I know this is beating a dead horse... but the core problem here isn't Sony's epic failure... it's that the credit system is so broken that this information that was stolen is enough to seriously fuck with someones life.
I'm not trying to downplay Sony's screw up. I have a PSN account and as such am suitably nervous. This whole thing just reminds me of how messed up our system is.
Speak for yourself... due to the economy, there is no way that someone could use my identity to fuck my life up worse than it already has been... speaking of which, if they had a credit card for me on file, the thing is most certainly invalid by now...
Re:missing some key features...
on
OpenBSD 4.9 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
wake me when they have:
1) start/stop scripts, so I don't have to ps|grep|kill|...crap, what were those flags for the daemon again... to manage running processes or daemons
Well, for this one:
New rc.d(8) for starting, stopping and reconfiguring package daemons: The rc.subr(8) framework allows for easy creation of rc scripts. This framework is still evolving. Only a handful of packages have migrated for now. rc.local can still be used instead of or in addition to rc.d(8).
It might not be the point, but it's still only slightly less asinine than referring to processor speed in gigabytes, confusing downloads with uploads, or any of the other inane mistakes that make most of us shake our heads and die a little inside.
Oh we are... and of all things, chemicals weren't around since the beginning of time either. It took a non-zero amount of time for the energy in the universe to expand and cool enough for molecules to form. (I believe it's non-zero amount of time for even atoms to form.)
Yes, this is true, but things like a cold can be caught by 100% of the population (ok, more or less near 100%), but only a small percentage actually catch enough for it take enough of a foothold and cause symptoms.
Imagine if only 10% of people could contract The Plague... rather than wiping out an enormous amount of the population, it would have had a significantly decreased impact on the world. People are crazy likely to explain why only some people get a disease like that, by blaming some personality flaw on the person...
Mod parent up. Leprosy is no longer an issue. Antibiotics FTW.
Not only this but leprosy is like the bitch version of a bacterial infection. Most of the time, you have to be predisposed to being able to acquire it anyways (or immunocompromised, but that's true with any bacteria/fungus/virus). It's basically somewhere around 10% of the population that can actually acquire leprosy... everyone else could pretty much walk hand in hand with a leper and never catch a thing.
I'm curious what the rate of evasion is. In St. Louis we have a light rail that works similar to yours (the S- and U-Bahns, or light trains and subways for the non-german), but I know that evasion is very easy. They only check so many trains a day, though the fines cost probably $60 or so. The problem is that you can take a ticket for a daily or 2 hour pass and smudge off the validation time-stamp and re-use it 3-5 times before it is really worn out. Still, I imagine that a great number of the people have tickets with them, as usually the only people who seem to not are out of towners coming in from the airport (unless the ticket checker is a particular asshole, they let them off and just have them buy a ticket.
I only spent a month in Munich, and there were only two checks the whole month (riding it at least twice a day), and I only saw one pack of two or three kids get busted, so it's probably similar evasion rates... But the term for it, "Schwartzfahren" (black riding) is a well known word, so...
The whole kind of intent of my thing was that we should worry less about evasion... too many companies get miserly about their money, e.g. while working for Wal-Mart in the cereal isle, I was informally reprimanded for not putting up some cereal boxes that were seriously chewed up... it didn't matter that the product wasn't "up to snuff", they wanted someone to buy it, because they couldn't waste one box of cereal...
The German Bahn system works by letting pretty much anyone on board. If it's ICE, or regional then you're probably going to have your ticket checked by an attendant... the punishment for boarding without a ticket? Buying a ticket.
Bzzzt wrong. You will have to pay a surcharge when buying aboard an IC/EC or ICE train, and there's no onboard sale on regional/local trains (IRE, RE, RB and below). Plus, any sign that you were trying to evade the attendant and you'll be fined, too. Boarding a regional/local train without a ticket means a 40 EUR (or twice the regular fare for your ride, whichever is greater) fine plus legal consequences if you get caught. The only exception happens to be "my"* line, where we do sell tickets even though we're part of DB Regio - the reason being that some of our stops are so small and remote locations that it would not be economical to install a ticket vending machine there.
Oh... I was never doing Schwartzfahren, so I never actually learned what the full and real consequences were... thanks for the info!
What happens if you just happen to be in the bathroom when they pass? Nothing.
Bzzzt wrong again. We *do* knock at the door and expect you to provide your ticket. Of course you'll be given sufficient time to finish your "business" and wash your hands first.;-)
Oh, I was in the bathroom at one point, and no one knocked... I suppose I shouldn't have expected that to be actual policy.
This is actually a useful social study and most liberals will NOT like the result. This "experiment" shows that a large number of people will ONLY obey the rules of society if somebody is standing behind them with a heavy stick.
You're making an implication that this means that we have to stand behind them with a heavy stick to obey. The German Bahn system works by letting pretty much anyone on board. If it's ICE, or regional then you're probably going to have your ticket checked by an attendant... the punishment for boarding without a ticket? Buying a ticket. What happens if you just happen to be in the bathroom when they pass? Nothing.
If you're using the S-Bahns, or U-Bahns, or Straßebahns, then you're less likely to get checked, but the costs go up equivalently. The fee for using the S-Bahns/U-Bahns without a ticket? About 40€, which puts it at the same cost as a month-long ticket.
The advantages of this system are: no annoying turnstiles that don't let you through unless you have a ticket, no need to hire armed guards to patrol the facilities looking for people trying to beat the system, and while sure, some people get through without paying, and perhaps even ride a lot without paying, those that you do catch end up paying for a monthly ticket anyways, so you still get the funding that you need to keep operating, and the person learns a lesson in social responsibility...
And of course, even if you do stand behind them with a big stick, you're never going to completely stop everyone from ever committing a crime... that's simply a fact... and of course, the wonderful lesson here is: only a police state will stand behind you all the time with a big stick threatening to use it if you break the law... because only in a police state do they feel the need to ensure that people don't ever break the law in the first place.
As cos(0) says, but I'll clarify as I'm totally pedantic:
An illegal act is any act that is contrary to any law, while a criminal act is an act that is contrary only to criminal law.
As noted, shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater might actually end up getting you in trouble for a couple tens of wrongful death suits, however the key note is: it won't send you to jail.
Well, ok, actually... if you had good reason to anticipate that it was going to cause the death of another person, you might get charged with "reckless endangerment of human life" which might get you some jail time... and thinking about it since really any reasonable person knows that shouting 'fire' in a theater can cause a panic and the deaths of people, it would almost definitely get you charged with at least a manslaughter charge.
So, well... ok... the laws are always fuzzy, and honestly, prosecutors overcharge stuff all the time (as it's easier to dismiss indictments than add them) so you're likely to get at least charged with some pretty nasty sounding charges, and both sides of the law and order episode would be trying really hard to get you to plea to something... mostly because proving it would be harder than getting you to plea out. But if you stuck to your guns and had a decent lawyer, you probably ought be able to get out of any charge, because the act itself wasn't itself illegal, and you had no intent to get anyone hurt. (But the later would be an affirmative defense, which would kind of force you to admit that you did shout 'fire' in the theater, and so the likelihood of a conviction if the jury doesn't believe you, or depending on if the charge has a strict liability, you're kind of screwed.)... I know maybe you didn't want that pedantic of an answer, but cos(0) already gave you the simple one. An illegal act can only be sued for, while a criminal act can get you arrested and convicted.
True enough, but even the most idiotic, hyperbolic rant on the Internet doesn't equate to yelling "fire" in a theater. Otherwise most of the garbage that passes for "news" in the US would end up yielding criminal charges. The Japanese government (or whatever subset is responsible for this) just doesn't get the Internet. They should go back to being to not being responsible for Gundam.
Speech that presents a "clear and present danger" (like falsely yelling "fire" in a theater) hasn't been criminally illegal in the US since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1989...
Next time someone makes fun by shouting authentically "Fire! Fire! Run!" in a theater or some other 'suitable' place, and your relatives die there having been crushed by the panicking crowd trying to get out, maybe then you'll remember that there are certain situations where Freedom of Speech is limited, and rightfully so, precisely to prevent panic and to save lives.
Except that Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) overturned Schenck v. United States (1917), and holds that falsely shouting "Fire" in a theater cannot be restricted alone for presenting a "clear and present danger", and setting the now current and much higher bar that the speech has to provoke "imminent lawless action".
So, basically, in the US, you can falsely shout fire in a theater without committing an illegal act... (I do not however recommend it, as civil liability for wrongful death can be harsh... unless you're OJ Simpson...)
No, you're looking at Thomas Jefferson being clever.
You say "no", but then you proceed to state everything that I agree with, and nothing that contradicts what I said.
My point was that a lot of deists were deists of the time, because there wasn't a competing model to creation. They were humanists and naturalists of the highest order that atheists hold to today... but there was no naturalistic explanation for the origins of the universe or the diversity of animals. At the time, it was obvious that there was a creator (whoever/whatever that was) because there is stuff.
Essentially, deists of the day had pushed god back as far into the gaps that were available, but the gaps yet remained large enough for a god to hide in... now, with our naturalistic explanations some of us can push the gaps back far enough that nothing worth calling a god could hide in...
As a good analogy, the fact that Newton failed to ever believe in Relativity is not a mark against Relativity... but rather simply the obvious result of Newton living prior to the discover of Relativity. He died (most likely) of mercury poisoning not because he was a retarded idiot, but because human kind itself did not understand the dangers of mercury in his time. One cannot fault the ignorance of a person when such ignorance was inescapable for their time.
In the same way, saying many scientific discoveries were made by people of faith says nothing about the worthiness of that faith... the ancient Greek philosophers knew the world was round (more specifically spherical), and calculated its circumference better than Christopher Columbus had... yet this lends no credence to the Greek gods, which were the only available "faith" of the time.
I am not arguing that "people of faith" are not intelligent or anything. My argument is that the vast majority of "the most scientifically significant discoveries and theories" were discovered at a time when there was no reason to warrant disbelief in gods. Naturally, it was possible for people to disbelieve in gods prior to an understanding of the origin of species, and the origins of the galaxies, solar systems and planets... but one was left with an enormous gap of "I don't know" around where the universe came from, why things look the way that they do.
In more recent (but not modern) times, those people who would be inclined in our times to be atheist, professed "Deism", that a god existed, but we don't know anything about him. Specifically, they rejected the Christian conception of a god, but could not get around the looming issue of, "Oh yeah? Well, where did the universe come from?" Their answer was as close to the null-hypothesis as was possible at the time: "Something supernatural created the universe, but we don't, and cannot know anything about the nature of such a deity."
The necessity of a god in these earlier times was apparent, as no explanation was conceivable for the universe other than that of supernatural creation.
So, looking back on the people of faith that discovered incredible scientific principles, one must ask the question not "were they people of faith," because prior to about the 1900s or so, everyone believed in a god. Rather, one should ask oneself "If they were born in this age, with our knowledge... would they still be people of faith?" The answers for many Deists is most likely a resounding "no".
I'm fascinated by articles on language origins and the various methods used to build relation trees between them, but I have no idea what those pronunciation terms mean. Isn't there a site somewhere with SOUNDS to complement those linguistic terms ? I mean, WTF is a 'fricative', seriously !
A fricative is a sound made by constricting airflow into a narrow channel between two articulating points. In the case of an interdental, it means placing the tongue between the teeth (generally up on the upper teeth) and forcing air through it. It is the "th" sound in English. ("this" is voiced, and "thanks" is unvoiced.)
The only better choice is to get a linguist near you to sit down and sound them out for you... (you likely won't hear the difference between most, even if the linguist could pronounce them appropriately.)
As I mentioned earlier, many who made the most scientifically significant discoveries and theories have been people of faith.
Well, to be fair, until recently there wasn't really a good option otherwise. I mean, Galileo believed in special creation of the world, because there wasn't yet any reasonable explanation for how things got here. Now there is.
It's like when people point to the US Declaration of Independence "that they are endowed by their Creator..." first of all, all of the nouns are capitalized, so the capitalization of "Creator" is evidence of nothing. Second of all, they didn't say "God" they rather used an arbitrary term "Creator"... think about it, when the document was drafted no one had a good idea that evolution existed, or what the origin of species were... we were simply left with "something, or someone created the universe." It was the only plausible explanation at the time given their limited understandings.
So, pointing out that people who made scientific discoveries in the past were religious is kind of moot... they had no viable alternate hypothesis...
Hm, forgive me then, it appears I misunderstood your use of "putative" to mean that the existence of the relationship itself was in doubt, possibly due to your mention of "fringe" earlier in your post.
Well, when you say "in doubt", it is in doubt... it's just widely accepted that it's highly unlikely that two languages so close to each other physically, and reasonably similar in grammar are entirely unrelated.
It's precisely because the Japanese-Korean language family tree is likely that tons of linguists have been clamoring to try and prove it, but any theories suggesting that such a relationship exists are deeply flawed, and we are left with the scientific position that suggesting such a language family is still little better than pure speculation.
And I have had people argue with me that Korean and Japanese are completely unrelated, and that any similarities are purely accidental -- which strikes me as precious close to dogmatically delusional, or ideally just woefully misinformed.
Well, this is the current position of scientific consensus. Assuming that the languages are related at this point might be reasonable for the average lay person, but scientifically it's just really bad form to claim that they are related. We can show that Hungarian, Finnish, and Mongolian are all related, and they're separated by tons of distance, but yet we cannot seem to match up Japanese and Korean...
While it's wrong for someone to say that they're definitively not related (because this is unlikely) it is also wrong for someone to claim that they definitely are related.
And as it stands, no one has a better explanation for why Japanese and Korean are similar other than coincidence. And without any convincing evidence, the only reasonable hypothesis is the null-hypothesis: that the two languages are unrelated, and similarities are either coincidence or contact borrowings (Sprachraum).
I didn't say that the two weren't related. I call it putative, because there is no good scientific theory about how their relationship exists. This isn't just political. We can totally look at the two and notice similar grammars, and some similar words, but they could have just been a Sprachraum.
Until someone can demonstrate HOW they are related (and you admit that we don't know this), the relationship is putative.
The only difference between the Japanese "fu" and the English "fu" is whether your lower teeth make contact with your upper lip.
Yes, like I said, the Japanese "fu" is a bilabial (two lip) fricative, while the English "fu" is a labio-dental (lip and teeth) fricative. I didn't say they didn't sound similar, I said that pronouncing an English "fu" for a Japanese "fu" is mispronouncing the phoneme.;)
And not all English speakers are heavy on dipthongs, nor are all English vowels dipthonged. Heck, part of the "southern accent" is about the elimination of the dipthong in the "eye" sound ("I'm going to buy some ice" -> "Ah'm gonna bah som' ahhs").
Right, but the most common English accents pronounce not just the diphthong "eye" in that sentence, but even the vowel in "some" is pronounced as a diphthong. It's primarily by allophonic production, so none of them hear it or realize that they're even saying it, but they do it.
And as for your "sakey" example, that's just people who've never bothered to look up the pronunciation; that has nothing to do with how easy it is to pronounce.
Even if you tell an American how to properly pronounce "sake" and you coach them to pronounce it properly, because of allophonic rules, depending on how well they can pick up new phonemic rules, they will eventually revert to pronouncing it wrong. Unless they're a haughty taughty fellow, who excruciatingly examines everything they say, and then they just end up like pricks demanding that people pronounce "comfortable" correctly...
BTW, the one that is like scratching nails on a chalkboard to me is "Toe-Key-Yo";) But I generally find I have little trouble correcting people, and you'll find the same with sake.
I deal with so many horrible pronunciations I've given up on Americans... but you're right, it is a grating pronunciation. After coaching someone enough to get it right, come back a week later, and get them to pronounce it cold, without thinking about it... I almost guarantee you that they get it wrong.
The Japanese "fu" syllable is not just "softer" it's a bilabial fricative, of which there are none in English.
So, if you take "every English speaker mispronounces 'fu' and says 'su' instead of 'tsu'" sure... English speakers have a reasonably natural pronunciation of Japanese. Oh and as long as you're willing to accept that English speakers don't produce "pure" vowel sounds and seem to diphthong every vowel. And the whole "ends in/-e/ becomes/-ej/ or/i/" thing... If I could kill every person who says "saki" or "sakey"...
It's different issues, and I'll grant you, Icelandic is known to have a difficult phonology... but getting Japanese right isn't much easier than getting German right.
Some languages gain phonemes, some languages lose phonemes.
Some species gain genes, some species lose genes (and in a non-monotonic fashion), but yet we believe maps of genes provide reasonable taxonomic structures that descend from a single root (unless you're disputing this as well). Languages mutate and recombine just like genetic material. Why do you think we should believe in one and not the other?
Yes, and we tract species relations by tracking specific genetic mutations through the various genomes, such as Endogenous Retro Viral (ERV) insertions. We can use these mutations and rules to track Dutch, and German back to a related language, and then English into a further related language, and then back further to account for Latin, Greek, Indo-Iranian, and all the way back to showing relation to the Anatolian language(s). But here, we start running into problems. We cannot see the relations from Indo-European to Afro-Semetic languages, because the mutation rate is very high in languages, and the noise of mutations starts to drown out signal of relationships.
So, while it's accepted that it's quite likely that all the languages diverged from a common language, we don't have the same genetic analysis available to us that we do have for biological relationships of species.
I am not in any way an expert in languages, I think the reason why English has got so many irregular verbs might be a different one. For me it looks like the irregularities in English are not due to the simplicity of verbal patterns but rather due to numerous legacies (of middle German and Norman languages or so).
Something similar is also the case with Russian. The language itself has got lots of clear rules about verbal patterns, but also many exceptions that are legacies of old Russian, Church Slavonic and spelling reforms.
Yes, this is pretty much why English has irregular verbs. But there's an important thing here: Why doesn't Hungarian how so many legacies? The answer is that they do. The only differences is that if one has to learn a complex verb pattern, they will recontextualize verbs to fit the pattern rather than ingrain irregularities. It's the same reason English speakers create "Swing swang swung"... to make it fit a more generic verb pattern.
True. There are generally at least 3 major language families: tonal (e.g. Thai), click (e.g. Aborigine), and phonetic (e.g English). Now the majority of the world is primarily phonetic languages, and these split up into numerous categories. I'm not familiar enough with tonal and click languages to say how the break down; but they are primarily centralized in regions of Asia, Australia, and Africa.
Where did you get these language classifications? Tonal languages use standard phonetics, and so do "click" languages.
Though you also have to define a vowel. Not every language necessarily considers the same thing a vowel; so that could very. One language I'm working on for series treats 'c', 'p', and 's' as a vowel - it's got the 5 common vowels, plus about 4 or 5 functionary vowels that I can think of off the top of my head; over 30 letters in the primary alphabet.
I noted "syllabic consonants" as well. I know that some languages use some consonants as as vowels, e.g. Serbian language for itself is "srpski", where "r" is a syllabic consonant performing many of the same duties as a vowel. What am I defining as a vowel? The linguistic definition of a vowel, which excludes consonants, even if they are syllabic, and used similar to a vowel.
Except tonal and click languages don't necessarily have vowels and consonants. For example, in Thai you can say a complete sentence with the same phonetic sound by simply variant the pitch (tone). But then, vowels and consonants are more for written language than spoken - so (again) definitions are a must.
Where the hell did you get this notion? There is not a language in the world that doesn't have vowels, and similarly there is not a language in the world that does not have consonants. Even Pirahã at the lowest estimates has 7 consonants.
Thai uses tones layered OVER phonetics. Thai cannot say anything with "just tones" the tones are carried by syllables.
Vowels and consonants aren't more for written language, some languages don't even really write vowels (because they have say, only three vowels, so nearly any short vowel is an acceptable allophone of any other short vowel. And even then, the letters used to write the long vowels are actually glottal stop for "a", palatal approximant ("y") for "i", and labial approximant ("w") for "u")
So, could one possibly compose a Thai sentence using only one phoneme but only with tonal variation? Sure, if one stuck with a simple vowel, which would severely limit anything useful to say... but the vowel used in the sentence would be phonemically distinct from any other vowel. (They also distinguish vowel length, so perhaps you could get away with two phonemes.)
The likelihood is probably quite a bit higher than you realize. You need to study tonal and click languages - as they very well do much such distinctions.
I have studied some tonal languages, no click languages though. And when I stated that the probability of distinguishing dental voiceless plosive from alveolar voiceless plosive, I'm not speaking out of my butt... BOTH are represented simplistically in IPA with "t", because no language known at the time of the IPA makes any distinction between the two. But where distinction between the two is required, (typically only necessary for distinguishing allophones, or for transcribing speech) they have diacritics to more finely indicate place of articulation.
The human brain/ear/tongue is incredible in what can be differentiated between and produced. A baby and toddler learn the language around them, and later (by teenage years) lose much of the ability to pick up other languages - primarily due to losing the ability to distinguish and produce the variances in the "new" language versus what they are using every day. (Yes, there are some people do not lose that ability, or at least lose it as greatly as others.)
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is beating a dead horse... but the core problem here isn't Sony's epic failure... it's that the credit system is so broken that this information that was stolen is enough to seriously fuck with someones life.
I'm not trying to downplay Sony's screw up. I have a PSN account and as such am suitably nervous. This whole thing just reminds me of how messed up our system is.
Speak for yourself... due to the economy, there is no way that someone could use my identity to fuck my life up worse than it already has been... speaking of which, if they had a credit card for me on file, the thing is most certainly invalid by now...
wake me when they have:
1) start/stop scripts, so I don't have to ps|grep|kill|...crap, what were those flags for the daemon again... to manage running processes or daemons
Well, for this one:
New rc.d(8) for starting, stopping and reconfiguring package daemons:
The rc.subr(8) framework allows for easy creation of rc scripts. This framework is still evolving.
Only a handful of packages have migrated for now.
rc.local can still be used instead of or in addition to rc.d(8).
It might not be the point, but it's still only slightly less asinine than referring to processor speed in gigabytes, confusing downloads with uploads, or any of the other inane mistakes that make most of us shake our heads and die a little inside.
But it did the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs!
If we're being pedantic, that is.
Oh we are... and of all things, chemicals weren't around since the beginning of time either. It took a non-zero amount of time for the energy in the universe to expand and cool enough for molecules to form. (I believe it's non-zero amount of time for even atoms to form.)
Seriously, "only" 10% are at risk? 10% is HUGE!
Yes, this is true, but things like a cold can be caught by 100% of the population (ok, more or less near 100%), but only a small percentage actually catch enough for it take enough of a foothold and cause symptoms.
Imagine if only 10% of people could contract The Plague... rather than wiping out an enormous amount of the population, it would have had a significantly decreased impact on the world. People are crazy likely to explain why only some people get a disease like that, by blaming some personality flaw on the person...
Mod parent up. Leprosy is no longer an issue. Antibiotics FTW.
Not only this but leprosy is like the bitch version of a bacterial infection. Most of the time, you have to be predisposed to being able to acquire it anyways (or immunocompromised, but that's true with any bacteria/fungus/virus). It's basically somewhere around 10% of the population that can actually acquire leprosy... everyone else could pretty much walk hand in hand with a leper and never catch a thing.
I'm curious what the rate of evasion is. In St. Louis we have a light rail that works similar to yours (the S- and U-Bahns, or light trains and subways for the non-german), but I know that evasion is very easy. They only check so many trains a day, though the fines cost probably $60 or so. The problem is that you can take a ticket for a daily or 2 hour pass and smudge off the validation time-stamp and re-use it 3-5 times before it is really worn out. Still, I imagine that a great number of the people have tickets with them, as usually the only people who seem to not are out of towners coming in from the airport (unless the ticket checker is a particular asshole, they let them off and just have them buy a ticket.
I only spent a month in Munich, and there were only two checks the whole month (riding it at least twice a day), and I only saw one pack of two or three kids get busted, so it's probably similar evasion rates... But the term for it, "Schwartzfahren" (black riding) is a well known word, so...
The whole kind of intent of my thing was that we should worry less about evasion... too many companies get miserly about their money, e.g. while working for Wal-Mart in the cereal isle, I was informally reprimanded for not putting up some cereal boxes that were seriously chewed up... it didn't matter that the product wasn't "up to snuff", they wanted someone to buy it, because they couldn't waste one box of cereal...
The German Bahn system works by letting pretty much anyone on board. If it's ICE, or regional then you're probably going to have your ticket checked by an attendant... the punishment for boarding without a ticket? Buying a ticket.
Bzzzt wrong.
You will have to pay a surcharge when buying aboard an IC/EC or ICE train, and there's no onboard sale on regional/local trains (IRE, RE, RB and below). Plus, any sign that you were trying to evade the attendant and you'll be fined, too. Boarding a regional/local train without a ticket means a 40 EUR (or twice the regular fare for your ride, whichever is greater) fine plus legal consequences if you get caught.
The only exception happens to be "my"* line, where we do sell tickets even though we're part of DB Regio - the reason being that some of our stops are so small and remote locations that it would not be economical to install a ticket vending machine there.
Oh... I was never doing Schwartzfahren, so I never actually learned what the full and real consequences were... thanks for the info!
What happens if you just happen to be in the bathroom when they pass? Nothing.
Bzzzt wrong again. ;-)
We *do* knock at the door and expect you to provide your ticket. Of course you'll be given sufficient time to finish your "business" and wash your hands first.
Oh, I was in the bathroom at one point, and no one knocked... I suppose I shouldn't have expected that to be actual policy.
This is actually a useful social study and most liberals will NOT like the result. This "experiment" shows that a large number of people will ONLY obey the rules of society if somebody is standing behind them with a heavy stick.
You're making an implication that this means that we have to stand behind them with a heavy stick to obey. The German Bahn system works by letting pretty much anyone on board. If it's ICE, or regional then you're probably going to have your ticket checked by an attendant... the punishment for boarding without a ticket? Buying a ticket. What happens if you just happen to be in the bathroom when they pass? Nothing.
If you're using the S-Bahns, or U-Bahns, or Straßebahns, then you're less likely to get checked, but the costs go up equivalently. The fee for using the S-Bahns/U-Bahns without a ticket? About 40€, which puts it at the same cost as a month-long ticket.
The advantages of this system are: no annoying turnstiles that don't let you through unless you have a ticket, no need to hire armed guards to patrol the facilities looking for people trying to beat the system, and while sure, some people get through without paying, and perhaps even ride a lot without paying, those that you do catch end up paying for a monthly ticket anyways, so you still get the funding that you need to keep operating, and the person learns a lesson in social responsibility...
And of course, even if you do stand behind them with a big stick, you're never going to completely stop everyone from ever committing a crime... that's simply a fact... and of course, the wonderful lesson here is: only a police state will stand behind you all the time with a big stick threatening to use it if you break the law... because only in a police state do they feel the need to ensure that people don't ever break the law in the first place.
As cos(0) says, but I'll clarify as I'm totally pedantic:
An illegal act is any act that is contrary to any law, while a criminal act is an act that is contrary only to criminal law.
As noted, shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater might actually end up getting you in trouble for a couple tens of wrongful death suits, however the key note is: it won't send you to jail.
Well, ok, actually... if you had good reason to anticipate that it was going to cause the death of another person, you might get charged with "reckless endangerment of human life" which might get you some jail time... and thinking about it since really any reasonable person knows that shouting 'fire' in a theater can cause a panic and the deaths of people, it would almost definitely get you charged with at least a manslaughter charge.
So, well... ok... the laws are always fuzzy, and honestly, prosecutors overcharge stuff all the time (as it's easier to dismiss indictments than add them) so you're likely to get at least charged with some pretty nasty sounding charges, and both sides of the law and order episode would be trying really hard to get you to plea to something... mostly because proving it would be harder than getting you to plea out. But if you stuck to your guns and had a decent lawyer, you probably ought be able to get out of any charge, because the act itself wasn't itself illegal, and you had no intent to get anyone hurt. (But the later would be an affirmative defense, which would kind of force you to admit that you did shout 'fire' in the theater, and so the likelihood of a conviction if the jury doesn't believe you, or depending on if the charge has a strict liability, you're kind of screwed.) ... I know maybe you didn't want that pedantic of an answer, but cos(0) already gave you the simple one. An illegal act can only be sued for, while a criminal act can get you arrested and convicted.
True enough, but even the most idiotic, hyperbolic rant on the Internet doesn't equate to yelling "fire" in a theater. Otherwise most of the garbage that passes for "news" in the US would end up yielding criminal charges. The Japanese government (or whatever subset is responsible for this) just doesn't get the Internet. They should go back to being to not being responsible for Gundam.
Speech that presents a "clear and present danger" (like falsely yelling "fire" in a theater) hasn't been criminally illegal in the US since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1989...
.... correction, "without committing an illegal act" should read "without committing a CRIMINAL act."
Next time someone makes fun by shouting authentically "Fire! Fire! Run!" in a theater or some other 'suitable' place, and your relatives die there having been crushed by the panicking crowd trying to get out, maybe then you'll remember that there are certain situations where Freedom of Speech is limited, and rightfully so, precisely to prevent panic and to save lives.
Except that Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) overturned Schenck v. United States (1917), and holds that falsely shouting "Fire" in a theater cannot be restricted alone for presenting a "clear and present danger", and setting the now current and much higher bar that the speech has to provoke "imminent lawless action".
So, basically, in the US, you can falsely shout fire in a theater without committing an illegal act... (I do not however recommend it, as civil liability for wrongful death can be harsh... unless you're OJ Simpson...)
No, you're looking at Thomas Jefferson being clever.
You say "no", but then you proceed to state everything that I agree with, and nothing that contradicts what I said.
My point was that a lot of deists were deists of the time, because there wasn't a competing model to creation. They were humanists and naturalists of the highest order that atheists hold to today... but there was no naturalistic explanation for the origins of the universe or the diversity of animals. At the time, it was obvious that there was a creator (whoever/whatever that was) because there is stuff.
Essentially, deists of the day had pushed god back as far into the gaps that were available, but the gaps yet remained large enough for a god to hide in... now, with our naturalistic explanations some of us can push the gaps back far enough that nothing worth calling a god could hide in...
As a good analogy, the fact that Newton failed to ever believe in Relativity is not a mark against Relativity... but rather simply the obvious result of Newton living prior to the discover of Relativity. He died (most likely) of mercury poisoning not because he was a retarded idiot, but because human kind itself did not understand the dangers of mercury in his time. One cannot fault the ignorance of a person when such ignorance was inescapable for their time.
In the same way, saying many scientific discoveries were made by people of faith says nothing about the worthiness of that faith... the ancient Greek philosophers knew the world was round (more specifically spherical), and calculated its circumference better than Christopher Columbus had... yet this lends no credence to the Greek gods, which were the only available "faith" of the time.
I am not arguing that "people of faith" are not intelligent or anything. My argument is that the vast majority of "the most scientifically significant discoveries and theories" were discovered at a time when there was no reason to warrant disbelief in gods. Naturally, it was possible for people to disbelieve in gods prior to an understanding of the origin of species, and the origins of the galaxies, solar systems and planets... but one was left with an enormous gap of "I don't know" around where the universe came from, why things look the way that they do.
In more recent (but not modern) times, those people who would be inclined in our times to be atheist, professed "Deism", that a god existed, but we don't know anything about him. Specifically, they rejected the Christian conception of a god, but could not get around the looming issue of, "Oh yeah? Well, where did the universe come from?" Their answer was as close to the null-hypothesis as was possible at the time: "Something supernatural created the universe, but we don't, and cannot know anything about the nature of such a deity."
The necessity of a god in these earlier times was apparent, as no explanation was conceivable for the universe other than that of supernatural creation.
So, looking back on the people of faith that discovered incredible scientific principles, one must ask the question not "were they people of faith," because prior to about the 1900s or so, everyone believed in a god. Rather, one should ask oneself "If they were born in this age, with our knowledge... would they still be people of faith?" The answers for many Deists is most likely a resounding "no".
[...] interdental fricative [...]
I'm fascinated by articles on language origins and the various methods used to build relation trees between them, but I have no idea what those pronunciation terms mean. Isn't there a site somewhere with SOUNDS to complement those linguistic terms ? I mean, WTF is a 'fricative', seriously !
A fricative is a sound made by constricting airflow into a narrow channel between two articulating points. In the case of an interdental, it means placing the tongue between the teeth (generally up on the upper teeth) and forcing air through it. It is the "th" sound in English. ("this" is voiced, and "thanks" is unvoiced.)
A good place to start learning the terms would be to go to the Wikipedia article for the International Phonetic Alphabet. It has a table with all the sounds deemed possible to pronounce, and links to descriptions of them.
The only better choice is to get a linguist near you to sit down and sound them out for you... (you likely won't hear the difference between most, even if the linguist could pronounce them appropriately.)
As I mentioned earlier, many who made the most scientifically significant discoveries and theories have been people of faith.
Well, to be fair, until recently there wasn't really a good option otherwise. I mean, Galileo believed in special creation of the world, because there wasn't yet any reasonable explanation for how things got here. Now there is.
It's like when people point to the US Declaration of Independence "that they are endowed by their Creator..." first of all, all of the nouns are capitalized, so the capitalization of "Creator" is evidence of nothing. Second of all, they didn't say "God" they rather used an arbitrary term "Creator"... think about it, when the document was drafted no one had a good idea that evolution existed, or what the origin of species were... we were simply left with "something, or someone created the universe." It was the only plausible explanation at the time given their limited understandings.
So, pointing out that people who made scientific discoveries in the past were religious is kind of moot... they had no viable alternate hypothesis...
Hm, forgive me then, it appears I misunderstood your use of "putative" to mean that the existence of the relationship itself was in doubt, possibly due to your mention of "fringe" earlier in your post.
Well, when you say "in doubt", it is in doubt... it's just widely accepted that it's highly unlikely that two languages so close to each other physically, and reasonably similar in grammar are entirely unrelated.
It's precisely because the Japanese-Korean language family tree is likely that tons of linguists have been clamoring to try and prove it, but any theories suggesting that such a relationship exists are deeply flawed, and we are left with the scientific position that suggesting such a language family is still little better than pure speculation.
And I have had people argue with me that Korean and Japanese are completely unrelated, and that any similarities are purely accidental -- which strikes me as precious close to dogmatically delusional, or ideally just woefully misinformed.
Well, this is the current position of scientific consensus. Assuming that the languages are related at this point might be reasonable for the average lay person, but scientifically it's just really bad form to claim that they are related. We can show that Hungarian, Finnish, and Mongolian are all related, and they're separated by tons of distance, but yet we cannot seem to match up Japanese and Korean...
While it's wrong for someone to say that they're definitively not related (because this is unlikely) it is also wrong for someone to claim that they definitely are related.
And as it stands, no one has a better explanation for why Japanese and Korean are similar other than coincidence. And without any convincing evidence, the only reasonable hypothesis is the null-hypothesis: that the two languages are unrelated, and similarities are either coincidence or contact borrowings (Sprachraum).
I didn't say that the two weren't related. I call it putative, because there is no good scientific theory about how their relationship exists. This isn't just political. We can totally look at the two and notice similar grammars, and some similar words, but they could have just been a Sprachraum.
Until someone can demonstrate HOW they are related (and you admit that we don't know this), the relationship is putative.
The only difference between the Japanese "fu" and the English "fu" is whether your lower teeth make contact with your upper lip.
Yes, like I said, the Japanese "fu" is a bilabial (two lip) fricative, while the English "fu" is a labio-dental (lip and teeth) fricative. I didn't say they didn't sound similar, I said that pronouncing an English "fu" for a Japanese "fu" is mispronouncing the phoneme. ;)
And not all English speakers are heavy on dipthongs, nor are all English vowels dipthonged. Heck, part of the "southern accent" is about the elimination of the dipthong in the "eye" sound ("I'm going to buy some ice" -> "Ah'm gonna bah som' ahhs").
Right, but the most common English accents pronounce not just the diphthong "eye" in that sentence, but even the vowel in "some" is pronounced as a diphthong. It's primarily by allophonic production, so none of them hear it or realize that they're even saying it, but they do it.
And as for your "sakey" example, that's just people who've never bothered to look up the pronunciation; that has nothing to do with how easy it is to pronounce.
Even if you tell an American how to properly pronounce "sake" and you coach them to pronounce it properly, because of allophonic rules, depending on how well they can pick up new phonemic rules, they will eventually revert to pronouncing it wrong. Unless they're a haughty taughty fellow, who excruciatingly examines everything they say, and then they just end up like pricks demanding that people pronounce "comfortable" correctly...
BTW, the one that is like scratching nails on a chalkboard to me is "Toe-Key-Yo" ;) But I generally find I have little trouble correcting people, and you'll find the same with sake.
I deal with so many horrible pronunciations I've given up on Americans... but you're right, it is a grating pronunciation. After coaching someone enough to get it right, come back a week later, and get them to pronounce it cold, without thinking about it... I almost guarantee you that they get it wrong.
The Japanese "fu" syllable is not just "softer" it's a bilabial fricative, of which there are none in English.
So, if you take "every English speaker mispronounces 'fu' and says 'su' instead of 'tsu'" sure... English speakers have a reasonably natural pronunciation of Japanese. Oh and as long as you're willing to accept that English speakers don't produce "pure" vowel sounds and seem to diphthong every vowel. And the whole "ends in /-e/ becomes /-ej/ or /i/" thing... If I could kill every person who says "saki" or "sakey"...
It's different issues, and I'll grant you, Icelandic is known to have a difficult phonology... but getting Japanese right isn't much easier than getting German right.
Some languages gain phonemes, some languages lose phonemes.
Some species gain genes, some species lose genes (and in a non-monotonic fashion), but yet we believe maps of genes provide reasonable taxonomic structures that descend from a single root (unless you're disputing this as well). Languages mutate and recombine just like genetic material. Why do you think we should believe in one and not the other?
Yes, and we tract species relations by tracking specific genetic mutations through the various genomes, such as Endogenous Retro Viral (ERV) insertions. We can use these mutations and rules to track Dutch, and German back to a related language, and then English into a further related language, and then back further to account for Latin, Greek, Indo-Iranian, and all the way back to showing relation to the Anatolian language(s). But here, we start running into problems. We cannot see the relations from Indo-European to Afro-Semetic languages, because the mutation rate is very high in languages, and the noise of mutations starts to drown out signal of relationships.
So, while it's accepted that it's quite likely that all the languages diverged from a common language, we don't have the same genetic analysis available to us that we do have for biological relationships of species.
I am not in any way an expert in languages, I think the reason why English has got so many irregular verbs might be a different one. For me it looks like the irregularities in English are not due to the simplicity of verbal patterns but rather due to numerous legacies (of middle German and Norman languages or so).
Something similar is also the case with Russian. The language itself has got lots of clear rules about verbal patterns, but also many exceptions that are legacies of old Russian, Church Slavonic and spelling reforms.
Yes, this is pretty much why English has irregular verbs. But there's an important thing here: Why doesn't Hungarian how so many legacies? The answer is that they do. The only differences is that if one has to learn a complex verb pattern, they will recontextualize verbs to fit the pattern rather than ingrain irregularities. It's the same reason English speakers create "Swing swang swung"... to make it fit a more generic verb pattern.
Sounds like Koko the Gorilla.
True. There are generally at least 3 major language families: tonal (e.g. Thai), click (e.g. Aborigine), and phonetic (e.g English). Now the majority of the world is primarily phonetic languages, and these split up into numerous categories. I'm not familiar enough with tonal and click languages to say how the break down; but they are primarily centralized in regions of Asia, Australia, and Africa.
Where did you get these language classifications? Tonal languages use standard phonetics, and so do "click" languages.
Though you also have to define a vowel. Not every language necessarily considers the same thing a vowel; so that could very. One language I'm working on for series treats 'c', 'p', and 's' as a vowel - it's got the 5 common vowels, plus about 4 or 5 functionary vowels that I can think of off the top of my head; over 30 letters in the primary alphabet.
I noted "syllabic consonants" as well. I know that some languages use some consonants as as vowels, e.g. Serbian language for itself is "srpski", where "r" is a syllabic consonant performing many of the same duties as a vowel. What am I defining as a vowel? The linguistic definition of a vowel, which excludes consonants, even if they are syllabic, and used similar to a vowel.
Except tonal and click languages don't necessarily have vowels and consonants. For example, in Thai you can say a complete sentence with the same phonetic sound by simply variant the pitch (tone). But then, vowels and consonants are more for written language than spoken - so (again) definitions are a must.
Where the hell did you get this notion? There is not a language in the world that doesn't have vowels, and similarly there is not a language in the world that does not have consonants. Even Pirahã at the lowest estimates has 7 consonants.
Thai uses tones layered OVER phonetics. Thai cannot say anything with "just tones" the tones are carried by syllables.
Vowels and consonants aren't more for written language, some languages don't even really write vowels (because they have say, only three vowels, so nearly any short vowel is an acceptable allophone of any other short vowel. And even then, the letters used to write the long vowels are actually glottal stop for "a", palatal approximant ("y") for "i", and labial approximant ("w") for "u")
So, could one possibly compose a Thai sentence using only one phoneme but only with tonal variation? Sure, if one stuck with a simple vowel, which would severely limit anything useful to say... but the vowel used in the sentence would be phonemically distinct from any other vowel. (They also distinguish vowel length, so perhaps you could get away with two phonemes.)
The likelihood is probably quite a bit higher than you realize. You need to study tonal and click languages - as they very well do much such distinctions.
I have studied some tonal languages, no click languages though. And when I stated that the probability of distinguishing dental voiceless plosive from alveolar voiceless plosive, I'm not speaking out of my butt... BOTH are represented simplistically in IPA with "t", because no language known at the time of the IPA makes any distinction between the two. But where distinction between the two is required, (typically only necessary for distinguishing allophones, or for transcribing speech) they have diacritics to more finely indicate place of articulation.
The human brain/ear/tongue is incredible in what can be differentiated between and produced. A baby and toddler learn the language around them, and later (by teenage years) lose much of the ability to pick up other languages - primarily due to losing the ability to distinguish and produce the variances in the "new" language versus what they are using every day. (Yes, there are some people do not lose that ability, or at least lose it as greatly as others.)
I know about the critica