But the real question is whether it is a car at all.
In Hungary, if said, say, that you arrived at a party by car, but in fact travelled in a Trabant, your statement would be considered misleading at best. These things were not really considered cars.
The brother of a friend of mine (yes, this is a friend of a friend story) drove his Trabant from Hungary to Amsterdam in the 1970s, where Trabant's hadn't been seen before. Whenever he returned to his parked vehicle, there was always a small crowd around wanting a closer look and asking if he'd built it himself.
There is a joke (told back in the days when they made Trabants) about some Saudi sheik who'd heard about some car built in one of those northern European germanic countries (Trabant was produced in East Germany) that was so special that it took them years to build one for you (in socialist economies it was typical to wait several years between ordering a car or Trabant and it being available for you to pick up). So this sheik thought that he would order one and had one of his secretaries send away for it. Since he'd paid in real money, the vehicle was shipped immediately.
It arrived and the sheik was happily puttering around in a local village when he saw a friend of his and shouted out, "Hey, Abdulla! Look I ordered a car that takes years to make from one of those nortern European countries, and they sent me a paper model that actually runs!"
I won't go into what carrying on a converstation was like in one of those things. I would say that it would be like carrying on a conversation on a lawn mower, but the lawn mower probably has a more powerful engine.
Which tactic is working? Suing the crap out of d/l'rs or the rise in legitimate sources of online music?
From the data presented, I don't see a way to tell. But I wouldn't rule out the heavy handed RIAA tactics as making a substantial contribution. Anecdotally, there were an enormous number of people who simply didn't know that their "sharing" activity was unlawful. I've overheard and talked to enough people prior to the lawsuits who thought it was legal to believe that the misconception was very widespread.
My speculation is that the RIAA tactics did have a substantial effect, but only with the availability of alternative download mechanisms. In statistical terms the legal online music stores played a substantial moderating role in the causal relation between the high-publicity RIAA actions and the results reported.
With the right sort of data, it would be possible to test this speculation. Pew does things fairly well, and they may additional data which could be used to check it out.
Just because we despise the tactics of the RIAA and the structure of the music industry as a whole, doesn't mean that we have to pretend that their tactics couldn't have worked.
A year later I couldn't find anything to drink but a coke so I tried one and couldn't stand the taste. At this point I don't think I could ever drink Coke again, the taste is just nasty.
The same thing happened to me. I stopped drinking all sodas for a couple of years, and now colas taste vile.
As for whether people can really taste the difference between the various cola's. Here is what my wife has done three times a year for the past three years (she teaches "strategic management" in a business school). She buys a 2 liter bottle of each Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, and RC Cola. Removes labels and swap around indentifying caps. She asks her class (about 70 students each) who prefers Coke, who prefers Pepsie and who prefers RC. It's typically half for Coke and half for Pepsi. No more than one or two hands will go up for RC.
She has them taste, and rank their preferences on the blind test. The results are flat out random.
Of the six possible preference orders you get all six with frequency fully consistant with random preferences.
Now the tests are not under well controlled conditions (temperature, sequencing, carbonation levels), but any noise from this would not be systematically biasing the results across multiple trials. That is all bottles were openned and resealed at roughly the same time, all were stored in the same refrigerator, etc.
I am not disputing that people can't be trained to identify the differences under some conditions, but whatever test differences and preferences there are work out fairly randomly under typical conditiions.
When she indicates which is which, approximately half the class will have found that they ranked RC ahead of their stated favorite. At this point my wife asks the class how many of those people will switch to drinking the (cheaper) RC. The answer is always zero with a bit of embarrassed laughter.
And that is when she jumps into here lecture on the cola market.
Your statements are false. von Neumann was a Jew and his name reflects this (yiddish). Hungarians did not change their names because Hungary was part of the Austrian empire.
Neumann was, as you say, Jewish. And Neumann was the (unchanged) family name of German/Jewish/Yiddish origin.
Many Jewish intellectuals left Hungary in the 1930s because Hungary started to severely limit the percentage of Jews gaining university or government positions. In fact, Hungary, to its shame, was an early adoptor of this kind of thing.
Moreover Hungary is notorious for heavily persecuting Jews during the Holocaust. On March 24, 1944 President Roosevelt had to officially warn Hungary to refrain from anti-Jewish measures.
But Hungary only weakly complied with Nazi requirements to kill or deport Jews. It was only in the last year the war (when Hungary switched sides, and went from being a German ally to being occupied by the Germans) that the fastest deportation of Jews occurred. The Nazi's had installed the native Nyilas Kereszt (Arrow Cross)
thugs, who engaged in probably some of the most brutal treatment of Jews of the entire war.
"Of the original 825,000 Jews before the war, 260,000 Hungarian Jews survived and 565,000 perished."
As horrific as those number are, I strongly suspect that they compare favorably to what happened in surrounding Central European countries. Also remember that many suriviving Jews did choose to return to Hungary after the war.
My great-great-uncle was not so lucky. In the early 1930s, his brother in America (my great-grandfather) tried to persuade him to stay in the US after a visit he made. But this uncle reported that he was a decorated officer of the Hungarian Army from WWI, and was throughly integrated in to the Hungarian elite, that this whole thing would "blow-over" and he wasn't going to flee his homeland. Well, he and his family did not survive. These Jews did not see their friends and neighbors as threats.
Still, I don't think that Hungarian Jews blamed Hungarian society as a whole. They blamed the gang of thugs who had power only because the German occupiers put them there.
It would be foolish for me to claim that anti-Jewish feeling wasn't and isn't present in Hungary, but in Central Europe in the 20th century Hungary was definitely one of the better places to be a Jew or a Gypsy.
Thinking in terms of a "good list" and "bad list" of countries in this respect is easy, but wrong.
That would explain why I never heard a Hungarian use the "von Neumann" form of his name. Translating from the end of the fourth paragraph of this article
His banker father earned a heritable title from the emporer for his contribution to the development of the Hungarian economy. And this is why he had the "von Margitta" [margittai] surname, from which (through the English practice) the world knows of him as "von Neumann".
Also remember, kids, that Neumann was Hungarian, not German. Born and schooled in Budapest, Hungary. The name is Germanic solely because at the time (before World War I) Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy
In Budapest at the time, a Yiddish-inflected German was probably as widespread as Hungarian. Budapest was a boom town around 1880-1910, with massive immigration of Jews from north and east, and German speakers seeking to make their fortune in this booming frontier town.
Hungarians use the German pronunciation of this name. My wife's grandmother's maiden name was Neumann (no relation), and in modern Hungary (and certainly at the time) it is given the German pronunciation.
His father had bought a minor nobility title
There was an apocryphal story going around Budapest about how Janos' father acquired the title. He (Janos' father) had done some substantial service for the Emporer, and was asked what he wanted, he (Janos' father) said that there was nothing the Emporer could do for him, but his father (Janos' grandfather) always wanted a title.
By such means, as the story goes, Janos' father inherited a title instead of buying one. Again, this story is almost certainly apocryphal. Purchasing of minor titles was a standard practice in those days.
To his friends, "John von Neumann" was actually "Neumann Janos".
In the US he was called "Jonny" by his friends. Whether he went by "Janos" or something like "Jancsi" in Hungarian is not something that I have any stories about, apocryphal or otherwise.
One great mark of Neumann was what it really means to be multidisplinary. Often when you have, say, a computational linguist, the linguists will say, "well, he doesn't really understand linguistics deeply, but I guess his good in CS" and the CS people will say, "Well, he doesn't really understand CS deeply, but I guess he knows a lot about linguistics." With Neumann, the situation is the opposite. CS claims him as one of their own, mathematics claims him as one of their own, physics claims him as one of their own, and while nobody claims him as an economist, his work a foundation of an important subdiscipline of economics.
I graduated in 1984, went on the Stanford/CSLI, where I dropped out in 1987. I guess you recognized Jorge's computer class. Please don't ruin a good story by telling people that rogue
was not actually part of the course.
I take it that you have memories of UCSC, too. Feel free to email me. My email address is "jeffrey" at the domain you see for my URL.
I don't know if you actually meant this as a dig at Chomsky's writing style, but I laughed my ass off.
It was not an accident. The question everyone has asked (and there are even some speculative answers out there, too) is "how can such a clear and persausive speaker be such a terrible writer?" Reading Chomsky is not a way to understand anything.
But I also meant that Chomsky is not at all sympathetic to head-lexicalized context-free grammars.
What are sources for the more interesting field journals/publications worthy of swot - care to make some suggestions?
I dropped out 15 years ago, so I'm not really the best person to ask. For popular books on linguistics, I'd recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. (It is the book I wish I'd written). My favorite journal back in the days when I was reading them was Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
If you've had any contact, you'll know that linguistics is a bitterly divided field. I was of the west-coast variety. But you need advice from some one working in the field now. I'd suggest that you drop by your local university and ask around. But do remember that there are substantial divisions in linguistics, so take what you are told with a grain of salt.
I'm a PhD drop-out in linguistics, and happen to know precisely what a head-lexicalized context-free grammer is. (And, no, reading Chomsky is not the way to find out what it is). Below are some random musings on the geekiness of linguists.
Linguists have always been geeky. Don't forget that Larry Wall is a linguist first.
The only computer class I ever took was in 1983 called "Computer tools for natural language analysis". It was an introductory Unix course. We learned grep, awk, sed as well as tools like vi, Mail, and rogue. And a tiny little bit of C. But since then I've taught C at the graduate level.
Linguistics is all about the reprensentation and manipulation of information. But instead of it being about languages we design for particular purposes, it is about the language system that we use naturally.
Suppose you have a few thousand languages that you know were written with the same tools (like lex and yacc, but not lex and yacc), but you have no access to those tools. Suppose you are trying to figure out what those tools are from examining the languages (not the compilers) that have been specified using those tools. That is what theoretical linguistics is trying to do. We know that the specification of English and the specification of Dyirbal and every other human language out there are somehow "written" with the same tools. It's pretty need stuff.
Linguists were early adopters of TeX, have had a Unix affinity for a while, and as people who are interested in how information is internally represented and manipulated, like reading the source.
I remember once nagging the sys admins to always make sure that there is a man page for anything added to/usr/bin or/usr/local/bin.
The next day, they asked me to look at the manpage for something to see if it met with my approval. The DESCRIPTION was the C source. I was happy to say that it did, indeed, meet with my approval.
At one point, a well known professor (Geoffrey Pullum) had written a little essay for a newsletter on the "grammer of Unix" using linguistic style analyses of the shell. Naturally several of us feigned outrage at his confusion of "Unix" with the shell. Another linguist (Bill Poser), went so far as to write a shell which was verb (command) final, and post-positional. That is instead of saying cat foo bar > bang
you would say foo bar bang > cat
That is, the arguments preceed the command, and the redirect symbols go after the filename they redirect to or from. Now for various reasons, I had root access on a machine that Pullum used. So I changed his shell to this command final one. He actually caught on remarkably quickly. And after a quick /bin/sh chsh
he was ready to concede the point.
For me, there is no surprise that linguists, and particularly computational linguists, are OSS enthusiasts. But that is enough of my random musings for now.
Actually L and R are not. This was a joke about them told by Chomskian linguists. While linguists tend to be on the left like most academics, Chomsky is on his own. He has a small core of political followers among linguists, but his radical politics is far from dominant among his academic followers. (At least this was the case 20 years ago when I knew what was going on in the field).
But now that we've started, I have to tell some linguistics jokes. The second meanest one I know is
Q: Why are so many gays and lesbians advocates of Lexical Functional Grammer A: Because they insist on the strict separation of structure and function.
The meanest joke I know, I won't tell. But here's a variant of an old joke which either I or my girlfriend at the time added to. (We have different memories of it). First of all, it is much easier to tell this joke if we assume that 1 is defined to be a prime number. I know it isn't, you know it isn't, but the joke works better this way:
A man has heard the conjecture that all odd numbers are prime. So he first goes and asks a mathematician. The mathematician says, "Well, the product of two odd numbers [greater than 1] is necessarily odd and non-prime, so conjecture false".
But our hero figures that nobody understands what mathematicians say anyway. So he decides to ask a scientist that has to use real numbers. He asks a physical chemist who says, "Well, 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is, hmmm?, 11 is prime, 13 is prime. Yes, they are all prime, with a little experimental error around 9."
He then decides to ask an engineer. The engineer says, "1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is prime, 17 is prime, 19 is prime, 21 is prime, 23 is prime, 25..." And so on. [Here is where the original joke ended]
Anyway, he hears that some of the linguists (who certainly should be able to speak in plain language) know something about numbers, so he heads down to building 20 and asks a linguist. The linguist responds with, "Well, 1 is prime, so it must be a univeral."
Then there are some basic ones.
Q: What do neogrammerians eat for breakfest? A: Omlauts. Alternative A: Bran, to ensure regularity.
Q: How does Chomsky change a light bulb? A: He doesn't. He just persuades you that you can see in the dark.
Philosophy: Searching in a darkened coal celler for a black cat which isn't there.
Marxist philosophy: The same as philosophy, except that you occassionally shout out, "I've got it!"
And here is a real quote from Thomas Kuhn: "I am much fonder of my foes than I am of my fans."
And the worst philosophy joke ever: Hegel.
Due to lack of a camara at the right time, I missed a chance to make a joke. I was in a small zoo in Olney, England. There was a black swan there that was constantly attacking its reflection in the plexiglass. I suspect that it had been doing so ever since it was put in the cage. If I'd had a camara, I would have photographed this and titled it, "A problem for induction".
Speaking of induction, this one is about a pair of linguists who had a peculiar way of arguing. I will call them Linguist L and Linguist R.
L: Guess what, R? I've got a great new theory and I can prove it. It's that your eyes are purple. R: I'm a bit skeptical, but I'd like to hear your proof. L: Well the statement "your eyes are purple" is true exactly when when this is true: "for every X such that X is not purple, X is not your eyes". R: Well, yes. But how will you show that my eyes are purple? L: Well you see that telephone over there? It's not purple and its not your eyes. And you see this pencil? It's not purple and it's not your eyes. This table isn't purple and it's not your eyes. So we can see by induction that everything that isn't purple is not your eyes. R: That is pretty persuasive, but the problem is that when I look in a mirror, I can see that my eyes are not purple. L: That may be true. But there is a lot about mirrors that we don't understand yet.
Fair enough. But the problem is with some criteria in the existing law. The existing law measures damaging republication in terms of how many copies can be shown to have been distributed. I suspect (and this is pure speculation) that this was designed to protect publishers who prepared and printed material which they were going to acquire the copyright or (or copyright was expiring back in the days when that happened) before they actually had the right to publish. So the law defined publication with this "minumum ten" business.
Is it that unreasonable to talk about updating the law to cover a more modern definition of publication? Is it that unreasonable to consider expanding penalties and enforcement where existing penalties and enforcement practices fail to act as a deterrent?
Does it make sense for the government (that's your and my tax dollars) to carry out the **AA litigation and pay for 36 months of upkeep for the offenders.
Compare with spam and do the math. With existing civil law I can sue a spammer for the cost of each unsolicited turdlet that they put in my mailbox. But the cost of each suit enormously out ways the damages that could be claimed in any individual case.
Many laws exist are because individual enforcement through civil suit is just too inefficient. In principle, we could drop municiple parking violation laws and just settle incidents through civil suits. But some times the collective solution is cheaper. In the days when republishing something took a lot of resources, small scale violations could be ignored and large scale violations could go to civil courts. But things aren't like that any more.
we should just give up that whole "beyond any reasonable doubt" part and go with a lesser standard... "most likely happened", "might have happened" or "we assume it happened" sounds fair, doesn't it?
I hope that I'm not saying that. Republishing material which you don't have the right to publish
is the crime itself. But current law, with its basis in civil law and a requirement to show damages, fails to capture the "publication" issue properly.
I do not wish to advocate a general lowering of standards of proof. I didn't say things right in my first posting. Thank you for the correction.
It IS a copyright violation, which is a civil matter.
There is also such a thing as criminal copyright violation.
They want to send all the college students who send these movies to each other to jail for up to three years. Doesn't anything about that sound the LEAST bit wrong to you?
Maybe you're one of those people who believe people should be anally raped every day in prison because they got caught smoking pot once.
I certainly agree with you that those examples are disproportionate punishment. But as I said in my original post, the current threat and consequences of prosecution are not serving as a deterrent. And when that happens it is perfectly reasonable to consider greater enforcement or penalties.
Let's take for example, a copyright agreement we might be happier with, say the GPL or some form of the Open Content license. Now imagine that you release something under such a license, but the technology and incentives are such that many individuals can violate it and have some (small) gain in violating. This, of course, is not the case, but please imagine that it was. You would never be able to demostrate sufficent damages from a single vioation to make it worth going after an indiviual violator. Your only options would be (ala MIAA) to seek legislation to make it easier to prosecute people, or (ala RIAA) make examples of some violators.
Personally, I hate the way the recording industry treats artists and tries to limit what is available at any one time. And I certainly get some schadenfreude from watching them suffer from "sharing". But none of that justifies the widespread, systematic, repeated petty theft that they have become a victim of.
I am looking forward to the end of the music business as we know it. I can't wait for the Apple Music Store or the like to deal directly with artists instead of labels. That should be their next move after completing their iTunes for OS/2 project.
I don't like many aspects of DRM schemes, I think that the DMCA is evil, and I dispise the recording industry.
But I simply don't get what the problem is here. If one "shares" material in a manner which violates to copyright conditions, or receives something shared that way, it's a copyright violation.
And if you don't like the copyright conditions, than you are perfectly free not to obtain a copy. If you don't like the price, don't buy it, but don't steal it either. I don't like buying things from greedy, exploitative, monopolistic entities any more than others do. So, I only rarely consume their products.
As for "sharing" being a violation even if there is no evidence that someone took it, that seems fair enough. If people blatently commit a crime and run around shouting, "you can't catch me; you can't catch me," then of course there will be changes in the types and standards of evidence used for prosecution.
I think that it is realistic to say that the current level of threat of prosecution and penalties has not prevent widespread copyright violtion. So it is not evil or insane to look at raising penalties and enforcement. (Even if it is a very stupid tactic). Each instance of copyright violation is a very small crime. But if it is widespread it can be very destructive. I guess it is like spam in that respect.
Just because the [RM]IAA are evil, doesn't mean that we should feel justified in violating the copyright. As I've said before, it's not civil disobience if you try to evade prosecution.
Sorry for the rant. And I certainly don't intend this to be a troll (and I hope it won't have the effect of one). Anyone who feels a real need to rake me over the coals for this, should feel free to email me. (A small amount of digging will find my address).
In the early 1990s, I remember seeing a sign advertising "UNIX Import/Export" or "UNIX Kereskedlmi" or something like that in Budapest.
If I recall correctly, it was a little, poorly produced sign along Ulloi ut, in the tenth district.
I can't remember the name of the major cross-street (also the name of the metro stop).
I always meant to take a picture of the sign and do something with it, but the list of things I'd always meant to do is far far longer than the list of things I've actually done.
For all I know, the company still exists. I moved from Budapest in 1994.
they just want a count of the number of users that don't use/enable javascript.
At list one study has shown (not suprisingly) that different sorts of people run without JS than run with JS.
... And shoot those who leave open relays/proxies
on
License to Surf, Take Two
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I would like to see a highly publicized case of holding some home broadband user responsible for the fact that their machine was hijacked to send spam or participate in some DDoS.
I've talked to too many people who've said, "I don't need to bother securing my home system because I've got nothing anyone would want." I've answered, "They want to use your machine to attack me." But the message doesn't sink in.
While these end users are being provided with crap systems, there is a market out there. If their choice of bad systems gets them severly spanked, they will start making demands of their providers.
All it would take would be a couple of high profile cases.
There is a story that at one of the meetings at Los Alamos, Feynman was absent and Fermi had to leave the room for some reason. At this point one of the
remaining physicists in the room said:
Slashdot Mirror
Copy and error. Here is the sound of a Trabant
For those who haven't had the pleasure, this site (in German) features the sound of a Trabant.
But the real question is whether it is a car at all. In Hungary, if said, say, that you arrived at a party by car, but in fact travelled in a Trabant, your statement would be considered misleading at best. These things were not really considered cars.
The brother of a friend of mine (yes, this is a friend of a friend story) drove his Trabant from Hungary to Amsterdam in the 1970s, where Trabant's hadn't been seen before. Whenever he returned to his parked vehicle, there was always a small crowd around wanting a closer look and asking if he'd built it himself.
There is a joke (told back in the days when they made Trabants) about some Saudi sheik who'd heard about some car built in one of those northern European germanic countries (Trabant was produced in East Germany) that was so special that it took them years to build one for you (in socialist economies it was typical to wait several years between ordering a car or Trabant and it being available for you to pick up). So this sheik thought that he would order one and had one of his secretaries send away for it. Since he'd paid in real money, the vehicle was shipped immediately. It arrived and the sheik was happily puttering around in a local village when he saw a friend of his and shouted out, "Hey, Abdulla! Look I ordered a car that takes years to make from one of those nortern European countries, and they sent me a paper model that actually runs!"
I won't go into what carrying on a converstation was like in one of those things. I would say that it would be like carrying on a conversation on a lawn mower, but the lawn mower probably has a more powerful engine.
My speculation is that the RIAA tactics did have a substantial effect, but only with the availability of alternative download mechanisms. In statistical terms the legal online music stores played a substantial moderating role in the causal relation between the high-publicity RIAA actions and the results reported.
With the right sort of data, it would be possible to test this speculation. Pew does things fairly well, and they may additional data which could be used to check it out.
Just because we despise the tactics of the RIAA and the structure of the music industry as a whole, doesn't mean that we have to pretend that their tactics couldn't have worked.
The same thing happened to me. I stopped drinking all sodas for a couple of years, and now colas taste vile.
As for whether people can really taste the difference between the various cola's. Here is what my wife has done three times a year for the past three years (she teaches "strategic management" in a business school). She buys a 2 liter bottle of each Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, and RC Cola. Removes labels and swap around indentifying caps. She asks her class (about 70 students each) who prefers Coke, who prefers Pepsie and who prefers RC. It's typically half for Coke and half for Pepsi. No more than one or two hands will go up for RC.
She has them taste, and rank their preferences on the blind test. The results are flat out random. Of the six possible preference orders you get all six with frequency fully consistant with random preferences.
Now the tests are not under well controlled conditions (temperature, sequencing, carbonation levels), but any noise from this would not be systematically biasing the results across multiple trials. That is all bottles were openned and resealed at roughly the same time, all were stored in the same refrigerator, etc.
I am not disputing that people can't be trained to identify the differences under some conditions, but whatever test differences and preferences there are work out fairly randomly under typical conditiions.
When she indicates which is which, approximately half the class will have found that they ranked RC ahead of their stated favorite. At this point my wife asks the class how many of those people will switch to drinking the (cheaper) RC. The answer is always zero with a bit of embarrassed laughter. And that is when she jumps into here lecture on the cola market.
Many Jewish intellectuals left Hungary in the 1930s because Hungary started to severely limit the percentage of Jews gaining university or government positions. In fact, Hungary, to its shame, was an early adoptor of this kind of thing.
But Hungary only weakly complied with Nazi requirements to kill or deport Jews. It was only in the last year the war (when Hungary switched sides, and went from being a German ally to being occupied by the Germans) that the fastest deportation of Jews occurred. The Nazi's had installed the native Nyilas Kereszt (Arrow Cross) thugs, who engaged in probably some of the most brutal treatment of Jews of the entire war.
As horrific as those number are, I strongly suspect that they compare favorably to what happened in surrounding Central European countries. Also remember that many suriviving Jews did choose to return to Hungary after the war.My great-great-uncle was not so lucky. In the early 1930s, his brother in America (my great-grandfather) tried to persuade him to stay in the US after a visit he made. But this uncle reported that he was a decorated officer of the Hungarian Army from WWI, and was throughly integrated in to the Hungarian elite, that this whole thing would "blow-over" and he wasn't going to flee his homeland. Well, he and his family did not survive. These Jews did not see their friends and neighbors as threats.
Still, I don't think that Hungarian Jews blamed Hungarian society as a whole. They blamed the gang of thugs who had power only because the German occupiers put them there.
It would be foolish for me to claim that anti-Jewish feeling wasn't and isn't present in Hungary, but in Central Europe in the 20th century Hungary was definitely one of the better places to be a Jew or a Gypsy.
Thinking in terms of a "good list" and "bad list" of countries in this respect is easy, but wrong.
Hungarians use the German pronunciation of this name. My wife's grandmother's maiden name was Neumann (no relation), and in modern Hungary (and certainly at the time) it is given the German pronunciation.
There was an apocryphal story going around Budapest about how Janos' father acquired the title. He (Janos' father) had done some substantial service for the Emporer, and was asked what he wanted, he (Janos' father) said that there was nothing the Emporer could do for him, but his father (Janos' grandfather) always wanted a title. By such means, as the story goes, Janos' father inherited a title instead of buying one. Again, this story is almost certainly apocryphal. Purchasing of minor titles was a standard practice in those days. In the US he was called "Jonny" by his friends. Whether he went by "Janos" or something like "Jancsi" in Hungarian is not something that I have any stories about, apocryphal or otherwise.One great mark of Neumann was what it really means to be multidisplinary. Often when you have, say, a computational linguist, the linguists will say, "well, he doesn't really understand linguistics deeply, but I guess his good in CS" and the CS people will say, "Well, he doesn't really understand CS deeply, but I guess he knows a lot about linguistics." With Neumann, the situation is the opposite. CS claims him as one of their own, mathematics claims him as one of their own, physics claims him as one of their own, and while nobody claims him as an economist, his work a foundation of an important subdiscipline of economics.
Yes. Best undergraduate linguistics program ever.
I graduated in 1984, went on the Stanford/CSLI, where I dropped out in 1987. I guess you recognized Jorge's computer class. Please don't ruin a good story by telling people that rogue was not actually part of the course.
I take it that you have memories of UCSC, too. Feel free to email me. My email address is "jeffrey" at the domain you see for my URL.
But I also meant that Chomsky is not at all sympathetic to head-lexicalized context-free grammars.
I dropped out 15 years ago, so I'm not really the best person to ask. For popular books on linguistics, I'd recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. (It is the book I wish I'd written). My favorite journal back in the days when I was reading them was Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
If you've had any contact, you'll know that linguistics is a bitterly divided field. I was of the west-coast variety. But you need advice from some one working in the field now. I'd suggest that you drop by your local university and ask around. But do remember that there are substantial divisions in linguistics, so take what you are told with a grain of salt.
Linguists have always been geeky. Don't forget that Larry Wall is a linguist first.
The only computer class I ever took was in 1983 called "Computer tools for natural language analysis". It was an introductory Unix course. We learned grep, awk, sed as well as tools like vi, Mail, and rogue. And a tiny little bit of C. But since then I've taught C at the graduate level.
Linguistics is all about the reprensentation and manipulation of information. But instead of it being about languages we design for particular purposes, it is about the language system that we use naturally.
Suppose you have a few thousand languages that you know were written with the same tools (like lex and yacc, but not lex and yacc), but you have no access to those tools. Suppose you are trying to figure out what those tools are from examining the languages (not the compilers) that have been specified using those tools. That is what theoretical linguistics is trying to do. We know that the specification of English and the specification of Dyirbal and every other human language out there are somehow "written" with the same tools. It's pretty need stuff.
Linguists were early adopters of TeX, have had a Unix affinity for a while, and as people who are interested in how information is internally represented and manipulated, like reading the source.
I remember once nagging the sys admins to always make sure that there is a man page for anything added to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.
The next day, they asked me to look at the manpage for something to see if it met with my approval. The DESCRIPTION was the C source. I was happy to say that it did, indeed, meet with my approval.
At one point, a well known professor (Geoffrey Pullum) had written a little essay for a newsletter on the "grammer of Unix" using linguistic style analyses of the shell. Naturally several of us feigned outrage at his confusion of "Unix" with the shell. Another linguist (Bill Poser), went so far as to write a shell which was verb (command) final, and post-positional. That is instead of saying
/bin/sh chsh
cat foo bar > bang
you would say
foo bar bang > cat
That is, the arguments preceed the command, and the redirect symbols go after the filename they redirect to or from. Now for various reasons, I had root access on a machine that Pullum used. So I changed his shell to this command final one. He actually caught on remarkably quickly. And after a quick
he was ready to concede the point.
For me, there is no surprise that linguists, and particularly computational linguists, are OSS enthusiasts. But that is enough of my random musings for now.
Actually L and R are not. This was a joke about them told by Chomskian linguists. While linguists tend to be on the left like most academics, Chomsky is on his own. He has a small core of political followers among linguists, but his radical politics is far from dominant among his academic followers. (At least this was the case 20 years ago when I knew what was going on in the field).
But now that we've started, I have to tell some linguistics jokes. The second meanest one I know is
Q: Why are so many gays and lesbians advocates of Lexical Functional Grammer
The meanest joke I know, I won't tell. But here's a variant of an old joke which either I or my girlfriend at the time added to. (We have different memories of it). First of all, it is much easier to tell this joke if we assume that 1 is defined to be a prime number. I know it isn't, you know it isn't, but the joke works better this way: Then there are some basic ones.A: Because they insist on the strict separation of structure and function.
Q: What do neogrammerians eat for breakfest?
A: Omlauts.
Alternative A: Bran, to ensure regularity.
Q: How does Chomsky change a light bulb?
A: He doesn't. He just persuades you that you can see in the dark.
And here is a real quote from Thomas Kuhn: "I am much fonder of my foes than I am of my fans."
And the worst philosophy joke ever: Hegel.
Due to lack of a camara at the right time, I missed a chance to make a joke. I was in a small zoo in Olney, England. There was a black swan there that was constantly attacking its reflection in the plexiglass. I suspect that it had been doing so ever since it was put in the cage. If I'd had a camara, I would have photographed this and titled it, "A problem for induction".
Speaking of induction, this one is about a pair of linguists who had a peculiar way of arguing. I will call them Linguist L and Linguist R.
Is it that unreasonable to talk about updating the law to cover a more modern definition of publication? Is it that unreasonable to consider expanding penalties and enforcement where existing penalties and enforcement practices fail to act as a deterrent?
Compare with spam and do the math. With existing civil law I can sue a spammer for the cost of each unsolicited turdlet that they put in my mailbox. But the cost of each suit enormously out ways the damages that could be claimed in any individual case.Many laws exist are because individual enforcement through civil suit is just too inefficient. In principle, we could drop municiple parking violation laws and just settle incidents through civil suits. But some times the collective solution is cheaper. In the days when republishing something took a lot of resources, small scale violations could be ignored and large scale violations could go to civil courts. But things aren't like that any more.
I do not wish to advocate a general lowering of standards of proof. I didn't say things right in my first posting. Thank you for the correction.
Let's take for example, a copyright agreement we might be happier with, say the GPL or some form of the Open Content license. Now imagine that you release something under such a license, but the technology and incentives are such that many individuals can violate it and have some (small) gain in violating. This, of course, is not the case, but please imagine that it was. You would never be able to demostrate sufficent damages from a single vioation to make it worth going after an indiviual violator. Your only options would be (ala MIAA) to seek legislation to make it easier to prosecute people, or (ala RIAA) make examples of some violators.
Personally, I hate the way the recording industry treats artists and tries to limit what is available at any one time. And I certainly get some schadenfreude from watching them suffer from "sharing". But none of that justifies the widespread, systematic, repeated petty theft that they have become a victim of.
I am looking forward to the end of the music business as we know it. I can't wait for the Apple Music Store or the like to deal directly with artists instead of labels. That should be their next move after completing their iTunes for OS/2 project.
But I simply don't get what the problem is here. If one "shares" material in a manner which violates to copyright conditions, or receives something shared that way, it's a copyright violation.
And if you don't like the copyright conditions, than you are perfectly free not to obtain a copy. If you don't like the price, don't buy it, but don't steal it either. I don't like buying things from greedy, exploitative, monopolistic entities any more than others do. So, I only rarely consume their products.
As for "sharing" being a violation even if there is no evidence that someone took it, that seems fair enough. If people blatently commit a crime and run around shouting, "you can't catch me; you can't catch me," then of course there will be changes in the types and standards of evidence used for prosecution.
I think that it is realistic to say that the current level of threat of prosecution and penalties has not prevent widespread copyright violtion. So it is not evil or insane to look at raising penalties and enforcement. (Even if it is a very stupid tactic). Each instance of copyright violation is a very small crime. But if it is widespread it can be very destructive. I guess it is like spam in that respect.
Just because the [RM]IAA are evil, doesn't mean that we should feel justified in violating the copyright. As I've said before, it's not civil disobience if you try to evade prosecution.
Sorry for the rant. And I certainly don't intend this to be a troll (and I hope it won't have the effect of one). Anyone who feels a real need to rake me over the coals for this, should feel free to email me. (A small amount of digging will find my address).
If I recall correctly, it was a little, poorly produced sign along Ulloi ut, in the tenth district. I can't remember the name of the major cross-street (also the name of the metro stop).
I always meant to take a picture of the sign and do something with it, but the list of things I'd always meant to do is far far longer than the list of things I've actually done.
For all I know, the company still exists. I moved from Budapest in 1994.
I've talked to too many people who've said, "I don't need to bother securing my home system because I've got nothing anyone would want." I've answered, "They want to use your machine to attack me." But the message doesn't sink in.
While these end users are being provided with crap systems, there is a market out there. If their choice of bad systems gets them severly spanked, they will start making demands of their providers.
All it would take would be a couple of high profile cases.
I don't know. It could have been von Neumann. I don't even know if the story is true. I've heard it several times, but it might by apocryphal.
Gallium Arsenide semiconductors are the technology of the future. Always have been, always will be.