There's physical limits. Related to the quantumness of matter. One can't cause a lasting change with less than a certain amount of energy, dependent on temperature. (colder makes it possible to use less energy)
That limit is aproximately 15 doublings away from current CPUs, it is physically possible to get 2^15 more operations out of the same energy, at the same temperature. (cooling actively doesn't help, because that consumes energy too)
So yeah, there -is- a reason we can't go on growing like currently forever. If you want more details and numbers, google rec.arts.sf.science for "computronium"
Nah. Not a petabyte for $100. Progress is quick, but not -that- quick.
Current best capacity/dollar is about 4GB/dollar, no ? I'm thinking doubling that every 18 months or so may be realistic, that gives you 6 doublings in 10 years, so 256GB/dollar, or $4000 for a petabyte. But even that assumes buying the best price/capacity drives, and using them with no redundancy. The best price/capacity is currently at about the $200 mark, and I don't expect that to change much, so you'd be buying 20 50GB-drives and striping them.
Which ain't such a good idea.
Give it 25 years though, and if current progress continues, you may get your $100 PB-disk. That's long enough that there's a large risk that current trends -wont- continue though. So all bets are off. You don't need a PB anyway for this project, unless you imagine storing your entire life in HDTV-quality, including the boring parts like sleep, which seems overkill to me.
That's not far away. You can store very reasonable video-quality at 0.5GB/hour, much MUCH better than the typical "one low-res picture every second" of security-cams. So, a terabyte will be enough for ~2000 hours, 100 days. In practice you'll be able to get away with a picture every minute while asleep, and various other optimisations. Which means a complete video-log of everything you do for a year should fit on a single TB-drive.
A TB-drive is only $250 or so. $250/year isn't an outrageous cost at all, and besides, that price is falling like a rock. In a decade or so a single standard hard-disc will be able to store a reasonably complete video of your entire life.
Actually, science can't even show that $badthing is happening, merely that $thing is happening, atbest with reasonable hypothesis why it may be happening.
If the $thing is bad or good is a question of ethich, morale, politics, science has nothing to say about it.
Would it be a bad thing if the sun went nova tomorrow ? Most of us think yes, but there isn't, and can't be any scientific evidence to this effect.
I don't know the reason -- and I'm not convinced I -WANT- to know the reason. I just notice that this stuff works poorly, and it actually used to work better in both XP and Windows 98, neither of which where ever swapping without reason, despite the fact that the last laptop of my wife had only a quarter the RAM of the current one (512MB as compared to 2GB now)
Looked at the resource-monitor. The hard-faults are 0 (as they should be) when I'm doing nothing disk-usage is also zero. Alt-tabbing to thunderbird, and then back to resource-monitor brings hard-faults/sec up to ~200 for a second or two, disk-use climbs to 2MB/s or thereabout, before falling back after a second or so.
Your assumption that vista is over-caching seems correct. According to the task-manager, of the total 2048MB ram, 120MB is used by the kernel, and 1521MB for caching. Which leaves only 360MB for the applications. I'd actually expect that to be in the ballpark for the applications I have open, it's only Thunderbird, Firefox, Eclipse, afterall.
But it still seems strange that I should need to wait for my programs to be swapped in when I have 350MB worth of apps on a 2GB laptop.... I'm certain Vista can be tweaked to stop doing that, if I (or my wife) wanted to fiddle around with this kind of shit, we'd be running Gentoo though. out-of-the-box experience matters. It's everything 90% of your users will ever see.
It's interesting to compare. One thing that strikes me is, in general people say USA have low taxation, whereas for example Norway has high taxes.
But that completely fails to be the case for the lower classes, infact the oposite is true. With a gross-income of $12K in Norway, you would literally pay zero taxes. Not only that: Those zero taxes include full medical-insurance, so the real difference is larger than 15% (how much would medical insurance cost for a person earning $1000/month in the USA, aproximately?) I actually think you'd qualify for welfare at $12K/year gross, the minimum tends to be on the order of $1500/month, it varies somewhat based on where you live since costs of living differ in Norway too. (particularily housing varies wildly, other stuff is more constant)
There's no general minimum wage in Norway, it's just that you plain don't -GET- anyone if you're offering less than about $15/hour. Unemployment is at less than 2%, and in many areas there's more open jobs than there are unemployed people. Add in that perhaps half the "unemployed" are in reality unable or unwilling to work, and you see that employers have no choice but to be competitive if they want to hire anyone at all. You're free to advertise a job at $3/hour. Just don't expect anyone to apply for it.
The strange thing is, the average income in USA is almost as high as the average in Norway, still all the salary-levels you mention sound wildly low to me. As in a factor of 2-3 low. The explanation, offcourse, is that in USA the top 1% and top 10% get a MUCH larger portion of the total than here.
I'm pretty sure it's swapping. There's visible lag and the disk-ligth comes on for a second whenever I do something like alt+tab to a different application that ain't been used for a while. I thougth the most plausible explanation for this is that that app needs to be swapped in. I'd be glad to hear alternative explanations though.
Swapfile usage ain't high, and doesn't seem to be growing. Currently at ~100MB.
True, there's/currently/ a large price-differential.
But did you notice that flash-based storage has a capacity/dollar curve that is falling significantly more rapidly than the same curve for mechanical disks ? At the current rate, flash and mechanical will be equal storage-pro-dollar in aproximately 12 years.
In practice, mechanical is dead before that. Nobody would pay $100 for a 30TB mechanical disk if the equivalent price for a flash-based disc is $200. If you can only afford $100, you'll settly for the 10TB flash. It's just that much better: Silent, small, low-power, reliable.
Makes sense really, mechanical discs have moving parts. Moving parts are bad.
That low ? $5.85/hour means that if you work 8hr/day, 22 days a month that's aproximately how many workdays there are a month, on average, your gross earnings will be $1000 dollars. That's -gross- mind you, I don't know what the net will be, but it'll be less.
Can you actually live for that in the USA today ? Is it enough to cover even the basics reasonably ? What's the sense of a minimum wage that doesn't even permit a person to become independent ?
Flipping burgers pays that bad in USA ? I was thinking you guys have minimum-wage laws at around $10 ? Granted, even that is hardly enough for a reasonable standard of living, even with a fulltime job, but oh well.
Yeah. And where you to -delete- that entry, rather than move it, you'd have a fourth dialogue: "Are you sure you want to move this file to the trashcan?"
Four dialogues for deleting an entry from the start-menu is just -sligthly- annoying, no ?
Besides -- it HURTS security: people get so used to the annoying dialogues that they automatically click yes, frequently without even reading them.
My wife got vista for her new laptop half a year back. She didn't know any better. (neither did I, I'd have opted for Ubuntu, but I honestly wasn't aware that Vista is so horribly much more annoying than XP as it is.) (as if XP ain't annoying enough: Wanna reboot now, or should I nag you again in 3 minutes ?)
It asks for "confirmation" in literally hundreds of everyday situations. This adds nothing to security, because inside of the first week everyone gets used to automatically click "yes, do it, go away, let me -use- the damn computer, stop nagging me damn it" (the option says something else, but this is what people thing, aproximately)
it lacks support for bog-standard 2 year old mainstream hardware. Much worse than Linux has been on the hardware front lately. For example, our bog-standard scanner doesn't work, a driver is promised "in 2008", this is a scanner from 2005. One that sold 700.000. Same for our laserprinter, though there it's possible to have it work halfway by using a driver which exist for a smaller model. This loses the functionality lacking in that smaller model though (such as the duplex-unit)
The backwards compatibility for games suck. This matters, since more games is one of the sole remaining advantages for Windows over the competition at this point. Heroes of M&M IV works, but is buggy, especially the network-support. Capitalism II doesn't even start. SC3K seems to be working, sorta, it's hard to say, the palette is messed up, something I ain't seen on linux since X11 used to run in 8-bit palette-modus...
It's a resource hog. The laptop of my Wife is a Core-2-duo, 2GB ram and decent graphics. Should be more than adequate. Isn't. It's -swapping- as I write this very moment, There's no programs open other than FF which eats 112MB, if we believe Vista, and Thunderbird which eats 87MB. Don't ask me why it's swapping under these circumstances, but it is.
Java-support sucks. Yeah, that's probably partly a sun-issue. But Eclipse, under the same version of the same JVM crashed regularily on Vista, never experienced that on XP or Linux or Panther.
"Fast user switching" is a joke. The -fast- part particularily. ctrl+alt+F8 takes how long on Linux ? A second ? In vista, you click on switch user. It then spins for 10 seconds (with the aforementioned powerful laptop), it then displays a login-prompt. Where you can log in a second user, and in another 10 seconds or so you're good to go. This rigamarole repeats itself on each switch. That's rigth, even if both users are logged in, you still need to wait for the login-screen to load, then click on the user you want to switch to and enter the password. Half a minute for switching a user ain't fast in my book....
It still doesn't have any of the neat stuff that unix invented in the 70ies. Ok, so maybe I shouldn't have been hoping for that, but it's still a mystery. "shortcuts" are still a hack in the shell and don't universally work like symlinks and hardlinks have for literally 30 years in unix... Disks are still managed with "drive letters", and you've got no way to say move a directory from C: to D: and have the move be transparent to the user.
It still can't manage to move, rename, delete or in some cases even -read- a file if some other program has the file open. All of this stuff actually worked, literally, in the 70ies on unix.
The biggest problem though ? There is not a -single- actually relevant improvement from a user-perspective. Not one. Lots of drawbacks, no advantages. Oh, I'm sure they're there allrigth. But how splendid are they really, if the user doesn't even -notice- them in the first half-year of use ?
At this point my wife would swap Vista for XP in a heartbeat. Hell, she'd swap it for Windows-98 if given the chance.
Well, the fact that the large majority of verbs -arent- irregular is also proof that there's nothing much lost by being regular. Noisy environments are a special case, and one where irregular verbs or not doesn't really make much of a difference.
And at the same time the irregularities make it much harder to learn correct english, which is a significant impediment.
The Wii doesn't really -have- any "unique capabilities" though.
It has a novel input-device. But similar devices could trivially be added to any of the other current-gen consoles.
Witness how several games that require you to buy a special-purpose controller have nevertheless been huge successes. Singstar. Guitar Hero. Buzz. Eye-toy games. Various DDR-clones.
There's always huge redundancy in language, if terhe wree not you wluodn't be albe to raed tihs.
What I meant was, there's synthethic and analytic languages, they achive similar things with different methods. synthethic ones put several morphemes in each word, which tends to make the words longer, but you need fewer words, and the sequencing of words into sentences become freer. Analytical languages, in contrast, put less (in the limit, 1) morpheme in each word, which tends to make the words shorter, but you need more of them, and sequence tends to matter more.
It's not an either-or, it's more like a scale, most languages have -some- elements from both, but there's clear differences. Chinese is almost purely analytical, Finnish is pretty heavily synthethical. It's not better or worse, it's just different ways of achieving similar results.
For example, the finnish use patterns in the verb to show both person and if it's a question or not, this then frees them from having to put in a personal pronoun, but on the other hand it complicates learning finnish grammar, since there's simply more of it.
It seems to me, the trend in indo-european languages are we're moving in the direction of more analytical, less synthethical. This -does- seem to be easier to learn, and perhaps that is one reason, people speak more languages in addition to their native one these days.
An example: "puhutko...?", finnish verb. Has three morphenes: "speak" "2st person singular" and "question", if you want to express the same thing in english, you need several words: "do you speak... ?" each of the words have only one morphene, "you" says it's 2nd person singular or plural, "speak" says, well, speak, and the "do" is needed to indicate a question, "you speak german" would be a statement, not a question.
So, in this case english actually says -less- with 3 words than finnish do with 1, because in english it's not specified if we're talking 2nd person plural or 2nd person singular, whereas in finnish it is. Still, english is by no means -purely- analytical, for example "am" has 2 morphemes, "to be" and "1st person singular", same for "cars" which tells you that the topic is a car, *and* that we're talking plural. A purely analytical language would say "many car" or something to that effect.
Clearer ? If not, look the two types of languages up on wikipedia or wherever, I'm sure they explain it better than I do.
The border between action and speech isn't always so clear-cut.
If downloading speech is an unprotected "action", then free speech ain't worth much, since the govt can just forbid people from performing the "action" of viewing it. (there's no way you can view content from the internet without first downloading it)
Furthermore, to "speak" on the internet you need to perform any number of "actions", such as "push the on-button on your computer" and "upload the content to a webserver", if they can restrict these/actions/ your rigth to free speech ain't worth much in practice.
Now, free speech *ain't* absolute, and there's some sorts of speech such as threaths and kiddieporn which isn't protected. That's unproblematic. The only "problem" here is where to draw the line.
Current law prevents a guy I know from publishing nude pictures of -HIMSELF- as a 10-year-old on the beach. I'm not sure that should really be considered "kiddieporn". Nor am I certain that it's sane to do, as we currently do, and forbid also stuff that is fictious. The law says "are or appear to be", so you can be convicted for kiddie-porn if you make porn with someone who is actually legal (=16 in many jurisdictions) but which *appear* to be younger.
Dunno. But I've noticed the same in hacker-jargon. I think there's a built in tendency in many of us to regularise and build systems of rules. And that sometimes means ignoring exceptions and sticking to the rule, even when you're aware that that's not the way its normally done.
Sorta how most hackers tend to absolutely refuse capitalising commands, even when they appear at the start of sentences, because "Ls" is not "ls" dammit, and how we tend to put at the "wrong" place in relation to quotes when that makes sense from a logical POV.
My 3-year-old used to say that planes "air" when they do the oposite of "land", which makes sense but is wrong. I told him that actually they "take off", which prompted him to agree and then say that when they're done flying they "take on".
To be retains a lot of cruft that has fallen off less used verbs, such as distinct forms for different persons. I am, you are, he is, someone who doesn't know english won't even see any signs that these are the same word at all.
Compare I bike, you bike, we all bike.... the distinction by person is useless the way it is in english, I wonder if it'll disappear completely outside of "to be". (for other words you have the "he bikes" thing)
Thing is, this actually -did- make sence at some point (or atleast it served a purpose) in many languages that universally have different forms for different persons, you can remove the personal pronoun, since it's clear from the verb alone which person is meant.
"I am a boy" is superfluous; "am boy" conveys the same meaning since "am" can only be used for "I". Works that way in finnish, for example:
"puhun Suomi" (I speak finnish) "puhut Soumi" (you speak finnish), with enough grammar you can do away with many small words, and you can make the sequence of words more freely choosable. In english you make questions by reordering words. "you can have a cookie." "can I have a cookie?", with grammar that can also be done away with; In finnish you use -ko to symbolise question, so no need to reorder words (or add "do you" or similar antics)
"puhutko Saksa?" ("Do you speak German?")
In general though, it seems that the trend is that -less- grammar and -more small-word and word-sequence is used. English sure is losing grammar at a noticeable rate, same for Norwegian and German.
It depends. An improvement in comparison to certain earlier religions and cultures, a step back in comparison to others, overall I think it's a toss-up.
In any case you're certainly correct that this has long outlived its usefulness. People should go on believing whatever the hell they want to believe, but we should stop pretending there's anything particularily worthy or good about it.
These days christians in most western countries are dragged kicking and screaming into the modern times. They figth progress violently at every step, only to inevitably change their mind 10-20 years later. Whereafter they claim it's not fair to judge them based on anything they used to figth for up until yesterday because -modern- christians ain't like that. Rinse and repeat.
The protestant church in Norway has had (roughly) this procedure performed on it by society roughly half a dozen times in the last 50 years, and there's no sign they're learning anything from it.
They had a problem accepting that physical pain is inacceptable as a punishment for anyone. Then later they turned around. Today they act as if they've never been arguing that.
They had a problem accepting that women are allowed to do all the things males are allowed to do. Then later they turned around. Today they act as if equal rigths where always a christian value.
They had, a problem accepting that adult human beings are free to themselves choose with whom they wish to fuck, aslong as all involved parts are adult and consenting. Today they're in the process of being dragged kicking and screaming from their former opinion. In 5-10 years the process will be complete, and they'll pretend they never thougth differently.
They have a problem accepting that growing up with two mothers (or two fathers) ain't in any quantifiable way inferior to growing up with -one- mother, so there's no logical basis for opposing adoption-rigths for gay people. They'll change this opinion too in the next ~20 years or so. The process is just starting.
It's tiresome. It serves no useful purpose. They should just -STOP- it.
I actually think even they themselves -MUST- be aware of this pattern, so they know they'll change their mind in a few years. Why not change it -NOW- and be done with it ? What's the point of protesting gay priests for another half-decade before doing what everyone with above room-temperature IQ already know they'll be doing in the end.
Books aren't generally very dangerous in that sense. Not even this one. Mostly if you're old enough to be able to follow instructions to the point where it gets dangerous, you're old enough to understand that doing so may, infact, be dangerous.
Lots of objects are dangerous even to a child that can't yet understand how/why they are dangerous, or consistently evade the danger, but books only very rarely are.
The parents should decide. I don't think there's very many combinations of age/book that I would deny my children, but time will tell I guess. There's certainly a lot more combinations of age/object that I'd reject. A 5 year old has no business being alone with a dog. A 8 year old can't (generally, offcourse these things are always subject to the kid in question, which is one reason the parents are the rigth persons to make the choice) safely use a motorboat. A 14 year old can't on her own travel to Thailand (random example, but you get the point)
True, the live forever part is possible because of sacrificing a virgin -- well an innocent human being anyway, more precisely, the son of God, sacrificing a/normal/ human being wouldn't do.
Don't know in which way that improves things though.
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There's physical limits. Related to the quantumness of matter. One can't cause a lasting change with less than a certain amount of energy, dependent on temperature. (colder makes it possible to use less energy)
That limit is aproximately 15 doublings away from current CPUs, it is physically possible to get 2^15 more operations out of the same energy, at the same temperature. (cooling actively doesn't help, because that consumes energy too)
So yeah, there -is- a reason we can't go on growing like currently forever. If you want more details and numbers, google rec.arts.sf.science for "computronium"
Nah. Not a petabyte for $100. Progress is quick, but not -that- quick.
Current best capacity/dollar is about 4GB/dollar, no ? I'm thinking doubling that every 18 months or so may be realistic, that gives you 6 doublings in 10 years, so 256GB/dollar, or $4000 for a petabyte. But even that assumes buying the best price/capacity drives, and using them with no redundancy. The best price/capacity is currently at about the $200 mark, and I don't expect that to change much, so you'd be buying 20 50GB-drives and striping them.
Which ain't such a good idea.
Give it 25 years though, and if current progress continues, you may get your $100 PB-disk. That's long enough that there's a large risk that current trends -wont- continue though. So all bets are off. You don't need a PB anyway for this project, unless you imagine storing your entire life in HDTV-quality, including the boring parts like sleep, which seems overkill to me.
That's not far away. You can store very reasonable video-quality at 0.5GB/hour, much MUCH better than the typical "one low-res picture every second" of security-cams. So, a terabyte will be enough for ~2000 hours, 100 days. In practice you'll be able to get away with a picture every minute while asleep, and various other optimisations. Which means a complete video-log of everything you do for a year should fit on a single TB-drive.
A TB-drive is only $250 or so. $250/year isn't an outrageous cost at all, and besides, that price is falling like a rock. In a decade or so a single standard hard-disc will be able to store a reasonably complete video of your entire life.
Actually, science can't even show that $badthing is happening, merely that $thing is happening, atbest with reasonable hypothesis why it may be happening.
If the $thing is bad or good is a question of ethich, morale, politics, science has nothing to say about it.
Would it be a bad thing if the sun went nova tomorrow ? Most of us think yes, but there isn't, and can't be any scientific evidence to this effect.
You can't reason from descriptive to normative.
I don't know the reason -- and I'm not convinced I -WANT- to know the reason. I just notice that this stuff works poorly, and it actually used to work better in both XP and Windows 98, neither of which where ever swapping without reason, despite the fact that the last laptop of my wife had only a quarter the RAM of the current one (512MB as compared to 2GB now)
Looked at the resource-monitor. The hard-faults are 0 (as they should be) when I'm doing nothing disk-usage is also zero. Alt-tabbing to thunderbird, and then back to resource-monitor brings hard-faults/sec up to ~200 for a second or two, disk-use climbs to 2MB/s or thereabout, before falling back after a second or so.
Your assumption that vista is over-caching seems correct. According to the task-manager, of the total 2048MB ram, 120MB is used by the kernel, and 1521MB for caching. Which leaves only 360MB for the applications. I'd actually expect that to be in the ballpark for the applications I have open, it's only Thunderbird, Firefox, Eclipse, afterall.
But it still seems strange that I should need to wait for my programs to be swapped in when I have 350MB worth of apps on a 2GB laptop.... I'm certain Vista can be tweaked to stop doing that, if I (or my wife) wanted to fiddle around with this kind of shit, we'd be running Gentoo though. out-of-the-box experience matters. It's everything 90% of your users will ever see.
Thank you. +1 Informative.
It's interesting to compare. One thing that strikes me is, in general people say USA have low taxation, whereas for example Norway has high taxes.
But that completely fails to be the case for the lower classes, infact the oposite is true. With a gross-income of $12K in Norway, you would literally pay zero taxes. Not only that: Those zero taxes include full medical-insurance, so the real difference is larger than 15% (how much would medical insurance cost for a person earning $1000/month in the USA, aproximately?) I actually think you'd qualify for welfare at $12K/year gross, the minimum tends to be on the order of $1500/month, it varies somewhat based on where you live since costs of living differ in Norway too. (particularily housing varies wildly, other stuff is more constant)
There's no general minimum wage in Norway, it's just that you plain don't -GET- anyone if you're offering less than about $15/hour. Unemployment is at less than 2%, and in many areas there's more open jobs than there are unemployed people. Add in that perhaps half the "unemployed" are in reality unable or unwilling to work, and you see that employers have no choice but to be competitive if they want to hire anyone at all. You're free to advertise a job at $3/hour. Just don't expect anyone to apply for it.
The strange thing is, the average income in USA is almost as high as the average in Norway, still all the salary-levels you mention sound wildly low to me. As in a factor of 2-3 low. The explanation, offcourse, is that in USA the top 1% and top 10% get a MUCH larger portion of the total than here.
I'm pretty sure it's swapping. There's visible lag and the disk-ligth comes on for a second whenever I do something like alt+tab to a different application that ain't been used for a while. I thougth the most plausible explanation for this is that that app needs to be swapped in. I'd be glad to hear alternative explanations though.
Swapfile usage ain't high, and doesn't seem to be growing. Currently at ~100MB.
True, there's /currently/ a large price-differential.
But did you notice that flash-based storage has a capacity/dollar curve that is falling significantly more rapidly than the same curve for mechanical disks ? At the current rate, flash and mechanical will be equal storage-pro-dollar in aproximately 12 years.
In practice, mechanical is dead before that. Nobody would pay $100 for a 30TB mechanical disk if the equivalent price for a flash-based disc is $200. If you can only afford $100, you'll settly for the 10TB flash. It's just that much better: Silent, small, low-power, reliable.
Makes sense really, mechanical discs have moving parts. Moving parts are bad.
Being 10-30 times better than current wind-turbines would mean an efficiency above unity. Hardly likely, to put it politely.
That low ? $5.85/hour means that if you work 8hr/day, 22 days a month that's aproximately how many workdays there are a month, on average, your gross earnings will be $1000 dollars. That's -gross- mind you, I don't know what the net will be, but it'll be less.
Can you actually live for that in the USA today ? Is it enough to cover even the basics reasonably ? What's the sense of a minimum wage that doesn't even permit a person to become independent ?
Flipping burgers pays that bad in USA ? I was thinking you guys have minimum-wage laws at around $10 ? Granted, even that is hardly enough for a reasonable standard of living, even with a fulltime job, but oh well.
Flipping burgers in Stavanger pays ~$15-20/hour.
Could be worse. Pal of mine is named "Odd Even", which, I assure you, does not sound comical in the least in Norwegian.
He quickly found out when visiting USA that the name either cracked people up, or caused people to think he was pulling their leg.
So, he tried it with "Hello, I'm Odd", which wasn't really an improvement it turned out.
Yeah. And where you to -delete- that entry, rather than move it, you'd have a fourth dialogue: "Are you sure you want to move this file to the trashcan?"
Four dialogues for deleting an entry from the start-menu is just -sligthly- annoying, no ?
Besides -- it HURTS security: people get so used to the annoying dialogues that they automatically click yes, frequently without even reading them.
My wife got vista for her new laptop half a year back. She didn't know any better. (neither did I, I'd have opted for Ubuntu, but I honestly wasn't aware that Vista is so horribly much more annoying than XP as it is.) (as if XP ain't annoying enough: Wanna reboot now, or should I nag you again in 3 minutes ?)
The biggest problem though ? There is not a -single- actually relevant improvement from a user-perspective. Not one. Lots of drawbacks, no advantages. Oh, I'm sure they're there allrigth. But how splendid are they really, if the user doesn't even -notice- them in the first half-year of use ?
At this point my wife would swap Vista for XP in a heartbeat. Hell, she'd swap it for Windows-98 if given the chance.
So ? Just don't delete that then. Simple. Nobody said attachments should be deleted automagically.
Well, the fact that the large majority of verbs -arent- irregular is also proof that there's nothing much lost by being regular. Noisy environments are a special case, and one where irregular verbs or not doesn't really make much of a difference.
And at the same time the irregularities make it much harder to learn correct english, which is a significant impediment.
The Wii doesn't really -have- any "unique capabilities" though.
It has a novel input-device. But similar devices could trivially be added to any of the other current-gen consoles.
Witness how several games that require you to buy a special-purpose controller have nevertheless been huge successes. Singstar. Guitar Hero. Buzz. Eye-toy games. Various DDR-clones.
There's always huge redundancy in language, if terhe wree not you wluodn't be albe to raed tihs.
...?", finnish verb. Has three morphenes: "speak" "2st person singular" and "question", if you want to express the same thing in english, you need several words: "do you speak ... ?" each of the words have only one morphene, "you" says it's 2nd person singular or plural, "speak" says, well, speak, and the "do" is needed to indicate a question, "you speak german" would be a statement, not a question.
What I meant was, there's synthethic and analytic languages, they achive similar things with different methods. synthethic ones put several morphemes in each word, which tends to make the words longer, but you need fewer words, and the sequencing of words into sentences become freer. Analytical languages, in contrast, put less (in the limit, 1) morpheme in each word, which tends to make the words shorter, but you need more of them, and sequence tends to matter more.
It's not an either-or, it's more like a scale, most languages have -some- elements from both, but there's clear differences. Chinese is almost purely analytical, Finnish is pretty heavily synthethical. It's not better or worse, it's just different ways of achieving similar results.
For example, the finnish use patterns in the verb to show both person and if it's a question or not, this then frees them from having to put in a personal pronoun, but on the other hand it complicates learning finnish grammar, since there's simply more of it.
It seems to me, the trend in indo-european languages are we're moving in the direction of more analytical, less synthethical. This -does- seem to be easier to learn, and perhaps that is one reason, people speak more languages in addition to their native one these days.
An example: "puhutko
So, in this case english actually says -less- with 3 words than finnish do with 1, because in english it's not specified if we're talking 2nd person plural or 2nd person singular, whereas in finnish it is. Still, english is by no means -purely- analytical, for example "am" has 2 morphemes, "to be" and "1st person singular", same for "cars" which tells you that the topic is a car, *and* that we're talking plural. A purely analytical language would say "many car" or something to that effect.
Clearer ? If not, look the two types of languages up on wikipedia or wherever, I'm sure they explain it better than I do.
Yeah. And freedom to -distribute- what you say, in however way is apropriate to the message. Be it by soundwaves or ip-packets.
The border between action and speech isn't always so clear-cut.
/actions/ your rigth to free speech ain't worth much in practice.
If downloading speech is an unprotected "action", then free speech ain't worth much, since the govt can just forbid people from performing the "action" of viewing it. (there's no way you can view content from the internet without first downloading it)
Furthermore, to "speak" on the internet you need to perform any number of "actions", such as "push the on-button on your computer" and "upload the content to a webserver", if they can restrict these
Now, free speech *ain't* absolute, and there's some sorts of speech such as threaths and kiddieporn which isn't protected. That's unproblematic. The only "problem" here is where to draw the line.
Current law prevents a guy I know from publishing nude pictures of -HIMSELF- as a 10-year-old on the beach. I'm not sure that should really be considered "kiddieporn". Nor am I certain that it's sane to do, as we currently do, and forbid also stuff that is fictious. The law says "are or appear to be", so you can be convicted for kiddie-porn if you make porn with someone who is actually legal (=16 in many jurisdictions) but which *appear* to be younger.
Dunno. But I've noticed the same in hacker-jargon. I think there's a built in tendency in many of us to regularise and build systems of rules. And that sometimes means ignoring exceptions and sticking to the rule, even when you're aware that that's not the way its normally done.
Sorta how most hackers tend to absolutely refuse capitalising commands, even when they appear at the start of sentences, because "Ls" is not "ls" dammit, and how we tend to put at the "wrong" place in relation to quotes when that makes sense from a logical POV.
My 3-year-old used to say that planes "air" when they do the oposite of "land", which makes sense but is wrong. I told him that actually they "take off", which prompted him to agree and then say that when they're done flying they "take on".
To be retains a lot of cruft that has fallen off less used verbs, such as distinct forms for different persons. I am, you are, he is, someone who doesn't know english won't even see any signs that these are the same word at all.
Compare I bike, you bike, we all bike.... the distinction by person is useless the way it is in english, I wonder if it'll disappear completely outside of "to be". (for other words you have the "he bikes" thing)
Thing is, this actually -did- make sence at some point (or atleast it served a purpose) in many languages that universally have different forms for different persons, you can remove the personal pronoun, since it's clear from the verb alone which person is meant.
"I am a boy" is superfluous; "am boy" conveys the same meaning since "am" can only be used for "I". Works that way in finnish, for example:
"puhun Suomi" (I speak finnish) "puhut Soumi" (you speak finnish), with enough grammar you can do away with many small words, and you can make the sequence of words more freely choosable. In english you make questions by reordering words. "you can have a cookie." "can I have a cookie?", with grammar that can also be done away with; In finnish you use -ko to symbolise question, so no need to reorder words (or add "do you" or similar antics)
"puhutko Saksa?" ("Do you speak German?")
In general though, it seems that the trend is that -less- grammar and -more small-word and word-sequence is used. English sure is losing grammar at a noticeable rate, same for Norwegian and German.
It depends. An improvement in comparison to certain earlier religions and cultures, a step back in comparison to others, overall I think it's a toss-up.
In any case you're certainly correct that this has long outlived its usefulness. People should go on believing whatever the hell they want to believe, but we should stop pretending there's anything particularily worthy or good about it.
These days christians in most western countries are dragged kicking and screaming into the modern times. They figth progress violently at every step, only to inevitably change their mind 10-20 years later. Whereafter they claim it's not fair to judge them based on anything they used to figth for up until yesterday because -modern- christians ain't like that. Rinse and repeat.
The protestant church in Norway has had (roughly) this procedure performed on it by society roughly half a dozen times in the last 50 years, and there's no sign they're learning anything from it.
They had a problem accepting that physical pain is inacceptable as a punishment for anyone. Then later they turned around. Today they act as if they've never been arguing that.
They had a problem accepting that women are allowed to do all the things males are allowed to do. Then later they turned around. Today they act as if equal rigths where always a christian value.
They had, a problem accepting that adult human beings are free to themselves choose with whom they wish to fuck, aslong as all involved parts are adult and consenting. Today they're in the process of being dragged kicking and screaming from their former opinion. In 5-10 years the process will be complete, and they'll pretend they never thougth differently.
They have a problem accepting that growing up with two mothers (or two fathers) ain't in any quantifiable way inferior to growing up with -one- mother, so there's no logical basis for opposing adoption-rigths for gay people. They'll change this opinion too in the next ~20 years or so. The process is just starting.
It's tiresome. It serves no useful purpose. They should just -STOP- it.
I actually think even they themselves -MUST- be aware of this pattern, so they know they'll change their mind in a few years. Why not change it -NOW- and be done with it ? What's the point of protesting gay priests for another half-decade before doing what everyone with above room-temperature IQ already know they'll be doing in the end.
Books aren't generally very dangerous in that sense. Not even this one. Mostly if you're old enough to be able to follow instructions to the point where it gets dangerous, you're old enough to understand that doing so may, infact, be dangerous.
Lots of objects are dangerous even to a child that can't yet understand how/why they are dangerous, or consistently evade the danger, but books only very rarely are.
The parents should decide. I don't think there's very many combinations of age/book that I would deny my children, but time will tell I guess. There's certainly a lot more combinations of age/object that I'd reject. A 5 year old has no business being alone with a dog. A 8 year old can't (generally, offcourse these things are always subject to the kid in question, which is one reason the parents are the rigth persons to make the choice) safely use a motorboat. A 14 year old can't on her own travel to Thailand (random example, but you get the point)
True, the live forever part is possible because of sacrificing a virgin -- well an innocent human being anyway, more precisely, the son of God, sacrificing a /normal/ human being wouldn't do.
Don't know in which way that improves things though.