There have been about 2 general elections where the Scottish vote would have made a difference, and in both of those the difference was between a hung parliament and an outright majority. "Labour can't win without Scotland" is a myth.
The modern trend is towards linking states, not breaking them up into non-functional bits.
That's misrepresentative. The modern trend is for countries to get smaller, and for countries to form closer alliances via supra-national entities. Czechoslovakia split in two; Yugoslavia fragmented bit by bit; India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, then East Pakistan became independent as Bangladesh.
Iceland gained its independence from Denmark in the 40s, and Greenland and the Faroe Islands have gradually increased in autonomy, on a slow move that seems likely to end in full independence. It must be remembered also that Norway was a part of Denmark until 1814.
The Renaissance model of large countries was based on principles of colonialism, imperialism and restricted trade. Scotland entered the Union because the imperial powers had set up trade barriers and Scotland was effectively frozen out of all international commerce. These conditions no longer apply, so we should instead look at state size in more practical terms. As it turns out, the governance of large countries seems to be far less effective than the governance of large countries. If you look at the world's countries in terms of GDP per capita, you'll see a heck of a lot of small countries at the top. The USA is an exception, but then it (like Germany) is a federal system and its states have a high degree of autonomy. Notably, as the federal government has taken more and more power away from the state legislatures, the US has decreased in wealth relative to the rest of the world....
The problem is that any projection of a map onto a flat surface is distorted. There are no un-distorted maps. A map contains serveral classes of important data on a map, and projections mainly affect distances, areas and angles. It is mathematically impossible to have a plane projection of the Earth's surface which correctly displays distances, but you can have a map that preserves angles and a map that preserves areas.
The BBC weathermap is not a true planar projection, though. It's a 3D projection rendered onto 2D, emulating the view of the UK from orbit. Neither ground-level angles, nor latitudinal distance, nor longitudinal distance, nor surface area are preserved. All distances and all areas are reduced. This is because the projection is seemingly taken from somewhere above France, so the south of England is close to the camera, and the north of Scotland is not only further away (hence smaller) but also reduced in height due to the curvature of the Earth included in the projection.
When this first came in (years ago now), the justification of this was that it is more "natural" to look at, and easier to understand... but only a handful of people have ever had the opportunity to see the UK from such an angle, so I can't see what's so natural about it. Furthermore, the BBC initially refused to allow any regional opt-out from the standard projection, so the Scottish weather was on a zoomed subsection of the map, which had practically zero north/south resolution compared to exaggerated east/west.
After a lot of complaints, the BBC tweaked the angles slightly, but the problem still remains. It is particularly irritating that the Gaelic weather forecasts, half of whose target audience are in the Highlands and Islands, is forced to use the same map, where their part of Scotland is so drastically shrunken that a single weather symbol blocks out over a hundred miles on the map.
The English are free to have their own referendum on the matter. The United Kingdom is a union of equals, and any party to a treaty can choose to leave it unilaterally.
anyway, the only people who want independence are the Scottish national party, and even they want everything to be just as it was before only with Alex Salmond declared King of Scotland.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. I am not a member of the SNP. I do not particularly like the SNP. I want Scottish independence. I do not want Scotland to be "just as it was before". I want some things to remain the same and some things to change.
Personally, I think its right that Scotland gets independence for moral reasons - all those Scottish MPs (who are either Labour ot SNP) get to vote on things that only matter in the rest of the UK, so you guys gets to tell us what to do without any for of reciprocity. - so getting rid of those useless MPs would actually be beneficial for the rest of the UK, morally.
It's not Scotland's fault that there is no devolution settlement for England. Personally, I have always thought it ridiculous that devolution is so asymmetrical, with different devolved powers in each of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and none whatsoever for England. But that isn't Scotland's fault.
Actually imperative programming is a mathematic concept too. The difference between imperative and functional programming is a matter of abstraction level as both of those can be translated to the other model.
Yes, but the problem is that imperative coding abstracts the mathematics to the point where the programmer isn't thinking mathematically any more.
It took me a long time to get my head round my maths lecturers at university telling me a matrix was "a computer", but they were right. Imperative programming is inefficient because it doesn't allow us to take f(x) and g(x) and create g(f(x)) for all x, so we have to evaluate every step.
Not necessarily, imperative programming can have such transformations and in fact most modern ones do.
Ok, but most coders won't use such features, because they don't understand them.
Also most compilers translate the imperative code into an internal functional abstraction to simplify optimizations (often in the form of SSA or single static assignment form) and then translate that into the imperative form required by most computers.
Which calls into question the whole point of imperative programming. Why should I spend so much time telling the computer exactly what to do in what order if it's only going to attempt to extract the task logic and refactor everything anyway? Surely it's more efficient to just describe the problem and let the computer fix it?
most computation can be conceptualised as a data transform.
Indeed. Or more correct as a series of data transforms combined with internal state AKA a finite state machine.
Not "more correct", just "more computation". I'm not a functional programming hardliner, but I do see where they're coming from on stateless code. Why should determinism only apply at the system level? Do we not conceptualise procedures and functions as programs within programs? Determinism helps guarantee correctness.
We learned Standard ML in university, and my main complaint about it wasn't the weirdness of it or the impurity of the functional model, it was the fact that we were asked to do the complete task within the language. I never understood why they expected a full interactive program in FP, when instead they could have had a lightweight application layer in non-functional code that called stateless functions as required in order to manipulate and update its stateful data. Since the early days of computing, the ideal of programming was to be able to just tie prewritten blocks together to perform arbitrary functions, and every generation someone touts this idea as the next big thing, coming this year, but it never takes off. One of the reasons libraries can be such a pain to work with is because the internal stateful processing is unpredictable. Ban state, and the problem goes away, no?
Are you suggesting the best measure of a language is to see how easy it is to reimplement something that has been done a gazillion times before, rather than how easy it makes it to do something more complicated built on top of all the solved problems and preinvented wheels...?
The issue is more than merely about number of lines, it's about modes of thought. In most languages, coding is an exercise that basically involves a lot of mundane data shuffling that is easily expressed, but each individual line achieves nothing of consequence. When it comes to code maintenance, reading the lines is easy, but reconstructing the program logic is very difficult indeed. Wolfram's goal appears to be to strip away all the housekeeping in order to spotlight the code logic, which strikes me as the right way around.
Your use of the term "mathematician" is interesting too, because it does suggest that you don't feel mathematicians should be interfering in programming. Well, I'm of the opposite opinion. Imperative programming is the result of non enough mathematics in computer programming. It took me a long time to get my head round my maths lecturers at university telling me a matrix was "a computer", but they were right. Imperative programming is inefficient because it doesn't allow us to take f(x) and g(x) and create g(f(x)) for all x, so we have to evaluate every step. But a matrix encodes a linear transform, and multiplying two transformation matrices gives you exactly that -- g(f(x)) for all vectors x. Typically, using matrices for a single step is less efficient than just running the normal code, but when you're going to carry out the same calculation j(i(h(g(f(x))))) on hundreds or thousands of xs, calculating a single matrix and using that every time is the most efficient way.
This thinking doesn't start and end at matrices though.. most computation can be conceptualised as a data transform.
Sorry that's life, the_universe AND everything. It's a bitwise AND, of course, so that's 101010. Life is 111011, everything is (as you might expect) 111111. Finding all possible values of the universe is an exercise left to the reader.
Does the trade agreement state that every product must always be packaged in all three languages? I think you'll find that it doesn't, which means it's the producer's choice to package that way. It is therefore presumably in their commercial interest to do so. If it was cheaper to have 3 different packages, they would have three different packages.
Thank you! We are in total agreement! GEMA's business plan of charging about what the market will bear for the licensing fees is, indeed, not viable.
Seriously dude? Is that what this debate has descended to? "I know you are, but what am I?"?
The rental model is supposed to increase the benefit for all parties. If the rental model is not increasing the profits of the producers, it's a bad model. The consumer gets a broader choice and easier access, and typically pays extra for the privilege in the long term, which is how the producer profits. Spotify's model relies on less, less and less. The consumer pays less than elsewhere. The producer gets less than elsewhere. Spotify takes less commission than a retail outlet. The problem with this business model is that the producers' costs haven't decreased.
Secondly, Spotify have two very different products, as you yourself pointed out: music on demand and automatically generated playlists. These two products are of different values, yet Spotify pay the same for them. In essence, they're using the non-paying customers to keep the buy price down for the guys who bring in the cash.
Now imagine if there was a different royalty for on-demand vs algorithmically selected -- what difference does that make?
Well, for now, 100 plays at 0.6 cents gets 60 cents, total. If we double that rate for the premium users and half it for the free users, that's 52.5 cents generated -- a reduction. Double/half again, premium plays give a royalty of 2.4 cents and it's now generating 71.25 cents -- a profit for the producers. Even then, that's still an effective price of 3.4 cents per track to the buyer, which is a very low rental payment. If you double/half again, the royalty becomes 4.8 cents, and the effective price is just under 6.9 cents, a tenth of a low-cost iTunes song. Now you're starting to get into reasonable rental territory, and those same 100 plays, 25 from a premium user and 75 from a free user, generate $1.25, more than double the initial take for the music producers.
Of course, that would mean doubling the subscription price.
So, back to the problem of Spotify's business model... Spotify wants to be "freemium", but the freemium model relies on you owning what you are selling, because you can't give away something that you don't own. They've twisted and contorted the business model multiple times to try to preserve something of the original idea, but it's left them with two different products that they're trying to call one thing, and the lack of profit in the freebie product is interfering with the pricing and profitability of the premium product.
Ah, the old "there aren't as many of you, so you're less important" argument. When this is about skin colour, religion or sexual orientation, it's mostly accepted as being bigotry; but when it's about language, it's fair game, right? Cos "language is a choice". Yeah. The first thing I did upon being born was select which language my mother was to speak to me, and communicate that to her via telepathic link. By a lucky coincidence, I managed to pick the one and only language she was capable of talking to me in.
And as for manuals, mostly they just put a "quickstart guide" in the box, and a CD-RoM with the main manuals in PDF format. No-one reads the manuals anyway. Everyone's a winner.
"All versions of English spoken in areas of white native-speaking descent have a very high phonemic similarity."
This is not only not true (scots dialect is as 'white' as you could get and it's quite possibly the furthest outlier in the language)
When I say "versions of English" I mean "versions of Modern English". Scots is a language that diverged from English at the very beginning of the Middle period, if not before. "English" as we know it didn't exist then.
even if were true it would be pointless. Are you really implying that only *white* English speakers contribute to our literature? Please. You cannot be serious.
Sorry, I missed a vitally important word there: "areas of majority white native-speaking descent". My point is that in areas where colonists were in the majority, English was preserved more or less intact, and the imported slaves, the free immigrants and the locals learned from their pattern. The children of the non-natives then still had exposure to the native pattern, and spoke better than their parents. In such a situation, the non-native errors disappear within a couple of generations (you can see this in any immigrant community in any country and any language).
I was using white as a shorthand, because when you go to India or Oceania, you can see immediately that the population isn't descended from the colonists by the colour of their skin, and their English is markedly different, because it has turned what began as non-native errors into a part of their language variety.
There are even areas in the US where true "communities" persist based on colour, and there -- guess what? Strong dialectal differences persist, and black speech even has its own name: ebonics. These modes of speech are in no way inferior to standard English, but sadly society as a whole judges them to be so.
So no, I'm not saying that only white English speakers contribute to English-language literature. I am not racist (although my poor wording may have suggested otherwise). I was simply pointing to the fact that the ratio of native speakers to non-natives is what determines whether the language changes or remains the same.
That's because the natural way to coherently link the tangled mass of local phonologies together into a single written standard is to walk back the historical developments, providing written phonemes that represent the ancient root from which the diverse modern pronunciations stem.
You talk about dropped 'r's? That's barely even scratching the surface. There are dozens of different 'r's which are used by different dialects, in different environments, and when 'dropped' they are usually actually converted into another phoneme, or trigger a conversion of a neighboring phoneme...
"Dozens of different 'r's"... but they are all still Rs. If I write R, I don't care which R you use, I happily recognise it as an R. That's what a phoneme is -- it's a meaningful unit of sound that can be pronounced in multiple different ways. When the R reduces to the point that it turns the vowel before it into an "eugh" sound, it's still an R. I could write it as R, as , as , as &*, as anything -- it would still be one phoneme.
The mismatch between the written form and spoken is pretty much identical everywhere. The OU in "you" preserves an old form, but it's different from almost every other OU -- out, shout, etc. Rewriting "you" as "yoo" would not favour any dialectal variation over any other.
Sorry your scenario is the spurious one. Latin, as in Classical Latin, was spoken as a native language by no one, ever. It was always a literary language.
Spoken 'vulgate' latin was not a literary language and it was spoken all the way from Romania to Brittania at one time. The differences that develop have nothing to do with errors or failure to learn correctly just normal language change processes that affect all vernaculars
Languages do not have rights -- correct. People do -- correct. It was not the language that asked for itself to be defended, it was the people that asked for it to be defended.
There's no such thing as a "pure" version of French. Modern French, though primarily derived from Parision, is a mélange of features from different areas of France. Where words start ép-, éc- etc, that's a corruption of Latin sp-, sc-, and while the Celtic and Germanic tribes could say that, the Basques (in the South, a long way from Paris) couldn't; "c'est à moi" is thought to be a Celtic pattern; the name "France" comes from the Germanic people "the Franks" who originally lived in most of Northern France. And all of this was just "impure Latin".
The difference between Québuécois is simply that Québuécois is derived from a different mixture of regional dialects, as there were very few Parisians among the original settlers. Neither is more "pure", neither is more "cultured", neither is more "intelligent". At the end of the day, both are just "how people speak".
Languages evolve over time, but Quebecois has stagnated. Even the French call email "email", instead of "couriel."
They've already migrated away from this, and most people call it "mél", which is more like "mail" than "email". It also works great in email signatures, as they now typically go:
Tél: +33 1.23.45.67
Mél: nom@addresse.fr
This is a good example of borrowing, because it's been nativised. The "e" bit didn't work in French, so they got rid of it. Besides, email and courriel both give precedence to mail, and email is now the norm, with paper mail being the exception. Having email no longer subservient to postal mail as a concept makes a great deal of sense.
I used to live in Spain, right next to the French border. Lots of the products on the supermarket shelves were labelled in Spanish and Portuguese. Because it's easier for them to print one set of packaging and distribute it everywhere than produce different packs. Many of the products available in the UK have at least one language, quite often things like Dutch or Danish, which are relatively close by and have a small consumer base. Galaxy chocolates often have Arabic on them. There is even a couple of supermarket chains whose own brand products carry half the languages of the EU.
The rest of the world is used to this... calm down, North America.
or Ontario, New England States, Atlantic Provinces, online retailers, etc. There is a reason why most Francophones learn English. Quebec is a tiny spot of french speakers in a sea of english speakers.
So what? Wherever you live, you interact more with people in your area than people outside it. There's 200km between Montréal and Ottawa. There's plenty of places in the world where you can cross an entire country in 200km and encounter 3 or more languages in the process.
Deal with it instead of trying to preserve a society through legislation.
As a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland domiciled in Scotland, I never legislate on Canadian language matters, nor do I have to deal with it.
Non-Canadians can certainly have an opinion about this stupidity, and call it what it is.
Yeah, but see, here you aren't just expressing an opinion, you're expressing your opinion as unquestionable truth. There is a massive difference between "I think this is stupid" and talking about "this stupidity".
Thank you, Quebec... For making the product manuals on my bookshelf take up 50% extra space and consume 50% more trees.
Thank you, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy,... for making the product manuals in the boxed products I buy take up 1000% extra space and consume 1000% more trees. Cos, you know, here in Europe they like to make one box that they can sell anywhere.
Historical spellings are the only reason English is still a single language that is mutually intelligible (at least in written form) all around the world. It's the key to its success, not a weakness.
{citation needed}
All versions of English spoken in areas of white native-speaking descent have a very high phonemic similarity. It would not be difficult at all to make a single phonemic spelling that would adequately represent all dialects. There are only a handful of phonemic distinctions that are made only by a minority (WH vs W springs to mind) and even "dropped Rs" are almost never completely dropped.
If we follow your track well we can just look to Latin historically to see what happens. The local street languages will be adapted into faux-literary languages with phonetic spellings, mutually unintelligible.
That's a completely spurious comparison. Latin was spoken by the conquerors, and the locals failed to learn it correctly. The Romance languages show the effects of local language interference (eg intervocalic lenition in Spanish, likely a borrowing from Celtic phonology, insertion of e- at the start of many words in French and Spanish, a borrowing from Basque etc). English is in a completely different situation, because the expansion of the British Empire was concurrent with a population boom triggered by the industrial revolution. This gave a massive surplus population to settle the new colonies. Of course, not every colony got the number of native speakers the US, Australia and New Zealand did. If you look at the Carribean, you'll get creoles arising out of English. Listen to African varieties of English. Or Indian. Or the creoles of Oceania, from the relatively English-like Pitkern and Norfuk to the very exotic, like Bislama. These are the varieties that emerged where native speakers were in the minority -- these are the languages that are analogous to the Romance languages.
So no thank you, let's not try to kill the tongue of Shakespeare. Learn to use it better instead.
Sayest thou that we should cease to use the present progressive...?
Slashdot Mirror
Nationalism is a very good tool for the 1%-ers (just like religion is/was.)
You mean UK nationalism? Like all the "rule Britannia, better together" nationalism?
There have been about 2 general elections where the Scottish vote would have made a difference, and in both of those the difference was between a hung parliament and an outright majority. "Labour can't win without Scotland" is a myth.
The modern trend is towards linking states, not breaking them up into non-functional bits.
That's misrepresentative. The modern trend is for countries to get smaller, and for countries to form closer alliances via supra-national entities. Czechoslovakia split in two; Yugoslavia fragmented bit by bit; India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, then East Pakistan became independent as Bangladesh.
Iceland gained its independence from Denmark in the 40s, and Greenland and the Faroe Islands have gradually increased in autonomy, on a slow move that seems likely to end in full independence. It must be remembered also that Norway was a part of Denmark until 1814.
The Renaissance model of large countries was based on principles of colonialism, imperialism and restricted trade. Scotland entered the Union because the imperial powers had set up trade barriers and Scotland was effectively frozen out of all international commerce. These conditions no longer apply, so we should instead look at state size in more practical terms. As it turns out, the governance of large countries seems to be far less effective than the governance of large countries. If you look at the world's countries in terms of GDP per capita, you'll see a heck of a lot of small countries at the top. The USA is an exception, but then it (like Germany) is a federal system and its states have a high degree of autonomy. Notably, as the federal government has taken more and more power away from the state legislatures, the US has decreased in wealth relative to the rest of the world....
Fraoch (note spelling) Scottish. Please do not confuse "England" with "the UK".
The problem is that any projection of a map onto a flat surface is distorted. There are no un-distorted maps. A map contains serveral classes of important data on a map, and projections mainly affect distances, areas and angles. It is mathematically impossible to have a plane projection of the Earth's surface which correctly displays distances, but you can have a map that preserves angles and a map that preserves areas.
The BBC weathermap is not a true planar projection, though. It's a 3D projection rendered onto 2D, emulating the view of the UK from orbit. Neither ground-level angles, nor latitudinal distance, nor longitudinal distance, nor surface area are preserved. All distances and all areas are reduced. This is because the projection is seemingly taken from somewhere above France, so the south of England is close to the camera, and the north of Scotland is not only further away (hence smaller) but also reduced in height due to the curvature of the Earth included in the projection.
When this first came in (years ago now), the justification of this was that it is more "natural" to look at, and easier to understand... but only a handful of people have ever had the opportunity to see the UK from such an angle, so I can't see what's so natural about it. Furthermore, the BBC initially refused to allow any regional opt-out from the standard projection, so the Scottish weather was on a zoomed subsection of the map, which had practically zero north/south resolution compared to exaggerated east/west.
After a lot of complaints, the BBC tweaked the angles slightly, but the problem still remains. It is particularly irritating that the Gaelic weather forecasts, half of whose target audience are in the Highlands and Islands, is forced to use the same map, where their part of Scotland is so drastically shrunken that a single weather symbol blocks out over a hundred miles on the map.
The English are free to have their own referendum on the matter. The United Kingdom is a union of equals, and any party to a treaty can choose to leave it unilaterally.
anyway, the only people who want independence are the Scottish national party, and even they want everything to be just as it was before only with Alex Salmond declared King of Scotland.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. I am not a member of the SNP. I do not particularly like the SNP. I want Scottish independence. I do not want Scotland to be "just as it was before". I want some things to remain the same and some things to change.
Personally, I think its right that Scotland gets independence for moral reasons - all those Scottish MPs (who are either Labour ot SNP) get to vote on things that only matter in the rest of the UK, so you guys gets to tell us what to do without any for of reciprocity. - so getting rid of those useless MPs would actually be beneficial for the rest of the UK, morally.
It's not Scotland's fault that there is no devolution settlement for England. Personally, I have always thought it ridiculous that devolution is so asymmetrical, with different devolved powers in each of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and none whatsoever for England. But that isn't Scotland's fault.
Actually imperative programming is a mathematic concept too. The difference between imperative and functional programming is a matter of abstraction level as both of those can be translated to the other model.
Yes, but the problem is that imperative coding abstracts the mathematics to the point where the programmer isn't thinking mathematically any more.
It took me a long time to get my head round my maths lecturers at university telling me a matrix was "a computer", but they were right. Imperative programming is inefficient because it doesn't allow us to take f(x) and g(x) and create g(f(x)) for all x, so we have to evaluate every step.
Not necessarily, imperative programming can have such transformations and in fact most modern ones do.
Ok, but most coders won't use such features, because they don't understand them.
Also most compilers translate the imperative code into an internal functional abstraction to simplify optimizations (often in the form of SSA or single static assignment form) and then translate that into the imperative form required by most computers.
Which calls into question the whole point of imperative programming. Why should I spend so much time telling the computer exactly what to do in what order if it's only going to attempt to extract the task logic and refactor everything anyway? Surely it's more efficient to just describe the problem and let the computer fix it?
most computation can be conceptualised as a data transform.
Indeed. Or more correct as a series of data transforms combined with internal state AKA a finite state machine.
Not "more correct", just "more computation". I'm not a functional programming hardliner, but I do see where they're coming from on stateless code. Why should determinism only apply at the system level? Do we not conceptualise procedures and functions as programs within programs? Determinism helps guarantee correctness.
We learned Standard ML in university, and my main complaint about it wasn't the weirdness of it or the impurity of the functional model, it was the fact that we were asked to do the complete task within the language. I never understood why they expected a full interactive program in FP, when instead they could have had a lightweight application layer in non-functional code that called stateless functions as required in order to manipulate and update its stateful data. Since the early days of computing, the ideal of programming was to be able to just tie prewritten blocks together to perform arbitrary functions, and every generation someone touts this idea as the next big thing, coming this year, but it never takes off. One of the reasons libraries can be such a pain to work with is because the internal stateful processing is unpredictable. Ban state, and the problem goes away, no?
Welcome to democracy.
Are you suggesting the best measure of a language is to see how easy it is to reimplement something that has been done a gazillion times before, rather than how easy it makes it to do something more complicated built on top of all the solved problems and preinvented wheels...?
The issue is more than merely about number of lines, it's about modes of thought. In most languages, coding is an exercise that basically involves a lot of mundane data shuffling that is easily expressed, but each individual line achieves nothing of consequence. When it comes to code maintenance, reading the lines is easy, but reconstructing the program logic is very difficult indeed. Wolfram's goal appears to be to strip away all the housekeeping in order to spotlight the code logic, which strikes me as the right way around.
Your use of the term "mathematician" is interesting too, because it does suggest that you don't feel mathematicians should be interfering in programming. Well, I'm of the opposite opinion. Imperative programming is the result of non enough mathematics in computer programming. It took me a long time to get my head round my maths lecturers at university telling me a matrix was "a computer", but they were right. Imperative programming is inefficient because it doesn't allow us to take f(x) and g(x) and create g(f(x)) for all x, so we have to evaluate every step. But a matrix encodes a linear transform, and multiplying two transformation matrices gives you exactly that -- g(f(x)) for all vectors x. Typically, using matrices for a single step is less efficient than just running the normal code, but when you're going to carry out the same calculation j(i(h(g(f(x))))) on hundreds or thousands of xs, calculating a single matrix and using that every time is the most efficient way.
This thinking doesn't start and end at matrices though.. most computation can be conceptualised as a data transform.
it's just one line in wolfram:
print UNIVERSE.revealSecrets(ALL);
Output: 42
Sorry that's life, the_universe AND everything. It's a bitwise AND, of course, so that's 101010. Life is 111011, everything is (as you might expect) 111111. Finding all possible values of the universe is an exercise left to the reader.
Does the trade agreement state that every product must always be packaged in all three languages? I think you'll find that it doesn't, which means it's the producer's choice to package that way. It is therefore presumably in their commercial interest to do so. If it was cheaper to have 3 different packages, they would have three different packages.
Thank you! We are in total agreement! GEMA's business plan of charging about what the market will bear for the licensing fees is, indeed, not viable.
Seriously dude? Is that what this debate has descended to? "I know you are, but what am I?"?
The rental model is supposed to increase the benefit for all parties. If the rental model is not increasing the profits of the producers, it's a bad model. The consumer gets a broader choice and easier access, and typically pays extra for the privilege in the long term, which is how the producer profits. Spotify's model relies on less, less and less. The consumer pays less than elsewhere. The producer gets less than elsewhere. Spotify takes less commission than a retail outlet. The problem with this business model is that the producers' costs haven't decreased.
Secondly, Spotify have two very different products, as you yourself pointed out: music on demand and automatically generated playlists. These two products are of different values, yet Spotify pay the same for them. In essence, they're using the non-paying customers to keep the buy price down for the guys who bring in the cash.
Now imagine if there was a different royalty for on-demand vs algorithmically selected -- what difference does that make?
Well, for now, 100 plays at 0.6 cents gets 60 cents, total. If we double that rate for the premium users and half it for the free users, that's 52.5 cents generated -- a reduction. Double/half again, premium plays give a royalty of 2.4 cents and it's now generating 71.25 cents -- a profit for the producers. Even then, that's still an effective price of 3.4 cents per track to the buyer, which is a very low rental payment. If you double/half again, the royalty becomes 4.8 cents, and the effective price is just under 6.9 cents, a tenth of a low-cost iTunes song. Now you're starting to get into reasonable rental territory, and those same 100 plays, 25 from a premium user and 75 from a free user, generate $1.25, more than double the initial take for the music producers.
Of course, that would mean doubling the subscription price.
So, back to the problem of Spotify's business model... Spotify wants to be "freemium", but the freemium model relies on you owning what you are selling, because you can't give away something that you don't own. They've twisted and contorted the business model multiple times to try to preserve something of the original idea, but it's left them with two different products that they're trying to call one thing, and the lack of profit in the freebie product is interfering with the pricing and profitability of the premium product.
Ah, the old "there aren't as many of you, so you're less important" argument. When this is about skin colour, religion or sexual orientation, it's mostly accepted as being bigotry; but when it's about language, it's fair game, right? Cos "language is a choice". Yeah. The first thing I did upon being born was select which language my mother was to speak to me, and communicate that to her via telepathic link. By a lucky coincidence, I managed to pick the one and only language she was capable of talking to me in.
And as for manuals, mostly they just put a "quickstart guide" in the box, and a CD-RoM with the main manuals in PDF format. No-one reads the manuals anyway. Everyone's a winner.
"All versions of English spoken in areas of white native-speaking descent have a very high phonemic similarity." This is not only not true (scots dialect is as 'white' as you could get and it's quite possibly the furthest outlier in the language)
When I say "versions of English" I mean "versions of Modern English". Scots is a language that diverged from English at the very beginning of the Middle period, if not before. "English" as we know it didn't exist then.
even if were true it would be pointless. Are you really implying that only *white* English speakers contribute to our literature? Please. You cannot be serious.
Sorry, I missed a vitally important word there: "areas of majority white native-speaking descent". My point is that in areas where colonists were in the majority, English was preserved more or less intact, and the imported slaves, the free immigrants and the locals learned from their pattern. The children of the non-natives then still had exposure to the native pattern, and spoke better than their parents. In such a situation, the non-native errors disappear within a couple of generations (you can see this in any immigrant community in any country and any language).
I was using white as a shorthand, because when you go to India or Oceania, you can see immediately that the population isn't descended from the colonists by the colour of their skin, and their English is markedly different, because it has turned what began as non-native errors into a part of their language variety.
There are even areas in the US where true "communities" persist based on colour, and there -- guess what? Strong dialectal differences persist, and black speech even has its own name: ebonics. These modes of speech are in no way inferior to standard English, but sadly society as a whole judges them to be so.
So no, I'm not saying that only white English speakers contribute to English-language literature. I am not racist (although my poor wording may have suggested otherwise). I was simply pointing to the fact that the ratio of native speakers to non-natives is what determines whether the language changes or remains the same.
That's because the natural way to coherently link the tangled mass of local phonologies together into a single written standard is to walk back the historical developments, providing written phonemes that represent the ancient root from which the diverse modern pronunciations stem.
You talk about dropped 'r's? That's barely even scratching the surface. There are dozens of different 'r's which are used by different dialects, in different environments, and when 'dropped' they are usually actually converted into another phoneme, or trigger a conversion of a neighboring phoneme...
"Dozens of different 'r's"... but they are all still Rs. If I write R, I don't care which R you use, I happily recognise it as an R. That's what a phoneme is -- it's a meaningful unit of sound that can be pronounced in multiple different ways. When the R reduces to the point that it turns the vowel before it into an "eugh" sound, it's still an R. I could write it as R, as , as , as &*, as anything -- it would still be one phoneme.
The mismatch between the written form and spoken is pretty much identical everywhere. The OU in "you" preserves an old form, but it's different from almost every other OU -- out, shout, etc. Rewriting "you" as "yoo" would not favour any dialectal variation over any other.
Sorry your scenario is the spurious one. Latin, as in Classical Latin, was spoken as a native language by no one, ever. It was always a literary language.
Spoken 'vulgate' latin was not a literary language and it was spoken all the way from Romania to Brittania at one time. The differences that develop have nothing to do with errors or failure to learn correctly just normal language change processes that affect all vernaculars
Languages do not have rights -- correct. People do -- correct. It was not the language that asked for itself to be defended, it was the people that asked for it to be defended.
There's no such thing as a "pure" version of French. Modern French, though primarily derived from Parision, is a mélange of features from different areas of France. Where words start ép-, éc- etc, that's a corruption of Latin sp-, sc-, and while the Celtic and Germanic tribes could say that, the Basques (in the South, a long way from Paris) couldn't; "c'est à moi" is thought to be a Celtic pattern; the name "France" comes from the Germanic people "the Franks" who originally lived in most of Northern France. And all of this was just "impure Latin".
The difference between Québuécois is simply that Québuécois is derived from a different mixture of regional dialects, as there were very few Parisians among the original settlers. Neither is more "pure", neither is more "cultured", neither is more "intelligent". At the end of the day, both are just "how people speak".
Languages evolve over time, but Quebecois has stagnated. Even the French call email "email", instead of "couriel."
They've already migrated away from this, and most people call it "mél", which is more like "mail" than "email". It also works great in email signatures, as they now typically go:
Tél: +33 1.23.45.67
Mél: nom@addresse.fr
This is a good example of borrowing, because it's been nativised. The "e" bit didn't work in French, so they got rid of it. Besides, email and courriel both give precedence to mail, and email is now the norm, with paper mail being the exception. Having email no longer subservient to postal mail as a concept makes a great deal of sense.
I've never been to "Whales", but expect it to be quite small as countries go.
If you ever do, please say hello to President Jonah for me.
I used to live in Spain, right next to the French border. Lots of the products on the supermarket shelves were labelled in Spanish and Portuguese. Because it's easier for them to print one set of packaging and distribute it everywhere than produce different packs. Many of the products available in the UK have at least one language, quite often things like Dutch or Danish, which are relatively close by and have a small consumer base. Galaxy chocolates often have Arabic on them. There is even a couple of supermarket chains whose own brand products carry half the languages of the EU.
The rest of the world is used to this... calm down, North America.
or Ontario, New England States, Atlantic Provinces, online retailers, etc. There is a reason why most Francophones learn English. Quebec is a tiny spot of french speakers in a sea of english speakers.
So what? Wherever you live, you interact more with people in your area than people outside it. There's 200km between Montréal and Ottawa. There's plenty of places in the world where you can cross an entire country in 200km and encounter 3 or more languages in the process.
Deal with it instead of trying to preserve a society through legislation.
As a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland domiciled in Scotland, I never legislate on Canadian language matters, nor do I have to deal with it.
Non-Canadians can certainly have an opinion about this stupidity, and call it what it is.
Yeah, but see, here you aren't just expressing an opinion, you're expressing your opinion as unquestionable truth. There is a massive difference between "I think this is stupid" and talking about "this stupidity".
Thank you, Quebec... For making the product manuals on my bookshelf take up 50% extra space and consume 50% more trees.
Thank you, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy,... for making the product manuals in the boxed products I buy take up 1000% extra space and consume 1000% more trees. Cos, you know, here in Europe they like to make one box that they can sell anywhere.
Historical spellings are the only reason English is still a single language that is mutually intelligible (at least in written form) all around the world. It's the key to its success, not a weakness.
{citation needed} All versions of English spoken in areas of white native-speaking descent have a very high phonemic similarity. It would not be difficult at all to make a single phonemic spelling that would adequately represent all dialects. There are only a handful of phonemic distinctions that are made only by a minority (WH vs W springs to mind) and even "dropped Rs" are almost never completely dropped.
If we follow your track well we can just look to Latin historically to see what happens. The local street languages will be adapted into faux-literary languages with phonetic spellings, mutually unintelligible.
That's a completely spurious comparison. Latin was spoken by the conquerors, and the locals failed to learn it correctly. The Romance languages show the effects of local language interference (eg intervocalic lenition in Spanish, likely a borrowing from Celtic phonology, insertion of e- at the start of many words in French and Spanish, a borrowing from Basque etc). English is in a completely different situation, because the expansion of the British Empire was concurrent with a population boom triggered by the industrial revolution. This gave a massive surplus population to settle the new colonies. Of course, not every colony got the number of native speakers the US, Australia and New Zealand did. If you look at the Carribean, you'll get creoles arising out of English. Listen to African varieties of English. Or Indian. Or the creoles of Oceania, from the relatively English-like Pitkern and Norfuk to the very exotic, like Bislama. These are the varieties that emerged where native speakers were in the minority -- these are the languages that are analogous to the Romance languages.
So no thank you, let's not try to kill the tongue of Shakespeare. Learn to use it better instead.
Sayest thou that we should cease to use the present progressive...?