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I started BBSing in 1985 with a 300 baud modem and Commodore ('commode') 64.

    Things are much better now. I downloaded a game back in 1986 for the C64. It was 25K bytes in size and took 20 minutes to download. (It took almost that long to load from the Commodore 64 floppy disk drive.) Now I get downloads of old pop songs from Kazaa! in minutes.

    To connect to a BBS outside of your local telephone dialing zone, you had to pay long distance fees; high long-distance fees - by the minute. Now you can connect to anyone on earth with an e-mail address for free.

    The sense of community generated by the BBS network is found now in specialized Yahoo! Groups. And they're free. You don't need hundreds of dollars of specialized equipment or hundreds of hours of training to establish and maintain them.
Even intercontinental telephone calls are free when using Skype or some other VoiP. Not long ago (within my lifetime), intercontinental messaging was $1 a word.

    Massive personal file-sharing services similar to FTP is available freely now from Yahoo! Geocities. Want to share a file with anyone that has a downloadable internet connection? Put it on your free Geocities website. I do this with the data sheets of specialized old integrated circuits that I buy and sell on Bay and schematics of guitar effects that map out.

    Did I say eBay? Global near-free auctions of the most specialized items imaginable. Find a buyer for anything. PayPal handles the always sticky financial arrangements at a reasonable charge, even currency conversions. I've even sold guitar effects boxes to people who don't speak English. I sold an MXR Phase 90 to a guitarist in Italy and all e-mail communications went through the SysTran on-line translator between Italian and English. A micro transaction between individuals on the opposite sides of the world who don't speak a common language. But we both had a high number of 100% positive feedback eBay ratings, a communications channel, a translation service, and a common financial entity.

    Things are definitely getting better as a result of the global communications revolution. All this would have been science fiction when BBS networking started 25 years ago. Now it's beginning to become commonplace.

    Tell us of your experiences.

Systranoft - Does swedish!

SystranSoft's Systran is behind almost all of the machine translation srevices on the Internet, lincluding Google's.

I'm guessing it was supposed to be Systran, the company behind the translation engine used in AltaVista's Babel Fish translation service.

Thanks to SYSTRAN and Sherlock:

Panther iDisk Preview:

With Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Mac online storage service and the use of iDisk furthermore become simple and convenient. Mac OS X Panther*, using completely new architecture, in order to access iDisk, brings ultimate performance and convenience to automatic operation synchronizing of information in regard to offline access and the desktop and Internet.

The Advanced Capability of iDisk which can be used with Panther is introduced.

• Preeminent performance and file operation at of speed iDisk, speedy it is not different from the operation with the local computer with it is possible to do. Retain there are no times when lag occurs the case such that the contents of iDisk because it is retained in local hard drive the file, browse the directory, are opened.
• As for ultimate convenience iDisk when you use with Panther, because it is displayed in Finder, there is no access and the what change to normal hard drive. To that, the file is opened, because it edits on iDisk it is possible, to retain, it is not necessary to upload and/or to download the file.
• Being automatic, with the iDisk architecture whose synchronizing Panther is completely new, as for the file it is copied to the local hard disk first. Because it is reflected on the server of the apple periodically and automatically, always it can access the modification which does in the desktop the up-to-date file from with any computer. In addition, when multiple Mac are used, it is possible to access the up-to-date file directly from with Finder of which computer.
• When being connected to offline access Internet to iDisk even, it is possible to open the file, to edit, to retain in iDisk. After that when you connect to Internet, all modification contents synchronization are done in iDisk.
• *Mac OS X 10.3 Panther is the difference sale.

When lightning hits your antenna, you could lose your SW radio. Your computer, however, is (or should be) more expensive. Of course modem lines pose a similar threat, but without the big lightning rod on your roof being connected to your PC. With a little bad luck, you could take out your entire network.

Original English Text:
Slashdot: News for Nerds, stuff that matters

Oops. The babel fish is being particularly unreliable right now. Perhaps try again after a cup of coffee?

So for kicks I did a manual one at Systran -

English -> French -> German -> English

Slashdot: Message for bundle, substance, which imports

"And they maybe could add some region encoding so that people couldn't read a book in England that was meant for sale to Americans."

books allready have region encoding, its called language.

And I have its DeCSS, its kryptonite. It's called SYSTRAN, the engine behind AltaVista's Babel Fish.

Even then, if you're willing to accept a language barrier as access control, your analogy completely falls apart. DVDs produced completely in English should be viewable in Canada, Australia, USA, UK, South Africa, or any other place that has English (or an acceptably compatible dialect thereof) as one of its official languages.

Robot Challenge link from the story.

Gotta watch that "fair-use" stuff... it's extremely limited and does not refer to modification at all. You have the right to quote small snippets in a academic context, parody, and a couple of other small things, but it does not extend to arbitrary modification.

Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website.

First, there is no "right" to add value to somebody else's copyrighted work. If your use isn't covered under the extremely limited fair-use clauses and you don't have permission, you are legally out of luck.

The changes are not made on the server, they're made in the browser. Just because Opera allows you to zoom a page, is it violating fair use? No. A website delivers you some information, either free, or in exchnage for something (money, advertising data, etc.). At that point, as long as you're not duplicating it for others, it's yours. You can feed it through a program to do word-count analysis, you can feed it to a translation program, you can feed it to a program which shows you how it looks to people with color-blindness or other vision impairments, you can insert your own commentary on the page, you can rot13 it, encrypt it, delete it, etc. Copyright is about copying. If the information is delivered to you in a physical form (like a newspaper), you can destroy it, give it to someone else, etc., as long as you're not copying it.

In fact, the web gives you even more options: if the server permits, you can fetch the page through another server which translates for you, or processes the page to show you how it looks to a color-blind person. You used to be able to have whole collections of commentary on web pages, but the commentary was so useless that there's no money in it...

What Microsoft is doing is creating a filter in the users' browsers which adds complementary information. In theory (in other words, ignoring monopoly practices and considerations), users have every right to use that browser to perform that task, or to choose a different browser, to perform other information-processing tasks.

Actually, I don't think AltaVista or CMGI even owns that technology...they license it from SysTran, which doesn't seem to be owned by CMGI... ;) Maybe this is just a marketing ploy to gain media attention? I used to use AltaVista a lot, and it's still good for doing complex searches for obscure data, but it returns so many dead links and nonsensical results anymore that now I only use it if the other engines fail to find what I need... DennyK

As a side note, the link in the article points to The Babel Fish Corporation(TM), a whole other deal entirely.

Hey, I completely agree; the same arguments apply in the home, too. (manager->parent; employee->child)

There are a couple of other solutions, too. If you actually filter incoming *content*, then you can block what actually gets to the user; this could be done by having a proxy/firewall for the business, and only allowing web access to that. (unless you implement, say, a DNS/HTTP tunnel, or something equally ludicrous. ;)

The problem with that is, content filtering doesn't work very well. Often, people can't correctly identify or distinguish offensive material from art or literature, or have differing opinions, ("Huckleberry Finn", for example; I say it is literature, and relatively accurate period historical fiction; other people obviously don't know enough about the period...) so you really can't expect a computerized regexp parser to be even *that* good. ...and when it comes to analyzing, identifying and parsing images, well, a 5-year-old does a better job of that, still.

Therefore, we've already shown that filtering by URL often doesn't work, and accurate content filtering is pretty much impossible with today's technology, so it's gonna be unfair, and it's not the answer.

However, I believe you can buy software like babelfish from SYSTRAN, so suggest that to your boss instead. Heck, it'd probably be quicker to do it locally, and more full-featured as well.
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