There are places in Florida and California where you can't buy a beer without knowing Spanish, and there are Mexican restaurants here in Springfield where it's helpful to know Spanish, because the people who work there barely speak a smattering of English. My Spanish classes have been useful.
The main reason however to teach foreign human languages to children is because we know from childhood development research that a child that learns a second language at a young age is vastly more capable of learning new languages as an adult.
My late friend Ralph Weibe, who was a WWII veteran in the US Navy, was born in Russia. His parents had moved there from Germany to escape WWI, and moved to Oklahoma to escape Russia.
When Ralph was six and went to first grade, they sent him home with a note pinned to his shirt saying he needed to speak English; all he knew was German. His English had no German accent, he had an Oklahoma accent.
A co-worker who moved here from Nigeria at age 20 had a thick French accent after being here thirty years.
They should teach BASIC or some other simple programming or scripting language maybe in the third grade. People should know how their tools work.
Unfortunately, not many people I met from English-speaking countries can pronounce other languages indistinguishable from a native speaker, for some weird ass reason, while the opposite is not the case.
That's not been my experience. I met no one in Thailand who spoke English like an American or Brit or Australian, and the Hispanics I've met who weren't born here have all but a few had accents. Meanwhile, when I worked at Disney many South American tourists thought I was a native speaker. Perhaps it's because I was taught Spanish by a Mexican. I worked with a fellow who was born and raised in Nigeria, after living here 20 years he still spoke with a thick French accent. I suspect that his English teacher's native tongue was French.
Also, there are regional accents in international languages like Spanish and English where speakers are widely scattered. A Puerto Rican has a different accent in Spanish than a Mexican, just as one can tell an Australian from a Brit or an American.
Can you really study another culture without knowing some of their language?
No. It's hard enough to understand aliens if you do speak their language. For example, I was stationed in Thailand for a year and learned a lot of their language, which completely lacks the concept of evil. How can you study something that lacks a word that you have no concept of? Likewise, other languages have words and concepts that ours lacks that we sometimes borrow from other languages, like the per se the GP misspelled.
Likewise, it's a lot easier to learn a language if you're immersed in the culture. I took Spanish class in school for three years (taught by a native Mexican) but was more fluent in Thai with only an English-Thai dictionary after living there a single year.
I'm illiterate in Thai, they have a completely different alphabet than ours; not just one or two characters like Spanish or Russian but every single mark. Spanish, OTOH, is easy to read. It's a far more structured and logical language than English, which I'll bet is a bitch to learn if you weren't raised speaking it.
You could do that as long as you intend to never change it. My old sites are there, although they're not complete. But who hangs on to a completely static page?
First, archive.org won't keep anything you don't want them to -- DMCA. Second, you must have never been to archive.org; there's a banner at the top telling you it's archive.org and from the banner you can access earlier versions of the file.
Methinks a moderator needs more coffee, that wasn't offtopic. Let me explain the parent's point, since at least one person was too dense to understand.
The GP said "when a page is gone it should be gone", WHY? That's insane. Say you want to get out that old Quake game and want to look up console commands. You're not going to find that great site because it lapsed a decade ago (the parent used beermaking as his example).
The suggestion is that when you click that bookmark you saved a decade ago, rather than a 404 you get archive.org's copy. However, this might not work in some situations, like when a site is abandoned and someone else registers the name.
If you don't want your site archived, they'll take their copy down.
Windows has to be rebooted every single time any patch at all is applied to any part of Windows and every single time a program is installed or uninstalled. Linux only has to be rebooted when the kernel is replaced, and it's been a while since I've seen that. Almost all Linux patches require a single click, no reboots, no nagging.
I don't know, Pepsi and Coke are almost the same, especially from a fountain. I'd say it's the difference between a Pinto and a... excuse me, this win7 notebook wants me to restart it to apply patches... a Pinto and a Lincoln Continental.
Windows is the Pinto. I haven't tried Xubuntu, but Mandriva and kubuntu both have all the features of Windows while Windows lacks features, but Windows does have annoying traits (like having to reboot to apply patches) that Linux doesn't.
You seem to be arguing in favor of the Chinese room.
You can open the door to the Chinese Room and discover the guy who can't speak Chinese; you can never truly "open" a computational oracle, or a mind. If something quacks like an intelligence it is, insofar as we don't know how it works -- the only useful definition of "intelligence: is "that which behaves rationally but we don't know how."
But I do know how a computer works. I wrote a fake AI program in 1982 in a 1 mHz Z-80 16K RAM computer that did fool people who didn't know how computers work into thinking it was sentient.
There is no such thing as a "computational oracle". You cannot build a thing that nobody understands. Without knowledge of how a radio works you can't build a radio without detailed instructions from someone who does know.
The moment we discover how something works, it ceases to be conscious.
I don't buy that. When we discover all the brain's secrets we stop being conscious? It makes no sense to me.
clearly the intelligence is in the guy who wrote him the rules.
Bingo. The machine possesses no intelligence, the illusion of intelligence is simply the programmer's cleverness.
A person isn't a neuron and a billion people are not a billion neurons any more than a billion mechanical calculators are neurons. Two or a billion, if they don't know Chinese the symbols are manipulated mechanically; there is no thought.
Cars? Depending on the resolution (and they are using nanoparticles, while film used grains of silver) we're looking towards having holographic computer displays in the near (?) future.
The way a hologram (that uses film) works is, you take a laser and a dark room and unexposed film. IIRC (and it's been almost four decades since I took that class) you split the beam, and illuminate the film with one half of the beam (focused IIRC) and the subject with the other.
When you develop the film there's nothing recognizable on it at all, just refraction patterns. Shine a laser at it and it changes to a grainy 3D, but a true 3d. Focus your eye at the foreground and the background gets fuzzy, move from side to side and see different views.
A holographic computer display would need a freakishly high resolution LCD panel backlit by three lasers, each tuned to a primary color. Maybe these silver nanoparticles are the ticket?
Crap, I could have saved a lot of writing with a link to wikipedia, which is most likely more accurate and surely more detailed. Hell, google if you're interested.
Yes, I agree that every distro of Linux I've tried was incredibly easy to install (and every version of Windows a PITA), but my point is that Joe is ignorant. You can't install something you've never heard of, and Joe's never heard of Linux or has a clue what an "operating system" or a "botnet" is. If he's heard of Linux he probably sees it as "some kind of hacker thing, my buddy reset my XP admin password for me with it."
Right, but decoding is just the translation from one symbology into another, it doesn't create a semantic relationship
When I read a novel I don't hear the words in my head or even notice them on the paper. I see, hear, and feel the characters and what they do and say. The abstract symbols on the paper are decoded to concrete events and ideas.
only humans will be able to give the effect of the loop final meaning. All the program can do is keep juggling symbols back and forth according to what can be reduced to automatic production rules.
That's because humans can read and computers can't. Even a text to speech program can't read, it can only juggle the written symbols and the auditory symbols. A human can not only read the code, a human can understand out what that code does when it runs. A computer can't.
Kurzweil is a damned fine engineer, but he doesn't have a clue about the brain. He's obviously never heard of the Chinese Room (it appears you in fact have).
People like him who think computers will be sentient are dangerous.
It was a movie, written by two guys who learned everything they know about computers from AKIRA and 2001 A Space Odyssey
True, it was only an illustration. But think of an incredibly simple program, like an analog clock on your computer screen. Depending on the language and your expertise you could little more than glance at it and imagine the clock it would draw. When you write a program you certainly have to envision what the output will be.
And HAL is bothersome because HAL isn't, in fact, any more sentient than Watson. It's just a Chinese room that does a good job of fooling a sentient being that it is, when it isn't. People are going to push for equal rights for computers... Frank Herbert touched on this in Dune, when "intelligent machines" were used by unscrupulous men to enslave others (leading to the jihad and outlawing of intelligent machines).
They were calling computers "electronic brains" when a building-sized machine was less powerful than a musical Hallmark card. It worries me, because they're not brains. They're tools and toys.
What you guys are missing is that you're decoding the words on the screen right now. Reading just doesn't feel like decoding, especially if you're any good at it at all.
My daughter is like that with sheet music. Give her a clarinet and sheet music for a song she never heard and she'll just play it. I decode musical notation like a five year old decodes Dr. Suess, she reads music like I read books.
I use to write software, first as a hobby and later compiled PC databases and NOMAD mainframe coding at work (actually, they gave me training then changed my job, I never wrote any production NOMAD). Now I write books in my spare time (which I'll have more of as I'm retiring soon). Even though dBase and NOMAD are very, very similar in the way they operate (think C and C+), I don't think I read NOMAD code like I did dBase or assembly or BASIC, because reading is different than writing.
I keep thinking of the Matrix programmers. "I only see blondes, brunettes, redheads..."
D - its irrelevant because we should learn to adapt and get over ourselves.
It isn't us that is going extinct in our present day extinction level event. We'll live, just not as well. Elephants and blue whales are nearly extinct now; elephants are the biggest animals walking, and blue whales are the biggest animals this planet has ever seen. We've destroyed the elephants' habitats and hunted the blues to their embarrassingly low numbers.
Not since the anaerobic bacteria killed themselves by poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen has any species had a bigger impact on the Earth than modern man.
Rather than "getting over ourselves" we need to start acting like responsible adults rather selfish children.
I wish I'd run across this comment metamoderating, because that moderation is wrong. By no definition of the word is that comment a troll, it's a polite, reasoned opinion.
A full suite of programming languages? Kids today are spoiled, what's wrong with assembly? I mean, besides the fact that 8086 assembly is a pain in the ass compared to a Z-80 or 6802?
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There are places in Florida and California where you can't buy a beer without knowing Spanish, and there are Mexican restaurants here in Springfield where it's helpful to know Spanish, because the people who work there barely speak a smattering of English. My Spanish classes have been useful.
The main reason however to teach foreign human languages to children is because we know from childhood development research that a child that learns a second language at a young age is vastly more capable of learning new languages as an adult.
My late friend Ralph Weibe, who was a WWII veteran in the US Navy, was born in Russia. His parents had moved there from Germany to escape WWI, and moved to Oklahoma to escape Russia.
When Ralph was six and went to first grade, they sent him home with a note pinned to his shirt saying he needed to speak English; all he knew was German. His English had no German accent, he had an Oklahoma accent.
A co-worker who moved here from Nigeria at age 20 had a thick French accent after being here thirty years.
They should teach BASIC or some other simple programming or scripting language maybe in the third grade. People should know how their tools work.
Unfortunately, not many people I met from English-speaking countries can pronounce other languages indistinguishable from a native speaker, for some weird ass reason, while the opposite is not the case.
That's not been my experience. I met no one in Thailand who spoke English like an American or Brit or Australian, and the Hispanics I've met who weren't born here have all but a few had accents. Meanwhile, when I worked at Disney many South American tourists thought I was a native speaker. Perhaps it's because I was taught Spanish by a Mexican. I worked with a fellow who was born and raised in Nigeria, after living here 20 years he still spoke with a thick French accent. I suspect that his English teacher's native tongue was French.
Also, there are regional accents in international languages like Spanish and English where speakers are widely scattered. A Puerto Rican has a different accent in Spanish than a Mexican, just as one can tell an Australian from a Brit or an American.
Can you really study another culture without knowing some of their language?
No. It's hard enough to understand aliens if you do speak their language. For example, I was stationed in Thailand for a year and learned a lot of their language, which completely lacks the concept of evil. How can you study something that lacks a word that you have no concept of? Likewise, other languages have words and concepts that ours lacks that we sometimes borrow from other languages, like the per se the GP misspelled.
Likewise, it's a lot easier to learn a language if you're immersed in the culture. I took Spanish class in school for three years (taught by a native Mexican) but was more fluent in Thai with only an English-Thai dictionary after living there a single year.
I'm illiterate in Thai, they have a completely different alphabet than ours; not just one or two characters like Spanish or Russian but every single mark. Spanish, OTOH, is easy to read. It's a far more structured and logical language than English, which I'll bet is a bitch to learn if you weren't raised speaking it.
I speak a few languages. BASIC, assembler, dBase, NOMAD, javascript, English, Spanish, Thai, and Kentuckian.
There's one on their main page. Google site:archive.org works, too.
You could do that as long as you intend to never change it. My old sites are there, although they're not complete. But who hangs on to a completely static page?
Heck they just may no longer be in business anymore, and doesn't want people to think they are.
Have you never used the wayback machine? They leave no doubt where you are.
But we also have cases where we have a deliberate take down of information, due to legal, or personal reasons.
They won't archive anything you don't want archived.
Also the Last Page, may not be a good page to point to, as it may have been a victim of an attack and have harmful information on it.
Archive.org doesn't host malware.
First, archive.org won't keep anything you don't want them to -- DMCA. Second, you must have never been to archive.org; there's a banner at the top telling you it's archive.org and from the banner you can access earlier versions of the file.
Methinks a moderator needs more coffee, that wasn't offtopic. Let me explain the parent's point, since at least one person was too dense to understand.
The GP said "when a page is gone it should be gone", WHY? That's insane. Say you want to get out that old Quake game and want to look up console commands. You're not going to find that great site because it lapsed a decade ago (the parent used beermaking as his example).
Archive.org to the rescue.
The suggestion is that when you click that bookmark you saved a decade ago, rather than a 404 you get archive.org's copy. However, this might not work in some situations, like when a site is abandoned and someone else registers the name.
If you don't want your site archived, they'll take their copy down.
Windows has to be rebooted every single time any patch at all is applied to any part of Windows and every single time a program is installed or uninstalled. Linux only has to be rebooted when the kernel is replaced, and it's been a while since I've seen that. Almost all Linux patches require a single click, no reboots, no nagging.
I don't know, Pepsi and Coke are almost the same, especially from a fountain. I'd say it's the difference between a Pinto and a... excuse me, this win7 notebook wants me to restart it to apply patches... a Pinto and a Lincoln Continental.
Windows is the Pinto. I haven't tried Xubuntu, but Mandriva and kubuntu both have all the features of Windows while Windows lacks features, but Windows does have annoying traits (like having to reboot to apply patches) that Linux doesn't.
You seem to be arguing in favor of the Chinese room.
You can open the door to the Chinese Room and discover the guy who can't speak Chinese; you can never truly "open" a computational oracle, or a mind. If something quacks like an intelligence it is, insofar as we don't know how it works -- the only useful definition of "intelligence: is "that which behaves rationally but we don't know how."
But I do know how a computer works. I wrote a fake AI program in 1982 in a 1 mHz Z-80 16K RAM computer that did fool people who didn't know how computers work into thinking it was sentient.
There is no such thing as a "computational oracle". You cannot build a thing that nobody understands. Without knowledge of how a radio works you can't build a radio without detailed instructions from someone who does know.
The moment we discover how something works, it ceases to be conscious.
I don't buy that. When we discover all the brain's secrets we stop being conscious? It makes no sense to me.
clearly the intelligence is in the guy who wrote him the rules.
Bingo. The machine possesses no intelligence, the illusion of intelligence is simply the programmer's cleverness.
A person isn't a neuron and a billion people are not a billion neurons any more than a billion mechanical calculators are neurons. Two or a billion, if they don't know Chinese the symbols are manipulated mechanically; there is no thought.
Cars? Depending on the resolution (and they are using nanoparticles, while film used grains of silver) we're looking towards having holographic computer displays in the near (?) future.
The way a hologram (that uses film) works is, you take a laser and a dark room and unexposed film. IIRC (and it's been almost four decades since I took that class) you split the beam, and illuminate the film with one half of the beam (focused IIRC) and the subject with the other.
When you develop the film there's nothing recognizable on it at all, just refraction patterns. Shine a laser at it and it changes to a grainy 3D, but a true 3d. Focus your eye at the foreground and the background gets fuzzy, move from side to side and see different views.
A holographic computer display would need a freakishly high resolution LCD panel backlit by three lasers, each tuned to a primary color. Maybe these silver nanoparticles are the ticket?
Crap, I could have saved a lot of writing with a link to wikipedia, which is most likely more accurate and surely more detailed. Hell, google if you're interested.
Yes, I agree that every distro of Linux I've tried was incredibly easy to install (and every version of Windows a PITA), but my point is that Joe is ignorant. You can't install something you've never heard of, and Joe's never heard of Linux or has a clue what an "operating system" or a "botnet" is. If he's heard of Linux he probably sees it as "some kind of hacker thing, my buddy reset my XP admin password for me with it."
Right, but decoding is just the translation from one symbology into another, it doesn't create a semantic relationship
When I read a novel I don't hear the words in my head or even notice them on the paper. I see, hear, and feel the characters and what they do and say. The abstract symbols on the paper are decoded to concrete events and ideas.
only humans will be able to give the effect of the loop final meaning. All the program can do is keep juggling symbols back and forth according to what can be reduced to automatic production rules.
That's because humans can read and computers can't. Even a text to speech program can't read, it can only juggle the written symbols and the auditory symbols. A human can not only read the code, a human can understand out what that code does when it runs. A computer can't.
Kurzweil is a damned fine engineer, but he doesn't have a clue about the brain. He's obviously never heard of the Chinese Room (it appears you in fact have).
People like him who think computers will be sentient are dangerous.
It was a movie, written by two guys who learned everything they know about computers from AKIRA and 2001 A Space Odyssey
True, it was only an illustration. But think of an incredibly simple program, like an analog clock on your computer screen. Depending on the language and your expertise you could little more than glance at it and imagine the clock it would draw. When you write a program you certainly have to envision what the output will be.
And HAL is bothersome because HAL isn't, in fact, any more sentient than Watson. It's just a Chinese room that does a good job of fooling a sentient being that it is, when it isn't. People are going to push for equal rights for computers... Frank Herbert touched on this in Dune, when "intelligent machines" were used by unscrupulous men to enslave others (leading to the jihad and outlawing of intelligent machines).
They were calling computers "electronic brains" when a building-sized machine was less powerful than a musical Hallmark card. It worries me, because they're not brains. They're tools and toys.
What you guys are missing is that you're decoding the words on the screen right now. Reading just doesn't feel like decoding, especially if you're any good at it at all.
My daughter is like that with sheet music. Give her a clarinet and sheet music for a song she never heard and she'll just play it. I decode musical notation like a five year old decodes Dr. Suess, she reads music like I read books.
I use to write software, first as a hobby and later compiled PC databases and NOMAD mainframe coding at work (actually, they gave me training then changed my job, I never wrote any production NOMAD). Now I write books in my spare time (which I'll have more of as I'm retiring soon). Even though dBase and NOMAD are very, very similar in the way they operate (think C and C+), I don't think I read NOMAD code like I did dBase or assembly or BASIC, because reading is different than writing.
I keep thinking of the Matrix programmers. "I only see blondes, brunettes, redheads..."
D - its irrelevant because we should learn to adapt and get over ourselves.
It isn't us that is going extinct in our present day extinction level event. We'll live, just not as well. Elephants and blue whales are nearly extinct now; elephants are the biggest animals walking, and blue whales are the biggest animals this planet has ever seen. We've destroyed the elephants' habitats and hunted the blues to their embarrassingly low numbers.
Not since the anaerobic bacteria killed themselves by poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen has any species had a bigger impact on the Earth than modern man.
Rather than "getting over ourselves" we need to start acting like responsible adults rather selfish children.
I wish I'd run across this comment metamoderating, because that moderation is wrong. By no definition of the word is that comment a troll, it's a polite, reasoned opinion.
QWERTYdid not prevent jamming by making people type slower.
I never said it did. QWERTY wasn't designed with speed in mind, it was designed, as you said, to minimize jamming. Dvorak was designed for speed.
I just learned something, thank you!
I've been writing books on this notebook for years. Damned near impossible to touch type on it, I wind up hitting the wrong keys.
I don't use it, but a lot of people do. The windows key works in KDE the same way it does in Windows (or did before 8).
A full suite of programming languages? Kids today are spoiled, what's wrong with assembly? I mean, besides the fact that 8086 assembly is a pain in the ass compared to a Z-80 or 6802?