Everytime I see this type of argument I am reminded of what a load of crap it is. Note that I do indeed hate the RIAA and am not defending them but, seriously, why would they sue you? If you are downloading songs off the net then yes, they might sue you. This is the point where you'll claim that you weren't downloading songs that you did not own the CDs for. To which I'd have to say that is bullshit, why are you going through the hassle of downloading them when you can get a much better rip using your own disks with cdparanoia?
Vaguely related to this discussion is Eugene Volokh's blog today:
"Citizens were shackled in their actions by the universal passion for banning things"
-- Judge Kozinski
If you ask for explicit regulation, you might get it. The question is, do you know if the odds are in your favor? Would you rather have a rational and reasonable judge decide? Or would you rather have a politician decide?
I assme you meant "after all a space is a character.", except in languages like Japanese which doesn't use spaces. It's quite the bitch, you have to find things like the longest common subsequence, and even then you can't distinguish words from phrases. Although in this case it may give better results.
Personally I would love to have system for translating science papers, there are a lot of papers on wavelets written in french. Extremely well defined corpus, very little abstract phrases, no poetryesque language. There are even many papers that have already been translated (quite well) to english by their own authors.
To expound on the AC and Koos Baster's comments, try asking people to define ordinary words. You'll find quite often that the more basic the word, the more difficult it becomes. The definition of all words is circular since the definition of any word is given by other words, e.g., recursive: see recursive. Somewhere there needs to be a list of words with pictures, or math, or other way of defining each word without using any previously undefined words.
In this case the company did not send a lawyer to fight the court case, in fact they sent absolutely no one. Thus the question of whether or not sending a lawyer to fight a court case is cheap or expensive is irrelevant. And the article does not say that a lawyer called to do negotiations. The company sent a form letter with the amount requested, $199, filled in and a probably very standard gag-clause. Nothing earth shattering there. Something a lawyer's assistant would probably do. The person who did call probably asked him if he would accept the offer they mailed, he said no, end of conversation.
So the point is, you made an obvious mistake. Everyone can see it. The only mystery is why you insist on turning this into a circus with your denials and claims of not understanding what I said.
Sending a lawyer to fight a court case you know you are going to lose isn't cheap.
Why did you even bother? Are you trying to say that that is not what you said?
It's a good thing that/. isn't one of those boards where one can go and edit their posts.
4000 linux geeks dragging company representatives into small claims court equates to actual policy changes...
Sigh, did you get bored and stop reading the article half-way through too? He specifically stated that the company never showed up. You see, in small claims court not showing up doesn't cost you anything if you know you're going to lose.
I was just thinking that you could make a website that would auto-generate your form letter for you. You could just either hit the button that has the generic response from the company, or have a field to enter their response. The website would then produce a pdf/ps file for you to print out and tell you what to do at each step. If enough people do this we could optimize the whole process, the small claims judges would also get used to seeing the same exact case come up, making subsequent cases much easier.
"The computer uses this information to tune the parameters of a statistical model of the translation process. During the translation of new text, the system tries to find the English sentence that is the most likely translation of the foreign input sentence, based on these statistical models."
Sorry, your speculations are indeed wrong. How can I be so sure? The better UPS's can tell you how much juice you're sucking and it is often less than a 100 Watts for the whole box at a light load.
Not trying to be anal, but nearly all lasers used nowadays are LEDs. They do however cost about $50 bucks a pop as a separate component, or used to at least.
That could be BSD or older code. The only thing possibly apparent is that there is some similar code. There is nothing apparent about the origins of the code.
Well, have you ever actually complained to those people? If not then expect nothing to change. They probably one day switched over from latex to msword and no one said anything so they probably figured that everyone must like it.
By taking the same content, and changing the package name ("style sheet" for those whose world ends at the edge of the web browser), I get a journal article instead of a book. Or a set of overhead slides instead of a book. Or instead of a book.
Okay, this is mostly true but I wish there was a command for the multline environment to tell latex to only break the equation onto separate lines if it is too wide for the page width. When I changed my work to the thesis style sheet many of my equations were suddenly too long. Now that I've fixed them, if I use that same content in other papers then the equations suddenly have unnecessary line breaks.
Exactly why is this frustrating? Seriously, I've looked at a html version of my thesis and it sucks bigtime. Or are you talking short stupid pdfs that have no real purpose being a pdf in the first place?
If your colleagues are all familiar with LaTeX and CVS, then use MS Word...
Where is the "logic nazi" when you need him?
Actually I've found it best to do my tech docs (with equations) in Latex and distribute pdfs in the real world. You wouldn't believe the fscking numbnuts who inadvertently fork up a word file and then forward it on. Makes you look like a moron.
Yeah you're not wrong. PDFs do support things like adding post-it notes to the pages. I really wish xpdf or something would get support for that. The only catch is I'm not sure if its part of the PDF standard or a proprietary Adobe embrace and extend of their own standard.
Even something dead simple like saving a separate text file with the page number and coordinates of the text note would nearly solve the problem for xpdf users.
You disagree with what exactly? It is widely acknowledged that equations in Word suck. Show me ten pdfs and I can tell you exactly without hesitation which are word versions.
The phrase you are looking for is "opportunity cost". In short, that means if BG gave a $100mill away, his personal sacrifice was zero. He did not have to forgo that shiny new car, or live off of ramen for a week. He didn't have to postpone his trip to Hawaii to save up some cash. Yes, a $100 mill is a lot of cash to me, you, that idiot you replied to, but the personal sacrifice made by BG is still zero.
The real problem is not the 80bit fp itself, but its lack of reproducibility. The problem arises whenever there is enough register pressure to push the floats in registers on the stack or other memory, at which point they get rounded to 64 bits (double). This register pressure is pretty random, it can even change between compiles. Also whenever your process is switched out, the registers get saved in memory. That's why there exists a flag for gcc that says follow strict IEEE floating-point arithmetic, which rounds the 80bit fp values after every computation.
Maybe, maybe not. The problem is that most video compression schemes depend on the DCT. Thus the artifacts and such are similar, in other words those different formats are somewhat correlated. If the correlation between the artifacts is stronger than the signal then all you will be doing is amplifying the artifacts.
Think of a badly compressed video with lots of blocky shapes, combine several like that and you'll probably end up with something resembling a brick wall.
I've thought that a better method would be to figure out what the best undo-filtering process would be for the oh so common DCT blocking artifacts. It's like having an audio signal that is contaminated with a 60 Hz hum, you just filter it out.
Hold on here. Think about this... The disk itself is part of the focusing mechanism. The final lens in the player is more of a collimating lens. The player projects a beam (not a pure euclidean line, but a column) of light. When the light hits the plastic, it starts narrowing the beam. Don't take my word for it. Check this out (about halfway down, the bit about playback), or grab a copy of the Red Book. It's well known that the disk is part of the focusing mechanism. It's part of what makes CD's such a reliable mechanism.
If you look at this figure it clearly shows that the shape of the laser is not a column of light as it strikes the surface of the CD. It even lists the angle off of perpendicular as 27 degrees. Hardly negligible.
Since the laser is already focused (converging), it will form a focal point whether or not there is a CD in front of it. You can even use the supplied numbers to find that the focal point is (if my geometry is correct) approximately 785 um from the horizontal line given.
In fact if the plastic had an index of refraction identical to that of air, it could still be made to work by simply making the substrate thiner, 785 um instead of the approximately 1.2 mm.
To put it another way, you could use the angle of 27 degrees and the index of refraction given as 1.55 to prove that the substrate thickness must be 1.2mm.
Oh, and I no longer work there, but give me an address and I'll see if I can get some of my friends that still work there to get me a couple of pictures and I'll send them to you.
Post a link in your journal when you get some, I'm sure everyone would love to see them.
Slashdot Mirror
Vaguely related to this discussion is Eugene Volokh's blog today:
If you ask for explicit regulation, you might get it. The question is, do you know if the odds are in your favor? Would you rather have a rational and reasonable judge decide? Or would you rather have a politician decide?Wow that was childish.
Personally I would love to have system for translating science papers, there are a lot of papers on wavelets written in french. Extremely well defined corpus, very little abstract phrases, no poetryesque language. There are even many papers that have already been translated (quite well) to english by their own authors.
To expound on the AC and Koos Baster's comments, try asking people to define ordinary words. You'll find quite often that the more basic the word, the more difficult it becomes. The definition of all words is circular since the definition of any word is given by other words, e.g., recursive: see recursive. Somewhere there needs to be a list of words with pictures, or math, or other way of defining each word without using any previously undefined words.
So the point is, you made an obvious mistake. Everyone can see it. The only mystery is why you insist on turning this into a circus with your denials and claims of not understanding what I said.
Obviously you didn't read the article to the very end. The other side in this case never even showed up, thus there are no extra lawyer fees.
I was just thinking that you could make a website that would auto-generate your form letter for you. You could just either hit the button that has the generic response from the company, or have a field to enter their response. The website would then produce a pdf/ps file for you to print out and tell you what to do at each step. If enough people do this we could optimize the whole process, the small claims judges would also get used to seeing the same exact case come up, making subsequent cases much easier.
Sorry, your speculations are indeed wrong. How can I be so sure? The better UPS's can tell you how much juice you're sucking and it is often less than a 100 Watts for the whole box at a light load.
Not trying to be anal, but nearly all lasers used nowadays are LEDs. They do however cost about $50 bucks a pop as a separate component, or used to at least.
That could be BSD or older code. The only thing possibly apparent is that there is some similar code. There is nothing apparent about the origins of the code.
Well, have you ever actually complained to those people? If not then expect nothing to change. They probably one day switched over from latex to msword and no one said anything so they probably figured that everyone must like it.
Exactly why is this frustrating? Seriously, I've looked at a html version of my thesis and it sucks bigtime. Or are you talking short stupid pdfs that have no real purpose being a pdf in the first place?
Actually I've found it best to do my tech docs (with equations) in Latex and distribute pdfs in the real world. You wouldn't believe the fscking numbnuts who inadvertently fork up a word file and then forward it on. Makes you look like a moron.
Even something dead simple like saving a separate text file with the page number and coordinates of the text note would nearly solve the problem for xpdf users.
You disagree with what exactly? It is widely acknowledged that equations in Word suck. Show me ten pdfs and I can tell you exactly without hesitation which are word versions.
The phrase you are looking for is "opportunity cost". In short, that means if BG gave a $100mill away, his personal sacrifice was zero. He did not have to forgo that shiny new car, or live off of ramen for a week. He didn't have to postpone his trip to Hawaii to save up some cash. Yes, a $100 mill is a lot of cash to me, you, that idiot you replied to, but the personal sacrifice made by BG is still zero.
Yeah, I was thinking that the whale probably ate it, maybe even died from it, and thats the reason it's so hard to ID.
Yeah, before mankind started fscking with the environment these creatures lived forever, never dieing naturally and washing up on shore.
The real problem is not the 80bit fp itself, but its lack of reproducibility. The problem arises whenever there is enough register pressure to push the floats in registers on the stack or other memory, at which point they get rounded to 64 bits (double). This register pressure is pretty random, it can even change between compiles. Also whenever your process is switched out, the registers get saved in memory. That's why there exists a flag for gcc that says follow strict IEEE floating-point arithmetic, which rounds the 80bit fp values after every computation.
Think of a badly compressed video with lots of blocky shapes, combine several like that and you'll probably end up with something resembling a brick wall.
I've thought that a better method would be to figure out what the best undo-filtering process would be for the oh so common DCT blocking artifacts. It's like having an audio signal that is contaminated with a 60 Hz hum, you just filter it out.
To put it another way, you could use the angle of 27 degrees and the index of refraction given as 1.55 to prove that the substrate thickness must be 1.2mm.
Post a link in your journal when you get some, I'm sure everyone would love to see them.