Actually, no it's not. I'm a native English speaker and I've NEVER heard that word before. That's because it's not an English word. Some obscure nerd using a foreign word in an English website doesn't make it an English word.
But having been in English dictionaries for over 100 years does.
I am sure there are many English words you've never heard before. I'm sure there are many I've never heard before. English has a larger vocabulary than any other language. Nobody knows them all.
i'm not advocating using the simplest possible word to describe everything. i'm advocating not complicating stuff unnecessarily. perhaps it's because i lived in europe for a few years only knowing english. i worked with scientists who were required to learn english since it's the official language of the science. so i learned that some time, it more useful to sacrifice a bit of "flare" and nuance to get the point across using simpler words. and i also saw a lot of american tourists who were getting into extra crap with non-native english speakers trying to help them out in english (as a favor, i should add) because they didn't know how to simplify their communication style and made fun of them for not being fluent in english.
Should English-speaking travelers who don't know the local language use simple words and grammar when talking to locals? Of course (unless it's a country where English fluency is widespread).
But that doesn't mean an American company needs to write every single English-language news release as if it's a lost tourist in Shanghai looking for the bathroom.
i knew what the word meant. i'm not angry. i just think the use of "marginal" words just to jazz things up is not helpful or necessary.
And I think it's wonderful. It helps elevate writing into art instead of mere formulaic transmission of information. And the incredible variety of words is what makes English such a delightfully expressive language. It's a gift to be reveled in, and my hat's off to Google for selecting the perfect word for the occasion.
and, please, you knew well what i meant by "native" english word. to equate "man" and "zeitgeist" as both being "german" (thus not "native") is idiotic.
I don't get the distinction you're trying to draw. Both words came from German. One is used more often than the other. Does that make it more native? What, specifically, is your definition of nativeness in a language where almost all words are borrowed?
the fact you had to pull up a dictionary entry to show "zeitgeist" is even there shows that. do you even doubt for a second that the word "summary" is in the dictionary? how about "man"?
I didn't "have" to; I linked to it so that you could see it was there, because you seemed to be having vocabulary problems.
that's why i asked if there's a subtle (but relevant) nuance to the word zeitgeist that is different (in the context of describing this article) from the word summary. would you care to elaborate why "zeitgeist" is a much better word to describe this google page than "summary"?
Because "zeitgeist" means the pulse of the times, not just a summary of some stuff. The meaning is quite different.
It would be possible to label it "summary" and people would still be able to make out what was going on, if that's what you're after. Of course it would also be possible to do almost all communication in short declarative sentences with one-syllable third-grade-reading-level words. That way nobody, no matter how stupid, would be at a disadvantage in interpreting anything. But we'd lose a lot of nuance, meaning, and flavor, and communicating would become a lot less fun.
How well can someone with English as primary language navigate?
Quite easy - almost everyone speaks English in that part of town. Malaysia is made of three primary ethnic groups - Malay, Chinese, and Indian. Many Malays in their 20s and 30s didn't learn English in school due to a temporary nationalist policy of teaching Malay language only in public schools. But the Chinese and Indian schools kept teaching English. And now all the schools do again. Most of the people working and shopping in and around Low Yat are Chinese and fluent or near-fluent in English.
The hardest part is recognizing that people are speaking English! Since the language has been mixing with Chinese and Malay and Tamil for such a long time here, there's a thick accent and a lot of foreign words and structures. Many people call the language spoken here Manglish. It's pretty similar to the better-documented Singlish, as spoken in neighboring Singapore which has a similar ethnic mix (but different distributions).
The good news is that thanks to TV and movies, they can understand you even if it takes you a while to understand them.
Where is the Jalan Bulan Kiosk? This sounds really nice...
Kuala Lumpur, just across the road from Low Yat Plaza (Malaysia's biggest computer mall, a mere shadow of Bangkok's Panthip Plaza but with better prices).
You are imposing your opinion on a factual framework. Your beliefs regarding the nature of property don't have any effect on the reality of the situation.
Conveniently, in this case the dictionary and the law are on my side. Just a few Slashdot cranks and RIAA flacks on the other side of the table.
I understand that if someone copies your copyrighted material and distributes it without your permission, you have been illegally deprived of income.
I do not understand any claim that what happened was "theft". That's what I'm objecting to - not to assertions that it is illegal or wrong. I just don't like the misuse of terms. In my experience the misuse of terms is usually the first step toward a bigger lie.
The reasons that copyright infringement are different than theft have been belabored to painful extremes here and elsewhere.
The one that comes first to my mind, though, is that theft leaves the person entirely without the thing that was stolen.
Copyright infringement is one of the many things that deprive someone of income, none of which are theft. These include various illegal business practices, fraud, failure to adhere to contract terms, and so on.
It is not easy to calculate the amount of income that the victim is deprived of. It is somewhere between zero, and the profit that the victim would realize from one sale. But it is unlikely to be either of these extremes, but rather somewhere in the middle.
So you can see that it's theft neither in nature nor in practical impact.
Look, the copyright is the RIGHT TO CONTROL COPYING. Do you understand that? THAT is what the copyright holder owns. That authority is government granted property which can be used, discarded, transferred, and yes STOLEN. When you copy that CD, you STEAL the holder's right to control copies. S/he NO LONGER HAS THAT AUTHORITY/RIGHT when copies are made without permission. S/he HAS been deprived of something.
This is one of the most tortured arguments I've ever seen (and the copying == stealing thing usually brings some doozies out of the woodwork).
So you're saying that I when I illegally copy something, I've "stolen" and now possess the right to control who gets to copy it? Interesting. So I can go buy a copy of the Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo DVD, copy it on to my hard drive, and then using my freshly stolen rights, place the entire thing into the public domain? Or, since I have stolen and now possess the right to control who gets a copy, can I declare that underrated dance magician Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones is no longer entitled to the copy presented to him by the studio and have the police cart him off to jail?
I'm going to give you a clue (but I'll still have it after I give it to you, imagine that): "Property" is a term that applies to property. It does not apply to reputations, ideas, hopes, or dreams. Some of these things have their own laws to protect them, but they are different laws that take into account the differences between the different entities being protected.
To put it another way: If I shoot your television set and completely destroy it, I am not guilty of "murder". My act had some things in common with murder, but it cannot be murder, because the target was an entity to which the term (and associated law) does not apply.
If I copy your CD without your permission, YOU STILL HAVE IT.
Not if "IT" was the only known recording.
You've now decreased the value of my property. That's taking something from me.
Uh huh, next thing you're going to call me a "thief" for moving in next door to you, painting my house bright pink, and putting a private go-kart track in the front yard. Because you can damn well bet that's gonna decrease the value of your property.
If you wish to make the point that "copyright infringement" is less worse than "stealing", use your time to say *why*.
Giving it a new name says nothing at all.
It says something very important: It is a different thing. That is why we have more than one noun in our language.
I subscribe to a delightful hotspot service that charges me US$10 for three months of unlimited high-speed access at about 100 hotspots all over town (I know this sounds like a commercial but I really love them - it's completely changed my life and I now spend 75% of my working time outdoors at sidewalk cafes and the like).
But there are a lot of factors to balance in order to get the perfect working spot. If it's outdoors, it's got to be in the shade (during daytime) or under shelter (if rain seems likely). They've got to serve something to eat that I'm in the mood for. They can't be so crowded that I will feel guilty about tying up a table for hours. And preferably, they have a power outlet I can use.
While I could wander around the neighborhood sizing restaurants up with my laptop open and bleeping, I think that would be a bit dorky even for me. With the little detector, people just think I'm glancing at my mobile phone.
At the moment I'm sitting at an all-night sidewalk Chinese joint near the Jalan Bulan Kiosk hotspot, where I pigged out for $0.75. No power outlet but the price is right (and the food wasn't bad at all). There's a perfect breeze, and good music in the background. All thanks to SmartID. Don't knock it!
Here's one of his sites [babes.bomis.com]. You decide whether or not to call it "pornography".
That's a little disingenuous. Bomis (which goes way back, wow, I haven't thought about it in years) is a web-ring operator. They provide the infrastructure for similar-themed sites to find each other and provide links that help with mutual traffic generation. Click around bomis.com and you'll see rings for various types of aircraft, turkey recipes, stuffed animals, tips for pregnant mothers, woodworking, and everything else under the sun. One of the many subject categories is fan sites for nude models (and, I'm sure, the "fan" sites are largely dominated by pay porn operators). I could give you a link in google or yahoo that would do the same thing. Is Yahoo a pornographer?
Good, expensive bandwidth is always symetric. It was the genius idea of the technology and content providers to say that people download more than they upload, so provide less upload bandwidth to conserve the spectrum.
Think it through a little more. That piece of wire that can carry traffic at the same speed in both directions is subject to the same forces of supply and demand as every other commodity out there.
Content providers are willing to pay more for "upstream" capacity than consumer broadband ISPs on the same backbone or at the same peering exchange are.
Each bit that the content provider pushes along the wire is helping to fund the infrastructure that carries that bit to the broadband ISP's edge router. But if the broadband ISP starts pushing bits back up, that means more infrastructure that the content providers aren't going to pay for, so it means the ISPs will pick up a larger share of the tab.
That means they have to raise rates, and that means people stick with dialup.
My laptop (el cheapo iBook) can standby for over 48 hours (maybe longer; that's the longest I've let it go). It's rare that I walk around that long so busy trying to find a wifi signal that I don't get a chance to plug in the power adapter.
I was on vacation last week and saw an episode of MacGuyver (Richard Dean Anderson) and Teal'c (Christopher Judge) were in the same MacGyuver episode.
RDA was playing some special program school teacher, backed by the Peonix foundation and CJ was a football playing student in the class.
On the episode before this, Kera (from Deep Space 9) was a oil-driller's girl friend.
On another episode Cuba Gooding Jr. played a ranh hand.
That same night I saw Joey (Tribilni from friends, or the guy that plays hom at least) on Married with Children.
I think the main conclusion we can draw from this is that you watch way too much TV.
If you are doing advanced graphics stuff then you will get better results with PS (and there are some things you just can't print with PCL). But if you are just printing things you made in Microsoft Word you might as well get the extra speed from PCL.
Slashdot Mirror
But having been in English dictionaries for over 100 years does.
I am sure there are many English words you've never heard before. I'm sure there are many I've never heard before. English has a larger vocabulary than any other language. Nobody knows them all.
I was worried that some of my posts to this thread might have created an erroneous impression of maturity on my part, and I wanted to correct that.
Wow, your reading comprehension is really bad.
Should English-speaking travelers who don't know the local language use simple words and grammar when talking to locals? Of course (unless it's a country where English fluency is widespread).
But that doesn't mean an American company needs to write every single English-language news release as if it's a lost tourist in Shanghai looking for the bathroom.
And I think it's wonderful. It helps elevate writing into art instead of mere formulaic transmission of information. And the incredible variety of words is what makes English such a delightfully expressive language. It's a gift to be reveled in, and my hat's off to Google for selecting the perfect word for the occasion.
I don't get the distinction you're trying to draw. Both words came from German. One is used more often than the other. Does that make it more native? What, specifically, is your definition of nativeness in a language where almost all words are borrowed?
I didn't "have" to; I linked to it so that you could see it was there, because you seemed to be having vocabulary problems.
Because "zeitgeist" means the pulse of the times, not just a summary of some stuff. The meaning is quite different.
It would be possible to label it "summary" and people would still be able to make out what was going on, if that's what you're after. Of course it would also be possible to do almost all communication in short declarative sentences with one-syllable third-grade-reading-level words. That way nobody, no matter how stupid, would be at a disadvantage in interpreting anything. But we'd lose a lot of nuance, meaning, and flavor, and communicating would become a lot less fun.
It's in the dictionary, what more do you want? My suspicion is that you're just angry because someone used a word you didn't know.
And what's a "native English word" anyway? Would "man" qualify? That's German too. How about "detail"? That's French. "Pajama"? Whoops, Persian.
Quite easy - almost everyone speaks English in that part of town. Malaysia is made of three primary ethnic groups - Malay, Chinese, and Indian. Many Malays in their 20s and 30s didn't learn English in school due to a temporary nationalist policy of teaching Malay language only in public schools. But the Chinese and Indian schools kept teaching English. And now all the schools do again. Most of the people working and shopping in and around Low Yat are Chinese and fluent or near-fluent in English.
The hardest part is recognizing that people are speaking English! Since the language has been mixing with Chinese and Malay and Tamil for such a long time here, there's a thick accent and a lot of foreign words and structures. Many people call the language spoken here Manglish. It's pretty similar to the better-documented Singlish, as spoken in neighboring Singapore which has a similar ethnic mix (but different distributions).
The good news is that thanks to TV and movies, they can understand you even if it takes you a while to understand them.
Kuala Lumpur, just across the road from Low Yat Plaza (Malaysia's biggest computer mall, a mere shadow of Bangkok's Panthip Plaza but with better prices).
Conveniently, in this case the dictionary and the law are on my side. Just a few Slashdot cranks and RIAA flacks on the other side of the table.
I understand that if someone copies your copyrighted material and distributes it without your permission, you have been illegally deprived of income.
I do not understand any claim that what happened was "theft". That's what I'm objecting to - not to assertions that it is illegal or wrong. I just don't like the misuse of terms. In my experience the misuse of terms is usually the first step toward a bigger lie.
The reasons that copyright infringement are different than theft have been belabored to painful extremes here and elsewhere.
The one that comes first to my mind, though, is that theft leaves the person entirely without the thing that was stolen.
Copyright infringement is one of the many things that deprive someone of income, none of which are theft. These include various illegal business practices, fraud, failure to adhere to contract terms, and so on.
It is not easy to calculate the amount of income that the victim is deprived of. It is somewhere between zero, and the profit that the victim would realize from one sale. But it is unlikely to be either of these extremes, but rather somewhere in the middle.
So you can see that it's theft neither in nature nor in practical impact.
This is one of the most tortured arguments I've ever seen (and the copying == stealing thing usually brings some doozies out of the woodwork).
So you're saying that I when I illegally copy something, I've "stolen" and now possess the right to control who gets to copy it? Interesting. So I can go buy a copy of the Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo DVD, copy it on to my hard drive, and then using my freshly stolen rights, place the entire thing into the public domain? Or, since I have stolen and now possess the right to control who gets a copy, can I declare that underrated dance magician Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones is no longer entitled to the copy presented to him by the studio and have the police cart him off to jail?
I'm going to give you a clue (but I'll still have it after I give it to you, imagine that): "Property" is a term that applies to property. It does not apply to reputations, ideas, hopes, or dreams. Some of these things have their own laws to protect them, but they are different laws that take into account the differences between the different entities being protected.
To put it another way: If I shoot your television set and completely destroy it, I am not guilty of "murder". My act had some things in common with murder, but it cannot be murder, because the target was an entity to which the term (and associated law) does not apply.
Uh huh, next thing you're going to call me a "thief" for moving in next door to you, painting my house bright pink, and putting a private go-kart track in the front yard. Because you can damn well bet that's gonna decrease the value of your property.
It says something very important: It is a different thing. That is why we have more than one noun in our language.
Otherwise, why not just call it "murder"?
I subscribe to a delightful hotspot service that charges me US$10 for three months of unlimited high-speed access at about 100 hotspots all over town (I know this sounds like a commercial but I really love them - it's completely changed my life and I now spend 75% of my working time outdoors at sidewalk cafes and the like).
But there are a lot of factors to balance in order to get the perfect working spot. If it's outdoors, it's got to be in the shade (during daytime) or under shelter (if rain seems likely). They've got to serve something to eat that I'm in the mood for. They can't be so crowded that I will feel guilty about tying up a table for hours. And preferably, they have a power outlet I can use.
While I could wander around the neighborhood sizing restaurants up with my laptop open and bleeping, I think that would be a bit dorky even for me. With the little detector, people just think I'm glancing at my mobile phone.
At the moment I'm sitting at an all-night sidewalk Chinese joint near the Jalan Bulan Kiosk hotspot, where I pigged out for $0.75. No power outlet but the price is right (and the food wasn't bad at all). There's a perfect breeze, and good music in the background. All thanks to SmartID. Don't knock it!
No, he means sendmail, which is full of holes (and which is why he is the author of qmail).
It is not outside the realm of possibility that, for instance, a web server would use various programs to automatically process uploaded images.
That's a little disingenuous. Bomis (which goes way back, wow, I haven't thought about it in years) is a web-ring operator. They provide the infrastructure for similar-themed sites to find each other and provide links that help with mutual traffic generation. Click around bomis.com and you'll see rings for various types of aircraft, turkey recipes, stuffed animals, tips for pregnant mothers, woodworking, and everything else under the sun. One of the many subject categories is fan sites for nude models (and, I'm sure, the "fan" sites are largely dominated by pay porn operators). I could give you a link in google or yahoo that would do the same thing. Is Yahoo a pornographer?
Think it through a little more. That piece of wire that can carry traffic at the same speed in both directions is subject to the same forces of supply and demand as every other commodity out there.
Content providers are willing to pay more for "upstream" capacity than consumer broadband ISPs on the same backbone or at the same peering exchange are.
Each bit that the content provider pushes along the wire is helping to fund the infrastructure that carries that bit to the broadband ISP's edge router. But if the broadband ISP starts pushing bits back up, that means more infrastructure that the content providers aren't going to pay for, so it means the ISPs will pick up a larger share of the tab.
That means they have to raise rates, and that means people stick with dialup.
My laptop (el cheapo iBook) can standby for over 48 hours (maybe longer; that's the longest I've let it go). It's rare that I walk around that long so busy trying to find a wifi signal that I don't get a chance to plug in the power adapter.
You're taking the word of people who aren't able to run the system, that they know what to blame. Does that make sense?
Why aren't you blaming the hardware vendor or the electic company or the people who made the air conditioners? You'd have just as much basis for that.
I can't imagine why you couldn't, as the conclusion episode has been on BitTorrent for about 5 days.
I think the main conclusion we can draw from this is that you watch way too much TV.
If you are doing advanced graphics stuff then you will get better results with PS (and there are some things you just can't print with PCL). But if you are just printing things you made in Microsoft Word you might as well get the extra speed from PCL.