War_Machine

9 年前discuss

As long as Fortran is able to keep up with Python's capabilities (or any other language's for that matter), there seems to be absolutely no reason to make a change considering Fortran's history and familiarity in Physics. In other words, other languages need to make a big enough leap forward or Fortran to lag behind enough to justify a change. Your example just shows that it's fine to use other languages, and I agree, but it's not very compelling in promoting a change in language.

War_Machine

9 年前discuss

They've only now, in 2017, started the return program for the vehicles mentioned in that lawsuit, so this statistic probably doesn't reflect those returns yet.

War_Machine

10 年前discuss

After Power's IP addresses were blocked by Facebook, couldn't Power use the user as proxy to access Facebook instead? In other words, have the user (through some Power provided tool I suppose) access Facebook and feed Power the information it wants to send.

War_Machine

10 年前discuss

This article shows practically no evidence of its main thesis. To substantiate that Chomsky has been "blown out of the water", he mentions 3 things:

1) "[...] greater awareness of the diversity of human languages, and especially the discovery by Daniel Everett of a Brazilian indigenous language, Pirahã, that apparently has no subordinate clauses"

That's the one and only evidence the author shows for this point. No examples on how the language works or how it stands in contrast to Universal Grammar, and no other mention of any other language that might be contradicting UG as well (even though the author implies that there are other languages that stand in contradiction to UG). Later on though the author says "It is not even undisputed that Pirahã lacks subordinate clauses" so the one and only evidence is still a maybe.

2)"The second is advances in cognitive psychology. [...] Nowadays we know that the human mind has complex, powerful, abstract capabilities in many areas, not just language, and new possibilities are opening up for explaining language from general mechanisms of thinking and learning."

This is not an argument and no evidence has been shown for this point.

3)"The third factor is the increasing use of data-driven methods in computational linguistics [...] In a data-driven approach, structure arises because sentences obviously consist of parts that can be recognized before recognizing the whole. [...] This predicts that the grammar of uncommon words will be simple and regular, but common words will have more quirks because we have more examples from which to learn them. That is exactly what we observe in language, and it’s a source of great clutter in a grammar constructed on Chomskyan principles."

As far as I know, the fact that sentences have parts that can be individually recognized before recognizing the whole, is not contradicting UG at all. To the best of my knowledge, UG only says that there is a structure, not how the structure comes about. So the only point left is the fact that common words have more varied usage and are harder to pin down as a particular specific element of the structure. I don't see how that relates to UG quite frankly. Maybe someone can enlighten me on this.

I have no particular love for UG, I just know of it on a very general sense, but if I was a teacher and a student gave me this article as a report, I would've failed him just for the lack of evidence.

War_Machine

11 年前discuss

That's exactly my thought after hearing this story. Other than the fact that this game has been put through some trials and is backed by drug companies, how is it any different from any other dexterity-intensive videogame out there?

War_Machine

13 年前discuss

Who says Valve doesn't make a lot of profit from Dota 2?

My guess is that Riot simply didn't bother changing the model they went for in the first place for LoL, but I think Dota 2 has proved to be a great business model for Valve.

I'll be fair, I haven't seen any numbers from Valve, but if you pay any attention to the selling and trading of TF2 and Dota 2 items on Steam and many other places, you'd notice that people are outright making a living out of the whole Steam ecosystem.

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