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The first bloody paragraph of Strunk and bloody White.

Yes, and that's only one of the many many things that misguided and horribly out-of-date book is wrong about.

This post by Prof. Arnold Zwicky (Linguistics, Stanford) only gives a hint of how much that little book is loathed by people who actually know something about language and style. Especially on the other side of the pond where many of its "rules" were never ever considered correct.

Strunk & White is to language as BASIC is to programming--you can learn something from it, but it's likely to cause damage that will take years to repair.

I guess fixing the existing infrastructure in the US is not a sexy headline making theme for politicians but the existing problems should be addressed before we start spending money on random things just to create jobs.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/rebuilding-america/4301459

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2627

http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2009/02/04/americas-bridges-are-falling-down.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20095291/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/

Chicken.

I suspect that the comment you note is largely correct. Back when this was still on view at your friendly local hospital, people had a certain... urgency about vaccinations.

I suspect that there is one other slightly subtler sub-factor: the difficulty of intuitively comparing small risks. The vaccines that draw the most fire today are the ones for comparatively non-scary sounding diseases. Everybody knows that things like polio and smallpox were Seriously. Bad. News. Things like Measles and Mumps, though, just don't sound that scary. However, Measles, for example, does have a .3% mortality rate, and the risk of encephalitis or corneal damage isn't fun either. However, people are very bad, intuitively, at comparing very small and very large values. The rate of complications and fatalities from the MMR vaccine is lower than that of the diseases it helps prevent(even weighted with the less than 100% probability of getting the disease); but not quite zero. However, since both values are very small, they both fall into the "small; but gnawingly nonzero" risk category, which makes them feel close to equivalent. With something like Polio vs. Polio vaccine, the high risk/low risk intuition is straightforward and emotions match math. With low risk/lower risk, the math holds up; but intuition and emotion don't necessarily fall into line...

This is what I do to avoid lugging a laptop around:

Buy a 32gb USB flash drive, and store all of your data on it. Use Unison to sync the flash drive with all your computers as necessary. Once you learn not to make incompatible changes on both computers, syncing is extremely quick and easy. An added benefit is that you automatically get a redundant off-site backup.

I asked the same question in another thread, but didn't get any answers. But eventually I googled for Dropbox alternatives and came up with these:

DirSync Pro - Win/Mac/Linux, runs on Java
Unison - Win/Mac/Linux
QtdSync - Windows & Linux GUI for rsynch

Note: I haven't used *any* of these. I can't speak to whether they work or not. These were the ones that fit my specification of open, free, setup on my own server, GUI included (otherwise I'd just use rsynch), and multi-platform. I'll be exploring them when I get the time.

Can't help you at all with the pony. Sorry.

Oh no, that was obviously the wrong link I just posted. Here is the correct one: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

from their letter:

"Again, my apologies for the long delay in this correspondence. I do
anticipate we will have a revised procedure description online soon,
but did not want to delay further before sending this correspondence."

"In the meantime, I will summarize for you the main points that allowed
the renewal for Brainwave to apply to The Escape. Then, I will
provide a listing of the titles by Poul Anderson that we are working
with. That way, you might want to confirm whether our bibliographic
research (on title variations) and copyright research (on renewal
records) seems to be correct."

You seem to be under the assumption that it's EASY to find out if something is still under copyright.

from http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/renewals.html
"
There are a few ways to find out whether a copyright was renewed. Some are easier than others; some are more definite in their answers than others.

One easy way to check, sometimes, is just to see if there was any edition published more than 28 years after the original edition, and see if there's a renewal notice in that newer edition. This doesn't always work-- a lot of books simply don't get reprinted-- but if there is such an edition, it can be an easy check to make.

Another way that doesn't involve an exhaustive copyright record search is to write to the author, or their agent or estate, or to the last publisher of the book, and see if they can tell you whether the book's copyright was renewed. Of course, you might not always be able to reach them, and they might not always cooperate, but people on the Net have done this before and found out what they wanted to know. Sometimes, even if the copyright has been renewed, by mailing them you might be able to convince them to let an edition go online anyway.

It's also possible to do a search yourself of the copyright records. For 1978 onward, they're online at the Copyrigh Office, and below I'll describe how you can search the online records. Most book-related renewal records from years from 1950 to 1977 are now also online at least in page image form.

Other copyright records prior to 1978 are available in print and microform, both at the Library of Congress, and at other major libraries around the country, including many Federal Depository Libraries. A few libraries known to have a reasonably full set are the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, the Free Library of Philadelphia (in microform), the University of Chicago library, and the University of California, Los Angeles. ...
You can also arrange for the Copyright Office to do the search for you. There's a form you can fill out and send to them, and they'll eventually let you know if they find any renewal records, and if so, what they say. This has gotten rather expensive as of late; as of January 2010, the fees amount to $165 per hour (with a 2-hour minimum) for them to search their files for you. If you want an advance estimate of the search fee, it will cost $115 more! If you're precise in your book specification, they should be able to complete the search within the 2-hour minimum. See Circular 22 for more details, and a copy of the search request form.
"

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=569

Also reminded of this line from MC Lars' "Download This Song":

Epic's up in my face like, "Don't steal our songs Lars," While Sony sells the burners that are burning CD-R's

Sony shouldn't sell CD burners then? CD-R's should be banned? I am cool for downloading songs and Sony are suckers for making the technology that helps in this, even though I would otherwise say that technology is neutral and it is the individual's responsibility how he uses it? What exactly is the point being made?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=569

Also reminded of this line from MC Lars' "Download This Song":

Epic's up in my face like, "Don't steal our songs Lars,"
While Sony sells the burners that are burning CD-R's

Ah - my google-fu returned. The thing can indeed be found here: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Turns out what I posted was more of a paraphrase than a quote - I was connecting this passage:

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress

with this one, that actually occurs a few paragraphs before:

One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

But the one that really encapsulated my thinking (that made me respond in the first place) is this one:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

+5, Informative?...REALLY?!?...

OK, let's start with a handily recent post on the Language Log about Latin plurals (the post is about "syllabus", but "virus/viruses/*viri/**virii" show up in the comments).

Now, onward...

Well, if you want to get all prissy about the Latin, then it's incorrect to use the word to describe a single unit of the substance, in the way it's not correct to call a single water molecule "a water".

Actually (and ignoring the somewhat startling categorisation of computer virus as "substance"), not in the same way at all. You can't call a single molecule of water "a water" because "water" is a mass noun in English, and those don't (i) take indefinite articles, and (ii) don't pluralize nicely (inter alia). It's possible that this portion of your argument comes from here, which points out that in Latin, "virus" ("poison") was a mass noun. Of course, in English, "virus" is very clearly a count noun in English, since it can be (and overwhelmingly is) used with an indefinite article.

Id est, since a viral program is itself a cell in the viral infection of many computers, there's no term for it other than "viral program" and no term for several of them other than "viral programs".

You appear in the preceding to be claiming that the word "virus" doesn't exist in English (or perhaps simply that is has no referent) a claim some information security researchers (and doctors!) might take issue with (cue lambasting for the stranded preposition in 3...2..1).

That being said, this raises an interesting point about...something. Maybe the type/token distinction? When someone says "I wrote a virus", we take him (or her, I suppose) to be making a claim about an implementation of some specific algorithm in some specific language, but not to any particular token of it.

The "virus" would be some arbitrarily bounded subset of the population of said viral programs infecting machines, [...]

I don't understand the grounds on which you're making this claim.

[...] which could devolve to a single program infecting a single machine, but would still not be the correct term for that program or, indeed, for the viral infection being suffered by that machine. It could correctly refer to the running program and its data (which in most computers includes its instructions) and the progress of its states,

OK, so the "running program, and its data" counts pretty much as a "single token of the substance" at hand, in my book. So now it sounds like you're contradicting your opening claim.

but I'm pretty sure nobody much thinks of it that clearly when using the word "virus".

As I just mentioned, you seem to be contradicting yourself (although I may just be misreading you), so you'll forgive if I take claims of clear thinking only quasi-seriously.

Nor is it correct to use "a virus" to refer to a type of virus (exempli gratia Stuxnet, Sasser, Hopper, et cetera) [...]

Why is this 'incorrect'? "I wrote a virus. I'm calling it Johnny5." Seems like a perfectly good use of "a virus" to me.

[...] but only to an instance of that type of virus as it is spreading, [...]

Again, isn't this in contradiction to how you started this comment?

or, again, some arbitrary subset thereof, wherein it has its physical expression and aggregate, fluid form.

Aside from the impossibility of "some arbitrary subset" of an instance (I'll assume that was just a typo/thinko), now you're just engaged in verbal wankery. I mean, I suppose you might choose to model the spread of contagion in a network of computers as the flow of a kind of flu

+5, Informative?...REALLY?!?...

OK, let's start with a handily recent post on the Language Log about Latin plurals (the post is about "syllabus", but "virus/viruses/*viri/**virii" show up in the comments).

Now, onward...

Well, if you want to get all prissy about the Latin, then it's incorrect to use the word to describe a single unit of the substance, in the way it's not correct to call a single water molecule "a water".

Actually (and ignoring the somewhat startling categorisation of computer virus as "substance"), not in the same way at all. You can't call a single molecule of water "a water" because "water" is a mass noun in English, and those don't (i) take indefinite articles, and (ii) don't pluralize nicely (inter alia). It's possible that this portion of your argument comes from here, which points out that in Latin, "virus" ("poison") was a mass noun. Of course, in English, "virus" is very clearly a count noun in English, since it can be (and overwhelmingly is) used with an indefinite article.

Id est, since a viral program is itself a cell in the viral infection of many computers, there's no term for it other than "viral program" and no term for several of them other than "viral programs".

You appear in the preceding to be claiming that the word "virus" doesn't exist in English (or perhaps simply that is has no referent) a claim some information security researchers (and doctors!) might take issue with (cue lambasting for the stranded preposition in 3...2..1).

That being said, this raises an interesting point about...something. Maybe the type/token distinction? When someone says "I wrote a virus", we take him (or her, I suppose) to be making a claim about an implementation of some specific algorithm in some specific language, but not to any particular token of it.

The "virus" would be some arbitrarily bounded subset of the population of said viral programs infecting machines, [...]

I don't understand the grounds on which you're making this claim.

[...] which could devolve to a single program infecting a single machine, but would still not be the correct term for that program or, indeed, for the viral infection being suffered by that machine. It could correctly refer to the running program and its data (which in most computers includes its instructions) and the progress of its states,

OK, so the "running program, and its data" counts pretty much as a "single token of the substance" at hand, in my book. So now it sounds like you're contradicting your opening claim.

but I'm pretty sure nobody much thinks of it that clearly when using the word "virus".

As I just mentioned, you seem to be contradicting yourself (although I may just be misreading you), so you'll forgive if I take claims of clear thinking only quasi-seriously.

Nor is it correct to use "a virus" to refer to a type of virus (exempli gratia Stuxnet, Sasser, Hopper, et cetera) [...]

Why is this 'incorrect'? "I wrote a virus. I'm calling it Johnny5." Seems like a perfectly good use of "a virus" to me.

[...] but only to an instance of that type of virus as it is spreading, [...]

Again, isn't this in contradiction to how you started this comment?

or, again, some arbitrary subset thereof, wherein it has its physical expression and aggregate, fluid form.

Aside from the impossibility of "some arbitrary subset" of an instance (I'll assume that was just a typo/thinko), now you're just engaged in verbal wankery. I mean, I suppose you might choose to model the spread of contagion in a network of computers as the flow of a kind of flu

Unison is better for two-way sync (even with more machines, as long as you sync pairs: AB, BC).

Actually, the purpose of the joke is to show that punctuation matters.

But what is the punctuation (allegedly) doing in that joke? Resolving three ambiguities that conspire to give the sentence two very different potential readings: two lexical ambiguities (the 3sg-present verb form shoots vs. the plural noun form shoots; similar for leaves), one syntactic (shoots and leaves as a coordinate noun phrase object of eats, vs. eats, shoots and leaves as a coordinate verb phrase consisting of three verb phrases, each headed by an unmodified intransitive verb).

So, basically, the point of the joke is that the rule matters because if you violate it, people will read the potentially ambiguous sentence as something dramatically different from what was meant (the panda shoots people!). The answer to that (other than to point out, as I've done, that people don't actually conclude that the comma means that the panda shoots people unless you guide them very carefully to that conclusion beforehand) is that potential ambiguity is commonplace in countless contexts that, by that criteria, would merit countless absurd usage prohibitions. Arnold Zwicky (very notable linguist) has an interesting blog post making this argument at more length, with other examples.

The downloads page says it requires QWave for waveform display and playback. Could that be the problem?

Though there are interesting speech recognition products for other applications ; for this task Dragon and IBM ViaVoice, both sold by ScanSoft, are pretty much the only software choices until someone qualified gets an NSF grant to beef up Sphinx.

I can second the recommendation of the LDC's XTrans if you're going to do this yourself.

If you want someone else to do it, here are a lot of podcasters who want transcripts, and a bunch of transcription services have sprung up to address the market. They've already implemented a lot of the quality-control mechanisms you'd have to address in order to get good results from something like the Mechnical Turk.

The Wall Street Journal ran a side-by-side comparison back in 2008 and recommended castingwords.com, but another provider may very well be better by now. Shop around.

Try XTrans from the Linguistic Data Consortium. It's GPL and specifically designed for doing speech transcription. Ask nicely for support, please; the main developer is quite busy.

Why don't you give XTrans a shot: XTrans

Irregardless of your beliefs,

Uh-huh.

the phrase was used in a perfectly crommulent way.

Not really. 'Begging the question': we have answers on Language Log.

heya,

Err, because it's not one single pharmaceutical company, but many? And if they don't do it, another will? The pharmaceutical industry is *fiercely* competitive, as well as requiring ludicrous amounts of money to fund.

It's a basic competitive market, with your normal supply-demand laws. Also, it's a bit cynical to think they'd never develop a cure - why the heck would they string you along for? The good PR for having developed *drumroll* the cure *drumroll* is benefit alone to any company, and a good way to show you're better than .

However, pharmaceutical companies are *incredibly* apprehensive about developing drugs for diseases afflicting the developing world, probably due to have been screwed over in the past for little profit. E.g.:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2498

Look, they are certainly not saints, they're profit-driven companies, but you have to understand how they operate if you want to see how you can direct them towards the greater public good.

Cheers,
Victor

What you said is true of any language. More apropos of the subject, it's not that simple: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290

Did submitter actually read his own links?
No one "solved" equation. They proved existence of couple of soulutions with specific properties.
"Penn mathematicians proved the global existence of classical solutions and rapid time decay to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation with long-range interactions. "
http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/university-pennsylvania-mathematicians-solve-140-year-old-boltzmann-equation-gaseous-behaviors
"Penn mathematicians proved the global existence of classical solutions and rapid time decay to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation with long-range interactions. "

You and everyone else on Slashdot need to read the Language Log's post, "Begging the question": we have answers.

|Robert Bork would almost certainly be considered not conservative enough by today's Republicans because he took the 2nd Amendment literally and |believed it only applied to "well-regulated militias" and did not give everybody the right to pack heat.

Um, "A well educated Electorate, being necessary to self-governance in a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed."

Where does this re-write prevent the "keeping and reading" of books? (cf: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005229.html )

OK, off topic.

https://common.law.upenn.edu/Pages/default.aspx also works(go to the "Fun" tab at the bottom) and choose the "Goat Story". My previous link worked for me though, maybe it's only accessible from the US or something.

Nonsense! For example, a real human could never mishear the phrase "guide dog" as "gay dog" and refuse to let a dog into a restaurant.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_in_English_with_counterintuitive_pronunciations

Examples: Cholmondeley, Featherstonehaugh, Marjoribanks

I suppose Enroughty doesn't count :).

That said, I've heard another alleged Icelander pronounce the volcano name differently- she (Becca) pronounces the fjall part.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2257

Personally, I'm having fun with the pronunciation. Especially since every Icelander seems to have their own way of saying it. I'm going with eya-love-a-jock-itch.

Have you ever read any W3C standards? There are a lot of parts that are left to the discretion of the implementation.

And there are a lot of parts that are written in sufficiently ambiguous English that the developers have to decide which possible interpretation to use.

This is, of course, mainly the fault of the English language. When writing specs, it's easy to read a passage with the meaning that you intend, and not notice that the wording is ambiguous. This is a general problem in all human languages, but since English lost most of its inflectional endings some centuries back, it has somewhat worse problems than most other languages. (Iff you want to see a real winner in this category, take a look at Mandarin. You wouldn't believe that a language so fraught with homophones could ever be used to communicate anything at all. ;-)

There was a really cute example of this at the Language Log blog recently. The article's title is self-referential, in the sense that it commits the error that is the article's topic. The word "slander" in the title is not a verb; it's a noun. You need to read the discussion to understand what it's talking about. To fully understand it, you should also google the phrase "crash blossom", which comes from an especially spectacular failure at news headline writing due to English ambiguity.

Anyway, it's nearly impossible to write standards that don't have ambiguities. About the best that can be done is what the POSIX group did: They asked for submissions of what they termed "weirdnix", which was a POSIX-compliant implementation of a feature that was technically compliant with the wording of the standard, but did something in a way that would be surprising to programmers and would make the code non-portable. They used such submissions to rephrase the standards to eliminate the ambiguities that allowed such bad implementations. They didn't totally succeed, of course. Success isn't possible when written in a language like English.

(Many people have suggested that Microsoft consciously implemented "weirdnix" in their POSIX library. It's fairly easy to write code that works the same on all POSIX-compliant libraries except Windows. It's very difficult to write POSIX code that works both on MS Windows and on other POSIX-compliant systems. ;-)

Have you ever read any W3C standards? There are a lot of parts that are left to the discretion of the implementation.

And there are a lot of parts that are written in sufficiently ambiguous English that the developers have to decide which possible interpretation to use.

This is, of course, mainly the fault of the English language. When writing specs, it's easy to read a passage with the meaning that you intend, and not notice that the wording is ambiguous. This is a general problem in all human languages, but since English lost most of its inflectional endings some centuries back, it has somewhat worse problems than most other languages. (Iff you want to see a real winner in this category, take a look at Mandarin. You wouldn't believe that a language so fraught with homophones could ever be used to communicate anything at all. ;-)

There was a really cute example of this at the Language Log blog recently. The article's title is self-referential, in the sense that it commits the error that is the article's topic. The word "slander" in the title is not a verb; it's a noun. You need to read the discussion to understand what it's talking about. To fully understand it, you should also google the phrase "crash blossom", which comes from an especially spectacular failure at news headline writing due to English ambiguity.

Anyway, it's nearly impossible to write standards that don't have ambiguities. About the best that can be done is what the POSIX group did: They asked for submissions of what they termed "weirdnix", which was a POSIX-compliant implementation of a feature that was technically compliant with the wording of the standard, but did something in a way that would be surprising to programmers and would make the code non-portable. They used such submissions to rephrase the standards to eliminate the ambiguities that allowed such bad implementations. They didn't totally succeed, of course. Success isn't possible when written in a language like English.

(Many people have suggested that Microsoft consciously implemented "weirdnix" in their POSIX library. It's fairly easy to write code that works the same on all POSIX-compliant libraries except Windows. It's very difficult to write POSIX code that works both on MS Windows and on other POSIX-compliant systems. ;-)

It was the lovely "Google's Computer Might Betters Translation Tool" (since changed in the HTML title to "Using Computing Might, Google Improves Translation Tool" and "Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool" in the online heading):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2169

There's also some commentary about the article from Ben Zimmer at Language Log...
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2170

It was the lovely "Google's Computer Might Betters Translation Tool" (since changed in the HTML title to "Using Computing Might, Google Improves Translation Tool" and "Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool" in the online heading):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2169

There's also some commentary about the article from Ben Zimmer at Language Log...
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2170

And to filter out all the questions that are better suited for their less competent colleagues.

More importantly, how to filter out the answers from those less competent people. I don't really want to fade through the IT equivalent of chiropractors claiming to be able to cure asthma.

There's simply too much incentive to try to fool such search engines about your abilities for this to be useful.

Since the problem is tantalizingly easy to frame as a standard data-mining or machine-learning problem, albeit with some quirks, there's quite a lot of work from a lot of research groups that seems to be looking at it. Some examples: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

This is not the first time that open source has been accused of being a vector for illegal activity, also, it has been labeled as communist http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2007&post=2007-05-14,1 http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism Those are just two mild examples

It's probably interesting to Americans to read what US universities tell international students to expect. (That's just the first hit for "going to the doctor in the usa international student").
Payment is usually expected at the time the care is given, therefore you should always check that your insurance will cover the treatment before it is given.

The same search for the UK gives this first
if you are studying full-time and have permission to be in the UK as a student for longer than 6 months, you are entitled to use [the NHS]. Your sticker in your passport will probably say 'no recourse to public funds'. Using the NHS is not using 'public funds'.

Giving up your seat may not be an issue of life or death, but it certainly is an issue of human rights. If you are drawing your line there, I must say, I think you are drawing it in the wrong place.

On the topic of the appropriateness of breaking laws, I think this excerpt from the Letter from Birmingham Jail sums up my feelings nicely:

One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

You can read the full letter here. It is a very good read, I highly suggest it. Anyways, I suppose what I'm saying is that the severity of the injustice makes little difference to me, unjust laws do not get my respect.

And from TFA:

LONDON - People who spend a lot of time surfing the internet are more likely to show signs of depression, British scientists said on Wednesday.

Reader be ware.

You're using the infinitive form of the verb, which means you really haven't defined a definite time for the statement.

Anybody who's studied linguistics can tell you that that statement is nonsense. The names of verb forms are not descriptions of what they are for. More generally, labels are not definitions, so you can't reason from the non-technical meaning of a technical label to its meaning (it's a fallacy of equivocation). More importantly, the forms of a morphological paradigm are normally multifunctional, so you can't talk of the "meaning" of a form of the verb in isolation from the specific constructions in which the form occurs.

Not to mention the other problem that you have, which is that you simply don't know the import of the example that GP chose. As pointed out already, it's the habitual be construction of African-American Vernacular English, i.e., a grammatical rule in AAVE that's not present in Standard English.

You're using the infinitive form of the verb, which means you really haven't defined a definite time for the statement.

Anybody who's studied linguistics can tell you that that statement is nonsense. The names of verb forms are not descriptions of what they are for. More generally, labels are not definitions, so you can't reason from the non-technical meaning of a technical label to its meaning (it's a fallacy of equivocation). More importantly, the forms of a morphological paradigm are normally multifunctional, so you can't talk of the "meaning" of a form of the verb in isolation from the specific constructions in which the form occurs.

Not to mention the other problem that you have, which is that you simply don't know the import of the example that GP chose. As pointed out already, it's the habitual be construction of African-American Vernacular English, i.e., a grammatical rule in AAVE that's not present in Standard English.

Just some unrelated info: Wharton Reserach says that even from a business perspective of maximizing profits the labels should reduce prices as the average cost per song is only 15 cents to them

At the time, you had to explicitly renew your copyright at 28 years. For example, a fair number of old Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s are in the public domain because the owner at the time, Associated Artists Productions, failed to renew the copyright.

More importantly, instead of carrying a USB drive, you can now use Google Docs as a more convenient option for accessing your files on different computers.

I know very few people who use USB keychain drives for this kind of thing. I teach physics lab courses, and when students need to bring home a spreadsheets or something, they just email it to themselves. I don't think the size limit is the main reason they don't use flash drives. One reason is that they don't know in advance that they're going to need one. The other is that email is less of a hassle.

If you're getting up into the amounts of data that can't go in an email attachment, then you probably need a full-fledged file synchronization utility like unison anyway. Unison is smart about recognizing data that haven't changed, and it also takes away the hassle and confusion that people experience with trying to keep straight all the different versions of files they have when they try to use a keychain drive for this. If you don't have a decent tool like this, then mirroring large amounts of data is likely to be slow, labor-intensive, and error-prone. TFA says:

In addition to uploading any file into Google Docs, our Google Apps Premier Edition customers will be able to seamlessly upload many files at once and sync them with their desktop in real time using third party applications.

Presumably the "Premier Edition" part means you'll have to pay. So for the majority of applications where you have this much data, Google will give you convenience or zero cost, but not both.

One exception I can think of is that this could be a nice, convenient way to make off-site backups of a certain amount of personal data (that novel you've been writing, ...) in case of fire or earthquake.

There is a world of difference between translating between Spanish and English (two European languages) and English and Japanese or English and Chinese. Even bilingual people have trouble, www.engrish.com

Most of the stuff in the Engrish site is not a good example of difficulties in translation at all. A true example of difficulty in translation would be when a full bilingual (somebody who can understand and speak both languages correctly) would have difficulty rendering the meaning of a source language text into the target language without either using a lot of footnotes/parentheticals, or just dropping a lot of nuance.

The examples on the Engrish site don't fall into that category, for the most part, either because they're not really translations, or because they're translations but the people doing them are not bilingual enough to produce grammatical, idiomatic English. They fall into these:

1. English text used in Asian products for purely aesthetic reasons. In this case, the target audience doesn't know English beyond some elementary vocabulary, and the people putting the English text on the products neither. Hanzi Smatter is a site dedicated to the Western counterpart to this phenomenon. The technical terms for these are either "As Long As It Sounds Foreign," or "Gratuituous English," depending on the details.
2. Translations meant to communicate with English speakers, but done by people who don't really master the language; i.e., translators who are not fully bilingual. (Hint: if you want a translation to be right, you probably want to hire a translator who's a first-language speaker of the target language.) We could call this one "Eloquent In My Native Tongue."
3. Computer translations, typically of Chinese restaurant menus. These tend to involve the word "fuck" very often. (No, no clever names for this one.)

The media has propagated this view of science, because journalists could never hack the subjects themselves, and they just want to get their own back on those people who could do it.

It's even worse, they deliberately misrepresent science because they think that's their job:

Blumberg: Trumping up FOXP2 as yet another star gene in a series of star genes (the "god" gene, the "depression" gene, the "schizophrenia" gene, etc.) not only sets FOXP2 up for a fall; it also misses an opportunity to educate the public about how complex behavior - including the capacity for language - develops and evolves.

Wade: I'm a little puzzled by your complaint, which seems to me to ignore the special dietary needs of a newspaper's readers and to assume they can be served indigestible fare similar to that in academic journals. []

As for missing an opportunity to educate the public, that, with respect, is your job, not mine. Education is the business of schools and universities. The business of newspapers is news.

source via languagelog

Despite the fact that spousal abusers are just as likely to be women and that the abused are just as likely to be men

Citation needed.

One citation

TWO! Two citations ha ha ha haaaa!

THREE! THREE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CITATIONS! ha ha ha haaaa [looks around as thunder rumbles and lightning flashes]

Lots more citations as well as discussion of the work done by Murray Strauss, Suzanne Steinmetz and Richard Gelles can be found at the domestic violence wiki

Why exactly do you think that, if you've studied language, you must necessarily give up on linguistic prescriptivism?

Because you realize that, almost without exception, prescriptivists are full of shit, and trying to solve "problems" that don't exist with solutions that make no damn sense. You learn pretty quick that these folks don't know what the hell they're talking about and are constantly making up inane rules that they don't ever follow, and demanding that you do. You also realize that it all comes down to them trying to impose their idiosyncratic, unfounded taste as the rule.

Then you study some sociolinguistics, and you realize that it's just some folks trying to construct a style to distinguish themselves socially from other folks they look down on.

This is the same problem I have with the more glib moral relativists - I accept that there is no "objective" standard, but that doesn't mean that I can't make prescriptive statements, it just means they're backed up by me, as opposed to nature or God.

Are you really ready to back up your prescriptive statements about English usage, using modern linguistics? That would be quite an exceptional character.

Why exactly do you think that, if you've studied language, you must necessarily give up on linguistic prescriptivism?

Because you realize that, almost without exception, prescriptivists are full of shit, and trying to solve "problems" that don't exist with solutions that make no damn sense. You learn pretty quick that these folks don't know what the hell they're talking about and are constantly making up inane rules that they don't ever follow, and demanding that you do. You also realize that it all comes down to them trying to impose their idiosyncratic, unfounded taste as the rule.

Then you study some sociolinguistics, and you realize that it's just some folks trying to construct a style to distinguish themselves socially from other folks they look down on.

This is the same problem I have with the more glib moral relativists - I accept that there is no "objective" standard, but that doesn't mean that I can't make prescriptive statements, it just means they're backed up by me, as opposed to nature or God.

Are you really ready to back up your prescriptive statements about English usage, using modern linguistics? That would be quite an exceptional character.

What, no love for Unison?

And why on earth does OpenAFS never get a sniff? I know it's a pain to set up, but I would have figured by now that many would have taken it and run with it.