If there is a concept which is unexpressible in another language, I would like to see it. Some things are not convienient or easy to translate, some can only be accurately conveyed with some longer explanation, but if an idea is unthinkable in another language - if in any way language (not culture) affects perception - this difference should be measurable.
That makes it no longer philosophy. When the hypothesis has measurable effects, it's science.
Berlin and Kay tried to resolve this problem in the 60's, using colour terms to see if people's perceptions of colour depended on major categories of colour in their language, and came to exactly the opposite conclusion.
The first few paragraphs about human language - basically the idea that your language restricts what and how you can think - is about 95% false.
It's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (although there's some debate as to whether either Sapir of Whorf had anything to do about it) and is not widely held to be true among linguists. It occaisionally comes up in the literature, mostly to trash it.
Therefore, it is not a recurring theme in any literature about linguistics written by actual linguists of the last 30 years.
As for the contention that programming languages limit what kinds of programs we write, I am sceptical, but not so dismissive. Certainly I hate writting code to do lots of complicated string handling in C, prefering perl or java for the job. However, by building my functions carefully I can do it in C, and in fact have. I would balk at doing the same kinds of programs in assembly language.
That, however, seems mostly to be a question of finding the right tool for the job. If the next generation of languages allows me to abstract these differences and use one language with different toolkits (in principle I suppose this is possible with today's languages), I'm all for it.
...one with far stricter rules than this bill would provide, and they had no luck with enforcement.
There were no co-ed dorms. Students were not allowed to invite members of the opposite sex into their rooms. The rules stipulated no drinking, no smoking, no drugs, no dancing (you wouldn't believe the things Mennonites can talk themselves into), and absolutely-by-God no sex. RA's were expected to police the dorms to insure compliance.
I can tell you from personal experience that a good third of the students drank, a large number smoked, plenty of pot was smoked in and out of the dorms, and dancing wasn't considered serious enough to elicit serious rule-breaking. As for sex, have you ever known any large group of single 18-24 yr olds stuck together to abstain? I can assure you this group was no exception.
One of the English profs sang folk songs at a local bar, and a lot of her students showed up to listen to her. I caught my French advisor in a bar, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. (I had snuck in on a slightly confusing foreign ID.)
The pharmacy across the street from the college had a quite sizeable stock of condoms, cigarettes, booze, porno and even rolling papers. They filled an indeterminate number of birth control prescriptions. The college clinic was even willing to provide prescriptions for birth control, and under the table would point women to the Planned Parenthood office in the city if it was a little too late for the pill. (Confidentiality was in the clinic's charter.)
Of the 16 guys on my dorm floor, there were at least 5 who received soft porn magazines through the college mail, two who could be relied on to have that month's Hustler, and one guy who got a variety of stuff with names like "Big Boobs and Classic Cars."
The rules were not even dimly enforceable.
This was before the 'Net and at a private, religious school. What on earth could lead this McGrath person to think that if a conservative, Christian college with the full legal authority to enforce whatever rules they saw fit couldn't keep the kinds of rules she has in mind, what leads her to think she can impose them through legislation when local college administrators are openly hostile to her rules?
Nothing bothers me less than to see two giant media corporations go sue each other. I hope they bankrupt themselves.
Look, what if at hockey games, they start putting up blue screen ads, so that the TV networks can project their own ads onto them? Is this really any different than the way ads are sold now? No, not really. That kind of thing is already going on. Does CBS advertise its competitors for free? No. Big deal. So what if they start editing out outdoor advertising. Would anyone object if it was a cigarette ad they'd edited out?
The issue of honesty in reporting, which seems to be one of the major concerns here, is a total non sequitor as far as I'm concerned. Raise your hand if you didn't know that what you see on TV isn't always real. No hands? I thought so.
Jim Naureckas of FAIR seems concerned that this will undermine the credibility of TV news. As far as I can see, TV news already has no credibility, and print and Internet news isn't much more credible. The news is already a part of the entertainment, and is only done so long as it attracts ad revenue.
((I was under the impression that the distinctions had to be _easily_ measured, ie the blank stares Enoch said they get from Parisian French speakers. More than that, I believed it had to evolve naturally - creoles being an 'unnatural' form of evolution. ))
Think of Quebec French as being about as different from Paris French as Midwestern American is London English. These things aren't numerically measureable, so that's an approximation, but it's a pretty good one.
Dialects are fuzzy things, there isn't any notion (that I know of) of 'easily recogisable differences'. You could say that people from Minnesota have a dialect of English, because you can objectively measure consistent differences in their speech, but most Americans readily understand Minnesotans. Furthermore, many people can shift between the language they speak at home and some more standard or socially acceptible speech pattern. Dialects aren't solid things, so the only rigourous definition that's useful is any objective variation in speech that isn't an idiolect.
'Naturalness' isn't a notion that means much in terms of linguistic change. Creoles happen spontaneously throughout human history, usually when two or more groups of people have to live in close quarters and communicate, but share no language. However, they don't happen nearly as often when there is a single dominant language they all have to communicate in, like in the context of slave ownership.
((Interesting. So it's just pronounciations and word definitions that differentiate it? Or is there more?))
Mostly, that's it. A lot of people make noise about how common code-switching is in Quebec (using an English word or phrase in the middle of sentence in French) but that is something people do knowingly - only a few English words have really become integrated in Canadian French. The situation in New Brunswick is less clear, but I don't know the details of the French spoken there nearly as well.
((I am under the distinct impression that it is one. English forced on immigrants (in this case, black slaves) caused them to learn the basics, but they were still using it in the context in which they knew language. A new form sprung up as a result. ))
It's a cute theory, so cute almost everyone outside of linguistics buys into it. Unfortunately, there isn't any evidence to support the idea. There needs to be a consistent pattern of Bantu-style usages in order to establish the relationship, since the early period of slavery, when Black English first emerged, is undocumented. The lack of conjugation of the verb "to be" is well documented in many languages with no African contact, it alone isn't enough. Most of the structures used in Black English are inconsistent with typical Bantu grammar, and the few that are could easily be coincidence. After all, there are only so many ways of saying something, there's a good chance that any language will have some structure in common with any other language. Bantu languages most obvious feature is that they are very morphologically rich, while Black English is even poorer in morphology that the already morphology poor Standard English.
Furthermore, it's fairly easy to find phonetic links between Black English and the traditional dialects of the deep south. Certainly, Black English is more like white English in Alabama than like even the Carribean English variants.
((Incidentally, I know some distinctly NON-lower-income people who speak it as their birth-language. So it isn't restricted to those of the lower class or those without an education. )
True. It is mostly restricted to lower income groups and some people who have recently emerged from those groups. Like any linguistic phenomena, Ebonics is a fuzzy edged thing. There are always exceptions.
((Since you say the people you know disagree, could you tell me why? If you know more on the subject than I, I'd like to know what you think. What are the differences between the grammar of the language and the grammar of ebonics? Have you truly examined it, or are you contradicting me just so you can say ebonics is for uneducated losers (I'm not saying that to be inflammatory, I actually have been confronted by those who wanted only to say just that and had no logical backing for it). If need be, we can take this off slashdot - I'd be glad to email about it, so as not to continue an off-topic discussion. ))
First of all, I don't mean to say that Ebonics is in any way inferior or deficient or just for losers. That most of its speakers are black and poor is objectively verifiable. However, Ebonics is a perfectly normal, functional, useable language, as capable as any other of expressing any idea. Speaking it does not indicate lack of intelligence, nor today necessarily lack of education. (Although most well educated Americans can speak something closer to standard English, that doesn't mean they should have to.)
Had African Americans, from the day they set foot in America, been treated equally and given the same education as everyone else, I suspect there would be no Ebonics. Ebonics arose due to socio-economic factors, including poor education. This does not in any way indicate poor intelligence on the part of its speakers, nor deficiency on the part of their language.
In short, I want to distance myself from any idea that Ebonics = dumb and bad and Standard English = smart and good.
I gave a short summary of my reasons for disbelieving in the African origin hypothesis of Black English. If you need further reasons, we probably should take it off/., as we are well off topic. I don't think there is anything racist about suggesting that the African origin hypothesis is wrong. I don't mean thereby to invalidate Black English or suggest anything is wrong or deficient about it.
The differences in grammar between Standard English and Black English are fairly well documented by American linguists, and there is a fairly strong tradition of studies in this subject. Language in the USA was the text I had on the subject, but it seems to be out of print. I confess to not being an expert on American dialects - my subject was French - but I did study enough to get the principles down. (An' growin' up in da slums a Joizee shooa hep'd.)
It seems to me that WIlliam Labov is still the big name in that field. His website is at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~labov/home.html
If I've failed to answer any of your questions please e-mail me. I too have no wish to be hostile. Certainly, I'm not taking an anti-Black English stance.
Almost anything counts as a dialect, whenever there is an objectively measureable difference in the dominant speech of one area or socio-economic group compared to another.
Quebec French is objectively and legitimately different than French spoken elsewhere. The same can be said of Paris, Marseilles, Toulouse, Wallonia or for that matter Vietnam, Haiti, Louisiana or Reunion. Ergo, calling it a dialect is legitimate, so long as we all understand that all types of French are dialects.
Quebec French shows relatively little creolisation, and calling it a creole is certainly a misnomer. All languages adopt words from other languages, but a creole, as you point out, evolves from a pidgin generally. There is no history of pidgin in mainstream Canadian French. Only the Micmacs and the Michif used genuine creoles as far as I can recall, and neither group much influenced Canadian French.
Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Reunion, Mauritius and many other places have creoles, Quebec French is unquestionably French - it has only a smattering of foreign terms, no more really than Paris French and less than any modern variant of English. Quebec French has not adopted any grammatical structure from English, nor does the grammar of Quebec French vary in any important way from the standard model of French. Quebec French is, in many respects, very conservative compared to other variants - which is mildly surprising considering the history of poor literacy in Quebec.
There have been some changes in pronunciation, but the same can be said of France - the French spoken today in Europe is not the same as that spoken 300 years ago. There is some variety in vocabulary, but nearly all of it comes from French terms that have shifted in meaning, or retained meanings lost elsewhere. Again, that happens to all languages everywhere.
Furthermore, "Ebonics" (Or Black American English or whatever term you like) has few aspects of a creole. Although there are still some people who believe that black English grammar comes from West African Bantu roots, there are very few linguists who believe this. Black English bears very little (or no) relationship with the English and French creoles of Lousiana, the Carolinas and the Carribean. It is a language that has evolved from the English imposed on African slaves - there is no consistent link between its grammar and the features of any African language. Most likely, it's evolution is just as natural as that separating the varieties of British English from American English, but lack of literacy and education tend to exacerbate the drift.
Ebonics can probably best be characterised as a group of dialects limited primarily to lower income blacks and groups in direct contact with them.
...but with some background in dialectology, most of what you're saying is true. There is nothing less inherently correct or inherently French about the language of Montreal than the language of Paris. There is no one true French.
Whether you get something that could be passed off as Parisian French in school or something more legitimately Canadian depends on where you live and how much of the population is French there. My former students from Alberta and BC tended to to have illusions about the correctness of Paris French and often refused to use standard Canadian pronunciations (e.g/tsIp/ vs/tip/), but most of my Manitoban and Northern Ontario students spoke like Canadians. Students from N.B. usually seemed to pick up some Acadian usages (which I confess, with shame, to having a hard time understanding.)
Vowel raising is common in Ontario and throughout the prairies - I hear it everytime I visit my family in Winnipeg. Most Canadians only hear it when speaking to people from the Maritimes because their accent is pronounced in other ways as well. Most Canadians do have a perceptibily different accent, but are much easier for most Americans to understand than people from other regions of their own country.
I'd like to say that's because there are so many Canadians on American TV, but that's not actually true.
...there used to be a notice, part of Yahoo's copyright notice, saying they would tolerate reasonable parodies. Now that Yahoo is in the big leagues, I guess the lawyers are running things.
I remember a Weird Al Yankovic fan site that parodied Yahoo, and a joke on Isreali PM Benjamin Netanyahu called Net'an'Yahoo. Did Yahoo take action in those cases? No. Why the sudden change of policy? Does having your stock go up 8000% in three years mean one has to start acting like some dumb, litigious conglomerate?
I don't know how a case like this would play out in a Quebec court. Public opinion is likely to favour the local francophone over a big foreign Anglo company, but the judge may not see it that way.
The commentary in French on the page with Yahoo's letter is worth the trouble of reading, if you're French-compatible. This law firm can't even get the domain name right (pssst.qc.ca vs pssst.gc.ca).
Furthermore, the HTML source of http://altern.org/groov3/yahoo/ has been modified with the follwing embedded comment:
Youhou, avocats de Yahoo, l'auteur de ce site est dans le lien de courriel ci-dessous
Yoohoo! Yahoo lawyers, the author of this site is in the link below
C'est quioute, ça. C'est ben quioute.
Anyway, good luck with Yahoo, d'un québécois en exile.
Many libraries have children's sections, but even there, censorship is rarely the main motivator (although usually some censorship of content takes place.) Even a rule limiting library Internet access to patrons over 18 would be a better compromise than censorware - at least then grown-ups could decide for themselves what they want to read.
No library worth a hill of beans is free of socially disagreeable texts. A small city library is, IMHO, inadequate if it does not contain key political texts like Mein Kampf. Many, many 19th century American classics were written by racists, sexists and homophobes, not all of whom hide this fact in their books, yet a library that refuses to shelve these classics would be viewed by most people as negligent. No sane person would object to a public library containing a book of papal bulls, even though most rural American communities are overwhelmingly Protestant. I would wonder about a library that didn't have a copy of the Bible, or for that matter the Quran, yet these books contain material that surely offends large numbers of people. The works of many bestselling authors are full of obscene language, violence, and vividly described sex of many kinds. Andrew Vachss books are full of this kind of thing, yet most libraries have at least a few copies of his currently popular novels.
No one doubts that people can judge the contents of books for themselves, why do so many assume that isn't possible on the web? If the intent is to protect children, then an 18 and over rule is far, far more sensible (although still a bad idea in my opinion), yet, these nutters from the religious right all want censorship software.
The American Library Association has repeated, again and again, that librarians should make information available to the public. They are not willing to be censors. I'm with the ALA on this one, not the AFA.
"There were allegations that I was nuts," McCain said.
A new slogan for the McCain campaign (recycled from Barry Goldwater's '64 run for President):
In your guts, you know he's nuts!
Useful link - a list of Time Warner assets
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 2
http://www.cjr.org/owners/time-warner.asp
This page lists everything Time Warner owns. Some highlights:
Book-of-the-Month Club Little, Brown and Co. (Publishers) HBO CNN Cartoon Network RoadRunner (cable internet access) WB network (duh!) Hanna-Barbera (cartoons) Castle Rock Entertainment (TV, movies) Witt-Thomas productions (TV, former makers of Roseanne) Time Magazine Fortune Magazine Southern Living (I didn't even know about this one) DC Comics and Vertigo Comics (AOL owns Sandman!!!) Mad Magazine (and the TV show of the same name on Fox) Viva (German Music TV) Channel V (TV in India) New Line Cinema (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mortal Combat, various other crappy movies) Atlanta Braves (AOL owns John Rocker)
AOL Time Warner is in bed with Bertelsmann (AOL France, AOL Deutschland), Sony (Columbia House, HBO Asia), EMI (Viva, Channel V), Polygram (Viva), and Viacom (Comedy Central).
This new company is bound up in deals with its competitors, and the people it has deals with compete with each other. Nothing about the new company's operation are centralisable without destroying all those joint ventures. All kinds of anti-trust laws and agreements are tying it up. This new company does not pose any greaterr threat than it did before.
AOL Time Warner is about cable internet
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 5
AOL is running scared that they will be locked out of the cable internet market. That, and I suspect that alone, is why they're buying Time Warner. Time Warner owns extensive cable systems - I believe they are the number two cable company in the US. AT&T is the largest, now that they've bought TCI. AOL must be afraid that their efforts to get AT&T to open up their cable systems won't be successful.
This isn't very good for AOL financially in the short term. They are being widely downgraded, because the new AOL TIme Warner will almost certainly have a lower growth rate than AOL by itself. Only fear could have motivated a stunt like this.
AOL has no interest in running a TV/movie studio/network. There isn't much added value in owning both TV/film and Internet properties. This isn't about TV/Internet convergence.
AOL Time Warner is not a vertical monopoly any more than Time Warner or AOL were by themselves. AOL is one of the few internet companies with a steady, regular income, and this is because they are not especially involved in the content industry. They are an ISP - a very successful one. Time Warner is completely hamstrung by FCC regulations - they can't stop showing TV shows from competing studios on their networks, nor will they stop selling WB programmes to competing networks. CNN will still be seen on AT&T cable systems, and AOL doesn't open Time Warner up to new sources of TV or film content. AOL will continue to host websites and marketing for competing studios and TV networks. They recently signed a deal with PBS to carry some of their web content.
AOL and Time Warner will still have completely separate management structures. AOL has no background in mass media, and has no great reason to try to acquire some.
I will bet that a few years down the line, AOL will spin off the TV and film studios and the TV networks and just keep the cable infrastructure. That's the only part of Time Warner that makes any sense as a part of AOL.
I adhere in some ways to the Behaviorist notion that what matters about intelligence is a) what goes into the machine and b) what comes out. There is nothing else. If you feel that there is more going on inside you than what can be summarized by your external stimuli and your external reactions, then you are mistaken. You are only observing an internalized output to external stimuli. The feedback you would normally express in the outside world is instead being piped directly to your brain's input valve.
There are serious problems with behaviourism.
First of all, if behaviourism were true, we could teach pigs to sing. We can't. There are built-in functions in the brain that make a difference in intelligence.
Second, human children learn language in a fashion which behaviourism can't account for. Children will learn whatever language they are exposed to. They learn the rules of their language without ever understanding them as rules. They do not make the type of mistakes a trial-and-error behaviour renforcement model would require of them. They always group words into structures, even in highly inflected languages and even when they get the fine points of syntax wrong. Furthermore (and most damningly) a human child can become fully functional in a foreign language in under a year, while few adults can do so under any circumstances. The most parsimonious theory that includes these facts is that humans, like other animals, have biological mechanisms in the brain that enable them to do these things.
Thirdly, there are growing bodies of evidence that large areas of human behaviour are biologically influenced. Several forms of psychiatric disease can be clearly traced to biochemical roots. Human sexual behaviour has clear biological roots (I doubt anyone would much bother with sex if their brains didn't force them too.) Even areas like anti-social behaviour are increasingly believed to have partially biological origins, possibly hereditary ones.
That means that humans are not tabula rasa as the behaviourists believed. What goes on in our brains is not a simple function of external stimula.
Now, that does not mean it isn't possible to understand these parts of the brain and program computers to emulate them effectively, but if we do so, we are emulating a human, not creating a truly new machine intelligence.
I can easily imagine a machine pretending to be human wanting to become fully human. Such a machine would likely have emotional states, since we are unlikely to be able to separate these genuinely human conditions from an abstract intelligence. We don't even have a good definition of intelligence, and even if we fully understood the biology and functioning of the brain, we are unlikely to be able to discuss intelligence apart from it's structural framework.
An AI that thinks like a human is likely to want the range of experience and the level of autonomy that humans enjoy. It's not implausible that it would want to be seen and treated as an equal to humans. It is conceivable that it would view itself as superior, but I find it hard to believe that any probable AI would wish to reject the ensemble of human experience in the way you suggest.
I think Asimov would have liked it. The film covers the kinds of issues that Asimov brought forward in his robot stories, although there are a few big gaps in the story. For example, what happened to the three laws of robotics? Did Andrew just outgrow them or what?
Still, the film is basically sound. The science is, as always with film, its weakest point. There will not be household robots to do your cooking and cleaning by 2005, but what the hell, this is fiction.
"Robert Burns N6 and ZC series robots and Harley Davidson Paraphenalia" The sign on the shop in San Francisco is the best sight gag in the film.
This is a safe movie - it won't challenge any of your beliefs and it's quite safe to bring children to. The references to sex are few and very tame - there's no real bad language. The view of the future is presented very simply and without real change to society except that neckties look even stupider.
Whatever special effects crew did the robot effects - the masks and/or CGI - deserves an Oscar. It's amazing to see a bulky metal robot that is still clearly and obviously played by Robin Williams, not by some animatronics master or a computer program.
I am unaware of any current law or proposed law forbidding anonymity on the Internet. Their case seems largely built on an obviously unconstitutional (and technologically illiterate) law in Georgia which was immediately struck down by courts, an article in Communication Daily about some cops' wish list for the 'Net and by a quote, taken heavily out of context, from a justice department official.
(BTW, here is the quote in it's entirety. I found it in the endnotes:
"I think we are perilously close to a lose-lose situation in which citizens have lost their privacy to commercial interests and criminals have easy access to absolute anonymity." -- Justice Dept prosecutor Phillip Reitinger
This is hardly the statist plea to end anonymity that the author makes it out to be - the concern is legitimate. Reitinger is lamenting the loss of anonymity as much as deploring its drawbacks.)
I have difficulty seeing what kind of law could ban anonymity. As the author points out, "Laws requiring the disclosure of identity in cyberspace would require far-reaching changes in Internet technology." The current political climate makes that unlikely, nor are the courts in the US likely to put up with it.
Conceivably, a law could ban IP spoofing (probably not a bad idea) and anonymous remailers (probably a bad idea, but not the end of the world.) The people who would most suffer would not be those with controvertial ideas to disseminate.
Yes, police tend to be paranoid about anything they can't control and some cops have stupid ideas about how the 'Net ought to work, but that doesn't mean the government is about to come swoop down and take away your/. handle. Most cops also want the Miranda decision overturned, and probably would mind some weaker protections regarding the rights of prisoners, probationers and juveniles - that doesn't mean it's going to happen.
This is like the constant rumours that the FCC wants to regulate the Internet - juicy right-wing government conspiracy theories.
ISP's don't let you sign up anonymously for accounts - not if they want to get paid - and if police trace you back to your ISP they will bend over backwards to tell the cops who you are. ISP's have an interest in rooting out spam, and often try to trace anonymous messages back to their source. If you have lost your anonymity on the 'Net these days, it's not the government that did it to you.
I would think the Cato Institute would fight to the death for companies' freedom to deprive you of anonymity. Perhaps the Cato Institute is taking the distinctly anti-libertarian stance that ISP's should be required to provide you with anonymity, or perhaps they are trying to defend the right of spammers to use communication lines without permission of the owners.
Don';t let this strawman argument get you riled up against a problem that doesn't really exist.
There are already taxes on e-commerce, so I'm not quite sure what they mean. If you buy a book from Chapters.ca, you have to pay GST like everyone else. If you order from Amazon.com, you can evade state sales taxes, but if you get it shipped to another country, you may have to pay duties (although I think most industrialised countries have eliminated tariffs on printed material.) Certainly other kinds of e-commerce have to live with national taxes or pay duties if they apply to the product they are selling.
There are no special taxes on services sold over the web, and software sold over the web is in a sort of limbo where there is no clear avenue to charge duties across borders.
I suspect the WTO is simply postponing working out exactly what regimes of taxation should and should work over the web between countries. This is as much a bad thing as a good one - it is no guarantee of a tax free nirvana online.
The WTO encourages free trade after a fashion by providing a mechanism for determining what kinds of laws and taxes are fair for international commerce and which ones aren't. The only power of enforcement they have available is that they can sanction tariffs against offending countries if the country doesn't agree to change its laws.
The WTO can't just amend national laws. Any country can pass any law they like, as long as they are willing to pay the price.
My problem is not with the idea of a global tribunal of that type, nor with the idea of free trade, nor even with the very limited enforcement mechanism available to them. However, what I consider fair rules and free trade differs substantially from what the WTO thinks, and there is no mechanism whereby I can influence WTO policy in that regard. That is what is truely wrong with the WTO.
Miller didn't write a lot of SF - few people have read any of his stories, other than CFL, but that book bought him his well-deserved place in the pantheon of anglophone SF.
I graded some student papers on CFL some years ago, and there was a surprising array of conclusions about the book's message. Some saw it as straight SF about the consequences of nuclear war, a few seeing strong anti-nuclear messages in it. Others saw it as an anti-clerical novel, like the work of Victor Hugo. Some saw the reaffirmation of Clarke's maxim that any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, especially in the second part.
One thought the book was about the unnaturalness of modern society, suggesting that without constant efforts, man would naturally return to a feudal lifestyle. He made his point well, carefully avoiding the suggestion that Miller was a closet Luddite.
Another saw the preservation of knowledge as a key theme. He thought Miller was saying that preservation of knowledge is a holy calling, a cause requiring a kind of missionary devotion.
Many students found CFL a counsel of despair, suggesting that nuclear war is inevitable and that it would destroy our civilisation. Most caught on to the theme of despair in the last section, suggesting that man could never learn from history.
A few thought the last section had a theme of hope, that man could ultimately escape his own destructiveness, either by starting over elsewhere or by submission to God.
This is a complex novel, rich in subtle meaning and interpretation and full of diverse themes, told through a relatively small cast of characters. One of the most powerful things I brought out of it was new perspective on medaeval European history. Seeing how the people in CFL reinterpreted my civilisation made me think about how feudal Europe reinterpreted the Roman Empire.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a powerful book, more than worth reading and timeless in a way that very little SF is. Stay away from the so-called sequel though, it will only diminish the first book.
It doesn't surprise me that an information system the size of the Internet would have some unpredicted emergent properties. Stanislaw Lem, in his Summa Technologiae in 1962, predicted that biology would be the main source of engineering inspiration in the 21st century, and clearly this is coming true.
However, don't mistake a metaphor for a truth. They do not propose any kind of unified framework for analysing the 'Net, nor can they. They are simply looking to biology to inspire analytical methods.
Examining usage logs of 120,000 sites, Huberman and Adamic discovered that the distribution of visitors follows a universal power law -- better known as winner-takes-all. This is a world as viciously inequitable as the real one; the most popular 5% of websites get the lion's share -- 75% -- of all Internet traffic.
They missed an important implication of the power law. Increasingly, we should see metasearch systems parasitising the most commonly viewed sites - so long as IP law doesn't prevent it.
I'd like to see some useful predictions come out of there analysis, but I don't see any.
I'm not convinced that disk space restrictions are the major cause of the Darwinian distribution of file lifespans, as the article asserts in the second last paragraph.
Their discussion of an immune system for the web seems pretty speculative, and as they point out elsewhere in the article, monoculture systems are not sufficiently robust. A monoculture immune apparatus (as they propose) probably wouldn't be adequate either.
The point about monoculture is the best one they make. Melissa would have been impossible to propagate, or at least much less damaging, if Windows wasn't so widespread. You would think we had learned this lesson during the Internet Worm fiasco back in the late 80's.
Bail on the word "e-cology." Lem would probably call it "webological analysis", but I think something more greco-latin is in order. Gnostography maybe? Araneastics? Cognostofluxology?
No, there's only one non-metric nation left. IIRC, Brunei Darussalam went metric a few years ago.
The other country that failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child is Somalia, which has no effective government at this time. Somalia has been metric at least since the Marxist coup in '74.
Alas, the website has been/.'ed, so I can't look at the translator, but there are some serious questions to ask.
1 - testing: They claim to be the most accurate of the web-based translators. Based on what corpus and measured in what way? This isn't a trivial question, there are no benchmarks for translation programmes.
2 - parsing. If this program uses American style phrase grammar, it will inevitably break down. Phrase grammar is counterintuitive and for AI purposes pretty unproductive. It is computationally simple - see Charniak's last book for good parsing algorithms - but almost certainly isn't the way humans process language.
All of the most successful natural language translation systems are, in one way or another, dependency grammar based. Dependency based systems are also generally more portable to other languages.
3 - morphology. English is very morphology poor. If morphology is only minimally accounted for (as a lot of poorly thought out, English based NLP systems are), I don't see how it can hope to work in Russian, or Turkish or dozens of other major languages with rich morphology. Furthermore, what kinds of morphological rules can it accept? There are languages that use prefix, postfix and infix morphology. The kinds of simple rules that can account for English will not go vert far with other languages.
I haven't seen this program, and I don't know how seriously these issues have been considered, but they are the kinds of things to keep in mind when looking at machine translation programs.
The Chicago school has little in common with, for example, the religious right, so I guess one could call them liberal after a fashion. Adding "classical" to it gives them an edge I'm unwilling to conceed - the Chicagoists aren't the free traders of classical liberalism any more than the Austrians are. Times change, and few schools of thought survive the centuries intact.
Once upon a time, conservatives represented the power of landed aristocrats against the industrial aristocrats and the bourgoisie. Nowadays, not even the most conservaive politicians represent the landlords above the factory owners. Once upon a time (within living memory for some people) environmentalism was viewed as a conservative issue. Now it's almost exclusively a leftist one.
My point is times change, and conservative is relative to local values. Twenty years ago, I would have called Posner a radical capitalist and on a pithy day a nihilist.:^) Today, most of his ideology is mainstream in US government (which only goes to show that it's probably wrong) so I feel justified calling him a conservative.
The adminstrative costs of Chile's system are almost 30%, and payouts are still lower than in the early 70's - I'm not all sure they see a better return. Furthermore, you have to contribute a minimum amount to qualify for the minimum pension - many poorer workers are unable to do so. It was very damaging to those near retirement when it was put in place - they saw their returns cut dramatically by government fiat.
Note that military pensions are not invested in this scheme.
Actually, I was thinking more of the brutal suppression of the unions, who would never have stood for Pinochet's social security plan in a democracy. Friedman never hesitated to work for a dictator easily more brutal than many in the communist world. Chile's SS plan was imposed under the dictatorship, and satisfaction is not very high.
At any rate, I'm not a religious Keynsian - although as far as I can tell the Chicago school, like Marxism, is long on promises but had been a disaster in implementation. Chile took nearly twenty years to return to it's 1971 standard of living, and elsewhere Chicago-style reforms have proven even more disasterous. Government intervention in the economy has still done vastly more for the developing world than laissez-faire.
Keynes gets a lot of points for working out a system that actually worked at least some of the time. I know of no economist with comparable accomplishments.
I'm not a fan of the Chicago school of economics (after Milton Friedman helped the Chilean dictatorship screw its workers I'm certainly not a fan of its biggest proponents), but Posner is definitely the most qualified person Judge Jackson could have chosen.
Posner is most likely to understand what is in the findings of fact and knows that a slap-on-the-hands consent order is not going to be good enough, regardless of his ideology. Because he is well-known as a conservative judge, the libertarian fringe in the business community is unlikely to be able to claim big government is unjustly interfering with Microsoft.
This guy has it together enough to help punish Microsoft, and has a reputation that makes him unimpeachable if and when he does. This is one of those "only Nixon could have gone to China" cases where, despite being an unrepentant liberal and a soft Keynesian, I agree that the conservative is the right choice.
Microsoft has to be scared. They have no way of knowing what kind of punishment the court will mete out. The Justice Department has the same problem, but has political problems on top of that - 2000 is an election year and no one wants to make potential big business campaign contributors unhappy. Both have a vested interest in negociating something. In arbitration, they have some control over the outcome - in a court, no one knows.
Of course, both sides are still far apart on what ought to be done. Microsoft is adamant that they should be able to put anything they want in Windows, and that they won't permit disclosure of the source in any way. It's hard to see what the DOJ could ask for outside of such solutions, except perhaps actually breaking up the company.
I agree with Dr Hawkins below - the odds of settlement have improved. How much depends on how scared Microsoft is. The DOJ can't back down now - if there is no settlement, they will let the cards fall where they may. Any politician who is going to be hosed by the Microsoft case already has been.
I don't know about you...
on
Happy Odd Day!
·
· Score: 4
...but I expect to live to see 1-1-3111.:^)
As Woody Allen said, some people try to achieve immortality through their work, others through their children. I hope to achieve immortality by not dying.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is a concept which is unexpressible in another language, I would like to see it. Some things are not convienient or easy to translate, some can only be accurately conveyed with some longer explanation, but if an idea is unthinkable in another language - if in any way language (not culture) affects perception - this difference should be measurable.
That makes it no longer philosophy. When the hypothesis has measurable effects, it's science.
Berlin and Kay tried to resolve this problem in the 60's, using colour terms to see if people's perceptions of colour depended on major categories of colour in their language, and came to exactly the opposite conclusion.
The first few paragraphs about human language - basically the idea that your language restricts what and how you can think - is about 95% false.
It's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (although there's some debate as to whether either Sapir of Whorf had anything to do about it) and is not widely held to be true among linguists. It occaisionally comes up in the literature, mostly to trash it.
Therefore, it is not a recurring theme in any literature about linguistics written by actual linguists of the last 30 years.
As for the contention that programming languages limit what kinds of programs we write, I am sceptical, but not so dismissive. Certainly I hate writting code to do lots of complicated string handling in C, prefering perl or java for the job. However, by building my functions carefully I can do it in C, and in fact have. I would balk at doing the same kinds of programs in assembly language.
That, however, seems mostly to be a question of finding the right tool for the job. If the next generation of languages allows me to abstract these differences and use one language with different toolkits (in principle I suppose this is possible with today's languages), I'm all for it.
...one with far stricter rules than this bill would provide, and they had no luck with enforcement.
There were no co-ed dorms. Students were not allowed to invite members of the opposite sex into their rooms. The rules stipulated no drinking, no smoking, no drugs, no dancing (you wouldn't believe the things Mennonites can talk themselves into), and absolutely-by-God no sex. RA's were expected to police the dorms to insure compliance.
I can tell you from personal experience that a good third of the students drank, a large number smoked, plenty of pot was smoked in and out of the dorms, and dancing wasn't considered serious enough to elicit serious rule-breaking. As for sex, have you ever known any large group of single 18-24 yr olds stuck together to abstain? I can assure you this group was no exception.
One of the English profs sang folk songs at a local bar, and a lot of her students showed up to listen to her. I caught my French advisor in a bar, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. (I had snuck in on a slightly confusing foreign ID.)
The pharmacy across the street from the college had a quite sizeable stock of condoms, cigarettes, booze, porno and even rolling papers. They filled an indeterminate number of birth control prescriptions. The college clinic was even willing to provide prescriptions for birth control, and under the table would point women to the Planned Parenthood office in the city if it was a little too late for the pill. (Confidentiality was in the clinic's charter.)
Of the 16 guys on my dorm floor, there were at least 5 who received soft porn magazines through the college mail, two who could be relied on to have that month's Hustler, and one guy who got a variety of stuff with names like "Big Boobs and Classic Cars."
The rules were not even dimly enforceable.
This was before the 'Net and at a private, religious school. What on earth could lead this McGrath person to think that if a conservative, Christian college with the full legal authority to enforce whatever rules they saw fit couldn't keep the kinds of rules she has in mind, what leads her to think she can impose them through legislation when local college administrators are openly hostile to her rules?
Lacking IPA, this will be a little half-assed, but here goes:
awt 'n abawt 'n a boht
Canadians use a labialised vowel in all three words (their lips are pursed.) Most Americans only use a labial for 'boat'.
I, however, am a mostly biglossic Canadian, raised in both countries, so which I use depends on how unamerican I feel that day.
Nothing bothers me less than to see two giant media corporations go sue each other. I hope they bankrupt themselves.
Look, what if at hockey games, they start putting up blue screen ads, so that the TV networks can project their own ads onto them? Is this really any different than the way ads are sold now? No, not really. That kind of thing is already going on. Does CBS advertise its competitors for free? No. Big deal. So what if they start editing out outdoor advertising. Would anyone object if it was a cigarette ad they'd edited out?
The issue of honesty in reporting, which seems to be one of the major concerns here, is a total non sequitor as far as I'm concerned. Raise your hand if you didn't know that what you see on TV isn't always real. No hands? I thought so.
Jim Naureckas of FAIR seems concerned that this will undermine the credibility of TV news. As far as I can see, TV news already has no credibility, and print and Internet news isn't much more credible. The news is already a part of the entertainment, and is only done so long as it attracts ad revenue.
What a total non-issue.
...one who isn't from a state that doesn't border Canada, and say:
Out and about in a boat
When the American stops laughing, ask him if he can tell that you have an accent.
:^)
((I was under the impression that the distinctions had to be _easily_ measured, ie the blank stares Enoch said they get from Parisian French speakers. More than that, I believed it had to evolve naturally - creoles being an 'unnatural' form of evolution. ))
/., as we are well off topic. I don't think there is anything racist about suggesting that the African origin hypothesis is wrong. I don't mean thereby to invalidate Black English or suggest anything is wrong or deficient about it.
Think of Quebec French as being about as different from Paris French as Midwestern American is London English. These things aren't numerically measureable, so that's an approximation, but it's a pretty good one.
Dialects are fuzzy things, there isn't any notion (that I know of) of 'easily recogisable differences'. You could say that people from Minnesota have a dialect of English, because you can objectively measure consistent differences in their speech, but most Americans readily understand Minnesotans. Furthermore, many people can shift between the language they speak at home and some more standard or socially acceptible speech pattern. Dialects aren't solid things, so the only rigourous definition that's useful is any objective variation in speech that isn't an idiolect.
'Naturalness' isn't a notion that means much in terms of linguistic change. Creoles happen spontaneously throughout human history, usually when two or more groups of people have to live in close quarters and communicate, but share no language. However, they don't happen nearly as often when there is a single dominant language they all have to communicate in, like in the context of slave ownership.
((Interesting. So it's just pronounciations and word definitions that differentiate it? Or is there more?))
Mostly, that's it. A lot of people make noise about how common code-switching is in Quebec (using an English word or phrase in the middle of sentence in French) but that is something people do knowingly - only a few English words have really become integrated in Canadian French. The situation in New Brunswick is less clear, but I don't know the details of the French spoken there nearly as well.
((I am under the distinct impression that it is one. English forced on immigrants (in this case, black slaves) caused them to learn the basics, but they were still using it in the context in which they knew language. A new form sprung up as a result. ))
It's a cute theory, so cute almost everyone outside of linguistics buys into it. Unfortunately, there isn't any evidence to support the idea. There needs to be a consistent pattern of Bantu-style usages in order to establish the relationship, since the early period of slavery, when Black English first emerged, is undocumented. The lack of conjugation of the verb "to be" is well documented in many languages with no African contact, it alone isn't enough. Most of the structures used in Black English are inconsistent with typical Bantu grammar, and the few that are could easily be coincidence. After all, there are only so many ways of saying something, there's a good chance that any language will have some structure in common with any other language. Bantu languages most obvious feature is that they are very morphologically rich, while Black English is even poorer in morphology that the already morphology poor Standard English.
Furthermore, it's fairly easy to find phonetic links between Black English and the traditional dialects of the deep south. Certainly, Black English is more like white English in Alabama than like even the Carribean English variants.
((Incidentally, I know some distinctly NON-lower-income people who speak it as their birth-language. So it isn't restricted to those of the lower class or those without an education. )
True. It is mostly restricted to lower income groups and some people who have recently emerged from those groups. Like any linguistic phenomena, Ebonics is a fuzzy edged thing. There are always exceptions.
((Since you say the people you know disagree, could you tell me why? If you know more on the subject than I, I'd like to know what you think. What are the differences between the grammar of the language and the grammar of ebonics? Have you truly examined it, or are you contradicting me just so you can say ebonics is for uneducated losers (I'm not saying that to be inflammatory, I actually have been confronted by those who wanted only to say just that and had no logical backing for it). If need be, we can take this off slashdot - I'd be glad to email about it, so as not to continue an off-topic discussion. ))
First of all, I don't mean to say that Ebonics is in any way inferior or deficient or just for losers. That most of its speakers are black and poor is objectively verifiable. However, Ebonics is a perfectly normal, functional, useable language, as capable as any other of expressing any idea. Speaking it does not indicate lack of intelligence, nor today necessarily lack of education. (Although most well educated Americans can speak something closer to standard English, that doesn't mean they should have to.)
Had African Americans, from the day they set foot in America, been treated equally and given the same education as everyone else, I suspect there would be no Ebonics. Ebonics arose due to socio-economic factors, including poor education. This does not in any way indicate poor intelligence on the part of its speakers, nor deficiency on the part of their language.
In short, I want to distance myself from any idea that Ebonics = dumb and bad and Standard English = smart and good.
I gave a short summary of my reasons for disbelieving in the African origin hypothesis of Black English. If you need further reasons, we probably should take it off
The differences in grammar between Standard English and Black English are fairly well documented by American linguists, and there is a fairly strong tradition of studies in this subject. Language in the USA was the text I had on the subject, but it seems to be out of print. I confess to not being an expert on American dialects - my subject was French - but I did study enough to get the principles down. (An' growin' up in da slums a Joizee shooa hep'd.)
It seems to me that WIlliam Labov is still the big name in that field. His website is at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~labov/home.html
If I've failed to answer any of your questions please e-mail me. I too have no wish to be hostile. Certainly, I'm not taking an anti-Black English stance.
Almost anything counts as a dialect, whenever there is an objectively measureable difference in the dominant speech of one area or socio-economic group compared to another.
Quebec French is objectively and legitimately different than French spoken elsewhere. The same can be said of Paris, Marseilles, Toulouse, Wallonia or for that matter Vietnam, Haiti, Louisiana or Reunion. Ergo, calling it a dialect is legitimate, so long as we all understand that all types of French are dialects.
Quebec French shows relatively little creolisation, and calling it a creole is certainly a misnomer. All languages adopt words from other languages, but a creole, as you point out, evolves from a pidgin generally. There is no history of pidgin in mainstream Canadian French. Only the Micmacs and the Michif used genuine creoles as far as I can recall, and neither group much influenced Canadian French.
Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Reunion, Mauritius and many other places have creoles, Quebec French is unquestionably French - it has only a smattering of foreign terms, no more really than Paris French and less than any modern variant of English. Quebec French has not adopted any grammatical structure from English, nor does the grammar of Quebec French vary in any important way from the standard model of French. Quebec French is, in many respects, very conservative compared to other variants - which is mildly surprising considering the history of poor literacy in Quebec.
There have been some changes in pronunciation, but the same can be said of France - the French spoken today in Europe is not the same as that spoken 300 years ago. There is some variety in vocabulary, but nearly all of it comes from French terms that have shifted in meaning, or retained meanings lost elsewhere. Again, that happens to all languages everywhere.
Furthermore, "Ebonics" (Or Black American English or whatever term you like) has few aspects of a creole. Although there are still some people who believe that black English grammar comes from West African Bantu roots, there are very few linguists who believe this. Black English bears very little (or no) relationship with the English and French creoles of Lousiana, the Carolinas and the Carribean. It is a language that has evolved from the English imposed on African slaves - there is no consistent link between its grammar and the features of any African language. Most likely, it's evolution is just as natural as that separating the varieties of British English from American English, but lack of literacy and education tend to exacerbate the drift.
Ebonics can probably best be characterised as a group of dialects limited primarily to lower income blacks and groups in direct contact with them.
...but with some background in dialectology, most of what you're saying is true. There is nothing less inherently correct or inherently French about the language of Montreal than the language of Paris. There is no one true French.
/tsIp/ vs /tip/), but most of my Manitoban and Northern Ontario students spoke like Canadians. Students from N.B. usually seemed to pick up some Acadian usages (which I confess, with shame, to having a hard time understanding.)
Whether you get something that could be passed off as Parisian French in school or something more legitimately Canadian depends on where you live and how much of the population is French there. My former students from Alberta and BC tended to to have illusions about the correctness of Paris French and often refused to use standard Canadian pronunciations (e.g
Vowel raising is common in Ontario and throughout the prairies - I hear it everytime I visit my family in Winnipeg. Most Canadians only hear it when speaking to people from the Maritimes because their accent is pronounced in other ways as well. Most Canadians do have a perceptibily different accent, but are much easier for most Americans to understand than people from other regions of their own country.
I'd like to say that's because there are so many Canadians on American TV, but that's not actually true.
...there used to be a notice, part of Yahoo's copyright notice, saying they would tolerate reasonable parodies. Now that Yahoo is in the big leagues, I guess the lawyers are running things.
I remember a Weird Al Yankovic fan site that parodied Yahoo, and a joke on Isreali PM Benjamin Netanyahu called Net'an'Yahoo. Did Yahoo take action in those cases? No. Why the sudden change of policy? Does having your stock go up 8000% in three years mean one has to start acting like some dumb, litigious conglomerate?
I don't know how a case like this would play out in a Quebec court. Public opinion is likely to favour the local francophone over a big foreign Anglo company, but the judge may not see it that way.
The commentary in French on the page with Yahoo's letter is worth the trouble of reading, if you're French-compatible. This law firm can't even get the domain name right (pssst.qc.ca vs pssst.gc.ca).
Furthermore, the HTML source of http://altern.org/groov3/yahoo/ has been modified with the follwing embedded comment:
Youhou, avocats de Yahoo, l'auteur de ce site est dans le lien de courriel ci-dessous
Yoohoo! Yahoo lawyers, the author of this site is in the link below
C'est quioute, ça. C'est ben quioute.
Anyway, good luck with Yahoo, d'un québécois en exile.
Many libraries have children's sections, but even there, censorship is rarely the main motivator (although usually some censorship of content takes place.) Even a rule limiting library Internet access to patrons over 18 would be a better compromise than censorware - at least then grown-ups could decide for themselves what they want to read.
No library worth a hill of beans is free of socially disagreeable texts. A small city library is, IMHO, inadequate if it does not contain key political texts like Mein Kampf. Many, many 19th century American classics were written by racists, sexists and homophobes, not all of whom hide this fact in their books, yet a library that refuses to shelve these classics would be viewed by most people as negligent. No sane person would object to a public library containing a book of papal bulls, even though most rural American communities are overwhelmingly Protestant. I would wonder about a library that didn't have a copy of the Bible, or for that matter the Quran, yet these books contain material that surely offends large numbers of people. The works of many bestselling authors are full of obscene language, violence, and vividly described sex of many kinds. Andrew Vachss books are full of this kind of thing, yet most libraries have at least a few copies of his currently popular novels.
No one doubts that people can judge the contents of books for themselves, why do so many assume that isn't possible on the web? If the intent is to protect children, then an 18 and over rule is far, far more sensible (although still a bad idea in my opinion), yet, these nutters from the religious right all want censorship software.
The American Library Association has repeated, again and again, that librarians should make information available to the public. They are not willing to be censors. I'm with the ALA on this one, not the AFA.
BTW, the Holland Times article on John McCain is at http://www.theholl andsentinel.net/stories/011100/new_mccain.html.
It concludes with the following line:
"There were allegations that I was nuts," McCain said.
A new slogan for the McCain campaign (recycled from Barry Goldwater's '64 run for President):
In your guts, you know he's nuts!
http://www.cjr.org/owners/time-warner.asp
This page lists everything Time Warner owns. Some highlights:
Book-of-the-Month Club
Little, Brown and Co. (Publishers)
HBO
CNN
Cartoon Network
RoadRunner (cable internet access)
WB network (duh!)
Hanna-Barbera (cartoons)
Castle Rock Entertainment (TV, movies)
Witt-Thomas productions (TV, former makers of Roseanne)
Time Magazine
Fortune Magazine
Southern Living (I didn't even know about this one)
DC Comics and Vertigo Comics (AOL owns Sandman!!!)
Mad Magazine (and the TV show of the same name on Fox)
Viva (German Music TV)
Channel V (TV in India)
New Line Cinema (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mortal Combat, various other crappy movies)
Atlanta Braves (AOL owns John Rocker)
AOL Time Warner is in bed with Bertelsmann (AOL France, AOL Deutschland), Sony (Columbia House, HBO Asia), EMI (Viva, Channel V), Polygram (Viva), and Viacom (Comedy Central).
This new company is bound up in deals with its competitors, and the people it has deals with compete with each other. Nothing about the new company's operation are centralisable without destroying all those joint ventures. All kinds of anti-trust laws and agreements are tying it up. This new company does not pose any greaterr threat than it did before.
AOL is running scared that they will be locked out of the cable internet market. That, and I suspect that alone, is why they're buying Time Warner. Time Warner owns extensive cable systems - I believe they are the number two cable company in the US. AT&T is the largest, now that they've bought TCI. AOL must be afraid that their efforts to get AT&T to open up their cable systems won't be successful.
This isn't very good for AOL financially in the short term. They are being widely downgraded, because the new AOL TIme Warner will almost certainly have a lower growth rate than AOL by itself. Only fear could have motivated a stunt like this.
AOL has no interest in running a TV/movie studio/network. There isn't much added value in owning both TV/film and Internet properties. This isn't about TV/Internet convergence.
AOL Time Warner is not a vertical monopoly any more than Time Warner or AOL were by themselves. AOL is one of the few internet companies with a steady, regular income, and this is because they are not especially involved in the content industry. They are an ISP - a very successful one. Time Warner is completely hamstrung by FCC regulations - they can't stop showing TV shows from competing studios on their networks, nor will they stop selling WB programmes to competing networks. CNN will still be seen on AT&T cable systems, and AOL doesn't open Time Warner up to new sources of TV or film content. AOL will continue to host websites and marketing for competing studios and TV networks. They recently signed a deal with PBS to carry some of their web content.
AOL and Time Warner will still have completely separate management structures. AOL has no background in mass media, and has no great reason to try to acquire some.
I will bet that a few years down the line, AOL will spin off the TV and film studios and the TV networks and just keep the cable infrastructure. That's the only part of Time Warner that makes any sense as a part of AOL.
I adhere in some ways to the Behaviorist notion that what matters about intelligence is a) what goes into the machine and b) what comes out. There is nothing else. If you feel that there is more going on inside you than what can be summarized by your external stimuli and your external reactions, then you are mistaken. You are only observing an internalized output to external stimuli. The feedback you would normally express in the outside world is instead being piped directly to your brain's input valve.
There are serious problems with behaviourism.
First of all, if behaviourism were true, we could teach pigs to sing. We can't. There are built-in functions in the brain that make a difference in intelligence.
Second, human children learn language in a fashion which behaviourism can't account for. Children will learn whatever language they are exposed to. They learn the rules of their language without ever understanding them as rules. They do not make the type of mistakes a trial-and-error behaviour renforcement model would require of them. They always group words into structures, even in highly inflected languages and even when they get the fine points of syntax wrong. Furthermore (and most damningly) a human child can become fully functional in a foreign language in under a year, while few adults can do so under any circumstances. The most parsimonious theory that includes these facts is that humans, like other animals, have biological mechanisms in the brain that enable them to do these things.
Thirdly, there are growing bodies of evidence that large areas of human behaviour are biologically influenced. Several forms of psychiatric disease can be clearly traced to biochemical roots. Human sexual behaviour has clear biological roots (I doubt anyone would much bother with sex if their brains didn't force them too.) Even areas like anti-social behaviour are increasingly believed to have partially biological origins, possibly hereditary ones.
That means that humans are not tabula rasa as the behaviourists believed. What goes on in our brains is not a simple function of external stimula.
Now, that does not mean it isn't possible to understand these parts of the brain and program computers to emulate them effectively, but if we do so, we are emulating a human, not creating a truly new machine intelligence.
I can easily imagine a machine pretending to be human wanting to become fully human. Such a machine would likely have emotional states, since we are unlikely to be able to separate these genuinely human conditions from an abstract intelligence. We don't even have a good definition of intelligence, and even if we fully understood the biology and functioning of the brain, we are unlikely to be able to discuss intelligence apart from it's structural framework.
An AI that thinks like a human is likely to want the range of experience and the level of autonomy that humans enjoy. It's not implausible that it would want to be seen and treated as an equal to humans. It is conceivable that it would view itself as superior, but I find it hard to believe that any probable AI would wish to reject the ensemble of human experience in the way you suggest.
I think Asimov would have liked it. The film covers the kinds of issues that Asimov brought forward in his robot stories, although there are a few big gaps in the story. For example, what happened to the three laws of robotics? Did Andrew just outgrow them or what?
Still, the film is basically sound. The science is, as always with film, its weakest point. There will not be household robots to do your cooking and cleaning by 2005, but what the hell, this is fiction.
"Robert Burns N6 and ZC series robots and Harley Davidson Paraphenalia" The sign on the shop in San Francisco is the best sight gag in the film.
This is a safe movie - it won't challenge any of your beliefs and it's quite safe to bring children to. The references to sex are few and very tame - there's no real bad language. The view of the future is presented very simply and without real change to society except that neckties look even stupider.
Whatever special effects crew did the robot effects - the masks and/or CGI - deserves an Oscar. It's amazing to see a bulky metal robot that is still clearly and obviously played by Robin Williams, not by some animatronics master or a computer program.
I am unaware of any current law or proposed law forbidding anonymity on the Internet. Their case seems largely built on an obviously unconstitutional (and technologically illiterate) law in Georgia which was immediately struck down by courts, an article in Communication Daily about some cops' wish list for the 'Net and by a quote, taken heavily out of context, from a justice department official.
/. handle. Most cops also want the Miranda decision overturned, and probably would mind some weaker protections regarding the rights of prisoners, probationers and juveniles - that doesn't mean it's going to happen.
(BTW, here is the quote in it's entirety. I found it in the endnotes:
"I think we are perilously close to a lose-lose situation in which citizens have lost their privacy to commercial interests and criminals have easy access to absolute anonymity." -- Justice Dept prosecutor Phillip Reitinger
This is hardly the statist plea to end anonymity that the author makes it out to be - the concern is legitimate. Reitinger is lamenting the loss of anonymity as much as deploring its drawbacks.)
I have difficulty seeing what kind of law could ban anonymity. As the author points out, "Laws requiring the disclosure of identity in cyberspace would require far-reaching changes in Internet technology." The current political climate makes that unlikely, nor are the courts in the US likely to put up with it.
Conceivably, a law could ban IP spoofing (probably not a bad idea) and anonymous remailers (probably a bad idea, but not the end of the world.) The people who would most suffer would not be those with controvertial ideas to disseminate.
Yes, police tend to be paranoid about anything they can't control and some cops have stupid ideas about how the 'Net ought to work, but that doesn't mean the government is about to come swoop down and take away your
This is like the constant rumours that the FCC wants to regulate the Internet - juicy right-wing government conspiracy theories.
ISP's don't let you sign up anonymously for accounts - not if they want to get paid - and if police trace you back to your ISP they will bend over backwards to tell the cops who you are. ISP's have an interest in rooting out spam, and often try to trace anonymous messages back to their source. If you have lost your anonymity on the 'Net these days, it's not the government that did it to you.
I would think the Cato Institute would fight to the death for companies' freedom to deprive you of anonymity. Perhaps the Cato Institute is taking the distinctly anti-libertarian stance that ISP's should be required to provide you with anonymity, or perhaps they are trying to defend the right of spammers to use communication lines without permission of the owners.
Don';t let this strawman argument get you riled up against a problem that doesn't really exist.
There are already taxes on e-commerce, so I'm not quite sure what they mean. If you buy a book from Chapters.ca, you have to pay GST like everyone else. If you order from Amazon.com, you can evade state sales taxes, but if you get it shipped to another country, you may have to pay duties (although I think most industrialised countries have eliminated tariffs on printed material.) Certainly other kinds of e-commerce have to live with national taxes or pay duties if they apply to the product they are selling.
There are no special taxes on services sold over the web, and software sold over the web is in a sort of limbo where there is no clear avenue to charge duties across borders.
I suspect the WTO is simply postponing working out exactly what regimes of taxation should and should work over the web between countries. This is as much a bad thing as a good one - it is no guarantee of a tax free nirvana online.
The WTO encourages free trade after a fashion by providing a mechanism for determining what kinds of laws and taxes are fair for international commerce and which ones aren't. The only power of enforcement they have available is that they can sanction tariffs against offending countries if the country doesn't agree to change its laws.
The WTO can't just amend national laws. Any country can pass any law they like, as long as they are willing to pay the price.
My problem is not with the idea of a global tribunal of that type, nor with the idea of free trade, nor even with the very limited enforcement mechanism available to them. However, what I consider fair rules and free trade differs substantially from what the WTO thinks, and there is no mechanism whereby I can influence WTO policy in that regard. That is what is truely wrong with the WTO.
Miller didn't write a lot of SF - few people have read any of his stories, other than CFL, but that book bought him his well-deserved place in the pantheon of anglophone SF.
I graded some student papers on CFL some years ago, and there was a surprising array of conclusions about the book's message. Some saw it as straight SF about the consequences of nuclear war, a few seeing strong anti-nuclear messages in it. Others saw it as an anti-clerical novel, like the work of Victor Hugo. Some saw the reaffirmation of Clarke's maxim that any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, especially in the second part.
One thought the book was about the unnaturalness of modern society, suggesting that without constant efforts, man would naturally return to a feudal lifestyle. He made his point well, carefully avoiding the suggestion that Miller was a closet Luddite.
Another saw the preservation of knowledge as a key theme. He thought Miller was saying that preservation of knowledge is a holy calling, a cause requiring a kind of missionary devotion.
Many students found CFL a counsel of despair, suggesting that nuclear war is inevitable and that it would destroy our civilisation. Most caught on to the theme of despair in the last section, suggesting that man could never learn from history.
A few thought the last section had a theme of hope, that man could ultimately escape his own destructiveness, either by starting over elsewhere or by submission to God.
This is a complex novel, rich in subtle meaning and interpretation and full of diverse themes, told through a relatively small cast of characters. One of the most powerful things I brought out of it was new perspective on medaeval European history. Seeing how the people in CFL reinterpreted my civilisation made me think about how feudal Europe reinterpreted the Roman Empire.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a powerful book, more than worth reading and timeless in a way that very little SF is. Stay away from the so-called sequel though, it will only diminish the first book.
It doesn't surprise me that an information system the size of the Internet would have some unpredicted emergent properties. Stanislaw Lem, in his Summa Technologiae in 1962, predicted that biology would be the main source of engineering inspiration in the 21st century, and clearly this is coming true.
However, don't mistake a metaphor for a truth. They do not propose any kind of unified framework for analysing the 'Net, nor can they. They are simply looking to biology to inspire analytical methods.
Examining usage logs of 120,000 sites, Huberman and Adamic discovered that the distribution of visitors follows a universal power law -- better known as winner-takes-all. This is a world as viciously inequitable as the real one; the most popular 5% of websites get the lion's share -- 75% -- of all Internet traffic.
They missed an important implication of the power law. Increasingly, we should see metasearch systems parasitising the most commonly viewed sites - so long as IP law doesn't prevent it.
I'd like to see some useful predictions come out of there analysis, but I don't see any.
I'm not convinced that disk space restrictions are the major cause of the Darwinian distribution of file lifespans, as the article asserts in the second last paragraph.
Their discussion of an immune system for the web seems pretty speculative, and as they point out elsewhere in the article, monoculture systems are not sufficiently robust. A monoculture immune apparatus (as they propose) probably wouldn't be adequate either.
The point about monoculture is the best one they make. Melissa would have been impossible to propagate, or at least much less damaging, if Windows wasn't so widespread. You would think we had learned this lesson during the Internet Worm fiasco back in the late 80's.
Bail on the word "e-cology." Lem would probably call it "webological analysis", but I think something more greco-latin is in order. Gnostography maybe? Araneastics? Cognostofluxology?
No, there's only one non-metric nation left. IIRC, Brunei Darussalam went metric a few years ago.
The other country that failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child is Somalia, which has no effective government at this time. Somalia has been metric at least since the Marxist coup in '74.
Alas, the website has been /.'ed, so I can't look at the translator, but there are some serious questions to ask.
1 - testing: They claim to be the most accurate of the web-based translators. Based on what corpus and measured in what way? This isn't a trivial question, there are no benchmarks for translation programmes.
2 - parsing. If this program uses American style phrase grammar, it will inevitably break down. Phrase grammar is counterintuitive and for AI purposes pretty unproductive. It is computationally simple - see Charniak's last book for good parsing algorithms - but almost certainly isn't the way humans process language.
All of the most successful natural language translation systems are, in one way or another, dependency grammar based. Dependency based systems are also generally more portable to other languages.
3 - morphology. English is very morphology poor. If morphology is only minimally accounted for (as a lot of poorly thought out, English based NLP systems are), I don't see how it can hope to work in Russian, or Turkish or dozens of other major languages with rich morphology. Furthermore, what kinds of morphological rules can it accept? There are languages that use prefix, postfix and infix morphology. The kinds of simple rules that can account for English will not go vert far with other languages.
I haven't seen this program, and I don't know how seriously these issues have been considered, but they are the kinds of things to keep in mind when looking at machine translation programs.
The Chicago school has little in common with, for example, the religious right, so I guess one could call them liberal after a fashion. Adding "classical" to it gives them an edge I'm unwilling to conceed - the Chicagoists aren't the free traders of classical liberalism any more than the Austrians are. Times change, and few schools of thought survive the centuries intact.
:^) Today, most of his ideology is mainstream in US government (which only goes to show that it's probably wrong) so I feel justified calling him a conservative.
Once upon a time, conservatives represented the power of landed aristocrats against the industrial aristocrats and the bourgoisie. Nowadays, not even the most conservaive politicians represent the landlords above the factory owners. Once upon a time (within living memory for some people) environmentalism was viewed as a conservative issue. Now it's almost exclusively a leftist one.
My point is times change, and conservative is relative to local values. Twenty years ago, I would have called Posner a radical capitalist and on a pithy day a nihilist.
The adminstrative costs of Chile's system are almost 30%, and payouts are still lower than in the early 70's - I'm not all sure they see a better return. Furthermore, you have to contribute a minimum amount to qualify for the minimum pension - many poorer workers are unable to do so. It was very damaging to those near retirement when it was put in place - they saw their returns cut dramatically by government fiat.
Note that military pensions are not invested in this scheme.
Actually, I was thinking more of the brutal suppression of the unions, who would never have stood for Pinochet's social security plan in a democracy. Friedman never hesitated to work for a dictator easily more brutal than many in the communist world. Chile's SS plan was imposed under the dictatorship, and satisfaction is not very high.
At any rate, I'm not a religious Keynsian - although as far as I can tell the Chicago school, like Marxism, is long on promises but had been a disaster in implementation. Chile took nearly twenty years to return to it's 1971 standard of living, and elsewhere Chicago-style reforms have proven even more disasterous. Government intervention in the economy has still done vastly more for the developing world than laissez-faire.
Keynes gets a lot of points for working out a system that actually worked at least some of the time. I know of no economist with comparable accomplishments.
I'm not a fan of the Chicago school of economics (after Milton Friedman helped the Chilean dictatorship screw its workers I'm certainly not a fan of its biggest proponents), but Posner is definitely the most qualified person Judge Jackson could have chosen.
Posner is most likely to understand what is in the findings of fact and knows that a slap-on-the-hands consent order is not going to be good enough, regardless of his ideology. Because he is well-known as a conservative judge, the libertarian fringe in the business community is unlikely to be able to claim big government is unjustly interfering with Microsoft.
This guy has it together enough to help punish Microsoft, and has a reputation that makes him unimpeachable if and when he does. This is one of those "only Nixon could have gone to China" cases where, despite being an unrepentant liberal and a soft Keynesian, I agree that the conservative is the right choice.
Microsoft has to be scared. They have no way of knowing what kind of punishment the court will mete out. The Justice Department has the same problem, but has political problems on top of that - 2000 is an election year and no one wants to make potential big business campaign contributors unhappy. Both have a vested interest in negociating something. In arbitration, they have some control over the outcome - in a court, no one knows.
Of course, both sides are still far apart on what ought to be done. Microsoft is adamant that they should be able to put anything they want in Windows, and that they won't permit disclosure of the source in any way. It's hard to see what the DOJ could ask for outside of such solutions, except perhaps actually breaking up the company.
I agree with Dr Hawkins below - the odds of settlement have improved. How much depends on how scared Microsoft is. The DOJ can't back down now - if there is no settlement, they will let the cards fall where they may. Any politician who is going to be hosed by the Microsoft case already has been.
...but I expect to live to see 1-1-3111. :^)
As Woody Allen said, some people try to achieve immortality through their work, others through their children. I hope to achieve immortality by not dying.