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Language Log has a post about the typographical confusion in stories about this particle.

Before the war we said The United States are. After the Civil was we say the United States is. It made us an "is."

Not that canard again!

Then you may find this article (by Mark Liberman, Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, and one of the Gods of computational linguistics) enlightening. He not only quotes chapter and verse from the OED, but debunks the common theory that the phrase originated as sarcasm. (Note: he doesn't claim to prove the theory is false; merely that it's unsupported by any actual evidence.)

And yes, it's primarily an American phrase. The OED lists it as "US colloq. phr.". But before you jump on that word colloq(uial), not that I couldn't care less is also listed as a colloquial phrase. But the OED has never hesitated to document American English, whatever you may believe about how they "use the Queen's English".

Then you may find this article (by Mark Liberman, Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, and one of the Gods of computational linguistics) enlightening. He not only quotes chapter and verse from the OED, but debunks the common theory that the phrase originated as sarcasm. (Note: he doesn't claim to prove the theory is false; merely that it's unsupported by any actual evidence.)

And yes, it's primarily an American phrase. The OED lists it as "US colloq. phr.". But before you jump on that word colloq(uial), not that I couldn't care less is also listed as a colloquial phrase. But the OED has never hesitated to document American English, whatever you may believe about how they "use the Queen's English".

That's fine; I and many others, including some of the best linguists in the world, consider people who insist on made-up, bullshit rules about English, as you do, to be drooling idiots. The Language Log site (run by a collection of noted linguists from around the world) has a whole category of articles about making fun of dictatorial, whiny bullshit-prescribers like you.

As for your specific examples ("could care less" and "literally") both are accepted by the OED as valid and correct, despite your pathetic attempt to assert (with no evidence) that they're not.

I used that and it was quite good. I stopped when I started using my new(old) desktop instead of my laptop and used Unison for syncing the two. I probably should get back to using it as syncing two machines is not a backup.

The courts in the U.S. enforce foreign judgments* on a regular basis. The big question here will be whether the Australian court had personal jurisdiction over the defendant, or whether there's some other defect to the fairness of the judgment. For example, if the defendant could show that she had no notice to defend the suit in Australia, then she could raise that as a defense in the U.S. court. See the Uniform Foreign Money Judgments Recognition Act , a version of which has been passed in many states, for more information.

*In the U.S., "foreign judgment" can refer to either a judgment rendered in a foreign country or a a judgment rendered in another U.S. state.

The fact that Google achieves a 66.66% success rate in acquisitions is amazing. Most M&A's have a success rate of 17%.

According to a quote from the Wharton School of Business:

"Various studies have shown that mergers have failure rates of more than 50 percent. One recent study found that 83 percent of all mergers fail to create value and half actually destroy value. This is an abysmal record. What is particularly amazing is that in polling the boards of the companies involved in those same mergers, over 80 percent of the board members thought their acquisitions had created value.

— Robert W. Holthausen, The Nomura Securities Company Professor, Professor of Accounting and Finance and Management

http://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/open-enrollment/finance-programs/mergers-acquisitions-program.cfm

with a predilection for the first person singular that would make any communist or fascist dictator feel right at home

From the well-known linguistics blog Language Log:

As I've tediously explained tediously many times via tediously many actual tedious counts, President Obama actually uses "I" (and other first-person singular pronouns, like "me", "my", "myself", etc.) at a slightly lower rate, in a tediously wide variety of comparable circumstances, than other recent presidents.

(That piece is at this link, which helpfully contains links to 19 other entries refuting the business about how many times Obama says "I".)

Language Log recommends against using the phrase at all (in either sense), but also against arguing about its "correct" meaning if anyone else uses it.

Are you suggesting that "the" is syntactically singular? The other speakers of English will be quite surprised to hear this. In any case, while there has indeed been a shift from plural "United States" to singular, it was certainly not a rapid change caused by the Civil War: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1798

'I could care less' clearly grew out of 'I couldn't care less' via an accidental dropping of the negative, not out of a sarcastic twist. Users of 'I could care less' may well nowadays (anymore?) justify it by saying it is sarcastic, and indeed that would make it sarcastic nowadays (anymore? - am I getting the hang of this), but it was obviously originally a mistake, and I can't really see how 'I could care less' is any more sarcastic than 'I couldn't care less' anyway.

And you know this from your extensive linguistic studies of the English language do you? Many linguistics agree with my assessment of the situation. In fact, my assessment of the situation is not my own, but based on linguists who actually have studied this matter.

Surely with double negatives, most of the time it does resolve to a positive in English (your examples using other languages are interesting but irrelevant) but we all know when a speaker isn't meaning it to. I couldn't care less about your linguistic theory, if you say I haven't got no books, then you sound thick, and you sound thick because you haven't used the language correctly (ain't not used it incorrectly?).

NO, it does not "automatically" resolve to a positive. "I don't have no books" does not resolve to a positive anymore than "3 - x - y" resolves to "3 + x + y". Negation is distributive across all elements of a sentence. This is a well known feature called "negative concordance". There are a selection of words that are only used in negative sentences (by most people) case in point the original "anymore" that kicked off this whole debate. But just because the "anymore" no longer looks like a negative, does not mean that it is not there solely as a result of the sentence being negative.

The cases where two negatives make a positive, is when they compound directly upon each other.

I'm curious about the 'positive anymore' but something in me, and it seems most speakers, seems to rail against it, I think it's something to do with the 'more' part that seems to require a negative to set it up although I can't quite justify saying the 'positive anymore' is wrong.

What is railing against it in your head is that "anymore" is only allowed in a negative sentence. It's a negative concordance, and it is dictated in order to ensure that the word complies with the form of a negative sentence. It "appears" to be positive, because it does not actually contain a negating word, but in fact, it is a word that indicates a negative sentence, and thus it is itself a negative element of the sentence.

It's like some person in the past decided that there should only be one negative in an algebraic sequence, and that all other negatives in the sequence should be represented with, let's say "~". As such, the sequence "3 - x - y" would be viewed as "uncouth" and should PROPERLY be represented as "3 - x ~ y", because otherwise the two negatives would cancel each other out. Except that the negatives never did cancel each other out, and the "~" symbol for subtraction would itself be a negative component of the sentence regardless of any claims that it is "positive".

The whole fact that my sentence employs the "positive anymore" as opposed to the most widely used "negative anymore" should indicate that it is a negating element of the sentence.

Shoot, Nursie was even complaining that he apparently understands the sentence to be a simple negative, because the "anymore" has to be used in a negative sentence, and thus for Nursie, "anymore" is a negative word, so "I haven't seen him anymore" is a double negative, which should cancel to a positive!

That's known as the "needs washed" construction. See Language Log's post Annals of "needs washed" for more information on it.

As one data point, the only person I know who uses it is from Gettysburg, not Pittsburgh.

There is a wealth of scientific research about G dropping. For example:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000878.html

Unfortunately there is very little research into how zero gravity affects phonology. Time to lobby Congress for more funding,

Cool stuff, but it needs a link to the home page: https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/

Very cool (and creepy) crawler bot video on the homepage.

These flying bots remind me of you average Alaskan mosquito.

We know that all of the natural languages come from one common root because they have a lot of words that are related.

I'm not sure that we do know that. See for instance the paragraph beginning "the first problem" in this Language Log post; also this page from the site you referred to has a good explanation as to why seemingly related words don't necessarily imply any connection.

It may not make sense to you, but it sure make sense to apple fans.
If they didn't care about technology they wouldn't buy every new phone apple puts out.

Making things expensive has ALWAYS brought new customers and repeat customers. If the product in question is anything other than a commodity, raising the price, and thereby implying a better product always sells well.

No, he obviously meant Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology (MSCE) Whoo boy, that cert isn't worth the paper it's printed on!

That Shawn guy is all huffy because Anonymous and LulzSec break the law, as if legitimate political protest is on the same level as robbery or mindless vandalism.

During the Civil Rights Movement some white clergymen published an open letter thatvwhile ostensibly supporting equal rights for blacks, urged them to comply with The Whie Mans law during their protests, for example by not shutting down entire cities for days on end.

While spending some time in the slammer, The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior wrote "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" on a few scraps of paper that he begged from the jailer, in which he said "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

I regard that letter as King's most important written work.

My colleagues at Kuro5hin fault me for not being a Team Player because I regard raising Hell as the greatest contribution I can make to society. We would all be better off if there were fewer Team Players not more of them. Consider what happened when the "Guter Deutschers" - that was the German word for Team Player back in the day - failed to heed the dictates of their consciences and so encouraged Hitler's rise to power.

If you are not up to Hacktivism, don't just politely hand out some leaflets when you protest in meatspace. No, get yourself hauled off to jail by shutting down the entire business district of a city.

I think what you are missing is how pissed off Canadians would be if the US started calling them "The Canada" region as part of an overt anti-autonomy campaign, and then how frustrated Canadians would be if it then stuck.

see how stupid "The Canada" sounds, and how insidious it is?

now that you know better, you have a responsibility to society not to propagate the slur[0].

[0] http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html

Note that a well-known online language forum has picked up this story as the latest examle of a crash blossom, i.e., a headline that has two or more radically different parsings.

This one seems to have originated in the beeb, and there are suspicions that they have headline writers who specialize in this sort of ambiguity. They have had a lot of hilarious headlines recently, that are often read completely wrong by most readers.

the standards have fallen far from where they were, say, 50 years ago. If you need proof, try reading a book written in the 1800s.

Actually, you may have provided some proof yourself by implying that content in a 200-year-old book proves that standards have fallen in the last 50 years--unless you're in your seventies, I suppose.

In all seriousness, though, I would like to see some proof that educational standards have dropped in the last 50 years

I somewhat agree with your point about material from centuries ago, though it seems to me that rote memorization was much more common in the past. Many of the questions on this purported "8th Grade Examination from late 1800's" are superficially impressive, but really amount to rather useless memorization:

Give the epochs into which U. S. History is divided.
Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall & Orinoco.

The arithmetic section I linked mostly consists of unit conversions, which are again superficially impressive. In 8th grade my classmates were covering conic sections, which are less "mechanical" than plugging numbers in to conversion formulas, and I would say they're more difficult. Oddly enough, in this UPenn catalog from 1852, conic sections were a junior level (in college) topic. To be fair, that catalog also lists basic calculus (I imagine the equivalent of Calc 1 and 2) in addition to a dizzying number of topics on history, philosophy, Greek, Latin, "natural philosophy", and chemistry.

Today, there's just far too much information to absorb. Learning how to understand things quickly as they come up is more important than memorizing small chunks of human knowledge, even if it's less impressive. Perhaps students in the past were more studious as well, though things aren't all bad.

It's certainly a popular type of virtual currency. I'm reminded of this recent languagelog post: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3494 - it is obviously not a popular type of currency, but if you compare it to other *virtual* currencies, it's certainly one of the most popular. (What would beat it? Currencies of a few games, maybe.)

Haier is a former State-owned corporation, with very tight links to the top levels of government. It would be very unwise for another manufacturer to copy Haier's products and logos, within China. Some well-connected Chinese brands will enjoy western-style IP protection, within Chinese borders. Of course, the Chinese government will expect protection for its brands overseas, as well.

Quality Fade is a concept that Westerners need to understand thoroughly.

Unison: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Not better, faster.

This is the best public information that I can find on price discovery, you'll have to do a bit of gleaning. I believe you are commingling price discovery and valuation. Valuation takes an extreme amount of effort and time that the markets rarely reflect.

http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~fdiebold/papers/paper61/abdv2_062804.pdf

How is speed of transactions relevant to this situation, or are you thinking of something else?

The faster you are the more risk you can take with less possibility of return. The tighter the spread the less return a MM will receive, per transaction. Low latency allows for quicker reaction time to adjust prices, minimizing risk the market will move against you. If MMs can get out of a bad position, as a liquidity provider, much more quickly risk is reduced and parties are more willing to offer MM services for less profit, i.e. tighter spread. In this regard HFT is market making or liquidity providing. There is substantial evidence showing that HFT absorbed quite a bit of the flash crash of 2010, delaying the inevitable rather than exasperating it. The crash started as HFTs pulled out and stopped absorbing the toxicity.

Crashing your car has the benefit that then you'll be driving in a brand new car. So that is a benefit of crashing your car. Yet crashing your car is still harmful, and pointing out the benefit of having a new card to replace it doesn't negate that. So if someone tells you that crashing your car is just harmful, it's not a good point to say that he is forgetting about the benefit of having a new car, except perhaps to make him feel better.

You are miss-characterizing my statements. There is nothing broken/destroyed, HFT does not harm, except when used illicitly just as a knife harms when used illicitly.

I think you might not understand what I wrote. If HFT doesn't provide significant benefit to the world, yet significant money gets allocated to pursue HFT, then the harm to the world is the opportunity cost of those investments.

This argument can go for man many things in this world. You can always argue that where some money is put it can be put to something better. Also HFT is a tiny, *TINY*, fraction of all infrastructure and development that goes on in the financial world.

As of the first quarter in 2009, total assets under management for hedge funds with HFT strategies were US$141 billion, down about 21% from their high.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

PIMCO has over USD$1 trillion under management and that is one entity and they do not engage in HFT.

Markets are good because they allocate resources to the most productive endeavors. However, there is a mismatch between the interest of individual traders and the interests of the market/world. One example of that is insider trading - it is bad because it mis-allocates resources based on something that isn't useful to the world, yet it is very profitable. HFT is redistributing a lot of resources, but you have not demonstrated that the benefit that HFT provides is anywhere close to that.

I believe you are over estimating how much HFT is as part of the financial industry. There is only so much room that HFT can function, it is limit of market mechanics. It will grow in proportion with market growth. Tighter spreads across the entire financial trading realm returns more to the pockets of other traders than what has been made from HFT. HFT is a net positive.

I agree there is significant mismatch, legal and illegal. The finance industry has a higher proportion of psychopaths that would swindle their own mother for a buck. It has been this way since the Knights Templar became a popular tax haven and

Short version: a diversity of answers will be offered, and they will range from useless to knowledgeable and insightful.

Long version: People here often face similar questions/problems every day. Some answers that are offered won't meet the specifications (but then, other people's specifications might differ anyway), some of them won't be very good (those will get modded down). What you're left with is a whack of decent possibilities that you would inevitably have to check out on your own to know whether they will work for you, but it will probably be a more comprehensive list than if you simply googled. Coincidentally, I'm looking for a similar solution to what the person in the submission was looking for. Probably plenty of people are, which is probably why the editors accepted the question. Some of the options people have described I already knew about (e.g., Unison), some of them I didn't and will now check out (e.g., Crashplan). Even better than a list of options, you may get specific feedback from people who have already tried them, which could save you an enormous amount of time versus the "why didn't you just google?" shopping list. A "this solution sucks because of X" reply could be just as helpful as "this solution is wonderful because of Y".

That being said, yeah, it would help if people read the questions a little more carefully.

Before anyone jumps on the band wagon and says that we all have perfectly usable user space desktop apps for 28 years in the UNIX world, let me say that it is actually very important that now even Microsoft starts to understand that modularity is the way to go while designing complex systems. Moving various operating system components to the user space is just a logical conclusion of the research done during the last four decades. Look at the direction of modern OSii development, from MINIX to GNU. Started by GNOSIS, KeyKOS, EROS and Coyotos this trend seems to suggest that it is much more natural and reliable to design a secure capability-based system when all of the services are separated from each other. Now when even Microsoft is going in that direction - and it is not a trivial change for them, trust me - we can expect Apple and other OS vendors to follow which is a Good Thing. After all, even if people like you and me are using secure operating systems we still don't want to get spammed and dossed by all of the legacy machines out there. It turns out that the rumors that Microsoft is starting to take the latest research in operating systems seriously turned out to be true. This is good news for everyone.

Before anyone jumps on the band wagon and says that we all have perfectly usable user space desktop apps for 28 years in the UNIX world, let me say that it is actually very important that now even Microsoft starts to understand that modularity is the way to go while designing complex systems. Moving various operating system components to the user space is just a logical conclusion of the research done during the last four decades. Look at the direction of modern OSii development, from MINIX to GNU. Started by GNOSIS, KeyKOS, EROS and Coyotos this trend seems to suggest that it is much more natural and reliable to design a secure capability-based system when all of the services are separated from each other. Now when even Microsoft is going in that direction - and it is not a trivial change for them, trust me - we can expect Apple and other OS vendors to follow which is a Good Thing. After all, even if people like you and me are using secure operating systems we still don't want to get spammed and dossed by all of the legacy machines out there. It turns out that the rumors that Microsoft is starting to take the latest research in operating systems seriously turned out to be true. This is good news for everyone.

India will catch up in this area too...they're already the diabetic capital of the world, importing American style lifestyle diseases at a good clip. All they're really missing now is a good corn industry subsidy so that they can make everything with high-fructose corn syrup in it!

Not entirely true:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3067

Reconfigurable logic can be virtualized to get around the area limitations. Have a look at the SCORE publications for research on that topic: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~andre/compute_models.html

Tabula is a new FPGA company that implements time multiplexed logic to extend the effective size of a computation you can put in a given size chunk of silicon: http://www.tabula.com/ Their products are still statically scheduled and not really amenable to the full virtualization of the SCORE model, but its a real product and you can buy one today.

There's a big space between the fully spatial FPGA and the fully temporal CPU, and we've been seeing that space fill slowly over time. From the CPU side, we've seen cores handle more operations per cycle, hyperthreading, and no multi-core is the default configuration. GPUs are now composed of hundreds or thousands of execution units that are simpler than CPU cores, but more complex than the logic blocks in FPGAs.

There are problems that are best suited for each of these architectures. When you play a graphics intensive game, you expect the GPU to handle stuff its good at and the CPU to handle the bits its good at. FPGAs are just a little bit more obscure. But hybridization does make sense. That's why we've seen PowerPC and Arm cores embedded in reconfigurable fabrics, and now Intel putting FPGA cores in the same package as their dies. We're long past the point of saying that any of these are irrelevant because they are not the optimal solution for all problems.

To add to that, your comment on idle resources. We're also hitting thermal limits. Yes we can still put more and more transistors in a chip, but we can't switch them all simultaneously at full speed without frying the chip. Increasing cache size and core count helps. But if you're going to have more area than can be used simultaneously it makes sense to add different resources that handle different tasks more efficiently (energy and latency). That's part of why intel, amd and nvidia are all mixing GPU and CPU cores on die. If the atom+fpga combo works out well, I would expect to see regions on reconfigurable fabric directly on die in the not to distant future.

Every two years or so, I critically evaluate my options for this problem--even going through the trouble of posting an AskSlashdot on the topic--and every time, I always come back to unison. There are many DIY, non-cloud managed solutions out there; see this article for a useful comparison matrix. I've even tried using git for automated versioning and syncing. However, none seem to work as cleanly as a unison setup combined with a DynDNS IP forward to my home box. Include snapshot backups using StoreBackup--the best backup tool, IMHO--and you have a setup that is tough to beat.

There are plenty of people named Suparman, and Batman is a city on the Batman River in another Muslim part of the world.

Yes, and that is taken from rules of the International Trademark Assocation not US law.

It's good imagery.

It might have been at some point. Now it's just hard to understand for some, a tired trope to others and a symptom of thesaurus overuse.

Use British Headlinese. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3148

Indeed, that's what I used. And there's a precedent: This article reports that the following headline actually appeared in a newspaper:

TEACHER STRIKES IDLE KIDS

Use British Headlinese. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3148

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3161#comments An interesting link on that subject. I'm not a fan of dropping the "to be" myself, but it appears to be fairly common in certain regions.

If you want to see some good examples of what "human-level translation" might mean, look around on the engrish.com site, which shows you just how good humans can be at this task. Note that almost everything there is "official" in some sense, intended to inform the public of something; very few of the examples are intended to be funny.

There's also a good "Engrish" classification at failblog.org, if you want lots more examples from a different source.

The Language Log blog has lots of discussions of examples such as these, generally trying to answer the question "How did the translator go so wrong in this case?" You can learn a lot about the "gotchas" of human languages by reading these discussions.

So I'm not too impressed by yet another prediction of "human-level" machine translation. That's a pretty low hurdle to cross, if it means the level of accuracy that current human translators routinely consider good enough to put on signs, menus, etc. Yes, professional translators will generally do a lot better. But that's not what the summary or TFA predicts; they just predict an unspecified "human-level" capability, which would be satisfied by the examples in the above "Engrish" sites.

And unison extends the rsync model to do bi-directional syncing with basically no user intervention and no strict need for a centralized server. It's not quite mobile-ready, but there's real work being one on an ocmal runtime for android, which is probably 99% of what you need to get unison working there as well.

Comparing it to a polygraph is definitely misleading. A polygraph has at least some science behind it. According to Professor Mark Liberman, who has been studying these sorts of voice analyzer systems for years, there is absolutely no research to show that there is anything to measure, so the claim that they collected a bunch of data from police voice files is meaningless. They might as well claim that they studied the eye colors of people who were found to by lying in past polygraph tests, for all the scientific validity it adds to their claims.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3185

And seven years later, things haven't really changed. Of course, not all such systems claim to work on the basis of laryngeal micro-tremors — some explicitly say proudly that they *don't* use that method, which has gotten a bit of a reputation as snake oil. But neither do they cite a different method that's well enough specified for someone else to implement it and test it.

Real polygraphs measure several different phenomenon related to stress, and have to be carefully calibrated to each individual when used, and even so, they're not a lot better than a coin flip. The idea that this machine, which measures a single phenomenon (voice), and compares it to some sort of mythical average, rather than the current speaker's norms, when there's no evidence that the phenomenon it's measuring is even affected by lying, let alone how, let alone whether the effect is consistent between individuals, is simply preposterous. This doesn't deserve "a little more merit" than a polygraph; it deserves far less!

Well, this is even worse than a polygraph. While a polygraph detects stress, it's not even clear what (if anything) this machine measures. Read Speech-based lie detection in Russia.

Here's a citation to back up the parent's claim that "voice recognition of lies doesn't work at all". Language Log: Speech-based lie detection in Russia

You didn't. See this Language Log post.

something similar - http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/
All they have to do now, is get the source, fork it on github, and add a few conditions for... well, conditions.

Let's see some academic collaboration happening OSS style!

Really? Because even after it's been suggested, I'm finding it impossible to read as saying that the wife had died. Even if the commas were removed, "was used by my wife died" makes no sense. Dieds don't use. :)

Without the commas, it becomes a Crash Blossom that leaves me hanging in a world of no sense till I go back, reparse, and mentally fill in the missing commas. But the commas aren't missing from the actual quote, so the sentence makes perfect sense to start with, and I can't figure out how anyone could misinterpret it. Care to explain further?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=569
The different parts of Sony having conflicting interests..

A separate comment on that:

"Epic's* up in my face like, "Don't steal our songs Lars,"
While Sony sells the burners that are burning CD-R's "
-MC Lars, Download This Song

* Epic Records is one of the Sony Music sublabels

I never said that silica was the only material to make aerogels out of. I said that aerogels are usually made of silica, and silica aerogel is still the most common type used today. And I never said that CNTs can never be in a gel, I said they are never in a gel. And actually, after I went out and actually looked around to be sure of myself, it looks like I might be wrong, and someone might have already made a true CNT aerogel using critical-point drying: http://www.physics.upenn.edu/yodhlab/papers/2007/AdvMat_2007.pdf

Apparently, as far back as 2007, some researchers, using single- and few-wall carbon nanotubes in a suspension, used critical-point drying to create a true CNT aerogel. The aerogel was fragile by itself, but they were able to reinforce it with polyvinyl alcohol so that it could hold up to 8000 times its own weight.

Btw, if you are really interested in the algorithms for solving hypergeometric identities check out the ebook by Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger:

http://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html

It is one of the best free mathematics ebooks out there...