When CDs first came out, LPs cost 6.98. CD prices were a full TEN DOLLARS MORE at $16.98! The RIAA claimed this was because CD's cost more to make and would come down as technology improved.
While I don't disagree with your general thesis, your numbers ignore inflation.
CDs came out in the USA in 1983 (a year or two after the rest of the world, as usual with new technologies).
$6.98 in 1983 dollars is $13 in 2003 dollars. So Universal basically has brought the price down to pre-CD levels.
I really hope it's not dead, because I just bought a wireless Bluetooth keyboard for my laptop, and a USB Bluetooth dongle to go with it.
Even if it never achieves critical mass, I really doubt anyone's going to come to your house and confiscate your perfectly-decent equipment. So you can relax.
Umm I'm assuming this is some form of gag. I actually find that business gets done much quicker if I speak to people than if I send an email. Sure email comes in useful lots of times, but nothing beats a quick phone call to make sure everyone is clear.
My experience is pretty much exactly the opposite. If something is discussed via phone, everyone involved has a slightly different recollection and some people just forget it entirely.
On the other hand, when it's done via email, the issue tends to blip back onto people's radar screens as they page through their emails, vs being forgotten forever. And everyone has the same recollection, because everyone has the same printed version in front of their face.
Phones are very disruptive to concentration and tend to elevate every issue to the same priority. With email you can glance at something and decide for yourself when it will require your attention. The consequent perverse feedback cycle is that because so many people think things are urgent enough for a phone call when they really aren't, that I've basically stopped answering my phone. Maybe if/when caller-ID gets a "Subject:" line (hey, someone patent this before Microsoft does!) I'll start answering it again.
I'm also not the only one who just doesn't listen to voice mails unless I'm hopelessly bored. Spending 2 minutes hearing someone drone on with excessive details that I already know before they get to the point, instead of just skimming through an email message in 10 seconds, is a horrible waste of time. And there are no voicemail interfaces that are anywhere near as efficient as email for finding information - you can't search, you can't sort by subject or sender, and you can't skim (you can skip ahead a few seconds or play at high-speed if your system allows, which ours does, but it's still far slower than skimming by eye).
Basically, voice communications are a huge waste of time unless dealing with people who are temporarily unable to access their email.
It is free and has no market(money) driving it's development so therefore it's not good for the economy and the public interest in general
Good point.
There's an even worse case of this going on: The English language. People speak and read it, adding words and allowing others to fall into misuse, without any corporate entity providing profit-based guidance or deriving income from its use.
This is not good for the economy and for the public interest in general. Therefore, I propose that people start speaking Raju1kabirish, which will require licensing payments of $100 annually. I am sure you will be the first one to sign up.
Given your poor mastery of English, it would seem you have little invested in that platform anyway, so what have you got to lose? Put your money where your mouth is (wipe it off first though).
You have an overly optimistic view of the amount of time it takes to learn Spanish.
I had to learn Spanish for work last year. I'm still far from fluent (really far), but I went from zero to getting around town and talking about work-related things in about a month; no classes, just reading a book at night and then using it in the daytime. If I'd spent that same amount of time learning Esperanto I'd have nothing constructive to show for it: No employer would care, nor would any job be made easier. Socially, I have never encountered an Esperanto speaker who did not also speak some other language I knew. It is a hobby and a conceit. Spanish, on the other hand, has provided numerous social and occupational rewards.
A year of Esperanto gives you a skill. A year of Spanish gives you the option of going on trying for a skill.
Even a lifetime of Esperanto gives you a skill that is only as useful as speaking Klingon: membership in a delusional in-crowd. This crowd seems to be drawn from three kinds of people:
People with too much time on their hands.
English-speakers who are daunted by the number of languages out there and want some sort of "shortcut" to seeming all international and shit.
Non-English speakers who for ridiculous dogmatic reasons refuse to learn English.
I think their FAQ disproves this myth quite handily, so I won't bother. From your list of suggestions, I've already studied French and Russian, but the point remains (also in their FAQ) that I am at a permanent major disadvantage when conversing with a native French or Russian speaker.
If you just want to be on a level playing field with native speakers, either go there and hang around outside an institution for mentally challenged kids, or take the time to learn it right. How's my English? It's not my first language, but I don't think I'm at a disadvantage with native speakers at all. Is it your claim that Esperanto is a vehicle for people who are too lazy and/or stupid to learn a foreign language, so they can pat each other in the back when conversing in permanent mutual semi-intelligibility?
What, you've never heard of newsgroups and chat rooms? I suppose talking about hobby Foo in rec.hobbies.<foo> counts as a completely contrived situation in your mind
When Foo is the language, and the existence of the forum is used to prove the viability of the language, then yes, that's pretty much the dictionary definition of "contrived".
But you're dismissing it out of hand, not even willing to try?
This is not like refusing to eat Green Eggs and Ham. My rejection is not based on low expectations of the subjective experience of learning or using the language.
Rather, it's because I'm rational enough to realize that the exercise has no point. Learning a language takes a lot of work, and when I expend that work, I want a payoff greater than the ability to converse in rec.hobbies.foo.
It already has happened. There's over a million speakers around the world.
No, it is estimated there are over a million people who have at one time dabbled. The same could be said for piglatin.
While that does mean that I'm not likely to just run into someone on the street who speaks it (like I did in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), but when I travel to a new city, I can almost always contact someone there who will show me the city or give me a place to stay for the night. I did this countless times travelling through Brazil and Europe using the Pasporta Servo [tejo.org]. So, it is already useful
Sorry, that's contrived. You could say the same for membership in the Kiwanis or the Justin Timberlake fan club. Or, for heaven's sake, Servas.
You're pushing this is a geek club, not as a language. Which is fine, so long as you understand what it is.
Buisness could be conducted and treatys negotiated without one party being at a disadvantage
Who exactly is at a disadvantage when business is conducted in a language where one party has less than native fluency?
Unless you're trying to sell Monty Python dictionaries ("My hovercraft is full of eels") to the Chinese or something, I'd argue that both parties are equally disadvantaged. In my work I deal with non-fluent speakers and in various languages all the time and I don't see where one party gets any advantage out of being able to say things the other party doesn't understand.
If someone can come up with 1 sane argument against a universal auxiliary language
It's simply never going to happen. The value proposition of an artificial language is too abstract. For any rational actor, the choice between learning a language that a billion people (including many in the wealthiest economies on earth, and basically all of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people) already speak today, or learning a language spoken exclusively by anorak-clad boffins on the promise of eventual utility, is a no-brainer. People just don't have that much free time, and crappy English is better than fluent Esperanto for the practical needs of rich and poor alike.
or a better candidate than Esperanto for this language, I'd love to hear it.
Well, read this sentence aloud, and you'll be hearing it.
English has the closest thing to critical mass that any language in history ever had. This has been centuries in the making. Esperanto, on the other hand, has centuries yet to go, and even then, it's waiting in line behind Spanish, Chinese, and several others. By the time its turn comes around we'll either be using telepathy, or we'll be back to banging rocks and referring to all objects as "urk."
Fact is, the universal language is Bad English. It's spoken everywhere, and its speakers are largely mutually intelligible. Americans can't understand them, but that's just a matter of practice. The rest of us can, and we didn't even grow up on English.
Programmers will love this language. It's the Python of spoken languages!
Oh great, does that mean that the number of seconds I pause between words has essential grammatical significance?
(for those who don't know Python, it is distinguished from usable languages by its reliance on precise quantities of invisible characters as crucial syntactical elements)
Well, it's hugely useful on the net, groups like soc.culture.esperanto
How does that make it hugely useful? "Esperanto is very useful because you can use it as a way to join the community of people who speak Esperanto and wish they had someone else to talk to." What's hugely useful on the net is English.
let you interact with users who do not speak English, which can give you a perspective on the world.
Consider the self-selection fallacy here. The people you will be talking to are going to be more united in whatever character attribute led them to choose to learn Esperanto instead of English, than they will be distinguished by their local cultural characteristics.
For practical uses in the real world, it doesn't get much more useful than the Pasporta Servo, a service of Esperanto-speakers who volunteer to welcome travellers from other countries in their homes--in other words, learn to speak Esperanto and you can travel around the world and get FREE room and board!
Or join Servas and do the same, but with a whole lot more people.
Europe is extremely proud of it's phone system. They standardized on GSM early and it has paid off with near universal coverage and compatibility.
This is not a Europe thing. It is an "almost the entire rest of the world" thing.
The only point that can be proven by this is the opposite of what you're trying to say: The USA is able to get away with using its own oddball systems just because it happens to be reasonably large.
You sound like my Spanish teacher. Come on. This is why we have translations. There is a *huge* range of thoughts and ideas in English.
That's like saying there's no reason to try a papaya or mango because you can get those flavors as slurpees at 7-Eleven. A translation is a translation. It may be very good and have artistic finesse of its own, but it's not the original.
And yes, there are more books and ideas written natively in English than you could ever absorb. That doesn't mean you wouldn't benefit from the added diversity of being able to take in books and ideas in other languages.
Spanish is an interesting language with a huge diverse history and culture. That doesn't mean that it's a "new way of thinking".
It's not like dolphin thought or something, but it definitely does change the way you look at things. Spanish, like any well-developed language, has a lot of idioms that, as you learn them, encourage you to see certain parts of the world around you in strange and interesting ways.
This, incidentally, is another reason why Esperanto is a crock. Not having enjoyed the benefit of a critical mass of everyday speakers, or cultural communities that share boundaries with the linguistic community, it's a completely sterile language. The sample figures of speech that Esperantophiles wave around in rebuttal sound completely implausible and unnatural to the point of jarring dissonance.
I'm a nerd. All but one of the laundry-list assumptions are false in my case. And I'm considering learning Esperanto. Why? Because the reasons listed here are pretty good ones.
Really? I'd be genuinely interested to know which ones you found to be "pretty good". I skimmed through the FAQ (especially part 9) and all their answers struck me as either non-sequiturs or downright stupid.
Esperanto is not meant to be a replacement primary language. It's meant to be a useful fallback, a common secondary language.
Well, if that's your goal, you've definitely picked a loser. There is not, and never will be, any situation anyplace on earth outside of an Esperanto convention where you can find an Esperanto speaker more easily than you can find an English speaker.
If you want a fallback, pick something that people who leave the house actually speak. There are plenty of languages with large diasporas. Chinese. French. Russian. Arabic.
Or at least invent some sort of giant red forehead tattoo for Esperanto speakers so you can find your one counterpart among the thousand people you'll see in a week.
Until then, its only use will be in completely contrived situations (blue-moon-rare anecdotes about chance Esperantencounters notwithstanding).
The headmaster of a secondary school near Manchester, England, found consistently over an 18-year period that pupils who learned Esperanto for a year acquired a level of fluency in the language equivalent to four years of French study, and subsequently achieved a higher level in French after three years of study than those pupils who learned only French for four years.
And this has what to do with Esperanto, exactly? Studies have shown that learning any second language makes third and subsequent languages easier.
At least if their teacher had been responsible enough to teach them Spanish instead of Esperanto for the first year, they'd have a second useful skill to show for the time spent.
By making all the notes the same color, you HAVE to look at every bill you're accepting. This means you are more likely to notice a counterfeit bill.
Just wanted to say that this is the only insightful or interesting thing I've read in this entire discussion.
I've always been a big advocate of colored money, since there didn't seem to be a single coherent argument against it, but this one actually makes sense.
Anyway, I'm off to the bank to see if they have any of the new notes. Anyone managed to get one?
When will the Euro and the Dollar freeze parity?
And before you start ranting or laughing, think about it.
I say in 20 years from now the latest we'll have a unified currency across the western hemispere.
You know Europe's not in the western hemisphere, right?
Did he really "hack" into thier accounts or was he using them as the from field?
Did you read the article? (this is my favorite refrain today). He used the NEWSPAPER's addresses in the from field. He used zombie machines (hence "hacked in") to SEND the messages to the hundred thousand spamees.
I agree about killing all spammers. But... was this guy REALLY a spammer? He wasn't sticking it to people like you and me.
Did you read the article? He sent hundreds of thousands of copies of the message to people like you and me. It's just that he used the newspaper's return address. So they got all the bounces. And that's what got them up in arms.
I'm thrilled about this precedent. Someone has been using my domain name to send spam for several months now, and I've easily collected 100,000 bounces. This motivates me to get out there and figure out who it is.
I find the best way to use email is to email the important information, then print out a copy and fax the copy, then call the recipient to find out if they received both the email and the fax.
Why an email AND a fax?
Surely it would be faster to send the email, then make the phone call, then send the fax only if the email failed. No further call is required because the fax protocol, unlike email, has confirmation built in.
Plus, both you and the recipient save paper and avoid the disposal hassle for sensitive documents.
It never worked for me the vast majority of the time either. But then internet explorer tends to offer you it's own redirect service if you type in a wrong address.
Non-sequitur.
If you typed an invalid domain that ended with.com or.net, then Internet Explorer would have no way of knowing it was a "wrong address".
It certainly can. You can script any behavior you want in Perl.
For instance, when someone calls me, it first checks for a supplied caller-ID (CID) number. If there is one, and it's not on my blacklist, the call rings through to the phone (otherwise I hear nothing).
If they're on the blacklist, the call is picked up and immediately dropped.
If there is no CID, it starts playing my "answering machine" message. During that time, they can touch-tone in a code which I have given various people who call from overseas or who for other reasons can't send CID. Otherwise, it just lets them leave a message and then disconnects them.
I couldn't ask for anything more.
The total cost was about $200 in hardware plus a lot of time tinkering. That's a lot of money but really I count the time spent tinkering as entertainment value (the fun of being a geek) so it's well worth it to me.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't disagree with your general thesis, your numbers ignore inflation.
CDs came out in the USA in 1983 (a year or two after the rest of the world, as usual with new technologies).
$6.98 in 1983 dollars is $13 in 2003 dollars. So Universal basically has brought the price down to pre-CD levels.
Even if it never achieves critical mass, I really doubt anyone's going to come to your house and confiscate your perfectly-decent equipment. So you can relax.
My experience is pretty much exactly the opposite. If something is discussed via phone, everyone involved has a slightly different recollection and some people just forget it entirely.
On the other hand, when it's done via email, the issue tends to blip back onto people's radar screens as they page through their emails, vs being forgotten forever. And everyone has the same recollection, because everyone has the same printed version in front of their face.
Phones are very disruptive to concentration and tend to elevate every issue to the same priority. With email you can glance at something and decide for yourself when it will require your attention. The consequent perverse feedback cycle is that because so many people think things are urgent enough for a phone call when they really aren't, that I've basically stopped answering my phone. Maybe if/when caller-ID gets a "Subject:" line (hey, someone patent this before Microsoft does!) I'll start answering it again.
I'm also not the only one who just doesn't listen to voice mails unless I'm hopelessly bored. Spending 2 minutes hearing someone drone on with excessive details that I already know before they get to the point, instead of just skimming through an email message in 10 seconds, is a horrible waste of time. And there are no voicemail interfaces that are anywhere near as efficient as email for finding information - you can't search, you can't sort by subject or sender, and you can't skim (you can skip ahead a few seconds or play at high-speed if your system allows, which ours does, but it's still far slower than skimming by eye).
Basically, voice communications are a huge waste of time unless dealing with people who are temporarily unable to access their email.
Good point.
There's an even worse case of this going on: The English language. People speak and read it, adding words and allowing others to fall into misuse, without any corporate entity providing profit-based guidance or deriving income from its use.
This is not good for the economy and for the public interest in general. Therefore, I propose that people start speaking Raju1kabirish, which will require licensing payments of $100 annually. I am sure you will be the first one to sign up.
Given your poor mastery of English, it would seem you have little invested in that platform anyway, so what have you got to lose? Put your money where your mouth is (wipe it off first though).
Is there an online version of this study? I'd like to take a look.
I had to learn Spanish for work last year. I'm still far from fluent (really far), but I went from zero to getting around town and talking about work-related things in about a month; no classes, just reading a book at night and then using it in the daytime. If I'd spent that same amount of time learning Esperanto I'd have nothing constructive to show for it: No employer would care, nor would any job be made easier. Socially, I have never encountered an Esperanto speaker who did not also speak some other language I knew. It is a hobby and a conceit. Spanish, on the other hand, has provided numerous social and occupational rewards.
Even a lifetime of Esperanto gives you a skill that is only as useful as speaking Klingon: membership in a delusional in-crowd. This crowd seems to be drawn from three kinds of people:
People with too much time on their hands.
English-speakers who are daunted by the number of languages out there and want some sort of "shortcut" to seeming all international and shit.
Non-English speakers who for ridiculous dogmatic reasons refuse to learn English.
I have little use for any of these.
If you just want to be on a level playing field with native speakers, either go there and hang around outside an institution for mentally challenged kids, or take the time to learn it right. How's my English? It's not my first language, but I don't think I'm at a disadvantage with native speakers at all. Is it your claim that Esperanto is a vehicle for people who are too lazy and/or stupid to learn a foreign language, so they can pat each other in the back when conversing in permanent mutual semi-intelligibility?
When Foo is the language, and the existence of the forum is used to prove the viability of the language, then yes, that's pretty much the dictionary definition of "contrived".
This is not like refusing to eat Green Eggs and Ham. My rejection is not based on low expectations of the subjective experience of learning or using the language.
Rather, it's because I'm rational enough to realize that the exercise has no point. Learning a language takes a lot of work, and when I expend that work, I want a payoff greater than the ability to converse in rec.hobbies.foo.
No, it is estimated there are over a million people who have at one time dabbled. The same could be said for piglatin.
Sorry, that's contrived. You could say the same for membership in the Kiwanis or the Justin Timberlake fan club. Or, for heaven's sake, Servas.
You're pushing this is a geek club, not as a language. Which is fine, so long as you understand what it is.
If that's the "whole point", how come the only person to say it is an anonymous coward?
The cited article, for instance, makes no such claim. It only compares learning Esperanto to learning nothing.
Who exactly is at a disadvantage when business is conducted in a language where one party has less than native fluency?
Unless you're trying to sell Monty Python dictionaries ("My hovercraft is full of eels") to the Chinese or something, I'd argue that both parties are equally disadvantaged. In my work I deal with non-fluent speakers and in various languages all the time and I don't see where one party gets any advantage out of being able to say things the other party doesn't understand.
It's simply never going to happen. The value proposition of an artificial language is too abstract. For any rational actor, the choice between learning a language that a billion people (including many in the wealthiest economies on earth, and basically all of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people) already speak today, or learning a language spoken exclusively by anorak-clad boffins on the promise of eventual utility, is a no-brainer. People just don't have that much free time, and crappy English is better than fluent Esperanto for the practical needs of rich and poor alike.
Well, read this sentence aloud, and you'll be hearing it.
English has the closest thing to critical mass that any language in history ever had. This has been centuries in the making. Esperanto, on the other hand, has centuries yet to go, and even then, it's waiting in line behind Spanish, Chinese, and several others. By the time its turn comes around we'll either be using telepathy, or we'll be back to banging rocks and referring to all objects as "urk."
Fact is, the universal language is Bad English. It's spoken everywhere, and its speakers are largely mutually intelligible. Americans can't understand them, but that's just a matter of practice. The rest of us can, and we didn't even grow up on English.
Oh great, does that mean that the number of seconds I pause between words has essential grammatical significance?
(for those who don't know Python, it is distinguished from usable languages by its reliance on precise quantities of invisible characters as crucial syntactical elements)
How does that make it hugely useful? "Esperanto is very useful because you can use it as a way to join the community of people who speak Esperanto and wish they had someone else to talk to." What's hugely useful on the net is English.
Consider the self-selection fallacy here. The people you will be talking to are going to be more united in whatever character attribute led them to choose to learn Esperanto instead of English, than they will be distinguished by their local cultural characteristics.
Or join Servas and do the same, but with a whole lot more people.
This is not a Europe thing. It is an "almost the entire rest of the world" thing.
The only point that can be proven by this is the opposite of what you're trying to say: The USA is able to get away with using its own oddball systems just because it happens to be reasonably large.
That's like saying there's no reason to try a papaya or mango because you can get those flavors as slurpees at 7-Eleven. A translation is a translation. It may be very good and have artistic finesse of its own, but it's not the original.
And yes, there are more books and ideas written natively in English than you could ever absorb. That doesn't mean you wouldn't benefit from the added diversity of being able to take in books and ideas in other languages.
It's not like dolphin thought or something, but it definitely does change the way you look at things. Spanish, like any well-developed language, has a lot of idioms that, as you learn them, encourage you to see certain parts of the world around you in strange and interesting ways.
This, incidentally, is another reason why Esperanto is a crock. Not having enjoyed the benefit of a critical mass of everyday speakers, or cultural communities that share boundaries with the linguistic community, it's a completely sterile language. The sample figures of speech that Esperantophiles wave around in rebuttal sound completely implausible and unnatural to the point of jarring dissonance.
Really? I'd be genuinely interested to know which ones you found to be "pretty good". I skimmed through the FAQ (especially part 9) and all their answers struck me as either non-sequiturs or downright stupid.
Well, if that's your goal, you've definitely picked a loser. There is not, and never will be, any situation anyplace on earth outside of an Esperanto convention where you can find an Esperanto speaker more easily than you can find an English speaker.
If you want a fallback, pick something that people who leave the house actually speak. There are plenty of languages with large diasporas. Chinese. French. Russian. Arabic.
Or at least invent some sort of giant red forehead tattoo for Esperanto speakers so you can find your one counterpart among the thousand people you'll see in a week.
Until then, its only use will be in completely contrived situations (blue-moon-rare anecdotes about chance Esperantencounters notwithstanding).
And this has what to do with Esperanto, exactly? Studies have shown that learning any second language makes third and subsequent languages easier.
At least if their teacher had been responsible enough to teach them Spanish instead of Esperanto for the first year, they'd have a second useful skill to show for the time spent.
Just wanted to say that this is the only insightful or interesting thing I've read in this entire discussion.
I've always been a big advocate of colored money, since there didn't seem to be a single coherent argument against it, but this one actually makes sense.
Anyway, I'm off to the bank to see if they have any of the new notes. Anyone managed to get one?
How come all my US food labels have Calories and my non-US food labels have joules?
You know Europe's not in the western hemisphere, right?
Did you read the article? (this is my favorite refrain today). He used the NEWSPAPER's addresses in the from field. He used zombie machines (hence "hacked in") to SEND the messages to the hundred thousand spamees.
Did you read the article? He sent hundreds of thousands of copies of the message to people like you and me. It's just that he used the newspaper's return address. So they got all the bounces. And that's what got them up in arms.
I'm thrilled about this precedent. Someone has been using my domain name to send spam for several months now, and I've easily collected 100,000 bounces. This motivates me to get out there and figure out who it is.
Why an email AND a fax?
Surely it would be faster to send the email, then make the phone call, then send the fax only if the email failed. No further call is required because the fax protocol, unlike email, has confirmation built in.
Plus, both you and the recipient save paper and avoid the disposal hassle for sensitive documents.
Non-sequitur.
If you typed an invalid domain that ended with .com or .net, then Internet Explorer would have no way of knowing it was a "wrong address".
It certainly can. You can script any behavior you want in Perl.
For instance, when someone calls me, it first checks for a supplied caller-ID (CID) number. If there is one, and it's not on my blacklist, the call rings through to the phone (otherwise I hear nothing).
If they're on the blacklist, the call is picked up and immediately dropped.
If there is no CID, it starts playing my "answering machine" message. During that time, they can touch-tone in a code which I have given various people who call from overseas or who for other reasons can't send CID. Otherwise, it just lets them leave a message and then disconnects them.
I couldn't ask for anything more.
The total cost was about $200 in hardware plus a lot of time tinkering. That's a lot of money but really I count the time spent tinkering as entertainment value (the fun of being a geek) so it's well worth it to me.
Seems really unlikely the ticket would encode "Pay this person $100".
Instead, it would say "Pay this person the amount recorded in file number 30259794-7163979-94-4059-32574-5145 in the master database."
Faking that isn't going to get you very far.