My point was that if there were disputes over the intellectual property of the glassware, it would probably be the actual people who made the stuff who would sue me, and not some self-appointed industry lobbying group who claims to represent the poor struggling glassblowers while in reality they just represent the glassware labels who skim off all the money and pay their dupes "glassware advances" which they have to pay back by going on extensive glassblowing tours and selling glassware T-shirts.
If I buy a set of cognac glasses and then move to Belgium, I don't have to buy a special set of Belgian cognac glasses.
When I buy a set of cognac glasses, they'll work with any brand of cognac, even cognac my friends and I made as part of a giant collaborative project.
If I buy cognac glasses and decide to drink milk out of them, the manufacturer won't accuse me of violating the licensing agreement.
If I build exact replicas of the cognac glasses using my own materials, and then give these replicas away, I won't get sued by the Glassblowing Industry Association of America.
If I sell the cognac glasses at a second-hand store, the aforementioned GIAA won't accuse me of stealing profits away from the original cognac-glass-makers, or claim that I probably made an illegal copy of them before I sold them.
I don't have to pay higher prices on glassblowing supplies on the assumption that I'll probably use them to make illegal copies of cognac glasses.
And the #1 difference between DVDs and cognac glasses:
The cognac glass actually contains something I might enjoy.
Large-scale farming. -- an invention? or just bigger small scale farming?
That's a bit like saying vertebrates are just bigger protozoa. Large-scale farming as it is now practiced was made possible by a host of technological innovations, and bears little semblance to the small-scale subsistence farming which was the primary occupation of the vast majority of Americans in the nineteenth century. The development of large-scale farming contributed to the urbanization of America and the shift from an agrarian economy to a much more industrialized economy, which in turn rapidly accelerated our technological progress. It created modern consumer culture-- the move away from subsistence farming left more people with more disposable income, and created a market for more and more interesting gadgets to spend it on. In short, large-scale farming has changed our civilization to a much greater degree than all the dot-com bazillionaires put together.
You might think this shift in agricultural practices barely affects you because you don't live on a farm. Fact is, that shift is the main reason why you don't live on a farm.
That should read "Many commies add it to the water supply on the theory that it prevents American resistance to their scheming plots to conquer the world." That's why I only drink pure grain alcohol and rainwater. To preserve my Purity Of Essence.
You young whipper-snappers had it easy. I used to have to spend 3 hours feeding punched cards into the mainframe just to get the front panel LEDs to light up in the shape of a nekkid lady.
Steven Pinker argues for "octopuses": "The -us in octopus is not a Latin noun ending that switches to -i in the plural, but the Greek pous (foot). The etymologically defensible octopodes is not an improvement." (Steven Pinker, Words And Rules: The Ingredients of Language, 55.)
It is "Grammar," not "Grammer," and "Nazi," not "Natzi." And "an" can precede words beginning in "h" (e. g. "an historical occasion"). That letter is a breathing, not generally considered a true consonant. In Greek, for example, the sound does not merit its own letter, but is represented by a diacritical mark over the vowel.
Well.
Someone once said, "where they burn books, they will soon start burning people".
This has happend many times in history... and someone said that "What we learn from history, is that we never learn from history and are bound to repeat the same mistakes"
Yeah, and if you hadn't been kept from learning history by the book-burners, you might be able to attach some proper names to those quotes!
Shows how closely you've read the books. While the White Witch might use "deep magic from the dawn of time" for evil, Aslan (the pathetically transparent allegorical version of Jesus) defeats her using what is referred to as "deeper magic from before the dawn of time". In fact, throughout the books, pretty much anything that's intended as allegory for divine miracle is referred to as "magic."
A friend of mine studied anthropology.
Anthropology definitely recognizes a scientific notion of race. According to my friend, skulls can be classified according to race by looking at shapes and distance between features.
I have also studied anthropology, and I know several people who are actively working in that field. I can tell you that it's not as cut-and-dried as you make it sound. There is no such thing as a "negro gene," for example. Certain traits might be more common in Africa than in Europe, but there will always be some mixture of traits across even the most isolated population. Skull measurements and the like can give you a rough idea of whether someone would be considered black or white by today's standards, but it's not remotely in the same league as telling, say, a chimpanzee skull from a babboon skull.
For example, the so-called "asiatic trait" of shovel-shaped incisors is found in most east Asians, but also in Native Americans and Scandinavians (though it is less common in the rest of Europe or in Africa.) There are people in the south of India whose skin is as dark as any African's, yet whose facial features resemble those commonly associated with Europeans. The aborigines of Australia were classified as "negroes," yet many have blonde hair.
The concept of race rests on the assumption that there are genetically distinct and isolated populations in the first place, and other than in a few places like the New Guinea Highlands, this has never occured. The Danes invaded Ireland and gave them the now typically Irish red hair. The curly dark hair of many Mediterranean Europeans indicates some African ancestry. The Romans stocked the garrisons guarding the Germanic tribes with African troops, and to this day there are swarthy, dark-haired Germans in those regions. The Mongols interbred repeatedly with Europeans. And the "race" we call "Native Americans" is believed to have originated from at least three separate populations who migrated from Asia. In short, it would be nearly impossible to find any individual anywhere whose ancestry did not include people from most, if not all, of the inhabited continents.
As a matter of fact, it's said that if you compared the genetic average of all Europeans against the genetic average of all Africans, they would resemble each other to a much greater degree than if you compared two randomly chosen Norwegians.
Look at the college application process. It should be illegal to ask about your gender or race on an application.
There's another option here, and I'm waiting to see someone use it. The very concept of "race" is unscientific: not only are there no medical tests which can determine to which race someone belongs (since what we call different races are not hard-and-fast genetic differences, but rather vague clusters of certain traits to which we give names like "black" or "Asian"), but, at least in America, there are no strict legal definitions for race. The only proof an institution has that a given individual is a member of a certain race is that person's word. So the answer is to list your race as whatever you think the institution's acceptance policy is biased toward. If they accuse you of falsifying your race in order to thwart affirmative action, simply ask them to prove that you are not, in fact, of the race you claim to be. This is, of course, impossible. Maybe if there were enough court cases about this it would finally pave the way to ending the legal fiction of race.
Biological sex, of course, is another issue, since there are scientific and legal definitions thereof. However, with intersexed and transgendered individuals making it more interesting, one's gender identity and biological sex may not always coincide neatly.
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the
English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews
on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by
any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the
last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud
Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as
their national home." --M. K. Gandhi, 1938
Why? Lawyer-bashing is pretty much a bi-partisan sport. Liberals tend to criticize corporate attorneys and prosecutors, while conservatives hate ACLU lawyers and anyone who uses an insanity defense.
You're almost there but not quite. Imagine you're bi-lingual as I am. The insult e.g. dog in my native language would evoke a much stronger response from me then the equivalent in english. Therefore language that's spoken to/by you does affect how you react to things.
Again, this isn't the fault of the language, but of the respective cultures. When someone who lives in a culture where "dog" is considered a scathing insult calls you that, you know his intentions. If you had managed to learn the literal meaning of the word, but didn't know that speakers of that language considered this an insult, you wouldn't view it as particularly harsh. The culture determines the language, not vice versa. Just look at the many examples of a word which was considered insulting becoming innocent, or an innocent word becoming insulting, due to changes in cultural attitudes.
Of course they'd be able to distinguish between them. Just not very well.
First of all, how do you know this would be the case? Secondly, if it were the case, what evidence is there that their difficulty in distinguishing the two would be due to language?
The language you speak does influence how you think and in some cases you emotional response to certain words. For example, try translating insults from one language to another. What would be a killing insult in one language may just sound funny or nonsensical in some other language.
Again, how is this a case of language influencing thought rather than the other way around? For example, the insult "bastard" is much worse in English than the equivalent phrase would be in some other languages because of the historical importance of one's family name and inheritance in English society. The way people thought (about inheritance, legitimacy, extramarital affairs, and other things) caused the word "bastard" to be given negative connotations, not the other way around.
They'd simply think of them as the Dutch-who-are-attacking us versus the Ducth-who-are-defending us. The potential for friendly fire though doesn't bare thinking about.
You just proved my point. In that case they would have been able to make a distinction between the two groups, and to have come up with terms for them. Their supposedly limited language did not have a limiting effect on thought.
Oh, and you should learn to distinguish between "bare" and "bear."
The Kanka-Bono tribe amazingly have no words for basic concepts like "wireless router," "dual opteron server blade," and "network print server." When our team of researchers presented them with these items, they merely tried using them to break open coconuts. The obvious conclusion is that, since their amazingly primitive language lacks the words for these items, their tiny non-Caucasian brains are simply unable to form distinctions among such obviously diffferent objects. Thus the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was vindicated. Then they ate our Dell service rep. And there was much rejoicing.
Cart before the horse. They don't have a need to distinguish the two groups, and therefore they don't develop distinct words-- not they don't have distinct words, therefore they can't distinguish the two groups. (If this were the case, infants would be entirely unable to learn anything: since they have no words at all, they would be unable to distinguish anything from anything else!)
Imagine this scenario: your hypothetical people who don't distinguish between the Dutch and English are suddenly invaded by the English, and the Dutch come to their aid. Now, do you think they would be thinking "the exact same people who are attacking us are defending us"? Or do you think this new situation would cause them to finally have a reason to distinguish Dutch from English, and would result in the coining of new words to refer to them?
I found this out using a search engine called Google. It's full of facts, as opposed to guesses.
No, it's full of caches of thousands of webpages, which include facts, lies, guesses, conjectures, flimflam, misinformation, and everything in between. Though it is easy for some people to make the mistake of thinking that everything that shows up in a web search must be factual.
and not to an age group that accepts the words of adults on blind faith.
And what age group is this? Sorry, but the idea that children beneath the age of whatever are malleable raw materials that can be molded into whatever shape adults want is little more than wishful thinking on the part of those who employ school speakers. I was bombarded with various forms of propaganda from kindergarten all the way through high school, and seldom if ever saw any of the students take it seriously. If anything, the mere fact that schoolteachers and other adults were saying it made them want to do the exact opposite. So maybe the copyright weasel is a good thing after all.:)
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My point was that if there were disputes over the intellectual property of the glassware, it would probably be the actual people who made the stuff who would sue me, and not some self-appointed industry lobbying group who claims to represent the poor struggling glassblowers while in reality they just represent the glassware labels who skim off all the money and pay their dupes "glassware advances" which they have to pay back by going on extensive glassblowing tours and selling glassware T-shirts.
If I buy a set of cognac glasses and then move to Belgium, I don't have to buy a special set of Belgian cognac glasses.
When I buy a set of cognac glasses, they'll work with any brand of cognac, even cognac my friends and I made as part of a giant collaborative project.
If I buy cognac glasses and decide to drink milk out of them, the manufacturer won't accuse me of violating the licensing agreement.
If I build exact replicas of the cognac glasses using my own materials, and then give these replicas away, I won't get sued by the Glassblowing Industry Association of America.
If I sell the cognac glasses at a second-hand store, the aforementioned GIAA won't accuse me of stealing profits away from the original cognac-glass-makers, or claim that I probably made an illegal copy of them before I sold them.
I don't have to pay higher prices on glassblowing supplies on the assumption that I'll probably use them to make illegal copies of cognac glasses.
And the #1 difference between DVDs and cognac glasses:
The cognac glass actually contains something I might enjoy.
What would you say to a mom who wants to make a backup of her kids?
"Chill out, lady, don't you have enough children already?"
Must not work to well if you're posting as AC. ;)
Large-scale farming. -- an invention? or just bigger small scale farming?
That's a bit like saying vertebrates are just bigger protozoa. Large-scale farming as it is now practiced was made possible by a host of technological innovations, and bears little semblance to the small-scale subsistence farming which was the primary occupation of the vast majority of Americans in the nineteenth century. The development of large-scale farming contributed to the urbanization of America and the shift from an agrarian economy to a much more industrialized economy, which in turn rapidly accelerated our technological progress. It created modern consumer culture-- the move away from subsistence farming left more people with more disposable income, and created a market for more and more interesting gadgets to spend it on. In short, large-scale farming has changed our civilization to a much greater degree than all the dot-com bazillionaires put together.
You might think this shift in agricultural practices barely affects you because you don't live on a farm. Fact is, that shift is the main reason why you don't live on a farm.
That should read "Many commies add it to the water supply on the theory that it prevents American resistance to their scheming plots to conquer the world." That's why I only drink pure grain alcohol and rainwater. To preserve my Purity Of Essence.
You young whipper-snappers had it easy. I used to have to spend 3 hours feeding punched cards into the mainframe just to get the front panel LEDs to light up in the shape of a nekkid lady.
Any plural that isn't the singular form with -s or -es on the end is non-intuitive crap and should be stricken.
Er, should be "striked."
Steven Pinker argues for "octopuses": "The -us in octopus is not a Latin noun ending that switches to -i in the plural, but the Greek pous (foot). The etymologically defensible octopodes is not an improvement." (Steven Pinker, Words And Rules: The Ingredients of Language, 55.)
I once read of someone using a 68040 on their keychain.
I remember when the first batch of Pentiums were recalled due to the infamous floating point error. Someone started making the old ones into jewelry.
It is "Grammar," not "Grammer," and "Nazi," not "Natzi." And "an" can precede words beginning in "h" (e. g. "an historical occasion"). That letter is a breathing, not generally considered a true consonant. In Greek, for example, the sound does not merit its own letter, but is represented by a diacritical mark over the vowel.
Well. Someone once said, "where they burn books, they will soon start burning people". This has happend many times in history... and someone said that "What we learn from history, is that we never learn from history and are bound to repeat the same mistakes"
Yeah, and if you hadn't been kept from learning history by the book-burners, you might be able to attach some proper names to those quotes!
In narnia, it's presented as evil.
Shows how closely you've read the books. While the White Witch might use "deep magic from the dawn of time" for evil, Aslan (the pathetically transparent allegorical version of Jesus) defeats her using what is referred to as "deeper magic from before the dawn of time". In fact, throughout the books, pretty much anything that's intended as allegory for divine miracle is referred to as "magic."
You forgot Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged! :P
That piece of crap made me never want to read again!
A friend of mine studied anthropology. Anthropology definitely recognizes a scientific notion of race. According to my friend, skulls can be classified according to race by looking at shapes and distance between features.
I have also studied anthropology, and I know several people who are actively working in that field. I can tell you that it's not as cut-and-dried as you make it sound. There is no such thing as a "negro gene," for example. Certain traits might be more common in Africa than in Europe, but there will always be some mixture of traits across even the most isolated population. Skull measurements and the like can give you a rough idea of whether someone would be considered black or white by today's standards, but it's not remotely in the same league as telling, say, a chimpanzee skull from a babboon skull.
For example, the so-called "asiatic trait" of shovel-shaped incisors is found in most east Asians, but also in Native Americans and Scandinavians (though it is less common in the rest of Europe or in Africa.) There are people in the south of India whose skin is as dark as any African's, yet whose facial features resemble those commonly associated with Europeans. The aborigines of Australia were classified as "negroes," yet many have blonde hair.
The concept of race rests on the assumption that there are genetically distinct and isolated populations in the first place, and other than in a few places like the New Guinea Highlands, this has never occured. The Danes invaded Ireland and gave them the now typically Irish red hair. The curly dark hair of many Mediterranean Europeans indicates some African ancestry. The Romans stocked the garrisons guarding the Germanic tribes with African troops, and to this day there are swarthy, dark-haired Germans in those regions. The Mongols interbred repeatedly with Europeans. And the "race" we call "Native Americans" is believed to have originated from at least three separate populations who migrated from Asia. In short, it would be nearly impossible to find any individual anywhere whose ancestry did not include people from most, if not all, of the inhabited continents.
As a matter of fact, it's said that if you compared the genetic average of all Europeans against the genetic average of all Africans, they would resemble each other to a much greater degree than if you compared two randomly chosen Norwegians.
Look at the college application process. It should be illegal to ask about your gender or race on an application.
There's another option here, and I'm waiting to see someone use it. The very concept of "race" is unscientific: not only are there no medical tests which can determine to which race someone belongs (since what we call different races are not hard-and-fast genetic differences, but rather vague clusters of certain traits to which we give names like "black" or "Asian"), but, at least in America, there are no strict legal definitions for race. The only proof an institution has that a given individual is a member of a certain race is that person's word. So the answer is to list your race as whatever you think the institution's acceptance policy is biased toward. If they accuse you of falsifying your race in order to thwart affirmative action, simply ask them to prove that you are not, in fact, of the race you claim to be. This is, of course, impossible. Maybe if there were enough court cases about this it would finally pave the way to ending the legal fiction of race.
Biological sex, of course, is another issue, since there are scientific and legal definitions thereof. However, with intersexed and transgendered individuals making it more interesting, one's gender identity and biological sex may not always coincide neatly.
Since we're playing the quote game:
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home."
--M. K. Gandhi, 1938
Lawyers are a nuisance. [liberal]
Why? Lawyer-bashing is pretty much a bi-partisan sport. Liberals tend to criticize corporate attorneys and prosecutors, while conservatives hate ACLU lawyers and anyone who uses an insanity defense.
You're almost there but not quite. Imagine you're bi-lingual as I am. The insult e.g. dog in my native language would evoke a much stronger response from me then the equivalent in english. Therefore language that's spoken to/by you does affect how you react to things.
Again, this isn't the fault of the language, but of the respective cultures. When someone who lives in a culture where "dog" is considered a scathing insult calls you that, you know his intentions. If you had managed to learn the literal meaning of the word, but didn't know that speakers of that language considered this an insult, you wouldn't view it as particularly harsh. The culture determines the language, not vice versa. Just look at the many examples of a word which was considered insulting becoming innocent, or an innocent word becoming insulting, due to changes in cultural attitudes.
Of course they'd be able to distinguish between them. Just not very well.
First of all, how do you know this would be the case? Secondly, if it were the case, what evidence is there that their difficulty in distinguishing the two would be due to language?
The language you speak does influence how you think and in some cases you emotional response to certain words. For example, try translating insults from one language to another. What would be a killing insult in one language may just sound funny or nonsensical in some other language.
Again, how is this a case of language influencing thought rather than the other way around? For example, the insult "bastard" is much worse in English than the equivalent phrase would be in some other languages because of the historical importance of one's family name and inheritance in English society. The way people thought (about inheritance, legitimacy, extramarital affairs, and other things) caused the word "bastard" to be given negative connotations, not the other way around.
They'd simply think of them as the Dutch-who-are-attacking us versus the Ducth-who-are-defending us. The potential for friendly fire though doesn't bare thinking about.
You just proved my point. In that case they would have been able to make a distinction between the two groups, and to have come up with terms for them. Their supposedly limited language did not have a limiting effect on thought.
Oh, and you should learn to distinguish between "bare" and "bear."
The Kanka-Bono tribe amazingly have no words for basic concepts like "wireless router," "dual opteron server blade," and "network print server." When our team of researchers presented them with these items, they merely tried using them to break open coconuts. The obvious conclusion is that, since their amazingly primitive language lacks the words for these items, their tiny non-Caucasian brains are simply unable to form distinctions among such obviously diffferent objects. Thus the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was vindicated. Then they ate our Dell service rep. And there was much rejoicing.
Cart before the horse. They don't have a need to distinguish the two groups, and therefore they don't develop distinct words-- not they don't have distinct words, therefore they can't distinguish the two groups. (If this were the case, infants would be entirely unable to learn anything: since they have no words at all, they would be unable to distinguish anything from anything else!)
Imagine this scenario: your hypothetical people who don't distinguish between the Dutch and English are suddenly invaded by the English, and the Dutch come to their aid. Now, do you think they would be thinking "the exact same people who are attacking us are defending us"? Or do you think this new situation would cause them to finally have a reason to distinguish Dutch from English, and would result in the coining of new words to refer to them?
I found this out using a search engine called Google. It's full of facts, as opposed to guesses.
No, it's full of caches of thousands of webpages, which include facts, lies, guesses, conjectures, flimflam, misinformation, and everything in between. Though it is easy for some people to make the mistake of thinking that everything that shows up in a web search must be factual.
and not to an age group that accepts the words of adults on blind faith.
:)
And what age group is this? Sorry, but the idea that children beneath the age of whatever are malleable raw materials that can be molded into whatever shape adults want is little more than wishful thinking on the part of those who employ school speakers. I was bombarded with various forms of propaganda from kindergarten all the way through high school, and seldom if ever saw any of the students take it seriously. If anything, the mere fact that schoolteachers and other adults were saying it made them want to do the exact opposite. So maybe the copyright weasel is a good thing after all.