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Ironic DOES NOT mean contradictory! It also doesn't mean improbable, funny, or coincidental.

It's symmetrical not symetrical.

I know that the editors don't look at the summaries, but don't they even check the heading for spelling errors any more?

It's symmetrical not symetrical.

I know that the editors don't look at the summaries, but don't they even check the heading for spelling errors any more?

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=uranus

You'll find both are valid, depending on your regional accent.

I personally have never heard your version.

it's a freaking pain in the b-hind reading scuttlemonkeys items when he insists on linking every second f'ing word. do you want people to be able to read your blurtings or not? people writing like you are a curse on the internet that spells REALLY BAD AND ANNOYING NAVIGATION.

that harmless rant aside, nice stuff!

This is the most pathetic attempt at karma whoring I've ever seen. For those who can't follow the parent post because it contains big words, I offer the following guide (mod me up!):

for
people
who

Ah, screw it.

This is the most pathetic attempt at karma whoring I've ever seen. For those who can't follow the parent post because it contains big words, I offer the following guide (mod me up!):

for
people
who

Ah, screw it.

This is the most pathetic attempt at karma whoring I've ever seen. For those who can't follow the parent post because it contains big words, I offer the following guide (mod me up!):

for
people
who

Ah, screw it.

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. (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=terroris m)

the average TiVo household makes "something like" 357 clicks per day. With 4.4 million households, this works out to be over a half a billion clicks every single year. No wonder my fast forward button wore off on my remote

Stable is not only the name of a Debian release, but also a word in the English language. A "stable Debian system" merely meaning a stable system running Debian, you were probably thinking of a "Debian stable system"; while the latter usually implies the former, the former does not imply the latter.

Full details of why can be found here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/ i/its.html

it allows me to segway

God damn smartarse marketting terms taking over from the real word, *sigh*.

speeling flame.

Dictionary.com says that a conspiracy is "An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act."

Do you believe that the planes flew into the towers and the pentagon by accident? If not, you believe in a conspiracy.

I have never added a + to any phone numbers in my cell phone, and yet it has always worked, and I am Canadian, and live in Canada. I am not an American, and am not US-centric.

The dial plans in the US and Canada are identical, hence "Else you won't be able to dial it when you go to another country where the dialing sequences are different". Your dial plan was developed by Bell, whose center of gravity was solidly placed in the USA.

Perhaps the shibboleth (and thanks for the new word for my vocabulary, by the way) lies between those who assume that everything that isn't European must be American, and those who know there are other countries in this world that belong to neither?

Silly me. I'm in Malaysia, but until you opened my eyes I always thought it was either the USA or Europe.

P.S. All snarking aside, shibboleth is a great word! Glad you like it.

I have often wondered if much of the difficulty which arises in written communcation (email, IM, etc.) is due to a general degredation in the vocabulary of the populous.

Surely you meant populace?

Testing in multiple browsers will only show you that's it's broken. Fixing pages so that they look right is hard, and sometime impossible.

Nothing about that is AJAX-specific, and unfixable layout problems can always be worked around. This is a basic reality of the web. Using it to level pot shots at technology X simply doesn't work because it also affects technologies A through W.

Powerful, yes. Well designed, no. (Of course, this is a subjective judgement, and javascript does what it does a lot better than the alternatives. But there is still a lot it does badly, or shouldn't do at all.)

As far as embedded scripting languages go, I consider it damned amazing. We could have gotten something like TCL instead *cringe* ...and this makes it a bad choice for AJAX. If your only return type is marked up documents then you end up having to do funky stuff some of the time.

I don't need a fucking CORBA connection to the sever. Marked up documents are fine. There is this "interweb" thing that uses them all the time!

This is true to an extent. Rails makes it really easy to write most of your application, which leads to minimalism in your code.

Minimalism is not how many lines of code you wrote. Minimalism is how many features you left out.

It's not that slow.

No, it's really, really slow.

It should be quick enough for a lot of web apps. I find that any slowness is due to my bad coding rather than ruby's speed in the majority of cases. (Although this might say more about my coding that it does about ruby ;)

It's definitely fast enough to do web work with, and it has good caching support which can make up for slow page rendering. Regardless, I think the development time/performance tradeoff is worth it. Ruby and Rails are just joyous to work in.

No it doesn't. Rails providers helpers for AJAX and javascript, but it does not utilize them. People writing rails apps might utilise them, and the fact that rails helps you out is a Good Thing. It would be wrong, though, to suggest that rails somehow depends upon them.

Utilize != use. Read the usage note in this definition. No dependency was suggested.

Never get into a semantic war with me - I will end you :)

I think the grandparent poster is right -- comparing AJAX and rails is misleading. Rails is much better thought out and designed; AJAX is more of a cobbled together pragmatic solution.

The GP was the one who made the comparison (unless we are talking about a different post?). Really, AJAX is only a methodology, so the comparison is even more wrong.

The real beauty of rails is that it makes it easy to write applications properly, and discourages you from reinventing the wheel badly.

Agreement

"adv. 3. In the proper or desired manner; well: The jacket doesn't fit right."

Well hurray for you for pointing out that "there is technology". The telescreen is in fact the reference here, some tech thing that lets the government look into peoples' homes or something. I get the reference, okay?

The problem is that the stupid summary has it backwards. This scheme is nearly the opposite of that. It's video footage from outside coming in to peoples' homes.

I was trying to use this to make a more general point about crappy "tech = 1984" linkage, but you, the true ignorant party, missed this completely.

This is not a question of grammar, it's a question of semantics, i.e. the meaning of the word "technically".

According to principle; formal rather than practical: a technical advantage.

It is a grammar question, because grammar determines which definition is being used. "Technically, he won the lottery" implies that the subject did not in fact win the lottery. "Technically, it was legal to sell pot in 1950" implies that there was some barrier (an impossible permit, FWIW) to actually selling mary jane.

This is really a question of philosophy of science and epistemology - how do we know things about the world around us, and how do we separate good knowledge from bad. Scientific theories are a large part of the answer to that, but generalizing the knot metaphor as you've suggested loses the specific connection to theory that all good scientific metaphors have, turning it into little more than a fairy tale.

Supposing that a scientific metaphor is "good" only if it advances understanding of one theory is a logical failing. It's sophmoric to presume that a metaphor that does not enhance the "hollistic" understanding of the audience, such as one that encourages false conclusions, is anything more than "acceptable." Some metaphors, such as anthropomorphising chemical reactions, are even "bad" as they do more harm to the audience's general understanding than good.

Science is a way of determing the validity of a premise -- to use the modern day popular definitons, it's a way of creating knowledge. Science is not, however, a useful means of propogating knowledge. That task is part of Art, usually the art of writing, and metaphor is an artistic tool. We're not talking about scientific studies -- we are, in fact, talking about fairy tales and which ones are better to get the audience to understand the point.

(Come to think of it, a fairy tale metaphor for explaining quantum mechanics would probably be an excellent general education or undergraduate means of introducing the topic. So long as the metaphor wasn't taken too far, and remained more in the scientific voice than in a prose-drama voice)

Also, the idea that "knot" communicates more than "blob" is speculation which would have to be tested. Following the loose metaphorical logic you've proposed, knots don't stop you from shrinking the kids, because you could just pull the knots tighter.

"But you would be left with just as much string, and a bunch more slack, and you'd have a harder time stretching the knot out again. Not to mention that if your knot needs to move in order to work, it won't be able to move nearly as well."

I think it holds up pretty well, actually. There's no theoretical reason that we couldn't compress all of the protons, neutrons, and electrons of a 6-year-old child into a shape smaller than an ant. It would, however, produce an incredible ammount of energy due to fusion, leave us with a small dot that still weighed just as much as the boy, and would leave the boy himself quite dead.

(Note that I didn't claim that the knot would keep the shrinking-factor away while the blob metaphor wouldn't; it's just that the blob metaphor doesn't let you explain atomic structure without leaving your metaphor.)

Definition.

I'm all for giving the editors a hard time when they fuck up the English language, but this isn't one of those times.

funny
2. Strangely or suspiciously odd; curious.
3. Tricky or deceitful.

Heh! In this case there is quite possibly a greater chance of a "casual" link than there is of a "causal" link. What I think you meant, though, was "causal":

IOW: You can't casually cause causal casualties! :)

Heh! In this case there is quite possibly a greater chance of a "casual" link than there is of a "causal" link. What I think you meant, though, was "causal":

IOW: You can't casually cause causal casualties! :)

Um, in your first sentence you proved yourself and idiot (opps, I mean ediot).

emmigrate
immigrate

If you want to be taken seriously you really shouldn't correct someone who spelled a word correctly and then spell the word incorrectly yourself.

Just some friendly advise.

Um, in your first sentence you proved yourself and idiot (opps, I mean ediot).

emmigrate
immigrate

If you want to be taken seriously you really shouldn't correct someone who spelled a word correctly and then spell the word incorrectly yourself.

Just some friendly advise.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "academic". If you mean that he didn't write it for a class, then you're correct. However, he began writing Linux as a fun project, as a way to extend a terminal emulator he had built to read usenet news. He didn't intend it to get to the level it did/has. Based on these definitions (ex: "not expected to produce an immediate or practical result"), it's a pretty fair argument to say the beginnings of Linux were "academic".

Not irony. Irony is a contradiction of meanings or expectations. This is merely a humorous coincidence.

eh? the tags vanished?

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=whistlebl ower

And now I have to wait 5 minutes to fix the tags vanishing?

You've heard of this little old invention called a dictionary?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=socialism

      1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the econYou've heard of this little old invention called a dictionary?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=socialism

      1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
      2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

Now the fact is that, as paradoxical as the uninformed may find it, a socialist system in some aspects fail in ways similar to how the current cronyism based system fails. This in no way changes the fact that what you describe has nothing to do with socialism.omy.
      2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

Now the fact is that, as paradoxical as the uninformed may find it, a socialist system in some aspects fail in ways similar to how the current cronyism based system fails. This in no way changes the fact that what you describe has nothing to do with socialism.

You've heard of this little old invention called a dictionary?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=socialism

      1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the econYou've heard of this little old invention called a dictionary?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=socialism

      1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
      2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

Now the fact is that, as paradoxical as the uninformed may find it, a socialist system in some aspects fail in ways similar to how the current cronyism based system fails. This in no way changes the fact that what you describe has nothing to do with socialism.omy.
      2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

Now the fact is that, as paradoxical as the uninformed may find it, a socialist system in some aspects fail in ways similar to how the current cronyism based system fails. This in no way changes the fact that what you describe has nothing to do with socialism.

eloquence. a collection of lawyers is "a whole eloquence of lawyers." collective nouns are weird.

No, the correct term apparently is a pack, gang or sneak of weasels, or possibly a boogle or confusion of them:
http://rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml
http://www.hintsandthings.co.uk/kennel/collectives .htm
http://dictionary.reference.com/writing/styleguide /animal.html

I don't understand why you're oligated to fix this person's computer.

It's called being considerate. Some people still seem to think that's quite a worthwhile trait believe it or not.
Facetiousness aside, I believe the OP didn't need to be told that 'no' was an option; rather how best to let people down.

"I have one question on your examples, it is whether it's better to put the "Save" button on the left (like Windows often does) or right (like this Mac example)."

The correct answer to this is "Yes."

On the Mac, the default button is located on the right-hand side of the dialog box. The reason for this, buried deep within some Apple UI studies or so I hear, is that most people are right handed, have their mouse on the right hand side, and will have an easier time hitting the button on the right-hand side. This is also why the collection of buttons is usually right-justified.

Windows, over the years, has developed the philosophy that most people read left-to-right and that the default button should be the left-most button, because it will be the first one that the user reads.

Putting the default button on the left on a Mac will annoy your Mac users. I don't know if putting the default button on the right will annoy Windows users. Windows users may not care--they're not used to consistency anyway.

To use a language analogy (they are Dialog boxes, after all), it's somewhat like the whole question of whether the adjective comes before or after the noun. In English, it comes before. In French, after. Which is "correct"? Hard to say. But get it backwards and the person you're talking to will be confused.

So it's best to do it the way the user expects it to be, as defined by whatever guidelines may exist or whatever popular applications do.

FTA:

During your interview, Thompson also gives antidotes from his new book, "Out of Harm's Way" (Tyndale House Publishers).

I wish someone would give me an antidote to Jack Thompson...

Usage Note: The first and fully accepted meaning of deprecate is "to express disapproval of." But the word has steadily encroached on the meaning of depreciate. It is now used, almost to the exclusion of depreciate, in the sense "to belittle or mildly disparage," as in He deprecated his own contribution. In an earlier survey, this newer sense was approved by a majority of the Usage Panel.

Actually, "is riding" creates a nominative sentence--not active. It describes the boy as having a state of being: "riding." The word "riding" is a verbal noun (gerund), which is also used as an adjective.

So "Subject (helping verb) adjective" - nominative. The sentence is not active at all, but passive.

That depends highly on your definition of Romance. I don't think you'd find very many women who would find it "romantic" for someone to be working their way through every man and woman in the town.

While Casanova might be classified "Romance" by some publisher, that doesn't make it romance. While he may have engaged in romance with each individual woman, his over-all behaviour was not romantic.

and if you're going to correct someone, check your source first:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=whore
  "A person considered sexually promiscuous." I'd certainly catagorize them as sexually promiscuous.

I think dictionary reference #2 is succinct and accurate: "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."

Let's take a concrete example. Some Jihadists believe that they will get virgins in the afterlife as a reward for their service. I think you would be hard-pressed to get a rational explanation out of them for this belief. For them, it is a matter of faith. Yet, from an external perspective, it is easy to see that their faith/belief is based on the culture they grew up in. Someone raised in a Christian environment would not share this belief.

I see faith as a self-defense mechanism. It lets people go about their daily lives without questioning their core beliefs.

most, adj.

educated
adj.

1. Having an education, especially one above the average.

No, truth faith is based on nothing otherwise it is just belief.

This artificial separation of religious faith and reason baffles me. Unless one posits a perverse God who purposely structures the universe so that observation would lead away from the truth about Him, then one would expect true assertions about God to be at least consistent with reason applied to observation.

The grandparent mentions his Christian faith. Whether you think Christianity is true or not, Christian faith does not have to be blind belief in something one cannot support. Rather, the Christian's faith is trust in a God who the Christian has concluded has demonstrated Himself to be trustworthy. The Christian's reasons for making this conclusion can be examined critically. For example, Christianity makes strong claims of fact which can be the subject of historical investigation. If Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead as described in the Gospels, then that is strong evidence that there is something to this Christianity thing. If not, then even the apostle Paul says it is all pointless.

There is no such english word as virii!

Mods, please don't even bother modding people up who use the term. Seriously, where do people even pick this up?

you are an idiot

. . . and still have windoz to fall back on (ouch that would have to hurt).

Another point in Apple's favor is that you don't need to defenestrate the hard drive. =)

And in any case, my main beef is that it's the editor-in-chief doing this. If you're editor-in-chief for a major tech publication, it's generally good form to rise above this sort of thing--even if it means you don't get to pen snark pieces.

Apparently it doesn't mean anything.

"Except" is the verb in that sentence. I think it's an imperative sentence requesting that the reader "except" the sentence from the rule.

I elieve in this case, except is not a verb, but a preposition... http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=except

We = Us, our
Wee = Small, tiny
Whee = Used to express extreme pleasure or enthusiasm (Dictionary.com)

If you think about as meaning any of the above, the Wii isn't that silly of a name. Granted, if you have a puerile mind, it can also be a homonym meaning "pee". With so many words with double-meanings in the English language, you have to take it all in context. As a well-known example, "faggot" can be an offensive term for a homosexual man -- or it can be a bundle of twigs, or a kind of stitch, or a bassoon. A "fag" is a short form for the offensive term, or a cigarette. And you know damn well which one someone means when they ask if you'd give them a fag. When your child asks you to buy them a "wee", you'll know exactly what they're talking about.

One of the major complaints about the Wii name is that it doesn't define what the product actually is. Well, neither do iPod, Dreamcast, frisbee, Dr. Pepper, Lego, Nike... And yet these all are now memorable household names. Words can be created and then given a meaning, not just the other way around.

Perhaps you mean obolus?