By secession? It's only war if the rest of the country decides to murder and kill to keep people in it that want to leave. That's something gangs do.
Using force to maintain authoirity is something any authority does, which any authority has to do to do its main job: protecting people.
People join gangs because it's much better to have other people you can rely on to back you up when needed than being alone, and all governments are really just scaled-up and further refined gangs. They are in fact sufficiently advanced that some of their subjects have forgotten just how weak and helpless a lone human is. This, in turn, has caused the upsurge of extreme form of libertarianism and other ideologies which confuse heroic fantasy with real life.
Besides, a society which allows secession will simply break apart and be eaten piecemeal by one that doesn't.
The design of the workerbot is trivial and meaningless, there is no monopoly. The moonbase is important because, let's say, it's holds workerbotium which makes the best bots.
However, why would I need the best bot? It might take a day instead of hour to build my own space habitat with sub-optimal bot, but why would I care? Especially if the sub-optimal bot can still build copies of itself, allowing me to grow my personal manufacturing capability to whatever level I please?
Even with infinite technology there will always be resources and natural monopolies. You're in power there because you got there first and/or your daddy's clone gifted it to you.
Of course there will be resources and resource monopolies, but they don't give you any real power unless the resource is vital, that is, unless you can't survive without it.
You're looking at it from the perspective of the buyer. The consumer who wants things. Congratulations, you're an American.
I'm not an American, actually:). And the perspective of seller is really the same as that of the buyer, for he too is engaging in the exchange to get something.
I was looking from the perspective of the seller? Why sell to you? If all my needs are met by non-humans, i.e. mystical future-technology, then why would I suffer the presence of other humans?
I'm not sure I follow your logic here. You are positing a situation where there is no scarcity anymore (except for those resources and natural monopolies you mentioned earlier), then asking why anyone would sell anything is such a world. Well, you're completely right, economy doesn't serve any purpose when resources are limitless. But why would that matter to me, the prospective buyer, when I too can use technology to meet my needs?
Or are you perhaps imagining a situation where such technology magically appears out of nowhere to a single person in a world that's otherwise at about current level? If so then yes, said person could ignore or kill the rest of us, but like I said, it would require technology magically appearing out of nowhere.
Sure, it's the fear of kings when all his power is trivialized, but there WILL BE kings of some sort on our way there. If a CEO could run his entire empire without the need of employees, don't you think he'd fire everyone?
And all of those fired employees would then start their own empires using the same automation. For that matter, the investors would fire the CEO and let the automation run that position too.
During the Industrial revolution, machines took over jobs and there was a glut of non-working, un-needed craftsmen. They suffered for it. The people in power reaped the benefits, while the workers got the axe.
Yes, and it's important to understand the difference between what's being talked here and what happened during IR.
Before Industrial Revolution most of manufacturing was done by skilled crafsmen who worked with cheap equipment. This meant that a crafsman most likely worked as an enterpreneur, since the initial capital needed to, say, set up a smithery were pretty low.
Industrial Revolution changed all that. A factory needs a huge amount of capital to buy a large enough building and all the machines. Once that cost was paid, those machines could be operated by unskilled labour and still outperform a similar number of crafsmen by a huge margin. This led to crafsmen being outcompeted by factories, forcing them to go work there themselves and worsening the problem.
On the other hand, a simple worker-bot is not expensive to manufacture, since it can build more which can build more and so on in a geometric series. The more jobs are replaced by worker-bots, the more "leaks" of worker-bots outside the control of Evil
The thing that bothered me most about my last phone (a Samsung w580i) was not the shareware-like games and other apps they preinstalled on it, it was that the web browser is accessible from a easy-to-bump button on the keypad, and the phone doesn't bother asking you "are you sure you want to spend $0.01 per KB to access an auto-refreshing webpage?" when the button somehow gets bumped in your pocket.
Never has "it's not a bug, it's a feature" been more appropriate.
Also, back in my day malicious dialers were written by criminals rather than phone companies. I guess that's decisive prove that crime does pay...
Besides the fact that the concept of wealth inequality as moral negative is nonsense,
Then you wouldn't mind having the rich becoming richer at your expense, right? Because that's what "wealth inequality" means. And since you don't mind it, you must have also cheered the recent bailout to bankers, since that was a classic example of taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Right?
Or does the nonsense Cato Institute spouts - specifically, in your link, them intentionally likening an external difference of wealth to inherentl differences of talent, beauty and gender, and I also noticed a bit of trickle-down economics there too, oh and a truly twisted interpretation of The Ten Commandments - only apply when it's you who's benefiting from looting the weak?
Seriously, twisting the Bible to justify your greed is insane, even for a right-wing organization such as Cato. Do you people actually believe your own insane troll logic, or do you simply think that there's going to be someone stupid enough to do so?
You control the process and machine that makes the worker-bots that get shit done. But other then giving you resources to build more worker-bots in exchange for completed worker-bots, why perform that process at all? What's our motivation for not simply taking them?
What's our motivation for not simply taking them by force? And after we have taken them, given that a worker-bot can build more worker-bots, how is anyone going to get such a monopoly again?
Or, less dramatically, since worker-bots are based on all the other sci-fi technology, why couldn't other people develop them too? In fact, how is this any different from how all other machines have been steadily spreading and lessening the need for human labour in all fields?
Either way, the idea that you could keep a monopoly in such a technology is ridiculous.
The dream of getting rid of work would turn into the nightmare of trivializing humanity.
No. What it will end is coercive rule of people over other people, be it through force or starvation. That is certainly a nightmare to anyone who dreams of being a king; but for the rest of us it will be a world of endless possibilities, where we will not work out of necessity but out of will; not to fill our stomachs and use each others faces as springboards to ascend higher in a rat race but to fulfil ambitions such as developing AI, conquering space, developing ever more miraculous technologies, and in general earning our place in history.
For trees to be renewable you have to replant them. Waiting for a forest to regrow on its own, especially if the soil has been washed away is going to take a while, they are still waiting for the Sahara to regrow its forests.
Sahara will regrow its forests when the next Ice Age will cause climate patterns to shift and restore rains there.
As well as exploiting third-world workers in sweat shops we are knowingly exploiting future generations.
Who's this "we" you're talking about? I am not exploiting anyone; it's the corporate overlords who are abusing both first- and third-world workers and future generations to increase their profits.
In practice, a lot of garbage collectors collect _some_ unreferenced memory depending on a lot of factors.
Yes, and it shouldn't affect the output of a program at all if there's unreferenced but not yet reclaimed memory areas in its address space.
Also, don't forget about bugs caused by improper GC usage (like failing to mark reference as used). This has nothing to do with GC but detection of these bugs might be greatly complicated by a non-deterministic GC.
Um, what? The whole point of GC is that you don't have to mark references as used or unused, you simply either have them or not. The only way that could fail is if you held a pointer pointing directly to a table entry or something.
Are you perhaps confusing garbage collection with some kind of reference counting scheme?
So you think it is pedantic if someone desires the correct use of a word?
Words and phrases can and do have multiple meanings. It is pedantic - and, in fact, incorrect, since it directly contradicts reality - to insist that one of these is "correct" and the rest "incorrect".
Do you walk around and call black things white, and then look smug when people don't know what you're talking about?
It is you who wants to co-opt an expression in common usage to mean something else instead.
I'm not sure I understand people like you.
Yes, it must be difficult to understand people if you can't deal with ambiguity.
Seeing how garbage collection deals with reclaiming unreferenced memory, it should never interfere with compiler output. The only way it could is that you are somehow using that memory, suggesting that you have a buffer overflow or pointer arithmetic somewhere (since dangling pointers should be impossible with GC). This, in turn, is a bug and has nothing to do with GC itself.
Pretty much. ID demonstrates that survival of the fittest rules even in the Creationist world. Creationism wasn't fit enough to survive SCOTUS, so the population needed to evolve a blander strain with a fictitious motive.
Except that, since that blander strain was purposely developed, this would actually be an example of Intelligent Design:). Yes, that's the true irony here: ID actually models the current phase of human evolution, since humans are able to purposefully direct the way their societies develop. Of course the intelligent designer is the very thing being designed, so would this make it Intelligent Pantheism ?-)
Of course, since then, an even more vapid organism, Teach the Controversy, has been formulated, which is pretty much entirely without positive claim.
But more than makes up for it with fat. This beast won't be starved for a long, long time...
Seriously, this is my problem with your usual creationist (well, one among many). If you want to attack the science, you need to understand it better.
More generally, this is the bane of various religion-related debates in general. Neither common theists or atheists have any real comprehension of advanced scientific or theological concepts, yet both are constantly referring to them in an attempt to "prove" their claims. The whole thing would be quite comical if it wasn't so sad.
If they are indeed teaching intelligent design in much the same way as Niels Bohr's atomic model or -- perhaps more apt -- motivation for slavery then I have little problem with this. But if they spend anymore than a few hours discussing how it was flawed then I would consider this a waste of time instead of 'critical thinking.' It's great to see all the sides of a historical issue but that's all intelligent design is to me and, much more importantly, the peer reviewed journals and scientific community at large.
Intelligent Design is not "historical". It's an entirely modern invention. It's roots are in the counter-reaction to militant atheism that tried to use Darwin's Theory of Evolution to disprove Christianity (which it doesn't, of course, but that hasn't stopped the battle this far), and is - to put it bluntly - a deception meant to dislodge ToE from being taught at school. It's just the latest broadside in a completely pointless pissing match between two groups of people who can't stand the idea that someone might not agree with them. And, as usual, the weak and the defendless - children, in this case - make for a great target to show the superiority of your side.
But I digress. Intelligent Design is not a theory (it doesn't predict anything testable), it hasn't been around for more than a few years, and it should be used as a case study in psychology class, not taken seriously as science since it isn't.
Heck, ID is less scientific than Young-Earth Creationism, since the latter at least made some kind of claims you could conceivably find evidence for or against (namely, that the Earth is around 10,000 years old, and that the Biblical Flood happened at some point during that time). That's saying something...
So what happens when popular usage removes the ability to communicate important concepts like 'begging the question' since people cannot be bothered to understand the original meaning, as in Aristotle's usage?
It doesn't. You can simply say: "You are assuming the very thing you are trying to prove as a premise of the proof!" or "Your proof of X is only valid if X is assumed to be true". Or, in short, just say: "That's circular reasoning".
Of course, you could also point out that you are using the phrase as an awkward English translation of something Aristotle said. The meaning of communication depends on the context, after all, so establish it first if you wish accuracy.
Do we have to start speaking Latin? For example, it is still important to be able to identify a logical fallacy and why it is so without having to resort to long explanations or speaking a dead language.
English is not primarily used for formal logic, so it should come as no surprise that it is not optimazed for such usage. And exact explanations are usually also long since they require framing the question as exactly as possible first.
And no, you don't have to start speaking Latin. We have perfectly good domain-specific languages for doing formal logic nowadays; specifically, "begging the question" (as Aristotle used it) means that whatever was just said reduces to "x implies x", which is a tautology and thus true whether x is true or not.
However if people only understand the popular usage, popular because of ignorance to its real meaning (ignorance meaning just not knowing... not people being unintelligent), then we are left with the long explanations and dead language.
The popular meaning of any phrase of natural language is its real meaning. I'm sorry if you have trouble comprehending this concept, but it really is the key to understanding what a natural language is, how human minds work, and also very likely how to build strong AI. There was a concept, possibly invented by Aristotle, which was described in (bad) English as "begging the question"; for whatever reason, some people became enamored with this exact concept and this exact string of symbols to stand for it, to the point of claiming that anyone who uses them to any purpose is "wrong". Unfortunately for them, all these words are symbols by themselves, and put together, mean a pretty common thing - that someone said something that almost begs a follow-up question to be asked.
Besides, why not use dead language? That way, when you say "petitio principii", people still don't gain magical knowledge of what you mean, but at least they aren't confused by the popular meaning; besides, that "begging the question" means a form of circular logic is far from obvious unless you already know it, so it's a pretty horrible translation to begin with.
Finally... This is not going to change. "Begging the question" in the popular sense is a far more common occurence than "begging the question" in Aristotelean sense. Nothing you can say or do will change that, nor should it: after all, why should English-speakers in general give up an expression just to accomodate the inordinate fondness a small subset of them has for a particular meaning of it? Adopt another symbol for your use, or establish the context to establish the meaning, but either way stop whining that people don't care about what you think is "correct" usage of an expression.
Using STL frees you from having to do manual memory management.
So do Java, Python, Lisp, or pretty much every non-C programming language in use nowadays. This is not a feature worth mentioning nowadays, any more than protected memory in modern processors.
But then, crappy programmers misuse them, not knowing about what is done behind their back, and it becomes slow and bloated code.
This is a compiler we are talking about. I think that we can assume that people who program the program that turns code into machine code must "know their shit", so to say - otherwise the time taken to compile will be the least of the user's problems.
Besides, having people copy code from a webpage/programming manual doesn't improve things any.
Having to specify everything explicitely makes you aware of the complexity/memory usage of what you are doing.
No, they simply memorize magical mantras that, when regurgitated, will do what they want. It's much better to give such people as high-level libraries as possible and let them use those; the more they have to think about optimization, the more likely they are to do something unbelievably stupid.
Besides, the exact same argument could be used to condemn first OO, then structural programming, then anything that gets compiled, then finally machine code itself as an abstraction over the physical hardware of modern processors.
Sometimes generally accepted doesn't make something right. Kind of like the way everyone calls a van dyke beard style a goatee.:-D Just because a lot of folks say it's so, doesn't make it so.;)
In the realm of symbolic languages (such as all natural ones), yes it does. The term "van dyke bear style" has no inherent meaning. Neither do the terms "beard" or "goatee", for that matter. That's why languages differ so much from each other, why they evolve over time, and why jargons - domain-specific language extensions - arise.
Meaning is determined by usage and usage is influenced by meaning.
As has already been pointed out, you can't bookmark your place in HTML.
Um, what? Of course a reader can store the offset into the HTML document it's currently displaying. Most browsers simply won't, since their designers didn't see a need to; however, the data is available to Javascript as "window.pageYOffset".
That was a surreal complaint.
At that point, the publishers will relax enough to remove the DRM. Right now, there's not enough money in ebooks, I think.
Making ebook market bigger will make the publishers act in less, not more, rationally. Greed gets a hold and overrides common sense.
No. Simply use HTML. That way you don't have to worry about varying page sizes and people can do things like enlarge fonts, yet have everything reflow smoothly.
After all, it's not a (physical) book, it's a computer display with properties that are unknown ahead of time. Why reinvent the wheel when the problem has already been solved a long time ago?
There's also a bonus to using HTML: you can use the same viewer to view web pages, rather than just books. Or is that a minus for the e-book vendor?
This attitude utterly disgusts me. You people are pathetic. "Not drawing pictures of Mohammed" (PBUH) takes away precisely one "right" of yours, the right to be an idiot with no sense of tact or respect.
Not being allowed to draw pictures of Mohammed takes away the right to say anything anyone might find offensive - unless, of course, you are suggesting that Muslims should have special privileges in this regard?
If you've got a really good reason to draw a picture of the prophet, other than something along the lines of "I have a misguided idea of what free speech means, and I want to be offensive for a laugh" then I'd love to hear it.
Free speech means that neither I nor anyone else need to justify us drawing pictures of Muhammed, nor any other expression, to you or anyone else. That is what "freedom" means: I can do what I want, not what you graciously allow me to.
I'm a British atheist. What say I go to Alabama, defecate on a bible, wrap it in the US flag and burn the bundle. That's free speech isn't it? That's me exercising the right of a person living in the US isn't it?
No, it's me being an offensive dick for the sake of it. I'd get lynched, and rightly so. Grow up, the lot of you.
No, you wouldn't be lynched. You would be told you are an offensive dick, and possibly sued if you did this in public for the defecating in public part. If some mentally disturbed individuals were to take violent action against you, they would then face charges for their criminal behavior.
It is you who needs to grow up, and realize that murdering someone because he offends you is not acceptable.
And even if Apple did have complete control of what is available on the iPhone/iPad, who cares? Does freedom of speech require me to let you publish whatever you want on my webpage, or my billboard, or on my TV/radio show? Is the iPad your one and only source of media?
That depends: do you own a sufficient fraction of all billboards, webpages, and TV/radio shows? If you do, then yes, freedom of speech requires just that.
As your wealth and power grows to rival nation-states, you should be held to the same standards as any other government. Why shouldn't you?
To recap: whether iPad is the only source of media is irrelevant; what's relevant is whether it's a significant enough source of media that allowing complete private control over it gives that private entity a dangerous level of power in the society.
Slashdot Mirror
Using force to maintain authoirity is something any authority does, which any authority has to do to do its main job: protecting people.
People join gangs because it's much better to have other people you can rely on to back you up when needed than being alone, and all governments are really just scaled-up and further refined gangs. They are in fact sufficiently advanced that some of their subjects have forgotten just how weak and helpless a lone human is. This, in turn, has caused the upsurge of extreme form of libertarianism and other ideologies which confuse heroic fantasy with real life.
Besides, a society which allows secession will simply break apart and be eaten piecemeal by one that doesn't.
However, why would I need the best bot? It might take a day instead of hour to build my own space habitat with sub-optimal bot, but why would I care? Especially if the sub-optimal bot can still build copies of itself, allowing me to grow my personal manufacturing capability to whatever level I please?
Of course there will be resources and resource monopolies, but they don't give you any real power unless the resource is vital, that is, unless you can't survive without it.
I'm not an American, actually :). And the perspective of seller is really the same as that of the buyer, for he too is engaging in the exchange to get something.
I'm not sure I follow your logic here. You are positing a situation where there is no scarcity anymore (except for those resources and natural monopolies you mentioned earlier), then asking why anyone would sell anything is such a world. Well, you're completely right, economy doesn't serve any purpose when resources are limitless. But why would that matter to me, the prospective buyer, when I too can use technology to meet my needs?
Or are you perhaps imagining a situation where such technology magically appears out of nowhere to a single person in a world that's otherwise at about current level? If so then yes, said person could ignore or kill the rest of us, but like I said, it would require technology magically appearing out of nowhere.
And all of those fired employees would then start their own empires using the same automation. For that matter, the investors would fire the CEO and let the automation run that position too.
Yes, and it's important to understand the difference between what's being talked here and what happened during IR.
Before Industrial Revolution most of manufacturing was done by skilled crafsmen who worked with cheap equipment. This meant that a crafsman most likely worked as an enterpreneur, since the initial capital needed to, say, set up a smithery were pretty low.
Industrial Revolution changed all that. A factory needs a huge amount of capital to buy a large enough building and all the machines. Once that cost was paid, those machines could be operated by unskilled labour and still outperform a similar number of crafsmen by a huge margin. This led to crafsmen being outcompeted by factories, forcing them to go work there themselves and worsening the problem.
On the other hand, a simple worker-bot is not expensive to manufacture, since it can build more which can build more and so on in a geometric series. The more jobs are replaced by worker-bots, the more "leaks" of worker-bots outside the control of Evil
Never has "it's not a bug, it's a feature" been more appropriate.
Also, back in my day malicious dialers were written by criminals rather than phone companies. I guess that's decisive prove that crime does pay...
Then you wouldn't mind having the rich becoming richer at your expense, right? Because that's what "wealth inequality" means. And since you don't mind it, you must have also cheered the recent bailout to bankers, since that was a classic example of taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Right?
Or does the nonsense Cato Institute spouts - specifically, in your link, them intentionally likening an external difference of wealth to inherentl differences of talent, beauty and gender, and I also noticed a bit of trickle-down economics there too, oh and a truly twisted interpretation of The Ten Commandments - only apply when it's you who's benefiting from looting the weak?
Seriously, twisting the Bible to justify your greed is insane, even for a right-wing organization such as Cato. Do you people actually believe your own insane troll logic, or do you simply think that there's going to be someone stupid enough to do so?
You control the process and machine that makes the worker-bots that get shit done. But other then giving you resources to build more worker-bots in exchange for completed worker-bots, why perform that process at all? What's our motivation for not simply taking them?
What's our motivation for not simply taking them by force? And after we have taken them, given that a worker-bot can build more worker-bots, how is anyone going to get such a monopoly again?
Or, less dramatically, since worker-bots are based on all the other sci-fi technology, why couldn't other people develop them too? In fact, how is this any different from how all other machines have been steadily spreading and lessening the need for human labour in all fields?
Either way, the idea that you could keep a monopoly in such a technology is ridiculous.
No. What it will end is coercive rule of people over other people, be it through force or starvation. That is certainly a nightmare to anyone who dreams of being a king; but for the rest of us it will be a world of endless possibilities, where we will not work out of necessity but out of will; not to fill our stomachs and use each others faces as springboards to ascend higher in a rat race but to fulfil ambitions such as developing AI, conquering space, developing ever more miraculous technologies, and in general earning our place in history.
Sahara will regrow its forests when the next Ice Age will cause climate patterns to shift and restore rains there.
Who's this "we" you're talking about? I am not exploiting anyone; it's the corporate overlords who are abusing both first- and third-world workers and future generations to increase their profits.
Yes, and it shouldn't affect the output of a program at all if there's unreferenced but not yet reclaimed memory areas in its address space.
Um, what? The whole point of GC is that you don't have to mark references as used or unused, you simply either have them or not. The only way that could fail is if you held a pointer pointing directly to a table entry or something.
Are you perhaps confusing garbage collection with some kind of reference counting scheme?
Words and phrases can and do have multiple meanings. It is pedantic - and, in fact, incorrect, since it directly contradicts reality - to insist that one of these is "correct" and the rest "incorrect".
It is you who wants to co-opt an expression in common usage to mean something else instead.
Yes, it must be difficult to understand people if you can't deal with ambiguity.
Seeing how garbage collection deals with reclaiming unreferenced memory, it should never interfere with compiler output. The only way it could is that you are somehow using that memory, suggesting that you have a buffer overflow or pointer arithmetic somewhere (since dangling pointers should be impossible with GC). This, in turn, is a bug and has nothing to do with GC itself.
No, they're marketing geniuses making cool-looking products, for some value of cool.
Except that, since that blander strain was purposely developed, this would actually be an example of Intelligent Design :). Yes, that's the true irony here: ID actually models the current phase of human evolution, since humans are able to purposefully direct the way their societies develop. Of course the intelligent designer is the very thing being designed, so would this make it Intelligent Pantheism ?-)
But more than makes up for it with fat. This beast won't be starved for a long, long time...
More generally, this is the bane of various religion-related debates in general. Neither common theists or atheists have any real comprehension of advanced scientific or theological concepts, yet both are constantly referring to them in an attempt to "prove" their claims. The whole thing would be quite comical if it wasn't so sad.
Many people sincerely believed in the original Ponzi scheme, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a scam.
Intelligent Design is not "historical". It's an entirely modern invention. It's roots are in the counter-reaction to militant atheism that tried to use Darwin's Theory of Evolution to disprove Christianity (which it doesn't, of course, but that hasn't stopped the battle this far), and is - to put it bluntly - a deception meant to dislodge ToE from being taught at school. It's just the latest broadside in a completely pointless pissing match between two groups of people who can't stand the idea that someone might not agree with them. And, as usual, the weak and the defendless - children, in this case - make for a great target to show the superiority of your side.
But I digress. Intelligent Design is not a theory (it doesn't predict anything testable), it hasn't been around for more than a few years, and it should be used as a case study in psychology class, not taken seriously as science since it isn't.
Heck, ID is less scientific than Young-Earth Creationism, since the latter at least made some kind of claims you could conceivably find evidence for or against (namely, that the Earth is around 10,000 years old, and that the Biblical Flood happened at some point during that time). That's saying something...
It doesn't. You can simply say: "You are assuming the very thing you are trying to prove as a premise of the proof!" or "Your proof of X is only valid if X is assumed to be true". Or, in short, just say: "That's circular reasoning".
Of course, you could also point out that you are using the phrase as an awkward English translation of something Aristotle said. The meaning of communication depends on the context, after all, so establish it first if you wish accuracy.
English is not primarily used for formal logic, so it should come as no surprise that it is not optimazed for such usage. And exact explanations are usually also long since they require framing the question as exactly as possible first.
And no, you don't have to start speaking Latin. We have perfectly good domain-specific languages for doing formal logic nowadays; specifically, "begging the question" (as Aristotle used it) means that whatever was just said reduces to "x implies x", which is a tautology and thus true whether x is true or not.
The popular meaning of any phrase of natural language is its real meaning. I'm sorry if you have trouble comprehending this concept, but it really is the key to understanding what a natural language is, how human minds work, and also very likely how to build strong AI. There was a concept, possibly invented by Aristotle, which was described in (bad) English as "begging the question"; for whatever reason, some people became enamored with this exact concept and this exact string of symbols to stand for it, to the point of claiming that anyone who uses them to any purpose is "wrong". Unfortunately for them, all these words are symbols by themselves, and put together, mean a pretty common thing - that someone said something that almost begs a follow-up question to be asked.
Besides, why not use dead language? That way, when you say "petitio principii", people still don't gain magical knowledge of what you mean, but at least they aren't confused by the popular meaning; besides, that "begging the question" means a form of circular logic is far from obvious unless you already know it, so it's a pretty horrible translation to begin with.
Finally... This is not going to change. "Begging the question" in the popular sense is a far more common occurence than "begging the question" in Aristotelean sense. Nothing you can say or do will change that, nor should it: after all, why should English-speakers in general give up an expression just to accomodate the inordinate fondness a small subset of them has for a particular meaning of it? Adopt another symbol for your use, or establish the context to establish the meaning, but either way stop whining that people don't care about what you think is "correct" usage of an expression.
So do Java, Python, Lisp, or pretty much every non-C programming language in use nowadays. This is not a feature worth mentioning nowadays, any more than protected memory in modern processors.
This is a compiler we are talking about. I think that we can assume that people who program the program that turns code into machine code must "know their shit", so to say - otherwise the time taken to compile will be the least of the user's problems.
Besides, having people copy code from a webpage/programming manual doesn't improve things any.
No, they simply memorize magical mantras that, when regurgitated, will do what they want. It's much better to give such people as high-level libraries as possible and let them use those; the more they have to think about optimization, the more likely they are to do something unbelievably stupid.
Besides, the exact same argument could be used to condemn first OO, then structural programming, then anything that gets compiled, then finally machine code itself as an abstraction over the physical hardware of modern processors.
In the realm of symbolic languages (such as all natural ones), yes it does. The term "van dyke bear style" has no inherent meaning. Neither do the terms "beard" or "goatee", for that matter. That's why languages differ so much from each other, why they evolve over time, and why jargons - domain-specific language extensions - arise.
Meaning is determined by usage and usage is influenced by meaning.
Um, what? Of course a reader can store the offset into the HTML document it's currently displaying. Most browsers simply won't, since their designers didn't see a need to; however, the data is available to Javascript as "window.pageYOffset".
That was a surreal complaint.
Making ebook market bigger will make the publishers act in less, not more, rationally. Greed gets a hold and overrides common sense.
No. Simply use HTML. That way you don't have to worry about varying page sizes and people can do things like enlarge fonts, yet have everything reflow smoothly.
After all, it's not a (physical) book, it's a computer display with properties that are unknown ahead of time. Why reinvent the wheel when the problem has already been solved a long time ago?
There's also a bonus to using HTML: you can use the same viewer to view web pages, rather than just books. Or is that a minus for the e-book vendor?
Why is it that "conservatist" nowadays seems to mean "evil and stupid"? Or was it always that way?
What the world needs is more people with thick skins.
Trolls are working on it. Remember, every time you can get someone look at Goatse you are helping to create a bright future for humanity!
Not being allowed to draw pictures of Mohammed takes away the right to say anything anyone might find offensive - unless, of course, you are suggesting that Muslims should have special privileges in this regard?
Free speech means that neither I nor anyone else need to justify us drawing pictures of Muhammed, nor any other expression, to you or anyone else. That is what "freedom" means: I can do what I want, not what you graciously allow me to.
No, you wouldn't be lynched. You would be told you are an offensive dick, and possibly sued if you did this in public for the defecating in public part. If some mentally disturbed individuals were to take violent action against you, they would then face charges for their criminal behavior.
It is you who needs to grow up, and realize that murdering someone because he offends you is not acceptable.
That depends: do you own a sufficient fraction of all billboards, webpages, and TV/radio shows? If you do, then yes, freedom of speech requires just that.
As your wealth and power grows to rival nation-states, you should be held to the same standards as any other government. Why shouldn't you?
To recap: whether iPad is the only source of media is irrelevant; what's relevant is whether it's a significant enough source of media that allowing complete private control over it gives that private entity a dangerous level of power in the society.