"first of all, the boston tea party was about a tax imposed by a foreign power, and not a local (or federal) govt."
Well, at the time, that "foreign power" was the lawful authority governing the colonies. That government had a standing army in the colonies and carried the force of law. It was recognized in the international community as having sovreignty over the colonies in America.
When the colonies rebelled and waged war against England, they were taking on the lawful authority of their own government, not a foreign power as you say. The sitting government was completely intolerable, and totally unable to manage the colonies at a 4 month remove, and the revolutionary cause ran deep enough that entire MILITARY DIVISIONS were influenced to take up arms against their command (necessary for revolution, and the single missing ingredient today).
But England did not become a Foreign Power until AFTER the revolution...
"I think for many of them, it's a bait & switch tactic."
It's a pawn-shop thing. Whatever the original retail price for an item was, that'll be the price tag in a pawn shop.
Thing is, where a retail store is almost never open to negotiation, a pawn shop ALWAYS is.
So they set the asking price at the retail price (sometimes higher!), and if some moron pays it, they'll take his money. But if you haggle, they'll haggle.
>90% of the US is on the streets while the top >10% is easy pimpin' out of big suites and using >the botton 90% as sex slaves for goatse >experiments.
Uh, it *is* something like that. If you look at how well-off those 10% actually are, the difference between the living of the 90% and a herd of goats is statistically insignificant.
It's a good start into a market void, where we NEED a commodity device. Think about all the $15 - $50 PDA's. Sure they don't run palmOS. They can't do a lot of things a CE device can. SO? There's a market for them. How about those "laptops" for little kids? They're just toys. Some of them do a minimal amount of wordprocessing or calculator functions, or maybe they just moo and oink, who cares?
So there's a niche where a cheap as hell PC that does the stuff that a PC does, but is cheap as hell, would be very marketable. To all those folks who want a PDA, but don't want to spend the bucks for a Palm, and certainly not for something like a Zarus. Just like there's expensive phones and cheap as hell phones. Or cheap stereos.
There's a market for a cheap computer. If it does what it needs to do, software and file compatability be damned. There are a whole lot of people that, if they can't open a particular file format or view some funky proprietary content on the web, will just go "huh? oh well." and they'll get on with their lives! I'll bet if you had a few games for the platform that weren't on other platforms, they'd sell, too. And people would not be all that upset that Windows games don't work, provided you did not give them that expectation. People may not be knowledgeable, but they are NOT stupid. (I hail from a small town in East Texas, and believe I'm qualified to speak on that matter!)
I really don't think incompatability would hurt here as much as other people seem to think it will, and certainly not as much as Microsoft is betting it will. Do the people with $10 pda's care if they can't run palm apps? Do you really think the people with self-contained workflow are going to care whether they run Koffice, Openoffice, or word?
Microsoft, and all the software publishers (games mostly!) have created the expectation in consumers that "computer == runs windows software" but, I don't think that'll be terribly hard to break. Look at the console market, or any other product that has an aftermarket where accessories on one brand are incompatible with another.
Vacuum cleaner bags. They get it. I buy a Hoover, I need Type H bags. I buy a Eureka, I need type AA bags. I'll even bet some of them check the price, and they see if H bags are $3.00 and AA bags are $1.50, it influences their decision. But they get it, and they don't end up returning the Eureka because it doesn't use the Hoover bag.
Game consoles. Nobody has a problem understanding that Nintendo games don't fit Sony. And they're okay with that. Camera film comes to mind as another example, but seems somewhat anachronistic today.
So it doesn't come with Word? Well, that's a social problem for some people. The idea that not being able (or willing) to read a Word Doc might cost your job, etc.
Not everybody has their career resting on being able to open or save a powerpoint or a word doc. Lots of us are in that predicament, but, we're not the ones buying a $50 PC, are we? (Yes I know the lindows box is more like $200, but, I'm seeing the possibility).
The main thing that distinguishes "Computers" and "Peripherals, Software" from "Vacuum cleaners" and "Bags" is that the retailers have thoroughly ingrained the notion that "Computer == Windows" into the consumer's mind. But guess what? They can STILL sell something else, as long as they don't instill a false expectation in that customer.
To be sure, there will be salespeople claiming that Lindows runs Game X, Application Y. There will be people returning these things, partly just because people return things to Walmart, and partly because it hasn't met their expectations. There will be people who immediately wipe the disk and install windows on it.
And there will be people who use the system, never adding anything to it, happily emailing stories about the newborn poodle or how the floor of the shed needs to be fixed and can you pay the insurance on the truck this month to their kids and grandkids on the west coast. There will be a web resource here and there that won't load in opera or mozilla or whatever, sure, but if it *WORKS* and does what the customer expects it to do, it DOESN'T MATTER ONE BIT that it isn't Windows!
Point of information: The version of Windows that ships today has users and user privilege features that rival those of unix. They're *different* and not as good a design in my opinion, but, I think you're comparing Linux to Windows 98; and that's not fair.
(And this is coming from a dyed-in-the-wool Linux user since the Perot campaign!)
"Is having an Intel CPU still that big a deal to the average consumer?"
I have a friend whose father (68 years old I think) honestly believes that swapping his AMD machine for an Intel will stop the pop-up ad problem.
He believes this, and refuses to hear anything to the contrary.
Since I'm not being paid to convince him of the facts, (and I doubt you could pay me enough to try!), I'm pretty sure he'll get a new computer, it'll be an intel box, and, since it'll be a brand new XP installation, it probably will work better. It might even be configured with a pop-up ad blocker, who knows?
The whole idea of supressing information of any kind, to anyone, for any reason at all, strikes me as a bizarre artifact of our civilization.
I wonder if it is possible that the whole problem with society is in part DUE TO the fact we withhold information? Governments don't tell what they know. Businesses keep secrets from their employees, investors, other businesses. We think children should not be exposed to certain things. We even think adults shouldn't be exposed to certain things.
What if it were completely the other way around?
What if, no matter how ugly it seems to our current thinking, and no matter how ridiculously impossible it would seem to implement, we let everyone have any information they wanted. We didn't cram it down their throats, but we didn't stop them from learning.
When I was a very gifted child of 6, I was reading at just about the same level that I was when starting high school. There was very little that I could understand at the age of 14 that I could not have understood at the age of 6. I was painfully aware of this at the time, but not able to express the problem to a teacher. I read Shakespeare, Virgil, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and as much of our encyclopedia as I found interesting, because those were the books in our family room. I read my mom's gothic novels. I read my dad's Peterbilt service manuals. I knew some real estate lingo. From having to hang around in some of my parents' offices for long periods of time, I learned things like how teletype paper tape worked (and could recognize some characters!)
I read the paper and fully understood the impact of the war in Vietnam, and even understood some of the implications of us being in Cambodia. I remember being puzzled by the fact that the country was at war, but this would not be discussed in school.
I think if there'd been algebra, trig, and calculus books in our house, I'd have been able to deal with them as well. I was by far the most literate person in my first, second, and third grade. Was I ever encouraged to read? By anyone? HELL NO. I'm not sure I can say I was directly punished for it, but, that's exactly how I feel about it thirty years later.
What I'm saying is, the very idea that there are some things that should be, and some things that should not be, exposed to a child, makes no sense to me.
I have to wonder if it could be due to the very nature of suppression that we have some of the problems for which we perceive the solution is censorship. For example, porn, or violent subject matter. We make those things into the mysterious grown-up stuff on the shelf we're not supposed to reach. It just makes us hungry for it. Putting it on the high shelf and saying "that's not for you because you're a kid" just gives it that much more perceived value! Then, when we approach the age where we are better equipped to seek out this material, which happens to be LONG before the "approved" age, we seek it with passion. When we find that it is STILL being kept from us, sometimes we just create it ourselves -- we become sexually active sooner, or we become violent.
Could the censorship be the very thing that brings us the consequences for which we believe censorship is the answer?
Some projects I've worked on, I'd have enjoyed doing more completion; but the problem is that if we spent the time and resources to get 100%, or let's say better than 80% complete and extreme quality, two things would happen:
1. The business need for the project would have passed. 2. The costs would have exceeded the benefit.
So instead we go with "good enough to work and solve our problem" as a goal, instead of "good enough that we are willing to guarantee perfect results and great longevity", or even "suitability to tasks beyond the original scope."
Now a bridge will not have outlived its purpose in the first quarter after the mayor cuts the ribbon. Also, I think about one bridge in particular wher I previously lived. I would have my morning coffee at a little restaurant on one side of the bridge, close to my house. At the booth I usually sat in, was a photograph from the late 1800's when the bridge was built, and another from, I'd guess, 1920, showing model T fords competing for space with men on horses and horse-drawn wagons. I'd see this every day, before entering into the little traffic jam that was the bridge.
They didn't *design* that bridge for 1980's traffic and cars. And I doubt you could even say they overengineered the bridge; it just so happened that it was built solid enough for automobiles, simply because it was built to last.
But, the point here is that a bridge is going to still be used long after it's paid for, long after everyone who ever worked on it is retired, and certainly will outlive the business unit responsible for its construction.
If I were working on any project of such a scope, be it a piece of software, or a fifty year business plan, or a building design, then, "getting it done just enough to solve our immediate problem because we have other problems coming down the pipe" would not be a strategy worth considering.
However, if I've got a problem to solve, I can't put myself in a position where I'm still planning and perfecting the design for the solution long after the problem has led my company to bankruptcy!
Replace "Samaritan" with "Palestinian" if you want a modern context.
To say "Good Samaritan" is to reinforce a prejudice against Samiratans and Canaanites.
These people were the offspring of conquerors and indigenous tribes. When the Jews returned to Canaan to create Israel, the land was not empty and deserted; rather, it was populated by many races. These people were murdered and displaced under a divine mandate, whether you take the judeo-christian view or not... Even the Jewish tradition acknowledged that they conquered the land and took it from people who were living there. (Perhaps you read the divine command to murder the Canaanites, let's say, Deuteronmy chapter 7, as something more benign... But you'd need to be a pretty skilled spin doctor to soften "Do not leave alive anything that breathes... Completely destroy them [Hittes, Canaanites, etc.] as [God] has commanded you..."
Well, I'm guessing that was written long AFTER the genocide and occupation was done, as a justification, like a schoolgirl justifies sleeping with "motorcycle boy" instead of the "nice guy", after the fact...
This was a major political problem 2000 years ago, and continues to be a primary cause of unrest in the region today.
If it weren't for the fact that the people known as Samaritans were extinct today, the term "good Samaritan" would be horribly socially insenstive. The understanding of "good Samaritan" in the context of the myth depends on a general belief that Samaritans were NOT good to the Jews.
The Good Samaritan parable would have an excellent modern analogy, let's say, in a Palestian rebel deciding one day to assist a wounded Israeli soldier. But if we started referring to that Palestinian as the "one good Palestinian amid the whole race of evil ones" I think it would escalate the war!
Please consider that the impact of the Good Samaritan story stems from the fact that the Samaritans considered the Jews to be untouchables. What's more, the Samaritan in the story was breaking the law by helping the Jew. The priest and the Levite kept walking, which I imagine they were required by law to do.
What I take from the story is that there were good and bad Samaritans, good and bad Jews, and all lived under a terribly repressive social order. Not unlike the present day.
Well, we talk about "Costs" as if someone took $100 billion dollars, put it in a shuttle, and launched it into orbit.
That's NOT what happened to the money.
It paid for r&d infrastucture, it paid for development of materials and processes, and it paid salaries. It also paid for raw materials, and, yes, it probably built more than a couple of summer houses for a few politicians.
We talk about the "Costs" of the program apparently without realizing that we PAID ourselves. Jobs were created, University programs were funded, and the only real problem here is that the "taxpayers" are now unhappy about it and wishing they could have it to do over again and spend that money on something else.
Cat's preferred use is strictly the keyboard; and her favorite debugging method is to powercycle. Occasionally she will get the ball out of the trackball and get it good and lost.
"[O]ne case comes to mind of a man who had to have 60% of his face removed because of a fungal infection), or those with certain birth defects at birth."
That story really freaked me out. It also made me wonder whether the same treatment would have been given to someone with a lot of money, or famous. They "removed" the guy's eyes, eye sockets, nose, teeth, lips, sinus cavities, and cheek bones. Different strokes I suppose, but I cannot relate to the opinion that this is a better outcome than death.
I mean, if I had to choose between a month to live or that, I'd take the month. In the woods somewhere. Provided euthenasia isn't an option.
Anyway I've tried to find a follow-up to the story, but found nothing. Lots of interesting info about Mucormycosis though.
Original article is here:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/HEALTH/02/03/prosthetic. fa ce/
"Speech to text isn't very good because its very hard to turn phonetics into words."
I wonder why it wouldn't be appropriate to deliver the phonetics themselves? In my university language classes, I'm expected to read French from a standard phonetic alphabet. If the device in the article is truly mapping phonemes from speech, then a representation of those phonemes would be very useful; never mind representing them into a given language.
Of course it is. It's also not current technology. The phone is more of an oscilloscope than a speech translator.
If you want an apples-to-apples comparison, consider the alternatives between an animated face or a spectrum analyser, not between an animated face or a text display.
"2. software interprets phonetics converts it into words"
Is a very different, much more complex problem than:
"2. software interprets phonetics into picture based lip movements"
Consider that for the first example, we need the computer to understand the language, whereas in the second example, all the computer needs is a fourier transform and Max Headroom anatomy.
Personally, I think it would be simpler and more effective to put a camera on the phone and transmit an image of the speakers face.
You can map the articulation to an animated face without needing to know the language at all. Now, whether you can do it well enough to help a deaf person understand, is an open question.
All you'd need to do to represent someone saying "Oh" versus "Ooooh" is map the phoneme to a shape. I'd imagine Fourier analysis would be oen of the more useful tools here.
Fair enough. But I think you should compare your trust of someone very knowledgeable with WinNT AND Apache AND Linux, to setting up either system.
For instance, I'd certainly trust my own configuration of my own Apache server, before I'd trust my cat's setup of windows, but that's no more meanignful than your comment.
"This makes pages un-readable for some visual disabled who use text browsers to get to what they need and read it out on a braille-board or via software that simply reads the text out- load to them."
Don't sue -- bring criminal prosecution.
The one guy with the case against Southwest Airlines really didn't have a case, because SWA actually was making it possible for him to purchase tickets. Here, the situation is different. Not only is this company actively and agressively forbidding access to the blind, the spokesperson for the company is accusing these disabled individuals of being theives. I'm likely to get modded down as a troll, but I honestly believe there is a potential for litigation here.
Don't some of the larger internet providers distribute pop-up ad blocking software? AOL? Isn't that the sort of kindling for being a target of one of those lawsuits that bankrupts you just by being sued? You know, the kind of suits that "Everybody" is afraid to make the slightest contraversial move in busines because they're so afraid of being sued?
This would be a terriffic time to show me that's not a myth.
Slashdot Mirror
"first of all, the boston tea party was about a tax imposed by a foreign power, and not a local (or federal) govt."
Well, at the time, that "foreign power" was the lawful authority governing the colonies. That government had a standing army in the colonies and carried the force of law. It was recognized in the international community as having sovreignty over the colonies in America.
When the colonies rebelled and waged war against England, they were taking on the lawful authority of their own government, not a foreign power as you say. The sitting government was completely intolerable, and totally unable to manage the colonies at a 4 month remove, and the revolutionary cause ran deep enough that entire MILITARY DIVISIONS were influenced to take up arms against their command (necessary for revolution, and the single missing ingredient today).
But England did not become a Foreign Power until AFTER the revolution...
"I think for many of them, it's a bait & switch tactic."
It's a pawn-shop thing.
Whatever the original retail price for an item was, that'll be the price tag in a pawn shop.
Thing is, where a retail store is almost never open to negotiation, a pawn shop ALWAYS is.
So they set the asking price at the retail price (sometimes higher!), and if some moron pays it, they'll take his money. But if you haggle, they'll haggle.
>90% of the US is on the streets while the top
>10% is easy pimpin' out of big suites and using
>the botton 90% as sex slaves for goatse
>experiments.
Uh, it *is* something like that. If you look at how well-off those 10% actually are, the difference between the living of the 90% and a herd of goats is statistically insignificant.
It's a good start into a market void, where we NEED a commodity device. Think about all the $15 - $50 PDA's. Sure they don't run palmOS. They can't do a lot of things a CE device can. SO? There's a market for them. How about those "laptops" for little kids? They're just toys. Some of them do a minimal amount of wordprocessing or calculator functions, or maybe they just moo and oink, who cares?
So there's a niche where a cheap as hell PC that does the stuff that a PC does, but is cheap as hell, would be very marketable. To all those folks who want a PDA, but don't want to spend the bucks for a Palm, and certainly not for something like a Zarus. Just like there's expensive phones and cheap as hell phones. Or cheap stereos.
There's a market for a cheap computer. If it does what it needs to do, software and file compatability be damned. There are a whole lot of people that, if they can't open a particular file format or view some funky proprietary content on the web, will just go "huh? oh well." and they'll get on with their lives! I'll bet if you had a few games for the platform that weren't on other platforms, they'd sell, too. And people would not be all that upset that Windows games don't work, provided you did not give them that expectation. People may not be knowledgeable, but they are NOT stupid. (I hail from a small town in East Texas, and believe I'm qualified to speak on that matter!)
I really don't think incompatability would hurt here as much as other people seem to think it will, and certainly not as much as Microsoft is betting it will. Do the people with $10 pda's care if they can't run palm apps? Do you really think the people with self-contained workflow are going to care whether they run Koffice, Openoffice, or word?
Microsoft, and all the software publishers (games mostly!) have created the expectation in consumers that "computer == runs windows software" but, I don't think that'll be terribly hard to break. Look at the console market, or any other product that has an aftermarket where accessories on one brand are incompatible with another.
Vacuum cleaner bags. They get it. I buy a Hoover, I need Type H bags. I buy a Eureka, I need type AA bags. I'll even bet some of them check the price, and they see if H bags are $3.00 and AA bags are $1.50, it influences their decision. But they get it, and they don't end up returning the Eureka because it doesn't use the Hoover bag.
Game consoles. Nobody has a problem understanding that Nintendo games don't fit Sony. And they're okay with that. Camera film comes to mind as another example, but seems somewhat anachronistic today.
So it doesn't come with Word? Well, that's a social problem for some people. The idea that not being able (or willing) to read a Word Doc might cost your job, etc.
Not everybody has their career resting on being able to open or save a powerpoint or a word doc.
Lots of us are in that predicament, but, we're not the ones buying a $50 PC, are we? (Yes I know the lindows box is more like $200, but, I'm seeing the possibility).
The main thing that distinguishes "Computers" and "Peripherals, Software" from "Vacuum cleaners" and "Bags" is that the retailers have thoroughly ingrained the notion that "Computer == Windows" into the consumer's mind. But guess what? They can STILL sell something else, as long as they don't instill a false expectation in that customer.
To be sure, there will be salespeople claiming that Lindows runs Game X, Application Y. There will be people returning these things, partly just because people return things to Walmart, and partly because it hasn't met their expectations.
There will be people who immediately wipe the disk and install windows on it.
And there will be people who use the system, never adding anything to it, happily emailing stories about the newborn poodle or how the floor of the shed needs to be fixed and can you pay the insurance on the truck this month to their kids and grandkids on the west coast. There will be a web resource here and there that won't load in opera or mozilla or whatever, sure, but if it *WORKS* and does what the customer expects it to do, it DOESN'T MATTER ONE BIT that it isn't Windows!
>Yes, it runs as root. So does Windows.
Point of information: The version of Windows
that ships today has users and user privilege features that rival those of unix. They're *different* and not as good a design in my opinion, but, I think you're comparing Linux to Windows 98; and that's not fair.
(And this is coming from a dyed-in-the-wool Linux user since the Perot campaign!)
"Is having an Intel CPU still that big a deal to the average consumer?"
I have a friend whose father (68 years old I think) honestly believes that swapping his AMD machine for an Intel will stop the pop-up ad problem.
He believes this, and refuses to hear anything to the contrary.
Since I'm not being paid to convince him of the facts, (and I doubt you could pay me enough to try!), I'm pretty sure he'll get a new computer, it'll be an intel box, and, since it'll be a brand new XP installation, it probably will work better. It might even be configured with a pop-up ad blocker, who knows?
To him, it will appear that Intel is right...
The whole idea of supressing information of any kind, to anyone, for any reason at all, strikes me as a bizarre artifact of our civilization.
I wonder if it is possible that the whole problem with society is in part DUE TO the fact we withhold information? Governments don't tell what they know. Businesses keep secrets from their employees, investors, other businesses. We think children should not be exposed to certain things. We even think adults shouldn't be exposed to certain things.
What if it were completely the other way around?
What if, no matter how ugly it seems to our current thinking, and no matter how ridiculously impossible it would seem to implement, we let everyone have any information they wanted. We didn't cram it down their throats, but we didn't stop them from learning.
When I was a very gifted child of 6, I was reading at just about the same level that I was when starting high school. There was very little that I could understand at the age of 14 that I could not have understood at the age of 6. I was painfully aware of this at the time, but not able to express the problem to a teacher. I read Shakespeare, Virgil, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and as much of our encyclopedia as I found interesting, because those were the books in our family room. I read my mom's gothic novels. I read my dad's Peterbilt service manuals. I knew some real estate lingo. From having to hang around in some of my parents' offices for long periods of time, I learned things like how teletype paper tape worked (and could recognize some characters!)
I read the paper and fully understood the impact of the war in Vietnam, and even understood some of the implications of us being in Cambodia. I remember being puzzled by the fact that the country was at war, but this would not be discussed in school.
I think if there'd been algebra, trig, and calculus books in our house, I'd have been able to deal with them as well. I was by far the most literate person in my first, second, and third grade. Was I ever encouraged to read? By anyone? HELL NO. I'm not sure I can say I was directly punished for it, but, that's exactly how I feel about it thirty years later.
What I'm saying is, the very idea that there are some things that should be, and some things that should not be, exposed to a child, makes no sense to me.
I have to wonder if it could be due to the very nature of suppression that we have some of the problems for which we perceive the solution is censorship. For example, porn, or violent subject matter. We make those things into the mysterious grown-up stuff on the shelf we're not supposed to reach. It just makes us hungry for it. Putting it on the high shelf and saying "that's not for you because you're a kid" just gives it that much more perceived value! Then, when we approach the age where we are better equipped to seek out this material, which happens to be LONG before the "approved" age, we seek it with passion. When we find that it is STILL being kept from us, sometimes we just create it ourselves -- we become sexually active sooner, or we become violent.
Could the censorship be the very thing that brings us the consequences for which we believe censorship is the answer?
Some projects I've worked on, I'd have enjoyed
doing more completion; but the problem is that
if we spent the time and resources to get 100%, or let's say better than 80% complete and extreme quality, two things would happen:
1. The business need for the project would have passed.
2. The costs would have exceeded the benefit.
So instead we go with "good enough to work and solve our problem" as a goal, instead of "good enough that we are willing to guarantee perfect results and great longevity", or even "suitability to tasks beyond the original scope."
Now a bridge will not have outlived its purpose in the first quarter after the mayor cuts the ribbon. Also, I think about one bridge in particular wher I previously lived. I would have my morning coffee at a little restaurant on one side of the bridge, close to my house. At the booth I usually sat in, was a photograph from the late 1800's when the bridge was built, and another from, I'd guess, 1920, showing model T fords competing for space with men on horses and horse-drawn wagons. I'd see this every day, before entering into the little traffic jam that was the bridge.
They didn't *design* that bridge for 1980's traffic and cars. And I doubt you could even say they overengineered the bridge; it just so happened that it was built solid enough for automobiles, simply because it was built to last.
But, the point here is that a bridge is going to still be used long after it's paid for, long after everyone who ever worked on it is retired, and certainly will outlive the business unit responsible for its construction.
If I were working on any project of such a scope, be it a piece of software, or a fifty year business plan, or a building design, then, "getting it done just enough to solve our immediate problem because we have other problems coming down the pipe" would not be a strategy worth considering.
However, if I've got a problem to solve, I can't put myself in a position where I'm still planning and perfecting the design for the solution long after the problem has led my company to bankruptcy!
Replace "Samaritan" with "Palestinian"
if you want a modern context.
To say "Good Samaritan" is to reinforce
a prejudice against Samiratans and Canaanites.
These people were the offspring of conquerors and indigenous tribes. When the Jews returned to Canaan to create Israel, the land was not empty and deserted; rather, it was populated by many races. These people were murdered and displaced under a divine mandate, whether you take the judeo-christian view or not... Even the Jewish tradition acknowledged that they conquered the land and took it from people who were living there. (Perhaps you read the divine command to murder the Canaanites, let's say, Deuteronmy chapter 7, as something more benign... But you'd need to be a pretty skilled spin doctor to soften "Do not leave alive anything that breathes... Completely destroy them [Hittes, Canaanites, etc.] as [God] has commanded you..."
Well, I'm guessing that was written long AFTER the genocide and occupation was done, as a justification, like a schoolgirl justifies sleeping with "motorcycle boy" instead of the "nice guy", after the fact...
This was a major political problem 2000 years ago, and continues to be a primary cause of unrest in the region today.
If it weren't for the fact that the people known as Samaritans were extinct today, the term "good Samaritan" would be horribly socially insenstive. The understanding of "good Samaritan" in the context of the myth depends on a general belief that Samaritans were NOT good to the Jews.
The Good Samaritan parable would have an excellent modern analogy, let's say, in a Palestian rebel deciding one day to assist a wounded Israeli soldier. But if we started referring to that Palestinian as the "one good Palestinian amid the whole race of evil ones" I think it would escalate the war!
Please consider that the impact of the Good Samaritan story stems from the fact that the Samaritans considered the Jews to be untouchables. What's more, the Samaritan in the story was breaking the law by helping the Jew. The priest and the Levite kept walking, which I imagine they were required by law to do.
What I take from the story is that there were good and bad Samaritans, good and bad Jews, and all lived under a terribly repressive social order. Not unlike the present day.
"Does it really make a difference if I had the data a week before that?"
For you, the consumer, probably not.
If you were a merchant, it might be a huge deal.
Well, we talk about "Costs" as if someone took
$100 billion dollars, put it in a shuttle, and launched it into orbit.
That's NOT what happened to the money.
It paid for r&d infrastucture, it paid for development of materials and processes, and it paid salaries. It also paid for raw materials, and, yes, it probably built more than a couple of summer houses for a few politicians.
We talk about the "Costs" of the program apparently without realizing that we PAID ourselves. Jobs were created, University programs were funded, and the only real problem here is that the "taxpayers" are now unhappy about it and wishing they could have it to do over again and spend that money on something else.
>Please stop badmouthing Free Software as if it
>had anything to do with "Communism".
That became a lost cause when Stallman first used the term "Manifesto" to frame his agenda.
My opinion is that the Cyberiad, done in a light-hearted, animated way, would have been a better choice, if you wanted to make a film from Lem's work.
"Being British, I assumed that C# was pronounced "see hash" the first time I saw it. "
What does being British have to do with not being a musician?
Cat's preferred use is strictly the keyboard; and her favorite debugging method is to powercycle. Occasionally she will get the ball out of the trackball and get it good and lost.
"[O]ne case comes to mind of a man who had to have 60% of his face removed because of a fungal infection), or those with certain birth defects at birth."
. fa ce/
That story really freaked me out. It also made me wonder whether the same treatment would have been given to someone with a lot of money, or famous. They "removed" the guy's eyes, eye sockets, nose, teeth, lips, sinus cavities, and cheek bones. Different strokes I suppose, but I cannot relate to the opinion that this is a better outcome than death.
I mean, if I had to choose between a month to live or that, I'd take the month. In the woods somewhere. Provided euthenasia isn't an option.
Anyway I've tried to find a follow-up to the story, but found nothing. Lots of interesting info about Mucormycosis though.
Original article is here:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/HEALTH/02/03/prosthetic
"Speech to text isn't very good because its very hard to turn phonetics into words."
I wonder why it wouldn't be appropriate to deliver the phonetics themselves?
In my university language classes, I'm expected to read French from a standard
phonetic alphabet. If the device in the article is truly mapping phonemes from
speech, then a representation of those phonemes would be very useful;
never mind representing them into a given language.
"speech to text is a much better solution."
Of course it is. It's also not current technology.
The phone is more of an oscilloscope than a speech translator.
If you want an apples-to-apples comparison, consider the alternatives
between an animated face or a spectrum analyser, not between an
animated face or a text display.
"2. software interprets phonetics converts it into words"
Is a very different, much more complex problem than:
"2. software interprets phonetics into picture based lip movements"
Consider that for the first example, we need the computer to understand the language,
whereas in the second example, all the computer needs is a fourier transform and
Max Headroom anatomy.
Personally, I think it would be simpler and more effective to put a
camera on the phone and transmit an image of the speakers face.
> What was wrong with speech to text?
Speech to text is a much harder problem!
You can map the articulation to an animated face without needing
to know the language at all. Now, whether you can do it well enough
to help a deaf person understand, is an open question.
All you'd need to do to represent someone saying "Oh" versus "Ooooh" is map the phoneme to a shape.
I'd imagine Fourier analysis would be oen of the more useful tools here.
Fair enough. But I think you should compare your trust of someone
very knowledgeable with WinNT AND Apache AND Linux, to setting
up either system.
For instance, I'd certainly trust my own configuration of my own Apache
server, before I'd trust my cat's setup of windows, but that's no more
meanignful than your comment.
You're just kidding, but, I wonder if enough information about ENIAC
has survived, to make a simulator for it?
"This makes pages un-readable for some visual disabled who use text browsers to get to what they need and read it out on a braille-board or via software that simply reads the text out- load to them."
Don't sue -- bring criminal prosecution.
The one guy with the case against Southwest Airlines really didn't have a case, because SWA actually was making it possible for him to purchase tickets. Here, the situation is different. Not only is this company actively and agressively forbidding access to the blind, the spokesperson for the company is accusing these disabled individuals of being theives. I'm likely to get modded down as a troll, but I honestly believe there is a potential for litigation here.
Don't some of the larger internet providers distribute pop-up ad blocking software? AOL? Isn't that the sort of kindling for being a target of one of those lawsuits that bankrupts you just by being sued? You know, the kind of suits that "Everybody" is afraid to make the slightest contraversial move in busines because they're so afraid of being sued?
This would be a terriffic time to show me that's not a myth.
"As for liability, billboards cannot "change" (article's word) more than once every four seconds. "
That may be a California thing... I've seen full motion, full color video in Texas and in Las Vegas.