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irregardless is not a word.

May I suggest you go read a poem by Wordsworth, any poem at all, Poems .

Now imagine trying to do that with Leetspeek.

I believe the reason people think that Leetspeak has a deeper meaning (than English)is because they rarely know the meanings of the words which they use, their formative years of learning to communicate with each other are held in a zargon which doesn't lead itself to direct expression (hence the use of swearing).

Check out some wordsworth, come back when you know what: a flower, hill, stone, or a forest is to him ok?

I kant speel gud...

The paper tries to find statistical correlations

OK, I just thought that the effort involved is non-standard (mileage varies).

That's "ironic", not "ironically".

I thought (American English) this is an adverb and thus deserves a "-ly". But I am not about to indeed discuss this until you demonstrate equivalent aptitude in my mother tongue (German).

CC.

The Everywhere Girl has been deleted from Wikipedia. Will she get restored?

• www.google.com
• www.yahoo.com
• en.wikipedia.org
• Columbia Encyclopedia

SO are you saying that the majority of the people who live in israel are semites and the majority of the people living in palestine are not semites?

Last I checked that was not the case. Once again it is you who lack a grasp of reality.

The reality is that as a race the people living in israel are overwhelmingly caucasian.

I can report that that is a fact. I have been there and seen it, as my Friend H.G. Wells reported in his report on my adventures - http://www.bartleby.com/1000/

Please explain where in the US Constituion/bill of rights etc. it states a right to privacy.

As early as the early 1800s the US Supreme Court has ruled that the right to privacy is part of the First Amendment's right to free speech. And there have been other USSC rulings saying the right to privacy does exist, including one in 1969. If a person can't expect privacy then their freedom of speech suffers. Not all but some of the USA's Founding Fathers knew exactly what privacy meant, otherwise the "Federalist Papers" and many other writings would not of been published anomymously. Not all were as brave as Thomas Paine was when he wrote "Common Sense" or "These are the times that try men's souls" while serving under Washington's command.

Common Sense, written by who we now know was Thomas Paine was originally published anonymously, and for good reason too. Are you honestly suggesting that you should be allowed to practice free speech anonymously?

You could "infer" it from the meaning of the word "recite".

recite. To repeat or utter aloud (something rehearsed or memorized).

It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature.

It takes a lot of reading to realize that none of these sub-centimeter turbines has actually run yet. Perhaps the laws of combustion physics prevent this? There's a reason why candle flames are the size they are ... see Michael Faraday's classic lecture The Chemical History of a Candle.

a. A statement describing a relationship observed to be invariable between or among phenomena for all cases in which the specified conditions are met: the law of gravity.
b. A generalization based on consistent experience or results: the law of supply and demand.

What's even more exasperating about this situation is that Kerry wouldn't have had the power to change the abortion laws and Bush hasn't done a damn thing about them either. This makes the "my body my right" crowd just as idiotic. Abortion is always a steaming political debate right around an election and then subsides to nothing during the term because the trimester laws aren't budging.

The logical step is to not even base your vote on the abortion stance. Of course, none of the voters are logical.

I agree with many (most) of the points you made, but here I have to object. First off, you are wrong in saying that the President hasn't done anything to try to stop abortion; he has. Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts. Right now there is a five to four majority on the court in favour of abortion (the four liberals + Kennedy who voted for abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey), a number that has decreased by one this year. It is probable that one of the liberal justices (most likely Stevens, since he is as old as gravel) will die or resign during the next presidency. It is therefore crucial that the next president (and indeed the next senate) is pro-choice, because that is what will decide the legality of the right to an abortion.

Second, even if it didn't matter what the presidents stand was (as I said, it does, but now I'm going hypothetical), it is still an enormously important issue. You can tell a lot about a person just judging their stance on abortion. If they're pro-life, they're obviously anti-science religious zealots, because no rational person would say that a collection of cells without anything near counciousness can possibly be called a human being. Frankly, as a human being, I'm offended by that. Second, it's a clear issue when it comes to your personal stance on feminism. Unlike what most people think, feminism is a good thing. It is undeniable that women are being wildly discrimintated against, and that's what feminism is all about; fighting gender discrimination. In my book, if you're not a feminist, you are just as bad as a racist. That simple. The notion that a woman shouldn't be able to choose what happens to her own body, because of some arcane rules and rituals inherited from a frightingly patriarchical society is repulsive to me. I could never respect a person who took that stance. Never.

PS: As a total side note, the religious argument that "life begins when the sperm meets the egg" is actually completely contrary to what the bible says. Exodus, 21:22: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." That is, if a man causes a woman to miscarry, is he punished as a murderer, as he should be if life begins at the embryo stage? He is not, he has to pay a fine. A fine! It's essentially a property damage! The Bible doesn't value fetuses like humans, the value fetuses like, well, livestock! God dammit, I really hate hypocracy.

You're right. I should have said "hollow victory" or "meaningless victory." And Pyrrhic should be capitalized.

I could always claim that I meant "a victory with two short or unaccented syllables" but someone would probably call me on that, too...

One thing is sure, as my grandpa used to say, there is no smoke without fire.

Damn, your grandpa lived a long time ago...

That's because you're using the wrong dictionary.

Miriam-Webster says:

Main Entry: flagging
Function: adjective
1 : LANGUID, WEAK
2 : becoming progressively less : DWINDLING
- flaggingly adverb

SYLLABICATION: flagging
PRONUNCIATION: flgng
ADJECTIVE: 1. Declining; weakening: flagging strength. 2. Languid; drooping.
OTHER FORMS: flaggingly --ADVERB

This is probably just some weird, catastrophic oversight of mine. I probably preferentially hear/read distrust just because it's the term I prefer to use. As for which is proper, according to the Shakespeare Search Engine, both terms have been in use for at least 400 years.

This site claims they're rough synonyms, and that distrust adds an air of suspicion in addition to lack of trust.

And I'm still not entirely sure what this cloud is.

• Canada
• New Zealand
• Australia
• South Africa
• Republic of Ireland
• Costa Rica
• Brazil
• Norway
• Sweden
• Denmark

The article basically states that when they turned off the flow of ink-4, embyyonic stem cells were free to divide without check. The mice without the ability to produce ink-4 developed cancer within a year and died.

There's a famous principle in Mathematics & Quantum Mechanics, first discovered by the British mathematician GH Hardy, and then refined by Heisenberg, which states that both a function & its Fourier transform cannot decay too rapidly [otherwise the function is identically zero].

Or, as Mic Jagger put it: You can't always get what you want.

So it sounds like The Designer of the Universe [a pretty intelligent Fellow, from what I hear] may have placed the very same restrictions on the stuff He created on Day 5 as He did on the stuff He created way back on Day 1.

To quote Benjiman Franklin:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

And in this case we would get what we deserve. This law would make a mockery of due process and destroy many lives -- the number of people willing to commit perjury in order to watch the State and vigilantes ruin their enemy's or enemies' live(s) being large.

Sad how that the same appeals to fear work no matter how many times they are used. "Think of the children" is so commonly misused it was lampooned on the Simpsons, yet here it is again being used to justify subversion of our most important rights. It would not have the intended results. The addition of large numbers of wrongly accused would further discredit the validity of such registries, which are already subject to doubted meaning and credibility due to the extremely wide scope of crimes covered under the term 'sex offender' (did they rape an infant? did they kiss a 17 year old girl when they were 19 and her parents objected? both could be a 'registered sex offender') and the already existing issue of perjured claims in connection with custody and other issues.

That this is being proposed in Ohio, state of Ken Blackwell, is unsurprising.

Nice theory, but it doesn't seem to necessarily be correct:

E.g. this guy
"I imagine that the original image in the minds of those who developed this expression was a donkey or mule laden with cargo rather than being ridden, with its master alternately holding a carrot in front of the animal's nose (by hand, not on a stick) and threatening it with a switch"

Not does wiki, for what that's worth

Here's a better source "Combining a promised reward with a threatened penalty"

This is closer to your ideas
: CARROT AND STICK - Yes, this phrase has been discussed here previously. I thought the origin of this expression was pretty clear. But it turns out there are two schools of thought - 1. carrot ON a stick (a carrot dangling on a string on a stick before a stubborn mule) and 2. carrot and/or stick (alternating punishment and reward).

You are school 1 obviously, but 2 seems valid too, and the way I have mostly heard it used.

You assume that business interests are a subset of national interests

I don't assume it but many countries do. Certainly the old Soviet Union did and there is reason to think that China currently does as well.

In times past, people in power in the U.S. assumed an identity between American interest and business interests. Witness U.S. President Coolidge's statement "The business of America is business" and the statement by the president of General Motors thirty years later "What's good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa."

This president of GM, Charles Wilson, later became Secretary of Defense. He and President Coolidge may have had their ontologies wrong but they were in a position to act as if they were true.

No, there are cavities within the brain that are called sinuses, so there's no connection with yoga etc. and breathing. A little googling turns up, for example, this: http://www.bartleby.com/107/171.html

You are an apologist for thievery. You just mock virtue when you try to make your greed look like something it isn't with specious arguments. It's as simple as this: you're a cheap bastard who wants something for nothing at the expense of others.

Yeah right. If by relationship, you mean rampant corruption. Law enforcement has never been without scandal, and if the good ol' days seem better, it's just because we have short memories.

Even though careful writers often maintain this distinction, comprise is increasingly used in place of compose, especially in the passive: The Union is comprised of 50 states. Our surveys show that opposition to this usage is abating. In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected. See Usage Note at include.

Totally cock-sure of the fallacy that no one has ever thought up of your superb ideas before you, eh? I used to be like that. Especially with anything as 'brilliant' as using group theory in place of floating point values. Whoopie.

Okay, so I don't mean to be that harsh - we still need people like you with that sort of talent ... but only after you get a fresh perspective on exactly what constitutes originality. It appears you're still learning, so we shan't be too hard on your optimism. We'll be waiting when someone asks Slashdot about Bayesian networks and associative memory.

"Brilliant!" cried I.
"Elementary," said Holmes.
Ah, Sir AC Doyle.

My point - this user who asked the question wanted to re-invent the wheel, but at least he knows he's re-inventing it.

Give the world of programming some credit, young Tiger.

Yours truly,
Mr Trolley of Trolls Inc.

Yes, but there are more definitions: Google.com, Answers.com, Wiktionary. Particularly "Any one of various liquids for drinking, usually excluding water"/"A liquid to be consumed, usually excluding water; a drink".

Orwell didn't predict very much that actually happened, either. Brave New World looks far more likely.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/20/T0192000.html

Actually it has been accepted for quite some time. First appearing in the 19th and becoming popular in the 20th, particularly among spelling reformers...and is listed in most dictionaries.

It is a problem with repetitive names, but "Mohammed" (and varios spellings) is the most common name in the world. (ref)
The question I ask is, are we not wasting time on such a large grouping of people, that maybe no enough time is spent on other more viable candidates for scrutiny?
The story said the dollar value was $120? How about we use some sort of formula of frequency, amount, and throw in a few "risk factors," if you feel like name similarity would really be useful.

PS. There are a number of Smiths listed as an alias on federal watch lists. Western Union does not put a hold on every transaction to or from someone named Smith.

Over reliance on cut scenes and expositive narrative techniques are a sign of weak story telling in the game genre. A good game that tells a good story needn't depend on these. In fact (I think you'd agree from what you're telling me) they get in the way.

Perhaps what Game companies need to do is hire a dramaturge.

Proudly posting AC to Slashdot sans proxy for years. I have never set up an account and don't intend to. I have always felt like my words need not be backed by my name, pseudonym or built up karma. If what I have to say can't stand on its own merits it should be lanquishing at 0 or -1 if really bad. If the NSA wants to come after me for my many quotes of Thomas Jefferson etc then let them. Here, I will repeat a couple I have quoted before: "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." and "What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure." I suppose they could charge me for sedition for quoting Thomas Jefferson or many more of our founding fathers. They would be even more likely too if I had said the very same words as spoken by Jefferson without proper attribution. Hiding behind Jefferson? Perhaps to some extent, but then in any court but perhaps Quantanamo it opportunes my defense in court to introduce the related writings of Jefferson and those he corresponded with. Those two quotes and more can be found here

Something else to think about, all government is evil: "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." Thomas Paine Common Sense If you have never read Common Sense before you should and imo you should reread it each and every time before you go vote. Every time I read it I wonder if those in Congress have ever read it because their votes would seem to make it apparent they never have or have failed to see the logic in it. Send your elected officials a copy, highlight the points that can get them your vote.

This post reminds me of another reason I post AC, there really isn't anything I can say that hasn't been said before and probably better. Any posters been sued for copyright infringement yet?

By the way, hey Taco, you gotten any National Security Letters handed to you yet? Oh, nvm, unPATRIOTic ACT. Maybe you can use an open .gov proxy and post us an AC answer. Can see it now, 50 AC replies later someone is going to post "will the real Taco please stand up".

Amusingly: "please type the word in this image: rebels"

judgment, judgement (n.)

Judgment is the more commonly used American spelling, but judgement (the usual British spelling) is a Standard American variant, even though not widely used in Edited English.

Oh no! That means that "jigabyte" is actually the preferred pronunciation of "gigabyte".

While I realize that 'begging the question' is supposed to be a logical fallacy, I have never heard it used any other way than to mean 'raises the question.' And while I realize that my experiences and its use on TV and in movies are not the gold standard of the English language, at some point the language evolves.

Just think of all those English teachers in school that railed against ending sentences with prepositions. This particular 'grammatical error' was actually common to some of English's greatest writers, then went out of fashion in the 17th century, only to become accepted again more recently. Some people make it a point of pride to be uber-conscious of grammar, and cling to these little arbitrary rules to make themselves feel cultured or intelligent or something, but the point of language is to communicate something. If the person understands a phrase to mean X, and everyone generally understands that phrase to mean X as well, then the phrase means X. The fact that you understood 'begs the question' to mean what the submitter intended just shows what it really has come to mean. You can pretend that you are part of an exclusive group in the know ("Most of us won't say anything"), but the fact is that you are wasting valuable time nitpicking a grammatical non-issue to demonstrate your supposed superior intellect instead of doing something useful like selling your WoW character or compiling something for Gentoo.

For those that are curious, you can read more about ending your sentences with prepositions here and here. Also, a very interesting compilation of english grammatical issues can be found here.

Parent's sig: Be a patriot: Murder a Republican.

You are a murderer in every sense except for your cowardice.

I'm not a Republican, but I still find your signature fundamentally anti-liberal. See here.

I, for one, can't wait until I can use this, as I'm often asked at my job to generate Excel reports of insurance claim data to send off to insurance company employees, and it'll be nice not to have to open up OO.org just to copy and paste the CSV data from the DB just to convert it to XLS, as the recipients of the spreadsheet wouldn't know what to do with comma-separated data. (emphasis added)

Here is a fish: (*) What if there were a tool that would, say, convert CSV to XLS format? Knowing that a huge number of translators are available, I took a guess and googled:

csv2xls

csv2xls.pl

Learn how to fish: In general, "There's got to be a better way" is a flag which tells me:

• - Wait a minute!
• - There may already be a solution.
• - Don't reinvent the wheel.
• - Look and see what other people have done in the same (or in a similar) situation.

So, this problem was an instance of the general case of looking for a tool that converts from one extension to another. ps2pdf, pdf2txt,

Even if I don't find an all-inclusive solution to my problem, I often find other supporting tools that make my life easier. Further, I can then often use those tools / techniques to simplify things to the point where I CAN solve the problem.

(*) Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. - Chinese Proverb

Also, because it's so easy to whip out a quick PHP webapp, many, if not most, PHP programmers fail to delve very deep into the realm of programming, preferring to sit at the edge and reap the benefits without the work (I'm not talking about coding work, rather the work of understanding your field).

Is your field writing? If so, you may wish to consider delving into Strunk and White. (See Rule 5 and supplemental Rule 28 regarding the proper usage of commas and parentheses.)

See? We can all be snooty know-it-alls.

look at the meaning of toothpick and tell me how a toothbrush isn't one.

then go look at the meaning of "dumbass" and let me know how you're not one.

I'm sure it's not what you meant, but that first quote you mentioned is British, not American.

1.) It really is - split infinitive

Er, no, it's not. The infinitive form is the "to X" form; "to boldly split infinitives that no man has split before."

And there's really nothing wrong with splitting infinitives in English, that's a rule from Latin mistakenly carried over.

it's unreadable due to the spelling, grammer,

I love irony.

The omission of those key qualifiers--"essential" and "little"-- makes all the difference in the world. Ben Franklin has been hijacked to endorse an untenable and deadly view that no sacrifice of any liberty for any amount of safety at any time should ever be made.

These pseudo "civil libertarians" love to quote the venerable Benjamin Franklin (whose 300th birthday we celebrate this year) who said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." But they quote him entirely out of context.

First, his statement appears in his "Historical Review of Pennsylvania," published in 1759 (not available on line), a decade and a half before the Revolutionary War broke out. He was warning that state's legislature against putting too much trust in royal governors during the French and Indian War. True, it was often quoted later, but the purpose was to criticize those who sought safety from occupying British armies, not those who cooperated with Patriot measures to secure everyone's liberties by winning the war!

The Continental Congress regularly received quantities of intercepted British and Tory mail. On November 20, 1775, it received some intercepted letters from Cork, Ireland, and appointed a committee made up of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Johnson, Robert Livingston, Edward Rutledge, James Wilson and George Wythe "to select such parts of them as may be proper to publish." The Congress later ordered a thousand copies of the portions selected by the Committee to be printed and distributed. A month later, when another batch of intercepted mail was received, a second committee was appointed to examine it. Based on its report, the Congress resolved that "the contents of the intercepted letters this day read, and the steps which Congress may take in consequence of said intelligence thereby given, be kept secret until further orders."...

Before we go too far, it's worth noting that Franklin was talking about liberty, not privacy. There is a relationship between the two, but I find it strange that no one bothers to quote Franklin when we're talking about the liberty to choose how your children are taught or smoke cigarettes in public. Instead, he's used to protect us from the government trying to find out whether or not we're terrorists.

The truth is, the government must strike a balance between privacy and security. Reduced privacy leads to a certain number of innocent private lives disrupted and reduced security leads to a certain number of successful terror attacks. The NSA data mining effort did not take place in a vacuum: it actually stopped real terror plots.

The problem is that the phrase is actually to all intents and purposes.

It's bated breath.

What the hell, why do I have to worry about this crap? English, which has WAY less defined grammar rules, can still be decently parsed by MS Word and display a squiggly green underline under the sentences that don't work right

It also frequently puts the green squigglies under sentences with no grammatical problems. For some reason, it still has difficulty with "that vs. which" situations, at least as far as Strunk and White is concerned. It also rephrases all attempts at gender-neutral writing in the most obtuse manner possible (I've since turned off *that* particular grammar-check option).

Where is my free, lightweight, W3C editor with a squiggly green underline?

It comes with the next *free* version of MS Word, of course!

Here is a more complete version of the Ben Franklin quote:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." ATTRIBUTION: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor, November 11, 1755.--The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, vol. 6, p. 242 (1963).

This quotation, slightly altered, is inscribed on a plaque in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." http://www.bartleby.com/73/1056.html

Of course most people have heard this simplified version: "Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither." Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) U.S. inventor and statesman - published Poor Richard's Almanac; developed the open stove (1740), the lightning rod (1752) and the bifocal lens (1760). http://www.dontquoteme.com/search/quote_display.js p?quoteID=667&gameID=1

And most Americans can be lead like sheep into giving it all up, which is why the terrorists have won-- this is NOT the country of Freedom that our Forefathers envisioned. Terrorists ARE destroying our country. The main problem? You don't have to hunt for AlQuaeda, CITIZENS are doing most of the destruction of Democracy.

"We have seen the enemy and he is us." --Pogo comic, Walt Kelly

http://www.bartleby.com/66/41/27741.html

Or are you going to say that this was a joke while talking about setting a man who thinks god talks to him on fire to see if god will talk to anyone else was not?

The real problem with most writing is not grammar and spelling; anybody can (but obviously doesn't) learn those rules by reading some books and charts. The real problem is the organization of ideas, which includes paragraphs, sentence order, amount of crap to include in each sentence, etc. The most important writing process I have is making an outline. My software of choice for this is OmniOutliner, but the process works just as well with just a piece of paper.

Making a complete multi-level outline of a piece of writing before it's written will almost always ensure that its clarity is much higher than just attacking it head-on in prose form. For example, my work requires me to write software, write design documents about the software, and give presentations about the software to completely non-technical people who need to understand the technical issues. The only way I can accomplish this well is by creating outlines before I ever start writing code, paragraphs, or presentation slides. I'm convinced that my work comes out several times better than it would without a similar preparation and organization method.

Essentially, your students should learn to write an entire paper as just an outline first. If the outline is complete enough, then the paper will make sense before it's even written. If it's not quite there yet, modifying an outline is much easier than modifying a bunch of text. Once somebody's outline is all ready, he can then turn it into paragraphs and start worrying about grammar and spelling. This final step will be fairly straightforward, thanks to all the support that the outline will provide.

Some other posts mentioned Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style". Yes. And as also posted elsewhere, it's available online for free: http://www.bartleby.com/141/

1. On Writing Well, William Zinsser
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060006641/102-34 73650-2323300?v=glance&n=283155

2. The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
http://www.bartleby.com/141/