I tried ViaVoice about eight years ago and I heard that signal recognition - both OCR and VR - have come a long way since then. Haven't tried it though, and I don't know how good ViaVoice is now.
Also, "What is the sine of half pi and a half times the cosine of one quarter plus the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" works correctly. I found this pretty awesome.
Primitive question words like "what is" or "where is" or "how many" would still be nice to have, though - I agree however that trying to understand a full question is needless overkill.
"What is" is already mapped to "define:" as far as I know. "Who is" works in a similar way.
"Why did World War I start" or "what does a duck eat" are questions that require too much understanding and explanation of the concepts. But simple definitions, locations or numbers shouldn't be that difficult to spew out. "how many" could pretty much just map to the calculator, with more constants defined.
If the search engine merely checks for the presence of such a question word, it can already refine the results. Occasionally, the question is a simple one, but one not usually asked about the term you are looking for. In that case, the refining would speed up the answer by saving you the bother of looking through irrelevant results.
We have had motivation as an essential factor in a crime for as long as law exists. It is called mens rea. If you run someone over because it's dark and you didn't see them, your punishment will not be the same as it would be if you run them over because you wanted to kill them.
Mens rea is a "guilty mind". Yes, this means every crime committed consists both of a thought crime and a criminal act. The concept of thought crime in this context makes very good sense. The context in which it is not tolerable is when thought crime is punishable on its own, without a criminal act.
Whereas the oil tankers bound for the US (Iran's best buddies) will of course sail on unharmed. Good thing too, 'cause you use up like twice as much as we do, per capita.;-)
You want to protect us poor Europeans from the evil Arabs? How about you start by not picking unprovoked, hamfisted fights with them that result in them hating the guts of you and everyone associating with you?
Your inability to formulate anything coherent rather than a string of invective has sadly lowered my opinion of AC posts. I'll respond to the stupidity (IHBT, in other words).
You fail to get that your GP was not fucking talking about TSA policies (did I get the point across better by swearing?). He was making a general point regarding the blame given to leaders for evil they make their underlings do. His point was that the "I was following orders" defense is not a defense, but rather a cop-out for such criminals for disabling their own conscience. Given how Nuremberg worked out, this is hardly a new concept. It is a sound analysis of the morals involved.
So far the post. Now back to airport security (which the GP did not talk about, but which I still go back to because that's the topic of the article). "Genocide"? Do you need to kill millions of people to do evil? Do you need to kill thousands? Or just a few with liberal application of electric shocks? Or do you even just need to inconvenience thousands of people based on their ethnicity? I'd say that segregation and discrimination, humiliating and depriving people of their quality of life is capital-e Evil, even without mass murder.
If the only good thing you can say about TSA policies is that "they're not comparable to genocide", then that says a whole lot. If you fail to see that, maybe you are the moron yourself?
"Will be" when it is done? What about the planes that are there now? From this rhetoric, it sounds like hundreds of terrorist attacks on passenger planes have happened weekly since 9/11. Are the media somehow suppressing these, or did I just not pay attention?
You can argue about security keeping them off, but even if we assume that the security there is now is completely effective, why would it be less effective for these new planes? Will the terrorists just "try harder" because these planes look so much cooler?
Terrorist attacks in Europe and America (which is where this kind of paranoia is rampant) are far less common than the nationalist scaremongers would have us believe.
Except that adding or removing the term "alleged" to or from various statements depending on whether or not you agree with them is not in any way factual. (This is what the diff that is linked to by the summary is). If anyone else did so, you'd say he promotes his biased viewpoint. If the government does so, do you conclude that it must be true because they know best?
Some of these people freak out at the warning that "your computer is currently broadcasting an IP address to all websites you visit". Even if they figure out that it's an identifier, there's quite a step from there to understanding that it is universally identifying, and that it also identifies physical or organisational location.
Easy: \n and \t are recognized as whitespace in XML documents, but stripped out as superfluous by the filter. If your document contains a tag whose attributes are only separated by linebreaks, but not by trailing spaces, the filter will remove essential separator space and break well-formedness.
I have since realized that this can be fixed by adding normal spaces to my document, which I will get around to eventually. Still, it's a goof by the filter, as the characters it removes can be essential for the XML document.
So the leaders of the world's most powerful countries are sufficiently out of touch with reality to condone a conventional war, but not enough to accept the consequences of a nuclear war? The only actual difference of nuclear weapons (other than yield) is that they irradiate the atmosphere, change the climate and ruin the environment.
Last I heard, none of these issues were really important to politicians?
O2 in Germany has been doing this for UMTS connections for a long time. They've figured that stripping whitespace and artificially compressing images before transmission will save bandwidth.
Unfortunately, their white-space stripper breaks XML-wellformedness, which makes me unable to view any of my own sites with Firefox (unless I disable application/xhtml+xml as an Accepted content type).
Evolution and progress are not identical in that they spread neither by the same vectors nor do they advance the same types of traits. Education is not spread genetically.
But both (traits, vectors and all) *are* components of our species, which consists of our civilization at least as much as our genotype. They are also complementary in survival - technology can help a group to survive in an environment that their genetic makeup is not adapted to. And progress has the benefit of not relying on random mutation and not having a cycle of more than a generation before any changes take effect.
In other words, it's true that the majority of humanity will remain uneducated until education becomes available for everybody - but as education does not rely on the number of offspring of educated people, its progress will continue.
"Evolving backwards" is a contradiction in terms. The principle of evolution states nothing more or less than "what survives, survives". We can only ever become more adapted to our surroundings, never less. Our surroundings have changed, and (this is important) the new surroundings and our adaptation enables us to adapt/even faster in the future/.
The advance of technology and medicine means that physical fitness is no longer the key survival trait. My -9/-10 vision will not get me eaten (yay). This, in turn, increases diversity and better mental ability, which results in even more technology. This has been the trend since we stopped running after mammoths.
It is true that our civilization now moves at a far faster pace than our gene mutations could ever keep up with. Perhaps this could be analogized to the shift from pure-hardware computers to software - computers are far more adaptable than the single-purpose machines they started as, and so are we.
Really, to tag this "sheeple" seems like a pathological reaction to me. Independent thought is not the same as solipsism, and valuing the opinions of others is neither peer pressure nor fascism.
People complain that this is what causes lynch mobs. True - without this drive to conform to others, we would not have organized wars or mobs. But nor would we have organized societies or anything, because we would most likely fight each other one-on-one instead.
Let individualism be a conscious choice - then we can rely on the subconscious "sheeple" drive to keep us together.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried ViaVoice about eight years ago and I heard that signal recognition - both OCR and VR - have come a long way since then. Haven't tried it though, and I don't know how good ViaVoice is now.
Also, "What is the sine of half pi and a half times the cosine of one quarter plus the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" works correctly. I found this pretty awesome.
Primitive question words like "what is" or "where is" or "how many" would still be nice to have, though - I agree however that trying to understand a full question is needless overkill.
"What is" is already mapped to "define:" as far as I know. "Who is" works in a similar way.
"Why did World War I start" or "what does a duck eat" are questions that require too much understanding and explanation of the concepts. But simple definitions, locations or numbers shouldn't be that difficult to spew out. "how many" could pretty much just map to the calculator, with more constants defined.
If the search engine merely checks for the presence of such a question word, it can already refine the results. Occasionally, the question is a simple one, but one not usually asked about the term you are looking for. In that case, the refining would speed up the answer by saving you the bother of looking through irrelevant results.
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't search that."
So they care?
We have had motivation as an essential factor in a crime for as long as law exists. It is called mens rea. If you run someone over because it's dark and you didn't see them, your punishment will not be the same as it would be if you run them over because you wanted to kill them.
Mens rea is a "guilty mind". Yes, this means every crime committed consists both of a thought crime and a criminal act. The concept of thought crime in this context makes very good sense. The context in which it is not tolerable is when thought crime is punishable on its own, without a criminal act.
This sounds uncomfortably close to the Laconia order.
The safety of your armed forces is not worth paying in the human rights of your enemies, especially those of civilians.
The "blame" feature would certainly revolutionize political punditry.
Whereas the oil tankers bound for the US (Iran's best buddies) will of course sail on unharmed. Good thing too, 'cause you use up like twice as much as we do, per capita.
You want to protect us poor Europeans from the evil Arabs? How about you start by not picking unprovoked, hamfisted fights with them that result in them hating the guts of you and everyone associating with you?
Your inability to formulate anything coherent rather than a string of invective has sadly lowered my opinion of AC posts. I'll respond to the stupidity (IHBT, in other words).
You fail to get that your GP was not fucking talking about TSA policies (did I get the point across better by swearing?). He was making a general point regarding the blame given to leaders for evil they make their underlings do. His point was that the "I was following orders" defense is not a defense, but rather a cop-out for such criminals for disabling their own conscience. Given how Nuremberg worked out, this is hardly a new concept. It is a sound analysis of the morals involved.
So far the post. Now back to airport security (which the GP did not talk about, but which I still go back to because that's the topic of the article). "Genocide"? Do you need to kill millions of people to do evil? Do you need to kill thousands? Or just a few with liberal application of electric shocks? Or do you even just need to inconvenience thousands of people based on their ethnicity? I'd say that segregation and discrimination, humiliating and depriving people of their quality of life is capital-e Evil, even without mass murder.
If the only good thing you can say about TSA policies is that "they're not comparable to genocide", then that says a whole lot. If you fail to see that, maybe you are the moron yourself?
"Will be" when it is done? What about the planes that are there now? From this rhetoric, it sounds like hundreds of terrorist attacks on passenger planes have happened weekly since 9/11. Are the media somehow suppressing these, or did I just not pay attention?
You can argue about security keeping them off, but even if we assume that the security there is now is completely effective, why would it be less effective for these new planes? Will the terrorists just "try harder" because these planes look so much cooler?
Terrorist attacks in Europe and America (which is where this kind of paranoia is rampant) are far less common than the nationalist scaremongers would have us believe.
In lieu of mod points, kudos.
Will they subpoena the Slashdot staff for his IP? Has this happened before? And do they wear brown shirts like their inadvertent namesakes?
Except that adding or removing the term "alleged" to or from various statements depending on whether or not you agree with them is not in any way factual. (This is what the diff that is linked to by the summary is). If anyone else did so, you'd say he promotes his biased viewpoint. If the government does so, do you conclude that it must be true because they know best?
Some of these people freak out at the warning that "your computer is currently broadcasting an IP address to all websites you visit". Even if they figure out that it's an identifier, there's quite a step from there to understanding that it is universally identifying, and that it also identifies physical or organisational location.
The legal charges might not stick. The taser charges would pack a punch though.
Easy: \n and \t are recognized as whitespace in XML documents, but stripped out as superfluous by the filter. If your document contains a tag whose attributes are only separated by linebreaks, but not by trailing spaces, the filter will remove essential separator space and break well-formedness.
I have since realized that this can be fixed by adding normal spaces to my document, which I will get around to eventually. Still, it's a goof by the filter, as the characters it removes can be essential for the XML document.
I guess there are no non-metric scales to measure the power of lasers, and the submitter is unaware of the existance of the metric system.
"This laser can fry four MLoC (Mega-Libraries of Congress) per fortnight."
Can you still say stuff like this in the US? I read that at this point, you can get visited by the SS for joking online.
(Deja vu.)
Don't worry, it was not very funny. Google will explain it though.
So the leaders of the world's most powerful countries are sufficiently out of touch with reality to condone a conventional war, but not enough to accept the consequences of a nuclear war? The only actual difference of nuclear weapons (other than yield) is that they irradiate the atmosphere, change the climate and ruin the environment.
Last I heard, none of these issues were really important to politicians?
O2 in Germany has been doing this for UMTS connections for a long time. They've figured that stripping whitespace and artificially compressing images before transmission will save bandwidth.
Unfortunately, their white-space stripper breaks XML-wellformedness, which makes me unable to view any of my own sites with Firefox (unless I disable application/xhtml+xml as an Accepted content type).
Evolution and progress are not identical in that they spread neither by the same vectors nor do they advance the same types of traits. Education is not spread genetically.
But both (traits, vectors and all) *are* components of our species, which consists of our civilization at least as much as our genotype. They are also complementary in survival - technology can help a group to survive in an environment that their genetic makeup is not adapted to. And progress has the benefit of not relying on random mutation and not having a cycle of more than a generation before any changes take effect.
In other words, it's true that the majority of humanity will remain uneducated until education becomes available for everybody - but as education does not rely on the number of offspring of educated people, its progress will continue.
Careful, now you've revealed the Secrets of Scientology. Raving cultists will come after you. :P
(Unless you're a raving cultist yourself. Er... I have somewhere else to be, quickly.)
"Evolving backwards" is a contradiction in terms. The principle of evolution states nothing more or less than "what survives, survives". We can only ever become more adapted to our surroundings, never less. Our surroundings have changed, and (this is important) the new surroundings and our adaptation enables us to adapt /even faster in the future/.
The advance of technology and medicine means that physical fitness is no longer the key survival trait. My -9/-10 vision will not get me eaten (yay). This, in turn, increases diversity and better mental ability, which results in even more technology. This has been the trend since we stopped running after mammoths.
It is true that our civilization now moves at a far faster pace than our gene mutations could ever keep up with. Perhaps this could be analogized to the shift from pure-hardware computers to software - computers are far more adaptable than the single-purpose machines they started as, and so are we.
Really, to tag this "sheeple" seems like a pathological reaction to me. Independent thought is not the same as solipsism, and valuing the opinions of others is neither peer pressure nor fascism.
People complain that this is what causes lynch mobs. True - without this drive to conform to others, we would not have organized wars or mobs. But nor would we have organized societies or anything, because we would most likely fight each other one-on-one instead.
Let individualism be a conscious choice - then we can rely on the subconscious "sheeple" drive to keep us together.