Recall, if you will, the recent legal wranglings in California that made 'net cafes install surveilance cameras.
Yes, I hate having to go to internet cafes wearing a cloak, wide-brimmed hat (with tin-foil lining), dark sun glasses and a fake beard. People look at me like I'm some kind of nutter.
The big misconception in this, is that people believed they were anonymous in the first place.
But it is possible to be totally anonymous, isn't it? If I use the internet through a computer in an internet cafe (and pay by cash), or use one at a public library, then that is untraceable as far as I can see.
Do ordinary Joe Public people really believe they are anonymous when browsing the web? I would have thought that most people would have the sense to realise that when they are browsing the web from home, they will be tracable through their contract with thier ISP.
One thing anyone in the IT business should learn is to never ever under estimate microsoft.
A few years ago, I would have agreed with you. Now my response is:
Ooooh Microsoft is mad at me, I'm so scared! Microsoft is coming to get me! Oh no, don't let Microsoft come after me! They're so big and strong! Oh, protect me from Microsoft!
As someone who has travelled a bit and worked in a number of different countries, I expect it isn't that difficult to get a working visa for India. Getting a tourist visa takes a few hours if you visit the embassy. There's probably a bit more paperwork for a job visa, but I doubt it's that difficult.
Since I moved my site over to a php bases sytem, nothing beyond my index page gets a second look from google
Perhaps you are doing something wrong? All the dynamic PHP sites I know of are fully indexed by Google.
Get ready to tighten up those dynamic site scripts
on
Searching the 'Deep Web'
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· Score: 0, Redundant
My guess is that they will be looking at ways of automatically polling dynamic web sites to extract all the data from the database. So if a site has a page, for instance
www.site.com/index.asp?content=10,
the search engine will try content=1 to content=n to see what it gets.
Alternative, if you just need say 100 to 500 of the same design, you can get that put onto a writable CD for you by a CD duplication house fairly cheaply.
Two-way translations are a useless test of a translator.
No, they just show how crummy computer translations are. If you used did a similar test with human translators, you would get a similar text back most of the time. With good human tranlators, little if any meaning would be lost.
Don't call the test useless just because computers do so badly at it. It shows how difficult translation is.
We have been set up" could easily translate to "We have support"
Exactly. "We have been set up" could mean "We have support" or it could mean "we have been tricked" - two completely different things. How is a fricking machine going to understand which is the right meaning if it doesn't understand the context of what's happening? In a life and death situation, would you want a machine translating if it can't even understand the meaning of a simple sentence like "We have been set up"?
Solution: A sticker across the top of the device in all appropriate languages: "AVOID USE OF SLANG". Well, that's a partial solution. You also have to not hand it to an idiot.
But the problem isn't just slang.
I have taught languages, and one of the things that you realise is that people that don't speak a second language actually have a hard time analysing languages and realising what is colloquial, for instance, or when a sentence is simple for a foreign language speaker and when it isn't.
So many English speakers will think a sentence like "we've been set up" is very simple, because it uses little words, whereas many who have English as a second language would find it difficult to understand. ("Set up" is a phrasal verb, the "up" completely changes the meaning of the verb "set").
Language technology...is better than you may think.
I expect it is actually a lot worse than most people think. Yes, in specialised areas where you can use lookup tables it can work pretty well. But that's hardly suprising is it?
So how do you get soldiers and commanders speaking different languages in a theater of war to communicate effectively and not, for example, blow each other up mistakenly?
I think there is a simple answer to that question - use human translators! I would never trust a machine translation with my life.
I speak a second language to reasonably high standard, and so I realise that languages can be really subtle things. Sometimes things just don't translate directly, and they need interpretation e.g.
Non-English speaking soldier How's the new weapon system working?
US soldier It's hot! Damn hot!
Non-English speaking soldier Oh dear! It shouldn't be hot! You must stop using it immediately!
US soldier No I mean it rocks!
Non-English speaking soldier It's fastenings are insecure? Sounds like we should send an engineer immediately! Please cease using it!
Some things are healthy for the body, some things are healthy for the mind, and what's good for the body is not necessarily good for the mind and vice-versa.
For instance, during my finals at university getting blindingly drunk at the weekends was probably very bad for my body, but it really helped my mind. It got rid of the stress and I felt fresh again going back to my study. I'm not joking, I think it really helped.
It's like some people can't function properly unless they've had a coffee or a ciggie. May not be healthy for their body, but it helps their mind function.
and to be frank most effort is going on stuff that actually matters
I do think it matters a lot. Yes, I know standardisation of interfaces is very difficult, but we have the development of KDE apps and Gnome apps, for instance Gnumeric and Kspread. The developers of these programmes should not have to worry what desktop it will run on, they should work with generic programming interfaces.
I appreciate this is very difficult but as I said in my original post, it's a good thing to have both KDE and Gnome because then these issues can be tackled in a sensible and generic manner.
I've always thought that the reason having two (main) desktops (KDE and Gnome) is good is not necessarily because of the competition, but because there is a need to interoperate between the two, so sensible 'generic' programming interfaces need to be created. This should create more modular code, and modular code makes successful open source projects.
However, to what extent is this true? Can I, for instance, use just the Gnome file manager in KDE, and vice-versa? Is it an aim of these projects to make this level of interoperability a goal?
You think Catalan is dying out? As someone who lives in Catalunya, I'll tell you it's quite the opposite. Franco (the Spanish dictator who died in 1975) tried to outlaw it, and so for many years it was not spoken in schools. These days it is the principal language here, and I'm having to learn it myself just to be able to do business effectively here.
I read the other day that the troops in Iraq have a PDA thingy that automatically translates the local language into English. That is really going to disuade the troops from learning the local language and will keep a strong barrier of misunderstanding between the locals and the troops. Language isn't just about communicating fact, but it's about culture and ways of thinking.
Unfortunately most people who speak English as their mother tongue do not speak another language (by which I mean Brits, North Americans, Australians...)
This means that they tend to have very funny ideas about languages, and a distorted perspective on language issues. When you say "English is all over the world, and other languages are fast losing ground", what you mean to say is that many people use English as the "lingua franca". However, this does not mean that all those people are stopping using their mother tongues.
So you're not going to find all those Spanish, French, Chinese or whatever speakers suddenly stopping using their own languages and speaking exclusively in English. As far as I am aware, that isn't happening anywhere in the world.
So, if you want to make generalisations about English being many people's second language and being the new lingua franca, then fine, I agree with you. However, if you are trying to argue that other languages are dying out because of English, I would suggest you learn another language and hang out with native speakers of that language. Then you'll have a better perspective about language issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a powered-by-human ATM cash machine.
What, a money lender you mean? We did manage to organise things quite nicely before computers you know...
I live in Spain, but do a lot of business in the UK. Important snail mail that arrives to our UK offices is scanned and emailed to me.
That clip is classic! It sums up the problem with the current administration perfectly!
Given the anti-american semtiment in europe
It's anti-Bush sentiment. Of course Bush supporters don't see any difference, but there is one.
Recall, if you will, the recent legal wranglings in California that made 'net cafes install surveilance cameras.
Yes, I hate having to go to internet cafes wearing a cloak, wide-brimmed hat (with tin-foil lining), dark sun glasses and a fake beard. People look at me like I'm some kind of nutter.
The big misconception in this, is that people believed they were anonymous in the first place.
But it is possible to be totally anonymous, isn't it? If I use the internet through a computer in an internet cafe (and pay by cash), or use one at a public library, then that is untraceable as far as I can see.
Do ordinary Joe Public people really believe they are anonymous when browsing the web? I would have thought that most people would have the sense to realise that when they are browsing the web from home, they will be tracable through their contract with thier ISP.
One thing anyone in the IT business should learn is to never ever under estimate microsoft.
A few years ago, I would have agreed with you. Now my response is:
Ooooh Microsoft is mad at me, I'm so scared! Microsoft is coming to get me! Oh no, don't let Microsoft come after me! They're so big and strong! Oh, protect me from Microsoft!
(Thanks to MrBurns)
I personally think (in my opinion) that's a wonderful idea.
Well, if you did this you wouldn't be able to complain if India started taxing American goods that were competitive with local ones.
Its not a viable option.
Jeeze, you give up easily don't you?
As someone who has travelled a bit and worked in a number of different countries, I expect it isn't that difficult to get a working visa for India. Getting a tourist visa takes a few hours if you visit the embassy. There's probably a bit more paperwork for a job visa, but I doubt it's that difficult.
Or even better, use Apache mod rewrite
Since I moved my site over to a php bases sytem, nothing beyond my index page gets a second look from google
Perhaps you are doing something wrong? All the dynamic PHP sites I know of are fully indexed by Google.
My guess is that they will be looking at ways of automatically polling dynamic web sites to extract all the data from the database. So if a site has a page, for instance
www.site.com/index.asp?content=10,
the search engine will try content=1 to content=n to see what it gets.
Alternative, if you just need say 100 to 500 of the same design, you can get that put onto a writable CD for you by a CD duplication house fairly cheaply.
Two-way translations are a useless test of a translator.
No, they just show how crummy computer translations are. If you used did a similar test with human translators, you would get a similar text back most of the time. With good human tranlators, little if any meaning would be lost.
Don't call the test useless just because computers do so badly at it. It shows how difficult translation is.
We have been set up" could easily translate to "We have support"
Exactly. "We have been set up" could mean "We have support" or it could mean "we have been tricked" - two completely different things. How is a fricking machine going to understand which is the right meaning if it doesn't understand the context of what's happening? In a life and death situation, would you want a machine translating if it can't even understand the meaning of a simple sentence like "We have been set up"?
Solution: A sticker across the top of the device in all appropriate languages: "AVOID USE OF SLANG". Well, that's a partial solution. You also have to not hand it to an idiot.
But the problem isn't just slang.
I have taught languages, and one of the things that you realise is that people that don't speak a second language actually have a hard time analysing languages and realising what is colloquial, for instance, or when a sentence is simple for a foreign language speaker and when it isn't.
So many English speakers will think a sentence like "we've been set up" is very simple, because it uses little words, whereas many who have English as a second language would find it difficult to understand. ("Set up" is a phrasal verb, the "up" completely changes the meaning of the verb "set").
Language technology...is better than you may think.
I expect it is actually a lot worse than most people think. Yes, in specialised areas where you can use lookup tables it can work pretty well. But that's hardly suprising is it?
For general texts it sucks bigtime.
The article starts with a question:
So how do you get soldiers and commanders speaking different languages in a theater of war to communicate effectively and not, for example, blow each other up mistakenly?
I think there is a simple answer to that question - use human translators! I would never trust a machine translation with my life.
I speak a second language to reasonably high standard, and so I realise that languages can be really subtle things. Sometimes things just don't translate directly, and they need interpretation e.g.
Non-English speaking soldier How's the new weapon system working?
US soldier It's hot! Damn hot!
Non-English speaking soldier Oh dear! It shouldn't be hot! You must stop using it immediately!
US soldier No I mean it rocks!
Non-English speaking soldier It's fastenings are insecure? Sounds like we should send an engineer immediately! Please cease using it!
Some things are healthy for the body, some things are healthy for the mind, and what's good for the body is not necessarily good for the mind and vice-versa.
For instance, during my finals at university getting blindingly drunk at the weekends was probably very bad for my body, but it really helped my mind. It got rid of the stress and I felt fresh again going back to my study. I'm not joking, I think it really helped.
It's like some people can't function properly unless they've had a coffee or a ciggie. May not be healthy for their body, but it helps their mind function.
and to be frank most effort is going on stuff that actually matters
I do think it matters a lot. Yes, I know standardisation of interfaces is very difficult, but we have the development of KDE apps and Gnome apps, for instance Gnumeric and Kspread. The developers of these programmes should not have to worry what desktop it will run on, they should work with generic programming interfaces.
I appreciate this is very difficult but as I said in my original post, it's a good thing to have both KDE and Gnome because then these issues can be tackled in a sensible and generic manner.
I've always thought that the reason having two (main) desktops (KDE and Gnome) is good is not necessarily because of the competition, but because there is a need to interoperate between the two, so sensible 'generic' programming interfaces need to be created. This should create more modular code, and modular code makes successful open source projects.
However, to what extent is this true? Can I, for instance, use just the Gnome file manager in KDE, and vice-versa? Is it an aim of these projects to make this level of interoperability a goal?
Catalan
You think Catalan is dying out? As someone who lives in Catalunya, I'll tell you it's quite the opposite. Franco (the Spanish dictator who died in 1975) tried to outlaw it, and so for many years it was not spoken in schools. These days it is the principal language here, and I'm having to learn it myself just to be able to do business effectively here.
I agree absolutely.
I read the other day that the troops in Iraq have a PDA thingy that automatically translates the local language into English. That is really going to disuade the troops from learning the local language and will keep a strong barrier of misunderstanding between the locals and the troops. Language isn't just about communicating fact, but it's about culture and ways of thinking.
Unfortunately most people who speak English as their mother tongue do not speak another language (by which I mean Brits, North Americans, Australians...)
This means that they tend to have very funny ideas about languages, and a distorted perspective on language issues. When you say "English is all over the world, and other languages are fast losing ground", what you mean to say is that many people use English as the "lingua franca". However, this does not mean that all those people are stopping using their mother tongues.
So you're not going to find all those Spanish, French, Chinese or whatever speakers suddenly stopping using their own languages and speaking exclusively in English. As far as I am aware, that isn't happening anywhere in the world.
So, if you want to make generalisations about English being many people's second language and being the new lingua franca, then fine, I agree with you. However, if you are trying to argue that other languages are dying out because of English, I would suggest you learn another language and hang out with native speakers of that language. Then you'll have a better perspective about language issues.