and I hated it then, too. I was reading the comments on a recent Breakfast Topic and noticed that one thing that cropped up a bit in people's dislike of PvP was the use of unpleasant emotes by their enemies to rub in their victory or simply just as play progressed. This brought /spit to mind. It's something that I see every now and then, and I honestly cannot understand what possible purpose it ever served in the game or what purpose it continues to serve now, apart from providing another avenue for people to be unpleasant to one another. If there was one emote from WoW that I would remove, /spit is the one. But as I said, as a person who hates spitting, perhaps I'm just being unfair. So, dear readers, maybe you disagree? Or maybe there's another emote you dislike more than that one? I can put up with /rude, but not /spit. At least /rude can be funny if used at the right time and in the right context. What do you think?
Get diagnosed by spitting on an iPhone, social graces terminal
Korean scientists reckon that the capacitive touchscreens on our phones and tablets could help diagnose diseases from what's floating around in your mouth. It works through the screen's ability to detect minute capacitive differences in disease-carrying liquids placed on its surface. Experiments by Hyun Gyu Park and Byoung Yeon Won at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology in Daejeon managed to detect chlamydia microbes in three different concentrations. Once again, the iPhone acted as medical chief, although the setup isn't yet able to distinguish between different bugs. There are also teething troubles with the touchscreen, as capacitive read-outs can be affected by moisture and sweat that are on the screen alongside your 'sample.' One solution to this would be to create a disposable film that attaches to the iPhone surface. There's a second reason for this, as Park diplomatically puts it: "Nobody wants direct application of bio-samples onto their phone." Let's hope Siri doesn't take it personally. [Sneezing photo via Shutterstock]
NEC invents 99 percent effective SPIT catcher
Before we start, it'd probably be wise to point out that the SPIT we're referring to here is "Spam over Internet Telephony," not the stuff that formed those puddles around the iPhone booths the other week. NEC thinks that SPIT could potentially be the next big spam threat, and considering that SPIT combines the disruptive nature of junk phone calls with the ease of distribution of email based spam, it's easy to agree with this assessment. In order to preempt this threat, NEC has been hard at work on a piece of software called SEAL, which uses the Turing test to detect and then block any computer generated SPIT that it detects. A simulation showed that the SEAL software rejected 99 percent of the SPIT that it encountered: an impressive result, but the 1 percent that slips through could still potentially annoy a lot of people. Just think of how distracting each spam email that slips past your filter is, and then add the context of a ringing phone each time one arrives in your inbox: not cool. NEC hopes to improve the technology going forward, although as the current situation regarding email based spam shows, once the battle between prevention and the SPIT-spammers starts, it's unlikely to end decisively. NEC is showing off its SPIT-repelling SEAL software at the 3GSM World Congress 2007 this February and will continue to develop the solution until it's feasible to release it commercially.[Via Digital World Tokyo]
