If they want to test how secure a format is, and they know most people haven't got the connection or the patience to use the bootleg copy anyway, wouldn't they release the most popular film they could - to see how fast it gets cracked, no?
If they know it's too early to do commercially, they don't lose too many sales from a quick, successful crack. And if no-one cracks it for a week, say, they get some good feedback about the quality of the encryption. What they can be sure of is that a lot of people _will_ work hard to crack this [unlike some films, which only a masochist would want a free copy of] -- which matters if they're now standing around looking at their stopwatches while crackers test their security for them.
Wow, I would really like to hear those sounds you describe. Actually, it's probably pretty simple if I stir myself -- I could probably find some South African web radio stations.
Last year I met a German restaurant manager in Budapest who had picked up some Zulu in SA. Did your time in the country leave you optimistic/pessemistic about their future?
Bantu languages Re:hundreds of sign languages
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It's West-African Bantu languages which have the fearsome reputation among linguists for being festooned with grammatical aspects. Bantu is a big group of languages, even compared to Indo-European.
I envy you knowing an African language - is it Xhosa (Winnie Mandela's mother tongue I believe) which has that clicking sound in the throat?
I'm afraid that English and any West African language, equally English and any native American language, are at least as different from each as English and Japanese.
Gender and case agreement in languages like Croatian [most Indo-European languages have gender and case agreement - Latin is an Indo-European language] cause problems for English speakers, but however large these differences seem, the aspect system of, for example, the Bantu languages, is much more different. With West African languages it is not simply a case of modifying a noun or adjective to make it agree, as is the case with most Indo-European languages, but choosing from a battery of distinct verbs to express context. So there can be eight totally different [ie. no letters or sounds in common] verbs to express 'steal' or 'give' or 'kiss'. It's not a question of inflecting a wordstem, it's another thing altogether.
The language families are described that way by linguists because they have major structural differences between families bigger than any differences inside the family. So for example Croatian, English, Norwegian, and Persian/Farsi are classed as being closer to each other than any one of them is to Turkish or Hungarian, for example.
Nice idea, assuming that both languages contain roughly the same kinds of thing to look up [Spanish and English might not be too hard since they're so closely related compared to any given pair of human languages.].
But with two languages not in the same language family there's a pretty insurmountable asymmetry to do with context.
Putting an English text into one of the Bantu languages, for example, will just lead to enormous amounts of information important to the Bantu-language speaker being missed out because it simply isn't in the English. Stuff like the social context of the event, how many people saw it, whether they were men or women, young or old -- if that kind of linguistic data is not mentioned in the English text it simply can't be decided on in the Bantu side of the lookup table, leaving nothing like a real translation.
Re:Idiomatics not so serious an obstacle
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Speaking in Tongues
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Yes, lots of idioms and phrases need to be stored and looked up, but until developers show impressive results with two languages in different families [so not both Indo-European languages like Croatian and English] they haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the real problem.
Different language families are context-dependent in different ways, and creating an intelligent lexicon that can work between two languages that are context-dependent in the same way is far from proof of feasibility.
Idioms are pretty minor compared to structures that are regarded as important in one language but are totally missing from the other language.
Right -- and that assumes the two languages even recognise the same kinds of things to talk about.
The point about sentence order is good, but it is even worse. In plenty of human language pairs, one language as given [in text or speech] simply lacks information the other language regards as crucial. There are basic asymmetries.
OK, fair enough. Then if Croatian and English are very different, then Yoruba and English [or Sioux and English] are very very very different.
The problem everyone misses Re:Long way to go
on
Speaking in Tongues
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Right, agreed - I certainly look forward to steady progress in machine translation too, but I agree learning other languages is still a good idea.
The problem I think most posters have missed so far in this discussion [though I have overlooked lots, I'm sure] is that a lot of computer developers assume translation is about different ways of saying the same thing -- and that basically we are all talking about the same core topics. [Hence the discussion about resolving the amibiguities around 'river bank' versus 'money bank']
The real problem is that in fact translation is about different ways of saying different things. This problem is fairly trivial between any two European languages because they have such similar structures [eg languages as close as Croatian and English], and most of us in Europe and North America only get taught one or two of those languages, so most of us have no idea just how different different languages can be. But bridging between Japanese and English, achurch will have a much better idea than most of us of the problem of translating something there is not yet a way of saying in the other language.
Almost every language has a feature no-one else bothers with, and the key question is what do you do when you try to translate a type of statement into a language where it doesn't exist?
Example: non-Bantu-language-speakers' bewilderment at information like whether you are speaking to women, to men, among family, about something you saw with your own eyes, something you saw alone and more being encoded into the choice of verb. Bantu-language into English, OK - you can explain those features in the English translation. But the other direction? How? Going from an English text, how do you choose the right verb form in the Bantu language based on information the English words simply don't provide? Of course you choose a neutral or weak verb form to cover yourself, but then you [or the machine system] isn't really translating, and you really see the difference. A group of West African speakers of one of these languages [for example Yoruba] will rightly regard a machine translation as lame, because it leaves so much stuff out because that stuff simply isn't in the English text as presented. They will choose a Bantu-speaking human to explain what really happened, properly, putting back in all that missing context that a person can know but, until we have seriously intelligent machines, a machine does not know about a live, real-time situation [or even a situation presented in a written text].
That's the real problem. Not finding ways to match up different ways of saying something, but deciding what to do when information one language expects to be in any text or conversation simply isn't in the other language. Sophisticated look-up tables can work well between two languages in the same family [like English and Croatian] because you're looking up the same kind of thing. But outside the same family, and you have a real obstacle - asymmetry. One language wants you to look up something that's simply not there to look up in the other language.
Totally agree Re:Not quite real translation...
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Speaking in Tongues
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I totally agree. I'm a translator myself [Hungarian into English] and I'm sure look-up tables can get very smart [they certainly help us translators to work faster and better], but as for understanding texts, you've really hit on the weak point in existing systems there.
Not to be unkind, but I think the optimism of some people in computing about automating things like translation is due to them never having learned a second language and never having translated anything.
There is a massive problem with missing context between languages, for example, that is quite hard to explain to anyone monolingual.
There are hundreds of different sign languages round the world, but I guess the technical challenges may well be be similar.
But are we so sure the challenge underlying the thousands of spoken languages are totally sorted then? English and Croatian are both in the same family [Indo-European] that Chomsky mistakenly generalises all languages from.
Croat and English structures are pretty similar.
Whereas English in and out of Sioux or English in and out of a West African Bantu language like, for example, Yoruba would be a bit more of a serious test.
I'd like to see the developers tackle English-Yoruba translation, and then come back a little more modest!
I agree - well-known actors are paid to reduce risk for film-makers by giving a film name-recognition.
The real challenge for synthetic characters is for them to replace actual top-name movie stars. This may not be so hard: the human acting is very low-standard in most films, and a realistic-looking synthetic movie star could easily become known enough to pull in audiences too [imagine a much-improved Lara Croft - though she was played by a human in the film version, an impressive synthetic version would have had the same name recognition.... that role made that actress well-known, rather than the other way round].
Actually, I think synthetic characters could strengthen the Hollywood studio system, unfortunately. Imagine owning the software comprising such a synthetic 'actor'. They have no lawyer or agent, they never get sick, and you can make fifteen films at once with them if necessary -- your only constraint is whether that dilutes the brand. You can age them backwards or forwards - keep giving them roles in their '20s' for forty years if needed.....
I can imagine human audiences could get to like synthetic actors quite quickly. The test is outside sci-fi. If they can be indistinguishable from human actors and take part in historical movies, straight romances, comedies. I don't see why not - just involves a lot of work.
Yes it was sad, because they had two series based on (I think) distance and speed records for the rubber band and egg in the first half of each show and then some kind of there-and-then challenge for the second half.
Once, after a couple of runs, they had run out of egg-and-rubber-band things to do as the running theme linking each week, the name started to look a bit silly.
Heinz had to wear a bow tie of course, so he could be a funny professor on television.
The devices were quite ingenious (the idea of the show was to popularise engineering) and generally had a kind of cradle of wire and some very light plastic wheels. Some of the things trundled along for ages quite successfully at very low speeds like a couple of yards a minute.
Oh, and I think the makers could rely on the smooth, heavy-duty rubber floor of a TV studio. Traction or terrain surprises were not part of the challenge.
Doable? Perhaps for a bit of extra challenge one of the Swedenborg scholars should try entering the contest with an updated version of that early-18th-century saucer-shaped glider-looking thing of his. I've seen their updated models, but never heard of them getting together with new lightweight materials and going in for contests.
Swedenborg's design is probably unstable - has anyone checked that?
So by limiting the wingspan Redbull really is deliberately guaranteeing itself a cheery contest of comical would-be-flying contraptions for publicity purposes, rather than sponsoring a boringly earnest event where people might bring machines that might actually work?
Fair point. I was thinking more of the point about them accepting or not accepting Microsoft ads.
But I see what you mean about choosing to play or not play a game because Redmond irritates you. I can imagine you're right - it hardly sounds like going without food. I don't really know the gaming world at all.
Anyone remember a British TV series in the 70s where contestants had to build a device powered by one rubber band to carry one medium-sized hen's egg as far as possible?
How slowly or quickly the device moved was irrelevant - the issue was distance on a limited energy supply.
If I am trapped in a difficult situation and have to take money from an unfair employer in order to eat and stay alive, am I forbidden from criticising that employer's greedy and dishonest practices, and telling others about them?
Whether or not slashdot is hypocritical to accept Microsoft ads, this hypocrisy would have no effect on the validity or truth of claims published on slashdot about MS. Belief that taking MS money makes criticism of MS wrong puts consistency ahead of other virtues without any grounds for doing so, and is known as the ad hominem fallacy.
I thought Tim Berners-Lee persuaded CERN in Geneva [after several years of tenacious lobbying] to adopt HTML for Internet documents, but that the actual WWW took off in Chicago with the various innovations leading up to the Netscape browser, but I'm probably wrong. But it was clearly the Americans who ran with the ball and saw what the web could enable.
Isn't it called Minitel? From the 1980s? And it's almost impenetrable because no-one wants to join it.
I just wrote to Bill, author of the Register piece about Europeanising the Internet, asking him why he thinks we're not now having this discussion about Minitel? Why aren't we asking "How did we let France shape the world's communication network?" or "How can we reclaim our sovereignty from French cultural hegemony?"?
Because they didn't of course [though oddly, that's exactly what they wanted to do], and the reason they didn't is they built something typically European, typically closed, regulated, and government controlled - the way Bill would like it.
And that's why the Internet didn't turn into the world wide web in Europe, because no-one wanted to join things like Minitel.
Just wondering though if there are regions of the number line where as yet unused primes of useful size [large enough to make hard ciphers, small enough to be manageable] are few enough in number to make a primality test like this useful to surveillance agencies.....
.....not of course as a way of factoring large composites, but just for the sake of collecting a big list of suitable cipher-making primes in that region of size for later testing of large composites in other people's ciphers?
I mean that, aside from the mathematics, for full-time crackers and coders chunks of the number line might have a kind of political geography, with sections of the naturals known or believed by insiders to contain primes used by this intelligence agency or that surveillance group for this or that kind of encryption. The task might be ridiculously huge overall, but in local regions of the naturals, sections of suitable keys for some applications or machines might seem worth mapping, in someone's view.
In that context, surely a new classical primality test [especially if used to develop an improved probabilistic primality test] might make quite a difference, indirectly, to helping someone much more quickly factor large composites, no?
Slashdot Mirror
If they know it's too early to do commercially, they don't lose too many sales from a quick, successful crack. And if no-one cracks it for a week, say, they get some good feedback about the quality of the encryption. What they can be sure of is that a lot of people _will_ work hard to crack this [unlike some films, which only a masochist would want a free copy of] -- which matters if they're now standing around looking at their stopwatches while crackers test their security for them.
Last year I met a German restaurant manager in Budapest who had picked up some Zulu in SA. Did your time in the country leave you optimistic/pessemistic about their future?
I envy you knowing an African language - is it Xhosa (Winnie Mandela's mother tongue I believe) which has that clicking sound in the throat?
Gender and case agreement in languages like Croatian [most Indo-European languages have gender and case agreement - Latin is an Indo-European language] cause problems for English speakers, but however large these differences seem, the aspect system of, for example, the Bantu languages, is much more different. With West African languages it is not simply a case of modifying a noun or adjective to make it agree, as is the case with most Indo-European languages, but choosing from a battery of distinct verbs to express context. So there can be eight totally different [ie. no letters or sounds in common] verbs to express 'steal' or 'give' or 'kiss'. It's not a question of inflecting a wordstem, it's another thing altogether.
The language families are described that way by linguists because they have major structural differences between families bigger than any differences inside the family. So for example Croatian, English, Norwegian, and Persian/Farsi are classed as being closer to each other than any one of them is to Turkish or Hungarian, for example.
But with two languages not in the same language family there's a pretty insurmountable asymmetry to do with context.
Putting an English text into one of the Bantu languages, for example, will just lead to enormous amounts of information important to the Bantu-language speaker being missed out because it simply isn't in the English. Stuff like the social context of the event, how many people saw it, whether they were men or women, young or old -- if that kind of linguistic data is not mentioned in the English text it simply can't be decided on in the Bantu side of the lookup table, leaving nothing like a real translation.
Different language families are context-dependent in different ways, and creating an intelligent lexicon that can work between two languages that are context-dependent in the same way is far from proof of feasibility.
Idioms are pretty minor compared to structures that are regarded as important in one language but are totally missing from the other language.
The point about sentence order is good, but it is even worse. In plenty of human language pairs, one language as given [in text or speech] simply lacks information the other language regards as crucial. There are basic asymmetries.
OK, fair enough. Then if Croatian and English are very different, then Yoruba and English [or Sioux and English] are very very very different.
The problem I think most posters have missed so far in this discussion [though I have overlooked lots, I'm sure] is that a lot of computer developers assume translation is about different ways of saying the same thing -- and that basically we are all talking about the same core topics. [Hence the discussion about resolving the amibiguities around 'river bank' versus 'money bank']
The real problem is that in fact translation is about different ways of saying different things. This problem is fairly trivial between any two European languages because they have such similar structures [eg languages as close as Croatian and English], and most of us in Europe and North America only get taught one or two of those languages, so most of us have no idea just how different different languages can be. But bridging between Japanese and English, achurch will have a much better idea than most of us of the problem of translating something there is not yet a way of saying in the other language.
Almost every language has a feature no-one else bothers with, and the key question is what do you do when you try to translate a type of statement into a language where it doesn't exist?
Example: non-Bantu-language-speakers' bewilderment at information like whether you are speaking to women, to men, among family, about something you saw with your own eyes, something you saw alone and more being encoded into the choice of verb. Bantu-language into English, OK - you can explain those features in the English translation. But the other direction? How? Going from an English text, how do you choose the right verb form in the Bantu language based on information the English words simply don't provide? Of course you choose a neutral or weak verb form to cover yourself, but then you [or the machine system] isn't really translating, and you really see the difference. A group of West African speakers of one of these languages [for example Yoruba] will rightly regard a machine translation as lame, because it leaves so much stuff out because that stuff simply isn't in the English text as presented. They will choose a Bantu-speaking human to explain what really happened, properly, putting back in all that missing context that a person can know but, until we have seriously intelligent machines, a machine does not know about a live, real-time situation [or even a situation presented in a written text].
That's the real problem. Not finding ways to match up different ways of saying something, but deciding what to do when information one language expects to be in any text or conversation simply isn't in the other language. Sophisticated look-up tables can work well between two languages in the same family [like English and Croatian] because you're looking up the same kind of thing. But outside the same family, and you have a real obstacle - asymmetry. One language wants you to look up something that's simply not there to look up in the other language.
Not to be unkind, but I think the optimism of some people in computing about automating things like translation is due to them never having learned a second language and never having translated anything.
There is a massive problem with missing context between languages, for example, that is quite hard to explain to anyone monolingual.
But are we so sure the challenge underlying the thousands of spoken languages are totally sorted then? English and Croatian are both in the same family [Indo-European] that Chomsky mistakenly generalises all languages from.
Croat and English structures are pretty similar.
Whereas English in and out of Sioux or English in and out of a West African Bantu language like, for example, Yoruba would be a bit more of a serious test.
I'd like to see the developers tackle English-Yoruba translation, and then come back a little more modest!
Ah - sorry. I was generalising from my own ignorance.
The real challenge for synthetic characters is for them to replace actual top-name movie stars. This may not be so hard: the human acting is very low-standard in most films, and a realistic-looking synthetic movie star could easily become known enough to pull in audiences too [imagine a much-improved Lara Croft - though she was played by a human in the film version, an impressive synthetic version would have had the same name recognition.... that role made that actress well-known, rather than the other way round].
Actually, I think synthetic characters could strengthen the Hollywood studio system, unfortunately. Imagine owning the software comprising such a synthetic 'actor'. They have no lawyer or agent, they never get sick, and you can make fifteen films at once with them if necessary -- your only constraint is whether that dilutes the brand. You can age them backwards or forwards - keep giving them roles in their '20s' for forty years if needed.....
I can imagine human audiences could get to like synthetic actors quite quickly. The test is outside sci-fi. If they can be indistinguishable from human actors and take part in historical movies, straight romances, comedies. I don't see why not - just involves a lot of work.
Once, after a couple of runs, they had run out of egg-and-rubber-band things to do as the running theme linking each week, the name started to look a bit silly.
Heinz had to wear a bow tie of course, so he could be a funny professor on television.
The devices were quite ingenious (the idea of the show was to popularise engineering) and generally had a kind of cradle of wire and some very light plastic wheels. Some of the things trundled along for ages quite successfully at very low speeds like a couple of yards a minute.
Oh, and I think the makers could rely on the smooth, heavy-duty rubber floor of a TV studio. Traction or terrain surprises were not part of the challenge.
Doable? Perhaps for a bit of extra challenge one of the Swedenborg scholars should try entering the contest with an updated version of that early-18th-century saucer-shaped glider-looking thing of his. I've seen their updated models, but never heard of them getting together with new lightweight materials and going in for contests.
Swedenborg's design is probably unstable - has anyone checked that?
So by limiting the wingspan Redbull really is deliberately guaranteeing itself a cheery contest of comical would-be-flying contraptions for publicity purposes, rather than sponsoring a boringly earnest event where people might bring machines that might actually work?
And I thought human-powered flight over short distances like a hundred feet or so with altered microlights was already well established since the 80s.
Was I imagining all that? Too much caffeine?
But I see what you mean about choosing to play or not play a game because Redmond irritates you. I can imagine you're right - it hardly sounds like going without food. I don't really know the gaming world at all.
How slowly or quickly the device moved was irrelevant - the issue was distance on a limited energy supply.
Isn't hypocrisy a bit overrated as a sin?
If I am trapped in a difficult situation and have to take money from an unfair employer in order to eat and stay alive, am I forbidden from criticising that employer's greedy and dishonest practices, and telling others about them?
Whether or not slashdot is hypocritical to accept Microsoft ads, this hypocrisy would have no effect on the validity or truth of claims published on slashdot about MS. Belief that taking MS money makes criticism of MS wrong puts consistency ahead of other virtues without any grounds for doing so, and is known as the ad hominem fallacy.
It's also worth telling Bill that an Englishman working in CH, a country rightly so distrustful of Euro-fantasies that it won't even join the UN, never mind the EU, is hardly the Europe he's talking about when he champions the idea of Europeanising the Internet through lots of EU regulation.
I just wrote to Bill, author of the Register piece about Europeanising the Internet, asking him why he thinks we're not now having this discussion about Minitel? Why aren't we asking "How did we let France shape the world's communication network?" or "How can we reclaim our sovereignty from French cultural hegemony?"?
Because they didn't of course [though oddly, that's exactly what they wanted to do], and the reason they didn't is they built something typically European, typically closed, regulated, and government controlled - the way Bill would like it.
And that's why the Internet didn't turn into the world wide web in Europe, because no-one wanted to join things like Minitel.
I mean that, aside from the mathematics, for full-time crackers and coders chunks of the number line might have a kind of political geography, with sections of the naturals known or believed by insiders to contain primes used by this intelligence agency or that surveillance group for this or that kind of encryption. The task might be ridiculously huge overall, but in local regions of the naturals, sections of suitable keys for some applications or machines might seem worth mapping, in someone's view.
In that context, surely a new classical primality test [especially if used to develop an improved probabilistic primality test] might make quite a difference, indirectly, to helping someone much more quickly factor large composites, no?