I'm curious as to why then it becomes much harder for adults who are native speakers of one class of language(say Romantic) to learn languages that are not related to their native tongue...
Well, the article summary sez:
Young infants are sensitive to subtle differences between all phonetic units, whereas older children lose their sensitivity to distinctions that are not used in their native language.
Clear enough?
Expose your children to as many languages as you can, in their infancy and beyond. The more languages they hear sounds from, the better.
This effect might explain why my kids have all been a little slow in talking: they are hearing two languages, with very different sets of phonemes at home, and have to decode and make sense of both.
This is true, but for the presidential election it [voting for the third-party candidate] actually does little to nothing.
BZZZZZZZZZZT! Wrong!
Voting for the third party in the national elections does a lot of good: it helps them to get on the ballot next itme, and gives them a chance to force the Republican/Democratic party to adopt some of their issues.
Do those that truely have no idea or opinion really need to get out and vote?
Well, ``need'' or ``not need'' is pretty personal. I suppose it would depend on what they think they'll get out of it.
Let's think about what happens to the rest of us when the clueless vote. If they just picked a random candidate, it would be great for the third-party candidates (tpc's). The fact that the tpc's seldom get much of the vote suggests that either there aren't enough clueless voters to matter, or they don't vote randomly.
If the clueless voted randomly for the Republican or the Democrat, we'd get a lot of noise, but no change in the outcome.
If the clueless vote for whatever the news media or the union boss tells them to, they give extra votes to the demagogues. This seems unambigously bad to me, though I'm sure the news turds and union bosses love it.
Overall, I'd say, that the clueless aren't making our government better, and are probably making it worse. I think that if you are clueless, you should:
stay home, or
randomly pick a [candidate|third party candidate]
Otherwise, you're shitting in the bed we all have to lie in.
Bk(X#)UnaffiliatedAK
I'm not sure that I think much of Badnarik, but if a Libertarian gets into the Oval Office, he'll do less harm than either a Republican or a Democrat, since Congress will keep him from doing anything, and he'll keep congress from doing much. It would be ideal.
Yes, Alaska is solidly Bush, and I'm voting libertarian this year. I'm slightly less anti-Bush than anti-Kerry, but since it won't change anything anyway, I'm voting for the one I'm for.
Really, the only good thing I can think of to say for Kerry is that the Democratic presidents have generally been less effective at expanding the government than have the Republican presidents.
On the other hand, the only good thing about Bush is that the Republican presidents have generally been less effective at curtailing our civil rights than have the Democratic ones.
It all seems to come down to who's in the opposition: the civil libertarians go on an irrational, paranoid offensive whenever there is a Republican in the Oval Office, and the anti-big-government crowd does the same when there's a Democrat in there.
Which ever (of the Bush-Kerry pair) we elect, we lose.
There are two very interesting questions behind this story:
1) ``How did things get to be this way?'' and
2) ``Why are things this way?'', or ``Who made it so?''.
Evolution is a very plausible answer to the first question. Creationism is a very plausible answer to the second. Since there isn't any great overlap between the two questions, there isn't any strong reason to think that the two answers are mutually exculsive.
Science is concerned with the first question, because that is the question which can be given an objective answer from verifiable facts. The scientific method just doesn't lend itself to the second question.
The sooner the religious nutcases on the science side quit picking on creationism, and the sooner the religous nutcases on the religious side quit picking on evolution, the better off we'll all be. Unfortunately, since there's a lot of religious nutcases on both sides of the issue, that probably won't happen.
1) It all happened by an infinite number of rolls of the dice.
2) God loaded the dice.
There you have one Christian fundamentalist's opinion.
... many of the original programmers [of the internet], now working in home improvement stores up and down the land!
That should encourage us all: even after 35 years of internet-enabled outsourcing, really great programmers with a portfolio of original, ground-breaking work can still find a job without moving to Asia.
The Nana article says that it works by stealing your cookies, so I don't think the problem should last longer than two weeks, since that's how long the Gmail cookies are supposed to be good for.
I've been using the Gmail account for stuff I could afford to lose, since there doesn't seem to be any way to shift it in bulk to my home computer. Now I'm really glad I didn't use it for anything important.
Re:For Halloween..
on
Halloween Fun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Problem is, I don't know how to dress like a virgin.
The shuttle was designed by a comittee, and its politics was always its strongest point. I'm not surprised that NASA thinks they can do better than that today, 30+ years later.
What would really be a great thing would be for NASA to get out of engineering, and just let contracts for delivery of pounds or people to orbit. Let the vendors figure out the details.
A fool and his money are soon parted. Microsoft has years of experience at parting fools from their money, and now they're bringing that wealth of knowlege to a new industry, which will be much less wealthy after MS gets their hooks firmly sunk into them.
The one thing that MS will find different here is that if they actually cost the banks money due to some stupid vulnerability, the banks are quite likely to take it seriously, and do something. Most MS customers don't.
In the '70s and '80s, they followed Friedman and and the Chicago economists and started freeing their economies and privatizing their pension systems. Their economies started to make some progress, until the populists and the socialists managed to turn things around.
This should give Brazil's economy a big boost, too. Let's just hope that the usual suspects don't manage to undo all the progress in a few years. This should be popular with the populists, so maybe they won't screw it up. That still leaves the fascists and the socialists and the international corps to work to screw it up, unfortunately.
I predict that the most effective opposition will come from the U.S. and the E.U. governments. I hope Brazil stands up to them; I'd really like to be able to move South for economic opportunity!
Re:Thing are looking up down there
on
Exploring Antarctica
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Shackleton didn't lose a single man (although they suffered quite a bit and had to eat their dogs).
Dogs make much better emergency rations than do skis or snow machines. If Shackelton had made his sleds out of hides and meat frozen into shape (See Vilhjálmur Stefánsson and Peter Freuchen
) instead of wood, they could have made the dogs last a little longer.
I've been re-reading Endurance
. Shackelton was certainly a gifted leader.
Re:Thing are looking up down there
on
Exploring Antarctica
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success." Nowadays, we can tell them: ``safe return probable''.
On second thought, we seem to have lost the ``Honor and recognition in case of success'' part in the intervening 91 years, so maybe it wasn't progress after all?
That live DVD is 1.3GBytes. SuSE is smart: they don't host it, they just have a bunch of links to mirrors. Maybe the SuSE site won't go down. The mirrors might be in trouble...
So, nobody use the mirror I'm downloading from for about an hour and a half, so I have a chance to get done.
They didn't quite say it was smooth: they said that they can't see the topography.
Because of the global haze layer, Porco says, "we do not see shadows on the surface of Titan. And because we don't see shadow, we can't look at an image and immediately deduce what's up and what's down." There could be massive mountains and deep valleys there, or the surface could be completely flat. At this point, there's no way to tell.
The article also says that future flybys will give them radar and other data which will let them piece together the topography.
Another nifty bit was that the methane clouds don't seem to be methane.
Another possibility, he says, is that "it's [the clouds] some sort of organic goo. It could be some sort of organic polymer, essentially plastic particles. Maybe little polystyrene foam balls. Who knows?"
Obviously, Titan picnicers have been shredding their plastic foam coffee cups, and the winds have whipped them aloft....
It seems to me that what the article is really about is how today's dot-coms are not squandering money: few employees, low overhead, low capital needs, and so on.
If that's a Wiki World, that's where we came from and that's where we're headed.
If Wiki World means that everyone will be using wiki's for everything, well, maybe not.
Since the Verified Voting site is gone for the day, I took a look at mypollingplace.com. They give me the correct place to vote, but have the wrong information on what sort of voting machines and how to use them. We don't use touch-screen voting here: the voting is done on paper ballots which are machine-read (think bubble-sheets).
Too bad we knocked them out; I wanted to see their voting guide.
It's inherent "sometimes" nature (Sometimes you'll find the file you are looking for, sometimes it's busy/not found due to you not having the right connections) would seem to run counter to most business' requirements for reliability.
I don't think that companies will ever use this for getting mp3s over the web. On the other hand, companies could use this to disseminate their own internal stuff. Search for ``joes spreadsheet'' on the internal p2p network, and if you don't find it, Joe is in trouble. Academics are using these networks to disseminate their papers and data sets, too, though I can't give you link to an example.
Sun used to be all about high-quality hardware, where cost took a backseat to reliability. I wonder if they'll be able to keep their reputation for quality and support now that they're competing with HP and Walmart at the low end?
Another post pointed out that SGI started to self-destruct when they started selling Windows NT boxes. At least Sun is peddling these with Solaris, so they aren't literally going into the Dell/Walmart end of the market.
For every knowledgeable enthusiast, there are many more misinformed or incorrect speculators whose opinions usually spring from personal preference or a need to hear themselves talk.
I predict that cops everywhere, including the extortionist's home countries, will be willing to cooperate (for once) to fix their wagons.
The article says the message was signed 'Bohan Krascevic'. Most of the old Eastern Block countries are really protective of their kiddies. Bohan better hope he gets extradited fast, if they catch him.
Getting your local cops angry is a really bad idea, and this sounds like a really bad idea. I don't think it'll catch on.
... Beyond that, Google does 'not have any announced plans regarding how this technology will integrate with our current products and services.'"
This sounds a little scary. I hope they have some unannounced plans. I'd hate to think they're just blowing their cash pile on neat stuff, with no clue what they're going to do with it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the article summary sez:
Clear enough?Expose your children to as many languages as you can, in their infancy and beyond. The more languages they hear sounds from, the better.
This effect might explain why my kids have all been a little slow in talking: they are hearing two languages, with very different sets of phonemes at home, and have to decode and make sense of both.
BZZZZZZZZZZT! Wrong!
Voting for the third party in the national elections does a lot of good: it helps them to get on the ballot next itme, and gives them a chance to force the Republican/Democratic party to adopt some of their issues.
Sure. Vote third party.
Well, ``need'' or ``not need'' is pretty personal. I suppose it would depend on what they think they'll get out of it.
Let's think about what happens to the rest of us when the clueless vote. If they just picked a random candidate, it would be great for the third-party candidates (tpc's). The fact that the tpc's seldom get much of the vote suggests that either there aren't enough clueless voters to matter, or they don't vote randomly.
If the clueless voted randomly for the Republican or the Democrat, we'd get a lot of noise, but no change in the outcome.
If the clueless vote for whatever the news media or the union boss tells them to, they give extra votes to the demagogues. This seems unambigously bad to me, though I'm sure the news turds and union bosses love it.
Overall, I'd say, that the clueless aren't making our government better, and are probably making it worse. I think that if you are clueless, you should:
stay home, or
randomly pick a [candidate|third party candidate] Otherwise, you're shitting in the bed we all have to lie in.
Bk(X#)UnaffiliatedAK I'm not sure that I think much of Badnarik, but if a Libertarian gets into the Oval Office, he'll do less harm than either a Republican or a Democrat, since Congress will keep him from doing anything, and he'll keep congress from doing much. It would be ideal.
Really, the only good thing I can think of to say for Kerry is that the Democratic presidents have generally been less effective at expanding the government than have the Republican presidents.
On the other hand, the only good thing about Bush is that the Republican presidents have generally been less effective at curtailing our civil rights than have the Democratic ones.
It all seems to come down to who's in the opposition: the civil libertarians go on an irrational, paranoid offensive whenever there is a Republican in the Oval Office, and the anti-big-government crowd does the same when there's a Democrat in there.
Which ever (of the Bush-Kerry pair) we elect, we lose.
>>The world's first virtual stuntmen
>I thought this site was supposed to be News for nerds. This story is over a year old.
It was news to me. Does that mean I'm not a nerd? Or maybe it just means that I don't read University press releases.
1) ``How did things get to be this way?'' and
2) ``Why are things this way?'', or ``Who made it so?''.
Evolution is a very plausible answer to the first question. Creationism is a very plausible answer to the second. Since there isn't any great overlap between the two questions, there isn't any strong reason to think that the two answers are mutually exculsive.
Science is concerned with the first question, because that is the question which can be given an objective answer from verifiable facts. The scientific method just doesn't lend itself to the second question.
The sooner the religious nutcases on the science side quit picking on creationism, and the sooner the religous nutcases on the religious side quit picking on evolution, the better off we'll all be. Unfortunately, since there's a lot of religious nutcases on both sides of the issue, that probably won't happen.
1) It all happened by an infinite number of rolls of the dice.
2) God loaded the dice.
There you have one Christian fundamentalist's opinion.
That should encourage us all: even after 35 years of internet-enabled outsourcing, really great programmers with a portfolio of original, ground-breaking work can still find a job without moving to Asia.
I've been using the Gmail account for stuff I could afford to lose, since there doesn't seem to be any way to shift it in bulk to my home computer. Now I'm really glad I didn't use it for anything important.
Here's how Madonna did it.
(Image from here.
Each would be amusing, in its own way. Gates will be hot and bothered after this, no matter what.
What would really be a great thing would be for NASA to get out of engineering, and just let contracts for delivery of pounds or people to orbit. Let the vendors figure out the details.
The one thing that MS will find different here is that if they actually cost the banks money due to some stupid vulnerability, the banks are quite likely to take it seriously, and do something. Most MS customers don't.
This should give Brazil's economy a big boost, too. Let's just hope that the usual suspects don't manage to undo all the progress in a few years. This should be popular with the populists, so maybe they won't screw it up. That still leaves the fascists and the socialists and the international corps to work to screw it up, unfortunately.
I predict that the most effective opposition will come from the U.S. and the E.U. governments. I hope Brazil stands up to them; I'd really like to be able to move South for economic opportunity!
Dogs make much better emergency rations than do skis or snow machines. If Shackelton had made his sleds out of hides and meat frozen into shape (See Vilhjálmur Stefánsson and Peter Freuchen ) instead of wood, they could have made the dogs last a little longer.
I've been re-reading Endurance . Shackelton was certainly a gifted leader.
On second thought, we seem to have lost the ``Honor and recognition in case of success'' part in the intervening 91 years, so maybe it wasn't progress after all?
So, nobody use the mirror I'm downloading from for about an hour and a half, so I have a chance to get done.
Another nifty bit was that the methane clouds don't seem to be methane.
Obviously, Titan picnicers have been shredding their plastic foam coffee cups, and the winds have whipped them aloft....If that's a Wiki World, that's where we came from and that's where we're headed.
If Wiki World means that everyone will be using wiki's for everything, well, maybe not.
Too bad we knocked them out; I wanted to see their voting guide.
I don't think that companies will ever use this for getting mp3s over the web. On the other hand, companies could use this to disseminate their own internal stuff. Search for ``joes spreadsheet'' on the internal p2p network, and if you don't find it, Joe is in trouble. Academics are using these networks to disseminate their papers and data sets, too, though I can't give you link to an example.
Another post pointed out that SGI started to self-destruct when they started selling Windows NT boxes. At least Sun is peddling these with Solaris, so they aren't literally going into the Dell/Walmart end of the market.
And I thought it only happend on /.
The article says the message was signed 'Bohan Krascevic'. Most of the old Eastern Block countries are really protective of their kiddies. Bohan better hope he gets extradited fast, if they catch him.
Getting your local cops angry is a really bad idea, and this sounds like a really bad idea. I don't think it'll catch on.
This sounds a little scary. I hope they have some unannounced plans. I'd hate to think they're just blowing their cash pile on neat stuff, with no clue what they're going to do with it all.