Wirt's comment reminds me of a story I heard a few years ago about
computers and their ability to understand natural languages.  The
accuracy of the following is highly suspect ...

During the "Cold War", the US State Department asked that a program be
written to translate English to Russian, and Russian to English.  To
test the program, they decided to enter an English phrase, have it
translated to Russian, then enter the result and have it translated back
to English.

The phrase chosen was taken from the New American Standard Bible, Mark
14:38b, "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."  I don't know
what the Russian translation was, but when it was translated back to
English, it came out as, "the vodka is good, but the meat has gone bad."

Here's to natural language computing.
--Brent Flowers

>----------
>From:  Wirt Atmar
>Sent:  Thursday, October 16, 1997 1:59 PM
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject:       Re: Off-topic: 40th anniversary of Sputnik
>
<<snip>>
>
>As to Denys' other comment,
>
>>If the HP 3000 really continues to integrate with Windows NT, it will not
>>be long before you can speak to your Windows PC connected to the 3000 and
>>say:
>>"Take the full backup, send it to the Sony drive and step on it."
>
>the day that such a thing can be realized is much further off than Denys
>portrays -- if for no other reason, most computers don't yet have
>sufficiently movable legs and feet so that they can raise them high enough to
>step on any size drive, even a Sony, much less have the smarts to understand
>the sentence.
>
>Wirt Atmar
>