could you clear up that 'sun rise' and 'sun set' thing for me as well?
Sure thing. They are optical illusions. The sun actual moves across the sky much more slowly, taking a year to make the fulls circle. The Earth, however, is rotating once per day. This causes the apparent motion of the sun across the sky once per day.
Actually, the slow, year-long motion of the sun across the sky is also an optical illusion. In reality, the Earth moves in a nearly circular orbit around the sun, taking a year for each orbit. From our viewpoint, this has the effect of making the stars appear to shift by about a degree each day, but it's actually because we've moved about a degree along our orbit.
However, the sun is actually moving in an orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, pulling the Earth along with it. But that orbit takes around 230 million years, so the motion isn't detectable to our eyes, and may be ignored in explaining apparent motion of the sun.
Slashdot's discussion system is fundamentally broken, and only the first couple of posters get any real attention.
Indeed; it's usually difficult to even find the top-level replies.
I've often wished there were a mode of access that would show me only the first-level replies, each accompanied by a button/link that would expand it and show its 2nd-level replies, and so on recursively.
That way, I could easily spot and avoid the parts of the tree that degenerate to OT flamefests about religion, politics, Micro$oft, whatever. And I'd probably read at level 1 or 0 rather than the 2 or 3 I usually use now, because there are lots of good posts at the lower levels, and they'd be easier to separate from the chaff.
Now if I could only get my hands on the code and surreptitiously implement it...
Myself, I would have said "spread". There's really nothing wrong with short, simple, ancient, Anglo-Saxon words.
Except that we native English speakers have roughly 1000 years of social propaganda telling us that Anglo-Saxon words are coarse and vulgar, while words with Latin or French roots are classy. Greek is OK, too, as long as you don't make the mistake of mixing them (despite the fact that the Romans and French have done this all along;-).
It's hard to fight this sort of attitude.
Then there was Mark Twain, who explained that he wrote "cop" rather than "policeman" because he got paid the same for a 1-syllable word as for a 3-syllable word.
So WTF is a "money quote"? I've been seeing this phrase a lot lately, but even google can't find a definition. The best google does is find several pages with (mostly funny) quotes about money. But this particular quote has nothing to do with money. So why was it called a "money quote".
Inquiring minds want to know about this latest fad in crazy English...
Actually, this is similar to the "mechanical license" that many governments imposed on the music recording industry decades ago. Performers and/or venues pay an annual fee to a few copyright registries, giving them the right to public performances of any music they like. The registry agencies then figure out how to parcel out the fees as royalties to the copyright holders.
One problem with this system is that most holders of music copyrights never receive any royalties at all, or if they do, the royalties are less than the cost of registering your music with the agencies. We can expect that something similar would happen with a similar patent licensing system. Big corporations with zillions of copyrights would get a regular check, while individuals and small organizations would get nothing or less than the annual registration fee.
But it's something that's worth discussing. Various governments, including the US, Canada, and most of Europe, have done this in the past with music. So it's not a wild new idea. They just need to be persuaded that it could be tried with patents.
Actually, it's fairly well understood by linguists that all "natural" human languages have approximately the same amount of "complexity" (however you like to define that). English threw out most of the old Indo-European inflection system (noun cases, verb tenses, gender markers, etc.), but it trade, it has an unusually large number of irregularities in what is left. Most common nouns have irregular plurals, most common verbs have irregular past tense forms, etc.
The only real exceptions to this general pattern are 1) languages like modern Hebrew, which was revived from the dead in the midst of a war back in the late 1940s, and they didn't have the patience to master the full complexity of the classical languages; or 2) artificial languages like Swahili, Malay, and Esperanto, which were designed to be simple and regular. But give them a thousand years, and if they survive, they'll be just as complex as "normal" human languages. There's a certain amount of complexity that the human mind can handle, and our languages all end up that complex.
The main reason that English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are considered more complex and difficult to learn is their writing systems. Most languages have a fairly simple phonetic (or phonemic) writing system, with only a few irregularities. Those languages are burdened with writing systems that are crufty mixtures of several other languages' writing systems, with lots of illogical historical baggage and few reliable phonetic patterns.
Japanese and Korean are especially frustrating cases, because both of them have a fairly good phonetic writing system. (Japanese has two.) But they have kept the traditional (Chinese) writing, and intermingle it with the phonetic characters. If they would scrap the Chinese characters, they would be as easy to learn as, Spanish or Russian. But attempts to do this have been soundly rejected by both societies.
Chinese itself is a funny case. It's a runner-up, because its writing system consists of many thousands of random-looking characters, but it's not quite as bad as Japanese or Korean. The characters are actually a "syllabary", with each character standing for a specific syllable. Most of the characters have components that loosely indicate a base "semantic" category and a pronunciation. The "system" is messy and irregular, so there's a lot of memorizing. But it's partly phonetic (and partly semantic). So it's not as bad as using Chinese characters in Japanese or Korean, where they are just random glyphs with no tie to the pronunciation.
Actually, there's some dispute as to whether English spelling is closer in complexity to Chinese or Japanese writing. One could make a good argument that Japanese and Korean occupy the top slot in writing complexity, while English and Chinese are in the second slot (semi-logical with lots of irregularities that require rote memorization). Most of the rest of the world's languages are in the third slot (mostly phonemic writing, with some irregularities). There's a fourth, easiest slot that holds the few languages that are simpler than normal and have a purely phonetic or phonemic writing system. But such classifications have a lot of problems, because at least in the top slots the writing systems are overwhelmingly complicated and illogical, and meaningful comparison of complexities is difficult.
The real problem is the illogical nature of human societies.;-)
There isn't much the Patent office can do about a petty son of a bitch.
No, but there's plenty that Congress could do. For example, consider the similar problem that copyright causes for musical performances. The nastiness of the music companies is well-known, and isn't anything new. If every performer had to get a written license for performance of every copyrighted work, it would effectively rule out public performance of any but out-of-copyright music. But laws were passed long ago creating a "mechanical license", allowing a musician (or more often a venue) to pay a fixed annual license fee for the right to perform any such work. (Yes, the details are a bit more complex than that, but that's the basic idea.)
If parliament had decreed similar mandatory licensing for the mechanical technology that was becoming so important, Watt could have just collected the automatic royalties, spent his time working on his inventing and manufacturing, and the industrial revolution would have happened several decades sooner.
Congress could do something similar with software patents. They could set up a licensing agency to manage the patents, with a mandatory license at a standard fee for any use of a patent.
Of course, this would end the fun of "submarine" patents, and patents that cover things that every programmer learned in Programming 101. Patents would have to be written so that the patent-licensing agency could tell a client whether a specific piece of code infringes any patent. This would open the door to all of us making use of the patents to advance the industry. This would be a disaster for the big guys like Microsoft and IBM, so it probably ain't gonna happen.
There's plenty of historical evidence that things like patents and copyrights are primarily a barrier to progress, unless the government steps in a second time and decrees some sort of mandatory licensing. (But this doesn't have much effect on the doctrinaire arguments that we read here so often.;-)
Microsoft can't really sue anyone without putting their cards on the table.
SCO did; there's no reason Microsoft wouldn't use the same tactics. And they have orders of magnitude more dollars to spend on lawyers, judges and politicians than SCO ever did, even with Microsoft's contributions. Don't expect to read the details of the claimed patent violations during your lifetime.
And remember that, as of the 2000 US elections, Microsoft has been right up near the top of the list of campaign donors to both major parties. Why do you think the Justice Department caved and settled that big case on terms so friendly to Microsoft? And why do you think that such restrictions as exist in the settlement are routinely ignored and not enforced at all? Microsoft's management figured out how such things really are handled in the US.
English... may be the hardest language for nonspeakers to learn.
Some time back, in another forum I asked about this. English seems to be a close competitor of both Japanese and Korean. In all three cases, this seems to be mostly due to their illogical, only-slightly-phonetic writing systems. English may be the most annoying one of the three, because all the other European languages have had major spelling reforms in the past century or so that gave them decent spelling systems. The only holdout is English, whose spelling is a messed-up historic artifact long overdue for total revision. And it really wouldn't be all that difficult, though there would be a significant period of overlap, as happened with all the other languages.
There isn't 1 spoke Chinese. There are a number of different ones,...
Actually, linguists routinely dispute this. "Chinese language" is a term on a par with "Romance language" or "Germanic language". "Chinese" is about a dozen closely-related languages. Calling them all "Chinese" is a lot like calling French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Romanian all just "Latin".
The Chinese languages are sort of the opposite of the old saying that a language is a dialect with its own army. This explains why, for instance, Ukrainian is considered a different language from Russian, although they are (mostly) mutually comprehensible. But in China, there's a single government controlling the areas where all these languages are spoken, so people pretend that they're all just dialects of "Chinese".
And while Japanese has one spoken language, it has at least two written systems, though I don't recall what they are now.
Actually, they have four: Kanji, Hirogana, Katakana, and Romaji. And they mix them all together in the same sentence or on the same sign.;-)
...when you read this, had this image of Gates, dressed as Darth Vader with the breathing, holding out his hand to Red Hat (or whomever), and saying, "Come with me to the Dark Side and we can rule together!"
Heh. But more seriously, does anyone have any data on the survival rate of companies that become Microsoft Partners? I've seen some vague claims that this is a sort of Kiss of Death, but I've never seen any actual data supporting or debunking this. It'd be interesting to read some facts on the topic.
It does seem unlikely that, if you were building a competitor for some Microsoft (or other giant corporation's) product, you would benefit by partnering with them.
There are already tons of VMs, quasi VMs and multi-platform toolkits readily available. What benefits would developing with Inferno have over using Java,.net/mono, Flash, XUL, Qt, GTK+, etc?
Actually, for years there have been rumors that people were working on merging various VMs. I've heard about a pending java+perl+python (and maybe +tcl) VM repeatedly. But there's precious little public evidence that this is happening.
Possible it doesn't happen because it's just too difficult to organize. Thus, java really belongs to Sun, and all rumors aside, they're unlikely to ever allow a merger with GPL-licensed VMs such as perl's or python's.
Merging perl and python might be easier, but there are conflicts in their design philosophies. Perl's mantra is "There's more that one way to do it", and supports numerous design philosophies, while python is firmly based on OO design everywhere. How do you get these together for anything other than a flame war, since by both philosophies, the other is just wrong?
It does seem possible that, if Inferno starts attracting a user base, we could see ports of both perl and python to the limbo VM. That could be easier than rebuilding their own VMs for a rather different OS. But if people are looking at this, there seems to be no public hints.
In any case, combining two VMs is a rather non-trivial operation. Who would work on it without reasonable certainty of major personal rewards for such a huge effort?
Yeah; and by country I assume you mean Merry Old(e) England, since "inflammable" dates to the mid-1300s. The shortened form "flammable" wasn't invented for five more centuries, in the mid-1800s.
Similarly, doctors treat inflammations, not flammations. And politicians make inflammatory remarks about their opponents, not flammatory remarks.
And when something has finished burning, it has been incinerated, not cinerated. This use of in- as a prefix meaning "in" or "into", goes way back to Latin. English did make it a bit confusing by also using in- as a negative. The two in- prefixes have different etymologies.
Not that this helps much. Pity the poor foreigner trying to learn our insane language.;-)
(And nobody has yet pointed out that we drive on parkways and park on driveways.)
Serdar Argic was hardly a gang, just one guy with a bot.
Well, I've sometimes wondered about the facts. I'd concluded that it looked like the work of a very small gang with some bots and possibly an early version of what we now call zombie botnets. But I don't recall seeing good evidence that it was only one person. I don't know if you could distinguish that case from just catching one guy, and his buddies all deny any knowledge.
Not that it matters that much. The religious harassment of biological discussions is probably usually done by one or a handful of people, but with a bit of computer help, it doesn't take a lot of people to bog down a forum into uselessness.
In the current topic, it's a bit odd to read comments by people who don't have any idea why a group that wants to be open and public might find it necessary to have private discussions and only make the conclusions public. In only a few decades, the Internet has accumulated a lot of experience with "public" discussions, and we've learned a lot about the potential pitfalls. Some topics just can't be discussed sanely in an open, public forum, because a very small group (or a bit of software) can easily shout everyone else down.
Since all HTML docs started with already, the doctype is a pointless piece of text.
Well, if you think of HTML as a one-off creation unrelated to anything else in the universe, you're right. But actually, HTML is a dialect of SGML (and not a very well-conforming dialect, either). SGML had been around for some decades by the time HTML was devised, and HTML was consciously designed as a special case of SGML.
That <!DOCTYPE...> thingy is a standard SGML declaration stating information that clues SGML software in about where it can find the specs for the language used inside the <html> tag. Granted, the HTML folks could have included a version number, but that wouldn't have handled the problem that standards-compliant SGML software wouldn't recognize the contents of the <html> tag as a form of SGML. By adding that DOCTYPE tag at the beginning, a HTML doc became usable by SGML software. For a few years, anyway, until HTML started degenerating into the mess it is today.
Of course, most of the web crowd has never heard of SGML. Web developers went through all the pain of reinventing decades of software, due to their ignorance of (or contempt for) the efforts of the SGML crowd. The result was something that really isn't SGML-compliant, and the good intentions of the DOCTYPE tag were pretty much lost. That's the way the software biz works, mostly.
As someone who has written a fair amount of software to extract data from web pages, I'd agree that the DOCTYPE is somewhat pointless now. I do write code to parse it if it's there, and extract some useful info. But my code doesn't really "believe" it, because once you pass the <html> tag, all hell breaks loose, and there really aren't any reliable standards. The code just has to take such things as hints, and do its best to try to decipher the encoding that was actually used. Thus, that//EN is very often a lie; the text isn't always restricted to the English (i.e., 7-bit ASCII/ANSI) char set. So the code should try to figure out whether bytes above 0x7F were intended as 8859-1 or Windows-1252 or UTF-8 or whatever characters.
Oh, and I've seen <html version=...> tags. They are usually also lies.
It's all just a big example of the general contempt for standards.
Of course the FA says documents will be public and the results and all that, but the point of the FA and the point of this discussion for that matter is why go through the trouble of making all that public if you're going to keep the public out of it.
Actually, there's a great deal of precedent for this sort of approach. For example, the folks who developed usenet learned very early that they needed "moderated" discussions. For those not familiar with the term, this means a discussion that is visible to the public, but all contributions are sent to a central "cabal" for clearance.
Without some approach like this, many discussions simply can't happen. One case that I saw a lot of was biological news. In an open forum, even the slighted mention of anything that touched on evolution would elicit a torrent of the same sort of religious stuff that bogs down such stories here. This would bury any attempt at a scientific discussion. Serious biologists responded by adopting the moderation approach everywhere. In a few cases, they went so far as to try to restrict distribution of some groups (mostly those related to evolution), because some religious people would go to great lengths to pose as a biologist to get entry, and then flood the moderators with huge piles of religious tracts, making the moderators' job impossible.
Similar things turn up in political discussions all the time. I haven't seen them for a while, but back in the 90s, there was a gang (centered in Turkey as I recall) that wrote software to scan for keywords and phrases ("Armenian genocide" and "Kurd" were two), and post floods of fairly incomprehensible flames in response. This made open discussion of just about any Middle-Eastern topic impossible unless you effectively restricted participation to those willing to cooperate. I remember a funny case on an admin list, where someone tried starting a discussion of the general problem, and included a few examples of keywords (as I just did). The result was that the group suddenly went from around 10 messages per day to several thousand, as the political tracts were repeatedly posted from a large number of different sources.
Needless to say, many religious discussions take place on very restricted lists. Otherwise, they couldn't take place at all.
In some cases, you want the discussions private, with only a few summaries made public. This may be to protect the identities of the participants, or it may be just because the interminable discussions are deemed not worth the waste of bandwidth or disk space. In other cases, you can make the entire discussion public, but just restrict membership. In any case, there are often very good reasons for taking such steps.
It's easy to see why someone dealing with a hot-button topic (in some circles) like Net Neutrality might want to discuss things quietly, out of the public spotlight, even if the intent is to publish all the conclusions.
Now to see if my use of a few keywords elicits a flood of political tracts out of that Turkish gang...
Putting Microsoft software on that piece of hardware removes control from me of my own computer. I also have to give up the right to modify (disassemble, etc) Microsoft's code once it is on my computer.
Rather that's what the EULA might claim, but it is trumped by the "law of the land".
True, perhaps, but the "law of the land" is unknown and unknowable until it has been tested in the courts. Do you want to pay to be a test case? Against an opponent like Microsoft? If so, go right ahead...
,i>Can someone explain why it is that politicians are allowed to "slip" completely unrelated items into bills that must be voted on all-or-nothing? They do this all the time, tacking on things that only a small minority want, onto a bill that is important and that everyone is going to pass because the main item is needed by most/all.
Well, I think you just answered the question yourself pretty well.
Because anybody with a clue is using VoIP by this point,...
Except that many people (more every week) live in areas where the only ISP is the phone company, and they block user-level VoIP (while using it internally themselves).
In such a situation, all the clues in the world won't get you what you want.
It's the old "If you don't like it, you can move."
Then you'd better explain what "Global Mean Temperature" means when the atmosphere is nowhere near thermal equilibrium. I assure you that no such temperature exists.
Huh? The mean temperature of the Earth is 287K (rounded, of course). If you don't understand what this means, this simply illustrates your lack of understanding, and doesn't say that it's meaningless. It's not an easy measurement to make, but we have a number of gadgets in orbit that can do the job, and there seems to be fairly good agreement on the number.
And of course it's not near thermal equilibrium; that would be 255K for our orbit, and the oceans would be frozen. The reason is well understood. This has nothing to do with the fact that the mean temperature is defined and known. The whole "global warming" thing is based on the observed fact that the Earth's surface temperature is not just out of equilibrium; it's slowly rising. And we know most of the reasons for this.
(Actually, by the time you read this, the temperature may be 288K.;-)
Are you then saying that all climate scientists are bad scientists? Because they are unanimous in declaring global warming to be real and man-made.
Actually, they aren't really quite unanimous. While there is general agreement that the observed warming has a large "man-made" component, the estimates of the fraction attributable to human activity ranges from around 40% to as much as 120% (i.e., without humans the planet would be cooling slightly right now). There is also a lot of discussion of the error bars in the various climate models, and agreement that we need to improve the models to get more accuracy.
Some time back, a few scientists proposed an interesting scenario in which, despite continued warming, the rise in ocean levels slows or stops. This possibility comes from looking at Antarctica, which currently is a "desert" with extremely low precipitation. What little water falls, falls as ice, of course, and in many areas can take millions of years to reach the sea and melt. The suggestion was that as atmospheric water load rises due to increased evaporation at higher temperatures, more water vapor will reach Antarctica and fall as ice. Antarctica becomes a sinkhole to atmospheric water vapor.
These writers were careful to point out that they weren't predicting the magnitude or significance of this. They were merely presenting it as a possibility that current climate models can't exclude or predict accurately. Part of the reason is that Antarctica is meteorologically rather isolated from the rest of the planet. Current models do predict a rise in atmospheric water vapor, but they can't predict how much of this water vapor will reach Antarctica and stay there.
To my knowledge, the guys who wrote this haven't been attacked as any sort of blasphemers by other climate researchers. The main reaction has probably been "Hmmm...." followed by "further research is needed".
In general, there really isn't any lock-step consensus among climate researchers. Such consensus as exists is in the rough outline saying that we've entered a period of anomalous warming;, there is good evidence that most of this warming is due to human activity, and it's gonna continue unless we change our ways. Some of the results (further desertification of some areas, stronger storm systems, rising sea levels, loss of Arctic ice) are highly likely, though the exact size of the changes can't be predicted to many (or > 1) decimal places.
There is one key difference between us and the extincted races. They didn't have Slashdot.
So how do you know that? I'll betcha lots of people would like to see the evidence.
(Of course, we don't know of evidence that there was ever an earlier technological species on this planet. But sci-fi writers have made up a lot of scenarios in which they did exist. It can be quite difficult to prove that someone didn't exist, and if they did, who knows what sort of bizarre discussion forum they might have invented? And just maybe, if they did have something like slashdot, that may be part of the reason they aren't around any longer.;-)
Yes, because we all know that scientists are above the petty musings of mankind, like political ideologies and personal agendas.
Actually, if you'd bother to read some of the scientific literature, you'd quickly find that scientists are generally aware of their own failings. There has historically been a huge amount of discussion of the problems of "subjectivity". There are a great many scientific protocols for dealing with this. Some of them go by names like "publication review" and "replication" (of experiments and observations). The primary aim here is to take individual bias into account, and prevent such biases from affecting the results.
Merely observing that individual scientists have biases is trivial, and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of why the scientific endeavor has been so successful at producing valid results. Yes, of course scientists have biases. Scientific work, if done properly, tends not to depend on this.
Of course, as TFA points out, science does tend to be profoundly anti-democratic. Science doesn't use or accept voting schemes to determine validity. It doesn't much matter how many people believe something. There's no shortage of examples of large groups of people accepting something that isn't true. But when this happens in science, it usually doesn't last long, due to the many safeguards against it.
Slashdot Mirror
could you clear up that 'sun rise' and 'sun set' thing for me as well?
Sure thing. They are optical illusions. The sun actual moves across the sky much more slowly, taking a year to make the fulls circle. The Earth, however, is rotating once per day. This causes the apparent motion of the sun across the sky once per day.
Actually, the slow, year-long motion of the sun across the sky is also an optical illusion. In reality, the Earth moves in a nearly circular orbit around the sun, taking a year for each orbit. From our viewpoint, this has the effect of making the stars appear to shift by about a degree each day, but it's actually because we've moved about a degree along our orbit.
However, the sun is actually moving in an orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, pulling the Earth along with it. But that orbit takes around 230 million years, so the motion isn't detectable to our eyes, and may be ignored in explaining apparent motion of the sun.
HTH. HAND.
Can you imagine the President giving a speech: "We're fighting them in Meatspace in order to head off their attack in Cyberspace."
Actually, I can imagine Al Gore or Hillary Clinton saying that, but not the current meathead.
How about another annoying word: meatspace?
Ah, but "meatspace" is supposed to be insulting and annoying. Apparently it's doing its job.
Slashdot's discussion system is fundamentally broken, and only the first couple of posters get any real attention.
...
Indeed; it's usually difficult to even find the top-level replies.
I've often wished there were a mode of access that would show me only the first-level replies, each accompanied by a button/link that would expand it and show its 2nd-level replies, and so on recursively.
That way, I could easily spot and avoid the parts of the tree that degenerate to OT flamefests about religion, politics, Micro$oft, whatever. And I'd probably read at level 1 or 0 rather than the 2 or 3 I usually use now, because there are lots of good posts at the lower levels, and they'd be easier to separate from the chaff.
Now if I could only get my hands on the code and surreptitiously implement it
Myself, I would have said "spread". There's really nothing wrong with short, simple, ancient, Anglo-Saxon words.
;-).
Except that we native English speakers have roughly 1000 years of social propaganda telling us that Anglo-Saxon words are coarse and vulgar, while words with Latin or French roots are classy. Greek is OK, too, as long as you don't make the mistake of mixing them (despite the fact that the Romans and French have done this all along
It's hard to fight this sort of attitude.
Then there was Mark Twain, who explained that he wrote "cop" rather than "policeman" because he got paid the same for a 1-syllable word as for a 3-syllable word.
So WTF is a "money quote"? I've been seeing this phrase a lot lately, but even google can't find a definition. The best google does is find several pages with (mostly funny) quotes about money. But this particular quote has nothing to do with money. So why was it called a "money quote".
...
Inquiring minds want to know about this latest fad in crazy English
Actually, this is similar to the "mechanical license" that many governments imposed on the music recording industry decades ago. Performers and/or venues pay an annual fee to a few copyright registries, giving them the right to public performances of any music they like. The registry agencies then figure out how to parcel out the fees as royalties to the copyright holders.
One problem with this system is that most holders of music copyrights never receive any royalties at all, or if they do, the royalties are less than the cost of registering your music with the agencies. We can expect that something similar would happen with a similar patent licensing system. Big corporations with zillions of copyrights would get a regular check, while individuals and small organizations would get nothing or less than the annual registration fee.
But it's something that's worth discussing. Various governments, including the US, Canada, and most of Europe, have done this in the past with music. So it's not a wild new idea. They just need to be persuaded that it could be tried with patents.
Actually, it's fairly well understood by linguists that all "natural" human languages have approximately the same amount of "complexity" (however you like to define that). English threw out most of the old Indo-European inflection system (noun cases, verb tenses, gender markers, etc.), but it trade, it has an unusually large number of irregularities in what is left. Most common nouns have irregular plurals, most common verbs have irregular past tense forms, etc.
;-)
The only real exceptions to this general pattern are 1) languages like modern Hebrew, which was revived from the dead in the midst of a war back in the late 1940s, and they didn't have the patience to master the full complexity of the classical languages; or 2) artificial languages like Swahili, Malay, and Esperanto, which were designed to be simple and regular. But give them a thousand years, and if they survive, they'll be just as complex as "normal" human languages. There's a certain amount of complexity that the human mind can handle, and our languages all end up that complex.
The main reason that English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are considered more complex and difficult to learn is their writing systems. Most languages have a fairly simple phonetic (or phonemic) writing system, with only a few irregularities. Those languages are burdened with writing systems that are crufty mixtures of several other languages' writing systems, with lots of illogical historical baggage and few reliable phonetic patterns.
Japanese and Korean are especially frustrating cases, because both of them have a fairly good phonetic writing system. (Japanese has two.) But they have kept the traditional (Chinese) writing, and intermingle it with the phonetic characters. If they would scrap the Chinese characters, they would be as easy to learn as, Spanish or Russian. But attempts to do this have been soundly rejected by both societies.
Chinese itself is a funny case. It's a runner-up, because its writing system consists of many thousands of random-looking characters, but it's not quite as bad as Japanese or Korean. The characters are actually a "syllabary", with each character standing for a specific syllable. Most of the characters have components that loosely indicate a base "semantic" category and a pronunciation. The "system" is messy and irregular, so there's a lot of memorizing. But it's partly phonetic (and partly semantic). So it's not as bad as using Chinese characters in Japanese or Korean, where they are just random glyphs with no tie to the pronunciation.
Actually, there's some dispute as to whether English spelling is closer in complexity to Chinese or Japanese writing. One could make a good argument that Japanese and Korean occupy the top slot in writing complexity, while English and Chinese are in the second slot (semi-logical with lots of irregularities that require rote memorization). Most of the rest of the world's languages are in the third slot (mostly phonemic writing, with some irregularities). There's a fourth, easiest slot that holds the few languages that are simpler than normal and have a purely phonetic or phonemic writing system. But such classifications have a lot of problems, because at least in the top slots the writing systems are overwhelmingly complicated and illogical, and meaningful comparison of complexities is difficult.
The real problem is the illogical nature of human societies.
There isn't much the Patent office can do about a petty son of a bitch.
No, but there's plenty that Congress could do. For example, consider the similar problem that copyright causes for musical performances. The nastiness of the music companies is well-known, and isn't anything new. If every performer had to get a written license for performance of every copyrighted work, it would effectively rule out public performance of any but out-of-copyright music. But laws were passed long ago creating a "mechanical license", allowing a musician (or more often a venue) to pay a fixed annual license fee for the right to perform any such work. (Yes, the details are a bit more complex than that, but that's the basic idea.)
If parliament had decreed similar mandatory licensing for the mechanical technology that was becoming so important, Watt could have just collected the automatic royalties, spent his time working on his inventing and manufacturing, and the industrial revolution would have happened several decades sooner.
Congress could do something similar with software patents. They could set up a licensing agency to manage the patents, with a mandatory license at a standard fee for any use of a patent.
Of course, this would end the fun of "submarine" patents, and patents that cover things that every programmer learned in Programming 101. Patents would have to be written so that the patent-licensing agency could tell a client whether a specific piece of code infringes any patent. This would open the door to all of us making use of the patents to advance the industry. This would be a disaster for the big guys like Microsoft and IBM, so it probably ain't gonna happen.
For an interesting essay on the topic, read Boldrin & Levine: Against Intellectual Monopoly. Actually, just read the first couple of pages, describing the effects of James Watt's patent had on the development of steam engines in the late 1700s. It seems that his rabid enforcement of his patent pretty much blocked all further progress in the technology until his patent ran out in 1800. He didn't even profit from it himself until after his patent ran out, when he switched from patent enforcement to steam-engine manufacturing. And his own development was blocked by others' patents on other parts of the mechanism.
;-)
There's plenty of historical evidence that things like patents and copyrights are primarily a barrier to progress, unless the government steps in a second time and decrees some sort of mandatory licensing. (But this doesn't have much effect on the doctrinaire arguments that we read here so often.
Microsoft can't really sue anyone without putting their cards on the table.
SCO did; there's no reason Microsoft wouldn't use the same tactics. And they have orders of magnitude more dollars to spend on lawyers, judges and politicians than SCO ever did, even with Microsoft's contributions. Don't expect to read the details of the claimed patent violations during your lifetime.
And remember that, as of the 2000 US elections, Microsoft has been right up near the top of the list of campaign donors to both major parties. Why do you think the Justice Department caved and settled that big case on terms so friendly to Microsoft? And why do you think that such restrictions as exist in the settlement are routinely ignored and not enforced at all? Microsoft's management figured out how such things really are handled in the US.
English ... may be the hardest language for nonspeakers to learn.
...
;-)
Some time back, in another forum I asked about this. English seems to be a close competitor of both Japanese and Korean. In all three cases, this seems to be mostly due to their illogical, only-slightly-phonetic writing systems. English may be the most annoying one of the three, because all the other European languages have had major spelling reforms in the past century or so that gave them decent spelling systems. The only holdout is English, whose spelling is a messed-up historic artifact long overdue for total revision. And it really wouldn't be all that difficult, though there would be a significant period of overlap, as happened with all the other languages.
There isn't 1 spoke Chinese. There are a number of different ones,
Actually, linguists routinely dispute this. "Chinese language" is a term on a par with "Romance language" or "Germanic language". "Chinese" is about a dozen closely-related languages. Calling them all "Chinese" is a lot like calling French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Romanian all just "Latin".
The Chinese languages are sort of the opposite of the old saying that a language is a dialect with its own army. This explains why, for instance, Ukrainian is considered a different language from Russian, although they are (mostly) mutually comprehensible. But in China, there's a single government controlling the areas where all these languages are spoken, so people pretend that they're all just dialects of "Chinese".
And while Japanese has one spoken language, it has at least two written systems, though I don't recall what they are now.
Actually, they have four: Kanji, Hirogana, Katakana, and Romaji. And they mix them all together in the same sentence or on the same sign.
...when you read this, had this image of Gates, dressed as Darth Vader with the breathing, holding out his hand to Red Hat (or whomever), and saying, "Come with me to the Dark Side and we can rule together!"
Heh. But more seriously, does anyone have any data on the survival rate of companies that become Microsoft Partners? I've seen some vague claims that this is a sort of Kiss of Death, but I've never seen any actual data supporting or debunking this. It'd be interesting to read some facts on the topic.
It does seem unlikely that, if you were building a competitor for some Microsoft (or other giant corporation's) product, you would benefit by partnering with them.
There are already tons of VMs, quasi VMs and multi-platform toolkits readily available. What benefits would developing with Inferno have over using Java, .net/mono, Flash, XUL, Qt, GTK+, etc?
Actually, for years there have been rumors that people were working on merging various VMs. I've heard about a pending java+perl+python (and maybe +tcl) VM repeatedly. But there's precious little public evidence that this is happening.
Possible it doesn't happen because it's just too difficult to organize. Thus, java really belongs to Sun, and all rumors aside, they're unlikely to ever allow a merger with GPL-licensed VMs such as perl's or python's.
Merging perl and python might be easier, but there are conflicts in their design philosophies. Perl's mantra is "There's more that one way to do it", and supports numerous design philosophies, while python is firmly based on OO design everywhere. How do you get these together for anything other than a flame war, since by both philosophies, the other is just wrong?
It does seem possible that, if Inferno starts attracting a user base, we could see ports of both perl and python to the limbo VM. That could be easier than rebuilding their own VMs for a rather different OS. But if people are looking at this, there seems to be no public hints.
In any case, combining two VMs is a rather non-trivial operation. Who would work on it without reasonable certainty of major personal rewards for such a huge effort?
"Inflammable means flammable? What a country!"
;-)
Yeah; and by country I assume you mean Merry Old(e) England, since "inflammable" dates to the mid-1300s. The shortened form "flammable"
wasn't invented for five more centuries, in the mid-1800s.
Similarly, doctors treat inflammations, not flammations. And politicians
make inflammatory remarks about their opponents, not flammatory remarks.
And when something has finished burning, it has been incinerated, not
cinerated. This use of in- as a prefix meaning "in" or "into", goes
way back to Latin. English did make it a bit confusing by also using
in- as a negative. The two in- prefixes have different etymologies.
Not that this helps much. Pity the poor foreigner trying to learn
our insane language.
(And nobody has yet pointed out that we drive on parkways and park
on driveways.)
Serdar Argic was hardly a gang, just one guy with a bot.
Well, I've sometimes wondered about the facts. I'd concluded that it looked like the work of a very small gang with some bots and possibly an early version of what we now call zombie botnets. But I don't recall seeing good evidence that it was only one person. I don't know if you could distinguish that case from just catching one guy, and his buddies all deny any knowledge.
Not that it matters that much. The religious harassment of biological discussions is probably usually done by one or a handful of people, but with a bit of computer help, it doesn't take a lot of people to bog down a forum into uselessness.
In the current topic, it's a bit odd to read comments by people who don't have any idea why a group that wants to be open and public might find it necessary to have private discussions and only make the conclusions public. In only a few decades, the Internet has accumulated a lot of experience with "public" discussions, and we've learned a lot about the potential pitfalls. Some topics just can't be discussed sanely in an open, public forum, because a very small group (or a bit of software) can easily shout everyone else down.
Since all HTML docs started with already, the doctype is a pointless piece of text.
...> thingy is a standard SGML declaration stating information that clues SGML software in about where it can find the specs for the language used inside the <html> tag. Granted, the HTML folks could have included a version number, but that wouldn't have handled the problem that standards-compliant SGML software wouldn't recognize the contents of the <html> tag as a form of SGML. By adding that DOCTYPE tag at the beginning, a HTML doc became usable by SGML software. For a few years, anyway, until HTML started degenerating into the mess it is today.
//EN is very often a lie; the text isn't always restricted to the English (i.e., 7-bit ASCII/ANSI) char set. So the code should try to figure out whether bytes above 0x7F were intended as 8859-1 or Windows-1252 or UTF-8 or whatever characters.
Well, if you think of HTML as a one-off creation unrelated to anything else in the universe, you're right. But actually, HTML is a dialect of SGML (and not a very well-conforming dialect, either). SGML had been around for some decades by the time HTML was devised, and HTML was consciously designed as a special case of SGML.
That <!DOCTYPE
Of course, most of the web crowd has never heard of SGML. Web developers went through all the pain of reinventing decades of software, due to their ignorance of (or contempt for) the efforts of the SGML crowd. The result was something that really isn't SGML-compliant, and the good intentions of the DOCTYPE tag were pretty much lost. That's the way the software biz works, mostly.
As someone who has written a fair amount of software to extract data from web pages, I'd agree that the DOCTYPE is somewhat pointless now. I do write code to parse it if it's there, and extract some useful info. But my code doesn't really "believe" it, because once you pass the <html> tag, all hell breaks loose, and there really aren't any reliable standards. The code just has to take such things as hints, and do its best to try to decipher the encoding that was actually used. Thus, that
Oh, and I've seen <html version=...> tags. They are usually also lies.
It's all just a big example of the general contempt for standards.
Of course the FA says documents will be public and the results and all that, but the point of the FA and the point of this discussion for that matter is why go through the trouble of making all that public if you're going to keep the public out of it.
...
Actually, there's a great deal of precedent for this sort of approach. For example, the folks who developed usenet learned very early that they needed "moderated" discussions. For those not familiar with the term, this means a discussion that is visible to the public, but all contributions are sent to a central "cabal" for clearance.
Without some approach like this, many discussions simply can't happen. One case that I saw a lot of was biological news. In an open forum, even the slighted mention of anything that touched on evolution would elicit a torrent of the same sort of religious stuff that bogs down such stories here. This would bury any attempt at a scientific discussion. Serious biologists responded by adopting the moderation approach everywhere. In a few cases, they went so far as to try to restrict distribution of some groups (mostly those related to evolution), because some religious people would go to great lengths to pose as a biologist to get entry, and then flood the moderators with huge piles of religious tracts, making the moderators' job impossible.
Similar things turn up in political discussions all the time. I haven't seen them for a while, but back in the 90s, there was a gang (centered in Turkey as I recall) that wrote software to scan for keywords and phrases ("Armenian genocide" and "Kurd" were two), and post floods of fairly incomprehensible flames in response. This made open discussion of just about any Middle-Eastern topic impossible unless you effectively restricted participation to those willing to cooperate. I remember a funny case on an admin list, where someone tried starting a discussion of the general problem, and included a few examples of keywords (as I just did). The result was that the group suddenly went from around 10 messages per day to several thousand, as the political tracts were repeatedly posted from a large number of different sources.
Needless to say, many religious discussions take place on very restricted lists. Otherwise, they couldn't take place at all.
In some cases, you want the discussions private, with only a few summaries made public. This may be to protect the identities of the participants, or it may be just because the interminable discussions are deemed not worth the waste of bandwidth or disk space. In other cases, you can make the entire discussion public, but just restrict membership. In any case, there are often very good reasons for taking such steps.
It's easy to see why someone dealing with a hot-button topic (in some circles) like Net Neutrality might want to discuss things quietly, out of the public spotlight, even if the intent is to publish all the conclusions.
Now to see if my use of a few keywords elicits a flood of political tracts out of that Turkish gang
Putting Microsoft software on that piece of hardware removes control from me of my own computer. I also have to give up the right to modify (disassemble, etc) Microsoft's code once it is on my computer.
...
Rather that's what the EULA might claim, but it is trumped by the "law of the land".
True, perhaps, but the "law of the land" is unknown and unknowable until it has been tested in the courts. Do you want to pay to be a test case? Against an opponent like Microsoft? If so, go right ahead
,i>Can someone explain why it is that politicians are allowed to "slip" completely unrelated items into bills that must be voted on all-or-nothing? They do this all the time, tacking on things that only a small minority want, onto a bill that is important and that everyone is going to pass because the main item is needed by most/all.
Well, I think you just answered the question yourself pretty well.
Because anybody with a clue is using VoIP by this point, ...
Except that many people (more every week) live in areas where the only ISP is the phone company, and they block user-level VoIP (while using it internally themselves).
In such a situation, all the clues in the world won't get you what you want.
It's the old "If you don't like it, you can move."
Then you'd better explain what "Global Mean Temperature" means when the atmosphere is nowhere near thermal equilibrium. I assure you that no such temperature exists.
;-)
Huh? The mean temperature of the Earth is 287K (rounded, of course). If you don't understand what this means, this simply illustrates your lack of understanding, and doesn't say that it's meaningless. It's not an easy measurement to make, but we have a number of gadgets in orbit that can do the job, and there seems to be fairly good agreement on the number.
And of course it's not near thermal equilibrium; that would be 255K for our orbit, and the oceans would be frozen. The reason is well understood. This has nothing to do with the fact that the mean temperature is defined and known. The whole "global warming" thing is based on the observed fact that the Earth's surface temperature is not just out of equilibrium; it's slowly rising. And we know most of the reasons for this.
(Actually, by the time you read this, the temperature may be 288K.
Are you then saying that all climate scientists are bad scientists? Because they are unanimous in declaring global warming to be real and man-made.
Actually, they aren't really quite unanimous. While there is general agreement that the observed warming has a large "man-made" component, the estimates of the fraction attributable to human activity ranges from around 40% to as much as 120% (i.e., without humans the planet would be cooling slightly right now). There is also a lot of discussion of the error bars in the various climate models, and agreement that we need to improve the models to get more accuracy.
Some time back, a few scientists proposed an interesting scenario in which, despite continued warming, the rise in ocean levels slows or stops. This possibility comes from looking at Antarctica, which currently is a "desert" with extremely low precipitation. What little water falls, falls as ice, of course, and in many areas can take millions of years to reach the sea and melt. The suggestion was that as atmospheric water load rises due to increased evaporation at higher temperatures, more water vapor will reach Antarctica and fall as ice. Antarctica becomes a sinkhole to atmospheric water vapor.
These writers were careful to point out that they weren't predicting the magnitude or significance of this. They were merely presenting it as a possibility that current climate models can't exclude or predict accurately. Part of the reason is that Antarctica is meteorologically rather isolated from the rest of the planet. Current models do predict a rise in atmospheric water vapor, but they can't predict how much of this water vapor will reach Antarctica and stay there.
To my knowledge, the guys who wrote this haven't been attacked as any sort of blasphemers by other climate researchers. The main reaction has probably been "Hmmm...." followed by "further research is needed".
In general, there really isn't any lock-step consensus among climate researchers. Such consensus as exists is in the rough outline saying that we've entered a period of anomalous warming;, there is good evidence that most of this warming is due to human activity, and it's gonna continue unless we change our ways. Some of the results (further desertification of some areas, stronger storm systems, rising sea levels, loss of Arctic ice) are highly likely, though the exact size of the changes can't be predicted to many (or > 1) decimal places.
And further research is needed. ("Send money.")
There is one key difference between us and the extincted races. They didn't have Slashdot.
;-)
So how do you know that? I'll betcha lots of people would like to see the evidence.
(Of course, we don't know of evidence that there was ever an earlier technological species on this planet. But sci-fi writers have made up a lot of scenarios in which they did exist. It can be quite difficult to prove that someone didn't exist, and if they did, who knows what sort of bizarre discussion forum they might have invented? And just maybe, if they did have something like slashdot, that may be part of the reason they aren't around any longer.
Yes, because we all know that scientists are above the petty musings of mankind, like political ideologies and personal agendas.
Actually, if you'd bother to read some of the scientific literature, you'd quickly find that scientists are generally aware of their own failings. There has historically been a huge amount of discussion of the problems of "subjectivity". There are a great many scientific protocols for dealing with this. Some of them go by names like "publication review" and "replication" (of experiments and observations). The primary aim here is to take individual bias into account, and prevent such biases from affecting the results.
Merely observing that individual scientists have biases is trivial, and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of why the scientific endeavor has been so successful at producing valid results. Yes, of course scientists have biases. Scientific work, if done properly, tends not to depend on this.
Of course, as TFA points out, science does tend to be profoundly anti-democratic. Science doesn't use or accept voting schemes to determine validity. It doesn't much matter how many people believe something. There's no shortage of examples of large groups of people accepting something that isn't true. But when this happens in science, it usually doesn't last long, due to the many safeguards against it.