I think they probably watch more American TV in Britain than we do British TV here, so the plot is likely well under way and this is just a follow-up mission to judge the success of the over-all strategy.
Yes, but then we sneak British actors into those American TV shows (e.g., House). Little do you realise but we're infiltrating the USA with British English;-)
The primary goal of a language is to facilitate the transmission of information and abstract ideas.
That's questionable, actually. Spoken language at least seems to be far more often phatic than ideational. That is, the existence of the communication is usually more important than the information content. Most spoken language seems to be the verbal equivalent to ACK signals.
This isn't about standards of English, it's about laying off people and thus maximising profit.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK most young people can barely write a sentence these days, so any computer used over here will have to be taught "street talk innit" and all the other awful mangling of English that goes on. (They no longer teach correct spelling, or rather, they no longer correct bad spelling).
I take it you don't have kids in the UK school system? Here in the UK, all of the kids I know other than ones with identified learning difficulties(I know quite a few, until recently having been a volunteer youth worker) speak and write excellent English, and my daughter's school is very fussy about spelling (and grammar). Don't believe everything you read in the Daily Express.
Basically, what I am saying is that the collective "style guide" is and always has been a crock. It is an arbitrary and exclusionary set of principles for written english, with no objective or fundamental underpinning in any for of english that is or ever was spoken. The single best modern day wordsmiths can be found "rapping" in popular records in a dialect and with a style of grammar that breaks almost every rule in the style book, yet is unquestionably a more potent and superior form of communication for the purposes it is intended to serve.
In a way, the logical conclusion for the enforcement of the style guides can their eventually implementation on a computer. The style guides belong more to the realm of capricious, cold and uncaring logic than they ever did to the realm of human communication or expression.
And yet you chose to write that message in a style that would conform to pretty much any style guide. Probably because it's all about matching the communication to the purposes it is intended to serve. The style guides are great for the clearest communication to the widest audience, but that isn't always the purpose of language use (rap, for example).
My point is that it develops through a lot of mechanisms. It's naive to think that it develops completely organically, as the post I was replying to seemed to suggest. But it would be just as naive to think it's entirely down to definite conscious decisions (except in the case of artificially constructed languages). Hence: "Partly but not entirely..."
Seriously, I doubt it. English is far too irregular. A pogrom (sic) can only look for regularities, so will reward a particularly stilted style of english. Like "five paragraph themes". Maybe that will satisfy some in the ESL community, but it should not.
A simple test of any pgm is to see how it rates diverse examples of acknowledged great writing: Dickens, Steinbeck, Hardy and many others.
Feed any current grammar checker the opening to Bleak House and it will fail it for a complete lack of lexical verbs. It's a stylistic masterpiece, the absence of verbs giving a sense of an absence of change that prefigures the stalled court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, but a computer wouldn't spot that.
Indeed the rules of grammar can be seem obscure and almost arbitrary. However the rules of grammar8 actually grew naturally (i.e. not via committee, despite appearances) from a need of educated people to greatly clarify their communication.
Partly, but not entirely. There was a deliberate move in the 19th century to rid English of all those nasty Germanic influences and arbitrarily impose grammatical rules from the classical language onto English. The reason was nothing more nor less than intellectual snobbery, and the result was rules like not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions. Those rules have no natural place in English; they were only put there to marginalise those who did not have a classical education.
It also scores great writing and even greater speaking very inconsistently.
When fed Kennedy's "I am a Berliner" speech these systems always scored it rather low. Repetitious. Gratuitous use of foreign words: Ich bin ein Berliner.
You do realise that Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech might not be the best example of great speech, because it actually means something like "I am a donut" -- he should have just said "Ich bin Berliner".
Slashdot isn't in favour of or against anything. It's a whole bunch of different people with different opinions. Although I suspect quite a lot of us agree that it's clueless to mistake the opinions of individual posters for the opinion of/. as a whole.
AFPA were permitted to unilaterally terminate the contract (which is what the appeal was about) and so not pay EDU4 for the work. That looks like over a million euro -- hardly just "a slap on the wrist".
The article says it's water or hydroxyl (although it quietly drops the alternative for a while and just calls what they're picking up "the water signal"). I'm no chemist, but hydroxyl != water, right? So it's not unambiguous?
Haven't we had that argument a couple of times here already? Anyway : the reason you had trouble with it is not because it isn't intuitive, it's because you're very fluent with and accustomed to the old UI.
Don't think so, it violates quite a few basic rules of UI design. I know there are issues with the old 7+/-2 rule, but a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of non-intuitive icons is hard to search, it takes more screen real-estate than necessary, and is hostile to touch typists who don't want to have to keep moving their hand from keyboard to mouse and back (Alt-F S has become Alt H F D F -- double the keystrokes).
Yes (shared with my sister), in their will. Had they not done so, under UK law the same thing would have happened anyway. And it would be exactly the same with IP.
My parents chose to give it to me when they died. How is that different from them choosing to give it to me when they were alive? And how is it different from them leaving IP to me?
But despite being modded as a troll, I honestly can't see why inheritance of intellectual property is any different from inheritance of material property. Sure there are arguments to be had over whether IP should exist at all, or its duration if it does exis. But the argument that it shouldn't be inherited because the heir has done nothing to earn it is equally true for IP and material property.
I think that's just confusing terminology, from a time when humans considered themselves over and above nature. As far as evolution is concerned, the fact that we like to put weedkiller on something (or not) is exactly the same type of selective pressure as the fact that particular bugs like to eat it (or not). Nature is blind to whether it's us or the bugs doing it.
I think they're barking up the wrong tree; controlling the weed seems like an expensive pasttime. Instead, I'd combat it genetically:
- start building up cultures of the weed, test the characteristics of different strains (go for ones that are more susceptible to infections, aphids, lower burn temperatures, less serrated edges, etc), breed these together, and create a weaker strain; distribute that across infested regions to weaken the weed.
Surely natural selection would just mean that the weaker versions of the weed would be selected against and so their genes would be eliminated from the gene pool again, leaving just the toughest varieties?
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Well, damn again. I'm not joining Digg, even if it would mean getting laid more often.
"are people going to have to learn an especially bland form of English to pass exams?" . . . You haven't taken an English exam in a while, have you?
Yes I have, but at University level.
I think they probably watch more American TV in Britain than we do British TV here, so the plot is likely well under way and this is just a follow-up mission to judge the success of the over-all strategy.
Yes, but then we sneak British actors into those American TV shows (e.g., House). Little do you realise but we're infiltrating the USA with British English ;-)
The primary goal of a language is to facilitate the transmission of information and abstract ideas.
That's questionable, actually. Spoken language at least seems to be far more often phatic than ideational. That is, the existence of the communication is usually more important than the information content. Most spoken language seems to be the verbal equivalent to ACK signals.
This isn't about standards of English, it's about laying off people and thus maximising profit. I don't know about the US, but here in the UK most young people can barely write a sentence these days, so any computer used over here will have to be taught "street talk innit" and all the other awful mangling of English that goes on. (They no longer teach correct spelling, or rather, they no longer correct bad spelling).
I take it you don't have kids in the UK school system? Here in the UK, all of the kids I know other than ones with identified learning difficulties(I know quite a few, until recently having been a volunteer youth worker) speak and write excellent English, and my daughter's school is very fussy about spelling (and grammar). Don't believe everything you read in the Daily Express.
Mistaking repeatability for accuracy, though, is either a complete n00b move, or a total weasel move.
A commercial organisation sees a way of saving money. I think I know which of those I'd bet on.
in the "real world". [Period placement CMS 6.8]
and simple typos". [Period placement CMS 6.8]
Both instances are correct British English. What's the CMS reference for parochialism?
Basically, what I am saying is that the collective "style guide" is and always has been a crock. It is an arbitrary and exclusionary set of principles for written english, with no objective or fundamental underpinning in any for of english that is or ever was spoken. The single best modern day wordsmiths can be found "rapping" in popular records in a dialect and with a style of grammar that breaks almost every rule in the style book, yet is unquestionably a more potent and superior form of communication for the purposes it is intended to serve.
In a way, the logical conclusion for the enforcement of the style guides can their eventually implementation on a computer. The style guides belong more to the realm of capricious, cold and uncaring logic than they ever did to the realm of human communication or expression.
And yet you chose to write that message in a style that would conform to pretty much any style guide. Probably because it's all about matching the communication to the purposes it is intended to serve. The style guides are great for the clearest communication to the widest audience, but that isn't always the purpose of language use (rap, for example).
So the poor f2k in spring and the rich f2k in the autumn? Damn, what social group do I have to be in to get it all year round?
My point is that it develops through a lot of mechanisms. It's naive to think that it develops completely organically, as the post I was replying to seemed to suggest. But it would be just as naive to think it's entirely down to definite conscious decisions (except in the case of artificially constructed languages). Hence: "Partly but not entirely..."
Seriously, I doubt it. English is far too irregular. A pogrom (sic) can only look for regularities, so will reward a particularly stilted style of english. Like "five paragraph themes". Maybe that will satisfy some in the ESL community, but it should not.
A simple test of any pgm is to see how it rates diverse examples of acknowledged great writing: Dickens, Steinbeck, Hardy and many others.
Feed any current grammar checker the opening to Bleak House and it will fail it for a complete lack of lexical verbs. It's a stylistic masterpiece, the absence of verbs giving a sense of an absence of change that prefigures the stalled court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, but a computer wouldn't spot that.
Indeed the rules of grammar can be seem obscure and almost arbitrary. However the rules of grammar8 actually grew naturally (i.e. not via committee, despite appearances) from a need of educated people to greatly clarify their communication.
Partly, but not entirely. There was a deliberate move in the 19th century to rid English of all those nasty Germanic influences and arbitrarily impose grammatical rules from the classical language onto English. The reason was nothing more nor less than intellectual snobbery, and the result was rules like not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions. Those rules have no natural place in English; they were only put there to marginalise those who did not have a classical education.
It also scores great writing and even greater speaking very inconsistently.
When fed Kennedy's "I am a Berliner" speech these systems always scored it rather low. Repetitious. Gratuitous use of foreign words: Ich bin ein Berliner.
You do realise that Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech might not be the best example of great speech, because it actually means something like "I am a donut" -- he should have just said "Ich bin Berliner".
Slashdot isn't in favour of or against anything. It's a whole bunch of different people with different opinions. Although I suspect quite a lot of us agree that it's clueless to mistake the opinions of individual posters for the opinion of /. as a whole.
Of course we don't count. We're the ones who don't believe in the fairies and the magic blue smoke that everyone else knows make computers run.
Fairies and magic blue smoke? So that's where I've been going wrong -- I thought it was daemons.
AFPA were permitted to unilaterally terminate the contract (which is what the appeal was about) and so not pay EDU4 for the work. That looks like over a million euro -- hardly just "a slap on the wrist".
The article says it's water or hydroxyl (although it quietly drops the alternative for a while and just calls what they're picking up "the water signal"). I'm no chemist, but hydroxyl != water, right? So it's not unambiguous?
There are a lot of ISPs available in the UK, so there's plenty of choice for fleeing customers.
Haven't we had that argument a couple of times here already? Anyway : the reason you had trouble with it is not because it isn't intuitive, it's because you're very fluent with and accustomed to the old UI.
Don't think so, it violates quite a few basic rules of UI design. I know there are issues with the old 7+/-2 rule, but a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of non-intuitive icons is hard to search, it takes more screen real-estate than necessary, and is hostile to touch typists who don't want to have to keep moving their hand from keyboard to mouse and back (Alt-F S has become Alt H F D F -- double the keystrokes).
Hopefully -- otherwise it's goodbye Firefox from me.
Yes (shared with my sister), in their will. Had they not done so, under UK law the same thing would have happened anyway. And it would be exactly the same with IP.
My parents chose to give it to me when they died. How is that different from them choosing to give it to me when they were alive? And how is it different from them leaving IP to me?
But despite being modded as a troll, I honestly can't see why inheritance of intellectual property is any different from inheritance of material property. Sure there are arguments to be had over whether IP should exist at all, or its duration if it does exis. But the argument that it shouldn't be inherited because the heir has done nothing to earn it is equally true for IP and material property.
I think that's just confusing terminology, from a time when humans considered themselves over and above nature. As far as evolution is concerned, the fact that we like to put weedkiller on something (or not) is exactly the same type of selective pressure as the fact that particular bugs like to eat it (or not). Nature is blind to whether it's us or the bugs doing it.
I think they're barking up the wrong tree; controlling the weed seems like an expensive pasttime. Instead, I'd combat it genetically: - start building up cultures of the weed, test the characteristics of different strains (go for ones that are more susceptible to infections, aphids, lower burn temperatures, less serrated edges, etc), breed these together, and create a weaker strain; distribute that across infested regions to weaken the weed.
Surely natural selection would just mean that the weaker versions of the weed would be selected against and so their genes would be eliminated from the gene pool again, leaving just the toughest varieties?