Should I take solace that this will almost certainly get laughed off by Labour?
I'd like to suggest a fix: s/laughed off/co-opted and embraced/
I mean, this is exactly the sort of "third way" buddy-buddy up to business + nanny state garbage that Labour LOVES as far as I understand. You won't see any disagreement between Labour and the Tories over this. Gah. They make me as sick as the DLC, "New" Democrats in my own country.
It's practically the definition of fascism too: you agree to suspend any "abuse" of your civil rights that doesn't conform to our ideals of a morally pure society, and we'll extend your business monopoly and crack down on average citizens who threaten it.
I'm not fond of the coarseness of a lot of TV and music today, but I don't exactly want to see the government getting involved in preventing it, much less at the direct expense of the people's rights. However, if I were a media company, I'd be all over this. After all, once the copyrights are extended, it should be pretty easy to wiggle out of the self-censorship side of the deal with no repercussions.
The BBC can no longer cover the actions of Parliament or the PM?
Heh. You know, it's becoming less and less surprising that one of the UK's biggest objections to the EU charter has been the idea of signing up to the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It's probably things like this and their anti-terror laws that they don't want to give up.
No wonder British SF is so obsessed with the idea of their country becoming a fascist state.
Could you provide a link to back that up? I've been trying to find an explanation of how it supposedly works that denies what the grandparent poster said, but I can't penetrate the techno-babble.
As far as I can tell, it translated magnetic fields into mechanical motion. Sounds like 80% of all previous attempts at perpetual motion devices to me. It's probably just an unbalanced set of magnets, but I can't get at anything that makes any sense to be sure.
You are presuming that another civilization would have achieved interstellar spaceflight by being just like us.
There are several things we can reasonably assume. A civilization reaching space travel is probably going to have to have industrial metallurgy. (Otherwise, what are you going to make the ship out of?) That requires mining and a way to fuel the smelting of metals. Both of these things consume resources and leave geological markers. You don't go from banging rocks together to microprocessors without having to go through advanced mechanical devices and industrial chemical engineering first. You don't launch to orbit without manufacturing systems to make the various parts for the space craft, and this requires the consumption of resources, the production of wastes, and the building of structures that should've endured into the geological record.
Science and invention "stand on the shoulders of giants." This classic trope means that no invention or discovery happens in a vacuum -- it's the result of refinements and improvements based on the insights and creativity of past generations. While it's possible that you could make an entirely zero-impact industrial infrastructure, you would never be able to do so without going through dirtier technologies first.
If we were all of those things, we could easily have left the Earth thousands of years ago without having left a fraction of the mark we've made as earthbound primates.
Yes, but then they wouldn't be human -- or frankly any kind of terrestrial mammal that I'm aware of. We are the way we are because natural selection made us this way. We are obsessed with wealth and acquisitiveness because it helps us compete better against others to pass on our genes. We think of ourselves and our immediate needs because that's what helped us survive before civilization and long-term goals we invented. We fight each other other population pressures and philosophical differences because that's how social animals are; we form up in groups for mutual defense and then enhance our desire to compete against other groups by having a natural tendency to demonize their differences.
Natural selection is short-sighted. It only cares about the fitness of one generation to make the next. Anything beyond that is outside the scope of its ability to select. Really, aliens can't be an "enlightened" off-shoot of humanity from the past because humans from the past would've had the same evolutionary pressures as our ancestors. Too many of our negative traits go all the way back to ancestors far more ancient than hominids and primates, and they'd certainly share them.
Perhaps you disagree and think that humanoid aliens or time travel is more believable, in which case you're not really in a position to complain about thoughtless fantasy.
Considering all the points raised in my reply to your post, humanoid aliens and time travel are more believable. After all, we don't have incontrovertible evidence that aliens aren't commonly humanoid nor that time travel doesn't exist (though our current understanding of physics makes it seem pretty darned improbable).
On the other hand, we have plenty of evidence that there has never been a space-faring culture on Earth before us. All four are fantasies, but 2.2 & 2.3 are only ones that are easily disproved by the lack of physical imprint of all the progress such races would've had to make to get to that level of technology.
Do you really think the Democrats are better then the Republicans? As far as I am concerned they are largely the same party. The only candidate who voted against the war and will get us out is Ron Paul.
People like you are the same as Naderites. If you really think this country would've been no different if we had Democrats in charge of the three branches of government instead of Republicans for 6 out of the past 7 years, then you're nuts.
Ron Paul's pretty out there himself. While I respect his stance in voting against the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq War, I think he's nuts to call the abolition of the Federal Reserve, and I think he's soulless to have opposed any intervention in Darfur. In many ways, we represents some of the worst tendencies of libertarians.
Well, on one level I don't understand celebrity worship, but really, I think almost everybody has their celebrities. For most/many/some slashdotters they may not be actors, but it could be Joss Whedon, Linus Torvalds, Theo de Raadt, ESR, Richard Stallman, and even--as the GP mentioned--Thompson. Same kind of celebrity tracking, just a different kind of celebrity! (I'm think of names I see fairly regularly on slashdot..)
Well, yeah, I care about their newsworthy actions because they are usually doing something that affects my life (or at least the products I buy and use).
But I don't care about their marriages, their divorces, their kids (adopted or not), the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the houses the live in, the vacations they take, or any of the rest of that stuff that shows up in the tabloids, in the entertainment section of the news, or in People magazine. As far as I'm concerned, the entertainment section of any cable news half hour is just 5 minutes of important news about the world events and political decisions that affect our lives that's not getting covered.
I mean, I care about what movies Brad Pitt's gonna star in 'cause he's one of my favorite actors, but I'd really rather be punched in the face than hear the term "Brangelina" EVER again in my life. That's the sort of nonsense I just don't understand. People who pin their hopes and dreams on mundane details of the daily lives of people they'll never personally know disappoint me.
Of course, I'm almost certainly preaching to the choir here on Slashdot.
I think you're probably right. The broad umbrella of "antisocial tendencies" notwithstanding, being a complete, stubborn jerk isn't exactly a form of mental illness yet. Thompson's not a narcissist or a megalomaniac or a sociopath or anything like that -- he's just incredibly rude and disrespectful to people that don't see things his way, and he knows that his campaign to restrict access to violent games to minors requires a certain amount of grandstanding to rally supporters of the same goals.
And we dig it just as much as the rest of the world digs Paris Hilton's everyday antics.
Really? I thought that Paris Hilton got so much attention was because there were people who actually liked her. That argument actually makes a lot more sense than the impression I had.
I don't know. I've never been able to understand celebrity worship.
If a culture existed before recorded history that was able to achieve interstellar spaceflight, then all of the following questions must be resolved:
Where is their stuff?
Where is the plastic that wouldn't have biodegraded?
Where are the ruins of their cities?
Where is their waste, particularly the radioactive kind?
Shouldn't they have spanned the globe in seeking resources for their growth?
Where are their religious and historical monuments?
Where are they?
Did they develop cheap FTL tech? Why haven't we heard from their other colonies if so?
Why would they all have left at the same time with no dissenters left to stay on mother Earth after cleaning everything up?
Why are there things left for us?
Why do we still have oil and fossil fuels? Why didn't they cause a spike of global warming in their quest for the energy needed for space flight?
Why do we still have so many easily found fossils?
Why don't we see any evidence of industrial mining?
All in all, it just doesn't add up. If our supposed space-travelling ancestors were anything like us on a fundamental sociobiological level, then I don't see it.
The other AC is partially right. Cingular was a joint venture of SBC and Bellsouth which bought AT&T Wireless, begun to phase out the AT&T Wireless brand, and then reversed this decision to instead phase out the Cingular brand after SBC bought AT&T, renamed itself to AT&T, and gobbled up Bellsouth too. The Wikipedia article is pretty accurate from what I remember.
Why should we expect aliens flying spacecraft to be more competent than humans driving cars or flying small personal aircraft?
Because if flying here were trivial enough of a task that the incompetent could do it, then we probably would have seen a lot more of them by now. You don't put unskilled people on a potential first-contact, exploration mission unless it's cheap and easy to do it. You put skilled people on missions that are hard and expensive.
At some point far in the future our descendents try out time travel and something goes wrong with one of the time travelling craft (they were probably visiting roswell to see if an alien really was found there - ah, the irony...)
Actually, this is part of the backstory of the time-travelling, table-top RPG Continuum. Of course, being a game about keeping the timeline consistent, the "aliens" know that they have to crash and the have to die long before they're ever sent there.
The explanation for why humans ended up looking like grey aliens is pretty funny too. Essentially, when body modification became common, anime big eyes and small mouths became really popular and then fashion eventually trended that way.
Sorry, but your education is not my responsibility.
However, your ability to communicate your points is. Tossing a bunch of random links that do not spell out what you're trying to argue is a poor attempt at communication. They neither communicated that you understood my points nor what it was you (and "qualified people") disagreed with about them. Tell me what in them refuted my points, and don't make me go trying to augur a refutation to my own post out of data that is not organized to make such an argument. Communicate clearly.
But the difficulty of spelling in English pales into insignificance besides, say, learning the inflections in heavily inflected languages, or getting tones from a non-tonal background.
I will not dispute this in the slightest. It's practically a biological difference given how many native Cantonese speakers have perfect pitch compared to speakers of non-tonal languages like English. However, I will still dispute that your assertion that irregular spellings and the smattering of multi-lingual root words are actually helpful to understanding in the face of their alternatives. I maintain that it's an inefficient use of mental resources.
In other words, sure it makes it harder, but how is making spelling easier any more than a tiny bit helpful at the very beginning of language learning? And eniweigh eevn if i compretery misspl thingz u wil steel undrstnd.
Well, for one thing, I had to break out of scanning your words, slow my reading speed to less than a third of normal speed, and scan it twice to verify that I understood what you were saying. If you think this is irrelevant to the effectiveness of communication, you're barking mad. I mean, several of your misspelled words can't be pronounced the way the normal word would be under any use of the individual letters (e.g. "compretery"). That breaks the intuitive, shape-based pattern recognition flow of speed reading and requires them to be actively "read aloud" in your head until a meaning can be associated with the garbled "sound." You can't seriously be arguing that just because it's possible to understand what your saying that what your saying is clear or that your way of writing there was just as good as standardized spelling.
For another thing, the learning of a language never stops. I encounter words I've never seen before every month from everywhere around me -- from new areas of study, from old books, from new trademarks in ads, etc. In many of those cases, the spelling suggests to me a pronunciation that is different from what it intended. To this day, I probably have words that I pronounce wrong in my head because they're never used in daily conversation, and I'm only familiar with them from books. Every now and then, I turn one up to my embarrassment. I'm not alone in this; I had a friend pronounce "writhe" as "wreathe" because he'd not really ever used the word in a conversation before and had only read it.
Compare that minor possible gain to the simple fact that etymology supplies a lot of information for advanced users of all languages, and something has been lost at every historical attempt to "regularize" language.
But was the meaning of the root words lost in the obfuscation of their origins? If not, then that reinforces my point. If so, then you may have a point. While the radicals composing some characters were completely changed (instead of just simplified) in both Japanese and Chinese simplification efforts, no ability to puzzle out the meaning was lost -- just the historical roots. Writing the newer characters is significantly faster and no slower to read for people trained initially in the simplified system. I cannot comment on the German effort since I am not familiar with it other than to know that it's unpopular like every other attempt to modernize some traditional element of society that people take national pride in, like currency and measurement units. Some discussion of how it's ma
If you could, please point out where in any of your links someone disagrees with more core premises that:
Knowing the meaning of a root word is an essential tool for understanding new words based on it, but knowing the origin of the root word imparts no useful knowledge outside of etymology for etymology's sake. While the origins of words are fascinating curiosities in themselves, knowing the origins does not aid understanding of a word's current use.
Having multiple root words derived from different languages that all mean the same thing is an impediment to learning that language because it requires memorizing redundant information. A single, shared root for all compounded words would simply learning and communication, which is why constructed languages like Esperanto do not waste space on redundant roots.
Irregular spelling hurts people trying to learn a language because it wastes time and mental capacity on memorization of a catalog of exceptions instead of a few hard and simple rules. Find me a single linguist that makes a convincing argument that all the "ough" words help people learn English.
As far as I can tell, the paper in the first link mainly shows how knowing the meaning of a root words tells you why is shows up in so many seemingly unrelated concepts. In no way does it talk about any of my three points. It just talks about how knowing a root word is somewhat useful. (Though, even the English examples of "feature" and "trait" coming from "tractus" are so abstruse as to be useless since no casual reader would pick "tractus" out of a list of Latin words to guess as the origin of "feature.")
The second and thirds links are merely notes on morphology when you dig through them. They too, in no way dispute any of my three points about origin being useless info after knowing meaning, the useless redundancy of similar root words, or the impediments that irregular spelling bring to learning.
If there are many experts who disagree with me on any of my three points, then either cite an argument made by them or make one yourself. Don't just toss random links at me that make no real argument about anything I wrote about in my post.
I think impeachment of Supreme Court justices for pure political disagreement with the whatever the current Congress is would create a horrible backlash. I mean, just consider how unlike it is that Bush will get impeached even though he has committed blatantly criminal acts ranging from the petty (not turning over records) to the severe (spying on Americans), and he has an approval rating in the 20s.
Impeaching Supreme Court justices is never gonna happen in my lifetime. There's too little overt power to abuse, and the Democrats didn't have the spine to block them in the first place when it was easy. They should've filibustered, and "nuclear option" be damned. Voting for cloture and then making a symbolic vote against was the same as voting for their nomination.
Sorry, but when you support unitary executive privilege and support rather nasty police procedures like shooting fleeing pursesnatchers in the back or strip searching pre-teen girls by the roadside, then you ain't on the side of a just and democratic state. Alito's a monster. He will always vote on the side of executive power and business, usually in that order. The elevation of those two things together are classic hallmarks of fascism; he's a pro-big business authoritarian.
The major differences between modern neoconservative Republicans and fascists of old are:
A lack of exclusive racial policies. (I don't count the anti-immigration "invasion" talk as part of the neo-con mainstream; it's more of a traditional Republican groundswelling.)
A dysfunctional love/hate rhetoric about state power, praising small government while increasing its funding and power. Republicans are more open and more secretive about welding corporate power to government power. No formalized trade union and industry councils are being formed, but there is a cozy relationship between lobbyists and the politicians that are supposed to be overseeing them. No-bid contracts are pretty much the same under old and new crony capitalism.
Who says I bought in on credit? I may kick myself for buying it, but I wasn't a *total* idiot.
I regret the purchase because the contrast ratio was worse than I expected in a darkened room, and the DLP set that I really wanted and was told was going to be delayed 6 months to come out at $11,999 came out 3 months later at $6,399. Oh, and the dang thing doesn't work well for what I bought it for -- the DVI input won't take full 1080p resolution. This fact is not mentioned on any website that I researched the set on for the month before I bought it. Basically, it sits unused for weeks at a time until I decide to play a last-gen, non-HDTV console game. If I were to try to resell it, there are current sets of its type on the market that perform better that retail for $1500 or less.
The financially stupid part of the purchase was that I lost my car in an accident a few weeks later and was $2k short of a down payment on a car I really wanted, leaving me stuck with a car that gets worse mileage. I've never EVER let my account go below a certain amount since then. Lesson learned -- always keep emergency savings. Mine is now the cost of a down payment on a new car plus the full deductible on my health insurance; it's my "get put in the hospital in a car accident and not go bankrupt" money.
Your post is filled with so much delusional machismo and factual inaccuracies as to make me sick to look at it. It's a sad thing that people actually believe this kind of sheer propaganda.
Or that the economy isn't tanking, We have the capacity to deal with North Korea and Iran even with Iraq.
The GDP is growing. That much is irrefutable. Taken as an average, the economy is growing. However, this is not affecting the majority of Americans because the lion's share of the benefits are going to the wealthy. Wages are still pretty stagnant, the mortgage default rate is going up, the rate of new home construction is falling, and inflation in the cost of fuel and food (two goods that increase in proportion of budget inversely to income) is growing at a fast clip.
These are reasons why people are still worried about the economy. The class divide is yawning wider and wider right now. Executive pay is at an all-time disproportionate high compared to workers wages. The number of US millionaires increased at three times the rate of the growth of the economy. In the meantime, the subprime lending market is in a crisis, and the cost of healthcare spending is jumping up at twice inflation while percentage of uninsured citizens is very slowly climbing.
We don't have the ability to deal with North Korea or Iran except to bomb them into the Stone Age -- which will have absolutely no repercussions, I'm sure, in your fantasy land because we're just so badass. However, in the real world, a unilateral nuclear assault against North Korea or Iran would probably provoke military reprisal from China and Russia. In addition, the economic ramifications of such a move would see the end of the US economy if trade with China shut down and China focused its manufacturing base on goods for war instaed of goods for Wal-mart.
We can't fight a ground war against Iran or North Korea right now, and any such attempt to attack either would have terrible ramifications for Israel and South Korea. But, hey, can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
We are in not more of a vulnerable position the we were before Iraq. We have more then half our military force free to do whatever if absolutely needed.
Really? Then why are we extending tours of duty via stop-loss if we could just send some more troops to Iraq. What exactly are all those troops doing that so vital that we can't spare them for Iraq but could spare them for a two-front war... I mean a three-front war. You're forgetting Afghanistan, aren't you?
Now, don't take what is happening in Iraq to mean it would happen anywhere else. The only Reason we aren't waisting Iraq is because we are trying to save it. If another country starts something, we aren't going to be worried about saving it.
Oh, good. The only reason we aren't fighting a good old genocidal war is because we don't feel like it. I mean, there's no real long-term ramifications to just knocking over a nation and killing large chunks of its population and leaving it in chaos, is there? I mean, it's not like that's a recipe for terrorism or for religious or other dictatorial movements to sweep into power. A nation left in ruins always turns into a nice, democratic ally, right? Or maybe you're just of the opinion that we can just bomb the snot out of anyone who gets out line, if we'd just "man up" to it.
Man, the world would sooooo be a safer place if people with the balls to commit genocide and leave countries in chaos would just step up to the plate and shut up all the sissy liberals out there. 'Cause America can just go it alone if we get some freaking testosterone, right?
Psh. Violent military fantasies like this are why we've lost so much cache in the rest of the world. And you people wonder why anti-Americanism is on the uprise. "Why can't everyone see how wonderful we are? We should go kick their asses until they see the light."
In some cases, the good are the strong, and the strong are the good. If that frightens you, maybe you're not a part of either group.
If you aren't frightened by people that confuse strength with righteousness, then you almost certainly can't be counted amongst be the righteous. Might doesn't not make right, nor does it prove it.
The winner is not always the just, but history will do its best to remember them that way.
The current problem's solution is equally obvious.
Yeah. So, umm, how's that reckless military spending and labeling of our enemies as evil going for us so far? Any chance that we're going to bankrupt our enemies or get everyone to flock to our side against them soon?
But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word.
Knowing the origin of a root words is pretty much useless information for anyone but language historians. "Quatra-" or "tetra-"... it all means "four," and there's no need for the redundancy in the language. If anything it makes understanding the language harder because you need to learn to recognize multiple root words from multiple languages.
I've studied two languages -- Spanish and Japanese. Spanish encodes all the queues needed to pronounce a word in its written form. Letters are always pronounced the same way, and accents are visually encoded. This makes learning new Spanish vocabulary easy because you always know how to say a new written word and how to spell a new spoken word. (You also get all the benefit of Latin roots, too.)
Japanese on the other hand has an alphabet that tightly correlates to its spoken form except for the fact that it doesn't cover accent. Japanese is a semi-tonal language. The pitch of syllables as you pronounce them is import to sounding right, but it's not often essential to understanding what someone's saying. Accent isn't encoded into the written language, but the written language is phonic, so you always know how to write (in kana at least) any new word you hear.
Both languages have irregular verbs, but Spanish has significantly more than Japanese which only has two (seven if you count the -aru/-aimasu verbs). I'll tell you from experience that learning irregular verbs is purely a matter of memorization since no system (by definition) exists to describe them. This is a huge pain in Spanish, but a small workload in Japanese.
English spelling is the same. You have a general system of rules for spelling, and then you have a huge, exhausting list of exceptions. "Phone" vs. "feel" vs. "haphazard," "tough" vs. "through" vs. "throw" vs. "dough," "piece" vs. "receive" vs. "weird," "schnauzer" vs. "school," etc., etc. English spelling is an impediment to learning and not a tool for it. All the memorization of special rules takes up time that could be spent learning grammar or actually reading literature in class.
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Should I take solace that this will almost certainly get laughed off by Labour?
I'd like to suggest a fix: s/laughed off/co-opted and embraced/
I mean, this is exactly the sort of "third way" buddy-buddy up to business + nanny state garbage that Labour LOVES as far as I understand. You won't see any disagreement between Labour and the Tories over this. Gah. They make me as sick as the DLC, "New" Democrats in my own country.
It's practically the definition of fascism too: you agree to suspend any "abuse" of your civil rights that doesn't conform to our ideals of a morally pure society, and we'll extend your business monopoly and crack down on average citizens who threaten it.
I'm not fond of the coarseness of a lot of TV and music today, but I don't exactly want to see the government getting involved in preventing it, much less at the direct expense of the people's rights. However, if I were a media company, I'd be all over this. After all, once the copyrights are extended, it should be pretty easy to wiggle out of the self-censorship side of the deal with no repercussions.
The BBC can no longer cover the actions of Parliament or the PM?
Heh. You know, it's becoming less and less surprising that one of the UK's biggest objections to the EU charter has been the idea of signing up to the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It's probably things like this and their anti-terror laws that they don't want to give up.
No wonder British SF is so obsessed with the idea of their country becoming a fascist state.
Could you provide a link to back that up? I've been trying to find an explanation of how it supposedly works that denies what the grandparent poster said, but I can't penetrate the techno-babble.
As far as I can tell, it translated magnetic fields into mechanical motion. Sounds like 80% of all previous attempts at perpetual motion devices to me. It's probably just an unbalanced set of magnets, but I can't get at anything that makes any sense to be sure.
You are presuming that another civilization would have achieved interstellar spaceflight by being just like us.
There are several things we can reasonably assume. A civilization reaching space travel is probably going to have to have industrial metallurgy. (Otherwise, what are you going to make the ship out of?) That requires mining and a way to fuel the smelting of metals. Both of these things consume resources and leave geological markers. You don't go from banging rocks together to microprocessors without having to go through advanced mechanical devices and industrial chemical engineering first. You don't launch to orbit without manufacturing systems to make the various parts for the space craft, and this requires the consumption of resources, the production of wastes, and the building of structures that should've endured into the geological record.
Science and invention "stand on the shoulders of giants." This classic trope means that no invention or discovery happens in a vacuum -- it's the result of refinements and improvements based on the insights and creativity of past generations. While it's possible that you could make an entirely zero-impact industrial infrastructure, you would never be able to do so without going through dirtier technologies first.
If we were all of those things, we could easily have left the Earth thousands of years ago without having left a fraction of the mark we've made as earthbound primates.
Yes, but then they wouldn't be human -- or frankly any kind of terrestrial mammal that I'm aware of. We are the way we are because natural selection made us this way. We are obsessed with wealth and acquisitiveness because it helps us compete better against others to pass on our genes. We think of ourselves and our immediate needs because that's what helped us survive before civilization and long-term goals we invented. We fight each other other population pressures and philosophical differences because that's how social animals are; we form up in groups for mutual defense and then enhance our desire to compete against other groups by having a natural tendency to demonize their differences.
Natural selection is short-sighted. It only cares about the fitness of one generation to make the next. Anything beyond that is outside the scope of its ability to select. Really, aliens can't be an "enlightened" off-shoot of humanity from the past because humans from the past would've had the same evolutionary pressures as our ancestors. Too many of our negative traits go all the way back to ancestors far more ancient than hominids and primates, and they'd certainly share them.
Perhaps you disagree and think that humanoid aliens or time travel is more believable, in which case you're not really in a position to complain about thoughtless fantasy.
Considering all the points raised in my reply to your post, humanoid aliens and time travel are more believable. After all, we don't have incontrovertible evidence that aliens aren't commonly humanoid nor that time travel doesn't exist (though our current understanding of physics makes it seem pretty darned improbable).
On the other hand, we have plenty of evidence that there has never been a space-faring culture on Earth before us. All four are fantasies, but 2.2 & 2.3 are only ones that are easily disproved by the lack of physical imprint of all the progress such races would've had to make to get to that level of technology.
No one cares because we all realize that the system is rigged. We might as well buy now because we'll pay later whether we buy now or not.
This sort of mindset is exactly what got us into this situation in the first place.
Thanks for doing your part to make it worse.
Do you really think the Democrats are better then the Republicans? As far as I am concerned they are largely the same party. The only candidate who voted against the war and will get us out is Ron Paul.
People like you are the same as Naderites. If you really think this country would've been no different if we had Democrats in charge of the three branches of government instead of Republicans for 6 out of the past 7 years, then you're nuts.
Ron Paul's pretty out there himself. While I respect his stance in voting against the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq War, I think he's nuts to call the abolition of the Federal Reserve, and I think he's soulless to have opposed any intervention in Darfur. In many ways, we represents some of the worst tendencies of libertarians.
Well, on one level I don't understand celebrity worship, but really, I think almost everybody has their celebrities. For most/many/some slashdotters they may not be actors, but it could be Joss Whedon, Linus Torvalds, Theo de Raadt, ESR, Richard Stallman, and even--as the GP mentioned--Thompson. Same kind of celebrity tracking, just a different kind of celebrity! (I'm think of names I see fairly regularly on slashdot..)
Well, yeah, I care about their newsworthy actions because they are usually doing something that affects my life (or at least the products I buy and use).
But I don't care about their marriages, their divorces, their kids (adopted or not), the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the houses the live in, the vacations they take, or any of the rest of that stuff that shows up in the tabloids, in the entertainment section of the news, or in People magazine. As far as I'm concerned, the entertainment section of any cable news half hour is just 5 minutes of important news about the world events and political decisions that affect our lives that's not getting covered.
I mean, I care about what movies Brad Pitt's gonna star in 'cause he's one of my favorite actors, but I'd really rather be punched in the face than hear the term "Brangelina" EVER again in my life. That's the sort of nonsense I just don't understand. People who pin their hopes and dreams on mundane details of the daily lives of people they'll never personally know disappoint me.
Of course, I'm almost certainly preaching to the choir here on Slashdot.
I think you're probably right. The broad umbrella of "antisocial tendencies" notwithstanding, being a complete, stubborn jerk isn't exactly a form of mental illness yet. Thompson's not a narcissist or a megalomaniac or a sociopath or anything like that -- he's just incredibly rude and disrespectful to people that don't see things his way, and he knows that his campaign to restrict access to violent games to minors requires a certain amount of grandstanding to rally supporters of the same goals.
And we dig it just as much as the rest of the world digs Paris Hilton's everyday antics.
Really? I thought that Paris Hilton got so much attention was because there were people who actually liked her.
That argument actually makes a lot more sense than the impression I had.
I don't know. I've never been able to understand celebrity worship.
- Where is their stuff?
- Where is the plastic that wouldn't have biodegraded?
- Where are the ruins of their cities?
- Where is their waste, particularly the radioactive kind?
- Shouldn't they have spanned the globe in seeking resources for their growth?
- Where are their religious and historical monuments?
- Where are they?
- Did they develop cheap FTL tech? Why haven't we heard from their other colonies if so?
- Why would they all have left at the same time with no dissenters left to stay on mother Earth after cleaning everything up?
- Why are there things left for us?
- Why do we still have oil and fossil fuels? Why didn't they cause a spike of global warming in their quest for the energy needed for space flight?
- Why do we still have so many easily found fossils?
- Why don't we see any evidence of industrial mining?
All in all, it just doesn't add up. If our supposed space-travelling ancestors were anything like us on a fundamental sociobiological level, then I don't see it.The other AC is partially right. Cingular was a joint venture of SBC and Bellsouth which bought AT&T Wireless, begun to phase out the AT&T Wireless brand, and then reversed this decision to instead phase out the Cingular brand after SBC bought AT&T, renamed itself to AT&T, and gobbled up Bellsouth too. The Wikipedia article is pretty accurate from what I remember.
Stephen Colbert has a funnier take on it, though.
Why should we expect aliens flying spacecraft to be more competent than humans driving cars or flying small personal aircraft?
Because if flying here were trivial enough of a task that the incompetent could do it, then we probably would have seen a lot more of them by now. You don't put unskilled people on a potential first-contact, exploration mission unless it's cheap and easy to do it. You put skilled people on missions that are hard and expensive.
At some point far in the future our descendents try out time travel and something goes wrong with one of the time travelling craft (they were probably visiting roswell to see if an alien really was found there - ah, the irony...)
Actually, this is part of the backstory of the time-travelling, table-top RPG Continuum. Of course, being a game about keeping the timeline consistent, the "aliens" know that they have to crash and the have to die long before they're ever sent there.
The explanation for why humans ended up looking like grey aliens is pretty funny too. Essentially, when body modification became common, anime big eyes and small mouths became really popular and then fashion eventually trended that way.
Sorry, but your education is not my responsibility.
However, your ability to communicate your points is. Tossing a bunch of random links that do not spell out what you're trying to argue is a poor attempt at communication. They neither communicated that you understood my points nor what it was you (and "qualified people") disagreed with about them. Tell me what in them refuted my points, and don't make me go trying to augur a refutation to my own post out of data that is not organized to make such an argument. Communicate clearly.
But the difficulty of spelling in English pales into insignificance besides, say, learning the inflections in heavily inflected languages, or getting tones from a non-tonal background.
I will not dispute this in the slightest. It's practically a biological difference given how many native Cantonese speakers have perfect pitch compared to speakers of non-tonal languages like English. However, I will still dispute that your assertion that irregular spellings and the smattering of multi-lingual root words are actually helpful to understanding in the face of their alternatives. I maintain that it's an inefficient use of mental resources.
In other words, sure it makes it harder, but how is making spelling easier any more than a tiny bit helpful at the very beginning of language learning? And eniweigh eevn if i compretery misspl thingz u wil steel undrstnd.
Well, for one thing, I had to break out of scanning your words, slow my reading speed to less than a third of normal speed, and scan it twice to verify that I understood what you were saying. If you think this is irrelevant to the effectiveness of communication, you're barking mad. I mean, several of your misspelled words can't be pronounced the way the normal word would be under any use of the individual letters (e.g. "compretery"). That breaks the intuitive, shape-based pattern recognition flow of speed reading and requires them to be actively "read aloud" in your head until a meaning can be associated with the garbled "sound." You can't seriously be arguing that just because it's possible to understand what your saying that what your saying is clear or that your way of writing there was just as good as standardized spelling.
For another thing, the learning of a language never stops. I encounter words I've never seen before every month from everywhere around me -- from new areas of study, from old books, from new trademarks in ads, etc. In many of those cases, the spelling suggests to me a pronunciation that is different from what it intended. To this day, I probably have words that I pronounce wrong in my head because they're never used in daily conversation, and I'm only familiar with them from books. Every now and then, I turn one up to my embarrassment. I'm not alone in this; I had a friend pronounce "writhe" as "wreathe" because he'd not really ever used the word in a conversation before and had only read it.
Compare that minor possible gain to the simple fact that etymology supplies a lot of information for advanced users of all languages, and something has been lost at every historical attempt to "regularize" language.
But was the meaning of the root words lost in the obfuscation of their origins? If not, then that reinforces my point. If so, then you may have a point. While the radicals composing some characters were completely changed (instead of just simplified) in both Japanese and Chinese simplification efforts, no ability to puzzle out the meaning was lost -- just the historical roots. Writing the newer characters is significantly faster and no slower to read for people trained initially in the simplified system. I cannot comment on the German effort since I am not familiar with it other than to know that it's unpopular like every other attempt to modernize some traditional element of society that people take national pride in, like currency and measurement units. Some discussion of how it's ma
...Or kick him down a well.
So our country can be free?
As far as I can tell, the paper in the first link mainly shows how knowing the meaning of a root words tells you why is shows up in so many seemingly unrelated concepts. In no way does it talk about any of my three points. It just talks about how knowing a root word is somewhat useful. (Though, even the English examples of "feature" and "trait" coming from "tractus" are so abstruse as to be useless since no casual reader would pick "tractus" out of a list of Latin words to guess as the origin of "feature.")
The second and thirds links are merely notes on morphology when you dig through them. They too, in no way dispute any of my three points about origin being useless info after knowing meaning, the useless redundancy of similar root words, or the impediments that irregular spelling bring to learning.
If there are many experts who disagree with me on any of my three points, then either cite an argument made by them or make one yourself. Don't just toss random links at me that make no real argument about anything I wrote about in my post.
I think impeachment of Supreme Court justices for pure political disagreement with the whatever the current Congress is would create a horrible backlash. I mean, just consider how unlike it is that Bush will get impeached even though he has committed blatantly criminal acts ranging from the petty (not turning over records) to the severe (spying on Americans), and he has an approval rating in the 20s.
Impeaching Supreme Court justices is never gonna happen in my lifetime. There's too little overt power to abuse, and the Democrats didn't have the spine to block them in the first place when it was easy. They should've filibustered, and "nuclear option" be damned. Voting for cloture and then making a symbolic vote against was the same as voting for their nomination.
The major differences between modern neoconservative Republicans and fascists of old are:
Who says I bought in on credit? I may kick myself for buying it, but I wasn't a *total* idiot.
I regret the purchase because the contrast ratio was worse than I expected in a darkened room, and the DLP set that I really wanted and was told was going to be delayed 6 months to come out at $11,999 came out 3 months later at $6,399. Oh, and the dang thing doesn't work well for what I bought it for -- the DVI input won't take full 1080p resolution. This fact is not mentioned on any website that I researched the set on for the month before I bought it. Basically, it sits unused for weeks at a time until I decide to play a last-gen, non-HDTV console game. If I were to try to resell it, there are current sets of its type on the market that perform better that retail for $1500 or less.
The financially stupid part of the purchase was that I lost my car in an accident a few weeks later and was $2k short of a down payment on a car I really wanted, leaving me stuck with a car that gets worse mileage. I've never EVER let my account go below a certain amount since then. Lesson learned -- always keep emergency savings. Mine is now the cost of a down payment on a new car plus the full deductible on my health insurance; it's my "get put in the hospital in a car accident and not go bankrupt" money.
Your post is filled with so much delusional machismo and factual inaccuracies as to make me sick to look at it. It's a sad thing that people actually believe this kind of sheer propaganda.
Or that the economy isn't tanking, We have the capacity to deal with North Korea and Iran even with Iraq.
The GDP is growing. That much is irrefutable. Taken as an average, the economy is growing. However, this is not affecting the majority of Americans because the lion's share of the benefits are going to the wealthy. Wages are still pretty stagnant, the mortgage default rate is going up, the rate of new home construction is falling, and inflation in the cost of fuel and food (two goods that increase in proportion of budget inversely to income) is growing at a fast clip.
These are reasons why people are still worried about the economy. The class divide is yawning wider and wider right now. Executive pay is at an all-time disproportionate high compared to workers wages. The number of US millionaires increased at three times the rate of the growth of the economy. In the meantime, the subprime lending market is in a crisis, and the cost of healthcare spending is jumping up at twice inflation while percentage of uninsured citizens is very slowly climbing.
We don't have the ability to deal with North Korea or Iran except to bomb them into the Stone Age -- which will have absolutely no repercussions, I'm sure, in your fantasy land because we're just so badass. However, in the real world, a unilateral nuclear assault against North Korea or Iran would probably provoke military reprisal from China and Russia. In addition, the economic ramifications of such a move would see the end of the US economy if trade with China shut down and China focused its manufacturing base on goods for war instaed of goods for Wal-mart.
We can't fight a ground war against Iran or North Korea right now, and any such attempt to attack either would have terrible ramifications for Israel and South Korea. But, hey, can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
We are in not more of a vulnerable position the we were before Iraq. We have more then half our military force free to do whatever if absolutely needed.
Really? Then why are we extending tours of duty via stop-loss if we could just send some more troops to Iraq. What exactly are all those troops doing that so vital that we can't spare them for Iraq but could spare them for a two-front war... I mean a three-front war. You're forgetting Afghanistan, aren't you?
Now, don't take what is happening in Iraq to mean it would happen anywhere else. The only Reason we aren't waisting Iraq is because we are trying to save it. If another country starts something, we aren't going to be worried about saving it.
Oh, good. The only reason we aren't fighting a good old genocidal war is because we don't feel like it. I mean, there's no real long-term ramifications to just knocking over a nation and killing large chunks of its population and leaving it in chaos, is there? I mean, it's not like that's a recipe for terrorism or for religious or other dictatorial movements to sweep into power. A nation left in ruins always turns into a nice, democratic ally, right? Or maybe you're just of the opinion that we can just bomb the snot out of anyone who gets out line, if we'd just "man up" to it.
Man, the world would sooooo be a safer place if people with the balls to commit genocide and leave countries in chaos would just step up to the plate and shut up all the sissy liberals out there. 'Cause America can just go it alone if we get some freaking testosterone, right?
Psh. Violent military fantasies like this are why we've lost so much cache in the rest of the world. And you people wonder why anti-Americanism is on the uprise. "Why can't everyone see how wonderful we are? We should go kick their asses until they see the light."
I don't know... me working for lazy people's gain seems fairly evil to me. Maybe it's just Ayn Rand talking though.
I don't know... me letting people starve in the street 'cause I consider them lazy seems fairly evil to me. Maybe it's just Jesus talking though.
In some cases, the good are the strong, and the strong are the good. If that frightens you, maybe you're not a part of either group.
If you aren't frightened by people that confuse strength with righteousness, then you almost certainly can't be counted amongst be the righteous. Might doesn't not make right, nor does it prove it.
The winner is not always the just, but history will do its best to remember them that way.
The current problem's solution is equally obvious.
Yeah. So, umm, how's that reckless military spending and labeling of our enemies as evil going for us so far?
Any chance that we're going to bankrupt our enemies or get everyone to flock to our side against them soon?
But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word.
Knowing the origin of a root words is pretty much useless information for anyone but language historians. "Quatra-" or "tetra-"... it all means "four," and there's no need for the redundancy in the language. If anything it makes understanding the language harder because you need to learn to recognize multiple root words from multiple languages.
I've studied two languages -- Spanish and Japanese. Spanish encodes all the queues needed to pronounce a word in its written form. Letters are always pronounced the same way, and accents are visually encoded. This makes learning new Spanish vocabulary easy because you always know how to say a new written word and how to spell a new spoken word. (You also get all the benefit of Latin roots, too.)
Japanese on the other hand has an alphabet that tightly correlates to its spoken form except for the fact that it doesn't cover accent. Japanese is a semi-tonal language. The pitch of syllables as you pronounce them is import to sounding right, but it's not often essential to understanding what someone's saying. Accent isn't encoded into the written language, but the written language is phonic, so you always know how to write (in kana at least) any new word you hear.
Both languages have irregular verbs, but Spanish has significantly more than Japanese which only has two (seven if you count the -aru/-aimasu verbs). I'll tell you from experience that learning irregular verbs is purely a matter of memorization since no system (by definition) exists to describe them. This is a huge pain in Spanish, but a small workload in Japanese.
English spelling is the same. You have a general system of rules for spelling, and then you have a huge, exhausting list of exceptions. "Phone" vs. "feel" vs. "haphazard," "tough" vs. "through" vs. "throw" vs. "dough," "piece" vs. "receive" vs. "weird," "schnauzer" vs. "school," etc., etc. English spelling is an impediment to learning and not a tool for it. All the memorization of special rules takes up time that could be spent learning grammar or actually reading literature in class.