Um. What software are you referring to? Because I remember "don't copy that floppy".
If you're talking about some kind of 80s Sun-ish setup where you paid 5 figures for a workstation, well, despite its success at the time this was not representative of the industry as a whole and that business model obviously was not viable with the rise of the "x86 compatible". I'm specifically talking about the environment surrounding commodity hardware, not early (and doomed) business models that merely shifted the restrictions from software to hardware.
Yeah, as other people have noted this is pure crap. Qt wasn't open source; it was "free for non-commercial use", with the company retaining the option to change terms at any time. It was precisely because of GNOME that Trolltech eventually gave in and open sourced it. On top of that, after years with GNOME as a slowly improving competitor KDE decided stopped to sucking and make stability a higher priority instead of focusing all of their energy on building custom desktop KDefaultApplications that no one used.
So, RMS was right on that count, and he was even more right about BitKeeper being a bad move. (Linus's occasional silly claims that it was still worth it belies the fact that he didn't begin work on Git until after BK was shut down.)
Yes yes, as I mentioned in another post all of the big players (Google, Apple, Microsoft) have supported limited open source projects as a PR / goodwill type thing, and also sometimes to reap the benefits of community fixes. This is NOT the same thing as open sourcing virtually every piece of your main/only product.
The fact remains that what Apple did with their OS X (originally NeXTSTEP) is nothing like what Red Hat did with their OS, and these differences are directly traceable to the ramifications of the differing software licenses. Red Hat did NOT tolerate CentOS out of the goodness of their heart. Very early on they made it pretty clear they were displeased with their existence (although I think they've since made nice.)
I'm not sure what you expect to prove by listing a bunch of non-sequitur aphorisms. We have the facts in front of us, and it is very easy to imagine how the alternate universe would work by substituting "BSD" in place of "Linux". Does "Red Hat BSD" give away virtually their entire operating system for free, including modification and rebranding? No. No they fucking do not, and you cannot be taken seriously if you try to claim otherwise. I'm not talking about a minor permissive-licensed project (such as the kind that Apple or Google have been known to support) that doesn't affect the bottom line; we are talking about a software company open sourcing the lion's share of the code they write for their main/only product. There isn't a large, for-profit corporation in the world that does that kind of thing without some kind of legal compulsion. (Or perhaps you'd like to point out a sizable BSD-based for-profit distro that doesn't try to close source? They've had decades to come out with one.) So, admitting the absurdity of "Red Hat BSD" is step one.
Step two is admitting that while there are a number of decent home-grown options today, corporate-originated apps and sometimes core components are still very commonplace in your average distro and 10+ years ago they were even more prominent and important, particularly for business and other semi-technical users. Without corporate contributions, particularly from Linux-centric businesses like RHAT, Linux would be a pale shadow of what it is today, not just because it's hard to find full time volunteers but also because the whole thing needed a sustained kickstart before it reached a level where it was useful and appealing to people who weren't already hardcore Unix enthusiasts.
And... that's it. Admit those two things, and it's self-evidently true that the GPL was and is critical to Linux's success. This isn't philosophy any more; this is proven history. BSD gave us Apple's unholy reincarnation. GPL gave us Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, IBM, and dozens of other companies paying hundreds of developers to work on Linux full time, and every step along the way made perfect logical sense. There is no mystery as to why it happened this way.
If you want to argue otherwise, you're going to have to do a lot better than what you wrote there. For starters, you could try referring to reality once in a while.
GNU is nice, but his real contribution was the GPL. Without the GPL, Linux (including servers, x86, and Android) would be nowhere near where it is today. I'd argue even BSD wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today without spillover effects from what the GPL has wrought. In the early days of the GPL, the concept of a corporation giving away source code for free was utterly foreign and many people even argued that it would be legally infeasible for a public corporation to do (responsibility the shareholders, blah blah blah.)
If the GPL didn't exist, corporations would not voluntarily open source ANYTHING for ANY reason and in that 'tragedy of the commons' situation all would suffer (including most IT corporations... except the ones who were already doing well building their own monoliths, e.g. Microsoft.)
I'm still trying to figure out why Stallman can't be mentioned without a dozen users spewing the same cliched tirades, against a person who... has done what, exactly? Advocates a distro (gnewsense) that virtually nobody uses because it unnecessarily removes free software? Yeah, God damn him. He's ruining everything. Well, except for giving us the license that led to Android being an open source project, instead of being another locked down iOS-ish experience. And for giving us the license that's given desktop and server Linux users to millions upon millions of dollars of corporate-sponsored contributions that would have otherwise been locked down and lost in obscurity (also, absolutely destroying what very well might have been a Microsoft monopoly in the x86 server market before it had a chance to take off) whilst the BSD-based OSX remains locked down and illegal to use if you don't buy overpriced Apple hardware.
But no, the man has some 'extreme' personal views, which he does not try to involuntarily foist on any users anywhere and he occasionally tries to convince companies to voluntarily behave in ways that are healthier for the free software ecosystem, so therefore he must be bashed every time his name is mentioned. Oh, and he expects that people who voluntarily agree to the GPL to abide by its terms.
For the last time, having some instances of agglutination in a language doesn't mean you can construct any old form you like as agglutinative languages allow you to do.
Saying "English is agglutinative" is not the same thing as saying "English is first and foremost an agglutinative language" or "English is primarily categorized as agglutinative." It is roughly the equivalent of saying "English has [some] instances of agglutination." That was my intention at the time and it's clear that I was arguing for agglutination re: suffix attachment and not the exotic stuff, and so... by admitting that English contains valid instances of agglutination, you've completely agreed with me on every primary topic in this little tangent and pointedly ignored the rest (epicness being widely used and found in modern dictionaries, coinage of new words such as assassination, the split infinitives you refuse to discuss, etc.)
So, I'm calling this a win. Get back to me with something interesting or intelligent if you want; otherwise, I do believe I'm done here.
Especially in some older literature, agglutinative is sometimes used as a synonym for synthetic. In that case, it embraces what we call agglutinative and inflectional languages, and it is an antonym of analytic or isolating. Besides the clear etymological motivation (after all, inflectional endings are also "glued" to the stems), this more general usage is justified by the fact that the distinction between agglutinative and inflectional languages is not a sharp one, as we have already seen.
Sources are given for the entire section, all print but I'd seen some stuff on Google as well. Sorry, I'm not going to spoon feed it to you. If you have an ounce of intellectual honesty you will spend 30 seconds and reply to it on your own.
Somehow I knew you would do that, redefining standard industry terms to fit whatever you think might be applicable.
You ignored the very next sentence, where I implicitly acknowledged that the Pascal example (as an analogy) was a flawed one and I gave you a much better one involving C++, Java, VBA and CLOS. Ignoring my Lisp fetish for the moment, do you agree or disagree that Visual Basic (non-.NET) is object oriented and if you agree, what is the minimum subset of features you define for OO? I would argue that despite a very superficial implementation of a few C++-ish paradigms that in practice VBA isn't as OO as C is with structs and typedefs. So, is VBA OO or isn't it? Is C++? Is C?
Do you in fact care about the nuts and bolts at all or do you simply care about whether the marketing droids proclaim it to be an object oriented language on the cover of the latest "for dummies" book? Clarify this, and you clarify your own confusion over the agglutination bit.
It is certainly possible to roll one's own OO in Pascal or a number of other languages, to one degree or another. Or for a somewhat better metaphor, it's possible to talk about VBA's extremely anemic OO without implying that it can be placed in the same category of C++'s OO. And then a Lisper like me will chime in and say that without CLOS-type generic functions and considering all of those artificial barriers around what you can do with primitives, C++ really isn't very object oriented, either. Honestly, seriously, that ghetto "design pattern" OO dogshit that C++/Java has foisted on countless innocent minds has way more in common with C structs than it does with the majesty that is CLOS.
But that doesn't mean I get to wig out and demand that no one ever use the term 'object oriented' with C++ or VBA. In other words, OO is a non-atomic quality that can be possessed to greater or lesser degrees. While it is often valid and useful to talk in terms of discrete classifications of languages in terms of being OO or non-OO, it is also valid refer to the general principle when discussing specific cases--doing foo in language X is OO. Or, that language X is OO to the extent that people tend to do foo in it. VBA is nowhere near the ultra-OO side of the universe and English is nowhere near the ultra-agglutinative side of the universe, but neither case is a warrant for some kind of all-out war against simple, contextual descriptions.
Or, again, you know, YOU COULD GO LOOK AT THE FUCKING LINKS SHOWING THAT OTHER PEOPLE, THAT OTHER *LINGUISTS* HAVE USED THE TERM IN THE SAME GENERALIZED WAY AS I HAVE. Christ almighty, it's like arguing with someone who thinks that the word "conservative" can't ever be used unless referring to someone in Britain's Conservative party.
Moving goalposts? You've again switched the argument away from "epicness" to semantics, in reply a post that specifically refuted your claim that the word was something I made up (refuted) and was not found in dictionaries (also refuted). You're now going back to the claim that agglutinative has only one definition, which I have already refuted.
Your continued refusal to accept that a word might have another definition (which has also been used in the field of linguistics, specifically) is, of course, another fine and amusingly self-satirical example your own linguistic ignorance.
Of course there are languages that employ on the fly grammatical agglutination and I never said that English was one of them, but it is certainly agglutinative insofar as we have some commonly understood prefixes and suffixes that are routinely used to coin new words, generally without comment except from the cranky, ultraconservative peanut gallery.
Or, to put it another way: I have sources backing up everything I've said. You have nothing but your crotchety old man rants and your own highly mobile goal posts, which I've caught and demolished in spite of your disingenuous babble.
The split infinitive argument really has the potential to be much more fun, though, so I'd prefer you address that one. There's really no possible way to be against them without falling back on some very silly authoritarian and/or Romantic ideas.
The wikipedia article on agglutination had a sourced subsection of significant size (which I wasn't aware of when this started, nor would it make sense to argue otherwise because I had no reason to think you would embark on this newspeak semantic sideshow) which specifically, explicitly supports what I am talking about.
Epicness is obviously not "my own" coinage. It's been around for a while now. Given how cumbersome and Romantically portentious alternative constructions like "epic nature" would be, and given how easily understandable the -ness suffix is, I would say that far outweighs your own crotchety "but I don't liiiike it!" complaint.
You bring up dictionaries--again, English has no central authority. Dictionaries copy what people do, not the other way around. (This is of course why "muggle" is in the OED.) Given that there are countless examples of similar coinage (again: "assassination") you haven't explained what feature of English does or should prevent it. I assert that the only obstacles are self-important Latinophiles who prefer verbose constructions of atomic words, along with the centralized binding authorities that many Romantic languages seem to have.
Finally, you never clarified your position on split infinitives. Your reply to that post implies you're against them, in which case I would ask why you would want English to deliberately sacrifice its precision and flexibility by forcing us to emulate Romantic infinitives.
And you've spent like what, 5 comments in a row or something busy ignoring the original argument and focusing on playing semantic games instead because you know you are wrong. (Assuming you are the same person as the AC.)
I think that a core concept of linguistics is that words can have more than one meaning and that people who try to insist otherwise are douchebags. Exhibit 1: Noam Chomsky.
I'm using the original definition of the word, a definition that is still in common (if not the most common) use.
Again, you are arguing for a specific technical definition of a term while ignoring the obvious general definition I was using to make my point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... You admitted English was inflective and fusional, ergo it is also agglutinative (in the general sense of the term) to the extent that "epicness" is perfectly recognizable and valid. You want to argue with that, you might as well attack the word "assassination", a word invented by Shakespeare from the root word "assassin".
For all the intellectual honesty you're showing, you might as well start an argument with a chef that eggplant is a good dessert food, and then when they try to argue babble on about how eggplant is a botanical fruit. It isn't relevant to the original discussion, and furthermore non-botanists (/non-linguists) do not give a shit.
If you want to argue Germanic languages aren't agglutinative you are of course free to do so... with a linguist, in some jargon-heavy journal somewhere. Have fun. I'm not particularly interested in trotting down that particular pedantic path regarding degree or type of word-gluing that is considered "agglutinative" or not. A quick check confirms that the word agglutinative (which of course originally simply meant "to glue", or something along those lines) does indeed has multiple definitions--it's the broader definition that I was referring to, and this was obviously made clear in the context of the criticism of the word "epicness".
Trying to hijack the argument by using an alternate definition of the word that clearly wasn't intended (in light of my defense against your original half-baked criticism) is lame.
Split infinitives are perfectly natural, logical, have very long history of use and in some sentences are the only way to unambiguously tie an adverb down.
You wanna know the best part? I didn't even do that intentionally. Although to be fair, 'to tie unambigulously' wouldn't have been ambiguous. You may consult Google for some examples of situations where the non-split version is obviously and unfixably ambiguous.
Well not all of this was from university, but at some point I learned that English doesn't have a standardizing body--only handfuls of hypercorrective self-hating Latinophiles who occasionally pop up and try to deem perfectly logical and useful constructions 'incorrect'. I learned that English is closely related to a number of agglutinative languages, it's painfully obvious that quite a few of our words have been created via agglutination, I learned that the language spoken by Shakespeare was NOT "old English" but merely an earlier form of Modern English, and I also learned that Shakespeare invented a number of new words through agglutination that are still in widespread use today. By contrast, it is also quite obvious that Romantic languages have done a lot to resist new word formation via agglutination, which is one of the reasons (but not the only one) why you will so often see French or Spanish translations that have phrases 4-5 words long as the equivalent of 1-2 words in English.
People who don't believe that need explained to them why split infinitives are a good thing are either thoroughly-indoctrinated authoritarians parroting someone else's silly ideas or they are irredeemable Latinophiles completely unwilling to accept a different verb paradigm. Split infinitives are perfectly natural, logical, have very long history of use and in some sentences are the only way to unambiguously tie an adverb down. I determined this on my own through experimentation long before hearing it confirmed by someone with a doctorate in English. But again, the doctorates do not really matter--they have no binding authority. We therefore have only the history of the language and rationality to guide us, neither of which support your obviously Latin-derived arguments.
I sympathise with most Lucas complaints, but this is a pretty weird one. Are you suggesting that, because our particular planet has a lot of diversity (and do I need to point out that pretty much all of the other planets we've discovered are NOT diverse at all?) that all space operas should take place on a single planet? You don't think that might diminish the epicness a tad? You don't think that changing a planet-destroying weapon to, I don't know, a continent-destroying weapon would have been a tad lame?
The SW universe being too big is not a problem. In fact, its sense of size is one of the biggest things it had going for it, and it is precisely Lucas's unhealthy devotion to self-referential character-recycling smallness that drags things down--the main characters are all laboriously and ridiculously connected/related/cloned so that they are present or connected to all critical characters and all critical plot points. Boba Fett was a neat little background character that developed a strong cult following, so Lucas... decides to make him *the* clone of the mysterious 'clone wars', which is ridiculous from pretty much every single angle except the angle that he gets to prominently include a fan favorite in the prequels.
Which isn't to say that they shouldn't necessarily have dealings with terrorists, but they don't always do a great job at keeping them at arm's length (like the ACLU generally manages to do when they defend people like the Ku Klux Klan), particularly in their dealings with Moazzam Begg.
But even if they were doing a better job of maintaining their moral clarity (a moral clarity built on fighting against arbitrary indefinite detention and torture, which is of course extremely important) in their dealings with extremists, they still might be legitimate surveillance targets simply because they are dealing with a significant number of people who, by any sane definition, we can reasonably suspect to be engaged in terrorism.
I'm one of the strongest opponents out there of mass surveillance, but it seems reasonably likely that this is targeted, and correctly targeted at that. This isn't a defense of unlawful imprisonment or torture. Amnesty should be able to meet with suspected extremists as frequently as they want, and intelligence services should (provided they are obeying the letter and spirit of their charter) be able to keep an eye on anyone who voluntarily goes to meet with (reasonably) suspected extremists... and particularly after Amnesty goes on to forge some ties with a rather nasty jihadi group. If we give them too hard of a time with targeted surveillance... well, we already know what the alternative is.
Rich people have have problems too, just like the rest of us: family feuds
If I was rich I could move the hell away from the family drama. Both my wife and I would love to do this. Problem (mostly) solved. I don't deny there could be some lingering stress, but when you're a few hundred miles away it would not be debilitating.
marriage problems
The number one issue of contention in most marriages is money. The number two issue is infidelity, which is entirely up to the personality and attitudes of the people involved--we're in an (nominally, at least) open marriage so that won't be an issue.
bills
If you're rich and worried about bills then you either suck at managing your money, you like living extravagantly/dangerously (not us. We were all set to buy a lovely little $50,000 fixer upper house on half an acre before I lost my last job), or you aren't really rich at all.
poor health
Granted, not everything is curable even with a ton of money. But a ton of money cures (or at least treats) a hell of a lot more than no money.
but depression could just as likely make it hard to find or maintain a job.
If you are rich you do not need a job, and/or you can afford to take your time finding the right job, and/or you can afford to take some time off from work for a while without the dread of the future pressing down on you and crushing every little moment of happiness you have during your break from the grind.
Slashdot Mirror
Um. What software are you referring to? Because I remember "don't copy that floppy".
If you're talking about some kind of 80s Sun-ish setup where you paid 5 figures for a workstation, well, despite its success at the time this was not representative of the industry as a whole and that business model obviously was not viable with the rise of the "x86 compatible". I'm specifically talking about the environment surrounding commodity hardware, not early (and doomed) business models that merely shifted the restrictions from software to hardware.
Yeah, as other people have noted this is pure crap. Qt wasn't open source; it was "free for non-commercial use", with the company retaining the option to change terms at any time. It was precisely because of GNOME that Trolltech eventually gave in and open sourced it. On top of that, after years with GNOME as a slowly improving competitor KDE decided stopped to sucking and make stability a higher priority instead of focusing all of their energy on building custom desktop KDefaultApplications that no one used.
So, RMS was right on that count, and he was even more right about BitKeeper being a bad move. (Linus's occasional silly claims that it was still worth it belies the fact that he didn't begin work on Git until after BK was shut down.)
Got any more fun lies to sling our way?
Yes yes, as I mentioned in another post all of the big players (Google, Apple, Microsoft) have supported limited open source projects as a PR / goodwill type thing, and also sometimes to reap the benefits of community fixes. This is NOT the same thing as open sourcing virtually every piece of your main/only product.
The fact remains that what Apple did with their OS X (originally NeXTSTEP) is nothing like what Red Hat did with their OS, and these differences are directly traceable to the ramifications of the differing software licenses. Red Hat did NOT tolerate CentOS out of the goodness of their heart. Very early on they made it pretty clear they were displeased with their existence (although I think they've since made nice.)
I'm not sure what you expect to prove by listing a bunch of non-sequitur aphorisms. We have the facts in front of us, and it is very easy to imagine how the alternate universe would work by substituting "BSD" in place of "Linux". Does "Red Hat BSD" give away virtually their entire operating system for free, including modification and rebranding? No. No they fucking do not, and you cannot be taken seriously if you try to claim otherwise. I'm not talking about a minor permissive-licensed project (such as the kind that Apple or Google have been known to support) that doesn't affect the bottom line; we are talking about a software company open sourcing the lion's share of the code they write for their main/only product. There isn't a large, for-profit corporation in the world that does that kind of thing without some kind of legal compulsion. (Or perhaps you'd like to point out a sizable BSD-based for-profit distro that doesn't try to close source? They've had decades to come out with one.) So, admitting the absurdity of "Red Hat BSD" is step one.
Step two is admitting that while there are a number of decent home-grown options today, corporate-originated apps and sometimes core components are still very commonplace in your average distro and 10+ years ago they were even more prominent and important, particularly for business and other semi-technical users. Without corporate contributions, particularly from Linux-centric businesses like RHAT, Linux would be a pale shadow of what it is today, not just because it's hard to find full time volunteers but also because the whole thing needed a sustained kickstart before it reached a level where it was useful and appealing to people who weren't already hardcore Unix enthusiasts.
And... that's it. Admit those two things, and it's self-evidently true that the GPL was and is critical to Linux's success. This isn't philosophy any more; this is proven history. BSD gave us Apple's unholy reincarnation. GPL gave us Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, IBM, and dozens of other companies paying hundreds of developers to work on Linux full time, and every step along the way made perfect logical sense. There is no mystery as to why it happened this way.
If you want to argue otherwise, you're going to have to do a lot better than what you wrote there. For starters, you could try referring to reality once in a while.
GNU is nice, but his real contribution was the GPL. Without the GPL, Linux (including servers, x86, and Android) would be nowhere near where it is today. I'd argue even BSD wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today without spillover effects from what the GPL has wrought. In the early days of the GPL, the concept of a corporation giving away source code for free was utterly foreign and many people even argued that it would be legally infeasible for a public corporation to do (responsibility the shareholders, blah blah blah.)
If the GPL didn't exist, corporations would not voluntarily open source ANYTHING for ANY reason and in that 'tragedy of the commons' situation all would suffer (including most IT corporations... except the ones who were already doing well building their own monoliths, e.g. Microsoft.)
* unnecessarily removes unfree software
I'm still trying to figure out why Stallman can't be mentioned without a dozen users spewing the same cliched tirades, against a person who... has done what, exactly? Advocates a distro (gnewsense) that virtually nobody uses because it unnecessarily removes free software? Yeah, God damn him. He's ruining everything. Well, except for giving us the license that led to Android being an open source project, instead of being another locked down iOS-ish experience. And for giving us the license that's given desktop and server Linux users to millions upon millions of dollars of corporate-sponsored contributions that would have otherwise been locked down and lost in obscurity (also, absolutely destroying what very well might have been a Microsoft monopoly in the x86 server market before it had a chance to take off) whilst the BSD-based OSX remains locked down and illegal to use if you don't buy overpriced Apple hardware.
But no, the man has some 'extreme' personal views, which he does not try to involuntarily foist on any users anywhere and he occasionally tries to convince companies to voluntarily behave in ways that are healthier for the free software ecosystem, so therefore he must be bashed every time his name is mentioned. Oh, and he expects that people who voluntarily agree to the GPL to abide by its terms.
Goddamn terrorist.
Bookmarking this post for the next time someone tries to argue that black humor is never funny.
For the last time, having some instances of agglutination in a language doesn't mean you can construct any old form you like as agglutinative languages allow you to do.
Saying "English is agglutinative" is not the same thing as saying "English is first and foremost an agglutinative language" or "English is primarily categorized as agglutinative." It is roughly the equivalent of saying "English has [some] instances of agglutination." That was my intention at the time and it's clear that I was arguing for agglutination re: suffix attachment and not the exotic stuff, and so... by admitting that English contains valid instances of agglutination, you've completely agreed with me on every primary topic in this little tangent and pointedly ignored the rest (epicness being widely used and found in modern dictionaries, coinage of new words such as assassination, the split infinitives you refuse to discuss, etc.)
So, I'm calling this a win. Get back to me with something interesting or intelligent if you want; otherwise, I do believe I'm done here.
Especially in some older literature, agglutinative is sometimes used as a synonym for synthetic. In that case, it embraces what we call agglutinative and inflectional languages, and it is an antonym of analytic or isolating. Besides the clear etymological motivation (after all, inflectional endings are also "glued" to the stems), this more general usage is justified by the fact that the distinction between agglutinative and inflectional languages is not a sharp one, as we have already seen.
Sources are given for the entire section, all print but I'd seen some stuff on Google as well. Sorry, I'm not going to spoon feed it to you. If you have an ounce of intellectual honesty you will spend 30 seconds and reply to it on your own.
Somehow I knew you would do that, redefining standard industry terms to fit whatever you think might be applicable.
You ignored the very next sentence, where I implicitly acknowledged that the Pascal example (as an analogy) was a flawed one and I gave you a much better one involving C++, Java, VBA and CLOS. Ignoring my Lisp fetish for the moment, do you agree or disagree that Visual Basic (non-.NET) is object oriented and if you agree, what is the minimum subset of features you define for OO? I would argue that despite a very superficial implementation of a few C++-ish paradigms that in practice VBA isn't as OO as C is with structs and typedefs. So, is VBA OO or isn't it? Is C++? Is C?
Do you in fact care about the nuts and bolts at all or do you simply care about whether the marketing droids proclaim it to be an object oriented language on the cover of the latest "for dummies" book? Clarify this, and you clarify your own confusion over the agglutination bit.
It is certainly possible to roll one's own OO in Pascal or a number of other languages, to one degree or another. Or for a somewhat better metaphor, it's possible to talk about VBA's extremely anemic OO without implying that it can be placed in the same category of C++'s OO. And then a Lisper like me will chime in and say that without CLOS-type generic functions and considering all of those artificial barriers around what you can do with primitives, C++ really isn't very object oriented, either. Honestly, seriously, that ghetto "design pattern" OO dogshit that C++/Java has foisted on countless innocent minds has way more in common with C structs than it does with the majesty that is CLOS.
But that doesn't mean I get to wig out and demand that no one ever use the term 'object oriented' with C++ or VBA. In other words, OO is a non-atomic quality that can be possessed to greater or lesser degrees. While it is often valid and useful to talk in terms of discrete classifications of languages in terms of being OO or non-OO, it is also valid refer to the general principle when discussing specific cases--doing foo in language X is OO. Or, that language X is OO to the extent that people tend to do foo in it. VBA is nowhere near the ultra-OO side of the universe and English is nowhere near the ultra-agglutinative side of the universe, but neither case is a warrant for some kind of all-out war against simple, contextual descriptions.
Or, again, you know, YOU COULD GO LOOK AT THE FUCKING LINKS SHOWING THAT OTHER PEOPLE, THAT OTHER *LINGUISTS* HAVE USED THE TERM IN THE SAME GENERALIZED WAY AS I HAVE. Christ almighty, it's like arguing with someone who thinks that the word "conservative" can't ever be used unless referring to someone in Britain's Conservative party.
Moving goalposts? You've again switched the argument away from "epicness" to semantics, in reply a post that specifically refuted your claim that the word was something I made up (refuted) and was not found in dictionaries (also refuted). You're now going back to the claim that agglutinative has only one definition, which I have already refuted.
Your continued refusal to accept that a word might have another definition (which has also been used in the field of linguistics, specifically) is, of course, another fine and amusingly self-satirical example your own linguistic ignorance.
Of course there are languages that employ on the fly grammatical agglutination and I never said that English was one of them, but it is certainly agglutinative insofar as we have some commonly understood prefixes and suffixes that are routinely used to coin new words, generally without comment except from the cranky, ultraconservative peanut gallery.
Or, to put it another way: I have sources backing up everything I've said. You have nothing but your crotchety old man rants and your own highly mobile goal posts, which I've caught and demolished in spite of your disingenuous babble.
Google result for epicness: "About 987,000 results"
From its Wiktionary entry: "The quality or state of being epic."
The split infinitive argument really has the potential to be much more fun, though, so I'd prefer you address that one. There's really no possible way to be against them without falling back on some very silly authoritarian and/or Romantic ideas.
The wikipedia article on agglutination had a sourced subsection of significant size (which I wasn't aware of when this started, nor would it make sense to argue otherwise because I had no reason to think you would embark on this newspeak semantic sideshow) which specifically, explicitly supports what I am talking about.
Epicness is obviously not "my own" coinage. It's been around for a while now. Given how cumbersome and Romantically portentious alternative constructions like "epic nature" would be, and given how easily understandable the -ness suffix is, I would say that far outweighs your own crotchety "but I don't liiiike it!" complaint.
You bring up dictionaries--again, English has no central authority. Dictionaries copy what people do, not the other way around. (This is of course why "muggle" is in the OED.) Given that there are countless examples of similar coinage (again: "assassination") you haven't explained what feature of English does or should prevent it. I assert that the only obstacles are self-important Latinophiles who prefer verbose constructions of atomic words, along with the centralized binding authorities that many Romantic languages seem to have.
Finally, you never clarified your position on split infinitives. Your reply to that post implies you're against them, in which case I would ask why you would want English to deliberately sacrifice its precision and flexibility by forcing us to emulate Romantic infinitives.
And you've spent like what, 5 comments in a row or something busy ignoring the original argument and focusing on playing semantic games instead because you know you are wrong. (Assuming you are the same person as the AC.)
I think that a core concept of linguistics is that words can have more than one meaning and that people who try to insist otherwise are douchebags. Exhibit 1: Noam Chomsky.
I'm using the original definition of the word, a definition that is still in common (if not the most common) use.
Again, you are arguing for a specific technical definition of a term while ignoring the obvious general definition I was using to make my point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... You admitted English was inflective and fusional, ergo it is also agglutinative (in the general sense of the term) to the extent that "epicness" is perfectly recognizable and valid. You want to argue with that, you might as well attack the word "assassination", a word invented by Shakespeare from the root word "assassin".
For all the intellectual honesty you're showing, you might as well start an argument with a chef that eggplant is a good dessert food, and then when they try to argue babble on about how eggplant is a botanical fruit. It isn't relevant to the original discussion, and furthermore non-botanists (/non-linguists) do not give a shit.
If you want to argue Germanic languages aren't agglutinative you are of course free to do so... with a linguist, in some jargon-heavy journal somewhere. Have fun. I'm not particularly interested in trotting down that particular pedantic path regarding degree or type of word-gluing that is considered "agglutinative" or not. A quick check confirms that the word agglutinative (which of course originally simply meant "to glue", or something along those lines) does indeed has multiple definitions--it's the broader definition that I was referring to, and this was obviously made clear in the context of the criticism of the word "epicness".
Trying to hijack the argument by using an alternate definition of the word that clearly wasn't intended (in light of my defense against your original half-baked criticism) is lame.
Split infinitives are perfectly natural, logical, have very long history of use and in some sentences are the only way to unambiguously tie an adverb down.
You wanna know the best part? I didn't even do that intentionally. Although to be fair, 'to tie unambigulously' wouldn't have been ambiguous. You may consult Google for some examples of situations where the non-split version is obviously and unfixably ambiguous.
Well not all of this was from university, but at some point I learned that English doesn't have a standardizing body--only handfuls of hypercorrective self-hating Latinophiles who occasionally pop up and try to deem perfectly logical and useful constructions 'incorrect'. I learned that English is closely related to a number of agglutinative languages, it's painfully obvious that quite a few of our words have been created via agglutination, I learned that the language spoken by Shakespeare was NOT "old English" but merely an earlier form of Modern English, and I also learned that Shakespeare invented a number of new words through agglutination that are still in widespread use today. By contrast, it is also quite obvious that Romantic languages have done a lot to resist new word formation via agglutination, which is one of the reasons (but not the only one) why you will so often see French or Spanish translations that have phrases 4-5 words long as the equivalent of 1-2 words in English.
People who don't believe that need explained to them why split infinitives are a good thing are either thoroughly-indoctrinated authoritarians parroting someone else's silly ideas or they are irredeemable Latinophiles completely unwilling to accept a different verb paradigm. Split infinitives are perfectly natural, logical, have very long history of use and in some sentences are the only way to unambiguously tie an adverb down. I determined this on my own through experimentation long before hearing it confirmed by someone with a doctorate in English. But again, the doctorates do not really matter--they have no binding authority. We therefore have only the history of the language and rationality to guide us, neither of which support your obviously Latin-derived arguments.
Myths perpetrated by shameless Latinophiles. Let me guess: you're also one of those assholes who thinks split infinitives are incorrect?
I have my degree. English is agglutinative. Get over it.
I sympathise with most Lucas complaints, but this is a pretty weird one. Are you suggesting that, because our particular planet has a lot of diversity (and do I need to point out that pretty much all of the other planets we've discovered are NOT diverse at all?) that all space operas should take place on a single planet? You don't think that might diminish the epicness a tad? You don't think that changing a planet-destroying weapon to, I don't know, a continent-destroying weapon would have been a tad lame?
The SW universe being too big is not a problem. In fact, its sense of size is one of the biggest things it had going for it, and it is precisely Lucas's unhealthy devotion to self-referential character-recycling smallness that drags things down--the main characters are all laboriously and ridiculously connected/related/cloned so that they are present or connected to all critical characters and all critical plot points. Boba Fett was a neat little background character that developed a strong cult following, so Lucas... decides to make him *the* clone of the mysterious 'clone wars', which is ridiculous from pretty much every single angle except the angle that he gets to prominently include a fan favorite in the prequels.
Which isn't to say that they shouldn't necessarily have dealings with terrorists, but they don't always do a great job at keeping them at arm's length (like the ACLU generally manages to do when they defend people like the Ku Klux Klan), particularly in their dealings with Moazzam Begg.
But even if they were doing a better job of maintaining their moral clarity (a moral clarity built on fighting against arbitrary indefinite detention and torture, which is of course extremely important) in their dealings with extremists, they still might be legitimate surveillance targets simply because they are dealing with a significant number of people who, by any sane definition, we can reasonably suspect to be engaged in terrorism.
I'm one of the strongest opponents out there of mass surveillance, but it seems reasonably likely that this is targeted, and correctly targeted at that. This isn't a defense of unlawful imprisonment or torture. Amnesty should be able to meet with suspected extremists as frequently as they want, and intelligence services should (provided they are obeying the letter and spirit of their charter) be able to keep an eye on anyone who voluntarily goes to meet with (reasonably) suspected extremists... and particularly after Amnesty goes on to forge some ties with a rather nasty jihadi group. If we give them too hard of a time with targeted surveillance... well, we already know what the alternative is.
Rich people have have problems too, just like the rest of us: family feuds
If I was rich I could move the hell away from the family drama. Both my wife and I would love to do this. Problem (mostly) solved. I don't deny there could be some lingering stress, but when you're a few hundred miles away it would not be debilitating.
marriage problems
The number one issue of contention in most marriages is money. The number two issue is infidelity, which is entirely up to the personality and attitudes of the people involved--we're in an (nominally, at least) open marriage so that won't be an issue.
bills
If you're rich and worried about bills then you either suck at managing your money, you like living extravagantly/dangerously (not us. We were all set to buy a lovely little $50,000 fixer upper house on half an acre before I lost my last job), or you aren't really rich at all.
poor health
Granted, not everything is curable even with a ton of money. But a ton of money cures (or at least treats) a hell of a lot more than no money.
but depression could just as likely make it hard to find or maintain a job.
If you are rich you do not need a job, and/or you can afford to take your time finding the right job, and/or you can afford to take some time off from work for a while without the dread of the future pressing down on you and crushing every little moment of happiness you have during your break from the grind.