On the other hand, having just finished translating a letter from Finnish to German, I fear that in light of the fact that, unlike most other cultures, Germans consider unspeakably long, intertwined sentences with multiple asides quoting their dead grandmothers who used to go on and on like this all day and the mandatory Goethe or Immanuel Kant quote concerning the importance of staying on topic, of which this run-on piece of drivel gives you but a faint impression, rather stylish and intelligent, we might have to wait a while yet.
Would a program know how to break up a monster like that?
Or, seriously, I ended up rewriting most of the letter to convey its contents in a tone that hopefully won't insult the recipient because of differing cultural expectations.
Finns often consider politeness a waste of time. Now explain that to a statistical translator program: "Leave out/add in some polite blablablah"?
The idea that just waving a card in the proximity of a reader will make you poorer makes people uncomfortable. Poor feedback.
Our bus services recently switched to cards like that. People keep wondering, if the reader actually took the charge at all or charged them twice. The fact that the card itself has no display to show its balance and the reader a mere 20 character display increases the discomfort.
If these cards aren't surrounded by proper interfaces, they will not get popular....um...
Argh, I forgot the "Didn't cost anything: I paid with my Visa" effect that guides people into personal bankruptcy. They seem very comfortable with that. So forget I said anything.
Isn't it amazing how much ignorance people can stuff into one quote?
1) The bestselling rapper is white. Big news. The bestselling artist of any black music trend is always white. 2) That's Switzerland. Sweden has plenty of coastline. 3) People all over the world consider Americans arrogant, as they think this level of ignorance must be deliberate. Nothing new there. 4) Germany has a constitution, largely dictated 50 years ago by the allies, including the US, which interdicts any offensive war. And saying 'I'm feeling vaguely threatened by this little country way off on another continent' will not make it a defensive war as envisioned by the framers of the German constitution. They had no choice but to say no to war. Mind, it's a good idea anyway.
And yes, the best golfer in the world is Asian-African-American. Ten points for a reasonably correct answer.
What I find offensive about the war reporting are attempts to sanitize it, to sweep the suffering under a rug, as it might inhibit support for the war effort. Do show the corpses, the malnourished children and the diseases caused by impure drinking water. Truth hurts, but it's good for you.
For all intents and purposes there is no market whatsoever for paintings. Some ten thousand collectors make up the global buying public for modern art. Does that stop art production?
Nah. Even the smallest town in the world has one or two latter day Van Goghs churning out paintings for their closets, while working other jobs for a living.
If you look closely, you will notice that even today only one in a million bands makes significant money from music. And still every other basement has a band practising in it.
So the mass market dies. You get thousands of little Britney Spearses instead of one massive media monster. They sing at weddings, in pubs, and if you like them, you go to their web site, download their music and recommend the band to friends. Millions of musicians get to make some spare time cash. Only the dream of not having to work for a living, just churning out one CD each year, dies a deserved death. Who cares?
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
on
Dystopic Novels?
·
· Score: 1
Definitely a classic of 20th century dystopic literature. Carries the threats of environmental pollution and corporate irresponsibility to their gruesome extremes, producing a world that stinks - literally, of course.
Acid rain, poisoned food, household implements that kill you and every other threat to the quality of living for any criiter on Earth that environmentalists in the 70s could imagine.
Well written, too. Good characters, relentless plot.
John Brunner's other classic in the same vein is Stand On Zanzibar, which I remember very little of, as it's fifteen years since I read it. Pretty good as well, I seem to recall.
I think a variation of the universal electric shock symbol would work well - a body recoiling in pain from waves of radiation. Some cultures may worship the dead, but not too many worship pain.
Now why does that remind me of a certain energy softdrink commercial?
Let's hope future cultures don't worship frenetic music and caffeine...
Thank you for the kind words. So I've been conned. I just recall that Plutonium has a halflife of 90,000 years. Didn't know it was harmless. I wonder why we bother talking about burial of nuclear waste at all then. Why do they bother about all this long term storage in deep salt mines in geologically inert areas, if it'll all be so much harmless junk in a couple of centuries?
Just some TV documentary I saw once.
US businessman bought thousands of mummies - remember, they mummified anybody who could afford it back then, not just rulers - thinking of reusing the wrapping cloth as fiber for paper production. Turned out it was a waste of time, so the mummies ended up in the factory boilers.
They were dirt cheap back then.
I'll try to research it when I have more time. It's a nice bit of grotesque trivia, eh?
Imagine for a moment that the ancient Egyptians used nuclear energy four thousand years ago, and that all knowledge of it was lost in the following upheavals. We did after all only relearn to read Egyptian hieroglyphs during the last century.
Now imagine that the pyramids were nuclear waste disposal sites and that all those dread pictorial warnings of demons and death adorning them to warn off graverobbers that you know from Indiana Jones actually were warnings about nuclear radiation.
"You will die a slow and horrible death, if you enter here!"
Yeah right, said graverobbers throughout the millennia. Egyptian jewelry and pottery from those graves have adorned houses and women everywhere. They were fashionable in the 1920's, I believe.
Mummies were used for fuel in the USA a hundred years ago.
Hundreds of thousands of people would have been exposed to radiation before we finally gained an inkling into its dangers in the fifties.
It's rather improbable that our culture will last the 100,000 years that our nuclear waste will remain highly dangerous, so the above scenario is inevitable. People are curious and they do not believe in warnings of unseen, tasteless, odorless dangers. Better think of a way to hide the stuff well enough to stay inaccessible for that time.
Impossible? Well fancy you saying that! That's exactly why I have a problem with nuclear power generation!
So Terry Pratchett's decided that people have forgotten Momo by Michael Ende, so he can write his own version. Oh, I'm sure it's quite different, but the premise...
In Momo, a small girl and her turtle stop the time thieves who hoard people's time in their grey vaults and smoke it in their cigars...and so on...
Satire? Hm. Okay, a very friendly suburban version of satire, nothing hurtful or mean. No slashdot trolls anywhere...
For satire, I really prefer Robert Rankin - 'Armageddon, the Musical' or 'A Dog Called Demolition' or 'Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls.' More in the vein of Monty Python.
Of course AOL will keep supporting Mozilla and WinAmp at some level. They make for lovely bargaining chips in negotiating with the Empire. This way AOL doesn't come as a begging pauper to the negotiations. Just making it onto the Win XP desktop must have cost enough as it is. We'll never know, of course.
I seem to remember that a Silicon Valley highschool teacher earns about four times as much as her equivalent in Finland and still has trouble making ends meet.
US$50 is just about what I make as a freelance technical translator, and I live quite comfortably working just 50 hours a month or less.
Apartment rents in Helsinki are three times as high as in Berlin, but a bit lower than in central London, I think.
Re:Don't forget the other free software OSes
on
HP And Bruce Perens
·
· Score: 1
How about this new HPA High Performance Architecture on the Business Inkjet 2200?
They may talk about opening intefaces, but meanwhile they keep reinventing the winprinter.
This HPA appears to do the rasterizing in the driver and then send that compressed to the printer.
Could someone with programming experience tell me how much work it would be to implement that in Linux, if HP actually released some specs on it?
It doesn't sound as hopeless as a regular GDI printer, does it?
on this one page they claim Linux support for their new HP 2200/2250 printers:
Wider operating system compatibility (Yeah, right)
The only pity is that the base model, the 2200, does not and will probably not ever get supported, as it's another variation of a WinPrinter.
HP keeps sending me those automated responses, but so far they haven't fixed the lies on that page
(Like "Lower printing costs").
I don't think I'll ever buy HP again.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, having just finished translating a letter from Finnish to German, I fear that in light of the fact that, unlike most other cultures, Germans consider unspeakably long, intertwined sentences with multiple asides quoting their dead grandmothers who used to go on and on like this all day and the mandatory Goethe or Immanuel Kant quote concerning the importance of staying on topic, of which this run-on piece of drivel gives you but a faint impression, rather stylish and intelligent, we might have to wait a while yet.
Would a program know how to break up a monster like that?
Or, seriously, I ended up rewriting most of the letter to convey its contents in a tone that hopefully won't insult the recipient because of differing cultural expectations.
Finns often consider politeness a waste of time. Now explain that to a statistical translator program: "Leave out/add in some polite blablablah"?
The idea that just waving a card in the proximity of a reader will make you poorer makes people uncomfortable. Poor feedback.
...um...
Our bus services recently switched to cards like that. People keep wondering, if the reader actually took the charge at all or charged them twice.
The fact that the card itself has no display to show its balance and the reader a mere 20 character display increases the discomfort.
If these cards aren't surrounded by proper interfaces, they will not get popular.
Argh, I forgot the "Didn't cost anything: I paid with my Visa" effect that guides people into personal bankruptcy. They seem very comfortable with that. So forget I said anything.
That's not a cost item, is it?
Oh, you mean "Bribing and blackmailing the mayor to build you a new stadium," right?
"This team's gonna be the Chattanooga Choo-Choos next year, ifn ya don't build us a new stadium!"
Sports politics, gotta love it.
Isn't it amazing how much ignorance people can stuff into one quote?
1) The bestselling rapper is white. Big news. The bestselling artist of any black music trend is always white.
2) That's Switzerland. Sweden has plenty of coastline.
3) People all over the world consider Americans arrogant, as they think this level of ignorance must be deliberate. Nothing new there.
4) Germany has a constitution, largely dictated 50 years ago by the allies, including the US, which interdicts any offensive war. And saying 'I'm feeling vaguely threatened by this little country way off on another continent' will not make it a defensive war as envisioned by the framers of the German constitution. They had no choice but to say no to war. Mind, it's a good idea anyway.
And yes, the best golfer in the world is Asian-African-American. Ten points for a reasonably correct answer.
What I find offensive about the war reporting are attempts to sanitize it, to sweep the suffering under a rug, as it might inhibit support for the war effort. Do show the corpses, the malnourished children and the diseases caused by impure drinking water. Truth hurts, but it's good for you.
What a great idea!
You get beaten up, you can't call the cops or an ambulance, because your phone refuses to recognize you.
Unless we add algorithms that adjust for blackened eyes, broken nose, bruises, cuts, missing teeth and bite marks...
In other words, the phone beats you up, virtually, when you enter your face in its user database.
I'm a bit unclear on this.
Does he mean that the faster he can process those satellite images,
the more lives they can bomb to pieces,
or
the less lives will be lost to friendly fire as the pilots shoot at everything that moves while they're waiting for targeting data?
Going
s/boffins/funny men in white lab coats/
all over their database...
How about taking a text to speech synthesizer and have it read out your man and info files to mp3s.
...." etc. ad nauseam...
Hours of fun listening to robot voice going:
"NAME
bison - GNU Project parser generator (yacc replacement)
SYNOPSIS
bison [ -b file-prefix ] [ --file-prefix=file-prefix ] [
-d ] [ --defines=defines-file ] [ -g ] [
There is an analogue to this: The art world.
For all intents and purposes there is no market whatsoever for paintings. Some ten thousand collectors make up the global buying public for modern art. Does that stop art production?
Nah. Even the smallest town in the world has one or two latter day Van Goghs churning out paintings for their closets, while working other jobs for a living.
If you look closely, you will notice that even today only one in a million bands makes significant money from music. And still every other basement has a band practising in it.
So the mass market dies. You get thousands of little Britney Spearses instead of one massive media monster. They sing at weddings, in pubs, and if you like them, you go to their web site, download their music and recommend the band to friends. Millions of musicians get to make some spare time cash. Only the dream of not having to work for a living, just churning out one CD each year, dies a deserved death. Who cares?
Definitely a classic of 20th century dystopic literature. Carries the threats of environmental pollution and corporate irresponsibility to their gruesome extremes, producing a world that stinks - literally, of course.
Acid rain, poisoned food, household implements that kill you and every other threat to the quality of living for any criiter on Earth that environmentalists in the 70s could imagine.
Well written, too. Good characters, relentless plot.
John Brunner's other classic in the same vein is Stand On Zanzibar, which I remember very little of, as it's fifteen years since I read it. Pretty good as well, I seem to recall.
attempting to get the most bang for their bucks.
Guess I failed. Sigh.
Now why does that remind me of a certain energy softdrink commercial?
Let's hope future cultures don't worship frenetic music and caffeine...
If you're right, do enlighten me.
US businessman bought thousands of mummies - remember, they mummified anybody who could afford it back then, not just rulers - thinking of reusing the wrapping cloth as fiber for paper production. Turned out it was a waste of time, so the mummies ended up in the factory boilers.
They were dirt cheap back then.
I'll try to research it when I have more time. It's a nice bit of grotesque trivia, eh?
Now imagine that the pyramids were nuclear waste disposal sites and that all those dread pictorial warnings of demons and death adorning them to warn off graverobbers that you know from Indiana Jones actually were warnings about nuclear radiation.
"You will die a slow and horrible death, if you enter here!"
Yeah right, said graverobbers throughout the millennia. Egyptian jewelry and pottery from those graves have adorned houses and women everywhere. They were fashionable in the 1920's, I believe.
Mummies were used for fuel in the USA a hundred years ago.
Hundreds of thousands of people would have been exposed to radiation before we finally gained an inkling into its dangers in the fifties.
It's rather improbable that our culture will last the 100,000 years that our nuclear waste will remain highly dangerous, so the above scenario is inevitable. People are curious and they do not believe in warnings of unseen, tasteless, odorless dangers. Better think of a way to hide the stuff well enough to stay inaccessible for that time.
Impossible? Well fancy you saying that! That's exactly why I have a problem with nuclear power generation!
In Momo, a small girl and her turtle stop the time thieves who hoard people's time in their grey vaults and smoke it in their cigars...and so on...
Satire? Hm. Okay, a very friendly suburban version of satire, nothing hurtful or mean. No slashdot trolls anywhere...
For satire, I really prefer Robert Rankin - 'Armageddon, the Musical' or 'A Dog Called Demolition' or 'Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls.' More in the vein of Monty Python.
Of course AOL will keep supporting Mozilla and WinAmp at some level. They make for lovely bargaining chips in negotiating with the Empire. This way AOL doesn't come as a begging pauper to the negotiations. Just making it onto the Win XP desktop must have cost enough as it is. We'll never know, of course.
I seem to remember that a Silicon Valley highschool teacher earns about four times as much as her equivalent in Finland and still has trouble making ends meet.
US$50 is just about what I make as a freelance technical translator, and I live quite comfortably working just 50 hours a month or less.
Apartment rents in Helsinki are three times as high as in Berlin, but a bit lower than in central London, I think.
How about this new HPA High Performance Architecture on the Business Inkjet 2200?
They may talk about opening intefaces, but meanwhile they keep reinventing the winprinter.
This HPA appears to do the rasterizing in the driver and then send that compressed to the printer.
Could someone with programming experience tell me how much work it would be to implement that in Linux, if HP actually released some specs on it? It doesn't sound as hopeless as a regular GDI printer, does it?
on this one page they claim Linux support for their new HP 2200/2250 printers: Wider operating system compatibility (Yeah, right) The only pity is that the base model, the 2200, does not and will probably not ever get supported, as it's another variation of a WinPrinter. HP keeps sending me those automated responses, but so far they haven't fixed the lies on that page (Like "Lower printing costs"). I don't think I'll ever buy HP again.