I'd highly recommend Latin for young children, although it has very little relationship with German and only some relationship to English. Many of the apparent similarities between Latin and German have to do with the fact that they were both descended from a common ancestral language
I agree that both German and Latin share the similarity that PIE derived languages exhibit and would add that the influence of Latin upon German is not limited merely to this common ancestry. It may only occasionally be obvious semantically, where it usually reflects Roman technological superiority eg. in the German Fenster, which survives in English in the oft used (by Historians of Bohemia) term defenestration. Latin's later influence upon German (and not German alone) has been as a result of "latinising scholars" most especially during the formulation of a normative grammar for Old High German at the imperial court in Prague. Being an IE language German was naturally case-based, but in attempting to formalise a learned version of the common tongue --a tongue the Emperor Karl V described as being fit only for talking to horses --the learned men very consciously tried to shoe-horn German syntax into the Latin case system (or a subset thereof, ie. German lacks the ablative and the vocative) and to standardise the inflections within those cases.
Latin syntax is less obvious in English grammar, (though the rule against splitting infinitives is an invention by late latinisers), where the case system has all but died out --how many English speakers even know when to use whom any more? (and even there the distinction between the accusative and the dative has collapsed.) Well died out entirely perhaps:)
and German is more closely related to English than Latin
That is clear. Of course High German is even more closely related to Yiddish and English more closely to Dutch or Low German. But this is to say nothing of the influence of Latin (or Norman French for that matter) upon either German or English after the Germanic languages had separated from the Romance languages.
It helps immensely with reading and learning closely related languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian)
Latin, being not only the root language of the Romance languages, it is also a key to better understanding other European languages such as English, German &c.,
By force it to be Linux rather than something your child is likely to see outside your narrow view of the world. Might as well force him/her to speak Latin at home as well.
The benefits of speaking a 2nd language at home are too well know to dwell upon. You never know, being exposed to one may have saved you from being chained in your sadly narrow view of the world.
Latin, being not only the root language of the Romance languages, it is also a key to better understanding other European languages such as English, German &c., would be undoubtedly provide the child with great advantage. However since hardly any one is fluent enough actually to speak it at home this is unlikely to be a viable option.
As far as OSs, and their GUI frontends. I (doubt|hope) that the differences between a contemporary Linux GUIs and Windows or even Mac will be anywhere near as great as those between our GUIs and those that will dominate some 15 years from now (when said 3 year old may have to use computers professionally). My boys are conversant with linux, windows and OSX (thought they prefer the latter), and this has certainly not inhibited their skills in any one OS. So I can confidently say, without wanting to appear overly offensive, "you are full of shit mate!"
I'm showing my age here, but it only took those of us who grew up without computers (not entirely true, my first computer was a Kosmos Logikus) a week or three to learn how to use the early GUIs. There's nothing in there that is conceptually difficult for a reasonably intelligent young adult to pick up and learning to use a pointing device is a sinch for most anyone under that age of 60 (which isn't to say some 80 year olds don't find it a sinch either).
Computer exposure for children is somewhat overrated. Given the choice between learning multiplication tables by rote (which the school is refusing to teach my kids, "we don't do that any more") and developing "mouse skills" which is considered essential for modern survival, I would choose the former. Thank FOSS for... TUXMATH for teaching well, what the school will not (and you only need a keypad!) But probably not quite for a 3 year old (unless said 3 year old is Terence Tao).
Why wouldn't he? He was accused of criminality. Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I thought accusations of criminality were one of a species of imputations that are regarded as prima facie defamatory?! In any case, I don't think it would be overly burdensome to prove that calling someone a criminal is liable to lower their reputation in the eyes of upstanding citizens, or?
He should sue MasterCard. It was MasterCard that cut him off.
Under what head of action? Are you claiming MasterCard is under an contractual obligation to process payments to Wikileaks? Or do you imagine their liability is tortious?
Unless he can find the official government document instead of random remarks he doesn't have a case.
The PM made a defamatory statement outside the protection of parliament. Why does he need to find an official government document?
Suing anyone but MasterCard is a publicity stunt that is nothing but an ego stroke for him.
I'm not sure that MasterCard even comes into the question of whether he can sue. After all you don't need to show monetary damage to sue in defamation. Wouldn't the fact that MasterCard may have acted on the basis of the PMs alleged defamation only be relevant when it came to decide damages?
You know, despite your authoritative pronouncements on this matter, I'm not even sure you are an Australian lawyer.
It was meant as a joke... a joke intended to buttress OP's point that this particular skeuomorphic design doesn't actually "help you figure out how to work with it." But even as I was typing I thought "... hmm somebody probably has written a fix for this...":)
Unfortunately, this viewpoint neglects the fact that mathematicians, as a class in society, have ethical conflicts of interest with respect to the nature and scope of the mathematics, and thus reserving decisions on matters of mathematics to the numerate will sooner or later produce a badly messed up mathematical system.
The Mac desktop Calendar app? Sure it looks like leather but in no way does thinking of it like any kind of traditional leather-bound thing you may have known help you figure out how to work with it.
Yeah and the most annoying thing is that I can't seem work out how to pick away at the old bits of torn paper with my mouse. Is there some kind of Command-Shift-Option-F23 key combination that I should be pressing? Or do I have to buy a 3rd party razor-blade App?
Yup, the Sodomites wanted to rape the intruders. That was definitely wrong.
I rather think the offer of the virgin daughters to the prospective rapists was just as wrong.
Both these were only trivial wrongs compared to the actual breach committed by the Sodomites, which was to transgress against the rules of hospitality upon which civil society was founded. In context Lot's offer was arguably the very opposite of wrong, (though that may not be obvious to C21st eyes).
Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.-- Gen 19:8 [emphasis added]
So important is it for Lot to make good his promise of hospitality that he offers up his daughters (perhaps he should have offered his goats... or were they more valuable?). The fact that the Sodomites refused even this generousity merely exacerbated their serious transgression. That's why they got nuked.
You make it sound as if this was a criminal trial, it wasn't. Samsung and Apple were in litigation.
Any adult, given enough facts as presented by both sides, should be able to come to a conclusion as to guilty or innocent.
There is no 'innocent' and again words like 'guilty' are appropriate in criminal law and this was not a criminal trial. The question was whether a person infringed the rights of a rightsholder. I'm starting to think that YANAL.
It doesn't require an in-depth knowledge of law, but rather a simple way to judge to arguments and giving merit to one over the other. If it required an in-depth knowledge of the law, we would only have lawyers for jurors.
Like duh! The jury is the tribunal of fact, not the tribunal of law (that's what the judge is doing there). The jury is not supposed to reach any conclusion as to the law. The complaint here is not that the jury interpreted patent law incorrectly, it's that they supposedly gave the mountain of facts presented inadequate consideration. Now I don't necessarily agree, but that is the accusation.
I think we can all agree that's not a great idea;)
You're just flat out wrong on that score. Personally I believe a judge (a lawyer) unaided by a jury, which is to say a judge acting both as the tribunal of fact and of law, will often deliver sounder decisions in complicated civil litigation than a judge acting with the assistance of a jury (ie "twelve people too dumb to get out of jury duty"). But that is only as a matter of practice, from the PoV of legal/political theory I see the attraction of separating the tribunals of fact and law and of involving non-lawyers in deciding the questions of fact.
In any case what is being proposed here is a "panel of experts" not a panel of lawyer. "Experts" would be those who are usually called as expert witnesses to persuade juries as to matters of fact, but who in this capacity would not be acting for a litigant (nor be on their payroll).
The more in-depth knowledge one has on a topic, the less likely you are to get a consensus...
Now that is true.
... and the less likely you are to be able to look at a case objectively.
Huh? Not understanding the issues or their complexity leads to objectivity?!
Translation: If you want to run linux on it, don't buy a Mac (or any other machine for that matter) with the brand-new latest diddly-hey-whatzit technology until such time as you know that the drivers for said tech have been worked out. Which they will be. Duh!
However, I DO have a better choice in workstation OS that more closely mirrors our production servers on which to develop software.
Which is the reason I run linux as a Parallels partition on the iMac at home. And surely at home is where OSX should be?!
We had a linux box and the iMac at home, but my wife & my boys voted with their feet (or fingers)... no prizes for guessing which way. When the linux box died it was it was replaced with a virtual one... no probs at all. At work it's mainly linux though I've a Windows box to my right and a macbook to my left %-) neither of which get that much use here... especially not the one to my right!
The less people respect the idea of IP, the more draconian enforcement you need.
I agree
The divide between the public opinion on one side and the law, the entertainment industry and their lobbyists on the other side is growing.
I agree.
What you see as a crackdown I see as desperation, as more and more obnoxious threats are required to keep the population at bay.
When is a crackdown not desperation and threats to keep the public at bay? So we are in agreement there too.
They're not winning the hearts and minds of the young generation, they're just hoping to intimidate them into not file sharing.
I agree. They're not doing much to endear themselves to the older generations either. More importantly they seem to have perverted IP to the extent where it is, as I wrote above becoming "corrosive to the very aim it was conceived to serve," where it becomes a fetter to innovation.
Most people don't kill because they feel it's wrong, not because the law says so.
As I have so often pointed out. And wouldn't it a diseased society where all that stood between us and that killer's blade was the law! Of course we are not concerned here with the people who don't break the law. But point taken, a better analogy might be the War on Drugs(tm).
The situation is like a rubber band being stretched and stretched but sooner or later it will snap.
"Once our generation takes the reins of power marijuana prohibition will end. It's only matter of time" -- me in 1979
...
You're right, I don't expect the fight to be over in 10 years, but I expect them to still be on the losing side trying to hold it all together.
You agree. Well we're in agreement then.**:)
[**With the small caveat that I'm not ready to conclude that they really are on the "losing side," much as they like to cry poor.]
Property is a small part of a greater concept called individual sovereignty that's a direct result of free will. The laws merely formalize that which already exists.
That, to quote Jeremy Bentham, is "nonsense walking on stilts." You've failed to account for the historical reality that individually owned alienable real property only emerges at isolated times and places. It is the exception not the rule.
More importantly there is nothing natural about "individual sovereignty," a concept which would have been wholly incomprehensible through most of human history. And it is indeed an oxymoron, is it not? Rather than characterising "man in his natural state," as it were, "individual sovereignty" is a crowning achievement of civilisation. It is --to borrow the term above (though I would prefer the less anthropomorphic 'cultural development') --the "social choice" par exellence. Moreover it's emergence required the development of a system of justice the origins of which date back the the C12th. No mere formalisation, the Law is in fact the nursemaid of individual liberty.
There is, as my post above made explicit, a sharp distinction between traditional forms of property and so-called IP. However your analysis of the distinction between material and intellectual property is, I'm afraid, entirely without merit, being predicated as it is upon a simple misunderstanding of IP. IP does not, as you would have it concern itself with "thoughts and ideas in... people's heads." Very explicitly IP is concerned, not with ideas per se, but with their material representations. Copyright, for instance, arises only when an idea is "reduced to material form" (aka 'fixation') and notwithstanding appurtenant rights, such as performance rights, which muddy the waters somewhat, aims primarily to control the making of material reproductions of copyrighted materials (aka 'works'). It is certainly not in any way involved in controlling people's thoughts. Sorry.
The problem is that "to steer it back towards health" for the most part equals "turn back time".
Sure, but legally, not technologically. I had in mind curing the overreach and trying to shift the balance back towards consumers of IP since producers have had the ear of legislators for too long. This will not be easy (especially given what I wrote below) and for it to fly poltically it would require a concrete and hard-nosed platform that could not simply be dismissed as, "they want everything for free" or could be easily demonstrated to cause serious adverse economic impact.
One example is that IP law is lengthening protection for some types of media precisely at the point in history when the lifecycle of technology is shortening. Who will be interested in using Windows 95 by the time it enters the public domain. How many units was Microsoft still selling in 2005? A practical proposal within the current framework would be to propose 10 year software version copyrights.
As long as you have the following four components, IP is doomed
That's close to a falsifiable prediction. Come back in 10 years and tell me that IP is "doomed." Moreover components 3 and 4 are unnecessary to your argument. My government will not be able stop people communicating in private either.
The geo-economic reality here is that US manufacturing as an international earner has been declining for decades. It is clear the the US cannot compete against China in manufacturing. What the US has is Silicon Valley and Hollywood. This is why in 1986, after 100 years of sitting outside the international copyright framework the US finally signed up to the Berne Convention. It is why the US has been leading the charge internationally in "strengthening" IP protection. You've got time's arrow backwards.
if you'd like to kill piracy
There is no question of killing piracy. This is never an all-or-none proposition. We have had a law against murder for in excess of 8 centuries and people are still killing each other. I can tell you the crime of murder ain't going away any time soon.
Or you can accept that technology has moved forward and that the "good old days" are never coming back.
But it's precisely because technology has moved on that we will see ever more outrageous IP law enacted, unless and until it can be made into a major political issue.
Copyright and patents were crude tools used by kings for censorship and nepotism respectively.
Setting aside the word 'crude,' that's what we in the business call a fact.
They were repurposed with the eventual intent of benefiting society,
Sure, that is a fair enough characterisation. To be more precise patents over novel ideas were the only survivors of the numerous letters patent and other prerogative monopolies to survive the cull of these "crude tools." They survived because the clear benefit they bestowed. Arguably, by reconciling market forces with technological development, they were instrumental in giving birth both to capitalism and the industrial revolution. Copyright, for course, has a separate history.
but it is a tool incapable of that process, regardless of how well meaning those that craft the system are.
And that's what we in the business call highly debatable.
Why? Where does that notion come from? The very existence of copyright is a choice by society, it is not supported by any natural law.
Why? Because it is a "choice by society" of course!
The very existence of alienable private property, especially in land, is also "a choice by society." Now I do prefer being a holder of property in a "free" society rather than being a middle-European peasant bound to the inalienable estate of a seignour, as my ancestors were (bound peasants that is), but the study of history show that "natural law" is anything but natural. Property is not, as Locke argued, an admixture of nature and labour, but the ability to assert proprietorship by whichever societal mechanism exists for its enforcement. In the bad old days that was the sword and/or the consent of Church. Today it is by appeal the the courts and thus ultimately the coercive force of the state. A right is only a right inasmuch as you can enforce it. It's the idea that rights exist in 'nature' that is the "fiction" here.
"Intellectual property" is a fiction. It's a mass-delusion.
Arguably all law is a shared delusion. More practically however, intellectual property is a state-granted monopoly, the intention of which is to repair, inter alia, a well-understood market failure, namely the 'free-rider effect.' Inasmuch as it is enforceable in the courts it is a right.
You are correct, however, that it is not 'property' in all the senses we use that term in regard to the more traditional species of property: 'personal property' and 'real estate'... As "Big Tobacco" discovered today in the High Court of Australia.
It's a choice. It is not inevitable,
Agreed, nor is alienable real estate, gun ownership or universal suffrage.
it is not necessary
It is necessary inasmuch as the market left to its own devices creates a disincentive towards R&D. It is unnecessary as there are alternatives to encourage research, as was shown, for instance, in the old Soviet Union (which famously required no copyright law).
... and it has not been an aspect of civilization for most of human history.
Nor has digital media, the internet or alienable real estate. Humanity is permitted, one hopes, to progress?
As you can plainly see, attempts to maintain the entrenched system are leading to abuses of civil and privacy rights in the name of enforcing copyright law. It's no longer an enabling force for human creativity, it has become a threat to human freedom.
I think you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes there is a good argument to be made that IP has overreached to the point that it has become corrosive to the very aim it was conceived to serve. Yes the increasing criminalisation of IP law and the ever more draconian penalties being dispensed for the relatively minor injury any individual infringement constitutes are certainly inimical to liberty. However, and especially in the context of the every increasing ease by which media can be reproduced, until we can devise a new system which suffers from none of the evils and still ensures reward of intellectual labour, our best hope is to point out how badly the system has gone wrong and attempt to steer it back towards health.
Ditto. And I use it every day on OSX, Linux, Solaris, and not every day on Windows.
Cross-platform issues aside, if I use a Notepad like (non-modal) editor I end up with a lot of 'i's, '^T's and the like in my code. Most annoying:) Really once you've internalised the modal nature, the vi and ex commands etc. it's really hard having actually to think about how to manipulate text rather than just thinking "indent"... and the text indents as if by magic (though I'm sure my fingers are doing something.)
I wrote that it was "surprising" that those commenting would, as it were, be conscripted as spokespeople for said advertiser. On reflection it really isn't. Instead it probably flows ineluctably from the legislative framework within which the board has to work. That is, there is may be no easy way for current advertising law to distinguish between the content provided by the company and that provided by the commenters. The finding that a corporate FB presence constitutes advertising, leads to the result that it is an advertisement in its entirety, and that the law regarding the decency and truthfulness of advertising content applies throughout. If the legislation were to be amended to allow such a distinction to be made, any amendment should take into consideration the possibility of shill comments. Not an easy one.
From a company's POV, the attractiveness of building a community around your brand in order to foster brand tribalism is obvious. And this decision really calls into question how this marketing technique can realistically be pursued in Australia. When the dust settles this decision may be seen to go not so much to the issue of free speech, but instead to the issue of how to best exploit the earning potential of social media.
Why should anyone share responsibility for what you say?
If you are an official spokesperson for Company X, do you think that the company should bear no responsibility at all for what you say in acting out your duties are their spokesperson?
Remember, it's not Facebook that's being held responsible here. The decision merely states that corporate FB pages which push a product ought to be treated as advertising and be subject to the normal law as regards advertising. Thus a company advertising on FB can not, for example, make false claims about the product they are advertising. What is surprising perhaps is that the comments of third parties on those pages are being seen as forming part of the advert. The ASB seems to have some understanding of crowdsourcing. Who woulda thunk.
... just hop over and post a comment describing how their product is the perfect way to give people the energy needed to oppress minorities (or whatever it is that will get them in trouble).
Better still would be to make unsupportable claims about the efficacy of the product, eg. "Fosters has been shown in university tests to reverse prostrate cancer within two weeks. Now you can quit that chemotherapy and just drink beer. How good is that?!" That should tick all the boxes for false advertising without exposing yourself personally to any liability that might flow from breaches of anti-discrimination law.
On the other hand, there is *no* good reason for white space delimited blocks
On the contrary there is a very good reason to have indent delimited blocks sans the visual clutter of braces etc.: Readability counts.
especially when mixing tabs and spaces can give one an aneurysm:-)
Which is why you should 1.) Follow the advice in the Style Guide (aka PEP 8), "Never mix tabs and spaces... For new projects, spaces-only are strongly recommended over tabs.." And 2.) set up your editor to make it so. Having done so most of us find this infamous problem simply vanishes (along with any and all tabs in the source). Indeed not only does Python's indentation ensure visually clean code, after one gets used to it, having to add curly braces and the like feels like an imposition! "*@!*!! there is *no* good reason for brace delimited blocks!! *&@*"
Having said that, I must congratulate you on finding the rather arcane X11 paste example as a potential source of problems, made all the more so by the fact that PEP 8 also stipulates using 4 spaces per indent and the X11 paste will convert a tab to 8 spaces. Bravo!:)
There is not evidence of any sort against the existence of Santa Claus or Easter Bunny either. Does that mean I should build shrines to them & bow down to worship them?
It's up to you of course. However, since the set of postulated but non-existing objects for which there can be no evidence of either existence or non-existence (as opposed to those postulated but non-existing objects for which there are definite falsification criteria) is unbounded, you should prepare for some serious building work if you adopt this as a criterion for shrine construction.:)
And yes, I do realise you were only agreeing with me... I'm not sure you did though.
There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?
Heinlein misspoke. Surely that should be "there is no evidence of any kind of life after death, but there is no conclusive evidence against it." If I didn't know any better I might think that the author stemmed from a time and place in which the belief in life after death was generally accepted.
One can postulate any number of imaginary things for which there is no, or cannot be, any evidence of their non-existence. Which is why we usually don't waste too much effort establishing the non-existence of things for which there is no prima facie evidence.
As regards post-mortem consciousness, we have a) an absence of any empirical evidence, b) no necessary logical inference from the nature of existence and c) a compelling psychological reason for self-deception. Although post-mortem consciousness may not be impossible, we cannot establish at a high probability that it does occur. Thus contra Heinlein, there is no good reason to believe that we will "know" soon enough... chances are, we simply won't know.
Over the same 20 year period that you have been slipping into... what should we call it... spiritualism, my wife has been nursing in ICU and cardiac wards. Though she was raised to be religious, the many deaths she has witnessed have moved her from the "imaginary" position (to quote OP) to one more in keeping with the available evidence: that is something not dissimilar from OP's observation that "personality [is] dissolved into nothingness at the moment the brain's broke connection with one another."
Despite all the chatter of "weird unexplainable shit" happening, no-one has yet been able to provide any persuasive evidence of human consciousness existing absent a functioning human brain.
Old man, after you die, chances are you won't be aware that the surprise never came.
LOL. You actually believe you landed some logical killer-punch, don't you? Your level of self-flattery really does border on the pathological.
Yes, it is a question of validity. You were attempting to rebut my own comment by calling Latour's piece a "pseudo-scientific refutation"
Firstly the fact that a statement is "pseudo-scientific" does not require it to be untrue. However, I agree that it would be a natural reading of that term to imply factual invalidity. For that reason, and because you were obviously misreading it in this fashion, I conceded very early on in the piece that this was a poor choice of words and I should instead call it "para-scientific" or "non-scientific." Did you miss that? Oh you didn't... actually you quoted it.
I have been at absolute pains to explain that I'm making no call as to the validity or truth of the article. I wrote "pseudo-scientific" what once?... twice maybe. I've told you I'm making no call as to validity how many times? Nearly every damn post, count them! I must grant you this: you excel at being ignorant.
How could I pass judgement on the truth of a document I didn't even read? Huh?! You really, really, really want me to be saying that, but that is simply wishful (and formally incorrect) thinking.
What really concerns me though, is the triumphalist tone. What is happening here? Do you get some sort of self-valorisation from knocking down strawmen on online fora? "Yeah I really showed that guy, I'm the most awesome debater on all slashdot..." That's just pathetic.
This is slashdot. You don't win an argument here. There's no system of authority to determine the winner, no judge sitting on a bench assessing the validity of either side. There is only you patting yourself on the head and deluding yourself (and none other) that you are oh so awesome. I hate to say it, but that strikes me as almost mastubatory.
When I wrote (repeatedly) that I was not impugning the validity of what was contained in the document, when I wrote that "every word could be true," I actually meant what I wrote. Fancy that! Let me repeat, every word he wrote could be true, but it is not science, in the sense that it is outside normative scientific discourse.
I took the trouble to look up Professor Latour and his reputation
In which case you would have access to his publication record and you should be able to cite a valid source for his argument... if such exists.
... you looked at that "source", didn't like it's looks...
Yes exactly.
Just put yourself in the position of someone who hasn't gone down the denialist rabbit hole for a moment. Look at the site and imagine what it looks like to a sober and rational professional. Really, anyone who spends more than 10 secs on that site and doesn't realise that anything published there ought be dismissed out of hand (without even attempting to assess validity) ought to have their head read. OK, I'm being too harsh... it may have some mild entertainment value.
You are trying to claim that it is perfectly valid to dismiss, for example, the Declaration of Independence not because of its content, but whether you found it on Discovery.com or Disney.com.
Sorry sunshine, but that's how it works out here in the grown-up world. Turn up to a court where it is required that your case law be cited from the officially recognised reports with a printout of the exact same case from Disney.com, or your legislation where it is required to produce the official version with a printout from Discovery.com, and you will not be heard. Your law will not exist, just as Latour's article doesn't exist in science. And I'm a bit disappointed that you didn't work out that the National Archives versions sho
Slashdot Mirror
I'd highly recommend Latin for young children, although it has very little relationship with German and only some relationship to English. Many of the apparent similarities between Latin and German have to do with the fact that they were both descended from a common ancestral language
I agree that both German and Latin share the similarity that PIE derived languages exhibit and would add that the influence of Latin upon German is not limited merely to this common ancestry. It may only occasionally be obvious semantically, where it usually reflects Roman technological superiority eg. in the German Fenster, which survives in English in the oft used (by Historians of Bohemia) term defenestration. Latin's later influence upon German (and not German alone) has been as a result of "latinising scholars" most especially during the formulation of a normative grammar for Old High German at the imperial court in Prague. Being an IE language German was naturally case-based, but in attempting to formalise a learned version of the common tongue --a tongue the Emperor Karl V described as being fit only for talking to horses --the learned men very consciously tried to shoe-horn German syntax into the Latin case system (or a subset thereof, ie. German lacks the ablative and the vocative) and to standardise the inflections within those cases.
Latin syntax is less obvious in English grammar, (though the rule against splitting infinitives is an invention by late latinisers), where the case system has all but died out --how many English speakers even know when to use whom any more? (and even there the distinction between the accusative and the dative has collapsed.) Well died out entirely perhaps :)
and German is more closely related to English than Latin
That is clear. Of course High German is even more closely related to Yiddish and English more closely to Dutch or Low German. But this is to say nothing of the influence of Latin (or Norman French for that matter) upon either German or English after the Germanic languages had separated from the Romance languages.
It helps immensely with reading and learning closely related languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian)
Latin, being not only the root language of the Romance languages, it is also a key to better understanding other European languages such as English, German &c.,
Now about Hebrew ... ;)
By force it to be Linux rather than something your child is likely to see outside your narrow view of the world. Might as well force him/her to speak Latin at home as well.
The benefits of speaking a 2nd language at home are too well know to dwell upon. You never know, being exposed to one may have saved you from being chained in your sadly narrow view of the world.
Latin, being not only the root language of the Romance languages, it is also a key to better understanding other European languages such as English, German &c., would be undoubtedly provide the child with great advantage. However since hardly any one is fluent enough actually to speak it at home this is unlikely to be a viable option.
As far as OSs, and their GUI frontends. I (doubt|hope) that the differences between a contemporary Linux GUIs and Windows or even Mac will be anywhere near as great as those between our GUIs and those that will dominate some 15 years from now (when said 3 year old may have to use computers professionally). My boys are conversant with linux, windows and OSX (thought they prefer the latter), and this has certainly not inhibited their skills in any one OS. So I can confidently say, without wanting to appear overly offensive, "you are full of shit mate!"
I'm showing my age here, but it only took those of us who grew up without computers (not entirely true, my first computer was a Kosmos Logikus) a week or three to learn how to use the early GUIs. There's nothing in there that is conceptually difficult for a reasonably intelligent young adult to pick up and learning to use a pointing device is a sinch for most anyone under that age of 60 (which isn't to say some 80 year olds don't find it a sinch either).
Computer exposure for children is somewhat overrated. Given the choice between learning multiplication tables by rote (which the school is refusing to teach my kids, "we don't do that any more") and developing "mouse skills" which is considered essential for modern survival, I would choose the former. Thank FOSS for ... TUXMATH for teaching well, what the school will not (and you only need a keypad!) But probably not quite for a 3 year old (unless said 3 year old is Terence Tao).
The thing is does he have a case.
Why wouldn't he? He was accused of criminality. Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I thought accusations of criminality were one of a species of imputations that are regarded as prima facie defamatory?! In any case, I don't think it would be overly burdensome to prove that calling someone a criminal is liable to lower their reputation in the eyes of upstanding citizens, or?
He should sue MasterCard. It was MasterCard that cut him off.
Under what head of action? Are you claiming MasterCard is under an contractual obligation to process payments to Wikileaks? Or do you imagine their liability is tortious?
Unless he can find the official government document instead of random remarks he doesn't have a case.
The PM made a defamatory statement outside the protection of parliament. Why does he need to find an official government document?
Suing anyone but MasterCard is a publicity stunt that is nothing but an ego stroke for him.
I'm not sure that MasterCard even comes into the question of whether he can sue. After all you don't need to show monetary damage to sue in defamation. Wouldn't the fact that MasterCard may have acted on the basis of the PMs alleged defamation only be relevant when it came to decide damages?
You know, despite your authoritative pronouncements on this matter, I'm not even sure you are an Australian lawyer.
http://macnix.blogspot.com/2012/05/change-mac-os-108-mountain-lion.html
It was meant as a joke ... a joke intended to buttress OP's point that this particular skeuomorphic design doesn't actually "help you figure out how to work with it." But even as I was typing I thought "... hmm somebody probably has written a fix for this ..." :)
Thanks for the link.
Unfortunately, this viewpoint neglects the fact that mathematicians, as a class in society, have ethical conflicts of interest with respect to the nature and scope of the mathematics, and thus reserving decisions on matters of mathematics to the numerate will sooner or later produce a badly messed up mathematical system.
The Mac desktop Calendar app? Sure it looks like leather but in no way does thinking of it like any kind of traditional leather-bound thing you may have known help you figure out how to work with it.
Yeah and the most annoying thing is that I can't seem work out how to pick away at the old bits of torn paper with my mouse. Is there some kind of Command-Shift-Option-F23 key combination that I should be pressing? Or do I have to buy a 3rd party razor-blade App?
Yup, the Sodomites wanted to rape the intruders. That was definitely wrong.
I rather think the offer of the virgin daughters to the prospective rapists was just as wrong.
Both these were only trivial wrongs compared to the actual breach committed by the Sodomites, which was to transgress against the rules of hospitality upon which civil society was founded. In context Lot's offer was arguably the very opposite of wrong, (though that may not be obvious to C21st eyes).
Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.-- Gen 19:8 [emphasis added]
So important is it for Lot to make good his promise of hospitality that he offers up his daughters (perhaps he should have offered his goats ... or were they more valuable?). The fact that the Sodomites refused even this generousity merely exacerbated their serious transgression. That's why they got nuked.
Samsung and Apple were on trial.
You make it sound as if this was a criminal trial, it wasn't. Samsung and Apple were in litigation.
Any adult, given enough facts as presented by both sides, should be able to come to a conclusion as to guilty or innocent.
There is no 'innocent' and again words like 'guilty' are appropriate in criminal law and this was not a criminal trial. The question was whether a person infringed the rights of a rightsholder. I'm starting to think that YANAL.
It doesn't require an in-depth knowledge of law, but rather a simple way to judge to arguments and giving merit to one over the other. If it required an in-depth knowledge of the law, we would only have lawyers for jurors.
Like duh! The jury is the tribunal of fact, not the tribunal of law (that's what the judge is doing there). The jury is not supposed to reach any conclusion as to the law. The complaint here is not that the jury interpreted patent law incorrectly, it's that they supposedly gave the mountain of facts presented inadequate consideration. Now I don't necessarily agree, but that is the accusation.
I think we can all agree that's not a great idea ;)
You're just flat out wrong on that score. Personally I believe a judge (a lawyer) unaided by a jury, which is to say a judge acting both as the tribunal of fact and of law, will often deliver sounder decisions in complicated civil litigation than a judge acting with the assistance of a jury (ie "twelve people too dumb to get out of jury duty"). But that is only as a matter of practice, from the PoV of legal/political theory I see the attraction of separating the tribunals of fact and law and of involving non-lawyers in deciding the questions of fact.
In any case what is being proposed here is a "panel of experts" not a panel of lawyer. "Experts" would be those who are usually called as expert witnesses to persuade juries as to matters of fact, but who in this capacity would not be acting for a litigant (nor be on their payroll).
The more in-depth knowledge one has on a topic, the less likely you are to get a consensus ...
Now that is true.
Huh? Not understanding the issues or their complexity leads to objectivity?!
Don't buy a Mac.
Translation: If you want to run linux on it, don't buy a Mac (or any other machine for that matter) with the brand-new latest diddly-hey-whatzit technology until such time as you know that the drivers for said tech have been worked out. Which they will be. Duh!
However, I DO have a better choice in workstation OS that more closely mirrors our production servers on which to develop software.
Which is the reason I run linux as a Parallels partition on the iMac at home. And surely at home is where OSX should be?!
We had a linux box and the iMac at home, but my wife & my boys voted with their feet (or fingers) ... no prizes for guessing which way. When the linux box died it was it was replaced with a virtual one ... no probs at all. At work it's mainly linux though I've a Windows box to my right and a macbook to my left %-) neither of which get that much use here ... especially not the one to my right!
From where the rest of the world is, it looks like US is in the shits. Good riddance.
You would prefer living in a world dominated by the People's Republic of China? Really?!
The less people respect the idea of IP, the more draconian enforcement you need.
I agree
The divide between the public opinion on one side and the law, the entertainment industry and their lobbyists on the other side is growing.
I agree.
What you see as a crackdown I see as desperation, as more and more obnoxious threats are required to keep the population at bay.
When is a crackdown not desperation and threats to keep the public at bay? So we are in agreement there too.
They're not winning the hearts and minds of the young generation, they're just hoping to intimidate them into not file sharing.
I agree. They're not doing much to endear themselves to the older generations either. More importantly they seem to have perverted IP to the extent where it is, as I wrote above becoming "corrosive to the very aim it was conceived to serve," where it becomes a fetter to innovation.
Most people don't kill because they feel it's wrong, not because the law says so.
As I have so often pointed out. And wouldn't it a diseased society where all that stood between us and that killer's blade was the law! Of course we are not concerned here with the people who don't break the law. But point taken, a better analogy might be the War on Drugs(tm).
The situation is like a rubber band being stretched and stretched but sooner or later it will snap.
"Once our generation takes the reins of power marijuana prohibition will end. It's only matter of time" -- me in 1979
...
You're right, I don't expect the fight to be over in 10 years, but I expect them to still be on the losing side trying to hold it all together.
You agree. Well we're in agreement then.** :)
[**With the small caveat that I'm not ready to conclude that they really are on the "losing side," much as they like to cry poor.]
Property is a small part of a greater concept called individual sovereignty that's a direct result of free will. The laws merely formalize that which already exists.
That, to quote Jeremy Bentham, is "nonsense walking on stilts." You've failed to account for the historical reality that individually owned alienable real property only emerges at isolated times and places. It is the exception not the rule.
More importantly there is nothing natural about "individual sovereignty," a concept which would have been wholly incomprehensible through most of human history. And it is indeed an oxymoron, is it not? Rather than characterising "man in his natural state," as it were, "individual sovereignty" is a crowning achievement of civilisation. It is --to borrow the term above (though I would prefer the less anthropomorphic 'cultural development') --the "social choice" par exellence. Moreover it's emergence required the development of a system of justice the origins of which date back the the C12th. No mere formalisation, the Law is in fact the nursemaid of individual liberty.
There is, as my post above made explicit, a sharp distinction between traditional forms of property and so-called IP. However your analysis of the distinction between material and intellectual property is, I'm afraid, entirely without merit, being predicated as it is upon a simple misunderstanding of IP. IP does not, as you would have it concern itself with "thoughts and ideas in ... people's heads." Very explicitly IP is concerned, not with ideas per se, but with their material representations. Copyright, for instance, arises only when an idea is "reduced to material form" (aka 'fixation') and notwithstanding appurtenant rights, such as performance rights, which muddy the waters somewhat, aims primarily to control the making of material reproductions of copyrighted materials (aka 'works'). It is certainly not in any way involved in controlling people's thoughts. Sorry.
The problem is that "to steer it back towards health" for the most part equals "turn back time".
Sure, but legally, not technologically. I had in mind curing the overreach and trying to shift the balance back towards consumers of IP since producers have had the ear of legislators for too long. This will not be easy (especially given what I wrote below) and for it to fly poltically it would require a concrete and hard-nosed platform that could not simply be dismissed as, "they want everything for free" or could be easily demonstrated to cause serious adverse economic impact.
One example is that IP law is lengthening protection for some types of media precisely at the point in history when the lifecycle of technology is shortening. Who will be interested in using Windows 95 by the time it enters the public domain. How many units was Microsoft still selling in 2005? A practical proposal within the current framework would be to propose 10 year software version copyrights.
As long as you have the following four components, IP is doomed
That's close to a falsifiable prediction. Come back in 10 years and tell me that IP is "doomed." Moreover components 3 and 4 are unnecessary to your argument. My government will not be able stop people communicating in private either.
The geo-economic reality here is that US manufacturing as an international earner has been declining for decades. It is clear the the US cannot compete against China in manufacturing. What the US has is Silicon Valley and Hollywood. This is why in 1986, after 100 years of sitting outside the international copyright framework the US finally signed up to the Berne Convention. It is why the US has been leading the charge internationally in "strengthening" IP protection. You've got time's arrow backwards.
if you'd like to kill piracy
There is no question of killing piracy. This is never an all-or-none proposition. We have had a law against murder for in excess of 8 centuries and people are still killing each other. I can tell you the crime of murder ain't going away any time soon.
Or you can accept that technology has moved forward and that the "good old days" are never coming back.
But it's precisely because technology has moved on that we will see ever more outrageous IP law enacted, unless and until it can be made into a major political issue.
Copyright and patents were crude tools used by kings for censorship and nepotism respectively.
Setting aside the word 'crude,' that's what we in the business call a fact.
They were repurposed with the eventual intent of benefiting society,
Sure, that is a fair enough characterisation. To be more precise patents over novel ideas were the only survivors of the numerous letters patent and other prerogative monopolies to survive the cull of these "crude tools." They survived because the clear benefit they bestowed. Arguably, by reconciling market forces with technological development, they were instrumental in giving birth both to capitalism and the industrial revolution. Copyright, for course, has a separate history.
but it is a tool incapable of that process, regardless of how well meaning those that craft the system are.
And that's what we in the business call highly debatable.
Why? Where does that notion come from? The very existence of copyright is a choice by society, it is not supported by any natural law.
Why? Because it is a "choice by society" of course!
The very existence of alienable private property, especially in land, is also "a choice by society." Now I do prefer being a holder of property in a "free" society rather than being a middle-European peasant bound to the inalienable estate of a seignour, as my ancestors were (bound peasants that is), but the study of history show that "natural law" is anything but natural. Property is not, as Locke argued, an admixture of nature and labour, but the ability to assert proprietorship by whichever societal mechanism exists for its enforcement. In the bad old days that was the sword and/or the consent of Church. Today it is by appeal the the courts and thus ultimately the coercive force of the state. A right is only a right inasmuch as you can enforce it. It's the idea that rights exist in 'nature' that is the "fiction" here.
"Intellectual property" is a fiction. It's a mass-delusion.
Arguably all law is a shared delusion. More practically however, intellectual property is a state-granted monopoly, the intention of which is to repair, inter alia, a well-understood market failure, namely the 'free-rider effect.' Inasmuch as it is enforceable in the courts it is a right.
You are correct, however, that it is not 'property' in all the senses we use that term in regard to the more traditional species of property: 'personal property' and 'real estate' ... As "Big Tobacco" discovered today in the High Court of Australia.
It's a choice. It is not inevitable,
Agreed, nor is alienable real estate, gun ownership or universal suffrage.
it is not necessary
It is necessary inasmuch as the market left to its own devices creates a disincentive towards R&D. It is unnecessary as there are alternatives to encourage research, as was shown, for instance, in the old Soviet Union (which famously required no copyright law).
Nor has digital media, the internet or alienable real estate. Humanity is permitted, one hopes, to progress?
As you can plainly see, attempts to maintain the entrenched system are leading to abuses of civil and privacy rights in the name of enforcing copyright law. It's no longer an enabling force for human creativity, it has become a threat to human freedom.
I think you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes there is a good argument to be made that IP has overreached to the point that it has become corrosive to the very aim it was conceived to serve. Yes the increasing criminalisation of IP law and the ever more draconian penalties being dispensed for the relatively minor injury any individual infringement constitutes are certainly inimical to liberty. However, and especially in the context of the every increasing ease by which media can be reproduced, until we can devise a new system which suffers from none of the evils and still ensures reward of intellectual labour, our best hope is to point out how badly the system has gone wrong and attempt to steer it back towards health.
I use vim everyday, and I live in 2012.
Ditto. And I use it every day on OSX, Linux, Solaris, and not every day on Windows.
Cross-platform issues aside, if I use a Notepad like (non-modal) editor I end up with a lot of 'i's, '^T's and the like in my code. Most annoying :) Really once you've internalised the modal nature, the vi and ex commands etc. it's really hard having actually to think about how to manipulate text rather than just thinking "indent" ... and the text indents as if by magic (though I'm sure my fingers are doing something.)
:wq
I wrote that it was "surprising" that those commenting would, as it were, be conscripted as spokespeople for said advertiser. On reflection it really isn't. Instead it probably flows ineluctably from the legislative framework within which the board has to work. That is, there is may be no easy way for current advertising law to distinguish between the content provided by the company and that provided by the commenters. The finding that a corporate FB presence constitutes advertising, leads to the result that it is an advertisement in its entirety, and that the law regarding the decency and truthfulness of advertising content applies throughout. If the legislation were to be amended to allow such a distinction to be made, any amendment should take into consideration the possibility of shill comments. Not an easy one.
From a company's POV, the attractiveness of building a community around your brand in order to foster brand tribalism is obvious. And this decision really calls into question how this marketing technique can realistically be pursued in Australia. When the dust settles this decision may be seen to go not so much to the issue of free speech, but instead to the issue of how to best exploit the earning potential of social media.
Why should anyone share responsibility for what you say?
If you are an official spokesperson for Company X, do you think that the company should bear no responsibility at all for what you say in acting out your duties are their spokesperson?
Remember, it's not Facebook that's being held responsible here. The decision merely states that corporate FB pages which push a product ought to be treated as advertising and be subject to the normal law as regards advertising. Thus a company advertising on FB can not, for example, make false claims about the product they are advertising. What is surprising perhaps is that the comments of third parties on those pages are being seen as forming part of the advert. The ASB seems to have some understanding of crowdsourcing. Who woulda thunk.
Better still would be to make unsupportable claims about the efficacy of the product, eg. "Fosters has been shown in university tests to reverse prostrate cancer within two weeks. Now you can quit that chemotherapy and just drink beer. How good is that?!" That should tick all the boxes for false advertising without exposing yourself personally to any liability that might flow from breaches of anti-discrimination law.
On the other hand, there is *no* good reason for white space delimited blocks
On the contrary there is a very good reason to have indent delimited blocks sans the visual clutter of braces etc.: Readability counts.
especially when mixing tabs and spaces can give one an aneurysm :-)
Which is why you should 1.) Follow the advice in the Style Guide (aka PEP 8), "Never mix tabs and spaces ... For new projects, spaces-only are strongly recommended over tabs.." And 2.) set up your editor to make it so. Having done so most of us find this infamous problem simply vanishes (along with any and all tabs in the source). Indeed not only does Python's indentation ensure visually clean code, after one gets used to it, having to add curly braces and the like feels like an imposition! "*@!*!! there is *no* good reason for brace delimited blocks!! *&@*"
Having said that, I must congratulate you on finding the rather arcane X11 paste example as a potential source of problems, made all the more so by the fact that PEP 8 also stipulates using 4 spaces per indent and the X11 paste will convert a tab to 8 spaces. Bravo! :)
There is not evidence of any sort against the existence of Santa Claus or Easter Bunny either. Does that mean I should build shrines to them & bow down to worship them?
It's up to you of course. However, since the set of postulated but non-existing objects for which there can be no evidence of either existence or non-existence (as opposed to those postulated but non-existing objects for which there are definite falsification criteria) is unbounded, you should prepare for some serious building work if you adopt this as a criterion for shrine construction. :)
And yes, I do realise you were only agreeing with me ... I'm not sure you did though.
There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?
Heinlein misspoke. Surely that should be "there is no evidence of any kind of life after death, but there is no conclusive evidence against it." If I didn't know any better I might think that the author stemmed from a time and place in which the belief in life after death was generally accepted.
One can postulate any number of imaginary things for which there is no, or cannot be, any evidence of their non-existence. Which is why we usually don't waste too much effort establishing the non-existence of things for which there is no prima facie evidence.
As regards post-mortem consciousness, we have a) an absence of any empirical evidence, b) no necessary logical inference from the nature of existence and c) a compelling psychological reason for self-deception. Although post-mortem consciousness may not be impossible, we cannot establish at a high probability that it does occur. Thus contra Heinlein, there is no good reason to believe that we will "know" soon enough ... chances are, we simply won't know.
Over the same 20 year period that you have been slipping into ... what should we call it ... spiritualism, my wife has been nursing in ICU and cardiac wards. Though she was raised to be religious, the many deaths she has witnessed have moved her from the "imaginary" position (to quote OP) to one more in keeping with the available evidence: that is something not dissimilar from OP's observation that "personality [is] dissolved into nothingness at the moment the brain's broke connection with one another."
Despite all the chatter of "weird unexplainable shit" happening, no-one has yet been able to provide any persuasive evidence of human consciousness existing absent a functioning human brain.
Old man, after you die, chances are you won't be aware that the surprise never came.
People do not want to admit that death==nonexistence
But death != non-existence, as anyone who has smelt a decaying cadaver can attest. "Her final trip" means the drive to the crematorium, or?
QED. You can't talk your way out of that now.
LOL. You actually believe you landed some logical killer-punch, don't you? Your level of self-flattery really does border on the pathological.
Yes, it is a question of validity. You were attempting to rebut my own comment by calling Latour's piece a "pseudo-scientific refutation"
Firstly the fact that a statement is "pseudo-scientific" does not require it to be untrue. However, I agree that it would be a natural reading of that term to imply factual invalidity. For that reason, and because you were obviously misreading it in this fashion, I conceded very early on in the piece that this was a poor choice of words and I should instead call it "para-scientific" or "non-scientific." Did you miss that? Oh you didn't ... actually you quoted it.
I have been at absolute pains to explain that I'm making no call as to the validity or truth of the article. I wrote "pseudo-scientific" what once? ... twice maybe. I've told you I'm making no call as to validity how many times? Nearly every damn post, count them! I must grant you this: you excel at being ignorant.
How could I pass judgement on the truth of a document I didn't even read? Huh?! You really, really, really want me to be saying that, but that is simply wishful (and formally incorrect) thinking.
What really concerns me though, is the triumphalist tone. What is happening here? Do you get some sort of self-valorisation from knocking down strawmen on online fora? "Yeah I really showed that guy, I'm the most awesome debater on all slashdot ..." That's just pathetic.
This is slashdot. You don't win an argument here. There's no system of authority to determine the winner, no judge sitting on a bench assessing the validity of either side. There is only you patting yourself on the head and deluding yourself (and none other) that you are oh so awesome. I hate to say it, but that strikes me as almost mastubatory.
When I wrote (repeatedly) that I was not impugning the validity of what was contained in the document, when I wrote that "every word could be true," I actually meant what I wrote. Fancy that! Let me repeat, every word he wrote could be true, but it is not science, in the sense that it is outside normative scientific discourse.
I took the trouble to look up Professor Latour and his reputation
In which case you would have access to his publication record and you should be able to cite a valid source for his argument ... if such exists.
Yes exactly.
Just put yourself in the position of someone who hasn't gone down the denialist rabbit hole for a moment. Look at the site and imagine what it looks like to a sober and rational professional. Really, anyone who spends more than 10 secs on that site and doesn't realise that anything published there ought be dismissed out of hand (without even attempting to assess validity) ought to have their head read. OK, I'm being too harsh ... it may have some mild entertainment value.
You are trying to claim that it is perfectly valid to dismiss, for example, the Declaration of Independence not because of its content, but whether you found it on Discovery.com or Disney.com.
Sorry sunshine, but that's how it works out here in the grown-up world. Turn up to a court where it is required that your case law be cited from the officially recognised reports with a printout of the exact same case from Disney.com, or your legislation where it is required to produce the official version with a printout from Discovery.com, and you will not be heard. Your law will not exist, just as Latour's article doesn't exist in science. And I'm a bit disappointed that you didn't work out that the National Archives versions sho