It constructs filenames with certain numbers; if the number is outside a certain range (0 to 9999) it uses a default, but if not, it makes a file named demo#### where #### is the number left-filled with zeros. It does this by using a common rounding trick (based on ints being truncated).
It only generates the filenames deterministically from information given it, so its just a utility function for constructing names.
Oh, very nice with the Jubal Early reference.
(for those non-shiny people reading, Jubal Early is a particularly interesting empathic bounty hunter who appeared on firefly, and liked making observations that end in "Does that seem right to you?")
IOW, mod this guy up funny even more.
Here you go, I made this as an aid for my Model EU course. People should free to freely distribute and use it for noncommercial purposes, if they find it useful.
Since stories on slashdot have mentioned a first reading, its going under either the Cooperative or Codecision procedure, almost certainly the Codecision procedure.
The chart was made for people with some knowledge, so I'll fill in some of the things that aren't explained.
The "College" I speak of is the College of Commissioners, the commissioners themselves (sort of like ministers or secretaries of state/education/whatnot).
Consultative and Expert committees are just two types of committees that review and formulate Commission proposals (among other things).
Cabinets are personal cabinets of the Commissioners.
Directorates General are like US Departments (State Department, Education Department), and are not exactly under the authority of the respective Commissioners, but do work with and make information available to them.
Which procedure is used depends on what kind of legislation it is, and is specified in the various EU treaties. Most stuff that goes through nowadays is under Codecision or Consultation, I believe, and Consultation is mostly used in areas where the Council must agree unanimously (note my diagram is a little vague at points as to how much of the Council must agree; this is because the answer is often "it depends").
QMV, or Qualified Majority Vote, is a weighted vote based on country population and such. It is structured such that no two large states can carry the vote, and that a coalition of the smaller states can block any vote.
Absolute majority means that a majority of the people in parliament must vote yes, not merely a majority of those attending.
Unanimity means unanimity, though abstentions are okay, IIRC (and in some cases may mean the country need not implement the policy in question, though I forget the exact application of that bit of arcanity).
While the Commission has the sole power to initiate legislation, the Council of Ministers, Parliament, or European Council may request a proposal on a subject be formulated.
Policy legislation, more general legislation, is what must be approved by the Council or the Council and the Parliament (depending on procedure). This means all the policy legislation gets read by representatives of all the people voting on it, for instance, because its short enough to do that.
Administrative legislation, that required to implement the policy legislation, is enacted by the Commission under the supervision (but not control, exactly) of the Council under a procedure commonly called "comitology" (or the Commission directs member states to implement the policy law, depending on the treaty area). This is not covered by my flow chart, and is even more complex. However, it does ensure a lot of thoughtful consideration of detail law, and makes detail law easier to adapt based on changing situations.
For instance, say there's a bit of policy law saying unemployement rates must be reduced by five percent in the next two years. If the Commission adopts administrative, detail law specifying one method of doing so, and that isn't working, they just adopt new administrative law specifying new methods. The overall policy remains the same, the details of accomplishing it change.
The Semantic Web (or the part of it described in the first point:) ) isn't about an absolutely generalized interface for describing all objects at all. Its about community developed vocabularies at a high enough level to be useful, but at a low enough level to be used as good building blocks for lots of structures. They are standards not by imposition but by adoption and general consensus. Existing vocabularies not good enough for your project? Invent one to fill the gaps and tell people about it!
Take your annotation example. The Semantic Web approach wouldn't be to try to resolve the differences at all, or create some sort of neutral annotation. Instead, RDF vocabularies would be written for each form of annotation. If there were any points of commonality between the two sorts of annotation, those would be noted in ontologies, but if there weren't, no big loss.
The important thing isn't that the data is part of some universal consistent structure, but that the data is made available in ways that can be easily related (in many different ways) to other data.
You're misunderstanding the basic technologies of the Semantic Web as some big behemoth, when really the most basic technology is very simple. The only really important parts are these, in fact:
RDF data is made up of triples.
Triples have a subject, a predicate, and an object.
The subject must be a URI or blank node (really an anonymous URI, so to speak), the predicate must be a URI, and the object must be a URI, blank node, or literal.
It is both the simplicity of this structure (almost a graph) and the dependence on URIs that make it powerful. Because URIs are used, which are already used in practice as globally unique identifiers and may be easily extended and discovered, there is a certain universality to RDF statements.
Not that they are universally meaningful or anything of the sort, but that in most cases it will be possible for two RDF statements to agree if they're talking about the same thing or different things -- just check the URIs (ah, the wonders of personification).
I have a good friend doing graduate work in machine learning, she recently presented at that robot conference in Japan, I believe about task recognition. I myself am a lowly undergraduate in Informatics, and am thus perhaps a bit more concerned with the practical than some in the Semantic Web community;).
The dairy part would be taken care of because the milk (and its size, and such) would be discussed using common low level vocabularies (which reminds me, someone needs to come up with a units vocabulary for discussing units of measurement. note to self: do so, and gain fame and fortune;) ), but I wholeheartedly agree that matching semantic web information to loose queries and judging trustworthiness are prime areas where machine learning techniques will come to the fore.
Also, it is important to understand that the direction of the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and others closely involved in its creation does point towards a lot of knowledge synthesis and extension through inference, it still leaves doors open for machine learning-style inference (TBL somewhat seems to shy away from this, but I think in part its his background in classical logic that creates that impression. He does make it very clear the methods used to do things like infer trust are not set or even partially determined, but that he's just speculating on possible ways).
Many of the possibly application of the Semantic Web that he points to are very possible (and closer to what I characterize the Semantic Web as than many university researchers;) ), here's a good article (the seminar example is what I'm specifically referring to): linky
You know, if you wanted to cache in on the big research bucks, you could always come up with a way to combine machine learning and Semantic Web technologies (*hint hint*;) ).
I think you'll find that most of the sensationalized research that gets put out on the Semantic Web is not in fact most of the research that goes on:) (for instance, we hear all about the big expert systems research still going on, even, but remarkably little about the often very successful, if less grand in scope, machine learning research).
Most of the practical ontology research focuses on internal ontologies in data stores, so that an RDF store can return "more" information than was put in. Only information trusted by the controller of the data store is added to it, but queries to the data store (likely used to generate public views) are able to take advantage of the considerable inferential power.
Most of the practical work (and work in general) being done on the Semantic Web realizes that "low level" RDF tools, frameworks, and components are what will lead to the success of the Semantic Web, just as low level XML tools led to the success of XML.
As RDF spreads more and more, global application of ontologies will become more useful in limited ways, too. For instance, statements associated with, say, news articles (via URL) will be quite useful -- I'd love to be able to construct *likely* statements about the beliefs of people by finding first what articles they've authored and then connecting those to what positions those articles have supported. Still not a global knowledge store, but a limited application of ontologies across globally available data that is useful despite the specific untrustworthiness of the data (will it be possible to "Ontology-bomb" things? certainly, but Google's still useful despite Google-bombs).
"Isn't it cool that milk costs that low, low price of five dollars?"
"I am so gosh-darn happy that I can obtain the glorious bounty of milk for a mere five (count 'em, one-two-three-four-five) bills featuring our esteemed former president, George Washington."
Now, lets take a look at some possible semantic web statements.
Now, the above are slight simplifications for the purposes of conveying the essential ideas (we're not getting into the ideas of common vocabularies, though it makes relating information far simpler if used. Its a bit too much to explain), but it is amazing that anyone could think that programs which can parse the latter sets of information can parse the former!
The World Wide Web cannot "at its core handle inconsistent information" yet it seems to lurch along okay.
The Semantic Web is not some attempt at global knowledge, perfect knowledge, perfect reasoning, or anything of the sort, regardless of what many posters, including yourself, seem to have construed it as.
It is intended to be an analogue of the World Wide Web, which is primarily consumed by humans, that is instead primarily consumed by computers.
Can it know everything? Of course not! But it can make it so computers "understand" a heck of a lot more than they do today.
For instance: right now an everyday computer (or more accurately, the web browser) "understands" that (absent styling) a
tag is presented in a certain way. The Semantic Web wants to make it so the triple GallonOfMilk hasPrice $1.25 (this would actually be expressed in several triples about a product with a certain id, probably, but you get the idea) can be "understood" by a program in the same way across multiple sources.
The same as a person does not automatically assume a site is an absolute authority on the price of milk, semantic web enabled programs would not assume that this information was absolute (nor would it likely be presented as such). However, imagine how powerful it would be if one could give your browser the address of the RDF interfaces for local grocery stores (or it might autodiscover them at least in part), and then it would find out what the price of milk (and other groceries) is at each one of them.
That sort of thing is already possible today without the Semantic Web (or other semantic frameworks), but only with methods that either require heavy lifting on the part of the client system (such as web scraping every grocery store site, killing extensibility and easy implementation) or aren't cross-domain (perhaps I want to chart the price of milk (from some milk-price-archive) vs real dollar value -- now my client has to understand two possibly very different ways of presenting information, not just one integrated way).
The Semantic Web (and associated technologies) is an enabling framework that frees programmers from doing a lot of the heavy lifting involved in discovering meaning and relating meaning, just as SQL is an enabling framework that frees programmers from doing a lot of the heavy lifting involved in storing data and relating data.
The World Wide Web cannot "at its core handle inconsistent information" yet it seems to lurch along okay.
The Semantic Web is not some attempt at global knowledge, perfect knowledge, perfect reasoning, or anything of the sort, regardless of what many posters, including yourself, seem to have construed it as.
It is intended to be an analogue of the World Wide Web, which is primarily consumed by humans, that is instead primarily consumed by computers.
Can it know everything? Of course not! But it can make it so computers "understand" a heck of a lot more than they do today.
For instance: right now an everyday computer (or more accurately, the web browser) "understands" that (absent styling) a
tag is presented in a certain way. The Semantic Web wants to make it so the triple GallonOfMilk hasPrice $1.25 (this would actually be expressed in several triples about a product with a certain id, probably, but you get the idea) can be "understood" by a program in the same way across multiple sources.
The same as a person does not automatically assume a site is an absolute authority on the price of milk, semantic web enabled programs would not assume that this information was absolute (nor would it likely be presented as such). However, imagine how powerful it would be if one could give your browser the address of the RDF interfaces for local grocery stores (or it might autodiscover them at least in part), and then it would find out what the price of milk (and other groceries) is at each one of them.
That sort of thing is already possible today without the Semantic Web (or other semantic frameworks), but only with methods that either require heavy lifting on the part of the client system (such as web scraping every grocery store site, killing extensibility and easy implementation) or aren't cross-domain (perhaps I want to chart the price of milk (from some milk-price-archive) vs real dollar value -- now my client has to understand two possibly very different ways of presenting information, not just one integrated way).
The Semantic Web (and associated technologies) is an enabling framework that frees programmers from doing a lot of the heavy lifting involved in discovering meaning and relating meaning, just as SQL is an enabling framework that frees programmers from doing a lot of the heavy lifting involved in storing data and relating data.
The Semantic Web's use to resolve contradictions is probably least applied, at least in these early stages. Also, it is not meant to be a global information store (in which all contradictions may be resolved). It is meant to be large numbers of globally connected information stores, and between small numbers of these contradictions may be resolved.
Also, the ontology of the semantic web comes in 3 flavors, OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. The first two are limited enough that they are decidable (I'm not sure if this is guaranteed or just true for most use cases). OWL Lite in particular is light weight enough that processing of it is in reach for data stores, but powerful enough far more information can be inferred than what is directly stated in the RDF.
You'd be perfectly comfortable with a Mac, at least as far as the CLI goes. It's a unix (-based operating system, to please the open group). It behaves on the CLI like other unixes do (particularly FreeBSD).
And as for the rest, it's easy. Point and click isn't hard, and program interfaces are very similar across operating systems.
Re:Does Anyone Remember Cold Fusion?
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Sorry, no.
Entropy is not an absolute law, but a law based on extreme probabilities. In any reaction, certain quantities are completely conserved. One of these is energy.
The increase in entropy that occurs is due to energy being converted into less usable forms, such as from motion (kinetic energy) to heat (thermal energy).
It is not actually a decrease in total energy. Energy is perfectly conserved in any reaction.
In subatomic reactions, there is no place for energy to go, so to speak. In fact, the only thing energy really is is the motion (and mass, though those are remarkably interlinked) of subatomic particles.
When two subatomic particles collide, if neither of them splits or gives of any other particles, the energy remains entirely in the two particle system (that is, all that changes is kinetic energy; speed). Well, direction changes as well.
Mod parent down; he is incorrect.
(or not, I'm actually in favor of the mod up only philosophy, but parent would be a good one to mod down if you believe in modding factually incorrect posts down).
While it doesn't look to be too shabby a system, I think the rather extreme limits on many of the licenses will be a turn off.
Also, I think that a web interface is the wrong way to go. Web browsers are instruments of frustration, not slick customer experience. I think apple's strategy of embedding the interface in another app is superior, and likely to go over better.
Also, I don't see one click mentioned on buymusic, and that has been a way to bring in impulse buys for apple. It could be there, but I didn't see it.
And while they have a lower minimum price, it seems most of the prices are about the same as or higher than apple's prices.
Pros: some low prices, a good selection, and available to more people (unfortunately not including me).
Cons: web interface, limiting (and complicated, since it varies from song to song, which may upset people who expect consistency) DRM, not going to be the only kid on the block for long.
So an operating system isn't a success until it's #1? I'd hate to meet your children: "sorry, but unless you're the best at everything, you're failures".
Linux is a success on the desktop when it has a secure, decent-sized desktop userbase. Expecting a majority is both unreasonable and silly (see the kid example for why it's silly).
Notably, the most fervent researcher on the forum (Ameritec Tech) has discovered that the spammer was violating several people's copyrights. One of those people has replied and stated they are taking legal action against the spammer immediately for the violation.
I see hardly any/no illegal activity on furthurnet.
It's a network for trading legal songs (mainly concert recordings of bands that encourage the free distribution of their concerts for not for profit purposes.
I highly recommend ink4art as a source of printer ink.
For instance, it costs only $40 to get a six pack (3 color, 3 black) of ink cartridges for most kinds of epson printers. Or for under $20 you can get a snack pack (2 black, 1 color) of lexmark ink.
I've used ink4art several times, and they have excellent service.
Also, they offer numerous discounts: check out deals on the web, you can often pick up at least 10% off.
I'm not saying it would be perfect, but it wouldn't be terribly hard to provide software for each of windows, mac os x, and linux. That would cover most people.
Frankly, I think the advantages conferred by using downloaded software outweigh the infinitesimal loss in readership from people who do not run one of those three OSs.
ignore the above post, stupid forgetting to preview:
Would be somewhat modeled on Apple's iTunes Music Store, with a bit of O'Reilly bookshelf thrown in.
People could download an app, for free. It has exclusive access to a large number of online web comics. A person can enter their credit card info in the app (stored in the online store for one click purchasing, like amazon and apple use).
They can view a small number of example strips from each comic to get a taste for them, but to view them regularly must subscribe to a script. Subscribing doesn't cost anything, but whenever the person looks at a non-previously viewed strip ina subscription, it adds a small amount, maybe 10 cents, to their bill.
To explain my reasoning some: the reason for a standalone app is to make the experience very fast for the user, and continuous, unlike using a web browser. It should feel like a normal app (though a lot of the viewing could be done in a specialized markup language, like the iTMS). It also makes it much easier to do transparent micropayments.
The example strips thing is obvious. It would also give the author a way of controlling the first look at their strip, a common problem with online comics (bad first impressions).
The subscription thing is to prevent buyers from getting "I really didn't want to look at it" syndrome as easily. If they have to choose a strip as one they regularly want to view, it's a lot different from idly clicking a strip and having to pay 10 cents. It also makes in app organization easier to handle and use (since having an option to view a strip, and having a handy shortcut to it in your sidebar would be synonymous).
You know, now that I think about it . ..
*starts looking into how much it costs for a one click license*
Would be somewhat modeled on Apple's iTunes Music Store, with a bit of O'Reilly bookshelf thrown in.
People could download an app, for free. It has exclusive access to a large number of online web comics. A person can enter their credit card info in the app (stored in the online store for one click purchasing, like amazon and apple use). They can view a small number of example strips from each comic to get a taste for them, but to view them regularly must subscribe to a script. Subscribing doesn't cost anything, but whenever the person looks at a non-previously viewed strip ina subscription, it adds a small amount, maybe 10 cents, to their bill.
To explain my reasoning some: the reason for a standalone app is to make the experience very fast for the user, and continuous, unlike using a web browser. It should feel like a normal app (though a lot of the viewing could be done in a specialized markup language, like the iTMS). It also makes it much easier to do transparent micropayments.
The example strips thing is obvious. It would also give the author a way of controlling the first look at their strip, a common problem with online comics (bad first impressions).
The subscription thing is to prevent buyers from getting "I really didn't want to look at it" syndrome as easily. If they have to choose a strip as one they regularly want to view, it's a lot different from idly clicking a strip and having to pay 10 cents. It also makes in app organization easier to handle and use (since having an option to view a strip, and having a handy shortcut to it in your sidebar would be synonymous).
You know, now that I think about it . . .
*starts looking into how much it costs for a one click license*
Yeah, my thoughts often meander around so I'm often unclear. Particularly on legal matters, as IANAL and all that. I do find it interesting how many places I've heard it said that the supreme court said it's still okay to ban sodomy provided it's a non-sexuality-specific ban, considering how many (dozens) of times the Lawrence opinion explicitly says otherwise.
Oh, I don't judge Griswold, I'm merely pointing out it's one of the primary bases the court used to state homosexuals (and others) are entitled to engage in sodomy or other bedroom activities, in the Lawrence decision.
Slashdot Mirror
It constructs filenames with certain numbers; if the number is outside a certain range (0 to 9999) it uses a default, but if not, it makes a file named demo#### where #### is the number left-filled with zeros. It does this by using a common rounding trick (based on ints being truncated).
It only generates the filenames deterministically from information given it, so its just a utility function for constructing names.
Oh, very nice with the Jubal Early reference. (for those non-shiny people reading, Jubal Early is a particularly interesting empathic bounty hunter who appeared on firefly, and liked making observations that end in "Does that seem right to you?") IOW, mod this guy up funny even more.
Here you go, I made this as an aid for my Model EU course. People should free to freely distribute and use it for noncommercial purposes, if they find it useful.
http://homepage.mac.com/fugu13/decision.pdf
Since stories on slashdot have mentioned a first reading, its going under either the Cooperative or Codecision procedure, almost certainly the Codecision procedure.
The chart was made for people with some knowledge, so I'll fill in some of the things that aren't explained.
The "College" I speak of is the College of Commissioners, the commissioners themselves (sort of like ministers or secretaries of state/education/whatnot).
Consultative and Expert committees are just two types of committees that review and formulate Commission proposals (among other things).
Cabinets are personal cabinets of the Commissioners.
Directorates General are like US Departments (State Department, Education Department), and are not exactly under the authority of the respective Commissioners, but do work with and make information available to them.
Which procedure is used depends on what kind of legislation it is, and is specified in the various EU treaties. Most stuff that goes through nowadays is under Codecision or Consultation, I believe, and Consultation is mostly used in areas where the Council must agree unanimously (note my diagram is a little vague at points as to how much of the Council must agree; this is because the answer is often "it depends").
QMV, or Qualified Majority Vote, is a weighted vote based on country population and such. It is structured such that no two large states can carry the vote, and that a coalition of the smaller states can block any vote.
Absolute majority means that a majority of the people in parliament must vote yes, not merely a majority of those attending.
Unanimity means unanimity, though abstentions are okay, IIRC (and in some cases may mean the country need not implement the policy in question, though I forget the exact application of that bit of arcanity).
While the Commission has the sole power to initiate legislation, the Council of Ministers, Parliament, or European Council may request a proposal on a subject be formulated.
Policy legislation, more general legislation, is what must be approved by the Council or the Council and the Parliament (depending on procedure). This means all the policy legislation gets read by representatives of all the people voting on it, for instance, because its short enough to do that.
Administrative legislation, that required to implement the policy legislation, is enacted by the Commission under the supervision (but not control, exactly) of the Council under a procedure commonly called "comitology" (or the Commission directs member states to implement the policy law, depending on the treaty area). This is not covered by my flow chart, and is even more complex. However, it does ensure a lot of thoughtful consideration of detail law, and makes detail law easier to adapt based on changing situations.
For instance, say there's a bit of policy law saying unemployement rates must be reduced by five percent in the next two years. If the Commission adopts administrative, detail law specifying one method of doing so, and that isn't working, they just adopt new administrative law specifying new methods. The overall policy remains the same, the details of accomplishing it change.
Because this way other people get to see us chatter :-P ?
The Semantic Web (or the part of it described in the first point :) ) isn't about an absolutely generalized interface for describing all objects at all. Its about community developed vocabularies at a high enough level to be useful, but at a low enough level to be used as good building blocks for lots of structures. They are standards not by imposition but by adoption and general consensus. Existing vocabularies not good enough for your project? Invent one to fill the gaps and tell people about it!
Take your annotation example. The Semantic Web approach wouldn't be to try to resolve the differences at all, or create some sort of neutral annotation. Instead, RDF vocabularies would be written for each form of annotation. If there were any points of commonality between the two sorts of annotation, those would be noted in ontologies, but if there weren't, no big loss.
The important thing isn't that the data is part of some universal consistent structure, but that the data is made available in ways that can be easily related (in many different ways) to other data.
You're misunderstanding the basic technologies of the Semantic Web as some big behemoth, when really the most basic technology is very simple. The only really important parts are these, in fact:
RDF data is made up of triples.
Triples have a subject, a predicate, and an object.
The subject must be a URI or blank node (really an anonymous URI, so to speak), the predicate must be a URI, and the object must be a URI, blank node, or literal.
It is both the simplicity of this structure (almost a graph) and the dependence on URIs that make it powerful. Because URIs are used, which are already used in practice as globally unique identifiers and may be easily extended and discovered, there is a certain universality to RDF statements.
Not that they are universally meaningful or anything of the sort, but that in most cases it will be possible for two RDF statements to agree if they're talking about the same thing or different things -- just check the URIs (ah, the wonders of personification).
I have a good friend doing graduate work in machine learning, she recently presented at that robot conference in Japan, I believe about task recognition. I myself am a lowly undergraduate in Informatics, and am thus perhaps a bit more concerned with the practical than some in the Semantic Web community ;) .
The dairy part would be taken care of because the milk (and its size, and such) would be discussed using common low level vocabularies (which reminds me, someone needs to come up with a units vocabulary for discussing units of measurement. note to self: do so, and gain fame and fortune ;) ), but I wholeheartedly agree that matching semantic web information to loose queries and judging trustworthiness are prime areas where machine learning techniques will come to the fore.
Also, it is important to understand that the direction of the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and others closely involved in its creation does point towards a lot of knowledge synthesis and extension through inference, it still leaves doors open for machine learning-style inference (TBL somewhat seems to shy away from this, but I think in part its his background in classical logic that creates that impression. He does make it very clear the methods used to do things like infer trust are not set or even partially determined, but that he's just speculating on possible ways).
Many of the possibly application of the Semantic Web that he points to are very possible (and closer to what I characterize the Semantic Web as than many university researchers ;) ), here's a good article (the seminar example is what I'm specifically referring to): linky
You know, if you wanted to cache in on the big research bucks, you could always come up with a way to combine machine learning and Semantic Web technologies (*hint hint* ;) ).
I think you'll find that most of the sensationalized research that gets put out on the Semantic Web is not in fact most of the research that goes on :) (for instance, we hear all about the big expert systems research still going on, even, but remarkably little about the often very successful, if less grand in scope, machine learning research).
Most of the practical ontology research focuses on internal ontologies in data stores, so that an RDF store can return "more" information than was put in. Only information trusted by the controller of the data store is added to it, but queries to the data store (likely used to generate public views) are able to take advantage of the considerable inferential power.
Most of the practical work (and work in general) being done on the Semantic Web realizes that "low level" RDF tools, frameworks, and components are what will lead to the success of the Semantic Web, just as low level XML tools led to the success of XML.
As RDF spreads more and more, global application of ontologies will become more useful in limited ways, too. For instance, statements associated with, say, news articles (via URL) will be quite useful -- I'd love to be able to construct *likely* statements about the beliefs of people by finding first what articles they've authored and then connecting those to what positions those articles have supported. Still not a global knowledge store, but a limited application of ontologies across globally available data that is useful despite the specific untrustworthiness of the data (will it be possible to "Ontology-bomb" things? certainly, but Google's still useful despite Google-bombs).
This got insightful?!
Lets take a look at English, shall we?
"Milk costs five dollars."
"Milk always costs five dollars."
"Milk's price is five dollars."
"Isn't it cool that milk costs that low, low price of five dollars?"
"I am so gosh-darn happy that I can obtain the glorious bounty of milk for a mere five (count 'em, one-two-three-four-five) bills featuring our esteemed former president, George Washington."
Now, lets take a look at some possible semantic web statements.
Milk hasPrice $5
anonymousItem hasType Milk
anonymousItem hasPrice $5
KrogersItem54728 hasType Milk
KrogersItem54728 hasPrice $5
Now, the above are slight simplifications for the purposes of conveying the essential ideas (we're not getting into the ideas of common vocabularies, though it makes relating information far simpler if used. Its a bit too much to explain), but it is amazing that anyone could think that programs which can parse the latter sets of information can parse the former!
The World Wide Web cannot "at its core handle inconsistent information" yet it seems to lurch along okay.
The Semantic Web is not some attempt at global knowledge, perfect knowledge, perfect reasoning, or anything of the sort, regardless of what many posters, including yourself, seem to have construed it as.
It is intended to be an analogue of the World Wide Web, which is primarily consumed by humans, that is instead primarily consumed by computers.
Can it know everything? Of course not! But it can make it so computers "understand" a heck of a lot more than they do today.
For instance: right now an everyday computer (or more accurately, the web browser) "understands" that (absent styling) a
tag is presented in a certain way. The Semantic Web wants to make it so the triple GallonOfMilk hasPrice $1.25 (this would actually be expressed in several triples about a product with a certain id, probably, but you get the idea) can be "understood" by a program in the same way across multiple sources.
The same as a person does not automatically assume a site is an absolute authority on the price of milk, semantic web enabled programs would not assume that this information was absolute (nor would it likely be presented as such). However, imagine how powerful it would be if one could give your browser the address of the RDF interfaces for local grocery stores (or it might autodiscover them at least in part), and then it would find out what the price of milk (and other groceries) is at each one of them.
That sort of thing is already possible today without the Semantic Web (or other semantic frameworks), but only with methods that either require heavy lifting on the part of the client system (such as web scraping every grocery store site, killing extensibility and easy implementation) or aren't cross-domain (perhaps I want to chart the price of milk (from some milk-price-archive) vs real dollar value -- now my client has to understand two possibly very different ways of presenting information, not just one integrated way).
The Semantic Web (and associated technologies) is an enabling framework that frees programmers from doing a lot of the heavy lifting involved in discovering meaning and relating meaning, just as SQL is an enabling framework that frees programmers from doing a lot of the heavy lifting involved in storing data and relating data.
tag is presented in a certain way. The Semantic Web wants to make it so the triple GallonOfMilk hasPrice $1.25 (this would actually be expressed in several triples about a product with a certain id, probably, but you get the idea) can be "understood" by a program in the same way across multiple sources. The same as a person does not automatically assume a site is an absolute authority on the price of milk, semantic web enabled programs would not assume that this information was absolute (nor would it likely be presented as such). However, imagine how powerful it would be if one could give your browser the address of the RDF interfaces for local grocery stores (or it might autodiscover them at least in part), and then it would find out what the price of milk (and other groceries) is at each one of them. That sort of thing is already possible today without the Semantic Web (or other semantic frameworks), but only with methods that either require heavy lifting on the part of the client system (such as web scraping every grocery store site, killing extensibility and easy implementation) or aren't cross-domain (perhaps I want to chart the price of milk (from some milk-price-archive) vs real dollar value -- now my client has to understand two possibly very different ways of presenting information, not just one integrated way). The Semantic Web (and associated technologies) is an enabling framework that frees programmers from doing a lot of the heavy lifting involved in discovering meaning and relating meaning, just as SQL is an enabling framework that frees programmers from doing a lot of the heavy lifting involved in storing data and relating data.
The Semantic Web's use to resolve contradictions is probably least applied, at least in these early stages. Also, it is not meant to be a global information store (in which all contradictions may be resolved). It is meant to be large numbers of globally connected information stores, and between small numbers of these contradictions may be resolved.
Also, the ontology of the semantic web comes in 3 flavors, OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. The first two are limited enough that they are decidable (I'm not sure if this is guaranteed or just true for most use cases). OWL Lite in particular is light weight enough that processing of it is in reach for data stores, but powerful enough far more information can be inferred than what is directly stated in the RDF.
You'd be perfectly comfortable with a Mac, at least as far as the CLI goes. It's a unix (-based operating system, to please the open group). It behaves on the CLI like other unixes do (particularly FreeBSD).
And as for the rest, it's easy. Point and click isn't hard, and program interfaces are very similar across operating systems.
Sorry, no.
Entropy is not an absolute law, but a law based on extreme probabilities. In any reaction, certain quantities are completely conserved. One of these is energy.
The increase in entropy that occurs is due to energy being converted into less usable forms, such as from motion (kinetic energy) to heat (thermal energy).
It is not actually a decrease in total energy. Energy is perfectly conserved in any reaction.
In subatomic reactions, there is no place for energy to go, so to speak. In fact, the only thing energy really is is the motion (and mass, though those are remarkably interlinked) of subatomic particles.
When two subatomic particles collide, if neither of them splits or gives of any other particles, the energy remains entirely in the two particle system (that is, all that changes is kinetic energy; speed). Well, direction changes as well.
Mod parent down; he is incorrect. (or not, I'm actually in favor of the mod up only philosophy, but parent would be a good one to mod down if you believe in modding factually incorrect posts down).
While it doesn't look to be too shabby a system, I think the rather extreme limits on many of the licenses will be a turn off. Also, I think that a web interface is the wrong way to go. Web browsers are instruments of frustration, not slick customer experience. I think apple's strategy of embedding the interface in another app is superior, and likely to go over better. Also, I don't see one click mentioned on buymusic, and that has been a way to bring in impulse buys for apple. It could be there, but I didn't see it. And while they have a lower minimum price, it seems most of the prices are about the same as or higher than apple's prices. Pros: some low prices, a good selection, and available to more people (unfortunately not including me). Cons: web interface, limiting (and complicated, since it varies from song to song, which may upset people who expect consistency) DRM, not going to be the only kid on the block for long.
So an operating system isn't a success until it's #1? I'd hate to meet your children: "sorry, but unless you're the best at everything, you're failures".
Linux is a success on the desktop when it has a secure, decent-sized desktop userbase. Expecting a majority is both unreasonable and silly (see the kid example for why it's silly).
Notably, the most fervent researcher on the forum (Ameritec Tech) has discovered that the spammer was violating several people's copyrights. One of those people has replied and stated they are taking legal action against the spammer immediately for the violation.
I see hardly any/no illegal activity on furthurnet.
It's a network for trading legal songs (mainly concert recordings of bands that encourage the free distribution of their concerts for not for profit purposes.
Anyone have a mirror? It's gone down already. Fear the power of the /. effect.
I highly recommend ink4art as a source of printer ink.
For instance, it costs only $40 to get a six pack (3 color, 3 black) of ink cartridges for most kinds of epson printers. Or for under $20 you can get a snack pack (2 black, 1 color) of lexmark ink.
I've used ink4art several times, and they have excellent service. Also, they offer numerous discounts: check out deals on the web, you can often pick up at least 10% off.
I'm not saying it would be perfect, but it wouldn't be terribly hard to provide software for each of windows, mac os x, and linux. That would cover most people.
Frankly, I think the advantages conferred by using downloaded software outweigh the infinitesimal loss in readership from people who do not run one of those three OSs.
ignore the above post, stupid forgetting to preview:
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Would be somewhat modeled on Apple's iTunes Music Store, with a bit of O'Reilly bookshelf thrown in.
People could download an app, for free. It has exclusive access to a large number of online web comics. A person can enter their credit card info in the app (stored in the online store for one click purchasing, like amazon and apple use).
They can view a small number of example strips from each comic to get a taste for them, but to view them regularly must subscribe to a script. Subscribing doesn't cost anything, but whenever the person looks at a non-previously viewed strip ina subscription, it adds a small amount, maybe 10 cents, to their bill.
To explain my reasoning some: the reason for a standalone app is to make the experience very fast for the user, and continuous, unlike using a web browser. It should feel like a normal app (though a lot of the viewing could be done in a specialized markup language, like the iTMS). It also makes it much easier to do transparent micropayments.
The example strips thing is obvious. It would also give the author a way of controlling the first look at their strip, a common problem with online comics (bad first impressions).
The subscription thing is to prevent buyers from getting "I really didn't want to look at it" syndrome as easily. If they have to choose a strip as one they regularly want to view, it's a lot different from idly clicking a strip and having to pay 10 cents. It also makes in app organization easier to handle and use (since having an option to view a strip, and having a handy shortcut to it in your sidebar would be synonymous).
You know, now that I think about it . .
*starts looking into how much it costs for a one click license*
Would be somewhat modeled on Apple's iTunes Music Store, with a bit of O'Reilly bookshelf thrown in. People could download an app, for free. It has exclusive access to a large number of online web comics. A person can enter their credit card info in the app (stored in the online store for one click purchasing, like amazon and apple use). They can view a small number of example strips from each comic to get a taste for them, but to view them regularly must subscribe to a script. Subscribing doesn't cost anything, but whenever the person looks at a non-previously viewed strip ina subscription, it adds a small amount, maybe 10 cents, to their bill. To explain my reasoning some: the reason for a standalone app is to make the experience very fast for the user, and continuous, unlike using a web browser. It should feel like a normal app (though a lot of the viewing could be done in a specialized markup language, like the iTMS). It also makes it much easier to do transparent micropayments. The example strips thing is obvious. It would also give the author a way of controlling the first look at their strip, a common problem with online comics (bad first impressions). The subscription thing is to prevent buyers from getting "I really didn't want to look at it" syndrome as easily. If they have to choose a strip as one they regularly want to view, it's a lot different from idly clicking a strip and having to pay 10 cents. It also makes in app organization easier to handle and use (since having an option to view a strip, and having a handy shortcut to it in your sidebar would be synonymous). You know, now that I think about it . . . *starts looking into how much it costs for a one click license*
Yeah, my thoughts often meander around so I'm often unclear. Particularly on legal matters, as IANAL and all that. I do find it interesting how many places I've heard it said that the supreme court said it's still okay to ban sodomy provided it's a non-sexuality-specific ban, considering how many (dozens) of times the Lawrence opinion explicitly says otherwise.
Should be, entitled to engage in without repercussions under the law (provided other offenses are not involved)
Oh, I don't judge Griswold, I'm merely pointing out it's one of the primary bases the court used to state homosexuals (and others) are entitled to engage in sodomy or other bedroom activities, in the Lawrence decision.