"Salvaging the language recordings themselves might be useful to linguists and people studying the human brain..." Speaking as a linguist who has worked on endangered languages (and other languages), agreed. Language, in the sense of a means of communication with a syntax at (at least) the context free (and possibly higher) level in the Chomsky Hierarchy, is a uniquely human ability. (Well, I keep waiting for ET to phone home so I can find out how his language works, but no luck so far.) Every child (apart from the extremely retarded) picks up a first language (and in the right situation, a second language, or even more), while no linguist has ever completely and accurately described the grammar of any language. Which is very odd, when you think of it.
So agreed, language is a unique window into the human mind.
For better or worse, I think that's standard procedure in cases like this. Maybe they meant they didn't want the Russians, Koreans and Iranians to get a hold of the information too.
Some on this/. page have suggested this might have been a honey pot, with misleading information. I have no idea, but that would be comforting:-).
Top secret? I doubt it. The WaPo article that the/. post links to says "The data stolen was of a highly sensitive nature despite being housed on the contractor’s unclassified network. The officials said the material, when aggregated, could be considered classified..." So if the "officials" are telling the truth, there wasn't any classified material there.
The "aggregated" statement is the notion that if you put enough of the right unclass material together, it becomes classified. I know a little about classification, and I've never understood that theory. At any rate, I would assume it might at best become Confidential, which is two steps below Top Secret.
On the other hand, the WaPo article does say that the material "includ[ed] secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile". If by "secret" they mean "Secret" (i.e. the actual classification, as opposed to the idea that my vacation plans are secret), then the article contradicts itself.
"be trained at home": afaik, all current AI systems require huge amounts of training data to do anything useful, regardless of what hardware you throw at them. Assuming I'm correct (and if I'm not, doubtless some friendly/.er will let me know), it's anybody's guess what is needed to change this state of the art. My bet is on innate knowledge.
"I'm probably going to get shot down over this and get -1 as troll" You might get -1 as a prophet, but looks like you did pretty well otherwise. Well done!
"difficult to pick up in a few hours" Obviously you did not read the/. summary (which says nothing about "a few hours") nor the original article (which mentions a month of learning at one point, not including the preliminary research on which language to learn, nor the time spent in coding his app). The original article does mention "A few hours on freeCodeCamp, familiarising myself with programming syntax and the basic concepts", but that was a tiny portion of his overall effort.
"...we have a resonant chest cavity which creates lower frequencies, and the throat and mouth which creates higher frequencies." This description is simply wrong. The fundamental frequency comes from the vocal cords (for voiced sounds, like vowels, nasal consonants, and the/l/ and/r/, as well as/v/ and/z/ and some other sounds); the chest does not contribute to this frequency. The mouth (and some other parts of the vocal track) filters (or emphasizes) harmonics of the fundamental frequency. Read all about it in the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
"The word "laurel" contains a combination of both". As does virtually any other word. (Sounds like "pst!" don't have any "voiced" sounds, hence no fundamental frequency; whispered speech also lacks a fundamental frequency. A few languages also have some ordinary words that lack voiced sounds.)
The guidance computer generated a couple overflow alarms during the Apollo 11 descent, although this was apparently not a software problem, rather a problem of trying to get the computer to do more tasks than it was capable of, combined with a hardware problem (not in the computer itself): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
"Canonical concedes that it simply doesn't have the resources to review all code submitted to the Snap Store. Instead, it puts the onus on the user to do their due diligence by investigating the developer before deciding to trust them." What kind of nonsense is this? Every single user of one of their apps is supposed to "investigate" the developer of an app? If investigating the developer would succeed in preventing my downloading an app, then why doesn't Ubuntu do it?
Don't get me wrong, I don't really believe investigating developers would help. How am i supposed to do this, hire a private eye? But the notion that every user should do it is just ludicrous.
Don't look below this line. ================== I *told* you not to do that!
...some of them are visible at night and it is useful to have a word that means those things, and not every little icy body out there.
If that's the criterion, then Pluto should definitely not be called a planet, because it takes a telescope to see. (Near perihelion, an 8 inch telescope will reportedly suffice, but now that it's further out, you need at least a 10 inch, and at aphelion it will take an even larger scope.) And neither should Neptune, which is too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Uranus is reportedly visible without aid if you have good eyes and know where to look. (At least some of the ancients had the former but not the latter, so they didn't know about it.)
Speaking as a linguist, this whole discussion on the planethood of Pluto is just silly. Pluto is still the same icy body it always was, what earthly (pardon the pun) difference does it make whether the word "planet" is defined to include it or exclude it? I just don't understand why anyone cares.
Actually, I upgraded my PC and laptop to Win10 from Win7 long after the upgrade window supposedly ended. I don't remember where the instructions were, but it did not involve anything illegal--I went straight to the Microsoft site and got the upgrade.
In case anyone wonders why, it was so I could get the Linux subsystem for Windows. I do regard the Win7 UI as overall better, so I used ClassicShell and WinAero Tweeker to restore some semblance of elegance. (Otherwise Win7 is to Indiana Jones with Harrison Ford as Win10 is to Indiana Jones with Legos.)
In the interest of finding some concrete details, I just searched for "PowerShell remove Store apps", and came up with this very useful page (lots of others came up, but this one looked good enough): https://www.askvg.com/guide-ho....
There's some info on editing the hosts file here: https://www.bleepingcomputer.c..., with some links to sample hosts files that block certain ads servers. But it would be useful to know how editing the hosts file can be used to reduce telemetry without (for example) blocking updates.
My personal opinion is that spelling is a problem we have brought on ourselves. If English had a simpler spelling system, we could cut spelling out of the curriculum after the first year, and use the time we'd save for more important things. Or if we refuse to reform the spelling system (and I have no expectation that we will, given that we haven't succeeded in going metric), then let the computer handle it. These days, the computer can not only flag English words that aren't in the dictionary (including inflected forms that wouldn't be in a dictionary anyway), and suggest a correction that is usually correct, it can also usually flag and correct homophones like their/ they're/ there. There's of course a long tail of things it won't get, mostly personal and place names, but it's getting better with those, too. And there's no argument that you have to understand the reason words are spelled the way they are (unlike with math, where one can argue--rightly or wrongly--that you ought to know *why* the calculator comes up with the numbers it does).
40%, huh? Where did you get that #? I've no doubt that depending on ones definition of "poverty" and how you measure (which are two different things), there's a range of possible numbers. However, the lede in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) shows a value of 13.5%, which is miles away from 40%.
As a wise man once said, If you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, y' ain't gonna make with anyone anyhow. Toning down your claims might get you a larger audience.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but I think to be honest--as the third politician was--you need to take your statement out of passive/ middle voice, and put it into active voice. Instead of saying "tuition should be lowered" (passive voice) and "tuition goes up" (what I'm calling middle voice, although English doesn't really have such a thing), say s.t. like "university administrators need to lower tuition", and they need to do so by decreasing the spending on X (where X = building maintenance, landscaping, firing the administrators who do Y, etc.). Or maybe "the taxpayers need to pay more towards tuition", or "the government needs to spend less on Y and more on education" (remember, the OP was talking about Canada, so Y is probably not defense/ military).
Your comment on memorization reminds me of my experience in chemistry (my minor) in college. This was in the late 60s - early 70s, but I suspect chemistry is similar now. For inorganic, quantitative, and organic chem, I realized that there were a relatively small number of facts that I needed to learn, and nearly everything else could be seen as following from those facts. So I learned those facts, reasoned through everything else, and got high As in all those courses.
Then came biochem. Afaict, God could have made the synthesis of citric acid work in any of a thousand different ways. He didn't; it only works in one way, the Krebs Cycle, used by all aerobic organisms capable of synthesizing it. It therefore has to be memorized, if you want to pass biochem. I did pass biochem, but barely, because of the Krebs Cycle and a lot of other processes that I tried to memorized, since they couldn't be reasoned out. (These facts are where your reference manuals make the most sense! And of course reference manuals are necessary for inorganic and organic chem, when you need to work things out numerically. Don't get me started on my CRC Handbook...)
BTW, I looked up the Krebs Cycle just now (in a reference!), and it apparently is not as random as I thought; it's in fact the most efficient way to synthesize citric acid, with minor variation across aerobic organisms. But my point remains true, I think, from the standpoint of the learner; unlike learning, say, the properties that distinguish hexane from pentane, it's not obvious to the human why it has to work this way. God, of course, has a different viewpoint, and I'm sure He can reason it out.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess what you're saying is that for people who use MsWord every day, the hieroglyphics are good enough. But for the rest of the world, not.
BTW, it looks like your sig line is not true; you responded to a score=1. (Unless somehow it's been mod'd down.)
"Salvaging the language recordings themselves might be useful to linguists and people studying the human brain..." Speaking as a linguist who has worked on endangered languages (and other languages), agreed. Language, in the sense of a means of communication with a syntax at (at least) the context free (and possibly higher) level in the Chomsky Hierarchy, is a uniquely human ability. (Well, I keep waiting for ET to phone home so I can find out how his language works, but no luck so far.) Every child (apart from the extremely retarded) picks up a first language (and in the right situation, a second language, or even more), while no linguist has ever completely and accurately described the grammar of any language. Which is very odd, when you think of it.
So agreed, language is a unique window into the human mind.
For better or worse, I think that's standard procedure in cases like this. Maybe they meant they didn't want the Russians, Koreans and Iranians to get a hold of the information too.
Some on this /. page have suggested this might have been a honey pot, with misleading information. I have no idea, but that would be comforting :-).
"Let me look on you with my own eyes." --https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McUwVg6MfOk
Top secret? I doubt it. The WaPo article that the /. post links to says "The data stolen was of a highly sensitive nature despite being housed on the contractor’s unclassified network. The officials said the material, when aggregated, could be considered classified..." So if the "officials" are telling the truth, there wasn't any classified material there.
The "aggregated" statement is the notion that if you put enough of the right unclass material together, it becomes classified. I know a little about classification, and I've never understood that theory. At any rate, I would assume it might at best become Confidential, which is two steps below Top Secret.
On the other hand, the WaPo article does say that the material "includ[ed] secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile". If by "secret" they mean "Secret" (i.e. the actual classification, as opposed to the idea that my vacation plans are secret), then the article contradicts itself.
"users may hear prompts like "Do you have more questions?"" Ojala que diga, 'Tiene mas preguntas?'
(And to anyone who knows how to use accents and tildes in Spanish, or about inverted question marks: Sorry, this is /.)
"be trained at home": afaik, all current AI systems require huge amounts of training data to do anything useful, regardless of what hardware you throw at them. Assuming I'm correct (and if I'm not, doubtless some friendly /.er will let me know), it's anybody's guess what is needed to change this state of the art. My bet is on innate knowledge.
That’s true enough, Mrs Beaver. Too true.
Unreadable, you must be joking! (and yes, I did read the original article, and I found it quite readable)
"I'm probably going to get shot down over this and get -1 as troll" You might get -1 as a prophet, but looks like you did pretty well otherwise. Well done!
"difficult to pick up in a few hours" Obviously you did not read the /. summary (which says nothing about "a few hours") nor the original article (which mentions a month of learning at one point, not including the preliminary research on which language to learn, nor the time spent in coding his app). The original article does mention "A few hours on freeCodeCamp, familiarising myself with programming syntax and the basic concepts", but that was a tiny portion of his overall effort.
...you have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.
Is this a game or is it real?
What's the difference?
Maybe the ancestors of the octopi later became the Thermians. The resemblance is certainly striking: http://galaxyquest.wikia.com/w...
"...we have a resonant chest cavity which creates lower frequencies, and the throat and mouth which creates higher frequencies." This description is simply wrong. The fundamental frequency comes from the vocal cords (for voiced sounds, like vowels, nasal consonants, and the /l/ and /r/, as well as /v/ and /z/ and some other sounds); the chest does not contribute to this frequency. The mouth (and some other parts of the vocal track) filters (or emphasizes) harmonics of the fundamental frequency. Read all about it in the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
"The word "laurel" contains a combination of both". As does virtually any other word. (Sounds like "pst!" don't have any "voiced" sounds, hence no fundamental frequency; whispered speech also lacks a fundamental frequency. A few languages also have some ordinary words that lack voiced sounds.)
The guidance computer generated a couple overflow alarms during the Apollo 11 descent, although this was apparently not a software problem, rather a problem of trying to get the computer to do more tasks than it was capable of, combined with a hardware problem (not in the computer itself): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
"Canonical concedes that it simply doesn't have the resources to review all code submitted to the Snap Store. Instead, it puts the onus on the user to do their due diligence by investigating the developer before deciding to trust them." What kind of nonsense is this? Every single user of one of their apps is supposed to "investigate" the developer of an app? If investigating the developer would succeed in preventing my downloading an app, then why doesn't Ubuntu do it?
Don't get me wrong, I don't really believe investigating developers would help. How am i supposed to do this, hire a private eye? But the notion that every user should do it is just ludicrous.
Don't look below this line.
==================
I *told* you not to do that!
...some of them are visible at night and it is useful to have a word that means those things, and not every little icy body out there.
If that's the criterion, then Pluto should definitely not be called a planet, because it takes a telescope to see. (Near perihelion, an 8 inch telescope will reportedly suffice, but now that it's further out, you need at least a 10 inch, and at aphelion it will take an even larger scope.) And neither should Neptune, which is too dim to be seen with the naked eye. Uranus is reportedly visible without aid if you have good eyes and know where to look. (At least some of the ancients had the former but not the latter, so they didn't know about it.)
Speaking as a linguist, this whole discussion on the planethood of Pluto is just silly. Pluto is still the same icy body it always was, what earthly (pardon the pun) difference does it make whether the word "planet" is defined to include it or exclude it? I just don't understand why anyone cares.
Actually, I upgraded my PC and laptop to Win10 from Win7 long after the upgrade window supposedly ended. I don't remember where the instructions were, but it did not involve anything illegal--I went straight to the Microsoft site and got the upgrade.
In case anyone wonders why, it was so I could get the Linux subsystem for Windows. I do regard the Win7 UI as overall better, so I used ClassicShell and WinAero Tweeker to restore some semblance of elegance. (Otherwise Win7 is to Indiana Jones with Harrison Ford as Win10 is to Indiana Jones with Legos.)
In the interest of finding some concrete details, I just searched for "PowerShell remove Store apps", and came up with this very useful page (lots of others came up, but this one looked good enough): https://www.askvg.com/guide-ho....
There's some info on editing the hosts file here: https://www.bleepingcomputer.c..., with some links to sample hosts files that block certain ads servers. But it would be useful to know how editing the hosts file can be used to reduce telemetry without (for example) blocking updates.
My personal opinion is that spelling is a problem we have brought on ourselves. If English had a simpler spelling system, we could cut spelling out of the curriculum after the first year, and use the time we'd save for more important things. Or if we refuse to reform the spelling system (and I have no expectation that we will, given that we haven't succeeded in going metric), then let the computer handle it. These days, the computer can not only flag English words that aren't in the dictionary (including inflected forms that wouldn't be in a dictionary anyway), and suggest a correction that is usually correct, it can also usually flag and correct homophones like their/ they're/ there. There's of course a long tail of things it won't get, mostly personal and place names, but it's getting better with those, too. And there's no argument that you have to understand the reason words are spelled the way they are (unlike with math, where one can argue--rightly or wrongly--that you ought to know *why* the calculator comes up with the numbers it does).
40%, huh? Where did you get that #? I've no doubt that depending on ones definition of "poverty" and how you measure (which are two different things), there's a range of possible numbers. However, the lede in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) shows a value of 13.5%, which is miles away from 40%.
As a wise man once said, If you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, y' ain't gonna make with anyone anyhow. Toning down your claims might get you a larger audience.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but I think to be honest--as the third politician was--you need to take your statement out of passive/ middle voice, and put it into active voice. Instead of saying "tuition should be lowered" (passive voice) and "tuition goes up" (what I'm calling middle voice, although English doesn't really have such a thing), say s.t. like "university administrators need to lower tuition", and they need to do so by decreasing the spending on X (where X = building maintenance, landscaping, firing the administrators who do Y, etc.). Or maybe "the taxpayers need to pay more towards tuition", or "the government needs to spend less on Y and more on education" (remember, the OP was talking about Canada, so Y is probably not defense/ military).
Your comment on memorization reminds me of my experience in chemistry (my minor) in college. This was in the late 60s - early 70s, but I suspect chemistry is similar now. For inorganic, quantitative, and organic chem, I realized that there were a relatively small number of facts that I needed to learn, and nearly everything else could be seen as following from those facts. So I learned those facts, reasoned through everything else, and got high As in all those courses.
Then came biochem. Afaict, God could have made the synthesis of citric acid work in any of a thousand different ways. He didn't; it only works in one way, the Krebs Cycle, used by all aerobic organisms capable of synthesizing it. It therefore has to be memorized, if you want to pass biochem. I did pass biochem, but barely, because of the Krebs Cycle and a lot of other processes that I tried to memorized, since they couldn't be reasoned out. (These facts are where your reference manuals make the most sense! And of course reference manuals are necessary for inorganic and organic chem, when you need to work things out numerically. Don't get me started on my CRC Handbook...)
BTW, I looked up the Krebs Cycle just now (in a reference!), and it apparently is not as random as I thought; it's in fact the most efficient way to synthesize citric acid, with minor variation across aerobic organisms. But my point remains true, I think, from the standpoint of the learner; unlike learning, say, the properties that distinguish hexane from pentane, it's not obvious to the human why it has to work this way. God, of course, has a different viewpoint, and I'm sure He can reason it out.