Has anyone noticed that MS has completely stop any semblance of innovation or improvement upon products, and is now instead chasing every single idea in Tech simultaneously?
So when has their approach been different from that?
From the very first release of the "IBM PC" running DOS, the IBM/Microsoft strategy has been to watch what the flock of independent developers and small companies develops, watch the reaction of "the Market", and when someone develops something that sells, either buy them out or (if the little guys have dreams of making it as an independent) write a quick-and-dirty knockoff and use the overwhelming IBM/MS marketing budget to take over. If you're the "market leader", you can do this; nobody else much can.
Of course, since Microsoft became the semi-independent actor they are now (while still having IBM as their one huge client and supporter), with control of the "market leader" OS, they can also use another strategy: Package their knockoff with the OS, in such a way that users find it difficult and confusing to use anything else. Then the competition is rapidly eliminated from their customers' machines, and they control the market for the product without the need to use their marketing budget. The wording of TFA implies that this is what they're planning.
In some circles, this is known as "doing a Netscape" on the competition, since it's the way that Microsoft drove Netscape out of business. It works for Microsoft. It probably won't work for you or me, because we don't control the market-leader OS.
Ya just gotta understand how our Capitalist system actually works (as opposed by how economic theology says it should work).
[That last comment should suffice to get me a "flamebait" rating, as the amateur economic theologists come out of the woodwork and fire up a flame war.;-]
I don't get it. I cannot be a morality reason...since OTB for horse races and apparently some lotteries can be planed online...so, what is the big deal with banning online gambling?
Simple. The state doesn't get its cut from online gambling.
In every case of legalizing gambling that I've read about, the primary argument from its proponents has been the revenues to the state, which will keep down the need for other tax increases. In other words, we'll tax the idiots who gamble rather than you.
And you can bet that the politicians behind your local gambling establishments are getting their own payments for their support.
None of this applies to online gambling, which will be run by people outside the reach of the local government. So it natural that it should be outlawed. Why would a state allow something that can't be taxed (and doesn't provide kickbacks to local politicians)?
Similar incidents have been reported by people with hamsters and cats. The cat sees a small, furry thing, goes into stalk-and-pounce mode... and the hamster responds by wanting to play with the cat. The cat is puzzled, and eventually treats the hamster like a kitten rather than a meal. Of course, it doesn't always work, and some hamsters do get eaten, but most of them seem to survive and live with the cat.
I find the number of people that spend quite a lot of money in English school for 6 years (or more) and speak but a mediocre English staggering. I wonder why that is? Maybe it has to do with English being hard. Yes. Hard. It might be easy for you, but I have dozens of English books around me so that I don't screw up too badly.
I've seen a number of debates over which languages are the most difficult on the planet. The winners in this "contest of shame" are always the ones with the most insane writing systems. First place seems to be a tie between Japanese and Korean, because they both use a jumbled mixture of home-grown phonetic writing plus borrowed Chinese characters. Second place is approximately a tie between the Chinese languages ("dialects";-) and English.
It's common for people not familiar with Chinese writing to claim that it's the world's worst. But in fact it has a significant phonetic component, and when you compare it with the irregularities of English spelling, they turn out to have roughly the same level of phonetic insanity. In most text, English spelling is about as phonetic as Chinese, and about as difficult to learn.
As a result of this, plus the unfortunate fact that English has become the world's "lingua franca" over the past century, some people whose native languages are not English have made a modest proposal: The people in the world who are forced to use English should gang up on the English-speaking part of the world (whom they outnumber), and develop a phonetic writing system for English. They wouldn't try to impose it on the English-speaking people; they would sneak it in through the back door.
They would start by presenting it as a teaching aid. There are already several good candidates for this used in schools in English-speaking countries. They really only need pick one as an international standard. Then they escalate by converting publications in their own countries to this phonetic system. The emphasis would not be converting the English-speaking countries to use it, because this wouldn't happen. Rather, the emphasis would be on converting the non-English parts of the world to using the phonetic system for their own purposes, and the traditional English spelling when dealing with native English speakers.
The idea would be that this approach could make learning English much easier for the rest of the world. And most documents written phonetically could be re-written by computer software with only a bit of human editing. If this system were established, the result could eventually be the slow adoption of the phonetic system by native English speakers.
It's sorta like how the metric system spread throughout the world, and is even making strong inroads in the UK and America. If done right, eventually the English-speaking people would succumb to their natural laziness, and use the easy system. The traditional spelling is a big waste of time to them, too, you know, especially during their school years.
If this seems like a good idea, you should talk it up with friends. Mention it in other online fora like this one. Maybe eventually people outside the English-speaking countries will take it seriously, and do it. It could save everyone a lot of time, and finally give English a decent writing system.
I believe the databases exist, but they couldn't extract the data because it was in Access 97 format, and their field agents were using Access 2007.
You may be right. I do recall, a few years back, reading of an attempt by a government agency (IRS? DOJ?) to do a review of their financial records for the previous decade, to determine whether profit/loss figures were accurate. The story was that Microsoft couldn't extract the data from their archives, because they couldn't completely decode the obsolete data formats.
I also remember thinking "Yeah, right!" when I heard that. But then it occurred to me: This was not just a lame excuse to fend off the revenooers. It was also a message to managers anywhere: Use our financial software, and we can guarantee that your old financial records won't be available to government investigators after a few years. That's gotta be an important marketing claim. I'll bet their salesmen are using it right now in their battle against ODF and other such standards.
You really are coming accross as a chauvinist, you know? Why do you assume English is an obligatory language?
Maybe because he (she?) noticed that the story was about people in Israel, where nearly everything is bilingual Hebrew/English (with sometimes Arabic as a third, but not always). It's difficult to find anyone in Israel who doesn't speak English to some degree.
This is no more chauvinistic than expecting a Swiss citizen to be able to handle both German and French, or a Finnish citizen to speak both Finnish and Swedish. It's just familiarity with the country. Some Israelis don't speak English, true, but you might be surprised how difficult it is to find them.
Actually, it's a problem for visitors who want to practice their Hebrew. When Israelis hear an American or British accent, they almost always switch to English so they can practice it with a native speaker. I've had the same problem in Finland and Sweden, where everyone is always studying English and wants to practice it on every English-speaking visitor. I've also heard the same complaint from people studying Japanese who visit Japan.
Example of english -> spanish -> english -> german -> english -> russian -> english ->... babelfish translation
Some months ago, I saw a demo of a site that automated this, mostly for humorous purposes. But I neglected to write down the URL, and now I can't seem to find it via google. Anyone know what it might have been?
It's always pretty funny to see how far computer translation hasn't come in all these years...
[O]ne of the guys I worked with came from Pakistan. He said he could live the rest of his life in PK on $150,000 (converted to local currency) with a nice house, servants, and no worries.
Hey, give the Microsoft management a break here. They've only been doing this bribery thing since about 1999, when they started making "campaign contributions" to help bring about a US administration that would stop the Justice Dept's lawsuit and settle on terms favorable to MS.
But, let's face it, 8 years really isn't enough time to figure out the rules for bribery everywhere in the world. To MS's management, $400,000 may not seem like a large amount. Most of their experience is with bribing US government officials, and that's probably somewhat of a minimal bribe in Washington. You can't get a nice house with servants in the US for $150,000, you know. You can't get a condo in DC (without servants) for that price.
But we can rest assured that MS's management is learning from this latest incident. They have people who read slashdot, so they have just been notified of the bribery "exchange rate" in Pakistan. As a result of their discussions with the legal folks in Nigeria, they are probably getting a feel for what's a reasonable price there. Next time, they won't make the mistake of over-bribing, since that tends to get noticed.
And we should all understand that corporate bribery is a lot more difficult than political bribery. Corporations are a lot more secretive with bribery, as they are with other company secrets, and it can take some time to learn just what sort of bribe various officers of different companies expect.
So give them time. In another decade or so, they'll have detailed internal databases detailing the proper approach to bribery in companies and governments worldwide. Then we won't hear stories about dumb mistakes like this one.
Actually, it's sorta funny they wouldn't already have access to a good database of bribery info. You'd expect that some of their "partners" or purchased companies would have it all sitting in a computer somewhere. Maybe they just haven't thought to ask around to see if the data is already available for purchase. Or, more likely, available for quiet download after a reasonable under-the-table payment.
If anyone knows where such a database might be found, maybe you should post the URL here. Think of all the companies you'll be helping. OK; forget that; I know you aren't going to give it out for free. But maybe some pointers to help the "just curious" reach you.
Oh give me a break. When was the last time you used "Fruit flies like a banana" in conversation? Are you an expert on the aerodynamic qualities of food?
Hey, you don't need to be an aerodynamics expert to understand that, for example, raspberries have very different flight characteristics than bananas. Obviously, raspberries would fly much more like banana blossoms than like bananas themselves.
That's the main reason that I wouldn't use "Fruit flies like a banana" in its aerodynamic sense. It's simply wrong. However, the sentence is quite true in its entomological diet sense.
Not that I've often used it in that sense, either. But I have wondered out loud what sort of insect a "time fly" might be. I don't seem to find it in any of the standard biological reference volumes.
Actually, I expect a full scale move to encryption for all web traffic.
And I expect to see an effort to outlaw all end-user encryption.
Nah; probably not. Well, OK; you'll see it, but it'll fail. It would outlaw https:/// URLs, which would shut down all internet commerce and banking. The big companies funding the re-election campaigns wouldn't tolerate that. Even the dumbest corporate manager or politician understands why you don't want your credit-card data going through the internet's tubes in the clear.
The first piece of advice from every network security analyst from the start has been: The only security is end-to-end encryption of everything. Anything other than this is BS, and doomed to failure for the reasons others have explained here.
And even the people who think that their government is run by angels who should have full access to everyone's secrets still agree that it'd be stupid to let your credit-card and banking info go out unencrypted. They understand that there are people much more evil than government spooks on the Internet. There are corporate marketers. They want your credit-card and banking data. Some of them work for the telecom companies. If your credit-card and banking info is readable by your ISP, then it will be sold commercially to anyone with the right amount of money. Joe Sixpack understands that. Even a Congressman can understand that.
Sorry; the encryption genie is out of the bottle, and can't be stuffed back in.
At other times these unfortunate men are swindled out of their life's savings, in a familiar scam known as a "relationship". In extreme cases, the female may even be shrewd enough to entrap the unsuspecting male into a longer term form of servitude and punishment referred to as "marriage".
Sounds a lot like the Sex-For-Security Scam reported by The Onion about a decade ago. This one has been with us a long time. Yet the police do nothing about it.
Technically, the same sort of behaviour was sufficient to get plenty of German officials the noose at the Nueremberg trials.
Yeah, but they had also committed another serious crime: They worked for the losing side. If their side had won, they would have been part of the administration of "the sole remaining superpower", and they wouldn't even have been tried for those crimes.
How many cases are known in which a political leader on the winning side of a war was tried for crimes committed during the war? I'd think there would actually be a few, but I don't recall reading of this ever happening.
And if you look at the 18th century definition of "Misdemenor", you'll see that incompetence is, indeed, an impeachable offense.
Yeah, but this is a couple of centuries later, and it's the US. We don't really know what impeachable offenses are now, because we haven't had many votes on impeachment. But we have two recent data points:
1. Refusing to talk in public about who you've been having sex with is an impeachable offense.
2. Lying to the public and Congress about what the intelligence organizations have learned, in order to start a war, is not an impeachable offense.
We really don't know much more than this about what's impeachable and what isn't. And, as someone else pointed out, what qualifies as impeachable is not a legal question; it's solely a question of what Congress will vote on. If Congress votes to impeach someone for wearing mismatched socks, then wearing mismatched socks is an impeachable offense.
... across a distance of 1.5 million kilometers...
Huh? That's 5 light seconds. That barely gets you past the moon. It doesn't get you anywhere near another planet, much less out into the "universe".
Let's hold off talking about "huge distances" when we're dealing with at least a few thousand light years. (Even then, that doesn't get you outside the galaxy.)
Will they have enough clout to do something about the rampant port blocking? After all, this is against the main things that the Internet was designed for.
Women outlive men worldwide because men tend to be the lifelong breadwinners and take up the majority of the riskiest jobs which pull down the average....
Well, I've seen a number of statistical analyses concluding that the difference in lifespan between (American) men and women is entirely explained by two things: violence and smoking. In the past decade or so, smoking has slowly decreased among men, and there's no longer much of a difference between the sexes. The violence thing remains with us, especially with the country involved in yet another foreign war. But home-grown criminal violence is still more important that anything military, and there doesn't seem much prospect for cutting back on the tendency toward violence in human males.
I have wondered whether such data comes from minimal statistical studies. One can sometimes improve the significance of correlations by increasing the sample size. This might explain some of the different claims.
So now the shooter's state's law says the prosecution has to happen in the shooter's state, while the victim's state's law now says the prosecution has to happen in the victim's state?
Yeah, probably.;-)
Which in turn leads to more billable hours for the lawyers, as they debate the application of the Constitution's rule against "double jeopardy" (which isn't a TV show, but a legal term for being prosecuted more than once for a single offense).
I'd guess that they'd usually agree to prosecute in the victim's state. After all, California might not care if a Californian shoots a Nevadan, but Nevada probably would. And Californians might get upset if some Nevadans were hanging out at the border, gunning down Californians who came within range.
I do sorta recall that this was how the laws were changed. But I might be remembering wrong.
* Astronaut V is in Nation W's module, and shoots astronaut X, who is in Nation Y's module, but the bullet had to go through Nation Z's module to get there.
I've read of a similar case from some time back in the US. What happened was a shooting murder in which one of them (I've forgotten which) was in California, and the other was in Nevada. The lawyers discovered that in the shooter's state, the law stated that prosecution had to happen in the state where the death occurred, while in the victim's state, the prosecution had to be in the killer's state. So neither state had jurisdiction.
Needless to say, both states quickly revised their laws so this couldn't happen again. But the US Constitution has a ban on retroactive laws, so the guy still couldn't be prosecuted.
This has to have happened a few times in the past. Of course, the cops would likely look the other way if the victim's relatives or buddies "took the law into their own hands".
I tried googling for it, got zillions of hits, but none of them seem at all relevant. I also checked snopes.com just in case, but found nothing. So I'm tempted to add "[citation needed"].
Yeah; I've read of a few cases where people reportedly used this against government agencies that were demanding something of a company that would have cost a lot of money. The company lawyers just threaten to show up in court with the 13th Amendment defense, and offer an alternative: The agency can pay the company what it costs, plus 10%, and the company will do it. The government guys apply for the funding, they're now a bigger, more expensive agency, and everyone's happy.
Dunno how you'd go about finding the details, though. What I've seen amount to insider "leaks", for obvious reasons, mostly told as semi-jokes ("ha, ha, only serious") about how the government really works. But I think you just sorta have to stumble across such stories, and decide for yourself how much to believe.
It can be useful having a national law saying that you can't be forced to work for nothing (except as punishment for a crime of which you've been duly convicted).
Maybe in Deadwood (which I never watched), ISPs are state actors, but not in the U.S.
This is a frequent claim here, but the courts are highly likely to decide otherwise. A simple explanation is that recent legislation such as the PATRIOT Act effectively make all comm companies agents of the US government. Such "private" corporations are legally required to collect data for the US government and hand it over to government agencies on demand. And they are also required to keep these actions secret from their customers. It's hard to argue that they are not acting explicitly as agents of the government agencies for which they are collecting data. Yes, we can argue such here on/., but most judges would just snicker if you tried that line in their courtroom. Then they'd fine you for frivolous misuse of the court's time.
An interesting side issue that some companies seem to have figured out: The 13th Amendment outlaws "involuntary servitude". Whatever this means, it certainly means that the government can't require people to work for it without reasonable payment. So, while the main intent of the 13th Amendment may have been to outlaw slavery, and the "involuntary servitude" was included to outlaw hiding behind alternate terminology for what is really slavery, one of its effects is to guarantee that companies will be paid for anything mandated by the government. This rarely makes it into the courts, of course, because everyone involved understands what the result would be. So they just "come to an agreement", the data is collected and delivered, and payment is made. I suppose this is a Good Thing in general, since it mostly prevents the government from bandrupting a firm with unpaid mandates. But it's hard to be enthusiastic when you know that what a company is being paid for is spying on you for the government.
Further, there are tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures still alive on earth whose entire grasp of counting is "one, two, lots" or "one, two, three, lots" -- but, interestingly enough, never "one, two, three, four, lots."
Actually, this doesn't go all that far back. The reconstructed proto-language for the Indo-European family had nouns and adjectives marked for single, dual, and plural. Relics of this appear in most modern Indo-European languages, though English has simplified it almost out of existence. In Arabic and some other Semitic languages, there's a dual form that is still active, complicating life a lot for people trying to learn those languages. So the one/two/many system is still with us, built into many of our languages' basic morphology.
Of course, it's a mistake to make too much of such bits of linguistic evidence. You run the risk of noticing languages that lack such plural forms (such as the Chinese languages), and inferring that they must be either much more or much less advanced (it's not clear which) than the languages with plurals.
Less than a month ago, there was an interesting Language Log article illustrating a major pitfall of claims that some particular language can't express some important concept. The author shows that English is such a primitive language that most of its speakers have no words to express a class of concepts that are of growing importance in our modern world. These concepts can only be discussed by technical specialists using a vocabulary of words borrowed from other languages. While non-specialists may have heard those words, they are generally incapable of using them correctly or engaging in meaningful discussions of the concepts.
It's a useful example to keep in mind when reading comments on what other "primitive" languages can or can't express.
As I said before, abstraction is not an unknown concept (no pun intended).
Actually, it seems to have appeared fairly early on in the development of nervous systems. But there's an obvious hypothesis to explain it: Every critter needs to eat, and it's useful to distinguish edible things from not edible things. Without the ability to abstract, for example, every apple and every nut seen by a monkey would be a new sort of thing, without precedent. Every apple or every nut you see looks slightly different from the others you've seen recently. To recognize them well enough to put them into the "edible" class, while rejecting things like scorpions and snakes as "not edible", you need to do some minimal abstracting, so that those roundish, green-to-yellow-to-red things dangling from the ends of tree branches are recognized as something that goes into the "edible" class, while those long, skinny things moving along the branches or on the ground go in the "dangerous" class.
It's also useful to have a "sex" versus "no sex" abstraction, so that you don't go around trying to mate with everything in your environment, but try to choose just those objects that you can actually produce offspring with. This can be implemented with some simple chemical compounds and receptors that recognize them.
Of course, abstraction like this doesn't require advanced intelligence. Distinguishing Macintosh apples from Gravenstein apples is probably not necessary to a fruit-eating critter. And there's evidence that to a frog (for example), the main rule is "If it's small and moving, eat it". But even this requires a small degree of abstracting, which seems to be done mostly in the frog's retina. There's retinal circuitry that responds to a spot that covers only a few cells an moves across the retina, and sends the "eat" signal (with some coordinates) to the brain.
As others have pointed out, even our computer scientists' primitive neural nets do abstraction like this. It's a pretty basic capability, which probably appeared very soon after the first information (or state) processing cells evolved.
There's constant pressure from within the company to create new "products". Sometimes these mean new/more/bigger ads which usually result in people installing junkbusters.
Huh? Slashdot has ads? Who knew?
We could gain traffic by posting boobs or covering other subjects, but that would distract us from our real focus. And it would drive you guys away.
Well, my immediate thoughts was "That might entice me to turn the images and Web 2.0 junk back on." But then I thought "Nah; there's no shortage of them on other sites, some of which I have bookmarked. And I wouldn't go away, since I wouldn't see the boobs any more than I see the ads."
What might drive me away is if the site were "improved" to the point that I couldn't reduce it to plain text with no eye candy. Sites with actual information shouldn't bother with such junk; it just annoys those of us who are looking for information and don't like wasting time suppressing the junk.
Anyway, I'm somewhat sorry I missed the party. I had too many gigs. My sophisticated calculations conclude that the 20th anniversary will probably occur at Halloween, too, so I'll probably have too many gigs then, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone noticed that MS has completely stop any semblance of innovation or improvement upon products, and is now instead chasing every single idea in Tech simultaneously?
;-]
So when has their approach been different from that?
From the very first release of the "IBM PC" running DOS, the IBM/Microsoft strategy has been to watch what the flock of independent developers and small companies develops, watch the reaction of "the Market", and when someone develops something that sells, either buy them out or (if the little guys have dreams of making it as an independent) write a quick-and-dirty knockoff and use the overwhelming IBM/MS marketing budget to take over. If you're the "market leader", you can do this; nobody else much can.
Of course, since Microsoft became the semi-independent actor they are now (while still having IBM as their one huge client and supporter), with control of the "market leader" OS, they can also use another strategy: Package their knockoff with the OS, in such a way that users find it difficult and confusing to use anything else. Then the competition is rapidly eliminated from their customers' machines, and they control the market for the product without the need to use their marketing budget. The wording of TFA implies that this is what they're planning.
In some circles, this is known as "doing a Netscape" on the competition, since it's the way that Microsoft drove Netscape out of business. It works for Microsoft. It probably won't work for you or me, because we don't control the market-leader OS.
Ya just gotta understand how our Capitalist system actually works (as opposed by how economic theology says it should work).
[That last comment should suffice to get me a "flamebait" rating, as the amateur economic theologists come out of the woodwork and fire up a flame war.
I don't get it. I cannot be a morality reason...since OTB for horse races and apparently some lotteries can be planed online...so, what is the big deal with banning online gambling?
Simple. The state doesn't get its cut from online gambling.
In every case of legalizing gambling that I've read about, the primary argument from its proponents has been the revenues to the state, which will keep down the need for other tax increases. In other words, we'll tax the idiots who gamble rather than you.
And you can bet that the politicians behind your local gambling establishments are getting their own payments for their support.
None of this applies to online gambling, which will be run by people outside the reach of the local government. So it natural that it should be outlawed. Why would a state allow something that can't be taxed (and doesn't provide kickbacks to local politicians)?
Similar incidents have been reported by people with hamsters and cats. The cat sees a small, furry thing, goes into stalk-and-pounce mode ... and the hamster responds by wanting to play with the cat. The cat is puzzled, and eventually treats the hamster like a kitten rather than a meal. Of course, it doesn't always work, and some hamsters do get eaten, but most of them seem to survive and live with the cat.
I find the number of people that spend quite a lot of money in English school for 6 years (or more) and speak but a mediocre English staggering. I wonder why that is? Maybe it has to do with English being hard. Yes. Hard. It might be easy for you, but I have dozens of English books around me so that I don't screw up too badly.
I've seen a number of debates over which languages are the most difficult on the planet. The winners in this "contest of shame" are always the ones with the most insane writing systems. First place seems to be a tie between Japanese and Korean, because they both use a jumbled mixture of home-grown phonetic writing plus borrowed Chinese characters. Second place is approximately a tie between the Chinese languages ("dialects";-) and English.
It's common for people not familiar with Chinese writing to claim that it's the world's worst. But in fact it has a significant phonetic component, and when you compare it with the irregularities of English spelling, they turn out to have roughly the same level of phonetic insanity. In most text, English spelling is about as phonetic as Chinese, and about as difficult to learn.
As a result of this, plus the unfortunate fact that English has become the world's "lingua franca" over the past century, some people whose native languages are not English have made a modest proposal: The people in the world who are forced to use English should gang up on the English-speaking part of the world (whom they outnumber), and develop a phonetic writing system for English. They wouldn't try to impose it on the English-speaking people; they would sneak it in through the back door.
They would start by presenting it as a teaching aid. There are already several good candidates for this used in schools in English-speaking countries. They really only need pick one as an international standard. Then they escalate by converting publications in their own countries to this phonetic system. The emphasis would not be converting the English-speaking countries to use it, because this wouldn't happen. Rather, the emphasis would be on converting the non-English parts of the world to using the phonetic system for their own purposes, and the traditional English spelling when dealing with native English speakers.
The idea would be that this approach could make learning English much easier for the rest of the world. And most documents written phonetically could be re-written by computer software with only a bit of human editing. If this system were established, the result could eventually be the slow adoption of the phonetic system by native English speakers.
It's sorta like how the metric system spread throughout the world, and is even making strong inroads in the UK and America. If done right, eventually the English-speaking people would succumb to their natural laziness, and use the easy system. The traditional spelling is a big waste of time to them, too, you know, especially during their school years.
If this seems like a good idea, you should talk it up with friends. Mention it in other online fora like this one. Maybe eventually people outside the English-speaking countries will take it seriously, and do it. It could save everyone a lot of time, and finally give English a decent writing system.
I believe the databases exist, but they couldn't extract the data because it was in Access 97 format, and their field agents were using Access 2007.
You may be right. I do recall, a few years back, reading of an attempt by a government agency (IRS? DOJ?) to do a review of their financial records for the previous decade, to determine whether profit/loss figures were accurate. The story was that Microsoft couldn't extract the data from their archives, because they couldn't completely decode the obsolete data formats.
I also remember thinking "Yeah, right!" when I heard that. But then it occurred to me: This was not just a lame excuse to fend off the revenooers. It was also a message to managers anywhere: Use our financial software, and we can guarantee that your old financial records won't be available to government investigators after a few years. That's gotta be an important marketing claim. I'll bet their salesmen are using it right now in their battle against ODF and other such standards.
You really are coming accross as a chauvinist, you know? Why do you assume English is an obligatory language?
Maybe because he (she?) noticed that the story was about people in Israel, where nearly everything is bilingual Hebrew/English (with sometimes Arabic as a third, but not always). It's difficult to find anyone in Israel who doesn't speak English to some degree.
This is no more chauvinistic than expecting a Swiss citizen to be able to handle both German and French, or a Finnish citizen to speak both Finnish and Swedish. It's just familiarity with the country. Some Israelis don't speak English, true, but you might be surprised how difficult it is to find them.
Actually, it's a problem for visitors who want to practice their Hebrew. When Israelis hear an American or British accent, they almost always switch to English so they can practice it with a native speaker. I've had the same problem in Finland and Sweden, where everyone is always studying English and wants to practice it on every English-speaking visitor. I've also heard the same complaint from people studying Japanese who visit Japan.
Example of english -> spanish -> english -> german -> english -> russian -> english -> ... babelfish translation
...
Some months ago, I saw a demo of a site that automated this, mostly for humorous purposes. But I neglected to write down the URL, and now I can't seem to find it via google. Anyone know what it might have been?
It's always pretty funny to see how far computer translation hasn't come in all these years
[O]ne of the guys I worked with came from Pakistan. He said he could live the rest of his life in PK on $150,000 (converted to local currency) with a nice house, servants, and no worries.
Hey, give the Microsoft management a break here. They've only been doing this bribery thing since about 1999, when they started making "campaign contributions" to help bring about a US administration that would stop the Justice Dept's lawsuit and settle on terms favorable to MS.
But, let's face it, 8 years really isn't enough time to figure out the rules for bribery everywhere in the world. To MS's management, $400,000 may not seem like a large amount. Most of their experience is with bribing US government officials, and that's probably somewhat of a minimal bribe in Washington. You can't get a nice house with servants in the US for $150,000, you know. You can't get a condo in DC (without servants) for that price.
But we can rest assured that MS's management is learning from this latest incident. They have people who read slashdot, so they have just been notified of the bribery "exchange rate" in Pakistan. As a result of their discussions with the legal folks in Nigeria, they are probably getting a feel for what's a reasonable price there. Next time, they won't make the mistake of over-bribing, since that tends to get noticed.
And we should all understand that corporate bribery is a lot more difficult than political bribery. Corporations are a lot more secretive with bribery, as they are with other company secrets, and it can take some time to learn just what sort of bribe various officers of different companies expect.
So give them time. In another decade or so, they'll have detailed internal databases detailing the proper approach to bribery in companies and governments worldwide. Then we won't hear stories about dumb mistakes like this one.
Actually, it's sorta funny they wouldn't already have access to a good database of bribery info. You'd expect that some of their "partners" or purchased companies would have it all sitting in a computer somewhere. Maybe they just haven't thought to ask around to see if the data is already available for purchase. Or, more likely, available for quiet download after a reasonable under-the-table payment.
If anyone knows where such a database might be found, maybe you should post the URL here. Think of all the companies you'll be helping. OK; forget that; I know you aren't going to give it out for free. But maybe some pointers to help the "just curious" reach you.
Oh give me a break. When was the last time you used "Fruit flies like a banana" in conversation? Are you an expert on the aerodynamic qualities of food?
Hey, you don't need to be an aerodynamics expert to understand that, for example, raspberries have very different flight characteristics than bananas. Obviously, raspberries would fly much more like banana blossoms than like bananas themselves.
That's the main reason that I wouldn't use "Fruit flies like a banana" in its aerodynamic sense. It's simply wrong. However, the sentence is quite true in its entomological diet sense.
Not that I've often used it in that sense, either. But I have wondered out loud what sort of insect a "time fly" might be. I don't seem to find it in any of the standard biological reference volumes.
Nah; probably not. Well, OK; you'll see it, but it'll fail. It would outlaw https:/// URLs, which would shut down all internet commerce and banking. The big companies funding the re-election campaigns wouldn't tolerate that. Even the dumbest corporate manager or politician understands why you don't want your credit-card data going through the internet's tubes in the clear.
The first piece of advice from every network security analyst from the start has been: The only security is end-to-end encryption of everything. Anything other than this is BS, and doomed to failure for the reasons others have explained here.
And even the people who think that their government is run by angels who should have full access to everyone's secrets still agree that it'd be stupid to let your credit-card and banking info go out unencrypted. They understand that there are people much more evil than government spooks on the Internet. There are corporate marketers. They want your credit-card and banking data. Some of them work for the telecom companies. If your credit-card and banking info is readable by your ISP, then it will be sold commercially to anyone with the right amount of money. Joe Sixpack understands that. Even a Congressman can understand that.
Sorry; the encryption genie is out of the bottle, and can't be stuffed back in.
At other times these unfortunate men are swindled out of their life's savings, in a familiar scam known as a "relationship". In extreme cases, the female may even be shrewd enough to entrap the unsuspecting male into a longer term form of servitude and punishment referred to as "marriage".
Sounds a lot like the Sex-For-Security Scam reported by The Onion about a decade ago. This one has been with us a long time. Yet the police do nothing about it.
Technically, the same sort of behaviour was sufficient to get plenty of German officials the noose at the Nueremberg trials.
;-)
Yeah, but they had also committed another serious crime: They worked for the losing side. If their side had won, they would have been part of the administration of "the sole remaining superpower", and they wouldn't even have been tried for those crimes.
How many cases are known in which a political leader on the winning side of a war was tried for crimes committed during the war? I'd think there would actually be a few, but I don't recall reading of this ever happening.
[Citations needed]
And if you look at the 18th century definition of "Misdemenor", you'll see that incompetence is, indeed, an impeachable offense.
Yeah, but this is a couple of centuries later, and it's the US. We don't really know what impeachable offenses are now, because we haven't had many votes on impeachment. But we have two recent data points:
1. Refusing to talk in public about who you've been having sex with is an impeachable offense.
2. Lying to the public and Congress about what the intelligence organizations have learned, in order to start a war, is not an impeachable offense.
We really don't know much more than this about what's impeachable and what isn't. And, as someone else pointed out, what qualifies as impeachable is not a legal question; it's solely a question of what Congress will vote on. If Congress votes to impeach someone for wearing mismatched socks, then wearing mismatched socks is an impeachable offense.
... across a distance of 1.5 million kilometers ...
Huh? That's 5 light seconds. That barely gets you past the moon. It doesn't get you anywhere near another planet, much less out into the "universe".
Let's hold off talking about "huge distances" when we're dealing with at least a few thousand light years. (Even then, that doesn't get you outside the galaxy.)
Will they have enough clout to do something about the rampant port blocking? After all, this is against the main things that the Internet was designed for.
Women outlive men worldwide because men tend to be the lifelong breadwinners and take up the majority of the riskiest jobs which pull down the average. ...
Well, I've seen a number of statistical analyses concluding that the difference in lifespan between (American) men and women is entirely explained by two things: violence and smoking. In the past decade or so, smoking has slowly decreased among men, and there's no longer much of a difference between the sexes. The violence thing remains with us, especially with the country involved in yet another foreign war. But home-grown criminal violence is still more important that anything military, and there doesn't seem much prospect for cutting back on the tendency toward violence in human males.
I have wondered whether such data comes from minimal statistical studies. One can sometimes improve the significance of correlations by increasing the sample size. This might explain some of the different claims.
So now the shooter's state's law says the prosecution has to happen in the shooter's state, while the victim's state's law now says the prosecution has to happen in the victim's state?
;-)
Yeah, probably.
Which in turn leads to more billable hours for the lawyers, as they debate the application of the Constitution's rule against "double jeopardy" (which isn't a TV show, but a legal term for being prosecuted more than once for a single offense).
I'd guess that they'd usually agree to prosecute in the victim's state. After all, California might not care if a Californian shoots a Nevadan, but Nevada probably would. And Californians might get upset if some Nevadans were hanging out at the border, gunning down Californians who came within range.
I do sorta recall that this was how the laws were changed. But I might be remembering wrong.
* Astronaut V is in Nation W's module, and shoots astronaut X, who is in Nation Y's module, but the bullet had to go through Nation Z's module to get there.
I've read of a similar case from some time back in the US. What happened was a shooting murder in which one of them (I've forgotten which) was in California, and the other was in Nevada. The lawyers discovered that in the shooter's state, the law stated that prosecution had to happen in the state where the death occurred, while in the victim's state, the prosecution had to be in the killer's state. So neither state had jurisdiction.
Needless to say, both states quickly revised their laws so this couldn't happen again. But the US Constitution has a ban on retroactive laws, so the guy still couldn't be prosecuted.
This has to have happened a few times in the past. Of course, the cops would likely look the other way if the victim's relatives or buddies "took the law into their own hands".
I tried googling for it, got zillions of hits, but none of them seem at all relevant. I also checked snopes.com just in case, but found nothing. So I'm tempted to add "[citation needed"].
the law of common decency?
So are there any known countries that honor such a law? I've never heard of one.
Since primates were in space before humans, space is obviously under Ape Law.
... Humans are primates, in particular we're a species in the "ape" subfamily. It follows that any human law is an "ape law".
Hmmm
Am I missing something here?
Yeah; I've read of a few cases where people reportedly used this against government agencies that were demanding something of a company that would have cost a lot of money. The company lawyers just threaten to show up in court with the 13th Amendment defense, and offer an alternative: The agency can pay the company what it costs, plus 10%, and the company will do it. The government guys apply for the funding, they're now a bigger, more expensive agency, and everyone's happy.
Dunno how you'd go about finding the details, though. What I've seen amount to insider "leaks", for obvious reasons, mostly told as semi-jokes ("ha, ha, only serious") about how the government really works. But I think you just sorta have to stumble across such stories, and decide for yourself how much to believe.
It can be useful having a national law saying that you can't be forced to work for nothing (except as punishment for a crime of which you've been duly convicted).
Maybe in Deadwood (which I never watched), ISPs are state actors, but not in the U.S.
/., but most judges would just snicker if you tried that line in their courtroom. Then they'd fine you for frivolous misuse of the court's time.
This is a frequent claim here, but the courts are highly likely to decide otherwise. A simple explanation is that recent legislation such as the PATRIOT Act effectively make all comm companies agents of the US government. Such "private" corporations are legally required to collect data for the US government and hand it over to government agencies on demand. And they are also required to keep these actions secret from their customers. It's hard to argue that they are not acting explicitly as agents of the government agencies for which they are collecting data. Yes, we can argue such here on
An interesting side issue that some companies seem to have figured out: The 13th Amendment outlaws "involuntary servitude". Whatever this means, it certainly means that the government can't require people to work for it without reasonable payment. So, while the main intent of the 13th Amendment may have been to outlaw slavery, and the "involuntary servitude" was included to outlaw hiding behind alternate terminology for what is really slavery, one of its effects is to guarantee that companies will be paid for anything mandated by the government. This rarely makes it into the courts, of course, because everyone involved understands what the result would be. So they just "come to an agreement", the data is collected and delivered, and payment is made. I suppose this is a Good Thing in general, since it mostly prevents the government from bandrupting a firm with unpaid mandates. But it's hard to be enthusiastic when you know that what a company is being paid for is spying on you for the government.
Further, there are tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures still alive on earth whose entire grasp of counting is "one, two, lots" or "one, two, three, lots" -- but, interestingly enough, never "one, two, three, four, lots."
Actually, this doesn't go all that far back. The reconstructed proto-language for the Indo-European family had nouns and adjectives marked for single, dual, and plural. Relics of this appear in most modern Indo-European languages, though English has simplified it almost out of existence. In Arabic and some other Semitic languages, there's a dual form that is still active, complicating life a lot for people trying to learn those languages. So the one/two/many system is still with us, built into many of our languages' basic morphology.
Of course, it's a mistake to make too much of such bits of linguistic evidence. You run the risk of noticing languages that lack such plural forms (such as the Chinese languages), and inferring that they must be either much more or much less advanced (it's not clear which) than the languages with plurals.
Less than a month ago, there was an interesting Language Log article illustrating a major pitfall of claims that some particular language can't express some important concept. The author shows that English is such a primitive language that most of its speakers have no words to express a class of concepts that are of growing importance in our modern world. These concepts can only be discussed by technical specialists using a vocabulary of words borrowed from other languages. While non-specialists may have heard those words, they are generally incapable of using them correctly or engaging in meaningful discussions of the concepts.
It's a useful example to keep in mind when reading comments on what other "primitive" languages can or can't express.
As I said before, abstraction is not an unknown concept (no pun intended).
Actually, it seems to have appeared fairly early on in the development of nervous systems. But there's an obvious hypothesis to explain it: Every critter needs to eat, and it's useful to distinguish edible things from not edible things. Without the ability to abstract, for example, every apple and every nut seen by a monkey would be a new sort of thing, without precedent. Every apple or every nut you see looks slightly different from the others you've seen recently. To recognize them well enough to put them into the "edible" class, while rejecting things like scorpions and snakes as "not edible", you need to do some minimal abstracting, so that those roundish, green-to-yellow-to-red things dangling from the ends of tree branches are recognized as something that goes into the "edible" class, while those long, skinny things moving along the branches or on the ground go in the "dangerous" class.
It's also useful to have a "sex" versus "no sex" abstraction, so that you don't go around trying to mate with everything in your environment, but try to choose just those objects that you can actually produce offspring with. This can be implemented with some simple chemical compounds and receptors that recognize them.
Of course, abstraction like this doesn't require advanced intelligence. Distinguishing Macintosh apples from Gravenstein apples is probably not necessary to a fruit-eating critter. And there's evidence that to a frog (for example), the main rule is "If it's small and moving, eat it". But even this requires a small degree of abstracting, which seems to be done mostly in the frog's retina. There's retinal circuitry that responds to a spot that covers only a few cells an moves across the retina, and sends the "eat" signal (with some coordinates) to the brain.
As others have pointed out, even our computer scientists' primitive neural nets do abstraction like this. It's a pretty basic capability, which probably appeared very soon after the first information (or state) processing cells evolved.
There's constant pressure from within the company to create new "products". Sometimes these mean new/more/bigger ads which usually result in people installing junkbusters.
Huh? Slashdot has ads? Who knew?
We could gain traffic by posting boobs or covering other subjects, but that would distract us from our real focus. And it would drive you guys away.
Well, my immediate thoughts was "That might entice me to turn the images and Web 2.0 junk back on." But then I thought "Nah; there's no shortage of them on other sites, some of which I have bookmarked. And I wouldn't go away, since I wouldn't see the boobs any more than I see the ads."
What might drive me away is if the site were "improved" to the point that I couldn't reduce it to plain text with no eye candy. Sites with actual information shouldn't bother with such junk; it just annoys those of us who are looking for information and don't like wasting time suppressing the junk.
Anyway, I'm somewhat sorry I missed the party. I had too many gigs. My sophisticated calculations conclude that the 20th anniversary will probably occur at Halloween, too, so I'll probably have too many gigs then, too.