Do *you* have free will? Or is your free will an illusion, and the path you would take known to someone who knows everything that is and was, and cared to take the time to work it out?
I'll grant that your consciousness might be the issue, till you fall asleep. People in comas might object too, if they were conscious.
On the other hand, when it comes down to it I'd prefer to say "I erred on the side of caution, and was wrong" to "I sent caution to the winds, but was wrong". I don't know why, but society can't just vote that some things are wrong, and I don't know where the boundary is. If a society is pretty much divided, I think we should err on the side of caution, even if there's a majority in favor of considering some form of killing people to be legitimate. If on the other hand, the majority was overwhelming, then is the time to start thinking the majority may be right. (If the majority think it's right to kill you, indifferent children, "just because", and they do, didn't they murder you anyway? Not that abortion is at all the same as killing someone "just because".)
*Disclaimer: I would not forbid an unrelated person having an abortion, but I would strongly urge against it. For my own purposes, I do not think I could accept my (hypothetical, for I am slashdot) partner to have one except to safeguard her health and safety (when I'd think it was the only option), particularly given the availability & effectiveness of contraceptions these days. I was happier with the government of my state till the Labor Party basically decided to force the Premier into liberalising the law on abortion.
Does my first sentence of that disclaimer contradict the last? What does that make me, anti-life or anti-choice? Does my first para. rationalise the second, or did it serve as a good logical base? You decide! (I certainly don't know). But if you conclude I'm pro-life, please don't tell my sisters; I'd (therefore) prefer to live.
Whereas I have, and from what I understand... Debian doesn't *exist*, so Software in the Public Interest doesn't work for Debian; to the extent that Debian can get sued, it's SPI that gets sued. (Of course, it could be the individual debian developers that get sued in a certain circumstance.) Anyway, Goerzen is concerned that Debian developers have put SPI into a legally vulnerable position, and is objecting to the fact that SPI was never even consulted.
OTOH, as far as Debian and the SPI are concerned, they *are* distinct, and the SPI isn't meant to get involved in the inner workings of Debian.
So perhaps both sides do have *some* merit, but the arrangement sounds pretty precarious to me, and before it all topples over I think it needs to be re-thought, either with Debian split out from SPI, or Debian developers understanding their obligations to the SPI.
Fair enough. Possibly it did happen at the same time as the Cold War because America became more involved with Britain or something, and the British definition spread across.
Actually, an "oligarchy" is rule by a small group (that's what it means "rule by the few"). The term "republic" is pretty meaningless, and beyond "not a monarchy/empire", doesn't mean a whole lot. And even that doesn't mean much, when you consider elective monarchies like the Vatican and those, such as Japan, with neutered monarchs/emperors versus republics where autocratic power passes to the child (such as the former Commonwealth of England).
In any case, saying that "the US is a democratic republic" does not in any way refute the original posters point, any more than having said "Australia is a democratic monarchy" would, or "Iraq was a non-democratic republic". You could have democratic republics in which the 2000 election would've been wrong (think of Maltese proportional voting, which is the way it is because the party that won a majority of the popular vote didn't get a majority of the seats at one point). And even though what happened was legal, that's not necessarily the end of the story; a healthy democracy will debate about whether that was the best result and if necessary alter the constitution. (OTOH, the debate probably should take a slightly less partisan approach and now's probably the wrong time anyway.)
I think you're wrong. The term "democracy" probably spread to include the current political systems of America, Canada, Australia, the UK etc. because although they are all representative democracies, only one of that list is a republic. "Democracy" in that sense certainly isn't a "pop term"; it is considered correct with that definition in many countries. (It's actually a bit ironic: I think when America was first becoming a democracy, the normal interpretation of "democracy" was more like "mob-rule" and it was derogatory. So the Americans called themselves a "republic" instead, and named institutions to remind us of the Roman Republic. Nowadays, "democracy" is the good term; and "republic" is often viewed with some concern in British-influenced monarchies.)
The term "representative democracy" does not just describe a kind of republic in which the delegates are elected; it also describes democracies such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom which are not yet constitutionally republics.
Also, America *is* a democracy in the sense of the word which is current outside of America, and appears to be used a lot in America too, even though there it is often criticised. I don't know to what extent the correctness of this definition is an American-vs-Commonwealthish difference, but it's misleading to say that Americans don't live in a democracy.
The real question is, who would want to pay even a pittance for such poor typography? Some of the best-looking books have been produced using free software. Why can't they do the same?
Although I'm basing this on a sample size of 1, at my non-American University, there's quite a lot of Macs on the desks of staff in the Philosophy department, as well as quite a few Macs in the Behavioral Neuroscience lab, and in the computer study hall. OTOH, aside from servers that comp. sci. students can log on to, there's only one GNU/Linux box (undergrad) students can access that I know of, and it doesn't even work at the moment.
Of course, it could just be that Australia, as a puppet state of America, doesn't count as "outside the US".
I find that when I'm standing, using an optical mouse against my leg (or other convenient, vertical body part) is very comfortable. But then, I don't do it for extensive periods of time so you're probably already worked something out...
Well, the advantages of going to a national park over someone's backyard are numerous. Barbecues (what's the point in going to the bush if you don't get to have a bbq for lunch?), or at least places you can start a fire. No fences to jump. Often toilets. Car parking. Well-kept paths (if you want the bush to be there tomorrow, you oughta stick to them). You also don't have to worry so much that a tree might fall on your head.
The bush between the fences is pretty much the same as the bush on the other side of the fence too, and it's not like there's any shortage of parks. So given the situation in Australia (or Victoria), I don't know why I wouldn't want to go to a park over some random place.
(Which is not to say that I've never jumped fences out in the country, even when riding my bike, but then it's usually either because I'm at my grandmother's farm and don't really know where the boundries are; or because I'm taking shortcuts to parks.)
Although I imagine building campfires in private property without permission would be illegal in Finnland, the answer I was going for was actually "Cultural differences".
(Personally, I find the Finnish OP's comments somewhat strange too: In Australia, we manage to have public and private bushland, with the government neither owning all the bush, but nor does private ownership of some of it cause great stress to the public. If I want to enjoy the bush, I'll go to a national park somewhere, it'd never occur to me to go our randomly and start trekking through private property.)
The text of the first amendment to the US contitution is:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It does not necessarily limit the government from authorising private orginastions from detaining people, who set their own rules for who they'll detain. So perhaps as a cost-saving measure, the government allows lenders to detain their debtors. And of course, the lenders will be able to choose which debtors to detain (after all, they have their own costs to consider). And it just happen to be anyone who calls out for a change of government gets detained... (Some other part of the constitution hopefully does, though; or the Supreme Court might find implied rights; or something.)
Probably it sounds silly but certain parts of English aren't really transparent to English speakers from different parts of the world, and you've said a couple of words that I've wanted to know the meaning of for a while...
So what is a "jumpsuit" and what is a "shifter"? Thanks!
While we're being pedantic, "Van Diemen's Land" did not join in the federation; it was already known as Tasmania by then. This actually occurred to avoid the connotations the harsh penal colony had after transportation finished.
Hmm... Well I think the whole point of Gnome is that it's not overtly customisable. It's customisable in its own way, and it can enable alternative paradigms like spatial vs non-spatial or sloppy vs click-to-focus, but if you want to do something really strange I think it's better to use a tool that's more suited to the job so you swap out the tool and use something different that has that aspect as a primary concern. I don't think that's a failing, I think it's a win, even though the "win" means I don't use Gnome because I don't like most of its tools. I suppose I'm a bit "morally relativist" in terms of judging my file managers, and you're absolutist, even though we both agree we dislike Nautilus.
Still, I obsess about customisable window managers. That was really the thing I couldn't stand about the Mac. I can't live without focus-strictly-follows-mouse-and-vice-versa, and Sawfish is about the only thing that can give you that:)
("crucial", btw.)
You'd hate ROX-Filer, I think. It manages files, and it manages them well, but it doesn't do a whole lot else. No VFS layer.* No tree view. Basically each window shows just one folder a bit like the spatial paradigm, but you can get it to have multiple views of the same folder in different windows and they don't remember where they were (unless you ask them to) and stuff. Its customisation (which is close to Gnomish levels than KDEsque ones) is more focussed around accomodating rather than changing. Its intelligent file type detection behavior, its focus around avoiding using the mini file pickers in Open and Save As dialog boxes and the fact that single-click-to-run is the default (and much better supported in ROX then elsewhere) is what keeps me there. AppDirs are a boon too, but of course a ROX desktop uses them less thoroughly then a Mac desktop because there's only a limited amount of ROX software. But really, there's nothing innovative; it just does one thing, and does it well.
[* Which is one thing I *strongly* agree with. I can't imagine limiting myself just to one DE's apps; I want XMMS, Xterm/Zsh, Vim, Xpdf etc. to see the same as my file manager, so any VFS layer's gotta be at file-system level.]
I don't understand what you mean by GTK+ 2.x not being "modern", not being "pretty", not having "smooth fonts". It has as smooth fonts as anything on GNU/Linux does, which is different from Windows, but if you coped with KDE's smoothing, then GTK's is exactly the same. Perhaps your distribution didn't configure it properly?... if you were using a Qt-centric distro, perhaps they put no effort in, but something like Debian or Ubuntu should be fine "out of the box". GTK+ 1.x was awful, of course, but GTK+ 2.x is another story.
Well... the fact that there's not a GTK 2 file manager that you like isn't really a failure of Gnome, it's just a personal preference, and is the domain of third-party software, not the Gnome devs. I love ROX-Filer and can't imagine using my computer without it---in fact, it's a big part of the reason I've installed GNU/Linux on my iMac G5 (by now replacing, not augmenting, Mac OS X), even though I lost the fan control, accelerated graphics and sound. ROX-Filer is GTK. Still, some people like tree views or whatever or filesystem emulation. Damned if I know why, but that's up to you.
(Also, I got the impression that kioslaves are a part of the KDE architecture, and not the file manager i.e. KDE applications use it, not programs started by Konqueror to open files. But I've never really been able to feel comfortable with Konqueror, so vlrock.)
However... I think there's a new Xfce file manager in development that is obviously GTK 2 native, and I think from its screenshots and screenshots of Directory Opus, the interface looks a bit similar. Doubt that's enough seeing as you're on a Mac nowadays but maybe it's more like what you want...
Probably though I say nothing new to you and/or repeat myself and/or missed your point again. So never mind.:)
G'day Smash. I'm afraid you've missed my point (as I apparently missed the grandfather's!).
I intended to say nothing about the innovation of Gnome versus KDE, and I didn't really want to defend Gnome at all (I've replaced the file manager & panel with ROX-Filer, the window manager with Sawfish, the session manager with ROX-Session, the web browser with Galeon, the text editor gvim, the PDF viewer with Xpdf, and many other parts besides, so I don't even claim to defend or like or, um, use Gnome).
My purpose, instead, was to correct a perceived mistake in my parent post: It is possible to replace Nautilus with another file manager.
I did, admittedly, get in my opinion of Konqueror, but I've never been impressed with a file manager that tries to do anything besides manage files. The fact that I dislike KDE, however, does not in any way imply that I like Gnome.
Umzle... You can actually replace Nautilus with another file manager. I for a while was running Gnome with ROX-Filer, for instance, and you could just as easily replace Nautilus with Konqueror, if you can actually work out how to use it. This has been the case for ever as far as I know.
Actually, I find ROX-Filer a great complement to the command line, given it contains a built-in "minibuffer" which you can use to run a command-line script optionally with the current selection as its arguments. In addition, it also supports running files based on their type (by default it uses magic to detect the type, but you can override that by setting a MIME-Type extended attribute if your file system supports it). I'm pretty sure more file managers besides ROX-Filer and Worker do that.
Bah. It's just this sort of nonsense you expect from Latin fanboys. The ablative case was hardly a Latin innovation... even Sanskrit had an ablative case! And as for modern languages using it, there's always Finnish. Includes a case for whatever you might remotely think you need. Hungarian too.
Not to mention that in every other language you can simulate its effects by the use of prepositions, postpositions, other cases etc. So really you loose nothing at all by not having it.
Yes, this probably means unlearning almost everything you were taught about writing in college. Sometimes it means unlearning what you learned back as far as junior high school.
Which college teaches people to write so they can't be understood? I suggest that no-one should go there, ever again. I mean, there's trying to immitate the style of journal articles and textbooks, but no-one's ever taught you to do that. Probably if you've ever listened to a single lecturer or tutor about the topic, they've told you not to do that. After all, what's the whole point in essay writing?
(There's the occasional idiot who regurgitates rules like "don't use 'I' in an essay", and promptly make it an even worse expression like "this present author", but I've found that more a phenomenon of early high school teachers of subjects other than English.)
Slashdot Mirror
Do *you* have free will? Or is your free will an illusion, and the path you would take known to someone who knows everything that is and was, and cared to take the time to work it out?
I'll grant that your consciousness might be the issue, till you fall asleep. People in comas might object too, if they were conscious.
On the other hand, when it comes down to it I'd prefer to say "I erred on the side of caution, and was wrong" to "I sent caution to the winds, but was wrong". I don't know why, but society can't just vote that some things are wrong, and I don't know where the boundary is. If a society is pretty much divided, I think we should err on the side of caution, even if there's a majority in favor of considering some form of killing people to be legitimate. If on the other hand, the majority was overwhelming, then is the time to start thinking the majority may be right. (If the majority think it's right to kill you, indifferent children, "just because", and they do, didn't they murder you anyway? Not that abortion is at all the same as killing someone "just because".)
*Disclaimer: I would not forbid an unrelated person having an abortion, but I would strongly urge against it. For my own purposes, I do not think I could accept my (hypothetical, for I am slashdot) partner to have one except to safeguard her health and safety (when I'd think it was the only option), particularly given the availability & effectiveness of contraceptions these days. I was happier with the government of my state till the Labor Party basically decided to force the Premier into liberalising the law on abortion.
Does my first sentence of that disclaimer contradict the last? What does that make me, anti-life or anti-choice? Does my first para. rationalise the second, or did it serve as a good logical base? You decide! (I certainly don't know). But if you conclude I'm pro-life, please don't tell my sisters; I'd (therefore) prefer to live.
Whereas I have, and from what I understand ... Debian doesn't *exist*, so Software in the Public Interest doesn't work for Debian; to the extent that Debian can get sued, it's SPI that gets sued. (Of course, it could be the individual debian developers that get sued in a certain circumstance.) Anyway, Goerzen is concerned that Debian developers have put SPI into a legally vulnerable position, and is objecting to the fact that SPI was never even consulted.
OTOH, as far as Debian and the SPI are concerned, they *are* distinct, and the SPI isn't meant to get involved in the inner workings of Debian.
So perhaps both sides do have *some* merit, but the arrangement sounds pretty precarious to me, and before it all topples over I think it needs to be re-thought, either with Debian split out from SPI, or Debian developers understanding their obligations to the SPI.
Fair enough. Possibly it did happen at the same time as the Cold War because America became more involved with Britain or something, and the British definition spread across.
Actually, an "oligarchy" is rule by a small group (that's what it means "rule by the few"). The term "republic" is pretty meaningless, and beyond "not a monarchy/empire", doesn't mean a whole lot. And even that doesn't mean much, when you consider elective monarchies like the Vatican and those, such as Japan, with neutered monarchs/emperors versus republics where autocratic power passes to the child (such as the former Commonwealth of England).
In any case, saying that "the US is a democratic republic" does not in any way refute the original posters point, any more than having said "Australia is a democratic monarchy" would, or "Iraq was a non-democratic republic". You could have democratic republics in which the 2000 election would've been wrong (think of Maltese proportional voting, which is the way it is because the party that won a majority of the popular vote didn't get a majority of the seats at one point). And even though what happened was legal, that's not necessarily the end of the story; a healthy democracy will debate about whether that was the best result and if necessary alter the constitution. (OTOH, the debate probably should take a slightly less partisan approach and now's probably the wrong time anyway.)
I think you're wrong. The term "democracy" probably spread to include the current political systems of America, Canada, Australia, the UK etc. because although they are all representative democracies, only one of that list is a republic. "Democracy" in that sense certainly isn't a "pop term"; it is considered correct with that definition in many countries. (It's actually a bit ironic: I think when America was first becoming a democracy, the normal interpretation of "democracy" was more like "mob-rule" and it was derogatory. So the Americans called themselves a "republic" instead, and named institutions to remind us of the Roman Republic. Nowadays, "democracy" is the good term; and "republic" is often viewed with some concern in British-influenced monarchies.)
The term "representative democracy" does not just describe a kind of republic in which the delegates are elected; it also describes democracies such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom which are not yet constitutionally republics.
Also, America *is* a democracy in the sense of the word which is current outside of America, and appears to be used a lot in America too, even though there it is often criticised. I don't know to what extent the correctness of this definition is an American-vs-Commonwealthish difference, but it's misleading to say that Americans don't live in a democracy.
The real question is, who would want to pay even a pittance for such poor typography? Some of the best-looking books have been produced using free software. Why can't they do the same?
Although I'm basing this on a sample size of 1, at my non-American University, there's quite a lot of Macs on the desks of staff in the Philosophy department, as well as quite a few Macs in the Behavioral Neuroscience lab, and in the computer study hall. OTOH, aside from servers that comp. sci. students can log on to, there's only one GNU/Linux box (undergrad) students can access that I know of, and it doesn't even work at the moment.
Of course, it could just be that Australia, as a puppet state of America, doesn't count as "outside the US".
I find that when I'm standing, using an optical mouse against my leg (or other convenient, vertical body part) is very comfortable. But then, I don't do it for extensive periods of time so you're probably already worked something out...
Well, the advantages of going to a national park over someone's backyard are numerous. Barbecues (what's the point in going to the bush if you don't get to have a bbq for lunch?), or at least places you can start a fire. No fences to jump. Often toilets. Car parking. Well-kept paths (if you want the bush to be there tomorrow, you oughta stick to them). You also don't have to worry so much that a tree might fall on your head.
The bush between the fences is pretty much the same as the bush on the other side of the fence too, and it's not like there's any shortage of parks. So given the situation in Australia (or Victoria), I don't know why I wouldn't want to go to a park over some random place.
(Which is not to say that I've never jumped fences out in the country, even when riding my bike, but then it's usually either because I'm at my grandmother's farm and don't really know where the boundries are; or because I'm taking shortcuts to parks.)
Although I imagine building campfires in private property without permission would be illegal in Finnland, the answer I was going for was actually "Cultural differences".
(Personally, I find the Finnish OP's comments somewhat strange too: In Australia, we manage to have public and private bushland, with the government neither owning all the bush, but nor does private ownership of some of it cause great stress to the public. If I want to enjoy the bush, I'll go to a national park somewhere, it'd never occur to me to go our randomly and start trekking through private property.)
So why do Finns own property?
It does not necessarily limit the government from authorising private orginastions from detaining people, who set their own rules for who they'll detain. So perhaps as a cost-saving measure, the government allows lenders to detain their debtors. And of course, the lenders will be able to choose which debtors to detain (after all, they have their own costs to consider). And it just happen to be anyone who calls out for a change of government gets detained... (Some other part of the constitution hopefully does, though; or the Supreme Court might find implied rights; or something.)
Probably it sounds silly but certain parts of English aren't really transparent to English speakers from different parts of the world, and you've said a couple of words that I've wanted to know the meaning of for a while...
So what is a "jumpsuit" and what is a "shifter"? Thanks!
While we're being pedantic, "Van Diemen's Land" did not join in the federation; it was already known as Tasmania by then. This actually occurred to avoid the connotations the harsh penal colony had after transportation finished.
Hmm... Well I think the whole point of Gnome is that it's not overtly customisable. It's customisable in its own way, and it can enable alternative paradigms like spatial vs non-spatial or sloppy vs click-to-focus, but if you want to do something really strange I think it's better to use a tool that's more suited to the job so you swap out the tool and use something different that has that aspect as a primary concern. I don't think that's a failing, I think it's a win, even though the "win" means I don't use Gnome because I don't like most of its tools. I suppose I'm a bit "morally relativist" in terms of judging my file managers, and you're absolutist, even though we both agree we dislike Nautilus.
:)
... if you were using a Qt-centric distro, perhaps they put no effort in, but something like Debian or Ubuntu should be fine "out of the box". GTK+ 1.x was awful, of course, but GTK+ 2.x is another story.
Still, I obsess about customisable window managers. That was really the thing I couldn't stand about the Mac. I can't live without focus-strictly-follows-mouse-and-vice-versa, and Sawfish is about the only thing that can give you that
("crucial", btw.)
You'd hate ROX-Filer, I think. It manages files, and it manages them well, but it doesn't do a whole lot else. No VFS layer.* No tree view. Basically each window shows just one folder a bit like the spatial paradigm, but you can get it to have multiple views of the same folder in different windows and they don't remember where they were (unless you ask them to) and stuff. Its customisation (which is close to Gnomish levels than KDEsque ones) is more focussed around accomodating rather than changing. Its intelligent file type detection behavior, its focus around avoiding using the mini file pickers in Open and Save As dialog boxes and the fact that single-click-to-run is the default (and much better supported in ROX then elsewhere) is what keeps me there. AppDirs are a boon too, but of course a ROX desktop uses them less thoroughly then a Mac desktop because there's only a limited amount of ROX software. But really, there's nothing innovative; it just does one thing, and does it well.
[* Which is one thing I *strongly* agree with. I can't imagine limiting myself just to one DE's apps; I want XMMS, Xterm/Zsh, Vim, Xpdf etc. to see the same as my file manager, so any VFS layer's gotta be at file-system level.]
I don't understand what you mean by GTK+ 2.x not being "modern", not being "pretty", not having "smooth fonts". It has as smooth fonts as anything on GNU/Linux does, which is different from Windows, but if you coped with KDE's smoothing, then GTK's is exactly the same. Perhaps your distribution didn't configure it properly?
Well ... the fact that there's not a GTK 2 file manager that you like isn't really a failure of Gnome, it's just a personal preference, and is the domain of third-party software, not the Gnome devs. I love ROX-Filer and can't imagine using my computer without it---in fact, it's a big part of the reason I've installed GNU/Linux on my iMac G5 (by now replacing, not augmenting, Mac OS X), even though I lost the fan control, accelerated graphics and sound. ROX-Filer is GTK. Still, some people like tree views or whatever or filesystem emulation. Damned if I know why, but that's up to you.
... I think there's a new Xfce file manager in development that is obviously GTK 2 native, and I think from its screenshots and screenshots of Directory Opus, the interface looks a bit similar. Doubt that's enough seeing as you're on a Mac nowadays but maybe it's more like what you want...
:)
(Also, I got the impression that kioslaves are a part of the KDE architecture, and not the file manager i.e. KDE applications use it, not programs started by Konqueror to open files. But I've never really been able to feel comfortable with Konqueror, so vlrock.)
However
Probably though I say nothing new to you and/or repeat myself and/or missed your point again. So never mind.
G'day Smash. I'm afraid you've missed my point (as I apparently missed the grandfather's!).
I intended to say nothing about the innovation of Gnome versus KDE, and I didn't really want to defend Gnome at all (I've replaced the file manager & panel with ROX-Filer, the window manager with Sawfish, the session manager with ROX-Session, the web browser with Galeon, the text editor gvim, the PDF viewer with Xpdf, and many other parts besides, so I don't even claim to defend or like or, um, use Gnome).
My purpose, instead, was to correct a perceived mistake in my parent post: It is possible to replace Nautilus with another file manager.
I did, admittedly, get in my opinion of Konqueror, but I've never been impressed with a file manager that tries to do anything besides manage files. The fact that I dislike KDE, however, does not in any way imply that I like Gnome.
Umzle... You can actually replace Nautilus with another file manager. I for a while was running Gnome with ROX-Filer, for instance, and you could just as easily replace Nautilus with Konqueror, if you can actually work out how to use it. This has been the case for ever as far as I know.
Actually, I find ROX-Filer a great complement to the command line, given it contains a built-in "minibuffer" which you can use to run a command-line script optionally with the current selection as its arguments. In addition, it also supports running files based on their type (by default it uses magic to detect the type, but you can override that by setting a MIME-Type extended attribute if your file system supports it). I'm pretty sure more file managers besides ROX-Filer and Worker do that.
Yeah, I was going for anti-fanboy-fanboyism. Finnish and Hungarian don't even have cases, per se; they're agglutinations, rather than inflexions.
Bah. It's just this sort of nonsense you expect from Latin fanboys. The ablative case was hardly a Latin innovation ... even Sanskrit had an ablative case! And as for modern languages using it, there's always Finnish. Includes a case for whatever you might remotely think you need. Hungarian too.
Not to mention that in every other language you can simulate its effects by the use of prepositions, postpositions, other cases etc. So really you loose nothing at all by not having it.
Yes, this probably means unlearning almost everything you were taught about writing in college. Sometimes it means unlearning what you learned back as far as junior high school.
Which college teaches people to write so they can't be understood? I suggest that no-one should go there, ever again. I mean, there's trying to immitate the style of journal articles and textbooks, but no-one's ever taught you to do that. Probably if you've ever listened to a single lecturer or tutor about the topic, they've told you not to do that. After all, what's the whole point in essay writing?
(There's the occasional idiot who regurgitates rules like "don't use 'I' in an essay", and promptly make it an even worse expression like "this present author", but I've found that more a phenomenon of early high school teachers of subjects other than English.)