This is exactly the concept I objected to: […] And no, the outcome is not just someone's short-term hurt feelings. The outcome is express truth and revealed facts.
That means you're not objecting at all.
Let's take the Muhammad cartoons. The outcome was outrage across the Muslim world, i.e. it was an emotional offence. That's right, I said this alone doesn't make the cartoons wrong. However, is there any truth or facts in the cartoons? Even your article doesn't say that truth was the intention. The intention was to express an opinion. The question is, was it a constructive opinion? Was there any constructive purpose at all? The most evident purpose I see was to make a joke. So, were the cartoons funny? This last question is the only purpose where the cartoons can be coherently tied to. Again, there's no truth or facts in just being funny.
Therefore I object. Please exercise some consideration when you intend to be funny and nothing else. The cartoons had nothing else in them besides the purpose of being funny, but it didn't work out due to ill-chosen topic. There was nothing constructive or educating in them, nothing even remotely promoting critical thinking or such. Lack of consideration is the opposite of critical thinking.
Just because what is said might be emotionally upsetting or distressful to any group or person should not preclude what is being said from being protected by the Freedom of Speech, unless what is said is said with malice of forethought in order to specifically incite a criminal act against the person or group.
This is exactly the concept I objected to: Looking at the offence only keeping in mind the intention, not the outcome. When you look only at the intention, then how can you judge? Are you such a competent mind-reader of other people's minds? When you look only at the intention, then you could wiggle out from any kind of damage you caused by citing your noble intentions.
So, you have to look at the outcome too. And no, the outcome is not just someone's short-term hurt feelings. The outcome is express truth and revealed facts. To me it's obvious that, in ideal, freedom of speech isn't about my or anyone else's right to speak up about something, anything. It's not about letting everyone speak their mind to their heart's content regardless of the content. Instead, it's about letting people discuss and debate to find a solution or a better way, while it's understood that lies are still lies, slander is still slander, and blasphemy is still blasphemy. Even though the last concept has no legal purpose these days, isn't it evident enough that it has no constructive purpose?
In hot dry areas they have known how to build houses for millennia. Did people become stupid all of a sudden? Granted, it's not good for hot and wet areas, but surely there's some ingenious indigenous technique there too, if we are just smart enough to appreciate it.
Another serious issue is that changing to consoles (Ctrl+Alt+F1, F2, etc) cause the same crash.
I created another user account. Logging in and out and changing to console and back is trouble-free there. I will migrate to the new account, if I can't figure out how to repair the old one.
Edit: In conclusion, looks like Cinnamon 2 backported to Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't work so seamlessly and effortlessly, at least not when you install the meta package and Mdm. Cinnamon 2 was made for a later version, Mint 16 (Petra), whose Ubuntu equivalent is 13.10 (Saucy).
Around the turn of the calendar year, I added Mint main and backport repos to my Ubuntu 12.04 installation and this enabled me to install the latest Cinnamon 2. I took the meta package and also Mdm because my aim is to mintify this installation as far as possible. Unfortunately I ended up with glitches.
There's a cosmetic glitch around the ClipIt icon which sometimes affects also the CPU graph left to it (see the pic). More serious is that logout causes X.org to crash irrecoverably (reboot required). (I'm not sure my diagnosis is correct, but the symptoms are: the DE logs out, followed by blank screen where nothing works)
Does anyone know how to troubleshoot X concerning logout crashes?
Bah... Theism/Atheism is not a matter of "investigation" but about how we were born. Destiny it's what counts.
You mean to say that conversion doesn't happen?
Somehow, even though born in the Soviet Union, I resisted to be identified as a Soviet since very early age. Soon enough it turned out that the country itself was destined for destruction. In the light of this, what is destiny?
That would make most people atheists. Hmmmmmm.....When I was born, I didn't know anything about religion. As is true for every other human being. Does that mean anything?
Perhaps, but as any religionist will tell you, the Spirit of the Lard was watching over you at that time and all the way back to fertilization.
Children are clueless about most things. Is it surprising that they are also clueless about atheism-vs.-religion divide?
@Jimbro Kids are watched over by the parents. Perhaps this means something.
See, I am not good with that terminology. The Brussels regulation as propagated over here talks about savings bulbs only, not about what they technologically are. Again, definitions are important. I don't know if it's halogen or whatever. All I know for sure is that the old bulbs were better in several ways, but they have been replaced in shops with something less manageable, called savings bulbs.
Dutch is still the language most closely related to English by various measures.
What I have heard (actually read in encyclopedias), it's Frisian that is most closely related to English. But this is irrelevant in several ways. The languages in that corner of the continent are necessarily closely related. Moreover, English is a lingua franca, i.e. a global communication tool pliable hither and thither rather than a fixed symbol system, a distinctive marker of (self-)identity for a specific group/location. The latter is how I prefer to define (proper/real/true) language. Lingua franca is related to everything and everybody, nothing special about it.
I saw a South-African lamenting that if the Dutch hadn't disavowed Afrikaans on account of apartheid
...nicely illustrate how the distinction between dialect and language is political rather than linguistic. Science is politically neutral, even though it can be used politically, and often is.
By the way, my two sentences, as you quoted them, did not belong together. "Their mutual intelligibility is so fluent that they could be considered dialects" referred to the Scandinavian languages. With "Saxon, Franconian, and (High) German" I began next thought that I probably should have marked by beginning a separate paragraph.
I studied linguistics at the university and one of the professors was fairly straightforward: "We call them language/family trees but they aren't really. They are more like shrubs or bushes."
Did your professor study math? The tree is a topological type of a graph.
He studied literature, so he saw in the term "language tree" a poetic metaphor rather than a math concept.
Unless you're saying that incandescents are bad for people because they're bad for cacti, what's your point?
To everything I said previously, I can also add that they are near-perceptibly flickering, and this is another dead serious point to me, as I am a book-reading person. I hate cold light. I hate their colour range. I hate flickering. I hate it that they burn out fast in my particular lamps. What is there to like? Will they save the world somehow, like electric cars were supposed to?
Ersi, you're right about "continuum" but not right about the families - which are trees not clumps. Trees means that you cannot juxtapose two languages for that purpose isolately - because they are the most probably just the current-day states (slices) of themselves taken diachronically - when in time, they intersect in their certain ancestor (if one).
I studied linguistics at the university and one of the professors was fairly straightforward: "We call them language/family trees but they aren't really. They are more like shrubs or bushes."
Your remarks on divergence and convergence totally apply. Also assimilation should be an instantly understandable term. Other related terms are substratum and superstratum in language contact theory.
Still, I vastly prefer the Estonian variety (must be close to German) over Russian.
As far as I can tell, the big difference lies in the way the suerkraut was fermented, industrially or naturally matured in wood barrels. You hardly can find the naturally matured one at the supermarket
Right, I mean the wood barrel one. This is totally Estonian (or German if you wish).
The Russian one in the picture I linked is called "Siberian or Far East variety" on Russian Wikipedia, "which contains carrot in distinction from the variety used in European Russia." (Not so) oddly, we have carrot added to near-raw cabbage in our supermarkets too. I still refuse to call it sauerkraut, even though they do.
Dialect differences in Germany can be extreme, to a point where a Saxon won't understand a Bavarian or vice versa
Like I said, Saxon, Franconian, and German are three different languages from a linguistic standpoint.
From the linguistic standpoint, it's well understood that dialect and language form a continuum. Linguistically, undisputed languages belong to different families. Within language families, it's mostly politics that decides, not linguistics. A professor at the university brought an example concerning Indo-European languages: Lithuanian and Russian are separated to different groups (Baltic and Slavic respectively) while Icelandic and English which have significantly more grammatical differences belong to the same group (Germanic).
The Scandinavian languages are rather clearly a political phenomenon. Their mutual intelligibility is so fluent that they could be considered dialects. Saxon, Franconian, and (High) German have a common present. Politically they have a less common past, which makes them differ. It's a political choice if you prefer the point of view of the present or of the past. Geolinguistically they have been closely related all along.
Off-topic: It's apt that this thread split off one of the religion threads where I was in the business of defining God. According to one tenet, the relationship of the universe and God is like that of a word and its meaning. Indicative, not causal.
Dutch Wikipedia makes some unsourced claims that Sauerkraut might've originated in northern China, was taken along to eastern Europe by the Mongols, and made its way from there across Germany to the Netherlands with Ashkenazi refugees.
Indeed, now that you mention it, I remember how I enjoined "varza murata" in Romania and "savanyú káposzta" in Hungary.
Here's the Russian variety. In Siberia they touch Mongolia. Still, I vastly prefer the Estonian variety (must be close to German) over Russian.
The US will approve immigration reform? What does that mean? It reminds me of the oracle of Delphi: "If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed."
The oracle does not predict anything. The oracle only intermediates a required message.
And, for example, you don't seem right for me about the "switching problem": it's exactly the opposite as I could judge by 1) their "construction", 2) my own experience with them
It's hard to define the switching problem. It could be something to do with my ancient wires and/or voltage instability. Anyway, the old bulbs lasted just fine and they emitted proper heat. The old burning bulb really burns!
And I consider the invitation to come shopping seriously. It's been too long since I was in Russia.
The original thread was quite graphics intensive, we'll see how this one works out.
I can confirm what I said earlier. I spot no likeable architecture, none existing and none upcoming. Of course, I must admit that I am heavily biased in favour of the countryside.
I find the text "News: Settling in" generally an undesirable. It should appear when there are real news concerning the entire membership, in the category of the notification at My Opera that it will be closed down. Or when we are having a voting on the matter.
It's the funniest thing, but--- even though on the surface Vivaldi may seem to have more to offer, I don't feel "safe" about it. The idea that it's being run by Opera folks leaves me wanting to take my probing stick and bang extra hard on the ice before putting my weight on it. I actually feel "safer" here even though I know there isn't as much to support it-- we're on one guy's site and he's having to take space from his blog to make room for the forums-- but it still "feels" safer than Vivaldi does right now.
Even though I don't know exactly what you mean by "safer", I share the sentiment vaguely. Despite the generous offer of email and blogs at Vivaldi.net, the general atmosphere there makes me wary. A quickly increasing number of random people who contribute to chatter and noise, not discussion. The forums seem to lack focus and soul. People may use it to socialise in some isolated clubs or couples, rather than forums and blogs.
The effect that Vivaldi.net is having is mixed. It takes some energy out of Opera ASA's new forums by providing the social tools that Opera ASA is ditching. Maybe they hoped to provide a refugee haven (which I would like), but some of the prominent current employees and fanbois there extinguish this mood, while the bulk membership at Vivaldi.net are just general cosmic (as in Cosmo) static.
Here we have the true refugee atmosphere. There it's another FB, only accidentally and marginally related to Opera, and not really to old Opera. FB and Cosmo are not safe either to the body or to the mind. Honestly, I would not like the user count here to explode too fast. I would not like new users to be recruited from odd places. This place could lose its character. Then again, in order to have any character at all, the core users should be active. Where's Jimbro this year? Vacationing from retirement?
All the highrise buildings highlighted in media this century are very bad. Since I generally don't follow architecture news, I don't know of any positive examples. From what I've seen, small-scale city-planning (I hope this is the right term) has been forgotten, even though small-scale planning would be the saving grace for the planet. Land is being given away for corporate highrise buildings in ever larger chunks. There may be some amusing specimens among the buildings produced, but I haven't noticed any edifying or ergonomic or economic ones.
@Frenzie I don't even know what energy-neutral means, but sure this great innovation will reach our place too in no time. It comes from Brussels, so it must be absolutely fabulous. The previous great innovation that we blindly adopted (looks like irreversibly) was the "saving" lightbulbs that cost ten times more than previous lightbulbs and burn through ten times faster (literally) because here in our dark climate you need to switch the lights on and off often and those things are not built for that. Also, the new bulbs don't emit heat like the old bulbs did. Heat is really vital in our climate. The old bulbs are already prohibited and not in sales here. Some smart people bought up large stocks in time.
Unlike simple mirroring or backup utilities, Unison can deal with updates to both replicas of a distributed directory structure. Updates that do not conflict are propagated automatically. Conflicting updates are detected and displayed.
Rsync is of course just for mirroring. The files should be static when syncing. Each and every update gets displayed and asks interaction unless the action is specified beforehand.
In contrast, Unison seems a proper merge tool, not a mechanical copier. How does it compare to Git in your opinion?
Wasn't that about the automatic Amazon results in the Unity Dash?
Yes, about the fact that the search terms get sent to Amazon so that their offers may serve you better. The whole Zeitgeist and other software that record your moves is implicated as suspicious this way.
Ubuntu comes with Ubuntu One cloud service that syncs /home directory like Opera Link does with Opera's profile, only better.
- Same as in Opera Link, you can (un)select some folders-places to sync. - Different from Opera Link, you can sync the whole profile mercilessly. The files will be neatly viewable in the cloud like in a file manager. There's a storage limit of course, so it can't be abused without second thought. - Optional encryption. In this case the files in the cloud won't remain neatly viewable like in the file manager.
But Richard Stallman says Ubuntu services are bad for you, so...
For my own backup needs I have used good old copy-paste to an external HDD. Experiments with cp, mv, and rsync have been fun.
