It's a good thing no engineer has ever been able to improve on a hacked-together prototype built in some guy's garage with improved/new components, otherwise you'd look really stupid.
A better rebuttal: Old growth forests (like those deforested from the New World) have ZERO net impact on carbon dioxide levels. A mature forest releases as much carbon dioxide (from decaying organic matter) as it releases into the atmosphere. Removing a mature forest would have minimal impact on carbon dioxide levels.
Of course, I did not RTFA, so maybe the summary is just retarded.
Yes, I'm sure it's because coal miners would riot and not because of the thousands of other, more serious, financial and technological hurdles that would have to be overcome.
99% of people in the US would have no idea. The OMB is not a significant or well-known office. The GAO and the CBO are much better known (and more important) and still 99% of people in the US would have no idea what those are (Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office--both responsible for statistical analyses that study the efficiency and effectiveness of current and proposed government spending, respectively).
Maybe you've heard of this thing called NATO where most of those countries are guaranteed US military assistance if attacked? As in, declaring war on them IS declaring war on the US?
Because point and click is slow. Hell, I'd already long since switch to launchers like quicksilver on mac, and gnome-do in previous versions of gnome. Even Unity is better--super key+three letters+enter almost always gets me the right program faster than I could even move the cursor to the menu with my touchpad.
Any desktop manager that forces me to do every task the slowest possible way should be considered a failure. I use my computer to get work done, not to waste my time dragging my finger across the touchpad.
But the key is that he actively worked around his handicap (for lack of a better word). Many such instructors (I had two in my college math courses) do not.
That's the EU, not the US. In the US requiring workers to be clean shaven EXCEPT for religious reasons is allowed. You can't force the Muslims to shave, but you can force everyone else to (Minus other religions that require beards...you get the idea). Gender specific dress codes are definitely legal in the US--or else they'd have to ban strip clubs. Likewise with the tutu: not a problem.
Yeah, you can say that, and you're technically correct, but your actual point is simply wrong. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was put in place by a Democratic administration with the overwhelming support of the Republican party over the screaming objections of a significant minority of the Democratic party. The reality is that the vote in Congress was strictly North vs South. It had nothing to do with political party membership (as another replier to your post has pointed out). At that time the Republican Party was the party of the North, the Democrats of the South and North. The Southern Democrats left the Democratic Party because of that law, and joined the Republican party, took over it from the pre-1964 Republicans, and made it the monstrosity it is today.
So yes, the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because there were so many of them that the Republicans were irrelevant to the vote (you'll notice from one of your other repliers that there were 67 Democrats in the Senate and just shy of 50 voted for the act, but the Republicans voted yes by a larger margin--their votes just didn't matter as much because they were such a minority party). The Democrats did NOT pass the act over the objections of Republicans, they passed it over the objections of other Democrats.
In short, talking about the pre-1968 parties (the shift began in 1964, continued in 1968, and was more or less finalized by the election of 1972) as if they were the same parties as today is moronic.
(which I do not accept 100% because if we are capable of learning new words, we are certainly all capable of learning new and correct ways to say them)
Capable does not mean that it is easy on any given time scale. The time scale required will vary substantially from person to person, regardless of effort (and some may not realize the effort required of them). None of this means they are being lazy--some may simply have extreme difficulty (as dyslexic people have great difficulty reading but are not incapable of it), some may not believe themselves capable (which is different from being lazy), etc.
it should be safer to say that people with such strong linguistic handicaps shouldn't be teaching in the first place. After all, some people are simply not suited to some occupations. I doubt you would disagree with me were we talking about who should be a medical doctor and who shouldn't. If there is something about a person which makes them more difficult to learn from, they shouldn't be teachers at all right?
I never disagreed with this. Just as I should not be a professional basketball player because I can't make a jump shot to save my life, people who cannot communicate effectively in a given language should not be teaching content in that language. I very much agree with that point.
What I vehemently disagree with is your arrogant claim that because other people have a harder time than you do learning new phonemes and languages that they are being lazy.
In reality, you can't have it both ways. So either they are lazy minded or they are actually incapable. In one instance, they can improve and keep being teachers, in the other they should stop being employed as teachers all together.
Of course I can because the world is not a binary dilemma. Learning alien (utterly unfamiliar) phonemes requires varying levels of effort (and thus time spans to master), and many people on the lower end of linguistic learning capability will not even know they have a problem with it (as many with learning disabilities never realize they have a problem and thus never know they should be trying--which is still not the same as being lazy).
Sure. But in my Multi-variable Calculus class that I need to pass to get into grad school, which one do you think I give a fuck about? Grad schools don't admit based on my ability to understand obscure Chinese accents, as useful as that skill may be. If you want to add a GE class on accent comprehension that's fine. I can see the use in that. I don't see the use in making already difficult content courses harder in the name of not hurting the instructor's feelings.
For being such an arrogant ass about the matter, you're awfully ignorant of linguistics and the neurology of language.
Most people undergo what is called phoneme solidification around puberty. After that time they have great difficulty learning to distinguish new phonemes. An example would be aspirated/unaspirated bilabial stops in English (the difference between the 'p' in public and the 'p' in stop). In Thai the two are completely different phonemes, but in English they are not. Most English speakers have a difficult time learning this feature of Thai. Another example is 'r' vs 'l' for most speakers of Japanese when learning English.
This is not laziness. For you to claim so just makes you look like an inconsiderate asshole. I'm surprised your filipina wife didn't machete you.
The reality is that for most people the brain structures involved in learning to distinguish phonemes solidify around puberty. This is why for most people learning new languages before puberty is trivial (put a four year-old in a room full of people speaking a language he/she doesn't know and he/she will learn it without explicit instruction), and afterwards is generally difficult.
Just because you're fortunate to be capable of learning languages more easily than most people doesn't mean that's normal, or that they're lazy. But it does mean you're an asshole.
It's a very good theory (I assume you're alluding to the 19th century Hydraulic Empires theory?) and one that imho goes a long way to explaining things, but are you really saying that sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have any great rivers akin to the other "cradles"? Any suitable areas for large-scale agriculture? Any areas where agriculture isn't more affective than being a hunter-gatherer? I don't think that's true at all and it also doesn't jibe with African history.
No, but/. cut off the rest of my comment talking about the things you mention next (pastoralism and agriculture in Southern Africa/West African civilizations circa AD 1000).
As for the theory, I'm sure I'm not the originator, but I have no idea where I got it from. It just seems trivially obvious that environment will determine the technological advancement of a civilization. It's somewhat more complicated than that, but it boils down to people not doing things they don't see as beneficial. Environment is a very big factor in determining which technologies are beneficial to a civilization (alongside cultural attitudes, and some others). Genetics are not a significant factor.
It may not be politically correct, but you also have to be a rather simple-minded fool to not be able to figure it out.
It's all about location, location, location.
Settled, agrarian, and technological civilizations arise in regions where farming is advantageous over hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Civilizations only progress as far as their environments encourage them to--if developing new technology costs more than the increase in production, it isn't done.
It's not a racial, or even a "head start" thing. Over history major civilizations crop up in the exact same places over, and over, and over. The Nile River Valley, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Indus, the Yangtze/Yellow River Valleys, etc. Virtually all major civilizations started along major rivers with extremely fertile land along their shores, and spread out from there. Europe only gained civilization because of the spread of technology and culture from the Middle-East (Nile/Tigris/Euphrates) regions into Europe. Africa didn't gain it (it did actually, but in a more limited way), because the Sahara made a hell one hell of a barrier to cultural exchange. Where there was exchange, however (along the East African coast in the Middle Ages in particu
No. The evolution of the hominid family is WAY more complex than that. Basically you have a set of inter-breeding semi-distinct populations from 4 million years ago all the way to circa 30,000 years ago (maybe even as late as 20,000 years ago based on some finds of neanderthal tools). All the way through most of the populations would have been genetically similar enough to interbreed successfully (especially after H. ergaster and H. erectus 2 million years ago). H. heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis, and sapiens likely all interbred. Neanderthals were Europeans descendants of an earlier H. ergaster or H. heidelbergensis exodus from Africa. Australian aboriginals, like all modern humans, would be predominantly H. sapiens, with differing traces from the interbreeding with earlier populations.
Moreover, you've misunderstood the data on the Cro Magnon man. Modern humans arrived in EUROPE (Cro-Magnon is the place in France where skeletons were found) 35,000 years ago (as best as we can tell). They appear in Africa almost 200,000 years ago, and in the Middle East before 60,000 years ago.
Not any credible anthropologists. There's way too much data showing symbolic thought to be older than that (to the extent it is present in other species, and thus likely dates back to a common ancestor). As for language itself, there is no good data on when that started--some have tried to estimate it based on approximate rates of phonemic change and how far back you'd have to go for all known languages to coalesce, but that approach is based on extremely specious assumptions (among them that language was created only once, and that it's creation was a distinct event instead of a gradual evolution from the less sophisticated systems of communication we see in other species).
What the fuck is wrong with slashdot? This is beyond obviously fake. I know four people who've named their wireless networks that. It's a goddamned meme.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a good thing no engineer has ever been able to improve on a hacked-together prototype built in some guy's garage with improved/new components, otherwise you'd look really stupid.
A better rebuttal: Old growth forests (like those deforested from the New World) have ZERO net impact on carbon dioxide levels. A mature forest releases as much carbon dioxide (from decaying organic matter) as it releases into the atmosphere. Removing a mature forest would have minimal impact on carbon dioxide levels.
Of course, I did not RTFA, so maybe the summary is just retarded.
Yes, I'm sure it's because coal miners would riot and not because of the thousands of other, more serious, financial and technological hurdles that would have to be overcome.
99% of people in the US would have no idea. The OMB is not a significant or well-known office. The GAO and the CBO are much better known (and more important) and still 99% of people in the US would have no idea what those are (Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office--both responsible for statistical analyses that study the efficiency and effectiveness of current and proposed government spending, respectively).
Maybe you've heard of this thing called NATO where most of those countries are guaranteed US military assistance if attacked? As in, declaring war on them IS declaring war on the US?
... or he could just punch you in the jeans.
Hey guys, look! There's a monkey jerking off in the corner which makes him more productive than either of you have been in this discussion!
May the people collectively say: Fuck you.
Because point and click is slow. Hell, I'd already long since switch to launchers like quicksilver on mac, and gnome-do in previous versions of gnome. Even Unity is better--super key+three letters+enter almost always gets me the right program faster than I could even move the cursor to the menu with my touchpad.
Any desktop manager that forces me to do every task the slowest possible way should be considered a failure. I use my computer to get work done, not to waste my time dragging my finger across the touchpad.
But the key is that he actively worked around his handicap (for lack of a better word). Many such instructors (I had two in my college math courses) do not.
That's the EU, not the US. In the US requiring workers to be clean shaven EXCEPT for religious reasons is allowed. You can't force the Muslims to shave, but you can force everyone else to (Minus other religions that require beards...you get the idea). Gender specific dress codes are definitely legal in the US--or else they'd have to ban strip clubs. Likewise with the tutu: not a problem.
Yeah, you can say that, and you're technically correct, but your actual point is simply wrong. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was put in place by a Democratic administration with the overwhelming support of the Republican party over the screaming objections of a significant minority of the Democratic party. The reality is that the vote in Congress was strictly North vs South. It had nothing to do with political party membership (as another replier to your post has pointed out). At that time the Republican Party was the party of the North, the Democrats of the South and North. The Southern Democrats left the Democratic Party because of that law, and joined the Republican party, took over it from the pre-1964 Republicans, and made it the monstrosity it is today.
So yes, the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because there were so many of them that the Republicans were irrelevant to the vote (you'll notice from one of your other repliers that there were 67 Democrats in the Senate and just shy of 50 voted for the act, but the Republicans voted yes by a larger margin--their votes just didn't matter as much because they were such a minority party). The Democrats did NOT pass the act over the objections of Republicans, they passed it over the objections of other Democrats.
In short, talking about the pre-1968 parties (the shift began in 1964, continued in 1968, and was more or less finalized by the election of 1972) as if they were the same parties as today is moronic.
(which I do not accept 100% because if we are capable of learning new words, we are certainly all capable of learning new and correct ways to say them)
Capable does not mean that it is easy on any given time scale. The time scale required will vary substantially from person to person, regardless of effort (and some may not realize the effort required of them). None of this means they are being lazy--some may simply have extreme difficulty (as dyslexic people have great difficulty reading but are not incapable of it), some may not believe themselves capable (which is different from being lazy), etc.
it should be safer to say that people with such strong linguistic handicaps shouldn't be teaching in the first place. After all, some people are simply not suited to some occupations. I doubt you would disagree with me were we talking about who should be a medical doctor and who shouldn't. If there is something about a person which makes them more difficult to learn from, they shouldn't be teachers at all right?
I never disagreed with this. Just as I should not be a professional basketball player because I can't make a jump shot to save my life, people who cannot communicate effectively in a given language should not be teaching content in that language. I very much agree with that point.
What I vehemently disagree with is your arrogant claim that because other people have a harder time than you do learning new phonemes and languages that they are being lazy.
In reality, you can't have it both ways. So either they are lazy minded or they are actually incapable. In one instance, they can improve and keep being teachers, in the other they should stop being employed as teachers all together.
Of course I can because the world is not a binary dilemma. Learning alien (utterly unfamiliar) phonemes requires varying levels of effort (and thus time spans to master), and many people on the lower end of linguistic learning capability will not even know they have a problem with it (as many with learning disabilities never realize they have a problem and thus never know they should be trying--which is still not the same as being lazy).
School teaches more than just the subject matter.
Sure. But in my Multi-variable Calculus class that I need to pass to get into grad school, which one do you think I give a fuck about? Grad schools don't admit based on my ability to understand obscure Chinese accents, as useful as that skill may be. If you want to add a GE class on accent comprehension that's fine. I can see the use in that. I don't see the use in making already difficult content courses harder in the name of not hurting the instructor's feelings.
For being such an arrogant ass about the matter, you're awfully ignorant of linguistics and the neurology of language.
Most people undergo what is called phoneme solidification around puberty. After that time they have great difficulty learning to distinguish new phonemes. An example would be aspirated/unaspirated bilabial stops in English (the difference between the 'p' in public and the 'p' in stop). In Thai the two are completely different phonemes, but in English they are not. Most English speakers have a difficult time learning this feature of Thai. Another example is 'r' vs 'l' for most speakers of Japanese when learning English.
This is not laziness. For you to claim so just makes you look like an inconsiderate asshole. I'm surprised your filipina wife didn't machete you.
The reality is that for most people the brain structures involved in learning to distinguish phonemes solidify around puberty. This is why for most people learning new languages before puberty is trivial (put a four year-old in a room full of people speaking a language he/she doesn't know and he/she will learn it without explicit instruction), and afterwards is generally difficult.
Just because you're fortunate to be capable of learning languages more easily than most people doesn't mean that's normal, or that they're lazy. But it does mean you're an asshole.
I'm probably the only person on /.who will point out that none of Shakespeare's works were written in paragraphs.
It's a very good theory (I assume you're alluding to the 19th century Hydraulic Empires theory?) and one that imho goes a long way to explaining things, but are you really saying that sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have any great rivers akin to the other "cradles"? Any suitable areas for large-scale agriculture? Any areas where agriculture isn't more affective than being a hunter-gatherer? I don't think that's true at all and it also doesn't jibe with African history.
No, but /. cut off the rest of my comment talking about the things you mention next (pastoralism and agriculture in Southern Africa/West African civilizations circa AD 1000).
As for the theory, I'm sure I'm not the originator, but I have no idea where I got it from. It just seems trivially obvious that environment will determine the technological advancement of a civilization. It's somewhat more complicated than that, but it boils down to people not doing things they don't see as beneficial. Environment is a very big factor in determining which technologies are beneficial to a civilization (alongside cultural attitudes, and some others). Genetics are not a significant factor.
It may not be politically correct, but you also have to be a rather simple-minded fool to not be able to figure it out.
It's all about location, location, location.
Settled, agrarian, and technological civilizations arise in regions where farming is advantageous over hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Civilizations only progress as far as their environments encourage them to--if developing new technology costs more than the increase in production, it isn't done.
It's not a racial, or even a "head start" thing. Over history major civilizations crop up in the exact same places over, and over, and over. The Nile River Valley, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Indus, the Yangtze/Yellow River Valleys, etc. Virtually all major civilizations started along major rivers with extremely fertile land along their shores, and spread out from there. Europe only gained civilization because of the spread of technology and culture from the Middle-East (Nile/Tigris/Euphrates) regions into Europe. Africa didn't gain it (it did actually, but in a more limited way), because the Sahara made a hell one hell of a barrier to cultural exchange. Where there was exchange, however (along the East African coast in the Middle Ages in particu
No. The evolution of the hominid family is WAY more complex than that. Basically you have a set of inter-breeding semi-distinct populations from 4 million years ago all the way to circa 30,000 years ago (maybe even as late as 20,000 years ago based on some finds of neanderthal tools). All the way through most of the populations would have been genetically similar enough to interbreed successfully (especially after H. ergaster and H. erectus 2 million years ago). H. heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis, and sapiens likely all interbred. Neanderthals were Europeans descendants of an earlier H. ergaster or H. heidelbergensis exodus from Africa. Australian aboriginals, like all modern humans, would be predominantly H. sapiens, with differing traces from the interbreeding with earlier populations.
Moreover, you've misunderstood the data on the Cro Magnon man. Modern humans arrived in EUROPE (Cro-Magnon is the place in France where skeletons were found) 35,000 years ago (as best as we can tell). They appear in Africa almost 200,000 years ago, and in the Middle East before 60,000 years ago.
Not any credible anthropologists. There's way too much data showing symbolic thought to be older than that (to the extent it is present in other species, and thus likely dates back to a common ancestor). As for language itself, there is no good data on when that started--some have tried to estimate it based on approximate rates of phonemic change and how far back you'd have to go for all known languages to coalesce, but that approach is based on extremely specious assumptions (among them that language was created only once, and that it's creation was a distinct event instead of a gradual evolution from the less sophisticated systems of communication we see in other species).
Would the real /. please stand up? Please stand up.
I bet you believe in bird flight omens too.
Setting aside the fact that he wasn't arrested by the FBI, there is such a thing is pure, banal coincidence.
Oh wait, it's samzenpus. I get it. I done been trolled.
What the fuck is wrong with slashdot? This is beyond obviously fake. I know four people who've named their wireless networks that. It's a goddamned meme.
Freudian slips, all of them, I'm sure.