Did I read you right that the only word of Japanese you knew was "dame"? If so, you should not be surprised that you can't get what you want from people if you can only speak *one word* of their language. How much success would someone speaking entirely in Japanese have at ordering in a restaurant in your country?
I had almost universal success getting items not listed on the menu, even in chains like Watami, where the menu is laminated and identical from Sapporo to Fukuoka. My first success was with a whole roast garlic, and it was well worth the effort.
But I digress. It's possible to infer from what you wrote that you think that Japanese people act like machines more than people of other cultures. I don't know whether you really think that or not. Whichever is the case, I felt the need to challenge that implication.
An update on this story today: Imperial College has decided that A-levels have become worthless for deciding which students to admit. This from one of the academically strongest universities in the UK, which specialises in science and technology.
Their point is that nowadays, almost everyone gets 3 or 4 As, so they can't distinguish between them. They're going to start setting their own entrance exams.
The separation into species is a strange thing. It's subtle.
I think you're exactly right.
how can a new species evolve when there isn't a geographic separation?
A few ways:
Sterile offspring (e.g. horse+donkey -> mule or ass, which are sterile. Same for lion+tiger, although there happens to be a geographical separation here too.
Physical incompatibility. A chihuahua (very small dog) and a doberman (very big dog) can't mate and produce offspring, because they are just the wrong sizes to get it on.
some others, which I can't recall.....
The determiner for two individuals belonging to a separate species is something like "they can't both make a genetic contribution to an individual in a later generation".
So the horse and donkey in the above examples are a separate species, but the doberman and chihuahua aren't, because their grandchildren can inherit from both (we assume that both can mate with medium sized dogs, who have medium sized offsrping).
Also, geographic separation isn't sufficient for speciation. There are some related varieties of terns which live in four regions circling the Arctic. Each variety can breed with the variety in the neighbouring region. So, although European terns never meet Canadian terns, they each breed with Atlantic or Siberian terns. (IANAO - Ornithologist.)
What makes you think keeping saving a library of VCR tapes is infringement or illegitimate?
Isn't it? I'm assuming that if a court were to make a ruling, it would be (or, indeed, has been - IANAL) that saving such a library infringes copyright. If this assumption is false, then my point is redundant; my beleif is that it's a fairly uncontroversial assumption.
So, my point, and its relevance to P2P file sharing. The court had available to it the fact (not speculation, or expert opinion - fact) that the majority of BetaMax users made libraries. Nonetheless, it ruled as it did because of the existence of legitimate uses, including, as you say, Time Shifting. The parallel with P2P is striking: there exist legitimate uses of the technology, which are sufficient to justify it - the possibility (or even the fact) that some (even the majority of) people use it for illegal purposes, is simply irrelevent.
....the uncontroverted survey evidence established that 69% to 75% of all Betamax owners maintain large libraries of off-the-air recordings and that the vast majority of programs in those libraries are copyrighted motion pictures....
Only 9% of users were making legitimate recordings, but the court ruled that these people should not be denied, despite the majority's unlawful behaviour.
OSS is about choises, and/etc really highlights this. People have different ideas on how apps should be configured,
My choice is to have all the apps on my system configured the same way. The app developers don't agree with me? Fine - I have the sources, so I can make it happen myself. This is how F/OSS is... We don't have to submit to chaos and claim it's just inevitable in the OSS world.
....humans won't be able to compete with computer's at chess. Even so I don't think this is such a big deal.
I think it is a big deal. 50 years ago, if you'd told someone "I have a machine which can consistently draw with a grandmaster. Is it intelligent?" they would have said "Yes."
50 years later, we say "Yes, but only in a very limited way", or "No, it's doing a very different thing", depending on our point of view. In either case, we're taking a position on what we mean by "intelligent", and our understanding of that word's meaning is deeper than it would have been 50 years ago.
My view is that if the computer and the human acheive the same result, then they are doing the same thing. It doesn't matter that the computer is doing it in a "stupid" but well-understood way, and the human in an "intelligent" but poorly-understood way.
Tell me if I'm missing something, but why would you want to do that? The advantages of using X-terminals are that 1) They're connected to the main PC by ethernet - so just one wire, and you don't have to worry about how far you can extend the monitor cable, 2) You can add as many as you like without running out of slots for your graphics cards and 3) you can do it *now*.
And you can get an X-terminal for almost no cost (given that you're planning on getting a graphics card and monitor anyway). 1) Get a really old PC. Put your graphics card and an old ethernet card in it. 2) Arrange for it to boot linux and run X. [xgk]dm, the window manager and all applications can run on the main PC, so you can get away with a tiny hard disk (or no disk at all, if it boots off the network).
The state of the art for arbitrary news broadcasts is about a 20% word error rate. While this isn't good enough for the poster's needs, it turns out to be almost good enough for indexing.
Wonder when we'll start seing Google return audio and video along with text documents? There's a research project demo of this happening here.
Not quite true. During a special run downhill, Mallard's speed peaked at 126mph for a few seconds. Still not bad for a steam train though. UK trains still did respectably (6th) in the world rankings a couple of years ago.
However, it seems that there's some confusion in this thread between "Turing Machine" (described in the famous 1936 paper) and the so-called "Turing Test" (described in the famous 1950 paper).
The 1950 paper discussed machine intelligence, and Turing had the ingenious idea of replacing the (vague and contentious) question "Can Machines Think?" with the (less vague) question "Can a Machine win the 'Imitation Game'?" It's possible (given the dates) that Turing knew of Asimov's story, and that the idea for the 'Imitation Game' came from it.
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Did I read you right that the only word of Japanese you knew was "dame"? If so, you should not be surprised that you can't get what you want from people if you can only speak *one word* of their language. How much success would someone speaking entirely in Japanese have at ordering in a restaurant in your country?
I had almost universal success getting items not listed on the menu, even in chains like Watami, where the menu is laminated and identical from Sapporo to Fukuoka. My first success was with a whole roast garlic, and it was well worth the effort.
But I digress. It's possible to infer from what you wrote that you think that Japanese people act like machines more than people of other cultures. I don't know whether you really think that or not. Whichever is the case, I felt the need to challenge that implication.
An update on this story today: Imperial College has decided that A-levels have become worthless for deciding which students to admit. This from one of the academically strongest universities in the UK, which specialises in science and technology. Their point is that nowadays, almost everyone gets 3 or 4 As, so they can't distinguish between them. They're going to start setting their own entrance exams.
Here in Japan, I get ADSL at 12Mbit/s down 1Mbit/s up for Y3000 = US$30 per month with NTT/ODL.
Yahoo! BB gives 40Mbit/s down 1Mbit/s up for about the same price.
In some areas, you can can get 100Mbit/s fibre for about Y5000 = US$50 per month.
My ADSL is reliable, but contended at about 200:1, and I'm NATed.
I think you're exactly right.
how can a new species evolve when there isn't a geographic separation?
A few ways:
The determiner for two individuals belonging to a separate species is something like "they can't both make a genetic contribution to an individual in a later generation".
So the horse and donkey in the above examples are a separate species, but the doberman and chihuahua aren't, because their grandchildren can inherit from both (we assume that both can mate with medium sized dogs, who have medium sized offsrping).
Also, geographic separation isn't sufficient for speciation. There are some related varieties of terns which live in four regions circling the Arctic. Each variety can breed with the variety in the neighbouring region. So, although European terns never meet Canadian terns, they each breed with Atlantic or Siberian terns. (IANAO - Ornithologist.)
Interesting and lucid response - thanks.
What makes you think keeping saving a library of VCR tapes is infringement or illegitimate?
Isn't it? I'm assuming that if a court were to make a ruling, it would be (or, indeed, has been - IANAL) that saving such a library infringes copyright. If this assumption is false, then my point is redundant; my beleif is that it's a fairly uncontroversial assumption.
So, my point, and its relevance to P2P file sharing. The court had available to it the fact (not speculation, or expert opinion - fact) that the majority of BetaMax users made libraries. Nonetheless, it ruled as it did because of the existence of legitimate uses, including, as you say, Time Shifting. The parallel with P2P is striking: there exist legitimate uses of the technology, which are sufficient to justify it - the possibility (or even the fact) that some (even the majority of) people use it for illegal purposes, is simply irrelevent.
One reason SCOTUS gave Betamax their blessings was that people at the time weren't trying to build libraries of videos...
....the uncontroverted survey evidence established that 69% to 75% of all Betamax owners maintain large libraries of off-the-air recordings and that the vast majority of programs in those libraries are copyrighted motion pictures....
Not true. From the BetaMax Shield link:
Only 9% of users were making legitimate recordings, but the court ruled that these people should not be denied, despite the majority's unlawful behaviour.
OSS is about choises, and /etc really highlights this. People have different ideas on how apps should be configured,
My choice is to have all the apps on my system configured the same way. The app developers don't agree with me? Fine - I have the sources, so I can make it happen myself. This is how F/OSS is... We don't have to submit to chaos and claim it's just inevitable in the OSS world.
....humans won't be able to compete with computer's at chess. Even so I don't think this is such a big deal.
I think it is a big deal. 50 years ago, if you'd told someone "I have a machine which can consistently draw with a grandmaster. Is it intelligent?" they would have said "Yes."
50 years later, we say "Yes, but only in a very limited way", or "No, it's doing a very different thing", depending on our point of view. In either case, we're taking a position on what we mean by "intelligent", and our understanding of that word's meaning is deeper than it would have been 50 years ago.
My view is that if the computer and the human acheive the same result, then they are doing the same thing. It doesn't matter that the computer is doing it in a "stupid" but well-understood way, and the human in an "intelligent" but poorly-understood way.
Tell me if I'm missing something, but why would you want to do that? The advantages of using X-terminals are that 1) They're connected to the main PC by ethernet - so just one wire, and you don't have to worry about how far you can extend the monitor cable, 2) You can add as many as you like without running out of slots for your graphics cards and 3) you can do it *now*.
And you can get an X-terminal for almost no cost (given that you're planning on getting a graphics card and monitor anyway). 1) Get a really old PC. Put your graphics card and an old ethernet card in it. 2) Arrange for it to boot linux and run X. [xgk]dm, the window manager and all applications can run on the main PC, so you can get away with a tiny hard disk (or no disk at all, if it boots off the network).
To do it in general for random speakers though?
The state of the art for arbitrary news broadcasts is about a 20% word error rate. While this isn't good enough for the poster's needs, it turns out to be almost good enough for indexing.
Wonder when we'll start seing Google return audio and video along with text documents? There's a research project demo of this happening here.
Not quite true. During a special run downhill, Mallard's speed peaked at 126mph for a few seconds. Still not bad for a steam train though. UK trains still did respectably (6th) in the world rankings a couple of years ago.
Turing's famous 1950 paper Link missing from previous post.
However, it seems that there's some confusion in this thread between "Turing Machine" (described in the famous 1936 paper) and the so-called "Turing Test" (described in the famous 1950 paper). The 1950 paper discussed machine intelligence, and Turing had the ingenious idea of replacing the (vague and contentious) question "Can Machines Think?" with the (less vague) question "Can a Machine win the 'Imitation Game'?" It's possible (given the dates) that Turing knew of Asimov's story, and that the idea for the 'Imitation Game' came from it.