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Comment Re:Easy grammar (Score 3, Informative) 626

The problem with Esperanto is that it isn't easy to learn. It's easier than French and English, but for anyone who grew up in Asia for example it's actually quite difficult because of it's European bias. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Lojban tries to solve this problem. I don't know how well they succeed.

Comment Business professionals doing data analysis (Score 1) 144

Should study SAS instead, if they want "to gain an edge on their peers." R is dominant in academia, but SAS is dominant in business and government. Assuming you're not an Excel wizard already. Whether you use R or SAS, you will be interfacing with your co-workers through Excel.

Comment As a statistician (Score 1) 94

I've always said that data scientist is just a buzzword for statistician. Another statistician called me on that one day, and said "No, a data scientist is a programmer." I'm sorry, but in this day and age, if you are a statistician who can't program, you're not a very good statistician.

Comment No F-Keys, Arrows, Numeric Keypad (Score 0) 146

Lots of people are complaining about this, but if you read the article (sorry, I'm new to slashdot) you'd see that the idea was to have none of that. He was tired of moving his hands around they keyboard to get to all of those things, and wanted to have access to them on the main keyboard. Probably for silly reasons like increasing speed and decreasing carpal tunnel,

Comment Let's do the math (Score 3, Insightful) 703

$3,800 x 9 million students x 2 years = $68.4 billion dollars. Perhaps not a lot when you consider the full federal budget, but it's more than we spent on the entire Department of Education last year. The real numbers that matter are 54% and 57%, the Republican portion of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Comment Our Forefathers were Idiots (Score 2) 115

What were they thinking, trading slightly more fragile bones for longer life spans, less dangerous lifestyles, philosophy, sanitation, modern medicine, equal rights, going to the moon, labor saving devices, the internet, quantum physics, cell phones, the internal combustion engine, and digital watches?

Comment Re:How smart does a chimp have to be? (Score 2) 341

We already have primates that can communicate with humans in a human language (American Sign Language or something similar) at the level of a child.

To be clear, when you say "child," that means a 2-3 year old. They never (after a lot more than 2-3 years) get past simple two word sentences. It's not clear they're even doing that. Since they never demonstrate any understanding of grammar, it's almost impossible to show they're not just learning tricks to get a desired result.

Comment Re:PR works well? Where? (Score 2) 413

You're confusing two separate things: proportional representation and parliamentary systems. The two are typically combined, but there is nothing necessary about that. If the U.S. elected Congress through proportional representation, but continued to elect the President through popular vote (er, I mean the Electoral College), you would have the multiple parties of proportional representation without the instability of having to form a coalition government.

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