Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Project Babylon: Universal Translator
silance writes "Take a look at this project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)! This time the boys are trying to hammer out a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDA's to wearable military hardware to workstations (to replace their PRE-EXISTING ONE-WAY real-time hand-held audible translators, of course!). The site contains descriptions of technical approaches, a technical milestones timeline, and a nifty Power Point presentation for the executive-types ;) They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect...
Here's a link to Google's cached HTML version of the Power Point presentation just in case. (P.S. - get a load of that logo at the bottom of the page!)"
babelfish... proving yet again that sci-fi steers science and innovation. ;)
universal translator? i wonder if any trekkies patented it, or if it's even patentable?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
The next big thing I think would be a "smart" translator that can do pattern recognition and "learn" as it gets more of the language. IIRC This is how the star trek translators work.
Kind of the difference between pattern checking, and anomaly detection in virus scanners.
I wonder if it will do Klingon to Romulan
or maybe haXor to newbie
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
Well, someone had to say it.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
Yeah, wasting an exorbitant amount of tax dollars, sure. Like the internet.
Be cynical as you want, but DARPA is the one government agency which is really flexible and has a vision. With the rise of corporate dependency on innovation, even in the academic world, DARPA is one of the last bastions of basic research. Get with it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's cause they have all their technical people working on something real worthy. A free video game, well semi free. I'm sure I'll get a call from my local recruiter after he sees me play.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
it was done by a "lieutenant colonel" (LTC). well, army research == gov't geeks. you get what you pay for. =)
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
(emphasis added)
Does this set off alarm bells for anyone? Those are complicated languages, and I believe Mandarin in particular is EXTREMELY tonal (i.e., doesn't work well in speech recognition).
Look, just imagine which you get out of Babelfish. Now take it a few levels up, to speech. Does this proposal in any way sound achievable? (again, pun unintended)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
and the silly thing is that they DONT NEED ANY MORE RECRUITS!!! the govt should cancel that krap and cut their marketing budget. What's the point of adv. when they dont need anyone to signup?!?!?!!?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
It's cool that they're working on this and all, but their promises of building these into PDA's set off a flag in my mind. There's another company that, as of a couple of years ago, had developed a realtime program that allows one to speak english into a mic and have spoken japanese come out.
I remember reading that they needed serious processing power and RAM to make this work. (At least 512 megs...) It seems like if one language takes up this amount of resources, then it'll be a while before we have a multi-lingual PDA...
Maybe their technique is different? I dunno. I know it's not the same company.
I guess I'm just concerned about this being vaporware.
"Derp de derp."
can't you build a two-way system w/ 2 one-way translators?!?!? well, i guess they need to share the same db.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
So... now every USMC ground-pounder will be able to say "die, motherfucker, die" in 32 different languages?
Awesome.
Initial impression: boy are they in a hurry. Very aggressive time table for this project. 6 Months to "Emergency DARPA", 18 Months to 3 functional prototypes.
Then I saw what languages it will have: Arabic , Mandarin (the part of china that border Pakistan and India is mainly Islamic), Pashto (Pakistan/Afganistan), Dari (Iran/Afgan/etc)
Oh. What I want to know is what those 8 other languages are that they want to have the ability to add to it later?
Burn Hollywood Burn
Naw, that never works. Here's an example:
English: Help, I caught my penis in a blender.
English -> German: Helfen Sie, ich sich verfing meinen Penis in einer Mischmaschine.
German -> English: Help, I got caught my Penis in a mixing machine.
English -> Spanish: Ayude, yo cogió mi pene en un mezclador.
Spanish -> English: I help, took my penis in a mixer.
English -> Italian: Aiuti, io ha interferito il mio penis in un miscelatore.
Italian -> English: Aids, I have interfered with mine penis in a mixer.
English -> Portugese: Ajude, mim travou meu penis em um blender.
Portugese -> English: It helps, me stopped my penis in blender.
Compounding it doesn't help either:
English -> German: Helfen Sie, ich sich verfing meinen Penis in einer Mischmaschine.
German -> French: aidez moi verfing mes Penis dans un appareil de mélange.
French -> Spanish: me ayúde me verfing mi Penis en un aparato de mezcla.
Spanish -> English: me ayúde me verfing my Penis in a mixture apparatus.
Of course I'm speaking from the POV of someone who wants one.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Actually, I think you patent something *after* it has been invented ;-)
... The current USPTO is perfectly happy to patent unproven and/or obvious ideas where software is concerned. Been reading Slashdot long? :)
Oh, no
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I'd much rather see them give it to Linda Park (Hoshi Sato on 'Enterprise'). She's the one who really made the universal translators famous. On TOS, the concept was mostly ignored ("They always worked perfectly -- Yeah! That's the story!"). On Enterprise, she does the translating almost as often as the translator does.
Besides, I'd much rather see her recieving the thing in a newscast than Shatner (she's cuter!).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Well, give it some credit, you spelled verbiage wrong. Verbiage
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Isn't anybody going to comment on it. DARPA has been getting their ass kicked because of it....
I'm the last person to be offended, but even i think i'd in poor taste.
Why not Nichelle Nichols? After all, Uhura was the communications officer.
And if you want to talk about universal translators in sci-fi, Larry Niven's version was much better done in the Ringworld series. It didn't just magically make everyone speak English (or Interworld or whatever), it had limitations too: it had to listen to the foreign tongue for some time, to learn a minimal vocabulary, before it could begin communicating, which it did only haltingly at first. It sometimes couldn't translate words like <something> for which it had no context to deduce meaning. These limitations made for some interesting moments like the time Louis Wu had been captured by a woman who didn't talk much, and so he had to bide his time until the translator finally heard enough words to learn her language.
But then again, the Ringworld was unstable...
--Jim
The "Babylonian" reference may at first seem apt: the towers were built 'to the heavens' (well, pretty high) and a lack of communication and understanding among peoples led to their downfall.
However, the underlying, unspoken subtext of a comparison between us and Babylon is that we displeased God. Remember, in the Bible at least (there's other versions in other histories/religions), God was displeased, and the language confusion among the peoples was caused in order to bring us down.
What this logo basically tells the world (or at least those who have an understanding of the mythos) isn't that we're a great nation and metter communication would have helped us - it's that we went against God, and this is how we paid.
This sounds a lot like those right-wing extremists who tried to blame the attack on 'communists' and homosexuals in our country making God upset.
Now, I feel, like many people do, that our country has done a great many things wrong: setting policy based on oil needs and not human rights, keeping some smaller countries' governments (including some democracies) destabilized in order to serve our own interests, etc. However, just as I don't think that we can claim "God is on our side," neither do I think anyone can claim that God isn't.
This logo is offensive. That it shows the half-thought-out mentality of some of the people in charge at our governmental agencies should be a cause for alarm, not applause. We have been called Babylon by many people with grievances against us, and it seems our leaders are reveling in the name.
Get off my launchpad!
Does this proposal in any way sound achievable?
Not unless they solve the general AI problem first. In other words, no. You need a machine with a HAL-like intelligence to do good real-time translation. The machine will need to go to school for a few years to learn the idiosynchracies of each language and culture. No way this technology can fit into a portable translator given the current state of computer technology. Besides, even human beings have a hard time interpreting languages that they are fluent in.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've been hitting reload hoping that somebody will post some links to the real-time one-way translators which were mentioned in the post... anybody have some information on said devices?
DARPA has been funding in one way or another the premiere researchers in speech recognition, Dr. James and Dr. Janet Baker. Perhaps DARPA should have shown a little more foresight before the Bakers were permitted to sell off Dragon Systems to the Belgian corporation Lernout & Hauspie, which subsequently collapsed in bankruptcy amid fraud allegations, auctioning off assets such as Dragon Systems to ScanSoft, a Xerox spinoff.
If DARPA doesn't in the name of national security (look at the languages that are the candidates for the initial Babylon competitors) simply override what noncompete clauses, patents, etc. that would keep the Bakers from working full-time on this project then they have learned nothing from almost decades of the Bakers' kicking the ass of the entire speech recognition community with their superior statistical approach. Unfortunately I suspect that various government regulations would not permit DARPA to pay a fair market value for the Bakers' services. This to me illustrates how far the United States has fallen from any capacity to mobilize the scientific and engineering community for modern equivalents to the Manhattan Project, except for medical technology.
For those who don't know, an N-gram is data structure which encodes the statistics of word order in a language. These are used to greatly improve the accuracy of language pattern matchers such as speech recognition.
A typical speech recognizer might use a 3 word N-gram (tri-gram), which keeps track of all probable words which follow and thier likelyhoods. The probabilities are calculated by running terabytes of english text (books, magazines, internet chat boards) through a word counting program.
Thus, "green eggs and" will get a very high probability for "ham", but low for "jam", so it can bias a sound that seems to match "mam" acoustically to the more likely linquistic match "ham".
It wouldn't make sense to name these systems "DE" babel whatever. The system in no way reunifies the languages (assuming a biblical sundering of language from a unified root). In fact in all likelihood the success of a system such as this would result in even greater differences in language, especially if the system could learn. Imagine a translator that could render a foreign language understandable and maintain a slang similar to what you used. Self-reinforcing deviations from "proper" grammar could become a serious problem.
"Secrecy is the Beginning of Tyranny" "No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law" -Robert Heinlein
Looks like the link to the Google cache version of the document is in error. Here is the correct link
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Yes, DARPA had one really great hit -- about 34 years ago.
Be cynical as you want, but DARPA is the one government agency which is really flexible and has a vision. With the rise of corporate dependency on innovation, even in the academic world, DARPA is one of the last bastions of basic research.
I can be awfully cynical about DARPA. My former employer's bread and butter was DARPA research. Which is to say that our primary products were proposals and billable hours. Many of those billable hours were spent documenting our activities -- presentations, review meetings, progress reports, final reports. Sometimes we had time for actual research, the direction of which changed with the whims of the DARPA program manager and was at best loosely correlated with the work proposed in the proposal. I'm not accusing my former employer of wrongdoing; that's the flavor of pointy hair induced by DARPA policies.
By the way, DARPA doesn't do basic research. In basic research, most of which is still done in universities, you give lip service to vague area of applications, but the real goal is understanding. DARPA's research goals are always applied -- i.e. the goal is always to produce something useful, not simply to understand the world. But it's "early R&D", farther from being applicable than most R&D, and too much of a long shot for most R&D organizations. The rule of thumb is that if nobody else in the Dept. of Defense thinks they know how to solve the problem, DARPA works on it. (This translator work seems to be an exception).
So most of DARPA's work is in the gap between basic research typical R&D. Ideas seem to get stuck in this gap for decades, which is why DARPA was created. But there's been too much pressure for short-term results for too long, so the agency is badly broken.
Bleh, color me impressed when they get plain old speech to text translators that can translate my ENGLISH into ENGLISH text.
Until then I will be VERY skeptical about any vocal to vocal translators.
I have tried out every generation of speech to text consumer software since 1990, and so far is has all been crap. Even if the government has technology that is 2x what the private sector is at;
well hell, 2x ~10% is still pretty darn shitty and NOT something to be relied on in times of war.
Bleh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Doesn't anyone remember the addendum to the babelfish?
''Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloddier wars than anything else in the history of creation.''
we're doomed. I'm taking names for a bus to mars.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
If you look at the first page of the powerpoint file, it contains a picture (Bruegel) that shows the likely outcome of this project. An ambitiously large tower, abandoned and crumbling.
The picture was obviously taken from a painting of the Biblical Tower of Babel story. Given the state of AI, I predict about as much success for this project.
Where do you get the idea that we "don't need any more recruits"? We always need more recruits. It's not like the military ever says, "we're full, not hiring". All of military manpower is based on the idea that people move up and out. You always need more people at the bottom. Good recruiting years simply mean that you have enough people coming in (or enough to be a little more choosy about who you let in).
They have something like that already: its called the Defense Language Institute in Monterey CA. I'm a proud graduate of the Arabic program there over a decade ago. Can't remember much except military terminology and how to cuss. Of Course Arabic was my 5th langage after my native English, grandparent's German, 2 years of College Russian, and Soldiers/Programmer's Universal Language (Profanity).
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
I guess it's the most sickening yet use of the "terrorist" catch-word for getting public support.
This is quite offensive.
-twb
I know I'm mostly repeating what was implied by above poster, but this timetable could mean that something bad may be about to happen starting in 6 months and getting to full-scale whatevering in 18 months between the speakers of these languages.
-twb
A St. Petersberg company called Ectaco has already done this for bidirectional English-Russian handheld speech-to-speech translation. They call their stuff "Universal Translators" too.
I am impressed with the attempt to try to get a two way translator packed into a little box, but I don't think it's going to be much of a success. I gather the sudden need for computational translation is because the military simply has too few people who speak the languages of the areas that they cover. I also assume that this is in direct relation to the FBI/CIA etc requesting Pashto and Arabic speakers to come forward and help them after 9/11 last year and the difficulties in understanding a lot of the folk in Afghanistan who speak three major different languages (Pashto, Dari and Uzbek) with a whole bunch of dialects.
Sadly I think that it will be a waste of time. I speak six languages and at least one of them, Swiss-German, is not even a written language and here in Switzerland there about three major dialects of the language, some of which are not 100% mutually intelligible, and this in a Swiss-German population of about 5 million. I think that this system will run into the same sort of problems with languages like Arabic which has enormous dialectic variations in dialects say, from Algeria to Syria and people from the various areas can often not understand one another well. No one speaks classical Arabic of the Quran in day to day language use.
My guess is that the Military/CIA etc would be better advised to simply get people to learn the languages and to train others in using day to day expressions. This would have, amongst other things , the positive side effect that soldiers (some of them at least) would be better able to understand the culture and the situation of the local people where they are stationed. Not only this but people in all the countries I've lived in have reacted much, much better to me when I've tried to learn their language instead of being the usual culturally ignorant Anglo Tourist who expects everyone to speak English. I would argue that the general western ignorance (especially amongst English speakers) is one of the causes of the percieved arrogance seen by many third worlders. Another positive effect of learning the languages would be that there would be someone who would understand slang, as I think there's nothing like a bit of slang to throw off any translation software.
Good point. I don't know how speech recognition programs deal with homophones because from my understanding they work essentially one word at a time... I presume they try to be intelligent but allow the user to correct any mistakes. Translators also cannot accurately translate word for word for many reasons if the translator is attempting to create grammatically correct sentences. Simple things like verb conjugation for example. Going from English to Spanish (or any Romance language) requires that "you talk and run" "they talk and run" translate the verbs "talk and run" to "hablas y corres" and "hablan y corren"... not easy without figuring out the subject of the sentence.
I'll wait for DARPA (or maybe USAMRIID) to develop translator microbes for instanteous communication.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I work for UCSB for Murat Karaorman (the head of the CS department for the College of Creative Studies and now an employee of TI), who worked on that project. They took 2nd place at a techno-fair for most impressive technology behind the technology that was called Digital Versatile Disks. It required a Sun server farm (and well in excess of your 512 Megs of RAM). Exremely cool stuff. Their demo was unrigged, members-of-the-audience style. The thing had a sizeable vocabulary. The company he worked for killed the technology, though. Maybe you read about something different, I'd be curious.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
I wonder if this Universal Translator will handle the canine language...
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
From netcraft.com. The site www.darpa.mil is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
Wonder if their translator thingmy is going to be Microsoft BobXP
If you figure out what that Universal Syntax is (sorry, I forgot the exact term he used - it's been a while, and my university education was in Dutch), you can feed that into a computer and teach it to reduce all phonemes from a given language to it.
Syntax is not nearly enough. Unless you know what the individual words mean, you're shit out of luck. As an example, linguists pretty much had the syntax of Egyptian hieroglyphics figured out, but it took the discovery of the Rosetta stone for them to begin to understand what they were reading. Even then, there is still stuff they can't figure out. Something similar (old Spanish/Maya lexicons compiled by missionaries) was required to decipher Mayan symbols.
These are essentially the same goals that were set forth decades ago. This is a very hard endeavor, and while noble, I really wish they'd be a bit more realistic. I'm in the academic research world and this particular subject is what I plan to work in for my doctorate. Based on my perliminary background work, the state of the art in MT (Machine Translation) has moved forward significantly, but there is still a LONG way to go. To give an example, very good speech recognition (accuracies of 85% and above) and MT have been realized for limited domains. An example is the CMU plane ticket reservation system. MIT is working with MandarinEnglish translations in a ticket reservation scheme (and having some inside knowledge from both universities, I can say that the systems are impressive, but still a far cry from the wishes of DARPA). The MIT system, while the English speech was definitely computerized, the Chinese was sufficiently good that if I hadn't known that it was being synthesized, I would have had a difficult time guessing except for the fact that some of the translations were a bit off. Not necessarily wrong, but just the particular word choice sounded odd. Continuing, to give an idea of what problems researchers are tackling, Consider just the recognizer part of the system. Imagine the vocabulary set needed to work with the afformentioned domains. It's very limited, moreover, the syntactical structure of the language is also very constrained. And mind you, this is all being done on some high end workstations and servers. And they want to do this on PDAs? Not anytime soon. I'm all for this research because I love languages, but I would say that the type of system that these guys are describing would take at LEAST 15 years to get to and that's if there are some major breakthroughs very soon. So don't get your hopes up.
Humorless sig goes here.
Sadly, I went to babelfish, and got much the same result as above.
It sounds like a joke, until you try it...
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect..
If I recall the Trek backstory correctly, Spock's mother (a human woman) was the inventor of the universal translator. (And saved the show - no more needing to find planets where convergent evolution led to English-speaking neo-Romans.)
So give a copy to Nimoy as his inheritance. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Look. The military doesn't want to translate literature with this thing. They want something just good enough that US soldiers can communicate with the locals at a very basic level. It may be a struggle to communicate, but that's acceptable.
In fact, I was saying the opposite. Research can have incredible value, even if it doesn't make any money.
Presumably they are trying to paralell the tower of babylon and the twin towers. Supposedly, the tower of babylon failed because the builders could not speak to one another.
Their logo seems to be implying that sept 11 could have been prevented with better communication and understanding of language. Like the TOB, the WTC might not have fallen if people could actually speak to one another (or gather better intelligence, or not anger other nationalities, etc, etc). The 'remember' at the bottom also seems to back this up - trying to tie the lessons of the past to the events of the present.
It's the fire-breathing cat I can't figure out.
maybe it means that through better communication the whole mess could have been avoided?
not.
so we're okay with the government reading all our transmissions now? what if instead we found out why people were willing to kill themselves for their cause, and see if we can come to any basic understandment on that level, before spending vast amounts of energy on symptoms of the basic cause?
Just think how much farther along we'd be technically (read: your life more convenient) if we devoted all the energy and capital we spend on law enforcement now, on space exploration, or virtual reality...
I'm all for what you said in that first paragraph, but are you for real? You think we should just drop all our funding for law enforcement?
This is something I've always said, and noone seemed to understand. I think that if we could create a computer based non-spoken language, which would never change, and would be written in stone so to speak.
:)
I think this would also be very useful for historical reasons (that's actually the context I originally envisioned this). Imagine if every fifty or a hundred years we updated our language to translate into this intermediate language. So then, in the 23rd century we could easily read 20th century stuff. "Computer: translate this document from 16th century English into 21st century English".
The fact is that after a thousand years a language bears no resemblance to itself (English from a thousand years ago is about as understandable as modern German, to someone who speaks modern English and not modern German). I think for historical reasons, aside from the diplomatic value of such a project, we need to create this intermediate language.
An important part of this language is that it is not directly understandable to humans, and it certainly shouldn't be able to be spoken, since spoken languages invariably and inexorably change over time.
I'm glad to see someone has had a similar idea that I had.
I suppose Gene Roddenberry's family should have the rights to any patent relating to "universal translation devices" since it was his idea first, right? You know, there's more to getting a patent than simply dreaming up the idea. At least there should be more to it than that.
It was "The Vodka is good but the meat is rotten." This is the famous mistranslation of a the Russian proverb: "The spirit is weak but the flesh is willing." The translation was Russian > English, not English > Russian > English. For the background on that story and machine translation in general, see this Economist article. And if you're into such issues check out http://fieldmethods.net
fieldmethods.net: nlp and stuff like that
The main difference is that we are morally good and they are morally bad. Their teleology is broken - they justify evil (in a utilitarian sense) acts in this world with a fantastical (i.e. not based on logic or reason, but on an arbitrary book, the Quran) idea about martyrdom and the rewards of those who kill themselves to further their own faith (often including killing those who don't practice their faith).
I think the solution of law enforcement is quite a reasonable one if you think about it. You can't force people to change belief-sets, but you can damn well tell them that if they act on their beliefs, you will kill them on the spot, and in fact, kill their neighbors, next of kin, friends and so forth. It's a defensive posture, and a fair one. If you don't like it, get the fuck off my planet, or we'll be coming for you next (yes, that means you, whiny pro-terrorist Euro-leftists).
Why is Mandarin one of the first four languages translated?
Because, on a global population-based scale, it's the most commonly spoken language. Haven't you ever heard that old statistics joke about how according to the population statistics for the entire world, 1 in 4 people speak Mandarin Chinese?
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
//Yes, DARPA had one really great hit [the internet] -- about 34 years ago.
let's assume for a moment that you're correct in your assertion that the internet was [d]arpa's only big win. well, hey, that's pretty big, no? and work on it certainly didn't stop 34 years ago. having the physical network running and off the ground was by no means the end of the arpanet, later the internet, project. bind, for example, was a direct result of [d]arpa funding. sure, it's not the best DNS resolver or server out there, but it does the job, and was crucial early on. [d]arpa funding for internet-related work continued for quite some time, and may still today (they've got an impressive list of projects and i didn't feel like reading through them all just to write this response).
further, and more importantly, your assertion is just false. while the internet work is certainly their highest-profile win, it's by no means the only project that's had a direct impact on our lives. all manner of research into communications systems, rocetry and propulsion, and materials sciences has led to the possability of orbital communications satalites (not to mention the more direct military applications). much advanced work in robotics, which has led to serious changes in manufacturing processes (including lowering costs for consumers and improving quality of goods), as well as (again) military and pseudo-military applications like bomb detection/disarmament. funding work in semiconductor and integrated circuit research led to the first SUN workstation at Stanford (that's what the S initially stood for) and dramatically influenced microprocessor design through today via the creation of the MIPS architecture and significant advancment of RISC architectures in general. recent research in computer vision and AI systems are resulting in unexpected gains in security applications in the private sector. current ongoing research in human vision, while already proving productive in military applications, looks quite promising for restoring normal or near-normal sight to people who suffer from various forms of serious debilitating vision impairment in the next few years.
i could go on, but i think you get the point. you wanna talk about beurocracy, fine. i agree there's likely problems that could be reasonably addressed. but DARPA remains one of the better ways the U.S. federal government spends taxpayer money. DARPA projects save lives and improve the quality of life for millions, in America and abroad. don't sell them short.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Stories like that are not to far off, the Google translation from English to German will translate "router" as "Fräser", which comes from the "one that routs, especially a machine tool that mills out the surface of metal or wood" meaning of router. Which makes translations of texts about networking rather unintelligible, esp. when you never heard of that meaning of "router".
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
No no, I agree with that last sentiment. It just seems like he was suggesting that all forms of law enforcement are wasteful, even domestic law enforcement. I guess I just interpreted what he said to broadly.
Just to make myself clear: I've always said we need to work out why people are so pissed off, but people usually just give me a hard time about that.
That's actually a pretty interesting theory. Let me sleep on it.
That wasn't sarcasm, but I think that's a little flawed. I mean, you might in theory be right, but as of now, VR is not advanced enough to effectively simulate a rape or something, so I guess for now, we'll have to stick to law enforcement.
I do like that theory though.