String theory would be a good example. It is, in fact, not a theory. It makes no testable prediction. It's a neat bit of math and who knows, might even be correct. However at this time all it is is a neat bit of math, a hypothesis on how things might work. It won't even be a theory until they figure out how to make some testable predictions and won't be at all something to hang your hat on until there've been some serious tests of those predictions.
Actually, string theory may not be so immune to experimental feedback. The LHC offers both the possibility of providing experimental evidence (via the generation of supersymmetric particles), or of ruling it out all together if the decay rate of micro-black holes into neutrinos point to say 11 spacial dimensions, which is more than string theory can account for.
There is no technological reason Chinese (and other languages) cannot be used in URLs, including TLDs. Unfortuantely, ICANN doesn't really see offering the internet to non-Latin character set languages as important. ICANN only gave China,.cn. The US on the other hand has.com,.net,.org,.mil,.edu,.gov, etc...
Another problem is that ICANN gave the majority of the IPV4 addresses to the US. Huge countries such as China were left with nearly nothing. When given only one TLD, allotted only a small fraction of the IP addresses that the US gets, and being forced to write URLs in a foreign language, it's only natural that China would design a more rational replacement.
Regardless of what language was used for ARPANET, there is no good reason not to support all major languages now.
Despite what some people say about the joys of internationalization, I donâ(TM)t see making people use a foreign language to use the Internet as a good thing. How would Americans like it if they had to type URLs in Chinese and append a.ç¾Zå½ (.us) to the end of them?
I don't know about the rest of you, but as far as I'm concerned Moore's Law has already petered out. I just bought a couple of new games that run fine on my old computer... the computer I bought four years ago. It's an 1.5ghz Athlon. If speeds really were doubling every 18 months, I'd expect to have an 8ghz Athlon right about now.
I know CPU speed isn't everything, but there's no way I'm getting 4 times the performance for my money as I did 3 years ago, nor am I getting 8 times the performance I got 4.5 years ago. For storage space, Moore's Law is alive and kicked, but in terms of some things, it died along with the bubble.
Isn't this a textbook case of political restrictions inferfering with free trade? It seems to me that China could just bring the case up with the WTO and win sanctions against the US.
I already own the IP for a method of throwing away rotten meat and substituting it with avian flesh. If you want to do that, you'll have to license from me. If you wish to continue using my IP you'll have to pay me 80% of all medical expenses as well as the value of any psychological damages you avoid by not eating moldy rotten meat.
I agree with you if it's a game like Diablo. But learning a language from WOW isn't practical. There are too many time constraints. Overall, books are much better until you're at a pretty high level. When I was learning Japanese, I must have read hundreds of comic books and chilren's stories before I was able to tackle DQVII in Japanese.
1959-1962? The beginning of the Vietnam invasion!!?
Have you ever looked at non-US statistics? Can you honestly say any other country goes around the world killing so many people, torturing war criminals, breaking international treaties and then acting high and mighty about it?
I was not "trying to be clever". The simple truth is, no other county sends soldiers all over the planet like the US does. I'm not speaking only of Iraq, but it is a good example. China doesn't do this at all. Do you feel that it doesn't count as "killing" as long as the US government is doing it in other countries? I think you can look at any time period you like within the last 200 years. It can be during the Qing dynasty and the US war against the Cherokee, during the boxer rebellions and the mining towns slaughters, during the cultural revolution and the Vietnam war, or it can be right now. In just about any case it is the US government doing more killing and yet somehow the US press is quite self-righteous about it all.
On an unrelated issue, China's punishment systems, while brutal, are effective. The US on the other hand has a very high murder rate and a very high violent crime rate in general.
China's government is as unobtrusive and minimalist as they get. It like all governments is in the business of staying in power. Unlike the US government, the Chinese government is very direct about this. If you don't threaten their power, they don't mess with you.
The US government is different. Of course it's still in the business of maintaining its own power, but it isn't very upfront about it. As a result, it uses a vast assortment of hand-waving and various levels of bullshit along with excessive taxes to accomplish the same result.
I find the US media in absolute denial about this though. There are constant stories about this or that bad thing going on in China. If more Americans actually lived here, they wouldn't buy that load of crap. People don't have to "keep their heads down" and live in fear of the government at all times. Yes, there is capital punishment in China, but the Chinese government kills far fewer people than the US government does. Yes, there are people who have difficulties getting represented in court, but at least China doesn't openly flaunt international law by throwing people in jail indefinitely without trial and then claiming that international law doesn't apply to them. China doesn't go rampaging around the globe invading countries, or bombing embassies either.
In terms of propaganda, France, the US, China, Japan, and all the other powerful countries soak their populace in it constantly. In Japan, nationalist comics portray Koreans and Chinese and filthy barbarians; in Canada one of the most popular TV shows is dedicated to nationalistic prejudice; in China, people call Zhang Zi Yi a race traitor for starring accross from a Japanese man in a romantic role. Propagana, restriction of the truth, and disinformation are out in full force everywhere. It's just a pity that people are usually so unaware of the propaganda coming from their own countries.
How do we know that the people who are 'speaking out against the BBC' aren't themselves being coerced into doing so in an attempt by the chinese govornment to negate the BBC's coverage of Chinese freedom of speech issues.
Well, first off, I've talked with Wang Jian Shuo, and he's not that kind of guy. If he were that much of a risk-adverse, self-censoring person he wouldn't have written what he did about Microsoft back when he worked for them. Secondly, he's broken laws about with what he's written multiple times in the past and he's even been ballsy enough to draw attention to it. Finally, his blog gets over a million unique visitors a month and he's financially independent. If he wanted to leave China he easily could.
I'm not Chinese, but even I get pissed off at how slanted western media is whenever China comes up. In terms of basic freedoms, I think most westerners have a very unrealistic picture of both China and their own countries.
Then, when I search for "digital voice recorder", the first 2,000,000 results will be lame ass "coming soon" pages, or pages that suck so much nobody has ever felt like linking to them. Usefull sites, like this one would be near the bottom so as to ensure that "the rich are robbed".
Hell, while we're at it, why not make roads that way too! Let's rob the "population rich" metropolitan areas and focus our road building on the isolated rocky passes passes which have been deprived of people and infrastructure for far too long.
Maybe we could do elections that way too... oh wait. That actually could be an improvement.
I've made sites with fairly mainstream content before, which were totally ignored by google. But then, I put an article on my blog about the history of a certain group of elite English schools in Taiwan. Previously, this information had not been on the internet anywhere. Now, if you type the name of the original school of that group (Modawei) into google, my article comes up #1.
I think this issue is ambiguous enough that it will be in the best interests of studios to sue independent "midi remixers". Who would be willing to risk losing enough money to retire on and a jail sentence by actually taking it to trial? No... settlements from this will just be one more revenue stream for the bad guys.
My parent comment was NOT flamebait. Who the heck is it baiting? Maybe people don't like the idea that our science really is so advanced that we can destroy our world, but simple disagreement with my presentation of the facts is no reason to moderate it as flamebait.
Perhaps my post was a bit tounge in cheek, but with the offensive topics I regularly see targeted at Americans, Christians, MS employees, etc... I can hardly believe that my informative post, with links to supporting evidence can be considered flamebait. As long as people think we can't really damage the world, they're less likely to truly worry about the harm we do to it. Only by seeing the utter and complete horrible truth about what we COULD do, will people start thinking about what we MUST do. If we've already developed the ability to destroy the world, we should have confidence in our ability to find a way to save it.
I think it is Hubris for humans to think that we can destroy the Earth. We certainly can make it uninhabitable for certain flora and fauna, including Humans, but we can't destroy it.
My friend, you sorely underestimate us. First off, do you have any idea of the power of our nuclear arsenal? The bombs that hit Japan at the end of WWI may have had yeilds of a dozen kilotons or so. Contrast that with the Soviet Tsar Bomba made less than 20 years later and capable of over 50 MEGAton yeilds. Do you really think that there hasn't been any further refinement in the 40 years since?
It is entirely possible that we could knock the earth out of it's orbit entirely from here. However, it that isn't possilbe, it's entirely possible to knock asteroids and comets out of their solar orbits. We have the math and technical ability to put them on a collison course with the earth. And then... KAPOW! That would be enough kinetic energy to send this little ball of water and sand into a decaying orbit. All it would take would be a little "team work".
Would you use the "cannibal" sentence? I don't think there's anything wrong with how I used like at all. I'm sure it was grammatically valid.
Why is it so ridiculous to use object pronouns for objects and subject pronouns for subjects? Is a sentence SUCH AS, "The next generation will be more creative than we are," that pompous?
There is a difference in the meaning of the following two sentences:
1) I like video games more than her.
2) I like video games more than she does.
The first compares my like for video games with my like for her. The second compares my like for video games with her like for video games. These two sentences could be expanded to the following:
1) I like video games more than I like her.
2) I like video games more than she likes video games.
Notice that the subject in the first clause of each sentence is "I". The subject is the one doing the verb. The object is the person or thing on the receiving end of the verb. In the second clause of the first sentence, the object is "her". The action (of liking) is received by "her". However, in the second sentence, "she" is the subject and "video games" are the object. "She" is doing the action (of liking), and "video games" are receiving the action (of liking). Unless there's a good reason not to, you should use the proper pronoun.
I think the issue of splitting infinitives is the same. If you make a habit of splitting them, it will be easy to, for the reader, get confused. Sometimes it sounds strange not to split an infinitive, and in those cases it's best to split them. The biggest "rules" about writing are to be clear, well organized, and persuasive.
Instead of just "asking anybody on the street" about any given topic, maybe you would do better to ask someone who is educated about it. Would you ask "anybody on the street" how to file your taxes or how to sing? If I were the one asking, I'd be a bit more selective. Nothing is lost by using the proper pronoun, unless your goal is "street cred". If that's the case, then by all means you can flame me hairless with Mr. T. English, gangsta slang, l33t w3rdz, or whatever.
Personally though, I think people who want to learn something about grammar should read the "grammar Nazi" posts, and those who don't should just skim over to the next post and let it go at that.
Make them "more creative than us"? Don't you mean "more creative than we are"? "Us" is an object pronoun, dude. "We" is the appropriate subject pronoun.
I mean if you're not careful, you'll say stuff like, "I like eating cheeseburgers more than her," when you really mean, "I like eating cheeseburgers more than she does." NOT the same, bunky.
Even individual genes influence multiple traits of the organism. It is very possible for genes that influence race to also affect intelligence. There has been quite a bit of scientific evidence showing correllations. It's not politically acceptable to accept the results of this sort of science, but the results are there.
It could be argued that these correllations are due to environmental factors, however the twin studies also point in this direction. As for sex, there is overwhelming evidence that it has numerous affect on intelligence. From spatial thinking to language aquisition, nearly every aspect of the brain is changed by androgens.
In fact the differences are so profound that they can be visibly observed during brain dissection.
All the evidence in the world doesn't prove that intelligence is the effect, or that race or sex were causes. But the study made no claims of causality, only correllation. How ever does it really matter if sex causes a certain kind of brain, if a certain kind of brain determines sex, or if the two are non-causually but strongly correllated? The utility of the research seems about the same in all 3 cases... as does the inevitable reaction to suppress it for political reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, string theory may not be so immune to experimental feedback. The LHC offers both the possibility of providing experimental evidence (via the generation of supersymmetric particles), or of ruling it out all together if the decay rate of micro-black holes into neutrinos point to say 11 spacial dimensions, which is more than string theory can account for.
Ah! You're talking about Leonardo Da Vinci.
There is no technological reason .cn. The US on the other hand has .com, .net, .org, .mil, .edu, .gov, etc...
Chinese (and other languages) cannot be used in URLs, including TLDs. Unfortuantely, ICANN doesn't really see offering the internet to non-Latin character set languages as important. ICANN only gave China,
Another problem is that ICANN gave the majority of the IPV4 addresses to the US. Huge countries such as China were left with nearly nothing. When given only one TLD, allotted only a small fraction of the IP addresses that the US gets, and being forced to write URLs in a foreign language, it's only natural that China would design a more rational replacement.
Regardless of what language was used for ARPANET, there is no good reason not to support all major languages now.
Despite what some people say about the joys of internationalization, I donâ(TM)t see making people use a foreign language to use the Internet as a good thing. How would Americans like it if they had to type URLs in Chinese and append a .ç¾Zå½ (.us) to the end of them?
I don't know about the rest of you, but as far as I'm concerned Moore's Law has already petered out. I just bought a couple of new games that run fine on my old computer... the computer I bought four years ago. It's an 1.5ghz Athlon. If speeds really were doubling every 18 months, I'd expect to have an 8ghz Athlon right about now.
I know CPU speed isn't everything, but there's no way I'm getting 4 times the performance for my money as I did 3 years ago, nor am I getting 8 times the performance I got 4.5 years ago. For storage space, Moore's Law is alive and kicked, but in terms of some things, it died along with the bubble.
Isn't this a textbook case of political restrictions inferfering with free trade? It seems to me that China could just bring the case up with the WTO and win sanctions against the US.
I already own the IP for a method of throwing away rotten meat and substituting it with avian flesh. If you want to do that, you'll have to license from me. If you wish to continue using my IP you'll have to pay me 80% of all medical expenses as well as the value of any psychological damages you avoid by not eating moldy rotten meat.
I've written an informative summary of the ascendance of MS on my blog.
I agree with you if it's a game like Diablo. But learning a language from WOW isn't practical. There are too many time constraints. Overall, books are much better until you're at a pretty high level. When I was learning Japanese, I must have read hundreds of comic books and chilren's stories before I was able to tackle DQVII in Japanese.
That is very untrue. Many people starved, but it's not the same as killed.
Someone shooting the president the night before the re-election in 2004 doesn't make Taiwan look to stable, either.
1959-1962? The beginning of the Vietnam invasion!!?
Have you ever looked at non-US statistics? Can you honestly say any other country goes around the world killing so many people, torturing war criminals, breaking international treaties and then acting high and mighty about it?
How can American media point the finger at China?
I was not "trying to be clever". The simple truth is, no other county sends soldiers all over the planet like the US does. I'm not speaking only of Iraq, but it is a good example. China doesn't do this at all. Do you feel that it doesn't count as "killing" as long as the US government is doing it in other countries? I think you can look at any time period you like within the last 200 years. It can be during the Qing dynasty and the US war against the Cherokee, during the boxer rebellions and the mining towns slaughters, during the cultural revolution and the Vietnam war, or it can be right now. In just about any case it is the US government doing more killing and yet somehow the US press is quite self-righteous about it all.
On an unrelated issue, China's punishment systems, while brutal, are effective. The US on the other hand has a very high murder rate and a very high violent crime rate in general.
China's government is as unobtrusive and minimalist as they get. It like all governments is in the business of staying in power. Unlike the US government, the Chinese government is very direct about this. If you don't threaten their power, they don't mess with you.
The US government is different. Of course it's still in the business of maintaining its own power, but it isn't very upfront about it. As a result, it uses a vast assortment of hand-waving and various levels of bullshit along with excessive taxes to accomplish the same result.
I find the US media in absolute denial about this though. There are constant stories about this or that bad thing going on in China. If more Americans actually lived here, they wouldn't buy that load of crap. People don't have to "keep their heads down" and live in fear of the government at all times. Yes, there is capital punishment in China, but the Chinese government kills far fewer people than the US government does. Yes, there are people who have difficulties getting represented in court, but at least China doesn't openly flaunt international law by throwing people in jail indefinitely without trial and then claiming that international law doesn't apply to them. China doesn't go rampaging around the globe invading countries, or bombing embassies either.
In terms of propaganda, France, the US, China, Japan, and all the other powerful countries soak their populace in it constantly. In Japan, nationalist comics portray Koreans and Chinese and filthy barbarians; in Canada one of the most popular TV shows is dedicated to nationalistic prejudice; in China, people call Zhang Zi Yi a race traitor for starring accross from a Japanese man in a romantic role. Propagana, restriction of the truth, and disinformation are out in full force everywhere. It's just a pity that people are usually so unaware of the propaganda coming from their own countries.
Well, first off, I've talked with Wang Jian Shuo, and he's not that kind of guy. If he were that much of a risk-adverse, self-censoring person he wouldn't have written what he did about Microsoft back when he worked for them. Secondly, he's broken laws about with what he's written multiple times in the past and he's even been ballsy enough to draw attention to it. Finally, his blog gets over a million unique visitors a month and he's financially independent. If he wanted to leave China he easily could.
I'm not Chinese, but even I get pissed off at how slanted western media is whenever China comes up. In terms of basic freedoms, I think most westerners have a very unrealistic picture of both China and their own countries.
nah, man. I just ran with it and kept joking.
If you're not there to learn, you won't.
Then, when I search for "digital voice recorder", the first 2,000,000 results will be lame ass "coming soon" pages, or pages that suck so much nobody has ever felt like linking to them. Usefull sites, like this one would be near the bottom so as to ensure that "the rich are robbed".
Hell, while we're at it, why not make roads that way too! Let's rob the "population rich" metropolitan areas and focus our road building on the isolated rocky passes passes which have been deprived of people and infrastructure for far too long.
Maybe we could do elections that way too... oh wait. That actually could be an improvement.
I've made sites with fairly mainstream content before, which were totally ignored by google. But then, I put an article on my blog about the history of a certain group of elite English schools in Taiwan. Previously, this information had not been on the internet anywhere. Now, if you type the name of the original school of that group (Modawei) into google, my article comes up #1.
I think this issue is ambiguous enough that it will be in the best interests of studios to sue independent "midi remixers". Who would be willing to risk losing enough money to retire on and a jail sentence by actually taking it to trial? No... settlements from this will just be one more revenue stream for the bad guys.
My parent comment was NOT flamebait. Who the heck is it baiting? Maybe people don't like the idea that our science really is so advanced that we can destroy our world, but simple disagreement with my presentation of the facts is no reason to moderate it as flamebait.
Perhaps my post was a bit tounge in cheek, but with the offensive topics I regularly see targeted at Americans, Christians, MS employees, etc... I can hardly believe that my informative post, with links to supporting evidence can be considered flamebait. As long as people think we can't really damage the world, they're less likely to truly worry about the harm we do to it. Only by seeing the utter and complete horrible truth about what we COULD do, will people start thinking about what we MUST do. If we've already developed the ability to destroy the world, we should have confidence in our ability to find a way to save it.
I think it is Hubris for humans to think that we can destroy the Earth. We certainly can make it uninhabitable for certain flora and fauna, including Humans, but we can't destroy it.
My friend, you sorely underestimate us. First off, do you have any idea of the power of our nuclear arsenal? The bombs that hit Japan at the end of WWI may have had yeilds of a dozen kilotons or so. Contrast that with the Soviet Tsar Bomba made less than 20 years later and capable of over 50 MEGAton yeilds. Do you really think that there hasn't been any further refinement in the 40 years since?
It is entirely possible that we could knock the earth out of it's orbit entirely from here. However, it that isn't possilbe, it's entirely possible to knock asteroids and comets out of their solar orbits. We have the math and technical ability to put them on a collison course with the earth. And then... KAPOW! That would be enough kinetic energy to send this little ball of water and sand into a decaying orbit. All it would take would be a little "team work".
Would you use the "cannibal" sentence? I don't think there's anything wrong with how I used like at all. I'm sure it was grammatically valid.
Why is it so ridiculous to use object pronouns for objects and subject pronouns for subjects? Is a sentence SUCH AS, "The next generation will be more creative than we are," that pompous?
There is a difference in the meaning of the following two sentences:
1) I like video games more than her.
2) I like video games more than she does.
The first compares my like for video games with my like for her. The second compares my like for video games with her like for video games. These two sentences could be expanded to the following:
1) I like video games more than I like her.
2) I like video games more than she likes video games.
Notice that the subject in the first clause of each sentence is "I". The subject is the one doing the verb. The object is the person or thing on the receiving end of the verb. In the second clause of the first sentence, the object is "her". The action (of liking) is received by "her". However, in the second sentence, "she" is the subject and "video games" are the object. "She" is doing the action (of liking), and "video games" are receiving the action (of liking). Unless there's a good reason not to, you should use the proper pronoun.
I think the issue of splitting infinitives is the same. If you make a habit of splitting them, it will be easy to, for the reader, get confused. Sometimes it sounds strange not to split an infinitive, and in those cases it's best to split them. The biggest "rules" about writing are to be clear, well organized, and persuasive.
Instead of just "asking anybody on the street" about any given topic, maybe you would do better to ask someone who is educated about it. Would you ask "anybody on the street" how to file your taxes or how to sing? If I were the one asking, I'd be a bit more selective. Nothing is lost by using the proper pronoun, unless your goal is "street cred". If that's the case, then by all means you can flame me hairless with Mr. T. English, gangsta slang, l33t w3rdz, or whatever.
Personally though, I think people who want to learn something about grammar should read the "grammar Nazi" posts, and those who don't should just skim over to the next post and let it go at that.
Make them "more creative than us"? Don't you mean "more creative than we are"? "Us" is an object pronoun, dude. "We" is the appropriate subject pronoun.
I mean if you're not careful, you'll say stuff like, "I like eating cheeseburgers more than her," when you really mean, "I like eating cheeseburgers more than she does." NOT the same, bunky.
Even individual genes influence multiple traits of the organism. It is very possible for genes that influence race to also affect intelligence. There has been quite a bit of scientific evidence showing correllations.
e
m
It's not politically acceptable to accept the results of this sort of science, but the results are there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligenc
has quite a bit of information related to this.
It could be argued that these correllations are due to environmental factors, however the twin studies also point in this direction. As for sex, there is overwhelming evidence that it has numerous affect on intelligence. From spatial thinking to language aquisition, nearly every aspect of the brain is changed by androgens.
http://www.singlesexschools.org/research-brain.ht
In fact the differences are so profound that they can be visibly observed during brain dissection.
All the evidence in the world doesn't prove that intelligence is the effect, or that race or sex were causes. But the study made no claims of causality, only correllation. How ever does it really matter if sex causes a certain kind of brain, if a certain kind of brain determines sex, or if the two are non-causually but strongly correllated? The utility of the research seems about the same in all 3 cases... as does the inevitable reaction to suppress it for political reasons.