You're using the infinitive form of the verb, which means you really haven't defined a definite time for the statement.
Anybody who's studied linguistics can tell you that that statement is nonsense. The names of verb forms are not descriptions of what they are for. More generally, labels are not definitions, so you can't reason from the non-technical meaning of a technical label to its meaning (it's a fallacy of equivocation). More importantly, the forms of a morphological paradigm are normally multifunctional, so you can't talk of the "meaning" of a form of the verb in isolation from the specific constructions in which the form occurs.
"I be working" is ungrammatical to you because your variety of English has a rule that establishes an agreement between the verb and it subject (at least, in this tense). Some varieties of English--AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) in particular--do not have this rule.
No, this claim is wrong. AAVE does have subject-verb agreement in the present tense; for example, while He working is grammatical, *I working is not, and you must say I'm working or I am working. That's a grammar rule that restricts the admissible forms of the verb depending on the grammatical person of the subject--which is precisely what subject-verb agreement is.
No, it's because there aren't many security problems to solve at the IP layer or below.
Um, I don't how what you have in mind by "many," but the mutual authentication problems addressed by IPsec are pretty damn important.
You can't stop botnets or spam by putting security into the internet itself. Not without breaking what the internet *is*.
Haven't given much thought to botnets, but a big part of the spam problem is simply the fact that our email protocols are built so that the whole message contents are always immediately pushed to every recipient. An improvement on that would be a model where the sender can only push a notification, and must hold the content in an outbox server for the recipients to pull on demand.
The company is secretive about upcoming, not-yet-available products. Which is not information that customers require in their day-to-day work anyways. As a user or as a developer, it is information about the current, existing products that you need most. And as both I've always found that to be readily available whenever I needed it.
Frankly, no. The company is just very often secretive for no good reason. The unreleased products part isn't as clear-cut as you make it, because (a) Apple makes many products where the developer community could definitely benefit from a lot more information before the release, and (b) Apple does share such information with hand-picked outside developers before a release (folks from the companies that they bring into their announcement events, to advertise games under development for the iPhone and such).
Granted, the unreleased product examples aren't the best ones, because they're examples where you can easily argue either way. But there are other examples where Apple is excessively secretive about existing products for no good reason that I can discern. Here are two that I've personally encountered:
I bought an Apple Airport Extreme because Apple said that it would support their upcoming Time Machine feature with an external USB hard disk. In the end, it never did, which is really bad; but what's worse is that Apple simply dodged user questions about it for months.
Apple simply won't respond to questions from Aperture users about when (or whether) RAW support will be added for specific camera models.
Have you seen a professional photographer plying her trade with a pocket camera? Or even a low end DSLR? Nope, they all use heavy duty, full frame cameras that cost in the thousands, not including lenses.
I've heard of plenty of professional photographers who'd very much rather use a small, lightweight camera system that produces high-quality results. The problems they have are two:
A lot of customers won't take seriously a photographer who shows up with a small camera, or worse, they'll think they're getting ripped off.
There aren't really many good choices for such a camera so far. The two main contenders right now are either (a) Micro Four Thirds, which are very much low end, or (b) Leica, which are freaking expensive and lack a lot of functionality that many photographers would rather have. (Still, you do see a lot of full-frame DSLR owners buying into one of those systems.)
I guess the analogy here is that some people would very much rather have a Macbook Air than a Macbook Pro. (Or the time when I traded my work-issued MBP 17" for a 15" model, because I just felt that the 17" was too big and heavy.)
You can do pretty much what you want with a cheap camera or a cheap drill, but your life will be much easier with a professional tool. Because a professional tool will get out of your way and let you do your thing faster with a lot less headache and a lot more joy.
Not really true in the case of top-end DSLRs. An $6,000-$8,000 Canon 1D or Nikon D3 doesn't really have much more functionality than a $2,500-$3,000 Canon 5D or Nikon D700. They're mostly just a hell of a lot more rugged, and have longer battery life.
The majority of stock in a corporation like Google is held by mutual funds, who do not typically actively engage in corporate control. So 30% is more than 60% of the stock held by individuals, who are more likely to claim a voice in corporate governance.
This is probably true. However, it's worth pointing out that Google has a dual-share class structure, however, where most of the shares in the company are regular class A shares with one vote each, while the insiders have Class B shares with 10x the voting power of the regular shares. So you have to do the math a bit more carefully; how much of the profits of the company you own (your actual number of shares) isn't the same as what share of the vote you get (your proportion of A vs. B shares).
Larry and Sergey currently hold approximately 57.7 million shares of Class B common stock, which represents approximately 18% of Google's outstanding capital stock and approximately 59% of the voting power of Google's outstanding capital stock. Under the terms of these Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, and as a part of a five year diversification plan, Larry and Sergey each intend to sell approximately 5 million shares. If Larry and Sergey complete all the planned sales under these Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, they would continue to collectively own approximately 47.7 million shares, which would represent approximately 15% of Google's outstanding capital stock and approximately 48% of the voting power of Google's outstanding capital stock (assuming no other sales and conversions of Google capital stock occur).
So even today, L&S control Google despite only owning 18% of the company. Nice trick, huh.
I think that the premature optimization claims are way overdone. In the cases where performance does not matter, then sure, make the code as readable as possible and just accept the performance. However, sometimes it is known from the beginning of a project that performance is critical and that achieving that performance will be a challenge. In such cases, I think that it makes sense to design for performance.
Well, and then there's another approach, where you first write a fully-functional and readable implementation of the solution without regard to performance until you get it right, then rewrite the really critical parts from scratch to be a lot faster.
I've been involved with projects that went like this. Typically, the first stage is necessary because the task is very exploratory--e.g., write a fairly generic computation engine that processes user-defined formulas. The first pass is slow, but it serves to prove that you're on the right track, and then you rewrite it to be fast (typically by changing it from an interpreter-like design to a compiler-like one).
I work on software for processing medical device data and performance is often critical. You probably want an image display to update very quickly when it is providing feedback to the doctor guiding a catheter toward your heart, for example.
Well, yeah, real-time is a requirement that must be built into the design.
We had one project where the team decided to start over with a clean framework without concern for performance -- they would profile and optimize once everything was working. They followed the advice of many a software engineer: their framework was very nice, replete with design patterns and applications of generic programming, and entirely unscalable beyond a single processor core.
Partly this is an indication of how all the faddish evangelism about "frameworks" and "design" is often nonsense, and in this case, damned by the stated goals. Their claim that the framework was "generic" is contradicted by the fact that it doesn't scale beyond a single core. Basically, "generic" is supposed to mean that as few assumptions as possible are built in, yet the framework slipped in a big one-core assumption.
There were no performance tests done during development, and of course the timeline was such that there would only be minimal time for optimization once the functionality was complete.
And that of course is as big of an error as any of the other ones.
I'm sorry, but if you use Facebook, you have no expectation of privacy. Anything and everything you put into Facebook should be considered public knowledge.
Other people have brought up the issue of other people you know putting up information about you on the site, so I won't repeat that one.
However, I think even what you're saying is very dangerous. Sure, I understand the practical issues about why you should be skeptical that any information you put up on Facebook will remain private; let's call these the "well, duh" reasons you shouldn't expect privacy. These are things like the fact that Facebook make backups, that Facebook employees may look at info you don't want them to look, that Facebook may be subject to a security breach, etc. I'm sure we'll agree on nearly all of these.
What I still would be very, very wary about is that your comment can be read as a leap of logic that starts from the "well, duh" reasons for rejecting an expectation of privacy on Facebook, and ends up with some kind legally exculpatory rejection of the expectation of privacy. In other words, I'm worried about people using the reasons why it is unwise in practice to put private information on Facebook as a legal justification that Facebook should be able disclose and use that information to their hearts' will.
Another way of putting it: the exact same "well, duh" arguments about unreasonable expectations of privacy can be transplanted word-by-word to other cases where we do mandate an expectation of privacy. Say, for example, we could rephrase your comment this way to make the same argument about hospital emergency rooms (or any medical office, really):
"I'm sorry, but if you go to the hospital ER, you have no expectation of privacy. Anything and everything you tell to the ER personnel should be considered public knowledge."
The same kinds of reasons why it might be unwise in practice to reveal certain details about yourself to Facebook apply just as well to revealing facts about yourself to the hospital ER personnel. But doesn't follow that you have no legal expectation of privacy in your dealings with the hospital.
I suspect that by the criteria you're using, most stills cameras don't have "shutter speeds" either.
Um, I'm certainly wrong about the "most" part there. Most stills cameras don't have focal plane shutters. Most interchangeable lens still cameras do, though.
More accurately - most film cameras don't have a notion of a shutter 'speed'. The film roll still goes by at 24fps, but the actual shutter is a wheel. That wheel can have various sizes of gaps (to increase/decrease exposure *time*) and sizes (to produce specific motion blur effects; e.g. an object leading its own motion blur path requires a small shutter opening at first, ending in a large shutter opening).
I suspect that by the criteria you're using, most stills cameras don't have "shutter speeds" either.
The way the rotary disc shutter achieves different exposure levels actually sounds very much the same as the way a focal plane shutter in a stills camera implements fast shutter speeds. With a typical interchangeable-lens camera, when you set a very fast shutter speed like 1/1000, the shutter doesn't open completely for 1/1000 of a second and then close.
What happens is that a focal plane shutter has two curtains: the first curtain, which opens to expose the film/sensor, and the second curtain, which then closes to block the light. The curtains always move at the same speed, so the "shutter speed" is really just the timing between when the first curtain starts to open and the second curtain starts to close. So when you set shutter speed faster than what's called the "maximum sync speed," the second curtain starts to close before the first curtain is fully open. In effect, what you get is a narrow slit of light moving from one edge of the frame to the other; the narrower the slit, the "faster" the shutter speed, even though the curtains are not moving any faster than they always do. This slit of light gives you effectively the same effect as the gaps in the rotary wheel shutter; the wheel shutter seems to simply be a continuous implementation of the same idea.
That said.. you can't - short of electronic shutters - expose for -more- than the film's fps, though. A bit under 1/24th of a second is the most you'll get (that 'bit' being required to transport the film to the next frame).
Indeed. In a stills camera you can set shutter speeds slower than 1/24 because there's no roll of film rolling; even if you open the shutter for 30 seconds, the film or sensor will stay put.
At one point, Bruno Haible asks whether he could avoid releasing CLISP under GPL by bundling it with a libnoreadline that he would write, which duplicated the interface of libreadline but offered none of the functionality. The end user compiling the program would the link it to the real Readline. This is the response RMS gave him:
The FSF position would be that this is still one program, which has only been disguised as two. The reason it is still one program is that the one part clearly shows the intention for incorporation of the other part. [my emphasis]
The way I read this is that the technical details of dynamic vs. static linking are just not decisive. The key questions come down to a judge's judgement call whether the part under dispute "incorporates" the GPL'ed work, and that the set of arguments that can be made in one direction or another is actually somewhat open-ended. So, for example, I bet you that if I wrote a debugger-like tool that allowed me to dynamically link into arbitrary libraries at runtime, inspect their symbol tables and call into their functions, nobody could make me release it under GPL if I distributed it together with a GPL-licensed library that was in no way needed for my program to work.
The converse of this is that there are GPL licensors that take the position that some uses, despite not involving any linking at all, create a derivative of their own GPL licensed work. IIRC MySQL AB took this position with regard to client applications that used the GPL-licensed version of MySQL, even if the client applications did not link any MySQL-provided client libraries. In RMS's terms, these applications would "clearly show the intention for incorporation of" the MySQL server, by being written to rely on features unique to MySQL (e.g., by using MySQL-specific syntax or commands), or by virtue of only working if used with a MySQL server.
As to why GPL Firefox can link to proprietary Flash, I'd suggest that a key reason why this is so is because no copyright holder that would have standing actually objects to it. Courts in the USA for the most part are only allowed to rule on actual disputes, and clearly it seems like none of the potential parties here have any dispute.
If the data don't make sense according to your theory, you don't discard the data, you discard the theory and work out a new one that fits the facts as you've observed them. TFA says that Dunbar was watching postdocs doing research, and if so, they should have known better. Alas, too many people who call themselves scientists are more interested in proving their pet theory true than in finding out what's actually going on.
This is a beautiful explanation of how science is supposed to work. In reality, science doesn't really work this way. It doesn't work this way in my experience as a scientist, and it doesn't work this way if you read the history of science.
Indeed. The sort of thing being discussed in TFA is one of the classic themes of late 20th century philosophy and history of science: the disconnect between traditional philosophy of science and the actual practice of science.
Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a good place to start. Just one tiny example of the book: Kuhn goes on about how during normal science, scientists perform experiments to confirm the results that they expect to get. When an experiment contradicts the theory, they don't automatically assume that the theory is wrong; on the other hand, they assume that the experiment was flawed.
Feyerabend and many other philosophers of science take a complementary stand to this by stressing the theory-ladenness of "facts." The claim that the "facts" contradict a hypothesis is never a theory-independent observation, but rather, the conclusion of a different theory that we may overthrow. Feyerabend's classic example is the Tower Argument that Aristotle used to refute the theory that the Earth moves. Wikipedia's article on Paul Feyerabend has a decent, if terse, explanation of this:
"The tower argument was one of the main objections against the theory of a moving earth. Aristotelians assumed that the fact that a stone which is dropped from a tower lands directly beneath it shows that the earth is stationary. They thought that, if the earth moved while the stone was falling, the stone would have been "left behind". Objects would fall diagonally instead of vertically. Since this does not happen, Aristotelians thought that it was evident that the earth did not move. If one uses ancient theories of impulse and relative motion, the Copernican theory indeed appears to be falsified by the fact that objects fall vertically on earth."
Feyerabend goes on to argue that many of our most successful contemporary scientific theories (e.g., heliocentrism and geodynamicism) became so because their Renaissance and Enlightenment proponents held on to them and continued to elaborate on them despite them being contradicted by "the facts," as judged by the application of theories that were better established at the time (e.g., Aristotelian mechanics). That is, new scientific theories often succeed because their proponents keep working on them and improving them despite being contradicting by the "facts"; then as the new theories become stronger and better accepted, people start juding the "facts" by the lens of the new instead of the old, and forget the problems that the new theories were judged to have and never resolved (e.g., things like Newtonian physics not having the same explanatory range as Aristotelian physics).
There is a world of difference between translating between Spanish and English (two European languages) and English and Japanese or English and Chinese. Even bilingual people have trouble, www.engrish.com
Most of the stuff in the Engrish site is not a good example of difficulties in translation at all. A true example of difficulty in translation would be when a full bilingual (somebody who can understand and speak both languages correctly) would have difficulty rendering the meaning of a source language text into the target language without either using a lot of footnotes/parentheticals, or just dropping a lot of nuance.
The examples on the Engrish site don't fall into that category, for the most part, either because they're not really translations, or because they're translations but the people doing them are not bilingual enough to produce grammatical, idiomatic English. They fall into these:
English text used in Asian products for purely aesthetic reasons. In this case, the target audience doesn't know English beyond some elementary vocabulary, and the people putting the English text on the products neither. Hanzi Smatter is a site dedicated to the Western counterpart to this phenomenon. The technical terms for these are either "As Long As It Sounds Foreign," or "Gratuituous English," depending on the details.
Translations meant to communicate with English speakers, but done by people who don't really master the language; i.e., translators who are not fully bilingual. (Hint: if you want a translation to be right, you probably want to hire a translator who's a first-language speaker of the target language.) We could call this one "Eloquent In My Native Tongue."
Computer translations, typically of Chinese restaurant menus. These tend to involve the word "fuck" very often. (No, no clever names for this one.)
Look, nobody's arguing that the ISPs in the USA are saints. The point is that the typical response around here to the ISP monopoly abuse that you describe is to state that the ISPs should provide a service level that makes no damn sense (maximum advertised bandwidth 24/7 to all users of the network). There is going to be what the slashbot crowd dismissively calls "overselling," because that's the cost-effective way to provide service, and the way that all utilities operate.
If you're going to demand that ISPs provide us better service in exchange for their government-granted monopolies, making a senseless argument is only gonna get you pwned.
The prequels needed a rebel, and simply casting a cool actor to play a stuffy Jedi role doesn't magically turn that stuffy Jedi into a rebel. Realistically, the one who had the most potential to become the cool likable character was Qui-Gon. So Lucas did nothing to flesh out the character, and killed him off in the first movie. Brilliant.
Actually, if you watch the 70 minute video, they have a better idea than that. Basically, you could get rid of Qui-Gon and make Obi-Wan into the rebel character by making him be the one who discovers and bonds with Anakin, and then decides to train him over Yoda's objection that Obi-Wan is not yet wise enough to train Anakin. And have Yoda be right.
Now, nobody's saying that marketers are less than human and deserve to be marched into the ocean, but there's no reason why the network can't apply some volume normalization.
The problem is probably a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma: even if the each network wanted to normalize they volume of commercials, they are scared that if they did it they would only drive advertisers away towards their competitors. So basically, the networks want to tell advertisers who complain about having their ads' volume turned down to go complain to the FCC.
You're thinking of "syntax" and "morphology" as some sort of essentialist categories, with necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as one of them. I, on the other hand, am certainly thinking at least of "morphology" as the historical end-result of (human) language change, given certain facts about our psychology; and I am skeptical that any essentialist definition of phonology would satisfy me, because it would entail that a clear line between morphology and syntax, and I regard it as a virtue of the "historical end-result" approach that it implies there is no such line.
What I would say is that whatever theory of emergence of language you're thinking of, it's better to look at the phenomena in question in their own terms, instead of trying to analogize them too strongly to something else they're not. The monkey calls have their own combinatorics, which doesn't show clear evidence of compositionality of meaning (indicated by the fact that you have to resort to lots of polysemy to make the case for compositionality). The comparisons can be interesting, but there's little point IMO in arguing that those combinatorics are "really" syntax or morphology, when the differences can be pointed out so straightforwardly.
Re:It depends what one means by syntax...
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There is a reason why my original post is titled "It depends what one means by syntax." But let's go on:
1. Morphology is fundamentally syntax (underlying mathematics of structure), it's just the syntax with the word, rather than the assembly of words.
Again, there's a reason for the subject line. You're using "syntax" in a very loose sense, where it seems to mean nothing more than "rule-governed combination an expression drawn from set A with one of set B to form an expression from set C." Correct me if I'm understanding you wrong, but as far as I can tell, the way you're using the term would imply that phonology is "fundamentally syntax": the syntax of how to combine discrete speech sounds into syllables and morae. And in that case, I bet you tons of complex animal calls have "syntax" in this sense.
2. While morphology is unquestionably more basic than syntax, as a lexicon of words is (we assume) a precursor to the emergence of a language, and though morphology eventually becomes a distinct field in highly developed languages, the initial emergence of syntax (and accordingly, sentences) from morphology is not a black and white line.
There are a few points to be made here:
I would dispute that morphology is more "basic" than syntax, actually. There are good reasons to think that syntax is more basic than morphology--though again, just like there's the problem of what one means by "syntax," there's the problem of what one means by "basic." One of the leading theories about morphology is grammaticalization, where, to put it very crudely, today's morphology is the eroded remains of yesterday's syntax. What starts as a compositional, syntactic combination of two elements combined arbitrarily according to a general rule of grammar that doesn't remotely mention them specifically, gradually turns into a very restricted combination of two elements that can only be combined with an idiosyncratically limited set of items, and where the meaning of the whole only bears a historical relation to that of parts.
Of course, it's possible (maybe even likely) that grammaticalization theory is only applicable to human languages, and not to animal communication or the evolution of language. But boy, we sure don't know one way or the other, don't we?
There's actually no clear line between syntax and morphology in human languages, so no, we don't have to argue that there is some clear line marking the "initial emergence of syntax (and accordingly, sentences) from morphology." However, as implied by what I said above, one can certainly doubt that the direction goes the way you're assuming. What seems clear to me is that (a) compositionality is key, (b) it's far from clear that the animal calls described by TFA are compositional, and in answer to your argument, (c) it neither seems clear to me that the animal calls described there are some sort of clear stepping stone to compositionality.
Words grow longer and more complicated, and thus carry more and more meaning, until eventually a different structure, a grammar, has to replace a word-based method of communication. The question that this research seeks to answer is whether there is, in fact, a grammar within this language.
And again, this is one picture of how language emerges, but not the only possible one. The story can be told backwards, so that some phrases grow more and more habitual and disproportionately frequent, until they get squashed together and become single words. A lot depends on what you mean by "word" here, but the analogy you're making between animal calls and words and morphology in human languages is a lot weaker than you make it sound.
The claim is not problematic and does not necessarily indicate non-compositionality. Again, I believe your perspective is influenced by a study of highly evolved
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
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I don't know - a predator (danger that's out to get you) and danger from falling trees aren't entirely unrelated.
The point is that the "krak-oo" example is at best unclear as evidence of syntax. If you want to argue that there's human language-like syntax in monkey calls, you need to find a clearer example, and preferably one that leads to a combinatorial explosion, where n calls can be combined to yield something in the order of n^2 meanings in a predictable manner.
I'll reserve absolute judgment for when I get a chance to look at the actual paper, but this quote from NYT gives me pause: Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. This is not (typically) how human language works...meaning is compositionally built up from bits of syntax, whereas what's described here looks more like idiom. In fact, it looks more like phonology (*maybe* morphology) to me...meaningless bits that can be put together to make meaningful bits.
I second that wholeheartedly. This was precisely my reaction. My, you must be a linguist.
Or perhaps an analogy will show the problem...
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Quoting TFA again:
"Krak" is a call that warns of leopards in the vicinity. The monkeys gave it in response to real leopards and to model leopards or leopard growls broadcast by the researchers. The monkeys can vary the call by adding the suffix "-oo": "krak-oo" seems to be a general word for predator, but one given in a special context -- when monkeys hear but do not see a predator, or when they hear the alarm calls of another species known as the Diana monkey.
The "boom-boom" call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. "Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" is the monkey's version of "Timber!" -- it warns of falling trees.
Another way of expressing the problem I see with these examples: the researchers are looking at the individual calls "boom," "krak" and "-oo" as analogues of human language words or morphemes. However, if you look at them as analogues of syllables instead, then the argument looks much more flimsier. The English word disco shares a syllable with both disfluency and psycho, but that is not evidence of syntax or morphology; the meaning of disco is not a function of the meanings of dis and co.
It depends what one means by syntax...
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I'm sure there'll be a lot of enlightening commentary about this pretty soon, but my first reaction to it is that the example cited by TFA is not clearly syntactic, in the strictest linguistic sense. Look, for example, at this quote:
"Krak" is a call that warns of leopards in the vicinity. The monkeys gave it in response to real leopards and to model leopards or leopard growls broadcast by the researchers. The monkeys can vary the call by adding the suffix "-oo": "krak-oo" seems to be a general word for predator, but one given in a special context -- when monkeys hear but do not see a predator, or when they hear the alarm calls of another species known as the Diana monkey.
The "boom-boom" call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. "Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" is the monkey's version of "Timber!" -- it warns of falling trees.
So, the meaning we are told for "krak-oo" is not a clear function of the meanings of "krak" and "-oo." The second paragraph makes an even more problematic claim: "boom" and "krak-oo," combined together, means something completely different than the parts.
What's the problem with this? That one of the paradigmatic properties of syntactic constructions in human language is compositionality, the principle that the meaning of an expression made of parts A and B is a function of the meanings of A and B themselves, and of the manner in which they are combined in the expression. So the meaning of Dog bites man is a function of the meanings of the words, and the way in which they are combined (so that it doesn't mean the same thing as Man bites dog).
This doesn't mean that there isn't no non-compositionality in human language, or even in syntax, but rather that compositionality is typical of syntax, and noncompositionality is typical of morphology. There's in fact tons of noncompositionality in human language, but it's hard to argue that monkeys have a semblance of human language unless you can clearly argue that the meanings of the subparts of the complex calls combine compositionally.
Huh ? It is a lie, it is wrong, and should be illegal. I welcome you to show me otherwise.
It's actually much less than wrong; overselling is precisely what a communications network like the Internet was designed to achieve. Bandwidth on long-haul communications cables is a limited resource. The Internet is a scheme to share that bandwidth efficiently by overselling it.
Do you think that the existing transatlantic cables, taken together, have enough bandwidth to allow everybody in the USA with an Internet connection to simultaneously get their local maximum bandwidth to Europe? The whole point of the way the network is designed is that since the majority of the users aren't sending packets to Europe at any given time, they get a better deal (bandwidth/price) on connectivity by sharing a transoceanic cable that might not be able to accommodate them all at once, instead of each of them setting up their own dedicated transatlantic cable or channel.
This isn't the case only for Internet, but also for the old phone network ("all circuits are currently busy"), the power grid (blackouts during times of heavy use), or pretty much any public utility.
There is also a correlation between wealth and access to technology. And a correlation between wealth and literacy.
There are statistical techniques to analyze the contribution of multiple variables to a result, and social scientists routinely use these techniques to control for confounding factors like wealth.
For example, a typical study on something racism will claim something like, say, that after controlling for wealth and education, black people get worse deals on mortages; that is, the study will use statistical techniques to isolate the contribution of the three variables (race, wealth and education). A typical dumbass that doesn't like the conclusion of the study, however, will claim that the study is invalid because blacks are poorer and less educated than whites, and poorer people get worse mortgage deals. Which is, of course, a strawman, because the statistical techniques used in these studies are normally designed to compare people who have similar wealth and education but different race.
I certainly can't vouch for the study that's mentioned in this article, but I somehow doubt that you're any more ready to vouch against it.
So... talking about the horrors of the Holocaust is racist if you don't give equal time to every other ethnic slaughter? The lady was talking about what she knew firsthand.
You need to learn the difference between individual and institutional racism. The fact that ethnic slaughters in Africa are not given proportionate time and attention is a manifestation of racism, because it's basically the effect of the fact that people keep minimizing of the importance of black victims.
However, it's one of those forms of racism that you cannot easily pin into an individual person. Basically, it results from the pattern of behavior of the population as a whole, in a way that, most of the time, most of the people who contribute to it can disclaim responsibility for it. No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood. The lady was indeed talking about what she knew firsthand, but the victims of ethnic slaughters in Africa are not given that opportunity nearly as often, which an aspect of a real problem.
GP's action was still a typical teenaged asshole move, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who's studied linguistics can tell you that that statement is nonsense. The names of verb forms are not descriptions of what they are for. More generally, labels are not definitions, so you can't reason from the non-technical meaning of a technical label to its meaning (it's a fallacy of equivocation). More importantly, the forms of a morphological paradigm are normally multifunctional, so you can't talk of the "meaning" of a form of the verb in isolation from the specific constructions in which the form occurs.
Not to mention the other problem that you have, which is that you simply don't know the import of the example that GP chose. As pointed out already, it's the habitual be construction of African-American Vernacular English, i.e., a grammatical rule in AAVE that's not present in Standard English.
No, this claim is wrong. AAVE does have subject-verb agreement in the present tense; for example, while He working is grammatical, *I working is not, and you must say I'm working or I am working. That's a grammar rule that restricts the admissible forms of the verb depending on the grammatical person of the subject--which is precisely what subject-verb agreement is.
Um, I don't how what you have in mind by "many," but the mutual authentication problems addressed by IPsec are pretty damn important.
Haven't given much thought to botnets, but a big part of the spam problem is simply the fact that our email protocols are built so that the whole message contents are always immediately pushed to every recipient. An improvement on that would be a model where the sender can only push a notification, and must hold the content in an outbox server for the recipients to pull on demand.
Frankly, no. The company is just very often secretive for no good reason. The unreleased products part isn't as clear-cut as you make it, because (a) Apple makes many products where the developer community could definitely benefit from a lot more information before the release, and (b) Apple does share such information with hand-picked outside developers before a release (folks from the companies that they bring into their announcement events, to advertise games under development for the iPhone and such).
Granted, the unreleased product examples aren't the best ones, because they're examples where you can easily argue either way. But there are other examples where Apple is excessively secretive about existing products for no good reason that I can discern. Here are two that I've personally encountered:
I've heard of plenty of professional photographers who'd very much rather use a small, lightweight camera system that produces high-quality results. The problems they have are two:
I guess the analogy here is that some people would very much rather have a Macbook Air than a Macbook Pro. (Or the time when I traded my work-issued MBP 17" for a 15" model, because I just felt that the 17" was too big and heavy.)
Not really true in the case of top-end DSLRs. An $6,000-$8,000 Canon 1D or Nikon D3 doesn't really have much more functionality than a $2,500-$3,000 Canon 5D or Nikon D700. They're mostly just a hell of a lot more rugged, and have longer battery life.
Well, and then there's another approach, where you first write a fully-functional and readable implementation of the solution without regard to performance until you get it right, then rewrite the really critical parts from scratch to be a lot faster.
I've been involved with projects that went like this. Typically, the first stage is necessary because the task is very exploratory--e.g., write a fairly generic computation engine that processes user-defined formulas. The first pass is slow, but it serves to prove that you're on the right track, and then you rewrite it to be fast (typically by changing it from an interpreter-like design to a compiler-like one).
Well, yeah, real-time is a requirement that must be built into the design.
Partly this is an indication of how all the faddish evangelism about "frameworks" and "design" is often nonsense, and in this case, damned by the stated goals. Their claim that the framework was "generic" is contradicted by the fact that it doesn't scale beyond a single core. Basically, "generic" is supposed to mean that as few assumptions as possible are built in, yet the framework slipped in a big one-core assumption.
And that of course is as big of an error as any of the other ones.
Other people have brought up the issue of other people you know putting up information about you on the site, so I won't repeat that one.
However, I think even what you're saying is very dangerous. Sure, I understand the practical issues about why you should be skeptical that any information you put up on Facebook will remain private; let's call these the "well, duh" reasons you shouldn't expect privacy. These are things like the fact that Facebook make backups, that Facebook employees may look at info you don't want them to look, that Facebook may be subject to a security breach, etc. I'm sure we'll agree on nearly all of these.
What I still would be very, very wary about is that your comment can be read as a leap of logic that starts from the "well, duh" reasons for rejecting an expectation of privacy on Facebook, and ends up with some kind legally exculpatory rejection of the expectation of privacy. In other words, I'm worried about people using the reasons why it is unwise in practice to put private information on Facebook as a legal justification that Facebook should be able disclose and use that information to their hearts' will.
Another way of putting it: the exact same "well, duh" arguments about unreasonable expectations of privacy can be transplanted word-by-word to other cases where we do mandate an expectation of privacy. Say, for example, we could rephrase your comment this way to make the same argument about hospital emergency rooms (or any medical office, really):
The same kinds of reasons why it might be unwise in practice to reveal certain details about yourself to Facebook apply just as well to revealing facts about yourself to the hospital ER personnel. But doesn't follow that you have no legal expectation of privacy in your dealings with the hospital.
Um, I'm certainly wrong about the "most" part there. Most stills cameras don't have focal plane shutters. Most interchangeable lens still cameras do, though.
I suspect that by the criteria you're using, most stills cameras don't have "shutter speeds" either.
The way the rotary disc shutter achieves different exposure levels actually sounds very much the same as the way a focal plane shutter in a stills camera implements fast shutter speeds. With a typical interchangeable-lens camera, when you set a very fast shutter speed like 1/1000, the shutter doesn't open completely for 1/1000 of a second and then close.
What happens is that a focal plane shutter has two curtains: the first curtain, which opens to expose the film/sensor, and the second curtain, which then closes to block the light. The curtains always move at the same speed, so the "shutter speed" is really just the timing between when the first curtain starts to open and the second curtain starts to close. So when you set shutter speed faster than what's called the "maximum sync speed," the second curtain starts to close before the first curtain is fully open. In effect, what you get is a narrow slit of light moving from one edge of the frame to the other; the narrower the slit, the "faster" the shutter speed, even though the curtains are not moving any faster than they always do. This slit of light gives you effectively the same effect as the gaps in the rotary wheel shutter; the wheel shutter seems to simply be a continuous implementation of the same idea.
Indeed. In a stills camera you can set shutter speeds slower than 1/24 because there's no roll of film rolling; even if you open the shutter for 30 seconds, the film or sensor will stay put.
I hope you have read this old exchange between RMS and Bruno Haible on whether CLISP had to be released under GPL if it was written to link to Readline.
At one point, Bruno Haible asks whether he could avoid releasing CLISP under GPL by bundling it with a libnoreadline that he would write, which duplicated the interface of libreadline but offered none of the functionality. The end user compiling the program would the link it to the real Readline. This is the response RMS gave him:
The way I read this is that the technical details of dynamic vs. static linking are just not decisive. The key questions come down to a judge's judgement call whether the part under dispute "incorporates" the GPL'ed work, and that the set of arguments that can be made in one direction or another is actually somewhat open-ended. So, for example, I bet you that if I wrote a debugger-like tool that allowed me to dynamically link into arbitrary libraries at runtime, inspect their symbol tables and call into their functions, nobody could make me release it under GPL if I distributed it together with a GPL-licensed library that was in no way needed for my program to work.
The converse of this is that there are GPL licensors that take the position that some uses, despite not involving any linking at all, create a derivative of their own GPL licensed work. IIRC MySQL AB took this position with regard to client applications that used the GPL-licensed version of MySQL, even if the client applications did not link any MySQL-provided client libraries. In RMS's terms, these applications would "clearly show the intention for incorporation of" the MySQL server, by being written to rely on features unique to MySQL (e.g., by using MySQL-specific syntax or commands), or by virtue of only working if used with a MySQL server.
As to why GPL Firefox can link to proprietary Flash, I'd suggest that a key reason why this is so is because no copyright holder that would have standing actually objects to it. Courts in the USA for the most part are only allowed to rule on actual disputes, and clearly it seems like none of the potential parties here have any dispute.
Indeed. The sort of thing being discussed in TFA is one of the classic themes of late 20th century philosophy and history of science: the disconnect between traditional philosophy of science and the actual practice of science.
Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a good place to start. Just one tiny example of the book: Kuhn goes on about how during normal science, scientists perform experiments to confirm the results that they expect to get. When an experiment contradicts the theory, they don't automatically assume that the theory is wrong; on the other hand, they assume that the experiment was flawed.
Feyerabend and many other philosophers of science take a complementary stand to this by stressing the theory-ladenness of "facts." The claim that the "facts" contradict a hypothesis is never a theory-independent observation, but rather, the conclusion of a different theory that we may overthrow. Feyerabend's classic example is the Tower Argument that Aristotle used to refute the theory that the Earth moves. Wikipedia's article on Paul Feyerabend has a decent, if terse, explanation of this:
Feyerabend goes on to argue that many of our most successful contemporary scientific theories (e.g., heliocentrism and geodynamicism) became so because their Renaissance and Enlightenment proponents held on to them and continued to elaborate on them despite them being contradicted by "the facts," as judged by the application of theories that were better established at the time (e.g., Aristotelian mechanics). That is, new scientific theories often succeed because their proponents keep working on them and improving them despite being contradicting by the "facts"; then as the new theories become stronger and better accepted, people start juding the "facts" by the lens of the new instead of the old, and forget the problems that the new theories were judged to have and never resolved (e.g., things like Newtonian physics not having the same explanatory range as Aristotelian physics).
Most of the stuff in the Engrish site is not a good example of difficulties in translation at all. A true example of difficulty in translation would be when a full bilingual (somebody who can understand and speak both languages correctly) would have difficulty rendering the meaning of a source language text into the target language without either using a lot of footnotes/parentheticals, or just dropping a lot of nuance.
The examples on the Engrish site don't fall into that category, for the most part, either because they're not really translations, or because they're translations but the people doing them are not bilingual enough to produce grammatical, idiomatic English. They fall into these:
Look, nobody's arguing that the ISPs in the USA are saints. The point is that the typical response around here to the ISP monopoly abuse that you describe is to state that the ISPs should provide a service level that makes no damn sense (maximum advertised bandwidth 24/7 to all users of the network). There is going to be what the slashbot crowd dismissively calls "overselling," because that's the cost-effective way to provide service, and the way that all utilities operate.
If you're going to demand that ISPs provide us better service in exchange for their government-granted monopolies, making a senseless argument is only gonna get you pwned.
Actually, if you watch the 70 minute video, they have a better idea than that. Basically, you could get rid of Qui-Gon and make Obi-Wan into the rebel character by making him be the one who discovers and bonds with Anakin, and then decides to train him over Yoda's objection that Obi-Wan is not yet wise enough to train Anakin. And have Yoda be right.
That idea might sound familiar, BTW.
The problem is probably a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma: even if the each network wanted to normalize they volume of commercials, they are scared that if they did it they would only drive advertisers away towards their competitors. So basically, the networks want to tell advertisers who complain about having their ads' volume turned down to go complain to the FCC.
You're thinking of "syntax" and "morphology" as some sort of essentialist categories, with necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as one of them. I, on the other hand, am certainly thinking at least of "morphology" as the historical end-result of (human) language change, given certain facts about our psychology; and I am skeptical that any essentialist definition of phonology would satisfy me, because it would entail that a clear line between morphology and syntax, and I regard it as a virtue of the "historical end-result" approach that it implies there is no such line.
What I would say is that whatever theory of emergence of language you're thinking of, it's better to look at the phenomena in question in their own terms, instead of trying to analogize them too strongly to something else they're not. The monkey calls have their own combinatorics, which doesn't show clear evidence of compositionality of meaning (indicated by the fact that you have to resort to lots of polysemy to make the case for compositionality). The comparisons can be interesting, but there's little point IMO in arguing that those combinatorics are "really" syntax or morphology, when the differences can be pointed out so straightforwardly.
There is a reason why my original post is titled "It depends what one means by syntax." But let's go on:
Again, there's a reason for the subject line. You're using "syntax" in a very loose sense, where it seems to mean nothing more than "rule-governed combination an expression drawn from set A with one of set B to form an expression from set C." Correct me if I'm understanding you wrong, but as far as I can tell, the way you're using the term would imply that phonology is "fundamentally syntax": the syntax of how to combine discrete speech sounds into syllables and morae. And in that case, I bet you tons of complex animal calls have "syntax" in this sense.
There are a few points to be made here:
Of course, it's possible (maybe even likely) that grammaticalization theory is only applicable to human languages, and not to animal communication or the evolution of language. But boy, we sure don't know one way or the other, don't we?
And again, this is one picture of how language emerges, but not the only possible one. The story can be told backwards, so that some phrases grow more and more habitual and disproportionately frequent, until they get squashed together and become single words. A lot depends on what you mean by "word" here, but the analogy you're making between animal calls and words and morphology in human languages is a lot weaker than you make it sound.
But, to borrow a bit from another comment of mine, neither are disco and psycho , right? Lots of psychos go to discos, after all.
The point is that the "krak-oo" example is at best unclear as evidence of syntax. If you want to argue that there's human language-like syntax in monkey calls, you need to find a clearer example, and preferably one that leads to a combinatorial explosion, where n calls can be combined to yield something in the order of n^2 meanings in a predictable manner.
I second that wholeheartedly. This was precisely my reaction. My, you must be a linguist.
Quoting TFA again:
Another way of expressing the problem I see with these examples: the researchers are looking at the individual calls "boom," "krak" and "-oo" as analogues of human language words or morphemes. However, if you look at them as analogues of syllables instead, then the argument looks much more flimsier. The English word disco shares a syllable with both disfluency and psycho, but that is not evidence of syntax or morphology; the meaning of disco is not a function of the meanings of dis and co.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of enlightening commentary about this pretty soon, but my first reaction to it is that the example cited by TFA is not clearly syntactic, in the strictest linguistic sense. Look, for example, at this quote:
So, the meaning we are told for "krak-oo" is not a clear function of the meanings of "krak" and "-oo." The second paragraph makes an even more problematic claim: "boom" and "krak-oo," combined together, means something completely different than the parts.
What's the problem with this? That one of the paradigmatic properties of syntactic constructions in human language is compositionality, the principle that the meaning of an expression made of parts A and B is a function of the meanings of A and B themselves, and of the manner in which they are combined in the expression. So the meaning of Dog bites man is a function of the meanings of the words, and the way in which they are combined (so that it doesn't mean the same thing as Man bites dog).
This doesn't mean that there isn't no non-compositionality in human language, or even in syntax, but rather that compositionality is typical of syntax, and noncompositionality is typical of morphology. There's in fact tons of noncompositionality in human language, but it's hard to argue that monkeys have a semblance of human language unless you can clearly argue that the meanings of the subparts of the complex calls combine compositionally.
It's actually much less than wrong; overselling is precisely what a communications network like the Internet was designed to achieve. Bandwidth on long-haul communications cables is a limited resource. The Internet is a scheme to share that bandwidth efficiently by overselling it.
Do you think that the existing transatlantic cables, taken together, have enough bandwidth to allow everybody in the USA with an Internet connection to simultaneously get their local maximum bandwidth to Europe? The whole point of the way the network is designed is that since the majority of the users aren't sending packets to Europe at any given time, they get a better deal (bandwidth/price) on connectivity by sharing a transoceanic cable that might not be able to accommodate them all at once, instead of each of them setting up their own dedicated transatlantic cable or channel.
This isn't the case only for Internet, but also for the old phone network ("all circuits are currently busy"), the power grid (blackouts during times of heavy use), or pretty much any public utility.
There are statistical techniques to analyze the contribution of multiple variables to a result, and social scientists routinely use these techniques to control for confounding factors like wealth.
For example, a typical study on something racism will claim something like, say, that after controlling for wealth and education, black people get worse deals on mortages; that is, the study will use statistical techniques to isolate the contribution of the three variables (race, wealth and education). A typical dumbass that doesn't like the conclusion of the study, however, will claim that the study is invalid because blacks are poorer and less educated than whites, and poorer people get worse mortgage deals. Which is, of course, a strawman, because the statistical techniques used in these studies are normally designed to compare people who have similar wealth and education but different race.
I certainly can't vouch for the study that's mentioned in this article, but I somehow doubt that you're any more ready to vouch against it.
You need to learn the difference between individual and institutional racism. The fact that ethnic slaughters in Africa are not given proportionate time and attention is a manifestation of racism, because it's basically the effect of the fact that people keep minimizing of the importance of black victims.
However, it's one of those forms of racism that you cannot easily pin into an individual person. Basically, it results from the pattern of behavior of the population as a whole, in a way that, most of the time, most of the people who contribute to it can disclaim responsibility for it. No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood. The lady was indeed talking about what she knew firsthand, but the victims of ethnic slaughters in Africa are not given that opportunity nearly as often, which an aspect of a real problem.
GP's action was still a typical teenaged asshole move, though.