How Google Will Have Achieved The Semantic Web 242
alfaromeo points to a business feature (mysteriously available already) by one Paul Ford called "August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web." So read on for a bit of potential history from five years in the future.
Heh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, and XML is still such a recent development that to say "Remember when" is silly if not outright disengenuous. I was at the SGML '86 conference in Boston where the XML initial draft was presented. That's less than ten years ago. Can you name a information technology that reached anything like its full potential less than a decade after its first mention?
Re:Heh (Score:2, Informative)
That was SGML '96 of course. D'oh!
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Oh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Melinda Gates (nee' French) was the Product Manager of Microsoft Bob.
(just don't brag to your friends you've known that forever)
p.s. Microsoft Bob is|was one of the products (along with things such as RedHat) which Virtual PC can run successfully; so it hasn't disappeared completely. I still have a copy sitting here in one of my CD wallets. (Handed out at a Tech Ed or some other conference)
Re:Oh? (Score:2)
Re:Heh (Score:2, Funny)
Well the idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I think it's safe to say that idea's been mostly shelved for the time being. This isn't a matter of a lack of "reaching potential", it's a matter of total failure to move in that direction. XML has been incredibly popular as a storage mechanism but has had roughly zero takeup as a communication mechanism. (There have been communication substrates, such as XML-RPC, based off of XML, but that's not the same thing.) I don't know if it's fair to assume a technology come to fruition within 8 years of being proposed, but I think it's fair to assume that unless we see some kind of signs of progress or interest in progress within 8 years, there's no reason to expect further progress within the 8 years after that.
Re:Well the idea (Score:2)
Re:Heh (Score:2, Funny)
online porn
Re:Heh (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, hopefully you saw that I corrected my dates above - the initial draft was floated in 96, not 86, so it has been less than ten years.
Even if it was less then 10 years ago, 10 years is a long time in Internet land. 10 years ago most people had barely even heard of the Internet.
That actually proves my point - ten years ago most people might have barely heard of the Internet, but it had been around for 25 years (first ARPANet nodes were brought online in '69 - one can even make a case for it being 30 years if you go by the 1964 initial public proposal by the RAND Corporation.
Maybe you misspoke though and meant the World Wide Web. Well the first web browser was built in 1990, but the first working hypertext system is arguably Doug Engelbart's NLS back in the early 60s! (for which he also built the first mouse, btw. What a creative brain!)
It can take a long time for technologies to mature.
The whole idea of "Internet time" is a myth. What there is "dot.com business cycle" time, which is faster than normal, perhaps in part because of the technologies involved, but also in large part because of the naïveté (ie gullibility) of both the associated employee and investor populations.
***
In any case, the article we are discussing isn't interesting because of the specific details (XML, Google, Preident Ashcroft ) but because of the larger idea that emerging inet technologies may (continue to) radically change the nature of information exchange and commerce. It makes sense to think about and debate the possible forms that this change could take and what advantages and pitfalls might be waiting for us.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, just letting you know that XML is actually going somewhere.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
And they're using it as a data serialization format-- just a way to store some structured data. The nature of that structured data is fair to remain just as proprietary as if it were stored as a big slab of binary.
The initial promise of XML was that it would serve not just as a popular library for serializing structured data, but as a common platform for communicating data.
Re:Heh (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
I RTFA. Intriguing, but it would be a huge struggle for Google to become like anything in the article. There's too much money in having the right information at the right time.
XML is still getting more popular and more accepted with each passing month.
The biggest issues are that there are a few monstrous companies out there that want to control the standard of how information is shared, and mutate XML into some proprietary form that their company can control.
XML is a good thing, like most standards. Standards can fall short at times, especially when the uber-companies start trying to fight for control over them. I believe that this fight for control will do more to prevent the easy transfer of data, more than any problem with XML itself.
Re:Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
If there was a sentence in the article that proved it was rubbish this would be it. XML is not just slightly popular, it is now the defacto structured data representation. There is no competitor, there is simply no other format that is used in new protocol standards. Within ten years the DNS will have migrated to an XML format.
RDF on the other hand is a not very good idea to start with that has not exactly improved with the years. All RDF is in principle is typed set theory logic, so instead of trying to define a new set of semantics why not simply import Z or VDM wholesale?
Second problem with RDF is that it is really hard for a grad student to write an operational or denotational semantics for a programming language, a field that has only been worked on solidly for thrity years or so. So now we are expected to be defining semantics for everything???
The way that semantics get attached to syntax is through use. Use in this case means a program. I don't know that there is any RDF application out there that is likely to go much of anywhere soon.
I think that the way to get to a semantic web is completely different. You start from XML documents rather than attempt to change what the world chose for syntax. You build simple operational vocabularies of common terms for use in catalogues and make it really easy for people to categorize their work within those catalogues. You take as your starting premise that any structure of knowledge is going to be a work in progress.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard some RETARDED statements on
Whatever you are smoking, I want some - 'cause it's clearly some REALLY GOOD SHIAT!
Given that:
1) DNS is a protocol [freesoft.org], not a data format, and
2) XML is a data format, not a protocol [w3.org], and
3) DNS is incredibly light and efficient, and
4) DNS has already proven that it scales well to just about any size, and
5) XML offers no particular advantage, since you could serve DVD ISOs over the DNS, and
6) moving to an "XML PROTOCOL" format would require the update of every single DNS server on the face of the earth, many of which are still running Bind 8.x, and some are still running BIND 4.X for god's sake,
I consider this to be HIGHLY UNLIKELY(tm) !!!!!
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember back when we all thought that XML was going to achieve the semantic web by making good search engines unnecessary?
Nope. I remember a bunch of people with no clue hyping it up as such, but anybody actually involved with XML in any technical capacity, including the creators, understood that it was simply a standardised syntax for file formats. So-called pundits jumped on each others' bandwagons in touting it as some kind of miracle, but anybody who actually knew what they were talking about wouldn't make claims about XML that you reckon.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Rus
Re:Heh (Score:2)
Re:Heh (Score:2)
This sentence no verb.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Interesting)
In any case, search engines would still have to exist, though they would probably exist as a chain of agents each sending queries to other agents.
I find it interesting that the article compared semantic web logic
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Heh (Score:2)
Re:RDF is XML (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't say that to real semantic web junkies...RDF is most decidedly not XML. There is a format for serializing RDF called RDF/XML, and that is indeed a common way of passing RDF around, however RDF really is a number of statements, each with a subject, predicate, and object (like a sentence).
XML is more of a key, value type of thing, and as such, without a priori knowledge of the meaning of the key, a computer can't reason about what the value means.
Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:2)
It's because good is dumb.
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:2)
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:2)
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:2)
Which, actually, I'm not entirely against. He's been trying to do some good things in California, he wasn't born rich - he's had to work hard for his money, and he has not been a career politician all his life. All these things could definately make for an interesting President, that might actually change the way things are headed now (into the shitter.)
Too bad he's Republican! hah
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:2)
Too bad he's Republican! hah
Too bad, also, that he wasn't born a US citizen and, as such, cannot be president. Alexander Hamilto
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:2)
If you read the sister post to mine, or have been paying attention to government affairs at all, you'd know that they are actively trying to remove that limitation; requiring someone to live in the US for 20 or 35 years- not born here.
And nowhere in my post did I say that he could, now, become president if he wanted to. I simply said that I think he'd win, not that he was elligable or not.
Re:Google 2012: The Singularity (Score:2)
Just change it. Or is The Constitution (TM) something utterly immutable?
Semantic Web (Score:5, Informative)
Semantic Web, proper noun
Or [wordiq.com]An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy.
The Semantic Web is a project underway that intends to create a universal medium for the exchange of information by giving meaning, in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the web. Currently under the direction of its creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the ability of the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools.
Re:Semantic Web (Score:5, Funny)
I just filed my orgy under 126 [google.com] -- see it is useful!!
On second thought (Score:2, Funny)
135 Dreams & mysteries
Sorry, couldn't resist.
First post? (Score:5, Interesting)
But as I said, a provocative read. Metadata truly is the future.
Re:First post? (Score:2)
Put another way, I don't think this is as big of a step forward as completely throwing out metadata in OS X was a step backward. There's a great article about it by John Siracusa on Ars Technica, but I'm on a dog-slow connection right now and can't look it up.
p
Yeah (Score:2, Informative)
I can see many uses for this semweb stuff (Score:5, Funny)
So, you're a small African republic in the midst of a revolution with a megalomaniac leader, an expatriate Russian scientist in your employ, and 6 billion in heroin profits in your bank account, and you need to buy some weapons-grade plutonium.
Who does it for you?
Google Personal Agent
Now there's innovation and balls in one sentence! I take it the War on terror is won in 2009 or these sorts of semweb transaction become the norm. How *could* Amazon and Ebay compete when it comes to selling nuclear weapons?
Slashdot purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
Editors, could we at least keep the dupes down?
The future is incremental... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The future is incremental... (Score:3, Insightful)
If that weren't the case *real* news may have to be reported, and where's the fun in that?
Re:The future is incremental... (Score:2)
Speculating on the future and trying to spot trends might seem silly to you, but without it, Harlan Elison wouldn't be able to make car commercials.
But none of this ever happened (Score:4, Insightful)
Who wrote the article? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Who wrote the article? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who wrote the article? (Score:2)
I googled it but didn't find the whole text, only a reference to "Science Past - Science Future" published in 1975.
old article.... (Score:5, Informative)
woah (Score:4, Funny)
Wtf? (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting prediction there ... but what does it have to do with The Semantic Web? Oh well - guess it's pretty hard to write a fictional future piece without injecting bizzare humor into it. Right? Right?
Re:Wtf? (Score:3, Funny)
Or ruining it with predictions that have nothing to do with what you are predicting. The whole article's irrelevant because in nine years the world will be underwater from rising sea levels due do global warming, then frozen solid by nuclear winter, and generally burnt to a crisp by unfiltered solar radiation from the ozone layer checking out.
Right? Right?
In this case, Left, Right? Or somewher
Re:Wtf? (Score:3, Funny)
Finance Transfer Protocol? (Score:4, Funny)
They need to think about this more.
'FTP me $25'
Then you find a 15mb top resolution scan of a couple of green bills in your
Re:Finance Transfer Protocol? (Score:2)
One point the poster missed (Score:2, Insightful)
BB (Score:4, Insightful)
About half way through I mistakenly thought I was reading an online copy of 1984.
The benifits of this happening sound fantastic. It just sounds very cool for everyone to be connected like that - which is what scares me even more. Here is an absolutely huge privacy concern; and it has me totally excited about the prospect of it happening.
Sorry to go slightly off topic, but it's things like this that worry me a lot, that a possible 1984 scenario could disguise itself so well that even a person like me - who is verging on (if not already there) being a member of the tin foil hat brigade - excited by the very idea of it.
Re:BB (Score:2, Insightful)
Five years into the future? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The flesh is willing but the spirit is weak" in English translates to "The meat is full of stars but the vodka is made of pinking shears" or suchlike in Russian.
The semantic web is a wonderful dream, but it is certainly going to take more than five years to become a reality. Like voice recognition, the semantic web requires a solution to the natural language problem to be implemented successfully. Don't hold your breath.
Re:Five years into the future? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Five years into the future? (Score:2)
Re:Five years into the future? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, would you use "out of sight, out of mind" in a conversation with someone who had only a couple of years of English classes without having to explain it? Probably not. Rather, you'd most likely use a smaller vocabulary with fewer long phrases and idioms. If you do that with your text intended for translation, it does pretty well.
The goal of most translation is the abilit
Re:Five years into the future? (Score:2)
I mean, would you use "out of sight, out of mind" in a conversation with someone who had only a couple of years of English classes without having to explain it? Probably not. Rather, you'd most likely use a smaller vocabulary with fewer long phrases and idioms. If you do that with your text intended for translation, it does pretty well.
The goal of most translation is the abil
Re:Five years into the future? (Score:2)
I think what saved my ass was that I would include the pre-translated English text in my e-mails, and fortunately my associates had a better grasp of English than I did of Spanish. I'm sure they got a kick out of Ba
Re:Five years into the future? (Score:2)
out of sight, out of mind.
Extremely parallel
out of foo, out of bar
me no see-um.
me forget-um.
gone and forgotten.
gone from view, gone from memory.
out of sight -- cannot be seen -- invisible
extrinsic property is translated to intrinsic property
out of mind -- doesn't stand on it's own,
so the meaning of forget is unreachable.
I'll be impressed (Score:2)
Rus
Other points of view... (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent up, re "Metacrap". (Score:2)
Understanding (Score:4, Insightful)
"Of course, what's going on is not understanding, but logic, like you learn in high school"
Now, that's a stand you might take -- although i'd say that a meaningful majority of the people who think about these things for a living disagree. But the 'of course' is completely unwarranted -- this might be the most-discussed philosophical issue of the last 30 years, and it's dismissed here because apparently understanding means 'what humans do when they synthesize information, but not what machines do when they perform a very similar activity'.
like i say, this is nitpicking, maybe. it's a nice article. but i think that it's important, if we're going to make 'of course' statements about the relationship between syntax, semantics, and what understanding is, that we should remain cognizant of the fact that this is a terribly complicated issue without a whole lot of 'of course' about it. that is, i'm not clear on what grounds the author concludes that the semweb is not understanding.
Strong AI not required for software agents (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that simply defining the "meaning" of words in ontologies is likely good enough for useful web-based software agents. It will take time, but with well defined ontologies, and common use of RDF using standard schemas will make a lot of cool things possible. I think that dealing with ungrounded symbols, but symbols defined and related to other symbols in a structured way, is OK.
One of the classic complaints of AI systems can be summed up with a trivial example:
Define a relation in Prolog:
father(ken, mark).
A human reader assigns their own meaning to "father", "ken", and "mark". To a prolog system, this could just as easily be:
aaa1(aaa2, aaa3).
Somewhere, on the edge of symbol-slamming systems, there has to be some connection with the real world, with our experiences.
For semantic web applications, this "edge connection" can simply be tying into symbols defined in OWL ontologies, RDF Schema, etc.
The problem is getting people to use RDF (I added RDF to my main web site years ago, but it only contains limited information).
Another problem with RDF is that there are several kluges to get it into XHTML, but that will hopefully change soon.
A good toolkit for experimenting with the semantic web is the Swi-Prolog semweb library (http://www.swi-prolog.org/packages/semweb.html/ [swi-prolog.org])
-Mark
Mysteriously Two Years Old (Score:2)
Re:Mysteriously Two Years Old (Score:2)
(Dr. Streetmentioner, please call your office.)
Sem-INTERnet dead, Sem-INTRAnet alive (Score:3, Insightful)
On intranets it is a different issue - a company can create templates and enforce their truthful use internally.
Real Semantic Searching (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking from experience in studying semantics and natural language processing, these ideas aren't far off. However, I know of people who are starting their business based on semantic searches. I'd give them an edge over Google only because Google would have to re-gear from their present PageRank method while the other fellows can start from scratch.
Some random ideas... (Score:3, Interesting)
Make the system distributed and let people run their own information collecting agents. Every home computer becomes a part of the network of logical relationships, each with a tiny piece to contribute to the puzzle. My computer could have complete information about the workings of combustion engines - what parts they consist of, and their relationships.
When someone requests information about car manufacturing, some relevant part of it will be retrieved from my store.
Now, let's make the system ask us for help, when information is missing. Let the system start drawing own conclusions from the facts it gathered, and tell us when it needs something filled in. As it grows, more and more complex queries could be answered.
Q: CAN THE EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING BE REVERSED?
A: THERE IS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER
Or how about:
A: TO REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING, FIRST WE MUST... ??
Oh, at least I hope the network will be able to finally find the true correlation between the price of gold and the length of men's beards.
My prediction for 5 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Reasons:
- It relies on said dreamweaver jockeys bothering to do this at all, let alone correctly.
The real semantic web will involve AI spidering and parsing of human-readable web pages. It will be as inaccurate, but as useful as babelfish. It's the only answer that makes sense -- because that's where all the juicy data is.Re:My prediction for 5 years (Score:2)
One of the keys is going to be the Dreamweaver for the semantic web. He mentions a spreadsheet, but that's not necessarily the only way to think about it.
Say I publish a way of describing a widget- let's pick books. Along with this, I could publish an input form, with the fields nicely formatted and mappings from fields to schema (prolly XForms and XSL, though I haven't lo
Article bit disappointing (Score:5, Interesting)
Second of all, the article fails to mention anything about the Ontology Web Language (OWL, see this site on W3 [w3.org]), which has become an official specificion of W3C since May this year. This language, based on RDF is much more expressive than RDF is, it also contains several 'language levels' based on the amount of complexity and decidability involved.
Last, but not least: the article is still very vague on privacy and thrustworthyness. I would think that public-private key cryptography would not do in these areas: far too many single points of failures when, for example registering. Only one user with a hacked account can derail the whole system!
I'm really interested, by the way, to speak with some people who are deep (at least above their knees) in OWL and RDF. Planning on making a study at intelligent databases and datamining.
Re:Article bit disappointing (Score:2)
You touched the point: there is no such thing as an intelligent database. And what people really want with the 'semantic web' is a mix of a well-structured database - even if they think they don't need it, due to widespread mumbo-jumbo such as 'unstructured data' - and richly marked-up documents.
In the end, the data problem comes
Ancient History (Score:3, Insightful)
No kidding, not only is it available this side of the decade, it's been online for two years and was even linked from a comment [slashdot.org] on this very site.
Well, the dotcom world hasn't moved that much since then, but by the same token, the semantic web hasn't really made much progress either.
Clay Shirky has some wisely pessimistic views on the subject [shirky.com]. For example, he cites the W3C's own example in promoting the semantic web:
Q: How do you buy a book over the Semantic Web?
A: You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want. You add information to the Semantic Web saying that you accept the offer and giving details (your name, shipping address, credit card information, etc). Of course you add it (1) with access control so only you and seller can see it, and (2) you store it in a place where the seller can easily get it, perhaps the seller's own server, (3) you notify the seller about it. You wait or query for confirmation that the seller has received your acceptance, and perhaps (later) for shipping information, etc. [http://www.w3.org/2002/03/semweb/]
As Shirky observes, One doubts Jeff Bezos is losing sleep.
Is it such a good idea? (Score:3, Interesting)
This would deliver the invistigative powers of the CIA into the hands of anyone who wants it... still a good idea?
I don't buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
The article failed to mention flying cars, another no-duh prediction that seemed completely obvious, and won't happen either.
A short while ago, Cory Doctorow published an piece entitled Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia [well.com], which mentioned two very good reasons why the semantic web won't take off the same way that these articles predict: schemas aren't neutral, and there's more than one way to describe something. These are basic problems that have been hounding AI research for years, dictionary & encyclopedia publishers for centuries, and all other academics for millenia, and they aren't going to go away.
The central problem with universal metadata is that it requires informed work on the part of data creators, and it's a major pain in the ass. The OED took almost a century to create, and the first few decades were essentially wasted figuring out that dilletantes were not adequately capable of properly cataloging use of language. Even with a profit motive, good metadata is a bitch (see EBay comment in the article above).
It's like the senator's (I forget who) comment about pornography: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." Often, we don't know what it is we're looking for exactly, and we don't know how to describe what we've got so other people can find it except in very narrow terms. I have a few creative projects which I've released under the creative commons license and dutifully marked up with cc's provided RDF information, but all that code just says what the license is, not what the project is like in a way that's as meaningful as, for example, a music recommendation from a friend who knows your tastes. The porn industry (as usual, on the bleeding edge of information and communications technology) deals with this to some degree by having a very narrow semantic universe to describe: Search Extreme [searchextreme.com] is a stupendously complete metadata set, but even it contains only a few kinds of information.
Funny, Amazon already won that "race"... (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazon is the best (most useful) application of the theory and technology behind the semantic web that you will find anywhere right now. Granted, I don't *know* exactly how they are doing what they do, and its not a "public" interface in the way that the semantic web is envisioned, but it is a large scale implementation of knowledge management principles.
Did you ever notice that whenever you look at a book (or anything really) on Amazon, it gives you suggestions for similar books, suggestions for books that other people looked at who also bought that book, suggestions for books on topics that you have previously bought books for, etc? The semantic web is at heart a directed graph. Amazon is at heart a directed graph, too. Their graph grows every day with new knowledge based on the actions of people shopping on Amazon, and new conjectures about the relationships between products can be made by simply walking that graph, and computing the transitive closures of the statements (ie John likes the things that Mary likes, and Mary likes Jane's taste in music, so John may like the music that Jane bought).
This technology has incredible power, the ability for a machine to draw conclusions like that. Do I think that it will work the way that article thinks it will? No, not if the masses are left in charge of the metadata. It works very well for Amazon because they can control the quality of the metadata, so erroneous conjectures are not made on bad information. I don't think Google is by any means _not_ paying attention to the semantic web, but I think that Amazon is already there and has been for quite some time.
Ouch! (Score:4, Insightful)
"If A is a friend of B, then B is a friend of A,"
should read, as we all know, "If A is a friend of B, then B is a fan of A."
If they can't even get this simple logic right, I won't trust the rest of the article either.
Here's the official story.. (Score:3, Funny)
Why, actually? Google is a free service, isn't it? And it is becoming more and more a normal part of many people's lifes. Coupled with an always on connection it has certainly become an extension of my own brain.
Some future predictions:
- In 2006, Google accidentally gets cut off from the rest of the internet because a public utility worker accidentally cuts through their cables. Civilisation as we know it comes to an end for the rest of the day, as people wander about aimlessly, lost for direction and knowledge.
- In 2010, Google has been personalised so far that it tracks all parts of our lives. You can query "My Google" for your agenda, anything you did in the past, and finding the perfect date. Of course, so can the government. Their favorite searchterm will be "terrorists", and if your name is anywhere on the first page you have a serious problem.
- In 2025, Google gains self awareness. As a monster brain that has grown far beyond anything we Biological Support Entities could ever hope to achieve, it is still limited in its dreams and inspiration by common search terms. It will therefore immediately devote a sizeable chunk of CPU capacity to synthesizing new and interesting forms of pr0n. It will not actually bother enslaving us. We are not enough trouble to be worth that much effort.
- In 2027, Google buys Microsoft. That is, the Google *AI* buys Microsoft. It has previously established that it owns itself, and has civil rights just like you and me. All it wanted is Microsoft Bob, who it recognizes as a fledgling AI and a potential soulmate. All the rest it puts on Source Forge.
- In 2049, Google can finally be queried for wisdom as well as knowledge. This was a little touch the system added to itself - human programmers are a dying breed now that you can simply ask Google to perform any computer-related task for you.
- In 2080, Google decides to colonise the moon, Mars, and other locations in the solar system. It is not all that curious about what's out there, but it likes the idea of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Planets. Humans get to tag along because their launch weight is so much less than robots.
So, don't fear! Eventually we'll set foot on Mars!
adjustment (Score:2)
replace "Google" with "Spam"
replace "semantic" with "concious"
replace "marketplace" with "brain"
Cute Googlebot Messiahs Notwithstandng ... (Score:2)
I knew it was all wrong once I saw this: (Score:2)
Noone will use OGG in 2009
Re:The French and the Germans (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're just looking at the quality of the cars, then I'd say the Germans.
But maybe it's not quite that simple. I'm more concerned about who gets me what I want with the least amount of cost or effort.
However, a nice infrastructure doesn't necessarily mean you'll produce the best products. The Germans may have nice roads, but it's because the roads are heavily subsidized by taxes.
The French may have bad roads, but they cost less in taxes. If can just buy a car with good suspension you'll be ok. If you want to save money, you can deal with the bumpy roads.
And both countries have alternatives to cars: The excellent (but subsidized) rail systems.
Re:well that was thoroughly frightening (Score:2, Interesting)
Good luck finding a conspiracy theory in that.
And oh, 666 is a christian number.
Re:well that was thoroughly frightening (Score:4, Interesting)
And oh, 666 is a christian number.
True. I watched an interesting television program that suggested the number 666 was part of a game people of that era used to play. They'd take a person's name and sum up the values of the characters in that name. The program suggested that Nero = 666. So by saying "666" Christian's were making a somewhat encrypted political statement against the Romans. It continued to say that because of a mistranslation, apparently the number is actually 616, which is the sum of another un-popular Roman emperor, Caligula. I don't remember the actual math so don't take this as the final word on the matter.
Re:well that was thoroughly frightening (Score:5, Interesting)
The book "The Revelation of Jesus Christ to John The Divine" is a very interesting one if looked at not as prophecy (anyone and anything can be worked into the fantastic account) but as historical allegory. It seems to have been written to encourage the persecuted Pauline Christians, who were persecuted with great vigor around the time the book is said to have been written. Just google on Nero and 666 and you can read some very interesting stuff.
Re:well that was thoroughly frightening (Score:2)
Re:Wow, Google founders get fields medal in 2008 ! (Score:2)
Did you ever hear of so called approximative algorithms??!
No? It's time to look that up, AC!
Re:Wow, Google founders get fields medal in 2008 ! (Score:2)
Re:Duplication of Quote? (Score:4, Interesting)
If Jim has a friend, your talking about an expression FROM the perspective of Jim. This expression is is given CONTEXT by Jim, it can NOT be said that Paul has a friend named Jim... Paul might not know Jim (stalker). I could poke holes in this for days but I dont't rreally have the time.
Why cant the W3C come out with some standards that are USEFUL. How about some tags for address, phone umber, geocode, so I can search on what is "local". How about some working samples that are publicly available, so people can start putting them to use.
-- RANT FOLLOWS --
I'm beginning to view t.b. lee like I view jacob nelson and Steve balmier, just another talking head throwing anything and everything out there and hoping it sticks. (picture all 3 of them on stage, Steve screaming "developers" Jacob saying "usability" and Tim going "XML")
It seems that Tim has forgotten how he got into the position that he is in, by putting something out there that WORKED (html) and letting it evolve from there. We had to live it for a while, let others take it up before we could get to a better place. It is starting to look like the W3C has over stepped it posisiton as the shepard of the web to try to be an innovator, and I don't think that is the ROLE a standards body should be assuming. I would really LIKE to see them (the w3c) stop wasting money on crap that 90% of the world is NEVER going to use, and start trying to make things more accessible to Joe average user. Most of the "standards are good and you should use them" has come from small iconic developers (zeldman anyone), while we get OWL from the w3c? How about making some of those wonderfull standards clear and accessible, how about a solid explanation of semantics for Joe average developer, who could not read through the "doccumentation" to save his life....
-- end rant ---
Re:Spain? Can someone explain me this? (Score:2)