I love how the anti-American bigots trot this sort of bullshit out, without context.
Talking of context... anti-American? The guy kept saying EU/US, which means a shedload of other developed countries, and you immediate peg it as an attack on American masculinity. Nice.
"Corn" means "grain" (grain is from the French for corn, coming from a common root). "Corn" is only wheat by virtue of wheat being the most common type of grain... a "default", if you will. Similar to how I call a mallard a "duck", because it is the only breed found commonly where I grew up. (Daffy and Donald bost confused me when I was a child...)
The tradition was for a "code" to be a cipher or other defined means of information formalisation. The use of "a code" as synonymous with "a program" is relatively recent.
I think you're a smart guy Hatta, one of the best/. contributors. But I think you're a bit out of your element here, like someone who has merely used a computer forming strong opinions about kernel development.
That analogy seems to imply that people who waffle new-agey platitudes are somehow experts. I can't say they're wrong, but I wouldn't defer to their judgement anyway. When people talk about "higher realities" and "deeper truths" and the like, they're forcing the assumption that these unmeasurable subjective experiences are more fundamental to the universe than the laws of physics, and anyone is within their rights to call bullshit on that.
The "British alternative" is a red herring and bad PR. FutureLearn is simply an alternative MOOC platform that has been built from the ground up with mobile in mind. Coursera, Udacity and EdX all still assume that the world and his dog only access the internet at a desk, with an unlimited high-speed connection. FutureLearn have a massive potential advantage over their competitors, and they need to start pushing it to build the business before the established players catch up.
true that throwing extracts on the web doesn't help everyone but clear explanations of topics does help. this does not require two way communication. take a look at Khan Academy.
Khan Academy's problem is precisely that: there are some muddy, woolly and even downright wrong explanations in his vids, because there isn't any direct feedback to prompt the tutor to reformulate.
A police state is created by making laws in opposition to human nature.
Such as laws against assault, rape and murder? Such as laws that establish an age of consent for sexual relations? Such as laws establishing constitutions and defining democratic rights and obligations, and banning the practice beating the current alpha male to a pulp and taking his territory?
Modern society is built on controlling and suppressing damaging parts of human nature, and this has served us relatively well for millenia.
The prime thing you have over all other species on this planet is a better way to share information and ideas. Copyright and Patents are laws against not just Human nature, but the nature of Life itself.
Half right. Nature determines a balance between sharing and guarding information. Seagulls advertise the presence of fish to other seagulls, whereas squirrels hide their nuts. The seagull operates in an environment where shared knowledge benefits the sharer (a lone diving seagull is easy to evade, but when multiple seagulls dive into a shoal simultaneously, there isn't room for all the fish to escape). The squirrel, on the other hand, gains no benefit from other squirrels knowing where his nuts are.
Patent laws in the UK were drafted during the industrial revolution, and were aimed at the machines used in factories and mills. The factory with the best machine was most profitable, so you kept your secrets and you kept your edge. As the machines weren't the products, you couldn't buy them and reverse engineer them. They were not documented, and could be lost if the inventor died.
Patents overcame this problem in human nature, by giving inventors an incentive to document and to share. Licensing a patent meant getting a cut of the profits from multiple factories, and there was more profit in this than in protecting your margins.
To any who would say that patents are beneficial I must point out that patents are not the natural state of information conveyance. They are thus an invention of the mind as well. If you would put forth they are beneficial then I would task you to provide evidence to back your claim.
Your ask us for evidence, yet your argument is entirely predicated on the assertion that the "natural state of information conveyance" is inherently better. This argument is rendered paradoxical through being conveyed in an unnatural medium: the internet.
No, they are rent seeking for the sake of rent seeking. If they wanted innovation they would produce something or seek out someone to produce the thing.
Yeah, cos Dolby Labs, the example NPE quoted in TFA (you did RTFA, didn't you?) never innovate at all, do they?
This sort of "non-practicing entity" is actually better for innovation than many practicing entities, because they actively license to multiple parties, as it serves to get them greater profit. As a result, the invention is more widely available. Meanwhile, many actually practicing entities use patents far more abusively, more troll-like, than an NPE like Dolby Labs, using their patents to actively block other manufacturers from competing with them, stifling innovation.
4G is coming and phones will be increasingly cross-network compatible as time passes. Even if it's only a minority who will benefit at the moment, it's important to establish the principle early.
This is how it works in the UK. We still have contracts that subsidise handsets that you can be tied into, the carrier just can't prevent you using your device on another network afterwards or even at the same time if you're so inclined.
IE they can't stop you acquiring an unlock code from a third party. And IIRC correctly they are obliged to supply an unlock code on request once the contract term is up. This was a reasonable compromise in the days of "dumb" phones. However, the technology is now advanced enough that operators would be perferctly capable of making the unlock automatic, either by setting the countdown when the phone is first activated, or having a trigger sent by the servers.
Much more relevantly, we say "Inuit" rather than "eskimo".
The Inuit are only one tribe of the group referred to as Eskimos. Calling all Eskimos "Inuit" is like calling all Native Americans "Cherokee", or calling all white people "French, all black people Tutsies or all Arabs "Yemeni". Or indeed the "ancient, and not representative of modern behaviour" example of naming all Germans "Teutones"... or even "Germans" (also a name for one or the tribes).
We'd say that until we figured out how to talk to them, and once we did, we'd ask them what they want to be called and then use that.
What, like we call Deutsch people "German", and Nederlanders "Dutch"? Like we call people from Ni-hong "Japanese" and people from Zhongguo "Chinese"?
If we look further back we'll see that names are more likely to transfer from outside the group to in, rather than the other way round. The Gaelic for Scotland ("Alba") came via Ireland's old word for the island of Great Britain ("Alban") from the Latin for England (or at least part of it), whence also "Albion". "Scotland" itself comes from Latin, and has known Celtic antecedent. And the words "Gael" and "Gaelic" are thought to bear their origins in Welsh, possible meaning "forest-dweller", but it came to English via Scottish Gaelic and Irish, where they are used as the main terms for the languange and ethnicity (but not nationality).
And as for those Deutsch people I mentioned, the word derives from the Latin Teutones, which may have derived from one Germanic tribe's name, but was certainly not the name all of them used -- hell, they didn't even consider themselves one thing. This of course has parallels in the modern Inuit/Eskimo problem. The Inuits didn't want to be called "Eskimos", so we started calling all Eskimos "Inuit", which the non-Inuit Eskimo tribes in turn objected to.
Also, while we may have stopped talking about "Red Indians", the term "native Americans" has no native American derivation -- it's pure outsider. The Canadian equivalent "First Nations" is entirely composed of generic descriptive words.
And in a similar vein, I watched the Kickstarter video where Zahn says the alien names. When he says "Zhirrzh", I hear no justification for the double R, and his pronunciation of Kalixiri would be pretty unambiguous if rendered as "Calixeeri". Which surely looks alien enough as it is?
I checked out the website for the Mitsuku chatbot and took a rather pessimistic poke at it.
Chatbot: [boilerplate noises omitted]... "What is your name?"
Myself: "I'm the fiddler."
"the fiddler" is a job description, not a name. "The Fiddler" is a musical foil for Adam West's Batman. Unnatural response.
Chatbot: "Who made you the fiddler?" [A reasonable, albeit somewhat peculiar, response.]
Myself: "I took too long once to feed my peckish cat."
A: non-sequitur with no explicit change of subject. Unnatural response strategy.
B: misuse of the word "peckish". Peckish is a subjective state, and while you may know the cat is hungry, you cannot know the cat's subjective experience of that state. It's also used almost exclusively in a predicative position, ie after a verb such as "to be" or (most often) to feel. Highly defective sentence on your part.
Don't get me wrong, the chatbot is pretty poor, and one of the goals of NLP should be graceful degradation when there's erroneous or ambiuous input, but on the other hand... garbage in, garbage out...
Don't. AIML's incredibly limited and unwieldy for anything complex.
You'd probably be better off learning Prolog than this XML-based abomination.
Last I checked, Prolog was still too determinstic to be any use in NLP tasks. Decent NLP will never be possible with pure rule-based systems -- probablistic models are a necessity.
If you could offset the upfront costs against subscriptions, you could get the book/magazine to market and make a profit over time from sales.
I'm against even this, as I wouldn't put up money to a for-profit business just to get a promised product. If you want to get rich with my help, give me a slice of the action.
Small bands use subscriptions (crowdfunding) precisely because they're highly unlikely to get rich, so none of the labels is going to offer them an advance or a loan. My point is that if the backers pay only material costs, the content producer is still in a position of risk, just reduced risk, because if a singer don't sell a single copy of the CD after the backers get theirs, he'll be no better off monetarily than he was 6 months previously, with nothing to show for his time other than a CD no-one wants. All that time, effort and work for nothing (managing a Kickstarter campaign can be pretty time-consuming). So there's still risk.
I think Kickstarter's model is great... but not for this sort of endeavour.
The model isn't new -- it used to be called the subscription model, and we've forgotten what "subscription" means: sub=under, scribe=write... subscribers would "underwrite" the physical costs of printing a publication that was of value to them, because the authors maybe didn't have the money to pay for the first print run. If you could offset the upfront costs against subscriptions, you could get the book/magazine to market and make a profit over time from sales.
Plenty of Kickstarter projects work this way -- the purest example would be bands seeking money for studio time and disc pressing -- but I've seen far too many examples of people asking for money for books they haven't started writing yet. I'm happy to pay for material costs, even including travel costs for the right project. I'm not so keen on paying for time. Perhaps if it's commoditised work that could be done by pretty much anyone interchangeably (eg transcribing an old print book to electronic form), but for creative work, the work value is inestimable and it leaves me very uneasy.
On the other hand, if the teaching technique could be shown to consistently increase student time-on-task, the unamazing gain would still be worthwhile. However, for every flipped success story in this discussion, there's another story of failure due to student slacking.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing you can do in fortran that can't be done better in C++
Yeah? Well there's nothing in C++ that can't be done better in assembler.
I love how the anti-American bigots trot this sort of bullshit out, without context.
Talking of context... anti-American? The guy kept saying EU/US, which means a shedload of other developed countries, and you immediate peg it as an attack on American masculinity. Nice.
To use the rice analogy, you would say "bowls of rice", not "rices".
What, you mean like that ignorant error we all make of counting fish, cows etc?
"Corn" means "grain" (grain is from the French for corn, coming from a common root). "Corn" is only wheat by virtue of wheat being the most common type of grain... a "default", if you will. Similar to how I call a mallard a "duck", because it is the only breed found commonly where I grew up. (Daffy and Donald bost confused me when I was a child...)
You were not mistaken, the world just grows more poorly educated. Yesterday's illiteracy is today's literacy.
Forsooth, good sirrah, thou hast spake sagely, and shewn thyself more wise that thy wyrd wurds should haue me think.
The tradition was for a "code" to be a cipher or other defined means of information formalisation. The use of "a code" as synonymous with "a program" is relatively recent.
I think you're a smart guy Hatta, one of the best /. contributors. But I think you're a bit out of your element here, like someone who has merely used a computer forming strong opinions about kernel development.
That analogy seems to imply that people who waffle new-agey platitudes are somehow experts. I can't say they're wrong, but I wouldn't defer to their judgement anyway. When people talk about "higher realities" and "deeper truths" and the like, they're forcing the assumption that these unmeasurable subjective experiences are more fundamental to the universe than the laws of physics, and anyone is within their rights to call bullshit on that.
That's exactly what a Mossad agent would say.
The "British alternative" is a red herring and bad PR. FutureLearn is simply an alternative MOOC platform that has been built from the ground up with mobile in mind. Coursera, Udacity and EdX all still assume that the world and his dog only access the internet at a desk, with an unlimited high-speed connection. FutureLearn have a massive potential advantage over their competitors, and they need to start pushing it to build the business before the established players catch up.
But 3 is just what the OU has been - offering accredited BSc/BA all the way up to PhD, on usually part time and distance learning bases.
That is not what FutureLearn is, though.
true that throwing extracts on the web doesn't help everyone but clear explanations of topics does help. this does not require two way communication. take a look at Khan Academy.
Khan Academy's problem is precisely that: there are some muddy, woolly and even downright wrong explanations in his vids, because there isn't any direct feedback to prompt the tutor to reformulate.
A police state is created by making laws in opposition to human nature.
Such as laws against assault, rape and murder? Such as laws that establish an age of consent for sexual relations? Such as laws establishing constitutions and defining democratic rights and obligations, and banning the practice beating the current alpha male to a pulp and taking his territory?
Modern society is built on controlling and suppressing damaging parts of human nature, and this has served us relatively well for millenia.
The prime thing you have over all other species on this planet is a better way to share information and ideas. Copyright and Patents are laws against not just Human nature, but the nature of Life itself.
Half right. Nature determines a balance between sharing and guarding information. Seagulls advertise the presence of fish to other seagulls, whereas squirrels hide their nuts. The seagull operates in an environment where shared knowledge benefits the sharer (a lone diving seagull is easy to evade, but when multiple seagulls dive into a shoal simultaneously, there isn't room for all the fish to escape). The squirrel, on the other hand, gains no benefit from other squirrels knowing where his nuts are.
Patent laws in the UK were drafted during the industrial revolution, and were aimed at the machines used in factories and mills. The factory with the best machine was most profitable, so you kept your secrets and you kept your edge. As the machines weren't the products, you couldn't buy them and reverse engineer them. They were not documented, and could be lost if the inventor died.
Patents overcame this problem in human nature, by giving inventors an incentive to document and to share. Licensing a patent meant getting a cut of the profits from multiple factories, and there was more profit in this than in protecting your margins.
To any who would say that patents are beneficial I must point out that patents are not the natural state of information conveyance. They are thus an invention of the mind as well. If you would put forth they are beneficial then I would task you to provide evidence to back your claim.
Your ask us for evidence, yet your argument is entirely predicated on the assertion that the "natural state of information conveyance" is inherently better. This argument is rendered paradoxical through being conveyed in an unnatural medium: the internet.
I wonder if Forbes would weigh in on bad patents as strongly as they do in their reflexive support for trolls.
RTFA. The final line:
This is what some media commentators ignore when they try to tar all non-practicing entities with the same brush as abusive patent trolls.
They do not support trolls.
No, they are rent seeking for the sake of rent seeking. If they wanted innovation they would produce something or seek out someone to produce the thing.
Yeah, cos Dolby Labs, the example NPE quoted in TFA (you did RTFA, didn't you?) never innovate at all, do they?
This sort of "non-practicing entity" is actually better for innovation than many practicing entities, because they actively license to multiple parties, as it serves to get them greater profit. As a result, the invention is more widely available. Meanwhile, many actually practicing entities use patents far more abusively, more troll-like, than an NPE like Dolby Labs, using their patents to actively block other manufacturers from competing with them, stifling innovation.
4G is coming and phones will be increasingly cross-network compatible as time passes. Even if it's only a minority who will benefit at the moment, it's important to establish the principle early.
This is how it works in the UK. We still have contracts that subsidise handsets that you can be tied into, the carrier just can't prevent you using your device on another network afterwards or even at the same time if you're so inclined.
IE they can't stop you acquiring an unlock code from a third party. And IIRC correctly they are obliged to supply an unlock code on request once the contract term is up. This was a reasonable compromise in the days of "dumb" phones. However, the technology is now advanced enough that operators would be perferctly capable of making the unlock automatic, either by setting the countdown when the phone is first activated, or having a trigger sent by the servers.
Which is what they should be doing now.
Much more relevantly, we say "Inuit" rather than "eskimo".
The Inuit are only one tribe of the group referred to as Eskimos. Calling all Eskimos "Inuit" is like calling all Native Americans "Cherokee", or calling all white people "French, all black people Tutsies or all Arabs "Yemeni". Or indeed the "ancient, and not representative of modern behaviour" example of naming all Germans "Teutones"... or even "Germans" (also a name for one or the tribes).
Human nature never changes.
So where do I need to go to get this free beer?
You need to compile it from source.
We'd say that until we figured out how to talk to them, and once we did, we'd ask them what they want to be called and then use that.
What, like we call Deutsch people "German", and Nederlanders "Dutch"? Like we call people from Ni-hong "Japanese" and people from Zhongguo "Chinese"?
If we look further back we'll see that names are more likely to transfer from outside the group to in, rather than the other way round. The Gaelic for Scotland ("Alba") came via Ireland's old word for the island of Great Britain ("Alban") from the Latin for England (or at least part of it), whence also "Albion". "Scotland" itself comes from Latin, and has known Celtic antecedent. And the words "Gael" and "Gaelic" are thought to bear their origins in Welsh, possible meaning "forest-dweller", but it came to English via Scottish Gaelic and Irish, where they are used as the main terms for the languange and ethnicity (but not nationality).
And as for those Deutsch people I mentioned, the word derives from the Latin Teutones, which may have derived from one Germanic tribe's name, but was certainly not the name all of them used -- hell, they didn't even consider themselves one thing. This of course has parallels in the modern Inuit/Eskimo problem. The Inuits didn't want to be called "Eskimos", so we started calling all Eskimos "Inuit", which the non-Inuit Eskimo tribes in turn objected to.
Also, while we may have stopped talking about "Red Indians", the term "native Americans" has no native American derivation -- it's pure outsider. The Canadian equivalent "First Nations" is entirely composed of generic descriptive words.
And in a similar vein, I watched the Kickstarter video where Zahn says the alien names. When he says "Zhirrzh", I hear no justification for the double R, and his pronunciation of Kalixiri would be pretty unambiguous if rendered as "Calixeeri". Which surely looks alien enough as it is?
I checked out the website for the Mitsuku chatbot and took a rather pessimistic poke at it.
Chatbot: [boilerplate noises omitted] ... "What is your name?"
Myself: "I'm the fiddler."
"the fiddler" is a job description, not a name. "The Fiddler" is a musical foil for Adam West's Batman. Unnatural response.
Chatbot: "Who made you the fiddler?" [A reasonable, albeit somewhat peculiar, response.]
Myself: "I took too long once to feed my peckish cat."
A: non-sequitur with no explicit change of subject. Unnatural response strategy.
B: misuse of the word "peckish". Peckish is a subjective state, and while you may know the cat is hungry, you cannot know the cat's subjective experience of that state. It's also used almost exclusively in a predicative position, ie after a verb such as "to be" or (most often) to feel. Highly defective sentence on your part.
Don't get me wrong, the chatbot is pretty poor, and one of the goals of NLP should be graceful degradation when there's erroneous or ambiuous input, but on the other hand... garbage in, garbage out...
Don't. AIML's incredibly limited and unwieldy for anything complex.
You'd probably be better off learning Prolog than this XML-based abomination.
Last I checked, Prolog was still too determinstic to be any use in NLP tasks. Decent NLP will never be possible with pure rule-based systems -- probablistic models are a necessity.
If you could offset the upfront costs against subscriptions, you could get the book/magazine to market and make a profit over time from sales.
I'm against even this, as I wouldn't put up money to a for-profit business just to get a promised product. If you want to get rich with my help, give me a slice of the action.
Small bands use subscriptions (crowdfunding) precisely because they're highly unlikely to get rich, so none of the labels is going to offer them an advance or a loan. My point is that if the backers pay only material costs, the content producer is still in a position of risk, just reduced risk, because if a singer don't sell a single copy of the CD after the backers get theirs, he'll be no better off monetarily than he was 6 months previously, with nothing to show for his time other than a CD no-one wants. All that time, effort and work for nothing (managing a Kickstarter campaign can be pretty time-consuming). So there's still risk.
I think Kickstarter's model is great... but not for this sort of endeavour.
The model isn't new -- it used to be called the subscription model, and we've forgotten what "subscription" means: sub=under, scribe=write... subscribers would "underwrite" the physical costs of printing a publication that was of value to them, because the authors maybe didn't have the money to pay for the first print run. If you could offset the upfront costs against subscriptions, you could get the book/magazine to market and make a profit over time from sales.
Plenty of Kickstarter projects work this way -- the purest example would be bands seeking money for studio time and disc pressing -- but I've seen far too many examples of people asking for money for books they haven't started writing yet. I'm happy to pay for material costs, even including travel costs for the right project. I'm not so keen on paying for time. Perhaps if it's commoditised work that could be done by pretty much anyone interchangeably (eg transcribing an old print book to electronic form), but for creative work, the work value is inestimable and it leaves me very uneasy.
On the other hand, if the teaching technique could be shown to consistently increase student time-on-task, the unamazing gain would still be worthwhile. However, for every flipped success story in this discussion, there's another story of failure due to student slacking.