A lot of people I know (myself included) were diagnosed in elementrary school with ADD, and I kind of felt "why is this a problem?" But then I got to know my college roommate. He's a brilliantly creative and very funny guy. But he has ADD and when he forgets to take his medication, he is basically unable to do the things he wants, and finds basically everyday life very furstrating.
I think that ADD is very much overdiagnosed, to make kids easier for their parents or teachers to deal with, but there are cases in which ADD is a real problem for some of these kids.
As far as I know no complete (or close to complete) grammar exist for any natural language.
Yeah, well, it's not too difficult to write a grammar for english that encompasses most of the things that we say in daily conversation, if you're not dead set on making an unambiguous context-free grammar. We can parse general context free language in O(n^3). Most programming languages parsers use LL(1) or LR(1) grammars (subsets of context-free languages, but more expressive than regular languages), which can be parsed in basically O(N). Parsing general context-sensitive languages, well, knowing how long it will take solves the halting problem.
However, I think that a simple generative grammar, even a context-sensitive turing complete one is basically doomed to failure, since "valid english sentences" is a fuzzy set. This doesn't really matter from the point of view of making a parser, though (So what if it understands things that I might not, so long as it also understands the things that I do grok)
However even correcting for that, if you look at bigrams (i.e. pairs of words) in Shakespeare and, say, a newspaper article there will be very few in common and even those will mostly include prepositions.
I wonder how much of that is stylistic. Do you have any data on other bigram comparisons?
If you move west a bit, you get into languages like Vietnamese, where as far as I could tell from my 100 or so hours of field work on the subject, there is no difference between a compound word and two words. At all. They even leave spaces in the middle of what they call "compound words". Vietnamese is what is called an "isolating analyitic language" - that nothing smaller than a word has any meaning at all (as opposed to an agglutinative language like English, where prefixes and suffixes and what-not all carry small bits of meaning).
The Whorf-Sapif Hypothesis is much stronger than what you state. Basically it states that language constrains thought and this is rejected by pretty much all linguists
You are correct that Finnish and Sanskrit are completely unrelated, at least historically speaking.
They do share some features in commmon, though, such as the use of "cases" in lieu of prepositions. (I think Latin does a bit of this too, but I may be wrong.)
I don't know a whole lot about the history of the Finno-Ugric family of languages, but I can tell you that Finnish and Magyar (hungarian) are the most well-known examples, and that there are also a handfull of uralic languages (that is, spoken in the Urals) which belong to this family. (estonian, and lithuanian perhpas?).
I can also tell you a bit about the histry of the Indo-European language. From what I recall, the Aryans (the real ones, Hitler totally misclassified his own race!) brought it into india, with their miltary victory, some several thousand years back. They did a lot for the dissemination of the language family as they were a successful and aggressive people. There it evolved into Sanskrit (which has evovled into Hindi, which even today co-exists with the totally unrelated Tamil).
Think about Shakespeare, for example. The language of Shakespeare is so different from standard English as to have virtually no intersection.
Your are in error. Shakespeare is considered the beginning of "modern english", which is what we speak today. 95% of his vocabulary is the same (though some spellings differ), and most of the grammatical constructs we see in Shakespeare are still used today. The biggest reasons that his writings are at all difficult are that they are use a lot of metaphors, many of which are archaic and abstruse.
Even Chaucer (pretty much definitive "middle english") is fairly similar, though a lot of the words have shifted in pronounciation and spelling since then. I frequently need to say the stuff out loud to even recognize the words. But the sentence structure is basically the same, and for the most part the vocabulary is only superfically different.
ALWAYS have people felt that the langauge that they spoke was changing for the worse, and usually it's percieved that it's on the brink of disaster as well.
Is this democratization of linguistical/syntactical/semantical decisions a good thing?
There is no democratization. Language has ALWAYS been determined by how people spoke, and if people 'choose' to speak differently, the language changes.
To answer your questions: No. It's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing either. English will not be 'ruined' to the point of unusability. New and 'difficult' dialects may arise, but actually I don't think that will happen much either - today's level of global intercommunication makes even that unlikely.
I speak a little Japanese from what I took in college, and there are some unique features of the language that might effect syntactical structure
While I am sure Japanese has several unique features, the feature you mentioned (Subject Object Verb word order) is far from unique. Over 40% of languages use this form. (Turkish, Tamil, and Tibetan are a few examples) (SVO, the word order used by English, is a close second, and probably has more speakers than SOV languages (as English and Chinese are both SVO languages))
I don't follow how writing software and not giving you the source code is raping the public. Could you go into a little more detail on that point please?
What if you turn off optimisations on your C++ compiler? I know that VC++ does a good ammount of stuff toward the end of speeding up its output (it optimizes much better than C++Builder, for instance)
Should anyone have the freedom to create and use any technology?
In principle, I do think that. However, I also think that people should be held responsible for the results of their actions. I am free to use a piece of technology (say, a 2x4) but not in a way that harms others.
Regulation I feel is appropriate is: requiring research as to side effects of technology, and some moral evaluation of what exactly "harming" other people entails. That's going to be the tricky part.
But as far as I'm concerned you're welcome to set off a nuclear explosion wherever you like, so long as you choose a spot at which there are no harmful "side effects" (eg, people irratiated, killed, wide-scale ecological damage). It's the character of the technolgoy that determines what kind of restriction that effects, however.
The alternative is what? Stopping all innovation until we fully understand and accept its consequences? a) stopping all technological innovation is impossible, and b) fully understanding the consequences is impossible.
I don't particulary have any affinity for the "rules" as they stand now. I do think Humanity deserves a chance to work out for itself what the rules should be, and not have them handed to us at technological gunpoint by an elite.
What are you proposing? We have some global poll and decide what "we" want as a species and then judiciously allow only the things that further that goal?
It, in this case, being the right of an individual to make his will universal law via technology? That doesn't resemble any kind of freedom I know.
Nobody's singlehandedly making their own will universal law. If the only person who agreed with the freenet author was the freenet author, it would not be a powerful notion. The reason he is able to "impose" his will on others is that many of those others also agree with him, and are willing to work towards the same goals.
Yeah, that's great, if when you swipe a laptop you give a rat's ass about the data on it. But if you don't none of this matters, you can just erase the damned thing and no software countermeasures are going to make a whit of difference.
even the "hot" desktop CPUs don't disapate as much heat as the lightbulbs in my room, but I don't need cooling fans for my bulbs because they have more surface area...).
Actually recent CPUs have dissipated 60-90 Watts of power, more than a mid-sized conventional light bulb. The reason you cool a processor and not a lightbulb is that the lightbulb has a much safer effective operating temperature (if it doesn't get hot, it doesn't even work!) than a small wafer of silicon with 20+ million tiny little transistors (which should probably not go much above 60 degrees celcius).
And yeah, faster drives usually do need some kind of cooling to stay within their recommended operating temperature, but nobody would put such drives in a laptop.
But I DO agree with your original point, that the CPU is not necessarily the biggest drain of power on today's laptops, and even if it took NO power, the laptop wouldn't be usable for more than about a day on a single battery.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people I know (myself included) were diagnosed in elementrary school with ADD, and I kind of felt "why is this a problem?" But then I got to know my college roommate. He's a brilliantly creative and very funny guy. But he has ADD and when he forgets to take his medication, he is basically unable to do the things he wants, and finds basically everyday life very furstrating.
I think that ADD is very much overdiagnosed, to make kids easier for their parents or teachers to deal with, but there are cases in which ADD is a real problem for some of these kids.
Hey, everyone makes mistakes. NASA completes far more succesful missions than failures.
Correct, they hardly complete any failures.
people are much more capable than dinky little rovers (cute as they may be).
ravers are people too!
That wasn't the supreme court, that was like some judge in california, which is not going to be relevant to a case in New York.
crazy men are ALWAYS funny.
As far as I know no complete (or close to complete) grammar exist for any natural language.
Yeah, well, it's not too difficult to write a grammar for english that encompasses most of the things that we say in daily conversation, if you're not dead set on making an unambiguous context-free grammar. We can parse general context free language in O(n^3). Most programming languages parsers use LL(1) or LR(1) grammars (subsets of context-free languages, but more expressive than regular languages), which can be parsed in basically O(N). Parsing general context-sensitive languages, well, knowing how long it will take solves the halting problem.
However, I think that a simple generative grammar, even a context-sensitive turing complete one is basically doomed to failure, since "valid english sentences" is a fuzzy set. This doesn't really matter from the point of view of making a parser, though (So what if it understands things that I might not, so long as it also understands the things that I do grok)
However even correcting for that, if you look at bigrams (i.e. pairs of words) in Shakespeare and, say, a newspaper article there will be very few in common and even those will mostly include prepositions.
I wonder how much of that is stylistic. Do you have any data on other bigram comparisons?
If you move west a bit, you get into languages like Vietnamese, where as far as I could tell from my 100 or so hours of field work on the subject, there is no difference between a compound word and two words. At all. They even leave spaces in the middle of what they call "compound words". Vietnamese is what is called an "isolating analyitic language" - that nothing smaller than a word has any meaning at all (as opposed to an agglutinative language like English, where prefixes and suffixes and what-not all carry small bits of meaning).
The Whorf-Sapif Hypothesis is much stronger than what you state. Basically it states that language constrains thought and this is rejected by pretty much all linguists
Except, that is, proponents of Loglan/Lojban.
You are correct that Finnish and Sanskrit are completely unrelated, at least historically speaking.
They do share some features in commmon, though, such as the use of "cases" in lieu of prepositions. (I think Latin does a bit of this too, but I may be wrong.)
I don't know a whole lot about the history of the Finno-Ugric family of languages, but I can tell you that Finnish and Magyar (hungarian) are the most well-known examples, and that there are also a handfull of uralic languages (that is, spoken in the Urals) which belong to this family. (estonian, and lithuanian perhpas?).
I can also tell you a bit about the histry of the Indo-European language. From what I recall, the Aryans (the real ones, Hitler totally misclassified his own race!) brought it into india, with their miltary victory, some several thousand years back. They did a lot for the dissemination of the language family as they were a successful and aggressive people. There it evolved into Sanskrit (which has evovled into Hindi, which even today co-exists with the totally unrelated Tamil).
Think about Shakespeare, for example. The language of Shakespeare is so different from standard English as to have virtually no intersection.
Your are in error. Shakespeare is considered the beginning of "modern english", which is what we speak today. 95% of his vocabulary is the same (though some spellings differ), and most of the grammatical constructs we see in Shakespeare are still used today. The biggest reasons that his writings are at all difficult are that they are use a lot of metaphors, many of which are archaic and abstruse.
Even Chaucer (pretty much definitive "middle english") is fairly similar, though a lot of the words have shifted in pronounciation and spelling since then. I frequently need to say the stuff out loud to even recognize the words. But the sentence structure is basically the same, and for the most part the vocabulary is only superfically different.
ALWAYS have people felt that the langauge that they spoke was changing for the worse, and usually it's percieved that it's on the brink of disaster as well.
Is this democratization of linguistical/syntactical/semantical decisions a good thing?
There is no democratization. Language has ALWAYS been determined by how people spoke, and if people 'choose' to speak differently, the language changes.
To answer your questions: No. It's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing either. English will not be 'ruined' to the point of unusability. New and 'difficult' dialects may arise, but actually I don't think that will happen much either - today's level of global intercommunication makes even that unlikely.
Besides, wouldn't compilers have a problem with languages that required that much lookahead?
None of the word orders really affect look-ahead. postfix (SOV) is just as easy to parse as infix (SVO) (and is much less prone to ambiguity).
I speak a little Japanese from what I took in college, and there are some unique features of the language that might effect syntactical structure
While I am sure Japanese has several unique features, the feature you mentioned (Subject Object Verb word order) is far from unique. Over 40% of languages use this form. (Turkish, Tamil, and Tibetan are a few examples) (SVO, the word order used by English, is a close second, and probably has more speakers than SOV languages (as English and Chinese are both SVO languages))
ONly kind of on topic, but.. hey. =)
I don't follow how writing software and not giving you the source code is raping the public. Could you go into a little more detail on that point please?
Has nVidia made any PCI capabile chipsets since the TNT2 ultra?
What if you turn off optimisations on your C++ compiler? I know that VC++ does a good ammount of stuff toward the end of speeding up its output (it optimizes much better than C++Builder, for instance)
I just paypaled you $0.25.
Should anyone have the freedom to create and use any technology?
In principle, I do think that. However, I also think that people should be held responsible for the results of their actions. I am free to use a piece of technology (say, a 2x4) but not in a way that harms others.
Regulation I feel is appropriate is: requiring research as to side effects of technology, and some moral evaluation of what exactly "harming" other people entails. That's going to be the tricky part.
But as far as I'm concerned you're welcome to set off a nuclear explosion wherever you like, so long as you choose a spot at which there are no harmful "side effects" (eg, people irratiated, killed, wide-scale ecological damage). It's the character of the technolgoy that determines what kind of restriction that effects, however.
The alternative is what? Stopping all innovation until we fully understand and accept its consequences? a) stopping all technological innovation is impossible, and b) fully understanding the consequences is impossible.
I don't particulary have any affinity for the "rules" as they stand now. I do think Humanity deserves a chance to work out for itself what the rules should be, and not have them handed to us at technological gunpoint by an elite.
What are you proposing? We have some global poll and decide what "we" want as a species and then judiciously allow only the things that further that goal?
It, in this case, being the right of an individual to make his will universal law via technology? That doesn't resemble any kind of freedom I know.
Nobody's singlehandedly making their own will universal law. If the only person who agreed with the freenet author was the freenet author, it would not be a powerful notion. The reason he is able to "impose" his will on others is that many of those others also agree with him, and are willing to work towards the same goals.
Yeah, that's great, if when you swipe a laptop you give a rat's ass about the data on it. But if you don't none of this matters, you can just erase the damned thing and no software countermeasures are going to make a whit of difference.
I'm sorry, you're going to have to move to sone universe where testing does NOT take time.
but the craft doesn't think it's moving near the speed of light. I think it was meant near the speed of light, relative to the earth.
even the "hot" desktop CPUs don't disapate as much heat as the lightbulbs in my room, but I don't need cooling fans for my bulbs because they have more surface area...).
Actually recent CPUs have dissipated 60-90 Watts of power, more than a mid-sized conventional light bulb. The reason you cool a processor and not a lightbulb is that the lightbulb has a much safer effective operating temperature (if it doesn't get hot, it doesn't even work!) than a small wafer of silicon with 20+ million tiny little transistors (which should probably not go much above 60 degrees celcius).
And yeah, faster drives usually do need some kind of cooling to stay within their recommended operating temperature, but nobody would put such drives in a laptop.
But I DO agree with your original point, that the CPU is not necessarily the biggest drain of power on today's laptops, and even if it took NO power, the laptop wouldn't be usable for more than about a day on a single battery.