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So have I. It says equivilant in effect or value. Not necessarily the same. Other dictionaries have similar definitions. My personal favorite is from Cambridge: "being almost the same or having the same effect as, usually something bad: Her refusal to answer was tantamount to an admission of guilt."

In this case, I was referring to the fact that while she may have consented to one sexual act (the oral sex, which would have made it true rape) she did not consent to another sexual act (the distribution of a recording of that act).

"People use words in many ways and what is said isn't always what is MEANT and vice versa."

Are you trying to tell me what it was I meant to say?

"In the many discussions and arguments I've had over the years on a variety of subjects, one constant is that those who like to use "tantamount" have always really meant to say that x IS y, not x is sorta like y or X is almost the same as Y"

Well I hope you won those arguments because your foes had little grasp of the English language.

Copyright violation is NOT a felony, and is thus a matter for a civil case.

No matter how much you repeat that, in this case it is simply not true. Why don't we just take a look at the relevant federal laws here and here.

Now, the definition of "felony" is a crime that is punishable by more than one year of imprisonment (or death). Since this person distributed more than $1000 retail value of copyrighted materials in a 180-day period they are in violation of the title 17 law referenced above, and committed "criminal infringement". By the letter of the law, a crime. Since the title 18 law referenced specifies a punishment of up to three to five years imprisonment for said crime, it is a a felony by definition.

Leave it to an anonymous coward to not only spout 'facts' that haven't been checked, but also to fail to know (or check) the definitions of words.

It's in Cambridge. Trim the suffix. (And perhaps get a better dictionary.)

data
group noun [U]
information, especially facts or numbers, collected for examination and consideration and used to help decision-making, or information in an electronic form that can be stored and processed by a computer:

Data Audio pronunciation of "data" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (dt, dt, dät)
pl.n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)

1. Factual information, especially information organized for analysis or used to reason or make decisions.
2. Computer Science. Numerical or other information represented in a form suitable for processing by computer.
3. Values derived from scientific experiments.
4. Plural of datum.

define data

conclusion:
data = information

The money-delta between using Mozilla on Windows and IE on Windows is $0.00. It's free enough for the purposes of this discussion.

Actually, the sound you hear in the middle syllable of "fallacy", as it is pronounced in the US, is a schwa. In a stress-timed language like english, non-stressed syllable sounds tend to be pronounced as a schwa.

If someone has something interesting to say, but there are a few meaningless spelling mistakes, it doesn't really bother me. When I have to translate from what they actually wrote into what I think they meant to write, and that becomes like a lot of effort, that's when it bothers me.

English spelling is very difficult. I don't think there's any language with more difficult spelling. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. If you want to communicate effectively, and not have people constantly working to understand you, you should make an effort to spell things properly.

Criticizing someone's spelling on a blog like this is like criticizing someone's manners in person. It may not have a direct influence on their argument, but it sure does have an influence on whether or not you want to listen to what they have to say.

,only other English speaking countries spell it "cheque" - a printed form, used instead of money, to make payments from your bank account.

Maybe he's 12 light minutes away? That would make it a 467,000 mile wide closet. That's a lot more reasonable than a 12 light minute wide closet (134 million miles).

Or maybe he meant 12 minutes, as in there are 4 infintesimals in a minute, 24 minutes in a miniscule and 1152 minutes in an itsy-bitsy. An isty bitsy is half a teenie weenie. In case anyone still doesn't get it, look here.

-

the word is: scrupulous it think

Back then, Democracy meant exactly what the parent poster said. In those times, the populations were small enough to get a true Democracy to actually work.

According to the CIA World Factbook the government of the United States is a "Constitution-based federal republic; strong democratic tradition".

The operative word there is " republic", "a country without a king or queen, usually governed by elected representatives of the people and a president". In the US, the head of the republic is chosen by indirect democratic means. That very delegation to have the country run by a president rather than by direct choice of the people is what makes the US a Republic rather than a direct Democracy.

Before you start mouthing off about people misusing terms, you really should look those terms up yourself.

You know, I have mod points, and could just mod you down, but I thought I'd reply instead.

Godwin's Law isn't a rule about winning or losing arguments. It's a law of nature. It's like gravity. If a thread goes on for long enough, someone will mention Nazis or Hitler. But notice, I'm the first one in this thread to do so. Fascism is bigger than just Nazis. The Italian government under Mussolini was fascist as well.

Before you say that fascism requires burning racially inferior people in furnaces, you might want to at least read the definition:

a political system based on a very powerful leader, state control and extreme pride in country and race, and in which political opposition is not allowed

Let's compare that to the current state of affairs in the US of A:

• a very powerful leader -- I think unilaterally declaring US citizens to be enemy combattants qualifies here
• extreme pride in country and race -- substitute religion for race, and this clearly describes a lot of Bush's supporters
• political opposition is not allowed -- well they haven't won this battle yet, but remember many people argued that protesting the war was unamerican, remember how the republicans tried to shut down Farenheit 911, notice the tiny, dangerous, hidden "Free Speech Zone" at the democratic convention

There's no question, we're a long way from Italy or Germany in the '30s. At the same time, there's a continuum between an open society and a fascist one. The US is much closer to the fascist side of that spectrum than any other western (or modern eastern) country. Sure, Cuba is worse, and so is North Korea, but when those are the only countries that are more fascist than you... it's a pretty bad sign.

here, i even found you a paper on it!
(proving that the black death was not the bubonic plague that is)

Sorry man, but the word is used to mean malicious computer access as well. Words take on the meaning that the majority use them for.

This is an international site on the internet. And as every other article seems to be pointing to a BBC News page it is certainly not dealing with US only articles/issues.

Nor is it slashdot.us

.com does not mean American

I do not have an ass from which to take my head out of, I am sure that would be in breach of some law though, at least in the UK, perhaps it is common practice in the US - I can only hope not.

Acclimatize is in the dictionary (or at least several I could find on quick notice):

• Merriam-Webster
• Dictionary.com
• Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
• American Heritage Dictionary

In the future try this and this.

because the word "innovate" means to introduce changes and new ideas [emphasis mine]. Both HP and Dell are innovators.

What HP supposably does, or used to do, and Dell doesn't do, is invent, which means to design and/or create something which has never been made before .

Innovators will cease to exist if invention or discovery never happens, as there will not be any new idears or changes to introduce.

Mr Dell has made a common mistake, most people aren't aware of the difference between innovate and invent.

because the word "innovate" means to introduce changes and new ideas [emphasis mine]. Both HP and Dell are innovators.

What HP supposably does, or used to do, and Dell doesn't do, is invent, which means to design and/or create something which has never been made before .

Innovators will cease to exist if invention or discovery never happens, as there will not be any new idears or changes to introduce.

Mr Dell has made a common mistake, most people aren't aware of the difference between innovate and invent.

a unit of weight equal to 6.35 kilograms or 14 pounds, used especially when talking about a person's weight:
I weigh ten and a half stone.

She has lost a stone.

word != grammar
Excerpt from Cambridge Dictionaries Online:

word (LANGUAGE UNIT)
noun
1 a single unit of language which has meaning and can be spoken or written

grammar
noun
(the study or use of) the rules about how words change their form and combine with other words to make sentences

Right. The United States Army was the consumer in the free-market system. They said "hey, this product exists, and we want it". Some parts of industry disregarded this and preferred to focus on their own corners of the market. So the Army changed from pure consumer to producer, exactly as has happened in free markets since the dawn of time. Then, once other players in the market saw "hey, there's money to be made here!", they jumped on the bandwagon and penicillin became widely available. Classic story of the free market. Just because the government had a major role in it doesn't mean it's not free

I really shouldn't have quoted so much, but I just had to let it stand on it's own. By your token then the Soviet Union was a "classicy story of the free market". I mean, it's not as if Migkoyan-Gurewitch and Suchoi didn't compete for the different government contracts. As in taxes paid for them.

If you want to call that 'free market' then you should at least be aware that that's not what other people mean by the term.

In point of fact, war is my bet for the biggest force of medical advances in the 20th century. However, I believe the Jacquard loom is the biggest medical advance in the last millennium.

That's a period that covers everything from the plague to sars via the Spannish flu, and the discovery of germs, vaccination and antibiotics. I think you would have a hard time arguing that the introduction of cheaper fabrics (the cause of which; industrialisation, moved hordes of people into the cities, to live under unsanitary conditions, with widespread disease following) did much on the whole. Not that it didn't help of course, but washing clothes more often is a 20:th century affair, it didn't have much to do with the introduction of the Jaquard loom.

If you want to name one thing and one thing alone, it must be the discovery of the mechanisms behind disease, and the subsequent focus on sanitation. Whether you have one set of clothes or twenty doesn't matter much if you know to keep clean. And people in general (at least in Europe, and by extension the US) didn't know that before the 20:th century. Long after industrialisation had begun.

look it up
"a group of similar independent companies who join together to control prices and limit competition"
Do they control prices?
Do they limit competition?
Of course they do! Then it's a Cartel!

look it up
"a group of similar independent companies who join together to control prices and limit competition"
Do they control prices?
Do they limit competition?
Of course they do! They it's a Cartel!

What a dumb hippy. "Tear up the roads and plant them with trees"? Even the UK, pretty high population density, has a tiny 0.5 square km of motorway per 1000 sq km, thats 1 part motorway per 2000 parts. This picture doesn't exactly show intercity roads flattening the country does it? If you want to plan trees, a couple of fields worth would be equivelent of getting rid of roads. Read This book instead of beliving the mumbo jumbo spouted by the environmentalists.

While we're on the topic of nitpicking, I should point out that HTML is not an acronym but an abbreviation. For it to be an acronym, it would need to be pronounced as a word, not spelt out.

Oh, and you spelt "capitalise"/"capitalize" incorrectly, but I'll let that one slide :)

While we're on the topic of nitpicking, I should point out that HTML is not an acronym but an abbreviation. For it to be an acronym, it would need to be pronounced as a word, not spelt out.

Oh, and you spelt "capitalise"/"capitalize" incorrectly, but I'll let that one slide :)

Way offtopic now, but "booting a computer" comes from "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". As in, helping yourself up without help from others.

And if the trunk was indeed called a "boot box", that would make sense, or at least as much as "trunk" or "glove box". But just "boot"??

Gas is short for gasoline. Petrol is short for petroleum. You don't put petroleum in a car, otherwise really bad things happen.

Before cars, there were both boots and trunks. Trunks were big cases used for storing things, like clothing. Boots were the things you put your feet inside. Which one of those two better describes how the storage area in your car is used?

Hood is the only one that doesn't have a strong case for it. Both hoods and bonnets are typically head coverings. Neither makes much sense when it comes to describing part of a car, but neither is better than the other.

Gas is short for gasoline. Petrol is short for petroleum. You don't put petroleum in a car, otherwise really bad things happen.

Before cars, there were both boots and trunks. Trunks were big cases used for storing things, like clothing. Boots were the things you put your feet inside. Which one of those two better describes how the storage area in your car is used?

Hood is the only one that doesn't have a strong case for it. Both hoods and bonnets are typically head coverings. Neither makes much sense when it comes to describing part of a car, but neither is better than the other.

Genamics lists 989 journals related to Computer and Information Sciences. Surely some of them are good.

How about the Journal of Functional Programming or Theoretical Computer Science, or perhaps the Journal of Algorithms. And, for a more general approach, there's always the Journal of the ACM.

I haven't read any of these extensively, but surely some of them will have the kind of articles you'll enjoy.

I've just started consciously focusing on functional programming techniques in Mathematica . It's almost religiously advanced in most of the Mathematica texts I've read as being easier to read and, ultimately, faster to program than most procedural algorithms one could implement to do the same things. I've definitely adopted it for some operations on lists and things, but I'll have to get more comfortable with it to apply it to everything I do in Mm . As far as I know, the Mathematica Journal even has a column devoted to solving problems with "one-liners", using only functional programming techniques. (Of course, if one is really interested in it, he could go to Journal of Functional Programming and educate us all.) I'm too cheap to find out for sure.

It seems to me that Mathematica is extremely powerful in this respect: one can choose which paradigm to program in, and successfully mix paradigms, almost to the heart's content, and get useful information out. Of course, the execution speed may not be so hot, but for ease of use, it can't be beaten. What other programs out there allow such mixing?

There's a reasonable discussion of coin tossing in section 10.3 of Ed Jayne's book "Probability Theory: The Language of Science" published by CUP.

Like the article in Science News Jaynes makes it clear that the manner in which the coin is tossed is important. To accentuate the effect of bias---and to make the experiment easier to do---he reports how he tossed the 'metal lid of a small pickle jar' in three different ways: in the first he can control whether he gets heads or tails; in the second he always gets tails; in the last he gets 54 heads from 100 trials.

30-45 is not young when you consider that life expectancy was once much lower than it is today. Google it for yourself. Here is one blurb that puts the life expectancy in the 1800s at ~30

And have ever looked at laborer fashions from the 1700s? I haven't but, I suspect the women at least weren't showing much back. You can disregard the fashions worn by the nobles, because they stayed out of the sun (being tanned was considered coarse).

The final piece of information you aren't considering is the fact that most people native to regions with lots of sun have darker skin. This adaptation protects their skin from the damage caused by UV (incidently, it also makes it harder for them to produce the vitamin D they need from sunlight, but that's another story.) My ancestors were all from northern Europe, but I grew up in Arizona and live in southern California. I am not adapted for my current environment: I'm adapted for a place where the sun barely shines half of the year!

The real trouble started when us fair-skinned northern European types started moving to the sunnier areas, stripping down to our skivvies, and hanging out at the beach.

I never said I had all of the answers. But you don't appear to have any facts.

"How and why people decide to transition their information from the private to the public sphere is poorly understood."

Yes and that sentence is poorly written!

Transition

Not the bough. It's not a tree. The analogy is to a ship. When one armed ship wants to warn another ship, a common way to do it is to fire a shot across their bow (the front of the ship). This is a warning that is very difficult to ignore. Firing a warning shot across a large branch of a tree is... well... less effective.

The term piracy has been used to refer to unauthorized use of copyrighted materials for more than 150 years. This definition appears in any reasonable dictionary, even going back to 1828.

So get over it, already. It's piracy.

While you're at it, look up irony.

I'm not taking advice on English usage from anyone who uses the phrase "least worst".

"Worst" is definitive and one thing cannot be more or less worst than another.

Besides the original point made by the poster was incorrect. "He" is and always has been the neuter pronoun in English. See "he" and "she". Oh and while you are there learn about "worst".

I'm not taking advice on English usage from anyone who uses the phrase "least worst".

"Worst" is definitive and one thing cannot be more or less worst than another.

Besides the original point made by the poster was incorrect. "He" is and always has been the neuter pronoun in English. See "he" and "she". Oh and while you are there learn about "worst".

I'm not taking advice on English usage from anyone who uses the phrase "least worst".

"Worst" is definitive and one thing cannot be more or less worst than another.

Besides the original point made by the poster was incorrect. "He" is and always has been the neuter pronoun in English. See "he" and "she". Oh and while you are there learn about "worst".

Sorry, but that's nonsense.

To be pedantic: the use of the word "socket" as a verb is only found in modern American or colloquial English. Look up "socket" in a British or International English dictionary and you will see it listed as a noun only. e.g. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=754 42&dict=CALD

The "1533" listed in your reference (Merriam-Webster -- a modern American english dictionary) refers only to the usage of the word "socket" itself, and most definitely does NOT refer to the specific application of the word as a transitive verb. The unfortunate listing of the date under the verb is misleading. (A side-effect of a database-driven website blindly serving data without context or deeper understanding, I suppose. See http://www.bartleby.com/61/88/S0528800.html for a better presentation).

See http://www.m-w.com/dates.htm -- dates for first recorded occurrence are not related to the actual meaning of the word in modern English.

You can also see the 1828 definition here. Note that in 1828 the word is not listed as a verb.

Check the etymology in a more complete source than an online dictionary to see what I mean...

Wow, guess I got a bit carried away with this reply. I think I'm turning into some kind of language lawyer or "word addict". :o

That operational definition of species isn't without its problems though. Some north american squirrels have a wide distribution across the continent, and they can all interbreed with their neighbors. However if you take one from the extreme north and the extreme south of their distribution they cannot mate. Furthermore there are "ring species", species with a ring shaped distribution. Some of these species have been introduced at one point on the ring, and spread around until they meet on the other side. Funny thing is, in some cases these animals cannot interbreed with the other arm of the ring distribution, but they can still exchange genes by going all the way around the ring. My memory is a little foggy, or I'd have better examples, but I got all of this from the book "Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution" which was the subject of a Slashdot review.
I highly recommend it. Any university library should have it, if not I'm sure your local bookstore would be happy to order it.

It isn't like they were blocking it because the sitefinder page contained naughty words. They were censoring it because the damn service broke the Internet.

If I live next to a busy highway and decide to shine a mega-bright spotlight into oncoming traffic, that would completely mess up traffic and possibly kill a few people. If the cops come in and "censor" my spotlight, that's a good thing, right?

Censorship is removing objectionable, or unsuitable content. Preventing someone from shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre isn't censorship because it isn't that the words are objectionable, it's that the result of shouting them will cause chaos and damage. Likewise, Verisign's wildcard caused damage and so it was blocked.

Don'tcha mean conscience?

If it had been just another word in a sentence, I would have let you get away with it, but no. Not when you use it in a way as if you're defining it. That's a case when you really do need to spell it correctly. Besides, you didn't just get a letter or two wrong, you were completely off. No "n" sound. Not enough syllables... You got pretty close to conscious though, for what it's worth.

Don'tcha mean conscience?

If it had been just another word in a sentence, I would have let you get away with it, but no. Not when you use it in a way as if you're defining it. That's a case when you really do need to spell it correctly. Besides, you didn't just get a letter or two wrong, you were completely off. No "n" sound. Not enough syllables... You got pretty close to conscious though, for what it's worth.

Rule 1: Don't steal.
1. What about necessity (need to grab a life jacket from a sinking ship)?
2. What is stealing (picking up a penny from a sidewalk)?
3. What about "borrowing"? (joyriding in a car)
4. Filesharing.

So you think we need laws, or parts of laws to handle all the above cases? Laws are simply a way of codifying societal norms. Can't we just have a law saying theft is illegal and carries a punishment of "X", where theft is defined as (the act of) dishonestly taking something which belongs to someone else and keeping it?

Would someone who "stole" a life jacket from a sinking ship ever be brought up on charges of theft? No. What about picking up a penny from the sidewalk? So why add that part into the text of the law, making the entire set of laws more complex and unwieldy?

Sure, everything becomes complex when you try to enumerate all the potential variations and cases, but is that strictly necessary?

For giggles sometime, post "I use Macs/Windows because they're easy" sometime. See what you get.

Slashdot's audience is extremely tech-savvy and computer-professional centered. While there are some people that might respond like that, others would probably admit it's true that Windows and Macs are easy.

Now tell me, what would happen if I wandered over to a law site and said "Naah, you should never go to trial, always take a plea-bargain, it makes the process so much simpler."

I'm guessing from noone's computer, whoever this "noone" person is... unless maybe you mean no one?

This is true. Fuck Mao

Read Mao's War Against Nature by Judith Shapiro.

Anyone who supports the over-boiling of rice, in order to make it larger (absorbs more water, becomes the size of a marble) and more filling (which gives you that horrid disease when you intake too much water) which then leads to people starving and eating the bark off of trees, in order to make up for idiotic agro policies deserves to die on their photo-op-fake-ass swim across the yellow river.

Ugh. Spell it as article, please.