First, "legal realism" is a defined term, not my own, which refers to the belief that merely by virtue of being law, something is morally correct. When I say a realist must automatically agree with the moral distinction which exists in law between impulse/premeditated murders, that is what I'm referring to. You must not have realized that. No big deal.
Second, self-defense is ameliorative not because of "context" but because I think the act of murder is defined as the willful termination of another individual's life who is not actively engaged in attempting your murder. As such, self-defense fails to meet the definition of murder, any more than theft meets the definition of murder. Thats not context, thats just definition. Similarly, manslaughter is not murder.
Frankly, yes, I'm concerned with both punishment and prevention. If you know that murder will always get the same punishment (although not capital, which I'm not endorsing here) then you will be less apt to do it.
Moreover, you're mistaken about the nature of the legal system, and whether or not it punishment or rehabilitation oriented. The earliest legal systems we know of (Hamurabi's Code) were explicitly punishment based, with retributory goals. The European legal systems, universally, were retributory until at the earliest the 19th century when some began rewriting certain laws to shift the nominal goals of the jails to rehabilitate as opposed to punish (although some systems, especially the British, beleived that punishment was rehabilitation, hence their extensive use of indentured servitude in the colonies as a primary means of punishment).
Finally, the nominal goal of the extant legal systems in the USA, as well as Canada and Australia is NOT rehabilitation. Ask your local criminal judge, warden or educated police officer. The majority of prisons in any of those three countries are too overpacked to be concerned at ALL about rehabilitating. Instead, they function primarily to isolate the criminals from law-abiding society, and as such protect the citizenry. If you think jails are about rehabilitation, why do none of them feature mandatory therapy/reeducation? Why do virtually all of them fail to rehabilitate (as evidenced by the disturbing recindivist behavior of the majority of ex-cons)? The real world justice system is not about rehabilitation; its about isolation and punishment.
Granted we do (in the USA) make a distinction between impulse/premeditated murder (as well as attempted and successful murder), that doesn't mean we should. While the "realist" school of the philosophy of law of course would state that the existence of a law makes it right, many other schools of thought would say that law should be changed to reflect changing perceptions of morality. Personally, I dont believe in a difference between impulse/premeditated murder, nor attempted/successulf murder, nor hatecrime/normal crime, etc. I believe the action is the crime, and the context (excepting the concept of self-defense) is almost exclusively (if not exclusively) irrelevant. If you murder someone, you murder someone; period. Thats just me, though.
The short story (which is quite clever, and is available in the collection of his stories entitled "Minority Report", can be summarized as this: the protagonist thinks he is about to be replaced with a new guy, when he finds a card [from the precogs, delivered by computer] that indicates he's going to murder someone. He freaks out and runs, stealing the card. He irrationally believes it is a set-up by his believed-replacement. In actuality, it says he'll murder a politician. There are a series of turns here, but if I remember correctly, the only question in the minority report by one of the precogs was when the protagonist would kill this person. I.e. two of them saw it happening on one date, and the third saw it on a different date. The computer, however, doesn't print the dates on the cards (instead only the crime and the criminal) and as a result it didn't mention any confusion.
The word, you asked about, is "druid". I've explained it before, just have a look in my past posts.
Because they should still be punished for the crime. This has contemporary precedent: several states have the same punishment for attempted murder as for successful murder. This is because, to certain people (including whole classes of philosophy) it is the intention to act which is important, as opposed to merely the success or failure of that action. Moreover, we only saw [in the movie] what the police did when they had an emergency murder; one which was in-the-heat-of-the-moment as opposed to premeditated. As such, they had to bust in, otherwise there wasn't enough time. Moreover, we have no indication that anyone but violent [pre]offenders are jailed, since it isn't mentioned in the movie.
Moreover, just as Tom Cruise's character mentioned: just because you stopped someone from doing something, why shouldn't they be held responsible as if you hadn't intervened? Why does my intervention lessen the severity of your intended actions?
Coming at the argument from a different direction, one could argue that no one who would murder someone criminally (as opposed, of course, to self-defense) should be allowed to walk free. Depending on whether or not you believe it is psychologically possible to be actually rehabilitated (which is debatable) you may think that all people who are demonstrably capable of criminal murder must be isolated.
Re:Get your SciFi right
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Science Faction
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· Score: 3, Informative
There's a serious difference here, that you're clearly missing.
In 1984, there is no means by which Big Brother and the Party are actually able to know what you're thinking besides subtle clues. Granted, they keep you under nearly complete surveillence, but they're still guessing based on educated analysis of your behavior. The disturbing part is not supposed to be the observation, but instead the ability of the Party to essentially arbitrarily determine that you were a Thought Criminal. Because of this, all behaviors that might even seem innapropriate needed to be avoided, thus crippling human society.
Minority Report, on the other hand (both in the short story, and the movie), includes the accurate ability to scientifically predict significant aspects of the future. In the short story, three retarded precogs perpetually mumble and gurble snippets of truth about the future, with computers analyzing their output then proceeding to produce cards which tell the police who is going to commit a particular crime. In the movie, the precogs are not retarded, and have their direct premonitions of the future projected/recorded into an audio-visual format for outside viewers. In both cases, the police know, factually, that until they interfere that the perpetrator will [so long as all three precogs agree] commit that crime. The story, thus, is about whether or not there really is destiny, and whether or not you can change it regardless of whether you know its coming. The "big brother"-like aspects, wherein people are "ret-scanned" when walking along the street, etc. are not intended as being oppressive. In fact, it doesn't seem that they're even government administered since their effects are primarily commercial. We see the police access the tracking information, but its entirely possible that they required a warrant (which the evidence from the precogs would provide) to access that otherwise secure private system, along the lines of a phone tap. As mentioned earlier, the protagonist completely circumvents the system at several points: it is not big brother. As to your false claim that the story is a warning of tyrranical governments, you've clearly never read the story and seem never to have seen the movie. The story ends with perfect correspondence between the predictions and events, despite attempts by several people to distort the future based on knowing its course. The message is that destiny is completely written (which parallels many of Dick's other short stories involving precognition and time travel), and includes precisely zero attempt to portray it as "wrong" to arrest people for precognitive crimes. The movie also confirms the precog abilities by and large, but claims that there are sometimes "minority reports" wherein the precogs disagree. However, as also stated, the female of the trio is always correct, so the point is meaningless; it just states that the males are imperfect precogs. It includes zero instances of the government doing anything that oppresses rights or corruptly extends beyond the legal limits of the precog system. The only possible case of this is the corrupt and criminal head of precrime, who is removed when this is discovered. Moreover, his own system discovered him! You just seem to want the story to be about your perspective...
For the record, you can clearly see the T1000's penis on arrival in the 20th century, at the beginning of T-2. If you've got the DVD, check it out.
This was the source of quite a bit of humor last time I watched the movie; a bunch of us were just back in from the bars, and we popped the movie in. Normally, everyone would pass out within the first half hour of the movie at 3am, but we were all laughing so much when one of the girls pointed out the T-1000's penis that we watched the whole thing.
"And just how would these hanging handles move? Why not install seats too. And walls. And put them underground, and call them "Subways". I think I'm on to something."
THe handles would move, suspended from the ceiling, by a corresponding track. Duh.
I dont know; in my personal experience with these devices (in their slower, American and Australian forms), I've rarely seen people hold the railing. Most often, they're holding their bags, walking, or reading, etc.
Obviously, I'm not suggesting no one uses the railing. But the people who need the railing (i.e. the elderly, the poorly balanced) might not be well advised to use such a device as this.
Alternately: put hanging handles a la the subway system. They'd be adjustable (i.e. you could raise/lower them) with one hand, and then you'd avoid the need for a railing.
Their website states that after an interview with a Microsoft person who insinuated that EA was "stupid" for allowing the 007 exploit, this team released a parallel exploit for Microsoft's own MechWarrior. As such, it would seem that they could first use their own MechWarrior exploit, then this [overflow exploit]. Guess they wont need to share the money.
As mentioned in the article, the most difficult issue is the transition from moving on the walkway and moving on stationary ground.
It seems to me the best solution to this is to have "lanes" in the walkway. The far left lane would move at the maximum speed, whereas successive lanes to the right would be decelerated. When exits were reached, you could easily step to the right to get to a lower speed; the transition between 9km/h and 6km/h is still a transition, but its less than 9km/h to 0km/h.
Re:Spanish Language reference dictionary.
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Isn't It Ironic?
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Wow, you're factually inaccurate on every point.
"You mean to say latin-american spanish generally excludes the second person plural informal, viz vosotros. Also, while it reduces the number of verb conjugations in general use by a sixth, it doesn't reduce the total language by a sixth. Duh."
It doesn't generally exclude vosotros, it COMPLETELY excludes it. The noun vosotros and corresponding conjugations simply are NEVER taught in Cuban/South American spanish education.
"Uhm, you seem to have forgotten about él and ella, ellos and ellas. Woops."
Uhm, you're an idiot. El/Ella are third person objects, included with usted. They are NOT unique conjugations, and the conjugation is identical for usted as it is for el/ella. Moreover, Ellos/Ellas are the same thing, but for ustedes (third, plural). You're a complete idiot for not understanding that these are the same thing, and then claiming the contrary.
"I think you need a refresher on what first, second, and third person mean in English. In short: the first person is the one speaking, the second is the one being spoken to, the third is the one being spoken about."
I think you need a refresher on what first/second/third person mean in Spanish. In the spanish language, you can use the third-person to refer FORMALLY to the second-person object. This is not paralleled in English, and thats why you're an idiot acting like it is. Basically, by eliminating the EXISTENCE of a 2nd-person-plural (which is identical to 2nd-person-plural-informal as opposed to 2nd-person-plural-formal which is identical to 3rd-person-plural), S.American/Cuban spanish eliminates the ability to informally refer to a 2nd-person-plural group.
"Oh, and you claim that having fewer words and words borrowed from English is "worse". Right."
Okay, (a) having fewer words is worse, in my definition, because they've lost the ability to eloquently express ideas as compared to Castillian spanish. There's a reason why many Latin American poets compose in Castillian. As for borrowing english words, they've done so because they're poorly educated in the ALREADY-EXISTING spanish words which already express those ideas. There's no reason, except poor education or laziness to adopt the English word into Spanish, when there's already a Spanish word that fills the need.
So, to review: you were wrong on EVERYTHING you posted, which is (to refer to a recent/. article) quite ironic, since you claimed to be correcting me. Again: "idiot".
Re:Spanish Language reference dictionary.
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Isn't It Ironic?
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Among the three main places I've lived is Miami, where I grew up. A significant Cuban exile and Cuban-descendent population lives in Miami, esp. Little Havana.
Cuban spanish is exceptionally different from Castillian Spanish, although its quite similar to South American Spanish:
S.American and Cuban spanish primarily differentiate from Castillian spanish by the entire elimination of the grammatical conjugation of 2nd-person-plural (see the end of my post for explanation, if you're not clear what I mean here). This reduces the content of the language by one sixth.
Moreover, the vocabulary for Cuban spanish is approximately half or less, according to my High School and College spanish classes, than Castillian spanish. Worse, it contains a signficant number of English-borrowed words which have not only replaced the true spanish word (i.e. "Cake" replacing "torte", as the translation of the English 'cake'), but have in doing so eliminated Spanish cognates of the english word.
Now, to clarify the grammar issue: in Castillian spanish, there are six conjugations of all verbs: 1st person singular (yo), 2nd person singular (tu), 3rd person singular (usted), 1st person plural (nosotros), 2nd person plural (vosotros) and 3rd person plural (ustedes). Cuban/South American spanish completely eliminates vosotros as a word, and all verbs are conjugated as ustedes instead. In other words, there is no way, except for sentential context, to determine whether or not "ustedes" means "you all" or "they all" in Cuban/S.American spanish. As if to make this worse, there is the difficulty that 3rd person is often used in place of 2nd person in spanish to designate formal v. informal, and you realize that now there is no way to distinguish informal 2nd/3rd person plural again formal 2nd/3rd person plural in Cuban/South American spanish.
I've spent a significant amount of time living in various cities in Australia, and never encountered this. Having been a member at two different stores in Sydney, one in Adelaide, and with friends who are members in smaller towns like Canburra and others, its never been an issue. We simply brought in a peice of mail sent to us at our local [Australian] address to authenticate that we lived there.
I'm not calling you a liar or anything, but you ought to ask if you can do this.
Re:Obligatory Blackadder reference
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Isn't It Ironic?
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See, you're only half-correct. If something is in the dictionary, then its right insofar as that dictionary is held as an authority. This is the very nature of an authority. Thus, insofar as you believe a this dictionary is valid, then you must accept its definitions as valid. Its not a "take some and leave the rest deal"; either the dictionary contains all truth, or its invalid (and only contains an unreliable mix of truth and untruth).
However, you are correct that something not being in the dictionary doesn't necessarily make it untrue. At least, in American english. In the UK, the Oxford dictionary is the official lexicon, as far as I know. In Spain, there is a governmental organization which codifes the Castillian spanish, and thus its dictionary is the authority on Castillian spanish. Any word not present in it, isn't Castillian spanish. Period. Of course, South American spanish (not to mention Cuban spanish) has no such singular authority.
Part, I think, of the reason they weren't doing this before is the question of "name recognition" and their desire to build a brand.
By first establishing themselves as a complete "product", i.e. "Amazon", people will now recognize these portal'd Amazon links as something new but still part of the Amazon-whole.
If they had simply introduced this ability from the beginning, they risked other companies somehow taking advantage of it to make it appear as if the "store" was the secondary-site, as opposed to Amazon itself.
If an employee is forced to do something undesireable by a superior, the contract/agreement is essentially invalid because of the power the superior has over the employee. That is, the employee hasn't acted "freely" in making the agreement, and so the agreement is invalid.
With Jeremy and the RIAA, however, there's something different. The RIAA does not, in any legally important sense, have "power over" Jeremy. You may say that their economic influence is "power", but that simply isn't legally relevant. As to why, imagine if all agreements were null and void simply because one person had more money than the other? It'd be a nightmare: at the very least, you could never be legally employed again since your potential employer could never enter into a contract with you since they're always more economically influential.
Incidentally, neither of these are "blackmail". Blackmail is when you use force to secretly demand action of someone else, on the condition that if they do so you will relinquish [or at least fail to act on] that force. Basically, if the RIAA said "Sign this agreement or we'll kill you", that'd be blackmail; but they've just said "sign this agreement or we sue you". Instead, they sued him, and then offered him a way to end the lawsuit.
You're mistaken. Non-competition clauses are not routinely striken down, and when they are, its typically because it askes some excessive or innapropriate demand of one of them, i.e. an excessively large range of non-competition, etc.
Not incidentally, I finished examining that agreement, and see no reason why his conversations on CNN or any other interviews violated that agreement.
No, he agreed to a settlement. However fair or unfair the settlement was, if Jeremy agreed to it, then he's contractually bound. It would be wrong of the RIAA not to punish him for violating their agreement.
You know what, I made a mistake about the word "warcraft", so I'll definately give you the point for making an appropriate joke. I'm nothing if not mature enough to know I made a mistake there.
Um, this has nothing to due with flaws in the American system. If his comments to CNN violate the terms of the settlement, then the RIAA is fully in its rights to rescind all benefits from that dismissal.
Now, I am not sure - glancing at the interviews and the dismissal agreement - whether or not he's violated it or not. Frankly, thats for someone with a more precise legal background to handle than me. But thats the key issue: we simply cannot rant against the RIAA unless we first confirm that they're doing anything wrong.
I guess I should add an extra detail: according to the University of Sydney's anthropology department, under 30% of the current Australian population has any significant ancestry amongst those original "criminal" colonists. The gross majority owe their ancestrry to the repeated waves of immigration by people from nearly every country in the world (although there is a surprisingly small population of non-whites, with the notable exception of the significantly large Chinese population).
Of the criminals who were sent to Australia, you should remember exactly two facts, at least:
One, until the American revolution, those criminals were being sent to America as indentured servants; When the revolution occured, there was no means of removing those criminals from the overcrowded British system, meaning that instead they inhabited numerous overpacked ships for weeks and months off the shore of the UK.
Two, of the criminals that were sent to Australia, something on the order of 70% (the numbers vary) were non-violent, and under the age of 20. The majority of these criminals were orphans who stole bread, prostitutes and the ilk. These weren't, without many exceptions, murders and real theives. Moreover, a significant portion of the colonists were Black Sheep of wealthy European families, sent to Australia with the combination of hopes that they might not embarass the family further, and that they might redeem themselves.
Now, as to their rights...hey I love the country, and hope to move back there, but its a country that has a list of books/movies/games/music that the government deeps innappropriate, and can, if it wishes, refuse to permit their import. This occured recently, with GTA: Vice City, which forced Rockstar games to censor the game slightly for release there. Its a dangerous rule...of course the US (my current home) is getting precariously close.
Color me offtopic if you will, but the first thing I thought of after reading your post was that of a person driving while intoxicated by their belief in god.
Not a history really - there was a short-lived group that did this, and has since disbanded I believe. WiReD ran an article, just do a search on their website.
Slashdot Mirror
First, "legal realism" is a defined term, not my own, which refers to the belief that merely by virtue of being law, something is morally correct. When I say a realist must automatically agree with the moral distinction which exists in law between impulse/premeditated murders, that is what I'm referring to. You must not have realized that. No big deal.
Second, self-defense is ameliorative not because of "context" but because I think the act of murder is defined as the willful termination of another individual's life who is not actively engaged in attempting your murder. As such, self-defense fails to meet the definition of murder, any more than theft meets the definition of murder. Thats not context, thats just definition. Similarly, manslaughter is not murder.
Frankly, yes, I'm concerned with both punishment and prevention. If you know that murder will always get the same punishment (although not capital, which I'm not endorsing here) then you will be less apt to do it.
Moreover, you're mistaken about the nature of the legal system, and whether or not it punishment or rehabilitation oriented. The earliest legal systems we know of (Hamurabi's Code) were explicitly punishment based, with retributory goals. The European legal systems, universally, were retributory until at the earliest the 19th century when some began rewriting certain laws to shift the nominal goals of the jails to rehabilitate as opposed to punish (although some systems, especially the British, beleived that punishment was rehabilitation, hence their extensive use of indentured servitude in the colonies as a primary means of punishment).
Finally, the nominal goal of the extant legal systems in the USA, as well as Canada and Australia is NOT rehabilitation. Ask your local criminal judge, warden or educated police officer. The majority of prisons in any of those three countries are too overpacked to be concerned at ALL about rehabilitating. Instead, they function primarily to isolate the criminals from law-abiding society, and as such protect the citizenry. If you think jails are about rehabilitation, why do none of them feature mandatory therapy/reeducation? Why do virtually all of them fail to rehabilitate (as evidenced by the disturbing recindivist behavior of the majority of ex-cons)? The real world justice system is not about rehabilitation; its about isolation and punishment.
Granted we do (in the USA) make a distinction between impulse/premeditated murder (as well as attempted and successful murder), that doesn't mean we should. While the "realist" school of the philosophy of law of course would state that the existence of a law makes it right, many other schools of thought would say that law should be changed to reflect changing perceptions of morality. Personally, I dont believe in a difference between impulse/premeditated murder, nor attempted/successulf murder, nor hatecrime/normal crime, etc. I believe the action is the crime, and the context (excepting the concept of self-defense) is almost exclusively (if not exclusively) irrelevant. If you murder someone, you murder someone; period. Thats just me, though.
The short story (which is quite clever, and is available in the collection of his stories entitled "Minority Report", can be summarized as this: the protagonist thinks he is about to be replaced with a new guy, when he finds a card [from the precogs, delivered by computer] that indicates he's going to murder someone. He freaks out and runs, stealing the card. He irrationally believes it is a set-up by his believed-replacement. In actuality, it says he'll murder a politician. There are a series of turns here, but if I remember correctly, the only question in the minority report by one of the precogs was when the protagonist would kill this person. I.e. two of them saw it happening on one date, and the third saw it on a different date. The computer, however, doesn't print the dates on the cards (instead only the crime and the criminal) and as a result it didn't mention any confusion.
The word, you asked about, is "druid". I've explained it before, just have a look in my past posts.
Because they should still be punished for the crime. This has contemporary precedent: several states have the same punishment for attempted murder as for successful murder. This is because, to certain people (including whole classes of philosophy) it is the intention to act which is important, as opposed to merely the success or failure of that action. Moreover, we only saw [in the movie] what the police did when they had an emergency murder; one which was in-the-heat-of-the-moment as opposed to premeditated. As such, they had to bust in, otherwise there wasn't enough time. Moreover, we have no indication that anyone but violent [pre]offenders are jailed, since it isn't mentioned in the movie.
Moreover, just as Tom Cruise's character mentioned: just because you stopped someone from doing something, why shouldn't they be held responsible as if you hadn't intervened? Why does my intervention lessen the severity of your intended actions?
Coming at the argument from a different direction, one could argue that no one who would murder someone criminally (as opposed, of course, to self-defense) should be allowed to walk free. Depending on whether or not you believe it is psychologically possible to be actually rehabilitated (which is debatable) you may think that all people who are demonstrably capable of criminal murder must be isolated.
There's a serious difference here, that you're clearly missing.
In 1984, there is no means by which Big Brother and the Party are actually able to know what you're thinking besides subtle clues. Granted, they keep you under nearly complete surveillence, but they're still guessing based on educated analysis of your behavior. The disturbing part is not supposed to be the observation, but instead the ability of the Party to essentially arbitrarily determine that you were a Thought Criminal. Because of this, all behaviors that might even seem innapropriate needed to be avoided, thus crippling human society.
Minority Report, on the other hand (both in the short story, and the movie), includes the accurate ability to scientifically predict significant aspects of the future. In the short story, three retarded precogs perpetually mumble and gurble snippets of truth about the future, with computers analyzing their output then proceeding to produce cards which tell the police who is going to commit a particular crime. In the movie, the precogs are not retarded, and have their direct premonitions of the future projected/recorded into an audio-visual format for outside viewers. In both cases, the police know, factually, that until they interfere that the perpetrator will [so long as all three precogs agree] commit that crime. The story, thus, is about whether or not there really is destiny, and whether or not you can change it regardless of whether you know its coming. The "big brother"-like aspects, wherein people are "ret-scanned" when walking along the street, etc. are not intended as being oppressive. In fact, it doesn't seem that they're even government administered since their effects are primarily commercial. We see the police access the tracking information, but its entirely possible that they required a warrant (which the evidence from the precogs would provide) to access that otherwise secure private system, along the lines of a phone tap. As mentioned earlier, the protagonist completely circumvents the system at several points: it is not big brother. As to your false claim that the story is a warning of tyrranical governments, you've clearly never read the story and seem never to have seen the movie. The story ends with perfect correspondence between the predictions and events, despite attempts by several people to distort the future based on knowing its course. The message is that destiny is completely written (which parallels many of Dick's other short stories involving precognition and time travel), and includes precisely zero attempt to portray it as "wrong" to arrest people for precognitive crimes. The movie also confirms the precog abilities by and large, but claims that there are sometimes "minority reports" wherein the precogs disagree. However, as also stated, the female of the trio is always correct, so the point is meaningless; it just states that the males are imperfect precogs. It includes zero instances of the government doing anything that oppresses rights or corruptly extends beyond the legal limits of the precog system. The only possible case of this is the corrupt and criminal head of precrime, who is removed when this is discovered. Moreover, his own system discovered him! You just seem to want the story to be about your perspective...
For the record, you can clearly see the T1000's penis on arrival in the 20th century, at the beginning of T-2. If you've got the DVD, check it out.
This was the source of quite a bit of humor last time I watched the movie; a bunch of us were just back in from the bars, and we popped the movie in. Normally, everyone would pass out within the first half hour of the movie at 3am, but we were all laughing so much when one of the girls pointed out the T-1000's penis that we watched the whole thing.
Great movie though, of course.
"And just how would these hanging handles move? Why not install seats too. And walls. And put them underground, and call them "Subways". I think I'm on to something."
THe handles would move, suspended from the ceiling, by a corresponding track. Duh.
I dont know; in my personal experience with these devices (in their slower, American and Australian forms), I've rarely seen people hold the railing. Most often, they're holding their bags, walking, or reading, etc.
Obviously, I'm not suggesting no one uses the railing. But the people who need the railing (i.e. the elderly, the poorly balanced) might not be well advised to use such a device as this.
Alternately: put hanging handles a la the subway system. They'd be adjustable (i.e. you could raise/lower them) with one hand, and then you'd avoid the need for a railing.
Their website states that after an interview with a Microsoft person who insinuated that EA was "stupid" for allowing the 007 exploit, this team released a parallel exploit for Microsoft's own MechWarrior. As such, it would seem that they could first use their own MechWarrior exploit, then this [overflow exploit]. Guess they wont need to share the money.
Or, as Steve Martin once said,
"You can unscrew a light bulb".
(as opposed, of course, to a pregnant woman)
As mentioned in the article, the most difficult issue is the transition from moving on the walkway and moving on stationary ground.
It seems to me the best solution to this is to have "lanes" in the walkway. The far left lane would move at the maximum speed, whereas successive lanes to the right would be decelerated. When exits were reached, you could easily step to the right to get to a lower speed; the transition between 9km/h and 6km/h is still a transition, but its less than 9km/h to 0km/h.
Wow, you're factually inaccurate on every point.
/. article) quite ironic, since you claimed to be correcting me. Again: "idiot".
"You mean to say latin-american spanish generally excludes the second person plural informal, viz vosotros. Also, while it reduces the number of verb conjugations in general use by a sixth, it doesn't reduce the total language by a sixth. Duh."
It doesn't generally exclude vosotros, it COMPLETELY excludes it. The noun vosotros and corresponding conjugations simply are NEVER taught in Cuban/South American spanish education.
"Uhm, you seem to have forgotten about él and ella, ellos and ellas. Woops."
Uhm, you're an idiot. El/Ella are third person objects, included with usted. They are NOT unique conjugations, and the conjugation is identical for usted as it is for el/ella. Moreover, Ellos/Ellas are the same thing, but for ustedes (third, plural). You're a complete idiot for not understanding that these are the same thing, and then claiming the contrary.
"I think you need a refresher on what first, second, and third person mean in English. In short: the first person is the one speaking, the second is the one being spoken to, the third is the one being spoken about."
I think you need a refresher on what first/second/third person mean in Spanish. In the spanish language, you can use the third-person to refer FORMALLY to the second-person object. This is not paralleled in English, and thats why you're an idiot acting like it is. Basically, by eliminating the EXISTENCE of a 2nd-person-plural (which is identical to 2nd-person-plural-informal as opposed to 2nd-person-plural-formal which is identical to 3rd-person-plural), S.American/Cuban spanish eliminates the ability to informally refer to a 2nd-person-plural group.
"Oh, and you claim that having fewer words and words borrowed from English is "worse". Right."
Okay, (a) having fewer words is worse, in my definition, because they've lost the ability to eloquently express ideas as compared to Castillian spanish. There's a reason why many Latin American poets compose in Castillian. As for borrowing english words, they've done so because they're poorly educated in the ALREADY-EXISTING spanish words which already express those ideas. There's no reason, except poor education or laziness to adopt the English word into Spanish, when there's already a Spanish word that fills the need.
So, to review: you were wrong on EVERYTHING you posted, which is (to refer to a recent
Among the three main places I've lived is Miami, where I grew up. A significant Cuban exile and Cuban-descendent population lives in Miami, esp. Little Havana.
Cuban spanish is exceptionally different from Castillian Spanish, although its quite similar to South American Spanish:
S.American and Cuban spanish primarily differentiate from Castillian spanish by the entire elimination of the grammatical conjugation of 2nd-person-plural (see the end of my post for explanation, if you're not clear what I mean here). This reduces the content of the language by one sixth.
Moreover, the vocabulary for Cuban spanish is approximately half or less, according to my High School and College spanish classes, than Castillian spanish. Worse, it contains a signficant number of English-borrowed words which have not only replaced the true spanish word (i.e. "Cake" replacing "torte", as the translation of the English 'cake'), but have in doing so eliminated Spanish cognates of the english word.
Now, to clarify the grammar issue: in Castillian spanish, there are six conjugations of all verbs: 1st person singular (yo), 2nd person singular (tu), 3rd person singular (usted), 1st person plural (nosotros), 2nd person plural (vosotros) and 3rd person plural (ustedes). Cuban/South American spanish completely eliminates vosotros as a word, and all verbs are conjugated as ustedes instead. In other words, there is no way, except for sentential context, to determine whether or not "ustedes" means "you all" or "they all" in Cuban/S.American spanish. As if to make this worse, there is the difficulty that 3rd person is often used in place of 2nd person in spanish to designate formal v. informal, and you realize that now there is no way to distinguish informal 2nd/3rd person plural again formal 2nd/3rd person plural in Cuban/South American spanish.
I've spent a significant amount of time living in various cities in Australia, and never encountered this. Having been a member at two different stores in Sydney, one in Adelaide, and with friends who are members in smaller towns like Canburra and others, its never been an issue. We simply brought in a peice of mail sent to us at our local [Australian] address to authenticate that we lived there.
I'm not calling you a liar or anything, but you ought to ask if you can do this.
See, you're only half-correct. If something is in the dictionary, then its right insofar as that dictionary is held as an authority. This is the very nature of an authority. Thus, insofar as you believe a this dictionary is valid, then you must accept its definitions as valid. Its not a "take some and leave the rest deal"; either the dictionary contains all truth, or its invalid (and only contains an unreliable mix of truth and untruth).
However, you are correct that something not being in the dictionary doesn't necessarily make it untrue. At least, in American english. In the UK, the Oxford dictionary is the official lexicon, as far as I know. In Spain, there is a governmental organization which codifes the Castillian spanish, and thus its dictionary is the authority on Castillian spanish. Any word not present in it, isn't Castillian spanish. Period. Of course, South American spanish (not to mention Cuban spanish) has no such singular authority.
Part, I think, of the reason they weren't doing this before is the question of "name recognition" and their desire to build a brand.
By first establishing themselves as a complete "product", i.e. "Amazon", people will now recognize these portal'd Amazon links as something new but still part of the Amazon-whole.
If they had simply introduced this ability from the beginning, they risked other companies somehow taking advantage of it to make it appear as if the "store" was the secondary-site, as opposed to Amazon itself.
No, here's where your analogy fails:
If an employee is forced to do something undesireable by a superior, the contract/agreement is essentially invalid because of the power the superior has over the employee. That is, the employee hasn't acted "freely" in making the agreement, and so the agreement is invalid.
With Jeremy and the RIAA, however, there's something different. The RIAA does not, in any legally important sense, have "power over" Jeremy. You may say that their economic influence is "power", but that simply isn't legally relevant. As to why, imagine if all agreements were null and void simply because one person had more money than the other? It'd be a nightmare: at the very least, you could never be legally employed again since your potential employer could never enter into a contract with you since they're always more economically influential.
Incidentally, neither of these are "blackmail". Blackmail is when you use force to secretly demand action of someone else, on the condition that if they do so you will relinquish [or at least fail to act on] that force. Basically, if the RIAA said "Sign this agreement or we'll kill you", that'd be blackmail; but they've just said "sign this agreement or we sue you". Instead, they sued him, and then offered him a way to end the lawsuit.
You're mistaken. Non-competition clauses are not routinely striken down, and when they are, its typically because it askes some excessive or innapropriate demand of one of them, i.e. an excessively large range of non-competition, etc.
Not incidentally, I finished examining that agreement, and see no reason why his conversations on CNN or any other interviews violated that agreement.
No, he agreed to a settlement. However fair or unfair the settlement was, if Jeremy agreed to it, then he's contractually bound. It would be wrong of the RIAA not to punish him for violating their agreement.
You know what, I made a mistake about the word "warcraft", so I'll definately give you the point for making an appropriate joke. I'm nothing if not mature enough to know I made a mistake there.
Um, this has nothing to due with flaws in the American system. If his comments to CNN violate the terms of the settlement, then the RIAA is fully in its rights to rescind all benefits from that dismissal.
Now, I am not sure - glancing at the interviews and the dismissal agreement - whether or not he's violated it or not. Frankly, thats for someone with a more precise legal background to handle than me. But thats the key issue: we simply cannot rant against the RIAA unless we first confirm that they're doing anything wrong.
I guess I should add an extra detail: according to the University of Sydney's anthropology department, under 30% of the current Australian population has any significant ancestry amongst those original "criminal" colonists. The gross majority owe their ancestrry to the repeated waves of immigration by people from nearly every country in the world (although there is a surprisingly small population of non-whites, with the notable exception of the significantly large Chinese population).
Two points:
Of the criminals who were sent to Australia, you should remember exactly two facts, at least:
One, until the American revolution, those criminals were being sent to America as indentured servants; When the revolution occured, there was no means of removing those criminals from the overcrowded British system, meaning that instead they inhabited numerous overpacked ships for weeks and months off the shore of the UK.
Two, of the criminals that were sent to Australia, something on the order of 70% (the numbers vary) were non-violent, and under the age of 20. The majority of these criminals were orphans who stole bread, prostitutes and the ilk. These weren't, without many exceptions, murders and real theives. Moreover, a significant portion of the colonists were Black Sheep of wealthy European families, sent to Australia with the combination of hopes that they might not embarass the family further, and that they might redeem themselves.
Now, as to their rights...hey I love the country, and hope to move back there, but its a country that has a list of books/movies/games/music that the government deeps innappropriate, and can, if it wishes, refuse to permit their import. This occured recently, with GTA: Vice City, which forced Rockstar games to censor the game slightly for release there. Its a dangerous rule...of course the US (my current home) is getting precariously close.
Color me offtopic if you will, but the first thing I thought of after reading your post was that of a person driving while intoxicated by their belief in god.
Made me laugh.
Not a history really - there was a short-lived group that did this, and has since disbanded I believe. WiReD ran an article, just do a search on their website.