And who decides which of these groups are determining targets that are valid, as opposed to pursuing an agenda?
Ultimately, if you create a system that allows someone to orchestrate attacks on someone without judicial oversight and without letting the would-be victim get a chance to defend themselves against whatever grivances you might have, you're creating a system that is begging someone to abuse it.
We have courts for a reason. Lynch mobs are no way to get justice.
You miss the point entirely. While I don't know enough about Esperanto to discuss the merits of using it as an intermediate language, the point was that English certainly is NOT suitable if you want to be able to translate between arbitrary languages via an intermediate language - it is simply far too ambiguous.
Personally I doubt that ANY language would be suitable for the task - I don't think you'll be able to do anything resembling correct mappings via a third language without adding a lot of additional information.
I don't think English has few words, but it does in many areas have a relatively small "common" working vocabulary for most situations. That is, you'll be able to find an English word for most of your concepts, but many of them may not be commonly used and may be inappropriate to use in a translation outside specific contexts. You might find there are words that fit perfectly and would be suitable were you to write poetry or an epic novel, but that would make you sound like a pretentious twit if you used it in conversation, yet where the equivalent words in other languages are perfectly commonplace.
That's the case going to/from many languages, but if you're comparing it to Swedish, German or French, you run into the "complication" that English is a complete mish-mash of a Germanic base with about 40% of it's vocabulary coming from French. So many "English" words originating from both the Germanic languages and from French are still "there" in English but have fallen out of common use and aren't really suitable for a fairly generic translation.
The match between German and Swedish should be a lot more straightforward because the languages have evolved much closer alongside eachother.
Just to reply to myself, their current online dictionaries actually does reflect this problem for exactly the words I chose... How they'll handle this with the new structure isn't clear to me since they seem to believe that their English "backbone" description will be sufficient to define a word.
You're right. It'll be useless unless they map from each specific language to each target set, and they'll also require more than one target entry, and separate sets for each direction.
Here's an example. I chose it at random expecting to find a problem or two, but as you can see I could more or less go on and on for each iteration back and forth:
Norwegian "stein" can be translated to English at least as "stone" or "rock", however in English you will sometimes use "rock" to refer to a jewel for instance. That meaning would be lost on most Norwegian readers unless it's obvious from the context.
The right translation would instead be "juvel". Going the other direction again, "juvel" can be translated to "jewel" without many problems (except for the consideration of whether you want to use "gem" or "gemstone" instead). But if you want to translate "jewel" to Norwegian, you need to be aware that if you mean "jewel" as in a gem, you would translate it to "juvel", while if you mean "jewel" as in an ornament of precious metals or gems it would be more natural to translate it to "smykke".
Translating "smykke" back is more tricky, as in Norwegian that term encompass a much wider range of adornments than the English word "jewel", including chains, bracelets, ear-rings etc. that are not made of precious metals or gems or "lookalikes" - it could just as easily be wood, or natural stone or a variety of other materials.
In essence, their data structure seems fundamentally flawed, as it doesn't take into account the fact that MOST words map differently into MOST languages and have different mappings in both directions.
To do it properly, you need a many to many mapping from each word in each language to a set of target words in each language. Even if they restrict themselves from translating to/from English, they'd still have to expect
a one to many mapping in from English to each target language, and a one to many mapping from each target language and back.
But it presents gay characters in a positive light, implicitly approving of gay sex and relationships. The kind of people in question here don't take kindly to that.
Any source for that? The UK largely pioneered roundabouts for managing traffic flow (though they did not invent them), and has a higher number of roundabouts than most other countries in the world, with the number still rising. You might be thinking about older style "traffic circles" which differ by the fact that you often have to turn into them, possibly having to signal, and they are usually larger (Wikipedia has more on the distinction).
They often end up being replaced either by turning them into proper roundabouts or replacing them with other types of intersections as they don't have many of the benefits of modern roundabouts.
Seeing as the UK's public transport infrastructure depends extensively on buses since the rail networks are largely overcrowded, there would be no incentive to make them switch to red as it would make public transport worse. You apparently have missed that the major reason the government wants to "force motorists off the road" is because in congested areas it's the easiest way to make public transport faster and less prone to delays.
In London, for example, 70-80% of commuters use public transport, yet the streets are still clogged up during rush hour because of the large number of people that insist of using their car whether they need it or not, eating up a disproportionate part of available space.
Thus slowing down the car traffic in London further would be a disaster for public transport that would undo work that the government has already spent hundreds of millions on.
And pray tell, how do you determine who attacked you when the headers are unlikely to have ANYTHING to do with the sites linked to? What in your method of linking the two prevents someone from doing a joe job on a random site they don't like (sending out spam pointing you to a legit site in the hope of provoking a bad response)
You're making a lot of legal assumptions based on how the US legal system works here. Lycos might not be so lucky with regards to venue. They might also find themselves sued by ISP's the spammers are customers of, or even ISP's they spammers ISP's are customers of. Assuming that nobody that gets damaged from this will dare sue is naive at best.
The problem is that you aren't viewing the sites of people who have sent you spam. You're having a screensaver retrieve data from sites designated by Lycos for the expressed purposed of costing them money.
So what you are saying is that Lycos a) is admitting to on purpose target specific sites, b) admit that they are coordinating an attack on those sites with the express purpose of costing the sites money. Sounds like any lawsuit seeking damages from Lycos would be a slam dunk, and their officers should be very worried about criminal charges.
It's completely different. If someone steals from you, you can't legally steal from them in return. Legal self defense is just that - it applies to protecting your interests, not revenge or preemptive strikes.
If you see the convenience, then the rest is really a matter of a combination of how valuable your free time is to you and how much money you have. For some of us, that makes a media storage center worthwhile at current, for some it doesn't. I consider my spare time very valuable - I don't have much, and hence I'm willing to pay rather steep prices to get the convenience.
Once you start getting up in the several hundreds range it starts to get tedious to browse through them and pick the right disk. And besides, I have no desire to have 300+ DVD's (and growing rapidly) filling up my living room if I can put it all together with a file server in a cupboard somewhere.
It's not that it's "too much work" in the sense that it's tiresome, but frankly I'd much rather spend that time watching a good movie than trying to find that one particular DVD I wanted.
The one hope this has, is that it apparently has protection built in to ensure that it's only used as a "virtual extension cord". I.e. you need to have a cable subscription, and presumably you can still only receive one channel at a time, an to one location at a time. That makes it a lot more likely that you can argue that it's not fundamentally different from for instance time shifting with a VCR, which is allowed.
Thats common many places. The bureaucracy tends to have strict rules about how to handle consultations and how to handle questions and comments exactly because they are not elected and so their only way of ensuring there are no questions about the legitimacy of their actions is to hide it, follow orders from elected officials, or keep everything scrupulously to established procedures and document every step. Elected officials on the other hand can usually play the "I was elected, so I represent the will of the people" get out of jail free card, whether or not they actually give a shit about their constituents without being expected to back up their views with anything.
I've got about 300 DVD's, and I want them available on demand and there's no way I'm going to reencode anything in MPEG4. Filling 1.6TB is easy:) Add my almost-there MythTV setup and storage needs rapidly increase.
Archiving video is becoming a mainstream activity these days:-)
I'm really curious as to what would be a typical average reading speed for a native English speaker. For me it's my second language, and I don't have much problem with +/- 100 pages an hour depending on typesetting and language, and provided I start out reasonably rested. My fiancee who grew up speaking English reads a lot faster. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she could finish LOTR in 7-8 hours and still remember it better than me.
So? When I read it the first time (at about 10, I think) I spent about an hour on it each day, and completed it in 10 days (bet with my dad - if I did it in less than two weeks AND could answer questions about it afterwards, I'd get the C64 game) for a little more that 100 pages per hour. Reading it in one sitting would be tough, but then I've read it a few times by now and wouldn't need to spend as much time per page.
It's all culturally dependant. In many parts of Europe, making people use voice mail to reach you would make many people consider you rude, arrogant and not worth their time. I've seen my fiancee stop talking to people for weeks because they pissed her off by not picking up her phone, and personally I really hate using voicemail, often just ignoring mine (unless I'm waiting for an important message) and hardly ever leaving messages on peoples voicemails.
As for e-mail, at the moment I open my personal e-mail address (as opposed to my work address which I have to read) maybe once a month. I just don't have time to deal with it - people who have something important to tell me have other ways of reaching me. It'll likely change again when I have more time on my hands, but e-mail just isn't high priority for me at the moment (and I'm no newbie, I've been using e-mail regularly for more than ten years).
Keep in mind that in the US market small cars generally don't sell well, so nobody have wanted to push them in the US to any extent before, whereas in the rest of the world people care more about fuel consumption and don't mind (and in urban areas often see it as an advantage) if the car is small.
Sure, Linus accepts changes from a set of people he trusts. A lot of other people maintaining other Linux kernel trees ork that way as well. Even so, people CAN participate without contacts - there are plenty of people on the Linux kernel mailing list who'll happily look over your patches and recommend them to Linus if they're well done. But just as in a real bazaar not everyone will be prepared to trust complete strangers on their word alone.
I still don't think it's appropriate to talk about any cathedral forming around Linus - he is a central figure as a matter of respect and skills (of which diplomacy is getting more important than technical skills), not by virtue of any other authority. Unlike the priest in a cathedral, which has authority from the church and can ignore the suggestions from the people in the bazaar outside entirely, if Linus does something unpopular he'll be thrown aside and ignored.
The recent issues with the XFree86 license has shown that WHEN someone running an open source project truly try to operate a cathedral inside the bazaar, their lack of externally imposed authority WILL cause people to turn away from them when they misstep.
There's always authority structures, some more formal than others, but what matters is where that authority derives from. If the authority is a sign of respect for the work you do, then that is not necessarily a sign of a cathedral in itself. Particularly not when others are blatantly ignoring your authority all around you (maintaining alternative trees).
In fact, Linus has distanced himself more and more from authority in some ways by letting others handle maintenance of older versions, by more or less encouraging distribution vendors from maintaining their own patchsets and not distributing Linus kernels unmodified at all, by encouraging many projects to keep developing their stuff outside mainline if he doesn't think it's suitable for his tree.
Linus ISN'T a strong authority for Linux in many ways - there's lots of stuff he refuses to put in HIS tree that ends up in lots of the alternative trees and in the distributions anyways. Linus is important because he's pragmatic enough that most sane stuff sooner or later does make it in, and most silly stuff stays out, and hence he's a good middle neutral ground from the people that are driving major components forwards.
Linus doesn't direct or control the direction of Linux development, he asserts some degree of authority over when major changes makes it into a kernel that acts as a common baseline and clearinghouse.
Look at the variations in the kernels distributed with major distributions today. The differences aren't just minor changes, but major components like file systems, realtime support etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately, if you create a system that allows someone to orchestrate attacks on someone without judicial oversight and without letting the would-be victim get a chance to defend themselves against whatever grivances you might have, you're creating a system that is begging someone to abuse it.
We have courts for a reason. Lynch mobs are no way to get justice.
Personally I doubt that ANY language would be suitable for the task - I don't think you'll be able to do anything resembling correct mappings via a third language without adding a lot of additional information.
That's the case going to/from many languages, but if you're comparing it to Swedish, German or French, you run into the "complication" that English is a complete mish-mash of a Germanic base with about 40% of it's vocabulary coming from French. So many "English" words originating from both the Germanic languages and from French are still "there" in English but have fallen out of common use and aren't really suitable for a fairly generic translation.
The match between German and Swedish should be a lot more straightforward because the languages have evolved much closer alongside eachother.
Just to reply to myself, their current online dictionaries actually does reflect this problem for exactly the words I chose... How they'll handle this with the new structure isn't clear to me since they seem to believe that their English "backbone" description will be sufficient to define a word.
Here's an example. I chose it at random expecting to find a problem or two, but as you can see I could more or less go on and on for each iteration back and forth:
Norwegian "stein" can be translated to English at least as "stone" or "rock", however in English you will sometimes use "rock" to refer to a jewel for instance. That meaning would be lost on most Norwegian readers unless it's obvious from the context.
The right translation would instead be "juvel". Going the other direction again, "juvel" can be translated to "jewel" without many problems (except for the consideration of whether you want to use "gem" or "gemstone" instead). But if you want to translate "jewel" to Norwegian, you need to be aware that if you mean "jewel" as in a gem, you would translate it to "juvel", while if you mean "jewel" as in an ornament of precious metals or gems it would be more natural to translate it to "smykke".
Translating "smykke" back is more tricky, as in Norwegian that term encompass a much wider range of adornments than the English word "jewel", including chains, bracelets, ear-rings etc. that are not made of precious metals or gems or "lookalikes" - it could just as easily be wood, or natural stone or a variety of other materials.
In essence, their data structure seems fundamentally flawed, as it doesn't take into account the fact that MOST words map differently into MOST languages and have different mappings in both directions.
To do it properly, you need a many to many mapping from each word in each language to a set of target words in each language. Even if they restrict themselves from translating to/from English, they'd still have to expect a one to many mapping in from English to each target language, and a one to many mapping from each target language and back.
But it presents gay characters in a positive light, implicitly approving of gay sex and relationships. The kind of people in question here don't take kindly to that.
Not so for me. I get the horrible beta interface regardless how I access it.
They often end up being replaced either by turning them into proper roundabouts or replacing them with other types of intersections as they don't have many of the benefits of modern roundabouts.
In London, for example, 70-80% of commuters use public transport, yet the streets are still clogged up during rush hour because of the large number of people that insist of using their car whether they need it or not, eating up a disproportionate part of available space.
Thus slowing down the car traffic in London further would be a disaster for public transport that would undo work that the government has already spent hundreds of millions on.
And pray tell, how do you determine who attacked you when the headers are unlikely to have ANYTHING to do with the sites linked to? What in your method of linking the two prevents someone from doing a joe job on a random site they don't like (sending out spam pointing you to a legit site in the hope of provoking a bad response)
You're making a lot of legal assumptions based on how the US legal system works here. Lycos might not be so lucky with regards to venue. They might also find themselves sued by ISP's the spammers are customers of, or even ISP's they spammers ISP's are customers of. Assuming that nobody that gets damaged from this will dare sue is naive at best.
The problem is that you aren't viewing the sites of people who have sent you spam. You're having a screensaver retrieve data from sites designated by Lycos for the expressed purposed of costing them money.
So what you are saying is that Lycos a) is admitting to on purpose target specific sites, b) admit that they are coordinating an attack on those sites with the express purpose of costing the sites money. Sounds like any lawsuit seeking damages from Lycos would be a slam dunk, and their officers should be very worried about criminal charges.
It's completely different. If someone steals from you, you can't legally steal from them in return. Legal self defense is just that - it applies to protecting your interests, not revenge or preemptive strikes.
If you see the convenience, then the rest is really a matter of a combination of how valuable your free time is to you and how much money you have. For some of us, that makes a media storage center worthwhile at current, for some it doesn't. I consider my spare time very valuable - I don't have much, and hence I'm willing to pay rather steep prices to get the convenience.
It's not that it's "too much work" in the sense that it's tiresome, but frankly I'd much rather spend that time watching a good movie than trying to find that one particular DVD I wanted.
The one hope this has, is that it apparently has protection built in to ensure that it's only used as a "virtual extension cord". I.e. you need to have a cable subscription, and presumably you can still only receive one channel at a time, an to one location at a time. That makes it a lot more likely that you can argue that it's not fundamentally different from for instance time shifting with a VCR, which is allowed.
Thats common many places. The bureaucracy tends to have strict rules about how to handle consultations and how to handle questions and comments exactly because they are not elected and so their only way of ensuring there are no questions about the legitimacy of their actions is to hide it, follow orders from elected officials, or keep everything scrupulously to established procedures and document every step. Elected officials on the other hand can usually play the "I was elected, so I represent the will of the people" get out of jail free card, whether or not they actually give a shit about their constituents without being expected to back up their views with anything.
Archiving video is becoming a mainstream activity these days :-)
I'm really curious as to what would be a typical average reading speed for a native English speaker. For me it's my second language, and I don't have much problem with +/- 100 pages an hour depending on typesetting and language, and provided I start out reasonably rested. My fiancee who grew up speaking English reads a lot faster. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she could finish LOTR in 7-8 hours and still remember it better than me.
It's not that big :)
As for e-mail, at the moment I open my personal e-mail address (as opposed to my work address which I have to read) maybe once a month. I just don't have time to deal with it - people who have something important to tell me have other ways of reaching me. It'll likely change again when I have more time on my hands, but e-mail just isn't high priority for me at the moment (and I'm no newbie, I've been using e-mail regularly for more than ten years).
Worried about losing money in a market where small cars are notoriously unpopular more like it.
Keep in mind that in the US market small cars generally don't sell well, so nobody have wanted to push them in the US to any extent before, whereas in the rest of the world people care more about fuel consumption and don't mind (and in urban areas often see it as an advantage) if the car is small.
I still don't think it's appropriate to talk about any cathedral forming around Linus - he is a central figure as a matter of respect and skills (of which diplomacy is getting more important than technical skills), not by virtue of any other authority. Unlike the priest in a cathedral, which has authority from the church and can ignore the suggestions from the people in the bazaar outside entirely, if Linus does something unpopular he'll be thrown aside and ignored.
The recent issues with the XFree86 license has shown that WHEN someone running an open source project truly try to operate a cathedral inside the bazaar, their lack of externally imposed authority WILL cause people to turn away from them when they misstep.
There's always authority structures, some more formal than others, but what matters is where that authority derives from. If the authority is a sign of respect for the work you do, then that is not necessarily a sign of a cathedral in itself. Particularly not when others are blatantly ignoring your authority all around you (maintaining alternative trees).
In fact, Linus has distanced himself more and more from authority in some ways by letting others handle maintenance of older versions, by more or less encouraging distribution vendors from maintaining their own patchsets and not distributing Linus kernels unmodified at all, by encouraging many projects to keep developing their stuff outside mainline if he doesn't think it's suitable for his tree.
Linus ISN'T a strong authority for Linux in many ways - there's lots of stuff he refuses to put in HIS tree that ends up in lots of the alternative trees and in the distributions anyways. Linus is important because he's pragmatic enough that most sane stuff sooner or later does make it in, and most silly stuff stays out, and hence he's a good middle neutral ground from the people that are driving major components forwards.
Linus doesn't direct or control the direction of Linux development, he asserts some degree of authority over when major changes makes it into a kernel that acts as a common baseline and clearinghouse.
Look at the variations in the kernels distributed with major distributions today. The differences aren't just minor changes, but major components like file systems, realtime support etc.