Comment Re:Yes, nearby (Score 1) 242
No one wants to spend tons of money to send a group of people on a dangerous mission to a place that far away.
Depends how dangerous - and which people you have in mind...
Comment Re:Communism (Score 1) 400
Perhaps they were Sony laptops and the intention was that they'd eventually end up in the hands of Senor Castro (senior or junior).
It's probably the only assassination method the CIA haven't tried yet.
Comment Re:Fired him first? (Score 1) 502
His obligations to them ended as soon as they fired him. He's under no obligation to work for free. As to the stealing things analogy, the network is still there, isn't it?
Comment Re:subject-verb agreement (Score 1) 260
they're collective nouns and could go either way
That's why I included two alternatives, with "or" in between. It still doesn't mean you can say "they is" or "it are".
Comment Re:subject-verb agreement (Score 1) 260
Of course, it isn't technically a subject verb agreement thing
What is it then, asshat?
Comment subject-verb agreement (Score 1) 260
It's either "has released its" or "have released their".
Comment Re:I'll admit... (Score 1) 110
If you were the sysadmin, you could rightly claim it was a security exercise specifically targeting the wetware.
Comment Re:I'm writing this comment from 2017 (Score 1) 338
Because he means approximately a quarter past eight in the evening.
Comment Re:Focus Shift? (Score 1) 374
Har! My favorite part of that article is:
"Be should be very successful with its new focus. Internet appliances represent the kind of numbers to make a company like Be the money they need to support their efforts."
Internet appliances? Sure. Just as soon as Linux breaks through the Desktop market.
-dZ.
Comment Re:It Hurts (Score 1) 320
So she has apparently decoded a manuscript written in a language she does not read (medieval Italian) does not know what a medieval herbal looks like, is not a botanist, a linguist or anything else that would be helpful to decoding a medieval manuscript of any kind
For her next trick she will disprove Einstein, and prove the world is flat
Oh, by the way-- Einstein WAS wrong
Comment Re:It's obvious (Score 5, Insightful) 502
On Windows, only admins can install.
So only 99% of users?
Comment Re:What (Score 4, Funny) 570
Perhaps they're just hitting people with them?
Comment Bloody colonials (Score -1, Troll) 133
Ok, which kind of English would you pick? Canadian? Australian? Caribbean? Ghanaese? Indian? Scots?
Proper English, the one that doesn't have any kind of qualifier, description or ($deity forbid) hyphenation bolted onto it.
Speech-to-Speech Translator Developed For iPhone 133
Ponca City, We love you writes "Dr. Dobbs reports that Alex Waibel, professor of computer science and language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed an iPhone application that turns the iPhone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa. Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation. 'Jibbigo's software runs on the iPhone itself, so it doesn't need to be connected to the Web to access a distant server,' says Waibel. Waibel is a leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces, creating the first real-time, speech-to-speech translator for English, German and Japanese. 'Automated speech translation is an expensive proposition that has been supported primarily by large government grants,' says Waibel. 'But our sponsors are impatient to see this technology become more widely available and we, as researchers, are eager to find new revenues that will help us extend this technology to more of the 6,000 languages now spoken worldwide.'"
Comment Adam Smith - heard of him? (Score 1) 304
I'm starting to think that one of the biggest problems with patents is being able to sell them and hold them with out making products based on them.
So you'd like to prevent specialisation? A company that's good at R&D probably won't be good at manufacturing, selling and distribution.
The problem in this case, like many others, is the breadth & vagueness of the patent.
