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Unless you want your readers' eyes to glaze over, write in active voice.

Assuming the parent poster is French because of the reference to France, these pluralization mistakes aren't so far fetched for a Francophone. In French, verbs are conjugated to match whether or not the subject is plural.

How is that different from English? English has subject-verb agreement too.

So, he/she has the word "they" so naturally because this is a plural word, to him/her, "suck" should be pluralized to match.

The plural form of "suck" isn't "sucks"--you don't form the plural form of a verb by adding "s" to it, in either English or French.

Infinitive: "to suck". "He sucks": singular subject, verb ends in "s". "They suck": plural subject, no "s".

Infinitive: "sucer". "Il suce": singular subject, no "s". "Ils sucent": plural subject, no "s".

Yea. Till this year the US government has not been keeping their sites in line. Now a lot of things are happening with the government. Here is a link with links of things this year mostly: http://triton.towson.edu/~jlazar/abouthci.html

Dr. Jonathan Lazar - http://triton.towson.edu/~JLAZAR/index.html For for website designing: http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2010-10-12/designing-accessible-technology

Check out this nice article:

http://pages.towson.edu/ladon/wg/candywww.htm#SciAmer
  (also see the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence)
Article says sugar's light emission on crystal breaking is lightning on a small scale, charge separation causing electrons to jump and nitrogen emission. Doesn't describe x-rays or use of vacuum.

I am wondering:

- Could an x-ray or terahertz wave guide be included somehow in the adhesive used
- Would striking rocks against each other, or a cigarette lighter flint etc. also generate x-rays. Maybe best to stay away from sparky things?
- That finger x-ray image looks dangerous. My grandfather had terrible burns that never healed on his fingertips because dentists used to hold the x-ray film in their patients' mouths while taking x-rays, in the olden days.

Perhaps even more important than learning a foreign language is learning to write well in English. Few people, especially in technical fields, really learn how to write at a professional level. Research requires a lot of writing, usually in a highly specialized style and format. Take the time to really learn English grammar, punctuation, and usage. Familiarize yourself with a variety of writing styles. A course in technical writing might be worth taking.

Some good online resources include the following:
http://www.grammarnow.com/
http://www.grammarbook.com/english_rules.asp
http://www.towson.edu/ows/

http://www.towson.edu/ows/lose_lose.htm

"Imaginary property rights"? The right to have the right to say how something you own is used is an imagenary right? Artists have assigned control over their art to representatives, as is their right. Clearly this is the issue, than.

I believe the "imaginary" substitution is somewhat warranted. What is it, exactly that you believe these "artists" own? Is it the chords and how the song is played on an instrument? Because being a guitarist/psuedo-pianist/instrumentalist myself, I find the idea highly objectionable that anyone, that's right anyone can own chords or combinations of chords (known as chord progressions). If it's not the chords they own, is it the lyrics? Because as I've seen it, lyrics often contain information such as cliches and phrases borrowed from other sources. I find it difficult to believe that someone can "own" phrases.

Is it the chords combined with the lyrics? What exactly do they own?

The truth is that "intellectual" property is imaginary. It was only until I read that phrase in this very article that the issue had been nailed home so clearly in my head.

Nobody owns the plot that everyone uses in modern movies, popular culture, or "folk songs" and things were never before subject to such legislation. They were never "property" before. Myths and tales permeated the countryside. That was until plays could be captured forever as "movies", and music could be stowed away on "records." The truth is that media provided these now hugely successful recording artists with a brief window in which to make millions. That window was only provided by the fact that recorded media could be scarce. That limitation is now gone. Records don't require media anymore and are now as free as they were via word of mouth or through strolling minstrels. The truth is that it was a very small amount of time and their business model should *not* be protected. The reason why people say that artists ripping off other artists makes for great artistry is because it's true. Artists for centuries simply innovated and were free to do so by the free society of culture which has been cut off with records and movies. Well, gentlemen, welcome to the other side of the mountain. If you give something out to the free air that can be copied and played again, it will be. You have no power to stop the echo of your voice once you've used it to scream something from atop a mountain, it is then no longer yours to contain. And as such you have no power to stop the spread of your content. Culture is now back in the hands of the people, where it belonged to begin with. All your justifications and ideas of "intellectual property" are now gone. Get used to tightening your belt and practicing your craft...or find a new trade.

Sure the little brats will see it as a victory, right up until they get a new headmaster and loose access to myspace on the same day.

I'm afraid Roddenberry and Company were a bit late themselves. The term "hyperdrive" was used in Forbidden Planet in 1956. And according to this article, the idea of FTL through "hyperspace" goes back to a John W. Campbell story from 1934.

" ... You can not burn oxygen. Burning is a process of rapid oxidation. ..."

Or, burning is an exothermic chemical reaction limited by the availability of oxygen.
Or "A self-perpetuating exothermic reaction that ... increases the temperature of the reactants above the initial air temperature until an explosion, flame, or sustained glow occurs." There's dozens of definitions, actually. It seems something as simple as fire is fairly complicated to define comprehensively. These guys spend more than a few paragraphs trying:
http://saber.towson.edu/~schmitt/pyro/chapter1.htm l#Nex/

But, I'm willing to amend it, to:
Strictly speaking, Oxygen doesn't burn, even though you cannot burn anything without oxygen; and if you do have oxygen, once all the oxygen is gone the fire must always go out.

Wake on LAN is primarliy a NIC/driver/motherboard issue. From what you are saying, your PCs support it, but you are not sending the right kind of wakeup call. When a PC that's in standby or "off" receives a magic packet (which is what I've looked into), a wake up frame or the link state changes (depending on what you set it to do), the PC turns on. (getting them to standby/sleep reliably is harder. WoL can usually be handled without the OS) Check out magic packet info and MS reference.

The only people we had who brought in Quark files with any regularity were the "design" students at the local U, most of whom had no business touching it and should have stuck to Word and maybe the occasional foray into Illustrator. Seriously, the things these idiots would perpetrate in the name of "graphic design" made my eyes bleed and my stomach lurch.

Quark itself impressed me as a very powerful program, but with very damaging flaws, like its terrible color management (it would do horrible things to pastel shades a lot of the time), lack of PDF support, and the "quirkiness" involved in saving a 4.11 document from version 5 (we had 4.11/Mac at Kinko's and a lot of people who brought us stuff were using machines with 5).

Quark and its users got to be such a pain that we adopted a completely hands-off policy to it: you're welcome to bring your Quark file in and try to print it yourself, but we will not try to fix it, manipulate it, convert it, or anything else at all. We barely admitted we had it, unless we had to under direct questioning.

A critter is more than genes. There are also mechanisms to manipulate those genes

(Such a great example of stating something true but irrelevant.)

There are various mechanisms of mutation. If we interfered with the transcription checking, then that would also increase the mutation rate.

I don't know where you got this idea about increasing the temperature or the chemical reaction rate. We can do the experiment using mutagens or radiation to have the specific effect of causing mutations, and we can demonstrate they don't increase general chemical reaction rates and that a similar effect is seen whatever mutagen you use. (See for example this lab exercise.)

If we are not influencing the mutation rate, what is the mutagen changing? Is it just accelerating all reactions? No, we can observe that exposure to UV doesn't increase the reproduction rate or the metabolism rate.

Mutations can be beneficial as the environment changes. Indeed, even a mutation that looks neutral slightly deleterious at the time might turn out to be great a hundred generations later, when that bacteria is lifted into a different environment. Even if we suppose a vengeful god (or undergrad experimenter) was trying to cause random harmful mutations, some will eventually turn out to be useful.

You do realize your theory is inconsistent with basically all of modern microbiology and medicine? Feel free to propose an alternative, but it takes more than just saying "maybe you increased the temperature".

Guess that explains why Shakespeare and Chaucer are so easy for most people to read and comprehend today.

yet

Ha, that's cool.

Never heard about this so I thought you were making some sort of joke. So looked it up on google and even found some pictures of the effect.
Now where would I buy these lifesavers in Europe?

Here are the programs you need to have a k-133t windows system.

1. AOL- DUH, they are the greatest ISP ever.

2. Webshots - Impress your friends with your changing wallpaper!

3. Hotbar - Skin Internet Explorer and Impress your friends!

4. AOHell This program will make you l33t!

5. Incredimail This makes your e-mail look k00lah then everyone elses.

6. Microsoft Outlook because all the anti-virus tools work with it. You don't want to use another e-mail client, you might get a virus!

7. Comet Cursor. Makes your cursor R0x0r.

8. Intruder Alert 99 You need a firewall, the internet isn't a safe place!

9. Gator Gator is an awesome program that helps u remember ur passwords. This way u don't have to fill out stupid forms!

10. BO Server The guys in my gaming clan sent me this, they said it would improve my FPS, and make windows run faster. I think it did!

I'm aware of Asperger's, but I was really speaking more generally- and only "genetically" in the sense of refuting the "Next step in evolution! Nerd supermen will overrun the planet!" tone of the initial poster. Probably could've phrased things better, but hey, it's Slashdot. The point was that the *phenotypes* resemble the sickle-cell phenomenon (have 'half' the trait and you benefit, have 'all' of it and you're screwed); whether their expression is controlled by an underlying *genotype* or other environmental factors is up for grabs.

--

More of a personal ramble, here:

Knowing a few people diagnosed as Asperger's, and having some traits that may or may not fall under it myself, I have to feel there're some major problems in the diagnostic or treatment protocols. Too often I've seen people who *were* socially functional (if, perhaps, nervous and unsure of themselves, possibly based on an underlying autism) come back with their diagnosis and treat it as a 'free ticket' to discard/regress from their social graces.

The argument can run that, in those cases, the people don't really have the problem, but if that's the case, then I'd say the diagnostics are failing in 50% of cases... or if a true Asperger's individual is, by the nature of the beast, incapable of understanding why *not* to drop all pretense with diagnosis in hand... then the psychological establishment needs to fix its protocol there.

Since autism *isn't* conclusively genetically linked, and it comes in all sorts of flavors, I'm inclined to consider it a continuum, and to believe focusing in on labels for fairly 'loose' categories of symptoms hurts rather than helps. Better to spend some time probing each individual's strengths and weaknesses, and develop personalized protocols to help them handle whatever might need handling (vs. what's worth letting slide as human diversity).

Perhaps that's my inclination to recoil from incorrect categorization rearing its head; is that an autistic trait? :) I find I tend to focus on... little big pictures, problems within constraints as 'geeks' tend to enjoy... but wider constraints than most geeks, let alone autists would choose. Artificial overclassifications ('fuzzy states,' for those studying that branch of AI) tend to send me rocking in my chair. ;)

Hope some of that's readable; it's a tough concept to discuss. I should note I don't harbor any grudge against Asperger's individuals, as much as they can't help but assume it if I start discussing the syndrome; I just cringe that psychology cares more about the act of their diagnosis/labeling than about helping them select which traits to 'keep' and which to 'work on.' It's a common problem in the brain industry, and philosophical counseling, while a bit 'out there' itself, seems to be the closest thing to helping a patient define personal motives for 'change' (a crappy term- why should anyone have to 'change' just to integrate with society, when society itself is broken?), or better-put, 'reasoned action.'

Like a story *line* just won't cut it, nope, two dimensions are better than one. And how is it that this is exclusive, B5-specific jargon? You'll never hear mention of the Star Wars story arc, for instance.

It's not at all B5 specific. (In fact, the first Google result is a Star Wars reference, ah, the irony.)

"Story arc" is a writing term; it refers to the structure of the plot, elements like exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. "Story line" just means the series of events. If I tell you about going to the grocery store on a typical day, there's a story line ("First I went to the produce section, then I got some rice...") but no arc; there's no conflict being resolved, no plot.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/