Re:There are telephone translation services.
on
PDA Speech Translator
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Aptitude testing is useful, but two other major factors in the success of the US government language schools (there are actually four: The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, the Foreign Service Institute, the CIA Language School, and the NSA
Language School) are time and focus. In most other situations, such as high-school or college, people
studying a language study it a small fraction of the time. It's one of four or more courses. Class
time is 3-5 hours per week. On a typical university schedule, that's a maximum of 130 hours
a year in class. In contrast, in the government language schools, language study is the whole show. Students spend 8 hours a day or more on the
language (not all in class). That comes to much more time devoted to the language, and there are
fewer distractions.
I agree - the Ethnologue does make finer splits than
are sometimes warranted and this does result in smaller speaker numbers than other sources would give. Sometimes this unjustified, but in most of the cases mentioned I would argue that it is justified. Now and then, the Ethnologue is simply wrong.
In my experience, this occurs in cases where only a few specialists have the up-to-date information and it hasn't yet reached the compilers. But there's a reason that I said that the Ethnologue
is the "best single source": although for particular languages, regions, and language families there are sometimes better sources,
there isn't any other single source that is comparable in scope or accuracy to the Ethnologue.
If you really need detailed and accurate information, you shouldn't stop with the Ethnologue - you need to look for more specialized
reference works and, especially in the case of smaller languages, talking to specialists
may be necessary.
But the Ethnologue is the place to start.
Here's the Ethnologue entry for Farsi and its position in the family tree. The Ethnologue is the best single source for reliable information about where languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.
While there were a variety of word processors before
Microsoft Word, its direct ancestor was Bravo on the
Xerox Star sytem. One of Bravo's authors was Charles Simonyi who moved from Xerox PARC to Microsoft and became one of the developers of Word. I'm not suggesting that any code was lifted - in fact, I don't think it could have been since Bravo was written in Mesa, which as far as I know never ran on Intel processors - just that Simonyi brought a lot of ideas with him. I used Bravo once or twice and disliked it for some of the same reasons I dislike Word - I hated having to try to position the pointer finely in order to do anything rather than using keystrokes as in Emacs (or for that matter, Wordstar).
Re:Japan is a major importer of culture
on
Japan's Empire of Cool
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"To a large extent the borrowing of "continental" culture was via Korea."
Where do you think Korean ancient culture was influenced by?
That's why I said via Korea rather than
from Korea. It is true that there was
some direct contact with Tang China, but the heavy influx of Chinese culture, including the writing system and Buddhism, clearly came via Korea,
much of it prior to the Tang. Chinese writing was
probably introduced (in the sense of scholars teaching the Japanese to read and write - objects with Chinese writing on them reached Japan earlier) at the beginning of the fifth century,
that is, around 400 C.E., two hundred years before
the foundation of the Tang Dynasty.
The Japanese named their ancient capital to the same name as that of the Tang dynasty, translated to "Eastern Capital".
This is not true. Tokyo does indeed mean "Eastern Capital", but it is not the ancient capital of Japan. During the Tang Dynasty, the capital of Japan was at Nara, near Kyoto. Later it moved to Kyoto. In those days, Tokyo was known as Yedo
(now pronounced Edo in Japanese as a result of the
loss of/y/ before/e/) and was considered the boondocks. Edo became the de facto capital when Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan (effectively after the battle of Sekigahara in 1602, formally in 1615) and did not become the official capital until 1868. It is called "Eastern Capital" in contradistinction to Kyoto.
Re:Japan is a major importer of culture
on
Japan's Empire of Cool
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Japanese language did not come from China.
Japanese and Chinese are unrelated languages.
Japanese borrowed many Chinese words and the Chinese writing system, starting prior to the Tang dynasty,
but the core of the language was not borrowed from China. It is also worth mentioning that there was not all that much direct contact with China. To a large extent the borrowing of "continental" culture was via Korea.
While I can't deny that the US occupation of Japan provided a massive exposure of American culture to Japanese people, Japan was already engaged in the importation of Western culture on a large-scale prior to World War II. When the Meiji Emperor (ruled 1868-1912) decided to modernize Japan, Japanese people began to learn very actively about the West.
This activity centered on science and technology,
where Germany, as the industrial and scientific leader became the focus of attention. Physicians trained prior to the end of WWII, for example, used textbooks written in German and frequently went to Germany to study. Into the 1960s, patient charts in some Japanese hospitals were written in German. Modernizers also adopted or proposed the adoption of many other aspects of European culture. One seriously proposed that the Japanese language be abandoned, to be replaced by French!
A curious forerunner was the developement, during the Tokugawa period (1615-1868), when Japan was largely cut off from foreign contact, of rangaku
"Dutch Studies" (from Oranda "Holland" and Sino-Japanese gaku "study, -ology").
The Dutch were allowed to maintain a trading post on Dejima, then an island in Nagasaki harbor, so Japanese scholars interested in things Western focussed on the Dutch. Probably the most important thing to emerge from rangaku was knowledge of European medicine, particularly anatomy.
The US Occupation probably had much more impact on
popular culture, but at a more academic and technological level, the importation of Western culture had already taken place.
I don't know Erik Andersen or whether he is
unusually combative, but I see nothing wrong with his Hall of Shame. He's perfectly entitled to try to enforce his copyright, and publicizing violations seems like a reasonable way to go about it. And he isn't by any means alone. The Free Software Foundation enforces the GPL on software to which it holds the copyright.
Re:Effective as administrative grease
on
Source Code Escrow
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A month or so later along with delivery of the application
we got the code we'd paid for, our coders looked it over and liked the internals, it passed our QA, all good.
This isn't just escrow. You actually got the source along with the executables. That's even better than escrow since you can look it over and change it.
It's like purchasing the source without the right
to redistribute.
There are a number of factors that determine how useful the source code is
to a client, including:
does the client need to change the program's functionality or simply want a version
that runs on a new platform, works with new hardware, or can be linked with
improved libraries?
is the source written to a widely used standard in a widely used language (e.g. POSIX C)?
is the source well written?
is it well commented and supplied with other necessary documentation?
is it appropriately modularized, so that parts that are likely to need to be changed
can easily be isolated?
does it rely entirely on generic hardware interfaces, or are there aspects
that deal with particular pieces of hardware at low-level?
It seems to me that source escrow could be made more useful if the escrow agent
not only compiled the binary supplied to the client, as the parent suggests,
but also studied the source and issued a report on factors like the above.
This would allow potential purchasers to assess the risk that they were taking.
This could affect the choice of software and possibly pricing - some buyers might
be willing to pay more for software with lower risk, or might be willing to buy
riskier software at a lower price on the theory that they could estimate what
it would cost them to deal with less useful source if it came to that.
And since many of the same factors tend to be correlated with code quality,
a positive report on this front would also give some confidence in the quality
of the program.
Obviously open source provides the maximum protection, but if that is not an option,
a system like this would seem to be helpful.
Remember that unlike theft - the grounds on which Napster, et al have been pursued - anti-trust is a civil, not crimanl action.
Not so. In the United States, although antitrust action is usually civil, unlike most other countries it is also a criminal matter.
Check out the American Antitrust Institute's Primer on US Criminal Antitrust. The Sherman Act of 1890 provides criminal penalties for antitrust violations. In addition to fines, prison sentences of up to three years are possible.
I agree, Mandrake is a nice distro. I've been using
it for several years and just installed 9.2.
I've been using UNIX since 1982, GNU/Linux since
1995 and remember installing a device driver in
4.2BSD by manually editing the device switching
tables and recompiling the kernel. So I'm not exactly a newbie. But I like a distro that installs easily and recognizes my hardware.
I have plenty of other things to do than hassle
with my installation, including installing all of
the non-standard software that I use. I may do a
pure source installation on one of my machines
soon, for optimization and to get better acquainted with the current system, but except for
that situation, I see no reason to shift from Mandrake. People who deride a distribution just because it is easy should get a life; its a silly
form of machismo.
It's an overview. No single case gets more than a brief mention, and although there has been lots of FUD and SCO has made an ass of itself, there hasn't yet been much action in court. In any case, there is a sidebar menu
for "most popular headlines" which includes a link
to a
page about the SCO case.
Although it is rare for cabinet ministers, including the PM, not to hold a seat, it does happen from time to time. As the parent stated, it has been many years since a PM did not hold a seat, but in the fall of 2000, Edward John became Minister for Child Welfare in the NDP government of British Columbia. He ran in the next election, nine months later, but lost in the BC Liberal sweep. (The provincial and national parties, by the way, are not necessarily
related. The BC Liberals are far to the right of the national party.)
Several years ago there was a bit of a stir
about this when Sheila Copps, a cabinet minister,
revealed that her daughter (a Canadian like her,
living in Canada) who was I think about 12, had said that when she grew up she wanted to be President.
The US presence is so large in the news and popular culture, especially in the big cities close to the
US border, that it isn't hard to see how a child could fail to make the distinction.
Perhaps ironically, the exam that immigrants have to write to become Canadian citizens contains a number of questions about the Canadian political system, including the first two questions, which must be answered correctly in order to pass.
(You have to get 10 of the other 18 right.)
Granted that it isn't quite the Debian
social contract [English version], it's still pretty good. I think that it is especially interesting that Mandrake, which is known, and sometimes derided, for being easy to install and friendly to newbies, is doing this.
This looks like a straightforward and clean extension
that experienced C/C++ programmers won't find difficult to learn, but it isn't entirely clear to me whether just using this language, without any knowledge of GPU architecture, will lead to big improvements in performance. Granted, you don't need to know the details, but you've got to have an idea of what it is that you're trying to do
and in a general way how the special constructs of the language allow you to do that. As with other such language extensions, you can nominally write in the language but not really use the extensions (how many "C++" programs have you seen that were really C programs with// comments and a few couts?) or use them in unintended ways that prevent the intended optimization. It seems to me that if the project really is aiming at programmers who are not familiar with GPUs, they need at least to provide a brief introduction to the special properties of GPU architecture and some guidelines as to how to use the features of the language to take advantage of them. At present I don't find this either on the web sites or in the distribution.
If it's true that Brightmail made no special
deal with him, it looks like he could be prosecuted
for consumer fraud as well as spamming. Indeed, his clients could presumably sue him too. If Brightmail did make a special deal with him, assuming that they advertise that they block spam, then they comitted consumer fraud. Somebody's in
trouble here one way or the other.
According to the article in the New York Times
(p. C1, continued on C3) the suits are against
three companies. The actual spammer named is
a Paul Boes, who was employed as a marketer
by the other two companies, Synergy6 and
OptInRealBig. OpInRealBig is owned by Scott Richter,
the guy named by Spamhaus as the world's number 3
spammer. So, yes, assuming that this is the way it
works, they are going after the people who direct
the spammers.
This is rather ironic, given the story I remember
hearing during the first Iraq war. Customer support
at the Santa Cruz Operation, which in those days
was in the business of selling a version of UNIX
rather than FUD, got a call from Iraq. It turned out to be from a soldier in a tank (yes, tanks ran UNIX!) calling on a satellite phone. They downloaded
a patch and solved his problem.
Of course, if it had been open-source, he could
have fixed the problem himself. I sure wouldn't
want to be caught in a tank with a malfunctioning
computer without source!:)
I think we're basically in agreement on on the relative roles of linguists and anthropologists in language work these days. The main point that I meant to make was that it is for the most part linguists rather than anthropologists who now do the
"bulk documentation" work.Secondarily, I think that it is true that anthropological involvement linguistic work has declined in two other ways.
First, my impression is that it is considerably rarer than it once was for anthropologists to learn the language of the people they are studying unless their research is specifically on linguistic topics. Second, what some would call "cognitive anthropology", e.g., specifically, the study of such things as kinship systems, color terms, and
folk biological taxonomy, is out of fashion with, indeed despised by, a large fraction of anthropologists. This isn't just my own perception: I know of very distinguished senior anthropologists working in this area who say that they feel that they no longer have any disciplinary home: their work is appreciated by linguists and psychologists, but, they say, not by most anthropologists. But, as the parent says, there is an active area of anthropology concerned with language use.
I am not so sanguine about Postmodernism, though in part it depends on what you mean, and Postmodernism is a slippery creature. If we're talking about what I would regard as the hard core
of Postmodernism, with deconstruction at its core,
I view it as wholly negative. The epistemological
and linguistic foundation is infantile, the result is not "self-criticism" but intellectual nihilism ("there is no truth and nothing can be known"), and it replaces the search for fact and valid argument with a lack of concern for data and ad hominem argument and arguments based on putative political implications. On top of all this, Postmodernist writing tends to truly awful,
its only virtue the fact that it exemplifies Chomsky's observation that there are grammatical sentences of natural languages that have no semantic interpretation. The
Postmodernism Generator seems to me to be entirely realistic.
I don't accept the idea that Postmodernism has led to worthwhile self-criticism because Postmodernism doesn't actually motivate self-criticism. In fact, self-criticism is part of the standard scientific method of which Postmodernists are so critical.
Actually, not very many anthropologists these days do much linguistic work. That's partly because linguistics has developed as a separate field and partly because cultural anthropology was largely taken over by Postmodernists, as a result of which it has nearly died. Most research on "exotic" languages these days is done either by linguists or by missionaries (who want to translate the New Testament).
I am a linguist and have done extensive fieldwork, mostly on Carrier, the native language of a large region of northern British Columbia. (I also hack a little. Once upon a time I wrote the head-final shell mentioned in Charles Dodgson's comment.) Software is increasingly used for this kind of work, but for the most part it is
not the sort of NLP software provided on the Morphix-NLP CD. A lot of that software is useful primarily if you've got a large corpus to work with, and it often presupposes that some basic resources exist, such as a lexicon, or at least a
wordlist with part of speech information. For many languages even basic resources such as a lexicon don't exist or aren't available in electronic form, and when you're dealing with really small languages, there aren't any ready-made corpora,
such as news text. If you want a text corpus, you've got to make it yourself, usually by recording people telling stories or whatever, and transcribing it. This is an important part of fieldwork, but its incredibly slow and tedious.
There are some tools designed specifically for this kind of linguistic research. One is
Transcriber, a tool that assists a human being in transcribing audio recordings. One of the older tools is Shoebox
a dictionary database program for field linguists,
originally written to run under DOS.
Some of us have used Unix tools to extract
and process information, e.g. grep to do regular expression searches. Ken Church at Bell Labs
used to give a tutorial "Unix for Poets" on how to
use Unix tools for linguistics. Here is his
handout. For example, I've produced dictionaries of several dialects of Carrier using
scripts written mostly in AWK plus the usual Unix tools, controlled by elaborate Makefiles. Some of us also use emacs a lot,
not only as an editor but for doing searches.
If you're interested in what kinds of software
are of interest to linguists, you might check out
the
Computational Resources for Linguistic Research
page.
It is worth mentioning that spread of the internet
has made available a lot of useful material for
linguistic research. There are now quite a few
languages for which you can obtain a good chunk of text (say at least 100K words), and often you can find
parallel text (that is, the language you're interested in plus a translation into English or another language that is useful to you). But this works mostly for relatively big languages, that is, say, languages with a million or more speakers. There are around 340 such languages, depending on how you count, about 2% of the world's oral languages.
One topic that concerns some of us is how software and other technology can speed up the process of documenting dying languages. Languages are rapidly become extinct - some experts estimate that as many as 90% of the languages currently spoken will be extinct in 100 years. [Computer languages may be proliferating at the same rate.:)] The late Ken Hale had seven languages die on him. If we don't find a way to speed up the documentation, or slow down the rate of extinction, most of those languages are going to die without very much being known about them.
I'm surprised that the response has been so tame, actually. Given what is in the leaked email, I would think that the jurisdictions that had dealt with Diebold would be suing for breach of contract, demanding their money back and terminating existing contracts. And I wonder if some of the activity disclosed doesn't warrant criminal charges. Isn't screwing around with what is supposed to be a frozen, certified system election fraud?
In a similar vein, is Maryland really locked in to its deal with Diebold the way the Diebold people seem to think it is? If the system was secured as advertised and if Diebold screwed around with it in Maryland as they apparently did in some places, I would think that Maryland could easily void the contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Aptitude testing is useful, but two other major factors in the success of the US government language schools (there are actually four: The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, the Foreign Service Institute, the CIA Language School, and the NSA Language School) are time and focus. In most other situations, such as high-school or college, people studying a language study it a small fraction of the time. It's one of four or more courses. Class time is 3-5 hours per week. On a typical university schedule, that's a maximum of 130 hours a year in class. In contrast, in the government language schools, language study is the whole show. Students spend 8 hours a day or more on the language (not all in class). That comes to much more time devoted to the language, and there are fewer distractions.
I agree - the Ethnologue does make finer splits than are sometimes warranted and this does result in smaller speaker numbers than other sources would give. Sometimes this unjustified, but in most of the cases mentioned I would argue that it is justified. Now and then, the Ethnologue is simply wrong. In my experience, this occurs in cases where only a few specialists have the up-to-date information and it hasn't yet reached the compilers. But there's a reason that I said that the Ethnologue is the "best single source": although for particular languages, regions, and language families there are sometimes better sources, there isn't any other single source that is comparable in scope or accuracy to the Ethnologue. If you really need detailed and accurate information, you shouldn't stop with the Ethnologue - you need to look for more specialized reference works and, especially in the case of smaller languages, talking to specialists may be necessary. But the Ethnologue is the place to start.
Here's the Ethnologue entry for
Farsi and its position
in the family tree. The Ethnologue is the best
single source for reliable information about where
languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.
While there were a variety of word processors before Microsoft Word, its direct ancestor was Bravo on the Xerox Star sytem. One of Bravo's authors was Charles Simonyi who moved from Xerox PARC to Microsoft and became one of the developers of Word. I'm not suggesting that any code was lifted - in fact, I don't think it could have been since Bravo was written in Mesa, which as far as I know never ran on Intel processors - just that Simonyi brought a lot of ideas with him. I used Bravo once or twice and disliked it for some of the same reasons I dislike Word - I hated having to try to position the pointer finely in order to do anything rather than using keystrokes as in Emacs (or for that matter, Wordstar).
That's why I said via Korea rather than from Korea. It is true that there was some direct contact with Tang China, but the heavy influx of Chinese culture, including the writing system and Buddhism, clearly came via Korea, much of it prior to the Tang. Chinese writing was probably introduced (in the sense of scholars teaching the Japanese to read and write - objects with Chinese writing on them reached Japan earlier) at the beginning of the fifth century, that is, around 400 C.E., two hundred years before the foundation of the Tang Dynasty.
This is not true. Tokyo does indeed mean "Eastern Capital", but it is not the ancient capital of Japan. During the Tang Dynasty, the capital of Japan was at Nara, near Kyoto. Later it moved to Kyoto. In those days, Tokyo was known as Yedo (now pronounced Edo in Japanese as a result of the loss of /y/ before /e/) and was considered the boondocks. Edo became the de facto capital when Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan (effectively after the battle of Sekigahara in 1602, formally in 1615) and did not become the official capital until 1868. It is called "Eastern Capital" in contradistinction to Kyoto.
The Japanese language did not come from China. Japanese and Chinese are unrelated languages. Japanese borrowed many Chinese words and the Chinese writing system, starting prior to the Tang dynasty, but the core of the language was not borrowed from China. It is also worth mentioning that there was not all that much direct contact with China. To a large extent the borrowing of "continental" culture was via Korea.
While I can't deny that the US occupation of Japan provided a massive exposure of American culture to Japanese people, Japan was already engaged in the importation of Western culture on a large-scale prior to World War II. When the Meiji Emperor (ruled 1868-1912) decided to modernize Japan, Japanese people began to learn very actively about the West. This activity centered on science and technology, where Germany, as the industrial and scientific leader became the focus of attention. Physicians trained prior to the end of WWII, for example, used textbooks written in German and frequently went to Germany to study. Into the 1960s, patient charts in some Japanese hospitals were written in German. Modernizers also adopted or proposed the adoption of many other aspects of European culture. One seriously proposed that the Japanese language be abandoned, to be replaced by French!
A curious forerunner was the developement, during the Tokugawa period (1615-1868), when Japan was largely cut off from foreign contact, of rangaku "Dutch Studies" (from Oranda "Holland" and Sino-Japanese gaku "study, -ology"). The Dutch were allowed to maintain a trading post on Dejima, then an island in Nagasaki harbor, so Japanese scholars interested in things Western focussed on the Dutch. Probably the most important thing to emerge from rangaku was knowledge of European medicine, particularly anatomy.
The US Occupation probably had much more impact on popular culture, but at a more academic and technological level, the importation of Western culture had already taken place.
I don't know Erik Andersen or whether he is unusually combative, but I see nothing wrong with his Hall of Shame. He's perfectly entitled to try to enforce his copyright, and publicizing violations seems like a reasonable way to go about it. And he isn't by any means alone. The Free Software Foundation enforces the GPL on software to which it holds the copyright.
This isn't just escrow. You actually got the source along with the executables. That's even better than escrow since you can look it over and change it. It's like purchasing the source without the right to redistribute.
There are a number of factors that determine how useful the source code is to a client, including:
It seems to me that source escrow could be made more useful if the escrow agent not only compiled the binary supplied to the client, as the parent suggests, but also studied the source and issued a report on factors like the above. This would allow potential purchasers to assess the risk that they were taking. This could affect the choice of software and possibly pricing - some buyers might be willing to pay more for software with lower risk, or might be willing to buy riskier software at a lower price on the theory that they could estimate what it would cost them to deal with less useful source if it came to that. And since many of the same factors tend to be correlated with code quality, a positive report on this front would also give some confidence in the quality of the program. Obviously open source provides the maximum protection, but if that is not an option, a system like this would seem to be helpful.
Not so. In the United States, although antitrust action is usually civil, unlike most other countries it is also a criminal matter. Check out the American Antitrust Institute's Primer on US Criminal Antitrust. The Sherman Act of 1890 provides criminal penalties for antitrust violations. In addition to fines, prison sentences of up to three years are possible.
I agree, Mandrake is a nice distro. I've been using it for several years and just installed 9.2. I've been using UNIX since 1982, GNU/Linux since 1995 and remember installing a device driver in 4.2BSD by manually editing the device switching tables and recompiling the kernel. So I'm not exactly a newbie. But I like a distro that installs easily and recognizes my hardware. I have plenty of other things to do than hassle with my installation, including installing all of the non-standard software that I use. I may do a pure source installation on one of my machines soon, for optimization and to get better acquainted with the current system, but except for that situation, I see no reason to shift from Mandrake. People who deride a distribution just because it is easy should get a life; its a silly form of machismo.
It's an overview. No single case gets more than a brief mention, and although there has been lots of FUD and SCO has made an ass of itself, there hasn't yet been much action in court. In any case, there is a sidebar menu for "most popular headlines" which includes a link to a page about the SCO case.
Although it is rare for cabinet ministers, including the PM, not to hold a seat, it does happen from time to time. As the parent stated, it has been many years since a PM did not hold a seat, but in the fall of 2000, Edward John became Minister for Child Welfare in the NDP government of British Columbia. He ran in the next election, nine months later, but lost in the BC Liberal sweep. (The provincial and national parties, by the way, are not necessarily related. The BC Liberals are far to the right of the national party.)
Several years ago there was a bit of a stir about this when Sheila Copps, a cabinet minister, revealed that her daughter (a Canadian like her, living in Canada) who was I think about 12, had said that when she grew up she wanted to be President. The US presence is so large in the news and popular culture, especially in the big cities close to the US border, that it isn't hard to see how a child could fail to make the distinction.
Perhaps ironically, the exam that immigrants have to write to become Canadian citizens contains a number of questions about the Canadian political system, including the first two questions, which must be answered correctly in order to pass. (You have to get 10 of the other 18 right.)
Granted that it isn't quite the Debian social contract [English version], it's still pretty good. I think that it is especially interesting that Mandrake, which is known, and sometimes derided, for being easy to install and friendly to newbies, is doing this.
Even the dumbest PHBs couldn't be this stupid. I think that we need to abandon the idea that SCO is serious. This must be a Harvard Lampoon stunt.
This looks like a straightforward and clean extension that experienced C/C++ programmers won't find difficult to learn, but it isn't entirely clear to me whether just using this language, without any knowledge of GPU architecture, will lead to big improvements in performance. Granted, you don't need to know the details, but you've got to have an idea of what it is that you're trying to do and in a general way how the special constructs of the language allow you to do that. As with other such language extensions, you can nominally write in the language but not really use the extensions (how many "C++" programs have you seen that were really C programs with // comments and a few couts?) or use them in unintended ways that prevent the intended optimization. It seems to me that if the project really is aiming at programmers who are not familiar with GPUs, they need at least to provide a brief introduction to the special properties of GPU architecture and some guidelines as to how to use the features of the language to take advantage of them. At present I don't find this either on the web sites or in the distribution.
If it's true that Brightmail made no special deal with him, it looks like he could be prosecuted for consumer fraud as well as spamming. Indeed, his clients could presumably sue him too. If Brightmail did make a special deal with him, assuming that they advertise that they block spam, then they comitted consumer fraud. Somebody's in trouble here one way or the other.
According to the article in the New York Times (p. C1, continued on C3) the suits are against three companies. The actual spammer named is a Paul Boes, who was employed as a marketer by the other two companies, Synergy6 and OptInRealBig. OpInRealBig is owned by Scott Richter, the guy named by Spamhaus as the world's number 3 spammer. So, yes, assuming that this is the way it works, they are going after the people who direct the spammers.
This is rather ironic, given the story I remember hearing during the first Iraq war. Customer support at the Santa Cruz Operation, which in those days was in the business of selling a version of UNIX rather than FUD, got a call from Iraq. It turned out to be from a soldier in a tank (yes, tanks ran UNIX!) calling on a satellite phone. They downloaded a patch and solved his problem.
Of course, if it had been open-source, he could have fixed the problem himself. I sure wouldn't want to be caught in a tank with a malfunctioning computer without source! :)
If the problem can be eliminated through a Control Panel setting, charging for software to stop it sounds like consumer fraud to me.
Of course, as a Unix person, just about everything associated with MS Windows seems like that to me. :)
I think we're basically in agreement on on the relative roles of linguists and anthropologists in language work these days. The main point that I meant to make was that it is for the most part linguists rather than anthropologists who now do the "bulk documentation" work.Secondarily, I think that it is true that anthropological involvement linguistic work has declined in two other ways. First, my impression is that it is considerably rarer than it once was for anthropologists to learn the language of the people they are studying unless their research is specifically on linguistic topics. Second, what some would call "cognitive anthropology", e.g., specifically, the study of such things as kinship systems, color terms, and folk biological taxonomy, is out of fashion with, indeed despised by, a large fraction of anthropologists. This isn't just my own perception: I know of very distinguished senior anthropologists working in this area who say that they feel that they no longer have any disciplinary home: their work is appreciated by linguists and psychologists, but, they say, not by most anthropologists. But, as the parent says, there is an active area of anthropology concerned with language use.
I am not so sanguine about Postmodernism, though in part it depends on what you mean, and Postmodernism is a slippery creature. If we're talking about what I would regard as the hard core of Postmodernism, with deconstruction at its core, I view it as wholly negative. The epistemological and linguistic foundation is infantile, the result is not "self-criticism" but intellectual nihilism ("there is no truth and nothing can be known"), and it replaces the search for fact and valid argument with a lack of concern for data and ad hominem argument and arguments based on putative political implications. On top of all this, Postmodernist writing tends to truly awful, its only virtue the fact that it exemplifies Chomsky's observation that there are grammatical sentences of natural languages that have no semantic interpretation. The Postmodernism Generator seems to me to be entirely realistic.
I don't accept the idea that Postmodernism has led to worthwhile self-criticism because Postmodernism doesn't actually motivate self-criticism. In fact, self-criticism is part of the standard scientific method of which Postmodernists are so critical.
Actually, not very many anthropologists these days do much linguistic work. That's partly because linguistics has developed as a separate field and partly because cultural anthropology was largely taken over by Postmodernists, as a result of which it has nearly died. Most research on "exotic" languages these days is done either by linguists or by missionaries (who want to translate the New Testament).
I am a linguist and have done extensive fieldwork, mostly on Carrier, the native language of a large region of northern British Columbia. (I also hack a little. Once upon a time I wrote the head-final shell mentioned in Charles Dodgson's comment.) Software is increasingly used for this kind of work, but for the most part it is not the sort of NLP software provided on the Morphix-NLP CD. A lot of that software is useful primarily if you've got a large corpus to work with, and it often presupposes that some basic resources exist, such as a lexicon, or at least a wordlist with part of speech information. For many languages even basic resources such as a lexicon don't exist or aren't available in electronic form, and when you're dealing with really small languages, there aren't any ready-made corpora, such as news text. If you want a text corpus, you've got to make it yourself, usually by recording people telling stories or whatever, and transcribing it. This is an important part of fieldwork, but its incredibly slow and tedious.
There are some tools designed specifically for this kind of linguistic research. One is Transcriber, a tool that assists a human being in transcribing audio recordings. One of the older tools is Shoebox a dictionary database program for field linguists, originally written to run under DOS.
Some of us have used Unix tools to extract and process information, e.g. grep to do regular expression searches. Ken Church at Bell Labs used to give a tutorial "Unix for Poets" on how to use Unix tools for linguistics. Here is his handout. For example, I've produced dictionaries of several dialects of Carrier using scripts written mostly in AWK plus the usual Unix tools, controlled by elaborate Makefiles. Some of us also use emacs a lot, not only as an editor but for doing searches. If you're interested in what kinds of software are of interest to linguists, you might check out the Computational Resources for Linguistic Research page.
It is worth mentioning that spread of the internet has made available a lot of useful material for linguistic research. There are now quite a few languages for which you can obtain a good chunk of text (say at least 100K words), and often you can find parallel text (that is, the language you're interested in plus a translation into English or another language that is useful to you). But this works mostly for relatively big languages, that is, say, languages with a million or more speakers. There are around 340 such languages, depending on how you count, about 2% of the world's oral languages.
One topic that concerns some of us is how software and other technology can speed up the process of documenting dying languages. Languages are rapidly become extinct - some experts estimate that as many as 90% of the languages currently spoken will be extinct in 100 years. [Computer languages may be proliferating at the same rate.:)] The late Ken Hale had seven languages die on him. If we don't find a way to speed up the documentation, or slow down the rate of extinction, most of those languages are going to die without very much being known about them.
I'm surprised that the response has been so tame, actually. Given what is in the leaked email, I would think that the jurisdictions that had dealt with Diebold would be suing for breach of contract, demanding their money back and terminating existing contracts. And I wonder if some of the activity disclosed doesn't warrant criminal charges. Isn't screwing around with what is supposed to be a frozen, certified system election fraud?
In a similar vein, is Maryland really locked in to its deal with Diebold the way the Diebold people seem to think it is? If the system was secured as advertised and if Diebold screwed around with it in Maryland as they apparently did in some places, I would think that Maryland could easily void the contract.