It depends on jurisdiction and jurisprudential philosophy as to how you classify truth.
In general, "affirmative defense" means "yes, I committed that offense, but here's why you should still not punish me."
On the other hand, "absolute defense" means "no, I didn't commit the offense."
Alibis are absolute defenses (no way I committed that crime). One affirmative defense would be self-defense (yes, I did commit murder, but here's why you still shouldn't punish me).
A way to remember is that absolute defenses are also called "excuse" defenses or "justification" defenses.
I say that the classification of "truth" as a defense is based on philosophy because some jurisdictions/judges/people will say by claiming "truth" you are admitting that you did libel, but shouldn't be punished; others will say that by claiming "truth" you are saying "no way I actually libeled the guy."
It depends on how you treat the historical, common law libel claim, among other things, as to whether you consider it affirmative or absolute.
Court proceedings are not copyrighted. Thus, there is no conflict when the case is about streaming copyrighted material and the purported conflict is streaming uncopyrighted material.
You might as well say that a trial about an infringing public reading of a copyrighted book would be prejudiced because the court allows people to talk!
Yeah, you've said it better than I; I know that they're not "words" per se that are monosyllabic. I was trying to say something like "every character represents an indivisible sound" and "there aren't phonemes separate from hanzi," but that didn't quite express what I wanted to say. I'd hoped putting "words" in quotation marks would help me fuzz things up a bit.
And that's interesting about the character with multiple readings. Thanks for pointing that out. Still, there's no way multiple readings are more prevalent in Chinese than Japanese.
That's not true. In Japanese you can use the word "kanji" to refer to hanzi.
And I'm not aware of any major convention in the English language that restricts "kanji" to only meaning "kanji used in Japan."
Wikipedia defines "kanji" as only Japanese, but then they define "hanzi" as Chinese characters used in any language that uses them (including Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean).
But that's the only real evidence against my assertion, and it's not exactly a settled point of vocabulary in the English language.
I would argue that "kanji" isn't even prevalent to be considered a word in English outside of the category of jargon. People use the word "hanzi" even less.
The only reason "kanji" has such a restricted meaning in any community is because of Japanese learners who use it mistakenly.
Although I suppose in a few years it will be pretty prevalent in only meaning "Japanese characters" in the same way that "otaku" in the US refers to something different from "otaku" in Japan.
I'd be curious what word native-Chinese-speaking, acquired-Japanese-speaking American-born Chinese people use to refer to characters in Chinese when they speak English.
I tend to use the word "hanzi," but that's only around people who know Chinese. I use the word "kanji" around people who know Japanese. I have no default in English when discussing linguistically with people, although my knowledge that "kanji" in the Japanese language is not restricted to the Japanese-used characters likely influences my vocabulary choice.
In any case, this is an interesting area of English: how we treat words imported from Asia that have multiple pronunciations but the same definition across languages.
I may be out of my dialectal league here, but I think Billy Connelly's Glaswegian accent would sound more like "fucked" than Connery's Edinburghensian. At least, in my head, Connery's "forked" sounds way different than Connery's "fucked."
So the 2d Amendment is OK, but the 1st Amendment should be tossed out? I'm not sure what you're getting at here...
And I'm assuming you're American by your quick jump to gun violence after someone states their preference for you to GTFO rather than usher out the era of the 1st Amendment.
Well, Japanese has some limited form of a tonal system in addition to its tonality. It only makes a difference in certain words, though. For example, "ame" with "a" higher than "me" means "rain," while "a" and "me" at the same pitch means "hard candy."
The same pattern occurs with "kumo" for cloud and spider, "hashi" for bridge and chopsticks, and a few others.
Technically you're wrong, and you're using a Japanese-as-a-second-language understanding of what the word "kanji" means.
To cite an authority, my copy of the Koujien, which is pretty much the Oxford dictionary of Japanese for authoritativeness, has this to say (translation mine):
Kanji. Characters arising in ancient China. Currently used in China, Japan, and Korea. . ..
As someone who speaks Japanese and basic Mandarin: no. Mandarin is much more fertile. I know this is a gross oversimplication (by virtue of the fact that "word" is an inadequate term for many things in Mandarin), but Mandarin "words" are all monosyllabic. Japanese has many polysyllabic words.
Also, because agglutinating "words" in Japanese can change pronunciation ("tuka" (use) and "you" (use) put together becomes "siyou" (use, formal)) but Mandarin can, at worst, change only the tone (which still doesn't destroy a potential pun oftentimes), Mandarin still looks like it's going to win the trophy for punniest language.
Although TheoMurpse's postings on/. should take the prize for uncomfortably embedded parantheses.
The reason she doesn't hear a difference is because the difference between the "a" and "e" in those two words is slight at best. The vowel height and vowel backness are nearly identical. The fact that she doesn't have the habituation to hear the difference between them is because her native language doesn't have the sounds as different phonemes. If you don't learn to distinguish certain phonemes by the time you're, say, three years old, it becomes extremely difficult. It's connected to the Critical period in linguistics, but Wiki reports the boundary as sometime between five and puberty. However, that's for acquiring a native language. I think for acquiring the necessary phonological discernment, the cutoff age is much earlier. But IANALinguist.
For fun, listen to the "p" in "happen" (it's called a voiceless bilabial plosive because your voicebox doesn't generate sound (voiceless), you use two lips (bilabial), and you explode air out after building up pressure (plosive)) and the "p" in "parrot."
Rather, you won't hear a difference. Technically, one is aspirated and one is unaspirated.
But I guarantee you native Hindi speakers can hear a difference--in Hindi, they are different sounds that can affect the meaning of words; not so in English.
I'm not sure about native Spanish speakers. In Spanish, the aspirated "p" ("parrot"'s "p") doesn't even exist.
Less offensive (but perhaps more dangerous!) in Japanese is that the word for "aunt" or "middle aged woman" and the word for "old lady" or "grandma" are separated only by the fraction of a second of extra length you hold the pure-voweled "a." Many a noob inadvertently insults a middle-aged woman with that one.
The meme's been running for at least a year at a certain other website.
The only good one is Xzibit's face shopped onto Isaac Newton's head+wig with the caption "Sup dawg I herd u like calculus so we put a function inside yo function so you can derive while you derive."
The pun is on "drive" because Xzibit mods cars so crazily on his TV show that he might one day put a car in a car so you can drive while you drive.
In the show, there was once an energy drink dispenser that would only fit red bull or something and a popcorn machine installed in the cab so you could get energy and eat snacks while driving.
I think by explaining the joke, I've made it all the less funny...:(
I'm sure the most common chord prograssion is not one that follows the circle of fifths simply because nearly all music on the radio today maintains the same key signature throughout the song. Without a key change, the circle of fifths is not related to the music at all.
The most common chord progression is likely to be V-I, which is the final two chords of pretty much every Western pop song written in a major key.
Re:Warning to all mods: joke alert
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
That is precisely my reaction to seeing Citizen Kane (and hearing Bob Dylan and The Beatles) for the first time.
I enjoyed CK greatly, but I had to read up on the revolutionary cinematography and such to understand why it's so important.
Incidentally, I think the same thing applies to History of the World Part I: The jokes Brooks did there were new, but they've been used so many times since then, that a new viewer who is in the context of modern film would think Brooks did nothing but tell terrible, overused jokes.
It's a really dick move to wait for the film to be over before asking for the money back for the anti-piracy dots.
If you were a good person, you'd walk out in the middle and ask.
Waiting until you've enjoyed the whole film before asking for your money back is like eating the entire meal and then complaining to the manager that it was too cold.
Unfortunately, when you're making a film, and 99.9999% of the viewers will not get the reference, you'll instead be left with 99.9999% of filmgoers thinking your ending was a shit kludge, not a brilliant reference to the Justice League.
And the octopus alone isn't necessary to have the deconstruction of the superhero genre. The whole novel (and film?) is like that.
What is really important to understand the literary value of Watchmen is to know what comics were like before and after, and what Watchmen has to say about humanity.
Cutting out the squid does nothing to either. Hell, changing the ending to a fear of Manhattan rather than a fear of an alien invasion to justify world peace doesn't really change either in my opinion.
Just as the costumes were updated to be a satire of modern superhero films rather than then-contemporary superhero comics, you could even say that the "fear Manhattan" ending is an allusion to films like Cloverfield and the remakes of The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds.
Oh, that's not true. Most of my friends are atheists, and most of my roommates in college and grad school were atheists. I couldn't give two craps if you criticize my religion. Trust me. My last roommate couldn't stop speaking ill of it.
Only an extreme minority of my friends are Christian.
As I repeatedly said, I'm taking the portrayal of Dawkins on/. as how he argues, because I've got better things to do with my time (study for school and read all the literature I missed out on by majoring in abstract math) to read more science (or philosophy) books.
So, if his portrayal is accurate, then my aforementioned logical criticism (re-read my post, please) is a demonstration of "religious people are morons." That is not logical. That is an insult.
And "there is no proof, therefore God does not exist" does not a logical argument make. That's like an 11th century scientist saying "there is no proof of gravity off of the Earth, so there is no gravity off of the Earth."
I have thick skin. I live in a liberal, non-Christian-majority town (my temporary church's pastor talks about how far less than a majority of Austinites believe), and almost all my friends and roommates are non-Christians, with many being atheists. They are not muzzled; they speak up about my religion. I couldn't give two shits.
But I do not stand for people mischaracterizing what I say.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on jurisdiction and jurisprudential philosophy as to how you classify truth.
In general, "affirmative defense" means "yes, I committed that offense, but here's why you should still not punish me."
On the other hand, "absolute defense" means "no, I didn't commit the offense."
Alibis are absolute defenses (no way I committed that crime). One affirmative defense would be self-defense (yes, I did commit murder, but here's why you still shouldn't punish me).
A way to remember is that absolute defenses are also called "excuse" defenses or "justification" defenses.
I say that the classification of "truth" as a defense is based on philosophy because some jurisdictions/judges/people will say by claiming "truth" you are admitting that you did libel, but shouldn't be punished; others will say that by claiming "truth" you are saying "no way I actually libeled the guy."
It depends on how you treat the historical, common law libel claim, among other things, as to whether you consider it affirmative or absolute.
My approach has been to bruteforce the word "kanji" into the English lexicon ;)
Eventually it will catch on and replace "Chinese characters."
Court proceedings are not copyrighted. Thus, there is no conflict when the case is about streaming copyrighted material and the purported conflict is streaming uncopyrighted material.
You might as well say that a trial about an infringing public reading of a copyrighted book would be prejudiced because the court allows people to talk!
Yeah, you've said it better than I; I know that they're not "words" per se that are monosyllabic. I was trying to say something like "every character represents an indivisible sound" and "there aren't phonemes separate from hanzi," but that didn't quite express what I wanted to say. I'd hoped putting "words" in quotation marks would help me fuzz things up a bit.
And that's interesting about the character with multiple readings. Thanks for pointing that out. Still, there's no way multiple readings are more prevalent in Chinese than Japanese.
That's not true. In Japanese you can use the word "kanji" to refer to hanzi.
And I'm not aware of any major convention in the English language that restricts "kanji" to only meaning "kanji used in Japan."
Wikipedia defines "kanji" as only Japanese, but then they define "hanzi" as Chinese characters used in any language that uses them (including Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean).
But that's the only real evidence against my assertion, and it's not exactly a settled point of vocabulary in the English language.
I would argue that "kanji" isn't even prevalent to be considered a word in English outside of the category of jargon. People use the word "hanzi" even less.
The only reason "kanji" has such a restricted meaning in any community is because of Japanese learners who use it mistakenly.
Although I suppose in a few years it will be pretty prevalent in only meaning "Japanese characters" in the same way that "otaku" in the US refers to something different from "otaku" in Japan.
I'd be curious what word native-Chinese-speaking, acquired-Japanese-speaking American-born Chinese people use to refer to characters in Chinese when they speak English.
I tend to use the word "hanzi," but that's only around people who know Chinese. I use the word "kanji" around people who know Japanese. I have no default in English when discussing linguistically with people, although my knowledge that "kanji" in the Japanese language is not restricted to the Japanese-used characters likely influences my vocabulary choice.
In any case, this is an interesting area of English: how we treat words imported from Asia that have multiple pronunciations but the same definition across languages.
Reminds me of the Chinese tongue twister "ma ma ma ma, ma ma, ma ma ma ma"--Mom rides the horse, the horse goes slow, Mom cusses at the horse.
Damn, I didnt know Chinese used the latin extended charset!
I may be out of my dialectal league here, but I think Billy Connelly's Glaswegian accent would sound more like "fucked" than Connery's Edinburghensian. At least, in my head, Connery's "forked" sounds way different than Connery's "fucked."
So the 2d Amendment is OK, but the 1st Amendment should be tossed out? I'm not sure what you're getting at here...
And I'm assuming you're American by your quick jump to gun violence after someone states their preference for you to GTFO rather than usher out the era of the 1st Amendment.
Well, Japanese has some limited form of a tonal system in addition to its tonality. It only makes a difference in certain words, though. For example, "ame" with "a" higher than "me" means "rain," while "a" and "me" at the same pitch means "hard candy."
The same pattern occurs with "kumo" for cloud and spider, "hashi" for bridge and chopsticks, and a few others.
Technically you're wrong, and you're using a Japanese-as-a-second-language understanding of what the word "kanji" means.
To cite an authority, my copy of the Koujien, which is pretty much the Oxford dictionary of Japanese for authoritativeness, has this to say (translation mine):
As someone who speaks Japanese and basic Mandarin: no. Mandarin is much more fertile. I know this is a gross oversimplication (by virtue of the fact that "word" is an inadequate term for many things in Mandarin), but Mandarin "words" are all monosyllabic. Japanese has many polysyllabic words.
Also, because agglutinating "words" in Japanese can change pronunciation ("tuka" (use) and "you" (use) put together becomes "siyou" (use, formal)) but Mandarin can, at worst, change only the tone (which still doesn't destroy a potential pun oftentimes), Mandarin still looks like it's going to win the trophy for punniest language.
Although TheoMurpse's postings on /. should take the prize for uncomfortably embedded parantheses.
A cursory viewing of Cantonese phonetics reveals that the near-open front unrounded vowel (the "a" in "cat") doesn't exist. The open-mid front unrounded vowel (the "e" in "bed") does exist in Cantonese.
The reason she doesn't hear a difference is because the difference between the "a" and "e" in those two words is slight at best. The vowel height and vowel backness are nearly identical. The fact that she doesn't have the habituation to hear the difference between them is because her native language doesn't have the sounds as different phonemes. If you don't learn to distinguish certain phonemes by the time you're, say, three years old, it becomes extremely difficult. It's connected to the Critical period in linguistics, but Wiki reports the boundary as sometime between five and puberty. However, that's for acquiring a native language. I think for acquiring the necessary phonological discernment, the cutoff age is much earlier. But IANALinguist.
For fun, listen to the "p" in "happen" (it's called a voiceless bilabial plosive because your voicebox doesn't generate sound (voiceless), you use two lips (bilabial), and you explode air out after building up pressure (plosive)) and the "p" in "parrot."
Rather, you won't hear a difference. Technically, one is aspirated and one is unaspirated.
But I guarantee you native Hindi speakers can hear a difference--in Hindi, they are different sounds that can affect the meaning of words; not so in English.
I'm not sure about native Spanish speakers. In Spanish, the aspirated "p" ("parrot"'s "p") doesn't even exist.
Less offensive (but perhaps more dangerous!) in Japanese is that the word for "aunt" or "middle aged woman" and the word for "old lady" or "grandma" are separated only by the fraction of a second of extra length you hold the pure-voweled "a." Many a noob inadvertently insults a middle-aged woman with that one.
Obasan
Obaasan
The meme's been running for at least a year at a certain other website.
The only good one is Xzibit's face shopped onto Isaac Newton's head+wig with the caption "Sup dawg I herd u like calculus so we put a function inside yo function so you can derive while you derive."
The pun is on "drive" because Xzibit mods cars so crazily on his TV show that he might one day put a car in a car so you can drive while you drive.
In the show, there was once an energy drink dispenser that would only fit red bull or something and a popcorn machine installed in the cab so you could get energy and eat snacks while driving.
I think by explaining the joke, I've made it all the less funny... :(
I'm sure the most common chord prograssion is not one that follows the circle of fifths simply because nearly all music on the radio today maintains the same key signature throughout the song. Without a key change, the circle of fifths is not related to the music at all.
The most common chord progression is likely to be
V-I, which is the final two chords of pretty much every Western pop song written in a major key.
That is precisely my reaction to seeing Citizen Kane (and hearing Bob Dylan and The Beatles) for the first time.
I enjoyed CK greatly, but I had to read up on the revolutionary cinematography and such to understand why it's so important.
Incidentally, I think the same thing applies to History of the World Part I: The jokes Brooks did there were new, but they've been used so many times since then, that a new viewer who is in the context of modern film would think Brooks did nothing but tell terrible, overused jokes.
You do realize Watchmen satirizes that, right? It actually agrees with you on that point.
I've always heard people talk about The Dark Knight Returns as one of the two greatest comics ever (Watchmen being the other).
It's a really dick move to wait for the film to be over before asking for the money back for the anti-piracy dots.
If you were a good person, you'd walk out in the middle and ask.
Waiting until you've enjoyed the whole film before asking for your money back is like eating the entire meal and then complaining to the manager that it was too cold.
Unfortunately, when you're making a film, and 99.9999% of the viewers will not get the reference, you'll instead be left with 99.9999% of filmgoers thinking your ending was a shit kludge, not a brilliant reference to the Justice League.
And the octopus alone isn't necessary to have the deconstruction of the superhero genre. The whole novel (and film?) is like that.
What is really important to understand the literary value of Watchmen is to know what comics were like before and after, and what Watchmen has to say about humanity.
Cutting out the squid does nothing to either. Hell, changing the ending to a fear of Manhattan rather than a fear of an alien invasion to justify world peace doesn't really change either in my opinion.
Just as the costumes were updated to be a satire of modern superhero films rather than then-contemporary superhero comics, you could even say that the "fear Manhattan" ending is an allusion to films like Cloverfield and the remakes of The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds.
And Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.
Oh, that's not true. Most of my friends are atheists, and most of my roommates in college and grad school were atheists. I couldn't give two craps if you criticize my religion. Trust me. My last roommate couldn't stop speaking ill of it.
Only an extreme minority of my friends are Christian.
As I repeatedly said, I'm taking the portrayal of Dawkins on /. as how he argues, because I've got better things to do with my time (study for school and read all the literature I missed out on by majoring in abstract math) to read more science (or philosophy) books.
So, if his portrayal is accurate, then my aforementioned logical criticism (re-read my post, please) is a demonstration of "religious people are morons." That is not logical. That is an insult.
And "there is no proof, therefore God does not exist" does not a logical argument make. That's like an 11th century scientist saying "there is no proof of gravity off of the Earth, so there is no gravity off of the Earth."
I have thick skin. I live in a liberal, non-Christian-majority town (my temporary church's pastor talks about how far less than a majority of Austinites believe), and almost all my friends and roommates are non-Christians, with many being atheists. They are not muzzled; they speak up about my religion. I couldn't give two shits.
But I do not stand for people mischaracterizing what I say.
I beg you, please tell me what two contradictory principles I hold. Because you obviously know all Christians' beliefs so well.
So you have to have ethics to be an atheist? Atheism rejects people who are unethical? That sounds like religious talk to me! ;)