You raise plenty of interesting points and I agree with your opinions on Esperanto. I have only studied it for a week or two a year ago, but still I can get much of a text written in it on the internet. Unfortunately, I don't think that people will have time to embrace it simply because translation difficulties will fade away when AI gets rolling in the coming decades. Even though Esperanto would probably be a much better solution until then, the English-speaking powers will definitely oppose it, and the world's nations, having invested untold billions in English education programs, will want to continue out of sheer (foolish?) inertia.
As for my own linguistic background, I was raised until 2nd grade in Ukraine, and then moved to the US. I still speak Russian (and to a lesser extent Ukrainian) fluently because I've gone back there every summer. Here, I've studied Japanese for several years, and am probably on an intermediate level, along with my much more easily achieved competency in French from school. As for your question about the Japanese use of Kanji, it's one I asked when I started too. Judging by your smiley you already know what I'm about to say, but I'll say it anyway;). Kanji are indispensable for differentiating meanings between homonyms, because they not only drastically simplified ancient Chinese pronunciations of words throughout the years*, but also have always had purely Japanese words** that could sound like the borrowed Chinese ones, save only stress and pitch.
* Mandarin Huanghai, gonghai, Honghai, gongkai, hanghai, and houhui have all been reduced to koukai in Japanese.
** e.g. shika = poetry (Chinese) or deer (Japanese), kushi = outstanding (Chinese) or comb (Japanese), iki = one breath (Chinese) or going or freshness (Japanese), etc.
I've used "backwards" smileys for quite a while, mostly because they never get changed to some horrible-looking yellow ball in instant messenger programs d:
I got curious by all this and started trying out all the dir whatever stuff in the shell and it really does work a lot better than the normal Explorer search. I'm really wondering what this search program that you installed is, since I haven't found too many good ones, and even fewer sites that have reviews of them.
"It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me," said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, "every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?"
The walls of the swaying cabin were also black, the ceiling was black, the seats-which were rudimentary since the only important trip this ship was designed for was supposed to be unmanned-were black, the control panel was black, the instruments were black, the little screws that held them in place were black, the thin tufted nylon floor covering was black, and when they had lifted up a corner of it they had discovered that the foam underlay also was black."
The problam with that is that when the people at y try to check whether the spin has been set, they will set it themselves and not know if it was set before by the people at X.
I personally always have my bittorrent uploading (and occasionally downloading) random stuff, so I always have my computer connected to the net. It's a laptop, and I like to take from room to room, so it's always using wifi. I'm used to this, so if I ever get a Wii, I probably won't mind keeping it on, since it'll just use a small fraction of the download bandwidth that I don't use (plus my ISP has no transfer caps).
One thing I can't really understand is: wha will they use all that connetedness for when it only comes with about half a gig of flash memory to store the stuff on. I could fill that in about an hour on my connection, and it most definitely isn't the fastest out there.
On the other hand, of the reasons I want to get a PS3 instead of a Wii or a 360 is that it will (hopefully) run (a non shittified version of) Linux. This should allow me to do many things, including setting up bittorrent for it, so then I will have the PS3 uploading 24/7 (and maybe doing some folding@home too) while my laptop is off or doing something more productive. Plus it will allo me to continue uploading when I and my laptop are not at home and have limited access to the net.
Whoa, that brings back a ton of memories. Descent 2 was the first real computer game I (owned and) played. Unfortunately I never got very far, but I defnitely remember the thief-bot, it was annoying as hell! I think that that is a great example of an AI that can really get to at least some of the players. It was especially annoying when playing in the tons of hidden (and dark) tunnels, where it could easily sneak behind you and run away. Although I must admit that when I killed it after chasing it around all over the place, I felt a sense of success that I rarely even felt when finishing a level. All in all, I think it was a great addition to the game.
The AI is also why I prefer real-time strategy games. It seems like that's the only place where good AI can be used without fear of players whining about it. The game that I got after Descent 2 was Total Annihilation. It had pretty damn good AI, at least on the higher difficlty settings. RTSs are probably the only games that really benefit from AI nowadays, mostly because increasing its intelligence doesn't hinder, or even really change gameplay. I still play TA once in a(n admittedly long) while, and it is the last computer game that I have owned.
Unfortunately even printed kanji/hanzi can be nearly impossible to recognize because there are just too many strokes in some of them so they often get too cramped together to easily recognize. This is clearly seen on monitors when your resolution is set the same for asian and western writing lke so: / I like to surf the net. An OCR can easily read the english test even if you reduce the resolution, but a computer probably won't be able to reliably read the chinese at a reduced resolution. Another problem with Chinese (also present to a lesser extent in Japanese) is that word boundaries are not visibly indicated, while they can really help word recognition for western alphabets. Plus of course there are way more kanji/hanzi than there are letters and numbers in english.
All that said, I'm still surprised how well the built-in character recognition in Windows is:)
Anyways, I'm sure that a few circles are much easier to recognize (both for humans and computers) than 20-30 stroke characters.
Somewhat off topic, but there was a certain language that functioned like what you described, just not with numbers. It is called aUI (with that capitlaization) and was created in the 50s by Prof. John Weilgart, a (bored) psychologist. The language is composed of 42 very simple ideographic "letters" that each have both a meaning and set pronunciation. The letters combine to form concepts that can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them, and the latest edition of edition of his book (1979) has a dictionary of over 4000 words. It was made so that only the most general concepts (plus the numbers 0-10) would be classified as single letters, and I think this system works very well. I really suggest you check it out if you have any interest in languages or communication, but the information available online is somewhat limited. I was able to get his book, aUI, the Language of Space, through an interlibrary loan, but I am pretty sure it is long out of print. I really think this language has a much greater chance of being useful than anything based on numbers, and since it only uses very basic shapes (e.g. number shapes, a spiral, circle, oval, etc.) it could probably be recognized pretty easily by OCR systems, probably as well as or better than current print-letter recognition.
Yes, it will allow you to save the videos, just as you could do with some other apps, although this one definitely takes the cake for ease of use. Unfortunately, unlike with Google Video it is just the video which you were just viewing. With Google Video you can download vieos that are normal-resolution (i.e., 640*480) and high bitrate, instead of the super-compressed versions used in streaming.
2GB of mp3s, HA! good luck. It only offers 100MB. Hopefully there will eventually be more. However, even that is enough to host and share a few dozen songs, which an aquaintance of mine is going to do.
The part after "aditionally" is blatantly cut/pasted from the Engadget discussion on the same topic found at http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/18/playstation-3-c osts-900-sez-merrill-lynch-mob/#c1063780. Unless this person happens to be the poster of the comment on Engadget (and he didn't bother to direct people to it), it should be modded down even though he makes a great point.
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As for my own linguistic background, I was raised until 2nd grade in Ukraine, and then moved to the US. I still speak Russian (and to a lesser extent Ukrainian) fluently because I've gone back there every summer. Here, I've studied Japanese for several years, and am probably on an intermediate level, along with my much more easily achieved competency in French from school. As for your question about the Japanese use of Kanji, it's one I asked when I started too. Judging by your smiley you already know what I'm about to say, but I'll say it anyway ;). Kanji are indispensable for differentiating meanings between homonyms, because they not only drastically simplified ancient Chinese pronunciations of words throughout the years*, but also have always had purely Japanese words** that could sound like the borrowed Chinese ones, save only stress and pitch.
* Mandarin Huanghai, gonghai, Honghai, gongkai, hanghai, and houhui have all been reduced to koukai in Japanese.
** e.g. shika = poetry (Chinese) or deer (Japanese), kushi = outstanding (Chinese) or comb (Japanese), iki = one breath (Chinese) or going or freshness (Japanese), etc.
I can only say that this comment shows that someone can use a little growing up himself.
I've used "backwards" smileys for quite a while, mostly because they never get changed to some horrible-looking yellow ball in instant messenger programs d:
I got curious by all this and started trying out all the dir whatever stuff in the shell and it really does work a lot better than the normal Explorer search. I'm really wondering what this search program that you installed is, since I haven't found too many good ones, and even fewer sites that have reviews of them.
*bows to Mr Adams*
The problam with that is that when the people at y try to check whether the spin has been set, they will set it themselves and not know if it was set before by the people at X.
One thing I can't really understand is: wha will they use all that connetedness for when it only comes with about half a gig of flash memory to store the stuff on. I could fill that in about an hour on my connection, and it most definitely isn't the fastest out there.
On the other hand, of the reasons I want to get a PS3 instead of a Wii or a 360 is that it will (hopefully) run (a non shittified version of) Linux. This should allow me to do many things, including setting up bittorrent for it, so then I will have the PS3 uploading 24/7 (and maybe doing some folding@home too) while my laptop is off or doing something more productive. Plus it will allo me to continue uploading when I and my laptop are not at home and have limited access to the net.
The AI is also why I prefer real-time strategy games. It seems like that's the only place where good AI can be used without fear of players whining about it. The game that I got after Descent 2 was Total Annihilation. It had pretty damn good AI, at least on the higher difficlty settings. RTSs are probably the only games that really benefit from AI nowadays, mostly because increasing its intelligence doesn't hinder, or even really change gameplay. I still play TA once in a(n admittedly long) while, and it is the last computer game that I have owned.
All that said, I'm still surprised how well the built-in character recognition in Windows is :)
Anyways, I'm sure that a few circles are much easier to recognize (both for humans and computers) than 20-30 stroke characters.
Somewhat off topic, but there was a certain language that functioned like what you described, just not with numbers. It is called aUI (with that capitlaization) and was created in the 50s by Prof. John Weilgart, a (bored) psychologist. The language is composed of 42 very simple ideographic "letters" that each have both a meaning and set pronunciation. The letters combine to form concepts that can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them, and the latest edition of edition of his book (1979) has a dictionary of over 4000 words. It was made so that only the most general concepts (plus the numbers 0-10) would be classified as single letters, and I think this system works very well. I really suggest you check it out if you have any interest in languages or communication, but the information available online is somewhat limited. I was able to get his book, aUI, the Language of Space, through an interlibrary loan, but I am pretty sure it is long out of print. I really think this language has a much greater chance of being useful than anything based on numbers, and since it only uses very basic shapes (e.g. number shapes, a spiral, circle, oval, etc.) it could probably be recognized pretty easily by OCR systems, probably as well as or better than current print-letter recognition.
I never go through multiple pages since I set my Google preferences to display 100 results a page. A hundred results ought to be enough for anyone.
Yes, it will allow you to save the videos, just as you could do with some other apps, although this one definitely takes the cake for ease of use. Unfortunately, unlike with Google Video it is just the video which you were just viewing. With Google Video you can download vieos that are normal-resolution (i.e., 640*480) and high bitrate, instead of the super-compressed versions used in streaming.
Here's an even simpler solution: Adblock.
Except they already do play videos, even watch TV,in Japan and Korea where the iPod has only 51% and 2% of the market.
2GB of mp3s, HA! good luck. It only offers 100MB. Hopefully there will eventually be more. However, even that is enough to host and share a few dozen songs, which an aquaintance of mine is going to do.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The part after "aditionally" is blatantly cut/pasted from the Engadget discussion on the same topic found at http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/18/playstation-3-c osts-900-sez-merrill-lynch-mob/#c1063780. Unless this person happens to be the poster of the comment on Engadget (and he didn't bother to direct people to it), it should be modded down even though he makes a great point.
I really don't want to be pointing this out, but Zonk posted an article on this back in April when Best Buy announced this. See:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/02/06 17234
The BBC article is from March 17 and it was on /. on March 17.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/1 7/1541230
If it can detect cylons, it better detect cancer.