A store and forward messaging system. The Internet's BBS.
>Today you spend the bandwidth of 100 usenet messages going half way around the world loading the front page of one online news site
Not when those articles consist of rips from BluRay disks encoded as 7-bit ASCII.
>The whole concept of usenet is out of date,
Just because it's misused doesn't mean it's out of date. It was just never meant to carry binary data. This is evident because every binary attachment has to be encoded as 7-bit ASCII. If you don't understand this then I don't know what to say.
>far more practical to have one group on one server and have everybody access that.
What? And what happens when that one server goes down, or the owner can no longer pay for the bandwidth costs because everyone worldwide is contacting that one server? Eh? 'Splain this to me. How many websites do you know of that go back to the beginning of the Web besides CERN?
>I think it'd be almost easier with a screen scraper
You're kidding, right? Every web page owner that relies on ads to keep his machines up and the bills paid is raging at you right now.
I was very snarky in the previous post... second thoughts made me think more.
To follow up further on your post, I found it highly informative, and I agree that people like you and me take pride in our work (I'm a machinist). If I was designing subsea devices, I would take it rather personally if my stuff failed.
But I find the CEO of BP utterly without redemption. He does strike me as one who cuts corners as much as he can. There is a mentality at too many publicly traded companies to focus on the next quarter instead of the next ten years, because shareholders demand profit NOW NOW NOW NOW! DAMMIT! The downplaying of the extent of the disaster, coupled with the overconfidence of the solutions, at least as portrayed to the press, seems like an attempt at slowing the fall of the stock price than anything else.
He asked for a negative effect of nuking the well.
Being cynical, and watching BP utterly mishandle this situation, I gave the most cynical answer I could find that was still true. It was not meant as mere troll, but if you want to take it so personally, all I have to say is:
YHBT.
To quote my brother after owning me more than once in Scrabble: "gloat gloat gloat gloat gloat."
-- BMO - basking in the light of my excellent karma.
This is why AT&T and Verizon dropped Usenet at the very mention of child pornography by Eliot Spitzer. Eliot was grandstanding and everyone new it. It was the best excuse to drop the expense of Usenet altogether. They could have simply dropped the binaries. Now everyone is following suit. Comcast, and Cox have, and are (Cox in June) dropping Usenet. I predict that within 2 years, ISPs carrying Usenet will be ancient history.
It is the small number of users involved in copyright infringement that use up the largest amount of bandwidth by at least several orders of magnitude. Disk space, electricity, hardware, maintenance, and bandwidth are not free. Binaries are big bandwidth, and the ISPs do not charge any different whether you participate in text only or you have a peg leg, hoop earring, greatcoat, tri-corner hat, and a parrot on your shoulder. Giganews, on the other hand, charges between $3 and $30 a month depending on usage, which is why they're not exactly complaining about load. And even $3/month for text-only more than makes up for Giganews' costs - there are many nntp servers out there that offer text-only for free.
So I blame the pirates. Your abuse of a medium not suited for large binary files has led to providers determining that it's not worth the bother. For them, I have only two words: Fuck you.
I find being polite and pleasant do deal with lets me fly right through customs and immigration wherever I go.
Being a prick, however, will get you only problems even with Canadian customs and immigration. They may seem polite, but they can spot a lying asshole a mile away and then you're hosed.
Article choice seems to be lackluster these past few years. We got a link to a nutjob calculating the end of the world with regards to the gulf oil disaster instead of like... well.. a link to NPR.
However, I do cruise on by here every so often in the vain hope of a good story. The firehose method of "voting for stories" sucks.
ObT: Yeah, Apple is a walled garden, so what? Some people can't handle anything else and to decry walled gardens as evil are entirely missing the point. It's better to live in a walled garden when you're entirely incapable of defending yourself from the barbarians at the gates.
And, since no written or verbal agreement was ever made to transfer copyright over to my employer, I question whether they can claim that they now own the extended version of the project.
In the US, transfer of copyright must be in writing. They do not own what you created on your own unless you sign something. A contract upon hire would have taken care of this. If you signed no such contract, they own bupkis.
Let me reiterate:
The default with regards to copyright law is that the author has copyright and it *must* require a *written instrument* to sign over copyright. The law is _very_ clear on this issue.
This is what SCO tried to get around with the Asset Purchase Agreement. Since there was nothing saying they bought Novell's copyright to SysV Unix, they don't own it. They lost twice, once in front of a judge as a summary judgment, and later in front of a jury.
That's what you just described. The only thing is that Display Postscript always had an onerous licensing scheme so it got dropped as a technology by nearly everyone. Adobe could revive it tomorrow if they wanted and XPS would be a smoking crater. The only question is if they're smart enough to do it.
though I don't like having to type my password in for system updates or to use sudo
This is no different than using Windows from a limited user account, which you should already be using. If you are not, you are being silly. Updates are an administrative task and thus belong to administrator, not Joe or Jane in Sales.
su - requires root's password sudo - doesn't require root's password - no password sharing. It also allows you to unset root's password so users can't login as root directly, and cough "guests" to the system must guess which user (you should not be using fingerd) has sudoer rights in order to access root privileges.
Not only farmers say domesticated turkeys are dumb, but the neighbors (like me) of people who raise turkeys have found they are dumb as shit.
For instance, a turkey will sit on the double-yellow-line on a suburban highway until someone goes out there and gives it a kick. And a nudge isn't enough. They are stupid, stupid birds. They have not been bred for smarts at all. Indeed, it's probably best for Farmer Bob to breed a turkey which will walk itself up to the chopping block, or failing that, at least won't struggle when it's time.
I have seen their cousins (because I was really quiet and just stood there) and wild turkeys are amazing and beautiful creatures.
Works for humans. I don't need to recite some Shakespeare (or in my case, something from Eça de Queiroz) excerpt before people can understand me. It's not perfect, but it works fine.
If William Shakespeare came up to you, you'd have trouble communicating with him until you learned his lexicon and his pronunciation. Conversely, the reason why you are so easily able to communicate with your peers is because you have a similar accent and shared lexicon.
A computer speech recognition program is not a person living in society constantly immersed in the language. Language changes, especially English. Consider the words that have entered the vocabulary in the last 30 years. The database lag would be horrendous when trying to get every single pronunciation of colloquialisms. A database such as yours also doesn't adapt with the way you speak and pronounce words as you go through life. The way you spoke as a child was not the same way you spoke as a teenager or adult or as an elder. A centralized database is hindered in its ability to learn.
A personal dataset that goes with you solves all that.
If I sell a speech recognition device, in your scenario, I would also have to distribute the gigantic "universal" dataset you propose. This requires much more computing power than one that merely uses your own personal dataset. This is because I simply don't know just who is buying my device. I should not have to care who buys the device. If I don't want to ship a huge database with the device I _could_ require it to be persistently connected to the 'Net, but there are times when that's either not feasible or desired. If I sell a speech recognition device that uses the owner's own dataset, we wind up with a more accurate device while also scaling down the need for so much storage and it's *much* more portable.
Don't these different formats exist because of different approaches to the recognition, or could they simply be unified?
Unification should be one of the goals. Less duplication of effort is always a good thing.
Only you talk like you. There is no archive of speech large enough to encompass every speaker of a language except one that has a record of each and every speaker. And it still doesn't solve the teaching problem. The shotgun approach is problematic in many ways, most of all the size of the database and you'd still wind up teaching the speech platform to find what accent you're using, because if you ask most people, they don't have any accents at all.
Actually, I think the solution would be to make personal datasets portable, to standards, so when you go from one device to another, all you need to do is plug in your own dataset (or access it from the network) et voila, instant voice recognition wherever you go by systems designed to use that dataset standard. Sort of like an ODF for speech datasets. This way it's distributed, you don't have a humongously unwieldy database to manage, and it's personalized.
But that requires standards which don't yet exist, because every speech recognition platform reinvents the wheel every single time.
As if we're ever going to get away from training speech recognition programs when we train listeners every day when we speak. It's just that most people don't look at it as being trained, since we're so used to doing it.
I'm sure you have more trouble understanding someone with a thick Cockney or Scottish accent if you're from the Midwest US. You'd ask that person to repeat a few times, wouldn't you?
To expect speech recognition programs to *not* use training is to expect them to exceed human intelligence. Indeed, it's to expect such programs to be psychic.
Ignoring the civil rights issues which have been fully explained above, here are a couple of points not covered, because they are just truly bizarre:
It criminalizes bus drivers, cabbies, limo drivers, etc that do not make a "reasonable" attempt at determining passenger identity. All because it's intended to make it criminal to pick up a bunch of day workers with a truck. The law is so overbroad that if it was enacted in an urban area, it would cause chaos.
It also makes everyone guilty of a double misdemeanor by *also* charging them with Trespassing while being undocumented. This... this is just being spiteful.
The whole "papers please" bit is odious to actual citizens. I can't wait for the first Puerto Rican abused by this law.
It leaves "reasonable suspicion" and "careless disregard" completely undefined.
It makes local law enforcement do ICE's job when they'd rather be solving actual crimes. They would also like to be able to interview witnesses to real crime. But now that's all gone because someone's grandma is going to be deported to Mexico if a witness to a crime approaches police. No illegal immigrant is ever going to report a crime now.
The Sheriff's Departments are already strapped for cash. Now where are we going to put all the *other* illegal immigrants that committed no crime but one of status? Hey, let's build new prisons! Yay!
All of this is unfunded. There is no allocation with this law. Nothing to help with staffing and hiring more bodies to do this work.
Arizonans don't want to pay for the above. Well, guess what, you will. You will pay through the nose.
People have told me that this law is because the Federal Government has not followed through with reimbursing local law enforcement, and that ICE and the DEA and the rest of the feds are not doing their jobs. Well, this law doesn't do anything to solve that problem does it?
If the Feds have been sleeping while on watch, where is John McCain's legislation to fix this? Eh? *crickets.wav*
This law is a load of shit.
Please, keep this out of the rest of the US. Thanks.
No, I'm not wrong. You didn't listen to the radio. He comes across as a complete kook. Maybe the book is different, but that's not what it was like on All Things Considered.
And oh, gee, the other person in the thread who *also listened to the radio program* came to the same conclusion. Funny, that.
Lastly, my attitude? Attitude is not a reason to mod down. Read the rules.
I did hear part of that broadcast! I kept swearing at him! He's the king of "what could possibly go wrong?"
He's a troll. No question about it. We don't know enough to do geo-engineering and anything we do know puts us in the position of "knowing just enough to be a danger to ourselves." It's like understanding Maxwell's Equations and suddenly deciding to troubleshoot a substation.
And one of his points was once we start, we can't possibly stop doing it because the effect will go away. He forgets that John Martin was using his best Dr. Strangelove accent while saying "give me half a tanker of iron and I'll give you an ice age."
Yo, dude, John Martin was ONLY KIDDING!
The fact he got actual airtime on NPR makes me angry.
Slashdot Mirror
>But what exactly was the main point of Usenet?
A store and forward messaging system. The Internet's BBS.
>Today you spend the bandwidth of 100 usenet messages going half way around the world loading the front page of one online news site
Not when those articles consist of rips from BluRay disks encoded as 7-bit ASCII.
>The whole concept of usenet is out of date,
Just because it's misused doesn't mean it's out of date. It was just never meant to carry binary data. This is evident because every binary attachment has to be encoded as 7-bit ASCII. If you don't understand this then I don't know what to say.
>far more practical to have one group on one server and have everybody access that.
What? And what happens when that one server goes down, or the owner can no longer pay for the bandwidth costs because everyone worldwide is contacting that one server? Eh? 'Splain this to me. How many websites do you know of that go back to the beginning of the Web besides CERN?
>I think it'd be almost easier with a screen scraper
You're kidding, right? Every web page owner that relies on ads to keep his machines up and the bills paid is raging at you right now.
>Argument against having standards
LOL U TROLE ME.
--
BMO
I was very snarky in the previous post... second thoughts made me think more.
To follow up further on your post, I found it highly informative, and I agree that people like you and me take pride in our work (I'm a machinist). If I was designing subsea devices, I would take it rather personally if my stuff failed.
But I find the CEO of BP utterly without redemption. He does strike me as one who cuts corners as much as he can. There is a mentality at too many publicly traded companies to focus on the next quarter instead of the next ten years, because shareholders demand profit NOW NOW NOW NOW! DAMMIT! The downplaying of the extent of the disaster, coupled with the overconfidence of the solutions, at least as portrayed to the press, seems like an attempt at slowing the fall of the stock price than anything else.
So yes, I'm cynical about this.
--
BMO
This is late, but...
He asked for a negative effect of nuking the well.
Being cynical, and watching BP utterly mishandle this situation, I gave the most cynical answer I could find that was still true. It was not meant as mere troll, but if you want to take it so personally, all I have to say is:
YHBT.
To quote my brother after owning me more than once in Scrabble: "gloat gloat gloat gloat gloat."
--
BMO - basking in the light of my excellent karma.
This is why AT&T and Verizon dropped Usenet at the very mention of child pornography by Eliot Spitzer. Eliot was grandstanding and everyone new it. It was the best excuse to drop the expense of Usenet altogether. They could have simply dropped the binaries. Now everyone is following suit. Comcast, and Cox have, and are (Cox in June) dropping Usenet. I predict that within 2 years, ISPs carrying Usenet will be ancient history.
It is the small number of users involved in copyright infringement that use up the largest amount of bandwidth by at least several orders of magnitude. Disk space, electricity, hardware, maintenance, and bandwidth are not free. Binaries are big bandwidth, and the ISPs do not charge any different whether you participate in text only or you have a peg leg, hoop earring, greatcoat, tri-corner hat, and a parrot on your shoulder. Giganews, on the other hand, charges between $3 and $30 a month depending on usage, which is why they're not exactly complaining about load. And even $3/month for text-only more than makes up for Giganews' costs - there are many nntp servers out there that offer text-only for free.
So I blame the pirates. Your abuse of a medium not suited for large binary files has led to providers determining that it's not worth the bother. For them, I have only two words: Fuck you.
--
BMO
Assuming it worked at stopping the continuing spill, what would be the negative effects?
British Petroleum would lose the well permanently and have to drill a new one.
--
BMO
I find being polite and pleasant do deal with lets me fly right through customs and immigration wherever I go.
Being a prick, however, will get you only problems even with Canadian customs and immigration. They may seem polite, but they can spot a lying asshole a mile away and then you're hosed.
--
BMO
Article choice seems to be lackluster these past few years. We got a link to a nutjob calculating the end of the world with regards to the gulf oil disaster instead of like... well.. a link to NPR.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525
However, I do cruise on by here every so often in the vain hope of a good story. The firehose method of "voting for stories" sucks.
ObT: Yeah, Apple is a walled garden, so what? Some people can't handle anything else and to decry walled gardens as evil are entirely missing the point. It's better to live in a walled garden when you're entirely incapable of defending yourself from the barbarians at the gates.
--
BMO
"Your obscure Pokemon obsession is no more valid than my XKCD fetish" - Anonymous
--
BMO
One of the judgments was on unfair competition.
Really?
REALLY? /me holds up a mirror to the Board of Directors of the RIAA
I need a new irony meter. Mine just exploded.
--
BMO
P.S. I will honor the RIAA as a legal entity when The Romantics see a dime for "What I Like About You"
And, since no written or verbal agreement was ever made to transfer copyright over to my employer, I question whether they can claim that they now own the extended version of the project.
In the US, transfer of copyright must be in writing. They do not own what you created on your own unless you sign something. A contract upon hire would have taken care of this. If you signed no such contract, they own bupkis.
Let me reiterate:
The default with regards to copyright law is that the author has copyright and it *must* require a *written instrument* to sign over copyright. The law is _very_ clear on this issue.
This is what SCO tried to get around with the Asset Purchase Agreement. Since there was nothing saying they bought Novell's copyright to SysV Unix, they don't own it. They lost twice, once in front of a judge as a summary judgment, and later in front of a jury.
Don't be bullied.
Don't put up with this shit.
--
BMO
Two words:
Display Postscript.
That's what you just described. The only thing is that Display Postscript always had an onerous licensing scheme so it got dropped as a technology by nearly everyone. Adobe could revive it tomorrow if they wanted and XPS would be a smoking crater. The only question is if they're smart enough to do it.
--
BMO
though I don't like having to type my password in for system updates or to use sudo
This is no different than using Windows from a limited user account, which you should already be using. If you are not, you are being silly. Updates are an administrative task and thus belong to administrator, not Joe or Jane in Sales.
su - requires root's password
sudo - doesn't require root's password - no password sharing. It also allows you to unset root's password so users can't login as root directly, and cough "guests" to the system must guess which user (you should not be using fingerd) has sudoer rights in order to access root privileges.
--
BMO
Bloody Vikings.
Go away.
--
BMO
Lighten up. Have a beer. Debauch women.
--
BMO
Not only farmers say domesticated turkeys are dumb, but the neighbors (like me) of people who raise turkeys have found they are dumb as shit.
For instance, a turkey will sit on the double-yellow-line on a suburban highway until someone goes out there and gives it a kick. And a nudge isn't enough. They are stupid, stupid birds. They have not been bred for smarts at all. Indeed, it's probably best for Farmer Bob to breed a turkey which will walk itself up to the chopping block, or failing that, at least won't struggle when it's time.
I have seen their cousins (because I was really quiet and just stood there) and wild turkeys are amazing and beautiful creatures.
--
BMO
Parallel processing *is* the way to go if we ever desire to solve the problem of AI.
Human brains have a low clock speed, and each processor (neuron) is quite small, but there are a lot of them working at once.
Just because he might be biased doesn't mean he's wrong.
--
BMO
Works for humans. I don't need to recite some Shakespeare (or in my case, something from Eça de Queiroz) excerpt before people can understand me. It's not perfect, but it works fine.
If William Shakespeare came up to you, you'd have trouble communicating with him until you learned his lexicon and his pronunciation. Conversely, the reason why you are so easily able to communicate with your peers is because you have a similar accent and shared lexicon.
A computer speech recognition program is not a person living in society constantly immersed in the language. Language changes, especially English. Consider the words that have entered the vocabulary in the last 30 years. The database lag would be horrendous when trying to get every single pronunciation of colloquialisms. A database such as yours also doesn't adapt with the way you speak and pronounce words as you go through life. The way you spoke as a child was not the same way you spoke as a teenager or adult or as an elder. A centralized database is hindered in its ability to learn.
A personal dataset that goes with you solves all that.
If I sell a speech recognition device, in your scenario, I would also have to distribute the gigantic "universal" dataset you propose. This requires much more computing power than one that merely uses your own personal dataset. This is because I simply don't know just who is buying my device. I should not have to care who buys the device. If I don't want to ship a huge database with the device I _could_ require it to be persistently connected to the 'Net, but there are times when that's either not feasible or desired. If I sell a speech recognition device that uses the owner's own dataset, we wind up with a more accurate device while also scaling down the need for so much storage and it's *much* more portable.
Don't these different formats exist because of different approaches to the recognition, or could they simply be unified?
Unification should be one of the goals. Less duplication of effort is always a good thing.
--
BMO
Only you talk like you. There is no archive of speech large enough to encompass every speaker of a language except one that has a record of each and every speaker. And it still doesn't solve the teaching problem. The shotgun approach is problematic in many ways, most of all the size of the database and you'd still wind up teaching the speech platform to find what accent you're using, because if you ask most people, they don't have any accents at all.
Actually, I think the solution would be to make personal datasets portable, to standards, so when you go from one device to another, all you need to do is plug in your own dataset (or access it from the network) et voila, instant voice recognition wherever you go by systems designed to use that dataset standard. Sort of like an ODF for speech datasets. This way it's distributed, you don't have a humongously unwieldy database to manage, and it's personalized.
But that requires standards which don't yet exist, because every speech recognition platform reinvents the wheel every single time.
--
BMO
People want "human quality" speech recognition.
As if we're ever going to get away from training speech recognition programs when we train listeners every day when we speak. It's just that most people don't look at it as being trained, since we're so used to doing it.
I'm sure you have more trouble understanding someone with a thick Cockney or Scottish accent if you're from the Midwest US. You'd ask that person to repeat a few times, wouldn't you?
To expect speech recognition programs to *not* use training is to expect them to exceed human intelligence. Indeed, it's to expect such programs to be psychic.
--
BMO
Even humans mishear speech.
"'Scuse me while I kiss this guy"
That misheard lyric is so common that there's a book about misheard lyrics with that as the title.
--
BMO
>Australian Christian Lobby
You mean the Australian Taliban.
We have the same here. They call themselves Southern Baptist and Dominionists.
--
BMO
I read this law last Friday.
It is astonishing in its scope of stupidity.
Ignoring the civil rights issues which have been fully explained above, here are a couple of points not covered, because they are just truly bizarre:
It criminalizes bus drivers, cabbies, limo drivers, etc that do not make a "reasonable" attempt at determining passenger identity. All because it's intended to make it criminal to pick up a bunch of day workers with a truck. The law is so overbroad that if it was enacted in an urban area, it would cause chaos.
It also makes everyone guilty of a double misdemeanor by *also* charging them with Trespassing while being undocumented. This... this is just being spiteful.
The whole "papers please" bit is odious to actual citizens. I can't wait for the first Puerto Rican abused by this law.
It leaves "reasonable suspicion" and "careless disregard" completely undefined.
It makes local law enforcement do ICE's job when they'd rather be solving actual crimes. They would also like to be able to interview witnesses to real crime. But now that's all gone because someone's grandma is going to be deported to Mexico if a witness to a crime approaches police. No illegal immigrant is ever going to report a crime now.
The Sheriff's Departments are already strapped for cash. Now where are we going to put all the *other* illegal immigrants that committed no crime but one of status? Hey, let's build new prisons! Yay!
All of this is unfunded. There is no allocation with this law. Nothing to help with staffing and hiring more bodies to do this work.
Arizonans don't want to pay for the above. Well, guess what, you will. You will pay through the nose.
People have told me that this law is because the Federal Government has not followed through with reimbursing local law enforcement, and that ICE and the DEA and the rest of the feds are not doing their jobs. Well, this law doesn't do anything to solve that problem does it?
If the Feds have been sleeping while on watch, where is John McCain's legislation to fix this? Eh? *crickets.wav*
This law is a load of shit.
Please, keep this out of the rest of the US. Thanks.
--
BMO
No, I'm not wrong. You didn't listen to the radio. He comes across as a complete kook. Maybe the book is different, but that's not what it was like on All Things Considered.
And oh, gee, the other person in the thread who *also listened to the radio program* came to the same conclusion. Funny, that.
Lastly, my attitude? Attitude is not a reason to mod down. Read the rules.
--
BMO
Note to mods:
Read the rules on moderating. Thanks.
You can mod this one down too if you want to waste your mod points. Go ahead.
--
BMO
>His thing is geo-engineering though
OH YEAH NOW I REMEMBER. *smacks forehead*
I did hear part of that broadcast! I kept swearing at him! He's the king of "what could possibly go wrong?"
He's a troll. No question about it. We don't know enough to do geo-engineering and anything we do know puts us in the position of "knowing just enough to be a danger to ourselves." It's like understanding Maxwell's Equations and suddenly deciding to troubleshoot a substation.
And one of his points was once we start, we can't possibly stop doing it because the effect will go away. He forgets that John Martin was using his best Dr. Strangelove accent while saying "give me half a tanker of iron and I'll give you an ice age."
Yo, dude, John Martin was ONLY KIDDING!
The fact he got actual airtime on NPR makes me angry.
--
BMO