It seems quaint, doesn't it? A central authority trying prohibit a language from evolving by pronouncing the occasional fatwa against a loan word, a foreign coinage, etc. However, there's a good argument that such a preservation effort will be needed far more over the next 100 years than it was over the last ~400.
Alors, au cours du présent siècle où le monde se rétrécit chaque jour, je souhaite la meilleure des chances à l'Académie Francaise.
My children are at this same age, asking similar questions.
To 'explain copyright', first you will need to know your own goal.
Are you trying to teach your son how to comply with the law? Or, are you trying to teach your son how to recognize when a bad law is being used to make society poorer?
“There hasn’t been much research done on this in the past as for healthy people these do not pose much of a problem,” says . ..
You're kidding me, right? The national air forces of the world have been sending people up for extended patrols for something like 8 or 9 decades and there "hasn’t been much research done" to study personnel performance reduction as a function of time, altitude, air pressure, oxygen, etc?
So no, we don't have to let hateful organisations say whatever they want; the act of speaking such things is itself a kind of violence to our society. This doesn't mean that we should ban speech that makes us uncomfortable, or is unpopular. It DOES mean that speech that implicitly or explicitly advocates for genocide or violence is not worth protecting and is in fact speech that we should be actively attempting to limit by whatever means we can.
I must respectfully disagree. Violence is violence. Speech that advocates imminent violence (or that plans or coordinates violence) is suppressed because it leads to violence. Not because such speech _is_ violence.
It is entirely possible for speech advocating imminent violence to be valuable speech, but the cost of allowing such speech is too high. We are guaranteeing the right to talk, not guaranteeing the means to plan the fighting.
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, 'You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.'
We forbid censorship precisely because we believe that good ideas will displace bad ones when every viewpoint has a chance to be heard. If we didn't believe that, the only sensible course would be to repeal the 1st Amendment and get busy building the Ministry of Truth.
But, I still believe. And, I stand against any power (government or otherwise) that attempts to forbid a viewpoint* being expressed.
-- *Speech expressing a viewpoint is not the same as speech planning and coordinating violence, which should be prevented.
In any case, most sports are toast for the same reason. They depend on inflated broadcast deals that in turn are funded at least in part by carriage fees that are funded in a large part by people who never watch sports. These fees are becoming more scarce by cord cutters.
Indeed. I haven't looked for any stats, but I'm gonna take a wild guess that the cord-cutters overlap pretty strongly with the eSports-watchers. Hmm. If the people exiting cableTV are the ones that watched less sports, then the remaining viewership of cable becomes more sports-ish. Which makes me wonder why I'm still hanging around in a wasteland of pro sports, reality shows, and . . .
Actually, I'm not sure there is any third thing left on cable TV. It's long past time I, too, took ship at the Grey Havens.
Let us not forget that the relatively young are much more easily sold to by marketers than those who have already chosen and settled into their rut. Even if the 35-60 crowd or the 61-80 crowd has more money, it is much harder to sway those people to shift their spending. Plus, sports has probably already captured as much of the 35-80 crowd as it can reasonably expect to get. This is not to say that the 17-34 crowd are dumber spenders than older folks, but rather that they remain undecided spenders. They are the better opportunity for marketers.
"The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded."
So they're still waiting for the right weather to launch a very unique experiment.
Hear, hear! Mod parent up.
"Unique" cannot be modified in this way. The phrase David is looking for is "very rare." No one who has claimed the title of "editor" should be making such a mistake.
Additionally, that collection of words beginning with "So" and ending with a period could be improved by editing it into an actual sentence.
In other news, Minecraft software running on users' devices is estimated to spawn a new instance of ZOMBIE every 10 ticks, projected to total 26 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds x 200 ticks x 1 zombie/10 ticks x 1/24 average play time x 100,000,000 copies sold = 187,200,000,000,000 ZOMBIES by the end of the month.
How can we worry about a few million malware at a time like this?
Thanks for the informative response. A couple of thoughts:
As for your example of bays, your logic is faulty. Both can be bays in that circumstance, just like two objects can be moons of the same system, to which both bays are a part of a larger system known as Puget Sound.
So, Shilshole and Elliott can both be "bays", but when it comes to Pluto-Charon (or any system with 2+ self-rounding bodies) only one of them is a "planet"? Hmmm.
At this point, we could consume some time exploring Fishing Bay on the Chesapeake, but I think we'd soon conclude that terms like bay, sea, etc. have been applied pretty loosely and might themselves benefit from a debated and voted definition. My point, though, was this: we want the definition of planet to readily identify a class of objects that are of interest to discuss. Happily either a size + orbital circumstances definition or a size-only definition would do that.
(Planet name) A (n): an object in orbit around a star, of sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium, but that has not reached critical mass to achieve stellar fusion, and is the second-most prominent body in its orbit and neighborhood. . . . In this circumstance, (Planet name) A is a child object to (Planet name), or more simply, a moon.
Now I see how "most prominent" is a better formulation than "has cleared its orbit" was. As least under "most prominent", one of the bodies is likely to get labeled as a planet.
Well, if they do adopt a definition of planet based upon orbital circumstances, I can see that I'm going to need to find myself a word to describe planet-sized objections irrespective of where they are found. That is, ________: a planet, moon, or other object of similar mass.
A planet is any object in orbit around a star, of sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium, has not reached critical mass to achieve stellar fusion, and is the most prominent body in its orbit and neighborhood.
A moon is any object in orbit around a planet, of sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium, and is the most prominent body in its orbit and neighborhood.
An asteroid is any object in orbit around a star, has not reached critical mass to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium, and is shares its orbit and neighborhood with other objects of similar mass.
What does 'prominence in its orbit and neighborhood' gain us with respect to making the word usable in discussions?
If we drop that criterion, it seems quite wieldy to me to discuss, for instance, binary planets or sibling planets when multiple bodies of sufficient size occupy an orbit. In the same way, we discuss Shilshole Bay and Elliott Bay as two bays in the same neighborhood rather than claim that they aren't bays because they are too close to each other.
Keeping it requires us to say that bodies that look like planets aren't planets when there are two or more of them. Would we rather say, "I'm sorry, Shilshole, you're very bay-like, but until some one backfills Elliott or sinks Magnolia below sea level, you don't qualify as a true "bay"?
So, here is the question: If we keep the neighborhood prominence criterion, what do we call the following object?
________ (n): an object in orbit around a star, of sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium, but that has not reached critical mass to achieve stellar fusion, and is the second-most prominent body in its orbit and neighborhood.
The proposed definition can be found at words 765-799 of the article.
A planet, he says, is anything massive enough that gravity pulls it into a sphere (a characteristic called “hydrostatic equilibrium"), but not so massive that it starts to undergo nuclear fusion and become a star.
The preceding 764 words are a useless regurgitation of how people feel about definitions in general and Pluto in particular. Spare me.
Demanding both that E-W be horizontal and N-S be vertical buys us into some pretty severe distortion towards the poles (at ~50+ degrees lattitude), where Earth does have some populated land masses. I prefer to sacrifice N-S verticality, along with the unhelpful habit of forcing the world to be rectangular, and go with: Eckert IV, Robinson, or even Winkel Tripel.
It's the beginning of the end for Hollywood, IMO. Their model can only support smash blockbusters . ..
The end won't come for Hollywood until it stops making money. And that won't happen until some one steals their audience. Until then, people will keep on paying for "Crapisode VIII, now in 3D!", so long as it's labeled with the name of some older story that was good once.
I love Cryptonomicon (have read it 5+ times now), but it's unmakeable as a feature film, isn't it?
1. Two timelines, each of which has enough events for a feature film. 2. The 1990s timeline lacks action scenes (i.e., explosions, deaths) 3. Goto Dengo's 1940s scenes are almost nothing but deaths (brutal, depressing) 4. Bobby Shaftoe's 1940s scenes require expensive sets / locations 5. The easiest material to cut is Julietta and Ami (which we mustn't do)
Cryptonomicon would do better as a 8-16 hour series. In that format, the lighthearted but unexciting Randy and Lawrence scenes could offer relief from the brutal Goto Dengo stuff. Plus, intersperse some of the romping Bobby Shaftoe stuff to spice it up. Imagine what reading the book would have been like if NS hadn't done that.
And Java is also a good example of why it's a terrible idea.
So are cars on the road.
The roads dictate that cars can't be too big/heavy, too long, too light/fragile, too fast, too slow, can't use uncoated steel wheels, etc. And the cars dictate that the road mustn't be too fragile, too steep, too slippery, too narrow, made of rails, mustn't be a series of tubes, etc.
The result has been that the pace of innovation in ground transport has been glacial. So what if all cars operate on all roads? Great! Why are we still using cars? Or roads?
Part of the reason for the 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution was the presumption that good information would conquer bad in the 'marketplace of ideas'. Do you believe that the Earth is round? Or that the Earth orbits the sun? With freedom of speech, you could advocate those ideas and, it was hoped, overcome the flat-earth and geocentric hypotheses.
Then we had superstition, urban myths, and fake news.
Perhaps the truth-will-prevail folks failed to account for some important factors: 1) While people might have limited time to spread falsehoods, computers have overcome that. 2) Controversy sells, particularly in the age of click-advertising. 3) While charlatans used to be identified and shunned, internet anonymity lets them persist and reincarnate themselves. 4) No idea, no matter how bad, ever seems to go away entirely; convincing 'most people' is the best you can do. 5) Many people prefer a falsehood that seems to make them happy to an unpleasant truth.
Is free speech a failed experiment in the service of truth?
Again with the, "Why would you want privacy unless you had something to hide?" argument.
The answer is that even legal, ethical facts can be deeply embarrassing. If you enemy learns such a secret, he can use it to wound you or to turn your neighbors against you. Imagine that you had: 1. divorced a spouse because of their drinking problem or abusiveness 2. had a child who became a felon 3. been bankrupted by medical expenses / job loss
Don't talk to me about illogical. Don't pretend that my new community will treat me with fairness or compassion, or that I can magically find people who will. In real life, people keep secrets for good reasons. Because sometimes you just need a chance to start over and be known for what I am now.
And, don't tell me that I should submit myself to the judgment and compassion of the doxxers. It only takes one doxxer who values his cause more than justice and then the damage will be done.
High male-to-female limits sex-per-capita in a couple different ways:
It seems to me that we could do a couple of interesting studies along those lines: 1. Does per-woman* sex/month correlate with male/female** ratio in dating pool? 2. Does per-woman sex/month correlate with average female education level (or some other proxy for intelligence)? 3. Does per-woman sex/month correlate with female income level? with male income level?
*Obviously, per-man sex/month will decrease if there are more males than females. **We might be able to formulate some non-hetero questions, too.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems quaint, doesn't it? A central authority trying prohibit a language from evolving by pronouncing the occasional fatwa against a loan word, a foreign coinage, etc. However, there's a good argument that such a preservation effort will be needed far more over the next 100 years than it was over the last ~400.
Alors, au cours du présent siècle où le monde se rétrécit chaque jour, je souhaite la meilleure des chances à l'Académie Francaise.
They're gonna need it.
My children are at this same age, asking similar questions.
To 'explain copyright', first you will need to know your own goal.
Are you trying to teach your son how to comply with the law? Or, are you trying to teach your son how to recognize when a bad law is being used to make society poorer?
“There hasn’t been much research done on this in the past as for healthy people these do not pose much of a problem,” says . . .
You're kidding me, right? The national air forces of the world have been sending people up for extended patrols for something like 8 or 9 decades and there "hasn’t been much research done" to study personnel performance reduction as a function of time, altitude, air pressure, oxygen, etc?
So no, we don't have to let hateful organisations say whatever they want; the act of speaking such things is itself a kind of violence to our society. This doesn't mean that we should ban speech that makes us uncomfortable, or is unpopular. It DOES mean that speech that implicitly or explicitly advocates for genocide or violence is not worth protecting and is in fact speech that we should be actively attempting to limit by whatever means we can.
I must respectfully disagree. Violence is violence. Speech that advocates imminent violence (or that plans or coordinates violence) is suppressed because it leads to violence. Not because such speech _is_ violence.
It is entirely possible for speech advocating imminent violence to be valuable speech, but the cost of allowing such speech is too high. We are guaranteeing the right to talk, not guaranteeing the means to plan the fighting.
How about a quote from The American president, while we're at it?
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, 'You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.'
We forbid censorship precisely because we believe that good ideas will displace bad ones when every viewpoint has a chance to be heard. If we didn't believe that, the only sensible course would be to repeal the 1st Amendment and get busy building the Ministry of Truth.
But, I still believe. And, I stand against any power (government or otherwise) that attempts to forbid a viewpoint* being expressed.
--
*Speech expressing a viewpoint is not the same as speech planning and coordinating violence, which should be prevented.
Whither NetFlix?
In any case, most sports are toast for the same reason. They depend on inflated broadcast deals that in turn are funded at least in part by carriage fees that are funded in a large part by people who never watch sports. These fees are becoming more scarce by cord cutters.
Indeed. I haven't looked for any stats, but I'm gonna take a wild guess that the cord-cutters overlap pretty strongly with the eSports-watchers. Hmm. If the people exiting cableTV are the ones that watched less sports, then the remaining viewership of cable becomes more sports-ish. Which makes me wonder why I'm still hanging around in a wasteland of pro sports, reality shows, and . . .
Actually, I'm not sure there is any third thing left on cable TV. It's long past time I, too, took ship at the Grey Havens.
Let us not forget that the relatively young are much more easily sold to by marketers than those who have already chosen and settled into their rut. Even if the 35-60 crowd or the 61-80 crowd has more money, it is much harder to sway those people to shift their spending. Plus, sports has probably already captured as much of the 35-80 crowd as it can reasonably expect to get. This is not to say that the 17-34 crowd are dumber spenders than older folks, but rather that they remain undecided spenders. They are the better opportunity for marketers.
"The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded."
So they're still waiting for the right weather to launch a very unique experiment.
Hear, hear! Mod parent up.
"Unique" cannot be modified in this way. The phrase David is looking for is "very rare." No one who has claimed the title of "editor" should be making such a mistake.
Additionally, that collection of words beginning with "So" and ending with a period could be improved by editing it into an actual sentence.
Adding rat brains can make AI smarter, huh?
I guess that explains why the Borg kept wanting to assimilate humans.
In other news, Minecraft software running on users' devices is estimated to spawn a new instance of ZOMBIE every 10 ticks, projected to total 26 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds x 200 ticks x 1 zombie /10 ticks x 1/24 average play time x 100,000,000 copies sold = 187,200,000,000,000 ZOMBIES by the end of the month.
How can we worry about a few million malware at a time like this?
Leviathan Wakes
Caliban's War
Abaddon's Gate
Cibola Burn
Nemesis Games
All in the last month. Can't put them down.
Thanks for the informative response. A couple of thoughts:
As for your example of bays, your logic is faulty. Both can be bays in that circumstance, just like two objects can be moons of the same system, to which both bays are a part of a larger system known as Puget Sound.
So, Shilshole and Elliott can both be "bays", but when it comes to Pluto-Charon (or any system with 2+ self-rounding bodies) only one of them is a "planet"? Hmmm.
At this point, we could consume some time exploring Fishing Bay on the Chesapeake, but I think we'd soon conclude that terms like bay, sea, etc. have been applied pretty loosely and might themselves benefit from a debated and voted definition. My point, though, was this: we want the definition of planet to readily identify a class of objects that are of interest to discuss. Happily either a size + orbital circumstances definition or a size-only definition would do that.
(Planet name) A (n): an object in orbit around a star, of sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium, but that has not reached critical mass to achieve stellar fusion, and is the second-most prominent body in its orbit and neighborhood.
. . .
In this circumstance, (Planet name) A is a child object to (Planet name), or more simply, a moon.
Now I see how "most prominent" is a better formulation than "has cleared its orbit" was. As least under "most prominent", one of the bodies is likely to get labeled as a planet.
Well, if they do adopt a definition of planet based upon orbital circumstances, I can see that I'm going to need to find myself a word to describe planet-sized objections irrespective of where they are found. That is, ________: a planet, moon, or other object of similar mass.
A planet is any object in orbit around a star, of sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium, has not reached critical mass to achieve stellar fusion, and is the most prominent body in its orbit and neighborhood.
A moon is any object in orbit around a planet, of sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium, and is the most prominent body in its orbit and neighborhood.
An asteroid is any object in orbit around a star, has not reached critical mass to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium, and is shares its orbit and neighborhood with other objects of similar mass.
What does 'prominence in its orbit and neighborhood' gain us with respect to making the word usable in discussions?
If we drop that criterion, it seems quite wieldy to me to discuss, for instance, binary planets or sibling planets when multiple bodies of sufficient size occupy an orbit. In the same way, we discuss Shilshole Bay and Elliott Bay as two bays in the same neighborhood rather than claim that they aren't bays because they are too close to each other.
Keeping it requires us to say that bodies that look like planets aren't planets when there are two or more of them. Would we rather say, "I'm sorry, Shilshole, you're very bay-like, but until some one backfills Elliott or sinks Magnolia below sea level, you don't qualify as a true "bay"?
So, here is the question: If we keep the neighborhood prominence criterion, what do we call the following object?
________ (n): an object in orbit around a star, of sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium, but that has not reached critical mass to achieve stellar fusion, and is the second-most prominent body in its orbit and neighborhood.
Most of those that I know who advocated for Trump during the primaries and the general election did so for the lulz.
Misread that as Iuz. Which, I guess, isn't much farther fetched than what did happen.
The proposed definition can be found at words 765-799 of the article.
A planet, he says, is anything massive enough that gravity pulls it into a sphere (a characteristic called “hydrostatic equilibrium"), but not so massive that it starts to undergo nuclear fusion and become a star.
The preceding 764 words are a useless regurgitation of how people feel about definitions in general and Pluto in particular. Spare me.
I'm a fan of the Lambert cylindrical equal-area projection, which seems to be geometrically very clear and straightforward . . .
Demanding both that E-W be horizontal and N-S be vertical buys us into some pretty severe distortion towards the poles (at ~50+ degrees lattitude), where Earth does have some populated land masses. I prefer to sacrifice N-S verticality, along with the unhelpful habit of forcing the world to be rectangular, and go with:
Eckert IV,
Robinson, or even
Winkel Tripel.
Individual schools in the US have used the Peters maps, Scott said, adding: “We believe we are the first public school district in the US to do this.”
You have got to be kidding me. C'mon! Somebody prove that statement wrong. It can't possibly have taken this long* to start fixing this, can it?
*The West Wing, Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, season 2, episode 16, (February 28, 2001)
It's the beginning of the end for Hollywood, IMO. Their model can only support smash blockbusters . . .
The end won't come for Hollywood until it stops making money. And that won't happen until some one steals their audience. Until then, people will keep on paying for "Crapisode VIII, now in 3D!", so long as it's labeled with the name of some older story that was good once.
Snowcrash is eminently makeable. The pacing is great and there's just enough material for a feature film.
I vote for Cryptonomicon.
I love Cryptonomicon (have read it 5+ times now), but it's unmakeable as a feature film, isn't it?
1. Two timelines, each of which has enough events for a feature film.
2. The 1990s timeline lacks action scenes (i.e., explosions, deaths)
3. Goto Dengo's 1940s scenes are almost nothing but deaths (brutal, depressing)
4. Bobby Shaftoe's 1940s scenes require expensive sets / locations
5. The easiest material to cut is Julietta and Ami (which we mustn't do)
Cryptonomicon would do better as a 8-16 hour series. In that format, the lighthearted but unexciting Randy and Lawrence scenes could offer relief from the brutal Goto Dengo stuff. Plus, intersperse some of the romping Bobby Shaftoe stuff to spice it up. Imagine what reading the book would have been like if NS hadn't done that.
And Java is also a good example of why it's a terrible idea.
So are cars on the road.
The roads dictate that cars can't be too big/heavy, too long, too light/fragile, too fast, too slow, can't use uncoated steel wheels, etc. And the cars dictate that the road mustn't be too fragile, too steep, too slippery, too narrow, made of rails, mustn't be a series of tubes, etc.
The result has been that the pace of innovation in ground transport has been glacial. So what if all cars operate on all roads? Great! Why are we still using cars? Or roads?
Part of the reason for the 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution was the presumption that good information would conquer bad in the 'marketplace of ideas'. Do you believe that the Earth is round? Or that the Earth orbits the sun? With freedom of speech, you could advocate those ideas and, it was hoped, overcome the flat-earth and geocentric hypotheses.
Then we had superstition, urban myths, and fake news.
Perhaps the truth-will-prevail folks failed to account for some important factors:
1) While people might have limited time to spread falsehoods, computers have overcome that.
2) Controversy sells, particularly in the age of click-advertising.
3) While charlatans used to be identified and shunned, internet anonymity lets them persist and reincarnate themselves.
4) No idea, no matter how bad, ever seems to go away entirely; convincing 'most people' is the best you can do.
5) Many people prefer a falsehood that seems to make them happy to an unpleasant truth.
Is free speech a failed experiment in the service of truth?
Again with the, "Why would you want privacy unless you had something to hide?" argument.
The answer is that even legal, ethical facts can be deeply embarrassing. If you enemy learns such a secret, he can use it to wound you or to turn your neighbors against you. Imagine that you had:
1. divorced a spouse because of their drinking problem or abusiveness
2. had a child who became a felon
3. been bankrupted by medical expenses / job loss
Don't talk to me about illogical. Don't pretend that my new community will treat me with fairness or compassion, or that I can magically find people who will. In real life, people keep secrets for good reasons. Because sometimes you just need a chance to start over and be known for what I am now.
And, don't tell me that I should submit myself to the judgment and compassion of the doxxers. It only takes one doxxer who values his cause more than justice and then the damage will be done.
High male-to-female limits sex-per-capita in a couple different ways:
It seems to me that we could do a couple of interesting studies along those lines:
1. Does per-woman* sex/month correlate with male/female** ratio in dating pool?
2. Does per-woman sex/month correlate with average female education level (or some other proxy for intelligence)?
3. Does per-woman sex/month correlate with female income level? with male income level?
*Obviously, per-man sex/month will decrease if there are more males than females.
**We might be able to formulate some non-hetero questions, too.