I work on Welsh-English machine translation, and have looked at doing this in the browser with a bookmarklet so that comments in Welsh can be read by non-Welsh speakers. The trouble is that people tend to use non-standard spelling etc in informal postings such as facebook, whereas the majority of parallel text available to train a statistical machine translation model tends to be formal language (government documents, press releases from business, etc).

Possibly this could be solved with two stages of translation, i.e. (Lang1 with informal spelling -> Lang1 with standard spelling -> Lang2). If this mapping is relatively straightforward (e.g. common spelling substitutions such as 'ough' -> 'u' or 'uff') then a statistical model might work quite well, if you could first split words into syllables with some rule-based algorithm.

Just a totally trivial, obvious thought about the application of statistical machine translation (sorry if I've pissed on some patent troll's livelihood, heh)

Firefox is an open-source platform which is independent of any significant content provider. Chrome, like IE, is a project controlled by one company with a vested interest in directing users to particular content. I think we should find it concerning if Chrome is succeeding at the expense of Firefox.

Now I understand that many people really, really like Google, for important reasons such as their track record of being pro-standards and pro-freedom. But we should always support or oppose individual actions on their own grounds -- wherever possible, we should avoid depending on long-term trust of particular individuals or organisations, because there is no guarantee that we will still support their actions at some point in the future. We believe in political systems which have checks and balances. The same principle should apply here. A situation where the dominant search provider is also the dominant browser provider is one where we miss out on important checks and balances.

The situation is different from the phone market, where Android is squeezing a variety of closed platforms, thereby giving manufacturers and individuals more choice. In this case, there was already a viable and independent open platform, Firefox, and Google's offering is preventing it from becoming dominant.

These people could be paying £30 to let a salesman into his house to try and fleece them for all he can.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right -- my girlfriend got a £10 Groupon with some con artist photographers called Fusion Studios. They insisted on a "deposit" of £75 which took weeks of legal threats to get back ("the manager's in America this week and nobody else can sign cheques", etc). Some of her friends ended up paying £300 due to the high pressure sales tactics.

The moral: don't buy Groupons unless you're happy to experience con artists from time to time.

I wonder WTF their contingency plan is if a big tsunami hits now ...

I strongly believe we know how to set up technical systems for safe nuclear power. However I'm extremely sceptical of the idea that we know how to set up social / administrative systems for safe nuclear power. It's too easy to hide systemic weakness behind secrecy, or too embarrassing to identify and fix present failings, or the debate gets too polarised and ideological so people, politicians and regulatory systems lose sight of the actual safety issues because of the headline effect etc.

I wouldn't be quick to blame money or corruption or unscrupulous people, either. The key problem is secrecy -- even without malice, familiarity makes you blind to system flaws -- we software people know this very well. Only total transparency can ensure that flaws do not get hidden. On the other hand I don't know how this can be reconciled with security against sabotage.

There's a need for a sober, measured debate about all this and it's a pity that a few fundamentalists (on both sides) are making this impossible.

Florian contradicts himself in the article:

Google's own patent portfolio is [...] far too weak for what's undertaken in connection with Android.
[...]
Just today, Google was granted a typical "troll" patent ... A company that seeks to monopolize such basic ideas -- behind which there really isn't any serious technology -- apparenty loves patents

He can't have it both ways -- either he wants Google to file defensive patents or he doesn't. A patent isn't a troll, a patent aggressor is a troll. If you just use a patent defensively you're not a patent troll.

He also seeks to draw an arbitrary distinction between "trivial" and "non-trivial" patents. The problem with patents is not triviality. The problem is that they can hit you even if you thought of the idea independently, or if you're just trying to conform to a de-facto standard.

Withholding your encryption key when requested is now a criminal offence under Part III of the draconian Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000. According to the policeman in the article, this sends a robust message out to "those intent on trying to mask their online criminal activities". So I guess it's RIP to "Innocent until proven guilty", at least in the country where the phrase was invented. Note also that under section 53(2), if you have forgotten your password then you will still be found guilty of the offence, unless you can show that you have forgotten it. I wonder how you are supposed to show that you have forgotten something.

Withholding your encryption key when requested is now a criminal offence under Part III of the draconian Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000. According to the policeman in the article, this sends a robust message out to "those intent on trying to mask their online criminal activities". So I guess it's RIP to "Innocent until proven guilty", at least in the country where the phrase was invented. Note also that under section 53(2), if you have forgotten your password then you will still be found guilty of the offence, unless you can show that you have forgotten it. I wonder how you are supposed to show that you have forgotten something.