I actually put that word in there to see if you were paying attention. Knowing what your reaction to it would be was almost too easy. You just helped me win $20 from my cube-mate.
Are you saying that *everyone* should be free to do *whatever* their body tells them feels good?
Surely you aren't recommending anarchy are you?
Yes, a very astute perception. When I said that the negative feelings people get when viewing porn coming from outside and don't originate from within, I was recommending anarchy. I just didn't have the courage to say it. Thank you for helping me out.
Back to reality: All of those things where you asked "Are you saying..." can be answered by looking at what I was actually saying. Do I think everyone should be able to do anything that feels good? Irrelevant. I'm not talking about everything, just porn-viewing. I think they should be able to enjoy something that is harmless, like look at porn. My point about the guilt coming from morals and religion was to refute the idea that porn viewing inherently makes someone have these negative feelings. That is absurd.
Society imposes those restraints for a reason.
No, those societal morals evolve like anything else of that nature. Many of these societal morals have roots in religion, and in the case of the US, that means Christianity. They change all the time. A hundred years ago, people would have been shocked by the normal clothes teenagers wear (let alone the racy ones), being an independent woman would have been looked down upon, and cocaine would not have been considered a vice. And so on. There are a million things. Many people outwardly say that porn is bad (whether they believe it or not), more and more people publicly admit that they enjoy it. This is a case where it a moral is evolving. And in this case, I think it is for the better.
Blaming "society" when someone who does something wrong feels bad is a logical dead-end.
Actually, I don't "blame" society, because it does not consciously decide what morals will be, since they evolve naturally. But the fallacy of your statement above is "when someone does something wrong feels bad". Looking at porn is only "wrong" in your opinion, and I disagree with it.
Maybe Bush is actually a hardcore anti-spammer? Creating a national Do Not Call list is step one. But now, moving on to email spam... how to do it? Most of it comes from overseas. Maybe the reason Bush is trying to run the world is so that the anti-spam list would be able to be enforced?
First off, there is the standard religious view that lust is bad. One of the best, if not only, ways of dealing with lust is to stop feeding it.
Yes, it works great. I'm sure most people who try to "stop feeding" lust overcome it, especially priests. Hell, has anyone ever "won" against lust by just suppressing it?
Secondly, take a walk through google sometime and look for the various studies on porn and psychology. Pornography addictions tend to create feelings of unworthiness, self-hatred, "dirtiness," etc. There are many, many people who generally want to stop using pornography, but cannot.
No, that's religion and imposed societal morals that lead to those negative feelings. They want to stop because religion/society says it is bad, but the body enjoys it and really wants it.
Finally, consider that a great deal of the women invloved in the porn industry have histories of sexual abuse, and the emotioanl problems that entails... do you really want to take advantage of that situation for a few moments of pleasure?
Have you ever bought a product produced in a third-world country? Lots of things, right? How can you live with yourself? Don't you know about how workers are mistreated?
It's actually so strange, and with the words capitalized both times, it is unclear whether it is a typo of "insight" or whether "Napster Insite" (or a permutation thereof) is the name of the new incarnation of Napster (even if the name didn't appear in the article). I honestly was unsure until I Googled to make certain.
Besides that, I could probably decipher the article even if it was written in 13375p33k, but that doesn't mean it is okay if it were written that way.
These aren't 10 page essays here... these are short paragraphs!
I'm running the newest version of Virtual PC, though with Windows 2000 Professional. I have the dock integration. I still see no difference in the way that the VPC virtual machine can see the Mac. I don't see how you can browse through your Mac partitions unless you specifically said you wanted to share them. And if that is what you did, I believe you are in a small minority, since you can drag and drop between the Mac and Windows side, which works great for most people.
Yes, VPC *could* be set to share everything in all partitions by default in a new version, but there is no *way* that would be done, even with MS in charge of the changes. It would be as likely as MS enabling full access to all VB scripts in Mac Office, or something like that.
So, if you are talking about the sharing thing that I am talking about, then yes, we agree on the possibility for virtual OSes to see Mac partitions. But in my opinion, there is no way this would happen at all without overt knowledge and intentional action by the user.
Similarly, the Mac cannot open or read this virtual drive from within Mac OS.
Actually this isn't totally true. If you double-click on a VPC drive image, VPC will launch and mount the image on your Mac desktop, and from there you can quit VPC and navigate this image and copy files etc. natively in the Finder.
Re:How the well would it be able to see the Mac?
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Examining Microsoft Update
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· Score: 2, Informative
It (XP in VPC on a Mac) could EASILY see software on the other partitions.
How would it do this? The "partition" that the Windows OS runs in is a virtual partition, and is really just a disk image. The virtual OS only has knowledge of this partition and up to two other virtual partitions that you set in the preferences of that virtual machine. When you copy something between the Mac side and the Windows side on VPC, a temporary share is created for the duration of the copy.
It is possible to set up VPC to see your entire Mac partition by setting up folder sharing from the Mac's root directory. You'd have to go out of your way to do this, there'd be little to no point, and it would be in no way something MS could count on to happen.
Aspirin's success ended up costing the Bayer Company a great deal of money, when the U.S., England, France, and Russia forced it to surrender the trademark to them, as part of Germany's war reparations at the close of World War I. Bayer gave up the trademark in 1919, as part of the Treaty of Versailles, which explains why the aspirin, stripped of its trademark, is now written in the lower case.
Yes, and of course the reason I mentioned cloning is because we were talking about teleportation as making a copy somewhere else and destroying the original. If you don't carry out the step where you destroy the original, you have two exact copies.
Yeah, but wouldn't this have applications in human cloning? And not the kind that is currently making progress, but the real deal, sci-fi instant copy-of-me cloning that most people think of?
Which are just low-level electrical impulses! You are right! Human and Computer languages are the same: they are both a series of electrical impulses!
That isn't what I was trying to say at all. I was only trying to say that if a computer language does not resemble a human language after it has been converted to machine code, that is irrelevant-- all languages must be decoded by the receiver into something that isn't the language itself. There is no meaning in comparing one language after it has been converted to one beforehand.
Furthermore, I don't think that human and computer languages are the same, only that they aren't so different as the other person might think (he said they have nothing in common). In the most fundamental aspects, human and machine languages are very similar. This isn't a radical idea.
I understand what you don't like, but it's not what I've been talking about. If you arbitrarily decide that a student doesn't try hard enough, and subjectively decide on a lower grade, that is one thing. But giving a student one point for the effort instead of zero for getting everything wrong can only be beneficial. Really, the only way you can be negatively impacted is by not handing in any of your homework. I have no problem with that. And if we're talking about attendance affecting the grade, in that case it totally depends on the class. If it is giant bio lecture hall 101, then it shouldn't matter how much you attend. If it is daily participation rhetoric class or science lab, the absence of students negatively impacts the rest of the class.
I think you're looking at it simplisticly... there are lots of ways to factor in effort, and I think if you can do it such that those who really put in lots of effort get a slight bump up and those who totally blow off the class entirely get a slight bump down, you're doing the students a favor. It's about incentive to practice and try. These people ultimately are going to be holding jobs... do you think you get rewarded for being really skilled and knowledgeable at your line of work, or for putting in a lot of effort and making sure to get everything done?
Anyhow, the point I was trying to make is this. Computer languages resemble natural languages because they were designed to
Of course that's why. How else would we humans try to communicate abstract ideas?
Otherwise they are completely different.
So, besides the way they were made similar, they are completely different?
Computer languages exist to enable a machine to perform a task. After translation from the pseduo natural language to machine code, all aspects making it similar to natural langues are lost.
When you read something, that is translated to brain impulses as you understand it. Same thing.
Consider the directional instructions in how to get to a certain place. Compare these instructions to a work of literature or poem, and compare them to a computer program. You will see that in the directional istructions the words do not indicate direct action, they merely try to communicate ones information to another. ie, "this is how I get to this place and I wish for you to know as I do."
Do you think there is no room for expression in code? As I said, have you ever heard of jokes that are expressed in code? Where the code itself is the source of the humor? Sure, a programming language can't reach the depths of good literature without a LOT of work, but the extent to which it is poetic and flowing does not decide if something is a language. And an instruction manual or a set of instructions is still 100% human language.
Any similarities between computer and natural languages are pure asthetic additions to ease the ability of computer programs and to communicate the purpose of the program amoungst fellow developers.
Code is most definitely not read only by a computer. This is why you arrange it in a certain way, and choose certain variable names, etc.
Shrieben(x), in your example could be f(x), and in reality the shrieben tag is just a moniker used to help figure out to a human what you are saying. Your mistaking this natural language choice for the computer language, its not. Because the 2 functions have the exact same outcome, regardless of name change, the name shrieben is not a component of the computer language but mearly the use of a natural language moniker.
Now that's just silly. Of course they are part of the programming language. The compiler will probably convert the two functions to machine code in the same way, but that's after the fact. In the same vein, the brain will decode motorbike and motorcycle in the same way. But anything that is within a programming language is, by its very nature, part of that language.
Through all of this you still didn't refute my actual point, the first thing I said, the reason for me starting to write (maybe because you somehow didn't think I even said it!). It comes down to this. Is the C++ language just the same kind of language that Russian is? No way. Programming languages are limited in expression in many ways, but excel in certain other areas.
Are programming languages fundamentallydifferent from human languages? No. Do "written languages have nothing in common with programming languages", as the original post said? No, they have many things in common. Not everything, but many things-- substantial things.
To me, it's all a matter of properly balancing all these things so that it works.
If you give grades for homework and you grade it on effort only, then you set up the point system so that someone who doesn't know the material but does a whole bunch of homework gets an A. You give them a few points per assignment where doing a good effort on all your assignments might bump you up from a B+ to an A-, or not doing any of your assignments might bump you down.
But I don't see how someone who knows the material but doesn't put in a huge amount of effort would get hurt, unless they didn't do their homework at all. But that would be the case even if the homework was based on correct answers as well. That's what I don't understand about your complaint.
How would it be inappropriate for someone to get an A- on tests, but does no homework, to end up with a B or B+?
Then unless the grades are reweighted, the corollary to this is that it is possible to demonstrate during evaluations that you have learned everything in the class, yet you fail to receive an "A" due to effort.
How is that different if homework is graded by amount correct?
That it, instructors are not allowed to legally evaluate based on effort, so some disguise this in the form of evaluating homework. But if it is impossible to earn a "0" when turning in homework, then this may be a big no-no.
I don't understand what you are saying. What would be a no-no?
Furthemore, he isn't trying to state a 'rule' regarding what is and isn't a language, he's trying to make the point that a computer language isn't the same as a human language
Hmm, okay let's see what was originally written (by the other guy):
Unfortunately, natural languages have almost nothing in common with computer languages. Computer languages are for the most part 1:1 codes - the same command means the same thing in whatever context it appears in a particular language. Natural languages are not codes; an idiom means different things in different contexts. That's part of the problem comparing the two.
To this, I said:
If someone said that computer languages and human languages were the same thing, and you said "no way", I would agree with that. They aren't exactly the same. But saying that written languages have nothing in common with programming languages? That's stretching it a lot more, actually.
I then attempted to explain the fundamental ways in which programming and human languages were similar, and both challenged the notion that a 1:1 mapping of meaning was a big difference, as well as arguing that this 1:1 correspondence doesn't actually exist if you look at it rigidly. The main point, however, is that human and programming languages have a hell of a lot in common.
I could nitpick a lot of the other things you said but I'm trying to bring the point of what I was trying to say back into picture because you seem to have missed it.
As a student of languages, both human and electronic, you should know that writing on paper doesn't make it a communication.
Hmm... on the contrary, I do know that it is, even if it is a few scribbles or a thumb print.
It has to be interpretted by the receiver.
Yes, and the ability to be more precise and complex in what you communicate comes with a more complicated language.
The big difference here is that if you give the same instructions to 5 computers, each of the 5 computers will interpret the language precisely the same way (assume identical architectures for now -- see below)
Well, if I type the most simple "Hello World" program in C++ on my Mac and in DOS on a PC (and assume the syntax is exactly the same), I don't get the same results. In DOS the words will be dumped to the screen, in the system font, probably white on black. On the Mac, probably a text box pops up and displays the text in Geneva in white on black. And when the two compilers took in the code I wrote, they probably translated it to *completely* different machine code. So, saying these two are exactly the same is being very simplistic.
In any case, how is a rule for being a language being able to say the same thing to two people and having them understand it differently?
"Ahh!", I can hear you say, "But you could write the equivilent of 'print 5' in 10 different languages! All doing the exact same thing and looking completely different!" I reject that since it would also take 10 different compilers to transform that into the one language the computer actually understands -- which has (last time I checked) a 1:1 mapping.
Sure I could. Easily. All I would do is define a function called "Schreiben(x)" or whatever I want to call it and have the code be "Print x". I can do that for any language or any idiom I want.
Putting all of that last part aside, however, I don't see how this makes or breaks the idea of a programming language being extremely similar to a human language.
The more I study languages and linguistics, the more I realize how a language is an arbitrarily defined, fluid thing that is varied and evolving.
In my logic class (along with others), we had daily homework assignments. Those assignments were checked and corrected, but we got a point or two no matter how much we got wrong. The idea was to grade the amount of effort, not the amount of correctness. Homework is for learning, tests are for evaluating what you've learned.
Sounds like your class worked this way, and that might be a good thing too.
Man, I don't understand why, out of all other aspects of life, some profs get the idea that 100% on something in the context of class should mean "utter perfection".
What if it worked everywhere like that?
"Hey, I was supposed to make $18/hr, but I got my paycheck and only got $15/hr." "Well, only God is perfect and deserves 100%."
"Hey, waiter, you took my dinner away, but I didn't even finish it!" "Well, only God deserves 100%."
And I don't care if the prof said that in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. I remember one prof I had who said she almost never gave 18/20 on our weekly essays, and maybe one 19 every few years, never a twenty. "That's just my quirk! I just can't give perfect grades." *wink* Yes yes, very entertaining, I'm glad you get to indulge in your eccetricities... just please don't do it to *me*.
If you want to have your own grade scale because you have this unique outlook on the world and you want to express your views through your grade scale then that's fine. But then, when you turn in the grades, please translate them to something that will mean something to the other people who will have to interpret them without your explanation.
Otherwise, please tell me why grades are officially recorded by the institutions and not only given out privately to each student to gauge his or her own progress.
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Back to reality: All of those things where you asked "Are you saying..." can be answered by looking at what I was actually saying. Do I think everyone should be able to do anything that feels good? Irrelevant. I'm not talking about everything, just porn-viewing. I think they should be able to enjoy something that is harmless, like look at porn. My point about the guilt coming from morals and religion was to refute the idea that porn viewing inherently makes someone have these negative feelings. That is absurd.
No, those societal morals evolve like anything else of that nature. Many of these societal morals have roots in religion, and in the case of the US, that means Christianity. They change all the time. A hundred years ago, people would have been shocked by the normal clothes teenagers wear (let alone the racy ones), being an independent woman would have been looked down upon, and cocaine would not have been considered a vice. And so on. There are a million things. Many people outwardly say that porn is bad (whether they believe it or not), more and more people publicly admit that they enjoy it. This is a case where it a moral is evolving. And in this case, I think it is for the better.
Actually, I don't "blame" society, because it does not consciously decide what morals will be, since they evolve naturally. But the fallacy of your statement above is "when someone does something wrong feels bad". Looking at porn is only "wrong" in your opinion, and I disagree with it.
Maybe Bush is actually a hardcore anti-spammer? Creating a national Do Not Call list is step one. But now, moving on to email spam... how to do it? Most of it comes from overseas. Maybe the reason Bush is trying to run the world is so that the anti-spam list would be able to be enforced?
No, that's religion and imposed societal morals that lead to those negative feelings. They want to stop because religion/society says it is bad, but the body enjoys it and really wants it.
Have you ever bought a product produced in a third-world country? Lots of things, right? How can you live with yourself? Don't you know about how workers are mistreated?
It's actually so strange, and with the words capitalized both times, it is unclear whether it is a typo of "insight" or whether "Napster Insite" (or a permutation thereof) is the name of the new incarnation of Napster (even if the name didn't appear in the article). I honestly was unsure until I Googled to make certain.
Besides that, I could probably decipher the article even if it was written in 13375p33k, but that doesn't mean it is okay if it were written that way.
These aren't 10 page essays here... these are short paragraphs!
I'm running the newest version of Virtual PC, though with Windows 2000 Professional. I have the dock integration. I still see no difference in the way that the VPC virtual machine can see the Mac. I don't see how you can browse through your Mac partitions unless you specifically said you wanted to share them. And if that is what you did, I believe you are in a small minority, since you can drag and drop between the Mac and Windows side, which works great for most people.
Yes, VPC *could* be set to share everything in all partitions by default in a new version, but there is no *way* that would be done, even with MS in charge of the changes. It would be as likely as MS enabling full access to all VB scripts in Mac Office, or something like that.
So, if you are talking about the sharing thing that I am talking about, then yes, we agree on the possibility for virtual OSes to see Mac partitions. But in my opinion, there is no way this would happen at all without overt knowledge and intentional action by the user.
How would it do this? The "partition" that the Windows OS runs in is a virtual partition, and is really just a disk image. The virtual OS only has knowledge of this partition and up to two other virtual partitions that you set in the preferences of that virtual machine. When you copy something between the Mac side and the Windows side on VPC, a temporary share is created for the duration of the copy.
It is possible to set up VPC to see your entire Mac partition by setting up folder sharing from the Mac's root directory. You'd have to go out of your way to do this, there'd be little to no point, and it would be in no way something MS could count on to happen.
So the Actor's Studio with the Simpsons is going up against an hour block of the Simpons (with one new episode)??
Nice scheduling! Jeez.
Yes, and of course the reason I mentioned cloning is because we were talking about teleportation as making a copy somewhere else and destroying the original. If you don't carry out the step where you destroy the original, you have two exact copies.
Yeah, but wouldn't this have applications in human cloning? And not the kind that is currently making progress, but the real deal, sci-fi instant copy-of-me cloning that most people think of?
Don't confuse an (admittedly not-so-good) joke for a real criticism :)
It was supposed to be a joke... you know online travel. If I want to travel somewhere online I use google.
That's why I switched around the wording so it would be more obvious I was making the play on words.
That's what Google is for!
Furthermore, I don't think that human and computer languages are the same, only that they aren't so different as the other person might think (he said they have nothing in common). In the most fundamental aspects, human and machine languages are very similar. This isn't a radical idea.
I understand what you don't like, but it's not what I've been talking about. If you arbitrarily decide that a student doesn't try hard enough, and subjectively decide on a lower grade, that is one thing. But giving a student one point for the effort instead of zero for getting everything wrong can only be beneficial. Really, the only way you can be negatively impacted is by not handing in any of your homework. I have no problem with that. And if we're talking about attendance affecting the grade, in that case it totally depends on the class. If it is giant bio lecture hall 101, then it shouldn't matter how much you attend. If it is daily participation rhetoric class or science lab, the absence of students negatively impacts the rest of the class.
I think you're looking at it simplisticly... there are lots of ways to factor in effort, and I think if you can do it such that those who really put in lots of effort get a slight bump up and those who totally blow off the class entirely get a slight bump down, you're doing the students a favor. It's about incentive to practice and try. These people ultimately are going to be holding jobs... do you think you get rewarded for being really skilled and knowledgeable at your line of work, or for putting in a lot of effort and making sure to get everything done?
Here, first paragraph.
Of course that's why. How else would we humans try to communicate abstract ideas?
So, besides the way they were made similar, they are completely different?
When you read something, that is translated to brain impulses as you understand it. Same thing.
Do you think there is no room for expression in code? As I said, have you ever heard of jokes that are expressed in code? Where the code itself is the source of the humor? Sure, a programming language can't reach the depths of good literature without a LOT of work, but the extent to which it is poetic and flowing does not decide if something is a language. And an instruction manual or a set of instructions is still 100% human language.
Code is most definitely not read only by a computer. This is why you arrange it in a certain way, and choose certain variable names, etc.
Now that's just silly. Of course they are part of the programming language. The compiler will probably convert the two functions to machine code in the same way, but that's after the fact. In the same vein, the brain will decode motorbike and motorcycle in the same way. But anything that is within a programming language is, by its very nature, part of that language.
Through all of this you still didn't refute my actual point, the first thing I said, the reason for me starting to write (maybe because you somehow didn't think I even said it!). It comes down to this. Is the C++ language just the same kind of language that Russian is? No way. Programming languages are limited in expression in many ways, but excel in certain other areas.
Are programming languages fundamentallydifferent from human languages? No. Do "written languages have nothing in common with programming languages", as the original post said? No, they have many things in common. Not everything, but many things-- substantial things.
To me, it's all a matter of properly balancing all these things so that it works.
If you give grades for homework and you grade it on effort only, then you set up the point system so that someone who doesn't know the material but does a whole bunch of homework gets an A. You give them a few points per assignment where doing a good effort on all your assignments might bump you up from a B+ to an A-, or not doing any of your assignments might bump you down.
But I don't see how someone who knows the material but doesn't put in a huge amount of effort would get hurt, unless they didn't do their homework at all. But that would be the case even if the homework was based on correct answers as well. That's what I don't understand about your complaint.
How would it be inappropriate for someone to get an A- on tests, but does no homework, to end up with a B or B+?
I don't understand what you are saying. What would be a no-no?
To this, I said:
I then attempted to explain the fundamental ways in which programming and human languages were similar, and both challenged the notion that a 1:1 mapping of meaning was a big difference, as well as arguing that this 1:1 correspondence doesn't actually exist if you look at it rigidly. The main point, however, is that human and programming languages have a hell of a lot in common.
I could nitpick a lot of the other things you said but I'm trying to bring the point of what I was trying to say back into picture because you seem to have missed it.
Yes, and the ability to be more precise and complex in what you communicate comes with a more complicated language.
Well, if I type the most simple "Hello World" program in C++ on my Mac and in DOS on a PC (and assume the syntax is exactly the same), I don't get the same results. In DOS the words will be dumped to the screen, in the system font, probably white on black. On the Mac, probably a text box pops up and displays the text in Geneva in white on black. And when the two compilers took in the code I wrote, they probably translated it to *completely* different machine code. So, saying these two are exactly the same is being very simplistic.
In any case, how is a rule for being a language being able to say the same thing to two people and having them understand it differently?
Sure I could. Easily. All I would do is define a function called "Schreiben(x)" or whatever I want to call it and have the code be "Print x". I can do that for any language or any idiom I want.
Putting all of that last part aside, however, I don't see how this makes or breaks the idea of a programming language being extremely similar to a human language.
The more I study languages and linguistics, the more I realize how a language is an arbitrarily defined, fluid thing that is varied and evolving.
In my logic class (along with others), we had daily homework assignments. Those assignments were checked and corrected, but we got a point or two no matter how much we got wrong. The idea was to grade the amount of effort, not the amount of correctness. Homework is for learning, tests are for evaluating what you've learned.
Sounds like your class worked this way, and that might be a good thing too.
Man, I don't understand why, out of all other aspects of life, some profs get the idea that 100% on something in the context of class should mean "utter perfection".
What if it worked everywhere like that?
"Hey, I was supposed to make $18/hr, but I got my paycheck and only got $15/hr."
"Well, only God is perfect and deserves 100%."
"Hey, waiter, you took my dinner away, but I didn't even finish it!"
"Well, only God deserves 100%."
And I don't care if the prof said that in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. I remember one prof I had who said she almost never gave 18/20 on our weekly essays, and maybe one 19 every few years, never a twenty. "That's just my quirk! I just can't give perfect grades." *wink* Yes yes, very entertaining, I'm glad you get to indulge in your eccetricities... just please don't do it to *me*.
If you want to have your own grade scale because you have this unique outlook on the world and you want to express your views through your grade scale then that's fine. But then, when you turn in the grades, please translate them to something that will mean something to the other people who will have to interpret them without your explanation.
Otherwise, please tell me why grades are officially recorded by the institutions and not only given out privately to each student to gauge his or her own progress.