English has survived over a thousand years with hardly any sort of educational system to enforce its rules upon the masses.
Which, incedentally, is precisely why the spelling of words in English is so fubared. With the history of the language including so many absorbed populations, the lack of formalized spelling training meant that different people learned to spell completely different ways, and thats why we now have horrid spellings like "through" where "thru" would fit in better.
This reminds me of a roleplaying game I was in, in which the GM, to give us the 'feel' of a different language than English, but without making us learn anything hard, went and invented his own special spelling system for English. It was 100% predeictable such that there is only ever exactly one way to spell a sound. For example, all vowels are short by default, and to make them long you follow them with an 'e'. So "cat" is spelled "cat", but the girl's name "Kate" is spelled "Caet". (also, the 'C' always hard. A soft "c" is just the letter 's', really. The "k" ws thus unused), etc... Anyway, to get back the the point of homophones - This special spelling script was used on all sorts of notes the GM would pass out. If we found an old map, it would be printed in this script. If we found directions to a treasure, it would be printed in this script. The party was retracing steps of a previous group, who's notes we had found. Following these notes, there was a sentence that said: "And then we woked yst for daes byfoer terning north". (walked east for days before turning north). After walking east a very very long time, weeks and weeks of travel, finally the GM broke down and said, "what on earth are you guys doing? Where are you going?" The reply, "We're following the instructions. It said they walked for days. So we're walking for days and days and days until you finally gave us some kind of sign that they turned north".
"But after for days, you should have turned north!"
"Huh?"
The note had meant FOUR (4) days, not FOR days.
This is an example where the context does NOT necessarily resolve which homophone you meant. (The GM ruled that the mistake should stand and he wasn't going to back up time and do it over - after all, if this is the script used by people in the gameworld, then this mistake is a perfectly plausable in-character mistake to make.)
dismissed out of hand simply because the internet is considered an informal medium.
The poster never claimed the internet is an informal medium. The claim was merely that internet POSTS are an informal medium. That says nothing about, say, articles written for news sites, or online encyclopedias, and so on.
I think this is an important distinction because people forget that the internet is just a technology underneath the medium. The medium of, say, http://slashdot.org/, is something completely different than the medium of, say, http://news.bbc.co.uk/. Thinking of them as the same medium just because they are displayed in web browsers is like thinking of a phone book and a newspaper as being the same medium just because they use paper.
Your (self-admittedly) contrived example does not actually demonstrate what you were talking about, though. Student #1 isn't just saying the same thing with more verbosity. In addition to using overly big words, student #2 is *also* communicating a lot more information than student #2 was. Student #1 is mentioning what kind of sensor it is, mentioning a little about the style of communication with the computer, and mentioning that once the computer recieves the data it will be passed on to other interfaces.
So whether Student #1 was wrong to be that verbose depends entirely on the context (which we can't see from your contrived example) of the paper. What level of detail was appropriate? If it was supposed to be a more high-level view of what is going on, then student #2 has the better phrasing. If it is supposed to be more detailed, then student #2 has the worse phrasing.
As Einstein said, everything should be made as simple as possible, <b>BUT no simpler</b>.
The cutoff for a "battleground" state is rather thin. A lot of those 'safe' states really aren't totaly safe - it's just that the effort to make them change their mind is large enough that it's better to spend that effort somewhere else. It's not that it's really impossible. It's just beyond the point of diminishing returns where it's not worth it, especially with the fact that you have limited time and resources to spend campaigning.
It's like a snowball rolling downhill. Microsoft *likes* the ignorance of users, and seeks to make it difficult to correct it (by lying), so as users attempt to get more educated by reading advice from Microsoft, they end up more ignorant than when they started.
Microsoft isn't responsible for the *initial* ignorance. They are very responsible for the fact that that ignorance tends to snowball.
I'm more pissed at the congress than Bush for the recent screw-ups. Because it's congress's job to safeguard the balance of power between the three branches, because they're the only ones with the power to change the rules that decide who gets to be in charge of what. And when they passed the Patriot/USA act, all but one of them (hooray Russ) showed the country that they don't care about that duty of theirs, and have failed to do the job they were elected to do. Their utter failure pisses me off more than Bush. Bush's administration just took advantage of a stupid congress that shouldn't have been that stupid in the first place.
As far as voting agaisnt Bush, I was already going to do that even before 9/11. 9/11 and the responses to it didn't really make my opinion of him any worse. Yeah, it was bad what his administration did, but it was perfectly in keeping with what they were already doing before that so it wasn't like it was a new piece of evidence for me.
That's what people usually mean, but they're wrong. Any vote for *any* other candidate is also a vote against Bush, but perhaps less of one. If you are a regular voter who votes every election, then voting for Bush is a vote for bush (obviously), and refusing to vote for Bush is a vote against Bush because you denied him your number and therefore reduced his tally. That still hurts his chances. A vote for Kerry ends up being like TWO votes against bush, subtracting one from his tally and adding one to the opposing tally, yes that's true, but those who vote for someone else are *still* taking a vote away from bush.
It's nice to see that ignorance can fall on both sides of the evolution debate.
Including people who think that evolution is incompatable with creationism? Your arguments are not points against evolution. They are points against spontaneous genesis of life. The theory of evolution merely talks about the process of life *after* it got started, and describes how one kind of creature can eventualy breed into a different kind of creature, and that this is the likely reason there are so many different kinds of creature. It does not even make the attempt to explain why there exists life in the first place, and therefore it is not a strike against it to point out that it "fails" to explain this - it "fails" to explain it for exactly the same reason that the theory of gravity "fails" to explain electricity - it's because it covers an entirely different topic altogether.
This is still entirely compatable with the notion that there was a god who started the whole process in motion, and says nothing whatsoever about whether that is a true or false hypothesis. (There are other aspects of science that do try to touch upon that area, but it is wrong to categorize them as being part of the theory of evolution.)
(My personal stance is that I have no clue how things got started, but that's an insufficient reason to propose the existence of god. Like most atheists, I'm an atheist of the "it's just the reasonable default hypothesis" variety, not the "I have reason to be convinced there cannot be a god" variety. There might be, but it requires additional evidence I have not yet seen, and until then a lack of existence is the most likely explanation for the lack of evidence.)
You speak of a comparasin between the US and "here", but there is not enough context for me to figure out where you are posting from. I can guess that it's in the Europe somewhere, and that it's somewhere with a parlament, but that still doesn't narrow it all the way.
By the way, as a US citizen fed up with the process, I agree with your analysis of the US political system wholeheartedly. Lately I've been voting for whatever third party seems to have the best chance, even when I don't agree with anything they say - because generally a process of three-way debate is more intelligent than a two-way us-versus-them debate, and having people realize the existence of a third choice will increase the general level of intelligent talk on the issues overall. I can remember when Ross Perot was a candidate, the intelligence level of debates got better with three factions involved. And that's true despite the fact that Perot himself was a grandstanding idiot, mind you. (The existence of a viable third party forced the other two to become more reasonable.)
But, instead of going from a 2 party system to a 3 or 4 party system, I think the ideal system would be a zero party system, where you elect individuals to congress on their individual merits, using runoff elections. In round one, you'd have hundreds of candidates, most of them kooks who went through the paperwork to get registered as candidates just for the heck of it, but there would be some serious ones buried in there. The application would have space to summarize your platform, and this could be posted to a site run by the election commission. Then you have a vote on them, and eliminate the bottom 2/3 or so of them and vote again, this time giving candidates more space to state their platform. Repeat the process until you are down to only two remaining candidates in the last vote, and by then the remaining few would start to have enough recognition that they could form one-time donation groups to fund their commercials and public speaking events. Basically, only those people that really care a lot would be participating in the first few runoff elections, but by the time it got down to the last few, everybody would be paying attention. This might sound like an expensive process, but with the information age, it doesn't have to be. The major media attention doesn't need to be done until the last couple of elections in the proccess.
I don't think the number of IE-only sites are the reason for Microsoft's browser dominance. They are the result of them.
Neither one of those explanations tells the whole story. In reality it's a recursive circle. IE-only sites exist because IE is popular because IE-only sites exist because IE is popular because IE-only sites exist...
The first "base case" of this recursion was Microsoft making sure that IE exists on every single installation of Windows. That made web site developers think "If I develop for IE, I get most of the users, if I develop for something else I don't. Even if a user of Windows prefers something else to IE, I know that at least they have IE available as a fallback when they can't use my site in Netscape." (Of course the notion that it is good to develop for *all* browsers is alien to a lot of people).
The actual quality of IE versus the competition is irrelevant to this scenario.
if consumers can't differentiate between a good product and a bad product thats their own fault.
When the companies putting the products out are lying about them, it's the companies' faults. When FUD reins supreme, users are stuck having to just make guesses.
It's called not having the company you bought your product from lying to you. Microsoft can't be blamed for the intial ignorance of users, nor can they be blamed for the ones who refuse to learn. But they *are* responsible for the ones that do try to learn, and end up learning the wrong things that Microsoft themselves teach to them - like how having fun bells and whistles is more important than security - like how having automaticly executable content is the bestest most wonderful way to send messages to people, and those other OS'es that don't do that are so far behind the times for not having the same security holes.
As an aside: What sixth sense is it that you are using to detect the thoughts of the drivers of those cars with bad oil smoke? Long-term concerns aren't easy to detect by reading a person's expression. The ignorant driver who has no clue the oil smoke is a problem will be indistinguishable from the one that has noticed it creeping up over the last few days and is planning on having it looked at tomorrow.
You'd only ever notice the concern on his face if the driver is just discovering the problem for the very first time - like if something broke and the oil smoke started up very suddenly.
Given how they mislead their users, yes, it is perfectly fair to blame Microsoft for the ignorance of their users. Absolutely. Their entire business model is based on taking advantage of that ignorance.
The "marginal" states are actually MOST of them. The 60 vs 80 percent figure you quote is atypical. It is much more common for the vote to be closer than that.
Despite their outward sameness, most computers are so personalized with desktop preferences and software that borrowing someone's computer can seem as creepy as borrowing their underwear.
Well, given what kind of web browsing a lot of people use their computers for, it can be the case that not only is it *equally* creepy as borrowing their underwear, but that it is creepy for the exact same reasons too.
That figure includes everything, not just the employee's take-home pay. It includes the cost of (for example) the real estate of a few cubic meters of office space in which to put the employee, part of the cost of a janitor to come every night and clean the employee's area, the cost of having health benefits for that employee, and so on and so forth.
The states do that on purpose. It is not acutally mandatory that they use a winner-take-all approach, but most (not all) do so. The reason they do so is that it forces the candidates to take the state's issues seriously (allegedly). If you're a candidate who knows that getting 48% of the popular vote in a state (a typical winning percentage when all the third-party votes are taken into account) is just as effective as getting 100% of it, and you are currently sitting in the polls at, say, 46%, you're going to spend effort on promising that state a lot of stuff to try and swing that vote a few percentage points in your favor. So states do this thing on purpose to make themselves get more attention. The fact that it effectively disenfranchises about half the state's citizenry is something they don't care about (can you tell I don't like this practice?)
You compare a intergovernmental institution with a nation.
At first, the United States *was* an intergovernmental institution. There's a reason they're called "states", and it's no coincidence that 'state' is a synonym for "national government". At first, it really was a union of independant states.
What makes things signifigantly different is the culture. Unlike the EU, The new USA was made of member states that all spoke the same language. Unlike the EU, they all came from the same original parent culture. And unlike the EU, the states in question had no previous history of independant sovereignty to protect, and so were willing to 'give up' a little more. (They were moving from being colonies of an empire to being states in an alliance, without any intervening period of independant, non-allied rule.)
Your examples all make the assumption that you are going to iterate over a predefined range that is known at compile time. This is not the case in a typical real-world program, where you make an array that grows dynmaically as large as it needs to be based on the data it sees.
If you make an example where it's an array of 1..N items, with N to be determined by a parameter at runtime, then those range guarantees at compile-time can't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
English has survived over a thousand years with hardly any sort of educational system to enforce its rules upon the masses.
Which, incedentally, is precisely why the spelling of words in English is so fubared. With the history of the language including so many absorbed populations, the lack of formalized spelling training meant that different people learned to spell completely different ways, and thats why we now have horrid spellings like "through" where "thru" would fit in better.
This reminds me of a roleplaying game I was in, in which the GM, to give us the 'feel' of a different language than English, but without making us learn anything hard, went and invented his own special spelling system for English. It was 100% predeictable such that there is only ever exactly one way to spell a sound. For example, all vowels are short by default, and to make them long you follow them with an 'e'. So "cat" is spelled "cat", but the girl's name "Kate" is spelled "Caet". (also, the 'C' always hard. A soft "c" is just the letter 's', really. The "k" ws thus unused), etc... Anyway, to get back the the point of homophones - This special spelling script was used on all sorts of notes the GM would pass out. If we found an old map, it would be printed in this script. If we found directions to a treasure, it would be printed in this script. The party was retracing steps of a previous group, who's notes we had found. Following these notes, there was a sentence that said: "And then we woked yst for daes byfoer terning north". (walked east for days before turning north). After walking east a very very long time, weeks and weeks of travel, finally the GM broke down and said, "what on earth are you guys doing? Where are you going?" The reply, "We're following the instructions. It said they walked for days. So we're walking for days and days and days until you finally gave us some kind of sign that they turned north".
"But after for days, you should have turned north!"
"Huh?"
The note had meant FOUR (4) days, not FOR days.
This is an example where the context does NOT necessarily resolve which homophone you meant. (The GM ruled that the mistake should stand and he wasn't going to back up time and do it over - after all, if this is the script used by people in the gameworld, then this mistake is a perfectly plausable in-character mistake to make.)
dismissed out of hand simply because the internet is considered an informal medium.
The poster never claimed the internet is an informal medium. The claim was merely that internet POSTS are an informal medium. That says nothing about, say, articles written for news sites, or online encyclopedias, and so on.
I think this is an important distinction because people forget that the internet is just a technology underneath the medium. The medium of, say, http://slashdot.org/, is something completely different than the medium of, say, http://news.bbc.co.uk/. Thinking of them as the same medium just because they are displayed in web browsers is like thinking of a phone book and a newspaper as being the same medium just because they use paper.
student #2 is *also* communicating a lot more information than student #2 was
Oops. That should be: student 1 is commmunicating more than student 2 is, obviously. That'll teach me to post without previewing.
Your (self-admittedly) contrived example does not actually demonstrate what you were talking about, though. Student #1 isn't just saying the same thing with more verbosity. In addition to using overly big words, student #2 is *also* communicating a lot more information than student #2 was. Student #1 is mentioning what kind of sensor it is, mentioning a little about the style of communication with the computer, and mentioning that once the computer recieves the data it will be passed on to other interfaces.
So whether Student #1 was wrong to be that verbose depends entirely on the context (which we can't see from your contrived example) of the paper. What level of detail was appropriate? If it was supposed to be a more high-level view of what is going on, then student #2 has the better phrasing. If it is supposed to be more detailed, then student #2 has the worse phrasing.
As Einstein said, everything should be made as simple as possible, <b>BUT no simpler</b>.
The cutoff for a "battleground" state is rather thin. A lot of those 'safe' states really aren't totaly safe - it's just that the effort to make them change their mind is large enough that it's better to spend that effort somewhere else. It's not that it's really impossible. It's just beyond the point of diminishing returns where it's not worth it, especially with the fact that you have limited time and resources to spend campaigning.
It's like a snowball rolling downhill. Microsoft *likes* the ignorance of users, and seeks to make it difficult to correct it (by lying), so as users attempt to get more educated by reading advice from Microsoft, they end up more ignorant than when they started.
Microsoft isn't responsible for the *initial* ignorance. They are very responsible for the fact that that ignorance tends to snowball.
I'm more pissed at the congress than Bush for the recent screw-ups. Because it's congress's job to safeguard the balance of power between the three branches, because they're the only ones with the power to change the rules that decide who gets to be in charge of what. And when they passed the Patriot/USA act, all but one of them (hooray Russ) showed the country that they don't care about that duty of theirs, and have failed to do the job they were elected to do. Their utter failure pisses me off more than Bush. Bush's administration just took advantage of a stupid congress that shouldn't have been that stupid in the first place.
As far as voting agaisnt Bush, I was already going to do that even before 9/11. 9/11 and the responses to it didn't really make my opinion of him any worse. Yeah, it was bad what his administration did, but it was perfectly in keeping with what they were already doing before that so it wasn't like it was a new piece of evidence for me.
That's what people usually mean, but they're wrong. Any vote for *any* other candidate is also a vote against Bush, but perhaps less of one. If you are a regular voter who votes every election, then voting for Bush is a vote for bush (obviously), and refusing to vote for Bush is a vote against Bush because you denied him your number and therefore reduced his tally. That still hurts his chances. A vote for Kerry ends up being like TWO votes against bush, subtracting one from his tally and adding one to the opposing tally, yes that's true, but those who vote for someone else are *still* taking a vote away from bush.
It's nice to see that ignorance can fall on both sides of the evolution debate.
Including people who think that evolution is incompatable with creationism? Your arguments are not points against evolution. They are points against spontaneous genesis of life. The theory of evolution merely talks about the process of life *after* it got started, and describes how one kind of creature can eventualy breed into a different kind of creature, and that this is the likely reason there are so many different kinds of creature. It does not even make the attempt to explain why there exists life in the first place, and therefore it is not a strike against it to point out that it "fails" to explain this - it "fails" to explain it for exactly the same reason that the theory of gravity "fails" to explain electricity - it's because it covers an entirely different topic altogether.
This is still entirely compatable with the notion that there was a god who started the whole process in motion, and says nothing whatsoever about whether that is a true or false hypothesis. (There are other aspects of science that do try to touch upon that area, but it is wrong to categorize them as being part of the theory of evolution.)
(My personal stance is that I have no clue how things got started, but that's an insufficient reason to propose the existence of god. Like most atheists, I'm an atheist of the "it's just the reasonable default hypothesis" variety, not the "I have reason to be convinced there cannot be a god" variety. There might be, but it requires additional evidence I have not yet seen, and until then a lack of existence is the most likely explanation for the lack of evidence.)
You speak of a comparasin between the US and "here", but there is not enough context for me to figure out where you are posting from. I can guess that it's in the Europe somewhere, and that it's somewhere with a parlament, but that still doesn't narrow it all the way.
By the way, as a US citizen fed up with the process, I agree with your analysis of the US political system wholeheartedly. Lately I've been voting for whatever third party seems to have the best chance, even when I don't agree with anything they say - because generally a process of three-way debate is more intelligent than a two-way us-versus-them debate, and having people realize the existence of a third choice will increase the general level of intelligent talk on the issues overall. I can remember when Ross Perot was a candidate, the intelligence level of debates got better with three factions involved. And that's true despite the fact that Perot himself was a grandstanding idiot, mind you. (The existence of a viable third party forced the other two to become more reasonable.)
But, instead of going from a 2 party system to a 3 or 4 party system, I think the ideal system would be a zero party system, where you elect individuals to congress on their individual merits, using runoff elections. In round one, you'd have hundreds of candidates, most of them kooks who went through the paperwork to get registered as candidates just for the heck of it, but there would be some serious ones buried in there. The application would have space to summarize your platform, and this could be posted to a site run by the election commission. Then you have a vote on them, and eliminate the bottom 2/3 or so of them and vote again, this time giving candidates more space to state their platform. Repeat the process until you are down to only two remaining candidates in the last vote, and by then the remaining few would start to have enough recognition that they could form one-time donation groups to fund their commercials and public speaking events. Basically, only those people that really care a lot would be participating in the first few runoff elections, but by the time it got down to the last few, everybody would be paying attention.
This might sound like an expensive process, but with the information age, it doesn't have to be. The major media attention doesn't need to be done until the last couple of elections in the proccess.
I don't think the number of IE-only sites are the reason for Microsoft's browser dominance. They are the result of them.
Neither one of those explanations tells the whole story. In reality it's a recursive circle. IE-only sites exist because IE is popular because IE-only sites exist because IE is popular because IE-only sites exist...
The first "base case" of this recursion was Microsoft making sure that IE exists on every single installation of Windows. That made web site developers think "If I develop for IE, I get most of the users, if I develop for something else I don't. Even if a user of Windows prefers something else to IE, I know that at least they have IE available as a fallback when they can't use my site in Netscape." (Of course the notion that it is good to develop for *all* browsers is alien to a lot of people).
The actual quality of IE versus the competition is irrelevant to this scenario.
A better browser than the one *THEY* had been putting out before? Yes. A better browser than the competition? Hell No.
if consumers can't differentiate between a good product and a bad product thats their own fault.
When the companies putting the products out are lying about them, it's the companies' faults. When FUD reins supreme, users are stuck having to just make guesses.
Actualy computer geeks don't bother handling it becasue we avoid the operating system that has those problems in the first place.
It's called not having the company you bought your product from lying to you. Microsoft can't be blamed for the intial ignorance of users, nor can they be blamed for the ones who refuse to learn. But they *are* responsible for the ones that do try to learn, and end up learning the wrong things that Microsoft themselves teach to them - like how having fun bells and whistles is more important than security - like how having automaticly executable content is the bestest most wonderful way to send messages to people, and those other OS'es that don't do that are so far behind the times for not having the same security holes.
As an aside: What sixth sense is it that you are using to detect the thoughts of the drivers of those cars with bad oil smoke? Long-term concerns aren't easy to detect by reading a person's expression. The ignorant driver who has no clue the oil smoke is a problem will be indistinguishable from the one that has noticed it creeping up over the last few days and is planning on having it looked at tomorrow.
You'd only ever notice the concern on his face if the driver is just discovering the problem for the very first time - like if something broke and the oil smoke started up very suddenly.
Given how they mislead their users, yes, it is perfectly fair to blame Microsoft for the ignorance of their users. Absolutely. Their entire business model is based on taking advantage of that ignorance.
The "marginal" states are actually MOST of them. The 60 vs 80 percent figure you quote is atypical. It is much more common for the vote to be closer than that.
The Melting Pot isn't a myth. It's just that I was referring to the USA of the late 1700's, not the one of the 1800's.
Despite their outward sameness, most computers are so personalized with desktop preferences and software that borrowing someone's computer can seem as creepy as borrowing their underwear.
Well, given what kind of web browsing a lot of people use their computers for, it can be the case that not only is it *equally* creepy as borrowing their underwear, but that it is creepy for the exact same reasons too.
That figure includes everything, not just the employee's take-home pay. It includes the cost of (for example) the real estate of a few cubic meters of office space in which to put the employee, part of the cost of a janitor to come every night and clean the employee's area, the cost of having health benefits for that employee, and so on and so forth.
The states do that on purpose. It is not acutally mandatory that they use a winner-take-all approach, but most (not all) do so. The reason they do so is that it forces the candidates to take the state's issues seriously (allegedly). If you're a candidate who knows that getting 48% of the popular vote in a state (a typical winning percentage when all the third-party votes are taken into account) is just as effective as getting 100% of it, and you are currently sitting in the polls at, say, 46%, you're going to spend effort on promising that state a lot of stuff to try and swing that vote a few percentage points in your favor. So states do this thing on purpose to make themselves get more attention. The fact that it effectively disenfranchises about half the state's citizenry is something they don't care about (can you tell I don't like this practice?)
You compare a intergovernmental institution with a nation.
At first, the United States *was* an intergovernmental institution. There's a reason they're called "states", and it's no coincidence that 'state' is a synonym for "national government". At first, it really was a union of independant states.
What makes things signifigantly different is the culture. Unlike the EU, The new USA was made of member states that all spoke the same language. Unlike the EU, they all came from the same original parent culture. And unlike the EU, the states in question had no previous history of independant sovereignty to protect, and so were willing to 'give up' a little more. (They were moving from being colonies of an empire to being states in an alliance, without any intervening period of independant, non-allied rule.)
Your examples all make the assumption that you are going to iterate over a predefined range that is known at compile time. This is not the case in a typical real-world program, where you make an array that grows dynmaically as large as it needs to be based on the data it sees.
If you make an example where it's an array of 1..N items, with N to be determined by a parameter at runtime, then those range guarantees at compile-time can't happen.