Speaking of being more open, given that this project is supposed to help international communication, I'm surprised it gives so incredibly few details about their language. If you look at their project info page, this has been in development for a FEW YEARS already. Yet, their website only contains information on the software, not on the language itself, which would be the hard part.
I wish they'd give us more information on what UNL itself is like
Just to be a nitpick, UNL would not be a "meta-language" because it would not be a language about languages. It would just be an intermediate language. The enconverters and deconverters would be more like the "meta-languages", sort of...
As far as I can tell (just guessing, though) there are 2 key differences between UNL and Esperanto:
1) It's not Romance-based and thus won't be as Euro-centric and will thus probably translate Eastern languages better.
2) It's designed as an intermediate language and not as a final end-user language. As far as I can tell, it could even be machine-readible and not speakable. In any case, it will not have as many constraints as a language like Esperanto that is designed for human speech.
These are just my gueses. I don't know what kind of language they're actually trying to implement. (The website is skimpy on those details.)
That's not true. You definitely can be a Nazi or a member of the KKK. In fact, the ACLU reguarly has to defend their rights to peaceful demonstrations and so forth. Now, some of the heads of the ACLU are Jewish, even, but although people may get personally offended or even despise the views of white supremecists, they fully support their right to free speech.
That's why I so admire the ACLU's guts to stand by what they stand for so firmly and non-discriminately support the First Amendment.
Btw, I'm not saying that it's any easier to be a member of the Nazi party or the KKK than to be Peter Singer due to social pressures...
Yes, but selection of which exhibits to support and which not to on crtiteria of religious offensiveness goes against the separation of church and state clause.
Imagine if we had, for instance, "Everyone must pay taxes, except for people of such-and-such a religion."
Mr. Katz, what if you'd been the one born like that? Would you be so quick to praise the murder of newborns?
I don't think he would've been able to contemplate anything or praise anything since his brain wouldn't have had a chance to develop yet. That's the entire point of why infants are inherently different from adults.
Natural selection pretty much took care of babies who were too ill or sickly to survive. However, people tend to take care of them now. If they want to do that, it's their business, their money, and their lives.
Not entirely. They use up a lot of public funds in terms of welfare and insurance. I'm not making a judgment; just pointing out a fact.
This confuses me. What about site licenses? I interned at a large securities (not "security") firm for a summer, and they just duplicate a few master install harddrives wholesale to set up new computers with NT and all the base software.
Seems to me perfectly normal to do this when you have a site license.
Is #10 just talking about illegal copying, or do you actually have to install from a different CD on to every machine? (That'd be insane!)
All this is precisely why we need to work toward more automation, imho.
I mean, every time we automate something, people complain about losing jobs. But the thing is, if we somehow manage to keep population growth under control (WAY easier said than done, I know), in general automation lead people no longer being forced to do menial labor.
I'd rather have a processor a month or two later than have a crappy one that causes me headaches and likely a few months to replace.
I mean, people can live without the 500 MHz version for a couple of months.
It would be far worse if they just decided to quietly go ahead and release it and hope no one notices. (Or if they didn't even do enough testing to detect it in the first place.)
Well, there's certainly the math aspect of it, but there's more than that. For instance, in good OOP, you need to learn to encapsulate well and not reveal your implementation, etc. Half of good programming is just learning all the bad timesavers that you shouldn't do, and how to get good habits.
I'm afraid I can't really recommend any good books on the subject, as I've just been taking the courses here. I'm hoping someone else can?
The program was just the initial conditions, however, just as the initial conditions would be the formation of the Universe.
I have not ventured a hypothesis as to where the Universe came from. But evolution is analogous to this situation. Evolution theory does not concern the origin of the Universe itself.
Exactly. I really like it when colleges like MIT and Berkeley (I don't know about other places) teach their intro class in Scheme.. It really emphasizes that what you should be learning are the fundamentals and ideas, since languages are constantly changing anyway. (Well, so are ideas, but not as much.)
My point is that I don't think "potential" is the proper argument for not killing babies. I don't think it'd be wrong to kill you just because you could potentially do a lot in the future.
Otherwise, according to that logic, it'd be more okay to kill someone who was old and retired and not doing much than to kill an infant.
And I know some people really do believe that, and I think that's sick. Just my opinion, of course.:)
Re:Journal of Neuroscience isn't public
on
The Cat Cam
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I think it IS public for people at many educational institutions. It's probably IP-masked or something.
I mean look at all the things around you that are infinitely less complex (e.g., electronic equipment). If I told you those were "made" in the same manner (i.e., by evolution), you'd laugh.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you weren't there when the earth came into existence and you don't really know no matter how much you think you do, what really happened
Were you around 100 years ago? So why do you believe that the world existed 100 years ago? For all you know, it could all have been fabricated the day before you were born. You "really don't know no matter how much you think you do, what really happened" before you were born, according to your logic.
And where did this "eparation of church and state" come from? Its not in a the Delectation of Independence, its not in the bill of rights, etc. OK I know where it came from but its not in any of our official documents from our founding father of the country.
Yes, it IS in the Bill of Rights, in the First Amendment, as a matter of fact. Although someone beat me to pointing that out.
In any case, you should remember why it's in there in the first place.. It's there in large part because the Christians who came to this continent were being oppressed by a different sect of Christians back home who were ruling the country.
(It certainly helped, though, that Thomas Jefferson and many other founding fathers were Deists who had been disillusioned with organized religion altogether.)
In fact, I'm not sure I know any Christians who think the earth was created only 6,000 years ago.
I think you'd be surprised. In fact, according to a 1991 Gallup poll, iirc, 47% of Americans believe human beings were created "more or less in the form we are today"
I think another 45% believed as you do, that God simply helped things along.
Only 8% believed evolution was independent.
I'm quoting the numbers from the top of my head, but I believe them to be correct. (Anyone know where to find data on past Gallup polls?)
And those skelatal remains you are refering to are not complete. Matter of fact, no complete skeleton of man earlier than 30,000 years is "complete" from head to toe.
Gee.. y'think that being in the dirt for 30 thousand years will do that you? You seem to be implying that "incomplete" means "completely invalid". If you met a person with one arm amputated, would you say, "I'm not sure you're a human being because you don't have all four limbs"?! No! You'd see that the person is really similar to human beings in most ways, but for the missing arm, and extrapolate that the arm used to be there but is simply there no more.
"Lucy" was a hoax/mistake and folks fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker.
There are people who still believe the world is flat an the round earth thing is just a big conspiracy. Would you think that calling all flat-earthers fools is stereotyping?
Actually, I personally wouldn't, but not because I think they're right.. it's because I think stupidity is not necessarily the reason for their belief. I think there are other causes for people to believe in Creationism.. social factors and being taught it at a young age, as well as psychological comfort, and a host of other reasons that have nothing to do with "being fools".
Anyone mind telling me what the answers to numbers 2 and 3 are? (Number 1 has to do with the skinny man catching more air resistance per unit mass, I'm presuming.)
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of being more open, given that this project is supposed to help international communication, I'm surprised it gives so incredibly few details about their language. If you look at their project info page, this has been in development for a FEW YEARS already. Yet, their website only contains information on the software, not on the language itself, which would be the hard part.
I wish they'd give us more information on what UNL itself is like
Just to be a nitpick, UNL would not be a "meta-language" because it would not be a language about languages. It would just be an intermediate language.
The enconverters and deconverters would be more like the "meta-languages", sort of...
As far as I can tell (just guessing, though) there are 2 key differences between UNL and Esperanto:
1) It's not Romance-based and thus won't be as Euro-centric and will thus probably translate Eastern languages better.
2) It's designed as an intermediate language and not as a final end-user language. As far as I can tell, it could even be machine-readible and not speakable. In any case, it will not have as many constraints as a language like Esperanto that is designed for human speech.
These are just my gueses. I don't know what kind of language they're actually trying to implement. (The website is skimpy on those details.)
That's not true. You definitely can be a Nazi or a member of the KKK. In fact, the ACLU reguarly has to defend their rights to peaceful demonstrations and so forth. Now, some of the heads of the ACLU are Jewish, even, but although people may get personally offended or even despise the views of white supremecists, they fully support their right to free speech.
That's why I so admire the ACLU's guts to stand by what they stand for so firmly and non-discriminately support the First Amendment.
Btw, I'm not saying that it's any easier to be a member of the Nazi party or the KKK than to be Peter Singer due to social pressures...
Yes, but selection of which exhibits to support and which not to on crtiteria of religious offensiveness goes against the separation of church and state clause.
:P
Imagine if we had, for instance, "Everyone must pay taxes, except for people of such-and-such a religion."
Oh, wait.. that's already true...
Mr. Katz, what if you'd been the one born like that? Would you be so quick to praise the murder of newborns?
I don't think he would've been able to contemplate anything or praise anything since his brain wouldn't have had a chance to develop yet. That's the entire point of why infants are inherently different from adults.
Natural selection pretty much took care of babies who were too ill or sickly to survive. However, people tend to take care of them now. If they want to do that, it's their business, their money, and their lives.
Not entirely. They use up a lot of public funds in terms of welfare and insurance. I'm not making a judgment; just pointing out a fact.
This confuses me. What about site licenses?
I interned at a large securities (not "security") firm for a summer, and they just duplicate a few master install harddrives wholesale to set up new computers with NT and all the base software.
Seems to me perfectly normal to do this when you have a site license.
Is #10 just talking about illegal copying, or do you actually have to install from a different CD on to every machine? (That'd be insane!)
All this is precisely why we need to work toward more automation, imho.
I mean, every time we automate something, people complain about losing jobs. But the thing is, if we somehow manage to keep population growth under control (WAY easier said than done, I know), in general automation lead people no longer being forced to do menial labor.
Hey Bruce, if does violate the GPL, what can anyone do about it? Who would be the appropiate person to initiate legal proceedings?
You know, if it is a violation, we could TELL them about it and ASK them to release the source, rather than just go straight into litigation.
I'd rather have a processor a month or two later than have a crappy one that causes me headaches and likely a few months to replace.
I mean, people can live without the 500 MHz version for a couple of months.
It would be far worse if they just decided to quietly go ahead and release it and hope no one notices. (Or if they didn't even do enough testing to detect it in the first place.)
Huh? What are you talking about? :P
Why would students not want to hear that?
If anything, they'll try to use it as an excuse on tests.
Well, there's certainly the math aspect of it, but there's more than that. For instance, in good OOP, you need to learn to encapsulate well and not reveal your implementation, etc.
Half of good programming is just learning all the bad timesavers that you shouldn't do, and how to get good habits.
I'm afraid I can't really recommend any good books on the subject, as I've just been taking the courses here. I'm hoping someone else can?
The program was just the initial conditions, however, just as the initial conditions would be the formation of the Universe.
I have not ventured a hypothesis as to where the Universe came from. But evolution is analogous to this situation. Evolution theory does not concern the origin of the Universe itself.
Exactly. I really like it when colleges like MIT and Berkeley (I don't know about other places) teach their intro class in Scheme..
It really emphasizes that what you should be learning are the fundamentals and ideas, since languages are constantly changing anyway. (Well, so are ideas, but not as much.)
My point is that I don't think "potential" is the proper argument for not killing babies.
:)
I don't think it'd be wrong to kill you just because you could potentially do a lot in the future.
Otherwise, according to that logic, it'd be more okay to kill someone who was old and retired and not doing much than to kill an infant.
And I know some people really do believe that, and I think that's sick. Just my opinion, of course.
I think it IS public for people at many educational institutions. It's probably IP-masked or something.
I mean look at all the things around you that are infinitely less complex (e.g., electronic equipment). If I told you those were "made" in the same manner (i.e., by evolution), you'd laugh.
Er.. did you miss the recent Slashdot article about evolutionarily designed mechanical structures?
An evolutionary computing program designed a bridge and a crane and more...
Given the right info, there's no reason why it couldn't design electronic equipment.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you weren't there when the earth came into existence and you don't really know no matter how much you think you do, what really happened
Were you around 100 years ago? So why do you believe that the world existed 100 years ago? For all you know, it could all have been fabricated the day before you were born. You "really don't know no matter how much you think you do, what really happened" before you were born, according to your logic.
And where did this "eparation of church and state" come from? Its not in a the Delectation of Independence, its not in the bill of rights, etc. OK I know where it came from but its not in any of our official documents from our founding father of the country.
Yes, it IS in the Bill of Rights, in the First Amendment, as a matter of fact. Although someone beat me to pointing that out.
In any case, you should remember why it's in there in the first place.. It's there in large part because the Christians who came to this continent were being oppressed by a different sect of Christians back home who were ruling the country.
(It certainly helped, though, that Thomas Jefferson and many other founding fathers were Deists who had been disillusioned with organized religion altogether.)
Nerd are supposed to like SCIENCE. And this is about the politics behind an issue where people ignore the basic ideas behind science.
In fact, I'm not sure I know any Christians who think the earth was created only 6,000 years ago.
I think you'd be surprised. In fact, according to a 1991 Gallup poll, iirc, 47% of Americans believe human beings were created "more or less in the form we are today"
I think another 45% believed as you do, that God simply helped things along.
Only 8% believed evolution was independent.
I'm quoting the numbers from the top of my head, but I believe them to be correct. (Anyone know where to find data on past Gallup polls?)
And those skelatal remains you are refering to are not complete. Matter of fact, no complete skeleton of man earlier than 30,000 years is "complete" from head to toe.
Gee.. y'think that being in the dirt for 30 thousand years will do that you? You seem to be implying that "incomplete" means "completely invalid". If you met a person with one arm amputated, would you say, "I'm not sure you're a human being because you don't have all four limbs"?! No! You'd see that the person is really similar to human beings in most ways, but for the missing arm, and extrapolate that the arm used to be there but is simply there no more.
"Lucy" was a hoax/mistake and folks fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker.
Mind giving some EVIDENCE of that?
Calling all creationists fools is stereotyping.
There are people who still believe the world is flat an the round earth thing is just a big conspiracy.
Would you think that calling all flat-earthers fools is stereotyping?
Actually, I personally wouldn't, but not because I think they're right.. it's because I think stupidity is not necessarily the reason for their belief. I think there are other causes for people to believe in Creationism.. social factors and being taught it at a young age, as well as psychological comfort, and a host of other reasons that have nothing to do with "being fools".
Anyone mind telling me what the answers to numbers 2 and 3 are? (Number 1 has to do with the skinny man catching more air resistance per unit mass, I'm presuming.)