By and large, Europeans don't have the same obsession with the Free Market that Americans do. We don't consider it a panacea for all economic ills, and we quite like the idea of governments that put the common good above the health of its corporations. In fact, one of the major reasons why France rejected the EU Constitution was fear that it would enforce "Anglo-Saxon" laissez-faire capitalism on them.
Of course, even in the US unabashed Free Marketeering is contigent upon political expediency. Even the most laissez-faire US President will adopt illegal trade tarriffs if he thinks there's votes in it.
random access (or at least, the inclusion of an index) is the difference
Random access without an index is kinda pointless, because you don't know where to jump to...
My only disagreement with the original was whether you could extract a single file from a.tgz. He said you couldn't do it, I merely pointed out that you could do it, but that serial access made it a pain in the arse to do.
To extract a single file from a.tar.bz2 you need to decompress the archive up to that file (so, on average 50% the archive), and that can take a *very* long time
I think we're saying the same thing. You *can* extract a single file from a compressed archive (you just do the decompression in memory, and throw away the irrelevant bits to keep memory usage low). So it is possible -- but you take a huge performance hit (decompressing 50% of the archive, on average).
The huge advantage of zip over compressed tar archives comes from the fact that you have random access, i.e. can extract a single file from a potentially HUGE archive
You can extract single files from tar archives, too. It can just take a whole longer because there's no convenient index and you have to scan through the entire archive looking for your file.
So : yes, random access (or at least, the inclusion of an index) is the difference, but you've rather overstated the importance of it.
Because, let's face it, the only reason this is happening is because MS have lost the battle to outlaw reverse engineering. Now they'll have widely available specs for their file format -- and all you'll have to do is license the 20 or so patents that protect these formats, and you'll be able to make a competing product that can read Excel files.
Remember, GIF was a completely open format -- but that didn't mean Open Source software got to use them freely.
Well, that's the problem with non-violent resistance isn't it... If Gandhi had gone round beating the living shit out of people who mis-spelled his name, and shouting "I'm Mohandas Gandhi, bitch. G-A-N-D-H-I" while he did it, more people would be able to spell it today.
Trying or not (and some certainly were) there's little doubt that Nazi scientists were a long way from the bomb. Indeed, due to a widely circulated (and accepted) mistake in a calculation about the mass of Uranium required for a chain reaction, many believed it impossible.
Objectivism espouses helping others in emergencies
Not at the risk of one's own life, they don't. Objectivists espouse helping others only if you gain benefit from it yourself.
Rand rejects any form of sacrifice as an evil. I would suggest the deceased 9/11 firefighters, their families, and more importantly, the people they died to save, would disagree.
Now : show me where Rand espouses that I should help others except when I benefit myself.
"In any event, today libertarianism is part of our language and is commonly understood to mean the advocacy of minimal government. Ayn is commonly referred to as "a libertarian philosopher." Folks, we are all libertarians now. Might as well get used to it." -- Nathaniel Branden
Of course, a true Libertarian would note that the taxes that guarantee the existence of state-run police and fire services are so pernicious, that both services should be pay-as-you-go. Of course, then the fire department would have to check everyone's credit rating before determining if saving their lives was fiscally prudent.
You know, like American hospitals do.
Objectivists and Libertarians are not the same, but they both reject the interference of the state and advocate personal responsibility above all. And that means that the 9/11 victims had better save themselves.
Remember the Golgafrinchams C Ark... If we don't have our politicians to protect us, we may all be buried alive in a massive landslide of unspent lobbying money and political slushfunds.
Well.... given that there are large chunks of American political opinion that consider a selfish act to be the height of moral virtue (Hey, Objectivists and Libertarians, I'm talking to you!) you might not find that a persuasive argument to make.
Of course, Objectivist philosophy (a somewhat grandiose term to describe unashamed greed and selfishness) also suggests that the most moral course of action for the FDNY and NYPD during 9/11 would've been to stand at the bottom of the WTC and say
"Run in to the building and attempt to rescue people? Are you nuts? I'm not doing that, it's really dangerous."
which should tell us everything we need to know about that particular moral code...
The US takes $10 billion per year in ticket sales alone, and that's not counting DVD rentals & sales. Counting all those, worldwide, the figure's going to be an order of magnitude larger.
I am still surprised that video games make that much money though...
Well of course too much homework is bad for you. Why? Because that's what "Too Much" means. It's not a synonym for "a lot", it means "that level at which it's become counterproductive."
Too much of anything is bad for you. That's what makes it "too much."
You've misunderstood. I want MT to translate from Urdu to English, and I want it to translate a sentence that is unlikely to match an exact sentence in the collected speeches of the UN.
That would be a real test of this system, rather than the spurious one from which you're generalising such great things.
just the fact that they could translate this simple sentence is absolutely remarkable
Err. No. If it had an exact match in the corpus, it would be absolutely unremarkable. Which, given the sentence's content, its hardly unlikely that there is a very close match in the corpus.
Given that the corpus is mainly political speeches, I'd be considerably more impressed if the machine was shown translating an Urdu sentence about the state Bangladeshi cricket.
translate perfectly (or near-perfectly, as I can't read Arabic) a fairly semantically-complex sentence, which with using the old methods of translation was an absolute disaster.
Yes. One Arabic sentence. Picked by the google people to show their software in the best light.
Now, if you want to assume that means the job is done and that the software can correctly parse and translate any Arabic sentence, that's cool. Feel free to continue believing that.
On an unrelated note, I have a bridge that I'd like to sell to you.
I'd guess that this service is, from a technical standpoint, at least 95% done -it's just the packaging and touching-up that needs to be done.
I've got to admire your honesty -- you could've attempted to pass this uninformed speculation off as fact, but at least you've put it under the heading "Unsupported assertions"
Chess is trivial compared to the task of translation.
And yet some people here (we call them "idiots") are suggesting that Google will crack that nut in no time because (get this) they've made "groundbreaking" software like Google Maps. Which works by cross-referencing ZIP codes, for freaks sake.
My favorite is "bicycle shops near 121 Main street, Podunkville, VA".
Pretty handy, but it takes something more than an ability to do look-ups based on ZIP codes for me to call something "groundbreaking". My telephone operators been able to do that for years.
What other application development group would you say has a better chance of creating a better MT system?
IBM? Remember them? They probably spend more money on Blue Sky thinking than Google's entire research budget. Ever heard of Deep Blue, the computer that beat Garry Kasparov? Wasn't made by Google.
Now, which do you imagine is closer to the sort of non-linear processing needed to do machine translation... playing chess, or cross referencing an enormous lookup table of ZIP codes?
Slashdot Mirror
By and large, Europeans don't have the same obsession with the Free Market that Americans do. We don't consider it a panacea for all economic ills, and we quite like the idea of governments that put the common good above the health of its corporations. In fact, one of the major reasons why France rejected the EU Constitution was fear that it would enforce "Anglo-Saxon" laissez-faire capitalism on them.
Of course, even in the US unabashed Free Marketeering is contigent upon political expediency. Even the most laissez-faire US President will adopt illegal trade tarriffs if he thinks there's votes in it.
My only disagreement with the original was whether you could extract a single file from a
So : yes, random access (or at least, the inclusion of an index) is the difference, but you've rather overstated the importance of it.
Because, let's face it, the only reason this is happening is because MS have lost the battle to outlaw reverse engineering. Now they'll have widely available specs for their file format -- and all you'll have to do is license the 20 or so patents that protect these formats, and you'll be able to make a competing product that can read Excel files.
Remember, GIF was a completely open format -- but that didn't mean Open Source software got to use them freely.
Well, that's the problem with non-violent resistance isn't it... If Gandhi had gone round beating the living shit out of people who mis-spelled his name, and shouting "I'm Mohandas Gandhi, bitch. G-A-N-D-H-I" while he did it, more people would be able to spell it today.
Well, it wouldn't. It's a site set up by the BBC to promote the latest series of Doctor Who.
Trying or not (and some certainly were) there's little doubt that Nazi scientists were a long way from the bomb. Indeed, due to a widely circulated (and accepted) mistake in a calculation about the mass of Uranium required for a chain reaction, many believed it impossible.
There are transcripts and tapes of British debriefings at Farm Hall after captured German scientists were informed about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most express complete incredulity that the US scientists had succeeded.
"...while putting yourself only at a level of risk proportional to your care for the other person."
Doesn't really apply to strangers, then does it?
Rand rejects any form of sacrifice as an evil.
I would suggest the deceased 9/11 firefighters, their families, and more importantly, the people they died to save, would disagree.
Now : show me where Rand espouses that I should help others except when I benefit myself.
Of course, a true Libertarian would note that the taxes that guarantee the existence of state-run police and fire services are so pernicious, that both services should be pay-as-you-go. Of course, then the fire department would have to check everyone's credit rating before determining if saving their lives was fiscally prudent.
You know, like American hospitals do.
Objectivists and Libertarians are not the same, but they both reject the interference of the state and advocate personal responsibility above all. And that means that the 9/11 victims had better save themselves.
Remember the Golgafrinchams C Ark... If we don't have our politicians to protect us, we may all be buried alive in a massive landslide of unspent lobbying money and political slushfunds.
Brain drain or not, I imagine the US space programme will continue with the same policy that saw it be so successful in the 50s and 60.
Hire Germans.
As an added bonus, this time round they won't be Nazis.
Of course, Objectivist philosophy (a somewhat grandiose term to describe unashamed greed and selfishness) also suggests that the most moral course of action for the FDNY and NYPD during 9/11 would've been to stand at the bottom of the WTC and say which should tell us everything we need to know about that particular moral code...
The US takes $10 billion per year in ticket sales alone, and that's not counting DVD rentals & sales. Counting all those, worldwide, the figure's going to be an order of magnitude larger.
I am still surprised that video games make that much money though...
Well of course too much homework is bad for you. Why? Because that's what "Too Much" means. It's not a synonym for "a lot", it means "that level at which it's become counterproductive."
Too much of anything is bad for you. That's what makes it "too much."
You've misunderstood. I want MT to translate from Urdu to English, and I want it to translate a sentence that is unlikely to match an exact sentence in the collected speeches of the UN.
That would be a real test of this system, rather than the spurious one from which you're generalising such great things.
Given that the corpus is mainly political speeches, I'd be considerably more impressed if the machine was shown translating an Urdu sentence about the state Bangladeshi cricket.
Now, if you want to assume that means the job is done and that the software can correctly parse and translate any Arabic sentence, that's cool. Feel free to continue believing that.
On an unrelated note, I have a bridge that I'd like to sell to you.
Now, which do you imagine is closer to the sort of non-linear processing needed to do machine translation... playing chess, or cross referencing an enormous lookup table of ZIP codes?