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Nvidia Reintroduces SLI with GeForce 6800 Series
An anonymous reader writes "It's 1998 all over again gamers. A major release from ID software, and an expensive hotrod video card all in one year. However, rather than Quake and the Voodoo2 SLI, it's Doom3 and Nvidia SLI.
Hardware Analysis has the scoop, 'Exact performance figures are not yet available, but Nvidia's SLI concept has already been shown behind closed doors by one of the companies working with Nvidia on the SLI implementation. On early driver revisions which only offered non-optimized dynamic load-balancing algorithms their SLI configuration performed 77% faster than a single graphics card. However Nvidia has told us that prospective performance numbers should show a performance increase closer to 90% over that of a single graphics card. There are a few things that need to be taken into account however when you're considering buying an SLI configuration. First off you'll need a workstation motherboard featuring two PCI-E-x16 slots which will also use the more expensive Intel Xeon processors. Secondly you'll need two identical, same brand and type, PCI-E GeForce 6800 graphics cards.'"
Other than the rarely seen idiomatic form of the phrase that you favor, there is the fact that 'to beg' means 'to ask'. Therefore 'to beg a question' is the same as 'to ask a question'.
In debating. the "question" refers to the topic to be resolved. For instance, suppose that the question at hand is "Resolved: Ethics are Universal."
The universalist, for some reason, is flailing. He then argues that "Every culture has mores against murder."
But, murder is succinctly defined as "wrongful killing". In arguing that murder taboos are representative of a universal ethic, he is asking the audience, in fact, begging the audience, to grant him the question, without actually addressing the crux of the issue: "Is there are a universal ethic that defines certain conduct as wrongful?"
I believe you are yourself "begging the question" in suggesting that " to beg' means 'to ask". Implicitly, you asking the audience to accept that a thesaurus is transitive, and that "begging the question" is an example of colloquial english.
Yes, and ironically, said grammar nazi used a link to nizkor, of all places, as a reference ;-)
What's next? A pedant pointing out that this is actually not irony, and backing up his assertion with a link he found on save-the-children.org ?
Assuming it's safe to use just because everybody else is doing it is a bad attitude to take.
If a large majority suddenly decided that apostrophes were unnecessary (sometimes I get the feeling that it has already happened), would you jump on the bandwagon?
Is the benefit gained by the decreased work in typing or writing previously apostrophe-containing words worth the ambiguity introduced by missing them out?
You could argue that few enough people use the term "begging the question" in its correct sense, that the introduced ambiguity between that meaning and "leads to the question" is worth the convenience. But the line is difficult to draw.
So I would say: don't introduce ambiguities if you can avoid it.
Same goes for other commonly-used linguistic errors, such as using 'quote' as a noun, and so on.. In fact, with that particular 'quote' example, it's so widely used as a noun that it's even made it into the official dictionaries.