Even if they are using the grapes from Tokay in Australia, the soil is different. The soil has a noticeable effect on the wine produced, even if the grapes and methods are the same, so restrictions on regional names make sense.
What are the FYROMians doing with Greece's name Macedonia?
Continuing the name of that region? Almost no one disputes that the former Yugoslavian republic includes part of the historical region of Macedonia. It is simply a mere portion of that region, with the rest lying in Greece. What really started the beef between that region and Greece is the FYROM's appropriation of Alexander the Great and the traditional Macedonian sun symbol. Greeks say, "Hey, you're a bunch of Slavs. Slavs came in the 6th century AD, and this old stuff is all Ancient Greek, our heritage!". Inhabitants of the FYROM could say "Slavs came and imposed their language, but many of us are genetically descended from Alexander's people!"
Funny enough, Swinburne's second concern after philosophy of religion is philosophy of science. He does not feel that the reasoning of the latter must somehow compensate for the former.
I was raised in a non-religious household. I came to Orthodox Christianity because of Richard Swinburne's defence of Christianity (a multi-volume series published by Oxford University Press). Swinburne in turn left the Church of England for the Orthodox Church after he found it the only Christian denomination that matched where his philosophical reasoning led him.
So it's quite common for people to believe in Christianity through being convinced of its claims, not only because of an accident of upbringing.
Vinge would be the first to admit that the idea of Zones of Thought is pure fantasy, an element thrown in to liven up the plot but which has absolutely no basis in real physics.
(Also note that in his Zones universe, the zones in the Milky Way are not some natural process, but were set up by some ancient civilization which had Transcended in order to regulate the galaxy for some reason).
It doesn't matter if the company is run by a single private individual. To do business you have to legally register the company, which makes it an impersonal organization with public responsibilities.
Seriously, what's your point? Who gives a shit about your ARM Debian packages? Noone sane is going to be using them on a phone. People don't want nor need command-line applications for a phone.
Certainly the general public wouldn't be interested, but we're on a site that bills itself as "news for nerds". I don't get too nostalgic for the old days of Slashdot (my first UID was 5 digits, so perhaps I haven't been around long enough to be really crusty), but it seems like the last two or three years have seen a big decline in passion for nerdy computing, with discussion here now little different from other sites like Reddit.
I imagine if you approached Shakespeare and told him that his plays could be shown across the entire planet without any extra effort on his part - he would be thrilled.
No, by the time of Shakespeare there had arisen a sentiment among authors that only they had the right to disseminate copies of their works. Poets of, say, the Roman era didn't care that their works were transcribed from recitals, mass-copied by amanuenses and sold in the agora without any money going back to them. The only time they complained was when people put their own names on the work -- plagiarism, not copyright violation (Martial composed a witty epigram to this effect). Playwrights of Shakespeare's era, however, jealously guarded their scripts and tried to put a stop to the unauthorized copies made by audience members.
Ever heard someone refer to Internet Explorer as "The Internet"? Does it make your teeth grind?
No.
Those of us who understand the meanings of words have a responsibility to use them correctly and lead by example.
Maybe you should take a basic linguistics course. The very first thing you'll learn is that prescriptivism is ultimately futile. The meaning of words change naturally over time, in a variety of directions. There's nothing one can do to stop it, and putting people down for using a widely recognized meaning, just because you don't like it, just marks you as an ass.
It would be one thing if someone wrote a post on dictatorships and said "For the purposes of this post, by 'dictatorship' I mean regimes led by a single person". But it's another thing to do like the OP, and claim that anyone using variant meanings is wrong. FWIW, those variant meanings have been in the Oxford English Dictionary since before your grandparents were born.
Look, a dictionary is a normal tool for looking up the meanings that have been ascribed to words. In spite of the OP's claim, the word "dictatorship" is regularly used in the English language to describe governments like Iran's. The Wikipedia article is wrong inasmuch as it attempts to fix the word to a single meaning, while standard dictionaries like M-W which I cited above and the OED show it has a range of usages.
Not necessarily. Ever hear the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" within Marxist-Leninist thought? There the dictatorship would be ruled by the working class as a whole.
If you bothered looking up "theocracy" in the dictionary, then you should have looked up "dictatorship" too. Merriam-Webster give as their third definition: "3 a : a form of government in which absolute power is concentrated in a dictator or a small clique b : a government organization or group in which absolute power is so concentrated c : a despotic state". A military junta, or in this case a group of religious leaders who wield absolute power, unaccountable to the people (and who can override democratically elected legislators) can fairly be called a dictatorship.
The mullahs are the highest authority in the country, and they are not answerable to elections. They also have their own private army which is not responsible to the voice of the people even in the most abstracted fashion. Hard to claim that's not a dictatorship.
The Pirate Party is a separate deal from The Pirate Bay. Essentially, the Pirate Part is an organization that pushes for the legality of sites like The Pirate Bay, but they do not go distributing torrents themselves.
Native speaker of US English here. I've only heard "tabloid" used to refer to things like the National Enquirer and Weekly World News, i.e. publications that don't even pretend to be thoughtful journalism.
The major tabloids in the Nordic countries are to the "serious newspapers" what the New York Post is to the New York Times: less detailed articles, more "infotainment", a tendency to pounce on any small news item about crime or the private lives of politicians and declare it the collapse of society.
I have a problem with unions requiring a certain minimum salary, paid vacations, and other amenities that only serve to cost the employers money without increasing productivity.
Again, that's what you get in the Nordic countries, and it doesn't seem to have much of an effect on employment figures.
In fact, the first item, minimum wages, falls entirely to collective bargaining between unions and industries, at least here in Finland. There is no government-mandated minimum wage. Result? Even the most lowly of cleaners make around $10/hour, with slightly higher wages for night shifts and double pay for Sundays.
No one forces you to join unions here, or participate in strikes. The union's got your back even if you don't want to pay dues (which are minimal), but of course you do miss out in voicing your concerns in collective bargaining if you don't join.
The second item, paid vacations, have little to do with unions in most of the developed world because it is mandated by law. Unions might be responsible for the extra 10 days at some places around here, but almost a month of paid leave is universal across the European Union.
Strange that you think leisure time doesn't increase employee productivity. Exhausted employees don't work as effectively as content ones.
If Americans were willing to work cheaper (and were actually allowed to), we might get some jobs coming back. Instead, we get labor unions that argue for high wages and benefits at the cost of actual jobs.
The Nordic countries are passionate about unions, with something like 80% of workers belonging to one (versus 7-12% for American private sector workers), and yet their unemployment figures haven't suffered. Blaming unions is the easy thing to do, but examine the chronology and you'll find that offshoring really took off long after the American labor movement ran out of steam.
Marxism-Leninism and its offshot Maoism may be dead as a political force, but Communism is still very visible as a critique of contemporary culture. Slavoj Zizek, for example, seems to be everywhere I turn these days in aesthetics, economics and social phenomena, and I'm amazed at how many young people in Europe are not only reading his books, but downright enjoying them (rare among contemporary philosophers).
Oh please, for nearly everyone's listening environment, you're not going to be able to tell a decent MP3 from an uncompressed file.
Even on low-quality equipment, you can certainly tell the difference between MP3s and FLACs with certain repertoire due to the lower dynamic range. The works of the spectralist composers, for example, sound quite different when encoded into MP3. The opening of Norgard's Symphony No. 3, where the initial attack on low strings is supposed to be heard up to the 9th partial, doesn't work very well in compressed formats.
It's really warhorse symphonies last that long. Many concerti last about 20-30 minutes. Typical orchestral programming (at least around here) has two pieces of that length played in the first half of the concert, and a 40-minute or hour-long piece in the second half after the intermission.
What tosh. I've seen Ligeti's string quartets performed in several cities and it never fails to draw a decent crowd where most people are not musicians themselves. Sony Classical and DG have never let their Ligeti recordings fall out of print because they do sell rather well. In contrast to other mid-century modernists, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey has delivered a steady stream of new listeners wanting to check this weird guy out.
Machines make perfect replications. They can play the composure exactly as written. Unfortunately, that's a beginners mistake. When you play from the sheet music, you can tell the people who are beginners. They can play the written music technically perfect, but they can't put any feeling into it.
Depends on the composer. It is true that scores of earlier epochs left much of the detail out, and the only reason we know that the musician's deviation from the score isn't incompetence but "feeling" is because of a continuous performance tradition. Of course, with ancient music there's much controversy, because the scores have very little detail at all, but we're not sure exactly how these pieces were performed.
But there are plenty of composers who want their music to be performed exactly as notated, with the musician putting what he thinks is "feeling" into it. They have gone on to add so much detail to their scores that the musician couldn't possibly introduce something extraneous. Ferneyhough's scores are hyper-notated like this, as are a few of Ligeti's pieces (the Cello Concerto, for instance). Stockhausen and Xenakis have written scores where instead of a general metronome marking for the movement, each segment is specified as a certain number of seconds so that the conductor or musicians don't add any rubato.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if they are using the grapes from Tokay in Australia, the soil is different. The soil has a noticeable effect on the wine produced, even if the grapes and methods are the same, so restrictions on regional names make sense.
Continuing the name of that region? Almost no one disputes that the former Yugoslavian republic includes part of the historical region of Macedonia. It is simply a mere portion of that region, with the rest lying in Greece. What really started the beef between that region and Greece is the FYROM's appropriation of Alexander the Great and the traditional Macedonian sun symbol. Greeks say, "Hey, you're a bunch of Slavs. Slavs came in the 6th century AD, and this old stuff is all Ancient Greek, our heritage!". Inhabitants of the FYROM could say "Slavs came and imposed their language, but many of us are genetically descended from Alexander's people!"
Funny enough, Swinburne's second concern after philosophy of religion is philosophy of science. He does not feel that the reasoning of the latter must somehow compensate for the former.
I was raised in a non-religious household. I came to Orthodox Christianity because of Richard Swinburne's defence of Christianity (a multi-volume series published by Oxford University Press). Swinburne in turn left the Church of England for the Orthodox Church after he found it the only Christian denomination that matched where his philosophical reasoning led him.
So it's quite common for people to believe in Christianity through being convinced of its claims, not only because of an accident of upbringing.
Vinge would be the first to admit that the idea of Zones of Thought is pure fantasy, an element thrown in to liven up the plot but which has absolutely no basis in real physics. (Also note that in his Zones universe, the zones in the Milky Way are not some natural process, but were set up by some ancient civilization which had Transcended in order to regulate the galaxy for some reason).
It doesn't matter if the company is run by a single private individual. To do business you have to legally register the company, which makes it an impersonal organization with public responsibilities.
Certainly the general public wouldn't be interested, but we're on a site that bills itself as "news for nerds". I don't get too nostalgic for the old days of Slashdot (my first UID was 5 digits, so perhaps I haven't been around long enough to be really crusty), but it seems like the last two or three years have seen a big decline in passion for nerdy computing, with discussion here now little different from other sites like Reddit.
No, by the time of Shakespeare there had arisen a sentiment among authors that only they had the right to disseminate copies of their works. Poets of, say, the Roman era didn't care that their works were transcribed from recitals, mass-copied by amanuenses and sold in the agora without any money going back to them. The only time they complained was when people put their own names on the work -- plagiarism, not copyright violation (Martial composed a witty epigram to this effect). Playwrights of Shakespeare's era, however, jealously guarded their scripts and tried to put a stop to the unauthorized copies made by audience members.
Have you been on AMTRAK lately? They have made no secret of the fact that they want to eventually emulate the same security system as airports.
No.
Maybe you should take a basic linguistics course. The very first thing you'll learn is that prescriptivism is ultimately futile. The meaning of words change naturally over time, in a variety of directions. There's nothing one can do to stop it, and putting people down for using a widely recognized meaning, just because you don't like it, just marks you as an ass.
It would be one thing if someone wrote a post on dictatorships and said "For the purposes of this post, by 'dictatorship' I mean regimes led by a single person". But it's another thing to do like the OP, and claim that anyone using variant meanings is wrong. FWIW, those variant meanings have been in the Oxford English Dictionary since before your grandparents were born.
Look, a dictionary is a normal tool for looking up the meanings that have been ascribed to words. In spite of the OP's claim, the word "dictatorship" is regularly used in the English language to describe governments like Iran's. The Wikipedia article is wrong inasmuch as it attempts to fix the word to a single meaning, while standard dictionaries like M-W which I cited above and the OED show it has a range of usages.
Not necessarily. Ever hear the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" within Marxist-Leninist thought? There the dictatorship would be ruled by the working class as a whole.
If you bothered looking up "theocracy" in the dictionary, then you should have looked up "dictatorship" too. Merriam-Webster give as their third definition: "3 a : a form of government in which absolute power is concentrated in a dictator or a small clique b : a government organization or group in which absolute power is so concentrated c : a despotic state". A military junta, or in this case a group of religious leaders who wield absolute power, unaccountable to the people (and who can override democratically elected legislators) can fairly be called a dictatorship.
The mullahs are the highest authority in the country, and they are not answerable to elections. They also have their own private army which is not responsible to the voice of the people even in the most abstracted fashion. Hard to claim that's not a dictatorship.
The Pirate Party is a separate deal from The Pirate Bay. Essentially, the Pirate Part is an organization that pushes for the legality of sites like The Pirate Bay, but they do not go distributing torrents themselves.
Native speaker of US English here. I've only heard "tabloid" used to refer to things like the National Enquirer and Weekly World News, i.e. publications that don't even pretend to be thoughtful journalism.
The major tabloids in the Nordic countries are to the "serious newspapers" what the New York Post is to the New York Times: less detailed articles, more "infotainment", a tendency to pounce on any small news item about crime or the private lives of politicians and declare it the collapse of society.
Again, that's what you get in the Nordic countries, and it doesn't seem to have much of an effect on employment figures.
In fact, the first item, minimum wages, falls entirely to collective bargaining between unions and industries, at least here in Finland. There is no government-mandated minimum wage. Result? Even the most lowly of cleaners make around $10/hour, with slightly higher wages for night shifts and double pay for Sundays.
No one forces you to join unions here, or participate in strikes. The union's got your back even if you don't want to pay dues (which are minimal), but of course you do miss out in voicing your concerns in collective bargaining if you don't join.
The second item, paid vacations, have little to do with unions in most of the developed world because it is mandated by law. Unions might be responsible for the extra 10 days at some places around here, but almost a month of paid leave is universal across the European Union.
Strange that you think leisure time doesn't increase employee productivity. Exhausted employees don't work as effectively as content ones.
The Nordic countries are passionate about unions, with something like 80% of workers belonging to one (versus 7-12% for American private sector workers), and yet their unemployment figures haven't suffered. Blaming unions is the easy thing to do, but examine the chronology and you'll find that offshoring really took off long after the American labor movement ran out of steam.
Oh noes! Does it at least support the Gopher protocol and the <blink> tag?
Marxism-Leninism and its offshot Maoism may be dead as a political force, but Communism is still very visible as a critique of contemporary culture. Slavoj Zizek, for example, seems to be everywhere I turn these days in aesthetics, economics and social phenomena, and I'm amazed at how many young people in Europe are not only reading his books, but downright enjoying them (rare among contemporary philosophers).
Birthrates are going down over much of the world. This problem will become less acute, not more.
Even on low-quality equipment, you can certainly tell the difference between MP3s and FLACs with certain repertoire due to the lower dynamic range. The works of the spectralist composers, for example, sound quite different when encoded into MP3. The opening of Norgard's Symphony No. 3, where the initial attack on low strings is supposed to be heard up to the 9th partial, doesn't work very well in compressed formats.
It's really warhorse symphonies last that long. Many concerti last about 20-30 minutes. Typical orchestral programming (at least around here) has two pieces of that length played in the first half of the concert, and a 40-minute or hour-long piece in the second half after the intermission.
What tosh. I've seen Ligeti's string quartets performed in several cities and it never fails to draw a decent crowd where most people are not musicians themselves. Sony Classical and DG have never let their Ligeti recordings fall out of print because they do sell rather well. In contrast to other mid-century modernists, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey has delivered a steady stream of new listeners wanting to check this weird guy out.
Depends on the composer. It is true that scores of earlier epochs left much of the detail out, and the only reason we know that the musician's deviation from the score isn't incompetence but "feeling" is because of a continuous performance tradition. Of course, with ancient music there's much controversy, because the scores have very little detail at all, but we're not sure exactly how these pieces were performed.
But there are plenty of composers who want their music to be performed exactly as notated, with the musician putting what he thinks is "feeling" into it. They have gone on to add so much detail to their scores that the musician couldn't possibly introduce something extraneous. Ferneyhough's scores are hyper-notated like this, as are a few of Ligeti's pieces (the Cello Concerto, for instance). Stockhausen and Xenakis have written scores where instead of a general metronome marking for the movement, each segment is specified as a certain number of seconds so that the conductor or musicians don't add any rubato.