I think your expectations are a little high. It's unreasonable to assume people are perfectly well-read, when becoming even moderately well-read takes many years of work. If you want to complain about literary literacy, I would pick a more widespread problem, like the death of the common cultural mythology.
Actually, they say it'll support 3G and voice chat. And you know what that means: SIDETALKIN', the feature all other phones envy!
Basically, while Android and iOS won't necessarily disappear from the games market over night, it's lights out for them as serious competitors in the phone arena.
I'm not sure you have a very good grasp of linguistics. The people who coined the modern exclamation most likely had no knowledge of its history. From a philological standpoint, it's a homonym with the pre-existing definitions of "woot", and not actually the same word. Similarly, to Shakespeare, "anon" meant "at once!" or "shortly!", not "anonymous individual".
This is a pretty common phenomenon and drives most linguistic evolution to some extent. Languages are always evolving, and may even continue to evolve after they're formally pronounced dead, like Latin has. Particularly convenient words made out of popular letters are at a premium, so when one is forgotten, it's inevitable that a new one will appear with the same spelling.
I believe you'll find that most of the people who devote significant time to questions like that disagree with you. The United States looks much worse than it actually is because we're embroiled in it (or near it; I'm Canadian), and have a culture that lets us talk about its problems easily. In China, executions can be rushed so the local police department can make a quick buck from organ harvesting. Say what you will about the Reagan-tastic premises and oil-seeking tendencies of the Iraq War, or even Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib—the PRC has done much, much worse for to its own people.
I think the meaning has changed significantly. First it was a form of a word meaning 'to know', then a replacement for 'will you', and finally the new form is an exclamation of joy. It would only be a resurrection of the previous form if there were some manner of evidence for a deliberate reference. But since the meaning is so totally different and we can't exactly chase down whoever came up with it, it's kind of hard to claim that there is one.
(Moreover, I'm not sure "a?" is much of a neologism so much as an alternative spelling of the extremely venerated "eh?", which is easily hundreds of years old.)
Creationism is an infectious idea that has the potential to do a great deal of damage amongst the less educated. The last thing the United States needs is public resistance to fundamental research. If left to their own devices and accommodated instead of confronted, the supporters of this ideology could (and would) push the US back to before the Renaissance. It's happened before.
Of course, that being said, the Chinese would pick up the slack (and arguably already have), but their government is fantastically corrupt and secretive and probably wouldn't make the best flag-bearer for human civilization.
Radical populations have a long and storied history of getting violent when a law they don't like passes. Would you like me to start with the KKK or the anti-abortionism movement? I assume you've never had to deal with extremists face-to-face for very long. This really shouldn't surprise you one bit.
1. I was replying to someone saying that if we didn't like Apple's pricing scheme, we should make our own clone. Apple has succinctly demonstrated that it will not be tolerated. At no point was I making a statement about the Tab's quality.
2. But further, on the issue of clones: people didn't bitch when PC clones and the Macintosh came onto the scene. Why should this be any different?
3. And about quality: how do you know the Tab sucks? Yes, the Android tablet app ecosystem is still catching up to the iPad's, but the hardware is superior to the iPad 1. Pretty much every negative review about the original 7" Tab related to its smaller size, and a version comparable in size to the iPad is now out.
Please go dump your hatred of playing the family IT goon somewhere else. Your random bitching is giving professional trolls a bad name.
On the topic of different cultures trusting computers to a different extent, I remember reading once that there was a particular kind of critical situation wherein a jetliner is not sure whether to trust the autopilot or the human pilot. Boeing (American) planes opt to trust the human, and Airbus (European) planes trust the autopilot.
Still—that's a safety system, not a weapons platform.
On the topic of Perimeter's autonomy, most of the contradictory quotes are from bureaucrats who may have been playing the nuclear deterrent wargame, much like the spooks at the RAND Corporation once did. The Wired article goes on about it at length, and since it's much more recent, I'm inclined to trust it more. It also discusses the self-control aspect of Perimeter.
Religion, like law, is a system for controlling people. In general, unlike law, religions explicitly involve a certain group (a prophet or clergy, etc.) reaping benefits from their followers on a regular basis and thus not having to do any work. However, religion has had a very important impact on the history of civilization in that it has kept it from shaking itself apart. While we do not have too many reliable accounts of what life was like in the Roman Empire shortly before Christianity became mainstream, the evidence is that the people of the day were not yet ready to live in an atheistic or agnostic world. To some extent, it appears that there will probably always be a portion of the population that can be made to contribute functionally to society if they believe some old dude on a cloud is judging everything they do. And before you ask, genocide is not a realistic option.
Most biologists are able to ignore anti-evolutionary sentiments because they're far removed from it. This morning, I spent two hours cleaning up raw sequencing data for L. vannamei, a species of shrimp with 88 chromosomes in healthy, normal adults. Although it's never been assembled before, a significant portion of the shrimp's genome (above 4%) appears to be simple repeats of "AGAGAGA..." and "CTCTCTC...". Both the huge chromosome count and the repeats are consequences of the evolutionary process; over time, errors in DNA replication and crossover have caused bulk genetic information to develop. In essence, evolution has been staring me in the face all day. To hear that some hick in Texas wants to pretend it doesn't exist just seems completely irrelevant.
The big reason people don't understand evolution is because they don't understand how biology works—at all. They see how many vertebrae snakes have and how many vertebrae humans have, and can't understand that the difference is that, in humans, the gene that says "make more vertebrae" shuts off faster. They believe there are these fantastical differences between organisms because of exterior qualitative properties, when really it's all the same stuff, just under slightly different circumstances.
When you realise the person with whom you're arguing doesn't even understand the most basic fundamentals of what they're talking about, it becomes infinitely harder to take them seriously. It's like arguing with a three-year-old.
Apple is currently trying to ban Samsung's entire line of capacitive touch tablets and phones in the European Union. Apple has 69% of the tablet market in the EU, and Samsung has 7%. I promise you that making one's own iPad is not, in fact, an option.
I did indeed catch the distinction between Shakespeare's usage of wilt and the original form witen. All so, it doesn't mean he coined the term; even if it's unattested elsewhere, it may have been slang in that area at the time. I assume that the same argument has been had to the bitter end for just about everything he's accused of inventing.
Incidentally, I did encounter someone recently who was attempting to build a properly Germanic tongue from the ground up, but was having an awful time scraping together a clean, bare wordlist to use. I think the reason they're so rare is, frankly, because the phonotactic patterns of Germanic languages make them inherently less beautiful to the ear, particularly for those who grew up living with them. In most language synthesis projects, I've found that there's a desire to produce something that sounds foreign; thus, presumably, the people most qualified to build a Germanic conlang (natural speakers) are those least motivated to do so.
There has never been a system that can launch nuclear weapons without human involvement. The closest thing to that is Perimeter, which still requires human intervention to fire. The American counterpart strategy was to keep bombers in the air around the clock. Neither superpower ever developed an autonomous launch system.
Generals trust computers to carry out orders, but they don't trust them to make decisions. The design of Perimeter is nothing if not a testament to that. They've seen all of theoldsci-fimoviesthat suggest machines have the potential to go rogue. And every time a story like this happens, they only get more cautious.
Robotic soldiers might be plausible simply because the risk is comparatively small, but handing over power to a machine just ain't gonna happen.
But all of those technologies are controllable. The military is all about ensuring that every component can be completely trusted. I'm sure you've heard of ruggedized computers and cellphones meant for military use, and the rigorous tests consumer products must go through before being considered battlefield-ready. Guidance and aircraft control programs have to go through years of exhaustive analysis to make sure that every line of code does exactly what it should do under every possible condition.
Sentient artificial intelligence could never pass such inspection. We'd be talking about a person made out of metal and silicon who hasn't gone through basic training, or unit cohesion building, or any of the other brainwashing regimens every military in the entire world puts their troops through to make sure they never go rogue. Soldiers are supposed to remain loyal to the chain of command above all else!
And if you put it in a position of power, regardless of whether or not it rebels, thou art truly foolish, for you have created a dictator who is above reproach. Just as if you had put a human in the same position.
It appears I recollected an occasion on which Shakespeare did in fact use a word with the letters "woot", committed it to memory, and assumed that digging up the first dictionary that came to mind would settle the question properly without remembering any other detais. For what it's worth, this is what I should have been pointing to. At any rate, both accomplish my point: that "woot" has had a meaning in the English language for hundreds of years before the neologism was coined.
And bravo for rendering a grammatically valid structure; I spent five minutes pondering over how to cram it into the third person and the present tense and never considered dumping the stupid auxiliary verb. My linguistics background is mostly in the extremely synthetic breed of conlang, and as such I tend to stumble with subtle realities of legitimate linguistics.
woot. v. Middle English. Third-person singular simple present indicative form of witen. witen. v. To know.
And there was an English language and "woot" before... well, before a lot of things. I guess your high school English teacher doesn't woot Shakespeare?
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I think your expectations are a little high. It's unreasonable to assume people are perfectly well-read, when becoming even moderately well-read takes many years of work. If you want to complain about literary literacy, I would pick a more widespread problem, like the death of the common cultural mythology.
Plenty. The real question is how many of them have umlauts over the 'n'. (And if the umlauts look like little '11's.)
Actually, they say it'll support 3G and voice chat. And you know what that means: SIDETALKIN', the feature all other phones envy!
Basically, while Android and iOS won't necessarily disappear from the games market over night, it's lights out for them as serious competitors in the phone arena.
Not actually true, but I tend to agree with you that this is a case of the instinctive shark-jumping response.
Yes. Note that modern ethics thinks this is the better move. It's also less lucrative.
I'm not sure you have a very good grasp of linguistics. The people who coined the modern exclamation most likely had no knowledge of its history. From a philological standpoint, it's a homonym with the pre-existing definitions of "woot", and not actually the same word. Similarly, to Shakespeare, "anon" meant "at once!" or "shortly!", not "anonymous individual".
This is a pretty common phenomenon and drives most linguistic evolution to some extent. Languages are always evolving, and may even continue to evolve after they're formally pronounced dead, like Latin has. Particularly convenient words made out of popular letters are at a premium, so when one is forgotten, it's inevitable that a new one will appear with the same spelling.
The United States hasn't annexed Canada yet. So, no.
Also: it's a pretty wide margin. I would suggest using stronger language than "not quite as bad as".
I believe you'll find that most of the people who devote significant time to questions like that disagree with you. The United States looks much worse than it actually is because we're embroiled in it (or near it; I'm Canadian), and have a culture that lets us talk about its problems easily. In China, executions can be rushed so the local police department can make a quick buck from organ harvesting. Say what you will about the Reagan-tastic premises and oil-seeking tendencies of the Iraq War, or even Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib—the PRC has done much, much worse for to its own people.
I think the meaning has changed significantly. First it was a form of a word meaning 'to know', then a replacement for 'will you', and finally the new form is an exclamation of joy. It would only be a resurrection of the previous form if there were some manner of evidence for a deliberate reference. But since the meaning is so totally different and we can't exactly chase down whoever came up with it, it's kind of hard to claim that there is one.
(Moreover, I'm not sure "a?" is much of a neologism so much as an alternative spelling of the extremely venerated "eh?", which is easily hundreds of years old.)
Creationism is an infectious idea that has the potential to do a great deal of damage amongst the less educated. The last thing the United States needs is public resistance to fundamental research. If left to their own devices and accommodated instead of confronted, the supporters of this ideology could (and would) push the US back to before the Renaissance. It's happened before.
Of course, that being said, the Chinese would pick up the slack (and arguably already have), but their government is fantastically corrupt and secretive and probably wouldn't make the best flag-bearer for human civilization.
That doesn't sound very aerodynamic.
Radical populations have a long and storied history of getting violent when a law they don't like passes. Would you like me to start with the KKK or the anti-abortionism movement? I assume you've never had to deal with extremists face-to-face for very long. This really shouldn't surprise you one bit.
Thanks for being late to the show.
1. I was replying to someone saying that if we didn't like Apple's pricing scheme, we should make our own clone. Apple has succinctly demonstrated that it will not be tolerated. At no point was I making a statement about the Tab's quality.
2. But further, on the issue of clones: people didn't bitch when PC clones and the Macintosh came onto the scene. Why should this be any different?
3. And about quality: how do you know the Tab sucks? Yes, the Android tablet app ecosystem is still catching up to the iPad's, but the hardware is superior to the iPad 1. Pretty much every negative review about the original 7" Tab related to its smaller size, and a version comparable in size to the iPad is now out.
Please go dump your hatred of playing the family IT goon somewhere else. Your random bitching is giving professional trolls a bad name.
On the topic of different cultures trusting computers to a different extent, I remember reading once that there was a particular kind of critical situation wherein a jetliner is not sure whether to trust the autopilot or the human pilot. Boeing (American) planes opt to trust the human, and Airbus (European) planes trust the autopilot.
Still—that's a safety system, not a weapons platform.
On the topic of Perimeter's autonomy, most of the contradictory quotes are from bureaucrats who may have been playing the nuclear deterrent wargame, much like the spooks at the RAND Corporation once did. The Wired article goes on about it at length, and since it's much more recent, I'm inclined to trust it more. It also discusses the self-control aspect of Perimeter.
Religion, like law, is a system for controlling people. In general, unlike law, religions explicitly involve a certain group (a prophet or clergy, etc.) reaping benefits from their followers on a regular basis and thus not having to do any work. However, religion has had a very important impact on the history of civilization in that it has kept it from shaking itself apart. While we do not have too many reliable accounts of what life was like in the Roman Empire shortly before Christianity became mainstream, the evidence is that the people of the day were not yet ready to live in an atheistic or agnostic world. To some extent, it appears that there will probably always be a portion of the population that can be made to contribute functionally to society if they believe some old dude on a cloud is judging everything they do. And before you ask, genocide is not a realistic option.
Most biologists are able to ignore anti-evolutionary sentiments because they're far removed from it. This morning, I spent two hours cleaning up raw sequencing data for L. vannamei, a species of shrimp with 88 chromosomes in healthy, normal adults. Although it's never been assembled before, a significant portion of the shrimp's genome (above 4%) appears to be simple repeats of "AGAGAGA..." and "CTCTCTC...". Both the huge chromosome count and the repeats are consequences of the evolutionary process; over time, errors in DNA replication and crossover have caused bulk genetic information to develop. In essence, evolution has been staring me in the face all day. To hear that some hick in Texas wants to pretend it doesn't exist just seems completely irrelevant.
The big reason people don't understand evolution is because they don't understand how biology works—at all. They see how many vertebrae snakes have and how many vertebrae humans have, and can't understand that the difference is that, in humans, the gene that says "make more vertebrae" shuts off faster. They believe there are these fantastical differences between organisms because of exterior qualitative properties, when really it's all the same stuff, just under slightly different circumstances.
When you realise the person with whom you're arguing doesn't even understand the most basic fundamentals of what they're talking about, it becomes infinitely harder to take them seriously. It's like arguing with a three-year-old.
Alas, we didn't stay in touch, and I lost his contact details. But if I run into him again, I'll pass you on.
I propose that the Amsterdam accent should (jokingly) be called a Phlegmish accent. Not the most inventive pun, but far from unfitting...
Oh god. Now I'm going to have nightmares. Why did you lend this credence?!
Apple is currently trying to ban Samsung's entire line of capacitive touch tablets and phones in the European Union. Apple has 69% of the tablet market in the EU, and Samsung has 7%. I promise you that making one's own iPad is not, in fact, an option.
I did indeed catch the distinction between Shakespeare's usage of wilt and the original form witen. All so, it doesn't mean he coined the term; even if it's unattested elsewhere, it may have been slang in that area at the time. I assume that the same argument has been had to the bitter end for just about everything he's accused of inventing.
Incidentally, I did encounter someone recently who was attempting to build a properly Germanic tongue from the ground up, but was having an awful time scraping together a clean, bare wordlist to use. I think the reason they're so rare is, frankly, because the phonotactic patterns of Germanic languages make them inherently less beautiful to the ear, particularly for those who grew up living with them. In most language synthesis projects, I've found that there's a desire to produce something that sounds foreign; thus, presumably, the people most qualified to build a Germanic conlang (natural speakers) are those least motivated to do so.
There has never been a system that can launch nuclear weapons without human involvement. The closest thing to that is Perimeter, which still requires human intervention to fire. The American counterpart strategy was to keep bombers in the air around the clock. Neither superpower ever developed an autonomous launch system.
Generals trust computers to carry out orders, but they don't trust them to make decisions. The design of Perimeter is nothing if not a testament to that. They've seen all of the old sci-fi movies that suggest machines have the potential to go rogue. And every time a story like this happens, they only get more cautious.
Robotic soldiers might be plausible simply because the risk is comparatively small, but handing over power to a machine just ain't gonna happen.
But all of those technologies are controllable. The military is all about ensuring that every component can be completely trusted. I'm sure you've heard of ruggedized computers and cellphones meant for military use, and the rigorous tests consumer products must go through before being considered battlefield-ready. Guidance and aircraft control programs have to go through years of exhaustive analysis to make sure that every line of code does exactly what it should do under every possible condition.
Sentient artificial intelligence could never pass such inspection. We'd be talking about a person made out of metal and silicon who hasn't gone through basic training, or unit cohesion building, or any of the other brainwashing regimens every military in the entire world puts their troops through to make sure they never go rogue. Soldiers are supposed to remain loyal to the chain of command above all else!
And if you put it in a position of power, regardless of whether or not it rebels, thou art truly foolish, for you have created a dictator who is above reproach. Just as if you had put a human in the same position.
Do you see how idiotic the concept is now?
It appears I recollected an occasion on which Shakespeare did in fact use a word with the letters "woot", committed it to memory, and assumed that digging up the first dictionary that came to mind would settle the question properly without remembering any other detais. For what it's worth, this is what I should have been pointing to. At any rate, both accomplish my point: that "woot" has had a meaning in the English language for hundreds of years before the neologism was coined.
And bravo for rendering a grammatically valid structure; I spent five minutes pondering over how to cram it into the third person and the present tense and never considered dumping the stupid auxiliary verb. My linguistics background is mostly in the extremely synthetic breed of conlang, and as such I tend to stumble with subtle realities of legitimate linguistics.
woot. v. Middle English. Third-person singular simple present indicative form of witen.
witen. v. To know.
And there was an English language and "woot" before... well, before a lot of things. I guess your high school English teacher doesn't woot Shakespeare?