Mewing is verbal.

I didn't have any comment on the analogy, just on the point about sentience.

I'm not doing anything of the sort. Like I said, I had no comment on the analogy.

The savvy part is the fact of manipulating the media, not the way it's done.

The last time I had a conversation with my cat is this evening. If you mean direct, two-way, verbal communication, it was this morning. Her food bowl was empty, which she told me, by mewing and physically showing me what she was mewing about. She free-feeds, and sometimes it isn't empty, and she doesn't typically mew and go to her food bowl when it's not empty; when she does, something else is wrong and she knows that is a way to prompt attention.

Generally, the response I get to these sorts of scenarios is that I'm projecting and I can't adequately judge a non-human animal's attention without human language (which, by the way, begs the question). But this sort of reasoning easily devolves all the way to cogito ergo sum: nothing can be truly known but what's in your mind. What a hopelessly chaotic worldview. My cat and I communicate, sometimes with mistakes just as with human-human communication. But it shows an enormous lack of experience or empathy to believe that non-human animal sentience doesn't exist.

So are animals.

Except that's obviously a pick-one list. It can't be "retarded" to successfully manipulate "retarded" media. Either the media manipulation is successful—and the effort is savvy—or it fails—and the media is savvy.

So, you're actually saying that if you introduce toll lanes, the demand for those lanes will fall... and the people who previously had that demand will just vanish? Or will they just use the (now more congested) toll-free lanes? Demand for the good whose price increased may fall, but unless you impose tolls on all of the lanes (and then all of the alternate routes), you're just moving the congestion around, almost certainly non-optimally. The only way to actually reduce congestion would be to eliminate alternate routes for those who can't or won't pay the tolls. Which, considering the sort of oligarchic, myopic worldview this represents, is really a pretty good reason to discard this sort of "rational" economic reasoning altogether.

If you really don't believe that programming is math, what exactly do you think that a processor does with those "words"?

Wow thanks.

That sounds pretty good, can you post the recipe?

The hr element may lack semantic meaning, but as far as I'm aware no semantic equivalent has been proposed (which is a shame!).

The problem is you're trying to apply reasoning to taste. You and the posters above you. Talent may be measurable to some degree, but it would be an enormous waste of time to determine and measure all of the criteria, and most performers are unlikely to participate in the process; but music quality is determined by more than just talent.

As a silly example, it's debatable who has more talent in a class of guitarists which includes folks like Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai and so on, but I personally am more inclined to listen to Steve Vai, because his style appeals to me more than the others. That doesn't make him better or worse, and other people with different taste might prefer the others, and quite a lot of people prefer none of the above.

Taste isn't a measurement of talent, and measuring talent is largely pointless except for the talented seeking to advance their craft or career.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/somebody-should-do-something-about-all-the-problem,11018/

If you liked the disease risks of isolated microclimates full of the food supply we depend on, you'll love filling those up with the incubators we call mammals.

It's pretty doubtful that it tasted like a hoppy IPA; the hop trend is extremely recent, even modern American pale ales tend to be substantially hoppier than traditional IPAs. Traditional American recipes often used other herbs besides hops, and it would be unsurprising if pine needles were included. In fact, it was also common in many traditional American recipes to use sugar sources other than malted barley, such as molasses.

Are you the person with the baboons?