The use of "they" as a generic pronoun with a singular antecedent goes back at least to Middle English and has been used by many of the best writers of the English language. The idea that it is "incorrect" is a modern notion promulgated by people who believe there's some sort of Platonic perfect English out in the aether somewhere and only human failings keep us from reaching this ideal.
The better way to determine usage is to look at distribution in actual use (see The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language), not lists of pet peeves of Victorian and Edwardian era English professors and writers in book form *cough*Strunk & White*cough*.
For some reason, they've moved to www.windowmaker.info. If you look, the last release was 0.92 in July '05, and they have a month old news item apologizing for the downtime and announcing they are (mostly) back.
Are you honestly suggesting that your posting was somehow not self righteous Yup. I do my best to be an honest and moral person, but I definitely don't feel any righteousness, self or otherwise.
OK. I'll admit this: I do feel snarky most of the time though.;)
and that you don't attack Christians? Not last time I checked. Most Christians out there are just trying to be good and get by like anyone else. I understand and respect that. I just took issue with someone slipping an attack on atheists into a rant about actually ignorant people attacking things they don't understand. I'm sure you'll not like me saying this, but I bet that most atheists know more about Christianity than most Christians know about atheism. And Christians are the ones attacking atheists far more often.
1. Atheistic views are certainly transferred from parent to child just like "whacko" Christian ideas. OK. So, probably poor phrasing on my part. What I was trying to say is that most atheists didn't get the vertical transmission. Most Christians do. Undoubtedly there are some whose parents were atheists as well, but most atheists I've met don't fall in that category. (When I have kids they certainly will though.) I didn't say, nor intend to imply that Christians or their beliefs are "whacko" either. (There are some that are, but I know they aren't a majority.) I don't understand religion, but I'm not going to label a majority of the world's population as "whacko".
2. Atheists have equal capacity to Christians (or other religions) to be bigots. No doubt. All humans have equal capacity to be bigots. What I was responding to was the charge that ignorant atheists frequently go around trashing Christians. I don't remember any presidents saying Christians shouldn't be considered citizens. Or people saying that it's impossible for Christians to be moral. And if they did, they wouldn't get any mainstream atheist support. (Assuming there were an atheist "mainstream".)
I have to take great exception to a couple of your statements
self-righteous atheists who attack religous people.
For one, in my experience, it's almost always the other way around. In particular, one of the preferred attacks is to claim that atheists are always attacking them and trying to repress their beliefs, which is laughable in a country like the US where 80%+ of people are Christians, and an open atheist stands no chance of getting elected to national office. There is a minority of new atheists who are obnoxious asshats, but they usually calm down after a while, and they're no worse than born-again Christians, who (on the other hand) tend to never get less shrill.
Its usually the least informed who have the most to say.
For another thing, most atheists I know are quite familiar with the commmon arguments for and against the existence of God and knows at least a bit about the history of Christianity and the Bible. (Often weak on other religions, but hey, Christians are the majority religion here and are often big proselytizers.) Atheism is not a position most people come to passively or inherit from their parents -- unlike most religions. The atheists I know are well read, thoughtful, rational, highly informed people.
I call bullshit. Slackware was a floppy only distro until release 3 or 4.
I have a slackware CD I bought in 1995 with a book (Linux Configuration and Installation by Patrick Volkerding, Kevin Reichard, and Eric F. Johnson. ISBN 1-55828-426-5) that has Slackware 2.3.0. The book is the first edition, so it may very well be the first one on CD, but there may have even been earlier CDs.
It's a shame apt-get doesn't have something like a switch to select between "guaranteed stable", "probably stable", and "bleeding edge".
You can do that, but it takes a more sophisticated user and some reading to figure out. (Something I've been too lazy to do.) apt-get has a -t flag that lets you choose which distribution to grab from (e.g. apt-get -t unstable install package). There's also something called pinning, where you edit your sources.list and assign different values to different distributions. I know Knoppix makes use of this to do a mix of stable, testing, and unstable packages. There's a bit of an explanation of it here. If you have multiple distributions in your sources.list, synaptic lets you choose which available version of a package you want as well.
That being said, I've never tried these things myself, so I don't know if mixing distributions leads to dependency hell or what. Maybe it's great, maybe a huge pain.
It was common knowledge for educated people at the time of Columbus to know the world was not flat.
See the Wikipedia article on Columbus. He thought the circumference of Earth was 25,255 km (based on some odd theories and weird math), but it's more like 40,000 km, which had been known (modulo some later minor corrections) since Eratosthenes calculated it around 240 BCE.
most of the interstate highways that I've traveled were concrete and asphalt only where temporary patches were made
Where do you live? I live in Columbus, OH and have driven regularly to southeast Minnesota (via IN, IL, WI on I-71, I-70, I-465, I-74, I-51, and I-90) and to Rochester, NY (via PA on I-71, I-271, I-90, and I-390) and the only concrete bits I see are bridges.
let's say one researcher costs $100,000 then they can pay for 62,000 people doing R&D? This is ridiculous!!! I don't believe a word!
You're forgetting support staff, administrative staff, machine costs, cost to either rent or build office space, etc. Not to mention that benefits for employees are going to cost around as much as their salaries, give or take. With researchers, you also have to pay to send them to conferences so their work gets heard. And don't forget that Microsoft Research sponsors a number of conferences. I know they are a sponsor of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) annual conference, for one.
Why Ohio? Seriously. I don't know enough about our neighbor to the south-west (past the stereotypes), but it's not like Ohio is a state full of uneducated ultra-conservatives. The really conservative middle American states (The Dakotas, Kansas, etc.) think Ohioans are a bunch of East Coast Liberals. With the exception of Cincinnati, the major urban areas in Ohio *are* pretty liberal. It's just that they get balanced out and overtaken by the rich suburbs and the (ever shrinking number of) farmers. And as for lowbrow, you can't throw a damn rock without hitting a college or university in Ohio. I'm sick of people who don't know anything about the state imagining that we're a bunch of drooling hick farmers. It's a small (34th in size), densely popluated (7th highest) state, therefore largely urban.
Meh. No point in getting angry at a troll. But still. Meh.
as I understand it, they don't have v either. They use B. (at least in the language books I read)
In katakana, they have created a set of v sounds by taking u, adding voicing marks, and then subscripting an a, i, u, e, or o. So, they can make va, vi, vu, ve, and vo. The title of Evangelion is written in Japanese with the katakana va. (I wish you could use characters outside ISO 8859 on slashdot.) Of course, Japanese people over a certain age are pretty much not going to be able to make the v sound, but younger Japanese can, although it's going to take some effort for them to not just make a b.
Are you sure you're not thinking of "yoi," which is the root of yoku, yokatta, etc.? I'm pretty sure there's never been kana for "yi."
Hmm. Wikipedia agrees with you that there has never been a kana for "yi". Somewhere along the line someone told me that in Classical Japanese "yi" did exist and that the irregular conjugation of "ii" involves an old paradigm that's no longer productive, where the final mora of an adjective was Ci for present affirmative and Co for past and some other vowel changes I don't remember. (with C standing in for any consonant.) I have no means of substantiating that, so for all I know I could've just been fed a story. Man, I wish I took enough Japanese that I could've taken Classical Japanese.
The sounds Wii (We) are illogicaly difficult in Japanese as well. The character for wi existed in hiragana and katakana until after WWII when the Ministry of Education obsoleted wi and we because they had come to be pronounced [i] and [e]. The same thing is happening to wo (it's becoming pronounced [o] in running speech), but they keep it because it's useful as a particle.
Wii would almost certainly be changed to Rii(Ree). Uh, no. I'm not sure where you'd get that.
I guess it could be a katakana Wa with mini kakatakana i.
The accepted way to make "wi" in Japanese (since the post-WWII language reforms) is "ui", or rather an 'u' with a subscript 'i'.
Yes, "wii" is the way that nobles in the Sendai region used to say "ii" or "good."
That's clever and all, but "ii" used to be "yi", which itself is long obsoleted. So... nevermind, I guess. Run with people in Sendai saying "wi". That sounds cool.
Wait a minute... context doesn't change the harmless gaffe, he *did* say he was a jelly donut. I believe dropping the "ein" would have corrected it.
I've asked several Germans about this. All of them have said something along the lines of "Everyone knew exactly what he meant. If someone (usually not a native speaker) pointed out that it could mean 'I am a donut', then you'd think 'Oh yeah. I guess it could.'" Yes, a native Berliner would say "Ich bin Berliner", but the "I am a donut" reading of "Ich bin ein Berliner" is so inplausible, especially in context, that it's just not something that crossed people's minds.
Wouldn't it be great if Safari had really good ad-blocking features?!
Have you tried out Pith Helmet? It's not Apple official, and it asks for a $10 registration fee now and then if you haven't registred (but doesn't cripple itself if you don't ever pay), but it does a really good job.
I hope this isn't getting too off-topic, but you are the second person in this thread to quote the exact number of 1945 kanji symbols.
Is this just a natural number which falls out of being adequate for proficiency, or is it a somewhat arbitrary value? I assume it's a specific, standardized set that covers all the basics, or is that an over-simplification?
Yes, there is a set of kanji called the Jouyou Kanji ('General Use Kanji') that has been established by the Ministry of Education. Theoretically, these are the only kanji that are allowed to be used in newspapers and magazines, although there are exceptions for kanji used for people's names that fall outside the set. They are arranged into grade levels: 76 for first grade, 145 for 2nd grade, 195 for each of 3rd, 4th, 5th, 190 for 6th, and then 949 more you're expected to know by the end of high school.
I don't know where you can try Linux in a retail outlet
Microcenter has PC's running Linspire (or is it Xandros?) in their prebuilt PC section, at least in the Columbus, OH store. I'm not seeing them online though.
Slashdot Mirror
The use of "they" as a generic pronoun with a singular antecedent goes back at least to Middle English and has been used by many of the best writers of the English language. The idea that it is "incorrect" is a modern notion promulgated by people who believe there's some sort of Platonic perfect English out in the aether somewhere and only human failings keep us from reaching this ideal.
The better way to determine usage is to look at distribution in actual use (see The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language), not lists of pet peeves of Victorian and Edwardian era English professors and writers in book form *cough*Strunk & White*cough*.
Sorry. Somehow I didn't see that you found it yourself.
For some reason, they've moved to www.windowmaker.info. If you look, the last release was 0.92 in July '05, and they have a month old news item apologizing for the downtime and announcing they are (mostly) back.
Is this a joke?
;)
Uh, no.
Are you honestly suggesting that your posting was somehow not self righteous
Yup. I do my best to be an honest and moral person, but I definitely don't feel any righteousness, self or otherwise.
OK. I'll admit this: I do feel snarky most of the time though.
and that you don't attack Christians?
Not last time I checked. Most Christians out there are just trying to be good and get by like anyone else. I understand and respect that. I just took issue with someone slipping an attack on atheists into a rant about actually ignorant people attacking things they don't understand. I'm sure you'll not like me saying this, but I bet that most atheists know more about Christianity than most Christians know about atheism. And Christians are the ones attacking atheists far more often.
1. Atheistic views are certainly transferred from parent to child just like "whacko" Christian ideas.
OK. So, probably poor phrasing on my part. What I was trying to say is that most atheists didn't get the vertical transmission. Most Christians do. Undoubtedly there are some whose parents were atheists as well, but most atheists I've met don't fall in that category. (When I have kids they certainly will though.) I didn't say, nor intend to imply that Christians or their beliefs are "whacko" either. (There are some that are, but I know they aren't a majority.) I don't understand religion, but I'm not going to label a majority of the world's population as "whacko".
2. Atheists have equal capacity to Christians (or other religions) to be bigots.
No doubt. All humans have equal capacity to be bigots. What I was responding to was the charge that ignorant atheists frequently go around trashing Christians. I don't remember any presidents saying Christians shouldn't be considered citizens. Or people saying that it's impossible for Christians to be moral. And if they did, they wouldn't get any mainstream atheist support. (Assuming there were an atheist "mainstream".)
I have to take great exception to a couple of your statements
self-righteous atheists who attack religous people.
For one, in my experience, it's almost always the other way around. In particular, one of the preferred attacks is to claim that atheists are always attacking them and trying to repress their beliefs, which is laughable in a country like the US where 80%+ of people are Christians, and an open atheist stands no chance of getting elected to national office. There is a minority of new atheists who are obnoxious asshats, but they usually calm down after a while, and they're no worse than born-again Christians, who (on the other hand) tend to never get less shrill.
Its usually the least informed who have the most to say.
For another thing, most atheists I know are quite familiar with the commmon arguments for and against the existence of God and knows at least a bit about the history of Christianity and the Bible. (Often weak on other religions, but hey, Christians are the majority religion here and are often big proselytizers.) Atheism is not a position most people come to passively or inherit from their parents -- unlike most religions. The atheists I know are well read, thoughtful, rational, highly informed people.
I call bullshit. Slackware was a floppy only distro until release 3 or 4.
I have a slackware CD I bought in 1995 with a book (Linux Configuration and Installation by Patrick Volkerding, Kevin Reichard, and Eric F. Johnson. ISBN 1-55828-426-5) that has Slackware 2.3.0. The book is the first edition, so it may very well be the first one on CD, but there may have even been earlier CDs.
It's a shame apt-get doesn't have something like a switch to select between "guaranteed stable", "probably stable", and "bleeding edge".
You can do that, but it takes a more sophisticated user and some reading to figure out. (Something I've been too lazy to do.) apt-get has a -t flag that lets you choose which distribution to grab from (e.g. apt-get -t unstable install package). There's also something called pinning, where you edit your sources.list and assign different values to different distributions. I know Knoppix makes use of this to do a mix of stable, testing, and unstable packages. There's a bit of an explanation of it here. If you have multiple distributions in your sources.list, synaptic lets you choose which available version of a package you want as well.
That being said, I've never tried these things myself, so I don't know if mixing distributions leads to dependency hell or what. Maybe it's great, maybe a huge pain.
It was common knowledge for educated people at the time of Columbus to know the world was not flat.
See the Wikipedia article on Columbus. He thought the circumference of Earth was 25,255 km (based on some odd theories and weird math), but it's more like 40,000 km, which had been known (modulo some later minor corrections) since Eratosthenes calculated it around 240 BCE.
most of the interstate highways that I've traveled were concrete and asphalt only where temporary patches were made
Where do you live? I live in Columbus, OH and have driven regularly to southeast Minnesota (via IN, IL, WI on I-71, I-70, I-465, I-74, I-51, and I-90) and to Rochester, NY (via PA on I-71, I-271, I-90, and I-390) and the only concrete bits I see are bridges.
let's say one researcher costs $100,000 then they can pay for 62,000 people doing R&D? This is ridiculous!!! I don't believe a word!
You're forgetting support staff, administrative staff, machine costs, cost to either rent or build office space, etc. Not to mention that benefits for employees are going to cost around as much as their salaries, give or take. With researchers, you also have to pay to send them to conferences so their work gets heard. And don't forget that Microsoft Research sponsors a number of conferences. I know they are a sponsor of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) annual conference, for one.
Why Ohio? Seriously. I don't know enough about our neighbor to the south-west (past the stereotypes), but it's not like Ohio is a state full of uneducated ultra-conservatives. The really conservative middle American states (The Dakotas, Kansas, etc.) think Ohioans are a bunch of East Coast Liberals. With the exception of Cincinnati, the major urban areas in Ohio *are* pretty liberal. It's just that they get balanced out and overtaken by the rich suburbs and the (ever shrinking number of) farmers. And as for lowbrow, you can't throw a damn rock without hitting a college or university in Ohio. I'm sick of people who don't know anything about the state imagining that we're a bunch of drooling hick farmers. It's a small (34th in size), densely popluated (7th highest) state, therefore largely urban.
Meh. No point in getting angry at a troll. But still. Meh.
Yes, Dominic Giampaolo works at Apple and is in charge of filesystems there.
In modern Japanese, "wa" is a valid mora, but "wi," "wu," "we," and "wo" are not.
wo is still a valid mora, albeit a dying one. In practice it comes out o in running speech, but in careful speech many Japanese would still say wo.
as I understand it, they don't have v either. They use B. (at least in the language books I read)
In katakana, they have created a set of v sounds by taking u, adding voicing marks, and then subscripting an a, i, u, e, or o. So, they can make va, vi, vu, ve, and vo. The title of Evangelion is written in Japanese with the katakana va. (I wish you could use characters outside ISO 8859 on slashdot.) Of course, Japanese people over a certain age are pretty much not going to be able to make the v sound, but younger Japanese can, although it's going to take some effort for them to not just make a b.
Are you sure you're not thinking of "yoi," which is the root of yoku, yokatta, etc.? I'm pretty sure there's never been kana for "yi."
Hmm. Wikipedia agrees with you that there has never been a kana for "yi". Somewhere along the line someone told me that in Classical Japanese "yi" did exist and that the irregular conjugation of "ii" involves an old paradigm that's no longer productive, where the final mora of an adjective was Ci for present affirmative and Co for past and some other vowel changes I don't remember. (with C standing in for any consonant.) I have no means of substantiating that, so for all I know I could've just been fed a story. Man, I wish I took enough Japanese that I could've taken Classical Japanese.
The sounds Wii (We) are illogicaly difficult in Japanese as well.
The character for wi existed in hiragana and katakana until after WWII when the Ministry of Education obsoleted wi and we because they had come to be pronounced [i] and [e]. The same thing is happening to wo (it's becoming pronounced [o] in running speech), but they keep it because it's useful as a particle.
Wii would almost certainly be changed to Rii(Ree).
Uh, no. I'm not sure where you'd get that.
I guess it could be a katakana Wa with mini kakatakana i.
The accepted way to make "wi" in Japanese (since the post-WWII language reforms) is "ui", or rather an 'u' with a subscript 'i'.
English is the only language I know where "i" has somehow come to be pronounced "ay"
Blame the Great Vowel Shift.
Yes, "wii" is the way that nobles in the Sendai region used to say "ii" or "good."
That's clever and all, but "ii" used to be "yi", which itself is long obsoleted. So... nevermind, I guess. Run with people in Sendai saying "wi". That sounds cool.
Wait a minute... context doesn't change the harmless gaffe, he *did* say he was a jelly donut. I believe dropping the "ein" would have corrected it.
I've asked several Germans about this. All of them have said something along the lines of "Everyone knew exactly what he meant. If someone (usually not a native speaker) pointed out that it could mean 'I am a donut', then you'd think 'Oh yeah. I guess it could.'" Yes, a native Berliner would say "Ich bin Berliner", but the "I am a donut" reading of "Ich bin ein Berliner" is so inplausible, especially in context, that it's just not something that crossed people's minds.
Wouldn't it be great if Safari had really good ad-blocking features?!
Have you tried out Pith Helmet? It's not Apple official, and it asks for a $10 registration fee now and then if you haven't registred (but doesn't cripple itself if you don't ever pay), but it does a really good job.
I hope this isn't getting too off-topic, but you are the second person in this thread to quote the exact number of 1945 kanji symbols.
Is this just a natural number which falls out of being adequate for proficiency, or is it a somewhat arbitrary value? I assume it's a specific, standardized set that covers all the basics, or is that an over-simplification?
Yes, there is a set of kanji called the Jouyou Kanji ('General Use Kanji') that has been established by the Ministry of Education. Theoretically, these are the only kanji that are allowed to be used in newspapers and magazines, although there are exceptions for kanji used for people's names that fall outside the set. They are arranged into grade levels: 76 for first grade, 145 for 2nd grade, 195 for each of 3rd, 4th, 5th, 190 for 6th, and then 949 more you're expected to know by the end of high school.
And anyway, this is an English web site. We use the English alphabet. The spelling was correct as an anglicized version.
Actually, the correct way to handle ø if you don't have it is 'oe', so 'Ivarsoey' would be more correct.
I don't know where you can try Linux in a retail outlet
Microcenter has PC's running Linspire (or is it Xandros?) in their prebuilt PC section, at least in the Columbus, OH store. I'm not seeing them online though.
SuSE - zu-zuh
Ubuntu - oo-BOON-too