I'm not saying that having to communicate by telegraph is a good thing. However, I don't think telephones are the answer here. I make a call to someone without a phone, how do they get the message? You don't expect me to convince all my contacts to start using a phone to receive messages, do you?
Rehabilitation is good... for people who WANT to be rehabilitated.
If you had a poor family background, child abuse... yeah, you deserve rehab.
If were fed bad ideas growing up about morality... yeah, you deserve rehab.
If you had a known, tested-for mental illness with a physical component... yeah, you deserve rehab.
The spam king was NONE of that. He grew up just fine. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he just didn't give a damn. His final acts while alive demonstrate exactly the values he held: he was more important that others and was willing to shove them aside at every opportunity to further his own interests, and he would do whatever it took to manipulate others into doing his bidding.
What would rehabilitation do? Teach him that stealing is wrong? He knows that already. Teach him how he hurt others? He knows that. How to be a productive human being? He is. How to engage in mutually-beneficial economic transactions with others? He did it all the time. How to empathize? He's not interested, and he damn well had the chance to learn how to, every moment of his life.
I can understand your dislike of those who reject prisoner rehab, but you must make room for the possibility that some are well beyond that.
Hey, look, I can take your remarks out of context too!
'Say' and 'pay' are not related in that way because sibilants and liquids lengthen subsequent vowels.
They don't have to be "related in that way". The question was whether they form past tenses the way that regular verbs do. They don't. In the case of paid, because of the spelling. In the case of said, because of both the spelling and the pronunciation.
Your statement is plainly false--the extremely uncommon verbs are actually the ones least likely to change, because they aren't used frequently enough for people to shift.
Hey, man, take it up with the folks who wrote the paper. You know, the one with the numerous counterexamples to the theory you just pulled out of your ass? That is, actual evidence beyond armchair theorizing?
You're making a crack at prescriptivist English teachers, not linguists.... Linguistics does not correct; it models.
No, when you're telling me how long vowels "really" are pronounced -- and people don't actually go by that -- you are making prescriptions. Hey, what if I did shorten the relevant vowels you claim are different so that they're the same? Am I being "wrong" now, prescriptivist?
When people make it the past tense, they tag a/d/ on:/peid/
(Perhaps you think when I say "payed", I'm referring to something that's not an imaginary past tense of "pay"?)
"Paid" rhymes with:
Frayed, grayed, flayed -- regular verbs in their past tenses.
Paid does NOT rhyme with "said":/sed/
If "said" were regular and thus "sayed", on the other hand, it would. And that would make English easier to learn (but would have to be weighed against other consequences).
You gave the impression
No, *you* gave my words that impression, and contested something you apparently agree with!
Wipe your ass with your degree, as that's all it's good for. Wait wait wait -- I mean, that's all for which it is good, right?
Outside your cave. Sorry you made the mistake of trying to look informed while being ignorant of something that was all over the news. And that you think "payed" sounds different from "paid" and that verb irregularities make the language easier to learn.
In this case, and in most others, the "company's rights" can be equivalently expressed as a set of rights of the individuals working for it, making your objection little more than a nitpick.
How would this reasoning apply to people who put up videos of *themselves* while they are playing the game, such as DDR? That's something that I and many others do -- upload videos of ourselves dancing to the steps of DDR, or our finger movement in Guitar Hero. It's not a copy of the game (although some people, for reasons I can't discern, simply upload the screen feed! Yeah, REAL exciting to see a bunch of arrows scroll up and disappear, which could just be a script...) -- it's a person showing how he does the steps.
Yes, it's a "how-to-guide" in a sense, but then what about people who write their own dance steps?
I strongly disagree. As the developed world ages (greater fraction of the population living longer and being older), it will be EXTREMELY expensive to take care of them, UNLESS we can have home robotic assistants. And for them to work, it will be important for them to look human so as to comfort the elderly.
In preparation for this, I have half-jokingly made an agreement with my mom whereby she promises that if I ever "hire" her a "home care assistant", she will only "tip" the "woman" we hired with checks, rather than cash.
Interestingly enough, I estimated them costing in the $15,000 range, just what they're exptected to in the article, which is quite a bargain for taking care of elderly sick parents! It notes, properly, that they'll get cheaper, but the kind I'm referring to will also have to have a host of medical diagnostics and surveillance equipment (the former, of course, vehemently opposed by asshole doctors that claim it will be unsafe but really just want their cut), as well as e.g. bathing capabilities.
Give it ten years though, and only legal barriers will stand in the way.
Actually, to whoever spells it "payed", PLEASE KEEP IT UP.
When people use that form, they are converting a yucky irregular verb into a regular one. That is a good thing because the fewer irregular forms English has, the easier it is to learn.
And how do such conversions happen? By people gradually using the regular instead of the irregular. (In fact, some linguist has evidence showing that verbs regularize in proportion to how uncommon they are, and uncommon verbs are precisely the ones you can get away with for using the "wrong" form on. And thank secular God that I could use prepositions at the end of clauses there!)
How about basing your decision on the merit of the case rather than which side you "like" more?
In any case, the patent is almost certainly overbroad and/or obvious and never should have been issued, and they were only sued in the court that they were because it is notoriously biased in favor of patent trolls.
If by "good", you mean "lazy and overbroad", I agree. I can put in arrows just fine... it's just that they didn't configure the options on HTML right. Notice that HTML mode also won't recognize line breaks. Go fig.
Seems Slashdot has something against implementing some form of Unicode (and HTML 4 entity codes), so putting in (right arrow) or pasting the equivalent character don't work. You'd think they would pass it onto the browser rather than simply deleting them...
No, I wouldn't. This kind of thing is just par for the course in open source software.
Oh come on, the tin-foil accusation is low and very misplaced. The theory proposes precisely ONE agent acting. ONE. As in, "not a conspiracy". 95% of the theory is already public knowledge:
-Oil prices have ~doubled. -China wants to look good for the olympics, including having clean air. -Diesel is cleaner than coal. -China has already done lots of other things to clean up. -China has massively increased imports of refined diesel. -Developing countries were known to be growing rapidly since at least '04, yet it didn't seem to justify $100+ oil then. -Ditto for pretty much every other factor that can account for increasing oil prices.
And you can probably even look up the fraction of global oil recently bought by China, satellite images of power plant mods, etc.
I apologize profusely for not posting this in a more relevant spot, and for not finding where I originally heard this suggested, but, one interesting theory is that the reason for this nearly doubling of oil prices in the past year is that China is stockpiling it to run diesel instead of coal plants, so as to clean up their air for the olympics.
Considering how inscrutable these recent price increases have been, this one seems really good at explaining things. Just a thought.
For now, check out item 3 from a while ago, which mentions China trying to clean up for the Olympic games, and how they're importing more diesel.
Your general point is right, but remember: headlights are so THEY can see YOU, not so YOU can see THEM.
That's part of why they design cars so that if you can't see your instrumentation with sunlight, you'll have to turn on the headlights to see them (which are then coupled to the instrumentation lights). Thus, whenever others need your headlights on, you need them too. Incentives are aligned.
Or least, that's how it used to be. I got a new car recently, and somehow they threw out that principle out the window, and the instrumentation lights are always on (though not the radio lights...), which, during the break-in period led me to forget to turn on the headlights ~4 times.
The fact remains that one person using a sequence of words (or a song, or a movie, etc.) can't possibly interfere with anyone else using it; on the other hand, one person using a radio frequency can interfere with other people trying to use the same frequency.
Sorry, but now you're just being deliberately obtuse. I just explained how what counts as "interference" depends on what you consider to be the relevant use. Using someone's ideas certainly interferes with one *kind* of use for its creator, just as using a radio wave interferes with one *kind* of use for someone else. (If people enjoyed blasting off radio waves with no intent to transmit information, for example, then there's no interference there either!)
Your alleged "differences" are arbitrary attempts to stave of the reduction of your position into absurdity. You *like* the result of ownership of radio waves. You *don't like* the result of ownership of ideas. That's really all there is to it.
I don't care that you like to use radio waves for communication. I like to write books for profit. Why does wanting it get you the right?
It has nothing to do with "wanting it"; rather, it has to do with the general consensus
You make my point for me: if there's a "general consensus" that the ideaspace is only useful if there's a possibility of people creating works that have copyright protection -- and there is -- then the same pattern-formation rights are justified there.
inherent parallels between [rights in] property and information, however, are few and far between.
Because of either your inability to think abstractly or refusal to consider that which you don't like the implications of. They have many parallels even if you were right about scarcity, which you're not -- see below.
Er, no. Copyright is an exclusive right to share certain information (certain sets of facts) with other people. Radio spectrum is the right to transmit on a particular frequency within a particular physical area. One limits what you can say, the other limits where you can say it.
Wrong: they both limit what patterns you can form your property into.
But interference always matters, because the point of radio communication is that the signals you transmit will eventually be received somewhere else and decoded.
And the point of writing a book is so that I can get a monopoly on the transmission of the informational content of the book. So? I don't care that you like to use radio waves for communication. I like to write books for profit. Why does wanting it get you the right?
That's why radio spectrum is fundamentally different from information: one is a scarce resource, the other is not.
Your failure to differentiate them shows exactly why this scarcity distinction fails.
However I don't believe that it's as cut and dried as a lot of people here try to make out.
Acknowledging this is rare enough to get you on my friends list:-)
For my part, I think the issue is way more complicated than people give it credit for. The parallels between physical property rights and IP are too close to ignore, and in many ways modern property law is just as arbitrary a "creation of the state/government enforced monopoly" as IP. In the end, people are making the distinction:
-"I like it" = "This is a natural right, fully justified, part of nature, I worked for it" -"I don't like it" = "Wah, government enforced monopoly, full force of the state"
To see the problem most clearly, look at rights to radio frequencies, which people generally view as justified. Like IP, this is no more than the right to form a particular pattern within a certain jurisdiction. The "harms" of not having such rights depend purely on what you view as a harm. It's possible for infinite people to broadcast radio waves; that there is interference matters only if you want it to matter.
This is not to say I'm rabidly pro-IP. I'd like to see shorter copyright terms, by far. I'd also like to see some terms actually start to expire instead of indefinite re-extension. But the right itself is on solid ground, just not the existing terms.
By the way, isn't the term "base 10" devoid of meaning? If our system were base four, then "base 10" would mean "base four" since the characters "10" in base four mean "4" in base ten. Whatever base you use, "10" is your way of writing the value of that base.
Yes, that's the numero-anthropic principle:
"We use the base 10 number system, because if it were not our number system, we would not be calling it 10.":-}
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying that having to communicate by telegraph is a good thing. However, I don't think telephones are the answer here. I make a call to someone without a phone, how do they get the message? You don't expect me to convince all my contacts to start using a phone to receive messages, do you?
Rehabilitation is good ... for people who WANT to be rehabilitated.
If you had a poor family background, child abuse ... yeah, you deserve rehab.
If were fed bad ideas growing up about morality ... yeah, you deserve rehab.
If you had a known, tested-for mental illness with a physical component ... yeah, you deserve rehab.
The spam king was NONE of that. He grew up just fine. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he just didn't give a damn. His final acts while alive demonstrate exactly the values he held: he was more important that others and was willing to shove them aside at every opportunity to further his own interests, and he would do whatever it took to manipulate others into doing his bidding.
What would rehabilitation do? Teach him that stealing is wrong? He knows that already. Teach him how he hurt others? He knows that. How to be a productive human being? He is. How to engage in mutually-beneficial economic transactions with others? He did it all the time. How to empathize? He's not interested, and he damn well had the chance to learn how to, every moment of his life.
I can understand your dislike of those who reject prisoner rehab, but you must make room for the possibility that some are well beyond that.
Look, the joke was funny and all ... I got a LOL out of it. BUT:
I need my garden plowed.
What the hell does their being gay have to do with it? I mean, nothing against gays, but what does this homosexual innuendo add to the joke?
'Said' is not dipthongized.
No one said it is.
Hey, look, I can take your remarks out of context too!
'Say' and 'pay' are not related in that way because sibilants and liquids lengthen subsequent vowels.
They don't have to be "related in that way". The question was whether they form past tenses the way that regular verbs do. They don't. In the case of paid, because of the spelling. In the case of said, because of both the spelling and the pronunciation.
Your statement is plainly false--the extremely uncommon verbs are actually the ones least likely to change, because they aren't used frequently enough for people to shift.
Hey, man, take it up with the folks who wrote the paper. You know, the one with the numerous counterexamples to the theory you just pulled out of your ass? That is, actual evidence beyond armchair theorizing?
You're making a crack at prescriptivist English teachers, not linguists. ... Linguistics does not correct; it models.
No, when you're telling me how long vowels "really" are pronounced -- and people don't actually go by that -- you are making prescriptions. Hey, what if I did shorten the relevant vowels you claim are different so that they're the same? Am I being "wrong" now, prescriptivist?
Still waiting for that "+1 insightful" mod?
ROFL!!! Oh god you're a riot.
"pay" is pronounced /pei/
When people make it the past tense, they tag a /d/ on: /peid/
(Perhaps you think when I say "payed", I'm referring to something that's not an imaginary past tense of "pay"?)
"Paid" rhymes with:
Frayed, grayed, flayed -- regular verbs in their past tenses.
Paid does NOT rhyme with "said": /sed/
If "said" were regular and thus "sayed", on the other hand, it would. And that would make English easier to learn (but would have to be weighed against other consequences).
You gave the impression
No, *you* gave my words that impression, and contested something you apparently agree with!
Wipe your ass with your degree, as that's all it's good for. Wait wait wait -- I mean, that's all for which it is good, right?
Where?
Outside your cave. Sorry you made the mistake of trying to look informed while being ignorant of something that was all over the news. And that you think "payed" sounds different from "paid" and that verb irregularities make the language easier to learn.
Everyone's ignorant. Not everyone flaunts it.
In this case, and in most others, the "company's rights" can be equivalently expressed as a set of rights of the individuals working for it, making your objection little more than a nitpick.
How would this reasoning apply to people who put up videos of *themselves* while they are playing the game, such as DDR? That's something that I and many others do -- upload videos of ourselves dancing to the steps of DDR, or our finger movement in Guitar Hero. It's not a copy of the game (although some people, for reasons I can't discern, simply upload the screen feed! Yeah, REAL exciting to see a bunch of arrows scroll up and disappear, which could just be a script...) -- it's a person showing how he does the steps.
Yes, it's a "how-to-guide" in a sense, but then what about people who write their own dance steps?
I strongly disagree. As the developed world ages (greater fraction of the population living longer and being older), it will be EXTREMELY expensive to take care of them, UNLESS we can have home robotic assistants. And for them to work, it will be important for them to look human so as to comfort the elderly.
In preparation for this, I have half-jokingly made an agreement with my mom whereby she promises that if I ever "hire" her a "home care assistant", she will only "tip" the "woman" we hired with checks, rather than cash.
Interestingly enough, I estimated them costing in the $15,000 range, just what they're exptected to in the article, which is quite a bargain for taking care of elderly sick parents! It notes, properly, that they'll get cheaper, but the kind I'm referring to will also have to have a host of medical diagnostics and surveillance equipment (the former, of course, vehemently opposed by asshole doctors that claim it will be unsafe but really just want their cut), as well as e.g. bathing capabilities.
Give it ten years though, and only legal barriers will stand in the way.
Actually, to whoever spells it "payed", PLEASE KEEP IT UP.
When people use that form, they are converting a yucky irregular verb into a regular one. That is a good thing because the fewer irregular forms English has, the easier it is to learn.
And how do such conversions happen? By people gradually using the regular instead of the irregular. (In fact, some linguist has evidence showing that verbs regularize in proportion to how uncommon they are, and uncommon verbs are precisely the ones you can get away with for using the "wrong" form on. And thank secular God that I could use prepositions at the end of clauses there!)
Hard to say who to root for, if anyone.
How about basing your decision on the merit of the case rather than which side you "like" more?
In any case, the patent is almost certainly overbroad and/or obvious and never should have been issued, and they were only sued in the court that they were because it is notoriously biased in favor of patent trolls.
If by "good", you mean "lazy and overbroad", I agree. I can put in arrows just fine ... it's just that they didn't configure the options on HTML right. Notice that HTML mode also won't recognize line breaks. Go fig.
Seems Slashdot has something against implementing some form of Unicode (and HTML 4 entity codes), so putting in (right arrow) or pasting the equivalent character don't work. You'd think they would pass it onto the browser rather than simply deleting them...
No, I wouldn't. This kind of thing is just par for the course in open source software.
"User-friendly design? What's that?"
Oh come on, the tin-foil accusation is low and very misplaced. The theory proposes precisely ONE agent acting. ONE. As in, "not a conspiracy". 95% of the theory is already public knowledge:
-Oil prices have ~doubled.
-China wants to look good for the olympics, including having clean air.
-Diesel is cleaner than coal.
-China has already done lots of other things to clean up.
-China has massively increased imports of refined diesel.
-Developing countries were known to be growing rapidly since at least '04, yet it didn't seem to justify $100+ oil then.
-Ditto for pretty much every other factor that can account for increasing oil prices.
And you can probably even look up the fraction of global oil recently bought by China, satellite images of power plant mods, etc.
This is no tin-foil hat theory.
I apologize profusely for not posting this in a more relevant spot, and for not finding where I originally heard this suggested, but, one interesting theory is that the reason for this nearly doubling of oil prices in the past year is that China is stockpiling it to run diesel instead of coal plants, so as to clean up their air for the olympics.
Considering how inscrutable these recent price increases have been, this one seems really good at explaining things. Just a thought.
For now, check out item 3 from a while ago, which mentions China trying to clean up for the Olympic games, and how they're importing more diesel.
Actually, Mr. Clueless, I put off upgrading LiarSux as long as possible
BECAUSE OF ITS LONG FUCKING HISTORY OF DELETING MY BOOKMARKS AND JAVASCRIPT WHITELIST
whenever I do so.
Your general point is right, but remember: headlights are so THEY can see YOU, not so YOU can see THEM.
That's part of why they design cars so that if you can't see your instrumentation with sunlight, you'll have to turn on the headlights to see them (which are then coupled to the instrumentation lights). Thus, whenever others need your headlights on, you need them too. Incentives are aligned.
Or least, that's how it used to be. I got a new car recently, and somehow they threw out that principle out the window, and the instrumentation lights are always on (though not the radio lights...), which, during the break-in period led me to forget to turn on the headlights ~4 times.
Nissan Sentra, in case anyone's wondering.
The fact remains that one person using a sequence of words (or a song, or a movie, etc.) can't possibly interfere with anyone else using it; on the other hand, one person using a radio frequency can interfere with other people trying to use the same frequency.
Sorry, but now you're just being deliberately obtuse. I just explained how what counts as "interference" depends on what you consider to be the relevant use. Using someone's ideas certainly interferes with one *kind* of use for its creator, just as using a radio wave interferes with one *kind* of use for someone else. (If people enjoyed blasting off radio waves with no intent to transmit information, for example, then there's no interference there either!)
Your alleged "differences" are arbitrary attempts to stave of the reduction of your position into absurdity. You *like* the result of ownership of radio waves. You *don't like* the result of ownership of ideas. That's really all there is to it.
Well, gee, I tried to email you the videofeed of every airport security line in the US, but the server rejected it for being too big.
I don't care that you like to use radio waves for communication. I like to write books for profit. Why does wanting it get you the right?
It has nothing to do with "wanting it"; rather, it has to do with the general consensus
You make my point for me: if there's a "general consensus" that the ideaspace is only useful if there's a possibility of people creating works that have copyright protection -- and there is -- then the same pattern-formation rights are justified there.
inherent parallels between [rights in] property and information, however, are few and far between.
Because of either your inability to think abstractly or refusal to consider that which you don't like the implications of. They have many parallels even if you were right about scarcity, which you're not -- see below.
Er, no. Copyright is an exclusive right to share certain information (certain sets of facts) with other people. Radio spectrum is the right to transmit on a particular frequency within a particular physical area. One limits what you can say, the other limits where you can say it.
Wrong: they both limit what patterns you can form your property into.
But interference always matters, because the point of radio communication is that the signals you transmit will eventually be received somewhere else and decoded.
And the point of writing a book is so that I can get a monopoly on the transmission of the informational content of the book. So? I don't care that you like to use radio waves for communication. I like to write books for profit. Why does wanting it get you the right?
That's why radio spectrum is fundamentally different from information: one is a scarce resource, the other is not.
Your failure to differentiate them shows exactly why this scarcity distinction fails.
However I don't believe that it's as cut and dried as a lot of people here try to make out.
Acknowledging this is rare enough to get you on my friends list :-)
For my part, I think the issue is way more complicated than people give it credit for. The parallels between physical property rights and IP are too close to ignore, and in many ways modern property law is just as arbitrary a "creation of the state/government enforced monopoly" as IP. In the end, people are making the distinction:
-"I like it" = "This is a natural right, fully justified, part of nature, I worked for it"
-"I don't like it" = "Wah, government enforced monopoly, full force of the state"
To see the problem most clearly, look at rights to radio frequencies, which people generally view as justified. Like IP, this is no more than the right to form a particular pattern within a certain jurisdiction. The "harms" of not having such rights depend purely on what you view as a harm. It's possible for infinite people to broadcast radio waves; that there is interference matters only if you want it to matter.
This is not to say I'm rabidly pro-IP. I'd like to see shorter copyright terms, by far. I'd also like to see some terms actually start to expire instead of indefinite re-extension. But the right itself is on solid ground, just not the existing terms.
I get that, and yes, I was trying to be funny ... badly :-(
Was the :-} emoticon not clear enough?
Also, is it supposed to be the other way around to be an "anthropic"-kinda principle?
"If we didn't call it 10, it wouldn't be our number system."
Yes, case-in-point: Amazon's one-click.
The What: "being able to buy in one click"
It's like patenting: "being able to travel 1000 miles in 2 hours."
By the way, isn't the term "base 10" devoid of meaning? If our system were base four, then "base 10" would mean "base four" since the characters "10" in base four mean "4" in base ten. Whatever base you use, "10" is your way of writing the value of that base.
Yes, that's the numero-anthropic principle:
"We use the base 10 number system, because if it were not our number system, we would not be calling it 10." :-}