Or is it just that if the kids stayed home then the parent would have to stay home, and therefore do something other than chauffeur the kids around. Remember though, that the kids the P is talking about are not the poor, they are the upper middies who can afford to have one of the parents as chauffeur. So this is less important for them. I would worry more about parents who are working threee jobs, kids unsupervised after school, homework not being finished or attempted, students not meeting the standards and goals set by the teacher and belonging to a group that prides itself on being "stupid."
That is the America in a lot of schools today, for poor kids especially.
No, he is right. I belong to an NEA connected teacher's Union and we battle to get a 3% raise for faculty at a rising star university in Florida. Florida has the money, Florida needs to keep their faculty (and they are leaving now to get better pay in other universities) andwe are already in the bottom quartile for Adjuncts and instructors (instructional faculty as opposed to research faculty who are tenured or tenure track). But even the tenure track stars are still well below average here. The Unions struggle to keep @10% of the faculty as members, when we pay 1% of our income to the union for dues. So the 3% return is well worth it for our income which would be stagnant without the pressure they provide.
So, the old ideas about unions are real bullshit now, but, interestingly, I was teaching a History remedial class this past semester and in my prep I ran across anti-union speeches given by the 1%ers of the time and damned if they weren't reading from the same playbook more than 100 years ago. Join a union, get a payraise and lose your job because you are too expensive to hire any more.
Really, read some real history about working class and middle class people and forget what your buddies at Fox are telling you. They are the pawns of the system.
It's fear, fear, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Think about the policeman, anyone with an open, not fearful heart would ask the kid to tell him what was going on and then deal with the real problem: asshat kids. But no, everyone was scared to death because a Sikh (oops, non-muslim, hindu but they dress funny so they should be feared)
Where were the real adults? The real men and women who could have/should have stepped up to solve a problem that was easy to solve without fear and over-reaction? Where were the brave Texans of the Alamo?Where were the brave Americans of WWII, Korea and Vietnam (not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan: in fact, I believe that a real service person would have had the lack of fear to solve this, but I might just be hoping)?
OK, admit it Trump and Cruz and Rubio and all the rest of the clowns on left and right: how many of you would have walked bravely into this situation and solved the problem with words instead of what happened? And, if you wouldn't, if your handlers would have kept you back out of "danger," would you be ashamed, or be busy figuring out how to justify your inaction and the suffering of a 12 year old boy over a joke that adults over-reacted to?
Until we have leaders who don't need fences, leaders who welcome the poor and indigent, the war ravaged people of the world, then we are not the America that you think you are.
No, not "insightful," just overblown. Use reality instead of hyperbole. I lived for a couple of years where I could only drive once or twice a week, mostly on dirt roads with 0 traffic. The only time it was a problem was when I hit a deer, then I dragged the deer off the road and performed a hit and run. (really, that is what it was, but I knew the local constabulary would not appreciate being called out into the boonies because I hit a deer.) Even the insurance company agreed that it was the right thing to do. And I totally agree with your conclusion, but might also add: "don't drive in a way that might cause an accident that you feel you need to run away from."
Yes, one of them was 'Separation of Church and State'. They carefully chose the word "Church" because they did not wast a 'Separation of God and State.' The wanted all to believe in God, but at the same time, they wanted no organized religion, or church, to have a hold of the government. And even though this meme didn't make it into the constitution, or in even in the Amendment people assume has this meme, the Judicial system has most recently been interpreting laws as if 'Separation of God and State' were in the constitution.
Don't be messing with TJ my friend. Jefferson was interested in the Unitarians, he liked their ideas. But keep that very much in mind, he was an idea man, and his head was exploding with ideas. One of the ideas he struggled with was the difference between the need for a system that protects people (he was the man who wrote the Bill of Rights for the Virginia state constitution, which was the model for the Bill of rights in the US constitution) and the idea of a pure democracy based on the Athenian model (basically white male property owners could govern and vote) which is what his idea of the Constitution was. (I'm not saying he wrote it, most of it was written by James Madison, one of his closest friends in Virginia)
However to describe TJ as a "man of God" or anything like that would be very mistaken. He was a scientist and was very skeptical of the religious practices of his day, which was why he was interested in the unitarians: they seemed to focus on morality and ethical behavior that was supported by religions in general. He could support that.
I teach Saudi students. One of them was explaining to me that everything that science discovers is already in the Koran. Her example (And she, BTW, was divorced from her husband, working on/finishing her Masters in math and came from a wealthy family: she was not a fool, but she was indoctrinated) was that recently (IDK how recently, just recently) scientists have discovered that ant exoskeletons are made of silicon dioxide, which, being sand, is the primary ingredient of glass. This was already made clear in the Koran. How? Well when someone steps on an ant in the Koran the word for the sound of the ant being crushed is the same word for the sound of glass breaking. QED
While I am in general supportive of anything that has scientific grounding, as in empirical data for support, I also grew up in the modern world of scientific manipulation of data. Eg 1: Exxon just admitted that they hid their own evidence of global warming that they discovered in the 70s/80s. Now, I want to know who did the testing on the salmon, what were they testing for and what safeguards are in place to keep gene jumping into the wild (not hocus-pocus jumping genes, but a simple escape of fish into the wild and cross-breeding with wild salmon creating a fish that has genetic problems that allow it to become an invasive species. Eg 2: The tobacco companies knew about the correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer, as well as knowing that the manipulation of cigarette recipes (all the extra crap they began to put into cigarettes when they added filters) would probably increase that correlation effect (as in give more people a chance of cancer). Yet they battled that knowledge, using their head start to recognize their risk and game how to beat the "crazy, unscientific fools" who kept insisting that correlation was possible causation and therefore still a major risk. 20 years and more stupid greed driving people into their graves, just to make more money off cigarettes.
I work in a research university, and have tremendous respect for the work we do. BUT, the researchers I know are the most skeptical people I know, they are skeptical of their results as well as others. They are especially skeptical of research for and about something that already has commercial force behind it. While I don't speak for them, what I hear is that the original GM research was brought to market too quickly (in order to be first, of course) and that once there was a market behind it, it became suspect and unreliable.
Agreed, my mom was, well, high-performing in many things most of her life as was her mother before her. Both of them had dementia late in their life and it was so similar that I can guess where my sister at least is headed. She is also an insanely high-performing person and as she ages she can't help but search for the writing on the wall. While I am just five years older... my sister has to worry about dementia a lot too, did I tell you about my mother? She.....
Yeah, it is reaslly frustrating to try to stay in a repetitive loop with someone that used to be razor sharp. (not that I ever was as sharp as the women in my family) it is painful and depressing. Anything that can help slow or alleviate any of the symptoms would make a huge quality of life improvement for caregivers.
the OS X kernal was/is called Mach, which was a derivative of BSD. Linux, while considered by most to be a Unix variant, has taken the Unix base and built and built and built on it so that it now has evolved in many different directions. Yes, correct. This is good. Apple has also evolved OS X. Also good. But neither are adequate to meet the high standards you and I set for "innovation." My comment had to do with the "App Store" and the fact that it is just a repo with a price for the downloads. It is considered by many in the Apple world as the "innovation" that is making Apple rich. I dispute the use of the word innovation in this context. Both of the OSs are evolutions of Unix, but called the App Store an innovation is wrong.
Sorry, but I can't bring myself to rise to your level of vitriol, I have a life and things to do today.
Well, hmmm, not to make too big a point about this cause I am not the "ordinary" user.... well does anybody remember the WeTab? It was a 12"tablet from a German company (Titoo? I think) who made a tablet that could run Win 7, or Linux (I put Fedora on mine) or any number of other OSs. I bought a bluetooth keyboard and a simple little stand for it and had a pretty decent little desktop for a small investment. Fedora had touch pretty quick (had to bash around a bit the first time I did it, then it was standard after a year or so). So, while I am very impressed by the surface, it wasn't news to me.
What it was was a nice piece of well put together kit. I don't suggest them to my students, because of the price, but students who do have them can work just as well or better than the ones toting macbooks. Even the Chinese ones with macbooks running winXP (yes, that is a real thing). So I have to say that the Surface is as good as a Macbook. Yes, I just damned it with faint praise, but for most people that sounded like a big up, so take it as you will.
No, what Apple has always done is very good marketing, which is what they did with the iPad. The innovation had already come with the iPod and the music store innovation. An old, tired idea at the point where it became the "App Store." And really, they run repos for applications and charge you to buy them. That is innovation? No that is stealing the idea from linux and other unix derivatives and charging people for it. Charging people is not an innovation.
As far as I can see, Apple is a highly successful marketing compnay that caters to ordinary people (who are willing to spend 2-3 times a reasonable price) rather than geeks like most of us. Not only that, they are focused on maintaining control over anything they touch by claiming intellectual property rights and screwing people who don't accept their IP claims. It is this attitude about IP and closed source applications and kernels (when their kernel was sourced from an open project) that makes them the pariah of thinking people, geeks or not.
physics I don't know about, but 15+ years ago I was helping a PhD Biology student (working on a specific heart malfunction in humans, so bio-med or something) write his thesis/dissertation paper. I t turned out that while he thought he was studying the heart problem, his supervisor decided that the mouse that he was engineering to have to heart problem was such an achievement that he told him to write that up instead for the degree.
What does this have to do with the issue? The PhD student was the only one able to create the mouse. Four other groups around the world were trying, but had failed in the endeavor. Not only that, even people in the lab, with the same breeds of mice and the same equipment, under his supervision could not reproduce the mice. His mice could reproduce, so he just bred them and sent them out to other labs working on the heart problem, but no one, by the time I left, had reproduced the mouse. Sooooo.....
Eg: I live in Tampa FL. About 1 mile from downtown and 13 ft above average sea level right now. If the sea rose two feet in the next few years it would wipe out the most valuable real estate in Tampa Bay, pretty much devastating the economy of the area. Davis and Harbor Islands were manufactured with rubble back a hundred years ago, just one hurricane with a 5 foot storm surge would wash everything out on the islands, including the hospital (Tampa General Hospital). Yeah, this is real, we jeust had a summer of good rains, not hurricanes or tropical storms, just rains, and six of the small towns in the bay area were evacuated at least once. The bayfront properties were all flooded. South Tampa was cut off a few times. And it is getting worse because it is still raining.
Language is FUN! Notice the use of the word "tribes." It was passed to us through our civics and history books, that explained why the uneducated, unskilled native American tribes could not compete with the highly skilled and educated European nations. Oh yes, the language tells it all.
"Notice the use of the word 'nations.' It was passed to us through our civics and history books that explained why the uneducated, unskilled native American nations could not compete with the highly skilled and educated European tribes. Oh yes, the language tells it all."
I have biked (motor, electric and leg-powered) in Europe, Asia and the US. The US is crazy about going fast, too fast. So fast they must lose everything they gain by going fast when they arrive, change clothes and shower. In other places people slow down, pay attention to the surroundings and don't get into crashes that require a helmet to hold your brainshit in place for the ride to the hospital. They also can walk into work, stress-free and happy from some really useful exercise.
By following the simple rule of going slower than all the Americans around me, I have had a single accident: when a Chinese woman was texting while pulling onto a busy highway and almost ran me over. I had time to jump off, drop my bike safely in front of her car and thereby get a new bike for her stupidity. She lost her license as well BTW.
I used to work as a copy editor for a very small publisher and could not agree more. Basically, in my experience anyway, the copy editor is the person who actually sets the style, the vocabulary, the syntax and the grammar, while the "author" slings ideas at a blank screen. As the hiring of editors has reduced and the skill of the editors hired has plummeted we are seeing the mess that is publication being sucked down into a miserable hell.
You think this is bad? This is free! Wired is worse and they charge money for it!
They needed to do some meta-analysis of existing work first. There is quite a bit, even some existing meta work done on sound systems. Really, I speak Chinese and English and am aware of the similarities and difference. It is interesting about the use of high-pitch in the part of the countryside they were working in (but I would bet that the people in Yunnan might have some different sound options as would people in Xizang, GuangDong or the Manchu or any of the radically different language areas around China.
My students in Suzhou, China considered the highest pitches to be signs of opera, since the sung performances often used very high pitch. As well, I often saw comedians who would use a very high pitch to comic effect. All of these are quite different from what they were talking about since they were not semantic, rather meta-linguistic in themselves, "registering" comedy, or high drama or whatever was normal for that milieu.
I don't think that their direction of study is valid simply because they haven't done the meta-work to actually be prepared for this. If they doubled back and actually did that work then it might be of some use.
A "real" linguist here, one who specializes on the complex and semantic sound aspects of English. (in other words, I focus on how sounds are often semantically important in English, as they are in Chinese, but differently semantic)
The mistakes here are all based on not understanding that we have a built-in sound system that uses pitch, pitch change, length of vowel hold and variation in length of vowel change as well as loudness to affect meaning. The simplest example, for native speakers is: "Yeah, right." If I give the "right" part a very low pitch, set both lengths the same and add a higher pitch with a slight rise on the "yeah" part you get a phrase which says the exact opposite of the apparent semantic meaning of "yes, I agree." (as in "no, you are an idiot"). If you reverse the sonic structures (low "yeah" and higher and rising "right") you get the strong semantic meaning.
So, everything they are pointing to has existing semantic meaning in English, which kind of ruins their ideas unless they can show that these structures have the same meaning in all languages(which they don't).
the end of the article is a gentle rebuttal:" “From the data they have, there’s a big jump to the conclusions that they are making. But you have to start somewhere. I’m quite sympathetic with the conclusions.” Sympathetic? How very kind of you.
pardon my final sentence with a mistake in than>>then and the compklete failure of syntax. It should be saying: "Once people understand that LO/OO provide ease of use for everything they do, then they too will want to use it." That "I have" was egregious. Apologies, friends
I work in an environment (and have for many years, in many places in the world, doing many different jobs in a similar environment) where I have used Libre and Open office (and even tried Symphony for a short time). I have been able to consistenly provide perfect results with everything I do, whether spreadsheets, presentations or documents. There has never been a question or a problem. In fact, I have been able to often provide better and more consistent results than my colleagues can with MS Office.
EG: I work in an office right now where no one seems to be able to find or use the numbering function for numbered lists. MS Office has apparently hidden it in the ribbon and, perhaps because they don't use it often or at all, it is relegated to the ribbon dungeon.
Now, in none of the places I have worked has anyone shown me a function that MS Office has that Libre/Open office doesn't have THAT THEY USE. Obviously it is the use that is important. Once someone told me that they needed a particular spreadsheet function that LO/OO didn't have, but it seemed to me to be a naming difference rather than a function difference.
Now, this is not to say that there are not tons of edge cases that MS Office meets that LO/OO don't. But I wouldn't know because they don't affect 99% of users.
OK, everybody on the same page with me? So why do people insist that they must have the difficulty and complexity that is modern MS Office? 1) It is all that has been sold/given to them. 2) It must be better since it costs money. (yes, I and other FOSSarians know that this is meaningless, but most people live in a world where cheap or free means trashy and broken. I maintain that many people in this forum say these things about FOSS because they expect it to be trashy and broken , thereby creating an experience of the same. The amount of time I have watched colleagues fight, bitch, moan and struggle with the perfection that everyone agrees is MS Office would make me argue against its wonderfulness. 3) They once had something that they needed to do with something and they knew how to do it with MS Office but couldn't figure out how to do it in another (fill in LO/OO here even though it wasn't) suite. 4) They had a colleague who needed to handle an edge case that LO/OO really doesn't do and therefore they are useless for everyone. All it takes is one person in an office who has always used a particular function to create this situation.
I have seen all these situations in my various workplaces. I always use LO or OO and have never been restrained in what I do, have never been slowed down by my choice (in fact I usually finish first, but that might just be a matter of focus, food and sleep). I am legion, or would be if people just used simple solutions rather than stupidly complex solutions. (Notice that people are really much happier using a stupidly simple photo editor that only has 4 or 5 functions than using photoshop.) It is ease of use, which I think once people get it than they will stay with it, I have.
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Or is it just that if the kids stayed home then the parent would have to stay home, and therefore do something other than chauffeur the kids around. Remember though, that the kids the P is talking about are not the poor, they are the upper middies who can afford to have one of the parents as chauffeur. So this is less important for them. I would worry more about parents who are working threee jobs, kids unsupervised after school, homework not being finished or attempted, students not meeting the standards and goals set by the teacher and belonging to a group that prides itself on being "stupid."
That is the America in a lot of schools today, for poor kids especially.
No, he is right. I belong to an NEA connected teacher's Union and we battle to get a 3% raise for faculty at a rising star university in Florida. Florida has the money, Florida needs to keep their faculty (and they are leaving now to get better pay in other universities) andwe are already in the bottom quartile for Adjuncts and instructors (instructional faculty as opposed to research faculty who are tenured or tenure track). But even the tenure track stars are still well below average here. The Unions struggle to keep @10% of the faculty as members, when we pay 1% of our income to the union for dues. So the 3% return is well worth it for our income which would be stagnant without the pressure they provide.
So, the old ideas about unions are real bullshit now, but, interestingly, I was teaching a History remedial class this past semester and in my prep I ran across anti-union speeches given by the 1%ers of the time and damned if they weren't reading from the same playbook more than 100 years ago. Join a union, get a payraise and lose your job because you are too expensive to hire any more.
Really, read some real history about working class and middle class people and forget what your buddies at Fox are telling you. They are the pawns of the system.
It's fear, fear, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Think about the policeman, anyone with an open, not fearful heart would ask the kid to tell him what was going on and then deal with the real problem: asshat kids. But no, everyone was scared to death because a Sikh (oops, non-muslim, hindu but they dress funny so they should be feared)
Where were the real adults? The real men and women who could have/should have stepped up to solve a problem that was easy to solve without fear and over-reaction? Where were the brave Texans of the Alamo?Where were the brave Americans of WWII, Korea and Vietnam (not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan: in fact, I believe that a real service person would have had the lack of fear to solve this, but I might just be hoping)?
OK, admit it Trump and Cruz and Rubio and all the rest of the clowns on left and right: how many of you would have walked bravely into this situation and solved the problem with words instead of what happened? And, if you wouldn't, if your handlers would have kept you back out of "danger," would you be ashamed, or be busy figuring out how to justify your inaction and the suffering of a 12 year old boy over a joke that adults over-reacted to?
Until we have leaders who don't need fences, leaders who welcome the poor and indigent, the war ravaged people of the world, then we are not the America that you think you are.
Pure BS. I'm running fedora23 on a core 2 duo I built in 2007 with absolutely no problems. Even upgraded it with dnf system-upgrade without trouble.
No, not "insightful," just overblown. Use reality instead of hyperbole.
I lived for a couple of years where I could only drive once or twice a week, mostly on dirt roads with 0 traffic. The only time it was a problem was when I hit a deer, then I dragged the deer off the road and performed a hit and run. (really, that is what it was, but I knew the local constabulary would not appreciate being called out into the boonies because I hit a deer.) Even the insurance company agreed that it was the right thing to do.
And I totally agree with your conclusion, but might also add: "don't drive in a way that might cause an accident that you feel you need to run away from."
Yes, one of them was 'Separation of Church and State'. They carefully chose the word "Church" because they did not wast a 'Separation of God and State.' The wanted all to believe in God, but at the same time, they wanted no organized religion, or church, to have a hold of the government. And even though this meme didn't make it into the constitution, or in even in the Amendment people assume has this meme, the Judicial system has most recently been interpreting laws as if 'Separation of God and State' were in the constitution.
Don't be messing with TJ my friend. Jefferson was interested in the Unitarians, he liked their ideas. But keep that very much in mind, he was an idea man, and his head was exploding with ideas. One of the ideas he struggled with was the difference between the need for a system that protects people (he was the man who wrote the Bill of Rights for the Virginia state constitution, which was the model for the Bill of rights in the US constitution) and the idea of a pure democracy based on the Athenian model (basically white male property owners could govern and vote) which is what his idea of the Constitution was. (I'm not saying he wrote it, most of it was written by James Madison, one of his closest friends in Virginia)
However to describe TJ as a "man of God" or anything like that would be very mistaken. He was a scientist and was very skeptical of the religious practices of his day, which was why he was interested in the unitarians: they seemed to focus on morality and ethical behavior that was supported by religions in general. He could support that.
I teach Saudi students. One of them was explaining to me that everything that science discovers is already in the Koran. Her example (And she, BTW, was divorced from her husband, working on /finishing her Masters in math and came from a wealthy family: she was not a fool, but she was indoctrinated) was that recently (IDK how recently, just recently) scientists have discovered that ant exoskeletons are made of silicon dioxide, which, being sand, is the primary ingredient of glass. This was already made clear in the Koran. How? Well when someone steps on an ant in the Koran the word for the sound of the ant being crushed is the same word for the sound of glass breaking. QED
While I am in general supportive of anything that has scientific grounding, as in empirical data for support, I also grew up in the modern world of scientific manipulation of data.
Eg 1: Exxon just admitted that they hid their own evidence of global warming that they discovered in the 70s/80s. Now, I want to know who did the testing on the salmon, what were they testing for and what safeguards are in place to keep gene jumping into the wild (not hocus-pocus jumping genes, but a simple escape of fish into the wild and cross-breeding with wild salmon creating a fish that has genetic problems that allow it to become an invasive species.
Eg 2: The tobacco companies knew about the correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer, as well as knowing that the manipulation of cigarette recipes (all the extra crap they began to put into cigarettes when they added filters) would probably increase that correlation effect (as in give more people a chance of cancer). Yet they battled that knowledge, using their head start to recognize their risk and game how to beat the "crazy, unscientific fools" who kept insisting that correlation was possible causation and therefore still a major risk. 20 years and more stupid greed driving people into their graves, just to make more money off cigarettes.
I work in a research university, and have tremendous respect for the work we do. BUT, the researchers I know are the most skeptical people I know, they are skeptical of their results as well as others. They are especially skeptical of research for and about something that already has commercial force behind it. While I don't speak for them, what I hear is that the original GM research was brought to market too quickly (in order to be first, of course) and that once there was a market behind it, it became suspect and unreliable.
Agreed, my mom was, well, high-performing in many things most of her life as was her mother before her. Both of them had dementia late in their life and it was so similar that I can guess where my sister at least is headed. She is also an insanely high-performing person and as she ages she can't help but search for the writing on the wall. While I am just five years older... my sister has to worry about dementia a lot too, did I tell you about my mother? She.....
Yeah, it is reaslly frustrating to try to stay in a repetitive loop with someone that used to be razor sharp. (not that I ever was as sharp as the women in my family) it is painful and depressing. Anything that can help slow or alleviate any of the symptoms would make a huge quality of life improvement for caregivers.
the OS X kernal was/is called Mach, which was a derivative of BSD. Linux, while considered by most to be a Unix variant, has taken the Unix base and built and built and built on it so that it now has evolved in many different directions. Yes, correct. This is good. Apple has also evolved OS X. Also good. But neither are adequate to meet the high standards you and I set for "innovation." My comment had to do with the "App Store" and the fact that it is just a repo with a price for the downloads. It is considered by many in the Apple world as the "innovation" that is making Apple rich. I dispute the use of the word innovation in this context. Both of the OSs are evolutions of Unix, but called the App Store an innovation is wrong.
Sorry, but I can't bring myself to rise to your level of vitriol, I have a life and things to do today.
there was the "or hatred" in the definition which many seem to be ignoring.
Well, hmmm, not to make too big a point about this cause I am not the "ordinary" user.... well does anybody remember the WeTab? It was a 12"tablet from a German company (Titoo? I think) who made a tablet that could run Win 7, or Linux (I put Fedora on mine) or any number of other OSs. I bought a bluetooth keyboard and a simple little stand for it and had a pretty decent little desktop for a small investment. Fedora had touch pretty quick (had to bash around a bit the first time I did it, then it was standard after a year or so). So, while I am very impressed by the surface, it wasn't news to me.
What it was was a nice piece of well put together kit. I don't suggest them to my students, because of the price, but students who do have them can work just as well or better than the ones toting macbooks. Even the Chinese ones with macbooks running winXP (yes, that is a real thing). So I have to say that the Surface is as good as a Macbook. Yes, I just damned it with faint praise, but for most people that sounded like a big up, so take it as you will.
No, what Apple has always done is very good marketing, which is what they did with the iPad. The innovation had already come with the iPod and the music store innovation. An old, tired idea at the point where it became the "App Store." And really, they run repos for applications and charge you to buy them. That is innovation? No that is stealing the idea from linux and other unix derivatives and charging people for it. Charging people is not an innovation.
As far as I can see, Apple is a highly successful marketing compnay that caters to ordinary people (who are willing to spend 2-3 times a reasonable price) rather than geeks like most of us.
Not only that, they are focused on maintaining control over anything they touch by claiming intellectual property rights and screwing people who don't accept their IP claims. It is this attitude about IP and closed source applications and kernels (when their kernel was sourced from an open project) that makes them the pariah of thinking people, geeks or not.
physics I don't know about, but 15+ years ago I was helping a PhD Biology student (working on a specific heart malfunction in humans, so bio-med or something) write his thesis/dissertation paper. I t turned out that while he thought he was studying the heart problem, his supervisor decided that the mouse that he was engineering to have to heart problem was such an achievement that he told him to write that up instead for the degree.
What does this have to do with the issue? The PhD student was the only one able to create the mouse. Four other groups around the world were trying, but had failed in the endeavor. Not only that, even people in the lab, with the same breeds of mice and the same equipment, under his supervision could not reproduce the mice. His mice could reproduce, so he just bred them and sent them out to other labs working on the heart problem, but no one, by the time I left, had reproduced the mouse. Sooooo.....
Eg: I live in Tampa FL. About 1 mile from downtown and 13 ft above average sea level right now. If the sea rose two feet in the next few years it would wipe out the most valuable real estate in Tampa Bay, pretty much devastating the economy of the area. Davis and Harbor Islands were manufactured with rubble back a hundred years ago, just one hurricane with a 5 foot storm surge would wash everything out on the islands, including the hospital (Tampa General Hospital). Yeah, this is real, we jeust had a summer of good rains, not hurricanes or tropical storms, just rains, and six of the small towns in the bay area were evacuated at least once. The bayfront properties were all flooded. South Tampa was cut off a few times. And it is getting worse because it is still raining.
Language is FUN!
Notice the use of the word "tribes." It was passed to us through our civics and history books, that explained why the uneducated, unskilled native American tribes could not compete with the highly skilled and educated European nations. Oh yes, the language tells it all.
"Notice the use of the word 'nations.' It was passed to us through our civics and history books that explained why the uneducated, unskilled native American nations could not compete with the highly skilled and educated European tribes. Oh yes, the language tells it all."
I have biked (motor, electric and leg-powered) in Europe, Asia and the US. The US is crazy about going fast, too fast. So fast they must lose everything they gain by going fast when they arrive, change clothes and shower. In other places people slow down, pay attention to the surroundings and don't get into crashes that require a helmet to hold your brainshit in place for the ride to the hospital. They also can walk into work, stress-free and happy from some really useful exercise.
By following the simple rule of going slower than all the Americans around me, I have had a single accident: when a Chinese woman was texting while pulling onto a busy highway and almost ran me over. I had time to jump off, drop my bike safely in front of her car and thereby get a new bike for her stupidity. She lost her license as well BTW.
You seem to be geographically challenged friend. A Valley must have at least one outlet, therefor at least one "down."
I used to work as a copy editor for a very small publisher and could not agree more. Basically, in my experience anyway, the copy editor is the person who actually sets the style, the vocabulary, the syntax and the grammar, while the "author" slings ideas at a blank screen. As the hiring of editors has reduced and the skill of the editors hired has plummeted we are seeing the mess that is publication being sucked down into a miserable hell.
You think this is bad? This is free! Wired is worse and they charge money for it!
This is what I've been thinking of building on some mountain property I have. I'd rather do it myself and then bring it in and set it up.
They needed to do some meta-analysis of existing work first. There is quite a bit, even some existing meta work done on sound systems. Really, I speak Chinese and English and am aware of the similarities and difference. It is interesting about the use of high-pitch in the part of the countryside they were working in (but I would bet that the people in Yunnan might have some different sound options as would people in Xizang, GuangDong or the Manchu or any of the radically different language areas around China.
My students in Suzhou, China considered the highest pitches to be signs of opera, since the sung performances often used very high pitch. As well, I often saw comedians who would use a very high pitch to comic effect. All of these are quite different from what they were talking about since they were not semantic, rather meta-linguistic in themselves, "registering" comedy, or high drama or whatever was normal for that milieu.
I don't think that their direction of study is valid simply because they haven't done the meta-work to actually be prepared for this. If they doubled back and actually did that work then it might be of some use.
A "real" linguist here, one who specializes on the complex and semantic sound aspects of English. (in other words, I focus on how sounds are often semantically important in English, as they are in Chinese, but differently semantic)
The mistakes here are all based on not understanding that we have a built-in sound system that uses pitch, pitch change, length of vowel hold and variation in length of vowel change as well as loudness to affect meaning. The simplest example, for native speakers is: "Yeah, right." If I give the "right" part a very low pitch, set both lengths the same and add a higher pitch with a slight rise on the "yeah" part you get a phrase which says the exact opposite of the apparent semantic meaning of "yes, I agree." (as in "no, you are an idiot"). If you reverse the sonic structures (low "yeah" and higher and rising "right") you get the strong semantic meaning.
So, everything they are pointing to has existing semantic meaning in English, which kind of ruins their ideas unless they can show that these structures have the same meaning in all languages(which they don't).
the end of the article is a gentle rebuttal:" “From the data they have, there’s a big jump to the conclusions that they are making. But you have to start somewhere. I’m quite sympathetic with the conclusions.” Sympathetic? How very kind of you.
pardon my final sentence with a mistake in than>>then and the compklete failure of syntax. It should be saying:
"Once people understand that LO/OO provide ease of use for everything they do, then they too will want to use it."
That "I have" was egregious.
Apologies, friends
I work in an environment (and have for many years, in many places in the world, doing many different jobs in a similar environment) where I have used Libre and Open office (and even tried Symphony for a short time). I have been able to consistenly provide perfect results with everything I do, whether spreadsheets, presentations or documents. There has never been a question or a problem. In fact, I have been able to often provide better and more consistent results than my colleagues can with MS Office.
EG: I work in an office right now where no one seems to be able to find or use the numbering function for numbered lists. MS Office has apparently hidden it in the ribbon and, perhaps because they don't use it often or at all, it is relegated to the ribbon dungeon.
Now, in none of the places I have worked has anyone shown me a function that MS Office has that Libre/Open office doesn't have THAT THEY USE. Obviously it is the use that is important. Once someone told me that they needed a particular spreadsheet function that LO/OO didn't have, but it seemed to me to be a naming difference rather than a function difference.
Now, this is not to say that there are not tons of edge cases that MS Office meets that LO/OO don't. But I wouldn't know because they don't affect 99% of users.
OK, everybody on the same page with me? So why do people insist that they must have the difficulty and complexity that is modern MS Office?
1) It is all that has been sold/given to them.
2) It must be better since it costs money. (yes, I and other FOSSarians know that this is meaningless, but most people live in a world where cheap or free means trashy and broken. I maintain that many people in this forum say these things about FOSS because they expect it to be trashy and broken , thereby creating an experience of the same. The amount of time I have watched colleagues fight, bitch, moan and struggle with the perfection that everyone agrees is MS Office would make me argue against its wonderfulness.
3) They once had something that they needed to do with something and they knew how to do it with MS Office but couldn't figure out how to do it in another (fill in LO/OO here even though it wasn't) suite.
4) They had a colleague who needed to handle an edge case that LO/OO really doesn't do and therefore they are useless for everyone. All it takes is one person in an office who has always used a particular function to create this situation.
I have seen all these situations in my various workplaces. I always use LO or OO and have never been restrained in what I do, have never been slowed down by my choice (in fact I usually finish first, but that might just be a matter of focus, food and sleep). I am legion, or would be if people just used simple solutions rather than stupidly complex solutions. (Notice that people are really much happier using a stupidly simple photo editor that only has 4 or 5 functions than using photoshop.) It is ease of use, which I think once people get it than they will stay with it, I have.