I agree that ADHD is overdiagnosed, but ADHD is a real pathological condition with a biological substrate. It is a matter of ongoing research by neurologists. Those who have ADHD are not just "kids being kids".
I had a severe case of ADHD as a child, back in the 1970's when the name for the condition was "Hyperactivity". I knew perfectly well that I would keep getting in trouble and be rejected by my peers if I engaged in behaviors such as singing songs in class at inappropriate times, but I could not help it. No amount of punishment from my teachers or parents made the slightest difference. I would continually resolve to stop misbehaving and to start paying attention in class, and I certainly punished myself enough for being a bad kid, but I see now that no amount of willpower could change the basic biological problem.
When I finally got a correct diagnosis and started meds (which, in those days, was Dexedrine), the problematic behaviors stopped as abruptly as if a switch had been flipped. My grades immediately went from all F's to all A's. My teachers, who did not know that I had started meds, were astonished at the sudden change.
Fortunately, I largely outgrew the condition in early adulthood. That is not uncommon in cases of childhood ADHD.
At my day job in the software industry, I often feel like a musician who has to make a living writing advertising jingles. At least I get do use my talent, but it's not what I'd create if I had complete freedom.
I often dream about having the freedom and unlimited time to code whatever I want, on my own schedule, to my own standards, without any concern about whether the product could make money or not. One lifetime would not be long enough to code all of the cool ideas which I'm constantly thinking up.
One of the programmers was brilliant, but actually insane.... They kept him around because they couldn't afford to hire real programmers.
Having a psychiatric illness doesn't make you any less a "real programmer".
I'm sure there's a fair number of us here who have been treated for psychiatric conditions at one point or another and are still perfectly competent programmers.
Suppose your colleague's disability were physical rather than psychiatric. If he used a wheelchair, would that mean that he is not a "real programmer"?
Psychiatric illnesses are classified as disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the condition can be reasonably accommodated by the employer, then it is against the law to discriminate on the basis of that disability. If your employer got to the point where they could afford "real programmers" and ended your colleague's employment because of his psychiatric illness (assuming it's a case where reasonable accommodation is possible), then your colleague could take the employer to court under the ADA.
We should not be surprised with this. The Western nations have been at odds with Islamic nations for 1500 years, and with Persia for nearly 3000.
I think you're a bit off in your dates.
The wars between Greece and Persia took place between 499 BCE and 448 BCE, so the wars you refer to didn't start until 2508 years ago. The Persian Empire didn't exist 3000 years ago.
Mohammed hadn't even been born yet 1500 years ago. He founded Islam around 1387 years ago. If you want to take the first Muslim contact with Spain as the beginnings of the conflicts between European kingdoms and Islam, that happened in 711.
Let me give an illustrative anecdote here. Not long ago, I came across the autobiography of a gay man who joined the U.S. Navy in the late 1940's. He recounted the large number of sexual adventures he had in Japan, Korea, Germany, Austria, Italy, and the United States. I doubt very much that his story is unique.
It's true that air travel increased in the 1960's. It's probably also true that the average number sexual partners increased somewhat during that time (although people were also discuss sex more openly, so it's hard to say how much of the apparent increase is real).
Still, the original claim was that HIV requires certain circumstances which didn't exist until relatively recently. I'd claim that the circumstances did exist. The probabilities might have increased somewhat, but I think it could have happened earlier.
If the guy in the anecdote I mentioned had chanced to contract HIV, he very well could have been the vector who led to a larger outbreak much earlier. I think it's just an accident of history that that didn't happen.
You don't spell out what the change in circumstances are, but I'd guess that you're referring to the sexual revolution of the 1970's and to the gay rights movement.
Actually, I think a strong case can be made that the real change is in attitudes, not behaviors. When the first quantitative studies of human sexual activity were done back in the early 1950's, it was shown that men were having sex with men a lot; more than anyone had guessed.
So a good case could be made that the drought-ridden forest has always been there, and it was just an matter of chance that the forest fire didn't happen sooner.
I guess by that reasoning, a womb is a useless setting for a human embryo to develop. After all, the embryo gets no experience at all with such real-world tasks as breathing, walking, or eating.
It's possible to cram so much learning into four years of college precisely _because_ things are set up so that students are not distracted with the kinds of tasks you list.
I'm a gay man, and I've been told that my code is unusually clear. I think of my code as a letter that I'm writing to the next person who has to work with it. (Frankly, I consider clarity in code to be a measure of the competence of the programmer.)
Obviously, a pattern can't be drawn from one individual. However, if there's any validity to the claim about a difference in coding styles between the male and female populations, I wonder whether gay men tend to pattern one way or the other.
eBay Inc. 2145 Hamilton Avenue San Jose, California 95125
Dear Sir or Madam,
I read that eBay has sued Craigslist on the grounds that eBay's shares in Craigslist have been "unfairly diluted." The details of the case are under court seal, but there is speculation, both in the public comment by Craigslist and on boards such as Slashdot.com, that eBay's real intention is a hostile takeover of a competitor.
In my view, Craigslist is one of the most popular services on the Internet due largely to its largely non-commercial nature. A possible outcome of the case is that Craigslist would be taken over and overrun by ads, and that it editorial policies would be changed to reflect more heavily commercial goals, to the great detriment of the quality of the service. I do not want to see this happen to this excellent community service. If the essential nature of Craigslist is degraded as a result of this lawsuit, then it is my intention to permanently boycott eBay and PayPal, to shift my business to eBay's competitors, and to encourage others to do likewise.
However you define the word "terrorism", I think you should be consistent in applying it to anyone guilty of whatever act you're referring to, and not just to Muslims who are guilty of that act.
If by "terrorist" you mean someone who forces you to convert to his religion under threat of death or enslavement, then there are plenty of historical examples of "Christian terrorists" as in history well. Forcible conversion is hardly a uniquely Muslim phenomenon.
It is an anachronism to use the term "muslim terrorists" to refer to criminals of the early 19th century engaged in piracy for profit. Whether you think American and European policy in the Middle East over the last century has been right or wrong, it is fairly safe to say that "muslim terrorism" over the past few decades has been a consequence of those policies. It is a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries.
When you look at the historical record over many centuries, it's hard to say whether Muslims or Christians have been worse in terms of violent acts. On their side of the ledger, Christians have the crusades (which included the slaughter of the Rhineland Jews, among other atrocities), the complete annihilation of the Cathars, and the burning of accused witches, just to name a few of the more obvious examples.
Most Muslims and Christians aren't terrorists, either now or at any time in history. There are obvious political or propoganda reasons for repeatedly using the words "muslim" and "terrorist" in the same context, but I don't think that doing so is helping the cause of sustainable peace.
Many jurisdictions are adopting regulations that documents be stored in open-standard formats. There are multiple reasons for this, including the long-term archival accessibility of the data.
This was obviously threatening to Microsoft. It would be difficult on technical grounds to map between Microsoft's internal formats and a true open standard such as ODF. If Microsoft's products can't read and write in true open standard formats, then government bodies have no choice but to use a non-Microsoft product to comply with the open-standards requirement, which means lost sales for Microsoft.
By forcing thru their proprietary format as a "standard", Microsoft can now truthfully state that their file formats satisfy the legal requirement for government documents to be stored in open-standard formats.
"The problem is that warty old code isn't always just warty - it's battle-scarred. It has years of tweaks and bug-fixes in there to deal with all sorts of edge conditions and obscure environments. Throw that out and replace it with pristine new code, and you'll often find that a load of very old issues suddenly come back to haunt you. So, a total rewrite is out. This means working with the old code, and finding ways to wrestle it into shape."
There's a big difference between having code which just happens to somehow work, and having code which works because the code is clearly written and documented, where the person in charge of maintaining it actually understands what the code is doing.
Whether you rewrite from scratch or work with the legacy code, it's your job as the programmer to understand and document all of the tweaks, bug fixes, edge conditions, and obscure environments. If there aren't comments in the existing code to explain these things, then it's your job to understand why the code is doing what it is doing, and add the comments as needed. If the code isn't clear, it's your job to make it clear.
The author correctly points out that when you do a total rewrite, then the undocumented special cases handled by the old code will make themselves felt. As these problems present themselves, it takes time to fix them. However, you also get the opportunity to understand the undocumented special cases and get them clearly coded and properly documented, which reduces maintenence costs over the long term. Your judgment whether to maintain or to rewrite should take both of these factors into consideration.
Stating that homeopathy is at odds with generally accepted theories of chemistry and physics doesn't tell us whether the homeopathic hypothesis is true. A carefully constructed test of the homeopathy might run as follows.
Take a group of 1000 patients of varying symptom pictures. For each patient, have a group of trained homeopathic doctors evaluate the patient and prescribe the remedy which they believe best matches that patient's symptoms. Do a carefully controlled double-blind study in which half of the patients receive the remedy prescribed by the homeopathic practitioners, and the other half receive a placebo.
Additionally, for each patient, have a second group of doctors (preferably non-homeopathic doctors) evaluate the patient twice: once before the remedy or placebo is administered, and a second time some number of days afterwards. This second set of doctors judges whether the patient has substantially improved or not, but neither group of doctors, nor the patient, knows whether the patient is in the placebo group. Determine whether there is any statistical difference between the two groups of patients.
If the observations end up being at odds with currently generally accepted theories of chemistry and physics, then we need to change our theories to account for what we're observing. That's how science works. It's not "science" if you rejecting something as a "pseudoscience" merely because it doesn't square with our current theories.
I think that this is a misuse of the word "paradigm."
To closely quote Wikipedia, a paradigm is the set of practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time. A paradigm is defined by science historian Thomas Kuhn to comprise the following:
what is to be observed and scrutinized,
the kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject,
how these questions are to be structured,
how the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted.
It looks to me as if this chart does not show connectedness among "paradigms". It simply shows connectedness among various areas of study (as measured in terms of clusterings of bibliography citations).
A paradigm change is something that happens within a single area of study, such as geology or linguistics. To look at connectedness among "paradigms", you'd have to look at the history of single fields, not the current interconnectedness among different fields.
When a rebate agency is reluctant to give me my rebate, I've gotten good results by saying that I'm going to report the problem to Consumer Fraud division of the state Attorney General's Office.
Once, I was supposed to get a free scanner as a rebate. The form said that the scanner would be shipped within 6 weeks. For months, the rebate agency gave me the run-around, saying that my rebate was on "extended processing" and refusing to give me a date when I would receive it. I finally said that I was going to file a complaint with the Attorney General. The scanner showed up on my doorstep two days later.
It's easy enough to find the contact info for the Attorney General's office. Just search the web for the name of the state (from the mail-in address or the phone area code) and "Attorney General."
The article reports that "the researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French."
Unfortunately, these aren't reliable characteristics for determining language relatedness. For example, English and German are both undisputably West Germanic languages and are very closely related, having branched less than 2000 years ago. Nevertheless, German nouns have grammatical gender, while English nouns don't. German verbs come at the end of the clause (except in the main clause), while in English the placement of the verb is much more flexible but rarely at the end of the clause. Other examples could readily be given.
There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field: namely, by identifying a core of lexical and morphological items which show systematic correspondences in their sounds between languages (e.g. English father, fish, Latin pater, piscis), and which can't reasonably be attributed to borrowing or to chance.
Of course it would be nice if we could show relatedness between languages which branched further back than 10,000 years or so. Because of the way in which languages change, it's very unlikely that we'll ever be able to do so, at least if we are observing accepted standards of scientific rigor. Approaches roughly similar to the one described here have been attempted repeatedly in recent years, and have been repeatedly answered in the literature. You don't earn brownie points for sexing up an unreliable methodology by involving computers.
IAAPHCL (I am a professor of historical and comparative linguistics).
Pittsburgh is one of the very rare exceptions to the general rule that towns in the U.S. are spelled with -burg.
In the 19th century, the U.S. Postal Service pushed to standardize all the towns ending in -berg, -burgh, -berg, etc. to a single spelling. Most switched, but Pittsburgh was one city which resisted the push.
Also, one should remember that this teacher was not approved to give the lecture and decided to go without permission and give it in the cafeteria. This would be grounds for inspecting someones future at most companies/universities.
At companies, yes. At universities, no.
In academia, knowledge moves forward as we argue for competing viewpoints. Universities can't function properly unless it's possible to argue for unpopular viewpoints without fear of reprisal. This is one of the major differences between academia and the business world.
I'm a faculty member myself. If I choose to stand up in a cafeteria and speak my mind on any subject I please, that is my right. I'm not required or expected to obtain anybody's approval or permission. The rules are that I can't be fired for this. If you disagree with my viewpoint, then the correct response is to use your own freedom to state your dissent.
Most folks in academia, both faculty and administration, understand this, agree with it strongly as a value, and go to considerable lengths to safeguard this ability. Those safeguards grossly broke down in this case.
So that we don't have little kids waiting for the morning school bus when it's still pitch dark outside. That's why.
Question about dictionaries under GPL license
on
Universal Free Dictionary
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Some of the texts on the Free Dictionaries project are listed as being licensed under the GPL. Can you mingle public-domain text with GPL'ed text?
This is a matter of practical concern. I'm overseeing a project which is digitizing copyright-expired dictionaries of the early Germanic languages. Some of the texts on my site are in German, and I'd like to use the GPL'ed Free Dictionaries German-English word list to add a feature to my project which allows you to click a German word to get a translation for that word.
Question 1: Are there provisions of the GPL which would prevent the a GPL'ed dictionary from being intermingled in this matter with existing public domain texts?
Another problem. The texts in my project contain many rare German words relating to Iron Age technology which are unlikely to be in the Free Dictionaries list, so I'd like to add my own supplemental list of words.
Question 2: Can I assign my supplemental word list to the public domain, or do I have to license it under the GPL as a modification to the original word list?
If I got hit with one of these incorrect letters, I think I'd write up a bill at a typical consulting rate for the amount of my time which the MPAA used, and send it to them.
When the MPAA sends you an incorrect notice of copyright violation, there's a cost to you for your time for investigating the claim and searching your machine for potentially offending materials. They're effectively shifting the cost of doing a more careful search to you.
Of course, they wouldn't cough up the money without a fight, and the fight would not be worth it if the only thing you wanted was the small amount of money. But if even a few people chose to go thru and fight it and set a precedent, I'm sure that the MPAA would start being more selective with its letters.
Slashdot Mirror
Just let kids be kids?
Your statement is uninformed. ADHD is real.
I agree that ADHD is overdiagnosed, but ADHD is a real pathological condition with a biological substrate. It is a matter of ongoing research by neurologists. Those who have ADHD are not just "kids being kids".
I had a severe case of ADHD as a child, back in the 1970's when the name for the condition was "Hyperactivity". I knew perfectly well that I would keep getting in trouble and be rejected by my peers if I engaged in behaviors such as singing songs in class at inappropriate times, but I could not help it. No amount of punishment from my teachers or parents made the slightest difference. I would continually resolve to stop misbehaving and to start paying attention in class, and I certainly punished myself enough for being a bad kid, but I see now that no amount of willpower could change the basic biological problem.
When I finally got a correct diagnosis and started meds (which, in those days, was Dexedrine), the problematic behaviors stopped as abruptly as if a switch had been flipped. My grades immediately went from all F's to all A's. My teachers, who did not know that I had started meds, were astonished at the sudden change.
Fortunately, I largely outgrew the condition in early adulthood. That is not uncommon in cases of childhood ADHD.
At my day job in the software industry, I often feel like a musician who has to make a living writing advertising jingles. At least I get do use my talent, but it's not what I'd create if I had complete freedom.
I often dream about having the freedom and unlimited time to code whatever I want, on my own schedule, to my own standards, without any concern about whether the product could make money or not. One lifetime would not be long enough to code all of the cool ideas which I'm constantly thinking up.
One of the programmers was brilliant, but actually insane. ... They kept him around because they couldn't afford to hire real programmers.
Having a psychiatric illness doesn't make you any less a "real programmer".
I'm sure there's a fair number of us here who have been treated for psychiatric conditions at one point or another and are still perfectly competent programmers.
Suppose your colleague's disability were physical rather than psychiatric. If he used a wheelchair, would that mean that he is not a "real programmer"?
Psychiatric illnesses are classified as disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the condition can be reasonably accommodated by the employer, then it is against the law to discriminate on the basis of that disability. If your employer got to the point where they could afford "real programmers" and ended your colleague's employment because of his psychiatric illness (assuming it's a case where reasonable accommodation is possible), then your colleague could take the employer to court under the ADA.
We should not be surprised with this. The Western nations have been at odds with Islamic nations for 1500 years, and with Persia for nearly 3000.
I think you're a bit off in your dates.
The wars between Greece and Persia took place between 499 BCE and 448 BCE, so the wars you refer to didn't start until 2508 years ago. The Persian Empire didn't exist 3000 years ago.
Mohammed hadn't even been born yet 1500 years ago. He founded Islam around 1387 years ago. If you want to take the first Muslim contact with Spain as the beginnings of the conflicts between European kingdoms and Islam, that happened in 711.
Let me give an illustrative anecdote here. Not long ago, I came across the autobiography of a gay man who joined the U.S. Navy in the late 1940's. He recounted the large number of sexual adventures he had in Japan, Korea, Germany, Austria, Italy, and the United States. I doubt very much that his story is unique.
It's true that air travel increased in the 1960's. It's probably also true that the average number sexual partners increased somewhat during that time (although people were also discuss sex more openly, so it's hard to say how much of the apparent increase is real).
Still, the original claim was that HIV requires certain circumstances which didn't exist until relatively recently. I'd claim that the circumstances did exist. The probabilities might have increased somewhat, but I think it could have happened earlier.
If the guy in the anecdote I mentioned had chanced to contract HIV, he very well could have been the vector who led to a larger outbreak much earlier. I think it's just an accident of history that that didn't happen.
You don't spell out what the change in circumstances are, but I'd guess that you're referring to the sexual revolution of the 1970's and to the gay rights movement.
Actually, I think a strong case can be made that the real change is in attitudes, not behaviors. When the first quantitative studies of human sexual activity were done back in the early 1950's, it was shown that men were having sex with men a lot; more than anyone had guessed.
So a good case could be made that the drought-ridden forest has always been there, and it was just an matter of chance that the forest fire didn't happen sooner.
I guess by that reasoning, a womb is a useless setting for a human embryo to develop. After all, the embryo gets no experience at all with such real-world tasks as breathing, walking, or eating.
It's possible to cram so much learning into four years of college precisely _because_ things are set up so that students are not distracted with the kinds of tasks you list.
As an additional dimension to this question:
I'm a gay man, and I've been told that my code is unusually clear. I think of my code as a letter that I'm writing to the next person who has to work with it. (Frankly, I consider clarity in code to be a measure of the competence of the programmer.)
Obviously, a pattern can't be drawn from one individual. However, if there's any validity to the claim about a difference in coding styles between the male and female populations, I wonder whether gay men tend to pattern one way or the other.
eBay Inc.
2145 Hamilton Avenue
San Jose, California 95125
Dear Sir or Madam,
I read that eBay has sued Craigslist on the grounds that eBay's shares in Craigslist have been "unfairly diluted." The details of the case are under court seal, but there is speculation, both in the public comment by Craigslist and on boards such as Slashdot.com, that eBay's real intention is a hostile takeover of a competitor.
In my view, Craigslist is one of the most popular services on the Internet due largely to its largely non-commercial nature. A possible outcome of the case is that Craigslist would be taken over and overrun by ads, and that it editorial policies would be changed to reflect more heavily commercial goals, to the great detriment of the quality of the service. I do not want to see this happen to this excellent community service. If the essential nature of Craigslist is degraded as a result of this lawsuit, then it is my intention to permanently boycott eBay and PayPal, to shift my business to eBay's competitors, and to encourage others to do likewise.
(Signature)
However you define the word "terrorism", I think you should be consistent in applying it to anyone guilty of whatever act you're referring to, and not just to Muslims who are guilty of that act.
If by "terrorist" you mean someone who forces you to convert to his religion under threat of death or enslavement, then there are plenty of historical examples of "Christian terrorists" as in history well. Forcible conversion is hardly a uniquely Muslim phenomenon.
It is an anachronism to use the term "muslim terrorists" to refer to criminals of the early 19th century engaged in piracy for profit. Whether you think American and European policy in the Middle East over the last century has been right or wrong, it is fairly safe to say that "muslim terrorism" over the past few decades has been a consequence of those policies. It is a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries.
When you look at the historical record over many centuries, it's hard to say whether Muslims or Christians have been worse in terms of violent acts. On their side of the ledger, Christians have the crusades (which included the slaughter of the Rhineland Jews, among other atrocities), the complete annihilation of the Cathars, and the burning of accused witches, just to name a few of the more obvious examples.
Most Muslims and Christians aren't terrorists, either now or at any time in history. There are obvious political or propoganda reasons for repeatedly using the words "muslim" and "terrorist" in the same context, but I don't think that doing so is helping the cause of sustainable peace.
Here is what I see as the real issue.
Many jurisdictions are adopting regulations that documents be stored in open-standard formats. There are multiple reasons for this, including the long-term archival accessibility of the data.
This was obviously threatening to Microsoft. It would be difficult on technical grounds to map between Microsoft's internal formats and a true open standard such as ODF. If Microsoft's products can't read and write in true open standard formats, then government bodies have no choice but to use a non-Microsoft product to comply with the open-standards requirement, which means lost sales for Microsoft.
By forcing thru their proprietary format as a "standard", Microsoft can now truthfully state that their file formats satisfy the legal requirement for government documents to be stored in open-standard formats.
Very clever indeed.
In terms of constructive action: I'd like to write to the ISO regarding my views on this matter, urging that the matter be reconsidered.
Does anyone have the contact information for the appropriate body at the ISO?
There's a big difference between having code which just happens to somehow work, and having code which works because the code is clearly written and documented, where the person in charge of maintaining it actually understands what the code is doing.
Whether you rewrite from scratch or work with the legacy code, it's your job as the programmer to understand and document all of the tweaks, bug fixes, edge conditions, and obscure environments. If there aren't comments in the existing code to explain these things, then it's your job to understand why the code is doing what it is doing, and add the comments as needed. If the code isn't clear, it's your job to make it clear.
The author correctly points out that when you do a total rewrite, then the undocumented special cases handled by the old code will make themselves felt. As these problems present themselves, it takes time to fix them. However, you also get the opportunity to understand the undocumented special cases and get them clearly coded and properly documented, which reduces maintenence costs over the long term. Your judgment whether to maintain or to rewrite should take both of these factors into consideration.
"Chords" are in music. The structures in the larynx are "cords" as in rope.
Stating that homeopathy is at odds with generally accepted theories of chemistry and physics doesn't tell us whether the homeopathic hypothesis is true. A carefully constructed test of the homeopathy might run as follows.
Take a group of 1000 patients of varying symptom pictures. For each patient, have a group of trained homeopathic doctors evaluate the patient and prescribe the remedy which they believe best matches that patient's symptoms. Do a carefully controlled double-blind study in which half of the patients receive the remedy prescribed by the homeopathic practitioners, and the other half receive a placebo.
Additionally, for each patient, have a second group of doctors (preferably non-homeopathic doctors) evaluate the patient twice: once before the remedy or placebo is administered, and a second time some number of days afterwards. This second set of doctors judges whether the patient has substantially improved or not, but neither group of doctors, nor the patient, knows whether the patient is in the placebo group. Determine whether there is any statistical difference between the two groups of patients.
If the observations end up being at odds with currently generally accepted theories of chemistry and physics, then we need to change our theories to account for what we're observing. That's how science works. It's not "science" if you rejecting something as a "pseudoscience" merely because it doesn't square with our current theories.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
--Benjamin Franklin
To closely quote Wikipedia, a paradigm is the set of practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time. A paradigm is defined by science historian Thomas Kuhn to comprise the following:
It looks to me as if this chart does not show connectedness among "paradigms". It simply shows connectedness among various areas of study (as measured in terms of clusterings of bibliography citations).
A paradigm change is something that happens within a single area of study, such as geology or linguistics. To look at connectedness among "paradigms", you'd have to look at the history of single fields, not the current interconnectedness among different fields.
When a rebate agency is reluctant to give me my rebate, I've gotten good results by saying that I'm going to report the problem to Consumer Fraud division of the state Attorney General's Office.
Once, I was supposed to get a free scanner as a rebate. The form said that the scanner would be shipped within 6 weeks. For months, the rebate agency gave me the run-around, saying that my rebate was on "extended processing" and refusing to give me a date when I would receive it. I finally said that I was going to file a complaint with the Attorney General. The scanner showed up on my doorstep two days later.
It's easy enough to find the contact info for the Attorney General's office. Just search the web for the name of the state (from the mail-in address or the phone area code) and "Attorney General."
The article reports that "the researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French."
Unfortunately, these aren't reliable characteristics for determining language relatedness. For example, English and German are both undisputably West Germanic languages and are very closely related, having branched less than 2000 years ago. Nevertheless, German nouns have grammatical gender, while English nouns don't. German verbs come at the end of the clause (except in the main clause), while in English the placement of the verb is much more flexible but rarely at the end of the clause. Other examples could readily be given.
There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field: namely, by identifying a core of lexical and morphological items which show systematic correspondences in their sounds between languages (e.g. English father, fish, Latin pater, piscis), and which can't reasonably be attributed to borrowing or to chance.
Of course it would be nice if we could show relatedness between languages which branched further back than 10,000 years or so. Because of the way in which languages change, it's very unlikely that we'll ever be able to do so, at least if we are observing accepted standards of scientific rigor. Approaches roughly similar to the one described here have been attempted repeatedly in recent years, and have been repeatedly answered in the literature. You don't earn brownie points for sexing up an unreliable methodology by involving computers.
IAAPHCL (I am a professor of historical and comparative linguistics).
Pittsburgh is one of the very rare exceptions to the general rule that towns in the U.S. are spelled with -burg.
In the 19th century, the U.S. Postal Service pushed to standardize all the towns ending in -berg, -burgh, -berg, etc. to a single spelling. Most switched, but Pittsburgh was one city which resisted the push.
Also, one should remember that this teacher was not approved to give the lecture and decided to go without permission and give it in the cafeteria. This would be grounds for inspecting someones future at most companies/universities.
At companies, yes. At universities, no.
In academia, knowledge moves forward as we argue for competing viewpoints. Universities can't function properly unless it's possible to argue for unpopular viewpoints without fear of reprisal. This is one of the major differences between academia and the business world.
I'm a faculty member myself. If I choose to stand up in a cafeteria and speak my mind on any subject I please, that is my right. I'm not required or expected to obtain anybody's approval or permission. The rules are that I can't be fired for this. If you disagree with my viewpoint, then the correct response is to use your own freedom to state your dissent.
Most folks in academia, both faculty and administration, understand this, agree with it strongly as a value, and go to considerable lengths to safeguard this ability. Those safeguards grossly broke down in this case.
In that case why don't we always use DST?
So that we don't have little kids waiting for the morning school bus when it's still pitch dark outside. That's why.
Some of the texts on the Free Dictionaries project are listed as being licensed under the GPL. Can you mingle public-domain text with GPL'ed text?
This is a matter of practical concern. I'm overseeing a project which is digitizing copyright-expired dictionaries of the early Germanic languages. Some of the texts on my site are in German, and I'd like to use the GPL'ed Free Dictionaries German-English word list to add a feature to my project which allows you to click a German word to get a translation for that word.
Question 1: Are there provisions of the GPL which would prevent the a GPL'ed dictionary from being intermingled in this matter with existing public domain texts?
Another problem. The texts in my project contain many rare German words relating to Iron Age technology which are unlikely to be in the Free Dictionaries list, so I'd like to add my own supplemental list of words.
Question 2: Can I assign my supplemental word list to the public domain, or do I have to license it under the GPL as a modification to the original word list?
If I got hit with one of these incorrect letters, I think I'd write up a bill at a typical consulting rate for the amount of my time which the MPAA used, and send it to them.
When the MPAA sends you an incorrect notice of copyright violation, there's a cost to you for your time for investigating the claim and searching your machine for potentially offending materials.
They're effectively shifting the cost of doing a more careful search to you.
Of course, they wouldn't cough up the money without a fight, and the fight would not be worth it if the only thing you wanted was the small amount of money. But if even a few people chose to go thru and fight it and set a precedent, I'm sure that the MPAA would start being more selective with its letters.