The fact is the the western governments (mine included, I am British) do not like banning the sale of arms to these sort of countries as it damages our economies and may cost us jobs. According to some, the biggest threat to the US economy is that international drugs and arms dealers will switch from dollars to euros as their preferred brand of blood money.
so the US should, because otherwise US companies will loose. We have seen this with Iran and their nuclear power program. Because of stupid restrictions Pakistan and Russia now supply the Iranians. Yeah, we can only sell it to countries that aren't members of the non-proliferation treaty.
How can any company with a shred of ethics or morality excuse the sale of their filtering product? Yes, ethical companies would be making cigarettes or providing "security" service in Iraq.
1) China is one of the largest trading partners with Burma 2) Burma has lots of oil reserves, China does not. 3) China pwns the US economy.
Next time you see some proposed UN sanctions against Burma vetoed by China - you'll know why. And the US government will, at most, cry crocodile tears.
In every situation, he makes no decisions. He brings in an expert to do that. You want evil genius? Hired. But if said evil genius is not there speaking into his ear, when you talk to GW you get the ninth grader. And whipping out your secret decoder ring you get - Evil Genius |||| |||||| VVVV VVVVVV Dick Cheney
Isn't this going to actually make more work for the airlines, more delays because they have to wait for all the baggage so they can do LIFO loading?
And what's going to happen if you have a multi-leg flight with different carriers? Is the other carrier going to inconvenience itself to help this guy's money-making scheme?
Are they just making the rules up randomly or something? Pretty much. The idea is to make people feel safer because they are doing something. Or less safe, if some important unconstitutional legislation is up for a vote.
Now we get loud mouthed cellphone jabbers AND 13 yr old SMS kiddies beeping away during the entire duration of Sydney and LA... I can forsee 15 hrs of absolute murderous psychopatic bliss. Sydney to LA leaves you fit for a padded cell without regard for the yakking.
Think of that annoying little dog that keeps yapping all the time next door, especially on Sundays, and one day he gets hit by a car. Yes, it's tragic That might be considered a matter of opinion.
I guess I see my ideal Wikipedia as a complete collection. If someone writes a decent, complete article on something somewhat obscure, and it's deleted because it's not notable enough, that just doesn't make sense to me. I agree. The second main point about Wikipedia vs other encyclopedias (after it's incredible accessibility) is its breadth. What print encyclopedia is going to carry an article about some obscure '60s band's even more obscure third album? But there's times you run across a mention of stuff like that, and want to look it up without wading through ten thousand faux hits on Google.
I think I'd have a lot to add to Wikipedia, but I don't. Any time I have made any contribution, substantial or minor, someone else comes around and knocks it off. The feeling I've gotten is that people seem to 'own' pieces of territory in Wikipedia. Be it individual articles, or their interpretation, or something else. My contributions have no chance of surviving in the face of these Wiki die-hards. So what is the point? I'm a read-only user now. That pretty much describes me as well. I used to contribute quite regularly, but it got to the point where all the time I could afford to spend on it was spent reverting vandalism or people revising articles to suit their political, religious, or other kookish views. Or people who were just plain ignorant of the topic, and more interested in pontificating than learning.
Sorry, but even Slashdot is a better use of my time.
This of course raises the question of what kind of language the corpus is representative of, and what kind of language is is not representative of. The bodies of text we have for Old and Middle English are far less representative than what we have for contemporary English Also, what survives of ME comes in a great and confusing variety of dialects that almost seem like different languages.
Explicitly German, from which English derived That's a misconception: they both evolved from a common ancestry.
It's kind of fun to see all the misconceptions these language articles bring out. (And refreshing, because for the most part they aren't politically motivated.) Language is one of the most familiar of all phenomena, but our intuitive understanding of it tends to be way out of whack with reality.
I'm going on another date with the most wonderful girl I could possibly imagine Is that an indication of the fine qualities of the girl, or the poor quality of your imagination?
All I'd like to know is how in the hell did Boston become Bawstan and Chowder become Chowda? And what's with the cities around Massachusetts, anyway? Worcester is pronounced Wusta... ?!?!? What's funny is that some dialects drop a terminal -r, whereas other ones add a spurious one.
I occasionally see algorithms used to predict future outcomes of a system where the algorithm appears to have been manipulated to fit the data rather than actually attempt to model the system in question. A prime example is one where the "novelty" of the universe is plotted over time and spikes appear in correlation with historic events. My question: Is there a specific term to describe this type of shenanigans? In the general case it should probably be considered a form of "overfitting", in the sense of what happens when you use a high-order polynomial to pass your plot through all your data points, rather than using a straight line or simple curve and allowing some of the data to scatter around it.
Of course, if you deliberately do it to misrepresent something, it can be called "lying" rather than "overfitting".
Rudolf Flesch wrote some books back in the '50's implying that the most modern language we have is...CHINESE! Since Chinese is a spoken language rather than a written language (The writing is mostly pictorial representing whole concepts), it wasn't frozen in place with a bunch of affixes (suffixes, prefixes, etc.) or genders and all that other stuff that makes English hard to learn. Subject, verb, predicate.. That's all there is? You can't regularize verbs better than that! It's a misconception to think that languages evolve toward regularity. There are processes working in both directions. Believe it or not there's an underlying regularity to English's "irregular" verbs - it's just obscured by several thousand years of evolution. (Read up on ablaut, though the Wiktionary article doesn't do the topic justice.)
Another example is that Modern English has a "weird" class of adjectives beginning in 'a' that don't be have like other adjectives: asleep awry alive, etc. -- there's a pile of them. I talked to a professor of linguistics, who had published a fairly well known textbook on syntax, and he seemed genuinely puzzled by them. But a basic familiarity with language change reveals that they are actually fossilized prepositional phrases. Cf. the line in A Clockwork Orange, "While you are on life" = "While you are alive". So what looks like an unmotivated class of irregular adjectives is actually just the evolutionary reflex of a very normal, regular syntactic structure.
To add to the confusion, we're now getting a similar class of irregular adverbs with the derivation from the article 'a' rather than an old preposition, "alot", "awhile", etc., which while denegrated as ignorant spelling are actually a clue to the writer's understanding of the language. In a hundred years (or is that "ahundred"?), people without knowledge of English's history will think we have a class of irregular adjectives *and* adverbs, blissfully unaware that they are just evolved forms of very regular structures.
Oh, and the properties of Chinese have nothing to do with writing or a lack thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember a news story from way back when I was a kid, of some group getting raided in the USSR for possessing an unregistered mimeograph machine.
As this and the current Burma censorware article show, nothing threatens the powerful like a free exchange of ideas.
2) Burma has lots of oil reserves, China does not. 3) China pwns the US economy. Next time you see some proposed UN sanctions against Burma vetoed by China - you'll know why. And the US government will, at most, cry crocodile tears.
Evil Genius
|||| ||||||
VVVV VVVVVV
Dick Cheney
Isn't this going to actually make more work for the airlines, more delays because they have to wait for all the baggage so they can do LIFO loading?
And what's going to happen if you have a multi-leg flight with different carriers? Is the other carrier going to inconvenience itself to help this guy's money-making scheme?
(Or was that the Star Trek Wars?)
Sorry, but even Slashdot is a better use of my time.
At first I read that as "Japanese moon probe snaps: first photos"
It's kind of fun to see all the misconceptions these language articles bring out. (And refreshing, because for the most part they aren't politically motivated.) Language is one of the most familiar of all phenomena, but our intuitive understanding of it tends to be way out of whack with reality.
Of course, if you deliberately do it to misrepresent something, it can be called "lying" rather than "overfitting".
Another example is that Modern English has a "weird" class of adjectives beginning in 'a' that don't be have like other adjectives: asleep awry alive, etc. -- there's a pile of them. I talked to a professor of linguistics, who had published a fairly well known textbook on syntax, and he seemed genuinely puzzled by them. But a basic familiarity with language change reveals that they are actually fossilized prepositional phrases. Cf. the line in A Clockwork Orange, "While you are on life" = "While you are alive". So what looks like an unmotivated class of irregular adjectives is actually just the evolutionary reflex of a very normal, regular syntactic structure.
To add to the confusion, we're now getting a similar class of irregular adverbs with the derivation from the article 'a' rather than an old preposition, "alot", "awhile", etc., which while denegrated as ignorant spelling are actually a clue to the writer's understanding of the language. In a hundred years (or is that "ahundred"?), people without knowledge of English's history will think we have a class of irregular adjectives *and* adverbs, blissfully unaware that they are just evolved forms of very regular structures.
Oh, and the properties of Chinese have nothing to do with writing or a lack thereof.