I salute your run-on sentence skills even if I'm shuddering at the grammar and capitalization errors...
I think inertia is a large part of it, same as it was for the French Revolutionary Calendar. Although one could honestly argue the same thing for the switch from the Julian to Gregorian calendars. Although there, we at least had a single entity forcing the change upon everyone pretty much at once. (Although there are still a few hold-outs out there who are a few days out of sync with the rest of the world)
Personally, I think I could adapt to a new dating system within a decently short amount of time. It's not like I'm using to having many dates anyhow, posting on/.
{nods} They were doing practical studies a good 5-6 years ago, albeit with a 20x20 grid and fairly random placement of electrodes, relying on the brain's tendency to adapt. Personally, I'm wondering what the long term effects of pumping electricity directly into the brain will be... I read my mother'd psychology books as a kid and the pictures of the lesions in rat brains after going through the "pleasure center" experiments will probably stick with me forever.
Then, there's the arguments that, at least until the technology becomes perfect, we should be teaching these people to learn with their disability and join that culture. The same debate has occurred for magnifying machines, hearing aids, and cochlear (sp?) implants. It's a particularly rabid debate in the deaf community (albeit a quiet one... {duck}) where they've got their own culture and language going on.
I think blind people will be (sadly) marginalized until we can cure blindness, a la Geordi La Forge on Star Trek.
I know I'm showing my geekiness here, but IIRC, they never did properly restore his vision. He got heat vision, X-ray vision, and a lot of other modes, but his regular vision was never quite right. He could "see" by using all the different modes, but it wasn't normal human sight and, at least in the books, he'd occasionally have problems with colors of things, although that might have just been a matter of him trying to correlate the umpteen different visual modes overlaid on his FOV and trying to describe them to people stuck in a 7-color world.
On the other hand, he did receive his vision back during Insurrection...
IMO, attempted murderers ought to serve the same as real murderers, but that's just my opinion.
On first blush, I'd agree with you. But then, I stopped and thought about why they might have failed. In some cases, it's clearly just bad luck or incompetence. In other cases, you find their hands switched at the moment of shooting or, despite a good knowledge of knife techniques and human anatomy, they managed to strike the person in just the right place to miss all the vital organs. I'd say that's psychology working against them, which messes up the intent.
Then too, attempted murder is too often charged in cases where the defendent obviously never really attempted to kill the person. Everything from warning shots to pranks to kids LARPing is grounds for "attempted murder."
This is crazy in my opinion. When Playboy filed suit against Netscape for selling search words "playboy" and "playmate" to other sites, words that are standard English, they won. And now Google can use Geico, obviously a trademark term?
Is the story a lie or the truth who knows. The point appears valid none the less, that Lie Detection based upon Mental Stress or activity would have some rather gaping holes in the process. More likely than not a truely convinced liar (False memories or Just loose mental habits etc) would not be caught by such a method. Worse yet the process is likely to produce false positives for lie detection in parties under stress or otherwise distracted. A police department trying to convict might well flip a pretty picture or play some music timed well at the time of a question or kick the defendant... Convicted!
There was a Father Brown story along those lines... The lord of the house had apparently been kidnapped and they'd found a suspicious drifter nearby. He wouldn't talk, but whenever they started talking about the lord and his disappearance, his pulse rate and perspiration set off the machine, and therefore they were sure he was guilty. In actuality, he was the lord in question, who was trying to skip town due to massive debts.
Hey, I was wondering if you could integrate my natural log?
Baby, let's add you and me together, subtract our clothing, divide your legs, and multiply.
Given they wanted to make a movie of the second book right after they put out the first movie and Roald Dahl flatly refused to let them because of how much he hated the movie, I'd say the prognosis might be doubtful. I suspect they're only able to make this one due to some clause when buying movies saying that they have an exclusive right to remakes.
The key problem is that people are used to seeing how IE does things. Every person I've failed to convert to Firefox has held onto IE because Firefox "doesn't make their page look right" when they're using their downloaded scripts for theit blogs and the like. *wry grin* Sure, I could be a zealot and yell at them to write their pages in a standards-compliant manner, but from their point of view, their code works fine in IE, which most everyone uses so therefore this browser I'm suggesting must be fundamentally broken.
Then why is Spanish a faster-growing language in the US than English is?
Er... probably because 99.9% of the US speaks English already? I'm answering seriously, but I suspect you're making a joke. Or at least I hope you are...
English not only borrows words and phrases from other languages, it borrows grammar
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
-- Booker T. Washington
Actually, the complexity of English was rather profitable for me in college. Due to my parents being very insistent on my learning proper grammar and spelling (They proofread any paper I wrote and when I spoke incorrectly, they immediately corrected me), I have a fairly intuitive grasp of proper English. Moreover, extensive reading has given me a grasp of the nuances of various words. Honestly, synonyms aren't. Even when words are listed as being equivalent in a dictionary, they carry different connotations, sometimes cultural baggage and sometimes it's just in how they sound. (These days, I supect most people would be more offended if you called them niggardly than if you call them stingy, simply because of how similar it sounds to the racial epithet) ^_^ Anyhow, I would read peoples' papers and made suggestions, receiving a small consulting fee for doing so. In the end, the paper was still in their style and voice, but it expressed what they really wanted said, not what they wrote.
We cherished those bald eagles and brought them out of extinction but certain races of human beings it seems doesn't deserve that dignity
Funny, that. Smashing a Bald Eagle's eggs would probably net you a lengthy jail term. Killing unborn human babies, on the other hand, is acceptable and is a very profitable industry.
Honestly, I doubt many wars get started for the sake of profitting on business during the war. On the other hand, once a war is started, it tends to inspire a lot of entrepeneurs from weapons system manufacturers to vendors to prostitutes. Afterwards, they might have an interest in not having the war end, but they generally don't go around starting one. For one, starting a war is a very unpredictable; you never know for sure who will side with whom or where the war will be fought. On the other hand, in an existing war, intertia will tend to make shifts in alliances or location a bit slower, allowing you to build a business plan based on the circumstances. Yes, they're profitting off of human misery. So are drug companies, hospitals, and tech support.
IIRC, it is the most common second language. Britain was a major superpower for centuries and the US has been as well. Therefore, English has become a nearly universal language for business and science. Similarly, I remember hearing at one point that French is currently the second most common second language, basically a legacy of when French was the language of culture and royalty in Europe. I've seen several cites of English being the most common second language. I've only heard the French one as heresey.
^_^ Odd you should say that, as I seem to remember that I won my first time playing by this strategy. It was either that or something involving amassing a large amount of soldiers... years ago, and the game was interrupted a few times by teary calls from an ex-girlfriend (It would have been our two-year anniversary). But then again, my family is the type, when starting a game, to ask for the rules and quickly read the entire set for things like that.
^_^ Another fun game to play is Encore. While it does involve singing, it doesn't judge your singing voice, just your knowledge of lyrics. And, as the contest involves the teams going back and forth singing a section of lyrics containing the word on a card, there's no penalty for not having grown up in a particular era of music, as I've found in other singing games. Fun for the whole family, as the older members supply songs from the classical rock-and-roll era or even the Big Band era while the kids supply the latest childrens songs and jingles.
At one point, there was Beyond Balderdash, which added famous names, famous dates, acronyms, and movie titles to the mix. *wry grin* Some worked better than others, as the famous name and famous date categories often had a specific format to the right answer that made it easy to pick out among the user-submitted ones. The acronym one is an excellent addition though.
Although, come to think of it, last I was in the Toy Section of Walmart, they had a gold-boxed Balderdash which included the above, so it could be they rolled it back into the main line.
Check out the HikarUnix LiveCD at http://users.bigpond.net.au/cyberburn/hikarunix.ht ml. It's basically a LiveCD devoted to various computer programs of Go including several networked versions. And since it's a LiveCD, it's as easy as burning it and popping it into a computer when you want to play.
Also look at http://www.heroscape.net/ which has the rules as PDFs and various extensions by fans. It's essentially a very light wargame, simple enough that children can figure it out easily, but it can easily be made more complex for adults. (It ships with easy and "master" mode rules) There may be expansions if we can get people to buy the original game...
Yes, I know that, as a computer game, it's strictly not a board game, but Zillions of Games is one of the best generic board game simulators available on the computer, at least for discrete non-math-based, non-card-based games. About 30 games and their variants are included with the default installation and users can modify these files or create their own to create new games. The best part of it is that ZoG has an AI such that you can input the rules of a game and the computer can generally play competently enough to beat you a large amount of the time by brute force. This is an especially excellent program for people who are fond of chess variants and want to see how an invented variant might play out. It allowed me to implement a chess variant I wrote in middle school. ^_^ And showed me that the variant was hideously unbalanced, but that's another matter entirely...
In reality, most Civil War soldiers were illiterate. The letters that have been saved for the history books are the most elegant ones.
I believe you mean "eloquent." {waits for the -1 Pedantic mod}
That said, I agree that the sample set for historical documents does tend to be very skewed. It's kind of like the commentary on classical music made in "Stranger in a Strange Land" (can't find the actual quote currently, so I'll approximate) stating that the main benefit of classical music is that they've had a few hundred years to weed out the crap.
Personally, I agree with Paul Graham's opinion when he said that schools (in particular, High School) exist as holding pens to keep kids from bothering adults during the day.
Slashdot Mirror
I think inertia is a large part of it, same as it was for the French Revolutionary Calendar. Although one could honestly argue the same thing for the switch from the Julian to Gregorian calendars. Although there, we at least had a single entity forcing the change upon everyone pretty much at once. (Although there are still a few hold-outs out there who are a few days out of sync with the rest of the world)
Personally, I think I could adapt to a new dating system within a decently short amount of time. It's not like I'm using to having many dates anyhow, posting on /.
If they see each other every day, no attack. If one is absent, *boom*.
And I thought I had "Oh, shit!" moments when waking up from oversleeping...
Then, there's the arguments that, at least until the technology becomes perfect, we should be teaching these people to learn with their disability and join that culture. The same debate has occurred for magnifying machines, hearing aids, and cochlear (sp?) implants. It's a particularly rabid debate in the deaf community (albeit a quiet one... {duck}) where they've got their own culture and language going on.
I know I'm showing my geekiness here, but IIRC, they never did properly restore his vision. He got heat vision, X-ray vision, and a lot of other modes, but his regular vision was never quite right. He could "see" by using all the different modes, but it wasn't normal human sight and, at least in the books, he'd occasionally have problems with colors of things, although that might have just been a matter of him trying to correlate the umpteen different visual modes overlaid on his FOV and trying to describe them to people stuck in a 7-color world.
On the other hand, he did receive his vision back during Insurrection...
On first blush, I'd agree with you. But then, I stopped and thought about why they might have failed. In some cases, it's clearly just bad luck or incompetence. In other cases, you find their hands switched at the moment of shooting or, despite a good knowledge of knife techniques and human anatomy, they managed to strike the person in just the right place to miss all the vital organs. I'd say that's psychology working against them, which messes up the intent.
Then too, attempted murder is too often charged in cases where the defendent obviously never really attempted to kill the person. Everything from warning shots to pranks to kids LARPing is grounds for "attempted murder."
This is crazy in my opinion. When Playboy filed suit against Netscape for selling search words "playboy" and "playmate" to other sites, words that are standard English, they won. And now Google can use Geico, obviously a trademark term?
There was a Father Brown story along those lines... The lord of the house had apparently been kidnapped and they'd found a suspicious drifter nearby. He wouldn't talk, but whenever they started talking about the lord and his disappearance, his pulse rate and perspiration set off the machine, and therefore they were sure he was guilty. In actuality, he was the lord in question, who was trying to skip town due to massive debts.
Hey, I was wondering if you could integrate my natural log?
Baby, let's add you and me together, subtract our clothing, divide your legs, and multiply.
Given they wanted to make a movie of the second book right after they put out the first movie and Roald Dahl flatly refused to let them because of how much he hated the movie, I'd say the prognosis might be doubtful. I suspect they're only able to make this one due to some clause when buying movies saying that they have an exclusive right to remakes.
What, no "tits Audobon society"?
The key problem is that people are used to seeing how IE does things. Every person I've failed to convert to Firefox has held onto IE because Firefox "doesn't make their page look right" when they're using their downloaded scripts for theit blogs and the like. *wry grin* Sure, I could be a zealot and yell at them to write their pages in a standards-compliant manner, but from their point of view, their code works fine in IE, which most everyone uses so therefore this browser I'm suggesting must be fundamentally broken.
Then why is Spanish a faster-growing language in the US than English is?
Er... probably because 99.9% of the US speaks English already? I'm answering seriously, but I suspect you're making a joke. Or at least I hope you are...
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
-- Booker T. Washington
Actually, the complexity of English was rather profitable for me in college. Due to my parents being very insistent on my learning proper grammar and spelling (They proofread any paper I wrote and when I spoke incorrectly, they immediately corrected me), I have a fairly intuitive grasp of proper English. Moreover, extensive reading has given me a grasp of the nuances of various words. Honestly, synonyms aren't. Even when words are listed as being equivalent in a dictionary, they carry different connotations, sometimes cultural baggage and sometimes it's just in how they sound. (These days, I supect most people would be more offended if you called them niggardly than if you call them stingy, simply because of how similar it sounds to the racial epithet) ^_^ Anyhow, I would read peoples' papers and made suggestions, receiving a small consulting fee for doing so. In the end, the paper was still in their style and voice, but it expressed what they really wanted said, not what they wrote.
We cherished those bald eagles and brought them out of extinction but certain races of human beings it seems doesn't deserve that dignity
Funny, that. Smashing a Bald Eagle's eggs would probably net you a lengthy jail term. Killing unborn human babies, on the other hand, is acceptable and is a very profitable industry.
Honestly, I doubt many wars get started for the sake of profitting on business during the war. On the other hand, once a war is started, it tends to inspire a lot of entrepeneurs from weapons system manufacturers to vendors to prostitutes. Afterwards, they might have an interest in not having the war end, but they generally don't go around starting one. For one, starting a war is a very unpredictable; you never know for sure who will side with whom or where the war will be fought. On the other hand, in an existing war, intertia will tend to make shifts in alliances or location a bit slower, allowing you to build a business plan based on the circumstances. Yes, they're profitting off of human misery. So are drug companies, hospitals, and tech support.
IIRC, it is the most common second language. Britain was a major superpower for centuries and the US has been as well. Therefore, English has become a nearly universal language for business and science. Similarly, I remember hearing at one point that French is currently the second most common second language, basically a legacy of when French was the language of culture and royalty in Europe. I've seen several cites of English being the most common second language. I've only heard the French one as heresey.
^_^ Odd you should say that, as I seem to remember that I won my first time playing by this strategy. It was either that or something involving amassing a large amount of soldiers... years ago, and the game was interrupted a few times by teary calls from an ex-girlfriend (It would have been our two-year anniversary). But then again, my family is the type, when starting a game, to ask for the rules and quickly read the entire set for things like that.
^_^ Another fun game to play is Encore. While it does involve singing, it doesn't judge your singing voice, just your knowledge of lyrics. And, as the contest involves the teams going back and forth singing a section of lyrics containing the word on a card, there's no penalty for not having grown up in a particular era of music, as I've found in other singing games. Fun for the whole family, as the older members supply songs from the classical rock-and-roll era or even the Big Band era while the kids supply the latest childrens songs and jingles.
Although, come to think of it, last I was in the Toy Section of Walmart, they had a gold-boxed Balderdash which included the above, so it could be they rolled it back into the main line.
Check out the HikarUnix LiveCD at http://users.bigpond.net.au/cyberburn/hikarunix.ht ml. It's basically a LiveCD devoted to various computer programs of Go including several networked versions. And since it's a LiveCD, it's as easy as burning it and popping it into a computer when you want to play.
Also look at http://www.heroscape.net/ which has the rules as PDFs and various extensions by fans. It's essentially a very light wargame, simple enough that children can figure it out easily, but it can easily be made more complex for adults. (It ships with easy and "master" mode rules) There may be expansions if we can get people to buy the original game...
Yes, I know that, as a computer game, it's strictly not a board game, but Zillions of Games is one of the best generic board game simulators available on the computer, at least for discrete non-math-based, non-card-based games. About 30 games and their variants are included with the default installation and users can modify these files or create their own to create new games. The best part of it is that ZoG has an AI such that you can input the rules of a game and the computer can generally play competently enough to beat you a large amount of the time by brute force. This is an especially excellent program for people who are fond of chess variants and want to see how an invented variant might play out. It allowed me to implement a chess variant I wrote in middle school. ^_^ And showed me that the variant was hideously unbalanced, but that's another matter entirely...
I believe you mean "eloquent." {waits for the -1 Pedantic mod}
That said, I agree that the sample set for historical documents does tend to be very skewed. It's kind of like the commentary on classical music made in "Stranger in a Strange Land" (can't find the actual quote currently, so I'll approximate) stating that the main benefit of classical music is that they've had a few hundred years to weed out the crap.
Personally, I agree with Paul Graham's opinion when he said that schools (in particular, High School) exist as holding pens to keep kids from bothering adults during the day.
Damn shiftless linguists...