Ok, so the spammers have to pay $1 billion for what they did. On the other hand Diebold only had to pay $2.6 million for writing bad voting software that potentially ruined the future of the country by allowing for voting results to be hacked?
I believe the difference lies in the intent. Unless you're the tinfoil hat wearing type, problems with voting machines could be seen as a most likely stemming from honest mistakes in code. As it's a generally accepted fact that it is nearly impossible to rid complex code of bugs, it seems unfair to hold companies responsible for flawed code.
This is also why I am generally against electronic voting. I'd much rather have pen-and-paper ballots. But in those cases, the bugs lie more in the stupidity of the voters than in the system.
Spammers, on the other hand, intend to flood you with unwanted emails.
There was a fascinating article about some Caltech (?) researchers putting a little speech recognition into what was probably a Half-Life mod, and coming up with a 3rd-person shooter in which you had to learn Arabic words and phrases to complete missions. I think they were being funded by the DoD.
You're referring to the TacticalLanguage project that Lewis Johnson heads up. He gave a talk and demonstrated the system at a conference in Italy the past July. The 3d engine is actually an Unreal modification. It's really quite impressive from a graphical point of view.
One of the issues my advisor and I noted was that the dialogues and interactions were scripted. Meaning that the allowable deviation from the exact flow of dialogue was restricted quite substantially. This also necessarily means that repeating a particular lesson offers little variation. I'm not knocking it though; compared to other systems, it blows them out of the water.
A point you made in a different reply was pretty interesting - that pronunciation calcifies after about a year. I'm curious - to what degree is that dependent on the intensity of study? I.e., would a person taking five classes a week reach that point faster than a person taking one or two classes at night?
Unfortunately, I don't know this. I haven't seen any studies that have looked at this either. I'd be interested as well since my own research is focusing on the pronunciation aspect of foreign language learning.
Heh, thanks for the comments. Learning a foreign language is one of the hardest tasks one can take on. I can sympathize with your experience in Japanese. Chinese has a similar problem, although the memorization problem is a bit more acute.
As to what you said about current software, yeah. Alot of them suck. But some software/systems/algorithms that were once only available in the research world are slowly making themselves out into the real world. Although none of them hits on an "immersive" environment.
But that's why it's still a research questions.:-)
Well, one problem is that people aren't talking. Teachers are afraid of being replaced and techies think that their technology can solve all the problems created by poor pedagogy. In a FL specific context, I would be inclined to keep the computers out of the classroom since the temptation would be to use them _during_ class. It would be much better to have them in a lab environment for time spent outside the class.
Most so-called educational software suck, be it for japanese, polish, chess or cooking. A computer is a fast calculator and to me it should only be used as a very fast electronic dictionnary.
So aircraft control software is an inappropriate use for computers?
Computers might simply be glorified adding machines, but to say that they have or should have only one use is pretty stupid.
Fundamentally, the human brain is nothing more than a highly parallelized computer with extensive probabalistic modeling capabilities and sensory inputs to an external reality.
Absolutely. The key is integrating computers in such a way that they enhance the teaching already taking place. Unfortunately, I think most schools just say, "Ooooh, computer... instant Harvard admits, here we come." with little thought to just how teachers can best make use of them. When I was a kid, a computer in the classroom meant 1 computer that was used as a distraction or as a reward for good behavior.
Oh definitely, there has to be balance. I didn't mean by my comment to say that one aspect of FL education should be emphasized over another (although this happens quite a bit due to time/budget constraints). It sounds like you run a really good class (speaking as someone who just reads about education and successful teaching techniques and does no teaching of his own), which is more than I can say for some of the foreign langauge courses I've taken or observed.
One is that I was talking in generalities. Everyone has their own learning strategies that work best for them. For example, in general education, I find that I hate lecture unless the teacher provides some sort of insight into material that I can read myself. I find that I learn stuff best when I actually go about writing a program or actually applying the knowledge in doing something. In learning a foreign langauge (I've studied both German and Chinese. German unsuccessfully and Chinese with moderate success), I find that I most enjoy finding a native speaker with which I feel comfortable speaking and making mistakes. It's often hard to find that. Many native speakers will overlook mistakes or worse, laugh outright. Still, I find that this is what helps me the most, speaking with other people. Thus, I must admit that I probably have a bias towards teaching methods that focus on interaction with the material. You've had a different experience and perhaps you could shed some light on the structure of your English language classes?
Which brings me to another point, another reason people are successful at learning a foreign language is motivation. This has been studied to death in general education and foreign language education, but it bears repeating. If a student isn't motivated to learn the material, they probably won't. If they are, they will. English, for better or worse, is the language of international business, it is also the language for the country in which you apparently now operate on a full-time basis. I suspect that, for you, there was probably a very strong motivation for learning the language. Hence, your success.
Contrast this with someone who never plans to actually live in the foreign country or do any work in the foreign langauge they're learning. Their motivation is somewhat diminished. This is why you see many Americans not learning a foreign language successfully. Most Americans are of the mind they will never live or work outside the country, thus, the need to learn a foreign language is diminished and so is the motivation. And note, I'm an American, I'm in no way denigrating Americans. They're just factual observations.
Bearing this in mind, consider what happens when I travel to China, Taiwan, Germany, or Austria. In China and Taiwan, people see me (not incorrectly) as an opportunity to practice their English and they do so. It can be very difficult in those situations to speak Mandarin since it feels unnatural to have a conversation in two different langauges. (Note, a strategy to fix this is to get the first word in. Once a Chinese person sees that you're at least willing to try to speak the language, they are much more willing to try to speak with you in Chinese. A danger is that they'll assume full fluency and will leave you in the proverbial dust.) German has similar problems, but my personal experience has been that fewer Germans are so eager to practice English. That's more of a culture/sociological question though.
Let's couple this together. I have Americans trying to learn a foreign language spoken in a country they'll probably never live in and have a large portion of its population already proficient in or trying to get proficient in English. The motivation is diminished quite a bit.
Motivation also comes into play when practicing among peers. Highly motivated peers will practice with eachother and I've noticed that they are usually quite successful in learning the language. But more often than not, students will revert to the native language outside the classroom. It also has to do with numbers. For Americans, the number of people learning any particular foreign language is quite small (except for French, Spanish, and, to a lesser extent, German). In many other countries, English is mandated from grade school on. Kids get more exposure to it at a younger age, and there is a ready pool of motivated students to practice with.
It depends. Visual feedback, when done correctly can be fantastic. For example, one paper I read used the acoustic properties of speech to control a video game like racing game. I believe it was used to instruct hearing impaired children learn to pronounce sounds and words. I think they met with some modest to good success. What makes the work stand out is that it is an example of a computer simulation that is fun for the kids and attains its stated purpose using feedback that doesn't necessarily map intuitively to the acoustic signal.
In contrast, work I've seen cited (I really ought to track down the primary materials...) as examples of "poor" feedback have involved the use of the speech signal directly. I believe the spectrogram was used; students were given an examplar bit of native speech and told to try to speak so that their spectrogram matched the native spectrogram as closely as possible. What they found is that, initially, the students liked it quite a bit. But after a while, they became extremely frustrated because they couldn't get the two to match up. There were a couple of problems, one was caused by the fact that we all have uniquely shaped vocal tracts and this results in unique speech patterns. Although they're close enough for the brain to handle the differing patterns, in visual mode, they can be quite different. Another problem is that students would have a hard time knowing how to manipulate their voices to mimic the pattern in the spectrogram. You could expect, I suspect, to see similar results with students trying to mimic a waveform.
One caveat is that not all of this type of feedback generates poor results. I plan, for example, to explore experiments with tonal languages and you can normalize the F0 portion (the part most responsible for pitch) of the signal in certain ways that gender and speaker average F0 is removed making it easier, theoretically, for a student to match up the particular pattern with an exemplar.
My reasoning is that "statuatory rape" can mean a broad range of offenses. The girl could've been sexually mature 16+ but still a minor in the eyes of the law. Even having consensual sex at that point could have been considered statuatory rape. That could be the reason for the slap on the wrist.
I think I can speak at least somewhat authoritatively on this topic since it's at least part of my area of thesis research.
Bottom line: You are wrong when you assert that computers can be programmed to replace competent language instructors. But, the grandparent of this post is also wrong when they claim that they are not good for classroom instruction.
It takes some knowledge about what makes for effective foreign language learning. What it boils down to is interaction. The traditional school of thought used to be that foreign languages would be learned by studying the grammar of the language first, understanding the grammatical transformations that go on from L1 to L2. Then, drop in the appropriate vocabulary, and boom. You're bilingual! Problem is that this made people very good at translation but barely passable in communication. After this, another trend of thought was that students would learn the language with a shitload of input. Just keep hammering them with endless streams of data, and eventually the innate learning algorithms of the brain would kick in and bilingual ability would magically appear. Hence the number of hours one has to pull at language labs. Most students sleep at these labs. There are a zillion and one approaches that claim to be superior but are, more often than not, a theory for a dissertation. In alot of these cases, the "superiority" claim comes from the nature of the evaluation criteria. Like I said previously, those taugh tin the old school "learn the grammar then the vocab" school of thought were really good translators, but horrible at communication. Both of the methods above are illustrations of transmissive learning. The idea that students are just empty cannisters waiting to be filled with facts and figures and somehow, they will magically think and solve problems.
Fast forward to today. Educators have found that the most effective methods for learning are those that allow students to be actively involved in the problem domain. Allowed to explore and discover structure and make observations on their own with little guide posts to keep them on topic, students gain a more thorough understanding of the underlying principles.
The same is true for foreign language learning. Some of the best results come from students who are allowed and encouraged to vocally produce their own sentences (NOT simply read, write, or translate) in dialogues with other students or people fluent in the target language. Given feedback during the conversation, either implicitly or explicitly, students are allowed to explore and learn from mistakes while engaging in an activity that was, on the whole, more enjoyable than lecture or "drill-and-kill" exercises. This makes sense in light of research on language acquisition in infants which shows that social interaction is crucial for proper development of language skills. It is also anecdotally observed by all learners of a foreign language that one doesn't really learn the language to the point of communicative competency until one actually goes to a country and interacts with people in the language. (Where else will you learn that when you say "gan4", instead of "gan1" in Mandarin that it means "fuck" instead of "bottoms up?" Trust me, when I say "gan1" these days, my pitch is nice and level!)
This sort of activity isn't really encouraged in most foreign language learning classes. Especially at the high school level. In some universities it is, but for the most part it isn't. Most universities have the model of classroom time/lab time with tapes. One of the problems is student teacher ratio. When one is teaching 30 students, it's difficult to have proper dialogues with them... most resort to having students repeat phrases or reading scripted dialogue.
Another problem is that students might feel shy about speaking the language. No one likes to make mistakes, and among peers, this can be a particularly acute fear.
This is where computers can fit in. Dialogue systems (in the researc
Interesting suggestions. Some observations and questions.
Why should Lowe's be forced to employ him? What if he's a shitty worker? Do they now have to accept a poor worker for 9 years? Are you willing to pay enforce this? How should enforcement be done? Honor system, similar to parole, Rusty The Sheriff with a shoftgun standing by him? Many prisons already have "employment" opportunities inside. Prisoners are put to use instead of simply wallowing in the cell.
When you talk about high incarceration rates in the US, most people agree that the main culprit is the US' assinine drug laws. Please tell me how this relates to credit card theft?
On a somewhat related note, why is it that so few/.ers are getting their knickers in a twist over the blatant invasion of privacy and potential theft of billions these assholes tried to pull off? If this had been some ad-company surreptitiously grabbing personal information (not even CC information),/.ers would be going bananas.
"
The field of scientific research and related services is, of course, open to all," said Flint Lewis, ACS's secretary and general counsel, in a statement. "But when someone uses a trademark similar to ours, we have no choice but to take action--to protect the goodwill that we have built over the years and to prevent the likelihood of confusion in the marketplace."
No, it's not. Increasingly, high quality journals and research articles are kept hidden away from the general public by restrictive copyrights, exhorbinant fees, and other such crap. Unless you're a grad student or researcher at a company, it's very difficult to get your hands on articles printed in journals that require transfer of the copyright. The scientific knowledge is then closed off and the field is NOT open.
Well, honestly, that's the media's (applying a very broad brush here) fault. They're so quick to jump on a story because they want to be first (and thus, supposedly an authority figure) to get it out there. The problem is, they do this and the expense of accuracy or critical analysis. And this isn't just a problem in science stories.
Well, the difference is that is structured input. Their patent is for unstructure input... whatever that means. I assume they mean stuff like english sentences, speech, drawings, etc...
but those have structure... infact, the only way to get unstructure input would be to hook up a radioactive sample to the machine.../lamejoke
My PhD research centers around a system that provides pronunciation feedback in response to a task-oriented dialogue situation. Assuming that MS considers speech to be unstructured input, I can cite several instances of systems similar to what microsoft is describing. Some of them are a couple DECADES old.
"Improving your skills and aggressively pursuing a better position" may mean you have to move to another country in order to continue to work for your company. If you work for a small company that doesn't do any international business, then you might be fine... until it moves overseas.
Most large companies, on the other hand, have significant international presences and in order to advance you may have to be willing to move to a foreign country and work for a period of time.
yeah, basically bad ebuilds. At some point there was a majorish update to portage and I hadn't emerge sync world in a while. The paths had changes and whatever inheritance mechanims portage uses for its classes died. I also had a situation where I had to find a package for an older version of portage in order to fix some major complications with an upgrade.
I managed to resolve all those issues, but it took time.
I'm right there with you on the config files. why would I want to replace/etc/fstab with their default fstab? The mind boggles.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the difference lies in the intent. Unless you're the tinfoil hat wearing type, problems with voting machines could be seen as a most likely stemming from honest mistakes in code. As it's a generally accepted fact that it is nearly impossible to rid complex code of bugs, it seems unfair to hold companies responsible for flawed code.
This is also why I am generally against electronic voting. I'd much rather have pen-and-paper ballots. But in those cases, the bugs lie more in the stupidity of the voters than in the system.
Spammers, on the other hand, intend to flood you with unwanted emails.
You're referring to the TacticalLanguage project that Lewis Johnson heads up. He gave a talk and demonstrated the system at a conference in Italy the past July. The 3d engine is actually an Unreal modification. It's really quite impressive from a graphical point of view.
One of the issues my advisor and I noted was that the dialogues and interactions were scripted. Meaning that the allowable deviation from the exact flow of dialogue was restricted quite substantially. This also necessarily means that repeating a particular lesson offers little variation. I'm not knocking it though; compared to other systems, it blows them out of the water.
Unfortunately, I don't know this. I haven't seen any studies that have looked at this either. I'd be interested as well since my own research is focusing on the pronunciation aspect of foreign language learning.
Heh, thanks for the comments. Learning a foreign language is one of the hardest tasks one can take on. I can sympathize with your experience in Japanese. Chinese has a similar problem, although the memorization problem is a bit more acute.
:-)
As to what you said about current software, yeah. Alot of them suck. But some software/systems/algorithms that were once only available in the research world are slowly making themselves out into the real world. Although none of them hits on an "immersive" environment.
But that's why it's still a research questions.
Well, one problem is that people aren't talking. Teachers are afraid of being replaced and techies think that their technology can solve all the problems created by poor pedagogy. In a FL specific context, I would be inclined to keep the computers out of the classroom since the temptation would be to use them _during_ class. It would be much better to have them in a lab environment for time spent outside the class.
Most so-called educational software suck, be it for japanese, polish, chess or cooking. A computer is a fast calculator and to me it should only be used as a very fast electronic dictionnary.
So aircraft control software is an inappropriate use for computers?
Computers might simply be glorified adding machines, but to say that they have or should have only one use is pretty stupid.
Fundamentally, the human brain is nothing more than a highly parallelized computer with extensive probabalistic modeling capabilities and sensory inputs to an external reality.
Absolutely. The key is integrating computers in such a way that they enhance the teaching already taking place. Unfortunately, I think most schools just say, "Ooooh, computer... instant Harvard admits, here we come." with little thought to just how teachers can best make use of them. When I was a kid, a computer in the classroom meant 1 computer that was used as a distraction or as a reward for good behavior.
Oh definitely, there has to be balance. I didn't mean by my comment to say that one aspect of FL education should be emphasized over another (although this happens quite a bit due to time/budget constraints). It sounds like you run a really good class (speaking as someone who just reads about education and successful teaching techniques and does no teaching of his own), which is more than I can say for some of the foreign langauge courses I've taken or observed.
Some things to keep in mind.
One is that I was talking in generalities. Everyone has their own learning strategies that work best for them. For example, in general education, I find that I hate lecture unless the teacher provides some sort of insight into material that I can read myself. I find that I learn stuff best when I actually go about writing a program or actually applying the knowledge in doing something. In learning a foreign langauge (I've studied both German and Chinese. German unsuccessfully and Chinese with moderate success), I find that I most enjoy finding a native speaker with which I feel comfortable speaking and making mistakes. It's often hard to find that. Many native speakers will overlook mistakes or worse, laugh outright. Still, I find that this is what helps me the most, speaking with other people. Thus, I must admit that I probably have a bias towards teaching methods that focus on interaction with the material. You've had a different experience and perhaps you could shed some light on the structure of your English language classes?
Which brings me to another point, another reason people are successful at learning a foreign language is motivation. This has been studied to death in general education and foreign language education, but it bears repeating. If a student isn't motivated to learn the material, they probably won't. If they are, they will. English, for better or worse, is the language of international business, it is also the language for the country in which you apparently now operate on a full-time basis. I suspect that, for you, there was probably a very strong motivation for learning the language. Hence, your success.
Contrast this with someone who never plans to actually live in the foreign country or do any work in the foreign langauge they're learning. Their motivation is somewhat diminished. This is why you see many Americans not learning a foreign language successfully. Most Americans are of the mind they will never live or work outside the country, thus, the need to learn a foreign language is diminished and so is the motivation. And note, I'm an American, I'm in no way denigrating Americans. They're just factual observations.
Bearing this in mind, consider what happens when I travel to China, Taiwan, Germany, or Austria. In China and Taiwan, people see me (not incorrectly) as an opportunity to practice their English and they do so. It can be very difficult in those situations to speak Mandarin since it feels unnatural to have a conversation in two different langauges. (Note, a strategy to fix this is to get the first word in. Once a Chinese person sees that you're at least willing to try to speak the language, they are much more willing to try to speak with you in Chinese. A danger is that they'll assume full fluency and will leave you in the proverbial dust.) German has similar problems, but my personal experience has been that fewer Germans are so eager to practice English. That's more of a culture/sociological question though.
Let's couple this together. I have Americans trying to learn a foreign language spoken in a country they'll probably never live in and have a large portion of its population already proficient in or trying to get proficient in English. The motivation is diminished quite a bit.
Motivation also comes into play when practicing among peers. Highly motivated peers will practice with eachother and I've noticed that they are usually quite successful in learning the language. But more often than not, students will revert to the native language outside the classroom. It also has to do with numbers. For Americans, the number of people learning any particular foreign language is quite small (except for French, Spanish, and, to a lesser extent, German). In many other countries, English is mandated from grade school on. Kids get more exposure to it at a younger age, and there is a ready pool of motivated students to practice with.
This is a sort of similar phenomena that o
It depends. Visual feedback, when done correctly can be fantastic. For example, one paper I read used the acoustic properties of speech to control a video game like racing game. I believe it was used to instruct hearing impaired children learn to pronounce sounds and words. I think they met with some modest to good success. What makes the work stand out is that it is an example of a computer simulation that is fun for the kids and attains its stated purpose using feedback that doesn't necessarily map intuitively to the acoustic signal.
In contrast, work I've seen cited (I really ought to track down the primary materials...) as examples of "poor" feedback have involved the use of the speech signal directly. I believe the spectrogram was used; students were given an examplar bit of native speech and told to try to speak so that their spectrogram matched the native spectrogram as closely as possible. What they found is that, initially, the students liked it quite a bit. But after a while, they became extremely frustrated because they couldn't get the two to match up. There were a couple of problems, one was caused by the fact that we all have uniquely shaped vocal tracts and this results in unique speech patterns. Although they're close enough for the brain to handle the differing patterns, in visual mode, they can be quite different. Another problem is that students would have a hard time knowing how to manipulate their voices to mimic the pattern in the spectrogram. You could expect, I suspect, to see similar results with students trying to mimic a waveform.
One caveat is that not all of this type of feedback generates poor results. I plan, for example, to explore experiments with tonal languages and you can normalize the F0 portion (the part most responsible for pitch) of the signal in certain ways that gender and speaker average F0 is removed making it easier, theoretically, for a student to match up the particular pattern with an exemplar.
My reasoning is that "statuatory rape" can mean a broad range of offenses. The girl could've been sexually mature 16+ but still a minor in the eyes of the law. Even having consensual sex at that point could have been considered statuatory rape. That could be the reason for the slap on the wrist.
I would initially say "wow, that sucks. the system isn't perfect."
When then I noticed this comitting statutory rape.
What were the details of this incident?
I think I can speak at least somewhat authoritatively on this topic since it's at least part of my area of thesis research.
Bottom line: You are wrong when you assert that computers can be programmed to replace competent language instructors. But, the grandparent of this post is also wrong when they claim that they are not good for classroom instruction.
It takes some knowledge about what makes for effective foreign language learning. What it boils down to is interaction. The traditional school of thought used to be that foreign languages would be learned by studying the grammar of the language first, understanding the grammatical transformations that go on from L1 to L2. Then, drop in the appropriate vocabulary, and boom. You're bilingual! Problem is that this made people very good at translation but barely passable in communication. After this, another trend of thought was that students would learn the language with a shitload of input. Just keep hammering them with endless streams of data, and eventually the innate learning algorithms of the brain would kick in and bilingual ability would magically appear. Hence the number of hours one has to pull at language labs. Most students sleep at these labs. There are a zillion and one approaches that claim to be superior but are, more often than not, a theory for a dissertation. In alot of these cases, the "superiority" claim comes from the nature of the evaluation criteria. Like I said previously, those taugh tin the old school "learn the grammar then the vocab" school of thought were really good translators, but horrible at communication. Both of the methods above are illustrations of transmissive learning. The idea that students are just empty cannisters waiting to be filled with facts and figures and somehow, they will magically think and solve problems.
Fast forward to today. Educators have found that the most effective methods for learning are those that allow students to be actively involved in the problem domain. Allowed to explore and discover structure and make observations on their own with little guide posts to keep them on topic, students gain a more thorough understanding of the underlying principles.
The same is true for foreign language learning. Some of the best results come from students who are allowed and encouraged to vocally produce their own sentences (NOT simply read, write, or translate) in dialogues with other students or people fluent in the target language. Given feedback during the conversation, either implicitly or explicitly, students are allowed to explore and learn from mistakes while engaging in an activity that was, on the whole, more enjoyable than lecture or "drill-and-kill" exercises. This makes sense in light of research on language acquisition in infants which shows that social interaction is crucial for proper development of language skills. It is also anecdotally observed by all learners of a foreign language that one doesn't really learn the language to the point of communicative competency until one actually goes to a country and interacts with people in the language. (Where else will you learn that when you say "gan4", instead of "gan1" in Mandarin that it means "fuck" instead of "bottoms up?" Trust me, when I say "gan1" these days, my pitch is nice and level!)
This sort of activity isn't really encouraged in most foreign language learning classes. Especially at the high school level. In some universities it is, but for the most part it isn't. Most universities have the model of classroom time/lab time with tapes. One of the problems is student teacher ratio. When one is teaching 30 students, it's difficult to have proper dialogues with them... most resort to having students repeat phrases or reading scripted dialogue.
Another problem is that students might feel shy about speaking the language. No one likes to make mistakes, and among peers, this can be a particularly acute fear.
This is where computers can fit in. Dialogue systems (in the researc
Interesting suggestions. Some observations and questions.
Why should Lowe's be forced to employ him? What if he's a shitty worker? Do they now have to accept a poor worker for 9 years? Are you willing to pay enforce this? How should enforcement be done? Honor system, similar to parole, Rusty The Sheriff with a shoftgun standing by him? Many prisons already have "employment" opportunities inside. Prisoners are put to use instead of simply wallowing in the cell.
Well, you can't do nothing so what are your alternative proposals?
When you talk about high incarceration rates in the US, most people agree that the main culprit is the US' assinine drug laws. Please tell me how this relates to credit card theft?
/.ers are getting their knickers in a twist over the blatant invasion of privacy and potential theft of billions these assholes tried to pull off? If this had been some ad-company surreptitiously grabbing personal information (not even CC information), /.ers would be going bananas.
On a somewhat related note, why is it that so few
What he said. :-)
No, it's not. Increasingly, high quality journals and research articles are kept hidden away from the general public by restrictive copyrights, exhorbinant fees, and other such crap. Unless you're a grad student or researcher at a company, it's very difficult to get your hands on articles printed in journals that require transfer of the copyright. The scientific knowledge is then closed off and the field is NOT open.
Open to all? Not with this kind of system.
Because no one ever just makes shit up.
Well, honestly, that's the media's (applying a very broad brush here) fault. They're so quick to jump on a story because they want to be first (and thus, supposedly an authority figure) to get it out there. The problem is, they do this and the expense of accuracy or critical analysis. And this isn't just a problem in science stories.
No, they'll just segfault on math equations with a 0 in the denominator. ;-)
Well, the difference is that is structured input. Their patent is for unstructure input... whatever that means. I assume they mean stuff like english sentences, speech, drawings, etc...
/lamejoke
but those have structure... infact, the only way to get unstructure input would be to hook up a radioactive sample to the machine...
My PhD research centers around a system that provides pronunciation feedback in response to a task-oriented dialogue situation. Assuming that MS considers speech to be unstructured input, I can cite several instances of systems similar to what microsoft is describing. Some of them are a couple DECADES old.
Their patent is bullshit.
You're being a bit myopic.
"Improving your skills and aggressively pursuing a better position" may mean you have to move to another country in order to continue to work for your company. If you work for a small company that doesn't do any international business, then you might be fine... until it moves overseas.
Most large companies, on the other hand, have significant international presences and in order to advance you may have to be willing to move to a foreign country and work for a period of time.
yeah, basically bad ebuilds. At some point there was a majorish update to portage and I hadn't emerge sync world in a while. The paths had changes and whatever inheritance mechanims portage uses for its classes died. I also had a situation where I had to find a package for an older version of portage in order to fix some major complications with an upgrade.
/etc/fstab with their default fstab? The mind boggles.
I managed to resolve all those issues, but it took time.
I'm right there with you on the config files. why would I want to replace
Nope, no dependency hell except when it tells me that there are updates for my video card.
/feedtroll
Last time I let windows upgrade my drivers, my throat was sore from swearing.