English and German are actually very interesting languages to compare. They are historically much closer than many people realise. If you ever have the chance to study some Middle English or go see a play by Chaucer (or anything else that dates from before "the great vowel shift") performed with the pronunciation of that time the similarities suddenly become glaringly obvious. You'll start noticing them as well in modern versions of both languages. But these languages have evolved in very different directions since that time. German has a big emphasis on a very formalized grammar and on compounding, whereas English has evolved with a simpler grammar and greater emphasis on a larger and more complex vocabulary with more subtle differences in meaning. This is also strongly related to (actual or perceived) cultural differences between native speakers of both languages.
I love studying languages and particularly language change and currently speak 5 different languages with varying degrees of fluency (Germanic, Romanic and Slavic languages) and find it a very enriching experience.
NewSpeak was predicated on the idea that your language controls your thoughts. It's true, but only do a degree, which is how NewSpeak-minded people managed to make "special" or "challenged" an insult. Then again, the English word "nice" has flip-flopped several times without artificial assistance.
German is in many ways the hardest language for me because a lot of the old words took on meanings in very different directions. A classic example is let/lassen. "Ich lasse mein Haar schneiden" doesn't literally mean "l let my hair be cut", although presumably it was a voluntary thing. However, the more precise translation would be "I have my hair cut", meaning, effectively that instead of permitting it to be done, I've ordered it to be done.
Actually, words are only part of it. The intonation that you use to ask a question in Russian sounds to an American like the other person is about to commit assault.
I've seen worse on paperbacks. Baen is famous for their bad covers, though the non-US ones are far, far worse. This, for instance.
Yep. Darrell Sweet's stereotypical covers were stiffly posed and had a certain aura that some of the characters could benefit from seeing a dermatologist.
I don't even want to THINK of what the average cover for a bodice-ripper featuring Highlanders, Lords, cowboys or werewolves is like (other than basically all alike).
I don't understand why Microsoft wants to make a browser so badly. The consumer world has moved on to Firefox and Chrome and Safari and this is propogating through the enterprise world now.
What is the business case for having your own browser? So that bing can be the default search engine?
Well Duh. In Windows, the browser must be (squeaky Ballmer voice) "an Integral part of the Windows Operating System".
Because that works so much better than OS's like Linux and MacOS where the browser is a mere application program.
Go far enough down that path and you end up handling snakes in church.
Most people realize that God isn't going to protect them against things that they can protect themselves against.
Killing, however, is a one-way street, whether it's of self or others. God both can kill and resurrect - at least so we're told. People are only half that capable, as Gandalf once noted.
It does. Suicide is a sin. That's why they would be against it.
Suicide is never directly named a sin in the Bible. In fact, King Saul committed suicide.
Theologically speaking, however, suicide is considered arrogating the right of God to determine when and how you will meet your end and putting oneself on a plane with God is considered at least one deadly sin (Pride).
Which is why we have good Christian people demonstrating for the right to forcibly hold vegetative people alive even when they would not be able to live without artificial assistance and are likely enduring at best a living Hell, because "life" and "living" are 2 different things.
Then again, many of these self-same good Christian people have absolutely no problem with a Death Penalty, even though it removes even the slimmest chance that the person so convicted might wake up one day 50 years hence and repent. Or for that matter, be exonerated.
He wrote stories that were witty, entertaining - and full of knives.
The essence of Terry Pratchett can be summed up in one of his more frequent observations: that in the eyes of society, living in a vermin-infested slum practically makes you a criminal, but own a whole neighborhood of them and you're a pillar of the community.
I read several of the Discworld stories in magazines originally, which is how I know. Then one day years later, "Small Gods" came to my attention and I started backtracking from there. I don't know if he wasn't as well-known in the USA for his first few books or I'd just missed them.
I love the way Asimov in his later novels tied the robot stories back into the Foundation Trilogy covering 20,000 years IIRC.
He tried too hard. I wish he'd left some of his works unconnected, as the stitching is embarrassingly crude in some cases.
OTOH, Andre Norton mostly left well enough alone. While some concepts and places overlapped between series, there was no attempt to force them all into alignment when they differed. Her later years, perhaps not so much, but that's when she had other people tying into her works.
Sounds like Startup mentality and I agree with you. I would never work for a startup.
Except maybe for the hipsters, no. I've seen some pretty old-line companies with those attitudes. One was a stodgy old insurance company that passed out papers with cartoon illustrations for the CEO's invented "business language". Not content with using other companies buzzwords, he invented some of his own.
A bank where the CIO was always going off on the latest management fad to the point where the method you used became more important than the work you did.
A Fortune corporation where we were flatly told that (salaried) us "were being paid above average and expected to work above average hours" (in other words, lower effective per-hour rate). My response was I could take a job at a convenience store, a less-lucrative position and at least get a change of scenery every 8 hours.
In my experience, there are always candidates out there that can fill the position. The problem is that you and/or your company doesn't want to do what it takes to get such a candidate. That may mean paying relocation costs for someone to move, signing bonuses, or (god forbid) raise the salary. Its pretty clear that the market is tight in your area. That simply means you need to pay more than the company next door...
Or consider that I simply don't want to relocate to your town and fight your traffic and consider the fact that if some low-skilled poor-English person in Bangalore can do the work badly over the Internet that I might be able to do the job better over the Internet.
I cannot live on Indian wages because I don't pay Indian prices on groceries, shelter, and whatever. But I do discount for not having to drive in to work every morning just to do mostly the exact same things I can do from home.
Anything you leave behind at a crime scene is fair game.
The real issue isn't even DNA. It's in collecting a registry on people who are not suspected of committing a crime, whether it's because they were fingerprinted for fool enough to fly into the Land of the Free from a foreign country or applied for a job or whatever.
Because crime scenes aren't "clean" places. A lot of people have typically been on-scene. Jumping at the first match you find on file can end up convicting the wrong person. The actual perp may have been someone who'd managed to stay under the radar.
i've never understood why the unix file 'magic' approach wasn't used universally - it determines the type of a file based on the contents, usually the first few characters or lines.
Because first you have to open the file. If you have a directory with dozens of files in it, that can really slow things down versus just inferring the type from the extension in the directory.
I cleaned up someone's computer a number of years ago where in fact this was the case. He had a MASSIVE viral infection and one of the things it did was mess around with the registry settings for what happened when you clicked on icons. He was within millimeters of having to reformat his hard driver, but a command-line registry repair saved him.
But both Kirk and Picard tended to stress that the human race had grown beyond its more savage past when challenged by ostensibly superior beings.
Admittedly, evolution in the genetic sense isn't normally that swift. Although according to something I read today, if you were to take random humans from the 19th Century and give them a modern IQ test, they'd average about 70. Reasons not entirely clear, since better nutrition was only 1 factor suspected.
Nevertheless, social "evolution" is another matter. I don't know how to plot that, but it's plain for almost anyone to see that technological evolution, at least has been on something of an exponential curve for a long time.
Feel free to submit to a gentle, peaceful decapitation. Be sure to let us know how that works out for you.
I see what you did there.
Actually, decapitation historically was considered about the most humane and dignified means of execution there was. Commoners were hanged, royalty was decapitated. The guillotine was invented to make the process even more humane by making decapitation less likely to be botched.
Your dear friends at ISIS, and the like are deliberately perverting the process, just like they pervert their religion and everything else they touch. They saw someone's head off with a rusty knife and call it decapitation, but it's only decapitation in the literal sense of the word, not in the way that it was intended to be done.
Any form of fiction must portray human characters as realistically as possible. Star trek does not. Even "Twilight" makes for a better portrayal of human nature. Of course, angry childish nerds cannot understand this because they don't experience any form of human interaction except for rejection.
Or MAYBE the idea was that the human race had evolved???
Captain Archer in "Enterprise" was a pretty aggressive angry person, not afraid to get violent in ways that more reflect pre-1960 films than what we allow in today's lawyer-cowed world.
Captain Kirk wasn't afraid to get in a knock-down rip-your-shirt-off fight, but he was also famous for his ability to achieve a solution via rational argument (often in the same episode).
Picard is more intellectual and less physical.
Perhaps one of the most obvious cases in Science Fiction where the premise was that the human race wasn't the same was in Frank Hebert's "Dune" where whole planets specialized in some sort of intense mental/physical discipline and people's plots and motivations could make the Byzantines' jaws drop.
I don't know what 1000 shares in your employer is worth, but it doesn't sound like it's worth much if your financial investment isn't matched by your emotional investment.
And it certainly won't give you any extra job security unless management is hoping to persuade to to make further investments later.
being in a union doesnt make you care about the company you work for, it makes you care about the union you belong to.
Never said it did. However, a person who doesn't care about the company and doesn't have a union to protect his job is a loser both ways.
When it comes time to shed personnel, If you're in a union, I have to consider the union limitations on firing union members. If you're invested in my company, I would prefer to keep you over someone who's just pulling a paycheck. If you're neither - don't let the door slam.
The downside of of the high-quality video work that has been done on the Star Trek tapes is that you can see the black stains on his teeth from smoking in the closeups.
83 is a respectable age, but I recently lost someone who lived to about that age and had a similar smoking history. Whether not smoking at all would have made a significant difference in lifespan is uncertain. But it might have made those last few years a bit less difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
English and German are actually very interesting languages to compare. They are historically much closer than many people realise. If you ever have the chance to study some Middle English or go see a play by Chaucer (or anything else that dates from before "the great vowel shift") performed with the pronunciation of that time the similarities suddenly become glaringly obvious. You'll start noticing them as well in modern versions of both languages.
But these languages have evolved in very different directions since that time. German has a big emphasis on a very formalized grammar and on compounding, whereas English has evolved with a simpler grammar and greater emphasis on a larger and more complex vocabulary with more subtle differences in meaning. This is also strongly related to (actual or perceived) cultural differences between native speakers of both languages.
I love studying languages and particularly language change and currently speak 5 different languages with varying degrees of fluency (Germanic, Romanic and Slavic languages) and find it a very enriching experience.
NewSpeak was predicated on the idea that your language controls your thoughts. It's true, but only do a degree, which is how NewSpeak-minded people managed to make "special" or "challenged" an insult. Then again, the English word "nice" has flip-flopped several times without artificial assistance.
German is in many ways the hardest language for me because a lot of the old words took on meanings in very different directions. A classic example is let/lassen. "Ich lasse mein Haar schneiden" doesn't literally mean "l let my hair be cut", although presumably it was a voluntary thing. However, the more precise translation would be "I have my hair cut", meaning, effectively that instead of permitting it to be done, I've ordered it to be done.
Actually, words are only part of it. The intonation that you use to ask a question in Russian sounds to an American like the other person is about to commit assault.
I've seen worse on paperbacks. Baen is famous for their bad covers, though the non-US ones are far, far worse. This, for instance.
Yep. Darrell Sweet's stereotypical covers were stiffly posed and had a certain aura that some of the characters could benefit from seeing a dermatologist.
I don't even want to THINK of what the average cover for a bodice-ripper featuring Highlanders, Lords, cowboys or werewolves is like (other than basically all alike).
I don't understand why Microsoft wants to make a browser so badly. The consumer world has moved on to Firefox and Chrome and Safari and this is propogating through the enterprise world now.
What is the business case for having your own browser? So that bing can be the default search engine?
Well Duh. In Windows, the browser must be (squeaky Ballmer voice) "an Integral part of the Windows Operating System".
Because that works so much better than OS's like Linux and MacOS where the browser is a mere application program.
Don't you mean rusty tetanus-infected hook?
Go far enough down that path and you end up handling snakes in church.
Most people realize that God isn't going to protect them against things that they can protect themselves against.
Killing, however, is a one-way street, whether it's of self or others. God both can kill and resurrect - at least so we're told. People are only half that capable, as Gandalf once noted.
What the hell is there to fix in a protocol solely designed to return a string of numbers?
Yeah. All You Have To Do Is...
(screams)
It does. Suicide is a sin. That's why they would be against it.
Suicide is never directly named a sin in the Bible. In fact, King Saul committed suicide.
Theologically speaking, however, suicide is considered arrogating the right of God to determine when and how you will meet your end and putting oneself on a plane with God is considered at least one deadly sin (Pride).
Which is why we have good Christian people demonstrating for the right to forcibly hold vegetative people alive even when they would not be able to live without artificial assistance and are likely enduring at best a living Hell, because "life" and "living" are 2 different things.
Then again, many of these self-same good Christian people have absolutely no problem with a Death Penalty, even though it removes even the slimmest chance that the person so convicted might wake up one day 50 years hence and repent. Or for that matter, be exonerated.
He wrote stories that were witty, entertaining - and full of knives.
The essence of Terry Pratchett can be summed up in one of his more frequent observations: that in the eyes of society, living in a vermin-infested slum practically makes you a criminal, but own a whole neighborhood of them and you're a pillar of the community.
I read several of the Discworld stories in magazines originally, which is how I know. Then one day years later, "Small Gods" came to my attention and I started backtracking from there. I don't know if he wasn't as well-known in the USA for his first few books or I'd just missed them.
Some are, some aren't. The first two Discworld books are woven stories, but the infrastructure was basically consistent.
I love the way Asimov in his later novels tied the robot stories back into the Foundation Trilogy covering 20,000 years IIRC.
He tried too hard. I wish he'd left some of his works unconnected, as the stitching is embarrassingly crude in some cases.
OTOH, Andre Norton mostly left well enough alone. While some concepts and places overlapped between series, there was no attempt to force them all into alignment when they differed. Her later years, perhaps not so much, but that's when she had other people tying into her works.
That's SEVEN roommates, peasant!
Id love to see the breakdown on where they came up with this number.
Being that Obama just pulled that number out of his ass . . . I don't think you would want to see it in any detail.
More likely he got it handed to him from Microsoft.
Sounds like Startup mentality and I agree with you. I would never work for a startup.
Except maybe for the hipsters, no. I've seen some pretty old-line companies with those attitudes. One was a stodgy old insurance company that passed out papers with cartoon illustrations for the CEO's invented "business language". Not content with using other companies buzzwords, he invented some of his own.
A bank where the CIO was always going off on the latest management fad to the point where the method you used became more important than the work you did.
A Fortune corporation where we were flatly told that (salaried) us "were being paid above average and expected to work above average hours" (in other words, lower effective per-hour rate). My response was I could take a job at a convenience store, a less-lucrative position and at least get a change of scenery every 8 hours.
And so forth.
In my experience, there are always candidates out there that can fill the position. The problem is that you and/or your company doesn't want to do what it takes to get such a candidate. That may mean paying relocation costs for someone to move, signing bonuses, or (god forbid) raise the salary. Its pretty clear that the market is tight in your area. That simply means you need to pay more than the company next door...
Or consider that I simply don't want to relocate to your town and fight your traffic and consider the fact that if some low-skilled poor-English person in Bangalore can do the work badly over the Internet that I might be able to do the job better over the Internet.
I cannot live on Indian wages because I don't pay Indian prices on groceries, shelter, and whatever. But I do discount for not having to drive in to work every morning just to do mostly the exact same things I can do from home.
I saw a Dell ad this morning that listed among its numerous requirements 64+ years of experience.
I hope that was some sort of typo.
Anything you leave behind at a crime scene is fair game.
The real issue isn't even DNA. It's in collecting a registry on people who are not suspected of committing a crime, whether it's because they were fingerprinted for fool enough to fly into the Land of the Free from a foreign country or applied for a job or whatever.
Because crime scenes aren't "clean" places. A lot of people have typically been on-scene. Jumping at the first match you find on file can end up convicting the wrong person. The actual perp may have been someone who'd managed to stay under the radar.
i've never understood why the unix file 'magic' approach wasn't used universally - it determines the type of a file based on the contents, usually the first few characters or lines.
Because first you have to open the file. If you have a directory with dozens of files in it, that can really slow things down versus just inferring the type from the extension in the directory.
I cleaned up someone's computer a number of years ago where in fact this was the case. He had a MASSIVE viral infection and one of the things it did was mess around with the registry settings for what happened when you clicked on icons. He was within millimeters of having to reformat his hard driver, but a command-line registry repair saved him.
But both Kirk and Picard tended to stress that the human race had grown beyond its more savage past when challenged by ostensibly superior beings.
Admittedly, evolution in the genetic sense isn't normally that swift. Although according to something I read today, if you were to take random humans from the 19th Century and give them a modern IQ test, they'd average about 70. Reasons not entirely clear, since better nutrition was only 1 factor suspected.
Nevertheless, social "evolution" is another matter. I don't know how to plot that, but it's plain for almost anyone to see that technological evolution, at least has been on something of an exponential curve for a long time.
Feel free to submit to a gentle, peaceful decapitation. Be sure to let us know how that works out for you.
I see what you did there.
Actually, decapitation historically was considered about the most humane and dignified means of execution there was. Commoners were hanged, royalty was decapitated. The guillotine was invented to make the process even more humane by making decapitation less likely to be botched.
Your dear friends at ISIS, and the like are deliberately perverting the process, just like they pervert their religion and everything else they touch. They saw someone's head off with a rusty knife and call it decapitation, but it's only decapitation in the literal sense of the word, not in the way that it was intended to be done.
Any form of fiction must portray human characters as realistically as possible. Star trek does not. Even "Twilight" makes for a better portrayal of human nature. Of course, angry childish nerds cannot understand this because they don't experience any form of human interaction except for rejection.
Or MAYBE the idea was that the human race had evolved???
Captain Archer in "Enterprise" was a pretty aggressive angry person, not afraid to get violent in ways that more reflect pre-1960 films than what we allow in today's lawyer-cowed world.
Captain Kirk wasn't afraid to get in a knock-down rip-your-shirt-off fight, but he was also famous for his ability to achieve a solution via rational argument (often in the same episode).
Picard is more intellectual and less physical.
Perhaps one of the most obvious cases in Science Fiction where the premise was that the human race wasn't the same was in Frank Hebert's "Dune" where whole planets specialized in some sort of intense mental/physical discipline and people's plots and motivations could make the Byzantines' jaws drop.
I don't know what 1000 shares in your employer is worth, but it doesn't sound like it's worth much if your financial investment isn't matched by your emotional investment.
And it certainly won't give you any extra job security unless management is hoping to persuade to to make further investments later.
being in a union doesnt make you care about the company you work for, it makes you care about the union you belong to.
Never said it did. However, a person who doesn't care about the company and doesn't have a union to protect his job is a loser both ways.
When it comes time to shed personnel, If you're in a union, I have to consider the union limitations on firing union members. If you're invested in my company, I would prefer to keep you over someone who's just pulling a paycheck. If you're neither - don't let the door slam.
The downside of of the high-quality video work that has been done on the Star Trek tapes is that you can see the black stains on his teeth from smoking in the closeups.
83 is a respectable age, but I recently lost someone who lived to about that age and had a similar smoking history. Whether not smoking at all would have made a significant difference in lifespan is uncertain. But it might have made those last few years a bit less difficult.