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Remember Sony v. Sony?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn...

don't expect the left hand to know what the right is doing.

You're conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants as a group are less likely to take advantage of us. Illegal immigrants, and anchor babies, are far more likely to take advantage. By mixing the positive stats of legal immigrants with the negative stats of illegal immigrants you're painting a rosy picture that isn't true.

No, I'm not. I was specific in my language about immigrants - legal immigrants generally contribute to the system on pretty much the same terms as native-born citizens. Illegal immigrants, however, are even more beneficial from a fiscal perspective, because they are less likely to take advantage of public services, and less likely to commit crimes, because of fear of deportation, all while happily paying taxes. A poster below has already provided citations on that point.

Also, the other points I made about the link between population growth and GDP have nothing at all to do with the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. The point still stands that if you want to grow your GDP, one of the easiest ways to do it is to grow your population. Population growth drives construction, business expansion, and countless other secondary benefits for the economy. Population decline is an economic disaster, and that's what we would be dealing with if we shut down immigration.

You can cherry-pick one specific point to make it seem as though immigrants are a problem economically, but if you look at the big picture (taxes paid, services used, stimulation to the economy) and calculate the net result, immigrants are a huge win: http://budgetmodel.wharton.upe...

Someone just plagiarized most of the list of eggcorns listed at this site: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e...

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That is incorrect. "Their" is plural of his/her/its. We know his sex. Their is NOTHING wrong with using the correct pronoun that corresponds with his known nature - It is the suppression of doing so that is becoming the insane norm.

First of all, singular they has a long history within the English language dating back at least as far the Bishops (1568) and King James (1611) Bibles, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and many other notable authors.

Or, as Language Log put it:

By all means, avoid using they with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it. Language Log is not here to tell you how to write or speak. But don't try to tell us that it's grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare's rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn't ungrammatical, it isn't a mistake, it's a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don't buy what they're selling.

Second, the sneering and incorrect hyper-grammar-policing of a historically acceptable construction is bad enough, but did you really have to do it in a post mistaking "there" and "their" in the second sentence? Because that's not some marginal or debatable rule of grammar, that's actually two different words with totally different meanings. Even Safari's god-awful grammar checker flags that one as questionable . . .

That is incorrect. "Their" is plural of his/her/its. We know his sex. Their is NOTHING wrong with using the correct pronoun that corresponds with his known nature - It is the suppression of doing so that is becoming the insane norm.

First of all, singular they has a long history within the English language dating back at least as far the Bishops (1568) and King James (1611) Bibles, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and many other notable authors.

Or, as Language Log put it:

By all means, avoid using they with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it. Language Log is not here to tell you how to write or speak. But don't try to tell us that it's grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare's rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn't ungrammatical, it isn't a mistake, it's a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don't buy what they're selling.

Second, the sneering and incorrect hyper-grammar-policing of a historically acceptable construction is bad enough, but did you really have to do it in a post mistaking "there" and "their" in the second sentence? Because that's not some marginal or debatable rule of grammar, that's actually two different words with totally different meanings. Even Safari's god-awful grammar checker flags that one as questionable . . .

Oh, that's BS. Lots of Chinese people *suck* at Chinese. Why do you think they simplified the characters? Because it was hard for them, too.

If the Chinese had as many problems with their script as half the English population has with there/their/they're or your/you're, after simplification no character would have been left standing with more than five strokes.

(If you think this project is impossible, you haven't considered Randall Munroe. At a sustained rate of one character simplification per hour, he could have the first draft on the core 8000 characters completed in four standard work years, all down to five strokes, each and every one of them. Then you'd have to check that he hasn't turned all the characters that only show up only in the names of bird species into stick-figure girlfriends. Names of Chinese birds "According to this list in Wikipedia, the avifauna of China include a total of 1,314 species. Brelsford still has a ways to go before documenting most of them. But he seems like the kind of person who will persist to the end. He has what I call in Chinese "snail spirit" — go slowly but persistently; eventually you'll reach your goal.")

Simplification might have been a bit premature. Reading the traditional characters wasn't all that hard. But writing some of them took a lot of practice (and time, too, if you had to draw the three dragons without the use of ditto marks).

But soon we had computers (with decent input systems) to do all the actual writing, so that tedious skill rapidly became secondary.

I'm far from convinced that English would be easier to read, either, if we gave a thousand words the "thru" tummy tuck.

You really need to ask a deep neural network if the patterns are unreasonably complicated. "thru" might be simpler for a shallow network, whereas "through" might be far more consistent with the rest of the language once the network has trained for a while.

Human novices do prefer skills they can initially learn with shallow networks. So why don't we have an Esperanto version of everything? Because for anything we use heavily, we gravitate towards the minimal deep network. Our intuitions aren't very good yet about what this means. But now that we have all manner of sophisticated deep networks to interrogate, I'm expect we'll begin to progress on this eternal question any day now.

Just a little more snail spirit, we'll crack this one yet.

Sony is a Japanese conglomerate. Each division is run as a separate entity, which is why in the year 2000 this happened.

It explains why a PlayStation could get repaired for 18 years while their TVs will never get 18 years of support.

First, I'd like to address the notion that this is "my concept." I don't know whether or not UBI is the way forward, all I was doing is pointing to what an advocate would say in response and some of the reasoning behind it. These ideas are important to discuss. Next, I'd like to swat down the things that are completely irrelevant to the discussion, like how cynical I am or am not and whether your assessment is accurate as well as what kinds of people are talking about these ideas. All completely immaterial to the discussion.

That out of the way, I'd like to address the substance here.

I don't understand why you handwave replacing existing welfare systems for "obvious political reasons." It's not obvious to me why that would be, especially because the people on the many disparate welfare systems would probably be better off under a UBI. A lot of them require status checks, paperwork, etc. so unless the resources granted by the many disparate programs are significantly greater, the time-efficiency is rewarding enough to offset the switch alone. And because they don't generally get you many resources, covering the basic costs of living is probably an improvement in resource terms as well. It would also remove a lot of the perverse incentives to stay out of work or things like that. You dismiss the idea out of hand and proceed to attempt to demoralize the position without actually arguing any points here. Even if we assume that you're correct and the welfare state is deeply entrenched, you still need to go further and demonstrate that UBI conflicts with that.

I also don't care if people see it as an addition to the welfare state instead of a replacement. I would argue with them that this is stupid as well. You can't lump me in with them for no reason because that's not what I'm saying. This is what we call a strawman.

I can't help but notice that you ignored the part about machines in the bit about specialization. Wonder why that might be?

In any case, there are doubtless productivity improvements that come from specialization. I don't care at all about your strawman argument which casts all specialization as doctors that are also lawyers that are also farmers. You should know this is an absurd argument. Those are all immensely deep fields of study that can be adequately broken down into smaller subfields. We would be talking about things like flat semi-truck drivers vs van semi-truck drivers. Or maybe drivers that go from Ohio to Pennsylvania and drivers that go from Ohio to Michigan. Either arbitrary distinctions or nearly arbitrary distinctions simply to fill the job guarantee. There is some degree of specialization in everything that yields benefits but everything also has a point beyond which meaningful specialization isn't possible. There's some point - which may or may not be the same - where you divide up jobs into boring, fungible, high-turnover positions.

The relationship between specialization and job satisfaction isn't well-understood and there aren't a lot of research materials related. There is some evidence for both sides. Or in this case, it appears that both are useful but on different scales - focusing within a single day is beneficial and having variety over the

"Dolphins and whales exhibit languages with complex grammars... There is no known capability of human languages that bottle nosed dolphins lack. If we cannot even hack their language..." Putting on my linguist hat (and yes, I am a linguist), IMO, all three sentences are simply false. But under the assumption of your third clause ("we cannot even hack their language"), the second sentence and probably the first are undecidable. We can tell that there is variability in the sounds a whale makes, but that doesn't mean there's a complex grammar, much less a real language; it could be (and IMO is) just random variation, similar to song birds.

If you want more than my opinion (and I'm sure you do), you might look at the Language Log, e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e... (about the supposed names that dolphins use), or http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e..., or http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e.... Or just google "dolphin site:languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu" (or "whale" with the same "site:"). There are also interesting blogs there about songbird songs, and how much grammar they have.

"Dolphins and whales exhibit languages with complex grammars... There is no known capability of human languages that bottle nosed dolphins lack. If we cannot even hack their language..." Putting on my linguist hat (and yes, I am a linguist), IMO, all three sentences are simply false. But under the assumption of your third clause ("we cannot even hack their language"), the second sentence and probably the first are undecidable. We can tell that there is variability in the sounds a whale makes, but that doesn't mean there's a complex grammar, much less a real language; it could be (and IMO is) just random variation, similar to song birds.

If you want more than my opinion (and I'm sure you do), you might look at the Language Log, e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e... (about the supposed names that dolphins use), or http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e..., or http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e.... Or just google "dolphin site:languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu" (or "whale" with the same "site:"). There are also interesting blogs there about songbird songs, and how much grammar they have.

"Dolphins and whales exhibit languages with complex grammars... There is no known capability of human languages that bottle nosed dolphins lack. If we cannot even hack their language..." Putting on my linguist hat (and yes, I am a linguist), IMO, all three sentences are simply false. But under the assumption of your third clause ("we cannot even hack their language"), the second sentence and probably the first are undecidable. We can tell that there is variability in the sounds a whale makes, but that doesn't mean there's a complex grammar, much less a real language; it could be (and IMO is) just random variation, similar to song birds.

If you want more than my opinion (and I'm sure you do), you might look at the Language Log, e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e... (about the supposed names that dolphins use), or http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e..., or http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e.... Or just google "dolphin site:languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu" (or "whale" with the same "site:"). There are also interesting blogs there about songbird songs, and how much grammar they have.

Claims with no citations? You're either an idiot or an outright troll/liar.

A small sampling of the citations linked in the post in question:
http://www.city-journal.org/20...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Ben...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publ...
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abst...
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://online.wsj.com/articles...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short.

I think the ACLU is completely correct, the Internet has come to the point where it's de-facto a Public Utility

A public utility is something that is owned by the public. So, no, the Internet is not a "public utility", not even close.

ISPs have gotten to the point where they're just price-gouging

Telecoms have a net profit margin of around 11%. That's the maximum they could be overcharging for their services. So where is the "price gouging"? Where is the evidence that municipal broadband is any more efficient?

Municipal broadband appears cheaper because it loses money, money that needs to be made up for by tax payers one way or another.

It would not be denied. Prisoners are required to receive proper and up to date medical care.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! And also ABAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Now pull the other one.

There is plenty of evidence that having people with different backgrounds and ideas results in better outcomes for companies.

Results of numerous academic studies of the topic suggest that the presence of more female board members does not much improve — or worsen — a firm’s performance. In this opinion piece, Wharton management professor Katherine Klein summarizes academic research on the topic and discusses the possible reasons and implications for these surprising findings. Klein is also the vice dean of the Wharton Social Impact Initiative

Research on this subject ins't too consistent either: “Rigorous, peer-reviewed studies suggest that companies do not perform better when they have women on the board. Nor do they perform worse.”

You might change your mind after you read this: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e..., and some of the links there. (Mark Liberman is, btw, a very senior computational linguist.) Google Translate is now quite capable of turning gibberish into meaningful output.

Google Translate can also produce seemingly-sensible results when given senseless inputs. Getting some meaningful output is only a weak suggestion that they have meaningful inputs. They should not have published without finding at least one Hebrew scholar who would take a look at their work - and the fact that they couldn't convince anyone to do so is itself suggestive.

Placing government in control of a 5G network everyone uses grants government means of directly tracking high resolution movements of everyone everywhere in real time. Hard to come up with a worse more dangerous idea than this one.

This would in theory make carriers compete for customers everywhere, and increase signal availability and quality for everyone.

What would be better is framework for allowing competing carriers to dynamically share spectrum completely doing away with exclusive grants.

Allowing multiple carriers to use the same frequencies is technically feasible with next gen technology and opens up means to competition rather than allowing only those with the deepest pockets to win spectrum auctions.

This feasible technology is known as cognitive radio with spectrum pricing games. But given congressional-oligopoly financial feedback mechanisms, I expect the next gen will be wideband AM with 99% of the DC to Light spectrum allocated to Rush Limbaugh with the remaining 1% divided between for-profit emergency services, automated stock trading and World Harvest Radio's endtimes prophesy hour.

The burden of proof for alleged discrimination is to stand up and say "I allege discrimination". Discrimination alleged. QED. You have it in writing, on the court transcript.

If Damore is clever enough to work at Google, he's probably clever enough to figure this out, so I predict 100% chance of success in this legal endeavour.

How to Make It So

Unfortunately for Damore, the judge probably will probably award damages on the scale of one piping-hot mocha cappuccino (to be delivered upright, in a protective cup, with a spill-proof lid) and then assign the entirety of Google's legal costs to the plaintiff (Damore begins to faint), up to—but not exceeding—two hours of a discount public defendant, one H1-B dry-cleaning bill (it's just a second day job to pay the bills for an underfunded moonlight startup), and two cross-town Ubers (Damore perks up again like he just received a Mia Wallace special spiked with Adderall).

Google, with a driven corporate culture of work to completion, immediately delivers the requisite coffee to Damore, who expresses no surprise. (The inventor of Google Glass cut his teeth packing a fully articulated pop-up espresso machine into a svelte, feminine attache case—on his seventh of fifteen interviews.)

Judge raps gavel.

Damore approaches bench, profusely thanks his lordship, and pretends to forget his fancy coffee on the judge's bench.

Judge: Well, well, look what the bailiff brought me ...

Judge glowers dramatically at Google's counsel (all twelve), Morse-coding "should I drink this?" with his bushy eyebrows.

One of the sharper members of Google's half-and-half gender-balanced legal dream team (who happens to be a man) recognizes the Morse code gesture (it's a man thing), and Morses back with a precisely calibrated locker-room shrug "go ahead, it's just coffee, we're not quite that petty, you old toad".

That was extremely respectful, all things considered. The legal costs award will barely pay for his morning aftershave, which he seems to consume at twice his previous rate now that Google hires twice as many women, not that it improves his win rate, on either score, not one little bit.

Anyone who understands that there was a lot more to Bletchley Park than rotor combinatorics can't honestly say they find this result surprising.

Especially when the languages chosen have a shocked degree of family resemblence.

No word for "I" or "me" or "mine"

It isn't because the Vietnamese are not passionate. Rather, there is no word for "I" or "you" in colloquial Vietnamese.

People address each other according to their relative ages: "anh" for older brother, "chi" for older sister, "em" for younger sibling and so on. This is why Vietnamese quickly ask strangers how old they are so that they can use the appropriate pronoun and treat them with the correct amount of respect.

So a typical declaration of love might be: "Older brother loves younger sister."

From pronouns and proper nouns, quickly one identifies words associated with being a person, and immediately there's an enormous cluster of classifications and modifiers in any language especially dealing with human traits, not the least of which concerns hierarchy (mother, father, sister, brother) and age structure (baby, toddler, child, youth, adult, senior, geriatric).

Pretty soon you're into affect and habit, such as shivering while shovelling the driveway of the white snow, then contentedly taking a long, hot bath.

Simple thermodynamics.

Interestingly, Language Log put up this post just a few hours ago. (It's about which of the various methods people actually use to input Chinese characters.)

Here is what Chinese people think of Western technology translation and context

Here is what Chinese people think of Western technology translation and context

The argument that the kill list has no geographic limit is misguided at best, deliberately misleading at worst. The leaked white paper specifically says (emphasis added):

"This white paper sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the U.S. government could use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities..."

The Obama administration has never claimed it is fine to kill Americans in the US. It has claimed that what delineates the battlefield is unclear when dealing with a non-state actor, and that under traditional laws of war a belligerent can be fought wherever it is launching or planning to launch attacks from. And it has only ever claimed that it is legal in a foreign country, not the U.S.

They could give a shit less about the Constitution; what makes you think they could give 1 shit about THIS peace of paper???

The argument that the kill list has no geographic limit is misguided at best, deliberately misleading at worst. The leaked white paper specifically says (emphasis added):

"This white paper sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances in which the U.S. government could use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities..."

The Obama administration has never claimed it is fine to kill Americans in the US. It has claimed that what delineates the battlefield is unclear when dealing with a non-state actor, and that under traditional laws of war a belligerent can be fought wherever it is launching or planning to launch attacks from. And it has only ever claimed that it is legal in a foreign country, not the U.S.

Just google. You know google, right? Immediate results include operations like Arthur Anderson

Can you give us some other examples? When you say, "operations like Arthur Anderson", I assume there were others.

http://scholarship.law.upenn.e...

First you need to ask yourself some questions:
1. what are you trying to protect against? Hard Drive Failure?, Multiple hard drive failures? Fire? Theft? Disk/file corruption? Destruction of your whole home/work? Everything?
2. what's your budget?
3. how many copies of data do you want and where?
4. If you're looking at a cloud backup service then what's your bandwidth? How much of your internet usage are you happy to allocate to backups? how much is your data change rate? (i.e no sense using a cloud backup provider if you change your data faster than you can upload it)

Some options:
1. Cloud Backup service (e.g. Backblaze, many here)
2. Cloud Storage provider (e.g. Dropbox, Amazon Glacier)
3. Your own solution (e.g. FreeNAS, external usb drive, eSATA (external SATA) drive, home server, unison, xcopy etc...).

If you do use your own server solution then I'd recommending having a look at ZFS filesystem (e.g. zfsonlinux)

ExCAPE is a research program and grant, not a single finished piece of software. The output from such programs is mainly publications and ideas:

https://excape.cis.upenn.edu/p...

Automated programming, program synthesis, and similar projects have a long, long history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The NSF isn't developing anything. The NSF has created a program that funds large scale research grants to universities. In this case, the grant is to a collaboration of several large universities to explore ways to meet this goal. If you click through the article and then to the page about the project, including the universities involved in the collaboration (MIT, Cornell, Michigan, UPenn, etc...), you can see actual useful information: https://excape.cis.upenn.edu/i...

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."

-- MLK, from his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

There is a whole book about it: http://wdp.wharton.upenn.edu/b...

TL;DR: HR managers are way too picky and specific in their requirements. They only want to hire people who are currently doing the exact same job. They increasingly expect people to be willing to commit to shorter and shorter contracts for tasks that should take far longer to do right. But primarily: HR managers have, as a group, turned into power-mad, elitist, snobs who routinely throw away resumes after barely a glance if they feel like they just wouldn't like the candidate; just because they can. The personal bias being applied here is enormous.

The worst part is that the actual hiring managers are desperate to get the role filled, and would have been happy with half of the people the HR manager rejected. But the HR manager is using their position to attempt to control the durection of the company, or just fill it with "their kind of people."

So, do everything you can to bypass HR.

There has been work on the electrolysis of CO2, 2CO2 -> 2C0 +O2, where the CO could easily be used in the Fischer–Tropsch process to make Synfuel .

"Beg the question" doesn't mean "beg for the question." It means to avoid answering the question.

No, it doesn't. It means assuming something unproven as basis for a conclusion, or more typically a circular logic, using the conclusion as a premise for drawing the conclusion. Also known as "petitio principii".

Actually, "beg the question" doesn't really mean petitio principii anymore, outside of philosophy journals. A post over at Language Log from 2010 noted that of the 20 most recent hits for "beg the question" in the New York Times, only ONE was an actual example of "correct" usage: 15 used it to me "raises the question," and 4 were just people bitching about other people using it wrong. A survey of 50 usages in Google News showed 49 uses to mean "raises the question" and 1 hit discussing its usage (not just using it "correctly").

When the vast majority of even educated, edited prose adopts a new meaning for a phrase, it's standard. Deal with it.

It's called "begging the question" because the one who makes the fallacy petitions the opponent to accept the premise that's in question.

Well, that's sort of in the right direction. The link above has detailed etymology -- the problem is that the phrase originally comes from Aristotle, where (in Greek) it would have been understood in context as meaning something like "assuming the conclusion," which is a pretty clear description of the philosophical fallacy. Then it got rendered in medieval Latin as petitio principii, which used two words that had changed meaning since Classical Latin and had connotations that confused things. THEN it was rendered in English about 400 years ago as "beg the question" which was a literal translation of petitio principii, except not really the meanings of that phrase that got across Aristotle's meaning well. THEN both the words "beg" and "question" changed their meaning over the past 400 years to exclude the original connotations that caused that translation from Latin.

To sum up, we're a couple millennia, three languages, and a few major meaning shifts from the original phrase... so it's no wonder the original meaning of the phrase got lost somewhere.

Bottom line: nobody but philosophers and language pedants actually know the original meaning of that phrase anymore. Heck, you can find citations of the phrase meaning "raise the question" in good writers' prose even back in the mid 1800s!! The meaning of "raise the question" is well-established and completely dominates current usage.

Thus, it's time to give up the battle. I used to have my "pet peeves" for usage too, but an English teacher once gave me very sound advice: "When saying the 'correct' thing sounds weird enough or is obscure enough that it distracts from your writing/speaking, it's time to just avoid that 'correct' construction -- because language is about communication, and you're no longer communicating effectively."

Usage expert Brian Garner calls this a "skunked term": a word or phrase whose common meaning is branded by pedants as "wrong" but whose "right" meaning is no longer understood by even educated speakers. The only right thing to do then is choose a different term.

If you mean petitio principii, then use "assume the conclusion" or "circular logic" or whatever MORE DESCRIPTIVE phrase actually makes your point clear. If you mean "raise the question," then say it. All of these pedantic arguments about what "beg the question" REALLY means are just BS now -- they're just a waste of time arguing about a ship that sailed LONG ago.

Here are some of his actual equations. paper on price stickiness and the cost of menus.

Burdick v. US is not the only reference to pardons in American jurisprudence. If you'll read further than the summary, you will find that the first point was a direction on courtroom procedure, and therefore necessarily presupposed the existence of a court. It reaffirms earlier language in United States v. Wilson, and it was specifically addressing whether Burdick could continue to claim Fifth Amendment protections after having been offered the pardon. You're also suggesting that enumerated precepts are non-severable, which is very much not the case. Each is intended to address a separate question of law, and as regards the statement on guilt, that was intended to address issues raised by the ruling of Brown v. Walker, which involved statutory immunity from the consequences of testimony. The court held in Walker that the statutory immunity was as strong as the Fifth Amendment protection, and thus the government could compel testimony. In Burdick, in addition to setting out acceptance as a condition for the validity of a pardon, the court held that pardons carry the imputation of guilt specifically because they are able to be refused. It is the act of accepting the pardon, not the act of introducing it to a court, which connotes guilt.

You're arguing like a programmer, not a lawyer. You would be far better off trying to argue from e.g. Ex parte Garland that acceptance of a pardon does not imply guilt. You might start here or here. However, whether or not the legal concept of guilt could be strictly said to apply after having accepted a pardon, social opprobrium very much applies, and the political effects are unlikely to be very different.

Those of us on internet in late 90's remember the most popular voice chat software that even worked over dialup. It was hugely popular among ham radio operators as being one of them, we got the ok to setup links to 2 meter and 70cm band repeaters, after not the greatest of verification but it wasn't a disaster.

1995 article on the original iphone: http://www.wired.com/1995/10/i...

it worked damn good over dialup for what it was, even allowed calls to landlines, and ham radio links, it was great for those days, and of course peer 2 peer

1996 college paper on the specifics of Iphone: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~kell...

This reminds me of an incident in Turkey back in 2008, described and analyzed in Language Log: Two Dots Too Many. Due to a cellphone being improperly localized, a normal letter i was substituted for the Turkish back unrounded i (which I cannot figure out how to display here, ironically enough), altering the meaning of a text message, leading to a tragic misunderstanding, which resulted in a group attack on the sender who then murdered the recipient and subsequently committed suicide.

Engines want to be free!

Actually, "less lawyers" is grammatically fine. Ask a linguist (in this case, the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language).

All that blog amounts to saying is that, in informal usage, people don't necessarily speak grammatically. Which is pretty bleedin' obvious.

It doesn't mean there isn't a useful distinction between mass nouns and count nouns.

Actually, "less lawyers" is grammatically fine. Ask a linguist (in this case, the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language).

Actually, that article to which you linked contains the guy's opinion and a *plea* to abandon the different uses for "fewer" (fewer beers) and "less" (less beer) in some cases -- like, "Your package will arrive in seven days or less" vs. "Your package will arrive in seven days or fewer" -- and he makes some good points, but he's wrong. People should learn the correct grammar instead.

Even in the context of that article, "fewer lawyers" is correct, not "less" and, as far as I'm concerned, the sign for the express lane in your grocery store should still say: "10 items or fewer" - not "less".

Actually, "less lawyers" is grammatically fine. Ask a linguist (in this case, the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language).

Well, since the Yahoo's CEO stock options are currently worth about .5% of Yahoo's market cap, I think you are understating the effect.
You are also either mistaken, or disembling;
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn...

Weekends

Like most self-serving statements from organizations hyperventilating about their unassailable merit, this is overblown propaganda. As an alternative, I refer you to bona fide scholarly research which discusses how the forty-hour week was won

primarily through labor market tightness (wage increases, manufacturing employment expansion, and curtailment of immigration). State and federal government labor market intervention, increased union power, and technological changes in industry played smaller roles.

-- The shortening of the American work week: An economic and historical analysis of its context, causes, and consequences (Whaples, 1990).

The concept that a person of some given behavior is more likely to be locked up if he/she is of some ethnic origin other than white European, say, a black person, in America is incorrect.

That's just incorrect. There is plenty of evidence, shown in study after study, that shows there is a disparity in sentencing between white people and various ethnic and racial groups.
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... http://www.theguardian.com/law...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
https://www.aclu.org/sites/def...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
So maybe you want to start your reply again, armed with this new information?

Your position seems to be that unjust sentencing disparity caused by the race of the defendant is prevalent, that your numerous links contain statements that support that conclusion, and thus my position regarding preferential treatment is wrong. If, by posting all of those links, you mean to advance some idea beyond unjust racial sentencing disparity, you didn't say so.

But sentencing is only one element or the criminal process. Who is chosen to arrest is important as well, and that's what I just pointed out. The focus of law enforcement is the first element in the criminal justice process. I gave the example of leniency given to a peaceful crowd sitting on a porch selling crack. Sentencing, however unjust, has nothing to do with that.

It would be unrealistically unwieldy for me to rebutt all the contents of all those links. It wouldn't even make sense to read them. However, the studies I'm familiar with that express your conclusion (racial sentencing disparity in general) are flawed. Please pick one, or one concept from one, that you like, and I will address it.

The concept that a person of some given behavior is more likely to be locked up if he/she is of some ethnic origin other than white European, say, a black person, in America is incorrect.

That's just incorrect. There is plenty of evidence, shown in study after study, that shows there is a disparity in sentencing between white people and various ethnic and racial groups.

http://www.sentencingproject.o...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

http://www.theguardian.com/law...

https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...

https://www.aclu.org/sites/def...

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...

So maybe you want to start your reply again, armed with this new information?

I'm in favor of TPP, and of trade agreements generally. Consider the case of NAFTA, as an example that is less broad in scope and yet similarly reviled. We can now look at it in a bit of an historical perspective.

The populist arguments against NAFTA have generally been that it "enriches corporations, at the expense of American jobs". While it eased Canadian-US trade somewhat, the most visible effect of NAFTA was that US-Mexican trade was eased to the point that hundreds of maquiladoras (manufacturing facilities) sprung up close to the US border. Among other changes, Mexico has now become a top-10 exporter of automobiles.

The maquiladoras have enhanced the lives of many millions of Mexicans. Meanwhile, it had a mixed effect on the USA, in particular pressuring hundreds of thousands of US autoworkers. Benefits to the US were much more diffuse than the lost autoworker jobs, leading many people to conclude those benefits were negligible. That's a common policy-maker's problem, where a special-interest group (here, US autoworkers) holds policy or public opinion hostage to its interests because the incremental advantage of good policy is, while larger in aggregate, thinly spread among a large constituency. It's quite recognizable in, for example, the activities of the sugar lobby on influencing congressional lawmakers.

Such lobbies, by the way, are a big reason trade agreements must be negotiated privately, keeping details hidden from the public. Otherwise, special interest groups end up completely destroying the process while negotiations are underway. Remember, sugar tariffs are very good for the sugar lobby.

While I appreciate patriotism, I personally feel that we should be trying to make life better for humanity in general, rather than greedily holding onto wealth in the USA. Taking at face value the Wharton study quoted above, the USA was able to enrich Mexicans at zero cost to itself. From that point of view, similar trade agreements are nearly a moral imperative!

Coming back to TPP, it has some leaked aspects that I think are truly terrible, such as the intellectual freedom troubles. Those criticisms I consider reasonable, and I can appreciate why that would cause an informed and intelligent person to oppose the TPP. On the other hand, a kind of knee-jerk hatred to trade agreements in general appears to drive much of the opposition, and I think of those anti-trade arguments as having no moral standing, just like the ones put forth by the sugar lobby.

On balance, then, I think the benefits to human happiness worldwide from even an agreement with flawed and overly-broad terms will outweigh the serious problems, but I can see how intellectual freedom considerations might make you feel otherwise.

There was a discussion on whether the language David speaks to the Engineer in Prometheus was supposed to be Proto-Indo-European. I don't think it makes much sense to use that, but nothing in that movie made much sense.

My favorite translation of David's line:
"This greedy old man wants to live forever. If you rip my head off and beat him with it, he'll shit his pants!"

I am trying to make sense of how this phenomenon actually came about. It seems that the twenty or so different meanings of the three-stroke calendrical graph that is used to write GAN1/4 (a total of three distinct graphic forms in the traditional script -- , , -- all reduced to one -- -- in the simplified script) in Chinglish have all collapsed into the single meaning of "fuck". Wherever that graph occurs, Chinglish speakers will translate it as "fuck".

The Chinese characters in the above do not display properly on Slashdot but you can read the article at: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003205.html

In other words, the problem is with the written character, not the spoken word.

In any event, there is plenty of evidence of biological differences in the brains of men and women...

Vaague handwaving over common-sense notions isn't systematic evidence.

It took me about 3 minutes to find the following studies showing that brain structure/chemistry is indeed different for men and women:

http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://nro.sagepub.com/content...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.brain-mind-institut...
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org...

The last two of the studies listed above don't just show gender specific biological differences in the brain, they link the differences to skills/behavior.

Honestly, a trained chimp could find this stuff. Why is it you can't?

Vaague handwaving over common-sense notions isn't systematic evidence.

Sigh.

Talk about willful blindness. Why don't you take a look at this and tell me about vague handwaving. That's not the only "systematic evidence" either. And I'm not inclined to spoon feed you any other scientific studies on this subject...you're unlikely to open your eyes to anything that conflicts with your preconceived notions.

"God forbid" that figures of speech imply meaning.

And what meaning is that? How does "God forbid" - a common idiom - indicate that I prefer biology over culture? Perhaps English isn't your first language.

Whether this statement is an expression of your anecdotal experience or just willful blindness is impossible to say.

Fine. I'm prepared to change my mind if you can show me some "systematic evidence" to the contrary. And please don't waste my time by citing something more than a couple of years old. My statement was unambiguously qualified.

But since you prefer to divine "implied meaning" over the actual meaning of plain spoken words (and you don't know what constitutes an anecdote) I'm not hoping for much out of you.