> And environmentalists hate nuclear power more than anything.
A recursive shibboleth! Seriously, if some environmentalists are clamoring about fission, couldn't we just attempt to reassure those ones instead of stereotyping all of them?
Maybe it's just personal bias then. To me, Shakespeare seems to be closer to Am. English than ebonics, but you won't catch me claiming to have done any studies.
Mostly I just wanted to suggest that there is room for both sensibilities - without some level of adherence, you have Babel. With total adherence, you have stagnation at local optima. Maintaining the effectiveness of communication under changing conditions is a bland way of saying that language evolves toward global optima. Misuse is as important as consistency in the continued success of language as a communications medium; I suspect that broadly painting misuse as lazy and adherence as stubborn righteousness are both cases of misattribution of a certain degree.
>... ebonics... > That idea was as short lived as it was stupid.
Whether or not it should be taught in schools is a separate issue from whether or not it is its own language.
Without prior exposure, "ebonics" is difficult to understand by American English speakers - the vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar are markedly different. This is the case with Bavarian dialects and Chinese dialects, for example. Some in the know even consider those differences severe enough to count those dialects as distinct languages. It really depends on what rules you use to define the boundaries - you might not count dialects that result from socioeconomic factors as opposed to those that result from geographical separation. In that case ebonics wouldn't count as a language... but the rules of classification are hardly etched in stone.
Yeah, but isn't the point that Shakespearean English is not incomprehensible to American English speakers? Middle English a la Chaucer dates back more than 400 years, so that's not really an ideal example.
That being said, the original point isn't worthless - breaking rules is a part of how languages adapt, and the speed of these changes is not linear over all time, as Twirlip seemed to be implying. Laziness, for example, injects variablity into the "gene pool" of languages. If the goal is really precision in communication, and the evolution of languages is the heuristic by which we arrive at that global optimum of effective communication, then some level of random variability (from laziness, creativity, laws, war, whatever) is essential to limiting stagnation at partial solutions. I guess it's a self-fulfilling system, on one hand, but on the other hand, that seems to be part of the nature of evolving systems, including languages.
> I cannot bear the idea that someone might be working with me as a peer, or even > a superior, who truly does not know the difference between 'there' and 'there'
I can't say that I know the difference.:) Sorry, I could't resist.
I just got sick of seeing myself in the nazis here - snarling about something while making my own mistakes. I can forgive someone for not also being a grammar pedant. Wouldn't you say that in the scheme of things, grammar isn't high on the list of life priorities for 99% of people? Most people make up for it by being brilliant or effective in some other way, and there are plenty of grammar nazis who are woefully deficient in some other area. E.g. on slashdot there is no shortage of those with impeccable grammar and no apparent grasp of logic (present company excluded!).
I can sympathize with the sentiment of the article, in that it's annoying when you put effort into being precise for the sake of good business while your comrades are using words like "rediculous" and mixing up your & you're, its and it's, etc... to say nothing of malapropisms.
However, I've eased off on the grammar nazi thing as I've gotten older. I mean, if the goal is to get people on board with the art of literary and verbal precision, ridicule and swearing is not going to get you there in most circumstances. Of course, I got that idea from watching that ESP/electric shock scene in the original Ghostbusters, so I could be wrong.
> No, but it will be in most of the replies to this article.
Ah - you're preemptively replying to some presumed response. That had me a little confused, since your parent post is the actual story.
> You just took two unrelated things I said and strung them together.
That wasn't my intent. Maybe I read you too literally - i.e. the findings are that humanity is in danger, which I find, well, remarkable. Your point said another way: the findings aren't groundbreaking or new.
> And frankly, we can do this without ratifying Kyoto in its current state, > with no timetables or hard deadlines for compliance of developing nations, > that might harm our economy.
Really? How are we going about this? My impression is that there is no initiative (at least, with any prognosis of efficacy), in the market or in government, to migrate from a fossil fuel economy - it seems more like wait-and-see, at least in the US. Like I said, I can't really speak for the Chinese or the Indians because I'm from the States.
> Soon, it will be China and India that you're pointing fingers at, and not the US > (or Europe).[1]
The US isn't being unfairly singled out in any of the articles posted.
> There's nothing "remarkable" about these so-called findings.... > what's in danger is Earth's inhabitants.
What is unremarkable about that?
The idea that China and India (and other major greenhouse contributors) should be brought to task is fine. As a US citizen, however, I am primarily concerned with what my country can do to help, not in deflecting blame. Surely, we would be in a better position to apply pressure to other countries in this regard, were we at the forefront of C02 emmissions reduction?
I appreciate your position, and I think you are right to contribute to them if they represent your version of what's decent, but your post made me think about a similar feeling I get when I see shows like Seventh Heaven billing itself as "family-oriented." While it's ostensibly about a family, that family is primarily a vehicle for a broad range of Christian mores well beyond the family-specific ones. Seventh Heaven's makers are selling their particular brand of family values as a subset of Christian values.
The misadventures of a family is a formula used by countless of successful TV shows. That's why it's set in a household and not in a seminary. Should I lobby to get them off the air because they are cleverly packaging a larger value system in a marketable format?
Nah. I have no problem with the existence of Seventh Heaven, though I don't make it a habit of watching it regularly. Government censoring doesn't seem fair, despite the fact that, to me, the content of that show is often... well, dreck. But if it works for someone else, I'm not out to get it ripped of the air, nor would I suggest that my sesibilities be imposed on everyone else in the form of a pervasive rating system. I expect the same treatment.
I think a hint to living with on-air indecency is that how a show bills itself can always be viewed with skepticism and subsequently verified. There will never really be a guarantee of truth in advertising, whether it's the show's producers or its detractors. What happens if it's all crap? Those people with the "Kill Your TV" bumper stickers seem to be relishing their haughtiness. Maybe feeling superior is an adequate substitute for that warm happy feeling TV gives me. Who knows?
In that case, (honest question) wouldn't it make more sense to contact the fraud dept. of CC and let them take care of steps to prosecution? Or are they equally unresponsive?
Party after you have the job, and don't put "drinking" as a hobby in your CV and you should be all set.
Seriously, work on getting published or getting industry experience on the side, and start now. Working for free sucks, but in your case it's an investment that will pay off.
Maybe it's because slashdot is US-centric, in the US, US transportation is dominated by automobiles, and therefore the metaphor is more widely understood.
I did indeed, but I have to admit that I didn't drill down into the poll trends by issue. Is there anything out there that indicates that the Kerry dip is directly attributable to CBS?
> You wonder why people are uncivil to you on the internet?
No, I think it's because people have trouble dealing with such a medium in a civil way.
> What kind of civil reply do you expect to get to your nonsense post?
One like yours, for example. You're not being very condescending, you're not threatening violence, you're not deliberately obfuscating or toying with words, and you're speaking your mind. By contrast, if you lurk on contemporary political blogs, you see all sorts of abusive behavior. It's that abuse which incites more abuse, and blocks any chance for real discussion. I happen to think real give-and-take discussion and compromise are nice, fair ways to work out complex shared problems, but that's just one dude's opinion.
> In a real world face-to-face situation, people will usually walk away from > nonsense generators, while on the internet they don't.
Maybe. But then the question is WHY are people more reactionary online when compared to real life, and can that change?
It's useful right now - look at how conservative bloggers were able to take down CBS news. No matter what you may think of the story, there's no question the memos were forged, and ineptly at that. This story would not have broken without the bloggers.
Really? That debacle didn't strike me as particularly useful for anyone; except, maybe, typesetting enthusiasts.:)
Democratic Underground is much smaller and ironically has much less tolerance of opposing views than Free Republic.
I don't see that as ironic - my original point was that as breadth of readership grows, a space for civil discourse tends to emerge amid the flame wars.
A major reason for the emergence of liberal and conservative enclaves is that liberals and conservatives are pretty darn nasty when put in the same web site together, and as a result very little productive discussion actually occurs. This is unfortunate but true.
Clearly, this is often the case that disparate opinions breed nastiness, but in the end, don't the flame warriors all share the same country, problems, and successes? Surely, civil discourse is not a pipe dream. Maybe I'm just being naively optimistic, as suggested.
Regarding your opinion-based down-mods - I can't really answer for the/. collective liberal mind, if such a beast exists, but I could friend you and counter-mod. Poor moderators do surely suck.
> Would be interesting to see how this War Room will affect the election. Will > this tactic be successful or will it be information overload?
For the blogosphere to be anything but a wash, civility needs to evolve to enable people with conflicting ideas to actually talk and listen to each other.
Most mainstream political blogs are echo chamber fraternities for like-minded people to impishly vent about the "loonies" on the other side. For all of the stuff being written, there is very little over-the-center discourse. There is, however, lots of censorship, ill-will for stray visitors from the "other side", and groupthink.
Give it a few years - as more people arrive on the scene, a basic sense of civic decency might emerge and make blogging a useful tool for actual debate, instead of a big petri dish for idealistic bigotry.
Slashdot Mirror
> And environmentalists hate nuclear power more than anything.
A recursive shibboleth! Seriously, if some environmentalists are clamoring about fission, couldn't we just attempt to reassure those ones instead of stereotyping all of them?
Burger King Grunt: We've got a bunch of new applications from some former AOL employees.
Burger King Manager: Which ones?
Burger King Grunt: [pointing out window] All of them!
Maybe it's just personal bias then. To me, Shakespeare seems to be closer to Am. English than ebonics, but you won't catch me claiming to have done any studies.
Mostly I just wanted to suggest that there is room for both sensibilities - without some level of adherence, you have Babel. With total adherence, you have stagnation at local optima. Maintaining the effectiveness of communication under changing conditions is a bland way of saying that language evolves toward global optima. Misuse is as important as consistency in the continued success of language as a communications medium; I suspect that broadly painting misuse as lazy and adherence as stubborn righteousness are both cases of misattribution of a certain degree.
> ... ebonics...
> That idea was as short lived as it was stupid.
Whether or not it should be taught in schools is a separate issue from whether or not it is its own language.
Without prior exposure, "ebonics" is difficult to understand by American English speakers - the vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar are markedly different. This is the case with Bavarian dialects and Chinese dialects, for example. Some in the know even consider those differences severe enough to count those dialects as distinct languages. It really depends on what rules you use to define the boundaries - you might not count dialects that result from socioeconomic factors as opposed to those that result from geographical separation. In that case ebonics wouldn't count as a language... but the rules of classification are hardly etched in stone.
Yeah, but isn't the point that Shakespearean English is not incomprehensible to American English speakers? Middle English a la Chaucer dates back more than 400 years, so that's not really an ideal example.
That being said, the original point isn't worthless - breaking rules is a part of how languages adapt, and the speed of these changes is not linear over all time, as Twirlip seemed to be implying. Laziness, for example, injects variablity into the "gene pool" of languages. If the goal is really precision in communication, and the evolution of languages is the heuristic by which we arrive at that global optimum of effective communication, then some level of random variability (from laziness, creativity, laws, war, whatever) is essential to limiting stagnation at partial solutions. I guess it's a self-fulfilling system, on one hand, but on the other hand, that seems to be part of the nature of evolving systems, including languages.
Let's coin it: how about "The Avoidance Principle of Collision"
> I cannot bear the idea that someone might be working with me as a peer, or even
:) Sorry, I could't resist.
> a superior, who truly does not know the difference between 'there' and 'there'
I can't say that I know the difference.
I just got sick of seeing myself in the nazis here - snarling about something while making my own mistakes. I can forgive someone for not also being a grammar pedant. Wouldn't you say that in the scheme of things, grammar isn't high on the list of life priorities for 99% of people? Most people make up for it by being brilliant or effective in some other way, and there are plenty of grammar nazis who are woefully deficient in some other area. E.g. on slashdot there is no shortage of those with impeccable grammar and no apparent grasp of logic (present company excluded!).
I can sympathize with the sentiment of the article, in that it's annoying when you put effort into being precise for the sake of good business while your comrades are using words like "rediculous" and mixing up your & you're, its and it's, etc... to say nothing of malapropisms.
However, I've eased off on the grammar nazi thing as I've gotten older. I mean, if the goal is to get people on board with the art of literary and verbal precision, ridicule and swearing is not going to get you there in most circumstances. Of course, I got that idea from watching that ESP/electric shock scene in the original Ghostbusters, so I could be wrong.
> No, but it will be in most of the replies to this article.
Ah - you're preemptively replying to some presumed response. That had me a little confused, since your parent post is the actual story.
> You just took two unrelated things I said and strung them together.
That wasn't my intent. Maybe I read you too literally - i.e. the findings are that humanity is in danger, which I find, well, remarkable. Your point said another way: the findings aren't groundbreaking or new.
> And frankly, we can do this without ratifying Kyoto in its current state,
> with no timetables or hard deadlines for compliance of developing nations,
> that might harm our economy.
Really? How are we going about this? My impression is that there is no initiative (at least, with any prognosis of efficacy), in the market or in government, to migrate from a fossil fuel economy - it seems more like wait-and-see, at least in the US. Like I said, I can't really speak for the Chinese or the Indians because I'm from the States.
> Soon, it will be China and India that you're pointing fingers at, and not the US
...
> (or Europe).[1]
The US isn't being unfairly singled out in any of the articles posted.
> There's nothing "remarkable" about these so-called findings.
> what's in danger is Earth's inhabitants.
What is unremarkable about that?
The idea that China and India (and other major greenhouse contributors) should be brought to task is fine. As a US citizen, however, I am primarily concerned with what my country can do to help, not in deflecting blame. Surely, we would be in a better position to apply pressure to other countries in this regard, were we at the forefront of C02 emmissions reduction?
> "Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger."
;)
The sky is not falling yet
I appreciate your position, and I think you are right to contribute to them if they represent your version of what's decent, but your post made me think about a similar feeling I get when I see shows like Seventh Heaven billing itself as "family-oriented." While it's ostensibly about a family, that family is primarily a vehicle for a broad range of Christian mores well beyond the family-specific ones. Seventh Heaven's makers are selling their particular brand of family values as a subset of Christian values.
The misadventures of a family is a formula used by countless of successful TV shows. That's why it's set in a household and not in a seminary. Should I lobby to get them off the air because they are cleverly packaging a larger value system in a marketable format?
Nah. I have no problem with the existence of Seventh Heaven, though I don't make it a habit of watching it regularly. Government censoring doesn't seem fair, despite the fact that, to me, the content of that show is often... well, dreck. But if it works for someone else, I'm not out to get it ripped of the air, nor would I suggest that my sesibilities be imposed on everyone else in the form of a pervasive rating system. I expect the same treatment.
I think a hint to living with on-air indecency is that how a show bills itself can always be viewed with skepticism and subsequently verified. There will never really be a guarantee of truth in advertising, whether it's the show's producers or its detractors. What happens if it's all crap? Those people with the "Kill Your TV" bumper stickers seem to be relishing their haughtiness. Maybe feeling superior is an adequate substitute for that warm happy feeling TV gives me. Who knows?
You pay for that $50 "deductible" in other ways. Plus, any deterrence value the law had is gone if it's not enforced.
Never mind, just reread your post and realized why that was probably a dumb question :)
In that case, (honest question) wouldn't it make more sense to contact the fraud dept. of CC and let them take care of steps to prosecution? Or are they equally unresponsive?
From your blog:
> #
> Drunk
> 2004-11-14-02.26.29
>
> I am drunk
Party after you have the job, and don't put "drinking" as a hobby in your CV and you should be all set.
Seriously, work on getting published or getting industry experience on the side, and start now. Working for free sucks, but in your case it's an investment that will pay off.
Because cars are common complex machines that idiots can use? What else is used by regular people that is as complex?
Easy: the clitoris.
> Besides, it was simply an observation, I didn't expect to start a debate on it.
Oh now it's ON!
Maybe it's because slashdot is US-centric, in the US, US transportation is dominated by automobiles, and therefore the metaphor is more widely understood.
;)
Lugnut.
I wonderd if they have the skeleton of that little person they used in that automagic chess "machine?"
I did indeed, but I have to admit that I didn't drill down into the poll trends by issue. Is there anything out there that indicates that the Kerry dip is directly attributable to CBS?
> You wonder why people are uncivil to you on the internet?
No, I think it's because people have trouble dealing with such a medium in a civil way.
> What kind of civil reply do you expect to get to your nonsense post?
One like yours, for example. You're not being very condescending, you're not threatening violence, you're not deliberately obfuscating or toying with words, and you're speaking your mind. By contrast, if you lurk on contemporary political blogs, you see all sorts of abusive behavior. It's that abuse which incites more abuse, and blocks any chance for real discussion. I happen to think real give-and-take discussion and compromise are nice, fair ways to work out complex shared problems, but that's just one dude's opinion.
> In a real world face-to-face situation, people will usually walk away from
> nonsense generators, while on the internet they don't.
Maybe. But then the question is WHY are people more reactionary online when compared to real life, and can that change?
That's a good point overall, but this US pres. election will probably see relatively high turnout anyway, don't you think?
It's useful right now - look at how conservative bloggers were able to take down CBS news. No matter what you may think of the story, there's no question the memos were forged, and ineptly at that. This story would not have broken without the bloggers.
:)
/. collective liberal mind, if such a beast exists, but I could friend you and counter-mod. Poor moderators do surely suck.
Really? That debacle didn't strike me as particularly useful for anyone; except, maybe, typesetting enthusiasts.
Democratic Underground is much smaller and ironically has much less tolerance of opposing views than Free Republic.
I don't see that as ironic - my original point was that as breadth of readership grows, a space for civil discourse tends to emerge amid the flame wars.
A major reason for the emergence of liberal and conservative enclaves is that liberals and conservatives are pretty darn nasty when put in the same web site together, and as a result very little productive discussion actually occurs. This is unfortunate but true.
Clearly, this is often the case that disparate opinions breed nastiness, but in the end, don't the flame warriors all share the same country, problems, and successes? Surely, civil discourse is not a pipe dream. Maybe I'm just being naively optimistic, as suggested.
Regarding your opinion-based down-mods - I can't really answer for the
> Would be interesting to see how this War Room will affect the election. Will
> this tactic be successful or will it be information overload?
For the blogosphere to be anything but a wash, civility needs to evolve to enable people with conflicting ideas to actually talk and listen to each other.
Most mainstream political blogs are echo chamber fraternities for like-minded people to impishly vent about the "loonies" on the other side. For all of the stuff being written, there is very little over-the-center discourse. There is, however, lots of censorship, ill-will for stray visitors from the "other side", and groupthink.
Give it a few years - as more people arrive on the scene, a basic sense of civic decency might emerge and make blogging a useful tool for actual debate, instead of a big petri dish for idealistic bigotry.