Depends on how narrowly you define murder, but the current Chinese regime has taken decisions that have killed hundreds of thousands. The flooding caused by ill advised dam projects, lack of even basic safety standards in major industries (particularily mining) and the low standard of healthcare despite a vast budget for military expenditure are examples of that.
How does that compare to a country that diverted money away from flood defences to the military, leading to thousands of deaths, and doesn't have a national health service despite having the largest economy and greatest military spending in the world?
Yes, but whatever assets they do have will be taken by the music companies (and being who they are they *will* get them). Since that's all the companies could have got anyway they won't mind.
Hmm, the analysis I read said that at most over the 50 years it would delay the US by 6 months, reaching in December 2050 the level of wealth you would have got in July of that year without Kyoto. Big difference.
They simply used grammar and puncutation as their guide.
In which direction? Surely the computer poet could be easily made to follow grammar rules, or, if that made it seem too artificial, to induce a certain proportion of errors.
If the computer must be indistinguishable from a human intelligence, then it's not about fooling some of the people, it's about fooling all of the people
IIRC the original turing test was not about making it indistinguishable from a human but rather no more distinguishable from a human than a man is from a woman via the same method.
Sure there may be ways of layering scripts in order to give the impression that the computer is changing its code, but the sheer volume, as somebody stated, of the different things we know makes it impractical.
Just give it a basic set of rules about how to write rules and let it go from there. With a modern dynamic language like python or probably plain old TCL it's very much possible. Of course, as you say, the problem is training it, but we take the best part of 2 decades bringing up children, wouldn't you expect the same?
Thanks for the advice. RTF as an intermediary is a great idea.
Just about everything supports RTF, however word's support for it is pretty bad. I suspect (but can't prove) that it deliberately bloats RTF files when saving, to make them look bigger than.doc, and it changes into some funky unusual view when opening them. But it will work in just about anything - not just OOo but abiword, koffice and hancom office will open it on the open source front, don't know about other programs.
I don't recall Microsoft having any problems supporting say, WordPerfect documents, which after all were "very specific to the [WordPerfect] productivity suite."
Were they? WordPerfect seems like the kind of people who would actually go to great lengths to make a good standard, one that could work in any suite. Probably why they're not still around.
Also, KOffice had similar issues - some parts of the spec are very dependent on OOo - so there may be some truth in MS's statement. Not that much, since KOffice still got it more or less working, and once OOo 2.0 is released everyone can look at their code to iron out any unclear parts, but some.
Beginning with version 2.0 OpenOffice.org uses the open standard OASIS OpenDocument XML format as the default file format.
So do pray enlighten me: exactly how is OpenDocument not the OpenOffice.org format?
Because OOo 2.0 is not out yet. "The OpenOffice.org format" is, or at least could be, understood to mean the format the current version uses, which at the moment is.sxw and its friends, which is different from OpenDocument and may have different capabilities.
HTML by itself is not versatile enough or efficient enough to represent complex documents. I don't know what you mean by not efficient enough,.doc is horribly inefficient but represents things well enough, just in huge files. HTML by itself works fine - the web was fine before CSS was introduced. <FONT> is still a far easier way to do fonts than that css merlarky, and embedding with the <EMBED> tag works if anything better than <OBJECT>. I haven't seen CSS do anything that straight html can't.
No, heir to the empire had enough shame not to introduce another ridiculous superweapon. Suncrusher came in Darksaber.
Re:High Resolution Computer Graphics and Broadband
on
Pornified
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think they really were for games. Look how much faster South Korea was in broadband adoption compared to - well, anywhere. Over there gaming is recognised as the honourable sport it is, there are many pro and semi-pro gamers, wheras over here you're just seen as a loser. So South Korea has more gamers, more people who will admit to being gamers, and more parents willing to buy equipment in the form of broadband for their young athletes.
If your reason is the real one, then explain to me why South Korea has a much bigger need for porn than the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, people ignorant of history and science seem to believe that Columbus was the first to make the outrageous claim that the Earth was round. In fact, it was well accepted at that time that the Earth was round; the only uncertainty lay in the precise size.
There wasn't much uncertainty over the size. Almost everyone knew the approximate size, in particular, there was no way Columbus could carry enough food to reach India going west. He was quite rightly seen as an idiot, and just happened to be lucky in smacking into a landmass as he was running out of food with about 2/3 of his voyage still to go.
Real life is, on the whole, boring. Games are there as an escape from it, some would say that's their entire purpose. Now while interest can be gained from an accurate simulation of a real but rare event, e.g. a formula 1 racing sim or a flight simulator, with a completely fantasy game like Zelda the point is to throw out the real world and make one where you can be a hero and save the world, because you're really just another boring person. With that established, the graphics should be those that are most enjoyable when gaming, or more precisely those which enable you to enjoy the game most. Like an impressionist painting, the graphics are not meant to give an "accurate" representation - this is even more true in the game because there can't be an accurate representation when the world being represented doesn't exist. Wanting it to look like the real world is a lack of imagination on gamers' part, nothing more. The only important things about the graphics is that they are aesthetically pleasing and they enable you to play the game.
And to make matters worse, they are extending this functionality to the average luser. Can you imagine an internet flooded with teenaged girls exchanging "he said/she said" stories, grannies exchanging recipes and terrorists making planned meetings without any traceability whatsoever? It's a nightmare. At least there was some security with SpeakFreely since it was so hard to use. But this Skype thing just scares the piss out of me. You technology folks really need to get a grasp on reality.
If this comment retains its positive moderation I'm leaving slashdot.
This is far more interoperable. It's SIP, which is, quite simply, the standard. Skype avoided it because it has problems with nat/firewalls, and that may be why google avoids it (I haven't been looking at their client), but this client will interoperate with anything else.
First, why would you want multimedia in a public document? What is the added value of multimedia in deeds, law texts, minutes of government meetings?
A picture's worth a thousand words and all that. A video of something under discussion might help people to understand it enormously. But that's beside the point, argue that it's unimportant all you like but MS overemphasising the importance of multimedia is completely different from saying that openness is bad.
The ultimate implication of their argument is disenfranchisement though.
Their ultimate implication is that disenfranchisement is better than not being able to have multimedia in documents, not that they're in favour of disenfranchisement.
Now go shill somewhere else.
I'm not shilling, I don't to the best of my knowledge use any microsoft products and certainly don't get paid by them. But when the OP is basically lying, and getting modded insightful for it, I have to respond.
MySQL still seems to get an unreasonable amount of attention. Like firefox or OOo, it's not that much better than the alternatives but has become something of a mascot of the open source movement (or rather the dual-licensing variant therof). However, it has caught up a lot in terms of functionality, just as PG has in speed, and generally the two have grown much closer together as their respective shortcomings are sorted. There is far less to choose between them than there once was.
I've found gnunet better for actual use. Freenet people spend a lot of time "advertising", talking about freedom, but the actual network is useless. Gnunet is an anonymous, encrypted network that already supports pure F2F use, multiple transport protocols (not just TCP (with NAT support, of course) and UDP but also tunneling over HTTP and even SMTP), also a graphical client (which has just been rewritten to use glade and improve usability) rather than the goofy "access it through your web browser" method of freenet. Naturally there's also a command line client for scripting. Other nice features are digitally signed namespaces, so you can get your files from a reliable source, directories allowing you to group a set of related files, content migration while still allowing sharing local files in the traditional manner, rich metadata, and a reward system for those who upload. I've found it far superior to freenet as a usable filesharing network. Give it a look.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe look at a more impartial news site than googledot before doing that? Google's record is hardly any better.
Might be forbidden by Godwin, but the Nazis were an authoritarian government that never turned into communism.
How does that compare to a country that diverted money away from flood defences to the military, leading to thousands of deaths, and doesn't have a national health service despite having the largest economy and greatest military spending in the world?
Yes, but whatever assets they do have will be taken by the music companies (and being who they are they *will* get them). Since that's all the companies could have got anyway they won't mind.
Hmm, the analysis I read said that at most over the 50 years it would delay the US by 6 months, reaching in December 2050 the level of wealth you would have got in July of that year without Kyoto. Big difference.
In which direction? Surely the computer poet could be easily made to follow grammar rules, or, if that made it seem too artificial, to induce a certain proportion of errors.
IIRC the original turing test was not about making it indistinguishable from a human but rather no more distinguishable from a human than a man is from a woman via the same method.
Just give it a basic set of rules about how to write rules and let it go from there. With a modern dynamic language like python or probably plain old TCL it's very much possible. Of course, as you say, the problem is training it, but we take the best part of 2 decades bringing up children, wouldn't you expect the same?
Is it because of your mother that you can't distinguish the dialog of a typical IM user from a brain-dead conversation bot?
Just about everything supports RTF, however word's support for it is pretty bad. I suspect (but can't prove) that it deliberately bloats RTF files when saving, to make them look bigger than .doc, and it changes into some funky unusual view when opening them. But it will work in just about anything - not just OOo but abiword, koffice and hancom office will open it on the open source front, don't know about other programs.
Were they? WordPerfect seems like the kind of people who would actually go to great lengths to make a good standard, one that could work in any suite. Probably why they're not still around.
Also, KOffice had similar issues - some parts of the spec are very dependent on OOo - so there may be some truth in MS's statement. Not that much, since KOffice still got it more or less working, and once OOo 2.0 is released everyone can look at their code to iron out any unclear parts, but some.
So do pray enlighten me: exactly how is OpenDocument not the OpenOffice.org format?
Because OOo 2.0 is not out yet. "The OpenOffice.org format" is, or at least could be, understood to mean the format the current version uses, which at the moment is .sxw and its friends, which is different from OpenDocument and may have different capabilities.
HTML by itself is not versatile enough or efficient enough to represent complex documents. .doc is horribly inefficient but represents things well enough, just in huge files. HTML by itself works fine - the web was fine before CSS was introduced. <FONT> is still a far easier way to do fonts than that css merlarky, and embedding with the <EMBED> tag works if anything better than <OBJECT>. I haven't seen CSS do anything that straight html can't.
I don't know what you mean by not efficient enough,
No, heir to the empire had enough shame not to introduce another ridiculous superweapon. Suncrusher came in Darksaber.
If your reason is the real one, then explain to me why South Korea has a much bigger need for porn than the rest of the world.
There wasn't much uncertainty over the size. Almost everyone knew the approximate size, in particular, there was no way Columbus could carry enough food to reach India going west. He was quite rightly seen as an idiot, and just happened to be lucky in smacking into a landmass as he was running out of food with about 2/3 of his voyage still to go.
Real life is, on the whole, boring. Games are there as an escape from it, some would say that's their entire purpose. Now while interest can be gained from an accurate simulation of a real but rare event, e.g. a formula 1 racing sim or a flight simulator, with a completely fantasy game like Zelda the point is to throw out the real world and make one where you can be a hero and save the world, because you're really just another boring person. With that established, the graphics should be those that are most enjoyable when gaming, or more precisely those which enable you to enjoy the game most. Like an impressionist painting, the graphics are not meant to give an "accurate" representation - this is even more true in the game because there can't be an accurate representation when the world being represented doesn't exist. Wanting it to look like the real world is a lack of imagination on gamers' part, nothing more. The only important things about the graphics is that they are aesthetically pleasing and they enable you to play the game.
If this comment retains its positive moderation I'm leaving slashdot.
This is far more interoperable. It's SIP, which is, quite simply, the standard. Skype avoided it because it has problems with nat/firewalls, and that may be why google avoids it (I haven't been looking at their client), but this client will interoperate with anything else.
Quite possibly, but that's certainly not their official position
A picture's worth a thousand words and all that. A video of something under discussion might help people to understand it enormously. But that's beside the point, argue that it's unimportant all you like but MS overemphasising the importance of multimedia is completely different from saying that openness is bad.
The ultimate implication of their argument is disenfranchisement though.
Their ultimate implication is that disenfranchisement is better than not being able to have multimedia in documents, not that they're in favour of disenfranchisement.
Now go shill somewhere else.
I'm not shilling, I don't to the best of my knowledge use any microsoft products and certainly don't get paid by them. But when the OP is basically lying, and getting modded insightful for it, I have to respond.
MySQL still seems to get an unreasonable amount of attention. Like firefox or OOo, it's not that much better than the alternatives but has become something of a mascot of the open source movement (or rather the dual-licensing variant therof). However, it has caught up a lot in terms of functionality, just as PG has in speed, and generally the two have grown much closer together as their respective shortcomings are sorted. There is far less to choose between them than there once was.
In most countries, yes, but apparently it is illegal in Australia.
I've found gnunet better for actual use. Freenet people spend a lot of time "advertising", talking about freedom, but the actual network is useless. Gnunet is an anonymous, encrypted network that already supports pure F2F use, multiple transport protocols (not just TCP (with NAT support, of course) and UDP but also tunneling over HTTP and even SMTP), also a graphical client (which has just been rewritten to use glade and improve usability) rather than the goofy "access it through your web browser" method of freenet. Naturally there's also a command line client for scripting. Other nice features are digitally signed namespaces, so you can get your files from a reliable source, directories allowing you to group a set of related files, content migration while still allowing sharing local files in the traditional manner, rich metadata, and a reward system for those who upload. I've found it far superior to freenet as a usable filesharing network. Give it a look.
The new opendoc format that's under discussion is different from the format OOo has been using.