Yes... and that small snippet demonstrates a vocabulary multiple times the average today
Who's talking about average? I'd bet a nickel that that quote from 1780 was from a person with well above average education to a group with well above average education (about a third of the US population was illiterate at that time). Moreover, there are lots and lots of words that are in common usage today (like "airplane") that the 1780 speaker didn't know.
You're also comparing a style you like to styles you don't. I can talk like that. I son't. It sounds to me like an attempt to use flowery language, which in my opinion detracts from the point being made.
Each generation clearly sees a diminishing of English skills in the succeeding generation.
So, what you're saying is that, when illiteracy rates were over 80%, the quality of English used was much, much better? I find it much more likely that each generation complains about the succeeding generation.
Illiteracy has gone down over the past century in the US. What we talk about now is "functional illiteracy", which I don't believe they even tracked a hundred years ago.
At some point (unless you're going to go mystical on us), semantic analysis blends in with understanding. You're saying that it needs to have semantic metadata on moderately common phrases, and there's tons of those. It would be easy to miss some, and suddenly your system fails unexpectedly. "...because they had trepidations about violence" - that's highly unlikely to be in your semantic metadatabank, and can be interpreted. An English speaker with sufficient vocabulary will parse the sentence correctly (although, to be honest, I'm not sure if it's good English).
Anyway, you're not mentioning the store as a noun, and people want bicycles much more often than they want store windows. A lot of this is context. "Mary had been trying to decide what sort of small business to set up. Then she saw a bicycle in the window of a bicycle shop. She wanted it." I've made it a lot more ambiguous, by adding a completely different sentence in front of it.
The dress is described as something that might be desired with some details, and the mannequin is just mentioned. How about "Mary caught sight of a finely made mannequin that appeared to match her figure dressed in a wedding gown."? This is not a matter of the rules of English, since I can keep the sentence and adjust adjectives to make Mary want either the mannequin or the gown. Heck, how about "Mary caught sight of a well-made mannequin dressed in a tacky, overblown wedding gown."? It depends on the connotations of the descriptions.
Economic growth is based on eliminating jobs, so this isn't all bad. Moreover, if it's that drastic, it's likely to push us towards fixing the employment system.
There isn't that much difference between processing the rules of arithmetic and processing the rules of grammar.
Natural language processing aside, did you ever take a compiler class? One that covered the front end? I'm calling parsing and arithmetic to be significantly different.
Sure, they were paid for calculating things by hand. That didn't mean they were doing more than very basic mathematics. Show me a calculator that can prove that the square root of two is irrational, or that there's infinitely many prime numbers. These are really basic proofs, and nobody with a mathematical background should have any problem with them.
Why would any rational entity ever deploy a weapon system without also committing to developing a means to defend against it?
You may be unaware of this, but we don't normally worry about attacks from systems we deploy. We worry about attacks from systems other countries who are potentially hostile deploy. When the Soviets got nukes, we also committed to developing a means to defend against them. Know what? We couldn't develop a defense against nuclear weapons. Therefore, we should have stopped the Soviets, the Chinese, and the North Koreans from deploying such systems - how?
An no, mutually assured destruction has not been, is not, and will never be a 'defense'. It's simply a guarantee of more destruction.
We still haven't had an exchange of nuclear weapons. There still have been only two used against any sort of enemy, at the end of WWII. There's been a lot of crises and accidents in which such an exchange could have happened, and it never did. That's not the result of a guarantee of more destruction, but rather a successful defense.
This was an alert sent by a state that turned out to be wrong. There's absolutely no reason for the President, whether Donald Trump or Abraham Lincoln, to get involved.
There's so many legitimate complaints about Trump that there's no point in illegitimate ones.
"Duck and cover" can be a viable strategy if you're far enough away. There's nothing you can do if you're too close to ground zero, but if you're further from it getting in shelter can be useful. You seem to think survival precautions don't vary with distance from the blast.
The time from "not at war" to "BOOM" can be pretty darn short nowadays. Back in WWII, the Japanese tried half-heartedly to time a very nasty-sounding breakoff of negotiations to be just before the Pearl Harbor attack (the Japanese declared war hours after the attack). Had there been a good alert system in place, the Japanese attack could have been far less successful. (US codebreakers had determined that there would be a major diplomatic event at about sunrise, Pearl Harbor. This message was delayed in processing because nobody in charge was being urgent, and then the Army main transmitter in Washington was down, so they sent the alert by Western Union. The person delivering the telegram was approaching the base when the air attack started.)
Some people are color-blind. Never use color alone to distinguish things.
So, the test confirmation could have been a small yellow popup with standard yes/no buttons that plays Happy Birthday, while the real confirmation could have been a large red popup in another place playing the Imperial March, and with buttons that changed position in the popup so the operator would have to read the "Send Alert Message" button to distinguish it from the "False Alarm" button. (Yes, the latter is harder to do in MFC.)
You might want to look into railroad operations. Signals controlling sections of track must always fail to a "stop - don't go on this track" default, because the alternative is to have two trains trying to occupy the same space at the same time, given the correct mixup. It took a long time for them to come up with reliable software solutions, having previously used elaborately designed relay logic.
The point of war is to defeat the enemy. This can be done by physical or nonphysical means, including mostly bloodless. One of Napoleon's greatest non-battles was the non-battle around Ulm in 1805, in which he forced the surrender of an enemy army without serious fighting.
Now, all of these nonphysical means rely on physical force, so it's important to have the ability to kill enemies, but it doesn't necessarily have to be used.
To be specific, the Gnu project and FSF use the term "free software". It isn't quite the same as what the OSI calls "open source software", but it's very close. A project under a permissive license (Boost, to name one) is Free Software.
What's generally related to Gnu is copyleft. Boost is not copylefted.
There's a difference between Open Source as "software where you can look at the source" and "software with an OSI-approved license". That's caused a lot of confusion over the years.
In your first example, GPLv2 allows you to pass along a written offer you have. You don't have to maintain anything.
Your remaining examples seem to be cases of "I want to use someone else's code in defiance of how they wanted it used. What shenanigans can I do to make it technically legal?". If you use other people's code as they apparently wanted you to use it, you don't have that problem.
The GPL is quite clear to people who go by the spirit.
It's easy to find who your representatives are, and they normally make it easy for you to express your opinions to them. They're normally interested in being re-elected, and not that many people do express their opinions, so they'll probably be somewhat receptive to well-stated opinions. People without financial backing have managed to create movements that affect legislative actions before.
Or how about building garbage to produce future sales, like when Apple puts a garbage battery into a cellphone, or even cellphones without replaceable batteries?
In fact, lots of people like iPhones, and pay money for them when there are cheaper smartphones available. This suggests to me that some people (including me) like the iPhone. There are good reasons for the phone to be thin, in that that's what a whole lot of people want. (I don't want one much thicker than 7mm, myself.) There are good reasons for making the battery not easily replaceable.
This isn't a pump-and-dump scheme. Apple wants to keep their customers happy so they stay customers, and that means they want their customers to find their phones useful and stylish and whatever else they want with a phone. Apple likes repeat customers.
So, you're saying that you don't like some of Apple's design decisions, despite the fact that people are willing to spend a whole lot on their iPhones, and therefore the labor put into them is wasted. Car manufacturers could make longer-lasting cars (my wife and I generally keep ours for over ten years, BTW), but people aren't going to pay extra for them, so they make what they can best sell. Therefore, the auto industry is largely waste.
If you're going to make a point, try to keep your personal prejudices out of it. Find examples most people will agree with. There's a lot of irrational anti-Apple sentiment on Slashdot (and also some rational anti-Apple sentiment), but someone who doesn't share your opinions is going to discount what you're nominally trying to say.
With very few exceptions starting with Kennedy's Presidency, the deficit goes down with Democratic Presidents and up with Republican. (Depending on how you want to cut it, either LBJ raised the deficit or Nixon reduced it.) I've seen no such correlation with control of Congress. (I can't look up your site right now, as it's blocked where I work.)
Given that, it sure looks like a partisan issue to me. I'm not saying that Democrats are particularly fiscally responsible, but they do better than Republicans.
You seem awful happy about the idea that you can be shot dead for being misunderstood during an arrest, and everyone will think it's OK.
You also seem to be unaware that police tend to protect each other, and even a small number of bad police officers can do a large amount of harm unless and until stopped. I'm not suggesting that there are all that many bad cops, just many who will not stop a bad cop.
Or, for that matter, unaware that you could be arrested and be, at least temporarily, on the bad side of the law. Even if you never violate the law, a judge might consider there to be probable cause, or a prosecutor might take a flimsy case to a grand jury. Innocence will not necessarily stop you from being arrested, searched, and indicted (although it changes the odds a lot).
I have no idea why you consider the mishmash of US police forces to be the best in the world. As a general rule, they don't seem as capable of deescalating situations as several other countries' police forces.
I do support dashcam and bodycam recordings - as long as they don't mysteriously disappear after a police officer does something dubious.
What you say is contrary to my experience. I've used credit cards for transactions where I was required to sign, required to enter a PIN, and with no such authentication.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's talking about average? I'd bet a nickel that that quote from 1780 was from a person with well above average education to a group with well above average education (about a third of the US population was illiterate at that time). Moreover, there are lots and lots of words that are in common usage today (like "airplane") that the 1780 speaker didn't know.
You're also comparing a style you like to styles you don't. I can talk like that. I son't. It sounds to me like an attempt to use flowery language, which in my opinion detracts from the point being made.
So, what you're saying is that, when illiteracy rates were over 80%, the quality of English used was much, much better? I find it much more likely that each generation complains about the succeeding generation.
Illiteracy has gone down over the past century in the US. What we talk about now is "functional illiteracy", which I don't believe they even tracked a hundred years ago.
At some point (unless you're going to go mystical on us), semantic analysis blends in with understanding. You're saying that it needs to have semantic metadata on moderately common phrases, and there's tons of those. It would be easy to miss some, and suddenly your system fails unexpectedly. "...because they had trepidations about violence" - that's highly unlikely to be in your semantic metadatabank, and can be interpreted. An English speaker with sufficient vocabulary will parse the sentence correctly (although, to be honest, I'm not sure if it's good English).
I'm ASD, you insensitive clod!
Anyway, you're not mentioning the store as a noun, and people want bicycles much more often than they want store windows. A lot of this is context. "Mary had been trying to decide what sort of small business to set up. Then she saw a bicycle in the window of a bicycle shop. She wanted it." I've made it a lot more ambiguous, by adding a completely different sentence in front of it.
The dress is described as something that might be desired with some details, and the mannequin is just mentioned. How about "Mary caught sight of a finely made mannequin that appeared to match her figure dressed in a wedding gown."? This is not a matter of the rules of English, since I can keep the sentence and adjust adjectives to make Mary want either the mannequin or the gown. Heck, how about "Mary caught sight of a well-made mannequin dressed in a tacky, overblown wedding gown."? It depends on the connotations of the descriptions.
Economic growth is based on eliminating jobs, so this isn't all bad. Moreover, if it's that drastic, it's likely to push us towards fixing the employment system.
Natural language processing aside, did you ever take a compiler class? One that covered the front end? I'm calling parsing and arithmetic to be significantly different.
Sure, they were paid for calculating things by hand. That didn't mean they were doing more than very basic mathematics. Show me a calculator that can prove that the square root of two is irrational, or that there's infinitely many prime numbers. These are really basic proofs, and nobody with a mathematical background should have any problem with them.
You may be unaware of this, but we don't normally worry about attacks from systems we deploy. We worry about attacks from systems other countries who are potentially hostile deploy. When the Soviets got nukes, we also committed to developing a means to defend against them. Know what? We couldn't develop a defense against nuclear weapons. Therefore, we should have stopped the Soviets, the Chinese, and the North Koreans from deploying such systems - how?
We still haven't had an exchange of nuclear weapons. There still have been only two used against any sort of enemy, at the end of WWII. There's been a lot of crises and accidents in which such an exchange could have happened, and it never did. That's not the result of a guarantee of more destruction, but rather a successful defense.
Let who has never clicked on the wrong Slashdot moderation cast the first flame.
This was an alert sent by a state that turned out to be wrong. There's absolutely no reason for the President, whether Donald Trump or Abraham Lincoln, to get involved.
There's so many legitimate complaints about Trump that there's no point in illegitimate ones.
"Duck and cover" can be a viable strategy if you're far enough away. There's nothing you can do if you're too close to ground zero, but if you're further from it getting in shelter can be useful. You seem to think survival precautions don't vary with distance from the blast.
The time from "not at war" to "BOOM" can be pretty darn short nowadays. Back in WWII, the Japanese tried half-heartedly to time a very nasty-sounding breakoff of negotiations to be just before the Pearl Harbor attack (the Japanese declared war hours after the attack). Had there been a good alert system in place, the Japanese attack could have been far less successful. (US codebreakers had determined that there would be a major diplomatic event at about sunrise, Pearl Harbor. This message was delayed in processing because nobody in charge was being urgent, and then the Army main transmitter in Washington was down, so they sent the alert by Western Union. The person delivering the telegram was approaching the base when the air attack started.)
Some people are color-blind. Never use color alone to distinguish things.
So, the test confirmation could have been a small yellow popup with standard yes/no buttons that plays Happy Birthday, while the real confirmation could have been a large red popup in another place playing the Imperial March, and with buttons that changed position in the popup so the operator would have to read the "Send Alert Message" button to distinguish it from the "False Alarm" button. (Yes, the latter is harder to do in MFC.)
You might want to look into railroad operations. Signals controlling sections of track must always fail to a "stop - don't go on this track" default, because the alternative is to have two trains trying to occupy the same space at the same time, given the correct mixup. It took a long time for them to come up with reliable software solutions, having previously used elaborately designed relay logic.
The point of war is to defeat the enemy. This can be done by physical or nonphysical means, including mostly bloodless. One of Napoleon's greatest non-battles was the non-battle around Ulm in 1805, in which he forced the surrender of an enemy army without serious fighting.
Now, all of these nonphysical means rely on physical force, so it's important to have the ability to kill enemies, but it doesn't necessarily have to be used.
Not only are aircraft accidents acute, people who travel by plane will get more radiation exposure than people who live near nuclear power plants.
To be specific, the Gnu project and FSF use the term "free software". It isn't quite the same as what the OSI calls "open source software", but it's very close. A project under a permissive license (Boost, to name one) is Free Software.
What's generally related to Gnu is copyleft. Boost is not copylefted.
There's a difference between Open Source as "software where you can look at the source" and "software with an OSI-approved license". That's caused a lot of confusion over the years.
In your first example, GPLv2 allows you to pass along a written offer you have. You don't have to maintain anything.
Your remaining examples seem to be cases of "I want to use someone else's code in defiance of how they wanted it used. What shenanigans can I do to make it technically legal?". If you use other people's code as they apparently wanted you to use it, you don't have that problem.
The GPL is quite clear to people who go by the spirit.
It's easy to find who your representatives are, and they normally make it easy for you to express your opinions to them. They're normally interested in being re-elected, and not that many people do express their opinions, so they'll probably be somewhat receptive to well-stated opinions. People without financial backing have managed to create movements that affect legislative actions before.
In any case, you're blaming the wrong people.
Quote from your earlier post:
In fact, lots of people like iPhones, and pay money for them when there are cheaper smartphones available. This suggests to me that some people (including me) like the iPhone. There are good reasons for the phone to be thin, in that that's what a whole lot of people want. (I don't want one much thicker than 7mm, myself.) There are good reasons for making the battery not easily replaceable.
This isn't a pump-and-dump scheme. Apple wants to keep their customers happy so they stay customers, and that means they want their customers to find their phones useful and stylish and whatever else they want with a phone. Apple likes repeat customers.
So, you're saying that you don't like some of Apple's design decisions, despite the fact that people are willing to spend a whole lot on their iPhones, and therefore the labor put into them is wasted. Car manufacturers could make longer-lasting cars (my wife and I generally keep ours for over ten years, BTW), but people aren't going to pay extra for them, so they make what they can best sell. Therefore, the auto industry is largely waste.
If you're going to make a point, try to keep your personal prejudices out of it. Find examples most people will agree with. There's a lot of irrational anti-Apple sentiment on Slashdot (and also some rational anti-Apple sentiment), but someone who doesn't share your opinions is going to discount what you're nominally trying to say.
Obama cut the deficit he got from Bush. Trump is increasing the deficit he got from Obama.
With very few exceptions starting with Kennedy's Presidency, the deficit goes down with Democratic Presidents and up with Republican. (Depending on how you want to cut it, either LBJ raised the deficit or Nixon reduced it.) I've seen no such correlation with control of Congress. (I can't look up your site right now, as it's blocked where I work.)
Given that, it sure looks like a partisan issue to me. I'm not saying that Democrats are particularly fiscally responsible, but they do better than Republicans.
You seem awful happy about the idea that you can be shot dead for being misunderstood during an arrest, and everyone will think it's OK.
You also seem to be unaware that police tend to protect each other, and even a small number of bad police officers can do a large amount of harm unless and until stopped. I'm not suggesting that there are all that many bad cops, just many who will not stop a bad cop.
Or, for that matter, unaware that you could be arrested and be, at least temporarily, on the bad side of the law. Even if you never violate the law, a judge might consider there to be probable cause, or a prosecutor might take a flimsy case to a grand jury. Innocence will not necessarily stop you from being arrested, searched, and indicted (although it changes the odds a lot).
I have no idea why you consider the mishmash of US police forces to be the best in the world. As a general rule, they don't seem as capable of deescalating situations as several other countries' police forces.
I do support dashcam and bodycam recordings - as long as they don't mysteriously disappear after a police officer does something dubious.
What you say is contrary to my experience. I've used credit cards for transactions where I was required to sign, required to enter a PIN, and with no such authentication.