And the Iraqis are aggrieved at the marines. A 50-year-old businessman and farmer, Said Yahir, was driving up to the main body of the reconnaissance unit, stationed under the bridge. He wanted to know why the marines had come to his house and taken his son Nathen, his Kalashnikov rifle, and his 3m dinars (about £500).
"What did I do?" he said. "This is your freedom that you're talking about? This is my life savings."
I did a fair bit of research in speech synthesis a few years ago and I have to say this sounds good to me.
The system I was building was a diphone/triphone hybrid. We had a large inventory of basic segments (1500 or so) in LPC encodings, but we kept having to expand it to get different pitch contours.
One thing we did find that helped (probably the best idea of my life) was to try to capture features of the glottal excitation instead of using a simple spike excitation. Keeping a library of glottal pulses gave the voice a lot of naturalness (our goal was to generate arbitrary utterances for a particular speaker's voice).
So I have to say I totally agree with you. I think that natural voices will have to follow this sort of path - modelling the actual human vocal tract, not just a convenient mathematical model.
Unless we advance some form of public ownership, and tear down the structure of corporate business, we will always have corporations.
Maybe, but there are many choices of how corporations can be structured. Employee-owned businesses do not scale well to the level of the abuse that many C corps are capable of.
Telepathy... I have not seen either a proof or a disproof that met my standards. I also have a lot of trouble with defining it.
So do the people working on it. Apparently, there is no experimental design that will distinguish telepathy, precognition and clarivoyance. After reading about this and contemplating the models, I suspect that they are all precognition and that the brain takes advantage of some interesting temporal phenomena.
Skeptics in history like Gallileo and Copernicus who didn't want to believe in a flat Earth, around which the Sun revolved, just because thats what religion told them to do.
Speaking of urban legends, the Church did not claim that the earth was flat. Any learned person of the time (including the much maligned church authorities) was quite aware (from the experiments of Eratosthenes and Ptolomy) that the earth was round. Columbus had problems convincing the authorities in Spain that the earth was only 16K miles around (Eratosthenes had about 24K), contradicting what was known. The fact that he managed to con Isabella out of her jewelery and ran into a continent that was coincidentally where he thought China should be was sheer bald-faced luck.
So the skeptics in this case were actually the learned churchmen, and the purveyer of crackpot theories was the one who turned out to be revolutionizing the European understanding of the world. The ironies of all this in the context of this discussion are quite delicious!
(Incidentally, this myth was being taught in my grade school in the 70s, including the "fact" that Columbus discovered that the earth was round!)
these calls are providing real employment for people who would otherwise be living marginal or supported lives
Kind of begs the question of why do these people have to work at all? I mean if the choice is between having them do nothing (welfare), having them do something annoying (telemarketing) and have them do something destructive (rioting), I'd opt for nothing every time.
We live in an incredibly productive economy. Telemarketers aren't the only people doing nothing useful. Maybe we all need to lose this Calvinistic "he who does not work shall not eat" and start having more fun.
Re:Points out need for android Aunts, Uncles
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Uncle Tungsten
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· Score: 1
This convinces me that we need to make available to every family a set of android relatives who can visit and tell the kids about their fascinating professions.
Such people may be closer than you realize. We actually invited our neighbors over for a party the other day and I found out that the husband had worked on the space shuttle engines. This was wonderful to learn because my 4 year old is currently fascinated by the shuttle and I hope to get them together some time soon (they even offered to babysit for us!)
So go meet your neighbors - they may be cooler than you ever imagined.
A frend of mine observed that the real problem Republicans had with Clinton's oval office liasons was that by choosing Monica (instead of someone more um conventinally attractive) was that he diluted the Presidential/American brand.
The saga of Lik-Sang has continued with Dan Gillmor's recent visit to the region. He and Alex Kampl met and talked for a while. The comparisons are good ones - and ones that are clearly enough drawn that everyone should see the loss of their rights.
The thing that always bothered me about the Vinge Singularity was that it assumed that an increasing function necessarily becomes asymptotic. As a mathematician, he should know better.
I'd like to see someome have a go at making Dyson's metabolic life (c.f. Infinite in All Directions). He had the idea that reproduction was not necessary for life and did some simulations that showed this approach led to a reduction in the complexity threshold for viability of two orders of magnitude.
Basically, the idea is that you have a soup of chemicals that can perform metabolism - manage energy and synthesize new chemicals - without accurate reproduction. The thing can divide, but there is no guarentee of success for the daughters.
Cancelling a debt will hurt the recipient in the long run: He will get used to getting help for free and develop an addiction.
What a load of Calvinist drivel! Please present any evidence that demonstrates this. More to the point, you are making a category error and confusing a person with a nation-state, so even if it is true for individuals, this says nothing about the effect on nations.
There is at least one place in AntiPatterns where they advise you to get another job if you see a particular problem. Which is often the best way to fix some things!
All movies, even light-hearted comic romances, should have Joe Peschi beaten severely and buried alive.
. Oh, come now! I think the funniest SNL sketch I ever saw was Kevin Neelan at his oily best selling Peschi a pinky ring. Peschi spent several minutes flashing various rings at strategically placed mirrors while I nearly died laughing!
This entire thread is a major subplot of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy". He argues both sides quite eloquently, not to mention more thoroughly than the current postings.
As we saw just the other week, though, TCAS itself is generally ignored in favor of ground instructions, we lost two planes in a collision in Germany specifically because TCAS was ignored.
Not sure that this is a good summary of the situation. try this for example.
Re:Chance *is* significant, given the consequences
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What, Me Worry?
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· Score: 1
But considering how bad the consequences could be, 4 in a million is still worth worrying about.
Shoot, people get all excited about LOTTO jackpots with smaller odds than that...
don't imagine for a second that is why the state school system exists as it does. It is an investment in the future cashflow of the nation.
I beg your pardon? I was under the impression that the point of public education was that democracy is not viable without it. Now we are talking about Malaysia here, but your comment seems to be more general than that...
CVS is not the be-all and the end-all of VCS systems. It has a number of well-known, serious failings, including lack of versioning for directories and general performance. Perforce is an awsome system and it speaks well for M$ that they are using it.
C.S.Lewis wrote an essay about this in The World's Last Night called "Religion and Rocketry". He basically concluded that it was irrelevant to humanity's particular relationship with God and discussed some of the issues you raise (redemption in particular). He also wrote the well-known space trilogy (Out of the Slitent Planet et alia) which explores some of these issues in a more literary manner.
Please be careful with the term "Christian". In the USA it often means someone of a funamentalist stripe (Southern Baptist or whatnot) even though they are a minority (albeit a highly vocal one). And while this particular Christian (and just about every Christian he knows) has no problem with this or most other scientific discoveries (evolution, big bang, string theory, anthropology and so on) there are plenty of folks out there who do.
So when you ask this question, be prepared for a wide range of answers. Hopefully, I have done a good job of summing up the issue for the Anglican Communion, but we are notorious for having um a plethora of opinions;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I did a fair bit of research in speech synthesis a few years ago and I have to say this sounds good to me.
The system I was building was a diphone/triphone hybrid. We had a large inventory of basic segments (1500 or so) in LPC encodings, but we kept having to expand it to get different pitch contours.
One thing we did find that helped (probably the best idea of my life) was to try to capture features of the glottal excitation instead of using a simple spike excitation. Keeping a library of glottal pulses gave the voice a lot of naturalness (our goal was to generate arbitrary utterances for a particular speaker's voice).
So I have to say I totally agree with you. I think that natural voices will have to follow this sort of path - modelling the actual human vocal tract, not just a convenient mathematical model.
You mean someone came up with a way for the American population to get even fatter and it isn't selling?
After reading some of the linked articles, I started to wonder something...
Could there be a slight mismatch in the electron/proton charge what causes the inflation?
Speaking of urban legends, the Church did not claim that the earth was flat. Any learned person of the time (including the much maligned church authorities) was quite aware (from the experiments of Eratosthenes and Ptolomy) that the earth was round. Columbus had problems convincing the authorities in Spain that the earth was only 16K miles around (Eratosthenes had about 24K), contradicting what was known. The fact that he managed to con Isabella out of her jewelery and ran into a continent that was coincidentally where he thought China should be was sheer bald-faced luck.
So the skeptics in this case were actually the learned churchmen, and the purveyer of crackpot theories was the one who turned out to be revolutionizing the European understanding of the world. The ironies of all this in the context of this discussion are quite delicious!
(Incidentally, this myth was being taught in my grade school in the 70s, including the "fact" that Columbus discovered that the earth was round!)
We live in an incredibly productive economy. Telemarketers aren't the only people doing nothing useful. Maybe we all need to lose this Calvinistic "he who does not work shall not eat" and start having more fun.
So go meet your neighbors - they may be cooler than you ever imagined.
A frend of mine observed that the real problem Republicans had with Clinton's oval office liasons was that by choosing Monica (instead of someone more um conventinally attractive) was that he diluted the Presidential/American brand.
The saga of Lik-Sang has continued with Dan Gillmor's recent visit to the region. He and Alex Kampl met and talked for a while. The comparisons are good ones - and ones that are clearly enough drawn that everyone should see the loss of their rights.
The thing that always bothered me about the Vinge Singularity was that it assumed that an increasing function necessarily becomes asymptotic. As a mathematician, he should know better.
I'd like to see someome have a go at making Dyson's metabolic life (c.f. Infinite in All Directions). He had the idea that reproduction was not necessary for life and did some simulations that showed this approach led to a reduction in the complexity threshold for viability of two orders of magnitude. Basically, the idea is that you have a soup of chemicals that can perform metabolism - manage energy and synthesize new chemicals - without accurate reproduction. The thing can divide, but there is no guarentee of success for the daughters.
Indeed! Freedom != capitalism.
There is at least one place in AntiPatterns where they advise you to get another job if you see a particular problem. Which is often the best way to fix some things!
Oh, come now! I think the funniest SNL sketch I ever saw was Kevin Neelan at his oily best selling Peschi a pinky ring. Peschi spent several minutes flashing various rings at strategically placed mirrors while I nearly died laughing!
This entire thread is a major subplot of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy". He argues both sides quite eloquently, not to mention more thoroughly than the current postings.
Not sure that this is a good summary of the situation. try this for example.
CVS is not the be-all and the end-all of VCS systems. It has a number of well-known, serious failings, including lack of versioning for directories and general performance. Perforce is an awsome system and it speaks well for M$ that they are using it.
Real Vermonters know that Vermont is actually as big as Texas if you flatten it out.
C.S.Lewis wrote an essay about this in The World's Last Night called "Religion and Rocketry". He basically concluded that it was irrelevant to humanity's particular relationship with God and discussed some of the issues you raise (redemption in particular). He also wrote the well-known space trilogy (Out of the Slitent Planet et alia) which explores some of these issues in a more literary manner.
;-)
Please be careful with the term "Christian". In the USA it often means someone of a funamentalist stripe (Southern Baptist or whatnot) even though they are a minority (albeit a highly vocal one). And while this particular Christian (and just about every Christian he knows) has no problem with this or most other scientific discoveries (evolution, big bang, string theory, anthropology and so on) there are plenty of folks out there who do.
So when you ask this question, be prepared for a wide range of answers. Hopefully, I have done a good job of summing up the issue for the Anglican Communion, but we are notorious for having um a plethora of opinions
Or maybe they just destroy all the eveidence to match the Party line...