Of course you're describing exactly the system that the US has already. How clever of you.
Except you've omitted one tiny fact: the US system costs the US government (and thus US taxpayers) approximately 4 TIMES MORE per citizen than socialized systems, and the quality of care is demonstrably lower.
You don't do socialized medicine because it's kinder to poor people (although it is)
You don't do socialized medicine because it creates a healthier and more productive population (although it does)
You don't do socialized medicine because it removes the profit motive (i.e. denial of care) from the healthcare equation (although it helps to do this)
You do socialized medicine because it's cheaper.
Anyone who tells you that socialized medicine is more expensive, and/or will lead to a poorer standard of care, either works for a US insurance company, or is willfully ignoring all the evidence from every other industrialized 1st world country, or, like you I suspect, is just a fsckwit.
Novels rarely make good movies, mostly because they are simply too long and involved.
The good movies that come from novels are (almost always) films where the director has told a different story with the characters/setting of the novel. This is why we use the word "adaption" when talking about novel -> film.
Lord of the Rings is a classic example. It's (thank god) not the novels. Master and Commander is another excellent adaption, again, it's not any one of the 20 novels, but rather an independent story within that "universe". Blade Runner is another good adaption -- yet again the story being told is not the novel.
If there was a report saying an Asimov short story was being developed, I'd whoop for joy.
But color me skeptical that either of these will be anything other than I, Robot all over again.
One contains all the things explained by the phrase "god did it". The other contains all the things explained by "science".
A long time ago, everything was in the god basket, and nothing at all was in the science basket. The weather? God did it. Pregnancy? God did it. Disease? God did it. Where does stuff come from? God did it.
Then, as humanity learned more stuff, things got taken out of the god basket and put into the science basket. The weather. Pregnancy. Disease. Where stuff comes from, right back until a few billionths of a second before the big bang, getting closer all the time.
So what's left in the god basket? Good question -- but that's not where I'm going with this, because actually that's irrelevant.
The point is this: there has never -- never ever ever -- been a single thing that has been taken out of the science basket and put back in the god basket. Not one. Ever.
The traffic is all one way.
So I choose the basket that contains all human knowledge. I choose the basket that keeps getting new and fantastic stuff put in it. I choose the search for truth over the abrogation of understanding.
The god basket? You believers are welcome to that. It's basically empty, getting emptier all the time. But you're welcome to keep hanging on to it. The moment something is taken out of the science basket and put back into the god basket, you let me know, ok?
Ah, no, it isn't. Just as an example, right off the top of my head, they could go from 32 bits to 34 bits, giving them an extra 12,884,901,888 ids. Or 2 for every person on the planet.
Or they could round it off at a nice 40, for a healthy 1,099,511,627,776 -- roughly a trillion users.
There is absolutely no rule that says "need bigger than 32 bit -- must choose 64 bit".
The purpose of drawing guns is not to shoot but to immediately control a situation that could be deadly.
Which is why it was the wrong thing to do. Let's do a little thought experiment, shall we? Imagine you're a terrorist.
Further imagine that you've strapped on a bomb OUTSIDE YOUR CLOTHING and you intend to walk into an airport wearing that sh**.
Now imagine when the maximum point of "terror" would be for you to let the bomb off...
Yep. Bingo. Well done.
You'd let the bomb off EXACTLY at the time all the police pointed their weapons at you, and the crowd started to scream.
So, well handled to the police! They went all the way from a slight suspicion, to an ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE that the "suspect" would explode the device in about 10 seconds.
Lucky we have "trained professionals" on the job. Give them a few more years and I am sure they'll get that time way, way down...
Twice the average speed if you want constant acceleration.
Bingo! 160 km/s somewhere between Earth and Mars absolutely qualifies as solar system escape velocity! I'm a little rusty, but isn't it 400 km/s from the surface of the sun, and around 15 km/s out past Pluto? Voyager II was doing 16 km/s when it left the building...
...a similar engine could speed a spacecraft to Mars in less than a week.
Assuming you had another one on Mars to slow the thing down!
Let's assume they mean Earth to Mars in a week at their closest to each other (approx. 50 million kms). That's an average speed of approx. 300,000 km/h, or 80 km/s. Presumably the speed at the mid-point would be even higher. So anyone riding the spacecraft better hope that there isn't a malfunction of the "slowing down" laser at the other end, as depending on the angle, that might be enough to exit the solar system altogether!
Surviving minor rear-end accidents (the most common kind) without exploding is "normal use" for any definitions of the words "normal" and "use".
Read elsewhere about even the smallest drop -- the kind your laptop would "survive" (you might even call that "normal use") -- predisposing batteries to fire.
I'm still happy with the analogy... but remember you suggested it!:)
>>Your logic is flawed. I certainly expect a cigarette to cause a fire, [but not a battery]
Your science is flawed. I certainly expect high-density batteries to cause fires. Both because they have and also because of simple, general, chemical principles, the kind we should all have learned in high school.
The question then becomes how many fires, and what I am saying is that the numbers are currently way too low for any conclusion besides that the technology has been, historically, extremely and almost flawlessly handled by the entire industry.
>>The problem is that as battery density gets higher the danger from a failure gets higher.
Exactly correct. The problem is inherent in the technology.
Couple that with trying to squeeze that battery into a poorly ventilated laptop interior (where you also gotta fit your DVD drive, your CPU, etc. etc.) and you would think we'd see these things going off like bombs every week!
The fact that we don't is what I'm talking about...
Batteries (you know, those little packages of reactive chemicals?) have been bursting into flames ever since they were invented.
In TFA it cites a couple of modern examples. How many laptop batteries are out there?
Hardly a plague of battery burnin's.
Reminds me of SARS -- you remember, that disease that killed a couple hundred people in 2003 -- which basically shut down Asia for 6 months. Everyone suddenly forgot that the regular old "flu" kills 100,000 people every single year.
If we're gonna panic about "things that cause fatal fires" I'd be stomping on cigarette manufacturers before I went after the company that didn't even make the battery that caught on fire.
Cue 200+ comments to the tune of "I used to trust Dell but now..."
...Time on the 'net could be time spent with you Clicking on banners, searching for lovers Sneaking my laptop under the covers And I guess that's why they call it the blues
Ah, Elton, always on hand with crappy lyrics badly modified for current events...
It's called bait and switch. Advertise a low-price item and then try to up-sell the consumer to a more expensive one when they come into the shop.
No, what you described is perfectly legal. Trying to upsell -- no problem at all with that.
Bait and switch is when they say "50 inch TVs for $100!!!" and when you get to the store they say "Aw! Sold outta those, they went like hotcakes! But we DO have lots of 46 inch TVs for $99!"
Now you can make an argument that this is actually what they did with the 20GB PS3 -- but that argument won't hold much water when you take a look at this long list of 20 GB PS3s available right now on eBay, many of them brand new, from stores.
Sorry, but your education is not my responsibility.
That said, I agreed with your assertions about the relative difficulty of language learning in my original post. That much is true.
But the difficulty of spelling in English pales into insignificance besides, say, learning the inflections in heavily inflected languages, or getting tones from a non-tonal background. In other words, sure it makes it harder, but how is making spelling easier any more than a tiny bit helpful at the very beginning of language learning? And eniweigh eevn if i compretery misspl thingz u wil steel undrstnd.
Compare that minor possible gain to the simple fact that etymology supplies a lot of information for advanced users of all languages, and something has been lost at every historical attempt to "regularize" language. Reference the simplifying of the Chinese character set, the regularization of German spelling, etc. etc. etc. Again, do your own web searches since you don't seem to see the relevance of mine. Morphology plays its part here, in how we implicitly know words are "connected" in meaning.
Finally, there is no "memorization of a catalog" in language learning -- language simply doesn't work that way.
Look, IANAL ("L" being "linguist" in this case) but the last non-fiction book I read was "Language, Thought, and Reality", a selection of the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (look him up) and I get invited to all the linguist parties on campus!:)
Your example languages aren't good for your argument, as East Asian languages in general are actually _excellent_ examples of what I was "thinking of there".
Eg. For many years, "telephone" in Chinese was a loan word with three syllables in Chinese "te-le-feng" -- obviously from English, right? But as happens in most East Asian languages, that struck speakers as unnatural, and a "native" substitute took over completely. "Telephone" in Chinese is now "dianhua". Literally translates as "electric speech". Not a loan word, a completely native construction. But "telephone" -- the English word -- still retains its roots and is related to other words. If it was spelled "telifohwyn" (or three other variations in local varieties of differently pronounced English, or "faryap") could you say the same thing?
I speak four languages. In order of proficiency: English, Chinese ("Mandarin"), German, Spanish. Not sure what the relevance of that is, but you asked.
And notice, too, that I didn't say "all other languages" in the sentence you quote, nor did I say it was impossible to work out the roots in other languages. Not sure how you can tell what I "sound like" from reading something I've written... but we'll let that one go. I probably should have said "can be lost" -- apologies.
Unfortunately most of the academic articles I summarized to make my original post are behind logins.
One of the great and wonderful things about English is that spelling reflects quite accurately the history of the word. Sure, there are some pronunciation ambiguities that are a little difficult to learn, but even ESL learners get over that hill remarkably quickly.
But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word. Get the sound wrong and people will correct you almost immediately, so what's the problem?
In other languages, once a word has been imported, its roots are lost, and with that the connection to the linguistic system from which it came, and its connection to other similarly-sourced words.
So, regular spelling: great for primary school kids; not so great for everyone else who wants to use language at a more advanced level, for things like communication and literature.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you're describing exactly the system that the US has already. How clever of you.
Except you've omitted one tiny fact: the US system costs the US government (and thus US taxpayers) approximately 4 TIMES MORE per citizen than socialized systems, and the quality of care is demonstrably lower.
You don't do socialized medicine because it's kinder to poor people (although it is)
You don't do socialized medicine because it creates a healthier and more productive population (although it does)
You don't do socialized medicine because it removes the profit motive (i.e. denial of care) from the healthcare equation (although it helps to do this)
You do socialized medicine because it's cheaper.
Anyone who tells you that socialized medicine is more expensive, and/or will lead to a poorer standard of care, either works for a US insurance company, or is willfully ignoring all the evidence from every other industrialized 1st world country, or, like you I suspect, is just a fsckwit.
>>Can a teacher ask a student not to retain knowledge?
No, that's a stupid question. To be more specific: yes a teacher can "ask", but what possible good would it do?
>>How does IP law relate to teaching and sharing knowledge?
It doesn't, unless there is a contract between you and the institution. Is there? That thing you signed when you became a student, perhaps?
>>Whose property are those notes?
Yours, unless you agreed before the class started that you wouldn't keep any notes you made.
Why is this stuff "hard" or even "interesting"?
Novels rarely make good movies, mostly because they are simply too long and involved.
The good movies that come from novels are (almost always) films where the director has told a different story with the characters/setting of the novel. This is why we use the word "adaption" when talking about novel -> film.
Lord of the Rings is a classic example. It's (thank god) not the novels. Master and Commander is another excellent adaption, again, it's not any one of the 20 novels, but rather an independent story within that "universe". Blade Runner is another good adaption -- yet again the story being told is not the novel.
If there was a report saying an Asimov short story was being developed, I'd whoop for joy.
But color me skeptical that either of these will be anything other than I, Robot all over again.
Imagine two baskets.
One contains all the things explained by the phrase "god did it". The other contains all the things explained by "science".
A long time ago, everything was in the god basket, and nothing at all was in the science basket. The weather? God did it. Pregnancy? God did it. Disease? God did it. Where does stuff come from? God did it.
Then, as humanity learned more stuff, things got taken out of the god basket and put into the science basket. The weather. Pregnancy. Disease. Where stuff comes from, right back until a few billionths of a second before the big bang, getting closer all the time.
So what's left in the god basket? Good question -- but that's not where I'm going with this, because actually that's irrelevant.
The point is this: there has never -- never ever ever -- been a single thing that has been taken out of the science basket and put back in the god basket. Not one. Ever.
The traffic is all one way.
So I choose the basket that contains all human knowledge. I choose the basket that keeps getting new and fantastic stuff put in it. I choose the search for truth over the abrogation of understanding.
The god basket? You believers are welcome to that. It's basically empty, getting emptier all the time. But you're welcome to keep hanging on to it. The moment something is taken out of the science basket and put back into the god basket, you let me know, ok?
>>but it's the next biggest size
Ah, no, it isn't. Just as an example, right off the top of my head, they could go from 32 bits to 34 bits, giving them an extra 12,884,901,888 ids. Or 2 for every person on the planet.
Or they could round it off at a nice 40, for a healthy 1,099,511,627,776 -- roughly a trillion users.
There is absolutely no rule that says "need bigger than 32 bit -- must choose 64 bit".
Which is why it was the wrong thing to do. Let's do a little thought experiment, shall we? Imagine you're a terrorist.
Further imagine that you've strapped on a bomb OUTSIDE YOUR CLOTHING and you intend to walk into an airport wearing that sh**.
Now imagine when the maximum point of "terror" would be for you to let the bomb off...
Yep. Bingo. Well done.
You'd let the bomb off EXACTLY at the time all the police pointed their weapons at you, and the crowd started to scream.
So, well handled to the police! They went all the way from a slight suspicion, to an ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE that the "suspect" would explode the device in about 10 seconds.
Lucky we have "trained professionals" on the job. Give them a few more years and I am sure they'll get that time way, way down...
Twice the average speed if you want constant acceleration.
Bingo! 160 km/s somewhere between Earth and Mars absolutely qualifies as solar system escape velocity! I'm a little rusty, but isn't it 400 km/s from the surface of the sun, and around 15 km/s out past Pluto? Voyager II was doing 16 km/s when it left the building...
There was an interesting little bit about this topic in the transcript of the conversation when Nixon met Mao.
Nixon: We're concerned that people in your country don't have freedom of movement, Mr Chairman.
Mao: (thinks for a moment) Tell me how many million you want, Mr President.
Needless to say, the topic was dropped, and has never been raised again. How many tens of millions do you want?
Assuming you had another one on Mars to slow the thing down!
Let's assume they mean Earth to Mars in a week at their closest to each other (approx. 50 million kms). That's an average speed of approx. 300,000 km/h, or 80 km/s. Presumably the speed at the mid-point would be even higher. So anyone riding the spacecraft better hope that there isn't a malfunction of the "slowing down" laser at the other end, as depending on the angle, that might be enough to exit the solar system altogether!
Surviving minor rear-end accidents (the most common kind) without exploding is "normal use" for any definitions of the words "normal" and "use".
:)
Read elsewhere about even the smallest drop -- the kind your laptop would "survive" (you might even call that "normal use") -- predisposing batteries to fire.
I'm still happy with the analogy... but remember you suggested it!
>>would you expect a car to spontaneously combust?
Ah, you know they do, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto
Actually the analogy with the Ford Pinto is pretty exact. Read the "Safety Problems" part of that wikipedia page.
>>I think that the reason that SARS only killed a couple of hundred people was that Asia got shut down for 6 months.
Not correct, but revealing that this is what you think. Revealing in a "one more example of what I am saying about hype" kind of way.
SARS only killed a couple of hundred because it was WAY HARDER to get SARS from another person that it is to get the yearly 'flu.
SARS managed the trick of being fatal (like the flu) but didn't manage the trick of being horribly infectious (unlike the 'flu, which is).
>>Your logic is flawed. I certainly expect a cigarette to cause a fire, [but not a battery]
Your science is flawed. I certainly expect high-density batteries to cause fires. Both because they have and also because of simple, general, chemical principles, the kind we should all have learned in high school.
The question then becomes how many fires, and what I am saying is that the numbers are currently way too low for any conclusion besides that the technology has been, historically, extremely and almost flawlessly handled by the entire industry.
>>The problem is that as battery density gets higher the danger from a failure gets higher.
Exactly correct. The problem is inherent in the technology.
Couple that with trying to squeeze that battery into a poorly ventilated laptop interior (where you also gotta fit your DVD drive, your CPU, etc. etc.) and you would think we'd see these things going off like bombs every week!
The fact that we don't is what I'm talking about...
Batteries (you know, those little packages of reactive chemicals?) have been bursting into flames ever since they were invented.
In TFA it cites a couple of modern examples. How many laptop batteries are out there?
Hardly a plague of battery burnin's.
Reminds me of SARS -- you remember, that disease that killed a couple hundred people in 2003 -- which basically shut down Asia for 6 months. Everyone suddenly forgot that the regular old "flu" kills 100,000 people every single year.
If we're gonna panic about "things that cause fatal fires" I'd be stomping on cigarette manufacturers before I went after the company that didn't even make the battery that caught on fire.
Cue 200+ comments to the tune of "I used to trust Dell but now..."
Can we get a new tune up in here?
...Time on the 'net could be time spent with you
Clicking on banners, searching for lovers
Sneaking my laptop under the covers
And I guess that's why they call it the blues
Ah, Elton, always on hand with crappy lyrics badly modified for current events...
No, what you described is perfectly legal. Trying to upsell -- no problem at all with that.
Bait and switch is when they say "50 inch TVs for $100!!!" and when you get to the store they say "Aw! Sold outta those, they went like hotcakes! But we DO have lots of 46 inch TVs for $99!"
Now you can make an argument that this is actually what they did with the 20GB PS3 -- but that argument won't hold much water when you take a look at this long list of 20 GB PS3s available right now on eBay, many of them brand new, from stores.
Sorry, but your education is not my responsibility.
:)
That said, I agreed with your assertions about the relative difficulty of language learning in my original post. That much is true.
But the difficulty of spelling in English pales into insignificance besides, say, learning the inflections in heavily inflected languages, or getting tones from a non-tonal background. In other words, sure it makes it harder, but how is making spelling easier any more than a tiny bit helpful at the very beginning of language learning? And eniweigh eevn if i compretery misspl thingz u wil steel undrstnd.
Compare that minor possible gain to the simple fact that etymology supplies a lot of information for advanced users of all languages, and something has been lost at every historical attempt to "regularize" language. Reference the simplifying of the Chinese character set, the regularization of German spelling, etc. etc. etc. Again, do your own web searches since you don't seem to see the relevance of mine. Morphology plays its part here, in how we implicitly know words are "connected" in meaning.
Finally, there is no "memorization of a catalog" in language learning -- language simply doesn't work that way.
Look, IANAL ("L" being "linguist" in this case) but the last non-fiction book I read was "Language, Thought, and Reality", a selection of the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (look him up) and I get invited to all the linguist parties on campus!
Lots of people disagree with you there, many of them qualified. Here's a couple of essays on the topic for you:
http://mypage.iu.edu/~shetter/miniatures/zug.htm r .html#deriv
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~l150web/index.html
http://cla.calpoly.edu/%7Ejrubba/morph/morph.ove
You've missed my point again, but I've kinda tired of explaining it.
/. sniper, you will have seen my replies to other people on the gp.
Hopefully if you're actually interested in this topic and not just a
Good luck, and its encouraging that so many people seem to be interested in languages and etymology.
I agree. Here's a very loose primer on what I was talking about in the case of English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography
Your example languages aren't good for your argument, as East Asian languages in general are actually _excellent_ examples of what I was "thinking of there".
Eg. For many years, "telephone" in Chinese was a loan word with three syllables in Chinese "te-le-feng" -- obviously from English, right? But as happens in most East Asian languages, that struck speakers as unnatural, and a "native" substitute took over completely. "Telephone" in Chinese is now "dianhua". Literally translates as "electric speech". Not a loan word, a completely native construction. But "telephone" -- the English word -- still retains its roots and is related to other words. If it was spelled "telifohwyn" (or three other variations in local varieties of differently pronounced English, or "faryap") could you say the same thing?
>>Do you imagine that you can't do things like this in languages like German which have consistent spelling and grammar?
No.
I speak four languages. In order of proficiency: English, Chinese ("Mandarin"), German, Spanish. Not sure what the relevance of that is, but you asked.
And notice, too, that I didn't say "all other languages" in the sentence you quote, nor did I say it was impossible to work out the roots in other languages. Not sure how you can tell what I "sound like" from reading something I've written... but we'll let that one go. I probably should have said "can be lost" -- apologies.
Unfortunately most of the academic articles I summarized to make my original post are behind logins.
But here's a somewhat accurate free primer for you, if you're actually interested in the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography
One of the great and wonderful things about English is that spelling reflects quite accurately the history of the word. Sure, there are some pronunciation ambiguities that are a little difficult to learn, but even ESL learners get over that hill remarkably quickly.
But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word. Get the sound wrong and people will correct you almost immediately, so what's the problem?
In other languages, once a word has been imported, its roots are lost, and with that the connection to the linguistic system from which it came, and its connection to other similarly-sourced words.
So, regular spelling: great for primary school kids; not so great for everyone else who wants to use language at a more advanced level, for things like communication and literature.