Oh, I agree that phoning into a human translator is still going to provide the most accurate translation available. If you use a dedicated full-duplex telephone, the translator can even translate speech in real time, ending up with better accuracy and lower latency than the machine translator. But human translators aren't always available or cost-effective. The idea is to give people a rudimentary translating tool.
When I'm in western Europe, I normally carry a small electronic pocket translator around with me. It lets me learn new words as I travel, and helps me formulate specific sentences if I have a few minutes to prepare before interacting with someone. I imagine that a PDA-style machine recognizer/translator/synthesizer would fill this job rather more adequately. At the very least, I could use it to quickly translate phrases in anticipation of speaking.
To say that this PDA translation software "isn't as good as Babelfish" is to miss the point.
First of all, Babelfish is pretty darned good. It's true that Babelfish won't render the Rubaiyat into English; won't translate Shakespeare into Arabic. But if you use it to translate a general web page that uses newspaper vocabulary and avoids domain-specific jargon, Babelfish will help get the point across. If you count grammatical inaccuracies, Babelfish is less than 80% efficient. That's all we're looking for in this context: a tool I can use to get the point across if I'm conversing with an Arabic speaker and know only a little Arabic, or none at all.
Second, Babelfish does a bad job because it lacks context. Babelfish is designed with a huge vocabulary -- ideally it would know every word in every language! -- and must translate written language that deals with virtually any subject. by restricting recognition to a few specific domains, the recognizers and translators can do their job much better while consuming fewer resources. And once again: the goal is simply to get the point across, not to translate literature. Half as good as Babelfish would be sufficient.
Let's be pessimistic and assume that these devices bestow upon the user a vocabulary equivalent to a six-month student's command of the foreign language. That means the user can make use of the present tense, ask questions; determine gender and number of people and objects; translate written language phonetically; determine directions, distances, times and maybe a few colors; and make simple demands. It's certainly no replacement for even a novice human Arabic speaker, but it's better than nothing!
They can't tell their arse from their fanny, nor their bonnet from their boot! We're speakign of the despicable backwaters of civilization where "bumming a fag" from someone will get you a new homosexual friend. Places where they don't hold no truck with lorries, where there's no U in "local color" and they not only replace Ess with Zed, they replace it with Zee!
No, my friend, I'm afraid that in such a place, translation is the least of your problems. Your best bet is to placate the locals with any good beer you may have brought from home, and head for the airport as fast as your feet will carry you.
Learning to dabble in a language is one thing; learning a language with the level of detail and intimacy required to talk about medical affairs, or to interrogate a prisoner of war or quickly find out critical information from a panicked civilian -- these are, I'm afraid, a bit harder than asking your way to a good restaurant.
Get your DoD sponsorship and security clearance in order, enroll in the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language School, and you'll be speaking the language of your sponsor's choice, fluently, in about a year. A further year of study will have you speaking that language like a permanent resident, with a full battery of knowledge regarding the culture, customs, political and military situation in in the country where that language is spoken.
Monterey is considered by many to be the finest language institution in the United States, possibly in the world. Their best-kept secret is this: in order to gain a spot in one of their language classes, you must score 85 or above on their language aptitude test. For "difficult" languages such as Serbian, Greek and Russian the requirement is 95; and for Chinese, Japanese and Arabic you'll need a whopping 100 on the aptitude test.
I submit that the lesson we can learn from Monterey is: the ability to learn languages is a trait that can not easily be tuaght. Not everyone is capable of twisting his brain in the right way. To pick up a language with the fluency and facility demanded for military (or intensive civilian) applications, you need a natural aptitude for learning languages. Even the best language school in the world admits to this.
I personally love languages. I'm semi-fluent in three languages, can get by in three others, and given the choice I would spend the rest of my life learning, speaking and enjoying the languages of other cultures. Although I'm an anti-authoritarian and hate taking orders, I've even considered landing a job with the Department of Defense, JUST to be able to go to Monterey. But I'm lucky enough to have a natural aptitude for languages.
For all of those grunts and mere mortals who aren't so lucky, who find themselves in a dusty street or a dark alley or a dimly-lit hotel lobby without any way to communicate with the locals, we need a better solution. Machine translation isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing. It's certainly one step above a dictionary!
BIOS ain't broken? Then, pray tell, why does every modern OS stop using the BIOS ASAP after it's initialized?
For bootstrapping, power-on self test and simple initialization, I agree that the BIOS still does as good a job as it did ten years ago. But let us not forget that the BIOS was intended to be more than a bootstrap environment: it was originally a Basic Input/Output System. And as an I/O system it fails miserably. Its interrupt-driven interfaces are orders of magnitude slower than they need to be in order to keep up with today's hardware; its hardcoded lists of functions and subfunctions, and forced parameter-passing via register values are frightfully inextensible; BIOS code was never even designed to run in Protected Mode, which is where Wintel chips spend the vast majority of their time executing.
There was a time, circa DOS and Windows 3.1, when the BIOS still served a genuinely useful purpose. Even as far as Windows 95, you could still catch some machines occasionally using BIOS-driven disk I/O for compatability or in "Safe Mode." But those days are gone.
I'm not saying EFI is a great answer, of course -- I think it's a disastrous idea to store anything firmware-related on a disk partition, and I suspect that EFI's "optional" ability to store extensions on a dedicated disk partition will soon lead to disaster as OS vendors come to depend on it too much. We may also see EFI virii that are much more virulent than any boot sector virus around today.
Just because EFI ain't perfect, however, doesn't mean it ain't better than BIOS.
satire(n.)
1. A work of art in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
2. Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity.
Understand that George W. Bush is not a popular man outside the United States right now (nor within -- but that's a different story). On numerous occasions, he has offended, misled, downright lied to, and otherwise committed injustices against America's allies and enemies alike. The European community is up in arms against the United States for any number of quite valid reasons. The movie's use of sarcasm (or caustic wit) in comparing G.W.B. against infamous dictators is a perfectly valid instance of satire.
For Americans like you, whose jobs and lives don't call for trips abroad, perhaps this is a moot point -- you're never directly exposed to the seething hatred of America and all things American that is accumulating in the international community. The common view of us is that we crash around the globe like retarded children, breaking everything we touch and seldom bothering to fix it. We are seen to manhandle sovereign governments, using our wealth to dispense punishment or favor and our military might to bend smaller nations to our will.
It is my personal belief that George W. Bush and his team of handlers, cronies and special-interest-group puppeteers really are responsible for our foreign relations crisis, through their hamhanded approach to foreign policy. But my political beliefs are irrelevant to this issue. Regardless of my party affiliation, my liberalness or conservativeness or any other factor, tiven the choice between seeing our Illustrious Leader harmlessly lambasted with a bit of satire and seeing our entire nation bashed, I choose the former.
I don't know, but if the customer service rep actually said "case sensitive phone number," I'd sure love to call him back and demand an explanation while recording the conversation...whatever his answer, it's bound to be hilarious.
Don't forget the possibility of gyroscopic deceleration. Also, remember that the Embrio's computer needn't get all its speed information from the wheel speed...we know they need inertial sensors to run the gyros; perhaps they derive velocity from the acceleration readings.
I'm not saying your points aren't valid -- and I agree that we won't see Embrio-filled streets (EWWW!) any time soon. But the picture isn't quite as grim as you've painted it.
The point of the Punycode encoding is that end-users can register Unicode domain names and type Unicode domain names into their browsers. Punycode then provides a translation from those pesky Unicode strings into nice 8-bit ASCII, which is compatible with the DNS protocol.
For example: in Japan, Namie Amuro probably has a trademark on the Kanji characters her name. When it becomes possible for her to register her name.com.jp she will be legally entitled to register that name. What that effectively means, is that she will be legally entitled to register the *Punycode encoding* of that name...although if everything is implemented correctly, she (or her web designers) will never know this is going on.
The only problem that might occur, is if someone else wants to innocently register the same domain name and isn't aware that it is the Punycode encoding for a trademarked name. This is highly unlikely, however, since Punycode-encoded strings tend to have long sequences of random-looking digits. Furthermore, unless this person has a *trademark* on the Punycode-encoded string for Namie Amuro's name, there is no legal conflict -- just a disappointed would-be domain name holder.
So the only conceivable problem I can think of is a generation of i18n-squatters, who attempt to legally squat by trademarking Punycode-encoded versions of foreign stars' names. And I'm sure there's a legal precedent for this -- it would be equivalent to my trying to register "Maikurusofuto" as a trademark in Japan.
I'm not going to nag you about morals; I'd just like to point out that stealing calculators isn't all that geeky. It's merely illegal. But anyone can steal stuff from someone's backpack. In fact, students make better targets than most.
No, a *genuinely* illegal geeky thing to do would be to make peoples' calculators appear broken, and offer to buy the "broken" calcs from them. Then take the calcs to another school to sell them. Maybe find a combination of buttons, or a weakness in the design that was easy to break and easy to repair.
"This turbine forms part of the High-pressure Turbo...Next, the helium flows through the Low-pressure Turbine, which is part of the Low-pressure Turbo Unit...The helium is then cooled in the inter-cooler. "
In other words: they're going to build a twin-turbo nuclear reactor with an intercooler.
I didn't see any mention of chrome exhaust tips, cupholders, cruise control or racing stripes, but how far behind can these things possibly be? That's gonna be one decked out nuclear reactor...I wonder what kind of stereo system they'll put into it?
Perhaps for the opening ceremony I'll fly to Africa and plant a "Type R" decal on the side of the reactor building.
No, but we do know that Africa consists of many tiny republics, many of whom might not have the fiscal of administrative resources to operate their own self-contained power grid. Thus, it might behoove the government of each African republic to cooperate with its neighbors on forming a state-run, multinational infrastructure.
We do the same thing here in North America, only ours isn't state-run.
Furthermore, if I improve that something has an astronomically high Total Cost of Ownership -- let's say I find out that my '88 Honda Accord will cost me $175,000 to maintain over the coming year -- well, have I not established a "proven TCO?"
In the same vein, I could prove that Windows Server 2003 costs me more money than I spent to buy a license...thus, I have "proven" the ROI to be less than 1:1!
As if the acronyms weren't bad enough, the phrase "proven TCO and ROI" carries no information as to whether the TLAs are proven GOOD or proven BAD. Thus, it is an empty phrase, utterly devoid of informational content. Much like Carly Fiorina's mind.
Because of technical peculiarities, the EVD format will not support the proper R/RW profiles for recordable versions of the media. Under pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, China has announced that it will only support EVD-W and EVD+W formats.
The difference between R, RW and W is that with R and RW you can Record and ReWrite the disc, respectively. But with an EVD-W disc you can ONLY write to the disc. Once the disc has been written, you can never read from it again.
Copy protection, hell. You can't copy what you can't read!
"The disparity for the Bells lies in the fact that wireless local calling areas are generally much bigger than those of the Bells and may overlap several. So unless the wired phone and the wireless company's equipment are in the same Bell local area, a cell phone customer who switched a number to a wired phone could face toll charges to call next door."
Translation: the poor big telcos are sad because they can't get away with charging people an arm and a leg to call long distance anymore. Oh, wook, we made the widdle telco cry! In order to remain competitive they'll all be forced to switch to a fixed-rate nationwide calling model like virtually every wireless carrier in existence!
Jackasses. Telcos have been abusing their monopoly over the copper running into our homes for years, and fighting tooth-and-nail to maintain every scrap of their monopoly. They made a debacle of DSL, destroying its reputation simply because they didn't want to offer data service and couldn't stand to see other companies living inside their data centers and making money from their copper. Now, when the FCC enacts a progressive move such as number portability, they all start whining as if overcharging us for service were their privilege.
I have nothing wrong about the guy's quote. If the CD genuinely has no copy protection -- if I can copy Red Book audio off the disc -- then I'll consider buying the disc from a store, if I was already planning on buying the album and if I like the extras. The DRM'd files are a tad superfluous since they're probably in WMA (evil) and encoded at low quality. But, hey, I genuinely like their laissez-faire approach to copy protection.
On the other hand, I've recently started using iTunes Music Store. I'll pay a small premium in order to have a physical CD in-hand, and also for the right to rip the tracks and encode in whatever format/bit rate I want. But if the difference between the iTunes album and the physical album is greater than about $2, then forget about it!
In conclusion: surprise, surprise! If the record labels want to act like reasonable human beings, I'm willing to do business with them. But they're not guaranteed my business in a world where they've lost their monopoly.
Record labels are like mildly retarded children -- sweet and earnest (when it comes to money at least), but a little slow. Sooner or later it will occur to them to capitalize on new high-quality audio formats such as Super Audio CD or DVD Audio, into which they can design copy protection from the start. We'll see how long their "trust the consumer" mentality will stand in the face of THAT power trip!
Once upon a time, in the early 90s, the term *was* CGI: Computer Generated Images, or Computer Generated Imagery. Only circa 1996 did I start hearing people refer to computer graphics for movies as "CG."
I knew of CGI as a movie acronym long before I knew of CGI as a Web programming acronym -- and I was writing CGI guestbook applications in 1995, using C and printf/getenv. So I think the Common Gateway Interface would lose in any sort of chronological pissing contest.
Good point. Of course, you're assuming that the system is always transmitting the location of the truck, even before the truck is reported as stolen. If this were not the case, the terrorists' goal would be to silently subdue the driver and keep the alarm from being raised as long as possible.
Now, is it technically feasible to have all of these trucks constantly reporting their position regardless of their status? Probably not, if the tracking devices are satellite-based. If the tracking devices use a wireless data network such as CDPD or 1xRTT, then I'd say yes, it's feasible.
Of course, it occurs to me that the weakest link in any wireless communications system is the antenna. If the tracking device has any sort of external antenna, the terrorists only need to find it and destroy it, then move the vehicle quickly enough so that it's hidden safely by the time authorities can react.
People have been slapping LoJack and other vehicle recovery systems onto their cars for years, yet cars still get stolen. If your car is valuable enough, high-tech thieves will always be able to disable any alarm or tracking system you have installed. They can drive the car into a shielded garage (or simply deep into an underground garage) and work on it at their leisure, without being tracked.
The principle at work here is identical to the principle that drives software piracy. If someone gets hold of your protected object and has free reign to do anything he wants to its guts, then any protection you can built into the object is surmountable given a sufficiently determined cracker/thief with the right tools.
Here's the idea: everyone on the road has transponder that emits a unique code. The code is specific to your vehicle, but not linked to it in any way...you can get a new transponder code whenever you want, with no ID required.
When a vehicle approaches an intersection, a traffic control node at the intersection picks up its transponder. The traffic control node is smart enough to know which side of the intersection the vehicle is coming from, and potentially even how fast the vehicle is travelling.
At any point in time, the traffic control node knows how many cars are coming from each direction as well as their average speed. It can use this information to make an *intelligent* decision on when to change the traffic lights!
During periods of high traffic, the control node can switch to using a fixed program, or coordinating with nearby nodes in the traffic control network. Late at night, or during low-activity periods, it can change the lights on demand whenever a vehicle approached.
Now, I'm a privacy nut, so this scheme isn't quite good enough for me. I'd argue that transponders will still make cars too easy to trace. So, instead of using a centralized node for each intersection, let's turn traffic control into a distributed system. Now, each of the transponders is actually a peer in the traffic control network!
In the distributed traffic control network, every car coordinates with nearby cars using positioning information supplied by the roadway. They come to a concensus on how to behave. The red light and the green light are now located inside your car! Luxury cars with "city cruise control" can actually control their own speed, leaving you to concentrate on steering the car! When you come to an intersection, your car knows the optimal approach speed. When the "light" changes, your car knows to slow to a stop. If your car's traffic processor malfunctions, nearby cars take notice and go into caution mode, using onboard sensors to safely stop themselves, automatically flashing their hazard lights.
A crazy scheme? Sure! But hot damn, what an exciting and traffic-free world that would be...
The device is rather dangerous to public safety, yes. Consider that if someone is speeding -- which he'll easily be inclined to do if he has no red lights to stop him -- he'll approach the intersection much sooner than he should.
There may still be plenty of traffic in the intersection when the speeding car arrives. If it's a busy city such as Los Angeles or New York, the light even may go red when the intersection is filled with cars, causing people to panic. And let's not forget that Joe Schmoe using one of these devices might cause a *real* ambulance to be caught at a red light!
The real problem with device, however, is not traffic safety. These devices are a privilege; the word "privilege" comes from the Latin words for "private law." The devices give ambulances and other rescue vehicles a certain privilege, because the public good is better served if the rescue vehicles can get to their destinations faster.
In other words: the value of the lives and homes saved by ambulances and firetrucks far outweighs the cost of the slight traffic they cause. The value of Joe Schmoe getting to his movie before the previews are over, on the other hand, does *not* outweigh the cost of the traffic he causes when he uses his magical chrome box.
If everyone has a privilege, then it is no longer a privilege but a right. If it's everybody's right to make the light change to green at his command, no good can come of it.
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That sounds like a fun (if rather challenging) test. Thanks for the inside scoop!
Oh, I agree that phoning into a human translator is still going to provide the most accurate translation available. If you use a dedicated full-duplex telephone, the translator can even translate speech in real time, ending up with better accuracy and lower latency than the machine translator. But human translators aren't always available or cost-effective. The idea is to give people a rudimentary translating tool.
When I'm in western Europe, I normally carry a small electronic pocket translator around with me. It lets me learn new words as I travel, and helps me formulate specific sentences if I have a few minutes to prepare before interacting with someone. I imagine that a PDA-style machine recognizer/translator/synthesizer would fill this job rather more adequately. At the very least, I could use it to quickly translate phrases in anticipation of speaking.
To say that this PDA translation software "isn't as good as Babelfish" is to miss the point.
First of all, Babelfish is pretty darned good. It's true that Babelfish won't render the Rubaiyat into English; won't translate Shakespeare into Arabic. But if you use it to translate a general web page that uses newspaper vocabulary and avoids domain-specific jargon, Babelfish will help get the point across. If you count grammatical inaccuracies, Babelfish is less than 80% efficient. That's all we're looking for in this context: a tool I can use to get the point across if I'm conversing with an Arabic speaker and know only a little Arabic, or none at all.
Second, Babelfish does a bad job because it lacks context. Babelfish is designed with a huge vocabulary -- ideally it would know every word in every language! -- and must translate written language that deals with virtually any subject. by restricting recognition to a few specific domains, the recognizers and translators can do their job much better while consuming fewer resources. And once again: the goal is simply to get the point across, not to translate literature. Half as good as Babelfish would be sufficient.
Let's be pessimistic and assume that these devices bestow upon the user a vocabulary equivalent to a six-month student's command of the foreign language. That means the user can make use of the present tense, ask questions; determine gender and number of people and objects; translate written language phonetically; determine directions, distances, times and maybe a few colors; and make simple demands. It's certainly no replacement for even a novice human Arabic speaker, but it's better than nothing!
They can't tell their arse from their fanny, nor their bonnet from their boot! We're speakign of the despicable backwaters of civilization where "bumming a fag" from someone will get you a new homosexual friend. Places where they don't hold no truck with lorries, where there's no U in "local color" and they not only replace Ess with Zed, they replace it with Zee!
No, my friend, I'm afraid that in such a place, translation is the least of your problems. Your best bet is to placate the locals with any good beer you may have brought from home, and head for the airport as fast as your feet will carry you.
Learning to dabble in a language is one thing; learning a language with the level of detail and intimacy required to talk about medical affairs, or to interrogate a prisoner of war or quickly find out critical information from a panicked civilian -- these are, I'm afraid, a bit harder than asking your way to a good restaurant.
Get your DoD sponsorship and security clearance in order, enroll in the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language School, and you'll be speaking the language of your sponsor's choice, fluently, in about a year. A further year of study will have you speaking that language like a permanent resident, with a full battery of knowledge regarding the culture, customs, political and military situation in in the country where that language is spoken.
Monterey is considered by many to be the finest language institution in the United States, possibly in the world. Their best-kept secret is this: in order to gain a spot in one of their language classes, you must score 85 or above on their language aptitude test. For "difficult" languages such as Serbian, Greek and Russian the requirement is 95; and for Chinese, Japanese and Arabic you'll need a whopping 100 on the aptitude test.
I submit that the lesson we can learn from Monterey is: the ability to learn languages is a trait that can not easily be tuaght. Not everyone is capable of twisting his brain in the right way. To pick up a language with the fluency and facility demanded for military (or intensive civilian) applications, you need a natural aptitude for learning languages. Even the best language school in the world admits to this.
I personally love languages. I'm semi-fluent in three languages, can get by in three others, and given the choice I would spend the rest of my life learning, speaking and enjoying the languages of other cultures. Although I'm an anti-authoritarian and hate taking orders, I've even considered landing a job with the Department of Defense, JUST to be able to go to Monterey. But I'm lucky enough to have a natural aptitude for languages.
For all of those grunts and mere mortals who aren't so lucky, who find themselves in a dusty street or a dark alley or a dimly-lit hotel lobby without any way to communicate with the locals, we need a better solution. Machine translation isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing. It's certainly one step above a dictionary!
BIOS ain't broken? Then, pray tell, why does every modern OS stop using the BIOS ASAP after it's initialized?
For bootstrapping, power-on self test and simple initialization, I agree that the BIOS still does as good a job as it did ten years ago. But let us not forget that the BIOS was intended to be more than a bootstrap environment: it was originally a Basic Input/Output System. And as an I/O system it fails miserably. Its interrupt-driven interfaces are orders of magnitude slower than they need to be in order to keep up with today's hardware; its hardcoded lists of functions and subfunctions, and forced parameter-passing via register values are frightfully inextensible; BIOS code was never even designed to run in Protected Mode, which is where Wintel chips spend the vast majority of their time executing.
There was a time, circa DOS and Windows 3.1, when the BIOS still served a genuinely useful purpose. Even as far as Windows 95, you could still catch some machines occasionally using BIOS-driven disk I/O for compatability or in "Safe Mode." But those days are gone.
I'm not saying EFI is a great answer, of course -- I think it's a disastrous idea to store anything firmware-related on a disk partition, and I suspect that EFI's "optional" ability to store extensions on a dedicated disk partition will soon lead to disaster as OS vendors come to depend on it too much. We may also see EFI virii that are much more virulent than any boot sector virus around today.
Just because EFI ain't perfect, however, doesn't mean it ain't better than BIOS.
satire (n.)
1. A work of art in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
2. Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity.
Understand that George W. Bush is not a popular man outside the United States right now (nor within -- but that's a different story). On numerous occasions, he has offended, misled, downright lied to, and otherwise committed injustices against America's allies and enemies alike. The European community is up in arms against the United States for any number of quite valid reasons. The movie's use of sarcasm (or caustic wit) in comparing G.W.B. against infamous dictators is a perfectly valid instance of satire.
For Americans like you, whose jobs and lives don't call for trips abroad, perhaps this is a moot point -- you're never directly exposed to the seething hatred of America and all things American that is accumulating in the international community. The common view of us is that we crash around the globe like retarded children, breaking everything we touch and seldom bothering to fix it. We are seen to manhandle sovereign governments, using our wealth to dispense punishment or favor and our military might to bend smaller nations to our will.
It is my personal belief that George W. Bush and his team of handlers, cronies and special-interest-group puppeteers really are responsible for our foreign relations crisis, through their hamhanded approach to foreign policy. But my political beliefs are irrelevant to this issue. Regardless of my party affiliation, my liberalness or conservativeness or any other factor, tiven the choice between seeing our Illustrious Leader harmlessly lambasted with a bit of satire and seeing our entire nation bashed, I choose the former.
I don't know, but if the customer service rep actually said "case sensitive phone number," I'd sure love to call him back and demand an explanation while recording the conversation...whatever his answer, it's bound to be hilarious.
A case-sensitive phone number, huh? God forbid if I ever mix up an uppercase '7' with a lowercase '7'!!!
Don't forget the possibility of gyroscopic deceleration. Also, remember that the Embrio's computer needn't get all its speed information from the wheel speed...we know they need inertial sensors to run the gyros; perhaps they derive velocity from the acceleration readings.
I'm not saying your points aren't valid -- and I agree that we won't see Embrio-filled streets (EWWW!) any time soon. But the picture isn't quite as grim as you've painted it.
The point of the Punycode encoding is that end-users can register Unicode domain names and type Unicode domain names into their browsers. Punycode then provides a translation from those pesky Unicode strings into nice 8-bit ASCII, which is compatible with the DNS protocol.
.com.jp she will be legally entitled to register that name. What that effectively means, is that she will be legally entitled to register the *Punycode encoding* of that name...although if everything is implemented correctly, she (or her web designers) will never know this is going on.
For example: in Japan, Namie Amuro probably has a trademark on the Kanji characters her name. When it becomes possible for her to register her name
The only problem that might occur, is if someone else wants to innocently register the same domain name and isn't aware that it is the Punycode encoding for a trademarked name. This is highly unlikely, however, since Punycode-encoded strings tend to have long sequences of random-looking digits. Furthermore, unless this person has a *trademark* on the Punycode-encoded string for Namie Amuro's name, there is no legal conflict -- just a disappointed would-be domain name holder.
So the only conceivable problem I can think of is a generation of i18n-squatters, who attempt to legally squat by trademarking Punycode-encoded versions of foreign stars' names. And I'm sure there's a legal precedent for this -- it would be equivalent to my trying to register "Maikurusofuto" as a trademark in Japan.
I think we've found our magic bullet. The racket will work even better if two kids cooperate; one is the "breaker" and the other is the "seller."
:)
Feel like going back to high school, WhiteDragon?
I'm not going to nag you about morals; I'd just like to point out that stealing calculators isn't all that geeky. It's merely illegal. But anyone can steal stuff from someone's backpack. In fact, students make better targets than most.
No, a *genuinely* illegal geeky thing to do would be to make peoples' calculators appear broken, and offer to buy the "broken" calcs from them. Then take the calcs to another school to sell them. Maybe find a combination of buttons, or a weakness in the design that was easy to break and easy to repair.
Direct quotes from the PBMR web page:
"This turbine forms part of the High-pressure Turbo...Next, the helium flows through the Low-pressure Turbine, which is part of the Low-pressure Turbo Unit...The helium is then cooled in the inter-cooler. "
In other words: they're going to build a twin-turbo nuclear reactor with an intercooler.
I didn't see any mention of chrome exhaust tips, cupholders, cruise control or racing stripes, but how far behind can these things possibly be? That's gonna be one decked out nuclear reactor...I wonder what kind of stereo system they'll put into it?
Perhaps for the opening ceremony I'll fly to Africa and plant a "Type R" decal on the side of the reactor building.
No, but we do know that Africa consists of many tiny republics, many of whom might not have the fiscal of administrative resources to operate their own self-contained power grid. Thus, it might behoove the government of each African republic to cooperate with its neighbors on forming a state-run, multinational infrastructure.
We do the same thing here in North America, only ours isn't state-run.
Furthermore, if I improve that something has an astronomically high Total Cost of Ownership -- let's say I find out that my '88 Honda Accord will cost me $175,000 to maintain over the coming year -- well, have I not established a "proven TCO?"
In the same vein, I could prove that Windows Server 2003 costs me more money than I spent to buy a license...thus, I have "proven" the ROI to be less than 1:1!
As if the acronyms weren't bad enough, the phrase "proven TCO and ROI" carries no information as to whether the TLAs are proven GOOD or proven BAD. Thus, it is an empty phrase, utterly devoid of informational content. Much like Carly Fiorina's mind.
Because of technical peculiarities, the EVD format will not support the proper R/RW profiles for recordable versions of the media. Under pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, China has announced that it will only support EVD-W and EVD+W formats.
The difference between R, RW and W is that with R and RW you can Record and ReWrite the disc, respectively. But with an EVD-W disc you can ONLY write to the disc. Once the disc has been written, you can never read from it again.
Copy protection, hell. You can't copy what you can't read!
"The disparity for the Bells lies in the fact that wireless local calling areas are generally much bigger than those of the Bells and may overlap several. So unless the wired phone and the wireless company's equipment are in the same Bell local area, a cell phone customer who switched a number to a wired phone could face toll charges to call next door."
Translation: the poor big telcos are sad because they can't get away with charging people an arm and a leg to call long distance anymore. Oh, wook, we made the widdle telco cry! In order to remain competitive they'll all be forced to switch to a fixed-rate nationwide calling model like virtually every wireless carrier in existence!
Jackasses. Telcos have been abusing their monopoly over the copper running into our homes for years, and fighting tooth-and-nail to maintain every scrap of their monopoly. They made a debacle of DSL, destroying its reputation simply because they didn't want to offer data service and couldn't stand to see other companies living inside their data centers and making money from their copper. Now, when the FCC enacts a progressive move such as number portability, they all start whining as if overcharging us for service were their privilege.
I have nothing wrong about the guy's quote. If the CD genuinely has no copy protection -- if I can copy Red Book audio off the disc -- then I'll consider buying the disc from a store, if I was already planning on buying the album and if I like the extras. The DRM'd files are a tad superfluous since they're probably in WMA (evil) and encoded at low quality. But, hey, I genuinely like their laissez-faire approach to copy protection.
On the other hand, I've recently started using iTunes Music Store. I'll pay a small premium in order to have a physical CD in-hand, and also for the right to rip the tracks and encode in whatever format/bit rate I want. But if the difference between the iTunes album and the physical album is greater than about $2, then forget about it!
In conclusion: surprise, surprise! If the record labels want to act like reasonable human beings, I'm willing to do business with them. But they're not guaranteed my business in a world where they've lost their monopoly.
Record labels are like mildly retarded children -- sweet and earnest (when it comes to money at least), but a little slow. Sooner or later it will occur to them to capitalize on new high-quality audio formats such as Super Audio CD or DVD Audio, into which they can design copy protection from the start. We'll see how long their "trust the consumer" mentality will stand in the face of THAT power trip!
The Wayback Machine, baby. You can't lie to an archival robot.
Once upon a time, in the early 90s, the term *was* CGI: Computer Generated Images, or Computer Generated Imagery. Only circa 1996 did I start hearing people refer to computer graphics for movies as "CG."
I knew of CGI as a movie acronym long before I knew of CGI as a Web programming acronym -- and I was writing CGI guestbook applications in 1995, using C and printf/getenv. So I think the Common Gateway Interface would lose in any sort of chronological pissing contest.
Good point. Of course, you're assuming that the system is always transmitting the location of the truck, even before the truck is reported as stolen. If this were not the case, the terrorists' goal would be to silently subdue the driver and keep the alarm from being raised as long as possible.
Now, is it technically feasible to have all of these trucks constantly reporting their position regardless of their status? Probably not, if the tracking devices are satellite-based. If the tracking devices use a wireless data network such as CDPD or 1xRTT, then I'd say yes, it's feasible.
Of course, it occurs to me that the weakest link in any wireless communications system is the antenna. If the tracking device has any sort of external antenna, the terrorists only need to find it and destroy it, then move the vehicle quickly enough so that it's hidden safely by the time authorities can react.
People have been slapping LoJack and other vehicle recovery systems onto their cars for years, yet cars still get stolen. If your car is valuable enough, high-tech thieves will always be able to disable any alarm or tracking system you have installed. They can drive the car into a shielded garage (or simply deep into an underground garage) and work on it at their leisure, without being tracked.
The principle at work here is identical to the principle that drives software piracy. If someone gets hold of your protected object and has free reign to do anything he wants to its guts, then any protection you can built into the object is surmountable given a sufficiently determined cracker/thief with the right tools.
Here's the idea: everyone on the road has transponder that emits a unique code. The code is specific to your vehicle, but not linked to it in any way...you can get a new transponder code whenever you want, with no ID required.
When a vehicle approaches an intersection, a traffic control node at the intersection picks up its transponder. The traffic control node is smart enough to know which side of the intersection the vehicle is coming from, and potentially even how fast the vehicle is travelling.
At any point in time, the traffic control node knows how many cars are coming from each direction as well as their average speed. It can use this information to make an *intelligent* decision on when to change the traffic lights!
During periods of high traffic, the control node can switch to using a fixed program, or coordinating with nearby nodes in the traffic control network. Late at night, or during low-activity periods, it can change the lights on demand whenever a vehicle approached.
Now, I'm a privacy nut, so this scheme isn't quite good enough for me. I'd argue that transponders will still make cars too easy to trace. So, instead of using a centralized node for each intersection, let's turn traffic control into a distributed system. Now, each of the transponders is actually a peer in the traffic control network!
In the distributed traffic control network, every car coordinates with nearby cars using positioning information supplied by the roadway. They come to a concensus on how to behave. The red light and the green light are now located inside your car! Luxury cars with "city cruise control" can actually control their own speed, leaving you to concentrate on steering the car! When you come to an intersection, your car knows the optimal approach speed. When the "light" changes, your car knows to slow to a stop. If your car's traffic processor malfunctions, nearby cars take notice and go into caution mode, using onboard sensors to safely stop themselves, automatically flashing their hazard lights.
A crazy scheme? Sure! But hot damn, what an exciting and traffic-free world that would be...
The device is rather dangerous to public safety, yes. Consider that if someone is speeding -- which he'll easily be inclined to do if he has no red lights to stop him -- he'll approach the intersection much sooner than he should.
There may still be plenty of traffic in the intersection when the speeding car arrives. If it's a busy city such as Los Angeles or New York, the light even may go red when the intersection is filled with cars, causing people to panic. And let's not forget that Joe Schmoe using one of these devices might cause a *real* ambulance to be caught at a red light!
The real problem with device, however, is not traffic safety. These devices are a privilege; the word "privilege" comes from the Latin words for "private law." The devices give ambulances and other rescue vehicles a certain privilege, because the public good is better served if the rescue vehicles can get to their destinations faster.
In other words: the value of the lives and homes saved by ambulances and firetrucks far outweighs the cost of the slight traffic they cause. The value of Joe Schmoe getting to his movie before the previews are over, on the other hand, does *not* outweigh the cost of the traffic he causes when he uses his magical chrome box.
If everyone has a privilege, then it is no longer a privilege but a right. If it's everybody's right to make the light change to green at his command, no good can come of it.