Chernobyl had nothing to do with problems with fission reactors; it was about the problem with idiots. "Hey, Vassily, lets pull out the control rods, disable all the safety systems, and see what happens!"
So I'm supposed to believe an article written in another country, which quotes the hyper-archconservative Fraser institute (which has a huge "privatize health care so our wealthy members can make a killing off it" ax to grind) over my own experiences in my own country? Not fuckin' likely, my friend. Note that the article focusses on MRI and CAT waiting lists, which recent studies done by people more reputable than the Fraser institute have found to be largely the result of doctors refering patients to them for non-necessary reasons. The conclussion basically being that increasing the number of MRI machines, instead of decreasing waiting lists, increased them because doctors used them as a crutch instead of using other, less expensive, time tested diagnostic techniques.
Life lesson: Unless you live in a country, you need to do a hell of a lot more research than quoting one source (whose bias it would be very difficult for you to be aware of) before drawing some kind of conclussion. Recommended reading (use google to find copies): the Romanow report.
And people who realize that it would never work. Do you know how long the waiting lists and lines are for free healthcare in Canada, which has one of the best socialized healthcare systems in the world?
Yes, since I happen to live there. And the answer, in case anyone was wondering, is "Not particularly long". I've had relatives in the states wait much longer to have necessary procedures cleared by their profit grubbing insurance companies.
So let me get this straight. A person who works in the embedded market makes a comment on the embedded market and he's automatically wrong because he works in the embedded market?
No, his opinions are simply automatically untrustworthy because, as the president and CEO of a company that sells its own RTOS, he has a significant personal, professional, and financial stake in pushing a particular viewpoint (linux bad, my product good), and therefore has significant incentive to paint as distorted a picture of the market as is necessary to make his product look best. He's too damn close to the subject for any but the must gullible of rubes to consider him even remotely objective.
Look, I won't take advice on Buddhism from the Pope, I won't take advice on Linux from Bill Gates, and I won't take advice on non-FSF software from RMS, so I'm damn sure not going to take advice on RTOSes from this guy. What's so hard to understand about that?
In the interests of full disclosure, people taking "Tog" seriously should also read this article, in which Tog tells us why the web and everything on it should be written in BASIC.
I haven't been able to take his rantings even half-seriously since reading that load of garbage.
who, as near as I can tell, is some sort of sentient appendage growing on Bill Gates' ass. He has a whole site devoted to his particular brand of hyperactive boosterism.
You mean the modern theory (singular) of abiogenic hydrocarbons, promoted here in the US by one man, Thomas Gold. The theory is still controversial in the extreme, primarily accepted only by the Russian oil industry.
There are a lot of linguistic links between Japanese and Chinese. There are countless words in Japanese whose pronunciation comes from the original Chinese pronunciation. An obvious example is "denwa" (katakana reading) which comes from "dianhua" (pinyin) which means "telephone" in both languages. This is only a modern example, but many were borrowed so long ago, that the Chinese don't even say it the same way anymore.
You're describing loan words, which proves nothing about Japanese being descended from Chinese (which was the original parent's assertion). By your logic, English is descended from Chinese because we've incorporated words like "Gung-Ho".
Look, I'm not a lone voice crying in the woods here; there is a lot of linguistic theory devoted to the study of language families, language isolates and the like, and none claim that Japanese is descended from Chinese, even though they all (as I do) acknowledge that Japanese borrowed much vocabulary from Chinese. There are fundamental, radical differences (agglutinative vs. not, tonal vs. not, inflected vs. not, Subject-Object-Verb vs Subject-Verb-Object, etc, etc, ad naseum) between the two languages that preclude the idea that one is descended from the other.
It's a fascinating subject, and I'd usggest you do some research on it. Here is but one reference among many, many articles that have been written on the subject of Japanese and it's (lack of descent from) the Sino-Tibetan languages (specifically Chinese). Salient quotes:
Azerbaijani Turks write
Turkish with a Cyrillic alphabet, like the Russians use. But that doesnt
make Russian and Azeri Turkish related languages. Serbian and Croatian are
one and the same language but the Serbs write with the Cyrillic alphabet and
the Croats with a Latinate one. Chinese writing and Japanese writing may
look somewhat alike, but in fact Japanese and Chinese dont work alike, dont
form sentences or words in the same way, and are about as different as any
two languages can possibly be.
Nor should you confuse borrowing of words with being linguistically
related. Japanese and Korean both have borrowed many Chinese words but
that doesnt make Chinese the "origin" of Japanese. Japanese and Korean are
simply not demonstrably related to Chinese. "Related to" means "share a
common linguistic ancestor with". There is no known, reconstructed, or even
speculated at prehistoric language which is thought to have been the
ancestor of both Chinese languages and Japanese and Korean.
It simply depends on how accurate one wants to be. Japanese borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary, in roughly the same way that English borrowed the vocabulary of many other languages (notably Saxon), but to say that the early Japanese language was borrowed from the Chinese is inaccurate in the extreme.
Try getting the same results from a Finnish and a Mongol and tell me how successful you are.
That's an artifact of pictographic writing systems in which the core meaning of the characters is shared among multiple languages, and says nothing about the relationship of the underlying languages. Going the other way, for instance, is more difficult, because the Chinese lack the Hiragana/Katakana syllabaries and the entire concept of a particle system as it exists in Japanese.
Recall that grammar only provides the rules to using vocabulary.
Recall that, without grammar, language is useless. "Cow dog read the good fast" is chock full of english words, but utterly meaningless. Besides, linguists classify language into groups based not only upon grammatical relationships, but also on vocabularly relationships, and it nevertheless remains true that, despite the existence of many Chinese loan words in Japanese, Japanese is most emphatically not derived from Chinese.
Re:Japan is a major importer of culture
on
Japan's Empire of Cool
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...the ancient form of Japanese language itself...
This is incorrect. While the Japanese certainly imported the Chinese writing system, there are no known or suspected linguistic links between Japanese and Chinese (indeed, given that Japanese is a multisyllabic, agglutinative language, and the Chinese languages are monosyllabic and highly tonal, it is hard to see how they could be more different). Most linguists classify Japanese as a language isolate (one with no known relatives), although some suspect it is distantly related to Korean and Mongolian, and a few group it in a family with Finnish, Estonian, and Turkish as well.
If a volcano puts out a decade's worth of our contribution to greenhouse gas every time it blows, we can't be tipping the scales that much.
Source?
Without any attribution, this appears to be a miss statement of the commonly believed, Limbaugh spread junk science notion that "because volcanos have been spewing out volcanic chlorine for millions of years without wrecking the ozone layer, we can't possible be harming it with our CFCs". Problem being that volcanic chlorine is water soluble and rained out of the atmosphere long before it hits the ozone layer, whereas human generated CFCs are water insoluble, and live to reach (and destroy) the ozone layer.
In the interests of balance, it's worth pointing out that the second link (to hardylaw) is written by David T. Hardy, an ex-legal council for the NRA, and is not necessarily any more objective about Bowling than Bowling was itself.
You see, there's this thing called a "joke". You might want to look into it's definition before you go taking it literally and calling someone a dumbass.
Besides, whether or not pedophilia is something they've been "saddled with by nature" it remains, nonetheless, disgusting.
He's right and he's wrong. Yes it gets redirected, but no, it's not google doing that. It's "bomberrate", whoever they are, redirecting to ebay based on the google referal.
Just look at the "real" bomberrate page: it's essential a long circular string of links (a ton of which are labelled with variations on the word "Yu-Gi-Oh") all pointing to each other. Notice how they claim to sell an amazing variety of unrelated products, but you can never find any information on how to buy them? It's just page after page of long strings of text filled with abbreviations, specs, and other likely search terms, all pointing back at one another. Does this this strike you as the front page of a legitimate business, or a site designed to maximize the number of unrelated queries that turn it up? The entire site is a link farm designed to exploit Google's page-rank algorithm, get itself positioned very high on any search containing any of the insanely numerous, highly unrelated terms it contains, and then redirect them to a bunch of (quite possibly fraudulent) ebay sales in the hope that some sucker will bid on them.
The only thing Google has to do with any of this is the fact that they've been trying to fine tune the algorithm enough to put asshats like these out of business for a long time now.
Also interesting to note, did he die BEFORE or AFTER they stuck his name, address, picture, and the fact that he molested a 9 year old girl IN TEXAS up on the web?
Even more interesting: did he attempt to molest the 9 year-old girl BEFORE or AFTER he died??
Pedophiles are disgusting enough, but zombie pedophiles? That's the nightmare scenario.
Any tips on learning Japanese (spoken form)? Enough to get around and not offend too many people.
I don't think I can manage the written form:).
The Japanese language (spoken) hasn't been overly difficult for me to learn. Compared to english, it's much more regular, both in terms of pronounciation and the spectacular number of odd conjugations we have. I pity anyone who tries to learn english as a second language; our grammar is downright malevolent. I think a sticking point for many people may be the Subject-Object-Verb word ordering, but if you've ever programmed in Forth or used an HP calculator, it comes off as fairly intuitive. There's also a surprising (or not) number of english (and some dutch and german) loan words in Japanese.
In terms of the written language, the kana (katakana and hiragana, both syllabaries) are quite simple, and can be mastered within a week. The Kanji (the chinese characters) are obviously much more difficult, as you have to memorize around 2,000 of them to be basically literate, but it bears remembering that some linguists believe that learning it is no more difficult than learning english spelling, which boils down to memorizing arbitrary letter sequences with, in many cases, no relation to their pronounciation or meaning.
The Nakama textbook and it's workbook are the best intro to the language that I've come across.
So every UK news site and tabloid papers talking about "Bush Statevisit to England" wasn't news because it was talking about future events?
No, I think his point was that a statement of intent to arrest some pasty-faced freak is a lot less important and news worthy than a possible security breach in an area where two of the more important people in the world right now are meeting.
The implication being that MSnewsbot is just more celebrity obsessed, sensationalist garbage masquerading as actual news, whereas google's service manages to present stories of actual importance and relevance.
Tried running Neverwinter Nights with the newest Catalysts? They don't work; period. And The installation fucks something up so that you can't roll back to a working version, either. ATI makes good hardware, but their drivers are total crap, especially if you run linux. Like the parent, I cannot in good conscience recommend ATI products to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Chernobyl.
Chernobyl had nothing to do with problems with fission reactors; it was about the problem with idiots. "Hey, Vassily, lets pull out the control rods, disable all the safety systems, and see what happens!"
No, I'm not calling the CSM biased; read my post again. The source they cite, the Fraser Institute, is highly biased. Do some research.
So I'm supposed to believe an article written in another country, which quotes the hyper-archconservative Fraser institute (which has a huge "privatize health care so our wealthy members can make a killing off it" ax to grind) over my own experiences in my own country? Not fuckin' likely, my friend. Note that the article focusses on MRI and CAT waiting lists, which recent studies done by people more reputable than the Fraser institute have found to be largely the result of doctors refering patients to them for non-necessary reasons. The conclussion basically being that increasing the number of MRI machines, instead of decreasing waiting lists, increased them because doctors used them as a crutch instead of using other, less expensive, time tested diagnostic techniques.
Life lesson: Unless you live in a country, you need to do a hell of a lot more research than quoting one source (whose bias it would be very difficult for you to be aware of) before drawing some kind of conclussion. Recommended reading (use google to find copies): the Romanow report.
And people who realize that it would never work. Do you know how long the waiting lists and lines are for free healthcare in Canada, which has one of the best socialized healthcare systems in the world?
Yes, since I happen to live there. And the answer, in case anyone was wondering, is "Not particularly long". I've had relatives in the states wait much longer to have necessary procedures cleared by their profit grubbing insurance companies.
So let me get this straight. A person who works in the embedded market makes a comment on the embedded market and he's automatically wrong because he works in the embedded market?
No, his opinions are simply automatically untrustworthy because, as the president and CEO of a company that sells its own RTOS, he has a significant personal, professional, and financial stake in pushing a particular viewpoint (linux bad, my product good), and therefore has significant incentive to paint as distorted a picture of the market as is necessary to make his product look best. He's too damn close to the subject for any but the must gullible of rubes to consider him even remotely objective.
Look, I won't take advice on Buddhism from the Pope, I won't take advice on Linux from Bill Gates, and I won't take advice on non-FSF software from RMS, so I'm damn sure not going to take advice on RTOSes from this guy. What's so hard to understand about that?
In the interests of full disclosure, people taking "Tog" seriously should also read this article, in which Tog tells us why the web and everything on it should be written in BASIC.
I haven't been able to take his rantings even half-seriously since reading that load of garbage.
And I thought goatse was disgusting...
I guess his site should be renamed Gatese.
Yeah, because it's a huge stretch!
He has a whole site
And I thought goatse was disgusting...
Yeah, but wouldn't Goatse be a "hole" site?
who, as near as I can tell, is some sort of sentient appendage growing on Bill Gates' ass. He has a whole site devoted to his particular brand of hyperactive boosterism.
You mean the modern theory (singular) of abiogenic hydrocarbons, promoted here in the US by one man, Thomas Gold. The theory is still controversial in the extreme, primarily accepted only by the Russian oil industry.
Interesting article here
There are a lot of linguistic links between Japanese and Chinese. There are countless words in Japanese whose pronunciation comes from the original Chinese pronunciation. An obvious example is "denwa" (katakana reading) which comes from "dianhua" (pinyin) which means "telephone" in both languages. This is only a modern example, but many were borrowed so long ago, that the Chinese don't even say it the same way anymore.
You're describing loan words, which proves nothing about Japanese being descended from Chinese (which was the original parent's assertion). By your logic, English is descended from Chinese because we've incorporated words like "Gung-Ho".
Look, I'm not a lone voice crying in the woods here; there is a lot of linguistic theory devoted to the study of language families, language isolates and the like, and none claim that Japanese is descended from Chinese, even though they all (as I do) acknowledge that Japanese borrowed much vocabulary from Chinese. There are fundamental, radical differences (agglutinative vs. not, tonal vs. not, inflected vs. not, Subject-Object-Verb vs Subject-Verb-Object, etc, etc, ad naseum) between the two languages that preclude the idea that one is descended from the other.
It's a fascinating subject, and I'd usggest you do some research on it. Here is but one reference among many, many articles that have been written on the subject of Japanese and it's (lack of descent from) the Sino-Tibetan languages (specifically Chinese). Salient quotes:
Azerbaijani Turks write Turkish with a Cyrillic alphabet, like the Russians use. But that doesnt make Russian and Azeri Turkish related languages. Serbian and Croatian are one and the same language but the Serbs write with the Cyrillic alphabet and the Croats with a Latinate one. Chinese writing and Japanese writing may look somewhat alike, but in fact Japanese and Chinese dont work alike, dont form sentences or words in the same way, and are about as different as any two languages can possibly be.
Nor should you confuse borrowing of words with being linguistically related. Japanese and Korean both have borrowed many Chinese words but that doesnt make Chinese the "origin" of Japanese. Japanese and Korean are simply not demonstrably related to Chinese. "Related to" means "share a common linguistic ancestor with". There is no known, reconstructed, or even speculated at prehistoric language which is thought to have been the ancestor of both Chinese languages and Japanese and Korean.
It simply depends on how accurate one wants to be. Japanese borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary, in roughly the same way that English borrowed the vocabulary of many other languages (notably Saxon), but to say that the early Japanese language was borrowed from the Chinese is inaccurate in the extreme.
Try getting the same results from a Finnish and a Mongol and tell me how successful you are.
That's an artifact of pictographic writing systems in which the core meaning of the characters is shared among multiple languages, and says nothing about the relationship of the underlying languages. Going the other way, for instance, is more difficult, because the Chinese lack the Hiragana/Katakana syllabaries and the entire concept of a particle system as it exists in Japanese.
Recall that grammar only provides the rules to using vocabulary.
Recall that, without grammar, language is useless. "Cow dog read the good fast" is chock full of english words, but utterly meaningless. Besides, linguists classify language into groups based not only upon grammatical relationships, but also on vocabularly relationships, and it nevertheless remains true that, despite the existence of many Chinese loan words in Japanese, Japanese is most emphatically not derived from Chinese.
...the ancient form of Japanese language itself...
This is incorrect. While the Japanese certainly imported the Chinese writing system, there are no known or suspected linguistic links between Japanese and Chinese (indeed, given that Japanese is a multisyllabic, agglutinative language, and the Chinese languages are monosyllabic and highly tonal, it is hard to see how they could be more different). Most linguists classify Japanese as a language isolate (one with no known relatives), although some suspect it is distantly related to Korean and Mongolian, and a few group it in a family with Finnish, Estonian, and Turkish as well.
If a volcano puts out a decade's worth of our contribution to greenhouse gas every time it blows, we can't be tipping the scales that much.
Source?
Without any attribution, this appears to be a miss statement of the commonly believed, Limbaugh spread junk science notion that "because volcanos have been spewing out volcanic chlorine for millions of years without wrecking the ozone layer, we can't possible be harming it with our CFCs". Problem being that volcanic chlorine is water soluble and rained out of the atmosphere long before it hits the ozone layer, whereas human generated CFCs are water insoluble, and live to reach (and destroy) the ozone layer.
In the interests of balance, it's worth pointing out that the second link (to hardylaw) is written by David T. Hardy, an ex-legal council for the NRA, and is not necessarily any more objective about Bowling than Bowling was itself.
"Coming to a theatre near you: Zombie TEXAS Chainsaw Murdering Pedophiles"
Wait, are you saying that in Texas there are Zombies that wield chainsaws and kill pedophiles? Is that how this guy died? Ok - now I'm just confused.
He's saying that there are Pedophiles who murder Zombie Texas Chainsaws.
You see, there's this thing called a "joke". You might want to look into it's definition before you go taking it literally and calling someone a dumbass.
Besides, whether or not pedophilia is something they've been "saddled with by nature" it remains, nonetheless, disgusting.
He's right and he's wrong. Yes it gets redirected, but no, it's not google doing that. It's "bomberrate", whoever they are, redirecting to ebay based on the google referal.
Just look at the "real" bomberrate page: it's essential a long circular string of links (a ton of which are labelled with variations on the word "Yu-Gi-Oh") all pointing to each other. Notice how they claim to sell an amazing variety of unrelated products, but you can never find any information on how to buy them? It's just page after page of long strings of text filled with abbreviations, specs, and other likely search terms, all pointing back at one another. Does this this strike you as the front page of a legitimate business, or a site designed to maximize the number of unrelated queries that turn it up? The entire site is a link farm designed to exploit Google's page-rank algorithm, get itself positioned very high on any search containing any of the insanely numerous, highly unrelated terms it contains, and then redirect them to a bunch of (quite possibly fraudulent) ebay sales in the hope that some sucker will bid on them.
The only thing Google has to do with any of this is the fact that they've been trying to fine tune the algorithm enough to put asshats like these out of business for a long time now.
Also interesting to note, did he die BEFORE or AFTER they stuck his name, address, picture, and the fact that he molested a 9 year old girl IN TEXAS up on the web?
Even more interesting: did he attempt to molest the 9 year-old girl BEFORE or AFTER he died??
Pedophiles are disgusting enough, but zombie pedophiles? That's the nightmare scenario.
Well, why not? They do that for porn anyway.
But they don't do it for R-rated movies, and with spectacularly few exceptions even the worst video games go no further than an R-rated movie.
This legislation addresses a problem that doesn't exist, except in the minds of the "Won't somebody please think of the children?!" types.
No, the formula for Strip Poker is 0.50T, 0.50A.
Any tips on learning Japanese (spoken form)? Enough to get around and not offend too many people. I don't think I can manage the written form :).
The Japanese language (spoken) hasn't been overly difficult for me to learn. Compared to english, it's much more regular, both in terms of pronounciation and the spectacular number of odd conjugations we have. I pity anyone who tries to learn english as a second language; our grammar is downright malevolent. I think a sticking point for many people may be the Subject-Object-Verb word ordering, but if you've ever programmed in Forth or used an HP calculator, it comes off as fairly intuitive. There's also a surprising (or not) number of english (and some dutch and german) loan words in Japanese.
In terms of the written language, the kana (katakana and hiragana, both syllabaries) are quite simple, and can be mastered within a week. The Kanji (the chinese characters) are obviously much more difficult, as you have to memorize around 2,000 of them to be basically literate, but it bears remembering that some linguists believe that learning it is no more difficult than learning english spelling, which boils down to memorizing arbitrary letter sequences with, in many cases, no relation to their pronounciation or meaning. The Nakama textbook and it's workbook are the best intro to the language that I've come across.
AFAIK the japanese mainly understand japanese and nothing much else - a few engrish words don't cut it for many western style games.
Uhmmm, no. English is taught in Japanese schools from a fairly young age. You're waaaay off-base on almost everything in your post.
So every UK news site and tabloid papers talking about "Bush Statevisit to England" wasn't news because it was talking about future events?
No, I think his point was that a statement of intent to arrest some pasty-faced freak is a lot less important and news worthy than a possible security breach in an area where two of the more important people in the world right now are meeting.
The implication being that MSnewsbot is just more celebrity obsessed, sensationalist garbage masquerading as actual news, whereas google's service manages to present stories of actual importance and relevance.
Tried running Neverwinter Nights with the newest Catalysts? They don't work; period. And The installation fucks something up so that you can't roll back to a working version, either. ATI makes good hardware, but their drivers are total crap, especially if you run linux. Like the parent, I cannot in good conscience recommend ATI products to anyone.