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"Athhilezar? Watch Your Fantasy World Language" by Amy Chozick, New York Times, 12/11/2011 [^].
"The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over," said Paul R. Frommer, professor emeritus of clinical management communication at the University of Southern California who created Na’vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in "Avatar." While awaiting CodeProject's Lounge to evolve its own language (beyond "bacon," "elephant," and "sunshine" variants), I remain humbled by the complexity of human languages that evolved among groups of people living "more archaic" ways of life:
"There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language. Earlier in this century the anthropological linguist Edward Sapir wrote, "When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.
To pick an example at random of a sophisticated linguistic form in a nonindustrialized people, the linguist Joan Bresnan recently wrote a technical article comparing a construction in Kivunjo, a Bantu language spoken in several villages on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, with its counterpart construction in English, which she describes as "a West Germanic language spoken in England and its former colonies." ...
"The corresponding Kivunjo construction is called the applicative, whose resemblance to the English dative, Bresnan notes, "can be likened to that of the game of chess to checkers." The Kivunjo construction fits entirely inside the verb, which has seven prefixes and suffixes, two moods, and fourteen tenses; the verb agrees with its subject, its object, and its benefactive nouns, each of which comes in sixteen genders. (In case you are wondering, these "genders" do not pertain to things like cross-dressers, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, androgynous people, and so on, as one reader of this chapter surmised. To a linguist, the term gender retains its original meaning of "kind," as in the related words generic, genus, and genre. The Bantu "genders" refer to kinds like humans, animals, extended objects, clusters of objects, and body parts. It just happens that in many European languages the genders correspond to the sexes, at least in pronouns. ..." Steven Pinker, "The Language Instinct" p. 27 [^].
“I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.” Jorge Luis Borges
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I just saw a short video segment of the House of Representatives hearing into concerns for the privacy healthcare.gov
In it, there's a comment in the code that states that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy - a statement that is in direct contravention of HIPA.
A representative of the contractor has admitted knowledge of its inclusion in the source, yet claims that the responsibility for it lies elsewhere, which it may or may not in a legal sense.
But my question is: If the programmer that inserted it knew it was at odds to HIPA, should they also themselves be held to account?
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I think the company that did healthcare.gov should be held accountable for this entire mess.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
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enhzflep wrote: should they also themselves be held to account
This, taken to extremes, leads to the Nuremberg trials. Should a grunt (programmer) be responsible for executing decisions taken by his superiors (managers/designer/business).
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Indeed, that was precisely the comparison I'd hoped to elicit in people's mind.
There's no threat of death to the public or the employees concerned, which in my mind, makes it a question of morals.
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Personally I think the programmer has done precisely the correct thing, implemented the requirement and left a comment pointing out it's inadequacies. I know I would sack a programmer that refused to implement such a requirement bit I would expect the comment to appear in the doco and kudos to the programmer.
I would also want the guy to be a little more explicit about the details as to why the requirement is inadequate, I know simply saying it does not work annoys the sh*t out of me I imagine it does those further up the food chain.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: Personally I think the programmer has done precisely the correct thing
That was my take on it as well. Kudo's to the programmer for recognizing the situation and doing what they can to expose it. After all, the Gov't is still trying to gut the last big whistle blower....
Ken
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Why is it even a big deal? It's a comment, comments have no semantics.
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It is the government. They can do whatever they want. Look at the IRS giving bonuses to employees that own the IRS.
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About an hour debugging a bind failure in my configuration-based Unity container. Fusion log viewer and procmon going. Finally notice I spelled my assembly name wrong.
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Ouch.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
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First thing I do when some blasted xaml does not bind is copy/paste the names, my typing skills are quite limited
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Maunder, is that you again posting under another pseudonym?
B
MCAD
---
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Not sure if honored, or ...
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*BANG* Oh wait... should have read the whole post first!!
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Yeah, that is a dangerous request to make in The Lounge.
TTFN - Kent
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What shocked me, that some of the responses make the guy into a complete idiot, but do not mention the companies offering him a job for that 9 second accident...
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: What shocked me, that some of the responses make the guy into a complete idiot And what's idiotic about standing near a train that's doing about 10mph?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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For some reason I now have a song stuck in my head.
Quote: Dumb ways to die
So many dumb ways to die
Dumb ways to di-ie-ie
So many dumb ways to die
What is this talk of release? I do not release software. My software escapes leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
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i am making a SW for one of the hospital in my area and my confutation is about the UI related. I have two option as per my design. either i can send a complete Menu from my control layer to UI and inject the full menu control in my Main Host App or pass a XML with details like name and module to load and create a menu in my Host App and display it.
Both has their pros and cons. but i am bit confuse about which option is better. Just need some third party view on this.
Which option do you guys think is better
EDIT: i am using WPF and prism with Unity bootstrapped and sql express as backed. Access to different module can be configured in XML
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I recommend the XML form as this will make it easier to extend your server (service) to support UIs on other platforms (e.g. mobile) in the future.
/ravi
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