The OED is the perfect example of DEAD MEAT. Hopelessly fusty, out of date, and living in the past. They survive purely on snobbery.
It's a dictionary. How exactly would a dictionary "live in the future"? By making up its own definitions of words?
The OED is not like other dictionaries. If you're reading a book and you notice a word whose meaning you don't know, you probably don't go running off to the public library to consult the OED. Merriam-Webster will suffice. But if you want to know why a word means what it does, and since when, and who was the one to start using it in that way, and in what context, and how its meaning might have evolved over the years, then the OED is the source for you -- and probably the only source.
OED editors meticulously track down references for every definition included in the book, and they cite them: Shakespeare used this word in this way with this slightly-different spelling in this edition of this play in this year. That's what makes it the definitive reference to English words.
You can call that "snobbery" if you want. Some call it scholarship. If you think the two are the same, you're probably on the wrong site.
Check your public library's Web site for a list of online databases you can access if you login with your library card number and PIN. Chances are, one of them will be the OED.
Actually, you're thinking of the "compact edition," which comes with a magnifier to read the microscopic print. The regular version is 20 volumes precisely because the text isn't all that small and it's not printed on onionskin paper.
I've read it since and I'm convinced that if you're not an idiot, then you're a sucker for some really idiotic developers. There may be bugs in.Net, but nothing you've mentioned points to.Net bugs, no matter what your devs are telling you. Fire your people.
It's software. It has bugs. In this case, bugs that pop up in critical places and can't be hammered into place without avoiding.Net for that feature entirely.
Still waiting for an example. One would be enough to have a serious conversation about it. If you can't come up with even one, then please stop repeating yourself.
The submitter seems to think it's "ironic" that the license was changed at the behest of an Oracle VP. But looking at the code above, it seems the non-free portion in question was owned by Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems is now Oracle America. When you see the phrase "Oracle America" (as opposed to just plain Oracle), you know they're talking about the former Sun Microsystems.
So this is not "ironic" at all. Oracle America had the power to adjust the license, and Oracle America chose to do so. It makes one wonder why it was so hard to do while the code was still under the independent Sun Microsystems. Patents, maybe?
Portland Oregon is very white. Atlanta isn't, there was that change. Speech is different, I grew up speaking North Central American English so Pacific Northwest English is similar, but Southern sounds alot different. Dress, bustle of the city, the heat, it was very alien.
Wow. These all sound like pretty superficial differences to me. (The weather? Really?) I too have been to a lot of places in the U.S., and to me it's mostly all the same. Culturally speaking, nothing about the difference between Portland and Atlanta is as significant as the difference between Atlanta and Frankfurt, for example.
The main prejudice I encounter is that people from both coasts tend to assume people in the Midwest are all a bunch of illiterate hicks, which is ludicrous. Political opinion tends to differ from place to place, but that's true between different neighborhoods in my own city, and is generally predictable based on economic class.
Otherwise, an American is pretty much an American, and the only type that's likely to surprise a non-American is one who has spent any significant amount of time among people from other countries.
I'm not sure that's the issue. An author is under no obligation to defend a copyright or risk losing it, the way he might be obliged to defend a trademark or risk losing it. He can sue for copyright infringement today, tomorrow, or 50 years from now (under the current regime).
I think the debate is more about whether a text-to-speech process actually produces a derivative work. Authors have argued in the past that it does. But one could also argue that a computer reproducing a work via text-to-speech is no different than reproducing it by displaying its text on a screen -- and therefore it does not violate copyright.
Authors, on the other hand, don't want to lose the ability to sell audiobook editions because devices exist that can read books aloud automatically. Audiobook sales account for a large amount of royalties.
First, how does the Justice Department, as part of their interviewing process, figure out if someone legitimately has this skill or is faking it?
Have them translate something. It's not like this skill does not exist already. You have an expert write up a dialogue (or get one from a wire tap) and then have applicants decipher it. If they're right, they're in.
Second, if you had this expertise, how would you keep it current? Spend an hour a day riding public transportation in Oakland?
Probably a little more than that, but essentially, yeah. You need to speak to the people in question on a regular basis. Social workers might be good candidates.
You're being sarcastic, but this used to be true. Rapid changes in China's internal economic policy have created a growing "middle class" whose buying habits are much like those of American consumers. That includes a new interest in automobiles, as status symbols and otherwise, resulting in China becoming the largest car market in the world. That's right: China now buys more cars than anybody, and that wasn't true just a few years ago. 33 years ago there were only about a million cars in all of China. There are now four million cars on the streets of Beijing alone, and the Chinese bought 13.6 million cars in 2009. Americans only bought 10.4 million.
I know my monitor isn't turning off the LEDs completely because it has two dead pixels.
I still think it's hilarious that you can sit there and tell me what my monitor looks like.
It seems to me there are two basic concepts at work here: A.) Your belief that all LCD monitors look like shit; and B.) My general enjoyment of the reasonable color and rich blacks of my LCD monitor. Who's likely to convince whom? Like I said, hate your monitor all you want. I hated my old one.
No, he's right about that one. Most LED displays are edge-lit, at least so far. Monitors don't generally use the area-dimming technology you see in some high-end TVs.
I've had my LCD for a year, and I still get pissed off by the damn thing glowing grey when the screen saver kicks in.
I just bought a 22" LED-backlit panel and the blacks are very black. The glow of the black screen is not completely imperceptible in a darkened room, but it is hard to detect. As with all technologies, things improve over time.
I haven't read the article yet, but Ray Kurtzweil is a technology speculator - like a sci-fi writer except that he doesn't make up a story to go with his ideas and tries harder to convince people they're actually going to happen.
If that's so, then he's a genius at it. Among his speculations is the idea that we will eventually reach a point (the singularity) where technology becomes so sophisticated that the world is changed forever in ways we cannot yet comprehend, and that it's impossible to predict anything beyond this point. Ergo, the more wrong Kurtzweil's predictions are shown to be, the closer we must be to the singularity; Q.E.D., as Douglas Adams might say.
I'm going to assume you're not an American, because an American who needs a citation for this fact is woefully ignorant of what's going on in this country. According to the National Institute of Justice, a division of the U.S. Department of Justice:
Seven percent of the 1.5 million prisoners in the United States are held in privately operated prisons, according to the most recent survey of prisons published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.[1] At midyear 2006, there were 84,867 State inmates and 27,108 Federal inmates in privately operated prisons—a 10-percent increase over the previous year.
The company is the fourth-largest corrections system in the nation, behind only the federal government and three states. CCA houses approximately 75,000 offenders and detainees in more than 60 facilities, 44 of which are company-owned, with a total bed capacity of more than 80,000.
...in spite of the many concerns associated with Prison Privatization, the trend toward increased privatization is likely to continue. In fact, recent initiatives like the Bush Administration's FAIR Act seek to ensure such an outcome by setting mandatory privatization quotas including the privatization of 7,200 federal corrections jobs.
If that's not good enough for you, pick up a newspaper once in a while.
But the United States the trend seems to be regressing thanks to grandstanding politicians and bloodthirsty voters who won't countenance even the slightest hint of being "soft on crime".
That's not even the end of the story. Don't forget that a growing number of prisons in the United States are being privatized. There have already been cases of judges who have been convicted for imposing harsh sentences without appropriate judicial review, because they were accepting kick-backs from the prison industrial complex.
Sentencing reform is a long time coming in America. The Economist recently did a briefing on the U.S. justice system and its failings. Among the observations is that politicians tend to favor tough sentencing laws so they look "tough on crime," but those laws then tend to take power away from judges and put it into the hands of prosecutors:
Even the smallest dealer often has enough to trigger a colossal sentence. Prosecutors may charge him with selling a smaller amount if he agrees to “reel some other poor slob in”, as Ms Dougan puts it. He is told to persuade another dealer to sell him just enough drugs to trigger a 15-year sentence, and perhaps to do the deal near a school, which adds another two years.
You might remember it, but you'd be rewriting your own memories. Sorry, this is just one of those things that people have convinced themselves of. I was there, too. I watched it seven times in the theater. The original Star Wars had no "Episode IV" in the title crawl. In fact, if I remember correctly, the DVD of the 1977 cut of the film that was released a while back doesn't have the "Episode IV" either, so maybe we can finally put this urban legend to bed.
Oracle's legal action against Google over Android has already created confusion among developers about the future of Java as a platform.
How's that exactly? If anything, Oracle's move to protect the Java IP only signals a commitment to keeping Java a viable, coherent platform. Sun didn't let Microsoft get away with building a divergent implementation, so why should Google get away with it?
And lets face it, all Oracle wants is the money anyway. It doesn't want to kill Android, given how popular it is. Lord knows Oracle has no idea what to do with Java ME. Instead, Oracle wants it known that Android is built on genuine Java technology -- Oracle-branded Java technology -- and then it will leave Google to do what it wants and Oracle will take its cut at the end of every month.
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Yeah, but SQLite isn't even open source -- it's straight up public domain software. Hardly a threat to Microsoft or its business model.
The OED is the perfect example of DEAD MEAT. Hopelessly fusty, out of date, and living in the past. They survive purely on snobbery.
It's a dictionary. How exactly would a dictionary "live in the future"? By making up its own definitions of words?
The OED is not like other dictionaries. If you're reading a book and you notice a word whose meaning you don't know, you probably don't go running off to the public library to consult the OED. Merriam-Webster will suffice. But if you want to know why a word means what it does, and since when, and who was the one to start using it in that way, and in what context, and how its meaning might have evolved over the years, then the OED is the source for you -- and probably the only source.
OED editors meticulously track down references for every definition included in the book, and they cite them: Shakespeare used this word in this way with this slightly-different spelling in this edition of this play in this year. That's what makes it the definitive reference to English words.
You can call that "snobbery" if you want. Some call it scholarship. If you think the two are the same, you're probably on the wrong site.
Same here in San Francisco.
Check your public library's Web site for a list of online databases you can access if you login with your library card number and PIN. Chances are, one of them will be the OED.
Actually, you're thinking of the "compact edition," which comes with a magnifier to read the microscopic print. The regular version is 20 volumes precisely because the text isn't all that small and it's not printed on onionskin paper.
I've read it since and I'm convinced that if you're not an idiot, then you're a sucker for some really idiotic developers. There may be bugs in .Net, but nothing you've mentioned points to .Net bugs, no matter what your devs are telling you. Fire your people.
It's software. It has bugs. In this case, bugs that pop up in critical places and can't be hammered into place without avoiding .Net for that feature entirely.
Still waiting for an example. One would be enough to have a serious conversation about it. If you can't come up with even one, then please stop repeating yourself.
Can't wait to see what the battery life of an Android phone is going to be running .Net applications on Mono on top of Dalvik.
Did you even read the article?
No.
They began work on the issue while Sun was still Sun, but it was interrupted by the acquisition by Oracle.
So not only is it not ironic, it's actually not even interesting, let alone news.
The submitter seems to think it's "ironic" that the license was changed at the behest of an Oracle VP. But looking at the code above, it seems the non-free portion in question was owned by Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems is now Oracle America. When you see the phrase "Oracle America" (as opposed to just plain Oracle), you know they're talking about the former Sun Microsystems.
So this is not "ironic" at all. Oracle America had the power to adjust the license, and Oracle America chose to do so. It makes one wonder why it was so hard to do while the code was still under the independent Sun Microsystems. Patents, maybe?
Portland Oregon is very white. Atlanta isn't, there was that change. Speech is different, I grew up speaking North Central American English so Pacific Northwest English is similar, but Southern sounds alot different. Dress, bustle of the city, the heat, it was very alien.
Wow. These all sound like pretty superficial differences to me. (The weather? Really?) I too have been to a lot of places in the U.S., and to me it's mostly all the same. Culturally speaking, nothing about the difference between Portland and Atlanta is as significant as the difference between Atlanta and Frankfurt, for example.
The main prejudice I encounter is that people from both coasts tend to assume people in the Midwest are all a bunch of illiterate hicks, which is ludicrous. Political opinion tends to differ from place to place, but that's true between different neighborhoods in my own city, and is generally predictable based on economic class.
Otherwise, an American is pretty much an American, and the only type that's likely to surprise a non-American is one who has spent any significant amount of time among people from other countries.
Yeah, like I said.
I'm not sure that's the issue. An author is under no obligation to defend a copyright or risk losing it, the way he might be obliged to defend a trademark or risk losing it. He can sue for copyright infringement today, tomorrow, or 50 years from now (under the current regime).
I think the debate is more about whether a text-to-speech process actually produces a derivative work. Authors have argued in the past that it does. But one could also argue that a computer reproducing a work via text-to-speech is no different than reproducing it by displaying its text on a screen -- and therefore it does not violate copyright.
Authors, on the other hand, don't want to lose the ability to sell audiobook editions because devices exist that can read books aloud automatically. Audiobook sales account for a large amount of royalties.
First, how does the Justice Department, as part of their interviewing process, figure out if someone legitimately has this skill or is faking it?
Have them translate something. It's not like this skill does not exist already. You have an expert write up a dialogue (or get one from a wire tap) and then have applicants decipher it. If they're right, they're in.
Second, if you had this expertise, how would you keep it current? Spend an hour a day riding public transportation in Oakland?
Probably a little more than that, but essentially, yeah. You need to speak to the people in question on a regular basis. Social workers might be good candidates.
You're being sarcastic, but this used to be true. Rapid changes in China's internal economic policy have created a growing "middle class" whose buying habits are much like those of American consumers. That includes a new interest in automobiles, as status symbols and otherwise, resulting in China becoming the largest car market in the world. That's right: China now buys more cars than anybody, and that wasn't true just a few years ago. 33 years ago there were only about a million cars in all of China. There are now four million cars on the streets of Beijing alone, and the Chinese bought 13.6 million cars in 2009. Americans only bought 10.4 million.
I know my monitor isn't turning off the LEDs completely because it has two dead pixels.
I still think it's hilarious that you can sit there and tell me what my monitor looks like.
It seems to me there are two basic concepts at work here: A.) Your belief that all LCD monitors look like shit; and B.) My general enjoyment of the reasonable color and rich blacks of my LCD monitor. Who's likely to convince whom? Like I said, hate your monitor all you want. I hated my old one.
No, he's right about that one. Most LED displays are edge-lit, at least so far. Monitors don't generally use the area-dimming technology you see in some high-end TVs.
Only because your monitor is cheating and turning off the edge LEDs completely when it detects a black screen.
Either that, or the blacks are very black.
I love how you're going to sit there and tell me I'm wrong about the screen I'm typing on this very minute. But hey -- hate your monitor all you want.
I've had my LCD for a year, and I still get pissed off by the damn thing glowing grey when the screen saver kicks in.
I just bought a 22" LED-backlit panel and the blacks are very black. The glow of the black screen is not completely imperceptible in a darkened room, but it is hard to detect. As with all technologies, things improve over time.
I haven't read the article yet, but Ray Kurtzweil is a technology speculator - like a sci-fi writer except that he doesn't make up a story to go with his ideas and tries harder to convince people they're actually going to happen.
If that's so, then he's a genius at it. Among his speculations is the idea that we will eventually reach a point (the singularity) where technology becomes so sophisticated that the world is changed forever in ways we cannot yet comprehend, and that it's impossible to predict anything beyond this point. Ergo, the more wrong Kurtzweil's predictions are shown to be, the closer we must be to the singularity; Q.E.D., as Douglas Adams might say.
And for anyone who needs it, here's a citation about the crooked judges.
I'm going to assume you're not an American, because an American who needs a citation for this fact is woefully ignorant of what's going on in this country. According to the National Institute of Justice, a division of the U.S. Department of Justice:
Seven percent of the 1.5 million prisoners in the United States are held in privately operated prisons, according to the most recent survey of prisons published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.[1] At midyear 2006, there were 84,867 State inmates and 27,108 Federal inmates in privately operated prisons—a 10-percent increase over the previous year.
The largest operator of private prisons is the Corrections Corporation of America. By its own assertion as of 2010:
The company is the fourth-largest corrections system in the nation, behind only the federal government and three states. CCA houses approximately 75,000 offenders and detainees in more than 60 facilities, 44 of which are company-owned, with a total bed capacity of more than 80,000.
The International Foundation for Protection Officers says:
...in spite of the many concerns associated with Prison Privatization, the trend toward increased privatization is likely to continue. In fact, recent initiatives like the Bush Administration's FAIR Act seek to ensure such an outcome by setting mandatory privatization quotas including the privatization of 7,200 federal corrections jobs.
If that's not good enough for you, pick up a newspaper once in a while.
But the United States the trend seems to be regressing thanks to grandstanding politicians and bloodthirsty voters who won't countenance even the slightest hint of being "soft on crime".
That's not even the end of the story. Don't forget that a growing number of prisons in the United States are being privatized. There have already been cases of judges who have been convicted for imposing harsh sentences without appropriate judicial review, because they were accepting kick-backs from the prison industrial complex.
Sentencing reform is a long time coming in America. The Economist recently did a briefing on the U.S. justice system and its failings. Among the observations is that politicians tend to favor tough sentencing laws so they look "tough on crime," but those laws then tend to take power away from judges and put it into the hands of prosecutors:
Even the smallest dealer often has enough to trigger a colossal sentence. Prosecutors may charge him with selling a smaller amount if he agrees to “reel some other poor slob in”, as Ms Dougan puts it. He is told to persuade another dealer to sell him just enough drugs to trigger a 15-year sentence, and perhaps to do the deal near a school, which adds another two years.
You might remember it, but you'd be rewriting your own memories. Sorry, this is just one of those things that people have convinced themselves of. I was there, too. I watched it seven times in the theater. The original Star Wars had no "Episode IV" in the title crawl. In fact, if I remember correctly, the DVD of the 1977 cut of the film that was released a while back doesn't have the "Episode IV" either, so maybe we can finally put this urban legend to bed.
Oracle's legal action against Google over Android has already created confusion among developers about the future of Java as a platform.
How's that exactly? If anything, Oracle's move to protect the Java IP only signals a commitment to keeping Java a viable, coherent platform. Sun didn't let Microsoft get away with building a divergent implementation, so why should Google get away with it?
And lets face it, all Oracle wants is the money anyway. It doesn't want to kill Android, given how popular it is. Lord knows Oracle has no idea what to do with Java ME. Instead, Oracle wants it known that Android is built on genuine Java technology -- Oracle-branded Java technology -- and then it will leave Google to do what it wants and Oracle will take its cut at the end of every month.