That is correct purely in terms of grammar rules, however the English language is not defined by it's grammar. Rather the grammar is an attempt to apply a logical framework to a pre-existing structure. It doesn't always fit. In fact it rarely really fits.
The use of "fun" as an adjective is limited and constrained to certain specific common phrases or clauses. These limit the options for modification, especially in the areas of the "extreme" modifiers.
Really, as the rules are not solid, it all boils down to "because we don't say that in proper English".
As a teacher in China (private school, the only time I got into the public schools is when I was training the Chinese teachers) I can safely and solidly say that the Chinese education system "sucks".
No time is given to thought or creation. Everything (Really, everything!) is rote memorization. If Chinese students from the same high school are asked to write an essay on a topic then you get back multiple exact copies of an essay that almost (but not quite) fits the designated title, with varying opening and closing sentences used to shoehorn the text into compliance. Parents and students are often angry and puzzled when I grade such items lowly as the essay is one of the approved ones issued by the schools. Exceptional cases aside the students are usually unable to summarize, explain or answer questions on the essay they have just handed in.
This is not even a matter of bad teachers or bad textbooks. It is a cultural belief that knowledge comes from studying the past. That new is lesser and that all answers can be (must be) learned from the legendary sages of the deep past.
Mathematics is marginally more progressive in that textbooks are updated, but even so the students are given proofs to memorize and regurgitate on the test papers.
I am no longer asked to give training sessions for the English teachers of the local schools ever since I flatly refused to acknowledge any benefit in their efforts to teach students English by giving them phonetic books of (badly written, unattributed, incoherent) English short stories and poems to memorize, interspersed with the recitation of English grammar rules in Chinese.
Additionally, Slashdot has refused me mod points for more than two years now, despite Excellent karma and regular meta-moderation, ever since I used a full set of five on one inane, loudmouthed moron in one thread.
AC 1 : "Great, now assemble some of your Chinese peers together to let the local Party Representative know about these foreign ideas, then see what happens!"
AC 2 : "They would just brush you off and tell you to write them a letter (which will be thrown in the bin).
Much like every Government representative on Earth does."
Precisely. Unless it directly influences their bottom line government members (and police) here don't care about anything.
First item : We have one world. Developed World/Undeveloped world/Developing world.... That's a nonsense. One world. That's all we actually get.
And in order to solve the problem of over-population you suggest having more children? Have you really thought this all the way through? Having more children solves nothing, and following your assumptions and the behavior that follows will ensure only that some of the billions that die in horrible circumstances as the ecosystem collapses under the weight of humanity are (potentially) better educated than the screaming masses around them.
I am in fact a teacher, mostly on the grounds that while people will insist on over-populating I can throw my weight behind the best efforts to ensure the population is capable of reason and logic.
And once one thinks beyond their own retirement plans it'd pretty easy to see that the world needs several generations of negative population growth, making specifically not having children far more important than having them in terms of social continuity.
Mostly I'd agree with you, but I disagree quite strongly with your last paragraph. On a global scale nothing humanity can do is more important than to on average stop having children.
Dangerous in the short term, absolutely crucial in the mid and longer term (though in this context long term is so long term that we can't even really comprehend it).
The world is diseased. It is flooded with humanity. A top of the food chain critter like us (despite our physical shortcomings for the role) with our huge territorial needs (resource hogging) would be adequately represented on earth by a population of between 1 and 5 million on each continent.
I've done my bit to help fix this before we breed ourself to extinction, but there's nothing further I can ethically do beyond encourage fence-sitters to do the right thing. For me this was not a big sacrifice. I've never been particularly controlled by the more complex or abstract biological urges, but for most people this is too much of a sacrifice to even consider.
Far from reconsidering my choice I urge you to think beyond your own immediate economy and pension slave fund.
The term childfree (Simplistic definition : Childless by choice) has been around for quite a while now, and is not a single doctrine/dogma. There are a variety of routes that lead to the same conclusion. They range from the simplistic and accurate ("I don't like children. They tend to be loud and smelly") through to the altruistic and wishful ("World is overpopulated. I'll do my bit").
As I am a teacher I am by default already crotchety, but thanks for noticing.
Actually, if you would care to check you'll find I'm more than paying my own fair share into the social structure already. Long before I retire I'll have paid more than enough (even after extracting my share for govt and public works on a day to day basis) to live a retired life of luxury.
Unfortunately I won't get that life of luxury from the social structures, as the money is being wasted on unprepared parents and their spawn.
If I could opt out of receiving any retirement benefits in exchange for keeping that money and making my own arrangements I would, and I'd be far better off for it, but no. The childfree have got to pay for the childed's ongoing existence.
Just who's freeloading and who's pulling the cart? Simple answer : You were factually incorrect in your post.
What they want doesn't come into the equation. What they _chose_ does. Why should I suffer for others choices? And then be expected to be glad about it? Or criticized for not understanding how difficult it is? The whole point I made was that I looked at it rationally and constructively, weighted the difficulties and made the choice.
Now I am expected to suffer others problems because they were incapable of doing so? No, I really don't think so, thank you.
If your kids are the ultimate reward, that you will sacrifice all for etc etc etc blah blah blah broken-record....... then why do you feel such need to persuade me of how I am mistaken?
Are you completely sure it's me you're trying to convince?
Oh, and as for the "used to be one yourself" routine, I used to be a separate spermatozoa and egg at one point. Doesn't mean I want to be surrounded by unguarded samples of either while I'm eating/working/living, and I certainly don't want to be entertained by your detailed stories about them either.
Hint to all parents, NO-ONE wants to hear about juniors first unassisted dump. Not even his/her grandparents.
Stockholm's syndrome variant. It's amazing what we can persuade ourselves we agree with/enjoy/approve just because we get trapped and there's no moral way out.
And just to note, in addition to all the other benefits you listed for me, my non-wife and I get to have sex anytime, anywhere in our luxury home without having to deal with interruptions. And even beyond that there's not the slightest hint of the "hot dog in a hallway" issue.
And I do not get paid more. I just make better choices as to how I'll use my income. You chose kids (unless you were oopsed, in which case you've got a great line of rationalizing, and my sympathies)
And lets just note on the side that at no point has anything I have said been in any way construable as racist. Your reading comprehension is lacking.
I am however anti-human. There are indeed too many of us. By between 2 and 3 orders of magnitude. I've done my bit to reduce this problem. For the greater good of all. You, very selfishly, have apparently decided to let your biological urges over-ride your intelligence.
Nations, races and too a lesser extent families are a short term item. A nonsense in the grand scheme of things. Humanity in a recognizable form has only just been birthed and unless we get our population in check and under rational control we're going to drive ourselves to extinction in less than a hundredth of what even the dino's managed.
So, sure, I may screw up your 50 year plan to use the next generation as slaves to support your luxurious decrepitude, but unless a lot more people start thinking with the heads on their shoulders then you're all screwing humanity out of a future.
Firstly the childfree do not generally get paid more than their benefit sponging, continually "nipping out early", "kiddie sick day" taking co-workers.
Secondly most childfree are that way by choice, are not lonely and have no desire to have anything to do with other peoples kids.
The reason most childfree people are childfree is because they were smarter earlier and able to comprehend the needs and difficulties of child-rearing, weighed it against the benefits and decided voluntarily to have nothing to do with it.
The only thing we want from parents is that we don't have to carry the burden of their problems and mistakes. (Oh, and that they keep the squalling disease ridden fleshloaves away from us).
If you claim it literally as stated, then yes, it is arrogance. Severe arrogance. Just arrogance on a topic no-one rational really cares about.
If however you actually mean "I find that pizza is the food substance most appealing to me out of all the food substances I have tried" then it is fact.
At the moment I own four 2Gb MP3/MP4 players (MP4 features present, but crap and unused). I pick up whichever has what I feel like listenning to that day on it. Total cost for all 4 (and a few extra SD cards for them for when I'm going intercontinental)? Significantly under $100.
Of course, any intelligent (SW) engineer with scruples/morals and an interest in the future of their career knows better than to touch the whole voting machine fiasco.
And knew this before anyone even seriously suggested creating/using such devices.
A good Software Engineer (a bad term, it's not really an engineering profession per se) looks at the full system, not a block of code, and anyone with decent cognitative abilities can see that electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem, heavily laden with dozens of major flaws and hundreds of minor ones. And all this could be seen before anyone even sat down to write the first block (probably a visual basic bodge-up to display a scren of buttons with photos judging by the apparent code quality in action).
I suspect Diebold (and the various other competing corporations) have teams for voting machines made up of the clueless, the incompetant and the amoral.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is a lighthouse..."
That is correct purely in terms of grammar rules, however the English language is not defined by it's grammar. Rather the grammar is an attempt to apply a logical framework to a pre-existing structure. It doesn't always fit. In fact it rarely really fits.
The use of "fun" as an adjective is limited and constrained to certain specific common phrases or clauses. These limit the options for modification, especially in the areas of the "extreme" modifiers.
Really, as the rules are not solid, it all boils down to "because we don't say that in proper English".
Marginally different situation in that that was a genuinely copyrighted text, while this is an uncopyrighted/uncopyrightable number.
The fact that the patriot act allows criminalization for sharing of mere numbers is the real debate point here.
In casual modern English both are acceptable, and you wouldn't have to go too far back to find both used in all voices.
However I'd be extremely surprised to see "very fun" making a comeback in anything more recent or more formal than Enid Blyton.
As a teacher in China (private school, the only time I got into the public schools is when I was training the Chinese teachers) I can safely and solidly say that the Chinese education system "sucks".
No time is given to thought or creation. Everything (Really, everything!) is rote memorization. If Chinese students from the same high school are asked to write an essay on a topic then you get back multiple exact copies of an essay that almost (but not quite) fits the designated title, with varying opening and closing sentences used to shoehorn the text into compliance. Parents and students are often angry and puzzled when I grade such items lowly as the essay is one of the approved ones issued by the schools. Exceptional cases aside the students are usually unable to summarize, explain or answer questions on the essay they have just handed in.
This is not even a matter of bad teachers or bad textbooks. It is a cultural belief that knowledge comes from studying the past. That new is lesser and that all answers can be (must be) learned from the legendary sages of the deep past.
Mathematics is marginally more progressive in that textbooks are updated, but even so the students are given proofs to memorize and regurgitate on the test papers.
I am no longer asked to give training sessions for the English teachers of the local schools ever since I flatly refused to acknowledge any benefit in their efforts to teach students English by giving them phonetic books of (badly written, unattributed, incoherent) English short stories and poems to memorize, interspersed with the recitation of English grammar rules in Chinese.
Additionally, Slashdot has refused me mod points for more than two years now, despite Excellent karma and regular meta-moderation, ever since I used a full set of five on one inane, loudmouthed moron in one thread.
:-P
Slashdot censors me more than China does.
Still here.
Ummm, dude, from experience, these people you refer too... They _ARE_ the government.
AC 1 : "Great, now assemble some of your Chinese peers together to let the local Party Representative know about these foreign ideas, then see what happens!"
AC 2 : "They would just brush you off and tell you to write them a letter (which will be thrown in the bin).
Much like every Government representative on Earth does."
Precisely. Unless it directly influences their bottom line government members (and police) here don't care about anything.
And yet I just read them all and am replying to them from Shenyang, Liaoning, China.
It ain't so cut and dried.
First item : We have one world. Developed World/Undeveloped world/Developing world.... That's a nonsense. One world. That's all we actually get.
And in order to solve the problem of over-population you suggest having more children? Have you really thought this all the way through? Having more children solves nothing, and following your assumptions and the behavior that follows will ensure only that some of the billions that die in horrible circumstances as the ecosystem collapses under the weight of humanity are (potentially) better educated than the screaming masses around them.
Yay for reasonable and rational discourse.
Do you help educate young people?
Yes.
I am in fact a teacher, mostly on the grounds that while people will insist on over-populating I can throw my weight behind the best efforts to ensure the population is capable of reason and logic.
And once one thinks beyond their own retirement plans it'd pretty easy to see that the world needs several generations of negative population growth, making specifically not having children far more important than having them in terms of social continuity.
Mostly I'd agree with you, but I disagree quite strongly with your last paragraph. On a global scale nothing humanity can do is more important than to on average stop having children.
Dangerous in the short term, absolutely crucial in the mid and longer term (though in this context long term is so long term that we can't even really comprehend it).
The world is diseased. It is flooded with humanity. A top of the food chain critter like us (despite our physical shortcomings for the role) with our huge territorial needs (resource hogging) would be adequately represented on earth by a population of between 1 and 5 million on each continent.
I've done my bit to help fix this before we breed ourself to extinction, but there's nothing further I can ethically do beyond encourage fence-sitters to do the right thing. For me this was not a big sacrifice. I've never been particularly controlled by the more complex or abstract biological urges, but for most people this is too much of a sacrifice to even consider.
Far from reconsidering my choice I urge you to think beyond your own immediate economy and pension slave fund.
The term childfree (Simplistic definition : Childless by choice) has been around for quite a while now, and is not a single doctrine/dogma. There are a variety of routes that lead to the same conclusion.
They range from the simplistic and accurate ("I don't like children. They tend to be loud and smelly") through to the altruistic and wishful ("World is overpopulated. I'll do my bit").
As I am a teacher I am by default already crotchety, but thanks for noticing.
Actually, if you would care to check you'll find I'm more than paying my own fair share into the social structure already. Long before I retire I'll have paid more than enough (even after extracting my share for govt and public works on a day to day basis) to live a retired life of luxury.
Unfortunately I won't get that life of luxury from the social structures, as the money is being wasted on unprepared parents and their spawn.
If I could opt out of receiving any retirement benefits in exchange for keeping that money and making my own arrangements I would, and I'd be far better off for it, but no. The childfree have got to pay for the childed's ongoing existence.
Just who's freeloading and who's pulling the cart? Simple answer : You were factually incorrect in your post.
What they want doesn't come into the equation. What they _chose_ does. Why should I suffer for others choices? And then be expected to be glad about it? Or criticized for not understanding how difficult it is? The whole point I made was that I looked at it rationally and constructively, weighted the difficulties and made the choice.
... then why do you feel such need to persuade me of how I am mistaken?
Now I am expected to suffer others problems because they were incapable of doing so? No, I really don't think so, thank you.
If your kids are the ultimate reward, that you will sacrifice all for etc etc etc blah blah blah broken-record....
Are you completely sure it's me you're trying to convince?
Oh, and as for the "used to be one yourself" routine, I used to be a separate spermatozoa and egg at one point. Doesn't mean I want to be surrounded by unguarded samples of either while I'm eating/working/living, and I certainly don't want to be entertained by your detailed stories about them either.
Hint to all parents, NO-ONE wants to hear about juniors first unassisted dump. Not even his/her grandparents.
(Not too mention Bingo!)
Stockholm's syndrome variant.
It's amazing what we can persuade ourselves we agree with/enjoy/approve just because we get trapped and there's no moral way out.
Woohoo! Bingo!
And just to note, in addition to all the other benefits you listed for me, my non-wife and I get to have sex anytime, anywhere in our luxury home without having to deal with interruptions.
And even beyond that there's not the slightest hint of the "hot dog in a hallway" issue.
And I do not get paid more. I just make better choices as to how I'll use my income. You chose kids (unless you were oopsed, in which case you've got a great line of rationalizing, and my sympathies)
And lets just note on the side that at no point has anything I have said been in any way construable as racist. Your reading comprehension is lacking.
I am however anti-human. There are indeed too many of us. By between 2 and 3 orders of magnitude. I've done my bit to reduce this problem. For the greater good of all. You, very selfishly, have apparently decided to let your biological urges over-ride your intelligence.
Nations, races and too a lesser extent families are a short term item. A nonsense in the grand scheme of things. Humanity in a recognizable form has only just been birthed and unless we get our population in check and under rational control we're going to drive ourselves to extinction in less than a hundredth of what even the dino's managed.
So, sure, I may screw up your 50 year plan to use the next generation as slaves to support your luxurious decrepitude, but unless a lot more people start thinking with the heads on their shoulders then you're all screwing humanity out of a future.
You're really not getting it.
Firstly the childfree do not generally get paid more than their benefit sponging, continually "nipping out early", "kiddie sick day" taking co-workers.
Secondly most childfree are that way by choice, are not lonely and have no desire to have anything to do with other peoples kids.
The reason most childfree people are childfree is because they were smarter earlier and able to comprehend the needs and difficulties of child-rearing, weighed it against the benefits and decided voluntarily to have nothing to do with it.
The only thing we want from parents is that we don't have to carry the burden of their problems and mistakes. (Oh, and that they keep the squalling disease ridden fleshloaves away from us).
The enemy of my enemy is a pawn to be used to my own ends then shot in the back.
What? I'm agnostic. My belief structure allows me cheerily backstab anyone I (dis)like.
If you claim it literally as stated, then yes, it is arrogance. Severe arrogance. Just arrogance on a topic no-one rational really cares about.
If however you actually mean "I find that pizza is the food substance most appealing to me out of all the food substances I have tried" then it is fact.
At the moment I own four 2Gb MP3/MP4 players (MP4 features present, but crap and unused). I pick up whichever has what I feel like listenning to that day on it. Total cost for all 4 (and a few extra SD cards for them for when I'm going intercontinental)? Significantly under $100.
Of course, any intelligent (SW) engineer with scruples/morals and an interest in the future of their career knows better than to touch the whole voting machine fiasco.
And knew this before anyone even seriously suggested creating/using such devices.
A good Software Engineer (a bad term, it's not really an engineering profession per se) looks at the full system, not a block of code, and anyone with decent cognitative abilities can see that electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem, heavily laden with dozens of major flaws and hundreds of minor ones. And all this could be seen before anyone even sat down to write the first block (probably a visual basic bodge-up to display a scren of buttons with photos judging by the apparent code quality in action).
I suspect Diebold (and the various other competing corporations) have teams for voting machines made up of the clueless, the incompetant and the amoral.