I don't think that people who speak BAE make some kind of conscious choice, the way they speak is a natural consequence of their surroundings as they were brought up and learned to speak whatever language was around them.
Okay, that is the way I should have put it - because you are right that my approach was a bit inflammatory. I think racism is such an important issue for America that a little hypersensitivity is called for and the issue of BAE seems to be one of those issues which is a natural starting point. Many people seem so angered and offended by the notion that BAE is a natural dialect of English that I have to wonder at their motivation.
I don't think that most of the questions are selected to answer the question. As you correctly point out, the question can be solved with a search engine within minutes. Rather the question is supposed to encourage discussion - why does he need 16 G RAM, what are other people using such systems for, maybe someone has lab tested systems from several vendors and wants to share their results, how does the support offered by various OSs actually work. etc.
It's a dialect marked by (usually) incorrect usage.
There is no need to make excuses for people that refuse to learn to speak or write properly, or who for social reasons pretend that they know less than they really do.
I can't read such statements in the OP without seeing some very racist undertones. "Refuse to learn to speak or write properly" is especially distasteful. When I was very young a black family in my church was refused housing in our town until government action settled the matter, I wound up being friends with their youngest and heard teachers make comments to this effect about his speech and writing. Other experiences throughout my life have led me to see a strong supposition of superiority in anyone making comments like that, often by people who would never admit to actually being racist.
No, I'm not saying that. I was irritated that his condescending and racist message was being modded up, and posted a reply addressing that without actually making a point. What I believe is that BAE is not ungrammatical SAE, children grow up immersed in a dialect with different grammatical rules. The post I replied to had undertones of "lazy blacks won't learn proper English". Obviously children have to learn SAE in school since so much of social status is tied to language, but recognizing that BAE has different rules is a totally different thing than thinking of it as street slang with no rules.
I was interested enough in the spammer/pop-up advertiser mindset to read some of their drivel once... Their justification for attempting to defeat blocking is that ISPs and browser developers are making a choice for consumers (to block ads) without letting the consumer make a choice to do it themselves.
A silly bit of sophistry, but they can get really worked up about it. If you have a high resistance to righteous anger then follow one of their forums for a couple days to get some insight into how they think.
The US FTC did a
study
you might consider. It has case studies for 4 industries, arguments for and against patents, and recommendations on improving the patent system.
There is no real scientific argument for or against patents - since history and economics are not really sciences, but an observer of the last 100 years cannot help but notice that nations with patent systems have had much more innovation than those without.
This is NOT an argument on my part for unlimited patents and extending patents to business practices or math. Too much of a good thing can be worse than lack of it.
The thing that pisses me off about the braid tugging and bracelet rattling is that it is a valid (and initially charming) literary technique to let the reader know that non-verbal communication is taking place, but that none of the reader-identified characters understand it. Had he mentioned it a couple times, made it clear that it was going on all the time, and rarely mentioned it again then it would have been fine.
Instead we have books in which nothing ever happens, a bunch of increasingly obnoxious characters are brought out to do their shtick and maybe "develop" a little bit, maybe.
I'm just bitter cuz I read 8 books (or therabouts) before I gave up on that tedious )%#@&! Jordan.
The OP misapplied a rule of BAE grammar to a colloquialism (don't be hating). The rule requires a 'be' and 'non-be' form: "He be running" vs. "He running", the former indicates continual activity, the later indicates a single episode in the present.
Your 'incorrect usage' and 'people that refuse to learn to speak or write properly' comments are actually fairly ugly, and display the kind of unthinking prejudice that will take a long time to die out.
The worst Blockbuster has done is refuse to carry NC-17/unrated versions and thus put pressure for the studios to release R-rated cuts.
They used to do this and not let people know. Blockbuster got their bad reputation regarding censorship because they didn't let staff know - so someone would want to rent a movie, ask if it was censored and be told it wasn't, then of course be angry when it was.
Some of us Americans grew up reading old books or books with an intentionally archaic flavor. If I don't watch then I still sometimes throw in the extra 'u' or change a 'z' to an 's'. For some reason that habit drove a certain type of teacher nuts in grade school.
So it may be modern British English, but it is also archaic American English and using it does not necessarily mean you are British.
"Win at all cost" is not doing your job. Jobs with power (lawyer, doctor, banker, stockbroker, journalist, teacher) have professional organizations and ethical requirements to ensure that that power is controlled by a notion of responsibility for its use.
Yes, heaven forbid we ask people to stop breaking the law because it's WRONG.
There is NO moral force behind intellectual property laws that have been improperly manipulated in such a way as to deprive the public of rights forever. A temporary monopoly is a chance to make a profit, a perpetual monopoly is a license to steal from the public domain.
It's just division of labour. The pretty people look good for the camera and the smart people make all the important things possible and are entitled to hold an opinion about things other than clothing, fad diets, and exercise regimes. Come on admit it - you don't want to waste time listening to some vapid starlet prattle about zen or politics and no one wants to waste time watching non-pretty people be awkward in front of a camera.
Lets say a capitalist funds a drug company. People are dying, but cannot pay for the drug needed to keep them alive - the right of the drug company (and its investors) to control the use of property remains sacrosanct no matter what.
Any freedom can be abused in exceptional circumstances, yet no one in America seriously suggests that we abolish property rights because some people act selfishly. I don't buy the notion that we have to limit freedom of the press because some people abuse it.
Well yeah, if you do nothing more than break longArseFn into laf_1, laf_2, etc. and call the pieces in order then you gain nothing - the "function" is just as long as it was before and you probably even wind up adding some additional glue code. More often though a function winds up doing some extra "stuff" that can be put into a helper function or turns into a routing/dispatch function that uses the infamous copy and paste method of code reuse. It is not absolute, but 100+ line functions seem to be so prone to problems that they cry out to be broken into smaller parts that only do what they need to and have repeated code in a single spot.
There are few greater wastes of time than a code review attended by more than 4 programmers (and more than 0 non-programmers, the boss should only be involved if there is a serious problem), so I just hope that that line was delivered by a smirking co-peon.
Required javadoc/doxygen/VCS comments often result in "XXX: required for checkin" type comments.
Not knocking inline documentation - I think it is a great idea, but you have to make sure that developers buy into it.
Really there is a lot of common sense that can go into coding standards to help reduce recurring bugs in "problem functions". Rules for initializing and using globals, rules for maximum method length, code ownership, and small group code walkthroughs can do a lot to prevent the kind of problems you mention.
Every time the government has gone down this road of deciding that an activity is harmful and made it illegal without it being a protection of a right it has been a disaster. The government may have had the ability to make marijuana and alcohol illegal, but it certainly did not have the right to do so. The government had the ability to make slavery a property right, that did not make it correct.
That may be your interpretation of the amendment, and your interpretation may be a reasonable one, but that's not what it actually says. Others could argue that its purpose is to prevent an oppressive government seizing power over its people, and nothing to do with self defence.
Actually the two interpretations (defense vs crime and defense vs the government) are related in the minds of a good number of Americans. We do actually know the intent of the statement, because the authors of the constitution and bill of rights left a large number of documents, letters, and philosophical screeds explaining what they meant. It is pretty obvious that a nuke is not covered by the right to bear arms.
The point is that the government is not authorized to decide what uses of freedom of the press are responsible and in the public good, they are allowed to limit only those actions of the press that violate the rights of others.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, that is the way I should have put it - because you are right that my approach was a bit inflammatory. I think racism is such an important issue for America that a little hypersensitivity is called for and the issue of BAE seems to be one of those issues which is a natural starting point. Many people seem so angered and offended by the notion that BAE is a natural dialect of English that I have to wonder at their motivation.
I don't think that most of the questions are selected to answer the question. As you correctly point out, the question can be solved with a search engine within minutes. Rather the question is supposed to encourage discussion - why does he need 16 G RAM, what are other people using such systems for, maybe someone has lab tested systems from several vendors and wants to share their results, how does the support offered by various OSs actually work. etc.
It was a freaking joke about the inevitability of the "100 words for snow" coming up anytime the effect of environment on language is being discussed.
There is no need to make excuses for people that refuse to learn to speak or write properly, or who for social reasons pretend that they know less than they really do.
I can't read such statements in the OP without seeing some very racist undertones. "Refuse to learn to speak or write properly" is especially distasteful. When I was very young a black family in my church was refused housing in our town until government action settled the matter, I wound up being friends with their youngest and heard teachers make comments to this effect about his speech and writing. Other experiences throughout my life have led me to see a strong supposition of superiority in anyone making comments like that, often by people who would never admit to actually being racist.
Did you know the Inuit have over 100 words for "idiots who believe we have over a 100 words for snow"?
No, I'm not saying that. I was irritated that his condescending and racist message was being modded up, and posted a reply addressing that without actually making a point. What I believe is that BAE is not ungrammatical SAE, children grow up immersed in a dialect with different grammatical rules. The post I replied to had undertones of "lazy blacks won't learn proper English". Obviously children have to learn SAE in school since so much of social status is tied to language, but recognizing that BAE has different rules is a totally different thing than thinking of it as street slang with no rules.
I don't happen to remember the names, I think I just googled for 'emarketing' and 'forum'. then browsed through a couple.
A silly bit of sophistry, but they can get really worked up about it. If you have a high resistance to righteous anger then follow one of their forums for a couple days to get some insight into how they think.
There is no real scientific argument for or against patents - since history and economics are not really sciences, but an observer of the last 100 years cannot help but notice that nations with patent systems have had much more innovation than those without.
This is NOT an argument on my part for unlimited patents and extending patents to business practices or math. Too much of a good thing can be worse than lack of it.
Instead we have books in which nothing ever happens, a bunch of increasingly obnoxious characters are brought out to do their shtick and maybe "develop" a little bit, maybe.
I'm just bitter cuz I read 8 books (or therabouts) before I gave up on that tedious )%#@&! Jordan.
Your 'incorrect usage' and 'people that refuse to learn to speak or write properly' comments are actually fairly ugly, and display the kind of unthinking prejudice that will take a long time to die out.
They used to do this and not let people know. Blockbuster got their bad reputation regarding censorship because they didn't let staff know - so someone would want to rent a movie, ask if it was censored and be told it wasn't, then of course be angry when it was.
So it may be modern British English, but it is also archaic American English and using it does not necessarily mean you are British.
Did anyone actually call them "Freedom Fries"? I thought that was a satire on the sort of thing that culture-cons might be silly enough to do.
You don't think old women shaking bracelets at each other for 2 hours would make for an exciting film?
"Win at all cost" is not doing your job. Jobs with power (lawyer, doctor, banker, stockbroker, journalist, teacher) have professional organizations and ethical requirements to ensure that that power is controlled by a notion of responsibility for its use.
Looks pretty straightforward to me.
There is NO moral force behind intellectual property laws that have been improperly manipulated in such a way as to deprive the public of rights forever. A temporary monopoly is a chance to make a profit, a perpetual monopoly is a license to steal from the public domain.
It's just division of labour. The pretty people look good for the camera and the smart people make all the important things possible and are entitled to hold an opinion about things other than clothing, fad diets, and exercise regimes. Come on admit it - you don't want to waste time listening to some vapid starlet prattle about zen or politics and no one wants to waste time watching non-pretty people be awkward in front of a camera.
Any freedom can be abused in exceptional circumstances, yet no one in America seriously suggests that we abolish property rights because some people act selfishly. I don't buy the notion that we have to limit freedom of the press because some people abuse it.
Well yeah, if you do nothing more than break longArseFn into laf_1, laf_2, etc. and call the pieces in order then you gain nothing - the "function" is just as long as it was before and you probably even wind up adding some additional glue code. More often though a function winds up doing some extra "stuff" that can be put into a helper function or turns into a routing/dispatch function that uses the infamous copy and paste method of code reuse. It is not absolute, but 100+ line functions seem to be so prone to problems that they cry out to be broken into smaller parts that only do what they need to and have repeated code in a single spot.
There are few greater wastes of time than a code review attended by more than 4 programmers (and more than 0 non-programmers, the boss should only be involved if there is a serious problem), so I just hope that that line was delivered by a smirking co-peon.
...but that kind of passive aggressive joke is only really funny if you can manage to keep a straight face during a code walkthrough :)
Not knocking inline documentation - I think it is a great idea, but you have to make sure that developers buy into it.
Really there is a lot of common sense that can go into coding standards to help reduce recurring bugs in "problem functions". Rules for initializing and using globals, rules for maximum method length, code ownership, and small group code walkthroughs can do a lot to prevent the kind of problems you mention.
Every time the government has gone down this road of deciding that an activity is harmful and made it illegal without it being a protection of a right it has been a disaster. The government may have had the ability to make marijuana and alcohol illegal, but it certainly did not have the right to do so. The government had the ability to make slavery a property right, that did not make it correct.
That may be your interpretation of the amendment, and your interpretation may be a reasonable one, but that's not what it actually says. Others could argue that its purpose is to prevent an oppressive government seizing power over its people, and nothing to do with self defence.
Actually the two interpretations (defense vs crime and defense vs the government) are related in the minds of a good number of Americans. We do actually know the intent of the statement, because the authors of the constitution and bill of rights left a large number of documents, letters, and philosophical screeds explaining what they meant. It is pretty obvious that a nuke is not covered by the right to bear arms.
The point is that the government is not authorized to decide what uses of freedom of the press are responsible and in the public good, they are allowed to limit only those actions of the press that violate the rights of others.