DRM, Digital Rights Management -- "you have no digital rights." Spyware is, of course, an integral part of how DRM works. How else to know exactly what you've got on your machine? Well, not *your* machine per se, but the machine you're being allowed to use, at any rate...
Thanks for the reply. Good point about the timeline, rather renders things moot in terms of subduction.
About seawater and the vitrified waste though, how much do heavy metals dissolve in water? Are uranium, plutonium, and their ilk heavy enough that they would simply precipitate out and settle on the bottom, slowly sinking into the ooze? Or would they be tossed about on the currents, leading to even more glow-in-the-dark sea creatures and perhaps winding up on a beach somewhere? My gut hunch is on precipitation, but then I'm really not certain. What chemistry I've had consists of a course in high school and another in university, so when it comes to deep-sea solutions/suspensions of heavy metals, I'm rather out of my depth.
First off, IANAG, and second off, I'm seriously interested in any response you might have --
Even should the vitrified waste not be subducted, if it winds up deep enough in the sediment that it ends as a metamorphic rock deposit, isn't that good enough? I'm just wondering what the functional difference is between vitrified waste dissolved in magma, and vitrified waste trapped as a rock deposit. Frankly, to the best of my (limited) powers of imagination, both results seem to keep the waste safely squirelled away.
Please, if I have any grave misunderstandings here, reply and enlighten me, but as it stands, vitrifying the stuff to where it's stable in geologic timescale terms and dropping it into the Marianas or some other scarily deep trench seems a lovely idea, magma or no. Certainly better than having it eat through decades-old steel tanks at ground level and wind up in the drinking water.
Thanks for the link to the explanation, that was quite interesting. One thing I definitely don't get, however, is how the author of that page arrives at their arbitrary (to me) definition of Bob and Carol's present. I'm no expert in this area, but what reading I have done suggests that space-time is a cone (the mathematical sort, with two of your everyday cones coming together at the point), with the present being the singular point of junction. I took that to mean that there is only one present, with nowhen else for anyone else to be. Is this model then only relevant for a single reference point? And even if so, any clues on how the orionsarm person figured on Bob's and Carol's present, existing in me's past?
"Sorry to interrupt you, Alex, but the contestant was actually correct!"
In all seriousness, though, your very cropped quote is quite disingenuous, given the important omission of the following:
Thirteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives, raising the specter of possible civil rights violations that they said took place in Florida and elsewhere in the 2000 election, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in July, asking him to send observers.
So no, the observers are not going to be present simply as a matter of course: they were specifically requested to attend and oversee election proceedings.
Furthermore, I see no political slander anywhere, neither in the grandparent post nor in the article itself. I assume what you must be talking about would be this:
Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California agreed.
"This represents a step in the right direction toward ensuring that this year's elections are fair and transparent," she said.
"I am pleased that the State Department responded by acting on this need for international monitors. We sincerely hope that the presence of the monitors will make certain that every person's voice is heard, every person's vote is counted."
However, given the considerable issues that have come to light regarding the 2000 elections (some of which I touched upon earlier in this thread) and regarding touch-screen voting companies (ties topoliticalparties, missingvotes, negativevotecounts, etc etc), there seems to be considerable reason to bring in the international monitors.
If we as a nation truly have nothing to hide, this will be a nice vindication of our way of doing things. On the other hand, if there are real issues, best to find them and deal with them.
You may already know about him, given your mention of the BBC, but he's one of the many bloodhounds that aided substantially in ferreting out the irregularities that helped install Bush. Well worth a look for anyone disillusioned with the major corporate media outlets of the US.
I must forgo my mod points for this thread to respond to your post.
disenfranchised because they share the same name as people who were previously convicted of crimes in other US states,
All the people who were purged from the rolls for felony convictions were notified of the fact, well before the election, by a letter to their registered mailing address, which gave the procedure to correct any error and the necessary contact information to make it convenient.
Are you claiming that a disproportionate number of people who have names that might be mistaken for a felon's are Democrats? Or are you REALLY upset because the preponderance of felons who are registered to vote, illegally or otherwise, are registered as Democrats?
I see a number of problems here. Allow me to elucidate:
All the people who were purged from the rolls for felony convictions were notified of the fact
Doubtful. From an article on Salon.com:
most counties appear to have used the [central voter] file as a resource to purge names from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or no -- effort at all to alert the "purged" voters.
Never mind the rational argument questioning where these "registered addresses" would have come from, and positing the likelihood that they may no longer be correct. Never mind that some of these "felons"were booked in the future, making it extremely unlikely any of the data is correct, let alone true. And never mind that the list was kept secret, requiring a court order to be made public, thus further reducing the probability that those on it would have found out in time to try to fix their status.
Are you claiming that a disproportionate number of people who have names that might be mistaken for a felon's are Democrats?
I didn't coin the phrase, but in some circles it's known as Voting While Black, a disenfranchisable offence in far too many places in the US.
How could Florida's Republican rulers know how these people would vote? I put the question to David Bositis, America's top expert on voting demographics. Once he stopped laughing, he said the way Florida used the lists from a private firm was, 'an obvious technique to discriminate against black voters'. In a darker mood, Bositis, of Washington's Center for Political and Economic Studies, said the sad truth of American justice is that 46 per cent of those convicted of felony are African-American. In Florida, a record number of black folk, over 80 per cent of those registered to vote, packed the polling booths on November 7. Behind the curtains, nine out of 10 black people voted Gore.
Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project, Washington, pointed out that the 'white' half of the purge list would be peopled overwhelmingly by the poor, also solid Democratic voters.
Or are you REALLY upset because the preponderance of felons who are registered to vote, illegally or otherwise, are registered as Democrats?
Felons or not, the facts are that the vast majority of those who simply 'disappeared' from the Florida voting rosters were those who historically have voted for the Democratic candidate. Given that Bush's lead was reportedly only some 570, and that those wrongfully denied the right to vote likely numbered in the thousands (given a total voter purge list of 94,000 names, the size of which only came clear thanks to
Also, you seem to underestimate the difficulty of explaining the accountants the concept of different file formats and of save-as... I saw users attempting to convert a file by renaming its extension. It's surprisingly common.
No, say it ain't so! Ah, well. My father-in-law often talks of people's "unreasonable faith in reasonableness", and I suppose this might be a good example -- specifically, my dismay at reading your anecdote, rather than simply accepting it as a given.
Putting on my problem-solving cap --
What about capturing the Save event and running your own version, that results in both the usual.doc file, and the needed.rtf (.txt/.whatever) shows up as well? Or something similar that simply always saves as.rtf (admittedly quite limited if you're doing anything fancy)? Cludgy, to be sure, but maybe easier than mass education. I've never tried to educate a mass myself, so I really wouldn't know.
Out of earnest curiosity though, what format do you need your users to save in? There are some interesting efforts at expanding on OOo's headless mode for use as a server capable of handling such bulk document transformation requirements, for instance.
To catch drug dealers, the government buys drugs from them, while videotaping the transaction. This doesn't mean the government partakes in illegal drug dealing.
Do you mean a filter for use from within OOo? Been done. If you mean for use within MS Office programs, oofda. I can see the utility, but really, isn't it much easier (for those with it installed) to simply do any ex/im from within OOo?
I hear your point about defaults and personal preferences. However, your analogy doesn't quite work. Annoying defaults in Word actually get in the way of getting productive work done, whereas annoying defaults in a car radio hardly prevent one from driving (unless of course the music in question is bad enough to drive one to road rage...).
One of the subtexts of this overall thread has been that Word has erratic behavior, and finding and fixing the causes can be a long, drawn-out, and frustrating process at best. Leaving aside the issue of which defaults would be best, I think we can all agree on some level that Word has become cumbersome to use.
Actually, some of the more experimental (i.e., with big budgets and in labs, not the sort you'll be able to play with online) machine translation systems are showing interesting success rates using statistical models rather than any sort of conceptual processing. Instead of trying to imitate a human's range of knowledge and responses, the teams building these systems are coming at the problem from the point of view of, given X in language A, what is the most likely X in language B? And rather than approaching the text at the level of words (painfully failure-prone, requiring unwieldy grammatical modelling and extensive dictionaries), the models approach the text at the level of segment (usually sentences, but configurable). What some of the more successful systems have used is a set corpus of source texts, which the team then outsources to a number of different translators. These translations (target texts) are all fed into the memory system, with the relevant segments linked to the appropriate segments in the source corpus. Though now six years old, one such effort is outlined here.
However, ultimately, your comment of "narrow, carefully bounded areas of discourse" is perfectly apt -- the statistical model itself might be applicable to general discourse, but the amount of work needed to generate such a linked corpus precludes its creation for any but the most specific and clearly useful applications. Industrial language is a great area for machine and/or machine-assisted translation, in that the volume is high enough humans alone can't handle it without exorbitant cost, yet the language itself is constrained to the point that machine translation becomes feasible, even desirable in that humans would often be bored (the writers of such documentation also have my sympathies). Furthermore, new documentation is often only an update of what came before, meaning that most of it has likely been translated in the past, and the prior target-language text(s) can thus be reused. As I mentioned in another post in this thread, deliberately constrained writing can simplify the process even further. "Controlled writing" is much like a well-internationalized coding project, in that it is much more easily localized to other target languages.
I do tend to ramble on, but then translation is my livelihood.:) Cheers!
Hi, IAAPT (I am a professional translator), and what you're talking about is right on the money, so to speak. In fact, it's already being promoted in certain areas, specifically the kind of straightforward technical writing you're talking about. The term you're looking for is controlled writing, and there are even software tools to help technical writers match the style of specified writing projects. Controlled writing is of particular importance in machine translation, as there can only be a limited corpus of material in the translation database, and you want to be sure that you don't inadvertently throw something at the system that isn't already in there. As ever, the holy oracle of language usage has more to say about this if you're so inclined.
Furthermore, there are simpler translation memory systems that simply record the translations that a human has worked on. I use one such system from time to time, called Trados (disclaimer: no, I don't work for them or have any relationship at all aside from that of customer). Large corporate houses that handle significant translation volume can sometimes utilize such systems, which get better the more volume you have and the longer you use them. New documents for translation can then be run through the system for pre-processing, and then checked for accuracy. Whatever comes out the end that hasn't been translated at all can then be translated afresh, and possibly outsourced if the text is contiguous enough. (Outsourcers rightly enough often refuse to work on collections of discrete sentences, as there is often not enough context to either make out what is being said or to get into a good translating pace -- one major reason PowerPoint presentations are so difficult to outsource.)
Either route, the options presently available (and likely available for some years to come) still require knowledgeable and trained humans at the end to make sure you don't wind up with oddities like "there is a chisel in my dog" (hint: go to Altavista's Babel Fish page and translate "my dog has fleas" from English to Japanese and back again).
Anyway, this is probably more than you wanted to know, but there you have it.:)
"...which claims its members loose billions of dollars annually to copyright piracy"
Actually, they left out the word "set," as in "...which claims its members set loose billions of dollars annually to copyright piracy," for as we all know, the MPAA would love to copyright piracy, as then they would be the only ones who could legally pirate. It's what they've been working on for a long time now, with their never-ending copyright and worldwide price fixing. What better life than to sit back and have the profits flow in, without having to actually produce anything? Just live on your laurels for the rest of all time.
Ah, this makes more sense. (note to self to read the rest of the thread before posting replies:)
However, I still stand by my previous statement -- any enforceable copyright is an impingement upon the market, thereby rendering it less than free. I agree that monopolies do happen in a free market of sorts (just look back at the robber barons of 100 years ago)... but then I find myself straying into more philosophical ground: What is a free market? Is the market freer when there are no legal restrictions on economic activities? This gives rise to monopolies, historically shown to be as ruthless as many dictators when it comes to holding onto market share. Or is the market freer when certain economic activities are explicitly proscribed in an attempt at "levelling the playing field"?
Maybe someday we'll ditch the free market for information and the prices of DVD's will be fixed by government committee.
Um, aren't they already? By some extension, that's technically what is happening now, with the various IP groups purchasing their congresscritters to define what "fair" is.
It seems to have missed your notice, but the simple presence of copyright is a limitation on the market. Ergo, your comment about "ditch[ing] the free market" makes no sense -- we don't have one now, how could we ditch something we don't have?
All I'm trying to say is, if you want a free market, espouse a truly free market. What we have now with all the legal tangles is anything but.
Plus, going to Mexico isn't all that cost-effective
It most certainly is, when all that means is going a couple blocks to the south. Note that the article says this is happening at the University of Texas at Brownsville, which gives its zip code as 78520. A quick hop over to maps.yahoo.com shows us that this is smack dab on the border. Have a look here; the blue squiggly line is the Rio Grande itself.
So yes, it can be quite cost effective indeed, depending on where you are.:)
As a professional translator, I hear you and your concerns. This is something I and others in my field spend significant time studying.
However, I think you come close to hitting the proverbial nail when you speak of "chimp attract," in that the problem you speak of has two sides to it. On the one hand, you have
internationalization -- something coders in any sufficiently widely-targeted endeavour should be well familiar with -- which is all about creating a product as bland and malleable as possible (i.e. no hard-coded strings, easily-swapped resources like graphics and sound in case of possible offensive material in a different cultural context, etc), basically taking all the "chimp attract" out in case the orangutans get upset,
and then on the other you have
localization -- which is making something fit the locality you're trying to sell it in, or putting all the "chimp attract" back in for the chimps, but also putting in the "gorilla gotcha" and the "monkey magnetism," etc, for the other markets.
From what you say, and from what little I can recall of OS/2's timing, it seems to me that OS/2 2.0 was developed when people were still struggling with these ideas, and had not yet hit upon the dichotomy. Basically, OS/2 sounds like a wonderfully internationalized product, but also one that was only marginally localized, if at all.
I18n is the end of things the initial programmers need to worry about -- coding cleanly, i.e. hard-coding as little culturally-specific material as possible. The properly internationalized product is a bit like an empty apartment -- something that handles all the right things an apartment should do, with a roof and walls and maybe even electricity if we're getting fancy. L10n, on the other hand, is where you can let your sales and/or UI teams have their fun, making sure of course that the project uses the right team for each target market. A properly localized product is that same apartment decorated (and possibly even furnished) to appeal to specific tastes.
Probably more than you wanted to know, but that's probably why OS/2 2.0 was so damn dull -- it was a useful apartment, but quite drab; nowhere you'd want to spend your time relaxing. This seems like more evidence against the "one size fits all" mentality, in that you can't really please everyone all the time with the same thing. Each to their own. This is some of where Linux shines with its immensely malleable UI, and note that Microsoft too took the hint and saw fit to implement UI themability in XP. Sure, it's only eye-candy, but then so are an awful lot of the things we crave in life: beautiful vistas outside our windows, lava lamps, wallpaper. The "chimp attract," if you will.
"Dupe" obviously enough comes from "duplicate". Making three of something is making it in "triplicate", so obviously a gaff of this sort should be called for what it is: TRIPE.
It wasn't a right wing consiracy to be mean to the mentally ill, but rather, another mis-guided liberal program to "free" them.
Yes, the move to change how the mentally ill are treated by the social care system was indeed begun by those more in the liberal camp. To be fair, look back historically at what kind of places mental hospitals were at the time -- an awful lot of shock treatments, forced lobotomies, chemical straitjacketing. My wife worked in mental health, and we've read up on it a bit too. Scary stuff.
However, I think it can be pretty well established that the deregulation happened in the Reagan years, and there was a lot of talk from the administration about "community-based care" (i.e., the goverment ain't paying). This was a clever way of taking a call for improving the social systems for the mentally ill and twisiting it to fit an agenda of cutting government funding of social services.
Liberals will pave the road to hell with good intentions, and Conservative contractors will be right there, looking for the constuction contract.
The problem is that the provision of socially necessary services and the profit motive don't mix very well. Have a look at Enron and the California power crisis, or the mess in the UK ever since the water system was given over to private concerns. Many have also said this bad combination might have something to do with why medical costs in the US are the highest in the world. I think the profit motive is fabulous; but I also think vital services should not be run on a for-profit basis.
Allow me to chip in my ¥2 here. Sad as I feel it is, it seems to me that discrimination of some sort or another is inherent in what it means to be human. I live in Japan, and finding housing here is its own adventure with side-tales quite similar to mkuki's. The problem is I'm clearly white, with some folks thinking I might have a trace of Asian somewhere (who knows, all our ancestors got around quite a bit...). I've occasionally found more negativity directed my way when people think I might be part Japanese, but either way it can be like swimming in treacle sometimes trying to get past people's preconceptions.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to play apologist by saying we all do it. I quite agree with your idea that any change in discriminatory behaviors has to come from the ground up. But I think it's very important to realize that we all discriminate, and will continue to do so -- the trick is to teach ourselves to recognize when we're doing so, and to be smart enough to pick apart the reasons and criteria we're using, and consciously work through whatever it is that's engendered a discriminatory response.
Sure, we all have stereotypes -- they're a large part of human decision-making, an important way of taking our combined learning experiences (including those where our learning has come from others) so as to shorten the time it takes for us to evaluate each situation. What I think we need to be able to do is recognize when they don't fit, and make changes in our behaviour accordingly.
Precisely. As I just posted over here, I fear that a significantly large part of the electorate could not pass the basic test for citizenship. I suspect that most folks born in the US (i.e. those who haven't had to work for their voting rights) take their citizenship for granted, but in doing so, lose sight of the responsibilities inherent in being a vested member of a democratic system. Instead, they rely on occasional media exposure to "inform" them of the issues, sometimes never deigning to scratch beneath the surface of what the candidates look like.
Here's an idea -- if someone can't pass the same test immigrants have to pass to be citizens, they can't register to vote. That strikes me as a relatively fair yardstick. Provided of course that there's some way of ensuring that the test itself is fair (hint: education can go a long way towards this end).
I'm all for some kind of process to ensure the electorate has at least half a brain. One of the many embarassing things to me of late is the reflection that many of those with the right to vote in the US simply by dint of birth would likely fail the citizenship test all wannabe citizens have to pass. Could we not institute something similar before people could register? If an aspiring voter doesn't know who the current president is, for instance, or doesn't know that it's the electoral college that gets final say (two of the items on the linked sample test), should they really be given the power to help determine the leader of the country?
An uneducated and ignorant populace can only be expected to make uneducated and ignorant voting decisions. I recall with dismay talking with one young woman before the 1992 elections, when she said she had decided to vote for Bush "because he has better hair." Whatever your political leanings, this seems to me to be a very poor criterion on which to choose a president. And this is no isolated instance: the media are all very aware of how much minor details of appearance can sway the public mind. There seems to be little understanding of the old adage about books and covers, or awareness of the importance of actual policy, let alone an understanding of the ramifications of the few policies that are actually talked about during the campaign process.
So before we go into any drastic overhaul of the election system, I think we need to prioritize educational reform. For that matter, prioritizing education in general (instead of, say, building prisons) strikes me as a very good idea indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
DRM, Digital Rights Management -- "you have no digital rights." Spyware is, of course, an integral part of how DRM works. How else to know exactly what you've got on your machine? Well, not *your* machine per se, but the machine you're being allowed to use, at any rate...
...only half tongue-in-cheek.
Thanks for the reply. Good point about the timeline, rather renders things moot in terms of subduction.
About seawater and the vitrified waste though, how much do heavy metals dissolve in water? Are uranium, plutonium, and their ilk heavy enough that they would simply precipitate out and settle on the bottom, slowly sinking into the ooze? Or would they be tossed about on the currents, leading to even more glow-in-the-dark sea creatures and perhaps winding up on a beach somewhere? My gut hunch is on precipitation, but then I'm really not certain. What chemistry I've had consists of a course in high school and another in university, so when it comes to deep-sea solutions/suspensions of heavy metals, I'm rather out of my depth.
What thoughts, Malc?
First off, IANAG, and second off, I'm seriously interested in any response you might have --
Even should the vitrified waste not be subducted, if it winds up deep enough in the sediment that it ends as a metamorphic rock deposit, isn't that good enough? I'm just wondering what the functional difference is between vitrified waste dissolved in magma, and vitrified waste trapped as a rock deposit. Frankly, to the best of my (limited) powers of imagination, both results seem to keep the waste safely squirelled away.
Please, if I have any grave misunderstandings here, reply and enlighten me, but as it stands, vitrifying the stuff to where it's stable in geologic timescale terms and dropping it into the Marianas or some other scarily deep trench seems a lovely idea, magma or no. Certainly better than having it eat through decades-old steel tanks at ground level and wind up in the drinking water.
Thanks for the link to the explanation, that was quite interesting. One thing I definitely don't get, however, is how the author of that page arrives at their arbitrary (to me) definition of Bob and Carol's present. I'm no expert in this area, but what reading I have done suggests that space-time is a cone (the mathematical sort, with two of your everyday cones coming together at the point), with the present being the singular point of junction. I took that to mean that there is only one present, with nowhen else for anyone else to be. Is this model then only relevant for a single reference point? And even if so, any clues on how the orionsarm person figured on Bob's and Carol's present, existing in me's past?
(scratches head)...
"Sorry to interrupt you, Alex, but the contestant was actually correct!"
In all seriousness, though, your very cropped quote is quite disingenuous, given the important omission of the following:
So no, the observers are not going to be present simply as a matter of course: they were specifically requested to attend and oversee election proceedings.Furthermore, I see no political slander anywhere, neither in the grandparent post nor in the article itself. I assume what you must be talking about would be this:
However, given the considerable issues that have come to light regarding the 2000 elections (some of which I touched upon earlier in this thread) and regarding touch-screen voting companies (ties to political parties, missing votes, negative vote counts, etc etc), there seems to be considerable reason to bring in the international monitors.If we as a nation truly have nothing to hide, this will be a nice vindication of our way of doing things. On the other hand, if there are real issues, best to find them and deal with them.
You may already know about him, given your mention of the BBC, but he's one of the many bloodhounds that aided substantially in ferreting out the irregularities that helped install Bush. Well worth a look for anyone disillusioned with the major corporate media outlets of the US.
www.gregpalast.com
I must forgo my mod points for this thread to respond to your post.
I see a number of problems here. Allow me to elucidate:
Doubtful. From an article on Salon.com:
Never mind the rational argument questioning where these "registered addresses" would have come from, and positing the likelihood that they may no longer be correct. Never mind that some of these "felons" were booked in the future, making it extremely unlikely any of the data is correct, let alone true. And never mind that the list was kept secret, requiring a court order to be made public, thus further reducing the probability that those on it would have found out in time to try to fix their status.
I didn't coin the phrase, but in some circles it's known as Voting While Black , a disenfranchisable offence in far too many places in the US.
Felons or not, the facts are that the vast majority of those who simply 'disappeared' from the Florida voting rosters were those who historically have voted for the Democratic candidate. Given that Bush's lead was reportedly only some 570, and that those wrongfully denied the right to vote likely numbered in the thousands (given a total voter purge list of 94,000 names, the size of which only came clear thanks to
No, say it ain't so! Ah, well. My father-in-law often talks of people's "unreasonable faith in reasonableness", and I suppose this might be a good example -- specifically, my dismay at reading your anecdote, rather than simply accepting it as a given.
Putting on my problem-solving cap --
What about capturing the Save event and running your own version, that results in both the usual .doc file, and the needed .rtf (.txt/.whatever) shows up as well? Or something similar that simply always saves as .rtf (admittedly quite limited if you're doing anything fancy)? Cludgy, to be sure, but maybe easier than mass education. I've never tried to educate a mass myself, so I really wouldn't know.
Out of earnest curiosity though, what format do you need your users to save in? There are some interesting efforts at expanding on OOo's headless mode for use as a server capable of handling such bulk document transformation requirements, for instance.
Cheers!
Do some digging. It's pretty well established, albeit murkily, that the US gubmint is quite happy to sell drugs when it needs to raise some quick, shady cash. And with the War on Drugs, prices are nicely inflated.
Do you mean a filter for use from within OOo? Been done. If you mean for use within MS Office programs, oofda. I can see the utility, but really, isn't it much easier (for those with it installed) to simply do any ex/im from within OOo?
I hear your point about defaults and personal preferences. However, your analogy doesn't quite work. Annoying defaults in Word actually get in the way of getting productive work done, whereas annoying defaults in a car radio hardly prevent one from driving (unless of course the music in question is bad enough to drive one to road rage...).
One of the subtexts of this overall thread has been that Word has erratic behavior, and finding and fixing the causes can be a long, drawn-out, and frustrating process at best. Leaving aside the issue of which defaults would be best, I think we can all agree on some level that Word has become cumbersome to use.
Actually, some of the more experimental (i.e., with big budgets and in labs, not the sort you'll be able to play with online) machine translation systems are showing interesting success rates using statistical models rather than any sort of conceptual processing. Instead of trying to imitate a human's range of knowledge and responses, the teams building these systems are coming at the problem from the point of view of, given X in language A, what is the most likely X in language B? And rather than approaching the text at the level of words (painfully failure-prone, requiring unwieldy grammatical modelling and extensive dictionaries), the models approach the text at the level of segment (usually sentences, but configurable). What some of the more successful systems have used is a set corpus of source texts, which the team then outsources to a number of different translators. These translations (target texts) are all fed into the memory system, with the relevant segments linked to the appropriate segments in the source corpus. Though now six years old, one such effort is outlined here.
However, ultimately, your comment of "narrow, carefully bounded areas of discourse" is perfectly apt -- the statistical model itself might be applicable to general discourse, but the amount of work needed to generate such a linked corpus precludes its creation for any but the most specific and clearly useful applications. Industrial language is a great area for machine and/or machine-assisted translation, in that the volume is high enough humans alone can't handle it without exorbitant cost, yet the language itself is constrained to the point that machine translation becomes feasible, even desirable in that humans would often be bored (the writers of such documentation also have my sympathies). Furthermore, new documentation is often only an update of what came before, meaning that most of it has likely been translated in the past, and the prior target-language text(s) can thus be reused. As I mentioned in another post in this thread, deliberately constrained writing can simplify the process even further. "Controlled writing" is much like a well-internationalized coding project, in that it is much more easily localized to other target languages.
I do tend to ramble on, but then translation is my livelihood. :) Cheers!
Hi, IAAPT (I am a professional translator), and what you're talking about is right on the money, so to speak. In fact, it's already being promoted in certain areas, specifically the kind of straightforward technical writing you're talking about. The term you're looking for is controlled writing, and there are even software tools to help technical writers match the style of specified writing projects. Controlled writing is of particular importance in machine translation, as there can only be a limited corpus of material in the translation database, and you want to be sure that you don't inadvertently throw something at the system that isn't already in there. As ever, the holy oracle of language usage has more to say about this if you're so inclined.
Furthermore, there are simpler translation memory systems that simply record the translations that a human has worked on. I use one such system from time to time, called Trados (disclaimer: no, I don't work for them or have any relationship at all aside from that of customer). Large corporate houses that handle significant translation volume can sometimes utilize such systems, which get better the more volume you have and the longer you use them. New documents for translation can then be run through the system for pre-processing, and then checked for accuracy. Whatever comes out the end that hasn't been translated at all can then be translated afresh, and possibly outsourced if the text is contiguous enough. (Outsourcers rightly enough often refuse to work on collections of discrete sentences, as there is often not enough context to either make out what is being said or to get into a good translating pace -- one major reason PowerPoint presentations are so difficult to outsource.)
Either route, the options presently available (and likely available for some years to come) still require knowledgeable and trained humans at the end to make sure you don't wind up with oddities like "there is a chisel in my dog" (hint: go to Altavista's Babel Fish page and translate "my dog has fleas" from English to Japanese and back again).
Anyway, this is probably more than you wanted to know, but there you have it. :)
Actually, they left out the word "set," as in "...which claims its members set loose billions of dollars annually to copyright piracy," for as we all know, the MPAA would love to copyright piracy, as then they would be the only ones who could legally pirate. It's what they've been working on for a long time now, with their never-ending copyright and worldwide price fixing. What better life than to sit back and have the profits flow in, without having to actually produce anything? Just live on your laurels for the rest of all time.
Ah, this makes more sense. (note to self to read the rest of the thread before posting replies :)
However, I still stand by my previous statement -- any enforceable copyright is an impingement upon the market, thereby rendering it less than free. I agree that monopolies do happen in a free market of sorts (just look back at the robber barons of 100 years ago) ... but then I find myself straying into more philosophical ground: What is a free market? Is the market freer when there are no legal restrictions on economic activities? This gives rise to monopolies, historically shown to be as ruthless as many dictators when it comes to holding onto market share. Or is the market freer when certain economic activities are explicitly proscribed in an attempt at "levelling the playing field"?
...
Hm. How'd I wind up way out here in left field?
Um, aren't they already? By some extension, that's technically what is happening now, with the various IP groups purchasing their congresscritters to define what "fair" is.
It seems to have missed your notice, but the simple presence of copyright is a limitation on the market. Ergo, your comment about "ditch[ing] the free market" makes no sense -- we don't have one now, how could we ditch something we don't have?
All I'm trying to say is, if you want a free market, espouse a truly free market. What we have now with all the legal tangles is anything but.
It most certainly is, when all that means is going a couple blocks to the south. Note that the article says this is happening at the University of Texas at Brownsville, which gives its zip code as 78520. A quick hop over to maps.yahoo.com shows us that this is smack dab on the border. Have a look here; the blue squiggly line is the Rio Grande itself.
So yes, it can be quite cost effective indeed, depending on where you are. :)
As a professional translator, I hear you and your concerns. This is something I and others in my field spend significant time studying.
However, I think you come close to hitting the proverbial nail when you speak of "chimp attract," in that the problem you speak of has two sides to it. On the one hand, you have
and then on the other you have
From what you say, and from what little I can recall of OS/2's timing, it seems to me that OS/2 2.0 was developed when people were still struggling with these ideas, and had not yet hit upon the dichotomy. Basically, OS/2 sounds like a wonderfully internationalized product, but also one that was only marginally localized, if at all.
I18n is the end of things the initial programmers need to worry about -- coding cleanly, i.e. hard-coding as little culturally-specific material as possible. The properly internationalized product is a bit like an empty apartment -- something that handles all the right things an apartment should do, with a roof and walls and maybe even electricity if we're getting fancy. L10n, on the other hand, is where you can let your sales and/or UI teams have their fun, making sure of course that the project uses the right team for each target market. A properly localized product is that same apartment decorated (and possibly even furnished) to appeal to specific tastes.
Probably more than you wanted to know, but that's probably why OS/2 2.0 was so damn dull -- it was a useful apartment, but quite drab; nowhere you'd want to spend your time relaxing. This seems like more evidence against the "one size fits all" mentality, in that you can't really please everyone all the time with the same thing. Each to their own. This is some of where Linux shines with its immensely malleable UI, and note that Microsoft too took the hint and saw fit to implement UI themability in XP. Sure, it's only eye-candy, but then so are an awful lot of the things we crave in life: beautiful vistas outside our windows, lava lamps, wallpaper. The "chimp attract," if you will.
"Dupe" obviously enough comes from "duplicate". Making three of something is making it in "triplicate", so obviously a gaff of this sort should be called for what it is: TRIPE.
Yes, the move to change how the mentally ill are treated by the social care system was indeed begun by those more in the liberal camp. To be fair, look back historically at what kind of places mental hospitals were at the time -- an awful lot of shock treatments, forced lobotomies, chemical straitjacketing. My wife worked in mental health, and we've read up on it a bit too. Scary stuff.
However, I think it can be pretty well established that the deregulation happened in the Reagan years, and there was a lot of talk from the administration about "community-based care" (i.e., the goverment ain't paying). This was a clever way of taking a call for improving the social systems for the mentally ill and twisiting it to fit an agenda of cutting government funding of social services.
The problem is that the provision of socially necessary services and the profit motive don't mix very well. Have a look at Enron and the California power crisis, or the mess in the UK ever since the water system was given over to private concerns. Many have also said this bad combination might have something to do with why medical costs in the US are the highest in the world. I think the profit motive is fabulous; but I also think vital services should not be run on a for-profit basis.
Allow me to chip in my ¥2 here. Sad as I feel it is, it seems to me that discrimination of some sort or another is inherent in what it means to be human. I live in Japan, and finding housing here is its own adventure with side-tales quite similar to mkuki's. The problem is I'm clearly white, with some folks thinking I might have a trace of Asian somewhere (who knows, all our ancestors got around quite a bit...). I've occasionally found more negativity directed my way when people think I might be part Japanese, but either way it can be like swimming in treacle sometimes trying to get past people's preconceptions.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to play apologist by saying we all do it. I quite agree with your idea that any change in discriminatory behaviors has to come from the ground up. But I think it's very important to realize that we all discriminate, and will continue to do so -- the trick is to teach ourselves to recognize when we're doing so, and to be smart enough to pick apart the reasons and criteria we're using, and consciously work through whatever it is that's engendered a discriminatory response.
Sure, we all have stereotypes -- they're a large part of human decision-making, an important way of taking our combined learning experiences (including those where our learning has come from others) so as to shorten the time it takes for us to evaluate each situation. What I think we need to be able to do is recognize when they don't fit, and make changes in our behaviour accordingly.
Gee, nor have I. That might explain why I'm still in Japan...
Precisely. As I just posted over here, I fear that a significantly large part of the electorate could not pass the basic test for citizenship. I suspect that most folks born in the US (i.e. those who haven't had to work for their voting rights) take their citizenship for granted, but in doing so, lose sight of the responsibilities inherent in being a vested member of a democratic system. Instead, they rely on occasional media exposure to "inform" them of the issues, sometimes never deigning to scratch beneath the surface of what the candidates look like.
Here's an idea -- if someone can't pass the same test immigrants have to pass to be citizens, they can't register to vote. That strikes me as a relatively fair yardstick. Provided of course that there's some way of ensuring that the test itself is fair (hint: education can go a long way towards this end).
I'm all for some kind of process to ensure the electorate has at least half a brain. One of the many embarassing things to me of late is the reflection that many of those with the right to vote in the US simply by dint of birth would likely fail the citizenship test all wannabe citizens have to pass. Could we not institute something similar before people could register? If an aspiring voter doesn't know who the current president is, for instance, or doesn't know that it's the electoral college that gets final say (two of the items on the linked sample test), should they really be given the power to help determine the leader of the country?
An uneducated and ignorant populace can only be expected to make uneducated and ignorant voting decisions. I recall with dismay talking with one young woman before the 1992 elections, when she said she had decided to vote for Bush "because he has better hair." Whatever your political leanings, this seems to me to be a very poor criterion on which to choose a president. And this is no isolated instance: the media are all very aware of how much minor details of appearance can sway the public mind. There seems to be little understanding of the old adage about books and covers, or awareness of the importance of actual policy, let alone an understanding of the ramifications of the few policies that are actually talked about during the campaign process.
So before we go into any drastic overhaul of the election system, I think we need to prioritize educational reform. For that matter, prioritizing education in general (instead of, say, building prisons) strikes me as a very good idea indeed.
Which sounds a lot like "suru" ("to do") in Japanese. Somehow appropriate, given Sulu's role on the bridge... :)