If it's a Bayer sensor, you do get more detail from making the sensor resolution finer than the lens resolution, because you capture more color information and can use a weaker anti-aliasing filter. See my post here.
I think this merits explanation in a bit more length.
Nearly all digital cameras have Bayer array sensors, where each photosite only records the value for one of the three RGB color channels. A 12MP Bayer array camera produces full-color images with 12 million RGB pixels, but that overstates the amount of information that the sensor captures by 3x; for each pixel in the resulting image, only one of the three channel's value was actually directly recorded from the scene, and the other two channels' values were interpolated from the values of adjacent pixels that recorded the missing channels.
Or, the quick way to put it, a 12 megapixels Bayer array camera is really 6 green megapixels, 3 red and 3 blue. This has several consequences:
The sensor is susceptible to color moiré artifacts at its resolution limit. To avoid those artifacts, typically there is an optical anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor that blurs the image a little bit, so that some of the light that would have fallen on only one photosite is spread to hit adjacent ones. This comes at a resolution cost.
The effective resolution that you can get varies with the color of the subject. There's a good discussion of this effect at this page. But basically, if you're photographing a strong red or blue subject, your 12MP camera is closer to a 3MP camera.
These two things mean that you can get resolution improvements from putting more photosites on a Bayer sensor, even if the size of the individual pixels is smaller than the circle of confusion of the lens.
Imagine if the length of the side of the photosite coincided exactly with the diameter of circle of confusion. This means that a point on the subject that aligns perfectly with the center of a photosite is going to project entirely inside that photosite. Now assume that point of light is pure red. If the photosite is a red-sensitive one, the sensor then records the fact that the point has a strong red component, but it can't tell if it has a green or blue component. If the photosite is green-sensitive, then the sensor records the fact that the point has no green component, but it can't tell whether it has a red or blue component.
Now, however, imagine that the photosite is smaller than the circle of confusion. Then some of the light is spilling over to adjacent photosites--which means that you record a value for all three color channels for that point on the subject. This makes it easier to infer the values of the missing channels at the pixel that corresponds to that photosite, because the adjacent photosites will have recorded it.
So, making the pixels smaller beyond the lens' diffraction limit lets you (a) use a weaker anti-alias filter on the sensor (or none at all); (b) gives you more consistent resolution for subjects of different colors. If you go all the way, you'd make your sensor have 4x the amount of photosites as the number of pixels in the output images: e.g., you'd build a camera with a 60MP Bayer-array sensor but output 15MP images, using 4 photosites per output pixel (and no antialias filter). That would outperform today's 15MP cameras.
I'm just curious what this would be like in low light settings, cramming that many pixels into such a small space has got to have some effect on sensitivity.
The effect of more pixels has led to a myth that more pixels = more noise. But this is not really the case. The low-light performance of a camera sensor really comes down to two things:
The size of the sensor. Larger sensor = more light = more signal = higher SNR.
The efficiency of the sensor--how good it is at extracting signal out of the light that hits it, and how "quiet" its own electronics are.
For a fixed sensor size and efficiency level, more pixels means that you get more noise per individual pixel--but the noise of adjacent pixels cancels out when you scale the image down.
Remember that most sensors are Bayer array sensors, where each photosite records only one of the primary RGB colors, and the value for the other two channels must be interpolated from adjacent photosites. This means that even if an in-focus point on the subject is projected to a disc that's larger than an individual photosite, the spillover into adjacent pixels actually contributes to resolution, because it gives you more information to use at the demosaicing stage.
Put 4 photosites (RGBG) inside each circle of confusion and you may have built yourself something comparable to a Foveon sensor.
The correct value of pi is the conclusion of a theorem. If you propose that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is exactly 3.14, we can use math to prove that you're wrong. We don't have any choice as to what the value is; if you assume the wrong value for pi and try to reason from that assumption, you're going to end up with contradictory conclusions.
UTC, on the other hand, is an arbitrary convention. Its inventors and adopters chose to keep it within one second of GMT by adding or subtracting leap seconds at the unpredictable times when it starts to diverge too much. They could have chosen not to care about it, and they could now choose to stop doing so. All that we're changing is the labels in the scale in the time axis.
To give an analogy, it's like deciding to write pi in binary from now forward instead of decimal: 11.001001000011111101101010100010001... It's the same number, but we've labeled it differently.
So is Louisiana Creole a perfectly acceptable way to speak French then?
Tautologically, if it weren't they wouldn't speak that way. Of course, those speaking other dialects of French may disagree.
Oh, fun, it's creolistics time now. Yeah, this is mostly nitpicking.
Louisiana Creole, at the basilectal level, is more similar to Haitian than to French, and is on these grounds considered a separate language--by linguists, but of course nobody ever listens to linguists. OTOH Louisiana Creole is more heavily decreolized than Haitian.
The language, however, exists in that typical creole social situation where the people in its community tend to define it negatively in relation to the lexifier--the creole is said to be a "badly spoken" version of the lexifier, except by a few mavericks who insist that it is an autonomous language--with political implications, usually. So creoles are, in practice, either considered as remarkably unacceptable ways of speaking their lexifiers, or as autonomous languages; a speech variety that's somewhere in between these situations would probably not get labeled as a "creole" in the first place.
If they don't speak the same language, they can't get a decent job. Then, they stay poor, and liberal whiners claim that these people are "underprivileged". Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. If you want to speak a different language from the de facto language of economy in your nation, then you can't complain when you don't get to take part in the economy and raise yourself out of poverty.
I have to refer you to this post I made a bit ago, and also to this one. Basically, your assumption that African-Americans don't speak the "same language" as the rest of the nation is an arbitrary rejection and stigmatization of a dialect that's really not very different from Standard English. The range of speech varieties that are "de facto" considered standard language is not a logically or linguistically preordained fact; it is pure social prejudice.
Spanish speakers, for example, routinely accept dialectal differences that are comparable to those between SAE and AAVE. The verbal tense-aspect systems of Spain and Latin America are different, yet in Spain they don't think that, say, García Márquez speaks and writes substandard Spanish because of it.
Well, part of the problem is that certain sub-dialects are intended to obfuscate the meaning. Cockney Rhyming Slang evolved to make it difficult to for police and those not "in the know" to understand what was being said.
This is a common mistake: you're confusing argot and dialect. People speak argots to obfuscate meaning to outsiders, as you say. That doesn't go for dialects, though--people speak dialects simply because that's the way their peers speak. Another way to put it: using weird made up words so outsiders don't understand you = argot; speaking with systematic Canadian raising = dialect.
It does happen often that some argots are tied narrowly to specific dialects, but they're strictly speaking separate things. Rhyming slang is very associated with Cockney dialect, but you can speak Cockney without using the rhyming slang, and you could use rhyming slang in Received Pronunciation.
After all, the only thing making SAE more useful is that AAVE is rejected.
Common languages promote efficiency, so the dominance of SAE in the United States is a good thing.
The problem with that claim is that it subtly begs the question. It assumes that AAVE just can't be part of the "common language" of the nation. The rejection of AAVE is already built into that assumption.
Wrong. I don't think many people are demanding that anyone learn SAE; they just don't want to hear any complaints when people who refuse to learn and speak SAE can't get a job, can't talk to anyone, etc.
The problem with this claim is that right here in the discussion for this Slashdot article you're going to find, far more often than what you're saying here, claims that people who speak AAVE do so out of willful ignorance and that use of AAVE automatically marks a person negatively. Those folks are, effectively, demanding that African-Americans speak SAE all the time, or else be judged negatively. There's precious little allowance for the idea that AAVE might be the appropriate speech variety in many contexts, or that maybe one ought to not make such a big fucking deal of the fact that a bunch of underprivileged people in this country speak a dialect different than yours.
So-called "Standard English" and AAVE are mutually comprehensible languages, and always have been.
Mutual comprehensibility actually means next to nothing. It's a traditional criterion for distinguishing "language" from "dialect," but it's one that's never worked that, for reasons I can never understand, they just keep teaching in Linguistics 101 to people who then never take any other linguistics courses that would set them straight.
The problems:
There are no firm criteria that allow you to decide that two people who speak different varieties are able to understand each other. Spanish and Portuguese speakers can often have non-trivial conversations with each other, if they do it slowly enough and are attentive to when the other one doesn't understand them. Does that make Spanish and Portuguese dialects of the same language?
Two people's ability to understand each other is often asymmetric. For example, Portuguese speakers have the easier time understanding Spanish speakers than vice-versa.
The supposed mutual intelligibility relationship is not transitive. It is common to find so-called "dialect continua," where you have three varieties A, B and C such that A and B are highly interintelligible, B and C are also so, yet A and C are not. The criterion doesn't let you decide what the language boundary should be in that case.
Mutual intelligibility isn't a fact about the languages, because languages don't understand languages; people understand people. Whether a speaker of language A understands a speaker of language B isn't a function solely of the languages, but also of many other personal and social factors. For example, how much experience the speaker of A has with B, and also the willingness to make an effort to understand. If you're never willing to understand the speakers of a minority speech variety because you look down on them, you're not going to come to understand it, even if it's very similar to your own language.
Another way of thinking about it: which is easier for your average Standard English speaker to understand: AAVE or a cell phone contract?
Not that I endorse the idea that AAVE is a "separate language" (I don't believe the claim is well-defined at all!), but a cell phone contract is difficult to understand mostly because of (a) unfamiliar technical vocabulary, (b) extremely complex structures where it's easy to misunderstand the relationship between the parts. In the case of AAVE, most of the vocab would be familiar to standard English speakers; what's likely to completely go over your head is the tense-aspect subtleties of the dialect. The verbs in the cell phone contract, on the other hand, will work like Standard English verbs do.
Marxists believe that the class struggle is the one truly important social struggle, and that struggles between nations are simply distractions from the class struggle. The proletariat of all of the world's nations should unite in the fight against capitalism. Nationalist warfare is just a way that the capitalist class pits worker against worker in order to advance their own interests.
That attitude toward national differences, however, can go in two directions: one that pushes for an end to national differences ("we should all speak the same language and have the same culture so that those things no longer divide us"), and one that respects them. Communist movements have tended to adopt the latter in theory, but often the first in practice.
Who says the must assimilate culturally or linguistically as well as economically/politically/etc? That sounds a lot like the mentality of Soviet Russia's and Communist China's cultural revolutions?
Um, actually, it doesn't. Communists did not in general believe that ethnic minorities had to be assimilated to the majority culture. Soviet Russia and China had political divisions based on ethnicity, to give ethnic minorities more local power.
In practice, though, Russians and Han have been colonialistic towards their ethnic minority nations, though. The case of China's eastern regions is a good example--Tibet is formally an autonomous region that exists in order to provide self-rule for an ethnic minority, but well, that's not the best description of what's really going on there.
Spanglish is not a distinct language; it's a bunch of diverse Spanish-English bilingualism phenomena, which apply to different groups of people.
But yes, conceivably one might need experts to understand the meaning of some evidence produced by Spanish-English bilinguals. But those would probably be experts on the speech of a specific Hispanic subgroup, so that the guy who can help you descipher a Newyorican who switches between Spanish and English would be of little help with Mexican-Americans who did the same.
Creole has not developed in the USA. It's based on french, which was the "official" language of the black slaves imported from the Antilles, and various african languages.
You're misunderstanding the technical sense of the term "creole," which does not refer exclusively to French-language creoles like Haitian; there's also English-based creoles like Jamaican, or Portuguese-based ones like Papiamentu or Cape Verdean.
The other mistake you're making is that there are creole languages that are indigenous to the USA: Louisiana Creole (which is distinct from Cajun French) and Gullah.
In New Orleans, the Cadiens (now written "Cajun") descend from displaced french canadians and also evolved a distinct accent of french in their new english-dominated residence.
...and mistake #3 is that Cajuns ain't from New Orleans. They're from further out west. The languages of New Orleans prior to the arrival of English were French and Louisiana Creole.
10 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. However, leetspeak has invented new words - perversions of standard english words in the same vein as ebonics - acronyms, and entire phrases to its vocabulary list.
The difference between a linguist and a layperson is that the layperson thinks a language is a bag of words, while the linguist thinks that a language is a system for assembling complex utterances from simpler parts.
How many words leetspeak has invented is completely irrelevant to whether it's a distinct language; the rules for putting those words into sentences are the same as they are in English in general. African American Vernacular English, on the other hand, has a grammar that, while mostly coinciding with Standard English, shows some remarkable differences. The most striking example is the tense and aspect system of AAVE, which has, for example, a grammaticalized habitual aspect that doesn't exist in the standard language (the be in He be workin' Tuesdays).
To use less linguistese, AAVE is a dialect with a different verbal conjugation system than Standard English, that can express distinctions that need circumlocutions in the standard. Leetspeak is just English written funny and with a bit of slang.
If by very little control, you mean oversubscribing the line by a factor of N, then okay, whatever.
The whole point of shared computer networks is to oversubscribe the shared lines so that intermittent users can get higher maximum bandwidth than they would otherwise for the same cost. I don't think that you have some revolutionary plan that would allow every node in the Internet to get a dedicated line connecting it to every other node and thus get a guaranteed 24/7 full bandwidth to any node you wanted at any time--and if you had that plan, well, for the same amount of investment we could build a network that delivered higher average bandwidth to all the users by sharing the lines when they were not using them.
Personally, I'd really like something like an iPad as a no-hassle travel accessory to my camera system, equipped with some sort of lightweight mobile version of Aperture or Lightroom. I'd plug my camera or memory cards into the machine, read in my RAWs, review and rate photos, do some elementary edits (white balance, cropping, rotation), and then at some point import my work into the real computer. I hate having to take my full-sized laptop with me on trips.
I know of photographers who are using the iPad as a portfolio demo book they carry with them, because the screen is so nice and the photo display application is so easy to use.
Seriously? Ever hear of Vienna (in Austria), one of the most important cities in European cultural history? Mozart? Strauss? Freud? Schrödinger? and many others.
Can you tell us your ulterior motive for leaving out Hitler, or do I have to manufacture one?
Actually, the purpose of the joke is to show that punctuation matters.
But what is the punctuation (allegedly) doing in that joke? Resolving three ambiguities that conspire to give the sentence two very different potential readings: two lexical ambiguities (the 3sg-present verb form shoots vs. the plural noun form shoots; similar for leaves), one syntactic (shoots and leaves as a coordinate noun phrase object of eats, vs. eats, shoots and leaves as a coordinate verb phrase consisting of three verb phrases, each headed by an unmodified intransitive verb).
So, basically, the point of the joke is that the rule matters because if you violate it, people will read the potentially ambiguous sentence as something dramatically different from what was meant (the panda shoots people!). The answer to that (other than to point out, as I've done, that people don't actually conclude that the comma means that the panda shoots people unless you guide them very carefully to that conclusion beforehand) is that potential ambiguity is commonplace in countless contexts that, by that criteria, would merit countless absurd usage prohibitions. Arnold Zwicky (very notable linguist) has an interesting blog post making this argument at more length, with other examples.
To the contrary, the punctuation helps impart and/or define the interpretation/meaning - that's its purpose. Perhaps there actually are gun-toting pandas - sharks have lasers, after all.
So, you're reading a wildlife manual, and you reach the section on pandas--an animal that you've heard of countless times before. The manual says: "The panda is a bear-like mammal that eats, shoots and leaves." Do you conclude:
That the panda is an animal that discharges firearms between its meals and departures.
That the panda is an animal whose diet consists of shoots and leaves.
No sane person concludes (1), because all their previous knowledge about pandas and mammals in general, and there is no contextual cancellation of any of that background knowledge. Yet what your "precision" riff amounts to is that, faced with that (admittedly misplaced) comma, one may reasonably disregard context and reasonably conclude (1). That's insane.
Granted, the prohibition against a comma in that sentence is reasonable. But the reason the prohibition is reasonable cannot be that the sentence with the extraneous comma is liable to be understood as (1), because it's not. But then what the panda joke is doing is stating an invalid argument with a true conclusion and trying to get the reader to apply that argument in other cases--where it will wrongly prohibit perfectly reasonable grammatical constructions on the basis of ambiguities or misunderstandings that nobody would make. Not good.
Because it says so in Grammar and Language Arts textbooks, which are the closest things to official that language has.
But (a) the Linguistics textbooks say otherwise, and (b) actually, many usage guides endorse countable less (check out, for example, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which is probably the best usage guide).
Many history textbooks have said that Colombus faced considerable resistance to his project because medieval Europeans thought the Earth was flat. Which is just false; the people who wrote those textbooks got the claim from fictional accounts of Colombus' life. Do you know who writes the textbooks that you'd cite as authorities, and do you know the actual extent of their knowledge of language? It's very lacking. The "rules" usually come about because some dude made up some bogus reason to reject some construction as "wrong" despite the fact that everybody's used it for hundreds of years, and then grammar nazis cite him and each other as an "authority."
The story of the supposed prohibition on possessive antecents is notable for being (a) recent (the rule was invented out of thin air in the 1960's), (b) especially absurd (both in the reasoning behind the rule, and in the broad range of English classics that it would render "wrong").
How you expect to communicate without following some sort of "rules someone made up" I don't know.
The same way you communicate all the time, by using rules that nobody made up. That's what language is.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's a Bayer sensor, you do get more detail from making the sensor resolution finer than the lens resolution, because you capture more color information and can use a weaker anti-aliasing filter. See my post here.
I think this merits explanation in a bit more length.
Nearly all digital cameras have Bayer array sensors, where each photosite only records the value for one of the three RGB color channels. A 12MP Bayer array camera produces full-color images with 12 million RGB pixels, but that overstates the amount of information that the sensor captures by 3x; for each pixel in the resulting image, only one of the three channel's value was actually directly recorded from the scene, and the other two channels' values were interpolated from the values of adjacent pixels that recorded the missing channels.
Or, the quick way to put it, a 12 megapixels Bayer array camera is really 6 green megapixels, 3 red and 3 blue. This has several consequences:
These two things mean that you can get resolution improvements from putting more photosites on a Bayer sensor, even if the size of the individual pixels is smaller than the circle of confusion of the lens.
Imagine if the length of the side of the photosite coincided exactly with the diameter of circle of confusion. This means that a point on the subject that aligns perfectly with the center of a photosite is going to project entirely inside that photosite. Now assume that point of light is pure red. If the photosite is a red-sensitive one, the sensor then records the fact that the point has a strong red component, but it can't tell if it has a green or blue component. If the photosite is green-sensitive, then the sensor records the fact that the point has no green component, but it can't tell whether it has a red or blue component.
Now, however, imagine that the photosite is smaller than the circle of confusion. Then some of the light is spilling over to adjacent photosites--which means that you record a value for all three color channels for that point on the subject. This makes it easier to infer the values of the missing channels at the pixel that corresponds to that photosite, because the adjacent photosites will have recorded it.
So, making the pixels smaller beyond the lens' diffraction limit lets you (a) use a weaker anti-alias filter on the sensor (or none at all); (b) gives you more consistent resolution for subjects of different colors. If you go all the way, you'd make your sensor have 4x the amount of photosites as the number of pixels in the output images: e.g., you'd build a camera with a 60MP Bayer-array sensor but output 15MP images, using 4 photosites per output pixel (and no antialias filter). That would outperform today's 15MP cameras.
The effect of more pixels has led to a myth that more pixels = more noise. But this is not really the case. The low-light performance of a camera sensor really comes down to two things:
For a fixed sensor size and efficiency level, more pixels means that you get more noise per individual pixel--but the noise of adjacent pixels cancels out when you scale the image down.
Remember that most sensors are Bayer array sensors, where each photosite records only one of the primary RGB colors, and the value for the other two channels must be interpolated from adjacent photosites. This means that even if an in-focus point on the subject is projected to a disc that's larger than an individual photosite, the spillover into adjacent pixels actually contributes to resolution, because it gives you more information to use at the demosaicing stage.
Put 4 photosites (RGBG) inside each circle of confusion and you may have built yourself something comparable to a Foveon sensor.
The correct value of pi is the conclusion of a theorem. If you propose that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is exactly 3.14, we can use math to prove that you're wrong. We don't have any choice as to what the value is; if you assume the wrong value for pi and try to reason from that assumption, you're going to end up with contradictory conclusions.
UTC, on the other hand, is an arbitrary convention. Its inventors and adopters chose to keep it within one second of GMT by adding or subtracting leap seconds at the unpredictable times when it starts to diverge too much. They could have chosen not to care about it, and they could now choose to stop doing so. All that we're changing is the labels in the scale in the time axis.
To give an analogy, it's like deciding to write pi in binary from now forward instead of decimal: 11.001001000011111101101010100010001... It's the same number, but we've labeled it differently.
Oh, fun, it's creolistics time now. Yeah, this is mostly nitpicking.
Louisiana Creole, at the basilectal level, is more similar to Haitian than to French, and is on these grounds considered a separate language--by linguists, but of course nobody ever listens to linguists. OTOH Louisiana Creole is more heavily decreolized than Haitian.
The language, however, exists in that typical creole social situation where the people in its community tend to define it negatively in relation to the lexifier--the creole is said to be a "badly spoken" version of the lexifier, except by a few mavericks who insist that it is an autonomous language--with political implications, usually. So creoles are, in practice, either considered as remarkably unacceptable ways of speaking their lexifiers, or as autonomous languages; a speech variety that's somewhere in between these situations would probably not get labeled as a "creole" in the first place.
I have to refer you to this post I made a bit ago, and also to this one. Basically, your assumption that African-Americans don't speak the "same language" as the rest of the nation is an arbitrary rejection and stigmatization of a dialect that's really not very different from Standard English. The range of speech varieties that are "de facto" considered standard language is not a logically or linguistically preordained fact; it is pure social prejudice.
Spanish speakers, for example, routinely accept dialectal differences that are comparable to those between SAE and AAVE. The verbal tense-aspect systems of Spain and Latin America are different, yet in Spain they don't think that, say, García Márquez speaks and writes substandard Spanish because of it.
This is a common mistake: you're confusing argot and dialect. People speak argots to obfuscate meaning to outsiders, as you say. That doesn't go for dialects, though--people speak dialects simply because that's the way their peers speak. Another way to put it: using weird made up words so outsiders don't understand you = argot; speaking with systematic Canadian raising = dialect.
It does happen often that some argots are tied narrowly to specific dialects, but they're strictly speaking separate things. Rhyming slang is very associated with Cockney dialect, but you can speak Cockney without using the rhyming slang, and you could use rhyming slang in Received Pronunciation.
The problem with that claim is that it subtly begs the question. It assumes that AAVE just can't be part of the "common language" of the nation. The rejection of AAVE is already built into that assumption.
The problem with this claim is that right here in the discussion for this Slashdot article you're going to find, far more often than what you're saying here, claims that people who speak AAVE do so out of willful ignorance and that use of AAVE automatically marks a person negatively. Those folks are, effectively, demanding that African-Americans speak SAE all the time, or else be judged negatively. There's precious little allowance for the idea that AAVE might be the appropriate speech variety in many contexts, or that maybe one ought to not make such a big fucking deal of the fact that a bunch of underprivileged people in this country speak a dialect different than yours.
Mutual comprehensibility actually means next to nothing. It's a traditional criterion for distinguishing "language" from "dialect," but it's one that's never worked that, for reasons I can never understand, they just keep teaching in Linguistics 101 to people who then never take any other linguistics courses that would set them straight.
The problems:
Not that I endorse the idea that AAVE is a "separate language" (I don't believe the claim is well-defined at all!), but a cell phone contract is difficult to understand mostly because of (a) unfamiliar technical vocabulary, (b) extremely complex structures where it's easy to misunderstand the relationship between the parts. In the case of AAVE, most of the vocab would be familiar to standard English speakers; what's likely to completely go over your head is the tense-aspect subtleties of the dialect. The verbs in the cell phone contract, on the other hand, will work like Standard English verbs do.
Marxists believe that the class struggle is the one truly important social struggle, and that struggles between nations are simply distractions from the class struggle. The proletariat of all of the world's nations should unite in the fight against capitalism. Nationalist warfare is just a way that the capitalist class pits worker against worker in order to advance their own interests.
That attitude toward national differences, however, can go in two directions: one that pushes for an end to national differences ("we should all speak the same language and have the same culture so that those things no longer divide us"), and one that respects them. Communist movements have tended to adopt the latter in theory, but often the first in practice.
Um, actually, it doesn't. Communists did not in general believe that ethnic minorities had to be assimilated to the majority culture. Soviet Russia and China had political divisions based on ethnicity, to give ethnic minorities more local power.
In practice, though, Russians and Han have been colonialistic towards their ethnic minority nations, though. The case of China's eastern regions is a good example--Tibet is formally an autonomous region that exists in order to provide self-rule for an ethnic minority, but well, that's not the best description of what's really going on there.
Spanglish is not a distinct language; it's a bunch of diverse Spanish-English bilingualism phenomena, which apply to different groups of people.
But yes, conceivably one might need experts to understand the meaning of some evidence produced by Spanish-English bilinguals. But those would probably be experts on the speech of a specific Hispanic subgroup, so that the guy who can help you descipher a Newyorican who switches between Spanish and English would be of little help with Mexican-Americans who did the same.
You're misunderstanding the technical sense of the term "creole," which does not refer exclusively to French-language creoles like Haitian; there's also English-based creoles like Jamaican, or Portuguese-based ones like Papiamentu or Cape Verdean.
The other mistake you're making is that there are creole languages that are indigenous to the USA: Louisiana Creole (which is distinct from Cajun French) and Gullah.
...and mistake #3 is that Cajuns ain't from New Orleans. They're from further out west. The languages of New Orleans prior to the arrival of English were French and Louisiana Creole.
The difference between a linguist and a layperson is that the layperson thinks a language is a bag of words, while the linguist thinks that a language is a system for assembling complex utterances from simpler parts.
How many words leetspeak has invented is completely irrelevant to whether it's a distinct language; the rules for putting those words into sentences are the same as they are in English in general. African American Vernacular English, on the other hand, has a grammar that, while mostly coinciding with Standard English, shows some remarkable differences. The most striking example is the tense and aspect system of AAVE, which has, for example, a grammaticalized habitual aspect that doesn't exist in the standard language (the be in He be workin' Tuesdays).
To use less linguistese, AAVE is a dialect with a different verbal conjugation system than Standard English, that can express distinctions that need circumlocutions in the standard. Leetspeak is just English written funny and with a bit of slang.
The whole point of shared computer networks is to oversubscribe the shared lines so that intermittent users can get higher maximum bandwidth than they would otherwise for the same cost. I don't think that you have some revolutionary plan that would allow every node in the Internet to get a dedicated line connecting it to every other node and thus get a guaranteed 24/7 full bandwidth to any node you wanted at any time--and if you had that plan, well, for the same amount of investment we could build a network that delivered higher average bandwidth to all the users by sharing the lines when they were not using them.
Personally, I'd really like something like an iPad as a no-hassle travel accessory to my camera system, equipped with some sort of lightweight mobile version of Aperture or Lightroom. I'd plug my camera or memory cards into the machine, read in my RAWs, review and rate photos, do some elementary edits (white balance, cropping, rotation), and then at some point import my work into the real computer. I hate having to take my full-sized laptop with me on trips.
I know of photographers who are using the iPad as a portfolio demo book they carry with them, because the screen is so nice and the photo display application is so easy to use.
I don't know, maybe because the netbook would be smaller and lighter?
And I think there was once a war fought over the death of a Crown Prince of Austria or something like that.
Can you tell us your ulterior motive for leaving out Hitler, or do I have to manufacture one?
But what is the punctuation (allegedly) doing in that joke? Resolving three ambiguities that conspire to give the sentence two very different potential readings: two lexical ambiguities (the 3sg-present verb form shoots vs. the plural noun form shoots; similar for leaves), one syntactic (shoots and leaves as a coordinate noun phrase object of eats, vs. eats, shoots and leaves as a coordinate verb phrase consisting of three verb phrases, each headed by an unmodified intransitive verb).
So, basically, the point of the joke is that the rule matters because if you violate it, people will read the potentially ambiguous sentence as something dramatically different from what was meant (the panda shoots people!). The answer to that (other than to point out, as I've done, that people don't actually conclude that the comma means that the panda shoots people unless you guide them very carefully to that conclusion beforehand) is that potential ambiguity is commonplace in countless contexts that, by that criteria, would merit countless absurd usage prohibitions. Arnold Zwicky (very notable linguist) has an interesting blog post making this argument at more length, with other examples.
So, you're reading a wildlife manual, and you reach the section on pandas--an animal that you've heard of countless times before. The manual says: "The panda is a bear-like mammal that eats, shoots and leaves." Do you conclude:
No sane person concludes (1), because all their previous knowledge about pandas and mammals in general, and there is no contextual cancellation of any of that background knowledge. Yet what your "precision" riff amounts to is that, faced with that (admittedly misplaced) comma, one may reasonably disregard context and reasonably conclude (1). That's insane.
Granted, the prohibition against a comma in that sentence is reasonable. But the reason the prohibition is reasonable cannot be that the sentence with the extraneous comma is liable to be understood as (1), because it's not. But then what the panda joke is doing is stating an invalid argument with a true conclusion and trying to get the reader to apply that argument in other cases--where it will wrongly prohibit perfectly reasonable grammatical constructions on the basis of ambiguities or misunderstandings that nobody would make. Not good.
But (a) the Linguistics textbooks say otherwise, and (b) actually, many usage guides endorse countable less (check out, for example, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which is probably the best usage guide).
Many history textbooks have said that Colombus faced considerable resistance to his project because medieval Europeans thought the Earth was flat. Which is just false; the people who wrote those textbooks got the claim from fictional accounts of Colombus' life. Do you know who writes the textbooks that you'd cite as authorities, and do you know the actual extent of their knowledge of language? It's very lacking. The "rules" usually come about because some dude made up some bogus reason to reject some construction as "wrong" despite the fact that everybody's used it for hundreds of years, and then grammar nazis cite him and each other as an "authority."
The story of the supposed prohibition on possessive antecents is notable for being (a) recent (the rule was invented out of thin air in the 1960's), (b) especially absurd (both in the reasoning behind the rule, and in the broad range of English classics that it would render "wrong").
The same way you communicate all the time, by using rules that nobody made up. That's what language is.
I believe I address your implicit argument in this post. But in short, no, the rules of English grammar weren't "made up" by anybody.