I agree. My real interest in WoW died when they cut the balls off world PvP. What I was hoping for was an actual struggle between the factions.
For instance, if the Alliance managed to hold the center of a Horde contested town for, say 30 minutes, then Alliance guards, townsfolk, vendors and quest-givers would spawn, and neighbouring Horde towns would become contested. Then the Horde would have to strike back to reclaim their town. You could even work in something like DaoC, where there would be a global buff/debuff to each faction depending on what proportion of the world they held at any given time.
You could set it up so the harder-to-hold towns (the ones with a lot of high-level guards, the ones where you have to be holding three or four towns already before they become contested) spawn questgivers with rare and rewarding quests, or vendors with powerful items. Players could gain XP for towns they conquer or liberate. If enough towns are held for a certain length of time, a world event might trigger - like, say, Thrall getting off his arse, gathering the Orcish host and coming to reclaim his territory - so one faction would find it very hard to keep and hold all the towns.
That sort of thing would really promote cross-faction interaction, instead of the situation you have now, which is either just waving to the other faction as you cross their territory (PvE servers) or getting randomly ganked by decked out characters twice your level in Stranglethorn (PvP servers). The way it is now, they might as well just merge the factions for all the difference it'd make to the game.
Actually, my ISP regularly revises its prices downwards. The reason being, they're in a competitive marketplace, and if they don't then they'll lose customers.
Also, this tiered bandwidth thing has been the way broadband has been in Australia since the get-go. On plain old ADSL, you had a choice between 256/64, 512/128 and 1024/256 connection speeds, and various limits after a certain amount had been downloaded. There are options to go on a throttled service after exceeding your cap, or a pay-per-GB if you really want your speed. A lot of services in fact have two caps, for peak and off-peak time.
That's essentially all software dictation is - it recognizes the pattern of your speech, and executes the corresponding instruction (prints the correct word). The thing that really defines quality software is the accuracy of its comparison algorithm, and the speed of its learning algorithm. But essentially they do the same as you describe, just with a much larger search space.
I used Dragon Naturally Speaking for a while ages ago, and you could program it to respond to its name. Or rather, you setup a "start" sound that would indicate activate the listening algorithm. I had mine set to respond to "computer", but "minion" would work just as well.
I stopped using it after I accidentally left it on in training mode one day, when I was teaching it the word "bonza". The pet lorikeet outside my room made such a wide variety of noises, that from that time forth, it thought every word I said was bonza, and I couldn't be bothered retraining it - training time was more than 5 minutes back then.
I was using it more for commands than for dictation, and it was good at that, but there was one major drawback, and that was background noise - especially loud background noise emitted by the computer itself. One of the things I wanted to do was to get the computer to start and stop playing music on command. Unfortunately, once the music was playing, you had to really yell for the computer to differentiate the command from the music.
Always what will happen is the rate at which new works are produced will drop (significantly, most likely) but never cease.
And what will happen to the quality of work produced? People who do a job out of a love of the game generally do it better than those who are just grinding away to earn a buck. If changes cause all the hacks to drop off, nobody is particularly going to care.
Which would fall under the "didn't care" category. I wasn't arguing that he wasn't sociopathic, I was arguing that he most definately did know what he was doing, if not on the first, then at least on the subsequent attempts,
That might have been possible the first time. But he did it FOUR times. After he saw the first tram derail, then the consequences would have been made abundantly clear. The fact that he continued shows that he either didn't care, or enjoyed it.
RIAA serves a very important purpose for the recording industry et al
What important purpose? Helping them buy politicians more efficiently? That may be an important purpose for them, but I'm not going to cry overmuch if it collapses.
It depends what you mean by "understand". What current dictation programs do is really just pattern-matching. It analyzes each word, and finds a word in its database that fits. It's the same system as the automated phone stuff, just on a larger scale. What the grandparent was talking about is getting a computer to comprehend speech - it's known as the natural language problem, and it's nowhere near solved.
Even if a computer can pick the words out of your speech, it has no idea what they mean, unless such meanings have been pre-programmed in. And programming in every possible meaning in every possible context for every possible combination of terms in a human language is not realistic (and also doesn't compare to the way the human brain performs the same feat).
Fixing Australia's net access is simple, it's just that none of the politicians have the balls for it. Strip Telstra off the infrastructure, and either spin it into a separate company or, preferrably, set it up as a government-run department that charges the telco's for access and is required to provide equal access across Australia.
While Telstra controls the infrastructure, and is compelled against its will to sell it on to its competitors, you're going to have a dysfunctional system. It might not solve all the woes overnight, but it would create and environment in which growth could happen.
The reason he stayed in so long is that labour fell apart, and stayed fallen for most of his term. Their leadership changed every few years - and really, even Howard was better than Latham.
The question is, if you chucked the salesperson into the exec's job, how much difference would that make? The more authority you have in a company, the more impact you can have. Exec's don't necessarily make the company money because they themselves are so brilliant - they make the company money because the position they hold has enough authority to make a large impact on the company.
Of course, if you take a brilliant person and give them lots of authority, then they're probably worth millions to your company. However, I'd hazard a guess that most execs aren't brilliant. Like in any other role, there's a few brilliant ones, many mediocre ones, and a few useless ones. The problem is that the mediocre and useless ones still get salaries hundreds of times higher than any other employees - not because they're good, but because of their position.
Well, a usable unprivileged account system can, to an extent. As discussed in other places in this story, Windows XP and below (not sure about Vista) expect users to be running as admin, and often fail to work properly if they don't. If they worked closer to the *nix model, then the impact of malicious/buggy software is, if not ameliorated completely, at least reduced.
Really? You think your average user would pay attention to that? They know they're installing software, and they trust the source - unless they know what boot.ini and that it really is a bad idea to delete, chances are they'll just hit "Allow". That's one of the fundamental flaws of UAC as security. If the user trusts the installer, they're going to hit allow. If the user doesn't trust the installer, they wouldn't have run it anyway. UAC is good for things that try to stealth-install, or do things behind the user's back, but it doesn't protect from buggy software (like this) or malicious software that tricks a user into running it (like trojans).
Wake me up when the semantics of a tag changes the way it renders in the browser. Alternatively, give me a call when something other than a table-cell supports the vertical-height attribute, or there's an easy, cross-browser, standard-compliant way to make a div only use the minimum amount of vertical space required for it's content the way a table does by default.
I would prefer to write semantic code, but there's just too many bizarre design decisions made in the development of CSS and the float model, and far too many browser incompatibilities.
Firstly, it doesn't matter if they were in a shared folder or not. What matters is if someone *actually copied them* from that shared folder. Just because the potential was there to infringe copyright, doesn't mean it actually was infringed.
Secondly, since when does it matter where you keep your files? What the RIAA seems to be saying is that it the file was ok until it was moved to a certain folder. That's not the case at all; that file always was legal under fair use. What was not legal were any copies made from it while it was in the shared folder - just because an illegal copy is made of something, doesn't make the source suddenly tainted too.
Thirdly, how do we know who his "Shared Folder" was shared with? It could have been in the Kazaa shared folder without Kazaa running. If this argument is extended to other forms of "sharing", well, I keep all my music in a shared folder, so I can play it from other devices in my house. It's shared on my local network, not on the internet, and no copyright infringement takes place as a result of it.
What it sounds like is that the RIAA either don't have the actual logs of the file being copied, or are trying really hard to increase the number of infractions by one (by claiming the original file is in violation of copyright, as well as any duplicates made).
On the other hand, I'm not sure it's exactly helpful to have it believed that the first person to hum a tune can control everything done with it from now until the end of time. Just because neither extreme is useful doesn't mean there isn't a practical solution somewhere in the middle.
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I agree. My real interest in WoW died when they cut the balls off world PvP. What I was hoping for was an actual struggle between the factions.
For instance, if the Alliance managed to hold the center of a Horde contested town for, say 30 minutes, then Alliance guards, townsfolk, vendors and quest-givers would spawn, and neighbouring Horde towns would become contested. Then the Horde would have to strike back to reclaim their town. You could even work in something like DaoC, where there would be a global buff/debuff to each faction depending on what proportion of the world they held at any given time.
You could set it up so the harder-to-hold towns (the ones with a lot of high-level guards, the ones where you have to be holding three or four towns already before they become contested) spawn questgivers with rare and rewarding quests, or vendors with powerful items. Players could gain XP for towns they conquer or liberate. If enough towns are held for a certain length of time, a world event might trigger - like, say, Thrall getting off his arse, gathering the Orcish host and coming to reclaim his territory - so one faction would find it very hard to keep and hold all the towns.
That sort of thing would really promote cross-faction interaction, instead of the situation you have now, which is either just waving to the other faction as you cross their territory (PvE servers) or getting randomly ganked by decked out characters twice your level in Stranglethorn (PvP servers). The way it is now, they might as well just merge the factions for all the difference it'd make to the game.
Actually, my ISP regularly revises its prices downwards. The reason being, they're in a competitive marketplace, and if they don't then they'll lose customers.
Also, this tiered bandwidth thing has been the way broadband has been in Australia since the get-go. On plain old ADSL, you had a choice between 256/64, 512/128 and 1024/256 connection speeds, and various limits after a certain amount had been downloaded. There are options to go on a throttled service after exceeding your cap, or a pay-per-GB if you really want your speed. A lot of services in fact have two caps, for peak and off-peak time.
I picked it. Deep Impact was still a better movie, though :p
That's essentially all software dictation is - it recognizes the pattern of your speech, and executes the corresponding instruction (prints the correct word). The thing that really defines quality software is the accuracy of its comparison algorithm, and the speed of its learning algorithm. But essentially they do the same as you describe, just with a much larger search space.
I used Dragon Naturally Speaking for a while ages ago, and you could program it to respond to its name. Or rather, you setup a "start" sound that would indicate activate the listening algorithm. I had mine set to respond to "computer", but "minion" would work just as well.
I stopped using it after I accidentally left it on in training mode one day, when I was teaching it the word "bonza". The pet lorikeet outside my room made such a wide variety of noises, that from that time forth, it thought every word I said was bonza, and I couldn't be bothered retraining it - training time was more than 5 minutes back then.
I was using it more for commands than for dictation, and it was good at that, but there was one major drawback, and that was background noise - especially loud background noise emitted by the computer itself. One of the things I wanted to do was to get the computer to start and stop playing music on command. Unfortunately, once the music was playing, you had to really yell for the computer to differentiate the command from the music.
Which is why it got modded funny instead of insightful
Always what will happen is the rate at which new works are produced will drop (significantly, most likely) but never cease.
And what will happen to the quality of work produced? People who do a job out of a love of the game generally do it better than those who are just grinding away to earn a buck. If changes cause all the hacks to drop off, nobody is particularly going to care.
"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." - George Bernard Shaw
Which would fall under the "didn't care" category. I wasn't arguing that he wasn't sociopathic, I was arguing that he most definately did know what he was doing, if not on the first, then at least on the subsequent attempts,
That might have been possible the first time. But he did it FOUR times. After he saw the first tram derail, then the consequences would have been made abundantly clear. The fact that he continued shows that he either didn't care, or enjoyed it.
RIAA serves a very important purpose for the recording industry et al
What important purpose? Helping them buy politicians more efficiently? That may be an important purpose for them, but I'm not going to cry overmuch if it collapses.
It depends what you mean by "understand". What current dictation programs do is really just pattern-matching. It analyzes each word, and finds a word in its database that fits. It's the same system as the automated phone stuff, just on a larger scale. What the grandparent was talking about is getting a computer to comprehend speech - it's known as the natural language problem, and it's nowhere near solved.
Even if a computer can pick the words out of your speech, it has no idea what they mean, unless such meanings have been pre-programmed in. And programming in every possible meaning in every possible context for every possible combination of terms in a human language is not realistic (and also doesn't compare to the way the human brain performs the same feat).
Of course you can own. Don't give it out. Keep it locked in a safe forever. However, once you let it out...well, then the genie's out of the bottle.
Fixing Australia's net access is simple, it's just that none of the politicians have the balls for it. Strip Telstra off the infrastructure, and either spin it into a separate company or, preferrably, set it up as a government-run department that charges the telco's for access and is required to provide equal access across Australia.
While Telstra controls the infrastructure, and is compelled against its will to sell it on to its competitors, you're going to have a dysfunctional system. It might not solve all the woes overnight, but it would create and environment in which growth could happen.
The reason he stayed in so long is that labour fell apart, and stayed fallen for most of his term. Their leadership changed every few years - and really, even Howard was better than Latham.
The question is, if you chucked the salesperson into the exec's job, how much difference would that make? The more authority you have in a company, the more impact you can have. Exec's don't necessarily make the company money because they themselves are so brilliant - they make the company money because the position they hold has enough authority to make a large impact on the company.
Of course, if you take a brilliant person and give them lots of authority, then they're probably worth millions to your company. However, I'd hazard a guess that most execs aren't brilliant. Like in any other role, there's a few brilliant ones, many mediocre ones, and a few useless ones. The problem is that the mediocre and useless ones still get salaries hundreds of times higher than any other employees - not because they're good, but because of their position.
I thought that session cookies died when the browser window closed - or does .Mac use URL rewriting?
Well, a usable unprivileged account system can, to an extent. As discussed in other places in this story, Windows XP and below (not sure about Vista) expect users to be running as admin, and often fail to work properly if they don't. If they worked closer to the *nix model, then the impact of malicious/buggy software is, if not ameliorated completely, at least reduced.
Sorry, you're right, I misread the wouldn't as would.
Really? You think your average user would pay attention to that? They know they're installing software, and they trust the source - unless they know what boot.ini and that it really is a bad idea to delete, chances are they'll just hit "Allow". That's one of the fundamental flaws of UAC as security. If the user trusts the installer, they're going to hit allow. If the user doesn't trust the installer, they wouldn't have run it anyway. UAC is good for things that try to stealth-install, or do things behind the user's back, but it doesn't protect from buggy software (like this) or malicious software that tricks a user into running it (like trojans).
Wake me up when the semantics of a tag changes the way it renders in the browser. Alternatively, give me a call when something other than a table-cell supports the vertical-height attribute, or there's an easy, cross-browser, standard-compliant way to make a div only use the minimum amount of vertical space required for it's content the way a table does by default.
I would prefer to write semantic code, but there's just too many bizarre design decisions made in the development of CSS and the float model, and far too many browser incompatibilities.
Firstly, it doesn't matter if they were in a shared folder or not. What matters is if someone *actually copied them* from that shared folder. Just because the potential was there to infringe copyright, doesn't mean it actually was infringed.
Secondly, since when does it matter where you keep your files? What the RIAA seems to be saying is that it the file was ok until it was moved to a certain folder. That's not the case at all; that file always was legal under fair use. What was not legal were any copies made from it while it was in the shared folder - just because an illegal copy is made of something, doesn't make the source suddenly tainted too.
Thirdly, how do we know who his "Shared Folder" was shared with? It could have been in the Kazaa shared folder without Kazaa running. If this argument is extended to other forms of "sharing", well, I keep all my music in a shared folder, so I can play it from other devices in my house. It's shared on my local network, not on the internet, and no copyright infringement takes place as a result of it.
What it sounds like is that the RIAA either don't have the actual logs of the file being copied, or are trying really hard to increase the number of infractions by one (by claiming the original file is in violation of copyright, as well as any duplicates made).
On the other hand, I'm not sure it's exactly helpful to have it believed that the first person to hum a tune can control everything done with it from now until the end of time. Just because neither extreme is useful doesn't mean there isn't a practical solution somewhere in the middle.
you can hope that the waste won't hit the fan until after you're dead from something else
Of course, when you're advocating building giant fans all over the place, the chances of that increase.
No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright.
Either that, or there is a real problem with our copyright law.