You're making a straw man caricature out of the nativism detractors. Current researchers do not claim that first language is taught, that's why the field is called language acquisition regardless of whether one subscribes to nativism. The more nuanced non-nativist theories argue that grammar learning employs domain-general cognitive mechanisms, rather than language-specific innate grammar knowledge or principles. It's quite a stretch to connect any of this with political ideologies.
There is no consensus about this question. Both sides clearly have an ax to grind. Everett knows the language best, so I'd lend more credence to his judgment. Regardless of the answer, it only means that Chomsky's theory that everything is about recursion may or may not have been falsified, not that it is a good theory.
I don't see such a large difference between your wording and mine; "should" implies making some kind of best effort at doing something where possible. But regardless, where we differ is that I think that people are generally neutral or indifferent instead of kind. I don't believe this can be radically changed in a way that works out, that would be Utopian thinking. I gave you a very common example where being kind is not advisable, yet you claim this happens only in very extreme circumstances. I'm curious how you arrived at such a conviction.
Sure but that illustrates my point: applying as much kindness as possible is not what people actually strive for nor would it be a solution. Preventing being taken advantage of takes priority.
Saying we aren't rational is not an argument that philosophy cannot improve our lives. In ancient Greece the latter used to be an important part of philosophy. I think schools such as stoicism and epicureanism have a lot to offer.
Sounds great, but in practice people will take advantage of you; e.g., if you walk alone in the street at night in a big city and a stranger asks to use your mobile phone, you'd have to be particularly naive to say yes.
> What I'm saying is that if one wants to have the overwhelmingly warm service Americans expect in restaurants, we need to keep tipping.
Except you do not give any argument for why that is the case, but just hand wavingly claim it. Why exactly wouldn't it work if tips were abolished, all the prices on the menu are raised to match the average income from tips, and salaries raised to make up for tips? I don't see why good service would only be possible with tipping.
It's terrible terminology because "being in a circle" with someone suggests symmetry and reciprocity that isn't there. They mean "X has followed you", which is clear and to the point.
Reference counting and the C API are properties of the CPython implementation, not Python the language. Other Python implementations do NOT use reference counting and don't offer the C API, but do make guarantees about atomic operations. I think the problem with backward compatibility is with wanting to preserve the C API and the existing extension modules implemented in C, not necessarily with Python the language.
It seems to me that the option of going with a tracing garbage collector is preferable. Removing the GIL will require a lot of changes anyway, and it may be better to go all they way so as to preserve performance. It would affect the C API and extensions modules would have to be reworked for this, but on the other hand you avoid all the issues with reference counting. If extension modules rely on code generation, such as Cython, a move to a radically different C API might be less painful than expected.
From what I know, most current managed languages are using GC, not reference counting, so perhaps it's an inherently better approach.
No they cannot do it for free otherwise. Research takes a lot of time, and if you're not getting money to do it you can't keep doing it (need to pay rent, food, etc). Perhaps you meant to say that the people in research would like to do that research regardless of the money it earns them; that seems true enough.
The funding cycles will also make the people not in it for the money tired, except for the ones that keep winning; it's a rat race regardless of your interest in cash. Most research is not about being "on the brink of discovering something [...]"; that is a romantic idea of research which is exceedingly rare.
I know, no analogy is perfect. I am saying that getting mugged or having your keystrokes sent somewhere is inherently bad as default and should be opt-in, not opt-out.
You also get told before you are mugged; telling you about it has absolutely no bearing on whether the action that follows is acceptable.
Even if they tell you about it, it's still a bad idea. There's plenty of legalese that people don't read because life is too short. It would be better if this wasn't the default.
A bit is a binary digit, with a value of 0 or 1. Popcount counts the number of 1-bits; and, as said, population count actually is the canonical name.
You can apply __builtin_popcount in a loop if you want to count bits in multiple words. The point of exposing this particular operation for an unsigned int is that a recent CPU will likely have an efficient operation for it. Operating on larger units is something better left to your own code or a library. You're definitely not "back to square 1", because the intrinsic offers you an operation that would otherwise only be accessible with inline assembly.
IMHO the distinction between URL and URI is similar to the debate on SI prefixes for bytes, or whether we should insist on calling Linux GNU/Linux; i.e., most people just don't care enough so these things will never gain currency.
I just learned of this case. I would say he didn't have his domain name taken away, but voluntarily gave it up when he chose to settle (for an X-box...). I've always found it a disappointing aspect of lawsuits that they end up in settlements so often, this would have formed an interesting precedent since he might have had good chances of winning the case (real name, no intention of deception). Shouldn't there be some kind of rule that prevents lawsuits from being settled when it's in the public interest or in the interest of justice?
Actually, "animacy" is a fundamental feature in semantics. It's part of your mental lexicon that a cat is animate and a rug isn't, and you would simply infer from that which is the referent for "it". As semantic challenges go, this is a very trivial one. In general the border between linguistic and world knowledge can become blurred. There may be limits to what can be learned purely from text, but seeing that this model achieved 94%, a lot can be learned purely from (annotated) text.
That's basically Chomsky's argument with the "colorless green ideas" sentence. If you put words together to form a sentence never seen before, supposedly a statistical model cannot help you. The thing is, a paper later showed that a simple Markov model is actually perfectly able to discriminate this grammatical sentence from an ungrammatical one. Novel and surprising sentences are never completely alien. They use familiar structures of the language, and combinations of words and other building blocks that we have seen before, and this is exploited when we analyze such sentences. Surprise and novelty are actually strongly related to statistics (cf. information theory).
> I doubt anyone reading "Alice drove down the street in her car" actually parsed the grammatical structure of that sentence, either explicitly or implicitly.
You do need to analyze a sentence to understand it. Think of a classical attachment ambiguity such as "the boy saw the girl with the telescope". There are two readings of the sentence, and just like a Gestalt, you're typically perceiving it as one or the other. This involves a process of disambiguation, which is evidence that you have parsed the sentence.
Actually it's not very appropriate for studying bible text. In Biblical Studies you would prefer not to have any errors at all, and since you work with a limited corpus you can afford to annotate by hand. People have in fact done this and I collaborated with a group that has been working on this for decades.
Please don't. If you're going to bother the man, ask a more interesting question. He's made his position on this abundantly clear in the Chomsky-Norvig debate.