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Not to nitpick or anything, I just found your typo rather amusing.

From one nitpicker to another:

typo

malapropism

That kid does have a problem if you and/or his parents refer to his vision condition as a "problem." The only problem is a world that is slow to awaken to the understanding that the man-made world can be designed for universal access. Technology only makes it all the more easier. The possibilities open up as soon as you discard the idea that the kid is broken and begin to realize it is the world that is in fact backward. I'm sure you'll get a lot of good suggestions for stopgap measures. That's what the solutions really are. If you're buying special products and technology to substitute for tools used by sighted people, it's a stopgap product.

One day we won't have to buy "special" products or "special" software to do and access the visual world. One day manufacturers will approach the world with all of man's senses considered. Your PDA will have a speech option by default. The web sites you visit will be accessible by design. People won't see visually-impaired people as less than themselves. Teach that kid that he can do anything, and expect him to wow you.

There is no such word as demogogue, Einstein. If you mean demagogue , then you should go look the word up in a dictionary where you will learn that the term applies properly only to a leader who appeals to peoples emotions. For example, a president who tells everyone that Sadam Hussain was behind 911 when it was not true... is a demagogue. A president who says that he knows Sadam Hussain has weapons of mass destruction which then turns out to be a lie... is a demagogue. A president who says that a defeated, underdeveloped nation on the other side of the earth is a threat to the superpower know as the United States... is a demagogue. A president who calls his opponent 'wavering' and 'waffling' when that opponents positions have been steadfast... is a demagogue.

I'm afraid I have not studied latin, however, the third definition in that link seems to contradict that athletics refers to being only physical talent:

One fitted for, or skilled in, intellectual contests; as, athletes of debate.

Granted, a computer game is not particularly intellectual (at least those of this particular league), but the English language is always changing, with new words being added "officially" at least yearly. Is it much of a stretch to allow athletetics to be applied to a game of reflexes and some memorization?

I would agree, yet this seems to contradict the assumption that you must be physically fit to be athletic.

\Ath"lete\, n. [L. athleta, Gr. ? prizefighter, fr. ? to contend for a prize, ?, Hom. ?, contest, ? prize; fr. the same root as E. wed: cf. F. athl[`e]te.] 1. (Antiq.) One who contended for a prize in the public games of ancient Greece or Rome

A disturbing study showing that the suicide rates for whites in US metropolitan areas is higher in cities where more country music is played on the radio

Now why am I not surprised?

(lame joke elided)

Do you not know what the word metropolitan means?

Actually, what he said was:

The enemy understands a free Iraq will be a major defeat in their ideology of hatred. That's why they're fighting so vociferously."

What does he mean by that? Is the enemy shouting too much? Sheesh.

Dictionary definition

Competence is only the 4th entry in the definition, and the "professional=competent" synonym is clearly based on people doing work that's good enough to pay for. Sure, you might do "pro bono" work, but if your main income is from working in that field, you're a professional in that field.

The "professional bodies" you mention are groups of professionals. You join the organisation because you *are* a professional (ie. working in a job and getting paid for it) - you don't somehow become a professional by joining the society. In fact, the "sufficient experience" part will specifically require you to have been working in a position of responsibility for some time, which comes down to having a paid job. Working on an open-source project in your free time, however good you happen to be, won't cut it for membership of the IEEE if your day-job is cleaning the drains.

Linus is not now an amateur - he's being paid lots of money to do software. But at the time he created Linux, he was absolutely an amateur in every sense, both by not being paid and by not being a very good software engineer (his own admission). Granted, he created something pretty good, but that's the whole point of the article!

Grab.

stupid 7-11 etc clerks that will except the copies.

Surely you meant to say "accept"? If they "except" such fake bills, then that's exactly what we want to see happen!

Not to nitpick or anything, I just found your typo rather amusing.

stupid 7-11 etc clerks that will except the copies.

Surely you meant to say "accept"? If they "except" such fake bills, then that's exactly what we want to see happen!

Not to nitpick or anything, I just found your typo rather amusing.

1. Absence of any form of political authority. 2. Political disorder and confusion. 3. Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.

Just what I need, a bunch of amateurs trying to ensure that my life and future has more disorder, confusion, and lack of purpose....

The word is ridiculous, root word "ridicule".

It's interesting that dilemma simply means 2 (di) lemmas.

Did anyone else read that as "ornithological frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)" at first, or is it just me?

...I need to buy two or more licences for MS-Office? Nice.

How about at home? Since if I'm licenced to use it at work, I'm licenced to use it at home, no? So I can legitimately install it at home for free.

Now my teenage daughter sits down and uses my home copy, once, to make a price-list for her lemonade stand (ie a commercial venture) - am I liable for an extra licence?

How about if I install a copy at home for my use on "her" machine, is that OK?

And if I'm licenced to use it at home, does that cover work as well?

How about if a computer at work has twenty people use it for five minutes each, every day, to update a log. Do I now need to buy 20 licences for that copy of Office?

These rules aren't very clear, people generally just double-licence things anyway, and they cease to be a problem if I just use OpenOffice instead.

A quick reality check here. In 2003, a "noisy" Australian deisel boat sunk two US nuclear attack subs and an aircraft carrier during joint war games. The Dutch have done the same sort of thing. On a previous occasion, an Australian sub sat underneath a US carrier, inside the CBG cordon, and followed it around for some days. At the end of the exercise it surfaced next to the carrier to the horror and amazement of all involved.

The biggest danger the US navy faces is hubris my boy. That's the real thing you have to watch out for.

Uh, what? You want less space an a harder interface? Intuitive would mean that the functionality is relatively understandable and easy to use because the layout makes sense and is easily deductible. Why would you want something half as intuitive? Wouldn't that be the same as twice as hard?

It's not "per say", but "per se". For it comes from Latin, just like many other words in the English language. You must be an American...

Everything you said was true AFAIK, but I'd like to clarify. There are rights you can't sign away. I'm not a lawyer, but I do know what inalienable means and that it applies to the Bill of Rights. Some other, less fundamental, rights are alienable. And these are the rights we're talking about here; you don't need to agree to let someone kill you in order to attend a LAN party.

[*] - Though I don't believe they actually use that word - it does come up in the Declaration of Independence, but that doesn't have any legal weight, right?

Or just the usual Nobel prizes...

I know I know, it's alright on /. :-P

Additional forms of wordplay might include pattern repetition. An example might be "Lloyd's Lloses Llamas" as a headline if Lloyds of London had to settle a claim to a llama farmer.

This is called alliteration.

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

Source

You'll note that there is no distinction between governments or civilians. One could argue that a rebellion (and yes, the Founding Fathers were British citizens at the time) is a form of terrorism, as is destruction of property like the Boston Tea Party and other attacks on forts & munitions before the Revolution was official.

"Are we going to assume that everytime something happens to someone, a terrorist is behind it? I for one am tired of our leaders trying to make us afraid."

Actually, by definition, this is called "Fascism" (emphasis mine):

1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship , and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.

Caffeine is bitter.

Still, I hate to see companies get away with lying like this. There are plenty of non-psychoactive bitter flavors.

And as a bonified nerd, I say that with all the disdain possible....

I'm being terribly unfair - especially since your response is really quite nice and all ...

But, "bonified" would be the result of taking the root word "bone", and converting it to "bonify", meaning "to make into or resemble bone", and then make it past tense.

As in: "He was bonified when he drank too much of that calcium powder".

So, I get this weird picture of a nerd with big, nasty bones sticking out all over his face!

Yeah, grammar nazi, blah blah. It's quite funny when you think about it!

I'm pretty sure you meant "bona fide"!

The only reason our friend would have trouble addressing those arguments would be if he was undereducated in the sciences himself.

Where, unfortunately, "undereducated" means we think anything which breaches our a priori assumptions about the nature of the universe is dumb.

By that standard, most people, most scientists are "undereducated". For the longest time geology avoided anything that smelled of catastrophism, paleontology avoided anything that smelled of a flood, and astronomy avoided anything that smelled of structure.

For good scientific reasons? Not a bit of it. Because they were afraid of being labelled as one of the enemy, those insidious creationists, and ostracised like J Harlan Bretz was for 40 years.

A very highly qualified scientists have been brave enough to state outright that they are not impartial, like Richard Lewontin and his famous "cannot let a Divine Foot in the door" statement, but they are the exception.

The result in each of the above cases was that the science in question was held back by decades.

Meanwhile, one D Russell Humphreys had made some fairly specific predictions (in 1984) about the magnetic fields Voyager would find in the outer planets, which turned out to be both bang on the money and well wide of any other expectations when those fields were measured two years after publication. One of the more spectacular demonstrations that this "alien" and "impossible" perspective has predictive, scientific merit.

Anyone wondering why more such papers don't appear in the mainstream scientific press need only turn to the furor which exploded when the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington published a carefully peer-reviewed paper from well-known Intelligent Design advocate, Stephen C. Meyer. The then-editor, Dr. Richard M. v. Sternberg (a double PhD with many published articles himself), goes to great lengths on his website to explain that every positive scientific and journalistic step of the process was followed for the paper and had been independently verified and approved by highly qualified scientists before publication.

It is quite clear that the paper is being criticised on political/philosophical grounds, not because of any scientific merit or demerit.

The Origins show is based on philosophy, not on science. This is well and good except that it is presented as being purely based on science.

I need hardly point out that such misrepresentation is in itself unscientific, a meta-flaw under which to group all of the unscientific teleological statements about features "appearing" (ex nihilo, apparently) and organisms having "figured out" and "striving" to achieve "goals" without any guiding hand. Nevertheless, it will go ahead, and millions of viewers will be taught that random numbers have hidden intelligence and/or miracle-working ability which repeatedly transcends mere statistics, and introduced once more to a capricious goddess who goes by the name of Nature - all the while suffering the constantly asserted doublethink mantra that there is no supernature.

Meanwhile, back at Reasons , Hugh has had the more obvious inconsistencies and contradictions among his theories publicly pointed out to him

In order to be an Opera it would have to be set to music

Opera: A theatrical presentation in which a dramatic performance is set to music.

The closest relation is that Lucas has numbered them all with Episode numbers.

However, I would be interested in a Space Oprah...

science fiction n. : A literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy, typically based on speculative scientific discoveries or developments, environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets, forms part of the plot or background.

This "The US is a republic not a democracy" meme is really fucking annoying.

Now, you may be right that the US isn't particularly democratic, but that has fuck all to do with it being a republic. A republic is merely one (and probably the only practical one on a scale as large as ours) possible implementation of a democracy. There are likewise many ways of implementing a republic, some of which are more democratic than others.

Now, to the extent that the US Constitution is revered around the world, it is generally because it spells out in detail the structure of a government beholden to the people, and specifically enumerates the democratic rights of the people.

In that context, the electoral context may be an anachronism. The whole electoral system may, in this day and age, be working against the democratic ideals embodied in the constitution. In that case we have the constitutional power to change it. That's democracy.

The point is not that MS should be responsible for all third party usage of their DLL files. The point is that there is a trivial difference between having your scanner look in a few pre-determined directories for the DLL files and having it scan and list any known vulnerable DLL files. Instead it just gives a false sense of security. The post was about the MS released 'security tool' being useless, which it is.

Besides, MS doesn't follow their own guidelines half the time, how can you expect any else to? For instance, having a downloadable file right on their website for something that is so obviously marked "not to be redistributed" on your computer. I rest my case..

p.s. ridiculous

Hey, bonehead, there is no such word as virii. Look it up here if you don't believe me.

Some would say that it's a year short of a millenia as mankind surely didn't start at year 0 when Christ died

I really don't want to be the average nitpicky slashdot guy, but AD does not stand for "after death"

If you think about it, most people back then recorded things in either Hebrew, or Latin. AD stands for 'anno domini' in Latin. Therefore, we have BC (which, strangely, seems to actually stand for 'before Christ') to demarc the time before the birth of Jesus Christ, and AD, to mark the time after that event.

Besides, if we did the whole "Before Christ / After Death" thing, we'd miss out on about 34 years while the guy was still kicking around the Middle East, and that wouldn't do, would it!

Oh, and for you politically correct revisionists, there are new terms that don't mark important events based upon one guy's life in one particular religion - historians are starting to use the terms BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) which exactly correspond with the BC and AD labels. Pretty stupid, actually...

Some would say that it's a year short of a millenia as mankind surely didn't start at year 0 when Christ died

I really don't want to be the average nitpicky slashdot guy, but AD does not stand for "after death"

If you think about it, most people back then recorded things in either Hebrew, or Latin. AD stands for 'anno domini' in Latin. Therefore, we have BC (which, strangely, seems to actually stand for 'before Christ') to demarc the time before the birth of Jesus Christ, and AD, to mark the time after that event.

Besides, if we did the whole "Before Christ / After Death" thing, we'd miss out on about 34 years while the guy was still kicking around the Middle East, and that wouldn't do, would it!

Oh, and for you politically correct revisionists, there are new terms that don't mark important events based upon one guy's life in one particular religion - historians are starting to use the terms BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) which exactly correspond with the BC and AD labels. Pretty stupid, actually...

Some would say that it's a year short of a millenia as mankind surely didn't start at year 0 when Christ died

I really don't want to be the average nitpicky slashdot guy, but AD does not stand for "after death"

If you think about it, most people back then recorded things in either Hebrew, or Latin. AD stands for 'anno domini' in Latin. Therefore, we have BC (which, strangely, seems to actually stand for 'before Christ') to demarc the time before the birth of Jesus Christ, and AD, to mark the time after that event.

Besides, if we did the whole "Before Christ / After Death" thing, we'd miss out on about 34 years while the guy was still kicking around the Middle East, and that wouldn't do, would it!

Oh, and for you politically correct revisionists, there are new terms that don't mark important events based upon one guy's life in one particular religion - historians are starting to use the terms BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) which exactly correspond with the BC and AD labels. Pretty stupid, actually...

Some would say that it's a year short of a millenia as mankind surely didn't start at year 0 when Christ died

I really don't want to be the average nitpicky slashdot guy, but AD does not stand for "after death"

If you think about it, most people back then recorded things in either Hebrew, or Latin. AD stands for 'anno domini' in Latin. Therefore, we have BC (which, strangely, seems to actually stand for 'before Christ') to demarc the time before the birth of Jesus Christ, and AD, to mark the time after that event.

Besides, if we did the whole "Before Christ / After Death" thing, we'd miss out on about 34 years while the guy was still kicking around the Middle East, and that wouldn't do, would it!

Oh, and for you politically correct revisionists, there are new terms that don't mark important events based upon one guy's life in one particular religion - historians are starting to use the terms BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) which exactly correspond with the BC and AD labels. Pretty stupid, actually...

Right...because you certainly wouldn't want to do anything like obscure your data through encryption. That wouldn't be secure. That's why I insist my bank lets me send my password in the clear.

No. Obscurity is putting something like your source code in a pantry and merely hoping that no one ever looks in that pantry. Encryption, on the other hand, intentionally alters the data in such a way that the number of entities who can read it are controlled. You're not obscuring that bank data because you're still sending it over unsecure, public networks, but encrypted.

Right...because you certainly wouldn't want to do anything like obscure your data through encryption. That wouldn't be secure. That's why I insist my bank lets me send my password in the clear.

No. Obscurity is putting something like your source code in a pantry and merely hoping that no one ever looks in that pantry. Encryption, on the other hand, intentionally alters the data in such a way that the number of entities who can read it are controlled. You're not obscuring that bank data because you're still sending it over unsecure, public networks, but encrypted.

It just isn't a viable argument to say that it's too expensive. It can easily be obtained for free.

Yes, but a majority of us have morals.

That's a bit of an oversimplification compared to dictionary.com's definition. You have to think about why it would be unnecessary. Of course, the reason for this is because something that is repetitive and excessive is naturally considered unnecessary. Heck, look at the latin word it was derived from. Nothing about "unnecessary" in there.

Ummm, dumbass? You might want to take a quick look at what caldera actually means.

Who lets these freakin' idiots in here?

Monitor, NOT regulate.

Please order a lobotomy for dinner tomorrow, the world will be a better place. I promise!

Monitor, NOT regulate.

Please order a lobotomy for dinner tomorrow, the world will be a better place. I promise!

Republic

Hey moron, there is no such word as "viri" or "virii". The plural of virus is viruses. If you don't believe me, then go to Dictionary dot com or Merriam-Webster Online and look it up for yourself.

You stupid people make me sick.

Hey dumbass moderator:

Definition of redundant.

I think you wanted to use "off topic" instead, but you're obviously too retarded to know the difference. Schmuck!

Psst... separated ...

What the poster above you was trying to say is that you spelled gasoline incorrectly.

Again.

It might be a different color than a gasoline one, anyway...

According to the landlord, Larry Silverstein, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it. And they made that decision to pull, and then we watched the building collapse."

"Pulling" a building means to demolish or destroy. Since setting up a controlled demolition takes weeks of planning, WTC 7 must have been fitted with the appropriate explosives prior to 9/11.

See here:
here
"virii" doesn't work as a plural.