I think the poster wants something more foolproof than a regular PC.
A cheap laptop will still be prone to viruses, adware, etc. Maybe something running Linux or one of the BSDs could be set up to minimize the likelihood of his father getting in trouble.
If you're a big enough customer, or the vendor is understanding, perhaps
you can arrange for them to inspect the drives under your supervision and
confirm that they are no good. Then take them, accompanied by the vendor's
representative if they want to be sure you destroy them, and drop them into
the vat at your local steel mill, or whatever less dramatic method of physical
destruction works for you.
It's true that the headline is misleading. The patent application is not for "conjugating verbs". That said, it is still very broad and something for which there is tons of prior art. I don't see any specific methods mentioned. Software for generating the entire paradigm for a verb is nothing new, as various posters, including myself, have already pointed out. The idea that the user doesn't need to produce a particular citation form but that the system will figure it out is also not new. I published a paper ("Making Athabaskan Dictionaries Usable," in Gary Holton (ed.) (2002) Proceedings of the Athabaskan Languages Conference --- 2002, Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska. Working Papers #2. pp. 136-147.) a while back about how such a system can provide a usable dictionary for languages with extremely complex verbal systems, such as Navajo.
Here's a description of an actual implementation of a system like this for Nahuatl. Unfortunately, the site at which you can actually try it out seems to be down, but it does, or at least did, exist.
You very likely don't work in natural language processing. People have been generating whole paradigms for a long time. For a set of published examples, check out the Xerox Finite State Morphology software and textbook. The software provides ways of describing the morphology and lexicon of a language and compiling it into an efficient finite state transducer. Once you've got the transducer, you can run it in either direction, that is, you can parse, or you can generate. A common test, and exercise in courses on doing this, is to generate the entire paradigm of a particular word or set of words.
I don't find any statement of Schilling's position on this on his web page. Am I missing something? If not, that might explain why the article didn't bother to link to it.
This doesn't surprise me in light of my experience with some of his other projects. On several occasions I've come upon one of his projects on Freshmeat and been interested enough to try to build it. This has generally been problematic. He has his own configuration and build system. It isn't necessarily bad - it may even have some advantages - but it is idiosyncratic and in my experience a pain to use. When I've examined the specifics of his project I usually find that the differences between it and the more standard version (several of his projects are variants of standard utilities, e.g. his count is a variant of wc) aren't sufficiently interesting to me to make the hassle of his build system worthwhile, or that they lack features of other variants that are important for my purposes. (His count, for example, is said to be faster than GNU wc, but doesn't understand Unicode.)
None of this means that he is evil or incompetant, but it does give the impression of someone who is insistently idiosyncratic. I can easily imagine that he'd be difficult to deal with.
First, one of the two things that the defendant is asking for is a protocol specifying exactly what material on her hard drive the plaintiff will be allowed to look at. She is not simply asking for her own expert.
Second, it is not true that expert witnesses are always chosen by the parties. Precisely because of the problem of partisanship of expert witnesses and, as in this case, the possible invasiveness of the investigation, courts have the authority to appoint their own, neutral experts. They probably do not excercise this authority as often as they should, but from time to time they do. That is what the defendant is asking the court to do. It is a reasonable request and well within the authority of the court.
Canadian banks are regulated by the government, as they are in the United States and most other countries, but they are not owned or operated by the government. Wherever did you get that idea?
If you just want to show layout and don't want to draw by hand on
paper, why not use xfig or some other diagram-drawing program? If you do
a lot of this and want higher quality drawings, you can create a library
of objects.
It's a relatively minor annoyance but a terrific demonstration of Microsoft's arrogance and emphasis on marketing fluff over substance. Fortunately, I've been 100% Microsoft free for two years and have no intention of ever running Vista. Good riddance to bad garbage.
People have been burned by writing large pieces of software that used GPLed code in it, without understanding what their obligations under the GPL were until they had already made a significant investment into using it.
I'm curious: when has this happened? Can you point to examples? It is a logical possibility, but it seems to me to be pretty unlikely, especially if the project is significant and involves a big investment. The reason is that nobody who isn't awfully naive is going to think that it is safe to borrow somebody else's source. Most code, at least until very recently, hasn't been under any sort of free license - it has been proprietary. So it seems to me that anybody who isn't terribly naive is going to check into the conditions under which they can use other people's code. And since GPL'ed code must be clearly marked, they will quickly discover that the code is GPL'ed and what that means. As far as I can see, the only situation in which inadvertent use of GPL'ed code could occur is when the programmers are either incredibly reckless or really naive. And I wonder how likely it is that such programmers would write anything significant or that involved a large investment. Even startups don't usually have ignorant 10 year olds doing all their development.
The EPA is its own entity. It makes decisions on its own based on a plan that it generates. Do you really think Bush walked in to the EPA headquarters and said "shut it all down now!"? Try and read the story completely next time.
If you think that because an article attributes a decision to "the EPA" that means that the decision was not made by political appointees implementing administration policy, you're incredibly naive. Bush may well not have been personally involved in this decision, but it sure looks like a political decision, not something that EPA scientists and lawyers have come up with.
As for the scanning, did you also miss the fact that you can order whatever material you want via library loan?
Yep, I missed it because it isn't in the article. What the article says is that "all EPA-generated materials will continue to be available by inter-library loan. That excludes material not generated by the EPA. You need to be more careful about accusing people of not reading the article. I've obviously read it more carefully than you have. Furthermore, even if this does mean that the boxed materials will be available by interlibrary loan, how easy do you think it will be to find what you need, and how long a delay will there be in getting the boxed materials out of storage? I know from personal experience that it can be a real impediment to research to have to wait several weeks or even days to get something out of storage, and that often it is difficult to identify what you need if you can't go look at it on the shelf online.
Absolutely. A decent President would have seen to it that Saddam Hussein got a fair trial so that his evil deeds were fully exposed and everyone could see that they got him fair and square. Because of Bush's penchant for kangaroo courts, Saddam Hussein is being tried on rather narrow charges and in a fashion that will leave room for his supporters to claim that he was innocent and his condemnation purely political.
Uh, according to the article you cite, Bush is taking action BEFORE Congress has had a chance to act on his budget proposal. He isn't waiting to get approval. Furthermore, they say that they will digitize the 80,000 documents beyond boxed and stored, but I'll be very interested to see how quickly that will happen and how well they will be indexed. And the point that institutional memory will be lost when librarians are laid off is not addressed at all. The article is a lot more accurate than you make out.
It doesn't seem to be "internal" in the sense of a decision made by EPA scientists or lawyers. It looks like it was made by a political employee high in the EPA hierarchy. People like that implement the policies of the White House.
No, the reason you are being modded down is probably that you don't know what a communist state is. What the rest of us mean is a state that operates under a communist political and economic system. That means state ownership of all property, state control of the economy, and dictatorship of the proletariat. That is very different from the situation in Kerala where at both the state and national level the overal economic and political system is non-communist. The fact that Kerala is controlled by a coalition whose leading party is the Communist Party does not give Kerala a communist economy or political system.
If you want to complain about the policies of the Communist-led government Kerala, feel free, but don't confuse the system in Kerala with communism, and don't complain when the rest of us are not impressed with your confusion.
And you've missed the point. It isn't just that they are elected, it is also that the overall framework is not communist, so even a government dominated by communists cannot impose a truly communist state. Private property and private enterprise exist in Kerala, which they would not in a communist system, and the state government does not control the economy the way it would in a communist system.
Even if the reason for the ban on Coke and Pepsi is hostility to large, multinational corporations, that doesn't make Kerala communist. There are lots of Greens, for example, who are certainly not communist, who are hostile to such corporations. There are also other possible reasons for the ban. One is that if they think that the levels of toxic chemicals in Coke and Pepsi products are too high, it makes sense to ban sales entirely, not just in schools. Even if adults aren't at risk (and they may think they are), kids drink soft drinks outside of school.
Kerala is ruled by an ELECTED communist government within an overall governmental framework that is not communist. Private enterprise is alive and well in Kerala. Kerala also has the highest literacy rate in India (95%) and a lot of technically skilled people.
Furthermore, the big pollution problem in China isn't oil and petroleum, it is coal. The major energy source in China is coal, which is the only thing that is cheap and abundant. What is worse , it is bituminous "soft" coal, which contains a lot of sulfur. They burn coal to generate power for industry, to heat homes, and to cook. It causes horrible air pollution. When I spent time in Tianjin, if I left a book or paper out for a couple of days, when I picked it up again I got my hands dirty from the coal dust that had settled on it. This causes lots of respiratory problems. Switching from coal to natural gas for domestic use is one thing that China has been doing in an attempt to reduce air pollution.
I hate to burst your bubble, but there is climate data much farther back than 50 years.
Not only were people recording temperature and other variables more than fifty years ago, but there is data from other sources, such as ice cores and tree rings, going back much farther.
A friend's parents live on the part of the Navajo reservation that the courts awarded to the Hopis; they're grandfathered, but when they are gone their land becomes Hopi land. The time zone business is so confusing that they just have three clocks: one for Navjo time, one for Hopi time, and one for Arizona time.
You have my sympathy. I wrote a paper containing equations in TeX. The equations looked very nice. Once he accepted it, the journal editor insisted on WordPerfect so that he could edit it, so I converted it (manually) to WordPerfect. The equations didn't look nearly as nice. The publisher then demanded MS Word, so I converted it again. The printer evidently used the MS word file more-or-less directly, so the published version of the paper is noticeably uglier than the WordPerfect version. By far the nicest version is my original TeX version.
Before you can say anything intelligent about what kinds of computers/OSs are
needed, you have to be clear as to what you want to use them for. What is appropriate depends on the application.
If the purpose is to enable students to use computers as part of their education, they just need systems that let them surf the net, write, maybe do calculations and so forth. This they can do perfectly fine using just Linux or FreeBSD or indeed pretty much any single system. I don't see any particular benefit to diversity here.
If the purpose is to teach about how computers work and programming, again a single system will do just fine, and an open system like Linux or FreeBSD will be superior to a closed system like MS Windows.
For the specific purpose of teaching classes on topics like "Operating systems concepts" or "networking" there may be value in having a variety of systems to play with.
If the purpose is to teach "computer literacy", such as how to use word processors and spreadsheets, again a single system will work just fine.
If the purpose is to prepare students for jobs in which they will have to use specific systems or pieces of software, e.g. to train secretaries to use MS Word, there is reason to have the specific systems and software for which they are being trained.
If the purpose is to prepare students for jobs as general purpose computer techs, salespeople, etc., then it will be desirable for them to know about a variety of systems.
If the purpose is to use computers for administrative purposes, diversity is probably a bad idea as most of the users will be inexpert and you want the system to be easy
to maintain. In this area, availability of appropriate software may be a decisive factor in the short term, and may well favor MS Windows. On the other hand, as security is presumably a major concern here, that would be a strike against MS Windows.
It looks to me like there is no virtue to diversity, and a big advantage to open systems, for most of the purposes for which one may want to use computers in primary and secondary education. The cases in which diversity is a virtue, or there is a need for MS Windows in particular, involve certain types of vocational classes that would only be offered at a secondary level and a few CS classes of a type rarely offered below the college level anyhow. In short, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to make Unix-type open systems the foundation for educational computing and to provide other systems only for the limited set of secondary level classes, mostly vocational, for which there is a need for something else.
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I think the poster wants something more foolproof than a regular PC. A cheap laptop will still be prone to viruses, adware, etc. Maybe something running Linux or one of the BSDs could be set up to minimize the likelihood of his father getting in trouble.
If you're a big enough customer, or the vendor is understanding, perhaps you can arrange for them to inspect the drives under your supervision and confirm that they are no good. Then take them, accompanied by the vendor's representative if they want to be sure you destroy them, and drop them into the vat at your local steel mill, or whatever less dramatic method of physical destruction works for you.
It's true that the headline is misleading. The patent application is not for "conjugating verbs". That said, it is still very broad and something for which there is tons of prior art. I don't see any specific methods mentioned. Software for generating the entire paradigm for a verb is nothing new, as various posters, including myself, have already pointed out. The idea that the user doesn't need to produce a particular citation form but that the system will figure it out is also not new. I published a paper ("Making Athabaskan Dictionaries Usable," in Gary Holton (ed.) (2002) Proceedings of the Athabaskan Languages Conference --- 2002, Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska. Working Papers #2. pp. 136-147.) a while back about how such a system can provide a usable dictionary for languages with extremely complex verbal systems, such as Navajo.
Here's a description of an actual implementation of a system like this for Nahuatl. Unfortunately, the site at which you can actually try it out seems to be down, but it does, or at least did, exist.
You very likely don't work in natural language processing. People have been generating whole paradigms for a long time. For a set of published examples, check out the Xerox Finite State Morphology software and textbook. The software provides ways of describing the morphology and lexicon of a language and compiling it into an efficient finite state transducer. Once you've got the transducer, you can run it in either direction, that is, you can parse, or you can generate. A common test, and exercise in courses on doing this, is to generate the entire paradigm of a particular word or set of words.
I don't find any statement of Schilling's position on this on his web page. Am I missing something? If not, that might explain why the article didn't bother to link to it.
This doesn't surprise me in light of my experience with some of his other projects. On several occasions I've come upon one of his projects on Freshmeat and been interested enough to try to build it. This has generally been problematic. He has his own configuration and build system. It isn't necessarily bad - it may even have some advantages - but it is idiosyncratic and in my experience a pain to use. When I've examined the specifics of his project I usually find that the differences between it and the more standard version (several of his projects are variants of standard utilities, e.g. his count is a variant of wc) aren't sufficiently interesting to me to make the hassle of his build system worthwhile, or that they lack features of other variants that are important for my purposes. (His count, for example, is said to be faster than GNU wc, but doesn't understand Unicode.)
None of this means that he is evil or incompetant, but it does give the impression of someone who is insistently idiosyncratic. I can easily imagine that he'd be difficult to deal with.
First, one of the two things that the defendant is asking for is a protocol specifying exactly what material on her hard drive the plaintiff will be allowed to look at. She is not simply asking for her own expert.
Second, it is not true that expert witnesses are always chosen by the parties. Precisely because of the problem of partisanship of expert witnesses and, as in this case, the possible invasiveness of the investigation, courts have the authority to appoint their own, neutral experts. They probably do not excercise this authority as often as they should, but from time to time they do. That is what the defendant is asking the court to do. It is a reasonable request and well within the authority of the court.
Canadian banks are regulated by the government, as they are in the United States and most other countries, but they are not owned or operated by the government. Wherever did you get that idea?
If you just want to show layout and don't want to draw by hand on paper, why not use xfig or some other diagram-drawing program? If you do a lot of this and want higher quality drawings, you can create a library of objects.
It's a relatively minor annoyance but a terrific demonstration of Microsoft's arrogance and emphasis on marketing fluff over substance. Fortunately, I've been 100% Microsoft free for two years and have no intention of ever running Vista. Good riddance to bad garbage.
I'm curious: when has this happened? Can you point to examples? It is a logical possibility, but it seems to me to be pretty unlikely, especially if the project is significant and involves a big investment. The reason is that nobody who isn't awfully naive is going to think that it is safe to borrow somebody else's source. Most code, at least until very recently, hasn't been under any sort of free license - it has been proprietary. So it seems to me that anybody who isn't terribly naive is going to check into the conditions under which they can use other people's code. And since GPL'ed code must be clearly marked, they will quickly discover that the code is GPL'ed and what that means. As far as I can see, the only situation in which inadvertent use of GPL'ed code could occur is when the programmers are either incredibly reckless or really naive. And I wonder how likely it is that such programmers would write anything significant or that involved a large investment. Even startups don't usually have ignorant 10 year olds doing all their development.
If you think that because an article attributes a decision to "the EPA" that means that the decision was not made by political appointees implementing administration policy, you're incredibly naive. Bush may well not have been personally involved in this decision, but it sure looks like a political decision, not something that EPA scientists and lawyers have come up with.
Yep, I missed it because it isn't in the article. What the article says is that "all EPA-generated materials will continue to be available by inter-library loan. That excludes material not generated by the EPA. You need to be more careful about accusing people of not reading the article. I've obviously read it more carefully than you have. Furthermore, even if this does mean that the boxed materials will be available by interlibrary loan, how easy do you think it will be to find what you need, and how long a delay will there be in getting the boxed materials out of storage? I know from personal experience that it can be a real impediment to research to have to wait several weeks or even days to get something out of storage, and that often it is difficult to identify what you need if you can't go look at it on the shelf online.
Absolutely. A decent President would have seen to it that Saddam Hussein got a fair trial so that his evil deeds were fully exposed and everyone could see that they got him fair and square. Because of Bush's penchant for kangaroo courts, Saddam Hussein is being tried on rather narrow charges and in a fashion that will leave room for his supporters to claim that he was innocent and his condemnation purely political.
Uh, according to the article you cite, Bush is taking action BEFORE Congress has had a chance to act on his budget proposal. He isn't waiting to get approval. Furthermore, they say that they will digitize the 80,000 documents beyond boxed and stored, but I'll be very interested to see how quickly that will happen and how well they will be indexed. And the point that institutional memory will be lost when librarians are laid off is not addressed at all. The article is a lot more accurate than you make out.
It's called the "golden shower" theory of economics.
It doesn't seem to be "internal" in the sense of a decision made by EPA scientists or lawyers. It looks like it was made by a political employee high in the EPA hierarchy. People like that implement the policies of the White House.
No, the reason you are being modded down is probably that you don't know what a communist state is. What the rest of us mean is a state that operates under a communist political and economic system. That means state ownership of all property, state control of the economy, and dictatorship of the proletariat. That is very different from the situation in Kerala where at both the state and national level the overal economic and political system is non-communist. The fact that Kerala is controlled by a coalition whose leading party is the Communist Party does not give Kerala a communist economy or political system.
If you want to complain about the policies of the Communist-led government Kerala, feel free, but don't confuse the system in Kerala with communism, and don't complain when the rest of us are not impressed with your confusion.
And you've missed the point. It isn't just that they are elected, it is also that the overall framework is not communist, so even a government dominated by communists cannot impose a truly communist state. Private property and private enterprise exist in Kerala, which they would not in a communist system, and the state government does not control the economy the way it would in a communist system.
Even if the reason for the ban on Coke and Pepsi is hostility to large, multinational corporations, that doesn't make Kerala communist. There are lots of Greens, for example, who are certainly not communist, who are hostile to such corporations. There are also other possible reasons for the ban. One is that if they think that the levels of toxic chemicals in Coke and Pepsi products are too high, it makes sense to ban sales entirely, not just in schools. Even if adults aren't at risk (and they may think they are), kids drink soft drinks outside of school.
Because of the GPL, it isn't possible for a Linux company to develop the kind of control that Microsoft has.
Kerala is ruled by an ELECTED communist government within an overall governmental framework that is not communist. Private enterprise is alive and well in Kerala. Kerala also has the highest literacy rate in India (95%) and a lot of technically skilled people.
Furthermore, the big pollution problem in China isn't oil and petroleum, it is coal. The major energy source in China is coal, which is the only thing that is cheap and abundant. What is worse , it is bituminous "soft" coal, which contains a lot of sulfur. They burn coal to generate power for industry, to heat homes, and to cook. It causes horrible air pollution. When I spent time in Tianjin, if I left a book or paper out for a couple of days, when I picked it up again I got my hands dirty from the coal dust that had settled on it. This causes lots of respiratory problems. Switching from coal to natural gas for domestic use is one thing that China has been doing in an attempt to reduce air pollution.
I hate to burst your bubble, but there is climate data much farther back than 50 years. Not only were people recording temperature and other variables more than fifty years ago, but there is data from other sources, such as ice cores and tree rings, going back much farther.
A friend's parents live on the part of the Navajo reservation that the courts awarded to the Hopis; they're grandfathered, but when they are gone their land becomes Hopi land. The time zone business is so confusing that they just have three clocks: one for Navjo time, one for Hopi time, and one for Arizona time.
You have my sympathy. I wrote a paper containing equations in TeX. The equations looked very nice. Once he accepted it, the journal editor insisted on WordPerfect so that he could edit it, so I converted it (manually) to WordPerfect. The equations didn't look nearly as nice. The publisher then demanded MS Word, so I converted it again. The printer evidently used the MS word file more-or-less directly, so the published version of the paper is noticeably uglier than the WordPerfect version. By far the nicest version is my original TeX version.
Before you can say anything intelligent about what kinds of computers/OSs are needed, you have to be clear as to what you want to use them for. What is appropriate depends on the application.
It looks to me like there is no virtue to diversity, and a big advantage to open systems, for most of the purposes for which one may want to use computers in primary and secondary education. The cases in which diversity is a virtue, or there is a need for MS Windows in particular, involve certain types of vocational classes that would only be offered at a secondary level and a few CS classes of a type rarely offered below the college level anyhow. In short, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to make Unix-type open systems the foundation for educational computing and to provide other systems only for the limited set of secondary level classes, mostly vocational, for which there is a need for something else.