"Hardness testing machine translation is whether you can do the translation, back and forth without loss or distortion of meaning. When I was in school, someone had written "Borras be with me - I am punching bear - bore me Baret bread" on the desktop. It is very nice if you are a teenager and speaks Swedish."
That was a roundtrip through norwegian, catalan, german, swedish and estonian, with Google Translate. I think it's pretty impressive, only the carving has been significantly distorted - and that was arguably distorted to begin with.
By comparison, taking a trip through german, french and spanish in Babelfish gives this result: "L' crucial test for automatic Übersetzungsystem is s' it can do to Roundtripübersetzungen without the loss d' information or the distortion of l' importance. When j' props in l' school, quelqu' it had " ; cut state; Mig me - I in l' perforates to a Flock; bear - baret" perforated bjornen mig PA; ; in the office. It' ; s rather gladly if you' ; as for a young person, and they speak of the Swedish."
Indeed, indeed. I am very glad you took this opportunity to inject a debate about religion in this discussion by comparing religions to viruses. Really, slashdot doesn't have nearly enough of them!
But for the next time, may I suggest you add a comment to clarify that Scientology is no different from all other religions in any significant way. You get even more upmods that way.
And why do you suppose it's only climate scientists who do this? How can you rely on any kind of science at all? After all, they may be just making it up in order to gain research grants. </ sarcasm>
"I don't think anyone is arguing that the CO2 is not antropogenic"
Oh yes, there are. The much quoted Australian denialist Ian Plimer, for instance, claimed very recently that "we cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes". That is contradicted by isotopic evidence as well as emission accounting, but that doesn't stop him from saying it.
Some deny that CO2 causes warming. Some deny that temperatures are rising. Some deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Some deny that humans emit significant CO2. Some deny that CO2 levels are rising. But AGW deniers quote each other for support even when their respective reasons for denial are totally incompatible. They are allied in the fight against their "establishment", just like IDers and young earth creationists are allied, and various conflicting theories of alternative medicine.are allied - and that's something that should set off people's bullshit detectors.
By comparison, on the other side of the fence... There was a well-published spat between Mann and Von Storch about climate sensitivity a few years back. There were quite harsh words used, and for a while, Von Storch (unwillingly) became a denialist darling. But when Balunias and Soon managed to get a denialist paper published in Climate Research, Von Storch was among the editors that resigned from that journal in protest. He's not quote-mined much today.
You want the rich to be taxed less than today which is what matters. I'm perfectly aware the rich will still pay more total taxes than the poor, but that is an extremely low bar for a tax system. Dropping a progressive scheme for a regressive one? No thanks.
You do not adress the deductibles problem at all. There's a reason countries with a high sales tax (like here, 25%) apply it to the final sale only. It's not because they want to be nice.
To make all businesses in a value-adding chain pay the full tax will be the same as pouring tar into the economy. But if you don't, then you get the billion-dollar problem of deductibles fraud. Which is why sales tax sucks.
No, Bing is a law professor known for having translated several good science fiction books to Norwegian long ago, and now being completely out of touch, in particular by having spectacularly un-enlightened views on copyright enforcement the need for IP law reform.
Worst thing is, Microsoft actually paid good money for his domain name.
"The rich person did not have to spend all of their money just to survive, and was able to reinvest some it, or god forbid, even donate some to charities."
So, you're basically saying he should rely on trickle-down working - again?
Yours is a very revealing piece. You agree that the rich will be taxed less, and argue that they deserve it, and that is best for everyone anyway.
No, FairTax is not the most poor-friendly tax ever. The problem with sales taxes is that they are regressive - poor people have to spend a far larger share of their income on consumption than rich people, often all they have. "Fixing" this regressiveness with a tax rebate is adding insult to injury to those people so poor they won't even get the whole benefit of the rebate.
I propose a high, flat income tax with a sizable demogrant (like a tax rebate, but you can get back more than you put in) to make it progressive. There, now you've heard about a more fair proposal than FairTax.
Income taxes, especially flat ones, are easier to administrate than sales taxes. Sales taxes need to be (and are) refundable for businesses that buy things to produce other things. Otherwise, productivity really suffers, especially for businesses far down the value-adding chain. But when sales taxes are refundable, small business owners will buy blu-ray players and take them home as "necessary business expenditures", and it will be horribly difficult and expensive to catch them at it. That's sales tax fraud, one of the big headaches of countries with a high sales tax.
Sales tax does have some advantages. It discourages unnecessary consumption, and thus has environmental benefits, but since consumption varies so widely in its environmental impact, this is a very crude tool to reduce our footprint. For the environment, it's better to slap a tax on pollution directly, and ideally plow it back in the demogrant. That way above-average polluters compensate below-average polluters for their impact, and that's as it should be.
"A real time embedded programmer wants control over memory management. He can't tolerate garbage collection compromising his execution scheduling deadlines. It's a lot more than just Doom 8. It's your car. It's the airliner you ride in. It's process control."
But you know what he really should use in these spaces anyway? That's right, Ada. I do not want my life to depend on low-level C++ !! Ada is, to date, the only non-academic language capable of supporting formal verification of hard real-time systems (SPARK and RavenSPARK).
You can get pointer arithmetic in Ada, as long as you sign the proper disclaimer of warranty forms and send them to the DOD in triplicate.
Seriously, you can get pretty much anything in Ada, it's just that you need to be very, very verbose about the things you really shouldn't be asking for.
There's one thing classic conspiracy theory conspiracies very, very rarely have, and we're looking at it right now: Whistleblowers. It's not the first time either, that insiders have complained about political pressure.
So we're not exactly talking chemtrails-style conspiracies here, rather the kind of modest conspiracy that happens from time to time - such as a conspiracy to deny a link between smoking and cancer, or a conspiracy to deny that there's anything wrong with Iceland's economic situation. Not generation-spanning, all-encompassing conspiracies, just a couple of interest groups getting together and see if the can postpone inconvenient revelations (or their impact) a couple of more years.
> I should become an investor because the current ones are freakin retarded
You might certainly want to consider that, because it wouldn't be the first time investors as a group were marching off the cliffs...and there ARE profits to be had. Just remember Keynes' words if you are going to bet against the oil price: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Maybe better to follow the crowd anyway, and get out just in time, before everyone else, right?
> So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
As one witty peak oiler explained it: If I want an apple, I may pay a dollar for it. If I really want and apple, I might pay a thousand dollars for it. But no matter how much I like apples, there's one price I will never pay for one, and that is twoapples.
We will not "suddenly" run out of oil. What will happen, is that prices will become high, and stay high - even in the face of things which would previously send them into the cellar, such as, I don't know, a global recession.
I would argue that Godwin applies perfectly here. That it has been allowed to become a "meme" just means a significant part of the political spectrum have commited Godwin on themselves - and in the usual Godwin way, made fools of themselves.
Their business model, now enthusiastically adopted by all the other console makers, Apple on the iPhone, etc. has always been to have an iron grip over who and what gets the privilege of running on "their" devices. So whatever market there could be for non-kid games on the Wii, it doesn't matter, because Nintendo have developers' arms twisted behind their backs in order to preserve the Wii's "image".
Do you use the upgrade function or just reinstall and keep your home directories? I admit I've often done the latter in the past, since it's so easy to install packages as you need them anyway, and packages lying around from the old system have caused me trouble in the past.
But this time it was a bit more serious. I tried to upgrade just using the handy little upgrade button, figuring, what's the worst that can happen, I can just do a full reinstall if it fails.
Then the upgrade program met a package it couldn't uninstall (broken uninstall script returning an error, I think), panicked, and gave up. System was not very usable, so I rebooted.
Or I tried to reboot. The boot process barfed at mounting the file system. Early enough that Ubuntu's "recovery mode" program didn't even get a chance to run.
Let's just say fixing the mess was not something I would want to guide my mother through.
Now that I've done it, though, I'd say the system itself is very nice. Encrypted home directory just works, as do a number of other little things you had to do manually two cycles ago (and yes, those manual changes were the kind that wreaked havoc on the automatic update process). Ubuntu is progressing nicely, but they need to do more testing on the update function. It just should not, never! leave the system in an unbootable state.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hardness testing machine translation is whether you can do the translation, back and forth without loss or distortion of meaning. When I was in school, someone had written "Borras be with me - I am punching bear - bore me Baret bread" on the desktop. It is very nice if you are a teenager and speaks Swedish."
That was a roundtrip through norwegian, catalan, german, swedish and estonian, with Google Translate. I think it's pretty impressive, only the carving has been significantly distorted - and that was arguably distorted to begin with.
By comparison, taking a trip through german, french and spanish in Babelfish gives this result:
"L' crucial test for automatic Übersetzungsystem is s' it can do to Roundtripübersetzungen without the loss d' information or the distortion of l' importance. When j' props in l' school, quelqu' it had " ; cut state; Mig me - I in l' perforates to a Flock; bear - baret" perforated bjornen mig PA; ; in the office. It' ; s rather gladly if you' ; as for a young person, and they speak of the Swedish."
Indeed, indeed. I am very glad you took this opportunity to inject a debate about religion in this discussion by comparing religions to viruses. Really, slashdot doesn't have nearly enough of them!
But for the next time, may I suggest you add a comment to clarify that Scientology is no different from all other religions in any significant way. You get even more upmods that way.
And why do you suppose it's only climate scientists who do this? How can you rely on any kind of science at all? After all, they may be just making it up in order to gain research grants. </ sarcasm>
"I don't think anyone is arguing that the CO2 is not antropogenic"
Oh yes, there are. The much quoted Australian denialist Ian Plimer, for instance, claimed very recently that "we cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes". That is contradicted by isotopic evidence as well as emission accounting, but that doesn't stop him from saying it.
Some deny that CO2 causes warming. Some deny that temperatures are rising. Some deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Some deny that humans emit significant CO2. Some deny that CO2 levels are rising. But AGW deniers quote each other for support even when their respective reasons for denial are totally incompatible. They are allied in the fight against their "establishment", just like IDers and young earth creationists are allied, and various conflicting theories of alternative medicine.are allied - and that's something that should set off people's bullshit detectors.
By comparison, on the other side of the fence... There was a well-published spat between Mann and Von Storch about climate sensitivity a few years back. There were quite harsh words used, and for a while, Von Storch (unwillingly) became a denialist darling. But when Balunias and Soon managed to get a denialist paper published in Climate Research, Von Storch was among the editors that resigned from that journal in protest. He's not quote-mined much today.
You want the rich to be taxed less than today which is what matters. I'm perfectly aware the rich will still pay more total taxes than the poor, but that is an extremely low bar for a tax system. Dropping a progressive scheme for a regressive one? No thanks.
You do not adress the deductibles problem at all.
There's a reason countries with a high sales tax (like here, 25%) apply it to the final sale only. It's not because they want to be nice.
To make all businesses in a value-adding chain pay the full tax will be the same as pouring tar into the economy. But if you don't, then you get the billion-dollar problem of deductibles fraud. Which is why sales tax sucks.
Microsoft is a company, right, there are many people working there? So perhaps "Microsoft are not Google either" is better.
"Bing is just a shiny object."
No, that would be bling. Bing is just.. bing.
No, Bing is a law professor known for having translated several good science fiction books to Norwegian long ago, and now being completely out of touch, in particular by having spectacularly un-enlightened views on copyright enforcement the need for IP law reform.
Worst thing is, Microsoft actually paid good money for his domain name.
"The rich person did not have to spend all of their money just to survive, and was able to reinvest some it, or god forbid, even donate some to charities."
So, you're basically saying he should rely on trickle-down working - again?
Yours is a very revealing piece. You agree that the rich will be taxed less, and argue that they deserve it, and that is best for everyone anyway.
No, FairTax is not the most poor-friendly tax ever. The problem with sales taxes
is that they are regressive - poor people have to spend a far larger share of
their income on consumption than rich people, often all they have. "Fixing"
this regressiveness with a tax rebate is adding insult to injury to those people
so poor they won't even get the whole benefit of the rebate.
I propose a high, flat income tax with a sizable demogrant (like a tax
rebate, but you can get back more than you put in) to make it progressive.
There, now you've heard about a more fair proposal than FairTax.
Income taxes, especially flat ones, are easier to administrate than sales taxes.
Sales taxes need to be (and are) refundable for businesses that buy things to
produce other things. Otherwise, productivity really suffers, especially for
businesses far down the value-adding chain. But when sales taxes are refundable,
small business owners will buy blu-ray players and take them home as "necessary
business expenditures", and it will be horribly difficult and expensive to catch
them at it. That's sales tax fraud, one of the big headaches of countries with a
high sales tax.
Sales tax does have some advantages. It discourages unnecessary consumption, and
thus has environmental benefits, but since consumption varies so widely in its
environmental impact, this is a very crude tool to reduce our footprint. For the
environment, it's better to slap a tax on pollution directly, and ideally plow
it back in the demogrant. That way above-average polluters compensate
below-average polluters for their impact, and that's as it should be.
Another example: the LEGO company is anal about it being called "LEGO bricks" and not "Legos".
If not, perhaps WE can pay to have them removed.
Your three first sentences are wrong, wrong and wrong...
Erlang isn't named after this guy. It's named after this guy.
"A real time embedded programmer wants control over memory management. He can't tolerate garbage collection compromising his execution scheduling deadlines. It's a lot more than just Doom 8. It's your car. It's the airliner you ride in. It's process control."
But you know what he really should use in these spaces anyway? That's right, Ada. I do not want my life to depend on low-level C++ !!
Ada is, to date, the only non-academic language capable of supporting formal verification of hard real-time systems (SPARK and RavenSPARK).
You can get pointer arithmetic in Ada, as long as you sign the proper disclaimer of warranty forms and send them to the DOD in triplicate.
Seriously, you can get pretty much anything in Ada, it's just that you need to be very, very verbose about the things you really shouldn't be asking for.
There's one thing classic conspiracy theory conspiracies very, very rarely have, and we're looking at it right now: Whistleblowers. It's not the first time either, that insiders have complained about political pressure.
So we're not exactly talking chemtrails-style conspiracies here, rather the kind of modest conspiracy that happens from time to time - such as a conspiracy to deny a link between smoking and cancer, or a conspiracy to deny that there's anything wrong with Iceland's economic situation. Not generation-spanning, all-encompassing conspiracies, just a couple of interest groups getting together and see if the can postpone inconvenient revelations (or their impact) a couple of more years.
> I should become an investor because the current ones are freakin retarded
You might certainly want to consider that, because it wouldn't be the first time investors as a group were marching off the cliffs...and there ARE profits to be had. Just remember Keynes' words if you are going to bet against the oil price: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Maybe better to follow the crowd anyway, and get out just in time, before everyone else, right?
> So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
As one witty peak oiler explained it: If I want an apple, I may pay a dollar for it. If I really want and apple, I might pay a thousand dollars for it. But no matter how much I like apples, there's one price I will never pay for one, and that is twoapples.
We will not "suddenly" run out of oil. What will happen, is that prices will become high, and stay high - even in the face of things which would previously send them into the cellar, such as, I don't know, a global recession.
I would argue that Godwin applies perfectly here. That it has been allowed to become a "meme" just means a significant part of the political spectrum have commited Godwin on themselves - and in the usual Godwin way, made fools of themselves.
Bad boy.
Their business model, now enthusiastically adopted by all the other console makers, Apple on the iPhone, etc. has always been to have an iron grip over who and what gets the privilege of running on "their" devices. So whatever market there could be for non-kid games on the Wii, it doesn't matter, because Nintendo have developers' arms twisted behind their backs in order to preserve the Wii's "image".
Do you use the upgrade function or just reinstall and keep your home directories? I admit I've often done the latter in the past, since it's so easy to install packages as you need them anyway, and packages lying around from the old system have caused me trouble in the past.
But this time it was a bit more serious. I tried to upgrade just using the handy little upgrade button, figuring, what's the worst that can happen, I can just do a full reinstall if it fails.
Then the upgrade program met a package it couldn't uninstall (broken uninstall script returning an error, I think), panicked, and gave up. System was not very usable, so I rebooted.
Or I tried to reboot. The boot process barfed at mounting the file system. Early enough that Ubuntu's "recovery mode" program didn't even get a chance to run.
Let's just say fixing the mess was not something I would want to guide my mother through.
Now that I've done it, though, I'd say the system itself is very nice. Encrypted home directory just works, as do a number of other little things you had to do manually two cycles ago (and yes, those manual changes were the kind that wreaked havoc on the automatic update process).
Ubuntu is progressing nicely, but they need to do more testing on the update function. It just should not, never! leave the system in an unbootable state.
En la venonta, espereble.