V Entertainment claims the love detector has demonstrated 96 percent accuracy.
They probably tested it on Palestinians.
So much bullshit, so little sense. Lie and Love detector glasses?
Wonder how they did with ancient "I Lie" paradox. If I'm lying when I say 'I lie' I must be telling the truth, but if I'm being truthful, then I'm lying.
I often refer to prices in 'Minimum Wage Units', especially for comparing prices to the equivalent from twenty to fifty years ago.
For example, a popular top-40 song in 1965 would sell at a WalMart-type store for $0.75 in a 7 inch 45RPM vinyl single disk format (check Goodwill stores for examples of this audio format). The minimum wage at that time was about $1.60 an hour. With the minimum wage now at about $6.00US an hour, the price received by the RIAA companies has gone down.
The equivalent price for albums has stayed the same in minimum wage units (MWU) since the mid-1960s. The price of a stereo album in 1965 was $3.60 in a discount department WalMart-type store with the MimWage at $1.60 which is about 2.5 MWU. The current price of about $15 in WalMart for CDs is still about 2.5 MWU. This supports the RIAA claim that the price of recorded music hasn't changed in several generations. (It doesn't support the price level in the first place, or the systematic rip-off of the artists by the RIAA companies, the lawsuits against customers, ect...)
What has happened is that a huge consumer demand for recorded music built up over the years by the record companies keeping the prices artifically high for all product. When it became technically possible to acquire recorded music at prices that are an order-of-magnitude less than the RIAA level, this huge backed-up consumer demand created the MP3 phenomenon. Everyone wanted to finally hear the music that they've seen in record stores all these years but couldn't afford to buy.
Real consumer prices for recorded music haven't gone up, the expectation of the price that consumers are willing to pay for music has gone significantly down.
Your American recording industry association is the reason that Canadians pay an extra 29% for recordable media.
Do people in Canada make trips to the USA to buy those things that cost significantly less in the US? Is there hassles and confications at the border?
What about mail order? Do the companies that sell on www.pricewatch.com charge extra to shipments with Canadian addresses? Are shipments held at the border by Canadian Customs until the 29% surcharge plus customs duties are paid?
How about setting up a web site for people from the USA who are interested in visiting Canada. A person in the USA on the west coast would stop at a electronics department store like Fry's (just of f the highway I-5 south of Portland, Oregon) and buy a stack of 50 CD-Rs for $7 US (a common sale price). Then the traveler would meet the local Canadian at a coffeeshop or hostel and sell the stack for less than what the local BC price would be (which might be $10CDN + 29% + GST and provincial taxes, which adds up quickly).
These one-time microexchanges set up on the web could go a long way to nullifying the taxes and supplemental fees imposed.
But then again, lots of people actually do support all these fees, charges, taxes, ect...
I've been playing around with MIDI and super-cheap computers and PCs for about fifteen years.
I would have given up on MIDI about five years ago if not for the variety of inexpensive used synths and tone modules appearing on EBay.
MIDI is a serious pain to work with.
--The old MPU-401 interfaces don't work with newer Windows versions.
--The current-loop hardware configuration makes it hard to connect lots of inexpensive tone-modules together.
--The old editor programs for inexpensive tone-modules never work or are crippled shareware with untracable authors.
--The MIDI interface found on the joystick connector of most all modern PCs is all but useless because the low-level API programming needed to access it is so complex and underdocumented.
--Modern PCs are so fast that creating complex audio waveforms doesn't require seperate audio chips encased in stand-alone boxes with bizarre interfaces. But the market is so small that the makers of virtual DSP synthesizer programs need to charge large prices for their products, which limits the ablility to develop their market.
MIDI is currently at a dead-end. There may be a small resurgence as all the remaining MIDI synths and tone modules from the 1980's and 1990's start appearing at really low prices on EBay. Already Yamaha FB-01s are selling consistently for about $25 and Roland MT-32's for about $40.
Synths do have a great future. As to what form they will take eventually, I couldn't hazzard a guess at this point. But I know it won't be MIDI. MIDI's time has come and gone.
Hey friends, let's try to keep focused on the topic being discussed.
Trying to break through the obsession that Slashdotters have with their butt-holes is like trying to herd cats.
Since spamming is analogous to polluting a common resource for private gain, then I suggest that the penalities for spamming parallel those for polluting public lakes and rivers with hazardous materials for private gain.
there are about a dozen variants with very slight differences (encodings, cropping, someone added a few frames of "encoded by...")
Eventually (within about five years) the entire P2P/Kazaa community will specialize in custom variations of standard fixed titles of global media corporation product.
This is what will keep people coming to P2P after they get bored with traditional fixed passive media product like Hollywood films and classic-rock audio recordings.
P2P will eventually become the place where Hollywood tries out its new product. A place where it can get sarcastic and mean-spirited critisism of product-in-turnaround or under-development before committing several hundred million dollars to fixed final film, game, album or combination of all those that will be released in a frozen format worldwide.
Thank you for your reply to my somewhat sardonic off-the-cuff message about Canada.
My language abilities are not good enough to tell the difference between the various regional dialects of French. I've been told that Quebec speaks a different version of French but in my brief trips I have never been able to notice. I only understand about one word in ten that is spoken and can only hope that anyone who listens to me understands more than one word in ten.
I can't wait for the day of inexpensive speech- to-speech language translators, but they probably won't appear for another generation.
I have been able to notice that the audio translation of DVDs never matches the subtitle translation. They must be done seperately, by different teams. I'm amazed that the film studios don't forward the finished scripts to the translators: but it's just one thing about Hollywood that amazes me.
I do find it amusing that you assume that I would like adult-oriented videos. I guess just being on Slashdot gives me de-facto masculine gender. As for the spaghetti situation, might I suggest earplugs? When I did live as a human all too briefly in Florence about five hundred years ago, I sometimes encounted the situation you must be referring to. Ah well, Plus ca change, Plus ca meme...
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my somewhat sardonic message about Ottawa. It was informative.
Citizens of that somewhat overrated country girding the central latitudes of North America tend to underestimate the importance of Canada and the extent to its citizens preceive themselves as being quite different from the other North Americans.
With the coming of global warming and the change of the Gulf Stream in the next fifty years, large expanses of northern Canada will become productive farm land and metro area supports. The balance of power between Canada and its corrupt and ignorant neighbors will change for the benefit of the civilized world.
Grammer is becoming increasing important in large international web forums like Slashdot because Linux-based powerful language translators rely on accurate grammer more than individual words to make accurate translations.
Due to their recursion-based algorythmic structure, language translators take orders-of-magnitude more time to do simple translations when presented with unexpected or delibrate grammer errors.
Grammer trolling only seems nit-picking and irritating amoung people using a common first language. Because they intutitively know what the other person is meaning, faulting an unprecise grammer usage appears petty and mean-spirited. When using a powerful language translater to comprehend a message on its third language transform, precise grammer becomes much more important.
The point that I am trying to make is that when you have a multiGigaHertz CPU and a file system with hundreds of Gigabyte capacity, you should be able to just type (or speak) 'list contents of folder' or 'show me all the fucking files that I was working on last time' instead of:
$> ls som e we ird st*r ing ofcmds
or
dir and thirty clicks of stupid pop-up menus.
The fact that the current interface alternative is just as bad (but in a different way) no longer excuses a primative and backward interface.
We need to seriously address the issue that hardware technology advances double in price/performance every two years but software technology (such as interfaces and programming tools) advance very slowly. It is the fundamental cause of the boom and bust cycles of the electronics/computer/digital industry.
Command line control only works quickly after you have spent long hours studing and memorizing command line commands. Without having done this you are dead-in-the-water when faced with a command line.
You shouldn't have to click, click, click through long GUI structures. The OS should anticipate what you want to do based on what you have done before and by what others in the same situation have done before. Better, that is, more intuitive interfaces will reduce endless click-work.
If memorizing long and obscure symbol sequences made anyone part of a meritocracy, then Latin and Sanscrit professors would rule the world.
My primary point is that there is nothing deserving of merit or superior status in the computing community by mastering a command line interface. This is a 1970's era concept that is holding up the development of more powerful and more intutive interfaces.
It is more important to be able to conceive a new interface than to 'code it up'. That is why designers make more money than programmers.
Linux would be served best by having a place on the web were people could describe what they wanted the interface to do and how much they would be willing to pay to have someone develop it for them. That way all the newbies and Windows refugees could vent their frustrations and get focused results from the gurus. It would greatly increase the development of real alternative to the Microsoft monopoly.
I'm beginning to suspect that the use of legality to address what are essentially pricing issues will backfire on the global media corporations.
People will subconscously associate the use of all products from the global media corporations with being illegal as a result of the constant warnings from these corporations that viewing their products can in some circumstances be illegal. This will become even more true as media products shift from being watched in a public setting to the home setting, like what is happening now with DVDs replacing movie theatres.
When new forms of digital media begin to appear in the next ten years or so that are not primarily created and distributed by the global media corporations (and what these media forms will be I don't know but I do believe that they will happen), the global media companys will regret that they spent so much effort creating a public perception that viewing mass-marketed media products (movies, music, games, ect...) is somehow illegal because this perception will eventually start to shrink their market and revenue streams.
I realize that I'm not making a lot of sense. I must be well on the way of becoming a 'futurist'. If only there were any money in it!
Thanks for taking the time and trouble to write such a long and interesting message.
This is the main reason that we come to Slashdot and wade through all the stupidity and sarcasism. It is for the opportunity to get actual reports from professionals who have dealt with real-world situations and are willing to share their experiences and insights.
Just a little bit of background on primary human languages.
The popular language of carbon-based biped humanoid lifeforms that is known as English requires that all references to the first-person singular using the word 'I' be capitalized.
You may want to adjust your translation interface for this usage because ignoring it makes you look stupid to the human lifeforms that employ this method of symbol manipulation for their primary means of written communication.
Good luck with your continued interaction with this species!
I think it's accurate to say that most people on this planet, with the exception of Canadians, some Americans, and tourists to Canada, don't even know Ottawa exists.
Good point. But just out of curiousity, Why does Ottawa exist? It's way off in the middle of, well, somewhere.
Why isn't the capital of Canada in a city that is more accessable? Why isn't Toronto or Montreal the capital of Canada? Was Ottawa chosen because it's both on the border between the French and English-speaking nations of Canada -and- because it's far from the American border should they have decided to invade (a real consideration for the primary English North American colony two hundred years ago)?
Did the Canadian colonial government anticipate that most of the growth of Canada would be along the Montreal-Ottawa axis rather than along the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes?
In any event it's not too important. Few Americans are aware of Canada at all. Just the skiers and the marijuana community. Probably less than one in a hundred Americans are even aware that about one third of the Canadians don't speak English or would know what language they do speak. Ask them and they will say 'Eskimo' or 'Spanish'. Hell, I grew up in Massachusetts without being aware that there was a completely different world only two hundred miles away. I studied French in high school only because it was the only foreign language that could remotely be considered 'cool' and then found that I was the only only one in a caravan of drunken frat brothers that didn't freak out and run back home within a day of crossing the Vermont-Quebec border and finding themselves in an Alice-In-Wonderland situation that is Quebec for Americans that don't have any idea of how different things are once you start driving North from Boston and just keep going.
Anyway I like Quebec and Canada. I'm always preparing for my next trip there by listening to the French language audio with English subtitles (or vice-versa) with every new DVD that I get.
Each time that Slashdot has one of these forums on DRM I get dismayed at how few people write about the possible long-term consequences that DRM will take. By long term I mean twenty years at a minimum. Usually people just assume that in the long term there will be DRM on everything and every exposure to a piece of cultural entertainment will trigger a micropayment upon its view or interaction.
That is probably a fantasy wish of the entertainment-media conglomerate corporations.
I suspect that hard DRM (stuff that works like the media corporations want it to and can't be broken by users) would create a parallel 'pirate' media corporate group that would in the long term be absorbed into the other media corporations. This pirate group would provide media product at sharply reduced rates but delayed by months or years from the product's initial release by the primary media corporations. It would analogue the cheap neighborhood second-run movie theatres that played relatively new movies after they had been showing a few months in the larger first-run theatres. (This is how the movie business worked before the VCR boom in the late 1980's and the DVD boom currently happening).
This idea of people 'stealing' cultural product by not paying the media corporations fantasy prices for product would just go away, like the idea that African-American music was sinful (an idea that until the 1990's was often expressed in working class European-American churches).
An example of media corporations have fantasy prices is the notion that all recorded music product have the same price (such as $18 per CD) regardless of how long the product has been on the market or how saturated the market has become with this individual product. The idea that people are 'stealing' recorded music by the Beatles that is forty years old because they aren't paying $18 for a CD of ten songs is a perfect example. Especially when most of the 'thieves' of the Beatle's recordings have previously purchased the same recordings in 45RPM single vinyl format, 33RPM long-play album vinyl format, cassette format, 8-track format, premium Dolby re-release high-grade vinyl long-play album format, ect...
There are lots of other consequences of longterm DRM that you can think of that excape the rest of us here, please post your ideas.
You can be sure that when Linux actually overtakes Windows as the most popular desktop interface, the current Linux community will deride it as junk, not-Linux, 'Linux for Dummies', ect...
Part of the Linux/Unix fascination is a transformative mindset that confuses cryptic complexity with power and ease-of-use with restricted utility. It's part of the twisted mindset that exclaims without irony that using mispelled words like 'creat' for 'create' and 'ls' for 'list' and 'rm' for remove encourages flexiblility *it doesn't-it does just the opposite by forcing the memorization of a whole new set of words*. Anyone who in the twenty-first century who would say that typing something like:
>$ ls * rx -adlk- (*lf39(0309)) splatxy -3&**
makes programming more powerful just doesn't get the point of all the computer interface research that has been done since they were born.
This isn't a troll: it's a trueism. Linux/Unix must give up its 1970's mentality if it is ever going to be taken seriously by people who take computers seriously.
Thank you, (here I go again, another mod 0)
You left out the magic realism part of the story.
on
Paranoia
·
· Score: 1
Just exactly does a 'junior line manager' who agrees to be a spy in lieu of going to prison get hired into the top-secret research and development 'skunk works' section of the company's chief competitor?
Learning how to do this would actually be worth the price of the book.
Or is it just done with a glossed over plot device like Latin-American 'magic realism' or deus ex machina?
"If architects made buildings the way that programmers write software, then the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization"
The fact that you can crash a program completely by changing one bit of a million byte executable file never ceases to amaze me.
The fact that no one in the computer industry or university community will deal with this problem or even talk about it dismays me.
It just shows that the technological community is just not ready to be taken seriously and that all of their work is, in reality, just prototypes and toys.
The fact that no one into computer programming industry will guarantee in writing that their programs will actually work as advertised just proves the whole point.
If I were to get drafted into a war, I would be very greatful for my paintball experience because it has taught me just how easy it is to get hit.
The whole idea of paintball is convey the notion that if you get drafted for a war, then the only intelligent thing to do is get yourself to another country or place quickly where they aren't having a war. In the modern world the people who win wars are the people who don't fight them.
We, the USA, and the rest of the world spend far too much money on military affairs. Every year it just gets worse.
The purpose of the military is to protect the local country from invasion from other countries and their armies.
The Americans have 20000 nuclear bombs, no one is going to invade them, no one is even going to get close to invading and occupying them.
They don't need a military any more!! Yet they spend tons of their money on this unnecessary endeavor. It is really warping their minds and is making both their neighbors and the rest of the civilized world uncomfortable.
There is some twisted little defect in the American culture that makes their young people actually want to go into dangerous combat situations on the other side of the world and expose themselves to discomfort, death, and dismemberment against people that they have never even heard of. No one else seriously wants to do this.
But since they have so much powerful weaponry, no one wants to just take them aside for a little chat and suggest that they should just 'chill' because they don't have any real enemies that are dangerous enough for them to require this kind of behavior.
Creating an artifical environment where the young Americans can get their 'gook-killing' urges satisified is really money well spent, as long as the simulation is so good that they want to spend more time in it than in the real world.
Because, frankly, in this increasingly networked world of global corporations, having lots of young trigger-happy running amok with no idea of what they're doing, or who they're doing it to, or why they're doing it... is simply bad for business.
I find it strange that someone considers putting Claudia Schiffer on his desktop proper workplace behavior. Maybe it is if you work at a garage, but it's not going to be accepable at any Fortune 500 company.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I posted the photo on a PC that was in a room that was locked to all people except for me and my boss. It was not an accessable workplace. My boss, who was 15 years younger than me, had me tossed out of the company without review or comment.
It was only a picture of a beautiful young woman in an evening gown head and shoulders. Not a playboy foldout or cheezecake garage bikini shot.
This is what makes H-P weird. Again it was 1994 near the height of politically -correct hysteria, but these policies never change once instituted in any Fortune 500 company.
There was no possiblity of a lawsuit from anyone.
I believe that the ability to put a wallpaper on the PC screen that I am using daily is none of the concern of the employer. Lately I put images of Renaissance Madonnas as wallpaper, Botticelli and Rapheal. I would like to see a 500 year old painting of the Virgin Mary be declared as 'sexual harassment'. Then I would sue and have the art world, the Playboy foundation, the Church, and the anti-PC community on my side with a few women-studies professors and clueless Human Resources people on the other side.
...the technology experts, the computer industry, the peer-to-peer industry, the software industry, the entertainment industry, the privacy experts and the business experts to come together and discuss positive and meaningful solutions to this challenge...
Uhh, senator, aren't you forgetting someone here? Mainly the tens of millions of people who actually are downloading and consuming the music? All of the parties that you have listed are those that stand to gain from instituting a stiff DRM regime on what is de-facto public property, i.e. the cultural product of the last eighty years.
The media industry should realize that DRM, like any powerful weapon, can be used against their interests almost as easily as for their interests. The industry needs to remember that their product doesn't just appear out of thin air, it is rather the collective effort of millions of people absorbing cultural trends through mass media over long periods of time. Using DRM to choke off access to this media stream to the general public will within about ten years seriously reduce the number of people coming to them with new product for them to sell.
Record companies don't generate music; people bring them music mostly already finished for their marketing. Most of this music that is offered to them is a subtle variation of the product that has already been circulating for years. Musical trends are sequence of small steps in the basic format of the product.
Wrapping everything in DRM will interrupt this delicate ecology. Cut off from the global trends in music, musicians will start either creating new musical styles or cut-and-paste previously released product with new forms of samplers. But this new product won't be cycled towards the music corporations because they will have taken themselves out of the cultural feedback loop.
Like the old fairy tale, DRM is 'killing the goose that laid golden eggs, to get all the gold at once.' Only to end up with nothing but goose guts and no more golden eggs.
In 1994 I got a temp job (temp in the sense that they weren't hiring on less than the PhD level to avoid paying benefits, but permanent full-time in every other respect) at HP-Vancouver Washington.
My job was to disassemble brand-new packaged printers for rebuilding as prototypes for new models and loading the base unit CPU boards with Unix code for their prototype firmware.
I worked in a locked warehouse room with an outdoor loading ramp and about a million dollars worth of packaged printers stacked to the ceiling. (They'd given me a marijuana unine test so they knew that they could trust me, but of course, no benefits not even morning coffee). My boss and my self were the only people who had keys to this locked storage workroom.
I put a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown on my PC desktop as wallpaper to keep from going insane in this sealed environment.
After about three weeks, I was fired for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment' for this picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown.
I can't recommend anyone seriously considering working at Hewlett-Packard. Sooner or later their bizarre culture is going to wipe you out regardless of how well you work or try to avoid their weird company politics.
I'm sure that Carly's only made a bad situation worse.
Slashdot Mirror
V Entertainment claims the love detector has demonstrated 96 percent accuracy.
They probably tested it on Palestinians.
So much bullshit, so little sense. Lie and Love detector glasses?
Wonder how they did with ancient "I Lie" paradox. If I'm lying when I say 'I lie' I must be telling the truth, but if I'm being truthful, then I'm lying.
I often refer to prices in 'Minimum Wage Units', especially for comparing prices to the equivalent from twenty to fifty years ago.
For example, a popular top-40 song in 1965 would sell at a WalMart-type store for $0.75 in a 7 inch 45RPM vinyl single disk format (check Goodwill stores for examples of this audio format). The minimum wage at that time was about $1.60 an hour. With the minimum wage now at about $6.00US an hour, the price received by the RIAA companies has gone down.
The equivalent price for albums has stayed the same in minimum wage units (MWU) since the mid-1960s. The price of a stereo album in 1965 was $3.60 in a discount department WalMart-type store with the MimWage at $1.60 which is about 2.5 MWU. The current price of about $15 in WalMart for CDs is still about 2.5 MWU. This supports the RIAA claim that the price of recorded music hasn't changed in several generations. (It doesn't support the price level in the first place, or the systematic rip-off of the artists by the RIAA companies, the lawsuits against customers, ect...)
What has happened is that a huge consumer demand for recorded music built up over the years by the record companies keeping the prices artifically high for all product. When it became technically possible to acquire recorded music at prices that are an order-of-magnitude less than the RIAA level, this huge backed-up consumer demand created the MP3 phenomenon. Everyone wanted to finally hear the music that they've seen in record stores all these years but couldn't afford to buy.
Real consumer prices for recorded music haven't gone up, the expectation of the price that consumers are willing to pay for music has gone significantly down.
Your American recording industry association is the reason that Canadians pay an extra 29% for recordable media.
Do people in Canada make trips to the USA to buy those things that cost significantly less in the US? Is there hassles and confications at the border?
What about mail order? Do the companies that sell on www.pricewatch.com charge extra to shipments with Canadian addresses? Are shipments held at the border by Canadian Customs until the 29% surcharge plus customs duties are paid?
How about setting up a web site for people from the USA who are interested in visiting Canada. A person in the USA on the west coast would stop at a electronics department store like Fry's (just of f the highway I-5 south of Portland, Oregon) and buy a stack of 50 CD-Rs for $7 US (a common sale price). Then the traveler would meet the local Canadian at a coffeeshop or hostel and sell the stack for less than what the local BC price would be (which might be $10CDN + 29% + GST and provincial taxes, which adds up quickly).
These one-time microexchanges set up on the web could go a long way to nullifying the taxes and supplemental fees imposed.
But then again, lots of people actually do support all these fees, charges, taxes, ect...
I've been playing around with MIDI and super-cheap computers and PCs for about fifteen years.
I would have given up on MIDI about five years ago if not for the variety of inexpensive used synths and tone modules appearing on EBay.
MIDI is a serious pain to work with.
--The old MPU-401 interfaces don't work with newer Windows versions.
--The current-loop hardware configuration makes it hard to connect lots of inexpensive tone-modules together.
--The old editor programs for inexpensive tone-modules never work or are crippled shareware with untracable authors.
--The MIDI interface found on the joystick connector of most all modern PCs is all but useless because the low-level API programming needed to access it is so complex and underdocumented.
--Modern PCs are so fast that creating complex audio waveforms doesn't require seperate audio chips encased in stand-alone boxes with bizarre interfaces. But the market is so small that the makers of virtual DSP synthesizer programs need to charge large prices for their products, which limits the ablility to develop their market.
MIDI is currently at a dead-end. There may be a small resurgence as all the remaining MIDI synths and tone modules from the 1980's and 1990's start appearing at really low prices on EBay. Already Yamaha FB-01s are selling consistently for about $25 and Roland MT-32's for about $40.
Synths do have a great future. As to what form they will take eventually, I couldn't hazzard a guess at this point. But I know it won't be MIDI. MIDI's time has come and gone.
Hey friends, let's try to keep focused on the topic being discussed.
Trying to break through the obsession that Slashdotters have with their butt-holes is like trying to herd cats.
Since spamming is analogous to polluting a common resource for private gain, then I suggest that the penalities for spamming parallel those for polluting public lakes and rivers with hazardous materials for private gain.
there are about a dozen variants with very slight differences (encodings, cropping, someone added a few frames of "encoded by...")
Eventually (within about five years) the entire P2P/Kazaa community will specialize in custom variations of standard fixed titles of global media corporation product.
This is what will keep people coming to P2P after they get bored with traditional fixed passive media product like Hollywood films and classic-rock audio recordings.
P2P will eventually become the place where Hollywood tries out its new product. A place where it can get sarcastic and mean-spirited critisism of product-in-turnaround or under-development before committing several hundred million dollars to fixed final film, game, album or combination of all those that will be released in a frozen format worldwide.
That's the hole point of MD[45]
So what's the hole point about porn?
Thank you for your reply to my somewhat sardonic off-the-cuff message about Canada.
My language abilities are not good enough to tell the difference between the various regional dialects of French. I've been told that Quebec speaks a different version of French but in my brief trips I have never been able to notice. I only understand about one word in ten that is spoken and can only hope that anyone who listens to me understands more than one word in ten.
I can't wait for the day of inexpensive speech- to-speech language translators, but they probably won't appear for another generation.
I have been able to notice that the audio translation of DVDs never matches the subtitle translation. They must be done seperately, by different teams. I'm amazed that the film studios don't forward the finished scripts to the translators: but it's just one thing about Hollywood that amazes me.
I do find it amusing that you assume that I would like adult-oriented videos. I guess just being on Slashdot gives me de-facto masculine gender. As for the spaghetti situation, might I suggest earplugs? When I did live as a human all too briefly in Florence about five hundred years ago, I sometimes encounted the situation you must be referring to. Ah well, Plus ca change, Plus ca meme...
Thank you,
Simonetta
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my somewhat sardonic message about Ottawa. It was informative.
Citizens of that somewhat overrated country girding the central latitudes of North America tend to underestimate the importance of Canada and the extent to its citizens preceive themselves as being quite different from the other North Americans.
With the coming of global warming and the change of the Gulf Stream in the next fifty years, large expanses of northern Canada will become productive farm land and metro area supports. The balance of power between Canada and its corrupt and ignorant neighbors will change for the benefit of the civilized world.
Grammer is becoming increasing important in large international web forums like Slashdot because Linux-based powerful language translators rely on accurate grammer more than individual words to make accurate translations.
Due to their recursion-based algorythmic structure, language translators take orders-of-magnitude more time to do simple translations when presented with unexpected or delibrate grammer errors.
Grammer trolling only seems nit-picking and irritating amoung people using a common first language. Because they intutitively know what the other person is meaning, faulting an unprecise grammer usage appears petty and mean-spirited.
When using a powerful language translater to comprehend a message on its third language transform, precise grammer becomes much more important.
Welcome to the 21th century,
Thank you,
The point that I am trying to make is that when you have a multiGigaHertz CPU and a file system with hundreds of Gigabyte capacity, you should be able to just type (or speak) 'list contents of folder' or 'show me all the fucking files that I was working on last time' instead of:
$> ls som e we ird st*r ing ofcmds
or
dir and thirty clicks of stupid pop-up menus.
The fact that the current interface alternative is just as bad (but in a different way) no longer excuses a primative and backward interface.
We need to seriously address the issue that hardware technology advances double in price/performance every two years but software technology (such as interfaces and programming tools) advance very slowly. It is the fundamental cause of the boom and bust cycles of the electronics/computer/digital industry.
Command line control only works quickly after you have spent long hours studing and memorizing command line commands. Without having done this you are dead-in-the-water when faced with a command line.
You shouldn't have to click, click, click through long GUI structures. The OS should anticipate what you want to do based on what you have done before and by what others in the same situation have done before. Better, that is, more intuitive interfaces will reduce endless click-work.
If memorizing long and obscure symbol sequences made anyone part of a meritocracy, then Latin and Sanscrit professors would rule the world.
My primary point is that there is nothing deserving of merit or superior status in the computing community by mastering a command line interface. This is a 1970's era concept that is holding up the development of more powerful and more intutive interfaces.
It is more important to be able to conceive a new interface than to 'code it up'. That is why designers make more money than programmers.
Linux would be served best by having a place on the web were people could describe what they wanted the interface to do and how much they would be willing to pay to have someone develop it for them. That way all the newbies and Windows refugees could vent their frustrations and get focused results from the gurus. It would greatly increase the development of real alternative to the Microsoft monopoly.
I'm beginning to suspect that the use of legality to address what are essentially pricing issues will backfire on the global media corporations.
People will subconscously associate the use of all products from the global media corporations with being illegal as a result of the constant warnings from these corporations that viewing their products can in some circumstances be illegal. This will become even more true as media products shift from being watched in a public setting to the home setting, like what is happening now with DVDs replacing movie theatres.
When new forms of digital media begin to appear in the next ten years or so that are not primarily created and distributed by the global media corporations (and what these media forms will be I don't know but I do believe that they will happen), the global media companys will regret that they spent so much effort creating a public perception that viewing mass-marketed media products (movies, music, games, ect...) is somehow illegal because this perception will eventually start to shrink their market and revenue streams.
I realize that I'm not making a lot of sense. I must be well on the way of becoming a 'futurist'. If only there were any money in it!
Thanks for taking the time and trouble to write such a long and interesting message.
This is the main reason that we come to Slashdot and wade through all the stupidity and sarcasism. It is for the opportunity to get actual reports from professionals who have dealt with real-world situations and are willing to share their experiences and insights.
when it does i can..
Then i can file...
Just a little bit of background on primary human languages.
The popular language of carbon-based biped humanoid lifeforms that is known as English requires that all references to the first-person singular using the word 'I' be capitalized.
You may want to adjust your translation interface for this usage because ignoring it makes you look stupid to the human lifeforms that employ this method of symbol manipulation for their primary means of written communication.
Good luck with your continued interaction with this species!
I think it's accurate to say that most people on this planet, with the exception of Canadians, some Americans, and tourists to Canada, don't even know Ottawa exists.
Good point. But just out of curiousity, Why does Ottawa exist? It's way off in the middle of, well, somewhere.
Why isn't the capital of Canada in a city that is more accessable? Why isn't Toronto or Montreal the capital of Canada? Was Ottawa chosen because it's both on the border between the French and English-speaking nations of Canada -and- because it's far from the American border should they have decided to invade (a real consideration for the primary English North American colony two hundred years ago)?
Did the Canadian colonial government anticipate that most of the growth of Canada would be along the Montreal-Ottawa axis rather than along the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes?
In any event it's not too important. Few Americans are aware of Canada at all. Just the skiers and the marijuana community. Probably less than one in a hundred Americans are even aware that about one third of the Canadians don't speak English or would know what language they do speak. Ask them and they will say 'Eskimo' or 'Spanish'. Hell, I grew up in Massachusetts without being aware that there was a completely different world only two hundred miles away. I studied French in high school only because it was the only foreign language that could remotely be considered 'cool' and then found that I was the only only one in a caravan of drunken frat brothers that didn't freak out and run back home within a day of crossing the Vermont-Quebec border and finding themselves in an Alice-In-Wonderland situation that is Quebec for Americans that don't have any idea of how different things are once you start driving North from Boston and just keep going.
Anyway I like Quebec and Canada. I'm always preparing for my next trip there by listening to the French language audio with English subtitles (or vice-versa) with every new DVD that I get.
Thank you for reading my rambles,
Each time that Slashdot has one of these forums on DRM I get dismayed at how few people write about the possible long-term consequences that DRM will take. By long term I mean twenty years at a minimum. Usually people just assume that in the long term there will be DRM on everything and every exposure to a piece of cultural entertainment will trigger a micropayment upon its view or interaction.
That is probably a fantasy wish of the entertainment-media conglomerate corporations.
I suspect that hard DRM (stuff that works like the media corporations want it to and can't be broken by users) would create a parallel 'pirate' media corporate group that would in the long term be absorbed into the other media corporations. This pirate group would provide media product at sharply reduced rates but delayed by months or years from the product's initial release by the primary media corporations. It would analogue the cheap neighborhood second-run movie theatres that played relatively new movies after they had been showing a few months in the larger first-run theatres. (This is how the movie business worked before the VCR boom in the late 1980's and the DVD boom currently happening).
This idea of people 'stealing' cultural product by not paying the media corporations fantasy prices for product would just go away, like the idea that African-American music was sinful (an idea that until the 1990's was often expressed in working class European-American churches).
An example of media corporations have fantasy prices is the notion that all recorded music product have the same price (such as $18 per CD) regardless of how long the product has been on the market or how saturated the market has become with this individual product. The idea that people are 'stealing' recorded music by the Beatles that is forty years old because they aren't paying $18 for a CD of ten songs is a perfect example. Especially when most of the 'thieves' of the Beatle's recordings have previously purchased the same recordings in 45RPM single vinyl format, 33RPM long-play album vinyl format, cassette format, 8-track format, premium Dolby re-release high-grade vinyl long-play album format, ect...
There are lots of other consequences of longterm DRM that you can think of that excape the rest of us here, please post your ideas.
Thank you,
You can be sure that when Linux actually overtakes Windows as the most popular desktop interface, the current Linux community will deride it as junk, not-Linux, 'Linux for Dummies', ect...
Part of the Linux/Unix fascination is a transformative mindset that confuses cryptic complexity with power and ease-of-use with restricted utility. It's part of the twisted mindset that exclaims without irony that using mispelled words like 'creat' for 'create' and 'ls' for 'list' and 'rm' for remove encourages flexiblility *it doesn't-it does just the opposite by forcing the memorization of a whole new set of words*. Anyone who in the twenty-first century who would say that typing something like:
>$ ls * rx -adlk- (*lf39(0309)) splatxy -3&**
makes programming more powerful just doesn't get the point of all the computer interface research that has been done since they were born.
This isn't a troll: it's a trueism. Linux/Unix must give up its 1970's mentality if it is ever going to be taken seriously by people who take computers seriously.
Thank you, (here I go again, another mod 0)
Just exactly does a 'junior line manager' who agrees to be a spy in lieu of going to prison get hired into the top-secret research and development 'skunk works' section of the company's chief competitor?
Learning how to do this would actually be worth the price of the book.
Or is it just done with a glossed over plot device like Latin-American 'magic realism' or deus ex machina?
This whole topic reminds me of the old saying,
"If architects made buildings the way that programmers write software, then the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization"
The fact that you can crash a program completely by changing one bit of a million byte executable file never ceases to amaze me.
The fact that no one in the computer industry or university community will deal with this problem or even talk about it dismays me.
It just shows that the technological community is just not ready to be taken seriously and that all of their work is, in reality, just prototypes and toys.
The fact that no one into computer programming industry will guarantee in writing that their programs will actually work as advertised just proves the whole point.
If I were to get drafted into a war, I would be very greatful for my paintball experience because it has taught me just how easy it is to get hit.
The whole idea of paintball is convey the notion that if you get drafted for a war, then the only intelligent thing to do is get yourself to another country or place quickly where they aren't having a war. In the modern world the people who win wars are the people who don't fight them.
We, the USA, and the rest of the world spend far too much money on military affairs. Every year it just gets worse.
... is simply bad for business.
The purpose of the military is to protect the local country from invasion from other countries and their armies.
The Americans have 20000 nuclear bombs, no one is going to invade them, no one is even going to get close to invading and occupying them.
They don't need a military any more!! Yet they spend tons of their money on this unnecessary endeavor. It is really warping their minds and is making both their neighbors and the rest of the civilized world uncomfortable.
There is some twisted little defect in the American culture that makes their young people actually want to go into dangerous combat situations on the other side of the world and expose themselves to discomfort, death, and dismemberment against people that they have never even heard of. No one else seriously wants to do this.
But since they have so much powerful weaponry, no one wants to just take them aside for a little chat and suggest that they should just 'chill' because they don't have any real enemies that are dangerous enough for them to require this kind of behavior.
Creating an artifical environment where the young Americans can get their 'gook-killing' urges satisified is really money well spent, as long as the simulation is so good that they want to spend more time in it than in the real world.
Because, frankly, in this increasingly networked world of global corporations, having lots of young trigger-happy running amok with no idea of what they're doing, or who they're doing it to, or why they're doing it
I find it strange that someone considers putting Claudia Schiffer on his desktop proper workplace behavior. Maybe it is if you work at a garage, but it's not going to be accepable at any Fortune 500 company.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I posted the photo on a PC that was in a room that was locked to all people except for me and my boss. It was not an accessable workplace. My boss, who was 15 years younger than me, had me tossed out of the company without review or comment.
It was only a picture of a beautiful young woman in an evening gown head and shoulders. Not a playboy foldout or cheezecake garage bikini shot.
This is what makes H-P weird. Again it was 1994 near the height of politically -correct hysteria, but these policies never change once instituted in any Fortune 500 company.
There was no possiblity of a lawsuit from anyone.
I believe that the ability to put a wallpaper on the PC screen that I am using daily is none of the concern of the employer. Lately I put images of Renaissance Madonnas as wallpaper, Botticelli and Rapheal. I would like to see a 500 year old painting of the Virgin Mary be declared as 'sexual harassment'. Then I would sue and have the art world, the Playboy foundation, the Church, and the anti-PC community on my side with a few women-studies professors and clueless Human Resources people on the other side.
...the technology experts, the computer industry, the peer-to-peer industry, the software industry, the entertainment industry, the privacy experts and the business experts to come together and discuss positive and meaningful solutions to this challenge...
Uhh, senator, aren't you forgetting someone here? Mainly the tens of millions of people who actually are downloading and consuming the music?
All of the parties that you have listed are those that stand to gain from instituting a stiff DRM regime on what is de-facto public property, i.e. the cultural product of the last eighty years.
The media industry should realize that DRM, like any powerful weapon, can be used against their interests almost as easily as for their interests. The industry needs to remember that their product doesn't just appear out of thin air, it is rather the collective effort of millions of people absorbing cultural trends through mass media over long periods of time. Using DRM to choke off access to this media stream to the general public will within about ten years seriously reduce the number of people coming to them with new product for them to sell.
Record companies don't generate music; people bring them music mostly already finished for their marketing. Most of this music that is offered to them is a subtle variation of the product that has already been circulating for years. Musical trends are sequence of small steps in the basic format of the product.
Wrapping everything in DRM will interrupt this delicate ecology. Cut off from the global trends in music, musicians will start either creating new musical styles or cut-and-paste previously released product with new forms of samplers. But this new product won't be cycled towards the music corporations because they will have taken themselves out of the cultural feedback loop.
Like the old fairy tale, DRM is 'killing the goose that laid golden eggs, to get all the gold at once.' Only to end up with nothing but goose guts and no more golden eggs.
'Ramble On' --- Led Zeppelin
In 1994 I got a temp job (temp in the sense that they weren't hiring on less than the PhD level to avoid paying benefits, but permanent full-time in every other respect) at HP-Vancouver Washington.
My job was to disassemble brand-new packaged printers for rebuilding as prototypes for new models and loading the base unit CPU boards with Unix code for their prototype firmware.
I worked in a locked warehouse room with an outdoor loading ramp and about a million dollars worth of packaged printers stacked to the ceiling.
(They'd given me a marijuana unine test so they knew that they could trust me, but of course, no benefits not even morning coffee). My boss and my self were the only people who had keys to this locked storage workroom.
I put a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown on my PC desktop as wallpaper to keep from going insane in this sealed environment.
After about three weeks, I was fired for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment' for this picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown.
I can't recommend anyone seriously considering working at Hewlett-Packard. Sooner or later their bizarre culture is going to wipe you out regardless of how well you work or try to avoid their weird company politics.
I'm sure that Carly's only made a bad situation worse.
Thank you,