It's a problem with any discipline -- language is not exact.
Language is as exact as needed for everyday interaction. But some disciplines decided that they need a less flexible (and in some respects less effective) but more rigid medium and so they decided to define the terms they use normatively. That's why we have logic, algebra and other formalisms. In jurisprudence and the humanities/arts it works different, but they nonetheless deviate from everyday language.
Now we have to decide whether the term "planet" is needed as a technical term - if so we should better define it (and not as a prototype or radial categorie but as a classical one), if not we really can drop the issue and let lexicographers and lexical semanticist quarrel over how to describe its semantics.
The UCPD is a separate law enforcement agency with the same powers as CHP officers run by the University of California.
Can anyone explain to me what run by the University of California means in relation to a law enforcement agency?
I'm not an US citizen and more than a little bit confused about what I have read/seen, and think if the whole issue is half as bad as I understand it, you guys should better start to worry.
In any case I don't see why nuclear isn't being seriously considered as an option. We know that renewables won't scale. We also know that nuclear technology works and properly used is safe.
Because the problem of radioactive waste is still unsolved. The radioactive waste will be dangerous for literally thousands of year, we have no means to store it safely for even a fraction of that time. We actually don't even have means to convey the message that there is highly dangerous radioactive waste to people living in 2000 years.
Myanmar, China, Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan.
Technically we have a dupe here, the article is actually totally based on the Reporters without borders press release we discussed a few days ago. The list of enemies is also identical with the list of censors:
Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam (Only Burma is called Myanmar.)
This is actually a possible scenario. Not for the Amazonian rainforest but for the so called "green lungs" of the cities. These concrete could actually influence decision about smaller tree covered areas inside or next to urban areas and whether they are needed for the micro-climate of the area or not.
As posted by someone above:
Don't try to resolve the result of the problem... try to resolve the problem itself !
I think the whole problem will be again this monoculture, now not only in respect to the OS bt also in respect to virus protection.
The whole security stuff of Vista might even be the best evah, experience tells us that sooner or later it will be cracked and then it's the one that secures the vast majority of all computers. If you have several different protection systems the result would be much less severe.
Monoculture in the OS sector is already bad enough, this will make it worse.
Diebold is a big part of the problem, but they're simply just one of the players in an untrustable voting system.
Yes, and that the problem is not Republicans stealing votes from the Democrats or vice versa - doesn't make that much different who wins anyway - but that the voting system has become that untrustable, because its election infrastructure has become such a profitable business. Just make a projection from that 20 Mio. deal of one Ohio county buying Diebold voting machines.
And whether you like it or not: democracy and profit don't go well together. In a well balanced system economy does not derogate democracy, but for that we have to take care of our political system.
Why is everyone so "Google and Mac? I'm so excited, I'm going to p..."???
One major company (Google) starts to recognize the second largest non-OSS OS of a stylish hardware vendor as a possible field of profit and devotes a few more resources to that area. Great.
Don't misunderstand me, I love my Mac and the GUI is very well designed and Google still is the best search engine out there. So what?
I myself would be happier if there would be more good search engines out there (maybe even one more in a Wiki and/or OSS spirit???), and if OSS would be at the forefront of user-friendly GUI design. (KDE and Gnome have made enormous progress, but they are still way behind the Mac GUI.)
I think you are wrong here. Changing the storing media won't help as long as it can't be read as a stand alone entity.
The reason why we still can read old texts (either Egyptian, Chinese, Indian or whatever) is that they were preserved in a format directly accessible to humans (like epigraphic or numismatic artefacts).
But even then we need an uninterupted tradition or a kind of Rosetta stone to decipher them, otherwise we are in a situation like with the Indus script were we think it is a script, but we have no proof whatsoever that it really is. Let alone a clue what it say.
In March 2001, Bloomberg News reported that CCIDNET Investment, a VC arm of the Ministry of Information Industry, had become Red Flag's second largest shareholder.
Come on, who is the intended audience? Ok then, they won't by it for $300.
Who else might be interested in it? The vast majority of people is happy with a Dell or so and a crappy OS, they will upgrade everything if the advertisement is good, whether they need it or not.
Why should they buy one of these "underpowered" laptops?
There are people who are or might be interested in this. In general people who are fascinated by new stuff (and do not directly say "No...! Lame."). NGOs or scientists, people who work "in the backwaters of the third world", I'm quite sure they will find this thing quite useful and would buy it (btw I would).
But maybe they weren't so enthusiastic about pledging something on some web page somewhere. (I didn't like the idea myself and found 100,000 a bizarre number from the onset.)
Well, the problem is that understanding someone is far more than parsing the other's sentences. It's getting to the point where you understand what meaning the other intended to convey. That's here all this machine translation still fails (and probably will fail for a long time to come). Because for that you need a lot of backround knowledge, you actually have to attune yourself to the experiences, the culture of the other. And that is a large part of what is learnt in a foreign language course.
All this automatic translation feigns that you understand the other, but actually your interpretation might be very different from the intended meaning. Sometimes a rough understanding might work, but mostly it you run into problems later. You might discover real referential differences, like you two where talking about wo very different things, but also interpretational differences or social misunderstandings which might result in severe discord.
A good way to test this are jokes, because they are such a condensed way of cultural meaning.
But this works also between varieties of one language, e.g English. Are you really sure an American fully gets what a upper middle class person from India is telling him/her about her feelings or experience, just because both of them have English as their mother tongue?
Understanding the other is an undertaking that costs a lot of effort and machine translation helps very little with that. Appreciating diversity, like appreciating everything else, demands effort and dedication and there is no short cut.
Yeah! The point actually is that he is going to commercialise his hack. And that is something more newsworthy than the fact that you can copy DRMed material through a digital-analog-digital conversion.
And if he (or they i.e. DoubleTwist) is really doing that - what will Apple do to him/them in court?
DoubleTwist seem to be pretty sure about not being sued, but I can't imagine Apple not taking them to court. And thyen will any mp3-player manufacturer buy it before the whole issue is settled?
I have to agree with you, the situation in India is not as bad as the poster describes it. Especially the state is not as inattentive to the needs of the Indian people as the posters appearently assumes.
But You, him, and the grand-grand-parent-poster definitely ignore the big divide between urban and rural areas in India and China. Most of the described benefits from economical growth cluster around a few urban centres leaving the vast majority under really dreadful conditions.
But back to the main topic: A lot of the division of humans described by Dr Curry (by all names) has been in practice in India for a very long time now. The caste system is a kind of small scale rascism restricting people (traditionally but often also today) in their choice of profession and spouse. And I think it's a good example that nothing will happen on biological level even over the long run.
And come on, do you really think, people do not procreate with people they wouldn't want to have as official partners, that hilarious.
..and he can work for a day, teach him the sourcecode and he can work forever.
No, seriously, the OLPC (and other development projects) should be about empowerment. And for this goal open source is the way to go.
If you take a look at e.g. agriculture, you see a lot of (probably) well meant development projects that ended in dependence from some major company and did in the long run as much (or more) harm as they helped.
(And, by the way, OLPC is - intended or not - a political statement though not about free software. But there is a connection.)
Slashdot Mirror
[Some scientists] estimate that large predatory fish biomass today is only about 10% of pre-industrial levels. source
2002, 10% left - that's close enough for me
Language is as exact as needed for everyday interaction. But some disciplines decided that they need a less flexible (and in some respects less effective) but more rigid medium and so they decided to define the terms they use normatively. That's why we have logic, algebra and other formalisms. In jurisprudence and the humanities/arts it works different, but they nonetheless deviate from everyday language.
Now we have to decide whether the term "planet" is needed as a technical term - if so we should better define it (and not as a prototype or radial categorie but as a classical one), if not we really can drop the issue and let lexicographers and lexical semanticist quarrel over how to describe its semantics.
Can anyone explain to me what run by the University of California means in relation to a law enforcement agency?
I'm not an US citizen and more than a little bit confused about what I have read/seen, and think if the whole issue is half as bad as I understand it, you guys should better start to worry.
As if US politics hadn't enough *Gates in history.
But a Iraq SP2 might be useful anyway.
Ok, but suppose you have to convert a text file into a semantically structured file.
Please choose your preferred source format:
[ ] unstructured ASCII text file
[ ] XML-file
[ ] MSWord .doc
Invading North Korean soldier
or South Korean Soldier (or just a tourist) who lost one's way........
Clippy:
"It looks like you're intruding South Korea.
Would you like a perfect headshot?
*Get shot immediately.
*Run still a bit and get shot then.
[ ] Don't ask again."
Because the problem of radioactive waste is still unsolved. The radioactive waste will be dangerous for literally thousands of year, we have no means to store it safely for even a fraction of that time. We actually don't even have means to convey the message that there is highly dangerous radioactive waste to people living in 2000 years.
Technically we have a dupe here, the article is actually totally based on the Reporters without borders press release we discussed a few days ago. The list of enemies is also identical with the list of censors:
Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam (Only Burma is called Myanmar.)
Parent is not a troll!
This is actually a possible scenario. Not for the Amazonian rainforest but for the so called "green lungs" of the cities. These concrete could actually influence decision about smaller tree covered areas inside or next to urban areas and whether they are needed for the micro-climate of the area or not.
As posted by someone above:
I think the whole problem will be again this monoculture, now not only in respect to the OS bt also in respect to virus protection.
The whole security stuff of Vista might even be the best evah, experience tells us that sooner or later it will be cracked and then it's the one that secures the vast majority of all computers. If you have several different protection systems the result would be much less severe.
Monoculture in the OS sector is already bad enough, this will make it worse.
Belarus? Egypt? Tunisia? Cuba? ... Go, buy a new globe!
Opensourcing yourself means posting or otherwise publishing you genome, right?
Flickr? Screenshots.
Blogs? Release notes.
LinkedIn? CVS.
MySpace? Manual/FAQ.
Yes, and that the problem is not Republicans stealing votes from the Democrats or vice versa - doesn't make that much different who wins anyway - but that the voting system has become that untrustable, because its election infrastructure has become such a profitable business. Just make a projection from that 20 Mio. deal of one Ohio county buying Diebold voting machines.
And whether you like it or not: democracy and profit don't go well together. In a well balanced system economy does not derogate democracy, but for that we have to take care of our political system.
Oh yes I do appreciate the work of these people.
Why is everyone so "Google and Mac? I'm so excited, I'm going to p..."???
One major company (Google) starts to recognize the second largest non-OSS OS of a stylish hardware vendor as a possible field of profit and devotes a few more resources to that area. Great.
Don't misunderstand me, I love my Mac and the GUI is very well designed and Google still is the best search engine out there. So what?
I myself would be happier if there would be more good search engines out there (maybe even one more in a Wiki and/or OSS spirit???), and if OSS would be at the forefront of user-friendly GUI design. (KDE and Gnome have made enormous progress, but they are still way behind the Mac GUI.)
I think you are wrong here. Changing the storing media won't help as long as it can't be read as a stand alone entity.
The reason why we still can read old texts (either Egyptian, Chinese, Indian or whatever) is that they were preserved in a format directly accessible to humans (like epigraphic or numismatic artefacts).
But even then we need an uninterupted tradition or a kind of Rosetta stone to decipher them, otherwise we are in a situation like with the Indus script were we think it is a script, but we have no proof whatsoever that it really is. Let alone a clue what it say.
...the government owns Linux.
Red Flag Linux ( Linux)
Wikipedia:
I don't think it's doomed.
Come on, who is the intended audience? Ok then, they won't by it for $300.
Who else might be interested in it? The vast majority of people is happy with a Dell or so and a crappy OS, they will upgrade everything if the advertisement is good, whether they need it or not. Why should they buy one of these "underpowered" laptops?
There are people who are or might be interested in this. In general people who are fascinated by new stuff (and do not directly say "No ...! Lame."). NGOs or scientists, people who work "in the backwaters of the third world", I'm quite sure they will find this thing quite useful and would buy it (btw I would).
But maybe they weren't so enthusiastic about pledging something on some web page somewhere. (I didn't like the idea myself and found 100,000 a bizarre number from the onset.)
I've read through the whole article...
Hear ye!
Shouldn't it have been cookies?
Ok, maybe they were afraid they don't accept cookies.
Well, the problem is that understanding someone is far more than parsing the other's sentences. It's getting to the point where you understand what meaning the other intended to convey. That's here all this machine translation still fails (and probably will fail for a long time to come). Because for that you need a lot of backround knowledge, you actually have to attune yourself to the experiences, the culture of the other. And that is a large part of what is learnt in a foreign language course.
All this automatic translation feigns that you understand the other, but actually your interpretation might be very different from the intended meaning. Sometimes a rough understanding might work, but mostly it you run into problems later. You might discover real referential differences, like you two where talking about wo very different things, but also interpretational differences or social misunderstandings which might result in severe discord.
A good way to test this are jokes, because they are such a condensed way of cultural meaning.
But this works also between varieties of one language, e.g English. Are you really sure an American fully gets what a upper middle class person from India is telling him/her about her feelings or experience, just because both of them have English as their mother tongue?
Understanding the other is an undertaking that costs a lot of effort and machine translation helps very little with that. Appreciating diversity, like appreciating everything else, demands effort and dedication and there is no short cut.
Yeah! The point actually is that he is going to commercialise his hack. And that is something more newsworthy than the fact that you can copy DRMed material through a digital-analog-digital conversion.
And if he (or they i.e. DoubleTwist) is really doing that - what will Apple do to him/them in court?
DoubleTwist seem to be pretty sure about not being sued, but I can't imagine Apple not taking them to court. And thyen will any mp3-player manufacturer buy it before the whole issue is settled?
secunia has already reported the first vulnerability of the IE7.
I have to agree with you, the situation in India is not as bad as the poster describes it. Especially the state is not as inattentive to the needs of the Indian people as the posters appearently assumes.
But You, him, and the grand-grand-parent-poster definitely ignore the big divide between urban and rural areas in India and China. Most of the described benefits from economical growth cluster around a few urban centres leaving the vast majority under really dreadful conditions.
But back to the main topic: A lot of the division of humans described by Dr Curry (by all names) has been in practice in India for a very long time now. The caste system is a kind of small scale rascism restricting people (traditionally but often also today) in their choice of profession and spouse. And I think it's a good example that nothing will happen on biological level even over the long run.
And come on, do you really think, people do not procreate with people they wouldn't want to have as official partners, that hilarious.
Nope, nothing to see here but a little biologism.
..and he can work for a day, teach him the sourcecode and he can work forever.
No, seriously, the OLPC (and other development projects) should be about empowerment. And for this goal open source is the way to go.
If you take a look at e.g. agriculture, you see a lot of (probably) well meant development projects that ended in dependence from some major company and did in the long run as much (or more) harm as they helped.
(And, by the way, OLPC is - intended or not - a political statement though not about free software. But there is a connection.)
>> If your exiting PCs can take full advantage of Vista,
> I assumed this meant "existing". Exiting is a different word, having nearly the opposite meaning.
Rhetorics +7
Lexical semantics -57