I'm an engineer, too -- a serious math geek -- and I'm asking you to think about what you propose in terms of your native tongue (recognizing that L1 and L2 acquisition aren't exactly the same but share similarities).
Grammar is never explained to you as a child. You hear things in context, notice word colocations, and reproduce speech in the language. As a child, you go on understanding 80% of what you're talking about when you talk to a more advanced speaker. As an adult who is used to understanding everything, going back to that situation makes you extremely uncomfortable.
Still, I bet you didn't classify English as you were learning it. You just naturally acquired it. Sure, it took years -- that's what it takes as an adult, too.
As you and your wife found out, survival language is possible through the method you propose. True fluency isn't. Language isn't a skill that way. Context and comprehensible input make a second language center.
You learned how to read/write using the grammar-translation method, which isn't in itself a useful method for learning language. Even classical education recognizes this. For it, learning's merely a way to expand your mind.
Do you know how to conjugate verbs in English, or do you just use them naturally (and get the conjugation wrong sometimes)? Can you give me the grammar rules for English speech? Maybe you can, but they're certainly not require to speak well, and I'll damn well bet that you didn't even think of them while writing your response.
Language is not a skill you learn about then practice. It's acquired. The way it's acquired is understood fairly well, though there is some controversy. There is a lot of real, solid research on this fact about acquisition. Start by reading Krashen's work on it, back from 1981, then move forward to more complete stuff.
You're trying to put your personal experience and some common sense onto a well-researched subject which contradicts both. Accept it.
That's still the gold standard and the only real way to acquire (not learn) language. If you have a good teacher, the grammar questions don't come up often. When I learned Thai and Lao, the reasonable method used was that an accomplished learner came in once a week for an hour or so to clear up stuff the the native-speaking teachers just couldn't get across or which required a way of thinking foreign to them. That means about 5% of the study time was in L1. The rest was in L2.
That "faux immersion" is the best thing to ever happen to language teaching. Your first paragraph confirms it.
Any SOV, syllable-timed (really, mora-timed) language is going to be a PITA for a native English speaker. I don't think the alphabets would be difficult except the Kanji. That'll take a lifetime, just like Chinese does.
For an engineer, I'd recommend learning Mandarin. Now there's an easy spoken language as long as you've got the ear for tones.
Whatever you do, don't study Thai and Lao the way I did. Talk about limited-use languages....
What I find amusing is that, in most cases, the telcos have been given monopolies by the municipalities, so what grounds would the telcos have to sue the munis on? It's all very screwed up.
Ultimately, though, the U.S. consumer gets little choice in most cases.
Somehow, here in Korea, I have a choice of several broadband providers, including one that offers unmetered 100Mb/s downstream. There are also multiple Wifi systems for larger towns, though none in my little tucked-away village.
I think it's telling that most Slashdotters never RTFA. People come here for the comments (which aren't as interesting as they used to be, but...). Anyway, Slashdot is useful because the community is/was great.
On the other hand, I'll do myself a disservice and admit that I use Digg to find articles to read. I don't however, read the comments.
My point is... radically changing the comment method on Slashdot would be a big mistake.
I use Tomboy a LOT. It features notebooks, cross-linking, and the next version (due Oct.) should feature audio. Since it uses Beagle or Tracker to index the notes, finding stuff is easy.
the general opinion of the tech-oriented/. crowd will be that marketing is only used to sell things people don't need.
--
Quoting from the GGGP:
What an incredibly bone headed thing to say. Have you ever tried selling an expensive product to a customer? What about convincing a customer they have a need for your product, when they really don't?(emphasis added)
See now why that opinion exists? That's what started the whole "That's why Sales and Marketing are scum" set of comments above you.
Since the "Contacts" section of GMail basically operates as labels for each contact, allowing you to directly look at "Recent conversations," the hierarchy you suggest isn't necessary. Search for the company name in "Contacts," and you have the entire list.
Well, I lived in Monterey, which is a bit south of SF, and in Tacoma, just south of Seattle. I would take Monterey over Tacoma any day.
I like to say that there's a reason Starbuck's and Seatlle's Best started in Seattle: when it comes on to February and you haven't seen anything but gray for six months, you've got a choice of super-caffeinating yourself or putting the barrel of a gun in your mouth....
What I'm saying is that this "URL" (your "last block") doesn't have to be public, and if it's not public, then it's basically the same as encrypting before uploading. The result: you can store copyrighted works in a distributed file system without being sued for distribution since the file is not recoverable by anyone but you.
But if I have the legal right to the copyrighted data, and I keep the key and don't distribute it, wouldn't that mean that I could use this system to store my copyrighted material without fear of being sued?
Reading the summary, I didn't get the idea that this system was for sharing copyrighted works, just for distributed storage.
I think that OSS has always been about standards. It started as an implementation of POSIX. Programmers are much more likely to write a Jabber-enabled IM client than to write one with its own protocol. Once there was an office document standard, OSS programs rushed to add compatibility.
Freedesktop.org spends a lot of time writing specs which mean that desktops and programs can share data, configs, cache, or whatever is needed. Look at their attempts to modularize the XFree86 code, DBus, HAL, and XDG (which is attempting to get the user directory under control).
What this all means is that if you install a compliant WM like OpenBox and Python bindings for XDG, your autostart programs from Gnome will also start in OpenBox (unless they were defined to only start in Gnome). Now that the FLOSS community has these specifications (more like RFCs, not standards), the desktop is seeing a level of integration which wasn't possible a few years ago.
Driving and calling (even hands free), texting, or doing anything else (tuning the radio, setting up your nav system) for that matter is just dangerous.
My taxi driver the other day was obsessed with his nav system while driving me home -- He was playing solitaire on it. If I had been able to communicate with him, I would have cursed him out.
No. No. And no. Canonical stated at the beginning of the Hardy cycle that this release needed to be more stable and bug-free than any other release to date. Instead, they shipped an OS which had default apps (F-Spot for one) which didn't even launch on the 64-bit version. Utter crap.
Ubuntu is now an "I'll wait for the first service pack" OS.
Hardy is a sloppy release but includes upgrades for LOTS of packages trying to get into LTS so that's to be expected
This is the exact reason that I ran from Ubuntu this release after four years of trying to work with them and promoting them. Did no one get the memo that an LTS version should have been more stable. That it was sloppy was not "to be expected" -- it was a disaster.
Once Shuttleworth came out crowing about how great the six-month release cycle was and how everyone should be on it, I threw up in my lap then quickly reformatted everything in my house/cubicle back to Debian the way it was in 2004.
Yeah, Etch is ancient in Desktop Linux terms, but Lenny won't come out until they feel it's ready. I can count on something stable working for several years after that.
I understand that "I don't have the time these days" attitude, but would you ever say "Sorry guys, us mortals dont know how to run scripts and compile our own builds?"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an engineer, too -- a serious math geek -- and I'm asking you to think about what you propose in terms of your native tongue (recognizing that L1 and L2 acquisition aren't exactly the same but share similarities).
Grammar is never explained to you as a child. You hear things in context, notice word colocations, and reproduce speech in the language. As a child, you go on understanding 80% of what you're talking about when you talk to a more advanced speaker. As an adult who is used to understanding everything, going back to that situation makes you extremely uncomfortable.
Still, I bet you didn't classify English as you were learning it. You just naturally acquired it. Sure, it took years -- that's what it takes as an adult, too.
As you and your wife found out, survival language is possible through the method you propose. True fluency isn't. Language isn't a skill that way. Context and comprehensible input make a second language center.
You learned how to read/write using the grammar-translation method, which isn't in itself a useful method for learning language. Even classical education recognizes this. For it, learning's merely a way to expand your mind.
Do you know how to conjugate verbs in English, or do you just use them naturally (and get the conjugation wrong sometimes)? Can you give me the grammar rules for English speech? Maybe you can, but they're certainly not require to speak well, and I'll damn well bet that you didn't even think of them while writing your response.
Language is not a skill you learn about then practice. It's acquired. The way it's acquired is understood fairly well, though there is some controversy. There is a lot of real, solid research on this fact about acquisition. Start by reading Krashen's work on it, back from 1981, then move forward to more complete stuff.
You're trying to put your personal experience and some common sense onto a well-researched subject which contradicts both. Accept it.
Wow. A name troll of a Twitter sockpuppet account (which are themselves mostly name trols). Is this the new way to get back at Twitter?
That's still the gold standard and the only real way to acquire (not learn) language. If you have a good teacher, the grammar questions don't come up often. When I learned Thai and Lao, the reasonable method used was that an accomplished learner came in once a week for an hour or so to clear up stuff the the native-speaking teachers just couldn't get across or which required a way of thinking foreign to them. That means about 5% of the study time was in L1. The rest was in L2.
That "faux immersion" is the best thing to ever happen to language teaching. Your first paragraph confirms it.
Any SOV, syllable-timed (really, mora-timed) language is going to be a PITA for a native English speaker. I don't think the alphabets would be difficult except the Kanji. That'll take a lifetime, just like Chinese does.
....
For an engineer, I'd recommend learning Mandarin. Now there's an easy spoken language as long as you've got the ear for tones.
Whatever you do, don't study Thai and Lao the way I did. Talk about limited-use languages
What I find amusing is that, in most cases, the telcos have been given monopolies by the municipalities, so what grounds would the telcos have to sue the munis on? It's all very screwed up.
Ultimately, though, the U.S. consumer gets little choice in most cases.
Somehow, here in Korea, I have a choice of several broadband providers, including one that offers unmetered 100Mb/s downstream. There are also multiple Wifi systems for larger towns, though none in my little tucked-away village.
I think it's telling that most Slashdotters never RTFA. People come here for the comments (which aren't as interesting as they used to be, but ...). Anyway, Slashdot is useful because the community is/was great.
... radically changing the comment method on Slashdot would be a big mistake.
On the other hand, I'll do myself a disservice and admit that I use Digg to find articles to read. I don't however, read the comments.
My point is
Touche. I'll work on my reading comprehension.
The summary should read "... go too far ...." That's primary-school stuff.
Plus another $500 minimum for the computer to run it.
Influenza is contagious for about a week AFTER you stop having symptoms. Apparently children shed the virus earlier and for longer -- up to two weeks.
If he's the only one using his laptop, though, I don't think he'll need to worry.
I use Tomboy a LOT. It features notebooks, cross-linking, and the next version (due Oct.) should feature audio. Since it uses Beagle or Tracker to index the notes, finding stuff is easy.
Even if they live a while, Timothy has already had this strain and is likely immune, no?
the general opinion of the tech-oriented /. crowd will be that marketing is only used to sell things people don't need.
--
Quoting from the GGGP:
What an incredibly bone headed thing to say. Have you ever tried selling an expensive product to a customer? What about convincing a customer they have a need for your product, when they really don't?(emphasis added)
See now why that opinion exists? That's what started the whole "That's why Sales and Marketing are scum" set of comments above you.
Wasting six mod points to set the record straight
Since the "Contacts" section of GMail basically operates as labels for each contact, allowing you to directly look at "Recent conversations," the hierarchy you suggest isn't necessary. Search for the company name in "Contacts," and you have the entire list.
Maybe it's because you've got Oregon plates and the GP doesn't? Just sayin'.
Well, I lived in Monterey, which is a bit south of SF, and in Tacoma, just south of Seattle. I would take Monterey over Tacoma any day.
....
I like to say that there's a reason Starbuck's and Seatlle's Best started in Seattle: when it comes on to February and you haven't seen anything but gray for six months, you've got a choice of super-caffeinating yourself or putting the barrel of a gun in your mouth
What I'm saying is that this "URL" (your "last block") doesn't have to be public, and if it's not public, then it's basically the same as encrypting before uploading. The result: you can store copyrighted works in a distributed file system without being sued for distribution since the file is not recoverable by anyone but you.
Most of my music collection is from http://jamendo.com/
But if I have the legal right to the copyrighted data, and I keep the key and don't distribute it, wouldn't that mean that I could use this system to store my copyrighted material without fear of being sued?
Reading the summary, I didn't get the idea that this system was for sharing copyrighted works, just for distributed storage.
I think that OSS has always been about standards. It started as an implementation of POSIX. Programmers are much more likely to write a Jabber-enabled IM client than to write one with its own protocol. Once there was an office document standard, OSS programs rushed to add compatibility.
Freedesktop.org spends a lot of time writing specs which mean that desktops and programs can share data, configs, cache, or whatever is needed. Look at their attempts to modularize the XFree86 code, DBus, HAL, and XDG (which is attempting to get the user directory under control).
What this all means is that if you install a compliant WM like OpenBox and Python bindings for XDG, your autostart programs from Gnome will also start in OpenBox (unless they were defined to only start in Gnome). Now that the FLOSS community has these specifications (more like RFCs, not standards), the desktop is seeing a level of integration which wasn't possible a few years ago.
Driving and calling (even hands free), texting, or doing anything else (tuning the radio, setting up your nav system) for that matter is just dangerous.
My taxi driver the other day was obsessed with his nav system while driving me home -- He was playing solitaire on it. If I had been able to communicate with him, I would have cursed him out.
No. No. And no. Canonical stated at the beginning of the Hardy cycle that this release needed to be more stable and bug-free than any other release to date. Instead, they shipped an OS which had default apps (F-Spot for one) which didn't even launch on the 64-bit version. Utter crap.
Ubuntu is now an "I'll wait for the first service pack" OS.
Hardy is a sloppy release but includes upgrades for LOTS of packages trying to get into LTS so that's to be expected
This is the exact reason that I ran from Ubuntu this release after four years of trying to work with them and promoting them. Did no one get the memo that an LTS version should have been more stable. That it was sloppy was not "to be expected" -- it was a disaster.
Once Shuttleworth came out crowing about how great the six-month release cycle was and how everyone should be on it, I threw up in my lap then quickly reformatted everything in my house/cubicle back to Debian the way it was in 2004.
Yeah, Etch is ancient in Desktop Linux terms, but Lenny won't come out until they feel it's ready. I can count on something stable working for several years after that.
I understand that "I don't have the time these days" attitude, but would you ever say "Sorry guys, us mortals dont know how to run scripts and compile our own builds?"