It's been against the law to let non-white males vote. Does that mean it was right and shouldn't have been challenged? Things won't change if people don't make a stand for what they believe in. The truth is that most people don't support copyright laws as they stand today and the system is allowing huge corporations to rape the artists and consumers. If you're okay with that then you may as well go live under a king or dictator.
How about we each buy a spindle of cd-r's, burn off a stack of cd copies, and give them away free to our neighbors? Keep repeating until the RIAA starts suing people for having neighbors. I'n shocked that they;re not yet suing us for hjaving our stereo up loud enough that the neighbors can hear too without having coughed up a fee.
When iTunes removes the DRM I'll take a look at it. If it's not a wav, mp3, or ogg file then I have no need for it even if they gave it away for free. I don't want any of that DRM crap on my computers.
However you learn, standards matter. The w3c docs are open to the public. You have no excuse for not reading them. By not following the established standards it forces developers to check how their website's look in every version of every browser. What looks good in IE5 may not look good in IE6. What looks good in IE on Windows may not look good in IE on Mac. What works in Konquerer may not look good in Safari. Opera for Solaris renders differently than Opera for Linux or Windows and again each version has different bugs. Frustrating as hell for developers. Standards compliancy eases this. Sure there will still be bugs but at least then you know who is responsible for fixing those bugs. The web developers program to standard and the browser developers fix any rendering bugs in their browser.
Just because most people decide to ignore the law doesn't mean there is no law. Everyone speeds but you can still get a speeding ticket.
IE, Opera, Konqueror, etc can't even agree to have the same rendering bugs. As often as not they'll each render a page slightly differently and non is based on the standard. It shouldn't matter though. A good web designer would just make a custom stylesheet for each platform and use that to modify their standard stylesheet such that it looks good on all the platforms. It's not that hard to do.
Not to be rude, but is the part of your site that doesn't render correctly in FF following the established standards? If not then it SHOULD render incorrectly. If it is standards compliant then send a bug report.
Crappy websites designed by clueless designers who don't know how to write standards compliant code ot that are just to lazy to do so? You must use some pretty shitty websites. Most of the FF users I know are non-techies and I've only had them run into a couple websites that don't run in FF and most of those were due to programmer error. Dorks that code checks in their pages to disable them for non-IE browsers or that use ActiveX for everything.
I have more of a complaint with Thunderbird. It literally uses over a gig of ram most of the time. Horrible. Makes Firefox look like a second rate snatch and grab ram stealer. It is not good news that these apps take to much memory. It can cause systems to swap more than needed and in general slow everything down.
Of course the entire idea of swap memory is stupid anyway. If you run out of memory then just don't run so many programs. Swap is slow and is death to your hard drive. It's not made any easier though when some programs take way more memory than they need.
Mozilla is more standards compliant and that is a good thing. The world can't spend it's time trying to copy all Microsoft's errors in some de facto standard that changes with every release of IE. Pages designed for one version of IE don't even render the same in other versions of IE. Pitiful.
FF isn't completely standards compliant yet though. Not all of CSS2 is supported and most of CSS3 isn't supported. Also they do have Mozilla/Firefox CSS extensions (but they are properly marked as extensions). Rounded borders and transparency are fun.
Most don't. Most just need you to create one of the proper control files. I'd expect that in the next few years thee things will get even easier as competition for content heats up.
If your phone has web access then it should be no big deal to install a ringtone of your own. Most phones, even the cheapy ones, have supported web access for years now. It's not to hard to install them if you have your own web server or use one of the free services available to 'send' the ringtone to your phone.
I'm working on an opensourced program that will ease producing wallpapers and ringtones and send them directly to your phone or webserver for you. If interested ask on the mobile-oss mailing list. Let me know what model of phone you have and what carrier you use.
If it helps, I've been on the Internet more than ten years and I didn't get rich from the dot com bubble. Damn, I made the mistake of buying into the geeky net culture of making information and software available for free. Damn me for falling in with the wrong crowd. Why didn't I try some yuppie greed?!
Actually, from the first point I started recording my Internet experience (I was online maybe a year before that.), I've spent 10 years, 11 months, and 17 days on the Internet so far. Give or take a few hours a day to sleep and stuff.
Many people have some weird idea that evolution is dead. Others fear change as somehow making us elss human. Neither is true. Evolution is always with us. Life is evolution. To survive you must adapt and grow stronger. Humans are so adaptive that we don't even recognize that we're still evolving. This change is so constant that we mistake it for being something foreign to us. We create technology and it becomes a part of us and a part of our lives. It should be no shock that eventually this process will become so fluid that the machines and the production of those machines will actually become a part of us. It's as natural as tool users developing opposable thumbs. We're so good at evolution that we can self-evolve. We must self-evolve to keep living.
It ran for some time on various websites, muds, etc and I saw some adaptions of it that were even more useful as they were targetted to more precise knowledge domains (the bot had a scripting language built-in that allowed you to control many of it's features). One simple example would find the weather report for your area based on what you asked it. Not extremely fancy but interesting.
They probably were encoding the same phrases in equivalent responses in different languages but in practice that worked out to be very similar to translating. Enough to be interesting anyway.:)
They were copying what they'd sampled humans doing.. changing back and forth between languages. After sampling a large enough bit of data they treated the languages as interchangable but they would tend to output sentences in a single language as the word connections were stronger than those between similar words in different languages. I'm assuming this is because humans usually complete sentences in single languages.
The database got to be pretty huge but the program was pretty good at it's responses. It could fool most people into thinking it was a human for a couple hours. If I turned on some output tweaking features that'd force it to rework it's sentence structures (even if it said the same thing it'd mae it sound different) and add typos then it'd usually keep people going for five or six hours. The huge database was really the thing that made the difference. People don't expect programs to know about practically everything so if they talk to someone online and keep getting back well-formed and educated responses they assume there is a person in there. (I also cheated and let the bot look up data from Google as required.. so the user directed the bot's learning without knowing it.)
It wouldn't be a bad idea to feed such a program a source date as well as source language when training it on a document. So that it would have some temporal sense of the language it's using. I suppose variant of the language could be given as an input too. So that the program could learn the difference between gangster and geek.:)
Markov chains are fun and can be really useful if you do start tying them into some more selective algorithms. Some of what I've done with bots is embed markov chains into a simple AI engine that geneticlly ranks the connection strengths between words and against input strings. The bots learned from listening (to text) and reading (again, from the Internet) and then could respond with remarkable accuracy to anything you fed it. Sort of a fun toy.:)
Good point. I still wouldn't suggest training a program with EVERYTHING that comes off the Internet though. Or you are likely to train it that it's okay for English sentences to end in "and". Oops, there I just ended one that way.;)
Don't be so paranoid. A more likely outcome is the merging of man and machine. As devices become smaller and more a crucial part of our lives it's only a matter of time before we build them into our our bodies. Then as we get better at replacing body parts as our natural ones wear out (extending our natural lives) we'll probably begin bundling more devices in. Eventually these devices will probably be nano that'll just live in our bodies and reproduce with us (embedding in the bodies of our unborn young from mother to child).
The sepperation of man and his machines is a line that is getting fuzzier. It makes no sense to worry about machines taking over. We are our machines.
You could possibly have a language translation module implanted directly in your brain that'd make it so that you could understand any language you read or heard. It might be something like the Babelfish in Hitchhikers Guide.:)
Be afraid. I've read all of the HP books at least half a dozen times. I'm the kind of anal retentive fan that hated the last HP movie because it wasn't true to the book.
I like young adult fiction in general as it often has a better storyline than books for adults (no, I didn't say adult fiction. pervs!) and doesn't makeup for weak stories with swearing and sex. Of course Lord of the Rings (which I've also read half a dozen times) is young adult fiction too so probably 9/10ths of/. has read it in the past couple years.
I read mostly technical documents and scientific papers. When I relax I want something easy to read. I don't mind if I don't need a dictionary to decipher my leisure reading. So sue me if that makes me immature.:)
Maybe it's her way of getting those darn baptists to buy her books. To many of them seem to have some weird idea that Harry Potter is evil. Anyone that's read HP and knows anything about real witchcraft knows that the two have very little to do with each other. May as well say that using the Internet is witchcraft.
I tried that in about 1997. It did work pretty well but the biggest problem was the limitation of having copies of the same document in different languages. There are quite a few but they were dwarfed by the amount of single-language documents. Also the fact is that most text on the Internet is written the way that I write - badly. This can lead to translations that are written the way real people write which can be good for conversational bots but which is probably bad for translation software.
Some of the more interesting things about these bots of mine were that they weren't programmed to translate but they learned to do so anyway. If you spoke to them in English they might respond in French or German but the response would be correct. That was really a very surprising finding.
I expect that these guys have built a much more robust dictionary and that their algorithms are worked out better than mine were. They probably have taken texts off the Internet to train their dictionary but I doubt they'd want to submit random findings off the Internet.
I'd like to see what they could come up with for simplifying language. Take some source documents written in full geek jargon and take the same documents rewritten to be for the lay person. Train the program on that. Then us geeks could translate our docs into stuff normal people could read. THAT I'd buy.
I wonder if it'd be good enough to learn to translate source code into English or even into other programming languages? It'd seem that the same abilities would apply to this task.
Does anybody understand the tax code? Why should software be any different?
I think that software that can learn can be said to understand a problem just as much as a human can. The difference between understanding and just doing is having the ability to learn from new data and to change your actions as required.
I remember hearing about this a couple years ago. They were using translations of Harry Potter and the Bible to teach this software to translate. It seems to work well. I wonder what it'd make of different translations of technical documentation. That'd probably be even more interesting than what it'd make out of 'quidditch'.
This could be great if it were opensourced. It'd be nice to translate email, instant messages, websites, technical docs, and lots of other stuff we're currently using the fish for. The fish is nice but not that effecient to add to other programs and it's translations aren't usually that great.
Is there any sort of group that's collecting names in support of voting out these bills? Someone that tracks who voted for them to begin with? I'd like to vote against these people in my own state and I'd like to let them know why I'm voting against them.
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It's been against the law to let non-white males vote. Does that mean it was right and shouldn't have been challenged? Things won't change if people don't make a stand for what they believe in. The truth is that most people don't support copyright laws as they stand today and the system is allowing huge corporations to rape the artists and consumers. If you're okay with that then you may as well go live under a king or dictator.
How about we each buy a spindle of cd-r's, burn off a stack of cd copies, and give them away free to our neighbors? Keep repeating until the RIAA starts suing people for having neighbors. I'n shocked that they;re not yet suing us for hjaving our stereo up loud enough that the neighbors can hear too without having coughed up a fee.
When iTunes removes the DRM I'll take a look at it. If it's not a wav, mp3, or ogg file then I have no need for it even if they gave it away for free. I don't want any of that DRM crap on my computers.
True, my website uses that in some of the available stylesheets. Looks pretty cool - to bad most users can't see the effect yet.
10 hours. Gee what am i then? I'm probably 100 hours a week.
However you learn, standards matter. The w3c docs are open to the public. You have no excuse for not reading them. By not following the established standards it forces developers to check how their website's look in every version of every browser. What looks good in IE5 may not look good in IE6. What looks good in IE on Windows may not look good in IE on Mac. What works in Konquerer may not look good in Safari. Opera for Solaris renders differently than Opera for Linux or Windows and again each version has different bugs. Frustrating as hell for developers. Standards compliancy eases this. Sure there will still be bugs but at least then you know who is responsible for fixing those bugs. The web developers program to standard and the browser developers fix any rendering bugs in their browser.
Just because most people decide to ignore the law doesn't mean there is no law. Everyone speeds but you can still get a speeding ticket.
IE, Opera, Konqueror, etc can't even agree to have the same rendering bugs. As often as not they'll each render a page slightly differently and non is based on the standard. It shouldn't matter though. A good web designer would just make a custom stylesheet for each platform and use that to modify their standard stylesheet such that it looks good on all the platforms. It's not that hard to do.
Not to be rude, but is the part of your site that doesn't render correctly in FF following the established standards? If not then it SHOULD render incorrectly. If it is standards compliant then send a bug report.
Crappy websites designed by clueless designers who don't know how to write standards compliant code ot that are just to lazy to do so? You must use some pretty shitty websites. Most of the FF users I know are non-techies and I've only had them run into a couple websites that don't run in FF and most of those were due to programmer error. Dorks that code checks in their pages to disable them for non-IE browsers or that use ActiveX for everything.
I have more of a complaint with Thunderbird. It literally uses over a gig of ram most of the time. Horrible. Makes Firefox look like a second rate snatch and grab ram stealer. It is not good news that these apps take to much memory. It can cause systems to swap more than needed and in general slow everything down.
Of course the entire idea of swap memory is stupid anyway. If you run out of memory then just don't run so many programs. Swap is slow and is death to your hard drive. It's not made any easier though when some programs take way more memory than they need.
Mozilla is more standards compliant and that is a good thing. The world can't spend it's time trying to copy all Microsoft's errors in some de facto standard that changes with every release of IE. Pages designed for one version of IE don't even render the same in other versions of IE. Pitiful.
FF isn't completely standards compliant yet though. Not all of CSS2 is supported and most of CSS3 isn't supported. Also they do have Mozilla/Firefox CSS extensions (but they are properly marked as extensions). Rounded borders and transparency are fun.
Most don't. Most just need you to create one of the proper control files. I'd expect that in the next few years thee things will get even easier as competition for content heats up.
I'm working on an opensourced program that will ease producing wallpapers and ringtones and send them directly to your phone or webserver for you. If interested ask on the mobile-oss mailing list. Let me know what model of phone you have and what carrier you use.
If it helps, I've been on the Internet more than ten years and I didn't get rich from the dot com bubble. Damn, I made the mistake of buying into the geeky net culture of making information and software available for free. Damn me for falling in with the wrong crowd. Why didn't I try some yuppie greed?!
Actually, from the first point I started recording my Internet experience (I was online maybe a year before that.), I've spent 10 years, 11 months, and 17 days on the Internet so far. Give or take a few hours a day to sleep and stuff.
Many people have some weird idea that evolution is dead. Others fear change as somehow making us elss human. Neither is true. Evolution is always with us. Life is evolution. To survive you must adapt and grow stronger. Humans are so adaptive that we don't even recognize that we're still evolving. This change is so constant that we mistake it for being something foreign to us. We create technology and it becomes a part of us and a part of our lives. It should be no shock that eventually this process will become so fluid that the machines and the production of those machines will actually become a part of us. It's as natural as tool users developing opposable thumbs. We're so good at evolution that we can self-evolve. We must self-evolve to keep living.
It ran for some time on various websites, muds, etc and I saw some adaptions of it that were even more useful as they were targetted to more precise knowledge domains (the bot had a scripting language built-in that allowed you to control many of it's features). One simple example would find the weather report for your area based on what you asked it. Not extremely fancy but interesting.
They probably were encoding the same phrases in equivalent responses in different languages but in practice that worked out to be very similar to translating. Enough to be interesting anyway. :)
They were copying what they'd sampled humans doing.. changing back and forth between languages. After sampling a large enough bit of data they treated the languages as interchangable but they would tend to output sentences in a single language as the word connections were stronger than those between similar words in different languages. I'm assuming this is because humans usually complete sentences in single languages.
The database got to be pretty huge but the program was pretty good at it's responses. It could fool most people into thinking it was a human for a couple hours. If I turned on some output tweaking features that'd force it to rework it's sentence structures (even if it said the same thing it'd mae it sound different) and add typos then it'd usually keep people going for five or six hours. The huge database was really the thing that made the difference. People don't expect programs to know about practically everything so if they talk to someone online and keep getting back well-formed and educated responses they assume there is a person in there. (I also cheated and let the bot look up data from Google as required.. so the user directed the bot's learning without knowing it.)
It wouldn't be a bad idea to feed such a program a source date as well as source language when training it on a document. So that it would have some temporal sense of the language it's using. I suppose variant of the language could be given as an input too. So that the program could learn the difference between gangster and geek. :)
Markov chains are fun and can be really useful if you do start tying them into some more selective algorithms. Some of what I've done with bots is embed markov chains into a simple AI engine that geneticlly ranks the connection strengths between words and against input strings. The bots learned from listening (to text) and reading (again, from the Internet) and then could respond with remarkable accuracy to anything you fed it. Sort of a fun toy. :)
Good point. I still wouldn't suggest training a program with EVERYTHING that comes off the Internet though. Or you are likely to train it that it's okay for English sentences to end in "and". Oops, there I just ended one that way. ;)
Don't be so paranoid. A more likely outcome is the merging of man and machine. As devices become smaller and more a crucial part of our lives it's only a matter of time before we build them into our our bodies. Then as we get better at replacing body parts as our natural ones wear out (extending our natural lives) we'll probably begin bundling more devices in. Eventually these devices will probably be nano that'll just live in our bodies and reproduce with us (embedding in the bodies of our unborn young from mother to child).
:)
The sepperation of man and his machines is a line that is getting fuzzier. It makes no sense to worry about machines taking over. We are our machines.
You could possibly have a language translation module implanted directly in your brain that'd make it so that you could understand any language you read or heard. It might be something like the Babelfish in Hitchhikers Guide.
Be afraid. I've read all of the HP books at least half a dozen times. I'm the kind of anal retentive fan that hated the last HP movie because it wasn't true to the book.
/. has read it in the past couple years.
:)
I like young adult fiction in general as it often has a better storyline than books for adults (no, I didn't say adult fiction. pervs!) and doesn't makeup for weak stories with swearing and sex. Of course Lord of the Rings (which I've also read half a dozen times) is young adult fiction too so probably 9/10ths of
I read mostly technical documents and scientific papers. When I relax I want something easy to read. I don't mind if I don't need a dictionary to decipher my leisure reading. So sue me if that makes me immature.
Maybe it's her way of getting those darn baptists to buy her books. To many of them seem to have some weird idea that Harry Potter is evil. Anyone that's read HP and knows anything about real witchcraft knows that the two have very little to do with each other. May as well say that using the Internet is witchcraft.
I tried that in about 1997. It did work pretty well but the biggest problem was the limitation of having copies of the same document in different languages. There are quite a few but they were dwarfed by the amount of single-language documents. Also the fact is that most text on the Internet is written the way that I write - badly. This can lead to translations that are written the way real people write which can be good for conversational bots but which is probably bad for translation software.
Some of the more interesting things about these bots of mine were that they weren't programmed to translate but they learned to do so anyway. If you spoke to them in English they might respond in French or German but the response would be correct. That was really a very surprising finding.
I expect that these guys have built a much more robust dictionary and that their algorithms are worked out better than mine were. They probably have taken texts off the Internet to train their dictionary but I doubt they'd want to submit random findings off the Internet.
I'd like to see what they could come up with for simplifying language. Take some source documents written in full geek jargon and take the same documents rewritten to be for the lay person. Train the program on that. Then us geeks could translate our docs into stuff normal people could read. THAT I'd buy.
I wonder if it'd be good enough to learn to translate source code into English or even into other programming languages? It'd seem that the same abilities would apply to this task.
Does anybody understand the tax code? Why should software be any different?
I think that software that can learn can be said to understand a problem just as much as a human can. The difference between understanding and just doing is having the ability to learn from new data and to change your actions as required.
I remember hearing about this a couple years ago. They were using translations of Harry Potter and the Bible to teach this software to translate. It seems to work well. I wonder what it'd make of different translations of technical documentation. That'd probably be even more interesting than what it'd make out of 'quidditch'.
This could be great if it were opensourced. It'd be nice to translate email, instant messages, websites, technical docs, and lots of other stuff we're currently using the fish for. The fish is nice but not that effecient to add to other programs and it's translations aren't usually that great.
Is there any sort of group that's collecting names in support of voting out these bills? Someone that tracks who voted for them to begin with? I'd like to vote against these people in my own state and I'd like to let them know why I'm voting against them.