As one of my Lit professors put it: "The passive voice is a beautiful construct, but an overused one."
And I'll bet you he didn't (a) measure how much it is actually used, nor (b) elaborate on any standard by which we may judge how much usage of the passive is "overuse."
See The Elements of Style by W. Strunk and E.B. White for excellent guidance on this and many other topics.
Guidance? Look it up, pal. The "guidance" in question boils down to:
The active voice is (supposedly) more "forceful." (WTF is that supposed to mean?)
Therefore, you should not use the passive. Except in all the cases where you should use the passive, in which case, you should use the passive.
To be more charitable towards Strunk and White, they kind of incipiently shoot at the rule that subjects are usually topical, in the little bit where they talk about the passive being OK if the topic of the paragraph is the passive subject. The problems are that: (a) they issue an unhelpful, near-blanket prohibition against a construction, and an even more unhelpful side comment that it's somehow sometimes OK; (b) native English speakers already know at some level that subject should be topical, and already use passives in their spontaneous speech to make sure that the topical argument is the subject of the sentence.
Actually, "is riding" creates a nominative sentence--not active. It describes the boy as having a state of being: "riding." The word "riding" is a verbal noun (gerund), which is also used as an adjective. So "Subject (helping verb) adjective" - nominative. The sentence is not active at all, but passive.
That's a bunch of bullshit. Is riding is a periphrastic progressive form. You won't find a linguist anywhere that says anything of the sort that you've said here.
Also, the best way to avoid the "it's" and "its" issues is advice I received from a professor: never write a sentence requiring either. A sentence is less ambiguous when the sentence does not contain the word "it," although takes a bit of effort. He dropped a paper's grade by one letter if he saw the word "it" used anywhere in a final draft.
Your professor is a moron. Why should anybody refrain from using any grammatical construction used by all of the authors in the English language literary canon for the past 500 years or so, because of a dumb apostrophe? If for some reason the apostrophe really matters (like, you have to send your text to a bunch of jackasses who won't actually read it, and instead merely scan it mechanically for every instance of perfectly grammatical English that they were somehow taught never to use), well, that's what we have copyeditors and proofreaders for. Worry about organization and audience first, and only then worry about the small stuff.
Why should you avoid using a perfectly grammatical English construction such as the passive, just because of the superstitions of a bunch of self-righteous idiots who don't know what they're talking about?
You are correct in saying that active voice is the more direct and succinct of the two voices, and that technical writers should prefer it over passive voice.
Um, why?
Every single confused attempt I've seen at explaining why passives are such a horrible thing have turned out to be nonsense.
And the prescriptive grammar of other European languages have no comparable proscriptions. Are the people who teach writing in those languages morons who've failed to recognize an universally valid principle of logical language, or is it just that literate English speakers are traditionally taught nonsense?
1. Receiving credit for an offer can not be guaranteed. If you believe that you have completed an offer correctly, please open a support ticket with your name, account name, e-mail address, offer completed, and the date that you have completed the offer. We will try to give you credit for that offer, but we can not guarantee that you will receive any form of credit.
IV. Other Information
1. freesonyplaystation.com is allowed to place any account on hold for any reason.
2. freesonyplaystation.com is allowed to deny credit for any offer for any reason.
Yup, even if you complete the requirements of their offers, they're not required to actually send you the machine.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything but it does raise interesting thoughts/possibilities.
No, it doesn't raise any of your thoughts. You already had the thoughts in question beforehand, and you feel whatever correlation you have in mind justifies you in what you've believed all along. That's very different.
Now, there are facts you could seek out that would seriously support or disconfirm your expectations. You could actually look for real statistics correlating the incidence of various diseases with factors such as ethnicity, gender, social class, population density, and so on. However, you clearly do not care to do so, because you are only interested in "evidence" that merely sounds as if it might confirm what you want to believe.
Meanwhile, in actual public health circles, there is a discussion going on about what has been called the "Latino Health Paradox." This is a collection of facts that a number of people have measured, indicating that Mexican immigrants to the USA, overall, tend to be in better health that the American population at large. Here's, for example, a New Republic article on the phenomenon.
What does your claim tell us? That you don't care to look at actual facts. You have your set of preconceptions, and are on the lookout for facts that confirm it.
Equalizing the prices in the American and Chinese DVD markets can ultimately only be sustained by equalizing the prices in all other markets that they interact with. Critically, the labor market. If you want $1.50 DVDs in the USA, you should also be willing to accept Chinese wages.
How's your knowledge of mathematical logic? Graph theory? Abstract algebra? Linear algebra? Have you had much practice writing mathematical proofs?
I doubt you have taken much (if any) real, higher mathematics. You know, the kind where they don't give you problems where you're supposed to come up with a set of numbers for an answer, but rather, the kind where what you're expected to do is prove theorems about some kind of mathematical structure, which most likely doesn't even involve numbers.
Suppose Acme Inc. buys widgets and gadgets, and assembles them together into fudgets. Then it offers the fudgets for sale at more than the price of the widgets and gadgets that go into the fudgets. Why should I buy Acme's fudgets, instead of buying widgets and gadgets and making the fudgets myself? Whatever reason there is (if there is one, that is) is the value that Acme has added.
They may know more about fudgets than I do, and thus make a better fudget than I could; they may make a lot more fudgets than I need, and can achieve economies of scale; they may be able to offer me better advice on how to actually use the fudgets; they may absorb some of the risk of defective fudgets through a guarantee or service plans; etc.
A simpler example is compensated middlemen in transactions. Suppose I have a good to sell. How do I find the bidders that offer the best price? I can interrupt all of my other work to go and try to round up potential buyers, but this can be a forbidding task. Or I can go to a person who makes their living from matching sellers with the best bidders for the good in question. The buyer pays more money for the good than what I get, and the middleman pockets the difference; this amount is often called the spread. For this arrangement to work, the amount of the sale price that the middleman takes must be less than what it would have cost me to find the best bidder on my own. Or, in other words, the middleman's spread can only be rationally justified if he actually adds value to the transaction.
Both the insider and the person who receives the leak are resposible when they disclose information they can reasonably expect to be a trade secret.
Your problem is that you don't even care what the letter of the law says. There is such a thing as largely uniform laws on the disclosure of trade secrets in the USA, and you could have found this just by looking at even as bad an information source as Wikipedia.
So how is a publisher supposed to know if a bit of info is an illicit trade secret, or simply a marketing whisper campaign?
Ask the source of the information for proof that they are authorized to disclose it. If the proof is good, you go ahead and publish the information. If you want the source to give you fake leaks in the future, you don't disclose the fact that the "leak" was in fact authorized.
The people doing the fake "leaks" are trying to get you to do something that sounds sketchy, for their benefit. They should therefore accommodate you; if the "leak" is really authorized, they should be able to prove it to you. And if they want you to keep mum on the fact that the "leak" was authorized, they should also offer you some incentive to do so.
So. Google is monopolizing genetic resources by putting genetic information online for free?
You seem to imply that the two parts to this are somehow contradictory to each other, or at least incongruous. But keep in mind that the fact that something's online for free (beer) doesn't mean that it's unencumbered by IP issues. The best example is the US Patent Office online patent database; you can search it for free, but you sure as hell can't use the inventions described therein for free.
I'm still reading up on this, but I think the biopiracy problems with the proposed Google database are the following:
By putting all this information online for free, it makes it easier for biopirates to do their deed. It will become much easier to collect all the supporting information needed to put together a patent application.
By putting all this genome data online, one denies the people who provided it from having a say and/or financially benefitting from their knowledge. If we allow biopatents (and that is a big "if," I know), then other cultures' bioproperty and bioknowledge acquire an economic value they don't have otherwise. The argument then is that it's unjust to stiff them out of this value without their informed consent, even if you don't profit from the information yourself.
Really, the notion of informed consent that I highlighted is central. One core moral vice involved in biopiracy is obtaining materials and knowledge from other people through uninformed consent. You and your buddy go on a trip to the Amazon, hang out with some tribe, gain their trust, and you askl them to give you a bunch of plant samples and explain their medicinal uses. You, of course, intend to go back home and sell the samples and notes to a big company, which will patent them.
In order to make an informed decision on what to give you, the natives need to know all that you know about the patentability and value of the knowledge and material you're asking from them. However, this is exactly the information that you will hold from them.
You can just get an index fund that doesn't duplicate the S&P 500, but rather samples a broader index. There's the funds with names like "Total Stock Market" which sample the Wilshire 5,000, and are a better choice for most folks; they're better diversified (since they try to replicate the performance of investing in *every* stock in the US market, not just the largish S&P 500 stocks), and there's far less worry about index inclusion events like this, since their target index includes *every* stock, by definition.
Even if you specifically want a fund that invests in larger US companies, there's non-S&P 500 based large-cap index funds. And if you can't easily move your money from S&P 500 funds, there's also "extended market" funds that buy everything *except* the S&P 500. These funds will now have to *sell* their Google stock, and put the proceeds into other stock.
Every product, service and share price is only worth what others will pay for it.
Sure. But now ask the question: what will it be worth over the long term? I.e., how much will others be willing to pay for stock X 1, 3, 5 and 10 years from now?
This is the good old classic Ben Graham line about the market being a voting mechanism in the short term, and a weighing one in the long term. There are such things as short term pricing bubbles which are, in effect, pyramid schemes; they can't be sustained because it would require an infinite supply of suckers and money to keep pushing the price higher. Eventually you get to a group of late buyers who can't find anybody to sell to, and pop, there it goes.
On the other hand, real growth of a company's business puts the company in a position where it is capable of rewarding all of its shareholders equally, in proportion to how much stock they own (e.g. through dividends or repurchases). Even if people all too often band together and form an occasional speculative bubble, over the long term they can only expect to be able to find buyers who will pay for a company no more than an amount proportionate to its potential for real growth, adjusted downwards for the an estimate of its risk.
The portable player vendors should include a set of small closed headphones with their players, instead of earbuds.
I know people like earbuds because of their small size, and this is a disincentive for the vendors, but really, they should all get together for some wholesome industry initiative action, form a flashy hearing protection initiative with a conspicuous logo, publicize it all over in the press, agree only to include headphones that block a certain amount of ambient noise with their players, and slap the logo on their products.
The advantages:
Publicity for the participants.
Potentially, some tax breaks, if the thing is set up right.
Public goodwill.
Some measure of protection against lawsuits. If somebody sues them, they can tout the fact that they include headphones that block ambient noise with their products.
Some people might even stop turning their players so loud, and keep their hearing longer.
I still don't understand how can Google be valued at over 100 billion USD. An advertising company that also built some pretty good software? The lion share of their profits comes from ads, but I never click on those ads. I guess there must be someone out there who does click on them.
You can easily value Google from the comfort of your own chair. Just browse over to this page, and note the share price. Go over to the "Key Statistics" page, and note the total number of shares outstanding, and multiply it by the share price.
Though, you don't actually have to do that multiplication, because the very first page there already has the result computed for you ("Market Cap: 119.15B").
So, why is Google valued at over $100B? Because that's how much people are currently willing to pay for it, as determined by how much they're currently willing to pay for each individual share of the company. It has nothing to do directly with how much swag the company owns, or how much money they make a year, or how advanced their technology is. It has more to do with what people believe about the company's growth prospects; the better they think the prospects are, the more they are willing to pay. If they overestimate those prospects, then they lose money.
You shouldn't find it odd - you should find it more convincing, being that he's someone saying "subject A is harder than subject B" when he has experience in both.
Um, but Graham doesn't know jack about French literature, or gender theory, or feminism, or ethnography, or sociolinguistics, or...
Shame on you, for offering gratuituous metaphors while casually distorting Kuhn's ideas to fit your preconceptions.
Kuhn's paradigm shifts, perhaps one of the worst uses of technical terms that penetrated '80s business ideology, are more in line with the biological idea of punctuated equilibria applied to intellectualism. Things cruise along for a little while, ho-hum, until the intellectual climate changes and then science truly progresses.
Except that Kuhn's model does not claim that any particular science (not the bare, general "science" you use there; that's a non-Kuhnian way of thinking) "progresses" when it undergoes a paradigm shift. In fact, since the old and new paradigms are inconmesurable, the claim is meaningless.
Only if you are committed to be endlessly lax as to what you label a "computer."
That is: from my personal experience with people who claim this, I have this huge suspicion that no actual fact would dissuade you from the belief that the brain is a "computer." If I asked you to define "computer," and then I managed to get you to agree that some particular fact about the brain was incompatible with your claim that the brain is a "computer," I really believe you would not abandon your claim; rather, you'd redefine "computer" to fit the fact. This, of course, would beg the question, since, in effect, it is a form of assuming the conclusion.
Searle has made a related argument (which IIRC he regards as better than the Chinese Room, but nobody seems to have listened to): there is no natural fact of the matter as to whether something is a "computer." I could in principle, given some arbitrary mapping between the atoms that make up my wall and some Turing machine (or lambda term, or whatever), claim that my wall is a computer. Calling something a "computer" is just an interpretation that we impose on it.
Often a company will split to make the stock more affordable to smaller invsetors, but only in the sense that the price has become so expensive they won't even buy ONE share. Splitting doesn't change the fact that they own only a pittance in the company, but it does at least make it possible to own that pittance.
But the grandparent poster's point, if I understand correctly, is that that is precisely the reason not to split. Companies that avoid splits do not want to make it possible for smaller investors to own shares.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'll bet you he didn't (a) measure how much it is actually used, nor (b) elaborate on any standard by which we may judge how much usage of the passive is "overuse."
...and you established this "fact" exactly how?
To be more charitable towards Strunk and White, they kind of incipiently shoot at the rule that subjects are usually topical, in the little bit where they talk about the passive being OK if the topic of the paragraph is the passive subject. The problems are that: (a) they issue an unhelpful, near-blanket prohibition against a construction, and an even more unhelpful side comment that it's somehow sometimes OK; (b) native English speakers already know at some level that subject should be topical, and already use passives in their spontaneous speech to make sure that the topical argument is the subject of the sentence.
That's a bunch of bullshit. Is riding is a periphrastic progressive form. You won't find a linguist anywhere that says anything of the sort that you've said here.
Also, the best way to avoid the "it's" and "its" issues is advice I received from a professor: never write a sentence requiring either. A sentence is less ambiguous when the sentence does not contain the word "it," although takes a bit of effort. He dropped a paper's grade by one letter if he saw the word "it" used anywhere in a final draft.
Your professor is a moron. Why should anybody refrain from using any grammatical construction used by all of the authors in the English language literary canon for the past 500 years or so, because of a dumb apostrophe? If for some reason the apostrophe really matters (like, you have to send your text to a bunch of jackasses who won't actually read it, and instead merely scan it mechanically for every instance of perfectly grammatical English that they were somehow taught never to use), well, that's what we have copyeditors and proofreaders for. Worry about organization and audience first, and only then worry about the small stuff.
Um, why?
Every single confused attempt I've seen at explaining why passives are such a horrible thing have turned out to be nonsense.
And the prescriptive grammar of other European languages have no comparable proscriptions. Are the people who teach writing in those languages morons who've failed to recognize an universally valid principle of logical language, or is it just that literate English speakers are traditionally taught nonsense?
Yes, but do realize that English speakers, um, already speak English.
Look at these bits in particular:
Yup, even if you complete the requirements of their offers, they're not required to actually send you the machine.No, it doesn't raise any of your thoughts. You already had the thoughts in question beforehand, and you feel whatever correlation you have in mind justifies you in what you've believed all along. That's very different.
Now, there are facts you could seek out that would seriously support or disconfirm your expectations. You could actually look for real statistics correlating the incidence of various diseases with factors such as ethnicity, gender, social class, population density, and so on. However, you clearly do not care to do so, because you are only interested in "evidence" that merely sounds as if it might confirm what you want to believe.
Meanwhile, in actual public health circles, there is a discussion going on about what has been called the "Latino Health Paradox." This is a collection of facts that a number of people have measured, indicating that Mexican immigrants to the USA, overall, tend to be in better health that the American population at large. Here's, for example, a New Republic article on the phenomenon.
What does your claim tell us? That you don't care to look at actual facts. You have your set of preconceptions, and are on the lookout for facts that confirm it.
Equalizing the prices in the American and Chinese DVD markets can ultimately only be sustained by equalizing the prices in all other markets that they interact with. Critically, the labor market. If you want $1.50 DVDs in the USA, you should also be willing to accept Chinese wages.
I doubt you have taken much (if any) real, higher mathematics. You know, the kind where they don't give you problems where you're supposed to come up with a set of numbers for an answer, but rather, the kind where what you're expected to do is prove theorems about some kind of mathematical structure, which most likely doesn't even involve numbers.
Suppose Acme Inc. buys widgets and gadgets, and assembles them together into fudgets. Then it offers the fudgets for sale at more than the price of the widgets and gadgets that go into the fudgets. Why should I buy Acme's fudgets, instead of buying widgets and gadgets and making the fudgets myself? Whatever reason there is (if there is one, that is) is the value that Acme has added.
They may know more about fudgets than I do, and thus make a better fudget than I could; they may make a lot more fudgets than I need, and can achieve economies of scale; they may be able to offer me better advice on how to actually use the fudgets; they may absorb some of the risk of defective fudgets through a guarantee or service plans; etc.
A simpler example is compensated middlemen in transactions. Suppose I have a good to sell. How do I find the bidders that offer the best price? I can interrupt all of my other work to go and try to round up potential buyers, but this can be a forbidding task. Or I can go to a person who makes their living from matching sellers with the best bidders for the good in question. The buyer pays more money for the good than what I get, and the middleman pockets the difference; this amount is often called the spread. For this arrangement to work, the amount of the sale price that the middleman takes must be less than what it would have cost me to find the best bidder on my own. Or, in other words, the middleman's spread can only be rationally justified if he actually adds value to the transaction.
Your problem is that you don't even care what the letter of the law says. There is such a thing as largely uniform laws on the disclosure of trade secrets in the USA, and you could have found this just by looking at even as bad an information source as Wikipedia.
Ask the source of the information for proof that they are authorized to disclose it. If the proof is good, you go ahead and publish the information. If you want the source to give you fake leaks in the future, you don't disclose the fact that the "leak" was in fact authorized.
The people doing the fake "leaks" are trying to get you to do something that sounds sketchy, for their benefit. They should therefore accommodate you; if the "leak" is really authorized, they should be able to prove it to you. And if they want you to keep mum on the fact that the "leak" was authorized, they should also offer you some incentive to do so.
You seem to imply that the two parts to this are somehow contradictory to each other, or at least incongruous. But keep in mind that the fact that something's online for free (beer) doesn't mean that it's unencumbered by IP issues. The best example is the US Patent Office online patent database; you can search it for free, but you sure as hell can't use the inventions described therein for free.
I'm still reading up on this, but I think the biopiracy problems with the proposed Google database are the following:
- By putting all this information online for free, it makes it easier for biopirates to do their deed. It will become much easier to collect all the supporting information needed to put together a patent application.
- By putting all this genome data online, one denies the people who provided it from having a say and/or financially benefitting from their knowledge. If we allow biopatents (and that is a big "if," I know), then other cultures' bioproperty and bioknowledge acquire an economic value they don't have otherwise. The argument then is that it's unjust to stiff them out of this value without their informed consent, even if you don't profit from the information yourself.
Really, the notion of informed consent that I highlighted is central. One core moral vice involved in biopiracy is obtaining materials and knowledge from other people through uninformed consent. You and your buddy go on a trip to the Amazon, hang out with some tribe, gain their trust, and you askl them to give you a bunch of plant samples and explain their medicinal uses. You, of course, intend to go back home and sell the samples and notes to a big company, which will patent them.In order to make an informed decision on what to give you, the natives need to know all that you know about the patentability and value of the knowledge and material you're asking from them. However, this is exactly the information that you will hold from them.
Even if you specifically want a fund that invests in larger US companies, there's non-S&P 500 based large-cap index funds. And if you can't easily move your money from S&P 500 funds, there's also "extended market" funds that buy everything *except* the S&P 500. These funds will now have to *sell* their Google stock, and put the proceeds into other stock.
Sure. But now ask the question: what will it be worth over the long term? I.e., how much will others be willing to pay for stock X 1, 3, 5 and 10 years from now?
This is the good old classic Ben Graham line about the market being a voting mechanism in the short term, and a weighing one in the long term. There are such things as short term pricing bubbles which are, in effect, pyramid schemes; they can't be sustained because it would require an infinite supply of suckers and money to keep pushing the price higher. Eventually you get to a group of late buyers who can't find anybody to sell to, and pop, there it goes.
On the other hand, real growth of a company's business puts the company in a position where it is capable of rewarding all of its shareholders equally, in proportion to how much stock they own (e.g. through dividends or repurchases). Even if people all too often band together and form an occasional speculative bubble, over the long term they can only expect to be able to find buyers who will pay for a company no more than an amount proportionate to its potential for real growth, adjusted downwards for the an estimate of its risk.
I know people like earbuds because of their small size, and this is a disincentive for the vendors, but really, they should all get together for some wholesome industry initiative action, form a flashy hearing protection initiative with a conspicuous logo, publicize it all over in the press, agree only to include headphones that block a certain amount of ambient noise with their players, and slap the logo on their products. The advantages:
You can easily value Google from the comfort of your own chair. Just browse over to this page, and note the share price. Go over to the "Key Statistics" page, and note the total number of shares outstanding, and multiply it by the share price.
Though, you don't actually have to do that multiplication, because the very first page there already has the result computed for you ("Market Cap: 119.15B").
So, why is Google valued at over $100B? Because that's how much people are currently willing to pay for it, as determined by how much they're currently willing to pay for each individual share of the company. It has nothing to do directly with how much swag the company owns, or how much money they make a year, or how advanced their technology is. It has more to do with what people believe about the company's growth prospects; the better they think the prospects are, the more they are willing to pay. If they overestimate those prospects, then they lose money.
Um, but Graham doesn't know jack about French literature, or gender theory, or feminism, or ethnography, or sociolinguistics, or ...
Kuhn's paradigm shifts, perhaps one of the worst uses of technical terms that penetrated '80s business ideology, are more in line with the biological idea of punctuated equilibria applied to intellectualism. Things cruise along for a little while, ho-hum, until the intellectual climate changes and then science truly progresses.
Except that Kuhn's model does not claim that any particular science (not the bare, general "science" you use there; that's a non-Kuhnian way of thinking) "progresses" when it undergoes a paradigm shift. In fact, since the old and new paradigms are inconmesurable, the claim is meaningless.
That is: from my personal experience with people who claim this, I have this huge suspicion that no actual fact would dissuade you from the belief that the brain is a "computer." If I asked you to define "computer," and then I managed to get you to agree that some particular fact about the brain was incompatible with your claim that the brain is a "computer," I really believe you would not abandon your claim; rather, you'd redefine "computer" to fit the fact. This, of course, would beg the question, since, in effect, it is a form of assuming the conclusion.
Searle has made a related argument (which IIRC he regards as better than the Chinese Room, but nobody seems to have listened to): there is no natural fact of the matter as to whether something is a "computer." I could in principle, given some arbitrary mapping between the atoms that make up my wall and some Turing machine (or lambda term, or whatever), claim that my wall is a computer. Calling something a "computer" is just an interpretation that we impose on it.
But the grandparent poster's point, if I understand correctly, is that that is precisely the reason not to split. Companies that avoid splits do not want to make it possible for smaller investors to own shares.
There's not much of a leap from "nature" to "mature."