Posse comitatus. The Coast Guard and National Guard are a different animal from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, even though the Guard is definitely an arm of the military. If he tries to militarize the FBI, he runs up against posse comitatus.
Of course, Bush wants to get rid of of posse comitatus, but that is not going to play down South.
UMass Dartmouth is in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. That's where this happened. Dartmouth College is in Hanover, NH. That's the place people normally refer to as "Dartmouth." The difference is a matter of about $20K/year in tuition. Dartmouth College: $31,965 . UMass/Dartmouth: $17,536 out of state, in state $8,036.
The commander in chief only has this level of authority over the armed forces. Bush is an idiot, but what's worse, he's a power-hungry idiot. Lord Acton: right again.
If the Britannica article misspells 2 words, and the Wikipedia article is based upon an assumption that light travels through the medium of ether, does that mean that Wikipedia has half as many errors as Britannica? This is a lot more complicated than the kind of statistical error analysis these folks are trying for.
And I've never known *anybody* who can do that without making a mistake.
I don't know if the imprecision here is intentional, or simply negligent. Most people, some of the time, can make a statement that does not encompass error. You're not reading me very carefully: I said "things that check out" - not "things that always check out.
"Authority" is not absolute authority, it is relative authority: a programmer usually knows a lot more about the C language than a veterinarian. Not all programmers know more about C than all veterinarians, of course; but let's take the average C programmer and the average veterinarian. Who are you going to ask a question about C?
And no, it's not a model that supports a model: it is the same process, recursively applied to new individuals. There are a number of verification protocols (publication, tenure process, &c.) which, while not perfect, of course, do tend to weed out the most obviously unfit. The claim that a degree is worthless, by the way, is an obvious falsehood: when you're sick or injured, do you go to an MD or to someone who works at Wal-Mart? Degrees are not absolute markers, no, but they do tend to guide you to people more likely to have expertise in the subject area at hand than the average bloke.
You're making a lot of absolute statements and building a lot of straw men, but there's no argument here - merely assertion. "Zero real creativity." "Parrot what we already think we know." Sure, that's what you'll hear out of the average undergrad student pissed off because he got a B on a test; but the fact is that many academic programs do teach people how to learn and how to create: if they did not, the marketplace of knowledge would have selected them out a long time ago, as they tend to select out those individual programs that don't provide the necessary training. I'm not asserting that the process doesn't make mistakes, only that it is far more useful than some kind of Feyerabendian non-process.
Dogmatic nonsense. In my experience, plenty of human beings are capable of being objective within specific realms of knowledge. You can ask them to be objective about "is it day or night" at noon; but perhaps not at astronomical twilight.
Here's how "authority" works: an authority is someone who tells you things that check out. Over time, you trust them to continue to tell you things on the same subject that check out. If you are curious about an aspect of a subject on which your "authority" has tended to tell you things that seem to have worked out, you are more likely to consult that authority.
Academic authority is merely an attempt to create a web-of-trust relationship that models that kind of authority, so you can trust people whom you have never previously consulted and had an opportunity to verify. That's what a degree is: a bunch of folks who have previously been certified (with their degrees) to know what they're talking about agree to certify that yet another person knows what he's talking about. You could say that it's a house of cards; but the point is that these folks are subjected to tests of their reliability throughout their careers. The more unreliable they are, the less often they are relied upon, and ultimately, the less likely that they will be in a position to certify others as authorities.
There are two kinds of dictionaries in the world: prescriptive, and descriptive. The distinction is not necessarily ideological, as implied by the poster and a number of others in this thread, but functional.
The classic descriptive dictionary is the OED: it basically lets you know exactly how a word is used, where, and when. Great for dealing with contemporary non-literary texts, minority dialects, and especially historical literary texts. Descriptive dictionaries are anthropological in tone. The purpose of a descriptive dictionary is to teach you how words are and have been used in a language.
The classic prescriptive dictionary should be the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, though I think they've become more descriptive over the years. A prescriptive dictionary provides the normative usage in a standard dialect, by which I mean specifically a shared artificial dialect used for public discourse. The purpose of a prescriptive dictionary is to teach you how to use words yourself to engage in public discourse so that you remain within the main stream of a discourse community's spoken conventions.
When you understand the standard dialect of your community well enough to communicate in it easily, then you can learn to integrate the dialects you use with family, with friends, and with other discourse communities to enrich your writing and speaking in what are traditionally more formal discourse communities.
When a student is reading a book, a descriptive dictionary is the most useful. When a student is writing a paper, a prescriptive dictionary is most useful.
Educate yourself before commenting. Prior constraint is wrong even when one is trying to restrain hate speech, so long as no one is making threats or inciting violence.
We're talking about the Lem book here, not the movie. The book, as a sibling posting has already pointed out, was written in Polish. Then it was translated into French. Then THAT was translated into English. Poorly.
On translations "damaging" a work of art: what translations tend to do is to throw some facets of a work's art into higher relief and subdue or even drown other facets. Some translations do a better job of balancing than others. One translation may get the tone right, but muddle up the meaning, another get the meaning right, but be unreadably arch. At any rate, while translations can be their own works of art (take a look at Wyatt's translations of Petrarch some time), they all tend to introduce distortions which, while they may not "strongly" damage a work of art, do twist it a bit.
Now, when one translates a translation, one of two things happens: either the second translator accentuates the original distortions introduced by the first translator, or the second translator introduces whole new distortions that may not even represent aspects of the original work, but in fact represent features interpolated by the first translator. And that's when the translators are good: bad translators can take a work of exquisite delicacy and mangle it into a hamfisted thumper - even when they're not engaging in the methodologically suspect practice of double-translation.
O'Reilly chooses out of copyright images for their books. That way, they don't have to pay for rights, and can still have a rather consistent visual style. Just goes to show you that Tim O'Reilly does have a clue.
You must read Polish or French, because the English translation of Solaris (which is a translation of the French translation, not of the Polish original!) is unreadable. What they really need to do is to get it re-translated by Heine or Kandel (the translators of Imaginary Magnitude and Fiasco).
I'll tell you what - compare the dialogue of Jar-Jar Binks to that of any character in any Harry Potter book (which was also always for kids), and tell me again how brilliant a writer of dialogue Lucas is (we're talking about dialogue, here, because that's what the fellow's wife was shocked by - the subtitles). Episode III was good. Episode II was ok. Episode I was a video game commercial with dialogue a six year old would find painful. Better yet, just watch that whole "Tell me, Master Qui-Gon, what are midicholorians?" exchange and tell me that was written by someone with a clue about exposition and plotting.
The review after review and post after post are wrong. I've been running OS X since 2001, first on a 2001 iBook (500 MHz, 256 MB RAM G3), then on a G5. Yes, the G5 is much faster; but the G3 is fine, at least as responsive as Fedora Core 2 on a 700 MHz Pentium Dell with 256 MB of RAM (the machine I used to have at work). Mind you, OS X 10.0 was a bear. 10.1 was much better, and 10.2 and 10.3 were just about right. 10.4 is slower on that machine than 10.3, but still not boggy. I'm guessing that any further upgrades to the OS will not be worth it. Don't compare OS X to XP, they're not comparable: they degrade in completely different ways and circumstances. Running OS X on 256 MB of RAM is perfectly acceptable, running XP on 256 MB of RAM is painful.
That said, no, for $100 you cannot build a machine that will run 10.4 well, and yes, OSS is the best solution for this problem. If you can get a 100% supported environment running RedHat, you'll have a very good experience. Will it be as pretty as OS X? No. Will it have full support for MS Office or iLife or any of the other software that runs on OS X? No. But it will have support for OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and a lot of other software - and the best part is, most of the consumer-class software written for Linux is OSS, so the users will be able to download to their hearts' content.
And of course, the woman is in Canada, so US law generally doesn't apply there. (We didn't invade yet, did we?)
Of course not! We have to finish off Axis of Evil Episode I: The Mother of All Battles before we can go on to Axis of Evil Episode II: Anchluss in the Great White North!
They can match the Y chromosome of a brother (by the same father), or the son of his brother (by the same father). As long as you follow the male line, it works. Likewise, if Copernicus had a sister with daughters, they could follow the female line for the mitochondrial DNA. The point is that they are not looking for phenotype, but for particular parts of the genome (and for the mitochondrial genome) that do not change (beyond point mutation and other forms of genetic drift) so long as they can see a same-sex line of descent.
Actually, no, it was not "little more than an obscure research channel until the development of the web." I was on USENET for at least 8 years before I got access to the www.
Slashdot Mirror
Posse comitatus. The Coast Guard and National Guard are a different animal from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, even though the Guard is definitely an arm of the military. If he tries to militarize the FBI, he runs up against posse comitatus. Of course, Bush wants to get rid of of posse comitatus, but that is not going to play down South.
UMass Dartmouth is in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. That's where this happened. Dartmouth College is in Hanover, NH. That's the place people normally refer to as "Dartmouth." The difference is a matter of about $20K/year in tuition. Dartmouth College: $31,965 . UMass/Dartmouth: $17,536 out of state, in state $8,036.
The commander in chief only has this level of authority over the armed forces. Bush is an idiot, but what's worse, he's a power-hungry idiot. Lord Acton: right again.
"Good musician" is a much scarcer resource than "popular musician." Musical talent is a lot harder to find than marketing dollars.
[sarcasm] Ray? Who's this Ray? Did he sing for Mike & the Mechanics?
But, again, they don't compare the kinds of egregious errors, do they?
If the Britannica article misspells 2 words, and the Wikipedia article is based upon an assumption that light travels through the medium of ether, does that mean that Wikipedia has half as many errors as Britannica? This is a lot more complicated than the kind of statistical error analysis these folks are trying for.
And yet- MDs with degrees still kill people from time to time, they make mistakes too.
It seems you will only spout absolutes, and demand that you be given only absolutes. This is religion, not epistemology. Basta!
And I've never known *anybody* who can do that without making a mistake.
I don't know if the imprecision here is intentional, or simply negligent. Most people, some of the time, can make a statement that does not encompass error. You're not reading me very carefully: I said "things that check out" - not "things that always check out.
"Authority" is not absolute authority, it is relative authority: a programmer usually knows a lot more about the C language than a veterinarian. Not all programmers know more about C than all veterinarians, of course; but let's take the average C programmer and the average veterinarian. Who are you going to ask a question about C?
And no, it's not a model that supports a model: it is the same process, recursively applied to new individuals. There are a number of verification protocols (publication, tenure process, &c.) which, while not perfect, of course, do tend to weed out the most obviously unfit. The claim that a degree is worthless, by the way, is an obvious falsehood: when you're sick or injured, do you go to an MD or to someone who works at Wal-Mart? Degrees are not absolute markers, no, but they do tend to guide you to people more likely to have expertise in the subject area at hand than the average bloke.
You're making a lot of absolute statements and building a lot of straw men, but there's no argument here - merely assertion. "Zero real creativity." "Parrot what we already think we know." Sure, that's what you'll hear out of the average undergrad student pissed off because he got a B on a test; but the fact is that many academic programs do teach people how to learn and how to create: if they did not, the marketplace of knowledge would have selected them out a long time ago, as they tend to select out those individual programs that don't provide the necessary training. I'm not asserting that the process doesn't make mistakes, only that it is far more useful than some kind of Feyerabendian non-process.
Human beings are incapable of being objective
Dogmatic nonsense. In my experience, plenty of human beings are capable of being objective within specific realms of knowledge. You can ask them to be objective about "is it day or night" at noon; but perhaps not at astronomical twilight.
Here's how "authority" works: an authority is someone who tells you things that check out. Over time, you trust them to continue to tell you things on the same subject that check out. If you are curious about an aspect of a subject on which your "authority" has tended to tell you things that seem to have worked out, you are more likely to consult that authority.
Academic authority is merely an attempt to create a web-of-trust relationship that models that kind of authority, so you can trust people whom you have never previously consulted and had an opportunity to verify. That's what a degree is: a bunch of folks who have previously been certified (with their degrees) to know what they're talking about agree to certify that yet another person knows what he's talking about. You could say that it's a house of cards; but the point is that these folks are subjected to tests of their reliability throughout their careers. The more unreliable they are, the less often they are relied upon, and ultimately, the less likely that they will be in a position to certify others as authorities.
When Apple is a monopoly. IANAL, but I believe that bundling becomes a problem only when it is used to leverage monopoly power.
Read Lem's story "Golem XIV." THAT'S what an AI would be like.
Also, don't forget that Nehemiah Scudder is due to be elected President in 2012.
Looks like we're right on schedule, then.
There are two kinds of dictionaries in the world: prescriptive, and descriptive. The distinction is not necessarily ideological, as implied by the poster and a number of others in this thread, but functional.
The classic descriptive dictionary is the OED: it basically lets you know exactly how a word is used, where, and when. Great for dealing with contemporary non-literary texts, minority dialects, and especially historical literary texts. Descriptive dictionaries are anthropological in tone. The purpose of a descriptive dictionary is to teach you how words are and have been used in a language.
The classic prescriptive dictionary should be the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, though I think they've become more descriptive over the years. A prescriptive dictionary provides the normative usage in a standard dialect, by which I mean specifically a shared artificial dialect used for public discourse. The purpose of a prescriptive dictionary is to teach you how to use words yourself to engage in public discourse so that you remain within the main stream of a discourse community's spoken conventions.
When you understand the standard dialect of your community well enough to communicate in it easily, then you can learn to integrate the dialects you use with family, with friends, and with other discourse communities to enrich your writing and speaking in what are traditionally more formal discourse communities.
When a student is reading a book, a descriptive dictionary is the most useful. When a student is writing a paper, a prescriptive dictionary is most useful.
He found the prefect irritating sound by experimenting on his children.
Actually, it looks like he got the idea from a fellow from a small planet in the neighborhood of Betelgeuse, and not from his children after all.
Educate yourself before commenting. Prior constraint is wrong even when one is trying to restrain hate speech, so long as no one is making threats or inciting violence.
We're talking about the Lem book here, not the movie. The book, as a sibling posting has already pointed out, was written in Polish. Then it was translated into French. Then THAT was translated into English. Poorly.
On translations "damaging" a work of art: what translations tend to do is to throw some facets of a work's art into higher relief and subdue or even drown other facets. Some translations do a better job of balancing than others. One translation may get the tone right, but muddle up the meaning, another get the meaning right, but be unreadably arch. At any rate, while translations can be their own works of art (take a look at Wyatt's translations of Petrarch some time), they all tend to introduce distortions which, while they may not "strongly" damage a work of art, do twist it a bit.
Now, when one translates a translation, one of two things happens: either the second translator accentuates the original distortions introduced by the first translator, or the second translator introduces whole new distortions that may not even represent aspects of the original work, but in fact represent features interpolated by the first translator. And that's when the translators are good: bad translators can take a work of exquisite delicacy and mangle it into a hamfisted thumper - even when they're not engaging in the methodologically suspect practice of double-translation.
O'Reilly chooses out of copyright images for their books. That way, they don't have to pay for rights, and can still have a rather consistent visual style. Just goes to show you that Tim O'Reilly does have a clue.
You must read Polish or French, because the English translation of Solaris (which is a translation of the French translation, not of the Polish original!) is unreadable. What they really need to do is to get it re-translated by Heine or Kandel (the translators of Imaginary Magnitude and Fiasco).
I'll tell you what - compare the dialogue of Jar-Jar Binks to that of any character in any Harry Potter book (which was also always for kids), and tell me again how brilliant a writer of dialogue Lucas is (we're talking about dialogue, here, because that's what the fellow's wife was shocked by - the subtitles). Episode III was good. Episode II was ok. Episode I was a video game commercial with dialogue a six year old would find painful. Better yet, just watch that whole "Tell me, Master Qui-Gon, what are midicholorians?" exchange and tell me that was written by someone with a clue about exposition and plotting.
You are a lucky man, and your wife is a very wise woman.
By the way, the correct answer is "No, but George Lucas is. . . "
The review after review and post after post are wrong. I've been running OS X since 2001, first on a 2001 iBook (500 MHz, 256 MB RAM G3), then on a G5. Yes, the G5 is much faster; but the G3 is fine, at least as responsive as Fedora Core 2 on a 700 MHz Pentium Dell with 256 MB of RAM (the machine I used to have at work). Mind you, OS X 10.0 was a bear. 10.1 was much better, and 10.2 and 10.3 were just about right. 10.4 is slower on that machine than 10.3, but still not boggy. I'm guessing that any further upgrades to the OS will not be worth it. Don't compare OS X to XP, they're not comparable: they degrade in completely different ways and circumstances. Running OS X on 256 MB of RAM is perfectly acceptable, running XP on 256 MB of RAM is painful. That said, no, for $100 you cannot build a machine that will run 10.4 well, and yes, OSS is the best solution for this problem. If you can get a 100% supported environment running RedHat, you'll have a very good experience. Will it be as pretty as OS X? No. Will it have full support for MS Office or iLife or any of the other software that runs on OS X? No. But it will have support for OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and a lot of other software - and the best part is, most of the consumer-class software written for Linux is OSS, so the users will be able to download to their hearts' content.
And of course, the woman is in Canada, so US law generally doesn't apply there. (We didn't invade yet, did we?)
Of course not! We have to finish off Axis of Evil Episode I: The Mother of All Battles before we can go on to Axis of Evil Episode II: Anchluss in the Great White North!
They can match the Y chromosome of a brother (by the same father), or the son of his brother (by the same father). As long as you follow the male line, it works. Likewise, if Copernicus had a sister with daughters, they could follow the female line for the mitochondrial DNA. The point is that they are not looking for phenotype, but for particular parts of the genome (and for the mitochondrial genome) that do not change (beyond point mutation and other forms of genetic drift) so long as they can see a same-sex line of descent.
Actually, no, it was not "little more than an obscure research channel until the development of the web." I was on USENET for at least 8 years before I got access to the www.