Hmmm, my analysis of The Odyssy (written in the 9th century BC), suggests that the climate in the Mediteranean was pretty much the same as today while sea levels have gone down dramatically in some areas and up in others.
Quite aside from the fact that you really need to start using a spell-checker, it would be kind of hard for the Odyssey to be written a century or two before the invention of the Greek alphabet.
(I probably wouldn't have even picked on this if your joke had been funny.)
Non-anthropomorphic causes of warming do not satisfactoryly explain the current warming tend.
I have this sudden image of a giant cloudy figure in the shape of a man stalking across the countryside, smashing villages with its mighty fists. "Oh no! Here comes the dread monster Pollu! Who will save us now?" But fear not! Gojira to the rescue! He will put this horrific fiend that walks like a man back in its place.
For crying out loud. This is a most dysturbing tend. I'm normally on the (relatively) green side of arguments (except when it comes to obvious things like nuclear power). But with friends like you, who needs enemies?
It's not like you're going for a liberal arts degree there - grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Indeed: the ability to articulate ideas and express yourself clearly are wholly redundant in that environment. No one who does real work ever needs to be able to explain their findings. And of course MIT cares only about standardised grades! Why would a podunk place like that ever care about types of intelligence that are not easily measured by standardised tests?
</sarcasm> I am dumbfounded that there are actually people, in this forum of all places, who regard articulate use of language as a waste of time. OK, fine, the parent is capable of stringing together a sentence. But the simple fact is that many, if not most, school-leavers are not. I'm hoping the parent's post was sarcasm, but there aren't any signposts pointing to that. So I'm forced to conclude that the parent is simply living in an ivory tower where s/he never has to care about base things like communication.
The phrase caveat emptor has been around for at least 2000 years and probably a lot longer than that.
Since I am in a position to check, and since I am also a very nitpicky individual, I do check up stuff like this. In fact the phrase goes back less than 1500 years. Its first attestation is in the Digest, or Body of Civil Law, issued ca. 530 by the emperor Justinian (sections 19.1.11 and 21.1.26).
(I once went one a round-the-world holiday. At Fiji's passport control, they gave us garlands, and serenaded us with guitars; at US passport control they growled at us.)
... and even though Fiji is ruled by a military dictatorship now, it's still a more friendly place to visit.
Oh yeah? Well if apes aren't inferior, then why do we have writing and houses and cars and microprocessors and big office buildings with cubicle farms where we go to work every day and mortgages to pay off, while they just sit around lounging in the sun taking naps and eating fruit?
You forgot digital watches. It's all about the digital watches.
(I don't have a digital watch. *sigh* My life is incomplete.)
Even more specifically, most of Kafka's works are about systems that copy real-life scenarios but in his works go bananas.
The Castle is the aptest reference here: to quote WP on that,
[The protagonist] struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village where he wants to work as a land surveyor.... [The novel would have ended] with the Land Surveyor dying in the village; the castle notifying him on his death bed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there". Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is about alienation, bureaucracy, and the seemingly endless frustrations of man's attempts to stand against the system.
His other works, especially the most famous ones, illustrate the same madness, but in different systems: Metamorphosis, the derangedness of a petit-bourgeois morality and mind-set when you have been turned into a bug; The Trial, the justice system; In the Penal Colony, the penal system. Either the system is one that has gone mad, or the system is described by someone who is mad; in many stories, both options work at once. In any case, "Kafkaesque" is a popular term for a reason, and I doubt that it's actually misused very often.
True, but the reference in the article title is more specifically to The Castle than to The Trial. Regardless, the GP's comment is funnier than both of ours.
How much demand is there for top-flight buggy whip makers? Longbowmen? Flint-knappers?
As a sibling poster said, some. You're generalising on the basis of no data. Even in those areas "top-flight" people can -- and will, if they go independent rather than rely on someone else to employ them -- have a career. Here's one longbow manufacturer in China that employs 58 people; here's a buggy whip specialist in the US. (Flint-knapping was never really commercial, but there are still amateur associations, and some people even manage to make a living out of it.)
Why would I go to my local retailer for stuff that's out of copyright? Like most of Hitchcock's films (I've been on a Hitchcok binge recently), or for that matter all other films earlier than 1959?
I mean, OK, I can see that some people might be feeling so generous to their local retailer that they're willing to donate money for material that is public domain. As it happens, I'm not. So the GP's question is a good one.
Forgetting the price for a minute, there is a definite "no" on shipping:
Neller said heâ(TM)d love to see the day when Google Book Searchers can press a button next to a search result and find the closest local printer, but Google says thatâ(TM)s a long way off. -- wired.com
Another implication is that this is limited to brick-and-mortar shops where OnDemandBooks have a presence, which in turn means that to use this service you have to be physically present at one of just thirteen locations in the world -- five in the US, four in Canada, two in the UK, and one each in Egypt and Australia. More locations coming soon, none of them in my country.:-(
Since we're talking about portable media, I want it portable and use fat32.
I use FAT32 even on the HDD partition shared between Linux and Windows on my office machine. Other file systems have just caused me headaches with permissions in the past, though I suppose that's just because I wasn't managing them properly. I suppose I could change my ways, but it's easier just to use FAT. If that's ill-advised of me, maybe someone will tell me so:-)
I'm not sure what I'm going to switch to when >4 GB files become more prevalent...
I can tell you that academics love getting their panties in a bunch over what is Scholarly Publication and what is not. Some teachers will actually have special assignments that have to be written entirely using Scholarly sources, or in response to a Scholarly article.
There are two separate things going on there, and you've mixed them up slightly.
First: in the kind of scenario you raise, "scholarly publication" acts as a mechanism for filtering information. There's a lot of information in the world; stuff that appears in "scholarly publications" should, if that criterion is well-designed, have a better average quality. As filtering mechanisms go it's imperfect: sometimes stuff that has passed peer review is still fishy, and sometimes good stuff gets excluded, as you yourself have observed. Still, tools for picking and choosing are valuable. I'd add that an assignment that specifies that you're not allowed to use anything that doesn't pass the criterion is an assignment that won't teach you anything about how to exercise this kind of judgment yourself. (Usually I'd say that's a bad thing.)
Second: academics, even when they have powerful search tools and the competence to tell for themselves which stuff is good and which stuff is bad, still have to think about the criteria for what counts as "scholarly publication", because they get hired or fired on the basis of it. In some countries (e.g. the UK, Australia) there are very specific government-enforced criteria and processes for grading academics; in Australia, they use a whitelist of which journals you'll get credit for publishing in, and an article in an "A" rated journal will get you X amount of credit, while an article in a journal that doesn't appear in the whitelist will get you precisely no credit (and will actually count against you, if you are stupid enough to list it in your CV). This is obviously terrible, inexcusably lazy, and guaranteed to cause long-term harm, but it's an environment that academics still have to work in or else not work at all. Academics get graded in a similar way in the US, except that the criteria are less standardised.
Some thieves broke into my college's computer labs and stole all the four-year-old iMacs. They turned their noses up at the brand new Dell Precisions in the same lab...
That sounds sane, actually. Macs lose their resale value very slowly -- around 15% per year, I'd guess; but I'd be surprised if even a brand spanking new Dell would fetch more than about 40% of its retail price, and completely unsurprised if it went for 300 or less.
(Sane on the part of the thieves, that is, not on the part of the people buying the second-hand Macs.)
Don't these hard copy books still exist after Google has "digitized" them? If you re concerned over your privacy, simply go to the physical library as you would have before the digitization.
They don't necessarily exist. Recently I was looking for a relatively esoteric book on a particular ancient Greek author's parodying of bits of the New Testament. Now, careful checking showed that no library in my home town has the book; even more careful checking showed that the nearest library that had it is 9700 km [sic] away. The book was published in the early 1960s, so it's under copyright.
Now, this book is not everyone's cup of tea, sure, but that's kind of the point of books: they make information accessible to people who need that information when they need it. Market forces shouldn't constrain that kind of thing: just because I happen to be the only person on my side of the planet who's interested in the topic shouldn't mean that all information on that topic should vanish. To insist that market forces should be the only force in operation is to insist that all specialised knowledge should vanish forever without trace.
So what are my choices? I could
pay vast sums to borrow the book by interlibrary loan from a library 9700 km away
get my local library to contact an overseas library and get them to make an illegal copy and send it to me
find a torrent of the book -- yeah, right
look up the bit of the book I needed on Google Books
Of these, option 1 is expensive and time-consuming, but also the only legal option; options 2, 3, and 4 are illegal; option 2 is, I think, justly illegal, and would moreover require that someone else break the law on my behalf; option 3 is just ludicrous; option 4 is illegal, but only because of unbalanced copyright laws.
I submit that legitimising option 4 would be A Good Thing.
As it turned out, option 2 was the one that actually happened. A library in Europe was good enough to break the law for me. (To return the favour, I won't name names.)
It always cracks me up when Americans invent bad neologisms because they were unaware that better words already existed.
That's fair; you crack everyone else up, after all. "Ironise" goes back to Philostratos' Lives of the Sophists, published ca. 235 CE.
Oh, you meant in English? You're right, that is a lot more recent. That only goes back as far as William Warner, in 1612, in his book Albions England. Now, let me see, where might William Warner have come from? Was he American? Hmmm, this calls for some thought.
10,000 years of evolution, and the best thing to conserve information we came up with was stone tablets.
It's unfortunately true.
It is really, really not true. Have you ever stopped to consider
survival rate -- i.e. how many clay/stone tablets have not survived four millennia; and
how many clay tablets would have survived if kept under normal operating conditions -- i.e. not being fired when an invading army set fire to your city?
Now stone, I grant you, gets past the second of these conditions better than clay. However, it fails the first condition even more spectacularly than clay does, since stone tends to get destructively recycled as a building material.
Ancient people's idea of gravity was simple. Stuff goes down.
Then people figured out that the earth's surface is curved, and "down" didn't work anymore.
Just to nit-pick, it was "ancient people" who figured that out, and who determined that "stuff goes towards the centre of the earth".
(Well, not the Epicureans. They just went on thinking that "stuff goes down", and that the tangible universe was a random fluctuation. But then, they were loons -- almost as loony as the Pythagoreans.)
Maybe. For my money, Orwell wasn't a prophet or a doomsday proclaimer; he was a satirist. He'd be laughing his head off.
(Try it! Go and read the last paragraph of 1984, trying to keep in mind the hypothesis that it's meant to be funny. If nothing else, it really makes you realise just how over-the-top the language is.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, my analysis of The Odyssy (written in the 9th century BC), suggests that the climate in the Mediteranean was pretty much the same as today while sea levels have gone down dramatically in some areas and up in others.
Quite aside from the fact that you really need to start using a spell-checker, it would be kind of hard for the Odyssey to be written a century or two before the invention of the Greek alphabet.
(I probably wouldn't have even picked on this if your joke had been funny.)
Non-anthropomorphic causes of warming do not satisfactoryly explain the current warming tend.
I have this sudden image of a giant cloudy figure in the shape of a man stalking across the countryside, smashing villages with its mighty fists. "Oh no! Here comes the dread monster Pollu! Who will save us now?" But fear not! Gojira to the rescue! He will put this horrific fiend that walks like a man back in its place.
For crying out loud. This is a most dysturbing tend. I'm normally on the (relatively) green side of arguments (except when it comes to obvious things like nuclear power). But with friends like you, who needs enemies?
Who did they axe about this?
Whom did they axe.
(... no, that's too subtle, the mods will never work it out. In any case, I'm pretty sure that MIT would "ax" rather than "axe".)
It's not like you're going for a liberal arts degree there - grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Indeed: the ability to articulate ideas and express yourself clearly are wholly redundant in that environment. No one who does real work ever needs to be able to explain their findings. And of course MIT cares only about standardised grades! Why would a podunk place like that ever care about types of intelligence that are not easily measured by standardised tests?
</sarcasm> I am dumbfounded that there are actually people, in this forum of all places, who regard articulate use of language as a waste of time. OK, fine, the parent is capable of stringing together a sentence. But the simple fact is that many, if not most, school-leavers are not. I'm hoping the parent's post was sarcasm, but there aren't any signposts pointing to that. So I'm forced to conclude that the parent is simply living in an ivory tower where s/he never has to care about base things like communication.
The phrase caveat emptor has been around for at least 2000 years and probably a lot longer than that.
Since I am in a position to check, and since I am also a very nitpicky individual, I do check up stuff like this. In fact the phrase goes back less than 1500 years. Its first attestation is in the Digest, or Body of Civil Law, issued ca. 530 by the emperor Justinian (sections 19.1.11 and 21.1.26).
Of course your point still stands, though.
His lips are moving.
Sure. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't lynch them when you catch them at it.
(I once went one a round-the-world holiday. At Fiji's passport control, they gave us garlands, and serenaded us with guitars; at US passport control they growled at us.)
... and even though Fiji is ruled by a military dictatorship now, it's still a more friendly place to visit.
Oh yeah? Well if apes aren't inferior, then why do we have writing and houses and cars and microprocessors and big office buildings with cubicle farms where we go to work every day and mortgages to pay off, while they just sit around lounging in the sun taking naps and eating fruit?
You forgot digital watches. It's all about the digital watches.
(I don't have a digital watch. *sigh* My life is incomplete.)
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
"I hold you the duty I was dangerous as I recover you he" ...???
Even more specifically, most of Kafka's works are about systems that copy real-life scenarios but in his works go bananas.
The Castle is the aptest reference here: to quote WP on that,
[The protagonist] struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village where he wants to work as a land surveyor. ... [The novel would have ended] with the Land Surveyor dying in the village; the castle notifying him on his death bed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there". Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is about alienation, bureaucracy, and the seemingly endless frustrations of man's attempts to stand against the system.
His other works, especially the most famous ones, illustrate the same madness, but in different systems: Metamorphosis, the derangedness of a petit-bourgeois morality and mind-set when you have been turned into a bug; The Trial, the justice system; In the Penal Colony, the penal system. Either the system is one that has gone mad, or the system is described by someone who is mad; in many stories, both options work at once. In any case, "Kafkaesque" is a popular term for a reason, and I doubt that it's actually misused very often.
True, but the reference in the article title is more specifically to The Castle than to The Trial. Regardless, the GP's comment is funnier than both of ours.
250-Foot Hybrid Airship In Which To Spy Over Afghanistan
No. And your point is not about grammar, it's about semantics.
... Space and Missile Defense command plans to have an unmanned spy-ship ...
How much demand is there for top-flight buggy whip makers? Longbowmen? Flint-knappers?
As a sibling poster said, some. You're generalising on the basis of no data. Even in those areas "top-flight" people can -- and will, if they go independent rather than rely on someone else to employ them -- have a career. Here's one longbow manufacturer in China that employs 58 people; here's a buggy whip specialist in the US. (Flint-knapping was never really commercial, but there are still amateur associations, and some people even manage to make a living out of it.)
Downloading public domain material is "wrong", you say ... who is it that's doing the logical acrobatics, now?
(Good to know that some Anonymous Cowards are living up to their title, by the way.)
Your local retailer?
Why would I go to my local retailer for stuff that's out of copyright? Like most of Hitchcock's films (I've been on a Hitchcok binge recently), or for that matter all other films earlier than 1959?
I mean, OK, I can see that some people might be feeling so generous to their local retailer that they're willing to donate money for material that is public domain. As it happens, I'm not. So the GP's question is a good one.
So will all the books be $2 plus shipping?
Forgetting the price for a minute, there is a definite "no" on shipping:
Neller said heâ(TM)d love to see the day when Google Book Searchers can press a button next to a search result and find the closest local printer, but Google says thatâ(TM)s a long way off. -- wired.com
Another implication is that this is limited to brick-and-mortar shops where OnDemandBooks have a presence, which in turn means that to use this service you have to be physically present at one of just thirteen locations in the world -- five in the US, four in Canada, two in the UK, and one each in Egypt and Australia. More locations coming soon, none of them in my country. :-(
Since we're talking about portable media, I want it portable and use fat32.
I use FAT32 even on the HDD partition shared between Linux and Windows on my office machine. Other file systems have just caused me headaches with permissions in the past, though I suppose that's just because I wasn't managing them properly. I suppose I could change my ways, but it's easier just to use FAT. If that's ill-advised of me, maybe someone will tell me so :-)
I'm not sure what I'm going to switch to when >4 GB files become more prevalent ...
I can tell you that academics love getting their panties in a bunch over what is Scholarly Publication and what is not. Some teachers will actually have special assignments that have to be written entirely using Scholarly sources, or in response to a Scholarly article.
There are two separate things going on there, and you've mixed them up slightly.
First: in the kind of scenario you raise, "scholarly publication" acts as a mechanism for filtering information. There's a lot of information in the world; stuff that appears in "scholarly publications" should, if that criterion is well-designed, have a better average quality. As filtering mechanisms go it's imperfect: sometimes stuff that has passed peer review is still fishy, and sometimes good stuff gets excluded, as you yourself have observed. Still, tools for picking and choosing are valuable. I'd add that an assignment that specifies that you're not allowed to use anything that doesn't pass the criterion is an assignment that won't teach you anything about how to exercise this kind of judgment yourself. (Usually I'd say that's a bad thing.)
Second: academics, even when they have powerful search tools and the competence to tell for themselves which stuff is good and which stuff is bad, still have to think about the criteria for what counts as "scholarly publication", because they get hired or fired on the basis of it. In some countries (e.g. the UK, Australia) there are very specific government-enforced criteria and processes for grading academics; in Australia, they use a whitelist of which journals you'll get credit for publishing in, and an article in an "A" rated journal will get you X amount of credit, while an article in a journal that doesn't appear in the whitelist will get you precisely no credit (and will actually count against you, if you are stupid enough to list it in your CV). This is obviously terrible, inexcusably lazy, and guaranteed to cause long-term harm, but it's an environment that academics still have to work in or else not work at all. Academics get graded in a similar way in the US, except that the criteria are less standardised.
Some thieves broke into my college's computer labs and stole all the four-year-old iMacs. They turned their noses up at the brand new Dell Precisions in the same lab...
That sounds sane, actually. Macs lose their resale value very slowly -- around 15% per year, I'd guess; but I'd be surprised if even a brand spanking new Dell would fetch more than about 40% of its retail price, and completely unsurprised if it went for 300 or less.
(Sane on the part of the thieves, that is, not on the part of the people buying the second-hand Macs.)
Don't these hard copy books still exist after Google has "digitized" them? If you re concerned over your privacy, simply go to the physical library as you would have before the digitization.
They don't necessarily exist. Recently I was looking for a relatively esoteric book on a particular ancient Greek author's parodying of bits of the New Testament. Now, careful checking showed that no library in my home town has the book; even more careful checking showed that the nearest library that had it is 9700 km [sic] away. The book was published in the early 1960s, so it's under copyright.
Now, this book is not everyone's cup of tea, sure, but that's kind of the point of books: they make information accessible to people who need that information when they need it. Market forces shouldn't constrain that kind of thing: just because I happen to be the only person on my side of the planet who's interested in the topic shouldn't mean that all information on that topic should vanish. To insist that market forces should be the only force in operation is to insist that all specialised knowledge should vanish forever without trace.
So what are my choices? I could
Of these, option 1 is expensive and time-consuming, but also the only legal option; options 2, 3, and 4 are illegal; option 2 is, I think, justly illegal, and would moreover require that someone else break the law on my behalf; option 3 is just ludicrous; option 4 is illegal, but only because of unbalanced copyright laws.
I submit that legitimising option 4 would be A Good Thing.
As it turned out, option 2 was the one that actually happened. A library in Europe was good enough to break the law for me. (To return the favour, I won't name names.)
It always cracks me up when Americans invent bad neologisms because they were unaware that better words already existed.
That's fair; you crack everyone else up, after all. "Ironise" goes back to Philostratos' Lives of the Sophists, published ca. 235 CE.
Oh, you meant in English? You're right, that is a lot more recent. That only goes back as far as William Warner, in 1612, in his book Albions England. Now, let me see, where might William Warner have come from? Was he American? Hmmm, this calls for some thought.
To me that's like saying, "I'd hate to have an officer standing on the corner and policing my neighborhood."
With an officer of the law, there can in principle be such a thing as accountability. With CCTV, accountability is in principle impossible.
10,000 years of evolution, and the best thing to conserve information we came up with was stone tablets.
It's unfortunately true.
It is really, really not true. Have you ever stopped to consider
Now stone, I grant you, gets past the second of these conditions better than clay. However, it fails the first condition even more spectacularly than clay does, since stone tends to get destructively recycled as a building material.
Ancient people's idea of gravity was simple. Stuff goes down.
Then people figured out that the earth's surface is curved, and "down" didn't work anymore.
Just to nit-pick, it was "ancient people" who figured that out, and who determined that "stuff goes towards the centre of the earth".
(Well, not the Epicureans. They just went on thinking that "stuff goes down", and that the tangible universe was a random fluctuation. But then, they were loons -- almost as loony as the Pythagoreans.)
Somewhere, Orwell is slowly shaking his head...
Maybe. For my money, Orwell wasn't a prophet or a doomsday proclaimer; he was a satirist. He'd be laughing his head off.
(Try it! Go and read the last paragraph of 1984, trying to keep in mind the hypothesis that it's meant to be funny. If nothing else, it really makes you realise just how over-the-top the language is.)