It occurs to me that these two probably committed a federal crime. They're clearly guilty of felony reckless driving according to the laws of many states. Crossing state lines for the purpose of committing a felony, which is exactly what they did, is a federal crime.
Hear, hear! I hope they jail the SOB. These people aren't rebels or pioneers, they're dangerous sociopaths. They shouldn't be on the roads.
Re:Wow. I'm about to comment on. . .
on
SCO Layoffs Begin
·
· Score: 1
Sure, but the people who are now at SCO are neither the original Santa Cruz Operation, which became Tarantella, nor the people from Caldera, which eventually turned into the SCO group.
The people in charge, and as far as I know, pretty much everyone else at this point, are new people who had nothing to do with SCO Unix or Linux.
The Telcos aren't being asked to reveal information to the public - they're being asked to give it to another part of the government. That is not espionage. The state secrets privilege is a red herring here - it is used to prevent disclosure of information that would be harmful to national security to third parties in court. It has nothing to do with the ability of the legislative branch to enquire into the activities of the executive. In any case, there is an appropriate procedure here, which is not being followed. Congress clearly has the authority to demand this information. If the Telcos don't comply voluntarily, Congress should issue subpoenas. If the Administration believes that the information should not be disclosed, it can apply to the courts to intervene. That way, the decision is made by a neutral party.
Re:What? No comments...?
on
SCO Layoffs Begin
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The problem is that this is anti-climactic. They haven't laid off everybody but the book-keeper. They're still technically in reorganization, not terminal bankruptcy. SCO hasn't yet been delisted. No criminal charges have been filed. SCO has been so bad, we want blood. To paraphrase Conan, we want "to crush SCO, to see them driven before us, and to rejoice in the lamentations of their women".
It is quite common for the boards of non-profit organizations to have a provision in their bylaws that allows the rest of the board to remove any member who doesn't turn up for a certain number of meetings as well as a provision that lets any member force a meeting in which anyone who turns up constitutes a quorum under certain circumstances. That isn't undemocratic - it just prevents a few members from locking up the organization. I've had to use such provisions with an organization I was involved in. After several failed attempts to get a quorum, we forced one more meeting to be called. When it was one short of a quorum, we invoked the provision that let us call another meeting immediately with those present constituting a quorum. We then removed two board members who had failed repeatedly to turn up and passed the by-law change (announced two weeks in advance as required for such changes) that lowered the ridiculously high quorum requirement. This reactivated a frozen organization.
That's French for Ivory Coast, whic is probably how you know the country. They switched to using the French version as the official name even in English a while back.
I'm curious too, but, just a guess, I wonder if the word in question is "behema", which
is actually "water buffalo", but is used to refer to loud, rowdy, uncouth people?
I think you need to reread my comment, which you haven't understood. Yes, it has long been known that only common verbs remain irregular. The description I gave of the stages in child language acquisition was part of the explanation of why this is the case.
So, as I said, the basic observation is not news. The virtue of the study is in providing a more precise quantitative model.
Re:Yes, well...however...there are other methods.
on
The Evolution of Language
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Sorry, but this is absolutely false. Korean has dialects that differ significantly from each other - there is no single unified language. Nor did the king ever standardize the language. Korean is no more artificial than any other human language. This appears to be a garbled version of the development of the Hangul alphabet by king Sejong and his advisors. This was a great development, but it was just a writing system, not a standardization of the language itself.
Furthermore, it is not true that someone who speaks Chinese or Japanese can quickly pick up Korean. Chinese and Korean are not only unrelated but of radically different types. Chinese speakers find Korean quite difficult. Japanese speakers find Korean somewhat easier because the two languages are very similar in grammatical type, but even so most of the vocabulary is quite unfamiliar and the morphology, though similar in a general typological way, is quite different in detail.
This isn't really news. We linguists have known this for a long time, as the article mentions, and we've known why: a child learning a language tends to regularize irregular forms. If he or she then hears the irregular form enough, the child reverts to the irregular form. This is why you'll hear children learning English go through a stage in which their knowledge of verb forms is skimpy but they have irregular forms like "brought", because they are memorizing individual forms, then through a stage in which they produce incorrect but regular forms, which they could not have learned from adults, like "bringed", because they have learned the rule, and through a third stage in which they learn the exceptions to the rule and the irregular forms like "brought" return.
Irregular forms will only be learnable if they are sufficiently frequent. The only novelty of this research is the computational ability to carry out an accurate simulation.
As for predicting the future of the language, that's silly. There is a lot more to language change than what happens to irregular verbs.
Although there are 123 marks containing "cent", some of them are things like "nutracent", which does not contain the word "cent". Only one result comes up when I search for "one cent", and this is not actually a mark - it is an index term for a banknote design. In sum, I see no evidence that the mark "one cent" is owned by anyone, much less that "one cent" is an official mark of the Crown or of the Mint.
Have I missed something?
A second point is that registration of an official mark does not prevent the use of the same words in a generic sense, only as a competing mark. It is less than clear to me whether all of the uses to which "one cent" is being put in this campaign constitute use as marks.
I don't think that there was a way to create recovery media from the hidden partition on that machine, but that was several years ago. Maybe enough people complained that they added that capability. Even so, I bet that a lot of people don't realize that they can do this or neglect to do it.
A minor aspect of the article's proposal that I like is the requirement that
the manufacturer include an MS Windows recovery CD. Some manufacturers don't do that, even though you are paying for MS Windows. The last HP machine I bought had no CD. Instead, it had a hidden "backup partition". That's okay if you just want to reinstall the system after it has been corrupted, but useless if the drive dies or you decide to replace it with a larger one.
Copyright is copyright. One copyright is not stronger than another copyright.
The only difference between a registered and unregistered copyright is the burden of proof.
Sorry, this is wrong. Registration of the copyright provides a number of advantages, which are summarized here by the Copyright Office. Among them is that, if the copyright is registered within three months of publication or prior to infringement, statutory damages and attorney's fees may be obtained. If not, only actual damages may be recovered by the copyright owner. In the case of a letter such as this, which has no commercial value, actual damages would be zero, so the failure to register the letter effectively eliminates any financial recovery. (Of course, the author of the letter is unlikely to succeed in the threatened suit since this is an absolutely classic case of Fair use.)
Sorry, this is wrong. As officers of the court, lawyers have obligations to the court that override their obligations to their clients. For example, a lawyer may not suborn perjury by his or her client and may not intentionally misrepresent the facts of the case. When a lawyer submits case citations, they must, as far as he knows, be valid. If a decision is overturned while the motion is still before the court, the attorney is obligated immediately to notify the court. Failure to do so is fraud upon the court. Not only will the defendant here have an additional ground for appeal but the RIAA attorneys are subject to sanctions.
Indeed, more than "much". 90% of our population lives within 160km (100 miles) of the US border. That's 3.5% of the greatest north-south extent of the country. We've got electric lights, computers, cellphones, even broadband here in the north, but it doesn't light up like the far south.
I couldn't help noticing that the rules forbid interference with other boats' electronic equipment and colliding with other boats, but say nothing about the use of, say, cannon.:)
In the short term, English is pretty definitely the leading language, but it may
not be in the longer term. I'd say that Chinese and Hindi are the competitors to
watch out for. Both have many more native speakers than English and rapidly
growing populations. China and India are behind the United States in economic,
technological, and pop cultural clout at present, but that may not be true
some decades down the road. Spanish is widely spoken, but the Spanish-speaking world
doesn't show the potential power of China or India.
As for pissing in the wind, it is, I think, sadly true that efforts to maintain and revitalize minority languages, at least those that are already in serious decline, will mostly fail. There isn't any good reason though, other than lack of qualified
people and funding, that we shouldn't obtain good documentation for most of them
before they go.
The Living Languages Institute is just the latest of a number of organizations devoted to the study and/or maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Here are some other organizations and sources of information:
no one is killing people and in modern times no one is outlawing things
It is true that most language loss at present is due to cultural and economic pressure rather than force, but it is not true that "no one is killing people" and it is not true that "in modern times no one is outlawing things". One of the causes of linguistic and cultural loss in the Amazon is the extermination of Indians by rubber planters and other farmers who want their land. Some small tribes have been wiped out by slavers. The slavers, of course, don't intend to kill everyone, but they kill some in capturing the others, many others die in slavery, and those slaves who stay alive do not pass on their language and culture. Other areas in which genocide is affecting small cultures include the southern and Darfur regions of Sudan, parts of Ethiopia, and parts of Burma.
As for outlawing languages, one prominent example is Kurdish, which it was illegal to speak or teach in Turkey until last year, when the Turkish government finally succumbed to pressure from the European Union, which it wants to join. Even so, the Turkish government continues to repress Kurdish. Kurdish is also repressed by Iran.
Furthermore, to interfere with minority languages you don't have to ban them completely. If you send the kids to boarding schools and forbid them to speak their own language, you damage the transmission of the language. This was a very common practice until quite recently (in some places it ended only ten or twenty years ago), and in some places it continues to this day.
Yes, people do get caught in natural disasters, but the odds are way lower
than of having your house or office damaged. No backup solution is perfect.
Even if you copy your data to someplace on the other side of the planet,
if a good-sized asteriod hits the earth or the sun goes nova, you're screwed.
Memory sticks have gotten to be large enough that I can keep a backup of my most important and changeable data in my pocket. They aren't large enough for audio and image files, but they hold a fantastic amount of compressed text. Burglars won't get it because it isn't at home, and it isn't very likely to be damaged in a natural disaster either.
Slashdot Mirror
He can't go down very much if he has to average 90mph.
It occurs to me that these two probably committed a federal crime. They're clearly guilty of felony reckless driving according to the laws of many states. Crossing state lines for the purpose of committing a felony, which is exactly what they did, is a federal crime.
Hear, hear! I hope they jail the SOB. These people aren't rebels or pioneers, they're dangerous sociopaths. They shouldn't be on the roads.
Sure, but the people who are now at SCO are neither the original Santa Cruz Operation, which became Tarantella, nor the people from Caldera, which eventually turned into the SCO group. The people in charge, and as far as I know, pretty much everyone else at this point, are new people who had nothing to do with SCO Unix or Linux.
The Telcos aren't being asked to reveal information to the public - they're being asked to give it to another part of the government. That is not espionage. The state secrets privilege is a red herring here - it is used to prevent disclosure of information that would be harmful to national security to third parties in court. It has nothing to do with the ability of the legislative branch to enquire into the activities of the executive. In any case, there is an appropriate procedure here, which is not being followed. Congress clearly has the authority to demand this information. If the Telcos don't comply voluntarily, Congress should issue subpoenas. If the Administration believes that the information should not be disclosed, it can apply to the courts to intervene. That way, the decision is made by a neutral party.
The problem is that this is anti-climactic. They haven't laid off everybody but the book-keeper. They're still technically in reorganization, not terminal bankruptcy. SCO hasn't yet been delisted. No criminal charges have been filed. SCO has been so bad, we want blood. To paraphrase Conan, we want "to crush SCO, to see them driven before us, and to rejoice in the lamentations of their women".
It is quite common for the boards of non-profit organizations to have a provision in their bylaws that allows the rest of the board to remove any member who doesn't turn up for a certain number of meetings as well as a provision that lets any member force a meeting in which anyone who turns up constitutes a quorum under certain circumstances. That isn't undemocratic - it just prevents a few members from locking up the organization. I've had to use such provisions with an organization I was involved in. After several failed attempts to get a quorum, we forced one more meeting to be called. When it was one short of a quorum, we invoked the provision that let us call another meeting immediately with those present constituting a quorum. We then removed two board members who had failed repeatedly to turn up and passed the by-law change (announced two weeks in advance as required for such changes) that lowered the ridiculously high quorum requirement. This reactivated a frozen organization.
That's French for Ivory Coast, whic is probably how you know the country. They switched to using the French version as the official name even in English a while back.
I'm curious too, but, just a guess, I wonder if the word in question is "behema", which is actually "water buffalo", but is used to refer to loud, rowdy, uncouth people?
I think you need to reread my comment, which you haven't understood. Yes, it has long been known that only common verbs remain irregular. The description I gave of the stages in child language acquisition was part of the explanation of why this is the case. So, as I said, the basic observation is not news. The virtue of the study is in providing a more precise quantitative model.
Sorry, but this is absolutely false. Korean has dialects that differ significantly from each other - there is no single unified language. Nor did the king ever standardize the language. Korean is no more artificial than any other human language. This appears to be a garbled version of the development of the Hangul alphabet by king Sejong and his advisors. This was a great development, but it was just a writing system, not a standardization of the language itself.
Furthermore, it is not true that someone who speaks Chinese or Japanese can quickly pick up Korean. Chinese and Korean are not only unrelated but of radically different types. Chinese speakers find Korean quite difficult. Japanese speakers find Korean somewhat easier because the two languages are very similar in grammatical type, but even so most of the vocabulary is quite unfamiliar and the morphology, though similar in a general typological way, is quite different in detail.
This isn't really news. We linguists have known this for a long time, as the article mentions, and we've known why: a child learning a language tends to regularize irregular forms. If he or she then hears the irregular form enough, the child reverts to the irregular form. This is why you'll hear children learning English go through a stage in which their knowledge of verb forms is skimpy but they have irregular forms like "brought", because they are memorizing individual forms, then through a stage in which they produce incorrect but regular forms, which they could not have learned from adults, like "bringed", because they have learned the rule, and through a third stage in which they learn the exceptions to the rule and the irregular forms like "brought" return. Irregular forms will only be learnable if they are sufficiently frequent. The only novelty of this research is the computational ability to carry out an accurate simulation.
As for predicting the future of the language, that's silly. There is a lot more to language change than what happens to irregular verbs.
Although there are 123 marks containing "cent", some of them are things like "nutracent", which does not contain the word "cent". Only one result comes up when I search for "one cent", and this is not actually a mark - it is an index term for a banknote design. In sum, I see no evidence that the mark "one cent" is owned by anyone, much less that "one cent" is an official mark of the Crown or of the Mint. Have I missed something?
A second point is that registration of an official mark does not prevent the use of the same words in a generic sense, only as a competing mark. It is less than clear to me whether all of the uses to which "one cent" is being put in this campaign constitute use as marks.
I don't think that there was a way to create recovery media from the hidden partition on that machine, but that was several years ago. Maybe enough people complained that they added that capability. Even so, I bet that a lot of people don't realize that they can do this or neglect to do it.
A minor aspect of the article's proposal that I like is the requirement that the manufacturer include an MS Windows recovery CD. Some manufacturers don't do that, even though you are paying for MS Windows. The last HP machine I bought had no CD. Instead, it had a hidden "backup partition". That's okay if you just want to reinstall the system after it has been corrupted, but useless if the drive dies or you decide to replace it with a larger one.
Sorry, this is wrong. Registration of the copyright provides a number of advantages, which are summarized here by the Copyright Office. Among them is that, if the copyright is registered within three months of publication or prior to infringement, statutory damages and attorney's fees may be obtained. If not, only actual damages may be recovered by the copyright owner. In the case of a letter such as this, which has no commercial value, actual damages would be zero, so the failure to register the letter effectively eliminates any financial recovery. (Of course, the author of the letter is unlikely to succeed in the threatened suit since this is an absolutely classic case of Fair use.)
Sorry, this is wrong. As officers of the court, lawyers have obligations to the court that override their obligations to their clients. For example, a lawyer may not suborn perjury by his or her client and may not intentionally misrepresent the facts of the case. When a lawyer submits case citations, they must, as far as he knows, be valid. If a decision is overturned while the motion is still before the court, the attorney is obligated immediately to notify the court. Failure to do so is fraud upon the court. Not only will the defendant here have an additional ground for appeal but the RIAA attorneys are subject to sanctions.
Indeed, more than "much". 90% of our population lives within 160km (100 miles) of the US border. That's 3.5% of the greatest north-south extent of the country. We've got electric lights, computers, cellphones, even broadband here in the north, but it doesn't light up like the far south.
Here in northern BC this isn't a problem. They still haven't figured out how to enter beaver pelts into a computer system.
I couldn't help noticing that the rules forbid interference with other boats' electronic equipment and colliding with other boats, but say nothing about the use of, say, cannon. :)
In the short term, English is pretty definitely the leading language, but it may not be in the longer term. I'd say that Chinese and Hindi are the competitors to watch out for. Both have many more native speakers than English and rapidly growing populations. China and India are behind the United States in economic, technological, and pop cultural clout at present, but that may not be true some decades down the road. Spanish is widely spoken, but the Spanish-speaking world doesn't show the potential power of China or India.
As for pissing in the wind, it is, I think, sadly true that efforts to maintain and revitalize minority languages, at least those that are already in serious decline, will mostly fail. There isn't any good reason though, other than lack of qualified people and funding, that we shouldn't obtain good documentation for most of them before they go.
The Living Languages Institute is just the latest of a number of organizations devoted to the study and/or maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Here are some other organizations and sources of information:
It is true that most language loss at present is due to cultural and economic pressure rather than force, but it is not true that "no one is killing people" and it is not true that "in modern times no one is outlawing things". One of the causes of linguistic and cultural loss in the Amazon is the extermination of Indians by rubber planters and other farmers who want their land. Some small tribes have been wiped out by slavers. The slavers, of course, don't intend to kill everyone, but they kill some in capturing the others, many others die in slavery, and those slaves who stay alive do not pass on their language and culture. Other areas in which genocide is affecting small cultures include the southern and Darfur regions of Sudan, parts of Ethiopia, and parts of Burma.
As for outlawing languages, one prominent example is Kurdish, which it was illegal to speak or teach in Turkey until last year, when the Turkish government finally succumbed to pressure from the European Union, which it wants to join. Even so, the Turkish government continues to repress Kurdish. Kurdish is also repressed by Iran.
Furthermore, to interfere with minority languages you don't have to ban them completely. If you send the kids to boarding schools and forbid them to speak their own language, you damage the transmission of the language. This was a very common practice until quite recently (in some places it ended only ten or twenty years ago), and in some places it continues to this day.
For anyone interested in this area, I strongly recommend Tove Skutnabb-Kangas' book Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights?.
Yes, people do get caught in natural disasters, but the odds are way lower than of having your house or office damaged. No backup solution is perfect. Even if you copy your data to someplace on the other side of the planet, if a good-sized asteriod hits the earth or the sun goes nova, you're screwed.
Memory sticks have gotten to be large enough that I can keep a backup of my most important and changeable data in my pocket. They aren't large enough for audio and image files, but they hold a fantastic amount of compressed text. Burglars won't get it because it isn't at home, and it isn't very likely to be damaged in a natural disaster either.