iPods in uniform

There is actually an SBIR to develop a system in which someone speaks into a mic in one language it is translated to another and output through the speaker. So there will probably be iphones being used very soon. I think the goal is to reduce the costs as well.

This is a great application for consumer digital audio players, which ought to have a lot of benefits for us civilians in the future. Imagine going to China, and loading up a Chinese phrase dictionary on your iPhone first.

They could use pretty much any MP3 player for this, but using iPods obviates the need for UI training since almost everyone knows how to use one.

Someone needs to find a way to make this software WAY cheaper and with multiple languages. It would be a hit in the travel market.

Last time I remember the military can pretty much obtain rights to almost anything specially anything that they think will benefit them. Good luck suing the military! But no I dont think theres a group at apple working with the military but I doubt they dont support it, besides if they're buying that much ipods to send to troops all over then apple would be stupid not supporting it.

only one story today ?

Nonsense. In armed confrontations (which all these situations will be) you must have live-translators or you invite 'misunderstandings' (bang-bang).

The tech to phonetically 'speak' or list questions/commands to a contact/detainee does not provide any means to understand a verbal reply. Particularly in farsi or arabic, under stress, or in anger.

Intentional limits on resources per Rumsfeld had our troops in daily confrontations without military translators, & having to rely upon paid locals.

Of course, the locals had no agendas. Right?

I think it's a really great example of leveraging the inherent power of the iPod hardware. I saw their demo product at LandWarNet and was really impressed with how they had made their software work on the iPod, leveraging the unique hardware aspects like the click wheel.

We talked about coding using the iPhone SDK, and they were experiencing some of the same frustrations that I have had with the iPhone, that it is such a locked down environment, that it's hard to do stuff that Apple doesn't explicitly permit. For example, putting your own data files on the drive requires you to go through the iPhones API's, versus just writing them out on the hard drive. Even when your product is a standalone product, you are still locked up/blocked at every turn by the Apple iPhone SDK limitations.

Indeed.

The "war on terror" is merely the pretext for an international police state.

This dirties the Apple brand in my eyes, whether endorsed by Cupertino or otherwise :(

Um... is nobody else sad to see Apple hardware turned to such a use...?

This is the company that gave us a 'Think Different' ad featuring John and Yoko in full-on bed-in for peace mode, remember?

the potential for some prankster with a laptop to cause a huge amount of havoc with this system is virtually limitless.

"Please stay calm. We wish only to borrow your handsome mule for racing purposes."