I've got a better idea. Let's encode the text of these thousands of books to standard ASCII. Then we'll put the entire text of these thousands of books on a blank 39 cent DVD ROM. And distribute them to our friends or list them on P2P networks.
Then we will have thousands of web sites where people from all over the world can talk and read about the individual titles. Were certain characters jerks, megamanics, fools, cowards, heroes, or just ordinary people caught in difficult circumstances.
Maybe people will get out their camcorders and make 'home movies' based on chapters or incidents of the books. Imagine 21st century movies, P2P distributed zero-budget 'productions' that use different actors for different chapters or sections of a book.
The centralized movie business from Hollywood appears to have peaked and seems to be entering a period of accelerating decline. Insanely expensive and tepid remakes of mediocre television shows specifically focused on a young audience that has little to reference its quality.
The greatest threat facing Hollywood is not that people will endless consume its product without paying, it's that people will stop thinking of Hollywood as a source of entertainment product at all. This threat is increased by the fact that the change will be invisible to Hollywood until it has developed an unstopable momentum. Hollywood may find its product repelling people in a manner similar to identical poles of magnets pushing away from each other.
Hollywood is about to find itself in the same position as the big four American auto makers did in the 1980s. Someone comes out of 'nowhere' and takes a big chunk of their market share. And nothing they can do will convince people to go back to their product.
It doesn't matter what you think: It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what a million pissed-off voters think.
Any schmuck can get elected with this. It's a free pass to Congress. Campaigning against the nerds is a cheap and easy way to get elected, especially when the housing bubble starts to deflate and foreign governments start buying Eurobonds instead of US treasury bills.
All they have to do is stand up and start yapping about 'Welfare for the nerds' and 'millions of dollars of your money for comet smashing'. They don't have to talk about any real issues or piss anyone off like big corporate campaign contributors or psycho-moron bible thumpers.
Then science budgets will be slashed big time and the only place that legitimate scientific research will be done is under secret 'national security' budget covers.
Supporting insanity like comet-smashing guarantees more money going to military secret projects. More money to recruiting videos of yahoos riding tanks over Ali Babas.
Nobody knows what will happen when 820 pounds of metal slams into the comet with 5 kilotons of force,...
On the contrary, we know exactly what will happen. Absolutely nothing. A bunch of dust and rock will be silently blasted off the surface. A tiny amount will drift into space and most will fall back to the surface of the comet.
Oh, and a hundred million... yes, a cool fucking hundred million dollars of tax money will be pissed away on this madness. Tax dollars that could have been spent on health care, energy research, investment in jobs to replace the millions being sent offshore, or best yet,...millions of dollars not taken out of our paychecks in the first place.
Get a clue, Slashdotters! (and Slash-sons). Pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars on absolutely stupid and insane space projects like this is incredibly bad public-relations for any further necessary scientific research that will be needed in the future. These ridiculous space projects are poisoning the well that we all drink from. It's the kind of thing that people will remember twenty years from now when there isn't unlimited amounts of government money (backed now only by the willingness of foreign governments to finance ballooning US federal deficits) to piss away on these 'welfare for the nerds' boondoggles.
Wow, A program that simulates geographic views from any point on the globe by applying CGI to topographical data. Great for tourism, virtual and real.
Now, about all those people....
What about a program that simulates the experience of being around tens of millions of really poor people? Virtual Lagos, Virtual Nairobi, Virtual Mumbai, Virtual Shanghai, Virtual Sao Paulo, Virtual Mexico City, Virtual Djakarta.
Creating a program that simulates the earth as a beautiful place inhabitated by reasonable numbers of really nice people is a cultural conditioning exercise in proxy genocide. It prepares the mind for the deed just like the ultra-violent First-Person-Shooter video games and Hollywood movies prepare people to become mass murders.
"Wow, dude, blowing away a thousand people throwing rocks in front of the embassy with my too-cool XKE super machine gun was just like playing the most advanced game, man!. All the noise, all the screams, all the blood sprays, the bullet smell... like, totally awesome!
If those guys who are pretending to be a 'militia' patrolling the US-Mexican border are serious about cutting illegal immigration from the dirt-poor South, then they would be paying unemployed engineers and programmers to develop a robot that does berry and fruit picking. Stoop farm labor, which is mostly picking crops at the harvest, is (or is generally thought to be) the main employer of illegal immigrants from the lands south of the border.
NASA, of all people, claims to have developed a robot that can do fruit and berry picking. They claim that it's cheaper than sending than sending Mexicans into space, regardless of how little the wages are.
Personally, I've done stoop farm labor, picking shade tobacco, and it sucks. It's the true robot work.
But building a robot to do this is no simple matter. It's a serious programming challenge involving highly reliable vision processing, very intricate robotic arm positioning, and hygienic food handling in adverse conditions. And in order to be financially viable, these very sophisticated robots will have to be able to be manufactured cheaper than our neighbors can manufacture babies, and they have a 100,000,000 unit head start. We won't be able to just buy the robots either from the Japanese. By then, they won't be taking our near-worthless money and will demand payment in prime agricultural farmland. Where they will use their more advanced latest-model robots to grow their own food. Japan, you may recall, has 100,000,000 people living in a country the size of California where 80% of the land is too mountainous to use for farming or city space.
Now, having made myself seem to be a complete asshole from a politically-correct perspective, allow me to point out that the use of robots to replace unskilled labor is an issue that many (if not all) electronics and software engineers will be dealing with in the future. Farm laborers will hate us and will destroy the field robots at every opportunity. We will be accused of causing the childern of the unemployed workers to starve. And they will be right. The children of the unemployed farm workers will starve as a result of the farm robots. But, the robot designers point out, 'Why should an unemployed farm worker who must sneak into the US to work at sub-minimum wages have ten kids?' "We don't have ten kids. Hell, we can't even get the plain suburban white girls to go out with us. And we have real jobs!"
Ugly. A real mess. Unavoidable. Tragic. It's like saying that engineers are responsible for the continuation of African-American slavery from 1800 to 1865 because they invented the cotton gin. Without the cotton gin there wouldn't have been huge cotton plantations in the southern states of the USA requiring huge numbers of slaves. Had not the cotton gin been invented, the white southerners would have had an oversupply of slaves and would have shipped millions of them back to Africa.
Will we get the same blame a hundred years from now for causing millions of Mexicans to starve to death? Or will we be able to say that all those deaths were the result of a disfunctional culture obsessed with fucking themselves into massive over population just so that they would appear 'macho' by having absurd numbers of children?
50 years from now it's going to be pretty much like it is now with a few more conveniences, but we aren't going to see a wholesale change in the world as is frequently supposed by so-called futurists.
This is so true. I'm always amazed that Hollywood shows wildly advanced futures in only 50 to 100 years (Blade Runner is set in 2050?).
The world in 2070 is going to look pretty much the same as it does now. Same trees, same roads, same houses, same crappy suburban mini-malls, same crappy 7-11 Quick Rip Stores.
It is important to think now about what actually will be different in 2070. There will be far less casual driving of motor vehicles. There will be much less personal identity with countries and much more identity with individuals in distant parts of the world. Much more tribal identity that transcends national identity. All the specialized advanced programmers of certain chip in the world have more in common with each other than they do with their neighbors, even though they are of completely different cultures, religions, races, and nationalities.
There will be a major split between the people who believe in a religion and the secularists, regardless of the religion. The Believers will claim that the Secularists less than civilized humans because they have no religious beliefs and the Secularists will claim that the religious experience is simply a bio-chemical reaction in the brain that occurs in some people but not others, like the ability to curl the tongue.
There will be many more people around. The population will shift northward to deal with global warming.
Just what is it about the people who have jobs in marketing that leads them to believe the public is something that they own? They seem to think that the 'market' is a giant ocean into which they are completely free to dip their nets or a giant forest through which they can just chop down the trees.
The market, or the public spaces on the web, is more like a holy space or temple that they, as recognized sleazy sinners, should enter in fear and humility, desperate to seek forgiveness for their arrogance, greed, and repulsiveness.
The idea that marketters should somehow be upset that ordinary web users would use software to keep them out of their computers is absurd. It's like rats complaining about homeowners putting up traps and poison to keep them out of the kitchen.
Marketing software 'cookies' are like rat droppings. Finding them on your PC is a sign that you could have serious health problems in your system unless you start to take serious steps to get rid of the source of the problem.
And, marketers who believe that they own you and your computer, is the source of the problem.
Pirate: (Wink* Wink*) I'll buy you lunch if you show me how to hack it.
This is an example of why record companies should hate DRM. They have to pay the cost of its development. Then, when it's cracked or sold to organized crime in the dialog above, they lose the sales that are going to the pirates instead of music companies.
The consumers gain little because they are paying the pirates nearly the same amount of money that they used to pay to the record companies.
Record companies create their own piracy problems by persisting in the illusion that all music recordings should cost the same. They should institute an auction type of marketing structure for music sales so that people can chose what they would be willing to pay.
This doesn't work when the product is infinitely copyable and little cost. So the entertainment companies should get out of selling things that are infinitely reproducable at low cost and into some other profitable marketable entertainment product.
The record companies have put themselves into a difficult position with the absolutist stance on music copying. This stance is basically a physical metaphor imposed on a political position. In the 20th century, music sold in individual units of physical media with a specific amount of music available on each piece of media. This model of x minutes of music on 1 disk/tape selling for x dollars is a symetric and efficent business model that created a global music recording sales industry valued in tens of billions of dollars.
It does have one fatal flaw. It makes no differenciation between value of each individual title while every music consumer has a very specific pattern of choice in the music recordings. In the old model, you bought the number of selected individual recorded disks (each at the same price) that your budget allowed.
The technology of infinite non-degenerative copying at a next-to-nothing price (1000 songs on a 39-cent DVD recordable disk) is destroying the old model.
The industry has to decide if they are going to continue to use increasingly harsh legal resources to prop up the old business model. Or try new sales methods to find one that works well well with the new technology. Maintaining the old model is taking increasing amounts of company time and money, and the results (such as DRM and the DMCA) aren't functioning well.
Sony, as the one fully integrated entertainment company that owns the R&D, playback device manufacture and sales networks, and artistic talent to make the recordings, is in the best position to try new models. They have the least to lose. Music copying goes up; sales of audio playback devices goes up.
Music companies need to step back and examine what they are really trying to sell. It's not music disks specifically, but a sense of community and a social sharing among stangers. They're selling a bond of tribalism that unites atomized individual consumers into a shared social coherence. Once they master the means of marketing this quality, it won't matter whether the people share music. Music is just a tool to create the social bonding. People are paying to enter the tribe, not to listen to the music. If the record companies don't begin to understand this, all the DRM won't matter because people won't be interested in listening to their recordings, regardless of the price.
The worst thing that can happen to the music industry is not that people listen to their product for free, it's that people aren't interested in listening to their product at all.
Apple computers always seem to attract the kind of people who watch television specifically for the commercials.
The kind of people who believe that heaven is just one gigantic shopping mall.
The kind of people who would drive 10 miles at 3am to the all-night grocery because they drank the last can of Pepsi, even though their spouse has stockpiled four cases of Coca-Cola. They wouldn't dream on touching it. Must be Pepsi.
The kind of people never, never even consider using a different brand of shampoo...
In other words, Apple attracts a lot of neurotic upper-middle-class people who lived their entire lives believing that their mental disorders are 'cute'. Because their televisions have reflecting these eccentricities back at them with pretty actors since they were born, to keep them emmeshed in their consumtion cycle.
The kind of people who would actually think that it's 'just a simply wonderful idea' to trademark the word -numbers-. The kind of people whose greatest dream in life is to turn some common ordinary thing into a -=!!brand!!=-.
I read that in Singapore, the world capital for techo-fascist innovation, trucks would have flashing lights attached to poles on the side of the cab. When a sensor on the engine detected that the truck's speed ever went above 35MPH, the light would start blinking. Then the first police car to see it would issue them a speeding ticket.
If only half the things that I've heard about Singapore are remotely true, then this is one seriously weird place that reasonable people would be wise to avoid.
The biggest problem with moon exploration
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The biggest problem with moon exploration is convincing any reasonable and intelligent person on Earth that the entire project is not just a 'welfare for the rich' program for overspecialized engineers and defense contractors who run out of ideas for killing people who don't shop at the Baby Gap.
We have many major and serious problems on Earth now and are projected to have many more in the not-to-distant future. None of these problems are addressed by anybody's absurd space program.
I realize that this the least-receptive audience in the world for a rational discussion about the need of a Moon program, nevertheless you are all are really just going to have to used to the fact that there aren't that many people left who seriously share your vision of space exploration.
The Moon has been right above us for billions of years, and it will be there for billions of more years. It won't make any difference if we address more serious problems first and go back to the Moon in a hundred years or so from now. Nothing there is going to change.
This is not a troll; it's a serious challenge to the entire mind-set that there are valid reasons to spend billions of dollars on a Moon exploration program.
t wasn't defense spending in the U.S. that caused the fall of Communisim in the USSR, it was blue jeans and walkmans -- simple economics.
It might be argued that the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union was due to their internal history. All the millions of people sent to slave labor camps and the purposeful dislocation of entire ethnic groups. Plus the deliberate starvation that developed by the conversion of productive farms to collectives according to political theory. And the ruthless supression of any common sense dissent that disagreed with the current political theory. Plus the huge slaughter of World War II.
I suspect that the Soviet Union would have fallen even if they didn't have any external resistance from the West. The people themselves were simply worn out.
For the West to claim that their huge corrupt 'defense expenditures' (which primarily serves to give government funds to large corporations that are the largest campaign contributors) or clothing styles were responsible for ending the USSR is self-serving and absurd.
Sorry for disspelling your very original fantasies... but nothing of that kind seems to be happening here in Berlin
This may be cultural. Traditionally Germans do exactly what their superiors tell them to do.
My comments were about American poor urban centers, primarily black and latino. The African-Americans have been resisting the destruction of their culture and their enslavement for 400 years. The Latinos are isolated by language and citizenship issues. Their only television is the ultra-conservative Mexican-American cable TV networks like UniVision. The poor whites, the European-Americans, live on the outskirts of the cities and are sustained by cheap gasoline.
None of these groups can be expected to act like 'good Germans' when their television is shut down.
I suspect we may start to see illegal broadcasts in 2007 in poorer urban neighborhoods of the USA.
With all broadcast television on VHF/UHF scheduled to cease on New Years Day 2007, there are going to be a lot of pissed off people who don't have cable getting nothing but static on every channel.
This is assuming that UHF/VHF broadcasting actually does go off the air Jan 1, 2007. It doesn't seem likely at this time, but it is mandated by the TeleCom Act of 1996. And one never knows what the current administration is going to do.
Let's assume that it does happen. All the middle-class people won't notice it because they are paying monthly cable fees and cable TV will not be affected by the VHF/UHF shutdown. However, let's assume that in poor neighborhoods the convertor boxes don't work well, or are prohibitively expensive, or are too technically complex for the general population. Suddenly there's no television.
Well politics abhors a vacuum. We may find ourselves in a situation where people simply start pirate broadcasting on the unused television channels. This will probably cause problems with the new uses of the spectrum (private cell phone communications, I believe). The FCC will be really busy trying to track down pirate TV stations. Pirate TV stations are rare now because they can't compete with broadcast network quality, and there are outlets on local cable access for speciality and non-professional broadcasters.
But with the UHF/VHF channels gone off the air, people will start filling it up with DVD broadcasts. Maybe even porn broadcasts. Unregulated, and without commercials. All illegal.
These channels could become political if there is an economic downturn or a return of conscription into the permanent, endless war that the administration has promised the defense contractors and campaign contributors. Alternative broadcasts of police beatings at demonstrations made by tiny CamCorders alternating with current Hollywood movies downloaded from the DarkWeb could become common content on the new pirate channels.
I wonder if anyone is considering the possibility of this happening before they decide to shut down UHF/VHF broadcasting in 2007?
"I got forty-eight red, white, & blue shoestrings,
and a thousand telephones that don't ring.
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?"
And Louie the King said, "Let me think for a minute, son...
Yes, I believe that it be easily done. Just take everything down to Highway 61."
Imagine, two-fucking-million cue cats!
Who made these things? What were they thinking?
Why didn't they just make 10,000 and see how well they did in the market? Who is responsible for this? Someone should have to be a night-manager at Wendy's for the thirty years and then retired on $200 a month Social Security with a bad back and no health insurance for approving the manufacture of two-fucking-million cue cats!
Well, the floating gambler was very bored.
He was trying to create a next World War.
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor.
Saying, "I never engaged in this kind of thing before!"
"But, yes, I believe it be easily done.
Just put some bleachers out in the sun and have it out on Highway 61!"
These laws are nothing more than the THEFT of the public domain by extending the copyright period.
When you buy something on 'time', you make an agreed number of payments and then the item is yours, you own it. The seller does not have the legal right to decide to extend the number of payments that you have to make whenever you get close to completion.
The copyright period works in the same way. The people agree to let X corporation own the right to demand money for the viewing of an individual work of art or entertainment for a precise and limited amount of time agreed upon when the copyright was granted.
By bribing politicians to extend the copyright period without agreed upon compensation to the public, the corporations are stealing these works of art (or entertainment).
All demanded payments for viewing this title after the original copyright period has ended are improper and illegal extortions of revenue from the people wishing to view this work under their public domain rights.
The entertainment corporations can not claim that people downloading works in copyright are thieves when they are stealing the same works from the public domain for their own profits.
Jeez, I have a headache already just thinking about this. "...thousands of wirewrap connections..". To learn microprocessors, I wirewrapped demo prototype boards in mid 1980's and eventually made one for each of the major CPU chips available at the time (Z80, 6803, 6809, 8051). Each one had 40 wirewraps on the CPU, 28 on the EPROM, 28 on the RAM, 30+ on the I/O, 24+ on the UART, 16-20 on each of the ADC and DAC chips, on and on.
Then getting the thing to work! Using crash-and-burn EPROM erasing and testing. Before being able to afford a U-V EPROM eraser, I'd have a 10-20 chips sitting on the garage roof. Slowly losing their minds in the sunshine.
Things are SO much better now. Highly integrated Atmel AVRs and PICs that program over and over directly from the parallel port of the PC and don't have to be removed from the circuit. Simulators that work. JTAG structures that allow the functionality of in-circuit-emulators that are built right into every processor chip. SPICE.Microcontrollers like the AVR Tiny13 that have 10-bit ADC built in, operate at 20 MIPS, reprogram 10000 times, run on 1 milliamp, a cost less than a dollar.
I still wirewrap when there's no other way to get a prototype built and there needs to be TTL logic or bus-interfaced I/O or sensors on the board.
But I get halfway through the building of the prototype and this horrid feeling just creeps over me. It's like being in a solidifying muck of concrete that is getting harder by the minute and you can't pull yourself out. "Why am I doing this?".
So someone makes a web-server out of TTL chips and 'thousands of wirewrap connections'. Show it to someone like your boss and they'll say, "Cool, now make ten more". Then realize that by using modern tools, you can do the same thing in a FPGA that costs a few dollars. And make modifications that take a half-hour to write. And don't require connecting 50 logic-analyser little connectors, or studying miles of logic charts until you go mad, or trying to find the one broken wire in the six-deep layer of wires on the back of the wirewrapped board. Or finding that the one broken wire is the bottom wrap on a pin that has three other wraps on top of it...
It's called progress, gentlemen. Take advantage of it.
A digital piano consists of the sounds of a piano incorporated into a silicon chip. Either as a recording or sampled recording of the actual instrument, or the parameters needed to drive a synthesizer into producing a piano sound. Every year brings the chips closer in sound to the real instrument.
What makes the chip a 'passable substitue' for a piano is that a chip weighs at most a hundred grams while a piano weighs several hundred pounds.
And, a chip that reproduces the sound of a piano costs at most a few dollars to manufacture, while a real piano costs many hundreds of dollars to buy.
Only rich musicians with well-muscled roadies would claim that the-piano-on-a-chip is not a passable substitute to the real instrument. The technology for a real piano is fixed, but the chip synthesis technology gets better and more life-like every year.
I saw this movie on DVD about a year ago after reading references to it since the 1970's.
I noticed the same idea. All the long scenes of actor Michael Caine making coffee with a French press, grinding the beans, measuring the grounds, etc... I couldn't understand why these ordinary pedestrian things were taking so much time in a movie that had gotten so many positive reviews since its release.
Finally after a half-hour of this stuff, I gave up. One more movie that lost its cinematic impact over time. This happens to most movies and only a few become classics. And of the capital-C Classic films, few remain watchable even after only a few decades. Either the social conflicts that made them so intense on their release have ended, or the film techniques become too irritating to watch after years have passed and new film 'grammars' become common.
This has happened, in my opinion, to most of the European New Wave films of the late 1950s and 1960s that are so acclaimed. Upon checking out their DVDs from the library and viewing from contemporary perspectives, most are simply unwatchable now.
Why do I get the funny feeling that these people are much more interested in justifying putting people in prison for listening to music than they are with dealing with the fact that the five entertainment corporations have STOLEN the public domain in the USA by infinitely extending the copyright period.
When you buy something on 'time' you make an agreed number of payments and then the item is yours, you own it. The seller does not have the legal right to decide to extend the number of payments that you have to make whenever you get close to completion.
The copyright period works in the same way. We, the people, agree to let X corporation own the right to demand money for the viewing of an individual work of art or entertainment for a precise and limited amount of time agreed upon when the copyright was granted.
By bribing politicians to extend the copyright period without agreed upon compensation to We, the people, the corporations have stolen the work of art (or entertainment) and all demanded payments for viewing this title after the original copyright period has ended are improper and illegal extortions of revenue from the people wishing to view this work under their public domain rights.
By bribing the politicians to infinitely extend the copyright period, by extending it EVERY time that it is due to expire, the corporations are engaging in a repeated pattern of criminal behavior. Under the RICO act, the people can demand that the entities engaging in continous criminal behavior be deprived of their means, their assets, and the legal framework for their continued existence.
By copying music and movies and sharing these files, We, the people, are simply asserting our rights when faced with a corrupt and racketeering organization. Which in this case are entertainment companies who have stolen the public domain.
Don't let anyone ever tell you again that you are a 'pirate' or thief because you chose to share or download files of entertainment content. And don't take any nonsense from corporate-controlled non-government trade organizations either.
I use Windows 2000 and I have no plans to change, do any so-called update, or switch. I will use it until it stops working.
However at that point, I hope to change to Linux. There has to be a lot of people on Slashdot who have done this. Are there any suggestions of what to avoid? It has been my hope that Linux gets easier to install and operate ever few years.
I've installed Linux about five times in seven years. The first few times were absolute nightmares. The last time wasn't too bad. It's just that I already had Windows 2K working and it was free, and most important, I already knew how to use it.
I will never pay any money to Microsoft for any reason. It's just not an option for me. If they want me to give them money then they first need to give me a whole lot more money and then I'll consider giving some of it back. Technically then I would have given them money. But, they haven't contacted me yet.
One great advantage to Linux is the possibility of customizing it to your needs. I can't stand having Windows have the Exit Application button be right next to the Run-Ap-in-Background button. What fool came up with the idea of having them right next to each other in the upper right corner? And of course, it can never be changed in a hundred years.
Another serious disadvantage to Windows is when you have a huge well organized hard disk with lots of directories that have descriptive names. When you're working in one program and want to use the file in another program, you have to open the second program , click on file open and then go through the LONG process of finding the file in the directory tree. I want to have the File_open screen bring up a list of the last ten directory points where I have accessed a file, regardless of which program used to access the file. In Windows, impossible now, impossible forever.
In Linux, maybe. If not now then someday. It's these kind of things that cause people to switch.
Uebersetzoongsystems zee fullooeeng prudoocshun et zee fectury ruoote-a ooff zee A Mey 19 tu juoorneleests.
Looks like Dutch, which is somewhat close to English.
The problem with phonetic and dialect translations is that they rely on a non-standard way of expressing the phonetic sounds. A French speaker is going to have a different way of spelling out a Swedish accent than an English speaker.
Linguists have a precise set of symbols for describing the funny sounds that people make with their mouths. Unfortunately no one else knows this symbol set.
It might not be a bad idea to start using these standard symbols as a way to encode speech into text using computers. Maybe, just maybe, we can start a systematic and scientific way to approach machine translation speech-to-text-to-alternative language speech. The idea of using religious texts as the basis of multiple language translation gives me pause because (no offense, but let's be real here) most religious texts have been originally written by people with severe mental disorders whom we accept as messiahs and prophets simply because it is politically expedient and convenient for us to do so.
The more advanced the translations become, the greater the risk of incorporating the reminents of these mental disorders into our translation machines.
What will be done about idioms? Translating these word for word often makes no sense at all...
The often-quoted examples are: "Out of sight, out of mind" becomes "invisible idiot" and "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" comes out as "The meat is rotten, but the wine's great".
How many of the world's existing languages have enough text for this to even be feasible?
Ah yes, that's the tricky part. Translating for preservation near-extinct languages that are in spoken or recorded form only. A true programming challenge.
I find the Babel-Fish translator to be nearly useless and the Systran box at www.systransoft.com very helpful when selling things on eBay to people in non-English-speaking countries. When I get a question about an auction item that has little grammar cohesion and has a offshore domain, like "How many cost you Italia he transport?", I'll run my response through Systran's translator and add the original english afterwards. More often than not the sales and PayPal transactions are successful.
I believe that machine translation will be the 'killer application' for 64-bit home PCs. ..along with DRM busting..
There are five levels of machine translation:
1) word substitution. 2) phrase substitution. 3) cohesive paragraphs and idioms. 4) light literature, magazine articles, and business. 5) classical literature, law, and diplomacy.
Each level requires at least an order of magnitude more computing power than the previous one. Babel fish is on level two and systran is on three. Google is positioning themselves to be between levels four and five.
I wish them the best of luck. Without sarcasm or irony. This is important work.
"Give me a one sentence definition of 'irony'." "Yeah, it's where the Iranians come from."
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I've got a better idea. Let's encode the text of these thousands of books to standard ASCII. Then we'll put the entire text of these thousands of books on a blank 39 cent DVD ROM. And distribute them to our friends or list them on P2P networks.
Then we will have thousands of web sites where people from all over the world can talk and read about the individual titles. Were certain characters jerks, megamanics, fools, cowards, heroes, or just ordinary people caught in difficult circumstances.
Maybe people will get out their camcorders and make 'home movies' based on chapters or incidents of the books. Imagine 21st century movies, P2P distributed zero-budget 'productions' that use different actors for different chapters or sections of a book.
The centralized movie business from Hollywood appears to have peaked and seems to be entering a period of accelerating decline. Insanely expensive and tepid remakes of mediocre television shows specifically focused on a young audience that has little to reference its quality.
The greatest threat facing Hollywood is not that people will endless consume its product without paying, it's that people will stop thinking of Hollywood as a source of entertainment product at all. This threat is increased by the fact that the change will be invisible to Hollywood until it has developed an unstopable momentum. Hollywood may find its product repelling people in a manner similar to identical poles of magnets pushing away from each other.
Hollywood is about to find itself in the same position as the big four American auto makers did in the 1980s. Someone comes out of 'nowhere' and takes a big chunk of their market share. And nothing they can do will convince people to go back to their product.
You miss the point, Slashdaughter.
It doesn't matter what you think: It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what a million pissed-off voters think.
Any schmuck can get elected with this. It's a free pass to Congress. Campaigning against the nerds is a cheap and easy way to get elected, especially when the housing bubble starts to deflate and foreign governments start buying Eurobonds instead of US treasury bills.
All they have to do is stand up and start yapping about 'Welfare for the nerds' and 'millions of dollars of your money for comet smashing'. They don't have to talk about any real issues or piss anyone off like big corporate campaign contributors or psycho-moron bible thumpers.
Then science budgets will be slashed big time and the only place that legitimate scientific research will be done is under secret 'national security' budget covers.
Supporting insanity like comet-smashing guarantees more money going to military secret projects. More money to recruiting videos of yahoos riding tanks over Ali Babas.
Nobody knows what will happen when 820 pounds of metal slams into the comet with 5 kilotons of force,...
... yes, a cool fucking hundred million dollars of tax money will be pissed away on this madness. Tax dollars that could have been spent on health care, energy research, investment in jobs to replace the millions being sent offshore, or best yet, ...millions of dollars not taken out of our paychecks in the first place.
On the contrary, we know exactly what will happen. Absolutely nothing. A bunch of dust and rock will be silently blasted off the surface. A tiny amount will drift into space and most will fall back to the surface of the comet.
Oh, and a hundred million
Get a clue, Slashdotters! (and Slash-sons). Pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars on absolutely stupid and insane space projects like this is incredibly bad public-relations for any further necessary scientific research that will be needed in the future. These ridiculous space projects are poisoning the well that we all drink from. It's the kind of thing that people will remember twenty years from now when there isn't unlimited amounts of government money (backed now only by the willingness of foreign governments to finance ballooning US federal deficits) to piss away on these 'welfare for the nerds' boondoggles.
Wow, A program that simulates geographic views from any point on the globe by applying CGI to topographical data. Great for tourism, virtual and real.
Now, about all those people....
What about a program that simulates the experience of being around tens of millions of really poor people? Virtual Lagos, Virtual Nairobi, Virtual Mumbai, Virtual Shanghai, Virtual Sao Paulo, Virtual Mexico City, Virtual Djakarta.
Creating a program that simulates the earth as a beautiful place inhabitated by reasonable numbers of really nice people is a cultural conditioning exercise in proxy genocide. It prepares the mind for the deed just like the ultra-violent First-Person-Shooter video games and Hollywood movies prepare people to become mass murders.
"Wow, dude, blowing away a thousand people throwing rocks in front of the embassy with my too-cool XKE super machine gun was just like playing the most advanced game, man!. All the noise, all the screams, all the blood sprays, the bullet smell... like, totally awesome!
If those guys who are pretending to be a 'militia' patrolling the US-Mexican border are serious about cutting illegal immigration from the dirt-poor South, then they would be paying unemployed engineers and programmers to develop a robot that does berry and fruit picking. Stoop farm labor, which is mostly picking crops at the harvest, is (or is generally thought to be) the main employer of illegal immigrants from the lands south of the border.
NASA, of all people, claims to have developed a robot that can do fruit and berry picking. They claim that it's cheaper than sending than sending Mexicans into space, regardless of how little the wages are.
Personally, I've done stoop farm labor, picking shade tobacco, and it sucks. It's the true robot work.
But building a robot to do this is no simple matter. It's a serious programming challenge involving highly reliable vision processing, very intricate robotic arm positioning, and hygienic food handling in adverse conditions. And in order to be financially viable, these very sophisticated robots will have to be able to be manufactured cheaper than our neighbors can manufacture babies, and they have a 100,000,000 unit head start. We won't be able to just buy the robots either from the Japanese. By then, they won't be taking our near-worthless money and will demand payment in prime agricultural farmland. Where they will use their more advanced latest-model robots to grow their own food. Japan, you may recall, has 100,000,000 people living in a country the size of California where 80% of the land is too mountainous to use for farming or city space.
Now, having made myself seem to be a complete asshole from a politically-correct perspective, allow me to point out that the use of robots to replace unskilled labor is an issue that many (if not all) electronics and software engineers will be dealing with in the future. Farm laborers will hate us and will destroy the field robots at every opportunity. We will be accused of causing the childern of the unemployed workers to starve. And they will be right. The children of the unemployed farm workers will starve as a result of the farm robots. But, the robot designers point out, 'Why should an unemployed farm worker who must sneak into the US to work at sub-minimum wages have ten kids?' "We don't have ten kids. Hell, we can't even get the plain suburban white girls to go out with us. And we have real jobs!"
Ugly. A real mess. Unavoidable. Tragic. It's like saying that engineers are responsible for the continuation of African-American slavery from 1800 to 1865 because they invented the cotton gin. Without the cotton gin there wouldn't have been huge cotton plantations in the southern states of the USA requiring huge numbers of slaves. Had not the cotton gin been invented, the white southerners would have had an oversupply of slaves and would have shipped millions of them back to Africa.
Will we get the same blame a hundred years from now for causing millions of Mexicans to starve to death? Or will we be able to say that all those deaths were the result of a disfunctional culture obsessed with fucking themselves into massive over population just so that they would appear 'macho' by having absurd numbers of children?
Time will tell.
50 years from now it's going to be pretty much like it is now with a few more conveniences, but we aren't going to see a wholesale change in the world as is frequently supposed by so-called futurists.
This is so true. I'm always amazed that Hollywood shows wildly advanced futures in only 50 to 100 years (Blade Runner is set in 2050?).
The world in 2070 is going to look pretty much the same as it does now. Same trees, same roads, same houses, same crappy suburban mini-malls, same crappy 7-11 Quick Rip Stores.
It is important to think now about what actually will be different in 2070. There will be far less casual driving of motor vehicles. There will be much less personal identity with countries and much more identity with individuals in distant parts of the world. Much more tribal identity that transcends national identity. All the specialized advanced programmers of certain chip in the world have more in common with each other than they do with their neighbors, even though they are of completely different cultures, religions, races, and nationalities.
There will be a major split between the people who believe in a religion and the secularists, regardless of the religion. The Believers will claim that the Secularists less than civilized humans because they have no religious beliefs and the Secularists will claim that the religious experience is simply a bio-chemical reaction in the brain that occurs in some people but not others, like the ability to curl the tongue.
There will be many more people around. The population will shift northward to deal with global warming.
Just what is it about the people who have jobs in marketing that leads them to believe the public is something that they own? They seem to think that the 'market' is a giant ocean into which they are completely free to dip their nets or a giant forest through which they can just chop down the trees.
The market, or the public spaces on the web, is more like a holy space or temple that they, as recognized sleazy sinners, should enter in fear and humility, desperate to seek forgiveness for their arrogance, greed, and repulsiveness.
The idea that marketters should somehow be upset that ordinary web users would use software to keep them out of their computers is absurd. It's like rats complaining about homeowners putting up traps and poison to keep them out of the kitchen.
Marketing software 'cookies' are like rat droppings. Finding them on your PC is a sign that you could have serious health problems in your system unless you start to take serious steps to get rid of the source of the problem.
And, marketers who believe that they own you and your computer, is the source of the problem.
Scientist: We have a new CD protection scheme
Pirate: (Wink* Wink*) I'll buy you lunch if you show me how to hack it.
This is an example of why record companies should hate DRM. They have to pay the cost of its development. Then, when it's cracked or sold to organized crime in the dialog above, they lose the sales that are going to the pirates instead of music companies.
The consumers gain little because they are paying the pirates nearly the same amount of money that they used to pay to the record companies.
Record companies create their own piracy problems by persisting in the illusion that all music recordings should cost the same. They should institute an auction type of marketing structure for music sales so that people can chose what they would be willing to pay.
This doesn't work when the product is infinitely copyable and little cost. So the entertainment companies should get out of selling things that are infinitely reproducable at low cost and into some other profitable marketable entertainment product.
The record companies have put themselves into a difficult position with the absolutist stance on music copying. This stance is basically a physical metaphor imposed on a political position. In the 20th century, music sold in individual units of physical media with a specific amount of music available on each piece of media. This model of x minutes of music on 1 disk/tape selling for x dollars is a symetric and efficent business model that created a global music recording sales industry valued in tens of billions of dollars.
It does have one fatal flaw. It makes no differenciation between value of each individual title while every music consumer has a very specific pattern of choice in the music recordings. In the old model, you bought the number of selected individual recorded disks (each at the same price) that your budget allowed.
The technology of infinite non-degenerative copying at a next-to-nothing price (1000 songs on a 39-cent DVD recordable disk) is destroying the old model.
The industry has to decide if they are going to continue to use increasingly harsh legal resources to prop up the old business model. Or try new sales methods to find one that works well well with the new technology. Maintaining the old model is taking increasing amounts of company time and money, and the results (such as DRM and the DMCA) aren't functioning well.
Sony, as the one fully integrated entertainment company that owns the R&D, playback device manufacture and sales networks, and artistic talent to make the recordings, is in the best position to try new models. They have the least to lose. Music copying goes up; sales of audio playback devices goes up.
Music companies need to step back and examine what they are really trying to sell. It's not music disks specifically, but a sense of community and a social sharing among stangers. They're selling a bond of tribalism that unites atomized individual consumers into a shared social coherence. Once they master the means of marketing this quality, it won't matter whether the people share music. Music is just a tool to create the social bonding. People are paying to enter the tribe, not to listen to the music. If the record companies don't begin to understand this, all the DRM won't matter because people won't be interested in listening to their recordings, regardless of the price.
The worst thing that can happen to the music industry is not that people listen to their product for free, it's that people aren't interested in listening to their product at all.
Apple computers always seem to attract the kind of people who watch television specifically for the commercials.
The kind of people who believe that heaven is just one gigantic shopping mall.
The kind of people who would drive 10 miles at 3am to the all-night grocery because they drank the last can of Pepsi, even though their spouse has stockpiled four cases of Coca-Cola. They wouldn't dream on touching it. Must be Pepsi.
The kind of people never, never even consider using a different brand of shampoo...
In other words, Apple attracts a lot of neurotic upper-middle-class people who lived their entire lives believing that their mental disorders are 'cute'. Because their televisions have reflecting these eccentricities back at them with pretty actors since they were born, to keep them emmeshed in their consumtion cycle.
The kind of people who would actually think that it's 'just a simply wonderful idea' to trademark the word -numbers-. The kind of people whose greatest dream in life is to turn some common ordinary thing into a -=!!brand!!=-.
I read that in Singapore, the world capital for techo-fascist innovation, trucks would have flashing lights attached to poles on the side of the cab. When a sensor on the engine detected that the truck's speed ever went above 35MPH, the light would start blinking. Then the first police car to see it would issue them a speeding ticket.
If only half the things that I've heard about Singapore are remotely true, then this is one seriously weird place that reasonable people would be wise to avoid.
The biggest problem with moon exploration is convincing any reasonable and intelligent person on Earth that the entire project is not just a 'welfare for the rich' program for overspecialized engineers and defense contractors who run out of ideas for killing people who don't shop at the Baby Gap.
We have many major and serious problems on Earth now and are projected to have many more in the not-to-distant future. None of these problems are addressed by anybody's absurd space program.
I realize that this the least-receptive audience in the world for a rational discussion about the need of a Moon program, nevertheless you are all are really just going to have to used to the fact that there aren't that many people left who seriously share your vision of space exploration.
The Moon has been right above us for billions of years, and it will be there for billions of more years. It won't make any difference if we address more serious problems first and go back to the Moon in a hundred years or so from now. Nothing there is going to change.
This is not a troll; it's a serious challenge to the entire mind-set that there are valid reasons to spend billions of dollars on a Moon exploration program.
t wasn't defense spending in the U.S. that caused the fall of Communisim in the USSR, it was blue jeans and walkmans -- simple economics.
It might be argued that the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union was due to their internal history. All the millions of people sent to slave labor camps and the purposeful dislocation of entire ethnic groups. Plus the deliberate starvation that developed by the conversion of productive farms to collectives according to political theory. And the ruthless supression of any common sense dissent that disagreed with the current political theory. Plus the huge slaughter of World War II.
I suspect that the Soviet Union would have fallen even if they didn't have any external resistance from the West. The people themselves were simply worn out.
For the West to claim that their huge corrupt 'defense expenditures' (which primarily serves to give government funds to large corporations that are the largest campaign contributors) or clothing styles were responsible for ending the USSR is self-serving and absurd.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to make a response to my post. Your comments are well-written, well-thought-out, and perceptive.
Sorry for disspelling your very original fantasies... but nothing of that kind seems to be happening here in Berlin
This may be cultural. Traditionally Germans do exactly what their superiors tell them to do.
My comments were about American poor urban centers, primarily black and latino. The African-Americans have been resisting the destruction of their culture and their enslavement for 400 years. The Latinos are isolated by language and citizenship issues. Their only television is the ultra-conservative Mexican-American cable TV networks like UniVision. The poor whites, the European-Americans, live on the outskirts of the cities and are sustained by cheap gasoline.
None of these groups can be expected to act like 'good Germans' when their television is shut down.
I suspect we may start to see illegal broadcasts in 2007 in poorer urban neighborhoods of the USA.
With all broadcast television on VHF/UHF scheduled to cease on New Years Day 2007, there are going to be a lot of pissed off people who don't have cable getting nothing but static on every channel.
This is assuming that UHF/VHF broadcasting actually does go off the air Jan 1, 2007. It doesn't seem likely at this time, but it is mandated by the TeleCom Act of 1996. And one never knows what the current administration is going to do.
Let's assume that it does happen. All the middle-class people won't notice it because they are paying monthly cable fees and cable TV will not be affected by the VHF/UHF shutdown. However, let's assume that in poor neighborhoods the convertor boxes don't work well, or are prohibitively expensive, or are too technically complex for the general population. Suddenly there's no television.
Well politics abhors a vacuum. We may find ourselves in a situation where people simply start pirate broadcasting on the unused television channels. This will probably cause problems with the new uses of the spectrum (private cell phone communications, I believe). The FCC will be really busy trying to track down pirate TV stations. Pirate TV stations are rare now because they can't compete with broadcast network quality, and there are outlets on local cable access for speciality and non-professional broadcasters.
But with the UHF/VHF channels gone off the air, people will start filling it up with DVD broadcasts. Maybe even porn broadcasts. Unregulated, and without commercials. All illegal.
These channels could become political if there is an economic downturn or a return of conscription into the permanent, endless war that the administration has promised the defense contractors and campaign contributors. Alternative broadcasts of police beatings at demonstrations made by tiny CamCorders alternating with current Hollywood movies downloaded from the DarkWeb could become common content on the new pirate channels.
I wonder if anyone is considering the possibility of this happening before they decide to shut down UHF/VHF broadcasting in 2007?
Well, Mac the Finger said to Louie the King,
"I got forty-eight red, white, & blue shoestrings,
and a thousand telephones that don't ring.
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?"
And Louie the King said, "Let me think for a minute, son...
Yes, I believe that it be easily done. Just take everything down to Highway 61."
Imagine, two-fucking-million cue cats!
Who made these things? What were they thinking?
Why didn't they just make 10,000 and see how well they did in the market? Who is responsible for this? Someone should have to be a night-manager at Wendy's for the thirty years and then retired on $200 a month Social Security with a bad back and no health insurance for approving the manufacture of two-fucking-million cue cats!
Well, the floating gambler was very bored.
He was trying to create a next World War.
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor.
Saying, "I never engaged in this kind of thing before!"
"But, yes, I believe it be easily done.
Just put some bleachers out in the sun and have it out on Highway 61!"
Bob Dylan 1965
These laws are nothing more than the THEFT of the public domain by extending the copyright period.
When you buy something on 'time', you make an agreed number of payments and then the item is yours, you own it. The seller does not have the legal right to decide to extend the number of payments that you have to make whenever you get close to completion.
The copyright period works in the same way. The people agree to let X corporation own the right to demand money for the viewing of an individual work of art or entertainment for a precise and limited amount of time agreed upon when the copyright was granted.
By bribing politicians to extend the copyright period without agreed upon compensation to the public, the corporations are stealing these works of art (or entertainment).
All demanded payments for viewing this title after the original copyright period has ended are improper and illegal extortions of revenue from the people wishing to view this work under their public domain rights.
The entertainment corporations can not claim that people downloading works in copyright are thieves when they are stealing the same works from the public domain for their own profits.
Jeez, I have a headache already just thinking about this. "...thousands of wirewrap connections..". To learn microprocessors, I wirewrapped demo prototype boards in mid 1980's and eventually made one for each of the major CPU chips available at the time (Z80, 6803, 6809, 8051). Each one had 40 wirewraps on the CPU, 28 on the EPROM, 28 on the RAM, 30+ on the I/O, 24+ on the UART, 16-20 on each of the ADC and DAC chips, on and on.
Then getting the thing to work! Using crash-and-burn EPROM erasing and testing. Before being able to afford a U-V EPROM eraser, I'd have a 10-20 chips sitting on the garage roof. Slowly losing their minds in the sunshine.
Things are SO much better now. Highly integrated Atmel AVRs and PICs that program over and over directly from the parallel port of the PC and don't have to be removed from the circuit. Simulators that work. JTAG structures that allow the functionality of in-circuit-emulators that are built right into every processor chip. SPICE.Microcontrollers like the AVR Tiny13 that have 10-bit ADC built in, operate at 20 MIPS, reprogram 10000 times, run on 1 milliamp, a cost less than a dollar.
I still wirewrap when there's no other way to get a prototype built and there needs to be TTL logic or bus-interfaced I/O or sensors on the board.
But I get halfway through the building of the prototype and this horrid feeling just creeps over me. It's like being in a solidifying muck of concrete that is getting harder by the minute and you can't pull yourself out. "Why am I doing this?".
So someone makes a web-server out of TTL chips and 'thousands of wirewrap connections'. Show it to someone like your boss and they'll say, "Cool, now make ten more". Then realize that by using modern tools, you can do the same thing in a FPGA that costs a few dollars. And make modifications that take a half-hour to write. And don't require connecting 50 logic-analyser little connectors, or studying miles of logic charts until you go mad, or trying to find the one broken wire in the six-deep layer of wires on the back of the wirewrapped board. Or finding that the one broken wire is the bottom wrap on a pin that has three other wraps on top of it...
It's called progress, gentlemen. Take advantage of it.
A digital piano consists of the sounds of a piano incorporated into a silicon chip. Either as a recording or sampled recording of the actual instrument, or the parameters needed to drive a synthesizer into producing a piano sound. Every year brings the chips closer in sound to the real instrument.
What makes the chip a 'passable substitue' for a piano is that a chip weighs at most a hundred grams while a piano weighs several hundred pounds.
And, a chip that reproduces the sound of a piano costs at most a few dollars to manufacture, while a real piano costs many hundreds of dollars to buy.
Only rich musicians with well-muscled roadies would claim that the-piano-on-a-chip is not a passable substitute to the real instrument. The technology for a real piano is fixed, but the chip synthesis technology gets better and more life-like every year.
I saw this movie on DVD about a year ago after reading references to it since the 1970's.
I noticed the same idea. All the long scenes of actor Michael Caine making coffee with a French press, grinding the beans, measuring the grounds, etc... I couldn't understand why these ordinary pedestrian things were taking so much time in a movie that had gotten so many positive reviews since its release.
Finally after a half-hour of this stuff, I gave up. One more movie that lost its cinematic impact over time. This happens to most movies and only a few become classics. And of the capital-C Classic films, few remain watchable even after only a few decades. Either the social conflicts that made them so intense on their release have ended, or the film techniques become too irritating to watch after years have passed and new film 'grammars' become common.
This has happened, in my opinion, to most of the European New Wave films of the late 1950s and 1960s that are so acclaimed. Upon checking out their DVDs from the library and viewing from contemporary perspectives, most are simply unwatchable now.
Why do I get the funny feeling that these people are much more interested in justifying putting people in prison for listening to music than they are with dealing with the fact that the five entertainment corporations have STOLEN the public domain in the USA by infinitely extending the copyright period.
When you buy something on 'time' you make an agreed number of payments and then the item is yours, you own it. The seller does not have the legal right to decide to extend the number of payments that you have to make whenever you get close to completion.
The copyright period works in the same way. We, the people, agree to let X corporation own the right to demand money for the viewing of an individual work of art or entertainment for a precise and limited amount of time agreed upon when the copyright was granted.
By bribing politicians to extend the copyright period without agreed upon compensation to We, the people, the corporations have stolen the work of art (or entertainment) and all demanded payments for viewing this title after the original copyright period has ended are improper and illegal extortions of revenue from the people wishing to view this work under their public domain rights.
By bribing the politicians to infinitely extend the copyright period, by extending it EVERY time that it is due to expire, the corporations are engaging in a repeated pattern of criminal behavior. Under the RICO act, the people can demand that the entities engaging in continous criminal behavior be deprived of their means, their assets, and the legal framework for their continued existence.
By copying music and movies and sharing these files, We, the people, are simply asserting our rights when faced with a corrupt and racketeering organization. Which in this case are entertainment companies who have stolen the public domain.
Don't let anyone ever tell you again that you are a 'pirate' or thief because you chose to share or download files of entertainment content.
And don't take any nonsense from corporate-controlled non-government trade organizations either.
Thank you.
I use Windows 2000 and I have no plans to change, do any so-called update, or switch. I will use it until it stops working.
However at that point, I hope to change to Linux. There has to be a lot of people on Slashdot who have done this. Are there any suggestions of what to avoid? It has been my hope that Linux gets easier to install and operate ever few years.
I've installed Linux about five times in seven years. The first few times were absolute nightmares. The last time wasn't too bad. It's just that I already had Windows 2K working and it was free, and most important, I already knew how to use it.
I will never pay any money to Microsoft for any reason. It's just not an option for me. If they want me to give them money then they first need to give me a whole lot more money and then I'll consider giving some of it back. Technically then I would have given them money. But, they haven't contacted me yet.
One great advantage to Linux is the possibility of customizing it to your needs. I can't stand having Windows have the Exit Application button be right next to the Run-Ap-in-Background button. What fool came up with the idea of having them right next to each other in the upper right corner? And of course, it can never be changed in a hundred years.
Another serious disadvantage to Windows is when you have a huge well organized hard disk with lots of directories that have descriptive names. When you're working in one program and want to use the file in another program, you have to open the second program , click on file open and then go through the LONG process of finding the file in the directory tree. I want to have the File_open screen bring up a list of the last ten directory points where I have accessed a file, regardless of which program used to access the file. In Windows, impossible now, impossible forever.
In Linux, maybe. If not now then someday. It's these kind of things that cause people to switch.
Uebersetzoongsystems zee fullooeeng prudoocshun et zee fectury ruoote-a ooff zee A Mey 19 tu juoorneleests.
Looks like Dutch, which is somewhat close to English.
The problem with phonetic and dialect translations is that they rely on a non-standard way of expressing the phonetic sounds. A French speaker is going to have a different way of spelling out a Swedish accent than an English speaker.
Linguists have a precise set of symbols for describing the funny sounds that people make with their mouths. Unfortunately no one else knows this symbol set.
It might not be a bad idea to start using these standard symbols as a way to encode speech into text using computers. Maybe, just maybe, we can start a systematic and scientific way to approach machine translation speech-to-text-to-alternative language speech. The idea of using religious texts as the basis of multiple language translation gives me pause because (no offense, but let's be real here) most religious texts have been originally written by people with severe mental disorders whom we accept as messiahs and prophets simply because it is politically expedient and convenient for us to do so.
The more advanced the translations become, the greater the risk of incorporating the reminents of these mental disorders into our translation machines.
What will be done about idioms? Translating these word for word often makes no sense at all...
..along with DRM busting..
The often-quoted examples are: "Out of sight, out of mind" becomes "invisible idiot" and "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" comes out as "The meat is rotten, but the wine's great".
How many of the world's existing languages have enough text for this to even be feasible?
Ah yes, that's the tricky part. Translating for preservation near-extinct languages that are in spoken or recorded form only. A true programming challenge.
I find the Babel-Fish translator to be nearly useless and the Systran box at www.systransoft.com very helpful when selling things on eBay to people in non-English-speaking countries. When I get a question about an auction item that has little grammar cohesion and has a offshore domain, like
"How many cost you Italia he transport?", I'll run my response through Systran's translator and add the original english afterwards. More often than not the sales and PayPal transactions are successful.
I believe that machine translation will be the 'killer application' for 64-bit home PCs.
There are five levels of machine translation:
1) word substitution.
2) phrase substitution.
3) cohesive paragraphs and idioms.
4) light literature, magazine articles, and business.
5) classical literature, law, and diplomacy.
Each level requires at least an order of magnitude more computing power than the previous one. Babel fish is on level two and systran is on three. Google is positioning themselves to be between levels four and five.
I wish them the best of luck. Without sarcasm or irony. This is important work.
"Give me a one sentence definition of 'irony'."
"Yeah, it's where the Iranians come from."