Credibility
The magic word is credibility.
NATO took away part of its credibility by extending more and more the definition of military facilities, which where to be destroyed in order to end the Serb power.
Disinformation can mean leaving out important informations. Telling lies is not the only method of disinformation. The not telling also creates thoughts and delegates them into certain directions, whereas other models of thinking are left out.
Like this, the deaths on the own side are adjusted downwards whereas the victims of the enemy are counted proudly - as long as they are not civilians. The post-Gulf War period demonstrated how the population reacts if the number of innocent victims is much higher than expected. It was the fact of those numbers that provoked the biggest part of the post-war critique.
The media in democratic states tend to criticize this, which does not mean that they always want to be free of governmental influence. They can choose to help the government in a single case by not writing anything against it or by writing pro-government stories.
At the same time every democracy has undemocratic parts in it - which is already part of democracy itself. There are situations when a democratic government may find it essential to put pressure on the media to inform the population in a certain way; and also censorship is nothing that can only be connected to dictatorship; just think of the Falkland War, the Gulf-War or the Kosovo-War.
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1950: The Turing Test
Alan Turing, an English mathematician and logician, advocated the theory that eventually computers could be created that would be capable of human thought. To cut through the long philosophical debate about exactly how to define thinking he proposed the "imitation game" (1950), now known as Turing test. His test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an intelligent machine within a fixed time frame. After a series of tests the computers success at "thinking" could be measured by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject. Still today Turing's papers on the subject are widely acknowledged as the foundation of research in artificial intelligence.
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Vinton Cerf
Addressed as one of the fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf together with Robert Kahn developed the TCP/IP protocol suite, up to now the de facto-communication standard for the Internet, and also contributed to the development of other important communication standards. The early work on the protocols broke new ground with the realization of a multi-network open architecture.
In 1992, he co-founded the Internet Society where he served as its first President and later Chairman.
Today, Vinton Cerf is Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology at WorldCom, one of the world's most important ICT companies
Vinton Cerf's web site: http://www.wcom.com/about_the_company/cerfs_up/
http://www.isoc.org/
http://www.wcom.com/
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Invention
According to the WIPO an invention is a "... novel idea which permits in practice the solution of a specific problem in the field of technology." Concerning its protection by law the idea "... must be new in the sense that is has not already been published or publicly used; it must be non-obvious in the sense that it would not have occurred to any specialist in the particular industrial field, had such a specialist been asked to find a solution to the particular problem; and it must be capable of industrial application in the sense that it can be industrially manufactured or used." Protection can be obtained through a patent (granted by a government office) and typically is limited to 20 years.
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