We have friendly people, interesting discussions and huge orgy
Minor correction, "you *had* friendly people, interesting discussions, and huge orgy." Now that you've invited Slashdot, you'll have grumpy people, awkward silence, and a whole bunch of sweaty fat men staring at pictures of Natalie Portman and hot grits.
...just make sure you don't say the computer itself was compromised, as for many people, the computers on the network are all fine now, but their router has been redirected. I've had to help out a number of people who got nastygrams from their ISP saying their Windows PC was infected with the Alureon virus... people who tossed their Windows PC shortly after it got infected with said virus and switched to a Mac. The trick is that while infected, their PC used the default credentials for their routers to reconfigure their DNS for the entire network.
End result? Really confused users who thought they did everything right but are still getting scary-looking emails saying something is horribly wrong.
After they fixed DNS and DHCP on their routers and changed their admin passwords, everything was fine.
I think he's arguing that the implied religion in the xp's post is not what's at fault, but something else.
I'd say that something else is politicians (some of whom also hold religious offices of power).
Sex is definitely a relational lever, and is used by everyone. Because sex is related to human emotions and hormonal levels in the brain which affect many physiological and thought-based functions, it's kind of an obvious one. Blaming religion as taking especial advantage of it is definitely a straw man.
Guilt about sex is one of the things religion uses to keep people in line.
Except for the whole book of Song of Solomon, you mean.
But dont let your ignorance get in the way of your anti-religious sentiment, this is slashdot and theres karma to be had.
Ah; but he said religion, not religious texts. As such, he's talking about Catholic Priests, Southern Baptist Politicians, and Moslem extremists (and safely ignoring scriptural texts, polygamist religions, and anything else that contradicts the reasonable argument).
Better to say that people in power use sexual shame to control the masses. Witness the American movie rating system where mammaries boost the movie to an M rating (while most kids under the age of 5 see them all the time), but blowing a person to bits with a high explosive is only PG-13.
This is why I started teaching my kids how to hack words and sentences at a young age -- they know how to use the etymology of a word to pull it apart and guess at its meaning, even if it's a word they've never heard before.
If you can't tell the difference, then your writing is probably so poor that it "doesn't matter" to you. To everyone else in the world, it probably does matter, because you're likely confusing the hell out of them and looking unprofessional at the same time.
You just reminded me of something I haven't seen yet mentioned in this thread: the issue is mostly about depth of use of language.
Some people skate by with communication, misusing idioms, filling their sentences with cliches, not caring whether words are spelled correctly. They don't care, and they don't care if others do it. Why? Because it communicates as much as they're used to communicating.
It's like people living their entire lives by candle light. They see nothing wrong with doing everything in this manner, and can't see why other people get annoyed when they hand them a candle to do some task. They have no grasp that there is a higher resolution available.
Then others do everything under high intensity flood lights. They see the detail of everything around them all the time, whether they need to or not -- expending vast amounts of energy to ensure that they miss nothing. To them this is normal. If they visit someone who only has candles and then presents them with a famous painting to examine, they're insulted that the person thinks so little of them as to present the painting in such bad light. The candle person then gets affronted because their candle "isn't good enough" for the flood light person.
In return, to attempt to explain the situation to the candle person, the flood light person then unexpectedly turns on their portable flood lamp to show the candle person what they're missing... which of course does nothing other than hurt the eyes of the candle person and make everything so bright that nothing is truly visible.
People who take grammar, style, spelling and word choice very seriously tend to do so because to them, saying "a flame can be hot" is vastly different to saying "a flame may be hot". Their internal narrative of the world is much more complex than that of someone who doesn't really understand the difference.
For another illustration, there are some people groups in Central America who have no word for pink. This doesn't bother them; they don't ever have a reason to use the word, as they have no need to differentiate between pink and red in their daily life. Compare that to a graphic artist, who has very specific words for distinct hues and shades of colour. Neither people group is necessarily more intelligent Get them both to look at a pink flower and one will say it is red, while the other will say it is a pale dusty rose with a hint of burnt umber.
The same goes for grammar.
Ooh... another illustration. Imagine what would happen if someone who had never done any computer programming was asked to write something in, say, Python, using as much sample code as they wanted, but having to actually write it out themselves? You can bet that at the least, it would fail due to improper indentation. You can't really say that the compiler is a "python nazi" or that it is elitist or stuck up about the author's use of the language. It just can't understand exactly what is being asked of it, because there are key details missing or too vague to actually understand what is being asked.
Similarly, those who use language lightly generally don't put in as much work as those who plumb the depths of the language, and so aren't tripped up by all the "did they really mean to say that?" moments. They just assume everyone thinks like them and will get their meaning -- where observation clearly shows that even with a precise grammar and lexicon, two people need to use flow control and error correction in their conversation to have any hope of having an approximate comprehension of what is being discussed. But when disparate comprehension is "good enough" for what is actually being attempted, why bother actually trying to understand?
I observe that you are a student of the OED, otherwise I'd have to take you to task for the use of one of those commas:)
I think the GP's main point is valid: pointing out the mistake is generally useless -- it was either an honest mistake, or the writer is stupid or lazy -- and in none of these circumstances will correcting them in a public forum help them fix anything -- only ignorance can be corrected in such a way.
But as you state, what many grammar nazis are actually doing is providing feedback to let the authors know that their bad presentation form is probably conveying an unintended message, and *also* letting them know that the projected low opinion they have of their readers is offensive to at least some.
Personally, I tend to react to inappropriate grammar (not necessarily bad grammar) in the same way I react to graffiti -- it all depends on the context and how much I value the object that has been defaced (including whether I consider it defacement or a visual improvement).
Just to clarify on your point: "using correct grammar" is not a case of following a canonical style guide -- it's about structuring your sentences correctly to fit your target audience, optimizing their ability to comprehend the meaning behind the words you're using.
For instance, I remember having to use the Chicago style guide when writing specific kinds of papers, the Oxford guide for others, MLA for others, AP for others. While these encode style more than grammar, they also come with their own acceptable grammars which are a subset of English grammar.
Yes, I know, I'm throwing style into the mix when many are already conflating grammar and word use/spelling.
You appear to be conflating spelling and grammar. This discussion is about tools that can help a candidate use proper grammar, and how if you need such a tool, you likely aren't going to know how to use it effectively. Spelling is a much simpler beast.
If something is important enough to have someone proofread, you should do that. If it isn't—and you have any grammar skills of your own to start with—you're probably wasting your time using an automated grammar checker.
It appears you have written that sentence in the passive voice. Would you like me to fix that?
More seriously, iOS and OS X have had grammar checking built in to text fields for quite some time -- meaning Google shouldn't have to; this should be handled by the OS before the specific app ever gets their hands on your text field.
French grammar had almost no influence on English grammar, which is mainly a result of the pidginization that occurred when Old Norse/Danish came in contact with Old English, and all the agglutenate prefixes and postfixes were different while the roots were mainly the same. French words were hoovered up like crazy, but the grammar was ignored.
While true, the Roman occupation, and the use of Latin as the educated language did place the Latin grammar as a perfectly acceptable alternative to the established pidginized Germanic grammar -- with the result that to this day, people wanting to sound educated (or Yoda-like) use Latin grammar instead of Germanic, and everyone can understand them (although weird it sometimes sounds).
The problem I see with these resolutions is that they all necessarily must be imprecise in order to have any reasonable application. However, the lack of precision is the very thing that creates loopholes.
I have a resolution: Treat others as you want to be treated. Oh wait, that leaves a loophole for masochists.
Aha! So you're indeed conflating "bittorrent" the protocol and "bittorrent" the search index (because your client also does this);)
Interestingly, your suggestion regarding using torrents for OTA push updates of phone firmware illustrates the real reason why most corporations are hesitant to use torrents: bandwidth usage. A torrent will use the same amount of bandwidth as a served-up download, PLUS the same amount again (if you're being a good citizen) in upload bandwidth, PLUS the overhead of swarm management. End result: you end up putting a strain on the DNS servers and potentially tripling your data bandwidth. Plus, you're using your ISP's bandwidth in non-optimizable ways (point-to-point gets optimized after the first few packets, but peer-to-peer is multi-source, so the routers have the additional overhead of managing and prioritizing ALL those routes).
This issue is what caused the big "Net Neutrality" issue -- large corps using torrents are basically foisting the costs of serving up the content off on subscribers and their ISPs -- at a significant overhead. For large companies, using CDNs like Akamai are not only the more responsible route, but they also simplify support issues and improve throughput.
Preferring customers grumbling vs torrenting is a false dichotomy -- if they used torrents instead of single-serve or CDNs, they'd still have customers grumbling (for other reasons) AND they'd have ISPs grumbling as well.
Theological faith is best described as, "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." As you can see, it has two parts: the first part is knowing what we want to happen -- similar to a theorem. The second is being sure of something without proof. This fails under the bayes model, which instead posits being confident of something based on observation, until such time as a more refined theorem fits the observation. As you observed, I think the crux of the difference is in divergent existentialist philosophies.
...every time you do an experiment you get the same result. How can that not be evidence for the existence of the real world? Not that it's proof, you can't prove the non-existence of magic
This statement assumes that repeatable results on defined actions in the "real world" imply that the "real world" exists. This is a self-referencing proof, of the same type as "the Bible was written by God, because it says so, and the Bible says God cannot lie".
How do you know that anyone has ever done an experiment multiple times and got the same result? Or do you just have faith that this is true, and the entire concept was not placed in your consciousness (assuming you even have such a thing)?
Any time you assume something or take someone's word for something, you're delving into the realm of faith/trust.
I believe you're conflating using bittorrent with using an indexing site. If Photoshop were to distribute via bittorrent, they'd build their own client into their software update system, and you'd not even notice it was bittorrent instead of https or ftp or whatever they use now.
What I'm waiting for is a torrent client written in HTML5/Javascript -- so that you could go to a website and just watch the content. The segment prioritization would have to shift slightly so that the first x segments would always have top priority (so that you can start watching almost immediately), but that's already doable with the current protocol. Then again, distributing trailers via bittorrent makes NO sense. You'd want some sort of a streaming solution. Torrenting would be for delivering static copy-and-store content, like TV shows, or other "channel" content where they can push it to you before you want to use it.
When you say "if bittorrent was blocked" -- what exactly do you mean? Technologically blocking the protocol? Banning users whose DNS requests show P2P activity? Jailing people using the official torrent client? Blocking the transfer of any file ending in.torrent?
All these things can be easily routed around; clients like Vuze can even route around most of this via specialized plugins already. They handle Bittorrent-over-Tor etc, and could easily do the entire job via DNS, using a DNS server not hosted by your ISP with a simple plugin addition. Stick the trackers on Tor websites, and you've created a large public darknet which, while the performance would be worse and the network saturation more of a problem, would end up with the exact same measures needing to be taken against yet another protocol -- which leads to tor steganography in other content.
Side thought: wouldn't it be interesting if it turned out that all the spam clogging up the pipes was actually a distributed file sharing system?
Thank you for sharing your definition of intellectual piracy.
Other interested groups would argue that filesharing IS piracy, and is equivalent to stealing ships at gunpoint on the high seas.
Others will state that it's all about providing information in an unauthorized manner.
Others will point out that this is state-sponsored censorship.
Others will insist that information wants to be free, and that profit motive doesn't come into it.
Still others will agree, but say that while profit motive doesn't come into it, depriving companies of contractually agreed-to profits and stepping outside of the laws of the land is wrong, and should be punished -- and maybe even be called piracy or copyright infringement.
Personally, I think I agree with you, with the extra point that if someone is copying works of others without permission, with the intent to harm, that's bad too. But that doesn't preclude others disagreeing with you and being "more right" in a moral, ethical, legal or grammatical sense.
Slashdot Mirror
We have friendly people, interesting discussions and huge orgy
Minor correction, "you *had* friendly people, interesting discussions, and huge orgy."
Now that you've invited Slashdot, you'll have grumpy people, awkward silence, and a whole bunch of sweaty fat men staring at pictures of Natalie Portman and hot grits.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those...
...just make sure you don't say the computer itself was compromised, as for many people, the computers on the network are all fine now, but their router has been redirected. I've had to help out a number of people who got nastygrams from their ISP saying their Windows PC was infected with the Alureon virus... people who tossed their Windows PC shortly after it got infected with said virus and switched to a Mac. The trick is that while infected, their PC used the default credentials for their routers to reconfigure their DNS for the entire network.
End result? Really confused users who thought they did everything right but are still getting scary-looking emails saying something is horribly wrong.
After they fixed DNS and DHCP on their routers and changed their admin passwords, everything was fine.
Fighting straw with false dichotomy?
I think he's arguing that the implied religion in the xp's post is not what's at fault, but something else.
I'd say that something else is politicians (some of whom also hold religious offices of power).
Sex is definitely a relational lever, and is used by everyone. Because sex is related to human emotions and hormonal levels in the brain which affect many physiological and thought-based functions, it's kind of an obvious one. Blaming religion as taking especial advantage of it is definitely a straw man.
Guilt about sex is one of the things religion uses to keep people in line.
Except for the whole book of Song of Solomon, you mean.
But dont let your ignorance get in the way of your anti-religious sentiment, this is slashdot and theres karma to be had.
Ah; but he said religion, not religious texts. As such, he's talking about Catholic Priests, Southern Baptist Politicians, and Moslem extremists (and safely ignoring scriptural texts, polygamist religions, and anything else that contradicts the reasonable argument).
Better to say that people in power use sexual shame to control the masses. Witness the American movie rating system where mammaries boost the movie to an M rating (while most kids under the age of 5 see them all the time), but blowing a person to bits with a high explosive is only PG-13.
This is why I started teaching my kids how to hack words and sentences at a young age -- they know how to use the etymology of a word to pull it apart and guess at its meaning, even if it's a word they've never heard before.
If you can't tell the difference, then your writing is probably so poor that it "doesn't matter" to you. To everyone else in the world, it probably does matter, because you're likely confusing the hell out of them and looking unprofessional at the same time.
You just reminded me of something I haven't seen yet mentioned in this thread: the issue is mostly about depth of use of language.
Some people skate by with communication, misusing idioms, filling their sentences with cliches, not caring whether words are spelled correctly. They don't care, and they don't care if others do it. Why? Because it communicates as much as they're used to communicating.
It's like people living their entire lives by candle light. They see nothing wrong with doing everything in this manner, and can't see why other people get annoyed when they hand them a candle to do some task. They have no grasp that there is a higher resolution available.
Then others do everything under high intensity flood lights. They see the detail of everything around them all the time, whether they need to or not -- expending vast amounts of energy to ensure that they miss nothing. To them this is normal. If they visit someone who only has candles and then presents them with a famous painting to examine, they're insulted that the person thinks so little of them as to present the painting in such bad light. The candle person then gets affronted because their candle "isn't good enough" for the flood light person.
In return, to attempt to explain the situation to the candle person, the flood light person then unexpectedly turns on their portable flood lamp to show the candle person what they're missing... which of course does nothing other than hurt the eyes of the candle person and make everything so bright that nothing is truly visible.
People who take grammar, style, spelling and word choice very seriously tend to do so because to them, saying "a flame can be hot" is vastly different to saying "a flame may be hot". Their internal narrative of the world is much more complex than that of someone who doesn't really understand the difference.
For another illustration, there are some people groups in Central America who have no word for pink. This doesn't bother them; they don't ever have a reason to use the word, as they have no need to differentiate between pink and red in their daily life. Compare that to a graphic artist, who has very specific words for distinct hues and shades of colour. Neither people group is necessarily more intelligent Get them both to look at a pink flower and one will say it is red, while the other will say it is a pale dusty rose with a hint of burnt umber.
The same goes for grammar.
Ooh... another illustration. Imagine what would happen if someone who had never done any computer programming was asked to write something in, say, Python, using as much sample code as they wanted, but having to actually write it out themselves? You can bet that at the least, it would fail due to improper indentation. You can't really say that the compiler is a "python nazi" or that it is elitist or stuck up about the author's use of the language. It just can't understand exactly what is being asked of it, because there are key details missing or too vague to actually understand what is being asked.
Similarly, those who use language lightly generally don't put in as much work as those who plumb the depths of the language, and so aren't tripped up by all the "did they really mean to say that?" moments. They just assume everyone thinks like them and will get their meaning -- where observation clearly shows that even with a precise grammar and lexicon, two people need to use flow control and error correction in their conversation to have any hope of having an approximate comprehension of what is being discussed. But when disparate comprehension is "good enough" for what is actually being attempted, why bother actually trying to understand?
I observe that you are a student of the OED, otherwise I'd have to take you to task for the use of one of those commas :)
I think the GP's main point is valid: pointing out the mistake is generally useless -- it was either an honest mistake, or the writer is stupid or lazy -- and in none of these circumstances will correcting them in a public forum help them fix anything -- only ignorance can be corrected in such a way.
But as you state, what many grammar nazis are actually doing is providing feedback to let the authors know that their bad presentation form is probably conveying an unintended message, and *also* letting them know that the projected low opinion they have of their readers is offensive to at least some.
Personally, I tend to react to inappropriate grammar (not necessarily bad grammar) in the same way I react to graffiti -- it all depends on the context and how much I value the object that has been defaced (including whether I consider it defacement or a visual improvement).
...and the "which is a witch" test is that which came to me first too....
I think he was saying if the grammar is too lightweight, the author must be a which.
More people need to read The Phantom Tollbooth.
Just to clarify on your point: "using correct grammar" is not a case of following a canonical style guide -- it's about structuring your sentences correctly to fit your target audience, optimizing their ability to comprehend the meaning behind the words you're using.
For instance, I remember having to use the Chicago style guide when writing specific kinds of papers, the Oxford guide for others, MLA for others, AP for others. While these encode style more than grammar, they also come with their own acceptable grammars which are a subset of English grammar.
Yes, I know, I'm throwing style into the mix when many are already conflating grammar and word use/spelling.
You appear to be conflating spelling and grammar. This discussion is about tools that can help a candidate use proper grammar, and how if you need such a tool, you likely aren't going to know how to use it effectively. Spelling is a much simpler beast.
...making the one prior to ellipsis also correct, as it indicates a break in the sentence.
But he didn't use either of my favourite ellipses....
If something is important enough to have someone proofread, you should do that. If it isn't—and you have any grammar skills of your own to start with—you're probably wasting your time using an automated grammar checker.
It appears you have written that sentence in the passive voice. Would you like me to fix that?
More seriously, iOS and OS X have had grammar checking built in to text fields for quite some time -- meaning Google shouldn't have to; this should be handled by the OS before the specific app ever gets their hands on your text field.
French grammar had almost no influence on English grammar, which is mainly a result of the pidginization that occurred when Old Norse/Danish came in contact with Old English, and all the agglutenate prefixes and postfixes were different while the roots were mainly the same. French words were hoovered up like crazy, but the grammar was ignored.
While true, the Roman occupation, and the use of Latin as the educated language did place the Latin grammar as a perfectly acceptable alternative to the established pidginized Germanic grammar -- with the result that to this day, people wanting to sound educated (or Yoda-like) use Latin grammar instead of Germanic, and everyone can understand them (although weird it sometimes sounds).
Ineffective at what? They seem pretty effective at creating a public forum where countries can be heard on an equal* footing.
The debating until EVERYONE agrees is called democracy.
*some states are more equal than others -- mostly those who have nukes, just like in real life.
The problem I see with these resolutions is that they all necessarily must be imprecise in order to have any reasonable application. However, the lack of precision is the very thing that creates loopholes.
I have a resolution: Treat others as you want to be treated. Oh wait, that leaves a loophole for masochists.
Fuck it. Free for all!
That leaves a loophole for orgyists.
[next up: "Guns are people, Supreme Court decides in landmark case"]
One second... does this mean that guns DO kill people? Or just that people kill guns... my head hurts.
Aha! So you're indeed conflating "bittorrent" the protocol and "bittorrent" the search index (because your client also does this) ;)
Interestingly, your suggestion regarding using torrents for OTA push updates of phone firmware illustrates the real reason why most corporations are hesitant to use torrents: bandwidth usage. A torrent will use the same amount of bandwidth as a served-up download, PLUS the same amount again (if you're being a good citizen) in upload bandwidth, PLUS the overhead of swarm management. End result: you end up putting a strain on the DNS servers and potentially tripling your data bandwidth. Plus, you're using your ISP's bandwidth in non-optimizable ways (point-to-point gets optimized after the first few packets, but peer-to-peer is multi-source, so the routers have the additional overhead of managing and prioritizing ALL those routes).
This issue is what caused the big "Net Neutrality" issue -- large corps using torrents are basically foisting the costs of serving up the content off on subscribers and their ISPs -- at a significant overhead. For large companies, using CDNs like Akamai are not only the more responsible route, but they also simplify support issues and improve throughput.
Preferring customers grumbling vs torrenting is a false dichotomy -- if they used torrents instead of single-serve or CDNs, they'd still have customers grumbling (for other reasons) AND they'd have ISPs grumbling as well.
Theological faith is best described as, "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." As you can see, it has two parts: the first part is knowing what we want to happen -- similar to a theorem. The second is being sure of something without proof. This fails under the bayes model, which instead posits being confident of something based on observation, until such time as a more refined theorem fits the observation. As you observed, I think the crux of the difference is in divergent existentialist philosophies.
...every time you do an experiment you get the same result. How can that not be evidence for the existence of the real world? Not that it's proof, you can't prove the non-existence of magic
This statement assumes that repeatable results on defined actions in the "real world" imply that the "real world" exists. This is a self-referencing proof, of the same type as "the Bible was written by God, because it says so, and the Bible says God cannot lie".
How do you know that anyone has ever done an experiment multiple times and got the same result? Or do you just have faith that this is true, and the entire concept was not placed in your consciousness (assuming you even have such a thing)?
Any time you assume something or take someone's word for something, you're delving into the realm of faith/trust.
Police boxes are for tourists. Real scientists travel by Zeno's paradox.
For instance, torrent magnet links could be hosted in the downmodded comments on slashdot very easily, using google as the search method to find the content.
I believe you're conflating using bittorrent with using an indexing site. If Photoshop were to distribute via bittorrent, they'd build their own client into their software update system, and you'd not even notice it was bittorrent instead of https or ftp or whatever they use now.
What I'm waiting for is a torrent client written in HTML5/Javascript -- so that you could go to a website and just watch the content. The segment prioritization would have to shift slightly so that the first x segments would always have top priority (so that you can start watching almost immediately), but that's already doable with the current protocol. Then again, distributing trailers via bittorrent makes NO sense. You'd want some sort of a streaming solution. Torrenting would be for delivering static copy-and-store content, like TV shows, or other "channel" content where they can push it to you before you want to use it.
As hot as its been across most of the USA you are looking at...pastries?
Might I refer you to the article title? "BitTorrent Usage Increases In Europe"
Remember the laws of thermodynamics... that heat in the US needs to come from somewhere....
When you say "if bittorrent was blocked" -- what exactly do you mean? Technologically blocking the protocol? Banning users whose DNS requests show P2P activity? Jailing people using the official torrent client? Blocking the transfer of any file ending in .torrent?
All these things can be easily routed around; clients like Vuze can even route around most of this via specialized plugins already. They handle Bittorrent-over-Tor etc, and could easily do the entire job via DNS, using a DNS server not hosted by your ISP with a simple plugin addition. Stick the trackers on Tor websites, and you've created a large public darknet which, while the performance would be worse and the network saturation more of a problem, would end up with the exact same measures needing to be taken against yet another protocol -- which leads to tor steganography in other content.
Side thought: wouldn't it be interesting if it turned out that all the spam clogging up the pipes was actually a distributed file sharing system?
Thank you for sharing your definition of intellectual piracy.
Other interested groups would argue that filesharing IS piracy, and is equivalent to stealing ships at gunpoint on the high seas.
Others will state that it's all about providing information in an unauthorized manner.
Others will point out that this is state-sponsored censorship.
Others will insist that information wants to be free, and that profit motive doesn't come into it.
Still others will agree, but say that while profit motive doesn't come into it, depriving companies of contractually agreed-to profits and stepping outside of the laws of the land is wrong, and should be punished -- and maybe even be called piracy or copyright infringement.
Personally, I think I agree with you, with the extra point that if someone is copying works of others without permission, with the intent to harm, that's bad too. But that doesn't preclude others disagreeing with you and being "more right" in a moral, ethical, legal or grammatical sense.