yeah, after my post, I went back and read the things and saw that everyone was arguing the exact opposite point that I thought they were. Oh well.
My bad, anyways, at least it gets the facts on the table. I *have* had someone tell me before that if you word for word translate English to Norwegian it would be grammatically correct. Of course, now I would have the arms with which to argue the point, but at the time I didn't.
For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.
This isn't actually all that accurate. For instance, many would say that Latin is more complex than Spanish. But then you get into all the features of Spanish that aren't in Latin, and make Spanish more difficult than Latin.
While English has lost it's case system, it's gender system and numerous other Germanic features, it has gained a massive complexity in word ordering and sentence construction. While in German it's fairly rule based what goes where, in English it's all meaning based. Placing this word here means this, but placing it there means this. Or even so much in that placing the word here makes the sentence grammatical, but if you change this other word, you have to change the position of that word so that the sentence remains grammatical. This is why broken English is so broken. The person has learned the words, and the simple grammar structure, but has failed to grasp that there is an intricate rule set behind the English language of what goes where.
Now, let's jump ship and go to some other languages. People almost universally say that Chinese is hard, because of the tone system where *how* you pronounce Ma changes its meaning between horse, mother, and hemp (just to name the three I remember off the top of my head.) Ok, damn, that *is* hard for someone who isn't used to it. But consider that it has no plural system (thus no mouse/mice exceptions to exist) a regularized orthography (limited number of syllables), etc, etc, etc. And you start learning that once you get past the facade, the language is actually relatively simple.
Now, jump around to Japanese. Japanese has a highly regularized verb grammar, no real plural, and simplified word order. This makes it *very* easy to pick things up. Once you know a word, you can disect out it's regular grammatical structures, and then look up the word for its meaning. Now what could be so hard about *this* language that would make this heavy regularity hard (actually, Japanese regularity is so strong that at least one Japanese book that I learned from taught you patterns, not grammatical structures. Like "verb~ta no ga aru = I have done verb", where as if you look at it, it means, "I have verb-ed". So Japanese is VERY regularized compared to Indo-European languages.) Well, you start learning that there are tons of different words for usually some of the same things that are completely phonetically unrelated, and are used in different SOCIAL situations. For instance, words for "I": watashi, watakushi, atashi, atai, boku, ore, kore, kochira, and literally as many words as Japanese has names, considering that it's not rude in Japanese for a female to "refer to herself in the third person." (which they don't actually do, they just use their name as "I/me") This has generally been considered a feature of high-class females. Now verbs. "kure" is the verb for "to give down", "ageru" is the verb for "to give up", people always "kure" things to you, and you always "ageru" things to others. Do not attempt to tell someone to "sore o agette" (give that "up to" me) Because it's *rude*. Ok, so now "kure" even has a form that is called honorific, it is "kudaseru", who's imperative form is "kudasai", which is now mostly used by them for "please". But now look at what you're saying, "koko ni itte kudasai." (come here) you're literally saying: "here to come-*linking give-down-to-me-most-honorable-one." (drastically overreaching the translation there so you get the idea.)
So, the thing you have to learn is that vocabulary isn't getting any smaller, in fact it's getting larger. It's just also shifting away from certain words, and grammar isn't getting any simpler. (If you want a post about that, ask me about Ebonics being a simplified English.)
The relation of father->pater, and fish->piscis are a nature of English having gone through the first sound shift of German languages. This is where the Germanic language as it existed at that time underwent a general change different from Latin, such that Latin ended up with "pater" with a P sound, while English ended up with "father" with an F sound at the beginning.
A better example would be to show the other languages that are more closely related to English: German: Vater (pronounced fater), Dutch vader (again pronounced fader as an f), Swedish fader (or shorter far), Norwegian and Danish can be presumed to be the same.
The habit is of linguists to present a contrasting element, English father, Latin pater, while leaving it assumed that the listener is already aware of the reasons why they differ, and not to make the assumption that they are descendents.
English did not get the word "father" from Latin "pater" because it has undergone the germanic sound shift. If we had taken the word modern from latin, we would have a word like: "priest", "paster" or "padre". Note that all three of these words are decended from the Latin word "pater". But "father" is definitely not.
Swedish grammar: I hope to she comes to party-the (Jag hoppas att hon kommer på festen.)
--------
English grammar: I want to read the newspaper.
Swedish grammar: I want read newspaper-the. (Jag vilja läsa tidningen.)
Now, explain to me exactly *HOW* the Swedish grammar is closer to English grammar than German?
Or are you just up in arms about the V2 phenomena that German and Dutch have, but the Scandanavian languages don't? Because I'll tell you that all the Scandanavian languages have a grammatical feature where the "definite article" is actually a suffix upon the noun.
This neglects the whole issue of drastically different prepositional usage, and other grammatical forms. Scandanavian languages are not really any closer to English grammar than German grammar is. (For the record, I speak English natively, German at about a C1 rating at a quality of "ausreichend", and Swedish darn poorly likely around a lower B rating, but enough to know it's grammar is no closer to English's than is German's.)
See one of my other posts. I pointed out that Blizzard doesn't seem to give a crap about you unless you're a big media outlet. When Gabe and Tycho were all "Yeah, we're going to withdraw our GotY award to Blizzard." I'm certain that they listened, but they don't give a shit about you and me.
With the amount of people on WoW, it doesn't matter to just withdraw your money. In fact, it *NEVER* helps your cause to just withdraw your money. You have to get out there and be vocal on why you're withdrawing. You have to stage a number of people to boycott something, and even then it's hard to force a strong multi-national to do anything at all, like the boycott against Nestle. Yeah, there are(were?) people that are(were?) very vocal about it, and held a strong protest against Nestle. But fact is, that Nestle makes so much money, they don't care about YOU, they just care about the you's who are buying. In order to stage any sort of *effective* boycott, you have to take out a significant margin of their users/buyers, and that just isn't going to happen to WoW, people just aren't that upset enough about WoW.
Now, even if I posted vocally that I'm sick and tired of WoW, people like YOU just post back, "Oh, stop whining, just vote with your wallet, and leave the game." There's also no consideration that maybe I like the *game* but I don't like the companies attitude. Dillema.
Honestly, I'm not disgusted with Blizzard enough to stop paying them, plus, they're not going to give a shit about just me. So, ask me what am I supposed to do? I'm going to vocally complain, and continue paying, because my $15 some a month isn't going to make any signficant impact to their bottomline.
First, the Slashdot crowd would need a WoW account to post in the forums. Last I saw, that means they played the game at some point (unless they like spending money for no reason.) They have every right to be speaking out in the forums.
Off-Topic is stuff that likely should have nothign to do with the game at all, or only a passing relation. A link to a story on Slashdot about World of Warcraft is not a passing relation. It relates pretty deeply to the game, especially if people got their feelings hurt.
Ok, let's try an interview where people actually got real responses back. Penny Arcade's Tycho and Gabe were pissed at WoW for a while, and ended up talking to some people. They gave real answers and not some PR white-wash.
It seems like the only way to get straight answers from Blizzard is to be upset with their product(s), and be a popular web-celebrity. Otherwise, they don't care if you hate the game, because no one is really going to listen to you.
And just because the entirity of their interviews are crap, doesn't make it right. I mean, that's like saying when the Germans killed the Jews in Auschwitz "well, don't act surprised, look at what they did to the Jews before!" I don't want to equate giving BS PR responses to the Holocaust... it's hardly that serious of a crime. I'm just trying to draw a parallel here that shows you: just because they've done it before, and have only done it before, doesn't make it right, or even justified.
Giving PR drivel is fine if you're posting a simple product release, or you're just starting off the project, and no one really knows anything about your game at all.
When you're game is the King of the Hill, and the most popular geek news site comes at you looking for answers to some questions, you don't just throw a PR hack on the job. We already know what he has to say, and we don't care. We want to hear some serious truth.
You can whine all you want about our complaints, but I'm not whining, I'm justifably upset with the answers. This should never have passed anyone's ideas of the meaning of "Interview".
I was working for an ISP selling their accounts. We were instructed that if we're ever having computer trouble to tell the person on the other side: "I'm sorry for the delay, but we're upgrading our computers for your convenience and safety."
Or some other bullshit reason... But it was always supposed to be "upgrading" our computers. Now, it's so engrained into me, that anytime I'm interacting with customer service and they tell me that they're upgrading something, I hear "My computer broke, hold a sec while I reboot."
God, and in every company I've worked for they've told us to "own the problem". Meaning, if you make a mistake, stand up, admit it, and take the punches like a man, and get it fixed.
Now, WTF can't the company themselves do that? I mean, every company talks all this crap all the time about "be a better person", and "make moral decisions". But they're always acting like stupid braindead immoral idiots.
It's frustrating that they expect us to take responsibility, then don't themselves. They just use semantic tricks to wiggle out of responsibility.
I almost can't doubt that it went through the PR wash. The answers are bland, unresponsive and sometimes not even related to the question.
I mean, the one were they respond, "Oh, please try our game; we're sure you'll be pleasently surprised."
Only marketingdroids talk like that.
This is singularly the worst interview I've ever read. It's like an interview with a mural on a brickwall. No insight, just the same facade that you've already seen before. No DEPTH.
I wish companies would realize that when you get an interview list from Slashdot we don't want more dribble that we could read anywhere; we want real answers. *REAL ANSWERS PEOPLE*.
"To quote Bullet Tooth Tony, "Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity." People are, and always will be, stupid."*
To quote me. Never underestimate the desire of an elite crowd to point out, every chance they get, at how stupid the rest of the world is compared to them.
Well, I don't think it's an unfair assessment to make, when surveys have shown that about 1/5th of all Americans think the sun goes around the earth. Of course, this may have just as much to do with our education system, as anything else. People may come from all over the world just to study here, but it's not because of our superior programs, it's because of our superior opportunities.
I've generally found that each and every single individual is intelligent, and rational. But occationally, even the most intelligent or rational person will make a stupid choice, or believe something stupid. Some more than others. Some will convince themselves so heartily on a piece of stupidity that they will defend it to the grave, in a vane attempt to save face, or some unwillingness to take a good look at it and say, "Holy crap, I'm a moron."
*Are you saying you're stupid too?
Him? I don't know. But me? Yes, on quite a few occations, I'm stupid, also. And I sincerely hope that people point it out to me, when I am.
I'm sure Switchfoot isn't all that concerned, even if Sony drops them from their record label. There are a ton of record labels that would happily pick up Switchfoot.
That's just poor design by the CLR JITC team. You can write a JITC that does not break BOP and other such stuff.
But the CLR team would have to have gotten lazy, and not marked things as executable, and started exploiting other such things, just to save a few cycles.
While I agree that Esperanto isn't the one and only answer.
I did find that Esperanto was easier for east-asian peoples to learn.
I read a number of posts on alt.lang.artifical that were tripart in English, Esperanto, and Chinese.
The Chinese, I didn't even have the display method required, even if I had been able to read it (which I still can't); The English was a bunch of nearly incomprehensible bable in English words, that made it very difficult to read; and the Esperanto was perfectly written, and very understandble.
No, Esperanto isn't perfect, but in many ways, between speaking "broken" Esperanto, and broken English, the "broken" Esperanto actually isn't all that broken because of the simplified grammar.
Now, on that note, I hardly remember my Esperanto at all, and have fallen out of touch with the conlanging people. Too often it's full of people who want to show off their language, and less so learn anyone elses (I'm at fault there, too)
I can see someone spending years helping Esperanto and just deciding that it's all just a stupid idea. But "broken" Esperanto was significantly easier for me to read than broken English.
Interesting read? She used her stupid dog's name for the password hint question of: "What's your favorite dogs name?"
This is like some of the questions that PeoplePC has for its hints: "In which city did you go to high school?" Um... about 90% of the people who are buying a $10.95 per month internet service are likely in the same town now, as when they went to high school. (This is why I stopped asking that question.)
Also, "What's your favorite pet's name?" This is usually the currently living pet. And anyone who knows you, will know this.
The other two questions were better: "What's your mother's middle name?" and "What's your father's middle name?" Usually, mother's middle name is the same as her maiden name, and some people don't like to give it out.
But Father's middle name? Which of your friends know that? That's a pretty solid question that you're not likely to forget.
Well, even though he ended up at the FBI, he didn't start there right after being arrested.
He spent a fair amount of time in jail. It's only once they discovered that he would be such an excellent resource for them that they brought him on.
It's not just enough to break in, and do horrible things. You have to show a deeper understanding beyond that which could be obtained from simple learning.
For instance, a hacker who knows more about social engineering than someone who's just studied it thoroughly. It is possible to use social engineering on a simplified level, and not be all that good at it.
But being able to pull of incredibly complex actions, where they demonstrate an ability to understand, think, and problem-solve beyond the average person already on your team.
That's what counts. Not just "I hacked in, give me a job."
Slashdot Mirror
My bad, my guide for the Dutch language says that "v" is pronounced somewhere between "f" and "v".
yeah, after my post, I went back and read the things and saw that everyone was arguing the exact opposite point that I thought they were. Oh well.
My bad, anyways, at least it gets the facts on the table. I *have* had someone tell me before that if you word for word translate English to Norwegian it would be grammatically correct. Of course, now I would have the arms with which to argue the point, but at the time I didn't.
For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.
This isn't actually all that accurate. For instance, many would say that Latin is more complex than Spanish. But then you get into all the features of Spanish that aren't in Latin, and make Spanish more difficult than Latin.
While English has lost it's case system, it's gender system and numerous other Germanic features, it has gained a massive complexity in word ordering and sentence construction. While in German it's fairly rule based what goes where, in English it's all meaning based. Placing this word here means this, but placing it there means this. Or even so much in that placing the word here makes the sentence grammatical, but if you change this other word, you have to change the position of that word so that the sentence remains grammatical. This is why broken English is so broken. The person has learned the words, and the simple grammar structure, but has failed to grasp that there is an intricate rule set behind the English language of what goes where.
Now, let's jump ship and go to some other languages. People almost universally say that Chinese is hard, because of the tone system where *how* you pronounce Ma changes its meaning between horse, mother, and hemp (just to name the three I remember off the top of my head.) Ok, damn, that *is* hard for someone who isn't used to it. But consider that it has no plural system (thus no mouse/mice exceptions to exist) a regularized orthography (limited number of syllables), etc, etc, etc. And you start learning that once you get past the facade, the language is actually relatively simple.
Now, jump around to Japanese. Japanese has a highly regularized verb grammar, no real plural, and simplified word order. This makes it *very* easy to pick things up. Once you know a word, you can disect out it's regular grammatical structures, and then look up the word for its meaning. Now what could be so hard about *this* language that would make this heavy regularity hard (actually, Japanese regularity is so strong that at least one Japanese book that I learned from taught you patterns, not grammatical structures. Like "verb~ta no ga aru = I have done verb", where as if you look at it, it means, "I have verb-ed". So Japanese is VERY regularized compared to Indo-European languages.) Well, you start learning that there are tons of different words for usually some of the same things that are completely phonetically unrelated, and are used in different SOCIAL situations. For instance, words for "I": watashi, watakushi, atashi, atai, boku, ore, kore, kochira, and literally as many words as Japanese has names, considering that it's not rude in Japanese for a female to "refer to herself in the third person." (which they don't actually do, they just use their name as "I/me") This has generally been considered a feature of high-class females. Now verbs. "kure" is the verb for "to give down", "ageru" is the verb for "to give up", people always "kure" things to you, and you always "ageru" things to others. Do not attempt to tell someone to "sore o agette" (give that "up to" me) Because it's *rude*. Ok, so now "kure" even has a form that is called honorific, it is "kudaseru", who's imperative form is "kudasai", which is now mostly used by them for "please". But now look at what you're saying, "koko ni itte kudasai." (come here) you're literally saying: "here to come-*linking give-down-to-me-most-honorable-one." (drastically overreaching the translation there so you get the idea.)
So, the thing you have to learn is that vocabulary isn't getting any smaller, in fact it's getting larger. It's just also shifting away from certain words, and grammar isn't getting any simpler. (If you want a post about that, ask me about Ebonics being a simplified English.)
The relation of father->pater, and fish->piscis are a nature of English having gone through the first sound shift of German languages. This is where the Germanic language as it existed at that time underwent a general change different from Latin, such that Latin ended up with "pater" with a P sound, while English ended up with "father" with an F sound at the beginning.
A better example would be to show the other languages that are more closely related to English: German: Vater (pronounced fater), Dutch vader (again pronounced fader as an f), Swedish fader (or shorter far), Norwegian and Danish can be presumed to be the same.
The habit is of linguists to present a contrasting element, English father, Latin pater, while leaving it assumed that the listener is already aware of the reasons why they differ, and not to make the assumption that they are descendents.
English did not get the word "father" from Latin "pater" because it has undergone the germanic sound shift. If we had taken the word modern from latin, we would have a word like: "priest", "paster" or "padre". Note that all three of these words are decended from the Latin word "pater". But "father" is definitely not.
Oddly, I had a person at a cat rescue tell me that my cat might be "Laconic". I remembered this word from my GRE exam:
Laconic: Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise. See synonyms at silent.
(source: http://www.answers.com/laconic)
I just had to kind of wonder how my cat was going to be using a lot of words and thus, be anything but laconic.
English grammar: I hope she makes it to the party
Swedish grammar: I hope to she comes to party-the (Jag hoppas att hon kommer på festen.)
--------
English grammar: I want to read the newspaper.
Swedish grammar: I want read newspaper-the. (Jag vilja läsa tidningen.)
Now, explain to me exactly *HOW* the Swedish grammar is closer to English grammar than German?
Or are you just up in arms about the V2 phenomena that German and Dutch have, but the Scandanavian languages don't? Because I'll tell you that all the Scandanavian languages have a grammatical feature where the "definite article" is actually a suffix upon the noun.
This neglects the whole issue of drastically different prepositional usage, and other grammatical forms. Scandanavian languages are not really any closer to English grammar than German grammar is. (For the record, I speak English natively, German at about a C1 rating at a quality of "ausreichend", and Swedish darn poorly likely around a lower B rating, but enough to know it's grammar is no closer to English's than is German's.)
See one of my other posts. I pointed out that Blizzard doesn't seem to give a crap about you unless you're a big media outlet. When Gabe and Tycho were all "Yeah, we're going to withdraw our GotY award to Blizzard." I'm certain that they listened, but they don't give a shit about you and me.
With the amount of people on WoW, it doesn't matter to just withdraw your money. In fact, it *NEVER* helps your cause to just withdraw your money. You have to get out there and be vocal on why you're withdrawing. You have to stage a number of people to boycott something, and even then it's hard to force a strong multi-national to do anything at all, like the boycott against Nestle. Yeah, there are(were?) people that are(were?) very vocal about it, and held a strong protest against Nestle. But fact is, that Nestle makes so much money, they don't care about YOU, they just care about the you's who are buying. In order to stage any sort of *effective* boycott, you have to take out a significant margin of their users/buyers, and that just isn't going to happen to WoW, people just aren't that upset enough about WoW.
Now, even if I posted vocally that I'm sick and tired of WoW, people like YOU just post back, "Oh, stop whining, just vote with your wallet, and leave the game." There's also no consideration that maybe I like the *game* but I don't like the companies attitude. Dillema.
Honestly, I'm not disgusted with Blizzard enough to stop paying them, plus, they're not going to give a shit about just me. So, ask me what am I supposed to do? I'm going to vocally complain, and continue paying, because my $15 some a month isn't going to make any signficant impact to their bottomline.
First, the Slashdot crowd would need a WoW account to post in the forums. Last I saw, that means they played the game at some point (unless they like spending money for no reason.) They have every right to be speaking out in the forums.
Off-Topic is stuff that likely should have nothign to do with the game at all, or only a passing relation. A link to a story on Slashdot about World of Warcraft is not a passing relation. It relates pretty deeply to the game, especially if people got their feelings hurt.
Ok, let's try an interview where people actually got real responses back. Penny Arcade's Tycho and Gabe were pissed at WoW for a while, and ended up talking to some people. They gave real answers and not some PR white-wash.
It seems like the only way to get straight answers from Blizzard is to be upset with their product(s), and be a popular web-celebrity. Otherwise, they don't care if you hate the game, because no one is really going to listen to you.
And just because the entirity of their interviews are crap, doesn't make it right. I mean, that's like saying when the Germans killed the Jews in Auschwitz "well, don't act surprised, look at what they did to the Jews before!" I don't want to equate giving BS PR responses to the Holocaust... it's hardly that serious of a crime. I'm just trying to draw a parallel here that shows you: just because they've done it before, and have only done it before, doesn't make it right, or even justified.
Giving PR drivel is fine if you're posting a simple product release, or you're just starting off the project, and no one really knows anything about your game at all.
When you're game is the King of the Hill, and the most popular geek news site comes at you looking for answers to some questions, you don't just throw a PR hack on the job. We already know what he has to say, and we don't care. We want to hear some serious truth.
You can whine all you want about our complaints, but I'm not whining, I'm justifably upset with the answers. This should never have passed anyone's ideas of the meaning of "Interview".
No no no... that interview was much better than this dreck from Blizzard.
It is- I suppose- somewhat similar in the whole, off-topic-nicity. (Is that even a real word? Someone should ask jeeves about it.)
I was working for an ISP selling their accounts. We were instructed that if we're ever having computer trouble to tell the person on the other side: "I'm sorry for the delay, but we're upgrading our computers for your convenience and safety."
Or some other bullshit reason... But it was always supposed to be "upgrading" our computers. Now, it's so engrained into me, that anytime I'm interacting with customer service and they tell me that they're upgrading something, I hear "My computer broke, hold a sec while I reboot."
God, and in every company I've worked for they've told us to "own the problem". Meaning, if you make a mistake, stand up, admit it, and take the punches like a man, and get it fixed.
Now, WTF can't the company themselves do that? I mean, every company talks all this crap all the time about "be a better person", and "make moral decisions". But they're always acting like stupid braindead immoral idiots.
It's frustrating that they expect us to take responsibility, then don't themselves. They just use semantic tricks to wiggle out of responsibility.
I almost can't doubt that it went through the PR wash. The answers are bland, unresponsive and sometimes not even related to the question.
I mean, the one were they respond, "Oh, please try our game; we're sure you'll be pleasently surprised."
Only marketingdroids talk like that.
This is singularly the worst interview I've ever read. It's like an interview with a mural on a brickwall. No insight, just the same facade that you've already seen before. No DEPTH.
I wish companies would realize that when you get an interview list from Slashdot we don't want more dribble that we could read anywhere; we want real answers. *REAL ANSWERS PEOPLE*.
I'm just disgusted at these responses.
"To quote Bullet Tooth Tony, "Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity." People are, and always will be, stupid."*
To quote me. Never underestimate the desire of an elite crowd to point out, every chance they get, at how stupid the rest of the world is compared to them.
Well, I don't think it's an unfair assessment to make, when surveys have shown that about 1/5th of all Americans think the sun goes around the earth. Of course, this may have just as much to do with our education system, as anything else. People may come from all over the world just to study here, but it's not because of our superior programs, it's because of our superior opportunities.
I've generally found that each and every single individual is intelligent, and rational. But occationally, even the most intelligent or rational person will make a stupid choice, or believe something stupid. Some more than others. Some will convince themselves so heartily on a piece of stupidity that they will defend it to the grave, in a vane attempt to save face, or some unwillingness to take a good look at it and say, "Holy crap, I'm a moron."
*Are you saying you're stupid too?
Him? I don't know. But me? Yes, on quite a few occations, I'm stupid, also. And I sincerely hope that people point it out to me, when I am.
I'm sure many of those record labels are willing to go the extra mile and help them out.
Those kinds of people stick together, ya' know.
I'm sure Switchfoot isn't all that concerned, even if Sony drops them from their record label. There are a ton of record labels that would happily pick up Switchfoot.
MC = Midnight Commander
MC = Molten Core?
I'm confused what MC is...
Microsoft already has released a product with GPL software in fact.
If you install Services for Unix 3.5 (available free from Microsoft) then it comes with "gcc".
That's just poor design by the CLR JITC team. You can write a JITC that does not break BOP and other such stuff.
But the CLR team would have to have gotten lazy, and not marked things as executable, and started exploiting other such things, just to save a few cycles.
There's no reason why BOP should break the CLR.
The annoying thing is. I bet you Microsoft won't count this as "days of vulnerability."
:)
Sweet.
While I agree that Esperanto isn't the one and only answer.
I did find that Esperanto was easier for east-asian peoples to learn.
I read a number of posts on alt.lang.artifical that were tripart in English, Esperanto, and Chinese.
The Chinese, I didn't even have the display method required, even if I had been able to read it (which I still can't); The English was a bunch of nearly incomprehensible bable in English words, that made it very difficult to read; and the Esperanto was perfectly written, and very understandble.
No, Esperanto isn't perfect, but in many ways, between speaking "broken" Esperanto, and broken English, the "broken" Esperanto actually isn't all that broken because of the simplified grammar.
Now, on that note, I hardly remember my Esperanto at all, and have fallen out of touch with the conlanging people. Too often it's full of people who want to show off their language, and less so learn anyone elses (I'm at fault there, too)
I can see someone spending years helping Esperanto and just deciding that it's all just a stupid idea. But "broken" Esperanto was significantly easier for me to read than broken English.
I'm not suggesting that it's from the punctuation. I'm refering to the ambiguity that it doesn't indicate well WHAT was observed by Hubble.
If you attach it into the dependent clause, then it refers to the Voyager Spacecraft.
If you bring it out from the dependent clause, then it refers to the spokes of Saturn.
YOU LIKE MISTAH SPARKLE?
What? Are you suggesting that the Voyager wasn't observed by Hubble?
Interesting read? She used her stupid dog's name for the password hint question of: "What's your favorite dogs name?"
This is like some of the questions that PeoplePC has for its hints: "In which city did you go to high school?" Um... about 90% of the people who are buying a $10.95 per month internet service are likely in the same town now, as when they went to high school. (This is why I stopped asking that question.)
Also, "What's your favorite pet's name?" This is usually the currently living pet. And anyone who knows you, will know this.
The other two questions were better: "What's your mother's middle name?" and "What's your father's middle name?" Usually, mother's middle name is the same as her maiden name, and some people don't like to give it out.
But Father's middle name? Which of your friends know that? That's a pretty solid question that you're not likely to forget.
Well, even though he ended up at the FBI, he didn't start there right after being arrested.
He spent a fair amount of time in jail. It's only once they discovered that he would be such an excellent resource for them that they brought him on.
It's not just enough to break in, and do horrible things. You have to show a deeper understanding beyond that which could be obtained from simple learning.
For instance, a hacker who knows more about social engineering than someone who's just studied it thoroughly. It is possible to use social engineering on a simplified level, and not be all that good at it.
But being able to pull of incredibly complex actions, where they demonstrate an ability to understand, think, and problem-solve beyond the average person already on your team.
That's what counts. Not just "I hacked in, give me a job."