Your sentiment makes sense, but I have to agree with the GP. I think people miss some key points here:
1) The ethical (not legal - the contracts settle that) question up until this point has been whether the publishing company has a right to restrict distribution through other channels. It's not a hard case to make on the publishers' side: Until recently, there was little reason to expect that free distribution would make print sales go up, and the data on that remain unclear. So, as a publisher, why wouldn't you want to resist other distribution models?
2) If I read TFA properly, it appears that the text being distributed is the text that was edited, copy edited, etc. by Wiley. As far as I'm concerned, that gives Wiley just as much moral claim to the work as the author. People underestimate the amount of time and effort that goes into the editing process. Writers, by and large, are not good writers. So why should they always retain copyrights?
Disclaimer: I've edited for a newspaper in the past, and I'm currently an editor for an undergraduate journal, so I'm pretty obviously biased against authors-above-all types. Mod appropriately.
Russell contributed a great deal to both mathematics and linguistics.
Technically, I was wrong there. He actually contributed a great deal to the philosophy of language, which is not at all the same thing as linguistics (though there is overlap).
Linguists have tried to develop new international languages to replace English (e.g. Esperanto)...
Actually, Esperanto was created by an ophthalmologist. In general, linguists don't attempt to replace languages with "better" ones. They recognize that linguistic change is natural and unavoidable. And, like other sciences, linguistics is largely occupied with observing and recording phenomena. They do not, as a rule, take a prescriptive point of view.
...we tend to modify/evolve langauge to suit our culture and circumstances, so any designed language (and even existing natural ones) will be modified into many different dialects as it is used...
This is exactly why attempts to replace English (or any other presently used natural language) with constructed languages generally fail. Construction, and its attendant notions of maintenance and static-ness, preclude incorporation into actual use. Remember that Frege in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and Russell as late as 1919 were interested in describing an 'ideal' language, but they gave up in the end - Russell long after Frege, for various reasons. Frege did, however, manage to stabilize the symbology of formal logic, and Russell contributed a great deal to both mathematics and linguistics.
The notion that English is somehow less grammatical than other languages is just bunk. All languages function on similar principles, and all languages are heavily governed by syntax. IANACS (I am not a computer scientist), but I've often wondered just why, exactly, the grammar of English is so hard to parse. It does contain exceptions, unlike the computer languages of which I am aware, but I don't know why those have proven insurmountable.
Doing something extreme... increases a person's natural abilities.
Source please?
I would assume that if an ordinary person, with little or no building or moneymaking abilities did something as amazing as ascending to a million feet up in the air (or however high up this spacewalk is), their building and/or moneymaking abilities, and also their decisionmaking and other mental and physical abilities, should increase dramatically.
I hope I speak for the rest of/.'s sane readership when I ask: what the hell are you talking about? Really. I understand that you dislike the American education system, but in what way can something like an EVA build your "moneymaking abilities?" And, for that matter, who brought up "building or moneymaking abilities" in the first place?
You've made interesting claims - now explain them.
But there are various facts to back up my claim, such as the caliber of many of our ex-staffers (Cronkite and Moyers are just two); our very high circulation (which I think is the highest in the country); and the fact that the major Texan dailies refer to us as "The Daily Texan" and not "the Daily Texan, student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin," indicating some respect for the work we do.
Now, you may be referring to the fact that we have a reputation here as a liberal paper/city/university. Fair enough. But, you know, that's why you should keep source bias in mind.
Frankly, Mr. Ebb should have known better. As a copy editor at what may be the most prestigious college paper in the U.S., I can attest to Wikipedia's occasional (though not pervasive) errors. Because of these, I have a standing policy of referring to Wikipedia only for corroboration, not confirmation.
Anyone who fact-checks - for a living or otherwise - should already have in mind things like source bias, credibility, etc.
I know I'm risking my own karma to ask this, but why was parent modded Redundant? The comment is funny, and it accurately illustrates why we might take time to do something seemingly useless. Because it might be useful, duh!
Point is - parent should be modded up/funny. If I had mod points today I'd do it myself.
Generally, copy editors (and page designers in print) have the final say on typographical elements. Even if the journalist knows what he/she is talking about, the copy editors may not and may force quotation marks where they're unnecessary.
Of course, the fact remains that copy editors are also often fact-checkers. They should know better.
To a native German speaker, the fact that it ends in 'o' is irrelevant. It may be that the German gloss of a word inherits its originating language's gender designation, but it's hardly the case that German speakers think to themselves "-a means feminine; -o means masculine" (an extremely elastic rule, in any case). The rules governing gender designation are different for each of these languages.
When they say OS I don't think they mean it in a managing the hardware computer science sense, but more referring to the desktop environment.
I think you're right, and I think whoever came up with calling any of these things OSes should be taken out back and beaten. There's enough confusion among consumers today - the last thing we need is for Google or anyone else to come along misinforming them.
I was mildly excited about Goobuntu before it was denied, and I might be willing to run a GoogleOS. But PR execs and the like need to understand that it's insulting to call these things what they're not and expect us to go along.
Latin-derived grammars are usually a pain in the ass because of genders, irregular verbs, and noun cases. German suffers from all of those
Last year I had an interesting experience with my German professor regarding gender. Doing an assignment, I asked her the article (hence the gender) for the word "taco." She immediately came back with the article ("der" or "das" - don't recall). But I noticed that her reaction was strangely speedy. I asked her if she'd ever thought about "taco" in gendered terms before, and she said she hadn't. I also asked if every other native German speaker would come up with the same article/gender for "taco" and other words, and she said yes.
A hypothesis, then: There are rules for gender in German (and presumably the Latinate languages and others), but they're unclear. A comprehensive grammar of German would make those rules explicit.
Having lived in West Germany as an early child and approaching my 5th year of studying it here in the States, I find myself occasionally assigning genders in a knee-jerk fashion. And I've found that, when I let intuition command, I'm right 85-90% of the time. I rely on the skill in tests. Again, my hypothesis is that there are rules for the genders, and I'm guessing my brain's picked up on them without letting me know.
I am not aware of a language with a simple consistent grammar with no exceptions to just a few simple rules
I'm not sure "simple" would be a realistic request of a language. Complexity reigns, if only because of the requirement for recursivity.
The bicycle analogy simply isn't the same thing. I've yet to find a web site which lists spots you can go to find free bicycles to ride.
Though it's not exactly what you're talking about, the various Yellow Bike Projects around the world do offer free, public bikes to ride. And yes, in some cities, they're just left on the sidewalk until someone else comes and hops on.
On several occasions in one major YBP city, I've thought a bike was part of the prject and found out it wasn't (thankfully before I did anything embarassing or illegal). The example is trivial, but it raises a good question: how informed do I need to be about something (on public property, on MY property, etc.) that appears free before I use it?
I'm only mildly tech-oriented. I've played with programming on Windows and the Mac, and I read/., ars, and other sites religiously. I know enough to build my own box on the cheap. But that's it. I don't work in or study engineering or computers. I'm a hobbyist, and a light-handed one at that. My life and interests lie elsewhere. I think I represent a fairly large number of users in this respect.
That doesn't mean I don't want to run Linux. I love the idea of OSS, GNU, Creative Commons, the whole open-society notion. But there's a sort of "activation barrier" at work here. I need a critical mass of things to switch from Windows XP to Linux.
The absolutely most important of these is ease of installation, both for the OS and for applications. I'm not a programmer - I can't change environment variables or set up appropriate scripts without a LOT of reading to catch up - so I need an install that's going to run my hardware w/ few (if any) hassles.
Another issue, closely related, is the choice of distro/core packages. I haven't the faintest clue how to pick from all the choices out there. (And I at least halfway follow the community - imagine what the less-technical user must feel like!) Ubuntu? Xandros? Fedora? RPM or DEB? GNOME or KDE? WTF or FTW?
This is why pie-in-the-sky ideas like Goobuntu are exciting for people like me. We know, at the least, that Linux might represent a cool option - a way to break free of MS control or at least introduce some autonomy into our personal computing experiences. But we also know that the learning curve is pretty steep. And if a compan known to be user-friendly (in some respects) puts its name on a distro, we might be inclined to go for it.
Part of what bothers me about these discussions is that people assume extreme points of view - users are either know-nothings who just do what they can to match their work environment, or they're on a higher plane where OSS is a breeze to configure/run/maintain. Where's the recognition of the middle ground? OSS advocates could do a LOT for their cause by catering their campaigning to this kind of group. Some kind of resource where we could go get all the answers we need would make us much more likely to switch. Complaining that our objections don't stand up to scrutiny will not.
MS is good at this, offering Office and Windows licenses for $75 each (yes, the newest versions, think XP Pro and Office 2003 full whiz-bang version).
Just a note: At my University (among the top-five biggest in the U.S.A.), XP Pro is $12. Office is $10. Macromedia's MX studio is (roughly) $120. Photoshop is somewhere in between, IIRC. (I am a philosophy major - don't have to deal with PS.) I don't know, but I suspect these deals may extend to other schools in our "system" (being a public school).
The point is that good licensing deals are absolutely available, and at a price even the cheapest student won't balk at. These numbers likely come from the size of my institution, but even a smaller school should be able to get a reasonable high-volume license.
On a different world, under different atmospheric pressure, light spectrum and intensity and different chemical make-up of environment you could find life.
This is a common misconception, advocated by old Star Trek episodes and the like.
First, the activation energy required for molecular formation corresponds to a temperature of ~100 to ~1000 K. Any less and individual atoms can't get over the hump, any more and they come apart. Of course there are some reactions with low or no activation energy, and these often occur in interstellar space given the proper catalyst, and pressure plays a large role as planets form. But evidence increasingly shows that many of the molecules we find in ourselves show up in outer space, so under most conditions temperatures will have to be roughly in that range for the proper (read: any) molecules to form.
Second, the light spectrum we have is pretty handy, too. Ultra-violet rays aren't only dangerous to humans. A single UV photon, in fact, can knock a hydrogen molecule apart.
Third, while Si does have a lot of the chemical properties C uses to create the hydrocarbons we're all based on, it's also very rare in comparison. There's a reason we're C-based. The rate of Si-formation (much less Si-including molecular formation) is extraordinarily low. Consult any list of interstellar molecules for confirmation.
Slashdot Mirror
Your sentiment makes sense, but I have to agree with the GP. I think people miss some key points here:
1) The ethical (not legal - the contracts settle that) question up until this point has been whether the publishing company has a right to restrict distribution through other channels. It's not a hard case to make on the publishers' side: Until recently, there was little reason to expect that free distribution would make print sales go up, and the data on that remain unclear. So, as a publisher, why wouldn't you want to resist other distribution models?
2) If I read TFA properly, it appears that the text being distributed is the text that was edited, copy edited, etc. by Wiley. As far as I'm concerned, that gives Wiley just as much moral claim to the work as the author. People underestimate the amount of time and effort that goes into the editing process. Writers, by and large, are not good writers. So why should they always retain copyrights?
Disclaimer: I've edited for a newspaper in the past, and I'm currently an editor for an undergraduate journal, so I'm pretty obviously biased against authors-above-all types. Mod appropriately.
It's Transcendental number.
Not trolling, just helping since you asked.
Did you just notice a reference to a Will and Grace episode on Slashdot?
Russell contributed a great deal to both mathematics and linguistics.
Technically, I was wrong there. He actually contributed a great deal to the philosophy of language, which is not at all the same thing as linguistics (though there is overlap).
Linguists have tried to develop new international languages to replace English (e.g. Esperanto)...
...we tend to modify/evolve langauge to suit our culture and circumstances, so any designed language (and even existing natural ones) will be modified into many different dialects as it is used...
Actually, Esperanto was created by an ophthalmologist. In general, linguists don't attempt to replace languages with "better" ones. They recognize that linguistic change is natural and unavoidable. And, like other sciences, linguistics is largely occupied with observing and recording phenomena. They do not, as a rule, take a prescriptive point of view.
This is exactly why attempts to replace English (or any other presently used natural language) with constructed languages generally fail. Construction, and its attendant notions of maintenance and static-ness, preclude incorporation into actual use. Remember that Frege in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and Russell as late as 1919 were interested in describing an 'ideal' language, but they gave up in the end - Russell long after Frege, for various reasons. Frege did, however, manage to stabilize the symbology of formal logic, and Russell contributed a great deal to both mathematics and linguistics.
The notion that English is somehow less grammatical than other languages is just bunk. All languages function on similar principles, and all languages are heavily governed by syntax. IANACS (I am not a computer scientist), but I've often wondered just why, exactly, the grammar of English is so hard to parse. It does contain exceptions, unlike the computer languages of which I am aware, but I don't know why those have proven insurmountable.
Doing something extreme ... increases a person's natural abilities.
/.'s sane readership when I ask: what the hell are you talking about? Really. I understand that you dislike the American education system, but in what way can something like an EVA build your "moneymaking abilities?" And, for that matter, who brought up "building or moneymaking abilities" in the first place?
Source please?
I would assume that if an ordinary person, with little or no building or moneymaking abilities did something as amazing as ascending to a million feet up in the air (or however high up this spacewalk is), their building and/or moneymaking abilities, and also their decisionmaking and other mental and physical abilities, should increase dramatically.
I hope I speak for the rest of
You've made interesting claims - now explain them.
Errr, touché. ;-)
But there are various facts to back up my claim, such as the caliber of many of our ex-staffers (Cronkite and Moyers are just two); our very high circulation (which I think is the highest in the country); and the fact that the major Texan dailies refer to us as "The Daily Texan" and not "the Daily Texan, student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin," indicating some respect for the work we do.
Now, you may be referring to the fact that we have a reputation here as a liberal paper/city/university. Fair enough. But, you know, that's why you should keep source bias in mind.
Frankly, Mr. Ebb should have known better. As a copy editor at what may be the most prestigious college paper in the U.S., I can attest to Wikipedia's occasional (though not pervasive) errors. Because of these, I have a standing policy of referring to Wikipedia only for corroboration, not confirmation. Anyone who fact-checks - for a living or otherwise - should already have in mind things like source bias, credibility, etc.
I know I'm risking my own karma to ask this, but why was parent modded Redundant? The comment is funny, and it accurately illustrates why we might take time to do something seemingly useless. Because it might be useful, duh!
Point is - parent should be modded up/funny. If I had mod points today I'd do it myself.
Generally, copy editors (and page designers in print) have the final say on typographical elements. Even if the journalist knows what he/she is talking about, the copy editors may not and may force quotation marks where they're unnecessary.
Of course, the fact remains that copy editors are also often fact-checkers. They should know better.
To a native German speaker, the fact that it ends in 'o' is irrelevant. It may be that the German gloss of a word inherits its originating language's gender designation, but it's hardly the case that German speakers think to themselves "-a means feminine; -o means masculine" (an extremely elastic rule, in any case). The rules governing gender designation are different for each of these languages.
When they say OS I don't think they mean it in a managing the hardware computer science sense, but more referring to the desktop environment.
I think you're right, and I think whoever came up with calling any of these things OSes should be taken out back and beaten. There's enough confusion among consumers today - the last thing we need is for Google or anyone else to come along misinforming them.
I was mildly excited about Goobuntu before it was denied, and I might be willing to run a GoogleOS. But PR execs and the like need to understand that it's insulting to call these things what they're not and expect us to go along.
Latin-derived grammars are usually a pain in the ass because of genders, irregular verbs, and noun cases. German suffers from all of those
Last year I had an interesting experience with my German professor regarding gender. Doing an assignment, I asked her the article (hence the gender) for the word "taco." She immediately came back with the article ("der" or "das" - don't recall). But I noticed that her reaction was strangely speedy. I asked her if she'd ever thought about "taco" in gendered terms before, and she said she hadn't. I also asked if every other native German speaker would come up with the same article/gender for "taco" and other words, and she said yes.
A hypothesis, then: There are rules for gender in German (and presumably the Latinate languages and others), but they're unclear. A comprehensive grammar of German would make those rules explicit.
Having lived in West Germany as an early child and approaching my 5th year of studying it here in the States, I find myself occasionally assigning genders in a knee-jerk fashion. And I've found that, when I let intuition command, I'm right 85-90% of the time. I rely on the skill in tests. Again, my hypothesis is that there are rules for the genders, and I'm guessing my brain's picked up on them without letting me know.
I am not aware of a language with a simple consistent grammar with no exceptions to just a few simple rules
I'm not sure "simple" would be a realistic request of a language. Complexity reigns, if only because of the requirement for recursivity.
The bicycle analogy simply isn't the same thing. I've yet to find a web site which lists spots you can go to find free bicycles to ride.
Though it's not exactly what you're talking about, the various Yellow Bike Projects around the world do offer free, public bikes to ride. And yes, in some cities, they're just left on the sidewalk until someone else comes and hops on.
On several occasions in one major YBP city, I've thought a bike was part of the prject and found out it wasn't (thankfully before I did anything embarassing or illegal). The example is trivial, but it raises a good question: how informed do I need to be about something (on public property, on MY property, etc.) that appears free before I use it?
*puts on flame-retardant clothing*
/., ars, and other sites religiously. I know enough to build my own box on the cheap. But that's it. I don't work in or study engineering or computers. I'm a hobbyist, and a light-handed one at that. My life and interests lie elsewhere. I think I represent a fairly large number of users in this respect.
I'm only mildly tech-oriented. I've played with programming on Windows and the Mac, and I read
That doesn't mean I don't want to run Linux. I love the idea of OSS, GNU, Creative Commons, the whole open-society notion. But there's a sort of "activation barrier" at work here. I need a critical mass of things to switch from Windows XP to Linux.
The absolutely most important of these is ease of installation, both for the OS and for applications. I'm not a programmer - I can't change environment variables or set up appropriate scripts without a LOT of reading to catch up - so I need an install that's going to run my hardware w/ few (if any) hassles.
Another issue, closely related, is the choice of distro/core packages. I haven't the faintest clue how to pick from all the choices out there. (And I at least halfway follow the community - imagine what the less-technical user must feel like!) Ubuntu? Xandros? Fedora? RPM or DEB? GNOME or KDE? WTF or FTW?
This is why pie-in-the-sky ideas like Goobuntu are exciting for people like me. We know, at the least, that Linux might represent a cool option - a way to break free of MS control or at least introduce some autonomy into our personal computing experiences. But we also know that the learning curve is pretty steep. And if a compan known to be user-friendly (in some respects) puts its name on a distro, we might be inclined to go for it.
Part of what bothers me about these discussions is that people assume extreme points of view - users are either know-nothings who just do what they can to match their work environment, or they're on a higher plane where OSS is a breeze to configure/run/maintain. Where's the recognition of the middle ground? OSS advocates could do a LOT for their cause by catering their campaigning to this kind of group. Some kind of resource where we could go get all the answers we need would make us much more likely to switch. Complaining that our objections don't stand up to scrutiny will not.
MS is good at this, offering Office and Windows licenses for $75 each (yes, the newest versions, think XP Pro and Office 2003 full whiz-bang version).
Just a note: At my University (among the top-five biggest in the U.S.A.), XP Pro is $12. Office is $10. Macromedia's MX studio is (roughly) $120. Photoshop is somewhere in between, IIRC. (I am a philosophy major - don't have to deal with PS.) I don't know, but I suspect these deals may extend to other schools in our "system" (being a public school).
The point is that good licensing deals are absolutely available, and at a price even the cheapest student won't balk at. These numbers likely come from the size of my institution, but even a smaller school should be able to get a reasonable high-volume license.
On a different world, under different atmospheric pressure, light spectrum and intensity and different chemical make-up of environment you could find life.
This is a common misconception, advocated by old Star Trek episodes and the like.
First, the activation energy required for molecular formation corresponds to a temperature of ~100 to ~1000 K. Any less and individual atoms can't get over the hump, any more and they come apart. Of course there are some reactions with low or no activation energy, and these often occur in interstellar space given the proper catalyst, and pressure plays a large role as planets form. But evidence increasingly shows that many of the molecules we find in ourselves show up in outer space, so under most conditions temperatures will have to be roughly in that range for the proper (read: any) molecules to form.
Second, the light spectrum we have is pretty handy, too. Ultra-violet rays aren't only dangerous to humans. A single UV photon, in fact, can knock a hydrogen molecule apart.
Third, while Si does have a lot of the chemical properties C uses to create the hydrocarbons we're all based on, it's also very rare in comparison. There's a reason we're C-based. The rate of Si-formation (much less Si-including molecular formation) is extraordinarily low. Consult any list of interstellar molecules for confirmation.