What he meant is that these "predictors" seem to have a preference for events that have a mediatic impact on the West.
Did they "foresee" the earthquakes in Turkey, or in Bam (Iran), which killed many more people than the 09/11 attacks ? Also it seems that they were unable to predict the death of Diana, but for some reason "reacted" when her funerals were shown on TV. Hm. When the definition for "important event" is loose enough, any random number generator can be said predict "significant events" of some kind.
We're right into "Bible code" land.
Besides, the Red Nova article is simply ridiculous. The fact that some people have a spike in neural activity or stress a few seconds before being presented with items by the experimenter is presented as evidence of "seeing into the future" !
On the other hand, maybe these "eggs" are so efficient that they actually brought us an April's fool in February ?...
to help you with your spelling. It is explicit or implicit
>To help with your general knowledge in Indo-European linguistics, the -e ending is (among others) an adverbial flexion in Latin. In other words, it is an equivalent of the English -ly. Explicite is the Latin for "Explicitly".
It's ugly and non-orthoganal. Look at the Arrays class for example; there are dozens of duplicated methods that are identical except that they take bytes, chars, shorts, ints, etc. as arguments. I'd much rather have everything be a true object
Than you'd be using the ArrayList class, which can store any object (including Integer, Float, etc), and has the same capacities.
ArrayList is the standard, basic Java collection class. The Arrays class is a utility class, as can be seen from the fact that all methods are static. It can be seen as a set of utilities for independent arrays of primitive types, but there's no need to use any such array. It's just there to help if you absolutely want to.
Dear sir, after our recent discussion I am writing to you to tell you that you are a complete moron wait no that's not what I meant wait stop it suptid machine stop it now sob why am I not a train driver mommy mommy sob
Terragen is awesome software, and amazingly the developers have kept the cost reasonable
What ?!?!? C-c-c-c-cost ?!?!? You mean these evil greedy soul-sucking bastards actually charge money for using their program ? Shame on them ! Do they not know that the Prophets have said : "Thou shalt not write or use proprietary software, for it is unclean unto you" ? The wrath of the almighty Root be upon them ! They shall be cursed with all their descendents to the seventh generation !
And you, despicable sinner, who praised these sons of Satan, we thereby excommunicate you from the fellowship of our Holy Church. Don't bother coming again. You'll be shot on sight.
(Now let us sing the praise of the Holy Penguin: "Penguinus Deiiii, qui tollit errata codiiii...")
The interesting point here is that almost all the cases you mention can be summarised, not as US vs EU, but as US vs France.
- the great banana and steel trade war: France is probably the only banana producer in Europe (overseas territories), plus there was the question of specific import agreements with former French colonies (Lome agreements). As for steel, the steel giant of Europe, Arcelor, is mostly based on French production sites (my dad works in one of them).
- Freedom Fries vs french fries: self-explaining:)
- the EU vs Microsoft: this may be the exception. This was pretty much a Brussels-centric affair, with little to no coverage in national medias.
- Germany and France vs the US over Iraq : people often forget that it was Schroder who first opposed any war in Iraq. However Germany has never had much weight in international politics. France has much more clout, so the world hears them more. However in this situation it's not so much US vs EU, as US + UK + Poland against the rest of the whole damn world.
- the Euro vs the Dollar: ok, this is also a real EU issue, the European Central Bank has total control over monetary affairs now.
- snooty French people vs loutish American tourists: well we're still quite happy to take their money:)
- the new european GPS equivalent Galileo vs GPS: Like almost all matters related to space, it was initiated by the French. The French initiated, designed, funded and built most of the Ariane project as well. The toughest part was in convincing the Brits, who were quite happy with buying US-made rockets.
- everyone on Earth lead by the EU vs the US over Kyoto: see war in Iraq. You really have a problem with your administration, but you knew that already.
- the european vs US approach to Israel and the Middle East: It's quite ironic that, pre-1967, France was Israel's best friend in the West ! The French helped Israel start their nuclear programme. At that time, the US were quite wary of Israel, because they had ties with the USSR and showed sympathy with socialist ideals (kibbutz anyone ?), which was enough to draw both defiance from the US and sympathy from De Gaulle's France.
That was before 1967, when Israel invaded what is now known as the Palestinian territories, and "the little country that could" was suddenly seen as a nation of religious fanatics who invaded other people's lands because their god told them to - not exactly the best way to make yourself popular in arch-secular France.
- increasing secularism (EU, see for example banning of headscarves) vs increasing evangelicalism (US/Jesusland): the only country that banned headscarves in school, AFAIK, is France. They did take some flak from some other EU countries - in particular, from Britain.
It is the *programmer's* job to make the system usable by the user, *not* the user's! I shouldn't have to touch a text editor. If I have to configure anything, which I shouldn't, there should be a graphical tool for it, and it should allow me to configure *all* of the available options, not just the common ones.
This is 100% true. However, this is not so much the job of the Linux programmer, as the job of the distribution maintainer !
Linux is not an OS. I it a kernel, with plenty of software written for it by plenty of different people. The fragmented nature of the OSS world is both a strength (many eyeballs theory) and a weakness (no homogeneity).
Turning all thiss mass of software into one coherent, "Just-Working" environment (i.e. into an OS) is precisely the task of a distro. Linux is not an OS: Mandrake, RedHat, Suse are. An OS is a consistent ensemble in which things work predictably, in you can actually rely on copy/paste to work, etc. MacOS X is the reference for this.
And the only thing we can say is that, as far as the desktop is concerned, Linux-based OS are simply sub-par.
There is big money in sight for the first distro who will come up with a product that simply reaches the degree of integration and ease of use of Windows 2000. If they also manage to make an office application equivalent to Office 97, they will own the professional desktop. Windows XP did bring some important enhancements, but most of them are related to multimedia capacities. For most office work, people don't need WinXP, and they certainly don't need the monstously powerful machines needed to run it. Office97 is snappy as can be on a Pentium II-500 with 256 megs of RAM. Give PHBs a cheap, powerful OS, possibly with subscription-based support, which can run on cheap, deprecated machines. Can you see the gold glitter yet ?
Pyramid schemes always do, for those that make it to the top of the pyramid
This particular type of pyramid scheme is less evil than others, because no one really loses much. The monetary input is not provided by the lower scales of the pyramid (the "suckers"), but by companies which essentially pay for verified, targeted advertising. These guys have done the maths and concluded that this was a cost-effective marketing technique.
Of course you still have the basic problem of pyramid schemes, namely the necessity of exponential growth. A fundamental law of nature is that exponentials don't last very long. So while early participants did get their iPods, latecomers probably won't. But their loss will be a loss of time, not money. So it's not quite as evil as the pyramid scheme that ravaged Albania a few years ago.
the Spain governement has been overthrown during the last elections
Actually the incumbent party had a comfortable lead in the polls just before the election. Then they had tha Madrid bombings. What do you think they did ? They freaked out and immediately tried to blame it on the ETA (basque terrorists), without even a shred of evidence.
As it emerged that the bombs had been planted by Al Qaeda, the Spaniards got pretty pissed with their government and voted them out of office.
Compare with the US, where a government which actually lied not only to his own people but to the whole damn world has been easily re-elected.
most think that the UK government will pay in the near future too.
If elections took place today, Labour would win hands down. You underestimate Tony Blair's strategical masterpiece: the total occupation of the political center by the Labour party, which forced opposition either to the left of the left (LibDems) or to a growingly darker shade of the right. The Conservative party is not credible any more.
By the way, the conservative party supported the war too.
The ACS is going to lose big time in terms of paid subscriptions
Quite obviously you have never used it.
The ACS does not own the word "Scholar"
Neither does Microsoft own the word "Windows". Yet if Novell or Sun started a new unix-based OS called "Novell Windows" or "Sun Windows", I have the vague feeling that they would be fined into bankruptcy by the courts.
The accusation of trade infringement between ACS Scholar and Google Scholar is perfectly reasonable. I don't know what the judge will decide, but my money would be on ACS winning. However, considering Google Scholar is just a beta, it's quite possible that Google will simply use another name for the official product.
OMG, BS detector melting down into the ground here !
it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false
Says who ? (aka "source: my ass")
the word "loss" suggests events of a very different nature--events in which something they have is taken away from them.
Yeah, like the ability to make a living out of your music.
By releasing a work of art (regardless of its quality), some value is potentially created. You think this item has no value ? Then don't get it ! If you do want to get it, then by definition you attribute some value to it. In that case, what makes you think you have a god-granted right to obtain something valuable from someone else without giving anything in return ?
Please don't give me the old argument about evil megacorps blablablah. Hell, when sales go down and music publishers have to cut costs, who do you think gets the shaft first ? Britney, or Joe Musician ?
In other words, the "loss" comes from the copyright system; it is not an inherent part of copying.
!!!!!!
And the "loss" in being killed comes from being alive in the first place. It has nothing to do with the actual perforation of your body by metallic objects.
The middle east would not be a hotspot like it is now for example
Yeah, cos' Israel would not have invaded Palestine, or the Palestinians would not have replied with terrorism. They would all live together in everlasting fusion-powered peace...
You may be right on one point though: if oil dependency had been eliminated half a century ago (when we hardly had reliable fission), the US would have had no incentive in overthrowing Mossadegh, and Iran today would probably be a modern, developed, secular country.
The organisation of number in a meaningful way is the major challenge. It is perfectly possible that this organisation ends up being completely arbitrary (i.e. just adding new meanings sequentially).
If a language lacks a word for a given concept, well the corresponding entry is not referred to in the translation table for this language, that's all.
As for German, Finnish and other agglutinative languages, if your "meaning table" is complete enough, no matter what word, there should be an entry for it. If not, well, it means you have a new concept that never was encountered in any language. So you just create a new entry ! You may also want to modify the translation tables for other languages to accomodate for this new entry (find a description for this meaning to put in the description table, and the closest matching word for the translation table). Voila, you're done.
Clearly the difficulty lies in the clear definition of concepts, sufficiently clear to distinguish between every word of every language. This is extremely difficult. But if it can be done, then certainly a collaborative effort based on the internet is the way to go.
As you already know, your system (even with 2 tables per language) is ridden with problems that would make it virtually useless. Fortunately, there is a solution. It is a hard job, and no one has ever succeeded in doing it right - but you have the advantage of the internet, and this might be a decisive factor.
First, I will mention yet another problem: even if you have two table for each language (English -> OtherLanguage and OtherLanguage -> English), you will not be able to make translations between two non-english languages.
This is even more true because the language you chose as a backbone (English) is a very concise, ambiguous language, and it has many words that may be translated into several different words in other languages. E.g. quite often English has no differentiation for feminine or plural.
Example. Imagine that I want to translate from French to Italian. I take the French word "directrice", which is a *female* director (as opposed to "directeur", which is male). There is no special word for that in English. The dictionary will probably come up with the word "director", which will be translated as two words in italian: one for male director, one for female director.
So a purely female word will give me two results, one of which is obviously wrong because it's male! It's just an example. There are many more. Natural languages *are* ambiguous, that's why computer translation is so hard !
The only solution is that you should not organise your backbone structure by *words*. You should organise it by *meanings*. Your backbone should not be a list of english, french or chinese words, it should be a large list of abstract entries (e.g. numbers), in which every single entry would correspond to a totally unique meaning.
You would also need "description tables", one per language, which would link each of these entries to a small description of this unique meaning in the target language. Finally, you would need translation tables, one per language, which would link every word in the language with all the correct meanings for this word.
For example, in the table, entry 43597 would correspond to "female director", while entry 43552 would correspond to "male director". The 43597th entry in the english description table would read: "A woman who controls, commands or organises something". The english translation table would link the word "director" to both entries 43597 and 43552. But the french translation table would only link the word "directrice" to entry 43597.
In this system (if you get it right), translation is guaranteed to be efficient. No loss of precision, no false positives, and no duplication of information. This system is the correct version of what you want to do. The reason why it wasn't done 20 years ago is because it's *horribly difficult*. Who on earth is clever enough to distinguish precisely between all the things that can be expressed in all the languages of the world ?
But you have a major advantage over all your predecessor: the Internet, and the massive cost-free workforce that it can provide, as the Wikipedia project shows. That could change things a lot. Also, in order to start up the project, you might base your initial backbone on a language which is known to be very precise and have minimal ambguity in its words. Esperanto, Chinese (if you take two-character words) or even better Arabic (if you use the full range of all forms of each root - ask someone who knows Arabic to explain) come to mind. Of course, this would only be a starting point and would need to be refined in order to accomodate for all the possible meanings of the world.
Again, it's gonna be tough, but there's no other way to do it. And this thing could really change the way people communicate. Feel up to the challenge ?:)
the composition of the reviewers was understandably nuclear physicists... many of whom are deeply in hot fusion research. That means they stand to lose a lot by CF's successes.
Uh ? Nuclear fusion is interesting, but the basic mechanisms are known. Right now it's more R&D than fundamental research - frontier of technology more than frontier of science.
OTOH, whoever comes first in actually demonstrating cold fusion will probably set the new record for the quickest Nobel prize ever (remember, Nobel prizes can be awarded to a maximum of 3 persons, and Fleischmann and Pons had the good taste of being only two - leaving one slot open for scientific sainthood)
If any of these scientists had felt that cold fusion was not merely a possibility, but something real that only waited for careful scientific handling, they would have left their current activities at once !
The gist of this report is that, essentially, we're not really sure what happens in "cold fusion" experiments, and we're definitely not certain that it is actually fusion, but the results, although unclear, justify that "cold fusion" be readmitted within the realm of real science. The redemption period that followed the Fleischmann and Pons debacle (as described in "Voodoo Science", which should be mandatory reading for any/.er) is over. Good for everyone.
but whether Kazaa CAN be used for legitimate purposes.
Actually the really important criterion, according both to the original Betamax decision and its later interpretations, is whether it can be reasonably expected that the product would be commercially viable even if it was used only for legitimate purposes.
In the Betamax case the judges saw that the product was mostly used for legitimate purposes, and thus the argument held. In the case of Sharman Networks, playing the Betamax defence is a rather unimaginative form of suicide.
That's a bloody good question. No one really knows what it means to be alive, although we do have a good criterion for death - i.e. thermodynamic equilibrium. Living systems, bacteria, man, or embryo, take matter and energy from their environment and use it to dynamically maintain their own order in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. When dead, they just decompose and entropy wins.
An embryo is biochemically alive, just as a bacteria or any other microorganism: its genes are being expressed, its metabolic pathways run full speed ahead, all the enzymatic machinery is fully functional. But this is not the problem here: bacteria are alive as well, yet most of us don't have ethical problems about killing bacteria. The problem is to know whether they are living human beings and should be regarded as equivalent to babies or children.
Europe solved the problem in a rather pragmatic way: you can have abortion before X weeks of pregnancy, after that, you can't. The time varies between 10 and 22 weeks (22 for Belgium and the UK). Religious beliefs aside (and we all know that the US are the largest theocracy on earth), this is quite a reasonable solution.
Let me be the first to draw your attention to the fact that the parent poster may actually be seen as a technical pun on the term "good point", which may be a reference to "focal point".
I'll grant you that it is not clear whether or not this pun is intentional.
Note that here we're talking about broadband in general, including cable, on which telcos have no influence. If we only talk about DSL, France simply dwarfs the UK in absolute numbers, percentage and growth, as can be seen on this graph. (France and the UK both have about 60 mlns inhabitants, Germany has 82)
The mantra according to which state-owned = bad, private corps = good, is just an ideological stance. It's being shoved in your throat by the same people who believe that Scandinavia is a socialist hellhole (I'm not joking, some people really believe that having high taxes and highly developed public services is ethically wrong, regardless of the effect it has on the lives of people)
Thomas-
Re:As an IT Guru
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It makes me ill that small-minded whiners take such pains to keep them down so they don't have to work as hard
Sure. Because some people are so poor that they would gladly accept miserable wages, it is obvious that, morally and ethically, everyone has to accept miserable wages.
And it is clear that any dissenter must be classified as a "small-minded whiner".
Slashdot Mirror
What he meant is that these "predictors" seem to have a preference for events that have a mediatic impact on the West.
Did they "foresee" the earthquakes in Turkey, or in Bam (Iran), which killed many more people than the 09/11 attacks ? Also it seems that they were unable to predict the death of Diana, but for some reason "reacted" when her funerals were shown on TV. Hm. When the definition for "important event" is loose enough, any random number generator can be said predict "significant events" of some kind.
We're right into "Bible code" land.
Besides, the Red Nova article is simply ridiculous. The fact that some people have a spike in neural activity or stress a few seconds before being presented with items by the experimenter is presented as evidence of "seeing into the future" !
On the other hand, maybe these "eggs" are so efficient that they actually brought us an April's fool in February ?...
Thomas-
to help you with your spelling. It is explicit or implicit
>To help with your general knowledge in Indo-European linguistics, the -e ending is (among others) an adverbial flexion in Latin. In other words, it is an equivalent of the English -ly. Explicite is the Latin for "Explicitly".
Thomas-
It's ugly and non-orthoganal. Look at the Arrays class for example; there are dozens of duplicated methods that are identical except that they take bytes, chars, shorts, ints, etc. as arguments. I'd much rather have everything be a true object
Than you'd be using the ArrayList class, which can store any object (including Integer, Float, etc), and has the same capacities.
ArrayList is the standard, basic Java collection class. The Arrays class is a utility class, as can be seen from the fact that all methods are static. It can be seen as a set of utilities for independent arrays of primitive types, but there's no need to use any such array. It's just there to help if you absolutely want to.
Thomas-
Thought input might be faster still.
Dear sir, after our recent discussion I am writing to you to tell you that you are a complete moron wait no that's not what I meant wait stop it suptid machine stop it now sob why am I not a train driver mommy mommy sob
Thomas-
Terragen is awesome software, and amazingly the developers have kept the cost reasonable
What ?!?!? C-c-c-c-cost ?!?!? You mean these evil greedy soul-sucking bastards actually charge money for using their program ? Shame on them ! Do they not know that the Prophets have said : "Thou shalt not write or use proprietary software, for it is unclean unto you" ? The wrath of the almighty Root be upon them ! They shall be cursed with all their descendents to the seventh generation !
And you, despicable sinner, who praised these sons of Satan, we thereby excommunicate you from the fellowship of our Holy Church. Don't bother coming again. You'll be shot on sight.
(Now let us sing the praise of the Holy Penguin: "Penguinus Deiiii, qui tollit errata codiiii...")
Just write on the side: If you blow one of these up, we'll make bombers out of the others
And as you fly over the deserts of Iraq, expect to see written on the sand in Arabic: "Please do !"
Thomas-
The interesting point here is that almost all the cases you mention can be summarised, not as US vs EU, but as US vs France.
:)
:)
- the great banana and steel trade war: France is probably the only banana producer in Europe (overseas territories), plus there was the question of specific import agreements with former French colonies (Lome agreements). As for steel, the steel giant of Europe, Arcelor, is mostly based on French production sites (my dad works in one of them).
- Freedom Fries vs french fries: self-explaining
- the EU vs Microsoft: this may be the exception. This was pretty much a Brussels-centric affair, with little to no coverage in national medias.
- Germany and France vs the US over Iraq : people often forget that it was Schroder who first opposed any war in Iraq. However Germany has never had much weight in international politics. France has much more clout, so the world hears them more. However in this situation it's not so much US vs EU, as US + UK + Poland against the rest of the whole damn world.
- the Euro vs the Dollar: ok, this is also a real EU issue, the European Central Bank has total control over monetary affairs now.
- snooty French people vs loutish American tourists: well we're still quite happy to take their money
- the new european GPS equivalent Galileo vs GPS: Like almost all matters related to space, it was initiated by the French. The French initiated, designed, funded and built most of the Ariane project as well. The toughest part was in convincing the Brits, who were quite happy with buying US-made rockets.
- everyone on Earth lead by the EU vs the US over Kyoto: see war in Iraq. You really have a problem with your administration, but you knew that already.
- the european vs US approach to Israel and the Middle East: It's quite ironic that, pre-1967, France was Israel's best friend in the West ! The French helped Israel start their nuclear programme. At that time, the US were quite wary of Israel, because they had ties with the USSR and showed sympathy with socialist ideals (kibbutz anyone ?), which was enough to draw both defiance from the US and sympathy from De Gaulle's France.
That was before 1967, when Israel invaded what is now known as the Palestinian territories, and "the little country that could" was suddenly seen as a nation of religious fanatics who invaded other people's lands because their god told them to - not exactly the best way to make yourself popular in arch-secular France.
- increasing secularism (EU, see for example banning of headscarves) vs increasing evangelicalism (US/Jesusland): the only country that banned headscarves in school, AFAIK, is France. They did take some flak from some other EU countries - in particular, from Britain.
Thomas-
It is the *programmer's* job to make the system usable by the user, *not* the user's! I shouldn't have to touch a text editor. If I have to configure anything, which I shouldn't, there should be a graphical tool for it, and it should allow me to configure *all* of the available options, not just the common ones.
This is 100% true. However, this is not so much the job of the Linux programmer, as the job of the distribution maintainer !
Linux is not an OS. I it a kernel, with plenty of software written for it by plenty of different people. The fragmented nature of the OSS world is both a strength (many eyeballs theory) and a weakness (no homogeneity).
Turning all thiss mass of software into one coherent, "Just-Working" environment (i.e. into an OS) is precisely the task of a distro. Linux is not an OS: Mandrake, RedHat, Suse are. An OS is a consistent ensemble in which things work predictably, in you can actually rely on copy/paste to work, etc. MacOS X is the reference for this.
And the only thing we can say is that, as far as the desktop is concerned, Linux-based OS are simply sub-par.
There is big money in sight for the first distro who will come up with a product that simply reaches the degree of integration and ease of use of Windows 2000. If they also manage to make an office application equivalent to Office 97, they will own the professional desktop. Windows XP did bring some important enhancements, but most of them are related to multimedia capacities. For most office work, people don't need WinXP, and they certainly don't need the monstously powerful machines needed to run it. Office97 is snappy as can be on a Pentium II-500 with 256 megs of RAM. Give PHBs a cheap, powerful OS, possibly with subscription-based support, which can run on cheap, deprecated machines. Can you see the gold glitter yet ?
Thomas-
Do you have an URL where one can get your report ?
I've been wondering if evolutionary computation could be applied to fractal image compression for a while...
Thomas-
Pyramid schemes always do, for those that make it to the top of the pyramid
This particular type of pyramid scheme is less evil than others, because no one really loses much. The monetary input is not provided by the lower scales of the pyramid (the "suckers"), but by companies which essentially pay for verified, targeted advertising. These guys have done the maths and concluded that this was a cost-effective marketing technique.
Of course you still have the basic problem of pyramid schemes, namely the necessity of exponential growth. A fundamental law of nature is that exponentials don't last very long. So while early participants did get their iPods, latecomers probably won't. But their loss will be a loss of time, not money. So it's not quite as evil as the pyramid scheme that ravaged Albania a few years ago.
Thomas
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world
How many Libraries of Congress is it?
For you it will be about 0.8 Libraries of Congress, cos the relativistic speeds you'll reach on being booted from here will make it look smaller.
*Prepares deuterium-deuterium fusion tokaboot...*
Thomas-
the Spain governement has been overthrown during the last elections
Actually the incumbent party had a comfortable lead in the polls just before the election. Then they had tha Madrid bombings. What do you think they did ? They freaked out and immediately tried to blame it on the ETA (basque terrorists), without even a shred of evidence.
As it emerged that the bombs had been planted by Al Qaeda, the Spaniards got pretty pissed with their government and voted them out of office.
Compare with the US, where a government which actually lied not only to his own people but to the whole damn world has been easily re-elected.
most think that the UK government will pay in the near future too.
If elections took place today, Labour would win hands down. You underestimate Tony Blair's strategical masterpiece: the total occupation of the political center by the Labour party, which forced opposition either to the left of the left (LibDems) or to a growingly darker shade of the right. The Conservative party is not credible any more.
By the way, the conservative party supported the war too.
Thomas-
The ACS is going to lose big time in terms of paid subscriptions
Quite obviously you have never used it.
The ACS does not own the word "Scholar"
Neither does Microsoft own the word "Windows". Yet if Novell or Sun started a new unix-based OS called "Novell Windows" or "Sun Windows", I have the vague feeling that they would be fined into bankruptcy by the courts.
The accusation of trade infringement between ACS Scholar and Google Scholar is perfectly reasonable. I don't know what the judge will decide, but my money would be on ACS winning. However, considering Google Scholar is just a beta, it's quite possible that Google will simply use another name for the official product.
Thomas-
OMG, BS detector melting down into the ground here !
it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false
Says who ? (aka "source: my ass")
the word "loss" suggests events of a very different nature--events in which something they have is taken away from them.
Yeah, like the ability to make a living out of your music.
By releasing a work of art (regardless of its quality), some value is potentially created. You think this item has no value ? Then don't get it ! If you do want to get it, then by definition you attribute some value to it. In that case, what makes you think you have a god-granted right to obtain something valuable from someone else without giving anything in return ?
Please don't give me the old argument about evil megacorps blablablah. Hell, when sales go down and music publishers have to cut costs, who do you think gets the shaft first ? Britney, or Joe Musician ?
In other words, the "loss" comes from the copyright system; it is not an inherent part of copying.
!!!!!!
And the "loss" in being killed comes from being alive in the first place. It has nothing to do with the actual perforation of your body by metallic objects.
Thomas-
The middle east would not be a hotspot like it is now for example
Yeah, cos' Israel would not have invaded Palestine, or the Palestinians would not have replied with terrorism. They would all live together in everlasting fusion-powered peace...
You may be right on one point though: if oil dependency had been eliminated half a century ago (when we hardly had reliable fission), the US would have had no incentive in overthrowing Mossadegh, and Iran today would probably be a modern, developed, secular country.
Thomas.
The organisation of number in a meaningful way is the major challenge. It is perfectly possible that this organisation ends up being completely arbitrary (i.e. just adding new meanings sequentially).
If a language lacks a word for a given concept, well the corresponding entry is not referred to in the translation table for this language, that's all.
As for German, Finnish and other agglutinative languages, if your "meaning table" is complete enough, no matter what word, there should be an entry for it. If not, well, it means you have a new concept that never was encountered in any language. So you just create a new entry ! You may also want to modify the translation tables for other languages to accomodate for this new entry (find a description for this meaning to put in the description table, and the closest matching word for the translation table). Voila, you're done.
Clearly the difficulty lies in the clear definition of concepts, sufficiently clear to distinguish between every word of every language. This is extremely difficult. But if it can be done, then certainly a collaborative effort based on the internet is the way to go.
Thomas-
As you already know, your system (even with 2 tables per language) is ridden with problems that would make it virtually useless. Fortunately, there is a solution. It is a hard job, and no one has ever succeeded in doing it right - but you have the advantage of the internet, and this might be a decisive factor.
:)
First, I will mention yet another problem: even if you have two table for each language (English -> OtherLanguage and OtherLanguage -> English), you will not be able to make translations between two non-english languages.
This is even more true because the language you chose as a backbone (English) is a very concise, ambiguous language, and it has many words that may be translated into several different words in other languages. E.g. quite often English has no differentiation for feminine or plural.
Example. Imagine that I want to translate from French to Italian. I take the French word "directrice", which is a *female* director (as opposed to "directeur", which is male). There is no special word for that in English. The dictionary will probably come up with the word "director", which will be translated as two words in italian: one for male director, one for female director.
So a purely female word will give me two results, one of which is obviously wrong because it's male! It's just an example. There are many more. Natural languages *are* ambiguous, that's why computer translation is so hard !
The only solution is that you should not organise your backbone structure by *words*. You should organise it by *meanings*. Your backbone should not be a list of english, french or chinese words, it should be a large list of abstract entries (e.g. numbers), in which every single entry would correspond to a totally unique meaning.
You would also need "description tables", one per language, which would link each of these entries to a small description of this unique meaning in the target language. Finally, you would need translation tables, one per language, which would link every word in the language with all the correct meanings for this word.
For example, in the table, entry 43597 would correspond to "female director", while entry 43552 would correspond to "male director". The 43597th entry in the english description table would read: "A woman who controls, commands or organises something". The english translation table would link the word "director" to both entries 43597 and 43552. But the french translation table would only link the word "directrice" to entry 43597.
In this system (if you get it right), translation is guaranteed to be efficient. No loss of precision, no false positives, and no duplication of information. This system is the correct version of what you want to do. The reason why it wasn't done 20 years ago is because it's *horribly difficult*. Who on earth is clever enough to distinguish precisely between all the things that can be expressed in all the languages of the world ?
But you have a major advantage over all your predecessor: the Internet, and the massive cost-free workforce that it can provide, as the Wikipedia project shows. That could change things a lot. Also, in order to start up the project, you might base your initial backbone on a language which is known to be very precise and have minimal ambguity in its words. Esperanto, Chinese (if you take two-character words) or even better Arabic (if you use the full range of all forms of each root - ask someone who knows Arabic to explain) come to mind. Of course, this would only be a starting point and would need to be refined in order to accomodate for all the possible meanings of the world.
Again, it's gonna be tough, but there's no other way to do it. And this thing could really change the way people communicate. Feel up to the challenge ?
Thomas-
the composition of the reviewers was understandably nuclear physicists... many of whom are deeply in hot fusion research. That means they stand to lose a lot by CF's successes.
/.er) is over. Good for everyone.
Uh ? Nuclear fusion is interesting, but the basic mechanisms are known. Right now it's more R&D than fundamental research - frontier of technology more than frontier of science.
OTOH, whoever comes first in actually demonstrating cold fusion will probably set the new record for the quickest Nobel prize ever (remember, Nobel prizes can be awarded to a maximum of 3 persons, and Fleischmann and Pons had the good taste of being only two - leaving one slot open for scientific sainthood)
If any of these scientists had felt that cold fusion was not merely a possibility, but something real that only waited for careful scientific handling, they would have left their current activities at once !
The gist of this report is that, essentially, we're not really sure what happens in "cold fusion" experiments, and we're definitely not certain that it is actually fusion, but the results, although unclear, justify that "cold fusion" be readmitted within the realm of real science. The redemption period that followed the Fleischmann and Pons debacle (as described in "Voodoo Science", which should be mandatory reading for any
Thomas-
The enemy of my enemy is still a piece of shit.
Aren't you the enemy of your enemy?
Well in that case it would be more like the enemy of your enema....
*rimshot*
Thomas-
but whether Kazaa CAN be used for legitimate purposes.
Actually the really important criterion, according both to the original Betamax decision and its later interpretations, is whether it can be reasonably expected that the product would be commercially viable even if it was used only for legitimate purposes.
In the Betamax case the judges saw that the product was mostly used for legitimate purposes, and thus the argument held. In the case of Sharman Networks, playing the Betamax defence is a rather unimaginative form of suicide.
Thomas-
How do you define dead or alive?
That's a bloody good question. No one really knows what it means to be alive, although we do have a good criterion for death - i.e. thermodynamic equilibrium. Living systems, bacteria, man, or embryo, take matter and energy from their environment and use it to dynamically maintain their own order in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. When dead, they just decompose and entropy wins.
An embryo is biochemically alive, just as a bacteria or any other microorganism: its genes are being expressed, its metabolic pathways run full speed ahead, all the enzymatic machinery is fully functional. But this is not the problem here: bacteria are alive as well, yet most of us don't have ethical problems about killing bacteria. The problem is to know whether they are living human beings and should be regarded as equivalent to babies or children.
Europe solved the problem in a rather pragmatic way: you can have abortion before X weeks of pregnancy, after that, you can't. The time varies between 10 and 22 weeks (22 for Belgium and the UK). Religious beliefs aside (and we all know that the US are the largest theocracy on earth), this is quite a reasonable solution.
Thomas-
Hey, it's only business.
:)
Well at the very least it's quite revealing about the security (or lack thereof) of their OS !
I think they should pay themselves $690 and put Linux on their servers
Thomas-
Let me be the first to draw your attention to the fact that the parent poster may actually be seen as a technical pun on the term "good point", which may be a reference to "focal point".
I'll grant you that it is not clear whether or not this pun is intentional.
Thomas-
They would have no incentive to update technology since there would be no competition.
You're confusing "state-owned" and "monopolistic".
France Telecom is still a state owned company, yet broadband is more developed in France than in the UK.
Note that here we're talking about broadband in general, including cable, on which telcos have no influence. If we only talk about DSL, France simply dwarfs the UK in absolute numbers, percentage and growth, as can be seen on this graph. (France and the UK both have about 60 mlns inhabitants, Germany has 82)
The mantra according to which state-owned = bad, private corps = good, is just an ideological stance. It's being shoved in your throat by the same people who believe that Scandinavia is a socialist hellhole (I'm not joking, some people really believe that having high taxes and highly developed public services is ethically wrong, regardless of the effect it has on the lives of people)
Thomas-
It makes me ill that small-minded whiners take such pains to keep them down so they don't have to work as hard
Sure. Because some people are so poor that they would gladly accept miserable wages, it is obvious that, morally and ethically, everyone has to accept miserable wages.
And it is clear that any dissenter must be classified as a "small-minded whiner".
Thomas-