I'm too cheap to donate, and I'm only 16 anyway... But Wikipedia is a really good resource-- I've contributed to it myself.
Have you considered the possibility that, if you're still in secondary school, you might not exactly be qualified to write encyclopedia articles?
Come on, people, face it. Wikipedia boils down to a bunch of arrogant, half-educated, self-important g**ks blowing off on topics they hardly know. What's worse, now they want your money for their mediocre vanity project. I say: don't give them a goddamn cent, and buy yourselves a real encyclopedia (one which uses its money to pay experts to write and review its articles) if you need a good survey of general topics.
Noam Chomsky has become a crank for the most part. Have you read any of his recent political writings? And I'm not even sure his earlier work on linguistics and stuff is really all that well accepted anymore per se.
Excuse me. I'm a linguist, and I must tell you that I'm quite sick of the fact that Chomsky, every fifth year, makes some sort of pronouncement about changing his mind about some basic "axiom" of his theory (calling something so informal an "axiom" is overkill, really), and seeing all the big shots in the field completely rewrite all of their research to fit in to it.
Seriously. Chomsky has a goddamn academic cult around him, which dominates Linguistics in the U.S.
I don't think there's enough information to be either optimistic or pessimistic.
BSDi has working with the FreeBSD Project quite closely, disclosing code which is being incorporated into FreeBSD 5.0. Now BSDi is under new management. What will be the new management's take on this? Will they leave this untouched? Will they make changes here? Good or bad? How much can they affect the FreeBSD Project?
If Wind River is going to "integrate" FreeBSD the same way they "integrated" PSOS, then you can kiss it goodbye.
The FreeBSD Project exists as a separate entity from BSDi and Wind River. It is not going away. This is not "Wind River gained control over FreeBSD"; this is "Wind River gained control over a company that was doing FreeBSD work".
I even got a 600 on the Spanish ACT, though I can't read a Spanish newspaper much less carry on a conversation.
Regardless of the merits of the Spanish ACT, reading a newspaper (and especially a local newspaper) in a foreign language is typically much tougher than rudimentary conversation. Newspaper text involves a lot of complex and obscure grammar, fancy vocabulary, and TONS of cultural background-- history, geography and political organization of the country in question, well-known figures and organizations of all sorts (e.g. political parties and retired politicians, local businesspersons, etc.), all sorts of abbreviations and metaphors (equivalents to stuff like "GOP" or elephant renderings to refer to the Republican Party), and the list just goes on.
Hell, I'm a native Spanish speaker, and understanding a lot out of a newspaper from another Spanish speaking country can be difficult at times. Try reading local news stories in English from a local paper, and seeing how much knowledge is just presupposed.
If you want to try news in Spanish (which, again, would be very advanced Spanish), the things to read are the reports from international news agencies like EFE-- they are written for an international audience, and thus they have to minimize this kind of difficulty.
You can mount your ram disk noexec-- this precludes executables from being run from them. It doesn't stop scripts from being run, though, but presumably in a small enough system you will avoid having Pearl.
This sounds like the typical P.C. re-writing of history that has been going on for the past decade, and has boiled down to a Tonto-esque "Americans bad".
Look at the fucking historical sources yourself. Look at all the evidence-- primary sources, racial mixing, language and culture survival, etc. It is a historical *fact*, and has been considered so for far more than 10 years.
I think it would be more accurate to own up to the fact that all cultures, given the opportunity to do bad things to other cultures, will do so.
Where did I express anything in support or opposition to this? It's absolutely irrelevant. All I did was, granting that both the Spanish and the English did plenty of bad stuff in the Americas, still the Spanish were a lot milder. This does not excuse anybody, it is just a *fact*.
It also looks like the consquistadores did their level best to leave no trace of that culture. Any Aztec speakers in your neighborhood?
No, no Nahuatl speakers that I know of here in Montreal (ahem), but there's like 1.3 million Nahuatl speakers in Mexico. There's also a few million Quechua speakers (the language of the Incas); Quechua is even an official language in a few south American countries. And 95% percent of the population of Paraguay speaks Guaraní. The Mayan language family has over a million speakers.
The conquistadores *were* very intolerant of non-catholic worship, but they were tolerant of native languages (in the sense that they had no urgent desire to eradicate them; it *is* true that monolingual speakers of a native language frequently face prejudice). Native languages in general face less of a risk of extintion in ex-Spanish colonies than in the US. The Bible was translated very early on into several of the widespread native languages, for instance.
We have little cause for pride here in the North, but to be chastised by an Hispanic for our failure to respect other cultures and languages is ironic indeed.
There is no irony. Period. The Spaniard conquistadores, despite all their inexcusable actions, were mild compared to English pioneers. This is a historical fact that can be shown by mant sorts of data-- language survival like above, or an analysis of official policy of the Spanish empire (from the very start, around 1505 give or take a few years, the queen declared the natives to be her subjects, which, yes, is very imperialistic and arrogant, but it also meant that the natives were entitled to equal protection and to be members of the colonial society, even if they hardly ever had it. Native americans in general were not granted US citizenship until the '20s, IIRC).
In a nutshell, the Spaniard colonization was interested above all in christianizing the natives, and was a lot happier to have them around than other colonizations. The American pioneers mainly wanted more land.
Maybe I've been misled. You're clearly an educated man -- can you name an AmerIndian who's known for something other than being killed by the Spanish?
Why, Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Prize of Peace, comes immediately to mind. The Zapatistas in Chiapas are mostly amerindians. And this is only touching the surface.
You seem to be under the terrible misconception that the Spanish killed the natives where they went. I'm sorry, but that would be the English. The Spanish took over land and converted them to christianity, many times with a perjudicial effect on their culture, language, and livelihood, or many times introducing disease that decimated populations, but outright massacres were comparatively rare.
First of all, anytime somebody calls the northern Spain varieties "standard" (even if you attach no serious significance to the label, as you make explicit), it just drives me nuts. It's around 50 million speakers out of more or less 350 million who speak like that. Hell, there's about twice as many mexicans as people who pronounce the zeta.
So, in the rest of this post I'll refer to seseante dialects as standard.
When two or three sounds are this similar, something has to give. Either they grow closer and merge, or they grow further apart from one another. The seseo phenomenon is the first effect--that is, merging, wheras the differentiation of standard (read: Northern) Spanish is the second one.
Something implicit you could have stressed: contrary to common opinion, seseo does not consist of people losing or failing to make the distinction between ese and zeta. The speakers of the standard *never* had a zeta to begin with.
Spanish is full of fricatives, far more than in English.
I don't think so. (Only a precise knowledge of English phonetics, and the fact that my books are at my office, stops me from being sure.)
If you think of phonemes whose default realization is clearly fricative, Spanish has/f/,/th/ (only in nonstandard (i.e. Northern) Spanish),/s/,/x/, and only possibly one more (for the very variable realizations of what Spanish orthography writes "y"); that's 4, at most five. English has/th/ (the "th" in "thin"),/dh/ (the "th" in "this"),/f/,/v/,/s/,/z/,/S/ (as in "shop"),/Z/ (as in "Sean"), and/h/; that's 9 (unless I messed up and/th/,/dh/ are allophones, which would make it 8).
Of course, I'm not counting allophones here, while you did count fricative allophones of the Spanish voiced stops/b/,/d/,/g/, and the voiced allophone [z] of/s/. But how many allophones may we find of the English fricatives? My initial guess is that if we were to count allophones for the English fricatives, the more likely result is that English would still have more.
You have to remember that these guys are academics, who are interested in the PURITY of the language, so they are somewhat removed from most speakers of that language.
The guy cited in that article *does* sound like extremist purists. But don't think that all members of the Spanish Language Academies (all 21 of them) are like this. The Academy, after all, *has* accepted plenty of borrowings from English over the years. For example, "escanear" (to scan), "escáner", "eslogan", "estándar", "récord", "chequear", "casete", "estrés". All these will be in the next edition of the Spanish Academy dictionary. (The Academy still recommends usage of terms of Spanish origin, but they do recognize when a word has entered general usage.)
Having a language academy is no more absurd than having standards bodies for tech stuff. Spanish is a language spoken in 21 countries. You *need* a standard dictionary and grammar that tells you how to express things in a standard way if you want to make yourself understood by as wide an audience as possible.
Still, language academies are in general supposed to oppose mindless borrowing from other languages. Why? First, borrowed words may be borrowed with very different pronunciations and shades of meaning in different places (and this is a fact about Spanish: east-coast Puerto Rican "spanglish" and west-coast Chicano "spanglish" have confusing differences in words borrowed, and pronunciation of borrowed words).
Second, more importantly, academies *have* to promote the means offered by the language itself to express different concepts-- this is important for the general health of the language. There is a perilous slide from starting mindlessly borrowing words for a particular field that can end in the language ceasing to be used in that field at all. This makes the set of contexts in which speakers can effectively use their language shrink. And this kind of shrinkage is a major component of language death.
The way a language dies is that it gradually becomes replaced by another one in many contexts-- i.e., official uses of the language (laws stop being written and administered in the language, professionals communicate with another language, etc.), the general public use ceases, then children stop learning it, and then it's gone.
In the US in particular, Spanish is not used at all in many contexts. Laws are not written in Spanish; governments operate in English; education is in English; commerce is mostly in English; etc. Because of this, it is difficult in the US for somebody to learn to use Spanish in this kind of context.
I am soooo pissed off at all of those people out there that tie their language to their culture and then their culture to their identity. I see this the most in chicano and french writing. This does not have ANY positive effects. All this does is make people close-minded and against change all because they want to "preserver their culture." Whatever...
You advocate monolingualism and monoculture, yet you call people with more than one language, and who understand more than one culture, "close minded"? Gee...
the laws to protect the French language in Quebec are just a civilized version of ethnic cleansing.
How?
Those laws were there because, in a province where the majority speaks French, people couldn't get services and goods in French. If you would prefer that, well, don't be surprised other people will oppose you vehemently.
The bottom line is that you are not going to lose your culture by learning another language. You lose your culture by deliberately choosing to abandon it.
Bullshit. You are not your culture, nor its sole member; thus, the survival of your culture is not dependent on *your* actions as an individual, but those of your whole group. And there can be serious economic and social pressures against your culture, against which most members could be powerless. This sort of pressure should be kept in check-- this is why language laws exist.
If you bothered to know what actually happened, you'd realize how stupid you look.
The Aztecs ruled a huge territory. A good deal many tribes in this territory wanted to free themselves from the Aztecs. The Spaniards managed to take over because they had support of other tribes.
And anyway, Spanish colonization was *very* different from English colonization. Just look at the ratio of mixed european/native/black ancestry in Latin American countries in general.
Not that the spaniard conquistadores were saints-- they were far from it-- but what happened in the US was positively hellish in comparison.
Actually, I think it was quite a good point, and I disagree that the answer is a "brain transplant".
Then you are wrong. Period.
What you're doing is transplanting an individuals' personality.
No, you're transplanting an individual's brain. In any case, it's not the body you're transplanting.
Now what do you consider more important, a person's identity or their physical presence. If their identity defines them, then in a way you've done a lot more than what is conventially meant by the term "transplant". I would argue that the item being replaced is the body, and not the brain. I mean, would you be doing the transplant for the good of the body or for the good of the brain?
All of this is wholly irrelevant. "Transplant" in the medical sense involve taking an organ from one organism's body and putting it in another's. The definition excludes the concept of "body transplant" right off the bat, since a body is not an organ. And it certainly excludes "personalities" or other such mentalistic fictions you seem to reify.
Of course, if you're going to be a pedant, then you're right, semantically. But your scientific (anal?) approach to reading prevents you from seeing the point he was trying to make.
There's nothing particularly scientific to my approach. Using words to mean what they mean is an habit by no means exclusive to scientists.
Accusing me of pedantry simply for expressing myself clearly is quite low, BTW.
I bet when you're losing an argument, you're the kind of person who starts to criticise your opponent's use of language in an attempt to avoid having to acknowledge their points.
I hope gambling is illegal in your state, because you wouln't be very successful. Not only because you are so arrogant and foolhardy, making judgements about what you have not enough information to judge (like me), but also because you show yourself not to be very bright in your comment:
There was no "point" put forward by the post I replied to. The post consisted of a single question. Questions don't express propositions, thus, there was nothing in that post to agree or disagree with.
If anybody in the thread had actually made any "point" to the effect that this operation was a (ugh) "body transplant", how can they be said to have made a point if what they have said, by virtue of the meanings of the words "transplant" and "body", fails to have a sensible meaning?
Well, technically speaking, if we disregard all that we know about linguistic pragmatics, and take it on plain semantic grounds, it actually *does* have a meaning. But the extension of the term "body transplant" (ugh) is null, thus any proposition which involves it will be either tautologous or contradictory. And while real language use involves a good deal many obvious tautologies ("war is war", "men are men"), it is extremely uncommon for these to involve terms with null extensions. So anybody who uses such a term should have their competence seriously questioned.
Would you call it "brain transplant" or "body transplant"?
This has got to be one of the dumbest ways to try to sound smart ever.
To transplant means "to remove and put somewhere else". And of course, in the hypthetical operation in question, a brain is removed from a body, and placed in another. Thus, it is a brain transplant.
A "body transplant" (I can hardly believe I brought myself to actually *write* that oxymoron) would involve removing a body, and putting it in another body. Of course, since the concept of "removing a body" is senseless, there can be no such concept.
I'm always glad to see progress in this field- hopefully the long-term results of this surgery will be successful.
I just thought this might be a golden opportunity to remind the typically idealistic community of this site that "our" (== the ruling class of powerful countries like the US) understanding of the human nervous system, and many other things about human biology, comes in a big part from harmful experiments performed on third world peasants or prisoners, without their consent or even knowledge. Thus, people in places like Aztlán, Central America, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Haiti, etc., have been exposed to mutagens, radiation, experimental birth-control pills that cause birth defects, etc.
Thus, there are many among us that have reasons *not* to be glad about the "possibilities" that others at the top of the international food chain may see into this. We can only ask ourselves: what further abomination will be imposed on nuestra gente in the name of "progress"?
Yes, the "subscription" will be cheaper at first, but can you honestly believe M$ is gonna try to migrate to this if it doesn't put more money in their coffers in the long run? (BTW - when office 11 comes out, M$ will say "we said free updates, we didn't say a whole new version")....no, i don't see why anyone would have a problem with this;-)
I just *knew* some slashbot would come up with precisely this comment. Which is why I wrote in my top=level post:
And don't come out with the crazy conspiracy theory that "Office 11 will be subscription only". First of all, it attributes to MS a level of stupidity they simply lack. And there is simply not basis for that statement.
So, of course, now I must ask you: on the basis of which evidence do you claim Office 11 will be subscription only? And, oh, your drooling hatred of Microsoft does not count as "evidence".
You know this place has totally gone to hell when user #203477 can predict what #125130 will say.
Now M$ can force you to pay an arbitrary fee, and the program (and thus access to your data) won't work if you don't continue to pay. In other words, they blackmail you with your own data, and worst of all this is actually legal.
It is incredible what nonsense irrational hate of MS causes people to spout. Not only you misrepresent the facts (as somebody points out, you'd still be able to view documents with an expired version), you also make the implicit assumption that this will be the only licensing option available (when the press release clearly states it it won't), and simply fail to see the obvious fact that you could have saved your files in another format all along.
All righty then, Mr. Smarty Pants, why is it good? What extra service does the "rent" (vs. own) get you? What is it that would make me "buy" this rather than a version that doesn't auto-destruct? MS claims this is "an exciting new opportunity" -- for who? Their bankers?
Gee, last I heard, it is the buyer's responsibility (not the seller's, not a third party's, like you) to ascertain the quality of the deal he's getting. Whatever you believe about this is thus only relevant to your purchasing decisions.
Thus, why then act as if your opinion on the matter is of any other importance?
So Microsoft offers an additional option for people who want to use their software in terms different from the existing ones, and everybody just comes out and denounces them for giving their customers a choice. Yup, what a bunch of bigots on this site.
And don't come out with the crazy conspiracy theory that "Office 11 will be subscription only". First of all, it attributes to MS a level of stupidity they simply lack. And there is simply not basis for that statement.
Open source advocates are always talking about the virtue of choice, but when MS offers choice, they cry foul. How convenient.
A CD reissue of an old LP is typically not a reproduction of an old recording-- it is a remastered interpretation of the original recording, in a different format. And mastering is certainly creative work.
Slashdot Mirror
This is less properly described as "book search", than as "book advertisement service". In other words, that's all excerpts in that list of "books".
Have you considered the possibility that, if you're still in secondary school, you might not exactly be qualified to write encyclopedia articles?
Come on, people, face it. Wikipedia boils down to a bunch of arrogant, half-educated, self-important g**ks blowing off on topics they hardly know. What's worse, now they want your money for their mediocre vanity project. I say: don't give them a goddamn cent, and buy yourselves a real encyclopedia (one which uses its money to pay experts to write and review its articles) if you need a good survey of general topics.
Excuse me. I'm a linguist, and I must tell you that I'm quite sick of the fact that Chomsky, every fifth year, makes some sort of pronouncement about changing his mind about some basic "axiom" of his theory (calling something so informal an "axiom" is overkill, really), and seeing all the big shots in the field completely rewrite all of their research to fit in to it.
Seriously. Chomsky has a goddamn academic cult around him, which dominates Linguistics in the U.S.
BSDi has working with the FreeBSD Project quite closely, disclosing code which is being incorporated into FreeBSD 5.0. Now BSDi is under new management. What will be the new management's take on this? Will they leave this untouched? Will they make changes here? Good or bad? How much can they affect the FreeBSD Project?
There's not much to do but sit and wait.
The FreeBSD Project exists as a separate entity from BSDi and Wind River. It is not going away. This is not "Wind River gained control over FreeBSD"; this is "Wind River gained control over a company that was doing FreeBSD work".
Regardless of the merits of the Spanish ACT, reading a newspaper (and especially a local newspaper) in a foreign language is typically much tougher than rudimentary conversation. Newspaper text involves a lot of complex and obscure grammar, fancy vocabulary, and TONS of cultural background-- history, geography and political organization of the country in question, well-known figures and organizations of all sorts (e.g. political parties and retired politicians, local businesspersons, etc.), all sorts of abbreviations and metaphors (equivalents to stuff like "GOP" or elephant renderings to refer to the Republican Party), and the list just goes on.
Hell, I'm a native Spanish speaker, and understanding a lot out of a newspaper from another Spanish speaking country can be difficult at times. Try reading local news stories in English from a local paper, and seeing how much knowledge is just presupposed.
If you want to try news in Spanish (which, again, would be very advanced Spanish), the things to read are the reports from international news agencies like EFE-- they are written for an international audience, and thus they have to minimize this kind of difficulty.
You can mount your ram disk noexec-- this precludes executables from being run from them. It doesn't stop scripts from being run, though, but presumably in a small enough system you will avoid having Pearl.
Look at the fucking historical sources yourself. Look at all the evidence-- primary sources, racial mixing, language and culture survival, etc. It is a historical *fact*, and has been considered so for far more than 10 years.
I think it would be more accurate to own up to the fact that all cultures, given the opportunity to do bad things to other cultures, will do so.
Where did I express anything in support or opposition to this? It's absolutely irrelevant. All I did was, granting that both the Spanish and the English did plenty of bad stuff in the Americas, still the Spanish were a lot milder. This does not excuse anybody, it is just a *fact*.
No, no Nahuatl speakers that I know of here in Montreal (ahem), but there's like 1.3 million Nahuatl speakers in Mexico. There's also a few million Quechua speakers (the language of the Incas); Quechua is even an official language in a few south American countries. And 95% percent of the population of Paraguay speaks Guaraní. The Mayan language family has over a million speakers.
The conquistadores *were* very intolerant of non-catholic worship, but they were tolerant of native languages (in the sense that they had no urgent desire to eradicate them; it *is* true that monolingual speakers of a native language frequently face prejudice). Native languages in general face less of a risk of extintion in ex-Spanish colonies than in the US. The Bible was translated very early on into several of the widespread native languages, for instance.
We have little cause for pride here in the North, but to be chastised by an Hispanic for our failure to respect other cultures and languages is ironic indeed.
There is no irony. Period. The Spaniard conquistadores, despite all their inexcusable actions, were mild compared to English pioneers. This is a historical fact that can be shown by mant sorts of data-- language survival like above, or an analysis of official policy of the Spanish empire (from the very start, around 1505 give or take a few years, the queen declared the natives to be her subjects, which, yes, is very imperialistic and arrogant, but it also meant that the natives were entitled to equal protection and to be members of the colonial society, even if they hardly ever had it. Native americans in general were not granted US citizenship until the '20s, IIRC).
In a nutshell, the Spaniard colonization was interested above all in christianizing the natives, and was a lot happier to have them around than other colonizations. The American pioneers mainly wanted more land.
Maybe I've been misled. You're clearly an educated man -- can you name an AmerIndian who's known for something other than being killed by the Spanish?
Why, Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Prize of Peace, comes immediately to mind. The Zapatistas in Chiapas are mostly amerindians. And this is only touching the surface.
You seem to be under the terrible misconception that the Spanish killed the natives where they went. I'm sorry, but that would be the English. The Spanish took over land and converted them to christianity, many times with a perjudicial effect on their culture, language, and livelihood, or many times introducing disease that decimated populations, but outright massacres were comparatively rare.
First of all, anytime somebody calls the northern Spain varieties "standard" (even if you attach no serious significance to the label, as you make explicit), it just drives me nuts. It's around 50 million speakers out of more or less 350 million who speak like that. Hell, there's about twice as many mexicans as people who pronounce the zeta.
So, in the rest of this post I'll refer to seseante dialects as standard.
When two or three sounds are this similar, something has to give. Either they grow closer and merge, or they grow further apart from one another. The seseo phenomenon is the first effect--that is, merging, wheras the differentiation of standard (read: Northern) Spanish is the second one.
Something implicit you could have stressed: contrary to common opinion, seseo does not consist of people losing or failing to make the distinction between ese and zeta. The speakers of the standard *never* had a zeta to begin with.
Spanish is full of fricatives, far more than in English.
I don't think so. (Only a precise knowledge of English phonetics, and the fact that my books are at my office, stops me from being sure.)
If you think of phonemes whose default realization is clearly fricative, Spanish has /f/, /th/ (only in nonstandard (i.e. Northern) Spanish), /s/, /x/, and only possibly one more (for the very variable realizations of what Spanish orthography writes "y"); that's 4, at most five. English has /th/ (the "th" in "thin"), /dh/ (the "th" in "this"), /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /S/ (as in "shop"), /Z/ (as in "Sean"), and /h/; that's 9 (unless I messed up and /th/, /dh/ are allophones, which would make it 8).
Of course, I'm not counting allophones here, while you did count fricative allophones of the Spanish voiced stops /b/, /d/, /g/, and the voiced allophone [z] of /s/. But how many allophones may we find of the English fricatives? My initial guess is that if we were to count allophones for the English fricatives, the more likely result is that English would still have more.
The guy cited in that article *does* sound like extremist purists. But don't think that all members of the Spanish Language Academies (all 21 of them) are like this. The Academy, after all, *has* accepted plenty of borrowings from English over the years. For example, "escanear" (to scan), "escáner", "eslogan", "estándar", "récord", "chequear", "casete", "estrés". All these will be in the next edition of the Spanish Academy dictionary. (The Academy still recommends usage of terms of Spanish origin, but they do recognize when a word has entered general usage.)
Having a language academy is no more absurd than having standards bodies for tech stuff. Spanish is a language spoken in 21 countries. You *need* a standard dictionary and grammar that tells you how to express things in a standard way if you want to make yourself understood by as wide an audience as possible.
Still, language academies are in general supposed to oppose mindless borrowing from other languages. Why? First, borrowed words may be borrowed with very different pronunciations and shades of meaning in different places (and this is a fact about Spanish: east-coast Puerto Rican "spanglish" and west-coast Chicano "spanglish" have confusing differences in words borrowed, and pronunciation of borrowed words).
Second, more importantly, academies *have* to promote the means offered by the language itself to express different concepts-- this is important for the general health of the language. There is a perilous slide from starting mindlessly borrowing words for a particular field that can end in the language ceasing to be used in that field at all. This makes the set of contexts in which speakers can effectively use their language shrink. And this kind of shrinkage is a major component of language death.
The way a language dies is that it gradually becomes replaced by another one in many contexts-- i.e., official uses of the language (laws stop being written and administered in the language, professionals communicate with another language, etc.), the general public use ceases, then children stop learning it, and then it's gone.
In the US in particular, Spanish is not used at all in many contexts. Laws are not written in Spanish; governments operate in English; education is in English; commerce is mostly in English; etc. Because of this, it is difficult in the US for somebody to learn to use Spanish in this kind of context.
You advocate monolingualism and monoculture, yet you call people with more than one language, and who understand more than one culture, "close minded"? Gee...
How?
Those laws were there because, in a province where the majority speaks French, people couldn't get services and goods in French. If you would prefer that, well, don't be surprised other people will oppose you vehemently.
The bottom line is that you are not going to lose your culture by learning another language. You lose your culture by deliberately choosing to abandon it.
Bullshit. You are not your culture, nor its sole member; thus, the survival of your culture is not dependent on *your* actions as an individual, but those of your whole group. And there can be serious economic and social pressures against your culture, against which most members could be powerless. This sort of pressure should be kept in check-- this is why language laws exist.
If you bothered to know what actually happened, you'd realize how stupid you look.
The Aztecs ruled a huge territory. A good deal many tribes in this territory wanted to free themselves from the Aztecs. The Spaniards managed to take over because they had support of other tribes.
And anyway, Spanish colonization was *very* different from English colonization. Just look at the ratio of mixed european/native/black ancestry in Latin American countries in general.
Not that the spaniard conquistadores were saints-- they were far from it-- but what happened in the US was positively hellish in comparison.
Se me ocurre que quieras decir "aprehensión". Pero coño, todo el mundo dice "miedo", no?
Then you are wrong. Period.
What you're doing is transplanting an individuals' personality.
No, you're transplanting an individual's brain. In any case, it's not the body you're transplanting.
Now what do you consider more important, a person's identity or their physical presence. If their identity defines them, then in a way you've done a lot more than what is conventially meant by the term "transplant". I would argue that the item being replaced is the body, and not the brain. I mean, would you be doing the transplant for the good of the body or for the good of the brain?
All of this is wholly irrelevant. "Transplant" in the medical sense involve taking an organ from one organism's body and putting it in another's. The definition excludes the concept of "body transplant" right off the bat, since a body is not an organ. And it certainly excludes "personalities" or other such mentalistic fictions you seem to reify.
Of course, if you're going to be a pedant, then you're right, semantically. But your scientific (anal?) approach to reading prevents you from seeing the point he was trying to make.
There's nothing particularly scientific to my approach. Using words to mean what they mean is an habit by no means exclusive to scientists.
Accusing me of pedantry simply for expressing myself clearly is quite low, BTW.
I bet when you're losing an argument, you're the kind of person who starts to criticise your opponent's use of language in an attempt to avoid having to acknowledge their points.
I hope gambling is illegal in your state, because you wouln't be very successful. Not only because you are so arrogant and foolhardy, making judgements about what you have not enough information to judge (like me), but also because you show yourself not to be very bright in your comment:
Well, technically speaking, if we disregard all that we know about linguistic pragmatics, and take it on plain semantic grounds, it actually *does* have a meaning. But the extension of the term "body transplant" (ugh) is null, thus any proposition which involves it will be either tautologous or contradictory. And while real language use involves a good deal many obvious tautologies ("war is war", "men are men"), it is extremely uncommon for these to involve terms with null extensions. So anybody who uses such a term should have their competence seriously questioned.
Gee, that was a small book...
This has got to be one of the dumbest ways to try to sound smart ever.
To transplant means "to remove and put somewhere else". And of course, in the hypthetical operation in question, a brain is removed from a body, and placed in another. Thus, it is a brain transplant.
A "body transplant" (I can hardly believe I brought myself to actually *write* that oxymoron) would involve removing a body, and putting it in another body. Of course, since the concept of "removing a body" is senseless, there can be no such concept.
I'm always glad to see progress in this field- hopefully the long-term results of this surgery will be successful. I just thought this might be a golden opportunity to remind the typically idealistic community of this site that "our" (== the ruling class of powerful countries like the US) understanding of the human nervous system, and many other things about human biology, comes in a big part from harmful experiments performed on third world peasants or prisoners, without their consent or even knowledge. Thus, people in places like Aztlán, Central America, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Haiti, etc., have been exposed to mutagens, radiation, experimental birth-control pills that cause birth defects, etc.
Thus, there are many among us that have reasons *not* to be glad about the "possibilities" that others at the top of the international food chain may see into this. We can only ask ourselves: what further abomination will be imposed on nuestra gente in the name of "progress"?
I just *knew* some slashbot would come up with precisely this comment. Which is why I wrote in my top=level post:
So, of course, now I must ask you: on the basis of which evidence do you claim Office 11 will be subscription only? And, oh, your drooling hatred of Microsoft does not count as "evidence".
You know this place has totally gone to hell when user #203477 can predict what #125130 will say.
It is incredible what nonsense irrational hate of MS causes people to spout. Not only you misrepresent the facts (as somebody points out, you'd still be able to view documents with an expired version), you also make the implicit assumption that this will be the only licensing option available (when the press release clearly states it it won't), and simply fail to see the obvious fact that you could have saved your files in another format all along.
Idiot.
Gee, last I heard, it is the buyer's responsibility (not the seller's, not a third party's, like you) to ascertain the quality of the deal he's getting. Whatever you believe about this is thus only relevant to your purchasing decisions.
Thus, why then act as if your opinion on the matter is of any other importance?
And don't come out with the crazy conspiracy theory that "Office 11 will be subscription only". First of all, it attributes to MS a level of stupidity they simply lack. And there is simply not basis for that statement.
Open source advocates are always talking about the virtue of choice, but when MS offers choice, they cry foul. How convenient.
A CD reissue of an old LP is typically not a reproduction of an old recording-- it is a remastered interpretation of the original recording, in a different format. And mastering is certainly creative work.
No.
In any case, if you did, it would be a copy for your personal use only.
Idiot.