it is the inevitable byproduct of using a machine without experience or intelligence to translate between two dramatically different languages. Grammatical errors are going to happen.
99% of the problem is that babelfish, systran, and all the others, don't even try to move the verb where it should be.
Babelfish supports many languages that I don't know anything about. However, I can say with certainty, it would be trivially easy to compile a few wordlists for English and German, and write a script to move the verbs into their proper positions in the sentence structure. Why none of the translation engines do that is beyond me.
Then again, I was saying similar things about search engines before Google came along. Maybe some upstart out there will be replacing babelfish with a much better engine soon.
It's not ignorance anymore editors, it's pure arrogance. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
I hear people screaming at the editors over and over, telling them they should link to Coral/Mirrordot/Wayback/etc. As nice as it sounds in theory, every time somebody posts a comment with a link to any of those web caches, they go down much more quickly than the linked website itself.
One benefit of linking to websites directly is that they're each only serving up the contents for one story. If the editors used any of those caches, they'd be responsible for serving up the traffic for ALL slashdot stories. They'd close-up shop permanently after maybe 2 days of that.
If you've got some actual, viable alternative, let us all know about it.
Colors and Images have their uses, although the latter is abused plenty thanks to advertising. Javascript, however, has practically no productive uses. It is highly insecure, and it takes control of browsing the web away from you. Nothing else is so insidious as Javascript.
Enabling javascript so a couple poorly designed sites will work is like removing your firewall so a couple poorly designed programs will work.
This is just one of the reasons you should TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT. It is so very, very rarely used productively, in ways that HTML/CSS can't be used instead. And it is so very, very commonly used destructively, against users.
But will people turn off javascript? No, they'll add just one more work-around to prevent this specific form of attack, and then another one when the next attack comes along.
Just shut the damn scripting OFF, and the internet is a much nicer place.
Making the US healthcare industry and supporting industries a private, for profit enterprise was an epic disaster, particularly in the department of research and IP.
And we all know how much better communism/socialism does the job.
I really wish it was NBC doing this... Then maybe we could get new episodes of "Inconcievable". What a great show, and a great idea! They just didn't give it a chance. I wonder if an "Inconcievable" movie will come out?
Pffffhahahahahahaa!!!
Sorry, couldn't make it through that one...
Perhaps now you noisy handful of "Firefly" fans know what you sound like to the rest of us...
Looks to me like the plaintiff was visiting sites that had spyware attached to them, he shouldn't have visited these sites if he didn't want spyware installed.
Because everyone is psychic, and knows before-hand if the URL they are about to type-in is going to load spyware.
Just like you shouldn't be in the wrong place at the wrong time if you don't want to be mugged...
Just like you should just not read the more idiotic comments on/.
But there still needs to be someone physically present in the room to keep order and keep students from cheating.
Not at all. Teachers don't keep students from cheating, they simply need to recognize when they are, and fail them for it. It's not as if a teacher in the room would physically grab the student and throw them out.
Lawyers, like Pharmacists, are required to be licensed in the state in which they practice.
As I said in the first place, there will be one LICENSED lawyer in the courtroom, but pretty much all of his work can (and will) be done by people in other countries. Pretty much the same goes for doctors, mechanics, etc. Outsourcing can't COMPLETELY replace human presence, but it can GREATLY reduce it, perhaps by an order of magnitude. And when the demand for these jobs is a fraction what it is now, you can imagine how underpaid these positions will be.
And I notice you don't even try to explain how emergency workers could be outsourced.
As I've said, you can't outsource everything, but you can outsource almost everything. You'll certainly need cops on the street, but that's not to say a large number of detectives can't be replaced by outsourcing. You'll still need emergency-room doctors, but that's not to say you can't outsource most of the tasks of doctors. You'll still need some nurses, but that's not to say technology can't replace a large number of them... Even now, robots are driving down the halls of hospitals, taking the place of nurses. When the technology gets more sophisticated, you can bet they will take on more tasks.
I'm sorry, but any service position that could be outsourced could also be automated and thereby eliminated entirely.
That's not even remotely true. Visual processing is immensely difficult for computers, but very easy for people. Diagnosing anything from a CAT scan to engine damage is rather easy for a person, but immensely difficult for computers.
If A.I. was that far along, we wouldn't need Indians to write programs, computers could just write their own programs.
Re:Does anyone else find myth busters annoying?
on
Archimedes Death Ray
·
· Score: 1
Mythbusters is usually right on the money.
Only because they have a 50/50 chance of guessing it correctly. In addition, they often completely fail to reproduce a myth, then say it's confirmed because, well, they know of a confirmed case where it happened.
There have been many, many flagrantly horrible experiments they've done.
How about a hammer breaking the surface tension of water? How about breaking a car's axle? How about troops marching causing a bridge to break apart? Or the most blatantly unscientific one EVER... Frozen chickens hitting a cockpit windscreen?
Call it entertaining if you want, but the incredibly high bullshit factor makes it far less entertaining to me.
Want to be sure of having a job in the future? Become a teacher, pharmacist, plumber, doctor, lawyer, fireman, policeman, or any of the many other jobs that one can't telecommute to because they are required by the laws of physics to be in physical proximity to their clients.
Teaching positions can surely be outsourced, unless your referring to the part-babysitter types...
Pharmacist can also be outsourced. It's really the lower-paid assistants that actually fill the perscriptions, once the pharmacist has said "Okay, that probably won't kill him."
Doctors are already being outsourced. Reading of X-Rays, MRIs, etc. is easy to outsource, and it's being done right now.
There's currently plenty of work being developing robots so a doctor can be on the other side of the planet while cutting you open. It's not nearly ready, but that kind of technology has the potential to kill-off nearly every service industry. I'm sure auto mechanics will be 99% outsourced as soon as that technology matures. And plumbers probably won't be far behind.
Bein a lawyer is all information-based. While you'll need one in the courtroom, the other 5 can be Indians, in their US law library, researching rulings, typing up motions, deciding on the best arguments, etc.
The service industry doesn't have much longer to live than the other industries.
if the US sucks up many of the smartest, most rational people in the world, how are nations like China, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan ever going to advance politically? They need an educated middle class, because it's the educated middle class, not the wealthy and not the blue collar workers, that drives nations towards democracy and freedom.
You said it yourself, it's the educated MIDDLE CLASS, not the top scientists, that they need to be pushed toward more freedoms and democracy.
Who was protesting in Tiananmen Square? Not 40 year-old engineers and scientists... College students.
If there is no neutralization of the cost of labor differentials between the United States and India/China, all of these newly created scientists and engineers will be unemployed. How is THAT going to help things?
Work is outsourced only in mature industries (so far). When a company wants to make something new, something like Tivo a few years ago, outsourcing the entire process doesn't really work.
For quite some time, the mantra has been that new industries, new technologies, will spring-up to replace the ones that have been outsourced. That obviously requires the US to have a large number of skilled technical employees to come-up with that new technology, those new industries, etc. Unemployed engineers often invent new things. Unemployed english majors don't.
I'm not saying that it is going to work or not, but in a 100% free-trade economy, with no indication of any kind of restrictions being forthcoming, it's really the only plan with any hope of keeping the economy going.
I think the EU is playing it smart, betting on the fact that the buck has such powerful sway in the US that if the government doesn't agree, they will be made to in very short order when the large US corporations start pressing to get their customers back.
Really? Where do you think more money is spent... Other countries buying from US companies, or Americans buying from foreign companies?
This may enrich the justice department, computer companies, and/or their shareholders, but how does it help me?
It gives the government ample motivation to sue companies the next time they are doing anything illegal. When the politicians stand to gain, they pull out all the stops.
Actually, the DMCA outlaws the mere creation of a technology for circumventing a copy prevention system.
Not if you are the copyright holder, or have permission of the copyright holder. As I said in the first place.
Sec. 1201 (3) `(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;
Someone could probably come up with a software solution to defeat 5C, but with the DMCA [wikipedia.org] in place and without the DMCRA [wikipedia.org] to defend our rights, doing so would be illegal.
It's only illegal to reverse-engineer the DRM if you don't already own the copyright on the content.
How hard would it be to get someone's student film (or whatever) broadcast by a TV network, thereby making it legal for him to reverse-engineer the DRM?
TiVo, for all of it's faults, is still trivial to set up and use.
Is a couple hours of your time worth saving ~$300, having a better and more flexible DVR, and knowing that NOBODY can go in and remove features, delete shows, track what you are watching, etc?
To me, it's more than worth a little bit of time. It just seems far too few people are aware of what nasty things Tivo does, so they are still selling units...
Windows Media Player has been included since Windows 3.1.
Technically, yes, but it wasn't anything like Windows Media Player as everyone knows it today. Just as Windows 3.11 wasn't very much like Windows, as everyone knows it today.
I don't like how Windows Media Player 8/9/10 promotes DRM, installs a DRM service in every Windows XP computer (mspmspsv.exe), and may potentially install more DRMware at the driver or kernel level, but Real is no better.
What? Real doesn't force DRM down your throat at all. Let alone at every turn like Microsoft. How is that not better?
Their software is harder to install, and more bloated and cumbersome than Windows Media Player 9.
Yes, it's harder to install because Real isn't Microsoft. Microsoft uses their monopoly to bundle their media player with the OS, and use Windows Update to install updates to the media player. Something Real can't possibly do. Hence the lawsuit for Microsoft abusing their monopoly.
As for bloat, you're just completely wrong. WMP9/10 eat up huge ammounts of resources for no good reason. It may load-up quickly because there's no way to disable it's built-in "quick launch" feature, unlike Real.
And their RealOne player is one of the most invasive pieces of software when installed.
How many years ago was RealOne discontinued? Have you really never used anything since? The Helix player has been a monumental improvement over their old players.
There is no single "MPEG 4" codec; instead, there's Microsoft's MPEG 4, DivX, XviD, QuickTime, blah, blah, blah.
This is ridiculous. Any MPEG-4 codec can playback files created with any other. The old problem has been the various fourccs, but any remotely recent version of Divx/Xvid will just simply play them all. Quicktime's and Microsoft's are slightly different only because of the container, not because of the codec. Try playing MP3 in an ASF/MOV container and see how compatible MP3 is...
Besides, it really, really doesn't matter that there are lots of different things called MPEG-4 that are slighty different. Why should it? Quicktime plays back quicktime files. WMP plays back WMP files. What codecs they are using don't matter at all.
I would also just like to congratulate you for managing to get a completely uninformative, uninsightful post modded up to +5.
Hmmm...maybe with such sufficient cash reserves, Apple might be tempted to finally sue Real over that nice little DMCA violation it committed last year by cracking Fairplay's DRM.
Now what in the hell are you talking about? DVD Jon is the only one with any sort of 'crack' for Fairplay DRM. The only thing Real did with Fairplay was to reverse-engineer it enough to give their own files compatible DRM. That's just about the exact opposite of circumventing copy protection, and it's not outlawed by the DMCA.
Allow me to say once again how lowsy/. moderation is...
Slashdot Mirror
99% of the problem is that babelfish, systran, and all the others, don't even try to move the verb where it should be.
Babelfish supports many languages that I don't know anything about. However, I can say with certainty, it would be trivially easy to compile a few wordlists for English and German, and write a script to move the verbs into their proper positions in the sentence structure. Why none of the translation engines do that is beyond me.
Then again, I was saying similar things about search engines before Google came along. Maybe some upstart out there will be replacing babelfish with a much better engine soon.
I hear people screaming at the editors over and over, telling them they should link to Coral/Mirrordot/Wayback/etc. As nice as it sounds in theory, every time somebody posts a comment with a link to any of those web caches, they go down much more quickly than the linked website itself.
One benefit of linking to websites directly is that they're each only serving up the contents for one story. If the editors used any of those caches, they'd be responsible for serving up the traffic for ALL slashdot stories. They'd close-up shop permanently after maybe 2 days of that.
If you've got some actual, viable alternative, let us all know about it.
Whaaa? Several hundred comments, and still no comments welcoming our pot-smoking ultra-intelligent rat overlords?
/. and what have you done to it?
Where's the real
Colors and Images have their uses, although the latter is abused plenty thanks to advertising. Javascript, however, has practically no productive uses. It is highly insecure, and it takes control of browsing the web away from you. Nothing else is so insidious as Javascript.
Enabling javascript so a couple poorly designed sites will work is like removing your firewall so a couple poorly designed programs will work.
You can't put an HTML redirect in the TITLE. Javascript, however...
This is just one of the reasons you should TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT. It is so very, very rarely used productively, in ways that HTML/CSS can't be used instead. And it is so very, very commonly used destructively, against users.
But will people turn off javascript? No, they'll add just one more work-around to prevent this specific form of attack, and then another one when the next attack comes along.
Just shut the damn scripting OFF, and the internet is a much nicer place.
Deja Dupe. Just a couple days ago.
Feel free to copy/paste those highly rated comments into this thread...
And we all know how much better communism/socialism does the job.
I really wish it was NBC doing this... Then maybe we could get new episodes of "Inconcievable". What a great show, and a great idea! They just didn't give it a chance. I wonder if an "Inconcievable" movie will come out?
Pffffhahahahahahaa!!!
Sorry, couldn't make it through that one...
Perhaps now you noisy handful of "Firefly" fans know what you sound like to the rest of us...
Because everyone is psychic, and knows before-hand if the URL they are about to type-in is going to load spyware.
Just like you shouldn't be in the wrong place at the wrong time if you don't want to be mugged...
Just like you should just not read the more idiotic comments on
Not at all. Teachers don't keep students from cheating, they simply need to recognize when they are, and fail them for it. It's not as if a teacher in the room would physically grab the student and throw them out.
As I said in the first place, there will be one LICENSED lawyer in the courtroom, but pretty much all of his work can (and will) be done by people in other countries. Pretty much the same goes for doctors, mechanics, etc. Outsourcing can't COMPLETELY replace human presence, but it can GREATLY reduce it, perhaps by an order of magnitude. And when the demand for these jobs is a fraction what it is now, you can imagine how underpaid these positions will be.
As I've said, you can't outsource everything, but you can outsource almost everything. You'll certainly need cops on the street, but that's not to say a large number of detectives can't be replaced by outsourcing. You'll still need emergency-room doctors, but that's not to say you can't outsource most of the tasks of doctors. You'll still need some nurses, but that's not to say technology can't replace a large number of them... Even now, robots are driving down the halls of hospitals, taking the place of nurses. When the technology gets more sophisticated, you can bet they will take on more tasks.
That's not even remotely true. Visual processing is immensely difficult for computers, but very easy for people. Diagnosing anything from a CAT scan to engine damage is rather easy for a person, but immensely difficult for computers.
If A.I. was that far along, we wouldn't need Indians to write programs, computers could just write their own programs.
Only because they have a 50/50 chance of guessing it correctly. In addition, they often completely fail to reproduce a myth, then say it's confirmed because, well, they know of a confirmed case where it happened.
There have been many, many flagrantly horrible experiments they've done.
How about a hammer breaking the surface tension of water? How about breaking a car's axle? How about troops marching causing a bridge to break apart? Or the most blatantly unscientific one EVER... Frozen chickens hitting a cockpit windscreen?
Call it entertaining if you want, but the incredibly high bullshit factor makes it far less entertaining to me.
If you will, allow me to say just one thing, and end this discussion in it's tracks:
IT AIN'T BROKEN!!!
Teaching positions can surely be outsourced, unless your referring to the part-babysitter types...
Pharmacist can also be outsourced. It's really the lower-paid assistants that actually fill the perscriptions, once the pharmacist has said "Okay, that probably won't kill him."
Doctors are already being outsourced. Reading of X-Rays, MRIs, etc. is easy to outsource, and it's being done right now.
There's currently plenty of work being developing robots so a doctor can be on the other side of the planet while cutting you open. It's not nearly ready, but that kind of technology has the potential to kill-off nearly every service industry. I'm sure auto mechanics will be 99% outsourced as soon as that technology matures. And plumbers probably won't be far behind.
Bein a lawyer is all information-based. While you'll need one in the courtroom, the other 5 can be Indians, in their US law library, researching rulings, typing up motions, deciding on the best arguments, etc.
The service industry doesn't have much longer to live than the other industries.
You said it yourself, it's the educated MIDDLE CLASS, not the top scientists, that they need to be pushed toward more freedoms and democracy.
Who was protesting in Tiananmen Square? Not 40 year-old engineers and scientists... College students.
Work is outsourced only in mature industries (so far). When a company wants to make something new, something like Tivo a few years ago, outsourcing the entire process doesn't really work.
For quite some time, the mantra has been that new industries, new technologies, will spring-up to replace the ones that have been outsourced. That obviously requires the US to have a large number of skilled technical employees to come-up with that new technology, those new industries, etc. Unemployed engineers often invent new things. Unemployed english majors don't.
I'm not saying that it is going to work or not, but in a 100% free-trade economy, with no indication of any kind of restrictions being forthcoming, it's really the only plan with any hope of keeping the economy going.
Really? Where do you think more money is spent... Other countries buying from US companies, or Americans buying from foreign companies?
I would imagine it is the latter.
It gives the government ample motivation to sue companies the next time they are doing anything illegal. When the politicians stand to gain, they pull out all the stops.
This story is about Windows-based DVR software, not Linux.
Not that it will take too much longer to get a Linux DVR set-up.
Not if you are the copyright holder, or have permission of the copyright holder. As I said in the first place.
Sec. 1201 (3)
`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;
It's only illegal to reverse-engineer the DRM if you don't already own the copyright on the content.
How hard would it be to get someone's student film (or whatever) broadcast by a TV network, thereby making it legal for him to reverse-engineer the DRM?
Is a couple hours of your time worth saving ~$300, having a better and more flexible DVR, and knowing that NOBODY can go in and remove features, delete shows, track what you are watching, etc?
To me, it's more than worth a little bit of time. It just seems far too few people are aware of what nasty things Tivo does, so they are still selling units...
Technically, yes, but it wasn't anything like Windows Media Player as everyone knows it today. Just as Windows 3.11 wasn't very much like Windows, as everyone knows it today.
What? Real doesn't force DRM down your throat at all. Let alone at every turn like Microsoft. How is that not better?
Yes, it's harder to install because Real isn't Microsoft. Microsoft uses their monopoly to bundle their media player with the OS, and use Windows Update to install updates to the media player. Something Real can't possibly do. Hence the lawsuit for Microsoft abusing their monopoly.
As for bloat, you're just completely wrong. WMP9/10 eat up huge ammounts of resources for no good reason. It may load-up quickly because there's no way to disable it's built-in "quick launch" feature, unlike Real.
How many years ago was RealOne discontinued? Have you really never used anything since? The Helix player has been a monumental improvement over their old players.
This is ridiculous. Any MPEG-4 codec can playback files created with any other. The old problem has been the various fourccs, but any remotely recent version of Divx/Xvid will just simply play them all. Quicktime's and Microsoft's are slightly different only because of the container, not because of the codec. Try playing MP3 in an ASF/MOV container and see how compatible MP3 is...
Besides, it really, really doesn't matter that there are lots of different things called MPEG-4 that are slighty different. Why should it? Quicktime plays back quicktime files. WMP plays back WMP files. What codecs they are using don't matter at all.
I would also just like to congratulate you for managing to get a completely uninformative, uninsightful post modded up to +5.
Now what in the hell are you talking about? DVD Jon is the only one with any sort of 'crack' for Fairplay DRM. The only thing Real did with Fairplay was to reverse-engineer it enough to give their own files compatible DRM. That's just about the exact opposite of circumventing copy protection, and it's not outlawed by the DMCA.
Allow me to say once again how lowsy