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Comment by ecaron | Hacker News Reader

It is still really disappointing that TED never released the Sarah Silverman talk (http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/15/the-ted-v-sarah-silverman-f...). Isn't it their purpose to expose the ideas, and ours to contemplate them?

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Yeah but TED talks are _heavily_ edited from how they appear live on stage. TED puts an insane amount of effort into making the talks appear fluid and this is subconsciously I think partly why TED has been successful (everyone seems inhumanely perfect and articulate). If a TED talk bombs, it can be tricky to edit it into a coherent whole - I can imagine this is doubly hard with a comedian because timing is so important.

Source: I bombed a TED talk at TED 2011 in long beach. But I'm only 22 so hopefully I'll have a chance to do it again right in the future :)

on computer vision? (judging from your profile) Any chance it's up so that we can see how it was edited?

indirectly, yeah (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/60024/). It's not up yet (despite all my testing/preparation the WiFi didn't really work so it was a little rough) - not sure if it will go up, I guess we'll known before TED 2012 :)`

I dunno, lots of the talks are stellar in person too... People practice a lot before they are allowed to go on.

Very true, although I think in person we're less sensitive to "um"'s and "ah"'s than we are when watching video due to the expectations set by professionally produced TV and movies.

Ah, I saw this talk from a live stream! Really felt your pain but I think the audience was sympathetic. I took it as a good lesson to have a demo-fallback which also works offline, although admittedly that's not as realistic.

we did have a fallback which worked offline. the problem was that without wifi we had to rely on the iPad's compass (previously, with wifi i was proxying gyroscope data from iPod Touches tucked in the back of the iPad cases) - normally this would have worked fine. when we were onstage with so many cameras there was so much current flying around that the compasses went completely haywire and we were truly fscked. I wasn't kidding when I said on stage that if the iPad 2 had come out a week earlier we wouldn't be having any problems :)

Their handling of that whole thing was, for me, the breaking point when I could no longer give them benefit of the doubt or any longer take them seriously.

I was in the audience at the time. It was awful.

I'm glad comedians are trying to reclaim the term "retard" but I had no context for it and it just seemed inappropriate.

Interesting thought about reclaiming the word from where I sit. As a trained chef (baker), the verb "retard" is commonly used for its meaning of slowing something down. This is usually with bread making, especially sourdoughs. Yeast development can be retarded using colder environments to enable better flavor and texture. Honestly, I have a loaf of bread retarding in the refrigerator now, and I'll bake it in the morning.

Since I work often with bakers and baking companies (marketing), the word is used often and I've never once heard someone make a crack involving the word's derogatory usage. Yet, I know the word is not one considered acceptable to use to describe a person or one's actions. But how the word is used in my world obscured its obvious position as something ready to be reclaimed.

That'd be ret-ARD, rather than RE-tard.

Or do Americans put the stress on the first syllable even in the verb? Stressing first syllables is a pretty common feature of American English.

re-TARD, actually.

And it gets stress on the the first syllable where it's used as a noun, second syllable as a verb. cf "address", "attribute". (I do realize the noun–verb distinction doesn't come play in the UK for the former.)

So shouldn't TED release the talk so we can all have the opportunity to come to the same conclusion?

Think of it from their point of view. They want to be known for brilliant talks, not crap ones. If it really was an awful talk, it devalues their brand to publish it.

A good chunk of the TED talks never make it to the site.

Really? Well in that case, why are we even having this discussion?

Damn you, internet!

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that.

The word was 'retarded'. Sarah never said 'retard'.

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