The same works in the other direction, though. English does have more words than in Shakespeare's time, but it's also lost a lot of words since then. Shakespeare plays are full of words that we no longer use. Quick, what does "exeunt" mean? We've lost a lot of expressiveness words and gained a ton of technology words. Moreover, your average English speaker (someone who's never read Shakespeare) is barely or completely unfamiliar with the culture at that time, and wouldn't understand a lot of concepts that were common in those days. It wouldn't be nearly as bad as for the person in the past coming to the future, because life certainly is more complex now, but it would still be a difficulty.
That depends really. You're assuming hypersonic flight will be incredibly expensive. Even the Concorde wasn't that expensive. How much is a flight on a heavy bizjet? A hypersonic flight should be cheaper than a Concorde ticket; aviation technology has progressed significantly since 1970, and if the hypersonic plane is large enough, the per-seat cost might be OK. For people traveling between, say, Beijing and London, it may not be ridiculous, and would certainly be a lot faster than current means.
Owning the artefact is what matters, and buying a band's cassette isn't that much different from buying their poster - it just so happens that you get to play it as well as having it look cool on your shelf.
Then buy the CD, like I do. You get the artifact, the best possible sound quality (since SACDs and DVDAs never took off), and can put it on your shelf.
Thousands of years? Modern technology is only a few hundred years old. All the Roman-era tech was lost after the fall of Rome, and western society didn't develop any real technology again until the Renaissance, and later the Industrial Revolution. We went from swords to landing on the Moon in less than 500 years.
Advanced planes with the capability for space-flight to other planets? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. If you want to prove this, you'll need a lot more than "it's written down in some text somewhere."
Some people don't claim that ancient Indians had any such things. Instead, they claim that ancient alien visitors had these things, and that ancient Indians regarded them as gods.
Farfetched, absolutely. But much less so that some of the crazy stuff we westerners believe. Over here in the US, a bunch of us actually believe that some guy in upstate New York was shown the location of golden plates by an angel, and these plates had a missing testament describing how Jesus came to the New World and met with a bunch of mesoamerican tribes, for which zero archeological evidence exists. They also believe that God lives on a planet near the star Kolob, and that if you're good in this lifetime, you'll become the god of some other planet. There's a whole bunch of people in Clearwater, Florida who believe that all our mental problems are caused by the disembodied souls of aliens brought here 175M years ago by Xenu of the Galactic Confederation, who brought them here on space-going DC-10s and blew them up in a volcano on Hawaii.
Compared to that stuff, the idea that aliens with advanced technology visited this planet a few thousand years ago is actually quite reasonable. I'm not saying it's true or that there's any veracity to it, but before we make fun of it, maybe we should look at the crazy shit we believe first.
Then you have politicians that flirt with separatist fringe groups in Texas and in Alaska, simply to get their votes, with absolutely no intention of succession.
You mean "secession".
They need to encourage separatist groups in Florida, and get that state to secede. We'd be better off without FloridaMan.
He's most likely talking about vactrains: maglev trains operating in tunnels where the air has been evacuated. Think of those pneumatic tubes that drive-up bank tellers use. Something like this can travel at thousands of miles per hour, since there's no air resistance.
The problem with the bizjet is that it has very limited range. Small jets can't cross the Pacific Ocean, and many can't cross the Atlantic. If you're flying regionally, and can afford it, yes, bizjets are great. Coast-to-coast probably means a fuel stop in between. But unless this is a rather large "bizjet", it's not going to take you to London.
The question might be asked, could a literate speaker from the early 1900s pick up an English language book from today and read it with the same ease that going the other way would be?
It depends on the book. If it's a computer book, certainly not. If it involves modern technology at all, probably not, without learning a bunch of new terms. If it's a historical fiction novel (set in a time no later than the early 1900s, perhaps something written by Ken Follett), then he shouldn't have much trouble at all. There might be a handful of new words he won't recognize, but not many.
This has only been a problem with some things (like ST:TOS episodes). Lately, I haven't heard of this being a problem anymore.
Or until your ISP starts charging you overages every time you watch. And it's not just cell ISPs that do that; satellite ISPs and even DSL in parts of Iowa do it too.
This is only a problem for some people; anyone with ISP service should know if they have data caps. I seriously doubt most Netflix subscribers have this problem. But yes, if you have this problem, then buying DVDs might make some sense. Or, you can just restrict yourself to Netflix's DVD mailing service. Or, you can do that, AND just rip/copy DVDs that you liked so you can watch them again quickly instead of having to put them at the top of your queue and wait a few days.
Apple glomming onto Webkit for Safari as well as Opera and others is fast tracking the browser world to have one standard -- Webkit. This is a monoculture and is not good. Mozilla may or may not survive well without Google's handouts. We'll see. Microsoft is about to release another browser based on their Trident rendering engine.
I'm sorry, I don't buy this monoculture stuff at all. There is absolutely no indication that either Firefox or IE is going to disappear any time soon, even though the webkit browsers (mostly Chrome) have definitely gained a huge amount of marketshare. As long as FF and IE are around, there's no monoculture, and there's also zero indication that either one is moving to webkit. We deride IE a lot, but as long as corporations keep using Windows desktops, IE is going to have a significant (though probably never again anywhere near majority) marketshare.
Your allegations of a monoculture sound like "the sky is falling".
I like Netflix's subscription model too, but that's because I never rewatch the same movie over and over and over again. If I really liked a movie *that* much, I could just buy it on Blu-Ray (but if it's on Netflix instant viewing, even that isn't necessary). But again, I don't actually watch movies over and over. I might rewatch a movie after 5-10 years, and that's it.
Music is totally different. I listen to the same music over and over. Led Zeppelin never gets old, and between driving and work, there's tons of time to listen to it in the background. Music doesn't demand 100% of your attention the way movies do.
Who the hell is buying cassettes any more? I didn't even know they still made those things. You can't even buy a cassette player any more, except of course on Ebay. And why on earth would anyone use those things when you can use CDs instead? At least with vinyl, I can understand how people might get some warm n' fuzzy nostalgic feeling, or actually be deluded into thinking they sound better, but not with cassettes. No one has ever thought those things sounded good; they only were popular because they were more portable than LPs and could be easily played in car stereos.
You don't have to give the record label your money (directly) when you use streaming. If you just use Pandora, they somehow get money for that (I'm not sure how that works to be honest), but there's no requirement that you pay any money for that service.
We need to pass another amendment to repeal the 13th. That amendment isn't "business friendly". We need to just let the Free Market work without any of this government interference!
Looks like a good idea to me. Why bother being on Eastern time only 4 months out of the year and Atlantic time (effectively) the other 8; why not just stay on Atlantic time year-round?
Sometimes I really wonder what would happen if the Democrat Party, as a whole, suddenly changed their platform on two issues: gun control and immigration, to mostly match the Republicans on those issues. (i.e., no new Federal gun laws, and no more push for "comprehensive immigration reform".) I believe the Republican party would quickly cease to exist with a majority of it voters switching to the Democrats, and a new party left of the Dems would quickly rise up to fill that void.
Neanderthals never really went extinct, they were merely assimilated into modern humans. Most humans (esp. European-ancestry ones) have some Neanderthal DNA in them.
Slashdot Mirror
The same works in the other direction, though. English does have more words than in Shakespeare's time, but it's also lost a lot of words since then. Shakespeare plays are full of words that we no longer use. Quick, what does "exeunt" mean? We've lost a lot of expressiveness words and gained a ton of technology words. Moreover, your average English speaker (someone who's never read Shakespeare) is barely or completely unfamiliar with the culture at that time, and wouldn't understand a lot of concepts that were common in those days. It wouldn't be nearly as bad as for the person in the past coming to the future, because life certainly is more complex now, but it would still be a difficulty.
That depends really. You're assuming hypersonic flight will be incredibly expensive. Even the Concorde wasn't that expensive. How much is a flight on a heavy bizjet? A hypersonic flight should be cheaper than a Concorde ticket; aviation technology has progressed significantly since 1970, and if the hypersonic plane is large enough, the per-seat cost might be OK. For people traveling between, say, Beijing and London, it may not be ridiculous, and would certainly be a lot faster than current means.
Owning the artefact is what matters, and buying a band's cassette isn't that much different from buying their poster - it just so happens that you get to play it as well as having it look cool on your shelf.
Then buy the CD, like I do. You get the artifact, the best possible sound quality (since SACDs and DVDAs never took off), and can put it on your shelf.
I see. I was thinking more of the Cessna Citations and Learjets.
I thought they cleared the pipe out of that already and were back to work.
Thousands of years? Modern technology is only a few hundred years old. All the Roman-era tech was lost after the fall of Rome, and western society didn't develop any real technology again until the Renaissance, and later the Industrial Revolution. We went from swords to landing on the Moon in less than 500 years.
Advanced planes with the capability for space-flight to other planets? Sorry, but I'm not buying it. If you want to prove this, you'll need a lot more than "it's written down in some text somewhere."
Some people don't claim that ancient Indians had any such things. Instead, they claim that ancient alien visitors had these things, and that ancient Indians regarded them as gods.
Farfetched, absolutely. But much less so that some of the crazy stuff we westerners believe. Over here in the US, a bunch of us actually believe that some guy in upstate New York was shown the location of golden plates by an angel, and these plates had a missing testament describing how Jesus came to the New World and met with a bunch of mesoamerican tribes, for which zero archeological evidence exists. They also believe that God lives on a planet near the star Kolob, and that if you're good in this lifetime, you'll become the god of some other planet. There's a whole bunch of people in Clearwater, Florida who believe that all our mental problems are caused by the disembodied souls of aliens brought here 175M years ago by Xenu of the Galactic Confederation, who brought them here on space-going DC-10s and blew them up in a volcano on Hawaii.
Compared to that stuff, the idea that aliens with advanced technology visited this planet a few thousand years ago is actually quite reasonable. I'm not saying it's true or that there's any veracity to it, but before we make fun of it, maybe we should look at the crazy shit we believe first.
http://unews.utah.edu/news_rel...
Then you have politicians that flirt with separatist fringe groups in Texas and in Alaska, simply to get their votes, with absolutely no intention of succession.
You mean "secession".
They need to encourage separatist groups in Florida, and get that state to secede. We'd be better off without FloridaMan.
but when I'm out it would just drive up my cell bill for the data usage.
You need to switch to T-Mobile; streaming music doesn't count against your data cap.
Many of the dystopian-future stories focus on an overly-powerful central government working in partnership with very large corporations.
That's not a fictional dystopian future; that's an accurate assessment of the present day state of affairs.
Don't modern TBMs (tunnel-boring machines) make this kind of work much, much faster? They didn't have those back in the 70s.
He's most likely talking about vactrains: maglev trains operating in tunnels where the air has been evacuated. Think of those pneumatic tubes that drive-up bank tellers use. Something like this can travel at thousands of miles per hour, since there's no air resistance.
Wow, I never even heard of this. WTF is with these idiotic hipsters these days?
And you're exactly right about the usefulness of cassettes vs. LP covers.
The problem with the bizjet is that it has very limited range. Small jets can't cross the Pacific Ocean, and many can't cross the Atlantic. If you're flying regionally, and can afford it, yes, bizjets are great. Coast-to-coast probably means a fuel stop in between. But unless this is a rather large "bizjet", it's not going to take you to London.
The question might be asked, could a literate speaker from the early 1900s pick up an English language book from today and read it with the same ease that going the other way would be?
It depends on the book. If it's a computer book, certainly not. If it involves modern technology at all, probably not, without learning a bunch of new terms. If it's a historical fiction novel (set in a time no later than the early 1900s, perhaps something written by Ken Follett), then he shouldn't have much trouble at all. There might be a handful of new words he won't recognize, but not many.
Until the film expires from Netflix
This has only been a problem with some things (like ST:TOS episodes). Lately, I haven't heard of this being a problem anymore.
Or until your ISP starts charging you overages every time you watch. And it's not just cell ISPs that do that; satellite ISPs and even DSL in parts of Iowa do it too.
This is only a problem for some people; anyone with ISP service should know if they have data caps. I seriously doubt most Netflix subscribers have this problem. But yes, if you have this problem, then buying DVDs might make some sense. Or, you can just restrict yourself to Netflix's DVD mailing service. Or, you can do that, AND just rip/copy DVDs that you liked so you can watch them again quickly instead of having to put them at the top of your queue and wait a few days.
Apple glomming onto Webkit for Safari as well as Opera and others is fast tracking the browser world to have one standard -- Webkit. This is a monoculture and is not good. Mozilla may or may not survive well without Google's handouts. We'll see. Microsoft is about to release another browser based on their Trident rendering engine.
I'm sorry, I don't buy this monoculture stuff at all. There is absolutely no indication that either Firefox or IE is going to disappear any time soon, even though the webkit browsers (mostly Chrome) have definitely gained a huge amount of marketshare. As long as FF and IE are around, there's no monoculture, and there's also zero indication that either one is moving to webkit. We deride IE a lot, but as long as corporations keep using Windows desktops, IE is going to have a significant (though probably never again anywhere near majority) marketshare.
Your allegations of a monoculture sound like "the sky is falling".
I like Netflix's subscription model too, but that's because I never rewatch the same movie over and over and over again. If I really liked a movie *that* much, I could just buy it on Blu-Ray (but if it's on Netflix instant viewing, even that isn't necessary). But again, I don't actually watch movies over and over. I might rewatch a movie after 5-10 years, and that's it.
Music is totally different. I listen to the same music over and over. Led Zeppelin never gets old, and between driving and work, there's tons of time to listen to it in the background. Music doesn't demand 100% of your attention the way movies do.
Who the hell is buying cassettes any more? I didn't even know they still made those things. You can't even buy a cassette player any more, except of course on Ebay. And why on earth would anyone use those things when you can use CDs instead? At least with vinyl, I can understand how people might get some warm n' fuzzy nostalgic feeling, or actually be deluded into thinking they sound better, but not with cassettes. No one has ever thought those things sounded good; they only were popular because they were more portable than LPs and could be easily played in car stereos.
You don't have to give the record label your money (directly) when you use streaming. If you just use Pandora, they somehow get money for that (I'm not sure how that works to be honest), but there's no requirement that you pay any money for that service.
We need to pass another amendment to repeal the 13th. That amendment isn't "business friendly". We need to just let the Free Market work without any of this government interference!
Looks like a good idea to me. Why bother being on Eastern time only 4 months out of the year and Atlantic time (effectively) the other 8; why not just stay on Atlantic time year-round?
Sometimes I really wonder what would happen if the Democrat Party, as a whole, suddenly changed their platform on two issues: gun control and immigration, to mostly match the Republicans on those issues. (i.e., no new Federal gun laws, and no more push for "comprehensive immigration reform".) I believe the Republican party would quickly cease to exist with a majority of it voters switching to the Democrats, and a new party left of the Dems would quickly rise up to fill that void.
Neanderthals never really went extinct, they were merely assimilated into modern humans. Most humans (esp. European-ancestry ones) have some Neanderthal DNA in them.