I suggest you look at the history of WIPO, historically it was voting against poor IP terms and long copyright because the African nations couldn't afford to compete or provide drugs to cure illnesses amongst their people under these terms.
The US didn't like the democratic nature of WIPO so it started the WTO under which it designated itself and friendly economies far more control whilst leaving none for smaller, poorer nations. As such WIPO has been forced into irrelevance such that it either tows the US line, or faces extinction.
WIPO was actually a brilliant organisation until the US used subversive tactics to force it away from being a democratic representation of the world's interests in terms of IP and Copyrights.
Yes, he's an example of precisely the problematic mindset some Americans have that is being discussed here.
They think it's okay to tell others what to do, to bully them into it, or simply force their will on them, in fact, they're so naive they don't even know they're doing it.
But then when someone does the same back they're suddenly up in arms about it, it's a gross injustice.
It's not entirely an American thing, many countries have this special kind of hypocritical ignorant idiot, but it's certainly more prominent there.
The style of control has changed that's all, whilst the British would often install one of their own at the top or someone extremely biased towards them, America now just uses the latter option entirely - it replaces leaders it doesn't like, with leaders it does such that they will adhere to US policy and US interests even if it's against the better interests of the nation in question.
It uses softer pressures such as "We wont trade with you unless you do what we want", or "We'll give you funding for arms if you follow our will".
They still control these countries like every other empire has, they just don't own them.
It's got a history of being run by competent technocrats who have been very good at what they do, it already does a great job of managing satellite orbits, radio spectrums and so forth.
Too many people when they hear "UN" think of the security council, or in the best case, the general assembly, but this is all but a minor facet of what the UN does.
I'm not keen on all UN organisations, I think the WHO is largely incompetent, their handling of the swine flu situation amounted to little more than over the top fear mongering not based on solid science. The WTO is a proxy for the US to try and control global trade to it's advantage hence why it always ignores rulings against it whilst it pressures others to join and adhere to rulings in it's favour, and the world bank is less than stellar.
But the ITU, IMO, UPU, UNESCO, ICAO, IAEA, are very good at what they do, governed largely by experts in the field in question who actually know what the fuck they're on about rather than career politicians. WIPO was very good in making sure IP was fair until America screwed it for the WTO because WIPO wasn't working in America's favour (i.e. strong copyright and patents that we now have today). The International Criminal Court would be an excellent addition to the UN family of competent organisations, but struggles to get support because America wont sign up to it, presumably due to the fear of having the likes of George Bush held to account, and African nations are failing to honour their obligations to it claiming it's biased against Africa, seemingly missing all the European ex-Yugoslav and ex-Nazi war criminals it's dealt with, but then, if Africa stopped producing more war criminals than any other continent too then yes there'd probably be less focus on it also.
It doesn't give any new information than BT's official checker gives for me sadly. For what it's worth the URL for the official checker that most ISPs etc. use anyway is:
Yeah this only gives exchange information though not the cabinet details. The problem isn't the exchange - I already know this has fibre, the problem is whether they've rolled the fibre out to the street cabinets from the exchange, this is the part BT don't advertise, they only talk about how many exchanges they've enabled, even though it may be the case that only 10% of people on an exchange can get fibre because they've only rolled it out to 10% of cabinets attached to that exchange.
Because this is Apple's iProduct feel good story for 17th November 2011.
Yesterdays was probably about a boy trapped down a well and Facebooking out on his iPhone for survival. Tommorrows will be someone using their iPad to get out of a forest they got lost in, the day after it'll be a miracle iPhone being dropped off a boat and find by it's owner washed up on shore using find my iPhone, after that we're probably due another one about one being dropped from a plane or cliff and not breaking again, it wont be long until the next leaked or stolen iDevice recovered by ninja Apple agents story either probably. I should stop now, before I give them anymore ideas.
If people haven't figured out how it continues to be iPhones that end up in these miraculous scenarios every week despite that being statistically unrealistic due to the fact they now only own 15% of the market according to Gartner's latest report then there's not much hope.
These regular iDevice feel good stories are part of Apple's impressive marketing campaign, one of the things they've always been excellent at is keeping their products in the public mindset by keeping them in the news, on the radio. Part of this is about highlighting genuine uses of the device and publicising that (even if competitors devices are being used for the same purpose) as if it's an Apple only thing as is almost certainly the case here, part of it is simply making shit up. Some of the stories in the past have just been outright impossible to verify- they've involved people who have gone unnamed from very unspecific locations, with no pictures or other evidence the scenario even ever happened - there's no evidence the story was even real in some cases, but still the media blindly publish without even realising they're doing little more than giving a firm free marketing. More fool them I guess.
It's already kind of here with 3D printers, you could already distribute a printable 3D model of some component or tool and presumably face a lawsuit over it, it's just not quite commonplace enough technology yet to have reached that point.
Wait until in a few years time when there's a trend in producing custom mobile phone cases or something and Apple or whoever file a lawsuit because they don't want to lose the lucrative accessories market profits to hobbyists creating their own designs.
The ashtray in my car (not that I use it for ash as I don't smoke!) had cracked and the car dealer will charge a fortune for what is essentially just a piece of plastic. I was thinking how awesome it would be if I could just download plans for the part from a car enthusiast site and print one out in a 3D printer based world, but I'd bet the dealers will jump right on and try and get that sort of thing banned.
I think the scenario you pose is probably closer than you think to becoming reality, albeit not quite with a full blown car just yet.
Yes, my point wasn't that the UK has no problems, it has plenty, you've done a pretty good job of listing some of the worst ones. My point was simply that the UK's problems are no worse and no more numerous than other nations, as I say, the likes of Sweden has allowed far more RIAA/MPAA interference of it's police, judiciary, and government than we have, and France's use of weaponry against protestors and rioters is far more brutal, as is it's allowance of content industries to dictate it's national laws and the level to which they are embedded within government (Sarkozy's wife is a music artist which I suspect is a large part of that).
In the UK we had television debates before our elections for the first time last year they were attended by the biggest 3 party leaders.
In a setting where media bias couldn't help people the 3rd place party, the Lib Dems, started to shoot ahead in the opinion polls, at one point polling as the most popular party with a chance of winning.
Enter Murdoch et al. an expensive coordinated slander campaign in his papers and come election day they did no better than they usually do despite the high polls prior to that.
But there was another twist, neither of the other two parties won a majority, and so a coalition was required, the Lib Dems got at least a share of the power as a result of this.
Yet it didn't really matter, because they ended up getting swallowed up by the other party anyway, the times they've tried to pursue their own agenda out come Murdoch's attack dogs again, and so effectively they've just been forced to act as puppets to prop up the Tory administration.
The moral of the story is that a 3rd party is not a panacea, unless you can deal with the deep rooted corruption and media stranglehold on influencing national political leaning then the 3rd party will either get slandered out of existence or swallowed up to become one and the same as the other two anyway.
I've learnt that the only way to win is to not play, I've heard all my life about how important it is to vote, but this is really all part of the same game. It's actually not important to vote at all, by voting for a lost cause you're merely adding legitimacy to the corrupt powers that repeatedly win out because they can come out and say "Hey look, we got the highest share of votes on a turnout of 60%!". Better to let the turnout drop and let them try and claim legitimacy when less than half the population can't even see the point in voting anymore. It's only at this point when their foes on the international stage are laughing in their faces at their claims of democratic legitimacy that they will be embarassed into accepting change. It's only when this facade of legitimacy they've built has crumbled that they can't carry on as they have.
Really, it's the fundamental system that's the problem, and when you vote within that system whoever for you're merely giving the system a vote of legitimacy it doesn't deserve. Both the British and American forms of power designation need a root and branch change to be more proportional and more representational.
I don't think they really have, it's fairly simple pattern matching. Take:
Example 1: Siri, tell my wife I'm going to be late home
It'll just be parsed as:
1. Siri - confirms it's a command for the phone 2. Tell - lookup against other terms, alternative for "contact", so do a contact action 3. Wife - found as a contact in the address book 4. Send "I'm going to be late home" to contact Wife
Example 2: "Is it raining outside?"
1. Assume command addressed to device 2. Lookup term categories, "raining" is a weather related term, outside is a place, presume meaning as current location if no further detail given 3. Return weather for current location
Have a look at the answers, it struggled with most.
Really, all Siri is doing is splitting the message up and checking terms against defined categories and meanings and creating a probabilistic average of what application and what method for that application to use based on the categories discovered. There are far more advanced implementations of this technology in the business world in the shape of business intelligence tools.
I worked on an application at my previous company that would scrape news stories and search them for our extensive list of client names, it was an engineering firm and we sold to defence, metals, minerals, food industries and once a client name was found it would look for key terms and in a similar way would build up a score for each of these industries we sold to, and would then dispatch the the story to the highest scoring industry (some clients had sites in multiple industries) sales and engineering manager in our firm. The directors loved it because it was like magic to them having the sales and engineering managers for each industry being handed industry stories relevant specific to them, and stories about our clients opening up new sites meant they were aware of a lot of sales opportunity they may not otherwise have been aware of, but despite the success it wasn't exactly the most complex of systems.
This is really far from groundbreaking - you can pose these questions in an equally natural language form into Google search and it'll respond and have been able to for years. I dare say because Google's voice recognition tech is better (it handles accents far better than Siri), because Google translate is better than anything Apple has, and because Google search is already better at figuring out what people want to know, then Google can build something like Siri with little effort, but more impressively have it work in different languages too. I'm not sure if you've used Google translate on Android but it was quite impressive when I played with it a year or two ago, being able to speak into it in English and have it translate and respond to me in French was impressive.
The only part that Google doesn't have is the translation related to things more local to the device itself (i.e. looking up your calendar), but that's trivial compared to what Google search already figures out.
Perhaps Google didn't realise the potential, perhaps they thought people would laugh at it and use it against Android if the poor performance of a multi-second round trip response was widely noticed, perhaps Google knew about Siri and are concerned about patent issues in creating their own version. I suspect a large part is that second point - if Google had done this it'd be bad, but despite it's numerous faults and flaws Apple fanboys are still hyping it up as the slightest thing since sliced bread. It's yet another fine example where the difference between a negative and positive view of a feature is the marketing. One thing is for sure though, Google devs could slap together a Siri killer in under a week leveraging their existing technology because they already have all the component parts.
The biggest danger for the US tech economy is that all new start ups will do so in places like Europe and Asia where these silly patents are unenforcable and will grow their businesses there until they're big enough to compete on the American stage.
I don't think it'll harm innovation and new players entering the market globally, but that it will harm America's long term technology economy. With the current patent system America runs the risk of handing it's high tech industry crown to other parts of the world, and handing them it on a plate.
"Open Source doesn't need more code, it needs more coders and users."
Right, and we all know the best way to get them is to insult people who aren't yet sold on the FOSS philosophy and attack firms who believe they're doing the right thing when they hand source to the FOSS community, then mod people troll or flamebait if they dare point out how counter-productive this is?
The problem is the community is full of introverts with the social competence of a rock, but not only that, they're the worst kind of those people - they're the kind that don't even realise what dicks that makes them come across as to - you guessed it - the very people they're claiming they want more of in their community.
You're right about Android but look how many attacks there are on it from the FOSS community? Look at any Android source related story on Slashdot, or wherever else to see my point, many even claim it's not real FOSS for the most inane reasons just because to them a large succesful company couldn't ever be beneficial to their little introverted hacker elite.
FOSS zealots are frankly the only thing in the IT world that are worse than Apple and Sony fanboys and until there's a bit of rationality in the community many users and developers will continue to be put off.
"Nope. UK has all the chances to go 'bankrupt' (in the sense of requirement for _really_ high inflation to avoid it)."
It does if it gets itself into a situation like Italy where the rate on bonds is unsustainable, that's kind of the point.
"Canada is NOT 'weathering the storm', it enacted a REAL stimulus program quite soon and fast and avoided most of the crisis."
This is comical, Canada wasn't hit very hard because it already had sane laws governing the financial practices of it's banks, didn't have to resort to the kind of bailouts most other western countries did which is what drastically increased their debts.
It doesn't matter if Sweden and Poland enacted a stimulus in their respective countries, if they haven't gotten rid of their debt it's going to come back to bite them at some point and this is what you still don't seem to get. Besides, Sweden was, like Canada much more sensible in it's fiscal and banking policy well before the recession and Poland is a growing economy like China (although to a much lesser extent) - when you're a poor country to start with the scope for growth is good regardless - Brazil and India are two other examples.
Ireland only made cuts once it was forced to after the EU was forced to bail it out, the fact it had to be bailed out is what caused it's high rates.
You just don't get it so I'll give up here, all I can say is thank god Brownites like you who got us into this mess by lumping everything on the credit card with no plan to pay it off are no longer in charge and thank god we're not like Greece, Italy and Spain as a result of this. Presumably you're aware that Britain was going to lose it's AAA rating and the very reason it didn't was the austerity cuts? No? Didn't think so. If we were on such a wrong path as you believe we wouldn't have such low rates, we wouldn't have positive responses from the people who actually lend the money, and we wouldn't still have an AAA rating. You can believe what you want but it goes completely and utterly against the facts of the situation and there's a word for that - it's called dumb ignorance.
Because unlike many other Western countries right now, it means we have very little chance of going bankrupt. Like countries such as Canada, and Germany, we're capable of weathering the storm.
Saying it doesn't cause a reduction in rates is laughable, it's the reason rates are low in the first place, if we took your option they wouldn't be, they'd be like Spain's, France's, or Italy's
You can find analysts arguing whatever you want to find them arguing in this economic crisis, but fundamentally what matters are the facts.
The deficit is declining well ahead of schedule, a drop of £56bn in a year is pretty impressive.
Growth is still reasonable compared to similar economies, unemployment is still better than most other countries. The people who actually depend on these things - the money men who lend the money and don't want to lost it in a default believe our plan is superior to the alternatives too.
You can argue "yeah but it wont work, it'll make the deficit worse and send us back into recession" all you want, but people have said that since before the austerity measures were even set in stone, yet that hasn't turned true.
I prefer to stick with the facts, and the facts are that it's already working well right now, maybe that'll change, but so far it's working great, and short of a Eurozone default which will cause problems whatever method you take through the financial crisis there's no evidence yet that it's going to fail. I don't even know how the deficit will grow, you think the Tories are going to turn round and say "Right, that's that eliminated, let's spend £20bn on an ID card database we don't want and can't afford and get the old deficit up again"? No, that's the Brown/Balls path.
I agree it's not the view of the whole community but it's also not a lone comment on the topic, I see that sort of setiment expressed all the time from the FOSS community and it makes them their own worst enemy.
You see it in other areas as well, more than once I've seen people bitch in one thread about Linux not being taken up on the desktop because companies are "dumb" and that sort of sentiment, then in another thread go on to show a complete lack of understanding as to why end users need a decent user interface with comments about how CLIs are faster and that users should just learn to use them instead.
"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15653282 - trade is flagging,"
No, the trade deficit just spiked for a month.
"http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt - debt is growing."
Well of course it is, that's what happens when you have a deficit, and it'll continue this way until you eliminate the deficit, which is kind of the point in what I've been advocating.
"http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/31/business-confidence-lowest-for-30-months - business confidence craters."
That's great, but the economy still grew 0.5% last quarter.
"Deficits are not significantly affected."
Yes it is, the government deficit reduction is still perfectly on track, well, actually, it's ahead of schedule. It was about £178bn when Labour left power, it's set to be down to about £122bn this year:
The original plan was to eliminate it by 2015, it's quite possible we'll do it earlier.
So what happens when the deficit is gone? well, if we're smart we start running a surplus, what do we do with surplus? we reduce that afformentioned national debt that you mentioned is growing.
I'm not entirely sure you understand all this, it seems a bit odd you'd complain about debt growth, whilst complaining about deficit reduction - of course when you're spending more than you're making your debts are going to increase, what do you think happens? This is the whole point in eliminating our deficit, so we can reduce our debt or at very least stop it growing.
Right, so when a company end of lines a product they're criticised for not open sourcing it.
Now when a company open sources an end of lined product, they're "offloading another failing technology".
This is why companies don't give a fuck what the FOSS community thinks, because with the FOSS community you can never do anything right. See all the whinging about Android's open source initiatives for another fine example.
See my reply to the other guy who responded at the same level as you, despite our supposed overly drastic austerity measures we've still got better unemployment stats than countries like the US who have taken the alternative route of getting higher growth by spending hundreds of billions in stimulus, so I'm not sure that argument actually has any real validity.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you look at the history of WIPO, historically it was voting against poor IP terms and long copyright because the African nations couldn't afford to compete or provide drugs to cure illnesses amongst their people under these terms.
The US didn't like the democratic nature of WIPO so it started the WTO under which it designated itself and friendly economies far more control whilst leaving none for smaller, poorer nations. As such WIPO has been forced into irrelevance such that it either tows the US line, or faces extinction.
WIPO was actually a brilliant organisation until the US used subversive tactics to force it away from being a democratic representation of the world's interests in terms of IP and Copyrights.
Yes, he's an example of precisely the problematic mindset some Americans have that is being discussed here.
They think it's okay to tell others what to do, to bully them into it, or simply force their will on them, in fact, they're so naive they don't even know they're doing it.
But then when someone does the same back they're suddenly up in arms about it, it's a gross injustice.
It's not entirely an American thing, many countries have this special kind of hypocritical ignorant idiot, but it's certainly more prominent there.
Well you had one for years, but then Harper got a majority.
The style of control has changed that's all, whilst the British would often install one of their own at the top or someone extremely biased towards them, America now just uses the latter option entirely - it replaces leaders it doesn't like, with leaders it does such that they will adhere to US policy and US interests even if it's against the better interests of the nation in question.
It uses softer pressures such as "We wont trade with you unless you do what we want", or "We'll give you funding for arms if you follow our will".
They still control these countries like every other empire has, they just don't own them.
I've said it before, the organisation to do this already exists. It's the ITU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union
It's got a history of being run by competent technocrats who have been very good at what they do, it already does a great job of managing satellite orbits, radio spectrums and so forth.
Too many people when they hear "UN" think of the security council, or in the best case, the general assembly, but this is all but a minor facet of what the UN does.
I'm not keen on all UN organisations, I think the WHO is largely incompetent, their handling of the swine flu situation amounted to little more than over the top fear mongering not based on solid science. The WTO is a proxy for the US to try and control global trade to it's advantage hence why it always ignores rulings against it whilst it pressures others to join and adhere to rulings in it's favour, and the world bank is less than stellar.
But the ITU, IMO, UPU, UNESCO, ICAO, IAEA, are very good at what they do, governed largely by experts in the field in question who actually know what the fuck they're on about rather than career politicians. WIPO was very good in making sure IP was fair until America screwed it for the WTO because WIPO wasn't working in America's favour (i.e. strong copyright and patents that we now have today). The International Criminal Court would be an excellent addition to the UN family of competent organisations, but struggles to get support because America wont sign up to it, presumably due to the fear of having the likes of George Bush held to account, and African nations are failing to honour their obligations to it claiming it's biased against Africa, seemingly missing all the European ex-Yugoslav and ex-Nazi war criminals it's dealt with, but then, if Africa stopped producing more war criminals than any other continent too then yes there'd probably be less focus on it also.
Consider your comment occupied. I'm not even sure why, but I thought I better get in on the fad before I start to look uncool.
It's a shit meme and anyway George Bush beat them all to it years ago with Occupy Afghanistan in 2001 and Occupy Iraq in 2003.
It doesn't give any new information than BT's official checker gives for me sadly. For what it's worth the URL for the official checker that most ISPs etc. use anyway is:
https://www.btwholesale.com/pages/static/Community/Broadband_Community/Coverage/ADSL_Availibility_Checker.html
I guess I'll just have to play the waiting game and keep checking!
Yeah this only gives exchange information though not the cabinet details. The problem isn't the exchange - I already know this has fibre, the problem is whether they've rolled the fibre out to the street cabinets from the exchange, this is the part BT don't advertise, they only talk about how many exchanges they've enabled, even though it may be the case that only 10% of people on an exchange can get fibre because they've only rolled it out to 10% of cabinets attached to that exchange.
How do you find out what cabinets BT is rolling out to? this is something I'm interested in seeing as my exchange is enabled but my cabinet is not.
Because this is Apple's iProduct feel good story for 17th November 2011.
Yesterdays was probably about a boy trapped down a well and Facebooking out on his iPhone for survival. Tommorrows will be someone using their iPad to get out of a forest they got lost in, the day after it'll be a miracle iPhone being dropped off a boat and find by it's owner washed up on shore using find my iPhone, after that we're probably due another one about one being dropped from a plane or cliff and not breaking again, it wont be long until the next leaked or stolen iDevice recovered by ninja Apple agents story either probably. I should stop now, before I give them anymore ideas.
If people haven't figured out how it continues to be iPhones that end up in these miraculous scenarios every week despite that being statistically unrealistic due to the fact they now only own 15% of the market according to Gartner's latest report then there's not much hope.
These regular iDevice feel good stories are part of Apple's impressive marketing campaign, one of the things they've always been excellent at is keeping their products in the public mindset by keeping them in the news, on the radio. Part of this is about highlighting genuine uses of the device and publicising that (even if competitors devices are being used for the same purpose) as if it's an Apple only thing as is almost certainly the case here, part of it is simply making shit up. Some of the stories in the past have just been outright impossible to verify- they've involved people who have gone unnamed from very unspecific locations, with no pictures or other evidence the scenario even ever happened - there's no evidence the story was even real in some cases, but still the media blindly publish without even realising they're doing little more than giving a firm free marketing. More fool them I guess.
It's already kind of here with 3D printers, you could already distribute a printable 3D model of some component or tool and presumably face a lawsuit over it, it's just not quite commonplace enough technology yet to have reached that point.
Wait until in a few years time when there's a trend in producing custom mobile phone cases or something and Apple or whoever file a lawsuit because they don't want to lose the lucrative accessories market profits to hobbyists creating their own designs.
The ashtray in my car (not that I use it for ash as I don't smoke!) had cracked and the car dealer will charge a fortune for what is essentially just a piece of plastic. I was thinking how awesome it would be if I could just download plans for the part from a car enthusiast site and print one out in a 3D printer based world, but I'd bet the dealers will jump right on and try and get that sort of thing banned.
I think the scenario you pose is probably closer than you think to becoming reality, albeit not quite with a full blown car just yet.
Sure but the problem here is distribution, licensing and reuse of it.
Yes, my point wasn't that the UK has no problems, it has plenty, you've done a pretty good job of listing some of the worst ones. My point was simply that the UK's problems are no worse and no more numerous than other nations, as I say, the likes of Sweden has allowed far more RIAA/MPAA interference of it's police, judiciary, and government than we have, and France's use of weaponry against protestors and rioters is far more brutal, as is it's allowance of content industries to dictate it's national laws and the level to which they are embedded within government (Sarkozy's wife is a music artist which I suspect is a large part of that).
In the UK we had television debates before our elections for the first time last year they were attended by the biggest 3 party leaders.
In a setting where media bias couldn't help people the 3rd place party, the Lib Dems, started to shoot ahead in the opinion polls, at one point polling as the most popular party with a chance of winning.
Enter Murdoch et al. an expensive coordinated slander campaign in his papers and come election day they did no better than they usually do despite the high polls prior to that.
But there was another twist, neither of the other two parties won a majority, and so a coalition was required, the Lib Dems got at least a share of the power as a result of this.
Yet it didn't really matter, because they ended up getting swallowed up by the other party anyway, the times they've tried to pursue their own agenda out come Murdoch's attack dogs again, and so effectively they've just been forced to act as puppets to prop up the Tory administration.
The moral of the story is that a 3rd party is not a panacea, unless you can deal with the deep rooted corruption and media stranglehold on influencing national political leaning then the 3rd party will either get slandered out of existence or swallowed up to become one and the same as the other two anyway.
I've learnt that the only way to win is to not play, I've heard all my life about how important it is to vote, but this is really all part of the same game. It's actually not important to vote at all, by voting for a lost cause you're merely adding legitimacy to the corrupt powers that repeatedly win out because they can come out and say "Hey look, we got the highest share of votes on a turnout of 60%!". Better to let the turnout drop and let them try and claim legitimacy when less than half the population can't even see the point in voting anymore. It's only at this point when their foes on the international stage are laughing in their faces at their claims of democratic legitimacy that they will be embarassed into accepting change. It's only when this facade of legitimacy they've built has crumbled that they can't carry on as they have.
Really, it's the fundamental system that's the problem, and when you vote within that system whoever for you're merely giving the system a vote of legitimacy it doesn't deserve. Both the British and American forms of power designation need a root and branch change to be more proportional and more representational.
It escaped litigation because id made a deal with creative to promote creative hardware within Doom 3 in exchange for not getting sued.
Presumably that deal didn't include releasing the source at some point.
I don't think they really have, it's fairly simple pattern matching. Take:
Example 1: Siri, tell my wife I'm going to be late home
It'll just be parsed as:
1. Siri - confirms it's a command for the phone
2. Tell - lookup against other terms, alternative for "contact", so do a contact action
3. Wife - found as a contact in the address book
4. Send "I'm going to be late home" to contact Wife
Example 2: "Is it raining outside?"
1. Assume command addressed to device
2. Lookup term categories, "raining" is a weather related term, outside is a place, presume meaning as current location if no further detail given
3. Return weather for current location
A quick Google search pulled up this thread:
http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/threads/can-siri-answer-these-questions.81195/
Have a look at the answers, it struggled with most.
Really, all Siri is doing is splitting the message up and checking terms against defined categories and meanings and creating a probabilistic average of what application and what method for that application to use based on the categories discovered. There are far more advanced implementations of this technology in the business world in the shape of business intelligence tools.
I worked on an application at my previous company that would scrape news stories and search them for our extensive list of client names, it was an engineering firm and we sold to defence, metals, minerals, food industries and once a client name was found it would look for key terms and in a similar way would build up a score for each of these industries we sold to, and would then dispatch the the story to the highest scoring industry (some clients had sites in multiple industries) sales and engineering manager in our firm. The directors loved it because it was like magic to them having the sales and engineering managers for each industry being handed industry stories relevant specific to them, and stories about our clients opening up new sites meant they were aware of a lot of sales opportunity they may not otherwise have been aware of, but despite the success it wasn't exactly the most complex of systems.
This is really far from groundbreaking - you can pose these questions in an equally natural language form into Google search and it'll respond and have been able to for years. I dare say because Google's voice recognition tech is better (it handles accents far better than Siri), because Google translate is better than anything Apple has, and because Google search is already better at figuring out what people want to know, then Google can build something like Siri with little effort, but more impressively have it work in different languages too. I'm not sure if you've used Google translate on Android but it was quite impressive when I played with it a year or two ago, being able to speak into it in English and have it translate and respond to me in French was impressive.
The only part that Google doesn't have is the translation related to things more local to the device itself (i.e. looking up your calendar), but that's trivial compared to what Google search already figures out.
Perhaps Google didn't realise the potential, perhaps they thought people would laugh at it and use it against Android if the poor performance of a multi-second round trip response was widely noticed, perhaps Google knew about Siri and are concerned about patent issues in creating their own version. I suspect a large part is that second point - if Google had done this it'd be bad, but despite it's numerous faults and flaws Apple fanboys are still hyping it up as the slightest thing since sliced bread. It's yet another fine example where the difference between a negative and positive view of a feature is the marketing. One thing is for sure though, Google devs could slap together a Siri killer in under a week leveraging their existing technology because they already have all the component parts.
In America yes.
The biggest danger for the US tech economy is that all new start ups will do so in places like Europe and Asia where these silly patents are unenforcable and will grow their businesses there until they're big enough to compete on the American stage.
I don't think it'll harm innovation and new players entering the market globally, but that it will harm America's long term technology economy. With the current patent system America runs the risk of handing it's high tech industry crown to other parts of the world, and handing them it on a plate.
"Open Source doesn't need more code, it needs more coders and users."
Right, and we all know the best way to get them is to insult people who aren't yet sold on the FOSS philosophy and attack firms who believe they're doing the right thing when they hand source to the FOSS community, then mod people troll or flamebait if they dare point out how counter-productive this is?
The problem is the community is full of introverts with the social competence of a rock, but not only that, they're the worst kind of those people - they're the kind that don't even realise what dicks that makes them come across as to - you guessed it - the very people they're claiming they want more of in their community.
You're right about Android but look how many attacks there are on it from the FOSS community? Look at any Android source related story on Slashdot, or wherever else to see my point, many even claim it's not real FOSS for the most inane reasons just because to them a large succesful company couldn't ever be beneficial to their little introverted hacker elite.
FOSS zealots are frankly the only thing in the IT world that are worse than Apple and Sony fanboys and until there's a bit of rationality in the community many users and developers will continue to be put off.
"Nope. UK has all the chances to go 'bankrupt' (in the sense of requirement for _really_ high inflation to avoid it)."
It does if it gets itself into a situation like Italy where the rate on bonds is unsustainable, that's kind of the point.
"Canada is NOT 'weathering the storm', it enacted a REAL stimulus program quite soon and fast and avoided most of the crisis."
This is comical, Canada wasn't hit very hard because it already had sane laws governing the financial practices of it's banks, didn't have to resort to the kind of bailouts most other western countries did which is what drastically increased their debts.
It doesn't matter if Sweden and Poland enacted a stimulus in their respective countries, if they haven't gotten rid of their debt it's going to come back to bite them at some point and this is what you still don't seem to get. Besides, Sweden was, like Canada much more sensible in it's fiscal and banking policy well before the recession and Poland is a growing economy like China (although to a much lesser extent) - when you're a poor country to start with the scope for growth is good regardless - Brazil and India are two other examples.
Ireland only made cuts once it was forced to after the EU was forced to bail it out, the fact it had to be bailed out is what caused it's high rates.
You just don't get it so I'll give up here, all I can say is thank god Brownites like you who got us into this mess by lumping everything on the credit card with no plan to pay it off are no longer in charge and thank god we're not like Greece, Italy and Spain as a result of this. Presumably you're aware that Britain was going to lose it's AAA rating and the very reason it didn't was the austerity cuts? No? Didn't think so. If we were on such a wrong path as you believe we wouldn't have such low rates, we wouldn't have positive responses from the people who actually lend the money, and we wouldn't still have an AAA rating. You can believe what you want but it goes completely and utterly against the facts of the situation and there's a word for that - it's called dumb ignorance.
"Why is it impressing?"
Because unlike many other Western countries right now, it means we have very little chance of going bankrupt. Like countries such as Canada, and Germany, we're capable of weathering the storm.
Saying it doesn't cause a reduction in rates is laughable, it's the reason rates are low in the first place, if we took your option they wouldn't be, they'd be like Spain's, France's, or Italy's
You can find analysts arguing whatever you want to find them arguing in this economic crisis, but fundamentally what matters are the facts.
The deficit is declining well ahead of schedule, a drop of £56bn in a year is pretty impressive.
Growth is still reasonable compared to similar economies, unemployment is still better than most other countries. The people who actually depend on these things - the money men who lend the money and don't want to lost it in a default believe our plan is superior to the alternatives too.
You can argue "yeah but it wont work, it'll make the deficit worse and send us back into recession" all you want, but people have said that since before the austerity measures were even set in stone, yet that hasn't turned true.
I prefer to stick with the facts, and the facts are that it's already working well right now, maybe that'll change, but so far it's working great, and short of a Eurozone default which will cause problems whatever method you take through the financial crisis there's no evidence yet that it's going to fail. I don't even know how the deficit will grow, you think the Tories are going to turn round and say "Right, that's that eliminated, let's spend £20bn on an ID card database we don't want and can't afford and get the old deficit up again"? No, that's the Brown/Balls path.
I agree it's not the view of the whole community but it's also not a lone comment on the topic, I see that sort of setiment expressed all the time from the FOSS community and it makes them their own worst enemy.
You see it in other areas as well, more than once I've seen people bitch in one thread about Linux not being taken up on the desktop because companies are "dumb" and that sort of sentiment, then in another thread go on to show a complete lack of understanding as to why end users need a decent user interface with comments about how CLIs are faster and that users should just learn to use them instead.
"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15653282 - trade is flagging,"
No, the trade deficit just spiked for a month.
"http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt - debt is growing."
Well of course it is, that's what happens when you have a deficit, and it'll continue this way until you eliminate the deficit, which is kind of the point in what I've been advocating.
"http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/31/business-confidence-lowest-for-30-months - business confidence craters."
That's great, but the economy still grew 0.5% last quarter.
"Deficits are not significantly affected."
Yes it is, the government deficit reduction is still perfectly on track, well, actually, it's ahead of schedule. It was about £178bn when Labour left power, it's set to be down to about £122bn this year:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/21/government-borrowing-september-budget-deficit
The original plan was to eliminate it by 2015, it's quite possible we'll do it earlier.
So what happens when the deficit is gone? well, if we're smart we start running a surplus, what do we do with surplus? we reduce that afformentioned national debt that you mentioned is growing.
I'm not entirely sure you understand all this, it seems a bit odd you'd complain about debt growth, whilst complaining about deficit reduction - of course when you're spending more than you're making your debts are going to increase, what do you think happens? This is the whole point in eliminating our deficit, so we can reduce our debt or at very least stop it growing.
Right, so when a company end of lines a product they're criticised for not open sourcing it.
Now when a company open sources an end of lined product, they're "offloading another failing technology".
This is why companies don't give a fuck what the FOSS community thinks, because with the FOSS community you can never do anything right. See all the whinging about Android's open source initiatives for another fine example.
See my reply to the other guy who responded at the same level as you, despite our supposed overly drastic austerity measures we've still got better unemployment stats than countries like the US who have taken the alternative route of getting higher growth by spending hundreds of billions in stimulus, so I'm not sure that argument actually has any real validity.
As you say though, only time will truly tell.