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to boot

Besides, in addition. For example, It rained every day and it was cold to boot, or He said they'd lower the price of the car by $1,000 and throw in air conditioning to boot. This expression has nothing to do with footwear. Boot here is an archaic noun meaning "advantage," and in the idiom has been broadened to include anything additional, good or bad. [c. a.d. 1000] (emphasis added)

troll

1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. (emphasis added)

Do I really have to explain my comment?

You might have to. The average intelligence quotient of a slashdot reader has been slipping and for the anonymous cowards who can't understand the long and complex words in this post I have taken the liberty of providing links to Dictionary.com for definitions for all words three or more syllables long.

Sorry to troll here, but you and the parent poster seemingly think that the words "then" and "than" are interchangeable.

I suggest you brush up your vocabulary by visiting http://www.dictionary.com/

I've noticed this trend happening quite a lot lately, and for a pedantic limey such as myself it always manages to invoke feelings of psychotic rage. Well, almost :-)

cartoon Pronunciation Key (kär-tn) n.

....1.
........1. A drawing depicting a humorous situation, often accompanied by a caption.
........2. A drawing representing current public figures or issues symbolically and often satirically: a political cartoon.
....2. A preliminary sketch similar in size to the work, such as a fresco, that is to be copied from it.
....3. An animated cartoon.
....4. A comic strip.
....5. A ridiculously oversimplified or stereotypical representation: criticized the actor's portrayal of Jefferson as a historically inaccurate cartoon.

v. cartooned, cartooning, cartoons
v. tr.

....To draw a humorous or satirical representation of; caricature.

v. intr.
....To make humorous or satirical drawings.

You can't.

Before Google, no one knew definitively how to spell anything; it's only recently, since the advent of the Internet, that spelling has been standardized. Fortunately, this makes information exchange much, much easier than during the dark days before 1991.

Probably because they mean acronym.

lobotomy

1. What a hacker subjected to formal management training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter doubtless intend it as a joke.

2. The act of removing the processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it. Some very cheap clone systems are sold in "lobotomised" form - everything but the brain.

[Jargon File]

Is conneXion considered an error? I like it much better than connection.

It's correct, but British. Just like colour/color, or theatre/theater. Or foetus/fetus, though that doesn't seem to come up so often.

connexion
Pronunciation: k&-'nek-sh&n
chiefly British variant of CONNECTION

Did it never occur to you to check an actual online dictionary? I use google to see if my usage of a word or phrase is acceptable (or at least common), but a dictionary is probably a better bet for spelling.

GROSS (the Get Rid Of Slimy girlS club)

Um, I don't think that one is right.

Square: A plane figure having four equal sides.
Rectangle: A four-sided plane figure with four right angles.
Source

Therefore, a square is a type of rectangle, but a rectangle is not always a square.

And as for Linux video driver, they suck, They are slow, I know this from years of Linux use.
I get better FPS in games in Linux than I do in Windows, using the same configs and all; Doom III being an example. Provided the +~10 fps I gain is just from less OS overhead, they're still even to the Windows drivers. Saying they are indeed slower and that I get more than 10fps from less overhead would be a really ignorant thing to say, but I've heard less intelligent things from you already (see above). Besides, if we're living in some fairy world and you're right, then who cares? I'm still getting more FPS.
This is the official, and up to date, nVidia driver I am using. I don't know what card/driver you're using, but they're not all slow.

Weird. Well, the resource I quoted was just www.dictionary.com which builds its information from the following resources:

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2001 Denis Howe

Jargon File 4.2.0

CIA World Factbook (1995)

Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary

Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary

U.S. Gazetteer, U.S. Census Bureau

I'm at a loss as to the disparity between these two sources, but suffice to say that, in practice, communism results in the inability of individuals to excercise ownership over anything.

Do they EXCLUSIVELY control the acquisition of music by consumers? Do they EXCLUSIVELY control the sale of portable hardware on which you can transport and play music? Do they EXCLUSIVELY control the personal computer business?

The answer to all of these is HARDLY; and any claim otherwise means you fail to understand anti-trust law, and certainly didn't follow the Microsoft anti-trust case. A LARGE amount of effort in that case was spent defining the "market". Defining the market for portable music as only including iPod and iTunes is ignorant, at best.

In the spirit of giving on this, the holiday season, I present you dictionary.com.

May it serve you well.

That is not irony that is in fact entirely appropriate.
It could be considered ironic if it worked really well despite the name, but in reality it is very much lame and crippled in several ways.

You may not have known this, but some words in the English language have more than one meaning. It's a difficult concept to grasp, but it's true. I swear it.

metaphysical, adj.
1. Of or relating to metaphysics.
2. Based on speculative or abstract reasoning.
3. Highly abstract or theoretical; abstruse.
4. (a) Immaterial; incorporeal. (b) Supernatural.
5. often Metaphysical Of or relating to the poetry of a group of 17th-century English poets whose verse is characterized by an intellectually challenging style and extended metaphors comparing very dissimilar things.

metaphysics, n.
1. (used with a sing. verb) Philosophy. The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value.
2. (used with a pl. verb) The theoretical or first principles of a particular discipline: the metaphysics of law.
3. (used with a sing. verb) A priori speculation upon questions that are unanswerable to scientific observation, analysis, or experiment.
4. (used with a sing. verb) Excessively subtle or recondite reasoning.

Source: dictionary.com. Next time you correct someone's word usage make sure you know what the hell you're talking about.
--
Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.

Who you calling, Shirley?! ;)

They don't? Then what's this?

I'm all for this but dictionary.com,Babelfish, and google meet my dictionary needs.

..."meme".

INDEED !

This is an opinion I see expressed a lot. There are some that are biggoted and intollerant of those they think are wrong, and there are those who have love for and wish to help those they think are wrong. There is a world of difference between tollerance and acceptance. It would have to hate someone to tell them everything they do is good and well when I believe it will hurt them in the long term. I tollerate it when they refuse to see the truth of the matter, but I don't accept it as being right.

Your bigotry and intolerance don't surprise me at all when you cannot even spell the word "tolerance" correctly which means that you have hardly read enough texts about it. Should you have read and written the words "tolerance", "tolerate" and "tolerant" anough times, you wouldn't write
"tollerance", "tollerate" and "tollerant" now. So please read something and educate yourself. You may start from wikipedia.org/tolerance or indeed dictionary.com/tolerance.

Flamebait?

I don't mean to feed the troll or anything, but he/she has a good point. I have quite a few Canadian friends, and I'm sure if I called them 'Canucks' I'd get punched in the face quicksmart.

Also, check out Dictionary.com - it lists 'Canuck' as an offensive slang.

It's just a matter of time before someone else gets offended.

They believed in LESS government. Look up the word LESS. What we have now is a government that people want to have do everything, and it can't do that.

1. 1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.

you probably also suggest that there is...

no such thing as cold, just the absence of heat
no such thing as dark, just the absence of light

guess what?
we english speaking humans have decided to call
and the absence of heat, 'cold'
the absence of light, 'dark'
and negative acceleration, 'deceleration'

You can look up what we call things here
;-)

dictionary.com defines dithering as "To be nervously irresolute in acting or doing." In other words, to flip-flop. This is precisely the case when dithering an image from a large number of colors into a smaller number of colors. Instead of producing an exact pixel color, the algorithm chooses somewhat randomly between alternatives so as to produce an approximate match, at least when viewed from far away. It behaves "irresolutely" (it can't make up it's mind), or, in other words, it "dithers."

I know that somewhere in here lurks a very lame Kerry joke, but I won't be the one to say it.

Wow, you are compairing computer bugs to life and death situations.

What's worse is someone marked you 'insightful.'

Sometimes slashdot think truely amazes me.

Sometimes /. ignorance appalls me; occasionally checking against Dictionary.com doesn't hurt!

Usage Note: Affect and effect have no senses in common. As a verb affect is most commonly used in the sense of "to influence" (how smoking affects health). Effect means "to bring about or execute": layoffs designed to effect savings. Thus the sentence These measures may affect savings could imply that the measures may reduce savings that have already been realized, whereas These measures may effect savings implies that the measures will cause new savings to come about. From http://www.dictionary.com/

I think most people would prefer the spelling "skeptical" to avoid any possible confusion with:

septical: Having power to promote putrefaction.

internet
<networking> (Note: capital "I"). The Internet is the largest internet (with a small "i") in the world.

Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2004 Denis Howe

(courtesy of dictionary.com)

Congratulations! I think you may have hit upon the reason it did not do well! Good job, have a cookie.

I owe all my success to dictionary.com.

>> I guaranty you that this post has two misspellings.

> Uh, your post has no misspellings. And warrantee was use of wrong word, not a misspelling

Usually spelled "guarantee".

'Guaranty' in the original post, like 'warrantee' in the story post are both words. They are just not the words intended by the poster. The parent tried to misspell guarantee but used an actual word that means something quite similar. Same with warrantee.
You can go look it up if you want.

Ok, it's getting old now - He didn't want to kill all the whales or cut down all the trees - It's called an f'n joke people:
Joke

..See also farce, monkeyshine, parody, quip, wisecrack and gag.

Ok, it's getting old now - He didn't want to kill all the whales or cut down all the trees - It's called an f'n joke people:
Joke

..See also farce, monkeyshine, parody, quip, wisecrack and gag.

Ok, it's getting old now - He didn't want to kill all the whales or cut down all the trees - It's called an f'n joke people:
Joke

..See also farce, monkeyshine, parody, quip, wisecrack and gag.

Ok, it's getting old now - He didn't want to kill all the whales or cut down all the trees - It's called an f'n joke people:
Joke

..See also farce, monkeyshine, parody, quip, wisecrack and gag.

Ok, it's getting old now - He didn't want to kill all the whales or cut down all the trees - It's called an f'n joke people:
Joke

..See also farce, monkeyshine, parody, quip, wisecrack and gag.

Ok, it's getting old now - He didn't want to kill all the whales or cut down all the trees - It's called an f'n joke people:
Joke

..See also farce, monkeyshine, parody, quip, wisecrack and gag.

Ok, it's getting old now - He didn't want to kill all the whales or cut down all the trees - It's called an f'n joke people:
Joke

..See also farce, monkeyshine, parody, quip, wisecrack and gag.

how do you google for a word you do not know exists?

Do you really not know how to look up new information? Ever heard of a Thesaurus?

In the future try this and this.

from:Dictionary

animal ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-ml)
A multicellular organism of the kingdom Animalia, differing from plants in certain typical characteristics such as capacity for locomotion, nonphotosynthetic metabolism, pronounced response to stimuli, restricted growth, and fixed bodily structure.

About 60% of this definition applies to bacteria. None of it to plants. What plants and bacteria share are a similiar cell wall. As for Text books, I'm aware that they are not stricktly animals but they also not plants. The prokaryote group encompasses far far more diversity then the eukaryote group. I am a University graduate, I took genetics and biology. The kindom classification is very very subjective. There are bacteria which would satisfy all of the Dictionary definitions for beign an animal. In a way your right, according to the classic definition Bacteria aren't "animals" however I was just tryign to make a point. No matter what you eat somethign suffers for it.

You forgot the noun version(which is not listed on dictionary.com)

Spell it right (stationery) and I think you'll find that it is.

The World-Wide Web search engine that indexes the greatest number of web pages - over two billion by December 2001 and provides a free service that searches this index in less than a second.

The site's name is apparently derived from "googol", but note the difference in spelling.

The "Google" spelling is also used in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep Thought's designers asks, "And are you not," said Fook, leaning anxiously foward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"

Word History: An agnostic does not deny the existence of God and heaven but holds that one cannot know for certain whether or not they exist. The term agnostic was fittingly coined by the 19th-century British scientist Thomas H. Huxley, who believed that only material phenomena were objects of exact knowledge. He made up the word from the prefix a-, meaning "without, not," as in amoral, and the noun Gnostic. Gnostic is related to the Greek word gnosis, "knowledge," which was used by early Christian writers to mean "higher, esoteric knowledge of spiritual things" hence, Gnostic referred to those with such knowledge. In coining the term agnostic, Huxley was considering as "Gnostics" a group of his fellow intellectuals"-ists," as he called them - who had eagerly embraced various doctrines or theories that explained the world to their satisfaction. Because he was a "man without a rag of a label to cover himself with," Huxley coined the term agnostic for himself, its first published use being in 1870.

Just goes to show, I can learn something new everyday...

sandbender n. [IBM] A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design of chips. Compare ironmonger, polygon pusher.

Yeah you got me! I need to pruef reed a little better :) I never said writing properly and correctly was easy; I find it's extremely difficult!

As far as the accented character, it's easy: I cut-and-paste the text from the dictionary.com page :)

SeaDour writes "The year's first meteor shower, the Lyrids, will peak in the pre-dawn hours of April 22nd when the Earth plows through the debris trail of Comet Thatcher at a relative velocity of 49 km/s

There is no direction given, so SeaDour should have used speed, not velocity. Or is this a convention often used in astronomy?

This is a convention often used in the real world. Yes, velocity is a vector. Yes, the word "velocity" can be used without giving a unit vector direction. Kindly pull your head out of your academic ass: the world has far too much momentum to stop turning every time someone uses the word "velocity" and doesn't mention that, "oh, by the way, that's in the direction of unit vector e..."

From http://www.dictionary.com:

velocity
n. pl. velocities

1. Rapidity or speed of motion; swiftness. [emphasis mine]
2. Physics. A vector quantity whose magnitude is a body's speed and whose direction is the body's direction of motion.
a. The rate of speed of action or occurrence.
b. The rate at which money changes hands in an economy.

1. Fake words of the day from dictionary.com, which were later used in conversation with management.
2. Wimp of the year email poll
3. Switching the microphone and receiver in the telephone.
4. Holding desk trinkets hostage, complete with ransom notes and 'terrorist-esque' videos.
5. Putting index cards randomly throughout the other's books and files (still finding them to this day).
6. Replacing the background on the computer with a fat man in a thong and deleting the feature for changing backgrounds.
7. Setting the background to a remote file and slowly reducing brightness over a few weeks.
8. Cleverly renaming humorous audio files so that fart noises are sent to one's wife and mother.
9. Stealing a trailer hitch cover, encasing it in scotch tape, wire, and expanda-foam, and hiding it in the plant with a series of clues strewn about the building.

Okay moron, pay attention.

LOSE = opposite of win
LOOSE = your mom

Try www.dictionary.com next time, asshole.