That's right...who needs that pesky Bill of Rights, anyway? If you refuse to answer a question or let the cops ransack your house, you must be guilty, otherwise you wouldn't have anything to hide.
It's probably a Latin vs. Greek thing--just as Hercules is the name the Latin-speaking Romans gave to the character the Greeks called Herakles. Which is which I couldn't say. (Ooh, ick. I just realized that "Kerberos" is probably pronounced "Care Bear Ohsss." Care Bears--echh!) Hmmm. Latin used hard "c" throughout; I'm not even sure they had a letter "k." So, I'd guess that "Cerebus" (pronounced "Keh-reh-booss") is Latin, and "Kerberos" is Greek. Weird things happen to words as they get borrowed (tying back to a subthread of "will there be a universal language for the Internet?" a few days ago).
That seems to be a common notion--St. Francis Xavier thought Japanese to be of Satanic origin, and stories vary about Basque (one claim is of Satanic origin, and another is that Satan tried to learn Basque to assist with tempting the Basques, and gave up after a few centuries, having only learned a couple of words!).
You're liable to get comments of varying levels of heat. Swahili (in Swahili, kiswahili, the Swahili language, as opposed to waswahili, Swahili speakers) is arguably a lingua franca in much of Africa. If you remember those old Afro Sheen commercials on Soul Train, the backup singers first sang "Beautiful people" and then sang "Watu wazuri," which is the same thing in Swahili. (I have a copy of Teach Yourself Swahili and must regrettably admit to not having seriously started on it. I would still need a mkalemana (translator).)
He screwed up trying to say "You are an ugly camel." (I was about to wonder whether there are any native speakers of Esperanto, but I vaguely recall hearing of some Esperantists bringing up bilingual children who could thus be argued to be native Esperantists.)
For "unperverted" English, one would want a copy of Beowulf. Even before the Norman Conquest, other invaders left their mark on English. An example cited by Mario Pei: in the sentence "Take the knife and cut the steak," the only English word is "the"; the other words are of Scandinavian origin.
Yup, La Academie Francaise, like the Spanish Academia Real, try to specify what is French or Spanish respectively. They must feel a lot like King Canute. Not to mention that some attempts at linguistic purity are not particularly reality-based. Mario Pei cites an attempt to "purify" Italian back in the Mussolini era that, for example, eschewed "hotel" for "albergo," which sounds very Italian but turns out not to be.
I like the way English goes with the flow. It is good to be able to make the distinctions that seemingly redundant words allow. As someone once put it, [exiting politically correct mode] Venus is a celestial body but has a heavenly body.
One that I ran across recently (new to me; probably well known to anime folks) is, in English messages, spelled "cosplay," probably in kana "kosupuree." What it means is dressing up like an anime character, i.e. "costume play."
The Norman Conquest, when French-speaking people conquered England. Made French the language of the powerful in England for some time, and English gained lots of vocabulary (large hunks of legal and heraldic terminology, to give very small examples) and lost a fair amount of Germanic flavor.
English and Japanese alike have been sucking up words from other languages for a long time. The big switch for English was the 1066 thing; the Japanese borrowed big time from the Chinese (writing system, various abstract terms, numbers, all those on pronunciations)--but even so, the process continues. English sure as heck hasn't merged with French despite the Normans, and Japanese won't lose its character no matter how many garaigo (borrowed words) they pull in from English.
One big thing about that is that Japanese borrow words without necessarily having any idea of etymology--to the Japanese a smorgasbord (we borrowed from Swedish there) is a bakingu, which is how "Viking" sounds from Japanese-speaking lips. Garaigo also get shortened in ways that ignore etymology--the British abbreviate "television" to "telly," which splits it along root boundaries, and we shorten "temporary" to "temp," which keeps the major part of Latin tempus on which the word is based. OTOH, the Japanese turn "television" into terebi, or "orchestra" into oke (as in karaoke, literally "empty orchestra"); a Japanese-speaking coworker of mine named some variables "tem", which puzzled the [insert favorite expletive here] out of me until I realized that was how he shortened "temporary." The most notorious example is probably beea (I lack a macron to mark long vowels), for an increase in base pay. English "base up" turned into beesu appu and thence to beea. Good luck figuring that one out unaided!
Japanese garaigo show the futility of Loglan's attempt to be ecumenical via trying to maximize some weighted average of phonemes in natural languages for their equivalents of the concept one is inventing a Loglan word for. The result is something unintelligible to the speakers of the languages one is supposedly aiding.
I've heard ARMs are famed for low power consumption, but wonder if someone who knows more than I do about it might comment on what kind of battery life we might expect from an ARM-powered Palm.
Um, MicroBerto...AIDS is communicable and has no known cure. It may just be a matter of time before some version of the virus evolves that will survive in mosquito guts, and then we're all, no matter what Jerry Falwell et al. say, in very deep dung. Seems to me it's worth devoting significant effort to.
Sigh. If something shouldn't be done, then it shouldn't be done by a corporation, but the main obligation a company has is to provide the best product it can for the money. Other people have no moral claim on a company's profits, any more than they do on an individual's income. (That's other random people, of course; one's spouse, children, friends, or parents are a different matter.)
Do you consider Microsoft "moral" because of Gates's donations to charity (much of which consists of software, costing Microsoft nearly nothing, tax deductible at full inflated retail price, and serving to indoctrinate more future customers)?
Sigh. Very bogus analogy. Surely it's a good enough "story" to say "We can use this to create mass storage devices that are very small and don't need to be rotated by large energy-eating, not to mention noisy, and prone to mechanical failure--motors."
As for "nobody will ever need that much space" line--data, like work, expands to fill the space available. Parents and grandparents would, I expect, love to be able to store every image, sound recording, etc. made of their offspring, or scanned images of their offspring's scrawled drawings. Genealogists probably wouldn't mind having portable versions of large databases that they could consult, or update on their laptops or PDAs they take with them to cemetaries or offices in small towns. Musicians would love to be able to keep large sample/patch libraries at hand, or store a lot of their work.
As far as looking up...any more, consulting a centralized (and hence easily updated) database for matching partial URLs is just about necessary, unless you like having people flame because the quick and dirty heuristic of slapping.com on the end and http://www. on the front got them to the (in)famous porn site whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov... As much as I despise the Evil Empire, I can't quite attribute malevolence to them in this one case.
At what cost? This sort of program lends itself to incredible abuse. Children whose only crime is not being in the right clique or not wearing fashionable clothing or not conforming to standards of beauty will have more to worry about than the usual harassment--they can get branded as possible killers, too, and all students will get that much better early indoctrination into proper behavior in a police state. How can you beat a deal like that?
Re:Tell your lawmakers what you think (Thanks MS!)
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Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 1
I went to the "Freedom to Innovate" page. They have a quote listed as "from a FIN [Freedom to Innovate Network"] site visitor" that is interesting:
"I fully intend to e-mail my representatives, and I hope they realize the important impact that Microsoft has had on the computing industry alone, and ALL the other industries as well."
Now, that by itself doesn't indicate whether the site visitor thought that impact was good or bad, just that it was important. For all I know, the very next sentence might have read "Microsoft's monopolistic tactics have held back the computing industry, and Judge Jackson's decision is just the first step towards punishing Microsoft as it deserves," or it could have been something much more favorable to Microsoft...but had it been more favorable, don't you think they'd have quoted more, rather than chopping it down to an ambiguous sentence a la the reviews written about performances by Florence Foster Jenkins, thought by many to be the worst opera singer of all time?
If this is the best they could do of the comments they received, perhaps things are looking up.
Re:We win! Where is the Party?
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 1
No!!! No party yet. There are still ways that the Evil Empire can weasel out of this. Rod "The Rock" Kinnison's line in the analogous situation near the end of Triplanetary is apropos here.
That said, the verdict is encouraging. Back when IBM was the Evil Empire, the DOJ never got this far.
Slashdot Mirror
You are joking, aren't you, Atticka?
It's probably a Latin vs. Greek thing--just as Hercules is the name the Latin-speaking Romans gave to the character the Greeks called Herakles. Which is which I couldn't say. (Ooh, ick. I just realized that "Kerberos" is probably pronounced "Care Bear Ohsss." Care Bears--echh!) Hmmm. Latin used hard "c" throughout; I'm not even sure they had a letter "k." So, I'd guess that "Cerebus" (pronounced "Keh-reh-booss") is Latin, and "Kerberos" is Greek. Weird things happen to words as they get borrowed (tying back to a subthread of "will there be a universal language for the Internet?" a few days ago).
That seems to be a common notion--St. Francis Xavier thought Japanese to be of Satanic origin, and stories vary about Basque (one claim is of Satanic origin, and another is that Satan tried to learn Basque to assist with tempting the Basques, and gave up after a few centuries, having only learned a couple of words!).
You're liable to get comments of varying levels of heat. Swahili (in Swahili, kiswahili, the Swahili language, as opposed to waswahili, Swahili speakers) is arguably a lingua franca in much of Africa. If you remember those old Afro Sheen commercials on Soul Train, the backup singers first sang "Beautiful people" and then sang "Watu wazuri," which is the same thing in Swahili. (I have a copy of Teach Yourself Swahili and must regrettably admit to not having seriously started on it. I would still need a mkalemana (translator).)
He screwed up trying to say "You are an ugly camel." (I was about to wonder whether there are any native speakers of Esperanto, but I vaguely recall hearing of some Esperantists bringing up bilingual children who could thus be argued to be native Esperantists.)
For "unperverted" English, one would want a copy of Beowulf. Even before the Norman Conquest, other invaders left their mark on English. An example cited by Mario Pei: in the sentence "Take the knife and cut the steak," the only English word is "the"; the other words are of Scandinavian origin.
I like the way English goes with the flow. It is good to be able to make the distinctions that seemingly redundant words allow. As someone once put it, [exiting politically correct mode] Venus is a celestial body but has a heavenly body.
One that I ran across recently (new to me; probably well known to anime folks) is, in English messages, spelled "cosplay," probably in kana "kosupuree." What it means is dressing up like an anime character, i.e. "costume play."
The Norman Conquest, when French-speaking people conquered England. Made French the language of the powerful in England for some time, and English gained lots of vocabulary (large hunks of legal and heraldic terminology, to give very small examples) and lost a fair amount of Germanic flavor.
One big thing about that is that Japanese borrow words without necessarily having any idea of etymology--to the Japanese a smorgasbord (we borrowed from Swedish there) is a bakingu, which is how "Viking" sounds from Japanese-speaking lips. Garaigo also get shortened in ways that ignore etymology--the British abbreviate "television" to "telly," which splits it along root boundaries, and we shorten "temporary" to "temp," which keeps the major part of Latin tempus on which the word is based. OTOH, the Japanese turn "television" into terebi, or "orchestra" into oke (as in karaoke, literally "empty orchestra"); a Japanese-speaking coworker of mine named some variables "tem", which puzzled the [insert favorite expletive here] out of me until I realized that was how he shortened "temporary." The most notorious example is probably beea (I lack a macron to mark long vowels), for an increase in base pay. English "base up" turned into beesu appu and thence to beea. Good luck figuring that one out unaided!
Japanese garaigo show the futility of Loglan's attempt to be ecumenical via trying to maximize some weighted average of phonemes in natural languages for their equivalents of the concept one is inventing a Loglan word for. The result is something unintelligible to the speakers of the languages one is supposedly aiding.
Hmmm...if it said "Abort, Retry, or Ignore?" then answering "retry" would be double jeopardy, so wouldn't they need a special version of Windows?
I've heard ARMs are famed for low power consumption, but wonder if someone who knows more than I do about it might comment on what kind of battery life we might expect from an ARM-powered Palm.
Libertarians aren't hermits; they form voluntary social structures like anybody else. The author is flailing away at a caricature of libertarianism.
If everybody else pays comparable wages in that area, on what basis do you claim it is "unfair"?
Um, MicroBerto...AIDS is communicable and has no known cure. It may just be a matter of time before some version of the virus evolves that will survive in mosquito guts, and then we're all, no matter what Jerry Falwell et al. say, in very deep dung. Seems to me it's worth devoting significant effort to.
Do you consider Microsoft "moral" because of Gates's donations to charity (much of which consists of software, costing Microsoft nearly nothing, tax deductible at full inflated retail price, and serving to indoctrinate more future customers)?
As for "nobody will ever need that much space" line--data, like work, expands to fill the space available. Parents and grandparents would, I expect, love to be able to store every image, sound recording, etc. made of their offspring, or scanned images of their offspring's scrawled drawings. Genealogists probably wouldn't mind having portable versions of large databases that they could consult, or update on their laptops or PDAs they take with them to cemetaries or offices in small towns. Musicians would love to be able to keep large sample/patch libraries at hand, or store a lot of their work.
I expect they'd be lynched if they went to the miniskirts the women wore in ST:TOS; that at the very least will be changed.
"Fair taxation" is an oxymoron.
You've got it backwards. The brick and mortar stores should be asking that their sales not be taxed, just like online transactions.
So why aren't you protesting? Taxation is theft.
As far as looking up...any more, consulting a centralized (and hence easily updated) database for matching partial URLs is just about necessary, unless you like having people flame because the quick and dirty heuristic of slapping .com on the end and http://www. on the front got them to the (in)famous porn site whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov... As much as I despise the Evil Empire, I can't quite attribute malevolence to them in this one case.
At what cost? This sort of program lends itself to incredible abuse. Children whose only crime is not being in the right clique or not wearing fashionable clothing or not conforming to standards of beauty will have more to worry about than the usual harassment--they can get branded as possible killers, too, and all students will get that much better early indoctrination into proper behavior in a police state. How can you beat a deal like that?
"I fully intend to e-mail my representatives, and I hope they realize the important impact that Microsoft has had on the computing industry alone, and ALL the other industries as well."
Now, that by itself doesn't indicate whether the site visitor thought that impact was good or bad, just that it was important. For all I know, the very next sentence might have read "Microsoft's monopolistic tactics have held back the computing industry, and Judge Jackson's decision is just the first step towards punishing Microsoft as it deserves," or it could have been something much more favorable to Microsoft...but had it been more favorable, don't you think they'd have quoted more, rather than chopping it down to an ambiguous sentence a la the reviews written about performances by Florence Foster Jenkins, thought by many to be the worst opera singer of all time?
If this is the best they could do of the comments they received, perhaps things are looking up.
That said, the verdict is encouraging. Back when IBM was the Evil Empire, the DOJ never got this far.