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I once saw Unison advertised as a generic cross-platform user-friendly system on top of rsync.

Dunno if it works in real life or even if it was completely finished as Google SoC project. Perhaps someone else here has tried it?

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

Works on all the platforms you mentioned... It can synchronize 2 disparate directory trees (you made updates to files A, B, C on one system and D, E, F on another system and want to merge them) and when it can't figure out what to do it asks you.

I like Unison for this sort of thing.

I still can't find that study, but I did find this paper from the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the interesting things discussed is how the U.S. for a very long time consumed more cigarettes per capita than any other nation, and that is why people over age 50 have such high mortality rates. It also has some very interesting discussions on how the international standards are actually made and there are case studies on prostate cancer and breast cancer. You should check it out. It contains far more concrete evidence than I have seen from the liberal camp.

I was in the military and none of my friends were ever encouraged to go to midwives and they had access to as much drugs as they wanted.

Summary of why the reporting on this story is mostly bogus here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1869

Discussed here by someone who actually knows about this stuff:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1869

MIA. It's not being discussed publicly by anyone inside Apple, so far as I've seen. Incidentally, all this SSD love makes me wish Apple would offer an SSD build-to-order option for those sweet new iMacs. An external FW drive could house movies and music. That would be sweet and relatively easy for Apple: they already SSDs in MacBooks Pro.

"[...] is currently being sued by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for saying that there is no evidence for claims that visiting a chiropractor has health benefits."

That alone is not why Mr. Singh is being sued. The issue is specifically driven by his use of the word "bogus." The judge has taken it to mean "consciously dishonest." Not just peddling an ineffective treatment, but knowing that it's ineffective and still claiming otherwise. If Singh just claimed it was an ineffective treatment, he would not be criticizing the BCA directly, so it wouldn't be actionable... However, the judge and the BCA took him to be saying that the BCA are knowingly and intentionally dishonest in their promotion of the treatment.

I wouldn't think to interpret "bogus" in this way, but that seems to be the original meaning. I hope the judge realizes Singh was using it in a more modern sense, but if it's interpreted as the BCA claims, then it certainly explains how far this lawsuit has gone, and invalidates many of the comments here so far including the inflammatory summary. Singh can criticize the effectiveness of the treatments to his heart's content, as long as he doesn't accuse the BCA of fraud! You can read some more linguistic analysis of this lawsuit and the evolving meaning of "bogus" over at the Language Log.

This problem has been discussed recently on Language Log, for those who are interested.

This problem has been discussed recently on Language Log, for those who are interested.

"fewer" not "less". Bits are discrete.

Well off topic and far too pedantic, but what the hell. A blog at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html references Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage (MWCDEU) to point out that "less" has been used before plural, countable nouns since the time of King Alfred. It was the opinion of Robert Baker, written in "Remarks on the English Language" in 1770, that "fewer" was preferable. It is unknown how this became the rule, but usage then and now do not conform to the rule.

From the MWCDEU:

If you are a native speaker, your use of less and fewer can reliably be guided by your ear. If you are not a native speaker, you will find that the simple rule with which we started is a safe guide, except for the constructions for which we have shown less to be preferred.

There's a scan of the MWCEDU available from the blog post. Make of it what you will, I found it interesting.

Also libraries don't glue hundreds of pages of their books together so that you can only read some parts. And they certainly have better metadata in their catalogs, so you might actually find what you're looking for.

That's great, as long as morons don't take that to mean "... and therefore your horrible grammar and spelling errors aren't actually errors, but the natural evolution of language." I've seen a lot of people who seem to think the fact that language evolves means that they are the instruments of said evolution, rather than semi-literate tards.

So what's the big fucking deal? A lot of "grammar rules" are arrogant, ignorant bullshit, so if most people just ignore most of that stuff it's really no loss. And a lot of otherwise smart people just can't spell very well. But if they had to improve at only one thing, which of these would you prefer?

1. Spelling
2. Using paragraphs

There are writing skills that are a lot more important than spelling and your so-called prescriptive "grammar," period.

This bullshit accusation comes up every time anyone mentions IBM and is a great way to get guaranteed mod points on oh-so-politically-correct-slashdot. Here's what "Foobar of Borg" doesn't tell you:

- the book was written by the former publisher of "OS/2 magazine", Edwin Black, who profited from his association with IBM for many years until its folding in 96
- Black also "co-incidentally" launched a high profile lawsuit against IBM that was summarily thrown out of court, but the press did not cover this fact.
- Many people have questioned the authenticity and accuracy of the accusations, which while juicy, do not stand up to close scrutiny.

Ultimately Black's assertions are like claiming that gun manufacturers are responsible for the murders that are committed with their products, or that manufacturers of crowbars are responsible for breakins, or that people who write Linux are morally responsible for the many people who die when it is used by the US military.

- Anonymous, because I will almost certainly be accused of being anti-semitic, even though I am jewish.

I would recommend to use Subversion

I agree. But don't forget to do the thing the students will care most about: shave your beard.

You look like Richard Stallman.

Perhaps a little offtopic, but stopping apoptosis may be useful to prevent systemic self-dectruction of cells during reperfusion of heart attack victims or other victims deprived of oxygen - allowing people to recovery from being deprived of oxygen for an hour.
.
To Treat the Dead -- http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045%5D
.
Currently they use a hypothermia protocol to reduce the damage done during reperfusion.
http://www.med.upenn.edu/resuscitation/hypothermia/

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002458.html

It appears that is debatable.

that's LOLCAT; a derivative of texting language, itself a derivative of common IRC abbreviations

Lolcat didn't derive from text language. AIUI, it sprung up as a grammatical variation of standard english with rather irregular conjugation of verbs, combined with instant messaging / chat room slang, often misspelled for "cute" effect. Certainly, Mark Liberman associated it with leet rather than texting.

1337-5p34| was developed to make the text hard to read/index and was "cool" for the hip 90's h4X0rz generation.

Leet is both a method of encoding using alternative characters and a set of slang words; either can be used with or without the other. Many of those slang words have entered the instant messaging slang; words like "pwn", "noob" or "pron" are common with people who would never otherwise use leet.

35+ Years ago, Professor Nabil Farhatpresented what might be called "Handwriting Attribution by 3 Year Olds." He showed an audience 3 different handwritten cursive script documents, let's call them A, B, and C. The texts of the three documents had nothing to do with each other. The authorship of documents A and C was uncontested. The authorship of B was highly contested. He then showed the 2D Fourier transforms of the documents. To any observer, even a three year old, two of the image transforms (A&B) were obviously similar, while one (C) was very different. A was written by Esterhazy, while C was written by Dreyfus. B was the controversial letter behind the Dreyfus Affair.

See also:
Writer identification based on handwriting

Check out unison.

Directory synchronization over several protocols, brilliant include/exclude syntax, failure protection & rollback, rsync style 1-way or 2-way block synchronization and intelligent file change detection, Unix and Windows support, open source... It's what you need.

It's a blatant ripoff of a letter sent by MLK. Some say it was a good device to demonstrate the feeling of oppression - which I believe is inherent in military invasion. As an English major, you should probably understand that dogmatic adherence to grammar will net you nothing but a by-the-numbers Grisham novel, which in my opinion, is soulless and not worth the advertising budget it was sold with.

He's quite a bit more eloquent:

"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

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

I use SyncToy at work to sync my laptop up with the network for a quick and dirty solution that just requires a simple replication of data, but I've found it to be less than satisfactory for more complex tasks and interminably slow when there is a large quantity of files in a sizeable directory structure.

For home use (a mix of Linux and Windows boxes) where things are more involved I started using Unison for a cross platform solution but in the end settled on a simple RSync for the Linux data and SyncBack SE for the more complicated Windows stuff. SyncBack SE might not be free (it's $30), but it is lightning fast, extremely flexible and can handle very sophisticated synchronisation and backup tasks including versioning, support for more than one target, remote targets via FTP and email), bandwith controls... Worth a look!

Unison

Your one google does not support your claim. I counter it with two wikipedias and one miscellanea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_kinetic_energy_theorem#The_relation_between_work_and_kinetic_energy

According to the work-energy theorem if an external force acts upon an object, causing its kinetic energy to change from Ek1 to Ek2, then [...]

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

Gravitational fields are also conservative; that is, the work done by gravity from one position to another is path-independent.

Work is simply any force applied over a distance. Clearly gravity is a force and can be applied as an object moves non-orthogonal to its field. Therefore, gravity does do work.

http://www.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/phys150/lectures/lecture_oct_08_1999.html

This site demonstrates that you can define potential energy *in terms of this work*.

You must remember that the work-kinetic-energy-theorem states a relationship between work and only kinetic energy, not potential or total energy.

Voice stress analysis is pseudoscientific and the devices are all hoaxes.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1390

Please do not perpetuate the scams.

Also, as a general FYI, we decided to use rsync over ssh into a BackupPC datastore. There is then an archive of this information created on removable media (that is unplugged, rotated, and kept off-site). I first heard mention of BackupPC here on /. a few years ago and wanted to pass the info on to those who haven't heard of it yet. Works well for me/my company.

If you do Windoze, you might also consider Unison instead of rsync as I hear that Unison can do the volume shadow copy stuff in Windoze. (YMMV as I haven't tried unison yet.) AND, yes, I know there is an ugly Cygwin version of rsync that doesn't do volume shadow copy and can't backup an outlook.pst file when outlook is running.

Interesting.

Only five books from that site are listed as free at the Online Books Page though:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=National%20Academy%20of%20Sciences

Do you have a list of free books there beyond that? If so, you should send it to John Mark Ockerbloom so that he can add them.

William

Not being pedantic really helps one to not be ignored. You could have read GP's comment as {less stupid} people instead of less {stupid people}. Or, you could realize that there is no lack of precision in GP's post. See: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html

And finally, just to annoy you some more, there's a split infinitive in the first sentence of this post.

They fail to give any meaningful data on its oxygen dissociation curve against pH, so we have no idea how it will perform as an oxygen transporter at physiological conditions.

Why you gotta be all chemical about it?

In seriousness, the Dutton lab webpage, the ones who did it, has a crystal structure image that looks like it does have the histidines in place above and below the heme ring to stabilize the O2, although it's been a while since I had a biochem course. So those could actually be anything and I wouldn't know. Matter of fact, that could be the wrong lab for all I know.

Anyway, it seems the focus of the lab is non-clinical (predictably.) They may not have mentioned any of that stuff because it was less interesting to them than "holy crap, I've actually made a completely novel protein!" It will be really really interesting to everyone else when it moves into translational / applied clinical research, but from their perspective (and mine too) this is quite remarkable in and of itself, whether or not it will itself be usefull is a close second.

Perhaps by having two actors in different courtrooms on the same day, charged with exactly the same crime under the same circumstances, except one is black and the other is white, and repeat the experiment many times to see if they receive different average sentences. For a scientist, the idea is the most natural thing in the world. Forget the fact that the legal system doesn't do this -- why is virtually nobody in the legal profession even suggesting it?

Nobody is suggesting it because the legal system operates on the premise that judges are impartial and unbiased.

The Western system of justice functions because the courts and their decisions are respected. To suggest (God forbid you actually show) otherwise is to damage the court's effectiveness... which is why studies showing that minorities receive harsher sentences are rarely popular.

There are always 'inconvenient truths' that must either be rhetorically obfuscated or avoided entirely. And with the proliferation of bias *studies, it is harder and harder to make the claim that individuals (Judges, Prosecutors, Police) are unbiased, because studies keep showing that even 'unbiased' individuals have unconscious biases.

Implicit Bias among Physicians ... Black and White Patients
Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees (3rd one down)
Check your own biases using Harvard's IAT tests

*and corresponding studies looking at ways to practically apply the results of such bias studies

(repeat from below)

Within the EU, this is relatively straightforward. The Brussels Regime provides a framework for one member state to enforce the judgement of the Courts in another member state.

Within the US, there is also (in most cases) a mechanism for the enforcement of a foreign (i.e. UK) monetary judgements, but this isn't automatic by any means and is dependent on state law.

It should be noted that, in both cases, such judgements won't be honoured if the appeal process is still ongoing.

The Brussels Convention - http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:41968A0927(01):EN:HTML

Uniform Foreign Money Judgments Recognition Act 1962 - http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/archives/ulc/fnact99/1920_69/ufmjra62.pdf

Within the EU, this is relatively straightforward. The Brussels Regime provides a framework for one member state to enforce the judgement of the Courts in another member state.

Within the US, there is also (in most cases) a mechanism for the enforcement of a foreign (i.e. UK) monetary judgements, but this isn't automatic by any means and is dependent on state law.

It should be noted that, in both cases, such judgements won't be honoured if the appeal process is still ongoing.

The Brussels Convention - http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:41968A0927(01):EN:HTML

Uniform Foreign Money Judgments Recognition Act 1962 - http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/archives/ulc/fnact99/1920_69/ufmjra62.pdf

The sad thing is that people who lie on the test (and are consistent about it) are the ones that are going to get hired.

I posted a story about these types of tests in January. One comment stood out:

These types of tests have been used ever since professional management was invented as a skill separate from actually being able to do anything economically useful.

I suggest that anyone who has to work in an organization that uses these types of tests read "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte. Some key chapters are online here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-main.html [upenn.edu] However, what is not online is the Appendix, titled "How To Cheat on Personality Tests". The book was published in 1956.

Whyte doesn't suggest that you cheat on personality tests just because you are greedy, or because corporations are evil and you have to survive, or anything radical like that. It is clear from the book that Whyte is the kind of guy who presumes that most people are well-intentioned, that managers probably want to hire the best, and they need these scores to cover their ass, so people should give the correct answers on tests so managers can then pick the good guys and promote them.

Meyer-Briggs and Minnesota Multi-Phasic whatchamacallits have never been shown to be of any practical use, and their pointlessness has been known for decades.

"The Organization Man" is one of the funniest books I have ever read, but I think it is only funny if you have been exposed to Organization Men enough to recogize the traits he points out, and it is a kind of dry, no-punch line humour that I associate with old men who are constantly laughing at you inside. For the enjoyment of Slashdot I will reproduce here a couple of paragraphs from the "How to Cheat on Personality Tests" chapter:

"The important thing to realize is that you don't win a good score: you avoid a bad one. (...) Sometimes it is perfectly all right for you to score in the 80th or 90th percentile; if you are being tested, for example, to see if you would make a good chemist, a score indicating that you are likely to be more reflective than ninety out of a hundred adults might not harm you and might even do you some good."

"By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score somewhere between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules you can follow: (1) When asked for word associations or comments about the world, give the most convential, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To settle the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to yourself:

a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more
b) I like things pretty well the way they are
c) I never worry much about anything
d) I don't care for books or music much
e) I love my wife and children
f) I don't let them get in the way of company work"

You know what is the saddest about these personality tests ? This guide to cheating on them was written just a few years after the basic ones became popular (they were developed in the 20's and 30's, came into use and were standardized (and also statistically tested and proven worthless) in the bureaucracy of WWII, and The Organization Man was published in '56), but the cheat guide works perfectly well even for tests developed long after the cheat guide was written.

You can take a computer administered test developed in the last few years by the best minds in modern management theory, and cheat it with a guide written over 50 years ago.

The line-oriented diffs of svn are particularly useless for a language in which newlines are often not semantically meaningful. To get anything useful out of this approach, people end up constraining their use of paragraph reflowing, so you end up with crazy hard-to-read .tex files, which is definitely something that should be handled by a revision-control system better.

It also interacts badly with other synchronization methods between multiple machines. I use a laptop and a desktop, and synchronize them with unison. But svn changes their local file formats across platforms and versions, so when the .svn directories get synced between the current Debian and current fink (OS X) versions, stuff gets corrupted. The workaround there is to *not* sync on my side with unison, and instead use "check into svn and check back out" as a synchronization mechanism. But that leads to checking in half-done stuff that gets in other people's way.

Math class is tough. Want to go shopping? Okay, meet me at the mall!.

WP, while a useful web site, tends to promote "popular opinion" into "psuedo fact". As long as enough people who edit WP believe something to be true, the entries about that item will promote the popular belief as fact. Eventually, due to WP's popularity, the psuedo fact becomes accepted as an actual fact.

Example: according to linguistics, there are no rules about what words can be added to the English language. Indeed English is the least pure, most widely hybrized language on the planet and new words are added to it daily. For example the verb "slashdotted" :-) or the verb "google" etc.. Nowhere are there any rules saying "these specific things cannot be added to the english language because they don't meet criteria 'x'." According to linguistics, the only rules used to determine if something is actually a word or not are these two:

A: Is the word being used?
B: Is the meaning of the word as used agreed on?
If those two requirements are metthen the word in question is a legitimate word.

The example peevologists hate the most: "virii" (yes, it meets the requirements. Therefore it is a word, despite being desperately hated by peevologists :-) So use it often! ;-)

Instead of following these rules, WP indulges in what linguists call "peevology" which is the process whereby a language myth becomes accepted as "fact" due to aggresive "enforcement" of the myth by people who actually have no idea what they are talking about.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=q9z&q=peeveology+OR+peevology+OR+%22peeve-ology%22&btnG=Search

Fortunately even the mainstream peevologists are realizing that language just isn't used the way the 18th century grammarians (who started the whole myth of "standard english) think it ought to be used. In fact it wasn't used that way back then, and never has been from then until now.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507EFDA113AF93BA2575BC0A9649C8B63

The biggest issue with peevology is that many copy editors have been mis-educated about these very issues and go forth laying waste to perfectly good writing because they (incorrectly) believe said writing is not following "the rules". (the article refers to prescriptivists who have some overlap with peevologists but are generally less harmful, just annoying.)

Examples from the language log http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
"Singular they" is illegal. http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003572.html
"Split infinitives" are not allowed. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=515
"That isn't a Word." http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001652.html

David Crystal, in his new book How Language Works, says "Language change is inevitable, continuous, universal and multidirectional. Languages do not get better or worse when they change. They just -- change." http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=How+Language+Works&x=15&y=17

Geoffrey K Pullum:

I was walking across campus with a friend and we came upon half a dozen theoretical linguists committing unprovoked physical assault on a defenseless prescriptivist. My friend was shocked. Sh

WP, while a useful web site, tends to promote "popular opinion" into "psuedo fact". As long as enough people who edit WP believe something to be true, the entries about that item will promote the popular belief as fact. Eventually, due to WP's popularity, the psuedo fact becomes accepted as an actual fact.

Example: according to linguistics, there are no rules about what words can be added to the English language. Indeed English is the least pure, most widely hybrized language on the planet and new words are added to it daily. For example the verb "slashdotted" :-) or the verb "google" etc.. Nowhere are there any rules saying "these specific things cannot be added to the english language because they don't meet criteria 'x'." According to linguistics, the only rules used to determine if something is actually a word or not are these two:

A: Is the word being used?
B: Is the meaning of the word as used agreed on?
If those two requirements are metthen the word in question is a legitimate word.

The example peevologists hate the most: "virii" (yes, it meets the requirements. Therefore it is a word, despite being desperately hated by peevologists :-) So use it often! ;-)

Instead of following these rules, WP indulges in what linguists call "peevology" which is the process whereby a language myth becomes accepted as "fact" due to aggresive "enforcement" of the myth by people who actually have no idea what they are talking about.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=q9z&q=peeveology+OR+peevology+OR+%22peeve-ology%22&btnG=Search

Fortunately even the mainstream peevologists are realizing that language just isn't used the way the 18th century grammarians (who started the whole myth of "standard english) think it ought to be used. In fact it wasn't used that way back then, and never has been from then until now.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507EFDA113AF93BA2575BC0A9649C8B63

The biggest issue with peevology is that many copy editors have been mis-educated about these very issues and go forth laying waste to perfectly good writing because they (incorrectly) believe said writing is not following "the rules". (the article refers to prescriptivists who have some overlap with peevologists but are generally less harmful, just annoying.)

Examples from the language log http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
"Singular they" is illegal. http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003572.html
"Split infinitives" are not allowed. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=515
"That isn't a Word." http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001652.html

David Crystal, in his new book How Language Works, says "Language change is inevitable, continuous, universal and multidirectional. Languages do not get better or worse when they change. They just -- change." http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=How+Language+Works&x=15&y=17

Geoffrey K Pullum:

I was walking across campus with a friend and we came upon half a dozen theoretical linguists committing unprovoked physical assault on a defenseless prescriptivist. My friend was shocked. Sh

WP, while a useful web site, tends to promote "popular opinion" into "psuedo fact". As long as enough people who edit WP believe something to be true, the entries about that item will promote the popular belief as fact. Eventually, due to WP's popularity, the psuedo fact becomes accepted as an actual fact.

Example: according to linguistics, there are no rules about what words can be added to the English language. Indeed English is the least pure, most widely hybrized language on the planet and new words are added to it daily. For example the verb "slashdotted" :-) or the verb "google" etc.. Nowhere are there any rules saying "these specific things cannot be added to the english language because they don't meet criteria 'x'." According to linguistics, the only rules used to determine if something is actually a word or not are these two:

A: Is the word being used?
B: Is the meaning of the word as used agreed on?
If those two requirements are metthen the word in question is a legitimate word.

The example peevologists hate the most: "virii" (yes, it meets the requirements. Therefore it is a word, despite being desperately hated by peevologists :-) So use it often! ;-)

Instead of following these rules, WP indulges in what linguists call "peevology" which is the process whereby a language myth becomes accepted as "fact" due to aggresive "enforcement" of the myth by people who actually have no idea what they are talking about.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=q9z&q=peeveology+OR+peevology+OR+%22peeve-ology%22&btnG=Search

Fortunately even the mainstream peevologists are realizing that language just isn't used the way the 18th century grammarians (who started the whole myth of "standard english) think it ought to be used. In fact it wasn't used that way back then, and never has been from then until now.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507EFDA113AF93BA2575BC0A9649C8B63

The biggest issue with peevology is that many copy editors have been mis-educated about these very issues and go forth laying waste to perfectly good writing because they (incorrectly) believe said writing is not following "the rules". (the article refers to prescriptivists who have some overlap with peevologists but are generally less harmful, just annoying.)

Examples from the language log http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
"Singular they" is illegal. http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003572.html
"Split infinitives" are not allowed. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=515
"That isn't a Word." http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001652.html

David Crystal, in his new book How Language Works, says "Language change is inevitable, continuous, universal and multidirectional. Languages do not get better or worse when they change. They just -- change." http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=How+Language+Works&x=15&y=17

Geoffrey K Pullum:

I was walking across campus with a friend and we came upon half a dozen theoretical linguists committing unprovoked physical assault on a defenseless prescriptivist. My friend was shocked. Sh

An opinion piece in a newspaper isn't worth much, but an interview, with direct quotes for example, is.

You should be careful of supposed direct quotes, too. It's all too common for news organizations to "edit" quotes, and sometimes the result says something rather different than what the person originally said. Publications with reputations as good as the New York Times have been documented publishing manufactured quotes inside quote marks. So it's still best to dig for the primary source (a recording - which could also be edited) rather than relying on what a news publication says a person said.

Newspapers are used all the time as sources for University level historical research.

And note that some newspapers are "publications of record", i.e., they're the primary sources of certain kinds of information. The best known are marriages, deaths, and court decisions. These are documented in official archives, of course, but a newspaper "of record" is usually much more easily available from many libraries. You just have to be a bit careful to quote only the things for which the newspaper really is an official publication of record.

Okay why can't we have an open standard to sync data with mobile devices?

Because your mobile devices are proprietary systems, and the companies who sold them to you don't want use every possible piece of functionality as a revenue stream.

If you want to synchronize your files between various devices, using open-source software, try unison. It's free, it's open source, it's fast, and IMO it's of very high quality. I use it to sync two desktops, a server, and an ARM-based network appliance (NSLU2). The key is that none of these are locked down systems sold to you by a cell phone company.

Some confusion exists about the status of these spelling variants. The argument is sometimes heard that they represent etymologically distinct words, and that gantlet is the only correct choice--or at least the preferable one--in the common phrase run the ga(u)ntlet. This argument is mistaken.

Then it goes on to describe why.

Given that the OED hasn't found a distinct difference between the two and that MW's linguists agree with the OED, I think you're wrong and being an incorrect prescriptivist.

These types of tests have been used ever since professional management was invented as a skill separate from actually being able to do anything economically useful.

I suggest that anyone who has to work in an organization that uses these types of tests read "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte. Some key chapters are online here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-main.html However, what is not online is the Appendix, titled "How To Cheat on Personality Tests". The book was published in 1956.

Whyte doesn't suggest that you cheat on personality tests just because you are greedy, or because corporations are evil and you have to survive, or anything radical like that. It is clear from the book that Whyte is the kind of guy who presumes that most people are well-intentioned, that managers probably want to hire the best, and they need these scores to cover their ass, so people should give the correct answers on tests so managers can then pick the good guys and promote them.

Meyer-Briggs and Minnesota Multi-Phasic whatchamacallits have never been shown to be of any practical use, and their pointlessness has been known for decades.

"The Organization Man" is one of the funniest books I have ever read, but I think it is only funny if you have been exposed to Organization Men enough to recogize the traits he points out, and it is a kind of dry, no-punch line humour that I associate with old men who are constantly laughing at you inside. For the enjoyment of Slashdot I will reproduce here a couple of paragraphs from the "How to Cheat on Personality Tests" chapter:

"The important thing to realize is that you don't win a good score: you avoid a bad one. (...) Sometimes it is perfectly all right for you to score in the 80th or 90th percentile; if you are being tested, for example, to see if you would make a good chemist, a score indicating that you are likely to be more reflective than ninety out of a hundred adults might not harm you and might even do you some good."

"By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score somewhere between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules you can follow: (1) When asked for word associations or comments about the world, give the most convential, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To settle the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to yourself:

a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more
b) I like things pretty well the way they are
c) I never worry much about anything
d) I don't care for books or music much
e) I love my wife and children
f) I don't let them get in the way of company work"

You know what is the saddest about these personality tests ? This guide to cheating on them was written just a few years after the basic ones became popular (they were developed in the 20's and 30's, came into use and were standardized (and also statistically tested and proven worthless) in the bureaucracy of WWII, and The Organization Man was published in '56), but the cheat guide works perfectly well even for tests developed long after the cheat guide was written.

You can take a computer administered test developed in the last few years by the best minds in modern management theory, and cheat it with a guide written over 50 years ago.

Wow, some fun, interesting, and smart goings-on here at Slashdot! Oh yeah, that's why I still come here... :)

As an aside to the debate, I don't see those two as utility-less. Bear in mind that utility is a really broad requirement, and "providing entertainment" or "reducing embarrassment" are perfectly legitimate uses.

Forgive me, I should have been more explicit. I don't consider the ideas claimed to be utility-less, but rather the patents themselves, w.r.t. any advancements -- both "inventions" have likely been around at least as long as swingsets and male pattern baldness, respectively. :) Any utility either patent would have would therefore lie not in expressing the claimed inventions to the public and thereby advancing public knowledge, given that neither "invention" really is one, but rather purely in the short-term monopoly granted to the patent holder, and since these two "inventions" were in all likelihood both fully extant prior to being patented, the granting of such monopolies constitutes little more than a power grab, should the grantee actually seek to exercise their exclusivity rights.

On the minus side, a lot of shiat gets found too...

< sigh. > Yes, this is indeed a problem with allowing public comment. Crowd-sourcing anything, be it prior art research or Wikipedia or even democracy, will produce crap from time to time, and possibly more often than not if there is no QA mechanism. I don't suppose you have any QA mechanism ideas for the Peer2Patent process? Specifically, QA that would vet prior art references before reaching the patent examiner's desk? I can't think of anything useful off the top of my head.

Theoretically, at least, the examiners are working with new inventions, stuff no one has thought of before - it's therefore impossible for them (or anyone else other than the inventor) to be an expert on the invention already.

It might be a subtle distinction, but my concern in my previous post, and I guess in this thread in general, has more to do with patent examiners being experts in their respective fields, not necessarily being experts regarding the claimed inventions per se. Such an expert should be able to effectively evaluate any application for obviousness and prior art. While perhaps not the best example, an expert on swingsets, for instance, would realize offhand that swinging sideways is both an obvious and widely used means of deriving entertainment, and such an expert would therefore have rejected the application to patent a Method of swinging on a swing on both obviousness and prior art grounds. W.r.t. TFA itself, an expert in computer security systems should be aware of not just POSIX permissions (a red herring many others have brought up), but also capabilities (which sound much closer to what IPAT claims to do). Given that capabilities have been researched, written about, and implemented since at least around the late 1970s (KeyKOS, for example), even if IPAT's claims go beyond capabilities themselves, and would therefore not be subject to rejection on prior art grounds per se, in such a case they should be stringently evaluated for obviousness as a possibly inevitable outgrowth from or extension of capabilities. (Note that I'm not saying that such evaluation did not occur -- I have no way of knowing. I *am* saying that the existence of dubious patents such as the swingset and combover patents does raise suspicions that due diligence has not been fully carried out, for pretty much *any* patent.)

So, to restate my concerns here, I am worried that USPTO patent examiners appear to not have adequate expertise to p

That said, the guys who developed KeyKOS did it (and patented it) a long time before they did.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/

It's like eskimos and words for "snow".

Ah, that tired myth: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004003.html

What I mean is that "octopodes" would be correct if you wanted to borrow (from latin) the plural form as well as the singular form. "Octopi" is what people think the borrowed plural should be but it's incorrect. But yes, "octopuses" is how the plural would be formed in English and that seems to be gaining ground over octopi. According to this page written in 2004 octopi had a slight advantage in terms of number of results returned by Google. It's now very much in favour of octopuses, 490,000 to 344,000.

For some additional info, see Octopussies.

rtorrent watching a directory for .torrent would be the way to go. And then use unison to keep the .torrent directory in-sync.

The old "there a shortage of skilled labor" myth.

First off, all we have is the anecdotal exposition of one person.

See my other posts on the skills shortage. I've posted this before:

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/itaa.real.html [ucdavis.edu]

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/essay.html [fastcompany.com]

http://www.upenn.edu/researchatpenn/article.php?708&bus [upenn.edu]

http://techtoil.org/wiki/doku.php?id=articles:shortage_myth [techtoil.org]

All companies want are disposable interchangeable people who will work for nothing. This concept is doomed.

What, exactly, Bjarne, is the definition of a qualified developer? Developer of what? Software for what?

The entire concept of a "software engineer" or "developer" is meaningless. Take for example the statement "I am an Engineer". That statement is so broad to be meaningless. What type? Electrical? OK, what type? AC or DC? Electronic? Computer? Servo systems? Architectural electrical? Power grids?

Do you get my point?

Ok, now to developer. Database applications. Financial systems. HR. Medical systems. Commercial systems. Academic records. I've had a5-6 IT and development jobs and each domain was unique requiring becoming a psuedo expert in a few short months. Expecting a "one size fits all" approach to work is a recipe for failure.

So before we prescribe a solution, we need to determine what exactly we are trying to solve.

However, some people have been looking into cell death from lack of oxygen, and it looks like the rate of cell death is quite low until oxygen re-enters the system, at which point it spikes up.

http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/apr07/resuscitation-center.html

When a person has a heart attack, their cells are deprived of oxygen. So Dr. Becker began studying oxygen deprivation in cells. What we found when we studied oxygen deprivation in cells astounded us, explained Becker. When cells are deprived of oxygen for an hour there is only 4% cell death. After four hours, cell death is only around 16%. Both of these numbers are low. The amazing thing was once we re-introduced oxygen to the cells they died off rapidly to almost 60% cell death. This re-oxygenation injury we termed reperfusion injury. We concluded that the re-introduction of oxygen must be handled carefully for the majority of cells to survive. Our studies will be concentrating on ways to prepare cells deprived of oxygen for the re-introduction of oxygen.

This article also seems salient: Severe heart attack damage limited by hydrogen sulfide