The spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules are inherited not just from several different languages, but from at least three distinct language families.
Spelling, sure. All the words conform to whatever spelling rules were in effect in the language we borrowed them from, at the time we borrowed, them, rather than to some overarching set of spelling rules. That does make it hard to spell English words. Vocabulary might be an issue too, as it's my understanding that English has a lot more total words than many other languages.
But grammar? English nouns don't have gender. That alone is a giant simplification from other languages - at a minimum, you don't have to memorize the forms of the articles (as an example, in German, the words for knife, fork, and spoon each have a different gender, and there's no particular rhyme or reason to the selection). Also, English has a relatively simple case structure: we have the subjective, objective, and possessive cases. German has four - Nominative (subject), Accusative (direct object), Dative (indirect object), and Genitive (possessive). And of course, the articles for the each of the noun's genders are different for each case, so you have 12 variations on the word "the" to keep track of. Other languages have even more cases.
Word order is also the fairly straightforward subject-verb-object form, and beyond that, you can be fairly flexible in how you arrange your sentences. In German, when describing an action, you must specify "time, manner, place", in that order - so you can say "I went today quickly to the stadium", but not "I went quickly to the stadium today", or "I went to the stadium quickly today".
I've also heard tell of these studies that indicate other languages are easier than English to learn, but I'm sort of baffled by this. I spent some time learning German in the distant past, and my continual thought was "man, I'm glad we don't have so many weird rules". But then German is incredibly easy to spell - if you can pronounce a word, there is one and only one way to spell it - so that was nice.
That's the case with a lot of the things discussed in the GP... they were developed one place, then independently developed somewhere else at a later time. But by then, there was already an installed base in the first place, and you couldn't switch to the newer standard, even if it was better, because it was too expensive to scrap your existing investment. Then there's the tendency to have vendor lockin for a lot of stuff. So those are some of the reasons for the great thing about standards (there are so many to choose from!).
... why would we switch from the same ol' method we've used since the beginning of cars. I'm not one to stick to something just because "we've always done it that way", but neither am I in favor of changing things for the sake of change. This would be a major change to the human-car interface, and is accordingly going to result in significant monetary and opportunity costs (people will need to be retrained, which costs time and money). I'm far from convinced that the benefits of this will be worth it.
This is exactly right - ignoring format until the end is fine if your document isn't very long or complex. But for big, complicated documents, it's a big time and money saver to have the format at least mostly right from the start.
The topic I was discussing here was whether PDFs are suitable as a means to collaborate on a document. They're not. Your comments about whether Word is suitable in such a situation are interesting, but beside the point.
They want marriage specifically for the legal protections: so they can force employers to provide health insurance, get estate rights when their partners die, tax breaks, etc. Of course, there's no reason why much of this couldn't be done on a contractual basis in the absence of legal marriage, but the state always finds a way to mess things up and make things difficult for people.
What? This isn't the state making things difficult for people, it's making things EASIER for people. Sure, you do all the legal legwork required to get contracts in place to cover all of this stuff... or you could just trot down the courthouse and get married, which takes care of all that easily and cheaply. Not to mention the fact that a lot of states now have constitutional amendments the SPECIFICALLY PROHIBIT entering into contracts that are "designed to simulate the benefits of marriage". Which was done specifically to screw with gay people.
... is that you need some way of officially establishing your relationship with someone to whom you're not related by blood. Otherwise, 1) how would a hospital decide who could visit a sick person? 2) who could inherit property (without going through probate). You can probably think of other examples. I agree that most of the laws involving marriage mostly amount to cruft... but there's still some value there.
When hordes of cousins, sisters and brothers, etc, start demonstrating for the right to get married, we can worry about those questions. In the meantime, there's an entire class of unrelated people who'd like to get married, but are being prevented from doing so because certain religious groups think it's icky. I think it's rather silly to muddy the issue with a bunch of hypothetical problems that are unlikely to ever come up in the real world.
it's no one's business how I mark a ballot, nor is it anyone's business that I signed the petition.
In fact, it's everyone's business that you signed the petition... by law. That's what "public record" means. Sorry if that's inconvenient, but it's still true.
Speaking of the right tool for the job - a friend of mine told me the horror story of his buddy in college, who wrote is term paper... in Excel. Yes, that's right, one word per cell, moving to a new row when he wanted a new line. And he wanted my friend to show him how to double-space it!
... if you're not trying to collaborate on WRITING a document. They're fine for sending someone a finished product, not so good when you're working with someone on a draft.
I myself haven't seen a document saved in Office 95 in, well, many years - almost every document I deal with is either in 2003 or 2007 format. And while I'd really, really like to make the move to Open Office, it's really not there yet in terms of compatibility (at least, as of OO.o 3.1).
I think the real issue with nuclear plants isn't the cost-effectiveness, it's the (economic) risk. From the same Wikipedia article:
Private generating companies now have to accept shorter output contracts and the risks of future lower-cost competition, so they desire a shorter return on investment period — this favours generation plant types with lower capital costs even if associated fuel costs are higher.[6] A further difficulty is that due to the large sunk costs but unpredictable future income from the liberalised electricity market, private capital is unlikely to be available on favourable terms, which is particularly significant for nuclear as it is capital-intensive.[7]
In other words, you really don't know in advance whether you'll be able to make a profit. It should also be noted that for alternative energy sources like wind and solar, both the capital costs and the fuel costs are lower than nuclear. And given that wind/solar have a much warmer and fuzzier public perception, for an investor, the decision to go with alternative energy is a no-brainer.
So in other words, although a nuclear plant may be marginally more cost-effective over it's lifetime than another form of energy, there are still economic reasons why these plants are not being built. It's not simply a matter of NIMBYism.
They have become insanely and hideously expensive to build primarily because of the influence of your sign-waving hippie-hordes and mouth foaming idiotic masses. The actual cost to build a nuclear power plant would be a secondary consideration if it weren't for the likewise insane regulatory requirements, which if you ask me are slanted disproportionately at nuclear power. Ergo, the sign wavers won, and sanity lost.
On one hand, the nuclear crowd wants to point out that although we've had some near misses, we've never had a really serious nuclear accident. True enough. They also like to point out that all this safety is expensive, which is also very true. And somehow the conclusion reached is: we need less of that expensive safety stuff so nukes can be cheap! I'm sorry, but WTF? The expensive safety stuff is what's actually PROVIDING the good safety record. In fact, experience has shown that it's pretty carefully crafted to neither be over- nor under-safe - we have occasional near misses, but nothing too serious.
Insisting on having high safety standards isn't just the domain of dirty fucking hippies, and it's hardly insane. It's a result of people's perfectly rational desire not to have a serious nuclear accident in their hometown. And yes, that means nuclear energy is always going to be expensive. Sorry.
In other words, random mutation ain't the great source of creative, beneficial change we all thought?
Actually, I surprised that there was so much beneficial change. Think back to the days in using Basic - ever write a program where you wrote a program that randomly POKE'd changes into the system? Were any of the changes beneficial to the program? Obviously, DNA is a lot more redundant than a BASIC program, and has repair mechanisms that would fix a lot of potentially lethal problems, but still - random changes in your operating program are generally going to be neutral, sometimes fatal, and more rarely, useful. This doesn't seem counterintuitive at all to me.
... your claim that a magic man in the sky is extraordinary, and requires evidence. My claim that there is no such magic man does not. In other words, it's your job to prove that God exists, not mine to prove that he doesn't.
Neither you or I can prove that God does not exist and currently we have no data or observations that can disprove that God did not set into motion the creation of the Earth,
Look, I'm not by any means a radical atheist - if you want to believe in God, you're welcome to, and I won't waste my time and yours by trying to change your mind. But statements like the above have an obvious logical problem: the existence of a magic man in the sky who created the entire universe out of nothing, and is variously attributed to have other "magical" powers, is an extraordinary claim. Anyone who makes a claim like this can't pass off the problem of proof to the skeptics - it's on you to convince US that God exists. If I were to claim that there was a pink unicorn in my backyard that commanded me to dance naked on top of the birdbath, you'd think I was nuts. But if I said "but you can't prove there's no pink unicorn"... you'd still think I was nuts. The point here is that you don't get to enter the argument assuming that God is real, and I have to disprove it.
I know the new loans are not as cheap, but thats because some idiot decided having non-direct loans and promising a profit to everyone who serviced them. Doh!
Yeah, this happened because of an unfortunate overlap between the interests of the banking industry and the "free market uber alles" crowd - we got roped into a system where the federal government basically bribed private lenders to give student loans, and then the private lenders just kept all that subsidy money and didn't even make the loans cheaper. It's worth mentioning that there's a bill in Congress to cut out the middleman by just having the gov't lend directly to students. It's a money saver for taxpayers, and should also result in cheaper loans to students. But the banking industry is fighting tooth and nail to stop it.
While I fully understand you being annoyed that your current distro/version ships with a default configuration that isn't fully adjusted to this very common usage pattern, it also means that the situation will get better as distributions learn how to properly integrate Pulseaudio and the remaining bugs in Pulseaudio itself are fixed and it gets better at automatically detecting and adjusting to different hardware setups.
Look, I understand that getting this stuff right is a hard problem and takes some effort to get resolved, and that' s not necessarily the fault of the developer. But it's not my fault either. I don't have time for this kind of thing - while there was a day when I really enjoyed spending a bunch of time fiddling around with my computer to get it to work right, those days are mostly over for me now. I need sound to "just work", and if Pulseaudio doesn't, then I'm not using it.
If its rest mass is imaginary, you're talking about a tachyon - it must always move faster than the speed of light (per relativity). Or else it's energy becomes a complex number. If its rest mass is complex... oh, my head is starting to hurt again. In that case, there doesn't seem to be any way to avoid having a complex value for the energy of the body... and I can't imagine what that even means.
Realistically, talking about tachyons is probably outside the realm of science - there wouldn't seem to be any way for them to interact with the "real" universe, so it's hard to imagine how to develop any kind of testable proposition regarding them.
Saying airpower doesn't win wars is probably false. I would suggest that the thermonuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a war-winning role.
Not a very good argument. The war was essentially over by this point anyway - we could very likely have just stood by for a month or two and waited for the Japanese government to collapse. But this:
Our big problem now in Afghanistan is that we are not defining winning.
Right on, brother. If we ever figure out why we're there, we might make some progress in A-stan. Until then, we're just spinning our wheels. This was the same thing that made Iraq drag on for so long - the objectives kept changing. In fact, I think that much like it was in Iraq, the solution is to simply declare victory and go home.
Slashdot Mirror
Spelling, sure. All the words conform to whatever spelling rules were in effect in the language we borrowed them from, at the time we borrowed, them, rather than to some overarching set of spelling rules. That does make it hard to spell English words. Vocabulary might be an issue too, as it's my understanding that English has a lot more total words than many other languages.
But grammar? English nouns don't have gender. That alone is a giant simplification from other languages - at a minimum, you don't have to memorize the forms of the articles (as an example, in German, the words for knife, fork, and spoon each have a different gender, and there's no particular rhyme or reason to the selection). Also, English has a relatively simple case structure: we have the subjective, objective, and possessive cases. German has four - Nominative (subject), Accusative (direct object), Dative (indirect object), and Genitive (possessive). And of course, the articles for the each of the noun's genders are different for each case, so you have 12 variations on the word "the" to keep track of. Other languages have even more cases.
Word order is also the fairly straightforward subject-verb-object form, and beyond that, you can be fairly flexible in how you arrange your sentences. In German, when describing an action, you must specify "time, manner, place", in that order - so you can say "I went today quickly to the stadium", but not "I went quickly to the stadium today", or "I went to the stadium quickly today".
I've also heard tell of these studies that indicate other languages are easier than English to learn, but I'm sort of baffled by this. I spent some time learning German in the distant past, and my continual thought was "man, I'm glad we don't have so many weird rules". But then German is incredibly easy to spell - if you can pronounce a word, there is one and only one way to spell it - so that was nice.
That's the case with a lot of the things discussed in the GP... they were developed one place, then independently developed somewhere else at a later time. But by then, there was already an installed base in the first place, and you couldn't switch to the newer standard, even if it was better, because it was too expensive to scrap your existing investment. Then there's the tendency to have vendor lockin for a lot of stuff. So those are some of the reasons for the great thing about standards (there are so many to choose from!).
... why would we switch from the same ol' method we've used since the beginning of cars. I'm not one to stick to something just because "we've always done it that way", but neither am I in favor of changing things for the sake of change. This would be a major change to the human-car interface, and is accordingly going to result in significant monetary and opportunity costs (people will need to be retrained, which costs time and money). I'm far from convinced that the benefits of this will be worth it.
So, Toyota, you're planning on building a car that no one knows how to drive? Let us know how that works out for you.
This is exactly right - ignoring format until the end is fine if your document isn't very long or complex. But for big, complicated documents, it's a big time and money saver to have the format at least mostly right from the start.
The topic I was discussing here was whether PDFs are suitable as a means to collaborate on a document. They're not. Your comments about whether Word is suitable in such a situation are interesting, but beside the point.
What? This isn't the state making things difficult for people, it's making things EASIER for people. Sure, you do all the legal legwork required to get contracts in place to cover all of this stuff... or you could just trot down the courthouse and get married, which takes care of all that easily and cheaply. Not to mention the fact that a lot of states now have constitutional amendments the SPECIFICALLY PROHIBIT entering into contracts that are "designed to simulate the benefits of marriage". Which was done specifically to screw with gay people.
... is that you need some way of officially establishing your relationship with someone to whom you're not related by blood. Otherwise, 1) how would a hospital decide who could visit a sick person? 2) who could inherit property (without going through probate). You can probably think of other examples. I agree that most of the laws involving marriage mostly amount to cruft... but there's still some value there.
When hordes of cousins, sisters and brothers, etc, start demonstrating for the right to get married, we can worry about those questions. In the meantime, there's an entire class of unrelated people who'd like to get married, but are being prevented from doing so because certain religious groups think it's icky. I think it's rather silly to muddy the issue with a bunch of hypothetical problems that are unlikely to ever come up in the real world.
it's no one's business how I mark a ballot, nor is it anyone's business that I signed the petition.
In fact, it's everyone's business that you signed the petition... by law. That's what "public record" means. Sorry if that's inconvenient, but it's still true.
Speaking of the right tool for the job - a friend of mine told me the horror story of his buddy in college, who wrote is term paper... in Excel. Yes, that's right, one word per cell, moving to a new row when he wanted a new line. And he wanted my friend to show him how to double-space it!
... if you're not trying to collaborate on WRITING a document. They're fine for sending someone a finished product, not so good when you're working with someone on a draft.
I've had the same experience - frequently, a document too fouled up to open in MS office, will magically be "fixed" if opened and resaved from OO.o.
I myself haven't seen a document saved in Office 95 in, well, many years - almost every document I deal with is either in 2003 or 2007 format. And while I'd really, really like to make the move to Open Office, it's really not there yet in terms of compatibility (at least, as of OO.o 3.1).
I think the real issue with nuclear plants isn't the cost-effectiveness, it's the (economic) risk. From the same Wikipedia article:
In other words, you really don't know in advance whether you'll be able to make a profit. It should also be noted that for alternative energy sources like wind and solar, both the capital costs and the fuel costs are lower than nuclear. And given that wind/solar have a much warmer and fuzzier public perception, for an investor, the decision to go with alternative energy is a no-brainer.
So in other words, although a nuclear plant may be marginally more cost-effective over it's lifetime than another form of energy, there are still economic reasons why these plants are not being built. It's not simply a matter of NIMBYism.
On one hand, the nuclear crowd wants to point out that although we've had some near misses, we've never had a really serious nuclear accident. True enough. They also like to point out that all this safety is expensive, which is also very true. And somehow the conclusion reached is: we need less of that expensive safety stuff so nukes can be cheap! I'm sorry, but WTF? The expensive safety stuff is what's actually PROVIDING the good safety record. In fact, experience has shown that it's pretty carefully crafted to neither be over- nor under-safe - we have occasional near misses, but nothing too serious.
Insisting on having high safety standards isn't just the domain of dirty fucking hippies, and it's hardly insane. It's a result of people's perfectly rational desire not to have a serious nuclear accident in their hometown. And yes, that means nuclear energy is always going to be expensive. Sorry.
Oh, wait, you didn't read the FAQ. Slashdot, per TFM, is a US-centric site. Get over it.
Actually, I surprised that there was so much beneficial change. Think back to the days in using Basic - ever write a program where you wrote a program that randomly POKE'd changes into the system? Were any of the changes beneficial to the program? Obviously, DNA is a lot more redundant than a BASIC program, and has repair mechanisms that would fix a lot of potentially lethal problems, but still - random changes in your operating program are generally going to be neutral, sometimes fatal, and more rarely, useful. This doesn't seem counterintuitive at all to me.
... your claim that a magic man in the sky is extraordinary, and requires evidence. My claim that there is no such magic man does not. In other words, it's your job to prove that God exists, not mine to prove that he doesn't.
... is not my job.
Look, I'm not by any means a radical atheist - if you want to believe in God, you're welcome to, and I won't waste my time and yours by trying to change your mind. But statements like the above have an obvious logical problem: the existence of a magic man in the sky who created the entire universe out of nothing, and is variously attributed to have other "magical" powers, is an extraordinary claim. Anyone who makes a claim like this can't pass off the problem of proof to the skeptics - it's on you to convince US that God exists. If I were to claim that there was a pink unicorn in my backyard that commanded me to dance naked on top of the birdbath, you'd think I was nuts. But if I said "but you can't prove there's no pink unicorn"... you'd still think I was nuts. The point here is that you don't get to enter the argument assuming that God is real, and I have to disprove it.
Yeah, this happened because of an unfortunate overlap between the interests of the banking industry and the "free market uber alles" crowd - we got roped into a system where the federal government basically bribed private lenders to give student loans, and then the private lenders just kept all that subsidy money and didn't even make the loans cheaper. It's worth mentioning that there's a bill in Congress to cut out the middleman by just having the gov't lend directly to students. It's a money saver for taxpayers, and should also result in cheaper loans to students. But the banking industry is fighting tooth and nail to stop it.
Look, I understand that getting this stuff right is a hard problem and takes some effort to get resolved, and that' s not necessarily the fault of the developer. But it's not my fault either. I don't have time for this kind of thing - while there was a day when I really enjoyed spending a bunch of time fiddling around with my computer to get it to work right, those days are mostly over for me now. I need sound to "just work", and if Pulseaudio doesn't, then I'm not using it.
Hmm, good point. I don't have an answer for that one.
If its rest mass is imaginary, you're talking about a tachyon - it must always move faster than the speed of light (per relativity). Or else it's energy becomes a complex number. If its rest mass is complex... oh, my head is starting to hurt again. In that case, there doesn't seem to be any way to avoid having a complex value for the energy of the body... and I can't imagine what that even means. Realistically, talking about tachyons is probably outside the realm of science - there wouldn't seem to be any way for them to interact with the "real" universe, so it's hard to imagine how to develop any kind of testable proposition regarding them.
Not a very good argument. The war was essentially over by this point anyway - we could very likely have just stood by for a month or two and waited for the Japanese government to collapse. But this:
Right on, brother. If we ever figure out why we're there, we might make some progress in A-stan. Until then, we're just spinning our wheels. This was the same thing that made Iraq drag on for so long - the objectives kept changing. In fact, I think that much like it was in Iraq, the solution is to simply declare victory and go home.